Blog News Watch

I think Google’s site ranking system is broken.

In fact, I think they broke it a very long time ago.

The Internet is meant to be inclusive, to level the playing field a bit in a competitive world, and to give newcomers a chance. Of course it’s still possible to build a new site up to popularity, but the world’s biggest search engine isn’t helping matters.

Since Google’s search is the average internet user’s portal to almost all the information they access, breaking Google means breaking the Internet.

Problem: Google’s most important ranking measurement is inbound links.

This means that in order to ever be seen in a Google search result that doesn’t contain your name or your blog’s name, you have to be popular. You know how in the real world people complain that governments and corporations keep the rich, rich and the poor, poor?

It’s the same with the holy ruling class of the interwebs, Almighty Google, who will give you priority only if you’re already a popular blog. Keep the popular sites popular, and the unknown sites unknown.

I know that it’s an easy way to determine good quality sites versus spam sites, but it’s the easy way out that takes the magic out of what the world thought the Internet was when the hordes began to adopt it.

How do you win today? The two most important things I believe you can do are:

1. Create value. If you don’t offer value to readers, you’re not going to become valuable.
2. Forge relationships. Enter the discussion. Don’t segregate yourself or stand on the sidelines. Use the full potential of the Internet to reach out to other bloggers and form networks of good writers giving the gift of good content.

Relationships are the key to success in an Internet where search and indexing have been broken.

John Reese announced today that BlogRush will soon be available in new “flavors” - different color schemes that will help bloggers integrate the widget into their blog design more seamlessly.

He also takes on the “pyramid scheme”rs. One thing I never understood about this complaint - how can it be a scheme when no one’s out any money? This is a free tool, and as one of John’s commenters pointed out, either it works or it doesn’t. If it works, you keep it and so much the better. If it doesn’t, you aren’t out anything. You just take it off. What’s the problem? (And “you lose integrity” is soooo not an answer. I’m sorry - if a potential reader thinks I have less integrity for trying to offer my readers something extra, then that’s a reader I can do without.)

I’m not yet ready to call myself a BlogRush cheerleader yet but I’m certainly failing to see the support behind the complaints, at least so far.

From Bloggers Blog comes this review of Feedjit’s new stats widget which sits quietly in your sidebar and tracks your readers. The interesting thing is that it also creates a list of the geographic locations of your readers, and with the addition of another widget, can even create a little map of your last 100 readers based on their location.

You can get the Feedjit traffic widget here, and read more about Feedjit the startup here at Startup Squad.

Ever since Wil “Wesley Crusher Who?” Wheaton landed his book deal on the strength of his blog, would-be bestsellers everywhere have been aching for the big break - the almighty book deal.

Here’s a story from the other perspective - book-then-blog. Author Tim Ferriss wrote  The Four Hour Work Week and used his blog as marketing device for the book. In this post, he recounts for us how he got to the highly enviable position of having his first book land simultaneously in the number one slots on both the New York Times bestseller and Wall Street Journal business bestseller lists.

As a would-be author myself, I’m especially heartened by learning that Tim’s book was “turned down by 13 of 14 editors.” Wow.  There’s hope for all of us!

Technorati Tags: tim ferriss, using blog to market book

From Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Program, I bring you this post. There will be much more about this program on this blog in the upcoming days, as I write about my experiences growing and tweaking my own blogs using what I’ve learned from Yaro. But for now, let’s start with this:

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog, chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need an easily [remembered] domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at http://blogcarnival.com/.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time. The tips here are just that - merely the “tip” of the iceberg of what you’ll get in the Blog Mastermind program.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link.

Full Disclosure: these are affiliate links.

So, this is pretty sweet. Last week, I’m browsing through the RSS feeds, catching up on stuff I’ve missed in the runup to the holidays. I come across this post from Penelope Trunk on Brazen Careerist, one of my absolute favorite blogs for her writing style and unique perspective on all matters related to work and life. Penelope says:

Cory [Miller] is offering to create a new blog design (and implement it) for someone for free. It’s gotta be in WordPress, (technically called a WordPress Theme) and he’s going to give you six hours of his time. …  If you’d like this chance to spruce up your blog, send an email to me … with three sentences about why you’d be a good candidate for the award.

So, me being - well, me - I wrote to Penelope:

Hey Penelope - only three? OK, here goes:

1. I am a solo lawyer hoping to branch out into coaching other solo lawyers (and other kinds of solo professional service providers) in developing their web presence and practices, and as such a really nifty web presence of my own is a key.
   
2. I already have such a site and it’s as developed as I can make it using my own (limited) Wordpress skills, and while I and many others like it, it’s not quite “right” for what I want to do with this site, on further reflection - not “inspired” enough, and the features are lacking (I could go on and on about what I don’t like about the theme).
   
3. Because I’m monetizing this blog there’s a bunch of stuff Cory can tinker with, such as text link ads, a sales page for affiliate programs, a bookstore (Amazon Associate program), and some other pages, plus the main page blog; or if he’d prefer he can ignore all that stuff and the theme will take care of the overall “look and feel” (and I can do the rest); either way, your readers can see how one blog theme can be implemented and stretched across multiple purposes - creativity in action!
   

Wordy McWord here, signing off, with a “pretty please”!

I think it was the “pretty please” that did it. Cory picked my blog, and so I’ll be getting a brand new design from him within the next few weeks or so!

Can I just say - apart from how awesome this is for me personally - how awesome a thing it is to do, period? For anyone? You want to build your blog traffic? Figure out something you can do like Penelope’s Coachology - find a way to give something valuable away for free. You’ll get people commenting, visiting, linking, and looking forward to the next post! Make it something like this, that people can check in on (i.e., a finished website, or an article, or a redesign of some feature) and it’s even better. It doesn’t even have to be something you can do yourself; if you know someone who’d like to get some more traffic for him or herself, you can partner up. You present the contest, your partner gives the reward, and you both (of course) get to blog about it.

Technorati Tags: cory miller, penelope trunk, brazen careerist, new blog design, the inspired solo

If you don’t subscribe to DoshDosh yet, you might want to start. Maki’s starting a new daily series about how to raise blog traffic, the universal blog currency. Want to get paid? You have to drive the traffic first, and DoshDosh is a great place to learn how. Maki’s got a very clear writing style that’s accessible and thorough without being too technical. Plus, I have to admit, the capitalist in me really digs the emphasis on money-making (no, it’s not everything but it’s a big fat something!).

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I had never considered it but she’s absolutely right: Lorelle wrote for The Blog Herald earlier this week about the impact on your Google PageRank score resulting from updating past content. Says Lorelle:

A webmaster/blogger who pays attention to their blog content,
updating and fixing old posts, is one who cares about their blog and
their blog’s content. Google’s PageRank algorithm tests to see how
often a web page is updated and the length of time between changes in a
blog post’s content.

It makes sense, too. If you work hard to bring the best content to
your readers, then you would want to make sure that the old content
continues to have life and vitality. Google wants to honor those who
honor their blog content.

She’s right, and she also offers some excellent tips on how to do just that - among them:

• Link back to old posts
• Rewrite an old post from a new perspective
• Revise to include more keywords (I’d add the unspoken but understood “relevant keywords”)
• Fix an old post, then post a new one to let your readers know about it
• And many, many more

I’d also add one other suggestion - consider a post linking an old post of yours with a new post from another blog. Don’t be coy about it, and certainly don’t be all “I said it first and better” about it (not that you ever would do such a thing - nooo, not my readers!) - but find a way to evolve the discussion beyond both posts by linking them up.

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It is not the job of Search Engine Optimization to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the web site so that it becomes an eagle.

This quote from Bruce Clay’s Search Engine Optimization primer page pretty much says it all. (Bruce Clay, Inc. is an international internet marketing firm with offices in the US, England, Australia, and Africa.) The page is an amazing bottom-line 411 on SEO for the nontechnically-oriented. A step-by-step “here’s what you do, and here are the tools with which to do it.” I bought some SEO books earlier this year - and I’m seriously wondering why, now, with this amazing free resource there for the taking and devouring.

Worthy of a bookmark and a few hours’ deep reading time. With notetaking.

SEO primer, bruce clay inc.

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Conga-rats to Jummy from Life Tips Daily who won last week’s Open Mic Talk Back Fridays comment contest! Jummy wins my editing services for one upcoming post - congratulations, Jummy, and thanks for playing!

How can you win the same prize? Simple - read the post below and comment away! The most original and well-expressed thoughts win. (And spelling counts! Or might. Depends on my mood.)

How Do You Monetize A Personal Blog? Should You Even Try?

Something a bit different this time: Jummy’s winning comment (OK, it was the only comment but still, it’s good!) poses a question about personal blogs, like Dooce.com. Namely: How do you create enough interest in your personal blog to make monetizing it worthwhile?

This is a great topic. There are a couple of schools of thought, I suppose. One - the odds are against you, so don’t bother. Or put your ads up, sure, but don’t expect a lot.

I think that’s rubbish.

Frankly, just because something’s hard, it’s never been sufficient cause to me to avoid even trying. How about you? All “hard” means is “time to buckle down and get creative.”

So, let’s help Jummy out - how do we create buzz over a personal blog?

Some ideas to start us out:

• Get arrested. Just kidding.
• Find a way to distinguish your blog. What’s your “unique selling proposition” to borrow a term from marketing?
• Write incredibly well. If you’re going to hold readers’ attention over your personal life, you’d best bring your A game, each and every single day. Impeccable grammar and spelling, perfect formatting, sharp and descriptive word choice, arc and development for each post’s “story.”
• Eye-catching design - visually and aesthetically pleasing, something sharp and unique, not your “top 10 Wordpress themes” unless you tweak it significantly…

What else can we do to turn a personal blog into a moneymaker? Post away!

personal blogs, monetizing personal blogs