The proliferation of blogging has captured the online community. As blogs originally were most popular during political campaigns, there are now blogs dedicated to pretty much any topic under the sun. If you’re new to the blogging community or are looking to improve your current blog, you should try to make your blog stand out from the rest of the pack as much as possible. The only way you’ll generate steady traffic to your site is if it offers something that other blogs in the same genre don’t. Here are a few tips to consider as you try to develop a niche audience for your blog:
- Produce new material. If you’re simply regurgitating what’s already available on the web then you’re going to have a small audience and nobody will link to your site. Offering a unique perspective on your topic is what will keep people coming back for more. While you should read as many blogs similar to yours to see what others are saying, use your research to your advantage and figure out what seems to be missing in the online dialogue and fill in those holes.
- Be amusing. Regardless of whether you’re telling a personal story or commenting on something that happened in the public limelight you should let your sense of humor emerge. What’s humorous for one person may not be for the next guy, but don’t let that keep your sense of humor to shine through.
- Link to a variety of sites. If you’re simply linking to the same sites that other blogs in your genre are then you’re going to alienate readers. Readers want to follow a trail of links that brings them to new, interesting sites. Peppering fresh links into your articles will make your readers a happy bunch and they’ll remember that you produced an enjoyable reading experience.
- Keep it short and sweet. You need to keep your reader’s attention span in mind and keep your articles on the short side. Somewhere between 300 and 500 words is a solid length for your posts. Being concise and getting to your underlying point quickly will make your blog sing better.
- Accept guest posts on your site. Allowing other people to post on your site helps you and your guest blogger. It gives you a rest and gives the guest blogger a chance to shine on a reputable blog.
By-line:
This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of yahoo efax. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.
Blogging, Tips Blog, Blog Tools, Blogging, SEO, Tips
Customizing your videos adds attractions to viewers and your profiles. There are several ways on how you can create a customized YouTube videos.
1. YouTube’s own customization service. YouTube Users has been enjoying the ability to customize their video players to match the theme and layout of their website and blogs.
2. Slide SkinFlix. It lets you choose the skin and theme of your player. You can make it appear like a plasma TV, iPhone, theater, etc. It is perfect for MySpace and Friendster layouts. See the sample video below.
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Google, Internet, Tips Google Videos, How-To, Internet, Tips, Videos, YouTube
For months now, this blog has been freed from comment spam I used to experience before because I found out the most effective ways to avoid WordPress spam.
1. Deactivating Akismet. Previously, I was getting at least 200 spam comments per day. I had to scan them one-by-one because some comments were filtered as spam by Akismet. Out of frustration, I deactivated the plugin with thoughts of completely avoiding these spam messages. True enough, I have not received spam comments since then.
Note: Do not delete Akismet from the plugins directory because you’re blog may experience another spam flood.
2. Install a spam blocking plugin. Currently I am using Matriphe Keycode, one of the best anti spam plugins I’ve ever used.
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Blogging, Tips, WordPress, WordPress Plugins Anti-Spam, Blogging, Online-Tips, Spam, Tips, WordPress, WordPress Plugins
When I was just starting to blog, I feared of two things: not being able to generate blog traffic and site suspension. I had managed to work on the first one since I am now getting a satisfying number of page views per day. The latter was my worry before I switched to paid hosting from WebHostingBuzz.com. I’ve had several site suspension before, and termination at some point when I was still hosted by free hosts. I’ve had several site migration. Somehow, I blame this mishaps why my main blog (jammedph.com) is not visible now in search engine rankings and Google bot stopped crawling it.
But when I switched to paid host, I thought site suspension will no longer be a problem. But imagine to my disappointment and nightmare when I saw my site last night with a suspension notice. According to the technical staff, some scripts I am running in my website was responsible for a resource abuse. Unexpectedly, the plugins installed in this blog caused all the problem. Problems like this is common in shared hosting where you share IP address with other hosted members.
I immediately contacted the billing department and I was grateful because of their prompt reply and unsuspended my account.
What did I learn from this incident?
1. Always do a blog backup. It was only these days that I always forget to backup my account. I was relying to much on my webhost to do all the backups for me which should not have been the case.
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Blogging, Internet, Technology, Tips Blogging, Free Domains, Free Hosting, Internet, Technology, Tips, top-level-domain
Domain name registration these days costs an average of $9.00/year. It already sounds much for me. So I looked for ways that will give me cheaper domain registration. My first option was to search the web for cheap domain names. My second option is to use a coupon code to avail discount. But where do I get one?
Luckily, I found a great site which provides coupon promotional codes including those for domain names and hosting. Retail Me Not is an easy way to find online coupon codes.
Using the FEBLUV code (NameCheap’s coupon code for February) I got the domain name for only $8.41 from its original price of $9.96!
Promotional coupon codes for domain registration and hosting.
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Blogging, Contests and Freebies, Internet, Tips Blogging, Contests and Freebies, Coupon-Promotional-Codes, Domain-Registration, Free Domains, Free Hosting, Internet, Tips
Yesterday, I was asked by a visitor at Student E-Resources on how to put a contact form in the new Blogger after she saw my contact form embedded in one of the pages.
For this particular one, I am using Wufoo HTML forms. The advantage of Wufoo is you can create any kinds of online forms like mailing list and subscriptions, job applications, etc.
However, with Wufoo, you have to login to your admin dashboard to read the messages generated from your contact form. I have a particular dilemma on this. I usually forget to check my dashboard so I sometimes reply late to my visitors messages.
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Blogging, Computer, Internet, Tips, WordPress Blogger-XML, Blogging, Computer, Contact-Forms, Internet, Online-Forms, Tips, Website-Feedbacks, WordPress
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