Safety Tips When Browsing Online Penpals or Friends

With the advent of Web 2.0 and all of its social networking websitesand online communities, more and more people have become comfortable with meeting strangers on the internet. Whether you are searching fornew friends or even a possible dating partner, there are some very important safetyprecautions you should take.

1. Never fully trust anyone until you know them in real life

This sounds obvious, but many people do not practice this valuable piece of advice. As fun as the internet might be, you should never fully trust anyone you meet online until they become real-life friends. Even then, you should never meet someone in person until you have spent a long time getting to know them using online chat programs such as Skype, and exchanged a few photos or video calls. Scammers and criminals have become very clever with creating fake profiles with realistic photos, hobbies, and such, and can easily blend into social networks. Not all fakers use gorgeous photos of models, surprisingly enough.

2. Never divulge your full identity or sensitive data

Since you shouldn’t trust strangers online as noted above, this means there are certain things you should never share with people online. Banking and financial information is the biggest one, along with identification numbers like your driver’slicense. Additionally, it is a good idea to choose a nickname on social networks, or at least go by just your first name. Sharing hobbies and interests is a great idea, but avoid revealing your home address or place of work. If you are searching for penpals, then consider setting up a P.O. box for mailing purposes.

3. Never send money, receive random mail, or assist with paperwork

Penpal sites and social networks are popular targets these days for all kinds of scams. Some of the common ones are people pretending to have a sick relative who then beg for cash from their newfound friend (you) or who ask pen-pals to receive mail for them and relay (send it forward) to another 3rd party. You should never talk about money, mail forwarding, immigration papers, or otherwise with people you meet online. Anytime these issues come up, you should avoid them at all costs.

5 Easy Guidelines to Develop Your Blog's Readability

There might be hundreds of blogging guides and tutorials available on the internet, but no one can ever spoon feed the techniques of blogging. Blogging is not the complex way of writing, but creativity is the very soul of the art of blogging. Your blog is a window of your imaginations and the perceptions about the subject. You can mix up your writing style within the boundaries of your perception, but never do something, which leaves a bad impression in any way.

If you are done with a domain name and web hosting, then start writing. A blog should contain great content. It must provide a valid reason, as why a reader should spent time on reading it? Mentioned below are few tips that you might consider to build a better blog.

The Basics of Hosting a Blog

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Basic Hosting Terminology

Nearly all hosting companies offer 24/7 support, promise 99.9% uptime and allow you to install certain scripts at the touch of a button (eg wordpress, phpbb) however the main things you need to look at and understand when you see a hosting package advertised is the following :

• Disk Space – The disk space is the amount of hard drive space you have to upload your files to and is either stated in megabytes or gigbytes. For most blogs, images and movies will be the files that eat away at the space you’ve got.
• Bandwidth – If the home page of you blog takes up 10kb and the images on the design take up 90 kb then everytime someone loads your page 100kb of bandwidth will be used every time someone views that page. Note, search engines can eat at your bandwidth too (for example with my poker forums in April 2007- googlebot took up 6.5gb of bandwidth, Ask took up 5gb and Yahoo took up 4.5gb)

How to convert guests to readers

Say you are going to launch a new blog. Or you are going for a revamp edition of your existing blog. What are the things that will get you instant attention, when you show it off to the world? What will ensure you that your first time visitors (guests) gets hooked to your blog instantly?

Number one – Domain Name:-

A domain name is really really really important as it’s your domain nameIt tells out what your content is , or who you are or what aer you blogging about. I would suggest that any domain name should either specify one of these – not anything else.The best example is here on bloggingtips.com – It tells you exactly what the content is,what you are writing about and what you will get from reading it. Simple precise and easy to remember.

Some ways to encourage visitors to comment

Comments are a very important aspect of blogging. The ability to contribute to articles allows readers to participate in the topic in question. The number of comments in blog posts is usually a pretty good indication of how popular the blog is.

How to encourage readers to comment?

When your blog is still new you may struggle to get some or even any comments to your posts. If you continue to update your blog with good posts though the comments will come in time however there are a number of methods you can use to encourage comments to your post.

See where your visitors come from

Blogging Should Be Easy

‘Blogging Should be Easy!‘.

There will be the odd time when you are struggling with what to write but generally speaking you should not have any problems with coming up for ideas for your blog. If you are struggling for post ideas or have lost interest in your blog altogether then your either blogging about the wrong thing or blogging just isn’t for you.

Blogging Should be Easy

Blogging should never feel like hard work!

Top 5 mistakes i did when i started blogging

1 – I should’ve selected the template with care.

I was looking for free blogger templates and as and when i came across one, i picked it up almost instantaneously.I did not check for cross-browser compatibilities, I did not even check if the comments link is working, I didn’t check if the columns(it was a three column template) are all placed well at different resolutions. And heck, i didn’t even check as to how big and ugly the code was.
All that mattered to me was the look. And somehow in my browser(FF), it looked all good. But not to everyone – i received emails from my friends (i didn’t even have a good number of reader’s at that time) saying that the columns are all over the place. Thanks to them, i started to tweak the code but in vain, there were certain things that i could not get away with – I was done! One fine day i decided to change the template once and for all -hah! what a relief, that’s the template I’m using right now.

The importance of getting away from the pc and enjoying life

I thought it would be fitting to talk about ‘the importance of getting away from the pc and enjoying life’ on the day before i leave to go travelling around beautiful new zealand for 3 weeks. (Note i wrote this post on Thursday 10th May – thank you Mr Timestamp!).

I love blogging because it allows me to write and express myself in a manner i couldn’t otherwise. Updating this blog is never a chore however i always do everything i can to enjoy myself away from the pc.

Don’t Add an Advertising Page until your blog is established

An advertising information page is essential to any website. You don’t want potential advertisers to have to search high and low on your website to find how they can advertise on your blog. The page should be clearly displayed in your main navigation links.

More and more bloggers are placing ‘Advertise here’ links underneath their google adsense and other ad areas before their blog is even established. I am not referring to these links – i am referrings to blogs who have dedicated advertising info pages before they have anything to give to the advertiser.

I believe this to be bad practice.

How do you reward your good commentators?

As you know, i removed the ‘no follow’ tag from all comments so that google will follow the websites of those who comment here. I also list the top commentators with a link on every page.

Whilst browsing through other blogs recently i have noticed that a lot of bloggers are abusing the top commentators add on which made me think ‘Is there a way to reward good commentators and not bad ones?’

How are they abusing it?

When should you display your feedburner rss to your readers

FeedBurner is a tool which allows your blog’s feed to be syndicated and subscribed to more easily to your readers. It really is a fantastic tool and i’ve no doubt you will already know about the site already since so many large blogs use it.

Basically, when you sign up to feedburner, your feed url goes to an easy to read page where readers can add your feed to their chosen rss reader.

Moving your blog to a different directory, domain name or host

I’ve decided to write a guide to help those who are considering moving their blog to a different position on the web. Be it from

• www.domain.com to www.differentdomain.com
or from
• www.domain.com/blog/ to www.domain.com

Moving your blog to a different area on the web

‘Cheating’ the search engines

i found this article on the bcc website today. Its rare to find a SEO related article on a major news site. The article is called ‘Cheating’ the search engines – it basically just talks about link bombing. Link bombing is quite an old topic so i dont think theres any specific reason why they decided to cover it today.

Ive repeated the article below or if you prefer, check out the original article here.

We have come to expect a lot from search engines.

Why Pingbacks are important

Pingbacks and trackbacks have become a very important feature in the blogosphere. This post discusses why pingbacks are such a fantastic feature for blog owners.

What are Pingbacks?

Three Lessons I Learnt from Getting and Losing Traffic

This article will be explaining some great lessons I learnt from getting and losing thousands of visitors to my blog.

1. Preparation is Most Important

The fact is it doesn’t matter how sticky your content is, how great your blog is or how branded you are, you have to understand that you can’t get all new visitors to always return to your blog so you should always do your best to prepare for them.

Tips to Improve Your Writing Skills

To run a successful blog or online business you need some writing skills. Most people will not stay on your site very long if the writing quality is poor. It doesn’t matter how great the information is, if it doesn’t make sense, people won’t read it.

A Very Essential Trait of Successful Blogging

A lot of bloggers give their best, they create content they see as the best for their readers only to end up seeing the content as a failure.

I have also experienced the same, wherein I did my best, put in lots of hours into a blog post only to see it end up as a failure. And I have written some posts I didn’t even expect to exceed a few hundred views only to see them skyrocket my traffic above the roof. The one question I ask myself is, what makes this post different from the others?

As a blogger, your blog is as successful as your content and there is no point in writing blog posts that don’t get read. There are so many things you can do to increase the likelihood of your blog post being read by your readers and one great, tested and proven thing to do to ensure your bog posts are always read is to make them more personal.

3 Reasens Breaking Down Your Target

There are four trends in the mainstream workforce that top level managers pay attention to so they can better serve their customer base. Doing business online is a slightly different animal, but there’s no reason you can’t keep up with areas to help your business grow and evolve into the future.

4 Reasons You Need to Have a Blogging Niche

It Differentiates Your Blog and Makes You the Ultimate on Your Subject

I didn’t really think about the importance of this until now but if you ask me which blog I’d go to if I need tips on blogging it’d be Problogger. Why? Because the blog is based around the blogging niche and I’m always certain of reading about blogging anytime I get there. If you ask me which blog I’ll go to whenever I’m in need of copywriting or marketing tips it will be Copyblogger because that is its niche and if you ask me which blog I’d go to when I’m in need of traffic generating tips it will be Think Traffic because the blog is based on traffic generation.