RituSays(Ritu’s Corner) Gets Its Own Domain Name RituSays.Com

There comes a day in every blog’s life, when it has to be hosted on a domain of its own in stead of relying on free portals like WordPress, Blogger etc. The day has come for RitySays.WordPress as well. Yes, after enough deliberation and dilly-dallying for a while, we have finally (sigh….) migrated [Ritu’s Corner] to a new domain name RituSays.Com.

The website RituSays.Com is now hosting all the blog-posts, that were originally published on ritusays.wordpress.com. While we are still not done with the blog-migration and there are few things that are still being worked over, namely User Subscriptions (email based as well as RSS/XML Feeds), WordPress URL Redirects, Themes etc, we expect you to have a look at our new home i.e, RituSays.Com.

For a blog, its readers are of utmost importance and their constant encouragement has motivated us enough, so as to keep this blog going great guns. We hope to see the same kind of enthusiasm from all our readers on our new home RituSays.Com as well. Looking forward to see you all there 🙂

PS: (Sadly) This will be our last blog on RituSays.WordPress.Com 😦

Advertisement

RituSays (Ritu’s Corner) crosses 50K page views :-)

Folks, It is time to celebrate yet another landmark for RituSays (Ritu’s Corner). We just crossed the magical figure of 50,000 Page Views (In fact, as we write this, we are already nearing 54K !!). We still remember how ecstatic, we were, when our site-stats crossed 500 at the start of this year (yes, you heard it right, we celebrated even 500 page-views !!) and then again around the mid of this year, when we received our First Page Rank of 1 from Google. In a span of just 9 months, we managed to clock 50,000 page views, averaging around 180 page views every day.  I have tried putting some Smart Stats for our Blog.

• The month of August brought the maximum number of page views 8,593, while January was the least productive one with only 1,489 page views. Average page views per day for August and January were 277 and 48 respectively.

• The busiest day i.e maximum page views that our blog attracted for a single day, was 429 on September 26th. We don’t have the exact date, when we had the minimum page views for a single day, as WordPress doesn’t store site-stats on a daily basis. But we expect that must been in the months of January, when it averaged 48 page views per day.

• ~11000 page-views happened via searches using keywords, with the following search words bringing maximum number of visitspf account balance 451
  pf settlement claim id 397
  tatkal rules 2011 291
  difference between fixed deposit and recurring deposit 266
  indian railways tatkal rules 2011 249
  covered area 239
  new tatkal rules 2011 234
  pf account balance online 232
  band baaja barat review 231
  difference between fd and rd 186
  hdfc phone banking 178
  band baaja barat 167
  recurring deposit vs fixed deposit 153
  track pan card 145
  difference between rd and fd 142
• Close to 5,000 page-views happened via referrals from various websites (predominantly search engines like Google, social media channels like Facebook and Twitter and email-subscription via Yahoo, Gmail)google.co.in 1,977
  Google 403
  en.search.wordpress.com 329
  Facebook 304
  search-results.com 184

• A total of 34 people subscribed to our blogs, while there were 10 subscribers for comment subscriptions.

• A total of 97 posts were written, with January being the most productive one with as many as 33 blog posts. The credit to this goes to “WordPress Post A Day” challenge, which we so enthusiastically participated in, but had to call off due to other priorities.

• Out of a total of 17 categories, Finance has seen the most number of articles written with as many as 32 blog-posts.

• A total of 97 comments were posted, with Track Your Provident Fund being the most commented article with 20 comments.

• Following is the list of top 10 blog posts, that attracted maximum number of page views from our readers

Title		Views
Track your PF (Provident Fund) Claim Settlement Account Transfer Online Or On Your Mobile Phone		7,513
Indian Railways Introduces New Guidelines For Tatkal Ticket Bookings From 11th Feb 2011 : To Carry Original Id Proofs During Travel		5,209
Difference Between Fixed Deposit(FD) And Recurring Deposit(RD)		4,013
Track Your PF Provident Fund Account Balance Online		3,472
What Is Covered Area, Carpet Area,Built Up Area And Super Built Up Area In A House		2,904
PF(Provident Fund) Claim Process Track Your PF(Provident Fund) Claim Status		2,324
PAN Card Application, Apply and Track PAN Card Status India		2,011
Change in HDFC PhoneBanking Numbers Customer Care Numbers Call Centre Numbers From February 2011		1,477
How To Link Connect Facebook Account With WordPress Blog To Automatically Update Facebook Wall About Any New Blog Posts		1,472
“Band Baaja Barat” Review		1,470
PF Vs PPF Difference Between PF(Provident Fund) and PPF(Public Provident Fund)		1,408
Capital Gain Taxation Short Term Capital Gain(STCG) Long Term Capital Gain (LTCG) And DTC (Direct Tax Code)		1,356
LIC (Life Insurance Corporation Of India) Jeevan Anand Endowment Assurance Life Insurance Policy		1,334
Government Issues Clarification On DTC (Direct Tax Code) Clause For NRIs (Non Resident Indians)		1,332
Tax Benefit On Home Loans And Economics Of Purchasing Second House		877

All this has been possible due to all our readers, who have frequently visited our site and found our blog-contents interesting and useful. We hope, you will continue doing so and find our blogs useful. At times, we have not been able to update the blogs as frequently as we would have liked to, but we promise, we will try to keep such instances to minimum. Thank you all and wish you a very happpy Diwali 🙂

RituSays (Ritu’s Corner) Gets Its First Page Rank After Google Page Rank Update

Folks, it is time to celebrate. On June 27th, Google have issued an update to PageRank for the second time this year (First update happened in January 2011) and guess what ?? [Ritu’s Corner aka RituSays] has just got its first page-rank :-). Prior to this update, its PageRank was N/A (Not Available), but now its PageRank has increased to 1.

Last time, when we wrote about this blog’s popularity and hit-counts, calling for cheers and celebration, we had just crossed 500 hits mark, today we have clocked ~ 24000 Hits, with an average hit-count of 200-250 on a daily basis. Needless to say, we are happy and we are pretty sure, so are our readers.  This updated Google PageRank has definitely motivated us a lot. We hope to continue with our exploits in coming months and be more regular with our blog posts.  Thanks to everyone, who visited our site. We hope, you will continue doing so and find our blogs useful.

Use Zemanta To Find Related Images Links Articles Automatically And Spice Up Your Blogger BlogSpot Blog

In one of my earlier blog-posts, I had talked about Blogging Assistant Zemanta on WordPress and how it can help you spice up your blog by enriching it with full of Relevant Hyper Links and Images. Well, the good news is, Zemanta is now available on Blogger/BlogSpot as well. So if you are blogging on Blogger and need assistance in finding and inserting Related Articles/Blog-Posts or Images and Hyper Links relevant to your Blog-Post, you have reasons  to be happy. You have Zemanta as your Blogging Assistant, yes an assistant literally 🙂 Here are things you can and cannot do with Zemanta on your Blogger Blog.

What it can do for you ??

1. Links Recommendations : Zemanta will try to link any of the words/set of words inside your Post to something on web. And it does in real time, so as and when you are writing, you can automatically link your content to other web-resources, as shown in the following image

2. Related Images : It will again look up on web and try to find out related images on Web based on your content and give you a list of images to choose. If you want to add any of these photos to your blog, just click on it and they will automatically be added to your post.

3. Related Articles : It will look up on web and give you a list of all related articles on the right side panel. Clicking on any of them will automatically update your blog-post with a footer like the one shown in the following image

Note : All the screen-shots presented here are for a blog I wrote recently on “Shweta Tiwari Declared The Winner Of Bigg Boss Season 4“.

What it can’t do for you ??
Unlike WordPress wherein Zemanta recommends a set of Tags for your blog-post, Zemanta when used on Blogger BlogSpot Blogs doesn’t generate a set of labels (Similar to tags on WordPress) automatically.

How to Enable Zemanta For Your Blogger/BlogSpot Blog ??
By default, Zemanta is turned OFF for your Blogger blog. To enable it, type the following URL in your browser
http://www.blogger.com/zemanta.g
If are  you are not logged into your Blogger account, it will take you a Blogger Sign-In page. Enter your Blogger Username and Password and login. You will end up with a page like the following

If you have more than one Blog registered under the same name, Select the Blog where you want to enable Zemanta and Click on ADD ZEMANTA Button and you are done. Next time, you write a blog-post, you will see all Zemanta recommendations on your Edit Post Page. So enjoy not having to Insert Pictures and Adding Hyperlinks yourself and let Zemanta do it for you and that too for free 🙂

Migrating Blog From Blogger BlogSpot To WordPress

Are you one of those, who have been blogging for a while on Blogger aka BlogSpot and somehow felt that your blog lacks something, may be that Killer Punch, may be a Dashing Design, which can catch its visitors’ attention. Yes, there comes a time, when you make that decision to switch to WordPress. You were possibly attracted by a plethora of easily Customizable WordPress Themes or the cool widgets, which let you do almost everything you want to do.  If you are planning to migrate your blog from Blogger to WordPress, but worried about the whole process of importing blogger posts with comments into WordPress, just take a deep breathe and calm down. It is ridiculously simple to migrate. In fact, its so easy that you won’t stop laughing at the end of it !!

Here are the simple steps to easily “Migrate Your Blog from Blogger to WordPress“

Step 1. Go to Dashboard -> Tools (You will find that on the left right at the bottom) and click on Import

Step 2. You will taken to an Import page, wherein WordPress will show up a host of Blogging Platforms, from which you can migrate your blog to WordPress. Click on Blogger

Step 3. You will be taken to a page where WordPress will ask you for your permission to login to Blogger and have the authority to access all your blog-posts and comments. Click on Authorize

Step 4. Next you will see a confirmation window from Blogger/Google about allowing WordPress to access your Blogger Account. Click on Grant Access

Step 5. Now you will be shown your Blogger Blog with the number of your blog-posts and comments, along with an Import option, the so-called The Magic Button. Click on Import Button and the Migration Process will start

Step 6. The Progress-Bar will tell you about the Completion of your migration. When it finishes, you will see a message like the following

That’s it !! Yes, you are done 🙂 All your Blog-Posts, Comments, Categories (Blogger Labels) and Users will be visible in WordPress in few minutes depending on the size of your Blogger Blog. You will also be glad to know that all your Blogger Blog-Posts’ Date and TimeStamp are preserved and don’t require any action from your front.

Now is not that as easy as a walk in the park ?? Yes, it indeed is !! Now you know, you have been unnecessarily developing cold-feet about migrating your blog from Blogger to WordPress, right 🙂

How To Link Connect Facebook Account With WordPress Blog To Automatically Update Facebook Wall About Any New Blog Posts

In one of my earlier blog posts, I had described “How To Connect Your Twitter Account With WordPress Blog To Automatically Update Twitter About Any New Blog Posts“.  Today I am going to talk about the same thing i.e, How to Connect Social Media to Your WordPress Blog so as to ensure Real-Time Updates, as and when you update your blog with any new post. After Twitter, its the turn of Facebook.

Generally, if you have to post something on your Facebook Wall with regards to any new blog-post, that you recently wrote, you will have to manually copy some relevant content out of the blog, copy the URL (or take help  of any URL Shortener) and paste it across in your Facebook Wall. Now in stead of doing all that yourself, how about WordPress doing all that work for you for free ??

Yes, you heard this right, WordPress allows its users to connect/link their Facebook Account to their WordPress Blogs, so that their Facebook Wall gets updated automatically on their behalf, every time they post a new entry to their blog. Here are the steps on “How to link or connect your Facebook Account with yout WordPress Blog” and “Automatically update your Facebook wall with any newly created Blog Posts”.

Step 1. Go to My Account -> Global Dashboard, you end up with a page like the following

Step 2. Select “My Blogs” from the left side menu, which will lead you to a listing of all the blogs you are a member of

Step 3. Under the Publicize drop-down, you check the Facebook Box. It will open a Pop-up confirming your action and asking for your permission to authorize your WordPress account to connect with your Facebook account. You press the Authorize OK button

Step 4. It will go to Facebook URL and now Facebook will ask for your confirmation with regards to allowing your WordPress Account access to your Facebook account. You click on Allow

Step 5. After you have allowed your WordPress account to access your Facebook profile, next in line is a permission to post to your Facebook wall. You click on Allow

Step 6. It takes some time to complete and when it finally returns, you will again be back to the Global Dashboard page with a congratulatory message at at the top confirming the same that you have successfully connected your WordPress Blog with your Facebook account.

So next time you write a new blog-post, you don’t need to go to Facebook manually for updates regarding your new blog-post. The moment you click “Publish” button, WordPress goes ahead and automatically updates your Facebook wall with relevant details regarding your blog-post, as follows

So, enjoy the feeling of not posting anything on Facebook wall about your new blog-posts any more 🙂

How To Enable Guest Blogging in WordPress Blogs

In one of my earlier blog posts, I had talked about the Various Benefits of Guest Blogging and also explained How To Enable Guest Blogging in BlogSpot/Blogger Blogs. If your blog is hosted on WordPress, you will be glad to know that WordPress also allows Guest Blogging on your blog. In fact, you can have as many as co-authors for your WordPress blog, as you want. BlogSpot/Blogger limits this number to 100, but WordPress doesn’t set any upper limit for the same. Here are the steps on “How To Enable Guest Blogging in WordPress Blogs”

Step 1. Login to your WordPress blog and go to Dashboard. On the left side menu towards the end, you will find a Users button.  Click on Users


Step 2. It will take you to Users page, where you will see a list of all Current Authors for your blog, along with a form-field to Add More Users. Enter the email addresses for people, you want to invite as Guest Bloggers for your blog. Unlike Blogger/BlogSpot, which allows you to specify a Comma Separated List of Email Addresses, WordPress allows only one email address at a time. You also have to select the privileges your Guest Blogger is going to have. Unlike Blogger/BlogSpot which only has two levels of privileges : Authors and Administrator,  WordPress has as many as four of them

• Administrator – Access to all the administration features
• Editor – Publish and manage posts and pages as well as manage other users’ posts.
• Author – Publish and manage their own posts and not others’
• Contributor – Write and manage their posts but not publish them

Step 3. If the user whose email address you have provided already has a WordPress account linked to that email address, he or she will be immediately be added as Guest Author to your blog.

But if your invitee doesn’t have any WordPress account linked to that email address, he or she will have to create one and after you have clicked on “Add User“, you will see a page like the following

Once you click on “Invite Your Friend“, there will be an invite-form, which will be sent to the email address given in “Add User” page.

Once you “Send the Invite“, your invitee will be receiving an email asking them to join WordPress as per your invitation

Once your invitee clicks on WordPress link provided in the email, he or she is taken to WordPress Sign-Up Page. WordPress allows you to register just for a username and is not necessary that you have to have a blog registered in order to sign-in to WordPress.

Once they sign-up on WordPress, they will be automatically be added to your blog as Guest Authors and on their Dashboard they will be able to see your blog. So have fun with your blogging and enjoy Guest-Posts being written by your Guest-Bloggers

How to Transfer A Blogger/BlogSpot Blog to Another Blogger/BlogSpot User or Google Account/User

In one of my earlier posts, I had talked about “Transferring a WordPress Blog to Another WordPress User or WordPress Account“. Today, I am going to talk about the same thing Transferring Blogs only, but on a different blogging platform that is Blogger aka BlogSpot. Yes, Blogger also allows Blog-Transfer Across Blogger Users, so if you don’t need any blogname, you can pass it onto someone, who may need it. Unlike WordPress, Blogger doesn’t have a “Transfer Blog” feature allowing direct transfer of blogs across WordPress users, but  it still allows us to achieve the same objective via Guest Blogging Route.

Here are the steps on “How to Transfer A Blogger/BlogSpot Blog to Another Blogger/BlogSpot User or Google Account“.

Step 1. First you have to add the person, to whom you wish your blog transferred to, as a Guest Blogger to your blog. Steps on how to do that are explained in one of my earlier posts about Guest Blogging on Blogger.

Step 2. Once you have added the person as a guest blogger, Go to Dashboard -> Settings -> Permissions, it will show you a list of current Blog-Authors. This will include you as well as the person, whom you have just invited for Guest Blogging.

Step 3. Click on “grant admin privileges” link, it will throw a pop-up warning you of the consequences of Granting Admin Privileges to a Guest-Blogger and confirm the action from your side.

Step 4. Once you have granted admin privileges to the guest blogger, you will see the following in your Blog Authors Page
Did you notice a “Remove” button against your name, which was not present earlier ?? Yes, it shows up only when you have more than one ADMIN user. Yes, its true, you can remove yourself from your own blog 🙂

Step 5. Click on Remove and it will throw a pop-up warning you of dire consequences of removing yourself from your blog

Step 6. Click on “Remove Blog Member” and you are done with your blog-transfer !! The blog stands transferred to the other Admin user. Next time, you login to your Blogger/BlogSpot account, you will no longer see this Blog underneath your name.

How To Enable Guest Blogging in BlogSpot Blogger Blogs

In one of my earlier blog posts, I had talked about the Various Benefits of Guest Blogging. BlogSpot/Blogger allows Guest Blogging on your blog. In fact, you can have as many as 100 Authors for your blog. Here are the steps on “How To Enable Guest Blogging in BlogSpot/Blogger Blogs”

Step 1. Login to your blogger account and click on Settings

Step 2. On the Settings page, click on Permissions

Step 3. Now you’ll see your name along with your gmail address, listed as Blog Author.

Step 4. Click on Add Authors and enter the email address(es) you wish to be guest author(s) on your blog and click on Invite. If you are entering multiple invites, you can specify a comma separated email addresses list.

Step 5. Now your invitees have to accept your invitation to be a guest-blogger.Till they accept, you will see them on your Invitee-List

Step 6. After your invitation is sent, your invitees will all be receiving a mail to be a Contributor on your blog.

Step 7. Once they click on the “To contribute to this blog” link provided in the email, they will be taken to Blogger home-page asking them to sign-in. If you are a google account (Read gmail) holder, you can straight-away enter your credentials and sign in. If you don’t have a google account, you will have to create one, which you can use to sign-in to Blogger.

Step 8. Once they click on “Accept Invitation“, they will automatically be added to your blog as Guest Authors and you will see as such in your Dashboard as such

By default, the Guest-Bloggers will be added as Authors, which means, they will only be able to edit their posts alone and won’t be able to edit blog’s settings or template or edit other members’ posts.  So you don’t have to worry about your settings or things, your Guest Blogger may have access to. Have fun with your blogging and enjoy Guest-Posts being written by your Guest-Bloggers 🙂

Use Guest Blogging To Publicize and Promote Your Blog And Increase Traffic and Google PageRank

Guest Blogging is defined as Accepting Posts from other Bloggers to publish for free on your blog, or writing posts for other Bloggers to publish on their blogs for free (If you are good enough, you can charge some money as well. But then, if you are already good enough to make money with your writing, you won’t be writing on others’ blogs, Right ;-)).

Guest Blogging is a great way to build your Online Reputation and Drive Traffic to your blog and can be treated as a Traffic-Building and Networking-Tool. This will help in your Blog’s growth and also gives you an opportunity to market your writing skills in Bloggers’ Circuit. Usually, Guest Bloggers are allowed to have a small brief about them, which appears at the bottom of every Guest Post written by then and people allow Guest Bloggers to have one or two links of theirs, something like
So you can choose to mention your Blog URL, so that visitors who may have liked your Guest Post can go to your blog for more.

So by doing Guest-Blogging on a mature blog with decent traffic, a novice blogger can get more visibility by virtue of more Backlinks and Hits to his new blog. It also increases your Google PageRank as its pass the PR to your website from the hosting blog. Further, it brings freshness to your blog. All of us have a certain way of writing, and so have the Guest-Bloggers. So with their fresh content, your blog will be queried by search engines with more and more search terms, further boosting your traffic and PR.

Now a days, most of the blogger, if not all, who are interested in Networking and Generating Traffic for their Blog, are into Guest Blogging. So next time, you see the following at the top or bottom of a blog-post

You know this is a Guest Post written by a Guest Blogger. Now that, I have discussed enough about the various benefits of allowing Guest Blogging and writing Guest Blog Posts, when are you going to do that 🙂