FTP Blogger Blogs to WordPress Migration
Recently Google has announced that they are going to stop supporting FTP publishing Blogger blogs. Initially they’ve planned to stop the support by February but then due to the noise made by bloggers Google has postponed it to May.
Google claims that there are several reasons why they stop supporting FTP, but in my opinion I see it as more of an arrogant tone of a giant.
So I decided to move my blog to WordPress one of the best blogging platforms on earth. Thanks to Ravi (Successful WordPress Freelancer) for pointing me to correct resources.
Procedure is very simple. Please read Ravi’s Blog for guidelines and if you wanna retain your incoming links and redirect your feed visitors then you gotta read the post from DW.
Happy Blogging. WordPress ROCKS!!!
PS: My moved site is active up and running, I didn’t lose a single incoming link.
SEO: Demand your second click
One of the reasons why people often have high bouncing rate is because of the bad usability issues in the pages. Your blog’s bouncing rate is 90% means; ninety out of hundred people, who came to your blog, puked and went away.
Usually bouncers are considered a negative statistic: the blog failed to engage them enough to entice even a second page view.
Here few tips on how to improve usability of a blog, in order to reduce the bouncing rate. When a user comes to your blog for the first time, you must make him a loyal visitor. Unique visitors will stay in your blog and click through several links, only if you have good content as well as good usability throughout the blog.
Colour Scheme
Home page is the most visited single page in your blog. We need to give colourful but simple design. Colour scheme must match the theme of your blog. If you’re making a fan blog for ‘Twilight Movie’ then you can use dark colours, but no point of using dark colours for a business blog.
For an example have a look at Harry Potter official site and Virtusa Corporation’s site. You can differentiate the colour scheme they’ve used.
Meaningful Graphics only
Use meaningful graphics. Don’t just use some red roses around your blog unless your blog is a niche blog for Valentine’s Day.
Excessive use of Ads
Don’t use Ads excessively. Google AdSense is obviously the easiest way to harvest some money out of your blog, but if you use them excessively it’ll look bad on your blog. Visitor will get an impression that, this is a fake blog trying to rip off a click from me.
Search Box
When visitors find interesting articles in your blog, they tend to go for a search inside the blog. If you don’t have a search box then you’re losing your potential second click.
Related contents
One of the advantages when you make a blog for targeted audience or a niche blog is you’ll have related contents. If a visitor interested in one of your article then probably he’ll be interested in another article too. It is recommended that you’ve got a niche blog to have low bouncing rate, though it’s not always possible.
Be Proud and show your contents
You must be having good popular contents in your blog. Show those popular contents to your users. This is why most of the popular blogs such as Daily Blog Tips having a section in side bar for popular contents and recent contents. A pleased visitor will definitely click on a link.
Colour of the Link
Visitor will identify a link in seconds if we have blue underlined links. When you use different colour for your links, it may confuse your visitor and he’ll end up closing your page. But always remember it’ll not always true. There are some popular blogs using different colour links. Why give trouble to your user?
- Image by LollyKnit via Flickr
I can recommend you to have blue colour link.
I recommend you to try Google Analytics to check bouncing rate. If you’re using Google Analytics once you logged in, you can see the bouncing rate for your site.
Google Friend Connect Now Available in Tamil and 47 Languages
Google Friend Connect is a service provided by Google to integrate Social Network feature into sites. You can see Google Friend Connect integrated with MAYUonline.com.
Google has once again shows their cabability in localisation. Now they’ve released Google Friend Connect in 47 languages, including Tamil. South Asian languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu are supported in this release.
Tamil Interface
It’s a good opportunity for web masters as they can easily reach their users in their native laguage. You can set languages for your site, so it’ll automatically show relevant langauge gadgets in your site.
If you use localised browsers then it’ll show Google Friend Connect gadget in same language. I’m using Tamil Google Chrome, when I visit my site (thought it’s English) it is showing the gadget in Tamil.
Friend Connect’s newly supported languages are: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnames.
Hot to go Google 
Special thanks to Arabcrunch.com for updating me about this development.
Another WP PLUGIN Week from Binny
You may wonder what the hell this guy is talking. Actually a LAMP specialist dedicated for WordPress made WordPress Plug-in last December for about a week.
Last time he made six WordPress plug-ins just for the WordPress community in just one week. Binny is good friend of mine and a regular reader of my blog.
Once again he has prepared to launch another WP Plug-in week. Actually he has released his first plug-in Weather Man.
You may ask me, what is weather Man?
Binny’s blog answers the question
Weather Man shows the weather as a widget in the sidebar. You can add the widget using the Widget page under Appearance. Or you can add it in a post using the [weather-man] shortcode anywhere in the post. It uses Yahoo’s Weather API.
Don’t just under estimate his work. Last time, his WP Plug-in week was featured in Blogging Tips.
Let’s download and test his Plug-in and encourage this young dynamic WP developer.
WordPress.com Search Engine
We have conventional Search Engines such as Google and yahoo but one year back WordPress.com has come up with a Search Engine which can search within WordPress.com.
I don’t see a valid reason for this, according to WordPress.com it’ll show the post in the result once it’s published, in other words instantly.
I don’t think this initiation will become popular because even Google can fetch your blog update within 10 minutes. I have seen and amazed on how Google index posts from our blog so quickly.
In the other hand you have enough options in Google where in WordPress.com search haven’t got any advance searching feature.
May be WordPress.com could have extended their search to other self hosted blogs too. It would have brought much wider audience to the search Engine.
This is only just a WordPress.com search engine, nothing much to talk on this feature.
PS: Tamil interface also available for WordPress.com search
Google PR UPDATED [28-2-2009]
Guys!
Google has updated PR (Page Rank) again. My new Page Rank is 3. I used to have 2, later it became 0 and now gained to 3.
I was expecting atleast a Page Rank 4, since I got incoming links from many sites, especially Sri Lankan sites. Thanks for linking my site.
And few more…
Anyway I’m happy. Hey what about your PR?
How to promote your blog among your Friends & Relatives
When you have a blog, you must promote your blog to get more traffic. More traffic means more money from the site. When it comes to promotion you’ll think of spamming other’s blogs, forums (oh yeah! Not everyone… I can hear you) or buying PPC ads on Google Adwords.
When your blog is new, probably you’ll be starting it as a hobby. At this time, you must introduce your blog to your family and friends. Get their opinions and modify your web site accordingly. You can use them as your testing community. Most probably you’ll get honest feedback from them. Once your site started to catch up in blogosphere, you’ll be already one step ahead of your compititors.
Let me tell you some interesting ways to promote your site to your friends and relatives.
1. Email them about your blog
First thing you can do is, email your family and relatives about your blog. Ask them humbly to leave a comment. Don’t give up on your friends. They’ll come and comment on your site. This technique will bring you traffic and comments.
2. Email a sample post
Copy a post from your site and email it to your friends. This technique is much similar to the previous one but instead of sending a link, you’re sending a whole article with a link to your blog.
3. Status Message
You must be using Yahoo, MSN or at least embedded Gmail chat. When you write a post leave a link and description about your post in your status message. Whenever you’re online you can promote your blog to your online friends. I always do this technique to grab the attention of my messenger contacts.
4. Email Signature
Leave a link to your blog at the bottom of your email signature. Therefore when you send your email to others you’re automatically promoting your blog to your email reader. When you leave a link at the bottom of your signature leave the link to your home page. Otherwise they’ll think this guy is spamming our account.
5. Social Network
Last but not least, you must leave the updates of your blog in Social network sites such as facebook , Hi5. When I write a new post I leave a status update in facebook. I can get at least 10 impression from facebook. This hits are worth more than the hits you get from search engine, because your friends will stay in your site for a long time compare to the person came from search engine.
Also guys please remember too much of anything is good for nothing. Use them but don’t use them excessively. Happy blogging!
Western Money Transfer to Receive Adsense Payment
Most of bloggers are using Adsense as the primary monetisation tool. But receiving the payment from Adsense is a real problem. My first Adsense Cheques have not reached my home even after two months. My next cheque is also ready to be delivered by end of this month.
Even after receiving the cheque when we cash it in our local banks they are taking around 1000LKR as commission. We know how hard we worked to get $10 in Adsense and these Banks are getting commission.
If we can receive payments in local currency then that’d be an ideal scenario where we don’t have to pay that much of commission to local banks. For some countries Google transfers money to their local bank accounts directly. All above mentioned features are not available to Sri Lankan users. Cheque out available method of payments from Adsense.
Another option is Western union money transfer, where we can get the money instantly. I personally prefer this method. Unfortunately this way of transfer is not available in Sri Lanka.
Recently they have introduced to Indonesia; following countries got the facility to receive Adsense money via Western Union Money transfer.
• Argentina
• Bulgaria
• Chile
• China (Mainland)
• Colombia
• Egypt
• Lithuania
• Malaysia
• Morocco
• Pakistan
• Panama
• Peru
• Philippines
• Romania
• Taiwan
Their website reads “Though we may offer Western Union to a wider set of publishers in the future, we do not have a date for when this may become available. We appreciate your patience as we expand this payment option.”
I think we all must write to Google requesting Western Money transfer to Sri Lanka. I have already left a comment requesting same feature to Sri Lanka. Please guys, Leave a request to Adsense support.
WordPress Television
Blogger has its own blogger video tutorial online. I was so worried that there are no official tutorials from WordPress it self. Today Automattic has announced of WordPress.tv.
Basically it’s a place where you can expect tutorials for both WordPress.com and WordPress.org, also you can find cool presentations which was used in WordCamp and all.
We hope you’ll consider WordPress.tv not just a support resource, but a place to hang out and keep up with all the geeky goodness going on in the WordPress community. Tune in regularly for fresh content and updates to the WordPress.tv blog. Lots more is on the way.
Go and have some fun out there on WordPress Television.
Subscribe to comments in WordPress.com
Subscribe to comments is one of my favorite WordPress Plug-in. If you installed this on your WordPress installation, your readers will get an option to subscribe to the desired post’s comments. As the result, readers can follow up the comments and it’ll also increase your traffic.
Now WordPress.com has given this plug-in for their millions of users. It’s an exciting news for those who blog on WordPress.com
Check WordPress.com blog for more information.
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