November, 2008

Use two Search forms to increase the pageviews

We have been experimenting with the Google Custom Search Engine, and we had put two CSE on our blog. As you can see, we have placed one at the top and one at the footer of this blog.

We could see that the number of search almost tripled and the page views were four to five(fluctuating) times more than before.

This is because, when people read the entire article, they will reach to the end of the page. Now they can see the “Related Articles”. And if they do not want to read those things and want something else, then they obviously need to search for it, and showing a search form at the end of the blog reminds them to search for the things they want.

People are lazy and they will not always scroll up and do a search on your blog. They may just think that the information isn’t available on your blog. And its frustrating to search for the required article from any achieve page manually!

So a search form at the footer helps a lot.

Now what about the page views?

Google Custom search engine and most other search engines which you can put on your blog, has the feature to select the websites from where it should search for the keywords. So each time someone uses your Search engine, he is likely to visit some other article of your own blog. This will just repeat and result in the increase of your page views.

There are many other benefits:-

1. You can know, what people are searching.

2. Earn a bit of revenue(if you want– Optional).

3. Increase page views.

4. Very useful for visitors.

Now to add Google Custom Search Engine to your website, just follow this article- “Add Custom Search Engine to your wordpress blog easily“.

After adding the Google Custom Search Engine to your blog, make sure that your articles are indexed..

Watch this video to know more about indexing, in Google Custom Search Engine:

Having two Adsense for Search or Google Custom Search Engine on a single page is allowed. But having more than two forms is against TOS and will also annoy the visitors!

Adding 2 search engine to this blog showed some positive results, but you need not take this as a rule. Every blog is different and results vary, so do some research and experiments on your blog and analyze the results and then decide whether to keep one or two search engine forms on your blog.

While placing the Search Engine forms, just keep in mind that, their placement also play a major role.

And also keep in mind that, you need to have more articles on your blog. If you have just 10 to 25 articles, then you cannot relay on the results. If that is the case with you, then stop the experiment and concentrate more on blogging and do further research when you have more articles.

Microsoft Windows 7 and Multi-Touch Technology

hh_promo_windows7_cropped Windows 7 is the next version of Windows for PCs, which mainly promises things like enhanced reliability, responsiveness, and faster boot and shut-down. Make everyday computing tasks easier, like connecting and syncing devices, browsing the web, and managing a home network.
Here is a Video showing the power of multi-touch, which uses Windows 7:

This video shows the multi-touch innovations first previewed in Surface that will ultimately play a part of the next version of Windows.
The OS you see in the video is Windows 7, which looks much like Windows Vista.
Windows 7 is expected to be released sometime later in 2010! So it has a long way to go.
[ But Windows 7 Beta Version is already available to download in net, its not a official release, so use it on your own risk. ]
Windows Vista wasn’t a big hit, so Microsoft wouldn’t take a chance again and we believe that Windows 7 will be much better.

Windows 7 Multi-Touch @ PDC08(HP Computer):

Being a programmer and a geek myself, I have a desktop computer dedicated for testing all the software releases. So we have used almost all Windows OS. WindowsXP SP2 was simply great, while Windows Vista wasn’t so bad(our experience).

Anyway, we use and recommend Unix and we don’t find any other product to be better than that. OpenSource, reliable, secure etc.

Would like to here your views..

Link love for people who involve in conversation @ Technotip.org

We started this blog mainly for the purpose of building a community over here. And wanted to share our views, thoughts here and let others share their thoughts and views. Remember, we always believe in these words – “If two people exchange 1$, both will have 1$ each. But if they exchange 1 idea, both will have 2 ideas each”.
So involve in the conversation and make this blog more lively. As a bonus, we link back to our Top 10 commentators from our homepage.
We love to link to everyone reading our blog, but you know, that is not possible. As this blog would look spammy to search engines and mainly its not the purpose people visit Technotip.org, people want some good information out of our site and they wouldn’t like to see bunch of links to someother blogs.
Please do not comment on our blog, just to get linkback from the homepage!
Make sure that your comment adds value to everyone reading it. You will get more traffic to your site, if you comment more relevantly. This practice will bring in traffic to your blog consistently over time.Share your ideas liberally. The benefits from accountability and feedback outweigh the risk that someone steals your idea! Many productive creative professionals and entrepreneurs claim that they become more committed to their ideas after telling people about them! The fact is that great ideas are plentiful, and very few people have the discipline and resources to make them happen. When you feel accountable to others, you are more likely to stay focused.

Wordpress has made the commenting so easy and adds more fun. You can interact with the blogger or/and even with the other commentators. Share your thoughts with other commentators, this is a best practice, in terms of getting traffic as well as to get attention and make the conversation more valuable.
The philosophy to “share ideas liberally” defies the age-old instinct to keep ideas secret. However, the creative person’s tendency to jump from idea-to-idea-to-idea causes most ideas to die in isolation. Creative professionals should take every opportunity to communicate new ideas broadly, seek feedback, and develop a sense of accountability.
And do not be harsh or abuse other commentators or the blogger! etc etc etc, we hope you know all those bla bla bla..
And remember, we have comment moderation. “Akismet” plugin will help us fight with spams.
Be wise, be responsible, be cautious….thats what we can say, rest you know 🙂

Basic Things to do: To Convert Readers to Subscribers

Many bloggers keep trying to develop a loyal reader base for their blog, and will surly be willing to convert their visitors to subscribers.

Following some simple tweaks or optimizations will help us in increasing our blog subscribers:

First of all label the RSS and/or email subscription link as FREE RSS and FREE EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION. This will make some people curious to checkout and someothers will not have fear to click on it(as its free)!

We ran an experiment session with some of the people who use internet to read emails, Google for stuffs they want to know about – Not so geeky about internet. We could see that many of them clicked on an text ad or any related topic links, after they read any article ( that they got while Googling ) or they checked for things which are labeled FREE Gifts or just FREE !

And we also saw that many people never bothered to see the small subscription links. And they just book marked the URL of sites which they liked.

But some of them subscribed to some blogs[which had some interesting contents] which were showing email subscription form at the end of each article and many others gave their attention to the big email subscription form present in 300 x 250 or 250 x 250 space at the right side sidebar.

So we can say that, we need to show some really big, appealing subscription forms and links, for our visitors and make them aware that we do provide FREE RSS and email subscription options on our site.

So some of the things to remember is:

1. Show email subscription form below each article or in a place where there is high visibility. This would surly increase your subscribers.

and/or

Showing Big subscription forms in 300 x 250 space, in upper part of your blog would encourage them to subscribe.

2. Labeling it as FREE will attract some more non-geeky people to check it out.

3. Call for action: Ask your readers to subscribe to your blog. This is also an effective strategy.

4. Educate your readers about the RSS and email FEED of your blog. This would also bring in some more subscribers.

Also run some experiment session with friends(friends who are non-geeky, geeky), and take care that you don’t do experiments on your blog, with your friends, as they may click on your ads(PPC) and make loss to your advertisers 🙂

If you want to know about your blog/website, just ask your friends or online guys to give you feedback about your site.
5. Run contests or giveaways and attract some more people to subscribe to your email updates.
6. Provide value to your readers and they are more likely to subscribe to your blog updates.

These are some of the basic things which we can implement to get more subscribers to our blog updates.

Now we ask you to support us, in the effort of making this place ( Technotip.org ) as a place which provides value to all our readers. Please subscribe to our blog using RSS or email subscription options:

Have Navigation links both in header as well as in Footer

We have seen many blogs having no navigation links in the footer. I also use to think, Whats the need of a navigation link again in footer, when we have it in the header!
Until one day I realized while I was reading the articles of some of my favorite blogs on a mobile phone.
Its not that difficult to scroll up and click on the navigation menu in the header while we are using our Computers to surf, but it really becomes hard and sometimes really annoying when we are reading long articles using a mobile phone. After reading the whole article, when we want to navigate to the homepage or somewhere else, we need to scroll up, and it takes a lot of time. It takes so long that, sometimes we may even forget what we were looking for in the navigation menu 🙂
footer-navigation-technotip.org
And another thing to be noticed is, people are lazy and they need more options or else they will just not even think of navigating to some other pages of our blog! — Seems to be funny, but its true.
Regular readers of our blog wont get discouraged by not seeing the navigation links at the footer, but its the search engine traffic and those who are new to our blog, who get confused or feel lazy to scroll up and see if the navigation is available in the header part.
So if you are thinking of converting search engine traffic to your regular readers, then you must seriously consider adding navigation links to your footer soon.
Main navigation links to consider are:
Home
Subscription links. And you may also consider using anchor tag, which takes you to “top” of you blog quickly.
Copyrights, Policies etc.

People are used to using the footer navigation links, as many mainstream websites and many “A” grade bloggers blogs are using this footer navigation links. So there is no option than following this on our blog too. And its commonsense that, people who read the entire article and/or even comments will surly endup at the footer of our blog, so there should be some way to get them to the desired location or if we place some navigation link at the footer, they may see it and may just feel like visiting some other places of our blog. This is the main reason why many popular themes are using “Most popular articles”, “recent articles” link and the authors information links at the footer of the blog.

Another reason to use the footer navigation links would be, it looks professional and the footer doesn’t look empty and it adds up to the users good experience.
If you succeed in making lazy people(using internet) feel comfortable using your blog, then you already won the race for 50% 🙂

Please share your thoughts in the comment section.

Auto Translate Now Available For Videos With Captions + Search Bar – YouTube

Ever got frustrated by watching your favorite celebrate interview video where they are speaking in some language that you don’t know and which is having captions too in some other language ?

Now Google has taken another step, where your videos can reach wider audience. Google Translate adds real-time machine translation to any caption tracks you upload. Now you can enjoy this video spoken in Italian, even if you don’t understand Italian.

To get a translation for your preferred language, move the mouse over the bottom-right arrow, and then over the small triangle next to the CC (or subtitle) icon, to see the captions menu. Click on the “Translate…” button and then you will be given a choice of many different languages.

When you add captions to your video in one language, it will be readable to almost everybody through auto translate. While machine translation is not perfect, but still this will help creators to offer a better understanding of their videos.

Search bar at the top of video:
As Google has started – “To help its video content partners earn more money, YouTube will
begin running overlay ads in YouTube partner videos embedded on other websites”.

So now youtube generates revenue whenever someone uses its content partners video, anywhere in the internet. So now youtube has added this search bar within the video player, and now we can search for any video from within the player and watch it wherever we are!

Create your New Yahoo! profile

Yahoo! is popular for its email and IM services, so having a Yahoo! profile seems more interesting.

Some of the good features in Yahoo! profile are:
1. We can now invite our friends by importing our contacts from Yahoomail and messenger. This is a cool feature.

2. We can set the status message. — Since twitter has been so popular, this status message feature has also become a must feature in many social networking sites.

3. We can write about me section here too 🙂

4. There is a nice “Guest Book” in everybodies profile – Giving it some more touch, for social networking.

5. Drag and drop the “Guest Book”, “Connections, “Updates”, “About me” boxes in your profile and place it according to your wish.

6. You can share the Updates of “Yahoo! 360”, “Yahoo! Avatars”, “Yahoo! Buzz”, “Yahoo! Shine”, ”
Personal Info” with your contacts in Yahoo profile. You get the option to determine what to share and what not to.

7. People can now find you(search for your profile) and add you as friend. And you can opt to get an email notification when there is some activity in your profile. And you can opt it out too! .You can search for new/old friends by just searching for their Name or email address.

8. You can set the permission for, who can see your updates and who should not see your latest updates.

9. And there is an interesting feature called “Connection Suggestion”, which automatically suggests some of the contacts from our email. These are people you communicate with a lot in Yahoo! Mail, or who you added to Yahoo! Contacts or your Messenger List.

10. For security concern Yahoo! has also given the option to make our profile public or private.

You can add me to your Yahoo! profile contact — technotip.org!

Voice and Video chat – right inside Gmail

Today Google released the Voice and Video chat feature to its Gmail. Switching from email to chat as needed, all within the same app, is really great for productivity.
video-voice-chat-gmail
From Gmail Blog:

All you have to do is download and install the voice and video plugin and you are ready. And in the spirit of open communications, Google has designed this feature using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP, and H.264, which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat.

Source: GmailBlog

This feature is available both in Gmail and Apps account. Seems like Google will soon steal the market share of Email Service. Presently Yahoo tops the list – Comscore figures.
The problem with Google not listing in the top might be, many people with a domain will be using Google Apps google.com/a/domain.com instead of the default gmail.com.