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Archive for September 27, 2009

bikram | September 27, 2009
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Who Else Wants to Earn From His Blog?

If I asked you this question that how one can make a living from his blog. What would have you been your answer? By selling ad space and securing sponsorship?

Well, you are right, but not completely, as there are many ways to make money from a blog. In this blog post, I will share all the possible ways in which you can earn from your blog.

Selling Ad space

This is the most common type of blog monetization, and this is the easiest way as well. You just need to register yourself to a PPC, PPM, or affiliate network followed by placing their codes or banners on your blog. Afterward, wait for users to click on any of them for you to make money.

Tip Jar

If you are considered an expert in your field then you can prepare a tip jar (e-book), which people will pay to read. Free tip jars also secure donations from readers.

Donation

Donation model is not new, but it is very effective. If people like you, they will donate you some money. Put a “buy me a beer” link followed by PayPal button, and see how many people are paying you.

Paid reviews

If your blog has good flow traffic then you can also sign-up for the paid reviews website, but always remember paid review may reflect badly on you. You will have the freedom to choose the kind of reviews you will write and post on your blog.

Blog trading

This is not something which most bloggers do, but there are some online entrepreneurs who will setup a blog, optimize it for search engine, get good Page Rank, post insightful content, and then will sell it.

Information products

Selling information products, either yours or someone else, is one of the ways to make money from blog. Write a book, promote it, and gauge the reaction.

Coaching and consulting

If you are a star in your field with a proven record then you can even impart training to others. You can also work as a consultant. These are the really good paying works, but not everyone can go for these.

Merchandising

This option is not for all. Only a strong blog with a huge fan base can use this technique. You need to have a huge base of followers that devour whatever you write or do.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 26, 2009
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Here’s a Quick Way to Find a Perfect Web Host

You got a cool website name, a trendy design, and the best in the class content, and even lots of traffic, but still you will not be successful if you do not have a good web host to host your website. How good is your design if your server is down most of the time? And how good is your content if your website takes years to load? Nothing matters, if your hosting is not right. It is like, having everything fancy in place, but what is missing is the infrastructure.

Your webhost provides you the infrastructure to erect your online empire; therefore, it is very necessary to find the right web hosting company to host your domain. Here I am going to share some tips that will help you in finding a good webhosting company.

Web hosting quality checklist

These are steps I followed when I chose a web hosting company for my blogs. Follow these ten steps and see if the host you are considering meets all of these criteria or not.

  1. Bandwidth: The more bandwidth you will get the more users you can entertain.
  2. Storage space: If you want to host a lot of website, or host heavy files then you will need a lot of space.
  3. Speedy technical support: You will not like to wait for days before you get your answer like the grand daddies of web hosting make you do.
  4. Easy to use control panel: managing domain should be easy.
  5. Seamless upgrading and downgrading: your web host should help you seamlessly upgrade or downgrade your account without any downtime.
  6. Free e-mail hosting: you will like to have yourname@yourdomain.com; hence make sure your hosting plan allow you to have many e-mail accounts.
  7. Unlimited domain hosting: see if your web hosting company gives you the opportunity to host more than one website or not.
  8. Good infrastructure: See if your web hosting company has up-to-date servers or not. And what about their backup servers?
  9. Uptime: the web hosting that you choose should guarantee at least 99.99% uptime.
  10. One-click software installation: your web host should have one-click installation for WordPRess, Drupal, Joomla, osCommerce, ZenCart, and other common softwares.

Recommendation

At this point, I will say this: if you are looking for a reliable web hosting company that offers Unlimited disk space, bandwidth and e-mail account at an affordable price then you should check Gossimer Unlimited webhosting plan. It is worth a look.

Category: Web Design, Web Hosting | Tags: ,
bikram | September 25, 2009
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SEO Simplified: The Free Keyword Tool, a New Kid on the Block

During one of my relentless wanderings through the web world, I stumbled upon The Free Keyword Tool, and later I was thankful for this accidental encounter. The tool has a nice and sleek layout. On the left side of the screen, right beside the keyword search box, you will see “related keywords” box. It comes handy in searching for keywords related to your primary keyword. You can use this tool to search LSI keywords as well.

Have a look at the screenshot:

When you are done typing your keyword in the “List Keywords” box, you will see that the “related keyword” box starts working, and it comes up with some terms that are somehow related to the keyword you searched for. And when you click submit keywords, you will get a list of keywords corresponding to your search sorted on the basis of the popularity.

You will notice one difference here. The tool does not show all the results. It shows just 100 results, but you should not worry about it, as there is a green button at the bottom of the results that you can use to email your keywords. This is a nice handy tool to search for niche and micro-niche keywords.

Filter keywords

You can even filter the words that you do not want to appear in the result. For that, you just need to highlight the keywords from the results, and click the red X that will appear after highlighting text in the result box.

Conclusion

Let me summate it by saying that I have already provided my contact details to this website, and I am a registered member here now. I particularly liked the “related keyword” feature. It will help me greatly in doing LSI research. Did I tell you that it is completely free? You can use this tool by clicking on

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 24, 2009
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SEO SIMPLIFIED: Why Not to Use Hotlinking on Your Website

Do you remember the hotlinking issues we talked about in the article titled, Do Not Allow Hotlinking, I discussed the way some webmasters uses to steal the bandwidth from another webmaster. This, of course, is immoral and unethical, but there is much more on stake than mere ethics and morality. In this article, I will tell you why not to use hotlinking on your webpage; what are the risks involved, etc.

Perils of Hotlinking

Hotlinking is used to steal bandwidth by not only the unscrupulous webmasters, but it is often used by innocuous newbies as well. The newcomers do not realize the perils of their action and take hotlinking as a device that can save their bandwidth and time else invested in downloading the same image and uploading on their server.

By direct linking to the resources hosted on another website, you are relinquishing your control not only on the resource but also on the block where you have used it. This gives the victim webmaster from whom you have stolen the resource has a full control of that block, which he can exercise at his will. At the least, he can replace the original funny picture or anything like that.

Some webmasters even will go as far as putting a warning sign in that block saying, you have stolen the resource, and the image or flash or whatever you displayed was not yours. How do you think your visitors going to react? And what if the webmaster writes an inactive link in the warning image urging the visitors to see how the original place looks like?

Add on these perils, the risk of lawsuit because of the infringement of copyright. I know, this has a very remote possibility, but you never know. What if the webmaster files a complaint with your webhosting, and the hosting decides to shut your site?

There can be many implications, therefore I strongly suggest against using hotlinking, if you mean business.

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 22, 2009
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SEO Simplified: Backlinks and Yahoo

Yahoo has at least two firsts to its credit, one is search engine and another is social site. You must be aware of the search engine bit, but you need a cue to remind yourself of social site bit. Yahoo answers is the first social site, at least the first that we all use.

In this article, we will talk about this tool, and how to use it to get backlinks. As we know that Yahoo answers is meant to give answers to the questions asked by users. We can use this tool to get some traffic to our websites as well, but before we go on talking about that, I must say that if you use this technique profusely, you risk account blocking in yahoo answers. Your competitors may complain and get you banned, therefore use this tool with much care. Another thing is this: the links your website will get from Yahoo answers will not qualify for Page Rank, as these links are no follow, but it certainly will give a boost to your traffic.

Traffic from Yahoo Answers in 10 steps

  1. Register an account and choose your categories, wisely.
  2. Find 20-30 simple questions. You can go for idiotic ones as well.
  3. Provide simple answers to these questions
  4. Do not add any link in these question
  5. Now, find some good quality questions
  6. Supply the question with a well though answer
  7. Provide links to authority sites like Wikipedia, or university websites
  8. Bury your links midst these authority sites
  9. Post your answer
  10. Do not over do it. Do not complete all these things in one day, you will get caught.
Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 20, 2009
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SEO Simplified: Comments that Bring More Traffic

Traffic is the ultimate goal of any website, and this is precisely why you optimize your website for a search engine. There are many ways to pull traffic to your website, commenting on others’ website is one of them. The role of blog comments in increasing your Page Rank has been reduced by Google, seeing the rise in spam comments and comment exchanges, but it still hasn’t lost the potency to pull visitors to your blog. But not all the blog comments are created equal.

Some types of blog comments will fetch you more traffic while others will give you just a zilch. Why it is so? What makes one comment more virile than others; we shall see in the following paragraphs. Due to increased number of spams most of the bloggers have removed a free access to their blog comments. Comments are moderated now. The nature of your comments decides whether it will be approved or denied.

Classification of comments

Problem finders

These kinds of comments will find the problem in the blog post and try to provide the solution for it or rectified version of it. This not only helps you build reputation for yourself, but it also plants the seed of curiosity in the readers, which forces them, to click through the link on the anchor text and visit your website or blog.

Informational

These types of comments add some extra information that supports the blog post. In essence, it extends the scope of blog post that tells the reader that you have good command over the subject. This will pull the interested visitors to your website.

Point of view comments

These are the comments that share your point of view on a given topic. If the point of view is powerful, the readers who follow the article will definitely pay a visit to your website to see what else you write about.

Controversial comments

The chances of approval for these comments are very low, but if these kinds of comments are approved they will bring more visitors to your website than any of the method dealt above. The goal of this kind of comment is not to provide only an alternative point of view, but to create a controversy that should result in a heated discussion on the blog. If you manage to get your comments approved, you will see what I mean by this.

There are many more types of comments that you can use to get back links and traffic to your website, which we will discuss in detail in the next blog post. Please write in your views and suggestions in the comment box and see how much traffic you get from this blog post.

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 19, 2009
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SEO Simplified: Using LSI keywords

Taking our discussion on LSI keywords further, we shall see how to use LSI keywords in this post. Before I do that, I must remind you that in the recent years, Google has adopted a favorable stance for LSI keywords; therefore, I will strongly recommend using LSI keywords to support your main keyword.

You can use your LSI keywords to build context for the main keyword that you are going to optimize your website for. You can use LSI keyword in the following ways:

  • You can sue LSI keywords randomly in your web page. This way you will be conveying Google that the page has actually been used to talk about the keyword it has been optimized for.
  • Use LSI keyword naturally. Do not force it. It will have a negative effect.
  • To build context for the main keyword, use LSI keywords as near to your main keyword as possible.

Types of LSI keywords

I think LSI keywords should be classified into two categories:

  1. 1. Type I LSI keywords
  2. 2. Type II LSI keywords

Type I LSI keywords will be those keywords that uses the same keyword with different modifiers in the main body or the ones which mean the same thing, whereas, type II LSI keywords will be those keywords that will keywords that compliments the main keyword.

Like if we have “spring bed” as main keyword then

Type I LSI keywords = soft spring bed, spring mattresses, mattresses, good quality bed, wonderful mattress, etc.

Type II LSI keywords = Pillow, soft pillow, Bed, Quilt, bed room etc.

As you can see Type II LSI keywords build the context more loosely but more naturally, whereas, Type I LSI keywords tightens the focus around the main keywords in question. It helps the marketer communicate the nature of content more forcefully.

How to find LSI keyword

There are two ways to find LSI keywords. One is to use your common sense and second is to use keywords tool to get type I LSI keyword. You can also use Google Wonder wheel, Quintura, or any visual search engine to search for both type I LSI keywords and type II LSI keywords.

I hope this categorization of LSI keywords will go down well with the SEO industry. What do you think? Is my classification worth the effort? Please send me a mail with your view on Bikram [at] biksy.com, or use the comment box.

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 18, 2009
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SEO SIMPLIFIED: What is LSI Keyword?

I am sure this is one thing, which will be popping up these days in the SEO texts that you read, and chances are fair that you got scared just by the look of it: LSI. Do not worry, this is not a monster or some kind of addictive drug, it is far from it. Let me help you understand this LSI, which indeed is addictive.

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Keywords that supports the theme of your website. LSI keywords support the main keyword of your website. Google has recently started giving much respect to LSI keywords and keyword phrases. This is the reason why more and more people have started using these to build context for their main keyword. Let’s take an example. It will help you understand the concept of LSI.

Let’s say the keyword you want to optimize your website is “spring bed” then keywords like comfortable spring mattresses, coir foam mattresses, pillow, how to buy spring mattress, keep your spring bed tidy, etc., will be your LSI keywords.

Does it make sense now?

You must have seen that the LSI keyword builds a conducive environment for your keywords to flourish.

By using LSI keywords in their search algorithm, search engines can also ward off spammy sites from getting a good ranking in the website. After all, the website dealing with “spring bed” will not have Acai berry pills, Viagra or Pfizer pills written in its body, or will it?

I have a good reason to believe that the proximity of LSI keywords to the main keyword plays an important role in search engine. I suspect the more closer they are tied in, without looking like a spam, the better ranking the webpage will get.

Well, this is just a common sense guess, and I do not have any research data to support or thrash it. I will stick with it till I am proven wrong. What do you think? How wrong or right I am?

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 17, 2009
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Create a New Profile in Firefox in 5 Simple Steps

Firefox is amazing and we all know that, but did you know that you can create different profiles in Firefox, and that each profile can have a different set of bookmarks, passwords, themes, and even extensions? Well, to be honest, I was not always in the know, and it was not until I found myself in trouble that I searched for this. I do not want you to be in the quagmire that I found myself in; hence, I am providing here the steps that I took to create a fresh profile and worked my way around the problem.

Step 1

Make sure that the Firefox is closed. You will not be able to create a profile, if Firefox is working, even in the background. Go to File and click Exit to close the Firefox, if it is open.

Step 2

Now, the next step involves launching Firefox profile manager, and for this you need to click start menu and then “Run”. Type “firefox.exe –P” or “firefox.exe –ProfileManager” (without quotes) in the “Run” dialogue box and hit “Ok”.

Step 3

This will bring Firefox profile manager. Click the “Create Profile” button and wait for the welcome message to appear. Now click next.

Step 4:

Type a profile name in there, and make sure you are typing a profile name that will help you remind yourself of why you have created it. Click Finish and you are good to go.

Step 5:

Activate your profile manager, one more time. If the profile manager is not active, follow Step 3. Choose the profile you want to use from the list and click start Firefox. That’s it. You are done.

Category: How-To Guides | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 15, 2009
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Office 2007 tabs: Are you Tabby Enough?

Tabs in office 2007, have I gone nuts? You will not believe anything on the contrary until you see the picture below.

Yes, I am talking about tabbed workspace in Microsoft Office 2007, and I am not crazy that got proved by the above image, and if you still think it is some kind of a trick then download OfficeTab on your windows system and see how nutty this plug-in makes you, your Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007.

Well, I am not suggesting that everyone who will see this plug-in is going to jump off his “windows” to grab this plug-in, but most of us will do so. People who are not excited about this plug-in are those who compares two or more documents by cascading or tiling the word files. I believe they can still do it by turning this damn thing off. This is not a big deal.

I must add here, in my test, I could successfully cascade my tabbed windows with this plug-in on. I tiled three documents both horizontally and vertically, and for a problem, I faced none.

OfficeTab is highly customizable plug-in. you have an option to choose from 12 different styles of tabs. Not only that, you can edit the tabs to make it look more personal. Even the location of tabs could be changed. You can use control and tab (Ctrl+Tab) to toggle between different documents.

Supported Language: English and Chinese, Chinese because the plug-in has been developed by a Chinese developer. Hey, did I forget to say that OfficeTab is free.

I find this plug-in cool. What about you? I am dying to hear your point of view on this tool use it and let me know what you think.

Category: Articles | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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