Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Top Misc Content on Internet

Top Misc Content on Internet


How to use bullet points - Trade Secrets of Communications

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 08:03 AM PST

"Well, if there’s gonna be any shooting…I gotta get my rest.”

Clint Eastwood as ‘The Man With No Name’, in For A Few Dollars More

Every good western needs a shootout. But it isn't just gunslingers for whom the bullet can be a best friend. Used judiciously, the bullet point can be one of the most effective weapons in a writer's armoury.

For a start, there can be very few writing devices that combine such a wealth of different functions. By way of example, let me demonstrate how bullet points are used for:

  • Drawing the reader's eye to key points
  • Making information-heavy text easier to read
  • Condensing lists
  • Breaking up technical information into manageable chunks
  • Lending authority to important statements

Not bad, eh?

But – just as with real bullets – bullet points must be used with caution. Use them too often and your text can sound hectoring, as if you're giving your reader a series of lists; get them wrong and you look unprofessional. So, here are some tips to ensure your bullets always hit the target.

Trigger happy tips and tricks

Sure shot

Whilst it's true that bullet points allow you to circumnavigate certain grammatical rules, you must make sure you are consistent. If one point isn't a full sentence, none are; if you do use full sentences it's best to begin with a capital letter. Starting each point with either a verb or a noun makes your bullets sound consistent, but active verbs work best (see how we like to write our bullet points, above). And always use the same tense for each verb.

The wild wild Web

Bullet points work especially well in the quick, scan reading world of the Internet. With a readership that is impatient for information, getting to the point quickly (and noticeably) is even more important, so make sure that your main message is at the start of each bullet point.

Law and order

It's not the law, but bullet points work best if the text introducing your list ends with a colon. Consider the order of your bullet points. If some are more important than others, should it be a numbered list? Are there some points that belong together? If you have more than 5, could they be broken into two groups?

Key points

Bullet points are eye-catching. Summarising the key points of your writing in bullet points means that if the readers only see that section, they still hear your key messages. But remember that bullet points communicate efficiency rather than warmth, so avoid them when you want to build rapport or deal with a sensitive issue. Shorter bullet points, of similar lengths have the greatest impact.

VJLine Comes Up With Web Based Tutorial (WBT)

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 06:10 AM PST

VJLine is now more focused to provide e-learning domain with quality tutorials developed using advanced tools making it more interactive.
 
We develop customised tutorials according to your requirements and make sure that stand at user's expectation. To make it more effective, we provide it with more sections including tutorial objective, summary, and learner's assessment. It finally produces an analysis report that explains users’ weak and strong part according to the assessment.
 
There are following tutorials, which are available for demo:
  • The C for beginners
  • The C++ for Beginners
  • Internet Browsing
  • Visual Basic
  • Computer Hardware
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO – Basic and Advance Level)
  • SAS
We are looking more reliable and long lasting relationship with you to bring dramatic change in education industry.
 
Skype: VJLine

What’s the Best Time to Write?

Posted: 23 Jan 2012 04:33 PM PST

Writers have mood swings that at times affect the writing condition. There are times when they feel like writing and sometimes not at all. But writers need to write every day especially if writing is their main bread and butter. But what is the best time to write? Here are some points to consider when it comes to choosing the best time to write:

1) Most Creative Time. The best time to write must be the time when you are at your most creative. For some, it could be early in the morning or late in the evening. It depends. Find your most creative moments. Try with different times of the day to find the best time to write.

2) Impulse and Desire. When you suddenly feel like writing it is best to take the time to follow your impulse to write. It is essential to recognize these impulses as it allow you to produce more writings. When the desire to write comes, heed them since it is the best time to write.

3) Peaceful. The best time to write would be when you are at your most peaceful state. You can write at the comforts of your home or visit relaxing places. It would be the best time to write when you are quiet because that is when your ideas run freely.

4) Distraction-Free. Remove all kinds of disruptions. Find out what disrupts you the most and implement ways to remove it before you start writing.

5) Deadline is Approaching! There are some writers who become more creative when deadline for writing is drawing near. If you can do that, set shorter deadlines for yourself.

Choosing the most creative time is quite complicated. You must test with different times of the day, moods, and occasions in order to find the best time to write your masterpiece.

Bad examples of anchor text from an SEO content writer

Posted: 23 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST

Ted Koppel 1976

No, not you, Ted Koppel. Wrong kind of anchor.

The last article explained how to use anchor text to build linkbacks.  Now, let’s make that a little more concrete by looking at some good and bad examples of anchor text.

You see a lot of random anchor text on websites.  Don’t do this!  Here are some bad examples of anchor text usage.

Why shouldn’t an SEO content writer use anchor text like this?

What’s wrong with these examples?

In the first example, the anchor text is “here”, which says nothing to search engines about the client’s site.  Bad, bad, bad.

The second example uses the client’s URL as anchor text.  Again, this misses the opportunity to tell search engines that it’s relevant to travel advice.

In the final example, the anchor text includes the keyword, but includes a lot of other junk too.  It effectively makes the whole phrase “the best place for travel advice” into one big keyword.  How often will users search using that exact phrase?  Not as often as with the simple two-word phrase “travel advice.”

Now, I threaten to get myself into trouble here, because there are times when you do want longer, less common phrases.  They’re called “long-tail” search terms, and they are relevant to the customer buying cycle, but that’s an advanced keyword research concept and can be safely ignored for our introductory purposes here.  For the most part, as an SEO content writer, you should stick to just your keyword as anchor text.

More things to avoid in anchor text

Be careful not to be deceptive in using anchor text.  If the site has little to do with travel advice, that’s bad etiquette.  Likewise, if the context of the link suggests something other than being taken to the client’s site, that’s bad too.  For example, if a definition of the keyword is suggested, and then user gets transported to a commercial site, that’s deceptive.  Don’t do it.

Another thing usually good to avoid is building linkbacks within the body of the article.  The risk here is that the article will turn into one big advertisement.  Article directories usually want solid, relatively impartial content.  It depends on the site that publishes your work, but most prefer you to save the linkback for the resource box at the end.  Doing otherwise might get your article rejected.

Good use of anchor text

As stated in the previous article (but which cannot be overstated), remember the following points to make the best use of anchor text:

  • anchor text is what’s displayed to the user as the hyperlink
  • the words of the anchor text tell search engines something about the site to which they link
  • use the keyword as anchor text

Free Online Article Rewriter Software 2012 internet search engine optimisation freelance work

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 11:15 PM PDT

Article Content Spinner With Resale Rights

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 08:09 PM PDT

ScienceDirect - Computers and Composition, Volume 27, Issue 3, Pages 161-246 (September 2010)

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 07:59 PM PDT

Article Writing Services

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 07:34 PM PDT

22 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue [Infographic] | Copyblogger

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 07:25 PM PDT

The Art Of Content Marketing | Smashing Magazine

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 04:57 PM PDT

iWriter : Article Writing Service | Get Content For Your Website, Cheap!

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 04:54 PM PDT

A Rant (Mostly) About Web Content

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 02:17 PM PDT

Writing for the Web: Table of Contents

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 02:16 PM PDT

5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang | Copyblogger

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 02:11 PM PDT

Is Pinterest Traffic Worthless?

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 04:00 AM PDT

image of pinterest logo

You’ve seen tons of articles raving about it.

How it’s driving more traffic than anything in the known universe. How you need to be “pinning” and have “pinnable stuff” or you’re going to fail at this magical new social network. How it’s the greatest thing since, well, the last greatest thing.

And you want someone to be straight with you. So here’s the truth …

Pinterest traffic is worthless.

But so is all traffic — unless you do something with it.

Seeing patterns that aren’t there

The problem with most of what’s being written about Pinterest traffic is that it’s pointing out the wrong things. What passes for “reporting” is someone opening Google Analytics, seeing a spike in referrals from Pinterest, and writing an “OMG! Lots of Traffic” post.

Very few are taking the time to do any due diligence on the larger picture.

Are people clicking through, or is the “traffic” just a remote call to the pinned image? Where are your visitors going? What are they doing? Does the traffic convert?

You have to ask real questions, and look for real answers, not patterns based on what others think they’re seeing.

And the wonderful thing about running a business online is that almost everything is testable, trackable, and adjustable.

What’s really going on with Pinterest traffic?

Data doesn’t lie (at least when you’re using it correctly).

Understanding your data — traffic, patterns, and conversions — is critical to your content marketing strategy. Especially when it comes to a new traffic source.

At Copyblogger Media, much of what we do is guided by data — traffic patterns, market analysis, feedback, customer input, and conversion scenarios.

And the increased Pinterest traffic we receive is treated no differently.

We watch, track, analyze, and correlate to figure out how best to capitalize on this new traffic source. Here are a few things we’ve discovered …

Traffic:

  • In the last three months (Jan 1-Mar 28), Pinterest helped traffic grow on each of our sites.
  • For Copyblogger, Pinterest was the #3 referring website, bested only by Facebook and Twitter.
  • Between January 1st and March 5th, when the 15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly infographic was posted, Pinterest sent close to 15,000 visits. Based on the number of times it was pinned, this told us that fewer than half of the people who pinned the image actually clicked through.
  • In the week following that infographic, Pinterest sent 2.7 times as much traffic as the three months before.
  • Individual post activity seems to hold a long shelf life when it’s popular on Pinterest. Often, a tweet is lifeless within a day, where a pin can continue pulling traffic for weeks after being published.
  • During this same three-month period, Pinterest was the #29 referring site for StudioPress.
  • While the amount of raw Pinterest traffic — the number of visits — is smaller for StudioPress than for Copyblogger, visitors to StudioPress stay much longer and visit more pages on average. For example, the average visit duration for a Pinterest-referred visitor on Copyblogger is 0:00:32, compared to an average of 0:05:28 on StudioPress.
  • Pinterest visitors check out 1.16 pages on average after clicking through to Copyblogger, compared to 6.34 pages on StudioPress.
  • The bounce rate for Pinterest visitors on Copyblogger averages out to 91.7%, StudioPress is 49.9% on average. This is much higher than our site averages, and higher than most other traffic sources.

Visitor Flow:

  • Infographic pins have exceptionally high bounce rates and very short visits, usually less than a minute. However, other pins (such as the 56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest post) that led to straight copy had much longer visits and lower bounce rates.
  • On that Pinterest marketing post, the majority went on to the main page, followed by the Internet Marketing for Smart People, Genesis, and SEO site quality pages.
  • On days when Pinterest activity was particularly high, traffic increased to each of our product sites from Copyblogger.
  • 89.6% of Pinterest-referred visitors to Copyblogger were new to the site. Only 44.4% of Pinterest referrals on StudioPress brought new visitors.
  • The StudioPress top Pinterest-pulling post included an infographic about How Developers are Driving the Business Adoption of WordPress.
  • The vast majority of other StudioPress popular pins were all themes or showcase websites. These pins, on average, showed very low bounce and exit rates, with most continuing on to the themes page, the showcase, the blog, or the features page.
  • On average, they also showed fewer new visitors, which historically correlates with low bounce rates on our properties.

OK, so what does all of this mean for you?

In short, it means:

  1. You need to have specific goals for using the traffic from Pinterest.
  2. Work with the traffic as you would from any source — driving it to landing pages and through a conversion path.

For example, we’ve optimized certain pages on Copyblogger to drive visitors to our list and product pages. We’ve found that the traffic from Pinterest can be also driven to those sources, if a clear call to action is present.

On StudioPress, optimizing showcase pages to drive traffic to the related themes has shown an increase of on-page time and conversions — especially for repeat visitors.

So, even though the traffic from Pinterest for StudioPress was much lower than for Copyblogger, the overall bounce rate was also lower, on-page time was higher, and conversions were better because the path was more predictable.

Armed with that data, we can better utilize the traffic on all of our sites through tracking and testing.

And so can you.

Our analysis shows us a number of best practices for converting Pinterest traffic:

  • Infographics and smaller images command more click-throughs because they’re unreadable from the Pinterest site.
  • Infographic headlines are key to getting people to click through.
  • Compelling subjects covered with too-small-for-Pinterest font choices are ideal.
  • People who do move around your site upon arrival will likely follow a predictable path (for example: a showcase theme pin leads to a page path that is more likely to start with the themes gallery than the blog).
  • You can control how traffic responds by making a specific call to action on your pin’s landing page.
  • Longer visits on pins that bring repeat traffic is an important metric, since on commerce-driven sites you may need to get someone to your page a few times before they buy.
  • Pinterest doesn’t sell stuff — you do. By funneling the traffic properly, you can convert visitors into customers.

Traffic from any source is only worthwhile if you have specific goals for it. You can use Pinterest for customer engagement, personal branding, or as an entry point to your conversion funnel.

But you need to understand what your traffic is doing in order to accomplish those goals. That’s where your data comes in. (And if you’re looking for a place to start, try Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics: An Hour A Day).

So is Pinterest traffic worthless? That’s up to you to find out.

Major props to Jessica Commins for her valued assistance with the data recon.

About the Author: Tony D. Clark is the COO of Copyblogger Media. You can follow him @nestguy on Twitter if you’re into the whole brevity thing.

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