Archive for Blogging Tips

Blogrush is a new service by John Reese to generate targeted traffic for blogs. The service is free and many A-list bloggers (Andy Beard, DoshDosh ) have jumped onboard early to benefit from the tier referral system that will reward early adopters. 

Viral Effect

The tier system which is detailed below means that early adopters of the service are likely to be rewarded with a serious return of traffic for their involvement.

Your Traffic = 1:1 1st Generation Of Referrals = 1:1 2nd Generation Of Referrals = 1:1 3rd - 6th Generation Of Referrals = 1:4 7th - 10th Generation Of Referrals = 1:8

A baisc way of looking at the 1:1 ratio is that for every page hit you get for a page that has the widget on it, an article of yours will be displayed in someone elses widget once.

Widget

The widget (see footer) is nothing special, it is rather chunky and not customizable.…

In an environment rich with social media sites providing quick fix for our short attention spans what is an acceptable time for a visitor to spend on a Blog? If you don’t keep track of the statistics of your site Google Analytics will do nicely for tracking your site statistics.

The Bounce Rate (also called % Exit) is the percentage of visitors that leave your site without clicking any further links. So if they were sent to a certain page on your site by Google search, they looked at that page, then left.

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist states, “it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.” Source: Wiki

The Wiki goes on to explain that different types of pages should expect different bounce rates based on the type of traffic expected to visit that page.

1) Typical traffic expected on a…

Pre dating your blog posts is rather simple, basically, you set the date of a post your are publishing to a date that will bury your post in your blog archive. Why? Well the idea of having a pre dated post would be to get content onto your site that may be considered less desirable to your core readers, but some how still useful to your blog as a whole. Before I go too far here, I want to state that I have never done this, and have no plans to do it in the immediate future, however, I do see some merits in the idea, which is why I think it is worthy of a post.

Some situations where predating your posts may be a useful idea:

People who use search engines can’t spell

There is large growth on the Internet based around the idea that people can’t spell. There are sites…

 
Every blogger loves getting new comments. Comments are blogging gold. Comments create 2 way conversation. Sometimes they add to the content of your posts. They create a community around your blog. So how do you get more of them?

Ask Questions - Ask questions in the writing of your articles that may prompt readers to answer them in the comment section. 
Invite Comments - Have a small remark above your comment form inviting users to add to your topic. Ask readers to respond to points in the body of the article.
Interact With Comments Left - Make sure you answer questions left in your comments section. Thank people who leave thoughtful comments.
Be Open Ended - Try and leave areas of the topic uncovered, so that users can add their thoughts. Theoretically if you covered every possible aspect of a topic, there would be no points for readers to jump in and add.
Have A Comments Policy…

This article is a summary of some of the best articles I have read recently.

Steven Snell from Vandelay Design writes about 9 Essential Tools for Bloggers. This is a great article summarizing some key tools for bloggers. The article names the following list of tools, please visit the article for a full write up.

FeedBurner
Google Analytics
Del.icio.us
Bloglines RSS Reader
Windows Live Writer
Google Webmaster Tools
Page Speed Checker from Self SEO
Google Alerts
Link Checker from Technorati

Nate Whitehill writes about Using Free ebooks to Promote your Blog. The article suggests how using ebooks he can convert people who download the ebook into email subscribers. Costa also has a Cheap Ebook Download. Good stuff.

Tadeusz Szewczyk from SEO 2.0 writes about The Real Rules of Social Media Marketing. Tad writes good stuff, and this article is well worth reading if you want to improve how your content’s scores of social media sites. Tad has informed me that this article is a parody of Social…