Buzrr: Add a Google Buzz Counter Button To Your Blog
Google Buzz hasn’t been around for too long, but top blogs and content publishers are already taking advantage of the service to give their readers another option to help spread the word around about their content. While Google Buzz may not be the right choice for all websites, it’s always nice to have a simple way to add a Google Buzz counter to your website or portal. That’s where Buzrr comes in. It’s a simple to use service that lets you add your own Gbuzz button to your blog to help your content go viral.
4 Cool Wordpress Themes For Your Personal Blog
There have been many bloggers who have made a business out of branding their own names. If you happen to have had any success blogging or doing anything else for that matter, you want to make sure you build your domain name (e.g. [Firstname][Lastname].com) to help people find you more effectively and leverage the site to push your other endeavors. Personal blogs are also useful for those who just want to aggregate all their activities on social networking sites in one place. Even if you don’t have a plan for your domain name, you still want to take the first steps to make sure you get the proper credit from the search engines.
Thanks to Wordpress, anyone can put up a website in a matter of minutes. There are plenty of themes that you can choose from to give your website the look and feel you crave. But if you are interested in giving your visitors ways to contact you or follow your work online on your blog, these 4 personal blog Wordpress themes come in handy:
Social Life: integrates all your favorite social media services into one page. So essentially, you won’t have to do anything other than doing what you have been doing on Twitter and other social networking sites. This theme takes care of the rest.
AntiSocial: one of the best aggregator themes on the market. If you happen to be invovled heavily in the social media, you are going to love using this theme. It’s pretty flexible and makes it easy to create a website that your visitors can use to get in touch with your work. Read more »
Fixed Social Plugin: Wordpress Meets Social Media
In a perfect world, your readers will take the time to remember to submit your best content to all relevant social media services around. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if you got some exposure on those sites for all the work you have done without having to lift a finger. That’s actually possible as long as your content provides unique value to your readers. You also want to have the proper tools on your blog to make it easy for your readers to submit your posts to those sites. If you are running your blog on Wordpress, you are in luck. There are plenty of plugins that make it so easy for your visitors to share your content on top social networking sites.
Fixed Social Plugin is an amazing little plugin that is worth a try for anyone who’s looking to get more exposure for his/her content on sites such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, and other top sites. This plugin is very flexible. It lets you pick and choose the style of your buttons and also the ones you want to show on your blog.
Share Your Content On Social Sites with HomePuzz
Many bloggers complain about being overwhelmed with all the social media websites that they are involved in. Chances are you are a part of Facebook and Twitter. But those are not the only services that can help you connect with others, expand your community, and drive more traffic to your website. Besides, managing your presence on these social sites could take a bit of time and effort if you tackle them one by one. HomePuzz is an exciting service that can help you organize your social media life and share content across multiple networks more effectively.
The service is pretty simple to use. Once you have signed up for the service, you can use it as you would Twitter. However, you’re going to have the option to share your posts with your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, or Buzz contacts. You are obviously sharing your posts with your HomePuzz friends. So you are hitting 4 targets in one shot.
3 Powerful Cache Plugins To Speed Up Your WP Blog
Millions of people run their blogs on Wordpress. It’s the most popular blogging CMS hands down, and it keeps getting better. No matter what CMS you are using or how attractive your theme is, you want to make sure your blog loads fast when your visitors come to your blog. Wouldn’t you find it annoying if your favorite blog took forever to load? No matter how popular your blog, you are going to have to deal with speed issues on your blog at some point. One way to speed up your blog is by adding the proper cache plugin in to your website. Caching not only reduces the load on your servers, but it improves the performance and speed of your blog, hence keeping your visitors happy.
If you are looking to speed up your Wordpress blog and improve its performance dramatically, here are 3 powerful cache plugins worth trying:
WP Super Cache: one of the most powerful cache plugins available for Wordpress. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog, meaning that your server won’t have to deal with those resource intensive PHP scripts all the time. The bad news is this plugin is known to have issues with some web hosting services (e.g. Dream host). Read more »
5 Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing May Not Be The Answer For Your Blog
Credit: evagor@sxc.hu
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money blogging. As long as you are writing about a niche that a few people care about, there is a good chance you can find affiliate programs that can help you promote products to your readers and get compensated when they buy using your links. There is no magic number of dollars that you can make with affiliate marketing. Many bloggers assume that there is no ceiling to how much money you can earn from affiliate products. While that may be true, since you are only getting a small percentage of what you are selling on your blog, there is so much money you can earn. But there is a floor. That’s when you don’t sell any products. So affiliate marketing is quite risky for publishers especially if you have CPM deals lined up for your blog.
I have been fond of affiliate marketing for years now. It’s what allowed me to start my business and fund it when I didn’t have enough resources to hire people or purchase equipment and services for my business. So affiliate marketing will always have a special place in my heart. But there are reasons I am not focusing my efforts on affiliate marketing anymore. The business has changed dramatically in the past few years, and while the industry is not dead, it is being pressured from all sides. Here are just a few reasons why I don’t consider affiliate marketing to be right for my business:
- Control: when you start your own business, you’d hope that you can have control on what’s going on with your business, and what you can do to increase your revenue. In reality, affiliate marketers are not in control of their destiny. In many cases, affiliate programs are too uptight with all their rules and policies. Some affiliate programs don’t pay you if you blog about their products. Others will right off your affiliate commissions if you refer people to them through the search engines. Worst of all, your affiliate program could ask you to make major changes to your website in order to continue your relationship with them. Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in the corporate environment, and I am aware of the challenges of working with partner companies in the past. But I have found many affiliate programs to be too demanding and uptight.
- Unfavorable Landscape: affiliate programs have shown that they really don’t care about their affiliates. When companies cut their affiliates off the minute Internet tax is imposed in a certain state, you know you are not a priority for your affiliate partner. I guess it’s only fair as affiliates are there to generate leads for their merchants. So expecting merchants to care too much about affiliates may be wishful thinking. Many merchants are struggling these days and affiliate marketers are getting the boot as a result. Fair? Read more »
reCAPTCHA: Protect Your Blog Against Spam
Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform around. It’s not only free but can easily be enhanced through its huge database of plugins. But like every popular platform, Wordpress is susceptible to spam attacks as well. If you don’t believe me, just start a Wordpress blog with no security plugins and write a couple of posts on it. Once your site is crawled by Google and other search engines, you are going to see those nasty spammers make their way to your blog with their Viagra and other obscene plugs. That’s why you don’t want to abandon your Wordpress blog as far as its security is concerned.
reCAPTCHA is a powerful Wordpress plugin that helps you manage spam much more easily. Everybody who has been on the Internet for more than a few months has seen those annoying CAPTCHA systems. Yes. They can be annoying, but if you are getting a lot of spam comments on your blog, you’ll have to do something about it. I am sure your audience would understand. With reCAPTCHA, you can stop spammers in their tracks and make the process less convenient for them. Read more »
How To Add Google Buzz To Your Blog
Google Buzz is one of the most exciting new social features added to Gmail. Google is always innovating and adding new features to its existing services. Google Buzz gives you yet another way to share your content with your friends and followers. Just like Twitter, you can attract followers and leverage them to help you get your content viral. But not everyone is going to use Google Buzz right from the start. So it’s always nice to provide them with proper call to action. That’s why you should take time to add Google Buzz button and content to your blog.
If you happen to be using Wordpress to manage your blog content, you are going to love some of the Buzz plugins that have been released to the market. My favorite plugins so far are WP Google Buzz and Google Buz ER. They allow you to add Buzz buttons and content to your blog respectively.
WP Google Buzz is not only very easy to use but is very flexible as well. For starters, you won’t have to touch your code if you don’t want to. The plugin comes with 11 buzz buttons to help you choose the one that works for your blog design. You can even avoid leaking link juice by no following Google Buzz links.
Blogs On Shared Web Hosts: Right Idea?
Whether you are a professional blogger or have just started with your own blog, you have probably had to deal with hosting issues in the past. Web Hosting is one of those tricky issues that can determine the success or failure of your site. You can work on your content all day, but if your website is down when your visitors pay you a visit, you are not going to get too much value out of your web host. Unfortunately, choosing the right web host is not an easy process. There are plenty of companies that promise you a lot of things but don’t deliver on their promise. In the past, I have talked about how you should go about choosing a web host for your blog, so there is no reason to address that again. But even if you do your best to research all the web hosting services around, there is still a chance you can sign up with the wrong partner.
When you start your blog, there is a good chance you are not going to get a lot of traffic right from the start. So the idea of signing up for a shared web hosting service can be intriguing. After all, nobody minds paying $5 a month for one of these services. But many bloggers feel hesitant when it comes to signing up for a VPS or dedicated server account. Those accounts are going to cost you significantly more money. Of course, there is a reason for that.
Shared web hosting services will work fine for new blogs. As long as you are not getting a decent amount of traffic, your shared web host should be handle your traffic. But there are many limitations on these accounts. It’s so easy to hit those limits with bad plugins or scripts on your server. What happens when you hit those limits? Your site could crash or become so slow. That’s the easiest way you can lose your loyal visitors as no one likes to wait a minute for your site to load up, no matter how good your content is.
Job Board Theme: Add a Job Board To Your Blog
There was a time when having a job board feature on your blog was something unique. Not anymore. Many top blogs come with job boards to enable readers to find or post jobs. When you think about it, the idea of having a job board on your blog is not too crazy. As a blogger your goal should be to build a more solid community. What a better way to do that by helping your readers to connect with those who are seeking for a job or looking to fill a job. A few years ago, you’d have to spend a significant amount of money to get a professional looking job board up and running. But these days you can get the job done easily with the power of Wordpress and a decent premium theme.
Job Board Theme is a premium Wordpress theme that lets you create a job board for your blog fast. You won’t even have to know any programming to get started. Of course, if you know design or have the budget to hire a designer, you can change the default look and feel and get even more value out of the theme. Job Board Theme makes life easy either way. Read more »
