Ifttt (if this then that) is one of my favorite online tools. It’s a free automation tool for popular online tools and services. It can do a lot of stuff, below screenshot should give you some ideas on what it can do. These are some of the ready ‘recipes’ that you can use right away.
But you can also do a lot of custom recipes of your own. If you like Google Alerts you will love Ifttt, because it can do a lot more than Google Alerts.
Website: Ifttt.com
You run a nice business. Maybe you’ve been running it for years. Your business is a “tangible” one. Perhaps you operate out of a storefront or maybe you deal in personal services, like catering or landscaping. You’ve thought about going online. Heck, everybody else is doing it. 
you’ve already gotten your feet wet using the Internet a little to build business leads. Maybe you even have a home page. Or maybe you’ve even gotten hold of a generic template and patched together a bare-bones website, just to show everyone that you can be as cool as they are. But, truth be told, you haven’t really given the Internet a whole lot of thought. How could you? You are way too busy running your offline business to start worrying about the online world.
So when the day finally comes when you see enough of your competitors coming up with flashier and fancier websites, will you be prepared to do something yourself? And when you do something, will you have given it enough thought and preparation to do it in a way that will help your business more than hurt it? Here are some tips to help you make your online presence most effectively complement your offline business:
Invest in your website. Managing the site properly takes time and effort. So don’t skimp on the resources you devote to site management. If your budget allows it, hire a full-time site manager who knows what he/she is doing – or even better, develop a web team. Make sure they have a wealth of knowledge about the Web and that they understand design techniques, color theory, spacing, etc. Many companies make the mistake of assigning web management as a corollary duty to a person already busy with “higher-priority” assignments. In some larger firms, web maintenance is often relegated to junior staff members who have neither the experience nor the clout within the organization to push the site forward to its rightful prominence. Invest in your website so that it can become a good investment for you.
Keep your message consistent. Your website is an online reflection of your business. Therefore, it should have the same look and feel as your store, your ads, your signage, and your business vehicles. Your brand identity should be mirrored on your site in every way possible. Pay attention to thinks like colors, logos, fonts, visuals, and even the style of language you use on your site. Remember that one of the biggest advantages to having a website is that it gives you a permanent conveyor of round-the-clock publicity for your business.
Use social networking properly. Prominent links to social media tools such Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn are great ways to extend your reach and interact with new and diverse audiences. But you have to be sure that you do this in the right way. Always keep in mind that the primary purpose of social networking is for people to engage Continue reading →
I have guest-blogged on Darren Rowse’s blog Problogger.net, the post title is “5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours“. It’s a very practical post that will be beneficial when you launch a new project. I hope you will find it a useful read.
My thanks to Darren for the opportunity!
ProBlogger Readers, Welcome to AdesBlog!
If you came here from Problogger.net, I would like to welcome you to my blog. My name is Ades and this is my blog AdesBlog.com where I talk about Blogging, Usability, Making Money Online, Entrepreneurship, WordPress.. etc.
If you have found my guest-post on Problogger useful, you might like the following posts too.
For more great posts please go to my Popular Posts page, you may also browse the blog through Categories links in the right column below.
Lastly, I hope to see you around on my blog from now onwards. Please drop by again for more great articles!
Subscribe to my RSS: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/AdesBlog
Great Free Color Picker for Bloggers: http://www.adesclrpicker.com – my freeware software that will make getting HTML color codes from screen a snap! Give it a try!
Are you a company that is into corporate blogging? Do you feel that somehow your blog is not taking off? Nobody’s commenting?
Well, I think it’s a common problem in many companies. They are just into it (i.e corporate blogging) because they saw their competitors had a blog, or they don’t want to be seen left behind, or the boss said so!
If you want your corporate blog to be successful, you can’t take it as another PR tool only. Sure, you can post the news about your company, new products and services, events that your company is sponsoring etc. But corporate blogging is not about that only, if you restrict your blog into all the above mentioned things alone then it’s not a blog… it’s just a “news page” that is located under your domain dot com/blog directory.
Recommendations and Examples
For your corporate blog to be successful you need to do at least several things, the more the better, namely:
net.tuts has a great roundup of 10 online data backup tools here.
This is an interesting business model and a useful tool for those who want ‘outside the box’ ideas for their new websites’ domains.
Let’s say you are launching a new online project and thinking of finding a suitable domain name for it. You have brainstormed yourself and have listed some domain names, but you are unsure if they are creative enough or web2.0 enough. So you think, only if I could use the creativity of the internet users for this task!
PickyDomains is a website that allows you to utilize the internet users’ ideas… It’s not free but for $50 you could land a ‘million dollar domain name’ so to speak. So it works like this, you give $50 to them and wait for suggestions to flow in… once you like particular domain name you chose it to purchase it. All suggested domain names are available domain names, system will automatically check and discard the registered domain names.
And the best part is if you don’t like any of the suggested domain names, you will get back your $50.
Making Money with Picky Domains
If you have creative mind you might want to try making money with Picky Domains. You can sign up as contributor and if your suggested domain name is picked by the buyer, you will get 50% of $50, that is $25 for each accepted domain name.
Website: PickyDomains.com
Free services like XML-sitemaps is great for creating Google Webmaster Tools’ compliant sitemaps for your blog. But the problem is: Your blog is dynamic – it changes daily – and your sitemap is not!
Luckily there is a WordPress plugin called Simple Google Sitemap. Once installed it will create a dynamic sitemap that will update every time you make a new post. Sounds great, isn’t it? That should save a lot of trouble and time for you!
Now you don’t have to create your sitemaps manually and upload them throught FTP..etc.
Plugin allows you to assign ‘priority levels’ and ‘change frequency’ to your posts, pages and articles.
When you are done, just post your sitemap url to Google Webmaster Tools and Google will have up-to-date info about your blog’s changes.
Author Blog: http://suche.pytalhost.de/
WP Extend Plugin Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-google-sitemap/
There are many “free” online conversion tools on the net, but they make your life difficult. While they are free, most of them will force you to wait before you get your converted file. And that spoils the whole “free concept” thing.
But this open source tool JODConverter seems great. No BS, no nonsense – just upload and get your file converted.
Available conversions include Microsoft Office to OpenDocument (ODF), Microsoft Office to PDF, and OpenDocument (ODF) to PDF. A more detailed list:
Website: http://www.artofsolving.com/online-document-converter
Google FriendConnect added a toolbar widget. Now you can display it on top of your blog or at the bottom of it for your members to join and communicate with each other.
Unlike Yahoo’s MyBlogLog, Google FriendConnect is a bit vague in its positioning. I am still not very clear what its real objective is? How about you?
Do you use it on your blog? If yes, how it has benefited your blog? Share with us your experiences and success stories so to speak.
Here is its description on Wikipedia:
Google Friend Connect is an online service by Google that allows users on the internet to connect with their friends on different websites.
Google Friend Connect is an Open Social application offered by Google that started in May 2008. Google Friend Connect main focus is to simplify the connection between social and non-social websites and standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content. It uses a blend of open standards, such as OpenID for signin, oAuth to control data, and Open Social for applications.
Google Friend Connect is free but requires approval of the website using it. It requires no knowledge of web programming and enables any website to offer social applications and content from Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, MySpace, Google Talk and other social networks.
At the time the interface is in English and there’s no option to choose other languages. Google didn’t announce any plans to translate it and most words can’t be translated by the site that implements it.
Examples of use are:
- E-commerce site: Allow users to check whether friends purchased or review the product you are interested in on the product web page.
- News sites: Allow users insert comments and opinions with their real profile.
- Organization Sites: Increase marketing and communication within members of the organization.
- Blogs and Personal Websites: Increase communication within author friends.
Source: Wikipedia
Now after reading that, it makes some sense. Join my FriendConnect by clicking at the toolbar below, let’s get connected!
Website: http://www.google.com/friendconnect/
P2P file sharing traffic can constitute up to 75% of all the broadband bandwidth depending on the country. This of course increases the cost of operation for the ISPs, since it means traffic congestion and slow internet for them which leads to unsatisfied customers.
To solve this problem they either buy more traffic, or they limit the p2p traffic. Businesses being businesses – maximize profit, minimize cost – some of them go for the second option, that is to limit the torrent traffic of their customers.
How to check if your ISP limits your torrent traffic?
This tool called Glasnost can check if your ISP is manipulating your torrent traffic. It takes 7 minutes to make a full analysis of your ISP.
Test on my ISP (Streamyx) returned a negative result for the main port 6885, even though Streamyx is in the Bad ISPs list that are known to throttle the torrent traffic.
Maybe I have not reached the limit yet? Glastnost’s note could be the explanation:
Note: that some ISPs do not throttle all BitTorrent traffic but only if this traffic exceeds a certain threshold. Thus, passing our tests does not necessary mean that there is no throttling occurring on your link.
That’s probably correct since I am not a heavy p2p user.
Website: http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest-mlab.php
Let’s say, you want to have 7 posts on the main page of your blog, but you also want to have 15 posts on Search results page. And you also want to have on category pages 12 posts (per page). Normally, you can’t do this with WordPress, because by default WP shows you same number of posts on all pages.
But with Different Posts Per Page plugin you can do it. (see screenshot below)
Why would you want to have different number of posts on different sections of your blog? To improve your blog’s usability! That’s why.
For example my search results page only shows the title of the blog post, date, and category (see here). So, they are pretty compact. Therefore, I want to have more than 6 posts on my search results page (i display 6 posts on the main page).
With Different Posts Per Page plugin, now I am displaying 20 posts on search results page.
Only one disadvantage getting this plugin is that, you need to subscribe to Pawan’s email list first. But that’s a small matter, you can unsubscribe anytime if you want. Besides, he sends some useful emails anyway.
My flowgram has been voted as the best flowgram in the “Best Web Roundup” category (see screenshot). It’s now featured on the main page (www.flowgram.com). Thanks to Flowgram team!
If you didn’t know, flowgram is a free online tool to create presentations out of websites, rss feeds, images and powerpoint presentations. You can actually write on websites, highlight some texts, record a voice on it…etc.
You can use it to bookmark sites, make a collection of live sites under one URL (together with your comments on them) and send it to your friends..etc.
URL: www.flowgram.com
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