Blogging for Good in the Modern World

Filesonic – free unlimited storage and money earning capabilities

2012-01-21T11:20:00.001-08:00

Filesonic isoffering solution for a cloud storage and file hosting needs to its users. Youcan enjoy free and unlimited storage, and downloads and uploads of files up to 5GB. Filesonic gives you access to your files when you need them, wherever youare.

On top of the useful unlimitedstorage for your files, you can also share them with your friends or your blogvisitors, and get paid for. Artistsare able to make money from their original content (music, original videos,art, poetry, etc) through the platform, offered by Filesonic. Simply uploadyour files and share them with the world (through email, social media, or yourown website or blog).

Youwill be compensated for every download of your files ($35 for 1000 downloads),or every time a premium membership is sold to customers you bring in. Eitherway, FileSonic will share its revenues with you and allow you to turn youroriginal content into money.

Payments:

Payments released weekly to Paypal, Webmoney and AlertPay. Payments via bank wire transfer are available on request.
Minimum payout is $15 (Except Elite).

How to administrate automatically interactive tasks on multiple social media accounts?

2012-01-10T20:47:00.000-08:00

If you consider Twitter as an essential element ofyour marketing campaign, you may increase its effectiveness significantly bycreating automatic rules of interaction between your different accounts invarious social media structures.

Many professionals admit that the new service withpretty strange domain http://ifttt.com can be acornerstone of the automation. IFTTT acronym has, however, pretty descentexplanation - it means “If this, then that.” Think of all the things you could do if you were able todefine any task as: when something happens (this) then do something else (that).The “this part” of a task is the Trigger. Some example Triggers are "I'mtagged in a photo on Facebook" or "I tweet on Twitter." The “thatpart” of a task is the Action. Some example Actions are "send me a textmessage" or "create a status message on Facebook."

Using this free service, you can set up list ofrules-based automatic interactions between Twitter and other popular web apps,including Dropbox, Facebook, or Tumblr. For instance, you can set up a taskthat will automatically save your Twitter favorites to your Evernote notebook,or a task that will copy your Twitter pictures to your Flickr account, and sendyou an email, when the task is completed. Your options are endless.

Channels of interaction available:

So, take some time, define useful rules, and let theservice do all the administrative jobs.

Website: http://ifttt.com/

XLogan – Free Blog Performance Monitor

2012-01-04T20:39:00.000-08:00

For serious bloggers, shaping up their development strategy andmarketing campaigns, it is essential to work closely with site relatedstatistics and trends. While there are web-based monitoring tools, like GoogleAnalytics, you may prefer to use the desktop utility for the same purposes.

Xlogan is a free tool for generating statistics from your web site orblog log files. These statistics can reveal a lot of useful information aboutyour website, such as which sites are linking to you, what search terms peopleuse to find your site, how often each file is downloaded, what countries yourvisitors come from, and much more.

Log files are created as visitors move around your website, and yourweb host or ISP then makes them available for you to download.

The utility will help you to answer multiple questions, related to yourblog performance. Among them:

Main statistics:

· How many visitors your website receives

· Which other websites refer visitors to yours

· Which countries your visitors come from

· Which pages each visitor views

Browser usage statistics (to invest more time on site optimization for the most popular browsers)

Blog performance measurements through conversion rates evaluation on the level of success to "convert" your visitors into customers or subscribers.

Searching keywords people are using to find your site.

Measuring the effects of those changes, imposed to your blog by direct result comparison.

Evaluation of the Google AdWords success rate by measuring your ROI (return on investment) through the program.

Website:http://www.axeuk.com/xlogan/

Direct Download: http://www.axeuk.com/xlogan/xlogan202.exe

Checking your blog for broken links with Xenu's Link Sleuth

2011-12-25T19:29:00.000-08:00

As your blog fills up with posts, there is a highprobability that the external off-blog links you refer to might become outdatedovertime. Also, if you use third-party services to store your images, software,or other reference files, might become broken. Therefore, it is a good ideaonce awhile to perform blog maintenance and restore the links functionality.However, checking manually one-by-one might be a tiresome and time-consumingprocedure. Today, we would like to present a free portable utility, which isgoing to help you performing the task.

Xenu's Link Sleuth checks Web sites for brokenlinks. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames,plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and javaapplets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort bydifferent criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Additional features:

Simple, no-frills user-interface
Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
Simple report format, can also be e-mailed
Executable file smaller than 1MB
Supports SSL websites ("https:// ")
Partial testing of ftp, gopher and mail URLs
Detects and reports redirected URLs
Site Map

System requirements:

Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7,WININET.DLL required (included with Internet Explorer).

How to make utility portable (optional):

Download the ZIP package and extract. Extract the installer to a folder of yourchoice with Universal Extractor. Delete $PLUGINSDIR folder. Launch Xenu.exe.

Developers’ website: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Direct Download Link (latest release 1.3.8): http://home.snafu.de/tilman/XENU.ZIP

Free Blogs Pinger - For Multiple Sites to Multiple Services

2011-12-11T19:12:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, I have presented the rating list for the freemulti-site online pinging services. While it is a good solution, I stillfind it somehow limited. Most of these services do not accept multiple blogsentrance at the same time, and in almost all services, the list of the linksfor your blogs to get submitted, is hard coded and cannot be changed.

For me, the ideal solution would be a simple script, when I can add asmany blogs as I need, and I can ping all these blogs at the same time to thecustomer-made list of the sites, I will compile myself.

Today, I would like to present such a script to you, but with one catch.The software does NOT have English interface (at least, I could not find one).The software is in Russian, and since its operation is absolutely simple andstraightforward, with my basic translation (I speak Russian fluently), you willbe able to use it “as is”.

The software is portable, and does not need to be installed to the harddrive. Actually, it is one executable file with one two windows. In one, youpost list of your blogs, in another, there is a preset list of services to pingto, which you can change as you like. Good thing, that after software is closed,all settings are saved in you user files (so, correcting myself, it is notcleanly portable, which is good in a way as when you reopen it next time, the lastused listing is automatically loaded, so you do not have to input your customURLs and pinger leads again).

The software is called PingXpert, and its translated screenshot is below:

Again, operation is simple: in the top window add all your blogs, in thebottom is pre-populated list of services, which you can edit as you wish. Clickright button on the bottom and wait. The response code for each service willshow, how successful the ping was. If it has reached the target, the code is200.

Website (in Russian, you can useGoogle translator if you wish): http://www.pingxpert.com/

Direct Link for Download: http://www.ziddu.com/download/17787121/pingxpertfree_SendBlogPing.exe.html

Please share with me if you areaware on any similar script with English interface.

4 Free Ways to Download Facebook Photos and Albums

2011-11-30T21:28:00.001-08:00

Facebook is a Worldwide Social Networking Leader. Ithas multiple built-in capabilities for convenient communication and virtual sharingof your life events. In this post, we would like to present several softwareutilities to help with one of the tasks associated with Facebook, and particularlydownloading images and complete albums from the friend’s profiles. All thereviewed utilities are free for use.

FotoBounce

FotoBounce offers one of the most convenient andcomprehensive ways to download pictures from Facebook and manage them easily onyour computer. FotoBounce is offered both for Windows or Mac platform. It workslocally from your computer and provides simple way of downloading pictures.

Fotobounce utilizes advanced face detection andrecognition technology to automatically detect faces when photos are found orimported. As faces are detected by Fotobounce and tagged by the user, this“trains” Fotobounce to learn who people are and helps automate the taggingprocess. The process is similar to the Picasa Web Album as to this feature.

While this post focuses on photos downloading, youcan enjoy other features of FotoBounce like uploading photos to Facebookgallery and Flickr. Photos are uploaded directly from Fotobounce – with tagsand descriptions intact. There’s no need to spend additional time painstakinglyre-tagging photos and no browser-based transfers or third-party software isrequired.

Fotobounce Viewer is a separate product that runs onWindows, Mac, Linux and Android. The Viewer makes it easy to browsephotos and share them on the go from any platform and practically any mobiledevice. A version will be available soon for the iPhone (iPad and iPod)and the BlackBerry Playbook. For devices not supported by the FotobounceViewer, users can use Fotobounce Mobile.

Photos or albums can be sent to Twitter fromFotobounce. Fotobounce is the only solution in the industry that allows anentire album to be attached to a single tweet.

Website: http://fotobounce.com/

Direct Download Page: http://fotobounce.com/download/

Bloom

Bloom is another multi platform desktop app that letyou upload your photos and videos easily and efficiently to Facebook, and, whatis important for the matter of this post, download albums and view yourfriends' photos.

Main features includeability to download albums or individual pictures from Facebook

Website and Downloading Page: http://antaki.ca/bloom/

PhotoGrabber

PhotoGrabberis very simple desktop application which allows you to download Facebook Photoalbums to your computer with no technical knowledge. It is available forWindows and Mac platforms.

Website:http://code.google.com/p/photograbber/

DirectDownload Page: http://code.google.com/p/photograbber/downloads/list

Pick & Zip

Pick&Zipis not a software utility, but totally free online tool allowing you todownload photos from Facebook in a single ZIP or PDF file. In this case, you donot have to download any software on your computer to use this web application.

Tostart using this service, you just have to log in with Facebook credentials.Pick& Zip allows you to download your own pics for backup purposes, taggedphotos of you (even if they were not uploaded by you), and also, the albums ofyour friends. When you login with your Facebook login credentials, you can seeall your friends on the left side as a list. When you click on any of yourfriend’s name, all the albums of that person are listed. You can download aparticular photo or the entire album.

Website:http://www.picknzip.com/

4 Free Services to Unfollow Inactive Followers: Twitter Tips and Tricks

2011-11-20T21:27:00.001-08:00

ManageFlitter

Formerly known asManageTwitter, ManageFlitter is considered by many as one of the bestapplication for unfollowing Twitter users. It is a very simple, bur features-richand powerful, tool to unfollow on Twitter. This app may take a couple ofminutes to load if you have multiple followers, but it allows you to quicklyunfollow lots of people in few steps. It loads all the people who you arefollowing, and points out on the people who are not following you back, givingyou an easy opportunity to select uses you would like to stop following. Clickthe "Unfollow" button, and the request will be instantly filled. Thisis also the only application that gives you the option to unfollow people whoare inactive, haven't tweeted in a while, or have not posted aprofile picture.

At the top of eachpage is a nifty ordering tool. This tool allows you to rearrange the people inthe list below. It's a fast way to find out which accounts you follow have themost followers. Maybe you'd like to find the people who haven't tweeted for thelongest time. You can do this by ordering based on their last tweet time.

Website: http://manageflitter.com/

JustUnfollow

JustUnfollow makes it easy to unfollow those who are not following youback on Twitter. It displays 50 of your non-followers at a time and lets youdecide whom you would like to un-follow and whom you would prefer keepfollowing. It uses Twitter oath for authentication so your password won’t getleaked in the process; signing in process requires using your Twitter account.

Note that free accounts can unfollow up to 50 users in a day. If youare searching for a bulk unfollow twitter app then you should know bulkunfollows aren't allowed by twitter. You get to check and unfollow only thoseusers that you want to.

Website: http://www.justunfollow.com/

The Unfollow App

As the service name suggests, The Unfollow App offers you to clean upyour Twitter directory by un-following those who are inactive and do not followyou back. The application recommends you these profiles and even gives you thedetailed information of all the connected users in your social network. Therefore,the Unfollow App makes it easy for you to make informative decision on whom tofollow and unfollow on Twitter.

Website: http://www.theunfollowapp.com/

Twit Cleaner

Twit Cleaner is helpful because it analyzes the Twitter users youfollow and presents you with a (free) report highlighting those who you maywant to unfollow for one reason or another. The application isespecially useful if you like to keep the Tweeter account as clean as possible,removing not just inactive uses, but may be active as well, whose activity doesnot meet your desired requirements to your Twitter profile page.

This application allows you to analyse the people you follow indetails, locating time wasters, spammers, the boring posters, bots etc.,providing you with smart recommendations on how to improve your own Twitterpresence.

Website: http://thetwitcleaner.com/

Free Online Wordpress Theme Generator

2011-11-10T20:44:00.001-08:00

If you plan to starta new Wordpress blog, or you are going to refresh design for your existingblog, you may be looking for the nice template, which may fit your format,color scheme, design, and structure. No problem, if you have knowledge andexperience on the web development, and you can make template for your blogexactly as you want. If you are not proficient on web design, or you have notime or interest in doing that yourself, there are multiple readymade templateson the Web, both free and commercial. But any template you find has limited setof the adjustments and changes you can make, so it is quite possible that yourblog appearance will look similar to thousands other blogs, using the sametemplate.

In this post, Iwould like to present free online services from Lubith.com, offering Wordpressthemes creator.

Main Features

Intuitive interface. Move and resize the theme elements just by dragging the two knobs.
No code required. You can design, edit and use your theme without needing to write a single line of code.
Every theme is being kept on server for 7 days after your last save and then it will be erased. So, you can get back and make adjustments to the theme you have initially generated.
You cannot work on several themes in parallel. If you reset the theme, the previous layout will be lost.

Installing your Theme in WordPress

From WordPress admin panel, go to the Appearance ->Themes.
Click the Install Themes tab (at the top).
Click the Upload link.
Browse for the zip file downloaded from Lubith and click Install Now button.
Click the Activate theme link to activate the theme.

Website: http://www.lubith.com/

Dynamic Views Templates Enhancement in Blogger Blogs

2011-11-01T20:33:00.000-07:00

Back in June, we presented the Blogger enhancement allowingyour blog visitors to see your blog differently through new and refreshed Blog appearancethrough DynamicViews. Encouraged by a positive feedback from blogs’ owners and blogs’visitors, Blogger recently extended these feature capabilities.

In brief, the Dynamic templates are new templates designs,which were made available to apply to Blogger blogs. In comparison with thestandard templates as were used for your blog before by default, these dynamictemplates are quite advance aesthetically, giving a new look and new feel toyour website. Built with the latest in web technology (AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3),Dynamic Views offer a unique browsing experience that will inspire your readersto explore your blog in new ways. The interactive layouts make it easier forreaders to enjoy and discover your posts, loading 40 percent faster thantraditional templates and bringing older entries to the surface so they seemfresh again.

You may choose from seven various Dynamic Views Templates thatdisplay text and photos differently. For example, if you have lots of photos onyour blog, you may prefer Flipcard or Snapshot. If your blog is moretext-heavy, then Classic, Sidebar Timeslide may be preferable. Here’s a quickdescription of each of the new views, along with links to some of our favoriteblogs where you can check each of them out in action.

Classic: A modern twist on a traditional template, with infinite scrolling and images that load as you go
Flipcard: Your photos are tiled across the page and flip to reveal the post title
Magazine: A clean, elegant editorial style layout
Mosaic: A mosaic mix of different sized images and text
Sidebar: An email inbox-like view with a reading page for quick scrolling and browsing
Snapshot: An interactive pinboard of your posts
Timeslide: A horizontal view of your posts by time period

On top of adding two more templates to the initial offering,Blogger invested time and resources to their customization. Now, you can choosewhich view should be shown to your blog readers by default and enhance the preferredview with several options, like uploading a header image, changing background, orcustomizing the colors and fonts.

Adding a Dynamic View to your blog is as easy as changingyour template. Log in to Blogger, click on the Template tab on your dashboard,and select whichever view you want to set as your default.

Note that readers can still choose to navigate your blog ina different view by selecting from the pulldown in the upper left of thescreen.

While adding most of the widgets available for the normaltemplates, are still not embeddable, it is the forward-looking developmentdirection for the Blogger team. Adsense widget, however, can be already seen onsome templates.

Sources and AdditionalInformation:

http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/09/dynamic-views-seven-new-ways-to-share.html

http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/10/dynamic-views-update-2.html

Boostpost - Easy Social Network Ranking Integration

2011-10-23T22:55:00.000-07:00

Promotion is important for every blog or website, except forthe cases, when blogs are created for personal needs or very limited privatepurposes. And for most bloggers spreading a word is essential for the sitepopularity and profitability. There are many ways and approaches, and involvingthe steady rising trend of the social media is one of the most promising amongthem.

So, so main question is what is the most efficient way ofdistributing your publications, and there is no the one and the best answer. Inthis post, we will review the free services from BoostPost – one of the easiestways to add social network ranking buttons to your blog or website. With onesimple button or widget, your page gains the integration of over 50 socialnetwork buttons. The visual presentation is a uniform, organized view of howyour post ranks among those networks. A button and widget can be easily embeddedin blog postings for multiple blogging platforms.

Boostpost helps to:

Enhance internet posts via the presentation of valued reader statistics.
Promote posts to new audiences all over the world.
Give active readers new opportunities to "break the story".

The list of thesocial networks is compiled from the most popular services, including Facebook,Twitter, Digg, and Reddit, but also have some, which you may even not ever usedor even heard. Does not matter, as your visitor may be using these services,unknown to you, and they will submit your post there, gaining additionalexposure to the group, you never reached before.

If you participate in the Google Adsense revenue program,you may even add one more channel of income. If you provide your Google AdsenseClient ID in your button or widget code, you are entitled to get revenues sharefrom the ads posted on your boostpage.

Website: http://www.boostpost.com/

Missing Link between Facebook and Twitter

2011-10-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

Most of the modern time bloggers recognize the value of thesocial networks to promote their blog post, sharing the related information onthe multiple sites and creating additional web links to your blog, which plays positiverole for your site ranking.

Among the two leading applications in the social networkingare Twitter and Facebook. Free web service Natter will save you time by linkingyour two accounts in these communities. As you register to the Natter account,all your tweets will be monitored by the Natter service and instantly posted toFacebook. The same way, your every comment posted on Facebook, will be automaticallyreposted to Twitter in real time. So you can follow your Facebook right fromyour favorite Twitter client.

Main Features:

Post tweets to your Facebook profile.
Post Facebook comments back to Twitter.
Only post tweets containing a hashtag (e.g. #fb) to Facebook.
Finds and displays links in your tweets as a Facebook post.
Translates twitter names to their real world counterparts.

Website: http://natter.r10.railsrumble.com/

Free Real-time Website Tracking with Google Analytics

2011-09-30T16:39:00.000-07:00

Google Analytics has been the leader of web analyticssoftware and services for a while already, but there was one area where theysuffered from the competition: real time statistics. It is an exceptionallyuseful tool for those who participate in the Google AdSense context advertisingprogram, and need to measure the instant effect of the new posts, interfacechanges, new program launches on their sites.

Until recently, you were not able to see how many visitors arevisiting your site at that particular moment, what pages they were visiting,where they were coming from and so on. Yesterday, September 29, Googleannounced adding new features to Analytics, including real time tracking.

Through their own words:

The web is gettingfaster, and not just the speed of the pages, but also the speed of change.Before, it was fine to build a website and modify it only when new productswere launched. All of us avid Analytics users know that’s just not good enough.We need to be constantly on the lookout for problems and opportunities.

Currently, GoogleAnalytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excitedto bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google AnalyticsReal-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as ithappens.

You’ll find the Real-Time reports only in the new version ofGoogle Analytics. If you’re not already using the new version, you can start byclicking the “New Version” link in the top right of Google Analytics. Real-Timereports are in the Dashboards tab (though they will move to the Home tab in theupdated interface next week). You will have access to Real-Time reports if youare an Administrator on your Analytics account, or if you have access to aprofile without profile filters. Real-Time does not support profile filters.

Note that while the features were enabled for multiple users already, everybodywill have eventually the access to Real-Time in coming weeks. If you can’twait, you can sign up for early access through the following link: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/.

Real-Time Analytics allows you to instantly track theefficacy of social media campaigns. By tagging links that you share on Facebookand Twitter with tags related to your marketing campaign, you can track theexact impact of those links. If you need to know how to do that, here'sthe link.

While the free real-time stats for Google Analytics remainfree for its users, this week it also introduced Google AnalyticsPremium, its first paid offering for larger websites. While Google's freeoffering tops out its data collection at 10 million website visitors per month,its new paid plan offers more data collection, additional modeling tools andservice support. When Google called this service "Premium", it wasn'tkidding. The service costs $150,000 per year--far out of the reach of mostsmall and midsize businesses (SMB), according to Forrester analyst JosephStanhope. But for the large businesses it should be an extremely robust tool.One feature alone--downloadable unsampled reports--sounds temptingly like itwould let you download your own data about your Web properties from Google.The 24-hour live technical support is attractive--especially to the lesstech-savvy at larger corporations who may miss out on key data with the currentGoogle Analytics.

Sources and AdditionalInformation:

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-analytics-offers-real-time-tracking-now/

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-happening-on-your-site-right-now.html

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/240931/google_offers_realtime_site_analytics.html

http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/29/technology/google_real_time/

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393902,00.asp#fbid=gItZQaRm3xE

Editorial Calendar Plugin for WordPress from StressLimit

2011-09-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

If you are serious professional blogger, using WordPress as a bloggingplatform, you may want to look on the free feature offered by StressLimit.Planning ahead will bring your blogging to the next level of professionalismand improve your rating among the readers. Eventually, that will help toimprove your blog visibility in search engines, bring more visitors, andimprove your profitability.

Why Use anEditorial Calendar?

An editorialcalendar is the foundation of strategic blogging; it lets you do the planningthat it takes to get the most audience reach from your blog content.

An editorial calendar lets you plan ahead;
An editorial calendar adds structure to your creativity;
You can take a great concept further by serializing content;
You can be proactive and capitalize on search trends.

Main Features

See all of your posts and when they’ll be posted.
Drag and drop to change your post dates.
Quickedit post titles, contents, and times.
Publish posts or manage drafts.
Easily see the status of your posts.
Manage posts from multiple authors.

Developers’ Website: http://stresslimitdesign.com/editorial-calendar-plugin

26-th Edition of Blog Carnival - Bringing more traffic to your blog

2011-09-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the September 10, 2011, 26-th edition of "Bringing more traffic to your blog" Blog Carnival. Some statistics: Submitted Articles - 168. Published Articles - 28. I want to thank all the authors contributing to the issue. Some articles were excluded from the review, since their topic of discussion did not match the main target of the carnival. I am sorry, that not all submissions were accepted, as some of the excluded articles carried a significant value.

Charles Chua C K presents 3 Business Concepts to Promote Your Blog Effectively posted at All About Living with Life.

d andersen presents 8 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Blog by Writing about 8 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Blog posted at FLAMING PHOENIX OF FLAMES.

anasta presents Managing your business’ social media strategy posted at Managing your business’ social media strategy.

bob presents How to Get Others to Drive Traffic to Your Blog posted at Blogging Your Passion.

Betsy White presents Beyonce’s Baby Announcement Leads to New Twitter Record | Hudson Horizons Blogs posted at Hudson Horizons Blogs.

Charles Chua C K presents 7 Effective Ways to Write Articles with Focus posted at All About Living With Life.

simon presents Increasing Traffic to Your Website | True to Business posted at True to Business.

Chadrack presents SEO Keyword Research: The Tools and The How To of Keyword Research! | Web Income Journal! posted at Work at home making money and blogging tips for home business entrepreneurs!.

DebB presents Search Engine Traffic Is Worth The Effort posted at How To Build A Website Quick.

Zhu presents All About Blogging: 5 Ways to Promote your Blog posted at Correr Es Mi Destino.

RebeccaExpertmom presents The Secret Tricks of your SEO Expert and Web Writer posted at Rebecca.

David Leonhardt presents Links from statistics websites posted at David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing.

Raj presents Build Traffic To Your Blog: How To Generate And Increase Traffic? posted at MT Herald.

Ryan_Taft presents Participating In Twitter Chats Helps Attract New Twitter Followers posted at Catalyst Marketers.

Brittney presents Reputation Management: Dealing with negative online postings posted at Information Law RSS Feed.

Adam presents Content is King, Still posted at Affordable Website Design.

Bryan Keithley presents 6 Tips for Creating a Community Through Replies posted at Ascentive.

Meka presents 20 Ways to Generate Traffic To Your Blog or Website posted at Earn Money Online.

Zhu presents The Art Of Promoting Your Blog | Correr Es Mi Destino posted at Correr Es Mi Destino.

Bob presents How to Auto-Feed WordPress Into Facebook posted at Blogging Your Passion.

Steven Chang presents How To Syndicate Your Blog Content With Blog Carnival posted at How To Start A Blog: For Fun And Profit!.

Jacob D presents 5 Really Simple Steps to Boost Your RSS Subscribers posted at The Writer Tank Journal.

Jason @ Social Tech Tips presents Email Marketing Tips: Getting More Email Subscribers to Your Blog posted at Social Tech Tips.

Caffeine Coquette presents 10 Tips for First Time Bloggers posted at The Caffeine Coquette Blogazine.

Jason @ Social Tech Tips presents 10 Ways to Find Blog Topics posted at Social Tech Tips.

Tash Hughes presents encouraging links to your blog posted at Word Constructions.

Josh Wood presents 5 ways to get me to read your blog | joshwoodtx blog posted at Josh Wood’s Blog.

DebB presents Link Bait - Build Natural Incoming Links posted at How To Build A Website Quick.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of bringing more traffic to your blog using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Technorati tags: bringing more traffic to your blog, blog carnival.

3 Free chat widgets for Blogger Blog

2011-08-29T23:29:00.000-07:00

If you are interesting in adding high level of interactivityto your Blogger Blog, you may consider embedding one of the free chat widgetsto your web pages. That will give your visitors an opportunity to discuss inreal time the blog content, share ideas, and provide instant comments.

While there are multiple services offering their products tothe blog publishers, we will review just few selected.

Chatroll (http://chatroll.com/)

Chatroll allows addingchat room to your blogger blog with great ease, in matter of minutes. First, goto Chatroll, enter your community’s name in the “Name Your Live Community…” boxand click “Create”. Choose a name that fits your blog, and this name will serveas a title for your chat box. It is recommended to invest some time in writing anattractive and detailed description for your chat room purposes, so that peoplecan easily find your new Chatroll community. Detailed instructions on how toembed your new chat room into your Blogger blog are provided here.

Free plan allows chatting in your chat room for up to 10users simultaneously. Any time, you can upgrade your plan to the payable morefeatures-rich plans, and even utilize the income sharing moneymaking opportunities,offered by the service developers.

Shoutmix (http://www.shoutmix.com/main/index.php)

Shoutmix is oneof the most popular on the market services, adding live chat capabilities toyour blog. You will be able to get instant feedback and great user interactionwith this shoutbox chat widget. As with most of the chat room widgets, you willhave to register your shoutbox widget first. Detailed instructions on how toembed your new chat room into your Blogger blog are provided here.

Basic free account gives you comprehensive set of featuresand capabilities to start with, like supporting up to 100 users and storing 150posts in your shoutbox. You can always upgrade to the Premium account, whichwill cost you $2/month for more capabilities.

Freeshoutbox (http://www.freeshoutbox.net/)

If you prefer service which is totally free with no free andpaid plans, as in most other offerings, you may take a look at Freeshoutbox.net. Integration is fastand simple, and you have multiple (more than 200) templates to choose from inorder to match the shoutbox design to your blog structure. Detailedinstructions on how to embed your new chat room into your Blogger blog areprovided here.

Service is free, with unlimited bandwidth and auto-refreshrate 6/minute, but you will get unobtrusive advertising at the bottom of thewidget.

Adding music to Blogger – an easy way!

2011-08-20T23:59:00.000-07:00

There are multiple solutions for those, who would like to add musiccollection to the Blogger blog. If you have the music and entertainment relatedresources, most likely, you already have the more or less professionalsolution, while you keep the audio files on your own or web based server, andyou broadcast them through the embedded audio player. However, for those whoneed to illustrate the post with the music collection occasionally, thepresented solution might be quite handy.

iLike is a socialmusic discovery service and the dominant music application on the Facebook andGoogle platforms, which is now a subsidiary of MySpace since 2009. For ourpurposes, iLike.com allows creating a playlist of chosen songs and adding music toBlogger, Typepad, or, in fact, any web site, for free. For Blogger, you don'teven need to mess with the HTML code - you create a playlist and then hit the Addto Blogger button.

What isiLike.com?

iLike.com is a free service that lets you create playlists of songs youwant and share them with friends. Additionally, you can download free MP3 songfiles from new artists, learn about concerts, watch videos uploaded by artistsand much more. The community run web site lets you follow changing music tastesand access popular songs.

How to createa playlist of songs and add it to your blog?

Though there is a glaring orange signup button when you go to iLikehomepage, you actually don't need to register for an account just to create aplaylist of songs. Point your browser to embeddable playlist page (http://www.ilike.com/playlist/create_embedded).

You can now start creating the playlist - follow the five steps outlinedin the image below.

Step 1: Enter a name for the playlist - this can be anything you want. A descriptive name is recommended.
Step 2: Search for a song by either entering an artist or the song name in the search field.
Step 3: Search results will be listed. I recommend trying to locate a song by its name because if the search is performed on the artist's name, only 10 results will be displayed and the song you are looking for might not be shown. Click on the "Add" button to include the song in the playlist.
Step 4: Organize your playlist. You can also reorder the song listing by either entering a new order number or using the conveniently provided arrow buttons. To delete a song from the list simply hit the "Delete" (the one with the cross) button.
Step 5: Click on the large "Done" button when you are satisfied with the playlist and are ready to add it to blogger.

The next page shows you how the playlist is going to look on a web page -on Blogger, as we shall see, the playlist is added as a widget which you canplace at different positions on the web page. You also get the direct link (theURL) of you playlist on iLike.com website. With a single click you can also putthe list on your Facebook profile page or tweet it on Twitter (where else?).You don't need to fiddle around with the HTML code if you just want to includethe playlist on Blogger.

Add the musicplaylist to Blogger

Click on the large "Add to Blogger" button in the middle of thepage. A new browser window shall open in which you need to enter your bloggerusername and password. You will now find yourself in the Layout -> Pageelements page. Place the playlist in the blog as you want and save thechanges. Note: it's added as a widget. Review your blog and tell everyone aboutit.

If you need to add this playlist to any other web site, you can get therelated code you can embed it anywhere with ease.

This review is performed by WebDevelopers Notes Blog.

The service drawback is that you cannot upload your own files to the playlist, and the fact that not all the tracks you may find through the search are in fact playable.

Free analysis for your blog at SEOprofiler

2011-07-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

There are different approaches blogger may have towards their blogging activities. Some consider content as the most important, and the only important, part of your activity as bloggers, putting next to zero attention on search engine optimization, links promotion, keywords, and everything else, which is requires extra time and efforts. Other bloggers strictly follow the rules of SEO, and investigate the possible implication for the blog popularity, and write the content solely based on the popular keywords and known guidelines. Most of the bloggers see themselves somewhere between these extreme approaches.

So, if you are content blogger (as I am), you may want once a while check your site for backlinks, ratings, and Google PageRank, for example, to see where you are from SEO perspectives, and how you can improve the blog popularity without shifting your attention from the content itself.

There are multiple services, and some are free, to help you with the task. Today, we would like to present the SEOprofiler offerings for bloggers. The process is fast and simple and does not require registration.

Web site: http://www.seoprofiler.com/analyze

I have analyzed as example one of my blogs http://webfreebies4u.blogspot.com

The first tab, which will be opened by default, will show you the amount and list of the latest backlinks to your blog.

Below, you can see most popular anchor texts in the links and the strongest pages.

The second tab Rankings shows with which keywords your site and selected pages have high ranking in search engines. That will give you idea, where you can expect the traffic, and might give you directions on the further blog development.

How to Change WordPress Login Logo?

2011-07-12T23:01:00.000-07:00

The post titlereflects the question received from one of the blog readers. Since I am stillactive Blogger user, I am not so familiar with Wordpress tips and tricks. Ihave to admit that I even did not know myself that the logo can be changed.Actually, changing the logo appeared to be a simple and straightforwardprocedure.

Why it might be agood idea to perform this modification? The main advantage is ability to betterbrand your product. This is especially useful if you have multiple authors, or yourequire commenting visitors to sign in repeatedly from that page.

The instructions toperform the modification are posted on QuickOnline Tips Blog. Follow instructions step-by-step to get the desiredoutcomes:

1. Modify your logo size to create a new image withfollowing parameters:

.GIF image
Transparent background
Size – 310px wide, 70px height
Name - logo-login.gif

2. Check your WordPress login screen which would be locatedon the URL http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/, or if you host your WordPressin a folder, then it is at http://yoursite.com/folder/wp-admin/.

3. Login via FTP on your server and browse to the wp-admin/images folder.

4. Find logo-login.gif image and rename to easilyrecognizable name like logo-login-back.gif for backup purposes.

5. Upload your own logo image logo-login.gif to replace theoriginal one.

6. Check your WordPress login screen and your logo islive.

Using Bitty Browser to Enhance your Posts

2011-07-03T23:31:00.000-07:00

If you reviewing particular Website or blog, you may want to include a fresh “screenshot” from the site’s main page. That will give your visitors a better insight on what you are reviewing, and add credibility to your review.

Here, you can use the free services offered by Bitty Browser. Bitty Browser actually helps you keep track of the foreign Web stuff by enabling navigable windows directly within your own site and your own post — it's like Picture-in-Picture for the Web.

Create the widget is easy: enter the desired URL and the embed code will be created automatically. Below is example of my other blog devoted to the Web Freebies, embedded in the post.

&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;a href="http://www.bitty.com/"&amp;gt;Bitty Browser&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt; (iframes required)&lt;/p&gt;

Using the service does not require registration. Start from the main page: http://www.bitty.com/

Evaluate your Blog with Blog Grader

2011-06-20T23:12:00.000-07:00

Do you know, how good your blog is? May be you sure it is good, but your traffic is not reflecting the fact. What are you doing wrong? If you need professional feedback you turn to the professionals. If you need just fast and free overview to get some side view and fresh ideas, online free grader, offered by HubSpot.

The fast test, which does not require registration or login (you need to enter email address, but that can be any address), will bring you some sort of feedback on your blog structure and elements. You do understand that your content or design will not be evaluated by this service.

So, input your blog address and wait about a minute for the results generation. What you will see once the analysis has been completed includes an embeddable “Blog Grade” badge, a very large “Tweet” button and an analysis breakdown of (5) main categories: Grade Summary, Blog Subscribability, Article Engagement, Search Engine Findability and Blog Content.

You may like what you see, you may not like what you see. But read carefully enclosed recommendations for the length of your titles, posts, presence of links and images. That is actually the most useful part, because it might show you some hidden flaws you never thought about before. You may also like the section for your posts analysis, where you can see the popularity of each of your latest post at Twitter and Facebook.

Do not get upset by the results. That is just one of many, and very specific, view on your virtual home. Use the provided advice to tweak your writing style and post characteristics for better performance results.

Access Blog Grader at http://www.bloggrader.com/

Google continues tweaking search algorithm to promote high-quality content

2011-06-12T00:25:00.000-07:00

CNet reported that Google is planning to make more changes to its search algorithm, the process which has started earlier this year, and already significantly affected multiple websites and blogs ability to be rated high in the Search Engine.

According to Search Engine Land, which puts on the event, Google's Matt Cutts said that his company plans to launch Panda version 2.2 at some point in the near future. The update will reportedly deal with the issue of sites that republish content being placed higher in search results than the original source.

Google launched a Panda update earlier this year. At the time, the company's goal was to improve results on queries that had previously been dominated by content farms, like eHow and Answers.com, which wrote SEO-friendly stories, contained little actual value to users. In a blog post announcing the change, Google said that it would affect 11.8 percent of all queries.

"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites--sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful," the search giant wrote in a blog post in February. "At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites--sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis, and so on."

In April, CNET examined the impact that update, along with the addition in April of more "user feedback signals" to Google's algorithm, had on results. Based on its research, CNET found that news sites took the most advantage from Google's changes, while sites like WikiHow and eHow were hit hard.

Demand Media, the company that operates eHow and Livestrong, among other sites, confirmed during an earnings call with investors last month that it was hit hard by the algorithm change.

"In February and April, we experienced two major algorithm changes," Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt said during his company's first-quarter earnings call. "For eHow, here is the impact: as compared to the levels before the first February change, we saw a net decline in search engine referrals of 20 percent."

In response, Demand Media promised more high-quality postings on popular topics.

A Google spokesman told PCMag that sites that believe they have been adversely impacted should "extensively evaluate their site quality."

"In particular, it's important to note that low quality pages on one part of a site can impact the overall ranking of that site," the Google spokesman said. "Publishers who believe they've been impacted can also post in our webmaster forums to let us know. We will consider feedback from publishers and the community as we continue to refine our algorithms."

Durant Imboden, editor of Europesiteforvisitors.com, tried just that. After experiencing a 35 percent drop in U.S. traffic last week, he added a "nofollow" attribute to affiliate links and cleaned out archived material to "help Google distinguish our site from content farms." But the expected results were not been received.

Although Google engineers use feedback in the forum to update its search algorithm, the Google spokesman noted that there was no whitelist or blacklist for sites affected by the algorithm. In other words, the search engine doesn't plan on making individual exceptions.

"Our recent changes to help people find high-quality sites are entirely algorithmic and we have not taken manual action, nor will we take manual action to address particular sites. Instead, we will consider feedback from publishers and the community as we continue to refine our algorithms to improve our search quality at scale."

Though Google's upcoming 2.2 update might not affect as many sites as its major update in February and the subsequent algorithm change in April, it signals that the company is constantly evaluating results, and will change things as necessary. In fact, Cutts reportedly said at the SMX Advanced Conference that the search giant will continue to tweak its algorithm as it sees fit.

In response to a request for confirmation that it's launching an algorithm change soon, Google has this to say: "We'll continue to iterate on returning high-quality sites to Google users as part of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year. We have nothing more specific to announce at this time."

To help webmaster distinguishing good from bad, Google posted some questions that one could use to assess the "quality" of a page or an article. These are the kinds of questions they claim to ask themselves as they write algorithms that attempt to assess site quality.

In their own words: Of course, we aren't disclosing the actual ranking signals used in our algorithms because we don't want folks to game our search results; but if you want to step into Google's mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how we've been looking at the issue:

Would you trust the information presented in this article?
Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
How much quality control is done on content?
Does the article describe both sides of a story?
Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Bottom Line

If you want to be successful in blogosphere, you need to put more emphasis on writing unique quality content, otherwise you may see further decline in your performance statistics.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20070336-17/report-google-panda-update-2.2-coming-soon/

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381394,00.asp

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Dynamic Views in Blogger News

2011-06-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

At the end of March, Blogger has introduced something they never offered before, something entirely new, entirely cool, and undoubtedly – promising. What I am talking about? Dynamic Views.

This new feature allows unthinkable earlier ability to present your content in several new and exciting ways. Google has introduced 5 new dynamic templates in Blogger. Now, you can view any Blogger blog as a Flipcard, Mosaic, Sidebar, Snapshot and Timeslide. No need for any additional changes for your existing template, which is just an extra way to see what you have already. Dynamic views are different versions of your blog, in some way, different ways to navigate your blog, without changing your template, using Ajax, CSS 3 and HTML 5.

What is all About?

Who can use Dynamic View?

These dynamic views will work on your blog if all of the following are true:

· Your blog is public. Your readers don’t need to sign in to view your blog.

· Your blog has feeds fully enabled. In the Settings | Site feed tab, you have enabled either Full or Jump Break for your Post Feed.

· You have not disabled dynamic views. In the Setting | Formatting tab, the option for Enable Dynamic Views is set to Yes.

How to use Dynamic Views?

To try these views on your own blog, simply add “/view” to the end of the blog URL—for example, http://depressivedisorder.blogspot.com/view

Here are several screenshots in different templates:

Flipcard

Direct Link: http://depressivedisorder.blogspot.com/view/flipcard

Mosaic

Direct Link: http://depressivedisorder.blogspot.com/view/mosaic

Sidebar

Direct Link: http://depressivedisorder.blogspot.com/view/sidebar

Snapshot

Direct Link: http://depressivedisorder.blogspot.com/view/snapshot

Timeslide

Direct Link: http://depressivedisorder.blogspot.com/view/timeslide

Main Benefits

Infinite scrolling: read more posts without having to reload or click to a second page
New layouts: different views suited to different types of blogs
Speed: download images as you view them, not all at once in advance
Interactivity: there are now more ways to experience and engage with blog content

Known Limitations

· Please note that these views do not currently support many of the features your original blog may have, including displaying advertisements.

· The older browsers do not support the feature.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1227173&ctx=go

http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/03/fresh-new-perspectives-for-your-blog.html

http://blog.btemplates.com/blogger-dynamic-views/

Google Advanced Image Search

2011-05-30T00:38:00.000-07:00

Many bloggers use Google image search engine to find suitable images for their blog posts but in some cases it takes a long time to find and filter the appropriate results from the amount loaded for your search terms. You may significantly save time if you use Google Advance Image Search instead of Google Image search. You can also switch interface from Basic Search to Advanced Search from the main image search interface by clicking on small hyperlink to advance search under the Search button, if needed.

Google Advanced Image Search is both powerful and easy to use. Following are some simple instructions on how to use Google Advanced Image Search.

Step 1. Visit Google Advanced Image Search at the following link: http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search. If you plan to use Google Advanced Image Search in the future, it is a good idea to bookmark the site now.

Step 2. Familiarize yourself with the interface. Google Advanced Image Search is extremely intuitive and looks like Google’s advanced search for text information. There are ten easy ways to maximize your image search results – some empty fields in which you can easily enter text, others drop down menus, and others radio buttons. Here is a listing of each of the fields and how to maximize your results with them:

Find results related to all the words- in this field you can easily enter keywords that relate to the image you are looking for. At any time you can go ahead and click on Google Search to begin your search for images.
Find results related to the exact phrase- in this field you can narrow down your search by including phrasal keywords that relate to your search.
Find results to any of the words- for a broader search in which there may not be lots of images available, you can easily add non-specific keywords.
Find results not related to the words- this field can help you to remove ambiguity when a search term may have several meanings.
Content Types: return images that contain- this search field is a radio button that gives the user three different options which are all self explanatory (1. any content, 2. news content, 3. faces)
Size: return images that are- this field is a drop down menu giving the user five different size choices to choose from. The choices are any size, small, medium, large, and extra large. There is no way to input the exact size of an image you are searching for.
File types: return only image files formatted as- this field is a drop down menu where the user can choose the type of files that he or she is looking for. There are five different choices that can be selected: any file type, JPG files, GIF files, PNG files, and BMP files.
Coloration: return only images in- this field is a drop down menu where the user can choose from the following choices: any colors, black & white, grayscale, and full color.
Domain: return images from the site or domain- this is a field that can be inputted with a domain of your choosing. For instance, if you would like to search for an image on Wikipedia, you can easily include the full domain in the box.
Safe Search: Safe search allows a user to ask Google to filter your search. For instance, if you are at work or searching for an image at home with your children, you can use the radio buttons to choose the level of filtering to reduce the chances that unsavory material will appear. There are three choices for Safe Search: no filtering, moderate filtering, and strict filtering.

Step 3. Once you have filled in the criteria that you think best supports your image search, simply click on the Google Search button on the upper right hand corner of the page. If you find that your search has resulted in either not enough or too many listings, you may want to change you criteria and try again.

How to make links open in new windows for Blogger blog?

2011-05-22T00:09:00.000-07:00

If you design your blogs with lots of links to other blogs and web sites, you probably like to make the links to the other blogs and web sites open in a new browser tab or window (depending upon reader preference). That helps with reader retention (for you), and increases convenience (for your readers).

Unfortunately, in all of the Blogger GUIs, there's no selection for "Make links open in new window". If you want all links in your blog to open in a new window, you can do this with a simple template change as described below. If you want specific links to open in a new window, you will have to manually code each link individually.

To make all links open in new window is amazingly simple. Just sign into Blogger DASHBOARD > DESIGN > EDIT HTML to open template editor

Use keyboard shortcut ctrl+F to find <head> and immediately after that, add a single line

<base target='_blank' />

so that it become

<head>
<base target='_blank' />

Save the edited template and all links in your blog will now open in new tabs or windows.

If you prefer selective links not to open in new window/tab but to open in the same window, as you have now, add the attribute target="_self" for those links you want to open in the same window/tab.

Blogger who have multiple internal links, might not find the presented solution as acceptable since they might not like the idea to open ALL links in a new window, or to edit each link manually. The target is open in the new window just external links from your blog (what happens if the user clicks on your archives, or on the title, or on comment links, or on a javascript link?)

Here is a vanilla javascript solution, that you want to paste into your template just before the end of the body (if you're old-style template), or paste into a javascript widget:

Replace XXXXXX with the appropriate URL prefix.

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
var arr = document.getElementsByTagName("a"); //get all links in the page
for(var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++)
{
if(arr[i].href.indexOf("XXXXXX.blogspot") < 0 //not links that are 'inside' blog
&& arr[i].href.indexOf("javascript:") < 0) //not javascript links
arr[i].target = "_blank";
}

Sources and Additional Information:
http://www.bloggertipsandtricks.com/2011/02/how-to-make-all-links-open-in-new.html

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2009/02/make-links-open-in-new-window.html

http://www.streamreader.org/superuser/questions/54474/blogger-blogspot-open-all-links-in-new-windows-closed

How Anonymous is Anonymous Blogging?

2011-05-10T22:09:00.000-07:00

There is a feeling that when you are online, you are anonymous, you are free to say, to do, or to blog anything. Partially, that is true. Mainly because there are so many online records, that nobody really cares about what you say. Definitely, unless you blog about terrorist activities and create guide on how to make a nuclear bomb at convenience of your home. But in case somebody really cares of what you say and who you are, your anonymity might be really stripped, and you may face the organization or the person in public, whom you never expected to meet other than through virtual pathways of Blogosphere. Presenting an article from ArsTechnica on the topic.

US courts have historically looked on anonymous bloggers and commenters with a sympathetic eye, but there are exceptions. A Tennessee judge denied a blogger's motion to quash a subpoena to reveal his identity last week, and he also denied a motion to dismiss the case. With few other options available to him (or her), the blogger in Swartz v. Does looks likely to be revealed.

Even on the Internet, anonymity is never absolute... especially when you're accusing someone else of arson and tax evasion.

Critical blogging

It all started when a "prominent" couple in Old Hickory, Tennessee found themselves the target of an entire blog called Stop Swartz. Donald and Terry Keller Swartz were involved in local politics and maintained an active real estate business, in addition to operating a halfway house for those recovering from substance abuse.

The blog in question, however, painted the Swartzes in a very unflattering light—the anonymous blogger(s) heavily criticized their real estate activities and, among other things, accused the couple of committing arson, failing to report property sales in their local registry, and of being drug addicts themselves.

If this was all false, it would be considered defamation, which made up one part of the Swartz's lawsuit against the blogging Does when it was filed in February 2008. The other part of the lawsuit centered around privacy—the Stop Swartz blog had called out to readers to report back any time they spotted a Swartz anywhere inside or outside of town.

"It sends a clear message to Don and Terry that their actions are not being ignored . . . . We will tolerate their crap no longer," the blog said.

The Swartz's subpoenaed Google to reveal who was behind the Stop Swartz blog—a common tactic in cases like this. While many other anonymous bloggers don't show up in court, John Doe #1 filed a motion to quash the subpoena. In March 2009, the court denied Doe's motion but granted a temporary Protective Order to keep him or her anonymous until further review.

Doe then filed a motion to have the case dismissed. At that time, Doe tried to argue that the Swartzes had failed to prove that he was a real person who could be sued in a state court, that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would protect him against liability of any comments made by his readers, and that the First Amendment protected users' rights to criticize public figures.

The CDA claim might have meant something if the blog itself didn't induce readers to start spying on the Swartzes and report back—if users (and only users) had merely posted the comments on their own with no invitation, it would practically be an open and shut case.

As for whether Doe is a human being who can be sued, well... we suppose there's no obvious way to prove that, but the court decided in its judgment last week that it did have jurisdiction over Doe thanks to a past blog post indicating that he owned a home in Old Hickory.

While the court agreed with Doe that the Swartzes had failed to produce evidence of defamation in one of the claims, it denied his other claims. "[T]he court recognizes that anonymous speech is entitled to First Amendment protection. [...] However, just as other forms of speech are limited by defamation or privacy considerations, Internet anonymous speech is not entitled to absolute protection," wrote the court.

Ultimately, the court said that the Swartzes have the right to discover Doe's identity. In similar cases—such as one involving anonymous donut shop critics, a blogger critical of a local police department, and a blog commenter who targeted a Massachusetts real estate developer—the courts felt that commenters were within their free speech rights. If Doe actually gets unmasked, it could set a precedent for future cases regarding anonymous speech.

Doe has one last chance before his or her name gets splashed across Internet headlines. The judge said that his decision would be subject to interlocutory appeal, meaning that a ruling from a higher court could overturn his decision even before the case itself is over (most appeals can only be made after a trial is concluded). Doe might still get lucky with such an appeal, but at this point, he or she looks likely to show the rest of the anonymous Internet just where the limits of anonymity lie.

Zoundry Raven Open Source Desktop Publishing

2011-05-02T23:14:00.000-07:00

On the RateItAll Rating List of the best freeware desktop blog publishing utilities the Zoundry Raven got to the top 5 programs on the list among 39 reviewed applications. Since February 2009, this program has been release as an Open Source and is available for free distribution for any purposes. It is a simple to use WYSIWYG blog editor that helps to arrange posting to your blogs convenient and fast. It has been designed with simplicity of use as a word processor, with additional tools to add links, tags, photos, music and video files to your posts.

It was also included by PCMag in its respectable collection of the best freeware utilities for blogging for year 2011.

Main Features

Tabbed WYSIWYG Editing: Powerful XHTML editing is embedded inside the intuitive user interface so you can be sure that what you create is what others will see online.
Multiple Blogs Made Easy: If you have multiple blogs for different audiences, you will enjoy writing and publishing your posts to separate blogs all with one editor.
Improved Content Management: With the powerful indexer, you can browse all of your previous posts across all of your blogs by tags, links, or images.
Manage multiple media storage services: Set up different media services (Picasa, Image Shack, Ripway, custom FTP) for different blogs. Share single media service with multiple blogs.
Portable Application: You can install Raven as a Portable Application on your flash/thumb drive, not requiring installation on the hard drive and not affecting any registry settings.
Supported Blog Platforms: Blogger, Movable Type & TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, and more...

Screenshots

Website: http://www.zoundryraven.com/index.html

Direct Download: http://www.ziddu.com/download/14835978/zRaven-1.0.375.exe.html

25-th Edition of Blog Carnival - Bringing more traffic to your blog

2011-04-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the April 15, 2011, 25-rd edition of "Bringing more traffic to your blog" Blog Carnival. Some statistics: Submitted Articles - 122. Published Articles - 27. I want to thank all the authors contributing to the issue. Some articles were excluded from the review, since their topic of discussion did not match the main target of the carnival. I am sorry, that not all submissions were accepted, as some of the excluded articles carried a significant value.

Blog income presents Turn Your Post Into A Video! posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "One of the easiest ways to get started with video blogging is by turning a post or an article you�ve already written into a PowerPoint presentation!"

Peter Lee presents List of 5 Best WordPress Plugins For Your Blog posted at Internet Marketing Mentor.

sokun presents Search Engine Optimization posted at Abidings.com.

Alex Rivera presents Traffic is King, but this comes FIRST posted at Legitimate Home Based Business Options Blog, saying, "Traffic is useless . . . unless… Before you begin trying to get traffic to your blog or site, you need to do your keyword research first. Why?..."

BC Russell presents Top Of Google! posted at Internet Marketing... while being careful with your cash., saying, "New Website, One Tool, 19 Days Later…"

Russell Renkes presents Blog Commenting For Backlinks And Traffic « Russell’s Marketing Tools posted at Russell’s Marketing Tools, saying, "Blog commenting has become a very popular way to generate backlinks for your site, however there are other benefits to it."

Blog income presents WordPress Plugin: You Must Have This Installed posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "W3-Total-Cache is the must have plugin for those who are serious about improving the load speed of their blog."

handleynation presents How a Blog is Not Like a Movie (And How It?s Exactly Like One) posted at HandleyNation, saying, "The way you look at your blog will determine its success in a lot of ways. I’m a big movie buff, so I found a way to look at it in terms of cinema success."

Yujuan Bao presents A useful widget to monetize your website or blog posted at Social Deal Map, saying, "As the emerging of group buy site, it is a hot area to make money from group buy site such as Groupon. This article introduce a widget display Groupon and other social deals on a local map(GEO IP location detected so that the map is always centered at the reader’s location). The best thing about it is you can configure it with your own affiliation id and start to make money from it. These deals are usually quite attractive with huge discount and they are local. Blogger /website owner should be able to generate good revenue from it."

Bob Wehrsdorfer presents 5 Ways to Get Free Website Traffic posted at www.our-success.com.

Blog income presents New Google Algorithm: What You Need To Know posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "Andrew Rondeau shares 4 techniques on how you can benefit from Google’s new search algorithm."

David Leonhardt presents Animate Thy Blog posted at David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing, saying, "Animate your blog. No, not that kind of “animate”. I’m not talking about Flash or GIFs or even video. I am not talking about animation. I am talking about animals."

Marisa Wikramanayake presents List of Planet Sites To Submit Your RSS Feed To posted at Marisa Wikramanayake.

Tony Eldridge presents Marketing Tips For Authors: 10 Ways To Find Material To Blog About posted at Marketing Tips For Authors, saying, "If you are a blogger, there probably comes a time when you hit the wall and run out of things to say. This can be especially true if you blog 5 days a week or more. In this post, we will look at ways to find fresh blogging material week after week, year after year."

Christine Wolf presents How Do I Start A Blog? posted at Christine Wolf’s Blog.

Jessica presents Blogging about Blogging: SEO posted at Literary Journey of a Freelance Writer, saying, "Search engine optimization (SEO) is big news. If content is king, SEO seems to be queen. That being said, if it’s not done properly it can quickly become the jester."

John Paul Aguiar presents Blogging Tools That Successful Bloggers Use Daily posted at Money Dummy Blog.

Techmaker presents Article Submission and Blog Traffic posted at Tech Blaster, saying, "Once you made a blog you will look for more visitors to your page. But it is not that easy to brings visitors to your blog or website. There are several ways to bring traffic to your blog/website. In this article I will discuss one method of driving traffic to your blog. By visiting my blog you can learn more methods on driving traffic to your blog...."

Techmaker presents Blog Comments and Blog Traffic posted at Tech Blaster, saying, "Commenting on others blog with backlink to your site is a very good method of driving more traffic to your blog. But you need to know what are the blogs you should comment on. In this article I have discussed how to select a blog to make a comment. You can learn more tips and tricks to drive traffic to your blog by visiting my blog...."

John Paul Aguiar presents How To Use Social Media To Reach Blog Traffic Nirvana posted at Money Dummy Blog.

BWL presents Create SEO-Friendly URLs with WordPress posted at Blogging Your Passion, saying, "This is a quick look at how you can quickly make your wordpress blog URLs more SEO-friendly."

Maureen O’Danu presents Am I the Only One Dancing?: This Blogging Business: Come On In (Linking) posted at Am I the Only One Dancing?, saying, "Some absolute basic linking advice written for beginning bloggers from a personal blogging perspective."

Jason @ Social Tech Tips presents How to Start a Blog Checklist posted at Social Tech Tips, saying, "A simple guide to starting a blog with the purpose of making extra money and building a readership."

Norman Robillard presents What Is A Blog posted at Selling Products Online.

Jacob D presents 5 Really Simple Steps to Boost Your RSS Subscribers posted at The Writer Tank Journal, saying, "Hey, I’m not sure whether this is or isn’t something you’d be interested in including. Take a look though, since it is related but not right on topic."

Mike Sprouse presents Five Tips to Increase Traffic to your Blog for Free posted at Open Mike.

Bryan Keithley presents Using the Lessons of the Squeeze Page to Increase Traffic posted at Finally Fast, saying, "People love free stuff. It’s kind of a universal rule. How can you leverage that love of free stuff into significantly increased traffic for your blog? The secret lies in the squeeze page. Check out our post on using the squeeze page to gain insight into creating effective squeeze pages, using them to fatten your email list, and leveraging that list to drive more traffic to your blog."

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of bringing more traffic to your blog using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Technorati tags: bringing more traffic to your blog, blog carnival.

32 Alternatives to Google AdSense

2011-04-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

Google AdSense program has changed the World of online advertising forever. It is a bigger player on the market, and if you just start making your way to online income making strategy, you should consider AdSense first. However, it is not the only player on the market. There are still reasons to monitor alternative ads revenue generation solutions, which are not affiliated with AdSense.

Some webmasters were banned from AdSense for cause or without cause. If potential income, you can generate for Google, is relatively small, you have very little chances to get fair investigation anyway.

Other Webmasters simply do not wish to do any business with Google for personal considerations. And, finally, there are many programs, which can be used on your pages in parallel with Google AdSense. For example, I use personally Infolinks together with AdSense. Having multiple advertising providers do not violate rules, so you just get some kind of extra income with zero extra efforts.

No matter what your reasoning is, there are still many valid alternatives to Google AdSense. The following Rating List from RateItAll will review 32 Google AdSense Competitors on the market with brief description, rating, and direct links:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-26233-google-adsense-alternatives.aspx.

Demotivation Posters on Blogging

2011-04-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

Encyclopedia Dramatica defines Demotivators as pretty much the opposite of the motivators. These posters are designed to put the person reading it down, destroying any self esteem that they may have. People who create them take a beautiful, amazing picture and then wreck it completely by giving it another meaning, mostly by invoking anal satisfaction or gratuitous cum-stains.

It may be used to torment people in not funny ways. Even if you're there to watch them break down in tears and reach a point where they contemplate suicide you will feel nothing just knowing that you ruined someone's day/week/month/possibly life will destroy you. It would be foolish to use against those really cocky people with too much confidence.

And, today we present a small collection of the Demotivation Posters about Blogging. We have so many bloggers, so if following these pictures review, so of them decide to abandon this hobby, that will significantly help blogosphere J.

Click to Enlarge:

100+ Ways to Battle Blogger’s Block

2011-03-26T23:42:00.000-07:00

Why do you blog? Do you blog for money? Do you blog for fun? Actually, the purpose of your blogging will largely define the strategy you apply. I blog for both: fun and money, but fun goes first. Therefore, each of my 20 blogs I started because I liked the topic, because I wanted to learn more about, and because I was more or less confident that the same topic will be interesting for my readers.

But, overtime, your interests change, you feel that there is nothing more you can say on the topic, and you just do not want to discuss the topic any more. Here it comes blogger’s block. If I feel like that, I usually put the blog on the passive preservation mode, remove it from the active blogs list and focus on other topics. Overtime, my perception might change, I might find a new perspectives or the new line of discoveries on the topic, thus become interesting in the blog again. These blogs are returned to the active list. Other blogs will remain on the passive lists forever, supported by by-monthly posts just to keep them alive. In any way, if I do not feel like writing on the particular blog or topic, I just skip it and go to the next. Well, it is my way of coping with blogger’s block.

BloggingBookshelf is offering more than 100 professional advices on how to battle the Blogger Blog in their free eBook. You can download the brochure from the following link:

http://www.ziddu.com/download/14357071/bloggers-block-ebook-from-blogging-bookshelfv3.1.pdf.html

5 Free Mobile Apps for your Taxes Visibility

2011-03-20T23:58:00.000-07:00

This post is not about blogging. Since the due date of the tax form submission is coming close, I would like to share with you several free taxes related applications for smartphones, which will help you with this process. Hopefully, your blog monetization was successful last year, and your extra (or full time) income came as valuable addition to your home budget.

The IRS's App

IRS announced its first of a kind app called IRS2Go which allows taxpayers to find basic tax information and track the status of their refunds. The app is available on iTunes and in Android Market. Take note that you are required to enter your SSN in order to check your status.

IRS indicates that if you e-file your tax return and are owe a refund, you will be able to check your refund status via the app after 72 hours. If you mailed your tax return, it may take 3-4 weeks.

Federal Tax Estimator 2010

This app by Nate Ram has been reviewed on the CBS Tech Talk show. The app lets users estimate their federal tax liability. It supports all filing status options, allows for multiple W-2 forms, tracks dependents and unemployment benefits, storing all data on your mobile phone. Available for Android and iPhone.

Tax Reference 2010

This Chesnut designed application provides you with a wealth of tax information at your fingertips including corporate tax rates, retirement contribution limits, depreciation, business deductions, personal tax rates, itemized deductions, estate and gift taxes and lots of other useful financial data and so much more. Definitely a great app to use for tax planning all year round, and it is available for Android and iPad (iPhone).

iTaxMama

Created by Tax Anxiety Inc., this app helps keep your tax due dates organized by providing an easy to use tax planning calendar. It includes reminders for quarterly tax payments, tax filing deadlines, and has been fully updated for this tax season.

Pageonce

H&R Block and Pageonce have announced that you can track the status of your tax refund from your BlackBerry, Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone. To facilitate this, H&R Block’s Tax Center is integrated into the Pageonce mobile app and provides DIY filers with timely updates of the status of their tax return, and more importantly, their federal and state tax refunds. Users simply enter their H&R Block At Home username and password in the Pageonce mobile app, and their information is automatically populated into the Tax Center. Taxpayers can instantly see when their refund will arrive.

To learn more about the service, head over to the Pageonce site.

Adsense Earnings, Tips, and General Thoughts

2011-03-14T00:32:00.000-07:00

I got several questions from the readers of this blog on how my Google earnings do versus my expectations, some complaints that the earnings drop significantly down from the beginning of the year, and some requests to share useful tips on how to boost the Adsense earnings from blogging. As you probably know, revealing the Adsense earnings and statistics is not allowed by the program rules, so trying to follow them, I will just mention a general trends:

Being in the blogging business from 2007, I should admit that my Adsense earnings are slowly climbing up, however not as fast, as I would like it to do. It is still a good side income and source of inspiration and self-realization, so, overall I am quite pleased with the general outcomes.
At the end of the year, I have lost one of my blogs, and all the efforts to get it restored failed so far. As soon as I understood, what the reason for the ban was, I actually stopped any additional appeals. The blog was devoted to the Online MBA, and it was totally my fault that it was banned. The reason – using my own study papers as sampled for the blog on how they should be written, while publishing student papers is forbidden by the Google Adsense rules. Learning through mistakes…
The income from the beginning of the year is indeed slightly lower than expected. There are several reasons, which might contribute to that:

When the blog, I mentioned above, has been banned, the entire account got blocked. As it was during my ski vacation, with no Internet, it took me about a week, till I have learnt about the incident and restored my account. All my Blogger blogs were inaccessible for a week, and that is not a good way to treat your faithful readers and visitors.
After the shopping season, investments in advertising may go down, so it is understandable the cost of the click decrease.
Overall, I observed the rough trend of dropping earnings for the period from January to April, with gradual increase from beginning of April through the end of December. Note that it might not be a global trend, since other program users report different results. I guess, it depends on the niche you are working, the structure of the blog, and from some other details.

In spite of the earning decrease, the amount of unique visits per day is steadily growing, so there is a good chance, that these visits’ monetization is just matter of time.
In terms of advices and recommendations, I am not sure that I have enough knowledge and experience to share them with broad public. By simple googling, you can find tons of useful, and not so useful advices.

I will just offer you several general, but fairly reasonable tips from Ryan on the Adsense business arrangements:

a. Be Committed To Your Adsense Business.
Many publishers never see their Adsense business as a real business but rather a virtual fun. In order to succeed you need to be a 100% committed. Take your online business seriously as you would with your offline business. Be professional, track your progress and never make the same mistake twice. Sometimes, novices have the fallacy that their online actions stay transparent and unseen. Well, you better be careful because everything is tracked and consequences are lurking.

b. Stay Within The Circle
Use the latest Adsense tools and software for your business. The super Adsense earners are always very smart. They apply the services of these tools first and dump them when they get ineffective. These tools serve as their secret weapon and that is why they must get hold of it first.

c. Choose the right Keywords
A lot of publishers go for those keywords that have high payout range with too much competition. They might get lucky every now and then. But the mega Adsense earners always look out for those less competitive keywords and build a lot of sites with them. It pays more on the long run.

d. Start With An Umbrella
In order to be more focused and effective, you need to start with a broad subject which you can easily break down. Choosing a broad niche and breaking it down makes your work concentrated and allow for flexible connection between your sites or blogs. This way you also keep your visitors longer into your site.

e. Keep It Simple
Make your sites or blogs simple and easy to navigable. A slick home page with clear links always predisposes the visitors positively and you reduce the bounce rate of your site.

f. Purpose
Do not build a site without a purpose. Your site cannot be everything to everybody. It has to be narrowed down to a topic. Target a certain group of people with common interests. They are going to be your audience in the long term.

g. Consistency
Track your success and repeat what works. Building just a site is not enough. You have to build to exhaust all possible sub-niches within your broad subject. Then chose another subject and continue your work. Your audience will appreciate the valuable content you give to the web.

Big Collection of Free Blogger Templates with Reviews and Ratings

2011-03-06T20:46:00.000-08:00

If you are building your blogs on free Blogger platform, you noticed that the new options significantly improved your capabilities to use customized templates from extensive choice of options. However, if you cannot find a suitable design, you may look for alternative sources to find a suitable template.

There are many websites offering Blogger templates collection, so there is not so difficult to find one you really like. In this post, I would like to present one of the sites – Blogger Styles. They provide thousands of template downloads and ratings on each of the blogger templates.

Samples:

If you are designer, who would like to share your personally created template, you can submit it to the site for review and posting.

Website: http://www.bloggerstyles.com/

How to make extra income being a virtual Mayor of your own town?

2011-02-27T22:27:00.000-08:00

Travel industry is a very promising area for web marketers. Therefore, there are multiple successful interactive guides and social communities, capturing this niche. I would like to present a new site on the map, addressing this high-demand topic - http://zoomvillage.com/.

The site provides an interactive platform for creating online tourism guides for any town in the United States (and a few other countries). The developers started from covering the town, they actually reside (Litchfield, CT) to give an example of the site features and capabilities. The central point is the offer to all the fellows bloggers to join the project and to get a portion of the generated revenues.

The profit generation scheme looks as follows:

The first person to establish a town or city on ZoomVillage is automatically named the Mayor and given the special privileges enjoyed only by Mayors.

The Mayor receives 50% of advertising fees for all ads placed on the town's site.
As the chief editor of the town's site, the Mayor is responsible for monitoring additions to the site, such as when a user posts information about a new restaurant.
Although any registered resident of the town can make certain changes to the town's attractions, some editing tasks (such as deleting an item) are reserved for the Mayor only.
The Mayor can give administrative control to other trusted users. The administrators have some, but not all, of the Mayor's privileges.

Advertising rates are dynamically calculated and are a function of the number of active registered users in each town.

So, as a Major of your City, you start your own project of promoting your local community. And your earnings are directly influenced on how successful your efforts are to promote your virtual project.

At the moment, it is hard to estimate, how successful the site may be, and how much visitors (and advertisers) it may attract in the future. But, being at the very beginning, you can make a difference, and the site success will be based on multiple local communities administrators’ success.

Sounds interesting? Register for the site and claim your city or town, while still available.

Web site: http://www.zoomvillage.com/

Multi-Rank Checker from iWebTool

2011-02-19T23:47:00.000-08:00

In the process of the SEO optimization you may be looking for the simple, reliable, and easy to use way to check Google PageRank and Alexa ranking for multiple domains. The free online checker will save you a lot of time as one can retrieve the data in one click almost instantly. The blog you are testing the ranking for, is not necessary should be owned by you, so you can perform analysis for your competitors’ blogs as well.

Sequence of operations:

1. Enter the exact website address of the page you want to check the ranking for into the text box. (include www at the beginning of your domain)

You can enter up to 10 different websites to check their ranking. After entering the first address, press Enter and insert a new website address on the new line.

2. Click the "Check!" button

Please note the Google PageRank goes up to 10 and the best Alexa rating is 1.

Website: http://www.iwebtool.com/multirank

24th Edition of Blog Carnival - Bringing more traffic to your blog

2011-02-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the February 11, 2011, 24-rd edition of "Bringing more traffic to your blog" Blog Carnival. Some statistics: Submitted Articles - 85. Published Articles - 28. I want to thank all the authors contributing to the issue. Some articles were excluded from the review, since their topic of discussion did not match the main target of the carnival. I am sorry, that not all submissions were accepted, as some of the excluded articles carried a significant value.

Lindsay presents 2 Link Building Techniques Perfect for Writers posted at The Irreverent Introvert.

kerry Russell presents Don’t Pay For Traffic - With A Little Time and Effort You Can Get Free Targetted Traffic posted at Internet Markeing - Kerry Russell, saying, "none"

Welly presents How To Build A List With A Blog posted at Internet Business Make Money Online With Welly Mulia.

Blog income presents Little Blogging Crackers: Get Backlinks On Autopilot posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "It�s not money that makes the on-line world go round�it�s backlinks. Here’s how to get more."

Lindsay presents 7 Quick and Dirty Link Building Tips for Authors posted at The Irreverent Introvert.

john presents Traffic is King, but this comes FIRST posted at user review site.

Blog income presents Blog Expert Series: The Little Blogging Secret Nobody Wants To Talk About posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "Understanding The Nature And Form Of Effective Communications Skills"

Angel Taylor presents 3 Free Traffic Methods That You Aren’t Using posted at Creative Success Factor Articles.

Carl Ringwall presents KeywordLuv Search Engine | Data SystemsPlus posted at Data SystemsPlus.

BC Russell presents Blog Carnival Submission - My Secret Weapon For Blogging posted at Internet Marketing... while being careful with your cash., saying, "Gotta love a blog carnival! Here are some tips..."

Alyvia Tremor presents Want To Build Blog Traffic? Focus On Content First posted at Alyvia Tremor.

Mike Glover presents SEO vs. SEO 2.0 ? What is the difference? posted at Organic Search Engine Optimization Blog, saying, "SEO vs. SEO 2.0 What’s the difference? A breif description of SEO 2.0 and a comparison to SEO with 15 major components comparted side by side."

Pamell Androsen presents 19 Essential Web Applications for Journalists and News Bloggers posted at Journalism Degree, saying, "Today’s journalist or blogger has more resources than ever to get the story fast and get it to press fast. Using your home or office computer as well as your smart phone when you’re out and about can help you get the news out there when you need it."

Steven Chang presents 50 Things to Blog About posted at How To Start A Blog: For Fun And Profit!.

Kevin Poulis presents TycoonBlogger.com - Promote Your Blog, Promote Your Business. posted at SiteTally.com.

Maurice Snell presents Review - Indexing Tool Wordpress Plugin posted at TheCaymanHost - Wordpress | Hosting | Marketing, saying, "Review of a little known premium Wordpress plugin that uses RSS in clever ways to get more backlinks to your Wordpress sites indexed by the search engines"

Peter Lee presents Getting No Traffic To Your WordPress Blog? Try These 3 Surefire Ways posted at Internet Marketing Mentor.

sangeeth presents Optimize Blog For Mobile View! posted at Computer tweaks - Mobile Tips!.

leah aharoni presents 6 Steps to Writing An Easy-to-Read Blog posted at AQText Translation Services.

Blog income presents How Can I Convince You To Do A Daily Blog Backup? posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "I want you to take the backing up of your blog very, very seriously."

Welly presents 5 “Secrets” To Failing Online posted at Internet Business Make Money Online With Welly Mulia, saying, "In this post, I share 5 reasons why people fail when they try to make money online."

Almanzo Greenwick presents Fear and the internet posted at Greenwick Press, saying, "Greenwick Press discusses trying very hard to write unique and interesting content, contrasted with writing what is really important to the individual blogger. All the marketing in the world can’t keep a reader interested if the content is no good, after all."

Mike Glover presents SEO Strategy in a Box | Optimize your SEO Efforts for Maximum Efficiency and Results posted at Organic Search Engine Optimization Blog, saying, "The key to effective organic search engine optimization is the “organic” part. Organic, meaning “natural results” also means (or should mean) “natural processes”."

Blog income presents The Future Is NOT Auto-Blogging posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "Google have recently changed their search algorithm"

Peter Lee presents Discover How I Get Unstoppable Free Targeted Traffic To My Blog posted at Internet Marketing Mentor.

Fred Tracy presents Blog Traffic and Adsense Earnings Experiment : Personal Development with Fred Tracy posted at Personal Development, saying, "In this article I talk about what I’m going to promote my blog, as well as what gains I’ve made thus far."

Bailey Digger presents 7 Reasons to Study Web Design posted at Web Design Degree.

Kate Croston presents 10 Reasons Twitter Has Become Intolerable posted at Internet Service.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of bringing more traffic to your blog using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Technorati tags: bringing more traffic to your blog, blog carnival.

How to add Instant Messaging to your Blogger blog?

2011-02-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

Plugoo Widget enables your website visitors (blog, social network profile, online shop…) to get in touch with you in real time, directly on your Instant Messenger (MSN Messenger, GoogleTalk, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL AIM, ICQ, Jabber…). If your messenger status is online, visitors can send you an instant message through the Plugoo Buddy in your messenger buddy list. You can thus chat with them, answer their questions or comments Live!

Your visitors need neither to download any software, nor to create an account before they can contact you. They never have access to your instant messaging information (username). And conversation between a visitor and you is strictly private – other simultaneous visitors on the website don’t see the conversation. You don’t have to change your habits, you keep using your favorite messenger on your desktop or from your mobile phone.

How does Plugoo work?

On your blog, personal website or online shop, you embed a Plugoo. Visitors on your website can see the Plugoo and write through it a message for you.

As this Plugoo is directly connected to your Instant Messenger, it forwards you in real time all the messages your website visitors can send to you. You reply to your visitors from your Messenger while they are currently browsing your website.

You can also use myPlugoo, a simple link http://www.myPlugoo.com/... to let your friends IM you from any web site, email or blog. For instance, you can add this link to your email signatures or to your blog/forum comments… This way, your emails recipients or other Net surfer have the opportunity to pop-up your Plugoo Widget with just one click and start a LIVE conversation with you!

Chatting with several visitors at a time

You can handle five simultaneous conversations with five different visitors. When you’re already chatting with one visitor and a second one wants to chat with you, you will receive an invitation in your Messenger conversation window to pop-up the multi-conversations Plugoo Module (if you activated the Plugoo Multichat Mode – to activate this option, sign in at www.Plugoo.com and click “My settings”, then choose the option “Multiple”).

Thus, you will be able to chat with five visitors at a time (visitors from any of your websites). The Plugoo’s name appears above the conversation window on the multi-conversations Plugoo Module so that you can identify the origin of the conversation.

Website: http://www.plugoo.com/

Linkwithin Related Post Widget Review

2011-01-27T23:52:00.000-08:00

As any other blogger, I have explored several ways to install random or relevant articles widgets on this blog, trying to attract the readers not just with the information, they came for through the search engine, but also offering them a chance to stumble on some of my older posts. Until recently, I could not find one, which really made impact on my stats…

Before I installed LinkWithin widget… I tried it on one of the blogs, then on other… The results of the investigation were quite positive. From a technical standpoint, the widgets are working flawlessly on all of blogs, I have embedded them to. And now I would definitely recommend them for anyone who has been blogging long enough to build a decent collection of articles.

LinkWithin is blog widget that creates 3-5 links to your related older posts from your blog, looking for appropriate titles, keywords, and text, which matches more or less your recent publication. It puts a thumbnail picture under your posts or just plain text links, if the adequate posts with images could not be located on your blog. So by putting LinkWithin in your blog, you encourage your reader to see some of your blog posts, they would most likely miss without this hint. This is the known SEO (Search Engine Optimization) approach of interlinking your posts.

The main features of the LinkWithin widget:

It's Free.
No Sign-up required.
No Advertisement Included.
Fast to install (less than 5 minutes)
Good SEO tactic.
Simple and Elegant Design.
Works fine, with no glitches.

The plugin is available for Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger platforms. The instructions for installing the widget on Blogger were nice and clear. There are also instructions which tailor it to different types of platforms. Note that you are provided clear instructions only when you provide email address and blog web address. You have also options to mark if you have a dark text on light background, or light text on dark background, so that will help to match widget appearance to your blog theme.

Actually, you can see the possible output at the bottom of this and any other posts on this page.

Highly Recommended!

Website: http://www.linkwithin.com/learn

Freeware Google PageRank Checker

2011-01-18T20:48:00.000-08:00

Google is the most popular search engine, and there is a common consensus that Google PageRank is one of the most important characteristics of the website or blog in relation to the ability to drive quality traffic.

07 Google PageRank Checker is free software that will allow you to monitor Google PageRank on all your websites and on any other competitive websites, allowing you to make prompt adjustments to your strategy. The software allows to checks Google PageRank on multiple websites at the same time. It will automatically access Google Search engine datacenter to query PageRank. There is no need to install Google Toolbar to use the software.

Publisher: http://www.1-search-engine-marketing.net

Direct Download: http://www.1-search-engine-marketing.net/download/GPCSetup.zip

OS Requirements: Windows 98/2000/2003/XP or later.

Free High Resolution Images on your Blog

2011-01-12T20:22:00.000-08:00

In some cases, you may need to use large scale and high resolution images to explain better the material you are presenting in your post. However, you have certain limitation on the images size, resolution, and format, you may upload or embed. The new service Zoom.It will allow you to bypass any limitations, and you can present image of any size or complexity.

Zoom.it is a free service for viewing and sharing high-resolution imagery. You give us the link to any image on the web, and we give you a beautiful new way to experience it — along with a nice short URL.

How it works

Zoom.it converts your image to the Deep Zoom format, which lets you smoothly and efficiently explore the whole image, no matter how large is it. Zoom.it runs on Windows Azure and enhances the experience with Microsoft Silverlight when available.

How to use

Upload image you like to share on any online file storage site. Save the link to the image for future use. Note that you can actually provide also links to PDFs, SVGs and even regular webpages.
Paste the link into the textbox on the page http://zoom.it/pages/create and hit "Create" button.
Wait for rendering completion, and you can view instantly the resulting Zoom.it image, which you can share with anyone through short URL, or by embedding the viewer directly onto your own blog.

Saving your Blog Post as PDF

2011-01-05T22:27:00.000-08:00

One of the ways to treat your readers is giving them an easy ability to download your posts as PDF files with a single click. The PDF outcome files are free of any advertising and you also can get full access to your stats so you know what articles downloaded most, etc.

The site, giving this nice option is Web2PDF Online.

Join the site through the following link: http://web2.pdfonline.com/pdfonline/web/signup.asp
The next step after you sign up is to set the Conversion Options for your "Save page as PDF" button.

Paper Orientation: Portrait or Landscape

Paper Margins (Top, Bottom, Left, Right): Specify the paper margins in inches

To see how the PDF is going to look like, simply type the URL of your web page and click on the "Convert to PDF" button.

Tip: You can always use this feature to convert any web page into PDF for any other purposes.

Next, click on the "Generate the JavaScript" button to generate the JavaScript necessary to embed the "Save page as PDF" button in your website.

The last step is to copy-and-paste the JavaScript within the body tags of your web page(s), exactly where you want the button to show up.

Embed easily forum in your blog with Tal.ki

2010-12-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

If you plan to bring more interactive communication to your blog, you may be interesting in embeddable free forum offered by Tal.ki , so your visitors can have discussions right in your site.

Main Advantages

No account registration needed. Your forum will be integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other services so members can skip registration.
Engage your website's visitors. Turn passive blog and content readers into participating members, contributing content.
Make your website stickier. Forums tend to keep people on a website longer and have them visit 50% more pages.
Seamlessly blends into your website. Tal.ki detects the colors of your website, the layout, and the fonts and automatically styles itself to blend it with your site.
Easy to use Admin Tools. Configure the privacy settings for each forum to choose who has access, from guests to moderators.

Screenshot

AppVita Review

Tal.ki is an application that lets users embed forums into their websites just like they would a YouTube video. If you can copy and paste, then you have the skills necessary to create a fully functional online forum where the readers of your blog or website can interact with each other and discuss the day’s latest events. Much more than just a souped-up commenting feature, Tal.ki forums put the control in your readers’ hands by letting them create new discussions centered around the topics that matter to them most.

Multiple Tal.ki pricing options let you select the plan that fits best; depending on the number of visitors you expect to have using the forums on your site. After signing up, Tal.ki will give you a line of HTML code to embed in your website just like you would embed a YouTube video clip. Paste the code wherever you like, and within an instant you’ve got a functioning forum where your readers can sound off. Individual Tal.ki forums can be run across multiple pages of your website, allowing people to check out the forums no matter what page they’re on. Even better, your readers don’t have to sign up for an account with Tal.ki before they get started posting. Instead, they just need to log in with a Google, Facebook, Yahoo, or Twitter account and they’re ready to go.

Like other online forums, Tal.ki forums feature multiple categories and sticky posts, and let users subscribe to certain threads to find out when new content has been added. And because the forum is located on your site, you’ll always remain the key administrator in charge of determining who is and isn’t allowed to post what types of content. For bloggers and developers who need a better way to increase the amount of time users spend on their sites, Tal.ki forums are an obvious solution that can ramp up user interaction on any website or blog.

Practical Uses:

Create a forum on your blog where readers can chat with each other
Get to know your fans by communicating in your own forum
Find out what readers would like to read more about on your site
Encourage your website readers to spend more time on your site

Insider Tips:

Users can log in to post with a Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, or Open ID account
Forum users can change their display name to whatever they want
Hide your member list from the view of others at any time
Allow members to include photos with their forum posts

What we liked:

Adding a Tal.ki forum to a website is as simple as clicking copy and paste
Admin panel is easy to understand and use
Tal.ki offers plugins for increased integration with WordPress and Google sites
Forums are a great way to get to know your readers

What we didn’t like:

The Tal.ki forums design might not blend in seamlessly with all websites

Costs:

Free account with limited features
Pro account is $9.95/month
Platinum account is $59/month
Max account is $249/month

Website: http://tal.ki/

3 Laws of Blogging

2010-12-14T23:47:00.003-08:00

I am blogging for 3 years. Is that a lot? Yes and no.

Did I reach the goals I setup for myself in 2007? Yes and no.

But no matter, if my financial expectations were real or not, I am not leaving. Because, I like blogging. I do not expect immediate results anymore, I set the realistic expectations, and I enjoy every bit of success.

And what about you?

I found the article on VA4buisness useful for those, who started blogging, but are not happy with their results. Presenting below…

Many people start blogging with a big hope, but a lot of them fail to convert that hope into real excitement. And a lot many say quit, just after a couple of months of blogging. I have personally witness the sad exist of many talented blogger. They would have done better, if they had persisted and factored in the elements I am going to talk in this article.

I personally do not like the idea of quitting, and seeing countless many people failing, I decided to pen down 3 laws of blogging which should never be broken or overlooked — come what may. These laws are there since always and they have been talked about many times, but still people are not applying them. I hope this article will help them put things in order.

Clean design

Design is the first thing anyone notices on your website, and when I said anyone I meant search engine spiders as well. Yes, they too care about the design and how well your website is laid out. Still many people do not seem to care about this, and they end up choosing a poorly laid theme for their blogs.

A poorly laid theme could be of two kinds: one that looks sleek to human, but the codes are not well written, such themes appears messy to search bots, and the another type could be the one that appears messy and cluttered to human as well.

You should choose a theme that looks clutter free, and whose code is optimized for search bots. Any blogging theme that comes from a reliable designer meets these criteria. Themes created by armatures do fail to meet either of the two criteria I talked about above.

Creative content

Although the design of a blog is what people notice at first, it is not “the thing” for which they come to your blog, with a possible exception of blogs that are known for their WOW (read creative) design.

Content of a blog is more important than the design, and it should always be top quality. Do not ever use syndicated content. I know, upon reading this, a lot many eye brows must be raised, but this will not change the fact that they are not “top quality” content. Search engine may not penalize the use of syndicated content, but human does. No one likes to waste time reading crappy article, which is available everywhere else.

You should stay clear of duplicate content as well because even search engines do not like this. I must add here that syndicated content is classified as duplicate content by search engine or not is a debated issue, and the winner of the debate is yet to be decided.

Do not use any PLR content or spun articles on your blog. This will not only push your visitors away, but it will also push the search engines to raise red flag, which may lead to banishment from the search world. And no website or blog would like to be “search untouchable”.

Constant promotion

Promotion is akin to going on rooftop with a loudspeaker in your hand and shouting at top of your voice. This may sound heinous — blame it on the description of promotion I gave above — but we need to do that only. You may not want to do that in your neighborhood, but up here on the Internet, you do not have any other option. If you do not do that, no one will know about your blog.

The Internet is an overly crowded world, and it is getting even more crowded after every passing second. Just being different or even the best will not cut it for you here. You will have to outspoken about the services you offer.

Do not shy away from promotion. This is the only marketing tool we have to inform our visitors about the work we do. Talking about you and your work is not a shameful activity. Be as enthusiastic about promotion as you can be.

Do not break any law

The laws of blogging that I have talked about above are not like traffic laws in your city, which by design is stupid and senseless. These laws have their foot in reality and consumer psyche. Breaking any of the above given three unbreakable laws of blogging will put your blog at risk.

My comment

So, what am I doing? Why I am intentionally breaking one of the unbreakable laws and posting non-original content? It might look illogical in content that I absolutely agree with author that duplicate content is not well-accepted by search engines? Simply say – because I respect the reader and if I find the content and explanation useful, there is no point to re-write it just to please crawlers. How reasonable that is? I deem that a reasonable approach, but admit that it can be questionable.

And what is your opinion?

23-rd Edition of Blog Carnival - Bringing more traffic to your blog

2010-12-09T23:55:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the December 10, 2010, 23-rd edition of "Bringing more traffic to your blog" Blog Carnival. Some statistics: Submitted Articles - 77. Published Articles - 23. I want to thank all the authors contributing to the issue. Some articles were excluded from the review, since their topic of discussion did not match the main target of the carnival. I am sorry, that not all submissions were accepted, as some of the excluded articles carried a significant value.

Email Connecting presents Four Simple Email Marketing List Building Strategies posted at Email Marketing Tools | Email Marketing Services Dunwoody | Direct Email Marketing, saying, http://www.EmailConnecting.com - Are you seeking email marketing list building strategies?

Randy Sult presents My Affiliate Marketing � Blog Archive � Free Traffic Anyone? posted at My Affiliate Marketing.

Christina Crowe presents 6 Major Benefits of Blogging and How to Incorporate Them Into Your Blog posted at Cash Campfire, saying, "Why create a blog? The focus of this article is to describe the key reasons why people blog and how to benefit from these reasons with your blog."

Latha presents Zero Down Traffic Blueprint By Oli Tee | How To Make Money At Home | Internet Marketing Affiliate Programs | Work At Home Programs posted at Internet Marketing Affiliate Programs Review.

Tom Johnson presents Learn how to generate website traffic posted at Website Marketing Today!.

John presents How to Strategically Use Keyword to Build Your Business posted at KeywordMarketingPro - Professional SEO Services, saying, "How to Strategically Use Keyword Marketing to Build Your Business"

Review Monsters presents Many Ways To Make Money Online posted at Welcome to Review Monsters!.

Mike @ jammer(six) presents How to Remove the "Required" Category Base From Your WordPress Permalinks posted at jammer(six).

Blog income presents Blog Expert Series: Does Stripping Down Stress You Out? posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "Now you have your niche, you are ready to start writing?"

Jules Colmar presents Marketing tips posted at Blog users marketing.

Susan Liddy presents 3 Excuses For Not Guest Blogging and Why They Don’t Work | Aspiring FEMpreneur posted at Aspiring FEMpreneur, saying, "Guest Blogging is a great way to drive traffic back to your blog. Here are three common excused for not guest blogging and how to overcome them."

Ziki presents A Simple Way of Making Money online - Make Money with Clickbank and Youtube posted at Video Marketing Strategies ;).

RLM presents WordPress Pagination in Custom Loop posted at Cincinanti SEO Blog, saying, "If you use custom loops in WordPress you may run into pagination issues. Specifically, no matter what page you’re on, only the first page’s worth of posts are displayed. Here’s a really quick solution to that problem using the query_posts() function."

HomeList presents Massive Drop In Traffic After Using Google’s Change of Address Option posted at HomeList.

Missy Diaz presents 5 Reasons To Love MyBlogGuest.com posted at G34 Media.

BC Russell presents Blog Carnival Submission - My Secret Weapon For Blogging posted at Internet Marketing... while being careful with your cash., saying, "Gotta love a blog carnival! Here are some tips..."

Rita presents 28 Day Rinse and Repeat Plan To Huge Amounts of Laser Targeted Traffic posted at reptilianwisdom.com.

Evan Gold presents How I Make Thousands of Dollars A Month in Passive Income posted at Internet Income Formula.

Blog income presents Learning How to Write for Blogs: 3 Major Mistakes I Made as a Blog Post Writer and How to Avoid Them posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "The top 3 blogging mistakes I made are:"

John Paul Aguiar presents Be A Blogger That Stands On His Own Two Feet posted at Money Dummy Blog.

FSK presents Optimizing Blog Title for Better Search Engine Results posted at Blogger SEO, saying, "We all want to make money, and if you spend time blogging then youd like to have a return on that investment. In order to monetize your blog you first have to spend some time doing Search Engine Optimization"

Jason Vincion presents Blogging Tips posted at For the Love of Creativity, saying, "A blog post that offers suggestions on how to create a more successful blog."

Aaron presents Getting Traffic to Your Website or Blog for Beginners posted at The Life Stream, saying, "Just a quick guide I wrote up after struggling with getting traffic started to my own site a while back. It’s basically for people who want to get their name out there to begin with, those who’re just starting out…I’d like to hear about some of the methods that come out of this carnival also, sounds like a topic I’m interested in and can use. Thanks for reviewing and for your time. ~ Aaron"

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of bringing more traffic to your blog using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Technorati tags: bringing more traffic to your blog, blog carnival.

HTTrack Website Copier

2010-12-02T00:24:00.000-08:00

This Thanksgiving Holidays brought me an unpleasant surprise. Coming home from the long and cold weekend, I have found out that my Blogger account was completely blocked and all 18 blogs, I am managing, were disabled. Luckily, the account restoration was smooth, and the blogs reappear immediately after my credentials were confirmed. All blogs, but one, which was claimed to be a splog (spam blog). Even though I am absolutely confident that there was mistake in the spider definition, I cannot be sure that it error is going to be corrected, and the blog is going to be restored. That is one of the major drawbacks of using overly nice, convenient, and free Blogger platform. But even thou I have appealed twice for additional review, the blog can be gone forever.

So, what could I do differently to avoid such situation? Follow the rules? I followed them. Be careful with posted content? I am confident, there was no violation. But, I missed one important step: I failed to backup the blogs. Indeed, if I would have a backup of the blocked blog on my hard drive, I could more or less easy transfer the posts to a different location, another blogging or hosting platform.

Essentially, I started looking for good solution to backup the remaining blogs. While there are several online services available for blogs backup (like Blog Backupr, for example), I decided to shoot for completely independent solution and choose the software, which will allow downloading the entire blog with text, pictures, and comments to my Hard Drive). And I would like to share the utility, I am going to use from now on. Hope you may find it useful as well.

HTTrack is a free (GPL) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It is able to operate with any website on the Web, including blogs. Software allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure.

Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

The software has many configuration options for advanced users, but it can be used “out-of-the-box” right away without making any changes to the default settings.

WinHTTrack is the Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Seven release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release. Portable version is available, so you do not need to install the utility on your Hard Drive.

Developers Website: http://www.httrack.com/

Downloading page: http://www.ziddu.com/download/12789420/httrack-noinst-3.43-9C.zip.html

Google PageRank Explained

2010-11-23T19:02:00.000-08:00

Everybody using internet is aware of the power of Google. Google is everywhere whether its search engine, email, social networking, online marketing, blogging etc.

But most important of all these is it's search engine which share approximately 60% of all searches made all over the world.This explains the importance of rank SERP (Search Engine Results Page) fo Google.The higher the ranking on SERP the more free visitors you will get from Google.

While displaying the results for a particular query Google takes into consideration a lot of factors.

Two most impotant factors being (source - Google's Corporate Information) -

PageRank Technology
Hypertext-Matching Analysis.

Now here comes the importance of Google PageRank.

What is Google PageRank?

According to Google - PageRank is Google's view of importance of a webpage. Pagerank is given out of 10.

Thus a webpage with a higher pagerank will be more important in view of Google as compared to the one with lower pagerank. Hence, a webpage with a better pagerank will get higher position in the SERP.
e.g. A webpage with Google PageRank of 5/10 will be more important and hence placed higher in Google SERP than the webpage with Google PageRank of 3/10.

How does Google determines a PageRank for any webpage ?

Lets see what Google says -

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

So Google takes into account the backlinks each webpage gets from different other webpages. Each backlink a webpage gets is considered as a vote by Google in the favour that webpage. But at the same time Google also analyzes the webpage from which a baclink is given.

Let's examine the following figure for some better understanding -

In the above figure A,B,C,D,E and F are different webpages. Here you can see that page C has got a higher pagerank than page E, even though it have fewer links as compared to page E. It's because of the importance of the page from which page C is receiving a link and also the number of outbound links from that page. In the above case as you can see page B has got most importance and is having only one outbound link to page C, so up to 90% of its PageRank is carried to page C.

In the essence, a page with higher baklinks from quality pages (those with higher pagerank) will have a better pagerank.

Thus, improving your Google PageRank helps you by getting you more visitors through search engines and ultimately can result into better revenue from your website/blog.

Source: Blogger-Help

Do you have too many "real" friends on Facebook?

2010-11-17T21:10:00.000-08:00

"Remember five years ago when no one had Facebook and you didn't know what the guy you took high school biology with was having for lunch?" Jimmy Kimmel asked the audience on his show last night. "Remember how that was fine? Let's go back to that."

If you didn't watch "Jimmy Kimmel Live" November 11, you might think Kimmel started a campaign to end Facebook, but he's not. Instead, he announced a new national holiday called "National Unfriend Day," where he encourages you to "cut out some of the friend fat in your life" on Facebook and otherwise.

Today, November 17, Kimmel wants you to look at all of your Facebook friends and decide: who is really your friend? A friend, as he says, is not someone who "asks what 'Harry Potter' character you are."

See two Video Presentations (watch one after another as they are logically connected):

National UnFriend Day

National UnFriend Day (part 2)

On his show yesterday evening, Kimmel celebrated the arrival of National Unfriend Day with its very own anthem sung by country artists Brad Paisley and Darius Rucker.

To all the friends I've un'ed before

Who sent me quizzes about Jersey Shore

You made my life a hell

With your stupid LOL

To all the friends I've un'ed before

To all the guys from grammar school

Posting shirtless pictures by their pool

Your fat and sweaty back

Really makes me want to yak

To all the friends I've un'ed before

Our time on earth goes by so quickly

We have to make each moment great

So I cannot waste one more minute

Reading your dumb status update

Kimmel may have a point, but this rather funny joke of a holiday seems to be more a late night comedy sketch than an event manufactured out of real concern for the status of friendship.

Still, National UnFriend Day is good natured -- at least for those not being unfriended -- and you might even consider taking the day to cut some friend fat of our own.

Facebook had no immediate comment on how the festivities were being marked at company headquarters. Needless to say, Zuckerberg is not likely to be adding Kimmel to his friends list anytime soon.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://100searches.blogspot.com/2010/11/national-unfriend-day-clean-your.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/04/national-unfriend-day-jim_n_778742.html

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/11/11/national.unfriend.day.mashable/

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20023121-501465.html

http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/11/08/jimmy-kimmel-national-unfriend-day/

How to Highlight Author Comment in Blogspot Blog?

2010-11-10T23:00:00.000-08:00

This trick is to give a Highlight Author Comment. This will make the blog's owner comments looks different from the visitors’ comments. It is very useful and interesting blogger hack tips. You can see the example in my blog. Here is what to do to make a "Highlight Author Comment" effect in Blogspot.

Credit for the trick goes to Trick Tips Blogger.

1. Login to blogger, then choose "Layout --> Edit HTML". Don't forget to backup your template first.
2. Check the "Expand Widget Templates" box.
3. Copy this script and put it before ]]></b:skin> or copy to your CSS area.

.comment-body-author {
background: #E6E6E6; /* Background color*/
color: #000; /* Text color*/
border-top: 1px dotted #223344;border-bottom: 1px dotted #223344;border-left: 1px dotted #223344;border-right: 1px dotted #223344;
margin:0;
padding:0 0 0 20px; /* Posotion*/
}

4. Then find this code:

5. The red color text is the code that you have to add to your script. The position must be right.
6. And then save your template.

TinEye – Reverse search using your Images

2010-11-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

When you prepare your blog post, you may need to add several images, which will help your readers to understand better the content, or will make the post more attractive and readable. Let’s say, you have found an image but you are not satisfied with quality, resolution, or you prefer having the same pic, but without visible watermark. Definitely, you may continue image searching through the popular sites, but there might be difficulties to locate what you exactly need. Here, you find a new useful service - TinEye - a reverse image search engine.

Using it is quite simple. You submit an image to TinEye and find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in the index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

Note that TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been edited, like cropped or resized.

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It is free to use for non-commercial searching. TinEye regularly crawls the web, looking for new images, and in addition accepts contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed out 1.8 million images from the web to help you find what you're looking for.

Examples of use

Find out where an image came from, or get more information about it
Research or track the appearance of an image online
Find higher resolution versions of an image
Locate web pages that make use of an image you have created
Discover modified or edited versions of an image

Free services limitation

The free for non-commercial use version of TinEye at tineye.com allows you to do up to 50 searches per day, up to 150 searches per week.

Registration

TinEye must be able to save your search image to permanently link to your search results. Unregistered users of TinEye cannot save their search images, as they are automatically discarded after 72 hours. Links to these searches will stop working after 72 hours, unless a registered user happens to save the same image. Registered users of TinEye can save their search images if history is enabled in their user Profile. Saved searches are available from the History page, and permanent URL links to any saved search can be bookmarked or shared with friends.

Registration to TinEye is free.

Screenshots (click to enlarge)

Review the following screenshots to check what the service can do for you.

Website: http://www.tineye.com/

How to Post to Your Blog with Word 2010?

2010-10-28T22:21:00.000-07:00

While I am personally not using Word 2010, I am sure that there are many bloggers who already relocated to this text editor platform. So, the question for those who use it: do you know that it is possible to write and publish a blog post using the same application you are using for anything else?

Device Magazine provides detailed review of this new Word feature I would like to present today.

It makes perfect sense that Microsoft should want their users to employ Word for all word processing tasks, not just the ones that take place on documents stored on their PC or laptop.

Microsoft have become more and more aware of the wider uses for their Office applications in recent years, and have even released an online version of Office which is free to use for domestic users and offers the ability to save work in the cloud.

Writing a blog post with Word 2010 is nothing more but an extension of this. You are probably thinking "so I can write a blog with Word, but I can do that anyway and paste it in" but this method allows you to connect Word directly to the blog software, removing the need for any desktop or browser based blog editors like Scribefire, and dispensing with any problems with Word formatting causing problems with the display of your blog post.

Write a Blog Post with Word 2010

You can easily create a new Word document for your post and have it ready to publish to your blog in minutes. There are several blog platforms supported by Word 2010:

Windows Live Spaces
Blogger
SharePoint blog
Community Server
TypePad
WordPress

…and if you don’t use any of these, you can enter manual configuration options by choosing “Other”.

To set this up, create a new document in Word 2010 (File > New) and choose Blog post under Available Templates.

You will then be prompted to setup an account – here you should choose from one of the options as listed above. For instance, if you're using a WordPress blog, you will be prompted to enter the Blog Post URL for the XMLRPC.php script that manages links from third party apps like Word. You will see something like this:

http://<Enter your blog URL here>/xmlrpc.php

If you use a private WordPress blog, simply enter the URL as instructed, and then add your username and password. Many WordPress users have blogs hosted at www.wordpress.com – they should enter

http://<blog account name>.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

For Blogger and TypePad accounts you need only enter your username and password, while SharePoint blogs require just the URL. Windows Live Spaces blogs require the space name and your “secret word”, while Community Server requires a special URL similar to that shown above (to the “metablog.ashx” script) as well as a username and password. Once you have configured the account for your blog, you’re ready to start posting!

Publish Your Blog with Word 2010

With your blog linked up to Word, you can then proceed to write a new post. Using the Blog Post and Insert tabs, you can visit the Home page, choose a Category for your blog, apply text formatting (if supported by your blog) and insert Tables, Pictures and Clip Art, Hyperlinks and other media options.

A few useful blog platform tools are missing, however – there is now way, for example, to split your post so that only a small portion of it appears on your blog’s home page. This would need to be added manually in your blog admin screen. Similarly, tags and labels cannot be added, but other than this, you can use Word as a great alternative to tools like Scribefire or your blogs own admin screen.

One word of warning: when your blog account username and password are used by from Word, they may not be encrypted. This will be down to the authentication method used by your blogging platform, so make sure you make regular backups of your blog and that you don’t employ a username and password that you might also use for other purposes.

Freeware Blog Editor from Firefox Browser

2010-10-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

Deepest Sender is a blogging client that runs inside popular browsers Firefox, SeaMonkey, and XULRunner.

So, Deepest Sender is a blogging client for Firefox-based applications. What does this mean? Well, it means that instead of having to go to the Update page on LiveJournal/WordPress/Blogger/whatever, or loading up a separate client program, all you have to do is hit Ctrl+\, or click the button in your toolbar, and you can start posting.

Advantages over using update pages:

* Multiple accounts - You can have multiple accounts in Deepest Sender, and quickly switch between them.

* WYSIWYG - An integrated mini-HTML editor, with countless hacks implemented to get it to function as well and as neatly as possible. You can also switch between that and source view, or preview mode. No more typing countless <li> tags!

* Sidebars! You can load up Deepest Sender in the Mozilla/Firefox sidebar, and post from there.

* Drag and drop - select part of a page, drag it onto DS, and it's there!

* Music detection - if you have Foxy Tunes installed, or are running Windows and are using a plugin for your media player that is compatible with the Windows Media Player blogging plugin, then you can have music automatically detected for you. If you can get your player to write song details to a text file, then DS can detect the current music from that, too.

* Spellchecking - if you're running Firefox 2 or SeaMonkey with spellcheck installed, you can spellcheck your entries!

* Crash recovery - if Mozilla/Firefox crashes while you were halfway through typing up a huge entry, don't worry! When you next load Deepest Sender up, it'll try and recover as much of your post as possible.

* Load and save drafts - want to come back to something later? Save it as a draft, then get to work on another post. You can load it back up later.

* Easily edit posts - instead of poking through LiveJournal's edit system, just hit Ctrl+Shift+H, and use the calendar to find the post you were after, load it up, and edit it. If you're using other blogging protocols, you can easily search through the last 15 posts.

* Offline mode - Can't connect? Well, type away at your post, then load Deepest Sender at a later time when you can connect to your server!

Advantages over other clients:

* Easy installation - go to the Deepest Sender site (or Mozilla update), click install, restart your browser, and start posting! Even if you're on a computer account that doesn't have administrative priveliges (on Firefox)!

* Small download - how many other blogging clients are under 300KB?

* Cross-platform - Deepest Sender will run on any OS that Firefox will run on. Type up posts at work on your Windows computer, then come home and type up more posts on your Linux box - using the same program!

Screenshots (Click to Enlarge):

Developers Website: http://deepestsender.mozdev.org/

Latest software release: 0.9.3 (June 2, 2010).

Direct Client Download: http://downloads.mozdev.org/deepestsender/deepestsender-0.9.3.xpi

Review more free software for blog publishing (48 items to choose from at the moment) at RateItAll Rating List.

6 Applications to post on Blogger Blog from Android Phones

2010-10-16T01:13:00.000-07:00

I love my Android based HTC Incredible. Actually, it is the first mobile phone I really love. More and more functions, unthinkable for being performed through mobile phone can be done fast and efficiently now. It is time for me to think about convenient mobile blogging agent to be able post from the road to my blogs. In search for the suitable client I came to several utilities on the market I would like to share with you:

1. Blogaway for Android is a simple blogger client for your Android phone that helps you blog on the go. Blogaway works with blogs hosted on Blogger (the next Beta client is developed to support Wordpress blogs as well). Blogaway supports almost everything that you need to post a simple blog with images, links and videos. It works with blogs hosted on blogspot as well as on custom domains. You can also read blogs of your favorite authors’ right from inside Blogaway.

Here are a few features that make Blogaway a great blogging tool for your mobile. And we are continuously adding more.

- Multiple accounts/blogs support.
- Posts with images (single), videos(single), links, tags etc.
- Add your favorite blogs to Blogaway.
- Read/post comments on blogs.
- Share your post's URL through multiple channels.
- Geotag your posts.

Website: http://sites.google.com/site/blogawaysupport/home

My rating: 4 of 5.

2. AndroBlogger is very basic Blogger authoring client to read, post to and comment on blogs based on Blogger engine. Recently more features were added, making the utility more useful, such as pictures (as URL only), text formatting, rich preview, etc. Most international encodings are now supported.

Website: http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-sadko-androblogger-jiAi.aspx

My rating: 2.5 of 5

3. Bloggeroid is a small application (about 50KB), which can help you blog on Blogger blogs "attached" to any of your Google Accounts. You may upload many pictures, and you decide where in your posts those images will be placed. You may use also some kind of "wikisyntax", so when you will wrote **bold** in the result you will have word bold in bold, for __italic__ it will be italic. You can edit existing posts, and you can choose if this should be edited in HTML or in this "wikisyntax".

Website: http://www.androidpit.com/en/android/market/apps/app/pl.przemelek.android.blogger/Bloggeroid

My rating: 3.5 of 5

4. Blogger-Droid is a simple Blogger client, allowing to create/view/edit/delete blog posts on Blogger Blog. You can also post comments to published blog posts, upload picture(s) and video(s). So, with this application you can easily share pictures, videos, YouTube clips, links etc.

Website: http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/social/bloggerdroid_hikk.html

My rating: 4 of 5

5. I am Blogger is a lightweight application with limited functionality that allows keep your travel status in Twitter and Blogger's blog. You can send tweets and short blog records with your location and photo.

Website: http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-mblog-activites-iCAn.aspx

My rating: 2 of 5

6. Moby is a multi-platform utility, allows its users to share photos, videos, audio and text from their Android based phones with your friends, family and contacts on all the major social networking sites and services. Moby distributes to more than 25 sites and services including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Netlog, and many more.

Website: http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-mobypicture-android-qDjp.aspx

My rating: 3.5 of 5

22nd Edition of Blog Carnival - Bringing more traffic to your blog

2010-10-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the October 8, 2010, 22-nd edition of "Bringing more traffic to your blog" Blog Carnival. Some statistics: Submitted Articles - 78. Published Articles - 30. I want to thank all the authors contributing to the issue. Some articles were excluded from the review, since their topic of discussion did not match the main target of the carnival. I am sorry, that not all submissions were accepted, as some of the excluded articles carried a significant value.

Ryan_Taft presents Passion & Creativity Go a Long Way for Small Business Owners posted at Catalyst Marketers, saying, "When you combine passion, creativity, and the right online tools, you can drive much more traffic to your small business blog than you could ever imagine. Check out this post to learn more."

Ziki presents Online Marketing Lesson 2 - Make Money with ClickBank Part 2 (The Beginner’s Guide) posted at Video Marketing Strategies ;).

Joe Revod presents Where Do You Get Backlinks? posted at Internet Business Make Money Online With Welly Mulia.

Pat Doyle presents Best Keyword Research Guide - Part 1 posted at Internet Business | Pat Doyle, saying, "This article is part of a series that explains what keyword research is, why it is important, and how to do it the easy way."

Mark Fisher presents Common SEO Mistakes - Free SEO Tutorial (Part 2) posted at Leads Leap - A Viral Blog That Sends You Traffic.

Tod presents Criteria for Writing a Great Blog Article posted at Tod.FM, saying, "Keep this list in mind if you want to create the best articles you possibly can."

GreatManagement presents Blog Content: Make It Easy For People To Find posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "There are a few things we can do to improve our chances of getting spotted and revisited when it comes to writing your blog."

Yael Borg presents How to get traffic on your blog without selling out posted at Onmywaytomentalhealth’s Blog.

GreatManagement presents Link Building Campaign: How To Prevent Getting Banned From Google posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "Don’t get banned by Google!"

John Paul Aguiar presents Start A Blog - 20 Must Know Reasons Why | Money Dummy Blog posted at Money Dummy Blog.

Annah Rondon presents Red Means Go!: HOW TO GET FOLLOWERS (AND LOSE THEM TOO) APPARENTLY I’M AN EXPERT AT BOTH posted at Red Means Go!, saying, "I wrote this post in an effort to help new bloggers gain followers and a little bit of traffic. It’s my most popular post to date."

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Dear Spammer Dude posted at Mad Kane’s Humor Blog.

GreatManagement presents 24 Blog Optimizing Tips to Attract Search Engines and Readers posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "Applying the following optimizing tips can be very useful in pleasing both the search engines and your users."

AllanJames presents Free Website Traffic � 8 Easy methods to bring a flood of targeted free visitors to your offers. posted at The StartBusinessMentor Training Blog.

Darliss Waters presents Content Marketing (Naughty) Trick posted at Internet Business Make Money Online With Welly Mulia.

Steven Chang presents 100 Must Have Wordpress Plugins posted at How To Start A Blog: For Fun And Profit!.

Rodrick Etienne presents How To Increase Blog Traffic | The Home Business Coach Blog posted at The Home Business Coach Blog.

Steven Chang presents 35 Blogging Best Practices To Help Your Blog Succeed posted at How To Start A Blog: For Fun And Profit!.

baliconfederate presents Google and Ranking Result Accuracy posted at webandrank.

Ellan Elanzen presents The Marriage between SEO and Commercial Blogging posted at Eliteblogger, saying, "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the ways to make money blogging. This essentially means that the page that is holding the content is listed on the major search engines as available when the user types in a query."

Tash Hughes presents 7 tasks to delegate for your blog posted at Word Constructions, saying, "Ensuring you have time to create excellent content is a great step towards generating traffic to your blog."

Andy Hayes presents Why You Website Will Never Meet Everyone’s Expectations posted at Travel Online Partners (TOP), saying, "Tweaking your blog design can bring you more traffic, as well as make more money from the traffic you already have."

SoulRiser presents How To Make Money With Your Website (Part 1) posted at ShareNoesis, saying, "Part 1 of a series on how to make money online from a website (or multiple websites). Covers search engine optimization, keyword research and competition analysis."

John Lenaghan presents One Of The Biggest Untapped Keyword Tools posted at John Lenaghan’s Blog.

Tom Tessin presents More Web Site Traffic: 12 Ways to Increase It posted at FBC Blog, saying, "12 simple steps you can take to bring traffic to your blog."

Blog income presents Make Your Blog Sticky With Passion posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "There are a few easy ways to make sure your blog content is always fresh. Keeping your passion isn�t as hard as it first might seem."

KTanna presents How to Increase Your Website’s Traffic using Twitter posted at Words With Style.

Carl Ringwall presents How Backlink Index Express Works–Part 1 | Data SystemsPlus posted at Data SystemsPlus.

RLM presents 4 Shockingly Easy Steps to Improve Your SEO Today posted at Cincinanti SEO Blog.

vans presents The Keys to Finding Niche Internet Markets posted at Seo � Clickbank And Seo Content, saying, "Finding an internet market is easy. Finding a niche internet market that is PROFITABLE can be a bit more difficult, but actually quite simple when you understand what you are doing."

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of bringing more traffic to your blog using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Technorati tags: bringing more traffic to your blog, blog carnival.

How to create a Free Professional Blog with BlinkWeb?

2010-09-27T19:54:00.000-07:00

Discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the blogging platforms for the new bloggers, we often restrain our reviews by the big players in this marketing niche only (like Blogger, for example). However, there are many small players, who may offer quite impressive set of features and capabilities.

Today, we are going to present of the sites, which can easily compete with big boys – BlinkWeb. It’s one of those websites that surprisingly offers you their services for free without any loopholes and hassles. The site was founded in June 2008 by Brad and Matthew Callen, the company is based in Indiana, USA.

BlinkWeb offers you to create professionally looking website or blog with simplicity and speed of the drag and drop functionality. You can easily create all the major website types such as a blogs, a content style websites, or a sales letter style websites. The blogging platform was developed with novice users in mind. However, those with moderate experience, basically anyone who doesn’t know the least bit about html and other coding stuff, can still very easily make use of this platform. Blinkweb comes equipped with many high quality website templates that users can select from, making the new blog unique in the blogosphere.

To get started with the service is pretty simple: you just need to sign up for a new account on BlinkWeb. It is easy as well. Simply enter your chosen username, password and your email address on the homepage of the site in the signup box. It’s free to sign up and use BlinkWeb, depending on where you want to host your site you may have to pay a fee.

The Blinkweb page builder is completely free. After the user creates their website, they are presented with 3 main options which include; get a subdomain for your website, get a domain name for your website, or download your website in .zip format. Users will be able to get a subdomain completely free, which is then hosted by our servers. Users can also choose to get a domain from Blinkweb. Domain names are completely free as well. Should the user choose to get a domain name, Blinkweb will host their website for $1.00 the first month and then $14.95 for each month thereafter. Users can have unlimited domains with Blinkweb. Each additional domain is only an extra $1.30/month. Finally, if users prefer to host their websites with their current webhost, rather than through Blinkweb, they can choose the 3rd option, which is to download their website in .zip format. Doing so costs only a very small fee. Blinkweb also offers an extensive line of training tools and guides to earning money strictly from an online business. These tools come in the form of videos, workbooks, and audio CDs.

It incorporates the following features:

It has a very user friendly interface, even a novice can get a hang of it in no time.
You can download website to your own computer
It very conveniently lets you build websites by simply dragging and dropping components
You can also add few add-on and plug-in like AdSense, contact forms, guestbooks and maps according to your requirement.
The basic services comes for free but if you are looking for trying out and applying more advanced features then you will be charged accordingly.

Access Website Homepage: http://business.blinkweb.com/

Google Instant Search and Marketing Concerns

2010-09-18T01:04:00.000-07:00

Google recently introduced their “Instant Search” feature which starts to populate search results the instant you start typing into the search box. At the same time, Google suggests alternate search terms as you type to help narrow your search without forcing you to enter entire search phrases.

The main idea behind this new feature is to save users a few seconds on each search and cut down on misspellings for search terms, business names or product names. Users may not notice much difference in their overall experience, however, for small businesses and online entrepreneurs, this new search method carries a few interesting ramifications.

Since Google clearly ranks as the “900 lb. Gorilla” of the online marketing world, acting as de facto gateway to the Web for millions, any change to their system makes businesses nervous. Many have expressed concern that this latest change will force users of Google’s AdWords program, the search giant’s lucrative pay-per-click marketing arm, to pay for more expensive keywords.

They reason that since the most popular search terms appear in the search box first, and that most people will opt to accept Google suggestions, those most popular searches will carry the highest click prices. In other words, businesses that depend on Google to show their ads fear that Google will force them to pay more money by recommending more expensive keyword searches.

But that might not be a real future!

The suggested search term feature actually appeared on Google quite a while ago, and all that’s really changed is Google starts to display the actual search results AS you type. With the old 2-step process, Google made suggestions as you typed and then you clicked the search button to see the search results.

Instant Search just creates a FAST way to see the results for different search variations without forcing you to click the button each time to see those results. This process makes it simple to see the results, change your mind, and not wait for the results each time you change the phrase.

Most people always start with a broad search and then narrow it by including more descriptive terms (often called “long-tail” keywords) to better find what they want. This new process won’t change that.

In fact, it will give people more chances to refine their searches on-the-fly by providing Google more details of what they want. Instead of posing a threat, I believe this new Instant Search feature creates an opportunity for any business to perform high-speed market research to look for possible opportunities and trouble spots.

The following four steps will help any small business use Google’s new feature for instant results.

1. Go to Google and search for your business as if you were a consumer.

2. Make a note of the keyword suggestions Google offers as you type.

3. See if those suggestions give you any ideas for your own marketing (since they should represent the most popular phrases).

4. Note which competitors show up and where you appear in relation to them.

These 4 simple steps make a great barometer for taking a read on your local market, fast.

Who appears consistently?

Who shows up hit-and-miss or every once in a while?

Who shows up in Google Maps?

If your competitors show up and you don’t, you’ve got some work to do!

Bottom line: as a small business, use Google’s new Instant Search to quickly get the big picture when it comes to your business, industry, and local competition.

Source and Additional Information:

http://smallbusinessmarketingweekly.com/

http://www.webguild.org/20100909/google-instant-implications-for-users-advertisers-website-operators

http://searchenginewatch.com/3641319

101 tips for improving your blog by Ben Barden

2010-09-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

In this post, I would like to present an ebook - 101 tips for improving your blog by Ben Barden from http://www.toptenblogtips.com/. As the title claims, the ebook contains 101 essential tips for all bloggers, no matter how technical you are, or which platform you use.

The ebook is divided into 10 sections, each containing 10 tips:

Advertising and Promotion
Blogging Personalities
Comments
Content
Design
Guest Posts
Networking
Overcoming blogger's block
Planning
Post frequency

Tip #101 is provided at the end of the ebook.

You can download the ebook here:

http://www.ziddu.com/download/11644427/Ben_Barden_-_101_tips_for_improving_your_blog.pdf.html

It's a free download, so you can share it with no restriction.

How to submit blog sitemap to Bing?

2010-09-06T22:18:00.000-07:00

As you know, Search Engine Bing, powered by Microsoft, is one of the new successful additions to the marketing niche, dominated by Google. You may need to consider seriously your exposure to the Bing searchers, besides focusing on Google and Yahoo! To get more visibility, you can follow the simple steps, described below.

1. The first thing is to create an account or use one you already have for the services of pages of Microsoft, like Hotmail.

2. If this is the first time you access the service and never have sent your URL, you will see the option to "Add Site. You can have multiple websites / blogs in the same account.

3. Go to http://www.bing.com/webmaster/
* Click the "Add Site" to add the URL of your blog.

* Enter the address of your blog where it says.
* And click on "Submit" to submit your request.

4. Verify your ownership of your website.

Webmaster Tools requires authentication to ensure that only the rightful owners are provided with information about their websites. There are two ways to prepare your website for authentication, both of which rely on your adding an authentication code your website. You need to do only one of them to get verified.

* "Option 1" offers blog authorship verification by hosting a XML file on your Web Server, which is appropriate for the server hosted blogs (Wordpress.org, for example).

* "Option 2" represents a meta tag authorization by adding certain source code to your blog template (recommended for Blogger blogs).

As I am a Blogger platform user, I have applied the second approach, and it takes just a minute to complete site authorization. You can go to the panel, click on "Design" ~> "Edit HTML" and embed the generated line under the head. Then click the "Verify" button to let Bing to confirm your registration. Note that the tracking and displaying data indexing can take several days to begin to appear.

5. Adding sitemap of your blog

Now, when your blog has been successfully verified you can send its sitemap to get it crawled easier and help the algorithms to find and read its contents. Click on Add Sitemap on the line of your blog listing. At this point you have to add the address of the sitemap file to your blog.

* For blogs on Blogger (Blogspot) your map address definition is pretty simple. Just Enter the default address of RSS Feed, as in the example below:

URL- http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

* For wordpress.org blogs

You may use site maps generator Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. Simply create or have created an XML file of your sitemap, hosted on your host and add the link as explained above, clicking the "Submit".

Stream Music on your Blog with iRadeo

2010-08-26T22:08:00.000-07:00

About iRadeo

iRodeo offers the bloggers’ community a free open source MP3 player and online radio streaming platform. You can start streaming your mp3 files with ease, launching your online radio station.

iRadeo is the simple, easy-to-use technology that allows turning any website or blog into a professional, lively, or altogether unique page. You can even personalize your homepage to have audio that reflects you, or play your own pre-recorded audio files.

Main Features:

· Fast and easy setup. Register, customize your settings, and upload to start streaming. No other setup required. You can embed player on any website. Nothing to download and no technical skills required.
· Unlimited streaming. Stream as many MP3 files as you provide, without any restrictions.
· M3 tags detections. Auto MP3 ID tag detection and display is built-in.
· Unlimited listeners. No restrictions on number of listeners at the same time.
· Complete customization. Complete control of the style for the player, including color, size, types of players and field options.
· Free downloads for your visitors. Enable your listeners to download each stream.

Web site: http://www.iradeo.com/features

Promote your blog through Dagaloo

2010-08-19T23:56:00.000-07:00

No matter how popular your blog is, there is always not enough if you are rather ambitious blog owner. So the question on how to spread a word about the site always remains on the bloggers’ agenda. Today, we are going to present a new service, based on a Twitter mini-blogging platform, developed by a respected blogger, Nick Cardot, from SiteSketch 101. The site is called Dagaloo, and it is described as “an intense social media sharing community”.

Here’s the basic concept at the heart of this program: help another user by tweeting out a link to their content and in return another user will tweet out a link to your content. Practical implementation is very simple and straightforward. You join the community (where you sign up with your Twitter ID and password). You then tweet a link to share another member’s content with your followers. Each time you send a tweet, you are awarded points. The point system is based on your Klout score.

Then you submit your own content and community members will tweet your links to their own followers and earn credits from you for the effort.

To avoid the system misuse, there is a limit for tweets submission to only 1 tweet per 90 seconds, so hopefully as you browse the site, you’ll take the time to find content that you’re truly impressed with to share with others.

How to track stats directly from the Blogger blog?

2010-08-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

I have noticed a new feature Stats in Blogger onsite editor not right away, as it was introduced, but now I am using it all the time. It gives you convenience of instant access to the basic statistics and data of the blog, you are working on. The brief explanation on the new feature is offered on the official Blogger blog.

Although some of you use Google Analytics or other third party tools to track your blog traffic, many of you have requested an easier-to-use, fully-integrated stats feature for Blogger. We heard that, and we are excited to announce that Blogger in Draft now has built-in stats. Just go to Blogger in Draft, and you'll notice a new "Stats" tab. You don't have to install or configure anything to start benefitting from Stats.

The coolest thing about the new Blogger Stats is that it monitors and analyzes your visitor traffic in near-real-time. You can see which posts are getting the most visits and which sites are sending traffic to your blog right now. For example, if a reader shares one of your blog posts on Twitter and the post is getting lots of clicks, you will see a traffic increase in Blogger Stats almost instantly, with the particular Tweet mentioning your post being identified as the traffic source. Of course, traffic data across longer time periods (day/week/month) and all-time historical data are available as well.

There's also a lot more data that's being tracked, such as popular search keywords that send visitors to your blog, which country your visitors come from, and which web browsers they are using. Basically, with the new Stats feature, you know what's going on with your blog right now.

The new Stats feature shows all of this data in a simple, easy-to-understand graphical user interface. Since Stats are part of Blogger, you don't have to sign up for another service, or embed any code in a gadget.

Additionally, if you want the enterprise-level power and flexibility of Google Analytics, you can still use it, as outlined in this Help Center article. Note that the pageview data in Blogger Stats and in Google Analytics may not be identical, due to different collection mechanisms used. Also, Blogger Stats do not support private blogs for now.