BlogHASH » Blogs

Bloghash gets a new theme

Raj — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:50:13 +0000

Hello there! Welcome to the new theme launch of Bloghash.com

I started Bloghash.com in 2006 to get some hand-on experience with blogging and to know what it’s all about. I must tell you that I am still going strong with it and learning new things almost everyday. In the last 3 years of its life, Bloghash has gone through 2 makeovers out of which the first was a free template and the second theme was designed by myself. It gives me immense pleasure to launch the third makeover that has a professional design.

Alex ElChehimi from Spicydesign was kind enough to accept the complete theme design project and has come up with what you see today on the site. During the entire course of designing the theme, Alex had been very patient with me through every stage of the theme design and I recommend his services as a professional blog designer to anyone who would be interested in getting a theme designed for their blog.

The template design objectives were that the design should look very simple and yet professional, from the current three column layout I wanted to get down to just two columns which will make the blog easy on readers. The other important objective was to optimize the design for adsense. The earlier template was good on the adsense CTR but the new one is going to perform much better.

For next few days, we will be making final touches and fixes if any required to the new design. So please hang on while we transition to the new theme. I would like to request you to visit the site and take a look around and if you notice some problem, please don’t hesitate to let us know about anything you find and also provide us with your valuable feedback on the overall design.

If you reading this post in your RSS reader, you may want to visit the blog.

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13 reasons why you will not make money by blogging

Raj — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:43:10 +0000

Here’s a list of reasons why you will not be able to make money by blogging or have been unable to make money from your blog so far. Read through them, if you think they are applicable to you then make a note and take some action on them. I am also making few suggestions after those points just to make sure I don’t confuse you in anyway and also justify my points at the same time.

1. You write articles only for search engines

2. You write articles only for people
If you write only for search engines, your content may not have substance but only contain a lot of keywords. On the other hand, if you write only for people then you might forget to include those keywords that people use in search engines to reach your blog. Maintain a balance between them and you will be happy in long term.

3. You have paused writing articles and spend more time finding the best way to make more money from existing search engine traffic.

4. The major sources of traffic to your website are social media websites.
You should know that traffic from social networking websites has the least CTR. You get nice amount of traffic but no money.

5. Over 80% of your visitors are repeat visitors.
People who keep visiting your blog become blind to the ad banners that you placed across your blog after a lot of analysis. The end result is 0% CTR.

6. Your blog’s bounce rate is above 90%.
That simply means that over 90% of the visitors who visit your blog do not click on anything and either close the browser window or click on the back button to go back to where they came from. If you use website analytics software such as Google Analytics, finding the overall bounce rate of your blog is easy. Just check it out and prepare a plan to reduce the bounce rate. Less bounce rate translates into higher CTR numbers. Trust me on that!

7. You write what everyone already knows.
If you are writing articles on how to make money from your blog, it might be worth it. But if you are targeting SEO section of a blog, think twice. Unless you write articles that offer value to your visitor, it’s not going to work in your favor. Writing the same content that every tenth blogger writes is of no use in long term.

8. You write what everyone else is writing.
Ok, so Kindle 2 came out just now and you read about it somewhere. You then check out Google blogsearch and find that there are 200 blogs already covering that topic. You still write about it by becoming 201st blog to cover that news. What difference did you make? I would say, you wasted your precious time. Instead you should have spend 20 minutes reading through the features of Kindle 2, compare it against the Sony electronic book readeing device and made a nice article ‘How Kindle 2 competes with Sony book reader’. You would have then become the 1st blog to cover that. I hope you are understanding the point.

9. You are the owner of over 10 spam blogs.
I don’t know what comes to your mind when you copy content from other websites and create so many blogs. In short term probably you are happy but in long term you will make nothing. As search engines advances, it will become very easy for them to know which site has the original content, perhaps just a day to determine the original site and knock your site out of their index for ever. Give up spamming!

10. You don’t have patience

11. You write about everything, every topic, every niche.
The worst part of blogging is that you write about a lot of topics. If you stick to just a few topics of your interest, it becomes easy for you to research and produce quality content on those topics than writing about everthing that comes to your mind. You would then be a newspaper portal but never a blog, unless it’s a blog network with multiple authors on multiple topics.

12. You don’t know about any other program than AdSense.
My friend, open your eyes now. Look around, there are a lot of good ad programs for publishers that will help you monetize your blog better than even AdSense. Do some research, I mean do some search.

13. You are still in denial mode about most of the above points.
God helps them who helps themselves. Did you get it?

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WordPress: Spam comments on my blog are down by 90%

Raj — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:08:33 +0000

Are you receiving tons of spam comments on your blog and spend a lot of time filtering them manually? I have recently installed a plugin that has taken care of the spam comments on my blog for ever. The plugin is called Simple CAPTCHA that adds a image based verification to the comments section of a blog. This has helped me a lot and I highly recommend that you also install this plugin on your blog and spend your productive time writing quality posts instead of filtering those nasty spam comments.

Look at the comments section below to see how the image verification looks like after installing this plugin.

Download Simple Captcha plugin for WordPress.

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Adding one more topic to BlogHash

Raj — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:50:49 +0000

It’s been quite a while since I had been contemplating on adding one more to topic to the list of topics I blog on BlogHash. The topic is gadgets/electronics. Well, I have already written a few posts on various gadgets, but I don’t regularly write on that topic here and hence forth, I will write a little bit more on that topic.

Why? – It’s pretty straightforward. The following are the main reasons to add gadgets to the list of topics that I will write more about.

1. There are tons and tons of gadgets. I see many new products being launched almost everyday. – No dearth of topics.
2. I don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking before I can make a post. Writing about gadgets is little easy when compared to writing about Web 2.0 related topics, but that’s me. Every gadget has a purpose that it serves and has list of things it does and doesn’t. Makes my job easy to write about it.
3. There are similar products from different companies, that gives me scope to compare products and that results in more and more posts.

I recommend that you also take a look at the topics that you already write about and see if you can expand the list of topics to incorporate a new/different topic you can easily write about.

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Best blog directories to list your blogs

Raj — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:00:36 +0000

Have you recently launched your blog and looking for ways to publicize your blog? Here’s a list of the most popular blog directories you should submit your blogs with. It hardly takes any time to submit your blogs, so start now.

9rules network – A blog network and directory focusing on a selection of quality content.

blo.gs – lets you keep an eye on your favorite weblogs via the web and email. you can even put the list on your site: a blogroll that knows what is new!

Blogarama – Blogarama is the best free directory of weblogs (blogs). You spend time maintaining your blog, now let people find it in The Blog Directory

Bloggernity – Search engine and directory to blogs on a range of topics, from around the Web.

BlogStreet – BlogStreet : Indian Blogs Portal, Blog Buzz, Directory, RSS Search Engine.

BlogHop – Their mission is to match blogs with readers! If you’re searching for a blog, you can tagsurf to blogs that match your interest. If you’re a blogger, add your blog there and make sure to include a good description.

Bloghub.com – is an online directory and community where members from around the world gather and exchange ideas.

GetBlogs – The Blog Directory is a comprehensive human edited directory of over 11,000 Weblogs in 190+ categories. Search for blogs, or submit your blog to our blog directory for free.

Globe of Blogs – An index of weblogs as submitted by their authors. Submit your blogs for free.

NYC Bloggers – There are a million blogs in the NY city; here’s where to find them.

Technorati – Technorati indexes the live web within minutes, providing its users with up-to-date information about the topics and authors they care about.

I know that there are many other blog directories but I did not find most of them worthwhile. If there’s any blog directory that you have a good experience with, let me know and I will add them to the list above.

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Blog Hacked – Paying the price for not upgrading WordPress

Raj — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:44:38 +0000

I don’t remember which version I installed first when I started this blog back in Nov’06 but I followed the upgrade cycle with every release till 2.1.1. I became a bit lazy and did not follow the security exploits news that kept circulating on net about WordPress security exploits with version 2.1.1 and few other releases.

Beginning first week of march, the traffic from Google started to dip in a big way. By second week the traffic was down by 90% and now the traffic is reduced to only a few hits.

Since last week I spent a lot of time looking at logs, my content, links and everything I could get my hands on except one thing! It was checking for hidden text in the HTML source of the posts. I could have easily not checked it but I saw a hit from Live which was referring to an Office template post for a keyword ‘ringtone’. This clue was good enough to nail down the culprit. I had then searched google for keyword ‘ringtone’ in my site and I was looking at the worst thing that could have ever happened to any of my sites. My blog was hacked!

Looking around on net for WordPress exploits brought up many posts pointing to a common wp_footer exploit and I knew what had happened. I removed the call to the function wp_footer from footer.php and looked at all the php files in the wp-includes folder and the root folder of my WP installation. I have now changed the password also and hope to see things getting back to normal in a few weeks time.

My advice to you – if you are still on WordPress 2.1.1 or any other older release, please do spend sometime today or this weekend and upgrade your WP to the latest version available. You will avoid the kind of pain I have gone through since last few weeks.
[tags]WordPress, Security[/tags]

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It’s time for DoFollow comments to GO

Raj — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:45:26 +0000

Way back in August 2007 I had removed the nofollow attribute from the comments section of this blog to show some link love for my readers who post comments. That did not show up any problems for quite sometime but now it has turned into a problem that I need to immediately take care of. And the problem is an increase in spam comments by almost 500% that results in significant amount of time that I now need to spend in going through the comments to filter them.

A while back I was going through all the comments that my blog received in last one month just to make sure I did not miss giving reply to any comment and that’s when I noticed that I have let some spam comments come in. The comments looked genuine at first and that’s why I let them in but when I checked the website of the commenters, to my horror they now point to a page that promotes some product. I always check the website of the user before I approve their comment and I am sure that when I checked those sites at the time of approving their comments, they must have had something else on the website but now changed into something else, spam!

So, there you go, good bye DoFollow! I hate turning it off but that’s what I think is best for my blog in the long term. Do you still DoFollow?
[tags]Dofollow, Blog[/tags]

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A New Look for BlogHash

Raj — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:30:24 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks I had been busy working on a new template for BlogHash and finally it’s ready. If you are reading this post from your RSS reader, visit the home page once and take a look at the new theme of Bloghash.

Why did I do it myself?

In the last few months I have contacted at least 5-6 WordPress theme designers but none of them seems to have had any interest in designing a theme for my site; no one replied to my email. Hence, I took it upon myself to design a theme for my blog site. I knew it wouldn’t be easy but then I wanted to learn.

Thank you for the inspiration

First it was John Chow, then Problogger and Keith also got a new design. When they got a new theme loaded up, it was perhaps the last spark needed to start the fire in my mind; I wanted a new one too!

The components of my theme

Before even I started with the design plan, I visited at least over 100 different blogs, thanks to the great list of WP designs on SmashingMagazine, and made a note of the different features on each of those blogs. Most of them had common set of things on their home page and almost everyone’s single view pages were left aligned with one sidebar on right. I wanted to design something different.

The new home page shows excerpts of most recent posts, on the right there are two sidebars showing some of the most visited posts under various categories. This helps in flow of page rank to those pages from the home page.

The single post view has one sidebar on either side. The one on the left is to show ads while the one on the right is to show related popular posts which I am still working on. I intend to show the most relevant post depending on the category of the post viewed.

Please give me feedback

Please spend a few minutes browsing the new theme on my blog and provide me with your valuable suggestions and feedback. Do let me know if you have any tips to help me improve my blog’s design.
[tags]BlogHash, Design, WordPress, WordPress Themes[/tags]

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5 Most important questions to be successful in blogging

Raj — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:41:53 +0000

Out of those millions of blogs in the Blogosphere, including yours and mine, only few hundreds are very popular while most others are still struggling to make a mark and find a spot of recognition and fame. When it comes to building a successful blog, you will agree that no one has ever found the opportunity to become successful overnight. It takes much more than what one can imagine reaching that place where you currently see ProBlogger, John Chow, Engadget, Lifehacker, Read/WriteWeb, ShoeMoney, Digital Inspiration and many other popular bloggers today. With their differentiating factors, which I call blogging EDGE, they have earned tremendous popularity and respect in Blogosphere.

For rest of us, myself included, who are yet to travel that much distance, I have come up with a list of the most important questions to ask ourselves and take charge of our blogging destiny and, of course, success.

1. How different is your blog from rest of the crowd?

Millions of blogs, billions of posts! What makes your blog different when compared to at least 20% of those blogs that are from your niche? Do you think your blog has an edge over others? If not, you need to sit back and take a stab on your blog’s niche first and then few other things that you will read shortly, below.

2. What matters most to you? – Quality or quantity?

I see tens of blogs linking out to my post every time I write one and when I visit their blogs to see what they blog about, I didn’t find a single article which looked like their original creation, I see tons of posts which seems to have been posted automatically using feeds. If your blog is one amongst those, please stop blogging! If you can’t produce original content, you will either never make it to the top or someday give up blogging.

3. What are your blogging strengths?

It’s Ok not to know anything about WordPress but still use it as your blogging platform, but do you have the right kind of skill set for blogging? Some of the required skills for successful blogging are distinguished writing style, ability to research content, expertise in at least one of the topics you blog about and etceteras. What’s your skill set?

4. Do you have short and long term blogging goals?

Are you sitting there in that remote corner of the world and blogging away to glory, dreaming to occupy one of the top positions without any goals and aims to realize? Where do you want to take your blog in next 3-6 months, what you expect from your blog in next 12-18 months? Dare to dream and care to realize! Fix goals and work hard to meet them. Every one of us has only 24 hours in a day. Make the best use of available time and make some progress everyday.

5. Why should I read your blog?

In most simple language, can you tell me only 4 reasons as to why should I read your blog and why should I come back to read the next post you will write? In short, what’s your value proposition? Can’t think of one? Bad! But don’t worry; I am still thinking about the 4th reason myself. I am working on it, but are you?

It’s never too late. Take the charge, plan well and execute it well. If you shall need help, ping me.

Please do post your feedback and share your thoughts that will help my readers as well. Did you like this post? – please subscribe to my feed to receive more such interesting articles in future.
[tags]Blogging, Blogging Tips[/tags]

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First few lines of your blog post are most important

Raj — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:09:03 +0000

First few lines have the greatest impact on your visitors. Why? – First few lines of your article can either attract a visitor or make them skip your article. How? – There are more than just one factor that goes into making the first few lines of your blog post the most important section of your post. Let’s go through the factors one by one.

1. First few lines of your post is what visitors would see when they find your blog post’s link in search engine’s results. If you have some catchy words included in the first few lines, chances of a user visitor clicking on your result link would be much higher than the link of some other website ranking higher than yours.

2. Some RSS readers show the starting few lines of your post in a preview mode when a user hovers their mouse on your blog post link. A user can either decide to open the feed url and read your post or mark it as a read item if the post excerpt is not enticing enough.

3. Blog syndication networks which further distributes your content to wide variety of websites often relies on the first few lines of your blog post to either include your post for distribution or skip it. Even editors of those websites that use the blog syndication services and go through literally hundreds of posts quickly judge your post’s inclusion by just looking at the first few lines of your article.

4. If your article’s content is enticing, people link to it and most often use the first few lines of your article while linking to your content from their blogs. The readers of those blogs will then look at the those first few lines to click on your link and visit your blog.

5. First few lines or the first para has a significant impact on the search engine optimization of your blog. Ideally, it’s advisable to include the keywords in the first few lines that you want to target in search engines. Those first few lines are visible in search engine results from your site and visitors find it enticing to click on your link and visit your blog. Every visitor is a potential subscriber to your blog. Isn’t it?

What are you waiting for? Make sure that you follow these guidelines from your very next post onwards towards your maximum advantage.
[tags]Blog Promotion, Blogging Tips, Keywords, Optimization, RSS Reader, Search Engine[/tags]

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How to know if you are blogging on a wrong niche?

Raj — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 10:08:42 +0000

I was recently invited by Keith of Techie Buzz to do a guest post and I chose this particular topic. In the post, I highlight some of the major factors that will tell you if you have chosen a wrong niche or set of topics to blog.

You may want to head over to Techie Buzz and read my post.
[tags]Blogging, Blog[/tags]

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SEO Tip: Use Comments Section of Your Blog to Get More Search Engine Traffic

Raj — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:14:21 +0000

I presume that you very well know how important it is to use the most appropriate keywords, in your blog posts and websites, to get the kind of traffic you expect from search engines. If you are still a beginner in this arena, I recommend you reading – 5 steps to finding the best keywords for your website, or, please continue reading this post.

I usually don’t find enough time to spend towards analyzing the web server logs of my blog for doing additional keyword research after it’s a while since an article has been posted. Luckily, for me, I found some free time last month that I thought should be spent in looking at the keywords that people have been using to reach my blog site. And I found something that did not strike my mind earlier. I quickly conducted an experiment and the result has been mind blowing.

I found that there were many posts/articles in my site that were receiving hits using various keywords, that too long tail, that I had not mentioned in the article when I posted them. Then how come they received traffic, a lot of traffic, using those keywords? – It was the comments section that enlightened me. There were many comments posted in the comments section of some articles and to my surprise someone had actually used good keywords, while posting their comments, that did not had lot of competition in the search engine. It was obvious that I had to start a little experiment to see if I could use it to my advantage.

How to use the comments section to get more search engine traffic?

My experiment had the following steps:-

First, I read through the comments that were posted.
Found relevant keywords that I had not used earlier in the post. Made a small list of at least 3-5 keywords such keywords that had less competition in the search engine.
Replied to the comments posted by visitors and included the keywords from my list in the sentences I used.
Made my reply look as natural as possible. The subsequent replies to the comments included more and more keywords.

Result of this experiment? – After few weeks of using this technique, I started receiving more and more search engine traffic because of those keywords that I had used in the comments section. I am now continuing to use this technique and results are outstanding.

Bonus Tips for using this keywords technique

If there are multiple comments, don’t reply to all of them at once. You should reply to each one of them individually and use different keywords in every reply. You may also want to repeat some of the keywords that you think are important.
If a visitor needs additional info that is available in one of your earlier posts, then put a link in the comments section to that post and use a good keyword as the anchor text to link to that article. Example – I will show you how to find the best keywords.
Always use the keywords that are relevant to the topic of your posts. Avoid using negative keywords that add no value.

Also, I am doing an another experiment to see if I can increase my AdSense PPC value in anyway using the same technique. If I see a dramatic increase in my AdSense PPC values, I will let you know about it.

Please post your comments and thoughts in the comments section below and I will take it forward. If you use this technique in your blogs, please do let us know how did it go with you. Remember – The success of this technique depends directly on the keywords you choose.

If you haven’t subscribed to my blog yet, please do so (Use Email or RSS) to receive such articles in future by either email or in your RSS reader.
[tags]How To, Keywords, Search Engine, Optimization, SEO Tips, SEO, Keyword Research[/tags]

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4 things to consider before submitting your site to web directories

Raj — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:00:07 +0000

We’ll know how important it’s to have as many as quality links from different websites to your site and most of us tend to rely on directory submission to get back links from high PR directories and its pages. But you should know that submitting your site to every directory doesn’t really help you in gaining more PR or any kind of benefit. Why? – Because, search engines have started to scrutinize web directories and their website inclusion process. The chances of a web directory getting penalized is very high when it doesn’t follow certain quality guidelines and hence your backlinks could be considered paid text links.

For the benefit of those who are interested in submitting their websites to various directories hoping to get some link love from search engines, here are 4 major points that you should consider before you decide to submit your website to a directory.

1. Does the directory accept paid submission? If a web directory accepts paid submission, that is, you pay the directory certain amount of money to get listed in their pages, someday that directory could get banned from search engines and you will stop receiving any kind of benefit from your listing in that directory. Why? – Because there could be no quality guidelines that the web directory might follow to list your website for a fee, wherein that fee is not used to main the software, web servers, payment to people who manually review a site etc. It could be just a money making directory but not a directory of genuine websites having good content.

2. Does the directory require a compulsory backlink if they list your website in their directory? If yes – This MAY be ok to a certain extent. But if a directory lists all sorts of websites and require a backlink before a site is listed its pages, think again. Such directories are only looking at getting as many as sites listed in its pages to get more backlinks and then use the traffic to make a lot of money. They could get banned any day in future. And since you are linking out to them, you may also suffer the penalty to a certain extent.

3. Are there any quality guidelines that the web directory follows to list a website? Is there a manual inclusion process or links are automatically placed in the directory? There are tons of directories on Internet which accepts websites from online/offline tools and that too without any kind of manual review of the website submitted, so, every site that’s submitted is listed. Such directories do not really offer any benefit to you in short/long term. Think again!

4. Consider the quality of URLs in the directory before you submit your website for getting listed in it. Lookup the category and sub-category in which you want to list your website and then browse the links of those websites that are already listed there. Check to see if those websites have good content and are genuine. There is not point in getting listed in a directory that consists of only low quality links despite manual review process.

I am sure, SEO experts might add more points to the list above. If you have something to say, please write in the comments sections below and share your thoughts.
[tags]Directory Submission, Internet, Search Engine, SEO[/tags]

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Another simple way to increase Alexa ranking of your website

Raj — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 09:00:32 +0000

If you had missed on my previous post on a trick to increase Alexa ranking of your website and blogs, don’t worry. The new way that I have discovered to increase Alexa ranking is simple and better than the one I had mentioned before and it works without having you install the Alexa toolbar on your system.

Increase Alexa rank of your website with Alexa Traffic Rank Button

This traffic rank widget allows you to place a Alexa traffic rank button/widget anywhere onto your site. It’s been over two weeks since I have placed this widget on my blog site. You can see it on the right hand sidebar. And my observation is that, this traffic rank widget serves the same purpose as that of the Alexa toolbar, that is, count every unique visitor to your website for a credit towards your ranking. In two weeks, my traffic rank has seen a gain of close to 40,000 ranks. It was somewhere in the range of 220,000 to 230,000 and now it’s around 188,000.

If you want to know how the Alexa traffic rank affects your website, I recommend you read my earlier post on how to increase Alexa traffic rank of your website.

Sounds interesting? Place a traffic rank widget on your site too. It’s here!
[tags]Alexa, Alexa Rank, Alexa Toolbar, Blog, How To[/tags]

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Bloghash.com is Now 1 Year Old!

Raj — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:06:45 +0000

It’s been an year from this day since BlogHash.com was launched and has seen good progress. During this time, I explored a lot about blogging, different blogging platforms, ways of publicizing a blog and also I now know quite a few things about search engine optimization and marketing.

To my personal life, blogging has made a lot of difference. I now do better time management than before, read between the lines for a story that I can post here, I look for opportunity in every article that I read but I am yet to learn to create controversies like most bloggers do. Perhaps some day I will learn that too!

I want to thank my readers, visitors and everyone of you who have given me feedback that encouraged me to make improvements and keep writing.

Good luck!
[tags]blogging[/tags]

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