Shanker Bakshi dot Com » Blogging

How to Auto-Submit Content to New Digg?

Shanker Bakshi — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:08:48 +0000

Have you checked out the feature of Digg of submitting content of your blog automatically, well new version of have some cool feature and this one of the best thing that they have come up with all new Digg.

Its pretty simple, no rocket science, you just need to submit your blog feed to Digg and verify that you are the legitimate owner of your blog.

Just follow few steps

1. Login to your Digg account

2. Go to account Settings

3. click Import feed

4. Submit your blog RSS feed URL and click add feed ( to know more about RSS feed read What is RSS Feed and how you can use it ?)

5. After that you need to verify ownership of your feed. verifying your feed establishes that you are the owner of this content and allows Digg to auto-submit your stories as they are published.

To verify your feed:

Take the verification key shown and add it to a new post of your blog, for quick addition you can create a test post (which you can delete it later) then click “Verify Now”
Note that RSS auto-submit does not submit content already residing in your feed, so once it is verified please add a new entry to test things out. Please allow some time for the new entry to get pulled in.

Please note that it will not work if you add verification code to already published article, for that you need to create a new post, so better you create a new TEST post verify the key and delete after that.

With Digg you can sky rocket your blog traffic, if you have strong community and following up there. So quickly make use of this new feature and get on with Digg.

3rd Anniversary Celebration

Shanker Bakshi — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 06:21:30 +0000

I am celebrating “Shanker Bakshi dot Com” third birthday today, 29th August 2010. Yes , you guessed it right, I am a big fan of Michael Jackson so I started it on his birthday exactly three years back. He is not here but we can always found his presence through his music.

How about distributing some free stuff as my birthday treat?

I am giving you following stuff for FREE!!!

1. eBook “WordPress Websites Secrets” (if you have not downloaded it yet.)
2. eBook ‘ AdSense Revenue Exposed”
3. ebook “dot Com Guru Guide on Twitter Traffic”
4. ebook “email marketing”
5. ebook ‘facebook Essentials”
6. “250 Niche Articles” worth

Hope some of them ( if not all) will serve your need and purpose.

So sign up with your name and your email ID so that we can send this Birthday bundle right into your INBOX

How to Reduce Bounce Rate?

Shanker Bakshi — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:33:43 +0000

Can you do anything which make someone visiting your blog/site for the first time and stick to it for hours, can you glued your visitors with some tools so that they find it difficult to leave your blog. Its not a question whether you can do it or not but somehow you need to make your visitors should not leave your blog/site quickly. Technically when people left your site from the same page they enter is called “Bounce”. You must do all efforts to lowering down this rate.

knowing about your site bounce rate is very simple, register your site with Google analytics and you can see and monitor your site bounce rate from there. If say your site bounce rate is showing up 90% it means that 90% of the users coming to your site are quickly glancing around and leaving, deciding immediately that this site isn’t for them.

Google define bounce rate as;

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run.

Frankly speaking if a visitor who landed on your site while searching for something which is not there ( that happens very rarely ) then you can’t do much about it but most of the time you can always control and your lower bounce rate if they arrive searching with the relevant keywords related to your blog niche.

I am not giving you here some philosiphical measures to reduce bounce rate, I am not preaching about why your bounce rate is low but i am suggesting you about some WordPress Plugin which will definitely help you out to lower your site bounce rate. Here are some WordPress Plugins to take control of your site bounce rate;

Insights

The best way to keep your visitors engage in reading your blog is to internally link important keywords phrases in your current posts to your older relevant posts. Insight plugin help you do this job superbly. Tell me how you find your old posts for linking, may be you search it in your own site open it, copy the URL and link it in current post, and when you don’t have much time in your hand you usually skip this step but believe me if you are doing it in that old fashion way then this plugin is life saver for you.

Insights allows you to do all this using dynamic AJAX interface which loads the relevant posts to link it in just a few seconds. It saves your time and increase productivity.

It Searches your blog for posts, insert links to them into the current post
Search Flickr Images for your search keyword
Insert Youtube videos
Search and link to Wikipedia
Search Google
Search News
Google Blog Search
You can also have an option to Insert a Google Map

So if you have written tons of great posts on your blog this post give you an easy way to link them with relevant keywords and phases in your current blog post.

Download this Plugin HERE

Related Post Plugin

Displaying related post is another important tool which help you to make your reader get involve into other posts on similar topic. There are many related Post plugin there in WordPress Plugin Repository, I use this related posts plugin from last couple of years. It pulls out related posts in same category which ultimately help readers to get into the depth of that topic by offering more posts on topic.

Link Within related posts with thumbnails

A picture speaks thousand words so why not display some more related posts with thumbnail images. If your have posts salacious photos as Seth Godin suggested then this plugin could earn you some more page views. People love to click on salacious images, no matter they are in hurry or have some urgent task at hand.

You can download this plugin here

: Another attempt to keep readers “Stay tuned” on your blog.

These big sites uses related post thumbnail on their single post pages;

Popular Posts Plugin

I remember how I started my blogging, a three years back when I landed on John Chow’s blog while searching for “money” related keyword on Google it was his Top Post page which kept me surfing through various top class posts all day long. Surely if a visitor impress with your writing skill he must wish to read some more great stuff from you and your top posts or popular posts page serve him the dose he need.

I use a plugin for showing most popular posts on my blog and configured it to show up top posts of last 30 days, its highly customizable sidebar widget displays the most popular posts on your blog.

So if you really want to impress a new visitor then what can be better than to serve them your best.

These were some plugins which help lowering down bounce rate. These are practical solutions to a higher bounce rate problem which can be a major headache for any blogger struggling with higher bounce rate.

Most click-able area in a website

So as you have seen that placing related posts text links and thumbnails help you reducing bounce rate. After reading the complete post that is the only area where readers looks for some more interesting information. Now I will try to show live example you how these popular bloggers are doing it.

: Famous Bloggers Sidebar and Post Footer Area

A bunch of smart bloggers created a multi-authors blog and Social Network platform for making money online. ( Smart Idea!). Above is a screen shot of fomousbloggers.net post footer and sidebar, you can see that both post footer and sidebar have thumbnail images of related posts and popular posts. Plus some more related posts shown above comment area to keep the reader engage in reading and surfing through the blog. it seems that they believe that an image can attract more then showing plain text links and thats very true as I said it before people are more keen to dig through an image unless you really know the art of writing wire titles for your posts.

: Related Posts, Recent Posts , Ramdom Posts – Shout Me Loud

Now have a look at the sidebar and single post footer of tech blog Shout Me Loud by my friend Harsh Aggarwal, you will notice there are enough data links floating around while you read through posts. There are related posts given at the end of the post for In-depth sight on subject then there are random posts and recent posts in sidebar, but if you would surf through various posts you will find a very smart inter-linking has been placed with relevant anchor keywords within posts and that always help you to lower down your site bounce rate.

Write Effective Headlines

This is what google suggest you to do, I also told you about Writing headlines as you are a wire service writer attract readers, if you place these related posts, random posts widgets and those posts have weired or effective headlines chances are that readers will surely hit it.

other thing to remember while writing effective headlines as suggested by Google

Include keyword in the headline.
Headings should not sound like an ad
Highlight benefits rather than features.
Make headlines look easy to read.

Hope the above tools and measure will help you lower your site bounce rate. share in comment below your experience with bounce rate and what you think works better.

WordPress 3.0 Released and Future Plans of Matt

Shanker Bakshi — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 03:26:51 +0000

Wait is over, WordPress 3.o is here , thirteenth major released of state of the art blogging platform. a few days back i talked about the major features of this release. some of them are;

A sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten
Long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress
New lighter interface
The contextual help on every screen

One year back when ma.tt was here to attend WordCamp he organised features suggestions contest to make WordPress a better blogging software. I suggested for integration of WordPress MU and BuddyPress with WordPress. he like my idea and awarded it. Here is the post i wrote two years back about it. Good to see WordPress would now merged with WordPress in 3.0 released.

Download WordPress 3.0 here

Future plan of Matt for WordfPress

WordPress 2010 State of the Word speech at WordCamp San Francisco. where matt talk about the future of WordfPress.

Blogger Introduces Template Designer

Shanker Bakshi — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:58:07 +0000

Good News for those who are blogging at Big Daddy’s blogging platform blogger.com. They can now choose theme they like and change it with the click of a button.

Since the launch, we fixed many bugs and added even more themes and background images. But the Blogger Template Designer has only been available on Blogger in Draft, which is why we’re excited to announce that the Blogger Template Designer is now available to everyone.

I started my blogging with shankerbakshi.blogspot.com back in 2007. i still have couple of active blog on blogger.com

Since when i start thinking about monetizing my blogs i turned to WordPress self hosted blog which is by far the best thing happened to blogging.

Watch the video below to see how you can do it. ( If you are a newbie)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Shanker Bakshi dot Com » Blogging

How to Auto-Submit Content to New Digg?

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3rd Anniversary Celebration

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How to Reduce Bounce Rate?

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WordPress 3.0 Released and Future Plans of Matt

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Blogger Introduces Template Designer

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