How to increase your blog visitors with Pinterest

A picture is worth a thousand words!  The more attractive your images are, the more they get the attention of your viewers. That's how the magic of Pinterest works to get more traffic to your blog and website, when viewers Pin, Add to Favorites and Repin your images. But have you linked your blog post image correctly, when you upload them on Pinterest?

Recently, I checked my Pinterest blog images that were uploaded directly on Pinterest. I noticed the images were linked to my blog, but does not link directly to the blog post url. This has to be done manually.

When a visitor clicks your blog post image on Pinterest, it should take them directly to the blog post and not to your blog homepage.

Below are the guidelines to ensure that your blog post image is linked correctly on Pinterest, so as to drive traffic back to your blog:

• Upload your blog image directly on Pinterest 

• Enter the title, description and keywords.

• SAVE the image

• When you hover your mouse over the image, you would notice a 'pencil icon' on the top right corner, as shown in the image below.

•  Click on the 'pencil icon' and add your blog post link in the space provided for 'Website'.

• Save the image once again.

Many of us would have failed to notice this feature. But aren't we leaving behind a plethora of wealth?  Make it a point to link your images on Pinterest, back to your blog posts and web pages. 

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Work smarter by using dropbox for business

Remote access is one of the important features in using business apps.  Yes, Google Apps for Business would be one of the best choice for many, to organize their business and share documents.  Wherever you go, whatever you do, you have them all at your finger tips. 

But recently, I came across another cool app Dropbox that makes my work much more flexible and easier.  It works almost like my computer drive, with added features.  

No more  wasting time on email attachments, downloading or uploading files, to share them with your team members.  Create or edit your docs, images, videos and files in your dropbox folder and share it right away with your team.  It's that simple!

Once you install Dropbox on all your computers, mobile phones and tablets, you can access your files on these devices simultaneously by way of syncing (also known as File synchronization). 



This is one of the coolest business online software, that I have ever worked with and still lovin it.  

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Quick tips to increase your ebook sales on Amazon

Promote Amazon eBooks

 

Simply uploading your eBooks on Amazon is not going to increase your sales overnight.  That is just the initial process and there is much more to do, before it catch the attention and interest of readers. Just like any other product, you need to promote your eBooks effectively.  This doesn't mean you need to spend hours in marketing your eBooks, but promote them smartly.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon's Founder and CEO

Here are quick tips that were shared by successful authors who climbed up to the Amazon Best Sellers page, apart from promoting the eBooks on their websites.

1. Participate actively in the Amazon's Discussion Forum

Active participation at the forum would draw the attention of other amazon members and visitors to take a look at your profile.  Create an Amazon Listmania Lists and a Wishlist.  Ensure, that you list your eBooks in these two categories.



    2.  Kindle Boards

Share your thoughts, ideas about writings and be helpful to other members of this board.  Shameless self-promotion without adding value to the discussion is not going to benefit you in anyway.


   3.  Mobile Read

 

An online community that give members the opportunity to exchange ideas, gain knowledge and seek suggestions on every topic regarding the mobile internet world.  Be a part of this gadget community and its worth your time spent here in getting many hot leads. 

 

   

   4.  Amazon's KDP Select (Kindle Direct Publishing)

A self-publishing platform to sell your books at the Amazon Kindle Store. The eBooks are available for purchase on all Kindle devices and Kindle apps. When books are made available through KDP Select, you can earn 70% royalty and also promote your eBook for free.

 

Another feature is when your eBook is exclusively published at KDP for 90 days, it would also be available in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library.  The best part is you would earn a share of the monthly Kindle Owners' Lending Library fund, when your books are borrowed from the library.

Certainly, these tips would have a great impact on your eBook sales on amazon.  Just ensure not to blast these platforms with advertisements and surely, in no time readers would soon start recognizing your presence on these discussion boards.

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Purpose of Optimizing Blog Images for Search Engines

By seeing an image on a blog post, search engines does not understand what our blog is all about.  We need to make it more clear in a descriptive manner to allow search engine spiders to crawl our blog. 

Optimizing blog images helps to get targeted traffic through Image Search Engines like Google image search, Bing images and Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa that are popular photo sharing sites on the web.

It is only recently that bloggers have started giving importance in optimizing their blog images.  This is such a cool method in getting targeted traffic without much effort.

Blog Image Optimization

You might as well may want to check out the 5 guidelines for better blog image optimization:

1.   Alt text

This is an 'alternative text' (alt text) for blog images.  It is a text that help search engines to have a better understanding about the image.

The syntax is also useful where viewers would like to browse the blog by turning off the graphics.  Here the visitor would only see the alternative text instead of the image.

Once you add an image on your blog, go to the Html view and you will see a code as shown below.

Change the code to

In the code only just change the "Alternative Text for Image" to a text relevant to your blog post and image.

For Example:
If your blog is about SEO Techniques, you can use an alternative text for image with a keyword relevant to the blog post.



2.   File Name

The file name of your blog should be keyword oriented and this too help visitors on the web to quickly find your blog image.


For Example:  When you use Google images or any other search engines to find an image for seo tips, you would notice that most images display the file name.

Google Image Search for Seo Tips

When you hover on any of those pictures on Google image search, you would see the image file name as shown in the below image.

Image Search for SEO Techniques

Note that you need to save the image file name with hyphen after each word.  Most Search Engines treat the hyphen as spaces.  Eg. seo-tips-and-tricks.jpg

3.   Image Captions

They may not seem important, but it is a good practice to always write a caption. Visitors do find the captions of an image catchy, when they visit a website.  Captions decorated with keywords is another method to drive traffic to your blog.

4.   Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Too much of makeup doesn't make a woman look very beautiful.  The same applies with blog images.  Search Engines would find it disgusting on crawling an image stuffed with keywords and would assume it is spammy.

5.   Monetize Blog Images

Just as you can monetize blogs, there are many sites that help you to monetize your blog images with adsense and CPM advertising.  Find the one that adapts perfectly with your blog and get you more image traffic as well.

It doesn't take much of your time to optimize your blog images, as mentioned in these detailed guidelines provided.  Once done the traffic through images keep flowing and that is until you decide to delete your blog.

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Importance of linking with.edu blogs

Blogs with .edu, .org and .gov domains are considered reliable by google and have a higher impact on all search engines.  Such blogs are specifically for universities and other educational purpose.  They are highly monitored blogs and so getting a link back from these powerful .edu blogs would also increase your blog's credibility.

Backlinking with .edu sites

It is not quiet easy to find .edu or .gov blogs pertaining to your niche and those that allow you to place a comment.  Most of them are nofollow blogs, but that shouldn't be a problem as long as you get organic traffic.  Backlinking with at least a few education blogs itself, can have a great impact and increase your blog rankings on search engines.  Also, take note of the PR (page rankings) when you come across .edu blogs.

I have been hunting this down for long and now came across a way to find .edu blog with certain parameters.  So jump on to google search and enter the parameter as shown below.

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “keyword”

site:.gov inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “Keyword”

Site:.edu inurl:comments/feed

Your search on Google after entering the parameters would look like this

Example of Google parameters on SERP

Note :  Instead of "Keyword", enter your niche.  

For example: "increase web traffic" 

                          "personal development"

                          "mlm network marketing"

Though there are more search parameters, I have only provided the most relevant ones to make things simple. The other search terms will need you to further keep digging the mine to find the appropriate blogs and that is time consuming.  Ok got an idea how to do it?   Now go get it  :)

Golden Rule:  Always add value to the post with interesting comments relevant to the subject.  This would help your blogs to get noted in no time and your comments to stay on these high authority .edu blogs.

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How to protect your affiliate links from theft

Are you aware that your affiliate earnings are being stolen? Someone else is enjoying the commissions for all the work you do, in promoting your affiliate business.  But how does this happen?

Affiliate marketing is a method adopted in marketing the products and services of another company, where in turn you are rewarded a compensation for your efforts.  Once you sign up as an affiliate for a company, you are provided a link with your affiliate code in it.

For example:

Your affiliate link would look something like the one below.
http://xzy.com/?afid=23456

It is this link that you have to promote inorder to get  business for the company.  Each time a visitor sign up or purchase the products through your affiliate link, the company rewards you a percentage of the affiliate commissions.

But here arise the problem.  Visitors are more smart and savvy these days, that they remove your affiliate id on the link and try to enter the company website directly. With reference to the link above, visitors would erase ?afid=23456 on the link and sign up directly through http://xzy.com/  

This way you could lose your affiliate commissions, when visitors sign up directly on the website.  There are even softwares that track and rewrite your affiliate code as theirs and ultimately enjoying your commissions.

So to protect your affiliate commissions from theft, it is advisable to use a link cloaker or better still to make the best use of redirection or forward domain that would mask your affiliate links.  When you purchase a domain, you  normally get this facility to forward domain either for directing visitors to another website or for masking your site.   This don't need any technical knowledge and using the redirection option is search engine friendly.

Forward domain through the web hosting site is one of the simplest redirection methods, but if you are a bit techy, you can follow the instructions in the video with another option for masking your affiliate links.

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How to make use of Windows Live Writer for blogging

Windows Live Writer helps publishing your blog to any blogging platforms quickly with many cool features.  Use Live Writer to create your blog post and then publish them on WordPress, TypePad, LiveJournal, Blogger and Telligent Community (previously known as Community Server).

For instance, you created a blog post for wordpress and now you want the same post  to be published on another blogging platform. You can quickly post it through live writer  to typepad, blogger or livejournal.  You can even create  blog entries offline, once the live writer is downloaded to your desktop.  This is useful for bloggers  and writers with limited internet usage.

One of the best features is that the Live writer comes with a number of cool plugins to enhance your blog.  Simply download the Insert Video plugin and you can easily add videos from various sites like MSN SoapBox, YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo, MySpace Video, Video, muveeMix, myvideo.de and BrightCove.  Once the plugin is downloaded, copy and paste the video link from any of these video sites to your blog entry and the video plugin would ensure rest of the work is done.

Another cool feature is that you can edit and add effects to your images right from your blog.  Normally, you have to do this on your photo editing software.

This is just few among the lot and there is much more that you can do by using live writer.  It is recommended to writers and bloggers to make the best use of this tool.  Actually, this was suggested by one of my friends on a business network.  I'm just checking out these features and still in the process.

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How to find dofollow sites quickly

It is a process to check out for dofollow blogs and websites for the purpose of backlinking, even with available backlink checker tools on the web.

I found a quicker way to do it, that hardly consumes  much time.  Within 15 minutes, you can post your comments to nearly 10 - 20 sites. 

Quick Tips 

• Download any SEO toolbar.  I prefer to use firefox seo plugin or WebRank Toolbar.

• On any search engine, check out for blogs or websites according to your niche like mlm, network marketing, entrepreneur coaching and so on.

• Click any of those sites and once you are on the page, you would notice the below figures on your seo toolbar.

•  These figures are mainly rankings for alexa, google, yahoo, bing, no. of backlinks to the particular site that you are currently viewing, etc.

•  Click the icon on the seo toolbar that shows backlinks for google as shown in the image above.

•  You would get a list of sites, that are linking back to the website you are browsing.

• Now go do your job to post comments on those blogs and websites, to create quick backlinks to your website as well.

Do this on a routine every day and you would be able to create a number of backlinks to your site quickly with amazing results.

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How to check a website/blog is dofollow or nofollow

For newbies in internet marketing, this subject would be something new to them.  But some of us are still confused whether search engines do crawl, nofollow websites and blogs.

What is NoFollow ?

It is an attribute that is added to websites and blogs, instructing search engines not to follow the links on that site.  This helps to avoid spammers from getting credits  by a way of linking their site with nofollow websites, inorder to get crawled by search engines.

For example, if your html link is as follows:

Once your website or blog is coded in the above format, visitors who post a link on your site, would never be crawled by search engine robots.

So what could then be the benefit of posting your link on a nofollow site?

It is merely to get organic traffic to your site, when a visitor clicks your link on nofollow websites. But your link will never be spotted by search engine crawlers. So for that reason, posting comments on nofollow blog and article sites would be helpful.

How do we trace whether a website or blog is nofollow?

Seo professionals, this shouldn't be a problem.  They are able to figure out the nofollow html codes placed on the links of that site, when they check the source page of the website.

For non-techies, if you are using Firefox browser, there is a plugin in Tools - Add ons to check NoDoFollow sites.  On adding this plugin to your browser, each time you visit a site, it  would highlight the links which are DoFollow and NoFollow.  Those links highlighted in Pink are NoFollow and those with Blue are DoFollow.

                                      NoDoFollow

So if you notice a link in the comment already posted by members on a blog, it would be now much easier to trace out whether it is a DoFollow or NoFollow Blog from the color of the link.   When you post a comment on a blog, there is an option to enter your name and website link.  In the image above, you would notice it is a nofollow comment as the link is highlighted in red.

It now makes sense for posting comments on nofollow sites, though it does not contribute to increase rankings on search engines. 

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How to free disk space on your hard disk without upgrading

The other day, I was googling for a solution to move files from my hard disk to another drive.  My C drive is so full, that it was lacking even the minimum disk space required to work the system files.  There is no way that you could copy and paste system files from one drive to another, as the whole system itself would be in a mess.  Upgrading the system is time consuming, as all the softwares that I'm working on have to be downloaded again.

It is so happened that I bumped on a tool that does this function easily with a few clicks, without the need to upgrade the system.  EASEUS Partition Master helps to resize/move/split/merge files without any data loss and redistribute free space in the drives that is overloaded with data files.  The tool works on Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows7 32 bit and 64 bit system.

One of the main feature of Partition Master apart from speeding up your computer is that, it allows to recover deleted/lost partition and backup the disk.  It is highly recommended to backup your disk, before you proceed with any of the functions.  Thus ensuring your data is safe and  allows smooth functioning of your system files.

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How to create and upload a sitemap to your blog easily?

Sitemap is a collective list of pages of your website or blog, which could easily be accessed by visitors to your website and crawled by search engines.  Having a sitemap would increase the traffic to your site and ensure that search engine spiders do crawl each page on your site.

Creating a sitemap is now simple and do not require any technical knowledge.  There are many free sitemap generator tools to help you create a site map for your website.  A site map could be created in XML (.xml), HTML (.html) and Text (.txt) formats.  Once created, it could be submitted to all the popular search engines.  You can either submit the sitemap individually to each search engine or use a Search Engines Sitemap Submitter.

Wordpress blogs do provide plugins to upload your website sitemap file.   But in blogger blogs, there is no such option.  So for blogger blogs,  you could use your blog feed url ( that is if you do have a blog feed) to submit the sitemap to a search engine sitemap submitter like the one mentioned above.

Your xml file to be submitted should be like the below format --

yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

OR

yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Remember to only submit your sitemap just once a day or it would be treated as spam.

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How to add Retweet button on blogger

Adding the Retweet button on blogs and websites, help readers to share interesting information with their twitter friends just like the above retweet button.

To add the Retweet button on your Blogger Blog --

• Login to your blogger id

• Click on ‘Layout’ or 'Design' tab

• Select ‘Edit HTML’ tab

• Check the ‘Expand Widget Templates’ box

• Now place the code below that is highlighted in the box between <  b:loop values='data:posts' var= post and the line <  /b:loop  >

• Finally Save template

You can adjust the alignment of the Retweet button according to your requirement.

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How to connect your computer to TV

We feel more satisfied in watching movies and videos on a big screen rather than on our computer screen.  The picture quality may not be good as that you watch it on your pc, but still you could enjoy watching your online videos on a bigger screen.

You can do this with few simple steps to get you started in minutes.

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Key to lasting success

Perserverance is our key to success. We would have observed many of the successful business people, whom we have known for years. Initially, they were not minting money as they are at the moment.

It is a process and they had to first learn, plan, decide and implement them in their business. In a competitive business world, people are on the look out for new horizons in earning money online.

The road is not smooth and it is our perseverance to succeed that would help us reach great heights.

So well said "Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration, desperation, perspiration and inspiration." - Evan Esar

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