Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 |
Its the beginning of a New Year, and its a fresh start for all of us. Its time to let go of any or all of the disappointments that you may have faced as a blogger.Although I started blogging 6 months back, as a blogger the last 3 months have been very productive and inspiring for me, because of some great support from my blogger friends and decent success with the social media. I would also like to thank all my readers who take some time out to comment on some posts they like.
The success of a blog is measured in various terms like the Traffic Rank, Number of subscribers, activity on the blog (comments) and buzz about the blogger in the Social Media.There are quite a few things that I have learned from blogging last year and I would like to share some things that are critical to follow and commit to, if you would like to get better results for your blog.
1) Plan a schedule carefully and stick to it:
You might have a 9 to 5 job and you barely get time to blog, or maybe you are a full-time blogger, who gives all his time to blogging. Either way a proper schedule will help propel your blog to the next level. If you follow a schedule you can get more things done and be more productive. I have seen that I have always been able to post regularly and get more subscribers, traffic and activity on my blog if I follow a schedule.You should plan well so that you can accommodate reading blogs, posting on your own blog and social networking properly. Try and keep a track of not only of posting time, but how much time do you dedicate to reading other blogs, skimming through RSS Feeds and interacting in Social Networks.
Also, keep a notebook ,or a diary or a cell phone, to note down ideas. No Idea is a small idea and with some brain storming, you can make it a big one. Noting down would help you accumulate some nice concepts to write about in the future or a rainy day. It is also effective against writers block.
2)Write for your readers,but don’t ignore the search engines and Social Media:
Before you write every post, think how would this benefit my readers. Will writing this post add value to my blog. Will this post be valuable from a year from now? Its not always that a post can fit all these criterion. Sometime you need to blog about a special offer or a free service, which may not be valid for more than a few days. But don’t make this a regular feature. Make sure every post you write benefits the reader in someway.
As on this blog, I don’t have a clearly defined niche. I am a technology enthusiast who is a interested in blogging and involved in social media. What I write is about technology that would benefit bloggers and regular internet users. As I learn about new tips that would benefit any of these 3 niches, I write about it. And this is why The community I have around this blog are people who are interested in any or all of these niches.
Writing for search engines is important as, after the tons of traffic you receive from social sits starts waning, the search engines provide a constant source of quality traffic.You should try and make sure each post has proper SEO attributes and use a plugin like AIO SEO Pack to get maximum benefit from search traffic.
Also try and build a culture around your blog, in which you encourage your readers to submit your articles to social media, if they are good enough.
3)Start building a community around your blog:
Building a community around your blog can be a difficult task,but if you invest time in it, it will pay both in terms of loyal readers and also regular traffic and promotion. In order to start building a community you should first set a minimum number of subscriber number, like about 500 to 1000, as small communities tend not to work very well.
Get your readers involved by helping them out in any way possible. If you are a technology blogger you can ask them to send technical queries. Same goes for other niches. Not only would you help readers and build goodwill, but also get great ideas for future posts.
Surround yourself with bloggers from your niche to keep abreast with the latest happenings and to learn from collective experience, what works and what doesn’t and plan the content accordingly. You can also build a community and connect well with other bloggers by either offering to guest post on their blogs or letting them guest post.
4)Link to blogs in your Niche:
One of the mistakes I made last year was not to connect to some excellent content produced by bloggers in my niche. You can start a post which would contain some of the best work produced from around the blog-O-sphere, related to your niche. This has two advantages. Not only would you provide you readers with valuable content but also get get appreciation from a fellow blogger for linking.
Think about it for a second. You work on a post for several hours and create value for your readers. If some fellow blogger appreciates this and shares it with his readers,he would not only provide some good content for his readers but also get your gratitude. You can make great friends in this process. I missed this last year, but from this year, I would share with you some of the most original and well written content from around the web, from now on.
5) Don’t pretend to be A-List, Be an A-List blogger:
What does an A-List blogger have that you do not?? Hmmm….Answer anyone? Traffic you say. Yes, thats correct, but you don’t have enough of what he does : Value Packed content. All A-List Bloggers, have been known to be different from the crowd. Creating head turning, jaw dropping, link baiting content. Its not that tough really. If you take some time out (about 30 mins everyday) for contemplating, how you can write about an already written story from a different angle, you can make heads turn too and get more back links than you had imagined.
If you dedicate some time to read 30-40 blogs, you can note some idea, about a post that you a different opinion about or may be written in a different way. Another way is to check out the archives of A-List bloggers and apply the same procedure to write about things differently from your own point of view. From reading various blogs in your niche, you can generate and record ideas for future posts or follow up articles on your own past blog posts.
6) Become an expert in your niche:
As I mentioned in the point above about answering questions from your readers would be really easy if you are an expert in your niche or have an open mind to learn about new things about it. But before they ask any question, you need to prove you have a good knowledge by writing authoritative posts which pack some solid content.
Reading and following a lot of blogs in your niche would help you understand, what works and what doesn’t. Skimming through a lot of feeds daily would help you a lot in generating ideas for posts.
The day you are able to engage readers in this activity, you can safely assume that you have decent knowledge about the niche and now you can move towards more ambitions projects.
7) Create resourceful posts:
Take a Pledge. Pledge that you would invest time for creating at least one resources related post for your readers every week. If not every week then every fortnight. These are the kinds of post that have the highest rate of success among your readers and social media. Not only will this a source of perpetual traffic, but also would be accessed and bookmarked the most.
I have written just one resources post last year about Top 50 YouTube Tools and Resources on the web. I examined my traffic and feed stats for the last 4 months and I have seen that this post has been most visited and clicked on through all these months, and brings in traffic from search engines and social media alike. I now think If I had invested time in writing resources post every week for last 3 months, I would have a much better traffic flow and subscriber base.
8)Create backup for the unseen future:
When I speak about back up, I am talking about 2 things. The literal backing up of your blog and creating content for the future for days you just cant find time to post.
I learned a very important lesson a very hard way last year, when I almost lost my blog to a server crash. I moved from a cheap web host to a reliable host after that but the damage had already been done. I was able to recover all my posts, but lost all comments and had to re-upload all the pictures in the post. Make sure you back up your blog atleast once per week so that in case something goes wrong you would have things backed up and you would not lose out on all the hours of time you invested in writing for your blog. I have written a guide about backing up your blog, if you are interested in knowing the process.
There are days when you would not be able to find time to post. Either you have some important business to attend to or you have a writers block. One way or the other, in order to stick to a schedule you would need to post something. According to the resolve of being an A-List blogger you can’t just post anything. So for such a rainy day, keep some posts in your arsenal, that can be posted anytime. Make sure they are the kind that provide value and can be posted anytime.
A very good example of such posts would be resource posts that have very few resources, like 3 or 5 resources about your niche. But not only would you not break the schedule but also provide some valuable content to your readers. Your regularity would be appreciated in the long run.
9) Create a strong social presence:
2007 was the year of Social Media. Bloggers who were aware about this at the beginning of the year, not only strengthened their social profiles but also capitalized on their reach on these networks. A strong social network presence would help you build a brand name for your blog and for you as well, and get boatloads of traffic.
To build a good presence, you should at least dedicate a couple of hours for your favorite social bookmarking and networking sites, submit good content and connect with fellow bloggers and people who like the same stuff you do. A strong social presence give boost to your traffic and branding in more ways than you can imagine.
10) Encourage Readers to Subscribe and Stay:
Getting readers is easy compared to the task of making them stay. First, You are doing nothing wrong, if you ask visitors of your blog to subscribers 2-3 times on the blog, or maybe use some tricks to get their attention for subscription. You work hard to create content and you can tell the readers that subscribing would help them to stay updated with more good content that is in the pipe line, so that they don’t miss it. You can use subscriptions encouragement plugins or can ask visitors to subscribe manually by posting the link in between the posts, which reminds me, do subscribe to this blog, if you would like to get good tips about Blogging, Technology and Social Networking.
I have lost boatloads of subscribers when my blog crashed. I needed to work even more to get those 200+ subscribers back. This is something that isn’t common but you should prepare for it. There are many plugins that can spice up your feeds. In the feed you can remind the readers, that you are a good content producer and if there is no activity on the blog for a couple of days, they shouldn’t just go ahead and unsubscribe, but wait, as time interval in between indicates a great post in the making. You can use these words to encourage present subscribers to stay.
Following any and all of these resolutions would take your blog to a higher level in all the “terms” we use to measure the blogs success. This is not a compiled list of resources, but something I have learned and shared with you to help you in a little way I can, to propel your blog to the next level.
If you think any more tips that may benefit bloggers, please feel free to share them in the comments!
If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my Full RSS feed. Join the Discussions about Blogging and Social Networking in the Forum.Thanks for visiting!
Posted in Blogging, Social Networking, Tips and Tricks | 12 Comments »
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 |
This post is a part of “Group Writing Project at Daily Blog Tips“
Speaking about the goals for 2008, I would like to let my present readers know where this blog would be heading. As you know this blog focuses on tips about Blogging, Technology and Social Media and doesn’t have a razor sharp niche. So my readers are distributed, but they are exactly the people who I want to connect with, because they have similar interests like mine. One of the commitments for 2008 is that posting schedule will be well planned and would be followed religiously,unlike in 2007. Its best to put down the numbers on the table as it helps one focus better. These are some objectives, I intend to achieve by the end of next year.
Blog Stats - Present and Predicted:
RSS Subscribers:
Present: I have a current subscriber base of 122 readers, which varies. It goes up after a good post and goes down if there is a interval between two posts.
Aim: I have a lofty aim for this as I have already crossed 350+ subscribers in the past but I lost over 200 subscribers when my blog crashed and had no activity for a week. Some of the guys later told me, they though the blog was dead. Don’t worry guys I have risen from the ashes and plan to stay with you for a really long time. The aim is to cross the mark of 3000 RSS readers in 2008.
Unique Visitors:
Present: Currently Digital Musings get around 500 unique visitors every day on an average. If a post does well on social networking site, it jumps up to 1000.
Aim: The aim for next year is to take the daily unique visitor count up to ~2000 unique visitors. I am not very active in some Social Networking sites, that generate a lot of traffic. I would see if participating in them helps for a better exposure for my posts and the blog as a whole - increasing traffic along the way.
Revenue:
Present: At present I have no advertising options, neither have I encouraged anyone to approach for advertising. However I plan to put up an advertising options for certain interested services. Digital Musings makes ~ $100 at present.
Aim: I am going to open up advertising options for interested advertisers. Couple of services have shown interest in advertising and that is encouraging. The aim is to become self sufficient so that I can do justice to this blog and give it enough time to take it to a higher level, both in levels of quality and success.
Posting Schedule:
Present: Erratic. Some of my readers have actually emailed me and asked why I have such gaps in posting. I have lost a lot of subscribers due to this reason. The reason for this was I had taken up more work than I could handle, but from January ‘08, things would be different and you would see a significant difference in the posting schedule.
Aim: Follow a proper posting schedule, religiously. At least take it up to 7 posts a week against 3 posts per week on an average now.
Being more Innovative:
Present: I have worked on being different from other blogs in a good way. Building a popular blog in such competitive niches is a real challenge. However I haven’t actually achieved what I was really looking for yet. Having great ideas just in mind isn’t great, we need to put them on paper, and that exactly what I plan to do.
Aim: I plan to start some informative and fresh series for bloggers. Something new and fresh. Keep a look out.
Various Ranks:
Present: Digital Musings is a PR 4 blog. I was very happy with the progress as in the very first go it got a PR 4. Also the Alexa rank has been moving up steadily. Although some think its inaccurate, I have seen the spikes going up and down in accordance with the flow of traffic on this blog, so I think its pretty reliable and gives a good Snap Shot of traffic on a blog.
Aim: I hope to see this blog to got one notch up in the Google PR upto PR 5, as I have been receiving decent number of back links. Also, I want to break into the Top 50000 Alexa rank. One step at a time!
Social Networking:
Present: Social Media wasn’t utilized properly this year by me. First of all it took me some time to get out of the mis-conception that social networks are just for traffic. But I have mend my ways and enjoying it for what it can really offer, a chance to stay updated and make some good friends.
Aim: My Strategy and attitude towards social networking has changed a lot and I intend to have a strong presence on most of the Social sites that I use, as it is one of the stepping stones for building a successful brand around one’s blog.
I have observed, that if one puts a good amount of time and effort in something, it succeeds. So, If I put enough effort, this blog would grow as well.
What one man can do - another can do!
What one blogger can do - another can do!
Congratulations to all my fellow bloggers who saw success in 2007 and Good luck to all who are seeking it in 2008. And a heartfelt thanks to all my readers, who have been here reading and appreciating my posts! I hope I would be able to meet your expectations better in 2008!
See you at the top! Merry Christmas and Happy New year 2008!
Posted in Blogging | 18 Comments »
Saturday, December 15th, 2007 |
Everybody approaches Social bookmarking in different ways. For some bookmarking websites are an invaluable resource to save important links online so that they can access them from any computer, for some its a way to share some cool links and websites with their peers and for some its just a way to get some traffic to their blogs.
When I first got into blogging and was introduced to this fascinating trend, all I saw and read, pasted all over other blogs is bookmarking brings you traffic, use all the services, get a lot of friends in your network and viola its raining traffic. And being a new blogger, I took the advice. I started with great spirit and made a lot of friends on various networks, it worked out quite well. I have received most of my traffic and subscribers via this channel.But, the charm seemed to wear off after some time. Less people wanted to join in my network and the not many interacted, which isn’t much fun, if you are on “Social” site.
Now why did this happen, traffic was steady but the activity on my profiles was way down as compared to before. I thought what might be the reason, and then I realized what I was missing. Many people have been on these sites for quite some time and are smart enough to understand whats going on. As the time passes and your bookmarks are seem you can either be labeled as an active users - who get a good response from the community, a traffic greedy webmaster - who are ignored after sometime or the spammer - who is either blocked, ignored or removed from the community.
The whole point of social bookmarking is not just using it to get petty traffic but to share your knowledge, your reach and expertise on a subject. If you read a lot about technology or gadgets or blogging or any other niche and you bookmark some really awesome stuff that you encounter on the internet, your peers would appreciate this effort and reward you by joining your network, or sending traffic to your blogs.
To be frank I was initially shown the wrong way and approach. Its after using these networks for sometime I realized where I was going wrong. And believe me, if you do it right, you actually get to learn a lot. After I understood the approach and changed my stance and started bookmarking meaningful and useful stuff, I got a good response from my friends on these sites.
The two ways of going about sharing stuff you find on the internet:Just for Fun and Learning more about your interest.
Just for fun Approach:
First is just for fun. There are many sites that are for fun like online flash games, comic strips, funny videos and pictures, jokes etc. These are something that you can share with your friends while enjoying the great resource the internet is. Some of the sites that are good to share this stuff are:
- StumbleUpon
- Leaptag (now a Facebook application)
- Tumblr
- Twitter
Now since I have labeled them for just for fun doesn’t mean everyone uses them for fun, some use these sites for saving and sharing important stuff. These are the sites that I would use for sharing some fun stuff with my friends.
The Serious Approach:
The second approach is saving some really important stuff for future reference as a part of a research or study or just for more knowledge on a specific subject. Some really good websites to save this stuff and share them with specific users are:
- Del.icio.us
- Furl
- Netvouz
- Linkagogo
These sites are excellent to store your bookmarks and organize them in different folders and tags. They also provide an option to share it with friends, and if you want to keep some bookmarks private, we have than option too.
So its my advice to the new bloggers and Social sites users out there to start using these sites correctly as they are a great resource for those who understand the importance of collective knowledge. These sites are a road map of the web, based on the recommendations of people who have traveled it extensively. So either you can learn a lot from others and extend your knowledge while sharing it with others or just keep on bookmarking your own site till its ignored by everyone or worse banned from these networks.
So whats your approach?
Are you a Greedy webmaster hungry for traffic, a spammer or a active user who is valued a lot in these communities?
Posted in Blogging, Online Services, Popular, Social Networking | 17 Comments »
Thursday, December 13th, 2007 |
If you don’t already know the founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg recently saw a survey from Google, in which the search giant examined all of the http headers of Web. He found that .8 percent of those pages were powered by WordPress. Considering there are more than 100 million websites on the internet a 0.8 percent would mean an incredible reach for any platform that started just a few years back.
This could be as a good a time as any for any service to capitalize on the reach of WordPress, and Yahoo! has just jumped in. After Yahoo got together with Adobe for PDF Ads, Yahoo has just released a plugin for WordPress users called as Yahoo! Shortcuts, which creates small pop ups containing relevant information linked to the term. It works something like the Snaps from Snapshots.com. However the content that is displayed in these shortcut pop ups is that of Yahoo itself.
As you type the content for your blog post, this plugin looks for Flickr Photos, Maps to any locations that you might mention in the post, any products that are listed or even related news to your blogs post.
If your content regularly mentions some companies regularly, Yahoo shortcuts can bring up latest financial information related to that company.
Relevant search results would also come up for certain terms like in the image shown UNIX Pipes would pop up a Yahoo shortcut with relevant contextual search results. Some bloggers may find some shortcuts annoying and irrelevant to their blogs content, but some might really find it useful. It all depends on what you blog about.
However the best feature I think is the auto detection of relevant images to your blog post. Images can really enlighten the posts and make them more interesting.
Best Yahoo Shortcut feature: Relevant photos for your Blog Post.
Yahoo shortcut comes up with the most relevant images for your post. As mentioned in the image above the images are licensed images and when you insert a related image in the blogs post the credit is provided to the owner automatically. This feature is quite useful and can save you some time hunting around for images on the web. Also attribution issues are taken care of automatically.The Creative Commons license aggresments for these images can be found here.
Another faeture is the various size choices that one has while adding a photo to the post. It has been displayed in the image below.
Images below display the small pop up that comes up when you hover the mouse pointer on a location or address. There is a feature called as “Badges” in this plugin using which you can embed the entire map as an image in the blogs post.The users have complete control over which links should show up and if required they can just remove all the links from the option that comes up in the writing pane of the blog post.
These two images display Yahoo short cut as a pop up and the actual Badge as embedded in a post. As you can see both of them contain information from Yahoo database from yahoo maps.
In a way yahoo has found a use of WordPress while helping bloggers find relevant content for their blg posts.
Use of Yahoo shortcut Images and other contents are under a BSD License. You can read more about BSD license here and here. The terms of use for Yahoo shortcuts is here.
Get a T-Shirt for using this plugin.
Since the plugin is new, yahoo is promoting it by offering T-Shits to bloggers who use this Plug in. You can get a Charcoal gray T-Shirt with “Pimp my Blog” written on the front and “shortcuts.yahoo.com” written on the back.
I would like to have this T-Shirt as I already started using this plugin and find it useful for getting blog images. However, its only for guys who live in USA. Unfortunately for me, since am not in the US I can’t get it.
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You can see the Irony of the situation. Yahoo has released a plugin for WordPress which requires the version of WordPress to be 2.2 and since Yahoo powered hosting is still using Wordpress2.0.2 the Yahoo shortcuts plugin is not compatible with yahoo hosting itself.
Details of Yahoo hosting are here.
I think this plugin would draw mixed reactions. Flickr users would most probably like it. However bloggers who prefer to look for images themselves and have a source of getting images for their blogs would not use it.
You might wonder why my links are not Yahoo shortcuts enabled,even though I am using th plugin? An update for Yahoo shortcut guys, my blog breaks the Yahoo shortcut images and pop ups, so it looks kind of messy and so I had to remove all the links. I guess that is a part they need to work on and might soon need to send an Update.
Posted in Blogging, Blogging Tools, WordPress, Yahoo | 12 Comments »
Saturday, November 24th, 2007 |
rssHugger is a new service developed for blogs who want more exposure for their Rss feeds and help them reach readers who are interested in their niche. You can get your rss feed listed on rssHugger and it would get its own page. According to John Chow, this website is being dubbed as the technorati without the spam, as every blogs entry would be manually reviewed.
The initial plan was, one would get a 10 year listing for $20 and if you blog about the service then the same page would be available for your blog for $10. However on advice from John Chow, rssHugger is now letting any blog which posts about them, to get your own page for free.
From the rssHugger blog itself :
The community has spoken, and we have listened! We have removed the $10 registration fee. Write a blog post reviewing rssHugger and get a 10 year listing absolutely free! We feel that in order to allow the smallest blogs that write quality content to join, we needed to offer a free solution.
This is actually an excellent idea as now the service would get good exposure and has a great chance of going viral. If you own a blog and would like to get listed, you can write about rssHugger and get more exposure for your blogs feed!
Update:
Collin the man behind the website rssHugger personally checked my blog and the feed and then approved it. He commented on my blog to let me know my blogs feed is a part of the
system. You can find my rssHugger feed page here.
Join in and get your own page now!
Posted in Blogging Tools, Online Services | 6 Comments »
Friday, November 16th, 2007 |
Recently I had to face the nightmarish experience of a Server crash, which eventually resulted in the database corruption of the entire Blog and whenever I tried to open it in a browser, all I saw was an option to Reinstall WordPress?? RE-INSTALL WP?? What happened to all my posts, my theme,the plugins and all the comments? When I tried to reinstall it, I got a list of over a 100 database errors. It was a horrible experience. Many weeks of work vanished in a matter of seconds! I used to believe one has to experience something to understand its gravity, but I pray to God, none of you guys ever face a server crash.
I read a lot of Blogs and subscribe to quite a few, but I have seen this topic does not get the attention it deserves. Many bloggers are beginners and don’t have experience in maintaining their self hosted blogs. One is not always aware how shared hosting can be deceptive and you can lose your entire site in a server crash, so its of utmost importance that one backs up his work as often as possible, at least once a week. It is almost the only insurance one has.In this post I have covered the process of backing up your blog along with various resources, tools and services that can be useful in this process.
Any WordPress blog, consists of two important parts that need to be backed up separately. One is your actual blog, and other is the database. Its important to understand the difference between these two as both have a different method of backing up and they are incomplete without the each other.Some people just backup the database and think they don’t need to worry about anything, but thats not enough.
Your Blog + Your Blogs Database = Your Complete Site.
Your WordPress Blog consists of the following:
- Your WordPress Core Installation.
- Your WordPress Theme.
- Your Plugins.
- The images and files on your Blog.
- Various Scripts (Java scripts, php scripts etc) and static webpages.
Your WordPress Database consists of the following:
- Your Blog Posts.
- Your Blog Comments.
- Various data that is generated by different plugins. (like Akismet and WP Stats)
These two components together constitute your Blog. If you back up your blog and not the database then you would only get a blank theme and no content. And if you backup the database and not the theme, you would all your content but, the Theme would need to be rebuilt from scratch. Now I would elaborate on the methods of backing up the Blog first and then the database with the most commonly used tools.
Backing up your WordPress Blog: There are three ways to backup your blog(files).
- Back Up software provided by your Webhost: Almost all Webhosts provide some software to back up your Blog. You should consult with your respective Webhost and find out what options do you have to back up your Blog. You should also check with them how often do they back up your blog and if they back up just the database or the entire site.
- Copying your entire blog to your computer using a FTP software: Using a FTP software like FileZilla or CuteFTP you can connect to your server and download the entire site in one of the folders on your computer. If your blog is quite large with lot of images and other graphics you can use a Zip software to Zip it and save space, which will let you have multiple back ups without wasting space. A comprehensive guide by WordPress.org about FTP clients and how they work is given here.
- Synchronizing your Blog with the backup of your computer: There are certain softwares that can automatically sync your Blog contents and the changes that you make on your blog,with the files that you have previously backed up on your computer. Its a a automated process and saves time. Once you get a hang of it, backing the Blog will become quite easy. SyncBackSE and WinSCP are two products that allow you to sync your blog. You can download them and get more information about them by clicking on the names.
Backing up your WordPress Database: There are three ways to back up your WordPress Blog Database.
- Using a web-based MySQL database Administrative tool: Almost all webhosts provide a utility like phpMyAdmin which is a program to perform administrative operations on your database.Its graphical user interface makes it more intuitive to use. An excellent guide to backup the database using phpMAdmin can be found here. Another excellent guide can be found here. Please bookmark these links for future as backing up of the database is of prime importance. However phpMyAdmin can’t handle large databases. For large databases straight MySQL code would help. Instructions can be found here.
- Using the WordPress database backup Plugins: There are quite a few plugins that would help us backup our WordPress database. The ones I have used or currently using and recommend are, WordPress Database Backup. Another effective plugin for database backup is BackUp WordPress, its in beta phase but it works quite fine.
- Using an Online Blog Backup Service: This is also a good option. You can use this as a back up of the back up. One of the great features of a Online Blog back up service is that once you set it up, its completely automated and each post is backed up after its published. The one week of data that I had not manually backed up was recovered from one such service. I would recommend you register for one as well. The one I use is Blog Back Up Online. Limitations are 50 Mb space and its in Beta stage. It supports all major blogging platforms.
After backing up your blog, in case something goes wrong and you need to restore the back up, and excellent guide to restore your database can be found here.
I hope you find the above information useful and make the best use of it. I would ask you to backup your blog every week at the least. I would be more than happy to answer and assist you with any stage of backing up your blog as I have gone through the entire process, using all the above methods to get the peace of mind that my blog is perfectly safe.
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Posted in Blogging, Online Services, Popular, WordPress | 20 Comments »
Friday, November 2nd, 2007 |
Social networking is the 1st step towards getting exposure for your blog and building effective links with other bloggers. You might have Tons of friends on Social networks like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter etc, but do you have personal interaction with them? Having a network of contacts and friends on Instant Messaging network can help you develop a closer and well connected social network.
Having a IM Network helps out in several ways. At times you may need some assistance with some aspect of your blog, or there is a technical issue that can be sorted through Real Time Chat. You can consult with them about forums and social bookmarking sites and get their point of view. If you have a network of bloggers who are related to your Niche, you can exchange tips and comments both on IM and on your blog. These same people in your IM network would be more willing to follow you on any other social network and from there on you can expand the network gradually.
The secret to building large Social network can begin through this small initiative. Also I have started forming a social network within the Digital-Musings.com Forums. I have just started promoting it as well. If you join in now, you would be able to expand your network from the very start. Once the network is large enough it would be easier to get exposure on sites Social Networking sites!
Listed below are my IM details. Please feel free to add me in your IM friends. If you wish to exchange information with other DM reader, post your information below and start building your IM network.
Yahoo: VikramKinkar [at] yahoo.com
MSN: VikramKinkar [at] hotmail.com
Posted in Blogging, Social Networking | No Comments »
