Make Money from Blogs » Readers

Get others to look at what you are doing

ashish — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:04:16 +0000

Seems like a very cryptic topic, so let me explain. This topic refers to the concept that even though you are very sure of what you are setting out to do, you should get some second opinions. Let me explain with an example from my own experience in writing blog articles. I started out with writing articles and posting photos, and was very confident about what I am doing. Isn’t that true for most of us ?
However, it took some time to figure out that my posts were not sticky, people were not frequent visitors, and even though I would get users from search engines, the comments and some statistics did not show frequent readers, and I was not able to build up a RSS based set of readers. So, what happened ?
Well, I swallowed my pride, and asked a few close friends to review what I used to write and post; and boy, were their comments a revelation. It turned out that my style of writing earlier, even though with good grammar, was coming out as too formal and not able to draw in readers to remain attracted, and as for photos, the photos that I posted would often enough tend to not have a warmness in them. It was an experience that people were either attracted to incredible nature scenes (and I did not have too many of those), or those photos with people in them.
Why this example ? Well, the basic lesson is that a person should always look to get feedback from people (includes friends and family), solicit it from people, put a section on your site where you can collect feedback from users about how they feel your site could be improved. Once you start to get feedback, acknowledge this feedback, thank them. You automatically start to get people feel a bit better about your site. Always be looking out for opinions other than yours, and if necessary, bend your own opinion.

Using the TwitterCounter to showcase your visitors

ashish — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:13:02 +0000

Twitter is a pretty powerful social networking tool, that allows users to quickly get updates when you make a post. If you are writing a blog, and have good, rich content, using Twitter is pretty important to gain readers. There are a huge number of readers out there, and if you are writing content that is rich, and useful to readers, then there is no reason why you cannot increase the number of Twitter readers you have out there. As recently as the controversial election in Iran from several months back, Twitter was one of the tools that was used to spread awareness and communicate information between users.
There are numerous tools that allow you to quickly post your updates to Twitter whenever you post to your blog, and the one I use is called “TwitterFeed“. However, this post is not about how to post your updates to your Twitter account, instead it is more about show-casing your Twitter followers on your account. Suppose you have readers who are following your posts on Twitter, would it not make sense to showcase these followers on your blog itself. If you have a number of Twitter followers, it increases the chances that more people would consider your tweets worthy of following and add themselves on as subscribers. Further, the widget + site also provide statistics such as the number of followers over a period of time, the number of tweets your followers have made, and so on.
How can you do this ? Well, there is a site called Twittercounter that provides a widget that allows you to do this. How do you do this ?
1. Go to the following site (link)
2. Click on the “Generate your widget code” tab on the site
3. Add the details such as your twitter name, the size and color of the counter you want, the width, and so on.
4. You will be able to see a preview, and code will be generated that you need to add in your site.
This will provide you a widget that will show you the followers to your Twitter account.
Why not try it – you will see an increase in the number of Twitter followers.

Using Networked Blogs to add content to your Facebook Fan Page

ashish — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 08:28:56 +0000

Once you have setup your Facebook Fan Page, you would want to ensure that you have a constant stream of articles, tips and other information flowing into your Page so that your fans get stuff that is interesting to read. An important way of doing this is to ensure that you are able to get content from blogs that are relevant to your readers or fans. You can not only use content from your blogs, but even from other blogs. In a previous post (link), I had shown how to do this using the “Notes” tab of a Facebook Fan Page. At the same time, there is a limitation in using the import via Notes feature in that you can only do this for 1 blog, and any photos in the blog post are not imported. Given that Facebook supports using a number of external applications, one application that makes it easy to do so is called “Networked Blogs”.
Let us experiment with a Fan Page that I created for people interested in setting up their Kitchen Garden, learning tips and techniques, and so on. So I went ahead and created this page (link) and added an appropriate photo, that of a yellow ripe tangerine.

I also have a Blog Site called Kitchen Garden Help (link) where I put tips and other information to help in creating and maintaining a Kitchen Garden. Now, the need is to ensure that posts from the blog make it to the Fan Page. For this purpose, need to search for the Networked Blogs application and add it. At the bottom of the page, to the left, there is an “Applications” button, click that, and then click on “Browse More Applications”

You will reach this page. In the search near the top left, enter Networked Blogs and search. You will get a search result which mentions Networked Blogs.

Click on the search result, and you will reach the following page, which is the Home Page of the Networked Blogs application. Click on the “Go To Application” button on the left side, and you are now much closer to getting to your goal.

This takes you to a page which shows you feeds from blogs that you have already setup, and in the top right corner, there is a button called “Register a New Blog”. Click on the button.

Now you have reached a page where you can enter the details of your blog. If you recall from the beginning of this post, I was trying to add a blog called “Kitchen Garden Help”, and now I will enter the details of this blog in the page, including a short title, a tagline, 3 tags, and a description of the page. Once entered, need to click on the next button. Click next again in the next screen.

After this, you will be asked whether you are the Author of this blog. In my case, since I am the author of this blog, I click on the “Yes button”. Next, you are asked to verify ownership, and that is something you can do later, so I click on the “I’ll do it later” link and move on. And then, success. You reach a page where you can see that a blog has been added, and your account shows as a follow of this page. You now need to click on the “Feed Settings” link near the right middle side.
Note: In case you do not see the Feed Settings button, sometimes Networked Blogs throws up an error. You need to click on the “Get Verified as Author” link and then try again till it accepts you as the author.

Once done and clicked on the “Feed Settings” link, you will get a post that shows you both your profile, as well as your Fan Pages, and you can select the specific Fan Page to which to post to. In this case, select the “Kitchen Garden Help” Fan Page and click on the “Configure” button. You will need to do some further setting, in the case when the application of Networked Blogs has not been installed on your Fan Page.

So, you will get a prompt of installing Networked Blogs on your page, and go ahead and install it. Proceed with the steps on the new window that opens, and eventually Networked Blogs will get installed.

The process that moves on will launch your Fan Page, and if you refer to the Blog tab, then you can see the icon of Networked Blogs, signifying that it has been properly installed.

Go back to the previous page, and there will be a query about whether Networked Blogs has been installed. Once you click on “Yes”, you will next see an option “Auto-Publish blog posts to Page Wall”. Tick this option, and then you will another option where Networked Blogs is trying to get access to automatically post to your Fan Page.

Once you are through with this process, Networked Blogs will automatically pull in the posts and import them into your Fan Page, along with a thumbnail. The advantage you get is that the Blog is now registered with the Networked Blogs application, and others can also eventually find your blog and follow it if they find it interesting.
The one limitation that I have seen with the Networked Blogs application is that it only fetches 3 posts at once, so if you have written more than that many posts in the last few hours, it will only get the last 3.

Using the Notes feature to import your blog into your Facebook Fan Page

ashish — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:17:43 +0000

Now you have your Notebook Fan Page and the need of the hour is to ensure that you have more content on this page. How do you do this ? There are many ways of generating content for your Fan Pages, such as:
- As your number of fans increase, they generate more content on their own, and eventually make the page self-sustainable
- You can add links of articles or other similar stuff that are similar to your subject (even if you don’t own those links), if you feel that the content is useful to your users
- And you can setup your blog such that blog contents are automatically updated to your Fan Page

Let us talk today about how to update your Fan Page to do this automatic posting, something that will save a lot of effort for you. But how do you make such a thing happen ? There are numerous ways of doing this, such as using the Notes feature of your Fan Page, using a service that takes your RSS post, or using the Facebook application called “Networked Blogs”. Today, this article will talk about how to use the Notes feature to directly import blog articles.
In a previous post, I had showed how to create a Fan Page (link), and the following page (Information about Health) was created. Now, the next step is to integrate blog posts from the Health blog (Good Health Tips) to it. The Facebook Fan Page Notes feature gives an easy way to get posts directly. Here are the steps:

1. Add the Notes tab to your Fan Page by selecting it. The “Notes” tab will get added to the list of tabs, and you are now ready for the next step.

2. Click on the “Write a New Note” button, and you will get to the following page where there is a page that tells you how to write a note.

3. Once you click on the button, then you get to this page which is a step in the whole process. You need to click on the Notes button in the top right button, just below the Settings text.

4. You have reached the actual place where you can now set your blog settings. Click on the “Import a Blog” link, and you are almost done.

5. Enter the URL of your blog and check the box which asks whether you are allowed to get the content of your blog. Now click on the “Start Importing” button.

6. Once you can see a preview of your blog, then click on the “Confirm Import” button, and you are done. Now your posts will be automatically imported.

The only problem that I see with using the Notes feature to import Blog posts is that it does not bring in any images or videos that are present on the blog. If you use the Networked Blogs application, then it does import thumbnails of photos as well as videos, and I will cover this topic in future posts.

Promote your site by using StumbleUpon buttons

ashish — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:37:44 +0000

StumbleUpon is a great site for increasing the number of readers on your site as well as the number of casual visitors. And when I say casual visitors, I mean casual visitors. A huge chunk of the visitors you get from StumbleUpon are what we call the fickle visitors; they will come to your site with a short attention span. If any of your articles gets StumbledUpon, then you can assume that you will a huge spurt of the number in visitors, along with an increase in the number of people subscribed to your blog. After that, it is upon you to determine whether you can convert some of these visitors to more long term.
Your blog needs to be:
- More attractive and eye-catching
- Have information presented in an easy to read way
- The ads should be tastefully blended and not annoying
In fact, you should put yourself in the average StumbleUpon visitors point of view by first viewing other blogs through the StumbleUpon toolbar, marking other people articles and then studying your own habits. That will help you determine what you need to do in order to ensure that a larger percentage of your own visitors are sticky. If it turns out that you are only self-promoting your own articles without contributing to the community, it is fairly likely that you will get banned. A swap ratio of recommending 15-20 articles of other people to 1 of your own is a healthy swap ratio.
At the same time, you should ensure that people are easily able to recommend your sites through the StumbleUpon site, and for that you can pick up any of the buttons from this site (link), and then put this button your site. If your readers find any of your articles interesting, they will send the article off to be StumbledUpon. At the link above, you get a choice of icons as well as the ability to select your blogging platform so that you can get the required code, ready to put on your site.