TechCounter - TechNews, Money & SEO

While many of your readers may not be familiar with RSS, almost all of them are familiar with email. Expand your subscriber base by delivering your content in a format familiar to them.

Nourish is a next generation newsletter service which allows you to take any RSS feed from content you publish (like this blog), and convert it into an automated email newsletter readers can subscribe to. This way, you can focus on creating great content and let Nourish take care of the rest.

Nourish allows you to manage as many campaigns as you want. Each campaign represents a different newsletter that your readers can subscribe to.

Managing a large list of subscribers is effortless. The opt-out process, as well as subscribing/unsubscribing to individual campaigns can be completely automated.

Popularity: 33% [?]

StumbleUpon has released a new toolbar version, version 3.15 which enables SearchReviews opt-in and improves existing Facebook integration.

This new SearchReviews as part of the new StumbleUpon toolbar shows which of your friends have rated a site a thumbs-up. You can see this with star ratings along with icons indicating which one of your friends like the site. This in turn allows for search personalization. You can also add people whom you think are experts in a particular category as your friends so that you can view their search result endorsements.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

StumbleUpon has been one of my most favorite sites since I first Stumbled upon it. Since then, using StumbleUpon, I have discovered new and amazing websites which I probably would never have come across if not for StumbleUpon.

Now, in order to cater to your ever increasing personalized tastes, StumbleUpon has launched a new personalized user profile page. When you log into your current StumbleUpon homepage, you are given the option to update to the new personalized StumbleUpon homepage.

New Features

* Check out “What’s New” and find out what your friends are doing & saying
* Try the simplified navigation where all the things you want to do are right at your fingertips
* Use the integrated Visual Editor to create and enhance your blog postings

all resulting in a page that looks something like below.. more web 2.0 for lack of a better word and better organization and above all more features for the stumbleupon user. Click on the picture below to check out my Stumbleupon homepage.

Popularity: 14% [?]

A Website Directory is something that specializes in liking to other web sites and classifies and categorizes these links. Unlike search engines which bring back results to you based on keywords, a web site directory lists websites by category and subcategories. Web Directories allow blog and website owners to directly submit their blog for inclusion and have editors for reviewing new submissions.

Some of the most popular web directories are Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project(DMOZ). Every search engine recommends these two web directories in particular and once accepted, you gain trust in search engine eyes not to mention the high page rank of those incoming links. All this could result in higher search engine placements for posts on your blog and an increase in page rank which in turn would allow you to monetize your site even further. Oh, also the increased traffic to your blog by visitors to these directories.

Directories have various types of listings, often dependent upon the price paid for inclusion:

* Free Submission - there is no charge for review of the site
* Reciprocal Link - the site submitted must link back to the directory in order to be listed
* Paid Submissions - a fee is charged for reviewing the submitted link

* No Follow - there is a rel=”nofollow” attribute associated with the link, meaning search engines will not follow the link.
* Featured Link - the link is given a premium position in the category where it is submitted
* Featured Homepage Link - the link may be listed on the homepage of the directory.
* Bid for Position - a recent innovation (2007) where sites are ordered based on bids

Yahoo! Directory and ODP are very hard to get into. I know of a website which in spite of having a high Page rank and high traffic did not get accepted into ODP for over 14 months. I have listed some of the website directories out here which will help bring more traffic to your blog. The name of the website directory along with its page rank is shown here. The list starts with a Page rank 8 directory and lists page rank 7 and page rank 6 directories.
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Popularity: 17% [?]

What is a gravatar?

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums and allows you to create your Identity online.

How Do I create a Gravatar?

Signing up for a Gravatar is simple and above all FREE. All you need is to associate a picture with your Email address. This would be the email address you enter while commenting. It is important that this email account is legit. My suggestion, associate your Blog’s email account with your Gravatar account.

Step # 1: Sign up for your Gravatar account

You can signup here to Get your Own Gravatar

All you need is your email address! You will then receive a confirmation email including a link that will activate your Gravatar account and allow you to set your password.

Step # 2: Set up a password.

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Popularity: 21% [?]

MySpace recently launched a new news aggregator service called MySpace News which looks to be a mashup of Google News and Digg combining both algorithms and user rating features.

The feature list, via Terry Heaton:

*MySpace News takes News to a whole new level by dynamically aggregating real-time news and blogs from top sites around the Web
*Creates focused, topical news pages that users can interact and engage with throughout their day
*MySpace is making the news social, allowing users to:
-Rate and comment on every news item that comes through the system
-Submit stories they think are cool and even author pieces from their MySpace blog
* MySpace users previously had to leave the site to find comprehensive news, gossip, sporting news, etc. With MySpace News, we bring the news to them!

Mashable thinks that this could result in a boom for celebrity blogs since most of MySpace demographic prefers such news just as Digg’s users adore Apple, Google and Digg.

However, all things apart, this could be an excellent opportunity for bloggers like you and me to bring in MySpace traffic. MySpace gives you a form page to submit your Blog or WebSite

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Popularity: 13% [?]