10 Tips for Writing a List Style Post

This is a guest post by James Adams. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

The list post is a tried and true way to get your reader’s attention as well as generate new readership and authority for your blog. With your headline, you are giving your readers specific expectations on the contents of your post. Attract your readers through the headline, then provide solid content to back up the points promised within your headline. Here are ten tips to nail those list posts.

1. It’s all in the headline: The headline is the one part of your article that a visitor is most likely to read. Put all of your attention on the headline and think about the most exciting ways to convey your information. Make your headline something of a curiosity, something that dares your readers to take a look at what you have to say. Five ways to legally swindle the government. 15 under $5 DIY projects. Follow your great headline up with some astounding content, and your readers will be clamoring for more.

2. Short sentences: Keep the sentences within your list post short. Do not attempt to overwhelm your readers with the breadth of your information. You will have ample opportunity to elaborate on your points. After all, the single list post might lead to more list posts. When you are editing, see which sentences can be split into multiple sentences. If you must use commas, use only one comma per sentence.

3. Short paragraphs: Along the same lines as #2, shorten the paragraphs within your lists. Your readers do not want to embark on a dissertation about your subject, they want to know the fifteen reasons that you like ham. The shorter the paragraphs, the more likely they are to be read. Many of your readers are skimming the headlines rather than delving into the thorough nature of your post.

4. Use action words: Eliminate the passive voice. Remove words which are wishy washy from your lists. ‘Apparently’ or ‘it seems that’ and other statements reduce the confidence that the reader has within you. Take every opportunity to ‘trade up’ your words to focused action words. Remove the qualifiers.

5. Be honest: Honesty is always the best policy. While you are removing the qualifiers within your list, make sure that you are not removing the truth from your statements. Each one of your points needs to be absolutely true and verifiable. If there are grey areas, revise or remove the point from the list.

6. Spellcheck and grammar: Spelling and grammar are important. Take the time to read over your post before you distribute it to the world. Make sure that there is nothing awkward about your sentence structure. Examine your word usage. Search for words that are spelled correctly yet used improperly. You do not want to remove your garnered authority with tiny mistakes.

7. Be passionate: Your passion fuels better blog posts and list posts. If you are writing about a subject which inherently bores you, save that one for the time when you have absolutely nothing to say. Your passion should shine through on your lists, starting with the headline, traveling through the copy and ending with that final punctuation mark.

8. Editing is important: Self editing is essential to writing a great list post. Your writing needs to be focused and simple, especially when writing in the short bulleted format. Examine your work for words and phrases that you use all too often. Look for useless adverbs and flat writing.

9. Make it interesting and relevant: You may know the seven ways to make the perfect sandwich, but that might not be appropriate content for your blog about dog training. You want the topic to be wide enough so that others will read but narrow enough so it is relevant to the topic of your blog.

10. Be controversial: Create a list post about something which can engender debate. Don’t be controversial for the sake of the controversy, but take one side of an argument which will spur your readers to respond. Six reasons why X public figure is wrong makes a great topic of debate and can draw attention from all around the blogsphere. When you are controversial about a passion, you create great link bait.

The best list posts are concise and simple. They have been well thought and offer the slightest bit of controversy. By using action words and editing properly, your list posts will get attention.

This post was written by James Adams, a writer who spends his time covering new technology developments and reviewing hardware such as the HP Q6000A at a leading supplier of toner cartridges based in the UK.

Save Self Hosted Email Accounts from the Spam Monster

This is a guest post by Selena Narayanasamy. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

At the bane of any business’ existence is the dreadful spam email that crowds its inbox and seems to multiply exponentially, even after it’s deleted. The annoyance of receiving unwanted emails and their accompanying links makes any business owner (or even someone who is using hosted email for personal use) almost desperate to find software mechanisms to help avoid dealing with this time-consuming task. Of course, there’s the problem of real mail getting lost in spam too… but that’s a story for another day.

Avoiding Spam Mail
Self-hosted email accounts are especially vulnerable to viruses and attacks, because they often lack the applications and software that larger companies use for security purposes. Whether that’s due to budgeting or personal preferences, self-hosted accounts should take the same precautions to guard against spam as any other.

One of the first things a business should do at its setup is to install anti-spam software on all its systems. Anti-spam software acts proactively by preventing unwanted spam mail and junk email from getting to the email inbox. Most software includes preset filters for tracking and deleting spam, and they also send reports to the sender’s Internet provider. This action should discourage those annoying emails at best while filtering through what is and what isn’t relevant to the business.

Customizing Spam Software
Self-hosted email accounts can also easily customize anti-spam software to filter information based on the email subject, words, or even domain name. This should make it easier for a company to receive the emails it needs and delete those that it doesn’t. This is important to ensure the system doesn’t delete emails that come from clients or prospects. You’ll have some pretty irate clients on the other end, and you may lose out on some good business as well. A business can program the software to initiate at the computer’s startup, which will essentially prepare your email communications on a daily basis using a clean slate.

Email filtering software works in the same way as anti-spam software by organizing its features according to a pre-set list of criteria. When an email arrives, the software will categorize it and send it to the proper folder, eliminating the need to have to go through each piece of mail and manually file it. Depending on the sophistication of the software, the program used can perform certain functions to ease the transition of dealing with particular emails. Some programs will do the following things:

1. Automatically delete the email or file it according to certain keywords or domain names.
2. Instantly reject any emails that originate from a particular sender.
3. Redirect, filter, or edit the message during processing, eliminating the need for it to ever arrive in the recipient’s inbox.

When setting up the account filters, check that there is not too much protection installed. While spam protection is very important in a business’ setup, too much email filtering can cause a business to miss important emails. A company should ensure the software is as generic as possible in filtering keywords so the system will not eliminate important information.

Usually, the email hosting company a business uses will offer anti-spam features to attract customers. When a business installs anti-spam systems and software alerts, it should have an efficient way to eliminate and avoid spam emails while allowing important information through. Make sure you do your research and find out exactly what self-hosted email accounts offer you. It will save you time and keep you from banging your head against the wall when you have piles of spam to sort through.

Selena Narayanasamy loves everything technology, productivity, blogging, social media, caffeine and being sarcastic. You can find her blogging on her social/tech site, Esvienne, or listen to her musings on Twitter- @SelenaVidya

Top 7 Technical Mistakes Bloggers Make

This is a guest post by Ishan Sharma. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

It’s easy to get lost when you are new. After all, there’s too much to manage! You have design, content and what not. In all this mess, it is easy to make small mistakes.

Recently, I had a very bad experience when a friend’s blog got messed up because of some configuration problems and we had to setup WP and design from scratch! So I thought about writing a post that would save bloggers from making common mistakes and here they are:

Using A Free Service
Using a free host like Blogspot and WordPress.com seems good from far. But there’s a big problem with this option! You don’t own your content, the host does! Recently, blogger blocked and even deleted a lot of blogs. Among the victims was a customer who had 60,000 subscribers! Now, blogspot team is either nuts or using bots(which is likely high, considering it’s a property of big G) for blocking blogs.
In any case, the point is that you can loose a lot if you use a free platform. Consider getting a self hosted WordPress blog and while doing that, avoid the following mistakes:

Using “Cheap” Hosting
Many bloggers would move to a hosting company but would look for cheapest or worst – a free host. And the features they get are:

Regular outages.
Awful support.
Slow loading times.

Remember, you get what you pay for. Do not fall for the “unlimited bandwidth” and other tall claims! Before buying hosting, research well and shortlist 2-3 hosting companies and then compare them. It is also advisable to contact friends using different hosting companies.

Using Your Host As Domain Registrar And Vice Versa
Keeping both hosting and domain with same company is a really bad idea. Yes, there may be some discounts involved but it’s a bit dangerous.
Imagine something bad happens with your hosting company and there servers crash! Now, if you have both domain and hosting with them, your site will be completely down.

If you have domain with a different registrar, you can at least redirect it to a new page explaining something bad has happened. It won’t retain all the visitors but hey, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush!

Wrong Permalink Structure
No explanations for this one, just a quick question: Which one is better and easy to remember out of the next two URLs?

http://myblog.com/?p=123
http: //myblog.com/my-post

Of course it is the second one unless you have got a super photographic memory! Not to mention that it is also better for search engine bots(and they don’t have photographic memory even if you have! 😉 ).

You should always use a informative permalink structure for post. In WordPress, this can be easily changed by going to Settings → Permalinks. Set the structure to custom and in the text box, enter /%post-name%/ for structure like the second example. For more permalink structures, see WordPress Codex.

Using Too Many Plugins
Plugins add lot of functionality to WordPress. But the main problem with them is that it is easy to get carried away with them.
This was a mistake I made when I was new to WordPress. I fell in love with lot plugins and in first month, I had some 60 plugins active at one time. Now, you can imagine how slow the blog would have been. Thankfully, I realized it soon and uninstalled several useless ones. Now, I have around 30 plugins and performance is better.
As a rule of thumb, you should not install more than 25 plugins unless absolutely necessary and delete the inactive ones.

Not Tracking Stats
If you don’t know your stats, you are missing a lot. Using stats you can know where your visitors are spending more time on your blog, from which page they are leaving the blog, bounce rate etc. With all these data in hand, you can tweak the blog and significantly improve your blog and your readers experience.
And another thing is tracking feed subscribers. For this, you can use FeedBurner. You can use your platform’s default feed without any problems but FeedBurner has lots of advantages. First of all, you can track number of readers(although inconsistently). You can offer free e-mail subscriptions and also add AdSense to monetize your feeds.

Not Taking Backups
Taking backup is something you should start doing today.
Anything can go wrong at anytime and having a backup locally(i.e. on your hard disk) may be the only security measure. You should setup a automatic backup for your blog using a plugin like WP DBManager. For detailed tutorial, take a look at this tutorial: How To Backup A WordPress Blog.

These were top 7 mistakes that new bloggers tend to make. Do you have any tips for new bloggers? Do share with us in comments.

About Author: Hi, My name is Ishan Sharma. I am a teen entrepreneur and I love blogging and WordPress. I blog at Blogging
With Success about Blogging Tips and WordPress. If you need any type of help with your WordPress blog/website, I can be found at WordPress Blog Experts.

Target Advertising – What We Can Learn?

Target advertising has become a major success in web advertising industry. We see this in action every day on most of the websites.
Google has implemented this into their adwords system so the ads may seem more and more relevant and according to the user interest.

Example Ad:
Orkut has a lot of users from India and it collects various user data like internet speed, demographics etc — get a clue from their advertise page This is used effectively for advertising.

Video: Airtel Broadband ad on Orkut — Target Advertising

Airtel broadband ads are more targeted to low bandwidth users and these ads show the ease of uploading photos to Orkut using their high speed internet connection.

Take away message:
1. We can learn how to advertise our content, product, service effectively.
2. We should sell at a place where we have our potential customers.
3. The ad copy must convey the message properly.
4. Showing the result in action.
Ex: Showing how your product has helped someone reach their goal or improve their business or life.

WordPress 3.0 is Out – Do Not Expect WordPress 3.1 Shortly!

WordPress 3.0 has been released and you can find it in your dashboard.

Some of the interesting new things in WordPress 3.0:

1. The most interesting thing for theme developers is, it has a new default theme called Twenty Ten.

2. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing).

3. Facility to merge MU and WordPress.

And some other bug fixes.

Watch this video:

https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.21

Want to wait till WordPress 3.1 is released? Think again or read below:
This time WordPress team will be concentrating on things around WordPress.org, like showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org etc. So WordPress 3.1 may not be coming any time soon.

We have upgraded to WordPress 3.0 and I already love the lighter interface.

Update:
There is a Maintenance mode, which gets activated while you are doing any upgrades. See screenshot below.
wordpress3-maintence-mode

And if the automatic update fails, it shows a message at the top of your dashboard..
autoupdate-fail-wordpress3

HostGator New Discount Coupon: Valid For Any Hosting Plan

As always we try to bring discount coupons / offers / coupon code / promo code for valuable products and services.

Use “TECHNOTIP01” (without quotes) to get $9.94 off of any hosting package that you purchase from HostGator. And use “TECHNOTIP25” coupon to get 25% off on any package.

What I like the most about HostGator?

24×7 Live Chat with support team/Billing department.

Quick response to support tickets.

Their “Hatchling Plan” costs $4.95 per month.

And with “baby plan” which costs $7.95(if purchased for 3 years) you can host UNLIMITED Domains and have UNLIMITED databases– This is the number one reason for me to prefer HostGator.

Update: You will also get $100 Free Google Advertising Coupon / Adwords /Google Search Marketing Coupon code along with the hosting. After signing up for the hosting, visit your cpanel and claim your $100 Adwords coupon(There is a link at the top left sidebar to claim your coupon).

If you have hosting needs, then its a good idea to give HostGator a try. You have nothing to lose, after-all your first month bill can be exempted by using the coupon code “TECHNOTIP01” and “TECHNOTIP25” (without quotes), if you like it – you can continue or else there are many other hosting companies.

HostGator

1. Get 25% Off All New Hosting Packages With HostGator! – 25% discount on New Hosting Plans; Promo code: 25MODEL

2. Only One Penny For Your First Month Of Hosting With HostGator! – $9.94 discount on One Month Hatchling Plan; Promo code: ONECENT

3. Up to 60% off + $4.99 on select domains at HostGator.com! – 60% discount on any store item; Promo code: SPRING2017

10 Tips for Finding the WordPress Theme That’s Right For You

This is a guest post by James Adams. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Everybody knows that WordPress is extremely versatile. There are themes available for nearly every mood or whim and new ones are being added every day. When you’re ready to start blogging for yourself, how do you find a theme that will suit your needs? Here are some tips and questions to help you find the right WordPress theme for you.

1. Be aware of your purpose – To choose the best theme for your blog, you need to know what you are going to be using it for. Are you wanting to monetize it? Do you want to throw pay per click out the window and just write for fun?

2. Take a look at others, part 1 – Find the blogs that appeal to you and write the themes down. This first sweep looks specifically at form, rather than function. Write down the five styles that most appeal to you, then go to the next step.

3. Take a look at others, part 2 – There are two parts to any blog: form and function. Search around a little more to see if there are blogs that have the functionality that you want. Will the theme support the widgets that you want? Does it have the coding that you love already in place? Write down around five styles.

4. Do you need to learn a programming language? – Some WordPress styles are more technically intensive than others. Do you have the expertise to install the widgets, or would you prefer a ‘drag and drop’ sort of approach? Are you willing to learn new techniques? This is an important factor when selecting a WordPress theme.

5. Do you need to pay for it? – You might have found the theme of your dreams, but does it cost money? If you are plotting out a straight blog, do you need to have a custom theme available? Themes come in a variety of price ranges and you must be prepared to pay if you like one of the premium set ups.

6. Can you grow with your theme? – Are you satisfied with the WordPress theme enough that you’re itching to put all of your material into it? Can you grow with this theme? More importantly, are you willing to put a whole lot of work into the theme that you’ve chosen? If not, you may wish to choose something else.

7. Is there after sales support? – Does the company supplying the theme offer support in case something goes wrong? If they don’t, are you willing to search hither and yon for someone who can answer your questions? Adequate technical support is essential.

8. Does it upgrade regularly? – Are you going to be left in the dust at each new WordPress upgrade? Can your theme grow with you, or are you going to be left behind? Learn about this before you commit to the theme, because it will save some issues later on.

9. Read some reviews – Once you have answered your questions in terms of the theme that you wish to use, investigate to see if there are any reviews posted. If you can’t find any reviews, ask the people that have your potential theme on their site and see how they feel about it.

10. Give it a test run – All the preparation in the world is not a replacement for giving your theme a shot and seeing how it works. Kick the tires, put some comments in, play with the widgets. If you have to pay for your theme, see if the company will let you have a free trial.

Nothing can beat good content, but a great WordPress theme will make it easier on your readers and potentially attract new ones. It’s like finding the right partner, you’ll know it when you’ve found the right WordPress theme.
Image Source: flickr

This is a guest article from James Adams at Cartridge Save where he reviews merchandise like HP 350 ink to help customers make a more informed buying decision.

OnlineProfits.com – is now FREE to Join. Yes Free!

So isn’t it a good deal? You get a good quality hosting account and excellent free training program. OnlineProfits.com is by far the most complete Internet Marketing and Online Business training program on the web. So do not miss this opportunity.

Yes, you read it right. Daniel Scocco run OnlinePofits.com is now a Free training program.

So what’s the catch?
There is just one requirement: people will need to signup for a hosting account with one of their partners in order to get free membership. The partner hosting companies are Hostgator and Hostnine and the hosting costs $8 Per Month. You are supposed to keep the hosting account active for atleast 3 months inorder to get lifetime access to the membership program.
daniel-onlineprofits

Also there is one more exciting change: Now there is a “Live Case Study” area, where you’ll be able to watch Daniel build a profitable website from scratch. This way you can learn and implement the strategies that Daniel implements to his websites.

What about old members who paid for the course?
Old members will keep their account for lifetime and they will be benefited as there will be more lessons, audio, videos added soon.

Mark On Your Calendar:
OnlineProfits.com will open its door on June 8th. And I am sure, you don’t want to miss it this time!

Now you can go and grab:
1. News Letter.
2. Free Report.
3. And read an excellent article – “How To Make Money Fast On The Internet: 4 Methods That Really Work!” (Go read this excellent article, you will surly love it – and probably make some money after reading it.)