1. Uninteresting Posts

Before you start your blog, think about your goals you want to accomplish. Define your target readership and don’t forget that your future readers are common, real people and that you need to write posts that people enjoy reading and they will reward you by returning to your blog regularly. Getting the visitors is easy, making them your regular visitors is hard. Write in a conversational style and on one particular topic. Don’t worry about blog traffic but focus on quality contents.

2. Ignoring Search Engines Optimization

You should follow a basic but important search engines optimization tips that will make your page perfectly optimized like:
-Your blog URL should contain the primary keyword you want to optimize for.
-You should use your primary keywords in the title of your post and your secondary keywords in the body of your post.
-You should use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts.

3. Off to a Vacation Every Week!

Write often and write regularly so readers and search engines will visit your blog more often, post on weekdays, because there are more readers and than post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts. Even if you keep a low pace of posts, say 5 posts per week still be available for your readers most of the time.

4. Terrible Design

There are two things that your blog design should not be: complicated and visually unappealing. If your blog design is complicated it will make readers distracted from reading your content. It also can slow down loading and will drive impatient visitors away. But if your blog design is simple and visually appealing it will be more attractive to your regular readers and also you can submit it to some CSS gallery site that feature great designs and get some extra traffic from there too.

5. Not Spreading the Word About Your Blog

Don’t just post on your blog and leave it like that. Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums, submit articles and post a reviews to newsgroups. You must work a little bit harder and be active to generate traffic, read lots of other blogs, leave trackbacks, simply you should become part of the community.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Well, it plays approximately the same role in representing your blog to the world as looks do for women. A pretty woman will definitely be “right” at the moment she appears in front of the people. Later on, she may turn out to be stupid, boring, or even malicious, but she has won the first battle anyway. The same goes for your blog. You may have the best of the content however if you don’t have a good blog design, you’ll still lose a lot of readers just because the presentation of the blog isn’t that good.

Your blog’s design is very important to you. It reflects on you and how you’re perceived by other people. Believe it or not, first impressions do count. A good blog design will absolutely give you a better first impression. It encourages the people to click and read a bit further and get to the all-important content. In the wide world of blogging, the content might be the king, but the design is the queen. So use your first impression and give the content of your blog a better chance to be seen by the world.

In one of earlier poll (which unfortunately is still running, we’ll change it soon) results we found out that more than 80% of this blog’s readers think that blog design is really important in a blog’s success. Apart from that there are some of very renowned blogger/designers share there views about blog design -

1. How important is design to a blog’s success? – by Vandley Design.
2. Better keep a log on your blog (quoting Kiruba Shankar, one of the most prolific bloggers from India)
3. How important is blog design service? – Performancing

What makes a great blog design?

Again a lot has been already said on this particular topic, so I thought it would be best to share those wonderful links with you all -

1. 5 Characterstics of good blog design!
2. What makes a design good?
3. Ten important traits of a good blog design.

The design of your blog is just as important as any other aspect of your business and it will be wise to plan it in your budget. In blogging you can always change things, experiment, see what works and than use it. So take care of your blog design. Start with experimenting in a WordPress theme and if someday you decide to hire a blog designer to help you out, the Blog Design Studio is available and eager to help you any time.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Last year around this time, Google learnt the skill of indexing flash based content and since then have updated the robots to index the SWF files in even better way. As of now, Google can even index embedded content in the flash files and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.

Right now, Google’s bot can handle the flash files in the following ways -

1. Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
2. Discover links within Flash files.
3. Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
4. Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
5. Index sites scripted with AS1, AS2 & AS3, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated.

This is definitely a good news as not only this will make the sites beautiful, use of flash will also help in making them interactive. Although there is one question that comes in mind – “will this change bring any effect on Microsoft?” (SilverLight, MS Office may feel the effect in near future! Jeez, I should stop thinking too much about competition :P)

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Inbound Marketing University (IMU) is a free marketing retraining program for marketing professionals—as well as marketers between jobs—looking to gain new skills to get ahead in the competitive workforce.

They’ve tied up with leading internet marketing professionals like Chris Brogan, Brian Carroll, Mack Collier, Rand Fishkin, Eric Groves, Ann Handley, Jeanne Hopkins, Lee Odden, David Meerman Scott, Marshall Sponder of Monster.com, Elyse Tager and my favorite Mike Volpe. These professors will teach you internet marketing for a week (15th – 19th June, 2009) and will also have a certification exam to test your learnings.

If you are a business owner or if you are into online marketing for your company then you can’t afford to miss this program. This is once in a lifetime opportunity to learn the stuff from the industry experts and that too for free!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Although, I think that Twitter actually deserves that kind of attention. The reason is simple – finally we have a simple (not really for the starters) that fits everybody’s needs – be it marketers, bloggers, be it business owners, enterprises, celebrities, developers, designers and just about everyone! So, if there is a tool that is attracting everyone, don’t you think it deserves the attention that it is getting?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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It was a hot afternoon (not really! just trying to give it a dramatic angle) and the jaljeera story starts from this tweet of mine. Sachin & I were having fun on Twitter and was later joined by Praval (he rather hijacked the conversation – Good work buddy!) and Ketan (also know as Keeda - he is responsible for the motivation behind making Jaljeera as trending topic & for the cartoon).

What started as fun little activity was taken sportingly by Indian Twitterati and with the help of my amazing friends on twitter, we were able to make JalJeera a trending topic on Twitter. Before I continue with the rest of the story, lets see what WikiPedia has to say about JalJeera -

Jal Jeera is an Indian beverage. In Hindi, “Jal” means water and “Jeera” means cumin. Jal Jeera is similar to lemonade and is a popular summer drink in India. It is generally served as an appetizer as it is intended to startle the taste buds.

I know that it sounds stupid, however after Ketan’s idea of making it trending topic, I thought that lets find out that after how many tweets, on a particular topic – we’d be able to make it trend. And I have to say that I came to know about few things that I would share with you in this blog post.

Some facts about making “Jaljeera” a trend

1. It took us nearly 500 tweets to make Jaljeera as a trending topic! WTHashtag was the first to tell us about this historic funny event. The first tweet about Jaljeera by me was found here (on page 80th as of now).

2. Our idea of making Jaljeera popular, didn’t really work properly. We all wanted that Jaljeera would become popular however, there weren’t many tweets from people, who wanted to know about this wonderful drink. I don’t think people were either interested in this drink or they got confused with all “hindi” tweets, or may be trending topics on twitter don’t really create the buzz that people expect!

3. All brands should be on twitter – There were many tweets which will easily light up the eyes of every marketer. There were many tweets where users replaced a particular product with Jaljeera and were tweeting their tag lines. For e.g. the tweet below is one of the tag lines of Cadbury’s Bournvita in India.

4. If you are part of it, you’ll definitely attract new followers. I found lots of new friends on twitter and it wouldn’t have been possible to make “jaljeera” a trend on twitter without them. I won’t say that I found lots and lots of followers, however I would say that now I know many of them and interact more than before and thus it will surely help me in future.

5. There is another thing that I noticed, however I would discuss it in the next post :) Don’t forget to subscribe to our rss feed or newsletter :)

In the end, I would like to thank everyone who helped us in making “jaljeera” a trending topic. It was indeed a fun friday!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Anyway, this is what the email read -

We recommend that you begin removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible, to ensure that you can take advantage of the available ad space on your pages. At the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units will begin directing users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won’t generate earnings from them once this change occurs.

So, if you are using Google Adsense Video Units, then probably you should take them down and instead use regular text and image ad unit. This way you’ll be able to better monetize it. I’m using Google Adsense for video units on one of my blog, and I was even planning to take it down, till I got this email from Google itself.

What are your thoughts about Google Adsense Video Units, did you ever try them and how was your experience with them?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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I thought that it was my responsibility to inform him that WikiPedia takes donations from the users every year and even put the donation bar on the top, to attract donations and while I was telling him about this, something struck my mind – Why the hell, they are even asking for donations, when they can give donations?

WikiPedia is without a doubt, one of the top 10 visited websites in the world and if they start putting ads on it (non-obtrusive or the ones that don’t ruin the reader’s experience) then I’m sure they’ll make enough revenue to support themselves. Well, honestly they’ll make enough revenue that they’ll be able to donate it to various organizations that are supporting various causes in under-developed countries.

This is one question that has been troubling me from couple of days and I’m wondering if anyone had that idea come in their mind or not. I understand that WikiPedia’s idea is to provide all the information for free and they are not in favor of making money out of the service; well, I’m not even saying them to keep that money, just donate the generated revenue after they are able to support them and they won’t even have to ask for donations.

What are your thoughts on the same? Should WikiPedia ask for donations or should they donate money by making revenue?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Make comments on new blogs!

The task is that you have to make 10 useful and decent comments on 10 new blogs of your niche (i.e. 1 comment on each blog). If you don’t have a list of ten blogs of your own niche then you can make use of Technorati or Google Blog Search. That certainly doesn’t sound that difficult, how about doing this task for 7 days in a row? Sounds a little difficult, isn’t it?

What will happen if you leave comments on these blogs?

1. Helps in improving the bonding – If you go ahead and leave comment on blogs, generally the blogger will also come back on your blog and will leave a comment and then you know that you are good to go as this will help you in increasing the relationship with the blogger and the better relations you have with bloggers, it will be better for you and your blog.

2. Comments increases the sense of community – When conversations are created around blog posts, it helps in increasing the sense of community around the blogs and a community always spreads faster as compared to a lone guy.

Here are some of the other important blog posts that will tell you the power of comments -

1. Crash course in comments.
2. 21 surefire tips for a successful blog launch (not directly for comments, but it surely mentions the power of comments).
3. You’re an idiot if you don’t comment!

I’m sure that this small little task will keep you up on your toe and hopefully will help you in getting more traffic as well!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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The reason is pretty simple and that is those people invest their time in socializing with people on those social bookmarking sites. They spend time to be friend with them and they digg and stumble for them at regular intervals. Now the question arises that how can this be done slightly quickly and in a much organized way.

Here’s what I do to ensure that I can make friends from these social networks

1. Add people on your IMs – There are socially active people on these networks who share their email address or IM address and accept the invitations as their main purpose is to make friends with people. Find those people and add them on your IM. Create a new group and keep all those people on their and you will have a good network of friends who’ll be happy to digg/stumble for you, if you are ready to reciprocate.

2. Focus on one network at a time – Try to find as many as people and add them. There are top digg users who are ready to share their tips and tricks. Follow what they say, add new stuff regularly on these networks and that will help you in making your profile stronger and as your profile will become stronger, you’ll find that you’ll have better network of friends to help you in digg or stumbles.

3. Finding the contacts quickly – One may ask the question that how is one supposed to access the profiles quickly enough and then find if they have mentioned their email or IM address or not. Well, its holiday season, so I’ll share a quick tip with all of you. In order to find out those people, simply click on this link and it will show you the email address of those who have shared there email address.

4. Join the forums – There are many forums on blogging. Kevin’s Blogging Tips forum is one of the place where you can find more and more bloggers, who are interested in sharing digg and stumbles etc. Apart from that you can also find out various Google and Yahoo Groups, who actively share digg and stumbles or any other social bookmarking site.

Isn’t that like gaming the system?

Yes, it is and there is certainly nothing wrong in that too. Honestly, I feel that no matter how hard you try to game something, it won’t really make any difference to others who are not in part of this game. If they won’t like the story that you are trying to promote they won’t let it reach the main page or won’t make it popular.

However, if your story/blog post is good enough and attracts people then surely it will get the definite attention that it deserves. Apart from that, I agree with the point of Alex and feel that people like you and me are the ones who make these websites popular and if we reap any benefit out of it (that too only for genuine and deserving posts) then there should be no harm.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2008. | Permalink

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