Top-10 Blog Directories

One way someone can generate traffic for his website or Blog is to include it in a Directory. Directories generate traffic directly and indirectly since people would be refered to your site directly from a link there but in addition the search engines will value place your website or Blog higher if they find links to it from respectable outside sources.

One has to be careful though when dealing with directories. Some website and Blog directories are not respected by search engines since they are used to point to dodgy websites. Including your Blog or website there might have the opposite effect to what you were looking for and your site might get penilized.

Here is the top ten list of Blog Directories according to their alexa ranking:

• Blog Catalog
• BlogFlux
• Best Of The Web Blogs
• Geeky Speaky
• BlogPulse
• Blog Digger
• Blogorama
• Blog Rankings
• Blog Top List
• Top Of Blogs
  

A final Tip: If you are wondering about a directory and you want to see if you are going to waste you time or worse you might want to check with the blog-dir Blog.

The importance of RSS feeds

One of the most important services that you offer from your Blog is its RSS feed. RSS feeds allow users to view the content of your website as soon as it is posted without visiting your blog, through email or specialized readers. Through subsriptions a webmaster can measure the success and quality of his posts.

Someone might ask why is this different than checking the website or blog traffic. Traffic will not tell whether people like your posts. People might have come there through a search engine or other ways but they did not necesarily liked what they read. If people like what is on the blog they subscribe to make sure they get future articles. If people feel the quality has droped you will see the numbers fall as they will start to unsubcribe. Thus in essense traffic and subsriptions are two totally different things.

Make sure that when you create a feed you give the full feed and not just a part of it as a way to lure people back to your website. This is cheap and people hate it. If what you write is good people will come for the original. If it is good not the only thing you will acomplish is people to avoid your feeds.

Another very important aspect of feed management is feed redirection. Redirction is one feed to be accesible from another url other than its original. Redirection is very important since if you have multiple feed urls from various feed services you can redirect all of them to one single address. Thus, you only have to provide that one address to your users and you can easily track subsriptions of that address only since it will contain all.

The best free RSS feed management tool in the web is feedburner. It provides you with various tools to manage and track subsriptions. It provides you with ready made code for email and reader subsiption and it is optimized for various platoforms such as blogger. Feedburner is owned by Google, so you can use your existing google accound to manage your feeds as well.

A picture is worth a thousand words

From Wikipedia:

A picture is worth a thousand words is a saying/cliche that refers to the idea that complex stories can be described with just a single still image, or that an image may be more influential than a substantial amount of text. It also aptly characterizes the goals of visualization where large amounts of data must be absorbed quickly...

Using images and photos in your site and blog is very important. Having a website or a blog that only provides the user with text upon text is very tiresome for the him/her. The web 2.0 era dictates fast information presentation. It requires from the webmaster to draw the attention of the visitor and to direct him quickly where he/she needs to go. If the visitor has to go through endless lines of text to find where he/she needs to be the chances are he/she will leave.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Give your readers something to look at.

You will find that the readers are not very patient people. They want their information and they want it now. Images help them decide if they want to read through or not. In addition images draw their attention because they stand out from the text. Overdoing it though has the opposite result. Having images everywhere you confuse the reader. Depending on the length of the article you will need one, two or 3 images. This is not the rule though since your article might have special needs.

Another very important aspect is that the images make your blog and website look more appealing. Having tons of text with no image looks boring. Think back when you were a kid. You did not like books that did not have images. The reason was that you found them boring and you were finding it more difficult to keep reading because of that. Web readers are like that. Use images wisely to keep their attention by making the page they are on more beautiful.

Think about the needs of your article. Does it need a chart to show something? Does it need a picture to prove a point or report on something. Do you just need an image to make your page look more appealing. Think about your article's needs and find the appropriate images.

Know your readers

When you create a website or a blog you do not write stuff for you, you write them so other people will read them. Thus your number one priority is to keep you readers happy by providing them something that they want to read. Disregarding that rule will only bring you less readers.

You have got to start understanding you readers. You can do this by various methods: direct and indirect. Start reading through the traffic reports. Which sections or posts are the most popular? In which sections do your readers stay longer? You can view all this by using Google Analytics. This is a very powerful tool that if used correctly can increase the visits in you website and blog.

Another way of understanding your readers is through comments. If you allow comments on your blog it is a very good and direct way to hear your visitor's opinion. Reading through your visitors' discussion on a subject, presented by your website, gives valuable insight as to they way they think. In addition your readers can offer you advice or criticism on you work. Do no disregard this and always thank them for the criticism. Filter what they are saying and run it over other readers if you can. You will end up with a pretty good idea on what you need to do.

Another indirect way of knowing you readers is reading through a lot of other websites and blogs relevant to your niche. Do that especially if your website is new and you are not very experienced with writing about your niche. Viewing other blogs and reader comments will provide you with valuable lessons. Of course do not copy styles or content. You have to develop your own style. Knowing though what people like and what they don't you can adjust your website to people's taste. Do not be afraid to use something new though, as people like new material and new styles.

Gimp: The free and powerful image creation tool

When you are creating a website or creating new content for your website a very important aspect are the graphics. The graphics used are very important since they make your website look appealing. he graphics might as well add to the overall usability of your website since since they make the content standout and the user will find more easily what he/she looks for. Overdoing it though might cause the opposite effect as the user might get confused or your website be too heavy to load fast.

You can find many ready made graphics and images on the web ut what happens if you do not find exactly what you are looking for and you want to alter it a bit or you want to create something totally unique. Image creation/manipulation applications are your friends for these situations. These kind of applications are usually very expensive. Gimp is a totally free open source image creation/manipulation application that is as powerful as most of the commercial programs out there.

Using Gimp you can create beautiful images and graphics for your website and blog without having to spend a single penny. It is supported by great community that and the application is seeing constant improvement everyday. It ha a somewhat stiff learning curve but once you get to learn the basics that it will feel very easy to use. Gimp is available for all major platforms and you will be able to use in Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Download it and start playing around with it.
Windows users download from here.
Mac OSX users download from here.
Linux users check your distros repositories.

A very good place to start is the official tutorials page that will get you going in no time. Tutorials are available for beginners, intermediate and advanced users. You can also check noupe which posted a very good list of specialized tutorials for various effects using Gimp.

Blogrush is shutting down

Blogrush, the well known blog traffic generation tool, is shutting down. Today I received an email from them which holds the same message they have in their home page. They state that they are shutting down Blogrush. The odd thing is they do not give a specific reason behind their decision. They talk generally about the problems they faced troughout the one and a half year the service was online. They also thank all the users that participated in the service. They state that they had offers to sell out blogrush but they refused saying we truly feel it's the 'right' thing to do for our users. Who know what really happened..

I have mixed feelings about this. In my point of view, Blogrush never actually worked correctly. Almost all new blogs I know used it but there was very little traffic exchnage going on. It was a very good idea with a not so good implementation. It mostly helped the blogs that already had traffic to generate the credits but provided little help for those blogs that needed it the most and were not able to generate the credits to use the service. On blogs I was a regular I kept seeing the same 10 posts being advertised through it and I am sure this was not as it was supposed to be. At the same time if a service like blogrush cannot work that tells you something about the quality of the blogs out there and the how and the why they came to be.

Anyway, this is the nature of the Internet I guess... one services shuts down, ten come online. Let's see what tommorow holds.

Overlib: Use popups for your website the easy way

I generally do not like popups. I especially dislike popup windows and unfortunately the internet is infested with bad-design websites crawling with all kinds of kitsch popups and intrusive popup advertisments. When done tastefully and with modesty though a popup can add to the overall usability of your website. An example of this can be info tooltips. Info tooltips can be used to explain an option, or a link, or use it on an image for a special remark. A very easy way to use tooltips and popups in general in webpages of your websites is to use Overlib

Overlib is a totally free javascript library that handles all your popup needs in an easy to use way. It has various functionalities and different ways that your tooltips are drawn. In additon you can add extra html code in a popup and provide functionlity through a popup yourself. Since it is javascript and no extra windows are created everything is fast and blends with the rest of the page without causing trouble to the user.

To use it, you do not even have to know javascript. All you have to do is to deploy the library where you host your website an make sure to include it in your html header between the <head></head> tags. For example :

<script type="text/javascript" src="overlib.js"></script>

After that, you need to create a javascript mousover event and instruct overlib to do something
For example :

You can have tooltips like <a href="javascript:void(0);" onmouseover="return overlib('This is a tooltip popup.');" onmouseout="return nd();">this</a>

which produces:
You can have tooltips like this

if you now replace the "javascipt:void(0);" with an actual address you have links with tooltips like this:

To go to the home page click here

With just a line of simple javascript code you can create useful tooltips to include in your pages. You can check out the overlib manual for more examples and ways that you can utilize this handy library.