SevenToTen - Blogging About Everything

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Have you ever ask yourself why we are blogging? There are so many blogs on the internet, nearly 100 million of it, and the number continues to rise. Is there any chance of visitors coming to our site? Until recently, to make money online was not easy for ordinary people like us.

So, why do we blog? Here are some possible reasons:

1. Glory

The vanity will always be there. Everyone wants to be famous like Seth Godin, Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse, John Chow… They are the A-list bloggers who are raking in 5 figure income every month and they are influential enough to create a stir in the blogosphere with a simple review.

2. Self-expression

Many people are blogging because it gives them some charge of energy. I created this blog because I just want to share of my thoughts and experiences… Why not? And there are guys, who are the professionals in different spheres, but they don’t have another opportunities of expression. Internet is the best instrument for people like us. Blogging is exactly what we need.

3. Full time Job

For some, blogging is a full time job. They earn money from their blogs. Look at John Chow, his blog brings him over $30,000 a month. And John is not alone. For many people blog is a big business. I read somewhere, that Engadget makes more than $100,000 per month. You are probably agree with me, that these people don’t have any financial problems even nowadays.

A lot of bloggers follow the success stories and create their own websites, promote and then sell advertising space. Companies are hire people to write about their new products and its announcement. The middle salary of such blogger in US is around $3000 per month.

And eventually people are

4. Sale of affiliate or own products

Through Internet, we can start selling our own products or affiliate products worldwide from the minutes after beginning. Especially if we have an electronic product like eBook or useful software, Internet is the best that we can use. And people use it. Blog helps to realize these purposes.

5. To Help Others

Yes, yes, yes… And why not? I found many blogs of family doctors, radio engineering and even workers of the zoo which are writing about what should we do in different situations.

Any more reasons for your blogging? Please comment and let me know.

I saw this post on JohnChow and just realize that Blogrush is dead. Not that I am surprised because I have tried that service before and the traffic is pathetic.

As bloggers living on the fringe, we signed to such services in the hope of getting more traffic but the system fails because it favors the bigger blogs who already have established traffic. The more pageviews a site has, it translates to more appearances of your link on other sites.

I gave up on Blogrush after a month. Now that it failed, I guess I am not the only one who did not succeed with the system. Anyway, according to John Chow, the owner John Resee’s finances is hardly hit by the collapse of his brainchild with $500,000 flushed down the drain.

In any case, it is all about entrepreneur spirit. It is better to try and fail than not try at all, so kudos to John Resee.

You have been writing good posts and waiting for it to become famous in stumbleupon and it never seems to happen. What you have to do is, you’ll have to analyze what you have been doing. Once you find this, you can try to change a few things and see what results you are getting.

Few things which you can do to make your post get more stumbles are:

1. Format the post properly

2. Little ads

3. A very good image, if possible, a humorous one

4. Something unique.

You have done all the hard work to make your blog post become hot in stumbleupon and now you deserve the best results. Traffic from stumbleupon is obviously huge, though not as huge as a front page of digg. But it is a lot easier to get into the buzz page of stumbleupon for a specific tag, than to get anywhere near the front page of digg.

Read the full article here.

Below are 5 effective tips on how to get instant traffic and links to your blog:

1. Add comments to other blogs.

Adding comments to other blogs is a way of connecting with blogs and people in the same community. But you can’t just make a 3-word comment; your comments should be constructive and helpful to the blog you’re posting at.

Also, these blogs in which you’re going to write comments on should be relevant to your niche or else they won’t give you the results you want. Through these comments, you will be able to build friendly relations with other bloggers who can exchange links and visit your blog as well.

Through comments, viewers are also enticed to click on your hotlink so they can check your blog too. You may also opt to subscribe to ‘follow-up comments’ so you can get updated with the latest news in that blog you posted on.

2. Make use of Social Bookmarks

Another known effective way to garner instant traffic to your sites is through social bookmarking. You can do this by signing up for social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Technorati and Stumbleupon, and through there you can build a network of related links and views.

These sites are known to bring in huge amount of traffic via votes, comments and reviews by the people under the same niche that you take part of. These sites also do random features every now and then, based on quality content and popularity.

Social bookmarking is also a good place where you can find related blogs especially those which you cannot find in typical search results.

3. Join relevant niche communities.

4. Build profiles on social media networks

5. Upload a video.

Read the full article here.

Twitter is looking to hire and here are a few updates from Biz Stone and his wonderful team.

Hello Twitter-ers,

We’ve been really busy behind the scenes these days at Twitter HQ. Things are moving as fast as ever and we’re growing six ways from Sunday. In fact, we’re hoping to hire for a bunch of new positions. If you or someone you know wants to work at a small company with a bright future then by all means, check out our jobs page: http://twitter.com/help/jobs

TweetUp with Bijan in Boston

If you’re anywhere near Cambridge, MA on Wednesday morning this week you might want to swing by the Andala Coffee House in Central Square. Our board member Bijan Sabet along with Twitter users and developers are gathering from 8:30—10:30am for a TweetUp. Chat about Twitter as a consumer communication utility as well as a utility for applications and services. Also, you’ll meet some local Twitter-ers. Maybe @dunkindonuts will make an appearance. See: http://bit.ly/1F8ann

Interacting with Twitter Data

Our API Lead Alex Payne recently outlined five ways developers can interact with Twitter. Lots of API developers may not be aware that we have a special Search API, a Data Mining Feed, a Pinging Service via Gnip, and plans for introducing a way to access what we jokingly refer to as the Twitter Firehose–the entire stream of tweets that are publicly available from all around the world. For more information be sure to read Alex’s blog post here: http://bit.ly/36nf7F

Tuesday: A Big Day for Twitter

Which Twitter account will belong to the next President of the United States? Will it be @johnmccain or @barackobama? We anticipate record-breaking activity on Twitter all day tomorrow. We’ll be staying late at work watching Current TV’s Twitter-powered election night programming. We’re looking forward to the
live DJ set by Diplo combined with key results, facts and information. Check it out: http://current.com/election

Twitter App on LinkedIn

Recently, the professional networking service LinkedIn announced a new application platform. One of the first applications in the directory is a neat little app built using Twitter called Company Buzz. The application lets you see what people are saying about the companies and topics you care about and there’s a neat little trending component as well. If you’re on LinkedIn, it’s really easy to install the app: http://bit.ly/Q2of5

My blog is visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and other peoples forums are the number 1 source of this traffic. Darren has asked me if I’d share how I do it.

1. Identify where your blogs potential readers are gathering

I learned this from Darren here. For me the answer to this question is forums. I know that not every blog topic will have forums that relate to it online but the more blogs that I have started the more I have found that most topics do! You just need to know where to find them.

Quite often the forum is not just a standalone forum - it could be just part of a larger site. So hunt them down!

They don’t have to be big forums either (but they should be active). For my main blog I actually chose 4 forums, one big one and three small ones.

2. Join up…. and Do Nothing (for a while)

.
This is key. Many people identify a hot forum and rush in, leaving links to their blog as fast as they can. All this will do is quickly get your banned, annoy people and hurt your blogs reputation.

Instead of rushing in - join up and be a lurker for a few days. Watch and learn.

• Learn who the key players are.
• Watch to see what topics are hottest.
• See which areas of the forum are most active.
• Observe what the culture and rules of the forum are.

This ‘lurking’ is all about learning as much as you can so you can so that when you actually get active you can do it in a way that actually connects.

3. Set up your Signature and Avatar

Set up a very simple yet effective signature so that when you start posting people can find out more about you. My signatures are very understated. I simply include a link and name to my blog. I don’t do it in flashing fonts or bright colors. My reason for this is that the signature doesn’t convince people to come to my blog - the posts I write on the forum do.

If the forum allows you to choose an avatar - choose a simple one of these. I use a photo of myself because I feel it makes me more personal. On that note I make my forum name my real name. Again - this ‘humanizes’ me as I interact with people.

Also at this point I add links to the forums that I am going to interact in on my blog.

Read the full article here.

Finally, somebody (Shoemoney) explained in a practical manner what Twitter is good for. I have been using it for months and I update a tweet whenever I made a new post.

But it just seems like updating for the sake of updating. Nothing really useful there.

I never see Twitter as serving an email or instant messenger function but after Shoemoney explained, I think it makes sense.

“Twitter only allows 140 characters in a tweet.  Its very easy for me to respond to pretty much 100% of the people who ask me a question and takes little time out of my day to do so. ”

“I never accept anyone to my Instant Messanger unless there is a very good business need.  Twitter is much less informal but still has that feel of an instant messenger client… only it does not bug you when you get a message if you are busy.”

There is also a search function which I have hardly touched but I will be exploring it in depth later on. Through Twitter, Shoemoney has also “asked for tips, contacts, or whatever about a subject and got help within seconds.”

With his confidence boosting message about traffic and benefits, I will put more effort into Twitter as a promotion tool.

There are some significant changes in Entrecard which are supposedly good for the long term. These are listed below.

1. Buy credits for less

Entrecard is now selling 1,000 credits for $6.00. You can buy them at http://entrecard.com/r/buy_credits

2. More pricing increments

Instead of prices doubling every time, there are now a few more steps. The new price points can be found on the Advertising page in the wiki, here: http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=advertising

3. Members are not allowed to sell credits

This goes for ebay sales, posts in the Marketing forum, and posts on other forums. If you have references on your site to the sale of credits, please remove them immediately, as it is now against our terms.

4. Credit transfer limits

Members are allowed to make a maximum of 14 credit transfers a week, up to a maximum of 1,000 credits, whichever comes first. This means you can still run contests where you give credits away for free, and under 1k per week.

Note: This does not affect linked blogs, you can transfer unlimited credits between linked blogs.

5. Transfer tax

From now on, all transfers, including transfers made with our new payments API, will be taxed at a rate of 12.5%. The taxed credits will be sold to members (see #1).

6. Blogs cannot be unlinked

Once you link a blog, it’s there for good unless you ask us to delete the blog from your account. This prevents linking/unlinking to get around the credit transfer limits, and it also stops you losing access to a blog if you unlink it in error, which happens a lot.

7. No more coupons

You are no longer allowed to send coupons.

8. Shop closed

Except for Entrecard upgrades (Featured Status, Fast Pass) the Entrecard Shop is now offline until further notice. Please do not request a seller token until the shop returns. When it comes back, it will be bigger and better.

I believe such changes are necessary to put Entrecard on a stronger footing. Servers need to be upgraded big time and hopefully, they get more funds from selling of credits and advertisements.

For the time being, independent credit sales or credit transfers among members are prohibited, thus members who advertise heavily have no choice but to click 300 sites per day or fork out the $6 for 1000 credits.

I wouldn’t mind spending more on Entrecard if the end result is higher quality traffic, comments, and subscribers and better serps.

earch Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of optimizing your site blog to rank higher in SERP or Search Engine Result Position.

Being on #1 or page one of Google is the ultimate goal of any blogmaster. It’s the key that separates the average site from the extraordinaire. Simply put, the higher you are on the search results, the more organic traffic you will get.

Study has shown that most searchers don’t go beyond page three so if your site is found no where in the first 3 pages on your keywords, you have probably not done enough SEO, so to speak.

Now the question is how do you know if you are doing the right thing?

That’s where online SEO tools are available at your disposal to check and diagnose the SEO status of your site so you can take all the necessary steps to improve your overall search engine ranking.

The Best 15 SEO Tools for Beginners

PageRank Checker is a free tool to check Google Page Ranking of any site and its pages easily and instantly. Google PageRank or PR is a measure of any sites popularity based on Google kept-secret algorithm. The PR is an indication of certain authority to your site and how important it is in the eyes of Google. For the uninformed, here’s how Google calculates your PR.

PageRank Search allows you to search Google using any keyword(s) you wish. It will then return, in order of Google relevance, the sites associated with those keywords. Each result displays a graphical bar with the PageRank of that particular site.

Internal Pages PR Checker will check the page rank of all of your site’s inner pages index by Google and it’s useful to use right after the PR update.

Link Popularity Checker is a tool that checks total number of pages in each search engines index that contains a link to your site, including your own website. It is used to measure your site’s online visibility. The popularity of your site is an important factor in your search engine ranking. The more popular your site is, the better it will be ranked on the search engines.

Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer help you determine the backlinks of your site and anchor text (link text) used to link to your site. Link building is all about getting the quality backlinks along with the quantity. The truth is getting a few of the right links, from the right places can be more valuable than getting 100 links from the wrong places.

It’s all about using the right keywords you are trying to optimize as your anchor text (link text) from the right neighborhood.

Reciprocal Link Checker helps you ensure that your link partners are linking back to your site and determines what anchor text is used. Gone are the days when reciprocal links are considered important, the big G is now putting more weight on one-way (the best option) or three-way links (site A ↔ site C, site C ↔ site B and site B ↔ site A)

Keyword Density refers to the measurement in percentage, the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words in a page which needs to balance correctly. Too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, Too high and your page might get flagged for “keyword spamming”.

This tool parses the most frequently keyword of a website and calculates its percentage share.

Keyword Suggestion Tool will help you with choosing of the right keywords for your website and analyze which keyword combinations are more popular. Choosing the right keywords is critical for a success of your site. Target the wrong keywords and you have lost.

There is pure gold hidden in less competitive keyword combinations and variations.

Link Analysis of External and Internal Links - The link analysis display all internal and external links of a website with the corresponding anchor texts in a summary table. It’s one of the best I have ever used.

SERP Position Checker is the keyword position analysis used to check on which position your domain is ranked for a given keyword and compare the first 100 results by Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Robots.txt Syntax Checker is the simplest tool to check the contents of your site’s robots.txt against the search engines standard, along with providing warnings on the wrong use of syntax.

In case you aren’t in the know, robots.txt file is the key to stopping search engines robots from indexing certain pages of your site which are deemed unnecessary to be included in the search results, yet many people still fail to get the syntax correct.

Copyscape scours the net and finds sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that have quoted you. It is designed to protect you against online plagiarism and article theft.

Search Engine Placement Check is a verification tool that checks if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword. It’s important to be in the top 3 pages of a search result because most people using search engines don’t go past the 3rd page.

Bad Neighborhood Checker checks link pages and reports if there are links to bad neighborhoods. This tool will scan the links on your site, and on the pages that your site is linking to, and flag possible problem areas. This can greatly ease your SEO efforts.

Website Grader is a free SEO report that measures the marketing effectiveness of your site. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how your site can be improved from a marketing perspective. Check out the SEO report for thoushallblog.com.

Last But Not Least

SEO is never intended to be seen as touch-and-go effort in much the same way no success can be achieved overnight. It really takes a lot of patience, commitment and the know-hows to succeed. All the above tools will not bring you to #1 in search results but it helps you to be aware of ‘where you are now’ and ‘where you should aim to be in future’.

Knowledge is the key to SEO success

Indeed there are no hard and fast rules to SEO, it all boils down to the right mixture of quality content and quality inbound and outbound links with proper keywords optimization and all these tools will tell you if you are getting the right combination to move you closer to #1.

If you are in the mood for more SEO tips, here’s 15 SEO Tips for Beginners.

Good luck with your SEO. Any opinions or feedback are welcomed. I’m all ears.

On Another Side Note

Congrats to those of you who have just gained your PR status on the recent update. It’s another milestone for you and I’m sure you are pretty excited about it. Well, getting the PR is the easy part, maintaining it is a different ball game altogether.

I have just updated my PR list and if your blog (with Top Commentator) is not included in the list, drop me a line and I’ll put you in the list.

Did I say that’s one-way backlink?

Similar Posts:

• 15 SEO Tips for Beginners
• Has Your Blog Been Indexed by Google Yet?
• Why Blog With IE? What You Can Do With Firefox?
• What Do They Say About Link Building?
• 15 Most Under-Utilized Plugins for SEO

Microsoft Corp is set to cut the price of its best-selling Xbox 360 Pro model with the 20 gigabyte hard drive to $299 from $349. This will happen over the weekend before the video game industry’s biggest trade show, E3.

A price cut has been widely reported by popular video game blogs and technology Web sites. Many posted snapshots of flyers from various retailers advertising the $299 price. Microsoft refused to comment on this issue.

Microsoft last cut the price of the Xbox Pro in August, from $399 to $349, prior to the release of “Halo 3″ the following month.

A cut to $299 makes the Xbox 360 Pro $100 less than Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3 with a 40 gigabyte hard drive. Microsoft is locked in a three-way competition with Nintendo’s Wii and the PlayStation 3, which comes with a high-definition Blu-ray video player.

Price cuts from Nintendo and Sony seem unlikely. Nintendo’s $249 Wii is still in short supply at many retailers, while Sony has said it aims to turn its video game business profitable this year, making a cut hard to swallow.