Top 7 Easy and Free Web Hosting Services

Looking at the feedback I’ve got from my previous article about building a self-hosted Wordpress blog for free, and from personal experience, I can tell that good free web hosting services are hard to find.

Sure, you can get tons of results from search engines. But most of them turn out to be more annoying than useful. In the end, the results that we can count on are those which come from peer recommendation.

So, to help readers with their web-building experiments (and for my own future references), I tried to compile a list of good easy and free web hosting services. Many of the entries are readers’ recommendations, others are the remainder of the search engine results after filtering out the unqualified ones.

The elimination process

Before revealing the list, let’s look at several factors that made a few services good enough to not be eliminated from the list. Please note that I’ve tried my best not to play favorites, but my personal opinion might differ from others.

First, the features that make these web hosting services easy to use. One service offers different arrangements than the other one. But the ones that we are looking for must have:

• an installer script (usually Elefante or Fantastico) for automatic installation of Wordpress (and other server-side applications)
• access to a control panel for easier web management
• the latest version of MySQL and PHP (at least not too old)
• FTP access to upload and delete files
• the ability to host our own domain (so we can use the CO.CC address or other personal domain).

Second, the free factors. Most of the time, free is not really free. Some services offer free hosting with ads, some take forever for the activation process, some others require users to make a minimum number of posts in some forum before becoming eligible for the service. The ones that we are looking for should be “as free as possible”.

Again, the list is compiled with “newbies” and “experimentations” in mind. For better features, bigger disk space, monthly data transfer (bandwidth), access to customer service and technical support, and peace of mind, you should go and get yourself a paid web hosting service. Try Resellers Panel for much cheaper resellers price.

The Survivors

Here are the ones that still stand after the showdown.:) In no particular order, of course. I’ll only mention the disk space and monthly data transfer for quick comparison purposes. Please refer to each service provider’s website for the full list of features as they will be too long to list down here.

Zymic

Gives you:

• 5 GB disk space per account with unlimited account per users
• 50 GB of monthly data transfer

XtreemHost

Gives you:

• 5.5 GB disk space
• 200 GB of monthly data transfer

Hosting-Engine

Gives you:

• 150 MB disk space
• 4 GB of monthly data transfer

Host-Ed

Gives you:

• 150 MB disk space
• 4 GB of monthly data transfer

Freehostia

Gives you:

• 250 MB disk space
• 6 GB of monthly data transfer

PhpNet

Gives you:

• 350 MB disk space
• 15 GB of monthly data transfer

000Webhost

Gives you:

• 1.5 GB disk space
• 100 GB of monthly data transfer

Footnotes

I hope this list can help you start your first (Wordpress) blog or website (or park some of the domain names that you have).

I’m sure there are more options lurking somewhere out there, but these are the best that I could find within a few days of searching.

I also found out that some of these services don’t last very long. Many of the links that I found are dead. I guess that’s another side of free services that can’t compete with paid ones.

If you know of other good alternatives, please don’t hesitate to share using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

iWeb – Build A Quick, Easy & Beautiful Website [Mac only]

Having recently discovered a way to get my own (unlimited) domain names and several good places where I could host them for free, I can’t help but falling into the mood of web building. And while I’m at it, I think this is the perfect time to try building one using Apple’s own iWeb 09.

This free Mac website building tool comes with iLife suite – free with every new Mac purchase. It promises its users quick and easy ways to build beautiful websites. To be able to achieve that, iWeb comes with various ‘plug and play’ ready-made templates for users to use and modify.

Experience is the best teacher. So there’s no better way to explore what iWeb can do than by using it to make use of our domain name and web host.

Settling on the Settings

The first thing that you’ll see when you first open iWeb is the choices of templates. Don’t worry too much at this stage. Just pick the one that you like, and you can change your mind later.

Then we can continue with the settings. Click the “Site” item on the left pane, and you’ll see the “Site Publishing Setting” opened in the middle pane. This is the place to change the name of your site from “Site” into something more appealing.

If you want to publish your site on your chosen hosting service, choose “FTP Server” from the “Publish to” options. (Note: This option is not available on the older version of iWeb). Then fill in all the fields with the required information; from the site name, to the FTP settings, to the website URL.

For you Facebookers, there’s a bonus that you’ll love: the ability to update your Facebook profile when you publish your site. Tick the checkbox and provide the user information if you want to activate this option.

Shaping the Site

The web building process itself is as simple as adding pages (Command + N), editing the text, and replacing the pictures.

If you want to, you can edit every element of the page by clicking on that specific element and opening the “Page Inspector” from the “View –> Show Inspector” menu or by pressing “Command + Option + I”

There are several types of pages that you can add, such as a blank page; ready to edit pages (Welcome Page, About Me page); blog page – where you can write and update your posts; and also the rich-media pages (Photo Album page, Movies page and Podcast page).

The pages will be placed in the left pane and you can re-arrange the order as you like. You can also add another website(s) (Command + Shift + N) to the project, each with its own pages and themes.

Enhancing with Elements

To enhance your site, you can add as many kinds of elements you want to each page. There are four tabs on the right pane:

• Audios –> You can add music to your pages from Garageband and iTunes



• Photos –> You can add pictures from iPhoto and Photobooth



• Movies –> You can add movies from iMovie and iTunes



• Widgets –> You can add several ready made widgets, including the one to include HTML code called HTML snippet widget

There are more advanced settings that you can do by going deeper into the Page Inspector, but the scope is too big to be discussed here. You can find many nice effects while you experiment with iWeb.

After the building process is done, you can do the final step by clicking the “Publish Site” button below. If you put the FTP settings right, everything should be uploaded to your server, and your site will be alive.

iWeb might not be the ultimate tool for those professional-level web designers. But for everyday folks who just want to build a beautiful site quickly and easily, this app is more than capable to fulfill their needs.

Have you tried iWeb? Got any tricks to optimize iWeb? Share using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

Make Quick Money Online with Adsense revenue sharing programe

if you have writting skills..and want to earn money over the net…don’t get trap by affilations programmes available in internet world.you will get many sites with such a huge banner saying words like below.

“start making money online in 10 days“

“Google adsense cheque in a week“

“Online money making tips“

If you really want to earn money you shold have some skills …for example..writing skills,SEO skills then you can earn some money not in 6 figure.. i won’t let you live in dreamy world.

that was my experience since last one year i was planning to earn some money.

there is **NO** quick money online.

But if you want to start blogging with your writting there are real good tips which I can suggest you.

i m getting good income from google adsense revenue sharing programme offered by knowbest.info.i earn $ 13.37 in just last 2 days. totall earning in 21 days is apx. $36.22 (its initialy so not bad with liittle efforts-submitted tricks to knowbest.info )

Don’t get surprised, It’s my adsense report for today and yesterday. well today i earn $8.11 and yesterday i earned $5.26 .that means i got $13.37 in 48 hours without any efforts except that i submitted posts to knowbest.info and take part in adsense revenue sharing programmme.

Here is my adsense earning reports for last 2 days.

i really thank full to knowbest.info for giving me chance to knowbest.info.

I m possesing a blog i had tried many ways to earn money..struggled hard for achiving goal but not be succeded except my lots of time spending behind blogging..!! out put was zero..!!

i had tried many affilations programmes as well,but every where i found a trap for marketing.

A month before i got comment written regarding http://knowbest.info about Adsense revenue sharing programme on my own blog.I think Mohsin has written on my blog about ashring programme …we give 70% adsense revenue ..blaa..blaa..blaa..

i just join knowbest.info for trial writing as a guest author.also site looks and feel make me more impressive to write for this site.

initially i have some trouble for posting because i have no experience with wordpress….my experience mainly with blogger.Site owner helped me lot for posting also my first post was editing by admin and give suggestions by email….

But i read that knowbest.info now write article on how to post at Knowbest.info.

i already having a google adsense acount so, adding PublicationID and slotID in dashboard AT knowbest.info is so easy.

for more information on how to add my Adsense publication ID & slotID refer this article.

tha main thing is 70% adsense revenue..no site offrers this ratio… specially not a good site having good content..

think main advantage with Knowbest.info is traffic.if i write and publish same article for my blog…may be (surely) i dn’t get such a tragic figure income in 2 days..!!

now a days, you get more artcles from my sitde on knowbest.info- tricks sharing portal..i hope the magic income will continue increasing in my Google adsesense account and surely will get $100 check this month..!!

Iniatially i haven’t receved much income though page impressions is high. ..but since week it increase dramittically..!!

if you have any queary or trouble during posting , i suggest you ask by comments or Directly mail to site owner..he is very co-operative person..(my personal experience).

Also ask any quary by comments below so, other will benefit from this adsense revenue sharing programme.

Top 12 Reasons for your Blog’s Failure.!!

Well this post is especially for many new comers who want to succeed in this wonderful blogging environment. I am presenting you 12 steps to fail in this blogging world. Many bloggers are writing posts similar to this topic. But I have tried my level best to come with unique content here.

Here are the 12 steps to fail in blogging.

1. Think like a Genius
   Always think like a genius when blogging about anything. By this way, you can easily fail in blogging.
2. Scold your blog commentators
   Start scolding your commentators if they comment anything wrong about your posts. Now it is easy to lose your regular and loyal readers.
3. Blame other bloggers
   Blame anyone whom you think as a competitor to your blog. This will surely give your competitor one step ahead of his/her success and more steps for your failure.
4. Copy like a proxy
   Copy contents from other websites/bloggers. This will surely help you to lose your uniqueness in blogging.
5. Be Short or Long
   Write very short posts or very long posts. Such type of posts will surely confuse your readers and will show your failure in writing in your own style.
6. Be a Sponsor
   Make your blog posts full of sponsored posts. By this way, you too act as a sponsor for them and will just help you to fail as much as you can since you are making money rather than making a uniqueness.
7. Ads only Blog
   Just make your blogs full of advertisements and see how fast you are failing in this blogging area.
8. Be Irrelevant
   Write some posts which are totally irrelevant to your blog’s niche. For example, write something about politics in a technology related blog.
9. Post information
   Post some information as a blog posts/articles. For example, I know one of my friend who is always posting information about technology news which are actually present in millions of websites. He is simply lagging on his quality of writing articles rather than writing uniqueness and just failing in these days.
10. Compare
    Compare yourself with other bloggers and your blog with other’s blog and say that yours is always best. This will highly give you a chance to fail.
11. Be Incomplete
    Write incomplete posts in your blog. Find a topic for your blog posts and write incomplete posts which totally makes no sense to your topic.
12. Make it Past
    Flood your blog posts with past time contents. Many blog readers just want to update their knowledge with the latest information rather than knowing past things always.

Well this post is after my serious work on knowing about this blogosphere and I hope that this will be useful for many bloggers!

What do you think about this post? If you have any other points, kindly share with us.

Happy Birthday Da….

What are you thinking right now? Share with us. Definitely yours will be wonderful than mine.!!

Top 8 Reasons that Slow Down your Blog’s Perfomance

It is very simple and there is no hard steps to do it. It will be simple to lose your website / blog’s traffic. Here are those 8 easy steps.

1. More Javascript
   Include as much javascript code as you can in your web page. This will surely increase your webpage’s total size. And hence the loading time will be much more.
2. More CSS
   Once you have included more CSS codes/files in your web page, it is easy to slow down your website’s loading speed.
3. Embed Multimedia
   Multimedia files include Flash content, Audio Files, Video Files, etc. When including or embedding such files in your web page, it will increase the burden by means of size and more server requests.
4. Include Images
   Including images is not a big issue. But including as much images or flooding your webpage full of images will do the rest by slowing down the speed.
5. More Database Queries
   In dynamic web pages which uses languages like PHP, PERL, etc., start querying your database everytime without having much reasons. This will burden your database server with full of requests and will surely benefit your competitor.
6. Use Erroneous Scripts/Code
   This is one easy method. When the server faces any such erroneous script/ code, it will be in much confusion to solve it and will just flood your web server with error log files (more burden for server).
7. No Compression
   Don’t use any compression techniques in your webpages. This will not only increase your web page size. But will also increase your web server’s burden on responding to more requests from your web page.
8. No Cache
   Don’t ever cache any of your website’s content. Contents like CSS, JS, etc. can be avoided to cache in client’s computer. Hence, everytime when he/she requests for the entire webpage content, the web browser will fetch everything from the starting point to ending point.

One final word is just give more burden to your web server with full of requests and see the failure result.

What are you thinking right now? Share with us. Definitely yours will be wonderful than mine!

Website Templates - Photo Gallery

Website Templates - Photo Gallery
12 Flash templates

Download: Rapidhare - Easy-Share - Depositfile

How To Build A Self-hosted Wordpress Blog For Free

A blog is a layman-friendly variation of a website, and having a blog is one of the many ways to state your presence in the virtual world. While there are many hassle-free blog services out there that will take care of everything except automatically blog for you – like Blogger and Wordpress, nothing can beat a self-hosted blog in the terms of customization and self pride.

The problem is, the process of building your own self-hosted blog is (almost always) not free and is considered complicated. So most newbies will choose the easier path and never give themselves a chance to experiment.

I personally believe that experience is the best teacher (and that you should never consider yourself a cool person if you’ve never tried to “build” a blog).

So, if you are in an adventurous mood right now and willing to take up the challenge, I’ll show you how to easily set up a free Wordpress blog site.

Some of you might ask, “Why Wordpress?” I could go on and explain how cool it is, how it has grown from a simple blogging platform into an advanced CMS (Content Management System) and still stay simple and free, how you can expand it into virtually everything by adding plugins and themes; but to save you the time, I’ll just go with “Why not?”

Getting your own domain name

The first step in our little project is obtaining a domain name. But with zero budget, you shouldn’t expect to be able to snatch a dot com – or any other popular dots like org, net, name or tv. For this experimental purposes, we’ll go with a less popular but free alternative.

The free service that I always use for quick and free domain names is www.co.cc. This service will provide you with 2 free domain names (with .co.cc suffixes) for personal use. (But that doesn’t mean that you can’t register for more with different email addresses. Wink!)

Visit the site and search for the availability of your chosen domain name(s). I’ve registered buildablog.co.cc for this article so you can’t claim that one.

If your chosen name is available, please check whether it’s available for free because there are names which are not free. Then continue with the registration.

If you’ve been here before, you can log in with your account. Newcomers click “Create an account now“.

After completing the registration process, you need to set up your domain. This step should be done within 48 hours or they will delete the domain. So click the set up button now.

Finding yourself a host

To be able to set up the domain, you need a webhost. So, we’ll postpone the domain set up process for a while and find ourselves a webhost first. I stumbled on a service which provides free webhosting without ads called 000webhost. You won’t get premium features, but 1.5GB of disk space and 100GB of data traffic per month should be sufficient for our project.

Sign up for free hosting with your registered domain name from the previous step, and you’ll get the DNS addresses needed for the domain set up – both in the confirmation email and in the website. Armed with that information, we are ready to go back to our postponed task.

Please note that the host set up process could take a long time (up to 24 hours). So be patient here and refresh the page often.

Setting up the domain

Back at the “Manage Domain” page, choose the number one: “Name Server” option and write down these values:

- Name server 1: ns01.000webhost.com
- Name server 2: ns02.000webhost.com

Then click “Set Up“, and you’ll go into another waiting game.

Installing Wordpress

After the host and the DNS settings are active, we can log in to the cPanel to install Wordpress. You can log in using your email address and password.

Find the Software section inside the cPanel and choose Fantastico, then select Wordpress and provide the admin name with the chosen password. The Fantastico installation script will make the Wordpress installation easier by automatically building and linking the database for you.

You have to decide where you want to install Wordpress. If you leave the sub-folder blank, then Wordpress will be installed in the root folder: your domain name and you can access it using –> http://www.your-domain.co.cc. But if you put name in the sub-folder, then Wordpress would be installed in that folder and accessible via http://www.your-domain.co.cc/foldername

Customization and final notes

You can customize your Wordpress installation using plugins and themes and upgrade it to the latest build via FTP. The details of the FTP is available in the welcome email and in the cPanel. I won’t go into detail here because discussing that topic would require another one or two more articles.

With all that said and done, I have to emphasize that the free domain name and free hosting service will only go that far: as an experiment tool. If you want to do this seriously, you have to go with the paid service as they will provide you with more necessary bells and whistles.

But let me share one last trick here: you don’t have to settle with the price that web hosting company offer you. You can get a far cheaper price by applying for a web host reseller account. Normally, this kind of account is not opened to the general public and also not free. But I found one which is free for everybody to join called Resellers Panel. (The link will put me as your referrer, but you can go directly to their website if you want)

By applying to become a reseller, not only you can get the cheapest price for domain names and hosting but you could also start your own business by reselling the service with the market price.

Do you use Wordpress? Have you tried to install one on the web server? Share your experience using the comment below, and don’t forget to check out our article on installing Wordpress locally in your hard drive.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

Five Free Wordpress Templates To Dress Up Your Blog

A personal blog says a lot about you, and depending on your career it can be a deciding factor of where you’re going. It’s no longer the year 2004 where having a blog was enough; now we must trick them out with themes that are flashy, modern and by no means basic. Is you blog ‘basic’?

Many are. But then, downloading blog templates and installing them can be time consuming, not to mention expensive right? I recall laughing my head off when I seen the prices that some developers are charging for mediocre themes!

Below are five of my favourite free Wordpress blog templates that won’t cost you a single cent.

Creative Art

This theme is really attractive mostly because of that giant notebook-style posting area. The scrappy style is continued on to the left with a ‘Post It’ lookalike categories list. The background and the oddly placed RSS feed button just make it even better. Greys, reds and little features such as the tape that appears to hold up the posting area are nice touches.

This theme would suite your blog if you have a good following and blog about informal yet popular topics such as art, music, technology and the woes of life!

Modicus Remix

The Modicus theme is a little more plain than the last but it is by no means basic. It keeps the same artsy feel as the theme above but leaves more to the imagination. There is no colour at all with this theme, just a stark contrast between black and white. The amount of plug-ins and features that look good to the right-hand side of this theme is amazing – such as that ‘sign in‘ facility for your readers.

I recommend this blog for the more formal of bloggers out there such as those who see their blog as more of a regular column.

Aspire

An individual looking theme that looks like old parchment and worn manuscripts. It’s basically comprised of many different diluted shades of brown that make for a very attractive blog. Again, the posts go to the left with tags with the calendar and recent comments going to the right along with the categories. This theme is also available to download as a ‘Blogger’ version on the download page for those of you who use BlogSpot.

I think this theme would suit the more factual blogs that tend to discuss subjects within a niche. It wouldn’t do so well for a personal blog as the ‘manuscript style’ points to something entirely different.

Reviews Theme

This theme has curved corners with straight edges – one of my favourite styles for business/professional blogs. It looks good but doesn’t over-sell itself with artwork or over design. It has some good features such as a search bar and good navigation buttons along the top to direct the user to various contact and ‘About’ pages which are essential for a business blog.

The deep blue with the white, as I said, doesn’t jump out at you and do a song and dance like the other themes because they’re separated by different tones and shades of blue. The content sells itself. A professional and practical theme for a company’s site.

Light Weight

To end out list we have an elegant theme that has minimalistic design in mind. The baby blue background and the blue text work well together in this theme. The menu bar across the top is good for simple navigation and it separates the headers from the main attraction: your personal posts.

Given its simplicity yet attractiveness, I would recommend this theme for a personal blog. It has the necessary few buttons such as ‘Contact’ and ‘Subscribe’ with the posts being the centre of attention. It’s wide and as such it’s good for big photographs and screenshots that we all post on our personal blogs.

So, what do the MUO readers think of these free Wordpress blog templates and what themes do you recommend for small-medium blogs?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

10 Must have Firefox Add-ons for bloggers

Passionate bloggers are always seen to be keen to come up with quality content in each of their blog posts. They are known to research for information on the subject of their posts and present them in a format that can be easily understood by their readers. Many of the bloggers are also known to adopt search engine optimization techniques in order to drive internet traffic to their blogs.

Here we would like to present 10 very useful Firefox Addons to such hardworking and passionate bloggers like you:

1. Windows Live Writer: The live writer is a handy tool which allows bloggers to create blog posts and include multimedia content such as photos, video, maps etc in their blog posts. The add-on supports various blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, Live Journal among others.
2. Read It Later: This add-on for Firefox allows bloggers to get back to a page which might be of interest to a blogger. This is particularly useful when one comes across interesting content while casually surfing the internet. This add-on allows users to come back to that page of interest and then pursue their interests regarding the same.
3. InstaBlog Submitter: Professional bloggers would know of the importance of spreading the word about the content on their blog. In accordance with the same, InstaBlog Submitter, is an add-on which allows bloggers to submit their content in just 3 simple steps- Select content by Highlight, Right Click, and Submit. A must have add-on for bloggers.
4. NoDoFollow: Professional bloggers are aware of the importance of blog commenting as part of Search Engine Optimization techniques. As the name suggests, the NoDoFollow add-on is useful to check a particular page for its nofollow and dofollow link status of by applying appropriate colors transformations.
5. Tinyurl Creator: The popularity of twitter has also increased the need for presenting long urls in a condensed format. The TinyUrl creator add-on allows bloggers to cut long urls on their posts into smaller and simpler links.
6. ScribeFire: Formatting the content of a blog post can become a very tricky business. The ScribeFire add-on provides a feature rich editor which integrates with the browser and allows bloggers to drag and drop formatted text and also upload images and take notes etc
7. Zemanta: This add-on inserts a box on the right hand sidebar of WordPress write panel and enables bloggers to paste images and links into related posts with a single click. The add-on also supports other blogging platforms such as LiveJournal and Blogger.
8. SearchStatus: This add-on allows bloggers and webmasters alike to keep track of details such as PageRank, Alexa Rank, NoFollow among many other details of web pages. The add-on once installed produces these details for website automatically.
9. AdSense Notifier: Many bloggers are known to be very keen to check their AdSense earnings ever so frequently and thereby end up spending a lot of time for the same which can be better utilized for their blogging purpose. The AdSense Notifier add-on displays AdSense earnings on a sidebar and thereby saving precious time.
10. WebMynd Search Assitant: Remembering the pages visited can become a big problem when surfing through a large number of pages related to a particular topic. WebMynd records the web pages that you visit so that the next time you Google Search for the same, it provides you the past sites you visited through the search term.

How To Have a Blog You Don’t Have To Babysit

There are countless opportunities on the Internet to capture a niche market where people are searching for information that you may be able to provide. If you do a good enough job, you could capture a tremendous audience, a huge following, and of course in the blogosphere all of that equals fantastic advertising revenue and sales conversions. There are usually far more great opportunities and ideas out there than you’ll have time for, so it’s important to understand how to have a blog that you don’t need to constantly struggle with.

What’s so difficult about building a successful blog? It’s the element that causes most aspiring bloggers to fail – the lack of time to post quality content and updates to the blog, and every professional blogger knows that if you don’t provide constant updates to your blog, people get bored and eventually stop returning to check out if you’ve published anything new. I’m just as guilty of it as the next blogger. So I’ve spent some time digging through what tools and options are available to bloggers who want to know how to have a blog that doesn’t take so much work and effort, but still keeps readers interested. In this article I’ll outline a few great widgets and resources that can help.

How to Have a Blog Auto-Update With Embedded RSS Feeds

The most common approach when someone wants to have a blog with automatically updated content is to embed the RSS feed of someone else’s website or blog onto your site sidebar. There are many different ways to accomplish this, such as using a Javascript or Flash widget that serves as an embedded feed reader right on your web page. My own personal choice is the Google AJAX Feed API.

I like this one because it’s so fast and simple to set up. You just choose the formatting, enter the keywords that you want feeds for, and let Google do the work. Typing "SEO" returned the feed link for SEO.com – good enough for me. Clicking on the "Generate Code" button generates the code that you can copy and paste into your blog sidebar. In my case, I use Wordpress for all of my blogs, so I just go into the Text/HTML widget for the sidebar and paste the code Google provided.

After saving the changes, the widget gets embedded directly into the sidebar of the blog, essentially an embedded feed reader providing content from the SEO.com feed.

Google is obviously the easiest, but if you want a bit more ability to customize the embedded feed, you’ll want to consider adding any one of the many RSS feed widgets out there. You can find a few of those resources in Aibek’s article on 80+ Tools For Successful Blogging.

Embedded Widgets With Cool Content

While your blog is most likely very much text based, in this Web 2.0 world there’s so much more that people are looking for. If you can make your blog a fun and exciting place to check out by providing a wide variety of many types of content, you’ll end up collecting more readers much more quickly. The type of content you want to offer is limited only by your own imagination.

For example, FlashCountdownTimer embeds a cool-looking countdown clock on your site, or another great example is HeyZap, which lets you embed games right on your own blog. Widgetbox has always been my favorite source for these kind of widgets that you can embed anywhere on your blog. A couple of my favorite widgets that I find adds tremendous functionality to any blog includes the Skype Online Status Widget, and the Flickr Slideshow Widget.

The Skype status widget displays your current online or offline Skype status to folks who visit your blog – this gives your readers the feel that the blog is a very direct connection to you, a live, breathing person.

The Flickr Slideshow widget allows you to embed a customized photo slideshow of Flickr content tailored to the sort of content you have on your blog. It’s a very cool way to offer your readers imagery about the very topics they’re interested in! These are only a few examples – explore the world of widgets to determine what sort of dynamic content you want to embed on your blog. Just remember, it updates itself – meaning no work for you!

Embedded News Related to Your Content

Another source for some great content are news sources, which are mostly offered free for the taking. Most major news sites provide a widget or embed code so you can place news updates on your blog just like you can embed a feed. My favorite is, yet again, Google News – which offers a very simple wizard to embed news onto your own blog.

You can tailor the news that gets displayed by using keywords targeted towards the content on your website. This is a valuable feature on any blog where people may be coming to you for the latest information and news on a topic – and if your blog is also the place where they can preview news headlines on the subject, they’re more likely to keep coming back. And once again – the news headlines are updated with no effort on your part.

Free Article Directories

One of the things that makes blogging so great is that you can get to know a person through their blog. For this reason, it’s not always the best option to use article directories that offer free content. On the other hand, if you have a very hot niche and simply don’t have time to write about it as often as you’d like, and you don’t have the resources to hire professional writers, then article directories are a very viable option.

It’s important to shoot for the best directories and the highest quality articles (not many article directory articles are high quality, but there are some!) I’ve used some of these free articles before, and two of my favorite directories, as well as the most popular, are EzineArticles and ArticlesBase.

EzineArticles is, by far, the best of the best when it comes to free article directories. It’ll take some sifting through writing that’s pretty horrid at times, but before long you’ll hit a gem. Just make sure that before you use the article, you keep the writer’s byline and link to their website or blog. After all, you’re getting a free article, it’s the least you can do!

Articlesbase is the place I usually go for content when I can’t find anything at EzineArticles. Articlesbase is quickly rising as a prime spot for high quality free articles. Again, if you use any on your blog, just remember to give credit where credit is due, and you’ve got yourself a goldmine of free content for your blog.

In the end, the truly professional blog is one that’s constantly updated by professional, paid writers – that’s what attracts the most readers. But if you’re just starting out on your own and you just don’t have the time to create three or more blog updates a week – the resources in this article will let you update your blog more often without having to put in very much effort.

Do you have any blogging tips and tricks that you use to keep your blog updated and fresh? Share your insights in the comments section below.