Wayne Liew Dot Com

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I end the week with a small tweak to this blogging tips blog. I removed my Feedburner chicklet which is showing 142 at the time I am publishing this post. In my blogging resolutions for 2008, I aim to get more than 300 RSS subscribers at the end of the year but the low subscriber count showing on the chicklet is doing more harm than helping me to achieve my goal.

Don’t Boast RSS Count Too Early

I recommend bloggers to show the RSS chicklet after achieving at least 300 RSS subscribers. Showing off a low subscriber count will only flush out the thoughts of some new readers thinking of whether a subscription is worth. John Chow, in his recent interview with Alvin Phang, was quoted saying:

It is a psychological factor. If a shopping mall is empty, no one would dare to enter it. However, when one people walks in, everyone will follow.

Maki from Dosh Dosh revealed his RSS feed count only after he has more than 10,000 RSS subscribers. The response to that announcement was overwhelming because everyone was so curious about the figure until such a big one popped out.

More blogosphere buzz and blogging tips will be presented to you after the jump.

Continue reading Blogosphere Summary Week #6

Blog sidebar is one element of blog design that bloggers cannot ignore. However, blogger often face the few problems below with the sidebars on their blogs:

• Underutilized sidebars
• Flashy sidebars
• Never-ending sidebars
• Slow loading sidebars
• Sidebars in readers’ blind spot

Blog Sidebar Reconstruction Two Part Series

Ruchir touched on the downside of long articles with 7 Things I Hate About Blogging and it made me split this piece of blogging content into a two part article.

The first will be covering on step-by-step guide for a blog sidebar reconstruction and the next part (up next week) will be covering on blog improvement tips which you can use to enhance your sidebar and its usability on your blog.

If you have, seems to have or have doubts whether your sidebars have the few problems listed above, continue reading as this article and the upcoming one will present you with a packed guide and tips on how you can improve your blog by just tweaking the sidebars.

Continue reading Blog Sidebar Basic Reconstruction Tips [Part 1]

Sponsored reviews, paid reviews and paid posts is a popular way to make money blogging. In fact, it is the easiest way for bloggers to make good money from blogging as in the last few years, the launching of sites like PayPerPost, Sponsored Reviews and Review Me has popularized sponsored reviews writing as a blog monetization method.

However, not many are making fortunes from this type of blog monetization method because of the various problems that sponsored reviews writing can bring about. Last week, I got my first direct sponsored review request from SEO Meter and the below is the testimonial I received after the review is being published.

Wayne did a great job reviewing our site. First of all, his review was well phrased for the target audience (i.e., bloggers) and that makes the sponsored review much more effective.

Overall, the review was quite thorough and extensive. I’ll be happy to come back to his blog to order more reviews.

From the testimonial, I am glad that I have completed a good sponsored review.

Make Money Writing Sponsored Reviews Problems

Inability to find advertisers

Photo by: Ryan McD

You have a great blog, with great traffic but for some reasons, you are not being approached by advertisers requesting for a paid review. You think that your blog is bad enough and it may be the reason why you are lacking interested advertisers. You continue building your blog but still, advertisers don’t show up.

Continue reading 12 Sponsored Reviews Blog Monetization Tips

Here is another edition of blogosphere summary which you must follow every week on this blogging guides blog as I will bring you news and buzz from every corner of the blogosphere so that you will not choke yourself with a long list of blogs in your bookmarks and RSS feed reader!

Photo by: peasap

Be well prepared as this might seem to be the end of your week but I will give you a whole lot more work to do for your blog and your blogging life as the blogosphere has never been quiet.

This week, I will be bringing you blogging tips on blog themes modification, social media, blogging networking and Entrecard woes. Also, I will be showing two grand contests with great (I mean really great) prizes launched and coming up respectively! Read on to find out more on what I have to offer on this week’s blogosphere summary.

Continue reading Blogosphere Summary Week #5

The guys over at SEO Meter did a good job by creating a new SEO tool to measure Google bot crawl rate for our sites. Hop over now, add your blog to their directory and let them do the work of tracking your blog’s Google bot crawl rate.

Benefits of Knowing Our Blogs’ Google Bot Crawl Rate

Google bot crawl rate on your blog determines how fast your contents are indexed by Google and how high the trust that Google has for your blog. Getting our new blog posts indexed fast means that our blog will be faster than others to break a news on the search engines, even though we might be slower compared to others in posting the news.

Knowing the Google bot crawl rate can be said as a vital part of search engine optimization. All this while, we can only check the time that Google takes to index our new blog posts by guessing without having a known appropriate tool to assist us.

Continue reading SEO Meter: Unveil Google Bot Crawl Rate

Propaganda is a way not only to achieve surface objectives such as traffic building and branding for bloggers, it also enhances influence and authority, making persuasion much more easier.

Relevance of Propaganda to Blogging

Propaganda, as I mentioned earlier can bring a lot of benefits to your blog. When we plan to launch a propaganda exercise, we tend to leave deep marks in the subconscious mind of our readers which will lead them back to our blogs, opt-in for newsletters and purchase a product based on our recommendations.

Propaganda can be seen as a blogging style, which combined persuasion and interaction with the aim to influence. Seems like it is a difficult term for you? If you have a "Yes" answer to all the following questions, it is highly possible that you have a propaganda plan in mind.

Continue reading Propaganda Subject Matters for traffic building

Last week, I failed to compile a Blogosphere Summary because I am busy preparing myself for the journey back to my hometown.

Photo by: jsc*

This week is a little bit different. Apart from a celebration which I am really proud of, there are a few good reads from the blogosphere which I think will be beneficial for you! Also, I would like to wish every Chinese readers Happy Chinese New Year and let’s rake in more money in this new lunar year! Offer me Ang Pow money via PayPal if you think I deserve it.

Another Sphinn Social Media Success

Once again, one of my articles was featured on the front page of Sphinn. Networking With New Bloggers - Pros and Cons got 39 Sphinns and broke my own record for the number of social media votes on one article. Two weeks ago, Ask Your Blogging Questions At The Right Place got onto the front page of Sphinn with 31 Sphinns.

Continue reading Blogosphere Summary Week #4

Wordpress released version 2.3.3 after releasing version 2.3.2 just two months ago. Wayne Liew Dot Com is now running on Wordpress 2.3.3 as I always upgrade the plugins, softwares and blogging tools once there is an upgrade available.

Discussion on Wordpress "Frequent" Upgrades

I surfed through a few forums and blogs discussing this new Wordpress upgrade. I find that some of the Wordpress users are complaining about the frequency of Wordpress upgrades.

Wordpress is the best recommended blogging software around but still, the development pace and the release of upgrades left many of their users stay put at a few versions back, after being tired of all the upgrades.

Be honest with me. What version of Wordpress are you currently using to run your blog?

Upgrade and Don’t Blame Wordpress Development Team

I am on the "upgrade as it comes out" side and what will you be reading in this post is on why you should upgrade your Wordpress blog to the latest version.

Continue reading Wordpress Upgrades - Fuss or Must?

I started blogging at the age of 16, with a Blogger blog and every first experience of mine is still fresh in my memories. My first time of setting up link exchange deals, my first time getting all the dunks from the blogosphere, my first and last time trying to game Google Adsense and of course, my first time knowing bloggers of all sorts from all around the world.

Photo by: cambodia4kidsorg

Blogging is attractive for minors even though only few that will eventually step on a success route. Carl Ocab, the 14 years old make money online blogger is the leading idol for kid blogger wannabes and statistics on How Old Are ProBlogger Readers? Poll Results also shown that young bloggers own a big piece of the blogger’s demography.

Blogging at a young age has never been easier than blogging when you are halfway through your lifetime or when you are an experienced corporate figure.

Blogging Difficulties That Young Bloggers Must Brave Through

Discouragement from parents

Most parents on Earth want their children to pursue a Degree or Masters program rather than becoming an online entrepreneur or blogger. Most of their excuses are such profession will not secure a fixed income and it is risky.

Continue reading Blogging Difficulties For Young Bloggers

For those who are blogging on a self-hosted blog, we normally host our blog on our own server as well so when the images are inaccessible, it also means that our blog might be inaccessible as well.

However, some bloggers do host their blogs on image hosting sites like Flickr, Photobucket and ImageShack or on any other external sites which are very prone to having broken images published on their blogs. Also, we might have mistyped the URL for our images sometimes.

A few weeks back, I introduced the Broken Link Checker plugin, which is capable of notifying bloggers blogging on a self-hosted Wordpress platform about the existence of any broken images found on the blog as well.

The Problems With Broken Images

A broken image is much more troublesome than a broken link as a broken image will have the following effects:

• Bad first impression for readers
• Fail your attempt to convey your information such as in a how-to article
• Ugly red X will be shown if your readers are using Internet Explorer

We are not monitoring and scanning through our articles 24 hours a day and we will not know that when our images will be missing from our blog.

Continue reading Wordpress Plugin: Clean Up Broken Images