Ridhuan's Blog » Blogging Tips

How to Add HTML Textarea Box

Ridhuan — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 19:15:11 +0000

Textarea is a textbox containing predefined texts or codes. The main function is to display texts or HTML codes for users to use. Textarea is better used to display HTML codes because writing HTML codes directly in a page will usually display the function of the codes instead of how the code looks like. By using textarea field, the error of automatically converting HTML codes into functions can be avoided.

A textarea field:

texts or HTML codes here

The code:

"textarea" id="textarea" cols="45" rows="2">texts or HTML codes here

An example of using the textarea field is when to let other people place our banner or ads on their pages:

"textarea2" id="textarea2" cols="45" rows="2"><a href="http://www.ridhuan.com/blog/">"http://www.ridhuan.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/mybanner.gif" alt="mybanner" width="120" height="22" border="0" /></a>

Just copy and paste the code in your blog if you want to place my banner in your blog. Hope this is helpful.

Check How Much Your Website Worth

Ridhuan — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:14:42 +0000

Ever heard of the purchase of Overture by Yahoo!? Or the purchase of Google’s stake by Yahoo! involving billions of dollars? I don’t really know if Google is really owned by Yahoo! because I don’t really care about that. Google is currently holding the crown in Alexa ranking but perhaps Yahoo! has nothing to worry about because they might getting something good from it. This post is not about those two giants. Those are just introduction on how valuable a website (or a blog too) can be. There are people including a friend of mine who build and maintained websites and blogs so that they can sell them later.

A website or blog values is based on its popularity, daily visits and pageviews, search index, and backlinks. There might me some other things being considered such as the looks, contents, or anything else what ever you like. Statistics can be gathered individually by referring to website statistics services such as Alexa, Quantcast, or Compete. However, to get a suitable market price for a blog or website, some services are available to check the values by just a click.

Cubestat Data

Cubestat.com can check the value of your domain name by analysing the traffic ranking from Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast and other data from search engines such as Google PageRank, number of indexed pages, and backlinks. Displayed results are only estimates but they should give a rough view on how much a website is worth. Not just that, Cubestat.com will also display the estimated daily pageview and daily ads revenue the domain should have. Telling you the truth here, what I’m getting for this domain are not even close to the estimated values. This means that there are still a lot I need to do to get as close as what I should have based on my domain ranking. Websiteoutlook.com can also give similar analysis as Cubestat.com but recently they cannot scan Blogger domain.

There is also a blog value calculator provided by Business-opportunity.biz but it is mostly based on Technorati. Technorati is a blog directory and community therefore the tool from Business-opportunity.biz cannot be used to measure website value. The image below shows data gathered by Cubestat.com for a popular website.

Cubestat Data

Blogging is the Better Choice

Ridhuan — Sun, 03 May 2009 12:25:53 +0000

More than a decade ago, nobody has ever heard about web log or blog. All information in the internet was from websites run by companies and a small portion of individual websites. Producing a website was not a simple thing that everybody can do easily therefore limiting the publication only to developers or webmasters. People without these internet or computer skills will not be able to express their ideas online unless they hire a webmaster. As time move on, a lot of website publishing software emerges in the market allowing almost everybody to be able to publish their own website. Other problems arise as website publishing is not a one-man job. A team of people is required to make an attractive and successful website that have good articles, multimedia and graphic contents, and a good layout. Website publishing software and multimedia software are also quite expensive to be purchased by everybody. Domain registration and site hosting will also add to the cost of publishing a website. There is also an issue of portability where you can only edit the pages on computers with the editing software.

Blogging

Since blogging popularity start to arise in 1999, everybody can publish what they want in the internet at any place that has internet connectivity. There are also good interaction between the authors and readers by using comments and ratings. Blogging platforms provide users with individual accounts with users-selected subdomains for free. These accounts include storage space and editing application to allow users to write their own post. At the early years of blogging popularity, contents are just limited to articles and some images. Further upgrades to the blogging platforms allow users to customize their pages with their own themes, adding widgets or site add-on, and spread their blogs individually in the search engines. Users can also link their own domain name to these hosted blog. The customizing ability allows a blog to perform just like an individual website and promote products like a corporate website. Using the platform-hosted blogs also give search engine and traffic advantages to the individual blogs since there are so many bloggers are using the same platform and they all can link to each other indirectly thought the platform’s portal. This is because most of platform’s homepage or portal will display the latest post of a blogger and help to promote other articles related to a blogger’s post. This linked system will then help in popularity in the search engines.

Some blogging platforms offer users to host their blogs in their own servers by using the self-hosted blogging softwares. These softwares can easily be installed in the hosting server with their own domain names. These servers provide users with more storage space that what is provided by the platform-hosted services. The amount of space is only limited to the users budget. These hosting servers will also allow users to have their own subdomains where users can have a regular website as the main homepage, a blog in a subdomain, and another different blog in another subdomain. Self-hosted blog have unlimited customization ability because it is just depends on the skills of the author. Blogging has become a professional career when more people are making money just by blogging. For the professionals, self-hosted blogs are more preferred as they are more customizable and have better reputation to the advertising networks than the free platform-hosted blogs.

More open source softwares are now available for free in the internet. These softwares were based on the platform-hosted blogs and allow users to have an internet contents without any good webmaster knowledge. These softwares are now not just for publishing blogs but also a website. By installing these softwares in the server, one can edit a website or blog anywhere in the world as long as there is internet connection. Various plug-ins and contents upgrade to these softwares are available including page layout and theme that is plug-and-play with the software eliminate the need of web developers to create their own layout or to work hard to promote their sites. This is why these softwares are now more popular for producing a website than the traditional web developing applications.

Don’t Write About Internet Marketing

Ridhuan — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:25:32 +0000

Actually I’m tired of seeing all the internet marketing blogs but I do need to read them to learn more about internet marketing and to generate more from blogging. I’m also tired of those so-called ‘internet gurus’ which almost 60 percent of their posts just ask you to spend more for them. Everyday I get these kind of messages in Twitter or newsletters that I’ve subscribed “Hi.. want to know how I get $5000 last week? Check this out..” which actually ask us to spend on something. The truth is there are too many blogs about internet marketing that write almost the same thing. In this situation, Coca-Cola would be preferred instead of Ridhuan’s Cola. Despite the exponentially increasing numbers of internet marketing blogs, top searches in all search engines are still not about internet marketing or anything related. Try check Yahoo! Buzz or Google Insights for Search or Google Trends and you’ll notice that entertainment is always what people are looking for. Wait! Don’t write about Britney yet until you know your competition. There are more established entertainment websites than you can imagine that will always keep you invisible unless you’re a paparazzi and have what others don’t.

This is the reason why niche is important. If you asked any successful bloggers, the first advice you’ll get is to write about what you’re best of or what interest you most. Niche marketing or blogging is about having a targeted readers. Targeted readers are from any topics such as how to solve a rubix cube, games for iPhones, your graffiti artworks, anything. Internet marketing is also a niche but another thing is to know your competitors and try to write about something you already know instead of what you need to learn. What’s important is you stick to that niche so that your readers will also stick with you. I’m not an expert but here’s my experience with niche blogging. I have 2 niche blogs where one is about a Computer Aided Design (CAD) software and another for my artworks. Visitors to these blogs are in the same interest as me and as long as I keep giving what they searched for, they’ll keep coming and become subscribers. When the blog is getting more popular and interest to that niche is increased, more people come to the blogs and become subscribers. I write about a CAD software instead of CAD because CAD is still too general and covers so many aspects. By focusing on a software, I can easily write anything that I know without so much effort.

Another important reason why writing about internet marketing is not a good way to make money online is because people who read about internet marketing are mostly web-savvy. They know a lot about internet and advertising and will not generate so many clicks on your advertisement. To make most revenue from internet advertising, the target should be the non-web savvy users and search engines visitors. These are people who use internet to seek information and will go anywhere to find answers to their curiosity. Integrate all knowledge and resources of internet marketing that you know in these niche blogs or websites. If you have an internet marketing blog and another of different niche with similar amount of visitors, you’ll notice that more revenue is generated from the non-internet marketing blog. Different approach is required to make more income from internet marketing readers because they don’t just read your blog but also look at how you manage it. A referral link to an affiliate program will have more click than Adsense. Different approach is required to make more income from internet marketing readers because they don’t just read your blog but also look at how the blog is managed.

So why am I writing about internet marketing? I’m not an expert therefore everything in this blog are what I knew and experienced. I just write about everything I know and it feels good to share these information with others. Many people are trying to blog for money including me and this is actually not a good practice. The key is whether you like to write or not and what you can write about. If you don’t like to write, probably after a month you’ll give up and stop blogging. Same thing happen if you try to write about something you’re not good at. I know this because it happened. My suggestion is to make a research of yourself and find out what interest you most and you can write about the same topics over and over again. Don’t mix niches together in 1 blog because some niche readers don’t like a mixed category blogs unless you know how to organize them properly.