Google has added three brand new features to Google Talk trying to catch up with the other strong IMs out there.
1. File Transfer
With this top requested new feature, you can send unlimited files and folders to your friends through Google Talk. There is no restriction on the file type or size and the peer-to-peer transfer is fast and reliable. Learn more
2.Voicemail
If a friend isn't around to answer your call, now you can leave a voicemail. You can even leave voicemail messages for your friends who don't use Google Talk--they'll receive an email with the message attached as an audio file. Learn more
3.Music Status
Listening to music while on Google Talk? Now you can let your friends see what you're listening to by selecting "Show current music track" in your status menu. Your status message will change when your song does! Learn more
Though these features is only available to a small percentage of Google Talk users, you can now download it from here.
And did anyone test if GTalk or MSN is faster in file transfer?
Friday, July 28, 2006
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Tips to dirve traffic with blog directories (more than just listings)
There are hundreds and hundreds of blog directories out there for people to get their blogs listed. But apart from being included so that your blog can gain more exposure to the Internet users around the world, what else can a blog directory help to drive more and more traffic to your blog? Here's the answer!
With all the submitted blogs classified into various categories, bloggers can easily find blogs that are related or similar to your own blog. With this, you can start your own free advertising campaign by promoting in these related blogs. One of the easiest (and of course cheapest) way to achieve this is to leave a comment in the latest post. By leaving a comment, not only will the owner take notice of your blog but most importantly the visitors. Most visitors (me included) like to read comments very much and makes the so-called "comment advertising" so powerful.
Here are some tips you should bear in mind about leaving comments:
1. Never leave short, useless or canned comments like "Nice!", "Cool!", "Great Blog!", etc. Otherwise your comment will be deleted very soon. Take some time and read some of the content and give some solid suggestions for improvements or tell the owner why you love his/her blog. Afterall, everything is free so it takes you some time to do this. (But actually, I got a really nice tip for those who really don't have the mood to go over some tedious blogs out there. Try to give suggestions based on the layout of the blog. In this way, you only have to glance through the blog without bothering to read the content and it's always easier to criticise one's layout. You can try this: "It would be better, in my opinion, if you blend the advertisements in to your blog be setting the background colour of the ad units." By using this technique, you can give long but useful comments and gives the owner a feeling that you are here to help rather than to advertise.
2. Never be rude or too "hard-sell". Try to be humble as you won't want others to leave comments such as "I GOT A REALLY REALLY GREAT BLOG ABOUT ENGINEERING!!!! VISIT PLEASEEEEE!!!", would you? So try to keep your tone nice and kind. Use sentences like "I also got a blog about engineering, you might want to take a look at it, here's the link." or "Can you give me some advice about my engineering blog?" Your comment will always appear to be acceptable and pleasing if you don't sound like a salesperson.
3. Try to visit the blogs you have left comments on frequently and keep an eye on any replies to your post. Be responsive if the owner or visitors reply to you.
4. Leave comments again when you have written a new post or changed the layout. But remember, do this often or when you sense that the owner dislike your doing so.
Starting from today, don't just use blog directories as a listing place only, use them thoroughly by discovering blogs that are of the same category as yours. And drive traffic to your blog by commenting on them. Try it yourself and see how powerful this "comment advertising" is!
Here are some high-quality directories (what means by "high-quality" is that they review each submission to ensure that they are content-rich and blogs are well classified into categories):
Blog Announce
Blog Top Sites
Yahoo!'s Blog Directory
Google's Blog Directory
BlogFlux Directory
Hope you find this useful!
Keith
With all the submitted blogs classified into various categories, bloggers can easily find blogs that are related or similar to your own blog. With this, you can start your own free advertising campaign by promoting in these related blogs. One of the easiest (and of course cheapest) way to achieve this is to leave a comment in the latest post. By leaving a comment, not only will the owner take notice of your blog but most importantly the visitors. Most visitors (me included) like to read comments very much and makes the so-called "comment advertising" so powerful.
Here are some tips you should bear in mind about leaving comments:
1. Never leave short, useless or canned comments like "Nice!", "Cool!", "Great Blog!", etc. Otherwise your comment will be deleted very soon. Take some time and read some of the content and give some solid suggestions for improvements or tell the owner why you love his/her blog. Afterall, everything is free so it takes you some time to do this. (But actually, I got a really nice tip for those who really don't have the mood to go over some tedious blogs out there. Try to give suggestions based on the layout of the blog. In this way, you only have to glance through the blog without bothering to read the content and it's always easier to criticise one's layout. You can try this: "It would be better, in my opinion, if you blend the advertisements in to your blog be setting the background colour of the ad units." By using this technique, you can give long but useful comments and gives the owner a feeling that you are here to help rather than to advertise.
2. Never be rude or too "hard-sell". Try to be humble as you won't want others to leave comments such as "I GOT A REALLY REALLY GREAT BLOG ABOUT ENGINEERING!!!! VISIT PLEASEEEEE!!!", would you? So try to keep your tone nice and kind. Use sentences like "I also got a blog about engineering, you might want to take a look at it, here's the link." or "Can you give me some advice about my engineering blog?" Your comment will always appear to be acceptable and pleasing if you don't sound like a salesperson.
3. Try to visit the blogs you have left comments on frequently and keep an eye on any replies to your post. Be responsive if the owner or visitors reply to you.
4. Leave comments again when you have written a new post or changed the layout. But remember, do this often or when you sense that the owner dislike your doing so.
Starting from today, don't just use blog directories as a listing place only, use them thoroughly by discovering blogs that are of the same category as yours. And drive traffic to your blog by commenting on them. Try it yourself and see how powerful this "comment advertising" is!
Here are some high-quality directories (what means by "high-quality" is that they review each submission to ensure that they are content-rich and blogs are well classified into categories):
Blog Announce
Blog Top Sites
Yahoo!'s Blog Directory
Google's Blog Directory
BlogFlux Directory
Hope you find this useful!
Keith
Sunday, July 02, 2006
How to Increase a Blog's Page Views
There is often a lot of talk in ‘how to blog’ type articles on increasing visitors numbers to a blog there is another statistic that is important to some bloggers also - page views.
Most statistics packages measure both for you - ‘visitors’ (or unique visitors) measures the number of people, but ‘page views’ measures the number of pages on your blog that those visitors look at.
The number of page views per visitor varies quite significantly from blog to blog (based on many factors) but there are a number of reasons why bloggers might wish to increase this statistic including:
* Stickiness - the more pages a reader views the increased chance of them coming back are.
* Revenue - more and more of the ads that we are running on your blogs are impression based ads (ie the more times the ads are seen the more that is earned).
Whether you want to increase page views or not is something that different bloggers will place as a different priority, depending upon the goals of their blog, but if it is something you’d like to work on here are 14 tips on how to increase page views:
Interlink your Posts
Perhaps one of the simplest ways to increase the page views on your blog is to send yourself traffic by links between posts from within posts. While for some of us it might feel a little funny promoting your own writing in this way I find that my readers appreciate it if it’s done in a way that adds value to their experience of your blog by linking to other relevant things that you’ve written on the topics that you’re writing about. Most bloggers touch on the same topics numerous times in the life of a blog and to link to previous times you’ve mentioned something adds depth to what you write.
Highlight Related Posts
One way to interlink your posts that doesn’t happen from within a post is to have a ‘related posts’ section at the end of your entries. You’ll see an example of this if you scroll down this page to the yellow section just above my comments section. On ProBlogger this is run by a WordPress plugin (called related posts) which automatically finds other posts I’ve written on similar topics (if it’s doing it’s job you’ll find that I’ve written on this very same topic before - hopefully my ideas have developed a little). Of course you can also manually run a ‘related posts’ section also by simply ending your article with other relevant things you’ve written that readers might like to check out.
Add a Newsletter or Post Notification Services
One thing that I’ve noticed on some of my blogs is the power of having an email newsletter to increase page views. Those of you that have signed up to my newsletter here at ProBlogger will know that I generally have a section called ‘hot posts’ in which I recap the 5 most popular posts of the week on this blog. While regular readers of the blog who will have seen those posts already probably don’t visit those links quite a few people do. In doing so they often seem to visit more than one of them, thus increasing not only ‘visitor’ numbers but ‘page view’ numbers also. Other services automatically notify readers via email of new posts to your blog which you might also find useful (for example Zookoda and Feedburner both have ways of doing this).
Highlight Key Posts in Prominent Positions
I watched a friend surf through ProBlogger recently on their first visit to the blog. One of the things I noticed that they did was surf through the posts that I have highlighted in my three menu boxes at the top of this site. I’ve written previously about why I have those boxes up there and how they are key posts from ProBlogger that help with creating stickiness on the blog. My friend surfed through all of the links in the top left menu and some of those in the other boxes also - racking up page views along the way.
‘Best of’ Pages
The other thing about the posts that my friend viewed from my top menus is that many of them are what I call ‘best of’ or ‘compilation’ pages that link to multiple other pages on this blog. For example the ‘Top 20 Posts at ProBlogger‘ is a prime example and is a post that I know that many first time readers of ProBlogger surf through from start to finish (I can tell because I can see them leaving comments along the way).
Write a Series of Posts
Writing a series of posts on a blog is an effective way of building page views on two fronts. For starters as you write the series you will find it draws people back to your blog over a number of days because they want to find out what you’ve got to say next. Secondly it’s also great once you’ve finished the series because if you’re smart about interlinking them you’ll find that people will read your series (with each post on a different page) from start to finish. Probably the best example that I can give you of this is my Blogging for Beginners series which I highlight in the prominent position on this blog and which I know new readers surf through from start to finish (and in doing so they end up reading 30-40 posts).
Use Extended Entires on your Front Page
If you’re writing long posts use the ‘more’ (or extended entry) feature to link people into your individual pages. I wouldn’t do it on all posts as it can be annoying, but for long posts it helps keep your main page more manageable but also has the side benefit of increases page views. I think some bloggers use this feature too much - but in moderation in longer posts it can be useful.
Run a Blog Project or Meme
One of the side benefits of my recent group writing projects (like the recent ‘goals‘ one) is that I found they not only brought new links and readers to ProBlogger but they also drew people back multiple times in a week (and day) to see what updates there had been to it. While memes, contests or projects like these won’t appeal to all of your readers you’ll find that some really really get off on them and will keep coming back to participate. Again - it’s not my primary goal for doing them but is a nice side benefit.
Excerpts in RSS feeds
Longer term ProBlogger readers will be aware that I switched from partial to full feeds in my RSS feeds a month or two back. While I did this for a number of reasons I knew in doing so that I would probably see a drop in actual visitor numbers and page views to the blog. This has been the case (although keep in my that RSS readership has increased significantly). Obviously if you do not give RSS readers your full posts in feeds you force them to either only read the first part of your articles or to actually come and visit your blog. This is obviously something I’ve had a change of heart on but is something worth knowing if you’re considering moving to full feeds.
Entice RSS Readers to Visit
Don’t tease or suck your RSS subscribers into visiting your blog but be smart about using techniques that might get them to visit. Using Polls, writing posts in a way that invites comments, interlinking posts etc will all draw your RSS readers (who don’t create any page views) to come and visit your actual blog (I wrote a little more on this here).
Build Interactivity into your Blog
The more your readers participate in your blog the more they’ll come back to it and they more pages they’ll view when they do. For starters people will come back to a blog if they’ve left their mark on it (via a comment, a vote in a poll etc) to see how others interact there but secondly the act of interacting often means a second page view. For example the very act of leaving a comment means two pages are viewed (once in viewing the post and a second time once the comment has been made). Of course this is not the primary reason you want people to comment but it’s a byproduct of it. Interactivity on blogs generally happens around the comments section (find out how to get more comments here) but is also increasingly common around polls and other blog tools.
Draw People Back to Comments
To build on this idea of interactivity, especially around comments, a couple of techniques that people use effectively is to highlight recent comments (there are a variety of plugins that will help you do this in a section on your sidebar - here’s one such plugin) but also to give people the opportunity to follow your comments either by having a RSS feed for comments on your blog or by allowing them to subscribe to comments via email (here’s a WP comment that does this).
Add a Search Feature
Allowing your readers to look for previous topics that you’ve written about by adding a search feature to your blog can also add further page views. There are a number of these available - most blog platforms have them built in and AdSense also offers one that lets your readers search either your site or the web as a whole (and where you can make a little money on the side if they search and then click on an ad - see the search bar in my sidebar for an example of the AdSense one).
Give Your Readers a Homework Assignment
Over the last week or so I’ve started giving readers on my digital photography school blog homework assignments. Because the blog is a ‘tips’ one it is a natural progression for me to suggest something that they could go away and do having learnt the tip. I find that in doing so readers keep coming back to a page for a number of reasons. Firtly they come back to refer to the tip you’ve written - especially if it is a step by step tip that they’ll use over and over a again. Secondly they come back to the page to tell you about or show you their assignment (if you allow them to submit their work). At present I get users to submit their homework to a Flickr group I’ve set up for that blog so in effect I’m not really increasing my own blog’s page views - but it does add to the page views of that Flickr group which has become quite active in just a week.
All rights reserved by www.problogger.net
Most statistics packages measure both for you - ‘visitors’ (or unique visitors) measures the number of people, but ‘page views’ measures the number of pages on your blog that those visitors look at.
The number of page views per visitor varies quite significantly from blog to blog (based on many factors) but there are a number of reasons why bloggers might wish to increase this statistic including:
* Stickiness - the more pages a reader views the increased chance of them coming back are.
* Revenue - more and more of the ads that we are running on your blogs are impression based ads (ie the more times the ads are seen the more that is earned).
Whether you want to increase page views or not is something that different bloggers will place as a different priority, depending upon the goals of their blog, but if it is something you’d like to work on here are 14 tips on how to increase page views:
Interlink your Posts
Perhaps one of the simplest ways to increase the page views on your blog is to send yourself traffic by links between posts from within posts. While for some of us it might feel a little funny promoting your own writing in this way I find that my readers appreciate it if it’s done in a way that adds value to their experience of your blog by linking to other relevant things that you’ve written on the topics that you’re writing about. Most bloggers touch on the same topics numerous times in the life of a blog and to link to previous times you’ve mentioned something adds depth to what you write.
Highlight Related Posts
One way to interlink your posts that doesn’t happen from within a post is to have a ‘related posts’ section at the end of your entries. You’ll see an example of this if you scroll down this page to the yellow section just above my comments section. On ProBlogger this is run by a WordPress plugin (called related posts) which automatically finds other posts I’ve written on similar topics (if it’s doing it’s job you’ll find that I’ve written on this very same topic before - hopefully my ideas have developed a little). Of course you can also manually run a ‘related posts’ section also by simply ending your article with other relevant things you’ve written that readers might like to check out.
Add a Newsletter or Post Notification Services
One thing that I’ve noticed on some of my blogs is the power of having an email newsletter to increase page views. Those of you that have signed up to my newsletter here at ProBlogger will know that I generally have a section called ‘hot posts’ in which I recap the 5 most popular posts of the week on this blog. While regular readers of the blog who will have seen those posts already probably don’t visit those links quite a few people do. In doing so they often seem to visit more than one of them, thus increasing not only ‘visitor’ numbers but ‘page view’ numbers also. Other services automatically notify readers via email of new posts to your blog which you might also find useful (for example Zookoda and Feedburner both have ways of doing this).
Highlight Key Posts in Prominent Positions
I watched a friend surf through ProBlogger recently on their first visit to the blog. One of the things I noticed that they did was surf through the posts that I have highlighted in my three menu boxes at the top of this site. I’ve written previously about why I have those boxes up there and how they are key posts from ProBlogger that help with creating stickiness on the blog. My friend surfed through all of the links in the top left menu and some of those in the other boxes also - racking up page views along the way.
‘Best of’ Pages
The other thing about the posts that my friend viewed from my top menus is that many of them are what I call ‘best of’ or ‘compilation’ pages that link to multiple other pages on this blog. For example the ‘Top 20 Posts at ProBlogger‘ is a prime example and is a post that I know that many first time readers of ProBlogger surf through from start to finish (I can tell because I can see them leaving comments along the way).
Write a Series of Posts
Writing a series of posts on a blog is an effective way of building page views on two fronts. For starters as you write the series you will find it draws people back to your blog over a number of days because they want to find out what you’ve got to say next. Secondly it’s also great once you’ve finished the series because if you’re smart about interlinking them you’ll find that people will read your series (with each post on a different page) from start to finish. Probably the best example that I can give you of this is my Blogging for Beginners series which I highlight in the prominent position on this blog and which I know new readers surf through from start to finish (and in doing so they end up reading 30-40 posts).
Use Extended Entires on your Front Page
If you’re writing long posts use the ‘more’ (or extended entry) feature to link people into your individual pages. I wouldn’t do it on all posts as it can be annoying, but for long posts it helps keep your main page more manageable but also has the side benefit of increases page views. I think some bloggers use this feature too much - but in moderation in longer posts it can be useful.
Run a Blog Project or Meme
One of the side benefits of my recent group writing projects (like the recent ‘goals‘ one) is that I found they not only brought new links and readers to ProBlogger but they also drew people back multiple times in a week (and day) to see what updates there had been to it. While memes, contests or projects like these won’t appeal to all of your readers you’ll find that some really really get off on them and will keep coming back to participate. Again - it’s not my primary goal for doing them but is a nice side benefit.
Excerpts in RSS feeds
Longer term ProBlogger readers will be aware that I switched from partial to full feeds in my RSS feeds a month or two back. While I did this for a number of reasons I knew in doing so that I would probably see a drop in actual visitor numbers and page views to the blog. This has been the case (although keep in my that RSS readership has increased significantly). Obviously if you do not give RSS readers your full posts in feeds you force them to either only read the first part of your articles or to actually come and visit your blog. This is obviously something I’ve had a change of heart on but is something worth knowing if you’re considering moving to full feeds.
Entice RSS Readers to Visit
Don’t tease or suck your RSS subscribers into visiting your blog but be smart about using techniques that might get them to visit. Using Polls, writing posts in a way that invites comments, interlinking posts etc will all draw your RSS readers (who don’t create any page views) to come and visit your actual blog (I wrote a little more on this here).
Build Interactivity into your Blog
The more your readers participate in your blog the more they’ll come back to it and they more pages they’ll view when they do. For starters people will come back to a blog if they’ve left their mark on it (via a comment, a vote in a poll etc) to see how others interact there but secondly the act of interacting often means a second page view. For example the very act of leaving a comment means two pages are viewed (once in viewing the post and a second time once the comment has been made). Of course this is not the primary reason you want people to comment but it’s a byproduct of it. Interactivity on blogs generally happens around the comments section (find out how to get more comments here) but is also increasingly common around polls and other blog tools.
Draw People Back to Comments
To build on this idea of interactivity, especially around comments, a couple of techniques that people use effectively is to highlight recent comments (there are a variety of plugins that will help you do this in a section on your sidebar - here’s one such plugin) but also to give people the opportunity to follow your comments either by having a RSS feed for comments on your blog or by allowing them to subscribe to comments via email (here’s a WP comment that does this).
Add a Search Feature
Allowing your readers to look for previous topics that you’ve written about by adding a search feature to your blog can also add further page views. There are a number of these available - most blog platforms have them built in and AdSense also offers one that lets your readers search either your site or the web as a whole (and where you can make a little money on the side if they search and then click on an ad - see the search bar in my sidebar for an example of the AdSense one).
Give Your Readers a Homework Assignment
Over the last week or so I’ve started giving readers on my digital photography school blog homework assignments. Because the blog is a ‘tips’ one it is a natural progression for me to suggest something that they could go away and do having learnt the tip. I find that in doing so readers keep coming back to a page for a number of reasons. Firtly they come back to refer to the tip you’ve written - especially if it is a step by step tip that they’ll use over and over a again. Secondly they come back to the page to tell you about or show you their assignment (if you allow them to submit their work). At present I get users to submit their homework to a Flickr group I’ve set up for that blog so in effect I’m not really increasing my own blog’s page views - but it does add to the page views of that Flickr group which has become quite active in just a week.
All rights reserved by www.problogger.net
Saturday, July 01, 2006
From the AdSense Team
Hi,
We're happy to let you know that Google Page Creator is now compatible with AdSense. Please feel free to add the AdSense code to your Page Creator web pages. If you don't know how to implement the AdSense code with Google Page Creator, please follow the instructions below:
1. Log into your AdSense account at www.google.com/adsense
2. From the AdSense Setup tab, customize and generate your AdSense code
3. Copy the generated code from the 'Your AdSense code' box
4. Log into your Google Page Creator account
5. Select the web page you’d like to display AdSense ads
6. Select the field where you’d like the ads to appear
7. Click 'Edit HTML'
8. Paste the AdSense code in the HTML source code of the page
9. Save your updated web page
10. Publish your web page
After taking the steps above, your ads should appear shortly. If you have trouble implementing the AdSense code onto your web page, please feel free to respond to this email.
Good luck,
The Google AdSense Team
Just received this email from the AdSense Team, now that AdSense is officially accpeted in Google Pages, you might want to add in your AdSense codes too! But mind you one thing, after you have added AdSense codes to certain pages, you won't be able to edit them anymore in FireFox, so strike a balance.
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