Blog Tips To Help You Build A Better Blog | MintBlogger

Best Practices For Using WordPress Plugins On Professional Blogs

2012-05-21T16:00:00.000+05:30

Almost every WordPress blog uses plugins to extend the functionality of this powerful content management system. They not only help you incorporate custom features, but also save loads of your precious time. But, there's a dark side too that can leave your blog sluggish, broken or hacked due to improper or inappropriate use of these plugins. Fortunately, by following some simple guidelines we can get the most out of these awesome extensions without inducing any adverse effect on our blogs. So let's get started and learn some of the vital plugin usage basics.

Whether you're running a business blog or a personal blog, plugins are going to be an integral part of it and it's up to you how you select and manage them. About a week back, I received an email from a budding blogger asking about the number and types of plugins one should use on his blog. There's no simple answer to it. Depending on the type of blog, its goals and the blogger's technical abilities - plugin usage strategies may deviate significantly in different circumstances. However, there are some basic plugin usage principles that are more or less applicable in almost all conditions to get the best out of these pieces of code external to the core CMS.

Less Is More

When it comes to using plugins for a WordPress blog, the lesser you rely on them, the better it will be. With every new plugin added to the list, you introduce additional database requests, additional HTTP requests adding more burdens to your web server. This not only consumes additional resources at the server end, but also makes your blog sluggish at the reader's end. Here are some of the basic considerations that decide whether a plugin should be used or not.

Is it vital for blog's success?
Is there no efficient way to implement the solution without the plugin?
Is it going to affect your conversions significantly in a positive way?

If the answer to all the questions mentioned above is 'Yes', you can go ahead with selecting a good plugin to implement the required feature. If you go through this process, you can certainly reduce the number of plugins you're going to use on your blog. The end result will be less cluttered system with fast load times. So once you've identified a feature or functionality that requires a plugin, you should move on to the next step of choosing a right plugin.

Select Potential Candidates

Before you go ahead for searching a right plugin for your needs, I would strongly suggest you to look for the possibilities of implementing the feature in an efficient way through a custom functions file and WordPress hooks. A classic example is usage of plugin for displaying related content beneath blog posts. Generally users quickly download a plugin for the same. But, this feature can be easily implemented in an efficient way without using any plugin. In case you find no feasible solution except the plugin itself, you must select the best candidate from all the available options. How to do that?

Identify all available options - WordPress plugin database is so huge that you'll find multiple solutions for each possible feature you're looking for. You must prepare a list of all these plugins to maximize the probability of finding the best possible solution.
Check their revision history - The first things that need to be checked is the revision history and the last updation time. This gives a clear indication about how actively the plugin is being developed and when was the last time its stable version was released.
Check version compatibility - Make sure the plugins you're selecting are compatible with the WordPress version you're running on your web server. Good plugin developers always test their plugins against each new beta release and fix any shortcomings before the stable version reach general users.
Check user base - This is one of the success metrics for WordPress plugins. Check the number of downloads till date or downloads per day to get an idea about how popular it is among the community. You can get all this information on the plugin's page at the official WordPress site.
Check user reviews - This is yet another simple way to get a fair idea about any plugin's performance. I called it 'fair' because sometimes these reviews don't give the true picture. A newbie may test the plugin in the wrong environment and may end in bashing it in his review.

Cross-checking this essential data prunes your list of available plugins leaving only the very best to consider for the next important phase of testing. This whole exercise ensures that your time is not wasted in testing useless plugins that either yield poor results or are broken. At this point, you'll be having a list of shortlisted plugins that must pass certain basic yet very important tests to qualify for actual usage on your live blog.

Test The Waters

Do you simply download and activate plugins on your live blog? If that is the case, you're not only risking your blog's security, but you're also planting time bombs ticking day and night ready to explode unexpectedly at any time. To prevent this catastrophe, grill every single plugin against certain tests before they reach your live blog. Before you start testing your plugins, you must ensure that you've installed an exact replica of your live blog both on a local server on your computer system as well as on the web server itself. Why a replica is needed on the web server? Well, there are some plugins (e.g. some caching plugins) that cannot be tested correctly in a local web server environment. Once both test blogs are up and running it's time to plunge into rigorous testing routine discussed below.

Check for malware or malicious code - This is the most important step to ensure you're not getting crap out-of-the-box. Start scanning with desktop antivirus and continue the scan with WordPress-specific security plugins after installing them on the test blog. The latter part is extremely important because some plugins inject malicious code in an encrypted format in themes as soon as they're activated from the dashboard.
Check for plugin dependencies - Although it is very rare that a plugin is completely or partially dependent on another plugin, still you must read the plugin documentation carefully for any plugin dependencies. If that is the case, all the plugins in the dependency cycle must come under your testing radar.
Note plugin's database tables (if any) - Manually inspecting and noting plugin's database tables serves two purposes. Firstly, you can look for any suspicious data storage activity which can be otherwise missed by even the best security plugins. And secondly, you can identify, purge and clean up any left tables easily after uninstalling the plugin.
Stress on manual tests - Nothing can beat an exhaustive manual test taking important conditions into consideration that may arise during day-to-day usage. Remember, there's no silver bullet to completely test a piece of software, but through manual testing process you can reduce the damage probability to the minimum.
Check for plugin efficiency - Here we're talking about how much resources a plugin consumes and how its usage affects speed and load times. You can use P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin to check for some of the vital statistics associated with the plugin's performance. This includes runtime, plugin load time, database queries, memory consumption and much more.
Compare the results - Needless to say, the best performer always wins the race. When you're done with the tests, tabulate the results and select the best plugin in term of efficiency and ease-of-use. Your primary concern should be how efficient a plugin is. In other words, it shouldn't consume much system resources and shouldn't slow down your blog.

Install The Puppy

Now that you have tried and tested all the plugins in your hands, it's time to get the beast working on your live blog. Choose weekends to install new plugins when traffic is at its lowest. This way even if plugin breaks your theme the damage will be minimum and you'll get enough time to recover. If possible, immediately after installing the plugin you must ask some of your peers to check your blog on their systems whether everything looks fine at their ends or not. And now, here's a recap of using WordPress plugins in a better way.

Try to keep the number of plugins to the minimum. Anything less than 10 plugins is considered good for a typical WordPress blog.
Always keep your plugins updated to the latest version to not only get the better and improved features, but also to prevent any unauthorized penetration due to insecure code in old versions.
Always look for an efficient plugin-less solution before even considering a single plugin.
Test blog on a local system is the right place to begin using a new plugin.
A good plugin is - secure, efficient & user-friendly.
Never download any plugin from unknown or suspicious source. Official WordPress plugin directory is the right place to start with.
Review all active plugins at least once a year for plugin-less solutions.
Generally a plugin is the culprit for blog's sluggish performance.
If you're using only these 3 plugins (Google XML Sitemaps, W3 Total Cache & Akismet) - you're a WordPress ninja!

8 Things To Consider While Hosting A Contest On Your Blog

2012-04-30T15:00:00.000+05:30

Large number of niche and business blogs host contests for the readers' that includes freebies, prizes and giveaways for the participants. Bloggers do it for different purposes (at the micro level), but more or less the primary goal is almost the same - "Pulling more leads and prospects". If you're planning to host your very first ~~promotional~~ contest on your blog, chances are that it may not yield (or in fact ruin) the expected returns. You can never predict or assert the success level of a contest as it is dependent on several variable factors. But you can definitely minimize the risk of failure (a contest with no or very few participants) by following some of the most elementary guidelines for creating a fairly successful contest.

Some of these guidelines are quite obvious, while others are often ignored by first timers resulting in a dead contest. So let's see what it takes to host a successful contest on a blog. Here we go...

Relevance is the key - Here I'm talking about the activities to be done by the participants for winning the contest. Broadly, these activities are divided into two different categories (for e.g., simple voting or an exhaustive article submission) and are generally dictated by the value of the prize. How? Well, you can't expect each of the participants submitting a 1000 word article for winning a fountain pen. That was just an example to explain the fact that not only the contest activity should be relevant to your blog's niche, BUT the participating activity itself must complement the value of the prize. The more big prize you're announcing, the more liberty you have to include an activity that perfectly justifies releasing such a big giveaway.

It's not just the scale (big or small) of the activity, but the close connection (relevance) of the activity with your blog's niche is what matters the most. If I'm running a contest on this blog that involves a small survey about blogging habits of the participants, I'm likely to get more participants. On the other hand, if I try to host a contest about completing a survey for weight loss exercise, it is bound to face criticism from the readers.

Ensure a win-win situation - Now this is closely related to the 'Relevance factor' we just discussed above. An ideal win-win situation would be -- a decent prize for the winners and at the same time accumulation of loads of valuable information in your database that can be used to boost your online/offline business. The latter part doesn't mean capturing emails of the participants to bug them later with your affiliate marketing pitches. You can use the content or data (captured during the contest) to further replenish your online/offline business. That's why bloggers intelligently collect demographic data and/or industry trends through contest participation activities. It's a win-win situation for both the ends.

Find sponsors - This step may or may not be necessary depending on the scale and type of the contest. If you're giving away digital or tangible products to the participants, you must find some sponsors to arrange for the same in return of marketing or promotion through your blog and other social media outposts. Finding such sponsors is not a big task for a high traffic blog, but if your blog is still in the early stages, you may struggle to arrange sponsors for your contest.

If your blog falls in the latter category, the best way to clinch sponsorship deals is to directly email the potential companies and service providers giving them detailed information about the contest as well as mentioning what's in there for them. The more alluring is your offer (scale of promotion offered by you), the more are the chances of getting a sponsor with some great prizes.

Tabulate & announce the set of rules - Needless to say, no contest is complete without inclusion of transparent and clearly defined rules for the participants. Every post announcing the contest includes a separate section for these rules which is perhaps the second most read part of the entire blog entry.

The best way to post these rules is in a tabular form giving a number to each entry making all the important phrases bold, if necessary. This small tweak in posting style helps in understanding the rules easily resulting in more submissions for your contest. You can also provide a link to the PDF file containing all the rules just beneath this section for offline reading.

Market aggressively - Once your contest post is live, it's time to pull up your socks for some promotion campaigns. Start with a newsletter tailored specifically for the contest. That's the initial push which can bring momentum to the entire campaign. Do not forget to include social media sharing buttons within the newsletter at targeted locations. The next step involves mailing all your peers who regularly help you in spreading the word about your various online efforts.

Once these two steps are completed, you can start spreading the word on various social media platforms to gain maximum exposure through your friends' network. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are the most promising among all that can bring tons of potential participants in quick time.

Ensure transparent result declaration - Sometimes contests are ruined by the allegations of cheating in choosing the winners. It can happen with your contest as well. The best way to avoid such situation is to make the entire process completely transparent. How to do it? It's very simple. All you need is a desktop screen recorder and the services of Random.org website. With these two useful tools you can easily make the whole result declaration process credible and transparent.

Here's how to do it. First of all, you must ensure that each participant leaves a comment entry on the contest post. Number each participant in chronological order to give a unique identity to each participant. Make sure you announce the same in the rules for the contest. Now simply switch on your screen recorder, go to the website I've mentioned above and provide the minimum (generally 1) and the maximum value (last participant's comment number) to get the random winner from the lot. Once the recording is over, update the contest post to announce the winner and embed your winner selection video. This method works very well and the participants appreciate it wholeheartedly.

Follow up with the winners - Declaration of winners is just the beginning of the next important step. Whether the prize is a digital download (e.g premium WordPress theme) or a tangible product (e.g an iPad), ensuring their timely delivery to the winners is your responsibility. You must follow up with each of the winners till they acknowledge the delivery. Failing to do so may put you in an awkward situation if one of the winners start complaining about deferred or delayed delivery on various social media channels.

Doing such follow ups also ensure that each winner has received the correct prize as intended. Sometimes winners receive the wrong giveaway but never complain about the same. And lastly, it paves the way for next successful contest as such follow ups makes the winners' your die-hard fans. They not only participate in forthcoming contests, but also helps in spreading the word effectively.

Close the contest post with a final update - The last step involves two important activities that must be completed without any fail. Start with thanking all the participants as well as the sponsors who made the contest a grand success. Ensure that each new update is appended beneath the post with appropriate headline. Finally do not forget to close the comments for that post.

A Blogger's Guide To Google Webmaster Tools

2012-04-03T15:00:00.001+05:30

Almost every business or niche blog relies heavily on organic traffic for its survival. To ensure consistent traffic from search engines, we use several SEO techniques apart from creating useful content on a regular basis. But all these techniques will fail if your blog is NOT properly crawled and indexed by a search engine bot. And that's where Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) comes handy. Let's see how this excellent tool can help you find issues (if any) that may prevent your blog from being indexed correctly.

To kick things off, start by adding your blog's home page URL to the GWT dashboard. You will be asked to verify the ownership of your blog through one of the given methods. The easiest one is adding a site verification <meta> tag on the home page of your blog. You can remove this tag once verification process is completed.

Submit Sitemap

This is the most important task that must be completed after adding your blog to the GWT dashboard. Sitemap is simply a file containing a list of web pages that may be crawled by the indexing bot. The most common sitemap format is the XML file format that is well understood by all major search engine crawlers. Nowadays, all popular blog content management systems like WordPress and Blogger automatically generates a sitemap. Self-hosted WordPress blogs generally use Google XML Sitemaps plugin to generate an optimized sitemap for their blog.

Now the question arises - Why at all we need to submit a sitemap? The answer is very simple. GWT system checks for any discrepancies in your sitemap that may generate errors or warnings during the crawl process. The most common error is the presence of a broken link (non-existent page) in the sitemap. Warnings may include those pages which are inaccessible (https secure page behind a login) or are wrongly redirected pages that leads to nowhere. Sitemap submission ensures you're well aware of these errors and warnings and can take necessary steps to reduce these discrepancies to the minimum.

Submitting a WordPress sitemap - You can access sitemap submission page through 'Site Configuration -> Sitemaps'. Simply type 'sitemap.xml' in the submission box and press the 'Submit Sitemap' button.

Submitting a Blogger sitemap - You have to type a bit more while submitting a sitemap for a Blogger blog. Type-in the following text 'atom.xml?redirect=false' and you're done.

You can also use robots.txt file to tell the crawlers where to find the sitemap through this directive - sitemap: http://www.yourblogname.com/sitemap.xml.

Check Robots.txt

Head over to 'Site Configuration -> Crawler access' option to review your directory and file access permissions for indexing bots. It is done through robots.txt file located in the root directory of your blog. GWT dashboard shows the accessibility and content of this file along with a list of user agents (crawlers) for the specified URLs.

Robots.txt file generation - You can also create a custom robots file through this option. Remember, robots file generated through this option must be replaced with the old version present on your web server.

Content removal request - Although non-existent pages are automatically removed from the Google index, still you can use 'Remove URL' option to submit the removal requests. These submissions do speed up the removal process and more importantly, you can also initiate re-inclusion requests for previously submitted removal requests.

Manage Sitelinks

Sometimes Google displays sitelinks right below the search result for a given website as shown in the image below. These sitelinks are not available for every blog or website. Google's search algorithm decides when and which sitelinks (if any) should appear in SERPs. Generally, you can find these links in your Google analytics dashboard in 'Top Landing Pages' report.

Internally, Google creates a bunch of sitelinks and shows them randomly in subsequent search queries for a given domain. You cannot control the content (blog posts) which would appear as sitelinks, BUT you can surely ask Google to demote a post (URL), thus preventing it from appearing as a sitelink for at least 90 days. You can access this option from 'Site Configuration -> Sitelinks'. It's an important tool in your arsenal for preventing selective links from appearing as sitelinks.

Declare Change of Address

If you're moving your blog to a new domain, this option can speed up things. Once you've completed the migration process, make sure landings on all old links result in permanent 301 redirect towards new links. After implementing this redirection, add the new domain in your GWT account and head on to 'Site Configuration -> Change of address' option for the old domain. Specify the new domain where your new blog exists and press the submit button.

This ensures indexing of the new domain is speedy and accurate supplemented with fast removal of corresponding old links in the database. Note: While migrating to a new domain, ensure that all the internal links within the content are changed or redirected as well.

Apply Geo-targeting & Adjust Crawl Rate

If you're writing for local audience or for visitors' from specific geographical location, you must use the 'Geographic target' feature accessible through 'Site Configuration -> Settings' option. Here you're clearly indicating to Google about the geographical location of your audience. This helps Google in serving customized and tailored search results of your blog for that particular geographic location. End-result is highly targeted traffic leading to good conversions.

Another important feature that can be leveraged is tweaking the crawl rate of the indexing bot. This option is particularly useful for blogs having massive amount of content with multiple sub-domains. Generally, on each visit crawler grabs a limited number of web pages so that it does not overwhelm your web server. You can use the 'Crawl rate' option to change this default behavior instructing the crawler to go deeper into the content tree gobbling up more web pages in a single visit.

Leverage SERP Report

One of the best things about GWT is the inclusion of comprehensive SERP report that can be used to refine your on-page optimization strategy. This report gives you the last 30 days SERP data in aggregated as well as in segregated form. Confused? Let's try to understand both forms and see how this data can be extremely beneficial for your SEO efforts as a whole.

Aggregated data - The image shown below presents the last 30 days SERP data in aggregated form. Remember, this graphic simply tabulates the approximate figures and should not be treated as accurate display of results. This handy result sheet shows you three important metrics associated with your blog's SERP performance. Each of these figures gives you a fair idea about how organic traffic from Google search engine is flowing towards your blog.

Queries - This important metric show the number of queries visitors typed on Google search engine to find the relevant content. Needless to say, your blog's content was listed somewhere in the result pages for all these queries.
Impressions - It's the number of times your blog posts appeared in SERPs on different user agents on different platforms. For a given query, your blog post may rank on a certain position, but it may not be counted as an impression or a view unless that very page is fetched by the user agent (generally a browser) where your content appears in the result listing.
Clicks - And last but not the least is the number of clicks received by your content's entries in SERPs. For a popular blog, this figure can be much much higher resulting in massive organic traffic from this well-known search engine.

Note: You can filter the above chart on the basis of 'search type' - (web, image, mobile, video) or/and the 'geolocation' (country) of the visitor.

Segregated data - The next figure shown below shows the break up of the above chart in tabular format. You can export both these data sheets in csv Excel format. The following table gives you some extremely useful insights about how your content is performing in SERPs. Let's take a closer look and try to understand how this data is like a goldmine for optimizing your SEO efforts.

Query - This is the meatiest part of the report where you get the actual search queries that visitors use to reach your blog. It contains highly competitive prime keywords as well as long tail keywords for your analysis.
Impressions & deviation - The next important metric is the number of appearances in SERPs for each of these keywords (search queries). The change compared to previous time frame is also shown beside each of these metrics.
Clicks, CTR & deviation - The appearances in SERP alone doesn't guarantee traffic. It's the click-through rate that matters the most, and that's what highlighted in this column.
Average position & deviation - And last but not the least is the average relative position on SERP pages for each given keyword as compared to previous set of data of similar duration. For each of these columns, the deviations (positive/negative) are also shown to get a fair idea about how your content is performing with passage of time.

Now the big question is - How we can leverage this report to the fullest? Well, as I said earlier, this is a goldmine and you must know how to extract the required information for improving your on page SEO. Fortunately, you can easily export this data to an excel sheet with all columns intact. Here's what you can do to work on improving your on page SEO after exporting the data. Check out for top keywords (sending maximum traffic) and filter those with large negative deviations. Run the same query on Google search engine and see which site has outranked you recently for this keyword. Skim through the HTML and content of that page and make necessary improvements in your web page. This won't give you instant results, but can certainly prove vital in at least holding the current position (minimize damage) for a longer duration.

The second important trend that can be leveraged in this report is the list of new keywords that have recently gained prominence although not sending that much traffic compared to the prime search queries. These long tail keywords generally have large positive deviations contributing small amount of traffic. Pick out those that are relevant to your niche and work on optimizing your content for these long tail keywords. If you manage to rank well even for half a dozen of these keywords, you'll notice large inflation in your organic traffic.

Now Your Turn

There are several other sections for diagnosing crawl errors, for checking Google+ author stats and for analyzing search impact due to +1's received by your content. I've left these sections for you to explore and see what can be gained out of them. In addition to this, I'll love to get your inputs about how you are using Google webmaster tools to optimize your website or blog.

2 Important Google+ Metrics To Assess Your Reach And Visibility

2012-01-22T22:08:00.002+05:30

Now that Google+ is growing by leaps and bounds, power users are focusing on methods to leverage this platform to the maximum. For specialists, devising a powerful social media strategy that primarily focuses on engagement and networking is not that hard. What's even more important is formulating a method to correctly asses the return-on-investment (ROI) at both macro and micro level. This method may differ depending on the platform and requires accurate as well as timely data collection. So, are you planning to invest your time on Google+?

If so, have you devised an effective methodology to measure your reach and visibility? Engagement level and sentiment analysis are two primary attributes that are closely associated with the measurement of reach and visibility. So let's get started and see two very important Google+ metrics that helps you in analyzing how well you're engaging with people on this excellent social media platform.

Posts' Amplification (Visibility)

A basic criterion for measuring your reach on any social network is the extent to which your content (post updates, shared links and uploaded multimedia content) is shared within and beyond your existing network. It can be compared with a pebble creating ripples in the pond. Whenever you post an update on Google+, your friends or your Google+ page followers can share it in three simple ways.

Public sharing - This is pretty simple. Shares visible to anyone on the web are public in nature. Their visibility is not just limited to Google+, but is actively indexed by search engines as well. This essentially means that all these public shares may appear in SERPs as well.
Limited sharing - If you're sharing a piece of content with a group of individuals or selective circles, its scope is 'Limited'. Such updates are not visible to search engines.
Private sharing - You can compare it with email messaging. In such cases, you're sharing the content with a single individual within or beyond your network. If a user has enabled direct messaging in his profile, regardless of whether he is in your network or not, you can still share content privately with him.

This content amplification is one of the primary metrics to calculate the visibility of your update. Fortunately, Google+ provides you with enough data in different formats to give you a fair idea about how far and deeper your post has been shared. The first straightforward way to know about the number of shares is the count of reshares right below the original post. I'm not sure whether private shares are counted in this figure or not.

The second way to know about the reshares is the graphical representation of ripples across the Google+ ecosystem as shown in the image above. You can access this interactive graphic by selecting the 'View Ripples' option from within the post. Remember, this graphic doesn't show private and old reshares. We can well understand the exclusion of private reshares. If they are reflected in this interactive graphic, the whole purpose of sharing a piece of content privately is defeated. Old reshares are possibly excluded to reduce the complexity of the graphic, especially in cases where a post becomes viral and is shared consistently for a long period of time. Ripples visualization only shows last 53 days data.

The third type of posts' amplification data provided by Google+ includes three important metrics. This gives you new insights about the content being shared within the social network. You can access this data right below the interactive graphic that shows ripple visualization for a given post.

Key influencers - This data tells you about the top 5 users with wider reach and authority triggering large number of reshares. Do not confuse these users with top leaders in their domain, because it simply picks the top 5 users with maximum reshares. They can either be big names in their domain or simply your peers having active friends list.
Rate and extent of sharing - This one is my favorite and is extremely useful for those posts that really go viral. You can find out three important trends through this data. Shares/Hour gives you an average of reshares per hour for last 53 days. This trend may deviate sharply in the first 24 hours and may decline in a liner fashion as time passes by. Average chain length depicts the longest reshares done in a linear fashion where each subsequent reshare falls in an extended circle. Longest chain simply tells the longest ripple across extended circles.
Language-based segregation - Knowing about this trend is very useful for Google+ business pages targeting multilingual followers. You get a nice pie chart showing each section of users divided on the basis of their language.

Annotated References (Search Impact)

Tagging is one of the most common activities on almost every popular social media network. Although an annotated reference is automatically included in every reshare on Google+, it doesn't truly reflect the engagement level since the tagging is implicit in nature. What we're really looking for is explicit tagging activity triggering direct engagement with us.

Tracking each such explicit tag does gives you a measurement of your reach and direct engagement level. Generally, it is used to cite, quote or credit you in different contexts. Fortunately, Google+'s internal search engine is extremely powerful supporting site-wide search for tags and hashtags. This makes these annotated references extremely valuable as they directly impact the internal Google+ search.

Over To You

I've not discussed about +1's in this post, which is a popular way to add weightage to the content being shared on Google+. In future, it may affect the rankings of +1'd content appearing in SERPs. I would like to know your thoughts on using +1's as a concrete metric for assessing the reach and visibility on Google+. If you're using any other metrics, please do share with us in the comments below.

3 Niche Blogging Secrets Pros Never Told You

2012-01-16T16:19:00.000+05:30

Niche blogging is one of the most popular blogging formats prevalent today. Thousands and thousands of enthusiasts starts their niche blogging journey everyday. Only a handful of them succeed in making decent money out of it, while majority of them give up in a short period of time. Although there are tons of articles talking about making money out of blogging, very less focus on some of the hard facts about niche blogging. And that's what we are going to discuss here.

Failure Is Imminent

As I said before, only a handful succeeds in churning out decent money from their blogging efforts. Majority of newbies give up very soon. You certainly never want to be in the latter group. Interestingly, those who succeed also taste failure at least once while climbing the ladder. What are the pitfalls that bring failure for a budding niche blogger? How you can ensure that you'll survive through this phase? Here are the three main reasons that make you pack your bags much before you get your first 1000 visitors/day.

Picking wrong niche - It's like a footballer trying to play lawn tennis. Choosing a profitable niche is the very first step in winning the niche blogging race. Instead of wasting your time and money on an unknown domain, go with your strength to maximize your probability of building a successful blogging career.
Posting crap - This is one of the primary reasons your niche blog crawls like a snail. In computer terminology it's called GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) principle. If you're feeding dull content to your readers, you're going to perish very quickly.
Flooding adverts - This is the least you can do to hammer the last nail in your blog's coffin. Even if you create awesome content, plastering it with tons of ads is certainly not a wise strategy to achieve success in niche blogging.

Organic Traffic Is Your Bread And Butter

Undoubtedly, social media has become one of the primary traffic sources for any web site. But, when it comes to making money (through advertisements) from niche blogging, organic traffic is the key. I'm not undermining the importance of social media. In fact, it can accelerate your blog's growth to an unimaginable extent. But, various studies and researches have clearly suggested that organic traffic coming from popular search engines yields the best results for monetized niche blogs. I've experienced the same after analyzing data through Google analytics.

And there's only one recipe to pull massive amount of organic traffic consistently over a longer period of time. Creating evergreen content for the audience not only makes them glued to your blog feed, but also keeps the search engines happy. End result - Good presence in SERPs (search engine result pages) and consistent targeted traffic for your blog. In a nutshell, if you want to achieve success in niche blogging, focus on getting majority of traffic from search engines.

Self-explore or Die

And last but not the least is your thirst to learn by yourself. Learning these unwritten rules and untold methods require lots of preemptive research and experimentation. They key here is to continuously strive for inventing new ways to optimize your each blogging activity. These activities can be writing blog posts, designing and tweaking theme, moderating comments, creating newsletters, implementing social media strategy, using web analytics, monetizing and so on. Think out of the box and create unique and efficient methods to get most out of your blog. In this context, the pinnacle of self-exploration is inventing your own way to get things done more effectively than all the present methods.

A simple example can be use of custom web analytics report to optimize your subscribers' newsletter. Nobody is going to tell you how to do that. That's where self-exploration comes into place. Take the initiative and explore. You may fail sometimes, but the rewards are much higher as they easily outweigh occasional failures.

Bonus Tip: Make a list of top 10 blogs in your niche. Start consuming (reading and applying) their archives in chronological order 1 hour per day.

How To Implement Personalization And Behavioral Targeting On Your Blog

2012-01-09T15:00:00.001+05:30

Giving a unique experience to every visitor ensures maximum engagement that convincingly inflates the conversion rate beyond your expectations. Generally, blog visitors' get the same content irrespective from where they're coming from and what's their intent. This leaves big holes in your lead generation and subscriber acquisition strategies. To overcome this, bloggers employ different methodologies with varying complexity. Two most popular methods to spawn engaging sessions from visitors are personalization and behavioral targeting.

In simple words, personalization and behavioral targeting involves serving of custom (relevant) content to the visitors on the basis of geographical and various demographical attributes. This can be done in 3 different ways.

Implicit personalization - In this technique, custom content is served automatically on the basis of predefined parameters. Visitor himself doesn't have any idea that his visit has altered the default content of the landing page. Content alteration is dynamic and instant through a chain of rules that are triggered automatically as soon as visitor's geographical or demographical data is collected by the personalization engine.
Explicit personalization - As the name suggests, this methodology involves direct interaction with the visitors by letting them choose the type of content they want to consume. This strategy is widely used on e-Commerce web sites and portals. To make it understand better in the context of a typical blog visitor, you can compare it with a custom message appearing on top of blog posts through WP Greet Box plugin asking social media visitors' to share, like, stumble or tweet the post.
Hybrid personalization - Combine the two strategies discussed above and you'll get a hybrid solution that not only serves custom content automatically but also lets the visitor fine-tune the selection through various on-page controls. This is generally implemented on high-traffic e-Commerce web sites.

In whatever way you implement behavioral targeting, you must define the scope and purpose of implementing personalization. It can be broadly divided into three categories, viz., content targeting, ad targeting and business funnel optimization. In this context, what does these three terms mean and how do they differ from each other?

Content targeting - It is the simplest and widely used form of personalization. A typical example is a multilingual blog serving same content in different languages to visitors' coming from different countries. The language-based alteration is just one of the infinite possibilities of content targeting. A more complex example can alter the content of sidebars on the basis of visitor's IP address or gender.
Ad targeting - High-traffic blogs generally use this technique to serve targeted ads to the visitors. Don't get confused by comparing it with PPC ads served by ad-networks like Adsense. Firstly, their ad-serving logic (rules) is not controlled by the blog owner, and secondly they are primarily served on the basis of post content and visitor's geographical and demographical data plays the secondary role just for picking local ads from the inventory. In a true sense, personalizing ads involves serving of select ads (generally direct advertisements) to the traffic on the basis of demographical and geographical data. And this whole ad-targeting campaign is under direct control of the blog owner.
Business funnel optimization - And last but not the least is applying personalization to get better results from your sales funnel. This is primarily done as re-targeting campaigns and is generally applied on returning visitors. For that, you need to retain the visitors' data and need to apply 'rinse and repeat' strategy till you get the desired results.

Pros and Cons of Behavioral Targeting

While implementing such techniques, there's always a positive outcome accompanied with some grey areas that may land you in trouble if not taken care of. We are going to discuss about both facets to see whether the positive side outweighs the grey one. Whenever you're implementing personalization, you're doing two primary things. You're collecting visitors' data and delivering custom content on the basis of that data. An average visitor almost always welcomes the latter, but the former may raise doubt in the minds of the visitors. Here are the pros and cons of applying behavioral targeting.

Pros - Better conversions (more revenue) - The more relevant content a visitor gets, the more engaged is the visit. This automatically increases the chances of conversions (e.g feed subscription, newsletter sign up, affiliate product sale), which essentially means inflation in revenue. And that's what a typical niche or a business blog strives to achieve.
Cons - Privacy issues - Implications of collecting visitors' data online has always been fiercely debated on different forums across the world. It's a sensitive issue and if not taken care of, it can ruin your online business within days. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has drafted a framework for web masters about privacy issues while implementing behavioral targeting. The crux of this report stresses on self-regulation and more importantly discusses about prohibition of collecting personally identifiable information (PII) under any circumstances. Data accuracy and data retention (duration and type of data) also comes into play especially if you're going to implement re-targeting campaigns for returning visitors. Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) has devised a handy online tool for users to opt out from behavioral advertising implemented by several popular advertising networks.

Implementing Personalization and Behavioral Targeting

Enough of theory, and now is the time to see how to actually implement personalization on your blog. You don't need to be a programmer or a coding ninja to do it. However, a working knowledge of HTML and basic PHP/CSS can make things easier for you. We can use the combination of BTBuckets, SiteApps and Google Analytics to power our behavioral targeting engine. So let's get started and see how we can create a pretty robust and reliable personalization engine for our blog.

Define goals - The very first step involves tabulation of clearly defined, achievable and feasible goals. Unless you don't know what you want to achieve from your personalization exercise, you'll never be able to move on to the next step. Create success metrics and give each one of them a unique name that will appear in the analytics reports. This way you set the foundation for measuring the success rate and return-on-investment (ROI) for any personalization campaign. Goal creation process is not easy as you may think initially. You must do extensive testing for a decent duration to get enough data to decide what to look for and what can be achieved. Use can use Google website optimizer to do MultiVariate or A/B testing. Simply creating these tests alone doesn't do the job. You need a large volume of data to achieve statistical confidence level for creating right success metrics. This Split and A/B Testing Confidence Calculator is an excellent tool to crunch your test data obtained from Google website optimizer.

Create segments/buckets - Once you've clearly defined your goals, sign up for a free BTBuckets account and move onto the next step of segregating users on this basis of success metrics defined in the previous step. In simple words, you define the type of visitors you'll be targeting against each respective goal. For example, social media visitors, French visitors, visitors landing on a specific post, visitors on XP machine and so on. Possibilities are infinite and I've just presented some of the simplest cases.

While creating a bucket of visitors through BTBuckets, you'll be presented with lots of options as shown in the image above. The available segregating criteria is broadly divided into 3 parts, viz ., behavior, IP intelligence and technical. You can combine all the available options in a single rule forming large number of criteria to filter out the exact match you want. For example, you can create a bucket of French visitors landing on a specific post and having Windows Vista on their machine. Carefully create all the buckets segregating your blog traffic to test all of them against one or more goals.

Apply targeting logic - Now the next important step is the core of this implementation. Here you'll define the actual logic that will be applied against each bucket to achieve your goals. For each bucket, you'll define a unique chain of actions that will govern what to do when a visitor falling in that bucket lands on your blog. For example, if a visitor from France lands on your blog, you may define an action of serving the French version of your web page (through redirect) or a French version of an advertisement.

As shown in the image above, you can trigger the logic by inserting a custom code on your web page. This can be done in two ways. If the related actions have nothing to do with change of appearance and content of the web page (e.g page redirect), you can opt for auto-insertion. In case you want to change the appearance or content of the web page at a specific location you can use the manual insertion mode that allows you to execute your custom code exactly at the location where you want it to appear. This custom code can be a simple HTML snippet or a complex JavaScript call. You can bind each action to a specific bucket for maximum flexibility giving you the desired results. You can also use dozens of pre-made and free applications from SiteApps to easily deploy these custom actions for each bucket.

Rinse and repeat - Fortunately, both BTBuckets and SiteApps provides tight integration with Google Analytics to better analyze your results. BTBuckets handy Google Analytics Segmentation procedure and SiteApps free and robust Google Analytics on Steroids application gives you two ways to analyze and optimize your personalization results. Whenever it comes to analyzing such type of data, I always suggest taking a long duration data set to get a clearer picture of the trends. Same thing applies here while you're crunching imported data from BTBuckets and SiteApps in your Google Analytics dashboard.

Miscellaneous Guidelines

So finally we have seen a way to implement behavioral targeting on a web site. But things don't end here. There are several important pointers and suggestions that can significantly improve your personalization campaigns. Here's a list of some of the guidelines.

Unless you don't receive decent traffic on your blog, there's no point wasting your time and money in implementing behavioral targeting.
Since privacy is a very sensitive issue related to personalization, make sure you have a privacy policy page that categorically discloses the information you're collecting from each visitor and how you're using it for personalization.
You can also use commercial behavioral targeting solutions like SageMetrics and Criteo to power your personalization engine.
Make sure your targeting logic (custom code) doesn't slow down your blog. It can have adverse effect instead of yielding any positive results.

Now Your Turn

I'd like to know if you're using personalization on your blog. If yes, how you've implemented it and what challenges you've faced while deploying the whole system. If you know more ways to implement behavioral targeting, we'd love to know about it.

How To Generate Leads From Your Business Blog

2011-10-26T22:15:00.000+05:30

Often my clients (mostly small businesses/individuals) ask two common questions. Those who've already integrated a blog with their primary web site sulk about not getting any concrete results from it and those who've not yet started, question the necessity of having a business blog. In both cases, they do have general awareness about using blogging as a potent weapon to rope in customers, but they lack the know-how of effectively leveraging business blog's real estate.

It is either used as a news outpost or merely resembles a collection of posts hard-selling products. These are just the two mistakes at the macro-level which are blended with dozens other to make sure your business blog serves no purpose. As a result, the team maintaining the blog finds it very difficult to convince the management to keep it running in the absence of any credible data showing leads or sales. Your business blog is not just for announcing policies and products. So, for what it's made for?

It's there to make a connection with your existing customers.
It's there to turn prospects into loyal customers.
It's there to push potential buyers into your sales funnel.
It's there to get feedback about your existing products and services.
And last but not the least, it's there to give your company a face.

One of the primary purposes of a business blog is to generate leads and that's what we are going to discuss here. This whole process can be divided into three parts - acquisition, channeling and baiting. In a nutshell, it's all about attracting potential customers who are looking for solutions, and then pushing them to the honey pots embedded in your blog or web site and finally alluring them to subscribe for your sales funnel.

Acquisition - Getting Qualified Traffic

Over the years, different case-studies and analysis have clearly suggested that organic traffic from search engines yields much better results as compared to the traffic spikes coming from social media sites like StumbleUpon. Moreover, it's not the quantity but the quality of traffic that makes the difference.

What does 'Qualified Traffic' mean? It's as simple as pulling selective traffic from popular search engines where people are querying about exactly those problems for which you've affordable and easy-to-implement solutions. To pull this targeted audience, you need a thoroughly researched and refined content creation strategy. This strategy can be divided into 3 simple steps.

Identifying relevant keywords (long tail as well as highly competitive) people are using on search engines.
Creating an archive of relevant and useful content based on popular visitors' queries.
Refining and applying the above two steps in a loop.

Social media does help in getting quick and relevant traffic, but in the long run, a massive archive of quality content is the silver bullet to get continuous stream of qualified traffic from organic sources.

Channeling - Diverting Visitors To Honey Pots

Once you've managed to attract potential customers coming from search engines, your next step is to channelize them towards professionally written persuasive text/video/audio content that's going to be a foundation for sign-ups for your sales funnel.

These landing pages can be separate pages on your business blog or they can a part (static pages) of your primary business web site. I'll strongly suggest you to avoid the latter approach unless your blog's look 'n' feel matches with your web site. The most common and easy approach for creating diversions within a blog post is context-sensitive links with an alluring anchor text.

You can experiment with different anchor texts by tagging and analyzing them through your favorite web analytics system over a period of time. In fact, every link involved in the lead-generation process should be properly tagged for better analysis such that you get enough data to optimize and refine the whole process. Apart from text links, custom hyper-linked banners within or around the post are an effective method to divert incoming traffic. While embedding these banners, you must ensure they're not too loud; else you'll end up experiencing high bounce rates from these posts.

Baiting - Converting Prospects Into Leads

Successful completion of acquisition and channeling phase presents the next challenge of alluring an individual to sign up for your sales funnel via landing pages (honey pots). These pages consist of premium content surrounded by at least 2 or more email sign-up forms. The design and placement of these email sign-up forms should be actively researched and analyzed. A wrong placement or a too loud design not only kills the conversions, but may also trigger negative feedback on various public platforms. When it comes to premium content that's used as bait, there are several forms used by expert marketers over the years. Here's a list of diverse content formats served on such type of pages.

Videos - It is the most effective medium to persuade an individual. Video has the power to instantly make a connection with the viewer. With some clever tactics that uses human psychology, you can achieve very high conversion rates through videos.
Product comparisons - This is yet another popular method to allure a visitor. Carefully choose the rival products/solutions to compare with and created a table or an infographic highlighting what's unique about your product.
Q & A list - It is something like a FAQ section present on a typical web site. The only difference is that this list can be much longer and one question may lead to another question in the list. Tip: You may leave the most important question unanswered just above the email sign-up form.
Case studies/reports - If you have a data set from credible sources that convincingly displays the qualities of your products, nothing can be better than that. The real challenge is packaging this information into a persuasive copy that converts well.

Refining Lead Generation Process

No lead generation system is perfect and requires continuous monitoring and optimization. You need lots of data (visitors' behavior) and people smart enough to extract trends from that data that paves the way to replenish the existing system with new improved methodologies. Here are some general guidelines that will help you in creating a solid lead generation system through your business blog.

Extensively split test your landing pages using Google Website Optimizer. Employ both A/B and multivariate testing.
Get your email sign-up forms designed from a professional. It is one of the critical factors that decide the course of your lead generation campaign.
If your targeted landing pages are on the primary web site, make sure the design of your blog matches with the web site. That's where blog design fundamentals come handy.
Keep your business blog absolutely free of any sidebar widgets, adverts or any other distracting stuff that may hurt your conversions.

Image Credit: Wysz

How To Build A Thriving Personal Blog

2011-08-29T09:00:00.003+05:30

Niche blogs are the dominant species in the blogosphere. About a decade back, things were quite different, when it all started with personal diaries. Even today, personal blogs are abundant throwing light on people's day-to-day life. In recent years, a lot has been said about creating profitable niche blogs, but comparatively, you'll find very little about creating an awesome personal blog. There are some striking differences between a niche and a personal blog, and both of them require a different approach to get things done.

So let's get started and see what it takes to build a popular personal blog that people actually want to read. Some people say that personal blogs are dead with almost no readership. Well, if you're churning out remarkable content, no matter where it appears, people are going to flock around it. The only difference will be the type of audience and the way they interact and connect. A personal blog has the power to build or ruin your brand, especially if you're already into some kind of online business (running niche blogs/websites). In such cases, content created on your personal blog can directly affect your online business. A typical personal blog talks about a person's life, events and happenings. Some of them are more like a portfolio that is generally updated few times a year. Here are some pointers and guidelines that may help you in creating a thriving personal blog.

Define the scope

While creating a personal blog, you may opt to blog anonymously to avert any inadvertent damage to your business brand, or to comply with the restrictions/censorship imposed in your geographical area, or simply you just don't want to reveal your identity as you've decided to post about some controversial topics.

Blogging anonymously - If you've decided to blog anonymously, never use someone else's photograph. It may land you in trouble. Matter can become worse if you receive a notice from his/her attorney about impersonating an individual and damaging their reputation. Here are some guidelines for blogging anonymously.

Avoid using a name of a celebrity or brand.
DO NOT use someone else's photograph as your own.
If you're living in a sensitive geographical area, avoid revealing your location.
Always double check your posts, before you press the publish button.

Blogging as the 'REAL' you - In case, you've decided to blog without hiding your identity, things can become trickier if you're already running a successful online business. No matter how much you try to keep your personal blog activities separate from your business web sites, people almost always tend to mix 'em up and co-relate making judgments.

You can choose to talk about your business web sites on your personal blog and vice-versa cross-linking each other in the process. But, I'll advise you to avoid mixing the two. This doesn't mean that you should never talk about your business life on your personal blog, but doing it sparingly (within context) makes things much better.

Extent of sharing - This is yet another important attribute to take into consideration. How much of your personal life are you willing to share? Are you going to talk about very intimate things? What about posting photographs of you and your family members? Are you going to share real names of your spouse and kids? These are some important questions that need to be answered before your personal blog is up and running.

As I said before, if you're living in a geographically sensitive area, avoid your real names and photographs.
Do not post solo front close-up shots of your spouse. It can be misused by anybody.
Beware: Never discuss your family problems on your personal blog.
Clearly outline the boundary of information you're going to share with your readers.

Content creation strategy

Generally, personal blogs are updated at irregular intervals. The type of content can vary with each post, yet you have the challenge to keep your readers waiting for more. How to do that magic? It's very simple. Read on...

Use humor - Nothing can beat the use of humor in your blog posts. Since you're writing for a personal blog, you can liberally use it to make your post - a magnet. While writing such post, there's only one thing that need to be taken care of. Do not hurt any individual's sentiments that may result in public embarrassment. Cracking jokes on yourself is the best policy to avoid any controversies and at the same time it paves the way to win hearts of your readers.

Use Anecdotes (tell stories) - Now this is an art that you can refine with passage of time. If applied correctly, you can keep the readers glued to the screen till they've not finished your post. Add some spice to an interesting incident that you may face in your daily life and craft an alluring opening paragraph supported by a relevant image. Some personal blogs are able to attract large audience solely on the basis of such type of posts.

Give tips and life hacks - This is yet another way to make your readers coming back for more. Regularly sharing your useful productivity tips that actually provides an implementable solution making home and office management much easier, can make your personal blog a big hit in no time. These life hacks can be a simple kitchen tip or can be as complex as making your own useful gadget from the junk in your storeroom. Whatever is the case, you're guaranteed to get positive comments and applause, once you start posting such 'Everyday Solutions'.

Image-only posts - A personal blog is lifeless unless you post image-only posts. Share images from your overseas trip, a get-together on a festive season or a hilarious moment within the family. People tend to connect more easily with the blogger, if he/she shares images with the audience. In the number of image-only blog posts is large, make sure you optimize these images before upload else you may end up consuming all your hosting bandwidth.

Experimenting with visual appearance

Unlike niche or a business blog, a personal blog has more freedom to make changes in the layout and design. You don't have to stick around with a brand logo and similar visual elements.

A personal blog's header is one of the most important elements that can be used effectively to give returning visitors a refreshing browsing session. One of the best ways to get this done is to create a large header with rotating images. I'll suggest you to change your personal blog's theme at least once a year. These changes are more intended towards your loyal fans who expect something new and refreshing apart from the regular content they're fed with.

Bare essentials

And last but not the least, here are some of the technical/non-technical aspects that need to be taken care of to get the best out of your personal blog.

If possible, get your own name domain name for your personal blog. If your name has already been taken, try a shorter version.
One of the most visited pages on a personal blog is 'About' page. Spend some time in creating a rocking 'About Me' page and make sure it is updated regularly (whenever required).
Make a separate Gravatar profile for your personal blog.
Use you full name for the WordPress author profile.
Create a strong comment policy and prominently highlight (link) it near comment form. Personal blogs are more prone to trolls and you must have a strategy to deal with them.
If you're hibernating for a long period, announce the same through a sticky post.

So now it's your turn to share your experiences you had with your personal blog. I'd love to get more on this through your comments.

6 Reasons Google+ Will Redefine Social Networking

2011-07-20T18:14:00.003+05:30

After the decline of MySpace, Facebook has dominated social networking domain with a staggering growth rate in last few years. Absence of any strong rival boosted Facebook's hold and made it unchallenged player in the market. Google's two attempts to enter social networking domain with Google Wave and Google Buzz was turned down by the people. But wait, we learn from our mistakes, and that's what Google has shown this time.

On 28th June 2011, Google has launched a new social networking service called Google+. There's a clear indication that all the valuable feedback they've got through Wave and Buzz users has served as a road map to create Google+. I'm pretty much impressed by the way they have handled the concerns of people that popped up in Buzz. So, the big question is - "Is it going to be a big hit?" or "Can it dethrone Facebook?". Well, the trends and positive feedback suggests that it will gain wide user acceptance. Facebook is a social networking giant and dethroning it is a herculean task. If Google+ manages to secure mass adoption consistently, still it may take few years before it can give a real tough fight to its arch-rival. I'm active both on Facebook and Google+, but I must admit that some of the features (editable comments, photo-tagging permissions), which I always wanted in Facebook are there in Google+. There are strong reasons that make Google+ a unique and innovative way to connect and share with people.

Strong privacy controls

One of the reasons Google Buzz didn't cut the ice was imperfect privacy settings. Thankfully, well-knitted privacy settings make Google+ a more acceptable and secure platform. Whether it's profile visibility, status updates, photo sharing/tagging or network/friends management, Google+ team has taken care of the most essential privacy concerns that directly addresses leakage of individual's personal information and his online activities. Here's a glimpse of the most essential privacy settings for Google+.

Your circles (friends group) always remain private, i.e., your friend doesn't know that you've just added him to a circle named 'Bunch of Idiots'.
By default, all uploaded images are private.
During a 'Hang Out' session, your video stream isn't shared with participants, unless you explicitly give permission for the same.
Almost every part of your Google+ profile can be customized for visibility. This includes an option to exclude your profile from appearing in search results altogether. Note: Enabling this setting doesn't hide your profile from your internal friends network.
Needless to say, your status updates visibility can be fine-tuned too.

You own your data

Web sites running primarily on user generated content have different policies when it comes to ownership of content. Google+ has a clear-cut policy about ownership of your content. They call it 'Data Liberation'. Every single bit of information generated by you on Google+ can be exported without any hassle via Google Takeout.

Unlike some other data export systems, that bundle all the information in a single archive, Google Takeout lets you choose the service whose data need to be exported. This significantly reduces the archive size and facilitates easy exportation.

All the contacts on your Google Talk list (irrespective of whether you've blocked them in the past) can be exported along with their email addresses, provided they've enabled chat in Google+. This certainly makes it stand apart and induces trust and confidence among the users. Complete content ownership will be one of the primary attributes that need to be supported by future social networking services. You can delay it, but you cannot hide from it.

Deeply integrated with Google services

Google Buzz was tightly integrated with GMail, but failed to get the user base for two simple reasons. First, the information flow was overwhelming and hindered the regular mailing activities of users, and secondly, it was just limited to GMail. With Google+, the story is quite different. Google has cleverly created a notification bar that is integrated with all popular Google services. It has solved both problems existent in the previous attempts. First, it does not hinder your regular activities, and secondly, you can have quick access to your Google+ events irrespective of the Google service you're using currently.

It's not just the notifications in any of the Google service, but the intelligent use of related services like Picasa web (poised to be renamed as Google photos), and the use of search engine database for giving life to 'Sparks' has made it a win-win situation for both Google+ and it's users. This ensures that existing Picasa web users don't need to separately upload their collection to Google+. Secondly, users don't need to leave Google+ to search for content they want to share with their network. Simply create a collection of 'Sparks' of your interests powered by Google search engine database and get going.

Gorgeous Interface

Web site usability greatly depends on fascinating interface that is easy to use, isn't sluggish and is soothing to eyes. That's what Google+'s minimalistic, yet attractive interface brings to the users. The good thing about Google+'s interface is that it is not densely packed and the navigation is clean and obvious. And the icing on the cake is the speed at which it renders. Probably, it's due to the absence of extra features/services that makes the code heavy, since it's still in private beta stage.

Another striking feature of Google+'s interface is the minimal use of flash and relying heavily on CSS and JavaScript. Overall, you'll never be disappointed when it comes to usability and navigation on Google+. I'm sure a more dense and compact version is coming ahead to accommodate new features that will be rolled out in coming months.

Innovative ways to connect and share

With the launch of Google+, various articles on prominent web sites criticized Google+'s approach of managing friends network. Interestingly, comment threads beneath these articles told a completely different story. Despite initial criticism, Google+ circles have become a cornerstone of this project. People are loving this intuitive and unique way to manage their friends network. Apart from the default circles provided by Google+, users have learned to create more meaningful and necessary circles as per their needs.

The drag-n-drop feature makes the whole process of segregating users less boring and more of a fun. This doesn't end here. People have already started suggesting a more refined and optimized way to use this feature, i.e., inclusion of circle-in-circle (parent-child circles), overlapping circles (cross-posting with minimum hassle) and much more. Let's accept it, no other social network has managed to come out with such a different and unique approach to manage friends network.

Rocking feedback mechanism

This is yet another feature that makes Google+ stand apart from the rest. I don't remember any other social network giving me the liberty to provide direct feedback through such mechanism. It's not just plain email address or a contact page. As I said before, this time Google is damn serious about user feedback so that no stone is leave unturned to introduce necessary changes in time. In fact, its not just about getting feedback for changes in existing system, but it also serves as a medium to get valuable data to invent and introduce exactly those features that current user base is demanding.

This is a very smart move from Google+ team. The feedback submitting process itself is very interesting. You can highlight the problem area, or you can blackout sensitive information that makes things much easier to elaborate. And make no mistake about it - this feedback system really works. Suggestions that require major changes may take some time, but relatively smaller problems (like a navigation pitfall) are addressed immediately.

So, is Google+ poised to become a major player in the social networking domain? Well, that nobody can predict at this point of time, but one thing is absolutely clear. Google+ is completely different from Wave and Buzz, and the current user base is loving the way it works, i.e., users are definitely pouring in with ideas and suggestions, but by and large, I've not seen a user reporting any privacy breach (Buzz killer), or a major malfunction.

So that's my view of this new social networking service, what about you? Are you active on Google+? If yes, how do you find it different from MySpace and Facebook?

A Handy Guide To Twitter Automation

2011-06-13T08:20:00.004+05:30

When it comes to social media, automation is not welcomed by everyone, and rightly so. Having said that, one cannot ignore the fact that the sheer volume of new media applications and services is overwhelming us. One cannot actively manage multiple social media accounts and some level of automation is a must. But, doing it in a wrong way can land you in trouble resulting in suspended/terminated accounts. Let's try to understand automation principles for a popular social media service - Twitter.

Like any other social media service, twitter has set guidelines and best practices for automation. Adhering to these guidelines ensures you're playing safe without any worry of account suspension. Sometimes, twitter filters out spammy accounts from search results before suspension process is initiated. If bulk of your tweets is automated, it is advisable to check them in twitter search results everyday. Absence from twitter search is a clear indication your account has been pinned down by twitter and its time to rethink your tweet strategy.

So let's get started, and try to understand the type and degree of automation a twitter account can withhold without violating any rule.

Account creation - An individual or a business/organization can have multiple twitter accounts. However, creating mass twitter accounts in an automated way with overlapping use is not permitted. That doesn't mean charities; non-profits and similar entities can't have multiple accounts that broadly post similar content for social cause or general community service. But for that, make sure you take prior permission from twitter by submitting a request for the same.

Streaming external content - Apart from general conversations posted manually, twitter users love to stream content from external sources (feeds, multi-media updates - video or snap upload). Twitter encourages you to stream content owned by you, but that's not a strict requirement. Automating other feeds should be supported by proper attribution giving due credit to it's owner. Stuffing your tweet stream by countless automated external feed updates and that too without any attribution can lead to account suspension.

Streaming dodgy feeds - If you auto-post a feed containing links that go through a redirection leading to a landing/advertisement page before user can see the actual content, you're at risk of getting your account terminated. Avoid automating such feeds and make sure the links in every automated feed are free from any kind of redirection.

Trending topics and automation - A large chunk of tweets comprises of trending topics on twitter. Some applications have the (facility!) of automated tweeting on the basis of keywords within trending topics. This greatly reduces the quality of tweets within the trending topics stream. Twitter generally filters out such streams, but in case, your automated application is tweeting unrelated references associated with a trending topic, your account can be suspended for indefinite period.

Streaming ads and affiliate links - Automated tweets for which you're paid (per-click, per-tweet, per-sale) are strictly prohibited on twitter. This is a surefire way to get your account terminated. However, you can post sponsored or paid tweets manually (or approved manually) making sure they do not reappear in your stream. Needless to say, flooding such tweets can only bring your account under scanner and can also help you in losing your followers in no time. In a nutshell, paid tweets should never be automated or scheduled.

Streaming @replies and mentions - Certain so-called smart twitter tools send automated @replies to bunch of users based on keywords in their tweet stream. If you're using such tool, be assured that soon your account will be suspended. This is clearly a clever way to send unsolicited messages to unknown users (SPAM). Another kind of spam is automated retweets based on keyword searches. Do not try to automate such kind of updates else you'll risk your account being terminated.

Follow and unfollow - This is one of the most popular method through which large number of twitter accounts are terminated. Automated following and unfollowing based on keywords or in random order is not allowed on twitter. Only auto-follow-back (following a user after they have followed you) can be automated. Some twitter tools claim to get you thousands of followers overnight by indulging in mass automated following and unfollowing. I strong advice you to do this process manually and that too within the limits.

As a general rule of thumb, if your tweeting behavior results in large number spam and block reports to twitter, your account will be suspended or terminated. A simple example can be - sending automated direct messages to new followers containing affiliate links. It's up to you how you leverage this excellent social media platform in a right way. Keep yourself updated with the general set of rules and guidelines and if you're in dilemma about a certain automation process, ask any expert and head over to official twitter help. Happy automated tweeting!

Image Credit: Rosaura Ochoa

Understanding WordPress Roles And Capabilities

2011-06-05T21:31:00.003+05:30

Every content management system (CMS) inherently supports a strong access system for its users. WordPress is no different and have a very powerful and flexible access control system. An average WordPress user never bothers about different levels of access controls applicable to different types of users. Normally, we install WordPress, use the default account and blog on! But in multi-user environment, we have to choose different access level (account) for each user.

Note: To keep things simple, we're not going to discuss about Super Admin applicable only in case of multi-site installation for a blog network.

If you're running a multi-author blog or run a subscription-based membership site, you must understand different roles and capabilities WordPress has to offer. For each task certain privileges are required, and assigning more than what is required can prove fatal. A user with added privilege can inadvertently modify or edit those settings or content for which he/she has no authorization. To avert this catastrophic situation, the best method is to assign role-based accounts to each user. So let's get started and quickly take a look on different types of accounts WordPress has to offer.

Administrator - As the name implies, this role has complete access to all the rights and have complete control over the blog. Whether it's creating and editing content, tweaking theme, doing various system-wide settings or managing users, an administrator enjoys all the rights without any restriction.
Editor - Apart from core administrative tasks, an editor enjoys full control over content management and related tasks. An editor not only manages his own content but also have complete control over posts and pages created by all other accounts. He can edit, delete, schedule and publish posts created by any user.
Author - This role restricts a user to manage his own content. An author has complete control over the content created by him, but he cannot make any changes to the content created by other accounts. Generally, members of a typical multi-author blog are assigned this role.
Contributor - There is a striking difference between an author and a contributor. Both have complete control over their content when it comes to creating and editing the posts and pages, but a contributor cannot publish the post. Generally, new members of a multi-author blog are assigned this role, whose post submissions are reviewed by the editor before pressing the publish button.
Subscriber - If you offer premium content or run a coaching program with exclusive content accessible only to members, this role is the best candidate for the members. A subscriber have read-only access to blog's content which is hidden from general visitors.

If you run a multi-user blog, make sure you understand each role and carefully assign these roles to appropriate users. One mistake can lead to disaster that may cost you money and more importantly may lead to long-term repercussions that can hurt your online business. A rule of thumb is to start with least privileged account and to gradually promote the user. To avoid any confusion, you can create an access control matrix where each role capabilities are clearly visible to assist you in taking the right decision.

Image Credit: sbluerock

How To Keep Your Blog Alive During Long Vacation

2011-05-29T22:46:00.003+05:30

Planning to go on a long vacation with family? Have you ensured your blog won't go on vacation with you? Sometimes, we tend to procrastinate (haven't you ever?) even in the most favorable conditions and a long vacation can really trigger this deadly virus within you, unless you do the preparation in advance. Careful planning can keep your blog alive even during considerably long vacations. All you need is a meticulous plan to place everything in the right place.

Schedule beforehand - Unless you explicitly declare your non-availability during vacations, you can't afford post-less weeks without intimating the same to your subscriber base. The larger your subscriber base, greater is the risk of losing your credibility if you keep your blog starved for a long time. It's better to write some posts in advance and schedule it for the vacation time. You can reduce of the size of the posts as well as the frequency to speed up the scheduling process.

Invite guest posts - This is the second best option to fill your editorial calendar with content from your peers and readers. Gently push a message through popular social media platforms (Facebook, twitter) asking for guest posts. You can send direct message or email to some of the close blogging peers asking to contribute during your vacation.

Repurpose old content - This is an art that comes handy in such situations. It's like packing the old wine in a new bottle. Pick some of the least performing posts from your archive and create a fresh one improving on the old version adding some more spice to it. It's like adding bells and whistles to the old car and presenting it with new looks to the buyers. Needless to say, this method speeds up the post writing process and helps you in filling your editorial calendar at a much faster pace.

Interview peers - Who doesn't like to get interviewed and featured in front of qualified traffic? Quickly jot down a set of questions and create 4-5 different sets. Mail them to your network (selective peers), sit back and relax. In a day or two, you'll receive completed questionnaires ready to be scheduled. Just be careful not to post them in quick succession.

Miscellaneous tips for blogging on the go

Here are some essentials guidelines to make your routine blogging tasks as smooth as if you're doing them from your usual blogging workplace.

Don't forget to pack your blogging gadgets (laptop, smartphone and tablet) loaded with all the essential software.
Make sure you've turned off automatic software updates; else you may get a hefty bill (in case of metered broadband) from your hotel.
Blog about your entire day spent with the local people/culture and co-relate it with your blogging activities.
Switch-off comment notifications while you're on the move. Don't forget to enable them when you're back in your hotel room.
Avoid geo-tagging your social networks updates during vacations.
Nothing's better than editing and posting the drafts while sipping coffee in a local cafe.
Visit a local bookstore and you're guaranteed come out with dozens of new ideas to post during your long vacation.

What other tips you'd like to share with us for painless blogging during travel? Has it ever happened that you've canceled your trip merely because you couldn't keep up with your blogging routine? Share your thoughts and comments below!

Image Credit: Thom Watson

6 Easy Steps To Make A Successful List Post

2011-05-23T06:13:00.001+05:30

If you're filling your archive with different types of posts (e.g - how-to's, link roundups, news, informational, lists), you truly are doing justice with your subscribers. No one likes monotonous content that forces a subscriber to click the 'unsubscribe' link. Among these different types of posts, list posts are known to bring tons of traffic consistently. Lets walk-through list post creation process and see how to convert these gems into a perpetual fountain of traffic.

Choose a massively popular topic

This sounds very obvious, but sometimes we ignore simple things and pay the price. The moment you choose a trending topic (which can be controversial too), half of the battle has already been won. You may ask the question - Why the hell should I write about a topic already popping out on every corner of the web? Am I not creating a second copy?

No, you'll not create a copy provided you know the principles of creating remarkable content. Even if there are lists on similar topic, you can beat all of them by identifying their weakness and shortcomings. Selection of popular topic ensures that in case your list is elevated in search engine result pages, it can receive good amount of traffic.

Note: If you decide to choose a controversial topic, make sure you're not hurting the sentiments of a certain community at large.

Write a magnetic headline

Once you have a hot topic in your hand, move on to the next step of creating an eye-popping headline (post title). Creating a good post title is like hanging a carrot on the end of the stick. It should be irresistible enough to induce a click from a visitor.

Spice up with illustrations/pictures

No list post can be regarded as complete without pictures. Some lists require multiple small images, while others may require medium to big size images for each item/entry. Some of the most popular list posts are entirely made up of images. A very long list post without any image may not receive that much attention as you may have anticipated. While adding images to your list post, make sure you follow these simple yet very effective image optimization guidelines.

Say a big NO to long paragraphs

There's very little scope of large text paragraphs in list posts. Generally, an ideal list post is made up of images with little text sprinkled around them with a link (if required) for each entry. However, you may include a medium-sized opening paragraph to summarize the list content. Some lists that are devoid of any images do have the scope of very short paragraphs for each entry in the list.

Resist the temptation to create a very long list

Creating a very long list containing large number of hyperlinks can backfire. Same thing is applicable to image list posts. The larger the number of images, the more time it takes to open. This not only increases the bounce rate, but also unnecessarily consumes your server's bandwidth. If the number of images is very large, divide your list post into multiple parts.

Segregate related items into sections

If your list post is long, 9 out of 10 times you're filling enough items in it that can be easily subdivided to make the post less confusing and more readable. Group all related items in one section and order them logically for making it more useful and informative.

What Else?

Now it's your turn to add to this list. If you've been experimenting with list posts, what else you'll like to add to this post?

How To Create A Simple Wordpress Plugin

2011-05-15T01:02:00.002+05:30

Almost every Wordpress user is familiar with plugins and their benefits as a whole. They simplify complex tasks and enhance the functionality of your weblog without modifying the core. Even though there are thousands of plugins available on web, still sometimes we couldn't find the one that yields the same result, as we want. Why not create our very own plugin? Well, if you can tweak your theme (basic HTML editing, simple CSS enhancements), you can make your own plugin in no time. Let's see how to create a basic Wordpress plugin that serves as a platform for a more complex one.

Note: This tutorial assumes that you're familiar with Wordpress and have basic knowledge of HTML and PHP.

Our plugin will not do anything exceptional, since it's just a sample plugin to get you started. This elementary plugin will do two simple tasks. First, it will display a friendly text message on top of Wordpress administrator dashboard, and secondly, it will display a line of text at the end of each blog post. So let's get started.

We'll start by creating a new text file my-first-plugin.php. Add the following text to the file. It's a standard plugin information header that helps Wordpress in identifying the plugin.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Test Plugin
Version: 1.0
Description: Just a test plugin!
Author: Rajeev Edmonds
Author URI: http://URI_of_plugin_author_website
Plugin URI: http://URI_of_plugin_descripion_and_updates
License: A slug describing license associated with the plugin (usually GPL2)
*/
?>

Although each line in the header is self-explanatory, still it's better to once go through each entry.

Plugin Name - While naming your plugin, once check that you're not giving a conflicting name to your plugin. Since the sheer volume of Wordpress plugins is so high, there are good chances that you may end up putting a name that matches with an existing plugin.
Version - You can choose any version system you want. If it's going to be a complex plugin with frequent updates, it's better to go with a 3-digit version system (eg. 1.0.0), else, a simple 2-digit version system (eg. 1.0) will do the work.
Description - This is one of the important fields. Make sure, you're writing an unambiguous and clear text explaining the exact functioning of the plugin in layman's language.
Author - Do I need to explain this?
Author URI - Mention your weblog's or website's url here. It can be a homepage, portfolio or contact page.
Plugin URI - It's common for plugin authors to create a dedicated page for plugin mentioning about it's features and updates. Specify that plugin url in this field.
License - This field indicates the license associated with your plugin. Since you're going to build it for Wordpress platform, it's generally a good idea to go for GPL2 or compatible license. If you are building a complex plugin with proprietary images and javascript, you can opt for split GPL license.

At this point, your plugin has ample information to be recognized by Wordpress engine. Upload it to the wp-content/plugins directory and refresh 'Plugins' option in your admin dashboard. Here's what you will see.

You can activate and deactivate your plugin at this moment. Since we have not placed any real working code in it, plugin activation will have no effect except a notification of successful activation. So let's move on to the next step and include a code to display a message on top of the admin dashboard. Here's the code...

function display_admin_notice() {
echo '<p>Just a notice for demo purpose!</p>';
}

add_action('admin_notices', 'display_admin_notice');

Make sure you put this code just above '?>'. Now lets dissect what this code does. First, we've created a function display_admin_notice(), that simply displays a text message. The second part does all the magic. add_action() function is a Wordpress function that hooks on to a specific action specified by the user. Actions are referred to as events that are initiated by Wordpress core engine whenever something happens, like a page refresh in admin panel, change of theme etc. Here we've hooked on to 'admin_notices' action (triggered whenever admin dashboard page is refreshed) and have passed on our custom function to display the text message every time this event happens.

Once you've added the code, simply activate the plugin, and instantly you'll see the notice on top of admin dashboard as shown in the image above. Yay! We've just created our first working plugin.

Now lets move on to the second part, where we'll try to display a line of text at the end of each post. Again we'll take help of a custom function to append a line of text to the post content. Here's the code...

function display_post_end_notice($content) {

if (is_single()) {
$content .= 'It\'s just demo text at the end of every post.';
}

return $content;
}

add_filter('the_content', 'display_post_end_notice');

We've created a custom function display_post_end_notice() that receives post content as an argument. After appending a line of text, our custom function simply returns the modified post content. The second part consists of a Wordpress function add_filter(). Filter is simply a hook that Wordpress triggers before sending the modified text to database or to the browsers screen. Here we've used the 'the_content' tag that returns the post content and is passed on to our custom function display_post_end_notice() as an argument. After modification add_filter() sends the modified post content (containing our appended line of text) to the browsers screen.

And here's what it looks like. The first line is the original post text and the second line is injected by our plugin. Oh, I forgot to tell you about is_single() function used in our custom function. This function simply checks whether a visitor is browsing a single post page or not. If he's not on a single post page, nothing will be added to the post content.

So that's it. You can download this plugin file for instant testing on your local Wordpress install.

Image Credit: smemon87

12 Deadly Sins of a Small Business Blog

2011-05-08T21:05:00.002+05:30

Recently, I got two emails asking to get their small business blog pimped & pumped up. Interestingly, both of them were exhibiting almost same shortcomings that were hindering their growth. For some of us, it's very surprising to see a business struggling to take full advantage of their blog. Is it lack of formulating effective web marketing strategies or is simply underestimation of the power of new media? Whatever is the case; some of these mistakes are committed by countless small business blogs leading to frustration and financial loss.

Fortunately, the road map to build a successful small business blog is very much realistic, practical and implementable. It does take some time, but the results are equally rewarding. Some new small businesses also put this question - "Why the hell do we need a business blog?" That clearly suggests that the brains behind the business are ignorant about new media. Well, here's a list of DONT's, that may help in identifying and weeding out the negative practices responsible for sluggish growth of your small business blog.

Making it news outpost - That's the most common practice that makes your business blog dead even before you expect first 1000 visitors.
Posts written by bot - I've often found business blogs posting content without proper author profiles. You can see 'by Admin' as the author name. Common, you're dealing with humans!
Countless irrelevant categories - Now this is purely lack of professional blogging staff. I've seen business blogs creating categories as 'My Company X products', 'My Company Y products'. Categories are there to segregate relevant content, that's it.
Flash, flash & more flash - Some businesses can't resist to add a large flash gallery above the fold to showcase their products. Leave this for your primary website. Blog is to build a community around engaging and persuasive content.
Keeping comments closed - Unless you're a trillion dollar company holding a monopoly in your domain, you can't afford to close comments on your business blog. Bring out the human face and interact!
No contact information - This is the last thing can do to ruin your company's image and credibility. Build a contact page offering multiple ways (contact form, email, toll-free number) to contact your public relations department.
Hard-selling - This is yet another mistake done by large number of small business blogs. Use cleverly crafted contextual links within content to drive traffic to your primary website's product landing pages.
Irregular updates - Like any other blog, business blogs too demand regular content feeding. This doesn't mean you have post every single day. Create a posting frequency and stick to it.
Ranting about personal & business problems - Avoiding all this sounds quite obvious but still some small business blogs fall in this trap inadvertently. Think twice before hitting the publish button.
Disclosing classified information - This can be the last thing you can do to severely damage your company's credibility. Occasionally, business blogs do share statistical data and clients' case-studies, but make sure you're picking up the right files before making them public.
Indulging in head-on confrontation with competitors - Who doesn't like healthy competition, provided you keep the limits and practice good business ethics. Talking too much negative about your competitors on your business blog can backfire.
Failing to integrate correctly with primary website - Your small business blog should provide a prominent link to your business website. Make sure you host it in a sub directory (mycompany.com/blog) instead of hosting it on a sub-domain (blog.mycompany.com) to preserve link juice.

There are many other points mostly dealing with seo and technical aspects of blogging. If you really want to make your business blog successful, make sure you've hired a professional blogger. If you're making some of these mistakes, this is the time to switch gears and make your small business blog a favorite destination for your clients and prospects.

3 Essential Design Principles For a Blog

2011-04-24T21:55:00.001+05:30

A good blog design isn't just about implementing best web design practices, but involves much more than that. Unlike static websites, a blog incorporates much tighter integration of social features to facilitate direct interaction with the community. This makes designing task a bit tricky to get the maximum benefits from the available real estate on your blog. Lets dig in and try to find out some of the most necessary guidelines for designing a blog that keeps your visitors hooked.

Apply C.R.A.P Principle

If you're a web or graphic designer, you may already be implementing this concept on every website/blog coming out from your studio. For those, who are not aware of C.R.A.P principle, I must stress that it's not 'crap' but C.R.A.P (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity). It's one of the basic web design principle applicable to every single web page to make it more appealing and effective.

Contrast - Every blog have different sections comprising of content, header, footer, ads, comments and sidebar. These sections form a single unit (web page), yet they are logically separated from one another. If your blog visitor can identify these different sections easily without getting confused, it means you've applied the first rule well and good. Do not make different sections identical enough that visitors find it difficult to view each section as a separate unit.
Repetition - The design and style implemented for each section should be applied across every single web page. Change in style may lead to confusion resulting in bad browsing experience for your visitors. Whether it's home page, single post page, static page or archives page, keep the style of each section uniform.
Alignment - Now this is very simple. Arbitrary alignment of objects makes the web page look like dump yard. Streamline related objects aligning them uniformly to make your page well organized, more attractive and legible.
Proximity - The last but not the least is the proximity rule. Group all logically related objects together and keep them close to each other to form a well-organized cohesive unit. This ensures the section comprising of logically related objects serves its purpose and gives you maximum benefits.

Do Not Include Everything

It's a honeypot that looks good while implementing, but makes your blog bleed in the long run. It's very tempting to include fancy flash objects, rotating image galleries and similar elements to give a richer experience to the visitor. But behind it, you require well-optimized code, carefully chosen multimedia plugins and a good hosting server. A good blog design is considered to run fast with minimal hiccups even when several multimedia objects or scripts are running behind the scenes. Here are some guidelines to keep only the essentials and to cut down the weed.

Avoid flash objects wherever you can.
While choosing a multimedia plugin, make sure it passes the performance benchmark and doesn't consume too many server resources.
Use CSS + web optimized images, instead of scripts to beautify your theme sections.
Keep your content on the left. Research suggests that while viewing a web page, human eye tends to scan left to right.

Make it Social

Unless you don't provide ample options to share and aggregate your blog content, you're defeating the whole purpose of creating a blog. It's the community nurtured around a blog that makes it successful. Every good blog design includes rich integration of social media elements to allow easy commenting, bookmarking, subscription and cross-posting to popular new media platforms. Here's a checklist to make sure your blog design is well-equipped to handle social media savvy traffic.

Consider using a third party commenting system consisting of richer integration of popular social media services. Some of the commonly used commenting systems are Disqus and Intense Debate.
If you stick to native commenting system, use popular social media plugins like CommentLuv, Twittar to return social love to your commentators.
Include bookmarking section right below the post body to get the maximum sharing clicks.
I'm not a fan of top and bottom social media bars quite common nowadays. They hinder your normal browsing activity and are irritating. However, you can experiment with them and can consider in your blog design plan.
Consider displaying your latest tweet in your blog's header or footer to encourage more twitter following. Nowadays, large number of blog designs includes twitter updates matching the theme in various sections of the blog.

And last but not the least, I'd strongly suggest you to consider buying a premium Wordpress theme. The reason is quite simple. You get a well optimized and clean code that runs fast and is flexible enough is meet your design needs. Which premium theme you should consider? Well, that I leave up to you

Image Credit : MikeBlogs

Quora : A Socially-Driven Information Resource

2011-04-02T08:49:00.003+05:30

Year 2010 saw several new social media start-ups and one of them is Quora, co-founded by Adam D'Angelo (Facebook's former CTO) and Charlie Cheever. It's a socially-driven collection of questions and answers with emphasis on maximum user-participation featuring tight integration of social features. In recent months, it has acquired impressive user base and is growing strongly. I recently signed up for Quora and found it very interesting and useful resource. Let's see how can you make most out of this promising social media service.

Quora is all about user-generated content that's improved and refined over time. It's the users who ask questions, which in-turn triggers answers from other users. You can follow topics, questions and of course users of your choice. There's a voting system that ensures best answers are elevated to the top to keep the quality high. It has a followers & following system similar to a micro-blogging platform. Tagging similar to facebook ensures you can quote/refer/credit the desired source.

Questions are the building blocks

Yes, that's the backbone of quora. You create, answer, comment, vote, edit, aggregate, segregate and share questions with the Quora community and beyond (twitter and facebook). If used properly, Quora can build your brand and authority as you are surrounded by tons of questions that falls in your niche. You can provide your expert views and can update them as many times as you want. Since some of the answers may create a controversy or the user may not want to reveal his identity, Quora provides a facility to comment anonymously.

After sign-up, you may struggle to submit your very first question if it doesn't pass Quora guidelines. Thankfully, there are countless administrators, moderators and volunteers that are ready to help you post your first question smoothly. The most important thing is not to address an individual/person while asking a question. Keep it generic and free of grammatical mistakes. You can also attach a brief description with your primary question to make it more understandable for the community. The amount of flexibility Quora provides while posting a question is amazing. You can make it anonymous, redirect it to a related question, forward it to selective users, add topics to it and of course can stop monitoring it. You can also mark a question as a best source. This indicates the question has been favored as the most credible and complete information about the topic. You can also prevent users from adding more categories to the questions to avoid appearing them in irrelevant streams.

I've found the 'Monitor Question' option extremely useful, especially when lots of constructive discussion is going on by industry experts. Don't confuse it with 'Follow Question' option. The difference between both is quite simple. 'Monitor Question' sends instant email notifications as soon as new answers/edits are posted, whereas selecting 'Follow Question' option ensures the question appears in your home news feed.

Getting most out of Quora

Since I started using Quora, some interesting observations grabbed my attention that leads to better utilization of this useful platform. Some of these trends/observations are very elementary applicable to almost every social media service, while others are unique to Quora. So let's get started and see how we can get the maximum benefit/returns from Quora by using these simple tips and tricks.

Upload your avatar - If you've used Digg, you can remember some of its power users (e.g. babyman) just by their avatars. It helps build your brand among thousands of enthusiasts in your niche. After creating your profile, make sure you've uploaded your avatar.
Complete your profile - Don't left your profile information incomplete. Fill-in all the fields, as Quora's search functionality is extremely powerful. If you want to widen your reach, make sure you keep your profile updated.
Don't ask just for the sake of asking - That's what a good percentage of users do without thinking about the consequences that may lead to being marked as a spammer. Resist the temptation to bombard your followers with countless questions.
Make your question unique and interesting - That's one of the primary factors that ensures you get the maximum responses from the Quora community. It also helps in building your reputation. Some of the best Quora power users are known for their rich set of interesting questions.
Liberally up-vote the best answers - Promoting good content ensures others also get good stuff and at the same time you get new followers widening your reach.
Share on social stream - Quora lets you directly post your activity on twitter and facebook. This helps in getting more eyeballs for your questions and answers.
Select all topics related to a question - Whenever you post a question, take some time and select all the related categories. This ensures a large network views your question.
Tag people, questions and topics - That's how you grab attention and make the resource more useful and credible. Here I must warn about overdoing it, as it may put your question/response in the review queue.
Redirect your question to a parent question (if any) - Often you will find that your question completes or adds value to a similar question asked earlier. It's the perfect situation to redirect your question to the related question. This way you add value to the original question and will get more responses from the people already monitoring the original question.
Keep home feed clean and uncluttered - to ensure you don't waste your time reading junk. Select relevant topics and unfollow those disseminating irrelevant stuff on regular basis.
Ask questions directly to active/power users - If you think, your question has the potential to go viral, don't hesitate to directly pass it on to a power user. If he responded (positive or negative), your question is bound to be received well by the Quora community.
Avoid commenting anonymously - Nobody loves anonymity within a social group. If you disagree with an answer, down voting is one of the options. Sometimes its very useful when you follow a question anonymously just to watch the heated debate going on among your competitors.
Keep you account index-able -Quora has an option of search engine privacy. By default, it is disabled. When enabled, your Quora profile and all the related activities are shown as anonymous user in search result pages. If you're looking to build your authority/reputation, you'd like to keep it off.
Help new users - Quora provides the flexibility to edit the questions posted by the community. This helps in building connections thus improving the overall browsing experience. It's very helpful for new users who are looking for someone experienced to help them out in getting used to Quora.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to Quora to exchange the best with like-minded peers. Grow your authority, be recognized as an expert and give your best to the community. Before I close, I must mention about the fast and clean interface Quora engineers have developed for the community. There's no heavy flash/scripts that makes a site sluggish. The interface is minimal and extremely fast. So let's get connected on this excellent social media platform.

Essential Email Marketing Tips For Professional Bloggers

2011-01-05T15:00:00.004+05:30

As a professional blogger, you must be using various methods to gain new subscribers and customers. One of such tools is email marketing. It's a powerful methodology to attract and convert your audience. Having said that, one must take care of the negative implications that may arise if you do not use this tool - the right way. What are the email marketing essentials to leverage your list effectively? What things need to be taken care of to avoid any mishaps? Let's try to understand the basics of email marketing and how it can benefit you as a blogger.

Building Your List - The Right Way

Their are many ways to build an email marketing list. The fastest way is to buy one, which is the best way to kill your business even before it starts to flourish. There are thousands of individuals and companies who sell such type of lists at very competitive prices. What are the disadvantages of such lists?

You don't know who they are? (Demographic data)
You don't know what they want?
You don't know whether they voluntarily opted-in.
You don't know whether it's a list made from email farming software.

Starting campaigns with such lists is only going to hurt your reputation and more importantly you may be blacklisted as a spammer and your ISP may also block you. Although with some tricks, initially you may be able to generate some income through these lists, but in the long run, it's going to hurt you. There are several other good and effective ways to generate a list and this takes some time.

Let's discuss some of the best ways to build a list that generates business perpetually.

Your blog - It's the main weapon in your arsenal to grab subscribers that eventually populate your list. A blog with great content naturally attract subscribers and helps in building the foundation of an ever-growing list.
Monthly/Weekly Newsletter - Offer a newsletter with exclusive and premium content that you may not post on your blog. This technique works very well and if you learn the art of creating great newsletters, your list can grow exponentially in fairly short period of time.
E-books - This is yet another popular method to build a list. Create a free e-book for your subscribers with a link to opt-in page. Make sure your e-book is interesting enough to keep the reader engaged else you'll never receive a hit on your opt-in page.
Social media - How can we ignore the role of new media in any online marketing effort. Embed opt-in page links in forum signatures, and on twitter and facebook profiles to expand your reach. Networking on these platforms brings the maximum prospects to your doorstep.

While sending your prospects to the landing page, make sure you pre-fill the form as much as possible to make the submission easy. There's always been a debate whether you should choose a single opt-in or double opt-in method (where a verification mail is sent to the subscriber for confirmation) for building a list. Both methods have their pros and cons and it's entirely up to you, which one suits you well. Single opt-in ensures a subscription, the moment subscriber fills the details and press the submit button, while double opt-in method may leave a good percentage of unverified submissions. The quality of double opt-in list is much higher and promises more engagement and conversions.

Newsletter Preparation Essentials

Although you can deliver newsletters on your own, but I'll strongly suggest you to sign up with a professional email marketing service - for e.g: Aweber (aff) or MailChimp (aff) to get the best results. This way you not only ensure seamless delivery but also get the essential tools to make a profitable list without any major technical know-how. Let's discuss some basic guidelines that make an alluring newsletter.

Be consistent with design - Create a standard format and stick to it to avoid any confusion among your subscribers. You can use various templates available with every professional email marketing service or you can design from scratch using the rich text editor and basic HTML. Do not change newsletter format very often and accumulate enough data (2-3 months or 8-10 newsletters), before you come to any conclusion.

Don't talk about price - When offering a product, talk about benefits and results, not the cost. Sometimes newbies mention the price in bold letters or on a fancy BUY button, which is the last thing you can do to scare away the buyers. Newsletter is all about preparing a ground for a potential sale. So make sure not to include flashy dollar signs in your newsletter.

Experiment with blocks and links - This applies to almost every online marketing project. While designing a template, make note of all important links and keep a sharp eye on how your list interact with them. If two templates generate almost same number of landings via a link, choose the one with greater conversions. Try to shift content blocks in different locations and you may change their size during the shift. But be careful. During the whole experimentation and changes, keep the look and feel consistent, which is very essential for a successful marketing campaign.

Create different versions - Some people prefer to turn-off HTML email and are more comfortable with plain text emails. Professional email marketing sign-up procedure always asks the subscribers preference (HTML or plain text) during the subscription. Divide the list accordingly and send the preferred version to each subscriber.

Use case studies - Nothing convince better than real-life experiences of existing customers. Use them liberally wherever possible and see how your conversions inflate exponentially. While presenting case studies, take prior permission from the customer about the amount of details (personal/business) you can share with your list. Support your case study with data and illustrations, but don't overdo it.

Don't just hard sell - Sometimes when I follow a tweep, I receive an automated DM hard-selling their stuff. Result? Instant unfollow! Don't do this mistake with your list. Create trust by disseminating useful content consistently before you pitch for a sale. You can mix both (premium content & sales pitch) or can create separate newsletters. Remember, your subscribers want the right balance of both and you have the obligation to fulfill their expectations.

Delivering - What, When and How?

Once you've designed your newsletters, it's time to fill them with actual content. Divide your list in categories - (new subscriptions/active buyers/stagnant subscribers). If possible, create a different newsletter for each category. It's very important to preview the newsletter before pressing the send button, otherwise you may find yourself in very awkward or embarrassing situation if your subscribers find something that need to be corrected or hidden.

Generally, mid-week morning is the best time to send content to subscribers. This is just a general guideline. Some products are well received at weekends or on holidays. Do ample research, as to when people are searching most for a particular product. You can use Google Trends, Google Insights and Google Adwords Keyword Tool to get a fair idea about search traffic for a particular niche.

While sending a newsletter, make sure you newsletter complies with standard email marketing procedures. It should include your complete information (name, address & contact number) along with a unsubscribe link. If you're using a professional service, this information is automatically added with every newsletter. Needless to say, people who unsubscribe should never be bugged again.

Tracking And Responding

Most professional email marketing services gives you an option to integrate major web analytics system with your newsletters. This way, you'll be able to track your campaigns progress and will be able to collect vast amount of vital data. You may use this data to refine your email marketing strategy to give better returns.

Dealing with non-responsive database - When you send a newsletter to thousands of subscribers, a good percentage may never receive it. You'll be surprised to see hundreds of them bouncing back. Broadly, there can be two reasons for these bounces - non-existing email address or some temporary technical problem. If you're using a professional email marketing service, the former is automatically removed from the active database, while the latter cases are segregated according to the type of problem (for e.g. inbox full, server down, false-positive for spam). Create a rule for each case instructing your delivery program about the number of attempts that should be made before an email is removed from the active database.

How YOU Use Email Marketing?

What other techniques you regularly use for email marketing? Are you using a professional service or manage all on your own? Share your comments or add more to the topic enriching this discussion.

Image Credit: Casey Serin

How To Make Your Wordpress Blog Search Engine Friendly

2010-12-30T16:30:00.000+05:30

A successful blog post's life cycle starts with an empty draft and ends up in top rankings for popular keywords - consistently for a long period of time. No doubt your writing skills churns out a gem every time, BUT it may not rule the SERPs if you ignore some of the most essential search engine optimization tips. Wordpress is in itself a search engine friendly content management system, but it requires some tweaks and adjustments to completely leverage the power of this popular blog publishing software. Let's see, how to do it.

We write for humans, and they look for relevant information through different means. One of such means is search engine. We cannot afford to ignore the fact that organic traffic is and will remain the primary source of visitors for almost every site despite addition of new dimensions to this ever-changing web ecosystem. If your blog is well optimized for search engines, you are bound to get more traffic and that too - highly targeted, that can bring you more sales and conversions. So let's get started and see how to turn our stagnant Wordpress blog into a powerhouse.

Optimized Title Tags

Catchy headlines attract immediate attention of the readers. Visitors from search engines are more likely to click your post, if you've crafted the perfect title tag for each and every article. By default, the structure of title tag isn't SEO-friendly.

<title><?php wp_title(); ?><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>

This way, your title tag is formatted as 'Your Blog Name » Title of the Page', which is the least you require to optimize your blog posts. On a fresh Wordpress install, this setting is applicable to every page generated by you or by the CMS itself (category and archives page).

You can easily override the default settings with the optimized version either with the help of plugins or through directly hard-coding the following code in the header file (header.php). This ensures that the effect is reflected across the entire site/blog.

Once applied, this code ensures that you get the most optimized title for each type of page generated by Wordpress. It will also help you rank better in search results as well as getting attention of potential visitors.

Accurate Meta Description

There are several meta tags associated with a web page and one of them is 'description tag'. Although this tag doesn't directly affect your rankings, but it does play a very important role in how your post is listed in result pages.

All major search engines display preview snippets along with page title as shown above. Sometimes this snippet is picked from the meta description tag and the deciding factor is largely dependent on the search term/query typed by the visitor. The more relevant and alluring is your description the more is the probability that visitor will click and see your post. An optimal length for description is anywhere between 140-160 characters. One thing more - not every of your page requires description tag (archives/category).

Better Permalink Structure

The default permalink structure of Wordpress helps neither a visitor nor search engines. It's cryptic and is generated dynamically associating post id as a variable to the url of the post. Something like shown below.

http://yourdomain.com/?p=123

To give a better understanding what exactly a post talks about, you must change the default permalink structure. You can change it through 'Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks'. Choose 'Custom Structure' for modify the permalink setting. Some of the popular permalink structures are shown below. It's up to you which one suits you.

/%postname%/
/%category%/%postname%/
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Notice a trailing forward slash at the end of each permalink structure. This indicates the end of url and helps in reducing additional HTTP requests by the server thus speeding up your blog.

Short and Effective Post Slug

Every Wordpress post is accessed through an absolute url where the last part describes the post topic. By default, its generated automatically from the post title. Normally it is not optimized for search engines and includes unnecessary and sometimes redundant words/phrases. Fortunately, we can modify the post slug (as shown below) to get a optimized post url.

Once applied the above post's permalink will be:

http://yourdomain.com/common-writing-mistakes/

instead of:

http://yourdomain.com/10-common-mistakes-when-writing-post/

Try to keep your post slug as short as possible and make sure you've included the key phrase you're targeting. The best way is to include a phrase a general visitor may type-in to search for a particular topic.

Clever Anchor Texts

This is a powerful tactic and is often overlooked by newbies. Here I'm talking about clickable link text/label created within a blog post. Sometimes they're pointing outside your domain and sometimes they're referring your old content. Whatever is the case, an optimized anchor text helps both visitors and search engines in correctly assessing the page it is pointing.

Use a key-phrase consisting up to 2-3 words that correctly explains what it is referring to. If you look carefully, you may find some optimized anchor texts right within this post. Can you identify them?

Necessary NoFollow Links

When used properly, 'nofollow' attribute helps spread link equity evenly across your domain. It also helps in preventing flow of link juice to unwanted directions. Here are some important situations where you may use this attribute for maximum SEO benefit.

Less important pages - You may want to 'nofollow' some less important pages such as contact, advertise or about pages. There link is present almost on every page and normally it is a good strategy to 'nofollow' them.
Redundant links - It may happen that two or more links point to the same page within a single blog post. There's no need to pass link juice for every duplicate entry. Simply 'nofollow' each one of them keeping one with optimized anchor text.
Advertisements - Now this is quite obvious. Paid links MUST never pass link juice else you may end up getting your site banned on major search engines. If you're having a paid link on your blog, 'nofollow' it without any question.
Comments or user-generated content - Today you can find large number of 'dofollow' blogs. I personally don't support it as it's against the very essence of providing quality content to webizens on the basis of votes that involves links as one of the major factors in deciding the contents worth.
Grey links - Sometimes you may write about a site/blog that you may not want to pass the link juice. This can be a spammer, a hard-hitting rival or a shady site. In such cases, don't hesitate to use 'nofollow' to avert passing of link juice.

Optimized Robots.txt

It's a simple text file present at the root directory of any website. As the name suggests, robots.txt control how spiders and various bots crawl and index your blog. It's a very powerful tool through which you can avoid indexing of unnecessary and duplicate content. Here's a sample robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /wp-*
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /*trackback
Disallow: /*.css
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

Sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Through this file you can block various spam bots and can fine-tune which directories or type of files should be crawled and indexed. Here's a good robots.txt tutorial for beginners.

Dealing With Canonicalization Issues

Another problem that needs your attention is multiple urls pointing to same content/web page. This can be a huge blow to on-site optimization efforts if not corrected in time. To understand it better, take a look at the following list.

yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com/
www.yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com/
http://yourdomain.com
https://yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com
https://www.yourdomain.com

http://www.yourdomain.com/abc.html?lang=br
http://www.yourdomain.com/abc.html?lang=en

On the surface, it may look that these urls are pointing to the same location, BUT search engines may see them as different destinations. If not configured properly, this may lead to confusion and conflict for crawlers (duplicate content) and may also result in page rank split across multiple urls for same destination. How to get get rid of this problem such that all similar urls lead to one single url of your preference avoiding any kind of confusion for spiders. Solution is simple - .htaccess file. Like robots.txt, this file is also present in the root directory of your blog. With some simple directives through this file, you can fix all Canonicalization Issues.

For example, if you want all your non-www urls to automatically redirect to www version or vice versa, i.e. redirecting www version to non-www version, you can use the following directives in your .htaccess file that issues a 301 permalink redirect for every single url across your domain.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

#Redirect non-www to www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

#Redirect www to non-www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain/$1 [R=301,L]

This is just one simple example dealing with Canonicalization issue. There are several other things you may want to to with available .htaccess directives. For example, you may want to block hot-linking of media files that takes away your precious bandwidth and increases server load. It can be done with a simple directive through .htaccess file.

Including Breadcrumbs

Breadcrunbs are hierarchical (theoretically) navigation links that aids in easy browsing within a website as shown below. These links helps you get an idea about where you are and what can you expect as you go down further or go backwards.

Breadcrumbs can be made resembling the actual physical directory structure or it may be based on logical partitioning of different sections. In any case, it gives a clear view of the site structure and gives a better browsing experience to the visitor.

From SEO perspective too, it is very important. These navigational links aids in better crawling of the site. In case, some of your pages are not indexed due to unknown sitemap errors, these breadcrumbs make sure your every single page in indexed properly. Google also picks up breadcrumbs and shows in result pages as shown above.

No Comment Pages

Wordpress give you an option to paginate your post comments. By default, this option is disabled and I'll strongly suggest you to keep it that way. In fact 90% of blogs (low or medium volume of comments) don't need this. The problem with comment pages is duplicate content. Each comment page (except the first one) is a duplicate entry of the original post. Unless until you get very high number of comments, keep this option disabled, otherwise you may risk of getting your blog penalized for generating duplicate content.

Up-to-Date Accessible Sitemap

And last but not the least is your blog's sitemap. Keep it updated so that bots and crawlers can easily get information about your site's structure. You can use various popular sitemap maintenance plugins that automatically updates the sitmap every time you generate new content.

Make sure you've set the correct file permissions for your sitemap. A simple directive within robots.txt (see above) indicates crawlers where to look for a sitemap.

What Else?

These are some of the most essential search engines optimization techniques necessary for every Wordpress blog. There are many more and I'd like to add to the list through your comments.

Image Credit: Huasonic

How To Add Multimedia Content To Facebook Fan Page Using Static FBML

2010-09-15T18:54:00.000+05:30

Facebook fan page has emerged as a major social media outpost for businesses and individuals. Fortunately, facebook gives us ample flexibility to customize our fan page as per our needs and taste. One of the customization options at our disposal is - Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language). Although there are infinite customization possibilities with FBML, we as a user rarely use this powerful feature to its full extent. One such possibility is - 'Adding Multimedia Content to Facebook Fan Page'. Let's see how to do it the easy way.

You can embed various video/audio formats through FBML. Images can be inserted either through FBML or through normal HTML tags. Whatever media format you are using, make sure it's hosted on web, because an absolute URL is needed to embed the media through FBML.

Embedding Flash-based FLV (Video/Audio) File

Almost all multimedia components are embedded within a container. All you need is - calling the appropriate FBML tag with appropriate attributes. To embed a flash video, you need to host it on web with an absolute url directly fetching that video.

<fb:flv
src='http://path-to-flv-video...' /*Absolute url pointing to FLV video file. */
width='300' /* Width of video container in pixels. */
height='400' /* Height of video container in pixels. */
color='#FFBB00' /* Background color code, while movie is playing. */
salign='r' /* Alignment within container. (l-left,r-right,t-top,b-bottom) */
scale='showall'/* Flash attribute. (showall,noborder,exactfit) */
/>

The last attribute 'scale' supports 3 options. The 'showall' option plays the whole movie with original aspect-ratio, regardless of container dimensions mentioned by you. 'noborder' option fills the container body with the movie leaving no blank space within the container. If container size is smaller, this option may crop the movie. Last option 'exactfit' rearranges the movie size exactly matching the dimensions of the container. This may distort the movie if there is big difference between container and movie dimensions.

Embedding Flash-based MP3 Audio File

Embedding an MP3 audio file is a cakewalk. All you need is an absolute url pointing to the file, title of the album/song and name of the singer.

<fb:mp3
src='http://path-to-mp3-audio...' /*Absolute url pointing to mp3 audio file.*/
title='Name' /* Title of the song. */
artist='Artist' /* Name of the singer. */
album='Album' /* Title of the Album. */
/>

You can also provide width and height of the flash-based mp3 player. The 'height' attribute is fixed at 29 pixels and overrides the value provided by the user.

Embedding Photo

The best and simplest way to embed a photo involves using HTML '<img>' tag.

<
img src='http://path-to-mp3-audio...' /*Absolute url pointing to image file.*/
/>

You can align the image within the container (if any) using style attribute. Facebook provides FBML tag for embedding photos posted on Facebook. I've tried it, but it didn't worked for me. If you know about it, please do share in the comments below.

Embedding Shockwave Flash (SWF) Object

Embedding Shockwave Flash videos (e.g. YouTube videos) is a bit tricky. When you embed a YouTube video to a fan page, it doesn't play automatically. You have to click it to get it started. A workaround solution to this problem is to display the video image for the clicking action. Let's see how to do it.

<fb:swf
swfbgcolor='000000' /* Background color of flash video */
imgstyle='border-width:3px; border-color:white;' /* styling for the image */
swfsrc='http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxx&autoplay=1' /* Absolute url pointing to flash video. */
imgsrc='http://path-to-image file...' /* Absolute url pointing to image. */
width='340' height='216' /* Height and width of image and flash video. */
/>

You can observe xxxxxxxxxx in 'swfsrc' attribute. Open a YouTube video in a browser and copy the highlighted portion of url as shown below.

Replace the copied string with xxxxxxxxxx. Append '&autoplay=1' to the url to ensure video is played immediately after the user clicks the image.

YouTube allows you to embed custom-size videos. Make sure your image size matches the size of the video. Take the screenshot of the first frame or the initial black screen of a YouTube video of same size. You can use this image for 'imgsrc' attribute. Host it on any 3rd party image hosting service that allows direct linking (Eg: Photobucket). Update the width and height with your custom values. That's it!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in comments below.

Image Credit: pshab

A Blogger's Guide To Advertising Pricing Models

2010-08-04T07:00:00.002+05:30

Web advertisements are as old as the web itself. Blog monetization is quite common these days and involves various methodologies to effectively milk the real estate available on the web site. No matter what type of ad is running on your blog, each one of them follows a certain pricing model. Sometimes, you are in direct control of it, and sometimes you're not. In former case, you are in the driving seat (to some extent) deciding the best pricing model, making it a win-win situation for you as well as for the advertiser. Let's see how these pricing models affect your blog, potential advertisers and last but not the least - your blog visitors.

Flat Fee Model

It's one of the oldest pricing models for web advertisements. There is no complexity involved and price calculation is fairly simple. You charge a lump sum for a fixed period of time. This period is normally on monthly basis, though you can increase or decrease it as per your negotiations with the advertiser. When an advertiser opts for a flat fee model, he is more interested in announcing his presence rather than looking for maximum eyeballs or a sale or lead generation. In recent years, a variant of flat fee model has evolved where an advertiser demands a minimum threshold of traffic in a fixed period of time. There's a room for little deviation in the amount of traffic in this case, but if the deviation is substantial on the negative side, advertiser may not be interested in going ahead with the deal.

Flat fee model is easy to maintain from both ends (advertiser and publisher). There's no need of tracking impressions and valid clicks in this model. Despite it's simplicity, there are some drawbacks in this pricing model. Since the focus is more on time period, an advertiser may not yield expected results in the absence of any credible report about the amount of traffic an advert may receive during the period.

Traffic Based Model

Flat fee model and traffic-based model are two popular pricing models dominating the direct ad sales in blogosphere. As the name suggests, traffic based model is entirely dependent on the amount of traffic an advert will receive. A publisher charges a fixed amount for every thousand impressions an advert receives. An advertiser opts for this model, when he is interested in getting maximum eyeballs for his advertisement. This model is popularly known as CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) model. Sometimes, the traffic is counted on visitor basis regardless of number of page impressions in his visit.

Interestingly, some of the most popular blogs offers flat-fee option for advertisers, but internally they use CPM model to calculate the price for flat-fee offers.

User Action Based Model

Developed in recent years, this pricing model dominates affiliate marketing. Here, neither time frame (theoretically) nor the amount of traffic comes into play. It's entirely dependent on how a visitor interacts with the creative (banner ad) and the steps he takes thereafter. There are two variants of this model. One is the highly popular CPC (cost-per-click) model and the other one is CPA (cost-per-action) model primarily used for affiliate marketing. Popular Adsense ads are the best example of CPC model, where a publisher is paid for every valid click.

CPA model has developed in recent years booming the affiliate marketing business. The action user takes after clicking the banner ad decides the amount to be paid to the publisher. It may be - spending a minimum time on the landing page, or signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. Generally, the pricing for these ads is much higher as compared to CPC ads.

Here are some helpful guidelines for publishers related to web advertisements in general.

Tips for Publishers

If you own a low traffic blog, go for flat-fee model. CPM model is ideal for high traffic blogs.
If you're using electronic payment gateways, set the price such that their processing fees is included in the total amount.
Create a media kit with all the available options. (Preferably PDF format)
Create discounted options for long term deals. Don't wait for advertiser to ask about it. Include them in the media kit.
Host creatives on your own server. Preferably through an ad management service like Google Ad Manager, OIO Publisher or OpenX.
If you opt for CPM model, be ready to verify your traffic claims. You can provide read-only access to selective reports from your web analytics system.
Declare creative guidelines in media kit. (Max. size, image type - plain graphic or animated)
If possible, allow multiple payment options for potential advertisers.
Proactively send banner rotation reminders for long-term deals. Helps in averting ad blindness.
Share historical (censored) data with potential advertisers to show best performing options.
Publish success stories and testimonials of existing and old clients in 'Advertise' page on your blog.
Be flexible while negotiating. Rigidity may cost you a long-term partnership.

Do you host web advertisements on your blog? If so, which pricing model do you prefer and why?

MarketMeSuite : Swiss Army Knife For Twitter Marketing

2010-07-21T15:00:00.002+05:30

Since twitter has gone mainstream, it is considered as one of the best social media services to market and promote your business/service on the web. I’ve been using various twitter clients for last 3 years and each one of them was more or less the same offering basic twitter management. I started with web interface, and soon switched to twhirl, then to seesmic, tweetdeck, hootsuite and many more. The problem that I faced was (and probably you also) that none of them provided me all the required tools at one place to make most out of twitter.

Recently, I came across a twitter application that’s more than just being a typical twitter client. It’s called MarketMeSuite, but I prefer to call it - "Swiss Army Knife for Twitter Marketing". The array of features offered by this application can cater almost every need of a twitter power user. So let's get started and check out some of the most exciting features of this unique application.

Brandable Tweets

This is something unique to MarketMeSuite that makes it stand apart from all other twitter applications. MarketMeSuite gives you the ability to brand your every single tweet by placing custom clickable link beneath each tweet.

You can create multiple custom links per twitter account with attention-grabbing anchor texts to effectively leverage this useful feature. Use your imagination and craft the most alluring anchor texts to increase the probability of clicks. I've tested this in one of my twitter accounts and witnessed about 37% increase in traffic coming through my tweets compared to the same period (15 days) prior to implementing this option. Since I'm not publicly associated with this account, I cannot share the twitter handle, but I do have web analytics reports to share with you.

15 Days Period Prior To Tweet Branding

15 Days Period After Implementing Tweet Branding

For best results, test and tweak each custom link against the number of clicks each one of them attracts in a given time frame. This feature follows a simple rule. The more adventurous you are, the more birds are in your kitty

Powerful Marketing Suite

Branding alone doesn't guarantee success, unless it is combined by intuitive marketing initiatives. And that's where MarketMeSuite's marketing suite comes handy. It works behind the scenes and diligently grows your twitter influence while you do other stuff. Divided into four sub-modules, it provides all the nifty tools to connect with highly targeted tweeple in your niche.

Reply Campaigns - Do you regularly try to search and follow relevant tweeps through twitter custom search? If yes, what's your strategy to engage with them and making a connection? Often, when we run a custom search on a twitter client/service, the continuous stream of tweets is so rapid that we find ourselves as mere spectators. Reply campaigns lets you create unlimited reply templates and present you with the most relevant and targeted users based on the keyword list provided by you. You can rapidly engage with these users through pre-loaded replies making the whole process easier, faster and result-oriented.

Initially, you have to spend some time creating your bucket of reply templates. Once you are done with it, build your keyword list to get the most relevant tweets. Now on one hand you'll have a bucket full of reply templates and on other, a list of targeted users. From here onwards, picking each tweet and shooting the most relevant reply tweet (from templates bucket) is a cakewalk. The whole process is so engaging and initiates a chain reaction flooding your inbox with follow intimations by twitter. Building reply templates is a one-time process and can be optimized and reused in each campaign.

RSS Manager - As the name implies, this module lets you automatically tweet unlimited RSS feeds. You can prepend custom phrase/information (optional) in each tweet as per your requirement.

Follow Users - MarketMeSuite is completely twitter compliant and never automates the follow/unfollow process that may result in your account suspension. Instead of automating this critical process, it helps you in finding the right users to follow and engage with. These targeted users are based on keyword list provided by you in reply campaigns. Once you are presented with relevant tweeps, you are in full control whom to follow and whom not to. This module helps you widen your network and keeps your tweet stream free of junk.

Unfollow Users - And last but not the least is 'Unfollow Users' module that complements the previous module discussed above. MarketMeSuite smart algorithms filters (not unfollow) the most irrelevant and stagnant accounts and present them for your consideration. It's your decision whom to unfollow and whom to keep in your list.

Advanced Scheduler

MarketMeSuite has the most advanced tweet scheduler that lets you schedule your tweets in 3 different ways. No other twitter application offers this much flexibility for scheduling of tweets.

Regular Scheduling - This is the most common way to schedule tweets where you manually copy paste each tweet and schedule it. MarketMeSuite segregates all your tweets on weekly, monthly and yearly basis for better management. This makes reviewing and editing much easier as compared to searching the whole bunch at a single place.

Scheduling Through Google Calendar - Now this is something revolutionary. MarketMeSuite gives you the ability to schedule your tweets via Google Calendar. How does this benefit you? Well, you can use this powerful feature to schedule your tweets from iPhone, Blackberry, Andriod or just about any mobile device supporting Google Calendar. So don't worry if you're away from your desktop

Bulk Import of Tweets - This is yet another unique feature giving you an option to schedule large number of tweets in one go. You can either copy paste the entire collection of tweets in the text box or import the text file containing all your tweets.

Tweet Format for Bulk Import

Tweet format for user-defined date and time.
%T% this is a tweet %D% mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss

Tweet format for fixed interval tweeting.
%T% this is a tweet %D%

Example: %T% this is a tweet %D% 07/20/2010 17:38:16

Note: Each tweet should be on a separate line in a text file.

As shown above, each tweet should follow a pre-defined format for correct parsing by the scheduling engine. If you're not explicitly mentioning the date-time of tweets, you have the option of tweeting them at fixed intervals (10, 20, 30 minutes and so on...).

Miscellaneous Features of MarketMeSuite

Facebook integration on a separate tab. Update your wall, manage your fan pages and much more.
Send-to-all feature lets you send a tweet to multiple twitter accounts in one go.
Google URL Builder helps you track your twitter traffic effectively in Google Analytics.
Geo-targeting and language options ensure you're connecting with the right people.
Customizable and expandable panes.
Daily emails for @ mentions to keep track whose talking about you.
Optional auto-follow option.
Multiple url-shortners with bit.ly api key integration to track your clicks.
Ping.fm integration to post to your preferred social media service.
Excellent support services and forums.

Did I mentioned you can add UNLIMITED twitter accounts to MarketMeSuite? Yup, no limits on the number of twitter accounts you can use with MarketMeSuite

Why not check out this killer twitter application and see what it can do for you.

How To Sell Affiliate Products On Your Blog

2010-02-24T10:10:00.000+05:30

Affiliate marketing is one of the primary sources of income for large number of professional bloggers. Today, there are thousands of affiliate programs covering almost every niche giving you the flexibility to handpick products. It's very easy to sign up for these affiliate programs, but selling these products through your blog is altogether a different story. Let's try to understand the dynamics of successful affiliate marketing and how you can implement it on your own blog.

In my early days of blogging, I used to sign up for almost every affiliate program related to my niche. The end result was large number of affiliate accounts with nil earnings. It was very discouraging and I nearly gave up turning to pay-per-click ads. Gradually, I discovered how others are doing it successfully and how to replicate the same process on MintBlogger. Before I go ahead, let me tell you that you don't need tons of followers and massively popular blog to be successful in affiliate marketing. Yes, it does make things easy if you have one, but that's not a pre-requisite. Affiliate marketing works on a simple principle.

Identifying buyers needs. (research and evaluate)
Bringing them to your shop. (blog or landing page)
Creating a strong desire in them. (persuasive text)
Offering a solution. (unique selling proposition)
Giving various options to avail the solution. (showcasing your affiliate products)

We just need to apply, rinse and repeat this method till we start getting decent conversions. There are various methods to do it that may variate depending on the niche and the channel you are using.

Choosing Right Affiliate Products

The very first step involves choosing the affiliate programs that matches your niche. It's not just the relevancy, but several other important factors decide whether an affiliate program will be good for you and the buyers.

Quality products - Undoubtedly, one of the prime factors that should govern your decision to choose an affiliate program. The best case will be your own experience with the product. If not, make sure you have taken feedback from the actual users of the product. Quality products have huge fan following with positive reviews across the web. Googling about the product can give you fair idea about the quality and features.

Dynamic creatives - Affiliate marketing involves enticing advertising banners and links. For every program you sign up, pay special attention to the available creatives. Their quality, their type and their size should give you enough flexibility to experiment. Tip: Every quarter or so, make sure you change the creatives and custom ads for best results.

Decent commission structure - It may happen that you do all the hard work and make several sales only to discover that you're getting peanuts in return! Carefully read the commission structure for direct sales, affiliate sign ups and indirect sales commission (via sub-affiliates). Good affiliate programs share anywhere between 30% to 50% of the sale. Anything below 10% is not worth signing up.

Proper reporting - Tracking sales and click activities is an essential part of every affiliate program. Some programs provide detailed reports including raw clicks and impressions, while others provide concentrated statistics. Just make sure you have one of these including e-mail alerts for every sale with transaction details.

Flexible payment modes - Payouts is an important issue and must be easy, quick and transparent. It is seen that paypal is the most popular payment mode encouraged both by affiliates and product owners. In case, you are only left with an option of check delivery, make sure you're provided with proper tracking options for the dispatched courier with an option to raise a check re-issue request in case of unsuccessful delivery attempt.

Proven track record - And last but not the least is checking the overall goodwill of the affiliate program. As I mentioned earlier, the web itself can give you enough information about the program popularity. Make sure you don't go by paid reviews. Read real testimonials, reviews and experiences of actual customers.

In-Content Links Or Banner Custom Ads?

There are two popular methods to sell affiliate products on a blog. First approach involves writing persuasive blog posts and smartly embedding affiliate links within the text. The second much popular approach is displaying different formats of affiliate ads at prime locations. Both techniques work well, if done correctly.

In-Content links - This method is very effective and requires excellent copy writing skills. The placement and anchor text of the embedded links is one of primary factors that contribute to high click rate. You can embed your affiliate links either in a regular post or in a review post. In either case, disclosing the presence of affiliate links within the post is entirely on you.

Custom/Banner ads -The second much popular alternative is banner advertisement.

Pre-made creatives - Almost every affiliate program comes with pre-made creatives in different sizes. Perhaps, the most popular among them are 125x125 banners littering the sidebars of countless blogs. For many popular niches, readers are almost blind to these small banners. I've tried this before with almost nil conversions. Try large size creatives and experiment with placements.
Large custom ads - This is my preferred methodology and it works very well. Instead of relying on pre-made creatives, I normally prefer to design a large custom ad, which is a mix of graphical banner and text. An example is shown below.

These custom ads are very effective and conversion rate is much much higher than pre-made 125x125 banners in your sidebar. The fact that they are different from regular banners helps in immediately attracting the attention of a potential buyer. I'll strongly suggest you to take some time and design these large custom ads and place them at prime locations.

Unless you're not getting massive traffic from organic sources, don't waste your time by littering your sidebar with countless 125x125 affiliate banners. It's just a waste of premium space. Better leave that space for direct advertisements.

If you have a fairly popular blog with decent fan following, you'll find it very easy to sell affiliate products. The 'Trust' factor plays a major role in affiliate marketing. As I said before, it gives a push adding more sales to your kitty. On the other hand, if you have a new blog, there's no need to be disheartened. A potential buyer coming from organic source with a credit card ready in his hand won't even bother about blog and author. If he gets what he wants, you're bound to get good conversions. I'm saying this with my own experience and all you need is experimenting with custom ads.

Image Credit: captcreate

Analytics Intelligence : Leveraging Hidden Trends In Blog Traffic

2010-01-25T15:00:00.002+05:30

Web analytics have improved dramatically in the last few years. Plain data logs with cryptic entries is a thing of past. Nowadays, popular web analytics systems such as Google Analytics are powered by smart algorithms that look beyond page views and visits. Modern web analytics system has more to do with identifying browsing pattern of visitors and identifying key changes in traffic, which leads to depletion or completion of defined/undefined goals and conversions at a certain rate. GA provides excellent tools to help us identify these vital trends to better assess the shortcomings and potholes.

Every morning you open your analytics dashboard only to find pretty much same traffic pattern with no unusual activity (at a glance). But wait are you missing something? What's your primary purpose of using a web analytics system? Are you using it just to know the number of visitors reaching your blog everyday? If you answer is YES, read on.

Why Do I Need Web Analytics System?

Almost all of us track our web traffic through different web analytics system, but only a handful of us utilize the power of this amazing tool to its full extent. What's your ultimate goal to use a web analytics system? It's not just about counting visitors or pageviews. To make things simple, I'll use a famous quote by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld that highlights the crux of reporting and data analysis.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. - (Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld)

Secretary Rumsfeld is indicating about three types of data sets that can be mined by any reporting system. It is applicable to any reporting system regardless of the type of data and the type of method involved in extracting the relevant information. The first type is - known knowns - the information whose existence we know beforehand. In this context (web analytics) it can be compared to a pageview. The second type is - known unknowns - the information we know does exist, but somehow we are not able to quantify it in measurable terms. Any triggering condition that may inflate your pageviews or any causal factors that increase or decrease your conversions comes under this category. These conditions do exist, but we cannot predict, quantify, measure or detect them effectively. And, the third type is - unknown unknowns - the information that's present in our web traffic data set, but we don't even have the slightest idea of its existence. And mining this information is the most challenging problem for any web analytics system.

Analytics Intelligence - Digging Unknown Unknowns

Before going ahead, I'd like to discuss the question I asked in the beginning of this post. What's the ultimate goal of using any web analytics system? Well, use it to improve the usability of your web site. Our goal should not be just to count pageviews, but with the help of massive information we get from our analytics systems, we should strive to give the best browsing experience to our visitors. That's what web analytics systems are made for. Fortunately, combination of GA's Intelligence and Advanced Segments features helps us dig out unknown unknowns giving us the power to see those hidden trends that are so vital to improve the overall usability of our web site or blog.

Let's see how to use these two features to optimize our blog. Earlier, I've written about 'Advanced Segments' and their usage. For demonstration purpose, I took 3 days data and a popular post to properly explain creation of these advanced filters. Here's a simple guide to using Advanced Segments.

Using 'Intelligence' feature is extremely simple. All you need is to find the starting point. Ask yourself a question - "Where to start looking and what to look for?" It's all about anticipating developments within your web traffic. For example, you're running a campaign for newly launched product and are interested in measuring the demographics. We further assume, you're very hopeful for getting good results from Latin-American countries (for exp: brazil). You may create an 'Intelligence' alert such that if conversions from Brazil inflate by more than 25% compared to the previous day you should receive an alert. Here's how you can do this...

Let's take one more example. You may want to know when your new visits from organic sources (search engines) inflate by more than 10% compared to the previous day. Now if your blog is getting decent traffic, increase of 10% in total new visits from organic sources is a significant change in your daily traffic. It may happen due to page rank update. In that case, you may be interested in knowing which posts are receiving this extra traffic. So, let's create this alert.

Creating these alerts is not difficult. What matters is your anticipation and your chain of thought. When you start looking beyond pageviews and impressions, things change dramatically. Study your blog traffic and ask yourself generic questions that may affect your conversions and goals. Create a list of these questions and convert them into 'Advanced Segments' and 'Intelligence' alerts. Happy analyzing

Some parts of this post are inspired from Analytics Becomes Intelligent. Hello Insights!, an excellent post by Avinash Kaushik - Web Analytics Guru.

Wordpress MU 2.8 : Building Powerful Communities With Ease

2009-12-15T19:24:00.002+05:30

Wordpress powers millions of websites and blogs ranging from a small personal diary to big company portals. The single-site edition of Wordpress enjoys much more popularity leaving the multi-site version way behind. However, when it comes to developing a large blog network supporting unlimited users with each one having a separate blog, Wordpress MU is the best possible solution. It's extremely flexible, feature rich and is very easy to customize as per your needs. Recently, Lesley A. Harrison has released her book entitled 'WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner's Guide', available from Packt Publishing, which provides detailed step-by-step guide to build a powerful blog network that includes forums, photo galleries and much more.

The good thing about this book is that it assumes that you have no prior experience of working with Wordpress. Step-by-step tutorials supported with helpful illustrations make it one of the best guides to creating blog network through Wordpress MU.

Building The Basics

The first 3 chapters introduces Wordpress MU features, compare and compute hosting requirements and guidelines, presents detailed installation procedure and easy-to-follow methods of customizing the appearance of your fresh Wordpress MU install.

Ordinary shared hosting plans cannot promise smooth running of (active) blog networks. Keeping this in mind, the author has presented detailed web-hosting requirements and alternative solutions that can cater the needs of a fairly large and active blog network. The type of web-server components needed to run a typical Wordpress MU are also discussed, so that you can cross-check the configuration of server before signing up of any hosting plan. A comprehensive installation guide loaded with helpful illustrations ensures smooth deployment of your blog network. Whether it's about configuring critical security settings or about fine-tuning the most essential plugins, the install-guide covers every step in the right sequence to get your installation done in the minimum possible time. I particularly liked the section explaining database planning and implementation closely followed by sub-domain mapping and settings. Chapter 3 covers installing and customization of a fresh new theme along with configuration of the most popular Wordpress MU plugins.

On To The Next Level

One of the big issues maintaining a blog network involves user-management and related tasks. Users on a blog network may share different or same set of plugins and themes with different set of privileges depending on the type of account they hold. Chapter 4 deals with advanced user management with loads of practical examples turning you into an expert blog network administrator. No web site can claim to be 100% hacker proof. An entire chapter has been dedicated for addressing this sensitive issue. Chapter 5 provides in-depth methods of making your Wordpress MU install almost hacker proof securing it from all common hacking attempts. Automated backup strategy is also part of this chapter that is so essential for any blog network.

Going Beyond The Limits

Wordpress gives you the flexibility to customize it to the limits. Chapter 7,8 and 9 discusses some of the most advanced and much needed features needed in a typical blog network. Following is a list of important customizations featured in these chapters.

Some of the most essential features discussed are:

Integrating third party commenting system.
Setting up custom contact forms.
Integration of polls and sitewide searching.
Integrating bbPress Forum. (Includes styling and customization of forum)
Integrating BuddyPress Suite. (Enables flexible social networking features)

The list shown above clearly suggests that forum and social networking integration is becoming a norm in today's popular blog networks. You can think of it as a mashup of various social media platforms giving the users various options to connect and share their ideas and content. And that's where chapter 8 and 9 gives you the power to integrate these platforms to your Wordpress MU install. It will make your blog network more attractive, more appealing and eventually more popular among its existing as well as potential users.

Often blog networks are created with flexible monetization schemes to attract more registrations. This includes flexible revenue sharing options that may variate on per account basis. Chapter 10 deals with this extremely important issue and guides you to complete ad management solution for a typical Wordpress MU install. This includes ad management, revenue sharing techniques, supporting premium memberships and much more.

Site optimization is a critical issue, especially for multi-user blog networks. A sluggish blog network is the first thing you'll need to repeal the visitors. That's where chapter 11 comes to the rescue giving you all the vital techniques to make your blog network a zipper, with techniques to develop optimized database and themes. You'll also get to know server side optimization and load balancing techniques to offer highly optimized blog network to the users. And last but not the least is the troubleshooting techniques and miscellaneous daily routines needed to keep your blog network up and running. After going through the last chapter, you'll come to know about performing smooth upgrades, performing and restoring daily backups. Various backup strategies via different methods is the part of this important chapter.

All the development tools required to create a WordPress MU blog network are free. The book has a separate section in the beginning tabulating all the required tools, where to get it and what is their use. The author of this book is a freelance web developer and technology consultant with more than ten years experience in IT related fields.

Who should read this book?

If you are planning to create your own blog hosting service or want to build your own blog network (whether for your company or for your family and friends or for your closed community), this book can serve your purpose. Knowledge of basic HTML and general blogging principles is all you need to follow this book.

Book: WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner's Guide
Paperback: 268 pages [191mm x 235mm]
Publisher: Packt Publishing (Released: October 2009)
Language: English
ISBN: 1847196543
ISBN-13: 978-1-847196-54-5
Also available as an e-book from Packt Publishing