Richard Saul Wurman said in his book, Information Anxiety, that:

“There has been more information produced in the last 30 years than during the previous 5000″

This applies for the blogosphere too to certain extent. In the blogosphere, lots of information has been written today than a few years ago.

How will you manage online information overload?

Firstly, what is information overload?

According to Alvin Toffler, who coined to the term information overload, it refers to an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information.

Image Source: Information Overload by cambodia4kidsorg

How does this affect you in blogging?

Due to tons of information available online, which is increasing at a rapid rate every day, you have no time to process the information. As a result, you will neither learn a lot nor act on what you have already learned.

In whatever niche you are, there are already hundreds of good blogs if not thousands. To update yourself in your niche, you have to follow all these blogs. But following all the hundreds of blogs is merely impossible. Even if you subscribe to all the blogs, you are not going to read every post from every blog.

A year back, I subscribed to as many as 127 blogs. At times I used to go offline for a couple of days. Whenever I take short breaks and open my RSS reader after returning, I used to have at least 200+ unread items. I have heard people say they have 1000+ unread items. Is it possible to go through all of them and still have time to act on what you have learned? If you said ‘yes, it is possible for me’, consider yourself gifted. You won’t find much helpful information in this post. You can contact me and let me know how you do it if you wish. I’d be happy to learn from you.

But if you are like me, who cannot read hundreds of useful articles a day and act on whatever I have learned, this post is for you.

I’m going to share with you the exact techniques that have worked for me to avoid information overload. I have been using these methods for nearly 6 months and it has worked very well for me.

Image Source: New Controls in Google Reader
by Yandle

1. Subscribe to Less Blogs

If you want less information, subscribe to less blogs. Simple. If you are going to subscribe to 100+ blogs, you will come across the same thing I experienced (the above example). Be selective when subscribing to blogs. As I said, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of good blogs in your niche.

Here are some tips for selecting the blogs to subscribe:

A. Authority

Subscribe to all the authority blogs in your niche. If you are into blogging, subscribe to Problogger. If you are into community and social media, don’t forget to subscribe to Chris Brogan’s blog. These authority blogs will always deliver quality information. They are authority blogs for a reason. They know what they are saying.

B. Quality

This is the most important factor when you are looking for blogs to subscribe to. Read the recent posts in the blog, go through the archives and do all the research you want. It will not take more than 15 minutes for you to do the research but it will save you a lot of time in the long run.

C. Topic

Subscribe more to the blogs that belong to your niche. Subscribing to blogs that are not in your niche will not help you much. Of course you can subscribe to productivity blogs or technology blogs if you are interested. But I would recommend you to limit them.

Don’t subscribe to blogs just because your friends are subscribed to it. Think for a second or at least half a second if the blog will help you in achieving your goals. I used to do this. When my friends used to say that they have subscribed to blog A, I used to do follow them. Now I don’t do that though. Never subscribe to a blog that will not help you move forward in your life.

2. Learn to Speed Read

Take some time to learn how to skim. There are so many books out there that teach you exactly that. Grab a book and read it. Don’t mind about the time it takes you for learning how to skim. It will help you throughout your life. The best investment you can make is investment in yourself. If you spend a couple of dollars and a few hours, you can learn the art of skimming information.

Here are some articles that teach you how to speed read:

How to speed read – Boing Boing

Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

3. Using Social Sites

Social sites like StumbleUpon will help you a lot in avoiding information overload if you know how to use it. There are many social sites out there. There are also niche based social sites like Sphinn. If you are a SEO blogger, you should check out Sphinn.

How to use social sites to manage information overload online?

Go to your favorite social site. My favorite is stumbleupon. So I’ll tell you how I use StumbleUpon to process information.

I search for stumbleupon users who continuously stumble articles related to my niche. You can get a RSS link of each user’s stumbles. I add this RSS to Google Reader.

Tip: Don’t subscribe to the ‘likes’ in stumbleupon. Subscribe to ‘reviews’. StumbleUpon users stumble many sites every day. You don’t want 1000+ items in your reader. SU users review only selected articles.

You can find me on StumbleUpon here. I review mostly posts related to blogging and social media.

Small Niche Based Social Sites

You can find a list of niche based social sites here.

My favorite is Sphinn. Though sphinn is a famous social site, the number of front page articles per day is low.

Create a list of social sites based on your niche and subscribe to the front page of these sites. This way, you will only read the best content in your niche.

4. Content Aggregators

Content aggregators are sites which gather the top news in all the niches or all the social sites. The popular ones are Popurls and Alltop.

Popurls

This site gathers news links from social sites and top blogs. You can customize the content which you see in the homepage by creating an account.

Alltop

Alltop gets links from top blogs and categorize it into different niches. There are plenty of niches. You can make your niche alltop as your homepage and glance through the new posts in all top blogs. You can also create your own alltop page with blogs of your choice.

5. Using Twitter

Twitter is useful in many ways. It is not just about updating what you are doing. Twitter can be used to find useful information online.

Follow people who share useful links to articles in your niche. If you are interested in social media and tech, you should follow mashable. Once you have created a list of users who share valuable content in their twitter stream, add them to a group and create a column for it. You can use a twitter client like tweetdeck to do it.

You can find me on twitter here – @Ramkarthik.

These are the techniques I use for managing online information overload. I suggest you to take this as a base and form your own techniques. What works for me might not work well for you. This is the concept. Understand it and develop your method till you find yourself managing information efficiently.

If you liked this post, please give it a stumble and/or bookmark it in del.icio.us. I appreciate it.

As I promised, here is the link to download the pdf version of managing online information overload (Right click -> ‘Save As’).

It doesn’t matter who you are, if you are making money online, you need to be charged everyday to work and make the day productive.

Image Source: Money by jenn_jenn

So here’s how I do it.

Have you already earned your first check?

If you have already got your first check, take a screen shot of it and make it your desktop background or load it to your website and make it your browser homepage.

Every time you see this, you will be inspired. It works for me all the time. Whenever I feel unproductive, I see the screen shot of the first check I made online.

This reminds me that there is a lot of money to be made online. I have already done it before and so I can do it again.

What if you haven’t earned money online?

No worries. Nobody earned a check the minute they entered the web. I never made any money on the first day. In fact it took me nearly 10 days to earn my first check.

What I did to motivate myself before I earned any money was to get an image of a check from one of the gazillion sites online that have the image of a check (they are there everywhere). I made that image as my desktop background.

Whenever I saw that image, I got inspired to earn a check like that. When you see something hundreds of times a day and really desire to achieve it, your subconscious mind will be programmed for that.

Once it is there in your subconscious mind, you will work harder to reach your target.

How do you motivate yourself to make money online? Please share your views in the comments.

Image Source: The Real Jon Gos

Every time WordPress releases an update, I see few people struggling to update it for their blog. I hear it in forums. People always ask for a way to update to the newer version of WordPress. I have also seen few bloggers paying money to update to the latest version. If you are one among them, keep reading the post.

Most of you, by this time, would have heard about the WordPress automatic update plugin. If not, I’m going to talk about it in this post. That is the solution for your problem. WordPress automatic upgrade plugin does the job for you in updating to the latest version of WordPress.

Here are the steps involved in handling the plugin:

1. Download the plugin (Note: Also read the information given on that page. This is very iportant.)

2. Upload it to /wp-content/plugins/

3. Activate the plugin from your admin page

4. Backup your blog before doing anything (This is also very important)

5. Now, go to Manage->Automatic Upgrade and then select the option for automatic upgrade

6. It will take you through the process and will tell you to do few things

7. Tada! You have upgraded to the newer version of WordPress

Note: I have tried this and it worked for me. But it does not re-activate all my plugins which I had to do manually. If someone of you knows why I’m getting that problem, please tell me.

Hope you won’t have any trouble from now on. Do tell me how it worked for you.

For those who think for why you should cloak links, take a look at the below two urls.

http://www.productdomain.com/cbi-ref=1203847&aaskdj

http://www.yourdomainname.com/productname.php

Which one looks good? Which one will you click first?

Here’s 3 ways to cloak your affiliate links:

1. Link Cloaking WordPress Plugin

WordPress is a platform that has plugins for almost everything. There is a plugin which can cloak your affiliate links. What you have to do is:

• Download the plugin
• Upload The Plugin to “/wp-content/plugins/”
• Activate it
• Go to Options->Link Cloaking
• Update Permalinks

You can check this post for more information.

2. Use A Free Service

There are websites which gives you a short url when you enter a long url. Tinyurl is one of the famous link cloaking services. Though it shortens the url, the final link still looks like an affiliate link. There are few other websites that offer shortening of urls making it look like a sub-domain. The main advantage here is that you can also choose the name you want. Your affiliate url will look like http://www.thenameyouchoose.servicedomain.com

There are few websites that offer this kind of service. One such website which I use is Notlong.Com.

Here’s how my affiliate url looked at first:

http://www.ondemandprofits.com/?cb=ramkarthik

Here’s how it looked after link cloaking using this kind of service:

http://ondemandprofits.notlong.com/

3. Buy A Software Product

Though there are many ways to clock affiliate links, the professional softwares are the best. If you don’t have a WordPress blog or if you want to be a professional affiliate marketer, then the professional products designed to cloak affiliate links is the best option for you. There are many products in the net, and one such product which is really good is Affiliate Link Cloaker (aff).

Do you cloak links? What method do you use to cloak affiliate links? Share it in the comments.

1. Pick The Topic

Pick the topic in which you have most knowledge and you are most interested. There are many topics to choose and you can see a big list here. Find the topic of interest.

2. Choose The User:

Once you have chosen the topic of interest, you will be leaded to a page where you will see a few stumblers who have stumbled some articles recently. There will be 10 stumblers for any particular topic and you can choose a stumbler from it.

3. Add Them As A Friend

Be careful while doing this. You should not add all the users and send messages to them. Add one or two a day. Go to their profile page and click on “Add Him/Her As A Friend”.

4. Send Them A Message

This is the most important thing in getting friends. The message you send matters a lot. This message will determine whether the person will be your friend or not. Send a message like this:

Hi, I’m [Your Name] and I’m a [Your Profession]. I visited your profile and found that both of us have the same interests. I just added you now. How are you? Have a great time.

Cheers,

[Your Name]

This message will be good enough and the person you add will most probably add you.

5. Tell Them More About You

The next step will be to tell more about you and how much you liked their blog or website (many stumblers have a blog/website). Send them critiques about their latest post. Tell them about their blog design and how well it looks. Stumble a few of their pages.

That’s all you need to do to get a new friend through StumbleUpon. But maintaining the friendship is equally hard. Don’t send requests often to stumble your post unless you have written something of good value. Talk to them often. If you want to add someone right now, then feel free to add me. Also don’t forget to Subscribe to my blog for more posts on StumbleUpon.

P.S:Don’t spam the StumbleUpon community.

Image Source: the.farand.effect

1. Write like there will be no blogging from tomorrow

2. Write as if you will get a backlink from Boing Boing or Problogger

3. Write as if you will be hired by Blog Herald or Performancing after they read your post

4. Write as if your article will be stumbled any top stumbler

5. Write as if your article will be Dugg by the top digger or even by Muhammad Saleem

6. Write as if you will be picked by Brian for his next project after reading your post

7. Write as if you will get a guest posting chance in Lifehack or Lifehacker after you write a post in your blog

8. Write as if you be the next participant in the Bloggers face off at Daily Blog Tips

9. Write as if you are equal to Maki of Dosh Dosh in writing a comprehensive guide to any social site

10. Write as if you have a reader community like Liz

11. Write as if you will earn money like John Chow using any monetizing technique

12. Write as if your headlines are like the ones that Lyndon writes

13. Write as if you can report a news like Andy Beard does

14. Write as if you have co-founded a company at a young age like Neil Patel

15. Write as if all the other bloggers who I missed are your blog readers

You can produce great content only when you expect to achieve something high. Just a thought of the above situations can get you extremely good content ideas. Don’t worry about what others say unless it is a useful comment. Write what you know and what you are good at. Work hard and results will follow.

Image By Frances Berriman

Professional Theme Design
When advertisers come to your site/blog, they see the theme you have. Your blog should have a professional design. You would have seen the increase in number of sponsors for John Chow, Daily Blog Tips and few other blogs when they changed their theme to more professional looking one. If you have a professional theme, your advertisers will be happier to sponsor your blog. How to get a professional design?
1. You should know how to design a theme
2. This is by far the best option. Choose a company and get a unique and professional looking design.
Once you have a good theme design, you are set to get new sponsors. Offer them the most visible space.

Good Logo
When you start a blog, you try to limit the spending. You might have a good theme but a poor logo. This will also affect your blog from getting sponsors. When you limit the spending, you don’t worry about the logo. You don’t want to spend money for a logo. But the need of a good logo can be understood only after experiencing it. If your blog has good content, good theme and a poor logo, then head over to the Logo design website and get a professional looking logo at lot cost. Now, your blog will look more professional leading to increase in the number of sponsors. Though this cannot be given 100% assurance, you will most probably get a couple of advertisers by having a professional theme and logo.

Fast Loading Time
If people visit your blog, it should load very fast. People don’t have the tendency to wait for something. So if you don’t want to lose your readers any more due to this reason and henceforth if you don’t want to lose your sponsors, then remove the clutter from your blog. Always see to that, your blog loads faster.

You might have been wondering for so many days on why you didn’t get sponsors even though you had good content. This is the answer. Try following all the free steps and you might get a sponsor or two. Even after doing all these, if you are not getting a sponsor, then you must have over priced the advertising rates. Use the Text Link Ads calculator to know how much you can ask for a text link in your blog. Visit big blogs and see at what rate they offer the banner ads and find the amount you need to ask your advertisers for banner ads. 99% you are on your way to get a couple of advertisers.

Attract Audience:

Blogs have the capability to attract a large audience. Using a blog, you can create fans for your service. I have seen few companies that start a blog for their product which are set to release one month later. In this way, before launching, you get people interested in your product. Once you create a buzz about your product or company, the advertisement costs can be reduced.

Get A Name:

When you have blog and get many people to talk about your product, surely your company will get a good name. You, sometimes get linked from big sources which will make your company or product famous. Also blogs build your company’s/product’s brand. Using blogs you can answer the questions of your audience. This will create buzz and bring more popularity to your company or product.

How To Achieve These In 6 Easy Steps:

1. Create a blog and set it up in WordPress.

2. Write Content.

3. Give a free product to those who subscribe.

4. Keep them updated with the launch of the product.

5. Get popular in sites like StumbleUpon and Digg by writing great articles.

6. Launch Your Product.

Here’s a tip for those who can’t create great content:

Hire a freelance writer who is well experienced.

Yesterday I read a post by a famous blogger(Donna) in Blogging Tips which was about coining a term and ranking number one for it. What I normally do is to try ranking well for similarly pronounced words. If you can think for sometime, you will find many words that have similar pronunciation. For ex, few people write the bank cheques as check while others write it as cheque. Both have the same meaning and same pronunciation but the sites that rank for these two terms are not the same. Leave alone the first result, it is Wikipedia on both the case. See the second result for both the words and you will find two different sites ranking. While ranking number one for the term “check” is tough, the competition for the keyword “cheque” is comparatively less. But ranking for these two terms is overall tough.

This is just an example. If you can find words like these, then you can probably increase your search engine traffic. Also consider words like “their” and “there”. Though they don’t mean the same, few people mistype the two words. Consider this example: “their earnings” has a meaning where as “there earning” don’t have any meaning. People few times mistype the second term. Though these two words are not searched, you might consider them as an example. If you can think more, you will find words like that and as a result improve your search engine traffic.

Photo by cinefilo

Now this plugin has been very famous and most blogs use it to get more comments. As you can see, I have it installed on the right column. The main reason why people comment on these blogs is because they get a link back.

I have seen few blogs with the Top Commentators’ column running for long time and the top commentator owing nearly 80 comments. The main reason for installing this plugin is to give the commentators a link back when they get to the list. But when the readers see the comments number at 80, they won’t comment(70% they won’t unless you have made a very good post or he/she is a fan of your blog).

Why Should You Refresh The Top Commentators Column?

The main reason why you should refresh the Top Commentators column is to give your new commentators a chance to get a link back. You will also get more comments. And one thing I do when people mail me about link exchange is that I tell them to make a comment on my blog on Sunday so that they will get a link back. By this way you don’t have to link to me and still you get a link back.

How To Refresh The Top Commentators Plugin?

First Download the plugin if you have not. Then once you install it, you can make changes to the plugin. There are nearly 5 options available for you namely,

• Hourly
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• #

I would suggest you to weekly or use the ‘#’ and specify the number of days. Once you are done with it, your top commentators plugin will start to refresh every week or month or whatever you have specified. Before saving the changes use the Filter Users option and Enter your name in it so that you will not be shown in Top commentators. If I don’t so it, then I would be at the Top every week because I reply to every comment I get. So don’t forget to set the ‘refresh’ option and the filter user option. Now you have done everything right. Most probably you will start to receive many comments. But beware of spam, you might get few which you can delete using Akismet. Do you refresh the Top Commentators Plugin? How much is the interval you have set for it to refresh?