Bloggers at any level of their experience, feel that what they are doing is the right thing and there are minimal mistakes they are committing, and if any, they could be ignored. Having such a mindset itself is one of the mistakes that every blogger does. You are a learner from the first day to the last in your Blogging career. Words and paragraphs don’t flow out of your mind into the keyboard with perfection all the time. And it isn’t a particular blog post am talking about, but the entire blog where each and every aspect including the design, the conversations, which all hold equal importance.

In keeping a check on what all steps followed would be advantageous for the blog, many bloggers ignore what all mistakes are being done and the latter one would question the quality of the blog. One shouldn’t feel low or discouraged if someone points out the mistakes they make, because Bloggers are humans and are bound to make mistakes, but a few blunders, if kept a check on, could be avoided and would make the readers feel that it is a valuable resource they have reached to spend some time reading.

Here are the few Blogging Blunders that a blogger commits usually, and should try to avoid:

1. Lack of promotion, focusing just on content

You are not famous from the first day itself. Every basic step has to be taken to make the blog noticed by the readers, and the promotion has to be done for a blog to be run with good reader base and conversations. If you aren’t promoting your blog and the posts, and are just relying on the good content for visitors to flow in automatically, you are making a big mistake. You can use Social Networking and Bookmarking for Blog Promotion.

2. No check on Typos and grammar

Make yourself a reader and think for moment whether you would be reading any content which has got grammatical mistakes and typing errors. You surely won’t be liking it that way. Feel the same way for your readers, and so have your content neat and free from grammatical errors. The trust on the quality increases with the reduction of errors in the article. Always allocate some time to proofread your blog posts.

3. Re-writes are not always loved

This is the case we have seen many a times with bloggers. A couple of news rewritten might gain some instant popularity, but the bloggers make it a trend to start rewriting all the best written material from the other blogs. This leads to saturation, and is not always suggested. Try to research on the topic you are writing, so that what you write “stands high” well above the others. Try to produce more creative quality content instead of reinventing the wheel.

4. Blogging for money, not passion

Earning money would be a passion for anyone, either that would be a blogger, a freelancer or a webmaster. Making money has got hundreds of ways, but when someone thinks to blog only for Money, the main passion for Blogging isn’t there and this always would restrict you from being open-minded, which would have been a totally different case otherwise. When you are Blogging with a passion of writing and expressing yourself, the response and appreciation is totally different.

5. Starting with a niche, generalizing later on

Sticking to a particular niche when you have opened it for the same purpose, requires some guts and determination because many a times a single niche won’t bring in much traffic initially and the blogger would be motivating himself to write about the niches which are totally different, just to bring in more readers. There isn’t an ethic to follow that a particular niche is to be stuck upon, but the current return visitors of your blog would never like it when they get to read something entirely different than the regular trend on the blog. Imagine yourself finding a story about football on a health blog, that’s what your readers might feel too. Choose a perfect niche for your blog before starting your blog.

6. Images speak a thousand words, don’t forget to include one

Images are a style adding factor to the content. Content is a substance that people would read to gain the information, but to make the same interesting and stylish, and keep the users interested for more, the Images play a main role. You are jolting down thousands of words writing about something really important, but without any images, most of the readers would ignore more than half of the content just wondering how boring it would be to go from A to Z of the entire page. There are several reasons to have images on your blog and you can get copyright and royalty free images easily.

7. Comment on other blogs, but stick to the niche

Commenting on other blogs to attract new visitors and blogger friends is one of the best tricks around, but if you have an intention of just keep commenting and not have a control on where you are doing that, it would hurt the blog’s ranking, firstly for sometimes landing into those blog pages where there are hundreds of outbound links already, and secondly because you aren’t sticking to the similar niche. We always see many bloggers commenting on .edu blogs which are related to education, and the blog they are promoting in these edu blogs are related to technology. This doesn’t hold any advantage, but can go the negative way sometimes. By doing these you can become a hero on blog commenting.

8. Decision on choosing Blog Platform and Design

Don’t go with the trend. It’s good to take suggestions and ask people which Blogging platform would be holding an advantage over the other, but the end decision has to be taken by you. The Blogger platform is simple, has limited options and is the best for Amateurs, and just because the probloggers use WordPress, you shouldn’t use the same if you have no knowledge of how to customize the design or make changes in the blog. You could make irreversible blunders which might want you to start from the scratch.

Some useful posts related to this:

• Blogger vs WordPress – Reasons Why You Must Choose Blogger
• Which Suits You Better? Blogger or WordPress?
• Which Blogging Platform Is Best For You?

9. Accept criticism and learn from it

Not everyone has the same mindset. Each blogger and reader has their own aggression and politeness, but you should keep in mind to accept the criticism from those who don’t like the way you express yourself. Try to explain, rather than bashing back at them trying to defend yourself. Doing the latter would end up making you lose your potential readers, who sometimes had an intention to teach you but in their own way.

There are several other blunders which bloggers easily make, and I might be doing the same in this post but we are all learners. Trying to maintain a standard style of writing would help, rather than showing aggression and being too polite at times. Copying or Plagiarizing content is what many newbie bloggers do, just to fill up their blogs being confident that the readers would not find who is the original author, but if this becomes a habit, the blogger would never learn how to write on their own. Write, make mistakes, listen to the commentators and learn from it. Nothing else can make you a better blogger.

This article is written by Chetan Bhawani. He is a tech blogger, a web hosting analyzer who reviews the various web hosting services, one of them being the Web hosting geeks and writes the various web hosting services and shares guides about them. If you wish to write for HBB, kindly check this.

9 Blogging Blunders A Blogger Should NOT Make is a post from HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

Do it already! If you’re not posting online images and videos for your local business, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to capture the attention of your target market. Studies and statistics continue to prove that images capture the attention of online users significantly more than text, especially when they show up in search results. And more and more people are watching online videos for both personal and business use; don’t you want them to be viewing yours? Webmasters and Bloggers even use viral videos to drive traffic to their blogs.

To make images and videos work for your local business, I’ve provided five tips below.

1. Have a plan

What types of images and videos will you capture? Where will you place them? What’s the goal of your images and videos? Do your homework and create a marketing game plan to get the most out of your images and videos. You can use before and after pics, graphs, professional images, and more in regards to images, and you can capture all sorts of videos, including how-to, interviews, testimonials, employees on-the-job, and more.

2. Post them everywhere appropriate

Once you have images and videos, post them on your webpage and social media networks as a start. Facebook gets a lot of hits for images and videos. YouTube is also significant for video posting given that it’s the number one used video streaming site online.

3. Use GEO-modifiers

Local search is huge, so be sure to include your contact address (zip, city, etc.) when you post images and videos, and if you can, include such information in the URLs for each image or video.

4. Don’t forget about Pinterest

We could have included this in #2 above, but I felt it was worth it to mention it in its own section.  After only a few months, Pinterest has quickly climbed to the number 3 slot as one of the most popular social media networking sites. Pinterest allows you to ‘Pin’ images throughout the web and is a great way to create back links to your local business website. Do your homework to see if it could work to help indirectly (you’re not supposed to directly promote businesses on Pinterest) promote your local business to gain leads and traffic.

5. Spread the word

Once you’ve loaded images and videos, be sure to post the links throughout all of your online pages and networks, including email campaigns.  Post the links on your Facebook page for business, Tweet about it on Twitter, post them on your local business blog, etc.

To keep up with and stay ahead of your competition online, use these tips to incorporate a variety of videos and images into your local business’ online marketing strategy with ease. You’ll be sure to generate more leads, traffic and repeat visitors if you do (which equates to increased conversions and profits for your local business!).

Do you use images and videos for your local business? Do you have any recommendations and suggestions for posting images and videos for optimal results? We’d love to hear about it below.

This article is written by Chris. He writes from real world experience building businesses and closing sales. His company Surefire Social specializes in local business marketing. If you wish to write for HBB, kindly check this.

5 Tips for Posting Videos and Images Online is a post from HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

There are many people around the web who makes their living by writing and I’m another proud one among them. Sometimes I feel writing has been torturing me and I don’t feel like writing at all. I’m also a busy human like others, I do have my personal life and when I come home ending up a busy day, nothing concerns me more than a good sleep.

I heard people often saying, “When you’re tired, you must have rest. Don’t write until you start feeling better”. Everyone is ready to give a useless advice when others are struggling with something. They don’t understand how pressure a writer feel when he has some work to do and he don’t feel like doing.

I feel being tired is no less than a writers’ block. All the time, I’ve been working for my paid writings, personal writings and managing my personal life (home, family, friends, bla-bla…) and it’s quite difficult for me to get back into my shorts and sit in front of my computers for few more hours. Whenever I feel so, I turn complicated things into simple ones.

1. Save Heavy Parts for the next day

Writing for web isn’t just a bunch of words, clients expect an SEO friendly, optimized, keyword rich in my article and I must satisfy theirs’. So to make your writing easier at such odd times, flag those parts which you feel difficult as To Do’s for the next day.

2. Dig out the project of fun

Some of technical writings are serious by nature and work, while some others are fun to do. Suppose if you are going to publish an e-book or tutorial, you can work with the multimedia tools rather than editing your copyright and disclaimer.

3. Complete all the simple stuff

This part is followed by the previous one. When you’ve saved all the tough tasks for the next day, you’re directly meant to complete the remaining simple parts on that very day.

4. Watch Your Intakes

I often see people, who feel & put themselves in a writers’ block condition. Even they change their food habits at such conditions. But I suggest you to take a small lunch and please don’t take too much coffee. The carbohydrates and caffeine in that can definitely affect your energy levels. Also drinking water regularly will help you to blog better.

5. Take a Walk

When you don’t feel like writing at all, take a walk and have some fresh air to get your blood flowing and clear your brain.

6.Grab Your Headphones

Most of the people motivate themselves with music and so I. Put on your headphones and listen to your favorite numbers. You can also do this while writing. Personally, I am a great fan of Taylor Swift and I usually write hearing to her latest albums. If you have a Dropbox account, you can upload your favorite files there and play music from your Dropbox account or you can download some awesome MP3 Songs from Grooveshark.

7. Still Can’t Work? Take a leave

If none of these works for you, then you should better take a leave or a short-term vacation. If you don’t have enough time to go out for a vacation, you can at least do refreshing things of your type like I go for bike riding, golf course or watch a movie.

If you are interested in blogging and travelling, you can check these out :

• 35 Painful Mistakes Travel Bloggers Make (And How To Fix Them)
• 25 Great Online Tools for Travelers and Vacationers

This article is written by Koundeenya Dhulipalla. He is the owner of Ink Drops. If you wish to write for HBB, kindly check this.

Are You Tired Of Writing? 7 Tips To Overcome That! is a post from HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

HBB Overview of April 2012 is here. HBB tries to improve the community’s value by providing useful guest posts to our readers. Once again we are glad to announce the guest authors and the top commentators of April 2012.

If you wish to write for us, HBB is always open for you. Below you can see some useful posts related to it.

• Guest Blogging: So Why Should You Care?
• You Blog. Should You Guest Blog?
• 5 Common Guest Blogging Practices You Should Know
• 5 Things To Follow To Be A Good Guest Blogger

You can make note of these useful posts and below you can see HBB’s guest authors for this month.

1. Chris Marentis: Chris Marentis writes from experience about lead generation, closing the sale and leveraging social media. He is the founder and CEO for a local internet marketing company Surefire Social, a resource for local search marketing.

Article: 11 Great Resources Every Local Business Should Know About

2. Amarendra: Amarendra is tech enthusiast and blogger. He also works on discounts, deals and coupons.

Article: Essential Techniques To Capitalize On Affiliate Sales

3. Aakash Goyal: Aakash Goyal is a professional blogger at GeekBuzzer. Where he sometimes write about WordPress, SEO and Blogging Tutorials.

Article: Supercharge WordPress Blog With Cloudflare, MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache

4. Sandeep Singh: Sandeeep Singh runs Technoleash where he writes on topics related to Android and lots more.

Article: 5 Reasons Why You Should Not Outsource Blog Articles

5. Christopher J: He is addicted to computers, gadgets and technology. He likes blogging, photography and hanging out! He blogs about Technology and Software at SparkWiz.com.

Article: Why Google’s Android Platform Is So Popular?

6. Jasmine: Jasmine is an experienced web consultant. She is the chief editor at Best Web Host – a web hosting review and resources website.

Article: 5 Basic Tips To Proofread Your Blog Posts Easily

If you wish to be a part of HBB, you can become a guest author by contributing Guest Posts. Do check ‘Join HBB‘ and Guest Blogging Rules. Cheers.

The Top Commentators of April are Aakash Goyal and Jasmine. Congrats for them, and I would like to thank other participants as well.

My best wishes and congratulations to them and for all who participated eagerly. Kudos.

Send your 125*125 banner asap (if you haven’t) to this email id : pradeep [at] hellboundbloggers [dot] com

MUST READ :

1. Brand Your Comments To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

2. HellBound Bloggers – Comments Policy

3. Ad Slots For Top Commentators

If you are going to participate in this month’s contest, then you can subscribe to HellBound Bloggers to get the articles as soon as possible.

CHECK THIS : Ways For Respecting Your Beloved Commentators

Why don’t you participate right now by commenting here?

HellBound Bloggers (HBB) Overview – April 2012 is a post from HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

One of the big problems for all the young bloggers is exams, every young blogger faces this problem and they get confused whether to concentrate on exams or their own blog. Even if they leave blogging concentrate on exams, their mind will still be focused on blogging itself. So after completing a small research I’m now able to tell you about how to manage your blog during exams.

1. Seek Your Friend’s Help

Building a good relationship with fellow bloggers is very important. A cup of coffee can do this. Ask your friend to manage your blog until your exams ends, like writing articles, accepting guest posts, approving comments, building links, etc by giving him the administrator rights till the end of last exam, this can be done by paying some money to him or doing it for free, it depends on your relationship.

2. Make Use Of Free Time

Getting some time in between each exam can help you to approve some comments and make some conversations with your clients, fellow bloggers and readers. But don’t drag the conversations and sit on your desk for a long time because you have to appear your exam on the next day.

Using a Smartphone instead of sitting infront of your desk helps you to save some time and get more marks in the exams.

3. Hiring Content Writers

If you are a young pro blogger and make 5-6 posts in a day then hire content writers to write on your blog and give them the schedule for submitting the posts on particular dates. So you don’t miss your loyal readers interest of reading your feed daily.

Hiring Popular Content Writers will increase your website traffic and also get more readers.

4. Getting Guest Posts

If you can’t hire writers, then the only way to get posts without paying is from accepting guest posting to your blog.

How to easily get Guest Posts?

If you have good PageRank (PR) and traffic to your website then getting guest posts is not the hard, just make a list of guest posting writers by visiting a high level blog or search in Google for them and send an invitation to write on your blog. Done! Check your inbox or drafts folder in your blog on the next day

You can also get guest posts from number of authors, there are some websites which do this job to you. Here are 5+ Websites That Will Help You To Get Good Guest Bloggers

These are my own methods to manage my blog during the exams and if you have any other ideas/methods please let me and the readers know about them. Hope you have enjoyed reading this article. 

This article is written by Aditya Chintha. He blogs at Geeks Workshop about Android Stuff, Blogging, WordPress, and SEO. If you wish to write for HBB, then kindly check this.

4 Simple Ways To Manage Your Blog During Exams is a post from HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

If you are like me or like anyone using a WordPress blog, then you’ll be even ready to pay to prevent spam comments. Because that spoils almost 30% of our energy we give for our blog. Few plugins + few tweaks, you are ready to enter a spam-free dashboard then. Using such tips you can prevent them as much as possible because I have tried them on my blog(s) and it worked quite well. So I thought of making an article with all those tips combined, and here it is.

1. Use Akismet

Akismet is a MUST have plugin for a typical WordPress blog. If you don’t have it, then you’ll have the burden of differentiating genuine comments and spam comments. Akismet filters out your comment and track-back spam for you.

2. ReCAPTCHA

Before going to ReCAPTCHA I’ll tell you what CAPTCHA is. It is a type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a person. You can try lots of CAPTCHA plugins to prevent spammers from automatically entering the comments. You can also try Math Comment Spam Protection, which asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question instead.

3. Blacklist certain words

You can find this option on WordPress “Discussion Settings”. You can keep a list of words you don’t want to have in your blog comments, if you get any such comments it will be moderated. Like when a comment contains any of those words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be marked as spam. You can use the similar kind of form in the Comment Moderation if you want to moderate them instead of marking as SPAM.

[VIEW LARGER IMAGE]

4. Use Third Party Commenting Systems

I don’t have much experience but third party commenting systems like Disqus, Intense Debate, Facebook Comments, etc have good control over SPAM comments. Interestingly such commenting systems are not loved by spammers, they rarely poke their heads inside such systems.

Common Blog Comment Systems

• Disqus
• IntenseDebate
• Livefrye
• Facebook Comments

5. Avoid DoFollow

Spam commentators normally target dofollow blog because they’ll get more advantage over nofollow blogs. Comments on a dofollow blog have more juice and traffic. So you can make your dofollow blog as nofollow if you get lots of spam comments frequently. Though being a dofollow blog has some advantages you still need to battle the spam comments now and then.

6. Use Comments Policy

Every blog must have a “Comments Policy“, because that’ll help your readers and commentators to know the right format and way to comment on your blog. You can mention what happens if they spam on your blog. You can also tell how you reward them (learn how to reward commentators) for their genuine comments and why they should not spam instead.

7. Ban by IP

This WordPress plugin WP-Ban is a recommended one. If you find any person from a particular IP address continuously spamming your blog, then you can ban them using this.

It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name or referer url trys to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned. There will be statistics recordered on how many times they attemp to visit your blog. It allows wildcard matching too. You can also use the default WordPress comment moderation to ban IP addresses.

WordPress Plugin Used:

• WP-Ban

8. Use CommentLuv and KeywordLuv

Confused? The thing is, if you use such plugins normal readers won’t bother to fill their comments with spam content (like links). Instead they’ll use plugins like CommentLuv and KeywordLuv to fulfill their desires.

WordPress Plugins Used:

• CommentLuv
• KeywordLuv

9. Confirm you are not a spammer

Believe me, this plugin is equal to Akismet. GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin (G.A.S.P.) is what we are talking about. You just have to confirm that you are not a spammer using a check box.

WordPress Plugin Used:

• GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin (G.A.S.P.)

10. Close comments on old posts

If you wish to close comments on older posts you can do that on WordPress “Discussion Settings”. Just go there and under “Other comment settings” you can find “Automatically close comments on articles older than ___ days”.

Enter the age of the posts you want the comments to be closed and save. WordPress also provides the option to close comments on individual posts you can use of that. Because spammers target posts with high traffic.

11. Cookies for Comments Plugin

This WordPress plugin will set a cookie on a random URL that is then checked when a comment is posted. If the cookie is missing the comment is marked as spam.

This plugin adds a stylesheet or image to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet or image a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves a comment the cookie is checked. If it doesn’t exist the comment is marked as spam. The plugin can also check how long it took a user to enter a comment. If it is too fast it could probably be a spam bot.

WordPress plugin used:

• Cookies for Comments

12. Custom WP function to ban empty referrers

This function will reject the comments from the browsers which do not have referrers enabled. When the ‘referrer’ for a particular comment request is empty, then obviously the comment is not posted from your blog post comment form.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourblog.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]

Paste this code on your .htaccess file. Please kindly backup your .htaccess file before implementing this.

13. Simple trackback validation

You can also validate the trackbacks you are getting for your blog posts. You can check whether they are coming from original source or some crap site. Simple Trackback Validation Plugin performs a simple but very effective test on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam.

This plugin checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to.

WordPress Plugin Used:

• Simple Trackback Validation

14. Remove website column

Pretty simple way to avoid all sorts of SPAM comments. It will be hard for the spammers to keep your blog in their hit list then.

This screenshot of Woorkup.com shows comment form without website column. So normally spammers will give less preference to such sites, but it might also make link building readers aka commentators confuse.

15. Avoid HTML in comment

This tip will help you to disable HTML inside comments. Even if the commentator uses “HTML” syntax, they won’t convert. Commentators will normally keyword related anchor texts and make them as spam comments. By disabling HTML, you can make them look like normal text instead of clickable links.

Reference:

• How to Disable HTML in WordPress Comments

16. Add Invisible formfields to Comment form

By adding additional formfields to your comment form (which is only invisible to humans) you can differentiate between a normal comment and bot comment. If a spambot fills these fields blindly (which most of all spambots do), the comment will not be saved. You can use NoSpamNX WordPress plugin for this.

You can decide if you want to block these spambots or mark them as spam. Furthermore, you can put common spam-phrases on a local Blacklist or (if you have multiple Blogs) on a global Blacklist. This comes very handy when fighting againt “handmade” Spam.

WordPress Plugin Used:

• NoSpamNX WordPress plugin

17. Moderate first time commentators

You can restrict first time commentators from getting approved instantly. You can enabled the option that Comment author must have a previously approved comment by the administrators. You can see this on Discussion Settings > Before a comment appears.

18. Comment Email Verification

If a comment is held for moderation then an email message will be sent to the comment author with a link to verify his/her email address. When the comment author clicks on that link the comment gets approved immediately. This makes discussions more lively as users don’t have to wait for the blog admin to approve the comment.

Blog owners may also choose to hold the comments in the moderation queue even after successful verification. The verification status is shown in the comment lists in the admin.

WordPress Plugin Used:

• Comment E-Mail Verification

19. Restrict Comments to Registered Users

If you have enabled registration on your WordPress blog, then you can restrict comments to only registered users.

Go to the Settings > General panel > Under Membership:, select Users must be registered and logged in to comment. This will reduce good amount of spam since you can get genuine users by registering.

20. Limit Number of Links in Comments

Mostly spam comments will have links in comments so you can limit the number of links in the comments to avoid spamming.

To change the number of links in comment posts you can change the setting for the number of links permitted in a comment.

Go to the Settings > Discussion panel.

Scroll down to Comment Moderation.

In the section which covers the number of links in a post, it is set to 2 by default. You could lower to one.

NOTE: Do not set this to zero or leave the field blank. It will send every comment to moderation — not the desired effect.

21. Disable Comments & Trackbacks

This is not a tip to reduce spam comment, but to disable comments. Just uncheck the last two options to disable comments and trackbacks for your blog posts. No more SPAM comments. If you are really not interested in these comments thing, then this is the best option for you.

Settings > Discussion > Default article settings

You can also delete your wp-comments-post.php and wp-trackback.php to disable comments and trackbacks permanently.

I’m sure these tips will help you to reduce spam comments on your WordPress blog. If you know any other tip, kindly mention them in the comments.

20+ Sure Shot Ways To Reduce SPAM Comments is a post from HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

Facebook, the most popular social network in the world, is dominant in the social networking field, but yet still everyday we come across several new social network sites. The thing I liked about them is they try to bring up new concepts to impress their users. Earlier we saw about Zurker, a social network site with transparency. Now we are going to show another interesting Social Networking site called qmpeople. They didn’t restrict their concept to social networking alone.

qmpeople was born on 2004 and now counts several hundreds of thousands of registered users from any part of the globe. They are also available in the most common languages such as English, French and Spanish in more than hundred countries.

If you ask me the difference between other sites and this one, their main concept is to create a safe and fun environment for people to meet and interact without sharing any personal information. Right now the current platform version is Beta 3.0. Below we have mentioned some of the interesting features of qmpeople which you’ll love.

Play Exclusive Games & Have Fun

qmpeople is not restricted to Social Networking alone, they have also got some interesting games to play while you network with others. I came across 50+ interesting games like War Ships, Number Balls, Path Memory, Sandwich Shop and so on.

They allow you to challenge your friends for more fun. You can also choose to play both multiplayer or single player games. In the Multiplayer games you can add up to four concurrent players and also it depends on the kind of game you are interested in playing.

Share Gifts With Your Buddies

This is a pretty good feature I loved. This will actually allow you to give real gifts without the recipient’s address. Here is how it works, whenever a friend accepts to receive a gift, they’ll be requested to mention their full address to deliver your special gift. As of now they allow to make floreal or musical gifts only.

Exclusive Groups to discuss the things you love

You can also join groups to hangout with people having similar interests. You can share your interests and other multimedia content. All these posts will also be published automatically on respective author’s blog by this.

Chat and Meet New Friends

This is a new kind of chatting which no other social network will think about doing. Their chat system will allow you to create classic textual chats or audio and video chats. Using your cellphones you can do audio chats and this is free of cost. You can also invite a person for video chatting even if he is not currently chatting but surfing the site.

Talk and Share about your Favorite Places

This is a pretty cool application from qmpeople. It allows you to talk about your favourite places, share opinions, talk about your travels and explore new places from around the world. Each place’s page will have a short description, a picture and a geolocalized map.

Do checkout qmpeople and learn some interesting things about this cool social network.

qmpeople: Meet People In Safe and Fun Environment is a post from HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

Google Maps is a web based geographic mapping application and technology, which launched seven years ago on February 8, 2005, by Google Inc. It is available in all languages; hence it is Google’s multilingual applications.

Google Maps provides high-resolution aerial or satellite images for most urban areas all over the world and route directions up to four modes of transportation. Google Maps API is available for mobile phones as well.

Below is a screenshot of Google Maps showing every countries of the world

But Google Maps, and more specifically, Google Street View(which is a part of Google Maps), has recently come under scrutiny from various national agencies for issues related to privacy invasion and unauthorized snooping of Wi-Fi enabled users.

Though Google Maps is unarguably the best available geographical mapping application available today, one must take a look at the best available alternatives for Google Maps.

At the moment, The best alternatives for Google Maps are as follows:

• Yahoo! Maps
• Bing Maps
• OVI Maps
• WikiMapia
• Bhuvan

1. Yahoo! Maps

Yahoo! Maps is one of the best alternatives to Google Maps developed by Yahoo! It is a free online mapping portal and its APIs are available for developer community too. Yahoo! Maps was launched on May 16, 2007. In Yahoo! Maps, data and Imagery were primarily supplied by “Cartifact Company”.

Here’s a screenshot of Yahoo! Maps showing every countries of the world.

2. Bing Maps

Bing Maps is the second best alternative to Google Maps. It is a fast and feature-rich web mapping tool developed by Microsoft. It provides the users with the ability to browse the street maps for many cities worldwide. The key features of Bing Maps include:

• Road View
• Street View
• Aerial View
• Bird’s-eye View
• 3D Maps.

The 3D Maps enables the users to see the buildings in three dimensions. Roughly 68 cities worldwide can be viewed in 3D. Find below a screenshot of Bing Maps, showing all relevant countries of the world

3. OVI Maps

OVI Maps is the one of best alternatives to Google Maps developed by NOKIA to provide navigation features to their mobile devices. It is a free application and can be downloaded from the OVI Store. For key cities of various critical International markets, Nokia OVI Maps are far more detailed than even Google Maps.

It provides three map views one is Satellite view and second one is Terrain view and 3D Maps. You can also explore the places like Eat & Drink, Shopping, and Sights & Museums. The screenshot of OVI Maps showing every countries of the world

4. WikiMapia 

WikiMapia is basically the Wikipedia of the Mapping world. It is editable by anyone and majorly run by volunteers who wants to add any new info to geographical areas around the world. WikiMapia takes raw geographical data from Google Maps but user edited layers and markings/milestones etc are exclusive to WikiMapia.

The whole functioning of WikiMapia and how it manages to grow its information base is quite similar to Wikipedia. Top level moderators keep looking for contributions that aren’t suitable or wrong, in order to revert the changes and keep the Open source location mapping clean and accurate. Though it isn’t as technically sound and restrictive as Google Maps or other privately run Mapping applications, WikiMapia still works well for getting raw information about any geographical area in the world. However, as it’s openly editable, you may come across instances where contributors have randomly marked things, making things less detailed and more clumsy.

5. Bhuvan [India specific]

Bhuvan is a gateway to Indian Earth Observation, which allows the users to explore a 3D representation of the surface of the Earth developed by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization). ISRO launched the initial release of Bhuvan on August 12, 2009. The latest release of Bhuvan is its beta version of its web-based 3D satellite imagery tool, which launched on August 12, 2011. It is available in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu languages. It is a freeware virtual mapping software application. It provides features like Bhuvan 3D Visualization, Bhuvan 2D Visualization, Thematic Data Dissemination and Pocket Bhuvan for mobile devices

This article is written by David Rice. He is based in UK and works for a company that helps business leaders find the ideal office to let location. He runs What is Android and Price India blogs. If you wish to write for HBB, then kindly check this.

5 Best Alternatives For Google Maps is a post from HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

Pinterest is currently the toast of the town in the social media world. Though it started off as an experimental online pinboard, Pinterest has grown from strength to strength in the last couple of years. Whether it’s the ability to track a site’s popularity or defining effective B2B strategies, Pinterest has struck a chord with businesses all over the world.

In case, you aren’t aware of how leading brands worldwide are making the most of Pinterest, take a look at some of these pages – Toys R Us, Coca Cola, Target etc. While Pinterest isn’t a one size fits all solution that would work perfectly for businesses of all sizes, you need to try it out for your business before you take a decision for/ against it.

While it’s still early days, there’s no doubt that Pinterest holds the potential to be a game changing social media network for businesses. It has grown at a scorching rate off late – over 4000 percent, and now boasts of 10 million unique visitors. Here are 8 exclusive tips to help businesses ride the Pinterest wave.

1. Highlight your offerings

A picture is worth a thousand words and Pinterest is all about pictures and videos. Pinterest pictures are a great way for a business to showcase their products and services through pictures, thereby leaving a positive impact on the viewers. When you’re ready to launch a new product or service, highlight it via your pinboard to gain traction.

2. Interaction

Every picture tells a story which can’t always be captured via words. Pinterest is fast emerging as an effective customer interaction tool using the visual media. You should encourage other users re-pin your items and proactively seek their feedback.

3. Community

Pinterest offers an innovative approach to community building. On one hand, users re-pin items which they like. On the other, businesses can lay a foundation to build a customer community with initiatives such as sweepstakes contests and promotional giveaways. Pinterest contests provide a simple yet effective mechanism for promoting your brand.

4.PR (Public Relations)

While it’s no replacement for other classic and modern PR tools, Pinterest provides a unique storytelling approach for public relations. Pinterest images provide a great opportunity for your business to showcases your products and services in your own voice (via pictures) in front of millions of users.

5. Creativity

The best part about Pinterest is that it doesn’t limit your creativity. If you’ve got a great idea for your business, brainstorm it and come up with out of the box pictures and videos and pin these on your Pinterest board.

6. Traffic

Though Pinterest is all about images, it’s been smartly designed to adhere to SEO guidelines. As a business, you can pin your product and add then chose SEO optimized keywords along with adding your website link to gain additional traffic. Therefore, Pinterest passively provides high quality backlinks when a user back link to your products.

This article is written by Roger Collings. He is the Managing Director of RDC Communications Ltd and a telecoms consultant specialising in business VoIP. If you wish to write for HBB, then kindly check this.

6 Exclusive Pinterest Tips for Your Business is a post from HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

Today we are talking to Shabda Raaj, one of the founders of Agiliq who started in 2009 after working at Oracle for a few years. Shabda loves technology and he loves taking part in making the Internet better everyday by building amazing apps. Here he shares some tidbits about what he has learnt.

1. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

Google started as a graduate research project. Yahoo! was just a list of sites which Jerry Yang maintained. Facebook was something Zuckerberg did to connect with his fellow students. Don’t start with grandiose plans. Just start.

He started Agiliq with just two people in 2009 and about $10K. He hopes to make it a billion Dollar company by the time he done with it.

2. You have to keep the faith

As Steve Jobs (Apple) said,

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

Entrepreneurship is a roller coaster ride. You are on top of the world, making all the money you are gonna need, then your key clients leave you, the key people leave. You feel like your company going to gutters. You have to keep the head down and continue moving. As they say, “if you are going through hell keep going”.

3. Keep your focus

As a small company, you will have many distractions, many ideas which will seem to be good. You have to keep your focus in spite of temptations. He sees so many companies which do everything and the kitchen sink. They do “Web Design, Web Development, SEO, video, and everything”. But Agiliq does just two things Django Web App development and Mobile web development Using Sencha. Their clients love that they are so focussed.

4. It takes time

They started Agiliq in 2009. They have been growing slowly but steadily. You have to give time for the business to grow. If you look at Instagram and want to make a billion dollars in 18 months, lottery may be a better path than Entrepreneurship. It’s said “It takes 20 years to become an overnight success.”

5. Business is about people

You might think that software business is about computers, and you would be completely wrong. Your relationship and reputation are your biggest assets. You need people skills to work with clients, colleagues and contractors. Among everything they do at Agiliq, the thing he is most proud of is the team they have built at Agiliq.

6. Expertise pays

People skills will help you make the initial sale but ultimately its expertise which brings home the money. They have always been very focussed on making sure their team is skilled with the best skills and knowledge, and has the best expertise available in their technologies, Django and Sencha programming.

Some More Information About Agiliq Solutions

They are a Pvt Ltd company based in Hyderabad, and their legal name is Agiliq Info Solutions India Pvt Ltd. They have clients based all over the world. Their site is Agiliq.com and they maintain a blog at agiliq.com/blog. You can also find them on Twitter, github and Facebook.

6 Entrepreneurial Lessons From Shabda Raaj Of Agiliq is a post from HellBound Bloggers (HBB)