Satish | Technotip.org

3 Steps, Extra Traffic! : StumbleUpon

With 3 simple steps, add a StumbleUpon badge to your site so your visitors can easily submit your content to StumbleUpon and you can start enjoying additional traffic from StumbleUpon users who want to see content like yours! Simply copy and paste the code into your site and start receiving free exposure on StumbleUpon.

As you all probably know, StumbleUpon doesn’t crawl the web pages automatically. It only adds those pages which are added by its users. And then it rotates or displays these user submitted/voted quality content to its other users (who share similar interests). Providing quality content to its users and good traffic to the source. So everybody is happy.

Over years we have seen so many products claiming to generate huge traffic to our websites through Stumbleupon, but the trick is simple. Produce quality content (suitable for StumbleUpon community) and make it easy for StumbleUpon members to find and submit, vote for the story.

Having quality content is mandatory. Next thing is making it more accessible.

All these days we use to have a simple banner or a link to submit the article to stumbleupon, but now we can show a badge and encourage or remind our readers to submit and vote for the story, if they find it interesting.

Get your content discovered with SU Badges
With 3 simple steps, add a StumbleUpon badge to your site so your visitors can easily submit your content to StumbleUpon and you can start enjoying additional traffic from StumbleUpon users who want to see content like yours! Simply copy and paste the code into your site and start receiving free exposure on StumbleUpon.

These new badges reflect a real-time count of how many times your page has been viewed by members of StumbleUpon’s community of over 10 million users. Show off your big numbers!

Users clicking these badges will be prompted to submit a page to StumbleUpon’s index (if not already in the index) so other users can enjoy your content or to view the ratings and reviews of your page from other StumbleUpon users. Your site will not be framed when users click any of these badges.

Reason for this post: I had seen these badges some time back, but had never used them. Out of curiosity, I took some time to put them on the blog and to my surprise – traffic from Stumbleupon has significantly raised. I still thought it’s a coincidence. But after watching for some more days, I thought I would recommend using this badge for all my fellow bloggers/webmasters to generate good traffic from Stumbleupon or atleast try this out and share the results with us, in the comment section.

The badges are somewhat similar to that of the TweetMeme/Re-Tweet Buttons. But what I feel is, the color is too dim to notice.

You can check badges in these posts, to see them in action:
7 Ways To Get Traffic – Before You Need It!
10 Ways To Make Your Blog Load Faster and Save Bandwidth

You can get the code for implementing the badge at: SU Badge.

The numbers really encourage visitors to take action and hit that stumble button. Try it and share your experience with us.
“Simple Steps, extra Traffic!”

Bonus Tip:
You can even use the StumbleUpon URL shortener, it provides some easy, lazy way to hit the thumbs up button.

BuySellAds: Faster and Better(Show ads vertically with a click)

We all know that internally Google is thinking of considering site loading speed as one of the criteria for ranking the website. Apart form that, faster loading sites are key for grabbing user attention.

BuySellAds has come up with an innovative idea of making the javascript ad codes asynchronous(as they call it).

When any browser downloads the ad code that displays the ads, it blocks everything else on the page from rendering. And, while this process may take less than a second of the user’s time, it is noticeable and it is a big problem.

You can read more at BSA blog.

It is frustrating some times, when my visitors have to wait for the ads to load before they could see the entire page. Now I am happy as BSA is taking every effort to minimize that wait time. Infact, what I understand by reading their blog post, is that, with the new ad codes implemented visitors need not wait. i.e., the javascript codes as well as the other elements of the page load simultaneously. Thats great. So from now, we need not compromise user experience for making some pocket money(of course which is used for paying hosting and other expenses – coffee included!)

Faster is Ok, but I said “Better” in the title? It is because, a known issue for BSA publishers is alignment of the ads(problem with vertical alignment of ads). Now BSA has made it simpler. i.e., if we have implemented the new ad codes, now we can log into our BSA a/c, click on get code and make changes(make ads align vertical) and hit SAVE and the settings will be applied to the ad boxes on our site…..isn’t it better?

Additionally, you can even style your ads from within the BSA a/c – see below screen shot.

Previously we had to add float: left; to the a tag of the code. But people with no css knowledge what so ever, found it very geeky/confusing. So now, alignment of ads isn’t a problem with BSA ads.

If you had made any custom changes to the styling of your old code, then you need to add those changes to the new codes by applying them in the advance settings area in your BSA a/c.

Update:

To Show ads: 2 horizontal and the rest aligned vertically, you need to uncheck the vertical checkbox, and add float: left; to Anchor Style in the Advanced Settings of your BSA a/c. And don’t forget to SAVE the settings!

I highly recommend you to grab the new ad codes and make your site load faster.

My Experience: Purchasing a Dell Desktop Online

It was December 2009, my exams were still going on and I was restless in finding a good configuration for my next best PC!

My plan was: If I order the Computer now, it will be processed, built and sent to me by the time my vacations start. Nice plan. But nothing happened as I expected.

It was December 26th 2009, and I called up Dell Customer care to place my order. Someone luckily picked up the call(after trying 3 times) and talked to me. I was very happy, but they told me to hold the phone until they transfer my call to Dell Sales person. I was hearing some instructions, recorded sales pitch and the call got disconnected.

Same thing went on for the next 3 days. Finally I was connected to a Dell Sales Manager in Delhi – and he answered my call quite satisfactorily. He called me the next day, but I was writing my exams and couldn’t respond the call.

After my exams finished(02/01/2010) I took some more time to review the configuration and decided to purchase a high configure, costly computer. So I went on to mail some of my friends for help and finally settled with this configuration:

Dell Studio XPS 8000
8GB RAM
i7 process 2.8GHz
1GB nVidia GTS 240
24″ monitor
Win 7 etc(which comes with the XPS 8000 package).

Finally I called up Dell on 08/01/2010 and placed my final order. And on 09/01/2010 I sent them the DD[Demand Draft].
It wasn’t a surprise that the delivery will be slightly delayed, so I was mentally prepared. On 19/01/2010 I got an email confirming the payment, and I got my Order Number and Customer Code to track my product status.

I was checking the status daily and one fine day(after a week of waiting) I got a call from the same sales manager and he told me that Studio XPS 8000 is out of stock and I need to wait until Studio XPS 8100 comes to India(within 4 days), orelse I can get my money back. But since I had already waited so long, I decided to wait for 4 more days. After waiting for 4 more days, he called me and I sent him my final quotation:
studio-xps-8100-design1
studio-xps-8100-design3
Dell Studio XPS 8100
Processor i7 860 2.8GHz 8MB Cache
Dell ST2410 24″ Full HD Widescreen Monitor.
8GB(4x2GB) DDR3 SDRAM
500GB SATA 3.0 Gb/s Hard Drive
Wireless mouse and Keyboard
Windows 7 Home Premium
Blu-ray disk drive
nVidia GeForce GTS240 1024MB
Dell 2.1 Multimedia Desktop Speaker System
and a bunch of added legal software packages.

There was a little difference in the amount for XPS 8000 and XPS 8100 and I sent the remaining amount the next day. On 21/01/2010 the new order was placed.
Estimated delivery date was 03/02/2010 and there was further delay due to key board and mouse shortage and then finally on Feb 01 I got a mail and I thought it was another excuse – but it was not. Dell had already handed over my system to BlueDart. By 04/02/2010 my computer was in my home. But had to wait for 2 more days, as the product needs to be opened and installed by a dell representative only.

Everything went well, except for the multiple delays, which I can forgive and forget, as I am still satisfied with the system performance.

What I want to tell is: I had read a lot of bad review about Dell, and almost decided not to go with Dell. And started searching other PC vendors, but I found similar reviews about most of the companies, so I decided to give Dell a try and it was all a happy ending.
I am not saying that, there will be no problem if you order Dell computers online, it all depends on the circumstances – but I appreciate the honest efforts of Dell to serve its customers. In most of the bad reviews I read that, at the end they were able to replace their damaged product.

Have you ever purchased a Branded Computer? Please share your experience with all of us.

I will review Dell Studio XPS 8100 shortly.

Holy IT! – by Scott Wittig

Holy IT! The Amazing power of ClarITy – by SCOTT WITTIG.

‘Holy IT!’ – Is a Guide to Finding and Doing Your Thing – Your ‘IT’. This book is written to help you identify, and start acting on, that thing that you (and those around you) know that you should be doing, but aren’t. We all have one. Scott asks “What’s yours?”.

In scott’s own words – “I identified my purpose in life – to HELP OTHERS ACHIEVE.”
HolyIT-scott-wittig
Main Contents of the Book
IT
Identify
They Can’t Eat You.
Wat If…You Don’t Do It?

DO
Determine
‘fessing up
Great Expectations
Always Positive

Execute.
Baby Steps
Change Agents
The Law of the Squirrel
NOW Rocks!

It is a very small book, with 84 pages(excluding the Appendix etc) of content.

It talks about finding the passion inside us – and takes us through some steps to identify our passion. It helps us to examine whether the chosen IT is really our passion or just a short term interest.

What I like about the book
Goes to the point directly – no added fluff.
Good Writing – catchy structure of the content.
Use of Inspiring Quotes.

From the very beginning(Introduction) itself Scott starts to say what he actually want to say with this book.

This book will surly help you find your passion(if you have it), and it guides you what to do and what not to, to achieve your IT.

I couldn’t come up with a single chapter and say it as my favorite – in fact every chapter is packed with some good stuffs to learn.

I highly recommend this book to everyone. It costs $14.99(amazon) and is a best investment to a great source of information.

One of the quotes I read in the book:
“Death isn’t the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live.” – Norman Cousins.

My testimonial:

“I am Having IT, and I am Doing IT. Now you have IT and Do IT.”

“There’s no point in Getting Things Done or aspiring to a 4-Hour Workweek until you discover your IT! You need to know what drives you, compels you, fills you with passion. Holy IT! is a must read for anyone struggling to figure out their passion in life!”
– Andy Beal, co-author of Radically Transparent.

Twitter Mobile Web Adds Reply, Retweet, Favorite..

Twitter Mobile Web was friendly only for status update. There was no reply button, no retweet button and no favorite button.

It was kind of frustrating to remember the Twitter ID of the person, and then type it in the update box(without spelling mistakes!) and send the reply.

Recently Twitter has added bunch of new features to it, to make it more useful. Now I don’t use any Apps, I just use the simple mobile web interface.

Some of the things added to Twitter Mobile Web are – reply, retweet, favorite, turn off the images, Popular topics, popular topics of today week etc, real time search capabilities, hhmm, but the copy rights has not yet been updated, its still showing © 2009. If you find some thing more, please share it with us in the comment section.

Missing..
Yes, I still miss the display of updates in AJAX style(That we can see on Standard Twitter Web). We need to refresh each time to see the new updates. And there is a big Refresh button provided at the top for this purpose.

Here are some of the screen shots from my Nokia 6630.

Problem!
Although there was one issue(at the time of writing this post). Once you goto twitter mobile web and input your user id and password and hit signin, it just refuses to signin and stays on the same page. There is a big Refresh button at the top of the page, which is of no use!

To get into Twitter, all you need is, to switch to Standard Twitter Webpage – signin and then switch back to Twitter Mobile Web, and it works!

7 Ways To Get Traffic – Before You Need It!

One common question we all hear, and at some point of time have asked – How to get traffic to our new blog?

Here are some examples of how I got my first 500 – 800 visits per day in my initial days of blogging:

I started it before I actually needed it:

1. Commenting on other blogs: I had spent some time in selecting a domain name(even though I din’t have much knowledge about selecting a good domain name at that time). And started participating in comment section of various blogs – niche which I was interested in. And included the URL of my blog in all the comments(not within the comment section).
Tips: Do not leave your new website blank. Atleast have a single introduction page, or better if you can have atleast 10 good articles published.

2. SEO benefits: As I already had the blog up, most search engines had already crawled my blog and was visible in results page for some keywords.
Tips: If you know your niche, then have atleast 10 good articles published – which are fully concentrated on your niche. Include keywords related to your niche and take time to carefully optimize those 10 articles, so that you rank high for some keywords.

3. Put up the email/rss subscription options on your blog: Even though I had a single page on my blog – where I wrote about myself(profile kind of), many people subscribed to it! I had 30 – 40 subscribers when I started blogging – when my first real article was live.
Tips: Put a big and highly visible(yet not annoying) subscription link on your blog. I guess people who signup for your blog updates in the initial stage are email subscribers, so make sure you put email subscription option and highlight that its a free service.

4. Include your blog link in any social networking site you use.
Tips: Have conversation with like minded people, who are interested in the niche your blog falls in. This strategy would help in more conversion rate, and you will enjoy the social networking as you communicate with like minded people.

5. Participate in forums: Forums are good place to meet like minded people and to share your knowledge and to gain knowledge from other participants. Use your blog link in the signature area of the forum and in your forum profile.
Tips: Do not try to promote your blog in any ways. Because you don’t have an active blog yet and that may act against you. So be genuine in helping as many people as you can. This increases your credibility and builds a community around you before you actually need it.

6. Write Testimonials: As you probably read some books, attended some course, used some online services before you started your blog. Send your testimonial to those people, if you really like them and recommend them to other people. Again be genuine and don’t do it just to get a link back.
Tips: See previous testimonials. If the owner of the product is linking to the person who gave the testimonial, then you can expect a link back, if he thinks your testimonial helps his business.
Take time and form a very good, real testimonial. Do not make it over hyped inorder to get through.

7. Public Speaking & Presentation: If you get a public speaking opportunity and/or you have to give a public presentation for a social cause, then at the end its not a bad idea to show your blog Name and URL along with your Name and designation or whatever. This will give people a way to follow up with you, in case some one is very much impressed with your presentation and want to get more from you.

Caution
At this stage do not try to promote your blog in any ways, because it may have an adverse effect. Just enjoy the benefit of having a blog before its actually fully active.

Do not keep postponing the date to start blogging actively. no time is perfect time.
Imagine, if you are planning to have a blog and never actually taking your first step to find a good name, register it and write atleast 10 good articles – you would miss a lot of opportunity. You will have to leave comments on other websites/blogs as an anonymous guy, you will loose the SEO benefit etc to name some.

Do not plaster your blog with ads when you’re not yet blogging consistently, because this may give people a wrong impression.

I am not saying that – If you don’t start your blog/business now, you will loose money. But you will surly loose some benefits of starting it early enough. You will loose all the extra benefits I have talked above.

Finally
Its a good idea to take some time out of your busy life and find a good domain name(which is the only thing probably which will take some time), register it, and try to write atleast 10 quality articles concentrating on your niche.

Often times we get a brilliant idea for a blog post, but only to know that – “It would have been great, if I had started a blog”. Let that not happen to you, start a blog early and learn along the way.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race. Stop thinking about all the details, just start a blog/business. You are bound to stumble along the way, but you will figure things out as you move along.

It would be better to make a mistake while blogging than to never start the blog. Learning never ends and if you are thinking of starting a blog or a business after learning everything, then take it from me – You are not going to start your blog or business. Because learning is a never ending process.

10 Ways To Make Your Blog Load Faster and Save Bandwidth

This post is part of Saturday, Sunday Series for Newbie Bloggers. You can contact me, if you have any questions.

Sridhar

Q. I have been tweaking my blog to make it load faster, but nothing seems to be helping. And eventhough I don’t have heavy traffic to my blog, often times it goes down 🙁 Can you please suggest me something to over come my problem? Am I missing something or is it normal with all blogs. And I am hosting my blog with basic hosting package, so is that the problem?

To make blog load faster
1. Remove any extra widgets you are using on your blog.- Twitter updates, Facebook fan widget etc
2. If you are running banner ads, make sure you host all the images on your domain.
3. Make less http requests from any webpage.
Ex: Instead of using “http://yourdomainname.com/images/123.jpg” you can use “/images/123.jpg” in the img tag.
4. Use less images. Having one or two images for a article helps, anything more will really slow down the site. Use multiple images only if highly necessary.
5. Move all the CSS and JavaScript codes to an external file. And make sure to optimize them – remove extra spaces, delete the useless codes and make the scripts small and smart(good coding).
6. If you have any badges and banners which does not provide any value to your visitors, then remove it mercilessly.
7. Optimize the images that you are using on your blog.
8. Use Gzip compression. Add the following code to your .htaccess file if your web host have content compression (gzip compression) turned off. You can test it using http compression tool.


# Turn GZip compression on (as per http://tr.im/fnn6)
<Location />
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
# the above regex won't work. You can use the following
# workaround to get the desired effect:
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>

9. Do not make use of lot of javascript codes to track your visitors. Try to stick only to the necessary things. And do not forget to test your sites performance using Webmasters tool.
Goto Webmasters Tool -> Labs -> Site performance.

Here you can see the performance over view graph and lot more information like: Load time of certain pages from your blog, You can install a 1.5MB add-on to evaluate the performance of your pages and get suggestions on how to improve them, it also reports – what is consuming more time to load and what you can do to improve the performance etc.
10. Above all the speed of the servers where you are hosting your blog is very important – without which any tweaking will go in vain.

Bonus tips:
1. Use only the necessory plugins and remove the rest.
2. Do not use Widgets. Use handcoding and put the things into the WordPress theme directly – reducing the number of calls.

Have a backup of your blog, and if you are comfortable: Use DataBase cleanup plugin, Database optimizer plugin, delete the extra post revisions, use static links – this helps very little, if you already have Gzip compression enabled or Super cache plugin enabled.

Final Thoughts from Matt Cutts:

Hosting
Invest in a good hosting company. See to that you are paying atleast 5 to 6 $ per month for your basic hosting package. If you go far a cheaper web hosting, then the problems are mostly obvious. I suggest going with Doreo host, Blue host, Host Gator, MediaTemple etc. And a basic package is all needed in the initial days.

If you are hosting at a decent hosting company, and still facing this problem, then you must consider evaluating your blogs log files. It contains information about what is consuming the bandwidth. You can mail your hosting company support team and can ask them to check it for you and to report the possible problem. In most cases it would be a plugin problem or a faulty code introduced into the CMS. Or sometimes if you are using some automated scripts to handle some tasks, all these could create some problem, if there are some bugs.

A good hosting company should be able to help you with this – if not, you know, its time to move on. And there are plenty of good web hosts to opt.

Happy Blogging!

Phone Recycling – a Smart Idea, for a Good Cause

If you are living in India you might have come across an ad featuring Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan, where he endorse Nokia and its phone recycling work.

Message from the ad: “For every recycled phone, Nokia will plant a try.”

I was curious to know, whether there are any other companies out there doing this work already. Just Google and found a website SellMyMobile.

The difference is, Nokia will probably scrap the phone and make new phones using the recycled materials from your old phone.

Sell My Mobile is a mobile phone recycling comparison service that allows users to get the best prices possible when they come to sell their mobile phones. The site lists the most valuable phones and the most popular phones to be sold.

The process of selling your old mobile phone seems to be easy and takes just few minutes. All you need to do is type in your mobile phone’s model number into the search box and pick the best price that is returned to you. You will then receive a freepost address to send your phone away and a cheque will drop through your letter box within a few days. It really is that easy to sell mobile phone handsets with Sell My Mobile.

I also saw ebay and other places, but the price for the old phone was low and the third party website doesn’t seem to take care of the transaction – except taking their piece of price(service charge).