FireflyStream.com

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 РІР‚?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!

Help with Getting Started Working from Home

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.

I did this out of concern that my news sources would consist of nothing but "A-listers" and I'd miss out on the insights of those that wrote fantastic posts, but hadn't yet found the spotlight.

It's time to do it again!

Here's how it works. You leave your RSS feed URL in the comments below (no other links please, just the RSS feed). I'll subscribe to the first 100 and will continue to do so for the next two weeks. After the two weeks are up, I'll keep subscribing to anyone that really added value to my daily reading.

Sound like a deal?

Р’В Here's who I'm still subscribed to, after last year's request:

Р’В 

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 РІР‚?custom made' blog platform (sometimes even hand coded).

In the past few years, blogs have become a big part of business on the internet. Everything from anthropomorphized cats to celebrity gossip can bring millions of visitors and a steady stream of revenue. It can be hard to figure of where to start with your own money-making blog, but we've tried to make it a little easier by condensing the essential resources you'll need to start blogging profitably into this list. Check out these sources to get started right.

Blogging Platforms

The internet is chock full of sites that can provide a platform for your blog. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of them, so research carefully before deciding which will work best for you:

It's a pretty good bet that if you're not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you're probably making a lifestreaming application. Okay, so not everyone is into lifestreaming, but it is one of the hottest areas for development out there, and there are an overwhelming amount of services offering a way to aggregate all the little bits of your online life (which, for the purpose of this post, is the definition of lifestreaming that we'll use). Richard MacManus wrote an excellent primer on lifestreaming in January, but we touched on just 5 such services. The purpose of this post, rather than to review, is to just list the various options out there.

Lifestreaming apps generally fall into two categories: those that help you keep track of and display your own lifestream and those that help you keep track of your friend's lifestreams (or both). For the sake of clarity, we've focused mainly on the former for this list:

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.

Drupal 5.x. I recently decided that it was time to convert the site to Wordpress 2.5.x. The reason being that I was really using the site more like a blog than anything else, and although Drupal is a great piece of CMS, it is really not that great out of the box as a blog. Wordpress on the other hand….well it is awesome. There are not that many world class bloggers out there that use anything but, and there is a reason for that.

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 РІР‚?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.