Hello again, my social networking friend!

Let me Cut to the Chase:

This post is all in good fun, I don’t actually think old people are dunce because they don’t use IE, and I don’t think people that use IE in general are stupid. The post was written in a rather offensive writing style, but please be aware that I’m just joking around. So, with that in mind, everything thing I say can and will be held against me, but I don’t mean most of it.

There are currently two browsers that dominate the internet, one of which sucks, and one that everybody loves. Of course everyone already knows that these two browsers are Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. What you might not know is that Internet Explorer users are either afraid of change, senile, or they don’t use the computer much. When people don’t use their computer very much, it obviously wouldn’t matter if they used internet explorer or Mozilla Firefox, partially because they had no idea either one of them existed.

Many people just refer to their internet explorer, as Internet. If they found out of another way to connect to the internet then they would probably explode and spurt guts of stupidity all over their bedroom. Nipping the bud from the very beginning is the best thing someone could do. I would find it humorous, and a great justice if the default homepage for new microsoft computers was mozilla.com instead of msn.

Think about it though, if someone pointed a finger at you and asked you which program you wanted to use to surf the internet, before you knew anything about either program, which you would use? I’m guessing most of you would’ve answered firefox. Despite your answer being plenty biased already… I would’ve chosen it because Mozilla Firefox sounds way cooler than Internet Explorer.Then again, if it was my first time on the computer, and someone sat me down, and told me to choose between firefox or Internet Explorer then I doubt I would notice that Firefox was better.

You have to be tech savvy to really enjoy the wonders of Firefox, their marketing scheme, and the pretty colors in their logo. Maybe, if you were a natural to the internet, then you could sit down and decide that Firefox was better than IE7 without batting an eyelid.

Despite Internet Explorer User’s lack of intelligence, many of them can vouch for their precious IE7. For example (not a very good one), I tried switching my dads computer from IE7 to Firefox. I thought I was doing him the biggest favor by switching his browsers. He ended up yelling at me and forcing me to switch it back. I don’t know whether this is because he missed his bookmarks, or because genuinely liked IE7 better than Firefox. I know one thing for certain though; being senile definitely had something to do with it.

I feel distanced from all Internet Explorer users, probably because they have different interests than me. Seriously the only people that use it are the people that are to stupid to change it, don’t see any point in changing it, or don’t have the time to change it. I’ve had to change the browser to FF for both of my parents, so obviously old people are dunce when it comes to internet browsing software. To be honest though, as long as you don’t plan on spending a lot of time on the internet, and enjoying a feature rich experience isn’t in your best interest, than it really doesn’t matter which browser you use.

My feelings towards internet explorer users are left alone in the outside world though. My computer class had to use internet explorer because that’s what comes installed on the computer. Being built in to the computer seems to make the program more trustable… The truth is, I haven’t used IE7 on my computer since I used it to find firefox and download it. When I’ve turned on my Internet Explorer to check how a web page looks in that browser, I get some random popup and for some reason a bunch of toolbars are hovering over the content.

If you want a good internet browsing experience, then go with Firefox… If not for any of the reason above, then get it because of the cool addons. If everyone was as educated as you now are about the two leading internet browsers, the lead dev and his mom would be the only people using Internet Explorer 7.

Look Link Love

There are times when you won’t really want to take the time to write an entire article for your website. You might be in a state of exhaustion, on vacation, or just extremely uninterested in your blog’s topic for the day. When this happens you need to have a backup plan, and this article I’ve written while in a state of exhaustion will simply have to do. Well, this post isn’t physically your backup plan, but hopefully you’ll learn a method that you like from it and be able to use it in the future.

If you ever find yourself in a situation as annoying as I’m in, you’re going to need to do some planning in order to keep your blog running. Problogger has a solution for his scheduled leave of absence, and I wish I was intelligent enough to think of this earlier. By the way, congratulations to him for his new child.

I will be taking a couple of weeks off now however I’ve pre-prepared two great weeks of content here at ProBlogger for you. It will include a guest post each day from some great bloggers, a series of 10 posts from me on ‘how to let your blog go’ and a few other random posts from me that I’ve written earlier.

It’s very possible to lose subscribers and frequent readers when you don’t post for over a week. So, you should have some posts stored as drafts for whenever you go on a vacation, sporting event, grandma’s house, or etcetera. So whenever you don’t have time to sit down and think about a new blog post to write, you can simply publish an article you’ve written in the past. Whether you set up a complete series for a planned leave of absence, or you have some timeless articles you’ve just be storing for the right moment, at least one of the two is necessary.

Of course a small update about what’s going on in your life during vacation would be great content for a post as well. John Chow frequently posts about his vacations, the food he eats, or things he gets, and still maintains a very successful ‘Make Money Online‘ sort of blog. An example post can be found here. In reality that’s a pretty long post, but if you were just to post a video with a brief description you’d be fine too. In fact, images are probably the best things you could show people during a vacation, as novels generally aren’t as interesting to blog readers as short stories (with lots of pictures) are.

So, make sure you plan out some content before you go off doing something that will leave you unable to write quality posts. Whether you have pre-written content, pictures from vacation, or a video of you receiving a gift (lol), you should be in good shape!

The state I’m in now will probably deem this post worthless, and I’ll end up redoing it later, but that’s what I get for being a procrastinator.

How many people have told you that they have a great idea for a novel and are thinking of writing one when they find the time? Chances are you have run into them on more than one occasion, and they are hard to take. These are the people who ‘want to write’ but ‘can’t write’. The world is full of people who cannot write, and some even make a living at it. If you doubt that last statement, just look at television and tell me I’m wrong.
The truth is, while most people can’t write, there are some out there who can, and those are the ones you need to keep in mind when you are thinking of writing articles for your business.
If you want to write your own articles, then as long as you can define the following words, you may just be able to get away with it: noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, conjunction, proper noun, tense.
If you defined all those, and got it right, then you may have hope to write a good article, but chances are after noun and verb, you are completely lost. That is okay, you may not need to know how to write in your job, but when you want to promote your company through a press release, or through a sales pitch, then you better be able to write.

One of the biggest ways for you to lose business is to issue a sub-par article that is full of grammar errors and spelling mistakes. Even these can be simple things you may not think about like when to use ‘effect’ and ‘affect’ or ‘their’ and ‘there’. Hence, the reason you hire others to do it for you.

Those professional writers out there make their living writing things for people, taking the thoughts in your head and putting them on paper to make sure you are able to get the right point across, without embarrassing sentences like ‘Your crazy in affect if you didn’t bye this.’ If you caught the four errors in that sentence, then good on you.

The point is, if you had a car, and knew nothing about how to replace the brakes, would you do it yourself or would you pay someone professional to do it? Sure it isn’t cheap, but when you are slamming on the non-working breaks down a hill, will money be the first thing on your mind? Writing is the same way. Don’t let your company go in a tailspin because the press release or article you issued didn’t get the point across. Get things done right with a professional writer who knows how to write and can get your business on the fast track to success with their gift for the written word.

In a perfect world, only the websites people like would be at the top of the search engine results. In a perfect world, webmasters would focus only on building up their content so that people wanted to read it. In a perfect world, Search Engine Optimization Does. Not. Exist. Google is trying harder and harder to stop webmasters from gaming their websites to the top of the search engines. I’m assuming that they’ll never be able to completely end webmaster’s ability to purchase success.

A friend brought this to my attention when he told me that most webmaster’s were spammers. Buying, selling, and trading links are all against google’s wishes. Though Google is not the law of the internet, they’re plenty powerful to make it seem so. As far as I’m concerned, Google is right to deem the actions of certain webmasters’ wrong, or right.

Think about it, if the websites with the best content were at the top of all your search results, you and everyone else would get the information they really wanted. Unfortunately for your search for greater knowledge, depending on a webmaster’s ability to get people to link to him, he’s able to put any site he wants at the top of the search results. To me, it’s spam when you put a link on your site just because you were paid to.

Don’t get me wrong though, I have no problem profiting from people advertising on my website. Google does it with their contextual advertising company, Text-Link-Ads does it, Kontera does it, John Chow Does it, and so do many other websites. I feel so redundant right now I think I should end this post, but I’m ending it knowing you’ll see SEO in a new light. If you see the flaws of your old disgusting SEO habits, then repent, and try social networking. Since only the good stuff really gets popular, it’s not as spammy as Search Engine Optimization.

I’ve recently come to the understanding that publishing just about anything is not the right way to go about with your blog. Blog owners will agree with this statement, especially the professional bloggers that bring in hundreds of dollars each day. The downsides to publishing half-baked articles are numerous, and in order to retain your reputation, you really shouldn’t do it.

I know I’ve lost a good number of readers for the multitudes of blogs I’ve created because of my tendency to carelessly publish my uncreative posts. Bloggers all around the world and from each corner of the web have lost potential readers because of this bad habit. When you publish an article that’s not up to par, visitors that happen to make that fateful voyage to your site can only grimace in disgust and sail away. This can be extremely frustrating when you’ve worked so hard to write perfect posts, and then readers see your sloppy side on one occasion and decide that your blog just isn’t worth a read.

Some Advice For Publishing Good Articles:

1. After you write something, save it but do not publish it. An hour (or more) later you can come back and reread your potential post. If you think it’s perfect, then go ahead and publish it. If you think it’s garbage than just scrap it completely. What’s most likely to happen though, is that you’ll notice a bunch of mistakes and be able to fix them. After fixing your article you’ll think, “phew, I just saved my self from a huge loss of readers!”.
2. Don’t scramble to get a post done: Some people think that being the first person to publish an article for a viral news story is the only one that will get visitors to their blog. That fact is badoozie, and completely incorrect. Even if you’re first, and you’ve got the only post on the internet about a popular subject, people won’t read your article unless you’ve written in perfectly.
3. Peer Review: If you’ve got a good friend on the internet that you can trust won’t steal your content. You can ask him to read over your post and tell you about any mistakes he may find. Better yet, get your mom, dad, brother, wife, husband, or sister to look over your article and see what they can find (assuming they have equal or higher education than you).
4. Make sure you find your own post interesting, if you don’t then just get rid of it. Trying to post something that you don’t believe in will not help you at all. Also, make sure you know what you’re talking about, don’t try to completely BS (balonswivel?) your way through an article. Anyone who knows more than you do about the subject will discredit your article, and in time your entire site.
5. Practice: A highly redundant thing for me to say would be “practice makes perfect”. I’m going to bash that cliche statement and say that you’ll never be perfect. Nobody is, not even the professionals at Problogger, DoshDosh, or CopyBlogger. Godzilla forbid I call myself a perfect writer, I find it hard just to follow my own advice. The truth is, you’ll get better and better with practice, but reaching perfection is like trying to reach absolute zero for a chemist. It just ain’t gonna happen!

Despite how simple this advice may seem, it’s still extremely hard to follow. The more confident you get with your blogging skills, the less you’ll want to leave your posts just sitting for an hour. Even if your not confident yet, impatience can get the best of you. Try as hard as you can to follow atleast a few of these steps, and I guarantee your blog posts will come out 200% better than before.

Subscription is something you would usually associate with a prescribed drug you’ve been taking. Either you or your insurance company has to pay for that drug. In other words, someone happens to be paying for something, and you don’t want people to think that your RSS feed is for sale. So whenever a non-savvy internet N0b comes to your site and sees the word subscribe they’ll think you’re trying to get them to pay for something. Depending on what kind of blog you run, you might want to change the text subscribe to something else.

Although it only takes a single intelligent thought to come up with this theory, I didn’t do it on my own. I realized the extent of the word subscribe’s negative effects after reading a post on CopyBlogger. You can find the statistics, (a 254% rise in subscribers) after changing the subscribe text to something else on their post. What you’ll find is a somewhat drawn-out post that tells you what you need to do to increase your subscribers, and a screen shot to back the information up.

My question is, do you really want or need subscribers that don’t even know what subscribe means? Sure any kind of reader can bring a boost to your traffic and is a potential ad clicker. Though, if that person doesn’t know what subscribe means, will they know how to use their newly found RSS feed? So, if that person doesn’t know how to use an RSS feed, how will the feed help you to bring that person back to your blog? Copyblogger doesn’t seem to see a good enough reason to switch their subscribe button to something new either.

So in the end it’s up to you, the webmaster. Do you want to change your subscribe button to say something like, “Get our Feed Sent to You!” for the people who don’t know what subscribe means, and probably don’t know how to use an RSS feed anyways. Or would you leave your subscribe button alone for the more tech-savvy internet browsers. Who knows, maybe the people that know what subscribe means will get their feelings hurt when they think you are downplaying their intelligence.

Maybe changing the button to say “Subscribe for Free” would do just fine. Or, maybe I’m just delving way to deep into this subject.