48HoursWeb

Are you interested in the topic of traffic generation? In this article I would like to list some traffic generation ideas that I got recently:

-Include your URL on your business cards. This should increase the number of visitors you receive, especially if you hand out your business card to many people.
-Building a community around your blog is probably the most important thing. Regular visitors can constitute the majority of traffic. Make sure you offer some valuable content to your readers. It is important to build a strong reader base.
-Submit your articles to EzineArticles. Articles that will be accepted will be a good source of traffic as well. Makes sure you link to your own website from the submitted articles. Submitting articles on a regular basis will ensure that your website will receive a steady flow of traffic.
-Getting involved in sites similar to MySpace can boost the number of people visiting your site, especially if they have similar interests corresponding to your niche. Nonetheless, you should make sure that you are not doing anything that is considered spamming.
-Answer questions in Yahoo Answers while including your website’s URL. If you are an expert on some topic, then Yahoo Answers can help you attract many visitors. This strategy can also work for LinkedIn Answers.

There are probably many other ways you can attract traffic; however, the important thing is that whatever you do, you keep doing your best. Eventually there will be many visitors coming to your site.

Blog, Web

I got inspired to write this article after visiting another website. That website belongs to a completely different niche; however, the author of that site had some interesting thoughts that I think are worth mentioning. Anyway, I would like to discuss the idea of waking up early. I believe that waking up early is a good habit for bloggers, because blogging requires a lot of work. If you get up early then you can accomplish a lot more things. This is definitely the biggest argument as any successful blogger will tell you that you will need to invest a lot of time if you want your blog to be popular. I also think that it is easy to write a lot of posts in the morning, as for most people it is harder to do any work in the evening. I mentioned that this applies to most people and not to all, because I know that a lot depends on the individual. Some bloggers have the most work done during the night. On the other hand, since for most people it is more natural to work in the morning, our productivity would increase if we were getting up a little bit earlier. Try to get up earlier, and see how it works for you. It may be a good idea to write one post each morning. I am sure you will be surprised how much work can be done in the morning straight after you wake up. You will be rested and that is why your productivity will increase.

Blog, Web

Some time ago, I heard of a website that allows sending medals to people. I wonder if you will find it as interesting as I did. There are many medals to choose from, some more hilarious like “Irritable Panda Bear”, ”Mid-Air High Five”, or “Icy Cold Beer”. There are also some more serious like “Educational Blogger Award” and “Interesting Blog Award”. There are also some rude ones like a “Dead Cockroach Award”, which I guess are good for a prank, or you could also sent it to somebody who you do not like. Visit this site, and I am sure you will find some hilarious awards, although before you send a “Dead Cockroach Award” to anyone make sure that it is really what you want to do, and make sure that the person you are sending it has a sense of humor.

You can find the medals at www.justsayhi.com/bb/awards. All you have to do is choose an award, input the recipients name, email, URL, and provide your own name, email, and optionally URL, if you are a webmaster. What I like about this site is that it is directed towards bloggers, so if you are a blogger yourself, I am sure you will appreciate it. There are not many sites like this on the Internet.

Blog, Web

Submitting your website to different blog directories is an excellent way to increase your website’s Page Rank and to attract new readers. If you want to be a successful blogger, it is very important to have your website listed in many places. Each submission will give you a backlink, and each backlink will increase the popularity of your blog.

It might even take a couple of days/weeks to submit your blog to many directories, as there is really a lot of them. It is unfortunate that a lot of directories that are still being discussed on the blogosphere no longer exist, are not accepting registrations, or you have to pay to be included there. I would like to share the result of my work with you by providing a list of directories. They should be up to date, and are free unless something has changed recently. A lot of bloggers are submitting their sites to them, and they are generally considered to be a great place to be listed. Some of them will require your blog to have at least a few posts, in order to eliminate blogs which may not last a long time. Here is the list of the directories: technorati.com, findory.com, blogflux.com, blogarama.com, bloogz.com, globeofblogs.com, blogdigger.com, 2rss.com, blogstreet.com, bloghop.com, icerocket.com, readablog.com, weblog-index.com, bloggernow.com, fuelmyblog.com, blog-search.info, findingblog.com, blogintro.com, blog-search.com, blogdir.co.uk, lsblogs.com, 5starblogs.com, daytimenews.com/submit-rss-feed.aspx, blogmad.net, nodp.info, blogcatalog.com.

Please note that the order of the list is completely random. While some directories may cease to exist at some point, or do not allow registrations, I hope that most of them will be accepting registrations for a long time. Feel free to leave a comment recommending any other blog directories you think are worth being listed here.

Blog, Web

Taking care of a blog is quite complicated, and that is why there are some things you can forget about quite easily. There are a couple of things that I would like to mention that you should try not to forget about. It is important not to forget about the following points:

1. Proofread your posts before publishing them, or read them at least a few times. You do not necessarily need another person to proofread your posts. You can do it yourself if you stay focused on what you are doing. If your post is going to contain many mistakes, then your blog is not going to look professional.
2. Back up your blog often. The WordPress platform can do this automatically with a proper plug-in. However, if your does not, take care of this important aspect. Think how much time you would waste if your posts got deleted. Serious bloggers will always want to back up their blog.
3. Link to your older posts. In the opinion of many bloggers this is a very good idea. Your highest quality posts might not be easily accessible, and probably are not receiving a lot of traffic. Why not direct more visitors to these posts?
4. Upgrade your blogging platform. It is a good idea to upgrade your WordPress platform on a regular basis, as it enhances security. It also often adds some new and useful features. Make sure you upgrade your plug-ins as well.

Blog

Page Rank is the most popular way of ranking websites. There is a similar tool to the popular Page Rank that offers to rate your site in a different manner. In this case its name is Real Ranker, and you can visit its website to check out your rank. What is interesting is that each site is rated from 0 to 100 points, so each site is rated in a more precise way compared to the traditional PR scale from 0 to 10. I do not think that this tool will become very popular, because it was not released by any major company. It is not even backed up by any popular company. Nonetheless, it is an appealing tool that in my opinion has a lot of potential. Visit its website to check your Real Ranker score and see for yourself.

Blog, Tech, Web

There are many ways to monetize your blog. One of them is to implement monetization widgets. What is a monetization widget, one might ask? It is simply a script that gets displayed on your site as a widget. There are a few companies that offer such kind of widgets. I am going to list two of them, namely WidgetBucks and ScratchBack.

What is attractive about them is that they are similar to other widgets in a sense that they are easy to implement. This is especially true if you have a blogging platform like WordPress that supports plugins. Some of them work like pay-per-click ads, text lick ads, or even like affiliate links. They all might work in a different way, yet all of them provide you with an opportunity to monetize your site.
It is important to remember that while monetizing a website is a good idea, you should always keep your visitors in mind. This means that whatever ads you place on your website should be non-intrusive. Visitors will keep coming to your blog is they appreciate the content being posted there and you have to be careul not to have too many ads or widgets.

Biz, Blog, Education, Finance, Home, Web

On this website I give advice about blogging and about a variety of Internet topics. One of the key aspects of blogging is having your domain and hosting associated with it. If you want your blog to look professional, you need to choose an established and successful hosting provider that you will be able to depend on. There is nothing worse then investing a lot of your time in your blog and then realizing that your site is not working properly or is even down, because of your hosting provider. There have been cases where hosting providers suddenly vanished, either because of debt, or because they did not have profits. That is why you should be careful choosing your hosting provider and should ask other webmasters what they think about a specific company. You may even want to visit a website that discusses Web hosting, because you can never be too careful choosing a web hosting provider for your blog. You should always ask whether the uptime is guaranteed and what is the bandwidth limit. Basically, you jsut want to make sure that your blog will continue to work without any interruptions, even if you will decide to host larger files like audio or videos.

Blog, Main Category, Tech

As you probably know, being a blogger requires a lot of work. This not only applies to professional bloggers. A blogger has a multitude of things to work on: ideas for posts, marketing, website design, link exchanges etc. This time I would like to give you some advice on making your CSS more organized. For those who are wondering what CSS is, let me tell you that CSS is responsible for a lot of customizability when it comes to your website. You can change the font, colors, default paragraphs, and so on. In any case, to make your CSS more organized, visit www.htmlhelp.com/tools/csscheck/, input the location of your style sheet (CSS), and run a report that gives a feedback on your code. It will give warnings for any potential elements that might cause problems. In most cases when you use a popular template, then you should not have any error. However, sometimes even if you use a popular template you might want to do some changes, and if that is the case then something can always go wrong. By using such CSS tools you can make sure that your style sheet file does not contain any errors. Additionally, such tools can be very useful for web designers who create templates on a daily basis.

Biz, Blog, Web

When it comes to blogging, there are some decisions to be made related to our domain names. First of all, we have to decide where we want to host our website. For example, if we decide to host our site on Blogspot, then our domain name will look like this: domain.blogspot.com. On the other hand, if we choose a custom domain, then we can completely customize our domain name. We will also not be forced to use “blogspot”, “wordpress”, or any other word in our blog address. Custom domain cost money, but some sites can teach you how to have an extra income to cover the costs of your domains.

Being hosted on a custom domain name is generally considered to be a better solution, but why are there still many successful blogs that are hosted on Blogspot? I believe that they did not switch to a custom domain name, because they did not want to lose their domain age and back links. If that happened, this would mean that from a SEO perspective they would have to start from the beginning. Since accumulating links can take a long time, changing a domain is not an easy decision to make.
Another aspect to consider may be growing registration fees. The registration fees for domain names are generally getting higher, as VeriSign quite often raises the prices. VeriSign raised the prices at least two times since 2006, so some analysts are getting alarmed by this trend. I think that the prices are still relatively low, as the cost of hosting is the major expense for webmasters. This especially applies to those with a lot of traffic and downloadable resources such as videos, audio, and software. VerisSign claims that the .com and .net infrastructures are continually being fortified against more sophisticated cyberattacks, so let us hope that this company will spend the extra money it is receiving on security.

The decision whether to switch to a custom domain will ultimately be up to you, so consider all facts before making a final decision.

Blog, Tech, Web