Blog Post Checklist : Make Sense Of Your Posts

How many times have you published a post, only to find out you forgot to proofread and that many typos slipped through? What about when the links you included are broken, when you used the wrong keywords, or when you forgot to optimize the post title?
As you can see, there are many things one should check before hitting the “Publish” button, and most of us forget about them. That is why I decided to create “The Blog Post Checklist,” with a list of things you should check before publishing your post. You’ll find it useful especially for those long, linkbait type articles you publish once in a while (what I call “killer articles“).
Below you’ll find a description of all the checks, but you can also download a PDF version to print and fix above your computer.

1. Did I read the post after writing it?
Common sense as it sounds, most people don’t read what they just wrote before publishing it. This is a mistake, because unless you read your article as an integral piece you won’t be able to tell if the whole thing makes sense, if the paragraphs and sentences are in the right order, if the arguments are solid and so on.
Before anything else, therefore, read what you just wrote from top to bottom.
2. Is the post as complete as it could be?
If you want to generate as much traffic as possible and to get as many backlinks as possible, you need to make sure that your post is as complete as it could be. If you completed the previous check you should also be able to evaluate whether or not you could add more sections and explanations.
For example, you might be writing a software review, and your post is focused on the features of the software. What about the installation process? What about the compatibility of the software with other programs? These are all aspects you could include, making the post more valuable to potential readers. If you want to read more on this topic check these 10 tips to write popular posts.
3. Did I research the related keywords?
Keywords rule search engines (and the web, as a consequence). If you want to maximize your traffic you need to use the same keywords that most people use. First of all because this will make your post easier to understand. Second because it will help with the search engine optimization.
For instance, you might be writing a post about gaming notebooks. But should you call it “gaming notebooks” or “game laptops”? After using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool you would discover that the term “game notebooks” is searched by 8,000 people every month, while “gaming laptops” is searched by over 60,000 people. This means that the latter is much more widespread, and you probably should go with it.
4. Did I craft the title carefully?
The title of your post is the most important part. Even more important than the body of the post itself, because unless the title grabs the attention of visitors, they won’t read the post.
First of all make sure your title has an emotional hook. For example, you could get the reader excited by offering something of great value (e.g., “100 Photoshop Tutorials to Become a PSD Ninja”), or you could get the reader curious by making an unusual statement (e.g., “5 Things Chuck Norris Can Teach You About Marketing”).
Second, remember to use the main keywords of your post in the title, as this will help with the search engine optimization.
5. Did I proofread it?
I know you have already read your post once to make sure the ideas make sense and the paragraphs are in the right order. However, you’ll need to read it once more, to proofread it.
This time focus on spotting grammar and spelling mistakes. Here are a couple of tricks you can use for this purpose: read your article backwards or read it out loud. Both of these methods will allow you to focus on the single words, making it easier to spot the mistakes.
6. Did I link to one or more of my older posts?
Linking to older posts inside your blog is a practice that helps both human visitors and search bots. It helps human visitors because it lets them explore your archives, possibly complementing or expanding on the information they have just read. It helps search bots because it lets them crawl your site more efficiently, and it also helps them to understand your content (through the link anchor text).
Before publishing the post, take some time to find older posts you can link to.
7. Did I link to external resources when appropriate?
Do not be afraid of linking to external websites. You’ll not lose PageRank, and you’ll not lose readers.
If your content is solid, you’ll only be enriching it by linking to relevant external resources. If you mention a particular tool in your post, for instance, link to it. If you mention a term that readers might not be familiar with, link to the respective Wikipedia entry.
8. Did I make sure all links are working?
All it takes to break a link is to omit a letter, a dot, or to add an extra http:// heading. For example, if you write http://www.siteyouwannalinkto.co the link is not going to work. Similarly, if you write http://http://www.siteyouwannalinkto.com the link is not going to work either. The impact on the user experience, however, is quite significant. If your visitors can’t click on a link you mentioned and find the website they’ll get frustrated.
Before publishing the post use the “Preview” feature of your blogging software and click on all the links to make sure they are working and pointing to the correct URL.
9. Did I credit any sources I might have used?
If your post was inspired by something you read somewhere else, credit it. Similarly, if you used information that came from a particular website or blog, make sure to mention and link to it. This will be fair with the original author, and it will also be useful to your readers, as they will be able to track where everything is coming from.
One post that inspired me to write this one was 13 Questions to Ask Before Publishing a Post On Your Blog, by Darren Rowse. Even though I had read it back in 2008, the idea probably kept wandering in my head, until I finally decided to write my own take on the issue.
10. Did I include an enticing image?
If an image is worth a thousands words, why not use one in your post? Images are a great way to entice people to read the rest of your post. They can also help with the search engine optimization, and bring some traffic from Google image search.
Check out the post Where to Find Images for Your Blog to discover the image sources I use.
11. Did I optimize the permalink?
Most publishing platforms and software allow you to edit the permalink of each post you publish. You should use this feature to make sure your permalinks are concise, and that they contain your main keywords.
Apart from making the permalink look cleaner, this will also help with your search engine optimization and possibly increase the amount of traffic you’ll get from Google and company.
12. Did I add one or more elements to engage readers?
Every blog owner should be trying to build a community around his blog, and engaging readers with your content is one of the best strategies to achieve this.
Practically speaking you could ask them a question at the end of the post, include a poll, make a call to action, use their feedback directly in your post and so on.
13. Is this a good day for traffic?
Even if you have written a masterpiece, you’ll not get the best possible result if you publish it on a Sunday. The best days for traffic are usually Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. But make sure to track your traffic numbers, so you can be sure of the best day for your blog.
Second, keep an eye on international holidays. If you live in the UK, for example, you should check the list of US federal holidays and avoid publishing your killer article on any of these dates.
Over to the readers: Would you add anything to this checklist?

Ways to Promote Your Site With Small Lump of Money

Some time ago I wrote an article titled “Are you marketing your blog?” where I argued that there is a myth around the Internet that bloggers and webmasters should not spend money on advertising. The myth comes in great extent from the success stories of people that managed to create popular websites without spending a dime on advertising or other paid promotion techniques.
The reality is that most of those successful websites were pioneers on their niche, hence why they became popular without spending money on advertising. Now a days the market is crowded and you have thousands of websites and blogs even for small segments. As a consequence paid promotional techniques are becoming an important factor of any successful marketing strategy.
Below you will find 7 ways to promote your website or blog with a bit of money. You can use them to generate raw traffic, improve your search engine rankings, gain visibility on your niche and so on. Despite the initial investment most of those techniques will pay off on the short to medium term. If you are expecting to make money with your website there is no reason to assume that you will not need to spend some as well, right?
1. AdWords: Google make billions of dollars every year from the AdWords-AdSense combo. Why is that? Because they work. Adwords is probably the most efficient method to generated raw traffic for your website. In order to get started you should create an account, add lots (by lots I mean hundreds if not thousands) of keywords that are related your site and set the maximum Pay-per-Click rate at $0.01. After that raise the rate by $0.01 every week or so until you start getting the desired amount of daily clicks. Notice that at lower bids the keywords will be reported as “Inactive for Search”. Do not worry about it, it just means that your ads will not appear on the search network (Google’s search results), but they will appear on the content network (websites of people that use AdSense).
2. Site-Specific AdWords: if you pay attention to the AdSense units you will see that most of them have a link titled “Advertise on this site”. This feature enables AdWords advertisers to create customized ads that will be displayed only on specific websites. Those ads work on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) rather than a CPC (cost per click) basis, but they can generate a good amount of very targeted traffic since you will be in control of where the ad will be displayed and of the message. You can get even better results if you use some creativity when designing the ads, click here for some examples.
3. StumbleUpon Ads: StumbleUpon is a very innovative social bookmarking site that allows users to discover great websites by using a browser toolbar. When the user clicks on “Stumble” he will be delivered a website that people with similar interested rated positively. The user is also able to give positive and negative ratings to any website that he visits on the Internet. StumbleUpon also offers advertising campaigns, called StumbleUpon Ads, where you can deliver your website directly to those “Stumblers”. It costs $0.05 per page delivered, but since the websites that appear on StumbleUpon usually have a high quality it is very likely that part of that paid traffic will convert into regular readers.
4. Text Link Ads: if you are trying to increase your search engine rankings to leverage organic traffic you should consider buying some text link ads. While those text links can also generate direct traffic the biggest benefit you will have is an improvement on your search rankings, specially if the links are placed on authoritative and relevant websites. There are several places to buy text links, including specialized companies like Text-Link-Ads and Text Link Brokers or online forums like Digital Point‘s market place.
5. Direct Banner Sales: most established websites sell banner ads or sponsorship plans directly. Those advertising deals usually are structured with weekly or monthly fees, regardless of the number of impressions or clicks that you will get. Despite this characteristic a banner placement can represent good value for money because apart from the direct traffic you will also create visibility and brand awareness. Readers of the website where you will display your banner will associate the message on the banner with your site or blog. Should they come across that banner or message two or three times it is very likely that they will get curious and decide to check what the buzz is all about. Another advantage of banner placements is the fact that people will unconsciously think that the author of the website endorses your content or product.
6. Sponsored Reviews: buying some sponsored reviews is a good way to kick-start a website. They will bring backlinks, traffic and RSS subscribers. There are many market studies confirming that “word of mouth” is the most efficient way to capture people’s attention, and that is just what you get with sponsored reviews. You can either pay a low price (sometimes as low as $5 per review) to get a large number of reviews from small sites or you can focus on large players (which can charge several hundreds of dollars for a single review) that are authorities on your niche. The best way to purchase sponsored reviews is through sites like SponsoredReviews.com, ReviewMe or PayPerPost.com.
7. Blog Networks: there are several blog networks founded around a traffic exchange principle. Basically you create an account for you blog and you earn credits by surfing other members’ blogs. Afterwards you can use those credits to make people visit your blog or to display your banners around the network. The interesting part is that most of those blog networks allow users to purchase credits with money, and the price is really convenient. You should be able receive hundreds of visitors or to get thousands of banner impressions for less than 10 dollars. Some blog networks that sell credits include Blog Explosion, Blog Soldiers and Blog Advance

4 Ways to Increase The Traffic in your Blog And Make The Traffic Jam

One of the most common complaints that I hear from bloggers is the fact that no matter how hard they try, they can’t grow their blogs past 100 or so daily page vies. Those early days are indeed the hardest, because you need to put hard work in without the certainty of achieving results.
If you are in that same situation, here is a simple strategy that will certainly increase your blog traffic and make you break the 1,000 daily page views mark. In fact, the strategy could be used even if your are already over that number but have reached a traffic plateau lately.
Just make sure to execute the 4 steps as planned and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally).

First Step: Killer Articles (1 hour per day)

Spend one hour brainstorming, researching and writing killer articles (also called link baits, pillar articles and so on).
Notice that your goal is to release one killer article every week. If that is not possible aim for one every 15 days. So the one hour that you will spend every day will be dedicated to the same piece. In other words, expect killers articles to take from 5 up to 10 hours of work.
If you are not familiar with the term, a killer article is nothing more than a long and structured article that has the goal of delivering a huge amount of value to potential visitors. If you have a web design blog, for example, you could write an article with “100 Free Resources for Designers”. Here are some ideas for killer articles:

• create a giant list of resources,
• write a detailed tutorial teaching people how to do something,
• find a solution for a common problem in your niche and write about it, or
• write a deep analysis on a topic where people have only talked superficially

When visitors come across your killer article, you want them to have the following reaction: “Holy crap! This is awesome. I better bookmark it. Heck, I better even mention this on my site and on my Twitter account, to let my readers and friends know about it.”

Second Step: Networking (30 minutes per day)

Networking is essential, especially when you are just getting started. The 30 minutes that you will dedicate to it every day could be split among:

• commenting on other blogs in your niche,
• linking to the posts of bloggers in your niche, and
• interacting with the bloggers in your niche via email, IM or Twitter.

Remember that your goal is to build genuine relationships, so don’t approach people just because you think they can help to promote your blog. Approach them because you respect their work and because you think the two of you could grow together.

Third Step: Promotion (30 minutes per day)

The first activity here is the promotion of your killer articles. Whenever you publish one of them, you should push it in any way you can. Examples include:

• letting the people in your network know about it (don’t beg for a link though),
• letting bloggers and webmasters in relevant niches know about it,
• getting some friends to submit the article to social bookmarking sites,
• getting some friends to Twitter the article, and
• posting about the article in online forums and/or newsgroups.

If there is time left, spend it with search engine optimization, social media marketing and activities to promote your blog as whole. Those can range from keyword research to promoting your blog on Facebook and guest blogging.

Fourth Step: Normal Posts (30 minutes per day)

Just like a man does not live by bread alone, a blog does not live by killer articles alone. Normal posts are the ones that you will publish routinely in your blog, between the killer articles. For example, you could publish a killer article every Monday and normal posts from Tuesday through Friday. Here are some ideas for normal posts:

• a post linking to an article on another blog and containing your opinion about it
• a post informing your readers about a news in your niche
• a post asking a question to your readers and aiming to initiate a discussion
• a post highlighting a new resource or trick that you discovered and that would be useful to your readers

While killers articles are essential to promote your blog and bring new readers aboard, normal posts are the ones that will create diversity in your content and keep your readers engaged.

Add Favicon icon to Blogger URL

Have you wondered how these little icons appear next to the web addresses, like the one you see above? When you visit the sites or bookmark them, these icons will make these URLs stand out. These are “Favicons” or “Favorite Icons”.

You would first need to have an icon which you would like to use, bearing the extension .ico format. If you search your hard disk, you might find some icons which are generic. I would suggest that you create one to represent your own unique identity. There are quite a number of free icon editor software which you can download from the net.

As for myself, I went to Download.com site and downloaded a very small program called Imagicon which can transform images into .ico format. I created an image using Photoshop. You can use any image or pictures if you do not wish to create one. Next, run the program. It is rather simple to use. While you can create icons in 2 sizes – 16x16 and 32x32 – I would think a 16x16 icon is preferable since it is readable in most older browsers.

If you do not wish to download any software, you may also try creating an icon online. Just enter the keywords “online icon generator” into your Google search bar, and you should be able to find several programs that you can try.

Once you have created an icon, save it into your hard disk. The next step of attaching the icon is a little tricky. Ideally, all you need to do is to save it in the root directory of your blog site. Nevertheless, there is no way this can be done. For one, if you try to upload an icon image, Blogger will reject it. Two, any file that is uploaded will not go into the Blogger root directory.

The only method to use will be to upload the icon into some web folder, and create a link. You can read about using free hosts like Google Page Creator and Google Groups. We have also a rather comprehensive list of free Image Hosts and File Hosting Services in our article on Manage Blogger Image Storage Space. Check out those sites and choose one that is fast, reliable and allows uploading of .ico files.

Once you have done that, take note of the URL of your icon. If you are using Google Page Creator, hovering your mouse over the link, you will see that the file is stored under a directory which looks like this http://yourname.googlepages.com/iconname.ico
where “yourname” is your Gmail account name, and “iconname” is the file name. Copy this URL.

Go back to your Blogger dashboard and under the Template tab, go to “Edit HTML”. Near the top you will see a line like this:-

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

Update:

Copy and insert the following code below the line:-

<link href='URL of your icon file' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>

Inserting this will also work but the former is preferred:-

<link href='URL of your icon file' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/x-icon'/>

Remember to type in the “URL of your icon file”.

Save the template. When you refresh your blog site, you should see your nice little Favicon next to the blog address.

Other image types

The .ico image format has been used by many but you can also create an image under the .png or .gif format. Ensure that the size of the image is either 16x16 pixels or 32x32 pixels.

If you have a PNG format image, the link to insert is:-

<link href='URL of your icon file' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/png'/>

If it is a GIF format image, the link is:-

<link href='URL of your icon file' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/gif'/>

External Domain

For those who have hosted sites in external domains, insert the link in the root directory as well. Otherwise, you can upload the file into the root directory and name it favicon.ico

As an example, if your domain name is www.domain.com, the URL of the favicon will be www.domain.com/favicon.ico

This method is not preferred but a number of browser versions are able to process the icon. Since we do not have external domains to try out this alternative, you may want to see if it works for you.

Compatibility

While you can see the Favicon in Mozilla Firefox, many have problems seeing the Favicon in Internet Explorer. This is a known problem and has been a sore point with many IE users. In some versions of IE, bookmarking the site will display the Favicon. This is not necessarily so in IE7 that we are using. In fact, when we bookmarked the highly popular search engine sites, their Favicons don't show in our IE bookmarks too although they show well in Firefox. Perhaps this is one more reason to download Mozilla Firefox if you have not already done so

How to disable right click in blogger(blogspot) or any webpage

This post explains how to disable right click on blogger(blogspot) or any other webpage using a html(javascript) code.
It is so annoying if someone copies(thefts) your blog posts,articles,images and another kind of information owned by you saying that they are the original owners of the content.
But,I think 'disabling right click' is not the right solution for that.
Most people come to your site to read information and very small percentage of people come to your site to steal your work,images,etc.So,most people feel it insulting and I think it's very unprofessional thing to do

If you want to protect your images,my suggestion is to add a Watermark(logo) of your sitename,or your name on the images,pictures,etc.
Note:Using this javascript code,you only disable the right click by warning the visitors that the content is copyrighted.

That's all my personal opinion,However if you despirately want to add this feauture,You can get this code here.


Where to paste it in blogger ?
Sign in to your blogger dashboad>layout>Add a Pageelement>html/javascript(look at the screenshot below)
and paste the below javascript code and Save the changes.

How it works?
If you right click on the webpage,a message will pop up on screen saying "function disabled".If you want to change the message to you own one like "sorry....the work is copyrighted" or something like that,replace the "funtion disabled" text with your own message in the Javascript code.

How to add Blogger Share Buttons to Custom Blogger Templates

Recently, Blogger released their new Share Buttons feature which makes it easier for your Blog visitors to bookmark, tweet, fshare, email ,etc your post.

But, if you're using any custom blogger template.. you may not see the widget appearing in blog..even though you activate it.

So, if you have that problem. here is how to fix it.
(before making any changes..first backup your template)

1. Sign into Blogger > Design > Edit html
(tick the expand widget templates)

2. Add this line anywhere you want the widget to appear

<b:include data='post' name='shareButtons'/>

Normally, in most templates, you can add it after this line..

<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>

If you don't find that above line in your template....
Find this one.

<p><data:post.body/></p>

and add this code after that line..


<p><data:post.body/></p>
<div style='clear:both; padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px;'> <b:include data='post' name='shareButtons'/> </div>


Note: If you're using Magazine style blogger template, You can find the data:post.body line TWO TIMES.. So, try in both ways and find out which one is working..and remove the other one.

Finally..Save the template!

If you still don't see it in your Blog, Make sure..you activated it by going to
Blogger dashboard > Design > Click the 'edit' button of the Blog post section.