Daily Blog Tips Feed

Review: MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet (It Rocks)

dailyblogtips — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:53:18 +0000

A couple of weeks ago Pawan from MaxBlogPress.com contacted me, saying he had developed a new plugin that would significantly boost the number of sign-ups I was getting to my email newsletter.

I have known Pawan for a while, and I use many of his plugins, so I said “Sure.” He sent me the files, and I installed it on Daily Blog Tips. The plugin is called Subscribers Magnet, and the idea is to create multiple “hit” points (i.e., methods and places your visitors can use to sign-up) to increase the number of new email subscribers you get per day.

The idea sounded cool, but only when I started playing with the plugin I realized it was a really neat piece of software, and here is why.

First of all it integrates with most email marketing applications (e.g., Aweber, iContact, ConstantContact), so getting the plugin to work is straight forward. Second, some of the features the plugin has are really innovative.

The first feature is called “Form Auto Filler.” It will automatically grab the name and email from your visitors and fill your subscription forms for them. This means that when see the subscription form their details will be there already, so they will just need to click on “Subscribe.” How cool is that?

The second feature is the “Optin Form Adder.” This will basically allow you to insert a subscription form in the sidebar or/and below your posts. The form is completely customizable, and you once you activate it through the plugin interface it will start appearing on your site. Here is how it looks like:

The third feature is called “Subscribers from Comment.” This one allows you to capture subscribers from people who will leave a comment on your blog. You have several options regarding how you’ll do it. You can put a checkbox that commenters must tick, you can include a subscription form that will appear right below their comment, and you can also subscribe them automatically (they’ll still need to confirm it on the email they will receive, so this is compliant with the terms of Aweber and other email solutions).

The fourth feature is the “Popin” one. As the name suggests, it allows you to create a subscription form that will be displayed as a pop-up. You can customize the style, as well as the frequency of the pop-up and what visitors should see it. For instance, you could show it only after the second visit, only once every five visits, once every couple of days and so on.

The fifth feature is called “Footer Bar.” It allows you to create a dynamic footer bar on your website containing a subscription form. Just like with the pop-up, you can customize how often the bar will appear.

If you combine all these features and options you can add up to 17 hit points to your blog, and this is likely to boost the number of sign-ups significantly.

But facts speak louder than words right? Here is what the plugin did for me. I already had a decent structure to capture email subscribers, so I decided to use only three features: the “form auto filler”, the “checkbox in comment section” and the “footer bar.” Before installing the plugin I was getting around 67 new email subscribers per day. After installing it the number jumped to around 90, which is a 35% increase as you can see in the screenshot below:

These days I am actually getting closer to 100 sign-ups per day, so it is working even better.

Pawan told me he beta-tested the plugin with other friends too, and some of them got boosts of 100% in the number of sign-ups.

As I said before, it is a really neat piece of software. Most of the time when people give me free plugins or software to test I usually try them for a couple of weeks and then stop using them. This one I’ll probably stick with.

The plugin was officially launched this week. It is going to cost $147, but until tomorrow Pawan is offering a discount of 30%, so you can buy it for $97. I am not an affiliate, so I won’t earn anything whether you buy it or not. I just decided to review it because it worked really well for me, and because I think other bloggers will find it useful, too.

Original Post: Review: MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet (It Rocks)

11 Email Marketing Alternatives to Aweber

dailyblogtips — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:23:12 +0000

This is a guest post by Kevin Muldoon. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I recently stopped using Aweber. Not because I wasn’t happy with the service but because I sold the site I was using it for. For 2 years I was a very happy customer with Aweber and wouldn’t rule out using them again. However, starting a new blog gave me the opportunity to look more into what alternatives there are out there for email marketing.

In this article I will be showing you the main alternatives to Aweber available to you. This article is for:

Those who think their newsletter provider is too expensive
Those who think their newsletter provider lacks important features
Those who haven’t chosen their newsletter provider as yet and want to make sure they make the right choice

Before we look at the alternatives, let’s look at what Aweber offers and what it charges for using it’s service.

Aweber

Aweber is one of the most versatile email marketing providers available to bloggers. It’s not as user friendly as some other services however there is a huge amount of documentation and tutorials in the members area to help you get started.

Features include:

Advanced sign up form wizard and hundreds of sign up form templates to choose from
135 Email templates to choose from
Advanced autoresponder options
RSS to Email option
Traffic tracking and conversion options
Integration with lots of other scripts including e-commerce shopping carts

The base price of Aweber is $19 a month. This gives you an unlimited number of emails up to 500 members. You can pay $49 quarterly or $194 yearly, saving you $32 and $34 respectively. The monthly price increases as your number of subscribers grow.

Aweber offer a one month trial for $1. I recommend ordering that if you are unsure whether to use them. Be warned: you will automatically be charged $19 a month afterwards if you don’t cancel your account.

Subscribers	Monthly Price
0 – 500	$19
501 – 2,500	$29
2,501 – 5,000	$49
5,001 – 10,000	$69
10,001 – 25,000	$149

Monthly Membership Services with Unlimited Emails

There are several alternatives to you which follow the same business model as Aweber offering an unlimited number of emails to subscribers per month.

Prices increase in line with the number of subscribers though as you will see, the pricing plans of most of these services are practically identical. So the main factors you need to consider are features and user friendliness.

1. MailChimp

A hugely popular email marketing service, MailChimp is a fun and colourful service which has some fantastic features.

MailChimp for iPhone
Social Media Integration
Use friendly member area
Easy to use autoresponse system
Impressive sign up form wizard

Pricing is very similar to Aweber except the service is free up until you reach 500 subscribers. The monthly plans are about a few dollars more expensive that Aweber though.

Subscribers	Monthly Price
0 – 500	FREE!
501 – 1,000	$15
1,001 – 2,500	$30
2,501 – 5,000	$50
5,001 – 10,000	$75
10,001 – 25,000	$150
25,001 – 50,000	$240

A pay as you go plan is also available for those who send emails out less often. Prices start around $0.03 per email though the price drops to half a cent with orders over $1,000.

2. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a professional email marketing company which also offer online surveys and event marketing services.

Around 50 professional looking email templates
Impressive reporting options
Several stylish sign up boxes to choose from
Good import features for those migrating to the service

Pricing starts from only $15 per month and there is also a no risk 60 trial option which doesn’t require you to enter your credit card details (unlike Aweber which automatically rebills).

Subscribers	Monthly Price
0 – 500	$15
501 – 2,500	$30
2,501 – 5,000	$50
5,001 – 10,000	$75
10,001 – 25,000	$150

3. Get Response

GetResponse is a beautiful email marketing service which is a few dollars cheaper than similar services.

They boast a huge number of features including:

An email to speech feature that allows users to listen to newsletters ‘hands free’
Social media integration
iPhone application
Video email marketing
Surveys
Over 300 email templates
Good tracking and reporting options

Get Response is slightly cheaper than Aweber. There is a 15% discount for paying 6 months in advance and a 18% discount for paying a year in advance.

Subscribers	Monthly Price
0 – 10	FREE
11 – 500	$18
501 – 2,500	$28
2,501 – 5,000	$45
5,001 – 10,000	$65
10,001 – 25,000	$145

4. Campaigner

Campaigner is a good option for those who don’t need a lot of bells and whistles. The service has over 450 email templates to choose from however it lacks a lot of advanced features which other services have.

This is reflected in the price as Campaigner is quite a bit cheaper than most of it’s competitors. Their top package is around 20% cheaper than Awebers equivalent. There is also a 30 day trial available.

Subscribers	Monthly Price
0 – 500	$10
501 – 2,500	$25
2,501 – 5,000	$40
5,001 – 10,000	$55

5. Vertical Response

Vertical Response is an online service which lets you manage your email marketing campaign, create online surveys and send postcards directly to visitors.

Beautiful drag and drop email wizard
Sign up form integration widgets
Detailed reports

Vertical Response offer a 30 day no obligation trial and good discounts for paying in advance (particularly with larger email lists).

Subscribers	Monthly Price
0 – 500	$10
501 – 2,000	$28
2,001 – 4,000	$46
4,001 – 8,000	$72
8,001 – 16,000	$120
16,001 – 25,000	$150
25,001 – 40,000	$240

A pay as you go option is also available for those who don’t send emails as often. Rates start at a very competitive $0.015 per email, dropping to $0.01 an email with purchases over 25,000 email credits.

6. Benchmark Email

Benchmark Email is an easy to use email marketing service which boasts a large range of email templates.

Video integration
Drag and drop text editor
Survey and email tracking
User friendly interface
Campaign archive

Benchmark Email is similarly priced to it’s main competitors. However, you ado not receive unlimited emails. Instead you are restricted to 7 emails per month to your list.

If you plan on sending a lot of emails to your subscribers every month it’s best to avoid this plan because of the sending restriction.

Subscribers	Monthly Price
0 – 1000	$18.95
1001 – 2500	$28.95
2,501 – 5,000	$46.95
5,001 – 10,000	$73.95
10,001 – 20,000	$120.95
20,001 – 30,000	$179.95
30,001 – 50,000	$230.95
50,001 – 75,000	$339.95

There is also an email limit monthly plan. 1000 emails will cost you $12.95, 5,000 will cost you $35, whilst 10,000 costs $60.

7. iContact

iContact is an email marketing service which claims to have more than 60,000 customers.

Built in HTML WYSIWYG Editor
Good tracking and reporting features
Over 250 HTML email Templates to choose from

iContacts pricing plans have an email restriction of 6 times your subscriber limit. Those of you who send out newsletters a few times a week may want to consider an alternative.

There is a 15 day trial for those who are interesting in ordering a package.

Subscribers	Monthly Price
0 – 250	$9.95
251 – 500	$14
501 – 1,000	$19.00
1,001 – 2,500	$29.00
2,501 – 5,000	$47
5,001 – 10,000	$74
10,001 – 15,000	$109
16,001 – 25,000	$149
25,001 – 35,000	$239
36,001 – 50,000	$379
50,001 – 75,000	$529
75,001 – 100,000	$699

Pay Per Email Services

If you don’t send several emails to subscribers every month then you may find Pay Per Email services a lot more cheaper.

8. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is a popular email marketing service which is used by many top websites such as SitePoint.

User friendly interface
Beautiful email templates
Great tracking and reporting features

CampaignMonitor have a flat pricing fee of $5 per email and 1 cent for every recipient.

Therefore sending an email to 500 people would cost $10 and to 2,500 people would cost $30. There are big discounts for those who to send to more than 50,000 people.

9. JangoMail

JangoMail

Advanced HTML editor
Connect to external databases in real time
Create and send mass emails using Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora, Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

Jangomails pricing depends on how many emails you send in that month.

Monthly Emails	Monthly Price
Up to 1,000	$30
Up to 2,500	$50
Up to 5,000	$100
Up to 12,000	$200
Up to 18,000	$300
Up to 30,000	$400
Up to 45,000	$600

Cost per email drops to about $0.005 if you send over 616,000 emails per month. More information can be seen on the standard pricing plan page.

10. Boomerang

Boomerang is a simple but user friendly solution.

Pricing starts around 2 cents an email but drops to around 1 cent if you spend more than $100 a month.

Monthly Emails	Monthly Price
Up to 500	$9.95
Up to 1,200	$14.95
Up to 2,500	$29.95
Up to 4,500	$49.95
Up to 9,500	$99.95
Up to 14,500	$149.95
Up to 25,000	$249.95
Up to 36,000	$349.95
Up to 55,000	$499.95

11. Ezine Director

Ezine Director is very basic compared to most other options though you can still send HTML emails and set up autoresponders. It’s main selling point is it’s incredibly low price.

There are three different versions available: Free, Limited and Full.

The free version has a copyright notice in all emails and allows up to 249 emails to be sent.

The limited version costs $9.95 a month and allows up to 1,999 emails per month. It has the same features as the full version except it doesn’t have campaign tracking.

The full version has campaign tracking and allows up to 19,499 emails per month. Over that you are charged a ridiculously low $0.001 an email (and that drops to $0.0009 over 50k)

Ezine Director is a pretty basic service but is worth checking out if you are looking for a cheap newsletter solution.

Why you need an email list

You really shouldn’t wait any longer to start building your email list. Seriously, you should be building your list right now!!

RSS subscribers are great however you cannot contact them directly so it’s important to build an email list as well. Doing so will allow you to contact your readers directly. Not only can this provide an extra source of income for your blog, it will also allow you to connect with your readers in another way and give them more reasons to visit your blog again.

I have read many bloggers state that you should start emailing your subscribers from the very start. The idea behind this is that people will enjoy your newsletter content so much that they will tell their friends about it. I disagree strongly with this. I really do think this is a bad idea.

I do think that you should start building an email/newsletter list as soon as you launch your blog, even if sign up rates are painfully slow at the start (an extra 50 email addresses a year from now could mean an extra $100 from an affiliate commission). Though it’s pointless to spend a lot of time writing content for a newsletter until the list is at least 500 subscribers (but preferably more than 1,000).

What is the point of spending hours writing high quality original newsletters if you only have 40 readers? It makes much more sense to post this content on your blog where visitors and search engines can see it.

Once your email list has grown to a decent level you can then start spending more time offering exclusive content through your newsletter in order to develop a closer relationship with your readers.

Best Email Marketing Provider

Aweber deservedly has a great reputation amongst bloggers. Support is great and it boasts a lot of great features. Though I hope I have shown today that there are alternatives out there.

For my new blog I initially signed up to Campaign Monitor as I like the idea of only paying for the emails you send. It’s a good service and is very easy to use but in the end I decided to go with MailChimp.

MailChimp is a little more user friendly than Aweber and has more features than Campaign Monitor. Though the main selling point for me is the pricing plan which allows me to send up to 3,000 emails a month for free as long as my list is under 500 subscribers.

This allows me to build up my email list up to 500 people for free plus I can periodically email subscribers if I want too. If I used Aweber as my newsletter provider than it would cost me $19 a month even if I had less than 100 subscribers. Therefore I am saving a good bit of money if it takes me a few months to reach 500 subscribers.

If you are building a list for a brand new blog then I would consider MailChimp for this reason. If your blog is already established then you will probably reach 500 subscribers very quickly so you may want to look at the alternatives. Most of the monthly subscriber plans cost about the same so it really depends on what you are looking for. Make sure you take advantage of the free trials in order to try out an email marketing service you are interested in.

Those of you who will not be sending out emails every week may want to consider a pay per email plan as it will work out a lot cheaper for you in the long run.

If you have used any of the email services in this article, or any which are not in the list, please share your opinion of the site in the comment area. I’m sure it will help other bloggers out.

About the Author: Kevin Muldoon is a webmaster and blogger who lives in Central Scotland. His latest project is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News and Modifications.

11 Email Marketing Alternatives to Aweber

100 Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Website

dailyblogtips — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:27:55 +0000

Last week I told you guys I was working on a really long post that I hoped would become popular, remember? Well, I just published it on one of my other websites. The post is called 100 Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic.

I had seen a couple of similar lists around the web, but most of them contained only a single sentence per item, and most items were not directly related to generating traffic at all.

That is why I decided to write my own list. I made sure only to include points that are really going to increase your traffic (even if just slightly), and I also explained each point and included links to relevant resources where suitable.

The result is a monster post with almost 6,000 words. Here is a quote:

30. Launch a review contest. If you want to increase your search rankings you could launch a contest where people need to write about the content in order to get an entry. The links you’ll get will send you both Google juice and new visitors. Keep in mind that you need a good prize to motivate people to write about your contest though.

31. Launch a voting contest. You basically need to create a contest where the winner will be picked with a voting session. Suppose you have a fitness website. You could invite your readers to submit their best fitness tip, and then a voting session would decide which tip gets the prize. This would motivate participants to link to the voting session and to encourage their friends to visit your website and vote.

32. Launch a traffic contest. If traffic is what you want, why not be direct about it? You can launch a contest where people need to send traffic to one particular page inside your website. It could be the contest page (for a viral effect) or a resource page (e.g., a page where you give away an ebook). After the established time frame (e.g., 2 weeks, 1 month or anything else), you’ll simply need to check your web analytics to see which websites sent you more visitors, and then award the prizes.

Check it out. And if you like it, please help me spread the word with a stumble or a retweet!

Original Post: 100 Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Website

Should You Really Enter The “Make Money Online” Niche?

dailyblogtips — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:58:40 +0000

First of all, by “make money online” I mean all the Internet marketing niches, including blogging, social media, SEO, affiliate marketing and so on.

The question I am asking is: should someone who is getting started online enter the Internet marketing niche directly?

Many people seem to think so, judging by the amount of blogs and websites we see popping out in this niche every month.

In my opinion, however, this is a mistake.

Why? Because entering a mainstream niche (e.g., health care, education, finance, travel and so on) can be easier, because there might be less competition there, and more profitable, because the size of the potential audience is much larger. That is why they are called “mainstream” after all, because they appeal to the majority of the population, while Internet marketing has a really small audience in comparison.

Given these facts, why do people insist in entering the Internet marketing niche? I think for one main reason: the Internet marketing community is more vocal about its earnings, strategies and what not, so people get the idea that talking about making money online is the best way to actually make money online.

This is clearly not true.

There are many people out there making a killing in mainstream niches, the only difference is that they don’t blog about how much money they are earning, about the strategies they are using to achieve it and so on.

Now don’t get me wrong. Internet marketing is a profitable niche. I am not arguing otherwise. I am just saying that, in comparison, mainstream niches can be even more profitable.

At this point you might be thinking: “It is easy for you to say Daniel, but you have a blog about blogging and a course about making money online.” This is true, but I also have many other online properties in mainstream niches. Want one example? My other blog, DailyWritingTips.com, was launched after this one, and despite that it receives more traffic and makes more advertising money.

Here are the numbers to give you a better idea: DailyBlogTips.com has around 5,000,000 backlinks according to Google, and it generates around 300,000 page views monthly. DailyWritingTips.com, on the other hand, has only 150,000 backlinks according to Google, yet it generates over 500,000 page views monthly (according to Google Analytics. as you can see in the image above).

What is the explanation? It is simple, the “writing tips” niche has less competition and a larger potential audience. Most of my new projects these days are on mainstream niches as well, exactly because I think there is more money to be made there.

The bottom line is: You don’t need to enter the “make money online” niche to have a profitable website. If you learn the Internet marketing principles and apply them to mainstream niches you might end up making more money.

Original Post: Should You Really Enter The “Make Money Online” Niche?

Is It Worth to Buy Domains with the New .co Extension?

dailyblogtips — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:17:33 +0000

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question, just write a comment below.

Colby asks:

Just got a notice the .co domain is now available. Do you think this is going to take off?

A small bit of background information: In march of this year a company called CO Internet S.A.S announced that they would start managing domains with a new extension: .co. As of today these domains are already available, and you can get one with most big registrars.

Given the similarity of .co with .com, many people are claiming that .co domains might go mainstream, so trying to register premium domains with that extension (e.g., weightloss.co) could be a good idea. That is basically what Colby is asking.

One thing I know for sure: .co or any other extension they come up with will never take the crown out of the .com. If you want to build an online business, getting the .com version of your domain is a priority.

The next question is: will .co become a viable alternative to .com, as .net and .org are? We can’t say yet, but I wouldn’t count on it. We have seen many new extensions appear over the past years (e.g., .us, .tv, .biz), and none of them managed to establish itself. In fact, most of these extensions are associated with low quality, malicious and spam websites.

The .co extension has the advantage of being similar to .com and easy to remember, but I am not sure if this will be enough to make it go mainstream.

I for one won’t be buying any .co domains. My policy with domain names is the following: if the website I am building is a serious project (e.g., a startup, a blog with a big potential, a company website) I always go with a .com, even if I need to spend some money to grab a good domain. If I am building a mini website, on the other hand, I consider the .com but also the .net and .org versions of the domain I want.

Another point to consider is that there are more extensions to come shortly. If you remember well, ICANN announced last year that any company with enough infrastructure (i.e., money) could launch and manage its own extension. Extensions like .sex and .music are already on the way.

What will the consequences be? Only time will tell, but I suspect the confusion that will emerge out of all of this will only increase the strength of the .com extension. In other words, when in doubt people will type the domain followed by .com.

But what do you guys think. Will the .co extension establish itself as an alternative to the .com? Will it reach the same level of the .net and .org extensions?

Original Post: Is It Worth to Buy Domains with the New .co Extension?

Procrastinating to Write That Huge Article? Break It Down In Small Parts

dailyblogtips — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:06:48 +0000

Last week I got an idea for an article that I am sure will become popular. It basically contains 100 ways to achieve something (can’t talk too much about it right now, but I’ll let you guys know when it gets published).

The problem is that I couldn’t get motivated to start writing it. I would open the WordPress post editor, write the title, and then keep staring at the blank screen.

I tried to start writing the post for three days in a row, but every time I gave up after 15 minutes or so. “Man, it is going to be a pain to write these 100 points…”. “I got more important things to do right now, so I’ll get back to this later….”. These were the excuses I was telling myself.

Then this Monday I changed my approach. Instead of trying to write the article in one sitting, I decided to break it down in small parts. That is, I committed to write 10 points every day, so the article will be ready in 10 days.

Guess what? It worked like a charm. Writing 10 points takes 20 minutes or so, and I can squeeze that during any part of my work day. Additionally I also get more motivated as I go along, because I can see the article coming up nicely.

In fact this approach is working so well that I think I’ll make it a permanent thing. That is, every day I’ll take 20 or 30 minutes away to write a small part of a killer article (on top of my normal writing duties). That way every 10 days or so I’ll have one new killer article to publish on one of my sites.

What about you, are you procrastinating to write that huge article you had planned? Break it down in small parts and you’ll get it done sooner than you think.

Original Post: Procrastinating to Write That Huge Article? Break It Down In Small Parts

5 Reasons to Take A Break From Your Blog

dailyblogtips — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:26:15 +0000

This is a guest post by Bob Bessette. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Approximately three months ago, I had a personal loss in my family. As a result of that loss, I took a much-needed break from blogging. It ended up being about two months of posting nothing to my blog, or anyone else’s, for that matter.

Just within the past few weeks I’ve been getting back into the swing of posting to my blog and this is my first guest post since that break. I’ve learned a few things during this hiatus, not the least of which is that the break that I took was extremely beneficial. Why, you might ask?

1. Gives you time to reflect

What I realized, when I actually had the time to think about it, was that blogging was introducing a lot of stress into my life. The stress wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy writing my posts. The stress was caused by the pressure I was putting on myself by trying to adhere to a regular posting interval. Since I have started my blogging back up, I have vowed not to let some set posting interval determine when I publish a post. I understand that this goes against all conventional wisdom when it comes to blogging. But I really don’t care. I do this because I love it and I run the show, not conventional wisdom.

2. Revitalizing

I think we all need a break from things every now and then. Whether it be taking college classes or working extra hours at our regular jobs. We need to get away from it for a while. Granted, by taking a break from my blogging, my Alexa rating went from roughly 150K to 400K. I worked really hard to get it down to 150K, but now I am determined to work to get it back there, and even lower. Daniel allowing me to guest post here on Daily Blog Tips, is certainly a step in the right direction. I have a renewed vigor and energy to work on my blog and improve the content. I am revitalized and I know that, without that break, I wouldn’t feel this renewed vigor.

3. Therapeutic

As stated earlier, I was feeling the stress of having to post regularly to my blog. Once I was able to get away from the process for a while, the stress disappeared. It was extremely therapeutic for me. The thing is, I didn’t make a conscious decision to stop blogging. It was a personal loss in my family that consumed my life. I don’t think I could’ve written anything even if I tried. But, I realized, after it was forced on me, that I truly needed the break. I think sometimes we get so entrenched in doing something that we don’t realize that it may be adding stress to our lives. If I was to give you a bit of advice, take a step back and ask yourself “Is blogging still fun for me?” If the answer is “No”, then I suggest that a break may be just what the doctor ordered.

4. Reinforces your love of writing

Running a blog can be extremely time-consuming. Anyone who is reading this, assuming you run your own blog, understands that fact. Sometimes we get so caught up in the process, that we forget why we started blogging in the first place. I started my blog because I have always enjoyed writing. Taking that break reminded me how much I truly do love to write. It’s been something I’ve loved since I was a child sending actual snail-mail letters to loved ones across the country. If you find your love of writing waning from the pressure of blogging, a break may just remind you how much you do love to write.

5. Helps you appreciate your blogging buddies

I have met a number of special people through my blog. A number of these blogging friends contacted me when they noticed that there was a break in my blog posts. They felt that there must’ve been something wrong in my world, and they were right. The kindness that these friends showed me was touching. Granted, these are people I have never met in person, and they went out of their way to send their best wishes. It really gives you an appreciation not only of blogging friends, but of humanity.

I hope, for your sake, that a break in your blogging is not forced by a personal loss or tragedy in your world. But, if you are finding that blogging is adding stress to your life, consider taking a break. You may find that some time away, could revitalize you, and immeasurably improve your blog, in the long run.

About the Author: Bob Bessette writes a blog called Totally Unique Life. His blog is geared toward practical advice and strategies for life, work, and play.

Original Post: 5 Reasons to Take A Break From Your Blog

Four Simple Steps For Big Gains In Page Speed

dailyblogtips — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:00:17 +0000

This is a guest post by Greg Hayes. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

With the recent announcement that Google will formally include page load speed as a ranking factor, I’ve started looking at this subject pretty closely. What I’ve discovered is there are a handful of simple things that one can do to make big gains in page load times. Below you’ll find four of them.

1. Remove slow loading site elements that don’t add value

Take a hard look at the load times of those buttons and badges in your sidebar (and elsewhere) on your site. On many sites, these account for very little (if any) traffic, and can be removed. One good tool to view their effect on load times is Pingdom Tools, which will show the how rapidly different parts of your site are loaded.

2. Get a solid theme

Up until several months ago, I was using one of the “solid” free Wordpress themes. It’s well-known and even supported, but after seeing how my site was loading, I finally decided to plunk down the cash to see if it would actually make a difference. While I have no doubt that there are some very fast free themes out there, I have little doubt that, for me, premium theme was worth every penny.

3. Get a Content Delivery Network

This was a new one to me. Content delivery networks (CDN) work by caching your data around the globe, so that static pages on your site are more rapidly accessible to your visitors. This makes your site “appear” to load faster.

From what I can tell, at one time, deploying a CDN was a very expensive proposition. But with the introduction of Amazon Cloudfront, you’ll get the advantage of delivering your content from Amazon’s servers, while only being charged for the amount of data your transfer. Costs are low, and the improvements in speed are worth every penny.

4. Install W3 Total Cache

Every Wordpress blog needs a caching plugin. I was running WP Super Cache, which was working well, so I was hesitant to change. But after making the leap, I can say with complete honesty that W3 Total Cache is a far superior plugin. It takes some work to configure properly because it’s so powerful, and I managed to screw a few things up along the way, but it was definitely worth the effort. Not only that, but support for the plugin is awesome.

W3TC makes setting up Amazon Cloudfront a transparent process, and incorporates caching, as well as minification of .css and .js files. I’m still in the process of working through how best implement its features, but between Pingdom and PageSpeed, I’m convinced implementing this tool has reduced my load times by at least 30%.

What other tips do you have to reduce the load time of web pages?

About The Author: Greg Hayes is the author of Live Fit Blog, where he blogs about living fit while balancing the challenges of daily life.

Original Post: Four Simple Steps For Big Gains In Page Speed

Google Now Displays Complete Backlink Data For Your Website

dailyblogtips — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:05:28 +0000

There is a big change in the Google Webmaster Tools. Historically Google only showed a sample of your backlinks (i.e., 10% or less), so webmasters had no way to know how many backlinks their websites had according to Google.

People argued that this was a measure to prevent people from trying to reverse engineer Google’s search algorithm.

I was reading Search Engine Journal yesterday, however, and I discovered that Google just changed this feature. If you log into your Webmaster Tools account now, under the “Site Analysis” and “Links to your site” section you’ll find the complete backlink data for your website.

I remember that before this change Google was reporting around 500,000 backlinks for DailyBlogTips.com, and now it reports over 5 million (as you can see in the screenshot above). You can also see which pages are getting more links, and even export the whole thing as a spreadsheet.

I think this is an important change for two reasons. First of all it will help webmasters understand where their backlinks are coming from, and how they affect the search rankings of each page. Secondly, this change also signs that Google is becoming more transparent regarding how it indexes and crawls the web.

Original Post: Google Now Displays Complete Backlink Data For Your Website

Best Firefox Add-ons: SearchStatus

dailyblogtips — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:14:04 +0000

The browser is where we spend most of our time these days, and Firefox is the browser of choice for web geeks (along with Chrome these days). That is why I decided to start a series called “Best Firefox Add-ons.”

Every Monday I’ll be talking about one different add-on (also called extension), and most of them are useful to bloggers, webmasters and Internet addicts in general!

The first one is called SearchStatus. If I don’t have this extension installed it feels that something is missing on the browser.

It basically displays the Google PageRank and the Alexa rank of the website/page you are visiting.

On top of that you also have a wide range of features. For example, you can make the extension highlight nofollow links on the pages you are visiting, show the Whois or robots.txt of the website, and check how many backlinks the website or page has (according to different sources).

It is certainly the extension I use most frequently while working online, so check it out if you don’t have it yet.

Original Post: Best Firefox Add-ons: SearchStatus