I see alot of new blogs that are being started, but they lack commentators. Even though Balkhis was launched only two months ago , I have manage to get a fairly decent amount of comments, and as you can see the comments are increasing as my reader base grows. I have put together a list of what I have seen a trend with Balkhis that increases the number of comments on post and in general.

Offer Incentives to commentators

Offering incentives to your commentators will keep them coming back to your blog and post comments daily. One of the most easiest and effective incentive you can offer is listing your top commentators, in your sidebar or some other place (Sitewide) and do-follow. I hate blogs who actually pretend to list the commentators but then you see they are no following all the links. If I come in and post a half comment, ofcourse the blogger won’t like it. Just like I don’t like that happening. Though I will say that when there is nice content, I leave a reply regardless of this top commentator incentive or not. Another effective technique is having a contest. You can give out prizes to your top 3 commentators. This might increase your spam a little, but you will get alot of valuable comments as well.

Offer helpful advices / tutorials

Offering helpful advices will definately increase comments on your website. How? Well if you follow all the SEO Advices that I have given then you are very well likely to get decent rankings for some good long-tailed keywords. Which will bring new users to your site, and most will say thanks if they like your advice and even stay on the blog to read more. Example of an advice article I wrote was 5 things that can hurt the Search Engine Ranking Positions of your Website. Now always be prepared to get some negative feedback also. Some people might come and put their opinion that might completely disagree with your article which is fine. Also tutorial type articles like How to add a dynamic sidebar in wordpress? will lead people to ask you questions. You can reply to those questions and have an entire conversation.

Interact with your users

Bringing me to my next point which is interacting with your users. Always ask questions in your post that readers can reply to. Answer questions asked in the comments by your users. Such acts lead to a conversation to build up and more people can participate in it, and put their opinion there. For that you need the special comment mod that I have discussed in this post. It is called Brian’s Threaded Comment plugin which allows user to reply to a particular comment.

Controversial Topics

Controversial topics are another comment attractor type posts. I try to stay away from it for the most part, but they do get tons of comments, and alot of people get heated in the comments which is a downside because blogs are friendly places not a place to start a fight. One of my posts which I wrote about Host Gator scamming people with their marketing technique… actually resulted in 34 comments and even got big enough to have the admin of Host Gator visit the blog and reply. Topics of this sort tend to get alot of comments, but due to the fights and anger I try to stay away from those for the most part.

Offer Freebies

Freebies are one of the biggest user/commentator attractor to your website. Everyone love free stuff right. When they are happy with your free products, they will reply, and when they are not happy they will also reply. You are getting more comments either way plus more page views for your website.

Above are some of the things that I have noticed with Balkhis that attracted more commentators to my posts. You can use the same techniques and get more comments on your posts as well because I am sure people don’t like seeing a 0 comments next to their posts.

Ever wonder how does the Alexa Rank of Balkhis dropped from millions to now a mere 162,714 ? and How am I still managing to get it to go lower and lower? Let me tell you guys a few secrets about alexa ranking that I have learned over the years I have been in the webmaster industry.

For those of you who don’t know what Alexa Traffic Rank is then this is for you. Alexa Traffic Rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).

Why am I sharing this information? and Why should you use it?

I am sharing this information because I think it is essential for webmasters and bloggers. Why is Alexa so important? Alexa is important because when you go to sell ads people consider your alexa rank as a measure of your traffic. One of the biggest advertising networks in the industry like Reviewme, and TLA both use alexa rank to measure your page strength and determine the price. You should use this advice if you want to increase your revenue from your website.

Before I begin with the actual tips I want to make you aware that Alexa is a bit skewed toward the webmaster sites. Due to the fact that most users who use the alexa toolbar are webmasters, majority of the top ranked sites are webmaster sites. There are many blackhat ways that you can manipulate your alexa ranking by doing those which I don’t recommend anyone to take therefore I will not go into how those work.

Below are some of the tricks that you can/should use to increase your alexa traffic rank:

1) Place an Alexa [................More in the full Post ...............]

This post is a part two of my last post about Inspiration – Foundation of Ideas. Why am I writing these posts? Because I believe every person who starts a business online should know these valuable things which can help them make their vision of success come true.

Motivation and Dedication are the most important factor that determines the success of an online business. There are thousands of websites on the world wide web. Only those with motivated and dedicated owners tend to stand out among their industry.

All the webistes that are already at the top didn’t just get to the top for no reason. The owners and developers behind it worked hard. They were motivated and dedicated to their business. They all had their own goals. Which led them to be successful as an online businessman.

Many people enter the online business thinking it is very easy to make money online. How hard can it be? You just launch a website and put ads on it, and it will make money. WRONG. That is not how it works. You have to put all your hard work in the website to make it to that level so it is worthy enough for people.

I remember when I started out not knowing a single thing about photoshop. Reading every online tutorial that I could. Messing around on my own and keeping a track of what I do. Now I don’t consider myself a photoshop god, but I am decent with it and can fulfill my needs. Same thing goes with when I started out IDK. Ofcourse I didn’t work on the scripting end that much because the script was available to me, but I modified a whole lot of the site to make it work the way I wanted to make it work. It took alot of planning and time before I had the site completed. Then I decided to redesign it and add more features to it. Which took me over 2 months. Which is nothing compared to what Shoemoney did with his ring tone website. It took him four years to code the entire thing and make it work perfect in php.

This make the point clear that it does require alot of hard work. You need to be motivated and dedicated to be a successful online businessman. Treat your website like a job if you want it to be successful. A job that you like to do and not bored with, so you don’t slack of.

Good luck with your online businesses.

I was thinking why online businessman doesn’t find success in their ventures, or why someone who wants to start something online, but is unable to do so. I came to a conclusion that they lack inspiration. Inspiration is a foundation of ideas. Without an inspiration life is incomplete and business is relatively a small part in life.

All the people who are millionaires, or billionaires right now had some inspiration/motivation in their life that took them to a point where they are. Not saying that they didn’t put hard work and all, but without the inspiration companies like Apple, Microsoft won’t be there. I would like to share what were some of the things that inspired me and made me able to come to a point where I am right now.

When my uncle Shahbaz Balkhi made his first flash website in 1998, I was amazed. That website inspired me, and I said to myself I would do something like this. I learned basic flash effects, but then I moved on with life. I was just a kid and didn’t pay much attention to the industry.

Once I moved to United States, I faced language difficulties. The difficulties I had in adapting to the lifestyle in America caused me to turn onto internet to pass time. I remembered the old days and start messing around with graphic softwares and learned.

My next inspiration was Steve Job’s speech that he gave at Stanford University’s Graduation. The guy’s life story was so inspiring. I admire his courage and his success.

These were just inspirations that I got for my normal day life style. What inspired me to start my last project IDK. I visited multiple directories, and I took a little bit of all things. At the end I was still sitting there thinking I don’t know what to do. Heck I said well sitting here won’t do nothing, I registered the domain idk.in. The initials IDK stand for I Don’t Know. Inspired by me not knowing what the heck I wanted to do. I made it a directory because directory is for people who don’t know where to find what they are looking for. I was motivated. I was dedicated to IDK. I put all my hard work in it, and in the end selling it for a decent price when I moved to my college. Truth be told, I didn’t have enough time to manage a directory. Blogs are much easier because I write one post a day and let it be it.

I started Balkhis. I was inspired by Jeremy of shoemoney. I liked how he was blogging and having fun. I have blogged with IDK, so I thought why not do this. I have a dream (Vision for Success), and I am just trying to make it come true. I am doing everything that I would like my company to do with Balkhis. Sponsoring events, travelling and much more.

The key point that you should get from this is inspiration is the foundation of ideas. Without inspiration you cannot go anywhere. Next post I will talk about motivation because without motivation and hard work your business cannot be successful.

Every industry depends on innovation and new ideas to carry it forward. Blogging is one of the industries which is being renovated. The next big step is Video Blogging. As I speak, more and more bloggers are now using Videos on their blogs to explain their points better. Some even use it to make the blog more live and get more interaction. Probloggers even hosted a challenge to bloggers to make a video blog explaining Why do you blog.

I personally like the idea of Video Blogging, and I think it have its own benefits. Tons of people now use Youtube. As a college student, I see so many students here as well as many adults on youtube. If you look at Alexa Stats, Youtube is #2 beating Windows Live and the mighty Google. So you get the picture how big it is. Imagine if you post a video on your youtube channel and get tons of comments and views. Videos are a way to get your brand across. Your videos doesn’t even have to be related to your site. As long as the user come to your channel, and see the url they are most likely to check it out.

Video Blogging is very essential now if you are writing a tutorials. I know screenshot tutorial is a good way to explain, but sometimes video tutorials are the best. You will see me mostly using video tutorials to explain my steps because I just think that most of the people find it easy to follow the steps if I am recording the screen and speak.

In my personal experience, I have gained a few visitors from youtube from my wordpress tutorials for custom page, it got 340 views. I have 7 subscribers on my Youtube Channel. The number is growing slowly.

I mainly use Windows Movie Maker and the built-in camera on my Sony Viao, to record my videos. Windows Movie Maker is a decent software that comes in with your computer for free. It will let you allow slides before the video if you want to add advertisement and so on. I would agree, that Mac makes Video blogging a bit easier, but ah well. I love my Vaio.

There are multiple programs, free and paid to record your screen with audio. The one that I like is Camstudio. It is free. Just an advice for all those who going to be making a video. Use a fixed screen dimensions, not full screen because fullscreen will be blurry.

Good Luck Video Blogging and giving your blog a new life.