For iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android smartphone users, get a free $10 iTunes Gift Card (official promo link) when you sign up for and use IDrive.  The free IDrive Lite account is limited to 5GB of storage. To get this deal:

1. Download IDrive Lite to your smartphone
2. download IDrive for Windows
3. backup at least 1GB of data
4. you’ll receive confirmation of the free iTunes gift card within 72 hours

Dropbox is an awesome service that allows you to synchronize your files across your mac, pc, phone, etc. They offer 2GB of free space which should be enough for most users (ie. if you’re syncing your most important documents as opposed to your entire music library which isn’t as important).

However if you’re looking to eek out a bit more space, here’s a few quick tips.

1. If you haven’t signed up for the service yet, don’t. Or if you have and are willing to get a use a new ID, you can get an extra 250MB of free space through using a referral link when you sign up.  Don’t sign up straight from the dropbox.com site or you’ll miss out on this free referral space.

2. Sometime’s people miss this one when they first start out. I had registered for dropbox a year ago and didn’t see an obvious link back to this, but if you go through a few of the starting out tour tips you can earn an extra 250 MB of free space as well. Go to http://dropbox.com/gs

3. Finally, invite/refer your friends. This will earn you an extra 250 Megabytes of space up, capping at 3 GB for your free account. They need to both register and install dropbox for both of you to qualify for the free space credit.

Hope this helps!

Best tweeting time is 4:01 pm – some interesting stats from malcom coles :

• Half of people read every tweet.
• But 20% read only the last 20 tweets or less when they check Twitter.
• At 11am-12pm, 51% of Twitter users are looking at tweets, but only 31% are sending them – a margin of 20%.
• At 4pm-5pm, 56% of Twitter users are looking at tweets, but only 39% are sending them – a margin of 17%.
• At 7-8pm, the margin is just 2% – people are more interested in tweeting than reading.
• Weekend Twitter users are much more likely to be tweeting than weekday Twitter users who often just browse tweets.
• As a proportion of all tweets, use of the term RT (for retweet) is highest at 4pm

Blog posts seem to depend more on your readers, content type (if it’s breaking), and consistency.  Lorelle has a solid post on it, but it generally seems to be during the 9-5 working day.  Being in Eastern Standard Time, I generally prefer around the 11-12pm hot zone, while being able to catch the morning readers on the west coast.

Another tip if you’re auto-tweeting or have feedburner subscribers is to set it at a time a few minutes off of the hour when other larger services are bulk mailing.  ie. 11:55am.

Credit:Elliance

Some intriguing data by Focus that may make you want to tweak your web strategy.

There’s a lot of talk about the ability to reach thousands through a blog and earning money at the same time, but the reality is it can be incredibly difficult to get going.

I put my skills to the test recently and started a fresh niche blog and it’s been going fairly solid so far.

Without any real credibility of any type I built a great community around a fresh blog in a matter of weeks.  There was about 40,000 hits last month, averaged maybe about 10 minutes a day on it, and I didn’t pay 1-cent for any form of advertising.

Here are some tips from my recent experience

1.  Blog about something you’d enjoy spending time on anyways. Preferably something you’re an expert on or something you’re passionate about.  The right ideas at the right time can be a powerful force.  I started http://monopolyhq.com simply because there was a lot of hype around the fact that it was integrating the monopoly board game with google maps and I personally love the game.

2.  Get a memorable domain name. This usually means as short as possible, but there are plenty of remarkable long domain names.  Try and get a keyword people would be searching on in there.

3.  Build your site. I can’t recommend wordpress enough.  Google loves content-focused blogs in general, but it loves wordpress even more.

4.  Thesis. If you’re using wordpress, why not complete the awesomeness with the Thesis Framework.  It’s a dynamic professional theme that is built on rock solid search-engine-optimized code.  There’s a great user community around it and you can design it just about any way you want while keeping your content as clean and search-engine friendly as possible.

5.  Create valuable content. As long as it’s discoverable – content remains king.  Make it as clear and readable as possible.  While they might not admit it, people love lists, rankings, charts, bullet points, etc.  I typically keep posts below 300 words.  If you’ve got a lot to say, break it down into a series of posts people can track with.

6.  Design. Your site ought to leave an impression.  Without reading any of the content, within the first five seconds without going below the fold of your site, a person ought to know what your site is all about.  ie. for the monopoly site I branded it with similar monopoly colors and included a pair of dice slightly off the grid of the page just so readers know you’re not just scraping together content, but that you care about what you’re writing about.

6.  Be a collaborator not a competitor. Especially if you’re new, build contacts, partnerships, links with other sites and blogs of similar interest.  Leave useful comments on their posts (not spam!) and refer people to them as well if they’re offering something of value.

7.  Find what’s giving your competitors traffic. Is there a certain forum or hub or tool that’s giving them the edge?  You ought to be using at least that to give your unique content a chance.  Tweak your title/description to keywords that people might be searching for rather than whatever terms you think might be unique or cool.  ie. I originally had titled the blog ‘monopoly headquarters’ – but no one actually searches for that – they search for tips, hints, tricks, guides, etc.

8.  Twitter. As over-hyped as it is, social media is still huge.  However I’d recommend being highly strategic about it.  If I had a really solid and important post I submitted it to digg.  I didn’t just add anyone to twitter, each day i spent a minute following people who were using related keywords and hashtags.  Your most passionate users will not only follow you back but refer others to you.

9.  Community building. Respond to people’s comments, invite and affirm the contributions of others, share tools and unique insights, create a space for people to connect with one another rather than just you, etc.  Think through why you’d personally return to your site as a user.

10. Enriching content.

Timely – post really hot content that you’ve just discovered that others can retweet and spread.  Use link shorteners to make it concise and trackable.

Interactive – Use some form of comment subscription ((ie. subscribe to comments plugin, or intense debeate / disqus)

Automate – Use your sidebar to pick up other relevant content.  ie. have a live twitter hashtag feed or create a google-alert so your site can be a portal to similar content elsewhere.

11.  Tools. Make sure you’re using all possible tools at your disposal.  While I didn’t use this, sometimes when you purchase a domain or hosting account they provide some google/yahoo ad credits.  Use free tools like feedburner, popular posts and similar post plugins, and make translations easily available with tools like global translator.  Use google analytics to find who your top referrers are and what key words are hot.

I hope these tips help.  I’ve been blogging for a number of years so there are probably other more nuanced tips that I can’t recall at the moment.  Right now the monopolyhq site is so fresh I’ve yet to get a pagerank which is really the next goal.  Many people are saying page-rank isn’t as important any more, but even so, the principles behind a solid page rank will always remain important.

Do you have other tips for building traffic on a new blog?

Google offers up a phenomenally easy way of creating a solid form you can integrate onto any site while integrating it into google spreadsheets on the back-end.  However besides the preset themes they don’t offer up a way to customize it.  ie. change the background color.

Here are some tips:

• the form is embedded in an iframe, and it should use an embeddedform¹ type of URL
• the iframe’s width and height as supplied by the Google form editor will probably need changing (to avoid scrollbars)
• margin-width does not seem to work on the iframe, so one must use padding
• the iframe has its colour and padding set as CSS styles in the <head> section of the HTML file
• the padding leaves a white border around the form, so one must use the magic mantra allowtransparency="true" in the iframe tag [thanks to ahab for digging this out]
• one must append parameters to the key URL (the string &pli=0&ttl=1&bc=F6D478&f=Comic+Sans+MS&tc=c00&htc=666&lc=090&hl=en-gb ):
  • pli=0 – we don’t know what this does!
  • ttl=1 – turns the title “Form and format tester” on (ttl=0 turns it off)
  • bc=F6D478 – sets the background colour in HTML-style RGB hex format²
  • f=Comic Sans MS – sets the font (I don’t think you can set the size)
  • tc=c00 – sets the text colour in HTML RGB Hex format (you can use 3 or 6 figures)
  • htc=666 – sets the help text colour, i.e. for info such as “Please give your name”
  • c=090 – sets the link text colour at the bottom in HTML RGB Hex format (the green stuff)
  • hl=en-gb – sets the language³ for the form (the Submit button and green link text)

This works more or less the same in IE7, FF3 and Chrome at least (XP and Chrome) – there are minor differences in the amount of space inside the table border, and the appearance of the border itself, but the most noticeable thing is that the [Submit] button and text boxes pick up the Comic Sans font in FF and Chrome but not IE.

You can google for some more complex ways of changing the CSS of the embedded code they offer up, but these switches were the simplest way I’ve found so far.

Google Pagerank update is coming. Google generally updates 4 times a year and it was due in September. Rumors all currently point to an update coming by the end of October.

Page Rank especially matters for new sites like this one, where we’re virtually unlisted and devalued until we get scored a pagerank. Now’s your chance to go out and get those links pointing to your site or else you’ll be stuck where you’re at for the next 3-4 months.  Don’t miss it!