50 Great Widgets For Your Blog

Widgets are a handy, easy and simple way to add some flare to your blog. Whether you’d like to display the number of currently online visitors to your site or simply the weather report for Los Angeles, you can do it with widgets. We’ve assembled a list of 50 useful or simply cool widgets for your pleasure. And remember, the first rule of widgetizing your blog is - don’t overdo it!

MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers - this widget can easily be called a hit amongst blog owners; its popularity even managed to convince Yahoo into buying MyBlogLog. The widget lets you see the avatars of recent visitors to your blog, provided they’re also members of MyBlogLog.

Mashable - get the latest social networking news from this very site.

Flickr Flash Photo Stream Badge - display images from your Flickr profile with a handy Flash photo stream.

Preview Anywhere - see a live preview of outgoing links in a small popup which activates on mouseover. Some find this annoying, while others might find it useful.

Twitter Badge - if your life is so interesting that everyone must know what you’re up to all the time, then a Twitter badge is the ideal counterpart to your blog. It’ll proudly displays your recent tweets.

Digg News - display the latest Digg links on your blog. Themeable and fully customizable.

FEEDJIT - real time traffic data directly in your blog’s sidebar.

LineBuzz - inline comments for your blog. Very handy for blogs with frequent lively discussions.

Flixn - display a stream directly from your webcam, so your blog visitors can always see what you’re up to.

3Jam - lets your visitors send messages to your mobile phone, without them knowing your phone number.

Jaxtr - with Jaxtr, your visitors can actually call you to your mobile phone; again, your number stays private.

LinkedInABox - show off your LinkedIn profile. Perfect for personal blogs.

Box Widget - enable visitors to use box.net’s online storage directly on your web site.

Price of gas - displaying gas prices on your blog might seem unnecessary to some, but it’s cool if you have a traffic/travel related blog.

iBegin Weather Widget - Display weather information in your sidebar. Just like with Price of Gas, works great with travel-related blogs.

ClockLink - display time in various time zones with these nifty Flash clocks.

Film Loops - display the latest loops from your FilmLoops account.

Daily Painters - display paintings from famous painters on your blog.

WhoLinked - show your visitors which sites have recently linked to your web site. Works with all major blog platforms.

Criteo AutoRoll - displays links to blogs similar to your blog.

Bitty Browser - embed a cute, fully functional mini web browser to your blog.

Leafletter - create a mini website and embed it into your blog.

WikiSeek - search Wikipedia with this simple widget.

FeedCount - show off the number of visitors to your blog with this handy little button.

Technorati Link Count - display the number of links your website has from one of the biggest blog authorities - Technorati.

MyPageRank - another good way to show how “big” your blog is is to show off your Google PageRank.

CheckPageRank - in addition to showing your PageRank, this widget also shows your Alexa ranking.

BlinkxIt - embed a link to related videos directly into your website.

Skype button - display your Skype online/offline status on your blog.

RockYou Horoscope - not something I would personally use, but some people are into horoscope. Hell, most people are into horoscope. Anyway, this widget shows horoscope (doh!) and does it in a nicely designed colorful box.

del.icio.us Tagometer - display how many times have del.icio.us users saved your page.

del.icio.us Linkrolls - this badge shows your latest bookmarks from del.icio.us.

Timelines - need to create a timeline? Seek no further. This widget makes it really easy.

PollDaddy - PollDaddy lets you create beautiful polls in no time, and display them at your blog.

Vizu - another poll-making widget, compatible with all major blog platforms.

AnswerTips - display definitions from Answers.com for various terms on your blog. The definitions are shown in bubbles which are activated on doubleclick.

AnswerBoxes - give your visitors a chance to enter a term themselves, and get a definition from Answers.com

Now Playing - if you got to share your current playlist contents with the world, Sigamp will do the trick. Works with most popular music players, including Foobar, Winamp, iTunes and others.

BuzzBoost - display headlines from your RSS feed on any website.

LibraryThing - show off the latest books you’ve been reading.

Plaxo Address Book - let your most faithful visitors access their address books direclty from your site.

AuctionAds - a widget that displays auctioned items on eBay, and gives you a percentage of the price paid when sometimes buys an item.

aStore - similar to AuctionAds, only for Amazon. Create a mini-store on your site and receive profit when someone buys an item through your store.

Plazes - show your current location on a Plazes map.

Stockalicious - track your portfolio with this widget, and share it with others. Let everyone know how much money you’ve lost.

Yahoo! For Good - create a charity badge and ask for donations for a worthy cause.

Giftspace - your friends never know what to buy you for birthday? Let them know what you really want with this nifty widget.

MixMap - see where are the visitors to your MySpace profile from on a map.

Google Map Widget - display a searchable Google Map on your website.

Google Video Search - add a video search form and selected videos to your web site.

Odeo player - display an Odeo player for and podcast right there in your sidebar.

Credit to: http://mashable.com/2007/09/06/widgets-2/

Decorate blog with your blog name

Go to this website: http://www.imagechef.com and get some stuffs for yourself!

Here are some:





My name



And here is a message for you!

How to make a "read more" link on your post?

Sometimes, you'd like to shorten your post to show more posts on the homepage of your blog or you just want save some space on your blog instead of those very long posts. You can write a part of your post and then add a "read more" link. So how to do that?

Read more....

How To Increase Your Google AdSense CTR: Tips, Tricks & Guidelines

Who else wants to increase they AdSense CTR numbers? Everyone should be raising their hand. I’m going to tell you some of the secrets I have learned about AdSense throughout the years, and more specifically what you can do to increase your CTR percentage.

If you follow these steps, you should have no problem increasing your CTR by at least two percent, and you could possibly see a 100 to 1,000% or more increase if you follow these steps well.

Put Ad Units On Pages With Lots Of Text

This one is kind of a no brainer, but it makes perfect sense. For the most part, AdSense ads are displayed as text, and you can force AdSense to only display text ads too, which will work to your advantage. The more keywords you have, and the more content on your page, the easier it is for your ads to blend in with your site.

Do Not Tell Your Visitors That These Are Ads

I have never understood why people blatantly point out to their visitors that what they are seeing is an advertisement, either by using “Sponsored Links” or “Adverisements,” since those are the only acceptable methods for labeling your ads. Google already tells the user that these are Google ads!

Place Your Ad Units Above The Fold

You only have a couple of seconds to capture your visitor’s attention, so why would you waste your time by putting ads where they can’t see them?

Use Ad Unit Sizes That Are Proven To Work

Google, and many others, have said that the wider the ad, the better. Use this information to your advantage.

Blend The Color Of Your Ads With The Colors Of Your Site

Another no brainer. You do not want your ads to stand out, you want them to naturally blend in with the rest of your site. Keep the same theme throughout.

Blend Ads With Your Site

This one goes along with the blending of colors, but the emphasis here is that your ads shouldn’t have borders or even look like ads at all. Place it next to your text, making sure the text either wraps around the ad, or flows above and below it in a natural fashion.

Use Your Layout To Your Advantage

If your site has a sidebar, make sure the sidebar is the same width as your ad unit. A Wide Skyscraper (160×600) or Skyscraper (120×600) would be perfect for a navigation sidebar. Another sidebar size would be either the Medium Rectangle (300×250) or Square (250×250). Here’s an example of a good way to layout your ads relative to your content:

Place Your Ads On The Top Left Side Of Your Website

Eyetracking studies show that people read in an F- or E-shaped pattern. This is information you can use to your advantage.

Track Your Ads With AdSense Channels

You should always have a way to know which of your ad units are performing the best. Utilize the built-in channels to label your ads. It is also a great way to experiment. Maybe you don’t want to blend your ads, and instead want them to stand out. Label that ad as so, and run both variations for a week each.

I hope these tips will help you increase your AdSense CTR numbers. Depending on what your CTR rate is now, you can easily expect a 100 to 1,000% increase. Good luck!

Source: divspace.com

15 Effective Tips to Increase Google Adsense CTR

How to make more money with Google Adsense? Get more clicks on ads. We all want to increase Google Adsense CTR i.e. click through ratio, because the higher times the surfer clicks the Adsense ad, higher is the payout to you. So here are 15 effective ways to improve your Adsense CTR.

How to increase Google Adsense CTR?

* Post Adsense ads them on text rich pages and make sure that Adsense had a bunch of keywords to work with. Getting Higher paying keywords is better of course.
* Get rid of public service ads, which pay you nothing for your efforts. Here are some ways to avoid getting PSA’s.
* Avoid titles like the approved ‘Sponsored Links’ and ‘Advertisements’ above the Adsense ads. Why do you want to tell the world they are ads when google already puts ‘Ads by Gooooogle’ with them. These two terms are the only ones allowed by Google TOS. Any other terms will get your account terminated. Remember to avoid these 15 Adsense mistakes.
* Use section targeting - you can target an ad unit to a specific section of your blog, as well as block out irrelevant sections like navigational links. Useful to get more targeted ads.

What is the best Google Adsense Placement for CTR?

* Place Ads above the fold, i.e. you dont have to scroll down to see the ads. Moreover it loads before your entire page does. The more the visibility, the more chances a reader will click the ad.

* Provide some free space around ads so that they stand out and users know where to find them. Dont clutter up the ads inside your content.
* Experiment by changing the location of advertisements. Track them by channels to see which location works. Sometimes unusual locations can can do wonders for your CTR. Google Adsense support provides some good ideas for better blending

* Many experienced Adsense users have reported better CTR with vertical ads rather than the horizontal ones. But that really depends on your site structure.
* Usually it is recommended to place towers on your right, as users tend to use the mouse to scroll the bar on the right side wiht a higher chance to see your ads. Some have reported doubling CTR’s by placing towers to the left rather than the right, as people have got bored of seeing ads on the right, it has something to do with the sidedness of the brain which I do not understand and there is a tendency to read from left to the right.

* Many sites will have small ads in the top right hand corner, as they claim it is the first place where the eye sees.
* An excellent article on Eyetracking - What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes helps to tell you where users actually see first and in what order.
* Forums are tricky becasue they have a different kind of navigation, readership and participation. Here are some ad placements suggested by Google which work best for forums
Google Adsense for Forums

Best Google Adsense Link Colors to get higher CTR?

* Match the colors of your ads with the colour scheme of your site. Blending with your sites color profile helps to identify them not as ads, but as links similar to those of your site. The more the AdSense looks like part of your site, the higher CTR you will get. You can also match the Adsense fonts with your website font design for great results.
* Blend ads with your page - remove the borders by having a similar color as your background helps to show ads as being part of your site. Do not blend text or the ‘Ads by Gooooogle’ with your background color as it is against Google TOS (Google does not like hidden text!). However, such blending may not work for you always due to banner blindness. Neither do they see the ads, not do they click on them. So sometimes a bold contrasting ad may work better depending on your website design.
* Experiment by changing the colors, background of advertisements. You have to find out what works best for your site, not others. You can also rotate Adsense colors to reduce ad blindness.

I hope these tips help to get your Adsense CTR up by at least 100% if not more. Good luck and make more money!

Source: www.quickonlinetips.com

4000 Highest paying adsense keywords

Are you finding high paying keywords for Adsense? Here's a good collection for you!

Download here!!!

Using Your Blog To Make Money With AdSense

In order to maximize AdSense, you need pages with lots of relevant content. The AdSense program works best if your blog has lots of fresh, relevant content - and specifically, lots of textual content. Unfortunately, AdSense can not read images.

Several factors go into helping your blog generate a substantial AdSense income for you. The following valuable information will impact your AdSense earning capability the most.

1. The amount of Traffic you receive will have a direct bearing on your earnings with the AdSense program. The more people who visit your blog and see your ads, the more likely someone will click on them.

2. High Paying Ads -- This is probably pretty obvious. If the content you provide attracts high paying ads, you are going to earn a better than average income.

3. Relevant Ads that relate to the content and vice versa. Simply stated, the information contained in this blog is about blog marketing, blog optimization, search engine submission, and home based business marketing. So, my AdSense ads all relate to those keywords. Tailor the relevancy of your ads to your content, and that will bring you one step closer to increasing your revenue.

4. Optimize the placement and the design of your ads. With AdSense, you can choose the position and the color for your ads to match the color scheme of your blog page. Remember, position, position, position! Make sure you place your ads in the place where they will be seen. This is critical; if no one sees them, they'll never get clicked on.

Top 10 Tips To Boost Your Google Adwords Performance

Online advertising has rapidly grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, with Google’s recent $900 million deal to advertise on MySpace an example of it’s huge demand and popularity.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is the most cost-effective form of advertising so it’s vitally important that all aspects of advertising campaigns are managed to achieve maximum return on investment (ROI). Google AdWords is the most popular method of PPC and is an excellent way of increasing targeted website traffic, providing the advertising costs can be justified by ensuring the clicks turn into sales.

Nobody gets it all right the first time and most of the best advertising campaigns are developed over time. Below are 10 tips to get started and help to get the best performance from your Google AdWords advertising budget.

1) Keyword selection
Good keyword selection is essential to ensure you can attract users who are interested in your products and with the potential to become customers. It can be very easy to get carried away and select the most popular keywords recommended by Google AdWords and the highest in terms of clicks from the estimated traffic tool. But remember traffic is not your main goal, a successful advertising campaign is based on bringing quality traffic with the potential to bring sales to your site at a cost that can achieve a positive ROI. To help keep track of the performance of your ad campaigns it is useful to manage the selected keywords in multiple AdGroups and this will also help you to use ad text specific to each keyword.

2) Where to target your ad's
The best performing campaigns generally target the search network which for AdWords means that your ad will appear on Google and it’s network of partner websites. You also have the option of advertising on Google’s content network which includes all AdSense publishers, clicks from the content network can normally be attained at a lower CPC (cost per click) but this generally doesn’t convert into sales as well as the search network and is more likely to receive fraudulent clicks. The content network is normally a good option if your main objective is increased traffic as opposed to converting sales.

2) Location targeting
It is important to define the geographic locations you are targeting to produce sales from. If you are a business which only delivers within the UK there is no need to advertise your website outside of the UK as this would be a waste of a large proportion of your clicks. In some cases it is essential to restrict your ad’s visibility further than country level by setting a city or region to advertise in, for example a taxi company in the Oxfordshire region would only want to advertise to users within areas they pickup from.
For companies targeting worldwide users it can be advantageous to create individual AdGroup’s or campaigns for each country. This way sales can be tracked in order to define which countries are producing sales and which need working on or should be dropped.

3) Reviewing your competitors
Define what makes your company stand out from your competitors and try to find a niche in your market that users will be interested in. If your ad can stand out from the rest it is more likely to be clicked. Another good method to stand out from your customers would be to find out if they display their prices within the ad, if this is the case and your prices are lower it would be a good idea to display them as well to entice the user to click your ad instead.

4) Using effective matching options
Most optimized campaigns would use the exact matching option on all keywords to ensure that they are only bidding for that individual search. This is effective for ensuring you are only bidding on relevant keywords and improve your click through rate (CTR). CTR is a very important factor in deciding the cost per click (CPC) so the higher rate you can achieve, the less you are likely to pay for that keyword.

Using only the exact matching option can have the negative effect of only receiving a low amount of traffic as you are only targeting a specific audience. In addition, to attract a wider range of searches it may be worth adding the phrase and broad match versions of your exact match keywords. As these are less specific they are likely to achieve a lower CTR and conversion rate but will increase the amount of clicks. It is important to use the negative matching option effectively with phrase and broad matches to filter out any unrelated searches.

6) Managing your budget
In order to get the best from your daily budget I would suggest on starting with a low budget to begin with. This way you can ensure you are bidding on the right keywords at a cost-effective price without losing too much money. I would strongly suggest defining a separate value for content network bids as these should be achieved at a lower value than the search network. Once a positive ROI is being achieved you can then think about increasing the daily budget.

7) Choosing your Ad Text
Entice users to your site with a genuine interest in your business by describing what you can offer and why it can benefit them. Whenever possible it is also useful to raise your quality score by including the keywords within the ad title or description and by using action keywords such as register, sign-up or browse so that the user knows what to expect on the next page. A high quality score will help to improve the relevancy of your ad which can result in your ad ranking higher than a competitor with a larger bid. For large accounts a quick trick is to use {KeyWord:Default Text}, this will insert the keyword from your AdGroup into your ad text providing that it is within the character limit, otherwise it will use the default text defined.

8) Selecting your destination URL
The Google AdWords algorithm now reviews the quality of landing pages so it’s more important than ever to ensure your destination URL is relevant to the keyword bid upon. It is also important to make sure that the user is directed to the webpage they expect to see, rather than being taken to the homepage and having to find the right page for themselves.

9) Conversion tracking
In order to monitor the performance of your account it is important to track conversions so that you can review where sales or leads are coming from to help manage the campaigns based upon results. A cost per conversions value will then be displayed within your reports which will help to make key decisions (such as changing bids, dropping keywords or ad variations) easier. If you are running any other, non-AdWords, advertising campaign you can also set-up a cross-channel to track the conversions from these as well, for example Yahoo! Search Marketing. Research has shown that Google users are generally more likely to purchase online and this is normally reflected with a greater conversion rate from AdWords, although there are advantages to advertising using both methods such as exposure to a wider range of websites and lower CPC’s.

10) Website analysis tracking
Once your campaigns are up and running you will need to monitor how your users view your website. Google Analytics is excellent for it’s AdWords integration, displaying user stats to find out the users location, search engine, search term and the most popular links clicked on your webpage.

Basic Formatting HTML Tags

Here are some basic HTML tags for you, you may need them in some cases.



HTML tags with text
- <b>bold</b>
- <strong>strong</strong> (usually bold)
- <u>underlined</ul>
- <i>italics</i>
- <em>emphasis</em> (usually italics)
- <strike>strike through</strike>
- <center>This centers text on the page</center>
- <tt>teletype text</tt> (typewriter text)
- <blockquotes>blockquotes</blockquotes>

Links tags
- Basic Link <a href=”url”>link title</a> (where ‘url’ is the page you want to link to and ‘link title’ is the word/s that you want the link to say.
- Email Link <a href=”mailto:EMAIL”></a> (where ‘EMAIL’ is the email address you want to be a link).

Heading Tags
- <h1>An important heading</h1>
- <h2>A slightly less important heading</h2>
- <h3>A less important heading again</h3>
- <h6>The smallest heading</h6>

Font Tags
- Font Size - <font size=”x”>text to change</font> - change ‘x’ value to get different sizes. 1 is small and 7 is big.
- Colors - <font color=”#FF0000″>I’m red!</font> (get color codes here)
Font type - <font face=”Arial”>Hello there</font>

Image tags
- Basic Image tag - <img src=”url”> (where url = the url of the image you want to show)
- Image with sizing <img src=”url” width=”200″ height=”150″>
- Align image left - <img src=”name” align=left> (substitute ‘left’ with ‘right’ to align it right)
- Alt Tags - <img src=”url” alt=”short description of image”> (an alt tag tells the reader what they are missing if the image doesn’t load in their browser.
- Image as a link - <a href=”link url”><img src=”url”></a> (where ‘link url’ is the url of the page you want the image to link to and ‘url’ is the image location).
- Image with border - <img border=”1″ src=”url”> (the larger the number in the border “” the thicker the border)
- Space Around Image <img src=”url” hspace=10 vspace=10> (hspace is the horizontal space and vspace is the verticle space. The numbers are the amount of pixels sounding the image)
- <a href=”img url”> <img border=”1″ src=”url” width=”65″ height=”38″ align=left hspace=10 vspace=10></a> (an image that is a link that has a border 1 pixel wide, that is 65 pixels wide and 38 pixels high, that aligns left on the page and is surrounded by 10 pixels both horizontally and vertically).

Unordered Lists
<ul>
<li>the first list item</li>
<li>the second list item</li>
<li>the third list item</li>
</ul>

Ordered Lists
<ol>
<li>the first list item</li>
<li>the second list item</li>
<li>the third list item</li>
</ol>

55 Ways to Have Fun with Google

This is an interesting book. You can grab it by this link:

55 ways to have fun with Google

Choose a good Shoutbox for your blog

You can try these links. Have fun!

http://cbox.ws/

http://www.shoutmix.com/

http://tag-world.com/

http://oggix.com/

How to write HTML code in your post

When you need to write HTML code in your post, for example you'd like to write a tutorial for blog, it won't show up like you hope but may change the whole post. So what should be done to solve this? Let's try this way.

<span style="color: rgb(0, 153, 0);">All blog tips</span>

Change all the < in the code you have with this :
and > with this:

Write blog post in Edit html mode, paste the changed code and then Publish it. It will work in your way.

You can change the html code you have manually before posting it by using "find and replace" tool of Word or Wordpad of your PC. You can also use this link to change it faster by clicking Decode button.

Hope that helps.

How to add Google Translation to your blog

Here I'll show you the way to insert Google Translation to you blog. It's quite easy, you just have to copy this code and paste it in a new page element of your template.
Try it and you'll see.

It can translate your blog into 11 main languages. It will be like this (my blog)




Here is the code:

Remember to change the URL http://allblogtips.blogspot.com in the code into your blog URL.




<form action="http://www.google.com/translate"><script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"><!--document.write ("<input name=u value="+location.href+" type=hidden>")// --></script><noscript><input value="http://allblogtips.blogspot.com/" name="u" type="hidden"/></noscript><input value="en" name="hl" type="hidden"/><input value="UTF8" name="ie" type="hidden"/><input value="" name="langpair" type="hidden"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="Arabic" value="en|ar" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/358406/gse_multipart12399.png" width="30" name="langpair"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="中文（简体）/Chinese (Simplified)" value="en|zh-CN" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/546049/gse_multipart12397.png" width="30" name="langpair"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="中文（繁体）/Chinese (Traditional)" value="en|zh-TW" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/208681/gse_multipart12398.png" width="30" name="langpair"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="Français/French" value="en|fr" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/327620/gse_multipart12413.png" width="30" name="langpair"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="Deutsch/German" value="en|de" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/734899/gse_multipart12400.png" width="30" name="langpair"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="Italiano/Italian" value="en|it" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/306145/gse_multipart12401.png" width="30" name="langpair"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="日本語/Japanese" value="en|ja" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/443122/gse_multipart12402.png" width="30" name="langpair"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="한국어/Korean" value="en|ko" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/581031/gse_multipart12403.png" width="30" name="langpair"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="Português/Portuguese" value="en|pt" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/670301/gse_multipart12404.png" width="30" name="langpair"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="Русский/Russian" value="en|ru" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/111692/gse_multipart12405.png" width="30" name="langpair"/><input onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" title="Español/Spanish" value="en|es" type="image" height="20" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/6075/564571464515337/1600/z/998398/gse_multipart12407.png" width="30" name="langpair"/></form>

How to add Bookmark and RSS buttons to your blog

Besides those buttons provided by technorati, you can add your extra buttons to help your readers bookmark your blog and take RSS news more easily.

Go to this website: http://www.addthis.com

And grab your codes/buttons. That's really great!





You can put these buttons everywhere you love.

How to make a logo for your blog

Do you wish to make a button/logo for your blog with the familiar size 80x15 like this:



You just have to come here, and generate one for yourself!

Link: http://www.graphicsguru.com/button.php

Have fun!

Make your blog sparkling with glitter graphics!

I love this website, there are a lot of cute stuffs there for you! Go get them!!

http://www.glitter-graphics.com


Look at these!! Aren't they cute? =^^=
















And this is dedicated to you!

Show a clock on your blog

You can decorate your blog with a clock, that would be nice. ^^

Go to here: http://www.clocklink.com

Just get the html code and add to your template. Have fun!

There are many cool clocks there, here are some:

Joining these blog networks to improve your blog's rank

Join these and add their links on your blog. : )

http://technorati.com
http://link2blogs.com
http://blogtopsites.com
http://blogtoplist.com
http://bloglines.com
http://getblogs.com
http://topblogging.com
http://blogroll.net
http://topblogarea.com
http://bloggernow.com
http://globeofblogs.com

Traffic and hit counters for blog

Here are some good links for viewing where is your blog's traffic com from and getting hit counters I recommend:

You can use 1 or 2 along with 3, 4, 5, 6. ^^

1. http://sitemeter.com

2. http://www.histats.com

3. http://feedjit.com

4. http://geovisite.com

Joining these communities as well:

5. http://blogcatalog.com
6. http://mybloglog.com


Go get them!

10 nice ways to run traffic for your blog

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be series about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

This concept can be confusing so I suggest you take a look at the Carnival of the Cats for an example. You can also find a list of all the carnivals and submit your articles at the Carnival Submit Form.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King

Source: problogger.net

Introduction to Advertising Optimization - High Paying Ads

How to choose some high paying ads for your blog? Read this.

--------

Source: problogger.net



The last element of the mix to consider as you look to optimise your Advertising revenue on your blog is the actual amount that the ad will pay.

As we’ve discussed earlier in this series, there are many different advertising programs out there for bloggers - but most fall into three camps in terms of revenue. Firstly there is Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising, secondly Cost Per Impression (CPM - the M stands for the Roman numeral for one thousand and these ads are calculated on what you’re paid per one thousand impressions rather than per click) and thirdly there are programs that allow you to choose your own rates per time period (like BlogAds, Adbrite and private sponsorships).

CPM Ads - When it comes to CPM advertising programs it is pretty difficult to have much impact upon the ad value being paid. A program like Fastclick (aff) does let you specify which ads run on your site (or rather it lets you block some of the campaigns that it offers) and thereby you do have some impact on the level of income on your blog - but the process is reasonably messy and in my experience not really worth messing with (the tailoring of campaigns that is).

On the other hand the other two types of ads give you much more control over your ad values.

Time Related Ads - Obviously the ads you set the price on yourself is a matter of finding a price in the demand and supply spectrum that advertisers are willing to pay. This is not always easy and from my experience it can take a little time to hone in on the right figure to charge. For BlogAds and Adbrite ads for instance I usually just come up with a price that is similar to what others seem to be charging in my niche (BlogAds lets you look at what others charge) and then adjust it up or down over time depending upon how many people buy ads. If no one is buying I reduce the price, if people are buying lots I increase it.

When it comes to private ads it gets more tricky. I always struggle to know what an ad is worth and generally try to enter into a conversation with the advertiser to sound out their budget before coming up with a price. Again it’s about negotiating and seeing what others are paying. Over time you’ll get more of an idea on how to set your prices.

CPC Ads - These ads are usually more of an art form in systems like AdSense, YPN and Chitika. Different ads pay different amounts - largely dependent upon the keywords that triggers that advertisement. For instance in an ad program like AdSense if you have a blog about financial related products, the ads that appear on it are likely to pay more than a blog that is on the topic of pencils. The reasons are pretty obvious really - advertisers are going to be less likely to pay big dollars for ‘pencil ads’ than they are for ones advertising financial products.

What follows are some tips on how to maximize the amount that AdSense and Chitika ads will pay per click (I suspect that YPN will be similar to AdSense).

Finding High Paying Ads in AdSense

I’m often asked (weekly) by readers what keywords they should target on AdSense to maximize their income. My answer is always the same - target keywords that you’re writing about - relevant ads will always pay much better than irrelevant high paying ads (simply because people won’t click irrelevant ads).

Having said this - it can be worth doing some investigating around keyword value in AdSense because there can be significant differences in payouts on very similar words.

Finding high paying AdSense words isn’t always an easy thing though. Do a search for Google on High Paying Adsense Ads and you won’t find too many sites listing the best keywords for Adsense. The top Adsense users in Adsense discussion forums tend to be pretty secretive about not only what keywords they focus on, but also what sites they run. I don’t blame them either - its good business sense really.

Having said this there are a number of strategies and tools that you might like to employ to help find high paying keywords.

• Buy them - Finding high paying keywords for your blog is possible by yourself for free - but as with everything a few entrepreneurial types are willing to do the leg work for you to save you some time and give you a comprehensive result. One service that you might like to try to find good keywords is Top Paying Keywords (aff). I know of a number of ProBlogger readers who use it although have never felt the need to use it myself. I’m much more into the next method.
• Trial and Error - I know this will frustrate some of you who want a nice and easy quick fix but overall it is one of the best pieces of advice I can give. Try writing on a topic - track the results - if it pays off do it again….lots. Adsense allows you to track specific pages or sections of your blog using its ‘channels’ feature - if you’re smart you’ll watch which sections of your blog are generating the highest ads by dividing your overall earnings by the number of clicks and comparing it to other channels. Keep trying new topics until you strike gold and then dig in like crazy!
• 7 Search has a list of the 100 of the top paying keywords (in their advertising program - not Adsense) at the moment. Its a bit depressing actually to see a list like this because you’d have to sell your soul somewhat in order to go with many of them. Its an interesting site to check out though.
• Also from 7 Search (and more useful) is their Keyword Suggestion Tool which gives you an idea of what people are paying per click on different tools (again this is not specifically for Adsense but it will give you an idea of what the going rates are).
• Overture offers a service where you can enter your keywords and they will not only tell you how much advertisers are paying for the words but also how many people are searching for the term. This is a very useful tool that I use a lot to check keyword values. You do need to remember that the results you get with them are not for AdSense but another ad system and that they are what advertisers are willing to pay for words - and not what publishers get (ie the middle man always takes a cut). I do find it useful to compare keywords though.
• Sign up for Adwords - One way of getting a feel for how much people are willing to pay per click is to sign up with Google as an advertiser yourself. It doesn’t cost much to start a mini campaign and do some research this way. You’ll get a feel for what people are bidding on different words very quickly this way.
• Word Tracker is a good tool to help find keywords that people are searching for in the major search engines. The excellent thing about Word Tracker is that they also tell you how many other sites out there are targeting the same words. This is very handy as it will stop you targeting ‘Britney Spears’ as a Keyword phrase even though its one of the most searched for keywords on the web because literally hundreds of thousands of other sites have beaten you to the punch. Word Tracker has a free version to trial it.

Finding High Paying Ads for Chitika eMiniMalls

Probably the best advice that I can give with choosing the right keywords for your Chitika eMiniMall ads is to use trial and error and to track your experiments.

Ideally you’ll want to target keywords that are relevant to your content as much as possible (relevancy is crucial with these ads) but having said that if you want to go after higher paying ads I’d suggest setting up a channel for your test and to choose a keyword to test over a day or two and to run it exclusively on that channel (ie don’t rotate words). You’ll see very quickly (in that days statistics) by monitoring that channel what the keyword is paying. The next day try another word and see how it goes.

In this way you can not only track how much words are paying but also what kind of Click Through Rate the ads are getting.

I’ve also heard a number of bloggers say that if you search the ‘best selling buys’ in the different categories of these online stores that you will find higher paying ads. I’m not sure if this is the case - but there is some sense in this. In any case with the coming of channels we’ll soon know what type of keywords trigger what level of click values.

For example, on my digital cameras site, I visit the digital cameras section of shopping.com, and know that the results of that search generally pay pretty well as keywords in comparison to other cameras.

Ad Value isn’t everything

I want to finish by re-emphasising that with CPC ads that high paying ads are not everything. In fact you can have VERY high paying ads and not earn a cent if your ads are irrelevant and are poorly positioned and designed.

To maximise your ad performance you need to bring together all of the elements covered in this series - Traffic, Ad Position, Ad Design, Ad Relevancy and High Paying Ads. Become obsessed by any one of them and your overall earnings will suffer.

How To Market Your Blog in 2007

These useful tips are taken from problogger.net. Time for marketing your blog!

1. Write well, write consistently, don’t give up: All the marketing in the world won’t help you if you have a lame-duck blog. In your search for more traffic, more promotion, and more publicity, never forget it starts with great content — and needs to continue with great content on a regular schedule. There’s no question that maintaining quality and regularity is difficult while you’re starting out, particularly if you’re time strapped … but hang in there, because if you sacrifice this, all of your marketing efforts will be for naught.
2. Become an expert on something: Develop a keen interest, continue to read and write intelligently, and after a while, your experience will grant you this informal title; bloggers will seek you out, your reknown will grow, and it will be easier to be noticed, linked to, and get cross promoted (see below)
3. Design is more important than you think: Your mother’s right — first impressions count, and they can count for cash money. If you’re serious about blogging, don’t stick with a n unaltered top10 Wordpress theme no matter how cool you think it is. You want to separate and elevate yourself from the blogging masses, and its impossible to do if you look exactly the same as them. Easy to say, hard to do, but absolutely necessary if you don’t have the money to pay for a private ground-up theme: learn CSS and a photoeditor of choice, and learn to tweak your theme yourself, so that your blog looks professional, stands out, and screams “yes, I am worthy of your attention!”.
4. Get Your SEO On: An entire post in and of itself — get your own domain name, host your own blogging software, enable permalinks, create keyword rich headlines, create unique title tags, enable trackback and ping functionality, ensure your blog pings pinging-services.
5. Publish full feeds: A controversial topic. Publishing full feeds puts you at the mercy for content scrapers who will scrape your RSS feeds and repost your content, create traffic, and reap adsense bucks. On the other hand, some data suggests that it can also increase your traffic, and a few pundits swear by it. Feed subscriptions are critical; get your feeds burned through Feedburner so you can track how many are subscribing. People who subscribe to feeds rarely unsubscribe, and every single feed subscriber is a potential source of traffic to your blog.
6. Do interviews with other bloggers: Score interviews with newsworthy individuals (who may be linked to newsworthy content), to create link worthy content, but more importantly, create news on THEIR blog to get back to YOUR blog.
7. Break important stories: See the post on how to find news. Long story short: if you have an interest in an area, it is still possible to do this as long as you’re willing to put in the time and energy to find stuff. Benefit: being picked up by A-list blogs, mainstream news outlets and more.
8. Have a contest: Or, have regular contests, which encourage participation and buzz in your corner of the blogosphere.
9. Publish original research: If you’ve got the time, start with a question, try and figure it out with the data available, and “publish it”. For fun, I asked myself “How many of the Top 30 Diggers actually blog?” And I just went through their profiles and created a table of how many blogged. I then talked about what it meant, and tried to answer the question “why?” [answer: not many do blog, its because being a top 30 digger requires a huge time investment]
10. Put out Press Releases: Particularly if you have something new, unique, or particularly important to say (such as an important story, or research)
11. Work your long tail: A tip based on your SEO efforts; there is a free service called Hit Tail that will analyze the search terms leading to your blog traffic, and yank out high quality key words you should be focusing on that you might not immediately think of. This can help you focus your future posts as you are already getting traffic for those key words.
12. Answer your comments, in your comments, and off blog: Of course you have enabled comments on every post, right? So, when you do get comments, answer as many as humanly possible, and if its an interesting enough issue or question, contact the poster directly for a friendly follow up. Treat every potential poster as a potential subscriber to your feed, and a future friend and contact.
13. Spend time to create links and trackbacks: In every post spend as much time as you can to create outbound links to relevant and high linking blogs; many blogs automatically have trackbacks enabled, so in their comments section they will have a link back to your blog. If its a highly trafficked and ranked blog, this can mean traffic BACK to your blog, and it can draw notice from the author themselves — because, let’s face it, we’re all vain in a fashion, even A-listers, and we’re all interested in who is linking to us.
14. Get Your MyBlogLog widget and work it, work it, work it (in a nice way): MyBlogLog — know it, love it, and embrace it. Since its been acquired by Yahoo, it has the potential to explode all over the blogosphere. The two sentence run down is that it offers a free widget that enables you to build a free community around your blog, and to easily see which other bloggers have been to your blog. You can “add” friends, and generate traffic, but more importantly, your own network of like-minded blogging colleagues in a way that is relatively easy and efficient. Just go easy on the unsolicited messages. I wrote a complete review over here.

Getting the Word Out

1. Join a blog carnival: Where every blogger who joins one blogs about a topic, then each blog gets promoted. Here’s an index of blog carnivals to get you started.
2. Join blog network: Between 9rules, b5media, and others, there is networking potential, income potential, and a link-a-palooza waiting for you (through the linkroll as every member may have to link to every other member) if you’re able to get into one. Goes back to tip #1 — don’t forget to keep up your blog.
3. Participate in forums: Forums with tons of pages, huge lists of members, and a responsive community are an easy way to not only connect with other individuals, but an opportunity to tastefully demonstrate your expertise and a link back to your blog
4. Participate on larger blogs in comments: Like number three, except that by participating directly in another blogger’s comments you a) get their recognition and b) get the recognition of the blogging community. Also, here’s a tip: try and be one of the first few commenters on heavily trafficked sites to get recognized — most people won’t read past the first 10-20 comments. Here’s another tip for traffic: IF (and ONLY IF) you have posted something relevant that is pursuant to the ongoing conversation and IF the blog has a commenting policy that will allow you to do so, post a link back to a post on your own site (”hey guys, I wrote about how we can solve this problem! — check out the link over here, but let me summarize it for you … “). Sometimes you’ll be surprised at how much traffic comes back.
5. Join Blogburst: Blogburst is a type of “blog network”, which syndicates content across American newspaper’s websites, such as USA Today and Reuters. That’s right, you could get a post syndicated on Reuters. Trust me — it can happen . Highly ranked inbound links + traffic + bragging rights to your mom that your post got featured in a newspaper. Not too shabby. Also on the upside, they have a new revenue sharing scheme. The bad: read their terms of service carefully — you give up certain rights when they republish your content, and the revenue sharing works on the top100 publishers only.
6. Participate in Darren’s contests: He has enough of them, and often publishes links to all of the participants.
7. Submit to blog directories: So people can find your blog.
8. Submit to Google sitemaps: Really part of “get your house in order”, but when you do, Google will be able to find you so much easier; translation — more Google juice, more traffic, higher rankings faster. Tip: for Wordpress fans, this plugin is particularly useful.
9. Submit to article directories: You might want to submit your favourite posts to article directories, where they will enable you to have a biobox / blurb with a link back to your own blog. Again, demonstrating your expertise, and moreover, the article might get picked up in a ezine or another blog, leading to more traffic and more inbound links.
10. Get interviewed: If you’ve demonstrated your expertise, or have done something newsworthy, or reported on something newsworthy, try and get interviewed. As long as its done in a fair way (doesn’t need to be a completely puffpiece) by a site or blogger with some reknown, its more traffic for you.
11. Get listed on a news aggregator, or blog aggregator: Like Techmeme for technews, or Tailrank for blogging news. Hint: some news aggregators will actually accept submissions if you ask them nicely; double hint: try and get listed by linking to a top story within your first 100 words.
12. Create free stuff for yourself and give it away: Like ebooks, digests of your favourite posts, pdfs, and so on. Make sure to include a link back in the document, back to your site.
13. Create free stuff for other people: the same, let them distribute it, get a link back.
14. Pay for pub: Efficient means of using your cash is to buy targeted Adwords, or keywords in Yahoo’s advertising network; you could get other bloggers to write about you using PayPerPost or ReviewMe; or you purchase text link ads through Text-Link-Ads.com

Connect, Connect, Connect

1. Make friends with other bloggers: Ridiculously simple, but its true. Benefits of “networking” (making friends) include more mentions on other blogs, more requests for interviews, more partnerships in future deals, more “adds” into their MyBlogLog network, more “ads” into someone else’s blogroll (and therefore links back to your blog) — it goes on and on.
2. Guest blog: Offer to do it for free, and you’ll be able to demonstrate what you know to an entirely new audience. Gives you great credibility, and of course, most will allow a courtesy link back to your own blog. A free foot-in-the-door to some communities as well.
3. Volunteer, intern, scut-monkey your way into a blogger’s graces: Maintaining a highly trafficked site is a lot of work. Offer to volunteer your time with menial behind the scenes stuff (moderating posts, acting as a bird dog for news) for free and with a smile, and you’ll get a foot-in-the-door with the blogger, their network, and future opportunities.
4. Get hired: You never know which blog organizations are looking to hire new bloggers; again, an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge, meet new bloggers, and open tons of professional “doors” … because now that you’re getting paid? You’re a “pro-blogger”, mate!
5. Network in person: Find other local bloggers using services like Meetup, and see if they’re literally getting together to commiserate about blogging or their topic of blogging. If you’ve got the time, there’s nothing that makes an impression as actually meeting someone in person. Tip: bring a business card; Another tip: if you don’t have any, make some; yet another tip: if important people are going to be there, really — try and go. Remember, you didn’t know me before Problogger, but I met Darren in person at a function in Toronto that played a part in me writing this. Think about that.
6. Join virtual groups: Through Yahoo Groups, Usenet, and more; then bring the conversation off the group with emails and instant messages. Be friendly, be helpful, and it will pay dividends.
7. Cross promote: Once you’ve gotten to know people, you can kindly remind them to promote posts that you’re particularly proud of; or, vote for your submissions on Digg or your social bookmarking site of choice. Reciprocate.

Make Social Media Work For You

1. Facebook: Its a social network that has opened its doors behind its college beginnings. Anyone can sign up. Start connecting with old friends and colleagues, like any other social network. But, unlike other social networks (as far as I know), you can import your own blog’s RSS feed, so that your connections can see what you’re blogging. Who knows where that might lead? Update: Myspace also allows this function, i believe.
2. Join Helium: Helium is a new site that is actively looking people to head new categories of content. Think a paid “about.com” — for its authors. If you have a particular interest that isn’t yet served on Helium you might want to check it out; besides giving you cash for content, it’ll also demonstrate your authority in a topic, and you’ll be able to leverage Helium’s own traffic for your own blog through a linkback on your profile.
3. Yahoo Answers! A similar idea; but this time, you’re answering questions that people are posting. Yahoo! is quite careful about spam, however, and including a “signature” is a dicey proposition at times. There is a fairly sophisticated registry and voting system that tries to prevent “gaming”, but given how much traffic yahoo! answers gets, AND its inclusion as a separate result area in Yahoo SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) it might be something worth looking into.
4. Create a Squidoo Page Lens: On a given related topic to your blog; participate in the Squidoo community; Squidoo has a ton of traffic, and you could funnel traffic and tastefully include links to other relevant sites and perhaps your own blog.
5. Use MySpace Marketing: Far beyond the confines of this post, but in a similar fashion to Squidoo, the idea is to capitalize on the HUGE amount of traffic MySpace gets (some interesting thoughts over here). Create a profile, create relevant content and links back. Start adding friends. Comment on your friends space. Join groups. Start enjoying the trickle back traffic.
6. Get Dugg / Netscaped / Reddited / Stumbled upon: Whole articles (and sites) are written about the intricacies of socially bookmarking. Here’s a tip: focus on creating great content, make friends on these sites if they allow you to, and submit your stories judiciously. ‘Nuff said (for now).

10 Tips for Writing Better Posts

Here are some tips for writing good posts, just post here for sharing... ^^


-------

A blog is only as good as its content. Increasing the quality of our blog posts can bring traffic, inbound links, social bookmarks, subscribers, comments, and other rewards every blogger works hard to achieve. This post lists ten simple things you can do to produce better posts, every time.


1. Write headlines that promise value. The reason numbered headlines are so in vogue is that they’re incredibly specific about what the reader will get by reading the article. You can be both specific and gripping without numbers, however, as long as you use your headlines to give readers an enticing preview not of what your article is about, but what it has to offer. A good strategy is to think of your headline as the sign on a door you want readers to open: what kind of sign would make the reader want to peek inside?

2. Begin with a gripping lead. A great headline will get your readers to open the door, but the strength of your first paragraph will determine whether they step inside. The first few sentences of your posts should expand on the headline and get more specific about what the content has to offer, whether it be entertainment, humor, information, or important facts.

3. Signpost your logic with sub-headings. I tend to go against the grain in my reasoning for using sub-headings. As far as I’m concerned, sub-headings help your visitors read, not simply scan. Good sub-headings give readers an angle to approach the following paragraph, help interlink your ideas, and break up complicated thoughts into manageable chunks.

4. Utilize whitespace and images. Whitespace is the empty space in your blog layout (whether it’s white or not). Whitespace around your text makes it much easier to read, and a simple way to introduce more whitespace into your posts is to use frequent paragraph breaks. Another strategy to make your posts more readable is to break up your posts with relevant and illustrative images.

5. Weave appropriate links into your words. A good rule of thumb: whenever you write a string of words specifically relevant to content you’ve seen elsewhere, or a previous post you’ve written, turn those words into a link. There are a great number of benefits to doing this. You may be noticed by those you’re linking to, you can get traffic from trackbacks, it can encourage readers to explore your blog, and it adds another layer of depth and detail to what you write.

6. Suggest further reading. When appropriate, direct readers to other content you’ve written on the topic at the end of your post. Some bloggers do this with the ‘Related Posts’ widget, but you’re more likely to capitalize on reader attention of you suggest the links within the body of your post, while they’re still in ‘reading mode’.

7. Engage the reader. A simple strategy for increasing your comments is to ask readers what they think. Opinions are much more freely given than experiences, so asking for opinions is likely to produce better results.

8. Rigorously edit what you’ve written. Check for typos, make sure your links work, check that your logic is clear and your formatting is displaying correctly. Fixing up your posts at a later date may cause the post to re-appear in feed readers, which won’t be appreciated by those who’ve already seen it.

9. Make it shorter. Delete unnecessary words, sentences, and paragraphs. Retain only the minimum amount of information needed to make your point. Readers are more likely to commit to reading something they know they will finish. You don’t need to make every post you write short, but you will always benefit from making it shorter.

10. If you have the time, let your posts marinate. When you’ve been working on a piece of writing for an hour or two it can be hard to look at it with fresh eyes. You’ve probably noticed how different a piece of writing can seem when you re-read it a few days later, once you’ve had time to forget the thoughts behind each sentence. Letting your posts sit for a time will allow you to better look at your work from the perspective of a reader, and work out what needs to be improved.


Source: dailyblogtips.com

10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers

1. Make it easy and obvious

As I’ve said before in more detail, make your subscription options prominent, offer an email alternative to RSS, and ask for the subscription, preferably at the bottom of each post.

2. Be laser focused

Make sure that you are primarily focusing on a particular topic, and the more specialized that topic is, the better you’ll do. It’s also key to step back and evaluate whether there are enough prospective readers in your chosen niche. It’s better to be brutally honest with yourself than to toil away and end up disappointed.

3. Offer a bribe

Relax, it’s nothing illegal. It’s an ethical bribe, in the form of a free ebook, report, e-course or audio series. Typically this only works with email subscriptions tied to autoresponders, because you want to condition delivery of the bonus on subscription.

But here’s a nifty way to do it with RSS:

If you have a WordPress blog, use the free Feedvertising plugin to link to the download page for your free gift. Since Feedvertising links only show up in the feed (and not in the post), only feed subscribers will see the link and have access to the bonus.

4. Use viral ebooks

This is a spin on the ethical bribe strategy, but instead you let other people give away your PDF ebook or even bundle it for sale with other products. The PDF in turn promotes your blog. Check out this post to see how I bundled my free Viral Copy report with a book that spent several days at the top of the Amazon bestseller list.

5. Dedicated subscription landing page

Create a page that is dedicated to nothing more than obtaining a subscription, and drive traffic to it from your blog, AdWords, or really any other source you want. You can even put it on a unique URL, and add in the ethical bribe strategy to increase signups. For more information on doing this with AdWords, read this article, and then this one.

6. Become a guest blogger

Contributing content to someone else’s blog may seem crazy, but it’s a solid strategy to gain exposure for your own blog and build your subscriber base. Just make it very clear to the blog owner that you require a very brief byline at the end of the post, with a link back to your site. And make sure it’s original content, not something recycled off of your blog.

7. Start a podcast

Start a related podcast on your subject matter, and get it into iTunes and listed in the various podcasting directories. Mention your blog in every episode and the benefits of subscribing, and try to land some interviews with prominent players in your niche. Not only will you be opening up a new promotional channel, you’re also creating bonus content that can be reused as part of your ethical bribe campaign for new subscribers.

8. Post in forums

A tried and true technique since the earliest days of the Internet is to be a helpful, proactive participant in forums that are important in your niche. People will notice that you are offering yourself up to others, and will be more inclined to see what else you have to offer with your blog.

9. Networking

This is perhaps the most overlooked strategy for gaining traffic and subscribers. Don’t badger other bloggers for links, because it rarely works anymore. Find a way to help them with something, and then eventually work that initial graciousness into a business relationship and even friendship. There are real people behind these blogs, and they respond to good will just like people do offline.

10. Cross-promotional deals

Here’s another cool way to make use of the Feedvertising plugin for WordPress.

Find a blogger that publishes related, but non-competitive content. Work out a deal where you both promote each other in your RSS feeds, using Feedvertising. If one blog has way more subscribers than the other, work out a ratio deal. Since Feedvertising allows you to create up to six rotating links, the smaller blog would promote the other blog continuously, while the larger blog would reserve one slot for the smaller blog, and use the other slots for other cross-promotion deals, affiliate links, or sponsor ads.

So there you have it, with one additional word of caution.

All of the above presupposes that you are producing the best content you can. If you honestly cannot say that you are doing your best work content-wise, start there. But afterwards, using some or all of the above will definitely increase your subscriber count.

Source: www.copyblogger.com