Thursday, 31 May 2012

How to Start Blogging

Blogs have been ruling the internet for a while, and they are sure to continue to dominate the internet in the future. If you are planning to start your own blog, follow the tips in this article to come out with flying colors.

It is always wise to use the free blogs service provided by popular companies to gain experience in blogging. Free blogs providers use the latest web 2.0 technology making it easy for you to host and maintain your blog with out any knowledge in programming languages.



However, to be successful you need to know a few simple tactics in blogging. Keyword analysis is the first thing to be done before your pick your blog title or niche. It is wise to select the niche according to your interest because you will be working on it for the rest of your life.

Based on the keywords your have researched you can write articles that might interest your target audience. It is important to frequently update your blog with interesting articles to attract more visitors.

Once you have regular visitors and some page ranking, you can monetize your blog with the Google’s Adsense or similar programs offered by ad companies. You can also try some reviews and participate in blog contests to make some money.

You can tryout the various website promotion tactics with your free blog to make it rank high in search engines for specific keywords. Once your blog starts earning good money, it is time that your consider register your domain and host your own blog site.

Most Popular Ways to Get Desired Traffic

Website traffic is one thing that every website owner and webmaster desires for. They spend considerable amount of time, money and energy to obtain desired traffic to their websites. In fact, all the aspects of web designing, contents, SEO, revolve round the buzz word traffic. Unless you promote your website with various strategies to rank for keywords your website will get lost among the millions of competitors.


This article briefs on some of the popular ways to get good traffic to your website. Backlinks through directory submissions, article submissions, press releases, social book marking can deliver a good traffic to your website. This process optimizing your website to obtain traffic through backlinks is known as the offpage SEO. One other way of obtaining free targeted traffic is through search engines results. Onpage SEO is the most popular of all the ways that drive free targeted traffic to your website. SEO involves in optimizing your website content for specific keyword so that when a user types the words in the search engines you website is placed in the first page of the search results.

A few other types of strategies that have the capability to drive potential customers to product sites include pay per click (PPC) programs, banner ads, email marketing, business cards, brochures and word of mouth marketing techniques. While these methods for driving traffic to your website will cost you a little more than that of optimizing your website for free targeted traffic, they can greatly increase the conversion rate and online income exponentially.

How To Increase PageRank

Do you want to increase your pagerank? Do you want to know how you can increase your pagerank? Increasing your pagerank is much easier than understanding its algorithm, my friend. Read on, I will explain it in the simplest way I can.

As an introduction (just in case), pagerank represents the importance of a website in the vast internet, where a higher pagerank means better importance. Pagerank, which are scaled from 0 to 10, becomes interesting when involves traffic, those with more ranks will win more traffic from search engines.


Before starting, you should know that pagerank is updated once in 3 months. Therefore, you should not expect any changes soon after you start working on it. Meanwhile, you can try to know it first (What is PageRank), then try understand a bit of its pattern (Algorithm of PageRank).

I know you are too busy for that, so in summary of its algorithm, dofollow inbound links (backlinks) are the most critical aspect in determining your pagerank. Dofollow means that your link will be crawled by the bots / spiders of search engines, nofollow is the contrary, and both are set using anchor text attributes. Also, more ‘important’ (high ranked) website votes more. If all your pages are linked (dofollow) each other perfectly, you already get a pagerank of 1. Those are the main points.

So, here are some methods that can build your pagerank, starting from the free ones:

1. Internal DoFollow Linking

Good dofollow linking (internal site navigation) inside your website will be helpful in increasing your pagerank, though it can only reach a pagerank of 1 without external links. It can be easily done using an archive link / widget that is located in your sidebar, or a sitemap. It will render all your posts / pages connected each other handsomely, since your sidebar / sitemap goes to all your posts / pages.

2. Natural DoFollow Linking

When bloggers write something, they usually put some external links as an additional information for their readers. The links inside posts are usually dofollow, unless the bloggers specifically and manually defines nofollow attributes.

Here is how you can apply it: first you need to write good contents. If then people read and get impressed, there is a good chance that they will put your links in their own website / articles without asked (as additional resources). It gains you more dofollow inbound links, gives you more votes, and you grows your pagerank.

More great (not just good) contents means more chance of getting natural dofollow backlinks.

3. Blog Carnivals

Blog carnivals are blog posts containing submitted links of articles in a certain topics. BlogCarnival.com is a gateway for writers / bloggers and carnival hosts to interact. Writers submit their articles to the hosts through the website. Afterward, the hosts choose the articles they like and provide the links inside the carnivals, which are located on the hosts' websites.

Carnival hosts usually give dofollow links, because it is too much work to add nofollow attributes to each of the links, especially when there are lots of submission. If your articles are accepted, your dofollow backlinks increase in number. The hosts vote for your pagerank, so it shall rises.

4. DoFollow Link Exchange

Link exchange between sites / blogs is a common thing in the blogosphere / internet. If you have some friends that have websites or blogs, you can ask for dofollow link exchanges. When you can get more of this exchanges, you will earn more votes. Thus your pagerank will increase, very simple.

Getting some dofollow link exchanges with quality sites (higher ranked and relevant) are even better.

5. DoFollow Reviews

Asking bloggers to write reviews / advertorial about your site (with your dofollow backlinks inside them) will also help building your pagerank. Some reviewing services gives you dofollow links by default, while in some others, you need to manually state that you require dofollow links in the reviews.

You will need to spend some funds for this method, which is best for products and services.

6. DoFollow Text Link Ads

There are alot of websites that provide services in text link ads. Some of them provide dofollow text link ads, which can help you in bulding your pagerank. These type of ads will make the websites (where they are located) vote for your site and increase your pagerank.

Text link ads are usually not free.

Discussion and Questions - Answers:

1. How high can my pagerank grow?

Common bloggers /online business persons can reach 2-5 of pagerank with some efforts. Super successful and famous bloggers (like Darren Rowse of Problogger.net and Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com) can get 6-7 in scale. Social medias, like Twitter and Facebook, can obtain 8-9 in pagerank. Search engines, like Yahoo and Google, can get the ultimate 9-10.

If a blogger wants a pagerank of 8, he's dreaming.

2. Can leaving comments in other blogs / websites increase my pagerank?

Only if the blogs are dofollow, which means they allow search engine bots/ spiders to crawl your links inside the comments sections. Most blogs in the net are nofollow in their comments section to avoid abuse and spam. Leaving comments will increase your link popularity, but not pagerank. You need dofollow backlinks to increase your pagerank.

3. Can social medias increase my pagerank?

No, they cannot. All social medias automatically add nofollow attributes to all links inside them. Same with commenting, it will gain your link popularity but not pagerank.

4. Black Hat pagerank building may work, why don't you mention it here?

Search engines actively fight black hat pagerank building (like keywords spamming, hidden link, etc), because they want to ensure that high ranked sites are really valuable to online society, not just because they can hack things using their techie knowledge.

It's like getting money, you can get money from providing satisfying services to others, or by robbing or stealing from others. Both give you money, just which methods you want to use. Natural and black hat methods can increase pagerank, your purpose defines which one you will choose.

Besides, using black hat methods can result in ban or penalty from search engines.

Note: If you want to know how I earned a PR 5 on my new blog, I've written my unique custom methods here: How to Increase Pagerank.

How to Change Blogger Icon

Most bloggers (Blogspot users) are eager to uniquely customize the appearance of their blogs, and one of the small but significant customizations is changing the icon / favicon. This article will explain about how to change your blog icon, from the default Blogger icon to your own custom icon. I have used this method myself so I am sure it will work for you as well. Would you like to know more?

Recently, I had changed my tab icon of my blogger site. It used to be a common blogger icon which is an orange rectangle with the white letter B inside it. I changed it into my custom made icon of a sky blue rectangle with vertical I and Y (my initials), which also looks like a winking smiley. If you are interested in doing the same, here are the steps to do it:

1. Prepare an image, can be JPG or PNG format. I suggest PNG format because its size will be smaller by a 4:1 ratio. It means that a 10 Kb JPG image will be a 2.5 Kb in PNG format. Also make sure the size is small like 20 x 20 pixels or less, so the file will be smaller in size and won't make your blog loads slower.

If it's difficult for you to edit a small image, you can make a bigger one first, like 200 x 200 pixels or more, and after finish, you can skew it smaller. Microsoft Paint can do it for you easily.

2. Upload the image to an image hosting service, like the free PhotoBucket. Then, obtain the direct link to your image for the next step. You can use another image hosting service if you like, just remember to get the direct link.

3. Add this bold tags to your template. To access it, click "edit html" in "layout" section. Put them in head section, between "title" tag and "b:skin" tag. If you face difficulties in finding the tag, just use the find tool in your browser. In Mozilla Firefox, the shortcut is ctrl+f. If you use another browsers, apply with adaptation.


<title><data:blog.pagetitle>
<link href='put the direct URL of your image here' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>
<b:skin>

Save and done! Visit your blog, open a few tab, and you should see your new icon there. It is very simple, so feel free to try it. Any question?

Removing Blogger Newer Post, Home, And Older Post


Bloggers / Blogspot users are always seeking ways to customize their blog to express their personality more. Common template usage are to be avoided by advanced users, so are its common features, such as the links "newer posts, home, and older post". Removing them will make Blogger / Blogspot websites appear more uniquely customized.

Recently, I had removed these Blogger / Blogspot default links, which are usually located in the bottom section of all the pages, below comments. My only reason to remove them was because they “feels” too Blogger / Blogspot for me.

These three links does not always appear together, you know. They depend on which post you are currently viewing. If you are reading the newest post, of course you will not see any "newer post" link, since there is no newer one. The link "older post" works vice verse. The home link is likely to be similar in some cases, when you are currently visiting the "home" page, you definitely do not need the link "home", right? Blogger/ Blogspot programmers are not that dumb you know :D

In the middle of the process, an idea to keep the home link intact flashed inside my head. However, still I deleted it, since I did not have any home page yet, actually. The home page was only my latest post.

The removal technique itself requires a little bit of knowledge in HTML and CSS programming, since you will need to edit your template. However, this is very easy, so you don't need to worry even if you are a newbie.

To do it, access your template editing from layout section, then find these codes in "comments" region, which represent the setting of displaying the links of "newer post, home, and older post":

/* Comments
----------------------------------------------- */
#…
#…
#…

#blog-pager-newer-link {
float: $startSide;
}

#blog-pager-older-link {
float: $endSide;
}

#blog-pager {
text-align: center;
}

In case you are not familiar with the template codes yet, "find" tool of your browser can help you handsomely, I often use Firefox' myself. Once you find the codes, you need to add some other codes not to display them, and here they are:

#...
display: none;
}

The next step, you will have to add the removal codes to each of them. It's very simple my friend, just like this:

/* Comments
----------------------------------------------- */
#…
#…
#…

#blog-pager-newer-link {
float: $startSide;
display: none;
}

#blog-pager-older-link {
float: $endSide;
display: none;
}

#blog-pager {
text-align: center;
display: none;
}

Now, save the template, and it’s done! If you put the codes right, they should not be displayed any longer. To check, refresh your blog and pay some attention to the appearance. Now your blog shall taste less "Blogspot" :D

Note: To recover / show the links again, simply remove the added codes (removal codes).

Do you face any difficulties in applying the trick above? Feel free to share it on the comments section.