PLANET balkhis

In the ancient computer that serves as part of the Balkhis archives there is a folder. Its a folder that is opened hundreds of times over the course of a week and within it are projects too numerous to mention. Now this old workhorse of a computer is retiring from the Balkhis line up in the next month or so, but the files within it will be transfered to the new Balkhis computer and on to a set of external hard drives. As many of the files get archived for good, that one folder with active projects will always be used.

Most webmasters have a different mindset then the mainstream population. Us mainstreamers are serial monogamists to the end. We find one interest, one career, one hobby, and we try to do our best at it. When we feel satisfied, we leave that interest behind and pick up a new one. We do this on and on ad nauseam until the end of our lives. Webmasters on the other hand, are project polygamists. You have no idea how many dinner conversations have detailed new ideas for project now and in the future that will be operating parallel to the current set of sites. It is this unique mindset that gives webmasters the potential for success, but keeping all these ideas in order is the real trick to master.

Spitballing:

This is part of the products, services, and website review series on Balkhis.

Every day I open Firefox and open Google to search about whatever random thing I need to know about that day. When I first heard about Bing, I didn’t even give it a second thought. I figured it would go the way of the other search engines I have tried (like Scour) that slowly faded out of my search routine. Google was my bread and butter search engine, so why the heck did I need to try another search? Television was why.

About two weeks ago I started seeing commercials for Bing. The first time the “search overload” commercials were cute, but then I started seeing the same thing seven times a day. If I hear “moms who wear jeans to match their teen’s jeans” I was going to stab the television, so to prevent premature television death I decided to try out Bing.

Hello to all Syed Balkhi readers. I am one of the loyal readers of this blog and it has greatly influenced my blog.

My name is Satish and I am the owner of Technotip.org, a blog about blogging, SEO, WEB2.0, Traffic strategies etc. We started blogging on 18th June 2008. So its exactly 1 year for Technotip.org. We are not able to celebrate the 1st birthday due to my exams. So I thank Syed Balkhi for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts about my blog with all you guys. This opportunity is more than just celebration for me..

I started Technotip.org with the intention of sharing whatever I had learnt online for the past 2 years. I knew that blogging about blogging and monetizing that niche with Adsense wouldn’t yield much money. But my intention was just sharing. So you wouldn’t find even paid reviews on our blog.

We do interviews of successful bloggers on our blog, as we believe that learning from those who have already learn’t saves a lot of time. That’s one of the reasons why I keep reading balkhis.com .
We constantly come up with new traffic generating strategy and most of which receive a lot of traffic!, back links and thumbs up in social media sites.
Recently one of the article 60+ Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers got huge support from many “A” grade bloggers and most of them voted for it.

I am launching a mini giveaway to my balkhis users. This will go for the next 15 days. I will let you advertise your website, blog, or product on Balkhis as long as it is tech related and it can be helpful to Balkhis audience. Now what better way there can be to get a strong backlink and free traffic to your website.

Now comes the crucial part: I will not be writing about your product. YOU WILL.

The posts will be published as is, without any changes, so make it good. Remember images in the post helps explain alot.

Online forums are a great way to interact with experienced people in various fields from all over the world. Not only do you learn many things and promote your websites but you also make friends. Every day many forums are created, most of these forums just fail to even start properly. Starting and managing a forum is way more difficult than running a blog.

Before anything you must pick the right niche for the forum, and make sure you have a lot of knowledge in that field. Then you have to pick a forum software, there are many paid and free softwares available, I recommend vBulletin as it is THE best and most popular. Then you have to pick a good design, custom made if possible and lastly some add-ons.

Now to the main stuff:

As a blogger what do you think is your greatest skill? I think the reason what makes the top bloggers different from others is that they have the greatest blogging skill. This is one of the skills that every beginner needs to have if they want to become an expert. And you will be surprised when I tell you that it is not writing good content. It is not getting your users engaged. It is not having the convincing voice. Instead it is:

Learning From Your Yesterday’s Experience and Having a More Productive Day Today

Basically it is saying that you become a Better Blogger each day faster and faster. Technically most people learn over the course of the days and months. That is because they analyze the site over the six month period. I am telling you to analyze your blogs daily.

When advertisers are looking to buy ads on your site, they consider the page views. Because that is how they determine whether the cost of the banner is fair or not. With the page views they can calculate the impressions. Higher impression results into higher advertising spot value.

Now what others might tell you is that to increase traffic on your website because that will obviously increase your pageviews. For some people it gets really hard because they are either out of budget, or don’t want to advertise their site. Well in this post I am going to show you some ways which you can take within your website to increase the pageviews.

Interlinking between posts increase your pageviews. This is a trick that alot of top bloggers use. When you are writing a post, it often has terms or ideas that you have probably explained in details previously. Well then why don’t you link that post. Because someone reading this post, will eventually open that link, so they can understand the guidelines correctly.

As blogging is evolving, we are coming up with new methods to rank high, short cut tips to increase our traffic, and sometimes we don’t even reach the high metrics. That is because in the middle of all these new tricks, we are forgetting the classics. The old-fashioned Guide to Blogging Success still works. Don’t let the old-fashioned part of it fool you. You must implement the basics before climbing the next step, if you hop on to quick, it is easier to fall down further.

Majority of the blogs that are started are not successful, and the reason is because the blogger lose interest. They don’t have enough patience and perseverence. You have to be consistent with your writing. If you are not seeing the big numbers in comments, subscribers, and your user contribution then just be patience. The top blogs which you see today and envy started the same place where you did. The difference is, you just quitted, and they survived through the crucial hard times.

You need to be humble in order to succeed. Classic saying but it does work. Blogs take years into making, and it is the love of your readers and the contribution that makes it go far. Whether it was a small peice, or the big peice, all of the links help. After achieving the point, you must not forget where you started from because it shows you that you should be humble and show your gratitude.

As many of you know, I was in Atlanta for training for the past week and I finally returned home on Friday. I am an accountant and no matter what field you’re in, its always crucial to be well trained to perform the tasks that you are expected to complete at your job. As part of my training, I was involved in several hands-on projects, presentations and instructor guided learning seminars.

One such company that provides great training is known as Countrywide Training. Their onsite training provides its students to learn from a live instructor and ask questions that they may have as if they were actually in the class itself. Countrywide training also sets up training programs for companies in the event that you need to train more than one individual at a time. They send over a certified instructor to a company’s location to train its staff on a variety of topics.

One of their several different training programs includes Microsoft Office. This training helps employees become proficient in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. Being proficient in these programs is a crucial goal for any staff at any level in their career. Their training programs include other IT specific training courses and even several different types of certification programs to help elevate your staff to a higher level of technical knowledge. So, if you’re looking for some training programs then you should probably look into something like Countrywide onsite training.

I get questions through email about different topics, but one of the questions that I often get is how do I increase my subscribers. Like every other blog about blogging, I will tell you to work hard and write good content. Sounds like a simple solution right.

Knowing that you will get tens of thousands of subscribers by doing this gives hope to alot of new bloggers. But that doesn’t always happen. As a matter of fact most blogs have an average of 300 subscribers. Reasons for this is maybe you are in a less popular niche, or maybe you just was not lucky. You got in at the wrong time and you just wasn’t doing it for people.

The truth is this is the downfall of most bloggers. They might be self-proclaimed experts, but they have no idea how to get more traffic to their blogs. They are disappointed because they have more traffic then they started with, but they don’t have the massive number of subscribers which makes them think that the big bloggers are never linking to them and it is like an elite group and they want to keep it that way. Just stop and listen to me.

Of course they exist. Certification is an important part of getting accredited with certain credentials that are an important part of being a specialist in your field. I will be talking about Countrywide Training in my next post but today I wanted to highlight their it it boot camps certification programs. Lately, Ive spoken about Kalliance and several of their programs but if you’re looking for an alternative then you might want to check out Countrywide.

They offer similar certification programs and they offer them in a bootcamp setting. The boot camp training courses are only a week long and the curriculum is fast paced and rigorous. They state that if you’re not willing to put forth the effort or you dont think that you’re capable of performing the curriculum as it is intended, then you shouldn’t enroll in the bootcamps. They mention that there are several benefits to such programs. One situation in which you might enroll in these bootcamps is if you are in a hurry to get the certification for a prospective job, or your work requires you to be certified, then you can sign up and complete the program within a week.

They offer several types of bootcamp classes such as Cisco, CIW, Database, CompTIA, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, ITIL, EC-Council, SQL Server, Microsoft Windows Server, Oracle, Sharepoint, Microsoft Exchange and several others, for an entire list, check out their it boot camps list.

For the past few days, I have been trying out a system called BlogProfitz as they asked me to do a review for them. I have finally finished evaluating the system and in this post I will share my review of this product.

BlogProfitz is a system that brings Blogging and Affiliate Marketing together in a Wordpress blog. From the demo, it looks like a store that is running on Wordpress.

After setting up a Wordpress Blog, you start the BlogProfitz engine. BlogProfitz system injects your blogs with ten, hundreds or even thousands of affiliate products (complete with images, descriptions and affiliate links), all targeted to your blogs’ subject matter and niche. Products are organized in a ‘store’ format so your readers can then browse, read about and purchase the products they want, directly through your site. These products are being extracted from affiliate networks like CJ, Amazon, Ebay and more. With the combination of 10 Networks, BlogProfitz provide you with 24,000,000 products at your disposal.

First thing that comes to mind when talking about a famous brand is their logo. The logo gives a brand its unique identity therefore it is an essential component to a web design and a brand. Since the logo is so vital to a company’s brand and credibility, one must be very careful in selecting one. A good logo is creative, attractive and most importantly the reflection of a company’s product.

Many designers struggle while creating logos therefore I have compiled a list of outstanding logo design tutorials that will give you a head start in the process of creating great logos. Along with the logos, I have added to the collection some inspirational sites and useful articles that will assist you in the process of creating the PERFECT logo design for your business.

Below I present to you some of the best logo design tutorials on the web. These logo tutorials are easy to follow and provides great result.

We all know that Google is penalizing websites left and right for buying links, selling links, duplicate content and for numerous other reasons. And while you maybe safe right now, there is no guarantee that you will be in the future. For majority of us, Google is a huge source of traffic to our blogs and websites, so what will you do if Google penalizes you? We are not all like a web celebrity like John Chow who can still continue to make $40,000 with his blog even after the google penalty. But here is what I can tell you though. You can surely survive and still have a good amount of people visiting your blog.

They have a huge base of loyal readers already built. So even if they lose google’s ranking, they still have thousands of people visiting their site and reading them. And because they have thousands of people reading atleast hundred are writing about them and linking to them, and through the hundred, they are getting more new users to their blog. So at the end day, They can survive without Google!

Google is big and we know that, but it is not the end of the world. You need to follow the advice of “Not putting all your eggs in one basket” and start doing some of the things I am about to tell you which will ensure you that you are not dependent on Google. Also even if you are not penalized in google, these methods are great for you because they are going to build your readership.

So I graduated a week ago with a Bachelors in Accounting and it was a great event to mark my success and progression through life. Graduation is a big deal for anyone regardless of whether its high school, middle school or college. I was really glad and to top it off, I graduated with the highest honors (Summa Cum Laude) with a 3.9 out of 4.0 GPA. I was really excited and I thought I’d share the news with you. For those of you who are wondering, I will be going back to school for my Masters in Accounting and will graduate with my Masters same time next year so I’m looking forward to that.

After graduating, I look towards the future with happiness as well as a little nervousness. The reason is that the economy is still kind of down and jobs are harder to find. People are worried about their investments, homes and savings accounts. With everything coming forth, I wonder what is running through peoples minds.

Some people take every day at a time but I am someone who likes to look forward and plan ahead. I wonder what the future holds for me and I am skeptical about how the economy will fare in the upcoming year. I know a lot of friends and family members who are either out of a job or are at the risk of losing their current job. I’m sure when you look around, you probably see a somewhat similar situation. As they say, its a recession when people around you are getting fired, but its a depression, when you are the one getting fired. Sad, but true.

Online converters are one thing that every internet user can find helpful specially the webmasters. As a webmaster you cannot afford to keep large space hogging softwares in your own computer. I know that i have four 750 GB external hard drives in which 2 of them are completely full and 2 are half way done. You need to leave your computer space for your recent projects. That is when these extremely useful online converters come in handy. These are entirely web based scripts, that can perform actions such as converting html into javascript, favicons out images, html to pdf, rss to pdf, different video and audio formats and more.

These converters can come in handy at other occasions such as presenting at work. Since these are web-based, they are portable, you don’t need to have your computer with the software, to convert a file which is the biggest advantage of online converters. Without any further ado, I present to you, 30+ Essential Online Converters for All Webmasters.

So, every so often I do a re-design or I take my current theme and redo it based on what I think needs to be updated and what I feel like changing. Every single time, however, I notice that there are some things that I do to make sure the process goes through smoothly and usually I never have to go back to test it and I figured I’d blog about certain things I do and keep in mind while re-designing a new theme.

1) Keep Resolutions in Mind - No..no.. I’m not talking about your New Years resolutions but screen resolutions because that will help you in ensuring that your blog design looks and fits well in the most common screen resolutions out there (generally, 1024×768)

2) Graphics Load Time - I always try to maintain a load time for my pages to a certain amount of time. If it goes over, then I usually try to either reduce the graphical content or I try to compress some of the smaller, less important graphics but while you design your blog you should keep this in mind.

Direct Agents is back again with yet another great contest. This one is called New York, New York and if the name doesn’t say anything to you then maybe the following sentences will help you get a better idea. Direct Agents is offering the highest grossing affiliates for the Bidz.com entrants the opportunity to win a trip to NYC for the Affiliate Summit show and includes a stay at the New York Hilton. Here is what the prize list looks like: