I have finished my first html template. It’s not awesome, but I like it, it’s clean and simple. Here’s a preview of it:
As you can see it’s quite simple, sidebar in the left side, content in the right side, header on top. I provide a psd with it so it can be customized very easy if you want.
I’m waiting for your comments about it!
It’s great to be popular on different social medias, you can get huge traffic from them. I was writing here
how important is building your profile and how to build it, today I would like to tell you another great tip that will help you improve your strength on social medias.
Let’s say that you are an old member on digg and have a very powerful profile with many fans and a lot of activity. You have started a new profile on stumbleupon, and you would like to grow it in a fast manner. To do that you should put a link there on your digg account, a link to your stumbleupon page. If your fans are in love with your activity on digg, they will like what you will do on stumbleupon too, so if they have profiles there you’ll get some fans from the beginning.
And don’t stop here, make more profiles to other social medias, like mixx, propeller, reddit and do the same thing! After that submit daily some great news and you’ll see the traffic coming.
I’ve started writing an e-book about blogging and I stopped at this chapter – “Why blog and not website?”. There are pros and cons regarding this subject. Blogs are the last trend, that’s for sure, but are they better
than websites, pointing their usability, interface, user-friendly?
The first thing that comes in my mind is that blogs are pretty cheap, the script is free and a .com domain is not more than 10$. About websites, it may be a little hard to make a great one. Some months ago I started a project called PcPedia.net. It’s a news website that runs on the cms called Joomla and it was very difficult to modify it the way I wanted.
Many people would tend to say that a website is more professional than a blog, but I think that they are wrong. Take a look at TechCrunch – a very successful blog and professional too.
Another great plus for the blogs is that they look more user-friendly and are not so hard to be a little personalized. You know what a typical blog is, one or two sidebars and the content in the middle. By clicking on a post’s title you are able to write a comment. Nothing hard here, but an website can sometimes be tricky.
But what do you think? It’s better to have a blog or a website?
Today I would like to talk about this great blog as the blog’s owner asked me. Techathand.net is a blog about technology and blogging tips as I saw. I find it very interesting because I am a tech addict and blogging is my passion so it fits perfectly to me.
The blog’s domain name is very good and easy to remember so it can assure many direct visits if the content is good, and it is. Even if the blogger is from Saudi Arabia, he has an excellent English and great ideas!
About the template, I can’t say that is extremely good, but it’s ok, it doesn’t disturb me. As an advice, I would change its sidebars a little, fill them with a color different from the background’s one. But this is optional, the content is the most important aspect at a blog, and as I said earlier, on Techathand.net you can find some interesting posts.
Congrats to the blogger!
This is the last day until the new Adsense TOS will come into effect so if you use Adsense to monetize your blog, you should make a privacy policy page. Here is the model:
Privacy Policy for ____.com
The privacy of our visitors to ____.com is important to us.
At _____.com, we recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use visit _____.com, and how we safeguard your information. We never sell your personal information to third parties.
Log Files
As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as AOL or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site.Cookies and Web Beacons
We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site. This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to some of our features, such as forums.We also use third party advertisements on ____.com to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP , the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).
You can chose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.
Don’t forget that this isn’t something optional. I don’t know what will happen if you won’t do this but who knows, personally I don’t want to lose my adsense account.
Driving traffic to your blog is very important, I agree with that, but every new blogger should know that
at the beginning, subscribers are more important than traffic. You know .. visitors come and leave, subscribers read you every day and it’s very important to build a community, and have strong connections with your readers. So how do you convert traffic to subscribers?
Yes, this is a must. Nobody will ever come back on a blog that has poor content and nothing interesting. I know, you can’t have 100% original content, the blogosphere is immense and the internet too but you should say the things in a different way, be unique with something, come with something new! And don’t forget, many bloggers think that there’s a rule to write daily, like many posts per day. This is completely wrong. It’s better two write 3 awesome posts/week than 15 so and so posts/week.
So you have great content, and your readers want to subscribe at your blog, but it’s pretty difficult to find the subscriptions button or the box where they have to enter their e-mail. You should make this two things very visible. Look at my blog, the top part of my sidebar is reserved for these, but don’t believe me, take a look at other succesful blogs like problogger. Or at the end of your article you could write something like “If you liked this post, please subscribe” and include a link to your feed there.
We all like free stuff, don’t you? So this is a great tip to increase your subscribers number. You could offer an ebook written by you (a 50 pages one should be ok) or a free review on your blog. As I said, everyone loves free stuff! And if you have great content, that readers will remain subscribed.
You can never know. Maybe many readers of your blog don’t know what is RSS and how to use it so it should be a great idea to write a page where to tell them what’s a RSS and how to subscribe.
If you have something like 100 subscribers or even more, you should make that visible on your blog. New visitors will see that and will think that there must be something good at your blog if you have so many subscribers.
