Blogging Tips and Social Media | Mint Blogger

How To Track Your Advertising Campaigns

2009-07-05T08:23:00.001+05:30

Often we spend good amount of money on advertising but fail to convert the incoming traffic. One of the reasons is almost nil meaningful traffic analysis that is so vital for any successful advertising campaign. With the advent of new and improved web analytics services there are plenty of options at our disposal, provided we identify and utilize them in a correct way. Let's see how to track and improve our advertising campaigns that can give us maximum returns in limited budgets.

Divide - Segregate - Segment

Let's start with old principle of divide and rule. Whether you are tracking text links in email newsletters, regular text link ads, graphic banners ads or video/flash ads, the basic principle to track these ads is to separate each group of ads/campaigns and then associating identifiable and unique metadata to them. Let's assume you are planning to advertise about your new twitter marketing ebook. Let's further assume that you are going to use multiple ad formats with different landing pages for selective ad formats. To make it simple, lets say you have four text link ads and four banner ads (each with unique creative and different size).

At macro level, these ads can be divided into two groups. Each group can be further divided into four sub-groups each one containing ads of different size and different anchor/description text. Once you have completed the classification, you are ready to move on to next level. You can use Google Analytics to track your advertising campaigns. It's a powerful web analytics service that is often undermined by large number of users. It's free, simple to use and provides plethora of options to monitor, analyze and improve your web traffic.

Tag it! - Make Intelligent URL's

As I mentioned earlier, associating metadata with your ad links can help you track and analyze your ad campaigns in an effective manner. This technique is called - URL Tagging. Major PPC advertising networks like Google Adwords inherently supports URL tagging for intense campaign tracking and analysis. For other ad types (direct ads, promotional links), you can use the services of Google Analytics URL Builder to tag your ad links. Tagging a link involves associating variables with it starting with (? question mark) and each variable separated by (& ampersand) mark. For example,

http://www.xyz.com/landingpage.php?variable_1=value&varialble_2=value

Google's URL Builder uses 5 variables for tagging links out of which 3 are mandatory while other 2 are optional.

1. utm_source - As the name implies, this variable identifies the source of ad where it is going to appear. This can be an email newsletter, a feed, a page, a search engine or any other similar source. In simple words, it denotes the referrer. For example: (twitter_newsletter_v1,google,bing)

2. utm_medium - Again the name says it all. The ad medium is identified through this variable. For example: (email,banner,cpcflash,video)

3. utm_term - (optional) Generally, it is used by auto-tagging feature of Google Adwords to assist in better targeting of paid ads. Use this variable to identify paid keywords.

4. utm_content - (optional) Another non-mandatory option used to specify the type of ad associated with any ad link. If you want to differentiate ads on the basis of their types, you can use this variable to classify them. For example: (textlink,bannerlink)

5. utm_campaign - Identifies the campaign name. Use this variable to differentiate between multiple promotional campaigns running simultaneously. For example: (twiiter_ebook, seo_320pack)

So let's get started with tagging of ad links of our fictitious twitter marketing ebook ad campaign.

In first example, we have tagged a text link ad that will appear only on home page of site x. This ad will be served on cpc basis and is associated with twitter ebook promotional campaign.

http://www.xyz.com/ebook.php?utm_source=sitex_home_page&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=toc_text_link&utm_campaign=twitter_ebook_promo

In second example, we have tagged a URL associated with a banner ad (of size 468x60) that will be served on CPM basis on twitter ebook review page of site y. This ad is also associated with twitter ebook promotional campaign.

http://www.xyz.com/ebook.php?utm_source=sitey_review_page&utm_medium=banner_cpm&utm_content=toc_banner_link_468_60&utm_campaign=twitter_ebook_promo

Once you have tagged all the links, you can see the reports in your Google Analytics account via 'Traffic Sources -> Campaigns'. URL tagging not only allows you to track visits from a source, but you can further break it down to specific page and specific placement within that page. Combined with the power of goals, you can take it to the next level to get the actual performance of your advertising campaigns.

Analyze and Improve

Every successful advertising campaign is supported by analysis of ad performance data and doing improvisations wherever required. Here are some of the common methodologies that are implemented to improve the advertising campaigns.

Identifying performing creatives - Every creative is different and yield different results irrespective of its placement on the web page. Through Google Analytics campaign reports you can easily identify high-performing creatives. Design similar creatives or replace the non-performers with the other ones. Tip: Even if all your creatives are performing well, consider replacing them with the new ones after some time to help reduce ad-blindness.

Identifying best placements - It's almost similar to finding the best combination of your Adsense ads that gives you the best performance. Again, GA campaign reports can easily help you identify best performing spots within a single page.

Identifying performing landing pages - Some landing pages are like honey pots that inherently have very high conversion rates. Identify these high performing landing pages through GA campaign reports and make necessary changes to your ad links to divert the traffic to these pages. Alternatively, you can redesign the non-performing landing pages leaving the ad links intact without any changes.

Over To You

I would like to know your experience about tracking your advertising campaigns. What other techniques and methodologies you adopt to track your ad campaigns?

Related Reading:
1. How To Get Direct Advertisements For Your Blog
2. Ad Inventory Management For Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide
3. Google Ad Manager: Complete Ad Management Solution For Bloggers
4. Why Your Adsense Ads Do Not Recieve Clicks?

Image Credit: Roo Reynolds, Tamar Weinberg

5 Trends To Analyze Your Blog's Reach and Growth

2009-06-21T20:57:00.002+05:30

The traditional methods of analyzing a web site's performance and growth are slowly being replaced by new and better ways that stress more on audience engagement than simple crunching of page impressions. These smart metrics are in development stages and still no credible solution is available that can accurately capture visitor's behavior and engagement in his visit to a web site or blog. Are you limited to page views and unique visitors when it comes to analyzing your blog's reach and growth?

The following five trends that are often ignored by newbies can give you ample data about your blog's expanded reach and visibility. Almost all of these trends rely on readers' engagement (direct or indirect) that can help you in identifying the honey pots and weak zones in your blog.

Feed Subscription Growth Rate (Per Month)

One of the most important metrics that convincingly represent the quality of any blog is the number of feed subscribers. While approaching direct advertisers, subscriber count is one of the important stats present in almost every media kit. If your blog is relatively new with no presence in SERP's, this metric is not so relevant unless you develop a decent readership and enough traffic. Growth in subscribers depends on several variable factors like your blog's niche, audience size, quality of your content and how aggressively you approach to potential subscribers. Keep an eye on the number of subscribers you are gaining each month. Once you have accumulated data for at least 6 months, you will be able to analyze the growth in subscriptions in a better way and will be able to take necessary steps to increase the subscribers.

Comments Per Post (Avg.)

High number of comments per post is a strong indication of highly engaged community. The total number of active commentators for any blog is relatively far less than the number of daily visitors. A blog getting higher number of comments but less traffic is in much better position in terms of growth and reach than the blog getting tons of traffic but no comments. Regular commentators represent your core-readership that helps you in making your blog a hub of active like-minded community by initiating constructive discussions and at times confronting trolls without the need of your intervention. Rewarding commentators is an excellent strategy to attract more comments and building a lively community around your blog.

Social Media Boost (Retweets, Discussions, Bookmarking)

Since social media has gone mainstream, blog promotion strategies has changed drastically. Nowadays, a large chunk of daily traffic comes through social media channels. Make sure you keep track of all major traffic pulling sources through this medium. Whether you are using stumbleupon to pull traffic or using twitter to market your blog, social media referral is one of the important metrics that plays a big role in expanding your blog's reach. There are many ways to analyze social media traffic that can help you divert your energy in the right direction to get maximum benefit from this powerful medium.

References (Linkbacks Growth Rate)

Quality blogs attract backlinks naturally, which are vital for good rankings in SERP's. As your archive inflates, so does the probability of someone referring your content. It's not just about the number of new backlinks you acquire per month, but the quality of those links matters the most. You can try various methods to get backlinks that will give you the required boost in search result rankings. Keep track of the number of backlinks you are acquiring each month and do not forget to thank whoever links to your blog.

Readers Emails

Similar to comments on posts, emails from readers are vital for your blog's growth. If you getting regular emails from your readers, it's an indication of trust in you and an acknowledgment of your authority on a subject. Readers often mail to ask for advice, to get a solution to their problem, to send a guest post or to suggest an idea. Entertaining each and every mail received from your audience helps develop a strong bonding with them, that lays the foundation of building a core-readership that helps spread the word about your blog through word of mouth.

For example, my fellow blogger regularly receive mails from bloggers on blogger platform asking for help related to blogger templates. A friendly mail with all the assistance helps him in gaining a new subscriber and a fan. Remember, building core-readership is more important than just counting page impressions you are receiving per day. Whether it's through commenting or through mail communication, if you are adding regular readers to your kitty month-after-month, it's going to benefit you significantly in the long run.

Make Money Blogging: Myths And Realities

2009-06-02T21:46:00.002+05:30

Since professional blogging has picked up pace in last few years, we can witness thousands of weblogs sprouting almost every day with an aim to make money blogging. Large number of them die prematurely while others struggle to make a decent earnings from their blogs. Very small percentage of these blogs are able to generate good money consistently. Let's see what are the myths and realities associated with making money from blogging.

Myth #1: Making money blogging is very easy.

Wake up buddy! It requires considerable effort to start making decent money from blogging. If you will read biography of some famous bloggers who are making good money from blogging, you will notice something common in them. All of them blogged consistently and remained focused over these years to achieve what they are today.

Myth #2: It requires lot of money to start making money blogging.

Not at all. There are several free blog hosting services that can help you launch a new blog in no time. If you are going for a custom domain, you just require $10 to start a blog. It's not the money but your time and effort that is needed more to create a successful blog.

Myth #3: A niche with low or almost no competition cannot generate money.

This is not always true and depends on several variable factors. A niche with no competition can be a boon for you to tap the untouched market. Capturing this closed set of audience will be much easier for you without facing any tough competition from non-existent seasoned players.

Myth #4: Unless my content does not rule the front page of SERP's, I cannot make money blogging.

I know, I know you have heard 100 times from SEO gurus to rule the SERP results to get some business. But here all we need is a long tail, a massive archive of quality content. The more big is your archive, the more traffic you get. Forget about rankings and focus on creating large archive of good content.

Myth #5: Mr. Smart's $19.99 eBook about 'Make Money Blogging' will give me secrets to get rich overnight.

This eBook will only make one person rich overnight - Mr Smart himself. Do I need to say anything else?

Myth #6: Only self-hosted Wordpress blogs can earn money.

I've heard this many times from readers and some of my peers. Let me give you some examples of successful blogs hosted on blogger platform. Antonio Lupetti's Woork and Amanda Fazani's BloggerBuster are hosted on blogger and generate decent income through direct and indirect methods.

Myth #7: I need to be an expert, if I want to make money blogging.

Every successful blogger started from scratch. It's a learning curve where you refine your skills with passage of time. Some climb the ladder quickly, while others may take some time. Nobody is perfect and if you are deferring your blogging plan in fear of imperfection, then you are doing a big mistake.

Myth #8: Advertising is the only way to make money blogging.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions among large number of newbies. Advertising is just one of the direct methods of generating money from your blog. The indirect methods can comparatively earn you much more money and that too much quickly. Selling your own products and services are two of the most popular indirect methods of generating income from your blog. For example, if you own a food blog, you may launch your own cooking eBook or your own courses about learning various cuisines.

Myth #9: I only need to work 1 hour/week to make money blogging.

Nothing comes without hard work. If you are serious about taking blogging as a profession, you must devote at least 2 to 3 hours daily on your blogging activities. There are several scam programs on Internet claiming to make you millionaire by blogging just 1 hour/week. It's all junk and you must keep yourself away from all these scams.

Image Credit: Tracy O

What Is Remarkable Content?

2009-05-27T07:44:00.002+05:30

Web content in any form, be it text, audio or video is the driving force of millions of web sites and blogs. Content creation strategies have changed significantly with the passage of time. Whether you are writing for a niche blog or a company blog, your readers are going to judge your products and services through your content. What are the traits of quality content? How does it differ from average filler content?

Here are some of the characteristics of remarkable content that has the power to convincingly influence the readers.

Provides Immediate Value (Highly Relevant)

Good content always provides solutions to readers' grievances. Every niche has a closed set of audience that has certain demands, questions and inquiries about the subject. Whatever is your niche, your readers almost always have some burning questions waiting to be answered. It's all about anticipating readers' expectations and delivering the goods accordingly.

Remember, it's not just about providing the solutions, but how easily and quickly readers can apply those solutions to get the desired results. Quality content not only deliver the solution, but also present it in such a way that a layman as well as an expert, both can understand and implement it with ease.

Unique Voice

If your blog niche is highly competitive, things can become more difficult as you may be rehashing the content. Uniqueness is another important element of quality content. If zillion other blogs are also talking about blogging tips, what different are you going to offer to your readers? The difference lies in your perspective and how you elaborate and interpret it. If a reader gets the feeling that he or she has already read this before somewhere else, your content is merely a replica of a topic already covered effectively by somebody else.

The freshness of content directly relates to the uniqueness associated with it. If 10 people are talking about remarkable content, more or less their points at macro level will be similar. Yet one of them may be able to impress his audience more than the others. That's where the uniqueness of content plays a big role.

Appealing Presentation

The third most important element of quality content is the way it is packaged and presented to the readers. Visual appeal has the power to make an average piece of writing, a masterpiece. Use of typography, images, quotes, bullet lists and highlighted sections makes the content sticky and attractive.

Businesses across the world package the same product in different ways to increase their sales. It's a successful strategy that works very well in presenting the old wine in a new bottle. Same thing applies to web content. Package it in an attractive shell and you are bound to get more readers in due course of time.

Closely Connected (Engagement With Audience)

Passive writing is never welcomed by majority of readers. A great post directly relates the topic with the reader. This direct engagement makes a strong connection with the audience giving them the required confidence in relying on the provided solution. Having said that, one must keep in mind the negative implications of getting too much personal and informal while writing for a niche or company blog.

Image Credit: © dabawenya © (busyness!!! flickr vacation muna., Zahra

How To Track Social Media Traffic of Your Blog

2009-05-08T10:00:00.000+05:30

Nowadays, visits from various social media sites contribute a large chunk of total traffic received by a blog. We invest lot of our time in social media marketing without analyzing which social media platforms are giving the best results and where we should invest more of our energy to get the maximum benefits. Fortunately, Google Analytics provides some powerful options to monitor social media referrals.

There are several methods to view social media referrals via Google Analytics. Below are the 3 most common methods to see SM referral data. One of these methods requires Firefox add-on, while other one requires a simple filter to exclude traffic other than coming from social media sites.

Method - 1 (Analytics Referral Sites): The first method is the most easiest one. By deafult GA provides statistics for all the referral sites.

To see this data, go to your analytics dashboard. Select Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites from the side menu. The only extra work required is ignoring non-social media sites present in this report. Normally, social media sites are on top in this report and are easily spotted as shown above.

Method - 2 (Greasemonkey Social Media Analytics Plugin): The second method requires two Firefox add-ons. One of them is the popular Greasemonkey script that works as a driving engine for Analytics social media plugin.

To use this add-on, you must have new ga.js code installed on your blog. Once both these add-ons are installed in your Firefox browser, you can view various social media vote counts directly in Google Analytics reports as shown above. The developers are adding new social media services with each new version of this add-on.

Method - 3 (Custom Segments): Third method uses regular expressions and custom segments to get traffic report of selective social media sites. You can either choose to group traffic from all social media sites in a single segment or you can create a separate segment for every social media site.

Combined traffic in a single segment - To create a segment that shows combined traffic coming from a group of social media sites, follow this simple procedure.

1. Create a new custom segment.
2. From 'Dimensions', expand 'Traffic Sources'.
3. Drag the 'Source' statement to your custom segment.
4. Choose 'Matches regular expression' for 'Condition'.
5. Write the following regular expression in field 'Value'.

linkedin\.com|facebook\.com|twitter\.com|delicious\.com|digg\.com

Separate each site name with a pipe symbol as shown above, prefixing backslash before every dot in the domain name. You can add as many social media sites to it separating each one with a pipe symbol. The only restriction is the length (256 characters) of regular expression allowed in Google Analytics. To accommodate more sites in your expression, you can group them into two parts and can create two custom segments.

Separate segment for single site - The procedure for creating a custom segment for single site is same as shown above. Only the regular expression will change.

Let's suppose you want to create a separate custom segment to track all referral traffic from Facebook. Simply use this regular expression.

facebook\.com

Make sure you have prefixed the backslash before the dot in the domain name. If you want, you can create custom segments for all major social media sites to get a clearer picture about their performance. Remember, if you create too many custom segments and apply all of them in your traffic reports, it may clutter your graph reports.

Once you have created all your custom segments, you can apply them to your regular reports.

This is how your reports will look after applying the custom segments. You can clearly see all the segregated data giving you a better and clearer picture of traffic trends on your blog. After analyzing this vital data, you can introduce necessary changes in your social media marketing strategy to get better results.

8 Reasons Why Digg May Not Work For Your Blog

2009-05-07T09:41:00.001+05:30

Social Media has completely changed the way traffic was pulled to the web sites. Today, even a day old blog can get thousands of visits from social media sites on the first day of its launch. This was like a dream a decade back. Digg and StumbleUpon are two of the most successful social media sites that send tons of visitors in quick time.

Although Digg sends huge amount of traffic in a short span of time, it is comparatively hard to get success on Digg. It requires lot of time, strong network and right kind of content to be successful on Digg. Let's see, why Digg might not be the right place for your SMM efforts.

Wrong Niche - Digg users are well known to pamper and promote specific type of content. This includes tech news, Apple, iPhone and breaking news. If you are blogging about a different topic that inherently does not go well on Digg, you are never going to taste the success of Digg front page. I've written a guide about (How To Create Digg-Friendly Content).

Inactive Digg Profile - If you want to succeed on Digg, you yourself should be an active digger. This ensures that you are well aware of latest happenings and the trends going-on on Digg.

Poor Digg Network - No matter how good is your content, unless you do not have a strong network of Digg users including some power users, you will not get consistent results with Digg.

Poor Hosting Plan - Did your site crashed when you first tasted success on Digg? Sometimes, a cheap hosting plan with heavily loaded shared server is overwhelmed by the traffic surge from Digg and eventually takes down your site temporarily. This is a very annoying situation since your hard work gets wasted. If you are serious about Digg, make sure you have a good hosting plan and your blog is well-optimized for speed through cache plugins and various other techniques.

Wrong Submission Time - This applies to almost every social bookmarking activity. Submit your content in peak hours to get the better results. Research has shown that Tue, Wed and Thu are the best days to submit your content on Digg. Time can be as flexible as morning office hours to late noon.

Self-Promotion - If you are consistently digging your own content for prolonged period, it will be buried by Digg system and eventually your domain may get banned for indefinite period. It's better to play safe than wasting time in sending endless reconsideration requests to Digg.

Indulging in Digg Vote-Exchange - If you are aggressively asking for Digg votes in exchange for your votes on various media platforms, your content is destined to be buried on Digg. A little push by power users is acceptable. Except that, let the voting count inflate organically.

Junk-Promotion - Now this is quite obvious. Sell crap and you will get the same from the other end. Digg community is very sensitive to spammers. Do not submit your every single post to Digg just for the sake of submitting. Keep your pillar posts saved for mid-week publishing time and let your best content rule the Digg chart.

What's your experience about Digg and the traffic you receive from it? Do you think alternate social media platforms are slowly replacing Digg?

Video-Blogging: An Effective Way To Pull Traffic And Create A Personal Brand

2009-05-05T10:00:00.000+05:30

Text has always been the dominant communicating medium on Web and still continues to be so. With the introduction of new technologies, share of multimedia content has grown significantly. One such medium is video that has firmly established its roots in the world of blogging. Video blogging (vlogging) is getting popular nowadays with more and more bloggers coming out with their own vodcast series.

Vlogging not only helps attract readers much easily, but also has the power to create your personal brand. Many famous bloggers have used it successfully to reach new heights in their blogging journey. They have also used popular platforms like YouTube to market their blogs through informative and entertaining videos.

Getting Started with Video Blogging

Video blogging is simply using video as content for your blog. Some bloggers use it occasionally mixed with their regular posts, while others have dedicated video blogs (vlogs) producing series of vodcasts. In either case, the posting and distribution mechanism is almost the same. Since it stimulates several sensory organs, the viral appeal of a video post is extremely strong. Like every article is not a pillar post, similarly every video post can't be a cliffhanger. The success of a video post largely depends on the subject and the presentation skills of the blogger. A poor video presentation can ruin a blogger's hard earned reputation in a minute.

Requirements For Video Blogging

Presentation Skills - This is the most important pre-requisite to create appealing video posts. You must posses' excellent presentation skills that includes clear pronunciation, flair to speak, understanding of tone changes, convincing power and above all your ability to record and edit the recordings. Some people are born with exceptional speaking and presentations skills. Others can master it with regular mock presentations. I'll strongly advice you to defer your video post publication, until you do not get positive feedback about your test recordings from your close friends or some trusted fellow bloggers.

Hardware - If you want to post a high quality video, you would require a good quality camcorder or a powerful webcam. A camcorder will give you a slightly better picture quality than a webcam. If you are making the video indoors, correct lighting plays a big role in creating clear recordings. As a general rule of thumb, make sure light source is behind the webcam or camcorder with direct focus on your face. The distance and intensity of light source can be adjusted by doing some test recordings.

Software - There are several free and commercial video editing software. Normally, a video is recorded at higher bit rate to get a high quality picture, which is later compressed to reduce the size of the video. I personally found Camtasia Studio the best among all for creating videos for web publishing. Almost every commercial editing software supports easy creation of YouTube compatible video formats. It is the most preferred and widely used video format on web.

Server and Bandwidth - Since video eats up significant bandwidth, your web-hosting plan should be able to cater the needs of video blogging. Nowadays VPS hosting solutions comes at affordable rate and provides quite good service for high traffic sites. If you are planning to do regular series of vodcasts, I'll recommend switching to VPS solution rather than sticking with a typical shared hosting plan.

Preparing a Video Post

An ideal video post addresses an issue that solves a critical problem of the intended audience. Generally, bloggers divide the topic into several sections and create a video series . Often these series are as long as 10-15 videos per series.

Scripts - If you are inexperienced, writing a rough script for each video can help you in making the recording process much easier. This script may not be like a film script, where you have to chant every single word as it is. A general outline with main points can do the work if you are comfortable in expanding those points on the fly. If you still struggle to do that, full script is the only solution.

Editing - Once your recording is completed, you have to do all the necessary edits. This includes removing unwanted frames, amplifying voice at selective places as per the requirements, adding captions and background music, adjusting the speed of frames at selective points and last but not the least compressing the video and making it YouTube compatible.

Publishing - Once your video is complete, it is ready to be published. There are two approaches to publish it. Either you upload it to services like YouTube and Viddler and get the embed code directly from the site or you upload the video to your own web server. Remember, if you are embedding the video directly from Youtube, it may not be visible to your feed readers and they have to actually visit the actual post to be able to watch it. Here's an excellent tutorial about inserting multimedia content in a WordPress post.

If you are already doing video posts, what significant difference you noticed in readers' engagement and reactions? Do you prefer to host your videos on third-party site or your own server?

Image Credit: trekkyandy

How Contextual Linking (Internal) Can Improve Your Blog Rankings

2009-05-03T08:08:00.001+05:30

Great content automatically attracts quality backlinks. The basic criterion for a web page to rank high in SERP's is the number of backlinks pointing to it. Inbound links from other domains carry more weightage than internal links referring relevant content within the same domain. Keeping this in mind, normally we spend more of our energy in acquiring backlinks from external sources completely ignoring the power of internal contextual linking.

Here we are interested in getting more and more backlinks for weaker pages (non-performing content) in our archives. Since this content is average or below average, there are very little chances of getting quality backlinks (vote for exceptional content) organically.

A non-performing post doesn't necessarily represent poor content. Sometimes, the overall structure and poor selection of keywords keeps the post way low in SERP's.

If you have a large archive, a complete rewrite of all these pages will be a suicidal attempt to revive your blog rankings. So what other options are left...? Buying paid links? Desperate trading of social media votes? The former will make big daddy Google angry and the latter may get your domain banned on various social media sites. In either case, it will be a huge loss. Contextual linking is an ideal option that can give the much-required boost to these non-performing posts. It not only helps in elevating the SERP rankings but also helps spread the link juice evenly across your blog content. Let's see how to do it.

Contextual Linking Fundamentals

The basic idea behind contextual linking is (in-text links) cross-linking your blog posts in a specific manner. This way you are going to increase the number of backlinks for every inter-linked post. Every time you link to a post this way, reciprocity is not a necessity. Successful and effective contextual linking involves careful selection of links crafted according to needs and requirements. There are two basic principles while creating a contextual link.

Right Anchor Text - The selection of anchor text plays a big role in creating a well-optimized contextual link. Since they are created within the normal flow of content, choosing the right keyphrase is extremely important. The chosen anchor text should clearly indicate the topic of content it is going to refer. Do not make it too long (ideally, 2-3 words), and at the same time make sure you have included primary keyword within the phrase.

Content Relevancy (Context) - The second important factor is relevancy of both web pages connected via this link. There should be a similarity or co-relation between the subjects of discussion. The most important area is the surrounding text of the link. The more it's relevant to the referring page, the more is the SEO value of that link. Since your linked pages will be relevant, the probability of a reader clicking that link will also be high, helping in inflating your page views.

Contextual Linking Strategy

If you have not linked your posts earlier, you must do some preliminary analysis to figure out the right linking pattern. An ideal strategy is to link out to weaker pages from the top performing content. This way, you will be passing on link-juice from high-rank pages to weaker content giving them the required boost.

Let's assume you have a popular post about blog monetization with PR4. This post appears on first page of SERP's for several highly competitive keywords. Naturally, this post brings consistent organic traffic for you and will continue to do so for long time to time. Let's further assume that you have two more posts on blog monetization. One of them talks about direct advertising, while other one is all about affiliate marketing. Both these posts receive almost negligible traffic with no presence in SERP's.

Now you have a perfect situation where contextual linking can be used to spark some life in these dead posts. All you need to do is to link out to these two posts from your high-ranking post. Choose two relevant keyphrases from within the text of this post and create links to the weaker posts. This will not only give added backlinks from a high rank page, but will also divert traffic coming on that page.

Linking Patterns

There are severals ways you can link your blog posts. The two most common methods are:

Random Cross-Linking Approach - In this approach, you have to randomly pick all the related posts and link out wherever you feel a link will serve the purpose. Although this is a cumbersome process, especially if your archive is large, but gives very good results in boosting the rankings and traffic.

Top-Down Approach - The second approach is most widely used and preferred approach for majority of bloggers. I also use this approach. In this method, you normally do not touch your old posts. Whenever you write a new post, you create 2-3 contextual links to older posts in your archive. Here I must stress that just for sake of creating links, do not alter your original article or try to forcefully stuff any keyphrases. Just write your post in normal flow without thinking about any linkouts. Once your post is completed, almost every time you will automatically find scope of linking to older posts.

What's Your Linking Strategy?

I'm sure you do link your blog posts on regular basis. If yes, what is your preferred approach while linking out? Have you experienced any boost in rankings after linking your posts?

Image Credit: adria.richards

10 Reasons Why I Will Not Visit or Subscribe To Your Blog

2009-04-24T16:31:00.000+05:30

Despite posting consistently and doing your best to promote the blog, are you experiencing stagnant subscriber count with no growth in traffic? Are you worried about your low conversion rate? Well, here are some of the reasons that may repel the visitors leading to almost nil conversions.

Low Quality Content - It is one of the primary reasons why people won't pay a second visit to your blog. What's your primary goal? Just to get tons of traffic? Or to retain good percentage of visitors (high conversions) from whatever traffic you receive? It's not the volume of traffic but your conversion rate that decides how fast your blog will expand its reach. And the primary ingredient for high conversions is quality content. Give me some real stuff and I'll be more than happy to be a regular visitor.

Awful Sidebar - Once a reader finishes the article, he looks at the sidebar for more information. I've seen many sidebars littered with large number of fancy widgets to attract the visitors. Please remove those useless (countless) widgets and give me something useful (best content, latest posts, how-to's, tutorials) to click on.

Partial Feed - There's a lot of debate on providing partial RSS feed or full feed to blog subscribers. If we concentrate the juice of these debates, full feed option comes out as the clear winner. Partial feed is of the biggest reason why people may not consider subscribing. Majority of readers prefer full feed in their inbox. If you are distributing partial feed, I won't subscribe at all.

No Response - People come to your blog to gain some information. In the process, they share their views and ask questions. Unless you are not getting tons of comments, you must reply every single one of them. If it's one-sided conversation, your repeating visitors will dry up quickly.

Sluggish Navigation - Who doesn't love web sites and blogs with fast download time? In social media era, the traffic is very sensitive towards slow web sites. They're impatient and want quick access to information. Keep your blog code optimized for lowest possible download time. I won't stay on your blog if it makes me wait more than 15-20 seconds.

Poor Theme - Sometimes great content remain unnoticed due to extremely poor choice of theme. If you aren't a techie, hire a person to design a custom theme for you or DIY (do-it-yourself). A custom theme gives a unique voice to your blog and aids in attracting the first time visitors.

Ads, Ads and More Ads - I know you want to make money blogging, but where is the content? I can only see ads stuffed in almost every corner of your theme. Too much aggressive monetization will drive away all your visitors including me.

Too Much Self-Promotion - It's good to share your knowledge and expertise, but sometimes you may fall into trap of inadvertently over-selling yourself. The most successful bloggers are the most humble and down-to-earth people. Follow their footsteps and you will see more engagement of your readers.

Pop-Ups - Yet another annoying feature that prevents visitors to come to your blog. It's like twisting my wrist and asking me to subscribe. If your content is great, they'll subscribe automatically. Get rid of that pop-up and check your statistics after few weeks.

No Link-Outs - Yes, yes, I want links to some great resources whenever you pick any such topic, which has the scope of highlighting the best work on other blogs. Be generous and please do link to some extra-ordinary stuff of other bloggers. Trust me you won't lose me. In fact, I will be grateful to you for sharing relevant quality content with me.

Image Credit: Chesi - Fotos CC

Micro-Blogging: 26 Twitter Desktop Clients For Mac

2009-04-20T20:56:00.004+05:30

Since twitter has gone mainstream, the supporting applications and services are sprouting up like wildfire on Internet. Prominent among these applications are twitter desktop clients available for almost every platform. These handy applications help you manage your twitter activities in a much easier way than managing via web interface. Here's a list of select twitter clients for Mac platform.

Some of these clients have cross-platform compatibility and also works on Windows and Linux. The list is arranged in alphabetical order and in no way represent their popularity based on their position in the list.

Airmailr - A fully featured twitter client for OS X Dashboard. View different timelines (DM's , @replies, friends) and send tweets, replies and DM's. It also supports profile views with complete bio of the user within the widget window. You can also perform twitter search to watch selective tweets. The results are shown as a separate tab via scrollable list. Integrated URL shortening support (is.gd) and easy resizing option makes it quite flexible in usage. It has full growl integration and updates itself automatically. Airmailr uses the twitter's new OAuth standard for better timeline management with minimum delay in updates.

AlertThingy - This excellent application mashes up various social media services into a single application including twitter. Apart from twitter updates, you can also access Facebook, flickr, tumblr and many more such services. AlertThingy runs on Adobe AIR and is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. Business users can also access Yammer, Basecamp and Huddle from this desktop client. AlertThingy is light on system resources and has impressive interface. If you have multiple accounts on these services, AlertThingy can make your life easy with single point of access to keep you updated of all happenings across multiple social media accounts.

Blogo - As the name implies, Blogo is not just a twitter client but a full-fledged blogging and social media application. Blogo supports twitter and Ping.fm updates. Currently it's only available for Mac platform. Apart from twitter access, you can also post to Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Typo, Drupal, and Expression Engine. It has a built-in rich text post editor. Not only this, you can set automatic updates to twitter and Ping.fm accounts whenever you post fresh content on any of the supported web publishing system. You can re-size it freely and can even switch it to full-screen mode as per your convenience.

Canary - It is one of the promising twitter clients with multiple timeline support. It suports multiple twitter accounts and also recognizes hashtags. Full growl support for immediate notifications. Full URL shortening (Adjix, Bit.ly, Cli.gs, is.gd, Snipurl, TinyURL, tr.im and urlBorg) support makes it an ideal client to share your favorite content. Filters support lets you view selective twitter streams in a separate tab. Canary also supports TwitPic for sharing your pictures and iTunes integration to let your followers know which track you are listening. You can also add, remove, block and unblock twitter users at your will.

Chirp - Currently, only available for Mac platform. It is very light on system resources and supports twitter, Jaiku, FriendFeed, Identi.ca. Chirp supports multiple twitter timelines (replies, DM's and public timeline). It also supports instant search for all services with caching feature for offline use of your search results. Chirp comes with 6 different themes to suit your taste. I particularly liked the tooltip feature. that will show you the followers count of any user on hovering the mouse on this name. Chrip updates itself automatically with a small size binary making the whole update procedure lightning fast.

EventBox - As the name suggests, it supports multiple social media services (twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr, RSS, Reddit). Currently, this application is only available for Mac platform. EventBox has stunning interface that fully utilizes your graphic card capabilities making it one of the best looking twitter client. You can freely re-size its fluid interface. EventBox also supports instant notification of all new updates for each of the supported services. You can enable or disable notifications for selective services via settings option. EventBox future versions will also support del.icio.us, Last.fm and Orkut.

feedalizr - Yet another twitter client supporting multiple social media services. Apart from reguar twitter access, you can also update your Facebook status and send replies to your Facebook friends. feedalizr also has TwitPic support for sharing images with your followers. You can also access and update your Freindfeed account making it all-in-one solution for all your social media activities. The interface is quite impressive with multiple tab support for each stream. The hot topic bar lets you see whats currently hot on twitter. It is almost similar to twitscoop service. feedalizr is light on system resources and updates itself automatically.

Mac Lounge - This excellent twitter client is available both for Mac OS X and iPhone. The first thing that you will notice is the excellent interface which is very soothing to eyes. At present, this application is in public beta phase. It supports multiple twitter accounts and twitter search options. You can easily view different timelines (replies, DM's and public timeline) making things easy to manage and update. The search filtering option lets you create a separate section of selective tweets. This impressive client is not a resource hog and has promising future once it comes out of beta stage. The iPhone version is equally rich in features as its desktop version.

NatsuLion - It is only available for Mac platform (Leopard (10.5)). NatsuLion has different tabs for public timeline, replies, DM's, sent and unread messages. The interface is extremely good and the application is light on system resources. Growl notifications are tightly integrated with this twitter client. Your own tweets are highlighted with different color scheme to easily filter out remaining tweets. This application is ideal for light and casual tweeting giving you enough options to keep in touch with your followers. It is also available for iPhone covering all the features in the desktop version.

Nambu - It is one of the popular twitter clients for Mac platform. Nambu supports multiple twitter accounts and has a good interface. It also supports multi-column view for selective twitter streams. Apart from twitter is also supports FriendFeed and Identi.ca account updates. Groups, filters and twitter search makes it an ideal twitter client for novice as well as power users. It is light on system resources and updates itself automatically. You can open separate tab for every new search for all supported social media services. It shows you actual web site names of shared links via tweets. I'd highly recommend trying this twitter client.

P3:PeraperaPrv - Purely written in Java, this twitter client can run on Mac, Windows and Linux. It supports multiple tabs for viewing different timelines with auto-refresh for each stream. You can customize the appearance (color schemes) of different tweets (replies, DM's). Filtering support allows you to view selective tweets in a separate tab. It also supports URL shortening (tinyURL) to help you share your favorite links. You can also change the application and tweet font size making it ideal for people having vision problems. You can also search and favorite selective tweets from the timeline cache and can group them in a separate tab.

Pwytter - It's a light weight feature packed twitter client written in Python. You can switch to different timelines with a click of a button. Pwytter supports up to 14 different languages and has full unicode support. Timelines are cached for faster response in case of multiple search queries. Pwytter updates itself automatically and have the option of updating timelines either manually or automatically. It is one of the lightest and resource efficient twitter client ideal for low configuration systems. You can use it on Mac, Windows and Linux. It also supports viewing of separate lists of your followers and friends in a scrollable format.

Seesmic DESKTOP - I'm using this excellent twitter client. Still in private beta stage, it is destined to give Tweetdeck a run for its money. The interface is stunning giving Mac effect on every platform. Seesmic Desktop is not a resource hog at all even if several panes are opened at once. Multi-column views, search panes, custom groups makes it an ideal application for twitter power users. It also supports URL shortening, hashtags detection and automatic updates. It is freely re-sizable with option to switch to single or multi-column views. You can also hide and unhide selective panes at your will. I started with twhirl, then Tweetdeck and now I'm hooked to this wonderful twitter client.

Snitter - This twitter client works on both Mac and Windows. The Linux version is still in developmental alpha stage. It comprises all the features of a typical twitter desktop client. If you know CSS, you can easily customize the appearance (color, font size, avatars, shadow) of Snitter. You can also create a separate tab for favorite tweets. Snitter supports keyboard shortcuts to access each opened panel. Window resize, audible alerts and minimizing to system tray are some other features of this handy application. Snitter is light on system resources and is ideal for twitter users having limited following.

Spaz - It is available for OS X, Windows and Linux platform. Packed with powerful twitter search feature, it filters out selective twitter streams as per your needs. Spaz also has built-in support for URL shortening (is.gd, bit.ly, snurl.com) to share your favorite content with your twitter network. It has multiple themes and also gives you the flexibility to create your own theme via CSS overrides. Spaz is written in pure JavaScript , XHTML and CSS making it completely customizable by users. Audible alerts and separate listing of friends and followers makes it an ideal twitter client for every serious twitter user.

Syrinx - This twitter client is only available for Leopard (OS X 10.5+). Bookmarking (marking selective tweets) and integrated search feature are some important features on Syrinx. Growl notifications are tight integrated with this twitter client. It is light on system resources with neat and clean interface. Extensive keyboard shortcuts helps you manage your twitter updates fast and quick. Syrinx allows you to customize the colors as well as sound (audible alerts) that suits your taste. You can also customize the auto-updating frequency and scrolling behavior. You can also pause all the twitter updates and can resume it later with a click of a button.

Tweetr - This light weight twitter client is available for Mac and Windows. You can send files of size up to 10MB via tweetr. Just drag the files in tweetr window. It will automatically upload the file and will provide you a short URL to share it with your friends. tweetr has in-built URL shortening (hurl.ws) support. You can freely resize and drag the window to any part of the desktop. It also supports system tray integration on Windows platform. It also lets you share snaps from your webcam with your twitter followers. The file sending option and webcam support makes it stand apart from the rest. TweetIdeal for twitter users who regularly send and receive files from their twitter network.

TweetDeck - It is one of the most popular twitter clients with large user-base. Multi-column twitter timelines, powerful twitter search and custom groups makes it an ideal twitter client for power users. It has a rich URL shortening support. You can also update your Facebook account via Tweetdeck. You can also use the TwitScoop cloud to keep you updated about what's hot on twitter. Tweetdeck updates itself automatically and has various customization options including custom colors. The only issue that is frequently raised by users is the memory usage. TweetDeck is available for Mac, Windows and Linux platform.

Tototl - Currently, Tototl is only available for Mac platform. It supports 3 languages (English, Japanese and Spanish). It is one of the fastest and light weight twitter desktop client. Since it uses SSL for connection encryption, it keeps your twitter login credentials absolutely safe from hackers. The future versions may also support custom themes which will be highly customizable by users and native plugins support. Soon its Windows and Linux versions are also coming out. Tototl is ideal for casual twitter users who does not have large number of active followers. It also uses DSA signed updates for maximum security of your twitter conversation.

Twibble - This excellent twitter client is available for Mac and Windows. It supports multiple twitter accounts that can be managed as separate tabs. It has in-built location awareness support and can tell the exact location of any twitter follower via Google maps. It also understands GPS positioning sent via twibble mobile. Twibble updates itself automatically and supports keyboard shortcuts for fast and easy account management. On windows platform it can minimize to system tray. It's light weight and impressively fast with equally attractive interface. Tweets are highlighted in different colors depending on their type for easy readability. You can customize various options via its rich custom settings option.

Twidget - Currently, it is only available for Mac platform. This light weight twitter client is ideal for casual users who doesn't have large network of active followers. Some of the features include auto-updating timelines, alerts for new tweets, new version availability alert, links to DM's and twitter contacts and much more. You can also favorite selective tweets directly from within the refreshing timeline. Twidget also allows you to collapse and expand the timeline window at will. Future versions will have Growl notifications, audible notifications, URL shortening support, multiple language support and flexible resizing option.

twhirl - This was the first twitter client used by me. twhirl is the second most popular desktop client after Tweetdeck and offers tons of options for every serious twitter user. Custom themes, URL shortening (digg.com, bit.ly, snurl, twurl or is.gd), flexible resizing, audible alerts are some of the features of twhirl. You can do profile as well as keyword search with twhirl. It updates itself automatically and is available for Mac and Windows platform. It can also cross-post your tweets to Jaiku and Ping.fm. You can also tweak twitter API settings according to your activity. It supports multiple languages and several themes. Here's a basic twhirl guide for beginners.

Twitter Thingy - You can use Twitter Thingy on Mac, Windows and Linux. It supports custom groups and twitter search. You can type in your search queries is an expandable search bar at the bottom of the window. It is light on system resources and has quite attractive interface making it an ideal choice for an average twitter user. You can update your public timeline with a single click and can also favorite selective tweets. You can also delete your own tweets directly from within the timeline. Twitter Thingy caches your twitter timeline for fast response to search and updates. Automatic updates are not supported by Twitter Thingy.

Twitterrific - This twitter client has stunning interface and is light on system resources. It supports multiple twitter accounts and provides access to user profile pages with a single click. It supports audible alerts and keyboard shortcuts. You can also set custom hotkey for showing and hiding tweets. twitterrific also supports deletion of your own tweets and has customizable timeline auto-refresh intervals. Replies and direct messages are displayed inline highlighted with different colors for easy readability. Through custom settings you can also set window auto-hiding. There are two more variants of twitterrific for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Twitter Studio - It is only available for Mac platform. Growl notifications has been tightly integrated with this impressive twitter client. Twitter Studio updates itself automatically and supports profile lookups displaying user information within the application window. You can also set custom notification settings and custom twitter API settings. It also displays refresh rate limit indicator to help you set the optimum refresh rate. Future versions will support Twitpic integration, custom color schemes, tweet deletion support, custom groups, search functionality, menu bar quick access icon, iTunes plugin and much more. Twitter Studio comes with impressive interface and is not a resource hog.

Twittia - This light weight twitter client is only available for Mac platform. Growl notifications are integrated with this excellent and simple-to-use twitter client. You can view your public timeline, DM's and replies in different tabs. Twittia also allows you to set custom refresh intervals with desired volume of audible alerts. It also supports Twitpic to share pictures with your twitter network. The interface is clean and attractive making it an ideal choice for an average twitter user. It also supports twitter search for displaying selective tweets containing the keywords you are looking for. You can open multiple search tabs at a given time giving you custom twitter streams containing the keywords that are under your watch.

Image Credit: bertop

StumbleUpon Guide For Bloggers: Building Traffic - The Right Way

2009-04-14T17:19:00.003+05:30

Social media has completely changed the way traffic was pulled to blogs and websites. The core long-term traffic building concepts still remain the same (organic traffic from SE's), which are now supplemented by social media marketing to get the desired results at a much faster pace. StumbleUpon is one of the most popular social media services that have the capability to bring loads of traffic to your blog. Let's see how to use it correctly to its full potential.

Preparing For The Avalanche

Pulling traffic from StumbleUpon and leveraging the incoming traffic effectively are two different things. Before we dive into stumbling, we must prepare our blog to increase the conversions.

Decent theme and clean navigation - StumbleUpon traffic tends to exhibit impatient behavior and high bounce rate in certain conditions. They are known to immediately leave the poorly designed sites topped with cluttered navigation. So the first step is to fix these two things.

Don't make them wait - It's not just about the appearance and clean navigation. A sluggish theme is the best way to repel StumbleUpon visitors. Tweak your theme and practice speed optimization techniques to make your blog a flyer.

Give some meat to stay - Since SU traffic is volatile in nature, you must have a healthy archive to give them a reason to stay. Highlight your best work close to the main content to increase the probability of a highly engaged visit.

Call for action - Place subscription box and freebie offerings at targeted places. Make them loud to attract the attention of the visitor.

Stumbling All The Way

To get the maximum benefit from StumbleUpon you need to avoid certain mistakes that you may do inadvertently.

When we submit a web page to SU, it goes into main database and may or may not get queued to spread across StumbleUpon community. I'll explain later in a section when your content may not get queued and may get buried forever.

Knit a large net (Tag Wisely) - Generally, we concentrate more on the number of votes a submission may get. Our main concern is to get maximum number of reviews and votes for a submission. Have you ever experienced a submission getting almost no traffic despite getting decent votes? One of the reasons that may dry up the traffic can be - wrong way of tagging. Let's take an example to understand it clearly. Suppose you have written a post about designing a blog header. You happily got it submitted via your friend who tagged it with the following tag (header-deign).

The more you narrow down your tags, the more you limit its reach. Every StumbleUpon user has a set of preferences that suggests the type of content he/she may prefer to receive. Tagging with more broader and generic terms opens the possibility of capturing a larger audience. While delivering the web page, SU algorithm examines the tags a submission has received. Once your submission starts getting reviews and votes, generic tags helps in disseminating your content to larger user-base. Here are some guidelines to tag your submissions properly.

1. Use generic tags.
2. Use multiple tags separated by comma.
3. Do not use more than 2 words in a single tag.
4. Do not give more than 5 tags.
5. Keep them short, clear and unambiguous.

How to make your submission dead - Here's how you can make your submission dead even before it gets its second vote. Open the web page that has not been discovered yet. Now without discovering/stumbling it, use the 'Send to' feature on SU toolbar and ask your friend to discover it. As soon as he obeys you - Boom! This submission will remain in the main database but may not go into queue at all. So the rule of the thumb is - Never ever send any web page using the 'Send to' feature that has not been discovered. Try it once and see the results.

StumbleUpon authority - Needless to say, a stumble from a power-user can bring tons of traffic. Interestingly, if he is not the part of your network and stumble your submission organically, you will receive much more traffic than the other way round. How to build your StumbleUpon authority and how to identify a power user on SU? That's very simple. Look for a profile getting large number of testimonials (Good meaningful testimonials). Now look for his stumbling activity and his reviews. A power user writes descriptive reviews and doesn't limit himself to few chosen topics.

SU Power User = (Large Number of Testimonials + Descriptive Reviews)

Ready to network with some top stumblers? Here's a list of most active stumblers that have earned the status of a power user.

Avoid closed user groups - It is common for people to form a voting group and then vote for each other. When web pages from a domain receive stumbles (first few stumbles) from a group of users over long period of time, gradually the traffic subsides down with each new submission and such voting activity. A time comes when votes from this group has no effect on the submission. SU algorithm is smart enough to detect this phenomenon and to track any such activity.

Reviews are like blog comments - As I mentioned before, writing meaningful and descriptive reviews does help in making the submission go viral. If you are helping your friend then take some pain to write an original descriptive review instead of copy pasting the text from the post.

Timing matters - And last but not the least is the time of submission. This applies to almost any social bookmarking activity. Choose the peak hours to get your post submitted on StumbleUpon. The morning hours of mid-week is the best time to submit content to various social bookmarking sites.

I generally try to avoid stumbling my own content and would advice the same to you. Be an active stumbler, generously submit others' content and give meaningful reviews. They will eventually RECIPROCATE giving you the required spikes in traffic.

Image Credit: kitakitt

Interview With Cindy King: Cross-Cultural Communication Expert and International Sales Specialist

2009-04-13T17:41:00.005+05:30

Recently, I got the chance to interact with Cindy King, one of the famous international sales specialists with over 25 years of experience. She helps businesses grow in multi-cultural environments and posses exceptional networking and communication skills. Despite her busy schedule, I managed to get her interview. Here are the questions.

Rajeev: Cindy, tell us about yourself and what do you?

Cindy: I’m originally from the Bahamas, but I moved to Europe when I was 18. First to Berne, then Paris and London, and back to France again. I now live in France, just south of Paris, where the Parisian suburbs meet the French countryside, next to the forest of Fontainebleau.

Up until January 2008 I worked in international sales and marketing of various companies: from large multi-nationals to start-ups. Last year, I started my own international marketing company to help mid-sized businesses identify the best way to enter new foreign markets. My company offers 3 types of services:

1. Coaching mid-sized companies: starting from the process of creating their international development strategy through to creating international sales guides to get international clients.
2. Coaching small companies to help them define the international strategy they need.
3. International English copywriting for lead generation marketing materials targeting wide international audiences.

For the international web marketing of my business, I write 2 blogs:

www.CindyKing.biz – This blog is about international skills – to get more international clients through better cross-cultural communication.

www.GetInternationalClients.com – This blog is about international tactics. It gives small to mid-sized businesses an easy 8-step process for international business development.

And I also micro-blog - on Twitter @CindyKing - with an average of about 80-100 tweets a week, mainly tips and links on cultural and international topics.

Rajeev: How has blogging helped your business?

Cindy: Without blogging I would not have an online business. My local market was not ready for my services. So I needed to look for clients in other countries.

I had to put my international web marketing skills into practice for my own business: I published one blog post on both blogs every day in 2008 and also did extensive article marketing. With this blogging strategy:

1. In 3 months I gained enough online visibility to have prospects in foreign countries start contacting me.
2. As I learned more about my international clients and what they needed my online business became better defined – I even discovered some business opportunities I had not thought of.
3. After 6 months I developed my own coaching process based on my own field experience and expertise. This became the backbone for all of my services.

Rajeev: How do you improve your blogging?

Cindy: Blogging is an ongoing process of improving your relationship with your readers. This means that I regularly review my blogging strategy. I don’t have a strict schedule, but at least every 3 months I take an afternoon and review my blogging strategy. I look at what other people are doing and try to implement a new tactic or two to improve my own blogs.

During my last session I read the ProBlogger book. My schedule was busy, so I only decided to follow one of the easy tips in the book. I chose to do a blog post series. My series lasted the month of March. I had a huge surprise. At the end of March the number of visitors to my blog had increased by 92% compared to the previous month.

The result was so great I just had to do something. So I decided to run a little contest. I am asking readers to suggest other series for www.CindyKing.biz. I will send a free copy of the ProBlogger book to the people who send in the 6 best suggestions. The contest is still running.

Rajeev : What is your most important advice for people starting an online business?

Cindy: It’s funny, but I would give the exact same advice as I do for people who want to develop their business internationally.

1. Just do it. One step at a time. Get started. Get curious about creating relationships online.

If you want an online business you need to get involved in the social media platforms:

2. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the others if they are relevant.

Your clients are people. Social media is how you learn how to communicate with people online. You need to get your communication right if you want to get online clients.

In my experience, people need to actively participate in social media for a couple of months before they can say they know what it is. So, just get started. Get active. Stick with it. Learn how to communicate and build relationships online. Then, with your social media communication skills, think strategically about how to build your business online.

Rajeev: What are your plans for the future?

Cindy: There are so many things…

Use my tweets to develop the Useful Resource pages on my personal blog even more.

Upgrade the Get International Clients blog with a change of theme and a membership portion to give small businesses more assistance in developing their international business.

Continue to network offline with the people I meet on Twitter. It is a great way to develop professional networks for online businesses.

More blog post series… and another glance through the ProBlogger book to see what else I should give a try. :)

Thanks Cindy, for sharing all your views . You can also follow her on twitter @CinkyKing.

Is Perfectionism Killing Your Blog?

2009-04-11T12:38:00.002+05:30

Productivity is inversely related to perfectionism. The more you try to achieve perfectionism, the more your productivity decreases. Professional blogging requires consistency in content creation supported by aggressive marketing and promotion campaigns. You have exceptional writing skills and sound technical knowledge about blogging, but still struggle to produce regular content. Are you putting lot of effort to produce a gem every time you write a post?

If you can relate yourself with these symptoms, most probably you are trying to achieve perfection in everything you do. The end result is missed deadlines, irregular posting schedule and mental stress.

I faced the same situation, but thanks to famous 'Blogging and New Media Consultant' - Chris Garrett who helped me in coming out of this situation. Interestingly, in his early days he experienced the same situation but soon recovered from it. In his words - 'Curb the perfectionism - Just Do It'. If you are trying hard to be a perfectionist, your blog is destined to die prematurely. Here's what Jack Kirby has to say about perfectionism.

Perfectionists are their own devils - Jack Kirby

Let's see what are the effects and end-results when you try to be perfect in everything (blogging routine).

Perfectionism: Effects and Results

Procrastination - This is the most common behavior found in perfectionists. Procrastination is associated with deferring of a task/job in hand to cope with stress and anxiety associated with completion of that task. You are in constant search for a better way to complete that task and thus decide to defer it again and again.

Missed deadlines - Deferring of tasks leads to time mismanagement with more pressure to complete old tasks along with the new ones. As more and more pending tasks are accumulated, things go beyond your control.

Low productivity - Since you are not delivering in time, the overall productivity decreases. This creates distrust among your readers who have subscribed to get regular content. Things become worse when you take long breaks with no status updates for your readers.

Stress and anxiety - All this leads to constant stress on your mind. The fear of criticism triggers the endless cycle of repeating and rinsing the task elevating the level of stress and anxiety.

Health problems - A healthy mind leads to a healthy body. Your habit of trying to achieve utmost excellence in everything pushes you to work for long or at odd hours. This will deteriorate your health making the situation more worse.

Poor social network - According to psychologists, perfectionists tend to have low self-esteem, are pessimist and undermine their potential when socializing with people around them. The end result is no strong network that is so important to market and promote your blog.

Remedy To The Problem

Come out of denial mode - The very first step is identifying the problem and accepting it. Unless you are not ready to accept this negative phenomenon that is affecting your productivity, things can't change.

Ask and listen to the advice - Do not hesitate to discuss your problem with an expert. You can write a mail asking for advice to get out of this situation. Rest assured, 9 out of 10 times you'll get the answer. If you don't get any response from one place, try another.

Guard yourself - Create a blogging plan and follow it strictly. Audit yourself from time to time to assess your progress. Socialize with people (online/offline). This greatly helps in coming out of the shell and in kick starting the things.

Highly Recommended Related Reading:

1. How To Be a More Productive Blogger
2. How To Reduce Blogging Stress
3. Blogging Techniques For Part-Time Bloggers

Image Credit: DailyPic

5 Tips To Make Your Twitter Profile More Visible

2009-04-03T13:45:00.001+05:30

Twitter has gone mainstream with massive increase in its user base. Now it's not merely a micro-blogging service, but has transformed into an effective marketing tool. Creating a twitter profile and making it visible to maximum eyeballs are two different things. Here are some simple tips to increase the visibility and reach of your twitter profile.

Use Twitter Signature

Include your twitter profile link in your email and forums signature. Nowadays it is common to include link of blog RSS feed and links to various social media profiles in the email signature. You can use an excellent free email signature creating service WiseStamp to create a custom signature for all your email correspondence. This service works well with all popular email services and email desktop clients.

Include Twitter Link in Guest Post Author Box

Whenever you guest blog, make sure you include your twitter profile in the author box beside your blog link. It is one of the best ways to drive people to your twitter profile to get decent number of followers in quick time.

Normally, people tend to follow more easily on twitter then subscribing to feed. If the blog on which your guest post is going to appear has huge following, your twitter followers' count will inflate much quickly.

Use Twitter Widgets and Badges

Instead of displaying a plain text link in your sidebar, use twitter widgets and badges to grab attention of the visitors. Various social media sites allow the use of custom HTML to enrich the user profile. Take advantage of any such option and use twitter widgets in your various social media accounts to drive people to your twitter profile.

Here are some cool twitter widgets, buttons and badges:

1. TwitterSALT
2. TweetRoll
3. SayTweet Twitter Badge
4. 181 Free Twitter Buttons, Badges, Widget and Counters
5. Twitter Wordpress Sidebar Widget
6. TwitterCard

Use Hashtags

Sometimes new twitter users do not understand the use of hastags well. They are just like tags in blog used to logically bind the content of a specific topic. Hashtags are tracked by people, and this crowd constantly look for relevant tweets associated with their hashtags. By using inline hashtags for relevant keywords, the reach of your tweet increases dramatically.

Hastags are used by prefixing the '#' symbol against the desired keyword.

@mintblogger 10 Best #SEO plugins for #Wordpress http://.....

In the example shown above, I have prefixed '#' symbol in front of 2 words (SEO, Wordpress). Apart from your followers, people tracking these two hashtags are more likely to pick your tweet and may reach your twitter profile. You can look for most popular hashtags on hashtags.org. If you want, you can also create your own hashtags through this site. Overuse or unnecessary use of hastags can sometimes annoy the followers and may result in mass unfollowing.

Treat Your Twitter Profile Like a Website

Maki talks about treating your twitter profile like a website or blog to increase its reach and visibility. In his words,

The first step is to understand that your Twitter profile is like any other website. You should treat it no differently from your own blog or a free opt-in newsletter. With this in mind, you can play around with a myriad number of marketing strategies, just like how you would promote a website.

Once you have this in mind, you can aggressively use all the common traffic pulling strategies you normally use for your blog or website.

Related Reading:

1. 8 Tips To Use Twitter More Effectively
2. MicroBlogging: Twhirl Guide For Beginners
3. How To Lose Your Twitter Followers
4. Twitter: Building Your E-Brand

Image Credit: futileboy

How to Hire a Professional Blogger

2009-03-30T17:04:00.001+05:30

With more and more companies switching to different mediums to grow their businesses, blogs have become an integral part of promotion strategies and a new and effective way to directly connect with the customers. With the increase in blog becoming an essential part of every business's online marketing strategy, the requirement of professional bloggers has increased significantly. Are you planning to hire a blogger for your company or business blog? Here's a basic guideline to effectively fill the position of a blogger with a person that exactly meets your requirements.

Assessing The Requirements

The requirement may differ significantly depending on the type of blog and the purpose of your blog. A company blog created for the purpose of pulling more traffic and diverting it to the main site may need a full-time blogger compared to a tech blog already having a writing team solely made for the purpose of making money out of it. For the latter case, a part-time blogger can also do the job.

Posting Frequency - A lot matters on the number of times your blog will be updated with fresh content. A non-profit organization may require a posting of 1 or 2 times a week, while a business blog or a make money blog may be updated 5 times a week or even several times a day. Depending on the frequency you may want a full or part time blogger.

Extent of Involvement - The level of involvement you are expecting from the potential candidate also plays a major role in selecting the right person. Are you hiring a blogger only for creating content or are you expecting him to take charge of comment moderation, blog maintenance and social media marketing as well?

What To Look For?

Writing Style - Unarguably the most important thing is the writing capabilities of the blogger. Every blogger has its own unique style of writing. Some like to start with metaphors in opening paragraph summarizing the post in the leading text, while some other may prefer to simply jump on to the point of discussion without building any anticipation. In any case, it must match the style of writing you are expecting. To better assess his writing capabilities you can...

1. Ask for a sample post on the topic related to your blog.
2. Read his existing posts and various guest posts done on different blogs to get a fair idea about his writing capabilities.

Consistency - Whether you are aiming for a part timer or a full-time blogger, delivering the content in time is must in any case. It will be icing on the cake if you can get some references of his previous employers. If his track record suggests that he delivers in time then be sure he is good in most of his duties.

Social Media Participation - If you are expecting him to take charge of blog marketing as well, look for his social media profiles and the ask for some quantifiable statistics about the success he has achieved in the past through this medium. You must also observe how he has dealt with comments on different posts and his level of engagement with the readers.

Ability to Work in Team - If you have a multi-author blog, you must give preference to a blogger who has previous experience of working in such kind of environment. It will help him in quickly adapting to the situation and results will be fast and more promising. However, if the candidate has exceptional skills you can hire a fresher as well.

Hiring Process

Although every one has its own recruitment policy, I think this approach works well in most cases. Once you have decided to hire a candidate, make sure you create a draft of clauses tabulating all the terms and conditions. In most cases, exchange of faxed signed document containing all the T&C works fine. First let the candidate work on your blog for 3 to 4 weeks and pay him on per-post or per-week basis. Once you are satisfied with the performance, go ahead with signing the agreement.

Payment Criteria - In most cases paying on per-post basis is the most popular and comfortable payment scheme for both the parties. Short posts (300-400 words) are paid comparatively less than a long post (800+ words).

Performance Incentives - Generally, employers agree to reward on performance. It should be made very clear in the agreement how much a blogger would be paid in each case. For example, you may agree to pay $1 for each new subscriber.

Termination Clauses - Make sure you clearly mention the conditions under which the agreement may stand null and void. For example, if the content is already published somewhere else it may lead to termination of agreement without any prior notice.

Monitor, Encourage and Reward

And last but not the least is tracking the progress and rewarding on performance. Whether it's increase in traffic or more engagement of customers and readers or increase in sign ups of new subscribers. All these results deserve to be rewarded in terms of money as per the signed agreement. If you have enough budgets and your blog is getting heavy traffic, it is highly advisable to keep a back up as a trainee blogger in case the current blogger leaves on short notice.

Image Credit: EricMagnuson

How To Reward Your Blog Commentators

2009-03-27T13:35:00.003+05:30

Your readers are the best marketing tools to promote and spread the word about your blog. As your blog readership grows, so does the number of channels to disseminate your blog content across the web. The most active commentators on your blog acts as your blog marketing army bringing more and more visitors through their references. How to acknowledge their contribution in promoting and growing your blog?

Invite for Guest Post - One of the best ways to encourage and reward your blog commentators is to invite them to guest blog. This not only gives them an opportunity to present themselves to new audience but also passes some link juice. You can randomly select the top commentators for invites.

Link back To Their Content - Yet another way to show a gesture of appreciation for their contribution. You can link to best and relevant content of your most active commentators. While linking back, make sure you do not overdo it.

Build Posts On Their Comments (Highlight Them) - Generally readers ask lots of questions via comments. You can pick the best one and build your post on it. While writing such kind of post, quote their comment and link back to their blog. This will encourage more and more visitors to leave meaningful and regular comments on your blog.

Show Top Commentators In Sidebar - This is a very common strategy to highlight regular and most active commentators on any blog. Top commentators widget for Wordpress and similar plugin for Blogger makes it very easy to display the list of most active commentators. You can optionally do-follow the links in this list to further encourage more comments from existing and new readers.

Thanks Personally - If you have enough time in your hands you can even mail the most engaging and best commentators. A personal mail from you will make them feel special whose contribution is well noticed by you. You can also ask them if they want any kind of help from you.

Send A Free Gift - Freebies are always welcomed by almost everybody. You can send free ebooks, a white paper or a free theme to your top commentators.

Related Reading:

1. How To Handle Negative Comments On Your Blog
2. How To Comment On Blogs: An Introduction

Image Credits: Zahra, Here's Kate

Saturated Niche: Why You Should Brush Aside This Term

2009-03-19T08:55:00.000+05:30

A lot has been said about this term and most of the text suggests that you should be extremely careful while selecting a 'Saturated Niche'. Is there anything called a saturated niche or it's just an over hyped term? Let's try to understand this term with a different perspective.

Some even use the term - highly saturated niche. What is highly saturated? A saturated state is either saturated or not saturated. That's it. Let's first see what the word saturated means. According to Dictionary.com, in this context saturated means

- to furnish (a market) with goods to its full purchasing capacity.

In other words, it means demand and supply chain has met its endpoints. When this phenomenon occurs, no wise businessman would like to invest in that market which is already overwhelmed to its full capacity.

Now let's relate this to our much hyped term - saturated niche. It is often said that blogging about blogging (meta-blogging) is a saturated niche. If we go by the definition of the dictionary, it means there are almost nil chances of new players to grow in this niche.

But the reality is completely different. In my experience, there is nothing so called saturated niche. I would like to use the term highly competitive niche in place of saturated niche. A niche can be highly competitive but can never be saturated. Every month thousands and thousands of new blogs come up talking about 'Blogging Tips'. A large percentage of these blogs are abandoned pre-maturely and some never grow beyond a certain level. Still a handful of them cuts the ice and make their own place taking their share of the pie.

So where did the saturation go? How do these handfuls of new players manage to pull traffic and make it big despite of blogging about so called saturated niche? The answer is very simple. They generate unique content and have aggressive marketing strategy. Those thousands of blogs who dies pre-maturely suffer from one of the most common and inherent problems of meta-blogging - 'Repeating the same content already discussed on every corner of the web'. In words of Maki from DoshDosh.

Meta-blogging needs to be parasitic in order to evolve beyond its prison of ideas. It needs to latch onto another conceptual field in order to go beyond the thought circle it currently revolves in.

So, in order to withstand a highly competitive niche, these handfuls of bloggers generate high quality unique content. But again the question arises - If there is saturation in the market, from where does the buyers (visitors) come?

Thanks to never ending growth of Internet users, the raw material (traffic) required to run your blog is growing at constant pace. Today if there are 10 Internet users, tomorrow there will be 12 and day after tomorrow there will be 14 and so on. So we can clearly see that in this case the demand can never dry up.

Now, how does this affect the big fishes on top of the ladder? Well, surprisingly they benefit from this to a great extent. The more competitive quality blogs comes into existence, the more links and references are created to the top blogs. They automatically work as free marketing tools for the big fishes.

So in the end this is the equation.

Highly Competitive Niche -> Never Ending Demand -> Everyone Takes Their Share

Have Your Say

What do you think, in this context a blogging niche can be ever saturated? If yes, how do you see the future of web publishing 50 years from now?

Image Credit: krazydad

Why Your Blog Needs A Custom Theme?

2009-03-16T14:26:00.001+05:30

A unique blog design plays a big role in popularizing it. Blogging with a standard theme makes it somewhat difficult to compete with established blogs with highly customized themes. You write great content but struggling to retain your visitors? Maybe your standard blog theme is repelling your visitors. Let's try to understand why a custom theme is necessary for every professional blog.

Branding

Every successful business is recognized by its brand. The products are packaged and marketed under a brand name that differentiates the company from its competitors. Same thing applies to blogging. Blog branding is an essential ingredient of every successful blog marketing effort. It gives a unique voice to your blog. An identity that makes it stand apart from the crowd.

Your blog's custom theme with a unique logo, header and layout resembles your brand. The more you will invest in creating a stunning custom theme, more it will be easy to market, promote and develop it as a unique brand.

Extended Features

A custom theme gives you the liberty to add non-standard extended features that are normally not available in a standard theme. For example, if you want to integrate video posts, sliding articles gallery, random posts section on the homepage, a standard theme may not support these features. With custom theme you can choose your desired layout to make the landing pages more sticky and attractive for the visitors.

Speed And Reliability

Normally a custom theme is created from scratch and special attention is paid on creating highly optimized code for better reliability and speed. Today, a large chunk of traffic comes from social media sites. This traffic tends to exhibit high bounce rate and is volatile in nature. If your blog theme is sluggish, you are going to loose most of your traffic from these sources.

A custom theme optimized for speed not only helps in keeping the readers engaged, but also reduces the load on your web server significantly.

Search Engine Optimization

Whenever a standard free theme is created for masses, not much attention is paid on the SEO aspect while coding it. The code of these themes is often bloated that may introduce several complications while running the blog.

On the other hand, a custom theme is crafted to perfection with several in-built search engine friendly features. The classic example is Thesis Theme, which supports several search engine friendly features out-of-the-box. This means your blog will be crawled regularly, there will be no duplicate content and your posts will rank higher in SERP's.

Better Browsing Experience

As I said in the beginning, great content alone does not guarantee that visitors will be glued to your blog. Your blog's theme - it's layout, navigational structure, it's look and feel plays a big role in convincing and retaining the visitors. If a reader enjoys his stay on your blog he will come back more often.

Clean navigation structure, legible fonts and custom typography gives a unique browsing experience to your readers helping in reducing the bounce rate of your blog. With a custom theme you can experiment to choose the best performing combination that gives them most fulfilling experience to your readers.

Have Your Say

Do you think a custom theme is really necessary for any blog? If you have recently switched to a custom theme, what positive effects you have experienced after changing it?

A custom theme need not necessarily have to be a paid theme. You can modify the code of any free theme to customize it to any extent, provided you have the necessary skills to modify the theme of your blog.

Image Credit: Andy Woo

Why Your Adsense Ads Do Not Receive Clicks?

2009-03-12T22:24:00.002+05:30

Every Adsense publisher wants to see an inflated cheque in his mail basket every month. Some publishers get high click-through rate (CTR), while some wonder why nobody pays attention to their Adsense ads. Are you experiencing the same problem?

There can be many factors that may keep your visitors away from paying any attention to your Adsense ads. Let's discuss each one of them one by one.

Choosing A Wrong Niche

Sometimes publishers pick a wrong niche that inherently has no scope to perform well with Adsense. If you are writing about your garden, your dog and about your eating habits, how much traffic can you expect in the long run?

Choose a profitable blog niche and rest assured that half of the problem is already resolved. Sometimes choosing a popular niche alone does not solve the problem. Some popular niches have very tech-oriented and web-savvy audience who are familiar with PPC ads. They are simply blind to these advertisements and never click on them. For example, blogs on Internet marketing, SEO and blog tips normally receive knowledgeable crowd who are already familiar with these ads. On the other hand, large percentage of traffic on a weight loss blog is not aware about Adsense ads. The probability of clicks is much higher on a weight loss blog when compared to an Internet marketing blog.

Wrong Placement

Sometimes new publishers fail to place their ads at the best performing areas on their blog. Adsense has provided a heat map for publishers suggesting the best placements for their ads.

The red zone represents the best position for ad placement. This zone lies right in the middle of the page, above the fold just before the main content. The second best zones are highlighted in light brown color and the least profitable zones are highlighted in yellow color. Ads embedded around the main content are known to perform the best. Follow the placement suggestions given in this heat map to increase your CTR significantly.

Crazy Color Schemes

Take a look at the color scheme of a sample ad shown below. This dark color combination is definitely going to put strain on the eyes of most visitors.

Such color schemes normally repel the visitors and results in immediate bounce from the site. The enthusiasm and lack of experience contributes to generation of such color schemes by new Adsense publishers. I did it in my early days and found them damaging instead of giving me any clicks.

The best performing ads are gelled with the color scheme of the blog. Follow these simple guidelines to generate the best color combination for your ads.

1. Keep the ad background color, link color and the text color same as your blog's theme.
2. Use the Adsense latest custom fonts feature to closely resemble the ad unit same as your main content.
3. If you are embedding the ad right next to the main content, remove the border from the ad.

Sometimes, color blindness play a major role in reduced CTR. You can use the powerful palette rotation feature to deal with this situation. Recently, I've written an article about reducing ad blindness through palette rotation.

Not Using Large Ads

In many cases, a publisher uses small size ads that may fail to attract the attention of the visitors. Use large rectangle 336x280, medium rectangle 300x250 and wide skyscraper 160x600 to get the best results.

The combination of right color scheme and large ad size, supported by correct placement according to the heat map shown above, increases the probability of getting more clicks for your ads.

Displaying Less Ads

This is one more reason that may contribute to low CTR on your blog. Adsense allows up to three Adsense for content units, three link units, two search boxes and one Adsense for video unit on a single web page. So you have a total of nine ad units available for a single page of your blog. Having said that, one must keep in mind the negative implications of stuffing all these nine units on tightly packed page with relatively less content.

If your blog template is wide with good portion covered with your main content, you can experiment and choose the best combination (number of ads on a single page) for your blog.

Irrelevant Ads

Adsense ad delivery technology is very sophisticated supported by years of refinement to serve the most relevant ads on your blog. Still some publishers complain about getting irrelevant ads on their blog. What's the reason?

Well, this normally occurs when you try to blog about just anything under the sun. When a blog has no definite topic (no definite niche) and host content on wide number of topics some of which are totally irrelevant from each other, this phenomenon may occur. Narrow down your niche and post consistently about that topic to get the most relevant ads on your blog.

Dull Content

If you are experiencing low CTR, see the bounce rate of your blog. If it's alarmingly high (80% or above) you've found one of the reasons that are contributing to this low click-through rate. One of the primary factors responsible for high bounce rate is low quality content.

If large numbers of your visitors are not staying for long on your blog, the probability of clicks automatically reduces drastically. Write compelling content to give them a reason to stay longer on your blog. The more time they will spend in scanning the content, more will be the probability of getting clicks on your Adsense ads.

Less Organic Traffic

If large portion of your traffic is coming from social media sites or referral sites, you may observe low CTR with high bounce rate. Visitors coming from search engines are more likely to click on ads as they are genuinely looking for something, querying for something.

You cannot expect the increase in percentage of traffic from organic sources in a fortnight. It takes time to build an archive of quality content. As your blog archive will grow, traffic from organic sources will automatically increase bringing the kind of visitors you need.

Have Your Say

Have you ever experienced this phenomenon? If yes, what other steps you took to increase the CTR on your blog?

Image Credit: factoryjoe

8 Tips To Use Twitter More Effectively

2009-03-10T13:29:00.003+05:30

Twitter has gained massive popularity giving many established social media services a run for their money. This excellent micro-blogging service is becoming a favorite marketing and business development tool for thousands of organizations and individuals. Are you leveraging the power of twitter to help grow your blog?

Get smart and use this excellent social media marketing platform to give a much needed kick-start to your blog. It's simple, it's fun and it's intuitive. Let's see how to get more out this powerful micro-blogging service to get more eyeballs for your weblog.

Profile Says It All

A twitter profile giving a clear, crisp and unambiguous message gets the most attention of potential followers. Custom twitter background, your real name, a link to your blog and an appealing mini-bio turns any twitter profile into an effective fishnet to get new connections.

Services like twitbacks, freetwitterdesigner and PrettyTweet lets you create free custom twitter backgrounds. While uploading your twitter profile picture, give first preference to your own thumbnail image. The second best choice is your Gravator image. The whole idea is to keep your identity uniform across all the social media networks.

Follow Right People

Your success on twitter largely depends on whom you follow. It's not the quantity but the quality of your twitter network that matters the most. Follow most active, popular big names in your domain and leverage their strong network by interacting with them and by attracting their attention. Swim with a big fish and benefit from their reach.

Use services like MrTweet to get recommendations about whom you should follow to get the maximum benefit from this micro-blogging service.

Track Hot Trends And Join The Bandwagon

One of the keys to get connected with more people on twitter is participating in constructive debates. Use services like Twitscoop, Tweetmeme and Twitterfall to keep yourself updated with the latest happenings and the hot trends on twitter. Pick ongoing conversations and heated debates related to your niche, and take that debate to the next level by sending your constructive tweets. This will create large number of new connections in quick time.

Tweet What You Are Known For

Large number of your followers expects to get specific kind of tweets from you, whether it's your personal tweet or a tweet related to your business/domain. Intelligent tweeting involves cleverly crafted personal and business tweets intermixed with each other to keep your followers asking for more.

Direct Your Twitter Stream To Other Social Media Profiles

This is one of the best methods to leverage your already grown social media profiles. With the advent of various social media mash up technologies, you can easily feed your different social media profiles with your never-ending twitter stream. This will not only keep your other social media accounts active, but will also spread your tweets across different channels giving more eye balls for your twitter conversations.

Don't Be An Owl, Tweet During Peak Time

If you know your audience, then you are also aware about the demographic data associated with them. That means you very well know when they are most active on twitter.

Tweeto'clock is an excellent service that calculates the best time to tweet someone. You can handpick the most popular, active and interesting users in your twitter network and can calculate the best time they are most active on twitter. This will help you to engage with them more easily during their convenient hours.

Understand The Power of Retweets

Initially, Internet marketing experts never saw twitter as a viral marketing platform. As it grew, tweeple realized how a snowball effect is created when people start retweeting some interesting stuff. Once people start picking any tweet, it creates a rippling effect in connected networks spreading the content to massive number of people in very short time. Here are some tips to get your tweets retweeted more often.

1. Keep tweets short.
2. Keep them interesting. Ideally a condensed teaser excerpt with a link.
3. Use best URL shortening services to track performance of your tweets.

4. Embed retweet buttons in your posts available from Tweetmeme.

Don't Be a Bot, Ask And Discuss

In recent months, twam (twitter spam) has increased significantly and most twitter users are aware of it. Try to give your tweets a more human touch by answering questions and discussing heated topics.

Use TwtPoll to conduct short surveys on twitter. This will not only spawn more conversation threads, but will also give you vital data that can be used to craft new posts.

Over To You

I've been using twitter for last one year and found it extremely valuable tool in my arsenal to promote the blog. Do you have a twitter plan to increase your blog readership? Are you getting the desired results or finding twitter a waste of time?

Related Reading:

1. How To Lose Your Twitter Followers
2. MicroBlogging: Twhirl Guide For Beginners

Image Credit: Harrison / Peppery

How To Optimize And Speed Up Your Blog

2009-03-06T17:31:00.003+05:30

The content alone does not guarantee success of your blog. Fast browsing experience always plays a major role in retaining the visitors and giving them a reason to come back. Today a significant part of traffic comes from social media sites. These visitors generally exhibit high bounce rate. If our blog is sluggish, they are not going to give us a second chance. Let's see how to improve the load time and speed up our blog.

Optimize images

Pictures are an essential part of any blog. When we talk about image optimization, we generally aim for two things. 1. Reduction in size 2. Preserving the quality.

Reduce the size - by using Photoshop's 'Save for Web...' option. If your image is rich in color having various effects, use the .jpg format, else you can use the .gif format to reduce the size. Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor (Web Design Specialist) shows how we can optimize images for web.

Specify image size in code - to prevent server using extra CPU cycles to know the size of image. Here's an example.

Specifying image size significantly improves the load time of the web page.

Optimize CSS

Since the emergence of cascading style sheets (CSS), they have become the cornerstone of web development process. Today, almost every CMS use CSS for robust, clean and high performing web site. However, sometimes we may introduce latency in page load time by inadvertently introducing unnecessary or redundant code in CSS files.

Remove white space/compress CSS - to reduce the size of CSS files. You can use various CSS compressing services to strip off all white space and hidden junk characters from the file. Use Clean CSS, which not only remove white space from CSS, but also optimize it by removing unnecessary or redundant code.

Use shorthand CSS - to further reduce the size of your CSS file. The code shown below introduces redundant code.

.section {
width: 160px;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-right: 5px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
margin-left: 15px;
}

Same code can be re-written as:

.section {width:160px; margin: 10px 5px 5px 15px;}

Before you compress your CSS files, keep a backup copy of original file. You may need this more reader-friendly version in future to add/modify the code.

Use External File For Scripts And CSS

Do not fill your HTML files with inline CSS and scripts. Group all scripts/CSS in separate files and include/call them from header as shown below.

This will reduce the file size and redundancy in code speeding up overall load time.

Compress JavaScript - to reduce the size and to optimize the JavaScript code. JavaScript Compressor is an excellent service for compressing your JS scripts.

Append Forward Slash ('/') In Permalinks

While specifying the default permalink structure in your Wordpress dashboard, make sure you append forward slash '/' in the end as shown below.

/%postname%/
/%category%/%postname%/
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

Appending the forward slash at the end of URL clearly indicates the server that it is a directory page and no further look-ups are required.

Minimize Database Queries

There are some URL's and fields that rarely or never change during the lifetime of a blog. Instead of fetching them again and again from database, hard code them directly into your theme to speed up the download process. An example is shown below.

/* --- Original Coding --- */
<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></title>
/* --- Replaced by static HTML --- */
<title>MintBlogger - Blogging Tips And Social Media</title>

Similarly, you can hard code all references to blog title, blog description, theme's CSS file path, comment RSS links and post RSS links. This will ensure reduction in database queries and load on server.

Minimize Requests To External Elements

Try to avoid flooding your sidebars with 3rd party flashy widgets. This will only increase the load time testing the patience of the visitor. Similarly, avoid hosting all your images, scripts and other components on any external web server to reduce the HTTP requests and load time.

Use Speed-Up Plugins

Use Wp Super Cache and PHP Speedy plugins to make your Wordpress install respond quickly even during heavy traffic load. Both plugins are well known to speed up serving of web pages by caching web pages and by reducing the number of HTTP requests.

Analyze And Optimize

Use Pingdom full-page test to analyze the page loading action.

This test mimics page loading in browser and calculates the time taken by each component (including their total size) during the load process. Pingdom test helps in identifying the key elements responsible for slow loading of a web page.

YSlow is another excellent Firefox add-on tightly integrated with Firebug web development tool to analyze the elements of a web page.

Combined with the power of Firebug, YSlow provides vital information about web page components and the reasons why the page is slow. This helps you in identifying the problematic elements.

Have Your Say

What other optimization techniques do you use to speed up your blog? What was your post-optimization experience in terms of traffic behavior and conversion?

Related Reading:

1. 5 Best SEO Tips For Bloggers

Image Credit: Eole

Google Ad Manager: Complete Ad Management Solution For Bloggers

2009-03-04T15:15:00.002+05:30

Displaying ads on a blog and keeping track of all the granular data related to those ads are two completely different things. Almost all of us are familiar with a simple process of pasting ad code in our blog template. What about accurate and real-time tracking of impressions and clicks? What about the performance of these ads based on demographic data? Here comes the role of specialized ad management software.

There are several ad management software in the market. I chose Google Ad Manager for several reasons. It is free, uses the same proven ad management technology used by Adsense network and offers tons of options for complete ad inventory management. Here are some of the salient features of Google Ad Manager.

Simple User-friendly interface - helps you get started within few minutes after exploring various sections of the dashboard.

Adsense integration - gives you an option of filling empty slots with Adsense ads and an optional smart pricing feature for maximum revenue.

Speed and reliability - of Google's ad serving technology is proven from years of expertise in this domain. As I mentioned earlier, Google Ad Manager uses exactly the same ad delivery technology used by Adsense network.

Cost savings - are guaranteed, as you don't have to pay for anything. You can directly load all your direct ad banners on Google Ad Manager servers giving you significant bandwidth savings.

If you are accepting direct ads on your blog that are blended with ads from different advertisement networks, managing them can be a real headache. Google Ad Manager (GAM) gives you complete control of your ad inventory with maximum possible automation giving you peace of mind. Let's see how to manage our ads through GAM, which includes creating ad, tracking and reporting.

Creating An Ad

To demonstrate an example, let's create an ad with single slot (125x125) containing ads from two different advertisers shown on round robin basis (rotating banners). Let's assume we are going to display this 125x125 rotating banner ad on left sidebar.

Create New Ad Slot

1. We will start by creating a new Ad Slot. Go to 'Inventory -> Ad Slots -> New Ad Slot.

2. Give a unique name to this slot (for exp: 125x125AdSlot1). Next, select the size 125 x 125 from the drop down menu.

3. Specify the target window for this ad slot. If an advertiser wants the landing page to be opened in new blank window select _blank else select _top.

4. Deselect the 'Adsense' check box to prevent automatically populating this slot with an Adsense ad in case any advertiser does not book it.

5. The other two fields are optional and can be ignored at this moment. Click the save button. You've just created a new ad slot.

Bind Ad Slot With A Placement

Multiple ad slots are grouped together under a single logical unit called placement. Let's associate this ad slot with a placement.

1. Go to Inventory -> Placements -> New Placement.

2. Name this placement (for exp: LeftSidebar125x125Ads). Leave the 'Targeting' check box unchecked.

3. Associate the newly created Ad slot with this placement by clicking the 'Add >>' link in the slots table. Click 'Save' button. You've just created a placement and connected the ad slot with this placement.

Create Order

1. Now it's time to create an order. Go to 'Orders -> New Order'.

2. Name the order (for exp: CompanyName12x25AdSlot1).

3. Specify the 'Start Date' and 'End Date', the period for which ad will be displayed. You can also choose 'Unlimited' for 'End Date' in case there is no fix closing date for that particular ad.

4. Now associate this order with a particular Advertiser by selecting the advertiser name from the drop down box. If you have no record of that advertiser, you can create it instantly from the 'New Advertiser...' link within the drop down box.

5. Rest fields are optional and can be safely ignored. Press the 'Save' button to activate the order.

Create And Bind Line Items For Order

Since we want to display 2 rotating banner ads on a single location (ad slot), we will create two line items for this order. Let's move ahead...

1. As soon as you will save your order you will be given the option to create a line item for that order. Click the 'New line item' link to get started.

2. Name the line item (for Exp: CompanyNameProduct12x125).

3. Choose the 'Exclusive' option for 'Delivery Priority'. This ensures quick delivery of ad without any latency.

4. Specify the 'Start Date' and 'End Date' for this line item.

5. Enter the 'Cost' and optional 'Discount', if any. If you have chosen 'Exclusive' option for delivery priority, you can only provide cost on Cost per day (CPD) basis. To specify cost on Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) or Cost per action (CPA) basis, choose 'Delivery Priority' as 'Standard'.

6. Bind the line item with appropriate placement by choosing it from the placement table.

7. Leave the optional 'Targeting' criteria as it is.

8. Select 'Delivery Rate' as 'As fast as possible'. Select 'Creative rotation' as 'Even' to ensure equal impressions (rotations) of both banner ads in a single slot.

9. Click the 'Save' button and repeat the same process for second line item to be made for banner ad from second advertiser.

Define Creative For Each Line Item

After creating both line items, the final step involves providing details of banner images/Landing page URL's/Script/HTML code to create the actual advertisement.

1. Click the first line item draft from the table and click the link in yellow box asking you to create a 'Creative' for this line item.

2. Give an appropriate name to the 'Creative' and select the ad slot size (125 x 125 in our case).

3. There are several options for 'Creative Type'. The most common three are explained here.

Rich Media - option is selected when all you have an ad delivery code. If your advertiser is providing the JavaScript code, choose this option and paste it in the 'Code snippet' text box.

Standard image hosted - option is used whenever you only get the banner image and click-through URL from the advertiser. Upload the image and provide the click-through URL to complete the process. The image will be hosted on Google servers saving your's and the advertiser's bandwidth.

Standard image redirect - option is used when image is hosted on advertiser's server or on any external image hosting service. In this case, just provide the image and click-through URL.

4. As soon as you will click the 'Save', you will be presented a new button 'Approve and activate'. Pressing this button will activate the order and the associated line items and creatives. Repeat this process to create a second creative.

Generate HTML Ad Code

After completing all the steps, you can generate the ad code and paste it in your blog template to start serving the ads. Here's the process...

1. Go to 'Inventory' and select the appropriate ad slot. Now click 'Generate Sample HTML' to generate the entire HTML code.

2. The code will be divided into two parts:

Header code - As the name implies, this code will be pasted between <head> and </head>.

Ad delivery code - This code should be pasted on the actual location in the body of your template where you want the ad to appear.

After pasting the code, it may take up to 10 minutes before ads start appearing on the web page.

Tracking And Reports

Google Ad Manager has a rich reporting module giving you extensive details about ad performance, order status, impressions, average eCPM, Revenue, Clicks and much more.

Two most common report groups are Delivery Reports and Inventory Reports. You can automate the report creation and delivery process (via email) so that you can keep yourself updated about ads performance without leaving your inbox.

Related Reading:

1. How To Get Direct Advertisements For Your Blog
2. Ad Inventory Management For Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide

Image Credit: Stabilo Boss

How I Quadrupled My Traffic In Less Than 3 Months

2009-02-28T19:05:00.003+05:30

The most important metric to assess the popularity of any blog is the amount of traffic it is receiving. If you are unknown in blogosphere starting from scratch, building decent traffic on your blog can take some time. Here's how I managed to increase the traffic in recent months by applying some simple yet powerful techniques.

At present, I'm getting around 12,000 page views/month. I know it's not huge traffic when compared to some popular blogs in similar niche. However, the increase from 2,000 PV's/month to 12,000 PV's/month in about 2.5 months is certainly a good development for a relatively new blog.

If we closely look at the traffic graph shown above, we can witness a steady growth in traffic after some of my posts received good attention by social media users. You can clearly observe that before those big spikes, traffic was pretty much stagnant. The key factor was to identify this phenomenon and capitalizing on it. Following these big spikes, I introduced some major changes in my blogging routine to pull and convert more traffic.

Here are those changes that I implemented in last 2.5/3 months.

Posted Regularly

Readers and search engines both love regular feed of content. Prior to November 2008, my posting frequency was quite irregular with no definite pattern. Nothing can be better than daily posting, but if you cannot make it everyday, try to post at least 3 to 4 times a week. I have created a strict posting schedule and now I publish 3 articles per week. Try to publish at least one long in-depth post per week. Regular posting has not only given crawlers a reason to index the content quickly but it has also inflated the archives rapidly resulting in more traffic from organic sources.

Written For Audience

Daily posting alone cannot help build traffic on your blog. To make it clearer, let me ask you some simple questions. Why you visit some popular blogs? Do you like the design of the footer? Or you love to watch animated banner ads on that blog? I'm sure almost all of you go there only for one reason. To get answers of your questions and to get vital information related to your domain. So the key is to identify the needs of your audience and serve what they want. This is applicable to almost every business process - "Anticipating Customer Demands And Delivering The Goods Accordingly".

To implement this on your blog you need to do some research. Here's how I did it.

Google Analytics - is one of the best sources to identify what kind of content is receiving most traffic. Use the 'Content -> Top Content' report to identify the posts receiving most attention of the visitors. Generate 'Visitors -> Keywords' report to identity the most popular keywords that are sending traffic to your blog. After analyzing these reports, here's what I found out.

Following type of posts was receiving most traffic.

1. Problem-Solver Articles
2. How-To Tutorials
3. Lists of Resources
4. In-Depth Post About A Service/Feature

Asking fellow bloggers - in similar niche helped me in getting a clear picture about the type of content that receives most attention on their blogs. The results were almost the same as I got through analysis of Google Analytics reports.

Talking with some of my readers - gave some useful insight about their expectations and the type of content they are expecting from MintBlogger.

Updated Old Content

During this period, I updated and refreshed about 54 posts from archives. This whole exercise helped in making posts more readable, stickier and more useful for the readers. While updating these old posts I stressed on 3 important things.

Contextual Cross-Linking - I identified the possibility of cross-linking the posts with relevant anchor texts embedded right in the middle of the content.

Added Relevant Illustrations - This helped me in making the posts more attractive and sticky.

Modified/Added More Content - Some of the posts required updation of text and some of them demanded addition of extra paragraphs.

Here's a comprehensive guide to update and refresh old content on your blog.

Updated Archives Page

After analyzing the Google Analytics reports, I saw an alarming trend. Lot of visitors were heading to archives page and exiting immediately without any further navigation. The poor design of archives page was the culprit.

I completely updated the archives page by including yearly/monthly archives, highlighted categories section, list of posts in reverse chronological order and a search box. This drastically reduced the bounce rate. Recently, I've written about creating a high performing archives page.

Revamped Sidebar

It is very vital to know which parts of your web page are receiving the most attention and which parts are completely ignored by the visitors. There are some hot click-through zones and some non-performing zones. If you are able to identify them and manage to improve the latter ones, traffic is automatically going to increase.

I used Google Analytics Site Overlay feature to identify non-performing click-through zones. You can access this feature through 'Content -> Site Overlay' from GA dashboard. After analyzing site overlay report it was quite clear that my sidebar was not receiving the required attention.

Here is the composition of my old sidebar.

1. Categories
2. Four - 125x125 Ad Block
3. Recent Posts
4. One 250x250 Adsense Image Ad Block
5. Subscription Box
6. Social Media Profiles
7. Entrecard

In old sidebar, there was more stress on stuffing ads rather than providing links to some useful stuff for the visitor. After revamping the sidebar now it has the following elements and performs very well.

1. Subscription Box
2. Categories
3. Popular Posts
4. Best Lists And Resources
5. Recent Posts
6. Social Media Profiles

I completely removed all the ads from the sidebar, shifted subscription box on top and highlighted the best content on MintBlogger in different sections. In coming months, I'll divide these sections into Popular Posts, Best How-To's, Best Lists & Resources and Free Themes by MintBlogger, giving more options to the reader to scan and navigate the archives.

Commented On Tons of Blogs

You must have read several times about commenting on other blogs to get more exposure and traffic, but how many of us do it consistently over time. I have set a goal to daily comment on at least 10 different blogs similar to my niche.

Don't limit your comments on some selective blogs but evenly spread your comments across the blogosphere on as many new blogs as you can. Regular commenting will create new connections generating more traffic and exposure for your blog.

Did Aggressive Social Media Marketing

After getting the taste of success on various social media sites back in November 2008 (see traffic chart above), I became quite active on Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter. The result was some additional traffic from social media sites.

Changed And Tweaked Blog Theme

In the beginning, I was using Minyx template for MintBlogger. I was not satisfied with the theme and decided to change it with Adspress. This new theme has much cleaner navigation, fast load time and has a non-standard look. I edited the CSS to give it a unique look to provide a pleasant browsing experience to the visitors. I don't know how much it has contributed to the cause, but some of my peers agreed that after these theme tweaks MintBlogger doesn't appears to be hosted on blogger platform and looks reasonably good.

Networked With Peers

Nobody can grow in vacuum. Socialize, connect and interact to see your blog grow faster than your expectations. I used social media, emails, IM and discussion forums to connect with fellow bloggers and readers. This created a chain of people who knows about me and definitely some of them talk about me with their contacts spreading the word about MintBlogger.

In The End: Change of Traffic Pattern

I would like to finish this post by comparing 2 traffic pie charts generated through Google Analytics. You are going to see a classic example of how traffic pattern changes drastically when you change your approach and blogging routine.

Traffic Pattern Before November, 2008

Traffic Pattern From 1st Nov, 2008 To 20th Feb, 2009

From both pie charts, you can clearly deduce how percentage of traffic from organic sources and social media sites has completely reversed in last 3 months. Before November 2008 just 20% of traffic was coming from search engines, now it has swelled to 57% (indication of inflating archive with posts getting good rankings in SERP's). In the long run, this organic traffic is going to matter the most.

So these were some changes, tweaks and various methods implemented by me to pull more traffic towards MintBlogger.

Over To You

I would like to know various methods you may have implemented to build traffic on your blog?

Image Credits: _neona_

20 Useful And Essential Wordpress Plugins

2009-02-26T19:51:00.003+05:30

Wordpress is one of the most popular blog hosting content management system. Despite its feature packed options, every Wordpress powered blog needs an array of plugins to include additional features and functionality. Here is a collection of most essential plugins that makes blog management easy and creates pleasant browsing experience for the visitors.

1. Akismet: Undoubtedly the most essential plugin for any Wordpress install. Akismet is the best anti-spam plugin used by millions of bloggers across the globe. Akismet gives protection both from comment spam and trackback spam.

After activating this plugin, you simply have to provide Wordpress.com API key to kick start it. You can optionally choose to automatically discard spam on posts more than 1 month old.

2. WP Super Cache: A must for every professional blog. This plugin caches frequently accessed pages and eliminates repeated access of database. This significantly speeds up the response giving smooth browsing experience for the visitors. If your blog receives big spikes of traffic, this plugin can help your blog cope with the load of heavy traffic very easily.

3. Google XML Sitemaps: Very useful plugin from SEO perspective. This excellent plugin creates Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap that helps in proper indexing of your blog. Just install and forget it. Whenever you will create/edit/modify any blog post, this plugin will automatically update the sitemap.

4. Google Analytics for WordPress: Undoubtedly the best tracking plugin. One click install and simple configuration. This plugin helps you track the following:

1. Outbound links
2. Adsense clicks
3. Image search queries
4. Downloads

5. Feedburner FeedSmith: If you are using Feedburner to promote your blog feed, make sure you have this plugin. It redirects all your feed subscribers to a single Feedburner feed and keeps track of all of them.

6. All in One SEO Pack: The name says it all. This plugin takes care of on-page search engine optimization functions with ease. It automatically generates optimized title and meta tags for every new post. After configuring, this plugin also prevents creation of duplicate content.

7. WordPress.com Stats: Like Akismet, this plugin also requires Wordrpess.com API key for its functioning. Although much of your traffic analysis needs are fulfilled by Google Analytics, still this plugin installation is highly recommended as it gives detailed statistics about your traffic right in your Wordpress dashboard.

8. Exec-PHP: Very handy plugin that lets you execute arbitrary piece of PHP code in your posts, pages or sidebar text widgets. A must-have plugin for coding ninjas who extensively customize their default theme.

9. Contact Form 7: An excellent contact form manager plugin supporting Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, multi-language support and much more.

10. WP Ajax Edit Comments: Another must-have plugin facilitating editing and moderating at a click of a button. Once configured, visitors can edit their own comments for a pre-defined time interval. Administrator can modify, delete and moderate the comments directly from the post page.

11. Sociable: One of my favorite and highly recommended. Sociable easily integrates social bookmarking buttons on your post pages at specified location with ease. It supports up to 99 various social bookmarking services. You can also embed these bookmarking links in your feed as well.

12. Subscribe to Comments: Sometimes readers want to take part in ongoing debate in the form of comments on selective posts. This handy plugin provides a comment subscription to the commentators to get alerts for every subsequent comment posted. At any time readers can unsubscribe

13. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: A highly customizable plugin to display related entries beneath your posts or in feeds. This improvised plugin uses MySQL advanced search queries to correctly match the related entries displaying the highly relevant posts. Use you can display posts on the basis of tags or categories.

14. WP-DB-Backup: A must-have plugin for every Wordpress install. This simple yet powerful plugin backs up your blog's core database. You can optionally backup additional tables in the same database.

15. WP-Syntax: An ideal plugin for those bloggers who frequently use sample-programming codes in their tutorial/how-to posts. This excellent plugin provides syntax highlighting for several popular languages to give a clean and neat look to the embedded code for better readability and understanding.

16. AdSense Manager: A robust and highly customizable plugin ideal for serving different kind of ads from major PPC advertising networks. Configuration is very simple with custom placement widgets that automatically generate code for ad impressions at targeted places on the post.

17. Login LockDown: If you want to add an extra layer of security for your Wordpress install, then this plugin is a perfect addition in your arsenal. It logs IP and timestamp of every unsuccessful login attempt and optionally disable login page for some period (configured during installation).

18. RSS Footer: This plugin has dual use. It not only allows you to append arbitrary test/HTML at the end of feed but also lets you automatically embed permalink to original post with title as the anchor text. An excellent plugin to curb scrapping of your blog feed.

19. WP-Polls: Looking to host polls on your blog? Here comes WP-Polls to your rescue giving you highly customizable poll plugin. Latest version supports multiple answer options and custom CSS styles support.

20. pageMash: Ultimate static page management plugin. This plugin makes arranging order of static pages a cakewalk. Simply use the ajax powered drag-n-drop interface to shift page positions in a hierarchy. This plugin also lets you hide selective pages with a click of a button.

Image Credits: chrismeller

How To Write Blog Posts Fast

2009-02-23T14:03:00.007+05:30

Time is money, especially if you own several flourishing businesses (including your weblog). The more you multi-task, lesser the time you get for each one of them. Every blog demands constant supply of quality content to keep both readers and search engines happy. Developing fast writing skills can remove much of the burden of keeping your blog alive. Here are some basic techniques to develop fast writing skills.

Skim An Idea

Ideas can pop up any time. Whether you are watching a movie, taking bath, cooking or strolling in a nearby park. As soon as you pick up any idea, note it in your organizer, PDA or pocket book. Later on, you can transfer this idea to your blog post editor in the form of a draft.

Collect Data

Work on this idea by collecting facts and figures from various sources. Scan relevant sites, discuss with peers and use social media to gather more facts (create a mini poll). You can also use various Wiki's for collecting additional details about the topic.

Create Post Skeleton

Once you have the required data, divide them into main points/sub-headings. This will ensure a smooth flow while writing the blog entry. I have written an article about basic anatomy of a blog post that may help you in creating a post skeleton. Hold on, this is not the time to start a writing session.

Remove Distractions

Just before you start to write, switch off your mobile, logout from email, IM's or any social media account. Preferably, switch to an editor like Dark Room. I regularly use this editor to write fast without any distraction. If you prefer to write directly in your blog's CMS post editor and your web browser is Firefox, install thesaurus and dictionary plugin to aid in filling gaps and enriching the post with more professional language.

Write Like A Rabbit

Finally, you have all the building blocks in your hands. Start writing and do not stop until you are finished. Forget about spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, links, illustrations or the credits. Just keep writing till you have nothing more to say about it. If the article is not very long, this whole session will not last more than 15 to 20 minutes.

Polish It

Now it's time to correct and improve the post. Go through your article once again and correct all the spelling mistakes. Nowadays, almost every web browser supports spell-check plugins or native support to identify such mistakes and to provide alternative suggestions. Fill in all the gaps and if you feel the need, stuff additional text at selective places. Now quickly dump your article in a standard word processor and once again run a spell check.

Press The Publish Button

Just before publishing the post, apply this useful technique that has helped me in picking those mistakes that I may have missed in earlier stages. I always first publish the polished article on my test blog and read it aloud. This helps me in identifying several mistakes that I am not able to catch earlier. This is the right time to add illustrations, contextual links and credits, if any. Once satisfied, transfer the post to your main blog editor and hit the publish button.

Done. Total time 25-30 minutes.

Have Your Say

What's your approach to write quick blog entries? Do you use any external text editor or prefer your blog CMS post editor?

Image Credit: Zahra