Avenues Nepal

When you start your blog you are often confused over what to write about. You are not sure whether it will attract good traffic or people will be interested in what you wrote about. I as a frequent Stumbleupon user, often give thumbs up to humorous sites, creative advertisements, good piece of news, art collection and other informative articles. There are some blogs which tend to get more attention than others. So what really makes them stand out?

1. Outstanding Headline:
   People are always searching for something interesting on the internet. If you have a killer headline, you are sure to get people’s attention. A headline is what makes a reader want to read more. Here are few successful headline starters: 
   i.    What everybody ought to know about [gourmet meal]
   ii.   Here’s a method that is helping [body to heal itself]
   iii.  Now you can have [over 500 T.V stations] [at just $x per month]
   iv.  Who else wants [better links]
   v.   The secret of [successful web marketing]
   vi.  Little known ways to [write better blog posts]
   vii. Have a [MySpace Profile] you can be proud of.
   viii.Get rid of [mortgage] once and for all.
2. Interview with high profile people:
   People always want to know what’s happening with Britney Spears or who Angelina Jolie’s going to adopt next. Interview with high profile people tend to get more attention. You can also interview famous bloggers or experts on the related field. The readers would love to know the expert’s point of view.
3. Providing Resources:
   A good list of resources can bring in more traffic. If the readers find it helpful they will bookmark it or refer it to others.
4. Tips:
   People always look out for better solutions. Tips are popular among the readers because they are short and easy to remember and make their life style better. So list of tips can help you get good traffic. You can also provide “Tip of the day” section.

The best way to get traffic is by providing unique and useful content. People are always looking for something different on the internet. Videos are getting popular these days. You can also provide interesting videos or images on your blog to get more traffic.

Tags: blog, Content, headlines, marketing, Search, stumbleupon, tips, traffic, video, web, Web Marketing

Few days back I watched this movie “Definitely, May Be” starring Ryan Renolds, Abigail Breslin and Rachel Weisz. It wasn’t a great movie but I was thrilled by the way they showed the development of the internet and the cell phones. It just took 10 years for the internet to take over our lives. About eight years back I’d have never thought that something called Google would make my life so simple or should I say complicated. When I chat among my friends, the favorite statement has become “Hey why don’t you Google it”. With such an immense popularity of the internet I thought I’d give you some interesting tools available online to make your internet life easier.

1. Mystickies: My Stickies is an online tool which allows you to place little yellow squares of digital paper anywhere and everywhere you feel like in the whole wide web. Along with the ability to put sticky notes on webpages mystickies offers a powerful interface to browse, search, sort, edit and generally have a wonderfull time with your sticky notes from any computer that has internet access.
2. Ecalc: Ecalc is an online calculator. The features available on this are: calculator, scientific calculator, constants, linear and root solver, unit conversions and base conversion.
3. IPtools: IPtools offers a wide variety of online networking tools. With this site you can look up IP address information, check spam databases, run pings, run traceroutes, lookup WHOIS information and much more.
4. 10 min mail: 10 min mail allows you to create temporary email addresses that expire after 10 minutes. It’s great to use for sites that require you to receive something through email but you don’t want to be bombarded with spam.
5. SpeedTest.net: This is a useful tool to check your internet speed. Use this link (http://speedtest.knology.net/) to check your downloading and uploading speed. 
6. Go2Web : Go2Web is a Web 2.0 directory. Here you’ll find sites that deal with Web 2.0 application and services. Another site similar to this is Web2Bookmarks.
7. RouterPasswords: Router Passwords is a handy site to find the default passwords of routers as well as other devices. 
8. YouSendIt: You can use this to send large files which are too large to send it through email. DropSend is a similar kind of website where you can send large files to anyone without using your email. 
9. urlPass : urlPass is a free service that allows you to dramatically reduce the length of long and cumbersome URL’s (otherwise known as web addresses or links).
10. Picnik: Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.
11. Splashup: Splashup is a powerful editing tool and photo manager. With all the features professionals use and novices want, it’s easy to use, works in real-time and allows you to edit many images at once. 
12. Copyscape: Afraid your content has been copied? Use this tool to check which websites have copied your content. 
13. htm2pdf: A great site to convert your web pages to pdf files. 
14. Fodey: A little fun at work has caused no harm. Browse this site for fun-filled newspaper headlines, animated texts etc. 
15. Meebo: Meebo is a third party web based instant messenger service.
16. YouConvertIt: You can convert any media files like documents, images, videos for free. 
17. Cownter: Cownter is a service that allows website visitors to see how many people are currently looking at different pages within the site.
18. PimpmyIcon A good site to create animated icons using your own text and images. 
19. Jjot: You can use this site for jotting down notes. You can use it to take down any notes, reminders, or Internet research. These notes can be accessed from any computer and can be easily shared and emailed to other people.
20. SealGenerator: You can enter any text, choose an appropriate border, pick colors and get an official seal generated just for you.

I sure hope these sites will help you in someway or the other. If you have other interesting sites and would like to share it with us, Please go ahead and leave your valuable comment along with the link. Happy Surfing!!

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. A RSS feed contains a summary (Rich Site Summary) of content from a website. RSS is used to publicize the updates about blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. This helps people to keep up with latest changes in a website in an automated manner.

RSS feed is one of the best things you’ll be doing to your blog or website to get more traffic. In the past RSS feed were used mainly for blogs but with its popularity it is used for websites as well. The benefits of using RSS are:

• Saves surfing time:
  RSS feed gives the summary of the related articles and with the help if this, the users decide whether to read the whole article or to ignore it hence saving time. 
• Updates:
  RSS feed keeps you updated on the latest changes occurred in a particular website. 
• Spam Free:
  RSS feed does not use email addresses to send the updates therefore it is spam free. 
• Power of Subscription:
  Subscribing to RSS feed is really easy. The users can subscribe from an RSS feed of related website anytime. Unsubscribing is also easy with this. You can simple delete the RSS feed from your aggregator. 
• Marketing:
  RSS feed keeps the users updated with the latest products and services. This could help the prospects interested in the product as well as the businesses.

Tags: blog, Content, RSS Feed, website, Website Design

I am among those who hate to strain their eyes reading captchas just to verify that you are actually a human and not a computer filling the form. These eye straining letters or numbers are known as capcha. Wikipedia defines captcha as a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. People can get really creative while creating these captchas. If you think captchas are annoying take a look at these. These captchas simply cross the limit.

1. This captcha has been scibbled so hard, it makes the whole thing confusing.

2. The second captcha is an eyestrain for sure. Need a really good eyesight for this.

3. This captcha looks more like jigsaw puzzle.

4. Sure you can read “wikipedia” over here but what is 431 doing in the background? Are they supposed to be part of the code as well?

5. If I had to just type the dots it would have been easier.

6. Good when you have nothing much to do.

  read more »

If you have never heard of stumbleupon, it is time you Google it and find what it is all about. I started stumbling since Feb ’08. I won’t call myself a stumbleupon addict as few people do but I sure love to use it at least 3-5 times a day. Sometimes the number goes up. Stumbleupon is one of the book marking sites. Wikipedia defines it as “a Web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. Web pages are presented when the user clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar”. There is a different way of advertising on Stumbleupon. You don’t need to create an advertisement, instead you just tell them where you want the traffic to be sent. You can also mention what sort of people should see your site and in which category. There are numerous categories to choose from for example: humor, sports, art, photography. The people who are interested in certain category will view your site and give you the review whether they like it or they don’t. You need to get an approval which might take up to 24 hours and then you can pay them for which they’ll display your site to the people interested in the related topic. You can set a budget and choose the maximum number of visitors a day for your site. It might cost you $0.50 per visitor which is similar to pay per click on Google.

How can you make Stumbleupon advertisement work for you? read more »

Tags: design, Social Media, stumbleupon, website

Social sites have become one of the key targets for web marketers. The reason behind this is its popularity and growth in the number of users. Facebook alone has more than 60 million active users with an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. The other popular social sites are MySpace Linkedin, Xing
etc. There are many ways in which you can advertise about your company on these sites. Here are few tips you can follow to benefit from these social sites.

1. Your profile page is the place where people find you and know about your company. You can write about your company, the product or the service on your profile page. It’s always better if people can relate to you. You have to believe in what you are writing about. If possible you can create an About Me Page where you can write the details you want others to know. read more »

Tags: design, Google, information, marketing, professional, site, video, web

A good sales copy is really important to convince the visitors and turn them into customers. Follow these simple sales copy tips to get more profit.

1. Headline is the essential part of a sales copy. An attention grabbing headline will let the readers be more enthusiastic.

2. You should start by describing the benefits of using your product or service. It should include the details and the highlights of your product. It should let the visitors know how it can make things easier for them for e.g. you can talk about reliability, affordable price and how it is different from other products. read more »

Tags: audience, bonus gifts, credibility, fancy words, privacy policy terms, reliability, sales pitch, testimonials from real people, time period

In the process of gathering information about search engines, there are many things are work out well and the others are simply rumors or myths. About 10 years ago SEO was so much simpler and needed very less research and work. In this 21st century with the growing number of websites, SEO is not only complicated but very competitive as well. If you are a newbie then you might just be making the same mistakes just because you’ve heard it somewhere or read it somewhere. I’ve gathered five such SEO myths to help you understand Search Engines better.

1. Submitting your website to search engines:
   Submitting your website to search engines is the thing of the past. It is true that in old days you had to submit your website to search engines in order to get indexed. It however doesn’t affect your website in anyway to submit it but it is not a necessary thing. The best way to get your site indexed is by getting backlinks from popular sites which the search engine spiders crawl regularly like dmoz.org or yahoo directory. read more »

   Tags: change, Content, crawl, directory, engine, Engines, Google, harm, information, marketing, Meta, Meta-Keyword, nothing, number, order, Per Click, site, something, truth, work, yahoo
   

What are Negative Keywords?

A negative keyword is a special kind of keyword matching option with which you can prevent your ad from appearing when the specific terms are a part of the user’s search. When you add a negative keyword to your ad group or campaign, your ads won’t be shown for search queries containing that term. For Example: When you use a negative keyword –free picture, it would prevent your ads from showing on any search queries containing the terms free picture. However your ads might appear on variations of these terms.

You can add negative keywords to your ad group very easily. It is just like adding any other keyword with a negative sign (-) before them for e.g. –picture basketball. This keyword could be negative keyword for a basketball seller. read more »

Tags: Google, Per Click, Search, site

Link bait is used to attract visitors to your website through various measures like news, humor etc. Matt Cutts defines Link Bait as “anything that is interesting enough to catch people’s attention”. Link Bait is any content written to educate, entertain or broaden ones knowledge on certain topic. This creates a buzz and it spreads virally on websites in the form of comments or links. It is a tactic usually followed by bloggers and rarely by a typical website.

The quantity and quality of inbound links are used by search engine algorithms to rank a website. The higher and better the back links are the better are the chances of getting listed on primary pages of search engines. Linkbaiting aims at increasing relevant back links to a website.
¼br> There are many ways you can link bait: read more »

Tags: Content, engine, Engines, information, marketing, professional, Search, site, web, website