Technotip.org - Part 45

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.

$200 Giveaway – Technotip.org Celebrating a Small Milestone

Celebrating a small milestone:
We have reached 100th article on our blog today, with this giveaway announcement. We were writing consistent articles each day, but now due to lot of other works(projects) we are not able to write daily, instead we write only when there is something valuable to say.

We are happy as this blog is gaining some momentum now. And the blog will surly grow in an exponential manner from now. Time is the main factor for the success of a blog. Remember we started our blog on 18th June 2008, so Technotip.org is still a baby blog!

$200 Giveaway:
On this occasion we wanted to “call for action” to our visitors to support us by subscribing to our blog. But we thought to make it more interesting and worth my visitors time. So thought of giving some small incentive for being our reader.

This will only apply for our blogs free email subscribers, as we cannot track the RSS subscribers!

We are giving a total prize worth of 200$.

This is not given in the form of money, but will be given in the form of 125×125 ad banner for one month.
200$-giveaway-Technotip.org-100th-article

Our sponsors pay 50$ per 125×125 ad spot for one month. Now we are giving four(one for each winner) such ad spots for our winners, to showcase their 125×125 ad banner on our blog, for full one month. So hope you noticed by reading the last sentence that, there will be four winners( will be chosen randomly using www.random.org ).

Eligibility for entering the giveaway:
1. Basic eligibility is, you must be our blogs verified email subscriber.

2. You must be our blogs verified email subscriber. And should remain a subscriber till 2008 Christmas.

3. You must be our blogs verified email subscriber. And should remain a subscriber till 2008 Christmas.

4. You must be our blogs verified email subscriber. And should remain a subscriber till 2008 Christmas.

5. You must be our blogs verified email subscriber. And should remain a subscriber till 2008 Christmas.

Hope you complete all those 5 difficult eligibility criteria! And by now you may be knowing that the winners will be announced on 2008 Christmas.

What if you do not have a blog?
If you do not have a blog, then also its not a problem. Just subscribe to our blog, if you are one of the lucky winner, then we will allow you to run any of your affiliate program banner(125×125) on our blog for one month. And the full profit would be yours..obviously!
You can signup for many affiliate programs and make money from each signup or sales. orelse you can show your social network profile link banner(Ex:- Twitter) and get many friends. By this you can become popular and you can promote your blog(once you have it).
Any other ideas are welcome, but it should not include giving money directly.

Help us by spreading the word:
We are hard at work to provide value to our blog readers as well as our advertisers. So please support us by spreading the word about Technotip.org

Our blog is around here, from this summer and has managed to get links to some of our articles from many “A” grade blogs and websites, this shows that we are providing valuable information to our readers.

You can write about this contest on your blog or just email about this $200 Giveaway to all your friends, Stumble this article, Digg, Buzz etc. There are many ways that you can help us.
Thanks for all the support you have shown to our blog till now, and we hope to have this relationship growing stronger and stronger over time.. Hope I am getting emotional about the blog now. Let me end here. Looking forward to see you in my email subscribers list.

*You can also write about this $200 giveaway on your blog(Appreciable) — Not a requirement.
*Be our subscriber, as many such giveaway and contests are coming soon.

Update: Winners of the giveaway announced. Thanks for all the participants. We are planning to come up soon with some new and improved giveaway, so keep an eye on our blog.

Free Microsoft Software for Students

Microsoft DreamSpark Student Program, gives free software to college and high school students worldwide, and has now expanded to India. Bill Gates was in India and among other initiatives, he launched the DreamSpark program for all technical students in India.

If you are a student(anywhere in the world) then just go ahead and check www.dreamspark.com whether your country is listed or not. If listed:
Sign In using your Windows Live ID. Get verified as a student. The system is linked to schools and organizations around the world that can confirm student status. Simply choose your country and organization, enter your info and hit submit. Download your products. Some files are quite large, so make sure you have the bandwidth and enough space to bring them to your machine.
It supports the latest versions of both Internet Explorer and Firefox for your download.
Microsoft-free-software
Other Free Tools:
Microsoft-free-tools
If you are in India, you can download it online or else visit the Microsoft program partners like NIIT, Aptech and Hughes Net Fusion Centers – Simply show your college identity card and collect your free DVD containing the Microsoft software package.

Eligibility(To get the software for FREE):
Undergraduates or graduate students with their college ID card, are eligible to receive free software.
*They will expanded this exclusive offer to high school students(of India) by early 2009.

This program is active in many other countries. Checkout dreamspark.com, to know whether this offer is available in your country or not. If this offer is not available in your country, then wait till Bill Gates comes to your country! or just send a request to include this offer to your country students, hope Microsoft will here it.

[ Don’t be surprised, if someone(refuse to give you the Free Microsoft software DVD) at the Microsoft program partners like NIIT, Aptech and Hughes Net Fusion Centers do not know about this offer by Microsoft! Just bring them to this article and show them all the websites link we have given in this article. ]

Use Notepad(.bat) to Shutdown your PC(Windows Only)

Today we shall see some tricks to shutdown your computer by clicking on a file that you will be creating, using notepad or any other text editor.

Open a notepad. Save it as ILOVEU.bat (any name with file extension .bat), now copy and paste below codes into the notepad and save it again..

@echo off
c:
cls
echo hey wana be friends?
pause
echo did u say no???????????
pause
echo u r hacked
echo Type some message!
shutdown -s -t 30 -c “f*ck off”

As soon as someone clicks on this .bat file, these below popup’s will be displayed..

dos-prompt-program
shut-down-bat

Other options that you can use along with the shutdown command are :
To shutdown computer -> “shutdown -s”
To restart computer -> “shutdown -r”
To logoff computer -> “shutdown -l”
To halt a restart/shutdown –> “shutdown -a”
You can use all these commands directly in DOS prompt or in a script.

You can add some more features to this notepad by reading the help topics in your dos prompt.

Just type help after you enter the dos prompt ( C:\>help ).

Not recommended:
If you remove the pause statement from above code and put this file in the startup( C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup or C:\Documents and Settings\current user\Start Menu\Programs\Startup ) folder, then your computer will shutdown(automatically) when this file loads at startup.

This article is written to teach you the method to troubleshoot your computer yourself, if someone uses this technique and creates problem in your computer.

Solution:-
Just enter into the dos mode(pre-boot mode, using any bootable disks), and search for any file with .bat extension in Startup folder. And if found, just delete it and restart your computer and it will work normally 🙂

These type of files are being sent by some anonymous people in IMs and also as attachments in emails. This could create some irritating problem and you may loose some data on your computer that you have not saved. So be careful when you get a file with .bat file extension. Better not to click on it.