What is Cloud Computing?

It is the latest technology that is used to access services which are accessible on the Internet cloud. With this technology at you disposal, you no longer need to install any hardware or software as all services and storage space are provided over the internet. Moreover, it is quite easy to get started with this service.

When people start up with a business, they usually look for some cost cutting methods. The constant endeavor is to employ the most advanced tools for your job. With cloud computing you have an all in one and perfect solution. It not only helps in reducing the cost but is also very simple to set up and run. Discussed below are some of the Cloud based tools which you can utilize for your small business. These tools will help your business to become more fruitful and operate at a reduced cost.

1. Invoicing: Invoicing is an important and necessary part of every business. You can use Invoicera to send and create professional invoices and maintain your business accounts. Now, with the help of cloud based invoicing service, you can create and send invoices to your clients easily. This ensures that you get paid on time. There are some cloud based apps that let you track your time and expenses effectively. Thus it helps to keep you up to date. Although there are a number of Invoicing applications available in the market like Zoho Invoice, Blinksale, CurdBee, FreshBooks, but Invoicera is certainly the best among all.

2. Online Conferencing: Today, online conferencing has become a normal routine for almost every business. With online conferencing, you can meet your customers and employees. Go to Meeting, WebEx, WebDialogs.com (for video conferencing), Press8 Telecom (for audio conferencing), and Nefsis are some of the cloud based conferencing tools available across the internet.

3. File and Calendar Sharing: With a feature like calendar sharing, one can share and access digitally stored information like calendars, multimedia files, documents and computer programs. Some well known cloud based and calendar sharing applications are ZohoDocs.com, Google Docs, Microsoft SharePoint, Centraldesktop.com, etc. In fact, there are many hosting companies that offer MS SharePoint in a cloud. These companies charge on a per client basis.

4. Data Storage: Now you can keep a backup of your important digital files by making use of data storage service providers like ZumoDrive or Mozy.com.

5. VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) Hosted PBX: With VoIP PBX system, you can fundamentally access your PBX system over the cloud. This cloud based tool provides a simple sign up and you can get started with it within few minutes.

6. Blogging Software: A company blog is a simple way to keep your customers up to date and to publicize your enterprise. You can easily sign up with an online blogging company. Some popular blog software are WordPress, Squarespace, etc.

7. Custom Relationship Management (CRM): This is one of the most employed tactics in order to manage the company’s communication with its clients and sales scenario in an effective manner. This system is a must for every small business. Some of the well-known cloud computing CRM tools are Zoho CRM, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.com.

Author Bio: This post is contributed by Kevin. Kevin works as an E-Marketing Executive for PixelCrayons, which offers best ecommerce website development & designing services, online shopping cart development, Magento development & designing services and other ecommerce software services.

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Blog Stats – We are very close to 2400 posts, RSS Subscribers counts 8450, Alexa Rank is 22,589 and PageRank 4. There isn’t much progress in the traffic and revenue in last couple of months. Certainly, Panda aka Farmer update is the ultimate culprit.

A while back in July, we also launched a web app “WhatIsMySEORank”, a free and useful service for webmasters and bloggers. WIMSR offers a fast and efficient way to Find your website position in Google search results (Google.com). Do try it out!

Thanks to all our lovable readers, friends, family and sponsors for appreciating and motivating us in this long phase. Hope to see your warm support in future too!

Image credit: helen james

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Unfortunately, the recent Google Search algorithm (PANDA update) seems to give more importance to these splogs rather than the original site. I’ve seen many instances where our site was being outranked by the content scrappers in Google search, this makes me sad and is pretty bothersome. A small example of this can be seen below:

As you can see in above screenshot, the scrapper site is ranking at 1st position whereas the original site is at 3rd position. This definitely drops down our organic traffic and the sploggers who just steal our work enjoy the benefit of it.

To combat against this, Google seems to have finally started working to improve their search algorithm and they need data points for testing. Matt Cutts (head of the Google webspam team) just tweeted a link, using which site owners can report about blog scrapers to Google. This is a specialised webpage to Report scraper pages, it says:

Google is testing algorithmic changes for scraper sites (especially blog scrapers). We are asking for examples, and may use data you submit to test and improve our algorithms.

From now onwards, if you ever find any spam site or blog who is lifting your articles and is ranking above your site in Google, then do report about them and help Google in improving their algorithm. For me, Panda is a sort of nightmare that has turned into reality, resulting in 50% drop in both traffic and revenue since last few months.

To Report a Scraper site, just visit here. Input the search query, then URL of original site page and the scrapper site page. You can share some details too. Click Submit!

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This is usually the case with Spam Blogs who blindly copy your content and link directly to your site images. Let’s say you published an informative article, then there is a good chance that it might get scrapped by numerous content scrappers as was happened in my case. To prevent this, you must Enable Hotlink Protection for your blog or website and stop everyone else from hotlinking your site images and videos.

How to Stop Hotlinking using cPanel -

We’re sharing the easiest method to do this task, provided your site has cPanel and you have access to it. Follow the steps below:

1. Login to cPanel.

2. Select “HotLink Protection” from Security window in cPanel.

3. Click on the ‘Enable’ button to enable hotlink protection.

4. Now enter the desired URLs/website to whom you want to allow access. Make sure to enter your site domain here as well as the list of feed readers like Feedburner, Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. so they don’t display the redirect image on your site and feeds.

ADD all the domains listed in image below (replace webtrickz.com with your domain).

5. Specify the file extensions you wish to block. (Default are jpg, jpeg, gif, png, bmp)

6. Input the URL of any image (should NOT be hosted on your site) which you like to serve as the Redirect image on sites who have hotlinked your images. Below is an example of our redirect image hosted on Imageshack.

Then click ‘Submit’ and you’re done. Now visit any site who is directly linking to your site images. They must show the redirect image. In my case above image is shown, visit (goo.gl/2SmKN , goo.gl/j6cSK) to see the live demo

“Do check your website and feeds properly after making this change to make sure everything is working the right way.”

Thanks +Dhawal Damania and +Amit Banerjee for the hat tip!

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This is what Google says about its new SE ranking update:

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

To determine if recent Google algorithm has affected your website SE traffic, check it easily by analysing your site’s organic traffic in past few days using Google Analytics:

Just visit Google Analytics > Traffic sources > Search Engines and choose ‘Google’ (organic) as the traffic source. Now examine your site’s organic traffic by seeing its growth or fall after Feb 24. Fortunately, this update hasn’t impacted our organic traffic.

Do let us know if this new algorithm update has posed a positive or negative impact on your site’s traffic via Google search.

Tip via Labnol

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Certainly, our Comments section is bloated with lot of Spam comments listed under Spam section and similarly there are Pending comments. If you want to get rid of all the Spam or Pending comments, then you can easily remove all of them at once in just a few clicks without the need to use the uneasy phpMyAdmin method.

Just install the WP-Optimize plugin directly from your WordPress Dashboard and activate it. To access it, just open the Dashboard drop-down menu and click on the “WP-Optimize” option. Now tick mark the desired option ‘Clean marked Spam comments’ or ‘Clean Unapproved comments’ (Pending comments). Click on the Process button.

Voila! All the Spam or Pending/Unapproved comments will get deleted instantly. You can deactivate this plugin later if you don’t want to use it frequently.

Update – I just noticed that we can easily bulk delete all the Spam comments in WordPress without using any plugin. To do so, go to Comments > Spam and click on the “Empty Spam” button. All the spam comments will get deleted.

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This post is just to share a little insight of WebTrickz’s journey in 2010. I started this blog in May, 2008 as just a hobby but after stepping in 2010, I conceived to opt this as a profession. 2010 was truly a good and lucky year for me since beginning in which WebTrickz made prominent and steady growth every month. This always pleased and motivated me to work more harder and smarter.

Below are WebTrickz Traffic Stats for Year 2010 (Jan 2010 – Dec 2010) which will give you a view as how we progressed with time. Includes both Total Visits and Pageviews:

A Total of 800 Posts were made in 2010 on webtrickz, mostly all were written by me.

As far as Revenue is considered, it is pretty good and has made similar growth like our traffic. Below is the Annual Income Report 2010 (AdSense) for WebTrickz but without the actual earnings figure. You can see the growth though

Thanks a lot to all our readers, friends, fellow bloggers, and my family for their love & support. This all couldn’t have been possible without you. I’m looking forward for more perfection, growth, and sharing great articles in 2011. Keep supporting us in future too!

Don’t forget to follow @web_trickz (Official twitter profile of Webtrickz.com)

Again, Happy New Year 2011.

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WordPress 3.0 merges MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality. Users will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates and you can upgrade multiple plugins at once with a single click. It allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets, and much more.

See full list of changes in WP 3.0 [Version 3.0]

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