Blogs Tricks & Tips | Complete Source of Blogs Tricks | Blogger | Wordpress

SMS Text Message is a plugin for WordPress to allow blog owners to update their readership via SMS.

A user comes to a site and wishes to be updated (daily, weekly, monthly, etc) via SMS Text Messaging. The user enters their 10 digit phone number on a sidebar widget. The number is then added to a database. Then every so often, the site admin can send an update via text about what is new on the site.

Features
-includes built-in widget
-easy, simple administrative management interface
-support for all the major wireless carriers

Forums have been around since the earliest days of the Internet, and people have been using them ever since to drive traffic to their websites. While they’re not hip and sexy Web 2.0 darlings like Twitter or Facebook, forums are still a great way to drive targeted traffic to your blog. Below are 8 things you need to keep in mind when using forums as a traffic driving strategy.

1. Pick the right forum

Choosing the right forum(s) to participate in makes a big difference. Hopefully you’re already an active member of a forum or two. If not, hopefully you’re at least aware of some of the popular forums that cater to your niche. If that’s still not the case, Google “YOURNICHE forum” or check out Big-Boards.com.

If there are multiple forums in your niche, you should focus on being active in just one forum at first. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin, and you want to be sure you become a prominent member of the community. That’s hard to do when you’re trying to post in half a dozen different forums. Once you’ve become established in one, then you can determine whether joining another would be best for you.

If you’re not already active in a forum and you have multiple forums to choose from, there are a couple points to consider. How large and active is the forum? You won’t get much traffic from a forum that has 30 members and the last post was six months ago. Do you like the look of the forum? I’ve chosen to participate in certain forums because I just like the way they’re designed. Does the forum allow signatures? Some forums don’t allow signatures, which will make it harder for you to get traffic (see the “Put a link in your signature” section below). And finally (and perhaps most importantly), do you like the community that has built up around the forum? You’re going to be spending a lot of time there, so make sure you like the kind of discussion that’s going on.

2. Choose your username carefully

Your username is your brand out there on the forum for everyone to see, so it needs to be chosen carefully. Ask yourself what message you want your username to send. Using your name as a username gives your interactions with others a more personal feel than if you just used the name of your blog or business. It’s important that you username fits in with your niche and the forum. For example, if you’re posting to a realty forum and the forum community you’re posting to has a very professional feel to it, you’ll obviously want to steer clear of usernames like “xfallenangel1987x.”

3. Put a link in your signature

Your signature is the couple lines of text that appear below each one of your forum posts. Putting a link to your blog or to a particularly good post is the backbone of any solid forum-based traffic strategy. This is how you’ll get the majority of traffic out of the forum.

A standard signature will include the name of your blog and maybe your blog’s tagline or what your blog is about. Linking to an especially informative or interesting post can also be a good strategy if you want to drive traffic to certain parts of your blog. Remember that you can also link to a newsletter signup page to help grow your list.

You can read more about putting a link in your signature in this previous Daily Blog Tips post.

4. Craft your profile carefully

Your profile is what people see when they click on your username, and it usually consists at least of your avatar, a short bio, and a link to your website. Most often, your avatar should be a picture of you. We like to know that we’re interacting with a real person, and a photo gives a face to the name and helps create a more personal interactive experience. If you prefer anonymity, then use anything you want as long as it fits in with 1) the feel of the forum, and 2) the image of your blog or business. Using the realty forum example again, you wouldn’t want your profile pic to be a funny animated .gif of a guy getting hit in his private parts with a baseball. Likewise, you wouldn’t want to use a serious, black and white photo of yourself if you’ve got a fun and colorful blog about funny YouTube videos.

Your bio should include relevant information about you. Again, make it professional, but don’t be boring and one-dimensional. Sure, talk about how much experiences you’ve got in your particular field, but also talk about any other interesting information about yourself. If you’re on a rock climbing forum, you could state that you’ve been rock climbing for 12 years, that you are an avid backcountry skier in the offseason., and that you love watching Lost. Give people more reasons for them to interact with you.

And while we’re on the subject of getting people to interact with you, be sure to include a line in your bio (preferably at the end) that you welcome people to contact you with any questions or comments. This can help people feel comfortable about coming to you for any additional help or information beyond what you provide in your forum posts.

Many forum profiles have a space for your website’s URL or the URL of your favorite website. Be sure to put your blog in there!

Finally, take advantage of any other profile features your forum might have. Some forums let you enter your Twitter handle, for example. Others let you enter your other interests. Use these elements to further differentiate yourself from others, to establish yourself as an expert in your field, and to set yourself up as a person people want to interact with.

5. Don’t be spammy

When you’re networking with people in person, you don’t shake their hands and immediately stuff a business card down their throats. You want to get to know the person a little bit before interacting with them on a professional level. To put it another way, you wouldn’t go all the way on a first date, right?

Sure, you’re using the forum to promote your site, but that shouldn’t look like the main reason you’re there. Stick around the forum for a while before you start promoting your blog openly. No one likes it when the forum user’s first and only post is, “Hey guys! Check out my sick awesome new blog!”

6. Provide quality content

We’ve all heard that “Content is king” for getting traffic to your blog and getting people to subscribe to your blog. The same applies to forum posts. For example, don’t just respond to a question by saying “Yes” or “No,” but justify your response with a clear, well-thought-out, informative, helpful reply. Provide the best content you possibly can. Link to other resources both inside the forum and elsewhere online to provide even more helpful content.

Another tactic you can use is writing content especially for the forum. Think of it like guest posting for the forum: you provide your own content for free to the forum, and in exchange you get more exposure for your blog. At the end of the forum post, you can include a line of text that says something like, “This was written specifically for the Whatever Forum. If you found this information useful, check out my blog at WhateverIsAwesome.com.” You’re adding value to the forum while at the same time giving people a reason to check out your blog. Win-win!

Having said all of that, not all of your posts need to be long and epic. Quality content can be as simple as posting a funny YouTube video that a lot of people in the forum community can enjoy.

7. Start new threads

If someone opens up a thread to read it, that person is obviously going to read the first post in the thread, right? The first post in a thread gets read more than any other, so being in that position is a great way to leverage your forum posting.

It’s important, however, that you start the right kinds of threads. If you’ve got genuine questions about something, then by all means ask about it. If you don’t have any questions, a great way to go is to ask people’s opinions on a topic that they all can have input on. If you’re posting to a mountain biking forum, for example, ask people what they’d do if they had $5000 to spend. Would they spend it on a new bike? Upgrades to their current bike? Travel to that place they’ve always wanted to ride? More examples can be asking people on a Corvette forum to post sweet pics of their ride, or encouraging members on a photography forum to post links to their portfolios.

8. Post often

Forum posting isn’t the best passive traffic strategy. You can’t just spend a week posting multiple times a day and then sit back and expect the traffic to roll in forever. The threads that you spend all that time and effort posting in will eventually be pushed further and further down the page until they disappear from page 1. It’s sad, but that’s just the way it is. Participating in – and getting traffic from – forums is very much an active process. To get the best results, you really need to commit to it and make it a regular part of your blogging process.

Above all, just try to enjoy the experience. Hopefully you’re talking about things you like, and you might as well be building blog traffic while you’re at it, right? In addition, forums are great way to get post ideas for your blog, so keep your eyes peeled.

Pick a forum, do your best to become part of the community there, apply the above 8 points, and you’re sure to see the traffic start to come. Good luck!

Are you getting this error message on your blog dashboard, or while you are trying to access your blog?

Read on to find out what this problem is all about and how to help blogger to solve it.

What does 503 mean?

503 “Service Unavailable” is a “response code” like 404 “Page not found”. The 503 response code is a bit more complicated as it is not a page that is missing it is a server problem. Usually this happens when a server cannot cope or deliver its hosted content to web users, in other words blogger servers have been overloaded.

Background

Back in March Google engineers introduced Auto Pagination which basically reduces and summarizes the amount of posts that a blog displays on the home page, this only affects blogs that show all or most of their full posts on the home page.
This approach to the problem by Blogger has proved ineffective, and Blogger are now having problems in the delivery of certain blogs worldwide.

Who is affected by this 503 “Service Unavailable”

This problem affects all blogs worldwide. One of the ways to find out if you have been affected is to login in Google analytics and check your traffic sources, select search engines and select the keyword that brings most of the traffic to your blog, compare the data with previous months. A notable change in your bounce rate or average time will be a good indicator that your blog had been affected by this 503 response code. The logic behind this is simple, a user trying to view your blog has opened the 503 page and assumed the site down and gone to another site. Due to this you will receive a 100% Bounce rate for that keyword as well as a low time average.

Understanding the problem and its consequences

The consequences of this problem are that you can start to lose traffic and your ranking in search engines. You need to understand that this is not a problem of resources, this cannot be fixed by getting a new server for blogger (if it was I would not be here talking about it).
This is a problem of how we blog and what we do with our blogs.

How to solve the 503 “Server unavailable” on Blogger

Here are a few steps you could take in order to help Blogger to solve the issue.

Basic level (no skills required)
- Summarize your posts.
- Show only the most relevant post on your home page.

If you show full posts on your home page you have a greater chance of encountering the “503” problem, as your blog is using more resources from Blogger to deliver or load your blog. Secondly an excessive number of posts on the home page (even summarized posts) may result in a 503 as there is a delay with Blogger loading your blog. You can opt to show your latest post or more relevant posts, and include a widget with some links to your previous posts. This is SEO friendly and will reduce the amount of problems you will have with your blog.

Medium Level (some skills and knowledge are required)
- Use a light weight template and avoid using the “template designer” from Blogger
- Use Light images

If you are using a template made from the “template designer” tab, there is a simple test that you can do to reveal how efficient your template is: Clean the cookies of your browser and open your blog (not blogger dashboard) by typing the url in the address bar of the browser. Take note of the time that it takes for your blog to load completely, now go to blogger and change your template for any free template and repeat the same steps, clean your cookies and open your blog again and compare the time. Some of the templates made with the “Template Designer” have a poorer performance, especially those that have some java scripts and/or have a background image.

Images play an important part in saving some bites, you can use PNG format or GIF as these are lightweight formats, you can also use JPG but you must always compare them to find out which is the lightest one. PNG is not always the best. If you don’t know how to change the file formats of the images you can search on Google for GIPM; an open source software with features like Paint Shop Pro; easy to use especially to change image formats.

High level (Skills and Knowledge are required)
- Speed test using Firebug for Firefox

The best way to analyze and get a full report on the performance of your blog is by using “Firebug” for Firefox. Firebug will report a series of problems that your blog may have in order to reduce the loading time of your blog which is one of the determining factors of the 503 “Service Unavailable” error.
You will get specific reports on how your CSS is performing, where you can reduce the size of your CSS, where to put your Javascript files, and much more. Most importantly it will create a compressed version of your CSS (best performance) for you to use as well as a copy of all images in a different format, for instance if you have some JPG images, Firebug will compare the same image to other formats and will give to you the same image but under a different format saving you time in editing those images.

Overall there are alot of things that you will find out about your blog after running a test on Firebug that you may not know how to solve, if that is the case you can jump into the forum and ask questions about it.

Why should you bother with all of this?

You may be thinking why do I need to bother with all of this, why not just wait for somebody from Blogger and Google to solve the problem?. Well the answer to that is easy: this is not just Blogger’s problem this is a blog problem, and in this case, blogs worldwide. This is not solved by buying an extra server or hiring somebody to solve the problem, this can in part be solved by us bloggers and the way we do things. Blogger is the only blog platform that offers you the best of both worlds: the benefits of a self hosted blog for free. You just have to ask yourself would I like if Blogger changed the rules and started to charge it’s users for their free service?

This may or may not happen, but for now this is just an appeal to all bloggers to change the way they do things for the best, at the end of the day it will help your blog as well as the user experience that you offer to your blog users.

Resources

Firefox: Download Firefox Official Site
Firebug: Download Firebug Official Site
GIMP image editor: Download GIMP Official Site

(These links open on a new window and will open the Official sites where you can find more info before downloading each software. All software is Open Source and free of charge)

I know many Blogger don't like to get there unique content copied by any other blogger.
SO now don't worry about getting your content copied here is a solution.
By this Hack users of your blog cannot right click on your blog and your content remains safe :)

This widget is very simple to install into your blog
Following are the steps

Step 1 > Go to Template -> Page Elements.
Step 2 > Add a Page Element -> then Add a HTML
Step 3 > Now just copy and save the following code into HTML and you are done !




<script language='JavaScript'>
<!--

//Disable right mouse click Script
//By Maximus (maximus@nsimail.com) w/ mods by DynamicDrive
//For full source code, visit http://www.dynamicdrive.com

var message="No Right-Click!";

///////////////////////////////////
function clickIE4(){
if (event.button==2){
alert(message);
return false;
}
}

function clickNS4(e){
if (document.layers||document.getElementById&&!document.all){
if (e.which==2||e.which==3){
alert(message);
return false;
}
}
}

if (document.layers){
document.captureEvents(Event.MOUSEDOWN);
document.onmousedown=clickNS4;
}
else if (document.all&&!document.getElementById){
document.onmousedown=clickIE4;
}

document.oncontextmenu=new Function("alert(message);return false")

// -->
</script>



This Tip will change the Blogger's title tag to help amplify relevant keywords to your blog which improve the search engine ranking of your blog.

1. Log in to your dashboard--> layout- -> Edit HTML

2. Scroll down to where you see this:-

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


3. Now Replace above line with below code.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> ~ <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>


Click on "Save Templates" and you are done.