There were recent reports that Iran blacked out the Internet and for thirty minutes on Tuesday, the Web went blank on that country where freedom of speech and information has never really been high on the list of priorities.

Ron Deibert — director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab research centre at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto—sees more than just some kind of technical glitch here and warned of dark clouds on the horizon recently for freedom in cyberspace.

He called the whole episode the beginning of a perfect storm where cyber warfare in all its different forms will take the place of many of the geopolitical conflicts we’ve seen in the past. What it all means is experts in the field are warning us that Big Brother knows how important and effective the web can be and is taking steps to control it.

Deibert goes on in the article to say he thinks that the lockdown of the web was more than just a temporary situation, and that the Iranians were in fact testing what they call a ‘National Internet’ that will control all the sites that are allowed into the country.

“To me, this is changing the very architecture of the Internet,” Mr. Deibert said in an interview this week at an academic conference in Toronto that was reported in the National Post in Canada. “The digital curtain is going up all over the place. You can imagine the conversations that happen in, say, Belarus. In the past, these governments would just censor access to a few websites, but in the wake of the Arab Spring, what are they thinking: How do you nationalize this technology?”

It seems that years after one Iron Curtain crumbles, another one is being set up in cyberspace.

And of course what would a discussion on restricting the Internet be without mentioning China? The GhostNet cyber spy ring was discovered by Deibert’s team in 2009, and this Chinese ring was found to be spying on NATO operations in Germany, foreign embassies globally, and even the Dalai Lama’s American headquarters.

Still we can’t just wag our fingers at the people in other countries when it comes to curtailing cyberspace. Let’s not forget The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is being considered right here in North America and here the US government would have the power to shut down websites that were suspected of breaching copyright laws.

Over there they control their Internet to give religious and political institutions power over the people. Here we do it for big business.

How do you share all of your social profiles and contact info with others? Do you list out your social profiles individually or do you have a single URL to give them? How about your contact information? Do you often give out your email address or phone number even though you would prefer not to? Well Voxini, the easiest way to share your social profiles on mobile devices, has found a simple solution for you.

With Voxini, you get to create a mobile landing page that displays links to all of your social profiles. Plus, it also includes four useful tabs: Call Me, Write Me, About Me, Send Me. If you add your phone number and email to Voxini, others will be able to call and email you without needing to know your actual information. About Me is pretty self explanatory – write a little something about yourself. Send Me lets people share your Voxini profile with others via text message.

So now that you get the general idea of Voxini, lets go through the process of setting an actual profile.

Edit Your Social Channels

Upon signing up you’ll need to connect all of your social accounts. As always, this is a process that could be pretty quick or pretty long depending on how many social accounts you need to add. For each site, you’ll see a explanation and an example of what you should be entering in the text box.

Unfortunately, you’re limited to just one account for each service. So you won’t be able to add multiple websites, Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts, etc.

However, I do like that you can see how your mobile landing page will look as you’re adding your accounts. You’ll see a mobile device on the right site of the page that automatically updates each time you add a new account.

As you probably already guessed, this is not a static image, it’s very much dynamic. You can click on each social profile button to see just how your landing page will work when others interact with it. This is also a great way to test each button and make sure that it goes to the proper page.

Upload an Image

The next step is to upload an image. This is not required though and you will be able to skip it. If you prefer not to have a picture, then only your name will be displayed (as pictured above).

Personally, I feel that a picture should be required. As they say, ‘”a picture is worth 1,000 words”. Also, pictures are very important for any brand or individual looking to make a name themselves and want be taken seriously.

Update Your Profile

Lastly you’ll need to edit your actual profile. This is where you can enter basic information like your name, address, and short bio. As mentioned above, the information you enter in the “About Me” section will be displayed in the “About Me” tab on your landing page. So it’s pretty important to have at least a little something here. Also, keep in mind that your address will not be displayed publicly.

Get Your QR Code

After the final step you’ll get your own Voxini URL to share with the world along with your very own QR code. Just to test it out, I scanned the QR code with my iPad, and my Voxini profile does indeed come up. You can try scanning the code below to see for yourself (you’ll need a QR code scanning app for your device).

This is definitely a creative way of sharing your social profiles; almost everyone has a URL of some sort to share, but what about a QR code? You don’t see that being used too often. Voxini will give the code in jpg and png format so that you can download them to share on your website, blog, or anywhere else.

View Your Stats

Voxini also provides you with stats regarding your pageviews, scans, visits, and browser version of visitors. Right now it’s in a pretty basic format, but “more comprehensive reporting” is coming soon.

I can confidently say that I’ll be sharing my Voxini QR code on my blogs and using it for networking purposes.

How about you? How do you plan to use Voxini?

What’s the number one cause of failure and keeping you from getting totally focused? It’s one single, simple little word, but it can make or break you.

Distraction!

More people fail due to being and staying distracted. It’s no secret that a lot of big marketers want you to stay distracted so you’ll keep buying their next product to finally learn “the secret.” It’s kind of ironic that they do mention you need to get focused, but you most likely skim that part.

All successful people have one thing in common. It does not matter what their niche is, what business model they use, or what their product offering is. The one thing that they have, and you need to have, is focus. They don’t let anything distract them from working and building their business.

By having laser focus on their business building and working during their work hours, they have the luxury of having more free time. They are in control of their time. I know you’ve seen these guys posting pictures of their latest travels or vacation and you wonder how they can run a business and goof off so much. It’s because of focus. They focus on business when it’s business time and they focus on play time when it’s play time.

How can you develop more focus?

1. Decide and define what matters to you. You need a strong passion and a strong reason for why you want to build and run an online business. Until you decide and commit to that, you’ll likely keep floundering around, distracted.

2. Make a list of 3 things you must do each day. These should be tasks that actually grow your business or your online presence. Do not do anything else until these 3 tasks are completed.

3. Avoid email, social media and anything else that distracts you. There is a time for these things, but while you are working on the 3 tasks mentioned above, you need to turn everything else off and tune it out.

4. Do not multi-task! I know, you think you’ll save time by doing 3 things at once. Unfortunately this rarely ever saves time. Give your full attention to each task.  If you focus only on one thing at a time, you’ll likely end up finishing before you thought you would. That creates more free time for you.

If you’re a parent I’m sure you’ve read advice to give each child their own special time with you if you have more than one child. Each child needs some one-on-one attention from their parents. It builds their self-esteem and makes them feel special. Treat your tasks as children if you need to. Spend time with each task. Give that task your undivided love and attention.

5. Take breaks. Try to do this before you start losing focus and feeling distracted. You can push this to the last minute, but by doing so you’ll likely waste time trying to push through something. Instead, go take a short walk or enjoy a soda, coffee or tea away from your work station. Go have a few minutes of “you” time to regroup. Be sure to set a timer or an alarm on your phone so you get back to work after your allotted break time.

Focus can be a hard thing to master, but the more distractions you remove from your work time, the more you’ll get accomplished. Clear out the clutter and close off the world until you’ve done your tasks. You’ll be surprised how much free time you can create by doing this. One day you may even be the one posting those pictures of exotic places.

Feel free to share your time saving tips or how you developed your own focus. We’d love to hear from you.

SEO can be very difficult if you’re just starting and have little to no experience or authority to start with. Of course, there are tons of tutorials online about SEO and link building, but most of them can be sometimes complicated and long-term that it seems you’re not getting as much results for the efforts you put in. In this article I will be sharing a process I use to increase traffic to my blog from the search engines; using this process alone I have been able to increase SEO traffic to one of the pages on my blog from around 400 to 3,000+ visitors monthly. This technique isn’t automatic, it takes some time and effort but I can assure you that the results will be worth it at the end.

The Process is Called “Data Mining”

The idea is simple, take a look at the top 25 – 50 keywords sending traffic to your blog, try to look for common variations of keywords relevant to your blog, try to see if you’re not yet ranking #1 for those keywords and work on getting to #1. We rank around page 2 – 5 for most of those long-tail keywords that send us trickles of visitors every day, now imagine how much more traffic you will be able to get if you are able to be ranked #1 for that keyword on page 1. Of course, it will take some efforts but you will find it much easier to rank compared to if you were to start optimizing from scratch, simply because you’re already ranking for that keyword and only need to improve your rankings.

The good thing about this is that you can do it over and over again and there will always be new keywords to rank for; the great thing is that it takes little to no effort to rank and the traffic is completely relevant to you, and over time you will find yourself automatically ranking for most of the keyword variations.

In other words, no need to write new content, no need to do any keyword research, just look for those keywords and take necessary steps to start ranking.

You Need BACKLINKS, though

Even though the process is still relatively easy you still need backlinks so you should do your best to get as much of them as you can. My favorite approach for gaining backlinks at the moment is guest blogging, simply because it helps you gain authoritative backlinks while still giving you control over the links you’re able to gain. If you’re new to the idea of guest blogging you might want to check out this article on my blog about it.

Image Credit

When it comes to building quality links back to your web sites, it’s important not only to get people linking to your main page, but also your internal links. The internal pages of your blog or web site is where you are going to get all of your longtail keywords ranked, and traffic from the search engines. At the same time you also want to focus on link building for your main page, so what is the best solution?

Building PageRanked Links with BuildMyRank

Over the past couple of weeks I have been playing around with a content link building service called BuildMyRank. So far it’s been really cool to work with their site and watch my backlinks grow through the use of their site. How it works is quite simple:

1. Write up a few 150+ word articles.
2. Publish your articles through BuildMyRank
3. Keep an eye on your backlinks process.

Yes, it looks quite simple and that’s just a quick review on how the service works. To better explain, you pay a monthly fee to access their service, which is BuildMyRank publishing your article content on their network of pageranked sites. For ever 150 article you write, you get to insert one url back to your site. If you write longer articles, you can place an extra link for every 150 words. Also, if you don’t want to write your own articles, you can outsource your writing (which I will go into detail on a future post). On top of everything mentioned, BuildMyRank will then post your article links to a bunch of other directories and rss feeds to increase the link juice and exposure to your site links.

Tracking Your Backlink Building Results

First of all, the admin area for BuildMyRank is straight forward and extremely easy to use. Once you are logged in, you will see a bunch of reports, breaking down how many links/articles you have active, your top keywords used and a few other reports.

I’ve been using BuildMyRank for a couple weeks now and have posted around 120 articles, which are currently live. The way BuildMyRank posts your 150+ word articles to sites in their network is quite random. I’ve seen and talked to other people using their service who have received PR6 sites linking back to them, but so far I only have a couple PR5 links in place. You can see my currently links received below.

As you can see, the majority of these links are coming from PR1, 2 and 3 sites… but there are a decent amount PR4 sites (around 10%). It’s quite exciting when you get the PR5 sites linking back to you, but they are rare. As mentioned, I’m still waiting for my first PR6… and I know it will come soon!

Next week I will be writing a follow up post on how the next 100 article submissions perform, along with how to outsource your article marketing for cheap.

How to Use BuildMyRank for Best Results

We talked about the importance of linking in the beginning of the post, and not just about building links to your main page. Think about how many articles you’ve written for your blog or published on your site, that are just sitting nicely on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th pages of Google. They are most likely excellent quality articles, but they were just never given the chance to get the link backs that they deserve. This is exactly what BuildMyRank can do for you.

Right now I’m testing my link building efforts with 20 different sites / domains, and focusing the majority of the link building on long tail keywords and inner page content. Even within a week’s time, I’m already seeing some of my rankings creep up in the results. In the screenshot above you will see what it looks like when you have your articles in que, or already live on active sites. I blurred out the titles and keywords I am targeting, but you can clearly see the date the article was created, when it was published, if the post is now indexed in the search results and most importantly, the PageRank of the site your article and link is now featured on.

Most articles you submit will go live within 24 hours, and you can play with the settings in your account to change how many active articles and links you want to go live daily. This ranges from 1 to 10 per day, or you can go with “Random”, which will post a different amount of articles daily.

Fro what I’ve read from other people who are using BuildMyRank, it takes a lot of link building and article submissions to see any real movement, so I’m excited to see the results in the coming weeks as I continue to add more articles to create more incoming one way links.

10 Free Links Trial + The Costs of BuildMyRank

Considering how in depth and useful of a service BuildMyRank is, I don’t think it’s that costly of a service at all. If you are going to be writing your own articles, the only cost you have to pay is the monthly subscription amount, which is based on how many domains you want to promote through their site. You can see the breakdown of subscription plans below. It really makes sense to go for the 10 or 20 domains, as it’s just a few dollars more than the minimum 5 domain subscription plans. If you want to promote more than 20 domains, they have larger plans as well.

Up to 5 domains – $59/month
Up to 10 domains – $79/month
Up to 20 domains – $99/month

Right now BuildMyRank is holding a free trial where they are offering you the 10 incoming one way links to your web site or blog for free. You don’t even need a credit card! This is an insane opportunity to take a few minutes to write up some 150 word articles, and possibly bring in PR4, 5 or even 6 web sites with a one way link back to your site!

- Get Your Free 10 Links from BuildMyRank Now!

You’ve heard it a thousand times; you need a niche. Maybe you’ve tried several with some success but not the success you want. Or maybe you try one and it really doesn’t fit, so you try another, and then another. It seems like it’s a never-ending quest to find what you’re good at and can make money doing.

I’ve been there. I’m a writer. I “thought” my niche should be writing. The thing is, I’m not passionate about writing about writing. I love to write, I just don’t want to talk about it all day. I also love Internet Marketing, and while it’s not my true passionate niche, I do have a newsletter called, “The Write Marketing.” It goes out once a month, which is manageable, and covers topics on writing and marketing. However, it’s not my “have to do this” niche. It’s more of a side niche to break the monotony of daily writing.

It’s literally been years since I started searching for that “perfect” niche that fits me. I ran a health and fitness blog for a few years, and while I enjoyed that, it wasn’t my passion.

I’ve finally decided what it is that I’m supposed to do and I’ve started working on that area. I’m not ready to announce the website yet, but it’s in personal development. If you’d like to know when it’s launched you can sign up for the newsletter I mentioned above.

How did I decide this? Not long ago I decided I needed some training. I was floundering around in the marketing world, buying products and still not getting anywhere. I discovered a membership site called, “Nicheology.” I’ve really enjoyed it. There’s a ton of how-to videos inside and real, no-bones-about-it advice—solid advice. The main theme for Paul Evans (the owner) is to keep things simple and understandable.

I went through the video series on, “Find Your Niche,” and that’s when it hit me that I need to do what I do best–inspire and motivate. It was under my nose all along. Imagine that.

If you feel lost and can’t find your niche or just need some instruction on marketing, setting up blogs, profit systems, there’s a plethora of information inside Nicheology. You get tons of training and even monthly products that you can use in your business. All for less than $30 per month.

Stop chasing your tail and make a wise investment in your business and your future.

image credit: canalecomm.com

I deal with people now and again that understand they need some kind of Internet advertising to help their company to take off but they’re really not sure what it is and how to go about getting the right kind.

First off, the benefits to getting exposure on the Web. Simply put, you get more of it for less. With the right people using a combination of social media, blogs and articles as well as maybe even some videos and other mediums, more people will be able to read about the goods and services that you have for sale for a cheaper price than with print or even television and radio.

Availability is another one of the big bonuses to going with online advertising. Remember the work that content writers do for you is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week online. With the search engine optimization techniques that are available to today’s Internet marketers, you can also target a select audience to get your message to.

Online advertising campaigns are also much easier to track and measure conversion rates for. With some of the analytics that are available today, smart marketers can refine approaches to Internet campaigns while they are in full swing, usually at no additional cost to the client. For example, it’s not uncommon for a search engine optimization set of keywords to be evaluated and retooled on a constant basis so the client gets optimal exposure and the best return on investment.

Using social media also allows online advertisers to engage their target audiences more quickly and easily. Properly tracking Facebook and twitter accounts allows companies and individuals to be able to see and react to their target audience’s preferences without the need for long drawn out analytical evaluations of data. Getting the kind of information to keep an advertising campaign running smoothly is much quicker and much more immediate online.

Finally, Internet advertising is much more affordable than its predecessors. The Internet has been able to level the playing field so to speak so that the numbers of companies and individuals that any firm has to choose from are much more diverse.

It wasn’t that long ago that business came to realize that they need to work on the Internet in some way or form to be successful. Advertising has followed suit and now people can get broader exposure at a cheaper price with any of the Internet marketers available on the web today.

One of the best things about WordPress is the ability to customize your blog with plugins. The only issues is that there are thousands of plugins to choose from and just not enough time to go through all of them. Luckily, WordPress plugins are kind of like iPhone and Android apps: no matter what you’re looking to do, there’s an app for that. So you can be sure that whatever type of functionality you’re looking to add to your blog, more than likely there is a plugin for it.

There are plugins to help increase traffic, help boost your rankings, help speed up your blog, encourage the sharing of your content across the Web, and many more. So to save you a little time, let’s take a look at the top 10 WordPress plugins that can be used to help improve your blog.

Google XML Sitemaps

All blogs need a sitemap; it’s a must for SEO purposes and to help improve the rankings of your blog. While there are many sitemap plugins available, the most popular is Google XML Sitemaps. It’s easy to use and will help you create a sitemaps so that all search engines can better index your blog. Also whenever you post new content, it alerts the search engines that your blog has been updated.

cbnet Ping Optimizer

Did you know that every time you publish or even edit a post (and click save), WordPress pings your blog? So if you’re editing a post and hit the save button 10 times, your blog will be pinged that many times! To those specific ping services, this looks much like spamming because, well, technically it is. I’m sure you’re wondering how you can be penalized for something you had no clue you were doing, but unfortunately you will be.

If you’re not already, you’ll soon be banned from even pinging your blog anymore and this can hurt your traffic. Thankfully, cbnet Ping Optimizer helps to fix this issue. It’s stops all of the unnecessary pinging so that you won’t get banned. It’s smart enough to only ping when needed.

Spam Free WordPress

If you are having huge issues with spam comments or just want to prevent serious problems in the future, you might consider Spam Free WordPress. It blocks 100% of automated spam comments and has “zero false positives.” So you can be sure that it will catch all of the spam and keep it out for good. There are numerous features which includes: automatic blocking; local and remote block-list; database load reduction; no cookies or Javascript required. It just works.

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

This very simple plugin offers a great feature that helps increase user engagement on your blog. Whenever a reader comments on a post, they can sign up for email notifications, alerting them of new subsequent comments. This way the commenting doesn’t have to end; they can return whenever there are new comments and keep contributing to the conversation.

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded is actually a full featured subscription manager. So your readers can go in and manage all of their subscriptions and even stop the ones they’re no longer interested in.

PostRank

This is a great plugin that lets you “showcase your top posts with a PostRank widget, track social media analytics, and engage with your readers from the WP dashboard.” The widget not only displays the top overall posts, but also lets users search for the best posts on a specific topic. The Admin dashboard widget also comes in handy because you can see useful analytics and social engagement behind the scenes.

Simple Tags

Simple Tags is the best way to manage and optimize your post tags. It gives you tag suggestions (based on your post content) from Yahoo, Tag The Net, OpenCalais, Alchemy, Zemanta, and your local database. It also displays a click tags widget within the post editor so that you can add tags with just a click, instead of having to type them out. Other features include autotagging, a dynamic tag cloud, bulk tag editing, and more.

WPTouch

With the mobile Web and smartphones taking over, it only makes sense to optimize your blog for these types of devices. This is exacly with WPTouch does. Whenever your blog is viewed from an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung Touch, or Blackberry Storm/Torch it will display in a fully optmized mobile theme. You can customize many settings and upgrade to the Pro version if you’re looking for more features.

W3 Total Cache

Performance is a top priority for all blogs; the faster your blog is, the happier your readers. A slow blog will have a larger bounce rate because visitors will be sure to leave quickly cause of the slow load time. W3 Total Cache is the ultimate speed machine for your blog and caches every aspect of it. W3 Total Cache will improve the performance of your server and help to drastically reduce page load times. All of the settings can be a bit overwhelming, but there is many informative guides on setting up and optimizing this plugin to its full potential.

Related Posts Thumbnails

One of the best techniques for keeping readers on your blog longer is by providing related posts underneath your content. This way they might just see something else that interests them and click on it to reader. This plugin goes a step further by also including thumbnails, which stand out and have a better chance at grabbing your readers’ attention. Related Posts Thumbnails will automatically insert the code into your theme, so there is no need to edit anything. You can then customize the colors and other settings to fit your needs.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

Many people are taking advantage of the Dropbox, a free service that gives your own storage space in the cloud (2GB). The service works with mostly every system and device and can be used to save files, images, videos, music and now to even backup you WordPress blog!

This plugin lets you backup your WordPress blog and then save the backup directly to your Dropbox account. You’ll have to use OAuth to link your account and then from there everything is automatic. Whenever you need to restore your blog, just find the backup in your Dropbox account.

Remember, there are many plugins that can do the same thing. In your searching you’ll want to pick plugins that are up-to-date, have a 4-5 star rating, and are compatible with your current version of WordPress. Plugins can become obsolete and inoperable pretty fast, so make sure that you keep them up-to-date on a regular basis.

Do you use any of these plugins? If so, which one is your favorite? If not, which ones do you plan on trying out?

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing advisor for a to do list app company, and who also consults for a shipping company that offers pre shipment inspections in China and in Latin America.

Creating and maintaining a blog can be hard work, as it takes a lot of trial-and-error and can cause many headaches and frustrations. If you truly want your blog to succeed, you have to treat it as a business; this often involves putting in long hours of research, tweaking, optimizing, and much more. While those who are new to blogging often don’t realize what they’re getting themselves into, they quickly learn that blogging is not for everyone. If you’re not willing to put in the work and effort, then you might as well quit while you’re ahead.

However, if you’re willing to go the long mile and do what it takes to keep your blog going, here are 5 essential tools that can help you with that. If you’ve been blogging for awhile, then you know that there are way more than 5 essential tools that you need as a blogger, but these are definitely 5 that you should be using if you aren’t already.

SEO Blogger: Optimize Your Posts As You Write

If you’re a Google Chrome user, this is one of those tools that almost makes it worth it to switch to Firefox (at least for blogging). This Firefox Add-on helps you find the most sought-after keywords for whatever you’re writing about. It happens all within the Firefox sidebar so that you never have to leave the current window/tab.

This is a very essential keyword research tool that shows you how popular a keyword is and then shows you how often it is used within your content, thus helping to increase your search engine rankings for those keywords.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

There are a few ping optimizing plugins around that you can use for your WordPress blog, but MaxBlogPress is one of the most popular. Whenever you publish or edit a new post, WordPress pings it. This means that a single post could be pinged 10+ times in a matter of a few minutes. Unfortunately, this excessive pinging puts your blog at risk for being banned altogether from ping services, because it appears as if you’re spamming. So a ping optimizer is essential because it helps you to control how often your blog pings so that you won’t lose out on traffic.

While some users believe that these plugins are no long needed, since WordPress supposedly fixed the issue a few updates ago, it definitely won’t hurt to use it for extra precautions.

nrelate: Free Products For Online Publishers

nrelate offers extremely useful and stylish tools for publishers like in-text linking, a most popular plugin, and a related content plugin. However, my favorite plugin of theirs that is great for any blogger (and eye catching too) is the flyout plugin. It works by flying out from the corner of the page once users scroll to the end of your article; it’s really great for suggesting more content that they may like.

This is “not just another related posts plugin, it’s a patent-pending technology that continuously analyzes your website content and displays other related posts from your website”. This, of course, results in higher pageviews and lower bounce rate since users will remain on your blog longer.

Additionally, you can also enable advertising for the plugin and it will display sponsored content mixed in with your related content, so that you can also make money. There are many different styles to choose from such as an animation style to thumbnails with text to Huffington Post style.

Social Sharing Buttons

There are so many social button options out there to choose from, that finding the right sharing tools for your blog can be overwhelming, but it’s definitely essential! If you’re looking to increase your Web presence and want others to be able to share your content, you must have share buttons somewhere on your blog. Some prefer buttons above their content, others below, and some even prefer on the left side of their content. There are also social toolbars that you can add that encompass social sharing buttons, plus a lot of other great features.

Here are a few choices that provide options for all preferences.

• AddThis – The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark and share your site easily with over 330 popular services. (Blogger version)
• Share and Follow – Add Share Icons, Follow Links, Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet and other buttons in the way you want. Simple & adaptable social networking.
• Sociable – You can get more Sociable with Sociable Skyscraper and easily getting Rating and Review of: posts, pages, comments, Facebook, G+, LinkedIn, Twitter.
• ShareThis – The ShareThis plugin seamlessly enables users to share your content through Email,Facebook,Twitter, Google +1, Like, Send and many more. (Blogger version)

Real-Time Analytics

I’m sure that I don’t have to tell you how important and essential it is to use an analytics tool. You can’t measure how well your blog is doing and you certainly can’t create a marketing plan if you don’t know anything about your traffic (how much you’re getting, where it’s coming from, what is being viewed the most, etc). Personally, I prefer a real-time tool to a static one because I can see everything as it happens.

So let’s take a look at a few tools (besides Google Analytics) that can really help.

• Woopra – Features real time web analytics, live chat, and web statistics including tracking conversion and funnel reports.
• Leftronic – Create a website dashboard in minutes. Combine data from Google Analytics, Twitter, Chartbeat, and others tools. Easy web reporting templates.
• Cyfe – Web-based software that helps you bring all your business metrics into one single location. Monitor individual departments, multiple websites and anything else.
• Newsbeat – Tracks the activity of every page you publish in real time, from the top performers to the diamond in the rough.

What are some of your essential blogging tools that you regularly use?

Looking at my blog makes me nostalgic. It has been five years since I am into blogging and I have seen it growing gradually and like me, it had been through the ups and downs. Nevertheless, like inseparable friends, we stick to each other in thick and thin. But it pains me to see that there is no one else to take care of my beloved blog if I demise all of a sudden.

So, does this mean that my blog will come to an end once I depart? If the same thought hunts you every night, you need to check out the rest of the article carefully:

Pass The Responsibility

I remember a story I read in a newspaper that I cannot recollect properly how friends of a deceased person are maintaining his facebook account as an act of remembering him even when he is not around. Don’t be puzzled. These amazing friends used to share passwords of each others’ social media profiles and so when the unfortunate incident takes away the life of their beloved friend, they decided to sign-in to his profile and post something related his past life to keep alive his memory. Now, you can do the same thing. Rather than keeping the admin access to you, you can share the detail to someone you have faith in. Now, do not blame me, if things go awry or the person you trust deceives you. It is up to you.

Have A Co-blogger

This is the best way you can ensure that your beloved blog is not going to die anytime soon. Rather than managing the whole thing and getting all the profit, you can have a co-blogger with equal amount of responsibility and profit already shared. Since both of you have all the details like paypal id, affiliate program details etc, your blog is less likely to go off even if you die. Moreover, you will have the peace of mind that your co-blogger is there to take care of all these trivialities and eventually your blog will live a day or to two more.

Do Maintain A Diary

This may sound a bit old fashioned but still, it makes it easier for other people to get information about your personal life and other details. If you are putting down even confidential details like bank account password or your social security no in a diary, you need to make sure that the special person in your life is also aware of its existence. So, do add some personal details like admin password of your blog as it will help him/her to discover it if you passes away unexpectedly. At least, your blog will have someone to look after when you are not around.

Multi-Authors Blog

If your blog has more than one contributor, you are in luck. Once you find some suitable candidates, you can give them admin access so that they can publish them at their free time. I personally have admin access of some high quality sites. It is beneficial for both. You can be sure of one thing that your blog will not come to a sudden halt once your life cut short by some unexpected event.

This guest post was written by Michael Evans, a passionate writer and he has been writing for Site2You, which is the best drag and drop website builder. He has written different article on web design, online marketing and SEO. He is equally enthusiastic about latest gadgets.

Writing killer blog content isn’t enough. You also need to be linking to your old and best content in your latest blog posts. Why you ask? For multiple reasons…

• Help Google find relevant internal links and crawl your site
• Bring your older and best posts back to life with your latest posts
• Improve your search engine rankings with your keyword linking

So that’s easy enough to understand, but what if you have an old blog that you have just been focusing on writing content for and haven’t been doing any internal linking? Well… there’s a plugin for that!

SEO Smart Links is Your Solution

This free plugin, which has been downloaded a gazillion times, will be your savior for when you need to start building mass internal backlinks throughout your blog. Best of all, it’s free! Head to your plugins section in wordpress, then search and install “seo smart links” and you will be setup right away. It’s super easy to use. In a nut shell, you just need to add the keywords and urls that you want turned into active links. You can visit my SEO Smart Links post on PPC.org to see the full features and screenshots, or visit the official plugin site. For anyone looking to do some hardcore internal lin building and tracking, there are also paid premium versions of the plugin available.

How Helpful are Internal Backlinks for SEO Purposes?

With all the talk about internal link building and search engine rankings, I wanted to get an answers from someone who specializes in the seo and link building business. I sent over a few questions to my friend Alex Pyatetsky from TheHoth link building service. The question was simple… “How Much Do Internal Links Help with Search Engine Rankings?”… you will find his full answer below.

Internal links count. Period.

If SEO is an election and building links is pounding the pavement and shaking hands, then internal linking is interparty endorsements. Its a way to throw around accumulated clout (e.g. site authority) and focus it on the pages that you want to win the SERP election.

Here is a true story to help illustrate.

I was recently consulting for a client who previously owned several of the top blogs in his niche. He’s in a space where keywords have very brief lifespans, roughly 2-4 weeks before everyone forgets and moves on to the next thing. Once upon a time, every post on these authoritative blogs would rank in the top 5 within days/hours. But one day, it all changed and his fat, healthy cash cows went on the Olson Twins’ diet.

Upon reviewing the site, I noticed that he had no “Recent Posts” section, which would create a site-wide link to each of his new posts. This would allow him to throw around his site’s built-up authority to the new pages that need it most, when they need it most so they can rank faster.

As we dug deeper, I learned that one of the talking heads in the SEO industry previously told my client that having a site-wide element like a “Recents Posts” widget could hurt his blog because it would count as duplicate content.

This, of course, is the epitome of B.S. Global elements like “Recent Posts,” “Most Popular Posts,”etc., create great navigational experiences for users and very strong internal link structures for crawlers to index featured pages. Its ridiculous to think that they could hurt a site.

So guess what! My client got scared and took off the “Recent Posts” widget on all of his blogs as part of a sweeping round of changes. Magically, all future posts failed to rank.

Sure enough, he implemented my advice, returned the “Recently Posts” widget, and with a few weeks he started killing it again in the SERPs.

The moral of the story is

1) Don’t listen to the talking heads. [I'm referring to worshiped industry idols who preach unhelpful dogma, not the band. The band is awesome.]

2) Internal links count. Period.

So there you have it. If you are already building internal links on your blog, awesome! If not, you can easily make up for lost time with the use of the SEO Smart Links plugin.

FanMix describes itself as “one inbox to rule them all”. The tool allows you to manage all of your social conversations from across the Web. While they currently only support three social sites, you’ll soon be able to manage your blog comments as well as various other sources. It’s meant to be a “dead-simple inbox, just like email”.

So if you’re still suffering from social overload or just looking to make your life easier, FanMix is worth giving a try. It will help you keep up with all mentions of you or your company/brand (depending on how you decide to use it).

Let’s take a look at how FanMix can help the not-so-average social user.

Connect Your Accounts

Upon logging in you’re prompted to connect your social accounts: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. For now you can only add one account for each service. Once you click on the “Connect” button (when done) it will take quite some time to pull in all of your conversations.

It’s important to note here that this step takes pretty long – we’re talking 20-30 minutes here. So this is a great time to grab a cup of coffee or do a little reading or browsing.

Inbox View

Once all of your conversations have been pulled into FanMix, you’ll see that it’s almost as if you’re looking at your email inbox!

The default view is the Priority Inbox. Here you can see important messages, starred messages, and then everything else is below that. Each message can be starred and/or flagged as important. You’ll see that some messages are already automatically flagged as important, although I’m not sure how this is determined.

You can go through the different inbox views to see which works best for you. Besides priority inbox, there’s also: inbox, important, starred, sent messages, archive, and contacts (which is not an inbox, but a place to save and view contacts).

There is also a search box at the top of the inbox so that you can search through all of your messages. You can search for a contact name or a word within a message.

Reading and Responding

Clicking on a message will open it up just like an email; if there is an image in the message, it will be displayed here as well. What’s nice about this is that you’ll be able to write a reply to that message right from within FanMix. Once other sources are implemented here, this is going to be an excellent tool for responding back to messages all over the Web and will be a huge time-saver!

No need to insert that @username that you’re replying to on Twitter, it is automatically inserted for you. When you add a reply, it will display right below the message you’re replying to. So this is also a great way to view conversations on Twitter in a thread-like manner. You will also get Direct Messages here too and will be able to respond back.

Once messages have been read (or marked as read), you can archive them; there’s no delete/trash option. Also, clicking on your contacts name in a message will take you to their social profile (depending on which account the message is from).

Sending Messages

If you would like to post a status update to any of your accounts, just click on the big “Compose” button in the top left corner of your inbox.

You can only post to one account at a time, by clicking on the desired avatar image for that social account. Twitter, of course, has the 140 character limit, but Facebook and LinkedIn do not have any limitations.

Final Thoughts

I’m definitely a fan of FanMix and I’m finding it extremely useful. If only I could read my regular email here, it could serve as my one main tool for responding to ALL messages. Regardless, I can see myself keeping this open in a browser tab so that I can quickly respond back to all of my messages on Facebook and Twitter. I can’t wait to see how the service improves and what new sources are added to the mix.

Note: FanMix is currently in private inbox and an invitation is needed to get started.

What about you? What do you think about FanMix and will you use it?

Marketing, writing, networking and the likes are things we all do and see others do every day, and also with the amount of information online touching these subjects it becomes extremely easy for us to do them. For example, we all see the process of marketing, writing and networking most bloggers follow; we see exactly what they do and how they do it, and some of them are even kind enough to go to the extent of documenting their process for us. But the question is, have you ever wondered how a particular blogger is able to do everything he does and still have a life? Most of us find it difficult to understand how superstar bloggers create time for everything they do without sacrificing what really matters; their life, their relationships and their families.

I have good news for you! This article will be focused on helping you be more productive as a blogger.

Step #1. Have a Home Office

Having a home office is one of the cool things that just happened to me and the experience has been exhilarating. It has been a great experience and I find myself not wanting to leave the office anymore these days. I spend an average of around 12 hours daily in my office, yet I still don’t want to leave it at the end of the day. Why? I’ve found a place more conducive and fun for my working. No disturbances or distractions, I can create my own space and give it my own look and feel. The same thing can work wonders for you.

You might believe there is no need to spend additional money creating a home office “just for your blogging”, but you’ll be surprised. You need to start taking your blogging serious if you want it to take you serious, and that means you also have to keep investing more effort into making your environment the perfect place for you.

You will be at least 5 times more productive in a place without distractions than you will be in a place filled with distractions so make sure you have an office, or at least a room, dedicated just for your blogging.

Step #2. Create a Schedule

The next step to follow is to create a schedule for both your home office and blogging.

Make sure you have a fixed time to go to the office, and a plan on how to use that time. Don’t ever spend less, or more, than your appointed time in your home office or you will end up losing motivation. It might be tempting to keep working till 8PM when you initially planned to be closing at 5PM, but the reality is that, while it might be fun at first, you will end up burning out and all your efforts will have been wasted.

Make sure you have a strict schedule to follow and ensure you only use your time for what you planned to use it for.

Step #3. Set Goals, and Reward Yourself for Achieving them

Most of us just go through life setting goals, achieving them and repeating the same cycle over and over again. The reality is that you can only take so much of that, and sooner than later you will end up giving up. A solution to this is to create plans to reward yourself for every goal you achieve, and no, that reward shouldn’t be the product of your goal. In other words, if you plan to get an additional 10,000 visitors to your blog in a particular month by publishing 25 guest posts on top blogs in your niche, the reward of sticking to that goal shouldn’t be the 10,000 additional visitors…it should be something else totally unrelated to your goals. It could be giving yourself a day off, or treating yourself to a cruise or whatever else you find pleasing. Make sure your reward isn’t something that kills your passion, but something that makes you happier and determined to do more.

Step #4. Create Constant Changes, that can be Felt and Grasped

This is one particular lesson I’m starting to come to terms with lately. If you studied how human beings work you will notice that one of the best ways to motivate them to give their best is to employ constant, creative change. In other words, while you might have heard about the latest techniques that work really well to make people act better and work better, the reality is that that approach will only last for so long, as is with everything in life. There is only one solution, though; always work on creating changes. Make sure your working environment is always new, make sure your passion for working is always renewed and make sure your rewards for getting things done are constantly changed.

Getting used to the same version of one thing at the same time will soon wear you off, so introduce some changes every once in a while. It could be rearranging the furniture in your office, it could be repainting it, it could be adding music to it and it could be implementing the mundane in ways you’ve never seen. Make your working space feel different and your drive to work will come alive again!

Image Credit

As we all know WordPress is the simple and effective CMS to choose. It allows you to do anything as you wish to do. It has got huge number of themes and plugins which will allow you to achieve any custom requirement without coding knowledge.

Having a launching soon page for any under development business is very important to get interested subscriber upfront. Use a launching/coming soon page with options to subscribe to RSS and social media.

Here we tried to list 20 best launching soon pages for WordPress. Hope you’ll enjoy.

1. Ultra Sleek 3D Look Under Construction Page

2. Ready 2 Launch

3. Beback Coming Soon Theme

4. Simple Coming Soon Theme

5. Simple Coming Soon And Under Construction Theme

6. UnderFlo Constructionz

7. Speedo Under Construction

8. COSoo COming Soon Page Template

9. Paper Launch Under Construction Theme

10. Road Cone Under Construction Theme

11. 6-In-1 Coming Soon Page

12. A Stylish Under Construction Word Press Theme

13. Influction

14. Coming Soon Landing Page

15. Coming Soon Cool Vector Template

16. Under Construction Template-2 Styles-4 Colors

17. Super Charged Under Construction Themes

18. Chronos Under Construction Template

19. Cool Under Construction Theme

20. We Are On Holiday Under Construction Theme

This guest post was written by Nancy, a lead writer over at NTHEMES. Adding one new WP Theme daily, they keep their visitors informed on the latest and greatest in WordPress Themes broken down by category including Responsive, Photography, and Business just to name a few

One of the biggest reasons for failure is giving up too soon. If you’ve read the short story called, “Acres of Diamonds,” you know what I’m talking about. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, but this guy was digging for diamonds. He did this for a long time. One day, the shiny object syndrome hit him and he decided he should go look elsewhere. He did, but he never made a fortune. However, a fortune was made on the property that he left behind. He gave up too soon. That’s the condensed version, but you see my point.

There’s another story of a miner who kept digging for gold. He did this for a long time and then gave up and sold his mine. At the time he stopped digging, he was only one foot away from striking it rich.

Now, you can argue that there is a time to give up. However, if you fully believe in something, you should not give up until you bring it to success. Last week I shared a blog round up and I highlighted a recent article by Zac. One of his biggest suggestions was about not giving up.

Here is an excerpt:

Take a look at Problogger, Copyblogger, DailyBlogTips and even this blog. They all have one thing in common, and that one thing is that they never quit. The moment you quit, you’ve just taken a step towards failure, and every single day you think about quitting but you persevere, you’re taking another step towards success.

Be sure to read that if you missed it last week and find out more of what probloggers know.

Another interesting story of success is Walt Disney. I don’t think there is anyone living in a modern society that isn’t aware of Disney World. What most people don’t know is the number of times that Walt declared bankruptcy before his successful idea of Disney World.

It’s extremely easy to give up. For some reason, people have come to believe that if something doesn’t strike rich in the first year, then it never will. In fact, the opposite is true. It often takes at least five years to reach a desired level of success. It also takes a lot of hard work. If you aren’t willing to put in the effort and the work to see something through, then perhaps blogging and Internet Marketing isn’t for you.

It does take work and while you may not be able to fully plan ahead for the success of your blog, you do need to have some kind of vision of what you want to accomplish.

Are you ready to give up or do you have a success story because you pushed through the hard times? We’d love to hear from you.

image credit: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/