Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

Klout, an Izea property that measures how much reach and influence a person has over several social network platforms recently rolled out a new algorithm. Along with this, an influx of angry users due to their major drops in their Klout scores.

According to Klout, they score individuals based on three areas: True Reach, Amplification, and Network Impact.

Together these mean that Klout measures how many people you really are reaching, and if you are influencing them to actually do something. For example, doing something could mean retweeting a link or your words, or even talking with you.

According to Klout’s post A More Accurate, Transparent Klout Score they added subscores to allow you to see how your score has changed. They also mention that there may be people that do have drops, but significant ones are rare.

A lot of people use Klout for advertising, whether for their own website, or even monetizing their Facebook or Twitter Streams. Izea definitely uses this in consideration with working with advertisers for SponsoredTweets and some of their other properties.

As for this new algorithm, for those who experienced that “rare” significant drop in score, is it just the new Klout system trying to catch up, or how flawed is Klout.

Here are some of the reactions in the community.

Facebook (from Klouts fan page)

From Twitter:

Oh, and do not forget about Yoda!

What are your thoughts on Klout, either before or after this new algorithm implementation?

I am always looking for different tools out there for bloggers who have at least a minimal knowledge of putting together simple graphics. I stumbled upon Pixlr, which is a free online image editor.

Now, the site looks promising at a first glance and has an editor that you can use without having an account. The setup looks clean and has plenty of options, except for the fact that I could not use vector imaging to create.

(You can right click and open the image in a new window to see the full size of the image.)

This program even with just creating a simple image was a bit disappointing. When merging the layers of the background and text, and then saving as a JPEG at 100% quality, the image was a bit rough around the edges of the text.

Example:

For me, this is a big problem. Most of the people I know who have little knowledge of graphic design at least know how to put text on an image. If the text looks like this in the end result, the graphic editor is not worth using. Maybe in the future the editor may improve, but right now, even for basic text on graphics, this was a fail.

I did mess around with some of the brushes and effects, but it was nothing like using GIMP or Paint Shop Pro or even Photoshop. In fact, far from it. I think the best tool out of it was the free hand pencil. It has this shading feature that reminds me of studio art drawing.

Have you tried Pixlr? Are there other online graphic editors that you have tried?

Link building is the most important part to make any online marketing campaign effective. It is imperative to know how to formulate and also to execute the link building because, page rankings with popular search engines and traffic to the website are influenced by the quality of the incoming link. Many consider that link building consumes more work and time but the fact is that Squidoo has made link building very easier (among other Web 2.0 properties and other link building methods).

Squidoo is one of the most popular platform for publishing links. It makes it very easy to create the lenses (nothing but your posts; you also can create pages). Squidoo helps in getting all the resources to build link and also enables you to have control over the anchor text written in the link. It is the powerful way to build links, connect with many new readers and share your interests.

Why should you use Squidoo for link building?

Squidoo is a well authorized website which is indexed by Google; it has vibrant readers and writers. Squidoo provides RSS feeds based on category and therefore you can take an advantage to submit the feed to the RSS directories. There is no need for you to have more HTML knowledge to build a link on Squidoo as it can be built using the modules.

Squidoo offers many easy ways to build the link quickly by enabling you to use video, articles, images and more. If you require any changes in the content or in the web page, Squidoo makes it possible with simple editing process (even after publishing). The modules make it easy to edit, delete, re-order any content or portion of the webpage. With the top rankings in search engines, the links built on Squidoo will increase the power of back links to your blog, which in turn will increase the number of visitors to your webpage. Squidoo is therefore a valuable site for building links.

Building links

Squidoo is an excellent way to build links if you have a blog or a website ready with you. Squidoo generally works on the tags concept for which you need to select an appropriate category and tags for the lens you create. You have the option to provide a keyword rich title, which will be appended to the  the link for the pages and live links can be inserted into it. This therefore makes it possible to create links directly for your website without any cost.

Squidoo is being loaded with a lot of new content every day, therefore building links in Squidoo is the best way to attract search engine spiders easily to your website. Moreover, the WebPages are hosted in Squidoo’s own server and this will further help you to get links from unique IP and the traffic server.

How to build links using Squidoo

It is not a difficult thing to learn building links using Squidoo, in fact a lot easier. There is no need for you to have any web design, SEO or web development skills to build links and it can be accomplished with a few clicks. Here are few steps to make link building easy:

• First visit Squido.com. Sign up
• After setting up your account, login
• Choose the option ‘Make a New Lens’ within the dashboard after you login. You can find each Squidoo lens divided with various modules or sections.
• Choose a module for each section or sub-heading
• Use the keyword as the hyperlink to your website in order to get the contextual back link. You can create any number of back links, but do not do link littering. A max of 2 – 4 links is fine. You can also link to other quality websites.
• Use HTML to add keywords that are hyperlinked to your blog. For example <a target=”_blank” href=”hyperlink”>keyword</a>. That’s it. The “target=”_blank”" option makes your link open in a new window without breaking the readers from reading your Squidoo lens.

Squidoo is therefore helping in a better way to build links and boost the traffic for your websites. You can also get many useful guides by just typing “Squidoo Tips” to the Squidoo system. Squidoo not only helps you with link building but also to make extra revenue with its Adsense revenue sharing program. Through this you will get a share of revenue that is generated by your lens and you can also use other affiliate programs added with this like Amazon, EBay for generating more revenue.

Dlvr.it, allows you to connect your site’s RSS feed to social network sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

It also allows you to put in multiple feeds and if you manage several Twitter accounts, you can have multiple routes set up. Other options are replacing text, scheduling, filtering, and it even gives you some stats on how many times your links have been clicked. Pretty nifty, huh?

I think the site is fairly user friendly and just a great third party tool for bloggers. I had no problem adding feeds or taking advantage of the options for each feed I inserted.

FYI: For those who love to share the wealth of knowledge or like to give your trusted circle of blog friends a leg up, inserting their site’s RSS is great!

Another nice tidbit – as a mentioned above, you can replace text. For example, change blog to #blog or even blogging to #blogging. This will help boost your social network streams searchability, especially on Twitter.

Here is a video screencast on a intro walk through Dlvr.it. I will be following up with a more detailed screencast to help those who are not as Internet savvy.

By the way, with using Dlvr.it, those using WordPress, you can get rid of 1 more plugin – Twitter Tools. I hate to remove it, but with this service, but because of my belief in building a WordPress site with few plugins, this actually saves a little of your own site load.

Have you used Dlvr.it?

The past few years I have tried out Adbrite on some of my fanfiction community sites. Why? Because their rates on paying were a little more attractive and getting payout was a little faster than Google Adsense. Sometimes it still is depending on placement of the ad, or if a site own is using a full page ad. However no matter if it is a text link, banner or full page, Adbrite has not been monitoring their advertisers as closely as they should.

Case in point – Fanfiction.net, the largest collection of fanfiction online uses Adbrite. They are infamous for using an occasional full page loading advertisement. For those who are a little confused on what a full page advertisement is, it is where you click to go on a page, and instead of it going there, the advertisement loads. You have the option of clicking to go back to the original page.

The problem is that more often than not the page loads to a site that alerts you that you may be visiting and untrusted or harmful site. Sometimes it is malware. This is also possible in some of the text links as I had this issue with my own fanfiction community. Some of the regular members were kind enough to send me word that the text link they clicked on put malware.

This is not a most recent development. This has happened for the past few years and has not been corrected. Is Adbrite not monitoring their advertisers as closely as they should?

While the site owner can set their settings to manually approve advertisements, I would think Adbrite would at least be a little more pro-active about making sure malware sites are not in their system.

Though the pay is good, I am hesitant to even put Adbrite on Blondish.net. This would not look good if someone clicks on an ad and it goes to a malware site. I am sure Adbrite has been informed many times throughout the years about this issue. Why is it not being caught?

Have you used Adbrite? How has that worked for you?

Facebook has yet another update for Facebook fanpages. Not sure if this is a flop as I have not seen much on bad things with the update, but that is because I am still playing around with the the new features.

I am glad that with this update Facebook was courteous enough to put together a tour. They have added the same feature of pictures at the top like profiles. However, only you can update your own page’s photos so you will not get those annoying “tagged” photos from some of the Facebook apps.

Your edit page feature is in the top right of the page.

Instead of tabs, your former tabs are underneath your fan page image. Also, for those who use leaderboard 200×600 pixel images for their fan page image, it will be scaled down to 180×540 pixels with the upgrade.

The edit page has the sections to the right and the different sections like editing your fan page info/ description, adding applications, and more. It is less squished together than the older version to edit your page. I do not like that the insights page does not have a back link to the edit section. It only has a link to go back to the page itself.

You still cannot suggest to friends unless you are an admin or have a special fbml installed in your welcome tab, at least for those who have one. You also cannot see the members on a fan page you are not an admin of. You can only see your own members. You can however see how many of your mutual friends are fans of the same page.

You can view my fan page, the facebook fan page of Nile Flores to view the changes from the user perspective. (You can also right click on the image to the right to view it larger in a new window.)

Some people have complained that their update took a long time, but if you are having troubles (like you could not update your page, or something turns up strange and glitchy), then give Facebook a holler by reporting these issues. As a note, you will only be able to keep the old version of your fan page until March 1st. After that, fan pages that have not upgraded, will be automatically upgraded at that time.

Have you tried the upgrade or at least previewed your fan page in the upgraded format? What do you think? What could be improved upon?

Design is not that hard for some, but others, it might not be as great. Designing a website should convey its own type of message to your visitors that enhance what content is already available on your website. Design elements that are strategically made to attract your visitors to certain places are certainly things you want to apply in order to successfully convert your visitors. Here are 5 ways to make your site’s design pop in a way to convert your visitor to other places on your website than just the front page.

Colors

Color is important. People are visual creatures. It does not matter whether you are male or female, things that attract people are well put together palettes or tasteful, yet attention grabbing colors.

Typography

Years ago, it was not possible to properly implement different types of fonts on a site to dress up a site. This took encouraging visitors to download fonts they did not have. Since those days, people can use Typekit or what I like to recommend, Cufon Text Replacement to change elements in their site- like headings (h1, h2, h3, etc…) or using it in their graphics.

When considering the right font, choose them not just on how cool it is, but also for legibility.

Sliders/ featured post tools

Featured content sliders really have made a great element for converting websites. While some of the theme developers out there are implementing the content slider just for your posts, you can break out of that and use images and direct to different pages or areas of your site, much like a banner ad, but with some tweaks, you can really make a successful conversion tool. One of the plugins I like for sites that do not have built in featured content sliders is the Easing Slider for WordPress by Matthew Ruddy. You can use custom images or use it for your posts. A similar example of this is here on the front page of Blondish.net

A featured article widget is nice to have in your sidebar. You can show people the way to articles you think they really should read.

Design format

Your design format is important. If you have too much space or things seem smashed together, it becomes a problem for visitors wanting to read your site or go where you want them to go. Good code and clean design is good. If you made your site by yourself, consult a web design friend for advice. They will know or they SHOULD know the best practices in web design.

Interactivity/ forms

Leaving a way for your visitors to communicate with you is an excellent feature. Whether it is the comment form for your blog entries, a lead form, newsletter subscription, social network icons, these will build that dynamic that other sites may not have. Make sure to give the impression to your visitors that your door is open to them and they can contact you. The number of doors, or methods you choose to leave available will exponentially increase that engagement factor on your website.

Of course, the methods above are very basic, but with some clean design and proper placement on a web page, your website can attract those you are trying to reach.

What methods do you like to use on your website to attract visitors?

One of the things I hear a lot from people when they tell me they hate a place they had been a member of online and got their account suspended is that they believe they did not do anything wrong.

The problem is after asking if they violated the site’s Terms of Service, they said no. This is a big thing a lot of people are not getting. While there are a lot of free services out there, they often have rules. Over the past few years alone, Twitter has put a lot of effort in putting their rules together, along with an extensive FAQ to help users understand how to use their site properly.

While to some it might be an “in your face” response, read the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy or anything you plan to use online. You never know if you might violate the rules and a lot of companies that have been around, do not restore accounts based on “Oh, I did not know that.” Ignorance is not an excuse, especially when a lot of places have a checkbox field asking registering users if they agree to the site’s terms.

This also extends to guest blogging, and commenting at blogs. It is important to know before you use a website. In the late 1990s, this was not much of a problem, but that is also because there was not as many people or websites on the Internet.

It might be boring, but it will save you the headache later of being suspended from any website.

Do you read the Terms of Service for most of the sites you sign up for?