How To Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

If you haven't yet added LinkedIn to your social media arsenal, it's high time you should. With over 135 million users--many of whom are professionals at the top of their game--this is the ideal place for linking with valuable connections and getting yourself noticed in your field.

Here are a few tips to help you optimize your LinkedIn Profile for networking with the pros, showing off your talents, and capturing new clients.

Your Image

Unless you actually possess a blank face with no eyes, mouth, or nose, the default LinkedIn image will not reflect who you are. Plus, in the online world, people are leery of interacting with someone who refuses to post their image.

Choose a professional quality photo that shows you smiling and dressed for business. It is especially wise to use one photograph consistently across social media accounts in order to ensure that you and your brand are recognizable.

9 Best Ways To Build Links To Your Blog

A lot of bloggers are constantly on the look out for getting as many back links to their blog as possible. The reason for this being its generation of loads of free traffic. The more back links one has to their blog the better is ones ranking with major search engines. While there are many things that contribute to one’s blog figuring on the top of the search engines, link building is a sure shot method to do so. Following is a list of best ways to build backlinks to your blog:

1. Submit your articles to good article directories such as Ezinearticles and Goarticles.
2. Visit other blogs that fall in the same category as yours and make meaningful comments which helps in building relationship with fellow bloggers that goes a long way in getting more traffic to ones blog. (But remember NOT to spam other blogs)
3. Another easy way is to make use of Web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo, Hubpages etc. to reach out to a larger audience. Those properties have lots of pages indexed by search engines already and your content is easily discoverable.
4. Do guest posting on other blogs in your niche. This is an excellent way to build backlinks and authority at the same time.
5. Keep the comments section of your blog active and respond to both positive and negative comments equally and in a timely manner.
6. Make use of the various social forums and answer communities like Yahoo answers that people are on the look out for some information.
7. Enrol your blog in blog carnivals that target the audience based on the theme of ones blog and this is a sure shot way to get loads of quality visitors.
8. Make use of videos and upload them to video directories such as Youtube and other resources. Youtube has a very large audience base and authority, so you will get good quality backlinks. Include the link to your blog somewhere in the description of the video.
9. Last but not the least try to have quality content that is original and unique it surely will capture the visitors attention.This is natural way of building links. People will start to link to your site because of your quality content.

A lot of bloggers usually do not have the patience to go through the processes that have been mentioned above to get the back links and resort to faster short lived foul means to get back links. Well the fact is that most of the search engines are smarter (getting smarter day by day) than any of us and their crawlers will easily catch bad links.
This will leave your back links valueless and you would have wasted your hard earned money and effort that will bear no results in the future. Given below are a few things that one should strictly stay away from in the process of getting back links:

1. Do not ever try to get back links from any of the links farms available these days.
2. Google considers links from the websites of link exchange communities as crap and assigns no value to it while ranking a blog.
3. One of the worst things to do to kill your blog yourself is to buy backlinks.
4. Do not make use of cheap article submission services that submit your article to Junk Article Directories.
5. Last thing to remember is if you have multiple blogs do not try to link them to each other as it is viewed as two way by Google.

No one method to build links is the best. You have to find what suits best for you. But diversifying your link building efforts pay much. That is why you should try all of the above methods.

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This is a guest post by Jane, who writes about Blogging Tips, Relationships and Self Improvement on her blog FindAllAnswers.com

30 Best & Well-Liked Money Management Websites

Many of us are not good with handling in our finance. No matter how hard we try to follow the budget, but by the end of the month we hardly have any clue so as to where all the money has gone. This badly affects our long term financial goals. One easy way to deal with this persistent problem is to make use of money management websites which keeps a close track on each and every transaction made by us and helps us to deal with our finance in a much better way.
The online apps help in drawing the monthly budget on your behalf, when you have provided it with some basic information. Thereafter, it keeps a close on eye on all the transactions made by you through cards and checks and though sometimes you would genuinely feel that the apps is being too bossy, but you will happy to see the excess funds in your account at the end of the month. These apps will be specially useful for those who dream of establishing their own company in the long run. The best part is these apps can be accessed from your mobile phone or tablets as well. So you can access your account on the go and keep yourself constantly updated.
You are going to find many money management apps on the web but we have collected the thirty best and most user friendly among them in this write up. Take the aid of these efficient tools to make your life better and more prosperous.
1. Bill guard

2. Kapitall
3. Lending tree

How to Make Your Content Perform Again and Again

This is one of the best posts by Lindaw Foreshaw, that will take your attention to your own posts giving them a makeover and bring back all the traffic that those posts truly deserve.

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If you’ve been in the blogging world for more than a nanosecond, you’ll no doubt have heard that content is some sort of royalty. You may even have come across Seth Godin’s message that content marketing is the only kind of marketing left. Does that mean you should be furiously tapping away at your keyboard writing new content until repetitive strain injury brings you to a complete standstill? Not necessarily. There are several things you can be doing to maximize the performance of your existing content.

1. Past Posts
A good headline/catchy title is a must when you want to get visitors clicking on your latest content, but what happens when that latest content becomes yesterday’s news - when those catchy titles aren’t visible on your home page anymore? Any blogger worth their salt will be able to tell which of their legacy posts are still driving heaps of traffic, so why not dig out that info from whatever analytical program you’re using and build on the popularity of your most visited past posts? Optimizing the titles of your past posts for SEO (as opposed to user clicks) can result in huge spikes of traffic to your site. While you’re checking your stats you might notice a few blog posts that have been particularly popular with your visitors. Could it be time for a bit of a makeover where the nuts and bolts of the text is concerned?

2. Speed it up
Taken a look at your bounce rate lately? The good old days when a site had to load within the golden two seconds are well and truly behind us. These days if your site takes more than a blink of an eye to load up and be ready to go your visitors will be someone else’s visitors fairly sharpish. It means that you should be placing great importance on getting your site to load extremely quickly. This can be as simple as optimizing images, but there are plenty of other things to consider. The best practices for web page optimization provided by the Yahoo Developer Network is a great place to start if you want to speed up the pace at which your site loads.

Blogging for Moms

There used to be a thought that all, or most, bloggers are men. In fact, that is not true. There are literally millions of bloggers out there who are not only women, but moms. Mothers are some of the most prolific bloggers because a lot of them either work from home, have taken maternity leave, or are stay at home moms. They have the time and energy necessary to blog every day, like successful bloggers should. Sometimes, though, even mommies run out of things to write about. With that in mind, I wanted to share a few ideas for blog post topics. Whether you are blogging for moms or you are a mommy blogger, these tips and topics can equally apply.
Children
Well, duh, kids are going to be the first thing that moms blog about and want to read about. But what about kids? What do they want to know? What do you want to write about? Here are some ideas:

1. Real Life Stories – A lot of mommy bloggers start out by writing their own life stories. Their birth experiences, their children’s habits, their day to day lives full of adventure, boredom, and cleaning. Real life stories are so popular because everyone is unique. We can all learn from each other and grow together as we experience the same big issues in our own individual ways. There is just something compelling about true stories that make them excellent for blog posts.

2. Health Issues – Health is always a big thing with moms. From colds and allergies to autism and Down Syndrome, moms love to talk and read about health issues, how they can be treated, what to expect, and what they can do to help their children. Even things like immunizations and check-ups make for great blog posts.