Techol - Latest Tips, Tricks, News and Productive Hacks

Stumbleupon is one of the best social bookmarking sites in the world. You will be getting tons of visitors from it, if you uses it properly. From my experience it’s true. The main source of visitors to my blogs are referred by stumbleupon. But, in order to get huge visitors, you need to know – how to optimize and build up your blog and stumbleupon profile for getting more stumbles. I have read so many tips for it and had even created some from my experiences. I’ll describe briefly about them through this simple Guide for stumbleupon.

1. Tag your article under correct Tags.If your tag changes, then you may won’t get the visitors who loves to read such articles and vice verse.
2. Give great importance to the Title you gave to the stumble. It is known that stumble upon have great love towards articles named as “top 10 ____” ,”‘What is____”, “how to _____”, “the complete list of ____” etc.
3. Add a stumbleupon Badge to your blog posts – encourage your readers to give you one thumbs.
4. Join in groups and create lots of friends in stumbleupon. Your community will be having great influence on the stumbles you get.
5. Add more and more friends who are willing to help you and loves to read/stumble your articles.
6. Send the URL of your posts directly to the browsers of your friends. Ask them a stumble in a polite way.
7. Don’t let your friends think that you are making use of them.Instead, do favors back to them also.Read their articles.Stumble them before they tells you to do so and subscribe to his/her favorites. Let them consider the friendship with you as a mutual relationship !
8. Make use of stumble exchanging sites like stumbleudon and suexchange. They really works in bringing you more stumbles and there by more traffic.
9. Optimize your page loading page. Stumblers may won’t like to wait for your big page to load. They may push the button to go to another stumble !
10. Decrease the number of ads in your post. Stumblers will get angry if you hesitate them with lots of ads. The more number of posts you have, the less stumble you gets. Remove pop-up and toolbar ads for best result.

Just try to put these tips in practice. I’m sure that there will be an increase in your page views within a week. I’ll be coming with more tips soon.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a must to-do if you want to drive a lot of traffic to your blog.

In this post you will be learning how to get your site in the index/directories of the top 4 search engines:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. Windows Live/MSN
4. Ask

Google

The simple first steps to get your site indexed:

1. Fill up the Site Submission Form over here.
2. On the next step you may need to confirm the ownership of your site, either by uploading a page to your site or adding a meta tag to your site.
3. After your confirmation, just wait for the bots to index your site.
4. In the mean time you can do some link exchange with some sites with a higher PR (Page Rank) than yours. Its recommended to exchange links with a site with higher than PR3. Link exchange will help you to get traffic and also in the index progress as the Bots will visit these higher PR rank sites and when they find your link over there, they will index it.
5. Use social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg. Doing these will help you increase your popularity.

Yahoo

The basic steps:

1. Submit your site Here. Make sure you are logged-in to Yahoo before submitting the URL, or else it you can log-in to yahoo after entering the URL.
2. If you want to do some investment for your site on Yahoo, you can select from the plans that appear after the URL submission.
3. In the mean time you can do some link exchange with some sites with a higher popularity than yours. Link exchange will help you to get traffic and also in the index progress as the Yahoo Bots will visit these higher popularity sites and when they find your link over there, they will index it.
4. Use social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg. Doing these will help you increase your popularity.

Windows Live/MSN

Here are the easy steps:

1. Submit your site Here. Make sure to fill the Captcha before submitting.
2. That’s it…wait for the MSNBots to do their work.
3. In the mean time you can do some link exchange with some sites with a higher popularity than yours. Link exchange will help you to get traffic and also in the index progress as the MSNBots will visit these higher popularity sites and when they find your link over there, they will index it.
4. Use social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg. Doing these will help you increase your popularity.

Ask

There’s no specific way to submit your site to Ask. Ask doesn’t offer any site submission ways for free. But the Bot at Ask does crawl the web and it automatically adds pages. And being in DMOZ helps in fast submission to Ask.

Note: Many of the tricks below can be used on any website(marked by * | Non-wordpress as well as Wordpress hosted websites)

1. Redirection with CO.CC*

   CO.CC as you might already know, is a free domain(actually sub-domain) registration service. Some of the best features of co.cc include..

   • Google Apps Supported
   • DNS Service: Delegate CO.CC domain like a .com
   • Changeable Zone Records: Co.cc supports for CNAME, A, MX, NS records!
   • Google Adsense supported

   There are many other free Redirection service like co.nr, .tk, co.tv but co.cc is recommended. You’ll understand the reason in the next trick.

2. Subscribe to Google Apps*

   Google Apps lets you have name@yourdomain.co.cc email ID. Get a Standard Edition for FREE. Standard Edition provides 50 IDs. If you earn enough bucks by advertising, you can also buy the Premier Edition of Google Apps. Some of the best features of Google Apps Standard Edition include:

   * Your domain Gmail
   *Your Domain Gtalk
   * Google Calendar
   * Google Docs
   * Google Sites

3. Free RSS/SMS Alerts of new posts on your blog*

   RSS Alerts
   
   Its simple! All the wordpress blogs already have a RSS feed. For your blog, it will be yourblog.wordpress.com/feed>. Just replace the ‘yourblog‘ with your blog’s domain. You just need to tell your visitors or give them link in one of your posts(It is often preferred to make the post sticky).
   
   SMS Alerts(by Google SMS Channels)
   
   These are the steps to create an sms channel and alert your subscribers via SMS, for free, of course…

   1. Go to GoogleSMSchannels.
   

4. Add Widgets

Out of the various widgets available, I recommend you using these–

• ChatRoll.com Chat Room. There are various Chatrooms available to be embedded, but ChatRoll is much better because No, plugin is required, supports sounds, highly customizable, easily embeddable Discussions etc. are supported.
  
• Dhingana Music Widget (Recommended only if your target audiences are Indian and your blog/website is somewhat related to Music/Youth) Listen to songs online. Afetr you add the widget, your visitors will ba able to listen to the songs LIVE on just your blog. Loved Dhingana? Add it to Orkut!
• Add Fun polls to your blog. Lets get back to the official wordpress. Polls. Just as you open your Dashboard, on the right, there’s Quickpress, Click the ‘Create a poll button , then ‘New Poll’, create the poll and save it. When done, open the list of polls, choose your poll and click ‘HTML code’. Copy the short address and not the long one(Choose the one [Polldaddy xxxxxx]). Go to Widgets page, drag the ‘Text’ Widget to the sidebar and paste the code in it. Keep asking the visitors about the website, ask fun polls.

5. Contact Forms

I recommend Wufoo form creator, for the following reasons…

• 3 forms avalable for free.
• Easily Embeddable
• No Ads, even in free forms
• Highly Customizable(Create your own themes etc)

Go for it, create forms and link them directly from your blog. Such forms help to keep your own Email ID safe and also add to the looks of the website.

6. **Logo

Create a logo for your website, Just to spread the word. Like, for DevilsWorkshop, I would suggest something like this to be posted in forums etc. with link to DW…

To make 3D header online for free, check out this website.