Why Newsletter?

Newsletter creates a love bond between you and your readers. It allows you to really connect with your audience. No matter how often a reader visits your site, there will be times when they miss something crucial. That is when the newsletter comes in handy. People check their emails REGULARLY, so newsletters are a more reliable source of communication. Second, the newsletter allows you to distinguish between the average reader to your loyal and valuable readers. Your loyal readers are the ones who really care about your site, and they want to support you. I think they deserve something better than everyone else.

Advantages of a Newsletter

For you as a blogger, you can expect a better turn around for any product that you promote through a newsletter. If you are launching a new product, the best place to get started with the promotion is through your newsletter. Your newsletter subscriber actually opted-in to see what you are offering. They want to hear what you say. You can’t get a better connection with your reader than this. They trust you!

How to get Started?

There are tons of newsletter delivery services. Heck you can even use the combination of WordPress and Feedburner to create a Free Email Newsletter. But if you are thinking about this more seriously, then I would recommend:

Aweber
Mail Chimp

Don’t even consider any other companies. I have used both of them and I am more than satisfied. MailChimp has better email designs, so for a design blog, I recommend them. Aweber is very efficient and easy to follow.

The reason why you want to go with these paid services is because they are more Reliable then feedburner. The statistics you receive from them is no where comparable to the free newsletter tactic.

How do I create a huge mailing list for myself?

This is the biggest question that everyone asks. The answer is simple. Simply create something that other people would find useful. Then you want to give it away for free in an exchange for their email address. If they really want your product, then they will enter the email. The more often you do it, the bigger your list will be. There will be times when one of your product will do very very good and others it won’t. So its a matter of feeding the hunger. Give people what they want, and they will give you what you want.

Lastly, I want to apologize to you guys if you think that I am ignoring you here on Balkhis. I have a huge project going on at WPBeginner which is taking a lot of my time. Also Uzzz Productions is doing great. So I am having a really hard time keeping up with Balkhis. I want to say to you guys if you want my tips on marketing, blogging, and WordPress in general then consider subscribing to WPBeginner’s Newsletter. I send out weekly emails with resourceful articles that I am certain that you guys will find useful.

Don’t worry, I hate SPAM just as much as you guys. So this newsletter will not be spammy. I will NOT be using it as spamming tool like a lot of other marketers do it. These newsletter will have useful tips that are exclusive just for my A-List users. P.S. I will treat your emails like my own email so I won’t sell, share, or lease it to anyone.

Oh by the way if you sign up, you get the powerful Smart Sharing Plugin for WordPress that my team at WPBeginner developed. This plugin uses Skinner’s positive reinforcement theory and it is proven to work. It will add a floating share box that you can see on anyone of WPBeginner’s post. (Example)

If you have created a newsletter and want to share your experience then feel free to do so.

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.

If you did not know which site I was working on it is called WPBeginner – Beginner’s Guide for WordPress. It was launched on July 4th, 2009, Yes the Independence day of USA. Since then the site has collectively received:

175,533 Visitors
490,644 Pageviews
7.18 Million Hits

Current Alexa Stats Rank at: 35,847

Technorati Rank: 18,583

These stats above are decent for a site that is just two months old. In this article, I will share some of the steps that I took in order to achieve this. One thing I will tell you is that the monetary investment on this project was $0 in terms of advertising. The cost of running this site is our normal hosting bills, the domain cost and such. This is probably the most affordable way to launch and promote a blog.

Pre-Launch Phase

There was a lot that happened behind the scenes before the site was launched. Such as concept, picking the domain, design, testing, article preparation, future plans, deadline and such.

Concept

The concept of this site hit me when I saw Godaddy offering 99 cents .com domains for a short period of time, and I wanted to register a domain because for the least, I will make $8 profit on it if I sell it to someone else. Well when I was researching the niches that I like to pick the domain, WordPress certainly stood out. The reason for that is because when I was in the early phases of Balkhis, I wanted to start a WordPress resource site, but I was too busy with Balkhis and clients, and did not want to lose focus. So I took out a notepad and started jotting down some notes. These were initial plans of what I wanted to be on the site.

Picking the Domain

Picking a domain is a tedious process specially when you are making a resource site. There are a lot of legal issues that you must not ignore when you are going to have a site about a trademark product. Therefore the first thing I did was head over to WordPress.org and started looking at their Privacy policies, trademark policies, anything that I can find. After looking around a bit, I found a page called Domains. In that page WordPress clearly urged users not to use the keyword “wordpress” in the main domain name. The last thing you want to do at a start up phase of a resource site is to get on the bad side of the product company. So now I knew that my choices of domains are limited. I wanted to have WordPress in the domain name, but now I can’t. But WordPress allows for wp, so I went with that.

This was a tedious process because I wanted a perfect name. A name that is brandable, one that is catchy and easy to remember. I certainly did not want to compromise not having the .com extension, so the main goal was to find a name in the domain extension .com because it is the most common one. Most people type that by default, this way I won’t lose any traffic.

I used some of these tools and consulted with my team including Amanda Roberts, David Pegg, and Muhammad Karim and decided to go with wpbeginner.com

Site Plan

Just like before you build a house you need an architect to build a plan, you need a plan before you start any site or blog to avoid troubles in the future. I started working on the plan of this site by asking these questions:

• What features do I want this site to have?
• How the site will be organized?
• What were my motivations behind this site, my goal?
• How will I generate revenue from this site?
• How durable this site will be? What will be my deadlines?
• When will I quit if it doesn’t work out the way I want it to?

After answering all these questions, I had tons of notes and a pretty good idea where I was going with this site. Ofcourse this was not all my effort. It was a combined effort of my friends. You always want to try to get opinions from your friends and family to see what they think (Ask People who have a clue of what you are talking about).

I want to emphasize on the last two questions because some of you might wonder why they are even there. You need to know for how long can you produce fresh content on this. Or for how long do you think this idea will work before you have to add tweaks to it. And certainly the last one, what if you don’t meet your goals. You need to set a deadline and a quit date because there is no use in wasting energy and resources toward something that is not working out and seems to be a dead end.

You should quit if you’re on a dead-end path. You should quit if you’re facing a Cliff. You should quit if the project you’re working on has a Dip that isn’t worth the reward at the end. ~ Seth Godin

Design

Ever heard the saying: First Impression is the Last Impression. Well it is very true with websites. I will tell you that a look of your site can determine user’s perspective of your site. A site that looks good will be trusted more because it reflects professionalism. You need an eye-catching design. Colors that are friendly, colors that are marketable. Some colors are better than others when it comes to Marketing. Zac wrote an excellent article about The Emotions of Color in Marketing. Our color scheme we picked reflected the goals behind our site.

Orange is the combination of the happiness of yellow and the energy and strength of red. It symbolizes creativity, determination, enthusiasm and success. In addition orange indicates affordability.

White is purity, goodness, light and innocence. It is considered perfection. White is generally positive and simple.

Black is elegant, powerful and formal. It can also denote prestige.

It was actually added to Colourlovers by someone. (It was certainly not me or anyone in our team).

The second most important thing after the color is the logo. I want my users to associate WPBeginner with something. A brand perhaps, something that they will remember. When you see a big Y, it automatically makes you think of Yahoo. How about the big G… It makes you think of google. For all it can be for German site, but you will think of Google nonetheless. Therefore I wanted to create something different. Since the site is geared toward beginners, how would it be if its a cool little smily face guy? Sounds simple and easy to remember. If you want to create a best logo, then you should think how would the logo look by itself without any text or anything. If it looks good then it is probably a good option. You should check out these resources for logo designs for inspiration.

I like to think that Best designers don’t copy. They STEAL! What is the point of copying an entire site? How about you steal the elements from the best looking sites and make them work together on yours. The product you get is actually the Best of the Best. So that was the next step in picking the design. We wanted this to look more of a resource site than a blog. So we looked at all examples of sites across various CSS Galleries and picked the designs that are most elegant and functional. We took bits of that for WPBeginner and implemented those aspects in our design.

I won’t go into the nitty gritty of web designs, but we made sure our site has cross browser compatibility and it is functional. Note: the site was created in the local server, but it was put on an online server as a password protected site for us to test. I asked some other web friends that are designers, users with a lot of experience in the industry to check the site. Asked their opinion and have other friends beta test everything. Even though the design was ready, the site wasn’t ready to go live yet and I will cover that in the next section.

What you should get out of this: Design is probably one of the most important aspect of your site in the launch phase. A good design can really give you a tremendous boost in early stage and an edge over your competitor later on. You want to pick a good designer, one who knows all about these aspects that I mentioned above. Do not go for someone that is charging $30 for a custom design because most likely you won’t get a great design.

Article Preparation

What is the point of launching a site when you do not have any article. An advice that I took from Merlin Mann was always have at least 5 articles before you even think about going forward with the blog. Since it is a blog ran by a group of us, we assigned tasks and began writing. We had a good amount of resources before we made the site go live. We scheduled a lot of posts to go live on specific times. The reason for that was because I wanted to target audiences of all over the world and provide fresh content. Second reason was because it just looks weird when you have a new site and all articles were published all at once. It is good to space them out.

Do not count your welcome posts as the first five. Most people use their first five posts as a welcome post for the most part. You want to have articles that are helpful to your audience. Try to make them clear and thorough. Our goal was to create a site that helps WordPress users. So why not start out with a step by step guide that you need to setup a WordPress blog. Those were our first posts.

Reserving the Social Media Names

Social Media is the next big thing. Well it is already the big thing now and it will continue to do so. So it is good to reserve your brand name before it gets taken by someone else. So I did that as soon as I registered my domain name. Twitter profile was reserved and Youtube was reserved. For other places, I can probably careless because I am not that focused there yet.

Launch Phase

Most people start on this phase, but the pre-launch phase is probably just as important as the launch phase. In this phase, you make your blog available for the world wide web. You begin to promote it, use different advertising techniques, provide support, continue to write articles. I will tell you that with this site, I spent $0 in investment iin terms of advertising. All I spent was time and use the resources surrounding me.

Use of Twitter

Believe it or not, but the main way to get the word out, I used the twitter account. My twitter account @syedbalkhi and asked some of my friends to tweet it out as well. Now I did not focus on promoting the site itself. It was merely a few tweets that I sent out that read:

Check out @wpbeginner if you have any questions related to #WordPress

Now you notice that there is no link in this tweet, so it was easy for others to retweet it without thinking it was a spam promotion. I used the #hashtag for WordPress which will come up when people search for WordPress on twitter. Now obviously I got a custom twitter background and a link to our site on the tweets and the profile of @wpbeginner.

Now soon the word was getting out, but I said to myself, I can’t just stop here and netiher should you. We kept on bringing great articles on the site, but along with tutorials, collection / list posts was also in our priority list. The reason I encouraged the team to keep releasing list posts was because I know that social media loves them. And I wanted the social media love. That is free word of mouth advertising and believe me that is the best one out there. There is no better way of convincing a user to view your site unless a friend of theirs recommend it.

The thing with twitter is that you really have to be careful. There is a very fine line in between spamming and sharing content. But this is how I overcame that. Most people join twitter to gain followers. Well one of the easiest way to gain followers is by simply following more people, RIGHT? well I say NOT. I realized that by having quality followers and actually having the connection with them is actually a lot more important than following 30,000 people and have 32,000 followers without knowing a single person closely. Because when you are in a 30,000 boat, you cannot ask people to retweet you because you really do not know them that well. With me it is a different case because I developed a good connection with these people via twitter by retweeting their stuff and engaging in the conversations, I do not mind asking them to retweet something for me and certainly they do not mind retweeting my tweets. But when you ask someone to retweet for you and you do not know them as well, you tend to come off as a spammer.

You must need to know how to use twitter efficiently. I have written numerous articles regarding twitter but here is one that you should read: 25 Tips to Increase Your Influence and Gain Followers on Twitter. Now if you are not on twitter, then I got two words for you. JOIN Twitter. I know some people would ask for reasons, but if my stats are not enough, check out these 25 reasons to join twitter.

I will say that twitter was marjoly behind the success of this blog. Here is why I say that. One because I got to know a lot of people that I never knew without twitter and a lot of people got to know about WPBeginner that they hadn’t if they were not on twitter. It helped me get noticed. And the only way to get noticed is have a quality article, good friendship relations, and have a good reputation on social media networks because once the article goes viral, you cannot imagine the unlimited possibilities. Let me give you an example:

WPBeginner got featured at Webmonkey (Wired own magazine and it was also featured at Wired.com)

Tweeted by Vitaly Friedman (Smashingmagazine’s Editor), Darren Rowse (Founder of Problogger, b5media, DPS and more), Michael Hyatt (CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers), Jacob Gube (Founder of Six Revisions, Calvin Lee (Founder of Mayhem Studios, a credible designer on twitter), Chetan (Another credible designer behind Cheth Studios).

And ofcourse thousands of other users retweeted and tens of thousands viewed it because these guys together have combined followers count of about 200,000. And Wired has over 6 million user audience.

Use of Other Social Media Networks

Even though twitter was the most important one you must not forget other social media sites such as digg and stumbleupon because they can bring massive traffic. WPBeginner had 3 stories that got popular on digg which certainly brought in huge traffic. Multiple stories on stumbleupon got few stars and collectively social media helped WPBeginner got all the attention. It got mentioned at many sites related to the niche including WordPress.org itself. You want to allocate the use of social media to your benefits. But remember you must not spam them. Do not try to promote your own content. Try to share content. Be active in the community.

Use Your Beautiful Design to your Advantage

Remember how I went in great details above about the design. Well that was because it can really make a good impression on users. But It can also help you get free promotion and traffic from gallery sites and earn you good backlinks. Let me explain how you can do that.

Well there are CSS Galleries that are looking to feature beautiful designs. I have compiled a list of galleries here at Balkhis previously which you can use to submit your new blog. You must make sure that you are actually submitting a quality design. In order to judge that is honestly think to yourself would you add this site in your gallery, if this site was submitted by someone else.

Once you are listed in these galleries, when bloggers are making a list of best of or best designs, they might even pick your site. So that would be free backlinks for you and free traffic.

Submit News to Site

For a design related blog this is an excellent way to promote your articles individually. There are big sites like tutsplus that have an area for user submitted links, and you can submit your own articles. Obviously submit quality resources, so the admin of the other site actually appreciate it and would be glad to add you. As you continue to submit quality content to their news section, you will become more trusted and they will tend to link to you from their posts as well. This was one of the good source for me to gain more subscribers and users for WPBeginner.

1st Web Designer have a list of 40 Promotional Sites to add Your News for Designers

Get other Bloggers to link to you

This really help if you know people in the industry and have good friends. But if you don’t you should follow the guide that I wrote about How to get other bloggers to link to you. You will only get links if you have a quality product. You do not necessarily have to ask for al ink to your homepage. Try to get a link to a specific article. There are blogs that do weekly roundup, or monthly roundup of resources. You can suggest your links to them. Ask to be listed in the sidebar and such, but asking to be linked from the sidebar will not work unless you actually know the owners. Or you are providing something of equal value or $$ to get that link.

Another way to get other bloggers to link to you is by simply writing guest posts. This is what I did for some blogs. This actually shows the audience of that blog that you have interesting stuff, and you will get more users to come to your site.

Use this article that I wrote in the past 13 Ways to Promote Your Blog to Success

Bottom Line

The ways above worked out great for my new site and I hope it continues to do well. You can try them as well and let me know how it works for you. Don’t forget to check out WPBeginner.

P.S shameless plug: If you guys want someone to design your blog let me know

Needless to say that two month passed by without me making a single sale. I had no idea what I got myself into. Just like the majority of internet marketers I was mostly shooting blind, creating MySpace profiles, surfing the Traffic Exchanges a lot and spending my time mostly on the low dollar activities.

Now, year and a half later, I realize how childish it was of me to believe that success would come instantly. Mark Twain said: “Success Comes Before Work Only in Dictionary.” And it is indeed so. However, it is not because God hates you and wants you to work hard, but because in order to experience success you need to be ready for it Mentally, Physically and Spiritually.

Great Success comes with Great Responsibility, which means that in order to experience success one must understand what it means to succeed, first.

Are You Doing It For The Money?

Every success story always starts with a dream. For the most part, success means money, but what the majority of internet marketers don’t realize is that if your sole motivation is money, then sooner or later you will face an obstacle which is bigger, harder and more terrifying then anything you’ve seen before, which will lead you to a realization:

1. Money Isn’t Worth The Hard Work
2. I’ll Find Another Way To Get Money

To me, success is more than money. To me, success is the ability to spend 5 hours a day on my business and utilize the rest of my spare time on Fun, Growth, Mind Expansion, Quality Time with my family and just about anything that makes me enjoy life even more than I do now.

To me, Success=Freedom. Freedom is a much stronger motivator then Money. I haven’t yet met a person (online and off) that can be motivated solely by money ALL THE TIME. Humans are deeply emotional beings. We crave satisfaction, understanding and fulfillment – money alone simply cannot provide that.

How Hard Are You Willing To Work For It?

Another common mistake I see Internet Marketers make is after spending two weeks trying to setup a website, autoresponder and a newsletter – the intrepreneurs seem to believe that they did everything in their power to make it work. They believe that they have done A LOT. The majority of online business owners tend to think that placing a Pay Per Click ad immediately makes them the next Frank Kern.

Sorry to disappoint, guys, but it doesn’t. Success stories, for the most part, are years in the making. Anik Singal, one of the world’s top affiliate marketers, had to spend a year in his parents’ basement, working on his affiliate business before he could claim the “Super Affiliate” status.

Until you’re ready – it won’t happen. How do you get ready for internet marketing success? By working harder than everyone else does. When it happens – you’ll know you’re ready.

How Much Are You Ready To Change?

It is often believed that Success changes people. But relying on my personal experience, I must say that the change occurs long before success does.

Success often demands a mindset shift. And the moment I shifted mine – my life shifted as well. I even lost most of my close friends.

Before I became an internet marketer, I was a student at Israeli Air Force Technological University where I spend most of my days from 8am-16pm. After I have decided to go against the stream of commonality by pursuing an internet marketing career – my “friends” turned their backs on me and have never spoken to me since.

At first it was painful, but later I realized that it was necessary. I needed to change, and in order for change to happen – I had to find new friends. I had to find successful friends, friends that could contribute to my life experience and make it better – something my classmates simply couldn’t do.

Are You Ready For Massive Failure?

“Failure Is A Stepping Stone On The Way To Success”

Are you ready to fail? Are you ready to fail hard? Are you ready to fail so miserably, it will be a heart breaking scene to watch? If not, get used to the thought that you are going to fail. The sooner you do, the sooner you fail and learn the most valuable success lesson of all.

In his book “Think and Grow Rich,” Napoleon Hill says: “Every Failure Has An Equivalent Seed Of Success In It.” It is important to remember that failure is a lesson. Learn your lessons well. Better yet, try to learn someone else’s lessons first.

Failure is to success as thick lips are to Angelina Jolie – it’s an essential part of the whole thing. Failure is essential in preparation to success. Only the ones that never truly tried – have never failed.

Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before he invented the light bulb. When he was asked whether he wasn’t discouraged by failure, he said: “I didn’t fail 10,000 times – I found 10,000 ways how not to build a light bulb.”
I encourage you to find 10,000 ways how not to run a successful internet marketing business. Because as soon as you do, the one way that is correct will have no other choice but to present itself to you.

Author byline: Igor Kheifets is 21 year old Internet Marketing Expert and the author and creator of Mastermind Internet Marketing. Get More From Igor On Twitter.

1. Social Media is for Younger Generations

Social media is not limited to the younger generation. The community appreciates quality resources from everyone without judging the age. So if a thirteen year old wants to contribute to the network, then they may. Or if a sixty-three year old wants to contribute, they won’t be judged either. Social media networks have all age groups with some more abundant then others, but no community has put an age limit.

2. There are Rules to use Social Media

WRONG! In reality, there is no rule that governs the use of Social Media. You can tweet however you like, and format it in whichever way you see fit. You can digg the story, or bury it as you see it. You can share the links that you think are worthy in a way you think is best.

Now there are etiquette to using social media and if you don’t follow those then you will gain a bad reputation among the community. So careless self-promotion and spamming will get you blocked, but most people are too worried about doing it right. Relax and be yourself. If you like writing about puppets then write one sentence tweets about your puppets and those who are interested will follow you.

3. Its all about Quantity

Some people would like to think that people with more friends get a lot of retweets, or alot of diggs. That is not true. Because there are real estate agents who mass add people to their list on twitter, and not even know a single person. So they end up following 33,000 people who they don’t know, and 33,000 people follow them. But the fact is that they don’t get half the amount of retweets that you can get with just 1000 good followers that actually know you.

It’s never about the quantity instead it is about the quality. Its not about how many stories you submit on digg. Its about how good your stories are. Its not about how many status updates you made on twitter. Instead it is about whether those updates were useful to others. Its always about the quality, and users that provide quality are rewarded by the community not those who prefer the quantity road.

4. You have to be Everywhere

A more common misconception that I see is that you have to be everywhere. It is completely wrong, and as a matter of fact, I can argue that one person cannot be active on all social media networks because there are just too many of them. So take it one step at a time. Try out new things, and stick with the ones that you like best.

Remember, you can be a good community member at two communities and get tons of love and benefits such as visitors to your website, or you can be a member of one hundred communities and not get third of the traffic that you can get the other way.

5. Social Media Campaigns are all about having a Facebook and Twitter Profiles

While Facebook and Twitter are two of biggest social media networks, you cannot just stop by having a profile page on these sites. There are other great sites like Digg, Delicous, Reddit and others that can also get you alot of exposure.

6. Social Media Sites Send Poor Quality Traffic

Social Media Sites actually send one of the best quality traffic because you get only related audience. Popular sites like digg have users that visit the category that they like the best, so you are getting targetted users. On twitter, your tweets will only get retweeted by those who like it, so you are always getting targetted users.

7. Getting a story popular on Social Media requires the help of Power Users

Some people believe that it is true on sites like Digg and even on twitter, but I think it is completely wrong. It doesn’t require power users for your story to hit popular. It requires a quality article and that’s all. You can become a power user yourself as long as you contribute to the community, and the community loves quality. You don’t need power users, all you need is yourself.

8. Social Media is Fast

Ever heard of a saying how social media creates the boom, and it is fast. Well no it is not. It takes time to get popular on Social Media. You can tweet a story on twitter, but in order for it to get popular, it can take weeks and months. You need to structure a base for yourself in the community. Climb the ladder one step at at a time to the top. It takes time to build a good reputation on any social media community.

Sites that are whitelisted in digg are white listed because they have earned that reputation. Same goes with sites that get retweeted alot on twitter. That is because they have earn it.

9. Social Media is Easy

Every once in a while, I get this statement that social media is easy. It has some truth to it, but for the most part it is hard. It is not easy to earn someone’s trust. That is what social media is all about. Trust of the community. You need to work hard and show the community that you are worthy enough to be trusted.

10. You can disguise the community

You can never hide from the community. At least not forever. You might not be caught the first day, the first month, but you will be caught after the first year. There is no use to manipulating the system because playing the fair game is the best way. That’s how it should be done.

Most webmasters have a different mindset then the mainstream population. Us mainstreamers are serial monogamists to the end. We find one interest, one career, one hobby, and we try to do our best at it. When we feel satisfied, we leave that interest behind and pick up a new one. We do this on and on ad nauseam until the end of our lives. Webmasters on the other hand, are project polygamists. You have no idea how many dinner conversations have detailed new ideas for project now and in the future that will be operating parallel to the current set of sites. It is this unique mindset that gives webmasters the potential for success, but keeping all these ideas in order is the real trick to master.

Spitballing:

If you are one of those people who likes to go over your ideas with your friends or family, always carry paper and pen with you. Sometimes the best ideas can come to you at midnight at a Steak and Shake, so make sure you have something to write all your stellar ideas down on, otherwise you will be left with nothing but a faded memory when you try to put your plan into action.

The same goes for conferences or conventions that you attend. When we attended the 2008 Izeafest, Merlin Mann of 43 Folders was incredibly inspiring and had some solid common sense ideas for those who attended. Now, almost a year later, his powerpoint presentation is little more than a blurry image with isolated sound bites, but the notes from his presentation and the ideas it conjured still survive. Putting these paper notes into a three ring binder, an accordion folder or typing them and putting them in a folder for idea fragments could give you a well of ideas to dip into when you have the resources for a new project.

Images:

Designers are notorious for doodling. Having Uzzz Productions in addition of Balkhis means that there are pages and pages of drawings and memory cards full of photos for background images, design concepts or just inspiration. Now depending on your circumstances, it might be beneficial to scan and save all your drawings or to just find a large plastic folder to toss all of your sketches in.

Partially Completed Projects:

When you finally decide to start on a project you know that your timeline is constantly evolving. This is the time when you want to start creating a folder for each of your projects. Include things your drafts, your original ideas, and of course the names of contacts who will aid you along your way. Always remember, keep any copies of contracts you sign “in real life” and it might be prudent to scan a copy into your computer as well.

Remember that a good webmaster is organized and keeps up with their own projects. Make sure to review your list of projects a couple of times a year so that you don’t forget about that little directory or forum that you wanted to start up months ago. Being organized and being able to switch back and forth between multiple projects is an asset that will serve you well now and in the future.

Before anything you must pick the right niche for the forum, and make sure you have a lot of knowledge in that field. Then you have to pick a forum software, there are many paid and free softwares available, I recommend vBulletin as it is THE best and most popular. Then you have to pick a good design, custom made if possible and lastly some add-ons.

Now to the main stuff:

You need to get members to join. You can hold a contest, which is the best way. You can also invite your friends who can help you.

Then as an admin you yourself have to be very active and post threads which inspire and make people post. You have to post threads that not only cannot be found anywhere else but also really help people. People mainly join forums to learn new things, if you only have posts like ‘How old are you?’ it really is not going to work.

As the forum grows you have to appoint moderators, try and pick people you know. You can face many problems if you pick a bad team. You must pick friendly people who also know how to use the forum software you are using; also your moderators must contribute regularly.

Keeping the momentum going- At some point of time you will reach a stage where activity slows down. Here you just have to do something. Either you can hold contests or hire paid posters.

Now you must remember that forums are not something that you can make in a day, or a month. Successful forums take a lot of time to make. You have to keep putting in effort till the forum settles down. Promotion- Remember the more posts that take place, the more individuals will join. This is a “snowball” effect of forums, thus marketing must be done consistently and properly.

Ways of promoting your forum:

-Signature links in other forums of your niche.
-Mailing friends.
-Pay Per Click advertising.

Just like any other Internet venture, you need to take care of the hosting and maintenance of your forum. If your forum regularly has “downtime”, you will definitely lose members quickly, and a forum that has many coding mistakes will quickly frustrate all your visitors. You have to settle with a reliable host. If your forum is growing a lot, you may have to take a VPS.

You may be spending a lot on your forum. You just cannot keep spending a lot and not getting anything back in return. You have to monetize your site. But you have to keep in mind two things:
-Do not over monetize and stuff it with advertisements, as you will tick members off.
-Do not monetize it too early when you have very few members.

The best methods of advertising are private advertisements, but if your forum is new it is very tough to find advertisers. After using many alternatives, I think the best solution is Google AdSense. The rates per click is decent and you can earn even with a new forum. However, after some time people will turn blind towards these ads.

I have covered all the basics in this post and I hoped you liked it and learnt something from it.

This post was written by Farrhad A who has run many forums in the past and recently has started a new forum, Webmaster Peers. If you own a website and want to learn and interact with other website owners and developers you should join the forum.

Learning From Your Yesterday’s Experience and Having a More Productive Day Today

Basically it is saying that you become a Better Blogger each day faster and faster. Technically most people learn over the course of the days and months. That is because they analyze the site over the six month period. I am telling you to analyze your blogs daily.

Every night before I sleep, I try to do this. It is something that I learnt from Benjamin Franklin’s Biography. He used to look over his day before he sleep and put himself as an outsider which led him to learn more about himself. He improved his mistakes and now we see him on the 100 Dollar Bill.

Before you are ready to go to bed, check your stats for that day. See what you did which made you either gain or lose traffic. Think of ways what you can do tomorrow to improve, and then do those tricks. And repeat the process every day. And I will guarantee that it will work.

Think of it from the perspective of a production company. Think of yourself as a shoe production company. You started off along with two others company with the same resources.

Company #1 – Starts out producing 15 shoes a day and kept this production rate. (No Improvement)

Company #2 – Starts out producing 15 shoes a day and increase their daily rate by 5 shoes. (Improvement Skill is Present – Most Bloggers are in this category)

Company #3 – Starts out producing 15 shoes a day and increase their production by 5 on the first day, then move it to second the next day, and then fifteen on the third day and so on. (Greatest Improvement – This is what you want to be)

Now I am sure you like the idea of #3, but how can you do this as a blogger? I have mentioned above what you I do, but there are three personality traits that you need to adapt before you can achieve this skill.

3 Personality Traits to Achieve the Greatest Skill of Blogging

Stay Focused – There are many things that can be improved in your blogging. But you can’t do it all at once. So start with one aspect and work your way up. When you try to do it all at once, you either get distracted, or unmotivated. Which is a reason why most bloggers quit. If you don’t make blogging a chore, then you will stay motivated. And in order to do that you need to stay focused. Take a week to improve, your design, then one week to old posts, then one week to improve your SEO. Make as many categories that needs improvement, and then rotate them in cyclical manner weekly, daily, however you like it.

Never Give Up – Don’t ever give up this method. It might seem hard, and you might think that you are stressing yourself. But remember that this is the best way to improve faster and take the competitive edge over your peers.

Don’t Be Arrogant – No matter how much you know, you will never know enough. This is one trait that you must have in order to be a fast improver. Try to learn new things every day. Push yourself beyond your limits.

I can tell you that this technique is not easy. But those who adapt to this style usually become better bloggers. I know I have improved alot, and I am still no where close to my full potential. This technique not only works with blogging, but it works with entrepreneurship, and daily life as well.

Just remember don’t give up and try to improve at a faster rate than constant improvement rate. This way you will achieve success faster.

Now what others might tell you is that to increase traffic on your website because that will obviously increase your pageviews. For some people it gets really hard because they are either out of budget, or don’t want to advertise their site. Well in this post I am going to show you some ways which you can take within your website to increase the pageviews.

1. Interlinking

Interlinking between posts increase your pageviews. This is a trick that alot of top bloggers use. When you are writing a post, it often has terms or ideas that you have probably explained in details previously. Well then why don’t you link that post. Because someone reading this post, will eventually open that link, so they can understand the guidelines correctly.

I have read multiple posts that has links and links. These articles are so interesting, that I check out each of the other links, and I end up reading for hours due to this. I suggest you should try to interlink your posts as much as you can because it is going to help you.

2. Use Your Sidebar Effectively

Aside from your blog post, sidebar is you second major tool to increase page views. Add some popular posts on your sidebar, so your other users can see the top notch posts of your blog. This way when a user sees your post, they will head over to your other posts that they find interesting. This also decreases your bounce rate, so I suggest you implement this trick.

3. Multi-Page Posts

Have you ever seen forbes creating long lists. They use multi-page posts idea. It might be annoying when you are browsing, but it is a smart technique because thsi way you will get more pageviews. If you have a long list post, then just divide it into more pages. So people will open other pages, and this way you are increasing the value of your ad spots.

You might be thinking how you would do this. There is a plugin that is available for download called Multi-Page Toolkit

By implementing these 3 quick and simple tricks you will seriously increase your page views without increasing your budget. Implement these tricks on your website and increase your ad revenue.

1. Be Patient

Majority of the blogs that are started are not successful, and the reason is because the blogger lose interest. They don’t have enough patience and perseverence. You have to be consistent with your writing. If you are not seeing the big numbers in comments, subscribers, and your user contribution then just be patience. The top blogs which you see today and envy started the same place where you did. The difference is, you just quitted, and they survived through the crucial hard times.

2. Stay Humble

You need to be humble in order to succeed. Classic saying but it does work. Blogs take years into making, and it is the love of your readers and the contribution that makes it go far. Whether it was a small peice, or the big peice, all of the links help. After achieving the point, you must not forget where you started from because it shows you that you should be humble and show your gratitude.

Your users did not owe you anything, so be thankful. Write them thank you notes, personally contact users.

Yes it takes time, but the little time and patience that you put in your blog shows that you are dedicated, not someone who is in for quick bucks. Always link to others because it was the links that put you where you are. You must not stop giving back to the society.

Don’t just write for yourself, write for the web. Because the web is full of riches and it is what we want it to be. Add quality to the web because we already have to much spam. If you write quality articles, I can guarantee you that you will succeed because it always stand out.

3. Be a Good Friend before You ask for Favors

A good blogger is a good friend. A big difference between spammers and good friends is that good friends only ask good friends to do them a favor, whereas spammers ask just about everyone. Think about it, lets say you meet a guy on the road, and few minutes later you asked them to help you move. Why would I want to help you move your house when we don’t even know each other that well. This is exactly what the other user would think, and they will ignore you in the future.

So before you ask others to start doing you favor, think about your relationship with them and is it equal. Do you do them favors as well? If you ask others to link to you, have you linked to them before.

Spammers usually send link requests to blogs when they have no clue what is going on the blog. Make sure you are genuine about your relationship. Because it is something that cannot be faked.

4. Remember You are a Blogger

While it is true that a small part of the day bloggers check stats. Don’t make it any bigger than that smaller part. I have seen people getting obsessed with their stats. I know I had obsessed with them for the longest time. I got over my habit. All that does is makes you procrastinate. It decreases your productivity, and you won’t be able to gain alot out of it. Bloggers get their success from the rate of their audience.

If you have built a good and loyal audience, who cares how much users you get, and how many pageviews you get. If you are getting good number of comments which are genuine, then you are good.

Blogger’s don’t put their value on success hundred percent instead they value their audience.

Building a successful blog is not a one day job. It takes years into making. Each comment, every link, every single post on your blog will build your blog’s reputatoin. Your reader’s caution will turn into their love and trust. And when you look back you will see how being consistent and going through the hard times has made you come this far.