Hi!

Its good to be back. today when I switched my laptop on, I was taken to iGoogle, my homepage. A beautiful article by Yoast got my attention.

Joost De Valk discusses a list of 11 WordPress plugins to improve your blog performance. I happen to use few of them whereas others were a revelation.

Here is the article

http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins

Mark Brownlow has posted 22 sources of inspiration for email marketing designs and tactics on the blog. Each of source is really quite inspring.

Check for yourself

What Are The Things That Make You Successful Blogger?

A blog is reflection of your personality and the kind of efforts you are putting in. There are millions of blogs and a similar number of bloggers over there but the ones those are successful are just a percentage of that.

There are certain traits and habits that would help you become successful. Not only they would help you to be effective and successful blogger but also help to achieve other goals in your life.

Here are the habits that you should practice and develop if you are not doing them already.

Be A Prolific Writer

A blog is nothing if you do not write. Many a blogs suffer this death of neglect. People install, throw welcome posts or fw more and then once in a while.

Do not follow that route. Write as much as your time allows and maintain a consistency.

Remember! More you write, the better your writing gets.

It needs hard work, resistance to temptation and patience to be prolific. Keep pounding those keys, no matter what!
Focus

Have a focus and blog around that. It is worthless to describe the colors of your suit or of your cat if you have a business blog. Look it from angle of business. Your reader is not interested in all the decorative stuff like that. They want the information and if your blog is not doing that, you stand to loose a reader.

If you provide value instead, your blog would be rewarded with line of loyal readers.

Learn

Most of the people who come to your blog would not cross check. Only very advanced readers do that. Naive readers would perceive you as an expert and you should not be in business if you are not up to the mark. Therefore keep learning and improving. Do not bluff or misrepresent the facts.

Learning makes you knowledge enriched and a knowledge enriched person is treated with respect and followed.

Moreover, things change quite fast over the internet. Therefore, as  an expert it is your obligation to learn the new changes and apply to your business.

Persevere

The word persevere means to continue in a course of action even in the face of difficulty or with little or no indication of success. The success does not come over night. It demands input and patience. You need to persist to be successful. Continue even if you fail to see any success sign.

It would surely arrive.

Proactive

Take charge. Plan ahead and chart a course for your success. Innovate whenever you can. Go to other people’s blog and make comments. Discuss in forums. Make friends and create industry links.

Slowly, this would build a tide that would result in huge leap

What Do You Follow?

How do you approach becoming successful. What habits would you advise?

Social media is such a vast game that if you do not track it, you do not know what is the impact of your campaigns. Recently I came across two resources for tracking when you are mentioned in social media and how is your social media influence.

After all, it is the influence in the social media that is going to bring ultimate gains.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

You can easily track and measure what people say about you, your company, a new product, or any topic you choose

Social Mention monitors more than 100 social media sites like  Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

You can choose to have a search plugin where you can conduct search or subscribe to daily alerts or have a widget that displays real time mentions.

Klout

Klout is different.  Klout analyses more parameters and is more detailed in reporting. It tells you following values

Klout Score

Measurement of your overall online influence.

Amplification

Likelihood that your content will be acted upon

Network

Influence level of your engaged audience

True Reach

Size of your engaged audience

Do you use any of these services or any other service for measuring social influence.

What are your views on social measurements. Please discuss.

List of topmost 42 content marketing blogs

The Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report is out and it approaches following planning issues:

• How do I get the most out of every marketing dollar I invest next year?
• How do I optimize my email marketing campaigns for better results?
• How do I mitigate risk and avoid costly mistakes?
• Are my marketing peers using tricks I’m not yet using?
• These are questions that are tough to answer but collective wisdom of other marketers might help you to shape your strategies.

The book ask questions like what are best practices to improve email and online marketing results, what optin list building techniques should be used and  how to make use of social media to enhance other online marketing programs.

A total of 1300 marketers try to answer these questions

There are many more. It is free and available for download. They would off course want your name on the optin form they have at their website.

You can download the b0ok here

In world of internet making connections is damn easy but building relations takes time just as in real life. A relation is always built on mutual respect and trust and business relations are no exception.

One of the daunting tasks that a newbie faces is how to stand along with veteran imers without feeling intimidated and without being ignored.

Look! If you want to get connectd to someone, first thing you need is to get noticed. That means you need to be a face in the crowd because there are lot of people who wish to do the same.

If you yell to get someone’s attention, he might look for a moment but then that is all. You did not leave an impression that could carry relation building further.

If you remain in a “I am newbie, please help me, guide me” plead mode, you again come as someone who is pleading for help. Not good enough to build a relation. In fact your repeated such pleading may cause annoyance.

Other and more effective approach is stand where you are, be confident, accept your newbieness without whining or feeling guilty about it and still contribute.

Participate in discussions, raise good queries and answer with knowledge in the forum. Come across as confident, helpful and knowledge seeking.

Leave comments on the people’s blog you want to build with and leave good constructive comments. Good comments create a face in the crowd. You do get noticed.

In social media, promote the good stuff without making it blatant and meaningless promotion.

Consider all this like building your brand.. You may not get anything in the beginning but in the long run your name would enthuse familiarity and trust.

Doing this requires knowledge. You cannot participate in discussions for long wthout having an idea about things. That is where reading on the topic becomes an essential

Remember giving comes back in a big way.

In social media, we often get influenced by numbers. We tend to get influenced by someone who has higher number of followers or fans.

SEOAware has an article that would make you think otherwise.

Fast loading is now a demand of users as well as search engines. A site that loads faster is ranked better and provides a better user experience.

One of the main reasons for slower loading of the website is loading of external files. More external files you have to load, more time it would take.

In other words more HTTP request you have , slower is the loading time.

How To Reduce HTTP Requests?

Everything points to reduction. You can reduce HTTP request by

• Reducing Javascripts
• Reducing number of images to load
• Reducing CSS files

These points are discussed in detail by Josst De Valk at his blog. Here is a complete reading on How to reduce HTTP requests for your WordPress site.

He also discusses about content distribution, a feature I always have found interesting.

I have removed Clickbank Contexual Ads from this blog. They have a very poor response rate and zero conversion rate.