Archive for the ‘Stuff’ Category:
Why I Hate Blogs with Too Many Ads
Blogging could be a rewarding career, especially for those who find their voice and get to make a living talking about what they are passionate about. Unfortunately, not everyone actually gets to make a good living out of blogging. The top guys do make enough money to be comfortable and enjoy life. The rest will have to find ways to just stay afloat. Many new bloggers think they should start making the big bucks right from the start. That could be why some of them add all kinds of advertisements at the top of their blogs, thinking that ads are the best way to get those “big bucks.” In reality, some of these ads are the ugliest way to make money from a blog (especially those that are inside your content). Just to be clear, they do get the clicks if you put them in the right place. But you don’t want to be too aggressive with them.
There is nothing wrong with having a “sponsor” or “ad” section on your blog. I have them on this blog and almost all other bloggers have them too. But when you start adding advertisements inside your content (and all over the place), you want to be careful they don’t take away from your readers’ experience on your website. As a blogger I understand that people need to make money on their blogs, but here are the main reasons I hate those ad-filled websites:
- Too many ads could compromise reading experience: that’s just it. I find those big Adsense blocks that some use at the top of each post very annoying. Not only they are ugly, they make it tough to read those posts. Do those get clicks? You bet. I am just not sure they are worth the headaches they cause for readers. Read more »
Add a Social Bar to Your Blog with Apture
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One of the best ways to keep people from leaving your blog is by giving them what they are looking for on your site. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a tool that made your site more dynamic and gave your visitors a set of additional tools to explore and share content with others. That’s exactly what Apture is all about. It’s a fun social bar that sits on the top of your blog and gives your visitors the tools they need to submit your pages to Facebook/Twitter or search across the Internet without leaving your website.
As you can see in the above screen-shot, Apture bar sits at the very top with links to Twitter and Facebook. The Javascript content explore on the right side makes it so easy for your visitors to search for content without leaving your website. Setting up Apture on your website is not that hard. All you have to do is customize the look and feel of your bar. You can even upload your logo if you wish. Read more »
5 Quick Ways To Get The Word Out about your blog
Every blogger wants more traffic. The more people visit your website and read your content, the better chance you have of getting the recognition you deserve from your work. Of course, when you start a new blog, it is going to take time for you to get ranked in the search engines and for people to find out about your website. My philosophy is, every little thing that you do is going to help you over the long run. That’s why new bloggers need to focus on building links and creating outposts for their blog. Now here is the tricky part. You are going to have only 24 hours a day, so you won’t have the time to be involved on too many sites. That’s why you should pick and choose your spot.
All bloggers need to be involved on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. That goes without saying. But in order to further increase your traffic, you need to go beyond those 3 services. Here are 5 ways to get started:
Keep Building Those Hubpages
Hubpages is one of the most underrated web services around. I still get traffic from a hubpage I wrote a couple of years ago. Of course, you need to play the game and be involved in that community. Commenting on other people’s pages can help. You shouldn’t cut corners as people will call you out. Whatever you do, do not forget to link back to your blog.
Don’t Forget Squidoo
Squidoo is another one of those websites that can bring you lots of traffic or nothing at all. It really depends how much effort you put into your Squidoo lenses. The more comprehensive they are, and the more involved in that community, the better chance you have of gaining a decent amount of traffic from that site.
Get Involved on Posterous
Posterous does require you to dedicate a decent amount of time to keep your account up to date. But it’s a great community to be involved in if you are a social media pro or just a newbie blogger. Read more »
Learn Speed Reading with QuickReader
I have always been a slow reader. Whether I am reading an English book or one in a foreign language, it does take me quite a while to get it finished. It’s partly due to the fact that I stop and analyze what I have read over and over again before moving on to new chapters. But my reading speed did make it difficult to keep up with things. That’s why I picked up eyeQ solution a while back. It was a software application that taught me how to read faster. Nowadays, you don’t really need a PC software to learn speed reading. As long as you have a decent smart-phone, there is a good chance you can pick up a decent speed reading app to go with it. QuickReader is such an app for iPhone. It can not only open up your e-books, it can teach you how to read them faster.
A lot of people seem too lazy to try speed reading or just don’t believe it works. It really does as long as you are patient about it. QuickReader gives you access to thousands of free eb00ks on your iPhone and lets you import articles and web pages as well. This application is pretty easy to use. Just set the pace that you can handle and follow the guide as long as you can. If you choose a faster speed than you can handle, you are going to find it very difficult to follow the guide. You want to go step by step here, so there is no reason not to start with the speed that you are comfortable with.
Build Your Own News Aggregator with OneNews
In order to become a successful blogger, bloggers need to focus more on providing value to their readers. People come to a blog to learn new things, stay on the top of the latest news, and communicate with their blog community members. As a blogger, you may not be able to track every single piece of news, but it never hurts to create a news aggregator on your site to give your visitors an easy way to keep track of the latest developments in your niche without leaving your website. Thanks to OneNews for Wordpress you can do just that in a matter of minutes.
OneNews for WordPress is a very easy to use theme that transforms your blog into your very own news aggregator, similar to what AllTop offers. You can use the theme to add your favorite blogs, Twitter searches, and Google news feeds. That way your visitors can stay on the top of the latest developments in your niche all from one place. This theme can handle Flickr photos and YouTube videos too.
How I Organize My Feeds
Whether you are a part-time blogger or a pro-blogger who makes a full-time living online from your blog, you want to take time on a daily basis to keep up with the latest developments in your niche and other industries. You certainly don’t want to talk about things without being on the top of things in your market. Not knowing what you are talking about is the best way to lose your credibility and damage your blog’s reputation. Finding blogs to read in your niche is not that difficult. There are plenty of lists out there that show you what the top blogs are in each niche. There are plenty of bloggers that create posts about top blogs in different niches. So there is no excuse in finding a handful of blogs to read on a daily basis. Things get a bit more dicey when you are greedy like me. There was a time that I had over 1000 feeds in my “must read” folder. I was never able to catch up with everything in that folder, but it was a nice way to challenge myself.
I realized after a while that one just can’t keep up with that many feeds. Not without sacrificing some other things. As a business owner, I owed it to myself to organize my feeds in a way that would help me get the information I need on a daily basis without forgetting about my core business processes. If you suffer from information and feed overload, you may want to consider switching your feed reader and use one that lets you organize your feeds and get more out of them. Bloglines and Google Reader are both very powerful and worth using if you are a feed junkie. I personally stopped using Bloglines a while ago as Google Reader provided me with more social features, but either solutions works great. How you organize your feeds is going to be the most important part of the process. Read more »
10 Ways To Beef Up Your Blog
When it comes to taking your blog to the next level, there is so much content you can write. There are plenty of other ways to beef up your blog that go beyond writing new stories. The key is providing value to your readers. Something they can’t get anywhere else. Whether it is giving your readers new ways to consume your content or provide them with tools to get things done easier, there are ways that you can go viral and solidify your blog community at the same time.
You do want to think about what your audience is into before developing an action plan. For that, you need to figure out whom you are targeting on your blog and what are their needs and wants that you can address. That way, when you do create a service or product for your readers, it’s going to be something that they appreciate.
With that in mind, here are 10 ways to improve your blog and solidify your community:
- iPhone Apps: developing an iPhone app around your blog is the best way to get your community together and keep it growing. You do want your iPhone app to be more than just your blog posts. You obviously want to get some branding time. But don’t hesitate to go beyond your blog posts and develop an app that provides a unique value to your readers.
- Blog Themes: there are many new bloggers who have no idea how to design a theme for their blogs and don’t want to spend money on custom blog designs. The best way to help those people out is by offering them a free theme or two. You can always ask them to link back to your blog from theirs.
- Wordpress Plugins: lots of people use Wordpress as their blogging platform. Developing a useful Wordpress plugin can also help you get the word out about your blog and drive lots of traffic to your community. You don’t have to develop the plugin yourself. Use a service such as Rent a Coder to hire someone to do it for you. The temptation is always there to charge for your plugin. But offering it for free will have a more viral effect. Think of it as a form of promotion for your blog. If your plugin is any good, you are going to get a persistent stream of traffic for a long period of time.
- Facebook Apps: you can always create Facebook apps and pages for you blog. But don’t limit yourself to that. Develop something useful for your audience and reap the rewards as they keep coming back to you and your blog for more. Read more »
Blogging SEO 101: Get Started With SEO – Part I
Search engine optimization seems to get more popular by the hour. As the state of economy stays dire, as it has been in the past few months, many bloggers are cutting their monthly budgets and spending more time researching on free ways to drive traffic to their blogs. Search engine optimization is one of those ways. Many bloggers just assume that you have to be some technical genius to optimize your website for the search engines. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact is as a blogger there are simple steps you can take to increase your traffic from the search engines and take your blog to the next level.
How to Get Started with Blogging SEO
In order to optimize your blog for search engines, you need to focus both on on-page and off-page factors. The on-page factors are those that involve you making changes on your site, to your code. Off-page pages involve incoming links and your social media efforts. With that in mind, here are a few simple steps you can take to optimize your blog for SEO:
1. Content: since you are not trying to be one of those folks who optimize splogs for SEO, you want to make sure you provide real value to your readers in your blog posts. That’s not just good practice. It’s really the only way you can sustain a high level of traffic over a long period of time.
2. Title Tag: using your core keyword phrase in your title goes a long way towards helping you getting ranked for that term. It’s one of the most important on page factors.
3. URL: having your keyword phrase in your URL also helps you get a push on the search engine results pages. It’s very simple to do if you are using a content management system such as Wordpress.
4. Special tags: using special tags such as h1 and B tags can help you even more with your rankings. These tags give engines a better indication on what’s important to you on each and every page.
5. Keywords: the most important part of your SEO strategy. There are plenty of tools that you can use to do your keyword research and find those that people are searching for. Services such as WordTracker and Wordze come in very handy. You can also use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to do some basic keyword research done.
6. Links: linking to your own content should be a big part of your strategy. Your internal links do matter and can help search engines find and index more of your pages. Don’t forget about the text you use in your links! Use the keyword you want that page to get ranked for, and you’ll be off in the long run. You should also take time to link to authority sites from your site. Being associated with top authority sites never hurts, and while you may not get a link back from them, your readers will appreciate those links.
7. Long-tail: a guerrilla marketing tactic that I have been using for a few years now. You may ask, why would I want to get ranked for a term that only 100 people are searching for per month. Those terms are less competitive, easier to rank for, and your traffic adds up as long as you optimize for enough of them.
8. Inbound Links: don’t forget to submit your blog to directories such as E-zine Articles, Isnare, and more. You should also consider blog directories such as AllTop. All these links count one way or another (though you want to focus on the Yes Follow ones).
9. Social Media: using the social media to get links back to your site is a great way to push your content and get more traffic. Make sure to take advantage of Twitter, Facebook, and other sites to increase your traffic for free. Don’t forget to ask your readers to help you out.
10. Plugins: not a SEO tip, but you are always better off using blog enhancements to get the above steps down. There are plenty of plugins for Wordpress and other systems that help you optimize your titles, create a sitemap, and modify your URLs easily. It just doesn’t make sense to spend time doing all these steps by hand.
There you have it. 10 steps to help you get started with SEO on your blog. There are plenty of other tactics you can employ to climb the search engine rankings, which is why you should come back for the second part of this post.
Lost Your Job? Why Won’t You Blog?
The job market is tough. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that. It’s not that jobs are not out there. It’s just that you have more people going for less positions. To put it in economic terms, you have a lot of demand but not that much supply. A lot of job searchers have been discouraged by the conditions in the job market, and some even stop searching. I know a lot of these people, and it’s heart breaking to see people struggle to make a living these days. But the question that I usually ask this folk is whether they blog. It’s really simple. If you don’t have a job and searching for a job, you are still going to have some time to blog on a daily basis. It’s never too late to start blogging, and who knows where it’s going to take you.
Many people are afraid of starting a blog. They feel blogging is done only by geeks and nerds. That attitude has started to change in the recent month as more people are realizing how easy it is to start a blog and start building business. Becoming a blogging superstar is not that easy. It does take a while, and a lot of work. But that doesn’t mean you should start. If you don’t get into the game, you are never going to succeed. Blogging can open a lot of doors for you. You may get consulting offers from your visitors. You can even write a book (a lot of bloggers have). Here are just a few things you can achieve with blogging:
- Find a job.
- Build up your resume (blogging looks good on your resume).
- Gain more on the job experience.
- Find consulting/short-term projects.
- Create an in-demand product.
- Make money from your blog.
- Sell your blog for profit.
- Set yourself up as a guru in your industry..
- Increase your marketability.
- Network with other bloggers and expand your network.
- Find new passions and enter new industries.
- …
Whether you are looking for a job or you already have one, there is still no reason not to start a blog. The sooner you start blogging, the better off you will be in the long run. Your blog will gain value over time and open doors for you in the future. It’s not just about money, but rather about building assets. One day you are going to be thankful you started your blog when you did.
Your take: what has stopped you from starting your own blog?
Learn and Master Twitter with Twitter Hacks
Recently, I had a chance to write about how I drive traffic to my websites with Squidoo. Squidoo is powerful service that lets you create all kinds of websites fast. And it does help that it ranks fairly well on Google and other major search engines. In order to demonstrate how you can put up a useful Squidoo page that can provide value to your visitors, I decided to create Twitter Hacks. Twitter Hacks is a Squidoo lens that is put together to help those new to the world of Twitter master everything there is to Twitter and get their social media game to the next level.
Twitter Hacks not only provides you with Twitter training, but it also contains a comprehensive list of Twitter tools that you can use to get more done on Twitter with less. If you are an advanced Twitter user, you can also learn how to start and write your own Twitter application using Twitter API.
Twitter Hacks is just a simple example of how you can put up a Squidoo page together fast. It did take me a while to do the research and test all the different applications, but putting together the page didn’t take that long. Your Squidoo pages don’t have to be as comprehensive as Twitter Hacks, but you want to make sure you give your visitors something that’s worth their time.
P.S. don’t forget to rate Twitter Hacks if you like it.
