When it comes to the world of blogging, having a steady number of visitors is very important. The question is how to increase the reader base. There are different ways to encourage visitors to keep coming, but this time I would like to present you with a way to increase the number of visitors by encouraging them to contribute. By observing the top blogs on the Internet, it is quite easy to notice that many of them encourage their readers to share their own thoughts. This is usually done by asking an open-ended question at the end of the post. You can also simply ask them for an opinion. Ask them about something you know that they have interest in. Of course, another good way to encourage people to contribute is by starting some kind of contest. Anyway, there can be huge benefits arising from having a community that is used to actively contributing. Such dedicated visitors will be a less willing to stop visiting your blog. That is because they will feel that they contributed a lot to it. While it may not be that easy to encourage your visitors to do so, it will be worth it in the long run.
I have been focusing on proofreading this blog recently, and I am pleased to say that I corrected a lot of errors. According to many people proofreading is tedious, and hard to do well. Yet, every blogger can benefit from some proofreading tips. That is because we want our articles to look professional. We want the respect of our visitors, and fellow bloggers. Here are some tips which might help you:
-Read a lot. I think this point is pretty obvious. The more you read, the easier proofreading becomes. This is especially true if you assume a proofreader mindset. Try to inspect every word and take your time. Reading newspapers or magazines may be a good idea.
-Write a lot. The more you write, the less you are going to repeat common writing errors. You can either write a lot of articles for your blog, or simply write about whatever you like for practice. Writing articles is an excellent exercise.
-Ask another bloggers or friend to spell check your posts. It might be even more effective than checking your own posts. You may want to return the favor and spell check his articles as well.
Proofreading well is tough, but in the end it is very rewarding. Of course, it is not that easy to spot all of the errors, but it is important to at least notice some of them. With time you are going to be a better and better writer so do not worry about that.
What would you do if you had one million dollars? This is just an example of a topic you could ask your readers to write about if you organize a contest. Contests and giveaways are a great way to increase the traffic to your site and obtain valuable links from all over the blogosphere. I would like to give you some examples of some contests and giveaways that other bloggers organized:
-A certain blogger was giving away USB flash drives. You may even want to preload it with software to make it more valuable. Ask participants to post about your giveaway on their blogs. You may also choose to ask them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Participants should also leave a comment informing you what they did. To make this giveaway more appealing you may promise each participant that you will link to his blog just for participate in the giveaway.
-One blogger asked his readers to write about what they would do if they had one million dollars. You could ask them to create a post on their blog with a link to your contest, or you could simply tell them to leave a comment on your website.
-A webmaster of a popular blog organized a contest in which the prize was free advertising on this popular blogs website. This can encourage many people to participate if your blog is indeed popular and has high Page Rank.
-Another blogger asked his readers to write an article on any subject that explains how to do something. The only requirement was to link to his website. In this particular competition, he was giving away cash prizes. Giving away cash prizes is always a good idea, as this way people can spend their money however they want.
If you decide to organize contents or giveaways, make sure that you clearly specify when you will choose the winners. Additionally, you should keep in mind that asking participants to link to your site is a good way to obtain a lot of backlinks. Even if your blog is not very popular that is not a problem, because there will be fewer participants, which means higher changes of winning for anyone who participates.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools that people use to analyze the traffic coming to their websites. It has many features, and even demanding users are not complaining. Recently, Google incorporated a few useful tools like the benchmarking feature, data sharing, and audio ad charting. With these tools you can compare your sites performance to industry benchmarks. You will also be able to see when your Google Audio ads run, in relation to your web site traffic. The benchmarking feature is especially useful since you will be able to plot your data and give you the ability to overlay various industry averages on top of your statistics. For those concerned with privacy, I would like to add that the data is anonymized and aggregated, so you do not have to worry about your competitors checking out your site’s details. On the other hand, analyzing the data included in the benchmarking feature can be useful to every webmaster. That is because it is important to know how you compare to your competitors. The only people not interested in these features might be those who simply have a website for fun and do not rely at all on the number of visitors.
I would like to present you with blog directories that I found that might be useful to you. Some of them might accept only certain kind of blogs, so do not submit to directories that obviously deal with a topic different than that of your own blog. Here is the list:
-Bloogz allows you to search for blogs by typing in a keyword. You can choose from five languages.
-Icerocket is another blog directory.
-Readablog allows users can view blogs by new additions, most popular, top searches and recently viewed.
-Getblogs is a human edited directory of over 11000 Weblogs in 190+ categories.
-Bloggernow allows blogs to be listed under many categories.
-Fuelmyblog is displaying blogs of the day on their main web page.
-Blogsearch has a new blog, top rated, editor’s pick, and hot blog list.
-Superblogdirectory is listing Blogs from around the web broken down in easy to search categories.
-Findingblog is a searchable directory. It ranks the top 10 hottest sites in each category.
-Blogintro is another useful blog directory.
There are many advantages of having your blog listed in directories. Among the most important advantages are improved rankings and additional traffic. After all, those are the aspects that most webmasters care about.
Many people only use Internet Explorer and never even try to check out any other Web browsers. Internet Explorer is definitely the most popular browser, but who said that it is the best? It is certainly not the best only because it is bundled with Windows. As a person who prefers Firefox and Opera, I find it inconvenient that some sites only work well in Internet Explorer. Of course, I have IE installed on my PC as well. If it is necessary I can run it at any time, but generally I prefer not to do it. That is because I already have dozens of programs running on my computer.
Recently, I was wondering how many browsers a typical computer user can name. Do they know about Opera, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Netscape? Probably not everybody, as only those who spend a lot of time surfing the Web are more likely to know them. However, I am glad that the overall awareness of other browsers is growing, and that people are more and more open to using other browsers as well. I predict that in the future, there will be many reliable browsers which we will be able to choose from. Today the competition is still not so steep, but in the years to come, there will be more and more companies releasing feature-rich browsers. I encourage each one of you to try at least one other browser besides IE to see how you like it. If you do so, it will be a useful educational experience.
Today, I would like to offer a tip on opening restricted websites. When I am talking about restricted websites, I do not mean any illegal sites. On the other hand, what I have in mind what websites that you cannot open from places like your office or school. Those sites are not harmful, however, they are often considered distracting in certain environments, so that is why they are often blocked. I will show you how to access them anyway. Actually, there are a few ways to do it:
-Search for a website in Google like, for example, website.com. You will notice that when you click on the website it will not open. However, you can open the cache version of the page, which will enable you to visit the site. It might be a slightly older version of the webpage though.
-Use an online IP conversion tool to get the IP address of a particular website, and enter the IP address in your browser. This should open the website as well.
-Use a proxy anonymizer tool website, which will change your IP address. This will change your identity on the Internet, and should allow you to visit the restricted website as well.
I wrote the above guide for education reasons only, so please do not abuse the knowledge you gained. There are many reasons why a person would want to access a restricted website and I believe that there are many good reasons. Of course, there might be some situations when it will be wiser to to use this knowledge you gained.
When eBay was first created, it was basically sustained by a large group of small sellers. Those were people that were selling items only from time to time, but they were doing this quite regularly. EBay would not have achieved what it did, without this type of users. Unfortunately, it seems that nowadays eBay prefers large sellers that sale at least $1,000 or even $500,000 in merchandise on a monthly basis. Such sellers have discounts that make it quite hard for an average person to compete. After all, the best way to compete is through attractive prices. I know that there are still people who make money on eBay, but it is getting more difficult. Since eBay is the biggest online auction in the world, other auction sites may follow as well.
Some people might not agree that favoring large sellers will have an influence on small sellers, but the truth is that various fees can cut profit by a large amount. Overall, reducing the fees of large sellers will make them reduce the prices making it impossible to compete for regular sellers. Of course, this is not such a bad thing for buyers, because consumers are going to appreciate lower prices.
Do you think you have proper skills to be a good marketer? If you consider yourself to be a good marketer, then maybe you can make some money because of that. How about writing Google AdWords Ads for people who do not know anything about proper marketing? The ads are only three lines long, so there is not a lot of work involved and you could charge, let us say $10 per a properly written ad. You can find customers by looking at their sponsored results in Google, and if you feel that you could write a better ad, contact them, and they might be willing to sue your services. Webmasters spend a fortune on AdSense, and even if they pay you $10, this money is usually a fraction on what they spend on advertising.
If you are trying to advertise by using AdSense yourself, then you should take your time to write a thought over ad. This is very important because potential visitors to your website are going to decide whether it is worth visiting it just by reading your ad. It has to be concise, yet it has to draw attention. It is not that easy to advertise just by using AdSense, but if you know what you are doing then you can be quite successful.
Today, I am going to write a few sentences about Flixya. Instead of incorporating videos on your own blog or website, you can have a lot of fun while watching and sharing with others videos through websites such as Flixya and earn some cash too. I will try to explain exactly how Flixya works, so here it goes:
� You create a free account providing your Google AdSense ID.
� You share your favorite movie clips on youtube.com, gofish.com, daily motion and other pages. To make more money, it is advisable that you choose these which are entertaining and appealing to many people.
� You use your free account on Flixya to share the videos.
� You wait now to reap your profit. Every time a person clicks an ad displayed on the same site as your video, you make money.
� You are going to be paid by Google AdSense, not Flixya itself.
It always takes time to build an audience. You can make your videos more popular by sharing your personal video url on forums, social news sites like digg, delicious etc. The most important thing is that you have fun while doing it. If you are interested, you can sign up at their site for free. Flixya also uses referral system. For each referred person a user will get 20% of that person�s earnings.