Experience and Posting Promptly make a Good Blog Site Better

November 16, 2009 — John

Other than just being a personal site, your blog can get more visitors by making it a center piece of your own experience.  Not just any personal experience, but one that can fire up the interest and imagination of your visitors.  If you’ve had some recent tragic experience or one where you figured in a headline event, that’s a good start.
 
If you’re a professional, your insights can be a great focal point in your blog.  Health, sex and marriage, movie reviews if you’re a film buff or pet care if you’re a dog or cat lover can bring a lot of visitors to your site if your site content has interesting articles and posts about them. 
Just make sure to respond promptly to your visitor’s comments if needed.  This guarantees at least a return visit just to see what your responses are to the one who has posted on your blog.  Never fail to respond.

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Optimizing your Allotted Hosting Bandwidth

November 16, 2009 — John

Getting your website or blog hosted carries a bandwidth limitation spelled out in the hosting package you took.  Unless you signed up for a huge or unlimited bandwidth, you need to make sure you make use of your bandwidth allocation intelligently.  Bear in mind that aiming to increase traffic to your site means eating up your bandwidth allocation at any given time.  While you can get a high page rank and generate the most traffic, you have to content with your bandwidth.  The last thing you want is to be suspended by your web hosting service for exceeding your allocation.

That often means making your website easy to load to as many of your anticipated site traffic.  Images, Videos or Flash animation are fine but you need to strike a happy balance between spicing up your site and making it easy to load.  Minimize your images to just 20kb and your videos to 100mb.  Better still, get your images and videos hosted in a picture and video site and just leave a thumbnail on your website.

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Monitor Visitor Hits to your PHP Site

November 16, 2009 — John

You can ask your web host to that for you.  In fact, this is one basic service that most web hosting providers do for its clients – count the number of hits to your PHP site. Otherwise you can do it on your own using a PHP that your site can all.  Create a counter.php and a hits.php files in the same folder using this script.

<?php
$fd = fopen( ‘hits.php’, ‘r’ ); // Open the file to read
while( ! feof( $fd ) )
{$tmp = fgets( $fd ); //Get the. number of hits into tmp variable.}
$tmp = $tmp + 1; //Increase count by 1.
fclose( $fd ); //Close  file opened for reading.
$fd = fopen( ‘hits.php’, ‘w’ ); //Open the file for writing.
fputs( $fd, $tmp ); //Write the data.
fclose( $fd ); //Close file.
echo “$tmp”;
?>
Then embed this code into your PHP web page.
<?php
include(”counter.php”);
?>

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Monitoring the Links to Your Site

November 16, 2009 — John

If you’re doing SEO for your blog or website to improve your Alexa and Technorati  ranking, the Webmaster’s Tool from Google’s Webmaster Central has been enhanced precisely for this purpose and should help webmasters in this area.  It has been improved to show a list of external and internal links to your site in tabular form and you can click to view each as well as download in CSV format.

Submitting your blog or web site at the Webmaster Central will allow you to view these links so you can better monitor each to be sure you don’t have any dead back links to your site.

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Going Green, Take the Bus

November 16, 2009 — John

It was a great discovery to take the bus to work.  After I took my car for a most needed engine overhaul, I thought I’d take a week off, but as soon as I found the joys of commuting in Glendale, I think I better contribute to saving planet earth with less use of my carbon dioxide emitting car.  It isn’t as hard as I thought.

There are some things I’ve learned, like waking up early to get to the bus depot, keeping small change in your pocket for the bus fare, and, since it takes almost an hour to get to the office, I had to make sure my iPod or netbook is fully charged.  It’s interesting to discover that my WiFi works and could surf the internet while commuting.  Doing productive work on the bus is entirely new to me.  But it sure grows on you.

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Business in Developing Countries Should Go Online

November 16, 2009 — John

There are many start-up businesses in Europe and the US that have made remarkable strides with online portals taking on the world as their market literally is on their fingertips.  There’s hardly any capital outlay that traditional business would need, like having a store and middlemen to distribute your products.  All you need is some tech savvy colleague who can design and publish your e-commerce site on the net and some people to get inventories and shipping done.

This should very well be the business model for entrepreneurs in developing countries where capital can be difficult to get.  It’s just unfortunate that where online commerce has the potential to beef up the local economy, they can get encumbered with slow internet bandwidths and the cost of hosting. Hopefully, these things will change as telecommunication and computer hardware costs settle to more affordability.

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Grabbing Visitor Attention with Banner Ads

November 16, 2009 — John

Using just the right amount and balance of text, images and animation that are often done in Flash, banner ads have been proven to be effective online advertising tools.
If you’re designing banner ads, make sure they have small file sizes no larger than 20k so they load fast.  Just like any advertising imagery, banners should catch the first 10 seconds of a visitor’s fleeting attention span when getting to the page. 

No need for detailed information. That can be accomplished when the visitor finds your banner ad intriguing enough to click on it.  And that means making sure you put a clickable URL to link to the site you’re advertising.  Lastly, put your banner ad on the page that’s most frequently visited which is your homepage.

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Making Use of Google Commerce Search

November 16, 2009 — John

Unlike most Google tools, this one is not free.  The Google Commerce Search is aimed at large and small retail enterprises with commercial websites that enable fast and efficient search of your products and services.

If you are managing a vast portfolio of diverse products and brands on your e-commerce site, the Google Commerce Search will help your customers find exactly what they need with the least time navigating through your site. You get better conversion rates that turn visitors into paying customers.

The tool is essentially a search engine for your retail site, allowing spelling corrections on searches and filtering algorithms on price, brand or any product attribute and generally optimized for the purpose of getting more sales.

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Promoting your Blog Through Blog Announcement and Review

November 16, 2009 — John

If you’re starting out your blog site, you need to generate traffic to it. One way is to have it announced just like the release of any new product or brand in the market.  Get yourself to write an honest article about your blog, describing the subject, its focus and objectives.  Don’t forget to have a link to your blog site but don’t sound like a hard sell.  Send that to all the blog owners you have any kind of relationship with and ask them to have it published on their blogs. 

Tell them you will write a good review about their site which you will publish in your new blog.  You can also invite them to write a review, on top of the announcement, which they can publish in their own site.  These are mutually beneficial promotional activities to generate traffic to your site as well as theirs.

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Harnessing Forums to Promote your Blog or Website

November 16, 2009 — John

If you’re a member of any forums out there, like audioholics.com for stereophile hobbyists, you can increase your blog or site’s promotional mileage by creating a thread that’s relevant to both your blog and forum and inviting members to visit your blog or web site. 

Just be sure that your site covers the same interests that the forum does.  If it’s about photography, your blog or site should have that as its main focus or anything related to it. You can also use the forum’s signature or avatar with your site’s URL as signature.  This is one fine promotional method as your site gets displayed every time you post in the forum. 

In the process, you leave your site’s URL link on the forum.  This is one form of back linking to your site which increases its page rank in Google.  If you can do this in a number of forums related to your site or blog, the better for your site.

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