Forums that pass on link juice.

There may be hundreds of forums that may pass on link juice. Passing on link juice means removing 'no follow' attribute. Our blog gets backlinks-one way backlinks if we happen to leave behind our link to blogs as a signature.

But, I know all such 'do follow' forums may not be interesting to bloggers. Forums must be in our niche to participate-right?

Feedburner forum is definitely a nice for bloggers and it follows our links. I was encouraged to join this forum because it has more 75,000 members.

But, what a disappointment when I opened that site. It is on the verge of closing. I think I have missed out on a golden opportunity to get backlinks and readerships by not being aware of the feedburner forum earlier.

To start or continue a discussion about FeedBurner, please visit our new FeedBurner Help Group, part of Google Groups.

Mobile blogging agent GBlogger

With recent growth of the model communication devices, mobile blogging inevitably gains more popularity. With free mobile blogging utility Mobile GBlogger you can make post on the go to your Blogger account from anywhere in the world using your Windows Mobile 5/6 mobile device. All you need is a means of connecting your Windows Mobile PDA or Smartphone to the Internet.


Mobile GBlogger Basic is the completely free version of the GBlogger service. It is also the easiest to get going with. Simply download and install the client for your Windows Mobile device and you’re ready to go. With Mobile GBlogger Basic you get the following features:

* Publish or save as Draft full blog posts for all of your blogs.
* Insert preset HTML tags and objects such as hyperlinks, text formatting, YouTube Video objects, and others

With the free GBlogger service a small, one line advertisement for Mobile GBlogger is inserted at the end of the post. If you want to remove the ad, you can choose using the Mobile Gblogger Pro software version, cost $15 / year.

You can find more information and download the software from the developers’ website: http://www.pocketwatchsoftware.com/gblogger

Mobile Gblogger carries rating 3 of 5 on the RateItAll Rating List of 32 Free Utilities for Bloggers.

How the Moroccan furniture is known?

Do you know how the Moroccan furniture is known to the world? It is because, the Moroccan tiles and the sheer décor they added to any interior. The brilliant patterns made with pleasing and at the same time innovative color combination has been the choice of kings to households of yesteryears.

Even my husband’s ancestral home had Moroccan Alhambra tiles in the prayer room. I wonder how the Moroccan culture had penetrated deep into South India!

Alhambra Tiles
Source: Google Images

Seen those tiles in many places? I know! But you didn't know they are Moroccan Alhambra tiles! I have seen this in those huge mansions in Lucknow.

Why Moroccan furniture is so captivating?

I think it is because their culture itself is a fine mixture of French, Spanish and African. I have seen this (see below) multi-purpose wooden table in many houses. Actually no one knows that it is Moroccan furniture. These kinds of tables and settees are frequently sold in exclusive furniture exhibitions.

Moroccan furniture
Soure: Google images

How to brand your blog?

I realize I have committed a grave mistake of not closely following Darren Rowse's articles. Today, I happened to glance at the headlines of his blog feed. I ended up spending nearly 90 minutes reading them and many of his earlier blog posts.

No wonder he is very popular and respected in the blogosphere.

Apart from gathering information about various essential tools for bloggers, I read an interesting article about the importance of branding your blog and not you as an author.

This means you concentrate on building up the blog readership based on the content of the article and exclusively the domain of your blog. He has cited the examples of two great bloggers whom I also admire.

They are Pete Cashmore and Peter Rojas.

They are the authors of Mashable.com and Gizmodo.com respectively.

This is what he says about them:

"Should they have started their blogs on petecashmore.com and peterrojas.com, publishing the same content, I doubt that they would have had the same success."- Daniel Scocco in his guest post in Problogger.net

Muse on this please!

The disadvantages of being slim.

Don’t imagine that there are only advantages of being slim! There are areas where a fat person is able to claim certain privileges over me just because I am slim.

Three days before, I was traveling in a train. I was asleep soundly (of course without snoring) in a lower berth when I was impolitely shaken up by a woman and demanded that I take the upper berth because she could not climb up.

One glance at her convinced me that she cannot. Moreover, I did not relish sleeping under her. So I gave her room (?) and reluctantly took the upper berth after giving her a glare that won’t fade away from her memory.

Why don’t such women (I am not bothered about men) take alli diet pills, the FDA approved diet pill at present? Even eBay seems to be a place to buy alli diet pills, so she dare not give any excuses for not able to purchase at the local pharmacy.

Infolinks pays you to blog.

Info Links is an internet advertising company that offers in-text links advertising. Blog publishers can sign up for free and insert a java script in the body of their Blog's HTML .

Ads relevant to the keywords in yours blog will appear when the mouse hovers over the keyword that has two lines underneath it. When the ad is clicked, you are paid. When the mouse is moved away from the hyperlink, the ad disappears.

Bloggers are getting a lot of opportunities to earn from blogs. Every now and then, some innovative blog advertising appears on the scene and bloggers are presented with one more opportunity to get paid by blogging.

Features of Info Links:

. You can run it along with Google AdSense.
• Quick and easy setup with no changes to your website
• Ads are tightly integrated with your content - no additional space required

Yes, you got it right; it is similar to Kontera.

I have experienced some good customer support from Info Links. Sign up now with Info Links.

Create multiple articles avoiding duplicate content

It is not easy to write a good, informative article with original content. To increase readers auditory as much as possible, blogger repost the same article at the different blogs and social blogging communities. But duplicate content is not encouraged neither by search engines, nor by some blogging sites, where the condition to submit exclusively original content is strict.

DupeFreePro is a free software tool that will make your life easier to avoid using duplicate content when you’re posting articles here and there on the Internet. Note that it is not similar to those automated programs which create hundreds of junk articles, but it will help to evaluate your own modified articles for perceived uniqueness.

 

As you may know, Google ignores duplicate content while assessing the site SEO ranking. If you post the same article (containing a link to your web site) in more than one location, when Google calculates your web site’s rankings, it uses what it considers to be the first posting or the earliest article and ignores the others.

For optimal results, you want to rewrite the article enough so that Google perceives it as original content. This can be tricky, since it’s difficult to know when you have modified an article enough to rate as new content.

DupeFreePro solves this tricky problem for you, among others. DupeFreePro will tell you if the two articles are sufficiently different to be considered unique. It will also give you a keyword density rating so you can be sure your keyword or keyword phrase appears the “right” number of times. Additionally, it suggests other related words that Google expects to find in an article that contains your keyword phrase.

You can use DupeFreePro to be sure your rewritten PLR articles are sufficiently different from the originals; you can use the software to prevent accusations of plagiarism if you are using material you have researched online; and lastly, you can use it to optimize your articles’ keyword density for the search engines.

DupeFreePro is freeware and it can be considered as mature well-developed product. It’s a good help to anyone who uses article marketing, PLR articles, Squidoo lenses, HubPages, blogs or similar. There’s nothing to buy, or any special offers, just a form to opt-in and get the software.

Developers’ direct link: http://www.dupefreepro.com/

Additional Reading:

http://www.businessbrainwaves.com/blog/2007/02/useful-free-software/dupefreepro
http://www.junecampbell.name/?m=200802
http://imstemp.blogspot.com/2007/11/dupefreepro-helps-fight-duplicate.html

How to increase marketing conversion rate?

Every blogger is striving hard to promote his blog to get more and more visitors daily. I am tapping several blog marketing resources like actively participating in bloggers forum and blogging communities.

I also do social bookmarkings and outsource blog directory submissions. But I don’t get the desired results due to low conversion rate. When I hired a SEO specialist for just one hour, he reported that my advertising efforts are not enough to get a better response conversion rate.

In order to get a higher conversion rate optimization, the SEO person suggested a series of steps o be taken immediately else I will lose even the current blog traffic though I blog about useful matter to Bloggers.

I realized what I should do to achieve a higher conversion rate of up to 100% if not 900%.

Please, I urge you to visit websiteoptimization.com/services/marketing/conversion.html without any delay. I am sure you will find the site very useful.

New way to get one way backlinks.

Have you ever thought of giving useful tutorials about various aspect of blogging as a means to get one way backlinks?

Yes, writing articles with an author's byline is definitely a method to get one way backlinks but do you really think people will look for blogging tutorials in an article directory rather than in an exclusive site for blogging tutorials?

I would first search dedicated sites for blogging for guides and tutorials for blogging.

Here is WPTUT, a shortened name for Wordpress tutorials. This is a place where beginners can learn wordpress by browsing through great tips and guides for operating a blog based on wordpress.

If you have some knowledge about wordpress to share, you can submit your tutorial and point it directly to your blog post where the tutorial can be read in full.

There is also a forum in the site but that is still new and hence no activity as of now.

Removing Newer and Older Post Links in Blogger Blog

If you are using Blogger as blogging platform, you might be used to some of the built-in features, that you consider hard coded, but can be changed with slight template code modification. One of the hacks, presented in this publication, addresses a seemingly minor issue on the page - two links “Older Posts” and “Newer Posts” on the bottom of the page.

For those, who prefer their blog to be maximally close to the static webpages, these links not just unnecessary, but are plainly irritating. There is a way to remove them once and forever. And that is quite easy to do, even for not very experienced users. Note, that this hack will also remove “home” link from the bottom of the blog page.

Open Layout Tab in your blog profile page, choose Edit HTML, and search your code in your blog template for the following text:
#blog-pager-newer-link {
float: left;
}
#blog-pager-older-link {
float: right;
}
#blog-pager {
text-align: center;
}


Now replace that code with the following code:

#blog-pager-newer-link {
display: none;
}
#blog-pager-older-link {
display: none;
}
#blog-pager {
display: none;
}


Save the template and you are done. I hope that was indeed an easy and straightforward one.

Additional Reading:

http://bloggeruniversity.blogspot.com/
http://tipsforwebsite.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-remove-post-and-post-link-on.html

If it is Las Vegas, it must be…

Many of you might remember the wonderful movie, “If it is Tuesday, it must be Belgium”. Similarly, if you have a dream to go to Nevada, then you must experience some of the Wild West scenes, cuisines, wine and of course a bit of wilderness that merges with the horizon.

But to enjoy the above, you must plan well in advance. There is a particular show called “Spanish Trail Lunch Ride” in Las Vegas. Of the myriad Las Vegas Shows, only those that would like to soak in a bit of Wild West would prefer to enjoy this show than spending time indoors and juggling with coins in front of the machines.

Though horse back riding is not my chunk of sports, the idea of wearing one of the western straw hats and riding through the desert is quite tempting. Oh, I could even dress like Ursula Andress!

There are more exciting shows in Las Vegas to suite myriad tastes.

Image courtesy: Google Images.

Create online buzz hires bloggers.

I was sent an email by my online friend to register at a get paid to blog opportunity. It is a new Internet marketing company on the horizon: http://www.createonlinebuzz.com/

The parent site is 9.9 media.

I know you would be interested in making money through your blog by occasionally writing reviews of products and services.

Visit http://www.createonlinebuzz.com and register as a blogger. The rest of the formalities are nothing to seasoned Bloggers.

Once registered, you need to submit your blog by clicking on the "Submit / Manage My blogs" menu and "Submit New Site" button. Just follow the on screen instructions and fill out the form that opens wherein you need to specify your blog URL, category, common keyword tags of your blog, etc.

Await for their approval of your blogs. This happened to me in less than 48 hours. Now the impatient wait has begun to get the first assignment through email.

How to disable text selection on Blogger blog

In one of the previous publications, we presented a way to disable right click on the page of your Blogger blog to decrease the copyright violations from your readers “borrowing” your content for their own purposes. To go further in your content safeguarding efforts, you can make the next step, disabling text selection on your page entirely.

This hack was created by Dynamicdrive as well in the form of Javascript, and is also applicable to those bloggers who don’t like their content copied by others. If this concern is on top of your priorities list, then Copy the following code and Paste it to your blog template:


<script type="text/javascript">

/***********************************************
* Disable Text Selection script- © Dynamic Drive DHTML code library (www.dynamicdrive.com)
* This notice MUST stay intact for legal use
* Visit Dynamic Drive at http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ for full source code
***********************************************/

function disableSelection(target){
if (typeof target.onselectstart!="undefined") //IE route
target.onselectstart=function(){return false}
else if (typeof target.style.MozUserSelect!="undefined") //Firefox route
target.style.MozUserSelect="none"
else //All other route (ie: Opera)
target.onmousedown=function(){return false} How to disable
target.style.cursor = "default"
}

//Sample usages
//disableSelection(document.body) //Disable text selection on entire body
//disableSelection(document.getElementById("mydiv")) //Disable text selection on element with id="mydiv"

</script>

Slim claims?

Quick slim pills consumers claim more than the slim pills manufacturers. Is it a sales strategy? It must be because I too know a few persons who are on regular diet pill for long but still show no visible signs of matching my figure.

Or, do you think they are not taking the correct diet? I know diet pills takers are supposed to follow a few diet regulations.

Well, it is for them to figure out. Still, I thought I would ask them to read reviews of over 200 diet pills at pricexposed.net which seems to be getting more and more and visitors, a sure sign of providing useful and honest and reviews.

SEO guide from Google itself.

I have added one more ebook on SEO in my collection of SEO guides. But this time, this SEO guide in PDF format is none other from the might Google.

I started implementing slowly what I read and I definitely see a better search engine traffic. The comments for my blog posts are from new visitors.

Some of the content in the SEO starter guide from Google.

* How to create unique, accurate page titles
* How to make use of the “description” meta tag
* How to Improve the structure of your URLs
* How to make your site easier to navigate
* Write better anchor text
* Use heading tags appropriately
* Optimize your use of images
* Helpful resources for webmasters

I should thank Search for Blogging for having wrote about this SEO starter guide from Google.

Smart Blogger Assistant for Simple Blog Publishing

Developer Description:
Smart Blogger allows centralized management of your all diaries and blogs regardless of its Internet location. The software has a single universal interface for reading and sending messages to all blogs; it makes text formatting possible. With this application, you can monitor your friends' diaries checking their blogs for new postings. You can also look through commentaries to your postings as well as other peoples, place comments in blogs, and leave answers to threads.

The software supports three web-blogs:
- LiveJournal
- Blogger
- WordPress

Disadvantages:
This post has been made in Smart Blogger. I already see several disadvantages of using this free software for blogs publishing:

1. No possibility of the text alignment options.
2. Very basic text formatting: color and bold/itallic/under only.
3. No spell checking option.
4. No advanced features as horizontal lines or tables generation.
5. Small publishing field, not very convenient for big posts.

Advantages:
1. Nice and pleasant interface.
2. Easy to use.
3. Portable software exists, so you do not need to install the software on your PC

Developers WebSite: http://www.smartpctools.com/smart_blogger/index1.html

Assessment: The software is good for the light operations, small notes in your Journal, but is lacking functionality for serious blogging.

Software carries rating 3 of 5 in the RateItAll List of 29 free software titles:
http://www.rateitall.com/t-24825-blog-publishing-freeware.aspx

If you have personal experience using this software, you are welcome to leave your feedback in the rating widget below:

Blog Publishing Freeware on RateItAll

Marketplace for freelance bloggers.

The press release of Freelance Bloggers is a bit late I suppose as I have already written about them in my blog. The site is still very slow in loading and this is what keeping me away from it.

Well, Freelance Bloggers is actually a forum which also serves as a marketplace for bloggers and organizations looking for bloggers. As the press release said bloggers can post free profiles highlighting their blogging expertise; companies, organizations, and individuals can post open blogging jobs.

As I am writing this, I noticed a bunch of opportunities are posted for bloggers to grab. But, you should the patience of an eagle to read as the site is abysmally slow. Here are two sample posts:
Looking for Writer/Blogger
Sports Writer/Blogger

As my blogging assignments are already tieing me down, I am really not looking forward to sign up for more paid blogging jobs.

Customize 404 Error Page on WordPress Blog

404 Errors

By default, most Web servers return a simple "404 Not Found" error message when they are getting a request for a URL that they don’t have. This error message violates the three basic guidelines for error messages. All error messages must be:

• written in plain language that is easy to understand for non-technical users and that does not imply that the mistake is the user’s fault
  
• precise in specifying exactly what was done wrong (that is, not be generic or vague)
  
• constructive in suggesting steps the user can take to correct the problem

In terms of the "URL not found" error message, it would be better to explain to the user why the URL could not be found. It would be even better to list the most common mistakes in accessing files on the given site: for example, users often request URLs ending in .htm for sites that consistently use .html for all pages (or they use .html when all pages end in .htm). For any given site, it is recommended to have consistent naming conventions and list these conventions on a custom error message page.


The Importance of 404
Why working on the 404 optimization makes sense? It does not matter, if readers were looking something on your site and got there by mistake, or the link is incorrect, or visitors misspelled the address. They might go forever, never turning their head back to you and your site; even thou the site might have an excellent content. So, the main reasons your visitors may stumble into a 404 "Not found" page on your website are:

• A mistyped URL, or a copy-and-paste mistake
  
• Broken or truncated links on web pages or in an email message
  
• Moved or deleted content

It is a good idea to treat the 404 page as a doorway to your site, giving it the same degree of attention as a regular home page. The visitor who arrived to your 404 page by error, in many cases was actually looking for something on your site. Now you have to help them find it. That’s really the guiding light of 404 page design.


Tips for Improving Your 404

1. Don’t call it a 404 page. Your visitors have no idea what this means. Personalize your 404 page to make it user-friendly and understandable to any level of technical expertise.
   
2. Provide a way for the visitor to search for what they were looking for, installing the search box on the page.
   
3. Show them what you have to offer - the best of the best. Try to surprise and attract the visitors. You have may be just one chance to keep him. Show your blog sitemap or provide the easy visible link to one to let visitor know that you have indeed good stuff under your belt.
   
4. If none of the other options work for them (in other words, at the end of all of this, at the bottom of the page) get them a link to your contact form. If they get stuck, you want to know about it. Of course this is a last-resort option since no typically wants to contact the site owner when they have a problem. Just in case.

Using Wordpress to Improve Your 404
One of the beautiful parts about Wordpress is that you can very easily fix up your 404 page. It’s as easy as changing a template file.

1. Go to your Wordpress Theme Editor under Presentation. Select the 404 page to edit.
   
2. Edit the page using the offered guidelines. Two possibilities here: 

• If you’re a designer you should make this page look like the rest of your theme. I
  
• If you’re only a user, do your best to customize what you can. Change the headline, at the very least, to something like “Whoops, it’s not here!” or something of the like.
  

Custom 404 Samples

Find below a small collection of the funny and smart custom 404 pages screenshots, found on the Web.