All Blogging Tips

Knowing When to Hire New Writers for Your Blog

As a site owner and blogger, at some point you might want to start looking at the possibility of bringing in new content writers for your blog. There are many reasons why this can be a good thing and can help propel your blog to new levels that you aren’t able to achieve on your own.

Let’s quickly run through a list of reasons why you should think about bringing in more content writers for your blog.

Bring Fresh New Content to Your Readers

Depending on what type of blog you have, it may be easier for you to bring in writers than not. If you are using your personal name as your domain name and brand, you may be more reluctant to bring in guest bloggers and a new writing staff, as they may be representing your name whenever they write new content.

However, there are many generic and wide focused blogs out there that can greatly benefit from having new content added to their site. By bringing in new staff writers, not only are you freeing up time for yourself, you are also adding more content to your site and throwing in a new style of writing and probably a bunch of blog topic ideas you might not have thought of.

Content Generation isn’t that Expensive

The days of having to pay high prices for original web content is over. There are now more freelance writers looking for work than ever. In addition to writers, there are also a ton of freelance and content generation sites out there like Blogging.org, that will allow you to connect with other bloggers and content writers that can start writing for you right away. The concept behind these types of content generation sites is simple. All you need to do is create an account, add some writing jobs and you will get to review each article before accepting and paying for them.

Using content generation marketplace web sites is a great way to bring in new content for any site or blog without the need to hire a full time user or teach users how to manage and write for your sites. There are thousands of writers out there just waiting for new jobs to be listed. All you need to do is tell them what you are looking for, how many words and in what style of writing.

Guest Bloggers are Everywhere

Ever since Google put the smack down on unethical link building methods, there are more people turning to guest blogging every day. There is nothing wrong with guest blogging and it’s a great way to bring in free content for your site, but you will also have to spend a good amount of time reviewing each of the posts that you may receive.

In the end, many guest bloggers are out there to make money and they just want a link back to their site or their client’s site in the footer area. Don’t accept every post you receive and make sure to always check for duplicate content and proper grammar usage. I would highly recommend that you take the time to create your own guest blogging guidelines and section on your blog with the type of content and quality you expect to receive.

Your Blog Writers have their Own Social Networks

One of the best reasons to bring in new part-time and long term bloggers is because they can massively expand the current promotion you are receiving on your blog. Every time one of your writing team posts a new article on your site, they should be promoting those same posts to all of their social networks, like Twitter and Facebook. If you bring in around five new writers, just think about how many thousands of new people who may be visiting your blog based off their social presence and postings.

How to Get Started with Bringing in New Writers

When you first start thinking about bringing in new writers or buying content for your blog, it can be quite overwhelming. What you really need to focus on is making sure you are only going after quality content. It’s easy to pay for cheap content and accept as many guest posts as you can, but in the end you still want to offer your blog readers high value content that will keep them coming back.

To start looking for potential writers for your blog or web site, be sure to check out the top blogger job boards and also start ordering some content through freelance writer market places. Once you go through a few writers and look at what they are offering, you will quickly be able to weed through the good ones and bad ones. Make sure you keep the good ones happy as they are true gems!

Best Advanced Social Subscription Widget for WordPress

By Ammar Ali / WordPress, WordPress Plugins

Recently we shared Stylish followers count widget for WordPress. Now its time for something new and advance. Today we came with Best Advance Social Subscription Widget for WordPress. This plugin is provided by CodeCanyon one of best marketplace that provide wordpress plugins and much more.

Right now Advance Social Subscription widget comes with 2 editions for WordPress. If you are using feedburner than 1st edition works perfect for you ;) cost is just 8$

Advanced Social Widget Subscription widget FeedBurner Edition Adds an advanced widget box to your sidebar giving users the ability to link your site/blog to all popular Social Networking websites such as Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Pinterest and awesome FeedBurner Email Subscription with easy.

Advance Social Subscription Widget Preview! — Advance Social Subscription Widget!

Live Demo | Download | More Info

Features of Advanced Social Subscription Widget

Highly functional dynamic widget interface
Allow visitors to easily and effortlessly subscribe to your FeedBurner also display link to your sites RSS feed
Dynamic Google +1 features & follower count, Facebook Like features and Like count, Twitter Follows features & follower count
Allows you to save to Delicious. Automatically determines whether you are on homepage, category pages, single pages or other and dynamically creates the Delicious link to share
Links to your Twitter page, Facebook page, Pinterest account and page, LinkedIn
Open links in same window or new window with 1 click.
Decide whether to display social networking site name under social icons or not to display it.
Multiple widgets configurations
Inherits CSS styles from current active theme – fonts and colors

How to Install Advanced Social Subscription Widget ?

It’s very easy. Just download widget from here (Pay 8$ ;) ) and then watch video given below!

So what you are waiting for ? Go and download this great WordPress plugin Best Advanced Social Subscription Widget for WordPress.. :) Let me know if you face any problem?

Top 6 Tips to Bring More Visitors to Your Website!

By Masroor Aijaz / Blogging Tips, Free Traffic, Social Media

Bloggers are now a days working on to get more and bring more visitors to their website. Getting more visitors and readers is the key to success. But if you really want to bring more visitors to your website then you surely need to apply good methods. Today in this blog post I will provide you some of my tips that I use to bring more visitors to my website and I hope that it will also help you to get more visitors to your website.

Post on Regular Basis

Posting on regular basis is really necessary for every Bloggers because if you don’t post on regular basis then you will lose your loyal visitors that already like your site. Make sure that the article should be quality because people do not like low-quality and spam articles.

You can ask this question to yourself that do you like low-quality, spam articles. You would surely say No so think how the other people would like low-quality and spam posts? so consider posting quality article and your keywords should be sprinkled in your article/post.

Submit your Blog to Search Engines

Usually Search-engines automatically crawl your articles if it is high-quality but you should also try to submit your blog to search engines like Google, Bing, and Ask etc. Search engines like Google have already simplified the way of submitting your content. Google Webmaster Tools makes it easy for every webmaster to get their website crawled faster.

Promote to Social Media Sites

Consider promoting your website to sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter etc. Lots of people use these social media sites to get connected you can get that advantage by promoting your website to these sites.

In an every social media site there is a feature to share the world about your business. In Facebook you can create your page and promote it, more the people like, more you get visitors to your website. Now a days getting likes in Facebook is really easy because lots of users at the time use these social media sites even your friends. That’s the best method used to bring more visitors..

Read : Effectively Use Facebook To Increase Website Traffic

Increase Backlinks to Your Site

backlinks

Increase the number of backlinks. Backlinks can improve your Page Rank (PR). Try to get more and more backlinks. You can get backlinks by blog commenting, guest posting and many other ways. You can search on the Internet to increase backlinks to your website. More Backlinks = Improved Page Rank.

Video Marketing

Now a day’s Video marketing is really becoming successful method to increase visitors. Let’s say do you use YouTube? Answer of the most of you will be yes. Market your posts on YouTube and results will be better.

Video marketing is now a days becoming a good way to get visitors because people seems to like videos rather than text.

What you can do is make a step by step guide of your post, in the description add your website link and upload it to popular video sites like YouTube, Daily Motion, and MetaCafe etc. You can promote that video to your website, Facebook page and wherever you like and you will surely get 3x more visitors.

Read :: Is Video Blogging Worth Trying?

Yahoo! Answers

This is one of the method that is not really popular but trust me your traffic will boost using Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is a community where people ask questions and other people if they know the answer can answer to them.

In Yahoo! Answers you can answer to the question and leave your link with it because if your answer is selected as best people would surely click on that link.

Yahoo! Answer have good ranking in SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Yahoo Answers do not provide backlinks because the links are no-follow meaning that when Search engine will crawl the page they will not crawl that link. But instead of getting backlinks you can get more traffic.

Yahoo! Answers are strict with their rules so if you are spamming then your account may get blocked.

Conclusion

These tips are really useful for every Blogger. Not just it increases your visitors but also it improves your Page Rank and Alexa Rank.

If you follow the methods above correctly then I am sure that you will bring more visitors to your website.

Please tell us your views and what methods do you use to bring more visitors to your blog.

Boosting Your WordPress Blog’s Performance in 3 Simple Steps

By Rob / WordPress, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tricks

Often users ask me why their WordPress blog is so slow.

Well, there’s no general answer for that question, it could be due to plugins or maybe something related to your server host.

But one thing is certain: speed is one of the most important factors for a good UXP (= “user experience”) and a common reason why visitors leave a page, frustrated.

And were talking about matter of seconds here: From a waiting period of 3 seconds on you will lose approximately 40% of your visitors.

Also Google is very interested in a high build-up speed of your site; if you’re too slow, you are prone to receive penalties in terms of search results.

So let’s begin by finding out how slow your site really is. We are able to do so by downloading the yslow extension of Yahoo.

About Yslow

Yslow is a tool that lets you breakdown and display your site’s performance issues in a very simple way and gives tips on improving these problems.

On the basis of 24 criteria the global settings are then tested as well as your individual content (images / stylesheets / HTML), conclusively giving you school grades and points (maximum 100) based on the preceding analysis.

By clicking “Run Test” you get a detailed breakdown of your blog’s speed. Since problems are highly dependent upon what kind of theme you use, the main focus of this tutorial lies on general solutions that have the power to increase the speed of every blog.

1. Let’s start with the caching:

Caching is the process by which frequently used files are temporarily saved so they do not have to be created / recalculated each time . Your blog’s article overview for example would only have to access a database, even if new articles have been created, instead of obtaining a new list every time a new page viewer accesses the site.

You can achieve this and a lot more, by using caching plugins like the powerful W3 Total Cache tool.

2. Make your images load lazy

When it comes to space, images often claim more than 50% of a given page. They are one of the biggest traffic drivers and significantly connected to the build-up speed of your site.

Especially with very image-heavy blogs it pays off to make sure they are only loaded when the user scrolls towards them.

Thats exactly what the so called lazy load scripts do. They replace content outside of the browser window with placeholders, only calling up the real files when users actually scroll down to the image.

This will increase the build-up speed by a multitude, enhancing the UXP and costing less server bandwidth.

You can do this by going to Plugins → Add New and put in “BJ Lazy Load”. Of course there are several Lazy Load plugins out there, I would recommend the one by Bjørn Johansen tough, because it lags less when reloading and has a better compatibility with coaching-plugins.

READ : HOW TO: Increase Traffic To Your Photography Blog

3. Lazy Share-Buttons for social sharing

Integrating Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter buttons to your blog can considerably slow down your site.

But because social sharing is a thriving motor behind any blog’s success, we have to find a way to work around these issues.

READ: Best Social Sharing Plugins..

Option 1: Reloading Social Buttons per click

The two-click social button solution is mainly used by platforms that have critical privacy conventions. With every click of the like-button, facebook will know from where your IP has been prompted, thereby making it very easy for them to realize your path outside of facebook, which does not appeal to some users and page-owners.

The german tech magazine heide.de wrote a plugin that helps you work yourself around that, by blending out the share-buttons until the second click.

And even though our article here still focusses more on blog-performance, this plugin is definitely worth a try.

Installation:

Go to Plugins → Add New
Look for “2 Click Social Media Buttons”
Click installation
After completing installation, click “Activate”

Configuration:

Open the settings in the plugin-overview of “2 Click Social Media Buttons”. There you can decide which share buttons you want to use and where they should appear.

Important: Under Infotext you can change the descriptive paragraph about the plugin. This is important, because the default-text is set to German.

Add the following text in the spaces “Facebook” up to “Pinterest”:

2 clicks for more privacy: Not until you click here will the button activate and you will be able to send a recommendation to Facebook. Even by merely activating it there there will be data transmitted to third parties.

Write this under “Infobutton” :

If you activate these areas by clicking, your information will be sent abroad to Facebook, Twitter, Flattr and Google and they might be saved by these parties.

And under “Permaoption” you add the following text:

Permanently activate the Share-Buttons

Read: Pinterest’s Contribution to SEO

Option 2 : Newsgrape Mouse-Over share buttons.

Try adding mouse-over share buttons, so that you can make sure your site online transmits data when it is actually needed.

This will significantly enhance your performance, because the scripts are only activated when your users click on the buttons.

You can install the WordPress plugin right here, and it will look something like this:

Conclusion

These were some simple, yet powerful steps to boost the performance of your blog. If you have any further questions on how to conduct these alterations, feel free to contact me via rs@newsgrape.com

5 Basic Pillars of Creating Successful and Profitable Blog!

By Alihan / Blogging Tips, How To

To a lot of people blogging is deemed as “difficult” to create a profitable blog and making money from it seems next to impossible. I believe making money blogging is very easy and this is the mindset I approach my blogging ventures with and is also the same mindset you should have. The basic components of a creating a profitable blog blog are simple if you get everything right from the start. The only challenge is the execution of making money online. A lot of people have high aspirations of making money online but what most of them seem to be lacking is the right mindset, patience, dedication and perseverance.

Blogs have become one of the most popular past times in our day and age today, and it almost seems like everyone on the web is looking to start a blog. When the idea of the weblog was first created in 1997, the idea of making money had not even been a factor but now it seems that everyone is writing about something they love and making money from it.

So how do they do it? Well, having extensively studied many successful blogs online, I have compiled a list 5 basic but very important components that will factor in whether you are successful online and if you take the basics of the top bloggers and apply them into your own blogging, then you too can make a profitable blog in less time. Below are 5 Basic Pillars of Creating Successful and Profitable Blog..

Read: 10 Killer Tips For New Bloggers Before Starting A Blog

How To Create Profitable and Successful Blog?

1. Find a Broader Niche

Pick a Niche and Carve Out a Smaller One

This is most common rookie error when it comes to blogging. A lot of new start ups online fail to realize that they should not try to dominate the big niches and instead carve out smaller niches. The best way I can explain this is by giving an example of who is in my opinion the best blogger out there, Brian Clark.

Copyblogger is another blog that educates others about making money online but focuses strictly on copywriting and content. I had not seen any others doing this, so what he did was in essence carve out a niche for himself and that is what you have to think about doing.

My mentor Matt Bacak told me that if you want to be incredibly wealthy, you have to create and control markets. Find out where your passions and hobbies lie, and try to first recognize the bigger niche you can place your foot in. Once you have established this, find out where you can specifically specialize in and form your blog around that. This is how you create and control markets.

2. Find Out If Your Niche Is Profitable

Now the step above is very important point in Making a blog Successful and Profitable Blog, but this point is equally as important. When you are carving out a niche for yourself, you have to be smart about it.

Lets say you were thinking about entering the broad niche of health and fitness and knew a lot about swimming. This is good, and there are many blogs out there that talk about swimming in general but, if you decided that you wanted to teach people how to swim in the ocean and learn how to do deep diving and things like that, this may be great for some people, but would not be in the general interest of others.

Specializing in something like the Swimmers Diet and obtaining the swimmers body would be a better approach. This is something that only you can figure with a little research and common sense.

3. Finding the Right Keywords

Effective Keyword Research is Crucial

Anything can fit under the category of keywords. Your blog url. The titles of your articles. Your header tags. Meta description tags and anything else. SEO is a very crucial step in making money online and if you take the time to learn how to do effective keyword research from the start, you can really make your marketing and online awareness a whole lot simpler.

There are 2 ways to go about keyword research, and these are 2 things I do to find out which keywords I have a chance at ranking highly for in the shortest space of time.

1. Find Specific Long Tail Keywords – What keywords do you think someone might type when searching for your site in Google? How specific are they and how obvious are they? Specific long tail keywords are a great way to start your keyword research. Write down a long list of keywords that can be possible candidates for your title tags, header tags and article titles.

2. Determine Competitiveness of Each Keywords – So once you have your list of keyword phrases, it is time to see how relevant they are. Start by going to the Google Adwords Keywords Tool and typing in your keywords.

What we are looking for is a high global monthly search number. Anything with 10000+ is great.

Then what you want to do is do an “allintitle” search for your specific keyword. This is to see how much competition you have. In order to do this, just go to the Google and type in your keyword like this:

allintitle:keyword here

What this command does is it tells Google to tell you how many pages on Google have the keyword in the title tag. With this you want to aim for a number below 3000.

Once you have found a list of keywords with a high global monthly search and low all in title number, then you have a winner. This will surely help you in Creating Successful and Profitable Blog.

Must READ : Best SEO Tips To Use The Keywords Effectively.

4. Get Your Blog Set Up

The Power of WordPress

Once you have your keywords and your niche, it is time to create a blog. Creating a blog is very easy. Here are few things that you need. You can choose blogger or wordpress hosting. But I would recommend you selfhost wordpress blog. For wordpress hosting Hostgator is current the best web hosting provider. They have excellent support and features.

As a lot of Hosting providers have what is called “Fantastico De Luxe” on their C-Panel which allow you to set up a blog in literally minutes.

Don’t forget that a blog is basically a reflection of your expertise so it should reflect that of your brand. Look at how other people in your niche have set up their blogs and if the layout feels right to you, you can emulate some of their strategies and layouts in your own blog.

Don’t forget that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, so if someone else doesn’t like the look of your blog, it does not mean you should try changing to best suit their needs. Make it easily navigable, with colors that do not contrast too greatly and make your blogs purpose clearly visible!

Recommend WordPress Hosting.

Hostgator
BlueHost

Read Bluehost Vs Hostgator – Best Shared Hosting Comparison

5. Begin Creating Content !

This is when everything takes off! The purpose of a blog is provide your specialty and expertise to your reader. In essence, your information should solve the problem of the reader and upon reading your content, they should feel as if they have learnt something very valuable.

When you write content with confidence, people begin to respect you as an author and blogger and thus your credibility and authority in your “specific niche” goes up.

Make sure that your writing is educational, unique and mind blowing. I have found that telling success stories of yourself and/or others while giving tips is the best way to go. People feed off the success of others, and when they read about it, it makes them feel compelled to do the same. Adding in a quote here and there is also a great way to provoke a thought, I mean lets face it, who doesn’t love a clever quote?

Read : 7 Ways To Find Unique Blog Post Ideas For Your Blog

So, here are the 5 Basic Pillars of Creating Successful and Profitable Blog. These things are just the “icing on the cake” and the real success will come when you really get your blog into 5th gear and keep experimenting and implementing new techniques.

All I can say for now is master the basics and when all the fundamentals are in place, you can begin to look at more advanced techniques. The basics are always the most important factors and once you get them in place just keep going and you will see result!

Don’t forget to share your views about “How to create a Successful and Profitable Blog easily” in comments. Happy Blogging. ;)