Net Profit Mantra » Blogging Ideas and Guide

Net Profit Mantra Now Powered by HostGator VPS Hosting

Shanker Bakshi — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 11:13:41 +0000

Before I start saying anything, I want to thanks Ajith Edassery, a friend of mine and an excellent blogger and affiliate marketer, who suggested me and convinced me to gear up Net Profit Mantra with VPS hosting. He also helped me analyse how we can speed up page loading time. One important thing which I learned during last couple of weeks is that site loading speed makes hell lot of difference in traffic and Google indexing and PR. Just couple of weeks back, I switched my shared hosting on HostGator to VPS ( Virtual Private Server), and I can see clearly the difference in comments and traffic coming to this blog. Hopefully this trend will follow and I’m sure in next few months I will take this blog to its place where it was a few years back.

What is VPS Hosting and Why it Matters?

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting is a system where physical servers partitioned into several virtual machines to provides the power and functionality of a high-end dedicated server.

A Virtual Private Server will give you dedicated CPU and RAM and will not share them with anyone else.
It functions like a separate physical computer dedicated to the individual customer’s needs.

So it’s clear why one should prefer a VPS hosting service over the shared hosting. A shared hosting is where the many websites reside on one web server and each site is placed on its own partition on the server. A VPS hosting is always recommended if you need your site to load fast with a separate dedicated server backing it up without sharing CPU and RAM with other customers.

Usually a high end virtual hosting service comes with following features;

UNLIMITED Domains
UNLIMITED Sub Domains
UNLIMITED Email Accounts
UNLIMITED MySQL Databases
Off Site Backups
UNLIMITED FTP Accounts
FREE Site Builder Software
PRIVATE Name Servers
FULL Root Access
FULLY Managed cPanel or Plesk

All the above features clearly define why should pick a VPS hosting especially if you are a professional blogger serious about turning your blogging and affiliate marketing business in to a big venture. (I wish I could have it from the beginning) but as they says better late than never.

Why you need a faster loading Site?

It’s not a secret anymore, every single web developer and internet entrepreneur knows that speeding matters a lot to you and to Big Daddy Google. Last year in April 2010, Google officially announced it that they prefer, love and pamper fast loading websites over dull and slow loading pages. Here are excerpts from Official Google blog which will explain the whole point in more convincing way;

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

So to “please” Google, it’s compulsory that your site should be loading “lightening” fast.

How to check Site loading speed?

There are several tools available for testing site page loading time. Following are some of best tools that you can use to check and analyse your site page loading speed.

Moreover, you can also see your site loading performance in Google’s Webmaster tools central. My personal favorite among them is tools.pingdom.com. This will help you understand in detail about page size components and performance under various factors plus detailed page analysis. Here is my Net Profit Mantra performance on Pingdom;

How to improve or optimize page load speed?

Opting for a VPS hosting doesn’t always mean your site will start loading fast the next moment, you also need to optimize it. Actually there are few other things that you also need to make good. My last theme was not optimize from the point of view of page loading speed. So the first thing which I did after shifting the site to VPS hosting is to change the design with a theme which has minimal graphics and images. The idea was to reduce the gigantic 1.6 mb page size. Removing thumbnail images from home page speed up page loading but it also takes away the attractiveness of a website. Let me explain further what are the important aspects that you should work on to gear up the page loading time;

There are three things that you must note from the image above;

Request : The number of HTTP requests made to load the page, these requests are the HTTP calls for images, javascript, and stylesheets. In my case number of requests comes to 54 which is fair enough. better if one could reduce the number between 30 to 40.

Page Size: The other important factor is page size. You must keep it under 1 mb. Best to keep it around and under 500 kB. In mine case it is 413.1 kB which is fair enough for a good speed page load.

Load Time: If you can manage the couple of things mentioned above it will automatically reduce the page load time. A page load time of 1 to 2.5 second can be consider (for me at least). It means still there are few things which I need fix in the current theme.

How to reduce Page Size?

The best way to reduce page size is the reduce the size of images by optimizing. If your theme uses timthumb.php for auto thumbnail then you can reduce the size of thumbnail images by reducing the image quality in timthumb.php file. By default the the quality is placed at 75%. We can do this by keeping the quality around 30 to 40 (“q=3o”) It will help you reduce the image size ultimately resulting in a reduced page size.

Tools for optimizing image for website

There are couple of tools available that help you reduce the size of images without much affecting its quality.

Here are some of them;

With image optimizer, as shown above, you can reduce image size significantly without loosing its quality. I have decided not to upload any image without optimizing it for web.

The idea is to keep the page size low so that the page could load faster. Removing unnecessary images and graphic on home page will do the trick. If your site theme has a big header, try and optimize it with tools mentioned above and see the difference in site loading speed.

So to attain a good site loading speed

- A VPS hosting service, preferably from HostGator. You can trust that they actually create a partition on their physical server and do not share your CPU and RAM with other customer.

- A well optimize WordPress theme, preferably Elegant Themes, as they work a lot of loading time of their theme.

Share your site page loading experiences in comment below, plus share if I missed something important related to page loading speed optimization.

All New Blogger.com is Here

Shanker Bakshi — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:34:54 +0000

I always recommend using self hosted blogging platform WordPress to all my reders. But if for any crazy reason ( May be when you wish to check whether blogging is your cup of tea or not) you can always try out creating your first FREE blog with blogger.com. Even I founded my first FREE blog with blogger.com in 2007 ( Here it is)

Google is now on the path to give its every product the same look and feel, after giving new skin to Google AdSense, Gmail, Analytics, Webmaster tool it’s now blogger.com turn to get a makeover.

The new theme and design is awesome, neat, tidy and as simple as my love for you.

Spam Inbox

There are some new tools fitted to fight even Spam comments.

Blogger now filters comments that are likely spam comments to a Spam Inbox, much like the spam folder in your email. When someone leaves a comment on your blog, it will be reviewed against our spam detector, and comments that are identified as possible spam will be sent to your blog’s Spam Inbox, found at Comments | Spam.

Make Money with Blogger.com

Creating your FREE blog with blogger.com is not that hard, nor making money out of it is a rocket science now.

I can explain every bit of it to you here and now, but let this beautiful chick explain to you ‘how you can make money with blogger.com”. I wish and hope you will give enough weight-age to her Money Wisdom.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We also do Blogger.com to WordPress self Hosted migration ( sorry not just migration smooth migration). Visit this link for more details

Download Net Profit Mantra iPhone App

Shanker Bakshi — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 16:30:37 +0000

Now you can also read your favorite blog Net Profit Mantra through iPhone or android application.

My Google Analytics data shows lots of people access and browse Net Profit Mantra on their iPhone, so it will be great if i could provide them a better browsing experience. So with this motive we have developed this apps;

Procedure is pretty simple, just follow these steps

Download “Bloapp” application from iphone or android Apps Store.
Click the QR code from the image below with the apps QR code Scanner

Enjoy reading it on iPhone!!!

Wayback to the Past

Ramsha Afaq — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:29:44 +0000

The Wayback Machine is a historical archive of preserved web pages. Type in a URL and start surfing through time! The Way back Machine is the awesome tool that enables you to do whatever I mentioned above. It is a Creation by Internet Archive, a non-profit organization based in USA. The WayBack Machine also allow you to view the screenshot of your losted website, as being a kid I lost my websites due to domain expiry but now I can see how they use to look and it feels good to have an all time snap of your website and still now I can see how my blog deign changed with time. You can also see how your Blog or your favorite or the Big one used to look when they were amateur. You can find old stories and shares by the Blog, before you started visiting that particular web page. With this Tool you can save a lost website too. Create an Internet timeline, Track the Internet’s history, or your own, complete with screenshots. If you want to troubleshoot all time links that are broken, you can use the Wayback Machine and Xenu’s Link Sleuth software to find them and then take measures for improving Usability as well as SEO. You can also use it as an Evidence that the specified content is posted first on your site and plus more the pages indexed in the Way back Machine can ensure you exactly that. And some how many Search Engines use this tool for the Website Age.

Here are some screenshots taken from Wayback Machine, credit Royal Pingdom

Enjoy more on with your favorite websites Screenshots Wayback Machine

Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Is Now At A Special 50% Discount Closing Forever

Shanker Bakshi — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:08:58 +0000

learned a lot from this guy, Yaro is a super affiliate, top notch blogger, a Lister and what else. if you have noticed it, he is there in my friend list (see footer) from ages now. The best thing I like about Yara Starak is that he is always there to help you, if you approach him with some problem.

His Coaching program Blog MasterMind is a great source and now he is offering it to book your seat at 50% discount and the reason why he is doing so is because he is in mood to close it down forever and can concentrate on developing some new great project like this.

So here is a quick link that you should check and download his Blog Blueprint;

Four years ago I created a report called the Blog Profits Blueprint and it was, and continues to be, a huge hit. It’s been downloaded now over 100,000 times, and

every day at least 100 new people come to my website to get it. Incidentally, if you don’t have your copy of the Blueprint or you lost your original one, download

the text PDF version and a way cool AUDIO version with my voice speaking it out, right here -

http://www.blogmastermind.com/blueprint/download.php ( No affiliate link)