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If you are a new blogger who has started blogging in later part of 2016 or will open a blog in 2017, you might have looked on the web for tips for new bloggers. Of all tips that you see, many would have become ineffective, if not totally irrelevant, if the tip-giver has not updated his advice. We bring you a list of top tips that are effective as of 2017. Take the right steps and succeed as a blogger! 1. Free blogs on Blogger and Wordpress (not blogs created using wordpress.org CMS) rule the blogosphere.  You might have found some [successful] bloggers advising that you must buy a hosting plan to succeed as a blogger. They are saying this mostly because they have affiliation with some web hosting company/ domain registrar. The fact is that almost all hobby/ personal blogs and many well-monetized blogs are on these free platforms. All blogs using Blogger or Wordpress do not have .wordpress.com or .blogspot.com as the suffix of their URLs. (ITB is one of them!) So, i...

Many bloggers whose blogs are on Blogger platform have shared their dismay on the web about their posts disappearing while they were working on them. A friend said, she selected the text that she had composed over a week, something happened on its own and the next moment there was nothing on the post. Such experiences can be frustrating. The culprit is AUTOSAVE that comes by default on the Blogger platform, and you cannot avoid it. When you face sudden disappearance of text on a post, what happens is that you accidentally select the text and delete it (or you cut the text for pasting it elsewhere) and AUTOSAVE saves the post at that very moment. It saves the blank post and your text is gone! How to ret rieve post content on Blogger blog ? Google/ Blogger has no provision for undeleting post content. You can take these actions if you have accidentally lost content from a blog post on Blogger : 1. Quickly press Ctrl+Z (on Windows computers) or Undo (on iOS/ Mac) many times. ...

You start a blog. Then you write the best you can. You follow the advice that you see on the web - adding photos, sprucing up the headline, SEO, technical tweaking... The blog doesn't move forward. You realize that your friends who were initially commenting a lot on your  blog have become less interested, unless you had appreciated their latest posts. Something is wrong with the blog, you feel, and look for reasons for its NOT going the way you had visualized when creating the blog. You look for more advice and tips. You find a claim of getting a hundred thousand followers in a month and fall for it. You find some unethical tricks and are tempted to try them. Nothing works, or something seems to work for a few days and then the blog goes back to square one. What should I do? Why is my blog not getting enough traffic though I write so well? I have tried all SEO, even paid for it, but I'm not getting a lasting success, why? One of the main mistakes most bloggers make ...

In the first post in this 2-post series on ideal length of blog posts, we discussed how long posts work better towards authority and SEO as compared to short posts. We also discussed how quality matters more than the size of posts. In the present one, we'd discuss in what situations, writing a series is better than one long post, and how it is a win-win idea in certain cases.  Before we go any further, let's be sure of what we are discussing he re . Technically, one dirty joke a day on the blog also is a post series, but we are dealing here with series of valuable posts around a central theme. Why should I break my long post into a series when it serves great value as a single post? We'd draw your attention to what we said in the last post in favor of short posts. In brief, in this age of short attention and smart phones, small posts have a better chance to be read, shared and commented upon. So, if your post is long it has an inherent disadvantage in terms of quic...

Bloggers who want to grow fast with little effort often copy successful bloggers. Copying is not limited to images or passages but headings and titles too.  We were asked a question on Quora recently 'Can I use the same blog post title that's been already used by someone?' When we visited the original question, we found 5 answers, 4 of them supporting the idea of copying others' titles. Two of them added caution but yes, they started with supporting it. Why not, you might say. After all, it takes energy to make catchy titles . Sometimes you don't get great expressions even after trying for days. If you see a superb title used by somebody, why not use that? After all, just copying the title/ headline cannot be called plagiarism . As ethical bloggers, we can't support that. Forget the moral/ ethics part, the practical cost of copying others' titles is also much more than the intended benefits. One, you lose confidence in your capacity to write mar...

We received a query on Quora, How do I know when to post an article into the website page or post it as a blog post? Then a blogger posted this query on an ITB post, Whether we should have pages or posts on a blog that is not too frequently required to be updated. We thought, let's have some discussion around the topic of 'blog post versus blog page' so that the matter gets clarified. The concept of post is inherent in the concept of blogging. Pages arrived when the need for some static content was felt. So, different platforms have their own definition of what is a page and what's a post. O ver the years, a lot of convergence has taken place among platforms but at the same time, the concept of pages, posts and blogs has widened to include all types of long-form content that is regularly updated .  All things considered, t here are some common properties that differentiate blog pages and blog posts on major platforms and on blogs independent of blogging platfo...