How to Survive Google’s New Privacy Policy

From the 1st of March, Google will implement a new privacy policy across many of its products.
The aim is to give you a more personalised searching experience – whether you want one or not!

Every time you perform any search through Google’s search engine, and click on any of the results, Google will keep a track of your search clicking activities and will tailor the results it gives you next time to suit your interests mores.

This is already annoying, if, for example you have bought a pair of trousers from M&S and then every single web site you go on for the next few days shows you nothing but adverts for trousers from M&S. But you already have bought trousers, so why would you want to see them everywhere you go?

The way to stop this is to log in to your Google account and go to ‘Account Settings’.

Find ‘Services’ and you will see a link whick lets you ‘Go to web history’.

From this page it is possible to click on ‘Remove all web history’

You can also ‘Pause’ your web history on the same page. This stops it from gathering any more information about you.

This should stop any more information being kept about your internet activity.

 

Examine your blog as if you were the Hotel Inspector

I love the Hotel Inspector. She goes into failing, horrible hotels and businesses which are mostly run by, (how to put this tactfully?) fruitcases. And with her searing insight and years of undaunted experience, she is able to spot exactly what needs to be changed to completely turn the whole thing around and give it all a completely new lease of life.

This typically involves getting rid of the horrible colours that the owners think are cute. Destroying unnecessary decorations, in one case, a ‘museum’ of other people’s unwanted junk! And covering everything in sight with such an air of freshness and newness that people can not resist staying there and being happy to do so.

She resolves family issues, and staffing problems and then at the end they have a brilliant re-launch party.

Tomorrow, take a step back from your blog. Sign out and visit it as if you were a casual visitor, just surfing on by on the look out for something useful or interesting to read.

1. What are your first impressions?
2. Is it clean and crisp?
3. Are your ‘best bits’ on display in prominent places, where they can be easily found?
4. Do the colours or the images clash on the page or in the brain?
5. Do you have a ‘museum’ of unwanted junk which needs to be removed?

So you know what needs to be fixed. Done that?

Good. As Alex Polizzi would say: “That’s brilliant dahling”.

 

6 Reasons Why People Do Not Write

Fear:
The main reason that people do not write is fear of one sort or another.

They have various thoughts running through their brains such as : will my writing be good enough? Will people want to read it? Will people laugh at me?

It is the fear of exposing the workings of their private mind to the world at large, to friends and family and to all comers old and new.

Work:Reward Ratio.
When people want to write, one of the first things they do is to start to google various questions. just like when you want to change careers, you ask your faithful computer/Internet some basic and fundamental questions:

How do people write?
How do writers earn their living?
How much money do writers make?

Etc. etc.

And the results of these searches are often page after page of writers explaining just how little they actually earn. Warning others off trying to do the same and saying that not everyone can be like J.K. Rowling. This is an immediate dis-incentive. Why would anyone want to put themselves through that anyway?

Not Having Any Ideas:
The thing is, that most people do not have any ideas if put on the spot, and the thing also is that, most people would be able to come up with some amazing ideas if they were given half an hour and asked to come up with the most outrageous thing they can think of. Admitedly, there are some people who, after half an hour of thinking would imagine that it is outrageous to put paper in the normal bin and not the recycling bin (oh the terror!) but they would be few and far between.

Having an important career and other life.
Is it always a shock to find out that a respected High Court judge writes fluffy romances, or the Police Metropolitan Commisionner writes children’s stories? I don’t know. But it is possibly enough of a put off for these people to think to embark on a second career as a writer.

Having a silly name:
There are many people in all walks of life whose names now trip off the tongue because of the different things they now stand for. Donald Trump, something which obviously means a greatly different thing in the UK than in the States, is a prime example. How about Audrey Niffeneger, or Arnold Schwarzenegger? And a writer is at an advantage from the start because they can take a nom de plume.

Just Realising How Much Sheer Hard Work is Involved.
Many writers or would-be writers baulk at the idea of producing a certain numbers of coherently flowing words. Then, having written them, the idea of sitting down to edit them is also a huge put off!

But it is like playing the lottery. Why do people play for that one in fourteen million chance of winning? Someone has to win. Someone has to be the Rowling, the Tolkein, the Fleming, the Cartland, The Clarke… This list is endless!

The question should not be ‘why Do people not write’, but what on earth is stopping them?

 

A Quick Way to Get More Visitors Without Doing Anything!

From having this blog, I have noticed one thing about the way that visitors arrive here.

Now I will let you into the little secret that I have discovered:

Having interesting photos brings visitors to your blog too. A lot of people come to my blog after having looked for an alien picture. And that alien post is my most popular post and has had thousands of page views by itself.

• Relevant

Obviously, it would greatly help if the photo or image was completely relevant to the subject of the post. There is no use having a highly popular picture of a singer or something in a post about different styles of period lamp post. The visitor would come, find nothing to interest them and leave.

• Positioning

It helps to place it in a good place where it is high enough up in your post

• Size

Not too big and not too small

And that is the whole tip. To get more visitors, choose an interesting, relevant, popular picture and that will lead people to your website as well, after that it is up to you to grab their attention and keep them there.

Cute kittens always help too!

 

How To Get More Traffic for Your Blog Through Linkreferral

Linkreferral is a great website for generating traffic to your blog, e-commerce website, or any other website that you may have.

 It is basically a links directory where you can add the link for your own website into one of the many categories that they have after registering for their service.

After that they require you to do your share of visiting people’s websites which in turn makes people visit yours.

If you go to 30 websites from their directory, from any category, and review 5 sites, choosing one of them to be your favourite, and make one comment on the forum, then you have done your maximum daily amount.

Bad Points

• It takes ages to visit 30 websites. It is not possible to just click through quickly, linkreferral only registers your visit once the whole website home page has loaded.

• It also takes ages to leave 5 reviews on other people’s sites which are helpful and meaningful.

• Because the forum comments are perfunctory, the forum is full of thousands of comments, but does not have the feeling of a proper community. A bit like a dance for shop dummies. They are dancing, but they don’t know why they are there or whether they are having fun or not.

• From time to time, someone visits your site who just ‘doesn’t get’ what you do and what you are all about. This person just leaves a low score or a poor review and this can knock your ego a bit.

• Another bad point is that sometimes you come across a website which is so interesting that you find yourself so absorbed with reading it and forget to visit the other 29 and one link leads to another and…

Good Points

Linkreferral leads you to discover hundreds of other websites. These are often other blogs, or money-making websites, or anything you can imagine. You can leave comments on their sites and so build up your backlinks and they in turn visit yours.

• You do not have to do every part of the requirements, just surfing a few of the sites lets you work your way up the list of sites in your category. The secret is little and often. Since people have to visit 30 sites, if you are on the first page, then the chance are higher that you will get a visit.

• You start getting visitors almost immediately you join. 

• People come to your site and leave a review. This means that they can spot something obvious that you may have missed, and it also gets tested out by lots of different browsers and computers who can comment on how fast your images load etc.

Link Building
A directory website like this is very useful for making contacts and link building because you are able to send direct emails to the website owners.

Referral Programme
Unfortunately, the actual referral programme is not that great. They ask $50 to join and pay $0.15 cents per referral, so you need to refer at least 334 people before you even get your $50 back.

But on the whole, it is a great way to generate a steady stream of traffic to your site, who are interested to see what your site is like and can review it for you.

 

How to Write

When I was young, I bought a coach ticket for the first time. I simply went to the coach station ticket office and paid for it and brought this very important piece of card home.

Now, as the day approached for my coach journey, I wondered how it was that I would be told to get on the coach. I checked the post everyday to see whether an invitation had arrived telling me that my presence was requested to attend the launch. Or maybe a phone call would inform me that my seat was confirmed. I was expecting at least a gold-edged envelope. Because this was a journey from out of the city, it seemed to be more important.

But no, to my amazement, it was nothing like that at all. You make your way to the coach station on the day and at the time that the coach is supposed to leave, show the driver your ticket and go and find a seat – any seat you like. The coach goes whether you are on it or not.

This childish scene reoccurs to me now because if someone wants to be a writer, they must just write! There is not going to be a gilt-edged invitation, or actually even a ticket. For a first time, unpublished author, there are no looming deadlines, only the vague intention of somehow ending up with a publication one day.

Barbara Cartland, was one of England’s most prolific writers. She wrote for nearly eighty years and is thought to have sold over a billion books. She wrote over 700 books in total, writing 23 novels in one year alone – leading to an entry in the Guinness book of Records.

For her, writing was purely a matter of discipline. She used to sit down to dictate her books at 1.30pm she said, (not 1.35, and not 1.40), and she would write for two hours every single day. She said that there was no use waiting for the muse to arrive, you had to write, and it was mainly a matter of controlling yourself. When she died, she left 162 still unpublished books.


How to Write

• Set aside a certain amount of time everyday 
• Write
• For the first draft, think of quantity, not quality, if that helps. Have a daily word count goal and stick to it everyday.
• Write!
• Take part in an online challenge. NaNoWriMo is an excellent one with wonderful support and regional groups set up all over the world.
• Join a writers’ group or a creative writing course 
• Write

The best way to be a writer is to write. Don’t worry how you will handle all the fame and publicity. The theme park design can wait, it really can. First work towards producing a complete document.

 

How to Get More Traffic for Your Blog Through Twitter

Using Twitter is a great way to increase the traffic that you receive to your blog. Of course, you must already be a member of Twitter, and it is very easy to sign up here:

http://www.twitter.com

You do not have to have a large number of followers to get people to visit. But follow these easy steps and you will soon see an increase in the numbers of people who visit you and want to read what you say and if you do it properly, maybe an increase in twitter followers as well!

1. The very first step is to make sure that your blog looks at its absolute best. Build up a nice number of interesting and informative articles on your subject. This way when you get visitors, they will have something to read to stick around for, and hopefully join.

2. Test your blog by loading it using different browsers and get friends and family to test it on their computers. It must load quickly and be easy to read. The average visitor who comes along from twitter will not stick around if a lot of large graphics and fancy widgets slow the loading speed down. 

3. Sign in to Twitter.

4. On the twitter home page, you will see your timeline on the left hand side and on the right in the blue column, it list a varied amount of information, including a list of the top trends (TT) occuring on twitter at the moment. These sometimes have the hashtag symbol (#) and sometimes are just some words or a sentence.

5. If you notice one of the TT is relevant to anything in your blog, then it is really easy to tweet about it to that group of people who are currently discussing that subject. This could be thousands of people! The more relevant it is the better, because that means that your visitors will actually be interested in it and might stick around to read the rest of your blog and tell other people about it.

6. Because twitter limits the characters to 140, your blog url can take up a lot of this the first thing to do is to shorten your url so that it leaves space for the rest of your tweet. Visit a website like tinyurl and paste your url into the box so that you end up with a shortened version like this: http://tinyurl.com/74lmnqt

7. Now you are ready to tweet your information into twitter. 

8. Make it short and meaningful. I get some visitors to my How to Survive Spreadbetting page whenever there are relevant tweets on twitter by tweeting things like: Read How to Survive Spreadbetting (tinyurl link to page) and the hashtag, whatever it is. I do this when people are discussing the economy or the credit crunch, or banks, finances or anything relevant. 

9. Do not try to be obscure or witty or interesting, you can do that in your own timeline with your friends etc, Keep it short and simple enough and to the topic to make people want to click it and know what they will find. A lot of people will not click on a strange link in case there are viruses, but if it is interesting to them and about a topic which they have already been discussing, then they might click on your link.

10. Have a call to action like ‘Click here’ or ‘Click now!’ will incentivise more people to click.

11. When they get to your page, keep them there by having a few links of your other topics, this is easy in blogger by putting the ‘Labels’ widget somewhere on your page, like I have the ‘Categories.’ Click Now, if you see something interesting!

12. Don’t spam. You will not get any visitors who are interested and they may never click on one of your links again.

13. Don’t overdo it. About one or two of these types of tweets along with 30-40 of your tweets is OK but any more will really put people off!

14. A good thing to do might be to have two accounts where one of them is your personal one about your life and another one where you only tweet links. This way, anyone who signs up to join you will know what they can expect.