Category Archives: Blogs

Hosting an interview on your site is a great way to acquire new contacts and visitors. If someone famous decides to be interviewed by you on your blog, then this will surely draw a lot of traffic to your site and there is a big chance that the visitors will also read your other posts. When you host an interview, you do not necessarily need someone very famous- your blog might also benefit from an interview about some new product or about any interesting topic. A good place to find people to interview are forums, or even friends and family. Local organizations or Web communities might also help you achieve your goal.

Those of us who like to talk a lot might enjoy the idea of podcasting on the Web. Since everyone can do it, podcasting is not that complicated. All you need to do before you start recording and publishing your audio messages is take care of a few things like. Here are some of them:

• Appropriate software. Some programs can be found for free on the Internet, while for some software will have to pay. The choice whether to pay is yours, as there is a wide choice of programs.
• Suitable microphone. Make sure you buy a high quality one. If you buy the cheapest possible microphone, then you risk that your voice will get distorted.
• Make sure you have proper hosting. You will also probably need a website to upload your podcasts. If you already have a website, do not hesitate to publish your podcasts on it. If not, look for other places on the Internet where you could publish your work. They are many websites that host podcasts, but it all depends on the subject you want to talk about.

Like I said, podcasting is not that complicated, but you will need to take care of a few things if you are doing it for the first time.

Do you think that the design of your blog is important? There are bloggers who barely change anything after choosing a template that they found on some website. You can easily recognize such blogs as they usually do not differ from one another. As a matter of fact, most of them look very alike. In my opinion, they are also the easiest to navigate. I have seen a lot of templates of this type, and they are the most straightforward that I have seen. On the other hand, there are those who claim that originality is the key to success. They choose the most complex graphics for their blog, and they want to be the only ones that have a blog that looks very original. They spend hours upon hours customizing the default version of their template in order to make it as unique as possible. They create beautiful custom images in Photoshop, and implement them on their site so that no one else in the world will be able to have a similar design. They often upgrade their blog with new graphical elements.

Nonetheless, the question still remains whether working a lot on a template is really that beneficial. Are the readers of such a blog going to appreciate it? Are ads going to generate a bigger income? Is this blog attracting more visitors than a blog that uses a basic template? I believe that changes to templates are important; however, a blogger should not be obsessed about it.

From time to time I am thinking about what makes a good template choice. While there is a lot to write about, this time I wanted to share with you my thoughts about how many columns should a blog interested in monetizing its content have. Actually, I am not going to give a definite answer to that question, but I believe that a blog that plans to have a lot of content linked from the sidebar and possible some Google Adsense ads as well, will benefit from a 3 column template. Such templates are gaining in popularity and provide a lot of space for advertisements. Nobody can deny the fact that the blogosphere has currently millions of blogs and to be noticeable, you have to be original in some way. Often the more original you are, the better. For example, having a template that nobody else has might make your blog easier to remember, and consequently, more people may be visiting you. Putting templates aside, the most important thing when it comes to blogging is content. If you want to be an original blogger, then you should try to have original posts, and maybe even an original writing style. This is not possible for all niches, but in some cases, it might not be that difficult to try to be more original and write in a slightly different way. I cannot provide you with an easy solution, but I can just give you advice to think about it. Who knows, you might come up with some ideas.

Blogging is for many people not only a hobby, but also a passion. They spend a lot of time working on their blog, polishing some details, networking and so on. No wonder then, that there are many bloggers who are nearly obsessed with rankings. Personally I love rankings, because it is a nice feeling to see in some cases my blog ranked high, but not only for this reason because I also enjoy to observed which are the top blogs in the blogospheare. If you are one of such people that is interested in traffic rankings, then you should be promoting your blog in various ways.
Do you want to promote your blog? If that is the case, then you might want to check out various blog bookmarking and rating sites. You can start marketing your blog by submitting your sites and blog posts to such websites. By submitting your links and blog posts to various websites you have a chance to improve your brand awareness and a chance to acquire more visitors. Of course, before you start advertising a lot you should make sure that your website has a lot of valuable content. This way there will be a bigger probability that those who visit your website for the first time will become loyal readers. Remember, marketing is one of the key aspects of blogging, so it is important not to neglect it.

What would you say if I asked you how fast your blog loads? Most people would probably say that it loads quite fast, or slowly. First of all, the problem is that everyone has different Internet connection. Secondly, everyone has a different patience while waiting for pages to load. That is why we need to establish some standards. I found a great tool, namely iwebtool.com/speed_test that can check the speed of your site’s loading time. It can do it without any bias as it is a script, and can even display the “Size”, “Load Time”, and “Average Speed per KB”. I had a website once that contained a lot of unnecessary widgets and elements on my homepage. If I had access to a tool like this I would have realized it a lot earlier. The question what you need to ask yourself is whether you like to wait ages to a page to load. Obviously you do not, however, my point is that this is why you should put some work into making your blog load faster. Maybe you are embedding too many videos and images? Maybe your site contains too many widgets? Sometimes unresponsive scripts are the problem. Whatever the cause, minimizing load speed is a wise thing to aim for.