Technotip.org - Part 30

Are You Puzzling Your Visitors/Readers? Check List

It was completely different, if you were already a big brand or a celebrity. People will be mentally connected to you and will bare the inconvenience and do the things which you want them to do! But if you are like most of us, then you will have to think from users perspective.

This is exactly what comes to my mind when I visit a website/blog which is filled with many “call to action!” – Are You Trying To Puzzle ?

For example, there are many News websites and entertainment websites which are so confusing that, we bloggers can observe them and take advantage of it, by not doing such things on our blog.

Some of the puzzling things
1. Display half a page or so – ads!, and some dozens of sponsored links above the fold.
Displaying a lot of coupon codes/discount coupons of various products(which may be invalid), to gain search engine visitors to those keywords.

what-to-do

2. Some 15 to 20 social media widgets – for you, to inform your friends, family and their dog about the website.
And some more widgets to join their fan clubs – 1 fan club is a good idea. 2 is ok. Anything above 3 or 4 is a bad idea.

3. Some flash ads and animated .gif banners.

4. Few pop ups and pop under and not to forget text link ads(like kontera – which you may see on our blog too! , Infolinks etc).

5. And its quite common that, they will be having many CPM ads on their site, and so they need us to refresh the pages and visit various pages on their site – and its easy, break the single article into two(or even more) and link to it at the bottom of the first article, and link back to the 1st page from the 2nd page, so on.

6. Having a pop up, asking you to signup for a news letter – and the popup having no exit option!

7. Some audio/video(some time, sponsored audio/video), auto-playing! and the visitor searching all the open tabs for the possible culprit(to shut-it-down).

8. One or the other contest going on, and you participating in it with half a mind, because the prize is so valuable but you haven’t seen them announcing a winner. When announced, there will be no clue about the winners existence.

9. And a funny thing – I saw a Twitter widget integrated on one of the famous entertainment site, which shows the recent tweets of some one at their office. I thought, they want to give some real time entertainment news to their visitors. But when I observed it closely, all the previous tweets from almost months were tweeted by some bot(automatic tweets!), and most tweets were out of topic. Ex:- I increased my Twitter followers by using this service, check them out. bla bla bla.

10. And what else or what not ? ha…they also have some syndicated contents!

Innocent mistake:
Even though they have all these puzzling things around, not all News/Entertainment sites are useless. There are sites, which have good quality content. But the thing is, they forget their main product. The basic element that they wanted to sell you. That is their content or any of their own product, say a DVD or CD or their magazine.

But when the ad revenue or the other benefits get bigger then their main product they may get distracted and may start puzzling their readers with more of what makes them profitable, for the time being.

Smart Planning and Execution:
I have seen some people not displaying any ads or banners on their site for many years, and finally they release their own product – they take time to bring up a exclusive, quality product, while building a group of target audience. Once the product is launched, some people will surly talk about it on their websites, forums etc.
Similarly when a already messy site adds one more mess to its sidebar, who cares about it? And so the site owner will continue with the puzzling act of make money, instead of concentrating on their product.

Are You A Big Brand or a Celebrity?
It was completely different, if you were already a big brand or a celebrity. People will be mentally connected to you and will bare the inconvenience and do the things which you want them to do! But if you are like most of us, then you will have to think from users perspective.

But then, Some Facts..
Also know the fact that, many of these news/entertainment sites have got premium publisher accounts. That means they earn a major share in the total earnings they generate, unlike the usual 50 – 50 or 30 – 50 or 60 – 50 ratios. Some ad networks even pay 80% to their premium publishers. Because if they can retain some key players, they are sure to retain their loyal followers too. But such sites will have multiple posters and many many many posts in their archive.
Blogs with single author or 2 or 3 authors will have a hard time building such a site. Instead, you can concentrate on building a community around the blog, who can stick around longer. So, you may have to stop puzzling your readers and build the community, authority, trust around your blog/brand.

The final take from this post is:
1. If you have any widgets/banner on your sidebar, then take some time now itself and remove them.
2. I believe, you have some call to action to your visitors. Like news letter signup, buy this button for your product etc. Focus on the main thing(s), rather than wanting your visitors to do all the things which you expect them to do.
3. Avoid forcing your visitors to take certain actions. Let them choose what they want to do and what they don’t.
4. Teach your visitors whats on your blog. Ex:- Twitter had a video explaining what Twitter is all about. Similarly, some people write and educate their readers about things like – What is RSS. What are the bubble links that they are seeing when they hover over certain words – intext ads etc.
5. Label the things properly: Label the things like, subscription form, Search form, News letter form, recent links, popular links, Sponsored link, advertisements etc.
6. choose a good niche and try to be on topic as far as possible. Think, what if your favorite politics blog suddenly started writing only about entertainment and traveling!
7. Let the design of your blog be simple and well structured. And load before your visitor forgets, what he was looking for!
8. Do some testing and know which widgets your visitors use frequently to share the content on your blog. Retain such things and remove the rest.
9.
10.

You may earn a dollar more today by puzzling/confusing/misleading your visitor, but remember, with that intention, you might have already missed a big opportunity. Better late then not, you can take action now and never miss an opportunity in the future.

What do you think of sites which try to puzzle visitors/readers. I have left point, 9, 10 empty. Would love to know your experience, in the comment section.

Guide To Make Money Via Twitter: We Hate Spam Too!

First of all, let me make it clear – I am not here to suggest you or convince you to start using your Twitter account to scatter some sponsored ads and make loads of money from it.
A single rule of thumb be – “Provide Value to Your Followers.”

First of all, let me make it clear – I am not here to suggest you or convince you to start using your Twitter account to scatter some sponsored ads and make loads of money from it.

I am here to suggest some of the ways you can make money without annoying/hurting your followers.

My simple excuse for trying this service!
If you have used a product/service and satisfied with it, and if you get to tweet about the same product/service, then why not?

With so much of buzz about Making Money using Twitter, many people will be eager to know whether its just a hype or something worth while.

With this in mind, I started researching and testing some of the sponsored tweet services.

My official Twitter ID is @technotip and I tested sponsored tweets with my brand new Twitter a/c @thinkwithsatish

I got 2000+ followers in matter of days using twitfever.com. This is an online tool designed by Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com.
I suggest you to visit the website(even if you don’t want), and signup for the newsletter there. You will get a valuable Twitter course for Free.

Sponsored Tweet Service:
There are lot of websites which promise to make you rich, but never show up with a sponsored tweet again! I personally tested many of these websites(with my unofficial Twitter a/c @thinkwithsatish ) and here are some of the websites, from where you will get maximum value for your tweets(will add more websites to the list, after testing and retesting).

1. Adly: Calculates and shows how much you can expect to earn from 1 tweet.
2. SponsoredTweets
3. My Likes: This one is for most of us. You get a list of sponsored tweets, you can select the one you like, and tweet it or post on your blog. And you will receive money when someone clicks on those sponsored ads. Simple. The advantage is, even people will small number of followers can also participate and make money. Now the exciting thing! Payouts are fixed to as low as $2. Yes, you read it right. And the payment will be made once in a week i.e., on each Friday. You can almost get paid each week.

There are many more such services, but I suggest not to get distracted with any low paying services. Use only those services which you think will satisfy your followers and your pocket! ( I mean, provide best value to your tweets. )

All these websites have a market place where advertisers will select a particular group of twitterers to spread their message. In order to get more sponsors you need to maintain a good conversion rate stats, otherwise you will not get more sponsors. If you think of long term, then engage your followers and make sure that your tweets get some attention(in the distracting busy timeline of your followers).

And make sure to enter the interest area of the sponsored tweets(using keywords), so that only those tweet requests which you think would be a best suit for your target audience/followers will show up to you.

Caution: At times, when you start getting more sponsors, hence more money out of your Tweets, don’t be tempted to go the spammers way to make money. Stick on to your policies and make sure that you don’t annoy your followers by endorsing crap product/service.

A single rule of thumb be – “Provide Value to Your Followers.”

Disclaimer: I am not using my official Twitter a/c( @technotip ) for tweeting sponsored ads, thinking that it may disappoint my followers. As I said above, I used a brand new Twitter a/c( @thinkwithsatish ) to test all these. So using the above services is solely at your discreet.

New “labs” feature for webmasters rescue – Google Webmaster tools

Google Webmaster tools has introduced new labs feature – Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. They may change, break or disappear at any time.
With the introduction of labs in Google webmaster tools, they have brought up 2 useful things:

Google Webmaster tools has introduced new labs feature – Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. They may change, break or disappear at any time.

With the introduction of labs in Google webmaster tools, they have brought up 2 useful things:
1. Fetch as Googlebot
2. Malware details

Fetch as Googlebot:
The Fetch As Googlebot tool lets you see a page as Googlebot sees it. This is particularly interesting tool. We can analyze poor performance in search engines and we can take certain steps to improve.
The cause for the poor performance may be that, your visitors may be seeing something and Googlebot something else. If you use rich media, by using Fetch As Googlebot, you can see how Googlebot see the same page – whether they are able to crawl it or not.
While using Fetch as Googlebot, you can simply click on the Fetch button to see homepage being fetched. Or enter the URL of the article(without homepage URL). Note that, you need to enter a /(slash) at the end of URL orelse the fetching will not complete successfully[Google should think of fixing this].
After few seconds of submitting the URL, refresh the page and click on Success link, to see the fetched codes.

fetch-as-googlebot-labs

Ex: Some months back we had a problem with our blog.
i.e.,
1. Search results started showing only the Title of the blog, instead of article title/heading.
2. Pingback also started Displaying Blog Title and not Headline of Post.

We had hard time figuring out what was the cause for all the duplicate title errors in our Webmaster tools.
Finally with the help of a tool called spider-test, we rectified and fixed the problem.
You can read the full story here – Problem with Pingback and Title tag – Its Solution.

Spider test is a tool similar to Fetch as Googlebot. Spider test is a search engine indexing simulator tool which shows the source code of a page, all outbound links on the page, and common words and phrases found in the page copy.
Fetch as Googlebot is still in labs and we hope it will graduate with more power and usefulness.

Malware details:
This gives the details of the problem related to malware, which are affecting your web site. It gives the individual URLS and details such as the scripts/code that may be affecting the web site etc.
Now you know, where to look when you think that some malicious code has been injected into your website.

Use these tools and test your website, if you feel they are under performing in search engines, you may get to know what the culprit is.

You can access these tools:
1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. On the Dashboard, under Labs, click Fetch as Googlebot or Malware details.
3. In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check(with a / at the end), and click Fetch.
Malware details will be listed automatically, if found any.

Promote Your Business/Blog/Service on Orkut: FREE!

After status update, suggested friends, chat, SMS, widgets etc features, here comes one more important and most awaited feature orkut ‘promote’: a free tool to help you spread the news to all your orkut friends…and beyond!

Now marketers, bloggers can invest their time in tweaking the ad copy to impress Orkut users, to drive traffic, leads and sales.

When you first create a promotion, only your friends will be able to see it. Once they click on “promote it!”, their friends can see it.. and so on.

To see the number of clicks, views, Promotions, Trashes, goto “promote”, then click on “my promotions” tab.

Source: Orkut Blog

Ad format support:
For content creation, it supports Text, Image or YouTube Video. Text also supports the regular scrap markup, and is limited to 200 characters.
Only images that you have uploaded to Orkut and which is set to public viewing can be used. You can stop or delete a promotion that you’ve created at any time.

How to make your promotional content VIRAL ?
It is obvious that, the content that you are showcasing must be interesting. Along with that, you have to have friends who you actually know. If you just add every friend request and have no idea of who it is, then you most probably will not receive vote for your content(ad).

On the other hand, if you have 1000 active, and known friends your content will go VIRAL very soon.

1. If you are a blogger, you can find 1000 blog readers in Orkut and send them friend request.
After they have accepted the friend request, you can use your blog logo and good ad copy to promote your blog/product/service/business.
2. Publish your “Orkut Promotion ads” on your blog, so that your readers are familiar with the ad copy, and can vote for you when they see it in Orkut.
3. Remember, there are more Indian and Brazilian citizens using Orkut, so language also counts. It depends on who you are targeting and more importantly who your friends are.

orkut-promotion-my-ad

New things to be expected from Orkut:
1. Algorithm to track people who are trying to game the system.
2. Ability to create a Vanity URL for our profile.
3. Indexable by search engines(except the data which is set private)

Down side:
Also expect
1. More spammers.
2. More scammers, telling that they will make your ad to be shown to millions of Orkut users.
3. More and more people wasting their time trying to game the system.

Do not ignore the potential of promoting your business on Orkut. For more details of Orkut users, you can have a look at their advertise page.

If you are presently seeing adsense ads, then remember, Orkut Promote is used by both advertisers and orkut users. You can advertise on Orkut using AdWord also(which costs money).

Do you already have a strategy to make your content(ad) go viral on Orkut?

First Look at ProBlogger.com[munity]

Its been so long, Darren acquired ProBlogger.com and we have been expecting some thing very useful from him. Finally he has decided to start with a paid forum. I am sure, he will have plans to expand it, in the future.

Many people may think that paid forum is not the way to go, considering some other good quality forums already available for free. But Darren, is paying for the moderation and he also want to make sure that, the forum is difficult place for spammers!

If spammers want to create multiple accounts, then they obviously need to invest 1.95$ each month, per account 🙂

So far my experience is very good. People are actively, genuinely involved in conversation, and not just to get a link. I feel like visiting the forum frequently and involve in the conversation. Its already a great learning experience for me.
I have seen many high profile bloggers sharing their knowledge in the forum. Only thing is, you need to take advantage by involving in the conversation. Contribute to the community, and learn as much as possible.

In its pre-launch (the forum is not yet officially announced on ProBlogger.net, though almost everyone know about its launch already!) mode itself this forum has become so popular, I am sure still thousands of people will be joining with the official wordings from Darren Rowse on his blog.

problogger-community-forum

At the time of writing this post, the forum had:
Threads: 188, Posts: 2,063, Members: 1,248.

And not to forget, Darren is offering 50% discount on 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Work Book, for all forum members.

For more details and latest updates, visit ProBlogger.community

Update: ProBlogger.community is now officially launched.

If you are already a member, then please share your experience with us..

Interview with Chris Brogan

Chrish Brogan’s blog is ranked by Technorati as one of the top 100 blogs in the world.
Advertising Age’s Power 150 ranks him in the top 15. He has been blogging since 1998. He is also co-founder of PodCamp and part of many other online projects. He works with large and mid-sized companies to improve online business communications like marketing and PR through the use of social software, community platforms, and other emerging web and mobile technologies.

Chris is co-author of the book Trust Agents, with Julien Smith, which was recently released. If you run a company/organization, then please get a copy of this book, spend some time to read and understand it and order some more copies for your employees/members/co-workers if you think its of use for them.

Interview:

1. Do you think using your real name (or surname) in your Twitter ID (or any other profile ID) is good or using your company/brand name is good?

I believe you should use your real name. People want to connect with humans for the most part, not just brands. That is, unless your brand is widely known, and then you should manage two accounts. I think that having @coke *and* @bobjones is smart, because you can be the big brand, and/or you can be offduty.

2. With all the efforts to earn the Trust(for the sake of trust), when our blog readers/customers give bad personal comments, how does it feel about the trust that we have built?

Bad comments are golden. Value these like you value nothing else. They are moments where you must reflect on the value of what your customers have told you, and decide what you must improve, or whether it’s just someone complaining. In either case, thank them. They’ve taken the time to voice their concern.

3. Do you think having a forum helps in building the “Army”? As we can interact with the blog readers at a personal level in the forum. Do you think the time spent in the forum is well worth or is there any other more efficient methods to connect with our readers?

I think you can connect with blog readers on a blog, so I think forums are a way to “share the stage.” They’re a way for others to be able to start threads and be the host of a storyline. They don’t improve or diminish the ability to build an army, except insofar as the content they provide.

4. What components do you think makes a blog successful

Equipping your community for success makes your blog successful. Be helpful. Be consistent. Be mindful of people’s time. Give them unique ideas and your best thinking. Give away your secrets (you’ll make more). Provide them links to materials and ideas that others have done that will improve their learning. Comment frequently and reply to the people who speak with you (as often as you can).

5. Your advice for new bloggers

Write from the most unique possible perspective that you can. Writing a me-too blog is wasteful. Others have already done the work. See if you can find a unique voice and vision, and get that done. There’s so much more left to cover.

6. Your advice for students. We read in the book about how we can play the role of “Trust Agent” in a company, now would love to know, how students(who are studying in university ) can apply it.

Students can learn about trust and how to use these new tools to build relationships in ways that will improve their connectedness coming out of school. Building networks of passionate collaborators is a powerful way to apply what trust agents do, and will be beneficial to students who often need these networks for jobs and more after they’ve left school.

7. What have you learnt with the release of your co-authored book “Trust Agents”.

I learned that what people relate to the most is that we’ve written a book about common sense for the Internet age. It’s like 7 habits meets the web. I’m really passionate about the fact that common sense seems to have gone missing in business, so maybe that’s what people need right now.

8. What do you feel about Google Adsense? Do you think adsense ads make a blog look unprofessional? And what do you feel about the over all blogging for money concept.

I use Adsense for RSS with my RSS feed. I get about beer money worth of value. I think that blogs that stripe themselves with Adsense end up looking like NASCAR vehicles and not useful content. I love blogging for money, though. I think there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m certainly not part of the kumbaya crowd.

9. What do you think about Twitter(In general and for business purpose). How bloggers can use it the best.

Twitter brings me quite a lot of business. I love it.

10. What were the 3 major mistakes you did on your blog?

In the old days, I talked about me. Now I equip others. In the old days, I wrote a lot more. Now I write brief pieces. In the old days, I got really snippy. Now I try to keep it professional (though with a personality).

11. What were the 3 major mistakes you did while learning about Social Media?

None really come to mind. Not that I’m perfect, but nothing major.

12. Do you think that a hard cover book is worth more than a ebook?

No. I think a useful book is worth more than fluff.

13. How many hours do you dedicate to blogging? How did you manage time for writing the book? Please share about the records made by your book at some of the places, like Wall Street Journal, New York Times etc. And please share about, monetizing the blog with your own product rather than 3rd party advertising. How do you manage sponsors on your blog. How has this book added to it etc.

I write about two hours a day, though not all of it is for blogging. I wrote 1000-2000 words a day with Julien Smith. Writing’s my #1 business, basically, when it all gets said and done: writing and thinking.

We made the New York Times Bestseller’s list in 2 days and the Wall Street Journal bestseller’s list in 2 weeks, which isn’t that shabby. I still want to hit the USA Today and the BusinessWeek bestseller lists, too.

I make very little money off my blog by contrast to my consulting and agency work. I make some money promoting Chris Pearson’s Thesis WordPress theme, and some from the occasional sponsored post, but that’s about it. I think that sponsors are great if you build relationships between the sponsors and the community. I can’t just take money from people. I say no to about 95% of the sponsor offers I get.

We had a great time talking to Chris Brogan, and learnt a lot with this interesting interview. Hope you all enjoyed it and learnt a thing or 2 from Chris Brogan. You may also like his book Trust Agents. If you read it, please tell us, what you liked and what you didn’t like in the book. I am sure, Chris will also be eager to know.
Thanks to Chris, for this fabulous interview.

The Ideal way: Migrating from Blogger to WordPress

Many people start the blog on a free blogging platform like blogger and WordPress. And after 6 months or 1 or 2 years time, if the person keeps on blogging, then he is almost certain to start feeling that he did a mistake! Mistake of starting the blog on a free blogging platform.

But do not think it as a mistake anymore. While starting a self hosted blog is a smart idea, but we know the fact that many blogs die within 1 to 6 months, so its good to start a blog on these blogging platform and invest some time to figure out whether blogging is for you or not. And it will be a good thing to learn the most basic things using those blogging platforms and then move or start a new self hosted blog.

Many people may advice to have a self hosted blog from day one, and we respect that idea too. If you can dedicate more time to learn and if you are commented enough for your blog and blogging, then either way you can start your blog.

Installing a self hosted WordPress is very easy and only takes minutes.

If you have a blog at blogger and want to transfer to your own self hosted WordPress blog, then here is a resource which will help you through the process.

For the text version of this tutorial you can follow this link labnol.org
And to be on safer side, do not forget to tell Google that you are moving your blog, at webmasters tool.