I just spotted some strange looking Google AdSense ads on the blog today.

Here’s the screenshot, and here’s the full screen.

I use the large rectangle ads (336×280 pixels) beneathe each post. Today instead of the large rectangle I spotted two square ads or similar. There were four ads and they appeared well positioned with enough space padding in the larget rectangle space.

I couldn’t find the new formats listed at the official ad-formats page nor did I see any official notifications.

This may be a new trial run from AdSense unless if I’ve not missed any latest news from Google.

Anyway the ad looks like two small squares appearing in the large rectangle ads I’m using.

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I think the Social Media Optimization strategies are a bit overdone these days. Honestly, I don’t enjoy the typical “24 steps to make you famous” articles at all. They lack the quality factor in them. Everybody is too focused on numbers and the overall quality of your work is just ripped off for the sake of getting a stumble or that pinch effect on your traffic.

My favorite tool in Social Media is undoubtedly Stumble Upon. I just love the tool and is quite an experience using it.
I started using the tool earlier this year and it’s been a very enjoyable experience overall. I normally stumble blogs and articles along with interesting funny photos etc. The beauty about the tool is that it gives you surprises, all the time!

You get so absorbed with the tool that your number of stumbles automatically goes up and you never keep track of it until one fine day someone alerts you about it. You go on adding friends and one day you reach the 200 friends limit.

When do I use Stumble Upon?

Normally, I use stumbleupon when I want to get surprised! I know that there are lot of information available on the Internet about anything and everything, but where is all this catalogued? A directory? Come on, scrolling through a directory and finding content is the last thing I’d do to get surprised! LOL

Stumble Upon comes in handy at these times. I think it is the most disciplined human edited database of ONLY the most interesting webpages on the internet everyone has access to.

It also comes in handy when I’m running out of ideas. When I’m using it I’m pretty sure that the next stumble that I’d have is going to be better than the one I’m on right now. It takes me to the best pages every single time.

Why do I use Stumble Upon?

I prefer Stumble Upon to any other social bookmarking sites because of it’s quality. I think the SU community is very quick to respond to junk, than in any other social bookmarking site, so finding unworthy information is a rare possibility. The SU community itself is a factor that makes SU a great place to be.

Tips to make your Stumble Upon experience pleasurable

So, have you been using SU recently? If not, I strongly recommend you to go about it right now. You can find my profile here, don’t forget to add me as your friend.

If you have been using SU, I have the following tips to you to making it a pleasurable experience.

- Don’t do it for numbers please
One grave mistake we all tend to do (especially marketers out there) is to use SU for generating traffic alone.
Agreed, that SU is a great place to get traffic but please understand that it’s quality first. If you focus only on numbers, the SU experience is going to be painful for you. Instead, use the tool in it’s true sense. To share and to enjoy the internet.

- Network widely
Stumble Upon is a social networking tool combined with social bookmarking, so the more the networking the more pleasurable the experience! From my experience I understood that being an island on SU is like being a dumbass, it works well only if you network well. So appreciate others talk to them and review their stumbles. It’s fun believe me!

- Don’t self promote
Never ever do this. Well, I don’t think it’s against the TOS, but it definitely does not give a good picture about you to others. It’s other’s job to decide if you are good. You cannot self proclaim it can you? I’ve seen quite some webmasters do this for the sake of getting popularity, and sometimes if it’s a real good article the SU community will forgive you, but it’s really stupid for someone to ONLY submit his content. This normally happens wit marketers who use SU for only marketing purposes. You can easily make out these guys from their profile. They’d probably have 5 stumbles out of which 4 will be theirs and they’d only have joined a few months back, plus no reviews, no fans what so ever.

- Promote quality, avoid junk
Being a SU user, it’s your duty to promote quality by “thumbing up” a good article and it’s equally important to thumbs down a bad article. Because you don’t want your friends to see terrible webpages, but interesting ones. SO use the tool sensibly, thumbs down what you don’t like. There’s nothing wrong in it, it’s for the good of the community.

- Share and review
The most interesting factor about SU is that it helps you to share and review right within the tool. It may be available on other tools too, but I don’t think people get involved with it as on SU. So do share your thoughts on the stumbles, say your mind in the profile page about a stumbler or his stumbles, review people, it all helps in the betterment of the community.

- Stumble daily, make it a routine
Beginners would find it bizzare. But at least a month old stumbler would agree wit me on this that the more the stumbles the better the experience. So stumble daily and uniformly, make it a routine. It helps you in the long run. 

- Enjoy the small things in life like funny pictures
SU is a great place to find funny pictures on the internet. I mean, we all get those email forwards that we never really check, but imaging when you have an entire list of those pictures and you find it yourself? Interesting isn’t it? SU helps you to enjoy the small things like this, a picture, a video that will make your day.

- Stumble through your friends
This is a personal favorite of mine. I have a group of friends who are probably the best I found on SU. And there’s an option on SU to stumble only through your friends stumble. It’s highly possible that whatever they have stumbled would be of interest to me. So rather than doing a general stumble, do a stumble through your friends (or anyone of them) and it helps you to share things.

- Explore all categories and types
There are some interesting categories on SU like videos,pics,blogs etc that will help you to stumble pages by category. Rather than doing a general stumble, do stumbles in categories for example, stumble pics only. This will enrich your SU overall experience.

What you should not do at SU

- Never self promote
- Never spam
- Use pseudo ID’s

That’s about it. Have a great Stumble Upon experience !

Some of you might have already spotted it.. for those who have not, here’s the news.

I have a new website directory launched at DaiySEOblog. You can find it here.

It is a simple directory which enables you to add your site with the Title, Description and URL to the appropriate category. No link back required ;)!

There are some interesting categories at the moment, and many of them are technology, blogging and internet related. I’ll be expanding it soon to at least 50 in number soon. My idea is to keep the listings close while focusing on the content.

Does it make any sense having two categories - Web 2.0, Internet, Blogging and Weblogs? No Isn’t it?
So I may stick with one category Internet. But it’s not that horrible as it sounds I have some really nice categories for you there.

I will be manually moderating the submissions to the directory, and ONLY quality websites will be added, just because I want to keep out spam and low-quality websites.

By quality, I mean sites with original content and good quality articles. If you have a young site with no incoming links at all, don’t fret, provided you have good articles and a decent post frequency, you’ll be included.

Why should you include your blog in the directory?

Good question. Here goes -

- It’ll fetch you some quality  google juice.
- Get indexed on Google and other major search engines in less than hours.
- Also some decent traffic (you may have to get creative on the description.)
- Get noticed by other DailySEOblog readers.
- You don’t have to copy paste a code to link back!
- It takes only less than a minute to submit a site.

Who is the directory for?

Yet another good question. Popular bloggers might find it irrelevant because, they already have submissions at various directories.
But this directory is for the young bloggers, the budding bloggers who have great content in their blogs but cannot find a place to show it off.

I have gone through this earlier when I started blogging. When I had a month old blog, I found it difficult to get people’s attention. And honestly speaking, even some of my friends today were not willing to link to me, they would simply avoid my request.

So this directory aims at taking young bloggers out of that frustration.

Here, we give free incoming links to all the quality bloggers out there who is looking for some attention and some google juice the next google update.

Having said that, I’m extremely concerned about the quality.

If you are still not convinced whether to submit your site or not, read this and this and this.
Meanwhile, if you have suggestions, forward them my way.

I just looove these ads. There are lot of Get a Mac ads out there, and this one is a grand collection of all that together. You might have seen it already but this goes out to all those who not have. Must watch ! BTW Any Mac haters out there?

If there was one thing that you could do to dramatically boost your website traffic, what would it be?

You may go buy a copy of “Click monkeys”, buy the “Ghana Institute’s world famous Traffic Booster software”, or enroll in a “Double your traffic with popups” program. The first one doesn;t even exist, the second one will hack your paypal id and the third one will get your AdSense ads a lifelong ban. Kaboom!

Now, is there something that you can do worthwhile to really boost your traffic by double fold?

Honestly, I don’t think it’s fair to claim anything such. After all we know that there is nothing as “predictable traffic”. If that was the case,then SEO’s like me would’ve given you the exact measure of traffic boost you’ll get if we tweak just the title tag!

So coming to the reality version of things, is there really something that I can do to boost my daily traffic? Yes of course!

Now, this is no magic or “trick” as they call it. It’s sheer hard work. I’ll tell you the short-cut if you are willing to work hard.It worked for me so it should work for you, provided you try.

Step 1 - Subscribe to all those blogs you are interested in. They may be from the same niche you are in or they may be different, that’s not a problem.

What matters is,
- whether the blog authors are popular
- do they reply to comments
- are they likely to get high number of comments and
- do they update regularly

Yea so keep those in mind while subscribing.

Step 2 - Watch out for updates at these blogs in Google reader like  Hawk!!
Do you have a problem doing that? Then you are out of the game. If not, please continue.

Whenever there’s an update in these blogs, be the first to comment. No second no third, be the first!

I know what you are thinking - That’s not easy Mani, there are time differences, there could be others, and the topics may not be interesting, you know there are all these troubles.

Well, my friend, that answers the question why you are not seen a blogstar in the blogosphere!

Had you been the first to comment on the blogs..

- You’d get personal attention from the author.
- You’d get attention from the rest of the commenters.
- You become genuine and passionate blogger.
- You write meaningful comments, not a “I’m doing it just because I have to” thing.
- You’ll get insights on how to write better blogs.

Get the idea? You know that you can’t write great articles like them (the super blogs that you’ve subscribed to), so why not get the maximum out of them with the minimal effort? Makes sense isn’t it?

Some of the blogs that I’d recommend you to subscribe and star commenting firs would be - DailyBlogTips.com, Problogger.net,45n5.com,Copyblogger.com,Bloggingtips.com and Dailyseoblog.com

The inspiration to this article is Amit Agarwal when he “called” me A Rising Blog Star.

Meta tags and Titles play a significant role in deciding your search engine ranks. Meta tags are normally added manually to a page in it’s head section. But many a times, this becomes a tedious process. Luckily for Wordpress there are plugins that will help you to do this stuff pretty easily.

Here is a plugin called HeadSpace, which does exactly this.

HeadSpace configures your metadata, by creating custom titles for a post, converting it’s tags for specific pages or particular posts etc. in fact it does a variety of Search Engine Optimization tasks to relieve you of the chores. The plugin uses data from the post itself to create custom meta tags and description. It also allows you to edit meta tags of multiple posts from the dashboard. It also helps in enabling Google’s section targeting to improve the quality and relevance of AdSsense ads appearing in your articles.

The best part is that it uses data from other SEO plugins such as UTW, and All in One SEO pack.
It is compatible with Wordpress 2.3, you can download it here.

What’s common between Bloggingfingers, Cashquests, 5xmom, and Blotrepreneur.com?

Yep, you guessed it right. They are all “Make money online” blogs, and that they are all on sale/or sold already!

So, it’s a fact that all are eyeing on the big money and short term goals and dumping all the blame on “personal reasons”. I thought this might be the right time to discuss about things to look into when buying a website.

Honestly, I’m no authority to discuss this. I can probably give you a lecture on SEO aspects one should look into before buying a domain, but I thought it might make more sense to get advices from experts in the domain.

I went around asking all the experts about their opinions on things to watch out for before buying a blog. Let’s see.

1. Chris Garret from ChrisG says -

The main thing I would look for are verifiable details of the traffic and subscriptions. What you don’t want to find is you have bought a site thinking it gets 20k visitors a month only to see that 99% of the traffic is from one or two front page diggs and all the links disappear because they were rented.
Also be cautious of earnings claims, get details. A lot of sales show monthly earnings based on one-off affiliate deals, like new product launches, negotiated commission deals you could not continue yourself, or things Google is clamping down on such as selling links and paid reviews.

2. Daniel from DailyBlogTips says - 

The first thing you need to consider is what kind of content is going on that blog. Blogs that publish too much personal stuff lose a point here. You must make sure that the readers go to that blog because they are looking for the usefulness of the information there contained, and not because they like the opinions or style of the author. If that is the case it would be very hard to keep the momentum of the blog going after the sale.
The second aspect is the monetization one, given that many of these blogs that go on sale claim that they make good money. Make sure that the revenue sources are stable and legit. If they have direct advertisers, for instance, it would be a good idea to confirm that they would stay on board even after the sale (just ask the contacts and talk to them directly). Be careful with blogs that used to generate money via PayPerPost and similar as well, because that source is not stable.

3. Amit Agarwal from Labnol, suggests -

1. Check for any traces in the archive.org database
2. Check if google ads are not banned (through Adsense preview tool)
3. Ask for raw server logs before closing the deal

4. Emma Jean from Blog about your blog says -

If I was to purchase a site I would want to know about the history. How long its been established and if the domain has ever been dropped. If its been dropped and has a PR it could be affected the next update. Therefore the value isn’t as high.
As you can see with the recent sales of blogging fingers and cashquests is the branding and the blog. People know them just by the name.. “Oh Cash Quests ya that blog is about etc.”
The most important thing I would consider is the ability to expand and earn. If you are buying a site and must pay 10 months revenue, you want to be able to earn back your investment. If you can’t it’s essentially a waste.

5. Patrick Altoft from Blogstorm says -

1. I would want access to the sites Google Analytics account. If that wasn’t possible I wouldn’t buy.
2. Also I would check as many pages as possible from archive.org to see if the site sold links or anything in the past.
3. Check every page on the site and every link using Yahoo Site Explorer.

6. Mohsin Naqi from Bloggingbits says -

Essentially, I’ll give top consideration to the blog’s niche and its earning potential before checking domain’s age, its  google and Alexa rank, and other similar factors.

7. Ankesh Kothari from BlogClout says -

 * Current cash flow.  Is the site profitable?  $$ it earns.  Followed with: page views / unique visitors it gets.  Subscribers / members it has. 
 * Future potential.  Whats the current strategy of the website.  Is the seller selling because of some impending legal / technical reasons or maybe because of increasing competition?  Can I improve upon the strategy and the business model?  How much time, effort and money will go into it?  Will the site work without its current owner?
The price I would pay is 6-8 times the current monthly cash flow.  Plus $1-2 per subscriber.
This changes if the site also owns intellectual property (patents / exclusive softwares).  Also if the site sells a tangible product and I have to buy its inventory too.
I don’t look at the site age.  Or the participation on it.  Or its page rank or alexa rank or any such 3rd party ranking that has no effect on the bottom line. 
Google backlash comes under future potential - which I check for (For eg: if a blog whose business model upto this point has been earning via payperpost only - then I would think about buying it.  And go for it only if its price is lower than I would otherwise pay for it.).

8. Monika Mundell from Writer’s Manifesto says -

For starters I would look at the following stats:

Alexa ranking
Google page rank
Age of the blog
Active Subscribers
Blog Layout (is it designed to display ads effectively)

If the blog doesn’t qualify through this I will not go further. It would be silly to think that buying a so called established blog with no rankings and no subscribers will be justified. If the blog qualifies, then I will apply some deeper scrutiny, such as looking for income revenue. If the blog currently provides the owner with a monthly income either via adsense, direct advertising, pay per click or anything else, then my first point of evaluation would be how much income there is per month. If the sales price exceeds the blogs monthly earnings x 24, then it would be considered too expensive or over ambitious.
Example: Blog currently earns $400 of monthly revenue.
$400 x 24 months = $ 9,600 then this figure is the maximum I would pay.
Also another important step is to look at the current spending habits of the blog owner to get those $400/month. Naturally if the cost is considerably high, I would keep my fingers from it. One kind of blog I would never buy is a self branded name blog. Buying an established blog can be a great decision for any serious entrepreneur. But we mustn’t forget that the future growth of the blog will only happen if we choose the right niche for us and keep the blog
updated. It is no good spending $10,000 on a dog blog if we intend to write about cats in the future.

9. Kevin from BloggingTips suggests -

1 ) With regards to traffic. You need to see as many stats as possible. Ask for screen prints of analytics, webalizer, awstats and any other stat scripts the current owner is using. You should of course be interested in the current level of traffic however more importantly you need to look at where this traffic is coming from.

   * If a lot of traffic is coming from other sites the owner owns then you need to ask if these links will remain up after the sale and if so, for how long. Likewise, if traffic is coming from an advertising campaign, when does the advertising campaign end?

  * Has a lot of traffic come from social networking - eg. digg. If so, you should bear in mind that these traffic spikes were most likely due to the blog owner working hard to get posts dugg and unless you do something similar yourself you wont receive traffic in this way

  * What sort of search engine presence does the site have? What sort of keywords and search terms are bringing in the most traffic? Can you improve the SE presence the blog has?

2) The most important thing you need to pay attention to is how many subscribers the blog has but I believe it’s also worth checking out the growth of the feed. An easy way to check this is to view the feedburner feed graph. Big jumps in subscribers may have been of a result of an advertising campaign or even a guest post. It’s worth noting how much the feed count grows on a ‘regular day’.

3) Make sure that the income stats the blog owner is giving you are true. Try and get as much proof as you can. Many website owners exaggurate how much money their site makes in order to make more money from the sale. This is something which is unfortunately very common. Another important factor is how is the advertising generated. Does the blog make money from direct ad sales or through a CPM ad network etc?

You should also find out how long the blog has been live and how long the domain has been live on the net (sometimes not the same) and you should think about the design of the blog - are you happy with it? If not, how long would you spend working on a new theme, or, if your not a designer, how much would it cost to get a design which suits the blogs needs.

Finally, it’s worthwhile doing a background check on the seller. Check the previous posts from the seller - is he a trusted member of the forum community? Has he sold before - if so, what did the previous buyer think about them as a seller.

10. Skellie from Skelliewag.org says -

My primary concern would be that the content is transferable or not. Sometimes a blog and its author are virtually inseparable, and people visit and subscribe as much for the author’s experiences, advice, personality and style as they do for other aspects of the content. A blog like that(with strong personal style) may well flounder if it’s handed over to new authors.
Site age wouldn’t matter much to me. Some people take three months to grow as much as another blogger might grow in a year. PPP would actually devalue a site as far as I’m concerned as it’s not something I’d personally want to pursue. As for Google backlash, I’d want to take over a site with high quality inbound links but wouldn’t be bothered about PR and that sort of thing.

So essentially, there are a few things in common that’s interesting.

10 things that you must check in a website/blog before buying it.

1. Traffic is stable or not
2. Had there been a Digg effect recently?
3. Was the blog thriving because of the authors personal branding?
4. Get the detail report of their earnings. Make sure it’s not PPP or any affiliate sales.
5. Contact the existing advertisers to see if they will continue the ads if you buy the site.
6. Make sure the site hadn’t got a backlash from Google because of PPP or text link ad sales.
7. Check if Google ads are banned.
8. Check in archive.org for recent drop in Google ranks (PR drop).
9. Monitor traffic and cash flow for a longer period than specified.
10. Check if you are comfortable with the blog Niche and there’s future potential to it.

Some SEO aspects you must check before buying a blog/website(Just my two cents).

1. Age of the domain, from Archive.org. If the niche is promising, then you can compromise on the age, but the more the age, the better.
2. Incoming links on Google, Google blog search and Technorati. The more the merrier.
3. Quality of incoming links - Are they bought from link farms or are they genuine from blogger’s review?
4. Recent Google backlash? Google page rank drop?
5. Had the site offered PPP and paid text links?
6. Outgoing links - Does it link to malicious sites(mainly from the sidebar/footer)?
7. Content has duplicate content or not?
8. Has it got supplemental results on the SERPS? The less the better.
9. The frequency of posts to links ratio. An even ratio is better.
10. Spiderability of the site. Test with a spider simulation test to see if the contents are poperly seen by Google, or else you may have to go for a template change.

If you had been knowing the website for too long all this factors won’t really matter, but if you can probably negotiate with the seller if you find something interesting here on the above factors.

So there you have it! All the factors you must check before buying a blog. Hope they are also useful for bloggers who plan to sell their sites. Because you heard it from the experts.

UPDATE—-
This article got a thumbs down from one of the very senior SU members. Reason - The article is more focused on getting the numbers and does not really throw light on ensuring quality in your stumbles.
I agree on that , but I’ve taken care to ensure that the tips should not be mis interpreted for evil purposes. Readers, please note that SU is a place where quality weighs over quantity, and do not use any method that you think will corrupt the system. The blog deals with search engine marketing so naturally, I’m inclined towards the numbers part. But that is not an excuse to cut down on quality while stumbling pages.

Taken aback by the title? Well, I mean it. (And mind you, this is not the usual s**** where you get to read what you already knew. This is the untold stuff!)

Stumble Upon is the new social media bug that bit me recently! Ouch! That did hurt but seems like I’m enjoying every bit(e) of it.

Stumble Upon is a great way to boost traffic to your site,in fact, I prefer it to any other social media site.

 The reason - it gets me on a high when I receive 1000plus visitors to my site overnight.

Well, the relevancy of this enormous traffic is doubtful. Out of the 1000 odd visitors, probably only a few of them would actually subscribe to your feed or show interest in visiting your blog the next time. But it’ a good amount of traffic however.

Now, how can you make it to the top on SU? Is it really possible?
Indeed yes. If you see the top stumblers list on SU, each of them have some unique features that will give you some pointers.

(Update- I found out that this page is a mere listing of who stumbled the most on SU, it does not give you an idea of who are the real passionate stumblers who live the SU experience. Here is a better ranking based on the number of stumbles/thumbs, combined with the number of reviews , pics and videos. I think this makes more sense.)

And this is not the “usual stuff” article where you get to read the very same things again and again. Things that everyone knew. No this is not it.
If you do a googling on “How to get to the top of stumble upon”, you’ll probably get a couple of site that will give you ideas like, keep stumbling more pages, get reviewed by people, get connected with all, and stuff like that.

But hey, didn’t you already know it? All of us know that if you stumble maximum number of pages, under various categories, you probably will end up the top list of stumblers.

But is there a shortcut way? You came late to SU. Now, is there something you can do about it?

Let’s see. I’ll take my example.
Three weeks earlier, I was not using SU that frequently and I had stumbles less than 10 sites. Today I have stumbled 1,368 pages, 350 videos, 203 photos and 46 fans. See the difference? Huge isn’t it?

Now, I’m not trying to say that I’ve got into the top 50 stumbler’s list on SU. But it’s an example, to show that even if you came late to stumble, you can still make it big. Provided you know some tips and tricks. Let’s see what they are.

To increase the number of stumbles.

Stumbling is more a enjoyable experience to me and I enjoy every bit of it. It’s the perfect exercise if you are running out of ideas. So rather than seeing this as a method to just increase your number of stumbles, take this as a method to enjoy stumbling more than you ever did.

1. So enjoy stumbling, get into it deep and you’ll never regret it. 
2. Stumble using every possible channel like videos, blogs and news. It values more.
3. Rather than just stumbling, write reviews about sites that you stumbled.

Those were anybody’s guesses. Let me discuss with you some of my personal tips and tricks.

How to make it to the top on Stumble Upon in less than a week

1. Short cuts

In the stumble upon toolbar, you have the option to use short cuts to stumble and do the thumbs up.(See screenshot)

Change the shortcut to an easily accessible one, like 1 for stumbling and 2 for thumbs up. By default this is ALT+’ and ALT+1 respectively.

Now with the new short cut, you can quickly stumble a page and thumbs up or thumbs down a page. Earlier you had to do it manually and it becomes a lot easier now. Please don’t mis-use this option.

2. Reviews

Another way to get popular on Stumble upon is to write reviews. Actually, in order to rank high on Stumble upon you have to get reviewed by others. I’ve noticed that many of the top stumblers do have lot of reviews from other stumblers. And the only way to get people review is to review them first. It doesn’t mean that all of the people you have reviewed will review you back, but the more reviews you have the better.

3. Stumble more videos

Another point I noted among top stumblers is that they have lot of videos stumbled. There may not be any thumb rule to it, but yes, I think it makes more sense if you’d stumble more content, like say videos and photos, rather than just use the default option of stumbling whatever comes your way. This way you look more focussed and organized.

4.  Stumble frequently

Stumbling needs to be your daily routine. Just like you’d open your google reader, the first time you logon to the internet, make it a habit to stumble a few pages every day and write honest reviews about it.

5. Connect with the upcoming stumblers

Now, I could’ve easily said - connect with the top stumblers who have a very high stumble rate. But this is not going to help you in anyway. Because, all stumblers have a limit to add friends. After 200 friends (or so I think), you cannot add friends, but they can become your fans. In order to develop your network, you need to add friends. Top stumblers cannot add you as friend so there is no use in you adding them, instead hunt for the upcoming ones.

The upcoming ones are the guys with a good stumble ratio, and who have a good frequency of stumbles. They are most likely looking for friends who are interested in making it to the top, just like you.

6. Third party help

I really am doubtful about this point, but since it makes some sense, I thought I’ll mention it here.

There are third party stumbling helpers like SUexchange.com, which is a service that will list you guys who are interested in exchanging stumble. That is more like a link exchange, if you stumble them, they’ll stumble you.

Now, I am unaware if this is against the SU terms and service, if it is, you know what to do. Get the hell out of there.

I tried it a few times and the sites that are listed there weren’t genuine all the time. But if you need some initial help, this is the place to be.

So there you go. All the tips and tricks you need to make it to the top of stumble list. If you’d like to add me to your network, you can do it here.

Recently, I had blogged about the recent trend among bloggers going crazy over ad oriented themes. Many of them went for a custom design and incorporated lot of ad spaces in the layout. I think it all started with Tech Crunch, as reported by Darren here.

I found a free wordpress theme that is more or less similar to the ad oriented themes you find with the professional bloggers. It’s here at the Askgraphics site.

This one does have four 125×125 square boxes for ads and a little bit of tweaking can make it more like a custom made professional wordpress theme. The CSS is easy to tweak if you know the basics. Download it here.

The last two people I met on the internet, asked me this very same question, which got me thinking.

They were curious and one asked me,

Mani,how did you manage to write up all these content?

Other guy told me that he was curious to know if I copied the content from any other site.

Both very interesting questions. I believe I have a duty to clear these doubts to my readers.

Well, to be honest, very honest - I haven’t copied content from any source (website,newspaper,magazine,) at all. In fact, had it been that way, you would’ve seen at least a few hundred more pages on the site. :) 

All the articles you read here are all written by me and are original in thoughts. Well, on the blogosphere, everybody has their own platform and their own voice. So it’s just about how well you raise it. I have been inspired by many, and I think I’ve expressed my gratitude to all of them in the respective posts.

To be frank, writing articles daily isn’t easy at all. But there are a few things that I learned from my experience that help me make it, even today. I’d like to share it with you.

1 - Consistency
Every blogger who is serious about impressing others should be consistent. Consistency should be maintained in the frequency of posts and the quality of articles. You can take deviations once in a while, like writing a steroid article, like a 101 websites list, that is likely to make it to to Digg pages, but that is just garnishing. The basic course is your articles (whatever your niche is) and the quality of them.

To me, SEO writing SEO articles was more like maintaining a journal entry. I was lucky that I never ran out of topic to write an article. In the old times, while I was an SEO learner, I use to experiment with stuff and whatever the result was, I used to write it all down on the blog. That was a neat trick right? You study and you let others show your work at the same time.

2- Personal style
Even though this is something that I am still confused about, many of my readers tell me that they like the articles because they like the style and the way things are rolled out. So I guess, that forms my personal style.
I always assume that I’m talking to a normal person, who is not keen to  listen to the technical jargons, and write the articles catering to him. This works both for me and the reader. I talk to clients daily and this “jargon less” style is much appreciated by many of them. I adopt the same policy here on the blog.

3- Knowing your audience
Well, honestly, if there is anything that I’ve deliberately done to help me make a better blog, then this is it. There are numerous ways to get this done. You can assume things, try out a trial and error method, ask questions to your readers, and most importantly study from your stats. Use any method, but knowing who your real audience is really important as it lets you know what you should deliver. I get many clues from my organic referrals as to what are the contents that are missing in the blog. So I make it a point to write them up if it’s possible.

3- Communicating with readers
First off, let me say that this isn’t something that’s easy, but I love doing it. I’m not keen to talk to each and every reader at the same time, but may be one at a time. It’s not possible to make all of them happy as well. But what’s important is that you communicate to them. Many people ask me questions on email, and this itself gives me clues on what to write on the blog. People are reading your blog to learn something, so deliver it at the shortest time, in the right manner. It’s a simple concept I follow. To help this, talk to the readers.

5- I’m not a preacher I’m a learner like you
I don’t think that if you believe you are a guru or whatever, (giving advice to everybody), is a good idea. I cannot set myself in that frame of mind, it simply doesn’t work out. I prefer to be working along with my clients or the reader, and sit with them to find a solution, rather than sit on the other side spitting out “gyan”.

This is very much effective, as it helps you and the person you are helping. If it was otherwise, only the person I’m helping would benefit. Which is good, but if you have a better way why not try it?

So everyday, when I face roadblocks and bottlenecks during my work, I research on the topic myself, and record all what I’ve learned. Many of the posts that I’ve featured here are my research topics.

6- Forget who’s listening to you, talk to yourself
Now, this is a worst case scenario, I must admit that when I started off blogging there weren’t too many readers at the blog. Just like any other blogger,  I too struggled to get an audience. But at one point of time, I found that instead of wasting time in looking for readers, it’s better to focus my time in writing good articles. So that if at all someone visited your blog, there was enough content for him to browse. So whenever there was no reader at the blog, I’d talk to myself and write up a post. Adding a little bit of decoration to it, the very same post becomes enjoyable to a reader as well.

So those were some crude tips on how you can write articles on your blog too,and pile them up! Keep in mind, it’s all about quality not quantity, which is why I don’t agree with anyone who’ll say that there are lot of articles on this site and I did a good job in that. It’s a process and it’s going on, it’s  just about making sure that the process is enjoyable, not the final product.

Hope it helped you.