Blogging Tips

Earn money from Adsense: There's Always Better Way

2009-12-31T19:28:00.000-08:00

By : Deny E.Y.
To get a better income through Google Adsense you may have studied or read from various sources of inspiration.
And you might have done even success, or was not successful. We always assume that the latest way that we apply is the best, but still the result is still lacking. Why?
Review what you have done, compare it with what other people have done. That is some thing you should do.
The rest please do experiment, develop your own ways to optimize adsense. There is always a better way.

Assess your own blog from the perspective of visitors, to learn whether the order of writing, tapilan widget, font color and content of the article is "optimal adsense". What I mean is optimal if adsense can make people consciously or unconsciously touching your ads appear as part of the site / blog. The main thing is the ad that appears in accordance with the theme of blog so visitors do not feel disadvantaged at all when clicking on ads for the same at a time when he found what he was looking for.
The important thing to consider is not to violate the rules made by Adsense, read the Terms of Service Adsense. Because Adsense also has a rule that if violated will make all the things you have done become in vain.

Preparing for the Worst

2009-12-30T00:36:00.000-08:00

By : Deny E.Y.
This is not about the problems and solutions, but something that might be experienced by a bogger.
When starting a blog, we always have a purpose, although perhaps just a simple goal. Some of us build a blog to introduce yourself and make the writings to be read by everyone so that the aspirations distributed to the public, partly to make a popular scientific articles of people and read every day, there is a blog to sell products and goods, there also the only fun and to have fun. Some of them realized that blogs can make money and want to make blogging as a major work for a living.
But, things do not always go according to plan and desire as if it is difficult to be fulfilled.
Yag problems may occur:

1. You really want a booming visitors but in fact even just to get some visitors have had to do 'blog walking' is exhausting to leave a trail link in other people's blogs.
2. Dreamed of writing a popular, but instead of getting fans actually feel one open end of the blog and instantly closed it in when they think have read the "garbage that must be avoided". Very sad.
3. Pursuing google pagerank or alexa rank but never moved from the bottom.
4. Crave dollars of ad clicks that were installed on the blog, but the fact that ad box to make allergy and avoided visitors vacant as a result of income.
5. Because of the things above, make us become bored and desperate.
6. Run out of ideas to develop a blog that is like a stalemate.
7. Offline and online activities you do not leave time for maintaining blog. Your wife or even interfere with your blogging activities.
8. Feeling frustrated with the blog for no apparent reason.
9. Blog without a clear vision that makes writing in shambles and no focus.

Once again, this is not about problems and solutions. But by knowing the potential obstacles that might happen to make us better prepared and able to develop their own ways to deal with, even before the problem above actually happened. That the road to success becomes more spacious and mulus.Selamat work!

No Doubt To Start a Business on the Internet Right Now

2009-12-26T09:31:00.000-08:00

Every day hundreds of new blog appeared, hundreds of new sites created, millions of Internet users identify themselves every day.
I say that this is not about space and time, instead of the paradise of information, not about technology, but about the opportunity.
Many people who have seen what we'd never see and get what for us just a mere fantasy. It's all because of their ability to see opportunities before others noticed.
Many people who have been examples of successful use of the Internet to achieve wealth, you think maybe it's too late to start now.
But make no mistake, the chance always appear every time, more and more people doing business on the internet you might think of as competitors but in reality you are getting the opportunity to earn money.

The simple logic is as follows: Most of what is sold on the internet and information services, as for the information is not something out because it is used, but always increased every time submitted. Slightest information you have may be useful for some people. In this case you should be observant.
To sell information, you just have to provide what people want to know, what a useful thing for people, even the simplest.
This clearly does not require extra intelligence.
Once again, the opportunity is still wide open for you to dredge spoils from the internet. Do not hesitate to get started.

There is always more powerful than us

2009-12-24T20:39:00.000-08:00

Writter : Deny Eko Yuwono

The fact that what we have is not complete make us always seek to develop ourselves.
A webmaster sometimes have to do embarrassing things like: asking other webmasters.
Competition on the Internet is very hard, new things arise all the time, make new ideas become stale in a matter of hours. Thus we should not turn a blind eye to what is done by another webmaster. This is what makes consultation with their less embarrassing than just remain silent. Begging the information may still embarrassing, but it is not a taboo.

For me personally, which was still relatively new on the internet, nothing is taboo. He he he ..

How to Increase Revenue : Do not complicate things

2009-12-24T06:37:00.000-08:00

Writter : Deny Eko Yuwono

Many questions that produce thousands of complex answers about how to increase our adsense earnings.
But I think we should look at the situation with the most simple way: After disguising ads next appearance is to make ads appear as often as possible!
How do I: This is the most obvious thing, namely folding double your site traffic. And this is not something that can be negotiable.
Many ways to improve your traffic, but again do not make this too complicated. Simplify your thoughts.
Alternative you can do is as follows:

1. Advertise your site, eg through adwords, etc..
2. Suggest guests via email (email marketing)
3. Tap visitors through social networks, for example: facebook, twitter, etc..
4. Come up with original charm on your site or blog.
5. Continue to develop and fulfill your blog or website. Despite these blogs as good as any you think but do not produce anything, means that there are terrible and have not "sell".

The above items may not be enough, but persistence and patience can be very helpful in this regard.

The Secret of How to Maximize Google Adsense Revenue

2009-12-07T23:19:00.000-08:00

Writter : Deny E.Y.

Problems I might as well you are facing.
Can not be denied that money is one of blogging purposes. Money from the Internet can be derived from advertising, refferal, or direct product sales. Site advertising provider in the internet are many and varied, but the most popular is the google adsense.
For some users adsense may have been making millions of dollars, but for some others may only achieve a few cents.
In this case there is no element of chance, it is very affecting income is:
1. Low traffic
2. The number of sites installed adsense

3. CTR (clik Trough rate) is low
4. Revenue per click (adsense this rate depends on how popular your blog)
Above 4 things to keep in mind to maximize your income through adsense.

Problem:
But it turns out, despite the high traffic blogs or even a still high number of clicks to get very little (low CTR), why did this happen?

Answer:
Think as a visitor to your site or blog. At this moment people are used to avoid all things advertising, created annoyed with pop-ups, ignored the offer gifts, no matter the contest that promises and strive to avoid blatant advertising. Therefore you have to win back their hearts. How? Easy! Do not make your ads look like ads. Make sure the ads disguised so well that a cursory look like regular links.

14 Types of Stories You Can Tell On Your Blog

2009-12-04T22:11:00.000-08:00

Source : ProBogger

Today we’ll look at 14 types of stories that you might like to try on your blog.

14 Types of stories can you tell on your blog

Personal Discovery Stories – tell how you discovered a lesson. These stories show your readers how similar you are to them and also might give some practical advice on how they might learn from your experience.
Stories as Analogies and Illustrations – tell a story that on the surface has nothing to do with your topic but which illustrates a principle that is relevant.
Success Stories – tell how you achieved something. These stories can be inspirational and motivating for your readers.
Failure Stories – I find that these stories are incredibly powerful – particularly if you are able to show some lessons learnt through a failure.
Tell Someone Else’s Story – sharing the journey of someone else and how/what they learned can be effective
How I did it Stories – these practical stories can be effective because they talk your readers through a process in a relatable way
Biographies – pick a key person in your niche and tell your readers that person’s story – pulling out useful parts that can be applied and used to enhance your readers lives.
Autobiographies – tell your own story from start to finish. I’ve done this a couple of times (example) and find readers really respond well to it. It can also be something to link to from your About Page for further reading.
Picture Stories – using images or video can be another great way of communicating a story because it engages the senses in a way that text can’t (similarly – audio posts/podcasts can do this too).
Case Studies – quite often pulling apart someone else’s experience in a case study can be a powerful way to connect with readers. Similarly you can use your own story, or the story of a project, brand or company that you had something to do with can be useful.
Fiction – if well written a made up and imaginative story can be a good way to lead into a post. You’ll probably want to come clean about the fact that it’s not true though :-)

Reader Stories – ask your readers to tell you their stories/experiences on a topic. You might kick things off with a short one of your own but then quickly hand it over to others to share.

Collective Stories – sometimes telling the story of a group of people, industry, niche etc can be very powerful. This might be presented as a ‘history of….’ your niche/industry which chronicles key developments over time. These pieces can almost become reference material for others in your industry.

Imagine If…. Stories – another type of story that I’ve seen used well on occasion is one where you get your reader to imagine a hypothetical scenario that they are in. Here’s an example of this where I told a story in the 2nd person (with YOU the reader as the main character). These posts can be particularly useful for getting readers to FEEL something or to help them to understand that the problem that you’re writing about is one that is personal for them.

I’m sure there are plenty of other types of stories to tell. Feel free to suggest your own in comments below. I’d also love to see examples of where you’ve tried some of these story telling techniques (and others) as part of your blogging and to hear your stories of how they went!

101 Ways to Promote a New Blog

2009-12-04T22:06:00.000-08:00

This is a guest post by David Turnbull. Source : DailyBlogTips

Promoting a new blog can be quite daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. As you might expect, breaking down blog promotion into small, actionable tasks eliminates the mental road block you’ve probably experienced when trying to wrap you head around how to get people’s attention. You don’t have to do everything in this list, and some items will have a greater effect then others, but every tactic will at least drive some traffic, and any traffic is better than no traffic.

Content
1. Write a list of over 100+ resources or ideas.
2. Write the definitive guide to something. Spend time making this awesome.
3. Release a manifesto.
4. Release 2 manifestos.
5. Interview cool people. People like talking about cool people.
6. After your articles are indexed in search engines, break them up into smaller articles and submit them to ezinearticles.com (and other article directories).
7. Or just pay someone to submit the articles for you.
8. Write a list of all the cool blogs and people in your niche.
9. Check out the most popular content on high trafficked blogs. Create similar content but applied to your own niche.

Facebook

10. Start a page.
11. Make that page awesome.
12. Start a group.
13. Make that group awesome.
14. Create a Facebook app for your blog.

Fundamentals
15. Wait. After you’ve taken action it can take a short while for traffic to arrive.
16. Be patient. Some bloggers may seem like overnight successes, but if you look back in their archives, they’ve been creating content for a long time.
17. Motivate yourself.
18. Read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
19. Have an interesting story and overall purpose.
20. Embrace the Law of Reciprocity. Everything you give will come back exponentially.
21. Make blogging easier.
22. Take action every day. Just get one important thing done every day and eventually you’ll start getting traffic. The more you do each day the faster your blog gets traction.
23. Find people with blogs at a similar level to yours and help each other out.
24. Turn off your computer, do some cool stuff, turn on your computer again and blog about it.
25. Understand the importance of context.
26. Be consistent. You don’t need to blog every day but try to stick to at least some sort of schedule.
27. Make it a numbers game. Decide upon a definite plan of action (eg. 20 blog comments per day, 1 guest post per week etc) and stick with that.

Online Video
28. Create videos and distribute them through tubemogul.com
29. Or for wider video distribution trafficgeyser.com may work for you (expensive though).
30. Respond to YouTube videos with your content.
31. Include your full blog address at the TOP of your video descriptions.

32. Take your time with devising video titles and tags.
33. Convert your video to multiple formats, with slight editing changes, and upload it to video sites multiple times, targeting different keywords. The content remains the same but you can test what videos and titles work the best.
34. Buy the accounts of popular YouTubers and then add your blog address to the descriptions of their videos.
35. Start the first live show in your niche (Ustream, Justin.tv and LiveStream are popular choices). Make sure you record the shows too so they can be distributed as a podcast later on.

Other Blogs
36. Be the first commenter on the posts of popular blogs. But still provide value.
37. If you can’t be the first then comment anyway. But try to be the first.
38. Stumble and Digg cool blog posts you find and let the blogger know via a comment. If you have something worthy on your blog, they’ll probably reciprocate.
39. Use google.com/blogsearch to find fresh blog posts and then leave intelligent comments.
40. Link to blogs of a similar size. They’ll notice and then good stuff may happen.
41. Write a guest post for a large blog. You may not always get published, but when you do the traffic spike will be significant.
42. Write a guest post for a small blog. You’re more likely to get published and build relationships with the next wave of A-List bloggers.
43. Write some more guest posts. Can’t hurt, that’s for sure.
44. Join a blog network.

Paid
45. Start a StumbleUpon Ads campaign.
46. Get reviewed.
47. Buy some ad space.
48. Send out a press release.

People
49. Attend relevant meetups.
50. Tell your friends and family about your blog. Have them tell everyone they know.

Podcasting

51. Start a podcast and submit it to the iTunes directory.
52. Convert audio files to video files (just use Windows Movie Maker or iMovie) and send them out via tubemogul.com
53. Submit it to some other podcast directories.

Search engine optimization
54. Write linkbait.
55. Have any video or audio content transcribed and posted to your blog.
56. Register your domain name for 10 years.
57. Take advantage of sites scraping your blog’s feed by interlinking posts. Simple way to get deep inbound links.
58. Use Thesis.

Social networks
59. Join every social network you can.
60. Or, just join a couple and be really active.
61. Become active in relevant ning.com communities.
62. Convert blog posts to PDF files and submit them to Scribd – include your blog url in the description and document itself.
63. Add your Scribd documents to relevant groups.
64. Submit your best posts to blog carnivals.
65. Join relevant forums, add your blog address to your signature and start posting intelligently.
66. Sign up at ping.fm and use twitterfeed.com to auto post your latest blog content to a bunch of social networks.
67. Create lists on Amazon.com
68. Write reviews on Amazon.com
69. Better yet, create video reviews for Amazon.com
70. Answer relevant questions on Yahoo Answers, leaving your website as the source.
71. Or on Mahalo Answers.
72. Or even through LinkedIn Answers.
73. Start your own Slinkset, and feed your RSS feed into it automatically.
74. Submit your site to alltop.com
75. Write an article aimed at Digg (okay, that article won’t help much).
76. Also, befriend one of the many Digg powerusers.
77. Create a new thread on a forum and write up a really great guide with no self promotion. Simple way to be seen as an authority figure and to elicit comments on your writing (don’t forget that signature link though!).
78. Submit your content to dofollow social bookmarking sites.
79. Or have Bookmarking Demon do it for you (certainly a bend in ethics though).

StumbleUpon
80. Become an active stumbler to understand what stumblers like.
81. Friend people who stumble your content (they may just want to stumble more in the future)..
82. Have other people initially submit content (or “Discover” it as it’s known).
83. Place a Stumble button in your post template.

Su.pr
84. Sign up at su.pr and use it for all your short url needs.
85. Post content to your Facebook and Twitter stream.
86. Install the Wordpress plugin to automate the process.
87. Identify the times that result in the most clicks and schedule tweets for them.
88. Setup your blog as a promoted website.

Twitter
89. Include hash tags (#tagname) in your tweets.
90. Search for your niche and answer any questions people have.
91. Place a Retweet button in your post template.
92. Follow relevant, popular, and interesting people.
93. Send @replies to relevant, popular and interesting people.
94. Tweet links to your content at multiple times during the day.
95. Love a product from a company that’s on Twitter? Review it and they may just notice and tweet about the review. It’s happened to me.
96. Sponsor some tweets.
97. Find cool people in your niche who live nearby and organize a tweet up (a meet up where you invite anyone on Twitter).

Wordpress
98. Install All In One SEO Pack.
99. Automatically ping lots of ping services.
100. Create a theme, include a link to your blog in the footer, and then release it for free.
101. Create a plugin and release it for free. Add a link to your blog within the admin area. If it’s a good plugin people will love you for it.

David Turnbull is a Buddhist blogger, Apple fan boy, lousy musician, designer, book worm, simplicity freak and dedicated computer geek. You can visit his blog on davidturnbull.com.

6 Mistakes to Avoid on Email Subject Lines

2009-11-29T01:04:00.000-08:00

Source : DailyBlogTips

If you are a blogger, website owner or online worker, you probably need to contact people via email all the time. On some occasions you will also be the one starting the conversation and looking for a reply. For example, you might want to offer a guest article for a particular blog, or you might want to propose a business partnership to someone. Unless you craft your email messages smartly, though, there are good chances that the other person won’t even read them. Spam filters are the first obstacle, but even if your message goes though the other person might just delete it.

The subject line is probably the most important part of your message, and in this post I wanted to cover six mistakes that I see people making:

1. Creating one word subject lines

Have you ever received an email with the subject line “Hi”? If you have, you know how annoying it is. One word subject lines are terrible because they fail to communicate what the email is about, where it is coming from and the like (more on that later). Additionally, they might also reveal laziness or carelessness from the sender’s part, which might lead the receiver to ignore the email.

2. Making requests

People want to receive, not to give. If your subject line makes a request right away, the receiver will be less likely to open it. Examples include link exchange requests, voting requests and so on. A better approach to get the conversation going is to start by offering something.

3. Using spammy keywords

Using spammy keywords in your subject line is a no-no. Even if you get lucky and the spam filter does not block your message, there are good chances that the receiver will tag your message as spam as soon as he reads the subject line. Here is a short list of words to give you an idea of what should be avoided:

free
money
win
degree
gift
deal
sign-up
survey

4. Begging for attention

Using “Please Read This” as your subject line will not help convincing the receiver to open your email. Quite the opposite. The same is true for using words like “urgent,” “important” and similar.

5. Making it sound too good to be true

Real business or joint venture opportunities usually come from people you already have a relationship with. If you are going to email someone for the first time, therefore, avoiding using these terms, else you might be seen as a scammer.

6. Making it look like an automated message

If your subject like looks like an automated message from a website or online service, well, people will assume it indeed is. Just take a look at the automated messages you receive and avoid crafting your subject lines in the same fashion. One example is the “Invitation to…” subject line. Usually those come from social networks, and people tend to ignore them.

By now you might be asking yourself: “OK I understand the mistakes I need to avoid, but how should I craft a good subject line then?” In my opinion a good email subject line should have two elements: a relevancy hook (i.e., a keyword that will assure the receiver that the email message is indeed for him, like his name or the name of his website) and a brief description of the content of the email (because even if the receiver knows your message is a legitimate one, he might not read it immediately or at all unless he knows what it is about).

The Power of Being Personal on Your Blog

2009-11-17T00:16:00.000-08:00

Source : ProBlogger

The Day I Was Jumped On By a Reader

Last week while at Blog World Expo I was coming down off the stage after presenting on a panel when out of the corner of my eye I noticed someone moving towards me – fast.

Within a second of seeing the movement I was literally jumped upon and found myself in a tangle of arms, hair and tears – I was being hugged within an inch of my life.

I didn’t know what to do at first – I didn’t know who was hugging me but while a bit of a shock at first I could tell the person was genuine and so did the only thing I could think to do – I hugged back.

After a few seconds of hugging the person pulled away. I had expected it to be someone I knew but realised pretty quickly that this was a stranger (or at least she had been a moment or two before). She had tears in her eyes and was obviously emotional – I didn’t know why until she began to talk.

For the next 4-5 minutes my hugging assailant (a reader as it turns out) talked, almost without taking a breath. She told me about the first day she read my blog (she remembered the first post), she told me about how it had helped her, she told me about the ups and downs of her blogging, she told me about her family, she told me about my family, she told me that she’d bought my book, joined my community, bought my ebook, she just talked…..

She talked as if we’d known each other for years – I guess in a way we had…..

Gradually my new friend began to slow down (and breathe) she suddenly began to become a little more self conscious. She began to blush a little as she realised how what she’d just done. I assured her that it was totally fine and in her flustered state she said:

“It’s just that I feel like I know you.”

As we continued to speak I realised that here was someone who I had previously not known had existed (she’d never left a comment or said a word on my blog in over 3 years) who ‘knew’ me – at least to some degree.

Here was someone who’d not only read something that I’d written daily for years – but someone who had watched my videos, had noted when I’d become a Dad, had seen when I’d travelled, had observed my disappearances from the blog when I’d been unwell.

She didn’t know all this stuff because she was a crazy stalker (far from it) but because I’d allowed myself to blog in a way that was personal.

Not that ProBlogger is a ‘personal blog’ as such (not in the sense that I blog about the movies that I see, the things I eat or the everyday experiences that I have) – but I inject something of myself into this blog:

I use my real name
I share images of myself from time to time in posts and on key pages
I share videos where people can see my face and hear my voice
I include details of what’s happening in my life and family (usually in passing and by way of illustrating something)
I try to use personal language (I blog in the first person most of the time)
I write in a style that is similar to the way I would speak to a person face to face
I tell stories about my experiences as they relate to my topic
I use personal examples where I can to illustrate what I’m saying
I’ve done live streaming question and answer sessions via video

By no means am I the most personal blogger going around. Everyday I see opportunities to be more personal in fact – but I’ve made a concerted effort over the years to inject something of myself into what I do – and it’s paid off.

It’s paid off not just in terms of being jumped on by strangers when overseas but also in creating the kind of site that people want to come back to, the kind of site that people recommend to others and also the kind of site that people want to spend their money on (remember my friend has bought everything I’ve released – she said she did so because they were ‘mine’).

I know being personal on a blog is not something that everyone feels comfortable with and that is in everyone’s style – but it is one thing that I’ve seen exhibited in many successful blogs.

How about you? Do you take a personal approach with your blog?

5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast

2009-11-16T22:22:00.000-08:00

Source : ProBlogger by Sid Savara

If a tree falls in a forest, I don’t know if anyone hears it - but when your blog crashes or takes forever to load, I guarantee you nobody is reading.

When you work hard on your content, but aren’t able to capitalize on the attention because your blog takes too long to load you are throwing away hours of hard work and thousands of visitors. I know because I’ve been there. I’ve had multiple performance issues over the past year where SidSavara.com was unable to handle some of the traffic spikes that came my way - and believe me, it is soul-crushing to see your site doing well on social media sites, and knowing that many of those readers will leave before your article loads. It’s not every day you get 250,000 visitors to your blog.

Optimizing WordPress is a thankless, but necessary job. When your site is running quickly people don’t notice - but if your blog is down or slow, visitors will complain or worse (and much more frequently) just leave. In fact, if the very first page a visitor sees takes even a second too long to load, they are likely to leave instantly without reading anything - on to the next shiny thing that has caught their interest, and on to someone’s blog that is optimized.

I recently decided to dedicate some time to deal with this. After trying out many plugins, crashing my website a few times due to plugin incompatibilities and reviewing my results here are my recommendations - and it’s easier than you think.

5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast

WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh- A very fast caching plugin for WordPress. This is what has been saving me from traffic spikes. In a normal WordPress install, every time a visitor comes to your site WordPress builds the webpage for them from scratch by pulling information out of the database and processing a variety of things in the software. The bottom line is, this is time consuming - and usually after you’ve published a blog post, it doesn’t change very much except when people comment. When a page is loaded, WP Super Cache caches a static (one time generated) copy of that webpage, and then every time a new visitor comes, it preferentially gives them the cached version of the page. This is much faster, and has totally saved me when a rush of people come from one of my posts going viral.
GZIP Output by Austin Matzko- This plugin automatically compresses CSS, Javascript and HTML output, allowing it to travel faster from your blog to a visitor’s browser. According to Best Practices On Yahoo! Developer Network: “Gzipping generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip.” This is a simple change that will not affect what your readers see at all - except that it will load in their browser faster.
WP Minify by Thaya Kareeson- This plugin uses the Minify engine to combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time. Like the previous plugin, it also automatically shrinks the size of your files without you having to do anything.
W3 Total Cache by Frederick Townes- If I was starting a brand new blog today, this is what I would use on day one - and then go with a more complicated set up (like I have currently) after it grows. This plugin is amazing. It includes minify capabilities, caching (but less aggressive than WP Super Cache) and GZip compression.
Free CDN by Phoenixheart- If you have static files (images, javascript, css) taking a long time to load and slowing your site down, you may benefit by installing Free CDN - especially if you have large images. Briefly, a CDN is a content delivery network. Static files are cached on the CDN and pulled from their servers instead of your own - which means that your server has to do less work, and potentially can serve more people at once, faster.
Bonus: Upgrade WordPress! This isn’t a plugin, but every time a new version of WordPress there’s a good chance they’ve optimized the software so it runs faster than before. Be sure to test your blog after you upgrade to make sure everything still runs smoothly.

Firefox Plugins To Test WordPress Performance

You can check for yourself how fast your WordPress blog is and instantly get recommendations on what you can do to improve it with some free software. I use Firefox with the Firebug and YSlow plugins installed. The YSlow user guide is excellent and will give you all the tools you need to see where your site is slow, and what can be done to improve it. Darren has also previously written about 5 Methods to Enhancing Page Load with some best practices for ensuring your blog loads quickly for visitors.

Perjalanan Menuju Sukses Besar

2009-11-15T21:59:00.000-08:00

Oleh : Deny Eko Yuwono

Apakah Anda pernah mencoba mengunyah steik tanpa memotongnya? Meskipun dapat dilakukan, saya yakin itu akan menjadi hal paling mengerikan untuk dilakukan. Dengan kata lain, satu-satunya cara Anda dapat menikmati steak (asalkan Anda bukan seorang vegetarian) adalah dengan memotong dalam potongan kecil. Perjalanan menuju sukses adalah seperti makan steak, Anda hanya dapat menikmatinya dalam potongan kecil.

Berikut adalah beberapa poin yang perlu diingat saat Anda pergi:

1. One Step at a Time (Lakukan Langkah demi Langkah)

Anda perlu mengambil satu langkah pada satu waktu. Aku tidak tahu apakah kau suka menonton tenis atau tidak, tetapi adalah sebuah olahraga yang membutuhkan banyak energi dan konsentrasi. Dalam tenis, pertandingan bisa berlangsung berjam-jam. Tapi, jika Anda meminta seorang pemain tenis yang memenangkan pertandingan, dia akan memberitahu Anda bahwa selama pertandingan ia hanya memikirkan setiap pertandingan bukan tentang set atau seluruh pertandingan. Ia berfokus pada tugas yang ada di tangan.

2. Merayakan dan Menikmati Setiap Momen

Alih-alih menunggu waktu lama untuk menang besar hari, kenapa tidak Anda menikmati kesuksesan sehari-hari? Hal ini sangat penting ketika Anda menetapkan tujuan jangka panjang Anda bahwa Anda juga menetapkan sendiri tujuan yang lebih kecil (misalnya, saat penting), dan ketika Anda mencapai setiap tonggak Anda harus memberi selamat pada diri sendiri dan merayakannya.

3. Gairah dan Tekad

Gairah dan tekad adalah bahan bakar yang membantu Anda mencapai tujuan terbesar Anda. Jika Anda kehabisan dua hal penting ini, Anda akan memiliki waktu yang sulit berhasil.

4. Anda Bisa Gagal, Tapi You Can't Give Up

Ini adalah aturan emas untuk setiap orang yang sukses. Ketika Anda gagal, Anda dapat belajar dari kesalahan. Namun, jika Anda menyerah, Anda tidak akan punya kesempatan untuk berhasil. Kegagalan hanya destruktif ketika Anda menyerah untuk mencoba. Selama Anda tidak menyerah dan terus mencoba, Anda akan mencapai sukses.

Stop Scrapers and Spammers Fast

2009-11-13T00:37:00.000-08:00

Source : ProBlogger

One of the challenges that bloggers face is what to do when others want to use your blog for their own gain by either taking your content or spamming your comments section. The more I talk to bloggers about how they deal with these issues the more I realize how many different approaches there are to the problems. Today Seth Waite from Blogussion shares his approach. I’d love to hear your approach (whether it be different or the same in comments below).

Every blogger quickly learns the reality of hard work in blogging. After the “make money fast” hype has wore off and the reality that blogging is a great way to earn an income if you work for it has set in, you are left with a choice?

The choice is whether to stay in blogging or not. Many bloggers decide to stay but are again left with another extremely important decision. Should I put the effort into become a great blogger or just try to still do things the easy way and hope things will be different for me?

Those choosing to work hard begin the process of learning and eventually find success by learning, networking and earning their way to better blogging. Bloggers who are unwilling to face reality either quite or eventually become spammers, scrappers, or beggars.

I am not going to address the problem of bloggers who beg for help without working for it, but I do want to talk about spammers and scrappers. Most importantly, I want every hard working blogger to know how to stop selfish bloggers trying to use your work disrespectfully to help them.

Stopping Spam

The easiest way to stop spammers who are trying to get you to link to their blog/site is by controlling your comments and trackbacks. Although essential to building a great blog community, comments must be moderated to ensure your actual readers feel comfortable with the discussions on your blog.

Captcha

Commenting at first was easily controlled by forcing commentators to put their email address into the comment form. Spammers quickly got around this and now a very easy way to stop spammers is by adding a captcha feature to your blog comments.

Captcha is already used by Blogger and easily adds to Wordpress and other blogging platforms with plugins. The way it works is that you put in a series of numbers or letters from a visual image in order to post your comment. Other systems require you to add the numbers or fill in the form based on another easy question. Using captcha is a quick and easy way to minimize your blog’s spam, but it may also be annoying to regular readers.

Plug-ins

For many blog platforms, like Wordpress, a simple plug-in will solve many of the spam problems. The most common spam blocker is Akismet, which is now available for over 20 other blogging platforms besides Wordpress. Using this plug-in on your blog is simple and requires you to only check to make sure occasional comments are not being counted as spam. In addition to the normal comment protection it provides, it goes above and beyond captchas by protecting your blog against unwanted trackbacks.

Stopping Scrappers

Scrappers are bloggers who steal content you produced and put the entire work on their own blogs and websites. The practice sadly is common and creates reproductions of your content around the web. Luckily most search engines are good at recognizing the original content, but scrapping is illegal and damaging to the blogger and blogging.

Identify: The first step to stopping scrappers is by identifying your content and checking for copies. An easy way to do this is by using the sites CopyGator or Copyscape to check for the originality of your content and any potential duplicates.
Ask: Once you have found scrappers who have copied your material [note: the content duplication should be significant and their reasons should be to represent your content as their own, not to promote yours] email the owner or comment on the blog/site where the duplicate is found. In most cases the scrapper will take it down and apologize for misrepresenting the work. Always try this first so that the blogosphere can stay friendly and young bloggers who might be making an innocent mistake will learn without being accosted.
Block: The next step if they are unresponsive or belligerent to your requests is to use .htaccess to block the scrappers from your blog. This can be a little bit tricky for anyone who has never done this before, but here is a great link to learn how to stop scrappers [item #9]. Basically you are blocking the access of the scrappers from receiving your blog and rss feed.
Take Action: At this point you have been nice, notified them of their misdeed, blocked their access and still the content is ripped off and on their site. The next way to get your content off of their site is by contacting the site’s ISP or hosting. The easiest way to find that out is by using Who.is and just inputting the site’s web address into their search bar. The hosting information will then show up with the rest of the site’s information. Once you have the host information contact them with a formal letter or email specifically claiming what and where the content originated and where it has been reproduced. The host will then quickly take down the content and offer the site owner a chance to explain themselves. Warning, this is serious for everyone involved so do not use this lightly. If this does not work there is yet one more option. This is legal action. Filed suits can be taken up depending on the scrapper’s home country and legal system.

Stopping scrappers and spammers will not only protect your work but also encourage the internet to be a better place. Every time a spammer is thwarted, other bloggers win too. So be an internet community builder by taking the proper steps to stop content thieves.

A Plugin Broke Your WordPress Blog?

2009-11-12T19:10:00.000-08:00

Source : DailyBlogTips

Here Is What To Do :

Most WordPress users had this experience at least once. You find a cool plugin around the web, rush to upload it to your server, activate it, and then when you check the blog to see if its working, bang! The blog crashes and you can’t even load the homepage….

Obviously this is not WordPress’ fault. The crash usually comes from bad code that was used in the plugin itself, or from a conflict that is coming from another plugin already installed on the blog.

Either way it is a frustrating experience, and here is what you can do to get out of it.

1. Try to de-activate the plugin

The first thing you should try is to de-activate the plugin. Simply try to login into the admin area. If that is working, go the list of plugins and de-active the one you just installed.

2. Rename the plugin via FTP

Many times the crash will affect the WordPress admin area as well, so you won’t be able to de-activate it. In those situations you should try to rename the plugin file or folder via FTP.

3. Delete the plugin via FTP

If simply renaming the plugin was not enough, try to delete it completely. This will try to stop your WordPress install from loading the buggy code.

4. De-activate all the plugins via PHPMyAdmin

Some plugins will alter tables in your WordPress database when you activate them. As a result your blog might keep crashing even after you delete the plugins via FTP.

If that is the case, you will need to log into cPanel, and open the PHPMyAdmin interface. Then select the WordPress database, and browse inside the “wp-options” table. Look for the “active_plugins” column, and edit it. Inside the “options_value” field you will find something like this:

a:31:{i:0;s:13:"AddMySite.php";i:1;s:19:"akismet/akismet.php"; i:2;s:23:"all_in_one_seo_pack.php";i:3;s:16:"authenticate.php"; i:4;s:28:"breadcrumb-navigation-xt.php";i:5;s:18: "codeautoescape.php";i:6;s:37:

These lines represent the active plugins in your blog. Delete them all and save. This should automatically de-activate every plugin. Now check if your blog is live again, and if the admin area is working. They should be.

How to Use Apture

2009-11-11T22:35:00.000-08:00

Source : ProBlogger

By Mary Jaksch of Goodlife Zen.

Do you want to create posts that sparkle, dance, enthral, touch the heart, and inform? Do you want your blog to stand out, and subscribers to scramble in at the door? Then I suggest you check out what the New York Times, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the World Wildlife Fund, the blog of Tim Ferris, and Goodlife ZEN all have got in common: they use Apture.

Apture is a plugin that transforms an ordinary blog posts into an extraordinary media experience.

Here’s what Jim Brady, the Executive Editor of the Washington Post says about Apture:

Apture adds a new dimension - a web of information - inside washingtonpost.com stories, and continues our mission of bringing readers the most comprehensive and in-depth news coverage.

The most important feature of this award-winning plugin is that readers can access additional information - without having to leave your page. Whether it’s a Wikipedia article, a related blog post, or a video - all can be integrated seamlessly into a post. And Apture is free for blogs with less than 5 million visitors per month.

So are bloggers thronging to use Apture?

No - not yet. Typical responses I get are “It seems like advertising and it makes a site look too busy.” I don’t agree. I think Apture rocks!

10 reasons why I love Apture:

It’s free.
It saves time.
It keeps my readers onsite for longer.
I can create a multimedia experience for my readers.
I can offer a greater depth of content through layers of information.
I can shape and control the ambience of my blog.
I can use high resolution images and videos without bandwidth headaches.
I can draw readers deep into my blog through using attractive links to related posts.
Apture is stylish.
It’s creative, and it’s fun.

I think there are two reasons why bloggers are slow to embrace Apture. Firstly, bloggers don’t know how to use Apture. Which is hardly surprising, seeing that Apture lacks a user guide and tutorials. Not only does Apture lack information on how to use it, the team manages to hide some of the best features - which is an interesting kind of reverse-marketing. Secondly, Apture works with popups, and popups are seen as spammy advertising gadgets.

Are all pop-ups spammy?

A criticism frequently leveled at Apture is that it ‘looks like ads’. That’s because we associate pop-ups with nasty advertising. ‘In-text advertising’ or ‘contextual advertising’ means that links in the text lead to adverts, and not to further information. Some of the worst offenders are Vibrant Media, and Kontera. Personally, I hate contextual ads. They seem to me a betrayal of our readers. After all, readers come to a blog for information or entertainment - and not because they want to be shopped by the blogger.

Contextual advertising has created enhanced hyperlinks, called ‘blooms’. This means that a link can ‘bloom up’ into an image, a video, an article, a flash advert, and so on. There are other products on the market that are easily confused with Apture, for example Snap - which also ‘blooms up’ contextual links. Snap is primarily an advertising tool and gives bloggers and readers little or no control over their online experience. Snap uses pesky auto links, i.e., it automatically creates links in a post.

In contrast, Apture places control firmly in the hands of the blogger and the reader. A blogger can choose what she or he would like to link to, and the reader can determine how they want to use Apture. And they can even disable it. A new player on the market is Zemanta. You can read a review of Apture vs. Zemanta.

I’m sure you can see why Apture is treated with suspicion by many bloggers. I mean, who wants a spammy gadget on their blog!

But forget about ads for a moment. You see, the Apture guys had a brilliant idea: they decided to use the latest in-text advertising technology in order to create layers of information, so that the reader can understand the wider context of a particular topic, or drill down into more detail.

Apture is the art of adding layers of information to your blog posts, and wrapping multimedia around your readers.

You can see why the big newspapers have rushed to embrace Apture for their online resources. After all, their mission is to drive more and better information to the readers. Bloggers have yet to discover how Apture can transform their work. In this post you can learn how to use Apture, and get a taste of what it can do.

First up are step by step instructions on how to use Apture (including links to 5 training videos), followed by a section on Apture for minimalists. Next, I confront the Apture team with some challenging questions. And finally, you can find out how to wow your readers with Apture. In this section I discuss a post by blogger Arvind Devalia whose inspired use of Apture demonstrates that this plugin can transform a good post into a brilliant one. (If you’re short on time, head directly to Arvind’s 6 Key Lessons in Life From a 140 Year Old Man in order to get a sense of what Apture can accomplish. Make sure you click on all the links to get the full juice. There are some surprises…)

1. How to download Apture

Apture is configured for a variety of different blogging platforms, such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, Ning, Tumblr, and Drupal. You can can download Apture here. (If you use Blogger, Typepad, of Tumblr, you’ll need the Apture Firefox plugin.) In this post with its accompanying training videos, the focus is on using Apture in WordPress. If you’re not familiar with how to upload a WP plugin, watch Episode 1 of my screencast series Apture Made Easy.

2. How to install Apture

Installing a plugin is normally an easy process, but Apture is a little different, because there is an additional activation process. You can watch Episode 2 of my Apture Made Easy series.

Here is a short summary of action for more experienced bloggers: Once you’ve uploaded the plugin, activate it like any other plugin. When you then write a new post for the first time, a popup offers to install a short piece of code automatically into your site. You will also need to register with Apture at this point. If the code hasn’t installed, copy it and paste it before the last body tag in the footer code.

Apture has two widgets, the Link Widget and the Embed Widget. Together they make up the Media Hub. The Link Widget creates an in-text link - whether it’s an internal link which opens directly on your page, or an external link which transports the reader to another website. The Embed Widget takes objects, such as images, videos, etc, and embeds then into the post.

3. How to use the Apture Link Widget.

Apture links work just like plain links. For example the blog you link to gets ‘link juice’ - even through your readers dodn’t need to leave your page in order to follow the link. Watch Apture Made Easy Episode 3 for detailed information on how to use the Link Widget.

In brief, when you highlight words and click on the Link Widget ( the one of the right-hand side), a window opens that allows you to choose what to link to.Here is what you can do with the Link Widget:

Link to Wikipedia or other information sources. Scroll bars in the popups allow the readers to read a complete Wikipedia article. You can also choose Wikipedia articles different languages. You can also link to a particular section in Wikipedia.
Link to other websites. The links function like plain links,i.e. the blog you link to with Apture gets link juice - without the reader having to leave your site. You can also find links you previously made with Apture.
Internal links Apture links are a great way to entice readers deep into your blog. I use the Embed Widget in order to link to previous posts. Each Apture popups contain a post image and a snippet of text and looks very attractive. Here’s how to link to a previous post: click on the Embed Widget, and then choose ‘Enter a Specific URL’ . The Preview will show you what the link will look like. If you have more than one image in your post, you can select which one - if any - should appear with your post.
External links: You can choose to use Apture for plain external links that open in a separate window.
Customizing your sources: you add additional sources from Apture to pull from.
How to add links: check out the short article from the Apture team that explains how to add multiple links.
Twitter links: The Apture team has come up with some great options for embedding Twitter. You can link to a single Tweet, or show Twitter search trends. You can even embed your Friendfeed in your blog. Check out a YouTube video that shows some of the cool Apture tricks for Twitter. I think that Twitter fans will be all aflutter over these options.

4. How to use the Apture Embed Widget

Sourcing and embedding media is a snap with Apture. You can find step-by-step intructions in Episode 4 of my Apture Made Easy video series. Here is what you can do with the Embed Widget:

Embed images: Using Apture saves me a lot of time. For example when I use an image from Flickr, the shortest time it takes me to source, resize, embed, and credit an image is 06:48 minutes. The same process with Apture takes me just 44 seconds. Check out how to use Creative Commons images in Apture. If you use stock images, you can upload the images from your computer quickly resize them with Apture, using the ‘Upload File’ function. Check out how to resize images.
Embed audio: Apture embeds an elegant audio player. At present, music can only be sourced from Imeem and NPR. It would be good to see greater range audio sources, including radio stations outside of the US, such as BBC, etc. In order to upload audio podcasts, I suggest you upload the audio to Amazon S3, and then link to the file using the Apture Embed Widget.
Embed video: At present Apture supports videos by YouTube, Reuters, Truveo, Dailymotion, Imeem Video. If you want to embed your own flash videos, you may run into problems. Apture works with a fixed size of 320px wide and 250px high. In other words, Apture only supports videos that have the Standard Definition aspect ratio of 4:3 , and not ones with the High Definition aspect ratio of 10:9. (I have been assured by the Apture team that this flaw will be fixed very soon.)
Embed YouTube. With Apture you can control start and stop times of YouTube videos. This means that you can choose a clip from a YouTube video to support your post.
Use captions: You can use captions on all your embeds.
Add Additional content: You can add up to 6 pieces of additional content to your main link. The additional content is visible in thumbnails beneath the main embedded item. Watch this excellent video by the Apture team on the effect of adding additional content to one link: Why Include 1 Piece of Content When You Can Include 7

5. How to update a published post with one click

Let’s say you’ve published a post and some new information has come to light. Maybe a commenter has suggested a link, or you’ve found a new image that you want to include in your post. The old way of updating your post is laborious: you need to go into your WP dashboard, bring up the post, make changes, and save them.

With Apture, all you need is to go to your published post and bring up your Apture Dashboard by clicking ‘e’. (This is a widget that hovers on top of your published post. Then you can make changes to the published post by highlighting text and adding new links or images. Watch Episode 5 of my series Apture Made Easy for step by step instructions on how to use the Apture Dashboard.

6. Reader control

The reader is in control of her or his reading experience. A small question-mark in the bottom right-hand corner of each Apture ‘bloom’ leads to a popup where readers can customize their Apture experience. They can disable Apture completely, or choose whether Apture links open through a hover, or through a click.

7. Apture for minimalists

Hard-core minimalists may think that Apture look too busy on a page. I think it depends very much on how you use it. I recently ran a Virtual Zen Retreat and used Apture in order to create the daily retreat posts. I used images that supported the calm retreat ambience. I also embedded a couple of videos in order to sharpen the focus of particular posts. My aim was to create a calm retreat ambience that allows participants to deepen their experience. The feedback showed that it worked: most participants mentioned how much they loved the calming images and inspiring videos.

My suggestion to minimalists is to use Apture in a - well - minimal way. For example minimalists could use Apture just for fast selection of images, or for attractive internal links.

8. Apture secrets revealed

Apture hides many of its top features. (Note to the Apture team: how about installing a search function on your site?). Here are some features even die-hard users may not know about:

Apture uses Amazon S3 to store all media it provides links for, without passing the storage cost on to users.
Google Street View is supported by Apture. Watch this fascinating demo on what this could do for your blog.
Apture provides support for Linkedin profiles
Bing web and image search is integrated into Apture.
Apture supports super-search engine Lijit.
Apture integrates into URL shortener Kiw.is.
Apture supports Wikinvest. You can insert stock charts within their apturized embeds and links.
Apture has partnered with SlideShare, a community for sharing presentations where individuals or organizations can upload and share PowerPoint, PDF, or OpenOffice presentations. Check out how Apture integrates with Slideshare.

9. How to monetize your blog with Apture

As you can imagine, Apture has great potential for monetization, especially for blogs selling products. I use Amazon Affiliate links on Goodlife Zen and I’ve notice that since using Apture, my Amazon affiliate income has increased by 28%.

I am sure that there are many ways to monetize your blog with Apture. Here are two tips: if your blog is focused on Real Estate, read how Apture can help the Real Estate community make more sales.If you write about the Stock Marked try embedding real-time stock charts on their site.

10. Confronting the Apture team: questions and answers

Transparency is important. If we as bloggers want to engage with Apture and learn to use it, we need to be able to trust the company and know that it isn’t going to change the rules on us. So I asked Andrew Machado

When we invest our energy into learning how to use a major plugin, such as Apture, it’s important to be sure that we’re not going to encounter problems further down the track. So I asked Andrew Machado from the Apture team some searching questions (Andrew is the Community Manager at Apture and runs the Apture Blog.)

Question #1 Is Apture safe?
Answer: Apture was vetted by the technical and security diligence of the New York Times, BBC, Washington Post, and Reuters tech teams. We’ve also tested to make sure Apture is compatible with other WordPress plugins.

Question: If I decided to deactivate the plugin, would I lose all the images, videos and links created with Apture?
Answer: All baked Apture links will turn into regular hyperlinks pointing to their primary destination (Reference, Maps, Videos, Images, ….). All embedded images will remain while Videos turn into screenshots of the video which link to the video when clicked. Documents and Reference Viewers will turn into an image representing document or reference content that links to the document in question.

Question: When a new version of WordPress appears, how fast can you update the plugin? Will there be down times until you’ve adapted the plugin to a new WP version?
Answer: The plugin code responsible for inserting our JavaScript (which enables the viewing experience) is extremely small (10-20 lines) and interacts with a part of WordPress that is extremely stable over time. Very major changes to WordPress might cause problems with the editing aspect of Apture. Because of this (and for general compatibility) we test with pre-release versions of WordPress so the update is always ready in time for new WordPress releases.

Question: Can you confirm that for bloggers (below 5 mill visitors a month) Apture will remain free?
Answer: Yes, we will not be charging for the (current) basic version of Apture.

Question: What’s the long-term viability of the Apture project?
Answer: We raised our Series A round about a year ago and are very happy with our current financial situation and are very actively hiring and growing the team. We are absolutely in it for the long haul and all believe in the vision behind the company. The company was incorporated in July of 2007, we received our Angel financing at the same time, launched a beta in April of 2008, launched fully in July of 2008, and raised our Series A in the fourth quarter of 2008. We have, however, been working on Apture in some form since January of 2006.

11. How to wow your readers with Apture

So far we’ve looked at Apture as a tool for adding levels of information. But for bloggers, the secret of creating outstanding posts is to turn turn a read into an experience. I asked one of the new breed of up-and-thriving bloggers -Avind Devalia of Make it Happen - to test Apture. He was reluctant and wrote: “I’ve previously tried Snap on my blog but found it distracting and irritating as the boxes seemed to open up all too frequently by just hovering over a linked phrase.”

Finally Arvind decided to rework one of his popular posts with the help of Apture! The post is about Gandhi’s enduring legacy. Against this serious background, Arvind created a counterpoint with Apture links that are playful, emotional, rousing, fascinating, and surprising. Arvind’s post leaves the reader inspired, smiling, and with a tear or two. Check out 6 Lessons in Life from a 140 year Old Man. (Make sure you click on all the links to get the full experience!)

I think Arvind’s inspired use of Apture has turned what was a good post - into a brilliant one.

12. Conclusion

I think blogging is at at crossroads between old-style blogging, and new-style blogging. Old-style blogging replicates print media. In other words, the reader’s experience is focused on a page of text, which may contain images. In this scenario, the reader follows outward-bound links in order to access more information. New-style blogging creates a multimedia experience for the reader. Bloggers are waking up to the fact that Broadband allows us to deliver not only text, but simultaneously images, videos, music, and other media to our readers. Apture is a perfect tool for new-style blogging because we can add depth and focus to a post, as well as enhance mood and message - all by using easy one-click actions.

Quite simply - if you’re not using Apture yet, you’re missing out on the hottest tool for bloggers.

How to Get In Tune with Your Readers Needs [and Produce Compelling Content]

2009-11-10T19:50:00.000-08:00

Source : ProBlogger

Principle #1 – Being In Tune with Your Readers Needs

For content to be compelling it needs to connect with needs of those consuming it.

Whether those needs are for entertainment, news, inspiration, community, instruction, intellectual stimulation, a laugh/or a cry etc – if your content meets the need it goes a long long way to being compelling – after-all, who pays attention to something that has little relevance to them?

Staying in tune with these needs can be done in a variety of ways including:

watching the comments section of your blog for questions and problems
watching your metrics to see what words people are searching for in search engines to arrive on your blog
watching what people are searching for when they are on your blog using your internal search tool
running focus groups with loyal readers (something I’ve done a few times with real success)
keeping an eye on what questions are being asked on other blogs, forums and on social media sites
writing a post asking your readers for their questions or giving them an opportunity to share their needs

3 Hot Tips For Connecting with Reader Needs

Hot Tip #1 – Best and Worst Posts

I’ve recently asked my readers to share their ‘best and worst’ aspects of blogging at the end of a week. One of the benefits of doing this (and one I didn’t anticipate) was that it identified some common and recurring problems that my readers were having. The comments on these posts have led to me writing numerous posts that directly seek to solve their problems.

Ultimately your goal as a blogger should be to produce content that adds value to people’s lives. Produce this and you’ve got a great foundation to build a successful blog upon.

Hot Tip #2 – Ask So What?

I love the question that Chris Garrett (the co-author of the ProBlogger book) encourages bloggers to ask every time they write a blog post.

The question is – ‘So What?’

This question is all about asking yourself whether a post actually matters – does it have any point? Will it help people in some way?

Write it out in bold lettering and put it somewhere prominent in the place that you blog. Before your hit ‘publish’ on any post ask it to yourself – ‘SO WHAT’? Does your point have a point? Does it meet a need? Who will it help?

Hot Tip #3 – Solve your Own Problems

One of the best ways to ensure that your content is meeting real needs that people have is to Solve Your OWN Needs and Problems.

An exercise that I do every time I start a new blog is to not only brainstorm a list of topics I have expertise on and things that I can help others with – but I also create a list of things that I need to learn for myself on the topic. What don’t I know yet? What challenges do I currently face? What aspects of this topic do I ask others about?

Once you’ve got that kind of list you have a list of real needs that people have and your goal needs to be to learn more in order to be able to answer them or to find someone else to help you write content on those topics.

Another useful list to create is a list of problems that you have previously had and have overcome. Think back to when you were just first exploring your topic (or if you can’t remember put yourself in the shoes of a complete newbie who has just started out). What questions did you have? What mistakes did you make? What challenges did you not know how to overcome. These beginner questions and needs are GOLD – write them down and write posts that answer them.

Homework – Go Do This!

Take 15 minutes to go on a Reader Need Hunt

Your goal is to spend the next 15 minutes compiling a list of needs that your current readers and/or potential readers might have.

Start in your blog’s own comment section and hunt for questions and then proceed through the list mentioned above. If you don’t have any readers or those you have are not verbalizing their needs yet – focus upon the last two items on the list.

You can’t find enough of these types of problems and needs. Compile them all in a list and keep it somewhere that you can begin to work through.

What You Said on the Topic

When I asked you what compelling content was to you the themes I’ve explored above came up a lot – here’s some of what you said on the topic:

“Content that teaches you something that you can walk away and hold onto. Any bit of information that you can apply to your life.” Mitch
“It helps me solve a problem that I have” – Jan
” it needs to be a useful or helpful to the targeted audience. People likes to learn something useful or helpful” – Bash Bosh
“Helps me solve a problem that I have” – Dave
“The important of audience is pretty obvious – write what appeals to your readership.” – Jeffrey
“I enjoy content that logically lays out a problem and then shows me how to solve it.” – Jarie
“To me, compelling content is content which falls into one of – 1) Educates me on something I am interested in. 2) Provides insight into something I am interested in. 3) Helps me solve a problem” – Wesley
“Helps me to solve an issue or makes something easier to deal with, whether professional or personal. Sometimes its even straight forward advice you read and then think, this is it – this will work – this is my answer! These are often called my “Lightbulb Moments.”” – Denise
“For me, compelling content answers a question, solves a problem, or teaches me something I need to know.” – Judy

Thanks to everyone for their comments. I’ll feature more in coming days as we explore more on the topic of how to create compelling content.

6 WordPress Plugins for Better Comments

2009-11-10T00:38:00.000-08:00

Source : DailyBlogTips, Guest Post by Srikanth AD

Bloggers love to have comments on their blogs. It builds social proof, enriches the content, fosters community and so on. Here are six plugins that you can use to boost the number of comments on your blog and make the commenting process more efficient.

1. Better Comments Manager

Replying to comments from your readers will make them come back in the future, because they will know that your care for them.

The “Better Comments Manager” plugin allows you to reply to the comments right from the Admin panel. In the absence of this plug-in, you have to visit the post individually and reply to the comment which is time consuming and tedious if you have tons of comments to reply.

2. Subscribe to Comments

By installing this plug-in in your WordPress blog your readers can get email notifications about the further comments on the post. When a reader comments in a post and checks the box to get E-mail notifications, it helps him to stay in touch with the comments and encourages him to come back to your blog and stay engaged in the discussion.

This helps to add more value to your post as more and more commenter’s exchange their ideas and views on the post.

3. WordPress Thread Comment

This plugin for WordPress allows the readers to reply to a specific comment, making it easier to follow the discussion. The plugin should also be compatible with most WordPress themes around, and installation is not that difficult.

4. IntenseDebate

This is one another cool WordPress plugin to consider if you are looking to get more comments and visits to your WordPress blog. This plug-in encourages your readers to actively participate in the discussion and it allows them to rate a comment posted with simple thumbs up or down buttons.

They can also leave active replies to the comments or start a new comment. Commenters can also subscribe to the replies and new comments such that they get email notification when a reply to their comment is received or any new comment is added to the post.

5. Absolute Comments

This plugin for WordPress also allows you to instantly reply to comments right from the admin panel.

The interesting feature of this plug-in is that it supports threaded comments, and if you have set to receive email notification, when a new comment is posted you can see a direct reply link to the comment in the email.

6. Contact Commenters

This is a great tool to interact with the commenters of your blog posts. By using this plugin you can send email to selected commenters, perhaps thanking their for their comments or asking their opinions on a related issue.

Konten yang baik dan Salinan yang baik = SEO yang Bagus

2009-11-09T17:49:00.000-08:00

Oleh : Deny Eko Yuwono
Saya masuk ke mesin pencari optimasi dari sudut menulis dan tidak menulis, seperti banyak yang telah terjadi, dari sudut desainer web. Saya rasa ini memberiku sudut pandang yang unik dan mungkin kekuatan tertentu.
Fokus utama saya ketika mengoptimalkan SEO adalah pada apa yang saya pikir adalah strategi terbaik: membuat konten yang baik dan copy.

Berkonsentrasi pada situs konten tertulis merupakan salah satu metode meyakinkan untuk meningkatkan peringkat pencarian Anda. Sebagai perubahan algoritma pencarian dan beradaptasi dengan trik-trik SEO yang terbaru, dan sebagai trik beradaptasi dengan algoritma yang baru, satu hal akan tetap konstan; konten yang baik adalah konten yang baik, dan akhirnya ia akan mendapatkan perhatian. Mungkin tidak langsung terjadi, bahkan mungkin diperlukan cukup sedikit waktu dalam beberapa kasus, tetapi akhirnya ranking akan naik ke atas.

Memberi orang yang berguna, relevan, menghibur dan konten yang ditulis dengan baik adalah satu-satunya strategi jangka panjang yang akan bekerja. Anda mungkin mengikuti pendekatan baik lainnya menghasilkan lalu lintas, seperti optimasi kata kunci atau menghasilkan link, tapi lalu apa? Anda harus memiliki sesuatu untuk menjaga mereka di sana, atau untuk membuat mereka datang kembali, atau untuk membuat mereka ingin melakukan bisnis dengan Anda. Harus ada nilai.

3 Principles of Effective Communication

2009-11-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

Source : ProBlogger

Do you want to learn to blog in a way that goes beyond just conveying information and helps people to take action on what you’ve written?

Last night as I was watching the new Australian version of The Apprentice I saw a very short segment featuring public speaker Brett Rutledge. The winners of a task were rewarded with a session with Brett to talk about communication and public speaking. The show only showed 30 seconds of Brett but in that very short snippet he said something that resonated with me.

He was talking about principles of communication in leadership - but I think it applies pretty well to bloggers. I’m paraphrasing here but what he said boiled down to this:

To communicate to me clearly you need to do three things:

Give me a Message
Make me Care
Give me a Way to Remember it

I suspect there’s a lot of truth in that for leaders communicating in the business setting - but it rings true for me as a blogger wanting communicate effectively each day through my blog.

Lets explore each in turn briefly (this is of course my interpretation for bloggers on what Brett was getting at with his points).

Give them a Message

I suspect many bloggers work pretty hard on principle #1 - we craft our posts carefully and work hard on communicating clearly - but perhaps the other two elements are things that could lift posts to the next level in terms of getting people to actually take action on the things we write about.

Giving a message of course means we ourselves need to know what we’re trying to convey and what action we want readers to take at the end of posts. If we don’t know what we want people to do it’s pretty hard to get action.

It’s also about communicating clearly and giving people a call to the action we want them to take.

Make them Care

When someone cares about what you’re writing - they have much more motivation to take action on it.
When someone cares they’re more likely to tell someone else about it.
When someone cares they’re more likely to respond to you with a comment.

Communicate something to someone who doesn’t care and you might as well not be communicating!

How do you make them care? I think it partly comes down to showing people how what you are sharing with people applies to them, how it will make some aspect of their life better, inspiring them with a picture of how things will be once they’ve done something - it’s about getting people in touch with their feelings, fears, motivations, values and desires and tying them to what you’re communicating to them.

Give them a Way to Remember It

Have you ever read or heard something that inspired you to go away and take some course of action…. only to promptly forget to do it? I do it all the time. Sometimes I don’t take action because I change my mind, sometimes it is because I get busy and sometimes I just forget to do it (I’m thinking to myself ‘I’m sure there was something else I had to do today).

It’s one thing to communicate clearly what you want and to get someone to care about it - but a whole other thing to get them to actually take the action. A big part of closing the deal is to give them a way to remember what it is you want them to do.

I’d love to hear Brett (or others) talk more about how he helps people to remember what you say - but I find that I have most success in ‘closing the deal with people when I give them something simple, achievable and immediate to do.

How to Write a Blog Post That’s Stickier than Velcro

2009-11-02T00:20:00.000-08:00

by Marelisa Fábrega. Source : ProBlogger

Do you have a really good idea which you want to go viral? Is there a behavior you’re trying to modify in your blog readers, such as encouraging them to save, eat healthy, or start an exercise program? Are you looking for ways to persuade readers to purchase an affiliate product you’re promoting? If your answer is “yes” to any of these, then you need to make your writing stickier. In this post I’m going to share with you six principles which you can begin to apply right away to make your articles as sticky as urban myths, Aesop’s fables, the “Don’t mess with Texas” slogan, and JFK’s “man on the moon” speech.

In the bestseller “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die”, the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, explain that sticky ideas–ideas that spread, that are remembered, and that people act upon–have six traits in common. Sticky ideas are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and they’re told as stories (the authors use the acronym “SUCCESs”, with the last s omitted). Here’s an explanation of each of these principles:

Keep It Simple: It’s the Economy, Stupid

In order to make your message sticky, it has to be simple. This means that it has to convey a single, core idea that is meaningful and easy to understand. You need to make sure that your core idea stands out clearly from the very beginning, instead of being buried under an avalanche of facts, details, and abstractions. Keep in mind that simplifying your message doesn’t mean that you dumb it down; it means that you strip an idea to its most critical essence.

In addition, you need to prioritize. Psychology research shows that choice can hinder decision making. In one experiment cited by the Heath brothers, researchers took a group of college students who were planning to spend their evening studying and offered them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend a lecture by an author they admired. Almost 80% decided to skip the study session and attend the lecture instead.

However, when a second “fun” choice was added—watching a foreign film that was getting great reviews-only 60% opted for one of the “fun” choices and 40% chose to study. That is, when students had to choose between two “fun” options, more students chose to study as compared to the scenario in which they only had one “fun” option.

When you have several good ideas about a topic it’s difficult to pick the single most valuable idea and make it as sticky as possible, but that’s what works. Successful trial lawyers know that if they argue ten points, even if they’re all good, when jurors get back to the jury room they won’t remember any of them. James Carville summarized the most critical issue of the 1992 U.S. presidential election when he said: “It’s the economy, stupid”. Narrowing the issues to that one sentence stuck with voters and helped Clinton get elected.

Another way to keep it simple is by using analogies so that you can capitalize on what your readers already know. Think about the following movie pitch: Speed is “Die Hard on a bus”. How can you compare your idea to something your audience is already familiar with to help create hooks so that they will remember your idea more easily? Analogies allow you to say a lot with a little.

Make it Unexpected: Lose Weight by Eating Fast Food

With all of the information that’s available, one of the biggest hurdles you’ll have to face is capturing your readers’ attention. You can get their attention by taking an unexpected approach. Then, you hold their interest by making them curious. Behavioral economists argue that when we have a gap in our knowledge, we strive to resolve it. We’ve all stayed up late at night reading to discover who did it in a murder novel, or watching a movie to see how the conflict is resolved. Make your readers curious from the very beginning of your article by raising questions they don’t know the answer to, and then gradually filling in the gaps as they read along.

As an example of doing something unexpected, Chip and Dan refer to City Year. City Year is a nonprofit organization which offers 17 to 24-year-olds the opportunity to engage in 10 months of full-time community service. Here’s a slogan that they use: “We envision a world in which, one day, the most common question asked of a 17-year-old in this country will be, ‘Where are you going to do your year of national service?’” That’s a powerful, unexpected view of what the world could be like, and it gets people’s attention.

Another message that was unexpected was the one used in the Subway Guy marketing campaign. Jared was a college student who weighed about 430 pounds; he created a “subway diet” for himself and started walking every day to his local Subway Restaurant to have a subway for lunch and one for dinner. With this diet, Jared lost over 240 pounds. Subway came across Jared’s story and they turned it into a marketing campaign which was incredibly successful and which increased their sales dramatically. People were captivated by Jared’s story, in part, because of the unexpectedness of someone losing weight by eating fast food.

Make it Concrete: What Do 37 Grams of Fat Look Like?

In order to make sure that an idea can be grasped and remembered later, you have to make it concrete. If you describe something in a way that allows your readers to see, touch, or imagine it in their mind’s eye, the chances are much better that you’ll communicate successfully with them.

In 1961 U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced the following: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth”. This was a concrete vision: it was very clear about what it required—get a man on the moon and bring him back safely–and when it would happen. It captured the imagination of the American people for almost a decade.

The Heath brothers explain that Kennedy’s speech would have had much less impact if he had said something abstract like the following: “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” What does that even mean? Make sure that you make your ideas tangible, instead of delivering them in abstract, difficult to understand terms.

Here’s a second example offered by the Heath brothers of how to be concrete: A health organization was trying to convey to the movie-going public how incredibly unhealthy movie popcorn popped in coconut oil was. A typical bag of popcorn contained 37grams of saturated fat, nearly double the recommended daily allowance. But movie-goers weren’t interested in statistics. The health organization had to find a way to turn the abstract “37 grams of fat” into something concrete which would get the public to stop eating the harmful popcorn.

So what did they do? They called a press conference and laid out all of the following in front of the television cameras: a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings. Then they explained that a bag of popcorn had more fat than all of those meals, combined. If you think this was tangible enough to get the public to demand that movie theatres stop popping their popcorn in coconut oil, it was.

Make it Credible: The Surgeon General says . . .

If a message doesn’t seem credible it will be discounted, even if it’s perfectly true. Credibility can be achieved through status–such as citing a study conducted by a Nobel Prize winner–through prior performance, through the use of convincing detail, or through the appropriate use of statistics. When you use statistics, contextualize them in terms that are more everyday and human. A good example of making statistics more accessible is “The World of 100”, which presents different data about the world population in terms of a village of 100 people.

In addition, you can encourage your audience to test out your ideas for themselves. Chip and Dan explain that in the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics on the economy. Instead, he encouraged voters to test the effectiveness of the Carter presidency for themselves by telling them: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

Appeal to People’s Emotions: Make Them Care

Information makes people think, but emotion makes them act. You’ve probably heard of urban myths such as “the kidney-heist”and the Halloween candy tamperingstory. How do stories such as these spread across the country—and even the world–despite a lack of evidence? Why are they remembered and believed by millions? These stories are sticky. And one of the reasons that they’re so sticky is because they evoke emotion: in the case of urban myths, they evoke fear.

The authors of “Made to Stick” explain that in order for people to take action—donate money to your cause, buy your product, modify their behavior, and so on—they have to care about your message. You appeal to people’s emotions to get them to care. There are many different emotions you can tap into, such as a person’s “group identity”. When the Texas Department of Transportation was looking for ways to reduce litter on the Texas roadways, they discovered that most of the litter was being caused by truck drivers.

What was the best way get these truck drivers—characterized as “Bubba”—to stop littering? Applying threats and fines? Telling them about the impact they were having on the environment? What they did was much more effective: Bubbas love Texas, and the Texas Department of Transportation appealed to this pride. They cast Dallas Cowboys and Houston Astros in testosterone-soaked ads telling drivers: “Don’t mess with Texas”. With an emotional appeal to identity, the campaign managed to reduce litter on Texas highways 72% between 1986 and 1990.

Tell Stories – A Well-Told Story Jump-Starts Action

Research shows that when people swap stories they’re not just entertaining each other; they’re providing mental training. In “Made to Stick” the authors explain that when firefighters swap stories after every fire they’re helping each other create a rich archive of situations which they might encounter during a fire and the appropriate responses to these.

When we hear a story, we create a simulation of what’s happening in our minds. By providing a story in which the protagonist is in a predicament that is similar to our audience’s situation, we allow our readers to apply the story to their own situation.

In addition, Chip and Dan explain that a story is also important because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. Aesop’s fables—such as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”–teach their morals through stories. By telling the story of a bored shepherd boy who entertained himself by crying out “wolf” on repeated occasions and watching the villagers rush to his aid, and who was subsequently ignored by all when a wolf really did appear, Aesop shows his readers how liars lose all credibility and aren’t believed even when they’re telling the truth. Telling this story is much more effective than simply saying to people: “Don’t lie”.

As a further example of how to use stories in your blog posts, the best way to promote an affiliate product is to use it yourself. Then share a true story with your readers of how the product helped you to solve a problem that they might be having as well. Invite them to try it on for size and see for themselves.

Conclusion

To summarize, you can write sticky blog posts that get your readers to take action by making your ideas simple, unexpected, concrete, credentialed, and emotional, and by presenting them as stories. You don’t need to apply all six traits to have a sticky idea, but it’s safe to say that the more of them that you’re able to work into your writing, the stickier your idea will be.

Don’t just read this blog post and store it away as interesting, new-found knowledge: take the six principles presented by the Heath brothers and begin crafting your stickiest blog post yet. Incidentally, I tried applying most of the “sticky principles” to this blog post. How did I do?

Top 10 Websites to Get Internet Usage Statistics

2009-10-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

Source : DailyBlogTips

Sooner or later most of us need to collect some Internet statistics. Maybe it is for your homework, maybe it is for a market research you are doing for a project, maybe it is just out of curiosity. Over the years I came across several websites that provide these stats, and I decided to list the best ones in this post.

1. Pew Internet Project

One of the best resources for people looking for Internet statistics. Their research cover social networking, web 2.0, broadband and digital divide. Apart from detailed reports you will also find infographics, presentations, trends and surveys. The research topics are quite actual as well. For instance, they already have a bunch of reports and numbers on Twitter.

2. w3counter Global Web Stats

w3counter provides a web analytics program for website owners. However, they also use the data collected on the websites using the program (over 28,000) to create a monthly report called “Global Web Stats.” On the report you will find the most popular web browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions and countries.

3. w3schools Browser Stats

The w3schools website also publishes a report with browser, operating system and screen resolution statistics. One advantage of this site over the previous one is the fact that you can see at a glance the market share evolution of the different browsers over time. They have data going back to 2002, and there is also a section about the adoption of JavaScript.

4. Internet World Stats

If you are looking for Internet usage and adoption statistics from around the world, this is the website to visit. It comes with data regarding the total number of Internet users, a break-down by continent and penetration rates. The data seems to be updated frequently as well.

5. Alexa Top Sites

Not all of us are Alexa fans when it comes to traffic estimations. However, we can’t deny that Alexa has been tracking traffic numbers for a long time, and its list with the 500 largest websites on the Internet seem to be relatively accurate. If you need to get an idea of what are the largest sites on the web, it is worth a look.

6. Nielsen Net Ratings

Another company that offers decent traffic estimations for large websites is Nielsen. On the free report that is available inside their website they list the top 10 web parent companies, top 10 U.S. web parent companies, top 10 U.S. video sites and top 10 U.S. search providers. Nielsen also offers a monthly newsletter with the latest online trends and numbers.

7. Hitwise Data Center

Hitwise is a company offering competitive intelligence services. Inside its website there is a section called “Data Center” where you can access all sorts of Internet data. For example, they offer a list of the top 20 search engines, top 20 websites per industry, top 10 search terms per industry and the like. Make sure to check the Reports & Webinars section as well.

8. Point Topic

Point Topic is a research company specialized in DSL and broadband research. Most of their reports are paid, but they have a section called “Free Analysis” where you can get access to a bunch of free reports and studies. As far as broadband numbers go, they are the most complete I have found online. The only catch is that you need to register an account before getting access to them.

9. Internet Growth Statistics

If you want to see some data regarding the early days of the Internet (i.e. 1993 – 2000), check this website out. Apparently it was created by an MIT student, and it is not complete, but it does have some data available. For example, you can see the growth in the number of websites, web hosts, and the usage of the different protocols over time.

10. Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief

Verisign is the company responsible for the .com and .net domain registrations. As you can imagine, they have a lot of data regarding domain names, and they provide a quarterly report detailing all the latest numbers and trends on the domain industry. You can download the PDF documents directly, and they are well structured.

Apakah SebuahTop Ranking Blog dapat Dibangun dalam 1 malam?

2009-10-31T01:07:00.000-07:00

Penulis : Deny Eko Yuwono

Mengamati traffic blog-blog yang sudah mapan terkadang membuat kita ngiler. Lantas bertanya-tanya apakah blog ini dibangun dalam waktu semalam. Tentu keberuntungan juga yang membuat blog tersebut dibanjuri pengunjung.
Kenyataannya, dari pengalaman saya sendiri perlu waktu berbulan-bulan untuk mendatangkan traffic ke blog pertama saya, cuma rasa penasaran yang membuat saya masih bertahan. Ide-ide dan rasa frustasi datang silih berganti dalam benak saya. Setelah belajar kesana kemari, ternyata kunci yang paling pokok dalam membuat blog adalah ide, ide dan ide yang orisinil dan belum pernah terpikirkan oleh orang lain sebelumnya. Namun itu semua belum cukup. Hal-hal berikut ini yang perlu diperhatikan dalam membuat blog dari awal :

Idea, temukan tema yang benar-benar baru karena mengekor tema orang lain sama artinya seorang bayi yang baru lahir bertempur dengan tentara yang telah terlatih dan ditempa perang selama bertahun-tahun. Ini sama saja bunuh diri. Setelah menemukan tema yang tepat fokuslah dengan ide pada tema tersebut.
Tehnik, jangan pernah merasa puas dengan petunjuk pembuatan dan optimasi blog dari sebuah buku saja. Sebuah buku hanya berarti 1 pengalaman orang saja, sedangkan kita memerlukan ratusan bahkan ribuan pengalaman orang untuk kita pelajari dan membuat kita mampu mengalahkan mereka satu-persatu.
Ketekunan, anda mungkin frustasi dengan hasil karya anda sendiri yang bagaikan kuburan, tetapi mental andalah kini yang menentukan apakah anda layak menjadi top blog owner ataukah cuma menjadi pecundang.
Pikiran Terbuka, janganlah seperti katak dalam tempurung yang merasa pengetahuan dan semua yang anda miliki sudah cukup. Kritik dan saran selalu ada manfaatnya bagi kita.
Selalu cari kelemahan dari blog anda sendiri, dengan demikian blog anda akan terus berkembang menuju kesempurnaan.

Tulisan diatas mungkin saja tidak berguna bagi anda, tetapi setidaknya ada sesuatu untuk direnungkan kalau ingin menjadi seorang blogger yang sukses.

Salam hormat.

How I Diversify My Site and Income

2009-10-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

Source : ProBlogger

In this post I want to present some visuals on how I’ve expanded one of my blogs and diversified its income streams.

How do I expand my blog?
How do I move beyond the basics of making money with AdSense on my blog?

I’m asked these two questions a lot and in this post I want to share, with some visuals, how I do it on one of my own sites.

While at Blog World Expo last week I was asked to present to a small private group on how I make money blogging. As part of the presentation I put together some basic graphics that attempted to visualize how Digital Photography School works. With the permission of the clients I presented to I’d like to share them here.

Lets start with a basic rundown of what the site is made up of – or at least where I’m interacting with readers both on and off the site:

The site started as a simple blog. In time I added a forum and a newsletter. The forum added a more communal element to the site while the newsletter both gave a secondary connecting point with readers, drives significant traffic across to both the blog and forum but also opens up other ways to market to readers. In more recent times I’ve started using social media by creating a Twitter account and Facebook page.

In this next visual I highlight four of the main tasks that I focus my energies on with DPS. While there are other things that one must do to keep a site going, these are the main things I focus my time upon at present.

Creating Compelling Content – this is the foundation of the site and particularly in the early days of DPS was what I spent most time doing. Ultimately it is about creating useful content that solves problems and meets needs for people.
Build Community – getting a reader to your blog is hard so it makes a lot of sense to work hard on keeping the readers you have and doing whatever you can to keep them visiting again and again. One of the main ways to do this is to give them a sense of ‘belonging’.
Monetize – a site with great content and community is fantastic – but unless you can monetize it in some way it isn’t sustainable. As a result a percentage of my time and resources goes towards making money from the site.
Marketing – to make money from a website you need people to read it and to have people reading it you need to step outside of your own site and market yourself in some way. Great content and community is not enough. I’d include SEO in this category as it’s largely about driving traffic.

There are obviously other tasks that a blogger needs to work on (such as design, maintenance etc) but broadly speaking these are the four things I’m working on each day in some way or another.

Lets see how the two graphics above interact with one another. Below is a visual of the four areas of the site and the four ‘tasks’ that I do – it shows WHERE I’m doing each of the ‘tasks’ on the site.

OK – so I’m doing everything everywhere.

The reason I include this graphic is that I hear people talking about how certain types of media are only suited to some goals.

For example I heard one presenter at BWE talk about how social media is just for marketing or community building – however I think it can be used for monetization also. An example of this was when I launched the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook. I did launches for the ebook both here on the ProBlogger blog and also on Twitter – Twitter generated over twice as many sales as the blog.

While social media may not be as effective for everyone when it comes to monetization there are certainly ways to do it. The same goes with other mediums.

I won’t go through how each of the four areas achieve each of the four goals or tasks but the take home lesson here is that if you have a variety of goals for your site that there can be multiple ways to meet them.

Lets move onto monetization. The next visual highlights the four main ways that I make money off DPS (or at least the four ways it will make money shortly).

Ad Networks – in some circles these are looked down on as an inferior way to make money but on DPS they work. Running AdSense and Chitika in particular have been very profitable for me on DPS. Sure you share the revenue with the network but when you’re unable to fill your inventory with directly sold ads they can still work out for you. You should be looking to expand your focus and diversify but don’t write it off altogether – keep testing the options to see what converts on your site.
Direct Ad Sales – the obvious advantage of selling your own ads to an advertiser is that you’re not splitting profits with Google or some other ad network. The downside is that it can take time to find advertiser and negotiate with them to really get the return that you could get. This can get a little easier when you’ve got significant traffic but depending upon your niche and where the economy is at it can also be difficult – particularly to attract the bigger brand advertisers unless you have relationships with them or are well positioned in the advertising sales game.
Affiliate Marketing – this is something that I didn’t focus upon a whole lot on DPS except for using Amazon’s Associate program. However lately there have been a few quality photography products launched that have opened up opportunities on this front.
Products – this is the ’soon to be’ element of the monetization mix on DPS as I have two ebooks in development – one to be released in the coming weeks. I’m still yet to see how well products will work on the site but there’s significant potential if we can convince readers that paying for some content is worth doing (I’m sure I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks).

You’ll notice that there are other monetization streams that are not mentioned and that I don’t do at DPS – such as text link advertising, paid reviews etc.

Here’s one last graphic that overlays the monetization streams with the areas of the site.

Once again you’ll see that each of the areas of the site are involved in at least two of the monetization streams – although not all. Some of the exceptions are simply that I’ve not had time to try them but some I’m not sure will ever happen (either because I doubt that they’ll work or because they can’t – such as Ad Networks in Social media).

Again – the reason I include this graphic is that opportunities do exist to diversify income streams between mediums. For example newsletters are a great place to monetize. While you can’t run AdSense in a newsletter you can sell an ad to an advertiser. You can also use a newsletter to do affiliate marketing (in fact I find it works better in newsletters than anywhere else on my site).

I hope the visuals above are a little food for thought and make sense without the context of the rest of the presentation.

A few Take Home Lessons:

Let me try to pull together a few of the main take home lessons that I’ve been learning:

Know your goals – having identified that main tasks that I want to be involved in has given me a structure and helped me develop strategies to take my site forward.
Expand and Diversify – Adding different areas/mediums to your blog can help to make your site multi-dimensional and opens up new ways to achieve your goals. It is also good in turbulent economic times to have a site with a variety of different areas but also income streams.
Don’t Ignore AdSense – ad networks have their pros and cons. If you write them off completely you could be leaving money on the table. The key is to have an open mind, test what works best and revisit your decisions over time as different monetization streams will suit your site differently at different stages of its life cycle.
Don’t get lazy and rely upon AdSense – many bloggers get lazy and rely upon the same old way that their site has always made money to continue to do so. Keep testing, hustle to find new advertisers, test different affiliate products to promote, watch what your competitors are monetizing with and consider launching your own product.

5 Things to Know When Starting Your Blog

2009-10-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

Source : DailyBlogTips

This is a guest post by Adrienne Carlson. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

It’s a bandwagon that took off with startling speed, one that all and sundry wanted to get on. Most did get on the blogging train, but there were very few who tasted the kind of financial success that they dreamed of. Others fell by the wayside while the determined still plough on, making what little money they can and yet sticking to the path because they are passionate about what they do.

There’s no doubt that blogs are here to stay, but if you are thinking of hitching a ride only now, you need to be aware of a few ground rules. So, before you start your blog, it’s best to:

1. Be realistic: Yes, there are many people who blog for a living; they don’t have regular jobs, and they make all the money doing what comes best to them, writing for an audience and making money off it. But, you must be realistic when you start to write and know that you cannot expect such stupendous success, at least not for a few years. If you’re hoping to make huge amounts of money right from the word go, then you’re in for disappointment.

2. Don’t quit your regular job: Because blogs make money randomly or not at all, especially when they’re new, it’s not wise to quit your regular job and sit at home in front of your computer hoping to strike the mother lode instantly. Instead, set aside some time every day to work on your blog and popularize it.

3. Enjoy what you do: Only if you truly enjoy blogging will you be able to stick to it and make it work. If you’re in it just to make money, you’re not going to be able to keep your enthusiasm going when you don’t see the dollars pouring in like you’d envisioned. So write on something you’re passionate about, something that you can sustain on a daily basis over a long term period.

4. Focus on a niche: Blogs that focus on a niche tend to do better than those that just prattle on about any random topic under the sun or those that are more personal in nature. So choose a niche that you enjoy and one which you can portray creatively so that other people will be interested in reading what you have to say.

5. Know that patience pays: One thing you must remember when beginning a blog is that you must be patient in order to see even a modicum of success. It takes a long time to popularize a blog, and even when that happens, it may be some more time before you start to see monetary results. You must focus on quality rather than trickery to market your blog, because that’s what will sustain it in the long run.

A Simple Way To Funnel New Traffic & Sales From Buried Blog Archives

2009-10-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

Source : ProBlogger

In this guest post internet marketer and full time blogger Lynn Terry of ClickNewz shares one of her newest tested blog marketing strategies.

On the current theme of Content Marketing, I have a super simple strategy I have been testing to increase exposure and profit that you’ll really enjoy. It’s simple, it’s free… and it works.

Darren gave us 9 ways to seed content to consistently grow our blog readership with each new blog post. This 10th method will bring you a lot of readers as well, without even writing a new blog post…

Putting Your Best Content To Work For You

If you’ve been blogging for any amount of time at all, you probably have some incredible posts buried in your archives. Even blog posts written only a month or two ago rarely get a new comment. Properly optimized posts might continue to receive new visitors through the search engines, but most of your content is buried - both in your archives, and in the search results.

I make a regular practice of browsing through my archives for pillar posts. I often repurpose these posts into articles for Article Marketing, meaning I make a few small tweaks and submit them to EzineArticles.com.

There are 3 good reasons to submit your better archives to EzineArticles:

1. A keyword-rich title on EzineArticles can easily get your article ranked very well in Google search results, as EzineArticles is a content authority site. If the article is not ranking well on your domain, or if you have a relatively new domain, this is a great way to get “indirect” top rankings very easily.

2. Each article you submit may include an author bio, or resource box, which will have a live link back to your blog. Readers and search engines alike follow these links, and inbound links will help your blog get indexed or better ranked.

3. Publishers search EzineArticles.com for great content to use on their websites, at their blogs, and in their email newsletters. In addition to getting more inbound links, you may also find your content in front of a very targeted audience.

Duplicate Content?

There are many theories about duplicate content, and possible penalties for using the same content in more than one place on the web. Most of these theories are completely unfounded. Read this if you’re concerned about duplicate content.

Basically, Google wants to offer a wide variety of results for any given search. If your blog post is not already ranking in the top 10 results for a specific keyword phrase, you can easily achieve an “indirect” top ranking by submitting the post to EzineArticles.com as an article with a keyword rich article title.

Taking it one step further…

This method has been working very well for me, so I decided to take it one step further. Instead of repurposing a great blog post into an article, I turned a couple of my posts into short reports.

It’s the exact same content, just a new format: PDF.

PDF files are very easy to create. You can use any number of free PDF converters. Or you can download OpenOffice.org for free, which will allow you to turn any document into a PDF file with one click.

Don’t be overly concerned with the length of the report. Even 3-5 pages of great content will make a very nice short report that you can give away.

You can also add a cover page, a copyright/disclaimer, and an about page to round it out if you like. If you want your report to go viral, be sure to include a paragraph that clearly spells out the giveaway rights to your reader.

The Results

I decided to try this with a great how-to post I had written for my blog. This particular post ended with a recommendation for Darren’s workbook titled 31 Days To Build A Better Blog. I didn’t do any fancy formatting, I simply copied the blog post and pasted it into a document - and then converted it to a PDF file.

The result? The PDF file converted readers into buyers almost 4x more than the blog post!

Thanks to that short report, I am nearing the $1,000 sales mark for a product that sells for less than 20 bucks - which makes for a nice little commission check… on just one post!

The obvious conclusion here is that a report, or a PDF file, has a higher perceived value. The exact same content, with the exact same call-to-action, has proven to achieve a much higher conversion rate in PDF format.

Using Reports For Links, Traffic & Sales…

You should use one of your new short reports as an incentive for your readers to subscribe to your newsletter or blog updates. This is a great way to increase your subscriptions, and therefore your readership.

You can use your other new reports much the same as you use articles, as well. Submit your reports to free ebook directories, the same way you submit articles to article directories.

Google will index PDF files, so the links within your report will count as inbound links to your blog. Your report may also rank well in Google, which is another great way to funnel new readers into your blog.

Tip: Don’t submit the report you use as your opt-in incentive in other places around the web. Your new visitors will be disappointed to arrive on your blog, subscribe, and receive the same report that brought them there in the first place. Mix it up!

Make sure you include a strong call-to-action in the PDF version of your content. If your content is not directly recommending a product, you can invite the readers to related articles on your blog - or to subscribe at your blog for more great free reports on the topic.

Browse through your blog archives today, and locate some of your best (buried) posts. Repurpose those posts into short reports, and put that great content back into circulation to bring in more readers - and make more sales!