Dear Balkhis Users,

I am sure you are wondering where I have been. The last post on was Sunday, and nothing since then. Firstly, I would like to apologize to you that I have not been updating this blog, but there has been a lot of things going on in my life.

Monday was a religious holiday, so I drove 4 hours from Gainesville, to West Palm Beach to pray with the family. The same day towards the afternoon, my mother got sick. So we had to take her to the hospital. I won’t go in extreme details of what happened.

But she is getting well. She is still in the hospital. I drove back to Gainesville yesterday because I had an exam today. After my exam, I drove back. So most of my days, I am just driving. So I have no time to update the blog. Considering the final, and my suddenly getting sick. But she will be discharged from hospital tommorrow, hopefully. My finals will be ending by next thursday. So the schedule should be back to normal then.

You guys will see the big list of top 100 blogs of 2008. My New Years Resolution, and the trip that Uzzz Productions staff and I are taking to start our year of.

I still haven’t updated to wordpress 2.7 and you know the reasons. Once I update, I will put out my review.

I got an email with an offer to review a book called Blog Blazers. Firstly, I am not a fan of reading books. I would rather read online blogs, but when I visited the blog blazers website and saw what it was really about. I decided to accept the offer and see how good this book really is. Well the book arrived in my mail a few days back, and I am done reading it. I am going to tell you one thing and only one thing. This is a book that you should read, if you have never talked to one of the successful bloggers. Because this book have 40 Top Bloggers sharing their secrets to creating a High-Traffic and High-Profit Blog!

Before I give you more insights on the book. You guys should know who is the person behind this book. It is no one else but Stephane Grenier, founder of LandLord Max. Stephane sells property management to Real Estate Agents through his website. He also have a blog called Follow Steph which has generated good reviews for his product. He uses it to market LandLord Max, and it gets over 500,000 uniques per year.

So what is this book really about? Well it is one on one interviews with 40 top bloggers. They were all asked the same questions, and you hear different perspective on the same questions from these experts. Some of the questions were:

What’s your best tip for writing a successful blog post?

What are your main avenues for marketing your blog?

What’s the best way to make money from your blog?

What was your most successful blog post ever?

And a lot more. Each interview is about 5 pages long and the book contains 206 pages. This book put aside all the unnecessary crap, and gets right to the point. Ask them the questions that you need which makes this book an excellent piece of writing. It is easy to read and digest the information. There are some of the industry’s leading bloggers like Seth Godin, Neil Patel, Yaro Starak, Aaron Wall, and some that I didn’t know existed who have also made an impact in this industry.

There were a lot of resources mentioned in the book that I didn’t know about. So it is not pure common sense.

Some of the Downsides that I noticed in the book was that it could’ve used more popular bloggers. Perhaps Darren Rowse, Shoemoney, John Chow, Brian Clark, Merlin Mann. While I respect the reputation Neil Patel, and others have earned, but I think the guys I mentioned above are far more ahead in the Blogging Industry itself.

The bottom line is that this book costs $16.95, and it is worth every single penny you would spend on it. Some of the mistakes that these bloggers have made, you can learn from them. You won’t have to make their mistakes and risk your blog. So go out and buy this book right now.

People read this blog for SEO advices, Marketing advices, Web Design Resources, Ways to make money online etc etc. One thing that I realized that I don’t mention enough is great post. So I went on a streak of writing about post titles, core of blogging. My last post was answering the question, Why do some people always write magnificent post titles? From that post, a regular user of Balkhis, Hugo Santos raised a question how do you know which title really works.

As I promised on that post, that I will do some research on Balkhis post structures, and use my experience to come up with some headline formulas that work. Well here it is.

First of all Hugo, the answer to your question is experience. Each blog have different type of users therefore different titles work. So the results will vary. But there are some obvious headlines that always work. I mean you will always see these on digg’s front page or what not. So let me share a few that I think works almost all the time.

[Number] ways to do something something

A lot of people use the common number 101, 5, 10. I prefer to go a little off the chart and do 9 and others. Because I think 5, 10 are overrated.

- 113 ways to make money online
- 99 ways to say Sorry
- 101 ways to save electricity

How Did I [or] How I …

People love success stories, so if you accomplished something than share it because you will attract users left and right.

- How did I increase my search engine traffic by 258% in less than a month
- How I Increased my subscribers to over 1800 in ten months

[Number] Interesting Facts that you must know about [XXXX]

People love facts. They would open this post regardless. So you would be doing yourself 50% of a favor by using this headline. The other half is by writing a good post, so the user stays.

-9 Interesting Facts that you must know about Barrack Obama
-11 Interesting Facts that you must know about cell phones

You don’t have to be a [blank] to [do something]

- You don’t have to be an expert to make money online
- You don’t have to be an electrician to change your own circuit

Now these are just some ideas. These headline formulas are guaranteed to work. I mean over the years that I have been online, I have seen these work. Heck I have used some of these as well. If you are interested in knowing what posts work on Balkhis.

Check out the Case Study that I did, Which Blog Posts gets the most traffic?

If you have any more suggestions feel free to add it in the bottom. Remember headline alone just do 50% of the job. Make sure you write good content.

Ever seen top bloggers? Does it seem like that they always write great post titles? Damn I used to think this too. A person asked me after I wrote my post about Keywords and their importance in titles. The question was you always suggest that we need to write good titles. But how do we do that. How do some bloggers always write great post titles. How do you always write great post titles?

First I am flattered by the compliment. I know if you look over in my archives and check one of the earlier months, my titles weren’t as good as it was for the past 4 months or so. In this post I will tell you why some people always write magnificent post titles?

Why do you need to write great post titles?

Some of you might ask why are great post titles necessary? Remember when I wrote a guide to use digg for bloggers. Well the success with social media networks and search engines are greatly relied on great titles. You know all top bloggers get their traffic from social media and search engines. It is directly related to social media and indirectly related to search engines. When you have great post titles, you get tons of traffic from social media. More people visit your post, the more you are likely to get a backlink and the backlinks help you rank high in Search Engines.

Why do some people always write great post titles?

• They understand the concept of great headlines. A great headlines targets a specific audience and make an intriguing promise which makes the post to be irresistable. You need to understand who is your targeted audience. Because appealing to a mass audience won’t do you any good. You will see that most great headlines does not appeal to everyone.
• They know which headlines work. Aha! There is a key. You would only get this after a few months your blog is live. You would get an idea of which titles work. Which type of posts work. They see what other types of post work by looking at posts that make it on digg’s home page. Another great one to learn from is Yahoo’s headlines, they are also very catchy headlines. The concept here is that they know which headlines are proven to work. Like I know the ones that will work all the time. It means I know which posts people will respond to the most, and it has worked out very well for me on all the previous posts.
• They don’t fake headlines. They know why they write every single word. Their headlines are related to their context. They don’t try to lie just to get attention. That is why even if their headlines are not the greatest people love them. Their title is credible. So people love them.

So great headlines are an important part. People stress out about that. I am going to tell you that don’t compare yourself to experts. Because you might even be putting your self down. You don’t need to kill your motivation. So just go along with your titles. And see how it helps. Analyze your titles and write better titles. Just don’t get yourself down. Always think that if anyone can do it so can you.

Last week I missed the Link Love monday because of my little brother’s Birthday. I spent most of my day taking a test and than driving down south for his birthday. But that doesn’t mean that no link love this week. Today is the first day of the last month of the year. So it is time to get all the receipts together and see how much you made in the year

7 things you should be doing while your blog is still young

How to do keyword research for search engine rankings

20 reasons to choose wordpress as your platform

So there will be major announcement coming out this week that will upset a lot of people here. But there are other things that will make up for it also. So keep checking with Balkhis.

You might have noticed the post frequency have decreased on Balkhis and the sole reason for that is because I am on a break and I came back home. I prefer to spend more time with my family because I only get a few days. That is why I am only posting every other day.

Other than that the three articles you should check out on Balkhis this week are:

Keywords in Post Titles, Does it really matter?

How to limit number of archive months displayed

How to organize your wordpress blogroll links

I hope you all have a very good december. Keep up to see what I have planned for the upcoming year