Tips 4 Web

I was browsing through my RSS feed when I came across a curious (to say the list) post from TechCrunch, when they mention they have been hacked.

I figured it could be Michael Arrington jumping the gun on April’s Fools again (and setting a new world record at the same time…), but after reading the comments it looks like the most popular tech blog on the web was indeed hacked.

Apparently for some time whoever tried to access TechCrunch.com was redirected to another site. You can get more details from the comments.

The site seems to be working normally now, but it will be interesting to read their follow up on the issue, mainly to understand what kind of vulnerability was exploited.

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TechCrunch Hacked?

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I am a bit late with this book review, but from now on I’ll try to stick with the schedule, which is one review every two weeks. Anyway today’s book is a short but powerful one: Purple Cow. It is my first read from Seth Godin (what a shame, I know), but after going through it I already placed three of his other books on my to-read list.

1. The book: The Purple Cow is about being remarkable (and how this is essential to make your business prosper). Have you ever seen one, after all? If you had you certainly wouldn’t forget it! The book has 137, and it is very easy to read. Seth

2. The content: Initially I thought that writing a whole book to give out a simple message (i.e., you got be remarkable) was a waste of paper. After reading it, however, I can say that it is not the case.

Seth did a wonderful job explaining the whys and hows of being remarkable, including real life examples and case studies to help you understand his points better.

I also really liked his writing style. It is clear and succinct, which is the style I strive to achieve with my own text.

3. What I liked: What I most liked in the book were the real stories that Seth shares. For example, he tells you how Herman Miller managed to transform a somewhat commoditized segment – office chairs – into one with space for premium products. He did that by creating a purple cow, the Aaron chair.

4. Who would benefit from this book: Anyone who has or is planning to build a business. Be it an offline or an online business. The message of this book is one that all entrepreneurs should learn by heart.

5. Favorite quote:

You can’t make people listen. But you can figure out who’s likely to be listening when you talk, and then invent the right combination of Ps to overwhelm them with the rightness of your offer. Even if someone is listening your offering of “a little bit cheaper,” “a little bit better,” or “a little bit easier” is just a waste of time. The influential sneezers, the people with a problem to solve – they’re open to hearing your story only if it’s truly remarkable; otherwise, you’re invisible.

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Book Review: The Purple Cow

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This is a guest post by Ann Smarty. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Guest posting is one of the most effective ways to promote your blog, meet new audience and build valuable contacts. Therefore most A-list bloggers guest post and that’s why if you are a blogger, you should too.

This post will help you to start: it lists some useful, yet lesser-known Google search tips that will let you find valuable guest posting opportunities in your niche.

1. Make sure you use ALL synonyms

Various bloggers use different words to invite guest authors. Some directly ask to “submit a (guest) post”, others offer to become their author or write for them. Even the most straightforward invitation can be expressed in different words: you can be asked to submit, suggest or send a post for example. Here’s more or less complete list of phrases bloggers use to invite people to guest post:

• “Submit a guest post” / “Submit post” / “Submit blog post”
• “Add blog post”
• “Submit an article”
• “Suggest a guest post”
• “Send a guest post”
• “Write for us”;
• “Become an author”;
• “Guest bloggers wanted”
• “Contribute to our site”;
• “Become a contributor”;
• “Become guest writer”
• “(Write for our) guest column”.

Now, you may have noticed that all the phases are used in the quotation marks – this is to force Google to search for the exact match because otherwise you will get too general results randomly mentioning “post”, “contribute” and “guest”.

If you add some words that describe the topic of your blog, you will end up getting tightly relevant results:

2. Take advantage of wildcard (*) operator

In the previous step I have mentioned using quotation marks for better search results targeting. But some guest invitations can be slightly different. For example, a blogger may write “Become our contributor” instead of “Become contributor” or “Send us your post” instead of “Send your post” but these blogs will be filtered out because we were using quotation marks and thus instructed Google to search for exact match.

So how can we include all those slightly different results without sacrificing on relevancy?

This can be done with help of Google’s Wildcard operator (*) which in search results get substituted by one or more words. So if we, for example, search for “submit * guest post” search results will include:

• “submit a guest post”
• “submit your own guest post”
• “submit your guest post”
• “submit one guest post”, etc

3. Use OR and ~ operators to better describe your niche

More often than not it is hard to describe your blog topic with one (or two) words. For example, your blog may be about money, saving, frugality, shopping, etc. The more words you use, the lesser results you will get, because Google will do its best to show you only those pages that have all of those words listed.

To get broader but relevant results, we should instruct Google to search for any of the words – for that we can use OR operator between the words: “money OR saving OR frugality OR shopping” because, essentially we are interested in guest blogging on sites covering any of these topics.

To go even further in this direction, we can use ~ operator before a word that may have many synonyms and related words and thus instruct Google to look for all those synonyms. For example, “~money” search will include words like “currency”, “finance”, “financial”, etc.

So what do we have in the end after we combine all the tips? Here we go:

Ann Smarty is a search geek, social media enthusiast and experienced online shopper. Ann has recently started My Blog Guest – a community of guest bloggers which aims at connecting guest bloggers to blog owners who seek high-quality content and fresh perspectives. Join the community now and promote your blog by guest posting!

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3 Smart Google Search Tips to Hunt for Guest Post Opportunities

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Understanding how search bots see your site is quite important for anyone interested in search engine optimization. This let’s you know where your most important content should go, how the links should be structured and so on. A nice tool you can use for this purpose is called SEO browser.

Simply input the URL of your site there and click on “Parse URL.” The result will be how search bots see your site. One rule of thumb to follow is that your most important stuff on each page (e.g., the H1 tag and the content) should be as close to the top of possible.

You can also click on “Advanced mode” to get some extra details about the head section, the statistics of your content and links and so on.

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Check Out How Search Bots See Your Website

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This is a guest post by Amit Banerjee. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Email is the primary mode of communication between Internet users. You use email to network with other bloggers, to grow your online business, to convert potential prospects into clients and so on. The micro blogging sites like Twitter, Facebook may have changed the way we share information but when it comes in communicating with web users, email is probably the simplest and universally accepted option.

Having said that, it’s obvious that you should pay attention to all those emails you send everyday. Here are a few tips for maintaining proper email etiquette:

1. Use a meaningful subject.

Just as a meaningful title makes a reader read a blog post, a meaningful subject of your email sets it apart from the crowd. A meaningful subject saves time as the recipient can grasp your idea quickly.

For example: If you want to post a guest article at Dailyblogtips and want to contact Daniel, use the subject line as “Guest article” rather than “Hello Daniel”.

Also read: 6 mistakes to avoid in Email subject lines

2. Skip the introductory paragraphs, jump directly to the point

When you are writing an email, keep the purpose in focus. Do not make the email longer by adding unnecessary introductions or links. The person whom you are writing the email may have dozens of emails to read and if you make the email long and boring, he will rather skip reading it.

Thus, avoid the boring intros and jump directly to your point. It saves time at both ends.

3. Use saved templates for answering commonly asked questions

If you get frequent emails where readers ask you the same questions, spend some time writing a template and save it in your drafts folder. Whenever you get a similar message to which you have replied before, just paste the template into the email message.

4. Add a human touch. Make it personal

I just said using templates to answer commonly asked questions. But do not overkill by making everything automated. There are some emails that will need your personal attention. So spend some time on them and try to provide some value. Not only you will get respect from the receiver, it also adds an impression that you care about your prospects.

5. Never write in capital case

WRITING AN EMAIL IN CAPITAL CASE makes it difficult to read and the receiver will get annoyed for sure. Hence, do not write an email in capital letters or else your message might end up in the trash folder.

6. Stick to the proper message thread

Including the earlier conversations in your reply is a good habit. The receiver might not remember the subject and the progress of each and every conversation. Hence an email without a thread will surely frustrate the receiver and he will have to spend some time searching for earlier threads of the conversation.

Gmail automatically includes the threads in your “reply” messages. Whenever you are replying to an email conversation always click “reply” instead of composing a new email message.

7. Read the email before you send it

Before you hit the send button, read what you have just typed. There may be spelling and grammatical mistakes which might have slipped through. Try to read the email from the receivers angle and see if it delivers the same meaning which you are trying to convey.

8. Don’t use abbreviations, slang and emoticons

Business emails should be formal as they reflect the posture of your organization or company. If you lower the weight of your business email by adding lots of abbreviations and smilies (e.g., LOL and ), chances are there that your clients won’t take you seriously.

9. Be careful with formatting

Do not try to decorate your email message with lots of colors and formatted stuff. If you unnecessarily highlight text, the email can appear to be spammy. As a general rule, use black color on a white background.

11. Use short and simple sentences

Email’s should be simple to read and should convey the meaning as quick as possible. Never think that if your writing is Shakespearean, the recipient will take interest in reading it. Keep the sentences short and simple and never write an email when you are angry – it reflects.

Do you take care of all of the above mentioned emailing habits ? Let us know through the comments section.

Amit Banerjee is a computer geek who blogs about software’s, How-to’s and web tools at Ampercent.

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11 Things to Consider Before You Send the Next Email

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Hustle (verb): to proceed or work rapidly or energetically; to be aggressive, especially in business or other financial dealings.

I consider myself to be a hard worker, but I don’t think I am a hustler. Not yet, at least.

I will be trying to change that this year.

Now the difference between “working hard” and “hustling” might be a subtle one, but it is also an important one. In my opinion working hard is about being able to work long hours, to persist for months on projects that are not going well, to remain focused and so on. Hustling, on the other hand, is about making sure that the hours you’ll spend working will yield something. It is about making things happen, getting results, accomplishing goals, no matter what.

As you can see, you need both. You need to work hard and you need to hustle.

Practically speaking, I want to start hustling because I believe I fell into a comfort zone over the last year. The results I have been getting with my blogs, websites and with my online business as a whole were good, but they could have been better.

As a result I have set several goals for this year, and I will try to achieve no matter what.

One of them I wanted to share with you guys, because I might motivate you to do the same. That is, the goal of reaching 50,000 subscribers within the next six months (so by July 21). That is about 2,000 new subscribers per month, which is twice the historical rate of this blog (Daily Blog Tips is 39 months old and has 39,000 subscribers). It sure will require a lot of hustling to achieve that, but I believe it is possible.

As for the tactics and strategies I will be using to reach that goal, well, I will talk about them on future posts.

The message I wanted to send remains: hustling is essential. If you are not, get on with it!

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Hustling My Way to 50,000 Subscribers

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This is a guest post by Ciprian Ginghina. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

The word on the street, or perhaps I should say ‘information superhighway’, is that certain text style options make website content and blogs ‘pop’ and are thereby more appealing to readers. The use of short sentences within short paragraphs decorated with bullet point lists and sub-headers apparently hold our attention in a vise grip, bewitched by the format. Blogging gurus peddle these presentation options as if they are some magical beguiling cloak for crap writing.

Yup, advertisers have discovered writing. The same people that compose commercial content for the Thigh Master*, penis enlargement cream and the Snuggie* have suddenly realized that rather than hire professional writers (y’know, people that read and write extensively and thereby have actual vocabularies and legitimate skills in idea communication), they can instead employ any old Duncan to throw together a few mismatched words, inject them into their online formatting template, and boom! Instant captivation.

(Oops, that middle sentence in the last paragraph was far too long! But you read it? Why? How did that happen? There were no bullet points, nor even a sub-header in bold!)

One thing a writer requires is faith in his or her readers’ smarts. You shouldn’t treat them like idiots, because:

• They aren’t
• A high proportion of them are actually more intelligent than you are
• You have to respect that, or they can tell
• Oh Christ, I’m using bullet points

The use of such style tricks is akin to using flashing lights as a distraction in a zombie movie. If you instead want to attract survivors to your fortified mall/pub/apartment (especially physically attractive ones that can read) it’s best to write a legible banner and illuminate it with a single lamp.

Yup, I used an extended zombie movie metaphor. Nope, it’s not in the manual. And guess what? You read that bit, too.

I’m sure, by now, you’ve guessed my point. Writing can be compelling by itself if you’re willing to spend a little time making it so. You don’t need to follow style guidelines from some self-appointed expert. Sure, Search Engine Optimization is a desirable focus; you want people to read your stuff, and SEO is a method to elevate your Google/Yahoo/etc. page rankings. Thankfully, search engine Spiders, the software that secretly explores your web content for relevancy, are getting wise to the ways of the keyword stuffers. As technology advances, so does the ability of the Spiders to avoid being fooled by the black hat brigade. They are starting to develop methods of recognizing quality writing for what it is, rather than a bunch of filler packed around keywords.

And thank goodness for that. Maybe one day I won’t ever again have to waste valuable minutes of my life wading through pointlessly decorated drivel. (Incidentally, is no one else a little perturbed that a machine can recognize talent when it examines a block of text? There’s another blog, right there…).

Ciprian Ginghina is a full time web developer. He has over five years of experience in web development. He specializes in LAMP platform and JQuery framework. He is also passionate about online marketing. His blog is an effort to share his insights on online marketing, blogging, personal development and personal finance.

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Style Versus Content in Your Blog

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