Tips 4 Web

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

When we get into trouble we usually start looking for a solution outside, and more often than not it is under our finger tip!

I want to share my own experience with you today, and perhaps let you know about a very useful WordPress feature that you hadn’t used before.

Some days ago I published an article titled 60+ Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers, and later on I found that it had a spelling mistake. So I edited the article to fix the spelling and hit the “Update post” button. To my despair, on that day my Internet connection was acting wildly, and hence my browser got frozen….

I had alread tweeted about the article, and suddenly people started reporting to me that the URL of the post was blank. Basically when I tried to update the article with the spelling mistake fixed the whole thing got erased!

I got frustrated, as I had invested a lot of time to write that article. With frustration, I started looking all over to get some solution to restore the article.

The content of the article was even missing in my Feedburner feed, and the Feedburner email had not been delivered yet, so those were of no help.

The Solution

After some time, and with some luck, I found that WordPress itself had a feature to solve my problem. It is called “Post Revisions,” and it is basically keeps track of all the revisions that are made to your posts, allowing you to restore a particular one if necessary.

If you somehow lose one of your articles, just click on the latest Post Revision (with the help of date and time the article have been saved). Click on it to see the details like article title, content, and everything that has been saved previously. If it’s not the record that you were looking for, then you can select another Post Revision.

When you finally get the required post, just click on the restore button and the article will be restored and everything will work normally. And there is a tool to compare revisions too, which can be of some help if you have many of them.

Caution: this tip does not work when the whole article along with the URL is deleted. In such case you can contact your hosting company support team to get the recent backup file. If you are lucky enough, you will get the article back.

You can read more from Satish on TechnoTip.org, where he blogs about technology and the Internet.

Source
The “Post Revisions” Festure on WordPress

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This post is part of the weekly Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Melvin asks:

I am using the TweetMeme button and the problem is I am not getting that many retweets for my posts. My followers count 780, but I think I mm getting enough views for my posts that 10 retweets should be the average count. I don’t think my content sucks that much as well. Any opinion to share?

First of all you need to keep in mind that only a small percentage of people who are coming across your post will take the time to retweet it (or Stumble it, Digg it, email it to a friend and so on). This comes from the fact that people are busy, lazy, or unaware about the feature in question.

For example, I noticed that on some of my posts the retweets to views ratio is around 1/100. So for every 100 views that my posts get, one reader will take the time to retweet it. I would guess that your ratio is close to that. For some people it will be 0,5%, for others as high as 3%, but it will always be a small percentage no matter what.

If you want to get a substantial increase in the average retweets you get per post, therefore, aim to increase your traffic.

That being said, there are some tactics that you can use to increase the retweet ratio on your blog without necessarily increasing your traffic. And keep in mind that these tactics also work for other purposes (e.g., if you want people to subscribe to your RSS feed, to download your ebook and so on).

1. Educate

As I mentioned before, many people will not retweet your posts because they are not familiar with that feature. They might not know Twitter, and even if they do they might not know what a retweet is.

If want more retweets, you could teach your audience about Twitter and retweets. Write a post on the topic, include screenshots, explain the benefits of using those tools and so on.

2. Emphasize

If you want people to do something, you got ask them. This is one of the golden rules of marketing.

If you want more retweets, say so. Practically speaking you could position your retweet button in a more visible position, and you could also put a message close to it saying: “Liked this post? Please help to spread the word by retweeing it!”.

3. Reciprocate

If you want people to help you, help them out first. If you want more retweets, retweet more posts from other bloggers.

You could also be frank with this tactic. That is, you could contact some of your friends by email and mention that you will start retweeting their posts, and asking if they would be willing to do the same.

Over to the readers

Do you have any other tip to increase the number of retweets on a blog? If so, share with us with a comment.

Ah, and please retweet this post if you liked it!

Source
3 Tactics to Increase the Number of Retweets on Your Blog

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My friend Gyutae Park emailed me to let me know that he just released an ebook titled The Winning Way. The ebook is free, and you will just need to subscribe to his email newsletter to be able to download it.

It has 118 pages and it covers 500 different Internet marketing strategies and tips. Those are obviously short tips, but there are many interesting ideas among them, ranging from ecommerce to blogging and linkbuilding.

In fact here is what Gyutae wrote on the ebook page:

I’m so confident that this resource will help you as an Internet marketer that I’ll make you a deal. Download the checklist and read through it. If you don’t find at least 3 new ideas that help you to promote your website and drive traffic, I’ll send you $50 via Paypal for your time.

Smart idea huh?

Anyway the ebook was a promotional effort to help on the launch of his membership site, called Winners Circle. It is basically an Internet marketing community where members will get an exclusive case study each week and an exclusive interview every two weeks. Worth a look if you want to learn Internet marketing from real examples.

If you are wondering, those are not affiliate links, so I won’t earn anything whether you download the ebook or signup for his membership site. I am plugging the ebook because Gyutae is a friend of mine and because I do think it has useful information for bloggers and online marketers. It is also free, which never hurts!

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Google just released a Firefox/Firebug add-on called Page Speed. It is basically a tool that will help you improve the loading performance of your website. After you run it, you will see a list with all the factors that would make your site load faster, with an image illustrating whether or not your website checks for each.

There are some similar plugins available for Firefox, but this one seems to be more robust. It checks for a wide range of optimization steps, including proxy caching, DNS lookups, CSS combination, Javascript loading and parallel downloads. Worth a try.

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