Category: Blogging

Looking for your feed numbers to hit some magic number before disclosing them?

Having trouble breaking through a particular milestone in feed numbers?

You can pretty easily boost your numbers by adding your feed to various free feed directories. The directories themselves will show up as subscribers in the numbers, and they’ll regularly request your feed to look for new content. The only thing they won’t do is read or comment on your posts, or buy anything through your links.

But you can’t have everything, right?

Feed directories also give your feed a wider exposure in the long-term, and may very well result in additional real live human readers on down the line. So a short-term boost in feed numbers now, with the potential of more real readers later. There’s not much of a downside to submitting your feed.

I found a list over at DotSauce.com of 55 Active RSS Directories you can use as a starting point for your feed submitting frenzy.

As a side note, the list was compiled in June of this year, and already some of the links are down. So you take your chances with free directories, but as I said above there’s no real downside to submitting.

A past post of mine talks about how to pick a blogging niche. When I first started this blog, I thought I was starting a niche blog.

After all, it’s about how to make money online, right? It isn’t a personal blog, so it must be a niche blog.

Months later, I find that my chosen niche is far too large.

For example, I write about affiliate marketing, internet marketing, MLM programs, and ways to get more traffic to your blog. After all, without traffic you won’t make money. Those various categories are loosely tied together by the idea of making money online. But someone interested in SEO might not be interested in the other topics. Someone interested in MLM might not care less about general affiliate marketing.

Part of being successful in a niche blog is to have a niche that is very focused.

A good niche will have its categories tightly tied together, such that a reader who lands on a post in one category will be interested in posts in other categories, because they’re all part of the same niche.

A niche blog can monetize in ways specific to that niche. For example, a blog about restoring a specific sort of car can link to online sources for parts for that particular car. The readership might be low, but they’re ultra-targeted for that product. A blog about restoring old cars in general has much more diluted monetization efforts, because they’re trying to serve an audience with wider interests.

So if your purpose starting a niche blog is to make money, make your niche as tightly focused as possible. If you have a related topic you find you want to write about, start another niche blog in the new niche and link to its posts from the other blog.

Laser focusing your niches should result in better conversion rates however you monetize your blog.

Well, sort of. Prija, over at Cash for Comments is also the person behind Blogging The Movie.

As part of the promotion for Blogging The Movie, he’ll be giving away a Scion TC. The idea is that such an outrageous giveaway will create a lot of buzz for the movie and get people excited about it.

The catch is that he needs you to pay for the car. He’s offering 500 sponsorships, at $100 each. For that you get two reviews of your blog, advertising on the car itself, a permanent link on the contest page, and a chance to be part of blogging history. The money goes to buy the car for the giveaway, another for his sister, and the rest to pay for the filming of Blogging the Movie.

I’ve got to give Prija credit, he doesn’t do anything halfway. Regardless of what you might think about helping to pay for his sister’s car, the $100 sponsorship isn’t way out of line for the two reviews and permanent link.

One question I had after reading the contest page was, how long will the domain ads be displayed on the cars? He can, perhaps, get his sister to leave hers on while she’s at college. The winner of the other car, though, probably will paint it as soon as they can afford to do so.

Anyway, go over to the contest page to read all about it.

With the semester just starting, I’m keeping pretty busy teaching my classes and getting into the swing of being back at work. But I found some time today to spend with my much neglected RSS reader (currently at about 80+ subscriptions), and thought I’d share some of the posts I ran across that caught my eye.

Over at Interesting Observations is a great post on Creating Content From Everyday Life. I’d been about to write something of the sort, but Pearl beat me to it! Which reminds me of a story…but that’s for another post.

The Kosher Cooking meta-Carnival over at Juggling Frogs is the most amazing compilation of related links I’ve seen in a long time. A warning, though, don’t click through unless you have some food handy, because you’ll come away hungry!

The post about Virtual Real Estate over at Cash For Comments is a nice way of looking at the Internet. When I was trying to get my mind around domaining, the buying and selling of domain names for profit, what finally made it all click for me was the notion that registering a domain name is like creating new real estate.

At a time when I’ve started to take the weekend off, Dosh Dosh has a post on 7 Easy Ways To Get More Weekend Traffic for Your Website. The article is written from the perspective of wanting to avoid the sales dip that comes with low traffic periods.

Enkay Blog has a nice article about Google’s recent change to its webmaster guidelines. For more info, go read Google Says “OK” To Some Link Schemes?.

I’ve been following Yaro Starak’s series on How To Launch A Membership Site with great interest. Yaro knows what he’s talking about, having launched Blog Mastermind, a successful membership site that helps you learn how to make money blogging.

If you use WordPress themes someone else has designed, or plugins, you should take a look at How To Find Hidden Links In Your Site. Court goes through it step by step to show you how to find out exactly what links are in your site, including the ones you may not be aware of.

Self Made Minds regularly has posts about buying websites. The latest talks about how the price for older establish websites is increasing. Read A good website for 10-12 times net income, not anymore for the details.

Shaun Low has a fun post on How To Use Video Games To Promote Your Site. So for anyone who needs an excuse to play video games, start a website and call it a “promotional effort”.

Some Make Money has a post called Noepets, Minimum Wage Blogging, and Making Money Online. It’s a must read for anyone thinking about getting into blogging for money.

Hope you enjoyed this stroll through my feed subscriptions. I’ll probably do this fairly regularly, since it gives me a good excuse to give the subscriptions some attention.

Most people are interested in the huge amounts of traffic you get by hitting the first page of Digg. JohnCow.com did a piece recently titled, Digg Made Easy. Sure, 75,000 visitors is pretty nice.

But what happens if nobody else diggs your site? You’re left out there with just a single digg, or maybe two, and what happens?

You’re in luck, because I have the traffic analytics to answer that question!

Recently, as part of my Win Me As A Slave Contest, two of the contestants dugg the contest page. And that was it…apparently nobody on Digg itself thought a blogger giving himself away in (figurative) bondage to promote his blog was digg worthy. Everyone’s so jaded these days!

Anyway, 18 people from Digg clicked through to the contest page when it was on the first page of upcoming news. 1 person clicked through when it was on page 3, 1 from page 8, one from page 11, and one from page 53. 2 clicked through on the Offbeat News page.

Those 2 diggs resulted in a total of 24 unique visitors to the blog. Only a couple of them didn’t bounce immediately (apparently they weren’t actually interested in reading anything…note to self, include a picture next time!) The two that didn’t bounce spent about 12 minutes total on the site and clicked on a couple of other posts.

There you have it. You may not get much traffic from one or two diggs, but you do get some traffic. And a couple of people might actually take the time to read your site!

This has gone around before, but I just read about it again over at Eruanna and thought some of you might be interested.

You can go to DNScoop.com to see how much your site is worth. It gives a breakdown of analysis, including page rank, and how much you could get for text links, and comes up with a total.

According to them, I could get $7 a month for a text link on this blog, and the total blog value is worth $740. The number of inbound links and indexed pages is a big factor for the valuation, since an older site of mine that’s PR3 but with only 4 inbound links is only worth $345.

It’ll be interesting to see what effect the next page rank update has on that value. You can also enter any web address and get a valuation. Squidoo.com is worth $6,583,600. Any takers?

A common problem with blogs these days is the huge amount of blog comment spam.

Typically, comment spam promotes sex sites. There’s also a software application out there that automatically posts comments hoping to get backlinks for SEO purposes. An unprotected blog would be overwhelmed with comment spam in short order.

This post is designed to help new bloggers setup their blog so that comment spam is completely eliminated. I’m focusing on WordPress here, but similar techniques may work on other blogging platforms.

Activate Akismet

The first step, once you install your WordPress blog, is to head over to WordPress.com and signup. You don’t want to create a blog, you just want to get your API key for WordPress.com services. The main service being Akismet, their anti-spam plugin. Akismet comes with WordPress, but you can’t use it without an API key.

Once you get your API key, go into the plugins tab in your WordPress dashboard and activate Akismet. You should now see Akismet Configuration as a secondary option in the plugins tab. Click it and enter your API key and click Update Options.

Setup Comment Moderation

Akismet will do a great job of filtering out comment spam. It won’t completely eliminate it, though. To prevent the 1% or so of comment spam that Akismet doesn’t catch from hitting your blog, go into the Options tab of your WordPress dashboard and choose the Discussion sub item.

I recommend setting email notifications so you get email when comments are made or held for moderation.  At minimum, get email when comments are held for moderation.

The last settings provides great protection while minimizing your moderation duties.  You’ll need to moderate everyone’s first comment, but after they’ve shown they can be trusted to not spam your blog, their comments are moderated right away. 

That’s the setting that lets you catch any spam that Akismet doesn’t catch.  When you get an email about moderating a comment, and the comment is clearly spam, don’t hesitate to mark it as spam.  That allows Akismet to get better at recognizing spam.

In that same screen, I also recommend setting the number of links to 2 for holding comments for moderation.  Your regular commentors will often post comments with single links to related websites.  If they post 2 or more, the comment will be held for moderation so you can make sure it’s okay.

A No Spam Blog

These settings help you to run a no spam blog.  You’ll be amazed at the quantity of spam that Akismet catches for you, especially as your blog becomes more popular.  You’ll also be amazed at the extraordinary lack of creativity blog spammers have as you see comment after comment that is all the same.

How about those of you who aren’t using WordPress?  What do you do to avoid comment spam?

I had a fairly detailed post on how to handle the duplicate content issue in your blog, and then realized that I hadn’t plugged the Bloggeries Forum lately.

Bloggeries is a very nice blog directory, and the forum is a great place for new bloggers to get advice. Rob, the admin, does reviews of blogs that get posted on his forum, and the forum itself draws a good amount of search engine traffic.

When you register, be sure to specify your blog’s feed in the control panel, so that every post you make will also contain a link to your latest blog post.

So I wrote that detailed post about duplicate content, and put it on the forum as Duplicate Content 101.

Go there to read the full post, and while you’re there stick around and visit!

I’m using my seldom updated personal blog as a test bed for PayPerPost.com, which I first mentioned exactly three months ago in one of my first posts, How to Make Money Blogging.

It’s taken that long to get my personal blog accepted by PayPerPost.

The first submission failed because the blog needed to be both at least 90 days old (it was), and have 20 posts in that 90 day period (it didn’t). It took them a week or so to notify me about the reason.

The second submission failed because I had Blogger setup to only display a single post on the home page, and apparently that’s against the PayPerPost rules. Again, it took a week or so for the notification.

The third submission worked after I changed a Blogger setting to show multiple posts on the home page. This time the approval happened in a day after submitting.

So, finally, three months after writing about it I’m ready to start testing PayPerPost. I’ll let you know how it goes.

As a bonus, though, once I complete ten offers on my personal blog, I’ll be able to add this blog to PayPerPost. I don’t intend to do paid posts here, but with the blog accepted I can participate in their get-paid-to-review-my-blog promotion, so you all could earn money for reviewing your favorite posts here.

First, though, I have to make it through ten offers.

Have you had any luck with paid offers on your blog, whether through PayPerPost.com or somewhere else?

When I talked about picking a blogging niche, one of the tips was to write an article a day about your niche before you even started your blog. This was to make sure you were interested enough in the topic to sustain daily articles.

Fast forward, your blog is now three or four months old. You have some readers, and if you’ve been keeping to a daily posting schedule you have over a hundred posts in your blog.

Is it still fun? Are you still excited about writing that daily post?

It’s easy to get burned out on the routine, especially after the initial glow has faded. Not only writing the posts, but networking on other blogs to keep yourself a part of the community. Here are some tips that have worked for me for keeping everything exciting and interesting in the long-term.

Join MyBlogLog.com

It’s a small thing, but having that widget in your sidebar that shows the MyBlogLog members who recently visited your blog is a great motivator. I like seeing the avatars people have chosen, and love it when a new one shows up. I immediately go out to their blog to take a look, and I leave a message in their MyBlogLog area thanking them for visiting.

While I use MyBlogLog.com, any social website that has a recent visitors widget would work.

Hold Contests

Contests help to break the routine for blog owners, and provide a great excuse to interact with readers in a different way than just writing posts. This latest comment contest has been great for all of that.

Remember Why You’re Blogging

Hopefully you have a reason why you’re blogging. When you start to feel your motivation dwindling, remember why you started blogging in the first place. For me, it was to help newcomers to Internet marketing avoid the typical traps and scams by providing honest reviews. While I’ve branched out into more than just reviews, it’s still the idea that the posts help people that keeps me motivated.

Keep a To Do List

This might sound odd, but I come up with ideas for posts all the time when I’m driving, when I’m in the shower, pretty much anytime I’m away from the computer. Then sometimes I sit down at the computer to write a post, and my mind is blank. So out comes the scrap of paper I’ve written the ideas on, and they go into an unpublished page in my blog that contains all my to do list ideas.

Any time I’m stuck for a post idea, I pull up that to do list page and write about one of the items on the list. The size of the list grows and shrinks, but there are always a good eight to ten items on the list.

Get Away from the Computer

I tend to spend late nights writing posts for the blog, and tweaking this and that. There comes a time when I’m much better off just going to bed and not trying to get that last bit done. When I stay beyond that point, I find myself staring at the screen for minutes at a time.

It’s far better to leave the computer and get some sleep, or relax, or have fun. Then come back to your blog re-energized.

Those are some of the things that work for me. How do you avoid blogging burnout?