Information is Power

Every wise webmaster knows that the key to success involves keeping track of their websites statistics. So we use tools like awstats and google analytics.

Usually webmasters discuss which of these two provides the most accurate and pertinent data of our  sites. Google analytics has advantage in many ways, but there are still strong supporters of awstats.

But forget these two… There is a more sophisticated tool for us to use. It is called Woopra.

What is woopra?

As they say in their website, woopra is:

[...] the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. [...]

I have been using Woopra for some time now, and i must say that i am a fan since the first minute i start using it.

Woopra is still in beta, and i applied several months ago to use the software while it was in a closed beta. Now everyone can register and use woopra services for free.

You just need to register, add your sites, download the software to your computer and wait your sites to get approved, and off course, add a given code to your website.

Woopra’s Interface

There are two options to use woopra. One is accessing the data on their website (it does not work for me though), and the other is to use a software on your computer. That’s where the true power resides.

The software’s interface used rocks! It is dark and beautiful, easy on the eyes. Simple to use and fast. The learning curve of this software is very fast. You will learn how to use it in a couple of minutes. All options are just a few clicks distance and it is all organized for you to not get lost.

Woopra’s Features

You can see a detailed list of woopra’s features here. I will mention only a few:

1. Ability to track over 40 statistical events and analytics;
2. Real time stats: live track of visitors coming and going and moving through your site;
3. No delays in response time. The software is in your computer, not on a server.
4. Flexible interface;
5. Deep analytic and search capabilities;
6. Ability to see who is visiting your site now;
7. Chat functionality: you know who is on your website now, why not start a conversation with him? With woopra you can do this.
8. Member tagging: you can tag your visitors so that you  can easily recognize them;
9. Real Time notifications
10. And much more!

You can know a wide variety of information. If you are used to google analytics you know what you can get plus a lot more.

What i like the most, besides the information it can give to me, is because it is a local method to gather information. I don’t need to login to a website to check the information i want. I don’t have to wait… i can have the information almost instantly!

Another aspect i think it can be very useful is the Chat feature. What can be better to talk with our visitors in real time while they are browsing our website?

Ok, using woopra is great but there is a problem… Don’t really know why, but to get our websites approved we need to wait weeks!!!! Months even! I don’t remember how much time i had to wait until this blog got approved, but it was more than a month im sure. I have added a new site 3 weeks ago and it was not yet approved….

Ok, maybe writing this post was a good thing because every site i add now is approved in the next day

So if you want to used this software, then register an account and add your sites, because you will need to wait a long time… Other than this, woopra is a very valuable tool for all webmasters!

Duplicate content is always a subject that interests us, because we (webmasters) are afraid of it. We are afraid to get our content duplicated, we are afraid to get caught by google for duplicate content either by articles that we get from an article site of for having duplicate content on our own websites.

Copyscape

I have mentioned before an excellent tool to seek for duplicate content that is called Copyscape. I used it every time i write an article, or every time a change the article structure. It only gives me 10 results but that is more than enough.

And im here again recommending it.

The myth about duplicate content

One  of the worst nightmares that a webmaster can have is being penalized by having duplicate content. At least most of us think that way.

You probably looked for ways to avoid the duplicate content on you website. You probably read somewhere that a good way to avoid this in your blog is to have excerpts in your front page instead of full posts. Or you are worried about having multiple addresses going to the same place like: mydomain.com/myproduct and mydomain.com/myproduct&white.

Recently google made an interesting article regarding duplicate content, and they say there is no duplicate content penalty at least in the way we usually mention it.

Duplicating content from other websites: sure, you will get a penalty;

Getting your articles scrapped from other website: google says they can identify the original content fairly easy, so no worries here…. hum…

Having duplicate content on your own site: there is no problem unless google detects it is intended to deceive search engines.

Final Consideration

While having duplicate content in your site won’t get you a penalty, it will affect your site’s performance. Google bot will spend more bandwidth while crawling your website and we know how much bandwidth google bot can eat!!!!

The next time you see someone saying that you will get penalized for having duplicate content on you own site then send them to this page, where i have taken information to write this article.

We all know that to succeed in getting traffic from search engines, and specially from google, unique content is the gold ticket for it.

So, webmasters in general, and bloggers in particular spend hours writing unique content  for their sites/blogs to get some traffic from search engines.

The process is long and tedious, and some simply don’t have the patience to do this. If there is money available, then hiring someone to write for you is an option. After all, it isn’t that expensive, and the results are good (if you hire a good writer).

What if, there is a way to get unique content the easy, fast way? And specially free?

Interested?

Unique Content in less than a minute

We will achieve this using translators. But how?

First lets get our hands on an article we are interested.

Second we use a translation site/software that we like. (I would recommend to stay away from babelfish. It sucks big time. I prefer the google translation tool).

What we are going to do is to paste the article into one of these tools and translate it to several languages and finally translate it back to English.

An example of translation cycle could be this: English->Portuguese->French->German->English

After the cycle is over you should confirm the final text is original.

Confirm the uniqueness of your text

A tool that i like to use from time to time is Copyscape. This site will crawl the web to find any text that matches yours. It will even highlight pieces of text that are the same. Do this and decide if it is unique enough for your, or do the translation cycle again.

After all this, congratulations. You have your unique content in less than a minute!

I often find articles that are duplicated on thousands of sites. Yesterday i came across a website that was selling already established sites with more than 1000 articles. Did a check on the examples and no article was original!

Optimize your content

This is a mandatory step, and will take you some time to do (not that much).

Copyscape may have said that your content was unique but if you read it there are some parts that don’t make any sense!! This is very truth if you used BabelFish.

This was something to be expected. But relax. Now is up to you. Just change some words to make the wrong phrases to make some sense, and since you are doing that, why not reinforce the keywords you want?

Conclusion

Unique content is not that hard to have using this “technique”. Copyscape say its unique and i believe it.But if you do this i just ask that you give credit to the original author. You can just write something like:

“Based on Hugo Santos article. Available at: http://bloggervenue.com”

It gives credit to the right person, he will be happy, and you are happy :p.

Since i have said this, i must say that i have learned this from Scot at Revvenue.com

On my regular reading throughout the blogosphere i see many writing types and ways to organize posts.

I like to feel that a blogger has put some effort on the post he just published. This can be seen on the way he structures the post, on the way images are used, if they fit well on the content, or if they are able to show the message he wants to transmit to his fellow readers.

The majority of bloggers do this, although i think bloggers shouldn’t be afraid of using images on their posts. Some even go to a different level of post structuring. In some posts we can see that the blogger organized a logical sequence to write his ideas, and they even divided the post in topics to make reading easy.

This is honourable, and im happy to see that many bloggers follow this, but 90% (estimated, not calculated :p) of bloggers fail to do/remember one thing, that in my opinion, will make their posts look better.

Text Justify – Bloggers simple don’t do it

That’s right, for one reason or another, bloggers don’t justify the text in their posts, for one reason or another.

I can only speculate, but either they don’t think justified text is important, or they simply forget to do that. I continuously forgot to do this. But not any more. For some time now, the majority of my new posts have their text justified (i may have forgotten 1 or 2, shame on me lol), and i really like the results.

College essays have rules. One of them is precisely the one im talking about. If we do this for college works, why not do it on our blogs?

What does it look better?

Left aligned:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Proin ligula. Nulla pretium ultricies diam. Vivamus a eros eget felis sodales tincidunt. Aenean massa massa, fermentum at, lobortis ut, elementum a, lectus. Fusce eget nisl. Duis varius. Aliquam neque sem, sodales sed, scelerisque in, pharetra id, diam. Nullam tristique tempus purus. Etiam ultricies, dui sed luctus ornare, turpis justo dictum magna, at tempus turpis arcu sit amet urna. Phasellus sed felis. Cras enim. Ut sed nisl. Suspendisse ultricies lectus in tellus. Nam a tortor eu eros interdum dignissim.

Justified:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Proin ligula. Nulla pretium ultricies diam. Vivamus a eros eget felis sodales tincidunt. Aenean massa massa, fermentum at, lobortis ut, elementum a, lectus. Fusce eget nisl. Duis varius. Aliquam neque sem, sodales sed, scelerisque in, pharetra id, diam. Nullam tristique tempus purus. Etiam ultricies, dui sed luctus ornare, turpis justo dictum magna, at tempus turpis arcu sit amet urna. Phasellus sed felis. Cras enim. Ut sed nisl. Suspendisse ultricies lectus in tellus. Nam a tortor eu eros interdum dignissim.

Align Full

Align Full is the expression used in wordpress text editor. You can simply use it with one click. The button is just right of Underline and left of Select Text Color on the second row of your editor. If you don’t see these you will need to click on the button that says Show/Hide Kitchen Sink.

“Bad” Examples

I could give many examples of bloggers that don’t do this, but as i said, 90% don’t, so i could be here forever and make you fall a sleep, and i don’t want that.

So here is a list of bloggers that don’t do this and i think they could earn something by doing it:

Chetan from Thewwwblog

Syed from Balkhis

Alan from Affiliate Confession

Mattaw from Moneybites

Lucas from Netstrife

Even big bloggers like John Cow, ShoeMoney and John Chow fail doing this :p (i wonder why the last two don’t don’t have a link? lol)

Good Examples

Javo from Mr. Javo

Jason from Jason Boom

Yan from Thou shall blog

Jason Pereira from The University Kid

Just my two cents Cheers everybody!

All bloggers in their everyday blogging activity, which involves reading, commenting in other blogs, researching for new material, will eventually write a new post.

Now, a common mistake that i see a lot of times, in my opinion, is that some bloggers tend to write big articles. When i say big, i mean 1000+ words articles. I don’t know about you, but im not very fond of big articles. I mean, i get tired reading all that stuff, specially if the blogger does not know how to captivate the readers.

Im no angel here. I have some posts, specially the recent creating a forum series(part 1 and part 2), that reach 1000 words.

Blog Visitors are like newspaper readers. They look for the headlines and potentially for the first lines to get a global picture of what it’s about, and if they find it useful they will read it. But even so, they will jump paragraphs!

We want our visitors to completely read our posts, but lets face it. If we write to much we will loose them.

So how can we get more with less?

After thinking about it i have come across with a few tips to get more of your articles with less words:

1. If you plan to write an article and you know you have a lot to say then simply split the article, even if it is part of a series of posts;
2. If you can’t split the article then create sub topics in your post. This way, if the readers jumps paragraphs they can focus on the sub topics they are interested;
3. Write a nice introduction for your post, one that can grab the readers attention, making him want to read the full post.
4. Use related images. Don’t deny the power of an image inside a post. Just remember to insert it in the right place.
5. Don’t use a small font on your blog. It is a big mistake. Small fonts tire the reader’s eye, and it will most likely make him run away from your post/blog;
6. Write friendly. Don’t be formal. We want the visitors awake right?;

Now, this is my opinion, and you will find some bloggers that will totally disagree with me. They defend that more detailed (meaning: big) articles will produce more and better results…

They will say that depends on the niche, and if you are on the make money online niche, then a more insightful article will produce better results. But is it really?

So, what is your opinion and experience about this?

Paid Reviews are one of the main sources of income for many many bloggers, including my self. It’s easy, somewhat fast and a noob can start making money with little effort.

The process of receiving money to review a site or a product can lift some impartiality issues. We can think that if someone was paid to write about something will tend to do it in a positive tone, even if they don’t know squat about it. It is really easy to write a 50 or 100 hundred word review after looking at the site for a couple of minutes. But those kind of reviews only request some buzz and some links. And the advertiser does not care if the writer spent a lot of time researching.

But this brings another negative aspect. Google does not like paid reviews that pass some link juice to the reviewed site. And what does it do when it detects this? Google slaps your blog and you can say bye bye to organic visitors!

For that reason, more and more bloggers don’t disclose that it is a paid review, and use a sitewide disclosure page. Individual or sitewide, it is important that we disclose it was a paid review. The reader deserves this information and decide if it will continue to read or not.

For these reasons and more, many bloggers don’t do, or limit the number of paid reviews. But after this long introduction (yes it was an introduction lol), i will give:

5 reasons why you should do paid reviews on your blog:

1- You make easy money (dahh!): It is easy. You just need to signup for any paid to review site and get an opportunity. depending on the offer and your writing skills you can write a decent review in 10 minutes, and there are some offers that pay $10 or more for a 50 word review!

2- New advertisers may appear: If you got a paid advertising from private ad sales it is a complete different case from point 1. I recommend that you write the review slowly after a careful study of the site and be impartial. Ask for information, see what the advertiser pretends, and If you do a review that the buyer liked  then he may ask another one later or even recommend your blog to a friend. Word of mouth is the best advertising you can get.

3- Bring more visitors from search engines: Ok, some say that if you write a review you should try to fit it to your blog subject. That is comprehensible. But you won’t loose nothing if you write a review that is not related to the niche of your blog. On the contrary. There is the possibility that your paid review attracts visitors from google searchs. They visit your site, may get interested on your blog subject and you earn a new reader. Also, visits from search engines  are known to click more on adsense ads or affiliate links than your regular visitors. It is a double win: You get paid to review, you earn from visitors that come to that review.

4- Paid reviews may spark your comments on your blog: this may not result for everyone and depends on several factors, like what type of comment plugins you use or the skill you have to adapt the text to your blog subject or to your own experiences.

I did several paid reviews that caught the readers attention and made them comment, and sometimes creating a little discussion around the subject. And we, the bloggers, love to see some activity in the posts we create. If you see the review is not of the interest of your readers than if possible you should associate an experience you had, like a problem you had with hosting and what have you learned from that, or even about a loan you took a few years ago. This may encourage readers to share their thoughts and experiences with you.

Again you win. You win money and see your blog active.

5- Find something useful: I could mention another advantage such as you can increase your writing skills, but that you accomplish every post you write, and so, as a 5th reason i choose the possibility that paid reviews offers you the chance of finding something useful to you and your readers. I have found offers that were useful to me, by browsing the advertisers list of by reading other reviews made by fellow bloggers.