Savvy Affiliate

After having a nice vacation, I am settling back into my normal routine.   So expect prompt replies to comments, prompter replies to e-mail, and a post count which will pick up again in numbers on Friday.

Thanks to everyone who continued reading my blog while I was away.

A question for you, if you were reading through my normal 4-5 posts a day vs. the 1 post a day while I was on vacation which do you prefer?   Can 4-5 posts per day get to be too many?  Do they clog your feed and prompt you to delete without reading?

Do you enjoy the 4-5 posts of varying length and depth per day, or would 1-2 longer more in depth articles interest you more?

 Thanks for any feedback

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Adopting a persona when you’re writing is very important.  The object of your blogging is to get people to remember your site.  Your content, your site design, and your URL are all important aspects of making your site memorable.  But if you haven’t developed a persona for your writing, you are missing out on a valuable branding tool.

What’s an Example of a Persona?

You can think of a persona as a nickname which describes your personality, at least how it appears in the blog. The best example of a Blogger’s persona that I know of is John Chow.  He is known as “The Evil Blogger.”   Is he actually evil?   I’ve never met him, but I would be tempted to say probably not evil.  At least he doesn’t strike me as the devil incarnate from his writings.

So Why Pick a Persona?

A persona is great for getting people to remember your site and link to you.  I can’t count the number of times I have seen John linked to as “The Evil One” or a variation.  It gives the blogger doing the writing some flavor to add to their description, other than just JohnChow.com.   The flavor both makes it more interesting to read, and more likely that the link will be clicked on, and it makes it more likely that the reader will follow the link.  After all, why should I go to JohnChow.com?  Who the heck is he.   But an evil blogger?  That sounds interesting.

What else does a persona do? 

Although you will develop your persona from your personality and writing style, you will also find that your persona will drive your writing.   If you have a set personality for your site, you will find it easy to write posts which fit that personality.  If your persona is sneaky and devious, you’ll write a lot of posts about finding loopholes and playing the system.  If your persona is friendly and helpful, you’ll find that you spend a lot of time linking up with other bloggers and engaging in more conversations on your site.

How Should I pick my persona? 

You don’t need to pick your persona for your blog right away.  Spend some time writing your blog and see what kind of personality it develops.  Then play to that personality.  Online, it is much better to be an extreme something and be memorable, than to be in the middle of the personality spectrum and just like everyone else.

So what’s your persona? 

I am still in the process of developing a persona for Savvy Affiliate.  It is a relatively new site, approaching 2 months, and doesn’t have enough personality yet for me to play to any one aspect of it.  Although if you have any suggestions, or an opinion on what you think that this site feels like, I would love to hear them.

So how about yourself?  Have you given any thought to developing a persona for your site?  Is there a particular personality trait you play to in your writing?

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Hi Everyone,

 I’m going to be going on a business trip from Thursday June 7 through Monday June 11, so I won’t be able to post with my usual frequency, and won’t be responding to comments or e-mails as quickly.

However I have used the handy timestamp tool to ensure that I have at least one post coming out every day, and hopefully I’ll have some time to knock out a few more, so be sure to check back.

 Anyways, thanks for reading

Scott

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 I recently installed the Do Follow trackback plugin, which means that whenever you ping me with a link, the trackback that you get is SEO Enabled.

I went looking for other sites with Do Follow Trackback enabled.  Here is a list of sites I have found so far with it enabled.   If you have the plugin and would like to be included on list, drop a comment.   If you would like to encourage other people to use the plugin , please copy it and paste it in your blog.

• Savvy Affiliate
• Life Googles
• Robinsongo

That’s it so far.  This list need more people!  So sign up and reward the people who link to you.

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This is an experiment to see if you can do everything you need to to write a great post in 10 minutes

I starting writing this post with a stopwatch.  I will stop at 10 minutes, but before then I will try to do several things necessary to write a great post.  I want to ping at least 3 bloggers, make my text scannable, reference a post in my own site, write an interesting title, ask for comments, and use blockquotes.

1:28 Gone

Step 1 - write the title I used the 10 Tips for writing great titles from Problogger to come up with this, “How Some People Can Write Great Posts Quickly”  It can’t be that bad, as it got you to read this post

2:54 Gone

Step 2 - make my content scannable  

The internet isn’t a book.  You can’t expect people to read your information if you don’t make it easy for them.  Make it easy for people and they will stay.  Otherwise they will leave.

There are several things I need to do to make my content scannable 

• I need to use small sections
• I need to use lists and blockquotes
• I need to highlight and bold important points

5:00

Step 3 - ping some writers

It is important to ping other bloggers in order to get their attention, now I will ping a site letting you know about the comprehensive list of different ping services you can use.  2 pings down, 1 to go.

Step 4 - write a good excerpt

I need to write a good excerpt for this page in order to attract search engine searches.  Here are some tips for writing good excerpts

7:54 down, running out of time, better write my excerpt, put in keywords, spellcheck and go

Excerpt written - 9:07.  Time to spell check.  Luckily, since I use Google toolbar spell check, it goes quickly.

9:39

That’s all the time I have.  How long to you spend on your posts?  Did you find this interesting at all, or just a waste the 2 minutes you spend reading it?

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Some bloggers complain that they never have time to blog.  They can’t put enough content up, they simply don’t have time.

Blogging doesn’t need to take a lot of time!  Just sit down and write.  If you want to, you can probably write a post worth reading in less than 5 minutes.  

This post is a test of what you can do in 5 minutes time.  In another 3.5 minutes I’ll be leaving for a birthday party, what can I get done?

Tips on things you can do in 5 minutes

1. Moderate your comments - Comments can always be overflowing, take the next 5 minutes to delete spam and respond to the good ones
2. Read your feeds - If you are behind in your feeds, you can catch up and pick out some juicy articles to read in more depth later
3. Make a list - Want to write an article?  The best thing to focus on is a list.  You can keep going, and then stop whenever you run out of time
4. Comment on blogs - Get some traffic and join the blogging community.  Start commenting on other blogs.  Hopefully they will respond in kind
5. Digg your Posts - Digging doesn’t take long, and can drive a lot of traffic.  In 5 minutes time you can Digg, stumble, or both 3 or 4 posts.  Give it a try

 Well I’m running out of time.  I know that wasn’t the best post I’ve ever written, but I didn’t have much time.  And if you don’t either, give a quick 5 minute post a try, you may be surprised at the results.

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If you aren’t currently using FeedBurner, here is why you should.

Until recently the number of subscribers a blog had was an interesting stat, and little more.  Knowing that number made for some nice bragging around the blogosphere, but didn’t do too much to make money.  That has all changed, now knowing your stats can mean money in the bank.  Space on your site is valuable, and worth money.  But exactly how much money is it worth?  What is your reach? With sites such as ReviewMe and other methods of monetizing your feeds taking off knowing how many subscribers your blog has is an essential bit of information in order to extract maximum value from your site.

For the average blogger Feedburner will do little for them except give them accurate stats on how many people are reading their blog, and by what method they are reading it.  But those stats are worth $100 million dollars.  At least Google thinks so, in their deal to buy Feedburner.

Luckily, as important as feedburner can be to a website, it as just as easy to set up.  You can simply go to Feedburner and input the URL of your RSS feed to set up your feedburner account.  (If you are using wordpress you have an RSS feed, check out www.yourblog.com/feed or www.yourblog.com/Atom) 

It’s that simple, now I’m done right?  Well not quite, you have to force people to use that feed.  But once again it isn’t as hard as it sounds.  There are two ways that you can make sure that everyone uses your feedburner feed instead of using the feed published by your blog.

The hard way to do that is to play games with your .htaccess file.  This works but can be frustrating.  Worse, especially on Godaddy hosting, is that .htaccess modifications don’t always update right away.  They can often take an hour or more to take effect.  Thus you can make the right mods, not know it, and try something else.

The easy way to set up feedburner is to use this plugin. Download it, plug it in, and any user who goes to the feed your site publishes will be automatically redirected to the feedburner feed.  A word of warning however, my redirect took a couple of hours to take effect, so if it doesn’t work right away for you leave it on, come back in a day and see if it is redirecting.

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The other day I was streaming a video on the internet.  My cat was sitting on top of my monitor ( I still have a CRT ) as she is wont to do and batting at Hiro.  ( I was watching Heroes on NBC.com )  Now I have a problem with streaming videos sometimes.  Although I can maximize the videos, I still get the title bar of internet explorer, and my Google Search bar appearing, which can be slightly distracting at times.

Well any way my cat suddenly decided it as time to pounce.  She leaped from the monitor on top of my keyboard, landing on a dozen keys at once.  All of a sudden my internet explorer maximized the rest of the way.  The title bar disappeared and I just say the show.  I was mad at the cat, but I was thrilled that I could do that.

So I started pushing buttons on my keyboard while I had internet explorer open in order to see if I could duplicate it.  Eventually I did.

Here are some of the internet explorer hotkeys that I found while I was pushing buttons

F11 -  View Internet explorer in full screen, i.e. no title bar or menu bars

F1 - Help Menu

F3 - Find on this page

F4 - Web address pull down menu

F5 - Reload Page

F6 - Tab between menu bar options

F10 - Bring up IE 6 style File, Edit, View, Favorites menu bar

 Alt & F4 - Close window.  Don’t do this one by accident.

I had some fun finding these out.  Are there any that you use that I missed?

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Right now, this blog is in desparate need of some high PR incoming links.  So when I have a chance at a PR 4 or 5 link I have to take it.

 And when I can get it by answering science questions, so much the better.

 The question comes from Cool Tips and Tricks it is basically this.

You have a jar, a plate with a penny sitting on it, water in the plate which covers the penny, a candle and a match.  How do you get the penny out off the plate without getting wet or moving the plate (or the table).

Answer :

1) Light the candle

2) Place it on the plate in the water, but not too near the penny.

3) Invert the jar and place it over the candle

4) The candle will burn itself out

5) The jar will suck up the water on the plate, leaving the penny high and dry

But the real question, the one that can get me a decent link, is why does this happen.

Answer:

1) When you place the jar over the candle the air inside the jar heats up.

2) From the ideal gas law, PV = nRT.    The volume of the jar is constant.  The number of moles is constant (for now)  Therefore when the air heats up, the pressure must increase.

3) When the pressure increases, it pushes any water out of the jar, then air bubbles out of the jar decreasing the number of moles of gas.

4) Eventually the candle burns out, and the temperature of the gas decreases again.  Going back to the ideal gas law, the pressure inside the jar decreases.

5) Because some air escaped the jar the pressure in the jar is less now than when it was originally inverted.  Therefore the pressure in the jar is less than the air pressure.  As you can see with any barometer the exterior air pressure pushes the water into the jar.

6) As the height of the water increases, the volume of the air decreases, and the pressure of the air remaining in the jar increases.

7) The height of the water in the jar increases until ( P-atmosphere - P-jar ) = Gravity * Water Density * Height

Another thought might be that the candle burns up the oxygen in the air.  Since air is 20% oxygen there will be 20% less moles of gas, so the jar will have 20% less pressure and will suck up water until you get a pressure match.   However this is an incorrect assumption.   Combustion is C2 + 2O2 => 2C02    Combustion does not yield a net descrease in the number of moles of gas in and of itself.  Heating is the primary cause here.  You could achieve a similar effect by taking a blow torch to the jar, (assuming you didn’t evaporate all of the water) 

Moral :

Science is fun.

Try this trick and amaze your friends.

I need more pennies.

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