by Dee Barizo on March 21st, 2010
I sometimes hear bloggers say they don’t do keyword research. They have various reasons for ignoring this fundamental SEO strategy.
They say it’s too boring and laborious. They’re afraid it will make their writing too wooden and stiff. They believe it stifles their creativity as a wordsmith. They want to focus on their writing without resorting to a crutch.
They are similar to some of the writers I know who won’t use a thesaurus. (My response has always been, “Don’t you want to use every available writing tool?” I understand that it’s not good to use the thesaurus too much but I don’t see what’s wrong with using it occassionally.)
Many of these bloggers don’t really care about getting more search traffic so the traffic benefits from keyword research falls on deaf ears. But I’m here to tell you that keyword research, instead of stifling your writing, actually makes you a better writer.
Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: keywords, seo, Sunday Morning SEO
by Franky Branckaute on March 20th, 2010
Many people blog for fun while others blog to make money but at the end of the day most of us all have the same purpose in mind and the game is all about one thing, one word: traffic.
There are many different approaches to blogging and the best way to achieve long term success with your blog is to create valuable content but sometimes your entries need that small push to take off and you will have to promote your entries, often relying on friends/colleagues to get those first submissions/votes on social networks. On platforms such as StumbleUpon or Reddit verticals those first initial votes can make the difference between no referrals or thousands of visitors to your post.
So off you go hitting up all your friends on Twitter, Facebook and in Basecamp. Guilty as charged.
In this entry I am going to show you how you can easily set up a private network with WordPress and 3 plugins only, to promote your entries among, together with friends, hoping for those often crucial initial votes, submissions to the main social networks to maximally promote your awesome content. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tools, WordPress Tips
Tags: Promotion, Social Media, traffic, wordpress, WordPress Tips
by Darnell Clayton on March 19th, 2010
If there is anything I hate more than content thieves, it’s spammers!
Unlike the former who simply steal your content and claim it as their own, spammers attempt to destroy your site by linking to either “enhancements,” products or their own sad blog.
Since many bloggers power their weblogs with Blogger (aka BlogSpot) or WordPress (both WP.com and WP.org), here are 3 tips to help keep your blog free from spammers (and perhaps make them cry). Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: Blogger, spam, wordpress
by Jennifer Brown Banks on March 19th, 2010
It happens to the best of us. We start our blogs with childlike enthusiasm, super geeked to have our own online “space” that is totally ours and where we can finally be heard and uncensored.
Let’s face it, in real life our words of wisdom often fall upon deaf ears. Our mates have us on “mute” buttons, our kids think we’re from a different world, and our families know too much about us to care.
But on line we can strut our stuff, be the divas we dare to be. We can even take on a whole new personality if we choose.
So you start this blog thing, and actually find that some folks are digging what you have to say. Okay, so maybe it’s just the creepy guy with stalker tendencies that lives in your building, and your Avon rep, but still, it’s somebody.
Because practice often makes perfect, you find that the more you blog the better you become. Then 2 “fans” become 5, 5 become 10, and 10 become 20. You hit your stride and then people start talking. Before you know it, you’ve actually built a little “following” along the way.
Then comes the pressure… Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: Blogging Tips, Guides
by Darnell Clayton on March 18th, 2010
It looks as if my Blackberry friends can finally stop drooling over my iPhone now that Tumblr has launched an official app for Blackberry smartphones.
The app was built by Mobelux, the same company who created the official Tumblr iPhone app (which was previously known as Tumblrette).
Just like its iSibling, the Blackberry Tumblr app can upload images, text and audio, as well as video too (which might explain why Tumblr increased the video size for Tumblr fans everywhere).
Tumblr has yet to be listed upon Blackberry App World (as a quick search reveals), although “BB fans” can download the app over here.
While it’s great to see Tumblr embracing both the iPhone and Blackberry platforms, hopefully they will consider launching an Android app soon (as the only decent app available is Tumblroid, which will leave one $1.55 poorer).
Categories: Microblogging, News
Tags: Tumblr
by Franky Branckaute on March 18th, 2010
We all know it now, Facebook’s the new Myspace and Google all in one. There’s no way to escape it anymore. I have been sceptical about Facebook for years, especially because of privacy issues and occasionally strange changes to the ToS, but there’s no way round anymore. If you have a blog, your blog should be on Facebook.
No matter whether you like the platform or not. It’s a major traffic boost and recently even became the first social network users will check to discover breaking news.
I will continue to argue that not all content does as well on Facebook but you should at least have a Facebook page for your blog. The proof’s in the pudding.
Traffic
Facebook often can drive more traffic to your site, on the awesome ForeverGeek Facebook has replaced Twitter as second traffic referrer after StumbleUpon (and Google of course).
SEO
SEO benefits of Facebook pages are rather minimal because outgoing links are nofollow. But a quick Google search for bloggingpro explains why you should get your Facebook fan page. Similar results are seen for all our main blogs.
RSS Graffiti: Automated Smart Feed Import To Your Facebook Page
For a long time the main issue when deciding whether to use Facebook, and how to use your page, turned around what’s the best way to automate the import of my content to my page?. The Facebook RSS importer is a national disaster, Networked Blogs was an option, albeit a poor one. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tools
Tags: Blogging Tips, Blogging Tools, Facebook, RSS Graffiti, Social Media
by David Krug on March 17th, 2010
We’ve all made mistakes when it comes to our blogging careers. No one is perfect. Mistakes are natural. Some of us leave our blogs to rot on the vine, after inspiring so much greatness. It’s tantamount to meeting an amazing girl at the bar only to find out she’s a prude. It’s a terrible heartache. Others of us have Post Blog Sale Depression Disorder.
Then there are some of us who just plain fall off the face of the planet. No worries, it happens to the best of us. There is hope however. A few years ago I fell off the face of the planet ended up in a podunk town in Mexico, with a cervecia in one hand, and a cuban cigar in another. Picking up the ashes of a cumulative stretch of poor decisions. There is a path to get back into the swing of things. There is a path to redemption. It takes hard work. Just like any bad habit can be beat so can beating your bad habits around your blogging career. The relationships might never be able to be restored, but new relationships can be kindled, and consistency and trust can be earned again. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: Advice, Blogging Tips, Career
by Darnell Clayton on March 16th, 2010
Tumblr, a service that blurs the line between microblogging and a full featured weblog has just raised the video uploading limit to 100 MB.
While this might not seem like anything spectacular (after all YouTube is 20 time larger with 2 GB), Tumblr fans will be able to broadcast their videos immediately without dealing with the hassles of transcoding.
(Tumblr Staff) Over the next few hours, we’ll be rolling out crazy simple native video uploading to all accounts. This is designed to be an easy alternative to full-blown video sites when all you want to do is post a quick video to your blog. [...]
Tumblr will immediately post most H.264-MP4-AAC videos without transcoding! That means no waiting and no quality loss. Photo Booth videos and iMovie’s “Export to iPod/iPhone” work great.
Tumblr still limits users to the “5 minuet rule” when it comes to video uploading, although hopefully that will change once they unleash the rumored premium features.
Despite its simplistic approach to blogging, Tumblr is quickly turning into a full fledged blogging platform, whose previous additions of pages and comments could make it a strong contender against both Blogger and WordPress (especially for bloggers looking to save some money during this recession).
Categories: Blogging News
Tags: Tumblr
by Billy Mabray on March 15th, 2010
Happy Monday, folks! This week, Six Apart released a handful of plugins under open source licenses. Here’s the list of plugins released, from the announcement:
- GeoType allows you to associate GoogleMap data with an entry. Each map extends the MT Asset framework, so it’s managed similar to uploaded images or documents, and associated to an entry in the exact same way.
- PostOffice enables blog posting via email. You may have been following along in MTOS earlier this week about this one, Brad Choate made a lot of handy fixes.
- CentralAuthenticationService allows you to configure MT to delegate user authentication to a CAS server in place of the built-in native authentication scheme.
- BuildTracer benchmarks statically-published templates and provides a visual display of how long it takes each tag to publish. It’s originally by Akira and available on his site, but we’ve been updating it in Github to match the latest builds of MT.
Other plugins released this past week:
Taku Amano released CustomFieldsSearch which, as you can guess, let’s you search against your custom fields data.
ExpandCategoryAreaCSS from Yujiro Araki makes the category list on entry editing expandable so it’s easier to use.
RandomFeed by Junnama Noda displays a random feed from a set you specify in your dashboard.
We’ve also got a couple of tutorials to tell you about. Mike shows us how to create print-friendly entries using the Readability service.
Also, Maarten Schenk explains how to list entries from multiple Movable Type blogs sorted by date. What Maarten is doing here goes beyond what the built-in multi-blog functionality can do.
What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.
Categories: Movable Type News
Tags: Google Maps, movable type, Movable Type Monday, plugins
by Franky Branckaute on March 15th, 2010
For months I have been receiving emails sent via the contact form of one site for Blogger Jobs. Dee covered the advantages of cold call guest posts in his SEO Sunday column and as can be read in the comments, although the cold call strategy can work, there certainly are disadvantages as well. Mainly for site editors and owners.
If I received a guest post from an unknown player in my niche, I would delete it almost as if it were spam.
My energy is better spent focusing on long-term relationship strategies as opposed to a few links.
As Barry Deutsch mentions in his comment, the yield of cold calls is very low and often it’s a bigger waste of time on our end, because of the poor quality submitted, than for the application/submitter. This brings me back to the daily emails of writers interested in a paid blogging gig that land in my inbox. Let’s start the week with a selection of how not to ‘cold call’ apply for a blogging gigs. The best of 8 months of email applications and yes it’s a list. It’s also Monday.
Words fail me. Maybe it would be a good start NOT TO SHOUT AT ME WHEN TRYING TO LAND A BLOGGING GIG!!!!!1!!!1 Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: Blogging Jobs, Blogging Tips
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