Blogging [view: normal]

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

There are far too many people who are creating blogs (hundreds of millions at this point), without truly understanding their own personal brands. The end result is a blog that has a life expectancy of no more than a few months before it enters the R.I.P. blog graveyard.

Basing a blog off ...

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Irman asks:

I want to know how many blog posts in percentage normally Google indexes from a blog. I have been running a blog for a year, and I noticed only 30% of my posts are indexed by Google. What steps should I take to improve that?

Provided that you respect some basic SEO guidelines, 100%...

Twitter is probably the largest Internet phenomenon we have seen in a while. Everyone is using it these days. Affiliate marketers are using it to promote their affiliate offers. Companies are using it to sell products and services. Webmasters and bloggers are using it to drive traffic to their websites. You name it.

There are even people making money directly with their Twitter accounts by tweeti...

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

If your blog is on shared host but starting to get some serious traffic, then you are probably having problems with slow database queries, and in the future you might even be suspended because of exceeded CPU quota. The outcome will be frustration on your side and annoyed visitors on the other si...

A couple of weeks ago I was negotiating with some freelancers who were interesting in writing for a new website I am developing. We were discussing what kind of articles I needed, the length of each article, frequency and the like. The main point of the negotiation was the pay rate, however.

Most of the freelancers were replying to me asking if I knew how much the market was paying for similar gig...

It is a Google’s world, and as webmasters we live and die by our search rankings, right? Now one of the factors that both influences search rankings and that most people seem to care about is the Google PageRank. More specifically, we want as much PageRank as possible!

Now aiming to increase the PageRank of your pages is fine, the problem is when misconceptions around the PageRank algorithm affect...

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

I’ve always enjoyed skimming through magazines at local bookstores to review the annually featured holiday gift buying guides. These magazines usually give me great gift ideas for family and friends.

Thinking about that lately a creative idea sparked within my mind. What would happen if...

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Dan asks:

I deleted about 20 posts on my Romanian blog and started from scratch. Do you think this is bad for search ranking?

It is not good, that is for sure.

I am guessing that these 20 posts were all you had on the blog (else you would think twice before starting from scratch). If you also...

Last week we had a very popular guest post titled 101 Ways to Promote a New Blog. Just to give you an idea it got almost 450 retweets. I figured that promoting a new blog was an interesting topic for most of you guys, and it reminded me of a post my friend Neil Patel wrote a while ago. His post is titled Your First 30 Days of Blogging, and it features a check list with pointers and tips that you n...

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

Gone are the days of padding your Internet articles with hundreds of keywords hoping to find yourself in the top spots of Google’s search results. While keywords still play a role in search engine positioning, you can actually be penalized if your content seems to contain too many of...

If you are not familiar with the term, whois privacy is a service offered by most domain name registrars that protects your information as a domain registrant from people performing a “whois” on your domains.

Here is a screenshot of a domain using that service (it is actually one of my domains, and I am about to remove the privacy from it):

And here is one of a domain without the whois privacy:...

If you have the habit of visiting social bookmarking sites you probably know how popular web design related stories are. Every single day you can find a list with “the best collection of free textures,” “free icon sets,” “examples of stunning typography” and so on.

I do believe that design is an important part of the whole. As the Italian proverb goes, anche l’occhio vuole la sua parte (i.e., the ...

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

Despite having already quit my job, I recently attended a “escape the rat-race” type workshop for people who were looking to start their own businesses. My main reason for going was to see the process that people teach in order to help others successfully transition out of the cubicle and i...

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Kang Yudiono asks:

I am very happy because my blog got Google Sitelinks. For your information, the blog is 5 months old and written in Indonesian laguage.

My question: what is the benefits of sitelinks for a blog?

First things first, what are the Google sitelinks? They are those links that app...

You probably already visited or heard about I Can Has Cheezburger? right? It is the blog that pioneered the concept of adding funny captions to pictures of cats (called lolcats). What you might not know is the business empire that such blog created.

The blog was launched early in 2007, and late that year it was already so popular that a group of investors, led by Ben Huh, acquired it for around $2...

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

Promoting a new blog can be quite daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. As you might expect, breaking down blog promotion into small, actionable tasks eliminates the mental road block you’ve probably experienced when trying to wrap you head around how to get people’s attention. You don’t ...

Last week I was reading the official WordPress blog and I came across an interesting plugin: WordPress Exploit Scanner. It basically scans your database entries and site files looking for suspicious lines of codes. On top of that it also looks for suspicious plugins, posts, pages, users and WordPress settings.

Here is a screenshot:

It is worth to run this plugin once in a while, and especially i...

If you are a blogger, website owner or online worker, you probably need to contact people via email all the time. On some occasions you will also be the one starting the conversation and looking for a reply. For example, you might want to offer a guest article for a particular blog, or you might want to propose a business partnership to someone. Unless you craft your email messages smartly, though...

I was expecting a PageRank update to happen in September, but it looks like Google waited till the month was over. It looks like it was a subtle update too, as the PageRank on the homepage of most of my websites has not changed.

I noticed it by taking a look at posts that had been published after the last update. They used to show “unranked,” but now they are showing some PR.

What about you, did ...

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Christopher asks:

Do you know anything about hubpages.com? Is it a credible source to publish content on and get paid?

Also, can you post content on Hubpages, that you have posted say on your own site?

Yes I am familiar with Hubpages. It is basically a publishing platform where people from aro...

Yesterday one of our Indian readers emailed me to let me know that Daily Blog Tips had appeared on Tuesday’s edition of the Mumbai Mirror. I was quite surprised, as this is probably the biggest mainstream coverage I have had. The blog had been mentioned on some small newspapers and magazines, but the Mumbai Mirror has a circulation of around 1.5 million people according to Wikipedia.

Here is a sc...

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

It’s a bandwagon that took off with startling speed, one that all and sundry wanted to get on. Most did get on the blogging train, but there were very few who tasted the kind of financial success that they dreamed of. Others fell by the wayside while the determined still plough on, maki...

You probably already know the story behind OnlineProfits.com, and how I used the material on Yaro’s Membership Site Mastermind program to launch it right? If you don’t and want to read about it, check this post out.

Cutting to the chase, Yaro is re-opening his coaching program today. If you believe that launching a membership site could be the right business model for you, I recommend that you ch...

Sooner or later most of us need to collect some Internet statistics. Maybe it is for your homework, maybe it is for a market research you are doing for a project, maybe it is just out of curiosity. Over the years I came across several websites that provide these stats, and I decided to list the best ones in this post.

1. Pew Internet Project

One of the best resources for people looking for Intern...

I have been running many polls lately on the blog, and I find them pretty interesting because they give us some data on relevant issues. You guys seem to like them as well, so let’s try to make them a regular column. I will release a new poll every other Monday (so twice a month). The only doubt that I have is whether or not I should follow up with a post on the following week highlighting the res...