Blogged Out | Blog Promotion & Marketing Tips

You will I am sure of heard of this saying before, and it’s a lesson I learnt in 2005, when my business website [not a blog] slumped out of Google for 3 months, due to a penalisation for adding too many pages to my site in a short period of time [I activated Mod Re-write]

For these three months the site didn’t get any traffic from Google, and it was during our busiest part of the year that this unfortunately happened. Nowadays, I don’t rely completely on Google traffic, but anything they send me is a bonus.

Why am I writing this? Well, I have seen on some webmaster forums where people have spent hours after hour concentrating on optimising their website for Google. Yes, Google traffic referrals blow Yahoo and MSN out of the water, but think outside of the box, and look at other ways to market your blog.

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By admin, Filed under: Blog Promotion Tips on July 12th, 2007 | 5 Comments »

I’m not usually a lover of ‘meme’ or ‘link love’ type blog posts, but I’ve been amazed how successful the T list was amongst the travel blogging community. I’ve lost count the number of blogs that linked to my travel blog and participated, but we are talking a few hundred travel related blogs, and it spread around as fast an Australian bush fire.

The benefit of these types of posts is that it increases your Technorati ranking [be it for a short term], increases traffic, and increases the number of regular readers, which as a blogger, is something that we all aiming for.

I wonder though if Google frown against this type of link building exercise, and I guess it would be fairly easy to detect them, so it’s not something that you would want to participate in all the time – plus writing link love blog posts all the time will make your readers leave in their droves.

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By admin, Filed under: Blog Promotion Tips on July 9th, 2007 | No Comments »

I received the question from a reader [I’m sorry I deleted your comment in error!] who asked is it best to provide a full or half RSS feed for your readers.

It’s a good question, and I think it all depends on if your blog is being syndicated by authority sites.

Full RSS Feed

Advantages – syndicated authority sites like USA Today, Washington Post etc want to publish your content, and they want the full feed, this is going to give you tons of new readers, and will increase traffic to your blog.

Disadvantages – some splogger will find your publishing your full RSS feed, so will create a blog on your niche, and literally scrape all of your posts on to their blog, and in return duplicating content which the likes of Google could filter out your blog posts from it’s search results.

Half RSS Feed

Advantages – if a splogger uses your RSS feed then they are only getting part of your content, which lowers the percentage of it being taken as duplicate content, and readers of your RSS feed, are more likely to come on to the blog if it’s a post that there are interested in reading, this increasing traffic.

Disadvantages – RSS readers won’t appreciate it that they only get part of your feed, and for some, this is enough to remove your feed from their preferred RSS reader. Personally, I don’t mind if it’s half of an RSS feed, as I’ll just click through and see if there are any other posts that I may have missed.

So there’s my opinion on full and half RSS feeds, what’s your opinion, does size matter?

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By admin, Filed under: Blogged Out on July 9th, 2007 | 3 Comments »

Well, um, I have just uploaded my first video guide to Google video, which I hope you enjoy and can understand my dodgy English accent.

The video provides a few ideas on making your blog more search engine friendly. Maybe the video blog guide will get me more female readers, maybe it’ll drive you all away.

This video blog guide is aimed at new and amateur bloggers, but the more experienced might pick up a few tips along the way. This is my first [could be my last] video guide to blogging so it’s important you let me know what you think.

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By admin, Filed under: Video blog guide on July 2nd, 2007 | 1 Comment »

I’ve read comments on a few forums now about how people dislike blogs that don’t offer “link juice” and use the no follow tag. Firstly, by default Wordpress uses the no follow tag on all links within the comments section, and personally, I think this is the right decision.

If you are writing comments on blogs to help with your blog or websites search engine optimisation, well you’re wasting your time. You might be asking yourself, if someone leaves an excellent comment on your blog what are there going to get in return.

I asked myself the same question when I started to blog, and I quickly realised that by posting useful, interesting comments on authority blogs, my traffic and readership started to increase. I posted my response to a blog post on USA today, and received a nice link in the blogroll, the same with Conde Nast and many other authority travel sites.

So the answer here is folks, forget about SEO when leaving comments and think about networking, show people you know what you’re talking about and people will follow like a herd of sheep, it really does work.

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By admin, Filed under: Blog Promotion Tips on June 30th, 2007 | 3 Comments »

The internet is a great place to learn, and they are a number of people who I look up to and value their opinion. One person is Steve Gibson, a marketing consultant from Edinburgh, and today I found out that he has entered the Blogosphere.

If you want to market your business and improve sales and profits then I seriously recommend that you visit his new marketing blog and subscribe to his newsletter as it does have tons of tips and advice to help you out, and let’s be honest we all need some help along the way. Is there someone or a marketing blog or resource that has helped you?

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By admin, Filed under: Blogged Out on June 30th, 2007 | No Comments »

Don’t get me wrong, you’re not going to get thousands of visitors every week, despite it having a member base of over 25 million, but Facebook, is a free way to make new friends, and network yourself to people who are your targeted audience.

Here are 5 reasons why you should sign up with Facebook today.

Applications

They are some great applications which you add-on to your Facebook profile – my favourites are the twitter, Video, and Google RSS reader applications which help me communicate, and read my favourite RSS feeds and watch and share my videos.

Networking

When you sign up you can join a network – I joined the Leeds network because I want to promote my business to the 56,000+ members of Leeds who are on Facebook. I can communicate with other members by leaving messages or joining in discussions.

I can create a classified advert, so that people can see what service or product I offer, or I can ask questions to people to find out who would be interested in my service or product. Basically your promoting your business to your targeted audience.

Groups

You can promote your niche, product or service within a group – create one and ask people to join, create discussions, where people are involved. Within your group you can promote your business brand, and include your business logo and website address and contact details on your group.

People join your group and remember your brand and business the next time they need to use your service or product. It’s a good way to network and promote your business. Just don’t spam, the community hate that.

Notes

You can create notes and link to your blog or website pages which have interesting content for people to read – you can create automatic notes through your blogs RSS feed, so people can read your blog via your Facebook profile and comment on it as well.

Profiles

I would call these interactive media profiles, where you can share content, network, communicate, and really get involved in the community experience. I have added an application from Trip Advisor and Sidestep to share my travel experiences and plans.

I hope you enjoy reading this quick guide to Facebook, try it out for yourself and report back with your opinions, it’s fun, and a great way to network and promote your business. Enjoy!

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By admin, Filed under: Blog Promotion Tips on June 19th, 2007 | 5 Comments »

Directories are a great way to get one-way links, but let’s be honest; they are some pretty bad and very good directories, so how do you know which one is the best one to choose to promote your blog.

Well, design goes along way with me, because I feel that if they have put that time and effort [or money] into the design, they are going to put the same into promoting it.

How many directories do you see that is a plain template, boring design? This tells me that they can’t be bothered to make the directory look good, and if they aren’t going to spend the money getting a good template, then they aren’t going to spend money promoting it.

I thought I would list a few directories which I like the design of and seem to promote the directory well on the internet.

• V7N Directory
• Seven Seek
• Umdum

Just this morning I found out about a new web directory by Mugi Pacco, which has a very cool design and seems to be promoted well on webmaster forums. My tip for submitting to directories, is choose your directory well [on target but look at the Google PR] and write an attractive title and description.

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By admin, Filed under: Blog Promotion Tips on June 19th, 2007 | No Comments »

I wanted to update you on the development of my travel photo blog, which is powered by Blogger. As I mentioned I am running this small experiment to learn how blogger works and to see how easy [or difficult] it is to rank a free blogspot blog on the 1st page of Google.

Yesterday I added Google Analytics on to the blog, so I’m unable to give you any stats on the traffic until next week, but the blog was indexed by Google within 48 hours, and it appears in the search results, but at this early stage I am not sure how competitive the keywords are, and if the blog is in the Google sandbox filter.

To help Search engine optimisation I changed the code so that the blog post title appeared before the blog name, for example, one of my posts now has the title of ‘Holmenkollen Ski Jump Stadium – Travel photo blog’ rather than ‘Travel Photo Blog - Holmenkollen Ski Jump Stadium’

This means that the targeted keywords for this post will appear in the listing in Google. Just in case you don’t know Google chops off any words more than 65 characters for Google, so this is the primary reason for me making this change.

One of the issues Blogger has is that there is no category as such – they use labels, which are like Technorati tags, and can help the user find content on your blog easier. The problem is for people using the classic version of Google; it doesn’t let you add the labels in the sidebar.

You can upgrade your blog to Google’s new version, but your limited to the blog template design, and I wanted my blog to be unique, as I am fed up of seeing the same blog template on every blogspot blog I visit, it gets repetitive, despite how good the content is.

Some kind person has written some javascript code which will allow you to do this, and it’s easy to implement, but my advice is just keep to 2 or 3 labels a post otherwise your going to have tons of tons of labels, and the blog then starts to look messy.

From a search engine optimisation perspective, I am not convinced labels are a good thing – for example the label appears in the search results, but the page has the blog name in the title rather than the actual tag name, which means you’re going to have problems with duplicate content.

I’m sure there’s a solution for this and I’ll mention this in my next update and I hope I didn’t bore you too much with all this text.

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By admin, Filed under: Blogged Out Project on June 18th, 2007 | No Comments »

My good friend Chris, who is an admin at the WebTalk Forums [pop by and say hello] has launched an interesting new service, where bloggers can register on his blog, and write their own blog post promoting their blog or business.

I asked Chris to tell me all about his new service and this is what he said:

The function of newrss.net is to provide a place where you can blog about your own websites. The concept is simple. This website is a promotional tool for you to get back links to your websites by showing off your writing skills. Follow these simple rules and your posts will remain in this blog for its lifetime.

Should you decide not to follow the posting rules, then your posts and user account will be deleted. This website idea works best when everyone involved takes an active interest in our blog and treats it like their own. So register for our blog and post about your website.

Stop by and rate a few posts. Promote your latest website. So register now and post about your website. You’ll get back links and you might even get some traffic. It’s totally free, so you have no excuse to pass up this offer. Make the most of it and come back often!

Natural links like this are a good way to improve your blog’s position in the search engine, and whilst I haven’t tried the service out yet, and providing it keeps spam free, then it could be a good way of getting one-way links to your blog.

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By admin, Filed under: Blog Promotion Tips on June 16th, 2007 | 3 Comments »