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It never ceases to amaze me to see the quality of expertise from the readers of this site. You all really blow me away! I'm pleased to present 18 business and life balance How-To's ‘crowdsourced' from our reader community. These are extremely well written, in-depth articles that could stand alone as 'special reports' or even mini ebooks in some cases!

Part of having a successful website is attracting visitors. Keeping those visitors on your site, however, is another topic altogether. Of course, once you have the visitor on your site you'll want to keep them around for a while rather than seeing them quickly leaving to go somewhere else.

In order to do a good job of retaining visitors, increasing pageviews and time on the site, it's important to think about what could cause visitors to leave. By knowing some of the major reasons that people are leaving your site, you can make adjustments to improve this situation.

Here is a look at 16 common reasons for exiting visitors. If you have other factors in mind that I've left off of this list, feel free to leave a comment.

RSS feeds are a popular data format used for serving users frequently updated content and they offer great opportunities to publishers who are looking for alternative systems to generate revenue from their original content.

With the growing popularity of RSS feed-based syndication, many Internet publishers became concerned that subscribers to their RSS feeds would not be be exposed anymore to the advertising on their web pages, as some readers could now read all of their content inside their RSS reader. In this light, some decided to publish only a short part of their articles in their RSS feeds so that those interested would click through to their site to read the rest of the content.

As I said I'd do last week I've closed the latest Poll of the Week off because it was beginning to take over my sidebar. I found the results quite interesting. The question asked:

What Blog Platform Do You Use Most?

The results had a few surprises for me. While I was expecting a large showing for WordPress (around 37% of the 1000 respondents) I was intruiged by the large number of ProBlogger readers using the free hosted Blogger.com platform (22.2% - or 222 readers). This figure was almost triple the number of Movable Type Bloggers. Another surprise to me was the large numbers of Blog platforms that I'd never heard of before. By the end of the poll there were 49 options. Thirdly I was interested that 2% of those taking part use some sort of ‘custom made' blog platform (sometimes even hand coded).

It's no secret that YouTube's age demographics skew young, but young still means 18-34, and much of the content on the site would be inappropriate for children under the age of 13 -- the COPPA cut off age that YouTube adheres to as the minimum allowed for anyone to sign up on the site. Totlol is a new video site that launched in beta this week aimed at children aged 6 months to 6 years. The site is community moderated to ensure that video content is always appropriate for small children.

When I first read "community moderated video site for kids under 6 years of age," my immediate reaction was, "bad idea." Community moderation, after all, isn't foolproof and before the community has time to react, often bad stuff slips through. But Totlol is set up in a way that parents are able to screen and weed out bad videos before they reach the eyes of their children.

Only 1 out of every 100 readers of this post are likely to interact with it by leaving a comment...

Below I'll outline 10 techniques you can increase the participation rate in the comments section on your blog.

Jakob Nielsen's latest study finds that 90% of online community users are lurkers (read or observe without contributing) with only 9% of users contributing ‘a little' and 1% actively contributing.

So 1% of your blog's users are actively engaging with your blog and the rest are at best occasional contributers.

This post talks readers through some of the issues that they need to think through regarding choosing a blog platform.

• ‘Which Blog Platform Should I use?'
• ‘Should I use a free Blogger.com blog or get my own hosted blog on my own Domain? Which Blog Platform is best?'
• ‘What are the Pros and Cons of going with Typepad instead of WordPress as a blog platform?'
• ‘Should I start out on a free Blogging Platform and Upgrade later?'

These are just some of the typical questions that I get asked each day from bloggers starting out and attempting to make a decision on which blogging platform or tool they should choose.

One of the underlying themes from last weekend's SOBCon was putting more you into your work. There are literally hundreds of millions of blogs out there, with more starting every day. In a sea of competition, you've got to capitalize on what makes you unlike anyone else.

Your unique point of view. Your writing style. Your own individual, personal stories and the way they shape your message.

Online Marketing Blog manages a list of over 500 search marketing blogs called the BIGLIST, but it's not ordered other than alphabetically. A year ago I took a sample of SEO and SEM blogs that were publishing Feedburner counts and posted a list ranked by the number of RSS subscribers. Below is a re-ordered list of search marketing blogs by RSS subscribers as of today:

Matt Cutts

Search Engine Watch

Slide out and drawer effect

The effect is commonly known as an ‘accordion' and it's usually used to slide up, or down blocks of content to expose new blocks. The Apple web site is a great demonstration of this effect in action, where the mouse settles on the title of the 'section' and the associated links are exposed. What makes this effect particularly cool, is that the drawers maintain a fixed height and slide between restricted area.

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