Archive for June, 2006

Following the latest trends in the blogosphere can be tough.

How should I tag my posts?
What’s the newest Social Bookmarking Site?
Is there a Web 3.0 yet?
Who’s number one in Technorati?

OK so maybe that last one doesn’t change much, but it seems like every time you turn around there’s a new style you should follow, a new way to make money from your blog and a new bookmarking site that you need to get listed on to be anything but yesterdays news.

There is one thing that seems to withstand the test of time though. Successful bloggers. After mulling over all the types of bloggers there are I could really only come up with three styles of blogging that seem to work well. I’m sure there a variations on these three styles but the top blogs are pretty much one of these:

1. Multiple Daily Poster – Niche Blogs

A Multiple Daily Poster is someone that posts multiple times a day on the same topic. Their blog is very focused. They’ve carved out a niche and they post about all the newest developments within that niche. These bloggers write so much on their topic they have thousands upon thousands of daily readers who check their blog multiple times a day just to keep up with the latest trends.

Some of the best blogs within this category are also some of my favorites focused around technology and blogging news. One of the best single person Niche Blogs with multiple daily posts is Problogger.net where Darren Rowse has a beat on everything that is happening in the blogosphere as well as providing readers with valuable information on blogging and developing a winning blog. TechCrunch.com is another one of those that gets their information before anyone else has a chance to write about. He writes multiple posts and gets his 70,000 some rss subscribers to check their techcrunch feed several times a day.

A few others of these high powered blogs that keep you updated on specific subjects better than most online news centers can are FreeMoneyFinance.com and BlogHerald.com. There are of course the main stream blogs like Gizmodo, Engadget, and A List Apart.

All these blogs focus on a niche and have built a media outlet that people have to go to every single day. It’s like getting your evening news. Our parents (and most of us now) watch the news daily. Now we have another daily fill of something newsworthy, our blogs about the world, tech, political or other.

2. Large Article Posters

Large Article Posters are bloggers who post usually 2 or 3 times a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, and their posts are just that, very large. They’ll occasionally give you updates and tidbits here and there but generally their posts are lengthy and focus on one topic at a time.

One of the best examples of this type of blogger is Steve Pavlina and his blog StevePavlina.com. It’s a personal development blog that is based on lengthy articles with a massive amount of information contained within each. His blog layout is simple. No flashy graphics or pictures, just content. He claims to have read over 600 books on personal development and from his posts, it shows. Even if he isn’t the worlds best at everything, his blog will surely help any reader learn a thing or two about leading down the right path.

Another good example of this type of blogger is Yaro Starak who Publishes both entrepreneurs-journey.com and SmallBusinessBranding.com. The latter of which he purchased from the previous publisher. He writes about making money via the internet and branding your business very well, and he rights a lot. Long information rich posts are contained within both of those blogs.

There are of course many more than this but these two are both ones that I read regularly to keep up to date with bettering myself and making some money. They write well and people listen. Simple as that.

3. Random Posters

The first two groups of bloggers usually write on a specific niche, be it technology, blogging, money, or life, they focus in on a topic and write as much as they can. The last blogger that becomes successful is one who writes about everything and writes a lot. When you visit these blogs you never know what you’re going to get. It’s like the Maury Povich of blogging or a car accident, you know it’s a waste of time to look but you can’t not look.

A random poster has nothing to say about everything. They often bring up great points that probably not even they know what they just wrote about. But they brought that random interesting thought to the surface and brought it to you.

The following are some great examples of random post blogs that do very very well. BoingBoing.net – it’s a directory of wonderful things and has an immense following. eBaumsWorld.com – pretty random and not for everyone. GenuineCuriosity.com – brings you things you can learn usually multiple times a day.

There are of course others but these blogs are quite numerous, some have large following some have cult like followings. Most of these are put on by one or two people but there are a few that are similar and put on by a whole slew of people, of which you could be one.

Conclusion

As you can tell from this list the successful bloggers built there successful blogs many different ways. But they stuck to a specific method and it brought certain types of readers. Some like multiple updates during the day, some like one large article a week.

The point is you don’t have to be great one way or the other but you do have to stick to a plan. People who blog all over the map and are inconsistent usually don’t end up lasting that long and their blogs archives are stuck on Dec 2005 forever. Get a plan and stick with it. People like, even in this fast paced world, consistency.

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndicate. Syndication basically means distributing something (usually copyrighted work) to a large number of services which then publish, show, etc that work for you. When it comes to TV shows, newspaper articles, and pictures, it usually means money. RSS is just a type of electronic way to syndicate or feed your newest post to the world.

In the Blogosphere, Syndication means you get to syndicate your article for free to anyone who will listen. An RSS feed is what bloggers and internet news sites use to alert people that there is new content on their websites. Readers, like you, and I, have programs called feedreaders that are usually based online and can be accessed from any computer. When you log in all the blogs or newspapers feeds that you are subscribed to are downloaded, most of these are RSS but there is also Atom feeds and XML feeds that do pretty much the same thing.

If you look on the far right bar of this blog you’ll see some buttons labeled RSS, XML, add to google, etc. If you click on those buttons you can add this blogs feed to stay up to date with all the newest information for part time bloggers. If you don’t have a feed reader don’t worry just clikc on the button and you’ll be able to sign up for a feed reader without losing this blogs info.

For more information on RSS feeds and the history of feeds check out XML.com’s Feed Page.

Buying a domain name used to cost a lot and be for those select tech geeks that could track down a reputable domain dealer and buy redirect and use a domain name for their websites.

Now-a-days you can buy a domain name from any number of sources and you can do it all within minutes. You can even use paypal now at some sites to buy domains. Their are all different extensions, .org, .info, .us and now the world is getting full on involved with the world wide web and showing up with their own country codes like the .us such as; .eu for Europe, .cn for China, and .de for Germany.

If you’re worried that your domain name won’t work with your free host, don’t worry about it. If you use Blogger, or MSN Spaces to blog, or even myspace. Your blog on all of those sites has a main URL, all you need to do is redirect your URL from your domain host to that address. It usually takes only a few clicks. Seriously. Then you can give out your domain name rather than www.myspace.com/blogs/thisblog/2393jge93#3##tregfv983r8.

Some places where you can buy a domain name easily are:

GoDaddy.com
RegFly.com
1and1.com
Register.com
Yahoo Domains
Netfirms.com

These are just a few of the more reputable domain hosts out there. There are tons more and you just have to find one that works for you. If you want to change your host you have to wait 60 days prior to changing every time you change.

Improving your ranking in search engines is one of the best ways to get your blog more traffic. That and of course writing quality content that is updated every day.

Focusing on title tags though we must first tell you what they are if you don’t know. Title tags are found in the section of every one of your pages. The head section is what helps the browser you or your readers are using know what’s going on in your page. You can put meta tags like keyword and description (which we’ll talk about soon), you also direct the browser to know where to find the stylesheet if there is any, and other java, and browser related goodies. Also here is the title tag .

If you look in the top left hand corner of your browser window you’ll see some description of what this web page is, Blog Tips for Part-Time Bloggers, and if you’re on just a single post you’ll see something like “Name of Post” >> Blog Tips for Part-Time Bloggers. Those titles are exactly what shows up in search results and what people see before clicking through to your page.

Now lets say everyone of my pages used the generic WordPress title. My titles would go something like, “Archives – Date – Blogging On Empty.” What does that tell the user about your pages? Nothing. What does that tell search engine spiders and rankers about your pages? Nothing. Instead you should switch your title tags to promote your keyword heavy post titles that you should be using.

For this particular blog I use this little bit of php code to use what wordpress has stored in certain values, there’s a whole bunch of ways you can change the values around but the main ones you want to deal with from wordpress are as follows. Oh, and don’t worry, if you use other php based blogging platforms there is a good chance the use some sort of title function(described below) to display the title at the beginning of each post. You can use that to display the title as well as these other functions, with the browser:

bloginfo(‘description’) – this uses the description you enter in the general options section of your dashboard
wp_title() – this is the wordpress title you enter in the general options section of your dashboard
the_title() – this is the title give to each of your posts, this is the most important one.

Focus mainly, as I have been eluding to, on the the_title() function. This will allow the titles of your posts to be displayed as the title of your pages as read by the search engine spiders and your readers browser pane. If you use these php functions instead of hard coding everything then the title of each of your pages will change with the title of the post or page your reader is on and that the search engine spider sees.

For information on exactly what several people that I would call foremost authorities on the subject check out.

WordPress and SEO at the undersigned
Make post titles page titles over at Problogger.
Keywords in URLS at Blog Herald.

These are just some of the resources out there but the main idea is to use the titles of our posts for the titles that are displayed in your readers browser and thus displayed as the titled for search engine results. Having good keywords is a major plus and having good titles exploits that.

It is no secret, you don’t need to dig through all the blogs out there to know, writing consistent content is what brings readers to your blog.

Blogs are taking the Internet by storm because their setup provides for fresh new content. There are currently millions upon millions of blogs out there about thousands and maybe even millions of topics. What’s the key to getting your blog noticed?

Writing new content. Your content doesn’t have to be show stopping, call CNN type content, but it does have to be consistent and it does have to provide your readers with something useful.

Within the blog network that this blog is part of the writers, particularly me, notice one thing that attracts readers above all else to it’s blogs. Content. If even a day is taken off traffic drops. When all 10 blogs that are part of the network have new content readership is it’s highest. If you take two of those blogs and skip a day posting, traffic drops by 30%. If you skip posting on 4 of those blogs traffic drops by more than 50%. Yes 50% by skipping posting on less than half of the blogs.

When there is new content, maybe directing our readers to quality content provided by other users, like was done in a previous post about AdSense for beginners, traffic arrives.

To give you an example think of your blog like the gap (or abercrombie, prada, armani, guess, whatever). If those stores don’t have a new clothing line coming out people won’t go back. The clothing line is their content. The way they get people to come in the middle of the season is to offer sales. Sign-up for their mailing list (newsletter or RSS feed) and they’ll conveniently email you when skies are occurring. They try and keep their content fresh by offering it at a lower price.

You have to do the same but you have the ability to put out a new shirt every single day! People will always won’t to swing by to get the latest shirt from your store (or the latest scoop).

Just keep the content coming and your readers will follow the words.

Are you tired of digging through the endless SEO blogs and reading about everybody’s theory on what search engines are really looking for? Linking through the endless supply of SEO blogs can be daunting and it seems like everyone has their own theory. Use permalinks, don’t use permalinks. Comment more, comment less. Use a lot of keywords, keep your keywords down. What should you do.

Thomas over at The Undersigned has a great post about WordPress and SEO where he neatly lists some of the top things you can do to get better search engine rankings.

Concise and to the point, no more digging through blogs like this one for SEO tips.

Are you new to Blogging and the different ways you can monetize you blog? One of the easiest ways to make money from your blog is to put content targeted ads on the site via Google AdSense. The ads change based on what your posts are about and what the page they are displayed on deals with. It’s a simple program that anyone can sign-up for.

There’s also a whole science behind ad placement, ad type, color, set-up and what keywords you should be gearing your content towards. If you are new to the whole game you might want to check out Yaro’s latest post about a free e-book dealing with the topic over at his blog. The Post can be found at make money with blogs and adsense.

It’s a short and simple e-book from Joel Comm. Check out Yaro’s blog for a quick link over to Joel’s free e-book. If you’re looking for more tips and blogging and AdSense you may also want look through Yaro’s posts dealing with AdSense.

When choosing a topic for a successful blog you need to try and focus you topic as best as possible. This will give you the most chances to be higher ranked in Google Search Results providing you with more traffic.

Although this may sound easy to accomplish for beginner blogs there is often too much temptation to stray from the topic of choice due to writers block, wanting to blab about your recent victories, or a number of other reasons. As a blogger with little time to waste on matters that don’t add positively to your blog I suggest fighting the temptation as best you can to blog off topic.

As you begin to blog more and more about your niche topic you may also find yourself writing as though the topic is implied. Although this may save you time while writing it will, in the long run, hurt your search result rankings. One of the best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips you can follow is to keep up your keyword density within you niche topic.

Take for instance the blog in our network Wicked Backhand. We could easily omit referring to the word tennis since the site itself implies that it is a tennis focused site and words like stroke will refer to tennis stroke rather than paintbrush stroke. However, writing tennis stroke will help search engines “remember” that they are dealing with a tennis article and when someone searches for a tennis stroke we will have a better chance of being near the top of the results.

Don’t over due it though. You could easily write a keyword 50 times in an article but that borders on spam and search engine algorithms frown on that. Now we don’t know the magic keyword density number but as long as your sentences make sense you should be set.

Blog Nanny – New Bloggers will find articles here quite useful.

Marketing Tools Review – Helpful hints to get your voice heard, especially in a land of too many blogs!

Website Hosting Info – travel here to find out about getting a site up and keeping it going, money saving, tech tips.

Successful Blog – Read about good blogs and what’s happening in the blogosphere.

A great way to keep posting through a writers block or just when you have nothing good to say is to write quick little posts. If you take a look at some of the top blogs, Engadget, TechCrunch, and Problogger, you’ll notice that they all post several times a day and have quite a few simple two paragraph posts.

These posts are more than likely linking to other information on the Internet that they more than likely got from their RSS feeds or just surfing other blogs.

All it takes is a simple subject that relates to the content of your blog that maybe your readers would enjoy reading. A few words about what you are linking to. And then just through a link up there and presto. You have a post where you’ve been stagnant for a few days, or maybe, gasp, a week.

You should check out Problogger.net and some of his speedlinking posts. I find those to be some of the most useful posts he writes and all they are are links and little blurbs to other peoples blogs or services. Simple, useful and keeps your readers coming back for more.