| New Features |
Special Submission Contest, in cooperation with the Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Post is a leading English-language daily in Israel published since 1932. Its Internet edition – www.JPost.com - is one of the biggest Web sites operating out of Israel with about 2.5 million unique users a month, mainly from North America. 
The Jerusalem post is hosting a submission contest powered by BloggersBase and invites you to express yourself by submitting posts to this contest. By participating in the Jerusalem Post Submission Contest you increase potential exposure to yourself, your posts and your blog. Each week top bloggers will get discovered in the contest, be brought to the attention of the Jerusalem Post's editors and get a chance to be published on the Jerusalem Post's official website as well as in the print edition.
This is an amazing opportunity for all BloggersBase members to gain exposure on a much larger scale, and receive access to a completely new audience, including readers of the print edition, as well as be reviewed by professional editors. Meezoog Partnership – sponsoring Love and Relationship   Meezoog is now sponsoring the Love and Relationships blog on BloggersBase! Meezoog is a unique relationship network that introduces a new and innovative approach to online dating. This means that in this competition blog, the weekly prizes will be awarded by Meezoog. Samantha Karlin, Meezoog’s Dating Diva will be monitoring this blog, occasionally choosing great posts she recommends you read. The Dating Diva’s recommendations for great posts will appear in the top right hand corner of the Love & Relationships blog. Read tips from the Dating Diva’s blog on BloggersBase.
Crop Image on the fly!  
Do basic editing of your images (resize, crop, frame), right in the BloggersBase publishing wizard.
Up till now, you could resize an uploaded image, position it in your post wherever you saw fit and you could also add a border around it. Now you can also crop your image within the photo editor upload your image file and in the “Browse Images” tab simply click “crop” in the “Edit” column. After doing so the “Crop Images” tab will open and enable you to choose the part of the image you wish to keep in your post.
BB-Top BloggersBase is happy to introduce a new front page archive – BB-Top. BB-Top contains all the daily front pages BloggersBase had had according to dates. This way, if your post had made it to the front page it is documented in BB-Top. Finding the desired date is very simple. Just go to www.bb-top.com, and on the right-hand panel choose your date from the calendar. The relevant page, containing all the post that had made it to the front page on that specific date will be presented. You can use the link to the historic front page in which you have a post on and put the link on your personal blog or as reference for a successful post!
BBGoldmine  Another great new feature offered by BloggersBase is BBGoldmine. As you know, when you publish a post in a blog for the first time it is called a Nugget. If you happen to win the competition for the specific timeslot the Nugget you’ve published becomes a regular surface post. However, the Nuggets that didn’t win become Ex-Nuggets. The new BBGoldmine contains all of these Ex-Nuggets, as well as all current Nuggets. Nuggets are marked, as on BloggersBase itself, with a small golden nugget, while you’ll be able to recognize the Ex-Nuggets by a small grey nugget.
BloggersBase fan page on Facebook A new BloggersBase fan page was launched on the ever-growing social network Facebook. The fan page is titled “ BloggersBase.com - Blogger Powered, User Driven” and is updated with new and interesting links on a regular basis. Join us as fans and receive our links on your Facebook profile! |
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| New Upcoming Blogs |
Literature  BloggersBase is happy to introduce our “Literature” blog. This blog allows all of the literature lovers amongst us to learn some more about the texts we like. You can find book reviews, recommendations, explanations, poem analysis, writers’ opinions, interviews and so much more. Reading these posts gives one a deeper, more comprehensive relationship with the written world. Two prominent bloggers for Literature are Margo and Blogging Authors, check out their wonderful posts and enjoy.
Blogging
The “Blogging” blog is a brand new blog offered by BloggersBase. You all know what it’s like to be a new blogger, and this is the place to bestow some of your own experiences and wisdom about the process of blogging. Your posts can contain anything about blogging, your own experiences and feelings about writing, how to design posts, tips to improve one’s writing, what you’ve learned about trafficking, platforms for bloggers, and anything else that might be of value for other bloggers such as yourself.
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| Questions and Answers section | | Q: | Why don’t I receive some of the notifications about new posts from friends? | | A: | Receiving post notifications via e-mail is not always the most reliable way of receiving notifications as 20% of all e-mails don’t get through to the recipient. However, what you are able to do is subscribe to that specific person's RSS and this way you will never miss out on a new post. | | Q: | I won and still haven’t received my winnings-why? | | A: | Please make sure you have provided the correct details regarding your PayPal account. As soon as you insert the correct details we will send you your winnings. If the payment is still delayed, please contact us and we'll solve the problem together. | | Q: | I can’t seem to log off from BloggersBase, how do I fix this? | | A: | This problem might be caused by “Cookies”, which are files saved in the memory of your browser. Please refer to this official post for a detailed explanation on how to do this. |
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| Alex's corner | SEO principles: how to help us to help you
The three tips below join the rest of the guidelines I have published in the past in helping you boost the number of your readers. 61% of incoming traffic to BloggersBase is referred by the search engines, and it is on a steady rise. Traffic coming from the search engines is especially important since most of the visitors coming from the search engines read one of your posts for the first time and therefore they have the highest potential of joining your audience. In other words, bringing in more fresh blood is crucial in order to expand the circle of your readers and search engines do exactly that.
We at BloggersBase promote our bloggers by optimizing posts to be search engine friendly, so your posts will show up in search engines results as high as possible. Since we usually display the posts they way they were submitted, conforming to SEO principles when writing them can raise the rank of the page in as far as search engines are concerned. Most bloggers are aware of SEO, but it might be useful to scroll through some basic rules which apply to post writing:
1. Keep a good ratio between text and HTML code.
“What does this mean?”, you are probably asking yourself. Fear not, the explanation is quite simple. Behind each Internet document there is an HTML representation, which uses tags to define page formatting. Below is an example of how a page looks like in regular layout and its underlying HTML code.  
Obviously, when crawlers index the page, they need to get rid of all the tags, styles and other objects which are not text. It is generally considered a good practice to have as much text as possible compared to the volume of the HTML code beyond. There are many free tools helping to calculate text vs. HTML ratio, like this one: http://www.rankquest.com/tools/Text-Ratio.php. Some text editors are known as being poor HTML generators in this aspect. For example, if you write some short line in Microsoft Word and save it as a web page, you will see a great deal of unnecessary HTML styles and tags. The bottom line is: get rid of unnecessary HTML, avoid using Word’s ‘save as Web Page’ feature and try to write in plain text whenever possible.
2. Do not use H1 tags and restrict usage of H2 tags.
The rule of the thumb says that ideally HTML page should contain one H1 tag and few H2 tags. Since BloggersBase marks the post subject with H1, it is recommended that the post itself does not contain H1 tags.
3. Add descriptive descriptions to the images.
Crawlers cannot understand a semantic meaning of the images. And until they learn to do so simply from analyzing the images, we need to help them. Usually this is done by setting the alt property of the img tag.
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| Featured User of the Month |  This month we have 2 new exciting featured users! We’ll kick it off with Mashable who is one of our leading bloggers on BloggersBase. He publishes mainly in our “ Technology” category and receives top scores repeatedly. Here is what Mashable had to say to our readers: | Q: | What is the feature or aspect that you like the most about BloggersBase? | | A: | BloggersBase provides a perfect discovery platform for upcoming bloggers. The content posted becomes more exposed! And the best part is that users can control the content by rating it. One is able to receive all best user generated content of various categories in one place. | | Q: | What influenced you to start blogging? | | A: | Like most first time bloggers, I too started as a “copy blogger”. I didn't take it as seriously. Thanks to Dan who first helped me with some valuable tips on writing a blog post, and my friend myqute who shared some useful ways to attract more readers, I then started to pay more attention to reading more, subscribing to more blog feeds and getting to know more about all the latest technologies . One day I started writing on my own and got good, positive responses and comments from my friends myqute, kaytiiangel, DrRus, Wealth, Shari, CaroleParker. This motivates and pushes me forward to read and write more on what I read daily. | | Q: | What feature do you feel is missing from BloggersBase? | | A: | Please consider adding a RT (ReTweet) button on every post, which adds more value for the content. Other than that BloggersBase is doing a great job. | | Q: | How do you go about creating a post? Do you do any research, and if so, where? How do you choose your subject? | | A: | I am personally a "Technology Addict" so I always prefer to write about the latest technology happenings around the web. To know about all these updates I used to read Mashable, Techcrunch, Readwriteweb, Google Official Blog. The other important source is Twitter where you can get all the latest happenings instantly. I usually choose topics related to Twitter and Google products, which attract more visitors. If Gmail releases any new features in labs, then I try it out first before I start to blog on that topic . This allows me to easily express my own thoughts and suggestions. |
 Thanks Mashable for your thoughts! For our second featured user we decided to interview Halthouse1. Halthouse1 is a real up & comer in “ Politics & Opinions” and receives great feedback from other users. We love his posts and wanted to see what thoughts he has to share with our community. | Q: | What is the feature or aspect that you like the most about BloggersBase? | | A: | I love having a forum to present my thoughts, views and opinions to readers who may not be that familiar with some of the things that I write about. I also like the fact that posts are rated, as there is no better arbiter of my content and style presenting that content than readers. | | Q: | What advice would you give to new bloggers? | | A: | It is a little cliché, but write on whatever topic that you are passionate about from the point of view your core beliefs, as anything else will come across as disingenuous. Present it well, write clearly and don't be afraid to be controversial. On the other hand, always be respectful of those with differing views. At the end of the day, try and offer something of value to the people reading what you have to say. | | Q: | We see that you take the time to invest on your posts, what makes a quality post, in your eyes? | | A: | I think that a clear and concise presentation of the topic is a key. Try and inspire those who read it to think and ideally participate through comments. I also try and use some type of visual in each of my posts, whether it be a picture or video clip that is relevant. Bottom line: Content. Second: Presentation that holds the reader and makes it somewhat easy for them to read and understand what it is that you are trying to say. | | Q: | What feature do you feel that is missing from BloggersBase? | | A: | To be honest, I have really not found anything to be lacking, down to the fact that my blog feed is automatically imported and I can post my content with the click of a button in an email. Keep up the great work, and thank you for this honor. |
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| Invite Your Friends! | Help us spread the word about BloggersBase and you could win monetary prizes! Simply invite your friends or refer other bloggers by placing a link to BloggersBase on your own site. To do this, choose one of the banners offered in the 'My Account' tab of your profile page and place it on your web page. Each time a blogger who registers by following your link wins the competition in one of the surface blogs a cash bonus will be added to your balance. You can track the number of referred users and your bonuses in the 'My Account' tab of your profile.
You can also invite friends to join by clicking "Invite" on your profile widget to the same effect!
Contact Us
Regarding any questions about BloggersBase or suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact us here
If you wish to unsubscribe from our newsletter please update the ‘receive newsletter’ preference under the preferences tab in your profile. |
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| | | Tip of the month | The recently introduced bar at the top of the page contains links to the official BloggersBase Twitter page and Facebook fan page. Join the thousands of people already following BloggersBase, for up-to-date information, interesting news and networking with fellow users.  The RSS widget is expandable and it offers you an option to subscribe either to the current blog or a category. If you subscribe to the ‘Home Page’ feed, you will be updated with each post which qualifies to the front page of BloggersBase.
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