901am » Blogging

Effective Blog Promotions with Blog Search Engine

901am — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:52:01 +0000

Blogs have proliferated on the internet to such an astounding degree that it is hard to separate the chaff from the grain. There are so many blogs out there that you wouldnâ€™t know which ones are good or which ones are not worth your time. Itâ€™s so hard to rise above the din of the millions of blogs that are clogging the netosphere. What you need is a way to be heard and be seen.

There are many strategies you can take in order to make your blog more visible and gain more traffic, which is the lifeblood of any web site or blog. One of the most effective ways to increase traffic to your blog is by enrolling in blog directories. This is a service that can have a tremendous positive effect on your blog. Blog directories showcase blogs so that it can be seen by more people.

What are the benefits of a blog directory?

First, it allows your blog to be discovered by a lot of people. Internet surfers will usually visit blog directories because it is one of the most effective ways of getting information for a particular topic. This means people who are your target audience will find your web site or blog.

Second, you can generate backlink that goes back to your blog. Anyone who operates a web site knows how important back links are in generatingÂ a good search engine ranking.

One of the best blog directories you can find online is blogsearchengine.com, which is one of the oldest and most respected blog directories existing on the internet today. Recently, blogsearchengine.com was redesigned to further make it more usable.

Using blogsearchengine.com is very easy. If you want your blog to be published in blogsearchengine.com, first you need to sign up for a membership, which will cost $14.99. Upon sign up you can submit your blog details for review and to be featured in the web site. Users will receive their username and password on their email address. If you are happy with the service you can upgrade to more robust Silver, Gold and Platinum plans.

5 Twitter Etiquettes You Should Care About

901am — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:00:20 +0000

For businesses that maintain twitter presence, there is an unspoken list of etiquettes that one must adhere to. These etiquettes arise out of a need to acknowledge your target audience and give respect to all those who interact with you using the medium of twitter. Some of these etiquettes are pretty simple and do not consume much time. Let us discuss these over the following points:

1. Acknowledge those followers who send a message to you. While there may be automated bots that could have been used to follow your account, there is a chance that many genuine followers will use a manual effort to follow your tweets. And these visitors and followers need to be acknowledged to offer them the respect they deserve.

2. If you run a business, then your twitter language must adhere to professional levels of excellence. You must try to avoid language that is mostly abbreviated. Â The language being used must be clear, concise and crisp.Â

3. Always compress or shorten your URL to ensure that you can make the most of your tweets. Apart from converting your URLs to adhere to the character limit, most converting websites offer you a way to track the click-through that happen to the interesting content posted by you.

4. For a business that maintains twitter presence, there are chances that occasionally you may come across aggrieved customers. This is especially true for businesses that offer services to customers. In cases where in a twitter account has been exploited by an aggrieved customer to voice his displeasure and complaint, it becomes all the more important for you to maintain restraint and use polite language in trying to address the grievance in a timely manner. Your handling of a grievance can make or break your online reputation.

5. Do not spam your followers with tweets that make little sense. Remember that when you tweet, the message goes across to followers. Unless it is relevant to your business cause and twitter presence, try and avoid sending tweets to the followers. Always bear in mind that quality tweets bring in more recognition than quantity of tweets.

While these basic rules or principles will help you in improving your engagement levels with Â the intended audience, you will still need to make conscious efforts to develop and promote your twitter account for the mutual benefit of your business and your followers.
This posting has been written by Andy May, a professional fuel card strategist and a professional SEO and SEM professional.

This posting has been written by Andy May, a professional fuel card strategist and a professional SEO and SEM professional. The current analysis of fuel card offerings is focussed on the European Fuel Cards.

Twitter Tweaks its Homepage a Bit

Arnold Zafra — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:11:25 +0000

In case you’re visiting Twitter.com right now and you happen to be not signed in to your account, don’t be surprise to see a different Twitter.com homepage (see image above). Â Twitter has just rolled a new interface design for its homepage, this is the main page that you see when you’re not logged in to Twitter.com.

Actually in terms of look and feel the new Twitter.com homepage is not really that different from the old design. Â The large blue banner on top of the page is still there, although some phrases and branding statement where tweaked a bit.

Here’s Â the old Twitter.com:

If you’re a keen observer, the first thing that you notice is the change in the Twitter tagline – from “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world” to “What’s happening anywhere in the world, right now.” Obviously the word “share” was omitted. The Twitter blog didn’t directly give an explanation, although a line in the post announcing this change might have suggested the reason for deleting “share” from the tagline.

All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore. It’s a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there’s something of value for everyone. People who internalize the value of Twitter understand the power of this simple medium. But it hasn’t been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time.

In other words, Twitter is trying to underscore the “sharing” aspect of Twitter and highlights the fact that Twitter is now a place were discussions among Twitter members are held, what people are tweeting about, and who are the Twitter members who just visited Twitter.com.

So below the huge blue-themed banner on top, you’d see dynamic content highlighting the top tweets at Twitter right now as well as some famous Twitter members.

Generally, Twitter wants to give first time Twitter.com visitors some compelling reasons to sign up for Twitter while maintaining interests among current members.

Google Rolls Out New Blogger Template Designer

Arnold Zafra — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:34:29 +0000

For all those who stuck around with Google’s free blog hosting service Blogger, Google has just rolled out the new Template Designer. Finally, the folks at Blogger.com realized that the old selection of templates are too outdated and decided to introduced some new templates that you can use on your blogs as well as a new set of tools for customizing your blogs including designing your own Blogger template. This is also good news for those who wants to start their own blogs just now but don’t want to use WordPress.com.

Google’s Blogger Template Designer currently offers 15 new professional templates, custom blog layouts that you can apply in each of the new templates, professional background images coming from iStockphoto plus several color, fonts and other customization features that you can use.

If you have an existing Blogger account, you can try the Template Designer out by going to Blogger in Draft. Once you’ve come up with a great design, you can simply save it

The Blogger Template Designer is Â currently hosted in Blogger in Draft where you are free to try it out on your blog. You can see the Template Designer if you click on the Layout link. Once you’ve come up with the best template and design for your blog you can opt to apply it on your blog.

It would be interesting to note why it took Google this long to come up with such features. I almost thought that Google is about to shut down Blogger since it has not been given too much attention the past few months. But then again, given the millions of blogs hosted on Blogger.com, Google will definitely put this service down.

If you are currently maintaining a Blogger blog, check out the new Template Designer and share with us your experience.

WordPress 1.0 Now Available for BlackBerry

Arnold Zafra — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:50:37 +0000

The mobile version of WordPress seems to be having a tour across smartphone platforms right now. Â Or is it perhaps because of the resounding fact that the future of blogging is mobile? Â Anyway, after appearing on the Android market for all Android phone users and mobile bloggers to use, WordPress 1.0 is now also available for BlackBerry devices. And like the Android version, the BlackBerry version is equally robust and quite good if not better.

WordPress for BlackBerry has been in beta for quite some time now and after getting subjected to the scrutiny of selected beta testers, Automattic finally decided to take the app out of beta mode and release the final version of WordPress 1.0 for this smartphone.

So, what’s in store for all of you BlackBerry users who blog on your WordPress installation using your smartphone? The app lets you write posts, upload photos and videos, edit pages and manage comments on your blogs. Â It supports both self-hosted blogs as well as WordPress.com blogs.

Aside from the usual mobile blogging features of other WordPress mobile app, this one for the BlackBerry also features:

overall enhancements to the speed and stability of the app
streamlined UI and functionality relating to comment moderation
support for HD video service VideoPress
ability to record and upload videos from your phone

Since I don’t have a BlackBerry yet, I can’t test how good this app is. I really wish I could compare it with the Android version. Perhaps next week, after I got my BlackBerry Bold 9700. But the app must be so great that Darnell mentioned something like this app putting the iPhone version into shame. Now I’m intrigued.

ZooLoo Puts a New Spin on Blogging with Graffiti and iPhone App

Arnold Zafra — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:13:01 +0000

Sometime in July 2009, we’ve covered this online life management site called ZooLoo.com. Â Now, after several months, ZooLoo has launched a new blogging service, an iPhone app and a storefront with one main objective – to give you a facility to promote yourself and your interest from your own domain and social networks.

The site’s new blogging service is called the “Graffiti”. It allows you to publish links, thoughts, status, quotes, photos and videos to the site and share these as a blog posts to on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. The site lets you post content either from the ZooLoo homepage or by using a Share button or through their Â newly released iPhone app. (iTunes Link)

As for their Â new storefront, the site gives you various paid packages that they offer. The free service is still there, but if you want your blogging service hosted on a paid account you can choose from the different packages which have the following key features:

Custom domain names
Web Dashboards that bring all of your interests into one place
Patent-pending privacy manager
Customizable site pages using ZooLoo’s site creator
Third party tracking integration
Photo manager and gallery.

Each feature can be purchased with monthly micro-payments.

If you want to run ZooLoo on an enterprise setting, they also have solutions for this purpose.

WordPress 1.0 for Android Released

Arnold Zafra — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:37:15 +0000

Automattic just added a new application to the many available WordPress versions. This time the target are mobile bloggers using Android Phones. The new WordPress 1.0 app for Android has just been released and one thing I can say is that – this app is definitely a good one.

I don’t know if I’m just really excited to use the app on my new Nexus One although I’ve already installed a similar app called wpToGo. But having a mobile version of a WordPress from the official developer is certainly different.

Anyway if you’ve used wpToGo for Android before, WordPress 1.0 is almost the same since it was used as the foundation for this app. In fact, wpToGo will now be discontinued because all the development efforts will now be focused on WordPress 1.0 for Android.

So, if you haven’t used any mobile version on WordPress, now maybe the right time to try one out. If you’ve got any Android device download the app and enjoy these key features:

Configure and manage multiple blogs
Comment moderation including the ability to reply to comments
Create and Edit Posts including categories, tags and photos
Create and Edit Pages
Get notified of new comments in the Android notification bar

I’ve just installed the app on my Nexus One and it’s pretty cool. Setting up multiple blog accounts is a breeze. Likewise posting new blog post is also fast. My only gripe is that the app does not allow you to publish post quickly. You need to save it first to local draft before you can push it to your blog. But it’s just a minor issue and does not really affect the app’s usability.

WordPress 2.9 Available fror Download

Arnold Zafra — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:30:08 +0000

Here you go, the endless updates to everybody’s favorite blogging software, WordPress 9 is now available for download. Codenamed “Carmen” after the legendary jazz vocalist Carmen McRae, WordPress 9 boasts of several nice features with the built-in image editor as probably the one feature you would surely like.

If you’re looking at WordPress 2.9 from the point of view of a user, here are its nicest features:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature – lets you restore posts or comments which you might have accidentally delete.

2. Built-in image editor – crop, edit, rotate, flip and scale your image attachments before publishing your post.

3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking – lets you update 10 plugins at once, also check whether plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress.

4. Easier video embeds – this feature is going to make all our lives easier. This will let you paste a URL on its own line and WordPress will turn it into a video embed code. Supports YouTube, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revisions3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy and WordPress.tv.

If your inclination is a bit on the technical side of Â WordPress blogs, here are just some of the features under the hood:

1. rel=canonical support for betther SEO.

2. automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);.

3. Themese can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes

4. a new comment meta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.

5. Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment.

Alright, time to do some WordPress upgrading folks. Good luck!

How to Monetize Your Blog

Mike Abundo — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:29:05 +0000

Despite the uncertainty of the economy and the convenience of microblogging, blogging is hot again, baby — and during a gold rush, it’s the shovel salesmen who make the most money. The Joy of Tech shares the real secret to monetizing your blog. Time to polish those event management skills.

Say What? iPhone app offers multi social network searching

Andy Merrett — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:20:31 +0000

A recently launched iPhone application called Say What? allows integrated searching of Twitter, Digg, plus thousands of forums and blogs, from one interface.

iCrossing’s application has actually been freely available for about a month now, but I’ve only just discovered it.

While I personally don’t search in Digg much, the ability to search across both a significant section of the web (blogs and forums) as well as Twitter sounds appealing.

The app works by simply accepting a search term, after which the latest conversations are returned. It’s possible to dig deeper into responses from a particular source, and save a search history for quick recall later.

App page on iTunes