Which of the three services do you like (you can like all three) and for what purposes are you using them?

Do you buy into what this article stated – Google+ is Awesome. Facebook Maimed, Twitter Mortally Wounded | Singularity Hub

Vote here or just leave a comment with your thoughts if you like all 3 services equally or have no real preference at this time:

Technically Speaking, how many think that the “awesome” Facebook announcement was lame? (leave a comment also if you want to answer that one!)

Related articles

• Google should just buy Twitter already. At any price. (agrawals.org)
• Google Realtime Search (wir-sprechen-online.com)
• What’s the Deal with Google+? (directcontact.ca)
• Google’s Clinton Says Google + Great Success Already (seroundtable.com)
• Google Plus for Business (insideview.ie)

These are good tips – 7 Things to do From the First Day of Blogging:

This is a guest post by Karan who blogs at Karnlabs. If you like to write for Shoutmeloud, do read: Shoutmeloud revenue sharing program.

Here I have listed 7 things which a new blogger must do in order to lead his blog to success. Follow them and see your blog flourishing:

Blogging tips for new blogger

Create Sitemaps and submit them to Search engines.

This is the easiest way to get indexed and get your blog crawled by search engines.

This is the most basic step towards Search engine optimization and must be done whenever you setup a new site. If you are using wordpress then you can use this plugin which automatically creates a sitemap and submit it to search engines.

• Google XML sitemap: WordPress essential plugin
• How to submit blog sitemap to Bing

Engage with other bloggers on social networks

Participating in discussions with other bloggers on social networks like facebook and twitter is a great way to build up relationships with other bloggers of your niche and build up your own blogger’s network.

• How to form a community around your blog?
• 8 Important tools to make your blog rockstar

Offer different ways to subscribe

It is really difficult for your first time visitors to remember your name and revisit your blog. Hence, you should provide subscription services like Email subscriptions and RSS subscriptions. This will help you build readers and greater exposure for your content.

• Add to any WordPress Feed subscription plugin
• Email Subscription offer: A must have for all the bloggers
• Feed Subscription reminder plugin for WordPress
• How to add stylish feed subscription widget at sidebar

Plan out and works as per the schedule.

It is a must for all bloggers to have a Date-sheet or a schedule to plan out days for posting, blog commenting, researching, reading other blogs.  You can also pre-decide thetopics of your posts for each day and work towards it. This is a great way to ensure consistency in posting and link building.

Schedule your blog post to never run out of blog post

Technically Speaking, was that 7? Go read more …

One more from this blog that is loaded with some good info like the 5 Ways To Get Users To Your New Website:

Here are 5 ways I’ve used to launch a website and get the first users to my site.

1. Target Your Niche On StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon has a tech savvy base of people who are looking for cool websites just like yours.  When they are bored, they check Stumbleupon to see what cool new stuff has just been launched.

What’s great is that you can target the exact group who might be interested in your site.  For example, with BuyersVote.com I knew people into consumer info and possibly bargains would like the site, and I was able to target those groups.

Pros: Only $0.05 per visitor (way less than Adwords).  Can target people with relevant interests.  Can see a feedback report afterwards with what percent of people liked/disliked it.

Cons: Stumbleupon users are pretty click happy and are just trying to prevent boredom, so they tend to have a high bounce rate.  But then again, aren’t most web users?  This is a good test to see if your homepage is grabbing people’s attention.

2. Tell people your competition sucks

If you’re making a cheaper/better/faster alternative to an existing product, why not tell people that your competitor sucks?  Use their name right in the headline.  These ads tend to have a high click through rate, and your ideal early adopter is someone who is currently using the competition and is fed up.

Facebook ads work well for this, and their ad targeting is outstanding, but it can work elsewhere also like in Adwords or blog posts.  You may recall I launched FeedmailPro.com because I was fed up with Aweber and thought they sucked.

Pros: Works best when going against an established competitor.  Usually gets a high click through rate.

Cons: Sometimes you’ll run into problems using a trademark in your ad headline and Facebook or whoever will take it down.  But if it happens no biggie, you just take it down or reword it.  Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

3. Try to rank for long tail keywords

Traffic from organic search results is free, and 98% of people don’t click the ads when doing a Google search – they use the organic search results.  So obviously, ranking in search engines is great.  The problem is it’s very difficult for a brand new website.

The solution?  Target long tail keywords first – keywords which are more specific, have more words, are more obscure, etc.  One good way to make a long tail keyword is to add a city name or regional keyword on the end.

For UniversityTutor.com this is exactly what I did.  I had a couple dozen subjects (algebra, chemistry, Spanish, etc) and a bunch of cities (Austin, Boston, San Jose, etc) with tutors signed up.  So I combined the subject and the city name (and added ‘tutor’ in the middle) to auto-generate a bunch of long tail keywords, such as “calculus tutor Austin, TX”.  Then I auto-generated pages on the site that targeted those.  Within a few weeks I was getting 500 visitors per day (for free) from organic search results.

Even a brand new site can rank for long tail keywords with just on-page SEO.  If you can start getting traffic for long tail results, then you have early adopters who will eventually give you links, and you’ll eventually rank for more competitive keywords too (although this takes a while).  Oh yeah, and don’t forget to create a sitemap after you do this so Google actually finds the new pages.

Pros: Free!  Brings lots of traffic.

Cons: You need at least SOME good content on the pages for this to work.  It can be user-generated if your users are submitting content (this is best), otherwise you’ll have to generate it yourself.

Technically Speaking, this is a great blog to bookmark and read more …

Found this video on how to make your wordpress blog search engine friendly this post here:

Technically Speaking, even though it’s a video, there is some more good info to read more …

This is another great place to start if you are analyzing your blog’s landing pages:

Step 1 – Identify Problem Pages

This is easy to do with Google Analytics – just go to Content -> Top Landing Pages, and check the chart at the bottom of the page. These are the pages that visitors are most likely to enter your site through. Now check the column to the far right – Bounce Rate. This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without looking at another page on your blog. They hit the landing page, get what they want (or not) then leave.

If you have any high bounce rates in this section (80%+), you’re missing out on further page views from these first-time visitors. This is vital; pulling readers further into your site is essential to converting visitors to subscribers and/or sales.

Step 2 – Analysis

Before we start optimising the page, we need to do some more research. Here are the two main things you can do:

• Click on the name of each post, and look at the Time on Page. Is it significantly lower than the time it takes to read the article? If so, it’s likely that the reader is not finding the answer to the question they had when they clicked through.
• Ask them. Set up a Poll on the page, entitled “Help me improve this article: What information were you asking for?” Give a few options, and don’t forget to add ‘something else’ as an option. Alternatively, a simple “Did you find the information you were looking for?” can be useful. Experiment with putting it at the top and bottom of the post, to see if people are reading the whole article before bouncing.
• Check the entrance sources for the post on Google Analytics. Are people mostly finding the article through Google images? This might account for the high bounce rate.

Step 3 – Optimise

You should now have some ideas on how you might optimise the article. Perhaps there’s more information you want to add, maybe you want to shorten it, or then again maybe you want to make it more appealing and add more images. Then again, maybe the site design is unattractive, or there are too many ads or other annoying things on the page. Whatever you do, don’t assume; test.

Also, do ensure that there are links and pathways to other content on your site! This is essential. Maybe your related posts plug-in and category list are not effective – you might have to tell/coax your reader into looking deeper.

If you have several ideas on how to optimise the page, you may want to use Google Web Optimiser to run several new versions of the page. Each visitor will be randomly directed to one of your test pages, and you can compare the metrics against each other at the end of the test.

Technically Speaking, this blog post is something you want to read more.

As we all know, Google is everywhere. There is really no big surprise by this article about Google showing up in news searches now. Not a big deal if you ask me. Soon enough, Google might morph into twitter as many reports are stating. For full disclosure, yes I wrote that.

One thing I did forget to mention in the above SiliconANGLE post is that Google, while just firing up their Google twitter yesterday, has other Google properties already on twitter. So while the “real” Google is now on twitter, Google properties has been around and have already enjoyed the benefit of twitter’s real life conversation search. There was really no need for people to point this out. It is quite obvious that twitter’s benefit’s are now coming to light.

Technically Speaking, since I wrote that above post earlier this morning, the followers of the Google account have jumped another 4,000! I wonder if these people are expecting a really cool announcement or something? Only time will tell, and what I really wonder is when twitter will have to take a piss in the cup – ie. – Twitter is on steroids – follow along and you’ll understand my sense of humor!