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, Tech
There are various community exchanges that are getting organized all the time. Did you ever consider organizing a community exchange? Let us say that you want to organize a MyBlogLog community exchange. If you are interested in gaining a lot of traffic and increasing the number of readers you have, this can be a very good opportunity for you.
You should start by listing a dozen or so websites along with the link to their MyBlogLog community page, and notifying them about it. You should also inform them about the rules of participating in the exchange. Let them know that they should join all of the MyBlogLog communities on the list. They should also copy the list and create a new post on their blog. They should include the list in their post, and write a brief paragraph that explains the rules of the community exchange. They can add two or three more MyBlogLog communities to the list, and then publish the post on their blog. They should also indicate that if anyone wants to be added to this list, they should leave a comment requesting it.
Not only such exchange bring new readers to your website, but also increase your backlinks and can be a lot of fun.
Blog, Web
Online marketing has many strategies, one of which is keyword research. Blogs can often rank well in search engines due to their frequently updated content. This can bring a lot of visitors to your site. Another way to bring many visitors is to do some keyword research. This type of research will show you what people are searching for, and will maximize the potential the search engines have to bring traffic to your site. If you research what keywords are popular, then you will know what topics to focus on, and maybe you will even change the marketing strategy your blog has. Great tools with the help of which you will be able to research keywords are keyworddiscovery.com and wordtracker.com. Both of them are relatively easy to use so check out both of them in order to decide yourself which one you will want to stick to. I have to warn you that keyword research might take some time, but in the end it is worth it. After all, search engines are an excellent source of traffic for webmasters who optimize their site for them. I does not mean you have to makes drastic changes; however, being aware of the most popular keywords will surely give you an advantage over the competition. Investing some time into keyword research is certainly a good idea for any webmaster who wants to be successful. Using a powerful keyword research toll should save you a lot of time.
Blog, Tech, 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
If you like implementing videos on your blog, you might be interested in the feature I am going to discuss. Some time ago Adsense introduced a feature called video units that allows its users to embed a YouTube video on one’s blog. This allows to make money from ads being displayed along with the videos.
If the videos you embedded on your website are relevant to the topic of your blog, this feature will allow you to make some extra cash, while at the same time not distract your visitors from other content. You can be always sure that the ads displayed will be relevant to the video and they will be non-intrusive. Additionally, you will be able to blend your YouTube videos into your blog by customizing the color and layout, as well as choosing from a few different player sizes.
Of course, whether you will really benefit from videos on your blog depends on your blog’s niche. Some blogs can greatly benefit from YouTube videos like, for example, entertainment blogs. It might not be that easy to find suitable videos for a niche like blogging. However, since there are millions of videos on YouTube, I am sure that every webmaster will be able to find some videos worth embedding on his blog. There are many videos that can either teach something valuable or simply video that are entertaining. Whenever you implement a video on your blog make sure that your website loads quite fast. Many webmasters make a mistake of adding to many elements to their blog that take too long to load.
Biz, Blog, Finance, Health, Personal, Web
A lot of bloggers struggle to post on a daily basis on their blog. However, you do not need to post on a daily basis to be a successful blogger. What is important is that you should post on a regular basis, and that you should find your blogging rhythm. Here are a few tips which should guide you in the right direction:
-Consider your niche and type of blog. How often are your competitors posting? The ideal posting frequency might be once per week or even a few times per day. The posting frequency might depend on your niche. If you are a news blogs then you might need to post many posts per day.
-Be consistent. Try to establish a consistent posting rhythm, so that your readers will know when to anticipate your next post. You may decide, for example, to post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
-Start out slow. Make sure you do not put unnecessary burden on yourself. It might take some time before you will get used to writing posts every day. Once you will be more experienced it will be a lot easier for you to write posts.
-Monitor your readerships response. Do your visitors enjoy your current posting frequency? Look for any signs you might not be posting often enough. On the other hand, maybe you are posting too much and it is hard for most of your readers to keep up?
You will have to make the decision yourself, so take into account all of the aspects.
Blog, Web
From time to time, I like visiting a particular blog that I could describe as very successful. This blog mainly discusses the topic of blogging. What I found interesting is that in one of his articles he listed all of the things he has never done to promote his blog. These included no feedcount, no guest blogging, no guest posts on blog, no contests, no paid advertising, no incentives (this means no eBooks, free reviews, or gifts of any sort), no Digg frontpages, and no frequent posting. This was a very surprising information as it shows that he did not use many different methods to promote his blog, yet he has a lot of visitors. I still wonder however how he achieved such a success. It seems that there is no consensus on how to achieve a large number of visitors. However, there are some things you can work on to increase the number of visitors. I believe that organizing and maintaining a blog is not an easy task, and that is why I want to give you some SEO advice:
-Optimize your blog properly. Your blog should be optimized first for users, then for search engines, and later possibly for monetizing it. My advice is that you look for a template that will have a white background.
-Change your permalinks so that they look as follows: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/. This will make your permalinks more search engine friendly, and visitors searching for particular keywords will be directed to your post.
-Manage RSS feeds. RSS is a very good way to help your content read the data from your blog. I personally am quite familiar with FeedBurner.com; however, if you want you can also try OnlyWire.com and Technorati.com. To let the search engines know that you posted a message on your blog, use such free services like PingOMatic.com and Pingoat.com.
Blog, Health, Personal, Web
Do you sometimes wonder whether participating in contests is a good idea or just a waste of time? So far I have participated in quite a few contests. Different contests have different entry requirements. I am not going to write about those contests that require entrants to pay a certain amount of money, because I do not think participants should be charged for such things.
The contests I am usually participating in do not have high requirements, although the exception was one contest where ten highest ranked posts written by ten different bloggers were winning an award. All of the winners of that particular contest put a lot of work into writing their posts.
Generally, I am more interested to participate in contests that will give me something valuable for my blog, like a link back, or directed traffic. I especially like if the organizer promises to link back to each participant just for entering the event.
I am almost always avoiding contests that have high entry requirements, and want me to do at least a few things like leave a comment, subscribe to RSS feed, write a post, and so on. Additionally, if there are many participants, and there will be only one winner, then do not get your hopes up too high.
To sum up, I would like to say that the right contests can be really great. Simply participate in contests you are interested in, and make sure you have a chance to win.
Blog, Web
There are millions of blogs out there. While bloggers communicate with their readers with written language, I am wondering how attractive it would be for readers to view videos of bloggers speaking on various subjects. Qik Video Streaming allows streaming videos from mobile phones, and such content could appear on blogs or related sites like Facebook. I am pretty sure that video streaming blogs will not replace traditional blogs. On the other hand, I am also pretty sure that some bloggers will want to integrate video streaming to some degree. Qik Video Streaming has a latency of around 1-2 seconds, so it is pretty efficient. Time will tell how popular it will become. While it may not become very popular within a year or two, I think that video streaming will gain on popularity when fast broadband connections will be even more accessible. Many Internet users have download limits set by their Internet service providers so they cannot download as much data as they would like. However, this is also likely to change and this is one of the reasons why video streaming might gain on popularity in the future. Of course, it does not mean that regular blogs will disappear.
Blog, Tech, Web
Blogging requires a lot of dedication, so over the course of time, you might have abandoned one of your blogs. Maybe months might have passed and you did not add any new content. You barely receive any visitors, and have very few RSS subscribers. Is it worth restarting such a dormant blog? I believe it might be a good idea for a few reasons:
-This blog will have an older domain. Older domains seem to be more trusted by search engines. This means that your articles might get ranked higher in search engines.
-Existing back links are another reason why restarting your old blog is a good idea. Relevant back links often lead to increased traffic. Old blogs often have a lot of links coming from various sources.
-Existing subscribers. If you create a new domain, in the beginning you are not going to have any subscribers. Even if you currently have very few RSS subscribers left, at least you will have a few loyal readers from the start. Of course, if your blog has been abandoned for a very long time, then there might not be many subscribers left.
I think that there is no doubt that there are many advantages to restarting a dead blog.
Blog, Web