Expert tips and services for building successful blogs
In case you haven’t heard yet, Mark Joyner from Simpleology has compiled a brand new multi-media course on blogging, and you can snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.
I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.
I’ve just come across a great list of 75 websites you can submit your blog to, created by Kevin Muldoon at Blogging Tips.
If you were waiting for a super-easy and extra-useful list of resources – your wait is over, because Kevin did an impressive job by not only compiling the list but also providing direct links to submit pages where possible.
BlogRush has finally arrived and is quickly picking up the pace! Looks like it’s developing rapidly, with many features promised to be released in the coming days.
If you’ve been waiting for increasing the amount of relevant traffic to your blog, then I suggest you join the BlogRush and start enjoying its benefits.
For those of you who haven’t heard about it, I’ve compiled a very quick how-to on BlogRush.
It’s a traffic attraction tool which helps you get relevant traffic. All the members of the BlogRush service place their blogs into certain categories, and by showing links to blogs in your category, you automatically earn points which will make other blogs show links to you.
There’s a lot of hype around BlogRush, and while some people absolutely love it, others have learned to hate it in a matter of just few days since the release. Visit the BlogRush website, watch the introductory video, and it will hopefully suggest how useful it will be for your blog. My opinion is that it’s worth a try. But whether it will be a huge success or not is still to be found out.
It’s been reported that some categories of BlogRush consist mostly of splogs, but it’s only a matter of time before BlogRush guys get rid of them – looks like they’re moving to a manual submission reviews pretty soon, which will rule out the possibility to abuse the service.
After your sign up to BlogRush, you’ll be asked to provide basic information about your blog – it’s name, main page link and the blog feed link. Then you’ll need to confirm the interest group your blog fits into most. The last step is for you to integrate a piece of BlogRush code into your sidebar, and it will result in looking something like this (browser-based readers of this blog can find the live BlogRush widget in my sidebar):
It’s currently a fixed design, but works on BlogRush flavours are already in progress – so pretty soon we’ll be able to customize the look of this widget to better suit our blogs.
Every time someone opens your blog, they’ll see the BlogRush widget with updated links to other blogs in the same interest group. By showing links to them, you earn points so that the BlogRush widgets on their pages will show links back to your blog.
Here is my personal list of the best reasons to join BlogRush:
Simply follow this BlogRush registration link, and answer all the questions (there won’t be many). You can add as many blogs as you like, and pick a relevant niche for each of them.
The next few days will definitely bring useful advices on optimizing your experience, and I’ll be sure to post the highlights up on this blog.
That’s it. Not sure how successful BlogRush will turn out, but seems to me it’s definitely worth a try! Let me know how you find it once you sign up.
Mark Wielgus from 45n5.com has built a great Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs, a manually populated list which is automatically updated with Google PareRank, Technorati and Alexa ranks.
For one, it’s a great source for new blogs to read. Being rather dynamic, this list serves as a benchmark and helps owners of such blogs see how they rank along (don’t want to use against here) each other!
Have a look at the Top 100, you’ll probably want to bookmark it!
I’d like to announce that as of this week, Perfect Blogger is a proud member of the Digital Folders Network.
Digital Folders is a very young project, and that’s part of the challenge that I like about it – being so close to the beginning of the network is always exciting as all the approaches and methods, changes and interactions are actively discussed and reworked to ensure the maximum usefulness of the participating blogs which keeping visitors and advertisers interested and happy.
If you’re interested in joining the network, please have a look at the current team. Both new bloggers (a new blog will be created and hosted for you) and established blogs are welcome.
For advertisement, read more on the advertise with us page.
Exciting news! Brian Clark at Copyblogger has just launched a copywriting contest with $10,000 in prizes:
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make an irresistible offer. That offer should be in the form of a landing page that catches the reader’s attention, barrels them down a slippery slide to your call to action, and results in that desired action. Hey, that’s what landing pages are all about, right?
With the three great judges: Seth Godin, Darren Rowse and Brian himself, I’m sure it will be challenging enough. And judging by the anticipation shown in previous week’s comments at Copyblogger, the competition is going to be tough.
Good luck to everyone who decides to participate!
Even if you don’t, be sure to stop by cause there will definitely be examples of really good copywriting submitted in the coming days (all entries to be submitted by May 21st, 2007).
Visit Brian’s announcement post for the full contest details.
Leo from Zen Habits has just posted a great article with some insights of the great success of his blog: 10 Ways I Got 4,700 Subscribers in Three Months.
I’ve been a regular reader of Zen Habits for quite sometime now, and so it gives me pleasure to see someone like Leo become successful. If you’re into personal development, do have a look around after you finish reading the article!
Here are the three most important keys to blogging success in my opinion:
For more, please read the full article. Thanks for sharing, Leo!
It’s about time I start explaining how to combine great plugins publicly available to get the best results with your blog. Thinking about it, I’ve decided to start a series of posts on the plugins I think you’ll greatly benefit from. Starting today, every week I will talk about some new plugin. At a weekly rate, I think we’ve got at least 2 months of exciting plugins to be discovered! :)
Intro
What is one of the most important things about blogs? Why, sharing the content, of course! If you’re struggling to find an easy way for your visitors to share your posts with others – look no more. Sociable is a great plugin that will help you give your visitors an option of sharing posts through almost any well-known social bookmarking website (61 website is supported as of Sociable 2.0).
Peter Harkins is the developer behind this plugin, although originally Sociable was written by Kirk Montgomery.
How it works
After each post of yours, you will see a toolbar similar to this:
When you hover your mouse pointer over a particular icon, it is shown in vivid colours and you get a pop-up note with the name of the website, like this:
When someone clicks one of these icons, a relevant social bookmarking website opens with a standard page for sharing a link to your post with others. If visitor is not logged in in a particular service, then username and password will be asked first. Login and sharing pages vary in their design and complexity, but Sociable takes care of the most important part of sharing links: it automatically generates URLs understood by social bookmarking websites, so that whenever a sharing page opens, it already has the proper URL of your post.
Configuring Sociable
Once you upload plugin into your WordPress plugins directory (Sociable has all its files in a separate directory), simply activate it from the Plugins management panel of your WordPress Admin section. After this, in Admin’s Options you’ll see a Sociable tab with configurable sections:
1) Websites to be represented on Sociable toolbar
Out of a menu of many sites, which looks like this:
… you’ll be able to select only the websites you would like to be offered.
As you can see from this illustration, you can simply tick the websites you like. Also, as the instruction suggests, you can drag-and-drop options to achieve the perfect order of icons to be shown on your Sociable toolbar.
2) Text to introduce the Sociable toolbar.
You can type any phrase you like (and yes, there’s a default one too) – whatever you think will motivate most your visitors to bookmark your posts.
3) Sociable visibility options
This is a group of tickbox options at the bottom of the screen, which allows you to precisely limit the visibility of Sociable plugin. For instance, that’s the place to disable Sociable for your main page or archives pages. My personal preference is to show Sociable toolbar for posts and pages with useful content only, so I disable the front page and archives options:
Conclusion
I think that’s all you need to know about this plugin. It’s definitely one of the must have plugins in my opinion. Give it a try and I’m sure you won’t regret it!
External links:
I've switched my Personal Development Ideas blog from greyspk.com domain to a new one – personaldevelopment.ie. It was a planned event and I do know what to expect from such a move – for instance, my Google rankings will inevitably drop and will be regained in 3-6 months, after most of my newly located pages will be indexed and available by Google search.
But SEOmoz have just posted a great article on Expectations and Best Practices for Moving to or Launching a New Domain. What I really liked about this article is not only the realistic expectations set for both scenarios, but also truly the best practices for achieving your goals.
Here are just some of the really good advices given in the article:
An excellent article, Rand! Thanks a lot for sharing!
It's Saturday again, and this means I have a few articles I'd like to share with you. I'm sure you will find them useful.
Darren Rowse has created a list of all the RSS advertising options available to you at this moment. As always, he adds his own opinion and short description which is the most valuable feature of his posts. Thanks, Darren! I think as soon as I gain enough readership for my feeds, I'll be definitely considering one of the options he listed.
Joe Hauckes from Working at Home on the Internet shares his thoughs on overly aggressive ads placement with blogs in his How To Lose A Visitor Before They Become A Reader article:
This particular Blog had an ad in every Hot Spot and a few of the Cooler Spots, and even some of the Spots that were Below Freezing. I understand the need to use advertisements for income and support of the site, but at least allow people to see the Name of the Blog without being slammed in the face by Flashing Banners.
I absolutely agree. You've probably noticed me using AdSense as well, but I try and not make it block the actual content. I strongly believe that any online project should provide tons of useful content before making any attempt to financially benefit from it through ads.
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