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Yesterday, I was sent a question by a friend on Quora asking how can he write a 3000-word post. I wrote an answer about what techniques he could use, and then sat thinking more about the intent of the question and what can a well meaning blogger do if she/ he is struggling with 'writer's block'. So, this post. A painting by Leonid Pasternak Why write long posts on blogs? Long posts are seen to be valuable, because they are likely to contain information on different aspects of the issue. Therefore, visitors are more likely to refer them to others and visit the page again and again. Long posts are also liked by search engines. Google has said, it likes long, well-researched, blog posts and articles. So, they are good from SEO point of view too. So, a long article is likely to get more readers, better search placement, more links, more social shares and more engagement, and more traffic. How big a blog post is considered long enough? Blogging platform Mediu...

An eternal question, asked all the time and on almost all social media platforms! We bring you here the distilled wisdom which is current and effective in 2017 and will remain so in 2018. Before we go to the techniques, let's hurriedly remember that what we need on our blog or website is relevant traffic , not any type of traffic. Whether for spreading your messages among people who will appreciate them or for earning money from blogging, relevance of the traffic is of paramount importance. What relevance of traffic means is: Are the people who are visiting your blog interested in your content? When the traffic comes from bots and spammers, people who landed on your page due to presence of your website on search engine pages for wrong search terms, people landing there due to your email or someone's reference or a link but finding your website not what they were expecting, traffic from link farms, traffic for which you made payment, or your own traffic - this is poor quali...

Domain name registration is done only through registrars registered with ICANN, the international body for internet naming. So, all domain name registrars have to abide by the norms set by ICANN. Generally speaking, you are free to change your registrar. However, in certain cases, you may be denied such a transfer, e.g. if some fee payment is pending or someone else has represented to them to be the real domain name holder. The present registrar might even charge you for the transfer, and that is supposed to be legal! Domain transfers are allowed only after 60 days of purchase of domain or its earlier transfer. The process is slightly procedure-bound. Registrars generally have a facility for domain transfer, which once clicked guides you till you agree to their terms, and then it generates a code for unlocking the domain for transfer. You then apply to the new registrar for accepting the transfer through such a link on their website, and supply the code. The new registrar usua...

This article applies to Wordpress free/ personal/ premium/ business blogs as well as blogs created with wordpress.org CMS. Wordpress bloggers are fascinated with plugins because these little bits of software can add great functionality to the blog, ranging from improving SEO to installing a beautiful comment box to what not. And in most cases, you don't need to know coding at all. Yes, plugins are a wonderful way to add great things to the blog, which you cannot do without knowing a lot of PHP - the computer language used by Wordpress. Moreover, a number of plugins are free. Wordpress offers more plugins and allows you to install third-party plugins as you go for paid plans. On Wordpress-created self-hosted blogs, you can install plugins by dozens. For self-hosted blogs on Wordpress CMS, the number of plugins available is growing by the day. Its depository already has around 52,000 plugins! In all, plugins are such an important part of Wordpress ecosystem that withou...

Updated: January 2021 Art and craft blogs by Indians are hard to come by, nor are there more than a couple cartoon blogs that are regular and well designed. Many artists or art lovers create a blog but either leave it unattended or become irregular in updating it. There are only a few DIY blogs maintained by Indians. Out of all that are present, just a few blogs are worth mentioning and we bring them to you here. Art blogging There are thousands of blogs on the web on visual arts including drawing and painting, design, decor and craft. Some art blogs are well-established and earn handsomely. If you type "top art blogs" or "art and craft blogs" on Google, you get numerous listings, some with corporate websites and buy-sell platforms but also some outstanding art blogs by individuals and institutions. Artists, being highly creative in their field and immersed in their work, often lose sight of how blogging can help them in many ways. Some artists, however, have disco...

On a Facebook Group on blogging, someone created doubt recently whether Google gives low value to blogs hosted on its own Blogger platform just to prove a point before enforcement authorities that it does not favor people using its services. It looks logical, going by numerous court cases and questioning from national IT authorities such companies have to face globally, relating to anti-trust, monopolistic or restrictive practices. Or is it illogical? Specifically, we saw the following arguments during discussion on that group: Google deprecates Blogger blogs when it comes to its search preferences. Blogger blogs that retain .blogspot ending are thought of as not too authoritative sites. Google favors Wordpress blogs over Blogger blogs, for some curious reason. In any case, search engines think low of blogs unless the blogs are maintained as regular websites. I, or my colleagues here at ITB, have no clue about Google deprecating .blogspot blogs. And we believe, it won...

You can add new markup to your site or blog so that they are better discovered on Google visual search With the latest offer , Google has given a facility to showcase recipes on Google app on Android and mobile web by using a 'badge' feature. The badge on the image of your recipe prompts the searcher to visit your blog. That's it! What it means is (I'm using Google's own example) that if someone does an image search for cupcakes on Google on his mobile phone, he will get a badge on the bottom left corner of thumbnails which tells about the image's category and options available from there. So, if one sees a type of cupcake with a badge 'recipe' on it and clicks on it, he will be taken to the recipe to make that cake. This added good user experience is likely to drive traffic to the website or blog from which the image is sourced. As a blogger or website owner, what you have to do is to apply recipe markup to your pages so that your  images get t...