Archive for November, 2006

If you’re like me your blog writing probably goes in waves. Some days you’ll write three posts, some days or groups of days you’ll write nothing. It’s called a writers block, and it’s nothing new. One of the biggest keys to good blogging, and good part-time blogging is regular posting.

You need to publish something new all the time. People these days get bored easy. They bounce from television show to television show, activity to activity and most important from blog to blog. You don’t want them to bounce from your blog to the next just because you missed a day of content now do you.

So here’s what you do to keep them staying. When you’re in the blogging mood and you want to write a lot, write a lot. Write all you can and write as many posts as you can. Start as many posts you can and try like hell to finish them all. If you leave the posts unfinished you might not come back to them. So write, link and finish your posts. Then save them to post on your blog another day. You should build enough all at once so you can post everyday.
You be able to build your readership faster and keep them as your readers longer because you post every single day.

Now one of the downfalls to posting a lot all at once and saving your posts to publish for another day is that you may fall behind and have a few days of several posts, and then nothing for a week again. So you need to get into a routine. You need write a lot, then publish, write a lot, then publish then write some more. You can’t let your publishing catch up to your posts.

I’ve written before about ways to more efficiently check certain stats but how do you know if you are a stat junkie and check too often to begin with? Well I’ve compiled a somewhat commical list below to help you discern whether you are or not. You’ll never be a successful part-time blogger if you check your stats too much.

10. Your Google Adsense “Last Login” timer never reads more than 30 minutes.
9. You can tell me right now who your top referring link is.
8. You know the IP address of your last visitor.
7. You’ve worn out the S, I, T, E, M, and R keys on your keyboard.
6. You’ve worn out the S, I, T, E, M, and R keys on your friends keyboard.
5. You can tell me how much you’ve earned from Google Adsense already today.
4. You’ve written about your best stat day on your blog, in the last 5 days
3. You know your best commentor by their Host Name
2. You don’t know your social security number but if anyone asks your unique visitors for the year, you’ve got that covered.

And the number one way you can tell if you’re a stat junkie.

1. You haven’t blogged in days because your still trying to figure out why so many visitors are coming from Reston, Virgina.

 Enjoy the top 10 reasons and feel free to share them with anyone. By the way, I was only able to compile this list because I am guilty of all of them.

Most successful blogs are about a niche, a specific topic. People go to those particular blogs to find out about one subject and that’s what keeps them coming back. They know they’ll be able to find information about blogging, or movies, or whatever the blog is about. Most of the time, if the blogger writes consistantly, they’ll also provide the reader with the newest information for that particular topic.

If that’s what some of the best bloggers do why aren’t you? Are you blogging about everything under the sun but hoping that you’ll keep to your subject? That isn’t the way to build traffic and build your readership. For one thing search engines will rank you higher if you have more and a higher percentage of keywords related to your niche. If you write about anything that dilutes your keyword percentage and essentially puts you lower in the search engine rankings. Something you don’t want.

Keeping on topic and forming your sentences and thoughts into a way that supports the overall theme or niche of your blog will allow you to more easily build your traffic and readership. People will want to come back because they know what they’ll find and they’ll know that they’ll get the most recent infromation from that niche.

Over the past month or so I’ve been trying to link more within my blogs. I run Blogtown Press and with that many blogs I have to write a lot. Which leaves little time for promoting my posts and getting links elsewhere.

So what I’ve been doing, and noticing that it helps, is linking around. After all, websites are stores of information and if your blog is a narrow enough niche your readers will most likely want more information than what they came for. Why hide it then. Link around and allow your users to read more of your posts and increase your pageviews and increase the potential for your readers to read something worth linking to.
An added bonus of these links within your blog is that you create more links for search engine spiders, those little creatures that help Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft know that you exist, to see more of your pages more often. You’ll also start seeing an increase in the Google Link results for your pages.

Although most think that having these types of links don’t rank as high as an outside link, every little bit counts as you try and build your content and links on your way to higher Google search ranking. There are of course more ways to get outside links but inside links will help too. (See now wasn’t that easy)

What is that SEO mean anyway? It means Search Engine Optimization and its all the rage.

See, each search engine compiles it’s search results differently using algorithms, wizards, and little gnomes to rank pages all across the internet. Knowing how they do it and then tailoring your pages to their algorithms and gnomes liking is one of the biggest battles a webmaster can go through. Staying up to date it seems like is a full-time job and there are even blogs, lots of them, devoted to following Search Engine Optimization, for all the different search engines.

Really there are three search engines where if you follow your stats you can see that the bulk of your traffic comes from, or at least your search traffic anyhow. Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Each of them have slightly different ways of “indexing” your blog. Indexing is essentially putting all of your web pages into their system so people can search your content. Once they finally index your pages, they rank them for different keywords and keyword combinations.

Your job as a part-time blogger is to follow how they rank your pages and optimize your blog for that. As a part-time blogger that’s a tough thing to keep up with day to day. Like we said, it’s a full-time bloggers job, many of them.

We’ll be giving you tips here and there but the biggest thing you can do is get links and stick to keywords. Following those tips will help you optimize without knowing you’re doing it.

SEO can be a full-time job and following the world of Search Engine algorithms can keep your head spinning. We’ve compiled a list below of some of the best SEO Blogs and Watch Groups out there so you can bookmark one and let them do the work for you. You don’t want to waste your time as a part-time blogger figuring out what works best to get readers from search engines, you want to spend your time blogging and that’s it.

1. Problogger SEO Category
2. SEO Today
3. SEO Book
4. Yaro’s SEO Category
5. SEO MEMO

These are some good sites to keep you up-to-date with the SEO world and what works. If I had to choose one it would be Problogger SEO Category. It’s the best out there and will always be current. Keep that one on a must read. Feel free to add yours to the list via the comments. I’ll keep adding as you do.

If you’re strapped on time but want a top blog that everyone reads here’s one thing that can help you gain blogosphere fame, Build up content.

Launching a blog or even promoting a blog or blogs with little or no content may create some initial buzz, but you won’t get any return or regular readers. You’ll get some people stopping by initially, and then nothing. You’ll go back to your three or four unique visitors per day and be frustrated as to why that is. It’s content. Unless you’re putting up pictures of half naked women all over your blog you won’t get people coming back.

You have to build up content.

What I suggest first is to just blog for your friends. Start putting up content, tell your friends about it and put up some more. Having a few readers will be enough to keep you going through the initial phase of building content. Then as you have a good base of articles, maybe 30 or 40 spanned over a month, start stock piling. With just 30 or 40 minutes a day, rather than 15 or 20 minutes you can write two articles. Save one, (I suggest the non-time-sensative one you save), and post the other.

Once you have about 30 articles saved, you can then launch a blog to the masses. The time you spend promoting your blog will be well spent, and you’ll always have something new for the readers to read with your stockpiled articles, and you’ll have your content from your month or two of content building blogging. People will see that your blog is serious and ready to stick around and will for one thing keep you in their blog roll and for another, keep you around their regular reads.

I’ll say again, don’t launch or promote without content up, more than 30 articles, and content waiting in the wings, more than 30 preferrably. It’s like insurance in case you get bored, then your launch won’t be for nothing.

One of the fastest ways you can generate content for your blog is by reading a few articles related to your blogs topic. Blogs are fast becomming peoples choices to recieve their news.

Would you rather hit up a newspaper.com where writers seem so distant and chances are you would try and contact them or would you rather head over to some Average Joe, check out his or her blog posts for the day and see 3 or 4 articles reviewing your topic of chioce.

People dig that way of writing and you shouldn’t be afraid of doing it.

One of the best ways that I keep track of many topics and many articles is by using my flock rss wonder machine as well as the flock “blog this” option. You don’t have to use these (although if you’re a part-time blogger I suggest it) but you should get yourself a RSS agregator. Bloglines, Yahoo, Google, Rojo, NewsGator, there are a ton of them out there and you should try and get one asap.

Once you have one, organize your feeds if you have multiple topics you write about, and begin filling it with news sources you dig and blogs you dig. Most news sources online have these and you can easily add them to your aggregator.

Then all you have to do is Read Blog and read some more. But keep them simple and review like. Read a story, link and review. Write 3 or 4 sentences, relate it and link it to some of your content and build your web of goodness.

I’ve had several people write about the new Blogtown Press launch contest Link to a Coconut Contest, with regards to linkbaiting.

I think mine is unique because I’m giving away something so unique, a coconut! Who would’ve thought of that? It’s interesting and I’ve always wanted get a coconut in the mail. My girlfriend (at the time) fiance now, once bought me a coconut from Hawaii that sits in my parents basement, I requested it be sent to me when she went as senior in college on a tennis trip for The Michigan Wolverines, but she finally found it at the end of the trip and was unable to send it. Oh well. But the coconut is what I’ve wanted so now I’m sending it away, and requesting pictures of jubilation in exchange.

However, I’ll get links in exchange for the contest which really is the reason for the contest, but I’ve always wanted that darn coconut and hopefully will get some pictures from some excited people.

Another contest idea that I’ve had to generate buzz about the network is to give away an Apple IPOD, maybe a couple of iPOD shuffles in some sort of RSS contest that was suggested by another person, who once I digg through my emails I’ll gladly give a nice link to. But it looks like I’ve been beaten to the punch. It turns out the marketing pilgrim, who I must admit I haven’t ever been to their blog, but has started a contest which they’ll be giving away an iPOD to a certain RSS subscriber. What a great idea!

I may still get around to that as owner of Blogtown Press, so be excited about another contest. I love giving stuff away, I love buying things for people and I love thought of getting some sweet pictures from some super psyched people.

With the recent launch of blogtown press, the network home of Blogging On Empty, I have begun to see “The Power of the Network.”

With the Link to a Coconut Contest helping gain traffic to individual blogs, I’ve been tracking visitors behind the scenes and noticing that the network helps! Having that nice little block of links in the bottom right of every blog in the network, I’ve noticed that one visitor will be linked into the network ultimately see the network box and click through to another blog, and do the same on the next.

This just continues to build awareness of other blogs in the network, building traffic, page impressions and repeat visitors with subscribers to their RSS feeds.

With each blog that I add to the network that’s another blog that I don’t have to link exchange with for the blogs already in the network and another link for each of those blogs as well. That will ultimately build pagerank in Google, which will increase my traffic hits, subscribers, so on and so forth. It’s great!

Being an individual blogger, getting 12 links into your blog would take a lot of emails and a lot of link exchanges with other blogs. These links are now automatic within my network and will continue to grow as my network grows, 12, 15, 20, 100 links! Just like that.

At first I wasn’t sure what the impact of having a network would mean. I’ve heard it’s great just to get linked exposure from a network. But if you can build a brand from the network, which I hope to do with blogtownpress and it’s many contests that are going to be coming up, you can have exposure on every blog and every site in the network that builds traffic to every other blog or site.

It’s an exciting process to be going through and I’ll for sure keep you all informed on what the contest has done for Blogtown Press and just what being part of a network does.