Whether it’s a website or a blog, it needs to project credibility. If the blog doesn’t meet the highest standards of credibility, there is no way in the world that it’s going to attract a loyal readership.  So improving the reputation of your blog must be a high priority task for you.

Credibility can be built, but it can't be bought!

Here are three tips that will go a long way in improving blog credibility:

Only post Relevant Content

It is only if your blog has relevant content that it can strike a chord amongst users. The reason why visitors want to go through your blog is because you have promised them specific information and if they don’t find that information on your blog, they are not going to come back to it again.  For e.g. if your blog is about iPhone applications and their development and you start offering information about Android or Symbian development, it’s not something that the readers are going to like very much. Another facet of relevant content is that it should be fresh. Readers want the latest information and are not looking for content that is old and whose expiry date is long past.

Answer your Comments

If you think that you can improve the credibility of your blog purely by publishing fresh content, then you have another thing coming. Once you have posted on your blog, it’s important that you answer the comments that you attract for a particular post. The fact that readers have taken time out to post a comment means they have read your blog post with interest and decided to air their views about what was written. Their comments might be appreciative or can even be critical of the ideas or thoughts that have been expressed in your post. As a blogger you need to show your acknowledgment for their appreciation and in most case a short and sweet ‘thank you’ will do.

But when it comes to criticism, you can defend what you said in the blog post and clarify any doubts that the reader has expressed through the comment. This tells blog visitors that you know what you are talking about and are saying something not just for the heck of it, but with conviction. It’s a simple equation really – If you are convinced about what you are saying, you stand a better chance of convincing your readers.

Don’t Keep Projecting Yourself as the Best

Confidence is always good, and you can project that confidence through the content of your blog posts. But, if your blog keeps saying that you are the best at regular intervals, be it through the tag lines used, its content or the images used, instead of looking like an expert, you will come out looking obnoxious. The fact that you are the best shouldn’t be told to the readers of your blog, it must be something your readers should be able to gauge naturally, over the course of time.  The use of visuals, call to actions etc. must be commensurate with the purpose of the blog and not be put in place to tell visitors that there is nobody better than you.

It’s important to note that these are not the only tips that will ensure credibility for your blog. As you go along, you will learn of new ways to improve the credibility of your blog. The important thing is to do the simple things right.

3 Great Ways to Improve the Credibility of Your Blog is a post from: Blog Godown

To say that business conditions these days are less than ideal across the board would be a great understatement. Because of these conditions, companies must tread carefully when it comes to funding the marketing initiatives necessary for their very survival. Email marketing is already affordable, but it just doesn’t get any more economical than free. In this article, we will take a look at why free email marketing is such a good option for the small business operating in an ailing economy.

Email is Still Cool

Consumers these days use a broad array of devices and mediums to communicate. Social media, instant message, and SMS text are just a few of many that instantly come to mind. While several channels have come along over the last couple of years, email remains as common and useful as ever. Consumers around the world have an email account they use on a regular basis, and if you run a small business, you can rest assured that the members of your target audience are among the bunch. What does all this mean? That free email marketing can give you a reliable way to get in touch with the people you need to reach.

Its Measurable

Today, it takes a number of different key ingredients to make up a successful business strategy. One of the most important is a system that keeps track of your performance. Knowing how your campaigns are truly fairing can be difficult with traditional media, but it is a breeze thanks to the measurability of email. With the inclusion of a simple HTML image tag, email allows you to track just about every vital aspect of your campaigns. This includes the number and percentage of opens, clicks, forwards, and much more. Although robust tracking capabilities may appear to be a luxury limited to paying customers, it is very possible to find it in free email marketing.

Free = Huge Cost Savings

It is no wonder that the rugged economy has hit small businesses so hard when considering that they have fewer resources than their larger counterparts. Unfortunately, this usually means they are harder with smaller budgets as well. When money is tight, even methods that are generally affordable can be prohibitive. This is what makes a solution like free email marketing so ideal in these tough times. The cost savings it delivers can give a small business the opportunity to keep the budget intact, and boost their profit margin in the process. Spending less is always going to produce a better looking return in the long run.

Summary

Email marketing is a great fit for organizations of all sizes. In today’s sluggish economic climate, you could say a free service is perfectly suited for small businesses. It literally lays off the budget while providing all the powerful tools that many companies around the world gladly pay for. We can’t really think of any reason for a small business not to at least consider free email marketing.

Why is Free Email Marketing a Good Option for Small Businesses in a Struggling Economy? is a post from: Blog Godown

The two faces of blogging

The “Active” and the “Passive” has a lot of impact on the daily lives of bloggers. An “Active” blogger takes initiative, strives to be productive and does the hard work. The “Passive” counterpart is a big time procrastinator, shirks from menial tasks and tries to find shortcuts, even if they may not be the right things to do.

Classifying yourself as a pure “Active” or “Passive” blogger can be a bit strong. But, there are shades of both, one shade is bigger than the other one (more like a two face you see in the image (evil smile)). One can identify this by analyzing the behavour of “Active” and “Passive” bloggers. Let us take some examples which will help you understand the scenario better:

General Blogging:

The “Active”: An Ideal version of this type of blogger is a task master. A productive guy who does not stop with writing just the article. There’s a lot more it. He tweaks and optimizes and then markets it. Next, he analyzes his posts according to statistics. It is not the quality of article that matters to him, but the actual learning curve which will eventually lead to the path of becoming a problogger one day,

The “Passive”: The type of blogger that most of us experience in one stage or the other. We sometimes call it writer’s block just to avoid embarrassment but we are actually lazing around, dozing off . The Passive sounds fun but it is the path to disaster valley. The Passive guy is only interested in the results and hence, he tries to focus just on writing and super quick methods to make money online – the kind of methods which are sold by many crooks. Eventually, they are either cheated by some crook or they start using black hat methods.

Commenting:

The “Passive”: The “Good Post” and “Thanks for sharing” kind of comments are not adding value to the discussion. They were supposed to be of value years ago, when blogging had just started. Everyone was new to the concept, so short and supportive comments like these were always welcome. But, nowadays, this is a passive way of commenting. Most of these comments are spam, but even the real ones are of no use. Good Post does not reflect your opinions and ideas. It is an indicator that you are too lazy to write a thoughtful comment.

The “Active”: The Active commenter is every blogger’s favorite. The one who treats comments as a forum to discuss. He adds value to the forum by giving his insight and topping it up with his opinions. It can be a critique, or a strong reaction. But, whatever it is, it adds a spark to the commenting forum and adds to the reputation of the commenter.

Social Media

The “Passive”: The shameless self plug or sharing like a robot are signs of this guy. The Passive tries his best to automate each and every bit but fails because he is easily ignored by the people in his network (The people in your network are not dumb!).

The “Active”: He is the content curator who shares useful stuff which may or may not be related to his work. He understands the “social” in social media and makes it a point to be a part of conversations and discuss on big and small issues.

I would not ask which side you have been on, because i am pretty sure its been both. But, I would ask you, what do you consider “Active” and “Passive” in terms of blogging?

Active and Passive Side of Blogging is a post from: Blog Godown

This is a guest article by Kevin Moor. You too can be part of this great knowledge sharing community. Take a look at our guest blogging guidelines.

Blogging is a very popular activity; many folks that you know have a blog, and many of those folks will have more than one blog. Blogs are a great way to express yourself or share your knowledge and expertise, so it makes sense that you would want one too.

As you get started, you probably have done a little bit of research on blogging. It is important to know what to do with your blog, but it is equally vital to know what you shouldn’t do. The following tips are only 10 of the things that you should not do with your new blog.

Don't do this!

1.) DON’T overdo your layout. For your blog, simple is probably better. If you do a more elaborate layout with lots of logos you may end up making your blog too busy and hard to read. It could also end up making your blog look a bit unprofessional.

2.) DON’T create a big header. A big header with a logo is sure tempting to create as it can make you site look sharp. It will also make your blog hard to read. Big,slick headers can push the text down. If your visitors can’t see any actual text or content when they first visit your blog, they are more likely to simply surf away from your site before reading any of your posts.

3.) DON’T put too many ads on your blog. You want ads because you want to make money off of your blog; monetizing your blog with ads is one of the prime ways that the average blogger earns money for all of their hard work. You may like ads, but your readers definitely don’t. If you have too many obvious ads on you blog, you will turn your readers off and they may not end up coming back for more.

4.) DON’T disable comments. Turning comments off can be tempting for new bloggers. If you allow comments, you leave yourself and your posts open for critique and may put yourself at risk for someone saying something negative about your work. If you turn off comments, you won’t know all of the awesome things people are saying about your site either. Also, blogging is a type of social media, and this means that you are cutting off the conversation if you disable comments.

5.) DON’T forget to post. If you want a successful blog with lots of visitors, you need to post often. Some say that once or twice a week is often enough, and others say that once a day isn’t enough. However often you intend to post, you need to remember to do it. If you stop posting, viewers will stop checking back to see if there is new content.

6.) DON’T ignore social sites. Social media is a great way to get more eyes on your blog. Share your content via these sites, and be sure to open up accounts on the most popular sites for your blog.

7.) DON’T have a general blog. General blogs can be fun, but niche specific blogs can attract more readers. If you want a widely read, successful or profitable blog you should have it be on a particular topic.

8.) DON’T have music or video autoplay on your blog. You may think that these features make it easy to find the media, but all it actually does is make viewers want to click away from your blog as soon as they can. Visitors who may be checking your site at work or at class or another time when they aren’t supposed to will not appreciate this.

9.) DON’T use blackhat techniques to get people to your blog. If you don’t know what these are, don’t worry; you probably are safe. Otherwise, please know that these spammy, slightly underhanded methods will turn off your readers and may get you banned from search results.

10.) DON’T forget to read other blogs. By reading other blogs, you will get a lot of benefits, including learning about what does and does not work when blogging. You should also leave honest, pertinent comments on these blogs, as this will surely lead to even more hits for your own site.

10 Things You Shouldn’t Do With Your New Blog is a post from: Blog Godown

Blogging is the recent popular activity that all of us do regularly or in our free time. We share our thoughts and interests on a blog or give a comment on others blog or even become a blogger’s fan!

Many people have taken up blogging for their livelihood. The concept of guest blogging allows people to post articles in somebody else’s blog as a guest blogger giving each of the parties an advantage

of content, branding, traffic and good writing skills. Starting a blog, writing relevant content doesn’t comprise a good blog. Getting readers to read your blog is the most important task.

To have a steady flow of traffic to your blog, you need to promote your blog effectively. Facebook is giving us so much everyday. It is the largest social networking website in which millions of people connect with each other. Facebook is very good platform to publicize your blog. Let us see how FB apps can help you promote your blog.

I. Facebook Pages:

Creating a fan page is one of the top facebook applications which will help you promote your blog. When you decide to create a fan page, keep your personal FB account away from your blogging community. You can boost your facebook page by:

a. Discussion boards: Once you create a fan page, a discussion board tab is available to share views on with one another. The discussion boards resembles a forum in which you and your fans can start and carry out discussions thereby building relationships among fans.

b. Polling: Create a poll and get your users vote their choice. An easy way to gather data and responses. You can publish the results of the poll and get opinions from your fans.

c. Static FBML: If you think your blog needs a bit of customization then you need to be familiar with HTML codes. Static FBML(Facebook Markup Language) feature allows you to add tabs and modify them in your fan page. You can use HTML codes or FBML in the fan page to setup landing page for fans and non-fans.

II. Social RSS:

Add a RSS Feed subscription for your blog for users to get updated content. Let your Social RSS be visible and configured accordingly before you activate it. According to your latest post, the feeds will update automatically.

III. Notes:

Notes is one of the Facebook applications available on your tab once logged in. Importing blog posts is easier with the help of Notes and it is the reason why many use it. You can either import the blog or copy and paste your individual articles into Notes and share it with your fans. They in-turn can share the note with others or add comments on it.

IV. Blog:

The Blog application is the quick and easy way to start blogging on Facebook. You can promote your main site using Blog on Facebook. Another application similar to this is Blog Box which allows you to write, add a blog post or import articles from an existing blog. If you have imported articles, Blog box will check your main site for any new post and update content every 6 hours.

V. Facebook Ads:

Placing an Ad in Facebook is the quicker way to get visible but with a charge. FB Ads reach out all people and have the ability to attract visitors to your blog or fan page.

Note From Editor: So what have been your experiences with Facebook marketing? Which application has worked for you?

The Top 5 Facebook Apps to promote your blog is a post from: Blog Godown

Blogging is certainly not as easy as many people think it is. Blogging is actually a business and involves a lot more than just writing good content. Getting a nice design, moderating comments and promoting blogs are only just a bit of the whole blogging business. Running blogs as a professional does take up a lot of time especially if the blogger works a full-time job and can only attend to his/her blog at night or on the weekends.

Always running out of time!

Managing time is an essential skill that a blogger needs to learn. Even if you are a full-time blogger, you still need to manage your time properly. The tough question is always there – how to maximize the time, make sure that we get the most out of each hour and finally come out productive by the time we log off at the end of the day?

Let’s take a look at some time management tips that could be useful for bloggers:

• List down and maintain your ideas in idea file

  An idea for your next post suddenly pops out when you are waiting for the train to arrive – what do you do? Do you keep it in your head? I suggest writing down the ideas.

  Brainstorming activities take a lot of time. Save time and list down any ideas you have in your head so that later on, you only need to focus on the writing part. Create a “box” called an “idea file” and put all the new post ideas in it. When it is time for you to start writing, open the “idea file” and go!

  To record the ideas and store the details, I recommend Evernote. Evernote helps to maintain the idea list and the retrieving process is easy. If you don’t fancy Evernote as much, find other method that suits you. The list of ideas doesn’t even have to be maintained electronically; some people write their ideas in notebook or keep them in their smart phones. Whichever method are you using, the idea is to maintain the idea list to save your time.

• Build a routine and stick to it

  When we work for others, time is managed for us. We have certain expectations to be met – arrive at the given time, log on to the system, be productive, take a break, come back and be productive again. If you think this only applies when you work for others, think about it again. It is just as effective if we apply this to our own day when we become our own bosses. The only difference is that this time, we manage our own time, instead of having our schedule and tasks dictated by others.

  Schedule your blogging time, make it a routine and stick to it. Having a routine helps you to stay organized. If you don’t have a structured schedule, it is very easy for you to come up with excuses such as “no time” every time you messed up your progress. For instance, you might want to have a fixed brainstorming session every Monday and write articles every Friday. This helps you to focus on other tasks on the other days; you could spend those days working on marketing, generating traffic, etc.

• Focused Batches

  Focused Batches is a tactic to manage time effectively when running a blog. We all suffer from information overload and it can be a major interruption at work. Writing articles in one sitting and then publishing them in queue every day during the week is an example of focused batch work. It leaves the rest of your week open to other tasks such as developing products, for instance.

  You might want to consider breaking the weekly tasks into focused batches. Structure your schedule by allocating one or two hours just to focus on that single task, take a break and start with different single task in the next hour. You also can switch it to days instead hours but the gist is to have a single task to be focused at a go.

• Airplane mode

  Airplane mode is a feature on most smart phones that will turn off all connectivity once you activate it. You can’t call, text or surf the web. It is a “Do Not Disturb” hanging on the phone “door”. Apply the airplane mode to the times when you are doing important works on your blog.

  It literally means removing all potential distractions such as turning off Twitter, email notifications and going off Facebook. Carrying out your work at a fixed place such as in an office with a door might help you to get full, uninterrupted attention as well. It indicates you are in working mode and activating “airplane mode” makes you actually stay there with your work.

Everyone needs time management skills, regardless of whether you are a blogger, office worker or a homemaker. The tips above and some self-discipline helps to keep a blogger efficient and effective in running his/her blog, even if the blogging hours are limited.

Time Management Tips for Bloggers is a post from: Blog Godown

Social media has become increasingly important for all of us. It can greatly affect our career. Have some silly photos of you and your friends acting stupid when you were drunk at Christmas, and the next thing you know, you are not getting that promotion, and you start getting the feeling that you are not really wanted in the office anymore, and you don’t know why. Some people are getting obsessed with social media, Facebook and Twitter marketing. They have come to see themselves as a brand.

(credits: GOIABA (Goiabarea))

The worst personal experience I have had personally, more than once, is when I have met people in a social situation, we have had a good conversation, and then they ask for a Facebook profile. Soon after they don’t speak to you again when you meet them in public because you only have a few friends on Facebook and you are not ‘popular’ enough for them. It is important to manage our time on Facebook and other social media websites.

For some people, they have become addicted to the use of Facebook, and all they do is sit on it all day. They could be getting out, meeting real people, enjoying life, and actually doing something. Here is a look at how we can manage our Facebook life:

Time Constraint

We wouldn’t think it was appropriate to sit in front of the television for 8 hours a day, and do little else, and there is no reason why one should be sitting in front of Facebook for ridiculous amounts of time either. Set yourself a time limit for how long you will allow yourself to gossip, chat and be internet social.

Friends

The concept of friends online is very interesting. Facebook is much more useful when you actually know and have an interest in the people who are associated with your account. Do you really need to be adding all that junk on your account? If someone is not communicating with you via Facebook, and you don’t have a real relationship with them (a Facebook relationship is not a relationship), you should dump them from your account.

Not Real

Have you realised how much of what is happening on Facebook is not actually real? There are numerous fake accounts and fake people on Facebook. Those accounts are so obvious. They are the ones with women wearing a bikini looking alluring or the guy with the six pack abs. They will have 3 photos, little information, and randomly make a comment to everyone. Every now and then, she will tell you how great a product she has used is. She is a fake profile used by a guerrilla marketing company to push products and services.

Privacy

Facebook has been the subject of a lot of debate about privacy. Despite their attempts to give users more control it is struggling with so many users. Hacking, identity theft as well as stolen images have become problems. With so much personal information available on the site you can understand why so many criminals are trying to use it to run scams.

Gossip Book

Unless you are using it in a mature and controlled fashion, or you are using it for effective business purposes, such as boosting your SEO or career in a mature fashion, you might have a problem. Are you behaving like a snotty teenager, gossiping, acting obsessively and suffering from Facebook-nervosa?

Facebook-Nervosa: Are You Suffering this Illness? is a post from: Blog Godown

In internet forums and blogs people actively discuss the problem of website conversion rate evaluation and its increasing. The increasing part is one of the key tasks of web analytics, so this issue should be considered in more details.

So, what site conversion means? The simplest definition is the following: it is a process of making clients (customers) from site visitors. Conversion percent is correlation of number of visitors with the number of customers in percent. The problem is that many commercial site owners try to define optimal conversion rate for web resource which is not quite right. There can’t be one factor. For one business person optimal conversion rate is 3% (some online shop owners say that the conversion rate of their sites isn’t more than 2%), and for another – 10%. If the activity of site not only covers the expenses, but also allows to reinvest money and its future development – we can say that site conversion is not critically low.
But if the level of site conversion is threatening to site’s profit, you should take some actions to correct this situation. Taking into consideration that conversion is the process (visitor becomes customer), you must first make it maximally fast and convenient for visitors. The more difficult it is to use the site, the lower there is a probability of a new purchase. Bad website design makes people think that they have an affair with nonprofessionals.
Let’s discuss some key parameters that affect conversion rate of the web site:

1. Don’t overload visitors with information. Very often owners of online shops write too many information about product. In this situation it is better to make a link to additional information about the product and not to make visitor spend his precious time on reading the information that may be useless for him.

2. Don’t force visitors to give their personal information if it is not very important for you. For example, why must he register the account when he just wants to order a good? Or why do you ask his e-mail before he downloads price list orpdf-document? Very often visitors are asked to fill in a big web form, and if this process makes him tired and irritated, he will just leave your resource and never come back.

3. Be maximally frank and open for your potential clients. For example, if for some moment your internet shop doesn’t have a certain product, don’t show it on the front page. It is better to mark it “This product is not available now”. If the customer pays for delivery, you shouldn’t hide this fact. It would be better to describe all process of delivery in details. It is also advisable to inform the client about the time of product or service delivery.

4. Embed a contact page in your online shop. It would be great if you build a customised web form that will fully suit your web resource. But if you are not very good in programming, then you may use one of online generators like PHPForms. Visitors will feel that you care about their opinion and that you can answer all their questions very quickly via email or by telephone.

5. Offer potential clients several variants of payment. If you only accept the bank payment, your internet business won’t have any success. Very often the limited list of payments make people leave this website and go to your competitors.

6. Money refund. Remember, it is one of the most verified ways of clients attraction. If the visitor knows for sure that he may take his money back, he will trust this online shop.
Of course, there are plenty of other advises about increasing site conversion, but it all depends on individual parameters of your site. Anyway, these advises are the ones that you should adhere first.

Building Successful Online Businesses – Site Conversion Basics is a post from: Blog Godown

If you are serious about developing your blog as a business there are times that you will have to consider outsourcing some aspect of your blog. Indeed managing a blog when you have 100 visitors is a lot different when compared to 10000 visitors. This is why it might be important that you learn how to outsource some aspects of your blog. In this article I will be speaking about 4 interesting aspect of your blog that you can outsource

Design

The first thing that you might consider outsourcing is the design part of your site. Indeed things such as blog templates and logo design can all be outsourced without having too much impact on your blog. The key here is to make sure that you give enough information to your designers to make sure that they understand what you are looking for. There are plenty of freelancers online that will be ready to work for you at a really affordable price.

SEO

Another thing that can easily be outsourced is the SEO. Indeed things like social bookmarking or link building can beoutsourced quite easily and will allow you to save time for some more productive aspect of your blog. Again you will want to make sure that you choose a qualified person or firm to handle this as you will not want them to make use obscure techniques. Using such techniques can penalize your site and may cause your site to disappear from search engines ranking page altogether.

Blog Management

Updating blog software, hosting management and databases management can be a time consuming task especially as the number of visitors keeps on increasing. This is another aspect of your blog that you should be able to outsource quite easily if you want to save some time. It might be a good idea to leave this blog management aspect to the same company that designs your blog in the first place.

Content Creation

This is an aspect of your blog that can be quite tricky if you are careful. Indeed the success of your blog will depend on the quality of the content that you post on your site. Your post will normally be a reflection of your own personality and it can be quite difficult for another person to replicate this. This is one feature of your blog that you may have problem outsourcing as it may take some time for you to find the most appropriate freelancer.
Alternatively you might want to outsource only some categories of your blog while you continue to write on the core topics of your blog.

Outsourcing Your Blog: A Guide is a post from: Blog Godown

Faster website improves user experience and hence directly affects the bounce rate as well as the returning traffic. If you are targeting global audience, you should know that they are using different types of internet connections – some are fast and some are slow. Those with high internet speeds don’t care much about the site load time because almost every websites loads in a matter of seconds. However, those with slower internet connection, each byte downloaded is precious. Therefore, the goal should be to reduce the site load time by tweaking and optimizing the website.

Google Also Recommends Faster Websites

As you might know, google has included site speed as a part of their search algorithm. This was done by google for the same reason – website usability. They also believe that a good website should be fast loading in nature. Therefore, they have provided tools to check site speed such as google analytics and some other firefox plugins. This helps you find the bottlenecks such as SQL Queries, DNS Lookups etc.

Plugin Performance

Similar to the tools provided by google, godaddy has launched a wordpress P3 Plugin Profiler. This ingenious tool generates  ”creates a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time”. In layman terms, it finds the speed bottlenecks.

It generates virtual traffic for the website and measures the performance of each plugin and stores them in the results file. You just have to click on “Start scan” and it will do all the work automatically by loading multiple pages of the website.

It displays a pie chart of the average total time taken by each plugin. Here is what my website’s test results looked like:

As you can see, you can easily visualize which plugins are consuming more time and hence, you can act on it by:

1. Removing the plugin

2. Replacing it by another plugin which consumes less time.

3. Using a code snippet which has the same functionality as that of the plugin.

It’s a pretty cool plugin and has a lot of advanced features such as detail stats and timeline. You should give it a try!

Site Performance: Determining the Blocking Factor is a post from: Blog Godown

When the holidays descend upon us in full force, as bloggers we’re faced with a constant demand to stay on our toes and give our readers the holiday information, spirit and content that they’re seeking.  However, for every way that holiday blogging can become more difficult than normal, it also offers the opportunity to improve and grow our blog.  Readers are now, more than ever, passionate about making the internet an integral part of their holidays in every way from planning and organizing to shopping and avoiding the crowds.  No matter what your blog topic is, the holidays provide you with the opportunity to stretch and grow your reader borders.

Be in the Holiday Spirit..

Reach out with Holiday Spirit

In order to really reach readers during the holiday season, you’re going to need to bring a little holiday into your blog.  For whatever reason, when December hits, we become a culture obsessed with everything gone holiday.  We expect everything we see and everything we read to have a little holiday sparkle, and if it doesn’t, then we generally don’t want much to do with it!  So whether you do a little site redesign, you include some holiday themed content or even just place a unique holiday countdown tool in the corner of your blog, you’d be amazed how many people will be drawn to your blog or stay with your blog to see how you incorporate the holiday theme.  If you can come up with something extra innovative, you’ll have an even bigger opportunity for your blog to garner new readers as the word spreads and you have an opportunity to see something go viral.

Take Advantage of Some Bragging Opportunity

Holidays allow for a personal touch in the blog world like almost nothing else.  We expect people to open up and become almost like family during this time of year and we appreciate it when they do. You can take advantage of this by doing a few personal pieces on what your blog/business has accomplished over the year.  This allows you to put the post out there as more of a personal reflection piece than a bragging piece that would have the potential to put people off.  Share your highs (and even your lows if you can show how you overcame them) as you conclude your year, encouraging your reader with how far you’ve come and how far you expect to go in the next year.

Lure Readers in With Holiday Specials

If at all possible, take advantage of the blogging gift phenomenon and offer your readers holiday specials.  Whether you can provide special discounts; buy one, get this; or even freebies, you’ll be amazed at the spike your readership will get.  And, remember, getting people to the site is more than half the battle.  Once there, then it’s just up to you to keep them there with stellar content!

Point the Way to Other Specials

Even if you yourself don’t have anything to “offer” per se, as in your blog is not a business with product or discounts to offer, you are by no means out of luck.  When this is the case, all you have to do is do some research.  Compile lists of where all the best deals are.  Find every site listing free shipping and put together a guide by category.  Find the gift guides that you think your readers would love most.  If they can come to you for a concise list that will show them all the best deals and freebies that will save them having to put in all that research time, you’ll gain very affectionate, thankful, loyal readers.

Festive & Helpful

In the end, it mainly comes down to these two aspects: being festive and helpful.  Decorate the blog; provide fun, festive holiday themed content (you can tailor any content to be at least a little holiday-like) and try to put something like a countdown or a “25 posts of ________,” etc. that will keep your readers coming back for more every day.  And finally, do your best to offer them something tangible or direct them to where they can get something tangible!

Making the Most of Holiday Blogging is a post from: Blog Godown

This title is not meant to instigate. Take as much time as you need to craft a well written, thoughtful blog post that your readers will look forward to reading. Then, spend the next few weeks checking in with the comment board. For better or worse, comment boards are everywhere now. Most of them you can completely ignore, but that’s not the board’s fault.  The comment board is really a great tool for promoting your blog and getting your readers engaged. Here are five reasons to spend a good amount of time fostering the comment board on your blog.

Listen to what others have to say!

1. Provides an Open Forum

Of course, this reason will have its high points and low points, but when used as a tool to increase one’s knowledge, the comment board is fantastic. Your readers come to your page to read what you have to say, hoping to gain something new from you on a regular basis. Since the internet universe is pretty much infinite, there’s a good chance you may have missed an article or source your reader can bring to light for you. Giving your readers the chance to enhance the article for you and your other readers is a great idea, regardless of whether it supports or refutes your post. The more people that weigh in on your post, the better.

2. Allows for a Q & A

Not every post is ideal for a Q & A, but the ones that are can wind up being a valuable resource for a long time. On tech blogs, SEO blogs, and other industry specific blogs, you can get a lot of “Hows” and “Whys” answered from the educated readers sharing their experiences with you and your other readers. Promote the Q & A aspect by asking your own question when appropriate, asking for their experiences or knowledge. These posts can then show up when people with similar questions type them into the search engines. If they like what they read and it helps them, you can count on some new readers.

3. Develops the Social Aspect

There’s every argument for how important the social aspect is for every almost every website right now. Have your readers create a brief profile to comment. You can get to know the names and faces of your readers, and they can get to know you and each other. There is more weight to the comments of people with a history of good comments and helpful advice then the folks commenting behind the anonymous title. Getting to know your base in this way will only help to promote your blog, and understand more of what they look for in your posts. And that’s the point.

4. Reward Your Readers

Comment boards can be a great source for a quick link to your reader’s website. If one of your readers has taken the time to create a profile, read your posts, and interact with your story or other readers; show them some luv. Keyword luv that is. There are many blogs that allow their loyal users to use a keyword they want to be associated with as their username, which is a valuable anchor text for their site. As the moderator, you’ll be able to tell who is coming to your site for the right reasons. Reward these readers, and they’ll reward you with loyalty and spreading your blog.

5. Become a Better Writer

I don’t know if there has been an influx of English majors online lately, but for every few posts about an article, I see a comment about the author’s writing style or lack thereof. Granted, most times this is far from constructive criticism. In fact sometimes it’s downright mean. But if you are hearing feedback from your readers about a change of style or errors, use this as an opportunity to grow. Now it is your blog and they are coming to you, but one should never stop learning. So if there is anything of value to take out of these types of posts, give it a shot.

5 Reasons to Spend More Time on Blog Comments Than Your Blog Post is a post from: Blog Godown

The evolution of social networking brought it to a position of great importance for a web presence. There are so many interactive services and activities that are available to not only the individual user but business interests as well. Online projects and endeavors need to integrate social networking into their overall strategy to best utilize their internet presence and grow. These are the places where customers gather to share their ideas, likes, and dislikes. Being a part of that allows a business to grow better relationships with their customers in addition to facilitating the spread of relevant information.

SEO and Social Networking

Any doubts about the importance of social networking to an online presence should be dispelled when looking at the search engines. Major search engines such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo are all taking steps to better integrate social information into results. Bing was the leader of the pack by drawing on Facebook Likes and Fan pages to help gauge popularity of a subject. Yahoo and Google are following similar suit to take advantage of the dynamic nature of social networking to find the most relevant results for a search.

As it currently stands, social network ratings do not have a huge impact on SEO efforts. The industry seems to be in the phase of figuring out how to best draw on and utilize the information in a way that will be appropriate. For example, Bing offers a social oriented search which uses data from entities such as Facebook to help determine what appears on search engine result pages. However, you can also plug the information into a regular search query to generate a result that draws from traditional SEO practices.

Looking To Future Projects

A very apparent trend is the embracing of social media values to help determine what is relevant, authoritative content. The approach closely mirrors traditional link-building except on a much faster pace. Social networks simply move at a quicker pace than any other locations we may frequent on the internet. Users can update, Tweet, or tag on the go as often as they want. That provides the potential to simulate viral marketing and make an impact on a large audience in a relatively narrow timeframe.

A good, recent example of this was the “HOPA” girl who stuck it to a boss that referred to her in a derogatory way through text on white boards. She gave the impression she was standing up for herself while pointing out that the network activity showed her manager playing Farmville for several hours a week on the clock. That story and accompanying video spread faster than wildfire because of social networks. It wasn’t until a few days after the fact that it was discovered it was a staged marketing ploy to attempt to simulate viral marketing.

Preparing For Tomorrow

Your business, product, or message can benefit from the same kind of exposure especially as social networking is better integrated into the general internet experience. We are looking at an environment that is already starting to use the weight of some social page PageRanks to help contribute to results placement. Search engines are not releasing details but it is an activity that is confirmed.

A business cannot solely rely on traditional methods to generate online success. A business needs to have a social networking presence if they want to compete in the ever evolving online environment of tomorrow. Doing so will not only provide benefit in terms of search results but provide a great opportunity to better integrate with participants to facilitate the spread of information. There is no downside. The sooner a business gets onboard the better off they will be a year from now either through better rankings or exposure.

Social Networking Is Key For Successful Online Projects is a post from: Blog Godown

A guest article by Elena Vakhromova. You too can be part of this great knowledge sharing community. Take a look at our guest blogging guidelines.

Why do people guest-blog? For self- or product promotion, for traffic, money or just for interest’s sake. Indeed, guest blogging has become a marketing goldmine and all self-respecting online business owners tend to create a discourse around their product or service in blogosphere. Not all of them have the ability to write excellent posts which make the readers beg for more. Still any writing skills aren’t inherent or intuitive. Instead, good writing is a learned skill and it may be easily developed through practice.

If you’re preparing to plunge into guest-posting, you will need not only a knack for writing but a bunch of good tools to aid you in daily chores. Here is a roundup of handy web and PC-based applications which I find indispensable for everyone aiming at comfortable and effective guest-posting.

Evernote

Those who get tired of MS Word and OpenOffice, will definitely love this free note-taking app. Evernote is an ideal solution for drafting a guest post. Its main asset is being perfectly cross-platform: notes are easily accessible from a PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android phone and from the Web. Beside text notes, Evernote can keep whole web pages or excerpts, images, HTML code, PDFs, music, business cards, etc. Everything added to Evernote is automatically synchronized and made searchable. Evernote is also remarkable for its auto-saving, absence of cumbersome editing tools and ability to email notes.

FastStone Capture

Flickr

NoDoFollow

Bufferapp

WordWeb

It’s needless to say how grammar and spelling are important for a guest blogger, especially for a non-native speaker. Here WordWeb comes to the aid. This is a free powerful dictionary and thesaurus program that provides the definition, synonyms, antonyms of any given word without requiring you to go online. It has about 150,000 words in its database and allows you to look up a word in online reference sites. The app is also notable for its hot key support: you simply use a hot key combo when the cursor is pointed over any word, and WordWeb will pop up onscreen with all pertinent information. The Pro version ($19.50) includes more word definitions, advanced Web search options and other features.

Freemake Video Converter

Guest posts may get better coverage due to multimedia addons. If you’d like to put a video into a post, you can’t do without Freemake Video Converter. This is a free Windows-based software that lets turn any offline video into web-compatible format (Flash FVL or SWF) or easily upload it to YouTube. You can also cut unnecessary video parts, choose a custom video resolution and even create video out of photos and music.

7 Must Have Tools for Guest Bloggers is a post from: Blog Godown

Here are the most obvious LinkedIn benefits for bloggers.

1. Brand yourself

LinkedIn profile is an excellent way to build personal brand and promote yourself as a blogging expert. A complete, well-planned, and linked profile is a powerful way to show off your professional achievements and expertise. Your LinkedIn profile sums up your professional experience, career history, education, skills and interests. It gives you an opportunity to demonstrate what you can do for others (your target audience). LinkedIn profile is an important part of your public image and credibility. Promote it on your blog and in your email signature by adding link View my profile on LinkedIn.

2. Promote your blog

LinkedIn gives you an opportunity to add customized links to your blogs or websites. You can add up to three personal links in your profile. But, you can also use LinkedIn applications like WordPress and Blog Link to promote your blog feed on your LinkedIn profile. This is an awesome way to give you profile visitors the sneak preview of your blog content.

3. Increase blog Traffic

It is a well known fact that as bloggers we use social networks to promote our blog content and increase traffic to our blogs. When it comes to LinkedIn, you can share links with your connections only, groups you belong to, or publicly, with everyone who visits your profile. But, use this opportunity wisely and don’t bombard your connections and groups with links. That may have counter effect. You certainly don’t want to brand yourself as a spammer.

4. Build your network

LinkedIn enables you to quickly grow your network and connect with others. You can easily search through your email contacts and see who already has a LinkedIn profile, find your ex-coworkers, school  and college friends. LinkedIn also uses the system of connections to recommend users whom you may already know. LinkedIn logic is simple: The more connections you have, the more your network will grow. By adding connections you are increasing findability of your LinkedIn profile.

5. Build reputation and authority

There are authorities and leading experts in every field. If you want to position yourself as a blogging expert or blogging consultant, then you have to build your reputation in that field. LinkedIn can help you in this pursuit a lot. You can build your reputation and authority on LinkedIn through LinkedIn Groups and Linkedin Answers. LinkedIn answers and LinkedIn groups enable you to easily demonstrate your expertise in your field. By answering other users’ questions, you demonstrate your knowledge and prove that you can help others. As an active and helpful member of the groups you joined, you can increase your visibility and recognizability.
Another powerful way to position yourself as an expert is to get recommendations. Recommendations are personal endorsements and proofs that you deliver what you promise.

6) Find ideas for blog posts

LinkedIn questions and group discussions are absolutely amazing tools for generating blog post ideas. They provide an insight into what people want to know and need to learn. You may want to subscribe to new questions in your area of expertise. For example, if you are blogging about technology, it would be wise to subscribe to new questions in this category.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of LinkedIn benefits for bloggers. But these six are certainly good enough reasons to visit the site and click the button Join Now.

Six LinkedIn Benefits for Bloggers is a post from: Blog Godown

Twitter is much more than a fun service that lets people say whatever they want in 140 characters or less. It also a powerful marketing tool that offers some incredible opportunities for businesses. Twitter is not only great for generating exposure, but also making connections. There are many tools available to create these connections, and email marketing is one that does not get nearly enough attention. This article will go into detail about how email marketing services can be used to increase your Twitter following.

Get the Word Out

Social networking is a worldwide trend and with more than 200 million users, Twitter is one of the biggest parts of the phenomenon. However, even with such a large number of people around the world sending out tweets on a daily basis, your profile will do nothing but collect dust if you do not let people know you’re there. You need to draw attention to yourself, and email marketing is more than up for the job. Whether it’s dropping a mention in your newsletter or building an entire campaign around your Twitter presence, there are plenty of ways it can be used to get the word out and convert your subscribers to followers.

Give ‘Em a Reason to Follow

Some marketers flop with their Twitter efforts because they do not commit to spreading the word and essentially give up before really getting started. Others flounder because they are doing social networking all wrong, mainly by failing to make a notable presence. If you want people to follow, you must give them a reason to connect. Create a compelling profile, and whatever Twitter content you decide to share in your email campaigns, make sure that it is relevant and interesting. The more intriguing your presence and content, the more people will want to keep up with you on the network.

Use Social Sharing

Would you like for your email campaigns to travel further? If the answer is yes, then both Twitter and your email marketing services can help. Many companies now offer social sharing buttons that can be easily incorporated into your campaigns. This is a convenient luxury that allows readers to share your messages with their friends in a single click. When it comes to email marketing, social sharing has two perks. First it gives your message the chance to reach more people than it would have been able to otherwise. Second, it gives you an opportunity to increase your number of followers. If your content is relevant and useful to them, why wouldn’t people want to follow you?

Conclusion

Email marketing services can serve as a complement to any social media strategy, but especially one that involves Twitter. The platform is huge, and continues to show what a great tool it can be when used correctly. Choose the right service provider, and email marketing will help you get more out of your efforts on Twitter.

How Can You Increase Your Twitter Following by Utilizing Email Marketing Services? is a post from: Blog Godown

Social media is one of the “most important” and “most ignored” aspects of creating a successful online brand. When webmasters start a new site, they often focus on content, design, or functionality. Great content is extremely important, but even the best articles won’t get seen if they aren’t promoted correctly. This content not only needs to be seen, but seen by influential people in the niche. This is why becoming a “social authority” is one of the best ways to launch a site. Creating a popular Facebook page, Twitter account, Digg account, and online forum presence will promote your content to people who have a greater reach than you do. Once your social profile is well established, getting your message out will be much easier.

Your Brand Should Stand Out and not be Forgotten Like This!

Engaging In Forum Discussions

Establishing yourself as an authority on Internet forums can generate interest in your brand. One of the best examples i have ever seen of this was by an affiliate network owner. At the time he was an Internet marketer that was always helpful to everyone, always friendly, would answer any question you asked, and over time he gained a lot of respect in the community. Later, when he started his own affiliate network, everyone from the community quickly jumped on board. This helped him gain affiliates and grow a network at a time when networks were popping up like weeds. He now runs one of the most successful CPA networks in the space. In many cases, forums can be a huge time sink. But, if done with a goal in mind, it can be a way to promote yourself, your brand, and your products.

Building A Twitter Account

When twitter first launched, i have to admit, i did not get it. I thought it was for narcissistic people who thought everyone else cared that they “just ate a turkey sandwich for lunch”. But i stuck with it, and after a month or so, i began to understand why twitter was so important. Simply put, “it is a completely new way to communicate”. Twitter can be used to gain followers with like-interests. It is easy to create content for followers, due to the 140 character limit. One of the best way to create content is to link out to interesting articles or resources for people in your niche.

Treating your users well is important. You cannot just spam links to your site. It takes time to develop a relationship with followers so they pay attention to what you are saying. The quality of content you deliver should be the same that they grown to expect from your brand. Over time, this will help you build loyal group of people that are interested in your message and your products.

Building a Facebook Fanpage

Facebook is the 2nd most popular site on the internet and too huge to ignore. Its traffic is equal to or greater that of Google and has become the center of social interaction on the web. Creating a Facebook Fanpage is a way to connect to a group of users interested in your area of expertise. A Fanpage can be created within minutes, but gaining followers is more difficult. An easy, but more expensive way to gain followers is by advertising your page. Running a Facebook Ad is very easy and takes just a few minutes to setup. On the other hand, running a successful ad campaign that gets followers at a reasonable cost-per-acquisition is much more difficult. For the best results make targeted ads tailored to a very small group of people. Facebook Ads can target age, interests, jobs, and more. Pick a small group and make your headlines, images, and subjects specifically to capture the attention of this small group. This will increase click-through-rate of your ads and dramatically lower your costs.

Promoting your story on Digg

Digg.com is a social news site where users can promote their own stories. This site is skewed to a college male aged demographic and can bring a huge volume of traffic and links if a story is successful. They key to getting a story popular on this site is creating interesting content, specifically geared toward this demo. It is also important to build up a base of friends that will help you promote/digg your story. It is difficult to reach the front page, but if you make it, you will experience a flood of traffic that can send most servers crashing. You will also need to be prepared in case this does happen.

Building a well-known brand is the goal of most businesses. Creating social channels that can push your content out to customers is a proven way to grow a user base. Ignoring social media could be the difference between success and failure for your business. It is not easy to figure how to best use each platform, but taking the time and effort to learn each one is extremely valuable.

How to Use Social Media To Establish Your Online Brand is a post from: Blog Godown

Once in a while, we come across blogs that just makes us feel irritated. While there are so many great writers, bloggers and online writers in today’s Blogosphere, there are simply those who irritate you effortlessly – either on purpose or inadvertently.

This article lists seven of the most irritating things that make even the most loyal follower heading out your blog. And if we’re not too careful, we too might fall into this pitfall. So before you get your readers annoyed, here are six of the most annoying things you could do to leave your readers irritated.

You simply don’t know what you’re talking about

An informative blog, from the name itself, should inform and informing means telling what you know – but what if the blogger doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about? – That’s a deal breaker.

The reason why most expert bloggers advise blogging about things you are passionate about is that it would be easier for you to communicate and explain such topic. If a blogger doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it will surely manifest which can lead to the lost of his online reputation.

The know-it all blogger

A blogger who doesn’t know what he’s talking about is irritating but what about a blogger who knows what he’s talking about… but seems to rub his ingenuity and expertise all over your face.

To put it in its simplest terms, nobody loves know-it-alls.

The Jester

Injecting humor into a blog is a tried and tested method of attracting readers and loyal followers but what if your humor is just so horrific that it scares away your visitors? – might as well be serious.

You’ll just irritate your readers with your failed attempts at humor.

Grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes… over and over again

Grammar, punctuation and spelling are important in blogging. The argument that blogging is different from academic writing is quite silly. While you don’t need superb academic writing expertise when blogging, you should at least make it a point to write in an error-free manner.

Check your grammar for God’s sake.

Pop ups and audios and videos that automatically play

Pop ups will scare away visitors. Audios and videos that automatically play, on the other hand, breeds hatred – well, not really but they will also scare away your blog’s visitors.

Excessive advertising banners – too desperate in making money!

Excessive adverting banners are a sign that you are really desperate in making money with your blog. A blog splashed with banners only creates a perception that you’re living under the bridge on less than a dollar a day but also makes your blog look too cluttered.

With the millions of blog scattered all over the Blogosphere, nobody would be desperate enough to live with your excessive advertising banners.

The Six Most Annoying Things Bloggers Do is a post from: Blog Godown

Black Friday is one such time when you get the best deals online as well as offline. As my audience basically belongs to the category of bloggers, I make it a point to let them know the best offers available to them, so that they save a lot of money.

Here are some of the best deals available for grabs this Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

1. Hostgator (50% off)

I am a hostgator customer and I am happy with their hosting as well as the live support they provide. If you are looking for a good hosting option, then hostgator should be your first choice (P.S. This Blog is also hosted by Hostgator).

Offer: 50% OFF on ALL hosting services. This includes shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated servers and Windows hosting! This does not include domain names.

This promotion will bring hostgator’s hosting packages as low as:

Shared hosting: As low as $4.95 Now only: $2.48/month (pre-paid)

Reseller Hosting: As low as $24.95 Now Only: $12.48/month (pre-paid)

VPS Hosting: As low as $19.95 Now Only: $9.98/month (First Month)

Dedicated Servers: As low as $174 Now Only $87/month (First Month)

Offer Validity: The Offer starts from 12:00 PM  Friday, November 25^th, 2011 Central Standard Time (GMT -6) and is valid for one day. Also, it is valid on client’s first invoice, so it is advisable that you take orders for more than a month to avail the maximum benefit.

Grab 50% off by clicking on this link

2. Godaddy (5$ for a .COM domain)

Offer: Godaddy is Offering .COM domains for 5$ for an year (Usually the price is around 10$ for an year).

Offer Validity: This offer is valid for the order of upto 5 domains. The offer is not valid for Renewals or Transfer. The Offer will run through 11/28 or until all 10K domains are gone, whichever comes first!

Get a .COM for just 5$

3. StudioPress Theme (25% off on Everything)

Offer: The Amazing Genesis Framework is up for grabs. I have always wanted a theme that has flexibility and, the genesis framework makes this happen with ease. Everything at Studiopress is at 25% off – the genesis framework as well as the child themes.

How To Avail Offer: Use the coupon code: THANKS

Offer Validity: This deal ends promptly at 5:00 pm Pacific time on Monday, November 28, 2011.

Grab 25% off on Studiopress

4. MaxBlogPress Bundle (70% on the Bundle)

Offer:  The MaxBlogPress Bundle consists of 4  5-Star Products available at 70% off.  475$ worth products are available at 137$. A saving of 388$ (isn’t that huge!). You might have used MaxBlogPress’ free plugin and you must be aware of the quality it offers.

Offer Validity: The Deal starts on 24th November Midnight EST and is valid for 1 day.

Grab This Super Duper Offer Fast

5. DreamHost (50% on 1 year hosting)

Offer:  Dreamhost is a reliable web hosting and you could get an year’s hosting at half the price. This Offer is open only for the readers of this website. So Grab it fast!

How To Avail Offer: Use the Coupon Code:  BLACKFRIDAY2012

Offer Validity: Valid till 1st December

Get DreamHost Hosting at 50% Off

7. MOJO Themes (CyberMonday Super Saver Bundle)

8. Income Blogging Guide (40% off)

8. ThesisAwesome Blog Skin (50% off)

Offer: ThesisAwesome is a beautiful Thesis blog skin by my friend Hesham which improves the look and feel of your thesis website. He is offering 50% off on his thesis blog skin for the occasion of Black Friday.

How To Avail Offer: Use the coupon code: 266E 

Offer Validity: This code is valid till Monday midnight, November 28,2011.

Get 50% off on ThesisAwesome Blog Skin

9. OBOX Themes (25% off)

Offer: OBOX is a collection of classy and elegant themes which are available at affordable prices. On this black friday, you can get them at 25% off.

How To Avail Offer: Use the Coupon Code: BLACKFRIDAY2012

Offer Validity: The Offer is Valid till 30th November 2012.

Get 25% on all themes

10. WpWebHost (50% Off on VPS Upgrade)

Offer: If you are running out of bandwidth and want to reduce the website loading time, you can think of upgrading to the VPS plan by WpWebHost. They are offering 50% discount on the VPS Upgrade.

How To Avail Offer: Use the following code to avail the offer: VPS50

Upgrade to VPS Plan for half the rate!!

There are many more deals to come. So, stay tuned because this post will be updated soon!

Also, If you want a discount on a particular product you want to purchase. Just let us know and we will try to get a discount for you

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Super Deals for Bloggers is a post from: Blog Godown

Social media has become the de facto medium to air and receive opinion-both the public and polity. To facilitate its use and prevent abuse effective policies are required. Some of these are already being formulated. One such bouquet of policies is being readied by the US government.

Credit: Mashable

Social media, commonly associated with Web2.0 technology, allows for content to be generated by individuals or communities for interaction and perhaps collaboration. Policies are expected to be framed by companies –public and private governing the use of community platforms within their organizations. In particular focus are the companies providing social media services spanning various geographies. But formulation of such policies or their procedures is easier said than done. A lot of parameters need to be taken into account failing which chaos and misuse might prevail. Ultimately it will be left to the judicial systems to define and operate such policy. The executive and the public may have to rush to the judiciary for resolution of disputes. Why? Because some of the policy may just touch the basic rights enshrined in constitution for individual citizen rights-like privacy, freedom of expression, right to dissent (though peacefully) etc.

From the side of enforcers of law, that is, the police have to make sure that policy provides clarity and accountability. This policy needs to be precisely worded and mention the functions and concerns of law enforcers. It also needs to be tailored to regional requirements.

Law enforcement agencies and social media experts have arrived at a consensus on the points to be considered while formulation such a policy. These points are elucidated below.

What should the policy cover?

Determine the range of this policy. Determine who, which and in what form can be covered. Accuracy on the reach of this policy is vital for its implementation.

How should it apply to official and personal use?

The policy should list the sites authorized to be accessed by employees/employers during work hours. Further some features of allowable websites may be disabled (Ex: chat service). Further, personal content posted by staff even while not on duty needs to be regulated. This is because any potentially valuable message may innocently slip out in social media. This may be used by anti-social elements, attorney defending criminals or business rivals. This could lead to issues for the organization and the individual concerned including loss of credibility, integrity and even employee job status.

What is its role vis a vis existing policies?

There are existing policies that do handle issues related to social media pretty well. This policy could strengthen them further. At the same time there are other policies beset with loopholes. These have been successfully exploited to nullify any strong execution of the policy. The new policy needs to address this concern.

Furthermore, requesting or retaining individual data and or monitoring needs to conform to laws already enacted by various law making agencies. So a balance needs to be maintained as well.

Conclusion

An effective policy that seeks to keep all sections of the public, employees, employers and law enforcers on an even keel is required. This policy should not give leeway to one and penalize the other. It should also be broad based to help its implementation in different places and circumstances. Finally it should also be futuristic to take into account the changes in this dynamic world of social media.

Social media policy: Concerns or challenges is a post from: Blog Godown

If you’re newbie to SEO stuff, you might need to know the difference about the true and false statements made about it. Before actually starting to spend your own money and efforts on SEO, take some time to look through the statements and make a weighted decision.

1. SEO is way too complicated for the usual people.

It’s actually not true. The basics of the good SEO technology are placed in the basic texts, which will help you to make your text nice and clearly readable by the search machines. Of course, there are some complicated SEO topics, still, it’s much more an exception than the main rule. If you’re comfortable with the basics, you may start making SEO optimization for your site. Read the corresponding articles like “Ten steps to nicely optimized site” etc. There you will get the knowledge about how does the optimization process go.

2. There is too much to learn to do SEO. I’ll never learn such type of skills.

And yet again it’s not completely true. SEO is no less then any other subject, still it’s nothing more then a one. You don’t feel like getting a fishing specialist after seeing one single program on TV? Here we have got the same things, start from the very beginning and learn from the basics to the complicated things, step by step without fear or hesitation. Be sure that the knowledge will definitely come to you slowly. After feeling like you have learnt the basic concepts, try reading “SEO 101” for getting the overview of SEO.

3. The moment I Indexed my site for search engines, I got all the business done.

This is a completely false statement, as the indexing in search engines doesn’t guarantee high level of visitors. All you’ve done is you showed to the others you’re here, so they are now able to find you through the search engine. Yet still, you’ve got to do something for them to start looking for you. The best option is to get to the highest ranks of the search engines, so the link onto your resource will appear on the first page. Study the basics of publication for the information on the topic.

4. SEO optimisation needs too much time.

Not exactly again. The meaning of the effective optimisation is not a complicated one. All you need to know is that you shall have the unique interesting content, the code and the site design. You’re already spending enough efforts on these things, so all you need to do is to keep in mind the SEP basics to interlace them all into the project and to help yourself for the very point. Read the materials like “When do I see the first results?” to sustain your curiosity.

5. For success, I shall place my page in at least 1000 search engines – is that true?

This might appear to be the most common myth about SEO, as well as the most false one. First of all, think about all these search engines. Did you ever use any of them? So why do you think all other people know about their existence at all? If somebody asks for money to make publishing, he will most likely do nothing about it. Read “The basics of the site placement” for your consideration.

6. My site is way too big to do everything alone.

Be sure Roma wasn’t created at one single day. Same goes about your site. Take your time to consider the most useful tactics and start making everything page by page. Creating one page at a time will be just fine. Remember that every page is the bright door to your site available for the visitors. Concentrate over the post popular pages, try to analyze what do they actually need, after that consider the materials you have and make the proper decision. While combining the material, keep in mind the basics of SEO, to the effect would be greater.

7. Meta tags are the most important part of the process.

The popular Meta tags are just as important keywords as the other ones. They are usually placed as words, headlines, descriptions; all this is usually used by bots to index your page. There’s no actual fact for these tags to be the most important task for the SEO master. Still they are an important task of the popularisation of your resource, to keep them in mind as well.

8. I need directories to get a high rating for the page.

There is one thing you must know about directories, they are overflowing with keywords etc. All these ways are considered to be the black hat SEO techniques and shall never take place in normal ways of optimisation. These can be even considered as spam, and the bots will just ignore your site.

9. It’s not possible for me to reach the top if the keywords are very small.

The SEO optimization will demand a lot of energy from you as well as lot of efforts. You might think it’s actually not true, but a single thing won’t just bring you to the top. Your goals should not to be in the very top of the list at any cost. The most important thing is to offer your services to the audience, and this might happen on the third page as well. It’s sometimes enough to build a really good site with a lot of options and offers of the craved product to get a lot of visitors. Your site shall be productive and created according to the tendencies.

10. I don’t need SEO, the search engines are nice to me.

And yet again we have to agree with that. No matter how satisfied you are with the current level of visitors? Will you be satisfied with it in a month? Perhaps you will ask for something more and that is the most important part of SEO optimization. Take your time to learn the basic opportunities in order to make your site even more appealing for the clients.

10 the most popular myths about SEO is a post from: Blog Godown

Blogging arena has emerged as the sweet segment for the budding webmasters and those considering becoming rich quickly. However, over concentration and reliance on blogging can work against the established networks over a period of time. The webmasters often tend to align themselves more to changing SEO dynamics rather than writing quality content for the end users and as an aftermath traffic numbers dwindle and eventually the earnings. The blogging ecosystem is changing at rapid pace and is no more a standalone entity in itself. A well chalked out SEO and SMM hold the key.

Finding the right monetization strategy for you!

Research The Keywords Before Putting Thoughts Together

It is essentially imperative for webmasters to focus on a set of keywords for a stint only rather than sticking with them for a life time. The popular tools such as Google Trends should be leveraged by bloggers to know the current topics of interest and then concentrate on those. For instance, some iPhone niche bloggers are still focusing iPhone 5 keyword phrases rather than iPhone 4S and are hence are experiencing decreasing traffic trends.

Another strategy to counter the fad trends is by buying domain names with the high value keywords and stacking those with the blog posts. However, not everyone has the budget to buy too many sites and set them up from scratch with quality content. The strategy is highly recommended for webmasters who intend to develop a rich blogsites portfolio.

Try Non-Adsense Monetization To Boost Earnings

More often than not the bloggers tend to rely 100% on Adsense based earnings even if they crack higher rankings. There comes a saturation point in the earnings potential and unless non-Adsense route too is leveraged by the users the earnings will eventually normalize.

Technorati Media ads and Clickbank are fastest non-Adsense affiliate networks that have been yielding substantial earnings. The video ad networks such as Vdopia have penetrated the market with a boom too. You should try marshalling your resources around these potential monetizing possibilities in order to stay competitive in the blog niche.

Change & Innovation Are The Buzz Words

Even more than the content the look and feel of the blog should be appealing to the users. Have you ever wondered if the design of the site is intimidating and user friendly? Perhaps the good starting point will be to benchmark the design with the best competitors. The surfers tend to prefer blogsites which load up faster, have meaningful content and are not spammy.

There is no harm in re-engineering the site from scratch even if you have substantial traffic but are witnessing regular churn. Only by changing ad layouts, blog’s design and categorization you can know the things to concentrate upon. As a best practice you should ideally take a leaf from the book one by one rather than radically changing the design, layout and content in one go. And as pointed out by Tom pointers – Try fast and Fail fast, you should recognize what is going on wrong and how it can be corrected with apt steps in the next iteration.

Blogging Can Make You Riches To Rags Too – Be Cautious! is a post from: Blog Godown

You have spent long months to create your WordPress membership site and you have just launched it but to your (unpleasant) surprise, it doesn’t attract the attention you thought it would. While for newly launched sites low numbers of visitors in the beginning are just normal, if you want to make your site popular faster, you have a secret weapon – free content.

Free content must be your companion not only in the beginning. In fact, throughout the whole lifecycle of your membership site, free content is something you can’t go without. This might sound illogical but as I will explain in the next sections, your paid membership site can’t be successful without lots of free content with top quality.

Free Content Isn’t Cannibalizing Your Paid Content

Many inexperienced webmasters of membership sites will frown at the idea to have huge amounts of free content because they think it will jeopardize their paid content. The logic is that nobody will pay when he or she can get something for free.

However, this isn’t so. Your free content and your paid content are not competitors – or at least your task is to make them non-competitors. You don’t offer the same stuff for free and for a fee. For free you offer the basics, for a fee you offer the more advanced stuff.

If you are familiar with the open source model, the model you need to apply is similar to the model of open source software – great free functionality and paid extras. Depending on the type of your WordPress membership site, the free and the paid components can vary.

For instance, if you have a membership forum, you can allow everybody to register for free, read threads and post in them but reserve access to more advanced areas, such as a job board or a marketplace for paid members only. As you see, the two functionalities aren’t competitors; in fact, the paid ones supplement the free one.

Free Content Helps to Attract New Members

Maybe you still don’t see why you need free content. If we continue the above example with the membership forum, your free content will be visible to everybody on the Web and the people who are looking for a solution will find the threads where their problems are discussed. It is true that many of them will solve their problem for free by reading the publicly accessible areas of your site but if they are pleased with the quality, they might become your regular visitors.

Most of these free members will never upgrade – this is a fact. Still, don’t regard free content as a loss of valuable resources. Even if 1-2% of your free members upgrade, for a site with huge traffic this is enough to become sustainable. Additionally, if you place ads on your site, you do profit from your free members, too (very often you might profit from them more than from your paid ones), so there is no reason to consider the free sections of your site to be lost profit.

Free Content Promotes Your Site

Finally, in today’s competitive world, no business can be successful without promotion. You just need to accept that a certain portion of your budget will go for promotion. You can launch a dedicated ad campaign and pay for it but your free content does a great job in promoting your site without having to pay extra fees.

If your free content is top quality, this increases the chance to rank well with search engines. Search engines are still the best alternative to get free quality traffic and you can’t miss such an opportunity.

There might be a bunch of paid membership sites that offer no free content and still are successful but more often than not, this approach doesn’t work. Free content with superb quality is a must for a membership site – this is how the business goes.
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Why Your Paid Membership Site Can’t Go Without Free Content is a post from: Blog Godown

A guest article by (@filos). You too can be part of this great knowledge sharing community. Take a look at our guest blogging guidelines.

On February 2012, I will be on Twitter for 5 years. Five long years during which I slowly learnt how to get the most out of this wonderful platform and how to leverage it from both a personal and business standpoint. No doubt about it, Twitter is where it is thanks to the incredible group of third party developers who designed new great twitter tools to get the most out of that, way more than what you can get from the standard Twitter interface.

Twitter’s growth over the past 5 year has been incredible, going from a few thousands to a few hundred millions registered users. For this reason, the typical Twitter user changed over time, moving from the typical early adopter to what I use to call the “average” internet user. I laso know a lot of people who discovered internet just a few months ago (from no-techies to seniors) who are on Twitter already.

Today, I would like to share with you three web-based twitter tools I use everyday that really make the difference when it comes to use Twitter at its best.

Twimbow

Together with a few other tools my company developed, Twimbow was born first of all as a way to satisfy my needs of power Twitter user. Today, I wouldn’t recommend anything different in order to focus on what is really important for you and to get rid of the “twitter noise”. Tons of innovative features like Gmail-like colored labels, rich tags, the monitor, the profile browser and much more help you keep track on what’s going on that really matters for you, helping you save valuable time. Twimbow is a web based social media dashboard that helps you organize your online conversations thanks to a truly innovative set of features and a stunning user interface.

ManageFlitter

ManageFlitter Logo

ManageFlitter is definitely the best way to manage your Twitter followers and friends. It helps you filter the users you follow according to different criteria and lets you quickly identify users who are not tweeting anymore or that, depending on your personal criteria, are not offering more value to you. Through ManageFitter you can easily clean the list of people you follow and find new people worth following. If you want to get the most out of ManageFitter, I recommend to use it on Chrome together with the “Check All” extension, that lets you automatically check multiple items at the same time (it helps you save a lot of time).

Commun.it

Last but not least, Commun.it is another incredible tool that helps you manage your Twitter community from a different standpoint. In a certain time slot (3 hours, 3 days or always) It identifies the users who are supporting you the most (for ex. by retweeting your stuff), users you should consider to follow, new leads based on the fact they mentioned something you care of and so on. You can also decide to unfollow a list of selected users that Commun.it “thinks” are not worth following anymore, helping you to clean up your “following” list. Definitely a must-have for any Twitter user.

What do you think? Are you using these tools everyday to improve your Twitter “efficiency”? Please leave your feedback in the comment section and feel free to drop me a tweet anytime (I am @filos). Thanks!

3 Tools To Manage Your Twitter Community Everyone Should Use is a post from: Blog Godown

With all of the latest Google Webmaster Guideline Updates and Changes, it’s no wonder that the blogosphere is scattering to make improvements to their content and site structure. Of course, they own more than 65% of the search market, so abiding by what they say may be a good idea. Likewise, it’s been proven that search giants like Bing and Yahoo have mimicked the way Google has done things for years. Yet, their version of “best practice” blogging and content development is consistent of common sense, mostly.

When you’re trying to reach a specific crowd, I’ve learned that there are few really helpful techniques. First and foremost, you should always present some form of contact information, whether it be via twitter or a simple e-mail address. Users like to verify that what they’re reading is coming from an actual person. Similarly, they like to know that this person has a bit of an “expertise” in what they’re writing about. Bounce rates aren’t only the after effects of a poorly designed site; they’re certainly dependant on authorship. If you aren’t represented as an authority on anything, nor have you really made a name for yourself in that particular niche, you’re probably not on the right path to successful blogging.

Become Known as an Expert

And as I mentioned before, Twitter can be greatly useful to demonstrate authority and authorship. At the same time, it can be a great tool for spreading the word about your writings. The same can be applied for Facebook – I recommend updating statuses and sending out media regularly to your followers. Google + claims it has over 25 million users currently, which means it’s certainly worth exploring as well. Using http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org (Clinton Global Initiative) as a great example, you can clearly see they’ve done some tremendous work garner visitors and asking for help via Facebook. Brainchild of President Clinton and Doug Band, the CGI continues to flourish and provide unique and relevant content to its audience – Those interested in providing foreign aid.

Last but not least, you want to not only reach the right crowd, but also deliver something of substance. Don’t tell your readers the same thing that everybody else is saying, and certainly don’t post the same thing twice. It’s important to avoid paraphrasing, repetition and keyword stuffing for the pure sake of increasing traffic. If you’re content is noteworthy, people will find it. Accompany it with images and videos to solidify return rates and represent your blog as a real authority on the matter.

So again, if you’re an authority on something, and are helping to spread the word about this important matter, you’re golden. But remember, people won’t always trust you and your information if you’re not making your contact details available to them.

Substance, Authorship and Social Media is a post from: Blog Godown