Leaning with Intent

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Very often I write about the importance of quality of content. This time I would like to say a few words about the importance of checking your spelling. Your readers who perhaps visit your blog every single day are hoping that the posts you write look professional, without any spelling errors. Posts without such errors simply look more professional and are easier to read. Visitors might not take seriously into account what you are stating in your posts, if you are making many spelling mistakes.

With the current technology it is not that hard to spell check your posts. I know many bloggers who check their spelling with the aid of text editors like Microsoft Word’s that have a built-in spell checker. It might not be a perfect tool; however, it definitely detects almost all of the errors people make. For those of you who feel that you are making many mistakes in your posts, it might be a good idea to write your posts in a text editor like Word. Alternatively, you could at least copy them to Word in order to check the spelling of your post before publishing it. You could also use the default spell checking tool that Firefox offers.

Generally speaking, if you do not change many things in your blog, then you should not need to worry about your blog experiencing any errors. On the other hand, if you never experiment with changing your theme or other files, then you might never attain the knowledge you would be able to acquire otherwise. If you never add plugins to your site, then there is a lower risk something bad might happen, but your blog will not have as many useful features as the blogs of your competitors. Basically, the more active you are, the bigger chance something will go wrong. It is a good idea to check if the key aspects of your blog are working, because you would not want to have any problems due to the fact that you neglected to check some elements of your blog.

I recommend checking at least the most important things including the contact page, about section, adsense ads, blogroll, affiliate links, and feeds. You can never be too careful with your blog. Also, you do not want to receive emails from your readers telling you that something is not working properly. What you want to happen is that you want to check all the elements of your website on a regular basis, for example, while writing and publishing your posts. If you do not want to be checking the elements of your website too often, do not implement too many of them.

You do not have to store all your data on a disk to have access to it at all times. It will be even more convenient for you to store some of the more important data online. If your computer refuses to work or something else happens, you will be able to access your documents quickly from any other computer from an Internet cafe. To do this, the easiest way is to store your data in your email box. All you have to do is send an email to yourself. I have confirmed that it works with Gmail. Just click on Compose message or New message, type your own address, attach the desired files, and your email is ready to go. However, there is still another way you can protect your data. You do not have to necessarily attach them to your emails thanks to add-ons like Gmail Drive. Gmail Drive is a special add-on that you can have installed on your computer, and it can be quite useful in various situations. By copying your content to your Gmail Drive folder, the add-on will automatically send all its new content to your email account. There is absolutely no need for you to do it manually, as the add-on will take care of everything.

Most bloggers want to post new articles on their blog on a regular basis. Did a few days already pass since your last post, and you feel obliged to write something new? Do not worry, as there are a lot of things to write about, and all you have to do is stay focused. Here is some advice that may help you:

Duplicate content is something that every serious webmaster is trying to avoid. Basically, duplicate content means that some specific content, like an article, exists in a few locations on the Internet. Search engines often penalize websites for having duplicate content, as usually duplicate content provides a smaller value for Internet users. On the other hand, original content is something considered to be very valuable.

However, it seems that detecting duplicate content not always works as well as it should. From time to time, bloggers report that articles on their site has been marked as duplicate content, because scraper websites have copied those articles to their own domains. If the duplicate content filter was working correctly, then the scraper sites would be marked as sites with duplicate content, not the opposite. Generally speaking, scrapper sites are automated websites that pull content from other websites using web scraping. Most of those sites are made solely for Google AdSense. It is important to understand that many of them violate copyright law, as they do not even give credit to the original author. The webmasters of such sites do not put any work into writing articles, yet they might be listed quite high in search engine results.

Some speculate that many search engines fail to realize on which site the content was posted in the first place. The websites that copy/paste content from other sites, which are indexed earlier, might be actually treated as legit sites. While it is alarming, let us hope that the major search engines will work on those content filters, as we do not want our content copied/pasted to other websites. I hope that this article reminded all of us that original content is something we should strive for, and that copying copy/pasting content from other websites should be avoided at all cost.

Working on your blog is not always easy, so it is important to work on it in an efficient way. This will ensure that it will take you less time to write an article, and that the quality of the article will be higher. There are a couple of things that you can do to improve blog productivity:

• Have a list of URLs that you can visit for ideas of topics to write about. Every writer needs some inspiration. Who knows, you might get inspired and write your best article after finding some interesting topic to write about.
• Research the topic you are interested in more carefully. You may want to search for related posts about it on other blogs. Write only about topics you have knowledge about. Posts that contain a lot of useful information and reflect the knowledge of the writer are going to become popular.
• Use the best browsers. For example, your browser should allow tabbing. No doubt that Firefox and Opera are currently one the best browsers, but even IE has some useful features, although probably not as many.
• Store ideas for articles that you will want to write about in the future. There is nothing worse than running out of ideas.

Remember, whatever you do, make sure you enjoy it as your readers will be able to feel your enthusiasm or lack thereof.

For those of you who like to check out new websites where you can make money online, I have another one that I would like to discuss today. It can be easily found at gazhoo.com. The aim of the site is to connect buyers and sellers, this time of documents, like reports, term papers, business, and legal forms, as well as market research forms. If you are in a possession of such documents and you are the original author of them, you can upload your material for somebody to buy it. I think that this website is a great place for writers, and for those who like to write things which they would like to share with others. I believe that there is nothing wrong with getting paid for your articles, term papers etc., as long as you are the author of them. I know that it might sometimes be difficult to recognize whether a person in reality is the author of a paper or a document. However, there are very effective ways on the Internet which enable us to check if the documents or papers are genuine or not. While submitting your work on the website, you will have a chance to set up your own price for the documents. A short description and the number of pages are also required for the potential buyers. The company pays through PayPal, and has a referral program that you can take advantage of.

Those who host their own blog, such as most WordPress users, have to make some technical decisions when setting up their blog for the first time. One of such decisions is the directory to install WordPress. I would like to convince you to set up your WordPress installation in your sites root directory, as this will benefit your blog in the long term. One of the main reasons for setting up your blog in the main directory is to prevent a situation where your PageRank will be split. If your site can be accessed through www.domain.com and www.domain.com/blog/, then your PageRank will be divided, and it would be a disaster when it comes to SEO. Another reason is that your homepage will be duplicated which is not convenient at all.

Whenever you are blogging try to be as confident as possible. Perhaps a Los Angeles Cosmetic Dentist would help you gain confidence.

Another thing that I would like to advise you to remember is your homepage. Internet users who wish to access your site should be allowed to do it as easily as possible. That is why I wish to convince you to make accessing your site as easy as possible. What is mean is that many websites have a greeting page that is not the homepage, but which sole purpose is to welcome visitors. This page often contains flash animation or other graphics, which are supposed to impress Internet users, but they are often not necessary. The purpose of such a page is to redirect to the main site. I strongly believe that the smaller the number of steps required for the user to access your content, the better, so simply greet your user on your main site.

The technology has been moving forward really fast during the last couple of years. I think that one of the biggest changes there has been was with the Internet, and this includes blogs. When it comes to blogs, there are more and more plug-ins available that you can install, and I have seen many sites displaying how many visitors are currently online on the site. I would like to share with you some of my thoughts regarding displaying the number of visitors online. First of all, I think that it is a useful feature in some cases and has a certain “coolness factor”. If you often have many visitors online, it will definitely look great to display the number of visitors. What you need to take into consideration before you put such a plug-in on your site is why you want this plug-in in the first place. Personally, I would suggest that you only put such plug-ins on your websites if you really have traffic to brag about. On the other hand, if you usually have 0-2 visitors at a time, displaying the number of visitors will not present your site in a favorable manner. What I want to say is that you do not need to incorporate every clever plug-in there is, just because you know how to do it. First consider the advantages and disadvantages.

We can see the phenomena of multiple authors of a blog more and more often. There is something that attracts some bloggers to gather together and co-author one blog. However, maintaining a blog with a few authors can be quite challenging. That is why I would like to give you a few tips on how not to allow this experience to get out of hand:

1. Make sure that you team-up with like-minded people. There is nothing more annoying than having to deal with someone you do not like or understand.
2. Have similar goals. This is definitely an important point, because ultimately each blog has to have some goal. It will be a lot better if all of you work towards the same goal.
3. Be demanding when choosing the bloggers. You want to have the right people for the job, so make sure that you familiarize yourself with their writings before you decide to work with them.
4. Control the quality of the posts. Do not allow any of them to be of a lower quality than others. You need to have some standard according to which you measure the quality.
5. Check if the content is not duplicate. You don’t want to have co-authors which are stealing content. You may use Copyscape for this purpose.
6. Coordinate your schedules from time to time. Plan meetings or maintain regular email conversations.