Archive for August, 2007

I read this a while ago on the now closed blog Iffect.net. What he suggested was to view other blogs you read by clicking on existing links from your own blog as much as possible. So if their site is in your links or if they have left a comment on your blog, use those links to visit their site.

What is this madness you talk about?

What this does, is it will make your blog look as if you are referring extra traffic to the blog you are visiting. This isn’t always going to be practical, but I think it is a fairly smart way of promoting your blog to other blogs which you visit regularly. Most bloggers have some form of statistics installed on their blogs, and just adding that extra visit or two may make your blog stand out above others, and may earn you a mention in…

After reading an article on skelliewag.org called 10 steps to building a killer feed Collection I got to thinking about what sorts of extra feeds I should be subscribing to. The 10 points are listed below, but if this topic interests you I suggest you go and read the details of each point.

Subscribe to every good site you share a niche with
Subscribe to every bad site you share a niche with
Subscribe to quality sites linked to your niche, but not directly part of it
Subscribe to good lifehack and productivity blogs
Subscribe to good blogs about writing
Subscribe to content way out of your niche
Subscribe to sources of great writing
Subscribe to relevant search results in Digg and del.icio.us
Subscribe to the Digg front page
Subscribe to your own feed

The two points which I wanted to have a closer look at were 8 and 9. I guess…

As this blog is very new, I would like to share some of the start up knowledge that I have learnt, or wish that I had thought before I began. 21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch is also a very good article if you are thinking of starting a new blog and are looking for some advice.

Before launch

Get at least 5 posts ready

You really don’t want to launch a new blog with less than 5 posts. So you really need to get writing and and get some good content ready. If you have another blog, that has the odd post that relates to the topic of your new blog you could export those into the new blog.

Familiarize yourself with your blogging platform

Make sure you are comfortable with how things work, for example: how you send a track back, what your RSS feed is and how it works, how commenting…

Using Google with some basic knowledge on advanced searching techniques you can find some high quality free resources which have typically been set up as digg bait on social media sites. The results of using Google over searching through the sites individually are much better, try for yourself by typing some of the following terms.

To search popular posts on digg type the following into Google:

site:Digg.com Free Icons
site:Digg.com Free Vectors
site:Digg.com Free Clipart
site:Digg.com Free graphics

This also works for other social media sites:

site:stumbleupon.com Free graphics
site:del.icio.us free icons
site:reddit.com free icons

The “site:” part of the search term specifies the site that you are asking Google to search and the rest is the specific search you want it to look for. Good Luck.

I have been thinking about blog traffic quality a bit lately. There is definitely good quality traffic to a blog, and then there’s traffic which isn’t so good. What I mean by good traffic quality, is traffic that comes to the site and does more than just leave straight away. An example of typically poor quality traffic, is traffic from social bookmaking sites. Now don’t get me wrong, social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit are great, and they can bring in some serious traffic if you get dugg. However, if you analyze the traffic that typically comes in during a traffic burst from digg, most readers load the page that they came see, then they leave. If your blog is in the beginning stages like this one, you really need to look for high quality traffic, where users want to read more, and will ultimately contribute something to your blog.

An example…