Blog entries
Informative blog articles from Blogger IQ
5 Reasons Why WordPress Beats Blogger Every Time
If you’ve been debating whether to use WordPress or Blogger for your website, let me save you some time—WordPress is the way to go.
Of course, your specific needs comes first. Your website presence depends on those needs of yours. However, if you really want to take your online presence a notch up, WP is the way to go.
Here’s why I think it’s miles ahead:
- It’s Your Space, No Strings Attached
With WordPress, you own your little corner of the internet. Unlike Blogger, which is basically Google’s turf, WordPress gives you full control over your domain and hosting. No sudden surprises or restrictions—you call the shots. And, that’s because you pay and rent out the hosting space, and the domain. These are basically your assets. - Customize to Your Heart’s Content
WordPress is like the ultimate toolkit. Whether you’re adding plugins to a CMS or getting your hands dirty with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can make your site do pretty much anything you want. The possibilities are endless. - Tweak the Code Like a Pro
If you’re into coding, WordPress makes it easy to customize your site. You can edit your theme’s code directly or use a child theme to make changes without messing up the original. It’s a coder’s dream. - SEO and Speed on Your Terms
WordPress gives you serious control over your site’s SEO and loading times. With the right plugins, you can fine-tune everything to help your site rank higher on search engines. Plus, faster loading times mean happier visitors (and search engines). - Brand building – Look Like a Pro
Let’s be honest—a WordPress site just looks more legit. Imagine having a free URL like https: // something. blogspot. com and www . mything . com. It’s easier to create a sleek, professional design that’s perfect for branding. And with options to integrate memberships and payment gateways, you can start attracting sponsors and affiliate deals in no time.
Devil’s advocate: having said that, you can continue with your Blogger blog if that serves your current purpose. That’s absolutely fine as Blogger has some really simple templates/themes that are good for no-nonsense writers who treat their work as craft. Their writing makes all the difference, not the look and feel of the website. If that’s your case, Blogger wins.
So, if you want a website that looks great, works well, and gives you all the freedom to grow, WordPress is the way to go.
Let me know in the comments below on what’s stopping you from moving to WordPress.
How to Quickly Adjust Blogger Theme Width
Follow these steps to adjust your Blogger theme width:
- Log in to your Blogger account dashboard and navigate to the “Theme” section.
- In the Theme section, click on the “Customize” button for your chosen theme.
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- In the left sidebar, click on the “Advanced” drop-down; then within that click on the drop-down to find the “width” option. This option may vary depending on your theme.
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- You’ll typically find options to adjust the widths of the sidebar, content, and content margin.
- Use the provided sliders, input fields, or drag handles to adjust the width according to your preference. If you know the specific pixel count you want, you can also precisely adjust your Blogger Theme width that way.
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- As you make adjustments, you may see a live preview of the changes on the right-hand side of the screen. Again, this might depend and vary on your theme.
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- Once you are satisfied with the width adjustments, click the “Save” button to save the changes, as shown in the screenshot above.
The available customization options and their exact location may vary depending on the specific Blogger theme you are using.
If you don’t find the desired width adjustment options, you may need to explore alternative themes or consider using custom CSS to modify the width further.
On a separate note, if you are wondering how to disable right-clicking options in your Blogger blog, I have written a detailed blog post here to solve that for you.
Hope this helps you to quickly customize and adjust the Blogger theme width.
How To Complete Amazon KDP’s Tax Interview For Indian Authors
Having written the book that you are eagerly waiting to self-publish on Amazon KDP and thus reaching literally millions of audience overnight, there are some pre-work to be done before that success feeling can become your reality.
Updating the tax information, payment and bank information – though necessary to enjoy the fruits of your labour, often are quite confusing – no matter how easy the on-screen instructions are, from Amazon.
I can completely understand your situation, because, I have been there. That’s why I wrote this detailed post with some screenshots to help you quickly pass that phase.
Being an Indian author, I wanted to put this guide so it could help any non-U.S. author on KDP.
Especially more, if you are from India, as the screenshots are more relevant to Indian authors. You will see a step-by-step approach for completing your tax interview. Quite honestly, it’s really easy if you wanted to update it yourself on Amazon, but hey, this guide at least vouches that your submission could be more satisfactory if you had a fellow-author done along with you so you could match and review if everything was done correctly.
So, let’s begin.
Definitive Guide to Completing Tax Interview for Amazon KDP
First, login to your KDP Dashboard and click on your ‘Account’ to go to your account page.
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Since my tax info is already updated, you see a green text block there. But if you are updating this for the first time, just simply click on the button that says ‘View/Provide Tax Information‘. As you can see, it’s 15% rate for India as it has a tax treaty with the U.S. (see more info below); or else this could easily be nearly 30%.
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That will take you to the Tax Information Interview screen. Here’s where the tax interview is completed. Make sure you have a 10 minute time to finish this in one go. You can anyway save and come later, but it’s preferable to complete in one-sitting.
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For the question, ‘For U.S. tax purposes, are you a U.S. person?’ select ‘No‘. Click on ‘Save and continue‘.
On the next page, you will update the ‘Type of beneficial owner’, ‘Place of Organization’, ‘Organization name’ details. Of course, these details (and more such relative details in the upcoming sections of the tax interview) are unique to you and can only be better known by you. Please don’t answer them exactly as I have shown in the screenshots. Decide for yourself, which is applicable to you.
Since we selected ‘non U.S.’ person in the earlier screen, we get the customized questions in this screen for taking further inputs from us.
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Tax Information
Choose your respective options. If you are an Indian individual with no company, you can select ‘Individual’ as shown below:
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Are you an agent acting as an intermediary?
An intermediary is any person that acts as a custodian, broker, nominee, or otherwise as an agent for another person, regardless of whether that other person is the beneficial owner of the amount paid, a flow-through entity, or other intermediary. If you are an agent acting as an intermediary, select ‘Yes’ for the question, ‘Are you an agent acting as an intermediary?‘, I chose ‘No’ because I am not an intermediary. I am just an author trying to self-publish my book directly with Amazon KDP. Nobody else with me is working on this.
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U.S. Person Tests – Individual
Next question tests if you are really a non-U.S. individual from tax’s perspective. So, depending on your life’s situation, choose the options below. For me, none of them apply, so I didn’t check any option.
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Tax Identification Number (TIN)
Since we are speaking of a non-U.S. individual, who has a PAN card (applicable to Indian citizens only), you can directly select the 2nd option that says ‘I have a foreign (non-U.S.) income tax identification number‘.
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Treaty Benefits
India has an active Double Taxation treaty with the U.S. and thus, as an Indian, you will be eligible to receive a reduction in the statutory withholding tax rate of 30% (of course this is applicable to you only if you qualify to be an Indian resident).
If that’s the case with you (i.e. you are an Indian resident and the treaty applies to you and you don’t qualify to be a U.S. citizen for tax purposes, etc.) then simply check that box after selecting ‘India’ as your ‘Country of Residence‘.
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Foreign (non-U.S.) income tax identification number (TIN)
This is where you will input your PAN card number as your Tax Id number.
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Hit on ‘Save and continue’ button. The next screen asks you to ‘Review’ the details you have input in a Form format with all the details magically filled up for you. This is the Form W-8Ben which is a Certificate of Foreign Status of Beneficial Owner for United States Tax Withholding and Reporting (Individuals). This form gets electronically submitted to the concerned authorities at/by Amazon.
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Consent to electronic delivery of Form 1042-S
On the next screen, you will see a ‘Consent to electronic delivery of Form 1042-S’. You can select the ‘paperless’ option here unless you prefer to send a paper delivery. I recommend going paperless for various reasons – which includes saving trees and time.
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Consent to electronic signature
While there is no compulsion for you to go paperless, the benefits are obvious – you need not physically go to the post office or courier to ‘mail’ the documents in an envelope. Similarly, electronic signature is as simple as just keying your full name as per your records and just giving your account’s email address. So, in this section, just select the first option – “I consent to provide my electronic signature”.
Again, it’s your choice.
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After selecting the ‘electronic signature’ option, you will have to check approximately 6 checkboxes to testify some questions. These are quite basic and is kind of a review of the information you had already given. Just read them and select accordingly as per your situation. Here’s an example screenshot. Please read them carefully before selecting!
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Finally, you give your ‘electronic signature’ by typing your name, date (automatically filled in with your current date), and the email address along with your capacity as ‘individual’ (or whatever applies to you).
Once you are done, just hit on Submit button.
If not satisfied, or if you want to review, you can hit on the ‘Previous’ button).
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That’s all. For further information on Amazon KDP Tax interview, please refer to their guide given here.
Once you finish this Tax interview process , ensure you update the bank details as well (Amazon US and India supports EFT) for all other Amazon marketplaces give the ‘Check’ as your option (called as Cheque in India). So your bank details screen in the Account page looks like this:
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That’s all folks!
I have a book published on How to Self Publish your eBook in Indian Languages on Amazon KDP (affiliate link) which is a step-by-step guide to self-publish your ebook in Indic Languages – Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Malayalam.
Digital Marketing Course: Should I Buy or Not?
Updated on: October 1, 2024
Many tutorial centers and online courses offer to teach digital marketing courses, only to simply go over the digital marketing terms and case studies.
To put it bluntly, Digital Marketing is nothing more but the promotion and selling of products or services on the internet using SEO, social media, and pay-per-click advertising, to name a few.
Honestly, anyone can learn these terms and concepts online for free.
But tell me this: if you want to hire a marketer, what would YOU look for, in him or her? And do you think, YOU have those skills that you’d expect from others?
Some of the skillsets needed include
- email marketing,
- content marketing,
- knowing how to use various digital marketing tools,
- be aware of the available different digital marketing jobs,
- social media marketing,
- search engine marketing,
- learn how links work,
- remarketing,
- buyer’s psychology,
- technical SEO concepts.
You only need to know what to type in that search box to find the gold nuggets from the heap of repetitive content scattered over all the places on the internet.
In this short guide, I just want to prove that one can learn digital marketing courses from a few simple but effective resources.
However, no matter how hard one learns the terms and reads the examples, he/she cannot master the concepts unless really applied through personal experience.
What to look out for
Please don’t get me wrong. I am not against paying for a digital marketing course. With the ongoing buzz around this, there are definitely some well-structured courses on the subject that are worth paying for.
When you really want to pay for a course, look for what they cover: fundamentals, learning format, hands-on projects, certificate and validity tenure, networking and community options, references to experts, over and above the core concepts.
Enrolling into a course, paying for it, gives a kind of kick especially if you are only after getting a digital marketing certificate, but unless these are applied, they are all in vain – except the seller would have profited from you.
List of Free Digital Marketing Courses
So, if you are a beginner in learning digital marketing, start with the free resources given below to get familiar with the concepts, mindsets, and strategies. These are more than enough, to begin with.
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- Fundamentals of Digital Marketing – from Google (Free)
- Learn Google Analytics (Free)
- An SEO starter guide from Google (Free)
- How to Learn Digital Marketing at Home and For Free
Next, start your own websites and implement the strategies to conduct your own experiments and learn by doing it. This is where you gain mastery of these concepts.
If you already have a digital marketing job and if you are looking to upgrade your knowledge, then you must go beyond these basics – and that’s when the knowledge from the actual marketers and timeless books will help you.
Search for these books online, buy and read them (not an exhaustive list):
- David Ogilvy’s books,
- Seth Godin’s books,
- Philip Kotler’s books,
- Branding books by Marty Neumeier,
- Advertising basics by A K Varghese and J V Vilanilam.
People are seldom interested in investing the time necessary to take a deep dive into the already existing rich literature on the marketing concepts that hardly change with age and trends.
There are certain basic human traits that marketers tap-in, to cash-in. That’s the core! These are already available in the books.
Instead, if you fall into the numerous ads that float around your Facebook profile, and YouTube in-video ads, you may learn something but the content you gain from those, more often than not, in my humble opinion (and experience) falls flat on the ground without actually practicing it.
To conclude, whether you learn for free or through paid courses, if there is one takeaway from this blog post, remember to practice what you learn by experimenting with the concepts you learn.
All the best!