AdesBlog.com

Top commenters for June were: Rajaie AlKorani, Rice Blogger, Blog for Beginners, Eva White, Platform Beds, PS3, SEOrious Results, Marketing Man, PPC, and Dining Tables.

Thanks guys for being part of AdesBlog’s community!

P.S Why you should comment on AdesBlog? Well, there are many reasons, but one of the practical reasons is SEO for your blog. For example, try searching google for SEOrious Results (one of the commenters above), see any familiar blog in the results? (yes it’s that powerful ;)

Obviously it works better for new blogs that are competing in the niche market or in niche keyword targeting.

Popular keyword research tool Wordtracker is giving free 7 day full-access to its system.

I think 7 days is a plenty of time for me to research my keywords, I just have to remember to cancel my subscription within this period.

Please note that you will have to supply your Credit Card details when registering, so if you do not want your card to be charged, you will have to cancel your subscription within 7 days.

How to use Wordtracker? You can use Wordtracker to find keywords that are relevant to your products and services, how people are finding things that are similar to your products and services.

For example, let’s say you sell wordpress templates, so you optimize your site for this keyword - “wordpress templates“. But using Wordtracker you might find that equal number of people are finding your competitors’ sites, searching for keyword “blog themes“. So, Wordtracker will tell you what keyword you should target to attract more visitors to your website.

Below is the screenshot of one of the tools of Wordtracker. If you want to try it out for 7 days for free, you can register here.

Page: http://www.wordtracker.com/trial

CNET’s Download.com is one of the most popular sites for downloading softwares. If you are a software developer, I strongly recommend listing your site on Download.com for the following reasons:

Firstly, from my own experience (listing my color picker) I noticed that this is a great way to reach wider audience. Because your software not only appears on Download.com but on their whole network of sites (see AdesClrPicker on ZDNet.com, ZDNet Australia, TechRepublic, The New York Times, CNET Asia, CNET UK…etc) over 20 sites.

Getting your software on Download.com is already great, but getting it on more than 20 popular sites is even better.

Secondly, listing your software on Download.com can save you bandwidth, especially if your software is big in size or if the download traffic is too high. Download.com can host your software on their server for unlimited amount of downloads.

It’s also the trusted source of download for your customers, unlike many free file hosting services that could hurt your reputation.

Thirdly, I see that other smaller download sites see Download.com as their source for new softwares and software updates. So, getting your software on Download.com means — getting your software on hundreds of other smaller sites for free.

How much it costs? Is it worth the money?

Uploading your software to Download.com is done through its other site Upload.com. They have two different listing packages; one costs $9/month and another $99/month (see details).

I took $9/month package, with what I have listed above I would say it totally worths the price!

P.S Consider listing your software on Snapfiles.com and Tucows.com too.

Are you a blogger but not a twitter user? I don’t think that statement is true to many bloggers. Because most of the bloggers are already twitter users. But just in case if you are the one who blogs but doesn’t use twitter (yet). Maybe you should start using it after all?

I will give you a very good reason why you should join Twitter. Twitter is increasingly becoming one of the top sources of traffic to many people’s blogs.

JasonCalacanis: Twitter is the #2 referrer of traffic to my blog… behind Google. Wow.

ShoeMoney: twitter has now become the 4th largest source of referral traffic to this blog so that in a round about way would I guess contribute to monetization. I have seen people spam affiliate links and stuff so I am guessing that works too…

Top Traffic Sources to ProBlogger:

1. google / organic - 42.89%
2. (direct) / (none) - 17.59%
3. google / referral - 5.10%
4. stumbleupon / referral - 2.54%
5. yahoo / organic - 2.05%
6. twitter.com / referral - 1.87%
7. lifehacker / referral - 1.74%
8. delicious / referral - 1.65%
9. bloglines / referral - 0.81%
10. technorati / referral - 0.79%

GuyKawasaki: Twitter increased traffic. Jim Long is a cameraman for NBC. He flys around the world on Air Force One covering whatever the president does. One day he tweeted that he saw Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical 2 eating and smooching in Cafe Sydney in Australia while George W. was at APEC/OPEC. Someone picked up this tweet and truemored it, and this brought Truemors tens of thousands of page views. By the way, if you think insipid celebrity sightings doesn’t create traffic, you’re very wrong.

So if you are not a twitter user yet, then head straight to twitter.com and get yourself an account. Don’t forget to follow me huh? www.twitter.com/adesblog

If you find it difficult to tweet, try using this plugin which will post your blog posts automatically to your twitter account.

Previously I have written articles on .htaccess, they are:

• Tip: Increase your blog’s chances to get Stumbled(Upon)
• How to redirect traffic that comes from certain URL to another
• Why you should redirect yourblog,com to www,yourblog.com

But since not all of you know how to use and modify .htaccess file on your server, I am writing this basic htaccess tutorial.

What is this (htaccess) file and what does it do?

It is a file for managing directories on the web server (i.e your web hosting). the name htaccess comes from “hypertext access”. With htaccess, you can do many things, like:

• Defining your error documents (eg. 404 errors)
• Password protecting your directories
• Blocking users by IP
• Blocking traffic from certain sites
• Blocking bad bots (eg. spammers)
• Preventing hotlinking of your images
• Redirecting pages to another
• and many more

Where is this file?

.htaccess is a file that is usually found in your root directory. If your web-host allows you to see it, you can see the file together with your other files in your root folder (see below). However sometimes web-hosts do make them hidden (so that you don’t accidentally modify it or delete it).

You can also create different .htaccess files for different sub-folders on your website. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the root folder. However htaccess directives in the root folder will apply automatically to all sub-folders, so you have to be careful of what you do with it. For example, blocking google.com will be a nightmare to most sites. Especially if you are an e-commerce site that rely on Google traffic.

How to create them?

htaccess files can be created by notepad. Here is a sample htaccess file from my adesdesign.net site.

You can see that in my htaccess file I have defined Error files, and also have redirected adesdesign.net to www. adesdesign,net (with www). As you know URL with and without “www” are considered two different websites to the search engines. Therefore redirecting one to another is very important. Here is how you can do that.

So, creating htaccess file is easy. Just open the notepad, type in your commands and save it as .htacess (yes with dot in front) for the file name and select “all files” for file type as shown in the screenshot to the right. Save.

I hope you find this article useful. Do let me know if you have any questions in the comments section.

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Guys at MarketLeverage.com are quite creative. They have found a novel way to get mentioned on top blogs like problogger (46K+ readers) and shoemoney (16K+ readers) with a small investment that the team themselves will enjoy wearing. They purchased these two blogs’ t-shirts and wore them and sent a picture of the whole team wearing the t-shirts. Guess what? They got dedicated post on both blogs. That’s what we call a win-win situation. MarketLeverage (win), two blogs (win).

Shoemoney t-shirts are just $5.00 each for both men and women, and problogger t-shirts are $17.99 for women and $23.99 for men. So, LeverageMarket spent about $50 on shoemoney and $132 on problogger (unless they bought double logo t-shirts, which are more expensive). It’s a fraction of what you would actually spend to get publicity on these high-traffic blogs, if you were to go through normal conventional way of advertising.

Moral of the post: Be creative!