Internet E Club

The Golden rule of successful blogging is, The Golden Rule. People, whether defined as consumers, customers, readers, subscribers or any other noun used to describe those who participate in this new information world we call the Internet, do not want to be used, swindled or taken advantage of. Okay, nothing ground-breaking about that statement. When we deal with our family and friends, The Golden Rule comes quite naturally, and we often times do not even realize we are applying it.

However, when it comes to the world of business, marketing and advertising, The Golden Rule does not see nearly as much application and implementation.

Why is that?

Well, in my humble opinion, for far too long, companies did not look upon their customers as people to forge a legitimate relationship with. We were seen as nothing more than a warm body that could be used, persuaded, and often times deceived into purchasing a product or service. Corporations spend a ridiculously-inflated amount of money on marketing and advertising campaigns in order to convince us that our lives would be ‘oh so much better’ if we would just spend our hard-earned dollars on their products. This model has been effective for big businesses over the past several decades, as seen through the endless barrage of television campaigns that interrupt our favorite TV shows.

However, this approach to marketing no longer holds the same weight it once did. I believe Bob Dylan said it best, “For the times they are a-changin’.”

We are becoming less and less influenced by the unrelated gimmicks and pointless cartoon characters brain-stormed by companies who are constantly looking for new ways to peddle their products and services. The proof comes in the form of TiVo and DVR, which viewers are increasingly using as both a commercial filter and time saver. Can I get a show of hands of those who recently bought car insurance because you thought the little green gecko was just too adorable to ignore?!

But I’m not a business, just a blogger, you say?

If there was one piece of advice I could give to bloggers, it would be to consider yourself a business, and approach your blogging accordingly. Even if you do not participate in affiliate marketing or the selling of products, you are providing a service in the form of content. People who read your blog for the first time will decide rather quickly as to whether or not you are a worthy source for what it is they are looking for. By simply publishing content online, you have entered a competitive environment whether you like it or not, and this is a good thing. Competition raises the stakes and challenges us all to find out just how great we truly were created to be. It is this spirit of competition in the world of business that sparks our ingenuity, and drives us to prove to people that what we have to offer is better than the other guys’.

So how do you compete as a blogger?

By taking the same approach you take with your family and friends, and applying it to your readers and customers. The Golden Rule should not be a philosophy that is dedicated solely to our inner circle of family and friends. In order to become a successful blogger, you must open the door of your inner circle to your readers as well. You must treat them with the same respect and honesty that you would your friends. Below are three important aspects to the Golden Rule that can be applied to your blogging efforts.

1. Practice empathy. By placing yourself in the shoes of your readers, you will be more apt to know what it is like to be them. This will encourage you to try and understand how they feel, what they are going through, and how they may look upon you. By having a better understanding of who your readers are, you will be able to provide them with more targeted information and content, which can lead to a better retention of these readers. A practical approach to this could be as simple as posting a poll question or ending your blog posts with a question or statement that encourages readers to leave comments.
2. Be helpful. It is natural for people to remember those who either wronged us or did something that made our day. Stand out from your competition by helping people solve a problem or answering questions they may have. This can come in the form of writing a well-thought out, informative blog post or simply replying to questions they may pose in the comment section of your blog. By being helpful to others, you are more likely to be remembered and have your generosity shared with others. Of course, the flip side of this coin can be very detrimental to your blogging success. Piss people off and they will tweet about it, post it to their Facebook wall and spread the word.
3. Reciprocate. If a reader is going to take the time to read your blog posts and leave you a comment, then take the time to thank them with a response. If a reader takes the time to tweet one of your articles then thank them with a retweet. Take that a step further. If they are a fellow blogger, then check out their blog and tweet one of their posts which you would like to share with your followers.

The Technological and Social Revolution

This technological and social revolution we are currently in the middle of is quickly transforming how we communicate and relate to one another. The Internet has allowed the individual to have his/her voice heard and become a true player in the world of business and commerce. As a result, We The People have more freedom of choice than ever before, and as a result, are empowered to make decisions at a more rapid pace. We do not have to spend a great deal of time listening to the marketing ploys from a single entity, because there are a growing number of competitors who are vying for our attention and dollars. This is why, as a blogger, your first impression is very important. This is why, I believe the best way  to capture the attention of people, and encourage them to be a part of what you are doing is to treat them as you would your own family and friends. Employ The Golden Rule!

High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article we present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.

Please notice that the listed WordPress themes are presented in 8 sections: vibrant themes, simple & minimalistic themes, magazine style, grid-based, clean and legible, advanced, experimental, photoblog & videoblog.

The most popular question sent to our support team, is “How to become a successful blogger and earn money?”. We always had been providing guidance to our bloggers individually, on a case-by-case basis to improve their blog. But we thought this article would help all our bloggers to succeed in their efforts.

More Traffic – More Money
Many successful bloggers around the globe earn very good income from their blog. Here is a simple math. For every 1000 page views on your blog, you could earn anywhere from $2 to $10, depending on the topic your blog specializes. So target for 1000 visits per month to begin with and continuously raise your standards.

Many top blogs on an average get over Million page views a month. So, you calculate what they may be earning.

It Takes Time
Professional bloggers evolve over time as they develop skills and attitude to improve their blogging. For some, it’s natural but many need practice and the commitment to shine their skills. So, don’t give up.

Pick Your Favorite Topic
For gaining the reader’s interest and to turn visitors into your readers, your blog must provide useful information on a specialized topic. Pick any topic that you really like.

If you are not clear, do some research to understand what people are searching for, on the internet. Google Trends and Google zeitgeist are useful.

Stay on Top
Stay up-to-date with what is happening around. Do your best to post the latest information or any developments on your blog, on the topic you selected. Posting current affairs on your blog could bring more visitors to your blog.

What You Write Matters
Content is the key for any successful blog. Do not just write, but try to communicate your message to the readers. Write in simple language. Make use of examples to articulate.

Do not steal someone else’s content. Not only it is unethical, but also the duplicate content will make search engines to penalize your blog.

No Discipline - No Success
Nothing can be achieved with out hard work and discipline. Create a plan when and how much time you will spend on your blog. Stick to the plan. Make it a habit to regularly update your blog. Ask this question to your self. Will you read any news website; if the news is few days old?

Create Connection with Readers
Effective communication is very important. In your articles express your thoughts clearly and ask for reader’s opinions. More importantly, respond to those comments.

And the list goes on. We will stop there and wish you all the very best.

We had been getting many queries not to show Ads on the blog homepages or show fewer. So we have been experimenting for some time to see which type of visitors tend to click on ads and generate revenue for you on the blog and how the ads on homepage perform.

Following is an anonymized graph from Google Analytics, using a sample of 90 days data, shows the percentage of ads clicked by visitors coming from different sources.

It’s clearly evident that the visitors sent by search engines are generating 90% of the revenue that a blog earns. Though you see 19% direct visitors clicked on the ads, most of them were originally came from search engine results, for the first time.

And, further analysis has shows that 96% of search engine visitors do not land on a blog’s home page, but directly on a post.

So it appears that showing no ads/fewer ads on the home page has almost zero impact on the blog’s revenue.

Lately, Google has been strict on the new applications for the AdSense. Here are few tips that could get your AdSense application approved.

• Do not apply for AdSense with empty blogs where there is not much content.
• Make sure your blog has unique content and it provides some value to visitors.
• Do not copy content from other sites. Also do not post copied articles from free article websites. They also badly affect your blog’s search engine ranking, due to content duplication.
• Make sure you regularly write on your blog.
• Do not add lots of affiliate marketing links / sidebar widgets from all sorts of websites, unless they are very relavent to the content on your blog.
• Do not create a blog purely for search engine optimization.

Now your visitors can spread the word about your blog posts to their friends using Emails, IMs, and Social Networks. They can also reblog about it or bookmark it on social bookmarking sites with the new Tell-a-Friend which appears below every post.

SocialTwist’s Tell-A-Friend widget, customized exclusively for Blog.co.in is now available on all user blogs. It is enabled automatically for all the blogs and is shown at the bottom of each post.

It’s an easy and effective way to tell your friends about a post you just wrote or read on a blog. You can even bookmark it to popular social bookmarking websites such as del.icio.us, Digg, etc.

That’s just another reason to be a part of happy Blog.co.in family

Take a couple of minutes to explore it’s cool features. Give it a try, you gotta love this!

Here is a screenshot in action.

Adding image gallery is a simple task. Just follow the steps in the order as given in the screenshots below.

XML Sitemaps are automatically generated for all the blogs. They can be accessed via the URL http://interneteclub.com/sitemap.xml

For example, sitemap for the blog mirror.interneteclub.com can be found at http://mirror.interneteclub.com/sitemap.xml

We also submit the sitemap URLs to Google and other popular search engines, each time a new post / page is written on the blog.

This should help in improving the search engine rankings of your blog.

It is as simple as typing [ contact-form] in the post / page, wherever you want the form to appear. Following are some screenshots in action.

You can optimize your blog for Search Engines. Every post/page can have their own meta description, title, meta keywords. On the post/page editor scroll down to see the options. Below is the screehshow.