Recording videos and audio podcast episodes outside your studio is going to bring its own challenges. You are going to have to deal with unwanted noises and other issues when recording in a room that is not acoustically treated. There are ways to get rid of your computer noise when recording your sessions though. Here are 5 ways to do just that:

Buy a quiet PC: there are places you can pick up computers optimized for studios. Their makers use foams and other material to reduce the noise coming out of the machines they sell. You could also replace your old computer’s fans with quiet ones to make it less noisy. It really comes down to how much money you have to spend on this.

Get an Isobox: these are not cheap by any means but are designed for the pros. If you have a few thousand dollars to spend on one of these, you will be able to fit your equipment in your room without having to worry about the unwanted noise.

Buy a better microphone: I use the EV RE20 and Heil PR40 microphones for my own recordings. These are not cheap but are very quiet in comparison to the AT2020 mic that most bloggers suggest. Both of these are dynamic microphones, so if you are interested, you should consider getting a decent preamp for them.

Move your PC: this is a solution that works for folks who do not have any money to spend on room treatment or a new PC (which is most of us). Moving your PC to another room and recording in a quiet room is the best way to get around this issue.

Software optimization: this is another way to fix audio issues with your videos before uploading them to YouTube. Audacity, Camtasia, and other audio software solutions do give you the opportunity to get rid of the unwanted noise in your recordings easily. Getting a noise gate is not a bad idea either.

How do you get rid of your computer noise when recording audio or videos at home?

Many folks are making a good living publishing books to Amazon and other online e-book stores. As long as you have the talent for writing, there is no reason you should not pursue your dreams. You do need to track your sales and performance to make sure you are reaching your goals. NovelRank is a handy tool that tracks your sales rank and gives you an idea which months have been the best for you.

NovelRank gives you an idea how well your book is doing. It has plenty of tools you can use to track your books’ performances. It also has an iPhone app you can use to track your stats. NovelRank lets you track Amazon sales rank statistics of printed and Kindle edition books. You can view historical data for each book (daily and hourly sales rank data).

NovelRank tracks your statistics across international Amazon sites. You do need a NovelRank user account to get started. If you love writing books and are serious about tracking your performance, tools such as NovelRank are worth adopting.

Micro job sites such as Fiverr have been around for a while. You could find talent to help with your projects or get some paid work on those. Creating micro job sites may not be a bad idea for businesses. The Pricerr Theme is a professional theme that turns your WordPress site into a job site.

The Pricerr Theme lets you hold small fixed price auctions on your website. You can use this to find talent to perform simple tasks you simply have no time for. It comes integrated with PayPal, Authorize.net, AlertPay, and Google Checkout. It gives total control over jobs. Email notifications are customizable. You get Facebook and Twitter integration too.

The Pricerr Theme offers private messaging and has its own credit system. It supports multiple currencies. Creating a micro-job site may be an overkill for most folks. But if you need to create one, the Pricerr theme is worth checking out.

In the past couple of years I have seen many bloggers recommend others to publish guests post to gain links back from popular sites. That is not a bad idea if you don’t go overboard with it. Recently I have seen many bloggers who have been forced to remove guests post due to their sites being penalized by Google. While I have written about the importance of building quality links, I have never been a fan of just publishing guest posts one after another on any of our sites. Here are a few reasons for that:

• quality writers are rare: Not every writer you find can write well. We simply don’t publish all the posts that people send us. No matter how new your website, you need to have some quality control or your brand will suffer.
• dishonest authors: we did publish a few guest posts in our blog network in the past. Unfortunately, some of those authors switched links on us or published the very same posts on other sites. Getting flagged for having duplicate content is never fun.
•  maintaining our unique voice: publishing a couple of guests posts won’t take away from your blog or your voice that your visitors have gotten used to. But if you are publishing a couple of guests posts every day, that will dilute your presence. I have even seen bloggers who take weeks off and let guest posters do the writing for them. That’s not a great idea if you want your loyal readers to stay interested in your community.
• Google algorithm changes: Google changes its algorithm all the time. Unnatural building is now being targeted by the latest search algorithm changes. Many bloggers who were so high on guest-posting are now cautioning people against them. Publishing too many guest blog posts and linking to all kinds of sites were never a great idea.
• Maintaining a routine: accepting, editing, and publishing guest posts was never a main part of my routine. The more guest blog posts we accepted, the harder it became for our team to maintain our routine. At the end of the day, we love creating unique content on our own. That’s our core competence.

Don’t get me wrong. Guest blogging is still a great way to drive traffic to your website and gain links from top sites in your niche market. But it should not be your only strategy. You should also maintain a high level of quality control to make sure you only publish blog posts that fit your community’s standards.

Most bloggers understand the importance of being active on social networking sites such as Facebook. These sites can potentially drive a ton of traffic to your community. Adding the appropriate social buttons to your site would help your cause too. Many of us give the majority of our content to our readers for free. But there are some folks who charge their readers for their very best content. You don’t always have to ask your community to pay for your special posts. You could give premium content up for likes, tweets, and +1s, and get your posts to go viral.

The idea is a bit on the aggressive side. Not all your readers might appreciate such an approach. But you will never know how effective the idea can be unless you test it out. Social Locker for WordPress makes that possible. It locks certain parts of your site and displays them when your visitors like or share your posts. The plugin lets you control its header and message. You can also pick and choose which social sites you would like to target (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn).

Social Locker lets you pick any URL for your visitors to like/share/tweet/+1. It has an analytics tool so you can track which lockers are performing the best. The plugin has multiple themes and is quite responsive. The idea may not work for all sites but is worth exploring for a few posts.

Google Reader is dying. It is quite a huge deal for us bloggers. I don’t know about you but I have over 1200 feeds that I track with Google Reader. Unfortunately, Google is not going to keep Google Reader around past July 1, 2013. That does not mean RSS is completely dead. You will just have to find other ways to manage your feeds. Here are 4 tools you can use to manage your RSS feeds:

Great News: a desktop application that lets you save and organize your feeds on your computer. It is not perfect but it does what it promises. All your articles are stored locally, so you won’t lose any article.

NewsBlur: a great alternative to Google Reader. It provides you with real-time RSS tracking and is available for multiple platforms, including Android and iOS.

Feedly: many Google Reader users have joined Feedly as Google announced the pending demise of the site. You can use it on Firefox to track stories. It is Android and iOS friendly also.

Tiny Tiny RSS: so you want to run your own RSS news feed reader? Tiny Tiny RSS is more than capable of handling the job. It is a server side application, so you will only need a web browser to track stories. An Android app is also available for it.

What are your favorite alternatives to Google Reader?

Instagram is one of the most popular photo sharing sites around. A lot of folks are active on the site, sharing their photos with people from around the world. Editing photos to share on Instagram is not hard. There are many tools that can handle the job. InstaWeather Pro happens to be an elegant application that makes adding weather reports to your Instagram photos a lot easier.

The idea behind this app is very simple. It lets you add a weather report with location and temperature information to your photos. The pro version has 9 skins for you to choose from. You can include only simple information or detailed forecast with air pressure, temperature, rain, wind power, and direction. InstaWeather Pro works with Celsius & Fahrenheit, kilometres, and other units.

InstaWeather Pro is a pretty useful app for Instagram fans. It is perfect for those of you who want to share vacation photos or general weather reports with your friends. It is available for $0.99 at this point.

Google+ is more than a simple social network. It is a social layer for everything Google. It should go without saying that the more established you become on the site, the better chance you will have of leveraging your Google+ network to get your business more exposure. Becoming a Google+ superstar is not easy. It takes a lot of time and effort. You need to stay active in the community, build connections, and contribute value to the site. Here is a simple plan to strengthen your presence on Google+:

• share what the community is craving: easier said than done. But you can get a sense of what Google+ users are craving by looking at the types of posts that go viral. Just go to the Explore section and watch what is being shared there. Keeping track of tags is important too. Learning from the best is always a good idea.
• make the right connections: I have been lucky to make great connections on Google+ even when I had only 100 followers. That gave me some assurance that I was on the right track. If your content is good and unique enough, you will be able to leverage your superstar contacts to help spread the word.
• give others credit: I have seen so many top users on Google+ who are more than happy to give other users credit and share their stories. You should also do that to grow your community organically.
• grow your sources: relying on the same sites to find stories and content to share on Google+ gets old. I am tracking hundreds of blogs using Google Reader. You should too. Focusing on sites that cover your area of expertise is very important.
• offer unique value: this is where you can set yourself apart from others on Google+. If you are sharing what everyone else is sharing, you won’t be able to set yourself apart on G+. I have seen people offer tools, hacks, and round-up posts on Google+ to keep their content unique. A little bit of creativity would help here.

Becoming highly successful on G+ takes hard work and perseverance on your part. But if you are serious about using Google to grow your business, you have no choice but to get more active on Google+. The community is only going to grow from here.

VPN services should not need any introduction to business users. They help you keep your privacy while browsing the Internet. It is true that many torrent downloaders are relying on VPN sites to avoid getting tracked. But there are many legitimate uses for VPN services. They are especially useful for business users who are constantly traveling.

Not all VPN services are the same. Some promise a lot and don’t deliver. Then there are some that are slow and have non-existent customer service. With these VPN services, you don’t have to worry about those issues:

BolehVPN: provides you with proxied servers and lets you surf anonymously. It is useful when you are using public Wi-Fi hotspots. Your activity is logged by these guys.

Private Internet Access: protects your privacy and identity online. These guys have servers in many countries and keep you completely anonymous. For obvious reasons, many torrent downloaders are a fan of this service.

WiTopia: this service is being used by people from over 160 countries. You get a carrier grade network with fast connection and apps for Android and iOS.

There are many other VPN services you can use to stay somewhat anonymous online (e.g. BTGuard, Astrill, … ). The above VPN services have worked the best for us. You should always do your research to make sure you team up with the right provider for your needs.

We all use images on our sites. Blog posts without any images are plain boring and tend to get less attention anyway. Some bloggers believe they can just include any image they find online in their posts. That can’t be further from the truth. Including copyrighted material on your site without giving credit or asking for permission could get you in trouble. That’s where Alamy comes into play. It helps you find royalty free and premium images for your site.

The site is easy to use. You can search through images, videos, and creative material on the site. Just choose the options that work for you and search through the site. Keep in mind that royalty-free does not mean free. Besides, some photographers have strict licenses you will need to abide by. The site does allow you to go through its content by category and other criteria to find exactly what you need though.

Alamy is not my favorite site to find images for my own blog. I have had more success with sites such as Stock.xchng. But if you can’t find what you are looking for on free image sites, Alamy is worth giving a shot.