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

What’s 100% GPL(free) Commercial Premium Theme?

I thought it would be better to tell you that what exactly PremiumMod blog is all about. Not only that educates us about PremiumMod blog, it educates us about the concept of Free GPL Commercial premium themes too.

We modify commercial GPL WordPress premium themes and release it to public for free, with the main idea of creating a movement – for more people to produce high quality WordPress themes based on commercial GPL themes and make it available to public (in GPL license, of course) for free.

What’s more interesting to see is that the judges of the competition are veterans of WordPress and I’m sure that any theme that will win the competition will be high quality theme as it will definitely be hard to please these judges with ordinary work.

• Ian Stewart, the author of ThemeShaper and creator of the Thematic theme framework.
• Mohammed Haris, the owner of Design to WordPress.
• Hongkiat, a fellow Malaysian and the author of HONGKIAT.COM.
• Leland, the author of Theme lab.
• Dainis Graveris, the author of 1stwebdesigner.

Other than that, I came across a post by Michael from WPEngineer who is advising his readers that they shouldn’t use stolen premium themes. Well, I completely agree with him and the reasons are -

1. The efforts of the theme designer should be rewarded with some money. It takes lot of time and effort to develop a wonderful theme that can be called a premium theme. If the developer will get his share of money, i’m sure they’ll produce even better quality themes which will only help you.
2. Pirated theme can most likely be infected with spyware – As told by Michael, his friend’s stolen theme had code which was coded with sites to two spam links. If someone can put link to spam sites, then you can imagine that they can be linked to the spyware as well.
3. Even better – Why use them when we have free premium mod themes available on internet?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Attention span

Is the amount of time a person is able to stay focused on a certain task without becoming restless. According to Wikipedia the estimates for the length of human attention span range from 3 to 5 minutes per year of age in young children, to a maximum of around 20 minutes in adults. Combining what we already know about attention span and how the human mind works, I suggest that writing process should be punctuated with periodic activities. Your hippocampus will fill up after about 20 minutes and needs a break to regroup and store the information.  So every 20 minutes take a short break, let’s say 5 minutes.  During your break, try to move your body a little and fully relax your mind, try to think about something else. These breaks not only do not decrease your productivity, but enhance it.

Here is a good way to make the process of writing work for you:

-Write in spurts. Write for about a 15-20 minutes, than take a two to five minute break from it.
-During your break stand up from your chair, move your body, stretch and relax your mind.
-Really turn your mind on full for each of the spurts. Get the most of it. Be active, involved, and thinking.

Make your mind work for you, don’t work against it.

Have a pleasant stretch Mak! :)

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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

1. Irregular Posts – This blog has done well enough compared to the amount of efforts that I’ve put to build the traffic and subscribers on this blog. What ever success that this blog has received has been because of some decent seo tricks and web usability tricks. Not that I’m happy with what I have right now, its just that I always wanted to see a bigger and active community around this blog and the biggest reason for that is that I’ve been very irregular with my blog posting.

2. Not taking care of the readers properly – I’m ashamed of myself for not taking care of all my readers by not giving the proper attention to this blog. There were times when a community started growing on this blog, however because of not getting the proper attention, it never really grew at a good pace.

3. Not promoting the blog properly – Another mistake that I did was not to write the social media focused article, that way I couldn’t bring the readers of same interest under one roof i.e. Blog Design Studio.

4. No Comments – I have to say that I’ve been a bad commenter. I completely believe in the power of comments, however being a silent reader I’ve not leveraged the power of comments. Not only that, I was even lazy to comment back on the comments that you guys left.

5. Relationship with readers – That’s another area that I should have worked on. This was one of the biggest reason because of which the community around Blog Design Studio couldn’t grow at all.

I realize my mistakes and I’m working hard on them to fix up these problem areas. In the next post I would mention that how I’m trying to counter these mistakes. Wish me luck!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

While we can’t ever say that things will never change in our algorithms, we do not expect this to change again. If it does, I’ll try to let you know.

This statement comes from Matt Cutts and most likely it seems that Google isn’t planning to change this feature of the algorithm anytime soon. If that’s the case then it will be really beneficial for all of us to leave comments on various blogs. Although, this goes as negative for your own blog too, however we can easily balance it out by leaving comments on other blogs.

Well, this change will surely attract bloggers to use services like Disqus & IntenseDebate. These services have Javascript based comment forms and thus the link love will not be shared. Will you install any plugin of such sort to ensure that your PageRank flows in the right manner?

Anyway, if you didn’t find any other good reason to leave comments, here’s one for you! Leave comment on the competitor’s blog and you’d gain, he’ll gain as he’s getting comments and that’d benefit both of you [Evil Grin]

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

I was pretty surprised to see this post coming from Enk as he himself writes on a blog that is run by him in partnership with Abhishek. Then I realized that he was actually showing the other side of the coin. He has listed the points where many bloggers will tend to fight on various points, however I believe that those points can be easily tackled by various ready made solutions or can be easily ignored against the benefits that one gets by partnering with other bloggers.

1. Discouragement – Enk gave an example to explain him point that one of the blogger may discourage you to take some step that may be beneficial for the blog. I believe that this can be easily tackled as every decision should be taken for the benefit of the blog and not to satisfy one’s ego. If there is any doubt, then the step can be easily discussed with more experienced bloggers in that niche.

2. Revenue sharing – It’s been noted that more number of posts and more inflow of posts will ensure that the traffic will increase on the blog with right marketing strategies and good seo techniques. More traffic will increase the revenue as well and that can be easily shared between bloggers or one may use various multiple author ad plugins like AdShare.

3. Communication issues – This is one point that I will agree to an extent. There are times when it becomes critically important to have the other partner ready, although in many cases it may not be possible. However, it really can’t stop any one from having the partnership. Certain guidelines can be set in order to ensure that everyone is on the same page and if the people you are working with are sensible and grown-ups, you should really not face any problem at all.

There are various other points that can be picked up and discussed, however I believe that one should really focus on the positive points of having a blog partner. As far as issues are concerned, one can easily handle them if certain guidelines are set before hand and everything is written down somewhere safe for future reference.

What are your thoughts about this topic? Do you think one should partner or shouldn’t partner in starting and building up a blog?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Important question – Why is Google doing so?

Most likely the answer is that Google is experiencing lots of spam clicks as there are many click-fraud networks going on and Google wants to counter them by ensuring that they approve only legitimate publishers and not the click-fraud group members.

I’m legitimate! why aren’t they approving my Adsense account?

Google will give you the reasons for not approving your account, however if they haven’t; send them an email (don’t use all caps ever in any of your email, it’s never considered as polite) and ask for the reasons that were considered as negative for your blog. Remember! they are not your slaves, so you should always keep your tone polite enough. However, I would suggest that you should at least keep these points clear before you even apply for your Adsense account -

1. Top level domain will always benefit you – A top level domain name will leave a positive impression on reviewers mind as that shows that you are serious about your blog/website venture.

2. Try to have at least 30 blog posts – There are many bloggers who’d say that around 10-15 posts should be fine, however I would say that it doesn’t harm if you have some extra posts written and published as it’ll only shift you towards account approval and not towards account denial. Try to publish high quality posts and not just the rants against a person or service. What say harsh?

3. Don’t use black-hat seo tricks – Google is strict against black-hat seo tricks and even bans them from its search index. If at all you know those tricks, simply avoid them as they’d not leave good impression on the reviewer.

4. Submit your sitemap to Google webmaster tools – I’ve already written that how can you create a sitemap and integrate it in your blog. After you’re done with creating sitemap for your blog, you should go ahead and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. That will also ensure that you are serious about your blog and are interested in seeing that how it ranks in Google. It will also help you in improving your blog accordingly.

5. Have mandatory pages on your blog – There are many pages on a blog that are considered as a must and if you don’t have those pages, possibilities are that the reviewer will think that the blog/website is not complete and may think that it’s under construction. I would suggest that one should have these pages for sure -

a) About blog and its purpose.
b) About page of the author(s) of the blog, if possible put mug-shots as well.
c) Contact page – you don’t need to reveal your email address, you can always use some plugin for contact form.

In short, I wanted to convey that it would be nice if you’d show that you have an active site and a budding community around your website or blog. Your blog should also convey the message that you are not one of the spammers and that you are not trying to game the system.

Do you have any clue as to why Google is getting strict about approving Adsense accounts and if you have come across any other tip ?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

It may sound like that we don’t have many subscribers however, I’ve really not done enough work on this blog to gain that many subscribers too. I’ve just stuck to basics that I’m putting here and will also put other practical tips that other bloggers have used to ensure that they get more and more number of subscribers.

Increase your blog subscriber base

1. Niche blogs enjoy more number of subscribers – It has been noticed that if you have a blog on one particular topic/subject then you’d definitely get more number of bloggers. Blog Design Studio focuses specifically on WordPress & Blogging related tips and that’s why we’ve got these many subscribers and that too without much efforts.

2. Write posts regularly – I’ve kept a low pace of posts on this blog and normally I post not more than 4-5 posts in a week. Although, I’ve got plans to post more and more posts on it as I’ve noticed that the more posts you publish, you’d attract more subscribers as most of the subscribers are interested in a particular topic and want more and more information about it.

3. Don’t forget to add the value in the posts – If you really want to increase the subscriber base, then you should ask these questions every time you decide to write a blog post -

1. Will this add value for my subscribers?
2. Will this post serve the purpose for the new visitor and will it make sense to them?
3. Am I bringing a new perspective to this news?

The moment you’ll take care of these questions in your blog post, you’ll definitely churn out a high quality post that’ll attract readers and in turn they’ll become the subscribers. If there is any blog that I’d consider

4. Good marketing is a must – I’ve seen many wonderful posts that deserve digg front page or retweets that Mashable attracts, however they don’t have good number of subscribers. Why is that? The answer is “they lack good marketing”! I’m working on it, so I won’t be the best person however, I’ll list out common stuff, quotes, links from other famous and popular bloggers -

4a) 30 web design seo tips for web masters (also true for bloggers).
4b) How to market your blog in 2007 (its true in 2009 and will be true in coming years as well)
4c) Hit Digg’s front page by writing killer headlines.

4d) It’s important to be in touch and network with bloggers. You’d see that most of the tips will be around latest and “IN” thing of the year. Be active on most of the social networks, however focus mainly on one of them (you’d have to find out which one is easy to use and the one which is working for you).

Remember these wonderful lines by Darren (my blogging guru) -

20 minutes onTwitter, 5 minutes on MySpace, 20 minutes reading other blogs on Google Reader, 30 minutes checking out photos of friends on Facebook, 20 minutes checking out the latest threads on our favorite forums, back to Twitter for 20 minutes, 15 minutes following links we found on Digg……..

It’s easy to get to the end of the day and wonder what it was that we really achieved. We aimlessly drift around the web and have very little to show for the time we spend.

5. Blog design plays an important role too – One of the key reasons due to which we’ve got a decent subscriber base is that we have a good blog design and we focused in ensuring that the readers should see the subscribing options at important places. Check out these posts to find out that the role of a blog design in increasing the subscriber base -

5a) “Who sees ads” trick increased email subscriber base by 180%.
5b) How to increase subscribers by 50% in 30 days.

By good blog design, I don’t mean visually appealing and jazzy graphics! By good blog design, I mean that it the navigation should be easy and important things should be placed well in the sidebar and should be above the fold. Any good blog designer will work on those elements for you if you’ll tell them about your blog strategy of increasing the subscriber base.

I think if you would follow what I’ve written above and what you’d read in the links that I’ve mentioned in this blog post, you’d really be able to increase the blog subscriber base to the level you want to see. There is no other rocket science involved and no computer algorithms are required! It’s pretty simple and yet complicated, so the choice is yours! Don’t lose your focus and keep blogging with a plan in mind and you’d be one of popular blogger on charts!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

It was 10:42 AM (please don’t bother about seconds), Twitter timeline gets updated (Don’t forget to imagine it like a movie ad) and the world savior appears! Well, Not really! I simply came across a tweet (follow me here) by one of my friend that read – “You want to succeed in Business and in Life? Do it fucking now.”.

Movie Begins!

Don’t you think that we need to write these last four words of previous paragraph on a big poster and put it on the wall standing tall and straight (unless you prefer to make houses like Leaning tower of Pisa). How many times have you seen someone get back to full time job after they take the freelance mode? I’m sure – one or two at least!

Question – Why?
Answer – Lack of discipline!

As bloggers, freelancers we tend to become procrastinators as we bask on the newly found freedom. This procrastination is out of sheer laziness and even though we all know that it will not help the business or blog, we tend to follow the same path and we end up delaying things. At the end of the day, we are left with a To-Do list that looks impossible to finish and what do we say to ourselves – “First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll finish this first and then will take up anything else” and guess what, cycle continues!

Soon after that, we start realizing the importance of discipline (better, the sooner you learn and if you haven’t realized it till now – then listen to me!) and the question changes –

Question – I don’t get any time for other things in life! How can I fix this?
Answer – Do it fucking now!

Simple enough! Isn’t it? We need to learn the importance of discipline in life; actually most of us already know this fact, we just delay in accepting this. Followed by, the “act now” tip; I would also suggest “smart work”. If I would start writing all the tips on how to be productive, then I’ll end up writing a blog post that’ll be over 1000 words, however by linking to already written tips (read: smart work) – I’m sure I’ll save lot of sweat.

1. Productivity tips for a chronic procrastinator?  - It’s a forum thread and an awesome one at that! It’s got loads of tips and experiences of many entrepreneurs. Learn from their experience!

2. Productivity 101 by Steve Pavlina – Without a doubt – one of the best blogs you’ll ever read on this earth. Steve shares his productivity tips in this blog post.

3. Seven productivity tips for people that hate GTD – Of course, this is in contrast to this post, still serves the same purpose – increasing productivity thus improving blog/business.

4. 5 Millions tips for improving your productivity! – Google it!

In short – this whole post was about how you should act instantly on the work you get and get it done. This will generate more passion as you’ll see your business grow and that’ll reflect on your work quality as well. Eventually things will be complete before time and you’ll have lot of time in hands for things (thus solving the problem we had originally) all this will increase your blog business too!

The End!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink