Guest Post by Ashvini

Many of us search for a good blogging platform to showcase our ideas and experiences. Blogging has transformed itself from expression of our personal experience to now include providing information, brand building and online collaboration and sharing. Blogging inspite of skepticism has become one of the primary activities happening on the internet. A good blog entices thousands of users to share experiences, get into productive discussions and generally network with each other.That brings us to the question that if we decide to blog today, what blog platform should we use. My opinion is that any blog and its management software should have following features so that it makes blogging a lively experience.

The list above is not exhaustive but it is what I would be looking for in a blogging platform. When I started blogging, I came across blogging platform known as 'Wordpress'. As I learned more about it, I found that it is indeed one the best blogging platform available on the internet. Below are the reasons for the same :

That means you can have all the source code, modify as you want it and make the site suit your individuality or corporate image. It is written in PHP which is the defacto standard for web development making 'Wordpress' one of the most acceptable platform fro blogging.

According to wordpress site, "There are 16 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com as of December 2010.". That is a number that speaks volumes about the quality of wordpress software and in my opinion is a good reason to give it a try.

What makes Wordpress a great software is a great user community which helps resolve problems, create plugins for free and to improve the software continuously. That means you can get great quality plugins and support for free and authors ask only for donatios and appreciation. Isn't that just great?

You can create your own look and feel blog or choose from thousands of free themes available online. If you donot like the free themes, you can purchase template of your choice from many sites that are selling them at affordable prices. You can then customize to make them Search engine friendly, put in gadgets ( called as widgets here) and give your users a great web experience.

Wordpress has all the features of a great content management system. If you want to delay publishing a post you can set it to draft status. You can customize your links as they appear to viewers. You can also add users for guest blogging with varying permissions. Content can be neatly organized using hierarchies of categories and can be indexed by tagging it with appropriate tags. You can also chose to add media such as video, audio files or pictures to your blog post easily.

A wordpress blog comes free of cost and hence you dont have to spend a dime to get the world class software. Isn't that a great reason to use it?

Till this point, I am learning new things everyday about this great blogging platform and I have never been disappointed. Infact I enjoy creating my own blog themes whenever I am bored of the old ones. So try it out and have fun blogging.

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Ashvini Kumar Saxena is  an entrepreneur and an avid blogger. His website http://aks-blog.com is a resource rich site for wanna be entrepreneurs.

Tonnes of articles related to traffic building can be found on web today. No doubt, simply blogging and expecting miracles never pays. Traffic does not build by itself. You really have to work for it. I suppose we bloggers do realize the same. And this is why we look out for various tips and strategies so that our blogging efforts are paid with right results.

Talking in terms of blog onpage SEO, I must say that Google blogger does not provide you with much options for the same. It is never easy to go for an onpage optimization with my blogger posts and so, traffic building through organic listings does take a backseat. Unlike plugins in wordpress, where you can easily add and edit meta tags, Google Blogger does not provide any such facility or addon thus making it look more complex. Apart from working on the posts title tags and content optimization, there is hardly anything extra which you can do with blogger posts. You can still do much better if you know to play with the code part. You can easily define meta tags for your posts and thus rank better in Google SERPS. Here is a way to add and edit meta tags to your blogger posts. I am yet to apply these hacks and hopefully, I shall be applying it very soon.

Now when it comes to organic listings, Google has been very kind to this blog. But the same never gets shown from Yahoo. I am yet to get at least 2-3 visits from Yahoo in a single day. It has never happened on this blog though I understand that both Google and Yahoo have quite different search algorithms which really makes it complex to rank well in both. I was figuring out the same till I came across this post about getting traffic on blog from Yahoo by Darren Rowse. Darren’s post seemed to be very useful as I could see that getting traffic from yahoo is a big deal and even if you follow his tips like adding RSS feed URL to your MyYahoo page, you don’t make it much or worse, don’t make it at all!

Yahoo SEO Techniques certainly appear different in comparison to Google but as per my findings, it is quite easy to rank in both. The most important factors to remember are to use relevant Meta tags for every single page of your site, include as much content and update your site with new content as often as possible, and update a sitemap both on your website and with the Yahoo sitemaps function. Apart from having meta tags for each post and a sitemap, I am following each and every step so it should have been something if not everything but honestly, it has been nothing for me!

I have tried almost each and everything like I have my blog submitted and authenticated in Yahoo Site Explorer. I have also my feed submitted in the same plus I do have a good amount of inlinks for my site. But I did witness something strange while I was exploring my site in the Yahoo Site Explorer. I could see only 195 indexed pages in the same. This is truly shocking as I have more than 250 post pages in my blog. I could see that the last crawl for my homepage was on 26th of this month but apart from the homepage, the crawl rate for my post pages were far below than expected. More than 100s of my latest post pages were missing in the indexed list. I am totally clueless as I don't really understand how could those pages be left out. Not to mention, I have been updating my blog with fresh and quality content on a regular basis.

Well, here we go again. I am still not much bothered about Yahoo but there is nothing like ignoring it. I have done everything I could but results have never showed up. Maybe if I had my blog hosted on Wordpress, things could have looked different but anyways, have you too been facing the same issue with your blog? Do you get traffic from Yahoo? Does having your blog on wordpress makes the difference? I guess it does...Please share your thoughts..

My last blog entry was posted on 21st Dec and this is my newest post. It is almost a week now. Now, I could have published my post yesterday or I should say last weekend but I didn’t ever felt like posting it on the same day. Now, apart from lacking interest for the same from my side, I can cite some good reasons for not being in the right mood to post anything on weekends. Perhaps these may not make sense to most of you but this is all based on my personal observation.

Last week, I was really not able to find myself in the right mood to blog. Having been in the holidaying mood, I was really finding it difficult to concentrate on my blogging. I guess it must have been the same case with you too. Being busy and occupied with other tasks also made it impossible for me to find any time for my blogging.

Apart from all these, if you are speaking in technical terms, blogging on weekend does not make much sense. One of the very important reason for the same is that you don’t get the expected traffic. It has happened to me too where I have seen my site traffic drop like anything. It is nothing new and it happens quite often to my blog but mostly on weekends. After carefully researching over the same, I found that it is a very common scenario where people are mostly active only during weekdays. Weekdays are always the best for traffic because that is when people who should be working either surf the web on company time, or during short breaks to clear their mind visit their favorite websites. As opposed to the same, people generally like to stay away from their system on weekends and do something different like getting into leisure activities.

Well, weekend is one of the reasons. Not to forget, Christmas was another reason for the sudden drop in my site traffic. Contrary to all these, there are still many who get a good amount of traffic on weekends. I think it happens mostly with the popular blogs. Anyways, I know I am not the only one. Do you also face the same kind of drop with your site visits on weekends? Have you tried finding the reasons for the same? Please share if you know anything on it...

For any blogger, who thinks about traffic building is likely to think about link building. Especially when you are new to this blogging thing and you want to see your blog get more exposure, get more popular, link building is one of the things where your begin to focus your attention. The same happened with me too. Apart from directory submissions and blog submissions, I was also actively involved into link exchange programs. And it was driven more of the fact that I had a great desire to have a better Google page rank. Though I see people telling me that Google page rank is not that relevant today but I think it still is a valuable indication of your site’s popularity and obviously, a thing to consider for any blog or site advertiser. What say...hmm...I am really happy to have it maintained consistently well throughout my course of blogging in these 3 years.

Now, talking about the link building...for those who have been into the same must have realized that it is not actually the same now what it used to be few years back. It is surely a tricky deal now. You do it correctly and you see your site popularity shoot up like anything. or else if you don’t, you raise red flags with search engines standards. The very first and the most important thing to realize here is that it is no more the quantity of links, it is now mostly about the quality and certainly it is the most basic requirement today. Quality cannot be comprised with the quantity...that's for sure.

As far as link building with blogs is concerned, I do not see much difference as compared to link building on normal sites. The same rule applies everywhere and so it is very important to keep it all clean and clear. Below are some basic rules that you should follow with your link building campaign to have it all profiting in the longer run -

Link with relevant sites

As I mentioned it earlier, it is all about the quality and the relevancy. The moment you move away from the same, you get penalized immediately. You maybe having thousands of backlinks but if its not related with your niche or industry then you are just wasting your SEO efforts. Google won’t be impressed either and so, it is very important to have the relevancy factor with your link building efforts.

Checking link neighborhood

To be very simple, stay away from link farms or FFA sites! It is very tempting to get link here free and fast but it won’t be profiting in the longer run as most of these sites have a bad reputation which can negatively reflect on your site's rankings. Google may automatically assume that you are one of the bad guys and lower your positions in search results.

Say ”No” to Mass Link Exchange

This is a very common mistake where in order to have the top rankings, people get involved into mass link exchange requests and thus get themselves tagged as potential spammers. Too many links within a shorter period of time is most likely to raise suspicion with search engines as they consider this a counterfeit way of getting to the top result pages. So, make it all look natural, keep it few and exchange links only with good sites.

Practice deep-linking

It is one of the most important things to be known in any linkbuilding campaign. Instead of having all your backlinks pointing to the homepage, you should also try to get linkbacks for your inner pages or pages placed deep inside your site. This is seen very positive in terms of SEO efforts and is bound to significantly improve your website rankings. The approximate ratio of all links on a website's backlink profile should vary between 30-40% of links pointing to a homepage and 60-70% being deep links.

Pay attention to Anchor Text

Anchor Text is one of the most important things to consider in any link building campaign. The backlinks from right anchor text is likely to increase the chances to get high rankings in search results. So, do give proper emphasis on the same.

So, here we go again with our usual tips to promote our blogs through link building. Apart from following the above tips, make sure you are also doing a careful backlink research and planing out link building activities few steps ahead to get your link building campaign more successful in the longer run. There are many SEO tools available free online which can be used for all-rounded competition research to discover the juiciest link sources, evaluate each links in terms of SEO-usefulness and manage all your links. You can do Google search to know more about those SEO tools.

Currently, I am not into any kind of link exchange. I left doing it a long back. For those who have been regular on my blog might have seen that most of my outbound links are now removed. This is so because most of the links were unrelated to my blogging theme and also they were quite bigger in number than expected. Right now, I am purely into link baiting and I would recommend the same to my fellow bloggers. What about you ??

I can blog for the whole day. In other words, I can keep blogging forever. But anyways, I cannot. There is no doubt with the fact, blogging does involve a great deal of interest and passion for the serious bloggers like me ;) but to be blogging all the time, I think its not possible for me and more so because I have been lacking time for the same. Very honestly, I think it is not just me. I think it is a major worry for bloggers who being quite enthusiastic do not find the right time to blog. Of course, I am not complaining about the desire. It is always there but somehow we got ourselves haunted with how and when which finally leads to a situation where you find yourself way behind others. It is so very important to keep your blogging regular and equally more important is to find the right time to blog.

Having been through the same situation in the past, I must say that it is never easy for anyone who is as busy as I am at present. And I guess it is the same case with many unless you have nothing more to do except blogging. As per my own experience, if you ask me what is the best time to blog then I am most likely to tell you that you should be blogging in the night. Yes, perhaps some may disagree but for me night time is the best time to blog and to be more specific, it should be done after 10pm when you are finished with your dinner and everyone except you is ready to sleep thus creating an atmosphere where you can focus on your blogging with much better concentration. This is purely based on my experience.

And if you cannot do so then you should try doing it during morning before 8am. No doubt, morning time is the best time for any activity and what better than blogging. Morning time gets your more active and fills you with immense enthusiasm to carry out any task. But this again requires that you have a good sleep in the night  and do have a habit of waking up quite early in the morning. Morning time keeps you free from distractions, gets your blood flowing and increases your energy level making you feel more smarter and happier thus you can find yourself super-recharged for this blogging thing. And you do get a lot of interesting and unique blogging ideas in the morning which you really do not get in the night. This again is based on my personal experience. Opinions may vary from person to person but believe me, it really works the same way !!

Well finally it all comes to one’s convenience as you can blog at anytime in the day but I doubt if you can really blog that well if you do it at anytime in the day as I feel that you won’t find the same enthusiasm and interest to write anything which you can surely find it in  late night and early morning hours. Whatever I have shared above is purely based on my personal experience. Hope you do agree to me. Please do share your thoughts...

Most of us maybe very good at time management when it comes to blogging but still there are many who seem to be clueless about the same. For bloggers who have been struggling with the same, you really don’t need to do anything special except following few simple tips to make it look easy and comfortable.

Below are some helpful tips that can surely let you manage your time more efficiently with your blogging if followed seriously :

Brainstorming and Stockpiling Ideas

Believe me! This works like magic. Instead of being more creative at the time of writing your blog entries, try capturing ideas which come to your mind instantly throughout the course of your day. This really helps in managing your time more efficiently and come out with better blog entries as you are not being forced to be more creative with the content creation process. Lots of ideas come when you pay attention to small things. And when you have those ideas coming then you can simply pull off from any of those stockpiled ideas to save your time in creating much better blog entries.

Do Plan your Posts

It has been a case with me where I have been very impulsive with both writing and publishing my entries. This certainly gets time consuming at times as I am bound to being more creative plus also being more concerned about editing and formatting at the same time. To better manage your time, you should try separating these two tasks thus making you feel more 'fresher' and less stressed or frustrated which will result in you being more efficient and productive. By doing both but at separate intervals, you are in a much better position to decide over what to expect when you sit down to complete your tasks thus being more efficient with your time management.

Take Time to Review

Never be in a hurry to write and post immediately. If you are updating your blog entries then do save it before you make it finally go live. Your must make sure that your blog entries are properly reviewed for any mistake or any modifications to be done. This is essential as it makes your blogging much more easier by breaking down the entire process, starting with developing new writing ideas, into smaller and more manageable tasks allowing you to make better use of time. You can even do without it but you are likely to end up with a frustration.

So, here we go again. We have seen how time management skills can be used in creating much better blog entries. The whole idea is to make best use of the time available in the content creation process. It may take hours to find and develop new writing ideas but it should be done anyways. The above points are likely to help you with this if and only if you are serious blogger!

In our last post, we came to know a whole lot on inquiry forms and the role it played in maintaining a good relationship with your visitors. We had also seen some form creating services like one being provided as Google forms under Google Docs and also some feature rich services like Emailmeform which you could make use of in creating rich interactive forms with extra features. Honestly, it takes nothing in making use of these services and the results you get are mostly satisfying!

Anyways, that was all about inquiry forms. Other than having such inquiry forms, have you ever thought about having a live chat facility on your blogs or sites. Now unlike inquiry forms, live chat may not appear so powerful but to be very honest, I think it would be a big mistake to ignore it. Yes surely, you may feel like who has a time to chat or spend some time in real-time conversation but as per my observation, if you do incorporate anything like live chat on your blogs or sites, you are bound to increase your social reach and thus be more popular and efficient with your blog marketing activities. The best thing about being in a live conversation is the fact that you have an interactive medium which lets you get instant results in terms of feedback. Now, this feedback can be anything. It may be anything about you, your site or your overall work.

Live Chat is certainly an option for most of us but anyways, it is always a better option especially if you are a niche blogger or a pro-blogger who has a thing or two to offer to his readers or say, potential customers. Having had used such live chat facilities in the past, I must say...it can be so vital for any online business. Any business which makes use of live chat is likely to receive better results in terms of increased sales and enhanced customer satisfaction.

People do tend to make instant inquiries if you have anything like live chat enabled on your sites as you shouldn’t forget one important fact that anyone who comes to your site in search of any product or service using any search services like Google or Yahoo is likely to be in a hurry to buy anything he/she wishes to. Most of the times, if you have anything live chat facility placed at right place on your site or blog, you can certainly entice them to put their inquiries live which if handled intelligently, can certainly bring in the leads and hopefully much needed sales. Instead of letting your visitors look for the contact or inquiry form, adding a live chat facility can fill them with enthusiasm and hope to make instant queries or give feedback which can certainly help your site or your online business grow like anything. Again depends upon how well have you implemented the same.

Inquiry Forms and now, Live Chat. The former is a must have while the latter appears to be an option. Whatever maybe, there is no reason why you cannot have both on your sites or blogs. Finally, the choice is yours !

So you have a blog ? Surely, you must be having a great content. Surely, you must be having a solid niche to blog upon. But is it being all supported by equally good traffic ? Have you been keeping a check on the traffic received on your blog ? Are you tracking your visitors ? Do you use tracking tools for the same or not ?

As a blogger, what I feel is that you may have a great content and solid niche to blog upon but finally its all in the traffic you receive for your pages. You don’t need miracles to happen but you need traffic...surely we all do need it. And once you have more and more of it, it certainly brings a smile on your face and to keep that smile coming again and again, you need to be working upon few more things to ensure that your traffic is paying you in right terms. One of the most important things that you must do is to keep a check on traffic received by having a Blog Counter.

Blog Counter is nothing but a small piece of code which once installed on blogs begins to fetch vital statistics like how many visitors are visiting your blog, at what times are they visiting, what days of the week, from what websites or from internet service providers are they coming. These statistics are certainly vital as it lets you know about certain areas on your blog where you must be focusing hard to get the expected results. The information obtained from a blog counter can be used to make sensible changes on your blog to attract right kind of visitors which in turn can help you in recovering the expense which you are incurring in running your blog and gradually begin to make money out of it. No doubt, most of us are here are blogging to make money online and so it is always better to go for a change which increases our chances to make more and better income online.

A blog counter can provide you information on Page views and other related details like Unique views which in turn can help you know more about your visitor behaviour like how frequently has a web page has been accessed irrespective of how hits have actually been generated. Also, information related to referrers can be obtained which can help you to understand from where the traffic pertaining to your search engine is coming from. This and almost every possible detail related to user site behaviour can be obtained and so, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be using the same on your sites or blogs.

Now, definitely you must be thinking on how to get a right counter for your blog. Well, you can find a lot of them by google searching. Some are simply numerical counters where you don’t get enough details except total number of visits made on your site or blogs, certainly not very reliable to determine how exactly your website is doing and that is why it is better not to get swayed by the numbers reflecting. While there are other more detailed blog counters which are based on “Trackers”- this is a very focused data which basically segregates the type of visitors which you blog has been getting such as page views, unique views, referrers, time of the visits, the duration of different visits, the browser, the link through which visitors have accessed your blog and so on and so forth.

Well, finally it is your choice. As for now, I am leaving you with some sites from where you can get these blog counters. Two of my favorites are gostats, blogpatrol as I have tried out both of them. I was quite impressed with blogpatrol. I will recommend it for sure. But anyways, if you are looking for much detailed analysis of your site then you must surely go for something like Google Analytics, a completely free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. I guess...most of us are using the same for our sites or blogs. Anyways, having a blog counter is must for anyone who is seriously concerned about tracking traffic and other details related to site performance. Failure to do so could end you up losing money badly and would have to ultimately end up shutting up your blog. So, please think on it seriously...