Think about why people use twitter. I use twitter to connect with friends and other users who share the same interest as me. I use twitter to find new articles, and resources. But since there are thousands upon thousands of articles being tweeted every day, I can only pick the ones that grab my attention with the title. This applies to majorly everyone. You don’t really get a creative title with Auto Tweets. Sometimes your title is too long and you have auto tweet setup, so it will cut the title of. Most of the times, it starts with a generic statement saying: New on ….

This type of statement would not only make people ignore that tweet, but if you do that more often, people will begin to ignore you on twitter as well. So one of the reasons why you should always tweet the messages personally is because you can come up with creative ways to attract users. You can post the same article a few times and space it out with other tweets and use different titles to approach different type of audience.

Twitter uses hash tags and that is one thing Auto Tweet cannot do for you. If you tweet the link manually, you can not only make the best title, but you can also use hashtags for the keywords like “Designer”, “WordPress”, “Blogger” or what not. You can either incorporate these hashtags within the title, or at the end of tweet nonetheless these will get you targetted audience from twitter as people search for that specific hash tag.

What are you losing by posting tweets manually? Simply 15 seconds. But what are you gaining from posting tweets manually? A lot more targetted visitors and more credibility. Now there might be an issue with posting tweets on specific time. That is why you have programs like Hootsuite and others that will let you schedule your tweets, so use that and manually write your tweet. Don’t make excuses.

The answer to the question asked in the title is NO and if you read the post, you should know why.

So October 2nd was my birthday. No celebration on Balkhis because it wasn’t the right time. I was still working hard on WPBeginner. Well today I feel very happy as the Google PR updated. WPBeginner received a Google PR 6 with many inner pages at PR 5 and PR 4. Where as Balkhis got a PR 5 which went up also, it was a PR 4.

Now the Alexa of WPBeginner also went in 17k which is also very good, so all to all this startup was a very successful one.

What’s next in the list? Well you should expect me back to the posting schedule on Balkhis. Although I will not be posting once a day, but you should expect a few posts a week. We are also working on the redesign of Uzzz Productions. The new site will also be powered by WordPress but it will be built with mostly jQuery. It should be done by mid November.

We are also working on new features for WPBeginner coming by Mid December with a slight additions in the design to make it more user friendly. Add more services and so on.

Personally, I am conducting a twitter experiment which I will update you guys later and tell you how it worked out for me. Hopefully it will be great and it will benefit me a lot, and when I share it with you guys, I am certain that it will help you guys also.

I will be attending WordCamp NYC 2009 this coming November 14-15. If you are in New York and want to hang out, let me know and we can arrange a meetup. Ofcourse if you attend WordCamp then we can chill for the whole two days.

A contributing member of Balkhis, Zain Balkhi will be turning 6 on November 24 this year. So, I will be updating his portfolio site Life of Blogger. The site got a redesign when he graduated from his Pre-K class earlier this year.

A special plug for Darren Rowse and his new Pro Blogger community where I am an active member now a days. Quality discussion for bloggers and a good place to be if you are interested in interacting and learning from bloggers on all levels. There is a $1.95 monthly membership fee but it is well worth it. Join now before the price goes up because I am sure it will. The price is to avoid spammers and keep the quality discussion with paid moderators. I love it in that community. Good source of traffic also.

Something I realize that most people were confused about and I got many emails about it also. People asked me why does WPBeginner get better results than Balkhis. What you need to understand is that WPBeginner is a niche blog for WordPress users. Balkhis is my personal blog where I happen to share SEO tricks, Web Design tricks and basically my experience. Do not mistake Balkhis for something it is not. Personal blogs get big over time whereas niche blog gets big faster.

I also want to suggest if you want to stay updated with what I am doing then follow these two twitter feeds. @syedbalkhi and @wpbeginner.

I am also contemplating closing comments on posts that are older than 90 days to avoid SPAM. What do you guys suggest? Obviously the final decision will be mine, but I want my readers input in making this key decision.

I do encourage you to tweet with me, or email me if you have a specific question. I am glad to help out when I can. I missed you guys just as much as you probably missed me

It has been a huge misconception that a good number of traffic (pageviews and uniques) is the result of good blog marketing. I, as a blogger, have seen a lot of bloggers attributing increased number of traffic as a success for the promotions that they do. Although we can say that it is somehow a factor, we cannot just completely base it there. Here in my short post, I would explain why good marketing IS NOT just about getting good amount of traffic.

Most new and intermediate bloggers make the mistake of doing what I call as “hard promotion” (kinda similar to hard selling). Aggressive promotion is when a blogger considers quantity more than quality. If you’re into the blogging for fame or money, you probably have heard of the cliche statement “Blogging success doesn’t happen overnight”.

The problem with the statement is that many people, including myself, think it’s already obsolete! Tell me, are you going to wait for some period of time to implement new methods when you can do them now? The same applies to bloggers on getting traffic. They see other bloggers get ahead of them, they become impatient and they do things “aggressively”.

Why it’s harmful to your blog?

Just like the saying “Slowly but surely”, it goes completely the same the other way as well. I’ve spoken with some of my blogger friends and they describe the aggressive marketing as “annoying”. The harm here is that if your target audience gets annoyed, they would more likely tune you and your blog out. This is bad especially if you’re trying to establish a brand for your blog. You may not want to be known in the blogosphere for all the bad and wrong reasons, do you?

Good Amount of Traffic/Pageviews/Hits Doesn’t Mean Good Promotion and Marketing

Sure we can get a thousand unique hits to my blog in a day, but is the quality of traffic we are sending to my blog a good one? Or are we targeting the proper audience? During some point last year I know I made this mistake and the problem you would normally get is inconsistency in traffic and a very high bounce rate. These factors are crucial, especially if you’re working out on a certain goal to make your blog well-known.

Talking about increasing traffic and all the stuffs about it has become really mainstream. We, oftentimes read ways on how to get a thousand hits doing this and doing that but the real thing here is conversion. Are we converting on the traffic that our blog gets? Whether you’re focusing on building subscribers or having a good lively and interactive community, it’s imperative to assess whether what we are doing is worth it or not.

What about you and your blog? Yea, you’re getting more traffic than I do and that’s given. But are you converting enough and reaping the benefits of having a well-trafficked blog? Do you have a lively interaction on it? If not, maybe its time to re-evaluate. Maybe time to list the marketing strategies you did and evaluate whether it’s proper or not. After all we (bloggers) live altogether with one goal in mind, which is to benefit from something that we’ve done.

Melvin is a young entrepreneur and student who has been doing internet marketing related stuffs for more than 2 years now. He shares his experience and ramblings in his blog located @ MelvinBlog.com in w/c you can subscribe to. He also uses Twitter and hopes to get followed by more people.

If you did not know which site I was working on it is called WPBeginner – Beginner’s Guide for WordPress. It was launched on July 4th, 2009, Yes the Independence day of USA. Since then the site has collectively received:

175,533 Visitors
490,644 Pageviews
7.18 Million Hits

Current Alexa Stats Rank at: 35,847

Technorati Rank: 18,583

These stats above are decent for a site that is just two months old. In this article, I will share some of the steps that I took in order to achieve this. One thing I will tell you is that the monetary investment on this project was $0 in terms of advertising. The cost of running this site is our normal hosting bills, the domain cost and such. This is probably the most affordable way to launch and promote a blog.

Pre-Launch Phase

There was a lot that happened behind the scenes before the site was launched. Such as concept, picking the domain, design, testing, article preparation, future plans, deadline and such.

Concept

The concept of this site hit me when I saw Godaddy offering 99 cents .com domains for a short period of time, and I wanted to register a domain because for the least, I will make $8 profit on it if I sell it to someone else. Well when I was researching the niches that I like to pick the domain, WordPress certainly stood out. The reason for that is because when I was in the early phases of Balkhis, I wanted to start a WordPress resource site, but I was too busy with Balkhis and clients, and did not want to lose focus. So I took out a notepad and started jotting down some notes. These were initial plans of what I wanted to be on the site.

Picking the Domain

Picking a domain is a tedious process specially when you are making a resource site. There are a lot of legal issues that you must not ignore when you are going to have a site about a trademark product. Therefore the first thing I did was head over to WordPress.org and started looking at their Privacy policies, trademark policies, anything that I can find. After looking around a bit, I found a page called Domains. In that page WordPress clearly urged users not to use the keyword “wordpress” in the main domain name. The last thing you want to do at a start up phase of a resource site is to get on the bad side of the product company. So now I knew that my choices of domains are limited. I wanted to have WordPress in the domain name, but now I can’t. But WordPress allows for wp, so I went with that.

This was a tedious process because I wanted a perfect name. A name that is brandable, one that is catchy and easy to remember. I certainly did not want to compromise not having the .com extension, so the main goal was to find a name in the domain extension .com because it is the most common one. Most people type that by default, this way I won’t lose any traffic.

I used some of these tools and consulted with my team including Amanda Roberts, David Pegg, and Muhammad Karim and decided to go with wpbeginner.com

Site Plan

Just like before you build a house you need an architect to build a plan, you need a plan before you start any site or blog to avoid troubles in the future. I started working on the plan of this site by asking these questions:

• What features do I want this site to have?
• How the site will be organized?
• What were my motivations behind this site, my goal?
• How will I generate revenue from this site?
• How durable this site will be? What will be my deadlines?
• When will I quit if it doesn’t work out the way I want it to?

After answering all these questions, I had tons of notes and a pretty good idea where I was going with this site. Ofcourse this was not all my effort. It was a combined effort of my friends. You always want to try to get opinions from your friends and family to see what they think (Ask People who have a clue of what you are talking about).

I want to emphasize on the last two questions because some of you might wonder why they are even there. You need to know for how long can you produce fresh content on this. Or for how long do you think this idea will work before you have to add tweaks to it. And certainly the last one, what if you don’t meet your goals. You need to set a deadline and a quit date because there is no use in wasting energy and resources toward something that is not working out and seems to be a dead end.

You should quit if you’re on a dead-end path. You should quit if you’re facing a Cliff. You should quit if the project you’re working on has a Dip that isn’t worth the reward at the end. ~ Seth Godin

Design

Ever heard the saying: First Impression is the Last Impression. Well it is very true with websites. I will tell you that a look of your site can determine user’s perspective of your site. A site that looks good will be trusted more because it reflects professionalism. You need an eye-catching design. Colors that are friendly, colors that are marketable. Some colors are better than others when it comes to Marketing. Zac wrote an excellent article about The Emotions of Color in Marketing. Our color scheme we picked reflected the goals behind our site.

Orange is the combination of the happiness of yellow and the energy and strength of red. It symbolizes creativity, determination, enthusiasm and success. In addition orange indicates affordability.

White is purity, goodness, light and innocence. It is considered perfection. White is generally positive and simple.

Black is elegant, powerful and formal. It can also denote prestige.

It was actually added to Colourlovers by someone. (It was certainly not me or anyone in our team).

The second most important thing after the color is the logo. I want my users to associate WPBeginner with something. A brand perhaps, something that they will remember. When you see a big Y, it automatically makes you think of Yahoo. How about the big G… It makes you think of google. For all it can be for German site, but you will think of Google nonetheless. Therefore I wanted to create something different. Since the site is geared toward beginners, how would it be if its a cool little smily face guy? Sounds simple and easy to remember. If you want to create a best logo, then you should think how would the logo look by itself without any text or anything. If it looks good then it is probably a good option. You should check out these resources for logo designs for inspiration.

I like to think that Best designers don’t copy. They STEAL! What is the point of copying an entire site? How about you steal the elements from the best looking sites and make them work together on yours. The product you get is actually the Best of the Best. So that was the next step in picking the design. We wanted this to look more of a resource site than a blog. So we looked at all examples of sites across various CSS Galleries and picked the designs that are most elegant and functional. We took bits of that for WPBeginner and implemented those aspects in our design.

I won’t go into the nitty gritty of web designs, but we made sure our site has cross browser compatibility and it is functional. Note: the site was created in the local server, but it was put on an online server as a password protected site for us to test. I asked some other web friends that are designers, users with a lot of experience in the industry to check the site. Asked their opinion and have other friends beta test everything. Even though the design was ready, the site wasn’t ready to go live yet and I will cover that in the next section.

What you should get out of this: Design is probably one of the most important aspect of your site in the launch phase. A good design can really give you a tremendous boost in early stage and an edge over your competitor later on. You want to pick a good designer, one who knows all about these aspects that I mentioned above. Do not go for someone that is charging $30 for a custom design because most likely you won’t get a great design.

Article Preparation

What is the point of launching a site when you do not have any article. An advice that I took from Merlin Mann was always have at least 5 articles before you even think about going forward with the blog. Since it is a blog ran by a group of us, we assigned tasks and began writing. We had a good amount of resources before we made the site go live. We scheduled a lot of posts to go live on specific times. The reason for that was because I wanted to target audiences of all over the world and provide fresh content. Second reason was because it just looks weird when you have a new site and all articles were published all at once. It is good to space them out.

Do not count your welcome posts as the first five. Most people use their first five posts as a welcome post for the most part. You want to have articles that are helpful to your audience. Try to make them clear and thorough. Our goal was to create a site that helps WordPress users. So why not start out with a step by step guide that you need to setup a WordPress blog. Those were our first posts.

Reserving the Social Media Names

Social Media is the next big thing. Well it is already the big thing now and it will continue to do so. So it is good to reserve your brand name before it gets taken by someone else. So I did that as soon as I registered my domain name. Twitter profile was reserved and Youtube was reserved. For other places, I can probably careless because I am not that focused there yet.

Launch Phase

Most people start on this phase, but the pre-launch phase is probably just as important as the launch phase. In this phase, you make your blog available for the world wide web. You begin to promote it, use different advertising techniques, provide support, continue to write articles. I will tell you that with this site, I spent $0 in investment iin terms of advertising. All I spent was time and use the resources surrounding me.

Use of Twitter

Believe it or not, but the main way to get the word out, I used the twitter account. My twitter account @syedbalkhi and asked some of my friends to tweet it out as well. Now I did not focus on promoting the site itself. It was merely a few tweets that I sent out that read:

Check out @wpbeginner if you have any questions related to #WordPress

Now you notice that there is no link in this tweet, so it was easy for others to retweet it without thinking it was a spam promotion. I used the #hashtag for WordPress which will come up when people search for WordPress on twitter. Now obviously I got a custom twitter background and a link to our site on the tweets and the profile of @wpbeginner.

Now soon the word was getting out, but I said to myself, I can’t just stop here and netiher should you. We kept on bringing great articles on the site, but along with tutorials, collection / list posts was also in our priority list. The reason I encouraged the team to keep releasing list posts was because I know that social media loves them. And I wanted the social media love. That is free word of mouth advertising and believe me that is the best one out there. There is no better way of convincing a user to view your site unless a friend of theirs recommend it.

The thing with twitter is that you really have to be careful. There is a very fine line in between spamming and sharing content. But this is how I overcame that. Most people join twitter to gain followers. Well one of the easiest way to gain followers is by simply following more people, RIGHT? well I say NOT. I realized that by having quality followers and actually having the connection with them is actually a lot more important than following 30,000 people and have 32,000 followers without knowing a single person closely. Because when you are in a 30,000 boat, you cannot ask people to retweet you because you really do not know them that well. With me it is a different case because I developed a good connection with these people via twitter by retweeting their stuff and engaging in the conversations, I do not mind asking them to retweet something for me and certainly they do not mind retweeting my tweets. But when you ask someone to retweet for you and you do not know them as well, you tend to come off as a spammer.

You must need to know how to use twitter efficiently. I have written numerous articles regarding twitter but here is one that you should read: 25 Tips to Increase Your Influence and Gain Followers on Twitter. Now if you are not on twitter, then I got two words for you. JOIN Twitter. I know some people would ask for reasons, but if my stats are not enough, check out these 25 reasons to join twitter.

I will say that twitter was marjoly behind the success of this blog. Here is why I say that. One because I got to know a lot of people that I never knew without twitter and a lot of people got to know about WPBeginner that they hadn’t if they were not on twitter. It helped me get noticed. And the only way to get noticed is have a quality article, good friendship relations, and have a good reputation on social media networks because once the article goes viral, you cannot imagine the unlimited possibilities. Let me give you an example:

WPBeginner got featured at Webmonkey (Wired own magazine and it was also featured at Wired.com)

Tweeted by Vitaly Friedman (Smashingmagazine’s Editor), Darren Rowse (Founder of Problogger, b5media, DPS and more), Michael Hyatt (CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers), Jacob Gube (Founder of Six Revisions, Calvin Lee (Founder of Mayhem Studios, a credible designer on twitter), Chetan (Another credible designer behind Cheth Studios).

And ofcourse thousands of other users retweeted and tens of thousands viewed it because these guys together have combined followers count of about 200,000. And Wired has over 6 million user audience.

Use of Other Social Media Networks

Even though twitter was the most important one you must not forget other social media sites such as digg and stumbleupon because they can bring massive traffic. WPBeginner had 3 stories that got popular on digg which certainly brought in huge traffic. Multiple stories on stumbleupon got few stars and collectively social media helped WPBeginner got all the attention. It got mentioned at many sites related to the niche including WordPress.org itself. You want to allocate the use of social media to your benefits. But remember you must not spam them. Do not try to promote your own content. Try to share content. Be active in the community.

Use Your Beautiful Design to your Advantage

Remember how I went in great details above about the design. Well that was because it can really make a good impression on users. But It can also help you get free promotion and traffic from gallery sites and earn you good backlinks. Let me explain how you can do that.

Well there are CSS Galleries that are looking to feature beautiful designs. I have compiled a list of galleries here at Balkhis previously which you can use to submit your new blog. You must make sure that you are actually submitting a quality design. In order to judge that is honestly think to yourself would you add this site in your gallery, if this site was submitted by someone else.

Once you are listed in these galleries, when bloggers are making a list of best of or best designs, they might even pick your site. So that would be free backlinks for you and free traffic.

Submit News to Site

For a design related blog this is an excellent way to promote your articles individually. There are big sites like tutsplus that have an area for user submitted links, and you can submit your own articles. Obviously submit quality resources, so the admin of the other site actually appreciate it and would be glad to add you. As you continue to submit quality content to their news section, you will become more trusted and they will tend to link to you from their posts as well. This was one of the good source for me to gain more subscribers and users for WPBeginner.

1st Web Designer have a list of 40 Promotional Sites to add Your News for Designers

Get other Bloggers to link to you

This really help if you know people in the industry and have good friends. But if you don’t you should follow the guide that I wrote about How to get other bloggers to link to you. You will only get links if you have a quality product. You do not necessarily have to ask for al ink to your homepage. Try to get a link to a specific article. There are blogs that do weekly roundup, or monthly roundup of resources. You can suggest your links to them. Ask to be listed in the sidebar and such, but asking to be linked from the sidebar will not work unless you actually know the owners. Or you are providing something of equal value or $$ to get that link.

Another way to get other bloggers to link to you is by simply writing guest posts. This is what I did for some blogs. This actually shows the audience of that blog that you have interesting stuff, and you will get more users to come to your site.

Use this article that I wrote in the past 13 Ways to Promote Your Blog to Success

Bottom Line

The ways above worked out great for my new site and I hope it continues to do well. You can try them as well and let me know how it works for you. Don’t forget to check out WPBeginner.

P.S shameless plug: If you guys want someone to design your blog let me know

The main reason why you need a niche site is because it is easier to SEO i.e. to get backlinks to the site. If you want to get backlinks to your site, you need to do dofollow commenting, article marketing, directory submission and other ways. With all these methods, you would find out that what they all have in common is your anchor text. You would need to use your anchor text when doing this. so that you can improve your SERPs.

SEOing A Niche Site

When you are SEOing your niche site, basically you are mostly SEOing your home page. When you are doing this, you would have to use your anchor text or the keyword you would like to rank high on search engines. This means that all traffic that comes to your blog would be landing on your home page. This is great because when they go to your home page, the readers would see other articles you have written about the niche. Seoing a niche site is also easy to do directory submission. As you probably know, if you are doing directory submission, you have to submit your home page to the directory. Only few directories allow inner pages or deep submission. The top names directories such as DMOZ and yahoo directory requires you to submit your blog’s URL only. Most of the few directories that allow deep submission usually charge a fee for you to be able to do that.

SEOing A Nicheless Site

But if you have a nicheless blog, you cannot only optimize your home page. You have to optimize other pages for those pages to have good SERPs for their keywords. Optimizing other pages would need more work. And when the traffic (from search engine) comes to your site, they would not land on your home page, they would land on that article page they saw on thr search engine that they used. This means that they would not see other articles on your blog. The only readers that would see other articles are the curious ones that wants to know more about your site. You can argue that your readers would see other posts with the help of any related post plugin. But the plugin shows posts that are related either based on categories, keywords, anchor text or tags. For instance, if you wrote an article about caring for dogs and you also wrote another article about how to sleep; there is no way your readers would see the other article if they are reading one of the articles. They would only see it if they decide to explore your site.

In my opinion, not only do you make money with a niche site, but it is easier to make money if you can make a blog on a long tail keyword. The long tail keyword blog would help you to start making money quickly because it is easier to dominate. When you see that you can dominate the long tail keyword, that would post your confidence, and motivated you to go for the main keyword.

About the Author

Dalirin is a blogger that likes blogging about how to make money online. You can read more about how to make money on the internet at his blog.

Needless to say that two month passed by without me making a single sale. I had no idea what I got myself into. Just like the majority of internet marketers I was mostly shooting blind, creating MySpace profiles, surfing the Traffic Exchanges a lot and spending my time mostly on the low dollar activities.

Now, year and a half later, I realize how childish it was of me to believe that success would come instantly. Mark Twain said: “Success Comes Before Work Only in Dictionary.” And it is indeed so. However, it is not because God hates you and wants you to work hard, but because in order to experience success you need to be ready for it Mentally, Physically and Spiritually.

Great Success comes with Great Responsibility, which means that in order to experience success one must understand what it means to succeed, first.

Are You Doing It For The Money?

Every success story always starts with a dream. For the most part, success means money, but what the majority of internet marketers don’t realize is that if your sole motivation is money, then sooner or later you will face an obstacle which is bigger, harder and more terrifying then anything you’ve seen before, which will lead you to a realization:

1. Money Isn’t Worth The Hard Work
2. I’ll Find Another Way To Get Money

To me, success is more than money. To me, success is the ability to spend 5 hours a day on my business and utilize the rest of my spare time on Fun, Growth, Mind Expansion, Quality Time with my family and just about anything that makes me enjoy life even more than I do now.

To me, Success=Freedom. Freedom is a much stronger motivator then Money. I haven’t yet met a person (online and off) that can be motivated solely by money ALL THE TIME. Humans are deeply emotional beings. We crave satisfaction, understanding and fulfillment – money alone simply cannot provide that.

How Hard Are You Willing To Work For It?

Another common mistake I see Internet Marketers make is after spending two weeks trying to setup a website, autoresponder and a newsletter – the intrepreneurs seem to believe that they did everything in their power to make it work. They believe that they have done A LOT. The majority of online business owners tend to think that placing a Pay Per Click ad immediately makes them the next Frank Kern.

Sorry to disappoint, guys, but it doesn’t. Success stories, for the most part, are years in the making. Anik Singal, one of the world’s top affiliate marketers, had to spend a year in his parents’ basement, working on his affiliate business before he could claim the “Super Affiliate” status.

Until you’re ready – it won’t happen. How do you get ready for internet marketing success? By working harder than everyone else does. When it happens – you’ll know you’re ready.

How Much Are You Ready To Change?

It is often believed that Success changes people. But relying on my personal experience, I must say that the change occurs long before success does.

Success often demands a mindset shift. And the moment I shifted mine – my life shifted as well. I even lost most of my close friends.

Before I became an internet marketer, I was a student at Israeli Air Force Technological University where I spend most of my days from 8am-16pm. After I have decided to go against the stream of commonality by pursuing an internet marketing career – my “friends” turned their backs on me and have never spoken to me since.

At first it was painful, but later I realized that it was necessary. I needed to change, and in order for change to happen – I had to find new friends. I had to find successful friends, friends that could contribute to my life experience and make it better – something my classmates simply couldn’t do.

Are You Ready For Massive Failure?

“Failure Is A Stepping Stone On The Way To Success”

Are you ready to fail? Are you ready to fail hard? Are you ready to fail so miserably, it will be a heart breaking scene to watch? If not, get used to the thought that you are going to fail. The sooner you do, the sooner you fail and learn the most valuable success lesson of all.

In his book “Think and Grow Rich,” Napoleon Hill says: “Every Failure Has An Equivalent Seed Of Success In It.” It is important to remember that failure is a lesson. Learn your lessons well. Better yet, try to learn someone else’s lessons first.

Failure is to success as thick lips are to Angelina Jolie – it’s an essential part of the whole thing. Failure is essential in preparation to success. Only the ones that never truly tried – have never failed.

Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before he invented the light bulb. When he was asked whether he wasn’t discouraged by failure, he said: “I didn’t fail 10,000 times – I found 10,000 ways how not to build a light bulb.”
I encourage you to find 10,000 ways how not to run a successful internet marketing business. Because as soon as you do, the one way that is correct will have no other choice but to present itself to you.

Author byline: Igor Kheifets is 21 year old Internet Marketing Expert and the author and creator of Mastermind Internet Marketing. Get More From Igor On Twitter.

1. Lipton

2. Outdoor Italia

3. Interag

4. Nutrifield

5. Mint

6. Oypro

7. 4Design

8. Go Glamping

9. XHTMLit

10. Frog Watch

11. Viva Maria

12. Drop Bags

13. Straw Poll

I will personally try to design more new sites because I think this will be one of the trend that we will see in new designs.

1. Web Developer’s Toolbar

Web Developer`s tool bar probably will become one of the best plugins You`ve ever seen. It comes with his own tool bar that gives many useful tools for analyzing, validating and optimizing web-pages. The great thing about this plugin is that it’s on a few different browsers, so if you switch between them you will be able to use the same plugin on all.

2. HTML Validator

HTML Validator is an extremely powerful tool available to Windows users only. The add-on gives you feedback about errors on the page. It also lets you know where problems need to be addressed. But unless you’re an advanced Web designer, stay away from this tool. It’s very complicated.

3. CSS Validator

CSS Validator adds a right-click option in your browser, sending the CSS to the W3C CSS Validator. It opens the results in a new tab. CSS Validator is a nice tool that will come in handy often.

4. Firebug

Firebug is one of those extensions that you simply can’t be without. It lets you edit, debug, and view CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

5.. YSlow

YSlow requires FireBug to be installed for it to work, but it’s a great way to find out why your site is running so slowly. It analyzes Web pages and returns issues that are slowing the site down,

6. CSS Viewer

The add-on informs you of all the CSS information you’ll need from a site. Simply click on the page you want, open it in the Tools menu, and it will display CSS information.

7. Greasemonkey

It allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

8. JSView

All browsers include a “View Source” option, but none of them offer the ability to view the source code of external files. You can use the JSView extension to solve the problem. If the website you are viewing contains any external js/css files, an icon will appear that says “SS”, “JS”, or both. Each individual file can then be viewed by clicking on the filename. The file will be opened in a new window.

9. Color Zilla

If there’s a color on a Web page that you like, ColorZilla will find the precise code for it and allow you to paste it into your coding program. You can also create custom colors with its built-in palette browser. It saves the most-used colors for easy access later on. It’s powerful, it’s simple, it’s a must-have.

10. Font Finder

Font Finder allows you to highlight a font you like on any site, right-click on the selection, and after choosing “Font Finder”, view the full CSS text styling of the selection. You can then paste that into your own Web page.

11. IE Viewer

This add-on lets you preview websites in IE. It helps when checking for cross browser compatibility. You can also set some websites to always open in IE viewer if there are some compatibility issues.

12. Fire FTP

Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SFTP, SSL encryption, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag & drop, file hashing, and much more!

13. Screen Grab

Screengrab saves entire web pages as images. This tool will allow You to take screenshots of what is currently on your screen – you can even choose the portion of the screen you want to “grab”!

14. Code Tech

Get the feel of Dreamweaver in a Firefox extension. Edit your documents right next to your web pages as you surf.

15. Aardvark

This tool can be used to clean page from unwanted banners and ads, especially prior to printing a page. Pretty useful for web developers for analyzing the structure of a page.

1. Social Media is for Younger Generations

Social media is not limited to the younger generation. The community appreciates quality resources from everyone without judging the age. So if a thirteen year old wants to contribute to the network, then they may. Or if a sixty-three year old wants to contribute, they won’t be judged either. Social media networks have all age groups with some more abundant then others, but no community has put an age limit.

2. There are Rules to use Social Media

WRONG! In reality, there is no rule that governs the use of Social Media. You can tweet however you like, and format it in whichever way you see fit. You can digg the story, or bury it as you see it. You can share the links that you think are worthy in a way you think is best.

Now there are etiquette to using social media and if you don’t follow those then you will gain a bad reputation among the community. So careless self-promotion and spamming will get you blocked, but most people are too worried about doing it right. Relax and be yourself. If you like writing about puppets then write one sentence tweets about your puppets and those who are interested will follow you.

3. Its all about Quantity

Some people would like to think that people with more friends get a lot of retweets, or alot of diggs. That is not true. Because there are real estate agents who mass add people to their list on twitter, and not even know a single person. So they end up following 33,000 people who they don’t know, and 33,000 people follow them. But the fact is that they don’t get half the amount of retweets that you can get with just 1000 good followers that actually know you.

It’s never about the quantity instead it is about the quality. Its not about how many stories you submit on digg. Its about how good your stories are. Its not about how many status updates you made on twitter. Instead it is about whether those updates were useful to others. Its always about the quality, and users that provide quality are rewarded by the community not those who prefer the quantity road.

4. You have to be Everywhere

A more common misconception that I see is that you have to be everywhere. It is completely wrong, and as a matter of fact, I can argue that one person cannot be active on all social media networks because there are just too many of them. So take it one step at a time. Try out new things, and stick with the ones that you like best.

Remember, you can be a good community member at two communities and get tons of love and benefits such as visitors to your website, or you can be a member of one hundred communities and not get third of the traffic that you can get the other way.

5. Social Media Campaigns are all about having a Facebook and Twitter Profiles

While Facebook and Twitter are two of biggest social media networks, you cannot just stop by having a profile page on these sites. There are other great sites like Digg, Delicous, Reddit and others that can also get you alot of exposure.

6. Social Media Sites Send Poor Quality Traffic

Social Media Sites actually send one of the best quality traffic because you get only related audience. Popular sites like digg have users that visit the category that they like the best, so you are getting targetted users. On twitter, your tweets will only get retweeted by those who like it, so you are always getting targetted users.

7. Getting a story popular on Social Media requires the help of Power Users

Some people believe that it is true on sites like Digg and even on twitter, but I think it is completely wrong. It doesn’t require power users for your story to hit popular. It requires a quality article and that’s all. You can become a power user yourself as long as you contribute to the community, and the community loves quality. You don’t need power users, all you need is yourself.

8. Social Media is Fast

Ever heard of a saying how social media creates the boom, and it is fast. Well no it is not. It takes time to get popular on Social Media. You can tweet a story on twitter, but in order for it to get popular, it can take weeks and months. You need to structure a base for yourself in the community. Climb the ladder one step at at a time to the top. It takes time to build a good reputation on any social media community.

Sites that are whitelisted in digg are white listed because they have earned that reputation. Same goes with sites that get retweeted alot on twitter. That is because they have earn it.

9. Social Media is Easy

Every once in a while, I get this statement that social media is easy. It has some truth to it, but for the most part it is hard. It is not easy to earn someone’s trust. That is what social media is all about. Trust of the community. You need to work hard and show the community that you are worthy enough to be trusted.

10. You can disguise the community

You can never hide from the community. At least not forever. You might not be caught the first day, the first month, but you will be caught after the first year. There is no use to manipulating the system because playing the fair game is the best way. That’s how it should be done.

Many bloggers don’t know the right process of how blogs should be advertised. Its not a blatant statement I am making, I came to this conclusion after receiving many direct messages on twitter from people when I follow a them: Check out my blog – http://xxxx.com. I would never check out their blog because they didn’t give me a reason to do so. Instead what you should do is maybe sent a direct message of an individual post which might be useful to that person. And hope that the quality of your content persuades this person to explore more content on your blog and become a loyal user.

During the years that I have been working online, I learn that you can never get loyal users by simply advertising your home page specially when working with Discussion Forums, and Social Media Networks. If used effectively, both of them can bring you insane amount of loyal users for free. But you need to know how to do it the right way.

It might seem like that there is a connection with all top power diggers on digg, or all top users on twitter, but really there is not. They will digg or retweet your post, if it is worthy of it. So making that statement clear, I am telling you that you should not advertise all of your posts individually because not all of them are worthy.

The same way you should not put digg submit buttons, or reddit submit buttons on every article of yours. It hurts your site more than anything because not all your articles are digg worthy. And if your site is submitted on digg specially with an article like Attention Users there will be no post on Balkhis… Then you will probably get banned from social media networks. So refrain from abusing the system.

Now here is how you should do it. Lets take Twitter for example.

You should not just tweet your own articles. Tweet what you think your followers will like. Bring variety to the table. Its all about sharing the love in order to get it back. Contribute to the community and then community will appreciate you and will send its love to you.

So on average if you are tweeting 5 of your own links then tweet 10 of other people links. Now those could be the links that your friend tweeted, or asked you to retweet via DM or others that you found on the web.

Now when other sees that you are sharing useful information, they will begin to retweet your tweets, and next thing you know that your own site is being retweeted by others as well. Now if you simply put check out my site www.wpbeginner.com, most people won’t click it, but if you put check out 21 Mindblowing Premium-Like Free Wordpress Themes then more people are likely to see that article and your website indirectly.

This is killing three birds with one stone. Because you got the user to your website, you advertised the article, indirectly they saw your website as well, and now they are your loyal reader because they liked the article. So quality is a must.

Now when you are in social media networks, it is about making new friends. You can ask the friends to check out this link, and retweet it through a direct message. This way their followers can retweet as well. You can do the same with digg, facebook, and any other social media network.

What I am trying to say is don’t just stop after publishing your post. Instead you should go out and share it with others.