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Important Reasons why you should become Active in the Blogosphere

Important Reasons why you should become Active in the Blogosphere

There are millions of blogs out there on the internet and thousands of them are promoted on a daily basis and updated regularly. This means that in most cases there will be other bloggers in the niche that you choose to blog about, and although there your competition they can also help you out. You don’t always want to look at your competition as your enemy when it comes to blogging because there are ways you can benefit from other bloggers in your niche. The importance of becoming active on the authority blogs in your niche is becoming more important as each day passes and you should make sure you start commenting now. If you’re unsure as to why you should spend time becoming active on the authority blogs in your niche that’s fine as we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons now.

Reason #1

The first reason you want to become active on blogs in your niche is for the backlinks. The backlinks only count in the search engines if there do-follow, but nowadays there are lots of bloggers who use the do-follow feature on their comments. You should find all of the blogs that offer do-follow comments in your niche and you should make a note of commenting on these blogs regularly. The search engines love relevant links so by commenting on blogs similar to yours you’ll be getting about as relevant as links as you possibly can manage to get.

Reason #2

Commenting on blogs helps to also gain traffic for your blog over the long-term, and is one of the main benefits of commenting on blogs in your niche. As visitors see your comments on the blogs they’ll be able to click your link and visit your blog. You won’t get to much traffic from doing this, but it adds up over time and you should use any advantages you can over your competitors. The traffic you get from the comments will also be targeted and could result in a long-term reader of your blog or even a customer.

Reason #3

If you comment regularly enough on the authority blogs then the owner will begin to take notice of you and it could benefit you and your blog. As you grow a relationship with the other bloggers in your niche you open up your chances of exchanging links with them. To get an authority backlink in your niche usually means spending a lot of money, but if you can grow a friendly relationship through blog commenting then you may be surprised what the bloggers may do for you. If your blog has good content then they’ll have no problem linking to you in one of there posts, and this is when you get the real traffic.

There are even more reasons as to why you should become active in the blogosphere, but these three are the main reasons that I do it. You don’t need to go to blogs in your niche and spam all the posts on them as this will just upset the blog owner. You should comment on a regular basis as the blogger adds new content, as then they’ll know that you continually check their blog out and will make them more likely to check out your blog.

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Five Blog Writing Tips Anyone can Implement

Five Blog Writing Tips Anyone can Implement

There are plenty of us out there who are blogging and looking to become the next authority blog, but to do that it’s going to take a lot work. One of the most important aspects of your blog is the content, and without useful content you won’t make it very far in the blogging world. You’ll need to be able to offer people that noone else can offer them and you can’t become like most bloggers and regurgitate information that is found everywhere else. I want to spend some time looking at some tips you can implement into your writing so you can assist your blog in becoming successful.

Unique Content

As a blogger one of the worst things you can do is steal content from somewhere else and claim that it’s yours. Not only is this wrong in so many ways, but chances are your readers will catch on eventually and you’ll be stuck with a blog that has no traffic and no resale value. You need to make your blog your own by writing the content yourself so that you can interact with your readers. To gather loyal blog readers the only way to go is by offering unique content that is new and useful as well as interacting with your audience.

Know Your Niche

I’ve seen hundreds of bloggers in hundreds of niches that don’t know what a niche is. If you create a blog to write about airplanes then you shouldn’t ever be posting about recent celebrity news in your blog. Your visitors found your blog because they want airplane information and not celebrity information so make sure you know your niche. It’s important to not only know your niche, but you need to know what you’re talking about. The worst thing possible for a blogger is when your readers start correcting your information because it’s wrong. Take the time to write one good post each day and if you have to spend time researching the topic so that you don’t look stupid in front of your readers.

Keep Readers in Mind

The blog that you’ve created has probably been created so that you can eventually make some money off of it. Before you can make any money off of your blog though, you need a loyal readership that trusts you. In order to gain a loyal readership you’ll need to offer content everyday on topics your readers want to read about. You need to consider the different ways your readers have found your blog and then write content on those topics that are popular. It’s important to write what the readers want to read and not what you want on your blog if you want to have a loyal readership.

Reply to Comments

When someone takes the time out of there day to make a meaningful comment on your blog then you should spend the time to reply to the message. It doesn’t take long to reply to a couple comments everyday and if you do reply then you’ll be showing you care about your readers. A lot of people who make comments will come back to see if it’s been answered so make sure you stay on top of your comments in moderation.

Work with Competitors

Once you’ve established who your competition is you need to become friends with them and share resources. There is plenty of competition out there so by teaming up with a few other bloggers in your niche you’ll have a slight advantage over some of the other bloggers. It’s important to gain relevant backlinks so by swapping links in blog posts will other bloggers in your niche is important. You should also become an active reader and commenter on your competitions blogs as you’ll gain backlinks from your comments.

Writing is a huge part of blogging and if you think you’ll be able to get away without writing much content then you have another thing coming. Blogging is all about being able to offer readers useful content to read on a daily basis, so before you commit to blogging make sure you’re ready to write lots of content. All of these tips can be implemented immediately as long as you have the time, but if you don’t have the time for this then I recommend leaving blogging along and stick with static websites.

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If You Sell Products or Services Online You Need A Shopping Cart

If You Sell Products or Services Online You Need A Shopping Cart

The shopping cart is a vital part of any ecommerce site. A shopping cart allows your site visitors to browse your site, buy products or services and have a place to hold items while they continue to browse.

A shopping cart is a software application that gives your customer freedom to browse, to add or delete products from a virtual shopping cart and to see a running total of how much they have selected in dollar amount.

A shopping cart integrates with the rest of your site. A shopping cart may have links that allow the customer to search your site for specific items, see what is in their cart, even save their cart’s contents for later.

Shopping carts are designed in many programming languages. You can run a shopping cart on many different servers such as the Windows Web servers, Unix, and others. You can also place the shopping cart on your own web Server by transferring the files using any FTP program.

A shopping cart typically includes a database for storing information such as your product description; customer data, order information and can display this information for the customer on pages such as product detail page, checkout page, etc. Shopping carts also have an administration area where you can manage your store such as adding product, set up shipping and payment options, or process orders.

There are two parts or components to the shopping cart – the part that the customer sees, called the storefront and the administrative section where the owner manages the store. Features of a shopping cart will vary from one shopping cart company to another.

Basic features that most shopping carts should have are: A catalog of products, a search feature to locate items easily, a customer service area where customers can get help locating or buying products, special pages such as sales, featured products, a specific brands.

The administration section of the shopping cart is where the owner manages the store and should include general settings such as product, categories, currency, date format, language etc. and a module for creating and editing products, a place for managing product categories, and a section for managing options such as color or size. Another section that is important is the price setting and changing area. There also needs to be a module for managing orders such as those that need processing, those that are pending, and those that have shipped as well as a returns section.

Now that you know a little bit more about the shopping cart, you can understand just how important it is to have a shopping cart on your Website if you are selling products or services.

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Some Methods for getting Activity on your New Forum

Some Methods for getting Activity on your New Forum

If you’ve made the decision to make a forum then I must warn you that you’re looking at a long road ahead and you can’t give up. It takes a little while to get a new forum off the ground, but once you do then it basically runs on autopilot and earns you money. There is no limit to how big a forum can become either and that’s the great thing about starting a forum. You might make nothing, but you might also become popular and make thousands of dollars. There is definitely some risk for you when starting a forum though because you need to buy a forum license and some tools for your forum. You’ll also need to purchase a design for your new forum so that it stands out from others. It can cost you anywhere from $200-$1000 to get a decent forum started, so you need to decide if you can risk that amount of money. There is no guarantee your forum will become successful which means that your money might go down the drain, but like in most things you need to spend some money to make some money. We’ll now take a look at some of the methods you can use to gain activity on your forums while it’s new.

Choose a Niche

Often when people make a forum they want to cater to every topic out there because they think it will bring them more traffic which isn’t the case. You should choose a niche for your forum and then from there start adding content that is on topic with the niche you chose. People aren’t going to join an empty forum so in the beginning you need to do a lot of the posting to get some information into the forum so that people have a reason to join.

Hire Guest Posters

There are some websites out there on the internet that have a staff of people who strictly post on peoples forums. This will cost you some money, but often you can find deals for as low as $.15 per post which is literally pennies. Of course these members won’t stay once there done there job, but it’s a good way to get some activity on the forums so it at least looks busy. Also don’t hire just one person to do the work, you want as many different people doing small amounts of posts so that the member number increases. Don’t invest too much on forum posts, but spend a couple hundred bucks to get some activity on the forum.

Social Media

You can find hundreds of social media websites on the internet now and a few of them happen to be amongst the most popular websites on the internet. If you want to draw in some more forum members then you need to utilize these websites. You can do this by submitting your forum to social bookmarking websites with proper keywords, and also by submitting some viral videos on websites like Youtube. If your video becomes viral then you could generate a hundred or so members just from one video, so don’t overlook the power of social media.

Run a Contest

Running a contest will be a sure-fire way or you to increase the activity on your forums. Some people will only post while the contest is being run which sucks in a way, but there will be members who stick around if they like the forum.

All of these methods can bring in new members and make your forum look more active, but if the people don’t like the forum then it will be hard to keep them. You need to offer awesome information, have members post daily and a great theme before you ever make money on your forum. You will probably spend a year designing and building traffic for your forum, but once it’s active and moving then you can sit back and watch the money start rolling in.

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So What

So What’s New In WordPress 2.5.x?

In the beginning, everyone was excited about the news of the release of WordPress 2.5 but just when it was about to make its official debut on March 10, 2008, the release date was pushed back crushing the hope of millions of bloggers worldwide waiting anxiously for its release. Now, the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.5.1) is available for download at http://wordpress.org/download/

However, as of the time of release, it’s still in its early copy and was still under some concluding rounds of testing the program and also tweaking it; but it is now stable enough to provide you with a quick overview of some of the feature changes and additions, along with a brief comparison against its predecessor, WordPress 2.3.x series. It’s time to change!

i) The Dashboard

The very first thing you laid eyes on will be the dashboard which is similar to the hub of your blog. The new dashboard now not only features a sleek and more focused design but also comes with a few colour schemes which has switched from very cool, cool blues to the even colder icy blue, sexy dark grey and exotic burnt orange. The other change you will notice right away is the content’s layout. You will no longer have the content on your left and the blog statistics on your right but now you have a single column which has some quick links to the post composing screens, followed by blog stats, any recent comments you received, incoming links and lastly aggregated feeds.

On the plus side, now you can customize the feeds to the feeds that you want to see at a glance. Thus, you are no longer restricted to feeds from the WordPress development blog or WordPress planet. You’ll also be able to personalize your incoming links display such as from Google Blog Search to Technorati.

ii) The Navigation Menu

The navigation menu also has been changed from the straight forward menu of items in WordPress 2.3.x to a reduced menu with a few menu items completely renamed. While Write, Manage, Design, and Comments could be found in the usual spot, but the Plugins, Users, and Settings are now in the mid-upper right corner. The name changes are Presentation to Design, Options has become Settings and Blogroll renamed to Links and can be found under Manage. Under Write, there is also a Link navigation item where you’ll be able to add links to your blogroll.

iii) The Post and Page

The write pages have also undergone complete overhauls, leaving power bloggers who has grown accustomed to the many of the advanced WordPress features such as tags, categories, and trackbacks to do quite a bit of scrolling. Gone is also the option to drag and drop items in the order you’d prefer as you could in version 2.3.x. However, you may find a cool new addition which is the media manager. Currently, it only supports uploading from your computer but soon, there will be an option to add media from popular services such as YouTube and Flickr.

iv) The Post/Page Management

The Manage page no longer has the manual one at a time posts delete or clicking on the Edit link next to a particular entry. In version 2.5.x, to edit post, instead of edit link, just click on the post title while to view posts with a particular tags listed on the Manage page, just click on the tag and WordPress will list all those posts, the same with clicking on the author or category. As an added bonus, you can now mass delete entries.

The date format has also changed to sporting a user friendly “2 hours ago” as opposed to an actual date. After a 24 hour period, it will change to the usual date format. Besides that, you’ll also be able to see the posts’ tags and publication status.

v) The Edit Post Page

Most notable change is the “View this Post” button which has replaced the “preview” link that was hidden between the title and post content. In addition, you’re also able to quickly edit the post slug on the fly. Finally, there’s a quick link for deletion that enables the users to quickly delete their posts and there is an option to view the comments associated with the post, all comments, or even all posts.

vi) The Tag Management

Under Manage, you’ll probably see a brand new sub-menu named Tags. It allows you to do some basic tag management such as adding, editing, or deleting individual tags similar to category management page.

vii) The Media Management

The other new link appearing under the Manage tab is called Media Library, which has replaced Upload, and it’s where you can find and manage each of your uploaded files. WordPress is now supporting a multitude of file formats, such as video and audio.

viii) The Widgets Management

There will also be no need for you to click on any particular widgets onto the sidebar because you now can click on an Add link next to it and it is added! Once it’s already on the sidebar, then you’re free to click and drag however you want them to be arranged. To help beginners, each widget now comes with a brief description detailing what the widget does and widget filters as well as a search function (in case you lose track).

ix) The Other Changes

First, the user filters have been improved a little and clicking on a specific role’s link will only display users with that particular role. Secondly, WordPress will now show you exactly how many comments you have waiting for review in the navigation menu so you no longer have to click on comments to discover them. Third, there is an option (you can also disable it) to support avatars straight out of the box.
In conclusion, this version seems to be heading in the correct direction which has improved over the previous version with several small, yet significant changes to WordPress. For the most part, most people will either love it or hate it. But one thing for sure is WordPress will certainly leave a lot of commotion in its wake.

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PHP Shopping Cart Benefits Your Website

PHP Shopping Cart Benefits Your Website

You are an Internet entrepreneur hoping to make it big in the online world of business. You realize that your website has to be functional, accessible to viewers and attractive to keep the attention of the viewer; but do you realize the benefits of having a PHP shopping cart on your website? A PHP shopping cart can allow the visitor to your website to perform many functional tasks such as adding to the cart, updating the cart when changes are made to the items in the cart and deleting unwanted items from the cart. The shopping cart should be set up in a familiar way and should have a textual message on each page to inform the visitor of how many items are in the cart to remind the visitor when they are browsing the site of the existence of the cart in this “non-physical” world where a virtual cart is not as visible as a real shopping cart would be in the real world.

You can make a PHP shopping cart very accessible to the website visitor by a link, such as “add to cart”, or a visible button located by each item on the web page. You can also have both button and textual message for each product on the page.

The PHP shopping cart has many traits that lends success for your business such as having the requisite information being sent to the cart, the ability to locate and execute a high compliance cart, and the ability to call an external PHP file. It is also possible to have the PHP shopping cart to have the option of paying via the popular Paypal service.

Most PHP shopping cart software programs come with complete ready-to-run PHP shopping carts that do not require any programming knowledge. The software is usually cost-effective and can be complement major ecommerce features. PHP shopping carts are usually easy design integration with any HTML editor and are usually accompanied by ready-to-use skin templates. PHP shopping carts are search engine friends, and gives the website owner the ability to accept online credit card processing. Most PHP shopping cart software allows for real-time shipping quotes and easy order notifications by email or SMS. If you are looking for a software program consider PHP shopping carts.

PHP shopping carts are flexible, fully functional that can easily be integrated into any ecommerce website. Look for one with custom template systems that will make the cart easy to set up with multiple payment gateways. When purchasing a PHP shopping cart make sure the in company you purchase the software from has free technical support, multiple currency support and offers multiple shipping configurations. You want total control over your shopping cart and having separate links from each product to the shopping cart will allow the customer to easily add products to the cart.

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Why You Should Start a Membership Website

Why You Should Start a Membership Website

Membership websites have been around since the internet began and they’ve always been very popular forms of revenue for webmasters. There are many reasons why you would benefit from starting your own membership website and we’re going to look at some of those reasons today. Membership websites are now more popular then ever due to software programs coming out that makes setting up a membership website a breeze. There are also over a dozen payment processors to choose from to process your member’s payments which help make things easy.

Basically you’ll be required to set-up your website and then from there you’ll only need to promote it and add updates. There are many choices you need to make when you’re setting up the website in the early stages. You’ll need to decide what you want to offer in the member’s area, and you should be using more then one type of content in your member’s area. For instance if you have a webmaster membership website you should have articles, reports, eBook, software, templates and anything else you can think of. People like seeing lots of options in the member’s area, even though they won’t use most of it they like knowing that you offer enough value for the money. Once you’ve chosen what’s going to be in your member’s area you need to get it done and add it in. You also need to set-up your payment processor and decide whether it will be monthly, yearly or one-off payment. This is strictly preference and you can choose what you want, but generally you should choose monthly.

With monthly recurring payments you’ll be making a stable income from your membership website and this is the goal. There is no point marketing your membership website and then selling one-off payments because then once the crowd joins you won’t make anymore money and you’ll still need to update it. I would go with monthly recurring payments and make sure you offer enough weekly updates so that your clients want to stay a member.

Once you have a membership website with members and recurring payments rolling in you’ll only need to work on updates for the website. This could be outsourced at this point in time since you’ll be making good money and then it’s on complete auto-pilot. You won’t need to do anything except whatever promotions you want to do, and whatever communication you want to make with the members. You should play a role in the communication because people like to talk with the owner and many people will also have questions. You should just make a forum and that will make it very easy for everyone to communicate.

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