You write well thought out attention grabbing titles for your post. Unfortunately many of your email subscribers never get to see that title because it is inside an email with a boring subject line that gets repeated everyday. That pretty much sums up my frustration with feedburner emails.

Here is a simple wordpress hack that will make the subject lines of my feedburner mails dynamic. It sets the title of the latest post on your blog as the title of the feedburner email.

You need to edit 3 files in the wordpress source file for this to work

1. feed.php
2. feed-rss.php and
3. feed-rss2.php

All 3 files are present in the wp-admin folder of your wordpress installation. These files are responsible for generating your rss feed. Please take a back-up of the files before proceeding with the below hack.

Edit feed.php
Locate the function get_wp_title_rss.  Replace the existing code of the function with the following

function get_wp_title_rss() {
global $post;
$myposts = get_posts(‘numberposts=1&offset=0′);
foreach($myposts as $post) :
$title = the_title();
endforeach;
 return $title;
}

Edit feed-rss.php and feed-rss2.php

Look for the line  <title> ………………………</title>  and convert it to <title><?php  wp_title_rss(); echo ” from “; bloginfo_rss(‘name’); ?></title>

That’s it. The subject line of your next feedburner email shall be title of your last post from your blogname.

I had never thought about why I blog. I never had to. Because this blog was created to create the ground work for my main website for second hand mobiles. However as I find myself spending more and more time on this blog, the lack of clarity to that question seems to get me more and more confused.

Quality leads to success is the biggest BS
The best blog posts do not get you the maximum earning. Don’t trust me? Just check out the traffic stats for some of these posts that I wrote in less than 2 minutes each and these posts that took me 2-3 hours each and then compare them with the traffic stats for these posts that I have prepared after spending more than 60-70 hours each. Get it clear. There are posts that get you money, there are posts that get you recognition and then there are posts that get you respect.

                      There are very few posts that will get you all 3.

What do you want from Blogging? 
Money, recognition or respect? What do you want from blogging? Get that clear today. Print it out on a paper on big bold letters and put it right in front of your laptop. Next time before you hit the publish button for any post, ask yourself what will it get you or your blog. Is it in line with what you want. If yes then publish the post else simply delete the post.

1 post, 500 people who like it and you become an overnight celebrity. That is the promise of Digg to every blogger. This is my attempt to help you get going on this super fast train called Digg.

In this article I shall be discussing the following points

1. Why you must use Digg?
2. What is Digg?
3. Necessary success factors on Digg
4. How to select a good username?
5. How to go about making Friends
   1. Power Users
   2. How to identify power users
   3. Initial set of friends
   4. How to find friends  with mutual interest
   5. How to get attention of power users
   6. Shout or not shout?
6. Articles that Digg users love and Digg-Baiting
7. Digg penalty and how to avoid it

Why you must use Digg

• To succeed on Digg all that you need is a smart brain and an ability to write original and interesting post.
• Digg can bring in massive amount of traffic.
• Simply submitting your article to Digg will get you a highly valuable backlink.
• More importantly hitting the front page of Digg can get your blog a large number of links which will ensure a better performance for your blog on Google.
• If you use Digg regularly it can become a great source of content and post ideas

What is Digg?

On Digg users share content that they find interesting/useful. Other users then vote on the articles of their choice and the popularity of the article determines whether the article gets lost in the bylanes of Digg or the article hits the front page.

Necessary success factors on Digg

Actually succeeding on Digg is not complicated. Consultants/marketing gurus make it sound that way so they can justify their fees and keep you away from this wonderful source of traffic and links.

Forget about Digg and ask yourself what are the qualities common to the guy/girl popular in your office/society/college/school. Mostly these are people who were original/funny, they had the courage to stand up for things they believed in and most importantly they knew other popular guys.

Success on Digg requires you to display these 3 qualities as well

• Be original and funny/controversial
• Have the courage to stand up for something you strongly believe in
• Know the popular guys, actually make sure that the popular guys know you

How to select a good username?

Remember that the typical digg user is always in a hurry. She will look at your submission for may be 5 seconds before deciding whether she wants to see more or not. There is no proof but my personal belief is that a good, geeky username will help you get the attention of Digg users.

Never choose a user name which is same as your blog name. Digg users do not like people promoting their own content. Having a username different from your blog name will help you promote your content from time to time.

Who are Power Users: Digg may be a democracy. But unlike real world democracy in the world of Digg some votes are lot more important than other votes. These royal users are the power users of Digg. You can understand from the fact that 56% of the articles, that hit the home page, were submitted by the top 100 users

How to identify power users: Previously Digg used to publish the list of power users/top diggers. However Digg has recently stopped publishing that information, thereby making it difficult for us to find the power users.

Some methods that I use to find the power users include

• Look at the homepage of Digg. See the users, whose submissions have hit the front page.
• Find users in your niche with good number of friends
• More importantly find users who are regularly active and who tend to digg articles from different sources

Initial set of friends:

This is one thing that I think most gurus have got wrong. Everyone seems to advise the beginner to add the power users as friend. Do not add the power users as friend. At least do not start off that way. Try to think from the perspective of the power user. They get flooded with thousands of request from spammers everyday. You think they will befriend anyone who does not have a single friend?

Start by finding friends with some common interest. Finding friends with mutual friends is not that difficult. Just go to digg and search for your keywords. Digg by default gives you results from the front page. Change it to get results in the upcoming page. These are typically users who are starting out themselves and hence they love it when they get a friend request. Locate users whose submissions have got more than 5 diggs and digg their submissions.

Better still comment on those submissions. Commenting is very powerful in getting attention. Effective commenting is a great way to get the attention of power users of dig.

Shout or not shout? Shout is a method to let your friends on Digg know that you liked a particular interest. It normally increases the chance that your friends will digg your story. However do not shout everytime you digg an article. Users will tend to value your shout if you have a habit of shouting only when you have a great article to share with them.        

Articles that Digg users love and Digg-Baiting

There are certain types of posts that the community at digg loves. Several articles have been written about this topic. To summarize posts that tend to get popular on digg tend to be

• Top 10 lists
• Positive articles about Apple/Google/Firefox
• Negative articles about Microsoft
• Digg loves itself just too much. So write articles about Digg. (Why else I am writing this article. )

Read this article from wolf-howl about how to write a post that Digg will simply love.

Digg penalty and how to avoid it

Digg offers this seemingly gold-mine if you can play the games right. So some players try to game the system and Digg hits back by banning them. The problem is some innocent users get caught in the cross-fire. So stay away from any activity that may be construed as gaming the digg system. Never, never use any script that automates any part of your digging activity.

If you likes this post then show your love with a digg/ stumble or link.

Please read this post carefully since I am trying to explain a rather complex concept in a single post.

You can have traffic that converts to peanuts or You can have content that converts to gold but noone ever visits them.

Not all blog posts are created equal. Some posts can get you as much as 3-4$ per click, whereas some others get only 0.1$. Net result is the same. Your adsense earning is always pathetic.

Obviously we want to write about the first type of topic like web hosting, making money etc. There is a catch though. The reason single adsense click on a post about paid webhosting costs you too high, is because that field is way too competitive. You can write as much as you want but you are not going to get more than 100 visitors a day. 100 visitors at 20$ eCPM will get you hardly 2$!!!!!

On the other extreme you have bloggers writing about bollywood, cricket etc. These are the niches with rather lower amount of competition. So it is easy to get traffic to the blog. You can easily get 2000 users a day. But since the competition is less, eCPM is less as well (in the range of 1$). So you have 2000 users a day but at 1$ eCPM, you will end up getting only 2$ a day!!!

What is the solution
There is a strategy to solve the bloggers’ dilemma. The FMCG companies use it, automobile companies use it, even your local store uses it. The strategy is simple. Get the users with a low competition, low profit product and then migrate those users to high profit products to make money. The online sites that use this trick too well are the web hosting companies. The paid webhosting space is way too competitive with affiliate pay-out as high as 90%. So what do some smart web hosts do? They offer free web hosting to the users with the expectation that eventually they will migrate to the paid web hosting option.

You can use this strategy on your blog as well
Create a mixture of both types of posts. Get the users through lesser competitive terms like how to create proxy sites and then lead them to more profitable content like web hosting options. The strategy needs to be thought through very carefully. Like if you have site related to cricket, then do a post about online games and lead the users to that page.

You can also see the trend if you go through the Earnings report of bloggers that I have collected. Do let me know your views on this topic as this is a rather important topic facing many bloggers.

Robert Eric McFadden has been arrested for allegedly trading information about online escorts and prostitutes. McFadden maintained a website for customers to post reviews of hookers and call girls. One street worker was 17 years old. McFadden had organized a raffle with $10 tickets whose main draw was an evening with a prostitute. The detailed news is here

I can not care less about Robert McFadden arrest. This is also not one of my seo experiment post unlike ealier posts Escape From The Oval Office Walkthrough Cheat Tricks or post about Ron Pratte Car collection

This post is under the blogging tips section to remind all fellow bloggers about the requirement to be careful about what you post on your blog. You may think that it is harmless to write about your freinds’ experience with hookers or about the red light zones in the city, you visited. But please try to exercise caution to avoid getting arrested.

A blog without comments is as good as dead. While traffic feeds us, comments feed our ego. I am sure you will love to see the number of comments on your blog posts increase significantly. However before that can happen, you need to understand what drives people to leave comments on your blog.

People leave comments on your blog because

1. They have a strong agreement or disagreement with what you have said: A comment like SEO is dead, No patriotic lawyer should represent Kasab or only morons use stumbleupon is sure to get you lots of comment.
2. they appreciate your content This is the reason why I love comments. Everytime I have put in lot of effort to write a post, the post has been awarded with lots of comments. Write an original and useful content and you are sure to get a number of thank you comments.
3. they want to be part of a community or discussion Have you seen the comments on seomoz? The people there know each other, respect each other. Good insightful comments are sure to get you some really good recognition from peer group. The same thing explains me being active on indiblogger forum. This type of comment tends to be of the highest quality and adds a lot of value to the original post.
4. they expect some benefit like top commentators, comment king, traffic Have you seen blogs using recent commentator, top commentators plugins? They tend to get higher number of comments because the commentator is getting some benefit. However these blogs tend to be spammed a lot as well. A better approach is to use a comment king contest, where the blogger recognizes the best commentators for the month and rovides them link and other rewards.

These are the only motivating factors, I could think of. Can you think of something more?