Related Post Widget for Your Blog.

Related post widget is a great way of keeping your readers engaged by helping them to navigate from one post to another in an easy way. It is a great way of reducing bounce rates and increasing traffic to your blog.

Related post widget for Blogger

Normally what happens is a person lands up on one of of your blog's article, read it and then just leave. What if you provide some related articles to the one he is reading at the end of he post? Chances are that he will go on to read some more. This will improve your bounce rate and increase traffic to your blog.

There are many related post widgets options for you. I will be discussing all those in coming days. But the one I liked most is I am going to discuss.

▌ Add related post widget to your blog.

♦ Go to http://blogger-related-posts.googlecode.com/ and fill out the forms.

Blog URL: Something like http://www.mbblogging.com

Mode: You can select related post widget or Recent post widget according to your preference.

Max post: The number of related/recent posts you want to show.

Show titles/thumbs?: If you want your title or a thumbnail (an image from the article) to be displayed.

Thumb size: To select the size of thumbnail image that will appear. There is a list of sizes that are allowed. Choose according to your preference. "-c" is used to crop the image. I will suggest you to use cropped thumbs since not using it will create uneven thumbs and will not be soothing to eyes of readers.

♦ If you are done with above procedure, its time to select the style and appearance of the related post widget.

There are 4 modes available and these modes look like this:

Demo 1

Demo2

Demo 3

Demo 4

You can select any of these 4 modes according to your choice.

♦ Adding related post to your blog: Now, to add related post to your blog, copy and paste the generated code to HTML/Javascript Gadget in your Blogger layouts and you are done.!!

You have successfully added related post widget to your blog.

▌ Features.

♦ Display related posts with/without thumbnails.

♦ Since, images added to Blogger posts are uploaded to PicasaWeb, you can use many custom thumbnail sizes.

♦ You can use one of 2 CSS styles to help you get started quickly.

♦ Display posts with transition effects or as a fixed list.

♦ Many transition options are available like opacity, width, height, font-size.

♦ Optional timeout technique is used to finish widget loading when one or more feed requests were not completed successfully, instead of waiting indefinitely.

♦ Thumbnails loading is delayed until widget has finished aggregating related posts to avoid loading extra images

♦ You can customize it by placing optional parameters -like custom animation- in a HTML comment or HTML5 data attribute.

♦ You can disable widget if current page is not a post page.

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How to Increase Your Email Subscriber List.

Email subscribers

Email subscription is the best way of engagement to your blogger. If you drop a link on any social media be it Facebook or Google+, the ratio of visitors to the reach of link is no where near the visitors you get from your email list. When your article lands up in someone's inbox, most likely it would be read and you will get one visitor.

Most of the bloggers who are new to the Blogging concentrate in dropping links to every place and ignore the importance of Increasing email subscription list. Email subscription is the highest form of engagement to your readers and you must give importance to build up your email subscription list. Email subscription can be a primary source of source of traffic to your blog if you have a large pool of subscribers.

▌ How to increase your email subscription list.

There are various practices to increase your email subscription list.

♦ Place your subscription box.

No one will subscribe your blog until they "see" a subscription box. Putting your subscription box above the fold is very important. Most of the blogs (even Problogger), put their subscription box in right sidebar above the fold. That's the best place to catch readers eye and increase your email subscription list.

♦ What about a pop-up?

Pop-ups are a great way of catching user's attention, since they either have to close it or to subscribe it and they simply cannot ignore it.

However, you may have to limit the pop-ups to once/day/visitors or something like that. If I visit a blog which opens up a pop up every time I open an article to read is annoying and I will in most cases leave. 

♦ Provide unique and fresh content.

If you are giving your readers a great content, then they will naturally subscribe to your articles. People with thousands of people in their Email subscription list achieved this only through unique, fresh and highly informative contents.

♦ Ask people to subscribe.

mbBlogging subscriber box.

At the end of each post, you may ask people to subscribe to your blog. If they find your article useful for them, your chances of getting a email subscriber is more.

♦ Publish series of articles.

You may publish a series of articles and asking your readers to subscribe to your blog to receive the next parts in their mail box.

♦ Give them something free.

Give your readers who subscribe to your blog some incentives like free ebooks. If you don't have one such ebook, you may even start with giving a notepad text document with the list of CommentLuv enabled blogs to increase backlinks. You may put your creativity in this part.

       Last word. You may increase your email subscription list by following these practices. Email subscribers are often loyal readers to your blog who always will come to your blog if there is something updated.

However, while building your email subscriber list, keep in mind these points.

Do not annoy people by pop-ups too much. Limit the pop ups frequency. It may decrease your no. of page views / visitors.

Do not spam Inbox. People like me are very conscious about mail box. If at any stage any one feels you are spamming their mailboxes, they will unsubscribe or put you in the filter list. Be careful.

This was all I can suggest you to Increase your email subscription list. And I humbly request you to subscribe to my blog.
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How to Become A Good Commenter.

Do you want to spam others comment section with your personalized comments? Do you want your comment to end up in spams? I bet you don't.

Commenting is a great way of building backlinks along with increasing traffic to your blog. If done in right way, it may bring a good amount of traffic to your blog and increase your earnings.



There are some points which you must keep in mind while commenting on other blogs.

▌ How to become a good commenter. 

♦ Read the article first. To become a good commenter, you must read the article. Reading will ensure that you will put up a comment relevant to the article. A good commenter always ensures that what he writes is in accordance to the post.

♦ Do not do it for link building. If you think commenting as a link building, you will end up writing Hi!! Hello!! comments on other blogs. Instead, treat it as a way of building relationship with the author of that blog. Do not write one liners comments like "Nice post, keep up the good work!!". The chances are that the author will not even notice your comment.

I personally delete all those one liners comment that says "nice post buddy". I know the article is nice for me otherwise, I would have not published it. 

♦ Are you CommentLuv enabled blog lover? Perhaps you search for ComemntLuv enabled blogs for building backlinks. However, most of the blogs are no-follow, that means they do not pass any juice to your link. Hence, its not a good strategy to search only for CommentLuv enabled blogs. Instead, you can comment on any blog with WordPress, ComLuv, Disqus commenting system where they allow links to your blog.

♦ Stay focused to your niche. You run a blog on body building and end up writing a comment for backlinks on a technology niche, then perhaps you are doing it wrong. Google asks for relevance of links to your blog, and how is that technology niche link is relevant to your body building blog? So, commenting on blogs having that same niche as yours is a must.

♦ Do not put links in your comments. (unless its Wikipedia). There is no need of putting one or more links in the comments unless you have reference of some highly reputed blog. Moreover, you might end up in spam. I have noticed that the default Blogger commenting system puts up a comment in spam folder if there is a link in it. Almost all other commenting system does the same. So, be careful. You may select blogs that generates a backlink automatically from your blog feed to not to waste your time.

♦ End up asking for suggestions. Its a great idea to end up your comments with queries or suggestions. This improves your credibility as a blogger and will compel the author to reply to your comments.

♦ Be the first. The first comment will always stay on the top. If there's 100 comments on a post, I am gonna read the first one and the last one. The last one will keep on changing, so you have to be the first. You can do so by subscribing to the feed of various blogs of your niche and then when there's a new articles published, be the first one to comment on it.

♦ Do not criticize. Constructive criticism is always welcomed by all bloggers. If the author missed some points, you can add them in comments. If you want to suggest something you can. However, you should not criticize the author directly. No one keep a comment of his criticism. It will be deleted or not approved. Trust me.

       Commenting is a great way link building and building reputation in the blogging world. Writing up a good comment will ensure traffic to your blog and stay away from the myth of commenting on CommentLuv enabled blogs only. These points are the basics of commenting. If you want to add some more points to "how to become a good commenter", please use the comment section below.

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Default Sitemap for Blogger and WordPress.

A sitemap is a list of web pages available for the search engine crawlers. Sitemaps are important from the point that you will need to submit your sitemap to different search engines. Although, Search engines today will automatically crawl your articles in time, submitting sitemap will ensure its done sooner. And there is no missing out too.

I have seen most of the bloggers, both blogspot and WordPress users, searching information about sitemap and generating them with the help of softwares, plugins or some websites like www.xml-sitemaps.com/. These are equally helpful ideas for generating sitemaps.

But do you know that both WordPress and Blogger has a default sitemap for you?

Here is how to find your default sitemap for both the platform.

▌ WordPress user.

WordPress provides a default sitemap for the blogs for both hosted or non hosted. You can find your sitemap by adding /sitemap.xml to your homepage address.

Lets say you are usingWordPress.com blog and your address is www.abc.wordpress.com, so your sitemap will be www.abc.wordpress.com/sitemap.xml.

If you are using a self hosted blog on WordPress and have bought a domain, its the same process for finding out the sitemap. If you own the domain www.abc.com hosted onWordPress, its sitemap would be www.abc.com/sitemap.xml.

▌Blogger user.

Blogger also provides a default sitemap for every blog.
If you have a blog as www.abc.blogspot.com you can find your sitemap as www.abc.blogspot.com/robots.txt.

Similarly, if you have bought a domain for your blogspot blog, the sitemap can still be found at www.abc.com/robots.txt.

I am a Blogger platform lover and my sitemap is

Sitemap For Blogger Platform blogs.

          You can submit your sitemap to different search engines like Google and Bing webmaster for faster indexing.

And there is no need to use third party to create sitemap for your blog.

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