Let me ask you another questions, Will running your own business succeed ? My answer is Yes and No also. That’s right nobody can give you a definite answer, the very important factor lies on yourself, Yes, only you will know, Nobody in this world can guarantee you success in blogging, they can help you, they can guide you, they can even give you a portion of their business to get you going, but ultimately in the end it depends on how you bring your site to the world, how FOCUS are you on your business.

Frankly let me tell you, I have been earning money from my site, though not a lot, but then this is also real earning. Money from affiliates and from my skill setting up sites for clients. If you are thinking of making lots of money right from the start, then you might be disappointed, unless you really have a very good idea or really lucky. If not take it a step at a time.

You will start to earn money, only when you provide something of value to your readers, something useful to your readers, or you have a real useful products for your readers. There is a lot of ways to earn online, and different people will tell you different ways which is true also, as in the real world, as long as you have an idea, products, services or you have something that someone needs, you can make money. As easy as that.

How much you can earn depends a lot on you yourself, it depends on how far you can project your idea to, how many people is interested in your products or services. How you bring your site to the world, how you project yourself, how sincere you are. Blogging is sometime more personal, because you relay a message to your readers and you interact with your readers. Been true and sincere will definitely helps in bringing readers back to your site for more useful information that they needs.

I will be pushing out more articles on Relationship Management with readers throughout this year. They are based on real experience gained from my 13 years in business. I might not be some business Gurus, but then I hope to write down all my experience and skills acquired over the years and hope that most of it will be useful for you in your daily work, business and also online business.

Some of you might think that your brick and mortal business experience is of no help to my online business. Well this is what I have to say, success depends a lot on yourself. How you work, how you interact with clients and how you project yourself is really very important.

Well let me sign off here and wishing you all a Happy Easter Day. God Bless you all and your Family.

I will re-organise my time and also my writing style and drive this site to a new height, I believe I can do it and do stay tuned for more news and changes coming your way, bloggerhelpdesk.com style. We source and we help

Year 2010 is a year worth looking forward to. As we hope that the US economy recover and unemployment rate decreases I also hope for World Peace, especially with the recent failed bombing on the US passenger aircraft. It has once again makes us stand on our guard again.

Once again, Happy New Year to you all, God bless you all and you family with Happiness and Good Health.

For the past few months, I’m actually quite tied up with my other chores and therefore could not write that much on this blog, and I sincerely apologize on this. Come next year, I will spend more time on bloggerhelpdesk.com and get more reviews, write more useful tips and articles on blogging and make sure that ever reader who landed on bloggerhelpdesk.com will find my articles useful and gain valuable knowledge from it.

Christmas is a season of joy and giving, it is also the time to be with your family and love ones. Think about the past one year and look forward to the new year. I’m setting some personal goals for myself and also bloggerhelpdesk.com and I wish you all also spend some time to set some personal goals or targets for the new year.

6 more days to Christmas and I wish all my readers, A Merry Christmas, God Bless you and your family. Stay happy and be cheerful. It is a good 2009 and we look forward to a better 2010.

So what are the ways to leave a trace for bookmarkers to find you. There are simply only 3 way and there are easy.

Favicon

Having a favicon is a real easy and the best way for your readers to remember you, Use your logo or an unique icon to represent your site, Usually under the bookmark/favorite list your favicon will be displayed also. When your readers browse through their book marks list they will be able to pick up your links easily with the favicon.

You can check out this site to create your own favicon, It’s free www.html-kit.com/favicon

Name of your Home Page

By default, adding a book mark to the book mark list, the browser will set the page title as the default book mark name. So make it a point that every page title of your site or at least the name of the home page is unique as normally internet users will go to the home page and click on the add book mark link when they are really interested in your site. Make sure that it does represent your site, making it easy for your readers to pick up the book mark link. I have come across too many links that simply have “home” , “blog” & “Making Money” very simple description, this will never help when your readers wants to go back to your site, because when they scroll down the list, there names will not get register anything about you and chances are if they can’t find it, they never will.

Adding a Book Mark links on your page

Try adding a bookmark link on your site, for bookmarkers to click and add the links to their book mark list. This will make it more convenient for them. As you know that sometimes it is these few convenient things that you have on your site to make it easy for reader to remember and find you. You can check out this link to create a simple link for adding book marks for your readers using IE. www.webmaster-affiliates.net/bookmark-site_doit.php The benefit of adding this link is that you also get to specify the book mark’s name in any way you want if you want something different from your own title page description.

Business image, is how you present yourself to your clients. It will determine what type of clients you can have bring you up or down the ladder in the business world. There is a Chinese saying that “ Man depends on the clothes he wear and Buddha depends on their statue” literally, I hope I got it right. When someone comes into your web site or blog. There is some basic must have things to attract them and to have them read more into your business products and services.

What are the basic needs for a Web Site or Blog. I will highlight all the requirements that are a must have which I accumulate through my years of experience based on my own.

Speed

Very important, or I must say ultra important in serving your pages to your readers or clients. Human are getting more and more impatience when it comes to loading of Web Sites, if your pages takes more than 10 seconds to load, then I would say that you have in fact lost at least  50% of business opportunity.

I can safety say this because, in my own case, for any sites that takes more than 15 seconds to load, I will close my browser for that page and move on to other sites. I consider myself a patient person when it comes to loading of sites, because I knew the fact that sometimes it is my own ISP which is lagging or there is too many hops to reach that particular server.

But for normal users, I have gathered feedback from friends and clients of mine and the average is somewhere between 8 to 12 seconds. It can further break down into age group, sex, computing knowledge. which will generate many results. but we shall be safe if we are within this average.

Pages Readability

I have come across too many sites that have the words and background that are conflicting each other so bad that it strain your eyes when you start to read the pages. In this type of cases, most people will not stay at your site for more than 10 seconds, I can also tell you that they will never bookmark your site nor come back to your site, unless they are taking your site as an example.

Design

Design play a big part in retaining your readers on your site. By design in this case, I’m also referring to placement of your graphics and color matching for your over site. Try putting a pink color theme for a technology site. and chances are the first thought that came to the reader mind is that this is a porn site, or a site targeting ladies readers. This is an extreme example, but in reality certain color will relate to certain thing, so choose your color theme properly.

Don’t put too fanciful graphics on your site which are non-related or in appropriate. Also don’t have too much also, although “picture say a thousand words”  having too much in a single page will hamper your loading time which will lead to slow loading of your pages and you will lose your readers.

Links

Have a proper systematic approach on links and check on your links regularly. Ensure that your menu and your sub menu are related which are very basic common sense, but trust me, I have seen some really bad example. if the main menu is on your services, then sub menu should only contain your services, and not some other topics.

Do also ensure that when you are referring to some internal pages, or external site as an example do have a hyperlink created for the convenience of your readers, they will appreciate it, but a word of advise, have it open on a new browser when hyper linking to external sites. This is very important because you create the links for them for convenience, but you do not want to lose them to the external site also. have it open in a new browser so that when they are done with the other site and close that page, your page is still there and they can continue reading where they left off.

Check on your external links regularly, Ensure that the site or pages your are referring to is still there and not moved. I have encountered lots of broken links and could not get the information I needed. Therefore do check them and make sure that the sites you are referring to is still around. I really appreciate sites with good links and it will leave a good image to me, for site with bad links and so on, it will lower your creditability.

What I have mentioned above are the basic that your site must have in order to retain your clients or readers coming to your site for the first time. To make them bookmark your site and come back, you must prove to be of credibility and also have good contents to make them come back for more information.

Well, from my experience in the business world, It takes money to earn money and it is true. In a brick and mortar company, Services business and Blogging also. There would be people telling you that “blogging is free and you can sign up blogging account for free”. That would only be true to a certain extend.

When I started out on my main business years back, We were a bit lucky to get a rental free place to setup our business. So we thought that by just pulling our resources together we will have a business running. We started to bring things from our house to the office and start running our business.

But then we were wrong, We need cash to buy products and we need cash to buy tools, we need cash to pay our utilities bills and so on. We need cash when clients order a computer system, we need to buy the parts first and then sell it to our clients. Money is needed and we could not do anything without money, especially after the Asian Financial Crisis, suppliers do not give terms, all purchases are based on COD. Therefore we need cash to run our business.

It is the same for blogging also. when I started out hobby blogging by signing up for a wordpress.com and blogger.com account. It was free, but I felt that I was restricted, Like my post on going towards professional blogging, I could not have the flexibility of doing a lot of things, As a techie myself, I hate to be restricted when it comes to technology stuff.

I decided to go on the wordpress.org platform. By doing so, I knew that I would incur money. I’m not one who will settle for free hosting, because it comes with a lot of pop up and ridiculous ads which will not appeal to readers who comes into my site. I actually spent zero money on this because all along I already have my own hosting services, but in business term, this is still another department and should have it’s own ROI also. I need to purchase a theme for my site, I started out with a free theme, but restriction and lack of support lead me to purchase a premium theme. Then there is the design stuff, I got my designers to do up banners and logo for my site, this cost money also.

You definitely need money to get started first before you start bringing in money on your site. I firmly believe that there is no free lunch in this world, but then on the internet, there is budget and premium lunch available, depending on your budget, plan your budget carefully and try to stretch your dollar, every cents counts and I am sure that you will be able to blog on your niche in a more happy way.

When comparing a brick and mortar business to a blogging business, the cost involved is definitely much lower and easier to start, but do bear in mind that this is also the main reason why so many bloggers fail when they turn professional blogging. Because the cost involved is low the reason for giving up is also easier, since there is no much loss incurred.

I wish you all happy blogging and do e-mail me if you need help, I’m will be happy to be of help.

How does WOT work is so simple.  For each website, WOT gives five different ratings such as Excellent, Good, Unsatisfactory, Poor & Very Poor based on four criteria such as Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, Privacy & Child Safety. If a website is having a score of above 80% in each category, the site shall be rated as excellent and shall be denoted with the dark green color of the WOT icon. On the other hand, if the score is below 20%, then the site shall be marked as very poor and shall be having a red color for the WOT icon. Such sites shall automatically be blocked by this plugin [under normal settings]

Are those millions or billions of websites can be rated with this application? As expected, it is almost impossible. Not all websites are rated but the most commonly used ones and the sites having higher page ranks in search engines are rated. And to be mentioned, the number of websites in WOT directory is being increased each moment.

How these ratings are given and by whom? The trustworthiness of an application shall be questioned if it is not based on some strong and trusted facts. The ratings in WOT come in two ways. Ratings come primarily from the WOT community, but they also use data from trusted sources such as Panda Security. TRUSTe, PhishTank and hpHosts.

From my personal experience [of 3 months], I found WOT giving 90% accurate results. The main problem found is about the ratings of “Money Making” websites. Here in this case, what happens mainly is that, those who tried to make some bucks with a website and failed in their attempts will give a very poor rating to the site, regardless of the content and service given by the website. This in fact, will affect the reputation of the website and WOT as well.

So, if you notice any inaccuracies, please rate them yourself, ask your friends to rate them, and perhaps let others know by posting on WOT forum. They [WOT Team] want to have reliable, accurate ratings with the help of trusted webmasters and users. WOT becomes more effective when more people like you, are rating sites.

The application can be downloaded from the website www.mywot.com and is free to be used. Mozilla Firefox brings this plugin as an add on with the newest versions of their browser. Give it a try and if you find it useful, make it a habit. Above all, it’s up to you to decide.

This release fixes 2 security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges, accordingly to the official WordPress site.

As my blog do not have any users who has posting privileges, I’m not upgrading at the moment. For those who do have users who have posting privileges, the best bet is still to upgrade to 2.8.6, don’t take chances.

If you need more information, you can read more about it on the official WordPress site here