If you want to start a new blog and take it all the way to success, this condensed guide is everything you’ll need. Work as Darren Rowse’s, Steve Pavlina’s and Chris Guillebeau’s, as well as many others’ are of absolute help, have to be read and is where I got the inspiration to write this list.

But in here I have summarized which are, in my eyes, the ten important things you have to do. Blogging success is not easy, but the steps and the paths you have to take are all clear. If someone has a blog that doesn’t succeed is because they just don’t follow these rules. Read through and be willing to work hard on each of these points!

1-      Write quality content. Give value to the people. Make your articles great, deep and unique. Make the people be thrilled waiting for your next piece. Write timeless and viral material.

2-      Write quality content for others. This is THE way for you to reach new readers and drag people into your site. Leave thoughtful comments on other blogs, write guest posts and participate in forums. The more you do it, the bigger you’ll get.

3-      Post regularly. I schedule my posts for every Tuesday, Friday and Sunday and all my readers know that one way or the other the posts will be online by midnight at the latest. This helps building reader confidence and establishing a solid number of subscribers.

4-      Start with the best design possible. As long as you don’t have money to spend, get the best themes and designs you could possibly find for free. Once your writing gave you some return, reinvest it and set up your own custom designs. Get a logo designed from the best professionals, a premium or custom theme and show the world how serious you are about your blog.

5-      Build a big social media presence and leverage from it. Use Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, etc to bring new readers into your site. Connect with people in your niche, learn and also promote your work. It takes time but it’s absolutely worth the effort.

6-      Tell everyone about your blog. Tell your family, your friends, colleagues, etc. Let them all know about your work and also ask for their help and feedback. A friend of mine went far enough to leave a big sticker on the back of his car with the URL. Spread the idea as much as possible!

7-      Optimize for Search Engines. There’s a lot of talk about SEO these days. Honestly, I never went that deep into it but I do know a few things that are important. Pay attention to post titles and meta descriptions, build a solid internal link structure, install SEO plugins, use “nofollow” links and add a xml sitemap. All these have ended up giving me a lot of extra visits – Take a few days off your writing and focus on this too!

8-      Create a community. Don’t make your blog a monologue – Make it a thriving group, encourage people to speak out and build your own social movement. Interact with your readers, prize the ones who help you and also encourage participation.

9-      Learn to adapt on the fly. Perhaps your blog is not a success in the way you first planned it but ends up being a hit in some other. Change and adapt fast to satisfy the new and unexpected readers, offer them services and build value focused on them.

10-   Stay for the long term. Outstand your competition, stay longer than all of them and build your place in the scene. If you are planning a new blog, make sure you update and comprise yourself for at least a year. Support it, write fresh posts and give services and features all that long.

Photo credit: notsogoodphotography

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There’s no mailing client that is even as half as good as Gmail. It is just brilliant! Really, Gmail is that out of the league. First introduced in 2004, the service has been constantly improving, adding features and continuously making the user experience better. It is my favorite among all Google Apps, beyond the great products Reader, Docs and the Search Engine itself are. I just love it.

And I guess I’m not alone. Most Gmail users would never consider switching to Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook or any other services. There is really no reason. Google’s mail is just way superior. What makes Gmail that special then?

The Gmail Interface

I really can’t imagine myself using a client without the conversation-styled emails. I’m so used to it already, it’s that much better organized. Especially when it comes to chain emails, when many friends reply, it’s a relief to have all grouped together under the same conversation. It just makes things easy; it’s more comfortable to follow and to reply. It’s a winner and a great innovation from the Gmail team.

Then, the actual organization of emails themselves is easy to do with labels and the search options. Before Gmail, back when Hotmail and Yahoo offered only 2 MB of online space, it was impossible to keep your conversations and documents stored online. Gmail made it all easier. Just forget about deleting or spending time finding your old messages. They are all a few clicks away.

Add to this that the menus are clear and that is simple to navigate and you got a winner. Using Gmail is that easy. Honestly, I made my mom and dad use Gmail and it is the only computer application they are really comfortable with. Presentation is just top-noch.

Gmail Features

Gmail offers amazing features, even back from the old days. The filters are a great tool, as they can organize your emails according to their sender, keywords, subjects and more in a split second. If you want to keep your Inbox free or Facebook notifications, for instance, you just need to set up one filter and the work is done. All the emails will end in the Facebook label. Keep your Inbox clean and the emails where you want them to.

Then, ever thought on having two or even three email addresses? Gmail gives you the possibility of managing them all at the same time and from the same account. You have the possibility of receiving all the emails from all of your accounts into the same inbox. Then, in case you want to write with your work or university address, you are just click away of that with Gmail. They give you the option of “Send as…,” it’s great.

Also…

• You have the possibility of experiencing all these features in more than 50 languages.
• Gmail’s spam filter is excellent. Few times will spam sneak its way into your inbox.
• If you are part of a conversation or chain of mails and want to stop receiving all the responses in your inbox, you can go ahead and “mute” it and Gmail will keep it out of the way and deposited on the All Mail tab.
• Want to read your emails offline? Gmail gives you the possibility of downloading them all as if it were an Outlook client!

Product Integration

Product integration is another thing that makes Gmail excel from all its competition. Fully integrated into Gmail are Google Docs, Calendar, Tasks and Chat, among others. All these make Gmail a very powerful platform when it comes to organizing and planning your day to day life, making you visit Gmail even if you don’t have to write or receive any important mails.

Google Docs makes it possible for you to open all sent documents online, without having to download them into your computer. It makes it easy to read them, write them over and even to share. If you are doing some group work or assignment, Google Docs is the ultimate way to take it forward (at least, until Google Wave is out later this year,) and is a click away from your Gmail inbox.

Tasks and Calendar help you organizing your goals and plans. See what you have to do, at what time and where in the world. Put the addresses and even Google Maps will come to help telling you where it is exactly and the best way to get there. Tasks are a simple, fast and very reliable way of having a to-do list.

In the meanwhile, while you are writing emails, organizing your tasks or reading the documents, on the left or right hand side of the screen (you choose) you can have the GTalk chat client open. Chat with your friends straight from the inbox, without the need to install any new feature!

Gmail Labs

If as if all this was too little, Gmail offers users the possibility of trying the new features they have in the making. Gmail Labs has at least 20 things for you to try, ranging from the offline services mentioned above to many new features, which, among others, include:

• Navigating with Mouse Gestures
• Forgotten attachment detector
• Email translations
• SMS in chat
• Search auto complete
• Custom date formatting
• Youtube, Flikr, Picasa and Yelp previews in mail.

Personalize Gmail to your liking and to your needs with Labs. It’s just great!

How Does Google Profit From All This

Google, in the end, has to make money. It is their goal and the goal from any other company. Instead of leaving spam in all of your email signatures as Hotmail or Yahoo do, Gmail just shows up ads on the right side of the email interface. Honestly, it is nothing for all the free features you receive. And still, those ads are small, almost unnoticeable and, if you want to, some Firefox extensions as Adblock get them out the way!

Still don’t have a Gmail account? Go ahead and sign up now!

Photo credit: rovlls

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Type into Google search box and some suggestions will pop up. It all started as a noble cause to help people out and speed up search. But, thanks to the ridiculous thoughts people have, the suggestions have ever since become an Internet Meme of their own.

The fun thing is that it turns out what people are searching the most, so the suggestions are what the great majority of people think of one thing or the other.

I came up with an experiment and searched what Google suggested about the different people in the world. Some results are quite amazing! I just typed “Why do…” and the name of the people in question.

Why do…

Americans:

Nothing really surprising. I just wonder if the people who searched “Why do Americans pay takes” actually realized that the whole world does that.

Canadians:

Just one thing: I bet not all Canadians slaughter the poor seals, but I’m glad the people from the world show how worried they are for these cute animals.

Mexicans:

People are really curious about why do Mexicans sneak into the US. It quite makes sense as most Americans might wonder if life in Mexico is so bad for these people to immigrate en masse to the US.

French:

I wonder where the myth of French people stinking came from. Honestly, the French people I know don’t! But they do smoke a lot, that’s true.

Italians:

Italians do eat a lot of pasta, but mind that in Italian sauce is ragù, not gravy. But it’s quite right: many Italians do talk with their hands, have darker skin and even wear gold chains.

Greeks:

This one is a big fun too. Greeks are globally known for breaking plates at weddings and also for their particular noses. But I never thought that why they eat lamb, own restaurants and spit would break into the top 10!

Swedish (in representation of Scandinavia):

Leaving the blonde hair aside, it’s remarkable that people actually remember that bands as ABBA are Swedish and even acknowledge the fact that they don’t speak English as their first language. Wow.

Arabs:

Now comes the funny part! From now on all the people, it appears, smell. I really would like to know if the common American is that much cleaner than these guys. Surely not more than French, but still! Still, the results for Arabs are quite expected. They do fight with Israel, wear turbans and, lately, lose wars.

Indians:

Again, the smell takes prominent places on the list. Mix it with cow worshipping, eating with hands and wearing turbans and you got Indians.

Asians:

The eyes are a classic, but two important discoveries are that people are curious to know why Asian people wear surgical masks and, after all, why is it that they all look the same. Asians, on the contrary, always say that Westerners all look equal, funny. Oh, and Asians don’t only smell bad but, according to what people on Google think, they really stink.

Koreans:

It was interesting to make a special point about Koreans. Two Top 5 results are plain amazing, but still true. Koreans do eat dogs (disgusting, in my opinion) and they are big Starcraft players. I’m actually surprised only one game made it to list! And they really have nice skins too – Koreans, I believe, are the best looking in the whole of Asia.

Blacks

It’s really a big mystery why black people have white palms. I ask myself that too… But then, one thing that bugs me is if really black people love that much chicken (and watermelon)? Oh, and of course, as most of this list, they smell.

Photo credit: Alain Bachellier

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I hate to login to Facebook and see that half of my feed are quizzes and applications as stupid as personality tests, luck cookies, random phrases, etc. For long I hid all of these manually, only to see that new quizzes and new applications were being created to replace them. One good day I had enough and finally found a way to get rid of all of them for good. I’ll share it with you here.

It’s very simple and you don’t need to know any advanced computer skill, just take a look!

1 – The first step you have to take is to download either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. Both browsers are great and far superior to the competition. If you are not using one of these two, go ahead and give them a try. You won’t regret it!

2 – Once you have one of these browsers on your computer you have to install the GreaseMonkey add-on to Firefox, or, if you use Chrome, the GreaseMetal. Both are fast and easy to activate.

3 – Install the Facebook Purity script. You can install it directly from here or go to the developer webpage here.

It’s as simple as that! No more will quizzes, applications and other annoying activities will flood your feed. The Facebook Purity script directly blocks all applications created by external developers, tells you exactly how many were hidden and gives you the possibility, directly on the Facebook homepage, to show them back if you want it to.

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