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Feb 25 2013

5 Best Free Blogging Sites

by Leo

Blogging can be a great way to kill some serious time in a more productive way, express and share your ideas and thoughts with everyone, build authority on the internet, connect and network with other people from all over the globe, and of course, earn some money while doing it!

One of the great things about blogging is that you don’t really need a large investment to get started. In fact, setting up and starting a blog doesn’t cost anything at all, if you choose one of the many free blogging platforms out there.

You could, of course, take the self-hosted route: buy a domain, web hosting, and run and manage your own blog. But to be honest, it can be a bit (or a lot) of hassle when it comes to hosting your own blog – you have to manage the hosting, manage the CMS, and develop all aspects of your blog your own self.

Which is a lot to do for the non-techy, or people who simply want a blog to speak their minds or get the word out about something.

And that is where free blogging platforms come in! Here are 5 of the best:

 

1. WordPress

Easily, the best free blogging platform on this list, all things considered (well, at least in my opinion!). WordPress is absolutely fantastic: its free, its loaded with features, it’s very popular (for good reason) – it has a large community of developers working on theme and plugin development (among other things), built-in blog stats, easy integration with social mediums, easy post, page and comment management, is very secure, and to top it all off, WordPress has a brilliant back-end/dashboard/cPanel that is not only quite powerful but also very user-friendly! It takes minutes to sign up for a free blog, get it up and running and be on your way to publishing your very first blog post! All free WordPress blogs come with the extension .wordpress.com, so your blog will look something like YourBlogName.wordpress.com.

 

2. Blogger (aka BlogSpot)

Blogger is a free blogging platform owned by a little company known as Google ;) All Blogger blogs are hosted on Google’s servers, and in a similar way to WordPress, have a .blogspot.com extension. Blogger, like WordPress, is extremely popular and quite understandably so. In order to get started with Blogger, you need to create a Google account, and setting up a blog takes just a few minutes before you’re taken to your blogger blog’s control panel. Here, you can add and set-up more blogs, and control each blog’s individual settings very easily, such as change elements of the interface (layout and templates), add posts and pages, check stats and tweak other settings. You can also purchase a dotcom domain and add it to your Blogger account if you don’t with the .blogspot.com extension. Two of Blogger’s strengths, when compared to others on this list, is that (a) Blogger blogs tend to rank better on Google (for obvious reasons), and (b) you can integrate Blogger accounts with your AdSense account in order to earn from your blog.

 

3. Tumblr

Tumblr has seen an immense rise in popularity, especially recently – it hosts almost a 100 million blogs, and over 44 billion blog posts according to the latest statistics! I wouldn’t exactly call Tumblr a blogging website, as it belongs in the Microblogging category and targets the non-techies out there. But nonetheless, Tumblr allows users to post short blog posts, which can either be text, image or multimedia-based posts (such as an audio/podcast-based blog). Tumblr provides an immense amount of flexibility as far customizability is concerned, and Tumblr blogs are highly-customizable as well – a great variety of themes, free customizable domains, and a whole lot more. You can choose to make your blogs public or private (invitation-based). One of the appeals of Tumblr is that it has a very small learning-curve; a 10 year old could have a blog up and running on Tumblr easily! Tumblr blogs are also said to have a better retention rate than Twitter accounts, which pretty much speaks for itself!

 

4. Blog.com

One of the first things that you’ll notice upon opening Blog.com is its similarity with WordPress. Blog.com is powered by WordPress, and hence shares a similar front and back-end with the service. You get access to some really cool and elegant-looking themes and plugins, and pretty much the same usability and functionality that you get with a WordPress blog. In addition, you get 2GB storage space as well (which is less than what your get with WordPress though). Blog.com does shows a lot more ads on blogs hosted on it, however you can pay a small fee in order to get rid of these ads. For me, one of the biggest advantages of using Blog.com is that you get the same amount of features as WordPress, but a better extension (YourBlog.blog.com).

 

5. Weebly

Weebly is free, and provides powerful yet easy-to-use drag-and-drop website builder, which is perhaps its forte! There’s no need to know any technical mumbo-jumbo, and what you have is the ability to build a highly-customized and tailor-made website your own self, within a matter of minutes, all for free! In addition, Weebly also offers powerful cloud-based web hosting, as well as hundreds of themes to choose from. Weebly comes with a great user-friendly control panel, and you can add posts, pages, photos, videos and do just about anything through its intuitive drag-and-drop interface. You can see the complete list of Weebly’s features here.

What would make your list of the best free blogging platforms? Leave your feedback in the comments below!

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Feb 21 2013

Costs Involved in Starting a Website

by Leo

I was recently working on a freelance assignment for an individual who, while being quite tech-savvy and what not, who knew his iPhones from his Androids and his Macbooks from his Ultrabooks, was absolutely clueless about how websites are set up, and most importantly (for me), what are some of the costs involved in setting up a website or a blog.

Which got me thinking, you don’t come across a lot of material on this topic on the internet do you?

This article will list down a breakdown of all the (approximate) costs involved in setting up a small-to-medium website for a corporation or a business, or even a personal blog. I intend to keep it simple, and beginner-friendly. And the focus of this article will be people who are planning to start their own personal blogs, or small businesses or business owners looking for visibility and exposure on the internet through a corporate/company website.

Before we begin though, it is important to tell the readers that they don’t even need to spend a penny if they don’t want to, since there are plenty of free blogging platforms out there.

But these free platforms are usually quite limited in terms of functionality and customizability. Which is why it is generally a good idea to go for a self-hosted website or blog.

So without further ado, here is the breakdown of some of the costs associated with getting a website or a blog up:

 

1. Domain

The domain is essentially the name and identity of your website: YourWebsiteName.com or something similar. Buying a domain is often one of the first steps that you take when setting up a website/blog. Domains can be registered simply by visiting one of the many domain registrars out there; some of the reputable ones include Name.com and GoDaddy. The part of the domain name which is followed by the dot is usually referred to as the extension, and extensions such as .com, .net, .biz, .org, .edu etc. are called top-level domains (TLDs). TLDs such as .com and .net usually tend to cost somewhere around $9.99 to $19.99 per-year depending on where you register it. GoDaddy, for instance, sells .com domains for $9.99 for an year, and you can get a discount if you register yours for more than a year (can be done up to a maximum of 5 years, if I’m not mistaken). Domains need to be renewed every year (or at the end of the term you signed up for) so it’s a recurring expense.

 

2. Web Hosting

Another one of the essentials as far as getting a website/blog is concerned. Web hosting is the ‘virtual space’ on the internet where your website resides, and where its files are hosted. You can purchase web hosting from the million-and-one places on the internet, or give a local hosting company in your area or city a call or visit. Hosting companies usually offer a wide variety of different hosting packages, aimed at people with different hosting needs. For individuals and small businesses, a shared web hosting package usually does the job. HostGator is one of the best web hosts in the business right now, and offers shared packages for as low as just under $4-a-month. This package is particularly good as it offers unlimited hosting space, bandwidth and domains. Hosting too follows pretty much the same pattern as domains when it comes to the billing; you can purchase as less as 6 months of web hosting, or as much as 5 years of it. Although hosting companies usually list their cost on a per-month basis, billing is usually yearly.

 

3. CMS

Once you have web hosting and a domain, you need to get your website up, which usually starts off by choosing a CMS – or a Content Management System. While you can choose from a host of CMS, such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal for instance, the most popular one out there is WordPress. Its free, very easy-to-use, easy to manage, and lets you change the appearance of your website, add posts, pages, images, and content to it, design its layout, and much more!

 

4. Theme

WordPress comes with a very basic-looking theme and a pretty vanilla interface. In order to be able to get your website to look exactly the way you want it to, you’ll have to turn to one of the million themes available for WordPress. There are many free themes available, a lot of them on WordPress’s own website. Or you could also browse through the many paid-for or premium themes (such as these) or theme frameworks (such as the Genesis framework or the Thesis framework) available on the internet. Themes can cost from anywhere between a couple of dollars to hundreds of dollars for a lifetime license (ditto for a theme framework), so the costs here really depend on what you choose. Go through the links above to get an idea of the costs here.

 

5. Designing

Alternatively, you could have someone design your website for you from scratch. This would allow you to get a custom-built or tailor-made website built for yourself, built to your exact specifications. The downside is that the web designer may charge you a good amount of money, depending on the amount of work involved, and you may not be able to manage a custom-built website on your own (as opposed to a WordPress-based website which requires very little technical expertise to run and/or manage). Another option is to get a custom WordPress theme designed, if you decide to stick with WP, however that too could cost you some money.

 

6. Content

So that’s pretty much it for the setting-up part. Once your website it up, you’ll need to start putting content on it. Make sure you don’t do this after your website is up, rather plan your content well in advance so you know what goes where when the website goes live. You have two options here: either write the content yourself, or if you don’t have the expertise to do it, you might want to pay someone to do it for you – such as a content writer or a ghost-writer who produces the content for your website on your behalf. Costs, once again, can vary. Websites such as Freelancer.com are usually good place to look for people offering such services.

 

7. SEO

You might want to consider hiring someone to optimize your website for search engine traffic and human visitors for you. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, and includes a list of things that are aimed at optimizing certain on-page and off-page elements of a website in order to get maximum visibility, and attract the maximum amount of targeted traffic to the blog – both from search engines, as well as direct visitors. This allows people (such as potential customers) to be able to find you and your business, know about you, contact you, get information on the list of service you offer, know the products you sell and buy from you. Because that’s the whole purpose of having a website in the first place, right? Consider investing in SEO; for an idea of costs, once again go on Freelancer.com to look for freelancers who offer SEO as a service, or look for local businesses in the white pages or online.

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Feb 19 2013

6 Solid Ways to Make Money with a Website

by Leo

There are many different ways to make money online, especially if you have a blog or a website. While it is not easy to make a lot of money from a website (at least initially), and unrealistic to expect that making money through a blog is some sort of a get-rich-overnight scheme or a shortcut to earning a lot of money, with the passage of time and steadily you can indeed turn any website or a blog into a lucrative source of revenue.

Here are 6 of the best ways to do so:

 

1. Google AdSense:

Google’s infamous advertisement service called the AdSense is undoubtedly one of the most popular methods of monetizing a website or a blog and making some serious cash online. It is a PPC-based advertisement service, which is short for pay-per-click, which means that once you sign up for AdSense, you’ll be able to add text, image or rich-media ads anywhere on your website, and earn a small amount of money whenever a visitor clicks on these ads (hence pay-per-click!). How much you end up making this way depends on your traffic levels, how targeted your traffic is, and of course your CTR. There are many AdSense alternatives available out there as well which might be worth looking into.

 

2. CPM Ads:

An alternative to CPC ads, such as Google AdSense, is CPM (short for cost-per-mille) advertisements. These essentially function the same way as CPC ads, apart from their mode of payment; websites and blogs using CPM ads get paid on the basis of impressions or page-views, rather than clicks. The usual or standard is per-1000 impressions, and it usually varies from a few cents to $10-per-thousand impressions. Understandably, CPM works well on websites with a high number of visitors and page views. They can also be used in tandem with CPC ads.

 

3. Affiliate marketing:

Affiliate marketing is also one of the more popular ways of earning online. Essentially, it involves affiliates sell or market another business’s (merchant’s) products or services through their own website or blog, and earn a commission – usually a fraction/percentage of the sale – in return. From a website owner or blogger’s perspective, you are only responsible for marketing the product as an affiliate, and nothing more; all you need to do is send customers and visitors to the merchant’s website through banners, links, reviews and different ads as well as other techniques. The merchant is responsible for all other aspects of the sale, and each successful sale earns you a commission which means that affiliate marketing can be quite lucrative.

 

4. Offer/sell a product or a service

You can of course use your website to sell a product, such as a WordPress plugin, a Firefox extension, a WordPress theme or framework, and iPhone or Android app, eBooks on photography or internet marketing, or just about a million-and-a-half other things. You could even offer a professional service, such as a web-designing service or a copy-writing service, for starters. The sky’s the limit here, and selling something on your website could be a great way to earn some serious money, and even quit your day job and start your own company to work on it on a full-time basis!

 

5. Private forums or features

Create a forum that is exclusive and charge money for registrations or joining in, but make sure that your ‘product’ is unique and exclusive, and doesn’t have free alternatives already out there. Or you could offer certain goodies/bonus features/addons to your current members for a small fee, such as an ad-free experience, and a special VIP member’s badge. Bear in mind that your offer needs to be valuable enough so as to expect people to actually pay for it. For instance Reddit, the popular online social forums offer Reddit Gold, which unlocks additional features for members to use.

 

6. Donations

If you are offering a great product or a service on your website, and you’re not charging anything for it, you have a genuine and legitimate reason to ask for donations. However you really need to have something that is quite valuable on offer, so you don’t end up looking like you’re begging for money, and also so that people have a genuine reason to give donate to you. A lot of browser plugin developers, WordPress developers and Apple jailbreak community members ask for donations via PayPal, in order to cover development costs and keep their products free. Wikipedia runs a donation drive on an annual basis to cover server costs and whatnot.

 

Your Turn

I would genuinely like to hear from you on this: what do you think are the most lucrative ways of making money online, and what has worked for you? Leave me a comment in the comments section below!

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Feb 15 2013

8 Important SEO Tips for SEO Success!

by Leo

Here is a list of 10 essential Search Engine Optimization tips that all bloggers, webmasters, and business owners need to know in 2013:

 

1. It’s STILL all about the content!

Content – or rather quality content – will always remain king. Google algorithm updates, namely Panda and Penguin, have changed the way we used to do SEO, and now with these changes, the focus of any and all SEO campaigns will always remain on the content. Whoever is able to serve good, relevant and high-quality content to their readers (and market it properly of course) will ultimately be successful with their SEO and rank well on the SERP, it’s as simple as that! Break down your content into digestible parts (paragraphs!), write legibly, add variety to your posts, and check all content for any grammatical or factual errors.

 

2. Keyword research is a vital part of SEO success

Keyword research equips you with vital marketing intelligence; knowing what words and terms to rank for is as important as creating content (or anything else that you do). In fact, think about it: how would you be able to write something if you don’t know what you’re supposed to be writing? This highlights the importance of good keyword research, as good keyword research essentially sets you up for success. Above all, keyword research allows you to rank well for keywords valuable to you, and this, in turn, lets you bring in targeted traffic to your blog!

 

3. Domain and webhosting are quite important to SEO

Most people would be well-aware of the fact that a good domain has its own SEO advantages. A domain name has to be relevant to the content of your blog (should preferably be the name of your business), be short and precise, easy to remember, spell and pronounce, and should be a TLD (Top-Level Domain) such as a .com or a .net. Having said that, do not underestimate the importance of good webhosting, as a good webhost – even if it costs more than its competition – will ensure that your blog/website experiences minimal downtimes, loads quickly, and copes well with traffic spikes (all important ranking metrics).

 

4. Design matters too

The whole purpose of having a presence on the internet – be it through a website or a blog of some sort – is to (a) attract visitors to your website, (b) keep them there, and (c) convert them into returning visitors or customers. You cannot expect to do this without a good, attractive website design, even if you are doing everything else right. Looks matter, and it is important to invest in the appearance of your website. My suggestion? Go with WordPress, and you’ll have the option to choose from (quite literally) thousands of free and premium themes at your disposal! Or if your budget allows, you could always hire a web designer to build a website/blog for you according to your exact specifications. Either way, take the design of your web presence seriously.

 

5. Meta tags will help you rank well

Meta tags, such as the meta title tags and meta descriptions provide blog owners a way to optimize their website/blog for search engines, as well as human readers. The title tags of your website’s pages not only show up in the SERP (whenever your website appears in Google’s search results, for instance), you can also put our relevant keywords here and create a unique and enticing title tag for different pages, that contains keywords relevant to those pages, and entices visitors to come to those pages. Similarly, meta descriptions allow you to tell human readers and crawlers what your page is all about, and here you have the liberty to add a lot more characters as well (160, as compared to 60 for the title tags).

 

6. Build a strong presence on social media

… So that you can attract traffic to your website/blog through social mediums as well. There’s a massive number of people using the likes of Facebook and Twitter, and the numbers are rising pretty quickly, so now would be the perfect time to capitalize on social media’s rise-in-prominence. Build a page/account on all major social networks for your website, build your likes and followers, share your own content as well as links, news and stories from your industry, and try bringing traffic into your website through these mediums as well. All big corporations, brands, and businesses are making conscious efforts to boost their presence on the likes of Facebook (or are starting to do so), and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be doing this as well. Bear in mind that Google takes your social signals into account when determining your SERP rankings.

 

7. Link-building

Link building remains an essential element of good SEO. It is also the most difficult one. A backlink equals one vote in your favor, as far as search engines are concerned. The more ‘votes’ you have, the better your ranking will be. However bear in mind that not all votes are equal, especially after Google’s recent updates, which is why it is all the more important to build quality backlinks. There are numerous ways of doing so, such as by creating content that is so good, people naturally link back to you, sharing links on social media, guest posting, blog commenting, submission to article directories and social bookmarking websites, and sharing your links on other relevant sources.

 

8. Site-speed/Load-speed matters

We touched upon this particular aspect in the webhosting point as well. However site speed and site load times are so important, it warrants its own separate point. Essentially, Google now takes your website or blog’s load times into consideration when ranking you on the SERP, which is why it is essential to have a website that loads as quickly as possible. You can check your website load times in Google Analytics, or using this free and effective web-tool by Pingdom, however some tips to keep load times at the minimal: avoid loading your website with heavy, bandwidth-intensive images or code, use as less plugins as possible, use a CDN (Content Distribution Network) if need be, and of course, choose a good webhost.

 

As always, comments and questions are welcome!

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Feb 14 2013

How to Optimize Youtube Videos

by Leo

Lets start off with a simple question: What is the second-biggest search engine after Google (in terms of search volume specifically)? You might be surprised to know that it isn’t Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia or Facebook. It is in fact Youtube!

Youtube is a brilliant asset for search engine marketers and optimizers, a great source of generating traffic and building backlinks, as well as get exposure, promote their business or brand, and make money.

In order to do all that, you need to optimize your videos for maximum visibility on Youtube, as well as on search engines. This is important, because the competition to get on top of Youtube’s search engine results is quite tough (similar to what we see on Google), and a well-optimized video could very well be the key between ranking well or not.

Here are a few set of tips that anyone putting videos on Youtube should consider, in order to optimize their videos for maximum visibility:

 

1. Filename

Filenames are important, for obvious reasons. The filename of your video should properly tell what the video is about. Think of it as the meta title from one of your blog’s pages: it shouldn’t be too long, it should contain your primary keyword, and it should tell visitors as well as search engine crawlers about the nature of the video. For e.g. a video on the review of iPhone 5 should be titled iPhone5review.mpg, instead of clip1.mpg or movie5435.avi.

 

2. Keywords

Keyword optimization also plays an important role here, it is as essential as optimizing a webpage for keywords. Be sure to put all keywords relevant/important to your brand or business in the title, description and tags of the video during or after the upload process.

 

3. The Title

The video title too should follow the same best-practices that any blog article does: it should be short, compelling, and should entice users to click on it (for a high CTR). It should also include your primary keyword. And of course, it needs to be extremely relevant to the video itself, so that it can be indexed for the correct keywords, and visitors immediately know what the video is about upon reading it.

 

4. Descriptions

Once again, follow the same best-practices that you do on your website or blog. Include keywords (refrain from keywords stuffing!), don’t go into a lot of length, keep it interesting for a high-CTR, and always write for human visitors, not search engines. Another thing that you can do here is to give a link to your blog. This is important if you’re looking for exposure, and building an authority backlink.

 

5. Captions and Transcripts

If you decide on including any captions or transcription with the file (a text file), make sure that you use your main keywords in the script. Google also uses a speech-to-text conversion algorithm (closed-captioning or CC), which essentially transcribes audio into captions. Write a script for the voiceovers in your videos, and be sure to include important/relevant keywords here, so that Youtube can know how to rank your keywords properly when it ‘listens’ to them.

 

6. Comments and Subscriptions

Invite comments, questions and feedback from users, just like you would do on your blog. Be prompt in replying to comments as well, as Youtube says that the “first viewers are your core audience and building comments early helps increase the video’s ranking in search.” Comments also give you free keywords that could be relevant to the video. In addition, ask your visitors to like, share and subscribe to your Youtube channel, for obvious reasons.

 

7. Link your Youtube Account with your Blog/Website

Post a link, or a badge (or something similar) to your Youtube account on your blog. Promote your Youtube channel and videos on your blog, by actually telling your blog readers and audience about it. Post your videos on your blog – make a new section for it, or include them in your posts – by properly embedding them wherever you decide on including them.

 

Your Turn

What strategies do you employ to optimize your Youtube videos? What would you like to add to the points above? Comments in the comments section below!

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