48HoursWeb

First of all, I would like to say that you should value the traffic you already receive. Let’s say that you have 30 visitors per day. Some bloggers might say that it is not a lot, but you don’t have to think this way. There are some businesses which do not have that many visitors in their store. So, if you want to compare to them, it isn’t bad at all. On the other hand, what I suggest is to focus on getting a positive action per visitor. What I mean is that whenever a visitor enters your website, you should have some expectations what you want them to do. Do you want them to read your best posts? If so, then list links to your best posts on the sidebar. What if you want them to click on your ads? If this is what you want to achieve, then implement them in a visible area of your site, and make sure that they are related to the topic of your website. Overall, it is important that you guide your visitors in the right direction in order to maximize your positive action per visitor ratio. This way even if you don’t have that many visitors to your site, you might still be successful.

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Sometimes people wonder what to do in order to be one the best bloggers. There are many particular things you can do to become successful, but in my opinion you will not get very far if you do not really enjoy blogging. There are many bloggers who really enjoy writing and you can see it quite clearly if you visit their blog. However, there are also some who struggle to write posts, and decided to be blogging because their friends do it as well. Doing something because other people are doing it might not be a good enough reason to continue doing it. If you want to be the next blogging superstar, you need to really love what you are doing. There are countless things that you can work on in order to make your blog more appealing. However, if you do not enjoy blogging, then you might not have enough motivation to do so. Blog on the subject you love and make sure you enjoy it. Every person has some interests, so try blogging about the topics that you have interest in. If you are fascinated about the topics that you write, then it is also going to be interesting to read your articles. It might be a good idea to write down the list of things you have interest in. This might be a good exercise to try to figure out what you should be blogging about. Are you a blogger yourself? Do you enjoy blogging about the subject you write about? Those are some questions you might want to answer.

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Blogs are a great platform for people who wish to express themselves. They are also a great way to pass down knowledge. However, there is a problem that some bloggers might have noticed. I am talking about the fact that often very valuable, but older posts, get buried. After a blogger blogs for many months, he probably wrote many good articles, and it would be a shame if nobody would read them anymore. One solution is to link to your older posts from your newer ones. You can link to older posts that might be considered an introduction to your newer posts, or you can link to your older posts that present the same topic in a different way. Either way you do it, it is important that your readers will benefit from it. Another way to make sure that your readers will keep visiting your older posts is to link to some of them from your homepage. You may choose a few posts that in your opinion are the most valuable, as this way there will be always new visitors reading them. Yet another way to direct traffic to older posts is to submit them to social bookmarking sites like Digg. If your post contains any useful information, then it is very probable that many users will digg your submission. As a result your post will receive a lot of traffic.

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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.

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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.

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It is important to have links pointing to your site from other people’s blogs. Such links will not only contribute to higher Page Rank, but can also bring a lot of targeted traffic. There are at least a few ways you can try to obtain such links. Your site will benefit from them, so here is what you can do:

-Submit your blog to as many directories as possible.
-Submit your articles to free article directories.

The process of submitting your blog and articles can and will be time consuming. However, there is a solution to this problem. You can purchase the appropriate software that will do it for you automatically. This will cost you some money, but if you are dedicated to blogging it will not be a problem. Additionally, if your blog generates some money, your investment will surely not be wasted. It will still take you some time to register in order to submit your articles, but you will only have to do it once. The same applies to web directory submission. Many programs already have directories listed in their database for your convenience. I know there are many webmasters taking advantage out of such software, and they claim that it is worth it.

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If you are a blogger having a WordPress blog, you may want to insert a picture in your post from time to time. You might want to do that in order to make your blog more attractive to visitors. It might happen that some of your friends will send you an image that they will ask you to post on your blog. However, sometimes you might be surprised that the image is so big that it does not fit very well in your post. You should remember that you can always resize an image. To do so, go to your draft and left click on this picture once. You will see that it is surrounded by black frame with a few black dots. Move your cursor on one of those dots and wait until your cursor changes into double headed arrow. If it does, then hold left mouse button and drag it in order to make it smaller. Integrating images is a great idea, but try to remember not to make them too big. Another important thing that you should remember is to make sure your blog loads within a few seconds. In other words, do not upload too many images, or those visitors that use dial-up will have a hard time browsing your site. Images can make your blog look better, but you also have to take into account the loading time of your blog. There are some websites on the Internet that can help you measure that.

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CAPTCHA is very often used as a method to reduce the number of spam comments on websites. It is a way to verify that the person who leaves a comment is real, and is not an automated script. For those who do not know, CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. “CAPTCHA” is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, and it is often incorporated it in a way that visitors have to type the letters of a distorted image. Most spam comments are posted by bots or programs which are specifically designed for spamming. They automatically visit sites on the Internet to look for places where it is possible to submit comments. They do this in order to post unwanted advertisements of websites or services. One of the best ways to stop these bots is to use the CAPTCHA system which requires the visitor to write down the letters that he sees. Since computer programs do not know how to analyze images, only humans will be able to decipher the letters. While some CAPTCHA’s have been broken like phpBB’s, it is still a very good method to avoid scripts spamming forums or other websites. A lot of sites are recently adding the CAPTCHA verification system. I think that this will not make them necessarily less enjoyable to visit, but will rather prevent spammers and hackers. However, when using CAPTCHA it is important to make it readable to for average person. After all, we want to stop bots from visiting our site, not our loyal visitors.

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More and more people on the Internet listen to podcasts. For those who do not know, podcasts are similar to blog posts. The difference is that podcasts are in audio format. More technically speaking, a podcast is a collection of digital media files that are distributed over the Internet. It often uses syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers. Podcasts have become more and more popular, and some believe this is due to iPods. That is because iPods allow its users to listen to thousands of audio and video podcasts. In any case, if you want to compete with the best websites in your niche, you might consider using podcasts to gain an edge over your competitors. All you have to do is use the podPress plug-in that you can find on wordpress.org. This plug-in enables you to incorporate podcasts without making any serious changes to your site. There are many advantages of podcasts, but the biggest one is that you can speak directly to your readers or rather listeners.

One downside of podcasting is that not everyone knows how to subscribe to podcasts. However, once people get the hang of it, they usually really enjoy it a lot. They might even become fans because they will like them so much. If you want to add a personal feeling to your blog, at least consider the possibility of integrating podcasts. You might start by listening to some of the popular podcasts on the Internet in order to get inspired.

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Designing a blog template requires a lot of knowledge and skill. Even if we use finished templates, there is still a lot of work to do associated with designing our site. That is because we should try to make some changes so that our website will not look exactly like hundreds of other blogs. Sites that look more original are generally more valued over the Internet. There are many website elements that we may want to incorporate into our site to make it look more original, but the one that I want to discuss today are drop-down menus. These dropdown menus are html elements that upon clicking reveal a set of internal or external links. It sounds really fun, but in my opinion, we should generally avoid having such elements. That is because many visitors may not choose to click on the drop-down menu, and they will not visit the links we included there. We should encourage visitors to visit our links, not make it harder for them. It is true that people prefer more simple solutions, and giving them an option to choose from a drop-down menu, might only cause some unnecessary trouble. If you want to add any links on your website, try to keep it as simple as possible, and avoid complicated elements like drop-down menus.

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