Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Maybe you were told the lie that if you just set up a blog people would flock to it. But owning a blog is not even half the battle. It is just the beginning. If you own a blog and you are getting traffic but it is still not enough, it is time to take things to the next level. You don’t have to be satisfied with dismal traffic numbers on your blog. Here are some ways you can give your site the boost it needs to go beyond mediocre.
- Start networking with other bloggers. So you think you can do everything yourself, hah? Well if you don’t try to network and build relationships with other bloggers in your niche you are missing out on a huge opportunity. And I don’t just mean that you should spam a bunch of bloggers with your email begging for a link. Just write them like you would a friend and ask if you can submit an article to their site. If it is well written and it fits their niche, I’m sure they will accept it. And then you have “an in” to be able to contact that site owner in the future to ask about other networking opportunities. I have seen boat loads of traffic simply by networking with other bloggers, and it’s the single best advice I could ever give on taking your blog to the next level.
- Focus on interacting with your social media fans. Whether it’s Twitter followers or Facebook fans, you should be making it a point to interact with them. If you just use your Twitter account to let people know about a new post on your blog they will hardly pay attention to it. Social media is much more powerful when it is much more personal. When you take the time to ask them a question, when you answer their questions, and when you take the time to comment on a photo, you are making your entire blog more personal to them. And the more your readers feel like they know you, the more they will trust you and come back to your site more often.
- Try something new and completely different. Most bloggers are just trying to copy someone. But this only helps the person you are copying. Why not try a technique that no one has even though of it. This can involve using video on your blog in a different way, creating unique infographics that your readers will love, or it can be as simple as having a contest now and then. Anything to break the monotony of blogging will help give you that much needed boost. Dukeo.com did something creative by having silly caricatures drawn of some of the top bloggers in the world and it generated a huge buzz in the internet marketing community. That idea has been taken, but find another one and run with it.
- Tap into new traffic sources. So your traffic levels aren’t changing much? Well where are you getting that traffic from? The internet is huge and only getting more users on a daily basis. Find out where they are and build roads to your site. You can get these traffic sources through other blogs, traffic exchanges, email lists, PPV and PPC marketing efforts, article marketing, and many other places. This game is always changing and there is always a new source of traffic out there. But don’t forget the old ones either.
Phillip is a writer for a how to tips website at www.EZhowtotips.com where you can find all kinds of answers to how to questions.
It seems as though everyone is starting to develop Windows Phone 7 looking themes for all different software and device. The latest is a new WordPress theme called Metro Style. This theme is taken from the very popular Windows Phone 7 Metro UI.
Check out and download the theme here for free.
via LifeRocks
Some time, there are situations at home that really test our strength and patience. They confront us when we were not even thinking about them – like telephone bills popping up, shortly after we have paid the pending installment of the home mortgage. Or like the tire that goes flat, just when the car is being pulled outside for a picnic. Or when the internet connection flies to Timbuktu, when the download of one of our favorite TV shows is at ninety-five percent! We cringe, we shout, we cynically look for solutions but the glitch stays, just like an unwanted guest!
Of all the situations stated, the one at the end rarely manages to receive our calm response. We borrow money to pay off the electricity bill; we opt to take the bus, or hire a cab for the trip; but we cannot bring the neighbor’s internet connection to our house. Constant phone calls to the internet service provider lands up with several notes of promises and dates and, ultimately, no resolution. We are not able to download TV shows – end of story!
So, what exactly should we hold responsible, for making us so extraordinary deviant and crazy? It is the simple and easy accessibility to our favorite pastime! There are so many TV shows – separate favorites for kids, women and men – that it becomes humanly impossible to watch three different shows at the same time, on one single TV screen. It is not possible and it is not required!
When would the download factor come into play? If TV shows are all we want, TV shows are all we get! The internet provides virus-free links, fast and high-speed downloads, systematic and user-friendly approach to the desired shows and, ultimately, a solution to the unnerving it-is-my-turn-to-watch-TV fight at home. Furthermore, it is undeniably true that no matter what show, what season, what episode you are searching for, you are bound to get it, within seconds!
True also is the belief that you can watch your favorite TV show at one time, and put your favorite TV shows download at work, at the same time! I once tried catching two shows simultaneously, and all I could catch were the advertisements that would come harping every few minutes! That seems to remind me of another thing that we tend to avoid, as we set ourselves to catch shows after downloading them onto our PC!
We avoid advertisements – they are irritating, down to every sense of the word! It cuts short the pace of an amazing mystery, insufferably puts the supernatural drama to an abrupt halt and what it does to an intense romantic scene is something I will avoid mentioning here!
It seems that we will continue to do fine, as long as the internet connection stays on!
You can check out more from John here.
I quickly wanted to drop an article about the recent funding of Gigaom. Gigaom is a technology blog network that has managed to grab an additional $6 million in funding, which brings their total to $15 million.
Gigaom will use the new funding to push out their Gigaom Pro analysis service.
“We have demonstrated that paid content (not paywalls) can work, as long as you can provide value to your community,” Malik writes. ” Just as we never positioned GigaOM to compete with traditional media outlets, I believe we are charting our own course with our GigaOM Pro research service. “And it is working. It is working so well that we really need to put more gas in the engine to grow it even faster.”
Its great to see that blog networks are still thriving!
Facebook has unquestionably become a part of life for the majority of internet savvy people around the globe. Whether you’re a high school student using it to gossip with your friends, in your 30′s looking for old classmates, or an entrepreneur or bussiness owner publicizing your company, Facebook seems to have something for everyone.
I have always been savvy with technology and computers – I started working with my first computer at the young age of 8 and when I was 10, I taught myself how to program in BASIC literally overnight. For some reason, though, I didn’t immediately jump on the Facebook bandwagon the moment it became mainstream. It seemed silly, frivilous and simply trendy. I had been using MySpace and enjoyed the ability to control the look and feel of my page. I managed to find a few old friends on it, but most of them never posted anything. Mostly I just used my page as a personal blog to track my mundane life.
Then one day, I finally took the leap. I joined Facebook.
At first the pages looked dull and boring. A stark contrast to MySpace’s colorful pages, flashing blinkies and auto-loading music and videos. But what I quickly realized is that everyone I had on MySpace was also on Facebook and… guess what… they were actually posting! Next I realized that not only were my old friends there, but so were dozens more. To date I have connected with nearly my entire High School class, a childhood best friend I thought I would never find, old teachers, college friends, remote family and even old boyfriends (most of whom I was already still on speaking terms with). While these may not be people I feel the need to converse with on a regular basis, I feel priviliged that I can know what great (or terrible) things are happening in their lives, offer congratulations or condolenses, provide advice, wish happy birthday’s or just simply “Like” their status because… well… I liked it!
Today, like many people, I am hooked on Facebook. I have not only used it to connect with friends, but I have also used it to promote businesses I have been a part of and to follow other businesses I have interest in. And let’s not forget the oh-so-addicting games. So what if Facebook never existed? Where would be then?
Perhaps MySpace would have remained more popular. Or perhaps social networking as we know it today wouldn’t exist – at least not at the level it is now. Businesses would still rely solely on expensive advertising, email marketing and banner ads. While these methods are still used, Facebook’s advertising has been, in my experience, invaluable.
Some say people would call, write or speak in person more. But let’s be honest here, when was the last time you called someone just to update them on your life or find out about theirs? In High School? 15 years ago or so? People tend to stay in their own circles – in their comfort zone. Facebook allows us to open up and reach outside of our circle. It extends our comfort zone.
One thing is for certain, the world would be a less “friend”lier place. I never would have found my childhood friend or connected with classmates who had been outside my circle in High School. This also means I never would have intended to attend a reunion, which I now look forward to. Facebook has given me the ability to reach outside my daily circle and laugh, cry and vent with old and new friends alike. It has rekindled friendships and connected me with people I thought I would never get to talk to again.
So despite the addicting games and countless hours easily wasted away with Facebook, I am thankful it was created. I am thankful I took the leap. I am thankful for finding friends.
Case in point: Life just wouldn’t be the same without Facebook.
As with anything in life, if you want to be a pro it pays to start young. Blogging is exception and although the most successful blogs are ran by well established, authoritative, big players, there is no reason why you, as a young blogger, can’t get your content out there and make an impact. Internet usage is extremely high amongst teens and even pre-teens so if you are aiming for this demographic there is plenty of opportunities out there to gain traction. The blogosphere is heaving with content and popular topics include tech news and posts about how to make money online, despite the reams of content out there, there are in effect an infinite number of niches, if you can generate a healthy following by blogging about a particular topic, you will have a captive audience on which you can begin to build and improve.
So what are my top tips for all the budding young bloggers out there?
Pick a platform, and stick to it
There are many different applications out there which can facilitate your blogging adventure. You could easily spend months trawling through all the different platforms to find the one that’s perfect for you, but in my experience you’ll just be spinning your wheels. At this stage, the relative merits of Tumblr over Posterous are irrelevant. A successful blog isn’t grounded on bells ‘n’ whistles, but great content. Pick a platform and start writing, you can make changes to the look of your blog at a later date.
Stick to a Niche
Pick a subject you want to write about, and stick to it. Writing solely about that subject, exploiting every little intricacy, and keeping up with the latest news is far more valuable than going off on a tangent. Doing this alienates readers and will likely leave your blog with very few visitors. It doesn’t matter if the subject matter is Apple products or pet Newts, immersing yourself in a niche is far more rewarding than taking a scattergun approach to blogging.
Keep an Eye on Your Traffic
If you really want your blog to be successful, you need to know how it’s performing, the best way to do this is to keep tabs on your traffic with Google Analytics. Despite its scary sounding name, the software is free and easy to use. With analytics you can get an insight into traffic fluctuations which can go some way to helping yoyr blog become more successful, for example if you recognised a traffic spike on the same day as you published a post about the best feed for pet Newts, then you’ll know there is a demand for information on this particular sub topic. You can then leverage this knowledge to gain more traffic in future.
Promote your blog
If you don’t promote your blog, no one’s going to know about it, and no one’s going to read it. The best way to promote your posts is through existing networks you might already have in place. This means publicising your posts on social sites like Twitter and Facebook. You could even create dedicated feeds that compliment your blog, which will get you more targeted followers.
Be Regular
If you can, make a post everyday. It doesn’t have to be a considered, one-thousand word article, it can be anything from a top 5 tips post, few sentences accompanied by an image, or a funny video. Whatever it is you chose to post, regularity is important, if visitors come to your site, see a great post but recognise that your blog hasn’t been updated they will be more likely not to come back. If you can’t post everyday, make it every other day, or even twice a week, so long as your posts are spaced evenly and are predictable.
Respond to Comments
If your posts are funny. Controversial, or informative as they all should be, the likelihood is they will attract comments. Reply to these comments. Ignoring comments will not only turn readers off, it will make them think of you as rude and arrogant, hardly the way to build a large following.
Heed these tips, sprinkle in a little passion, dedication and knowledge and you as a young blogger will be able to take on the best.
Guest post by: Joe is a blogger working for a company that specialise in personal car leasing
SEO is a funny old game; you can link build until you’re blue in the face, but if you haven’t got your onsite SEO in place, then link building can be a little fruitless. In this post we explore 5 of the basic onsite factors that you should look to deploy across your website to gain maximum visibility in the SERPs.
Duplication
It’s a common misconception that Google will penalise your site for containing duplicate content. Google doesn’t penalise you for duplicate content, it just doesn’t give it as much credit. This is because Google doesn’t want to index the same content twice, or more. This way it can be sure that the results it serves up from your search query are not repeated, which would in turn give you a bad user experience. Anyway, if you own a website and are a little concerned about duplication then the very least you should do is ensure there is only one version of your site on the internet. Here are 3 possible variations of your home page that Google could be indexing:
http://www.example.com/
http://example.com/
http://www.example.com/index.html
If you can find versions of your website along the lines of the above examples, then you are being affected by duplication issues. You need to specify which URL is the one you want Google to see. You can do this by implementing the correct code in you web.config file / .htaccess file / httpd.ini file, depending on your website.
Page Title
Page titles play a huge role in SEO and should never be overlooked. If your current page title is ‘Home’ or worse ‘Untitled Document’, then you are doing your website a serious injustice. The title for each of your pages should tell people what’s on the page. Effective use of targeted keywords in the title is also essential for SEO. Short page titles can seem a bit spammy, so the use of themed words and stop words can work well to combine several targeted keywords. Each page should have a unique title with the current recommended limit for a page title length being 70 characters.
Page Description
Page descriptions are another onsite aspect that you should be making full use of for SEO benefit. Page descriptions (or Meta descriptions) are the informative bits of text that provide an explanation of the content on a page. They are used by search engines to display a snippet below a link in a search results page. Meta descriptions are key for a successful click-through rate and provide the perfect opportunity to tell people what exactly is on the page in regards to what they have searched for. The best descriptions will combine a couple of keywords in to a compelling description of the page. Each page should have a unique Meta description of around 156 characters.
Robots.txt
Every website should have a robots.txt file. This is the file that a search engine spider will look for to be given direction. If your robots.txt file is empty then the default behaviour for spiders is to index each page and follow your links. If your robots.txt file contains < meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” > then this will be impacting the visibility of your website in the search engine results pages.
URLs
URLs are another aspect of your website that can be optimised for maximum search engine visibility. Including the main targeted keyword for the page in its URL and locating that page as close to the root of the domain as possible will help. Also avoid using dynamic URLs that use ?, &, $, =, +, %, and other characters that have no SEO value. Also, try to avoid camel case and format each pages URL in the same manner.
Guest Post by: Dan dreams of being a dolphin trainer and swimming pool technician who treats above ground pools with Certikin along with other swimming pool chemicals like his friend Alex Harvey, he’s cool, You can find him on Twitter here @ harvey1dash8.
Unite is a new premium WordPress theme that is great for design related sites. This theme has 5 pre-made skins and its very clean and organised. The theme is easy to modify and ready to be up and running out of the box. The PSD files included have been customized to allow fast skinning.
Smart 404 is the best wordpress plugin for 404 pages. We have just installed smart 404 on Crenk it has really helped our readers that were find 404 pages.
Instead of just giving out a 404 page when content cant be found, smart 404 make an effort to guess what they were after in the first place and finds appropriate information. The plugin helps improve search results, pages, posts, tags and more.
These changes really help to improve SEO as Google and other search engines dont like pages that 404.
Download the plugin here.
We have just found an amazing free hand drawn icon set for both personal and commercial use.The icon set has 247 amazing icons all in .png format.
There are 2 sizes in the download package: 32 x 32px and 128 x 128px.
This hand-drawn icon set has almost all the items a web app. can need from actions to media or devices.
