Meet Chitraparna Sinha from SocialVani.com

Many of you will probably recognize Chitraparna as one of the most frequent writers on Blogging Tips. While I was going through the phase of hiring new writers for the site Chitraparna was one of the earliest new writers to the blog over the past year. It was just a year ago that Chitraparna made her first guest blog post on another site and is now running multiple successful blogs of her own, and now it’s a pleasure to feature her in this week’s edition of  “meet the blogger“!

1) Please tell us about yourself and how you got into blogging?

I am Chitraparna Sinha, a self-made freelance writer cum consultant and blogger from India. I started freelancing to cover college expenses. After clearing Masters’ in English in 2010, I was at a crossroads to either go for a conventional job or do what I really wanted, that is, to write.

I wanted to be self-employed. However, I was never sure how to go about it. True, I was earning as a freelance writer then too and had a good client base but I figured this won’t be enough. I figured if I had to earn handsomely, I need to escalate the earning process.

After much hard work, I am as you see me. There are very few freelancer writers in India who are earning a six figure income every month, on an average, without the support of any ‘conventional’ job to fall back upon.

Lastly, I got into blogging completely by chance. I did a lot of ghost blogging but when a friend of my mother, Shanker Bakshi, offered to register a domain and pay for my hosting, I danced with joy. Shanker is an affiliate marketer, a blogger from Chandigarh (India), and “very successful” in whatever he does!

He is my first stepping stone to blogging success and I am eternally indebted to him. He gave me the confidence that I was lacking. He taught me how to set up a blog, configure Live Writer, how NOT to spend on products blindly and he still stands behind me as a strong support system.

2) What is the focus of your blog and why did you choose that niche?

I didn’t have any choice of niche in the beginning. Blogging happened by chance and I figured social media would be interesting to write about. After some time, I started writing about small business resources.

Frankly, it was after 8-10 months of blogging that I could find my focus and decide how to take this blog forward. As I tell everyone now, it is a resource blog for bloggers and small business owners. Since I am a writer, a small section is also devoted to freelance writing and earning. These three are my main topics and somewhere or the other, they merge as “one” entity.

3) How are you currently monetizing your blog traffic?

Currently, I have AdSense enabled. Earlier, Info Links was enabled too but I removed it now. I get paid for product reviews, consultancy, guest blogging, paid ads plus I accept sponsored reviews.

As I am a content developer, I get a lot of small business clients via my blog and it gives 80% of my earning.

4) What do you know now that you wish you knew when you first started blogging?

I wish to know more about WordPress and how to customize themes. Not that I am an expert now but I can handle both better.

Secondly, I wish to know about monetization techniques to start earning earlier than later. I had much experience as a ghost blogger but when faced with the prospect of monetizing my own blog, I went blank.

Lastly, I wish someone had told me to start networking with other bloggers. I started it after many months and I lost a large chunk of networking benefit.

5) What are three blogs that you visit almost daily?

Barring yours Zac (I visit it daily), I am a regular reader of Ana Hoffman’s Traffic Generation Café, Neil Patel’s Quick Sprout and Steve Pavlina.

6) Can you give us three recommended tools/services that you use with your blogging? (Search tools, keywords, content, social)

I use these tools:

• Long Tail Pro
• Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Stumble Upon
• Windows Live Writer

7) What advice would you have for someone who is just starting with their first blog?

I would advise the blogger to keep a reserve of at least 3 months’ worth of blog posts. The first three months are maddening. There are a lot of things to do but so less time so the reserve of posts will lessen the work load. You will have time for designing, theme tweaking, making connections and social media sharing.

Lastly, I would recommend this post I published here for every newbie blogger. It is a must read.

8) What’s the best advice or tip you’ve discovered about blogging since getting started?

There are a couple of them actually:

• If you have something unique, don’t give it for free. I used to do a lot of free blog ‘content development’ advice but I have stopped them now. I charge for them.
• Do not write daily. When I started, I wanted to post something daily. Later I realized that unless I have a team, it is not possible and so I have reduced it to 2-3 times or less per week and I focus more on promotion.
• Blog for your audience and not for search engine bots.

9) If you only had $100 to start a new blog, how would you use it?

I would use $100 for domain name, hosting and logo branding. It might take a little more than $100 but these 3 are main priorities. Logo is very important. I like the way you have branded your blog Zac. It is a stepping stone towards authority building.

10) How can readers of the blog get in touch with you? (Social/blog URL’s)

Readers can get in touch with me via –

• My Blog – SocialVani.com
• Twitter Handle – @Chitraparna | @socialvani

Thank you Zac for considering me worthy of this interview. I really appreciate it.

Thanks again Chitraparna for taking the time to share your advice and story with the Blogging Tips community. If you would like to learn about other bloggers and how they are finding success online, be sure to read through our blogger interview series.

Here’s a Few Tips to Write Great Blog Posts

It’s not enough to have something to share when you’re writing blog posts,you need to understand the techniques that will attract as many readers as possible to get your point across. Although there are lots of different ideas about how you can drive traffic to your site, there are a few rules that are widely accepted as the best ways to write compelling and engaging content on a consistent basis.

Here’s a few tips on how to write great blog posts.

1. You need to be sure that the blog is scannable. This is a medium that works hand in hand with search engines and that means you need to have an eye to what attracts those Google bots as well as human readers. Keep in mind that most Internet based readers scan the copy they read for interesting points that jump out at them. That means you need to do away with large blocks of text right off the bat. Lists are a great way to present your points and bullet points are still one of the best ways to allow visitors to get to the information they want.
2. Formatting is another essential ingredient. Draw the reader’s eyes to the points you want them to see with bold and italics as well as underlined text. Being flexible with the font size is another great way to capture someone’s attention. Keep in mind that your blog post still needs to be cohesive. Using these techniques enable readers to scan the information but it still needs to make sense when read from start to finish as a whole. Blog posts that are well written and formatted will build your readership.
3. Don’t meander. Studies have shown that you only have a few seconds to attract and keep a reader’s attention. You can’t do that if you don’t have your thoughts organized. One of the most important techniques you need to learn to be a successful blogger is the art of writing well. That comes with practice, self editing and the patience to write more than one draft to ensure you present a professional end product.

Writing great blog posts is all about being consistent as well. Readers that want to follow you will want to visit your site at the same time to read a new post and establish a routine. Working at blog posts diligently also helps you to hone your technique and establish a voice that you’ll come to be known by.

Quick Tips for Increasing Your Alexa Score Fast

When it comes to building a successful web site or blog there are many ways to track how well you are doing. Some people will focus on traffic, revenue or even Google PageRank, but many people also like to look at the Alexa ranking. Alexa is the service that tracks all of the web sites on the internet and assigns them a ranking based on various factors such as traffic, incoming links, social sharing and many other stats you might be looking at as site owners.

Alexa is currently ranking over 30 million web sites world wide from over 125 different countries. For most web site owners, it’s usually a big deal when you break into the top 1,000,000 on Alexa, but the real treasure is when you get in the top 100,000 sites.

When I first acquiredBloggingTips.com a few years back it was in the 12,000 range, then I found myself not being able to dedicate as much time to the site as I would have like. At the high point it fell to around 18,000 on Alexa.

Once you get in the top 25,000 rankings of Alexa, it’s much harder to rank higher and very easy to fall back. In 2013 I made it a goal to get back into the top 10,000 Alexa (for whatever it’s worth), but it’s more of a personal goal than anything else. The best way to do this is through quality articles that get shared, linked and commented on.

You can see an Alexa ranking chart for BloggingTips.com to the right over the past two weeks. It’s nice to see that the blog is continuing to rank higher every single day. Special thanks toSiteRankHistory.com for the stats.

Through March the blog was able to jump another 1,000+ up in the Alexa rankings. It will be interesting to see how quickly the site continues to rank, as it will continually be harder to rank among authority sites and blog.

Does Alexa Score Matter?

Before we jump into the tips for how to get better Alexa score rankings, let’s first ask the question of does Alexa really even matter? In so many words… no, it’s doesn’t matter! While it’s an awesome way to keep track of your site performance, it really doesn’t mean much. Alexa is just a score and at the end of the day it doesn’t mean much. I actually have a few sites in the 1 million+ and few hundred thousand on Alexa and they are making almost more money than BloggingTips.com, so it’s definitely not a good way to measure the financial value of a site.

However… metrics are king and ad companies and businesses love stats. If your site is ranking in the top 10,000 on Alexa, you will probably get a lot more notice from ad companies and services looking to advertise or work with your site. Alexa is a fun way to rank and track the performance of your site, but at the end of the day it really doesn’t mean much.

Quick Tips to Improve Your Alexa Score

Now that I’ve upset everyone by saying Alexa doesn’t matter, let’s talk about how we can increase your score anyway! (haha).

Below is a list of some of the most well known and effective ways to improve the overall traffic, quality and growth of your site while improving your Alexa rank at the same time. I’m not doing anything special or amazing to continually increase the BloggingTips.com score, it’s all based off growing the site and my audience.

Install the Alexa Toolbar

I personally don’t use the Alexa toolbar, but there has always been a lot of talk about how effective it is to get people using the Alexa toolbar to browse your site. Obviously since you are visiting your site the most, and if you have the Alexa toolbar installed, then the toolbar will track a lot of visits to your site. This is one of the many reasons why tech and webmaster related sitesrank so well, many of the site visitors have the Alexa toolbar already installed since they are interested in the stats it can provide.

Claim Your Web Site or Blog

Over the years Alexa has grown into much more than a ranking system, they now offer advertising through their site, toolbar and advanced tracking for paid members. Another great way to increase your Alexa score is to claim your site using their system. Doing so will allow you to:

• Easily update your site’s contact information
• Update your site’s title and description
• Respond to user reviews of your site

Place the Alexa Badge on Your Site

Again, Alexa loves getting all the attention. If you use their toolbar it will help your rankings… claiming your site will also help, and so will pushing their badge on your site. There isn’t much detail on how much this will actually help, but if you love Alexa and want to show your ranking to the world, you might enjoy using this feature anyway.

Get Reviews for Your Site on Alexa

Again, not sure of the importance or value, but having reviews for your web site does go a long way with many directories and services. When logging into your Alexa account you can leave reviews for other web sites and blogs on the internet. You can see in the screenshot below you can see the Alexa review option.

Click here if you’d like to leave a review for BloggingTips.com.

Link to Alexa within Your Blog Posts

It never hurts to link back to Alexa within your content, as this will lead to more people finding out about their toolbar, downloading it and visiting your site, while also allowing Alexa to see that they are getting backlinks from your site.

The Biggest Alexa Score Ranking Factors

Update Your Blog Often with Quality Content

As mentioned, I’m not worrying about any of the methods used above, all I really care about is growing out the site with quality content that provides value to my audience, gets them to share the content and link to it from their site.

The better the quality content on your site and as long as you are posting on a consistent basis, this will greatly help in your mission to increase your alexa score. Don’t forget to always link to other content from within your articles and don’t spin articles or create garbage backlinks… this doesn’t help anyone at the end of the day and could also get your tossed out of the Google search engine.

Increase Your Social Reach and RSS Syndication

As less more are using the search engines and more people are relying on social networks, this should also be a major focus of yours. Make sure your blog content is being spread across Twitter, Facebook and Google+. You should also create a fan page for your blog if you haven’t already.

Even though Google Reader is going away, rss syndication and your blog update feeds are still going to be an important method for distribution and link building to your site.

Any more Alexa Score increasing tips?

There are many ways to increase your Alexa score and some work better than others. Be sure to share your opinion and tips in the comments section below.

Display Advertising Done Right with Bonadza Network

There are many different types of advertising available on the Internet. While the CPA affiliate model is definitely gaining in popularity these days, the traditional CPM model still holds a lot of credence from a branding perspective. Even if the site visitor doesn’t click on the ad, even if the site visitor never completes a transaction, there is a lot of value in simply getting your brand out in front of the right eyeballs.

Specializing in this type of advertising is a network called Bonadza, which boasts that it offers “display advertising done the right way.” It’s not about simply throwing up the banner on a wide range of random websites in hopes of getting some sort of return; instead, advertisers are offered great conversion tracking, super precise targeting, and access to websites in over 190 countries around the world.

The Sophisticated Media Buying Platform

If you were to look at the traditional CPM advertising model, it was typically true that you’d set your bid for a certain CPM and maybe you’d get to pick a particular category or keyword. Bonadza aims to go beyond that.

According to the official features page, Bonadza aims to provide a “feature-rich self serving advertising network” that has a “unique easy-to-use interface.” It’s meant to be approachable by novices, while still providing “extensive functionality and reporting” for the more seasoned veterans of Internet advertising.

One of the key features is something called Real Time Bidding Technology (RTB). Instead of serving up the traffic in bulk, Bonadza analyzes each impression individually. This ensures the quality of the impressions is kept high and it addresses your particular targeting needs as an advertising.

The Campaign Building Experience

The best way to understand Bonadza is do a quick walkthrough of the ad creation experience. After signing up for an account and funding it, you gain access to the main advertiser dashboard. From there, one of the main options from the navigation menu is to create a new campaign.

When a campaign is created, you’ll be able to view the impressions, clicks, average CPM, money spent, conversion percentage, and other metrics. For each of the campaigns, you can define the name, the start and end dates, and the budget expressed either in daily or overall form. Within each campaign, you can then create any number of AdGroups.

Again, you can name your AdGroup and set the daily budget. It is also possible to cap the number of impressions each day, but perhaps more importantly, there is a fantastic geotargeting tool. You can pick whole countries or you can narrow it down to individual states. Simply start typing in that field and it’ll bring up the possible options. Depending on what you want to do, you can also target your ad based on browser and OS.

After that, you move on the next tab in the ad creation process to setup your placements. This starts with setting your CPM bid. This defaults at $1.00, but you can increase or decrease it accordingly. The available placements are initially shown with all the categories, but you can narrow it down by looking through the 20 or so available categories. These include Technology & Computing, Education, Real Estate, Pets and Religion, among others.

From there, you can see the different domains in the Bonadza network that have available placements. The domains are not clickable, so you will need to copy-paste if you want to see how these sites look. You do see the number of daily impressions, though. Add the domains to your list of selected placements.

The final step involves naming the ad, setting the destination URL and uploading the creatives. Bonadza currently accepts six banner sizes: 120×600, 160×600, 300×250, 728×90, 700×500, and 300×600.

Highly Targeted Advertising Opportunity

If you are an advertiser looking for a robust platform where you can serve your display advertising with a high level of targeting and a worldwide reach,Bonadza is worth considering. There are several properties in the network that have seven digit daily impressions, so you are definitely able to get your banner in front of a lot of people from a range of websites and niches.

OptimalHosting Review – An Upcoming Cloud Hosting Service

If you are looking for an innovative and energetic hosting service that understands the demands and requirements of the internet era, then trying Optimal Hosting wouldn’t be such a bad option. Optimal Hosting is a young hosting services company providing cloud based hosting services. Established with the sole purpose of meeting the challenges of emerging internet businesses, Optimal Hosting has quickly become a reliable name and the preferred option for many webmasters. Their packages are flexible and their rates are quite affordable as well. Moreover, the one thing you can be sure, about any young start up, is energetic customer support.

Hosting Plans & Features

Optimal Hosting primarily offers a Cloud Hosting plan that can be customized according to the customer’s needs. They also have a special Online Marketing Package that includes additional marketing features, tools and coupons. However, these can also be availed with the standard hosting package.

With an Optimal Hosting account you will get unlimited disk space and monthly bandwidth, unlimited domain names, unlimited emails and databases. You will also get the standard Linux based cpanel to manage your account and hosting features. The user interface is friendly and easy to use where most of the necessary options are available on one screen. The famous statistics and logging applications Awstats and Webalizer are also available to monitor the traffic and bandwidth usage details of your account.

Emails & Connectivity

Optimal Hosting gives you the freedom of creating as many email addresses as you want with unlimited email storage. Emails can be configured on POP3 and IMAP as well. All the major mobile platforms like Android, iOS and Blackberry are also supported. There’s also a list of Webmail applications through which the emails can be accessed online.

Software & Scripts – Single Click Installations

You can install a huge variety of software, web applications and scripts on your Optimal Hosting account using Fantastico. All the major blogging and website management systems like WordPress and Joomla are available at single click installations. Other useful customer interaction features, such as Bulletin Board Forum, are also there for free.

e-Commerce Integration

In case you want to start selling through your website, you can choose from a number of secure ecommerce plugins like OS Commerce, Agora Shopping etc. that can smoothly be integrated in your website to start selling immediately. Paypal and merchant account support is also available that can be used to facilitate secure payments through your website.

Internet Marketing Features

Optimal Hosting seems to put a lot of focus on promoting its internet marketing and online business features. With a standard Optimal Hosting account, you will get free internet marketing coupons on all major marketing platforms including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Facebook. These coupons can be used once your account is active and running. There’s also a separate internet marketing package on Optimal Hosting that can be purchased to get a more comprehensive set of marketing and promotional tools and freebies.

Reliable Servers and Technology

Optimal Hosting works on the latest Cloud Hosting model. Its servers are based across two continents in various cities of Europe and North America. This reduces the chances of any major break downs or major scale failures since the servers are located at completely different locations. The company guarantees 99.99% uptime and claims to manage downtime much more effectively because of its cloud set up and smart load management mechanisms. However, we do not have any third party data to verify this.

In terms of security, Optimal Hosting gives a Hack-Free guarantee to all its customers. Keeping theincreasing online security threats in mind, this is a pretty useful reassurance.

Energetic Customer Support

As expected of any young start up, Optimal Hosting employs an energetic and proactive customer support staff that is available 24×7 to resolve any customer issues. They can be approached any time of the day at their main support telephone number where a knowledgeable and professional staff representative will be available to help you. There’s also a pretty decent knowledgebase that contains articles and answers to the most frequently asked questions. You may also use the well maintained video library that has video tutorials on many features and aspects of the Optimal Hosting account. The standard email ticketing system is also in place and they usually do not take a lot of time to respond to customer emails either.

Pricing – Have a Closer Look

The monthly charges of Optimal Hosting fall in the higher category when compared with other hosting services. The standard hosting package is available for $6.96/month for a 3 year contract. However, Optimal hosting is offering 6 months of free hosting services on the purchase of any of its hosting plans. So you can use these 6 months to judge the quality of services Optimal Hosting provides. As a new customer, you will also get 1 free domain registration that will be valid for one year. However, you will need to pay for the renewal of this domain name once it gets expired.

Optimal Hosting Review Summary

In our opinion, Optimal Hosting is worth a try. They are a relatively new company when compared with the established names such as Hostgator and Bluehost. However, their standard of services seems pretty similar and they seem to be improving quickly as well. Their customer support is very proactive and the technology they use reduces chances of any major downtimes. The only downside seems to be the higher price tag, but even that can be acceptable once you consider the reliability of their services.

How To Display Events On WordPress

For professionals that use WordPress for their business, adding an event calendar could prove to be a most usefulproductivity tool. Display timely information to customers or website visitors to promote your events with a calendar WordPress plugin. This article features the capabilities of the plugin Calendar developed and supported by Kieran O’Shea which features a monthly view of events, mouse-over details for the events, multi-author capabilities, recurring events, sidebar functionality, modifiable CSS, and more.

Installation and Set-up

Search for Calendar by Kieran O’Shea in the WordPress Plugins dashboard. Install and activate according to the installation directions in the WordPress details window. A Calendar tab will be added to the admin panel below the Settings tab to the left sidebar. From there you can configure the settings for Calendar.

Calendar Options

Choose your calendar display options here. Select the lowest user group that can manage events, toggle if you want to display author names on events they create, toggle if you want a jump-box to easily change the month and year when adding events, toggle for the day’s events and upcoming events (can decide how many days in the future to display), enable event categories and configure the stylesheet if you wish to make changes to match a particular theme.

Manage Categories

Users can create custom categories in the Manage Categories set up area. Add a name and color (in Hex format) for ease of visibility by event types (for example: one day, weekly events, monthly events, all day events, etc.).

Manage Events

Manage Events includes all the detail for one time and recurring events. Add an event title, event description, a category, a URL associated with the event if needed, a start and end date, the time, and recurring detail if needed.

Add to blog

Calendar offers a number of options to add event information to your blog. Short code can be added to create a calendar page or to add a day’s events to a post. Users can also add widgets to the WordPress blog sidebars to displace recent events. You have the ability to filter by categories to display what you want which is helpful to highlight what is relevant by topic area.

After installation and editing the setup options, add a couple test categories and test events to see how the calendar looks on your site. Make sure things are working the way you want before you add a year’s worth of events.

A calendar plugin is useful for any number of niche blogs and businesses. It is a great marketing tool to advertise upcoming webinars, online chats, product or service announcements and trade shows. On your custom calendar page, in addition to the shortcode for the calendar, it is a good area to add a contact form or a way for visitors to your site to contact you and inquire after more information. You can also add post event information to show visitors what they could be missing out on. Don’t forget to take advantage of the URL field for each event to draw visitors to a relevant article or to your contact form as well.

4 Quick Video Blogging Tips

Everyone likes videos and everyone likes quick tips… so when we combine them, we get this quick video blogging tips post!

In all honesty, video is huge and it’s crucial for all aspects of online business and blogging. Not everyone likes to read thousand word blog posts and sometime a short video can quickly provide more detail than a 500 word post. Even more important is that video goes viral and once you create it, new people will be watching it all the time.

Video Blog Tips & Crazy YouTube Stats

Before we get started with some quick video blog tips, let’s first show some crazy stats from Youtube and how many videos are being watched online.

• 800+ million monthly unique visitors
• 72+ hours of video uploaded every minute
• 1 million partner program members
• #2 search engine (bigger than aol, yahoo, bing combined!
• 4 billion hours of video viewed every month

If those numbers aren’t enough to get you excited, I’m not sure what will!

Quick Video Blogging Tips You Must Implement

The hardest part about doing video is actually getting yourself started. You no longer need a great camera and fancy equipment. Most iPhones and mobile devices are better than you average camera now a days and many of them have one click upload to YouTube which makes the process extremely easy.

Now for some quick tips to make your videos work better for you.

Videos on Landing Pages

If you’ve ever done anything in the world of online marketing, you will already know how importantvideos are for landing pages and getting people to take action. The majority of the top products andoffers on clickbank.com are using video to drive a massive amount of leads and new customers through their sites, and you should too!

Getting an Intro Video Made

An excellent way to brand your videos is to have a quick intro at the beginning. Nothing too long that it becomes annoying for the viewer if they are to watch multiple videos of yours. Something short that shows your logo and delivers a message. My friend Kevin did a great write up on places where you can get custom video intros designs.

Include You in Your Videos

I started making my own videos earlier this year and plan to get into it more, but I wanted to make sure I was able to connect with my audience and not just show them a power point presentation or screenshots of different sites. Instead I included a video within the video of myself talking. This not only allows the person to better relate with your video and content, but it also helps grow your brand and awareness of who you are.

Creating an End Call to the Action

One of the best tips that you will need to take action on is to put an “call to action” at the end of your video. This can be something you can click on, a url to display or telling your audience to do something or ask them a question. No matter what you do, don’t end your video with nothing. You have the viewer engaged and they are already waiting to take action and move on from your video. Tell them what to do next!

Using These Video Blogging Tips, How Can You Improve Your Site?

There you have it… four quick video blogging tips!

The funny thing is that many people will already know about these tips and realize they work, but for some reason they will never take the time to implement them or actually get started with incorporating videos into their blogs. Hopefully you will explore the world of video and see how it can improve your online business and blogging exposure!