Dear Yakezie Gamma Class Challengers,

The Yakezie Gamma Class sign-up page is now live!  I hope all of you have had a wonderful time getting to know your fellow Challengers and Members, while pushing yourselves to write consistent content on your respective blogs.  The official Gamma Class window was from Dec 1, 2010 to March 1, 2011.  However, it usually takes about 2 months or longer, depending on the class size and editorial calendar to publish all Member posts.  Hence, those who’ve joined in April are also welcome to the Gamma Class.  Everybody must go through a 6 month Challenge period to make everything equal.

It’s been great getting to know many of you during this time period and I’m sure you folks feel the same way.  All of you have seen your blogs grow quickly thanks to your consistent posting schedule and selfless support of others.  Our philosophy has always been that it is better to give than to receive and it is our culture that makes us who we are. 

THE NEXT STEPS Read More

At last.  Sometime in the latter half of June 2011, Google finally updated their PageRank system to the delight of many of us here at the Yakezie.  It’s been a long road for many of you who have been stuck with a 0 PageRank for months.  But, never one to lay down and roll over, we as a group collectively managed to elevate the importance of mozRank in the website ranking ecosystem.  Not only did we implement mozRank as a key metric for the Yakezie Blog Network list, we wrote posts describing the merits of the system which updates much more frequently, and have also convinced advertisers to use the metric as well.

I am extremely proud of all of you who stuck it through and got bumped up.  Instead of giving up, you kept on producing good content, linking out to each other, and sharing each others words.  A few of you have seen a loss of a PR point which doesn’t make sense.  Meanwhile, some of the less active bloggers achieved a PR of 5 or 6, which is excellent, but also quite curious as well.  Often times, there is no rhyme or reason to Google’s blackbox Pagerank system, but it is what it is.  Collectively, the entire Network wins, and if the Network wins, each individual Member wins as well given the increased authority and confluence of proposals that come our way.

Just looking at the Yakezie Blog Network list now, I am absolutely blown away by how excellent all of our sites are.  It’s one thing to have a list of personal finance bloggers, but it’s another thing to have a list of extremely impactful bloggers that know each other and collaborate!

“CREATING POWERFUL FRIENDS” Read More