Leaning with Intent

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Have you ever been wondering what to write about because it seemed like you run out of ideas? I have seen bloggers writing about various ideas that may help others to choose the subject of their posts. I would like to do the same, and that is why I present a list of ideas that hopefully will prove to be useful:

• Write a post that will include a poll. Participating in polls is interesting to most Internet users as it allows expressing one’s opinion. Having various polls on a website can increase the loyalty of visitors, as they will feel that they contribute to the website.
• Post results from a poll that you run. Writing a post that discusses poll results is also a good idea. This way you can prove that it matters to you how your readers voted. Those who participated in the poll will surely like it.
• Reveal some secret from your niche. It might be tricky, but if you think you possess some valuable knowledge, it could be a good topic to write about.
• Post a picture/graph and comment on it. Picture is like a thousand words, so do not be afraid to use them. You might even decide to use charts as well.
• Based on the data from your visitor traffic software/plug-in comment on the visitor tendencies. There might be some interesting data, including what keywords people used to visit your site. Of course, this only works if you have a traffic statistics software.
• Create an advantages/disadvantages post. It might be about a product, service or anything else you want. Discuss what are the advantages and disadvantages of something.

Make sure you write about something you like to discuss, because if you do so then your post will be higher quality.

A few years ago almost nobody heard about social networks, or at least they were not as popular as they are today. Currently, social networks are among the most popular Internet sites in the world. I think that is because talking with other people is a lot of fun. That is why phone cards are so popular as well. Anyway, millions of people who would otherwise probably not use Internet that often are spending many hours in front of their computers. Social networks allow people to make friends with others who live very far away, possibly even in other counties. Social networks are also used to communicate with those who we know in real life. With so much recent success of these networks, the question is whether they pose any danger. After observing people socializing on the Internet, I have to say that there might be a danger that since people are anonymous, they might say things they would not dare in real life.

The most popular social networks in the world are MySpace, Facebook, Windows Live Spaces, Habbo, and Friendster. Some social networks are popular only in specific parts of the world. For example, Friendster is no longer that much popular in the Western world, but is very popular is Southeast Asia. Hundreds of millions of people are part of various social networks and this number seems to be growing.

The term linkbaiting is not new in the blogosphere. It can be also referred to as link baiting, link bait, or linkbait. In general, this expression describes the actions that webmasters and bloggers undertake in order to increase the number of incoming links to their websites. They do this because they are hoping that it will bring more traffic and increase some important ranks including Google Page Rank. Here are some examples of linkbaiting:

1. Running a contest where one of the requirements is to link back to your site from a post.
2. Commenting on other blogs hoping that the author of this blog will link to you.
3. Providing other webmasters and bloggers with free tools and widgets that they will be able to use. In case of linkbaiting, you should make sure that such tools and widgets include a link to your blog.

It is true that webmasters and bloggers have been doing things mentioned above for many years now, even before the term linkbaiting existed. There is currently a debate going on as to whether linkbaiting is ethically right or wrong. There is no doubt that bloggers have different feelings towards such practices. What some consider as spamming, others might even appreciate. From the three points I mentioned above, I do not consider any of them to be ethically wrong. However, there are more linkbaiting techniques that I did not include in this article that can rise a question whether they are ethically justifiable.

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.

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.

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.

If you are serious about blogging, you probably understand the importance of backlinks. Basically, backlinks are links originating from other sites that point to your site. Backlinks that come from sites of the same topic are the most valuable. If you have a lot of backlinks, then your site is going to have a high Page Rank, and it will appear in many search results. There are many ways to obtain backlinks; however, I would like to present you with a rather original idea.

Basically, the way it works is that a blogger is going to announce that he is looking for sponsors of each of his blog categories. Such categories can deal with the topics of blogging, making money online, search engine optimization, marketing, or whatever a blog is focused on. Such blog should be updated fairly regularly, and have interesting content. A blogger can encourage his readers to link to his website, and in return is going to link to those readers from his category pages. The readers will be happy that they received a backlink from a popular blog, while such blog will also obtain a lot of backlinks. There are many ways to obtain backlinks so I suggest that every webmaster should experiment to find the most efficient way.

The spelling feature in Microsoft Word is a blessing to many bloggers. Since we are required to post our posts without grammatical and spelling errors, it is good to do some spell checking before you submit your post. In my version of Word I usually do not have to check spelling manually. Word does it for me and corrects me immediately if I write something in a wrong way, or if I write a word that is not recognized. If you have an older version of Microsoft Word, you might need to activate an option to check your grammar and spelling. You can do it by either going to Tools in the upper menu and then selecting Spelling and Grammar, or simply by pressing F7 on your keyboard. Of course, spell checking is not perfect and you have to spot some mistakes by yourself; however, it should not be a problem if you are a careful reader of your posts. Recently, I noticed that the WordPress platform allows bloggers for spell checking while they are writing their posts. From what I remember, this useful feature was not available in the past. Before this feature became available, many bloggers had to write their posts in Word document and then copy it to WordPress, and then publish it. I am very happy that a feature like this exists.