5 things to know about Office 365, a.k.a. Office “in the cloud”

There’s a new, cloud-friendly version of Microsoft Office in town. Perhaps more importantly, though, there’s a new and potentially less painful way to pay for Office: with a subscription fee.

Now, instead of coughing up $100-plus for a single box of Office CDs, you can buy an annual or even month-to-month Office 365 subscription, good for multiple, downloadable copies of Office on your PCs and Macs.
Office 365 (which has been available for business users for about a year now) could make for a relatively cheap, hassle-free way to dip into the latest versions of Office—provided you’re ready to deal with the new Office, that is.
Here’s five things you need to know about the home version of Office 365, starting with…

1. It includes the latest versions of Office

For Windows users, that means Office 13, a thorough revamp of the venerable office suite that boasts scores of new features—from an easy-on-the-eyes “Read Mode” in Microsoft Word to “Flash Fill” (which supposedly “learns and recognizes” your work and “auto-completes” the data in a given cell) in Excel.

Get ready for the shock of the new when it comes to Office 13.

Office 13 also makes heavy use of “SkyDrive,” Microsoft’s answer to such cloud-based data lockers like Dropbox and Google Drive.
Once you log in to your Microsoft account, you can use SkyDrive to open, edit, or even share your Office documents from anywhere, with anyone.
Last but not least, Office 13 has been optimized for use with touchscreen tablets and PCs.
Be warned, though: if you’re still using Office 2003 or (gulp) Office XP, prepare for a shock once you take your first glimpse of Office 13′s heavily redesigned “ribbon” interface.
You get used to the so-called “ribbon” (which sits along the top of the screen and contains dozens of font, formatting, formula, and other tools and buttons) eventually, of course, but it takes a little getting used to.
Mac users, meanwhile, get Office: Mac 2011, a slightly older (but still “ribbonized”) version of Office that’s a little clunkier when it comes to SkyDrive sharing but still packs in a bewildering number of features.

2. You can (essentially) rent Office rather than buy it outright

A $99 annual Office 365 subscription gets you access to Office 13 or Office: Mac 2011—or, if you’d rather pay a little less up front, you can (as I did) opt for a $9.99/month subscription.
There’s even a free 30-day trial for those who’d rather look before they leap; you can snag it right here.
Not bad, considering that you could essentially get the new Office immediately for as little as $10 up-front.
Over time, of course, you may end up paying more than you would for a single, retail copy of Office, especially if you don’t need such bells and whistles as Microsoft Publisher and Access (which are included in an Office 365 Home subscription, but not in the cheaper, sub-$399 Office stand-alone editions).
Microsoft, though, would argue that you’re getting more bang for your buck with an Office 365 subscription. Take, for example, the fact that…

3. You can install Office on up to five PCs or Macs

One of the beauties of an Office 365 subscription is that it lets you install copies of Office on a generous number of systems—up to five PCs or Macs.

With an Office 365 subscription, you can install Office on up to 5 PCs and Macs.

Once you’ve purchased a subscription, just log into your account, select either the PC or Mac version of Office, and click the Download button.
Installing copies of Office on a Windows 8 PC and an iMac took me a little under an hour (including the software download over my cable modem), and the actual installation process involved only a handful of mouse clicks.
Your Office 365 account keeps track of how many Office installations you have left, and you can always deactivate a copy of Office on an old PC if you want to install Office on a new system.
And here’s another nifty Office 365 perk…

4. You can stream Office from the could

Not sitting at your home PC, but need to dive into Office? No problem.
As an Office 365 subscriber, you can simply log into your account from any Windows 7 or 8 system and launch “Office on Demand,” a full version of the complete Microsoft Office suite that you can stream over the Web. Nice.

You can stream the full version of Office over the web using any Windows 7 or 8 PC.

Office on Demand is a noticeably slower than Office installed on a hard drive, and it demands a relatively speedy Internet connection. You’ll also need to download and install a small plug-in for your web browser.
That said, Office on Demand makes for a great way to get the complete Office experience—including, of course, full access to the Office documents in your SkyDrive account—even when you’re not at your desk.
OK, but what if you’re using an older Windows XP computer, or a Mac? In that case, you can try Office “Web Apps”—a bare-bones but peppy version of Office that offers basic editing tools in practically any web browser.

5. Sure, you can still buy a boxed version of Office

Still rather just own a retail copy Office? You can, with the bare-bones “Home & Student” version of Office 13 going for $139 while a more robust “Home & Business” edition sells for $219.
The top-of-the-line Office “Professional” (which includes all the individual Office components in an Office 365 subscription) costs a whopping $399. (Click here for a full comparison chart.)
Also, keep in mind that the stand-alone versions of Office are only good for one PC each.

5 things to know about Office 365, a.k.a. Office “in the cloud”

30 reasons your customers aren't buying: How to optimize your shopping cart

You know from your analytics data that customers are visiting your website: but they're not buying. Here's our list of 30 potential obstacles to that purchase (hopefully the first of many), along with suggestions on how blast the obstacles to pieces.

First things first

Have a think about the things that annoy you when you're going through a checkout process. Next time you're ordering a book or a pair of shoes, focus your mind on how you would improve on someone else's procedure. Is it too confusing, too time-consuming and frustrating? If so, why? Take notes. You'll probably have seen some of the problems in our list.

30 Checkout Optimization problems and how to solve them

1) There are too many hoops to jump through
Your aim should be to make the shopping experience as quick and simple as possible. Removing unnecessary steps can help improve conversions.
This case study from AB Tests shows how successful that can be.
2) You're forcing the customer to do something they really don't want to
Don't make it necessary to sign up for an account before your visitor can buy from you: you can ask them to do that afterwards. Provide a 'checkout as guest' option, like Walmart does:

Amazon make you sign in, but that's because they're enormous and already have a very good reputation.

Continue reading  30 reasons your customers aren't buying: How to optimize your shopping cart here

Understanding Google Analytics

Blogging can be a lonely business. You write and publish post after post in the hope of attracting more traffic, and in turn more revenue, but with little or no information as to who is reading your blog, how they are finding you and most importantly how you can generate more visits. Free to use, Google Analytics is undoubtedly one of the best performing web analytics applications available and it can be an invaluable tool to help make your blog work harder. This essential analytics guide will help you get the best out of this powerful program.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics tracks online traffic and generates detailed statistics about visits to a website or blog. An invaluable tool for bloggers, it is the most popular and widely used service for analyzing website statistics. In addition to the free program, a premium version is available for a fee.
It offers a quick and easy way to find out who is visiting your blog, what devices they use to view your blog, how long they stay on your site, and whether or not they are new visitors. This invaluable information will help you make informed decisions about the effectiveness of your posts and potential areas for content development. You should be able to use Google Analytics on most common blog and content management systems.

How does it work?

Google Analytics provides a tracking code which, when added to every page on your blog, collects and reports on visitor data obtained from a client’s browser, including whether a visitor has visited your site before and where they were referred from e.g., pay per click networks, AdSense or Adwords, search engines and online advertising.
The report displays an overview of your website’s traffic patterns within a specific date range or choice of date ranges which you can then review and compare for patterns, spikes, drops etc. Overviews and detailed reports for traffic sources, content, and conversions are also available, as are custom reports which enable users with specific analysis needs to choose their metrics and how they are displayed, for example in a table, graph, chart etc.

How can the data help my blog?

Understanding your blog traffic is key to developing, growing and maintaining your audience as well as enhancing your blog’s performance and content. Google Analytics data can also help you attract advertisers and sponsors and boost sales on associated websites. The following are the key insights you can expect to find:

• Visitors – new visitors are great, frequent repeat visitors are even better. They like what you do, are influenced by your content and are interested in getting the latest updates from you. By reviewing the “days since last visit” report on Google Analytics you can identify useful patterns such as time or day of visit and predict future visits to ensure your updates are timely.
  
• Bounce rate – a bounce is when a visitor only views one page on a website before leaving. A low bounce rate means that visitors to your blog are engaged in your content; conversely a high bounce rate suggests that people leave having not found what they were looking for on your website.
  
• Visit value – visit duration and the page depth (how many pages a visitor viewed) are two important metrics available on Google Analytics that will tell you how long people visit your blog for and how many pages they viewed whilst there. Your ultimate aim is to generate a high number of visitors who each view more than one page, and stay on your site for more than a few seconds.
  
• Traffic - understanding where your traffic comes can be powerful. Try to generate traffic from a variety of sources, that way you are not reliant on one specific source and are protecting yourself from a drop in traffic should that source unexpectedly close or change. Google Analytics can help you determine the strength of your search engine optimization (SEO), as well as incoming links, and effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

Is it difficult to install?

As a blogger you will already be familiar with your blog dashboard, and with some basic techniques such as installing widgets and plugins.  You will also need to ensure that you input the tracking code on every page to get the best out of it so follow the installation instructions carefully.  Google Analytics should be suitable for most common blog platforms and content management systems, but if in doubt review your blog help topics and search forums for installation tips.

About the author
Lucas Clum is a small business writer working with Simply Business and their analytics guide to help bloggers better promote their work.

Understanding Google Analytics

6 Blogging Mistakes for Business

These days it seems like every business — from dentistry to software — has a blog. However, just because everyone has a blog doesn’t mean everyone is doing it right. Whether you’re just launching a blog for your business, or you’ve been blogging for awhile, it’s easy to fall into some blogging bad habits.

As a small business owner, I try to truly embrace the unique opportunity that social media offers. I’ve been experimenting with our company blog for years; here are some lessons I've learned along the way, including the mistakes.

1. Mistaking your blog for a promotional platform.

Many small business owners rush to blogging, and to social media in general — they see it as free advertising. However, when your blog posts focus too much on your company, products and services, your blog is no longer useful or credible. Few readers will return to read about why you’re so awesome week after week.
If the bulk of your posts are company or product-centric, you’ll need to change the way you think about your blog. Focus your content so it offers information that’s useful and relevant to whatever your particular community cares about. For example, my company helps small businesses incorporate, file for trademarks and launch their business from a legal perspective. Therefore, we try to cater our topics toward whatever would help small business owners run their companies, from leadership and employee management tips to small business marketing and taxes.
Some experts advise on keeping a 90:10 or 75:25 ratio when it comes to educational vs. promotional content. You don’t necessarily have to stick to some magic equation, as long as you keep your audience’s needs and interests at the forefront of your blog strategy.

2. Not posting consistently.

It’s easy to start a blog, but not so easy to keep it going. A small business blog usually fails due to lack of commitment or resources. A HubSpot report found that companies who blog frequently and consistently benefit the most from their blogging efforts.
Before launching your blog, determine the ideal posting frequency to keep your blog fresh, for example, once or twice per week. If you need to, scout out your competitor’s blogs to gauge the average number of posts per week. In an ideal world, you should create a quarterly editorial plan for your upcoming post topics. And during downtimes, create a handful of general (non time-sensitive) topics that can be fed into the blog whenever the schedule gets tight.

3. Not engaging with your readers.

A blog isn’t a press release or static web page where information simply flows from you to the reader. Social media uniquely provides a direct link to interact with your customers and community; it would be shame not to take advantage of the opportunity. If you’re fortunate enough to have engaged readers who comment on your blog posts, be sure to acknowledge them – whether by thanking them for some kind words, answering a question, providing further details, or inserting yourself in a conversation.
While everyone will differ on the level of community moderation and control, the following is true: If you want to encourage engagement, you need to make it easy for your readers to leave comments. Log-in systems and captcha forms help limit spam or trolls, but they also make it difficult for the casual reader to leave a comment.

4. Being too SEO-focused.

Blogging can have an amazing impact on your keyword rankings and organic search traffic. I encourage businesses to develop an SEO strategy for their blogs. Identify the top keywords for your business and optimize your posts with those keywords. Tools like Scribe or Yoast can help you with search engine optimization.
However, the most successful business blogs write for humans, not machines. Don’t hire a poor quality SEO company that churns out posts filled with specific keywords and phrases, without even thinking whether the content is useful or easy to read. That strategy might drive visitors to your blog, but those visitors will never stay, read, engage with or share your content if it's poor. Keywords don’t create credibility. Write posts that are interesting, sprinkle in keywords now and then, and your efforts will be rewarded.

5. Not using images the right way.

While many new bloggers focus on the words, images are the best way to grab people’s attention quickly. In addition, breaking up longer posts with images that illustrate what you’re talking about will help keep readers interested and combat our limited attention spans.
For many small business blogs, the problem with images boils down to resource allocation. You may expect it to take you one hour to write a post, but only a few minutes to find an image. However, finding the right image is rarely that easy.
Before you begin searching, take a few minutes to think about the main concept, feeling or idea your post is trying to convey. You should always use images that are visually engaging, aesthetically pleasing and relevant to your post. Your image needs to express a concept and not just look like you picked the first stock image that came your way.
In addition, many small businesses run afoul of copyright law and fair use practices by thinking they have the right to use any photo found on the Internet. The best way to steer clear of trouble when selecting images for your blog is to use ones with Creative Commons licensing. You can search for Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr, on the Creative Commons website or via CC search engines like Compfight or Photo Pin.

6. Not listening to your readers.

Not sure what kind of content appeals to your audience the most? It’s not a mystery: Your blog analytics can provide valuable insight into what types of posts are resonating with readers.
By failing to pay attention to analytics, you’re ignoring valuable information that can take your blog to the next level. Continually track the responses to each blog post. Tinker with different topics, titles and types of posts. Which posts generate the most activity (comments, shares, likes)? Increase the frequency of the most popular.
What are some of the top lessons you have learned with your business blog?
Original article by Nellie Akalp in mashable
Photo via iStockphoto, Erikona
6 Blogging Mistakes

6 Things that make Your Blog Is Repelling Prospective Clients

One of the most difficult and perhaps the thorniest task for a freelancer is to get clients. You may be blessed with a great writing talent or web designing skills that sparkle interests and blow off minds, but if you can’t manage to get a single client, you won’t be able to seize upon your expertise – and obviously there is no point of labeling yourself as a freelancer.

Chances are, in your search to find tips on how to get freelance clients, you will find that experts expect you to build a blog as your portfolio. Which I’m sure you did. Nevertheless, getting clients still is a ‘glitch’ that you couldn’t ride out until now. Ever wondered what’s wrong with your blog that keeps repelling clients?

Here are some of the reasons:

1. Cluttered design

Here is a question: Can you attract a butterfly with a ghoulish and an unattractive garden? A place where they wouldn’t be comfortable hanging out and reaping the benefits of the nature? I’m sure it would be a little hard and most likely impossible.
For a clientele, the process is almost the same. In order to get clients and gain a client’s trust to contact you seeking for your freelance services you need to have a clean and ‘tidy’ design.
A blog with clutter, sidebars dreadfully structured, and widgets popping out can repel clients making them cast doubt on your potentials before even contacting you. Ensure that your blog is clean and clutter-free.

2. Buried contact forms

Your objective as a freelancer after generating a good impression is to make a client get in touch with you asking for your services. What if the client can’t find a form to fill-in and contact you? Is he going to waste his precious time foraging for one in your blog, when he could be working on finding another freelancer among the millions out there?
If he leaves the site without contacting you, you’ve just lost out on a potential income-earning project. Make sure your contact form is easily viewable to grab potential clients (who are already interested).
Hiding contact forms on pages, and camouflaging contact pages on fuzzy menus certainly repels clients.

 

3. Flabby first impression

Your website is a place to showcase your talents and what services you are offering to clients. It plays a major, yet essential role on a client’s first impression of your services.

If you are a freelance web designer, then your website shouldn’t be of the average standard. You should spruce up your web design to demonstrate your designing aptitude before your clients get in touch with you.
On the other hand, if you are a freelance writer the masterpiece of your copy and content should reflect your abilities as a writer. Failing to do so, grammar mistakes and inappropriate word use can result in a bad impression and obliviously push away freelancing writing gigs.

 

4. Presenting exorbitant fees

This is one of the most common mistakes a freelancer can make. Presenting the rates of your services can divert the client’s notion if applied wrongly. When a client stumbles upon your website, before he decides to reach out for your services, your rates will determine a further action.
If your rates are exorbitant and not even close to the client’s budget, he will feel undermined due to insufficient budget. You will lose out the opportunity of negotiating terms and prices because he’s already gone.
That is the reason why most freelancing experts advise to hide the prices as a way of getting contacted for further negotiations.

 

5. Fake testimonials

To increase your work reliability and credibility towards prospects you should attach in your website real testimonials from people who previously hired you. It woud be great if they could endorse your valuable services and recommend you to entrepreneurs who want to leverage their businesses.
The sad thing is that many freelancers drop the ball showing fake testimonials in the form of text only. To remove all doubts, you could attach a link to their websites and the images of the clients who endorse your work.
According to a research conducted by Eryn Jane Newman from the Victoria University of Wellington, images make claims and statements more believable than a simple text. With that said, you can implement that principle to increase the credibility of your testimonials.

 

6. No ‘About me’ page

You need an About Me page for clients to form a strong bond and build trust with you. You should make sure you include on your website, your personal picture and relevant information about yourself, your services, as well as your background (or portfolios).

With more and more scams turning up on the internet every day, if you don’t attach any photo of yourself on your website, clients will not be more likely to invest in you.

 

Conclusion

You might be thinking you are doing exactly what it takes to hook freelance clients but if your blog/portfolio doesn’t entice clients at first glance, you’ll end up losing out and repelling more high-paying and prospective clients over and over again.
Have a look at the strengths and weaknesses of your blog or website, tweak it to the best of your abilities with sources of inspiration you can find on this site to increase the likelihood of closing freelancing deals and contracts.
Source: hongkiat.com
6 Things that make Your Blog Is Repelling Prospective Clients

How to Share Vine Videos on Tumblr

When Twitter launched Vine Thursday it omitted one important social network from its sharing options: Tumblr. Looped GIF images are extremely popular on Tumblr, so the audience there for Vine videos is potentially huge.
Just because there’s no native way to share Vines on Tumblr, doesn’t mean you can’t share your creations on the site. Here are few different ways you can include Vine videos in your Tumblr posts:

Upload Directly To Tumblr

If you want to share your Vine on Tumblr, one of the easiest ways is to just upload it directly to your Tumblr from your iOS device using Tumblr's app.
Every Vine you create is automatically saved to the camera roll on your device. To upload to Tumblr:

• Launch the Tumblr app on your phone
• Create a new post
• Select video from the options
• Choose existing video
• Select the Vine you’d like to upload from the video clips stored on your phone

Vine videos shared this way will just play through once rather than loop. To get that looped effect, you can import the video clip into your favorite mobile video editor (Splice is a good example, but there are many others) and copy it several times, laying the copies down on the timeline, one after another. Once you’ve reached your desired length, export the video and upload it just as you would a traditional video through Tumblr.

If you don’t have a video editor on your phone, you can email the clip to yourself from your phone’s Photo Library and edit it on your computer instead.

Embed a Tweet

Embedding a tweet on Tumblr is the easiest way to share the looped version of your Vine. To embed a tweet:

• Share your Vine on Twitter
• Go to Twitter.com
• Click on the More button on the tweet associated with your Vine
• Select Embed Tweet
• Copy the code generated by Twitter and add it to a post on Tumblr

If you don’t want to share all your Vines through your own Twitter stream but want the ability to embed them, consider creating a Twitter account just for your Vines. Once you tweet them, you’ll be able to copy/paste tweets or links to your Vine from your special account to your main account fairly easily, and you won't pollute your traditional Twitter stream.

Upload To Your Favorite Video Service

iOS devices offer the ability to upload video clips directly from your Photo Library to YouTube.
Vine video files are saved as MOV’s so you can upload the file to almost any video service and then embed that player into your Tumblr blog.

The file can also be downloaded onto your computer and uploaded to Tumblr (or other sites) any way you’d like.
Have you tried sharing Vine videos on Tumblr, or another site?
How to Share Vine Videos on Tumblr

How To Use Flickr For Images, Backlinks And Traffic

Simply what I want to define you via this post is just how to use flickr to find perfect images for your blog post, how you can build backlinks with flickr and how you can get traffic to your blog via flickr. As we know flickr is one of the best and most visited website to find perfect images for our use. Till date, flickr is the world’s 65th visited website in this world. You can just imagine, if used properly in any manner how much traffic can any blog gets from flickr.

So i will explain you in simple steps how you can use flickr to find images for your blog and get traffic for your blog. I hope you would love these steps and surely use flickr for your blog next time.

How To Use flickr To Finding Images And Build Backlinks

1. Go to the official website of flickr. Just point your browser to flickr dot com and proceed.
2. You will find a search box. Enter any keyword for which you want to get relevant images.This box is mostly located at top of website.
3. If at flickr search box, if you are unable to find anything perfect related to your search, you can try Advance Search option.
4. Enter the keywords again for which you want to find relevant keywords. Database  is very large, so you will get tons of results in no time.
5. After finding lots of images related to your search , now you can sort them according to your desire. There are many options available at left side which you can tick and get more relevant images according to your search.
6. Now the game begins. Just choose any image that you want to use. You can easily see the license of the image at left say and read what it says.Here is the steps to use flickr properly. Now what you would have to do is to get proper attributes to use the image. Every person holding the copyrights of the image you choose will give you two options Either to link the image to the source where you use it. or to put the name of author who uploaded the image .
7. You can use any of these two options. If you choose the option of using the image in your blog , then that’s the step to find images from flickr to use in your blog post. But wait, we are still left to make backlinks. Remember the more people use your image and link back to you, the more backlinks you will get.That’s quite tricky but easy method to use flickr for our blog.
8. Now comes the way of traffic. How we can use flickr to drive traffic to our blog. Its not very difficult task to use flickr to drive traffic to our blog. Remember till date, flickr has an alexa rank below 100 and so you can imagine how much people would love to visit flickr each day.
9. Getting traffic from flickr is no more any difficult task. What you would have to do is search for your niche and find relevant groups at flickr. The more groups you join, the more you can discuss and hence finally the more traffic you can get from flickr.
10. You can use flickr groups to browse for different groups and join them. Join big groups and post your images along with your URL. Make sure do not spam at flickr or you might be banned.

So this was the trick to use flickr in an awesome way so that you can also get images, backlinks and traffic free of cost. If you liked this way to get traffic via flickr, you can share with others.
Original post in idealtechblog.com
How To Use Flickr For Images, Backlinks And Traffic

Top 5 Reasons Why Your SEO Isn’t Converting Significantly

Businesses have been learning real fast what SEO is thinking that they’ll be able to leverage more in their online market. In this article, we will discuss why some businesses who have applied SEO in their business don’t really experience significant conversions.

5 Reasons Why Your SEO Isn’t Converting Significantly

1. No Long Term Plan : One of the most important strategies in SEO is the maintenance. Your SEO efforts should not stop when you optimize your web pages and build many links toward your website. The tendency is to get little results when you view SEO as a short-term marketing plan for your company. Usually, the least amount of time required for you to develop and really achieve great SEO progression is six months to a year. Hence, you should keep improving on your techniques about three years or more down the road to get favorable rankings in major search engines and win sales conversions your business deserves.

2. Wrong SEO Strategy Implementation : If you are sticking on your long-term plan for years now and still have not gotten the amount of conversion you expect, you could have been implementing the wrong SEO strategies. There are so many competitors in the online realm these days that one mistake on your SEO can affect your business’ rank in the online search results. Between directory submissions, social media, press releases and link-building, you should also invest a great time and/or money to develop quality content. This is one secret of SEO and the best strategy to date. Publishing unique and high-quality content will never get you to the wrong place. Create value by writing evergreen articles, help your readers find answers and you’ll receive a massive amount of traffic and conversion in no time.

3. Wrong Target Setting : More number of views and unique counts of traffic in your website is not tantamount to creating more sales. When you have a low conversion rate despite the high traffic your website has, this only means that you are not targeting the right market. One way to connect to people who are largely interested in your niche and offering is to write guest posts in relevant blogs to grow a network that can directly respond in that field of interest.


4. Wrong Keywords Used :
Tracking keywords is really important in SEO. Your aim is to get organic searches as much as referrals so to determine the new trends demanded by searches, you should gauge the performance of your current keywords used. Choose among the long list you have and filter the ones which are bringing significant traffic and good conversion rates. Then optimize those keywords more to draw more leads into your site for your online campaigns.

5. Failure to Measure your SEO Efforts :
After all is done, don’t forget to measure your SEO efforts. You can use analytics tools as there are many available tools now online. The best recommended one that is used for free is Google Analytics. This is where you can generate and view reports on the rankings of your pages, links, referrals, sources of visitors and more. This tool will help you study and criticize your SEO strategy and let you create road maps for success. There are many areas in this application that you can explore to assess your standing. From time to time, it’s best to check on these to know if you are heading on the right track.

Conclusion : The truth is that not all SEO techniques can succeed. While some businesses achieve their desired results, others fail to apply the right and enhanced SEO strategies to get more conversions. To have successful conversions, you should take note of these reasons to serve as lessons for you to enhance your SEO and increase your online visibility further. Monitor your performance over time and improve your techniques as necessary. Never stay contented with what you have and done, to generate more chances of getting more followers and sales.

Top 5 Reasons Why Your SEO Isn’t Converting Significantly

12 Ways to Get Banned From Gmail

Just how bad do you have to be to get banned from Gmail? How many policies and terms do you have to violate to warrant suspension, or worse, Google termination?
Google has discretion on the site, with the sole power to warn, suspend or terminate those in violation of its policies at any time.

SEE ALSO: 9 Things We Wish Gmail Could Do

In order to ensure your continued ease of access with Gmail, we've compiled a list of things you shouldn't do — unless you want to lose your account.
1. Impersonate another person (via the use of an email address or otherwise) or otherwise misrepresent yourself or the source of any email.
Don't use someone else's Gmail account and write emails pretending like you are him or her. According to Time, there are nine states with online impersonation laws, and in New York and California online impersonation is a misdemeanor punishable by thousands of dollars in fines and up to a year in jail. So just don't create fake Gmail accounts in the first place. Ahem, Lennay Kekua, cough cough.
2. Send emails to users who have requested to be removed from a mailing list.
If you are still receiving emails from an address you unsubscribed from, try the troubleshooting advice in this Google blog post: unsubscribing made easy. Google launched a service that messages senders on your behalf, asking them to unsubscribe you from their list. Unfortunately it doesn't work for all senders right now, but Google is encouraging senders to support auto-unsubscribe.
3. Sell, exchange or distribute to a third party the email addresses of any person without his or her knowledge and consent.
The going rate for 1 million U.S. email addresses is $25, making your personal email address worth $0.000025. Besides the fact that selling email addresses without the person's knowledge or consent is illegal, it's not very lucrative. Trying to make a quick buck? Don't do it this way.
4. Send unsolicited emails to significant numbers of email addresses belonging to people you don't know.
Not only is selling email addresses illegal, but sending emails to a bunch of people you don't know is also illegal. So no, you cannot email blast the cast of Downton Abbey to ask about Matthew Crawley and Lady Mary's nuptials, or where Dan Stevens is eating dinner tonight...
5. Send, upload or distribute any unlawful, defamatory, harassing, abusive, fraudulent, infringing, obscene or otherwise objectionable content.
Email fraud has become rampant as technology continues to develop, but sending harassing or obscene content is also illegal. The U.S. government has drafted up a helpful manual for recognizing fraudulent content with tips on what to do when you encounter it. This list of illegal content seems pretty all-inclusive, so just send, upload and distribute only cute pictures of cats, okay?
6. Conduct or forward pyramid schemes and the like.
In order to avoid inadvertently becoming part of a pyramid scheme, check out some helpful tips. The old adage "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" works well in this situation. (Sorry, Bernie.)
7. Transmit content that may be harmful to minors.
In email and in life, ya heard? That includes child pornography, correspondence of a threatening, violent or graphic nature and age-restricted content, such as alcohol, drug or dating site material.
8. Illegally transmit another's intellectual property or other proprietary information without such owner's or licensor's permission.
Go to Tumblr; it's called a "reblog." Just make sure you have permission before sending anyone's work through the Gmail service, or else face the consequences.
9. Interfere with other Gmail users' enjoyment of the service.

GIF courtesy of loverofeverythingsweet
10. Sell, trade, resell or otherwise exploit for any unauthorized commercial purpose or transfer any Gmail account.
If you can't sell your account in the first place, how can you resell it? Besides that point, you can't make money from your domain name — even if it is really, really cool.
11. Use the Gmail service in connection with illegal peer-to-peer file sharing.
If you are illegally downloading music, movies, or TV shows (tsk, tsk), don't use the Gmail service to share the content with your friends. But remember: Friends don't let friends illegally peer-to-peer file share.
12. Modify, adapt, translate or reverse engineer any portion of the Gmail service.
Reverse engineering involves reproducing a manufacturer's product using a detailed examination of its construction. Basically, you can't take the structure of Gmail, copy it and then create your own email service.

12 Ways to Get Banned From Gmail

Catch Phone Thieves With Lookout Lock Cam

Mobile security firm Lookout on Wednesday began rolling out a new feature for its Android app intended to help users combat phone thieves and prying eyes.
The new Lock Cam feature notifies you if anyone tries to access your device, whether it has been stolen or someone is simply trying to snoop on your phone behind your back. Lock Cam uses the front-facing camera on your device to silently take a photo of anyone who enters the wrong password three times into your lock screen.

"You'll then receive an email with the picture and the location of your device, giving you valuable information about who tried to access your device and where it happened," according to a blog post from Lookout. "You can then use this information to take steps to further protect your device, like changing or strengthening your password."
Lock Cam is only available in English at the moment, and will only work if your device has a front-facing camera, is running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or above, and has the lock screen enabled. Premium users can access Lock Cam immediately, while it will be rolling out to free users over the next week, Lookout said.

To enable Lock Cam, go to "Settings" in your Lookout app and make sure you have "Advanced Protection" and "Lock Cam" enabled.
Meanwhile, Lookout today also announced another new feature for its Premium Android app ($2.99 month/$29.99 year) intended to help users recover a missing device. Premium users can now add a customized message of up to 300 characters to their Lookout Lock screen providing information about how they can be contacted if a Good Samaritan finds the phone and wants to return it.
For more on Lock Cam, see the video below.Also check out PCMag's full review of Lookout Mobile Security Premium (for Android).

Catch Phone Thieves With Lookout Lock Cam

How to Run an Internet Membership Site

Membership sites are very popular on the internet. They provide an easy way to make residual income from content or a product which can be purchased by your subscribers at a price that is worthwhile for both you and them. A membership site will usually offer greater value than if you purchased a product or service on its own, as you will be receiving revenue for the same product from a number of members.

Determine what your interest is and set up a website which provides rich content in whatever niche you choose. You should provide original content. You can offer content in the form of ebooks, articles, reports, videos, and other types of formats that would be appropriate.

It is usually a good idea to limit the amount of members in a membership site. You probably do not want more than a certain amount of customers to have the same product. Even though it is an original product, the value of the content would not hold up if too many people have the same product.

Do some research and see what you can offer to make your membership site stand out. There are many membership sites on the Internet, so it is a very competitive market. Make sure you are offering excellent content and great customer service, in order to attract and keep your members.

If you are offering an ebook every month, you might want to include a salesletter that your customers can promote it with. Give them two or three sets of graphics that they can choose from. This way everyone will not be selling an ebook that looks the same. Of course, you have to do the numbers to see what your product would be costing you and what you can charge for such a membership, as well as the number of members you will allow at that price.

Getting a script is very important to run your membership smoothly. There are many offered on the Internet and they range usually from $100 to $1,000. Once
you install the script your membership should be able to run pretty much hands off.

Create a few months worth of content before you open up the doors of your membership site. Always stay a little ahead so that you won’t run into a situation where you are not prepared for that month. You should always deliver on or about the same day of the month, that way your members come to rely and look forward to having your product. You always want to be reliable to gain the trust of your subscribers.

Membership sites are run on a month to month basis, so your customers can cancel at any time. This makes it a lot easier for people to join, because they do not have to commit to a lengthy period of time. That also means you have to be able to keep your members coming back by offering quality service and great products. Otherwise, it is very easy to cancel and go somewhere else that offers a better value.

It’s important to have a support desk that answers concerns or complaints in a timely manner. You have to make yourself available to your customer. Nothing turns people off more than not being able to get the information they need when they are paying for your services. So be prompt in responding to your customers’ concerns.

Listen to your customers and answer their needs. Make it a point to ask for their input and suggestions so you will be supplying them with what they are interested in. If you are not giving them what they want, they will probably go somewhere else. So listen to their needs and implement whatever changes that entails.

Make your membership site attractive and easy to navigate. Make sure that the site works well technologically and is not outdated. Keep fresh content and innovative ideas up and running all the time.

A membership site that is focused on its members is a membership site that will keep its members. If you think in terms of giving more value, you will probably have members that will be very glad to pay you your monthly membership fee month after month.

How to Run an Internet Membership Site

How to Add meta descriptions to Blogger

When you add a widget (or a gadget as Blogger would call it) to your blog, by default the widget would appear on all pages –homepage, index, archive, post and static pages. But what if you want a certain widget to appear only on a certain page or pages, can it be done? In other words can you select on which page/pages the widget would or would not appear?  The answer is yes you can -by using Blogger conditional tags.
Note: This trick doesn't work with Labels, Archive and Followers gadgets. For these gadgets you want to use the CSS's display none method.
Let us proceed,

1. Find your widget or section Id

To address a widget or a section in HTML, you need to know its Id. Here’s how to find a widget or section Id.

2. Locate the widget code in HTML

1. Go to Dashboard > Design > Edit HTML.
2. Check the  Expand Widget Templates check box on top right of the HTML window.
3. Find your widget in the HTML by using Ctrl+F and entering the widget Id in the search box.
   

Your widget code might look like this. It may be a little different, but it’s okay. Just pay attention to the highlighted lines. Widget content is contained in between those two lines -in "includable" section.

<b:widget id='WidgetID' locked='false' title='Widget title' type='HTML'>
<b:includable id='main'>  
    <b:if cond='data:title != &quot;&quot;'> 
    <h2 class='title'><data:title/></h2> 
  </b:if> 
  <div class='widget-content'> 
    <data:content/> 
  </div> 
<b:include name='quickedit'/> 
</b:includable> 
</b:widget>

3. Choose the appropriate conditional tag

I listed some conditional tags in another post -Targeting specific pages with conditional tag. Copy your desired tag from there and apply it here.

4. Apply the tag

Paste the tag (from step 3) immediately after <b:includable id='main'> and the code line 11 to 15 immediately before </b:includable>, as shown below.

<b:widget id='WidgetID' locked='false' title='Widget title' type='HTML'>
<b:includable id='main'> 
PUT CONDITIONAL TAG HERE  
  <b:if cond='data:title != &quot;&quot;'> 
    <h2 class='title'><data:title/></h2> 
  </b:if> 
  <div class='widget-content'> 
    <data:content/> 
  </div> 
<b:include name='quickedit'/> 
<b:else/>
<style type='text/css'>
#WidgetID {display:none;}/*to hide empty widget box*/
</style>
</b:if> 
</b:includable> 
</b:widget>

Replace WidgetID in line 13 with the widget ID from code line 1.
The code will check whether the condition is true or false:

• If the result is true, it executes (and display) the widget’s content.
• If the result is false, it skips the content and hide the widget.
  You need to hide the widget because in most templates the content-less widget will still appear -as an empty box.

5. Save and view

Click Save Template button and view your blog.

That’s all to it. Enjoy!

original post in bloggersentral.com
How to Add meta descriptions to Blogger

A better way to add meta tags to Blogger

One way to improve your blog SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to add in description and keywords meta tags. They are placed inside the head section of your blog template HTML.
In description meta tag you put a description of your blog, telling what your blog is about. In keyword meta tag you put in key words relevant to your blog content.

Duplicate meta descriptions

There is a problem though, in Blogger (blogspot) the meta tags will not only reside in your homepage but also in every post pages that you create (when you post an article). Let say you posted 100 articles so far, then all 100 pages (+1 for the home page) will share the same meta tags!. This is not good, for two reasons:

1. Google uses your meta description (if you have one installed) as content snippet in Google SERP (search engine results page). Imagine you have same snippet for all your pages!
2. Google will regard them as duplicate contents (duplicate meta descriptions).  Google Webmaster Tools will issue a warning if you have duplicate descriptions.

The solution

Update Mar 2012: You can now natively add meta description to individual posts/pages on Blogger.

There are two ways to prevent duplicate meta descriptions:

1. Create one set of meta tags for each page and apply them to their respective page using blog URL conditional tags. Can be done, but impractical -imagine adding 100 sets of meta and conditional tags in your template!
2. Limit meta description tag to homepage only. I choose this method, the easy way! (When there is no meta description exists in a (post) page, Google will use an excerpt from the post content as search result content snippet).

Adding the meta tags, the better way

So I’m going to explain method no.2, here it is:

1. First go to Dashboard > Design > Edit HTML and find this line in your blog template HTML codes:

   <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

2. Then put the meta tags code immediately below that line. The final result should be as shown below.

   <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
   <meta content='PUT KEYWORDS HERE SEPARATED BY COMMAS' name='keywords'/>
   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
   <meta content='PUT BLOG DESCRIPTION HERE' name='description'/>
   </b:if>

   What this code does is apply the keyword meta tag to all pages and limit description meta tag to only your homepage.
3. Save the template.

Checking the meta tags

Confirm whether you’ve entered the meta tags correctly, using an online meta tag checker.

• Make sure you check at least two pages -home page and one of the post pages.
• Compare the extracted meta information, notice the difference.

Enjoy!
From bloggersentral.com
A better way to add meta tags to Blogger

5 things you need to avoid to get ranking and traffic

There are five specific things you need to avoid to ensure that your content gets the ranking and traffic it deserves.

1. Keyword Stuffing

Never stuff keywords into your content. It's perfectly acceptable to use your keywords in your content but if they appear more than once every 200 words or so, you're overusing them. You do not want to be accused of keyword stuffing. Even a blog that doesn't stuff keywords into blog posts but does stuff them into lists of links in the sidebar, in the footer, and in other places on the blog could be considered guilty of keyword stuffing.

2. Hidden Text and Hidden Keywords

Don't try to hide keywords in an extremely small font or in text that is the same color as the background of your blog. That's a big SEO don't and is a guaranteed way to get flagged as spam content if you're caught.

 

3. Duplicate Content

Don't republish content that has already been published online. This holds true for content within your own blog. Search engines like Google punish content that is not original. That means even if you write the content, don't publish it in more than one place.

 

4. No Original Content

Never publish content on your blog that includes a page filled with ads or links with little or no original content. That's a big spam flag for search engines!

 

5. Paying for Links or Publishing Paid Links

When people pay for links, it artificially inflates their popularity. Search engine algorithms typically reward sites with a lot of incoming links with higher rankings under the assumption that pages with a lot of links must be good or no one would link to them. In an effort to crack down on paid links and reduce this artificial popularity inflation, sites that pay for links and sites that publish links that have been paid for could be punished if they're caught.

5 things you need to avoid to get ranking and traffic 

Blogging For Commercial Purpose

Here are a few rules to help you create your commercial blog. The rules are based around making a blog that has a high traffic rating whilst keeping it sincere enough so that people will not be deterred from re-visiting in the future. Traffic and promotion may be the first thing on most commercial bloggers minds, but these rules will help you to see past those concepts. They will enable you to create a long lasting and well attended commercial blog.

1. Your blog must be of value and use to your target audience
The biggest mistake that so many commercial blogs make is that the blog is beneficial to the business and not the user. The users are the ones that should come first because they are the ones you want to keep coming back. You want them to tell their friends about you and to share your content. You want them to talk about you on social media, to sign up to your RSS feed and comment in your comment section. No user will do this if your blog is not of any value or use to your target audience.

You should also remember that your target audience is the one you should appeal to. It is very easy to get a lot of traffic if your blog appeals to baser instincts (sex and violence), but if your target audience are not interested in such things then the traffic you attract will mean nothing.

2. Unless you are blogging for your affiliate advert revenue, you should avoid affiliate adverts
If you wish to blog in order to gain affiliate advert money then by all means add some affiliate adverts onto your blog. If you are blogging to promote your company or products, to send people to your website or to run your own adverts then you should avoid affiliate adverts like the plague. Not only will they take the focus off your message, they will also make your blog look over commercialized and tacky. They also lower your SEO rankings by slowing down your page loading times.

3. Brand your blog
This is an absolute must if you want to run a commercial blog. Your brand logo should be on every blog post, and the reader should never be in any doubt about whose blog they are on. Your blog post should be saturated with branding to be sure that the user knows who you are and what you stand for.

4. Always be positive in your blogs
 You must always be positive in your blogs, even if you are writing about things that are negative in nature. If you cannot avoid writing about negative things then you must place them in a very positive light. You must explain what the readers can learn from the situation, and how such a thing can be avoided if we apply these lessons in the future.

5. Do not badmouth your competitors on your blog
It is very tempting to use your blog as a little soapbox in order to tell the world how great you are and how bad your competitors are, but there are two good reasons why you should not. Firstly, your competitors may retaliate, which is going to mean negative PR for you. Secondly, many people will not trust your negative comments because you have a vested interest in saying it. Just like you have a vested interest in saying you are the greatest. The reader knows that you are extremely biased on the subject and so will have a lot of trouble believing you or taking you seriously when it comes to negative comments about others.

6. Do not promote yourself on your blog posts
 Nobody in their right mind is going to keep attending a blog every month or week so that they can be marketed to. Just do not promote yourself, your products or your services on your blog. On the other hand however, if your blog posts mention your company, products or services naturally then they should be written about in a very positive light. Write with an almost reverence of your company, products or services.
If you are planning your blogs correctly then your company, products or services should appear naturally in your text. You should not promote yourself, but if your target audience is the ones who would normally purchase your products, then your topics should revolve around the things that interest them.
Do not try the old trick of doing on promotional post and then three none promotional posts. All you will do is immunize your target audience against your promotional posts. If you post them at the same time every month then they will know which posts to ignore. If you release them randomly then they will learn to recognize them and simply ignore them when they see them.

7.  Put small picture adverts for your products or services at the bottom of each blog post
This is such a simple and yet underused idea. All you need to do is create your own small affiliate style adverts at the bottom of each post so that people can click on them when they have done reading. The idea is so inoffensive that many people click on the adverts as a way of simply investigating the issues brought up in the blog post. They are a great way of getting targeted traffic to your website.

8. Link to your main website at the bottom of every post
These links should be within your picture adverts at the bottom but even if you do not have picture adverts at the bottom, you should still link to your website. Do not link to the same page every week or you will be wasting the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value of your links every week.

Original article in http://idealtechblog.com
Blogging For Commercial Purpose

How To Use Effective Blogging Strategies in Place of Professional SEO Services?

There are thousands of articles discussing which blogging strategies have worked wonderfully in the past, which ones are effective at present, and which ones are likely to remain valuable in the future.
It’s easy to get lost in the sea of information unless you seek answers to one question at a time.
So, here’s a list that cuts out the noise and gives a straight and simple answer to only one question---How to use blogging for SEO?.

The More the Merrier...?

Without a doubt, the blogging community is growing ever bigger by the day. Many are simply blogging for personal gratification but for an increasing number of people, blogging is an opportunity to earn extra income. In fact the blogosphere seems a bit crowded now, and if in your chosen niche or subject matter there are already thousands of active blogs, it may take a while before your blog can gain momentum and generate income.
A fledgling blog can easily get overshadowed, just as an older blog may be unseated from its lofty spot at the SERPs by those that are managed by more knowledgeable SEOs. There are lucky bloggers though who are not really putting too much effort on the technical side of SEO, but are nevertheless rewarded with a high page rank, a constant stream of inbound traffic and even a top spot at the SERPs. How do these bloggers do that without hiring professional SEO services?

Common Factors of Successful Blogs

1. They have a niche... and they stick to it

   
   
   Ever heard of the disadvantages of being a jack of all trades but master of none?Image source
    
   The very first thing you need when you start a blog is to have a theme or a topic which will also be the central subject of all your posts. There are many benefits to concentrating on a single niche. First, it serves as a guide for your posts and keeps you from straying to subjects that your loyal readers may not be interested in. Many bloggers also find it easier to come up with article subjects and content if they have parameters to work with (but it is also a challenge to make each post fresh).
   Second, it’s usually easier to find advertisers and get approved by affiliate sites if you have a main niche. Third, it increases your chances of landing a lofty spot in the search engine results pages.
   
   What about Multiple-Subject Blogs?
   There are other bloggers though who don't have a single niche because basically, they are writing personal blogs. It's just that they must be doing something really good because regardless of the personal nature of the blog posts, they are still able to monetize those blogs. These people didn’t achieve all that instantly. Usually they are already a year old—or older—have many subscribers, and a constant stream of visitors.
   

2. They keep things simple

   Beginners usually have this misconception that the more glamorous the blog is, the better it can attract searchers. The truth is most Internet users are annoyed when there’s too much drama going on in a website. First of all, having too many Flash features and demanding plug-ins and widgets can slow down your website’s loading time. Unless users are utterly desperate for the information on your site, they’ll simply exit your site and move on to the next one in the SERPs instead of wasting time waiting for your site to finish loading. Keeping things simple and neat also brings attention to the more important thing: the content of your blog.
   

3. They have creative, news-worthy posts

   
   
   Think of viewers as consumers too; everyone likes fresh goods.Image source
    
   Being creative with your content doesn’t only please your readers and subscribers; it will also encourage other sites and blogs to link to your articles even without your prompting them to do so. Try to incorporate popular people, current events, and the like into your niche as well.
   These are the types of content that usually become viral or even featured in news sites. Fresh content is also appealing to link builders, advertisers, and other bloggers who are looking for external references for their own blog posts. It can definitely help with your organic SEO.
   

4. They post updates and new posts regularly

   You’ve read about how it is okay to update a blog at least once a month. While this is indeed acceptable for blogs that have already taken off, the same can’t be said for blogs that are still starting out. New blog posts will not only give your readers new things to look forward to each week (which basically translates to traffic, another important ranking signal), but they will also help keep your blog in the search engines’ radar.
   IMPORTANT REMINDER: Publish interesting, well-written and well-researched articles, for your credibility’s sake and to appease the Panda. Carefully choose keywords that you can rank in and make excellent content revolving those keywords.
   

5. They actually follow webmaster guidelines and rules

   What’s great about bloggers is that most of them actually don’t do SEO. They just work on their blog and then promote it to their friends and other people via social media networks. Their simple methods of blog promotion actually prevent them from committing serious SEO violations that are penalized by search engines.
   
   
   No more bunnies. Nowadays, the only animal you’ll be able to pull out of black hats will be the angry Penguin. Stick with the white hats.Image source
   Black hat SEO is like a collection of magic tricks: impressive, inspires jealousy, and often temporary. This is a collection of SEO strategies that is basically considered by search engines as cheating. Their goal is to manipulate the page rank of websites. These strategies may indeed give you the results you want to achieve, but it is unlikely that these effects will last in the long run. Search engines are now more intelligent and improve from day to day. Google, for one,is constantly upgrading and updating its algorithm to ensure that its users are getting the best results. Updates like Penguin and Panda were rolled out to weed out the black hat practitioners who can’t seem to achieve success in an equal playing field.
   
   
   
   

These five tips are just the top of the iceberg, so to speak. Blogging is not just a recreation or occupation; it is also a lifetime study. Consumer behavior, after all, is mercurial—just like search engine algorithms. The secret to blogging success is to earn the loyalty and approval of humans and the bots, respectively.

About the author
Emma-Julie Fox writes for Pitstop Media, a Vancouver based SEO company. Pitstop Media has been helping businesses across North America successfully increase their search visibility. If you want to invite the author to guest post on your blog please contact www.pitstopmedia.com.

Original article in bloggersentral.com

How To Use Effective Blogging Strategies in Place of Professional SEO Services?

Popular (but bad) Blogging Advice You Should Ignore

Every blogger I’ve known (including myself) has googled ‘How to grow a blog’ one time or another. Soon after the first post is published, you start thinking about getting traffic and comments, more precisely what you need to do in order to increase both.

(Image Source: Fotolia)

One of the first things a blogger does, when faced with the dilemma of growing his or her blog is research. As you search, you realize that you keep coming across the same advice over and over again – from A-listers and normal bloggers alike.
If so many people are vouching for the same piece of advice, then it must surely work, right?
So you spend the next few months trying one advice after another, hoping it’ll take your blog to greater heights. You’re doing everything that they say will work; the problem is, they don’t! Here’s what won’t work and how you can make it work for you.

Blog every day

This was the first blogging advice I took to heart – and failed spectacularly at. Blogging every day is an open invitation to a blogging burn-out. Not only do you run out of things to say but your writing suffers too because you can’t spend as much time proofreading, editing and polishing every post.

(Image Source: bLaugh)

To top it all off, your blog post’s life span is reduced to a single day. That’s not enough time for it to gain traction in social media or get comments. You don’t get any time to market it!
Blogging every day sounds good in theory, but in reality, it squeezes the life and creativity out of you.

How to make it work for you

Unless your blog is your business, there’s a good chance new blog posts every day isn’t what your blog needs. Change your goal of blogging every day to blogging regularly. Decide on your blog’s needs. How many posts a week do you really need to attract visitors and keep your blog active?
New blogs tend to do well with 2-3 posts per week. Experiment with posting schedules to see which days get most visits, comments and interaction and target your publications within that optimum space.

Write great content

The second piece of blogging advice that you still find famous bloggers imparting proved to be a bit of an oxymoron for me. How could I write great content if I had to blog every day? If you’re blogging every day, your content is going to suffer.
Great content takes time to write. It starts with a killer headline and ends with a powerful call to action. Throw in the content that needs to go between the two, and a mini-quest for the perfect images, and you’re looking at a LOT of time and energy devoted to creating great blog content.

How to make it work for you

Writing great content takes planning. Great content not only imparts knowledge but it solves your readers’ problems. It gives them viable solutions.
Take some time to go through your blog analytics. What are the people who are landing on your blog searching for? What answers are they looking for?
I’ve found that the posts I write based on conclusions from my search analytics are the ones that remain evergreen and keep the traffic flowing in.

Be controversial

That seems to be the advice for anyone looking to make a big splash with their blog. Everyone’s writing the same old stuff so they say be different, take an opposing view, and don’t be afraid to offend a few people.
What it really does is make a fool out of you. Instead of convincing readers of your point of view, controversial posts force them to take sides. What happens if you can’t defend your controversial view and some commentator comes in and convinces readers that you’re wrong? Only write a truly controversial post if you’re confident you can defend your point of view.

How to make it work for you

Instead of writing a loud, controversial post, pick an angle that hasn’t been covered. Let’s say you have a freelancing blog. Every other freelancing blog out there is telling you not to work for low rates.
No matter what the gurus say or how solid that advice is, freelancers still offer low rates in the beginning. So instead of trying to convince them not to do so, write a blog post about factors to consider when accepting a low-paying client.

Comment frequently

If you want to make your blog visible, comment on as many blogs as possible – that’s the general consensus. It allows you to leave your footprints all over the blogosphere which trails back to your own blog. While that was true a few years ago, it’s not anymore.

(Image Source: bLaugh)

Blog commenters have gotten busier. They no longer have the time to go over to your website after reading your comments. Most of the time, commenters don’t even read other comments! They leave a comment and get out.

How to make it work for you

No one is saying you shouldn’t leave comments. They are a very important part of your blog-growing strategy. However, comment on relevant blogs and posts, and then monitor which blog is sending you the most traffic.
I still get visitors from a blog I commented in 6 months ago. Here’s a tip: to increase visibility for your comment and your blog, sign your comment with your name and your blog’s name, for e.g. Samar @ myblog.com. This way when people see your comments, they’ll know which blog you’re from.

Run a competition

I fell for this advice hard – and swore off holding a competition on my blog for a long time afterwards. The fact that you need to grow your blog means you won’t be getting enough traffic to make the competition successful. Besides, competitions require effort on the reader’s part. They won’t make the effort if they don’t know or trust you.

How to make it work for you

Instead of holding a competition with a prize at the end, do a give-away instead. Social media is the best way to raise awareness these days, so ask for a simple tweet in exchange. If it’s a free report or a product of your own making, you can also give it away to everyone who tweets or shares it on social media. Create a social share page where they’d be taken to the info product after they share the page on social media.

Reflection

The problem with popular advice is that it’s generic. No two blogs can follow the same advice and get the same results. A lot depends on the blog content and blogger in question. So take the time to understand your blog and business needs before applying any of the advice you hear about blogging. Keep experimenting and tweaking until you find a combination that works.
Have you followed some popular blogging advice only to find that it didn’t work for you?

a post from hongkiat.com
Popular (but bad) Blogging Advice You Should Ignore

10 Tips & Tricks To Setup And Customize Microsoft Surface RT

Once you get it out of the box, you need only do a handful of things to set up your Microsoft Surface RT: select a language, accept the terms and conditions, name your device, connect to your home Wi-Fi and tweak some privacy settings. After going through this ‘welcome process’, you’ll be able to start using your device.

It’s likely that Windows RT is a whole new experience for you so we figured that you might like some tips and tricks to get you started. If you are interested in the swipes and gestures bit, take a look at our earlier post on A Guide To Windows 8 Metro Start Page Navigation before checking out how you can setup and personalize your Surface RT.

Surface RT Setup & Personalization

Here’s a few things to get you started on using your Surface RT.

1. Update Windows And Apps

First and foremost, you should update Windows and the apps that are pre-installed into the system.
To update Windows, go toCharms Menu > Settings > Change PC settings. Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see Windows Update, download and install the updates and restart the device if prompted to.

To update pre-installed apps, go to the Store app and tap on the green word, Update at the top right corner.

2. Easier Login With PIN

Since the Surface RT is linked to a Microsoft account, you’ll have to input your account password to unlock the device. Your preferences linked to the account will be synced into your Surface tablet. You will be prompted for the same password every time you want to use your device, but ther eis the option to set a 4-number PIN lock as a login.
To do this, open the Charms Menu > Settings > Change PC Settings > Users > Sign-in options > Create a PIN.

3. Enhance Security With Picture Password

If you think the 4-number PIN is not secure enough, then you can try the new ‘Picture Password’ as a way to unlock your device. You’ll find it at the same place you used to create a PIN, or just follow this path: Charms Menu > Settings > Change PC Settings > Users > Sign-in options > Create a picture password.
It will then take you through the steps and show you the gestures you can use to create a Picture Password. Do note that you have to use your own picture and not one that is available within the device.

4. Setup Your Personal E-Mail Account

By default, the Mail app will show emails from whatever email address you used to log in. If this is not your main email address, you can use other accounts from Hotmail, Outlook, Google or your own domain.
To add an account, open the Mail app and then activate the Charms Menu > Settings. Then tap on Accounts. You will see Add an account on the right sidebar.

If you don’t want emails from your Microsoft account to be displayed on the live tiles, you can open the Charms Menu > Settings > Accounts, tap on the email account you do not want shown, and untick ‘Email’ under Content to sync.

5. Choose Modern UI Color Schemes

Don’t like the color scheme you are dealt with? Good news, you can change the color scheme and the background design of the Modern UI. Open the Charms Menu > Settings > Change PC settings > Personalize to pick a different color scheme.

You can also change the lock screen picture here.

6. Managing Modern UI Tiles

You would probably prefer one app over the other, so it makes sense to personalise your tiles to reflect that rank of importance. Rearrange your app tiles by tapping and holding a tile to move it around.
The tiles can be made bigger or smaller to suit your personal needs, but note that smaller live tiles will display less information. If, however, you don’t want your information to be showing on the tiles, you can disable this temporarily via Charms Menu > Settings > Tiles then tap on Clear.

7. Naming your UI Tiles

You can also name groups of tiles by pinching with 2 fingers to zoom out of the Modern UI view. Flick downwards on any of the groups to bring up the menu on the bottom (or right click on your mouse). Tap on Name group and throw in a cool name, click Name and repeat for all other groups that need renaming.

8. Share Photos

To share photos or screenshots through the Photos app, select the photo and bring out the Charms Menu > Share. From there, you can share it by Email, upload it to SkyDrive or through other apps that support in-built sharing.

9. Enable Faster App Switching Multitasking

Swiping in from the left edge of the screen will show the multitasking bar, where you see all your recently used apps. However, you can set this gesture to take you directly to the last app you were using.
To do this, open the Charms Menu > Settings > Change PC Settings > General and under App switching, turn on the second option.
To show the multitasking bar when this option is enabled, swipe inwards from the left edge of the display then swipe back to the left.

10. Social Integration

The People app is a great way to receive multiple feeds of your social networks simultaneously. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts to see your feed.
Add your Hotmail, Outlook or Google account by going to the ‘People’ app and following the path: Charms Menu > Settings > Accounts > Add an account. Sign in to have your contacts transferred over.

There is also the native ‘Messaging’ app which not only connects to contacts linked to your Microsoft account; it can also connect to Facebook chat which allows you to receive chat notifications and reply straight to the to the chat thread.
To set this up, go to the Messaging app and open the Charms Menu > Settings > Accounts > Add an account and login with your Facebook details.

Tips from hongkiat.com
10 Tips & Tricks To Setup And Customize Microsoft Surface RT

How to Send Mass Personalized Mail Using Thunderbird

Sending mass mail with personal and friendlier touch is quite a tedious job as you need to change some of the variables in the mail content. For example, you’re hosting a birthday party and need to send out invitations but you do not want your mail invitation to sound like it’s a spam or you want to personally address the person using their name in your invitation. In order to do so, you need to send one mail at one time since you need to change the variables.

This is where Mozilla Thunderbird and a little add-on of it – Mail Merge, excels at its best. With this two tool you don’t have to keep on changing the variables. Just create a spreadsheet and draft a mail, and let this two tools do the hardwork for you.

Install mail merge

First thing you have to do is to download Mozilla Thunderbird. After installation, launch Thunderbird and it will ask for your email account. You can create a new one or use an exisiting account of yours.

Now, to install the add ons – Mail Merge. On the upper right side, you can see a "list" icon. Click on it and then click on add-ons.

On the add-ons manager page, search for Mail Merge. Click install and restart Thunderbird for the add-on to work.

1. Create a CSV file

The first thing that need to be done before you can send out your mails is to create a CSV file. To create a CSV file you can use any spreadsheet tool, if you have Microsoft Excel, you can use that.
The first row of the spreadsheet is used to enter the variables you want to use, for example – first name, last name, mail and etc. After you’re done, save the spreadsheet in CSV format.

2. Drafting Personalized Mail

Click on File > New Message > Message or press Ctrl + N
Enter the variables at places that you want the values to appear. Each variable should be enclosed using the double curly braces, for example {{FIRST NAME}}. Enter variable exactly the same as in the CSV file, this includes spelling, spacing and capitalization.

After you’re done with message creation, click on File > Mail Merge. Set Source > CSV , Deliver Mode > Send Later and Format > Both.
Under CSV section, for File, click on browse to locate the CSV file (spreadsheet) you did earlier. After you’re done click "OK".

After clicking "OK", your mail and CSV file will merge. Earlier, we set "Deliver Mode" to send later, so the mails can be found in Local Folders > Outbox. Click on the mail and you’ll notice that your variables has been replaced with the values in your CSV file.

To send out the mails, click on the "list" icon on the upper right, File > Send Unsent Messages.

And voila! you’re done. With this trick you can stop worrying about sounding automated when sending mass mail and sending personalized mail is no longer a tedious task.

original post is in hongkiat.com.
How to Send Mass Personalized Mail Using Thunderbird