I realized I did not update Balkhis in a while and I got plenty of emails from you guys when Black Friday came by asking me what I am getting and if I saw great deals or not. Well here is the update. Thanks Giving was great. I actually got to take a break with family. Most of my vacations are like work from another location, but this time it was actually a real break and no work. It felt good.

As you all know that I am still a student and week after thanks giving is the last weeks of school and exams are on my head, so it is pretty crazy along side with the clients and campaigns, it become really hectic. Yes I did go black friday shopping, but the best part about this year was that everything was online. I got a WD Passport Portable HD with 500 GB because it was $59.99. I was going to get a laptop from Best Buy because they put out exclusive offers to their Silver Premier members that we could get a head start on Black Friday deals by ordering online. But too bad Best Buy’s staff ruined it for them.

This awesome laptop was only $450 and I was dialing the phone. The girl picked up, told me to hold on and hung up. Called again, transferred me and no one ever picked up. I wrote an email to Best Buy and the best they could do was give me a 750 points in my reward zone. For those who want to know that is $15 worth… That is not how you treat loyal customers Best Buy. From now on, I will be looking for other alternatives before I go shop there.

Another thing that I realized on this blog is that a lot of people are using long keywords as their name while commenting. To all old and new users, it is getting really annoying. And I am sending every comment that does not use their name to SPAM. If it gets really worst, I will begin blocking IPs. I offer do follow top commentator list in the sidebar so don’t abuse it. I am getting keywords like NJ SEO Guy, India’s SEO Company, Business Cards etc. If need be, I will close down comment, or require user registration to cut down spam and worst of all, remove top commentators and make the blog nofollow links. I can now understand why Vitaly Freidman of Smashing Magazine removed the concept of links from the comments. They do not allow users to add links of their website both in the comment, or in the form at all. I might take that route. So take this seriously.

I am attending WordCamp Orlando this weekend and hoping to have a great time. So those who want to come join me, feel free to do so.

For the New Years, I will be going to Tennessee again to Ober Gatlinburg because we had a great time there last year. So a lot of fun coming soon, but right now it is tought times.

So this past weekend I was in New York City attending WordCamp NYC. This conference was great because I got to network with some of the most awesome people. It was great to learn more about the WordPress community and most of all, it was great to see how many people actually knew about my site WPBeginner. It was being used by the speakers in their presentation which was definitely something I was very proud of.

So we stayed in Sheraton at the Meadow Lands Plaza, East Rutherford, NJ. I have learned my lesson not to drive in NYC, so I did not waste a lot of time. Trains and Subways all the way. Now this was by far one of the best conference and it was really cheap. $40 << That's it.... Those who did not go missed a great social networking opportunity.

I met:

Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress
Brian Gardner from StudioPress
Jane Wells, Interface and experience designer for WordPress
Jeff from WPTavern
Daisy Olsen from WP Mama
Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Author of WordPress for Dummies book
Adria Richards from Freshworkshops

And Many Many Other people.

Aside from meeting these awesome people, I had a blast in Time Square LOL.

Well the plan in the future is that I am definitely attending WordCamp Orlando which is scheduled for Dec. 5th 2009. So for those of you who are in the area, it is definitely a great one to attend.

Thanks Giving is coming next week, so I am planning for the Black Friday Shopping. And most importantly, Zain’s Birthday is coming next Tuesday. He will be turning 6 years old now. I changed his blog to a single page website, which we do plan to build more on some day.

If you are in the affiliate marketing industry, Market Leverage has a great offer for Christmas which I think will provide great results. This offer is Santa Letters from the North Pole. From personal experience, a lot of parents and grandparents buy these, so it would be a great success in PPC and Mommy Blogs. A few extra bucks can help you buy Christmas presents for your loved ones too

I would like to speak at WordCamp Orlando, so lets hope they accept my proposal because I think I can give an awesome presentation on the topics I suggested them, so if you would like to see me speak, then send them a message (Shameless lobbying lol)

In blogging one of the worst moment you can have is a writer’s block. A condition in which you cannot think of anything to write about thus you cannot produce quality content. A tip that many give is stop what you are writing about and take a break. You can get up and go for a walk and come back to this specific subject a few hours later. You can take a break from your blog entirely for a few days or a week and then come back to it. Some authors even QUIT because of this writer’s block. No matter which option you select from the above list, you will not be able to stay productive.

Did you ever wonder, how do people run more than one blog. They have 5 or 6 blogs and they are all active. Some have a few guest authors, but others are just maintained by this one person. Producing content is a gift, but there is a lot of techniques that goes into it. I will share a technique that I learned from an expert blogger Merlin Mann of 43folders. This technique has worked really well for me.

What you need to do is have more than one topic to write about. So for example if you only have one blog like Balkhis. I would write a post in Advertising Category, For Starters Category, Web Design Resources category and so on. They will all be started with an intro and some ideas, but not finished. So if I start getting frustrated with the Advertising article and I cannot come up with anything, I would simply move onto the Web Design Resources showcase and work on that.

The whole idea about you going outside is taking your mind of a subject, but you can also do that by moving to another subject like I just mentioned. You can also alternate days to write posts on your two blogs. So for example Balkhis and WPBeginner. I would work on a post on Balkhis and WPBeginner at the same time. If I get stuck at a Balkhis post, I will move onto a small plugin review at WPBeginner. Then come back to the Balkhis article later, but the time I was taking a break, I actually wrote another article.

Try this technique and let me know how it works out.

Twitter at its peak point and every marketer trying to get the love from the community, we are seeing more and more users leaning toward Auto Tweets. If you consider yourself a marketer, or thinking about tweeting for the sake of exposure, Auto Tweets are probably THE WORST way to go about it. Why? Because auto tweets are generic, Auto tweets are annoying, and not interesting.

Think about why people use twitter. I use twitter to connect with friends and other users who share the same interest as me. I use twitter to find new articles, and resources. But since there are thousands upon thousands of articles being tweeted every day, I can only pick the ones that grab my attention with the title. This applies to majorly everyone. You don’t really get a creative title with Auto Tweets. Sometimes your title is too long and you have auto tweet setup, so it will cut the title of. Most of the times, it starts with a generic statement saying: New on ….

This type of statement would not only make people ignore that tweet, but if you do that more often, people will begin to ignore you on twitter as well. So one of the reasons why you should always tweet the messages personally is because you can come up with creative ways to attract users. You can post the same article a few times and space it out with other tweets and use different titles to approach different type of audience.

Twitter uses hash tags and that is one thing Auto Tweet cannot do for you. If you tweet the link manually, you can not only make the best title, but you can also use hashtags for the keywords like “Designer”, “WordPress”, “Blogger” or what not. You can either incorporate these hashtags within the title, or at the end of tweet nonetheless these will get you targetted audience from twitter as people search for that specific hash tag.

What are you losing by posting tweets manually? Simply 15 seconds. But what are you gaining from posting tweets manually? A lot more targetted visitors and more credibility. Now there might be an issue with posting tweets on specific time. That is why you have programs like Hootsuite and others that will let you schedule your tweets, so use that and manually write your tweet. Don’t make excuses.

The answer to the question asked in the title is NO and if you read the post, you should know why.

You guys probably cannot remember when was the last time you saw me writing on Balkhis. I surely can remember though. It was on September 2, 2009 and today is October the 30th, so almost 2 months ago. The last post was about How to Launch a new blog Successfully. Well now after all my methods and hard work has paid off. So this post is just to keep you guys updated and tell you how I have been.

So October 2nd was my birthday. No celebration on Balkhis because it wasn’t the right time. I was still working hard on WPBeginner. Well today I feel very happy as the Google PR updated. WPBeginner received a Google PR 6 with many inner pages at PR 5 and PR 4. Where as Balkhis got a PR 5 which went up also, it was a PR 4.

Now the Alexa of WPBeginner also went in 17k which is also very good, so all to all this startup was a very successful one.

What’s next in the list? Well you should expect me back to the posting schedule on Balkhis. Although I will not be posting once a day, but you should expect a few posts a week. We are also working on the redesign of Uzzz Productions. The new site will also be powered by WordPress but it will be built with mostly jQuery. It should be done by mid November.

We are also working on new features for WPBeginner coming by Mid December with a slight additions in the design to make it more user friendly. Add more services and so on.

Personally, I am conducting a twitter experiment which I will update you guys later and tell you how it worked out for me. Hopefully it will be great and it will benefit me a lot, and when I share it with you guys, I am certain that it will help you guys also.

I will be attending WordCamp NYC 2009 this coming November 14-15. If you are in New York and want to hang out, let me know and we can arrange a meetup. Ofcourse if you attend WordCamp then we can chill for the whole two days.

A contributing member of Balkhis, Zain Balkhi will be turning 6 on November 24 this year. So, I will be updating his portfolio site Life of Blogger. The site got a redesign when he graduated from his Pre-K class earlier this year.

A special plug for Darren Rowse and his new Pro Blogger community where I am an active member now a days. Quality discussion for bloggers and a good place to be if you are interested in interacting and learning from bloggers on all levels. There is a $1.95 monthly membership fee but it is well worth it. Join now before the price goes up because I am sure it will. The price is to avoid spammers and keep the quality discussion with paid moderators. I love it in that community. Good source of traffic also.

Something I realize that most people were confused about and I got many emails about it also. People asked me why does WPBeginner get better results than Balkhis. What you need to understand is that WPBeginner is a niche blog for WordPress users. Balkhis is my personal blog where I happen to share SEO tricks, Web Design tricks and basically my experience. Do not mistake Balkhis for something it is not. Personal blogs get big over time whereas niche blog gets big faster.

I also want to suggest if you want to stay updated with what I am doing then follow these two twitter feeds. @syedbalkhi and @wpbeginner.

I am also contemplating closing comments on posts that are older than 90 days to avoid SPAM. What do you guys suggest? Obviously the final decision will be mine, but I want my readers input in making this key decision.

I do encourage you to tweet with me, or email me if you have a specific question. I am glad to help out when I can. I missed you guys just as much as you probably missed me