You will somehow feels that it’s pointless for you to continue blogging, after all the efforts of maintaining the site and the amount of readers you have earned for yourself. I’m talking about one of my favorite blog - kevipodmusic.blogspot.com which was canceled by Google after several warnings.

The owner of that blog covers news on the music industry as well as posting up links for people to download latest songs. This could be the reason why Google took action against him, it’s all due to licensing and stuffs.

Another rumor surfaces stating that it’s all because Kev got his hand on Mariah Carey’s new track and posted the snippet in his blog hence her label took action against him. I guess only Google knows why for now. (Source)

He then made a statement in his new blog - http:kevipodSmusic.blogspot.com (notice the “S” there) about his thoughts on the account cancellation. Kev said,

As i’ve said i have lost my blogging spirit. If i get the old URL back, or begin fresh with this new one someday again the blog will get deleted. Because since this is a music blog and post music is my duty the same thing will happen again. Maybe a only MUSIC NEWS blog could be an option but not now. Maybe someday i’ll be back.

Wow! What a MEGA crush on him! But I certainly hope that he will come back! Seriously it could do a huge damage on a blogger who has been really passionate towards the entire blogging process! Maybe I could get him to guest blog in the event I’m having my own music blog too? I mean I’ve been a loyal reader of that website!

Now what would you do if your blog gets canceled by Google?

DO NOT BE AFFECTED BY THOSE COMMENTS.

What makes your blog stand out is when you have the initiative to attempt. As much as people comment about your “bad” English, take your precious time to improvise, blogging is definitely a great way for you to polish your skill. Apart from that, I would suggest you to read more articles and look up on words you don’t really understand then apply them.

For me, what makes a blog interesting is the points that are presented by the blogger. We don’t have to pin point the grammatical errors UNLESS his blog serves as a blog that teaches English, that would be another case.

If someone comments too much on your grammatical errors, be polite and thank the person. But as for people who love to pick bones on bloggers with “bad” English, I hope you know, it’s not a BAD blog and if he knows how to deliver his points, people will still come back anyway.

Like I suggested, if you want to improve your English, you can:

• Read more articles.

• Learn to look up for words you really don’t understand, if possible, get a thesaurus dictionary so that you can be exposed to words that have similar meaning to the word you don’t understand, that way, you can apply more.

• Write! Write! And write!

Good luck bloggers!

How many of us actually dare to post an entry asking your readers to comment on your blogging style? Most of the time we hate criticisms, because we think we are right and if they hate your style, they might as well just buzz off.

I just posted an entry in my personal blog, and apparently some readers think that I should just be who I am, nevermind those who think that my way of using foul languages can drive those readers away.

You may ask me, “This is your blog, why do you have to care about how people feel?”

Truth is, I demand improvement for my blogging skills. For those who have a chatbox in their blogs, I’m pretty sure it’s very common to see messages like, “nice blog!“. To me, this type of comment doesn’t serve much benefit to me, and people who posted this type of message can’t define what “nice” really means!

Give it a shot, bloggers, you may never know your weaknesses unless someone tells you about it.

Disadvantages of Writing Paid Posts

• You have to understand that some readers would rather stop reading your blogs if they found out that your blogs have too many paid posts.

• Losing readers would mean losing subscriber as well because they certainly don’t wanna read about things which have nothing to do with your blog

• The concept of having a niche blog would be defeated, sometimes you have to blog about something irrelevant.

• In order to rush writing paid posts, you will end up forcing yourself to include normal entries which don’t seem to have the quality.

Advantages of Writing Paid Posts

• It’s your source of income, if you have a self hosted blog, please don’t forget that you have to pay to maintain your blogs.

• Writing paid posts will trigger you to think fast! If you want to have more opportunities you cannot just waste time like that.

• Some opportunities require your website to be at least in Page Rank 1 and above, here you will learn how to earn more links from other sites and at the same time work on your socializing skills.

• If you decided to commercialize your blog, some advertisers will approach you and that’s how your cash keeps flowing in.

At the end of the day you cannot run away from having debates on writing paid posts, of course, everything has its good and bad sides. If it’s your blog, you do the talking! Some bloggers still have tons of readers despite they have paid posts in between their blogs. Paid posts are not necessarily bad isn’t it?

What is your view on bloggers who write paid posts?

All you need to do is to sign up for an account at StumbleUpon.com

Download the toolbar on your browser so that you’ll see these buttons.

After posting up an entry, just click on “I like it!” button on the toolbar and wait for people to stumble upon your blog.

Now bear in mind:

• At the end of the day, you need to understand that when you submit your blog entry to StumbleUpon, you have already made it clear to yourself that your post is not only about yourself, so try to avoid submitting entries about what type of color you like, instead, blog about how colors will affect someone’s personality, you know what I mean.

• StumbleUpon may drive traffics to your blog, no doubt about that but you’re the one who should determine whether people will come back the next day! Unless you will update everyday and submit it everyday, otherwise you will see a huge difference in statistics.

• Your traffic will increase if at all more than 1 member like your page! And the more people who like your page, the more frequent your post shall appear in StumbleUpon.

• Not everyone will stop and read everything you post, so you should work on the magic to make sure people stay for a while and read it. How? Be creative a little!

Good luck in having more traffics to your blog!

It’s almost the same when it comes to blogging. If you have your own style, more often than not people will remember you. What will drive your readers away is when you start to copy people’s work, now that’s really playing nasty and it’s like a suicide!

When it comes to style, creativity plays important role too. People who are more creative will benefit because they will create something which people have never seen before! But that doesn’t mean ONLY creative people can succeed in blogging

If you think that you’re not creative enough, you can actually make a reference to websites, blogs, news and re-write your opinion in your way. Note: You do not copy people’s content, for instance you read this post and you can actually go back to your blog and start telling people how nonsensical my blog post is.

There are certain styles which people are adopting, for example:

• Humor: Some bloggers like to humor their readers by only focusing on jokes.

• Controversial: Loads of swearing and cussing and guess what, the traffic keeps increasing.

• Comic: Some bloggers only upload their own comics to their blogs.

“My story”: Some bloggers only talk about their stories, what they eat, what they wear, what they like, what they hate bla bla bla.

When you finally have your own style, it’s important NOT to change it in a sudden. I believe an interaction with your readers would be effective before you make your decision. It’s like a humor blog suddenly turns out to be a blog about how depressed the blogger is, some people will take it as a brand new approach, some will abandon it.

Your style of blogging has to be unique in order to catch people’s attention, the key word is to stay focus and tell yourself what do you want to blog about and take it from there. Good luck!

Here’s what you should do, Wordpress readers who write their posts in visual format will be able to choose whether they want the link to be opened in current page or a new page, which I think is quite convenient. I’m not so sure with other blogging platforms but here’s what you can do to allow your readers to click on the link and open it in a new page.

Supposedly I wanna put a link (GoodBoyGoneBad.com) under “My Personal Blog” and have it opened in a new page, this is what I should do.

After placing a url on those words, simply add “(space)target=”_blank” ” after the url like this

And there you have it! People will be able to click on My Personal Blog and open the URL in a new window without quitting this page! Now that’s what I call convenient! Try to walk in your readers shoes because you don’t want people to be attracted to another site and don’t know how to come back!

Happy blogging everyone!

I supposed the current talk-of-the-blogosphere is a widget called BlogRush, and I’ve read about a lot reviews, some are supporting it, some just don’t. I’ve embedded the widget in my blog for quite sometime but I don’t see much traffic flowing in, instead, StumbleUpon was the only thing that helped out a lot!

The problem with BlogRush is this, the headlines keep changing because bloggers update their blogs from time to time, meaning if I make a new post, my headlines are not likely to stick there for quite sometime and people will not notice my blog at all!

Despite the tips offered by a blogger which heavily criticized bloggers who monetized their blogs about pumping in unique titles to attract readers, I doubt people will really aware of it as the updates are going too fast!


Notice the headlines will change as you refresh your page.

Currently BlogRush is having upgrades, I’m not sure how will they really benefit the bloggers but I will not take that widget down YET. So fellas, if you think BlogRush would really help driving much traffic to your blog, I would suggest you to try other methods like how I mentioned in my previous post.

Till then, I’m expecting great improvements from BlogRush. If you want to give it a shot and try your luck to have readers noticing your blog, sign up here.

Happy blogging people!

Let’s say you came back from a party and you wanna blog about it (I assume you have taken some group pictures) and you decide to upload 10 group pictures, trust me, it’s boring! And people won’t bother to read your long long descriptions!So why don’t you pick like 2 or 3 pictures and make them “talk”? Add some funny captions or add talk bubbles in your pictures and they will look pretty alive!

Let me show you the example:

And this

Now you decide which picture will humor your readers? But of course, you don’t do it to pictures that don’t need any effects to captivate your readers. Like I mentioned, if it’s a wonderful scenery, talk bubbles are unnecessary, but if you think the pictures you wanted to present in your blog look dull, make them talk!

Happy blogging everyone!

• Framework: You will have an idea what to blog about, and this is important so that you won’t jump from one topic to another and confuse your readers a lot! A framework will help you to slowly elaborate your ideas.

• Choice of Words: You can use beautiful words to describe something and impress your readers! Through planning you can then think of your choice of words, sometimes it’s important because some words do cause havoc, don’t even think of asking me to give you examples of words that will leave your readers shooting you like crazy.

• Additional Ideas: When you plan your post, you will avoid losing important things which you want to blog about, let’s just say you want to blog about an outing with friends, isn’t that sad if you left out someone’s name unintentionally? Just take your time and plan and you will never go wrong!

• Systematic: How irritating is it when you’re reading a bloggers’ experience in a restaurant then she talks about her boyfriend, then back to the food part, then her mother’s story then back to the food? She has lost it! Not systematic at all! Now you start to understand why planning is important?

• Save Effort To Re-edit: You will go crazy if you keep editing your post because you kept remembering things you left out! And your post just lose its credibility if you are the type who like to rush for a new post. So plan first!

This is your blog, and you’re not doing this because you have time constraint, take your time and plan for your post and you will see the difference. You will ask me, how to plan?

For me, I have a little notebook which I will jot down whatever that comes into my mind then rearrange my points to present them in my blog. Notebook would mean the classic paper made book, not laptop or whatsoever. I adopt mind mapping because it helps a lot for me to elaborate my points.

You can plan in your head as well, the whole idea is to get you to think carefully before hitting the “Publish” or “Post” button. Try to plan before blogging, I’m pretty sure it helps a lot!

• Too personal: Unless the blogger talks about interesting incidents that happen to him/her, many people dislike reading blogs about how their new clothes look like, what did they have for lunch, same activities in school. If you are a superstar then it’s different! Oh everyone wants to know what you’re doing! Otherwise try to avoid focusing too much on yourself if you’re the type who wants more readers.

• Tiny Fonts: Don’t you feel irritated reading blogs which have extremely small size? Maybe you think it looks nice for your theme but truth is if you want people to read your blog, don’t try to torture your readers’ eyes.

• Lack of Updates: If you only update your post every 2 weeks or so, people will forget your existence, try to update as soon as possible! But do not omit the fact that your content has to be good.

• Boring content: Imagine this, you go to a blog that talks about how boring his/her life is… You know you don’t have to go back anymore because you can guess what is going to happen next! People don’t like boring contents so try to pump some energy in it! And avoid blogging in just 2 or 3 sentences like, “I’m so bored today. Not much activities. I’m sick”

• No pictures: Now this is my problem, I receive feedbacks saying that I don’t use pictures in my blog. But in this blog, I do not squeeze my content in one paragraph so that won’t really hurt. As for those bloggers who love to write in a long essay format, please add some pictures in between, give your readers a break! And face it, most readers prefer PICTURES to words.

• Slow Page Loading: You have too many scripts in your blog which cause your page to load very slowly! And when your readers notice that your page loads very slowly, instead of waiting, they might as well read some other blogs. Always keep your blog simple and neat and that will do the trick!

• Too many Ads: Some readers don’t like Ads that are scattered all over your blog, I mean come on, you see Adsense almost every corner of the blog! Learn to organize your advertisement, it’s understood that you want to earn some living for yourself but if you scare your readers away, how are you going to even think of allowing people to click on your ads?

• Sudden change of Style: You will run away from this blog if I start talking about how bad the weather is, what is so special of this new car. Readers have their demands too and if you do not know how to maintain your style of writing, they will leave you.

• Unnecessary Widgets: I don’t know how you guys feel but I hate it when there is song auto-played in the blog that scares me. If you notice, almost all probloggers do not have musics being played at the background! Some widgets are helpful and some just don’t have its purposes and they might even slow down your page load.

• Rude: You do not respect your readers, you think that you are always right and if they hate your blog, they can leave it. Well you certainly have to bear the consequence if it really happens when they decide to just ignore your blog.

I have listed down 10 reasons why you are losing your readers, of course, if you have any extra suggestions don’t mind dropping me a few words at the comment box! I hope all of you will avoid making these mistakes if you want to have more readers. Cheers!

• Submit your website: A lot of fresh bloggers do not know what is submitting websites.This means you allow your website to appear in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and so on. To submit your website in Google, click here. After submitting to Google, you can use Submit Express to submit your websites to other search engines, all you need to do is to enter your email address and website so that they will require you to verify. Please constantly check your spam box. Why is submitting your websites so important? So that people will bump into your blog if they search a certain keywords which happened to be mentioned by your blog. Wicked!

• Websites: You can promote your website through other websites by creating a profile in Facebook, Myspace and Friendster. Sign up for Stumble Upon and Digg. I have a lot of traffic coming from Stumble Upon, so if you think your blog is awesome enough, submit it! You can also apply to have your blog reviewed.

• Comment: Comment in other bloggers’ blogs is very useful because from there you will get to know new friends/ readers. And each time you comment in someone’s blog, try to be sincere and not just go there and say, “Hi, nice blog.”, elaborate more on why you think the blog is fun or showing constructive opinion.

• Forum: Participate in forums (for example: Forum on blogging) will benefit you a lot because the members may be your new readers and you can learn a lot of things through forums. For me, I find The Blog Experiment very awesome because not just I made new friends from there, I learn a lot of things/knowledge!

• Real Life Gathering: If there’s a gathering for the bloggers, attend it! And inform people about your blog when there’s an ice breaking session. This usually works! Some people even have their blog address printed on their name cards, either way, use your chance wisely!

• Contest: Some bloggers would organize a contest and reward the winners, sounds interesting but you need to throw in efforts to succeed this event, you need to brainstorm the ideas and calculate the cost needed. But the benefit is great! People will start spreading about your contest and that’s when traffic flows in!

If you follow the steps above, you will somehow have some new readers. However, whether you can make your readers come back again that’s another story, you can have 100 readers for today and the next day you will have perhaps 30 or 40 readers, why? That’s when you need to examine the reasons why you are losing readers which I will cover later. Any question please leave me comments/contact me by clicking the page above.

• Buddies: Sometimes your good friends don’t comment in your blog, why? Because they can see you the next day and they can tell you about how they feel with regards to your entry!

• Chatbox: When you embed chatbox in your blog, sometimes people will not take the trouble to click on the link to comment, wait for the page to load or pop up, the easiest way to tell you how they feel about your content is through chatboxes.

• Unawareness: Trust me, there are still people who do not know what blog is, so they will read your article just for the sake of reading and killing times.

• Complexity: This is what I hate to see in someone’s blog, after entering my details, I have to enter the verification codes to make sure I’m a human. Sometimes the blog (Best example: Blogspot) only accepts people that has Blogspot/Gmail account to comment. What if your readers don’t have gmail/blogspot account, isn’t that too complicated just to comment?

• Link to comment is not obvious: People do not know if they can comment if your link to comment is not obvious or is located above your article, think about it, people respond to your entry after reading your post and you want them to scroll up again to comment? Some readers might as well just don’t comment!

• Nature of your readers: Some readers just WON’T comment at all and you can’t make them to comment. Or some have already read a post similar to yours. So just deal with it with open heart.

• Readers don’t know if they should comment: Sometimes readers do not know if they should comment to your blog because you did not specifically request for comments, passive readers are everywhere so you must encourage them to comment by adding simple sentence like, “I want to hear from all of you!”.

• You are unfriendly: As much as they comment but they still don’t get heard by you, they might just won’t comment anymore. Don’t let this happen to your blog, try to show some gratitudes to your readers.

• Have original post to refer: This is suggested by Sc_Bone, he says that it’s best to have the comment box along with the original post so that people can comment while referring to the post! It’s a good point and thanks Bone.

It’s not always because of your entry that prevented your readers from commenting, of course people won’t bother to comment if your blog is lame in nature, but if you think you have written a good post, encourage people to comment. Another trick to gain more comments is to have more readers, which I will cover later.

Honestly, having no commentators is still better than having NO loyal readers, I will also write about how to promote your blog to gain more readers. Stay tuned and happy blogging!

I love getting comments as well, but i must admit that I am darn lazy to reply back..any solutions?

Speaking of being lazy, I’m sure a lot of us feel that way (that includes me!), for instance you will just feel lazy to reply to 12 comments saying that they love your post. But try to think for a minute… What will you think if people do not reply to your comments? You will say, “I don’t really care!” But there are some who will think that their comments are not heard so they will not be back to comment anymore.

You’re losing chance to get to know new people, you are losing a potential loyal reader. So don’t let this happen to you! Unless you’re a super well known celebrity blogger, if you’re a fresh blogger, show gratitude to your commentators!

• One by one: What I’m adopting is the one by one style of commenting, meaning I’ll reply to each and everyone’s comment because I don’t have many commentators. This is a classic way to make your commentators think that they are welcomed to your blog!

• Summarize: If you have a lot of comments to reply and you know that it’s a hassle to reply one by one, you can summarize what you have to say. For example, “I am so grateful that each and everyone of you commented and trust me, all of you just made my day! Thanks everyone!”

• Learn to pick: Sometimes among 10 comments, there will be a comment which sounds different and important to you, make sure you will focus on that particular comment because if a commentator were to take a different approach, more often than not he is sincere so show your sincerity back!

• Polite and stern: You can’t run away from having nonsense comments in your blog, cursing your mom, dad, your entire generation or call you names. You can either delete those comments or politely ask them to screw off. If you aim to be a professional blogger and cursing like a mad dog pointing at a particular person will just tarnish your reputation. And you just made your hater feels good!

• Top commentators: You can download top-commentator widget (available for Wordpress users) and also the do-follow plugin so that your commentators will have free links from you! How about Blogspot user? You can always create a manual link by stating there “Best commentator of the week” or whatever.

Commentators are humans and needless to say, people will get offended if they are ignored or what, so try to be humble and show gratitude so that people will acknowledge your good reputation! “Thank you” is often a best way to make someone’s day. So try to show gratitude to your commentators!

Well let me tell you that there are some misconceptions that fresh bloggers should avoid!

• Number of comments: Number of comments do not determine the quality of a blog, and when people do not comment in your blog, this does not mean your blog is awful, there are reasons behind it and there are steps to counter the reasons which you might not know (I will talk about this later).

• Number of readers: It is definitely cool to have a lot of new readers to your blog and fresh bloggers please take note, what makes a blog even cooler is when you have what it takes to have some loyal readers, it’s not an easy task though, it takes time and effort!

• Overnight success: If Shakira were to start a blog tomorrow, I’m pretty sure her blog will be bombarded with millions of readers. Now if you, an ordinary person think that this will happen to you? Then I would suggest you to stop blogging immediately to avoid later mega depression. Your blog will become successful if you are willing to be patience and learn to write something outstanding!

• This is your blog and you can do whatever you like: Get real, you’re a fresh blogger and you must understand that you are responsible with what you’re saying. A lot of bloggers think that it’s cool to diss a religion, race, a particular person, truth is, if you’re aiming to stay at the top, you don’t do this as an “introduction”, that is very bad for your reputation and when you start to have anonymous haters, that’s when you will start to feel the threats.

• Cute widgets will make your blog attractive: The next thing you do is to embed loads of virtual pets, games, random jokes into your blog, although you mean no harm but people will stop visiting your blog if your widgets cause your page to load very slowly.

Those are some general issues which fresh bloggers should bear in mind, if you think that I missed out anything, kindly leave a comment down there and I’ll include you (with your link) and your suggestion in my post! Cheers everyone!

Blogging can have its niche too, some bloggers are excellent in talking about making money online, some bloggers love talking about entertainment and so on. Well whatever it is, it’s not hard to open a new blog and claim that you want to blog solely on FOOD, but what makes it hard is this:

Can you really focus on that topic?

If you are considering about starting a new niche, there are a few things you need to understand:

• Knowledge: So you see everyone is blogging about making money, and you vow to yourself that you want to blog about vehicles and their compartments so that you can be different. Fantastic ideas but later you realize that your knowledge is limited, what are you going to do? That’s when you are facing problems here.

• Focus: This blog is about blogging and information about blogging, what will you feel if after a while you start to see me blogging about how much I love this fruits because they are so sweet and juicy? This means you really need to stay focus only then can you call it a NICHE.

• Competitions: Do not always think that you want to conquer the entire blogosphere just because you have a niche, there are so many blogs that talk about things you want to focus on. Reading blogs is not like buying blogs, if you think that just because John Chow’s site is popular and you can’t blog about making money online anymore? Then you’re so wrong! Thanks to feeds and Google readers, people can choose to read as many blogs as they want, but it’s only up to you to make a difference!

• Target audience: What is your niche about and who are you targeting this for? Teenagers? Adults? General? You decide! At the end of the day, you need to understand that your niche blog will not attract everyone! For instance people who love golf will not find my blog interesting so try to lower your expectations.

• Honesty: You are one step closer to becoming a professional blogger so do not lie in your niche blog. People expect your honest reviews and commentaries on something so if you lie, you are killing yourself.

Before aiming to start a niche blog, think again if you have what it takes and good luck in blogging!

But there’s something I forgot, I know how to blog! And there’s just so many things to learn in blogging, it’s not like the usual “I’m feeling moody today, I love my pink dress.” NO! You wanna get to the top, unless you are already a superstar, then you must bear in mind that most successful bloggers start off without having any blogging knowledge.

Keyword? Consistency

I hope this blog will serve as your daily reads as I will put up useful information about blogging tips, ideas, reviews, commentaries and so much more! Whether from my head or research made by myself after browsing like millions of blogs. I’m not a successful blogger but I always remind myself that I want to stay at the top. And I know one thing,

I’m still learning and I hope my niche blog will benefit everyone!

Till then, show me some love and subscribe to me!