Question:

How do I make my own S4S code for MySpace?

Answer:

S4S (Support for Support) is used quite often on MySpace through bulletins for one to gain popularity (more friends). The code usually contains your picture as well as a quick description explain why one should add you. Your picture is also a link that can be clicked to view your profile or to add you. Basically you exchange S4S codes with another user and post them in a bulletin. Their friends will then see the bulletin and hopefully add you. Use the following code and steps below to create your own S4S code.

<A TARGET=”_blank” HREF=”URL”><img src=”PICURL”></A>

1. Insert the URL to either your MySpace profile or your ?Add me? link.
2. In the PICURL section, insert the link to your favorite image of yourself.
3. Now you’re ready to S4S, simply post a bulletin saying you will S4S, then people will hopefully message you asking to exchange codes.

The gist of it is quite simple. First, go to your Wordpress management tools and grb the ID of the categories you would like to remove from your feed. Then navigate to Feedburner and go to the your feed details. Edit your feed details and add the categories you would like to exclude from your feed. In the example below, I excluded categories 28 and 29 from my feed:

 I used the aforementioned method with Feedburner, which I use in order to manage my feed, although my understanding is that it works with other RSS feed management tools.

If you enjoy this post, you are welcome to subscribe to my feed.

You may want to keep off topic content away from your blog main page and your RSS feed. Failing to do so might annoy your regular readers , who visit your blog, make useful comments and subscribe to your RSS full feed. Obviously, that’s the last thing you want to do.

If your blog runs on Wordpress, excluding posts from your main page is a breeze. All you need to do is to create a new category that will host all your Off-topic posts. Note the ID of the category (from the Wordpress Control Panel Manage tab). Then you need to install a simple Wordpress plugin named Front Page Excluded Categories.

After installing the plugin you’ll need to configure it to exclude the Off-topic category from the first page. In order to do that just edit the plugin, and add the category id value(s)  that you wish to exclude to the $catstoexclude string.

Example:

$cats_to_exclude = ‘28, 29′;

This will exclude categories 28 and 29.

There are a few more plugins that might do the same job, after checking a few of them i found Wordpress Front Page Excluded Categories the simplest to use.

Enjoy!

Bloggers elaborated on the best ways that you can use in order to increase your Alexa rank. The most popular way to increase your rank was to install the Alexa toolbar at your browser. The only problem with that, was that until recently, Alexa didn’t offer a proprietary toolbar for Firefox, just one for IE ( Note: SearchStatus, a custom Firefox addon provides Alexa Rank display functionality).

Starting today, Alexa made available a toolbar for our beloved Firefox. Code named Sparky, the new toolbar offers the following features: 

• Related Links: Find sites that are similar to the one you are currently visiting.
• Traffic Trend: A sparkline showing the traffic trend from the last four months.
• Reach Meter: A neat little indicator that shows the site’s Reach.
• Traffic Rank: Shows the current site’s Alexa Traffic Rank.

If you have a blog and use Firefox (like most of my readers), i recommend that you install Sparky. In that way you do not help to increase your blog’s rank, but also help increase the popularity of other blogs you periodically read.

via: Connected Internet

Many bloggers talked about the neat features of WLW beta 2, so i won’t bother you with that stuff. I would rather concentrate on the rather painful and undocumented upgrade process from beta 1 to beta 2 on Windows Vista. I expected the installation will be simple and straightforward, but unfortunately, i spent around 30 minutes gathering information until i finally tweaked it and made it work .

So for my readers’ benefit, i woudl like to outline the right installation/upgrade process for WLW beta 2:

1. If you have WLW beta 1 installed, ensure that all work is backed up. This can be done using WLW backup, a routine which i reviewed not long ago.

2. Using your Control Panel, remove Windows Live Writer beta 1.

3. Run the WLW removal utility located at: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/3/0/23036331-516d-4c7e-b9ac-31554a2fec06/WL-Beta-remove.zip.
4. When prompted, click “Save” to save the ZIP file to your desktop.

5. Go to your desktop and open WL-Beta-remove.zip.
6. Extract all the files to your desktop (this should create a folder named WL-Beta-Remove on your desktop if not, skip to step 8).
7. Go to your desktop and open the folder named WL-Beta-remove (there should be a file named WL-Beta-Remove.cmd in the folder).
8. Double-click on the file named WL-Beta-Remove.cmd.

9. Go to http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas and install Writer beta 2.  NOTE: If you had Windows Live Mail or Windows Live Messenger installed you will also need to reinstall those applications:

Reinstall Windows Live Mail http://get.live.com/betas/mail_betas
Reinstall Windows Live Messenger http://get.live.com/betas/messenger_betas

11. Now delete WL-Beta-remove.zip and the folders named Log Files and WL-Beta-remove from your desktop.

Enjoy!

Source: WLW support forums

[tags] Windows Live Writer beta 2, Windows Live Writer beta 2 installation, Windows Live Writer [/tags]

If you are a subject expert matter, and your blog is an authority in its field, you can add your blog to the Related Blogs list for a certain topic, and be able to receive a moderate amount of extra traffic from Answers.com.

How to do it?

1. Navigate to Answers.com
2. Search for your most relevant blog keyword.
3. Scroll down to the Blogs section.



4. Click the Add to blog link to submit your blog to the Answers.com directory.
5. Fill in the required information. Note that you can actually relate your blog to multiple Answers.com topics.
6. Submit the form. Your blog will be reviewed, and good chances are that will also be approved and displayed in the Blogs section for some of the topics you specified.

[tags] increase blog traffic, Answers.com, blog traffic, blog [/tags]

The backup utility takes care not only of your recent blogs and blog drafts, but also your blog/s settings and installed plugins. Backup is kept as a *.wlwbackup file.

Note for Wordpress users : The utility doesn’t backup your blog database, themes, settings etc’, so it does not replace the great Wordpress backup plugin, that should be used periodically in order to provide a failover. 

The utility can be downloaded from here.

[tags] Windows Live Writer [/tags]

The number of feed subscribers is considered to be a good tool to measure a blog popularity , and thus is a factor in the formula that Review Me uses to determine your blog rating (Alexa Rank and Technorati Rank are used as well). Consequently, bloggers are usually very interested to know how many subscribers their blog has, and many actually login to the Feedburner website in order to check their stats on a daily basis.

Today, while chatting with Joel from LyteByte.com regarding his post on experiments that change your blog stature, i suddenly remembered a nifty trick i saw @ Amit Agarwal’s blog, that helps you to check your number of subscribers in seconds.

How to make it work?

• Open your browser
• Type http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/your_feedburner_feed_name
• The well known Feedburner subscriber counter gadget will appear

If you are curious to know how many subscribed to other partner (or competitor ) blogs, you will need to “guess” their feed name (which in 90% of the cases is their site name without the suffix), and use the procedure outlined above .

Looking for more extra nifty tips? Subscribe to this blog!

Enjoy!

[tags] feedburner, blogging tips, blogs [/tags]

I guess my only recommendation to Popuri.us is to add the Technorati ranking as well.

The thing is that small bloggers aren’t able to find an army of reviewers that will do the “deep link” work for free, and make their blogs hit Google’s first page for a 120K monthly searches keyword.

The Long Tail is the small blog’s savior as far as getting traffic from Seach Engines. The idea behind the ‘Long Tail’ is that given a big distribution channel (in our case, the Web), products that are low in demand (in our case, not popular keywords), make a market that rivals or exceeds the relatively low number of blockbusters( in our case, popular keywords).

Let’s apply the ‘Long Tail’ principle on the same search term John Chow used (using the Overture Keyword Selector tool) :

As you can see, the two alternative keywords i highlighted, have a much lower demand, however it is expected that also a less fierce competition. Those two alternative keywords might suite a small blog (with no more of 10K page views a month). Let’s take the keyword ‘Make money online from home’. Given the fact that Overture represents around 25% of the entire Seach Engine Traffic, is it expected that around 8K searches are done on that keyword every month. Understand the idea? Now it’s the time to pick your right keyword, start SEOing your blog and make it to Google’s first page!

Comments are more than welcome!