4 Tips For Choosing a Blog Niche

Blogging is a platform where you help people know things that you knew once and thought to share with others. Blogs are preferred to share the tiny details of your experiences and studies which are someday gonna help someone who'd be reading it. Most people don't realize what they want to blog about but they do want to write about something which they're not sure what it is yet.

I was referring to me especially who want to write-up something but couldn't exactly figure out sooner enough to start with.

This blog post is for those people who are like me who wanted /wants to write /share things whatever it might be yet isn't sure about it.

I''m gonna disclose some 4 tips down below that could get you choose what you really want to write about and start a blogging career sooner.

What Do You Know More About Anything?

Yep. That's a question that you gotta ask yourself first time when you choose you want to start a blog. 

Do you know that there are a lot of people in the world who needs to know about the one thing that you're good at and you know more than anything?

Yeah, that's true. You should be sure about what you know clear and good enough.

That's it. That will lead your mind to choose the niche you want to blog about.

Let Yourself Write For People :

Most people who choose a niche and start a blog will get it wrong the first time. Choosing to write expecting something back will always get yourself stuck into the runway.

Write a blog for yourself, and the people that are gonna read it. Let it be useful for the one's who actually admire the way as you are. Consider writing a blog as if you're keeping an online note of everything that you've learned and getting good at.

Writing for money can still get you score but that won't give you the flow and the interest as always. Yet if you find a niche that makes you money and keeps you interested every single time, then that's  reward for yourself.

Long Term Posts Frequency : 

Choosing a topic to write for a blog is not that hard when you know what you're looking for.

Clear up your mind on writing a blog. Take a list of all the topics that you could possibly want to write about. Make it an xls/ csv file if you want to. 

Now lets filter the topics that you think you can write for a long term frequently. You'd have filtered already and you're left with a little of something around 4 or 5 niche topics at last.

From there its not that for you to choose because you'd already made up your mind with some topic which is more convenient for you in delivering quality content to the readers.

Choose the One That Interests You : 

Interest is the main aspect in doing anything that you do in your day to day life. Interest is the one thing that keeps you doing the same thing everyday even at times when you think that's not worth doing.

Choose a topic that keeps you interested in writing for a very long time. Time is a constraint when you start blogging on a specific topic and you wouldn't know when you'd run out of topics. So, its always the best to choose a topic that you're so much interested as much that you're willing to write even when you find it very hard to continue the course.

Conclusion : 

Blogging is not just a money making platform for all who cares to start writing a blog. It could be a space where you share your skills and knowledge for the people who are in need of and also could become an identity of yourself in the online world.

So, concluding this, my one cent would be choosing a niche that you're good at or choosing a niche that you'd wanna be good at some point in future. Those are the two niche types that will keep you grow yourself and make you see yourself as a blooming blogger over the long run.

Also Read : 3 Things to Know Before Starting a Blog

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How to Find the Number of Connections on LinkedIn

Being a professional in any niche, it has become a mandatory to have a linkedin profile and its even more important if you are into entrepreneurship or a social media strategist.

LinkedIn has become a part of  any person that is into his way out on building an online profile. Linkedin has not just become an online profile maker instead it has emerged as a job searching platform as well where you can just find out the company profiles and get an idea of the people who work on those companies.

Building up a professional profile is not just filling up your portfolio, the projects you've done so far and the companies you've worked with. The main asset of having a linkedin profile is in building connections that might/will help you in any near future.

You see, connections in linkedin are as valuable as it seems. Connecting with people may get you leads to your next going to be successful business, or sometimes some of your connections will endorse you with new technologies that you know already, some can help you with recommendations.

While building up your business/personal profile, you obivously need to have a lot of connections both you know personally and virtually on the internet.

Connections are important and you'll realize when you're in need of someone in your connection professionally available someday.

There's one thing in linkedin that I feel a little bit typical that when you get a huge number of connections that you actually lost count, that's when the need for this arises.

You'd wanna look at your connections count and you have no clue how to find the number of connections in your linkedin account.

Don't worry., I've been there and  this post will help you find your number of connections in simple 2 steps.

Step 1:  

Goto the "Connections" at the top menu in your linkedin profile. Once you click, you'll be redirected to your connections list page where you can view the connections in your profile.

Step 2 : 

You'll find a "Settings" icon on the connections page which you should click to find out the number of connections to your linkedin profile.

This will be the url for the page where you'll see the number of connections.

https://www.linkedin.com/contacts/manage_sources/

There you go., you got your number of connections to your linkedin profile.

You can also click "Refresh" button if you wanna check the up to date connections number.

That's it., You got your connections number.

Check out my linkedin profile and lets get connected. ;)

vickythegme - LinkedIn

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6 Best Things Of Being a Blogger

Being able to write what we like and have a certain (limited or unlimited) amount of people that read and follow us for updates would sure make anyone feel awesome about it. It is the key source that induces to write better than you can with more accuracy.

Being a blogger can make you feel the way that you want to be in terms of what you write.

I've been writing this blog for nearly a couple of years and it takes real pleasure to write about what I want to. Most of the posts that I write here are related to Twitter tips, and a bit of blogging tips as well with a little option of SEO. And I've been getting pretty good responses based on the topics that I write which makes me to write even more posts related to the niche that I've chosen.

This post is completely about my experiences of being a blogger for this amount of time.

Here we go with the 10 Things that I feel great about being a blogger.

Independence Day :

The sub title seems a little bit strange, don't you think? ;)

The day I started to write this blog. I got the independence to write what just want and when I want to. Very often that just felt bad of not giving up what I learn everyday.

I was too narrow in choosing what to write and all of a sudden I wanted to write about something that I wanted to learn and with flow to the learning phase I'd write the posts then and there. That was the plan.

That made me to choose this niche and start collecting informations and started writing. And with that I got the independence to write about the things that I learn often.

Learning Curve :

I was really excited about writing on what I wanted to know.

Learning about SEO, reading blogging tips wanted me to write about it so that I could talk to pose with my ideas and views.

Connections :

Obviously, you should know the "Big Fish in the Pond".

Being a blogger, You obviously would get to know your fellow bloggers. Fellow bloggers who blog on the same domain, or different niches, start following then on Twitter, Facebook, G+, and other popular social media's so that you could get their updates soon and sometimes might get a chance to talk to them, discuss a little business ;)

Talking to like minded people helps a lot, the same way you could share your views with your fellow bloggers and understand their views .

Joining forums that teach/preach or actually discuss your niche, and interacting with other bloggers makes your learning curve speed up the graph.

Participating in IRC chats , Twitter interactions helps in this matters as well.

Accuracy :

Being a blogger taught me accuracy which is highly important for any blogger to have.

Anything and everything that a blogger writes should be accurate and relevant to topic. Before writing a post, I used to collect data from various sources that are legitimate and then start writing on my own blog.

Accuracy is the point anywhere that you should be having to write on a topic which should make the post a legit one.

Stay with the Trend :

Being a blogger means staying updated with the latest trends every single time. Whether it is SEO, social media, public news, tech or anything, you get updated all the time with the current trends.

At times, There can be running out of time, but never there's running out of knowledge of latest trending news June being a blogger.

I think you'll agree with me on this point.

The simple logic behind is that you do research before you start writing a topic. And that makes you get updated in your niche from time to time.

Business Opportunities :

Being blogger opens you a number of business opportunities on the road.

You're a blogger today and you just might become an entrepreneur tomorrow gather in your own followers and release something big that attracts a large amount of people online.

You'll never run out of ideas once you're onto blogging. If you're being an excellent writer in your own niche, chances are you'd see yourself blogging on some of the too blogs as well.

Conclusion :

The above things are completely based on my experience and I wanted to write about it as it 'll reach people who feel the same way.

I should say even this post is written to communicate with people anytime.

Now that I've shared my views it'd be awesome if you share your views in this posts via comments.

Photo Credit : Flickr

Friv 10 online games

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3 Things To Know Before Starting A Blog

Are you starting as a blogger in your own niche?

Are you bold enough to call yourself a blogger?

Have you made quite a few posts for the visitors and for yourself?

There are so many questions that rises when you start thinking about making blogging full time.

It should be pretty clear that you decided to blog for a reason. May be it is your option to make some money on the other side of having a full time job, or may be you love to help people with the things that you know and wanted to share via a medium.

Anyway you've chosen blogging for a reason. It should be obvious that at one point of time you'll start thinking what to write afterall you've written nearly everything that you know, This is the time that you've to evolve your ideas and broaden up your niche circle and start learn new things and then start writing about it .

Bloggers are growing in a large number these days and if you consider to reach more readers, then you should seriously think of doing something different that other bloggers couldn't, in a way of speaking you should give a clear impression to your readers what your blog consists of and what they can do if they start reading your blog frequently.

In short, your blog should interpret the input that you give and the visitors should be getting the exact output that you wanted.

Now below down are some of the tips that you should be knowing before you start your own blog.

Choosen Your Niche? 

It is good that you've chosen your niche.  Niche blogs get more visitors as it concentrates on a specific topic rather than to roam around different parts of the internet,

There are so many benefits of choosing a niche blog.

The best part about choosing a niche blog and get successful is the amount of fame that you'll get used to is huge.

You'll start to have your own following who wants to learn things from your in your niche. You'll get to meet people who think that you can change their life with what you write.

It is always to have a following who hear your words and thoughts.

One word of advice from my side where you can get like minded people is 'Twitter',. Yes, this is where you get to easily tweet/connect with people who share same thoughts.

Expect Nothing. Give Everything: 

This is one important thing that anyone who wants to become a blogger should work on. You should never worry about what you'll get in return for your writing and how you're going to get paid. You should be worried about a lot of other things like, how can you improve your piece of writing, how frequently you should blog, how many ways that you can let people know about your blog.

Put in everything that you have., If you're not clear about something, do some researches before blogging on that topic and then start to write about it.

Always strive heard to provide legit and useful content to your readers when it comes to blogging.

Even before writing this post, I did my research on this topic and found some useful and awesome posts on various blogs and then started writing this post.

You Blog? Then Blog Frequently:

Blogging is an art which is something that I believe. Getting your readers is more important as much as you have the content in your blog for the readers to roam frequently on your blog, Frequent writing is more important than anything for the growth of your blog.

Technically speaking, Google indexes fresh blogs (in the sense the blogs that is updated frequently) more often than those that are not updated for a long time.

Getting your post on the first page of the google search results is as much important as providing your readers valuable content once they click on your post link.

Conclusion:

Blogging can be very different when you start to blog with passion and not just for money. Frequent blogging keeps visitors to your blog all the time.

You'll start to enjoy every part of blogging and getting back responses.

Now do let me know what are the things that you think anyone should know before starting a blog in your comments.


Photo Credit : Flickr

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LongerTwits - A Simple Web App To Tweet More Than 140 Characters

Checkout my app at http://longertwits.vickythegme.com

Yay!!
I released my first app online which is currently serving as a sub domain on my personal blog vickythegme. I happen to read about twitter api past these days and got pretty much interested to it that I wanted to build an app on my own.

The first idea that I got is to bring up an app that would let users follow and unfollow (a simple twitter management tool similar to JustUnfollow, Unfollowers.me etc.,).

 By the time I got into it and been working on the app, I got another idea why not create a simple app and releasing it and wait for the user response so that I could carry the workings for the unfollow app behind the hood. (I still have the idea of developing an unfollow app as well.)

So, the simple app that I am talking about is none other than Longertwits – http://longertwits.vickythegme.com which is most inspired by Amit Agarwal’s talltweets.

I used to use talltweets back then to tweet if I need to send more than 140 characters and some day decided why not write a similar app on my own.

Once I started, I felt pretty good that I made an app (with some errors though ;) ), I started to work on the reducing the errors that could possibly happen and let the users use it as well.

So, here I’m sharing my first twitter app. – Longertwits.

So the thing that is different about the other apps is that I happen to manage 3 types of tweeting options like Tweet as Text, Tweet as Link, Tweet as Image

I could see so many apps that use these features and not one of them having all the three.!


With respect to that, I added these 3 options to tweet  to your twitter account.

Tweet as Text :

This option lets you tweet your message in the form of text. If an user types a tweet message that is more than 140 characters, the app splits the first 140 characters and sends it first and then sends the next 140 characters and so on.

Tweet as Link :

Tweet as Link option lets you tweet a text message which is more than 140 characters as link. This means that the tweet is sent with a link such that it shows some first 40-60 characters and add a link to the tweet that is saved in our db.

This option could be very useful if someone wants to mock up an essay of something or an announcement or anything that will relate to the limit.

Tweet as Image : 

Tweet as Image is one option that is mostly inspired with the idea of talltweets which I wanted to make it available to longertwits app as well.

This option lets you to send the tweet text in the form of an image.

The Images above are the old design with bootstrap 2 and I will be changing the app with the new bootstrap 3 design real soon.

Conclusion : 

I could not say anything more than just ask you to try out this simple app Longertwits  and do let me know your feedback below in here as comments or you can ping me up on twitter -@vickythegme or anywhere you feel convenient.

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How To Register A Twitter Application

Twitter Applications are nowadays getting created like hundreds and thousands a day.

According to this post -> One Million Registered Twitter Apps at their twitter blog back then at 2011, a new app is registered every 1.5 seconds. It is needless to say the amount of apps that would be registered by the end of this year and only you can imagine the limit. And the amount of twitter app developers are increasing day by day.

I've been running a nono-coding blog (mostly twitter related tips) and I don't wanna get into any details to coding with this blog, as I've my personal blog where I share some coding experiences.

This post will guide you to create (register) a Twitter App in just minutes.

The first thing you should do is to go to Twitter Dev - http://dev.twitter.com

If you have a twitter account (I'm sure you do), just sign in with it to twitter developers site.

Viola., You've created your developer account.

Now GoTo -> My Applications at the right corner of your account

In My Applications, obviously, you'll find nothing if you've not created any applications. ;)

So, create one by clicking on the "Create New App" button.

Follow the Instructions and enter the fields that are neccesary.

If you don't have a website, you can just add your localhost as your Website Address. But make sure you type

http://127.0.0.1/website 

Similarly when adding the callback url, make sure you add the localhost ip address, because it returns error if http://localhost/website/callback.php is entered.

Callback URL : http://127.0.0.1/website/callback.php

only if you don't have a server to host the application.

Once you click on the "Create Application" , twitter will generate some keys that you'll be needing when it comes to coding part.

The 4 needed part of the api applications are

Consumer Key 

Consumer Secret

Access Token

 Access Secret

You should be using them in integrating the app that you've created with your code to make it up and running with twitter.

An important thing to note down is that you can change your access level to the following.

Read - Can only read tweets, view user profile and login options

Read, Write - Can  both read and write (which means pretty much you can tweet , retweet, favorite tweets) etc.,

Read, Write and Direct Messages - Can read, write both statuses, direct messages.

To  know more about the Application Permission Model,->  https://dev.twitter.com/docs/application-permission-model 


And you can get user details, tweet status, retweet, favorite, do nifty things (not literally) with twitter api.

Now you can test your oauth connection with the test Oauth option at the top right side of your app.

To know more about the coding parts for the twitter integration with the app that you created just now., checkout my personal blog - vickythegme for the code pieces.

Let Us know your difficulties with creating a sample twitter app by following above.

Photo Credit : Flickr

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Search List of Twitter Apps with Twi5

Usage of Twitter has been increasingly growing its rate these years with the Bloggers and Social Media Strategists understanding the value of it.

You might not have seen much impact of twitter on bloggers and other internet promoters earlier and it is may be because of the power of social media in the field of SEO and Marketing.

Search Engines (clearly I want to refer to Google) have made it possible for the marketers to know the value of twitter and other social medias.

If you're a serious internet user or to be specific, a serious twitter freak, you must know the relatives of twitter (not really), but related to it and making it use better.

How cool it would be if you can find the information about all the twitter tools in just one place.?

You may have found this information on Wikipedia- List of Twitter Services and Applications, but still I have a better place in my mind to search for.

Here's a little description of one place where you'll find most of the interesting third party twitter applications.

You may know about it earlier and if not let me tell you, it is Twi5

Twi5 

Twi5 Logo - http://www.twi5.com/twitlogo-create-twitter-like-logo-for-free/5145/

Twi5.com, page by Nischal Shetty- Founder of JustUnfollow, is one place to search for most of the twitter tools online. Twi5 has a big list of vast range of tools to help you with twitter easy access and management. You could find most of the applications that are quite familiar with you and some you might not heard about it too.

And trust me, I haven't heard of most of the twitter resources until I looked into it.

To get your twitter app profiled in the site, you have to Submit your App and follow the details shown in the page.

There are so many apps that are related to some of the biggest social media names that you use already (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Orkut ) and it has the list of mobile apps related to those social medias.

You'll find it interesting to know about these apps and may be try out some.

Now let me know something that you find interesting about it at the comments.

Image Credit : Flickr

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4 Tools to Tweet Longer Than 140 Characters

Twitter Users are increasing more and more day to day. When you start using twitter frequently you may want to use something that ll make it easy for you to tweet at times when you can't be online all the time.

 There comes the usage of twitter management tools which will help you manage your twitter accounts (even multiple accounts too with some cents spent). But then you want something that will let you tweet more than the tweet characters limit which is obviously 140 as you know it.

Basically, twitter is designed as a Short Messaging Service (SMS) and you can't blame for what it is. There are many third party tools, that make use of the twitter's API facility and are created to fullfil your reason to tweet longer tweets more than 140 characters.

 With that in mind, I am going to share some of the 4 tools that will let you tweet more than 140 characters.

Talltweets :

This is the one that comes to my mind when I first think about tweeting longer sentences more than the character limit. You may know it obviously, the make of this application., Yes, you guessed it., Amit Agarwal, a professional blogger from India. This tool is a simple one with you can tweet more than 140 characters in two forms.

1. Tweet as text which will split the full lengthy tweet into chunks of tweets that apply the tweet character limit.
2. Or tweet as an image which will create an image of the tweet message and send it to twitter as one media tweet which looks good by the way.

Twitlonger :

Twitlonger is one tweeting tool which attaches a link to your tweet and let the users view your tweet on twitlonger site.

Also you can reply to the tweet that you sent or any tweet that is sent from the site.

Twishort :

Twishort is another one tweeting tool where you can tweet longer than 140 characters with a link attached to your tweet. The users can view the full lengthy tweet when they click the link which will take you to view the lengthy tweet in your account at twishort.

One different feature other than the above tools is that it has also a facility to reply to any specifc tweet. All you have to do it to copy and paste the twitter url link for the tweet that  you wanna reply to.

You may also would like to use their twiage - an app to calculate the your twitter age. :)

JumboTweet : 

Jumbotweets is another platform to tweet longer than 140 characters to your twitter account.

This works the similar way as the other tools,. tweets the lengthy messages with a link attached to it at the end of each tweet.

It is used as a microblogging platform service where you tweet with a link and the users can view the full tweet in its website.

P.S : A new service from us LongerTwits has come out to tweet longer than 140 characters and more.

Currently we've Tweet as Text facility where your tweets are split into chunks of 120 characters each and sent to twitter.

Tweet as Image facility will let you tweet your lengthy messages in an image format. (Inspired by TallTweets).

Tweet as Link will let you tweet your messages by attaching a link at the end of your tweet which links to your complete text in our site.

Soon, we'll provide the option to save and collect your tweets (last 3200 tweets).

Stay Tuned with our posts and let us know your feedback in the comments.

Photo Credit : Creative Tools - Flickr

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