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Not sure how often I’ll post here but I moved my Social Media Marketing blog over to http://successfool.com
Looking forward to seeing you there…
blogging social media marketingPopularity: 47% [?]
Bring Previous Visitors Back to Your Blog: Don’t Ignore your Blog RSS Feeds
One of the least understood aspects of blogging is RSS feeds. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication (amongst others) and is a way for others to receive your content without having to visit your blog. There are a number of ways people use RSS feeds, and the two most common ones are:
i. As a source of content for their own website and blogs. If they find your content useful they can take your RSS feed and turn it into content on their on website or blog. This is known as syndication.
ii. Instead of visiting your blog each time you make a post, they can plug your RSS feed into a feed reader. They will be alerted to your new posts and can then read your posts on the feed reader, for example the email client Mozilla Thunderbird allows users to subscribe to RSS feeds.
In either case you have to decide whether to provide a full feed (i.e. the whole post appears in the RSS feed) or a partial feed (i.e. only excerpts of the post are included in the RSS feed) in which case people who use your feeds will have to visit your blog to read the whole post. By default, WordPress automatically creates two RSS feeds - one for new posts and one for new comments.
The default WordPress RSS feeds are very basic. An effective way to enhance and manage your RSS feeds is to join FeedBurner, which has these main advantages:
i. Feedburner will automatically translate your feed into a format (RSS or Atom) that is compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application.
ii. Feedburner gives you the option to add the rel=”noindex” element to your feeds so the search engines will not index your feed. This is important because duplicate content filters are indiscriminate and they could filter out your main blog content in favor of your RSS feed. By adding the “noindex” element, you ensure that only your blog content is indexed.
iii. Feedburner has a “chicklet creator” which is simply a system for creating custom icons and the relevant html code from the popular web aggregators to help your readers easily subscribe to your feed.
To get the full benefits of joining Feedburner does mean the html code in your blog theme needs to be modified. The Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin from Steve Smith will do it for you. It works by forwarding all your feed traffic to FeedBurner.
Allowing others to subscribe to your RSS feeds is not the whole story… You can also monetize your feeds. Considering most RSS subscribers won’t visit your blog, and one of the main reasons behind blogging is to make money, it makes sense to monetize your feeds.
Feedburner has such a system, but it is only available to RSS feeds which receive a lot of subscribers. On the other hand, the Feedvertising plugin is free and allows you to run text link ads in your RSS feeds. The ads can come from the plugin supplier (Text-Link_ads.com), your own products, or your affiliate links.
If you decide to go with advertising in your RSS feeds, keep your ads relevant to the content in the feed, and be aware that you will lose some feed subscribers. There are people in this world who simply hate the idea that you are making money out of the free content you are providing…
Your Success - My Passion
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 98% [?]
Increase Traffic to Your Blog with Effective Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking websites differ from search engines because they are people driven and not software driven. A search engine ranks your blog (or website) pages through a complicated set of rules built into a software program (known as an algorithm). A social bookmarking site ranks a blog post or webpage based on the number of times it has been bookmarked by other members.
The effects of social bookmarking are much the same as word of mouth advertising. People generally only bookmark webpages or blog posts that interest them, but they also classify the pages by using tags. Generally these are only single word tags and are used in a simple search system to display matches ranked by popularity. The popularity of a webpage or blog post is determined by the number of times it has been bookmarked by other users.
Tags are simply a way of categorizing bookmarked pages. For example a blog post on increasing website traffic could be tagged with these tags:
- website
- traffic
Social proof plays a big part in bringing traffic to your blog from social bookmarking websites. The more one of your blog posts has been bookmarked, the more people will feel compelled to visit your blog to see what they are missing out on.
Some social bookmarking services like Digg can result in a huge increase in traffic if your post becomes popular and makes it into the homepage of its category, or makes it into the Top 10. Unfortunately Digg traffic is short lived and is often not very targeted, but you will get some regular readers from the traffic.
With this in mind, you have to make it easy for people to bookmark your blog posts. Fortunately social bookmarking services will supply you with a small coded button to place on your blog which makes it easy for visitors to bookmark your posts.
Some of the most popular social bookmarking services are:
del.icio.us
furl
Technorati
Spurl
Simpy
Scuttle
BackFlip
BuddyMarks
blinkbits
BlinkList
Digg
Netscape (probably my favorite)
If you don’t want to manually add a list of social bookmarking buttons, there is a plugin called Sociable by Peter Harkins which appends links to social bookmarking services so your readers can bookmark your blog’s posts.
If you are comfortable modifying php code, there is a good article by Andy Beard for modifying the Sociable plugin to add rel=”nofollow” to these links so your pages don’t pass any page rank to the social bookmarking services. You can read the article here.
A word of warning - people who regularly use social bookmarking services won’t be fooled by poor poorly written posts, over optimized posts or posts created from other people’s content. Make sure your posts contain useful well written content and you will get bookmarks and a corresponding increase in traffic.
One further point to bear in mind is many social bookmarking services will only accept bookmarks from posts on certain topics. The point being not to add links to every single social bookmarking service you can find. Choose a handful which best suit your blog, get to know the social bookmarking service fully and only link to the few you have chosen.
Your Success - My Passion,
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 86% [?]
Doubling Up: Reuse Your Blog Posts to Drive Traffic to Your blog
EzineArticles.com is an article directory which is viewed by the search engines as an authority website, and articles which target up 10,000 competing pages will normally rank very high in the search results, especially on Google.
You can use this to your advantage…
Each of the major blog posts you write should target a keyword phrase which receives some traffic, but has little competition. You can double up on the traffic by re-writing the blog post and then submitting it to EzineArticles.com. For low to medium competition keywords your articles could rank very high in the search results.
This means you could quite conceivably get your blog post and the article in the top 10 results. With two pages instead of only one listed you get a second change to draw more visitors to your blog.
At the bottom of your article submitted to EzineArticles, you are allowed to place a short paragraph which contains a link back to your blog (known as a resource box). If your article is informative and your resource box contains a well written link back to your blog, the reader may well click the link to read more.
If you wrote an article targeting the keyword phrase “increase website traffic”, you could use the following resource box:
If you want to read more about how to increase website traffic, click over to Ruby Rubble’s blog at http://Rubys-Blog.com.
The keyword phrase “increase website traffic” would be a hyperlink so the code you would use in your resource box is:
If you want to read more about how to <a href=”http://rubys-blog.com”>
increase website traffic, click over to Ruby Rubble’s blog at http://Rubys-blog.com
By re-writing blog posts which target very low competition keywords into articles targeting higher competition keywords you could end up with your article and your post ranking highly in the search engines for different keywords, and while your blog is still fairly new you could more than double the traffic you would receive from just the post on its own.
Until tomorrow folks,
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 80% [?]
Increase Your Blog’s Exposure: Tag and Ping Your Posts
Tagging is simply a method of organizing your posts under certain key words. Think of it as a filing system where blog posts are filed under the tags for easy retrieval. Since Technorati was one of the first services, their method of creating tags is the one most commonly used.
To create a tag you add the key word (or words) for your tag in a special link which has the following structure:
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/XXXX” rel=”tag”>XXXX</a>
Where XXXX is your tag name. If the tag is made up of more than one word, the words need to be separated with “+”, for example:
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/increase+website+traffic” rel=”tag”>Increase Website Traffic</a>
You can use more than one tag and they are generally placed at the bottom of each post. Just make sure you are using tags which:
i) Are relevant to your post
ii) Have some activity at Technorati (i.e. people are actually searching for the tag)
You can either add tags to your posts manually by separating each tag link with a comma or you can use a plugin to assist you. One of the best plugins to manage your tags is the Ultimate Tag Warrior which was discussed in the second chapter. Ultimate Tag Warrior saves the tags you add to your posts and makes them available for inclusion into future posts by simply clicking the relevant tag in the saved tag list.
Pinging is the name given to the process of informing various blog search engines and directories that the content on your blog has been updated. In WordPress there is a place to add the ping service URL’s in the control panel, found by navigating to “Options / Writing” and adding them to the “Update Services” text box.
In the appendix there is a list of these services, but be warned… Many ping multiple services which could well already be on the list under another ping service. This means you will be pinging the same service more than once and your blog could be labeled a spam blog (also referred to as a splog). A safer option could be to use Autopinger as discussed in the sixth chapter.
To your Success,
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 74% [?]
The first Step to Increased Traffic: Claim Your Blog on Technorati
Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs and as of December 2006 it had indexed over 55 million blogs ( I know that’s crazy huh? ).
While it may not be the best blog search engine, it is extremely popular and can provide a fair of amount of traffic to your blog. Blogs are ranked in authority by the number links it has received from other blogs over the last 6 months. Each post you write that is submitted to Technorati, by a process known as pinging, will be added to their database and there is a utility for searching this database for information.
Start by claiming your blog, then write a brief description and add a few Tags relevant to the theme of your blog. These tags are important because they are used by people looking for information using the Technorati search facility (the next chapter explains the concept of tagging and pinging).
Searches using Technorati can be made on all blogs or only those you have saved to your favorites. When conducting a search you can search in:
- Blog posts
- Tags
- The entire blog directory
And you can further refine your search by limiting results to blogs with:
- Any authority
- A little authority
- Some authority
- A lot of authority
Blogs are ranked in authority as follows:
- The Low Authority Group (3-9 blogs linking in the last 6 months)
- The Middle Authority Group (10-99 blogs linking in the last 6 months)
- The High Authority Group (100-499 blogs linking in the last 6 months)
- The Very High Authority Group (500 or more blogs linking in the last 6 months)
Your success with Technorati lies with accurate relevant tagging and building your authority. So you need to conduct a little research and find all the tags currently used in Technorati which accurately describe the overall theme of your blog.
Once you have found a list of related tags you can add them to your tag list or whatever tagging plugin you are using. When you write a post only select the tags that most accurately describe the content of your article. Don’t add tags to your posts thinking that certain tags will get you the most traffic. There are real people using Technorati who are looking for relevant content. By using the most accurate tags for people to find your posts, they will appreciate the rest of the content on your blog all the more.
Once your post has been pinged, it will be placed within the Technorati system so people searching for those tags can find your post. Unfortunately with popular tags, your post will be rapidly moved down the listing by posts from the latest pings received from other blogs (posts are placed at the top of the list when they arrive and are moved down by subsequent posts).
Do not repeatedly ping your post in the hope of regaining the top spot in the listing. Multiple pings for the same post will get your blog labeled as spam and it could be banned.
By regularly submitting quality posts to Technorati through the ping process you will begin to build a network of fellow bloggers who link through to your blog (either in their posts or in their blogroll). Technorati takes the number of these links into account when ranking your blog. The more links your blog gets, the higher its authority becomes and the more exposure your blog will receive on Technorati.
To YOUR Success,
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 77% [?]
Blog Spam: How It Will Affect You and How to Minimize It
There is one basic fact of life when it comes to blogging; your blog is going to receive spam in one form or another, and most likely all forms!
The most prolific form is comment spam. Experienced spammers use highly advance programs (known as spam engines) to leave comments on thousands of blogs which contain links to the product they are promoting - much the same as those spam emails you receive daily.
They have evolved to the point where they can read the verification images displayed by some anti-comment spam plugins. Some can read and interpret javascript code, and renaming your form variables in the comment files is not a worthwhile solution. They can still find the necessary variables by reading and interpreting the comment form code.
The Askimet plugin which comes with WordPress is pretty effective at stopping spam comments appearing on your blog, but it places them in a moderation queue so you still have to review them and manually delete them. Unfortunately it often places innocent comments in the moderation queue, so you have to check regularly.
To use the Askimet plugin you will have to sign up for a WordPress.com account in order to receive an API key for use with the plugin. When you enter your details into the sign up form, make sure you use the “Just a username, please” option. Once you have succesfully opend a WordPress account, they will send your API key via email.
There is another option for reducing blog spam offered by the plugin called HashCash from Elliot Black which slows down advanced spam engines and virtually eliminates most automated spam comments from getting near your blog in the first place. The advantage of this is you don’t get spam held in a moderation queue because the spam is stopped before plugins like Askimet can do their job of filtering it out.
It works by picking a random large number every four hours. Whenever somebody visits your posts, a javascript is called which first decrypts itself, then executes itself again to retrieve a secret value saved in a .htaccess protected folder, which it then sets in the form. If a comment does not have this value, it is rejected. If a comment is rejected more than four times, the user is blocked for a specified period of time.
It is important to note that this will not stop a spam comment left by a visitor to your blog, so the best option is to use HashCash in conjunction with plugins like Askimet. This way you only have a few comments to moderate instead of hundreds or thousands.
Most spammers who leave trackback spam will never place a link to your blog on theirs. There is a plugin called Simple Trackback Validation by Michael Woehrer which reduces spam trackbacks by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback (in the comment on your post) and checking if the page contains a link to your blog: if not, the trackback is placed in a moderation queue and is not published on your blog.
Unfortunately there is no 100% reliable automated method of accurately identifying, trapping and deleting spam. Normal comments will be trapped (known as false positives) and you will have to review your moderation queue on a regular basis, but by using plugins you can dramatically reduce your moderation workload.
Happy Blogging and have a great weekend!
Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
skype: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 87% [?]
Decision Time: Do You Want Readers to Leave Comments or Not
One of the quickest ways to increase content on your blog is to allow readers to leave comments, but for this to be effective you have to leave prompt replies. During the initial growth phase of your blog, you will not receive many comments… The volume grows as your readership increases.
At some point you will get into a situation where the sheer volume of comments becomes too much to handle on your own. You will spend too much time answering comments and not enough time writing posts.
The problem is not just the replies to the posts you have just published; the problem is compounded by visitors who find your old posts in the search engine listings. You will have to reply to comments on posts you published a long time ago. If your blog receives thousands of visits daily, many of those visitors will want to leave some sort of comment.
This leaves you with two options to consider:
1) Don’t accept comments
While this might effectively solve the problem outright, your new blog is not going to grow very quickly.
If you are creating an RSS fed blog which will run with little or no intervention on your part, then you don’t want to accept comments. Nothing will ruin your blog’s reputation quicker than unanswered comments on each post…
2) Stop accepting comments to posts after a certain time period has elapsed
Use the Comment Timeout plugin by James McKay which will allow you to automatically close comments on posts after a predetermined period of time. It also has an option which allows you to keep comments open for longer on older posts if recent comments have been left.
All settings are made through the “Options / Comment Timeout” page of your WordPress control panel.
This plugin will allow you to stop comments being accepted by setting the time period to zero.
Until tomorrow folks,
Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
Popularity: 87% [?]
Mind Freeze: What To Do If You Can’t Think of Anything To Write
You are going to go through stages when your mind will freeze up and you won’t be able to write anything for your blog. Often this will happen just after you have written your first sentence. Here are a few tips to get you writing again:
1) Go and read the latest posts on all the blogs you frequently visit. If you find an interesting post, write a few brief comments on the post and include the URL to the original post. Once you get into the habit of writing good articles, other bloggers will do the same for you.
2) Go to EzineArticles.com and search for articles related to your blog. Read as many as you can and write down any interesting points you could include in an article. Never copy text directly from any of the articles, just jot down the main points in your own words so you can expand them in your own article.
3) Go through the comments left on your own blog (or other related blogs) and jot down the main points of the questions being asked. Your answers will be the basis of an article.
4) Visit forums related to the theme of your blog and find questions being asked by members. Make a note of the questions and replies to these questions and write your own article based on the replies.
5) Once your blog starts receiving a good amount of traffic use the plugin by Survey Gizmo to employ surveys asking your readers which topics they would like to receive more information on. You can write articles based on the results.
6) Go to any of the social bookmarking websites and find popular bookmarks for sites with a similar theme to your blog. Make a note of the most popular topics and then visit the bookmarked pages. Take notes on the points covered in the articles on the various pages and use them as the basis for your own articles.
7) Go though your own blog posts, especially the more popular ones and figure out whether you have missed anything. Make a note of the missing points and write an article covering them. Remember to add a link to your original post in the new article.
Finally, when all else fails, “how to” articles and blog posts are some of the most sought after, linked to, and bookmarked content online. Pick an important process related to your blog’s theme and explain how to do it…
To Your Success,
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 62% [?]
Going Away but Still Want to Post to Your blog?
Posting regularly is necessary to keep your readers and the search engines interested in your blog. This becomes a bit of a challenge if you decide to go on holiday. The answer is to use one of the great features of WordPress, which is the option to save your posts and publish them at a date and time you specify.
In the “Post Timestamp” drop down box on the right hand side of the “Write” page, you will see a check box that says “Edit Timestamp” with a drop down box for the month above text boxes for the date and time. You can change these to the date and time you want your post to be published. You must check the “Edit Timestamp” check box in order for the change to take place. Forget the check box and when you click “Publish”, your post will be published instantly.
There is another aspect of blogging which makes this WordPress feature useful, and that is you will find inspiration for writing posts comes in fits and starts… One day you will get the urge to write a number of posts, while on other days you will draw a complete blank when you site down to write. When you do get the urge to write, create a number of posts and schedule them to be published over the next few days or weeks.
If you have opted to use the “Update Services” feature of WordPress and have entered a list of ping services into the WordPress “Options / Writing” page, the post will be pinged as soon as you save it. If you are saving a lot of posts they will all be pinged as soon as you save them and might be construed as spamming by the update services. The answer is to use a service or plugin which only pings the update services when your posts are actually published. Here are two such options:
1. The No Ping Wait plugin has been used for some time by bloggers, but with recent versions of WordPress some bloggers have reporting that saved posts are no longer being pinged when they are published. The PingFix plugin by Jan Piotrowski addresses this issue and only pings update services when your posts are published.
2. The other option available to you is to use the Autopinger service which checks your blog every thirty minutes or so and will only ping the blog services when a new post is published on your blog. If you decide to use this service, make sure you delete all the URL’s in the update services option in your WordPress admin panel.
To your Success,
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro
Popularity: 51% [?]