Traffic Exchanges

How would you like to have hundreds, even thousands, of visitors to your site, each of whom is guaranteed to spend 20 or 30 seconds looking over your content? Would you like them to review your blog? Rate your blog? How about if they voted for your blog in a head-to-head competition with the blogs of others? If it sounds great, that’s because it is.

Blog traffic exchanges are sites that guarantee visitors will visit your blog and spend a pre-determined amount of time there. But there’s a price: for each visitor that views your blog, you have to view the blog of another in the same manner.

Here’s how it works. When you register your blog on a traffic exchange, you create an account specific to your blog. You earn credits to your account by visiting the sites of others, which are displayed inside a frame with a timer that measures how long you must remain at that site. After an amount of time determined by the site, you enter a code into the frame (this ensures that individuals are actually at their computers) and move to the next site. For each site you visit, you receive credit which is “spent” by your blog being viewed by others. The more blogs you visit, the more visitors you will receive in return.
Read the rest of this entry »

Search Engines and News Engines

There are a million sites out there that promise to submit your site to hundreds, even thousands of search engines. Before you choose one - giving them your money or email address - think for a moment about how many search engines you use. You probably have a favorite or two, as do most people. And in many cases, they are the same ones.

That means that so long as your site is listed in the major engines (Yahoo! and Google and MSN, to name a few) there’s really no need to pay for someone to submit it to a search engine no one uses or to give them your email address (which will coincidentally be deluged by spam from that day forward). It’s worthwhile to manually submit your site – ONCE – to the bigger engines, but once you have a few blogs linking to you, search spider programs find you anyway by following from another site.
Read the rest of this entry »

What a Blog is (and is Not)

A good working definition of a blog is simply a journal or newsletter that is frequently updated and intended for the timely reading. It often provides opportunities for unfiltered and immediate feedback, sports an informal or even partisan attitude, and is written in a more personal style than traditional press outlets.

Blogs come in all shapes and subjects, from the maunderings of troubled teen souls to displays of classical photography to breaking news and commentary. They can be online journals, locked with a password shared by a few trusted friends, or they can be page after page of source code, sharing useful and free computer programs with the world.

A blog may be an online journal tangential to a company’s main business, where users of a company’s products give feedback and ask for help. Blogs can be hosted by single individuals, shared by teams, or produced by entire companies. They may be hosted on a dedicated blog server using fancy templates or lovingly hand-crafted in HTML on a page that resembles a bulletin board.
Read the rest of this entry »

Website Customization: What can we do?

Nowadays, in this trendy world, people get very uptight when they do not look entirely presentable. This would also be the case in web designing.  Every individual would definitely want their website to look good, if not, to the best they can. Here are a few things we could look out for when wanting to create a professional looking webpage.

Color Schemes and Themes.
When designing, always choose matching colors. An example of a matching color would be to have a dark background, with visible words and designs. With the dark theme, try not to mix too many bright colors into the design. What we should NEVER do, is to mix two very different colors, such as purple and yellow. Now, of course, it would depend on the purpose of the website, but those two colors are too striking for one who wants it to look more professional.

Themes must always suit the company or rather, the organization / etc. If the website was made to cater for a food company, it would be wise to stick to that particular category, rather than to revert to a different theme, such as machinery.

Fonts should be used in regard to the formality of the website. A simple sans-serif font would suffice in most cases. Exceptional cases such as design and art groups might want to use fanciful designs and fonts. Of course, that’s only if you know what you’re doing.

Finally, we must always try to think of our visitors, see the way they see. The resolutions and file sizes of the pictures must not be too large in terms of size. This is to allow maximum compatibility and cater our visitor’s needs.

So, planning is something we should always do, before attempting something.

Search engine copywriting

Search engine copywriting is a field that continues to develop each and every day. Copywriting as a field continues to grow but this particular niche is growing at a much faster rate than the overall field. As the Internet continues to grow, more and more companies are relying up on the Internet for a higher percentage of sales. This will ensure that search engine copywriting will continue to be in demand.

To give a general background on search engine copywriting, we must first look at why this field is growing so rapidly. The number of searches that are done on the Internet is in the hundreds of billions annually. The way that most people are able to get to a website these days is through search engines. It is much harder for your website to be highly ranked without being optimized for search engines. The number of pages on the Internet has grown to over 4 billion so increasing importance has been placed upon the fact that your webpage is easy to search and is indexed by search engines. Read the rest of this entry »

Advertising on Craigslist

Advertising on Craigslist is worthwhile for just about any business offering products or services. Whether these products are offered through ecommerce websites or physical stores, the business owners can see financial gains through advertising on Craigslist. Firstly unlike other advertising opportunities there is very little risk involved in posting on Craigslist.

With the exception of job postings and housing postings in specific markets, advertising is free on Craigslist. Users are asked to agree to the terms of service of the community and are expected to follow specific guidelines when posting advertisements but there are no financial obligations to those placing advertisements on Craigslist. This means those who post advertisements do not have to be concerned with whether or not the advertisement they place will meet their expectations in terms of sales generated.

Reaching Potential Customers on Craigslist
Another reason why posting advertisements for products or services on Craigslist is so worthwhile is the likelihood of reaching a large audience of potential customers. A review of the Craigslist fact sheet reveals pertinent information regarding the amount of traffic the website receives. According to this information Craigslist receives approximately four billion page views each month with ten million people using Craigslist each month. From these statistics it is clear that advertisements placed on Craiglist are likely to receive at least some attention from potential clients.
Read the rest of this entry »

What About Free Speech?

If and when you ban someone – or even credibly threaten to do so – you’ll certainly be attacked with the Free Speech argument. Doesn’t everyone have the right to say what they want?

Sure they do, but not in your home, and your blog is your home. It’s your property. You provide the service, you set the rules, and just as no one has the right to come into your home and abuse your family, no one has an absolute right to enter into your forums, push fraudulent medicine or imitation watches, and abuse your guests.

That’s why periodically publishing the forum rules is a must. While it might become necessary to remove someone from the discussion, it is only fair that you set expectations and enforce them fairly and consistently. The value of the forum is not in the cathartic (or financial) benefits it provides your readers, but in the information and conversation they share. Allowing your forums to become an abusive free-for-all will alienate the very readers that you want to keep. Putting out a few obnoxious and abusive guests is a small price to pay to allow the vast majority of your readers, who will have valuable input and discussions, to enjoy their visits to your virtual home.