With a small budget one of the best ways to increase the traffic to your blog is by using your social network. Use Facebook, Twitter and other social network sites to promote your blog entries. Paste links to your blog on your social network wall and ask friends to visit. You can also ask them to repost the links on their wall. Since the people in your network are friends, it’s pretty certain that a significant number of people will actually help you.

If you want to get the best out of yourself when you’re working as a freelance writer, you should first look at the service you’re offering – what niches do you write in? Often, many writers would restrict themselves to niches they believe they’re truly good at, choosing to ignore the rest. But you’d be surprised how easy it can be to write an article on bodybuilding or gardening – as purely random examples – if you just did a little research beforehand!

And by broadening your horizon, you’re very likely to find out a new subject that you’ve never thought you’d like but you actually love – and we all know that familiar feeling when you get the inspiration to keep writing, and the wonderful results that follow such inspired moments.

Broadening your horizon may sometimes require cleaning it up a bit first though – if you’re feeling particularly bothered or uncomfortable with a subject you write about, try giving it a short break. Sometimes it can pay to take some time off and adjust yourself, and consider if you truly want to continue writing on that topic.

One of the major challenges for any business operating a Twitter campaign is in getting enough followers to make the campaign worthwhile. This is a problem faced with any social media marketing campaign, whether in combination with other SEO services or as a standalone technique. Social sites don’t simply offer up valuable audiences to businesses in neat little packages. You can discuss social media campaigns with our experts at www.seoconsult.co.uk. The business owner has to work to make contacts, just as they would in any other social situation, and this can be very hard work indeed.

Why is it necessary to increase your popularity on Twitter? Without followers, your Twitter campaign is essentially falling on deaf ears. The more followers you have, the more people are receiving your personal message. The follower system on Twitter also means that this attention is of a higher quality, as users have already established their loyalty and willingness to listen in choosing to follow you.

Getting users to follow you in the first place is the trickiest element of the early stages of a Twitter campaign. There are some things you can do to increase your chances of becoming popular.

*Listen to the tweets of your industry. As anyone who has done any business networking knows, an industry can be an incredibly useful thing. Industries are sort of like the families of the business world. Business owners tend to listen to those in their industry, and have an automatic interest in them.

When you first join Twitter, look up others who are posting in your topic area and take the ‘follow me’ option for them. This will bring you to their attention, and may net you a few followers in return.

*Make yourself useful. One of the best ways to make friends on a social media site is to participate. It’s a good idea to begin your work on Twitter by reading other people’s tweets and leaving useful comments where appropriate. In leaving intelligent comments, sending useful links or offering good advice, you are building your reputation. When people realise that you’re the one offering all the reliable information around the community, they’ll be more likely to follow you.

*Host a competition. If all else fails, you need to find ways to draw Twitter users to you. Hosting a competition is a good way to attract attention, particularly if you are offering a good prize. Competitions don’t always have to be about prizes, however – even competitions held just for the sake of it can draw attention on Twitter. Twitter users love nothing more than being asked their opinions, so you can usually get a fair amount of attention by holding a ‘best movie of all time’ competition or something similar but related to your industry.

Whilst this can be done in the form of text, explaining your company background and facilities, the visual messages on your homepage are equally – if not more – important for generating custom.

There are two ways in which to encourage business through imagery. The first is your choice of stock pictures portraying your services. For instance, if you are a retail-based organization, it is important to include photographs of your flagship products on your homepage. If you provide a service, make sure that you use quality images that reflect your company’s attitude in a positive tone.

However, another way of incorporating strong sales messages into your web design is to include adverts on your homepage. By creating small graphics promoting particular products or offers with hyperlinks to the relevant page on your site, you give potential customers the ability to quickly and accurately locate the service they require without having to navigate their way through your menu.

At www.clickconsult.com, our web development department specializes in creating an attractive looking website that is also highly functional and targeted towards driving sales. We can devise a creative layout for site, which features homepage adverts, and we can also rotate these adverts according to the products you wish to promote and any special offers you may be showcasing during a limited time period – helping to increase revenue for your business.

The area of inbound links is one of the trickier parts of SEO, so it can be a good idea to discuss your linking plans with a consultant. You can talk to our experts at www.seoconsult.co.uk about developing a link profile for your optimisation plan. Whenever considering your site’s link profile, it’s important to keep the rules of linking in mind.

*Google doesn’t love paid links. This is one rule many site owners conveniently forget when they’re in the middle of building their link profile for SEO. It’s also one of those things search engine optimisation experts aren’t too clear on.

Some confusion comes from the fact that while most SEO experts forcefully say ‘don’t buy links’ when they’re handing out linking advice, but they then go out and buy links for their own and their clients’ sites. The truth is, Google doesn’t love paid links, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that all paid links are bad. Google is at the moment still unable to reliably detect when a link has been bought and paid for, which is why most websites still feature some paid links in their profile. This doesn’t mean that a profile full of paid links is the way to go. It simply means that you can get away with a few.

*Leaving it at ‘click here’ is a waste of a link. Anchor text is important for all types of links, internal and external. Generally, you have little influence over how your link is anchored when it’s on another site, but you can still try to get some decent anchor text happening. You also have control over links placed within your marketing material, which will give link providers a hint as to how to link to your site.

If you have any say in it, never, ever leave your anchor text at ‘click here’. Not only does this tell internet users nothing about where the link leads, it fails to take advantage of the opportunity to associate your link with your keywords.

*Mind your Qs when it comes to links – quality and quantity. Some search engine optimization experts would have it that one truly high-quality link is worth more than thousands of low-quality ones, making it one of the most valuable search engine optimization tools. This is true, but only for a certain value of ‘true.’

While quality is extremely important when it comes to link profiles, quantity also has some importance. Gaining one link from a prominent site in your industry does not automatically mean that you’ll surge ahead of your competitors in the SERPs. If your competitors have two high-quality links, they’ll beat you. Remember, it’s all relative.

What to do when you don’t know what to post. I occasionally encounter this problem at least once a week. This is mostly due to stress that I can’t think of any possible topic to post about, or when the good topics have already been posted. What I usually do is fix myself a cup of coffee, relax and just chill out, listen to music ( rock music works for me ). When writing an article you must enjoy and be comfortable on that subject, the harder the subject the less you would be able to post an article so in order to do that you must be stress free. Another tip is do something which is not related to blogging, take me as an example, for my stress busting day-off from blogging I go out with my friends for a nice day of paintball, releases all those pent-up rages and adrenaline you’ve kept for the week. Now after a tiring day of paintball, I can think of far-out topics about “how not to be a sitting duck when playing paintball” or “That 13-year old kid Owned me”, and or you can apply your guerilla tactics to your blog post, like “seek and destroy” , “Hit and Run” that sort of stuff, now will you be that lonely sniper that wait for perpetual targets to come into your view, will you be the Delta Force ( Elite Special Forces), or the Grunt of the blogging Army. Blogging is fun when you enjoy every minute of it.

Thanks to Blog Tutorials : Don’t know what article to Post?

The logging database by default contains the following information from all servers within the farm and it is fully supported to query this database directly.
• ULS Logs
• Event Logs
• Selected Performance Monitor Counters:
o % Processor Time
o Memory Available Megabytes
o Avg. Disk Queue Length
o Process Private Bytes (OWSTIMER and all instances of w3wp)
• Blocking SQL Queries
• SQL DMV Queries
• Feature Usage
• A host of information on search crawling and querying
• Inventory of all site collections
• Timer job usage

The Logging Database in SharePoint Server is one of the many new concepts that will make the life of many SharePoint administrators quite a bit more enjoyable. So catch up on this soon! There is a lot of juice in the SharePoint family of products including Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server 2007, and associated free SharePoint templates!

Why Client Object Model?
You must be thinking now why should I have Client Object Model when millions of sites are running smoothly without the Client Object Model. So here is the answer to your question – Client object Model is the result of SharePoint customers’ request to Microsoft to introduce more and more web services to get data out of SharePoint Server. But introducing web services will not fix the issues, as Microsoft found, because then the request for more functionality in the web services will continue. Even if Microsoft provides a good number of web services with SharePoint, customization in web services will be required for different clients, and this will make the out-of-the-box web services unusable. Also introducing a large number of web services will be a waste as not all companies will use all the web services functionalities. Thus, in order to add more web services from users, Microsoft has taken a different approach called Client Object Model (OM). This SharePoint Client Object Model will allow getting data out of SharePoint from PCs that are not hosting SharePoint. Also Client Object Model provides complete API to interact with SharePoint Server which is more intuitive, and useful and very much similar to SharePoint Object Model.

SharePoint 2010 has launched three new client APIs which can be used to interact with SharePoint sites.

The three APIs are targeted for three different types of clients:
• For .net Managed applications (for example, console applications, window applications, web applications etc, which are not running inside SharePoint Context).
• For Silverlight applications.
• For using with JavaScript (called ECMAScript). This API is only available for applications hosted inside SharePoint (for example, web part deployed in SharePoint site can use this JavaScript API for accessing SharePoint from browser using JavaScript).
• Conclusion: The new Client Object models provide an object-oriented system for interoperating with SharePoint data from a remote computer, and they are in many respects easier to use than the already existing SharePoint Foundation Web services. You start by retrieving a client context object that represents the current request context, and through this context, you can obtain access to client objects at site-collection level or lower in the SharePoint Foundation hierarchy. Client objects inherit from the ClientObject class (ECMAScript: ClientObject), and you can use them to retrieve properties for a specific SharePoint object, to retrieve child objects and their properties, or to retrieve child items from a collection.

The Client Object Model and other useful features in SharePoint Server 2010 encourage an upgrade from MOSS 2007. Also useful are the free SharePoint templates and web parts that are included with SharePoint products.

For most of the time, blogging is a hobby, a past time that allows release of thoughts and feelings. Blogging is, for the most part, an outlet. You post and post, not really caring if you’d have new subscribers, new visitors, new comments, and the like. But such are most welcome, of course, and it makes you happy.

However, you notice that on random days, you have more visitors / comments than usual. Does it mean that those random days have your best posts? Try looking at those posts that gained more / new viewers and look at how comments were directed. Were the comments merely observant or was there a formed discussion among the readers?

Read through your entries and find these posts. Apparently, these posts have the kind of topics that appeal more to readers. What you can do is write similar posts, improve on the ideas you’ve written in it, expound and make it in-depth, and explore similar topics. This is certain to gain you readership and maintain it as well.

Taken From Jaren’s Post on Blog Tutorials : Writing your Most Popular Post – and Keeping at It

I like Jaren’s post on Blog Tutorials Titled Blogging is Like…

There He compared blogging to playing the Game Sid Meier’s Civilization, I for one also Like playing Civilization and was excited upon reading the post. So here it is. I had to post it in here because it give a nice explanation why we blog.

Blogging is like playing Sid Meier’s Civilization, at first you start at something small, manage your resources (ideas, contents, topics), take care of your Cities and Citizens (your blog and readers) to make it grow by giving that what they want luxuries, food (info, tips, news) but somehow your cities ( your blog) also need security that’s why you have to make a defensive unit for it’s protection (spam-blockers, plugins) to make a very successful city (blog) in the long run. It takes time and effort to make it to the top. So if you agitated that your city (blog) isn’t growing, don’t fret maybe you need to trade with other civilizations (linking to relevant blogs, articles, posts) or maybe issue a trade embargo to other civilizations (stop linking to splogs or spam blogs) and yes you have to establish an embassy to other civilizations (commenting on blogs and establishing a communication with the blogger) and you have to balance your resources, luxuries and also your tax and science (researching on the topics that you would post) all this is hard work on the first hundred of years as you build roads, irrigation, mines to work make your city a top class city.

That’s Why I think blogging is like playing Sid Meier’s Civilization. The aspect of the game itself is building a civilization to stand the test of time and that should be your motto in blogging. You build a blog to stand the test of time.