Effective Website Branding Tips

So, what is it that would differentiate your website from the others? It takes only a few minutes (in most cases, a few seconds) for a visitor to pass by your site before he gets what he wants on the internet.

In a world, where billions of websites are available, yours is just one of them. Branding is the key here to hit the dart. In other words, to be noticed amongst the many is an art in itself.

Last month, I wrote an article on “Why branding is an essential aspect of marketing” and now, these few tips would help you make a start to be that one in a million websites:

Emphasize on what you do and not on who you are – Your website content should clearly project the commodity that you offer and not what you are all about. Use appropriate and minimal words to define your products/services. However, this does not mean that you should not give out information regarding your company. Ensure that you have a separate page depicting the corporate identity and stating what your organization stands for.

Attractive Website – A visually attractive website can count on more visitors than that of a less appealing one. Make appropriate use of colors that is in – sync with your theme. This could be done with the help of pictorial descriptions that make it easier for the visitor to understand. However, make sure that you balance all the aspects appropriately to give the perfect output.

Logo – A logo would give a picture to your entity. It would define your commodity giving a glimpse into what you stand for. Devising an effective tagline along with your logo is an added advantage.

Blogs & Videos – An internal blog giving updates about your organization as well as the industry would be an asset. There are definitely a certain set of people who constantly look for the latest. Keeping your website updated with all the latest blog posts would definitely act as advantage. This way, your website would be renowned as a leader in its domain.

Additionally, make your presence felt in the external domains as well. These include contributing blogs, articles and press releases in other websites meant for this specific purpose. Also, share these posts within your network in the industry. Your frequency in constantly sharing information would determine your popularity. So, “the more the better”!

Incorporating videos wherever necessary would also do the trick! Time constraints might lead the visitor skip your page but now you can stop him with that video which would hardly take a few minutes to get an overview of the entire commodity or the concept.

Research – Any new initiative on your site should always be accompanied by thorough research in your field. You definitely would not want to attempt something that has been tried and tested a several times. Conduct online and offline surveys amongst your target audience to know what they are looking for. Although it is time consuming but the results would set you apart from competitors. Also, you can take expert opinion in this regard, if the need arises.

Daily Blog Tips is on a New Server

Last week I opened a discussion on the blog titled “What is Your Favorite Web Hosting?“. That is quite a coincidence because when I wrote that I was not planning to move the blog anywhere, I just wanted to give my feedback from previous hosting experiences, and thought that it would be useful for the readers if they could also share theirs and read recommendations from other people.

I tried to talk with the customer support to see if we could solve the problem somehow, but there was nothing they could do about it. Most companies guarantee 99,5% of uptime, and that translates to 3 hours and 36 minutes of allowed downtime every month. Frankly that is not good enough for me.

I had not decided to move yet, but on Friday the blog went down for over an hour, and on Saturday it went down several times during the day, summing almost 2 hours of downtime (I track that with Pingdom.com). That made it for me. The situation was so bad that the support tried to offer me one free month of hosting.

Anyway yesterday I made the switch, and DBT is now hosted on a Doreo server. My other blogs are already hosted there, and they had 20 minutes of downtime over the past 8 months, so hopefully it will continue like this.

1. Set the TTL to a low value before making the transfer.

TTL stands for time to live, and it regulates how many transmissions a piece of computer data can go before being discarded. Your DNS records (the information connecting your domain to your hosting server) have a TTL, which is usually set a one day. That means that if you update your nameservers today (making them point to the new hosting company) it might take up to 24 hours before people actually start seeing your site on the new server. This may cause all sorts of problems, from the lost of comments and emails to some visitors not being able to access the site at all.

2. Prefer hostings that offer cPanel

In the past I had already transfered this blog between two different servers. One of them was not using cPanel, though, so I was forced to copy and restore all the site files and MySQL databases manually. It worked well, but somehow when I was restoring the databases it messed up some special characters on my blog posts, and I needed to fix them one by one, on over 200 posts…

How to put text inside search forms

Most blog templates come with search forms that have no text inside the input area. While this standard solution is fine, you might want to personalize your search form by adding a default text to it.

The text can help readers to identify the search area more easily, encourage them to use the search function or even clarify the searching process for non-experienced users. Here are some examples of texts that you can include on your box:

• Search
• Search here
• Search this blog
• To search, type and hit enter

Now lets clarify how to place the text inside the search form. The first thing you need to locate is the the search form code. Wordpress users should be able to find it within the header.php or sidebar.php files, depending on where your search box is located. Once you find the code look for the a line similar to this one:

Now you will need to add three new arguments inside that line:

• value=”Text to be displayed here”
• onfocus=”if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value=”;”
• onblur=”if(this.value==”)this.value=this.defaultValue;”

The last two arguments make sure that the text you inserted will disappear once the user clicks on the input area.

How to create a favicon

A favicon (short for “favorite icon”) is that small icon displayed on the browser URL bar, on the bookmark lists and, for certain browsers, on the navigation tabs. While a favicon will not drastically change your traffic it will certainly improve the look of your blog, adding a unique icon and making sure that readers are able to individuate your site inside bookmark lists easily.

1) General Guidelines

A favicon is nothing more than a 16 pixels by 16 pixels icon, and the file has a .ico extension. As you can imagine it is pretty difficult to put complex graphics in such a small frame. When designing your favicon, therefore, you should concentrate on simple images or letters. Make sure that the color of the favicon reflects the color of your website, so that readers will be able to associate the icon with the site.

2) Using Photoshop (skip this point if you are not using Photoshop)

Adobe Photoshop is probably the best alternative for a well-designed favicon. The standard Photoshop can not handle .ico, so the first thing to do is to download a Windows Icon Photoshop Plugin (you can download it here).

Once you have the Plugin installed you should create a 64 x 64 pixels canvas and start playing with it. After you are done designing the favicon you will need to resize the image. Go to the Image Size menu and click Resample Image. This process will make sure that the image will not blur as you scale it down.

How to Deliver the Highest Impact with Each Post

High-Impact Posts

There’s isn’t a formula for writing a high-impact post, but here are some tips from what I’ve learned:

• Extremely useful. Be as useful as possible on a topic that people want to learn about.
• Complete guides. An extension of the above tip, but as complete as you can be — someone should be able to read the guide and do whatever it is you’re teaching.
• Great headlines. The headline should make people think, or curious, or promise to be really useful.
• Controversial. Don’t just say controversial things in order to get noticed, but if you can think beyond the conventional and say something different, or in a different way, you’ll get people thinking and talking.
• Short. Not all high-impact posts are short — in fact many aren’t — but if you have a post with one brilliant idea, written concisely and memorably, it’ll have a great chance of getting spread. See Seth Godin for some great examples.
• Memorable. Don’t ever be run-of-the-mill. Do something different, in a way that people will remember. Be bold!
• Consistent. One memorable post is good, but if you’re consistently useful and memorable, week in and week out, people will come to expect it of you and each post will have greater impact.
• Full of resources. Link to other guides or great blogs or books. Save people hours of time researching a topic by giving them the best resources.
• New ideas. Don’t repeat the same ideas — come up with some of your own.
• Looking at new angles. Even if you don’t cover every aspect of a topic on one post, you can go into a lot of depth if you consistently cover different angles of a topic. The more angles you can look at in different posts, the more completely you’ll cover a topic.
• Fewer posts. While the big blogs like Lifehacker and Gizmodo can put out a dozen posts a day, smaller blogs have to make their posts count. By reducing the number of posts you have, you are less likely to overwhelm the reader — and so the reader will be more likely to read your posts.
  

Start Your Own Blog

Start Your Own Blog Site: Step 1
Starting your own blog is not really rocket science. The first step is to get an internet connection. Ok, that was not as funny as I thought it would be. Though, you do need internet connection, the first step is to get onto a blogging site. There are many options that one can choose from. The most popular and user friendly would be blogspot, blogger and wordpress. These websites are also search engine optimized, which helps your blog rank on search engines like the google search engine and bing. You need to register your self, once you're done with the registration and the settings, you will have your very own domain name.

Start Your Own Blog Site: Step 2
You can even start your own blog for money. Many people have asked me how to start your own blog and make money. It is as simple as it can get. Most popular blogging sites have addable gadgets. One of them is the google adsense. Google adsense is a method to get relevant adds on the page. The blogger has to register himself on the google adsense website (for which you will get directions along the way). You will have to fill the requisite details. The payments are on a per click basis.

Start Your Own Blog Site: Step 3
Now that you have handled all the gadgets, you need to ensure that you select a template. Every blogsite has different templates for the users to select from. One has the option to change the templates as per convenience. There are also a few other websites that provide free or premium blog templates and backgrounds. You can make a selection as per your choice.

Start Your Own Blog Site: Step 4
It is nice to make sure that your blog looks good, after all it is a part of you on virtual display. So, after selecting the template and backgrounds, you need to add content on the blog. You can add content as per your interest. It could be your thoughts, things that you observe around you, reviews, quotes etc. However, ensure that you do not copy content from any site. If done beyond a certain extent, copying content from other websites is considered illegal. Users can be prosecuted and their domains can be deleted for it.

Start Your Own Blog Site: Step 5
If your wondering about how to start your own blog page in order to make money, you need to make sure that you market your blog. There are websites that you can register your blog at in order to increase the traffic to your blog. Another thing you can do to market your blog is to add the url of the blog in your email signature, and at social networking sites. Peruse through other blogs and make relevant comments on their posts. This will make that particular blogger visit your blog as well. These small steps help make your blog far more popular than otherwise.

Tips To Make More Money Blogging

Making more money with your blog can be a real headache. I for one didn't start making any real money with my blog until recently (2 months ago). My blog is over a year old and just started to pick up in rankings and traffic. I can just say this much; it is the hardest thing getting traffic and making sales. Here are some tips on how to increase your income using your blog.

Use Social Bookmarking Carefully- You do not want to wind up like me; I got my website banned from most of the social bookmarking sites. This had a lot to do with me writing multiple blog post and bookmarking them all at the same time. Social bookmarking does not like 'self promotion'. So, you should bookmark no more than 3-4 of your blog post at a time. Once your website is banned, it doesn't matter if you open 30 new accounts, you will never get that organic traffic again from this resource.

Write Evergreen Content- I notice that I get more traffic from the search engines when I write Evergreen Content. What is Evergreen Content? This type of content lasts a long time in the search engines because people are always searching for this information. An example of this type of content would be Wikipedia articles or computer guides.

Write Longer Blog Post- Because of the spam problem with splogs, Google is paying more attention to blogs that provide organic and original content. They are also rewarding websites that have more content in each blog post. Last year, the norm use to be 400 words; now Google is favoring articles with at least 600 words or more.

How to Promote Your Blog

When the “How do I promote my blog” question is asked in forums it usually doesn’t take long for someone to reply with, “Content is king.” Really? Is content king? All websites have content – even the dancing hamsters is content. I would submit to you that giving people what they want is truly king. If that be content, then have relevant content. If it’s driving directions, then give good directions. If it’s discount prices on jewelry, then have quality jewelry at low prices. If it’s nude pictures of Jennifer Love Hewitt then she best not be wearing clothes.

There’s a reason your visitors came to your site. Are you fulfilling their expectations? If people visit your blog one day and you’re talking about PHP coding techniques but the next time they visit your blog you are reviewing the movie you saw over the weekend, you may find yourself having a hard time building a steady core of followers.

It’s not that you can’t do that with your blog; you can. That’s exactly what I do with my personal blog. I blog about anything I feel like blogging about: movies, music, Jennifer Love Hewitt, whatever. The problem is that blogs like that have no niche to fill. With no niche you have no target audience.

Give people what they want and do it consistently. Being a one-hit-wonder in a band or in blogging is not a good thing. I take that back, being a one-hit-wonder in a band can still make you millions these days, but in blogging it’s no good. Try and have quality content on a regular basis. It doesn’t have to be daily, just on a regular basis. You may decide to post once a week or twice a week, whatever, just be consistent.

Blog Traffic Analysis

With the introduction of Advanced Segments in Google Analytics, bloggers can now fine-tune the data mining filters to churn out the exact information they want. Combined with the power of Custom Reporting, it delivers the required information with ease. Let's see how to unleash the power of this beast to take out the relevant information that matters.

Segment and Conquer

To further refine the search, we must set 'Condition' as 'Matches Exactly' while giving the 'Value' as 'google'.

Now the last condition was to get information about those visitors who are highly engaged during their visit. How do we quantify this condition? Well, it depends on how much activity you consider as engaging. I personally consider page views of 3 and more in a session as highly engaged visit. To retrieve this information, I must set the dimension 'Page Depth' with 'Condition' as 'Grater than or equal to' and of course 'Value' field set as '3'. To get the required information, all these 3 conditions must be met simultaneously, therefore I have used the 'AND' clause while joining these 3 conditions.

Advanced Segments feature was enabled in my Analytics account about 24 hours back, and since then I am glued to it, experimenting and defining countless number of segments giving me extremely important information which was beyond my imagination prior to introduction of this new feature. The sheer power of this new feature can be imagined as Analytics giving you the ability to find a pin in a haystack, and that too, instantly. Let's create some segments and get a taste of it.

Note: For testing purposes I have randomly taken data of 3 successive days

Highly engaged visitors of US coming from Google SE

In first example, I want to know the number of visitors from United States coming via Google services (search engine or referral link via any of the Google services) and have visited at least 3 or more pages in a single visit. So our equation becomes:

Result ~ Visitors (US) "AND" Via Google "AND" Page Depth >= 3

To get this information you can create a new segment as shown below in the picture. It's a simple drag and drop methodology with selecting values from drop down lists. I have chosen 'Country/Territory' as 'United States'. The next condition is visits via Google. To retrieve those visits I have taken dimension 'Traffic Sources' as 'Source' with value 'google'. Notice the 'Condition' value 'Contains'. This ensures that the referring URL must contain the string google at any place.


And here is the result. Out of total 3,307 visits:

1. 1,680 visits from United States
2. 761 visits from referral URL's containing 'google' string
3. 394 visits with page views >= 3
4. 41 visits, which fulfill all the above conditions collectively <- Result

Where To Go From Here?

Do I need to say anything more?

With these 2 examples, you've got a glimpse of this new feature in Google Analytics. This is just a tip of the iceberg. You can also filter out the data on the basis of specific time (hours in a day), landing pages, exit pages. For example, you can create a segment that shows you the number of visitors coming from US between 3:00 PM to 8:00 PM on a specific post and spending at least 3 minutes on it, and then viewing at least 3 pages, and then clicking an Adsense ad with slot ID xxxxx, and then exiting via so and so post, and then.....

How To Increase Blog Traffic

1: Find Your Blog Sitemap

A blog sitemap is an XML feed of every link available on your blog. By default most blogging platforms, including WordPress, Blogger, and Moveable Type, have an RSS feed preinstalled on your blog. An RSS feed is a feed made using XML so there is no setup, it’s already there!

2 Load your blog sitemap in to Google Webmaster Tools

Visit the Google Webmaster Tools Home Page and login to your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, register one real quick.

Once logged in to the Tools dashboard you will see a textbox at the top allowing you to add your blog:

Next you will need to Verify your blog to Google. Click the “Verify your site” link and follow the instructions given by Google.

Once you have verified your blog click the “Sitemaps” menu item from the left hand side and click the “Add A Sitemap” link.

Select “Add General Web Sitemap” when asked to Choose Type. You will then see a text box to enter in your RSS feed URL like this:

Add Your Robots.txt File

A robots.txt file is a small text file placed on your blogs web server that tells search engines what they are allowed, and not allowed, to index on your blog. Most blogs come with a robots.txt file preinstalled. Check to see if your blog has one by visiting the following URL on your blog:

http://www.blogname.com/robots.txt

Just replace blogname with the name of your site. We are going to create a new robots.txt file so it doesn’t matter if you do not currently have a robots.txt file on your blog.

Create a text file named robots.txt on your desktop. Enter the following code in to your newly created file:

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.blogname.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: * – indicates to all search engines they are allowed to crawl your site
Disallow: – incidates what URLs to exclude from being crawled by search engines. Since we are not entering a value to the right we are telling all search engines to crawl everything on your blog
Sitemap: http://www.blogname.com/sitemap.xml – indicates to the search engines where your sitemap is located. Use the sitemap link from the previous tip.

Save your file and upload to the root directory of your server. Google looks for a robots.txt file on your blog once a day. You can verify that Google finds your file by visiting the following Webmaster Tool section:

Dashboard > Tools > Analyze robots.txt

That’s it! Now all search engines will know where your sitemap is located from your robots.txt file. The major benefit of this is to help search engines find your new posts and links easier.

Google Webmaster Tools offer some really great statistics about how Google crawls and indexes your blog. Make sure you poke around in the other sections.

iPhone 4 Blog

People have been dreaming about video calling for decades. iPhone 4 makes it a reality. With just a tap, you can wave hello to your kids, share a smile from across the globe, or watch your best friend laugh at your stories — iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 over Wi-Fi. And it works right out of the box. No other phone makes staying in touch this much fun.

Tips for Professional Bloggers

Some years before when blogging had started gaining popularity, I was one of the many people who decided to try my hand at it. Though I posted a few articles and poems, I soon lost interest in it. One of the reasons for this was that no one actually visited my blog. The frequency of my own visits turned from everyday to once in a week, gradually leading to none, so much so that I even forgot my username and password. After some time, I again tried to start my blog but never actually succeeded in it. Later, I realized that the reason for these failed endeavors in starting a blog and attracting readership was because I was unaware of so many important things that are needed to make a blog successful. Hence, this is an attempt to help people who are new to the world of blogging to understand its purpose and the important things that have to be done to achieve what they want.

What is Blogging?

Before we go to the blogging tips for beginners, let us try to understand what exactly is meant by blogging and also about its purposes. A blog is a personalized space on the Internet started by an individual for his own personal or professional needs and is read by other people. Many people start their blog to express their personal thoughts, views, opinions, etc. about different matters by publishing poems, stories, articles, etc. Though blogging was introduced with this purpose, soon they were used for business purposes also. Nowadays, people have even started blogging for money making purposes. As blogging has so many benefits, it is important for you to know certain blogging tips and tricks if you are thinking of creating a blog for yourself.

Diversify Income Sources

To succeed as a professional blogger, you need to start out by diversifying your income sources. You never know what might happen to a blog you're writing for another person or company. Unfortunately, the blogosphere is turbulent and a blogging job that seemed solid one day could disappear the next.

How to Create a Blog

Log in Your Blogger Account

http://www.blogger.com


Suggest Your Title and Site Name


Google New Function About Blogger Template.

Choice Your Design and Apply For New Template.

How To Master Corporate Blogging

Know the fundamentals of Blogging

There are millions of bloggers out there on the World Wide Web but only a few successful ones. This is because most bloggers have not understood or realized the true fundamentals of blogging. You can start a blog at any time and publish your articles but realizing the true benefits of blogging and understanding its importance as a tool for driving traffic and attracting readers is another story.

The first and the foremost thing is to have a strategy in place, a blogging strategy that will be supported by your marketing strategies, PR strategies, advertising strategies etc. The strategy should also be in-sync with your business goals. The second important aspect is to build blogger relations.
What blogger relations can really do is get other people involved in a discussion that could span over many months. As these discussions progress, you will get to know other people working in your industry. You will be able to share information and even get important and exclusive information that can provide you with a edge over other businesses in the same industry.

Value Creation
Why have you started a blog? This is one of the most important questions and the answer is also fairly simple. You should create a blog not only to promote your ideas but to provide value addition to your audience or readers through meaningful and relevant content. If you provide informative and interactive content then there is a high possibility that it will indirectly increase the flow of traffic to your parent or business website. No value addition – no traffic!

Sustain and grow
Sustaining is important and not easy but is required for overall growth and success as a blogger. The best way to do this is by keeping your audience up to date. To do this, you will need to know what is happening out there in terms of industry news and what your audience wants. If you keep providing interesting information from the industry and news snippets then more and more readers will be visit your blogs. This will lead to the growth in readership of your blogs and increase the visibility of your blog.

Provide an opinion
There are times when you may have a news snippet but you might not be able to form an opinion or perspective. In those times, try to provide a community opinion or a general perspective. This will open a thread of discussion and readers will get involved.

Always Respond
Responding to a comment left by another blogger or a reader is important as it will nurture relationships and increase the traffic to your blog or website. The essence of blogging lies in communication and discussion. A blogger or a reader will leave a comment expecting you to get back or for starting a discussion. If you are unable to carry the thread or keep the flow of the discussion, then it will eventually stagnate your growth process and your business will suffer. Replying to a comment will help in opening a discussion that will help in building bonds or relationship with other industry experts, readers and bloggers.

Tips for Increasing Conversions on Your Blog

Unless you call people to do what you’re wanting them to do you’re unlikely to get them to take that action. Many bloggers worry about being too aggressive with their calls to action, some to the point of not ever issuing them or doing them in just subtle ways that they’re ineffective.

While it’s possible to be too aggressive in your calls to action I think bloggers could do well to be a little bolder in many cases.

Calling your readers to your desired action can happen in numerous places on your blog including in blog posts (which is where they are often most effective), in your navigation menu, in your sidebar, on internal banner ads etc.

Positioning

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about getting people to take action is that it is often largely about ‘positioning’.

I discovered this in the early days of optimising the ads on my early blogs. Putting an AdSense ad over in the sidebar initially seemed like a logical spot for them – but the night I put them inside my content and wrapped the content around them I saw the click through rate skyrocket (I found it hard to sleep that night I was so excited).

Why did it work? The answer is simply that I started putting the ads where readers would see them.

How to Make Money with Amazon

you’ve read the tips above you may be thinking to yourself, ‘Alright that sounds great but, I’m still not sure where to start.’ Well, if your blog is in any way loosely related to consumer goods (almost everyone) there is an easy way to get started today by promoting deals for Father’s Day. Most bloggers focus on just the big holidays and shopping periods like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas. These are all great, but you can take it one step further by promoting products on almost every holiday without annoying your readers (I would skip this holiday though unless you have a blog about Pirates).



Early last week I received an email from Amazon’s Associates team that stated Amazon would be running Lightning Deals for Father’s Day for the first time from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM PST on Monday June 7th through Wednesday June 9th to celebrate Father’s day on June 20th. Amazon frequently creates landing pages like this for holidays so for every holiday worth promoting just search for the respective holiday landing page and replicate this strategy below on future holidays. Promoting products around the holidays is the best way to make money without looking like it’s your only focus.

How to Make Money on Every Holiday

Many people are turned off by Amazon primarily because of it’s short 24 hour cookie length, but I want to show an example on how I make money using Amazon by focusing on The next holiday coming up is Father’s Day and will be your opportunity to make some money today. But before we get to that I highly suggest you read some of the tips Darren has written in the past on how to earn money with Amazon which can be found here, here, here and… here! I also shared my own Amazon tips to earn more, but in a twist I used Amazon tracking ID’s for every single strategy all through 2009 so that I could determine which specific tactics were the most effective in terms of how much revenue they generated.

Blogging for SEO Success

Blogging is gret fun! Yes, blogging can be great fun. Just open you posting window and go for it without the restrictions of corporate style guides and other impediments to creativity. Got something to say? Just say it. The other fun aspect of blogging is that people can post comments about your blog posts.

Blogging is dirt cheap. The most powerful blogging systems are free. Wordpress seems to be the blogging standard and now comes standard with many cheap web hosting packages. For less than $100 per year anyone can get their own domain with blogging included.

I wouldn't use one of the free blogging services unless you are really desperate. You can't be sure if they will always remain free and your posts will be building up someone else' asset rather than your own.

Blogging is fast and easy. If you can use notepad you can blog. The user interface is very intuitive and allows you to add and edit, text, pictures, videos, whatever you want. Want to change the look and layout of your blog? There's literally hundreds of themes available that take less than a minute to upload and install.

It gives you products and services personality. People like to do business with people they like. By blogging you show your target market that there is a real person behind the company you represent. By reading you blog posts thet get an idea of what you're all about - warts and all. The personal aspect of blogging is one of it's most powerful characteristics.

Your blog becomes another Internet asset. Some blog sites get thousands and thousands of readers each day. This traffic can be converted to hard, cold cash through Google Adsense advertising, affiliate programs and straight advertising space sale. Once you blog increases it's Google PageRank, you also get the benefit of linking out from your blog site to other web sites you want to promote.

Search engines just love blogs. It is said in many SEO forums that Google staff are great bloggers and subsequently Google spiders and indexes blogs more frequently that normal web sites. This may just be a rumour, but I have found it to be true in my case. If you blog every day there's a good chance Google and the other major search engines will spider your blog every day looking for that new content.