Author Archive

Design Elements of a Blog

Sep 17, 2008 Blogging for Beginners

A blog may be essentially an online journal displayed in reverse chronological order but it is also a website which requires the same attention to detail any other website requires. It also requires the same design elements as a regular website which does not also function as a blog. Bloggers have decisions to make regarding design elements of the blog such as colors and layout, fonts and the inclusion of advertisements. Although many blog software programs provide a variety of templates which make designing a blog rather simple, blogs can also be highly customized by bloggers who possess some programming skills. This article will discuss some of the basic design considerations bloggers encounter.

Colors and Layouts of a Blog

The colors and layout of a blog is one of the most obvious design considerations bloggers must consider when starting or re-designing their blog. Bloggers may use a solid color background, blocks of different colors in the background or pictures or textures in the background. These background elements can be any color imaginable. However, bloggers who are considering the colors to use in their blog should consider using colors which will be aesthetically appealing to most blog visitors. This is important because the use of garish colors which are harsh on the eye can result in diminished blog traffic.

The layout of the blog should also carefully be considered by the blogger. The blog should be arranged in a fashion which is appealing to blog visitors, suits the subject of the blog and is presented in a logical manner which is easy for visitors to follow. Again, this is important because failure to use a layout which meets these criteria may result in blog visitors choosing not to visit the blog anymore because the layout is confusing or unappealing.

Fonts Used in a Blog

Bloggers have a number of options available to them when selecting fonts to use in their blog. These options include the font chosen, the text size and the color of the text. Bloggers should consider choosing a font which works well with the overall design of the layout of the blog and suits the subject matter of the blog but also is a font which common. This is important because blog visitors may have trouble viewing the font if the blogger selects a unique font which is not common. The text size and colors of the text should also be carefully considered. These elements are primarily important for readability. Text size should be set so members of the target audience can easily read the text. For example a blogger with senior citizens as the target audience may opt to use a text size slightly larger than usual. The colors used for the text should also be selected to enhance readability. One way to do this is to select colors which are appealing to the eye but also contrast with the background color.

Inclusion of Advertisements in a Blog

Bloggers must also consider the inclusion of advertisements when they are designing their blogs. This includes determining whether or not to include blogs. Once this decision is made, bloggers who opt to include advertisements must carefully consider how and where they wish to display these advertisements. Advertisements can be displayed in various locations throughout the blog and can be designed to be discrete or obvious depending on the preferences of the blogger. Advertisements can also be a variety of sizes and shapes and are highly customizable in a number of different ways.

Popularity: 33% [?]

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Best WordPress Plugins: WordPress Automatic Upgrade

Sep 11, 2008 Uncategorized

I have decided to start a new series for this blog relating on best plugins available for your WordPress installation. To start with, I will be talking about the WordPress Automatic Plugin.

One of the main steps in maintaining a WordPress blog is trying to keep the publishing software up-to-date, which is often forgotten by some WordPress users. Admittingly, I am one of those few who always choose forget or must I put it, neglects upgrading.

The main reason why I always neglect upgrading my WordPress install is I think that the steps on upgrading itself is too tiring for me. I think the job is tedious, especially because I have to manually upload the the files on my host’s server. Also, the compatibility issues on plugins that always tie up with WordPress’ new installation makes me cautious on upgrading.

Good thing, there’s a plugin available that will do the job seamlessly. WordPress Automatic Upgrade, as the name implies, automatically upgrade your WordPress database to the latest one without the need to manually transfer the files to your server.

WordPress Automatic Plugin does these important steps in updating your database:

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

I have used it personally on my other blogs and it worked as expected. However, I still advise to:

1. Create your own backup file.
2. Always consider plugin compatibility issues. To avoid future problems with the upgrades, always consider reading user’s experiences at the Support Forums.

Popularity: 24% [?]

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Creating a Popular Blog

Sep 10, 2008 Blog Traffic, Blogging Tips

If you want to make money through blogging, creating a popular blog is the key to success. If your blog receives very little traffic, you will not have much success monetizing it. No matter which method you use to make money from your blog, you will find the most success if you have a large readership. Because of this, making your blog popular and growing readership should be one of your primary concerns.

There are many ways to make your blog more popular. The first thing you should consider is who your audience is and who you are writing for. You should always write about something that interests you, and that will interest others. You may think that your new kitten is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but there are probably not very many other people who want to read a blog about it. It is best to find a niche audience that is large enough to support a wide readership but not to vague.

Blog readers are looking for interesting, relevant topics to read, not the next work of Shakespeare. Make sure what you write is interesting, edgy, or even controversial. Popular blogs are never boring and add value to reader’s lives either through information or entertainment. Make sure your blog adds something of value to your reader’s life otherwise you will not develop a large fan base.

Making your blog popular is a lot like driving traffic to a website. You can use many of the same techniques to drive traffic to your blog. Finding places to link back to your blog is a good way to drive traffic. Social sites such as Myspace, Facebook, and You tube provide lots of opportunities for this. You can also use social book marking sites such as Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Digg to promote your blog. Blogging on a popular blog site such as Wordpress and Blogger are also good ways to make your blog more popular as these blogging sites help to bring in traffic for your blog.

Whether you blog on a blogging network or you have an independently hosted blog, you need to make sure your blog is designed well. It is true that content is king and if a blog has great content is may receive lots of traffic even though it is ugly, having a well designed blog that is not ugly or annoying will help to drive repeat traffic. You want your blog to look unique, but not too unique. Keep with internet formalities such as blue links and use large font for headings.

You should break your post up into small paragraphs each with a headline if possible as internet readers tend to scan the screen looking for relevant information rather than reading everything word for word. Make sure your colors do not contrast too harshly and that the text is easy to read. Using good design will make your blog aesthetically pleasing and make readers more likely to come back and remain on your page.

No matter where your blog is hosted, you should try to get it indexed by all the major search engines. Some forms of blog monetization require that your blog be indexed by search engines before they will allow you to participate in your program. The higher ranked your blog is, the more visitors you will receive and the more popular your blog will become.

All forms of monetization for your blog require readers to work successfully. Before you try to implement your monetization strategies, make sure your blog has enough readers to make your efforts work. If there is no one to click your ads, visit your affiliate sites, or read your reviews, you do not stand much of a chance of making money.

Popularity: 40% [?]

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Ikarus, the King of All Premium WordPress Themes!

Sep 10, 2008 Layout/Design

The KING of all premium WordPress themes!

The KING of all premium WordPress themes!

And it’s available for FREE!

In search of great themes to blog about and probably use it on one of my blogs, I stumbled upon wpthemespress.com which offer great WordPress themes, including the IKARUS Premium Theme. I thought it was a paid theme but apparently what the theme author means by premium is a great, elegant layout.

The theme author spent over three months of developing the theme to assure a well-developed theme for the WordPress community. It has over 2,000+ user selectable variations and options all managed from the admin area.

It has several great features:

  • 4 homepage layouts to choose from, Blog, Magazine, List or Magazine List
  • FlickRSS
  • Theme options page and help page in admin
  • Custom values integration for featured images and video
  • Content Gallery (on or off) Slideshow or static header image with link
  • Featured Sidebar post (on or off)
  • Popular content rating
  • Recent posts, comments and feedback
  • TagCloud
  • Clean Page Nagivation (wpNavi)
  • Color coated “read more” buttons
  • Author thumbnails for comments
  • MyAvatars
  • Valid CSS and XHTML coding
  • Live theme preview in admin area
  • Related posts on post pages
  • Next and previous posts
  • Comment Rss
  • Cross browser support: IE, FF, Safari and Netscape
  • 6 125×125, 1 header 468×60, 1 footer 468×60 banners all managed from theme admin area
  • Feedburner integration
  • Feedcount
  • Logo as image or text (controlled from admin)
  • 10 color variations to choose from for header bar, widgets, post titles, links and footer
  • Set global image alignment
  • Set your own global header and font styles
  • Set global font size
  • Switch layout between left and right
  • 3 Columns
  • Widgets 2 columns
  • Tons of custom pages built in, search results, links, archives, pages, categories, comments, author pages and more.
  • CSS multi-level drop down page menus across header
  • MooTabs slider box
  • Featured YouTube Video post
  • Social bookmark tools on pages and post pages
  • Comments on pages
  • Admin area links in frontend when logged in for easy management
  • Tons of custom typography styles like: highlight, different heading styles, code, span, download, numbers, pre, ordered and unordered checklists, speech bubbles, blockquotes and more.

This theme is perfect for magazine websites, community portals, and even ordinary blogs.

Popularity: 22% [?]

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Five Most Important Things You Must Do for Your New Blog

Sep 7, 2008 Blogging Tips, Blogging for Beginners

Now that you have decided what topic fits in for your blog, and have chosen which blogging software to use, it should not end there. There are a couple of ‘must do’ steps before finally launching your new blog.

  1. Make sure you’ve configured everything. There’s nothing worse than having done 99% of the work, only to be let down by the final 1%. Get done with your profile settings like your About Me page, or any blog addons such as plugins (in the case of WordPress-powered blogs). Many plugins and themes require some work to make them usable.
  2. Pick a theme and stick with it. There are many available themes that you can use – either for free or paid ones, but make sure your blog will stand out from the rest with that theme., it is one of the major steps in retaining traffic and building readership. Adding a theme also makes you appear less like a spammer – most spammers don’t personalize their blogs and just stick to the default themes. Moreover, they don’t add personal information on the splogs.
  3. Provide good content. When you’re ready to upload the content, you should set it up to create a great archive. Make sure you categorize your posts accordingly.
  4. Promote your blog. Once you’ve got a nice stock of content up, start promoting your blog. Practice article marketing, exchange link with other related blogs, add your site to bookmarking sites and encourage your readers to do so, too.
  5. Enjoy your new blog. Blogging is just like any other hobby. You enjoy it and the best thing about it is you may earn from it. Blogging is about connecting with other people of similar interests and creates a reader base to discuss your work with. It also allows you to express yourself, make friends, and spread your expertise over the web. All in all, blogging is being social and having fun! readers and will give you a reader base to discuss your work with – but it will also allow you to express yourself, make friends, and spread your expertise over the web. But most of all, blogging is enjoyable, so always keep it that way, and have fun!

Popularity: 41% [?]

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Keyword Research Tools in Choosing a Niche

Sep 4, 2008 Blogging Tips

When setting up a niche website, one must consider choosing those keywords that are frequently searched for and which is in high demand. However, the keyword density must also be considered, that is, the keyword is not being already used by many other websites and competitors, thus low competition exist for the keyword. This is when keyword research tools come in.

Wordtracker is one of the best ones available and probably the widely used one. There are some more equally important research tools that one can also use. There’s the Overture, Google AdWords Keyword and Guidebeam.

Overture’s keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but doesn’t tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase. For example if you type ‘Computer’, the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word ‘Computer’ was searched, say for example 459550 times at Overture.Com. Similarly ‘computer game’ was searched 302210 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common search term then you will not get any results. It means that very few people have actually searched for that word during the last month.

Even Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Features of this tool include,

  • Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position.
  • Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords here and there or add them all at once.
  • Searches for keywords present even in any webpage URL specified by your search. It can also expand your keyword search even further to include those pages that are linked to or from the original URL page.
  • More keyword results are generated based on regularly updated usage statistics database. This helps you to get new keywords or phrase

Guidebeam. When setting up a niche website, one must consider choosing those keywords that are frequently searched for and which is in high demand. However, the keyword density must also be considered, that is, the keyword is not being already used by many other websites and competitors, thus low competition exist for the keyword. This is when keyword research tools come in.

These softwares are useful for researching how people search the web and then optimizing your own web pages so that more people find your web site.

Popularity: 18% [?]

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Earning Money Online with Your Blog: What are the Easier Ways

Sep 4, 2008 Blog Monetization

I must admit that one of the reasons why I stick to blogging despite the high-time demand of my hospital duties is the money I get out of it. Basing on experience, earning online is never that easy. I could attest that it’s a lucrative source of income but at the same time an unstable one.

There are several things that a blogger making money online could face. Many people might think that by mere posting they can already earn from their blogs. Of course you have to have an established blog before you could reach at least a $100 mark per month to get your monthly check. By saying ‘established’ I meant enough traffic, generated clicks and impression, good search engine and page rank, enough inbound links, etc. That is, your blog must meet at least nearly all the criteria of a good blog.

However, if you already have an established blog, it’s always easy to earn money from blogging.

There are three popular ways of making money through blogging:

Advertisement. Once your blogs become popular, you establish readership, which in turn attracts potential advertisers. There can be good reasons why most advertisers may prefer online advertising. It is widely accessed and most users belong to age group 15-40 years old, which have always been the target consumers of most advertisers.

Writing reviews. Although, this means of earning money online has became controversial because of the recent PR sweeps and disappearance in SERPs of blogs engaging to online reviews as punishment of Google for ‘manipulating the PR’.

You can earn more money by blogging about services, products, and popular companies. Since business owners want to popularize their names, they will offer you to write reviews about their products and brands.

The reviews should be positive so that more people are attracted to the said products or services. It must be able to generate an optimistic impression. If you’re a popular and experienced blogger, more and more companies will request you to write reviews about them.

Blog for others and get paid. Hired bloggers are increasing in numbers all over the world. Of course, earning money from blogging doesn’t always mean you have to have your own established blog to earn. Some people prefer blogging for others especially for companies to promote their products and services.

For beginners, earning money online can be hard however if you will be regularly doing it, you’ll get used to it. As they say, practicing makes one perfect.

In the succeeding articles, I will expound more on these money making strategies that a blogger can do online.

Popularity: 28% [?]

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A list of the High-PR Social Bookmarking Sites

Aug 31, 2008 Blog Traffic, Blogging Tips

The advent of social bookmarking sites has helped a lot of webmasters and bloggers to easily promote their sites and blogs.

Here is a list of the social bookmarking sites that have high Google pagerank:

http://del.icio.us/ PageRank: 8/10
http://www.furl.net/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.simpy.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://del.icio.us/ PageRank: 8/10
http://www.backflip.com/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.blinklist.com/ PageRank: 6/10
http://bluedot.us/ PageRank: 6/10
http://de.lirio.us/bookmarks/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.diigo.com/user/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.shadows.com/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.markaboo.com/ PageRank: 5/10
http://ma.gnolia.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://linkagogo.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://netvouz.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.mister-wong.de/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.spurl.net/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.rawsugar.com/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.stumbleupon.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.digg.com/ PageRank: 8/10
http://www.blogmarks.net/ PageRank: 7/10
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.netvouz.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.taggly.com/ PageRank: 5/10
http://www.lookmarks.com/ PageRank: 5/10
http://socialbookmarking.org/ PageRank: 5/10

Popularity: 29% [?]

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10 of the Best FREE ways to Promote Your Website

Aug 31, 2008 Uncategorized

1. Yahoo! Answers. Browse over the site for unanswered questions related to your website or any topic you are knowledgeable about and have relevant links point back to your site. It’s a quick way to build back links and actually have targeted users viewing your site.

2. MySpace.com. Create a myspace account and start marketing to the users. Some quick tips for MySpace are:

a. Never spam
b. Join as many relevant groups as possible and participate within the groups.
c. Post interesting bulletins that provide useful information
d. Send friend requests to users within the groups you’ve joined.
e. Use graphics in your posts to catch the attention of the reader.
f. Use catchy titles, anything boring will be ignored.
g. For non-targeted friends, you can look into friend trains such as friendstorm.net
h. To automate friend adding, comment posting and bulletin posting you can check friendbot.com and madderadder.com

3. Yahoo Groups. Join a Yahoo! Group related to your interest or website. You can then promote your website to your co-members.

4. StumbleUpon. The golden rule, “Do unto others what you want to others to do unto you” applies on this social bookmarking site. You can ask your friends or other bloggers and website owners to stumble your pages so you can likewise do it to theirs. Some members of webmasters forums are exchanging stumbles with their co-members. Perhaps you can join them.

5. Social bookmarking sites. You can also submit your post to other
social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us, Furl, Simpy, and other high PR similar sites.

6. Squido.com. Create a lens in Squido.com and start promoting your site through it.

7. Site maps. Always have a site map for all your sites, and ensure the site map is submitted to Google. You can create a free site map using the following site: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Once your site map is created, then upload it to your site, then submit it to Google using the link below: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview?hl=en

8. Submit To Directories. Most people already do this, but just in case you haven’t, you should submit to directories. You can find a list of directories at StrongestLinks.com. By submitting to these directories you can acquire back links and more traffic to your site.

9. Tell a Friend. You can install a tell a friend script to your site that will allow users to “refer” your site to their friends and colleagues. The downside to this is that some spammers try to manipulate tell a friend scripts. Be sure the one you use actually has “image verification” to limit form manipulation; otherwise you may find spammers trying to use your form to send spam. The technique to attract users to use your tell-a-friend box is to create good content.

10. Article Promotion. Promote your website through article marketing. Submit articles to well-ranked sites like Article City, E-zine Articles, Go Articles, etc.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Helpful Tips for Corporate Blogging

Aug 17, 2008 Blogging Tips, Corporate Blogging

Blogs are massive resources of information from both inside and outside companies. Businessmen survive the world of blogging because they know how and where to dig information while protecting their own secrets. Although blogging can be risky world for businesses, there are several helpful tips that can help bring success to corporate blogging.

The Importance of Training

It is important to make sure the members of the communications team. In the past, this team was composed of a small group. However, with the advent of blogging, everyone who blogs at the company is spreading a specific message about the company. People who handle the blogging for the company must be trained to avoid any spill of unnecessary information.

If by accident, important information regarding the company has been disclosed, this can put the company under the watchful eyes of the regulators. More so, inappropriate leaks can provide competitors with leverage and may lead to embarrassing revelations about the inner workings of the company and its staff.

Although the usual action to be taken is to restrict employees from blogging, this can be a shortsighted
decision. Bloggers from within the company can easily relate and make contact with potential clients and even enhance the brand of the company.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 39% [?]

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