You Really Should!!

You Step It Up

As a blogger, the moment you decide to build a profile of yourself or a brand of yourself in your blog, you really take that blog in as your online identity. It’s not too different to people creating an image of themselves on Facebook or even Twitter. Quite often, people see their blogs as just a small website they run. However, if you look to carve an image of yourself on your blog, you will unconsciously step it up in your blogging career.

A Dynamic Resume

Let’s face it. The Internet is dramatically changing the way the world of employment is run. I’m sure a lot of you have heard of the “rumor” that your employee’s are searching your name in Google or are “stalking” you on Facebook to learn more about you, beyond what the self-introduction section does in typical resumes. Well, wouldn’t it be cool to redirect these employees to your blog? Well… assuming your topic isn’t on something like warez or adult… Hey, I wouldn’t mind my employees stumbling over my personal blog or ahnternet. Plus, the fact that your blog is always growing with more content and changing with new events makes sure that your resume is excitement-filled and anything but boring!

You Build Respect

While you undergo the process of building a profile on your blog, because you will be approaching your blog and your readers in an honest way, you will build respect towards yourself among your followers. You won’t become the new Internet celebrity, but you certainly will create a true respectable relationship among you and your readers. This also means an increase in RSS subscribers and which blogger doesn’t like that!

The Only Reason You Should Re-think This…

Personally, the only reason I would every re-think the possibility of creating such an image on my blog is safety issues. The truth is, no one can really do anything bad knowing your name and your age, but the more they know about you, and considering the fact that a blog is very public (unless you put restrictions on it), there is a chance that someone can use those information in malicious ways (eg. spam). The chances are not too high, but it’s better safe than sorry!

Concluding…

Again, I personally feel that especially when you are the only one running the blog, you really want to create a certain image of yourself in your blog. Without much effort, you will definitely see yourself more engaged, and your readers more into your writing. To be honest, in an co-authoring blog, I certainly feel that such construction is possible, assuming you have an “author’s profile” section with each of your posts.

And You…?

As a blogger, or even a webmaster, do you build a profile or an image of yourself on your site? If so, how? If not, why don’t you?

I’m a real slacker. With the summer coming around, I have decided to aggressively move forward with my sites. Personally, I believe that writing content is half the battle; without marketing your blog, your content really goes to waste.

So, for this summer, I have decided to up my marketing efforts with a thoroughly thought out plan. I know that doing something is better than doing nothing, I know that the plan won’t fail. However, we’ll see how effective this summer comes out to be…

The 5-Step Plan

Ten Directories a Day

I’m setting 90 days as my summer working days right now and so far, and therefore, assuming I keep to the schedule, I should have around 900 submissions done for particular keywords I am interested in ranking for. 900 submissions could probably be done easily by hiring someone to do it, but I prefer the old manual submission and link building over long periods.

Article Submission

Probably not the best type of promotion for a blog like this one, but for my product sites,  I’m looking into writing two articles per week per site. This comes int around 22 articles per site, which is very doable.

Dofollow Blog Commenting

Dofollow commenting is extremely powerful, considering you can kill two birds with one stone. With quality commenting, not only do you gain reputation, but you can also get quality backlinks without being called a shameless advertiser or a spammer. Build a reputation among bloggers while promoting your site; how cool is that?! In regards to how much commenting I will be doing, I look to target at least five blogs a day in the niches that ahnternet covers.  With other sites, I’ll cover their niches with five comments a day.

Guest Posting

I think guest posting is an excellent way to reach out to new readers without going through the hassle of trying to build backlinks and hoping that a reader clicks on the link out of random interest. To be brutally honest, I have been quite terrible at keeping this one, so I’m going to limit myself to two a month and we’ll see how it goes from there.

Contest

Before the summer goes by, I hope to run a contest of some sort. Possibly with a fellow blogger, possibly by myself. For now, nothing is really set, but I have a rough idea on how I want to run it and what I want to give out as prizes, so keep your eyes out on that.

Concluding…

So we’ll see how it goes. Will it be a failure? Definitely not. I think it will be more on how much of a success will this bring to this blog and my other sites. Again, we’ll see.

If you have any other ideas on marketing websites for a low cost without too much work involved on my part, I would love to hear your comment. Sharing is caring.

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

And the one I have now is:

/%category%/%postname%/

Now, you are probably thinking that I’m going to lose out big time on linkbacks and search engine traffic, considering I am no mod_rewrite expert and .htaccess being anything but a friend to me. Well, fortunately, I guess there were more poor souls like me wanting to change their past permalink structure and a plugin was made to help these souls. Dean’s Permalinks Migration is the plugin I installed here at ahnternet and so far, it seems to be redirecting just fine.

Simply log in to your WordPress admin panel, install the plugin, and the plugin will give you an input form where you input your former permalink structure. Once you update the plugin with the past structure, you are good to go and change your permalink. The plugin will (or should) recognize the old format and redirect the visitor/robot/spider to the new format.

Update on possible downsides with this plugin will come if there are any.

Yesterday being April Fools day, I realized how to us bloggers, special days can be perfect days to write a post about. It is also one of the few days in a year where you can do something really different with your blog. When talking about websites, the one site that probably does this the most often is Google. Everyone knows of Google’s logos that celebrate a certain day. Did you ever wonder why they do it? Further on, did you ever think about doing it yourself?

Why You Should Take Advantage!

Attention To Detail

It speaks volumes when your visitors can see that you are on top of your blogging. Keep your blog dead for months and your visitors will know that you aren’t as devoted to your blog and possibly not visit as often. You certainly don’t want to give that impression. So, although it may seem like you aren’t exactly doing much, these subtle changes can give good impressions about your blog to your visitors.

Given Freedom

As a blogger, you are given some freedom. Take advantage of these days to go “off-topic” with your blog. Do something related to the day, but at the same time, do something random. Now, don’t do something extraordinary, such as trying to pull of an April Fool’s joke on the 4th of July, but as long as you maintain a degree of common sense too, your visitors will be fine with it.

You Have Your Topic

Quite often, bloggers can hit a writer’s block and just be empty with ideas. To be honest, unless you are in some crazy amount of industries at the same time, you ARE going to run out of topics to talk about. On these days, you have your “filler”… I guess.

But What To Do?

I know, I know. As a blogger, what can you actually do to celebrate the day on your blog? I have a few ideas that I frequently turn to for my sites/blogs, and I’m sure there are way more unique things you can do on these days. Got a cool idea? Just leave it as a comment!

Unique Logos

Again, Google is best known for this. Why do they do it and why should you do this? Well, the logo at the top of your blog is always in the visitor’s browser without the visitor having to scroll down to view it. Hence, this little change will be noticed by all of your visitors. You don’t want your work going down the drain do you?

A Special Blog Post

Another typical one you can always rely on as a blogger. Make a unique post related to that day on your blog. It doesn’t have to be witty (although the witty ones usually work best), so there’s really no pressure. Assuming your visitors do read your blog posts faithfully, they’ll notice it.

Overshadowing Notice

While this can be annoying to some visitors, unless the particular visitor is in some really bad mood, this little trick shouldn’t hurt to much. Make a small in-window popup appear to celebrate the day together with visitor. There are a few WordPress plugins that can assist you with doing this by the way, so you don’t have to worry about the coding side of this.

Concluding…

As a blogger, treat your blog as your online home. If it’s a certain day you want to celebrate, go for with… with your visitors too. More than less, outcomes are positive. Come find me if things go bad… I’m that confident.

If you are a blogger or related to blogging/Internet marketing in any way, then you might have faced the writer’s block.  We all face it or at least I face it daily, that irritating feeling of sitting in front of the computer browsing various websites, thinking about what to write, what my readers would like, what would be helpful for them, and what is something that they don’t know about. Suddenly your mind goes blank. Do you feel the same way I do? If yes, then please continue reading as I am going to share some tips which are really useful and helped me a lot to avoid such situations.

Taking Notes

Create a notepad file and list topics which you found while surfing on the web, chatting, reading the local newspaper etc. and feel that these topics could be of great interest for your readers. This list is very handy when you are facing a writer block and searching for some fresh ideas.

Digg

We all know about Digg and other social bookmarking sites. These sites are endless sources of fresh content and ideas. Go to any such website. I personally prefer Digg. Search the Digg stories relevant to your niche and analyze the taste of your target audience. See what kind of content is popular and write something on it.

Google Wonder Wheel

Have you heard about Google Wonder Wheel? Google Wonder Wheel is a flash based interface which shows the searched query in the hub. Results would be shown as its branches. To use Wonder Wheel, click on the “Show options” as shown in the figure below.

Then select the “Wonder Wheel” to see results in Wheel Format. I am using the keyword, “internet marketing” in my example, but you can use any keyword depending on your niche.

You can click on any branch you want to search further to get new ideas for your content. For example, I want to see which keywords are related to internet marketing strategies.

Yahoo! Answers

Another good source of finding fresh ideas is Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is one of the biggest community driven Q&A website on the web. You can easily search for the questions which are related to your niche to find what your target audience is looking for lately.

Google Blog Search

Going to relevant blogs and reading new posts are a great way to find new ideas for your own blog, but it is time consuming. Hence I prefer Google Blog Search. Go to blog search, perform search for your keywords, and see the latest blog entries dealing with that keyword. Finally, simply read only those you find interesting to get new ideas for your blog.

So, these are some tips which I use and hopefully they can be useful for you too when you are facing a writer’s block. Also, if you have any more ideas on how to avoid writer’s block then feel free to share them in the comments.

Gagandeep Singh is working as a marketing executive for Invesp and helps E-commerce websites in creating killer landing pages and in making their conversion rate optimization campaigns successful.

Quite often, bloggers struggle to write. Regardless of the niche, sooner or later, they will hit some sort of a writer’s block where they simply cannot get out of. Breaking out of that block is not the question as time as proven again and again that people do break out eventually. However, the importance lies in how quickly you break out of it and what quality of posts you write during your break out. It is easy to start writing low quality posts, but as much as your blog is an image of yourself, you certainly don’t want to take that route.

I find myself mostly struggling to find time to blog. Unlike many, I rarely (actually don’t recall once, but I will say rarely to be safe) find myself out of ideas to post about. Why? I go through these five steps to find ideas, and I go through these unconsciously. However, you can start by practicing them consciously and maybe these might melt into your daily schedule without you intending them to be. Then, voila! You overflow with ideas!

Read And Don’t Read Your Niche

Everyone nowadays will tell you this. Read blogs in your niche. I will say, “Read them, but don’t only read them.” This is because by reading other blogs related to your niche, you start to unconsciously develop a writing style that isn’t your own flavor, but one that imitates the blogs you are subscribed to. I always find new bloggers trying to imitate the bigger bloggers. If you read carefully into the bigger blogs, you will notice:

• they are talking in their own unique styles
• they have experience
• they have their unique sources of ideas

By imitating them, you are confined to only their share of knowledge and ideas. That limits your blog and it can only be, at the most, an “imitating” blog. You don’t want that happening.

To prevent that, you should read other blogs and writings. Newspapers, online news articles, and personal blogs are just a few to mention. Go for the global section that applies to everyone. The intention here is to read over multiple styles to start defining your own style. However, as the idea of this post is to give you ideas to talk about, I will also confidently state that by reading other subjects, you will also create an idea database in your mind. Some things will spark posts to write about and others won’t. In the long run though, you will be pulling stuff to implement into your posts from multiple sources here and there to create quality posts.

What’s Hot?

You may have brilliant ideas. However, if no one is interested in your ideas, although they may be brilliant, you are not going to get much recognition.  So, you want to blog about topics that are on everyone’s minds. There are multiple ways to do this.

• Visit forums related to your niche. For example, since I’m talking about blogging in this post, I may visit super niche specific forums such as BloggersBB or relatively focused forums such as Digital Point’s Blogging section. Regardless of which ones you visit, you are bound to see people asking questions of all difficulty and interest.
• Carefully read the comments on your blog and others’ blogs. You will start to see that there are many commentators that ask questions that unfortunately, many bloggers nowadays do not take the time to respond to. This is your chance to jump on the idea and write about it.
• Follow people on Twitter. The microblogging scene has added a whole new dimension to this blogging game and it certainly is a pot filled with stuff to talk about. See what Twitter users in your field are talking about and try to join in on the conversation, both using Twitter and using your blog.
• Run a poll on your site to see what people want to know about. Sometimes, you have to ask your visitors what they want and serve it to them. If you don’t have big traffic, this may not be the most ideal option, but minimal traffic will still give you some results.

Three More Ways To Fish Ideas!

So, I guess I’m not that great of a planner, making this post initially go past a thousand words. Little doses of medicine are much better than chucking the entire thing down your throat, so I’ll let you guys munch on these thoughts for a while until I release the next three ways.

For this post, I’m going to focus specifically on migrating your WordPress blog over from one host to another host. I’ll cover the more general technique of transferring your blog over to another blog. Then, I’ll cover a really straightforward option possible in the case the control panel your web hosting company offers you is cPanel.

Moving Your WordPress Installation

To move your blog over to another host, the two things that you want to backup are your wp-content and your MySQL database. To backup your wp-content folder, it is pretty straightforward. Just download the folder through your FTP client and you’re done.

Backing up your MySQL is a little more complicated. Login to your phpMyAdmin and select the database that has your WordPress installation. With the database selected:

1. At the top, click Export
2. When the page loads, at the left side in the Export box, there will be all the tables in your current database. Click Select All to select all the tables.
3. Underneath, among the radio buttons, there should be one labeled SQL. Select that.
4. Under the SQL section in the right, tick the settings: Structure, Add DROP TABLE, Add AUTO_INCREMENT, and Enclose table and field names with backquotes.
5. Then right below, tick Save as file. Once you save it to your computer, you’re pretty much done backing up.

Now, putting it back online.

1. Download a copy of WordPress from WordPress.org. Extract it and except for the wp-content folder, upload everything.
2. Then, update the wp-config-sample.php file to a database you have created in your new hosting account.
3. Upload the wp-content folder you backed up to your blog’s root directory.
4. To restore your MySQL database, login to phpMyAdmin and choose a database you wish to restore your tables into.
5. Then, click Import, Browse, select your SQL file, and click Go.
6. You should be all set then.

Super Easy Way If You Use cPanel

If you have cPanel and your new host uses cPanel, simply click Backup and backup the Home directory and the MySQL database. Then, in your new hosting account, simply use the Restore wizard, click Browse, and select your backups. Done!

Conclusion

When I changed hosts, I utilized both methods. I can confidently say that both methods work very fine. If you do try one of the two methods and get stuck somewhere, feel free to contact me and I’ll try to help you out.

How do you successfully move your blogs over, as not all hosts are always perfect? Any migration episodes to share?

So I was doing my usual random surfing on the web when I saw this theme.

My initial reaction was, “Wait, is this a wrong screenshot?” Then I looked again and thought, “What an awesome theme!”

Let’s face it. Not everyone is a hardcore blogger. You might make a post or two here and there during the week. It is certainly not updated to really call it a blog or a face of you. However, you might use Twitter intensely to really draw your day out completely. Maybe it is some other social networking site like Facebook. Then, this is where this Visiting Card theme kicks in.

I only took a peek at the demo, but was instantly amazed by its potential power. Now, if you modified this page to your taste, wouldn’t it be an awesome online business card for you?

Just a thought. I rarely make posts like this, but I was just too dazzled by this theme, I really had to share it.

Anyways, although ahnternet is technically a “personal” blog, I still want to give something worthwhile to you guys, so here it goes.

Today while I was waiting in line for my Transformers 2 ticket, I was somewhat befuddled at a screen that was showing the movies that the theater was playing. Drag Me to Hell, Terminator, Night in the Museum 2, Transformers 2, Transformers 1, … what?! Transformers 1? That must be an error, right? I quickly realized it wasn’t–they were playing it again to help people who might have forgotten the previous story. Anyways, what does this have to do with you?

“Publish” Doesn’t Mean “End”

Let’s first look at the “posts” component of this article–recycling in the aspect of the blogging. Often times, we will publish an article and think, “Well, that article’s done with now.” It is as if you won’t ever come back to that article. I feel that such a thought is actually a big mistake that bloggers make. It is like although “Publish” is a bit significant in that it feels like the article is finally ready to be released to the world, bloggers should see it as “just another draft.”

In the world where we’re constantly going after good keywords and SEO, we often forget who we actually write for. It definitely isn’t entirely for Google or any other search engine spiders and it also isn’t all for yourself. The majority of our content should be written for the blog readers and subscribers. Hence, you want to deliver quality.

Recently, I had a legitimate comment made on a post I made back in August 2008. That’s right, nearly a year ago. First, I was surprised that someone commented on a post that old. Second, I found a few sentences that I could rework (and I did) to make the ideas easier to grasp.

Regardless, I’m currently in the stages of composing a new post that enhances upon this post I made. Obviously it won’t be a lame re-phrase or a regurgitation of what I wrote 11 months ago, but its focus would certainly revolve around the same idea. Why am I doing this? There is a clear indication that there are new people coming into this industry and often times, these old posts can get buried away and catch a few webs. Therefore, it seems appropriate to re-open and explain once again. Who knows, you may have missed a couple points here and there too!

Recycling Ideas & Not Copying

Let’s admit this. We see same ideas coming up again and again. Remember The Million Dollar Homepage? That site and the script was cloned so much it wasn’t even funny. I think it came out to be that the only one that suceeded was the original. Hah! Well then, why am I saying, recycle ideas if you know that copies are bound to fail?

No, it is not copies that I’m talking about. I would say a model to build on with a hint of creativity. What am I talking about here? Let me show you.

The Thesis Theme is a popular theme in the blogosphere, not because it is fancy, but because it is an excellent theme to build on. However, let’s be frank. Many blogs that run Thesis, you sort of get the feeling that it is running Thesis. However, you still wouldn’t be able to conclude for sure. Why? Because the more successful ones have adopted Thesis, but have developed its own unique parts. This is what I’m talking about. Starting from something and building on it.

One of more direct examples I could give you is my mini-sites. I run a lot of mini-sites that sell various things ranging from simple eBooks to tools like directory submitters. Often, I’ll just copy over the same page, change the words from one product to another, and then play around with the site. Sometimes I’ll re-order the paragraphs and other times I’ll change the color of the page. At times, if I’m just flowing with adrenaline, I’ll add more scripts and functions to the site to make the visit a little bit more enjoyable. However, in the end, the core beginning is the same. By doing this, I am able to save money and time mostly while providing the same great quality and easy navigation to my visitors.

Conclusion

I will say this again. I am not promoting plagirism and I am not telling you to regurgitate your old posts. The point I’m trying to get across is that by enhancing your previous works, you both benefit yourself and your reader in the ways I mentioned above.

If you are an old blogger, look through your achives and see what posts could still be pertinent to readers today. See one?  Read through it and see how you can enhance it for today’s visitors new and old.

Are you a new blogger? Read through others’ blogs. See what they are talking about. See what you can give about that topic? Remember, don’t copy. However, I’m sure other bloggers wouldn’t mind you giving your view on the subject. Isn’t that what communication and interaction is after all?

What do you feel about recycling ideas or posts? Let me here your view through the comments, as I do fully realize that this can be quite a controversial assertion.

Well, TysBlog actually did this already and made their own Entrecard list. However, the big downside of the list was that it quickly got outdated. Way too many sites on the list have the Entrecard widget hidden somewhere near the bottom of the page, some of them don’t even have the widget anymore, and worst of all, some sites don’t even exist. As originally, a big fan of the list, now, I have my own list that I accumulated. Plus, these are sites that are related to my niche, which makes it a lot better for me too. Anyways, let me get to the point.

I’m going to make a new list. Now, why am I telling you this? I’m telling you this because I want to give my readers an opportunity to be on this 300 Entrecard widget supporting blog. I will heavily promote this list, so for every download and user, assuming that they add the bookmark into their browser’s favorite list, you can assume a unique visit from them once per day. Pretty sweet deal, huh?

Obviously, as it is Entrecard, you’re not really submitting here in hopes of getting more subscribers or more comments, although that is a possibility. The primary reason I use Entrecard is to gain credits to promote on other related sites, which is a pretty good deal in my opinion.

Criteria

However, as I have some great plans on promoting this list, I need to ask you to do a favor for me. No, I’m not asking for your money, all I’m asking for is the following:

• Entrecard widget should be visible on a full screened page, above the fold. I will accept F11ed FireFox folds.
• No splogs.
• Make sure that the widget is visible. Don’t hide it or camouflage it as I want blogs where you can see the widget pretty much the moment you open the page.
• A focused niche within the field that ahnternet deals with would be awesome, but outside is still fine, assuming that it is not a splog.
• If your site isn’t in the first batch, don’t bombard me with hate emails. If your site meets the above requirements, it will be in it within a few updates as I am pretty sure people won’t stay on par with the criteria above, booting them out of the list pretty much.

How to Submit

Simply submit it using the form below. Please submit one form for every website you wish to have submitted.

Anything Else?

As much as I love my readers, I love my subscribers even more. It would be kind of you to subscribe to this blog in appreciation of my efforts in this mini project. Subscribers (by RSS and email) can notify me through the form above and they will be moved up the 300 list, which ensures them a greater possibility of their blogs being looked at as opposed to #300, as most people start off from #1.

Also, by subscribing, you will get the latest updates on the 300 Entrecard enabled websites, which allows you to pretty much not have to do the bad job of picking out the bad and replacing it with the new, good ones.

To subscribe, just enter your email and away!

Conclusion

I’m looking at receiving about 100 submissions looking at popularity of this blog right now. However, the more I receive through the form, the better for me and for you as you will get more sites in a list that would be viewed by thousands while I don’t have to do the somewhat tedious job of going through the Entrecard directory looking for fast loading and above the fold Entrecard widgeted sites.

Anyways, so just feel free to submit the sites through the form above and if you would so kind to do so, subscribe to this blog so you can get the latest updates on the list of 300 that really works while also getting your site a good position within the list.