When you’re one of the guys in IT, one of the first expectations that readers want to see here is a custom blogger layout handmade by yours truly.
This is my ongoing project right now. I hope I’ll be able to come up with my own creation of this layout. I’m still learning my way in Blogger and I’m still thinking a lot about the layout that I want.
I have to balance my time between creating content and doing layout redesign.
I think it is time for online freelancers to blog about their jobs. Not just a blog about their personal lives or personal rants, but to write about things about their online occupation.
Why Should I Blog?
Blogging started out as a personal journal, a past time for people who like to write about their personal struggles, or simply write about their rants during the day. It is often used by expressive people who can express their thoughts.
As blogging gets to become more famous, big and small companies add blogs to a section of the website. A blog on a website reaches out to the site visitor that an active community is in place. It fosters interaction between the company and customer. It enables the feeling that there are “people” that are operating behind a website.
For freelancers, maintaining a blog can also give them fruitful benefits. Entries may not be done daily, but at least three entries per week are enough to keep loyal blog readers hooked. Blogs are not purely written in English: I’ve seen a lot of blogs in Filipino, Chinese, Indonesia and other languages.
Blogs are not all in written text. Others maintain picture blogs, video blogs which requires a few written sentences to explain what the picture or video is all about.
Blogging about one’s job often gives a deep understanding about the victories and difficulties of doing such job. Potential clients get to see the person behind a given profile. A blog portrays a unique personality in each freelancer through the words that he or she leaves with each post.
A profile is not enough anymore. Even a website of portfolio may not be enough. Start blogging about your job – it can attract a new group of potential clients not found on online job freelance sites.
Do you blog about your job?
I’m not new into doing programming and web pages. But I’m still new to PHP. I’ve decided to shift my interest from ASP to PHP because I do a lot of blogging. I think it would work more to an advantage for me if I work more on PHP pages where Blogger and WordPress pages are written on. It would not be so hard for me to learn and specialize in this area.
I’ve just downloaded PHP, JCreator and trial versions of Adobe products (Dreamweaver and Photoshop CS3) to start creating those pages. I would appreciate if you have any other idea to create those pages fast.
I’ve been exploring ways on how to improve my Alexa rank on my blogs. For one, I followed the popular advice to install the Alexa widget and the Alexa toolbar. The ranking improved, from a 2 million to 1.5 million in less than a week. I could not really say whether it was from the installation of the Alexa widget and toolbar, because I installed Entrecard code at the same time.
What is Entrecard?
Entrecard provides an innovative solution in getting traffic to one site. It prompts other bloggers to visit one’s blog and drop his or her personal Entrecard. The Entrecard is basically a 125 x 125 pixel graphic that acts like a personal business card. It is like an invitation to visit one’s site. But it is easy to abuse the system – I had to admit, I tried dropping up to the limit of Entrecards of up to 300 per day – and I find it difficult to read (and even leave a comment) on all of the 300 sites that I’ve visited. For many Entrecard is simply used to put in more traffic in the hopes of getting noticed. Since everyone in the Entrecard community speaks and promotes his or her blog, it can be quite difficult to gain a loyal follower of readers.
Entrecard credits is gained mostly through dropping and receiving Entrecards. When enough credits are accumulated, it can be used to buy an advertisement on another site – which means one’s Entrecard graphic is prominently displayed to entice another site’s visitors to visit the blog. Some sites are cheap, and others are expensive.
Get More Quality Comments and Build Loyal Readers
Entrecard has recently launched a partnership with SezWho just last week. I registered with this new service and installed the required JavaScript code and I was on the go! Although I still needed to work out the code (it overlaps some of the text here), I had to arrange the location of the SezWho rating after the post for another time because I do not have a fast connection to easily revise this site. Nevertheless SezWho provides the facility for any reader to rate my posts as well as provide ratings for each individual comment.
It looks like Entrecard had successfully motivated their Entrecard members to earn more Entrecard credits by leaving thoughtful comments on the sites that they visit. Two of my recent posts suddenly gained more comments after the installation of SezWho. To discourage the members from leaving two or three worded comments like “great post”, comments that are written by the members are left to the community to rate. Poorly rated comments and comments that seem to look like spam do not get any credit at all. To be fair, after the community gets to have their share of rating comments, Entrecard has devised their secret way to provide the proper credit for comment points!
Responsible Blogging
Entrecard is strongly promoting their vision to see their Entrecard members as the best commentators in the blogosphere. This would truly change the notion that Entrecard is a mere kickoff to oodles of traffic that will simply improve off one’s Alexa ranking and other indicators. I hope Entrecard finally succeeds in making more bloggers do their duty not only by writing posts but also by visiting others. Better traffic and loyal readership is gained by leaving well-thought out comments on other blogs – and not by simply dropping a card out.
One of the known best ways to promote the blog is to be personal in dealing with the readers. I find it more appealing if the owner of a blog or even a website exerts effort in producing quality custom messages rather than the generic ones that accompany many free email widgets offered around the web.The focus here is on putting a more personal touch to email newsletter in your blog. Bloggers often provide the option for the readers to subscribe to the posts in addition to the feed reader widget. There are plenty of email widgets available to subscribe to blogs, but as I’ve said, it is often better to put further effort into making the email newsletters personal at all.
IZEA, the Social Media Marketing which launched the success of PayPerPost and the new SocialSpark paid blogging opportunities, is now out once more with their Zookoda, an email marketing application designed for bloggers on the go. I’m really thinking about switching to their email marketing services than the one that I am using for the blog, because I get a better control at designing my own email newsletter that looks a lot similar to the blog template rather than the generic one that comes with my present email subscriber. Getting a more personal touch to email subscription needs time, but I think this is indeed a better idea to retain the interest of readers who follow posts by email.Have I mentioned that all of these great services are entirely free?
