Category: Site News

I’ve added the Blog Rush widget to the far right sidebar.

Blog Rush is, basically, a traffic exchange for blogs. We’d talked in the comments on a previous post about there being a market for something like this. You show the Blog Rush widget somewhere on your blog. Every time it shows, you get credits toward your posts appearing in the widget on someone else’s blog.

When you join Blog Rush, you specify a category for your blog. There are thirty some categories to choose from, and that category controls the blog posts that appear in your widget. So you’re earning credits from and showing your posts in blog that have similar topics. That’s a nice feature, since it means your gardening blog posts won’t be showing up on an automotive blog.

Unfortunately, there’s no “make money online” category. I tried Computers & Internet, Marketing, Career & Jobs, and Business. Business seemed to get the least irrelevant posts, so that’s what I ended up choosing. You can change your blog’s category in Blog Rush and then refresh your blog to see headlines in the new category.

Picking the right category is important. That way you’re more likely to attract interest from the people seeing your headlines, since they’re already reading a blog on a similar topic.

Blog Rush has just launched this weekend, so it’s a good time to get involved to start building up credits. There’s also a referral program of some sort, although the site is low on documentation right now. The rumor is that it’s a ten level referral tree, so you’ll earn credits from ten levels below you. Quite a lot of bloggers will be involved in this, so getting the widget on your blog early increases your chances of getting referrals to it through the widget.

What I like most about this is the set and forget nature of it. You don’t need to surf a traffic exchange, instead your normal blog visitors generate credits for you. You run the risk of losing some traffic to the widget, but that’s offset by the increased exposure you have on other people’s sites.

They do need to expand the category list a bit, to allow more highly targeted traffic, but that will no doubt come in time.

Click here to get started with Blog Rush.

For months now, the top commentators list has shown Betshopboy‘s entry together with someone else’s, with no link and no separator.

The problem was that some of his comments had a URL attached, and some didn’t, and that apparently confused the plugin. Since he recently got his own domain, I went through the database and updated all the comments to point to the new URL, and the top commentators list now displays correctly.

This isn’t really a permanent fix, though, since the next person who doesn’t put a URL in when they comment will still show up incorrectly. I haven’t quite figured out why, but suspect an incompatibility with the theme.

I’ll put some time into figuring that out when the problem comes up again.

Well, with the fall semester about to start, it was bound to happen.

I’m going to change the posting frequency of Online Opportunity. I’ve been a bit apprehensive about doing this, even though I’ve seen the need approaching, because of all the advice about maintaining a consistent posting schedule.

Well, I’ll still be consistent, just differently so.

My current plan is to keep daily postings throughout the week, but to take Saturday and Sunday evenings off. That will give me extra time to grade student assignments those weeks when I need to, and otherwise spend more time with my two-year old daughter when I don’t. I may pop on to moderate comments Saturday and Sunday while I’m checking email, but that’ll be about it.

In other site news, we’re approaching the four month milestone for the blog, on August 18th. I’m looking forward to another four months!

Well, we’ve had our first day at Online Opportunity without a major post.

I’m still not quite sure what happened. I had a post on the essential features of an autoresponder scheduled to be published at about 11PM EST on the 4th. It never made it. I’ve rescheduled that one for the 7th at about the same time, we’ll see if it makes it then.

I’ll watch more carefully tonight, and if the scheduled post doesn’t go out I’ll publish it manually.

Sorry for the brief intermission!

Well, Google has finally decided to admit that there are links to Online Opportunity, at least inside of their Webmaster Tools area.

I’d been annoyed at Google’s insistence that there were no links, when I knew very well that my link building efforts were moving steadily forward. Apparently Google doesn’t want to provide anyone with any reliable information on the number of backlinks a site has, just in case you can use that to reverse engineer their algorithm.

I’ve been building links through a variety of ways.

Directory submissions have been ongoing, half a dozen every couple of weeks. I add these slowly, because a quick jump in directory submissions tends to lower your search engine rankings rather than raise it. You can see my Directory Maximizer review for details of the service I use to make directory submissions. Since they have a 35 submission minimum, I submit to a range of sites I own, half a dozen directories for each site.

I’ve bought a few links here and there, for PR purposes, but those only early on and none lately. I’ve been meaning to find a few likely sites to purchase a link on to improve my search engine rankings, but haven’t done so yet. Suitable sites would be closely related to the topic of the blog, and have a page in place already with suitable anchor text. And, of course, be willing to sell a link in the body of the article.

A few Ezine articles have provided some backlinks to the main page of the blog, and some deep links to specific posts. I want to do more of this, and get articles distributed farther than just Ezine Articles.

I’ve also posted links in forums that use follow links, using my signature to get links to the main page of the blog. And of course various posts have been linked to from other blogs.

And, of course, every contest generally has a reward in it for linking to the site and the contest page. Every little bit helps.

As a result of the link building efforts, I rank in the top 3 for the keyword “online opportunity” without the quotes (with the quotes I’m #1, which is to be expected). The two other contenders are older sites, one a .gov and one a directory that requires backlinks to it. The exact position of the top 3 shifts over time as Google weights one or the other more highly.

For a three month old blog, I’m pretty happy with that. The blog doesn’t even rate for “make money online” yet, but I haven’t put much effort into link building for that keyword yet. Any sort of review scheme on that keyword will have to wait until the next PR update, since most blogs don’t value backlinks from blogs with lower PR than themselves (which I think is a mistake, but that’s a topic for another post).

Do you have any favorite link building schemes I’ve missed?

You may have noticed the I’ve Been Tagged band across the right side of the blog’s logo.

I don’t normally talk about directories I’ve added the blog to, considering that to be just normal SEO for the site. But the Tag Society is a bit of a different beast.

The Tag Society looks to keep a higher quality of website in its directory. In their own words,

We review each website so that the quality of the websites within this directory is kept at a higher level than many other web directories.

They also have a referral system in place. Your position in the directory is based on how many other websites you have referred. You get one listing point for every website you have referred, and the sites are listed in their categories by listing points.

While the goal of the Tag Society, to create a listing of quality sites, is a good one, I’m not crazy about the way their listings look. You can click here to see some of their listings. The little images that are presumably supposed to identify the website aren’t always meaningful. I always have to click through to the website to see what it actually is.

The Tag Society also requires a backlink in order to keep your listing points (the I’ve Been Tagged band counts as my backlink).

While a single directory listing doesn’t mean much in SEO terms, something as different as the Tag Society might become a nice traffic generator as it becomes popular with web surfers.

Click here to add your site, and don’t forget to tell them who sent you!

Some major and minor site updates.

Categories

I finally took the plunge and reworked my categories to be more manageable. One goal was to have a smaller category list for the sidebar. Another was to limit posts to being in only one category, for search engine optimization purposes. So I’ll put posts in the most appropriate category.

My apologies to everyone who received new pingbacks from old posts as I edited them to change the post categories.

Related Posts in Feed

I’ve added the add related posts to feed plugin, so that the feed will now have a list of related posts just like the post itself does. This should help feed subscribers who want to see an older article on the same topic, and will give me more backlinks if RSS thieves steal any posts.

Posting Frequency

I asked readers how many posts per day were too much earlier, and what I ended up deciding to do was to have one content post each day. A content post is one that is on topic and useful. This site update is not a content post.

So you’ll see one or two posts a day, with one of the posts being on topic.

That’s about it. Let me know what you think about the final list of categories.

You can now read Online Opportunity via a mobile device.

You’ll need to come to the website and click the BuzMe button to get started. My understanding is that after that, you’ll be able to read the blog’s feed on your mobile device without installing any additional software on your device. Get the latest from Online Opportunity while stuck in an elevator!

You’re supposed to be able to leave comments, too. I don’t have a mobile device that’ll work (I use a sadly old-fashioned cell phone for emergency use only), so I can’t test it. If anyone does, let me know how it works.

This technology is brought to us by BuzMob.com.

Look for advice for beginning bloggers on the Internet, and you’ll find lots. Some of it will be about posting regularly, preferrably daily. But if you can’t make daily, pick a frequency and stick with it.

I find myself having trouble limiting myself to daily posting. In fact, I’m usually not successful, having a couple of posts each day, sometimes more. I have so many ideas for post topics that it’s tough to not simply write them all and post them. I could use WordPress’ timestamp feature to write them all and post them daily over the next month, but I enjoy writing something each day. A month without doing so might get me out of the habit.

I’d like to get some feedback from the readers. Is it distracting to have multiple posts in a day? Has the number of posts been too much, or just right?

If you’re reading this through a feed, I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to come to the website and leave a comment. I try to ensure that the feed contains no more than two posts a day. Does that work for you or would you rather just have a single post each day?

Thanks for your feedback!

A few more site updates to note.

DoFollow plugin installed

I’ve now installed the DoFollow plugin, so commenter’s links will be followed by search engines. I’ve updated the comments guidelines to reflect the fact that using blatant keywords in your name is not allowed. Appropriate options for the name are either your name or your blog’s name. Also, comments that add nothing to the discussion won’t be approved (e.g. “Interesting”, or “Great post”).

I’ve set DoFollow on a 2-day delay, so the comments become follow comments after 2 days. That gives me time to delete any comments that do get through that are abusing the system. My goal here is to reward commenters who contribute.

Site Unavailable Plugin Installed

I’ve also installed the Site Unavailable plugin. When activated this plugin provides a simple “This site is down for routine maintenance” message to any one except admins. This solves a frequent problem I’ve had, where I want to update some aspect of the site that requires multiple steps, and until all the steps are finished the site may be broken. Users will now not see the site in the unfinished state, but get the site unavailable message instead.

So if you see that message, it just means I’m tinkering with the site. Check back later in the day to see what’s changed.

Signature Plugin Added

I’m now using a signature plugin and the RSS Signature plugin. I added these after Tyson’s post at Some Make Money was duplicated without proper attribution. This way, every post will have a link back here and a link to the blog’s RSS feed. If someone copies the post from the RSS, those links go along with it.

Categories

I’ve been trying to clean up the categories a bit. I didn’t have a clear idea of what categories I wanted when I started the blog, and want to cut down the number of categories a bit while keeping everything organized. So if you see a category that’s missing, that’s why.

This is a work in progress, so if you have suggestions on what categories I should get rid of, or which ones I need to add, let me know.

More Spam!

The blog has apparently become popular enough to attract spammers. So far Akismet is doing a wonderful job of blocking spam comments, and has only blocked one real comment.

Hope you’re enjoying the blog!