Archive for November, 2009

15 Tips to Unclog Your Blog : Breaking Blogger’s Block

by Ades on November 30, 2009 in Blogging Tips, Guest Posts with 51 Comments

Edward Khoo is a full time blogger from Malaysia. You can follow him on twitter at @squall768

The phenomenon of blogs has caught on, in case you hadn’t noticed. In just a few years, bloggers went from the unknown, unread, poor cousins of mainstream media to a powerful force that help shape everything from political policies to better eating habits.

However, keeping your blog fresh takes dedication, drive and hard work. It’s something you should do regularly and think about often as you drive around town. Here are some tips to keep you motivated, writing and posting. After all, your blog is important. It’s your little piece of the W3 landscape so take ownership and use it to spread your message.

1. Create a blog on a topic about which you have a passion or genuine interest.
It’s much easier writing about topics that actually interest you. So, if you’re interested in politics on a global scale, create a political blog that covers topics of interest to like-minded readers.

Writing about a topic that interests you is not a work. It feeds your natural, innate curiosity. You learn more as you teach others what you’ve learned.

2. Set aside a time each day to write your posts.
Schedule an hour a day (or more if you really want the world to read what you have to say) and stick to the schedule. Instead of turning on the TV after dinner, write a 500-word post for tomorrow.

If you opt to write when the spirit moves you, it may never move you and you may never post. There are thousands of dusty old blogs out there with posts that are five years old. Nobody is going to read that.

3. Visit blogs on the same topic as your blog.
You can’t copyright an idea. You can’t own an idea. So, visit blogs that cover topics similar to your own.

Now, you can’t (and shouldn’t) rip off content from other bloggers. That’s just bad form. But you will find topics you hadn’t thought of. Spin these articles to make them your own. Rewrite them from a different point of view. Reference other blogs and even link to them when the topic is related.

Blogging is a big part of web connectivity. Use it to discover people who share your interests, whatever they may be.

4. Take your blog seriously.
Think of it as a job – one wherein you’re the boss. No editor. You’re the editor. Post at least twice a week. Three times weekly is even better and daily is the best. Visitors to your blog will stop coming by if they see the same content each time they visit.

This ties back to point number one. If you have an interest or expertise about which you’re passionate, posting daily won’t be a chore. It’ll be fun. As you learn more about your topic, you’ll enjoy spreading the news.

5. Google the topic of your blog.
There are always new trends, new opinions, new concepts and new ideas available on the W3. Google keywords related to the topicality of your blog for new ideas and new topics about which to write.

6. Provide helpful information.
Even though it’s your blog – your digital real estate, your blog isn’t about you. It’s about your readers. Provide helpful information in your posts and you’ll soon start to build a following.

7. Keep your gadgets and widgets fresh.
There will be days when you just don’t have time to write a lengthy post on your passion for ceramics. However, you can post tips daily in your widget column. (See the miniblog on top of Adesblog? That’s what I am talking about!) Update these posts with quick tips. They’re only a few words and the tips you provide in your widget column will keep readers coming back. Continue reading →

Robert Kiyosaki Interivew on AlJazeera

by Ades on November 26, 2009 in Business, Make Money with 24 Comments

I am sure most of you don’t watch AlJazeera especially those who are in the States. So if you have missed, here is an interview with Robert Kiyosaki on AlJazeera with Riz Khan. Robert Kiyosaki is well known for his book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, his latest book is “Rich Dad’s Conspiracy of the Rich”.

What’s your opinion on the education system of your country? Does it prepare you to be successful businessman or good employee? I think in almost all countries in the world, it’s the latter. Please share your thoughts on this in the comments section.

Watch part-2 after the jump Continue reading →

google image swirl

by Ades on November 26, 2009 in miniblog with 11 Comments

check out google image swirl http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com

Some people don’t like backlinks

by Ades on November 24, 2009 in SEO & Promotion with 68 Comments

Some people just don’t like free backlinks, even if the number of backlinks are over 2000 :) Here is an email I got recently:

Yes, as requested I removed his backlinks from the blog. I guess he is like a Rupert Murdoch.

Next Wave is Mobile Internet

by Ades on November 24, 2009 in Business Ideas with 25 Comments

If you are still planning to create that “Make Money Online” blog of yours, you are probably too late… Now is not the time to create make money online blogs…

Instead why don’t you think about riding the next wave? That is – Mobile Internet.

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What can you do for the upcoming wave of Mobile Internet? Many things, some of the things you can do are;

developing mobile applications or ask others to develop it for you (for iPhone, Android, Symbian…etc),
developing app-store solutions (create your own getjar.com)
developing mobile phone services
manufacturing your own smart-phone :)

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Above screenshots were taken from this report by MorganStanley.

WebHostingGeeks – Hosting Reviews

by Ades on November 22, 2009 in Blogging Tips with 20 Comments

If you are new to setting up websites or blogs on the net, choosing hosting companies can be a real headache. You wouldn’t know which one to choose, all seem to claim offering great services, low prices and guaranteed 99% uptime (find out what does that mean here). web hosting geeks reviews

WebHostingGeeks is a website that offers a platform for people to review web hosting companies. Independent reviews are published in more than 10 categories, eg; overall web hosting, dedicated server, vps hosting etc.

When getting a hosting for your website/blog, third party opinions and reviews matter a lot. Don’t just go and get a hosting based on what you see on their website. Rather do some research and see what others are saying about the company. For example, on WebHostingGeeks InMotion got over 200 reviews and most of them are positive. That says a lot about the company and its services.

Tip: If possible, try to keep your domain names and hosting separate (i.e don’t get both of them from the same company). Because, when you change your hosting, and believe me you will… it can get complicated. Normally, I keep all my domain names with goDaddy and my hosting with Pair Networks.

Website: http://webhostinggeeks.com

Very Useful Trick using Majestic SEO

by Ades on November 19, 2009 in Research, SEO & Promotion with 17 Comments

By browsing Majestic SEO’s blog I stumbled upon a post that offers great tactic that might be useful to some of you. If you sell things online and offer affiliate program, surely you want to know about your competitors’ affiliate program i.e how many affiliates they have, who are the affiliates (maybe you can win them over) etc.

This post shows step by step how to find your competitors’ affiliates using Majestic SEO.

URL: http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/finding-affiliates-using-majestic/

Majestic SEO tool, free for your personal blog

by Ades on November 18, 2009 in SEO & Promotion with 30 Comments

MajesticSEO offers great set of SEO tools. I think they are the only one that do not require you to install a script to track the statistics of your blog. So how they get the data about your blog? They simply gather it from the internet (referring domains, backlinks, anchor texts etc).

While the service is paid, they allow you to get complete stats for your own blog (i.e for one URL). That’s enough for most bloggers. Check it out!

Website: http://www.majesticseo.com

Rupert Murdoch to Use Robot.txt to Block Google

by Ades on November 16, 2009 in News, Search Engines with 22 Comments

Rupert Murdoch the founder and CEO of the world’s second largest media conglomerate News Corp. has said in his latest interview with Sky News that they will be blocking Google from indexing their sites.

This he said will be their strategic move to increase the profitability of their online versions of their newspapers. Somehow he believes that Google is doing more harm by sending tons of traffic to their websites because he thinks that it’s better to have small number of people who pay (paid subscribers) rather than tons of people who do not pay and read his (News Corp) news from Google News for free (even if Google provides a link back).

News Corp. own tons of newspapers, magazines, tv and radio stations worldwide. Newspapers like The Sun (UK), The New York Times (US), and The Wall Street Journal (US) are owned by News Corp. (full list here)

That’s an interesting strategy indeed. He is the only person I heard on internet who doesn’t want traffic and Google’s indexing of his sites :) Normally everyone is after traffic and always trying to improve their SEO to better rank in major Search Engines.

I personally think this strategy of R.Murdoch will do more harm to his websites’ profitability if he indeed will block all search engines from indexing his sites. Sure, he might have loyal customers who will read WSJ and New York times everyday, but any product and website needs advertising. And free advertising like what Google is doing for them is the best thing that any website can get. He only needs to tweak the website to make it free section and paid section. Perhaps free section could only have some brief news and full articles could be accessed only by paid members etc.

Bad for Google?

In his private mailing list, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo suggested that, this move by News Corp might be bad for Google and good for Google’s competitors. Because he believes, now is the time for Bing and Yahoo to approach News Corp directly and be the exclusive provider of News Corp’s news on their search engines. Obviously this would affect Google’s reach and Google’s competitors could effectively snatch some Search Engine Share from Google. (read his article here).

What is your opinion on this issue? Do you think R.Murdoch is doing a right move by blocking Search Engines? Do you think his move is a loss for Google? (R.Murdoch’s interview on YouTube after the jump) Continue reading →

Results: Guest posting on Problogger.net

by Ades on November 13, 2009 in Blogging Tips with 42 Comments

Around 1.5 months ago I guest-blogged on Darren’s blog at problogger.net. Today I would like to share with you the results of this exercise.

I think the success of the guest-blogging depends on many things, on things like;

Authority, traffic, user-base… of the blog that you are guest-blogging.
Topic of your guest-post; how interesting it is, how beneficial it is, how well it is written etc.
What you have done to capture the new visitors to your blog?

So, as you can see the variables are many. For this reason, it’s very difficult to analyze one guest-post at one particular blog and apply the results on other bogs. However, for simplicity reasons, let’s say what economists like to say “ceteris paribus (all other things being equal)” and proceed with the results. I am sure the results will be beneficial to many bloggers, despite the fact that it’s based on one guest-post on Problogger. Just remember to keep those variables in mind if you decide to guest blog on other blogs. Do some basic research on the blog and its followers, niche, traffic etc. before deciding to give away one of your best articles.

Should you give away your best articles as guest-posts?

When I was done with my blog post titled “5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours“, I was about to push that “publish” button in my WordPress and then I remembered “How about I give away this blog post as guest-post to some high-traffic blog?”. I was satisfied with the quality of the post so I decided to test if it is worth to give away your best articles as guest-posts.

I quickly made a list of potential blogs that I could send my guest-post to. From a handful of blogs that I have selected, Problogger definitely stood out, so I sent a quick email to Darren.

Few things to remember when sending an email:

Write a brief intro about yourself (name), your blog (give URL) and the topic of your guest-post. Don’t make it more than 5 sentences. No one wants to read long emails.
Attach the article that you wrote to the email. Top-bloggers are usually busy and do not have time to reply (especially when they do not know you). So make it easy to get published, attach your guest-post to the email.
Give a time-frame to review and get back to you. 2-3 days should be fine. Let him/her know that if you do not hear back from him/her during this time-frame you will be posting it on your own blog or send to another blogger. This will make things clear for both of you.

The Results

The post itself on Problogger got over 900 tweets. So that’s a lot of traffic, even according to Problogger standards. It also received more than 150 comments.

On my side, Google Analytics is showing that Problogger sent me 384 visitors during the 20 days period after the guest-post was published. Which is not much but then again I am guessing that my WP-Cache plugin might have affected the real stats.

I use caching for my blog and it refreshes every 60 minutes. During the first week MyBlogLog statistics was showing over 100 visitors per day from Problogger. Anyway, my guesstimation is that the traffic was between 300 to 800 visitors for the whole 20 day period. (anyone have details whether wp-cache plugin affects traffic stats?)

RSS Subcribers: +50 (give or take)
Twitter Followers: +100 (give or take)

Conclusion

As a conclusion, for my case I would say the guest-blogging was definitely worth it. Increases in the RSS and Twitter followers and the flow of traffic for the first week was very significant. I certainly noticed the spike in all three.

As for you guys, you should definitely try guest-blogging as one of your marketing strategies. Only thing, like I said in the beginning of this post, choose the target blog and the topic of your guest-post very carefully and wisely. Also, titles play important role too, so make your titles catchy (but not misleading).

I hope you found this post interesting and beneficial. If you did, please tweet, stumble, digg… thanks!

Subscribe to my RSS: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/AdesBlog

StackOverflow Careers (Beta)

by Ades on November 6, 2009 in Software with 17 Comments

If you are a programmer or an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) then you have probably heard about Joel Spolsky and his company and his book and his blog and his projects. If not, then he is one of the guys you should follow… especially if you are into creating successful startups, products and hiring bright minds to your IT startups.

He has now launched a new project called StackOverflow Careers (Beta) for programmers to submit their CVs. Basically it will be a repository of CVs of programmers. The idea is to reverse the hiring process where instead of employees searching and submitting their CVs for various companies and job openings, it will be employers who will come to StackOverflow Careers database and look for talented programmers.

It’s similar to JobStreet’s http://PitchYourTalent.com but it’s only for software developers.

Website: http://careers.stackoverflow.com

Winners of Balsamiq Mockups Contest

by Ades on November 5, 2009 in Contests with 11 Comments

Second and Third Winners of the Balsamiq Mockups Contest are Nurbek Jusupov @nurbek and Brad Taylor @bradtaylor_au. Congratulations guys! You are now the owner of highly acclaimed mockup designing software each, enjoy!

I would like to thank Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni, Founder and CEO of Balsamiq Studios for sponsoring three copies of his great software for this contest.

If you want to own a copy for yourself after this, you can get it from http://www.balsamiq.com.