Why isn't my blog getting any comments?

Few days back, I had a chat with a newbie. He asked me "Why is that, your blog receives comment but, I don't receive any on my blog?" I have tried to answer this question on this post. I personally get excited when I see comments on my blog appreciating for my work. I'm sure it should be the same for many  people around the blogosphere as well. I have listed few points in this post which I feel stands as an obstacle to receive comments.

1. POOR CONTENT
Its a pretty common mistake that every newbie makes when he/she starts a blog. Their aim is to make money and they want to do it overnight. They copy and paste content from other websites. It is important to note that the content which you copied has already been indexed by Google and your new blog will nowhere stand with the blog that's already well established. So, it is very important to generate your own articles because "CONTENT IS KING".

Secondly, it is important to make your content precise. Be clean and clear with what you say. Don't make the post too lengthy unless it is required. Use bulletins or number the points, wherever required. Highlight the keywords on your post. I would suggest every one to add a bit of humor at places in your post and to share your personal experiences. Try it yourself and see the result, because it works well on my blog and probloggers,like Darren Rowse, too suggest the same.

2. LOW TRAFFIC
The second major constraint would be traffic. I have posted enough articles on increasing traffic to our blogs. So, I suggest you to have a glance at the previous entries on my blog - 
Article 1: How To Increase Traffic To My Blog?
Article 2: Improve Traffic To Your Blog.
Article 3: Increase Traffic To Your Blog With Meta Tag and SEO.
Article 4: Improve Traffic To Your Blog With Social Communities.
Having read these articles, you should have an idea where you are weak at. Optimize your site or methodology and start increasing the traffic to your blog. Apart from those, I suggest you to take part in forums/discussions related to your niche and leave your links there. It works very well, especially for blogs related to my niche (blogger tutorials, hacks, blogger widgets).

3. POOR INTERACTION
The most important factor which you leads to loss of comments and readers would be your interaction with your blog readers, fellow bloggers , forum members and other similar stuff. When some one comments on your blog, make sure you reply to their comment. Ask them to be more expressive and show some gratitude towards them. If you definitely want to make an impact, then I suggest you visit their blog and leave a comment there. This will definitely fetch more comments than what your blog is currently receiving. Also, use the social media to the best extent possible. Would stress this on my next post. Make sure you subscribe to my blog so that, you don't miss the next editions.

4. LACK OF COMMENT PROVOKING QUESTIONS/CONTENT
This is something related to the first point - content. Write on topics that would provoke more comments rather than writing some history about the topic on your article. It is advisable to write every post with a related question that would provoke users to comment on them. Secondly, ask for comments. For example, say your blog is dofollow (read more about dofollow blogs here: How To Make Your Blogger Blog DoFollow?), you may add a final tag on your blog saying - "We are a DoFollow blog. So, express your views about this post to generate a back-link for your blog".

5. LACK OF INCENTIVES & COMPLEX COMMENT PROCESS
If your blog is making good traffic and you generate a good revenue. Still, you don't receive comments. Then, you may run a contest which will temporarily increase the comments on your blog. May be, this will fetch more loyal readers to comment on your blog. Finally, make your comment process simple. Don't ask people for a login and stuff. You can enable comment moderation to prevent spam. So, stop asking people to login for commenting. Most important, make the comment section visible (USE COMMENT FORMS), not like my blog. I have a problem with the comment form, so I'm still stuck with this pop up window.

I have just enlisted a few simple ideas that can generate more comments. I'm sure there are better ways too. So, if you have any of them in your mind, please share it with our readers via comments. SEE!!! THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD GENERATE COMMENTS:)

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Add Image Captions On Hover With CSS3

I'm currently trying out few cool effects with CSS3. You might check out my entry which involves making rounded corners with CSS3 rather than the usual flat straight corners. Here, in this post , we deal with another cool effect namely, displaying the image caption only when you hover your mouse over the image. To check this effect, just hover your mouse over the image below.

Just Another Wildlife Photo
I hope you like the hover effect on this photo. This effect is visible only in the latest browsers - Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, not in Internet Explorer.

Image Credit : Adamhawtin

Are you excited about this trick??? If you are not able to view this effect, it simply means your browser does not support CSS3. I'm pretty sure this trick works on the following browsers - Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Just follow these simple steps to implement this effect on your blog.

1. Login to your dashboard. Navigate to "Layout>>Edit HTML" from your dashboard. Make a back up of your template before you do any changes in the template.

2. Search for the following code in your blog. You may use "CTRL+F" to fasten your search results.

]]></b:skin>

3. Now, paste the following piece of code just above the line you searched in step 2.

#post-image {
}
#figure {
position:relative;
float:left;
margin:10px;
overflow:hidden;
padding: 1px;
}
#figure:hover {
-moz-box-shadow:0 0 20px rgba(0,0,0,0.75);
-webkit-box-shadow:0 0 20px rgba(0,0,0,0.75);
box-shadow:0 0 20px rgba(0,0,0,0.75);
}
#figure .caption {
position:absolute;
bottom:0;
left:0;
opacity: 0.75;
margin-bottom:-115px;
-webkit-transition: margin-bottom;
-webkit-transition-duration: 400ms;
-webkit-transition-timing-function: ease-out;
-moz-transition-property: margin-bottom;
-moz-transition-duration: 400ms;
-moz-transition-timing-function: ease-out;
-o-transition-property: margin-bottom;
-o-transition-duration: 400ms;
transition: margin-bottom;
transition-duration: 400ms;
transition-timing-function: ease-out;
}
#figure:hover .caption {
margin-bottom:0px;
}
#post-image .caption {
width:100%;
height:90px;
padding:10px;
background:#111;
color:#fff;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
#post-image .caption b {
text-shadow: 0px 2px 0px #000;
}
#post-image .caption {
color: #ddd;
line-height: 24px;
font-size: 14px;
text-shadow: 0px 2px 0px #000;
}

4. Save your template. That's it.

IMPLEMENTATION IN BLOGGER DRAFT/POST:

I suggest you to use Yahoo! Smush.it before you upload any photo to Picasa Web Album because your images will load faster when you smush them.  To get more details about Yahoo Smush.it, check this article - Tips and Tools To Speed Up Your Blog. 

Once you upload the image to Picasa Web Albums, copy and paste the URL in a temporary text file. Now, paste the following piece of code in the place where you want the image to appear in your post. That is, shift to the HTML mode in the blogger draft and paste the following piece of code.

<div id="post-image">
<div id='figure'>
<img src="URL OF IMAGE FROM PICASA"/>
<span class='caption'>
<b>YOUR IMAGE TITLE/b>
YOUR IMAGE DESCRIPTION GOES HERE
</span>
</div>
</div>

Replace "URL OF IMAGE FROM PICASA" with the actual URL of your image - the one which you temporarily saved in the text file. Also, change the appropriate text for the title and description of the image. That's all folks. Now, publish your post. You should be able to see the cool CSS effect when you hover  the mouse over the image. Share your views via comments. We love to hear from you!!!!

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Making Rounded Corners With CSS3 On Blogger

Few people kept mailing me regarding the rounded corners in blogger/blogspot blogs. They wanted to show rounded corners rather than the straight edges. Since the number of mails kept increasing regarding this tutorial, I thought to make a post about them. Pretty good example to illustrate this would be consider the following boxes. Just look at the corner sections of each box.

CSS ROUNDED CORNERS EXAMPLE

CSS STRAIGHT CORNERS EXAMPLE

The former looks curved while the latter is flat. That's the trick we are going to learn in this post, that is, to add rounded corners on blogger/blogspot blogs. You may use them in displaying a note(like I do) or may be on the navigation bars or to display HTML codes withing blogger posts and so on. So, you may use them where ever you want. Remember that, this trick will  be visible only in the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera and not in IE. Check out the browser specific attributes table below.

Enough of the stories!!! Let's implement this trick on our blogs now!!! Just, follow these simple steps.

1. Login to your dashboard. Navigate to "Layout>>Edit HTML" from your dashboard. Make a back up of your template before you do any changes in the template. 

2. Search for the following code in your blog. You may use "CTRL+F" to fasten your search results.

]]></b:skin>

3. Now, paste the corresponding piece of code just above the line you searched in step 2. Paste according to your choice; not all of them.

EXAMPLE 1 - THIS BOX WAS IMPLEMENTED USING THE FOLLOWING CODE.

.example1 {
background-color:#F1F1F1;
border:3px solid #DDD;
text-align:left;
width: 525px;
margin:15px 35px 15px 15px;
padding:5px;
-webkit-border-radius: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 10px;
border-radius: 10px;
}

EXAMPLE 2 - THIS BOX WAS IMPLEMENTED USING THE FOLLOWING CODE.

.example2 {
background-color:#F1F1F1;
border:3px solid #DDD;
text-align:left;
width: 525px;
margin:15px 35px 15px 15px;
padding:5px;
-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
-moz-border-radius: 5px;
border-radius: 5px;
}

EXAMPLE 3 - THIS BOX WAS IMPLEMENTED USING THE FOLLOWING CODE.

.example3 {
background-color:#F1F1F1;
border:3px solid #DDD;
text-align:left;
width: 525px;
margin:15px 35px 15px 15px;
padding:5px;
-webkit-border-radius: 36px 12px;
-moz-border-radius: 36px 12px;
border-radius: 36px 12px;
}

EXAMPLE 4 - THIS BOX WAS IMPLEMENTED USING THE FOLLOWING CODE.

.example4 {
background-color:#F1F1F1;
border:3px solid #DDD;
text-align:left;
width: 525px;
margin:15px 35px 15px 15px;
padding:5px;
-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 30px;
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 30px;
-moz-border-radius-topleft: 30px;
-moz-border-radius-topright: 30px;
border-top-left-radius: 30px;
border-top-right-radius: 30px;
}

4. Once you have pasted the code. Save the template. Now, your ready to display them in the place you want. Just use a span or div tag to use the CSS3 of your choice. That is, paste the following code any where in the template area or as a HTML/JavaScript using "Add A Gadget" option on blogger design page or within your posts.

<div class="example1">PLACE YOUR CONTENT HERE</div>

5. Now, save your code. That's it!!!

Instead of adding pictures for rounded corners, if you make use of CSS, the time to load your site will be reduced enourmously. That's the biggest advantage with this trick. You might consider reading the following articles for speeding up your blogger/blogspot blog - Article 1 : Speed Up Your Blogger Blog, Article 2 : Speed Up Your Blogspot Blog, Article 3:  Tips And Tools For Speeding Up Your Blog. Express your views about this post via comments!!!

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Floating Subscribe Buttons To Blogger/Blogspot Blogs

Recently, one of my readers asked for a widget that will display the subscribe icons fixed on his blog, that is, he wanted to display the subscribe icons static as the page is scrolled to the top or to the bottom. It's pretty simple to add this widget on your blogger or blogspot blog. Just have a look at the final preview of the widget for better understanding.

I hope you are excited about the widget. Create a back up of your template before you modify your template. To do this, navigate to "Design->Edit HTML" and make a backup of your template by clicking on the "Download full template" link at the top. Once the back up is over, follow these steps carefully.

1. Search for the following of code in your template. Use "CTRL+F" to fasten your search results. 

<div id='main-wrapper'>

2. Paste the following piece of code just below the line you searched in step 1.

<div style='position: fixed; bottom: 1%; left: 1%;'>
<table border="0"><tr><td>
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOURFEEDNAME" target="_blank"><img alt="Rss Feed Options" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiznYCN1hwH_8fJ4pIr8mOBZfEHQiMCi1ivp7AwXwdrlvJyqQBhTPbqxLTGWxmc1XcVmhPumIL8wP7mbDBN6YUuXV1FQouR3f1bv2pTohLfiBmBN7hHV4KMcRMcmSGj6jW42l4NlXvMx-w/s800/RSS%20Tab.gif" /></a>
</td><td>
<a href='http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=YOURFEEDNAME&loc=en_us' target="_blank"><img alt="Subscribe Via Email Rss" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirVgvGKVFzycmfYtOs-nW7D-2Oi5-UIKoyqgyfxkjBuGvvqzAWgE4tyQVdopvBHMssJtD-tMglhGRH-RxrGy2bLw4MvIlWXelrO62iM1UB_ErFVPEvVbB-uqrY6vDDSF5DibTWYJW-3iM/s800/Email%20RSS%20Tab.gif" /></a>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<a href='YOUR FACEBOOK PROFILE URL' target="_blank"><img alt="Find Us On Facebook" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilmaKy0TsaNUdFIbccP4fSZUrrbDq3WPWyobd3VKrPUSk_jjd9VC_DXRTBEdvvwgjXZZzPOqH6LHH0yRm5vEXbAKNxCq0CbDZ2eWFLme2YsdgdGYYnq5x0Wi1cN18rWx69QXqV5LAbmoY/s800/Facebook%20Fan%20Tab.gif" /></a>
</td><td>
<a href='http://twitter.com/YOUR TWITTER USERNAME' target="_blank"><img alt="Follow Us On Twitter" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu1ZSD2kv8HEJzVl4kwJ01xcUxX76l__LsRMZoTwcTaG1FTFBdMMd1G6qVf4MvepFFBKkaJAEYVhOrZsbRa6ZgI5Vktu2JNV2iBSBrNQtC30OGOP8qfFJvNcg1PkHzOqnzH-E0CjOdqrc/s800/Twitter%20Follow%20Tab.gif" /></a>
</td></tr></table>
</div>

Note: You may add the above code as "Page Element" too. Just navigate to "Design->Page Elements->Add A Gadget" from blogger dashboard and choose "HTML/JavaScript" and paste the code in the window that appears and save it.

3. That's it!!! Save your template!!!

CUSTOMIZATION:

Once you add the above code, you need to make the first four changes in the code (those highlighted in green). First, change the text "YOURFEEDNAME" to the feed name of your blog. You can find this when you login to your FeedBurner Account. Next, replace "YOUR FACEBOOK PROFILE URL" with the URL of your Facebook fan page. Last but not the least, replace "YOUR TWITTER USERNAME" with the user name of your twitter profile. Make sure you save these changes!!!

I hope you like this widget. You may express your views about this widget and if you need some widget of your choice, please do post them via comments and I will try to figure out the code for them. We always love to hear from you!!!

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Infolinks Review - Make Money With Infolinks

Hi friends, it's been quite long since I made a post about making money online. Though many people would be familiar with Infolinks, I just wanted to share my experience with them. To start off, you first should know what is a text link advertising? Basically, text link advertising means to advertise using the text in our blog, that is, advertiser chooses a keyword for his advertising campaign. When that keyword matches with the content on your blog, they get displayed.

HOW DO I EARN MONEY WITH INFOLINKS???

It's very simple. As I said, when the keywords match, the advertisement gets displayed. When people click on these ads, you earn for every click they make. It's pretty simple to understand. To display the ads on your blog, you need to add a small piece of code on your blog. It's very simple. Once you sign up with them, you will be asked to verify your email address. After you complete the initial setup, login to the dashboard and navigate to "Integration Guide". 

Copy the code present on the "1-minute Integration" page. Now, navigate to your "Blogger Dashboard>> Design>> Edit HTML". Search for the </body> tag in your template. Paste the code "Infolinks code" on just above the </body> tag. Basically, you can paste the code any where in between the body tags but,  I prefer placing them at the bottom because scripts placed at the end will load our site faster. Meaning to say that people will see the content first and later the ads which is the right way to optimize your site. For more details on loading your page faster on blogger, you may refer to the following articles : Article 1 - How To Speed Up Your Blogger/Blogspot Blog?, Article 2 - How To Speed Up Your Blogger/Blogspot Blog?, Article 3 - Speed Up Your Blog - Tips And Tools
 

CUSTOMIZATION:

Infolinks offer the 4 customizations namely, the ability to change the color, style of underline (dotted or double underlined), set the maximum number of links per page, category which best suits your blog. It is pretty easy to customize. Just login to your Infolinks Dashboard and navigate to "Integration Guide>>Advanced Integration Wizard". Once you reach this page, it's going to be self explanatory. 

PROS:

One main advantage with Infolinks is that you can happily run the Infolinks ad with the Google Adsense. I guarantee you that there will be no PR ban nor the cancellation of Adsense account. The other advantage would be the newly introduced related tags. You may place them below every post or below the title of your post or below the navigation bar to increase your earnings by more than 30%.

CONS:

One main drawback with Infolinks is that they don't match exactly with the content of our blog rather they match with the normal words in our blog. To illustrate this, consider the following example. I found the word "matching" that displays a link to "shaadi.com", which is completely not in match with my blog's content. This is the only drawback which I found about Infolinks.

If you know more about Infolinks, please share your view via comments. Comments are always appreciated and we always love to hear from you!!!

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Common SEO Mistakes That You Should Avoid

Over the past few months, we see that there are hundreds and thousands of new bloggers evolving on the blogosphere. However, over a prolonged period, only few sustain. Why does this happen? Where do people go wrong? One simple reason could be an improper Search Engine Optimization. Rather than aiding SEO, people with or without their knowledge make the situation worse. I have enlisted few commonly made SEO mistakes that one should avoid.

CHOOSING UNRELATED URL OR TITLE
This is the most commonly made mistake by many newbies. They buy a domain name or choose one from the available blogspot domains keeping in mind to right some content say about "Making Money Online", "About Blogging" or some other stuff. But over a period of time, as they run out of content/topics, they tend to change their track and write a content which is completely not related to their title/URL. This happened to one of my fellow blogger and do you know the final result??? His blog was blacklisted on Google!!!

NEGLECTING ON-SITE SEO
There is a lot of buzz when it comes to ON-SITE SEO and OFF-SITE SEO.  The basic reason being the difficulty in understanding the two SEO's. Later, comes the problem of optimization. Though I myself have a lot of difficulties in finding the difference between the two, I would suggest you to have the following for your blog - proper TITLE TAGS for your post, INDIVIDUAL META TAGS For Your Post apart from the REGULAR META TAGS, proper links within your site - INTERNAL LINKS, ensuring that images have PROPER ALT TAGS and so on. Note: I don't stress too much on META KEYWORDS tag because, I never experienced any improvement having placed that tag on my blog.

FAILING TO RESEARCH YOUR KEYWORDS
One common fault which I encountered personally from my experience and through repeated search for SEO mistakes was to identify the potential keywords for your blog. I know it becomes a hectic process to identify the exact keywords for your blog. You might consider an SEO expert to do the job for you. If you are a blogspot user like me, the forget this point because we can't do much about it.

However, a person planning to host his/her website should consider doing a keyword research before building his/her website to know, what exactly people are searching for. With the automatic suggestions enabled on Google Toolbar or the search box, it has become a little easy to know what people usually search for in their niche. So, I would suggest you to optimize your site for those suggested keywords on Google.

FAILING TO CREATE A SITEMAP
Sitemaps are the most essential structures when comes to SEO. Every blog should posses a structured sitemap so that the search engine robots can easily distinguish those pages which are already indexed and those which need to be indexed. I will soon publish an article for creating a structured sitemap for blogspot users. However, you need to create a sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. I assume that many would have done this essential step. If not, do it now!!!

I know many people who indexed their pages would have used "atom.xml" when they created a sitemap for their blog. Doing so will index only a maximum of 25 URLs. Use the text "atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100" to get 100 posts indexed on your blog. You can vary the number as you want. I don't know how well it works. But, I use both for my blog. You can have a look at the screen shot above to understand this better.

CLICK THE PICTURE TO ENLARGE

Though there are a number of mistakes which we bloggers make, I enlisted only very few of them. However, I will be posting more about this topic in the upcoming weeks. If you know more about this stuff and you wish to share with us, you can consider writing a guest post on our blog - Guest Posting Guidelines, or just leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!!!

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