leisureblogging

Traffic Trends

2009-07-28T23:47:00.000-07:00

Our favorite blog has made a steady progress, albeit at a relatively snail increasing rate along its 8 months infancy old age. The blog dwells on driving and car review in leisure manner, not a niche topic. It discusses general issues on self experience motoring and automotive technology perspective; consequently it covers huge subtopics to wide array of auto makers. Mostly in the format of historical chronology towards engineering marvels and the impact to auto market sales reach.

Though admittedly have a bias tendency to that automaker with characters of poised ride and handling which unfortunately inherited that classical era of 1980 – 1990s car manufacturing period. The period of which most auto makers were tinkering with multivalve engine, fuel injection and open loop engine management; a simple engineering robustness and at the height of sophisticated ride-handling balance.

The era of which each auto maker has distinctive trait and has not suffered much of massive cost cutting measures which consequently leads to recent generic mass production cars of today. Today’s cars has generally longer maintenance interval yet possess great difficulties for DIY tinkering and once it reaches its life time expectancy the maintenance cost is exponentially escalating.

Combining such bewildering issues above with today’s car buyer preference is at best “Mission Impossible” tasks. The blog received a significant appreciations on classic car reviews particularly; 1986 G class Mercedes Benz and over the time 1997 Honda Accord. As well as to some degree on other topic such as classical rare cars, old cars for beginner, beginner rally cars and my favorite balanced ride-handling yet quite difficult to maintain Peugeot 505 and the eerie flying carpet ride of pre 1990s Citroen’s model.

Now we all are aware of the writing challenge toward decent blog content’s commitments, and to make the matters complicated; SEO, keyword selection and content research, writing style for the purpose of traffic generation. You would easily spot this self personal development reflects on traffic curve; it rises at faster rate in the beginning and then tapering off later on. It was a massive 140% increase down to 40 % trough into bottoming out 1%; mind you the July figure is short by 4 days for the month.

The greatest challenge was to make any intended keyword relevant to each article, then creating a useful and enjoyable blog’s readings. Towards the midway there was also self interest for portraying the highest possible keyword within, though it was not as challenging to promote SpiderWeb Marketing System on this very blog. Or interpreting what had gone wrong as one my other blog being regarded as spam blogging, not an easy task for newbie.

Every bloggers has its own unique way to ride along the individual learning curve to match its distinct goal in blogging world. That is regardless the goal is intended for mere conveying information to share or the ultimate challenging to be the authority blogger. There you have one particular unique blogging learning curve; so what’s yours look like?

Affiliate Funnel Is A Different Way Of Thinking When It Comes To Downline Building

2009-05-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

Downline building has been around since the beginning of the internet. The offer is very exciting, let people know about your product or service, refer a few folks and presto, you are on your way to massive success. What's the problem with this scenario though?

Simple, downline building isn't as effective as it once was years ago. Sure there are people making lots of money online using their downlines and affiliate marketing strategies but during the past few years a change has been taking place. It's called the marketing funnel and if you think of the pyramid look of a 'downline', flip it!

Here's how it works. Get as many people as you can into the top of your funnel and funnel them down into paying customers. Start with a free front end product or service and then let your marketing turn those free leads into paying customers and clients. Affiliate Funnel is a service that does this plus so much more. It is an all in one business hub that shows you how to properly promote online using the best free resources around and channel these leads into a thriving downline. This is the power of a well put together marketing funnel way, taking leads and turning them into clients.

Affiliate Funnel is owned by two guys who have build massive six figure businesses using free resources and their own marketing funnel. Paul Kinder and Jon Olson have put their experience in a bottle and packaged it for anyone to check out for free at: affiliatefunnel.com

Be sure to check out the Funnel today and start to promote your business the right way using the absolute best tools on the net. The results are there, it's time to grab them...

Analysis of traffic xchange supplier;

2009-04-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

Analysis of traffic xchange supplier;

Clicksia; Easyhit4you ; hitbandit;

Traffic exchange provider has long been recognized as a pivotal role to generate traffic at minimum cost. The more you surf the more traffic is directed to your own site. Does such traffic suit your target market? Mostly no, yet for the purpose of knowing and testing the incoming stream of traffic within your new site it is quite an acceptable practice.

How do we analyze these providers for our purposes? For quite some time I have been using "easyhit4you" on my cluster of sites. Three of which are very specific niche and rich of good quality content. In the beginning I did use the provider to improve my ads impression. Gradually I found my self building more sites to accommodate affiliate programs. These affiliate sites are unfortunately do not have relevancy to my niche sites. Exactly within the same period I also found some relevant stuffs which for some reason are not appropriate to be put on the niche sites, so I deliberately created some dummy acting as sort of page slave. One of my site "Glossary" is conveyed as my e-page and I have freedom to test whatever configuration of affiliate ad display.

I even went overboard by building some my way of traffic widget to watch my own site portfolio. I put seo statistic meters on those important sites here in one basket, so now I have sort of a dashboard to monitor those sites. I might leverage this portfolio dashboard in the near future. Coming back to traffic exchange issue; I am considering to extend the service of traffic exchange beyond just easyhit4you. Other providers seem to be the new guy on the block, having PR of less than 3, whist the one that I have already been using has PR5.

Get Free Targeted Website Traffic

2009-03-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

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Download this awesome tool now: http://www.InstantBuzz.com

I use it myself and I am getting some great results. It's a terrific internet marketing tool and I am happy to share them with you.

Thanks,

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YouTube traffic blueprint

2009-03-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

This is not one of those “getting rich quick” scam method, what it does is maximizing your traffic potential. Say you have target of generating traffic around 500 visitor on certain time frame. You may opt for paid review, but it would not generate recurring visitor nor would it suit your particular niche.

Then for using adword PPC you would at least need 10 cents multiplied by 500 which is $ 50. The next batch of 500 new visitor would also cost the same amount, yet using this YouTube system it would only cost you $7 once. The first batch would cost you less than 1.4 cents, it spiraling down to 0.7 cent on the next batch {700/1000}. The more traffic you generate the less cost it would be, and so on.

By utilizing video on your site you would attract more attention and get your message across rapidly, this is an incredible Web 2.0 concept for driving targeted traffic. Another benefit would be; your site get faster rank improvement on most search engine, particularly on Google. Certainly there is the downside, you could not reach easily to those visitor using dial up modem. Yet demographic target could be adapted to those using broadband, in fact this is your crunchy market segment.

So how do you learn the method? You would learn the method through exactly the same technology; video learning. The video helps trainee to understand, its visual graphic style allows anyone to grasp the knowledge much faster. It is a proven effective one-on-one training method which is suited to everyone for any niche and even for the beginner.

Through this one-on-one video training, SteveNam will step by step guide you as how you could get traffic to your site. YouTube Traffic Blueprint system consist of four e-book on YouTube with Camstasia software which worth more than $ 127 value. There is a further bonus and yet all this valid for a limited time only. Hurry up make decision on this terrific internet marketing tool and head for Traffic Blueprint!

Affiliate programs ; Shareasale

2009-02-16T08:14:00.000-08:00

Looking for unique specialized merchandising on your site? Adsense yields low conversion rate while that of Amazon only offers 7% commission on your sales conversion. How about 10% sales commission?

We all know that Adsense works around our content to pick up a focused topic within, it then decides on relevant ads to display. For a specific type of content-niche it has high degree of successful rate displaying ads that is relevant to your topic, but this is not always the case. Having an ability to pick up a choice of product niche may help a stimuli to encourage purchase decision. E-bay and Amazon does this, yet this affiliate network offers more than just that.

Here is an example of one particular product that suits the recent Valentine theme;

Black Onyx Sleeves - $ 14.95
These eye-catching fingerless gloves are made of liquid onyx and features a finger loop.

As a starting point this network the Shareasale.com has alexa traffic rank of: 1,072 (US; 306, Australia; 318, Canada; 438, UK ; 1,045, India; 894), with 64% of users are from US. It has also won numerous awards, amongst other : affiliate marketing legend '08, affiliate marketing advocate '07, Fair Practice Award '06. and other 4 best web awards in the past.

Statistic figure has shown that those clients from UK are more willing to conduct purchase on line compare to US at 9% and 7% respectively. Though UK has more penetration, the US market is indeed a lot larger. We all know that the market growth rate from these countries and those of other developed nations are diminishing, a sign indicates a fairly close to market saturation. While those from the developing countries are yet getting into the high gear, this includes the big market of China and India. Yet most of the reputable affiliate programs are only covering certain geographic area, in this case the US market.

Shareasale affiliate network offers many features that is convenient to affiliates such as; auto on deposit, auto approval, sizeable chunk of commission, longer period of time cookies recognition, a number of exclusive merchants and many more. In addition to this there is a powerful tool to search and select a desirable merchant to suit our criteria.

source reference; belajarbisnisinternet.com e-course day 14 by Sukarto and Hianoto Santoso. Both gentlemen deserve a lot of appreciation for this invaluable information as well as providing detailed guidance on becoming an affiliate member. These two gurus are willing to reveal and share their successful Internet business secret on a free 29 days e-book course. Unfortunately the course is available in bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language). Despite its short description, it is truly a comprehensive Internet business course I have ever read. In my own opinion it may show a lot more windows of opportunity than those coming from global Gurus such as John Chow, Yaro Starak, Wealthy associates and so on with an exception to some degree that of Carrol Middlebrook.

I would perhaps consider this topic on another separated article. Though for further advanced knowledge and sophisticated business implementations these global Gurus are worthwhile to joint in as a disciple. But for now to mostly newbie we do need more ample time to grasp those strange nitty gritty jargon one step at a time and more time to do lots of practice. A good decent internet business requires sound and solid foundation.

Having stated my own resources and a glance of my Gurus comparison, let's conclude my affiliate program review. So this program allows you to see what's every merchant has to offer. Its average sales conversion, credibility and so on. And also making comparison amongst the merchants. Hence if you think this reputable affiliate program suits you head for the banner below, or above posting or on the left sidebar.

Shareasale.com Affiliate Software - $ 100.00
Shareasale.com Affiliate Software can help you boost sales at your online store. No technical requirements, and can be up and running in a day.

Learn by practicing...Start with a small step at a time.... Remember that practice makes you perfect. Or I may quote Yaro's personal term; Start leveraging from a small stream... soon you'd be able to leverage on big river (of traffic stream), in one of his traffic generation blue print.

SEO standard practice

2009-02-13T02:49:00.001-08:00

4GreatBuys.com has been ordered by State Attorney General to refund its customers to the tune of $24,432 and another $25,000 for civil penalty. Apparently 4GreatBuys.com had failed to deliver its SEO services which cost up to $90 per month promising its customer of being the top 20 ranks on search engines.

The source of Seattletimes pointed out further that there were 100 complaints around the country, but did not elaborate cases from other SEO company services. How do you do your SEO work? Do you trust those company and outsource the work for you, or simply you do the work yourself?

I would find selecting paid SEO services as an overwhelming task. As there would be no binding clause indicating a sort of mutual SEO criteria between customer and the producer to make a good deliverable SEO services. No mutual understanding simply convey no deliverable, period! Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond

Peek-a-Boo Beaded Babydoll - $ 22.95
Show off your sexy back in this peek-a-boo babydoll. Made of mesh, this beaded babydoll features open back and cups. Includes matching g-string. Ties at back.

A Valentine's Gift Ideas!

Should we really consider SEO outsourcing, how do we know a particular net company has such reputation? 4greatbuys.com has alexa traffic rank of: 1,512,548, (for US alone is 982,649) not that good do reckon? Which its 28% traffic is coming from US, the remaining 72% is from other countries. What happen to those clients from outside US which predominantly contribute to this company? Rough estimate would be close to 300 complaints, who protect this side of clients? Since we know that US has the most legal protection when it comes to internet bounding law.

Another stats for this company, around a fortnight after State Attorney General's decision is that a 60% and 30% decrease of its global users and its page views respectively has dwindled down! Apparently the news has spread over the net. Hence be very careful if you opt for SEO outsourcing, it is indeed a necessary internet marketing tool.

Valentine Plus Size Babydoll Set - $ 24.95
Sexy heart printed satin and mesh babydoll. Includes eye mask and cardboard lover's game. Matching open crotch thong included.

Link Popularity Tool - AddMe

Traffic benchmarking #2

2009-02-09T01:47:00.000-08:00

I have covered blog traffic issue on my past 2 articles, one being my personal opinion while the other one from a blogging "guru" Yaro Starak. Yaro's article emphasizes on mostly content development, blog-walking and social community participation in order to create a stream of traffic building up. Where as for the content itself, it is highly dependent of each individual blogger's main target. A popular market target with top searchable keyword has always been very competitive, unless you are really genius and Internet savvy person it requires a long time effort to become a high profile blog.

On the other hand a niche market which has high relevancy to your expertise may provide you with firm gripping to grab a sizeable chunk, that is loyal traffic yet at a much smaller quantity segment. As the number grows, leveraging on this segment seems to be a more viable choice. At least that is my interpretation on Yaro's article.

Whatever your choices and on any level of blogging cycle you need to arm yourself with tool to monitor your traffic, traffic benchmarking is indeed a task that ought to be understood as you embark on blogging. This is what I have in mind as I started blogging a few month earlier. By joining two social communities such as Blogcatalog and Technorati enable us to monitor our own traffic, the latter in particular has blog authority feature. Making a virtual contact, blog-walking and traffic benchmarking are all in one package!

Prior the social joint I followed a recommendation from a good book (similar to this Braschi's) for blog-directory submittals. The submittance has a pre-requisite preparation to properly provide for Meta Tags on both your website's title and its description. Check your meta tags here;

"5 Ultra Simple Strategies For Effective Traffic Generation" - How To Increase Your Website Traffic Significantly! by Braschi.

Scrubtheweb.com has alexa rank of: 67,424, this figures might indicate a reasonable indication on their services. For a free meta tag builder on your site head to; Meta Tag Generator, you would certainly need to learn the xml code in my case blogger code tag.

leisure activities is back!

2009-01-22T02:29:00.001-08:00

As posted earlier on the subject of bandung-leisure.blogspot.com being disabled, I have ample of time to reflect back! Trying to figure out what went terribly wrong, by digesting many protocol abound and a forest of strange jargons. There was no recent similar problems to be found, the closest one being other's experience on the year 2005. After many interpretations I finally figured this out!

As the links were still existing elsewhere, one being at the blogger which I could not access and another at Amazon. A quick change was done to rename my Astore's ID track. Accordingly as I use Windows Live Writer, I also removed those suspicious links from the recent draft. Blogger did restore my site within minutes.

How bad was the damage? Rank indicator at blogcatalog had plummeted from 27.4 to 15 out of 100, strangely enough Technoratie's kept rising steadily. What gives as such? Furthermore I have new posting awaiting inline! Hard lesson!

Now as I have learnt the hard way, making link is of a cautionary step indeed. Careful link plan should be adequately taken. More importantly not to put the whole effort in one basket! Good luck to your own blog's learning curve! There is an old proverb saying; "you never stop learning".

Technorati Tags: splogging

Intel's Refocus on Mobile Gagdets

2009-01-18T22:02:00.000-08:00

"Intel said the most recent quarter’s results, which were in line with Wall Street’s expectations, included a billion-dollar reduction in their carrying value of the company’s own investments in Clearwire."

Yet despite its waning market, Intel has decided to boldly attack on competitive notebook, smartphone and other consumer electronic gadgets niches. Market niche which has shown a high turn over of new model's entry within every distinct fashionably year period. A fuzzy colourful niche with equally tumult marginal profit expectations.

The move is just a reminiscent of IBM's attempt to cannibalised its branded product with its own unbranded home PC. The only differing circumstance is the down turn economic crisis. Either way the consumer will win an affordable gadgets! Where as Intel could still get its sizeable market chunks, eventually!

Technorati Tags: intel's new penetration reaction

Tips to put amazone's iframe inside your posting

2009-01-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

Technorati Tags: tip blending an iframe to blogger

Copy the link code from Amazone, then paste in html mode into your blogger. Squeeze as many links according to your blog width, if necessary adjust each link width. Wrap around these cluster of link codes with <div align="left"><iframe blah.. blah with closing </div> parameter. Where blah..blah is your link code.

In my case I managed to squeeze 4 iframes across the width. Make sure to blend according to your blog's theme, by unchecking the borderline and color adjusting etc.

Choose product that is relevant to your niche, as this will invoke the degree of natural attraction from your visitor by a notch. Happy product hunting!

For more Optimal blending you might consider to replace your template here "tex-free blogger templates", its free. And look for cloudy blog template tags on the right sidebar, directly above traffic feed.

My way

2009-01-08T20:40:00.000-08:00

Every blogger has its own unique path to success. Frank Sinatra had its own way, so did the so called "Guru". My own path was and is still primary on content. Once you have set your horizon, you need to be able to position your self to test every opportunity, every mistake. Blogging could be much like marketing effort, that is if the intention is to monetize.

You don't know the mistake till you make one. Along the journey of my path has recently crossed one hurdle. My genuine intention was to ease my visitor to navigate my Amazone-Astore. It;s a 9 pages long within a frame inside my posting, consisting of few categories product. I have made direct links to each category within the writing right above astore. Alas the fuzzy spam algorithm falsely detect it as a robot induced spam.

It has been a week now and it still could not be restored. And this is one blog of a few that I have put a lot of effort as a newbie. 4 months of solid hard work to put everything on it may become vanish, due to my inability to absorb new jungle of internet jargons. Let alone the grey area encompassing third party's in-house rules.

I have been enjoying to see my traffic developed by joining communities like :

Technorati
Blogcatalog
Mybloglog
Travellerspoint

And do a bit of traffic analysis on ;

Alexa
Google
Shinystats

My stream of traffic though, has not converged as yet into quality one! I am still working on it, as much as I learn how to monetize the blog. See my spam blogging story!

Technorati Tags: blogging tips,hurdle,my way

Intro: SpiderWeb Marketing System

2009-01-06T22:55:00.000-08:00

Hello,

My name is Brag. I use The SpiderWeb Marketing System to expand my network because it works wider, faster, and more effectively than any other system.

As I’m sure you have, I quickly discovered that finding leads is difficult. Finding interested leads can sometimes seem just about impossible. That’s why The SpiderWeb Marketing System is so amazing. It brings interested leads to me.

If you contact me or view the testimonials on the website, you will see that The SpiderWeb Marketing System will leave you literally overwhelmed with leads. The key is what is called the funded proposal. It uses revolutionary Internet advertising strategies to perpetuate your network and the revenue it creates, with no extra effort.

The SpiderWeb Marketing System is the hottest new, cutting-edge system in the Network Marketing Industry. It was developed by experts after years of experience in MLM. Yet, the program is easy to learn through the 22 simple step-by-step tutorial videos. And most amazingly, its totally FREE. All I had to do was visit their website and grab my free system and training videos. That’s it. Other programs offering similar systems will charge you as much as $1500 for what The SpiderWeb Marketing System provides absolutely free of charge.

I don’t hunt leads anymore. The SpiderWeb Marketing System captures them and brings them to me. I’d love to show you how to get involved. Email me or visit the link below, and I’ll show you how.

Reporter vs Expert - Why Most Bloggers Are Stuck Reporting

2008-12-04T05:55:00.000-08:00

There are basically two types of bloggers in the world - reporters and experts - and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank, you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something - experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts - there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry - the Internet marketing industry - not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche - Internet marketing - and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things - email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it - making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) - your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion - your stories - and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously, you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.

Blogs, and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch”, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

blogmastermind.com

Inserting Photos from Picasaweb to a blog

2008-12-02T19:25:00.000-08:00

Tips to make photo with frame and caption :

Something to do when you upload from picasa
But, you can copy code and copy-paste code for the intended photo to appear
First line is source code from photo properties
Second line is url from photo address
Below is the code for wordpress blog :

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="128" caption="Post to renovation"]<a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/saskava.van.amboeloe/Heritage#5262112861626488530"><img src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_C9FpFyO1eI8/SQbHxI1C1tI/AAAAAAAAAQg/MUSj9YCs8WY/s128/front%20view%20postRenov_1.jpg" alt="Prior to Renovation" width="128" height="96" /></a>[/caption]

First things to do is to upload photos from your own computer to picasa. You need to sign up to picasaweb.google.com, if you are already have gmail account you are one step away. Choose account name in my case above "saskava.van.amboeloe". Upload those photos in an organized manner, assign one album for one blogging theme.

Secondly, use wizard to upload photos from your picasa album to your blog. You may tinker with this particular photo until it looks good to your own taste. Modify the size, border, caption and tagline.

Once you are satisfied with the look, the subsequent photo uploading to your blog is just merely copy paste existing code. Browse in Html, copy and paste the code. Now to tell your blog of the second photo sources, you need to take note ;

Source code from photo properties at picasaweb (firefox ), click right and copy. Paste it on the first line of url that appear on the above code ("picasa....heritage#..").
Photo address at picasaweb (firefox ), click right and copy. Paste it on the second line of url that appear on the above code ("lh5....").

Use similar method for your blogger's blog (blogspot), by merely changing :"[caption...blah..blah] ...code...[/caption]" to

I have spent hours to look for a faster way uploading images into my blog, however there is a more simple method. But this is one way to learn Html code yourself, and I could not find any clear instruction offline nor online.

This method helps a lot for those whose internet bandwidth is narrow albeit "slow". Photo resizing is recommended before uploading, do trial and error as to find a suitable resolution. Use batch resizing on acdsee or other similar photo manage application.

Other Photo tinkering by Blogdoctor.

10 Blog Traffic Tips

2008-12-01T19:21:00.001-08:00

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else's blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that's about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major "pillar" articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good "how-to" lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don't have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that's the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger's article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it's sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it's so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it's worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it's worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your "Resource Box". You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it's certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

Traffic benchmark

2008-12-01T01:01:00.001-08:00

Ordinary newbie bloggers ask a lot about traffic. As your content grows and genuinely think your articles are of good qualities. The next agenda would be ; how do we get more traffic?

A good starting point would be what is your current traffic? We need to establish a benchmark as to whether our blog could attract any visitor at all. My own experience after a few months blogging and a few blogging books indicates that first priority should be given to find the most popular topics/ keyword to start off with.

Second priority would be whether such topic is within your own capability to write decently. Either way start with what you'd like to write more passionately, it's better if you do have good supporting evidences. Your digital pictures is your strong arguments.

A survey on Blogosphere 2008 by Technorati clearly indicates that top 250 blogger write around 10 postings on daily basis. Also by signing up as Technorati's member you'll get a good indicator of your blog is doing.

The indicators measure wether you have adequate authority as well as the rank number of your own blog.