My Likings

Social bookmarking is a revolutionary aspect of the present age internet. I will like to discuss its history in details but as you people will surely get bored by those things I will keep the thing to the point and useful for all my readers. Just FYI social bookmarking is not a very recent thing but dates back to April 1996 when itList was released. In 2003 del.icio.us started the tagging concept. And we all know what happened next. In came digg, reddit, mixx and innumerable digg clones including the somewhat successful diggo.

Social bookmarking is basically a method in which you save your bookmarks in your account on a SB site rather than your browser. Then you can let other users of the site to view your bookmarks when they visit your profile or search the site for bookmarks. You can also add tags to the sites or pages which you bookmarked and when other users use the keywords in your tags your bookmarks come up in search results. Thus you share your bookmarks with the world.

Social bookmarking is done by either using a toolbar provided by the SB site or bookmarking buttons present in the site which you wish to bookmark. It works best for news based sites or sites having unique content but if your site is not like these you can still benefit by submitting your own content to SB sites.

In SB sites users vote for submitted bookmarks and if some bookmarks gets many votes it gets the homepage of the site and you get heavy traffic for the time it is on front page. So if you want traffic try to get votes to promote it to the top page.

This can drive you good traffic and also help in getting some inbound dofollow/nofollow links. But social bookmarking traffic is really not worth much as they don’t convert much. Still you can get links and some traffic for sure.

Problem 1:- Why am I not getting traffic from social bookmarking?

Solution:- If you wander how you get no votes or saves in SB sites while others get many votes in a short time. The fact is that you need unique and useful content for others to like it and vote for it. And you also need to have make a group in SB sites who vote for each others content to give the initial boost so that others notice it. You can let your friends know when you submit a new bookmark by message system among friends. So, try to deliver good content and make friends with some people who are willing to vote for your content in exchange of votes. But remember that if the same people vote for you then you will need more and more votes to go up as they are devalued. Also don’t submit your own bookmarks only. This will be considered as spamming and you will be banned.

Problem 2:- It gets painful to submit to so many sites. Any solution?

Solution- Sure there is solution. You can try paid social bookmarking services all over the net. Many people are willing to do this at a cheap price. Check http://forums.digitalpoint.com.

If you want it for free try www.onlywire.com. Many SB sites and you can submit to them from this site. But the easiest and most convinient is www.socialmarker.com. It has 46 sites to which you can submit and if you have account at these sites then you can submit to all the sites from here. I recommend this site.

Problem 3 :- Which sites are the best?

Solution:- Well there are too many SB sites and the truth is that it does not help you a lot if you submit to all the sites in the internet. So I will only list the important ones which will benefit you and save you from wasting your time on all the sites you find.

The coloured ones give dofollow link meaning you get inbound link from these sites which helps in gaining SERPS. All sites are PR 5 or above.

Using Adsense referrals properly is a problem for most Adsense publishers. Many try it and after not getting results dump it. It seems like a big mystery to unlock its true potential, doesn’t it? Well, let me tell you then that its not that difficult and with proper planning and strategy you can easily make good money with Adsense referrals. But some points need to be cleared beforehand.

Well, first of all let me clear the simple fact that referrals are pay-per-action ads. That means that don’t pay for clicks like normal ads. They pay only when an action is taken on the part of the person who clicked the ad. Actions can be sign ups, lead up, sales, downloads etc. Don’t worry, while choosing ads you can view their conversion details at the right side. One more piece of information is that GOOGLE does not pay for referrals for signing up for Adsense now.

Now the real advice to make money from referrals. Here we go: -

• You can use up to 3 referrals units on a page. So, use all of them if you need. There is no smart pricing for referrals and as they have fixed values you will not hurt your earnings by showing more ads. You will maximize your chance of profit in this way.
• You can set up 15 individual ads in each unit along with 10 categories and 10 keywords. But it is advised that you only use the 15 planned ads in each unit. Avoid category and keyword targeting. They seem to mess up the ads. If you target keyword and categories then you will show a lot undesired ads, which will lower your income.
• Choose your niche carefully. Referrals work best for technology, computers, Internet, software, dating, kid sites. But it also works on other niches.
• Choose some countries you want to target. Find out where most of your visitors come from. Also include US, UK as a country as these have the largest inventory of ads.
• As always relevancy is the key. If you put a beauty product ad on a SEO site you will never ever earn a penny. But if you put a dating site ad on a romance and dating resource site then it will convert very well.
• Remember that you can recommend a product to your viewers in case of referral ads. So, after you choose the desired ads place them along with a truthful recommendation. Make sure that the product you are promoting is of use of your viewers.
• Use image only ads when it blends with the site better. Some ads like gaming, Firefox convert much better with image only ads.
• Don’t stick to the usual Firefox and GOOGLE products ads. That way you will never earn much.
• If you have a regional language based sites then use regional language based referral ads. There are some available.
• Use a combination of high paying and low paying ads.
• Also you can try this. Set up a referral unit with only 1 ad and write something to recommend it along with the ad. Make it ad large size as possible and preferably an image ad. If the product is useful and relevant and you recommend it in a convincing manner you can see it paying a lots of money.

 Let me share the process I use with great results. I choose 5 countries and write them down. I use my home country, UK, US and 2 other countries from which I get good traffic with good ads in that niche. I set up referral units with 3 ads from each country. I choose 2 high paying ads, which require sell or download or similar things and 1 low paying ad, which pay for just signing up for each of the 5 countries. I do this with all the 3 referral units with same countries but different ads. Now I have a total of 9 ads each from 5 countries. So I have low paying ads which people usually sign up when they click to give me steady income. And the high paying ads give me the boost when they convert. Also I mostly use image ads as it works for me. But make sure to include same countries in all the units as other wise they will give blank spaces.

Long story made short- Use all 3 ads, keep it relevant, promote it, choose ads tactfully, use both high and low paying ads, only target particular ads and you will make good money.

Hope you liked it. If you have any other ideas or want to share your success story and strategy you are invited to post below. Thank You.

Wordpress or Blogger. This is one of the many questions that creep up in the mind of new bloggers when they start blogging. Wordpress is the most popular platform on the net for blogging and Blogger aka blogspot is from the house of the king of net GOOGLE. So, to newbies it seems to be really a tough choice. That’s why I am writing this post. Let me clarify to you the pros and cons of both the platforms and hopefully you will be able to make the right choice.

Blogger is a great choice if you want a free-hosted blog with great features and monetizing options. All you need to do is sign up at GOOGLE for Blogger and Adsense and you are set up. You display your own ads and get paid when you get clicks. Of course GOOGLE is being able to do this as Adsense is their own product and they great profit anyways. Free-hosted wordpress does not have this option of monetization. If you are looking to make money and are not interested in too much features then Blogger is best suited for you. Apart from the scope of displaying Adsense ads you can also add third party ads through template. Also the template is editable in Blogger but not in Wordpress as far as I know. You can install trackers in blogger but not in wordpress. But excerpt of posts is a thing supported in wordpress but not in blogger. It comes handy if you have many big posts in the first page or you want the visitors to visit the post pages.

Apart from these features the other widgets are similar. Blogger can add additional widgets as it supports third party HTML/JavaScript but wordpress cannot be extended in terms of features.

But if you are serious in blogging and really want to make money and make it really big then Self-hosted Wordpress is the better choice. Yes, there are free blogger blogs which earn 100$ a day but they are rare. In terms of features SH(Self Hosted) Wordpress is a hands down winner. Blogger comes with Google support and can be hosted in SH domains but I advice to go for Wordpress if you can afford a hosting which you should. Wordpress comes with huge collection of free themes, which are adsense ready, and of different looks like 2 column, 3 column. You can edit the templates, create your own, manully insert any ads in the pages. If you cannot edit them you can still use adsense quite well with so many useful plugins out there. Look at my Adsense for example. It has such a large user base that support is always availabe. they even install it fore free if you are having trouble installing it. Thousands of FREE plugins for everything you can wish for on a blog. You name them- spam protection, dofollow plugin, captcha, ad manager, analytics, post highlights, top comments, avatars, polls, AIOSEO the SEO pack and lots and lots more.

Yes, blogger has a lot of features but the free themes and plugins available for Wordpress is much more and of greater quality than of blogger. And GOOGLE also loves Wordpress blogs. SEO is not a problem with wordpress. The user-friendly admin panel of Wordpress also beats Blogger. Then there is the auto trackback feature for WP blogs. It also sends trackbacks to other blogs.

Conclusion:- If you are starting and also want to make money out of it without spending anything then go for blogger.

WYSIWYG editors have been always blamed by experienced coders for not being reliable. They say that it fills up with unneccesary code and often makes the code non-standard. Whatever be it, but still there is a lot of demand in the market for WYSIWYG editors. For newbies it is extremely handy in making a simple site (like me of course). And even complex sites can be made with these editors with some effort. And it also has code view. So, I don’t think it is bad at all.

But the problem is that with so many options availabe we tend to get confused about it. So, i have put up a mini review here. In this post I am only going to review the paid options which are generally better. After going through this guide I hope that you will be able to make up your mind about which one to try. I have reviewed the top 5 ones only and they are according to their rank.

Rank-1= Adobe Dreamweaver CS3- The undisputed king. The latest version even generates very clean code than any other editor. It has an wide array of functionality. The latest version has now spry framework for ajax, cross browser compatibility check etc. Also its CSS features is the best and much advanced in the latest edition. It aslo has the snippets which makes working a lot easier. You get advanced FTP functions with the latest version.

It supports many languages:-

• HTML
• JAVA
• PHP
• ASP.NET C#
• ASP.NET VBSCRIPT
• ASP.NET JAVASCRIPT
• ASP.NET VB
• JSP
• CSS
• XML

 Also tons of free templates available. Extensive tutorials on internet. A huge supply of plugins to make the job easier. Though some plugins will cost money.

Now comes the bad part. It costs a hefty 399$. 199$ for upgrade. But you can get a free trial though. But most likely you will like it and end up spending the money.

Rank-2= Microsoft Expression Web 2- Released recently on May 1 this is Microsoft’s bet against Dreamweaver. It is like a successor of Frontpage. Codenamed Quartz it is also quite a powerful tool and free of most of the drawbacks and limitations of Frontpage. That brings it to the number 2 position of this list.

It now has the advanced CSS functionalties. Like Dreamweaver it also supports:-

• HTML
• PHP
• XML
• JAVA
• ASP.NET 3.5
• Others

Oh yes, it now supports the newest ASP.NET 3.5. It also needs a .NET 2 framework to operate. The functionality and ease of use is much better compared to Frontpage and offers similar functions as Dreamweaver. And I think as Microsoft is taking this seriously, there will be no lack of support in the future. A very close second and has the potential to beat dreamweaver if works hard on development. Not a bad choice.

But the price tag is 350$ though you have the option of a 60 days trial version available.

Rank-3= Coffeecup HTML editor- Not even close to the first 2 but still a ggod one. these people have been providing these stuff from 96 and this is the most downloaded editor brand on the web.

It does not have that wide range but still supports HTML, CSS, XHTML, JAVASCRIPT and DHTML. the CSS feature is nice and it gives decent clean code.

But it gives everything a newbie or intermediate developer need.

• It has a inbuilt sitemap generator.
• It comes with a DHTML dropdown menu builder. No coding experience needed.
• “CoffeeCup comes with more than 100 DHTML and JavaScripts, a DHTML Menu wizard, 25,000 graphics and photos including more than 1,000 XP Style Icons, and access to more than 500 free Web-site templates.”
• Free Support and Upgrades for Life.
• Comes with a damn good tutorial.

You get all these at a price tag of 50$. If you are not into very advanced job and don’t bother about ASP.NET and PHP then this is the best for you. Comes at only a fraction of Dreamweaver and Microsoft price.

Rank-4=Microsoft Frontpage- Here comes our Microsoft frontpage. Not much to say. It comes with Microsoft Office but has been discontinued. If you have it and only interested in creating HTML pages then don’t pay anymore. Stick to it. Still does a good job for basic static HTML sites. Also has Javascrtipt, ActiveX and DHTML support. Creates forms in a fly though the backend integration takes time. It has the code view. So, coders can also work with it. But the biggest drawbak is that it produces bloated codes.

Moral of the story:- If you have it don’t waste money if you just want to create personal pages. Thats all.

Rank-5= Serif Webplus X2- First of all its more of desktop publishing package than a web developer. not a line of code is written before the site is published. But the published code is of decent quality and then you can hand edit if you like. It is best suited for newbies or people who does not want to learn coding. You can easily set up a decent HTML site in no time. Some of the cool features that makes it a nice tool for newbies:-

• RSS tools that enable you to insert blog headlines and news feeds.
• 30 professional templates
• One click embed Youtube
• Flash Animated photo galleries
• Comes with a built in forum builder
• Password protection and Captcha builder
• Site Search builder
• Serif Analytics support

Its a decent piece of tool at 79$ and good for newbies but still not a good one if you want advanced codings and extended CSS functionality. Better go with Coffeecup if you are a newbie and the frontrunners if you are in serious buisness. And the lack of direct coding makes it furthur limited in functionality and development.

I know there are many others but none come close to Dreamweaver or Expression Web but costs a lot more than decent ones like Cofeecup. See Web Studio at 169$ for example. So, including them would have been a waste of time for both you and me. If you still want more options visit this site. It has more options and will be beneficial for mac or linux users. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/05/06/25-wysiwyg-editors-reviewed/. I will again come up with anothwer post with thw free editors. Till then tell me if you enjoyed my post and found it useful. Waiting your comments ppl. Bye for now.