Essential Windows 7 Tips, Tweaks, and Secrets

Make the new Windows work for you with our mega-guide of essential shortcuts and secrets.

By John A. Burek

Here at ComputerShopper.com, we’ve been pinching and prodding Windows 7 since it was a baby in beta. And now that the new operating system (OS) has officially hit the street, we’re confident that Microsoft has a winner on its hands. Based on countless hours of installs and test-driving—actually, we’ve been using Windows 7 to produce the stories on ComputerShopper.com for some time now—the consensus of our editorial team can be reduced to an analogy familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a standardized test:

Windows 7 is to Windows Vista as Windows XP is to Windows Me

In simple terms, 7 smoothes out the bumps of its predecessor, and it has the potential to be Microsoft’s new “keeper” version of Windows, a laurel earned only by Windows XP and, to an extent, Windows 2000. Although we think Vista is still somewhat unfairly maligned because of its early troubles with drivers and hardware support, Windows 7 has already bested Vista in that regard. In our experiences with the beta, Release Candidate (RC), and Release to Manufacturing (RTM) versions, hardware support was largely transparent across a variety of desktops and laptops. (In fairness to Vista, that’s because Windows 7 works partly off the compatibility infrastructure Vista has painstakingly built since 2007.)

On the surface, Windows 7 may not seem a radical departure from Vista. The most obvious changes are a redesigned and rethought taskbar, the suppression of Vista’s default Windows Sidebar, a much more conservative (and tweakable) User Account Control warning scheme (the bane of Vista, for many), and a much slicker, graphical Devices and Printers panel for configuring your hardware. But Microsoft incorporated a tremendous number of subtle improvements and under-the-hood tweaks. None is jaw-dropping by itself, but the critical mass of all these smart changes adds up to an OS that feels more polished, tighter, and more mature than any Windows that has come before.

In our Windows 7 journey, we’ve been keeping a running list of the shortcuts, tips, “ah-ha!” moments, and lesser-known features we’ve run across. Some have been well-documented elsewhere; some you’ll find new. But all are worth checking out as you wind your way through the new Windows, or even if you’re just considering making the leap. (And if you’re on the fence and running Vista, check out our detailed step-by-step guide to dual-booting Vista and 7. You don’t have to drop Vista until you’re good and ready.) Either way, these tips will help you get your money’s worth in saved time and efficiency.

Show the Windows Desktop with a new shortcut

If you’re anything like us, once you’ve installed a new operating system or bought a new PC, you start out organizing files and documents with the best of intentions. But before long your Windows Desktop becomes your de facto filing cabinet, peppered with shortcuts, frequently used spreadsheets, random photos, and abandoned detritus. The easy way to access that debris field to find something—the Windows key + D combination, which minimizes all Windows for a clear view of the desktop—is a helper that most of us know.

Windows 7, though, lets you bring up the desktop without taking your hand off your mouse or pointing device—but it’s not obvious how until you stumble upon it. In the extreme lower right portion of the screen, at the far-right edge of the taskbar, you’ll see a little vertical rectangle with a “glossy” finish. Hover the mouse pointer over it, and the Windows Desktop appears, letting you inspect it. (You’ll still see ghostly outlines of the windows you have open.) Move the mouse off the rectangle, and your windows reappear. You can also activate this via a keyboard shortcut:Windows key + spacebar.

Click on the rectangle, though (as opposed to hovering), and you’ll minimize all windows, allowing you to interact with the desktop, open folders, and the like. If you don’t open or maximize any new windows manually, clicking the rectangle a second time restores the view to the state it was in before you clicked.

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5+ Practical Tips To Get Traffic From Google Plus

By Subodh Sharma IN Computer Tips

Social Media sites especially facebook is one of my favorite sites that increase the traffic count to my blog. I really enjoy investing my time to share blog posts in facebook groups, facebook page and on my wall too because it help me to connect with my targeted audience.

• Must Read: 5 Best Ways To Drive Referral Traffic To Your Blog

Today, I was reading some authority blogs and came to know about some amazing ways that can help bloggers to gain extra traffic to their blog posts using Google Plus. I’m going to share those ways via this post. Hope you guys would like to know about them.

Getting Traffic Using Google Plus

Effective Ways To Attract More Readers on G+ :D

Readers love to read, comment and share attention grabbing posts. This is the real Mantra to drive massive traffic to the blog. We will apply the same mantra while sharing our blog posts on Google plus to attract maximum readers. Let’s see what is new today 

1. Stylize Your Posts

During writing the posts, we use to highlight some text to grab readers’ attention. This thing not only make our blog posts attractive but also increase the readability. Then why not to apply the same strategy while sharing posts on Google plus.

We can apply some styles to our texts in below ways:

1. Bold: Use asterisks sign (*) around the text to bold it. Bold your targeted keyword there. It’ll help you to grab viewer’s attention easily.
2. Italics: Use underscores (_) around the words and italicize them easily to add more style.
3. Strikeout: Suppose you are offering a product or discount coupon code, you can easily run a line through old offer (like: 20% 30% discount) by putting hypens (-) around that word or sentence to highlight new offers.
4. Bullets: Bullets add more value to our content. We can also make use of bullets in our Google plus posts. Hit your space bar, enter a hypen, and then hit your space bar again. It’ll work as bullets and you can use it to add lists to your post.

2. Share Images – Not Just the Links

Sharing blog post URLs is the most common way to promote blog posts or to market the content. We have to do something unique and creative to attract more readers. While sharing your new posts on Google Plus, don’t just share some text and link. Use below pattern to increase viewer’s engagement.

1. Put a Heading first and apply some formatting to it. Better to go with Bold.
2. Add some text of two lines that better explain the post and generate curiosity to the audience to read what you have written.
3. Give one line break and then place your blog post link.
4. Now attach a high quality and attention grabbing image with your post. It’ll surely help you to target wider audience.

NB: You can even drive good amount of traffic from facebook through images. Checkout thisfacebook trick and it will surely blown your mind. I really mean it. 

3. Choose Targeted Audience To Share

We simply can’t get the goals by targeting the wrong audience. You must be knowing who and where your targeted audience is. Google plus allows us to create different circles. So, the strategy is, create one circle and add your targeted audience in that particular circle.

Suppose you are writing about ON-Page SEO Techniques, then don’t share it with your family. By doing so, you can’t hit the goals. Better to share it with your targeted audience. Mostly people share their posts with Public and Your Circles.

I’m surprised why they don’t create more circles to target their blog audience. Build relationships with others having interest in your niche. Add all of them into a specific circle and share your posts with them. I have created a circle named Blogger Tips Tricks and I always choose that circle to target my right audience. 

4. Tick “Send Email” For More Attention

Why not to use “Send Email” feature to get more attention of the readers. When you are ready to hit share button, put a tick on “Send Email” check box. It will send an email to the people regarding the update and if your post will be of their interest then surely you’ll get good number of clicks.

Note: No doubt sending emails is a smart step to get traffic from Google plus but also take care about the circle with which you are sharing your posts. Only send emails to right audience otherwise non-interesting people will get annoy with your emails in their inbox and surely they will mute you or in worst case, unfollow you.

5. Target Google Plus Communities

If you are a member of communities on G+, then you can post into those communities directly from your profile, from within the communities itself and by using “Share” button at the bottom of your posts as well.

Click on the share button below your posts

and then select the communities in which you want to promote your blog posts.

In this way, you can save a lot of your precious time that you can use to market your content on other places as well.

If you are out of time and still want to promote your blog posts, then use this method. It will allow you to share your content even while you are sleeping.

Few More Interesting Tips:

1. Use Hashtags in your G+ Posts. It will not only help you in targeting the wider audience but your Google Plus followers will also increase with time.
2. Create videos and upload them to Youtube. Add post link in video description and share the videos on Google+. It has some great benefits like:

• Your Google plus posts will look more eye catchy
• You’ll get referral traffic both from Youtube and Google plus
• You can even make money by using Youtube Partner Program. Share your Youtube channel videos and get views on them. Maximum views will give you maximum profit.
2. Respond to readers’ comment on your G+ post and tag them by simply putting a plus (+) sign in front of their name. It’ll increase readers’ engagement on your post and you’ll get maximum +1s, comments and traffic.

Conclusion

Not only G+, but all the social media sites are great source of free and targeted traffic if we use them smartly. Earlier I talked about getting traffic from Pinterest and I hope this post helped you in learning how to get traffic from Google Plus.

Now it’s your turn to share your experience with us. Leave a comment and let the world how you make use of Google plus or any other social media site to get blog traffic? Also if you liked the content then don’t forget to share it on Google Plus.

How To Drive and Increase Referral Traffic To Your Blog?

Increasing traffic on a website can be considered as both easy as well as tough task. It’s easy because if you plan a proper strategy and follow it then increasing your blog’s traffic won’t be a big problem but if you don’t plan anything and just do whatever you feel like doing then you won’t be seeing any improvement in your traffic numbers.

There are two main types of traffic sources – organic traffic and referral traffic. I am pretty sure you might have read a lot about organic traffic by now so we are not going to discuss that.

In this article, we are going to see some simple yet effective ways using which you can increase referral traffic on your blog.

But before getting into the article, we should see which traffic can be considered as referral traffic.

Table of Contents [hide]

·         What is Referral Traffic?

·         Best Ways to Increase Referral Traffic

o    Referral Traffic From Other Blogs and Websites

o    Drive Referral Traffic From Social Media

o    Drive Referral Traffic Using Forums

o    Get Referral Traffic From YouTube

o    Other Ways To Increase Referral Traffic

What is Referral Traffic?

In simple words, all the visitors that come from some other websites to your site can be considered as referral traffic. These sites can be other blogs, forums, social networking sites, directories etc.

It’s not a tough word so I hope that you now understand which traffic you should consider as referral traffic. If you still don’t understand then I will put it in another way.The traffic that isn’t organic, which doesn’t come from search engines, can be considered as referral traffic.

Best Ways to Increase Referral Traffic

As there are lots of websites out there from where you can get traffic, there are a lot of different ways that you can implement to increase the referral traffic.

In this article, we are going to see different types of websites from where we can get traffic – blogs and websites, forums and social networks, YouTube – because these are the only ones capable of sending targeted visitors to your blog.

Referral Traffic From Other Blogs and Website I am pretty sure that you know about the methods that you can use to get referral traffic from various blogs in your niche.

If you are not familiar with these methods then they are blog commenting and guest posting. There is another one as well but we will talk about it later.

1. Blog Commenting:Commenting on other blogs has been considered to be the best way to build new relationships with other bloggers and get a lot of traffic and backlinks. But it’s not always that easy and not everyone is able to benefit from it.Your website link is placed on these sites, which means they are referring your website to their readers and when more and more websites refer your site on their blog, you will be getting more and more referral traffic.

If you are commenting on various blogs and you are not seeing any results then you are doing something wrong.

Read: How To Build Blog Community To Get More Comments on Your Blog

Commenting is not something that you can do today and expect to start seeing results from tomorrow. It doesn’t work like that. It’s more of a long-term deal!

First of all, you should be looking for some real blogs that publishes great articles and get a lot of comments on them. When you find such blogs, start reading their posts and go through the comments and see if the comments are real and informative and whether the blog owner engage with other commentators or not.

If there are informative comments, bloggers engage with each other and the blog owner also actively participates in the conversation then you have found a winner.

Then for the next step, all you have to do is start reading their latest articles and share your honest opinions in the comments. Don’t post anything like “Amazing content” or “Thanks for the informative article” because that’s not going to benefit you in any way.

Write something that adds more value to the article, if you found something wrong with the post then don’t hesitate to point it out to the writer because that’s how you gain the blog owner’s attention.

The more comments you publish on their blog, the higher are your chances of getting traffic from that blog and at times, you might also get featured in one of the upcoming posts.

Tip: When you find such blogs with a lot of comments and engagement, join their email list and see what type of emails they send out to their subscribers. If most of them are just affiliate offers or they are trying to sell something then I won’t suggest you to comment on that blog. The reason is simple, they are not giving important content to their subscribers so their blog popularity is going to decline pretty soon.

2. Guest posts:

Guest Posts are something that gives you amazing and long-term results. When you publish a guest post on an authority blog, you get referral traffic in the beginning and since you also get backlinks from authority blogs, you will see an increase in organic traffic in the long run.

But when you do guest blogging, you should keep certain things in mind. You cannot just go around publishing articles on any blog that you want. You should spend some time in finding the blogs that are relevant to your niche and the content of your article.

Make sure that the blog enjoys a high authority in search engines and has a large reader base. As long as you post relevant article on relevant blogs, you won’t be penalized.

3. Third and a Superb Way:

Previously I said that there is another thing that we can do to increase referral traffic to our blog and now we are going to see which one is that.

This method won’t be giving you instant results but since you are a blogger, you should know this already that proper and long-lasting results can never be gained instantly.

When you create a high-quality content then I would recommend you to publish the article on your own blog. Make sure that the article has all the proper points for the topic you are covering, problems and solutions listed and proper resources mentioned wherever they are needed.

Then you should start contacting other bloggers through social media platforms or via their email and ask them to give your content a read. Don’t ask them to share the post or give a backlink to you, just ask them to go through it and share their feedback.

This way, not all, but some of those bloggers will read your article and if they are impressed, they might start recommending your blog to their own readers and share your posts frequently on social media.

Now since their reader base and followers count is much higher than yours, you can expect an increase in the referral traffic and you can also expect a lot of exposure and recognition in the blogosphere.

As I said that this method can take some time before it gives you any results so be patient and keep on working on writing the best possible content on your blog.

Drive Referral Traffic From Social Media

For getting traffic from social media, I am going to cover only 3 networks – Facebook, Twitter and Google+. I know there are other amazing websites like LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and others but since I don’t have any experience with LinkedIn and the traffic from StumbleUpon has a high bounce rate, I am going to skip them.

1. Facebook

The simplest way to gain traffic from Facebook is to join some relevant and active groups and share your posts with them. I said active groups because majority of them are dead and you won’t be seeing any benefits by using them.

However there are still some really awesome Facebook groups that you can join. No matter what your blog niche is, you will find a group on Facebook for it easily.

And to get maximum benefits from such groups, you need to stay active in the group. Like and share other people’s posts, comment on them – both articles and Facebook posts and be an active member of the group.

By doing this, you might get the attention of the admin of the group and if the articles you share are amazing, your post might get featured on the group.

Other simple thing to gain traffic from Facebook is to create multiple pages for your site. The reason I am saying multiple pages is because you need to share your content in different ways on different pages.

On one, share only the article links, on the other share photos and videos along with some article links and on the other, choose a different approach. Find out which one works the best, which page gets the most engagement and which one has the highest organic reach.

When you find the winning formula to bring the maximum traffic through Facebook pages, all you have to do is just merge those pages.

2. Twitter

Some of you might argue that you can’t get traffic from Twitter but I should stop you right there. If you use Twitter properly then you can get highly targeted visitors from Twitter as well.

The reason why you are not getting any traffic from the social platform is that you neither have a high follower count nor do you share proper tweets or take part in the various chats.

Getting followers on Twitter isn’t hard at all because if you share amazing tweets, not just updates from your blog, but tweets about the latest news, some new launches, sarcastic comments etc. and also take part in the Twitter chats then you are bound to get more followers.

So I would suggest you to join JustRetweet to start sharing other people’s tweets. However, you are going to find article links only so you are going to have to do some work to share other types of tweets as well.

If you are not free all day to tweet then you need to check out either Buffer or HootSuite so that you can schedule the time to tweet and also see the analytics of the maximum activity on any time.

As I mentioned about the various Twitter chats, I am going to tell you about some of the best ones. The best chats to join are #Blogchat, #SEOChat and others which you can easily find.

Here’s an amazing guide on Buffer blog on how to host or participate in a Twitter chat!

3. Google+

I have had some success with Google+ recently because I found out that if you share an article on Google+ with proper description and proper hashtags then you are going to get some really good traffic.

To get traffic from Google+, all you have to do is join the biggest communities (groups on Google+) and be active there and share your articles – much like Facebook groups.

And you can also create a Google+ page for your blog. A Google+ page can be a great thing because when you share articles with proper hashtags on the page then it can also reach a lot of people giving you higher engagement and high traffic. You can connect with BloggerTipsTricks’s Google+ pagehere.

I will share some tips on getting high social shares from Facebook, Twitter and Google+ in the upcoming posts, so stay tuned.

Drive Referral Traffic Using Forums

Being a part of an active and popular forum and engaging with other people’s posts can prove to be a lot beneficial to you in the long run.

Frankly speaking, I am not the right person to tell you how to use forums because I have never stayed active on any forums for a long time but I do know one thing, the forums are amazing source of traffic.

Whenever I decide to join a forum, I am going to follow all the below points and you should too:

• Create the perfect profile page – add a perfect bio, profile picture, social accounts, previous work and provide a way so that others can contact me.
• Stay active on the forums and utilize the signature space to add some relevant links.
• Start new threads based on relevant and popular topics and if there are older threads open then try to share your views in them.
• Always stay brief and to the point and always try to be helpful to others.
• Follow up to all my old as well as new posts and make some real connections with other members.

If you like to watch a video on getting started on forums then I would recommend you to check out QuickSprout University’s video on building traffic through forums.

Get Referral Traffic From YouTube

YouTube is the biggest video sharing platform where you can not only just watch videos but upload your own videos as well.

The site gets billions of visitors each month and a lot of people are redirecting some of that traffic to their own websites by uploading new videos regularly.

If you too know how to create videos then you should start creating a small and brief video for each new article and publish it on your channel. Not only you can get a backlink from the video but you can also get lots of visitors if your video goes viral.

If you are not able to create videos then you can always hire someone by going to sites like Odesk orElance.

Other Ways To Increase Referral Traffic

There are a lot of other ways as well to increase referral traffic for a blog. Blog commenting, guest posts, social media, forums and YouTube are just the best ones out there but that doesn’t mean you can’t use others.

Here are some of the other ways you can use to generate referral traffic:

• Blog Community Sites: Community sites like BlogEngage and BizSugar allows you to share your article links on their sites so that its other members can see, like it and comment on it. When you stay active on such sites, it is likely that your post will get featured and you might see a huge surge in traffic.
• Infographics: This is probably one of the best but an expensive way to increase referral traffic. Even if you know how to create an Infographic, it will take hours or maybe days to come up with one because you not only have to design but you also need to get the best information and relevant sources to make it go viral.
• Content Curation: This method can be a little time-consuming, but you will not only get high traffic but also get quality backlinks. You can curate content of your blog and other blogs and articles from the Internet by using sites like Scoop.it and Storify. Learn more about content curation from here.

So those were some of the best ways to increase referral traffic on your blog. I hope that you are going to try some of them right now and if you liked the article then do share the post with your friends. If you have something to say or you think that I missed something, then comment below to let me know about it.