Johny Kena Banned Blogger Template

Template Name: Johny Kena Banned Blogger Template | Download Johny Kena Banned Blogger Template

Template Type : Free Blogger Template

Author: MasKolis | Mas-Template

Basic Instructions : How to install a Blogger template

Properties : 2 columns, Ads Ready, 3 Columns Footer, Red, Fixed width, Magazine, Home Screen, Menu Links, Top Navigation Bar, Header Banner.

Tags: Johny Kena Banned Blogger Template ,Johny Kena Banned BTemplate , Johny Kena Banned Blogger Theme,Johny Kena Banned BTheme,Johny Kena Banned Blogspot Template, Johny Kena Banned Blogspot Theme

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Top 50 Article Directories By Traffic and Pagerank

	URL	Alexa Rating	Google Pagerank	No Follow
1.	ehow.com	127	7	NF!
2.	squidoo.com	207	7
3.	ezinearticles.com	442	6
4.	hubpages.com	467	6
5.	examiner.com	492	8	NF!
6.	seekingalpha.com	1,462	7	NF!
7.	technorati.com	1,673	8
8.	articlesbase.com	1,932	6	NF!
9.	apsense.com/article/start	2,049	4
10.	buzzle.com	2,068	6
11.	goarticles.com	2,855	2
12.	gather.com	3,833	6
13.	selfgrowth.com	4,303	6
14.	pubarticles.com	4,937	4
15.	suite101.com	5,321	6
16.	articlesnatch.com	5,417	5	NF!
17.	amazines.com	5,835	4
18.	helium.com	6,218	5	NF!
19.	ezinemark.com	6,292	4
20.	sooperarticles.com	6,553	4
21.	brighthub.com	6,944	6
22.	infobarrel.com	7,493	4
23.	textbroker.com	8,678	4
24.	triond.com	8,798	5
25.	articlerich.com	9,212	4
26.	articlecity.com	9,708	5
27.	submityourarticle.com/articles/ $	10,355	3
28.	articledashboard.com $	10,533	5
29.	isnare.com	11,344	5
30.	knoji.com/articles/	11,885	3
31.	thefreelibrary.com	11,937	7
32.	selfseo.com	11,990	4
33.	articlealley.com	12,365	4	NF!
34.	EvanCarmichael.com	12,579	4
35.	artipot.com	13,929	3	NF!
36.	expertscolumn.com	13,987	3	NF!
37.	articlesfactory.com	14,739	4
38.	bukisa.com	15,051	5	NF!
39.	biggerpockets.com/articles	15,635	4	NF!
40.	streetarticles.com	15,698	3
41.	articlebro.com	16,792	1
42.	articleclick.com	17,101	4
43.	articletrader.com	17,138	5
44.	galoor.com	17,213	3
45.	earticlesonline.com	17,397	2	NF!
46.	thewhir.com/find/articlecentral	17,563	5
47.	articlesphere.com	19,430	4	NF!
48.	snipsly.com	20,274	4
49.	abcarticledirectory.com	20,627	3
50.	articlefeeder.com	21,641	3

NF! - this site uses nofollow tag in author's resource box.
$ - payment required to submit articles.

Submit an article directory:

This is for article direstories only. Please, don't waste your time submitting other websites - they will be rejected.

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Facebook Likes Tripled Valuable Than Tweets

ChompOn, a company that provides a white label group buying service, similar to Groupon, that restaurants and other businesses can provide their customers directly, recently released a report (PDF) that used its wealth of marketing data to estimate the value of tweets, Facebook shares and other social networking behavior.

What the report found was that, for their customers and buyers, every share on Facebook was worth about $14 where every tweet was worth only $5. Likewise, a Facebook like, meaning someone was following the account on Facebook, was worth $8 but every Twitter follower was worth only $2.

ChompOn, however, did acknowledge that the value of likes and followers may be much higher due to long-term loyalty.

But even if the exact figures are off, the report shows the relative value between Twitter and Facebook and it paints a very bleak picture for the value of Twitter.

But does this mean that Twitter is dead or dying for marketing? Not likely at all.

Though the ChompOn report doesn’t speculate as to why Facebook actions are much more valuable than Twitter ones, there are several probable explanations.

• Less Noise: Most people have far fewer Facebook “Friends” than Twitter followers. This keeps the noise down and makes the message more likely to come through.
• Closer Friends: People more closely monitor who they friend on Facebook and many, if not most, limit their interactions to friends and family. This makes any recommendation on Facebook much more powerful, coming from someone that the viewer probably knows and trusts.
• More Users: Though Facebook users tend to keep a smaller social circle, there are far more Facebook users than Twitter users. This makes the potential reach of Facebook much, much higher.
• More Media: Where a tweet is pretty much just 140 characters of text and link, a Facebook message can have images, video, and much more text.
• Better Demographics: As the above demographics study showed, Facebook users tend to be more brand loyal and are more likely to update their status every day.In short, they are more committed to the brand and more likely to be there to share when they are wanted.

Of course, all of this is pure speculation but these are very likely factors in the nearly 3x valuation of Facebook shares over tweets. However, this doesn’t mean that Twitter is dead, just that it has a different purpose altogether.

Why Twitter Still Matters

While all of that being said is true, what Twitter lacks in quality it can make up for in quantity. For example, where a Twitter follower might only be worth a quarter of a Facebook “Like”, one can often get 5x-10x more Twitter followers than Facebook likes.

Since Twitter is viewed as less personal, people are more inclined to follow companies and marketers, making it easier to grow an audience.

Furthermore, even if tweets are significantly less valuable than likes, they still do add value. A five dollar tweet is still five dollars that the company did not have before. It is still, most likely, very much worth the time and effort to participate in Twitter.

That being said, Twitter is clearly a game of quantity over quality for social media, where Facebook is more about building fewer, higher-quality connections.

On that note, marketers, large and small, need to be aware of these differences and learn how to use these two promotional tools to their advantage. Ignoring the nature of these two services risks making your time on them useless.

Both sites still matter but have very different cultures and goals. What’s right for one is not right for the other and, at times, a business that does well on one won’t on the other, The goal isn’t to find the “best” solution for everyone but, rather, to find the best solution for your particular needs.

That, in turn, is why demographics like OnChomp’s can be so important, helping paint a clearer picture of what the sites can provide. - source

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Onlywire Best Social Bookmarking Tool Review

Have you even imagined how good it would be, when all you have to do is write a blog post and instantly the link is bookmarked in 50+ social bookmarking and social media websites? Sounds like a bloggers dream come true? Well, now it is actually possible to automate the social bookmarking process to get lots of link juice from bookmarking websites like Digg, StumbleUpon etc.

OnlyWire is a really service provider which offers to create bookmarks for your blog or website. Simply said, OnlyWire syndicates all you content to a number of high PR websites, this can be good if you are looking to go viral on the social hemisphere and also to get lots of incoming links for your website or Wordpress blog.

If you own a Wordpress blog, i would recommend you to download the onlywire wordpress plugin and try it out immediately. There is a free trail version available, with the free account you can post 300 times on various social bookmarking and social media websites, and the paid version allows you to post 1000 times a month for 10 USD. There are a lot of other wordpress plugins for social bookmarking and content syndication, but onlywire’s seamless service stand alone in front of all the other competitors. The only disadvantage of this plugin is that, the first time you create an account with them, you have to manually fill in all your social media profile log in credentials(I found this part a little scary). Once you have set up your onlywire account with all the log in credentials, for the websites you want the content to be syndicated with, just save it and the next time you publish a new article it will be bookmarked in all various websites you have activated.

The Onlywire wordpress plugin also comes with a ‘Share and Bookmark’ feature, bookmark and share buttons will automatically appear under all your blog posts, enable this option for better social sharing or if you prefer using some other social sharing wordpress plugins like diggdigg then you can disable this option on as well, the choice is all yours to make. If you can notice, i have not enable this Bookmark and Share option on my blog as i am currently using diggdigg wordpress plugin.

Onlywire is the by far the best social bookmarking – social media tool i have ever come across till date, it saves me a lot of time and build be a lot of incoming links, what else can a blogger ask for?

List of Top Social Networks Supported by Onlywire are as follows.

01. AOL lifestream
02. Bebo
03. Bibsonomy
04. Blogger
05. Connotea
06. Delicious
07. Digg
08. Diigo
09. Facebook
10. Facebook Groups
11. Facebook Pages
12. Folkd
13. FriendFeed
14. Google Bookmarks
15. Google Plus
16. Google plus pages
17. Hi5
18. Identi.ca
19. JumpTags
20. Kaboodle
21 Karmalynx
22. Linkagogo
23. Linkedin
24. Linkedin Groups
25. Live journal
26. Mister Wong
27. Multiply
28. MyAol
29. My Link Vault
30. Myspace
31. Netlog
32. Netvibes
33. Newsvine
34. Plaxo
35. Plurk
36. Posterious
37. Reddit
38. Scribd
39. Serpd
40. Sonico
41. Stumbleupon
42. Tagged
43. Tumblr
44. Twitter
45. Typepad
46. WordPress
47. Yelp and growing…

Hope this onlywire wordpress plugin review was useful, please comment below if you have any queries on this topic. - source

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Likes vs retweets driving website visitors

In the absence of empirical data, websites typically provide equal prioritization to driving visitors to either retweet or like content. If you only have space for one option (such as in content listings), which one should you use? According to research compiled by Allyson Kapin at Frogloop, Facebook likes provide greater web traffic than retweets:

• According to Mashable, Twitter received about 0.38 clicks per tweet, while Facebook received 3.31 clicks per engagement. In other words, Facebook “likes” gets almost 8.7x more clicks than a tweet. “But engagement activity has a short life on Facebook, with less than 20% of likes occurring after 24 hours,” said Vadim Lavrusik of Mashable.
• Eventbrite users shared events on Facebook almost 4x more then they did on Twitter. Eventbrite says Facebook has greater reach with almost 600 million users and an emphasis on user’s inner circles of friends, family and colleagues. Editor’s Update: Eventbrite has a big blue FB pop blue button saying “Share this link on Facebook.” This is probably one of the main reasons why FB is shared 4x more then on Twitter.
• Over the past six months, a typical tweet made up about $.80 in ticket sales on Eventbrite as compared to Facebook, which was about $1.34.
• When Eventbrite users shared the event link on Facebook after they RSVP’d, ticket sales increased by about 20% per share compared to a pre-purchase share. “The findings apply broadly to all e-commerce businesses, because the foundations of e-commerce are shifting as the social graph becomes a meaningful influence in driving transactions,” said Tamara Mendelsohn, Eventbrite’s director of marketing and former senior analyst at Forrester Research.

- source

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14 million domains on AddThis

AddThis, a provider of social sharing buttons, says it now has more than 14 million domains in its publisher network and reaches more than 1.3 billion web users per month.

For comparison, ShareThis says it has 1.3 million publishers in its network and Shareaholic says it has more than 200,000 websites using its tools.

AddThis’ numbers are impressive, and the company hopes to expand its footprint with a new set of social plugins that go beyond simple content sharing announced this morning. The plugins include a Follow tool, Welcome tool and a Trending Content tool. Here’s how AddThis describes each:

• Follow Tool: Follow buttons can be placed with content on site to allow users to become fans, followers or subscribers in one click.
• Trending Content Tool: The Trending Content tool uses a content feed API to continuously promote a brand’s top content in real time on their site, in newsletters or on social channels.
• Welcome Tool: The Welcome tool allows publishers to optimize an incoming user’s experience by welcoming them with a personalized greeting and call-to-action.

AddThis also says it’s expanding its existing Analytics tool to include data on which content is generating the most fans/followers, and which content is being copied/pasted most often.

There’s also change at the corporate level: The company — which was formerly known as Clearspring — is consolidating its activities under the AddThis name. - source

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Comparison of Gigya, ShareThis and AddThis

Integrating social sharing on your website can be as easy to implement as adding a script into your webpage templates.

I recently took a look at three of the most popular utilities for social sharing: ShareThis, AddThis, and Gigya. After conducting a review, AddThis came out on top as the best system for most users. Gigya, especially with it’s recent integration with Convio, might be your best bet depending on your needs.

Gigya, in addition to the standard social sharing options, also allows for Single Sign On, allowing users to bypass the standard account creation process. Instead, it allows users to use their Facebook, Twitter and other credentials and also allows for user interactions with the widget (e.g. sharing content) to be recorded in Convio. While it is highly powerful and customizable, be aware that setting up Gigya requires significantly more time and effort than setting up most social sharing widgets (even if you only use their social sharing features.

One concern with Gigya’s service is that sharing content through their widget prompts users to provide access permissions to their profile data on Facebook (see screenshot, right). While this may provide additional audience data, users may be wary of the privacy implications of this somewhat unusual request (for a sharing widget) and therefore it will likely have the effect of reducing clickthrough rates. Gigya also offers a simple sharing plugin which does not send a request for permission.

ShareThis and AddThis have had significant feature differentiation in the past, but as time progressed they have largely mimicked each other’s feature sets. Currently, there are a limited set of functional differences between them, primarily focused on default aesthetics and ease of customization.

• Customization: AddThis is generally preferred by developers due to an API that is easier to use, but the ShareThis API can typically accomplish the same tasks (though potentially at a higher development cost). One of the few differentiators between the two services is in the customization of which buttons are shared. Both services, by default, show sharing icons to each user based on their previous sharing history (across all sites using the platform). If, for example, someone typically shares via MySpace on other sites, the MySpace icon will appear in the sharing box on the very first time that the user visits a site. It’s possible to force a listing of pre-determined icons using AddThis, but that level of customization is unavailable with ShareThis (or it is not documented).
• Privacy Policy: AddThis received negative publicity several years ago for their use of a flash cookie which recorded a user’s browsing preferences across sites, with non-personally identifying demographic and historical visit information later being sold to advertisers. This practice is common among these services (including ShareThis and Gigya), but they received additional criticism due to the fact that the AddThis Flash cookie revived cookies that had been deleted. AddThis no longer engages in this practice.
• Reporting: Both AddThis and ShareThis integrate with Google Analytics to report on sharing, but neither provides the user-level actions that makes Gigya compelling.
• Clickthroughs: While there may be difference in clickthrough rates between these services, no testing has been done. Even so, scattered reports have suggested people find the AddThis hover menu to be easier to use than the ShareThis version.

Conclusion:

Based on most organization’s needs, the easy extensibility of AddThis is probably ideal. If single sign on is desired, or tracking by user (with Convio integration), Gigya’s software may be the best fit.

For more sophisticated sharing (i.e. allowing people’s Facebook posts on a topic to appear directly on your webpage), check out Disqus or Echo. - source

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AddThis vs. ShareThis Bookmarking Widgets

Over the period of last few years bloggers had found creative ways to allow their readers to easy share the content of the blog on social bookmarking websites. WordPress has several plugins allowing you to implement easy sharing of your content. Probably the most known plugin is Sociable- a plugin I often used on many of my WordPress powered websites. One of the things that I always wanted to see in Sociable plugin was the ability to report how many times and on which websites my content was shared. If they consider developing such reporting, I may use the Sociable plugin again. However for now I had to say goodbye to Sociable and for the past few weeks I was taking a closer look at AddThis and ShareThis.

AddThis

I came across AddThis before I discovered ShareThis. AddThis allows you to add a button to your website by inserting a piece of code into your website or, if you are using WordPress, you can try their plugin. One o the downsides of using the plugin is that it inserts the button below the post and is not offering flexibility to place the button anywhere you want.

Issues With AddThis “Dropdown” Button

One thing that I find annoying about “dropdown” version of the AddThis button is that behaves “unexpectedly” (example on the left). I belong to the “mindset” that if you just hover over the button with the cursor it should not talk, sing, smile, wink or otherwise interact with me. Unless, of course, I click on it!

AddThis Reporting And Related Issues

One of the things you may quickly discover that in order not to mess up your AddThis statistics. You may need to open several accounts if you would like to separate the statistics for each website.

I would love AddThis develop and offer more in depth reporting. In particular I would like to see them reporting not only how many times a particular URL was shared, but to tell me exactly on which of the social websites it was shared.

ShareThis

ShareThis LogoAs you can see I have chosen ShareThis for this blog. Although I have not made the final decisions which services I will end up using, there are few things I like more about ShareThis. (UPDATE: After trying both AddThis and ShareThis I have opted to use AddThis on most of my blogs)

ShareThis Allows You To Track Multiple Domains

In your ShareThis account you can ad more than one URL. ShareThis provides separate statistics for each domain. It takes abotu 24 hours for your statistics to be shown from the time you add a domain and install the code or the WordPress plugin on your blog.

ShowThis Has More Detailed Statistics

While still short of reporting exactly which URL was submitted to what social networking websites, ShareThis offers some extra statistics that I find interesting and useful.

ShareThis Button Can Be Placed Anywhere

If you decide to use ShareThis on your wordpress, it is quite flexible as to where you can place the button on your blog. By default it places the button at the end of the article, but you can override that option or place an additional button in the beginning of your posts.

ShareThis Button Can Be Placed Anywhere

If you decide to use ShareThis on your wordpress, it is quite flexible as to where you can place the button on your blog. By default it places the button at the end of the article, but you can override that option or place an additional button in the beginning of your posts.

ShareThis Offers More “Sharing Options”

Besides offering your readers to share your blog’s content on top social bookmarking websites, SharThis offers other blogger to “reblog” your content. It also offers and opportunity to your visitors to share your blog’s content via e-mail, SMS or Instant Messaging.

Conclusion

I think both services can improve reporting. While certain submissions (such as when your pages are submitted to StumbleUpon or Digg) can be noticed rather easily, allowing you to interact with the submitter. Improving this side of the reporting will allow yet another way for the owner of the blog to network with his or her readers.

Final thought for the blog owners. If you have not tried either of the services, make sure to try at least one of them. The implementation is very easy, both have WordPress plugin. It will take you less than 15 minutes to implement the plugins, but you can rep the benefits for years to come. One thing you have to remember that no plugin in the world can substitute your interaction with your readers and your fans. - source

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Centering Blog Header Image

How to center your header image.

By default, Blogger aligns your header image to the left. But some might want their images to be centered. There are a couple ways to accomplish this depending on how you've setup your header.

If your header is set to "Behind title and description"

Add the following code to your CSS:

1 2 3 4

#header-inner {     background-position: center !important;     width: auto !important; }

If your header is set to "Instead of title and description" or "Have a description placed after the image"

Add the following code to your CSS:

1 2 3

#header-inner img {     margin: 0 auto !important; }

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Removing Images borders and box shadow

How to remove the borders and box shadows from images on your Blogger blog.

Most of the default Blogger templates display a white border and box shadow frame around every posted image like the example below:

There are two ways to accomplish this depending on whether you want to completely remove the effects for every image or just on specific images.

Method 1:

If you want to remove the borders from all of the images on your blog, add the following code to your CSS. Design > Template Designer > Advanced > Add CSS:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

.post-body img, .post-body .tr-caption-container, .Profile img, .Image img, .BlogList .item-thumbnail img {     border: 0px;     -moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px rgba(0, 0, 0, .0);     -webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px rgba(0, 0, 0, .0);     box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px rgba(0, 0, 0, .0);     border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px;     background: none; }

Method 2:

If you want to selectively remove the borders from specific images, add this code to your CSS.

Design > Template Designer > Advanced > Add CSS:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

img.noborder {     border: 0px;     -moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px rgba(0, 0, 0, .0);     -webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px rgba(0, 0, 0, .0);     box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px rgba(0, 0, 0, .0);     border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px;     background: none; }

Then in your post editor HTML tab, edit the img tag(s) for each of the images you want to remove the borders from by assigning them to the "noborder" class like this:

1	<img class="noborder" src="http://YOURIMAGEURL">

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LinkWithin vs nRelate vs Outbrain

If you've been blogging or reading blogs for any amount of time, then you've probably noticed, or might even already have installed a related posts widget. They are a great idea and an effective method for increasing page views and reducing bounce rates by encouraging visitors to stay on your blog longer by showing them a list of other enticing posts that "They Might Like".

In my opinion, the choice of whether or not to install one of these widgets on your blog is a no-brainer. There are no drawbacks, unless you maybe have a small and infrequently updated blog with a limited amount of posts such as this one. In that case, you might want to hold off on it until you've built up a decent amount of posts or articles. However, if you have an established blog with a healthy number of posts, then you are missing out if you don't have a related post widget.

The only real question, and one not so easily answered is, of the many available solutions out there, which one do I use?

LinkWithin? YARPP? Outbrain? IGIT? nRelate? SimpleReach?

As you can see, there are several competing widgets designed to display related posts on your blog, and at first glance all the most popular ones do look similar and seem to be worthy choices. However, as I will point out below, there are some important differences to be aware of when making your selection.

I've been blogging for about 18 months now, and for most of that time I've been using a related posts plugin on my blog. Over that time, I've thoroughly examined a few of these offerings, namely LinkWithin, Outbrain and nRelate. The most of the others are designed exclusively for Wordpress blogs, so I couldn't consider them for my Blogger blog. In this post I will share my overall experiences with those three to help you choose the right one for you.

LinkWithin

No doubt currently the most popular related posts widget around, LinkWithin is an established presence and brand that practically everyone in the blogosphere is aware of. When I was starting out, I saw it on quite a few other blogs, so naturally it was also the first one I tried out.

To its credit, LinkWithin is a very simple and easy solution to add to your blog. You don't have to sign up, and with just a few effortless clicks you can be up and running. If a simple set and forget solution is what you are after then LinkWithin is an excellent choice.

I used it for the first 3 months or so of my blog's existence, and was completely happy with its functions. However, as I started to get the hang of things, I began tinkering more and more with my blog, learning how to customize various things from within Blogger, I also began to become frustrated by the lack of options offered by LinkWithin, and it's lack of tracking statistics. I found its simplicity to be a curse, as the only thing you can easily change is the amount of posts shown.

So I began the search for an alternative to try out, which led me to...

Outbrain

I don't recall how exactly I came to discover Outbrain, whether I saw it on another blog or found it by Google, but I was glad I did.

What initially attracted me was the cleaner default layout, one with only a tiny unobtrusive [?] in the bottom right corner, and also their claim of a more advanced widget, one that promised increased traffic by personalizing the links shown according to advanced algorithms, instead of simple random selections like LinkWithin.

Outbrain also had the same option of an easy-to-add free widget with no signup required, but I was enticed to sign-up in order to gain access to advanced features like a ratings system (since removed) and most importantly, reporting statistics to track the effectiveness of the widget.

Not all was roses though. After installing the Outbrain widget, I discovered that it was showing up in an odd position, on top of my Read More jump-links, not exactly the optimum placement for it; also there was very little whitespace between the widget and the post body, making it look cramped and cluttered; furthermore, each of the post titles shown also unnecessarily included my blog name at the end.

In the hopes of resolving those three issues I went over to their support forum and to no surprise found existing threads created by other bloggers with the same problems. What was unexpected and impressive though, was the rapid and friendly responses I received from multiple members of the Outbrain staff who worked quickly to fix the widget for me within hours of my requests. Until this point, I had never experienced such rapid and effective personal support, from a private company for a completely free service.

Unfortunately though, it seems they haven't kept up as well with this side of their business, as I have a more recent, less satisfactory encounter with Outbrain's support that I will get into a bit later.

Anyhow, I happily used the Outbrain widget for the next 9 months. During this time, I ran into no further issues with their widget, and everything continued to work nicely as my blog steadily grew. I especially loved using their neatly laid out dashboard to periodically check up on my stats reports.

Although I was seeing a decent CTR (Click Through Rate), with an average of 4.75% between January to September 2011. I couldn't help but begin to wonder about the true effectiveness of these 'personalized links', links which often appeared to be completely unrelated to the current post. So I started looking around to see if there might not be an even better alternative to Outbrain.

Enter the latest challenger nRelate...

nRelate

While researching for a new widget I noticed a lot of positive buzz for nRelate, a relative newcomer to the content recommendation game, offering yet another simple to use and easy to install widget, with claims of a 5-12% page view increase, and a very impressive amount of widget customization options. I decided to give them a 90 day test run at Pakitong.

Just like the others, nRelate gives you the option of installing without signing up, but then you don't get access to their superior customizing features, nor do you get to see the all important usage statistics.

One point to be aware of here, installation on your blog is not nearly as immediate as the others. nRelate says it takes about 2 hours after installing for the widget to begin to show up on your blog. In my experience it was more like 8 hours.

But once it does appear, you can login and change a wide array of settings that none of the other guys offer. Such as: the choice of several different thumbnail sizes; the ability to use your own custom default image; a half dozen different preset layout themes; the ability to completely disable the nRelate logo if you wish; and the most interesting one, you can toggle the degree of relevance you want your resulting links to have from low, medium, or high.

On my blog, I found the high setting was not very practical, returning only a limited number of links and sometimes none at all. The medium was slightly better, but still quite often didn't come up with the maximum 4 links that I had it set to. I had to settle for the low setting to guarantee a consistent amount of link results. Of course your results will vary depending on the amount and type of content on your blog.

All of that fancy stuff is nice, but ultimately what I was after was an increase in CTR over what I was previously getting from Outbrain. So most important for me was access to nRelate's reporting features to keep an eye on things.

Unfortunately, a couple of weeks after installing the widget, nRelate rolled out a system update which inadvertently caused me to lose the ability to see my stats. After failing to find a support link via the dashboard menu—there currently still isn't one—I finally noticed a nondescript support email address published in the welcome screen after you log in.

I sent an email to this address detailing my problem and received no response or acknowledgment for days. Eventually I discovered a link to their support forums in the footer of their main site and made a post there which was answered relatively quickly and got my problem taken care of. If anyone from nRelate ends up reading this, you guys may want to consider adding a link to the support forums in a visible location somewhere within the logged in partner dashboard.

With access to the stats restored, things rolled along smoothly for the remainder of my time with nRelate. I did find that the nRelate stats reports are much simpler and not quite as detailed (for example there is no way to see which of your articles is the most popular), and the charts and tables are not as visually fetching as Outbrain's very well designed reporting screens. Also, if you are an advanced user, they lack the ability to export your numbers into an Excel spreadsheet.

After 90 days, my average CTR from nRelate ended up being a disappointing 3.29%. A 1.5% drop from Outbrain. That might not sound like much, but for every 10,000 page views, that is an extra 150 hits lost. Of course this wasn't any kind of controlled scientific experiment, and there are many factors that could have contributed to this lower CTR, but the positive experience I've had with Outbrain in the past, combined with the more user friendly interface and advanced stats prompted me to switch back.

I do still highly recommend nRelate though, especially for its very extensive customization features, and for one other thing I haven't mentioned - the fact that they do not perform any redirection on the links in their widget. I'm not entirely sure of the SEO implications of link redirection, but both the LinkWithin and Outbrain widgets briefly redirect your visitors to their internal sites before bouncing them back to you. Although I personally have not found this to be a problem, some have claimed that this is in effect 'stealing your link juice' so it is something to be aware of.

LinkWithin is good if you want to keep things simple.

Outbrain is my widget of choice for performing slightly better in CTR and providing a great interface for stats.

nRelate remains just a nose behind Outbrain, but still an excellent choice with the most superior custom features of all.

Conclusion - Return to Outbrain

I switched back to using the Outbrain related posts widget on January 1, 2012 and immediately noticed a problem with the wrong thumbnails being scraped from my latest posts. I headed straight for the support forums where I had great results in the past and opened up a ticket.

Knowing it was New Years and the holiday season I didn't expect a lightning fast response, nor did I get one. I eventually got a response on January 4 that didn't quite solve my issue, but at least I had acknowledgement. After I replied back for clarification, I uncharacteristically did not receive any further communication until almost a month later. Finally on February 2, just as I was about to throw in the towel and head back to nRelate, someone from Outbrain came to my aid and fixed my problem. Hopefully things are back to normal now, but I haven't had any issues since, so I don't know if their response times have improved.

Despite the support delays, I will be staying with them for the time being, especially since my click rates have returned to what they were before. But I will also keep a close eye on nRelate as they remain an extremely viable alternative that with a few improvements could easily become my first choice.

Via stupidblogtricks

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Social Bookmarking To Generate Targeted Traffic

Even if you are new to Internet marketing and don’t have much experience yet, you would probably have heard about social media and how it’s growing more and more these days. Social media websites allow people to mingle with like-minded people about a chosen topic and there are an ever increasing number of these sites springing up on the internet these days. On these sites, communication usually embraces various forms of messaging, sharing, tagging, and commenting. But how can you use these social media sites to your advantage as an Internet marketer?

Many Internet marketers have already discovered how beneficial these sites can be for generating targeted traffic to their own websites and blogs. You could also be able to achieve an increase in sales, as these social media sites have gained a reputation for attracting converting traffic. In addition to increasing your traffic and sales, you could also leverage these social sites to establish your brand name.

If you don’t know much about generating traffic or establishing your brand, then you may have a slight difficulty in trying to understand exactly what you need to do to make effective use of this marketing tool. All businesses, big or small, can benefit from using social media marketing to generate greater traffic that will potentially make a purchase, and improve their standing in the market. Twitter is an excellent example of a micro-blogging website that allows you to keep your followers posted about activities and events happening in your life, by posting frequent short updates.

Can you imagine the impact this could have on your business if you were to post an update discussing your new product or service, or a great deal that you have found? The potential is really unlimited! Even if only 10% of your online following checked your posts, that’s still a big boost in visibility for your product or service. The more people that see your posts, the greater the marketing impact could be. Plus, how much time does it take to post a short simple update – probably only a minute or two. Therefore, just a small amount of effort and time could produce some wonderful results.

However, you will need to employ effective and tested strategies, if you want to have an successful social bookmarking campaign. The first thing you should do is bookmark your own website pages. This is quite easy and simply involves signing up to as many of these bookmarking sites as you can. It is really up to you to determine just how many bookmarking sites to join, but the more bookmarks you have, the more traffic you can generate. Don’t be afraid to ask your family and friends to bookmark your pages, every little bit helps. Make sure that you take part in the social networking websites, in other words, be active.

There are some bookmarking services that don’t have features for you to interact very much with other members, but others allow you to invite your “friends” and “colleagues” to share bookmarks. Bookmark other people’s pages, tag their bookmarks, and be a friendly person in general; you will find that people will usually return the favour.

In summary, you can really build a good sized audience for your website through social bookmarking. However, you will certainly need to have good content to really succeed with this method. Your content should be rubbish, but bookmark worthy, in other words it should be informative, interesting to read and fresh. So start yourself down the road to increased brand recognition and greater traffic by using some of these social bookmarking tips.

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Using Twitter To Generate Website Traffic

‘Twitter Traffic’ as some call it, is a great way to get some targeted visitors to your websites. Twitter is simply a social networking site that allows small updates of 140 characters long to be posted for anybody viewing your Twitter account. You also have the option to use Twitter in conjunction to your cell phone or Blackberry, making the whole promotion of your content and traffic generation easy. Whether someone writes a blog or if they have a business online, everyone wants to attract more people to their website.

You will find that your company or blog has more and more followers that are eager to see your updates on Twitter. It’s as simple as signing up for Twitter and posting messages. The possibilities are endless for how well you can use Twitter to your advantage. Twitter can get the word out quick about a new product, an affiliate product, a company event or anything else you may want to announce.

If you want to generate good traffic try not to abuse the benefits of Twitter. The regular tweets that you send across do make a big difference to your account but at the same time, as a marketer, you have to be aware of how much time you dedicate to each method and be efficient. You want to automate the process as much as you can. There are websites available that can help you accomplish this, including socialoomph.com which allows you to send micro messages to your entire list at one time, or at set intervals. In this way, you can spend the bulk of your time growing your account, because you will be saving approximately 30 – 60 minutes per day, by not having to type each message separately.

This is a good way to start taking things to the next level. Since Twitter lets you tweet links you can use it to link to your website and drive traffic. This is also an example of a feature that should not be overused, and it is recommended that you limit your posting of promotional links. You can also generate traffic directly from your profile because followers can see the relevant links that are posted there. You must first have a good understanding of who or what your intended audience is, in order to make the most of the opportunities to generate traffic from Twitter. Gain your followers trust by regularly providing accurate information and you will have good luck increasing the traffic to your site or your promotional deals.

If you have done any degree of homework on Twitter marketing, you will be aware that increasing the number of people that follow you and staying in contact with them is one of Twitter’s most significant traffic generating components. However, these aren’t the only ways to drive targeted traffic to your website or blog. The best part about Twitter is that you can tweet your updates and include a link in the update that leads people directly to what you are talking about on your site. If you want people to know about a product of yours, all you have to do is tweet a link that will take them to the page the product is on. Over time, you will be able to design new strategies for promoting your business or blog and find more creative ways to introduce links into your tweets on Twitter, which will help draw more visitors to your site.

Twitter is new but it is powerful because of its fast growing. The amount of people you can reach through Twitter is astounding, and is only growing. The opportunities Twitter offers are boundless. All you need to do is put a bit of common sense with an effective marketing strategy to see real time results.

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Effective Blog Design

Every successful blog has at least one thing in common – and that is a powerful blog design statement. Below are a few tips on how you can go about making such a blog design statement yourself on your own blog.

Your readers should see some of your personality in your blog. This has been said many times before, you need to show your readers who’s behind the curtains to get them excited. Because the web is a personal place, getting to see the person or persons behind the blogs you visit can make a big difference.

So, create a strong “About Me” page by going into detail about who you are. What you put there is a representation of you and your personality.

This is an area that you can play around with the design and use your picture to enhance the overall look of the page. Your aim here is to build a level of trust and loyalty with your readers which will take your blog a long way.

Secondly, have a real plan of monetization up your sleeve as far as the blog design is concerned. Be sure ahead of time how you’re going to monetize your blog. Some bloggers put up ads here and there without planning anything out, but you should go the other way and imagine how your blog will look with ads and what kinds of ads you plan to run before you finalize your blog design.

You could run banner ads on your blog or use Google AdSense. You will need to think of how to incorporate the ads into your design no matter what type of ads you choose. This way, your blog is much more enjoyable and this can lead to a better conversion rate.

Lastly, remember to utilize the favicon to your advantage. Although favicons are not that important, they can have a strong impact on readers. Readers will see favicons in the tabs right beside their bookmarks and in the browser’s address bar. So, a lot of people will view your favicon and identify you with it.

You should spend some time to make a favicon that not only grabs someone’s attention, but also gets good results. This is another good strategy for making your blog design unique and making your blog brand better known.

In order to grab your readers attention, concentrate on the basic blog design fundamentals.

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