If you are using WordPress, then you will be knowing the trouble of searching for video tutorials and the WordCamp videos all around the internet.
But WordPress has come to our rescue again! It has launched a new site called WordPress.Tv, which is a library of all the Useful WordPress tutorials[for both WordPress self-installs and WordPress.com], How-To’s, slideshows of presentations made by Automattic employees and other WordPress gurus, plus interviews done with the media and fellow bloggers. And there is a special section called “WordCampTv“, where you can get all the WordCamp videos.
https://videopress.com/v/DEesBAlR
All the videos are of high quality and for lower bandwidth or slower internet connection, you can always switch HD(High Definition) OFF.
If you want to learn anything about WordPress then, here is a great resource along with codex.
And do not forget to subscribe to WordPress.TV Blog, for latest updates.
Have you ever found the email subscription form and the search form boxes confusing?
I have seen many people keying in some keywords(query) and hit the subscribe button bymistake and they will be taken to the popup subscription form and they will close it. And sometimes people put there email ID in the search form and press search button, expecting the subscription form to come!
This happens because the search form and the feedburner email subscription form somewhat look alike.
To avoid confusion it is recommended to show some message inside the box, like Subscribe now, Google Custome Search Engine etc. Take a look at the below image:
Along with these changes[adding custom message], changing its look is better, to avoid any sort of confusion.
So inorder to avoid confusion among your readers, just make them look different.
Do not make any changes(manually in the coding) to your Adsense Search Form, as it may be against Adsense TOS.
So the leftout option is email Subscription form. Make it look different. Add colored borders, make it thick, change the length of the email form, etc. Here is some code to help you change the look of your subscription form:
Put these codes into your style.css (StyleSheet)
Look at the below codes[marked area] and change your codes accordingly:-
And before feeling happy about the changed subscription form, just check it once, whether it is working properly or not. Some times it gives the error message like, you have not enabled the email subscription option in your account or something like that.
If this is the case with you, just check the coding once again and it should work(if done correctly), if you have not disabled the email subscription option in your feedburner account!
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.
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.
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 🙂
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:
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 🙂
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.
Sadly WordPress 2.7 will not be released on Nov 10th, as per the schedule. But the first public beta of WordPress 2.7 is already ready for downloading and testing. Join the thousands of people already testing 2.7 by downloading 2.7 Beta 1. As previously mentioned on this blog, wp-2.7 is bringing a new visual design. This design is almost completely implemented, but there are still a few areas that aren’t quite finished in Beta 1.
If you are using the wp-2.7 Beta 1 you can enable the keyboard short cuts( and the same procedure apply for the final release software ) by visiting the Profile panel in Administration > Users > Your Profile. Check the Keyboard Shortcuts checkbox to enable keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation.
letter j key, or letter k key, to start navigating.
After that,
Pressing j moves the current selection (light-blue background) down.
Pressing k moves the current selection (light-blue background) up.
Pressing a approves the currently selected comment.
Pressing s marks the current comment as spam.
Pressing d deletes the current comment.
Pressing u unapproves the currently selected comment, placing it back into moderation.
Pressing r initiates an inline reply to the current comment (you can press Esc to cancel the reply).
Pressing q activates “Quick Edit” which allows for rapid inline editing of the current comment.
We have been using Related Entries plugin from the day we started blogging. And we had observed that many people use to click on the related entries articles more, as they were interested in reading more of the stuffs that they were previously interested in(obviously, right?).
We had seen many bloggers using and recommending this plugin(If you are not using any Related Entries plugin, then we highly recommend it). But to our disappointment some irrelevant articles from our blog started to appear on the Related article section. And when we use to see the preview of our article in wordpress, we could see no related articles.
But from the day we had 85+ articles on our blog, this plugin started working like a charm. Now the related articles are matching more accurately and related articles are shown even when we see the preview of our article.
Related Entries(or any such plugins) plugin should get more articles to match, so that it can match more accurate articles and present it. We know that, this is a common sense, but still we see many people talking about the efficiency of such(related entry) plugin’s without having atleast 20 articles on their blog. So we just thought that, this article would be a good thing to flush the commonsense and to re-direct the beginner bloggers to concentrate more on the content development.
There are someplugins which are more advanced and has more things(related to article match) under our control. But these plugin’s are little bit difficult to configure. For people who want simple and yet powerful plugin, use Related Entries plugin.
Sadly WordPress 2.7 will not be released on Nov 10th, as per the schedule. But the first public beta of WordPress 2.7 is already ready for downloading and testing. Join the thousands of people already testing 2.7 by 