Get Traffic from FriendFeed

I’ve been using FriendFeed for sometime now. (I can’t track when exactly.) But it is only today that I’m planning to use it for promoting my content and, perhaps, getting more networks. According to a few well known personalities in blogging and socialmedia (I won’t be giving names but I think some of you know who the heck these people are who takes FriendFeed as the holy grail of their blog traffic), FriendFeed can give your blogs and socialmedia profiles better exposure and following hence converting to traffic, which I can’t be sure if monetizable or not. Besides the potential to promote my blogs better, I think I’m giving FriendFeed a try because it enables me to follow people and see their select online activities that they chose to share with FriendFeed, which I can look at and see if it has any use for me. Also it provides a nifty search function which enables me to search through community exchanges which Google can barely provide.

FriendFeed, basically, for those who aren’t aware of it, is a social aggregator that sucks in all your activities across different socialmedia services. People can then see what you’re up to online through these collected services and decide if they subscribe and follow your feed. Also called “lifestreaming”, there have been a bunch of other sites that provide the same service of which BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are examples. What separates FriendFeed is that it provides better functionality than the rest, which enables you to manipulate a chaotic flood of noise into a filtered and organized content that’s more digestible.

Similar to other socialmedia sites out there, to get better exposure in FriendFeed’s system, you need to follow people and have followers as well. You need to have an active feed so that you won’t get buried by other’s feed. It’s often not difficult to get a constantly active feed since your activities from other sites, such as twitter or digg, will count inside friendfeed too, although you might want to do actual activity inside so that other users won’t brand you as a “poser”.

Ultimately, I’m writing this short FriendFeed article to get my profile some exposure. To see how much of a slacker online I’ve been lately, you can visit my FriendFeed profile. And maybe follow my feed so that I could also reciprocate. Additionally, I’m also looking at the possibility of having digg and stumble campaigns inside, although I’m not very optimistic that it will yield favorable results. Another benefit that I could think of from using FriendFeed is that I’ll be able to be updated with these people who’ve been inviting me in Twitter without necessarily joining Twitter. (I’m having second thoughts about this whole “microblogging phenomenon” because I see it as just another attention demanding tool that I have to struggle with.) It’s all just experimentation stage between me and Friendfeed for now. Hopefully, it’s going to be a worthwhile experience.

I know I haven’t covered FriendFeed enough to enlighten those who are new to it. I just don’t want to make any tips and/or recommendations to something that I haven’t tried and tested to a certain extent. If you want to know more about it, here’s a detailed guide on how to use FriendFeed. Alternatively, if you like to know more about how FriendFeed can enhance your web experience, here’s an article about FriendFeed’s great features.



technorati tags: friendfeed, socialmedia, traffic

Get More Comments, Technoratti Love, and StumbleUpon Exposure with these Links

Recently, I just installed the SezWho script for Entrecard. The adoption of this new entrecard program is basically to give my commenters, especially the entrecard users, a way to get some precious credits while commenting here. I’ll be ranking your comments, of course. I think using SezWho on your blog (through entrecard) will guarantee that you’ll get a comment or two for your blog (depends on how interesting your post is). I’m saying “a comment or two” because it’s not really the best way to get comments for your blog. If you really want to get comments, you have to focus on strategies and proven methods to make your readers speak up. I have a post just for that: How to Get Comments on Your New Blog.


One thing I don’t like about SezWho comment rating tool though is that it doesn’t provide any way for blogspot users to manipulate where exactly the ratings will nest in their blog. And it certainly affects how my blog template looks. Yes, you can customize how your stars and your profile size appear, but that’s just it. You can also manipulate its overall look through a long list of CSS codes which I have no idea where to start. I wish they can offer more ways for us to manipulate this tool much better. But if nothing changes within a month or two, I guess it’ll be bye-bye SezWho. For those who are not aware of it yet, here’s entrecard’s post about the SezWho and Entrecard Partnership.

Next in line is a blog carnival on recommendations for new and experienced bloggers about how they could increase the amount of visitors to their blogs with no financial investments. It’s Bringing More Traffic to Your Blog - July 18, 2008 - 6th Ed. There are about 43 articles for you to learn from about getting more traffic to your blog and an article from yours truly is one of it.

About the Technorati love, here’s Link Back Project. It’s basically a viral link train of the sort but it’s a whole blog dedicated for it (well, not so much now). You’ll get lots of backlinks to your blog when you participate which could fuel your Technorati ranking and authority. I’m just not sure about Alexa and Google; but theoretically all those incoming links should be able to make some significant changes in your blog stats, seriously. For more info about it just check out the project.

And then, here’s another Digg tool. It’s TINC. What it does is basically to show you who are digging your submissions and whose submissions you’re digging too. All you have to do is type your digg username in the search box provided and press enter. Results, which also include your latest ten submissions, will appear instantly. If you’re one of those who like to clean up their friends list if they’re digging your submissions or not, this tool is for you. But more than that, there’s another use for it which I’ll mention next.


You’ll be using TINC to integrate your Digg campaign to your StumbleUpon activity. Basically, what you’ll do is to find your digg friends in SU (StumbleUpon) then befriend them and/or vice versa. After that, use TINC to view your digg username’s results which you’ll then send to your SU friends via the send function of your SU toolbar. Your SU friends can then digg your post by clicking on the link from your TINC page and then head to your actual post and stumble it. It’s advisable to do this after you’ve submitted your/others’ content to Digg. Also, be sure to send it to your friends who know how Digg-TINC-StumbleUpon method works. Do you find my instructions hard to follow, maybe it’s best to get it straight from where I originally got the concept: Stumble Upon Digg Traffic.


technorati tags: technorati, stumbleupon, digg, comments

Naruto Shippuden – The Five Types of Blogging Chakra

In Naruto, ninjas were able to perform amazing feats that are beyond human because of their chakra. It’s something like a chi, or spiritual energy which ninjas can tap into to do special techniques. According to the story, a chakra is the resulting form of energy produced when Physical and Spiritual energies are mixed together within the body. Then to use it, Hand Seals are performed. This allows the user to expel it out the body in the form of an attack, and requires different Hand Seals for different attacks. Everyone is born with their chakra; but no body is born with the knowledge to use it to perform special attacks; except for a select few who can wield it through instinct or sheer will alone. To be able to use it, one should undergo rigorous and intensive ninja training.

Not all ninjas share the same type of chakra. There are five different types of chakra: Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, and Lighting. It’s like an affinity to the elements sort of thing. When you have the Fire type, you’ll be able to manipulate the fire element and everything associated with it with ease. The same goes with water type and the water element; and so on and so forth. Here comes the interesting part. Although subject to one’s ideas about blogging, I’d like to believe that your blogging energies share the same type of affinities as the chakras used in Naruto. Your blogging chakra separates you from the others and at the same time helps you execute blogging techniques that keep your blog alive. It’s very much debatable or discreditable depending on your discretion; but let’s just assume. What if it’s so?

The Five Types of Blogging Chakra:

Fire type – This chakra is associated with the fire element, hot, burning, and spreads easily. Bloggers using this type of energy are fond of creating conflagrations in the blogging world, also termed as “VIRAL”. They like their ideas to be the center of attention or at least gather up as much attention as possible so that it spreads and makes its mark. Bloggers who have fire type chakras have a very dominant character and/or likes to initiate things. They often spend their blogging time crafting ideas that will get people to participate thus resulting to popularity and more profit. Their schemes involve contests, memes, viral link trains, viral social media campaigns and other programs that require mass participation and link building. These bloggers can be seen at the forefront of the marketing and promotional end of the blogosphere. Although effective at making buzzes, they often run short at making in-depth analysis and evaluation of the things they’ve started.

Water type – Water is associated with calmness, free flowing force and change. Bloggers with this type of energy are resourceful and knowledgeable at what they do. They have an analytical sense of things and are gifted with the ability to purge deep into a subject matter like water that can carve canyons and polish rocks. They blog with direction and often excel in their niche. They don’t easily catch attention but are always found meandering here and there. They can easily adapt to change because they know their way around most of the time. Their power lies in observation, analysis, and quick intuition or feel of things. These types of bloggers are better at tweaking things and using their tools to their advantage. They make better SEO and SMO experts. They are great in terms of information but can easily be drowned out by hype and new things.

Earth type – Earth chakra can’t only be found in soil but includes everything that grows and walks on it such as the flora and fauna. Bloggers with earth chakra can be categorized as good writers as they have a very unique and colorful content. They have the ability to inspire other people to start new things. They can also be informative but not as specific and complete as the water types. Although not as detailed, they seem to impress and enchant people because of the richness of their descriptions and the way they talk to them. People can easily relate to them and are always approachable. They are humble and they fuel their blogs with their desire to maintain connection with their followers/friends and share their achievements. They make perfect nurturers of start-up bloggers and most bloggers find their blogs filled with opportunities such as guest posting, rewards, and contests where it’s always a win-win situation for all the participants (unlike the fire types which conducts competition in the very real sense of the term).

Wind type – Always playful and violent at times, that’s the rule of their game. The wind element can be as pleasant as summer breeze and as destructive as a storm. You can see lots of these wind type bloggers doing tech, humor and celebrity blogs. They are quick at catching buzzes and gossips that they are newsy at times. They appear less committed to their blogs but many of them are serious about it (it’s just hard to understand them). They like things to have a touch of humor or something fresh all the time which makes it light and easy to understand. They are not fund of making analysis and quick observations always pass as good information. They are good journalists and comedians. They are also good at making judgments based on popular sentiments. Bloggers with wind type chakra draw their powers from quick conversations and scoop information. They can manipulate the information they produce to make or break others. Often, they can be found dwelling among the top ranks of social bookmarking communities.

Lightning type – The most difficult type of chakra to possess. It’s fast like the wind and searing like fire. They are electrifying in some sense. They are highly unstable and it’s hard to predict a pattern out of them as they appear random at times. They’re always updated like the wind types when it comes to the new things about blogging, especially social medias. They appear newsy too but the only difference is that they are more willing to try what they’re looking into. They are keen to bite all forms of opportunity and will experiment all the time to come up with a result that’s somewhat viral in nature which resembles that of the fire types. They are hard workers but they value quantity over quality. They are good at making experiments and gathering information in a short period of time but their problem is they spread themselves too thinly in what they do resulting in poor quality. A lot of spammers and blog spams in social bookmarking sites are lightning types; they are remarkable at gaming things and doing black hat techniques because of their bold determination and quick thinking. The best lightning types are effective at making huge improvements in their stats in a short period of time. Common characteristics of lightning types are having many domains and multiple accounts in several social media sites.

Most ninjas in Naruto can only control one type of chakra but some possess two types of it while the legendary ones can possess more than two. In the blogging world, I think we’re capable of possessing up to three types but, more often than not, there’s always that dominant chakra that will really stand out above the rest. I’m also in a position to believe that the more experience you acquire in blogging, the better you are able to manipulate several of your chakras to your advantage hence better blogging techniques.

Admittedly, I see myself as a water type but not a lot of you know that I’m also maintaining other blogs where I use other types of chakra as well. Sometimes, I could see myself using wind chakra as I’m trying to keep myself updated with several things but I guess it’s not that significant to make me a wind type. How about you? What type/s of chakra do you think you possess?

If you find this post interesting, how about reading another of my post related to this: Naruto Games.

technorati tags: naruto, shippuden, chakra, blogging

How to Generate StumbleUpon Traffic to Your Site

Today I’m setting my eyes on StumbleUpon. I’ve been using it ever since I started this blog; but it hasn’t turned out any spectacular changes to my stats yet. One reason, perhaps, is my lack of activity in using it. But one thing I’m sure of is that it has the potential to benefit your site with lots of traffic if taken seriously. I’ve been receiving a trickle of visits from it (you can see it in my referral widget in the sidebar) by simply submitting my content and a few reviews and thumbs up of my favorite digests in my Google Reader. What more if I actively use it just like in Digg? For one thing I was able to get traffic via Digg whenever I submit my content and then employ the techniques I’ve been blabbing about sometime ago. It’s not great traffic like I said but it is steady traffic nonetheless.

A lot of articles have been published over the net about StumbleUpon traffic, and all of them agree on one thing; Digg traffic is nothing compared to StumbleUpon. I haven’t been a witness of that but the data they’ve gathered and the observations they were pointing out all make sense. StumbleUpon traffic lasts longer. StumbleUpon visitors browse more. StumbleUpon traffic has more potential to be converted into subscribers and more backlinks. Of course, how this traffic will react depends on how you present your content and appearance to them. The less crappy your content the more it will be appreciated, a given fact for every social media sites out there.

I think StumbleUpon presents a better platform for bloggers to market their content effectively without being too brutal about it like in Digg. I mean, if you want some good results from Digg, you have to spoon feed all your friends with requests to digg your submission before you can get it. In StumbleUpon, I think it doesn’t work too much like that. Also, SEO articles considered spam in Digg are well received and praised in StumbleUpon. To better understand what I’m talking about, we need to make a certain perspective on how StumbleUpon’s system works. After reading several resources about StumbleUpon, I came up with these:

1) StumbleUpon is not so much of a timely news site like Digg and Reddit. So even if your content is old as long as people can still appreciate it, it’s still going to be stumbled.
2) As long as people are still thumbing up your submission, even after it became popular, it still has the potential to make a comeback or generate further traffic at least.
3) StumbleUpon community is diverse, so more or less you’ll get people who’ll vote for your content besides your friends.
4) Votes and reviews count as recommendations for your submission. The more you receive the better exposure your submission will receive within the community.
5) Unique, useful, and appealing content gets more votes than ordinary ones.
6) Stumblers usually stumble through their toolbar which is affected in part by their network’s stumbles.
7) Top stumblers have more weight in their votes compared to the rest.

From here you’ll have a better view on how to strategize your way on making StumbleUpon traffic. I’m not sure if you’re seeing it the same way I do but for me everything boils down to your network and content, very much like Digg. The only difference is that there’re more opportunities for you to get exposure rather than in a one way system of voting.

How to get better exposure hence traffic from StumbleUpon?

There are four areas that you must focus on in order for your content to get better reception from Stumblers; the first impression, your content, your network, and your activity.

1) First Impression – Stumblers tend to look more than they read. So always make sure that you have a nice web design that doesn’t look too amateurish. Secondly, it shouldn’t be filled with all sorts of ads which is an eyesore for most web-savvy users. Always organize your layout so that your ads, widgets, and other web design features don’t intrude with the reading experience. Additionally, your site should load fast enough. Nobody wants to wait to see what you have to offer when they could get far better content by just skipping your eternally loading page. Another thing to give better emphasis is your headlines or post titles. I guess when it comes to social media sites; a catchy title is always catchy. Cleverly put titles that are good link baits work well in capturing attention.

2) Your Content – Well crafted content which shows how much effort has been placed in producing it are very much appreciated in SU. Write clearly and avoid too much rambling. Create articles with unique insights where people can learn something. Resource list and how to articles always get positive reactions. I have an article which deals about creating a great blog post to help you write one. Alternatively, contests and free stuffs, videos, humor, and bizarre things are also well received in SU.

3) Your Network – Basically, even how great your content is, it will have little exposure unless you have an effective network to back it up. Add friends to your profile. Of course, don’t just befriend people randomly. You can only have a maximum of 200 friends in SU so be careful about it. Get those people who share the same interest as yours. It will ensure that you get better response from them. You can start by befriending your fellow bloggers who are already in SU. Also, try looking at the reviews in SU of articles that you liked. You can access it through your toolbar (if you have one). Try befriending those who made their reviews or those who just voted. Whenever you submit your post to SU, you can send it to your SU friends to give it more votes and reviews (the send function is found in your toolbar as well). Of course, you don’t have to do this all the time because the more you do it the more it’ll be considered as spamming.

4) Your Activity – This will affect your authority as a stumbler and the exposure of your stumbles as well. When you’re active at stumbling and making reviews, more stumblers will recognize you and, perhaps, decide to follow you inside SU. Another benefit of being an active stumbler, although still improbable, is that it affects the weight of your stumbles. It’s like climbing the ladder to being a top stumbler, but of course that’s a very long way ahead. Ultimately, being active in SU will give you a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t inside the system which can be considered an edge when submitting your stuff. It’s like learning the right balance of these and those to get this and that.

These are the things that got me into rethinking my usage and traffic strategy in StumbleUpon. You can either believe me or not, but I believe it will not hurt you to give StumbleUpon a try. It’s a great tool to increase your traffic and could also help in your blog’s seo. The only factor that you need to add is your part as an active stumbler. By the way, if you’re looking for an SU friend who’d stumble your submission, you can start by befriending me. Here’s my SU profile: http://nepspeed82.stumbleupon.com/

Finally, here are some articles which you could read to help you incorporate StumbleUpon to your blogging:

The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Massive Traffic from StumbleUpon
A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website
How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide
A Definitive StumbleUpon Guide: Driving Traffic To Websites
StumbleUpon Optimization: Leveraging Photo Stumbles for More Web Traffic
UnOfficial StumbleUpon guide on how to get traffic


technorati tags: stumbleupon, boost traffic, social media

10 Simple Steps to Increase Your RSS Subscribers

1) Write quality content – People will not subscribe if all they’ll find in your blog are rants, the food you ate and more of your rants. Provide useful information that they could use for whatever it is they’re doing. The more they find your voice helpful, the more they will subscribe.

2) Write interesting content – Similarly, people will also subscribe if they could relate to your content and find it unique and interesting. People don’t only flock on useful things. They also tend to gather on things that appeal to them even if it’s not as useful.

3) Make catchy headlines – This is your article’s introduction. It’s the first impression that they’ll make of your post before they read it. If your titles are boring, that would instantly affect how they’ll receive the following lines of words you make. What do you think make girls buy glossy magazines just by looking at its cover? The same should also apply to your blog. Just convert buying into subscribing.

4) Make it easy to read – Make sure that your posts are easy on the eyes. Don’t publish research articles and blocks upon blocks of words that will intimidate the usual internet user suffering from attention deficit disorder. Use bullets to enumerate ideas. Use subheadings to break your train of thought in parts. And most importantly, use white spaces effectively. Don’t make one huge block of paragraph that’s hardly pleasing and difficult to read. It’s all about making it easy for the brain to digest your information quickly.

5) Get a clean and organized template – Imagine a non web-savvy internet user searching for answers in Google landing in your messy blog. How do you think he’ll browse what you have to offer and subscribe to your blog if you don’t have any links to your previous posts or it is buried 100 feet below your pile of useless widgets? Before anything else, your blog must serve its primary function which is to “SERVE YOUR CONTENT” and not to forecast your city’s weather or watch your neon ads. Emphasize your content, subscribe widgets, search box, categories, archives and anything else that will point to what your blog has to offer. Throw the rest away, or put them someplace where they can’t distract your potential subscribers.

6) Post regularly – Don’t write just when you feel like it. Also, don’t write like there’s no tomorrow (unless you’re a huge blogging institution). Determine your posting frequency like once or twice a day, thrice or twice a week, but never once a month. People hate it when you’re slacking; they also hate it when you’re too hyperactive that they can’t keep up with you. Just get the right blend. By posting regularly, the more people will know what they could expect from you. You’ll be keeping your current readers plus you’ll be pulling in new ones.

7) Stick to your niche – Keep posting relevant articles about your theme or topic. Your readers are expecting you to write more about it. By writing more about it, the more you become an expert on that field which leads to better posts which will lead further to more subscribers.

8) Make it easy to subscribe – Place your subscribe buttons where people can see them immediately. Offer email subscription for those who are not using feed readers. Additionally, ask your readers to subscribe to your blog through messages at the end of every post that tells them to consider subscribing to your updates. I’m not using it yet but I’m beginning to believe that they really work.

9) Tell the rest of the blogosphere about your blog – Tell more people about your blog not just your circle of friends. Make “useful” comments in other blogs to pull in readers from that blog. Join social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, etc and submit your posts. Join forums and use your blog url as your footer signature. Submit your rss feed to rss directories. Submit your blog to blog directories. It’s all about exposing your blog to a greater audience.

10) Use entrecard – I’m not sure if everyone will agree with me but by using entrecard you’re guaranteed to get your blog exposed to a lot of bloggers. And if you do the rest of the outlined tips from 1 to 8, it’s not impossible to convert a dropper into a subscriber. Just do your regular drops, and make “insightful comments” on the blogs you find interesting or relevant to your niche.

11) This is an extra tip which you might consider taking if you really want to boost your rss readers. Join blogcatalog and look for groups with threads that involve feed exchanges. Participate in the discussion and you’ll be guaranteed 20 or more new subscribers in a day. Of course, we all know that this is only for short term gratification. But it always depends on how you present your content to these people. If you’re proving yourself worth their attention, then by all means, why can’t they be your long term subscribers?

This post is my entry for

technorati tags: rss, subscribe, blog tips, group project

What It Takes to Create a Not so Killer but Highly Participated Blog Contest

These days, a lot of blogs are holding contests. It’s a trend that bloggers are quick to adopt because of the benefits they could get out of it. That’s because a blog contest is a powerful marketing tool to get blogs better exposure. Get more traffic, backlinks, readers, Technorati ranking, etc; it’s all about increasing blog stats to improve your blog’s authority.

What’s a blog contest?

A blog contest is just your usual online contest that is conducted by blogs to build publicity, recognition, and/or networks. A blog contest cannot be a contest without prizes. These prizes range from entrecard credits to real cash, gadgets, advertising spots, reviews, and other valuable online merchandise and services you could think of. Getting entries to win usually requires a participant to do some things that will benefit the contest host and his/her blog.

How do you benefit from holding blog contests?

Your blog can benefit from a contest in a lot of ways depending on your contest’s rules/mechanics and how well you promoted it; but generally, these are the areas where you’ll see much improvement and what most contest runners hope to improve after conducting it:

• More backlinks
• Increased Google, Technorati, and Alexa rankings
• More readers (subscribers and return visits)
• More traffic

How to Setup a Blog Contest?

Running a contest is not as easy as it looks. It requires a lot of effort to coordinate with everyone you want to get involved from its conception to the handing-over of prizes to the winners. If you’re planning of running one, here’s a guide which could help you.

There are 4 aspects to keep in mind when you decide to run a blog contest:

1. Your goals
2. The prizes
3. The game mechanics
4. Promotion

Goals

You don’t just hold a contest with nothing in mind. Think first of what you hope to achieve after conducting the contest, which will determine the competition’s success. It could be increasing your RSS subscribers, increasing your backlinks, increasing your stats, and any blog related increase you have in mind. Once you have your goals, you can then make better decisions around the competition format, prizes, promotion etc.

Prizes

Generally, the bigger your prizes are, the more buzz you’ll potentially make but it all depends on how much you’re willing to spend for your contest and how many sponsors you’ll get. If you’re not very experienced when it comes to marketing your ideas or is fairly new to blogging, it’s best to keep your prizes simple but useful.

Don’t give prizes that your contestants have no use for or you’ll end up with few or no participants at all. The best prizes are those relevant to your niche to hook up contestants that will better appreciate them. For many blogger contestants, entrecard credits are always a way to go, but you have to put the non-entrecarders into consideration as well. Cash is often the best form of prize but always try to come up with a considerably better value since a mere $10 will brand your contest as cheap. Regarding blogging tools, e-books, services, and other products; it’s best to put their monetary value as well so everyone will see how much they’re worth.

Besides the prizes for winners, a contest will get better reception if it has incentives for all the participants. Something like a free e-book, 10ec, or a linkback in the form of daily or weekly round up of participants for every contestant can be a start.

Before going all out with your prizes, always remember that giving away big ones is not a sure way to get your competition successful without knowing what sort of and how many response you might get. Also, if there’s shipping involved for the delivery of your prize, consider also the geographic constraints of such a medium. Try offering a prize equivalent like a PayPal deposit to encourage others to participate.

Rules of the game

Like said earlier, the mechanics on how to enter your competition always depend on what your goals are for holding one. You could require participants to comment in your post, subscribe to your feed through email, favorite your blog in Technorati, write about your contest, Stumble, or Digg before they could join your competition. It all depends on you. But more often than not, your participants are also as busy (or lazy) as you in their blogging careers, and if you make it hard for everyone to enter your competition, you’ll get less response from them. Keeping your contest requirements simple and quick will ensure more participation from your potential contestants.

From what I’ve been reading lately, contests that require people to write about it and its sponsors are getting less and less popularity unless it’s conducted by popular blogs with prizes that’s highly sought after. In most contests that I’ve seen so far, usually, the time consuming requirements to enter end up as optional means to get more entries to better a contestant’s odds of winning. Maybe it’s a better contest model that’s why more people do it, don’t you think?

Make your rules easy for you too. When you get a lot of entries that require you to sift through them all, moderate them, judge them etc. It can take a lot of time. Sometimes you might give them too many options to get entries that it becomes difficult for you to track their activities down. Think about things first like if there’s any way for you to automate processes or find others to help you with the logistics. Make it easy for both you and your contestants so everyone will benefit from it.
Another idea which you might want to incorporate in your contest is making it work around a certain theme or concept. Most of the successful and popular contests used unique ideas that presented something new or challenging to their readers. It adds a particular viral quality to your contest which let those participating spread the word in some way.

A reasonable time frame in which your contest will run is also important for your contest to be successful. Running a competition for a very long time often loses its momentum and presents problems especially to those who joined first. People believe that the longer your contest run, the more participants it will get. It’s wrong simply because there’s no guarantee that you’ll be getting interested parties to your contest through time alone. If you set the deadline to more than a month, within two to three weeks, your contest will start to get stale. What’s more is that your participants will start forgetting about your contest losing its element of fun and excitement. The ideal timeframe for you to conduct your contest, I believe, is within two to three weeks only; enough for the word to spread, for participants to join, and for sponsors to get their money’s worth.

Finally, write your rules clearly. Enumerate them and spell out the parameters to be qualified in the draw. It’s difficult when your contestants can’t understand what you want them to do. Inform them also about what they can expect from your contest if your winners will be picked subjectively (best submissions), or randomly (through some randomizer tool).

Promotion

For a contest to be successful, it needs many participants. And you’re in no way to get as many when you’re not promoting your contest effectively. Another purpose of your contest promotion is to pull in as many sponsors as possible to provide more and better prizes. Of course, it’s always up to you if you would require the help of sponsors or not.

If you’re interested in getting sponsors, try contacting your fellow bloggers first if they would be interested in becoming your contest sponsors. Tell them what’s in store for them if they become your sponsors like a free review, lots of backlinks, a month long spot in your ad spaces, etc. There’s no one who’ll better understand and relate to what you’re going through than them.

If your contest is really big or if it’s really promising (depends on how you see it), you can try contacting companies if they are willing to be sponsors. You have to put extra effort here in selling your blog’s nice stats and what your blog and your contest can offer to them. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get some of them to answer your plea.

When looking for sponsors, it’s best to conduct the search early on before you announce the call for contestants itself so that you can plan ahead how you’d run the contest based on the prizes you’ve managed to collect. You can start by making a post about your desire to find sponsors to grab the attention of those interested to offer their hand but you have no contact to. You can also try entrecard’s messaging system, as I’ve received countless offers of being a contest sponsor through it. And then there’s the traditional email, forums, and IM. Then there’s a tip I got from a blog contest article where “you can publish your request on sites like ProfNet” to find suitable sponsors for your contest.

To get more participants for your blog, you have to promote your contest to as many venues as possible. Start by promoting it in social media sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Twitter, BlogCatalog, etc. Invite your blogger contacts if they could join or help you spread the word, or try posting in forums, and commenting in other blogs. If your contest mechanics were made in such a way that your contest will be promoted easily across the blogosphere, then expect your call for participants to spread fast enough.

If you’ve noticed also, there are blogs and sites dedicated to announcing ongoing contests across the blogosphere. All you need to do is submit your contest to them. Sites like Contest Blogger, The Prize Blog, A.B.C. - About Blog Contests, and A Contest Blog are just a few examples. Please note that some contest submission sites require fees to get your contest listed or be featured.

Some bloggers resort to modifying their entrecard effectively to announce their ongoing contests. They create their 125 x 125 ads to do the announcing of their ongoing contest by including their best prize in big letters for everyone to see. Then they do frequent rounds of relentless dropping and relentless buying of advertising slots as well. Sometimes, also, they match it with changing their landing pages to the contest post they made. Others maximize what entrecard can offer by frequenting the entrecard forums and announce their contest there once a day.

These efforts you made to link back to your contest to promote it will not only get you your much needed participants but could also serve as backlinks that could help you in improving your rankings. So, don’t hesitate to make lots of them.

Other things to consider

When you’re expecting huge submissions for your contest, always make sure that you employ some form of system or methodology to track down your contestants activity. There’s nothing that could ruin your competition than having your contestants boycott you for being unfair just because you were unable to account for all of their submissions to enter the contest effectively.

Always correct the mistakes when you see one. Even how minimal it may appear, it has the potential to cause troubles in the flow of the contest especially if it accumulates.

Send your prizes as soon as possible. Don’t make your winners wait for half a year before they get their prize.

Live up to your word. If your deadline is after three weeks and the draw date on the next day, then make sure that when it comes your contestants will be able to see the results of your draws not later than two days after the draw date. Don’t change the rules all the time especially after the contest has already been started. That’s part of keeping up to your word. You should have overseen things right before you launched your contest.

Lastly, don’t raise your hopes up too much. Although there have been successful contests, there have also been failures. Don’t expect your blog to perform better afterwards. Although they have the capacity, running contests is not the only and perfect way to increase your blog’s stats and RSS feed count. Nonetheless, blog contests bring more fun and personality to your site and help build friendly relationships with your readers.

Oh yeah, one more thing. In case you're not that interested in holding contests yet, how about joining two of my recently sponsored contests:

• Pinay Mommy's Birthday Bash
• TheGermz.com's Birthday Contest

There's also another contest which I could've promoted along with these two but, unfortunately, this post didn't quite make it in time before its deadline. Anyways, here's it's link: Blog Me The Money's Summer Kickoff Contest.

technorati tags: blog contest, blog promotion, blog tips

Quick Links for Better Blogging

I haven’t finished my next post yet so I came up with these quick useful links which you could try. I hope you like it.

Comment Hunt – A Shareminer like customized Google search that helps you find High Page Rank DoFollow Blogs to get some quick links using blog comments.

A blogging and traffic tips carnival - July 2, 2008 – A carnival about blogging tips and generating more traffic. My post is included in the list. :)

Internet Marketing Carnival - Edition 6 – Another carnival about internet marketing and SEO. Same as the above. :) :)

Pinay Mommy’s Birthday Bash – Join Pinay Mommy’s Contest and get lots of entrecard credits and cash prizes.

Graham’s Entre-Digg – Graham Langdon, the founder of Entrecard, gives all entrecarders an opportunity to promote their blogs in entrecard. Hop in the “digg-train” and get more exposure from digg.



technorati tags: quick, links, blogging

Life is Colorful with $3,000 Worth of Prizes and 6000 ECs in Colourful Blog Anniversary Contest

I know this post is long overdue because Life is Colourful invited me to join this contest about 15 to 20 days ago (I can’t remember exactly as I’ve already deleted the message). Anyways, I guess it’s not yet too late to join since the deadline for submission of entries will still be on the 14th of July.

Life is Colourful is a blog about making money online with very diverse topics about blogging ranging from affiliate marketing, article writing, blogging tips, health, to life. Lately, they’ve decided to hold a contest as part of their blog’s first anniversary with prizes worth $3,000 and 6000 entrecard credits. That’s one hefty amount of prize if you ask me. It’s still the 2nd of July so you still have some more time to join if you’re interested.

Here’s the list of prizes Life is Colourful promises to give its contest winners:

Colourful Blog Anniversary Contest - Win Over $3000 in Cash and Prizes
Blogging Tools & Products, Webmaster Resources, Memberships

- A product to help you making money: Super Affiliate Blogger and Wordpress Adsense Theme by Easywordpress ($194 value - 2 x $97)
- Two-year subscription to GoStats Pro [One of the web’s leading traffic stats providers] by GoStats ($180 value - 2 x $90)
- Five One-Year VIP Memberships to CreateBanner.com by Xavier Media ($175 value - 5 x $35)
- 100,000 [One hundred thousand] Tnx points by Tnx.net ($125 value)
- Two One-Hour Consultation Sessions by TheUniversiryKid ($100 value - 2 x $50)
- "Building An Internet Business From Scratch - Making $1,000 After 24 Hours" DVD by Marcus Hochstadt ($100 value)
- Two copies of Direct Response Templates for Salesletters and Salesstickies by Carl "Kidblogger" ($74 - 2 x $37)
- Two Copies of "TO DO List Software" by Fruitfultime ($60 value - 2 x $30)
- One 30 minutes of blog consultation by The Net Fool ($40 value)
- Blog Bundle Pack 2 [Specially designed for Bloggers] by 1 Cool File ($20 value)

Cash Prizes

- $30 cash prize by Capitalist Guide ($30 value)
- $25 cash prize by Autoline Reviews ($25 value)
- $25 cash prize by Health and Fitness Center ($25 value)
- $20 cash prize by Leisa Watkins ($20 value)
- $20 cash prize by Travel Tips ($20 value)
- $20 cash prize by New Homes Section ($20 value)
- $20 cash prize by Social Networking Sites ($20 value)
- $20 cash prize by Quality Vista ($20 value)

All prizes shall be given through Paypal

Books and eBooks

- Three copies of "Work Smart, Get Rich!" eBook Donated by The Net Fool ($45 value - 3 x $15)
- Autographed Copy of "The 5 Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me About Life and Wealth" book by Leisa Watkins

Each participant of this contest will get dollar eBook from TheUniversiryKid along with his consultation time.

Advertising Space

- Four 3-months textlink at Life is Colourful ($360 value - 4 x $90)
- Four 3-months textlink at Finance Blog ($180 value - 4 x $45)
- One Greenland Country Ad Space at Buy a Nation ($125 value)
- Full Set of Advertising Space by Roman Dock ($125 value)
Two 125 x 125 ($20 value - 2 x $10)
Three 468x60 ($30 value - 3 x $10)
Five Textlinks ($50 value - 5 x $10)
One Full Review ($25 value)
- Four 3-months 125 x 125 banner slots at Article Rewrite ($120 value)
- Ten Featured Links at Piggy Web Directory ($100 value)
- Ten Textlinks worth $10 bid each at BYDY Link Bid Directory ($100 value)
- Four Express Link Submissions Forever at Mad Mouse Directory ($51.80 value - 4 x $12.95)
- Two Featured Link Submissions for One year at Mad Mouse Directory ($49.90 value - 2 x $24.95)
- One 125 x 125 at Winning the Web by Gyutae Park ($50 value)
- One Full Blog Review at Life is Colourful ($50 value)
- Five Featured Links at Directories.bz ($50 value) * These apply to directory submissions only, Flippable.
- Three Featured Links for Six Months at Massive Net Links Directory ($30 value)
- Three Featured Links for Six Months at Internet Stromer Directory ($30 value)
- Three Featured Links for Six Months at Internet Ahead Directory ($30 value)
- One 125 x 125 at Blogging Fingers ($30 value)
- One 125 x 125 at New Homes Section ($30 value)
- One 125 x 125 at Sueblimely ($30 value)
- One 125 x 125 at Life is Colourful ($30 value)
- One Full Blog Review at Finance Blog ($30 value) * These apply to Finance service reviews, Flippable.
- One 125 x 125 at Dot Com Mogul ($25 value)
- Two 125 x 125 at Vincent ($20 value)
- One Full Blog Review at Lightnings Blog World (value $20)
- One 125 x 125 at The WWW Blog ($15 value)

Entrecard Credits

- 2500 Entrecard Credits by Life is Colourful
- 2000 Entrecard Credits by Sueblimely
- 1000 Entrecard Credits by Lightning Blog World
- 500 Entrecard Credits by Vincent

Total: 6,000

I’m really after the ECs and advertising space that’s why I joined. How about you? What do you want to win? Join now if you haven’t yet. This is also an opportunity to improve some aspects of your blog. Hmmm, this gave me an idea for my next post.

For more details about joining the contest you can visit Colourful Blog Anniversary Contest.


technorati tags: colorful, contest, prizes

Track your Blog Performance, Make Friends, and Make Money Online with SocialSpark

I recently joined SocialSpark because of all the buzz about it in every blog I go, pretty much like with Entrecard back in January. SocialSpark and Pay Per Post are sister companies both owned by Izea; but a lot of bloggers are saying that it’s a lot easier to get your blog approved in SocialSpark compared to Pay Per Post. One interesting feature that SocialSpark boasts is its integration of social networking to the usual sponsored post program. SocialSpark also promises about creating unity between advertisers and bloggers. This I have yet to see; maybe when there will be more advertisers and competition of being first among bloggers isn’t that much of an issue. If you’re one of the small bloggers and has an interest in earning bucks every now and then through paid posts, give SocialSpark a try and see if it works for you.

Here's their code of ethics:
-100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure
-100% Transparency
-100% Real Opinions
-100% Search Engine Friendly

Make Friends

SocialSpark gives you the ability to make friends with like minded bloggers who have also participated in their program. You can view their profile pages, rate them via a prop (thumbs up) or a drop (thumbs down), send them private messages or leave a comment in their profiles, and make friend requests to get in touch with them or just boast that you’ve made hundreds of networks inside SocialSpark.

Make Money

Generally you could earn something in between $5 to $30 from SocialSpark depending on the how much the advertiser can offer. The price fluctuates from time to time depending on the number of bloggers who will participate for that opportunity and, perhaps, the overall rank of your blog (traffic, pageviews, Alexa, Google, and ROI). Also there will be some offers where you won’t be qualified to take based on your blog’s ranking and reach.

There are two ways to earn money in SocialSpark: via blog sponsorship and sponsored posts. In blog sponsorship, the advertiser pays you an amount of money for each day that their ad shows up in your blog. I haven’t personally seen how it actually worked but they provide a screenshot of how it’s supposed to look like in your blog. Imagine Adbrite interstitials, I guess that’s how it feels like. Once you’ve opted to try blog sponsorships, you can choose how many days an ad shows up in your blog.

The other one is through sponsored posts. You are paid for writing a post about a particular product. The advertisers often require that you write words not less than a particular amount or you won’t be paid at all. Sometimes, they would also require screenshots or images along with your post. This post you’re reading is a sponsored post.

Although you won’t earn anything from this feature, I think it’s better to include it because it was designed to help bloggers avoid “blogger’s block” by giving them ideas to write about. There’s this feature called sparks. They are free opportunities placed by both bloggers and advertisers and are taken without pay. Sparks are a great way to interact with other bloggers and begin to create a community within SocialSpark.

View Analytics

SocialSpark utilizes IZEA’s own RealRank. It enables both advertisers and bloggers to view the specs of each blog right on the SocialSpark website. Izea’s Analytics include information such as page views, visitors, RealRank average, Alexa rank, and Google PageRank. You can use the analytics to check your blog’s performance, and at the same time a competitor’s performance as well.

Entrecard Purging

Today, I received an email about entrecard purging all accounts from its system who are using quick drop pages. What's a quick drop page, you may ask? Entrecard defined it as following:

Quick drop pages are single pages with your Entrecard widget, made to load quickly and display your widget and not much else. Many quick drop pages have just a widget, and maybe an ad or some other type of widget.

If you have a quick drop page, remove it now or suffer being removed from entrecard. This is just a quick reminder for everyone using entrecard. Check the email you registered to Entrecard or Entrecard's blog for more information about this.


technorati tags: entrecard, quick drop, purging

Increase Your Subscriber Count and More by Joining Blog Carnivals

I’ve been joining blog carnivals recently, and right now my article is being featured in one: How to Make Money Doing What You Love Carnival. Do you know why? Blog Carnivals have the power to help your blog in many ways. It will give your blog exposure to more audience, new subscribers, traffic, that much needed deep link to one of your articles, and increased ranking in both Google and Technorati. Of course, how it will affect your blog depends on how much time and effort you invest in it. To learn exactly how to get more from blog carnivals, just read on.

What’s a blog carnival?

To those who haven’t heard of the term yet, a blog carnival is a particular kind of blog community where permalinks (or links) to posts of blogs are submitted, collected, and published at a specific date. The posts submitted are usually based on a certain topic or theme. The host of a carnival publishes the collected links with its title, author and description in his/her blog on the specified date of its publishing (usually the deadline of submissions). To get a better idea of what a blog carnival is really about, take a look at blog carnival’s FAQs.

How to join blog carnivals?

Blog carnivals don’t require registration. All you need is a link to the post that you have published already and an email where you’ll receive a form that says you’ve submitted a post to this carnival and the details of the said carnival.

blog carnival email receipt

The only thing you have to do is fill-up the information needed for your link to be published properly.

blog carnival form

One thing to remember also is to submit your desired post/s to the appropriate carnival to avoid having your submission declined. From what I’ve read, since I’m fairly new to this thing, there are some carnivals that are strict about their submission policies and stuff so there will be times when your submissions will be revoked for some valid reasons. But I believe there will be more carnivals that’ll gladly accept your submissions, so don’t lose heart.

You can browse for the right carnival for your blog posts in Blog Carnival. Alternatively, if you’re lucky to spot one, some blogs announce a call for submissions to their upcoming carnival edition. Usually, they provide a link to where you can submit your posts. If not, you can still find it in Blog Carnival through patient browsing of their numerous carnivals, which you could sort by categories and date of editions by the way.

Benefits from joining a blog carnival

One way backlinks – Blog carnivals are made of compiled lists of link submissions from different bloggers; so, definitely, once it’s published, a backlink to your article (or should I call deep link) will be there. One way backlinks, most importantly deep links, will greatly benefit your blog in terms of search engine, Technorati, and Alexa rankings.

Boost in rankings – a backlink coming from one carnival is like a touch of gold for you simply because search engines, Technorati, and Alexa rank your blog based on the number of quality sites linking to it, the higher the PR the better. Now, most of these guys holding and hosting carnivals have decent PRs too. What do you think will happen if you’ve made lots of submissions to different carnivals?

Traffic – I’d like to say “boost your traffic” but basically it all depends on the marketing and popularity of the carnival plus your post headline’s catchiness which will determine how much traffic your blog will receive. Most definitely, though, you’ll be guaranteed traffic even how small it is once your link comes up in the carnival. To guarantee the carnival’s success, help promote it by submitting it to social media sites, e-mailing your friends and contacts about it, and promoting it in your blog as well.

One interesting aspect about blog carnivals is that, like other blog posts, they are indexed by search engines. Now, depending on their link popularity and keyword optimization, they will show up in search results every now and then. What this means is that they can still provide traffic even after they were published. However, it will not be as many as the week it was published.

More subscribers – Generally, traffic coming from the carnival are those who got curious about your submission and decided to take a peek at what you have to offer. If they like what they found in your blog, then it’s guaranteed that they will subscribe or get back every now and then to check on your blog. To take advantage of this traffic, make it easy for them to subscribe and always make quality posts as much as possible.

Tips on maximizing your benefits from your submission

1) Submit to the right carnival. It should be obvious that if your post is about blogging, submit it to blogging related carnivals. Submitting it to cooking carnivals will not get it posted. Also, the more appropriate the carnival to your post, the more its audience will find your blog interesting.

2) Submit to carnivals at least once a week. Your steady submissions will give you better traffic from all of the carnivals you’ve participated in and better rankings because of them also. Take advantage of this free marketing tool to expose your unknown blog to a wider set of audience.

3) Submit your best or pillar articles. It’s always up to you, but if you want to get better impression and acceptance from other people, it’s normal to always put your best foot forward. By submitting your masterpieces, they will get a better idea of what kind of content they can expect from you and what you’re interested in blogging about.

4) Get one catchy title. You should have done this early on when you published your post, but in case you haven’t it’s best to change it in a way that other people will more likely click it. You might not see its text field in the submission form early on, but after providing your permalink it will appear containing your post’s original title. You can manipulate it from here. Of course, your choices of catchy words should revolve around what your post is all about. Don’t make up “über” titles that’re completely different from what’s originally provided. Like in well-known social-bookmarking sites like digg, reddit, and stumbleupon, people will get mad at you if you do that.

5) Provide a short summary for your post. Hosts always include the summary of the post you’re submitting along with your link. This summary will provide your potential readers what you could offer in your post. It’s always better to provide one so you can use it to market your post effectively.

6) Get your posts in early. I got the idea from this article; “Best Practices for Driving Traffic with Blog Carnivals”. Usually, carnival hosts will post in the order that they receive the submissions. This will give you a fair advantage since the earlier your submission goes in, the higher your link will be positioned in the list, and thus more people would possibly pay attention and click it. Alternatively, hosts will be more likely to read and review ( and give a thumbs up) your post if it's in early as compared to the posts they receive an hour before the carnival deadline.

7) Promote the blog carnival. It’s a lesser known rule of thumb in blogging to promote those sites that link to you except spam. Why? Because the more these sites or pages get popular, the more PR juice and visitors you could get from it. Blog carnivals are one of those sites. You can start by sending it to digg, stumbleupon, reddit, delicious, and several other social bookmarking sites. Post about it in your blog. E-mail it to your contacts and friends. It all depends on where you can promote it effectively.

8) Make it easy to subscribe to your blog. Turn your visitors into regular readers by placing your subscribe button where they can immediately see it. You can also optimize your theme where they can see your best posts to better convince them to subscribe to your blog.

That’s it. Blog carnivals can do a lot to your blog, especially if you’re a beginner or interested in making more traffic. Only, you need to be focused and serious about it and, of course, pay attention to these tips and/or learn your way to better blog carnival submissions.



technorati tags: blog carnival, blogging, tips

Naruto Games plus Naruto’s Guide to Effective Blogging Equals… Naruto Optimization?

Hmmm, what a title? For those who are wondering why, I’m just trying my hands on keyword experimentations to see if it can boost my traffic from search engines. For this post I’m setting my eyes on the naruto keyword, naruto games specifically. Naruto’s climb to being one of the highly searched keyword in the web started picking momentum by 2006, perhaps fueled by its story line which gets better and better as the characters grow up and its ever growing fan base as well. Obviously, since the keyword is too saturated with competition, which could mean a pretty tough niche to break into, I decided to settle down to naruto games which has fewer strings pulling on it but can still rake in 2,000 plus searches per day. Along with naruto games, keyphrases such as naruto online games, online naruto games, download naruto games, and free online naruto games also generate some substantial search volumes. I just hope that this post will eventually manage to squeeze into a better spot in the search engine results one day.

Naruto's Keyword Trend

For those who are living in another dimension and aren’t aware of the “naruto hype” going on these days, Naruto is a story of a young ninja, named Naruto, who has a nine tailed demon fox, called Kyuubi, sealed inside him to save the village of Konohagakure from its destructive powers. Having the nine tailed demon trapped inside him, Naruto possessed immense powers ninjas of his age don’t have. Powerful as he is, the draw back of this gift was being ostracized by most of the villagers because of the beast inside him, a curse which he eventually managed to overcome because of his boisterous and cheerful personality. The story revolves around the adventures and misadventures of the main protagonist, enemies that get more and more powerful each time, and new ninja techniques which get cooler and cooler as episodes get concluded. If you want to know more about Naruto please visit his Wikipedia page.

Being a Naruto fan myself, I believe one can pick-up a lot of lessons from him which you could apply in life, as well as blogging. To begin with, Naruto is a simple character, very predictable, but true to his intentions and goals. You could see through him because of his transparent character. Did I strike any chord about blogging? As homage to Naruto’s immense nine-tailed chakra, I came up with a list of 9 lessons from the anime series which could seriously help you in your path to being a better blogger. I’ll call it the “nine jutsus of blogging”. Here it goes:

1) Simplicity and humility

According to his creator, Masashi Kishimoto, Uzumaki Naruto was purposely created as a simple and straight forward character because he is not very much interested in smarter and sophisticated heroes. Being that, it’s easier for fans to understand and, perhaps, relate to him. Besides being simple, Naruto is also humble in his ways. He might be boisterous, but he never boasted about what he has achieved or looked down on his fellow ninjas based on their shortcomings because he understood that he has greater shortcomings himself.

As a blogger, I believe there’s an art of keeping complicated things simple. It’s difficult but we should strive to perfect it for our readers. It’s keeping things informal, conversational, and straight to the point. That way information can be a lot easier to digest for most readers. Also, keeping your blogging ways simple will make your blogging life a lot less complicated. In the same way, humility should be an integral part of blogging. There’s nothing people avoid the most than those who are unapproachable and extremely full of themselves. Always keep your feet firmly on the ground. Additionally, talking to people about themselves and what they were looking for is always better than focusing about you and you alone.

2) Dream big

Naruto dreams of being a Hokage, or the leader and protector, of their village. He strives each day to be one and never loses it. As a blogger, we should always think and dream big because that will shape our actions. It’s your reason why you started this whole blogging thing so hold on to it and never let go. Strive each day to follow that dream and little by little you’ll be closer than what you think.

3) Determination

When it comes to protecting his friends and those important to him, the straightforward Naruto will never give up no matter what it takes, even if it means sacrificing his life. We’re not warrior ninjas so we don’t have to sacrifice our lives; but it doesn’t mean we won’t give the obstacles that go our way one hefty fight. If you want success in anything, it’s always important to be determined about it. Iron determination is what differentiates those at the top from the rest. Without it, I doubt that you’ll still be blogging after a few months or a year.

4) Be friendly

I guess this is important everywhere you go. In blogging, our version of friendliness is through connecting with our fellow bloggers and our generous linking to other sites. Of course, being nice to our fellow bloggers is also part of being friendly. Naruto’s cheerful qualities helped him make lots of friends not only in his village but in other territories as well. And it is through his friends that he draws strength, courage, and the determination to be better every time. We as bloggers, on the other hand, have better means of connecting with other bloggers and making friends with them rather than fighting enemies all day. By being friendly, you’ll get more followers, learn new things, and meet people whom you could run to if you need help on something about blogging.

5) Nothing compares hard work

Although lazy most of the time, Naruto works hard when it comes to training and learning new ninja skills. Through the guidance of his teachers he is able to perfect some ninja techniques that no body else can do like his massive shadow clone technique (kage bunshin no jutsu). If you work hard on something, it will show afterwards. Oftentimes, hard work exceeds those which are done in a short time just for the heck of producing one. You could see it in the quality and detail of the work. Blogging will always be better if it’s out of hard work. Copy and paste blog scrapers are always doomed to fail. Come out with something unique through hard work and the rewards will be better.

6) Be resourceful

Naruto is not a genius but he is resourceful. If he can’t achieve something through the tried and tested way, he compensates by finding other ways of doing it. The same applies to us. More often than not, you’ll find things not working your way no matter how hard you try. It is during these circumstances that you must be able to reinvent things to make it work your way. Maybe it’s your limited time for blogging, your contests, or your blogging projects, etc. What matters is that you discover a way to overcome set backs and make things work to your advantage.

7) Always be positive

Always hope for the best, that’s the skill no ninja in Konoha have seen except for Naruto. They are always calculating and fearing of the evil things that would come after. But for Naruto, the world is what you make of it. He always hopes that it will be better and he works hard to make it happen. By being positive, it’s easier to work because everything seems lighter and manageable. Additionally, by being positive, you help others because, mysteriously, a positive attitude can easily infect others. People respond better to positive thoughts than negative ones.

8) Learn from your mistakes

You’ve heard it everywhere. Guess what, you’ll also get it here; “learn from your mistakes”. Naruto is a hard-headed brat. Being such, he often ends up in trouble, but it is through these troubles that he learns what works and what doesn’t. He learns that rasengan works only when it gets into contact with its target, so obviously he had to make diversionary tactics to trap his enemy into making contact with the rasengan before releasing it. We as bloggers often commit mistakes, don’t fear if you did. Accept and correct it. Don’t be a complete “noob” who refuses to learn and be corrected. By learning from your mistakes, you become better every time you rise up.

9) Strive to become better

Rise up from your old self. Become better. Naruto’s enemies get stronger and stronger every passing episode. If he isn’t getting better each time, he’d be dead before the story ends. Every time he learns a new technique, acquire new friendship, learn important information and work cooperatively with his team mates, he becomes better than his former rebellious brat self. What we have in our reality is the same. Everytime you move forward, your problems also move forward with you, it’s a never ending cycle. That’s why the saying; “With great power comes great responsibility” was conceived in the first place. Expect more headaches and troubles in your blogging path; you’ll be facing more and more as you climb to the top. But you should not worry if you’re striving to be better each time.

Okay, that’s it. Did you like it? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below. And yes, for those who got here because of the naruto games, I haven’t forgotten about you. Below are the links of the best online naruto games I found through my searches. Trust me, I’ve read their reviews.

The Ninja RPG – The best so far.
Naruto Arena – Some good reviews but many say it’s complicated. Also their servers seem down for the moment.
Naruto Flash Games – Past time games in flash.

Did you like this post? How about I offer you another serving of Naruto blogging one more time? Here's the next Naruto post in case you're interested: Naruto Shippuden.

technorati tags: naruto, games, guide, blog tips

How to Boost Your Blog Traffic Using Keywords

Basically, keywords can do a lot of magic to your blog in terms of traffic through search engines. It is because search engines understand your blog through keywords. When someone tries to search for a certain keyword through Google, Yahoo, or MSN, it will show results of the sites they have indexed containing the word that someone is looking for. Depending on the keyword consistency of the page and the site as a whole, the search engines display their results according to the authority of the site on that particular keyword from the strongest to the weakest; where traffic, most of the time, is exclusive only to those who are displayed on the first to the tenth results page. By using keywords effectively in your posts, theoretically, you’ll increase your traffic from search engines because you’ll get your site displayed on the first five or ten search result pages of your keywords. At the same time, you’ll have audience who are interested in what you have to say or offer because you appeared in their searches.

The concept might be simple to look at from this point but, frankly, it is a lot of work. SEO practitioners call it “keyword research” which was first used on traditional websites. Bloggers adopted the idea because, basically, blogs are websites too but with a much different purpose compared to the traditional ones. The strategy behind the practice is basically building your site/blog or article around keywords to optimize it for search engine indexing. The question now is how to boost your traffic using keyword optimization? Here’s how:


Brain storm your keywords

Usually, experts would tell you to think of words or phrases based or relevant to your blog’s theme or niche. Then, you have to start jutting them down to come up with a list of around 5-10 words or phrases. Your categories and the tags you always use in social bookmarking sites when submitting your posts can help you in forming them.

You can do this if you want it this way, but personally I’d prefer another alternative rather than coming up with a relevant keyword.

Find the hottest keywords

Sometimes, you might want to fight fire with fire rather than build things slowly because the keywords you’ve been brainstorming about don’t get a sufficient search volume which you could call a boost in traffic. And one way to get that hot traffic is to get highly searched keywords into your blog. Where do you find it? There are available tools out there which can help you in this respect. Some come with a cost while others are free. I wouldn’t recommend anything since I haven’t used any at all. What I’ll show you, though, are found online, free to use, and doesn’t require any installation.


There’s Lycos 50 where you’ll find the top searches made by Lycos users. It might not be the same as what’s being searched in Google, but does Lycos users’ search trend need to be completely different from Google? I don’t think so. The list you’ll find here is updated weekly. Each Monday they tally up the hits for each query during the previous week and make certain adjustments to come up with the list. You can read about the adjustments here.


Another one is HotWords.com. They provide the top 10 daily and monthly searches. And from here, you’ll get an idea that internet is used mostly for porn because they are the words that always get on top of the list. To know more about how they collect their data, see here.

One draw back here is that there’s no guarantee that the particular keyword you chose will be popular for long since what’s popular this week or month might be buried 100 feet under the next month. Also, these sources will not promise you accurate results because what they have are always estimates collected with filters which can affect how the data is interpreted. So, it’s always safe to check your keywords of choice which you’ll learn on the next step.

Use keyword suggestion tools

These tools will help you understand better the keywords you’ve acquired earlier by giving you other related keywords and keyphrases to your original keywords. What’s more is that they also include the estimated number of searches for your keywords per day.


Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker is a free online tool that suggests relevant keyphrases based on your core keyword. Enter a keyword and see in the results a long trail of keyphrases related to your keyword and their corresponding number of estimated daily search volume.


Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool is another free online tool that cross references your keyword searches from Wordtracker, Google, Yahoo, and MSN and displays the estimated daily volume of the keyword including the relevant keyphrases. It’s similar to the first one but a lot better. What’s good about this tool is that it also contains additional tools along with the search results to help you understand and optimize your keyword.

Based on your gathered results, choose the keywords that have a long list of related search phrases and bigger search volume. Why? The search volume determines the number of traffic you’ll be getting through your keywords, while the number of related keyphrases, on the other hand, determines the other keyword combinations which could become your potential source of traffic besides your core keyword. In short, the more of them the better. Additionally, these keyword suggestion tools may also provide you with a better keyword or keyphrase that has more search volume compared to your original one.

Determine the competition

The next thing to do is to determine if there is a good chance you will achieve your prized high search engine ranking or if the competition for that phrase is already saturated. One good indicator for this is through the search engines themselves. Search for the keywords you have chosen from above and look at the number of the results found. The more results the more the competition there is in that keyword.

Also, another method of determining your chances of getting a share of traffic from the competition is through analyzing the results of your keyword searches which is pretty complicated. For that I’ll recommend the following links for you to get a better view of how complicated it is: The Facts You should Know about Keywords Competition Research, Some Good Things to Know when Researching Competition in the SERPs, Keyword Competition Metrics.

Complicated or not, one easy way to know if you really have a shot of getting a better position in search engines based in your keywords is to look up your competitor’s backlinks. Go to Alexa.com and see how many sites are linking to your competitors. The more established and popular sites are linking to them, the more difficult it will be for you to beat them at their game. If this is the case, try to revisit your keyword suggestion tools and look for a relevant keyphrase to your keyword and determine your competition again.

Your Onsite Keyword Optimization

Once you’ve finally captured the right keyword/s for your post, you need to optimize your article for those keywords to give it an edge on getting a better placement in search engine results. You’ve already seen your competitors’ keyword optimization previously so you have to beat or match what they’ve already achieved for you to get better search engine exposure. Here’s my article on how to do just that: Use Keywords as Much as Possible.

Regarding the backlinks to your post, this is the part where it’s out of your hands completely. For your article to get better search engine ranking, you need to have quality links pointing to that article and to your blog. Although it’s out of your control, you can pretty much influence how things will work your way. And here are my other articles on how to do just that: Generate Inbound Links, Why Deep Linking is better than Simple Reciprocal Linking.

When performing your onsite keyword optimization, avoid over-stuffing your blog with lots of keywords because, obviously, search engines recognize this kind of tactic as a common trademark of spammers. By doing so, you might get penalized and be banned from the search engine forever.

Write for your target audience and not for the keyword optimization alone. Basically, your traffic will be pretty much useless if you couldn’t engage your readers to come back for more and perhaps click on your ads.

If you’re trying to use the hot keywords, you might want to find a way to merge your blog’s topic or niche into the keyword you have so as not to have an off-topic article from your blog’s theme. This is a common trend among bloggers who “hijacks” keywords to prevent search engines (Google in particular) from penalizing their rankings because it’s a form of “gaming” the search algorithms in itself.

Conclusion

Keywords definitely have the power to give your blog that much coveted boost of traffic, given that you do it wisely. Give more time on keyword research and the rewards will be great, something that I too should place great importance besides social media optimizations. I have provided some online tools that I’ve been using before and some techniques I found through my research which you could use for your keyword campaigns in your blog. The steps or sequence given here don’t necessarily reflect the exact pattern or sequence keyword optimization and research should be done. In fact, if you research on articles done by SEO experts themselves, it goes in different ways. This serves only as a guide which is supposed to help you get a better idea about using keywords in general. And lastly, before anything else, you must place more importance on your content’s quality; keywords are supposed to follow your content’s form and not vice-versa.



technorati tags: keyword, seo, boost traffic

Pinay Mommy Online’s PEXLINKS Triple Love Project

Do you want to improve your Technorati ranking, RSS subscription, and get more people to drop entrecards on your blog. If the answer is all yes, then you have to join Pexlinks Triple Love Project, a project created by a “stay at home mommy blogger” of Pinay Mommy Online, Mommy Ruby. The idea is basically to have members who will subscribe, drop, and fave each other. The more participants the better the odds for everybody – the very reason why I’m promoting it here.

Did you ever remember the viral linking strategy back then, It didn’t worked for some people especially those who are using free blogging platforms except blogger, but it worked fairly in my love potion blog which placed it a step higher in Google pagerank. That’s because of a lot of backlinks to my homepage. My list almost got to a hundred, 85 actually (monitored via technorati) before it stopped coming in. This idea is somewhat the same, only, it’s not easy to just hop in since there are more efforts involved for the project to work. Here, you have to subscribe to others’ feeds, fave them in technorati, consistently drop on their entrecard widgets if you have the time, publish a post about the contest, and install the “blogrolling script” which contains the blogroll list of those who’ve participated. It’s quite tedious not to mention the updating of faves, subscription, and regular drops for new members but I guess it’s worth the effort since you’re trying to boost many of your blog’s aspect.

To get a better view of the benefits you’ll get, let’s make an example. Let’s say there are about a hundred members already. That would mean 100 subscribers to your blog, 100 fans in technorati, 100 entrecard droppers, and 100 backlinks to your blog if you join. That’s quite a lot if you ask me. I believe this project will benefit greatly most newbie bloggers out there who wants to get more visitors to their blog as well as those who have been stuck to the bottom of blogosphere’s dark abyss.

If you really want more from your blog, don’t miss Pexlinks Triple Love Project now and boost your technorati rankings, subscriber count, entrecard traffic, and of course your most precious backlinks.

***Here is the list of those who have joined already.***

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PEXLINKS TRIPLE LOVE PARTICIPANTS

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technorati tags: pinay mommy, boost traffic, boost subscriber, boost faves, entrecard

Digg Friends with Benefits

Nope, it’s not the FB you’re thinking about. It’s about having the ideal digg friends who’ll digg your shouts and more. We all know that there are different kinds of digg users. Some of them are good for you and your content promotion, while others are simply not interested. There are digg users who are picky with their friends, and then there are those who just befriend anyone they could get their eyes on. I guess being picky for a right reason saves you the effort of having to add too many friends in exchange for better submission promotion. Why add 100 friends when all you need is maybe a carefully chosen 75 or half of it and get the same benefits. Of course, it sounds ridiculous since we all have reasons why we join digg and why we add friends, but if you’re interested in getting more from your “please digg shouts”, maybe filtering out the less responsive digg users from your potential friend list is a better option.

I got the idea from this e-book entitled “Breaking the Digg Code” which I’ve just finished reading. This is not a review of this e-book by the way since I’m only going to share a bit of what you could learn inside. I guess the author of the book won’t be mad if I share a little of his work (which, I believe, was created primarily to boost the readership of his blog).


Digg users who have many friends, send shouts for diggs, submitted to dugg ratio is below 20 percent, are members for more than a month, and digg a lot of stories are the type of people that should pass as a beneficial digg friend. Here are the reasons why:

The number of dugg stories

Obviously if you’re not an active digger, it reflects in your profile. When you see a user who has only 500 stories dugg after being a member since April of 2007, chances are this user is only using digg occasionally. What are your chances then of having your shouts noticed by this guy? Occasionally perhaps. Of course, you also have to check how long the user has been a member. If it’s only two months or less, expect a lower number. Generally, I think you should be able to reach the 1000th digg after 4 months or less of being a member. That’s like a maximum of 10 diggs a day. If you want your submission to get diggs, look for active digg friends.

Submitted to digg ratio is less than 20%

If you divide the number of diggs to the number submissions, you should get 0.20 or less.

Ratio = Diggs / Submitted

Why? Let’s say that user dugg 10 stories today, 2 of which is his submitted content if it’s 20 percent. That leaves 8 more stories where your story could be one of it. That’s an optimal state to be in since not all of the remaining 8 may come from the shouts this user received. It will be shared, perhaps, by the stories in the front page, his finds in the upcoming page, and then the shouts from his friends of which you are one. That’s why it has to be 20 percent or less. The lesser it is, the more possibility that this user diggs what his friends are digging. Never ever make friends with a user whose diggs equal to his submissions (or something near that) for they are only submitting their own stories and don’t bother with the word “community”.

Friendly

You should only “add” diggers with friends. I’ve seen quite a lot of digg users who don’t have digg friends. And, usually, they are the ones who submit stories and seldom digg other’s submissions. You have no use for them. Most probably, they have some fans before you and their requests to be befriended back weren’t answered. Why then should you waste your time on them?

Another, issue that’s worth looking at is the number of friends a user have. I usually try to add those with 300 or more friends and I either get a slow reaction or none at all and I’m stuck to being a fan. I’m guessing that the more friends a digger have the more lousy fans they have too and you could be one of them which keep you from being added back. This is most true for power users who have legions of fans waiting to be kissed back by some ultimate being or something LOL. You have two options for this: either you do something for them to notice you, or stick to those with lesser friends. If you think they’re worth the time, then try to grab their attention by digging their submissions all the time.

Date Joined

One issue with digg is that it’s got lots of spammy and temporary profiles where the user profile gets used for a few weeks only and then poof, off they go to make a new one. It’s part of their tactic to avoid getting caught by the digg authority, I guess. So you have to be careful about adding users who have been a member for less than a month. It’s better to add those that have been in digg longer, such as 2 months perhaps.

Shout Fanatics

This is one important indication that the user you’re looking at will more likely digg what you shouted to him/her. If you’re sending shouts to other people, it’s always a given that you are also digging the shouts you receive. You can see the shout activity of a user through the “history tab” in their profile. There are users who send unusually high volume of shouts per day. Well, they can also be put to good use, I guess, besides their spammy character. If they’re really into it, maybe you can ask them to share your submitted story to their friends after you dugg all their shouts. But then if they’re nagging you like crazy and they don’t even digg any of what you’ve been shouting at them, just unfriend them and report to the digg authority if found “too spammy”.


These are just my ideas of a truly responsive and beneficial character in the digg community given that you want your stories to be promoted and hit the front page. Of course, it’s always up to you if you want your digg experience be dictated by virtues of plain promotional character alone. After all, there are some instances where a user can be a contradiction of these qualities and yet would still prove more than beneficial for you.



technorati tags: digg, social media, friends

The Z-list Blogger’s Comprehensive Guide to Getting Traffic from Digg

Are you a new blogger or, perhaps, one of the bottom dwellers that comprise the majority of the blogosphere (like me)? What are your chances of hitting the front page of digg, you may ask? Well, I have no exact numbers for that; but if you’re no social media genius then most probably it’s next to impossible. You can submit all your posts to digg but I can guarantee you that all your efforts will just go to waste. I am not trying to deter you from submitting your posts but for expecting to land on the front page, although not completely impossible, you should be realistic about it. What then can we expect from digg? I did some research before I temporarily vacated this blog for three weeks at most and I found out that it’s possible to get traffic from digg without necessarily hitting the front page. It might not be as massive as thousands a day but I can guarantee you that it will definitely be worth the effort. All you need is time and a focused effort to do it.

DIGG?

For beginners, digg is a social media site that churns out what’s cool and popular in and around the net at the moment. Submitted stories are voted upon by digg users and, based on the quality of those votes, the fate of these stories to get more exposure are determined. It has witnessed several reformatting in its algorithms to avoid its users from spamming, gaming, and monopolizing the system to project an image of diversity and democracy in its voting system which somehow unintentionally (according to some) stripped its top users of their vote’s weight just recently. Your submitted stories are first seen in the upcoming section which is easily buried from sight as more users also submit their stories later on. Now, your story’s fate depends on the hands of the entire digg community if they will bury it, never to be seen again on the face of digg universe, or be carried up to the front page where you get your much coveted massive traffic.

HOW TO GET THAT TRAFFIC?

About Your Story

Diggable content
Basically, you have to understand what kinds of stories or materials digg community like to dig. Judging from its popular archives here are some examples of blog posts that work well in digg:

• Lists
• How to guides
• Tech related (internet, games, Google, Microsoft, Linux, Mac, gadgets, get it?)
• Any fact stranger than fiction that a lot of people don’t know about and haven’t been dugg before
• Extremely outrageous, weird, funny, or amazing things
• Important newsworthy events that big news sites haven’t covered yet (because if they were they’d be in digg and it’s pointless to resubmit the same story)
• Global warming, oil prices (recent), and alternative fuel sources

If your blog deals with any of these then you’re a lucky son of a gun. If your blog’s about seo, blogging, or making money online, uhm, better think twice about submitting, or better yet submit it someplace else besides digg. Digg people really hate these kinds since, even how much people deny it, the fact remains that most spammers are from the money making (or related) ranks.

Diggable buttons
Not necessarily a part of driving traffic to your blog but installing digg buttons in each of your posts makes it easier for people to digg it and be exposed to a greater digg audience.

Diggable headline
When you submit a story, this is the first thing you fill out. Usually, by default, your post’s title appears here. You can change it for a specific purpose if you want. Your headlines must be catchy but related to your original. The title must be interesting enough to convince its readers to click and read your story, or better yet, digg it. Words like “top, first, new, how, best, greatest, and free” are perfect examples which you can add to your headlines as long as they are applicable. Tip: It’s a good habit to make your post title “digg oriented” before publishing it.

Diggable description
After the headline or title, this is the next people read. It’s short so you have to be able to engage their thoughts fast. It could be information to support your title, or additional reasons/info on why they have to read further. Give them what they want to know about your story that will make them want to actually read it. A lot of digg how to guides say that it’s okay to give false promises to get people digging which turns to traffic, but digg community is also known to be a dangerous crowd when angered which could haunt your blogging existence forever. So be careful if you’re going to use this kind of writing tactic.

About Your Digg Profile

Be an active digger
It’s really no secret that if you want traffic from digg and wants your content to be seen, you should really be active in promoting it but not necessarily submitting it. Submit your blog post (not all the time), submit other stories you really dig, digg other’s submissions (or what they dugg), get friends - it’s one of digg’s essential part, and take time to read the messages or shouts your friends are throwing at you unless they’re spam. Act and be part of the community. It is in being active that your profile gain more exposure to other digg users for them to also take a look and digg your submissions.

Use an avatar
Get some picture to represent your digg profile. Without one, it will be hard to remember you by and digg people just find it hard to trust profiles with generic identity even in pictures.

The Rules of the Game

Don’t submit your posts all the time
Digg users hate spamming along with shameless self-promotion. And if you always submit your posts in the system, it will be easy for them to brand you as a spammer. The key here is moderation or complete avoidance. If you think your post has that “digg appeal”, don’t push your luck by submitting it yourself as it will almost always be ignored except by your friends. The best way is always to get others to submit it unless there’s no one willing.

Submit other stories
Some digg users devote their time submitting up to100 or greater stories a day to gain authority and attention in digg. Clearly, I would say, it would take someone without a life to do this sort of activity, be it automated or not, since you have to enter some description and authentication code for each which would really take time. For us bloggers who are constantly brewing new ideas (or recycling old concepts) and tweaking our blog’s performance, we don’t have that much time at our disposal. So, I think it would be better and a lot more efficient if you’ll be submitting 2 to 3 stories a day, preferably those related to your niche or chosen digg topic (this thing I’m yet to do). The best way to find new stories to digg is through subscribing to well-known news sources. Alternatively, you can also submit your favorite or idol bloggers’ posts if you want. Just think of it as your contribution to the community, even if they don’t show that much appreciation.

Submit original stories
Don’t resubmit the same story as your own original article (also known as blog spamming). It’s just useless and considered gaming by the system. If it’s just a recap or a short summary of the original, just digg or submit the source. Of course there are times when it’s really time consuming trying to know if it’s the original, but do try to avoid it as much as possible.

Get many friends
Digg is a social media and has the word “social” all over it so having “friends” is part of its features. These friends will be the core source of your diggs which will help you get a bit of an exposure, and the core source of traffic because they will check out your submitted story if diggworthy or not. Add as many friends as possible. Of course, don’t expect all of them to friend you back so that your shouts will reach them. Just think of them as your allies in your mini-battles inside the digg universe.

Send shouts
Don’t forget to inform your friends about your recent stories. Shout them your new submission and let them digg it on their own volition. Don’t force them, they’re your friends. Don’t send shouts all the time if you’re making a lot of submissions. If there’s one thing a lot of digg users hate, it’s becoming too annoying to the point that they want to report you as a spammer.

Digg your friends’ dugg content and submitted stories
You don’t have to digg it all. Just show that you pay attention to their activity and you help them out with their submissions too. It’s like do unto others what you want others to do to you. Digg what they’re shouting unless you’re strongly convinced that it’s a useless piece of crap. But don’t bury their story too, they’re your friends, remember?

Pay attention to who’s digging your story
These are your friends to whom you owe a reciprocal digg. Those who don’t digg you, well, you can forget about their submissions occasionally. Befriend those who dugg it but aren’t your friends yet.

Digg stories from the upcoming section
This is the part where a lot of users forget to venture into simply because it’s hard to get a hold of this page as it changes fast each minute due to massive submissions. Try to look for some interesting submissions and digg. This is an opportunity to get more friends. I’m not sure if it’s true for all, but I got some of my digg friends from digging their pathetic (lol) submissions in the upcoming section. Just kidding with the pathetic part.

Leave comments
This is the hidden gem that can give you extra traffic besides submission. It’s like commenting on blogs. Leave useful information if you’re dropping a url, and make sure that the url will contribute to the story, or else the community will see it as just spam and will appear hidden as default from the others who will care to read the comments. Also it’s not wise to leave comments in the popular section as there will be more comments in that particular story before yours which makes it harder to get yours read by interested parties but easier for troll diggers to vote out of the picture. The upcoming section is always the best source if you wish to be the first. Always make sure too that it’s not always a url to your blog that you’re leaving or it might get banned from digg permanently. It can give great benefits but commenting can also pose some sticky and worrisome situations for your blog. You might want to read this guide (Guide to Traffic from Comment Diggs) before undergoing a commenting spree.

Right timing
This is also one of the key techniques to get better exposure for your submission even if it doesn’t get to the front page. Digg has its low and peak hours. Since majority of digg users are coming from North America, it’s always safe to assume that you should time your submissions based on the usage patterns of this territories. According to this article (A Comprehensive Guide to Going Viral on Digg Part 1), there are time trends where digg submissions shoot up the graphs and hit the front page. These times are: 8:30am-10:30am,1:00pm-3:00pm, 4:00pm-6:00pm, and 8:00pm-10:00pm (Pacific Standard Time). That would be between 11:30pm-1:30am, 4:00-6:00am, 7:00am-9:00am, and 11:00am-1:00pm if here in the Philippines. Basically, if you don’t want your submission to get buried by hundreds of submissions in the upcoming pages these are the right times to send them and get more people to view it.

CONCLUSION

A well-crafted title and description of your submissions will always capture attention, hence traffic. Plus, observing digg’s unwritten rules will make your submission perform a lot better. What more if you time it when more people are able to see it? Like I said earlier, this guide will not help you get to the front page of digg but we cannot always discount the possibility of your submissions ending in the front page if you employed these techniques. After all, it was from articles that will teach you how to get to the front page. Even so, there’s no guarantee of terrific traffic since, obviously, it all depends on the quality of your submissions even how much you time, play fair, or promote it. But then, even if you don’t have that great a content, there will still be traffic coming from your friends (that’s why it’s important to get many), those really interested in what you have to offer, and from the comments you’ve been making. But always remember to play it right and avoid getting it beyond what the digg community can tolerate.



technorati tags: digg, traffic, smo

Bloggers Unite: Blogging for Hope

Today, the 15th of May, bloggers unite for a common cause which is to spread the word about human rights. (Actually it’s way past the 15th of May here in the Philippines but I guess I still have time since the 15th is not yet over for the rest of the world.) Visit the Bloggers Unite page in case you aren’t aware of this “cause” we bloggers should be blogging about.

It is true that we have made great strides in terms of technology, automating what was once a burden that prevented us from walking even further, but in terms of acting civil and protecting the rights of those who seek civility from civilization, it’s nay. Persecution, discrimination, slavery, and everything evil about man still exists and there’re no signs of stopping at all. Old ones disappear only to take or be replaced by a new form of hatred that converts even the meekest of men into an unsightly beast.

Here in our country, who would expect that the very person we appointed and gave the highest authority in our nation would be the very same person who would violate the trust her country vested on her simply because she is hungry for more power. Corruption to cover up more corruptions, extra-judicial killings by the military and even attempts to curtail the free press, of course it’s a bit less sinister as what China is doing to Tibet or on what’s happening in Burma, but it’s still violations upon violations of human rights anywhere you look at it. And now we are battered by the oil and food crisis looming over the globe, what will happen with these unaddressed problems and issues? Just old news that will be buried by more piles of the same issues, simply because we are all busy trying to survive our asses from a more pandemic problem that must be dealt with first.

I could still remember back in my college days when I was frequenting the libraries of our university trying to pay close attention to many influential and political thinkers since Plato’s Utopia to Foucault’s Post-structuralism. I don’t know what’s with me back then but it felt like the answer to all the ills of the corrupt capitalist world seemed to lie in the mouths of the radical thinkers of the time. And the right thing for me to do is discover them and perhaps enter politics or be a radical political thinker maybe. I’m not sure if I have the capacity to be one but I felt so inspired by their dissection of reality and how it could be made better.

But now I could only look back and see how stupid I was for believing them. It is, after all, these political virtues that create wars and suffering for mankind. Think about Communism for a second. Karl Marx made it as an answer to the problems of workers suffering at the hands of capitalists exploiting them to their very bone. It was made to correct so many wrongs but ended up more monstrous than the Capitalism it was meant to destroy. See how former Soviet did, or perhaps China and North Korea. How about the Islamic Fundamentalists? Why bomb so many innocents just to fight for a cause which was supposed to correct these very victims and make them right for Allah?

I now believe that, for the most part, most human rights violation are caused by these false virtues people adhere to which makes it difficult for them to see things clearly. It might be to rid your people of evil western influences, or to out phase the military might of US and blow them to smithereens to give a big Hoorah to your “anti-capitalistic” interests, or maybe to control more territories and resources to get more powerful and squish the enemies surrounding you like flies. All of these might seem reasonable at first glance but how about the repercussions it will produce, the innocent who will pay the price of the one-sided decisions made?

The best way to stop human rights violation is perhaps to make political leaders learn about human rights. I’m not sure if my observations are completely accurate but I think these leaders see their people as just pieces in a big game of chess, completely expendable to serve their purpose. They don’t care if you felt pain or die as long as they get the glory afterwards. Or maybe, they have this motto; “What’s a small sacrifice for the gain of the many?” where their “small” is their country men’s right to education or sufficient living condition and their “many” is their cronies’ oil companies, its benefits, and their pockets.

If they understood human rights the way most human rights activist understood it, do you think these racial genocides, political killings, corruption, and several other human rights issues would still persist? I don’t think so. But then again, how do we make them understand? I believe we can all as a community pressure them to yield to what we think is right for one time, but they and the people like them will still continue their odd ways no matter what, perhaps behind our backs when nobody’s looking. How about replacing them with someone who’s more observant of human rights? But how are we going to do that if at the slightest sign of opposition, you get a bullet in your head?

These are just my thoughts about human rights which I’m sharing to you as part of my contribution to the whole human rights community in their fight to make the world a safe and cozy place for each and everyone of us human beings. Still, the best thing to combat complete disregard and ignorance of human rights is raising its awareness. The more people know, the more it becomes power to reshape the future with future leaders who are more sensitive to these issues compared to the “crappy” ones we have today. Please support human rights. Let us unite and blog about it to help in the fight. Believe me; you’ll help make a better world for your kids in doing so.



technorati tags: human rights, bloggers unite, politics

Anatomy of a Super Digg Front Pager

You’ve guessed it right. It’s another one of my “attention-baiting” methods. But I believe you’ll learn something from here if you just follow the links I will be pointing you to. I’ll try to provide enough description about the links so that you can decide for yourself if you’d click it or not.

I know this is old stuff, but it’s funny since I have this conception and “sort of” short-hand observation that many bloggers today don’t even know how to get even a handful of traffic from digg. I’ve based my observations, of course, from my regular drops of entrecard. This idea, and perhaps my month long pre-occupation of digg, is fueled by my attempt to join the digg community. I’ve asked a friend about how to get that many diggs in an instant and, I believe, that also somehow strike a chord in me to research further about how to better improve my digg experience. So, expect more of these kinds of digg-crazy articles later on.

And now for the things you need to know. What makes an article a Super Digg Front Pager?

Anatomy of a Super Digg – An experiment that got massive diggs. Learn how they did it and their analysis of the cost and benefits of the traffic they got from it.

How to Create a Blog That People Really Digg – Here you will learn how to write for digg and how to turn your passions into something digg-friendly.

How to Write the Right Title for Digg – This, on the other hand, will teach you how to form titles that will give your post a shot on digg’s front page.

10 Steps to Guarantee You Make the Digg Front Page – Topics that digg users really digg. Humorous and worth the read.

Analysis of Digg top 100 articles – An analysis conducted to equate what works and what doesn’t on digg based on its top100 articles. If you’re not into statistics and numbers, I believe you can still understand this. It’s more on averages, you see.

A Comprehensive Guide to Going Viral on Digg – Like the title says, a comprehensive guide on how to get dugg more often. The article is about a step by step approach on building a viral article that works well on digg.

The 100% guaranteed way to get a front page story on Digg! – A short tip on how you’ll be a guaranteed front-pager in Digg. You just have to get dugg by this digg founder and chief architect and you’re on your way there. Trivial and in case you know how be dugged by him just drop a comment here. That’s a really big help for everyone.

75 Suggestions, Best Practices & Resources for Digg – A nice digg resource, but if you’re only interested on what works and what doesn’t in digg, look for this sub heading, “Examples of What Can Work Well on Digg”.

How to Write a Top 10 List for Digg – Possibly just a link and digg baiter that didn’t worked out good for the author’s intended purpose, which is to get dugg. But, nonetheless, there are some points here that are worth exploring. It’s basically about crafting top 10 lists that appeal to geeks.

What is the most popular “top (number)” list on Digg? – Another perspective on the numerological value of your list in digg. If you’re guessing why your top 75s or top 66s didn’t work, this is your answer.

Do you know of other articles that could help define the perfect digg front pager? Please drop it in the comments and I will add it on the list here.



technorati tags: digg, anatomy, social media, blog marketing

More Sites to Get Backlinks to Your Blog for Free

Remember the Million Blog List I was talking about before? Guess what? There’s another one like it where you could place a link to your blog for free. No need to register. Just edit the list and add your blog in there. Here’s the link: Wiki Blog Directory.

And here’s another social media site similar to Blogsvine where you could submit your blog posts too; Yearblook. I found it through my regular commenter Chelle. Here you can submit your post for its members to vote on. The catch in this voting system is, besides getting popular which instantly catapults your post to the front page for other people to see, the best post each day gets to be complied into a book that is a record of the year in blogs. What’s more is that each month the post with the most votes will receive $100, which is incentive enough for “poor-bloggers” (like me) to hop in. The person who submited the post will receive $50 and the person who wrote the post will receive $50. If the same person wrote and submitted the post, that person will receive the full $100.



technorati tags: backlink, free, social media

Bounce Rates, Bounce Rates, and More Bounce Rates

Most of the people leaving entrecard always have this word in their mouth: BOUNCE RATE. They always complain that the traffic it produces is junk simply because they have lots of bounce rates which makes their blog stats ugly. I’m one of the guys who actually believed that bounce rates can really damage my blog’s performance leading to no search engine appreciation at all. But instead of removing my entrecard, I still cling on because of one reason. Most of my traffic comes from entrecard. And it’s like, remove it and my blog will die. That was until I read this post by Turnip – Idiots and Bounce Rates – and it somehow altered my perspective regarding bounce rates, but not entirely.

Basically, bounce rates, from my research, have two possible definitions. One is how long a visitor stays in your page, the lesser it is the more it is conceived as a bounce rate (if it’s 15 sec or less). The other is the number of page views your visitor made while in your site. If one, then it’s also a bounce. Bounce rates, along with several other factors about your website, are used by search engines to measure your visitor’s "engagement" to your site. (You can see more of it, if you have a metric tool that measures your visitor’s activities in your site, such as Google Analytics). Now, most of these discontented entrecarders might have thought that the bounce rates they are getting suggest that entrecarders are just dropping by with an absence of “engagement” on their part. How these people arrived to their conclusion is based on the metric tools installed in their blogs to see the performance of their site. Perhaps it is true, but there must be some other explanations regarding high bounce rates.

For the most part, information produced by metric tools about your site can produce inaccuracies as well. User engagement, I believe can’t be entirely explained by numbers alone. These tools, although a critical tool for some, can only put together a few pieces of the whole puzzle. You could have a visitor which could register lots of page views and a longer time spent on your site but that doesn’t mean this particular visitor found the answer he/she was looking for. Maybe this visitor doesn’t even have a clue why he’s in your site, in the first place. Also, you could have lots of single page view visits but that doesn’t mean there’s no quality in it. These visitors could have been reading your post for an hour and a half but these metric tools will register the time they spent reading on your site as “0” simply because it has no way of knowing how long that visitor has been there without accessing another of your page as reference.

Additionally, the advent of tabbed browsing did a lot of mess to the computations of these metric tools. Let’s take for example I got to your site from entrecard. Suddenly, I noticed a banner about a contest and immediately clicked on it to open in a new tab (which I always do). And then after a few seconds, I saw a good headline in your “popular posts” and decided to click it in a new tab again. I then decided to read each of the 3 tabs I opened. As you can see I’m really engaging with your blog; but with the metrics, it will only register as three page views with a time spent as somewhere under 10 seconds. Very poor calculation as compared to the actual time I spent to try and comprehend your site. That’s the reason why you shouldn’t completely place your blogs value on the metric tools alone since more often than not it’s very far from the reality. To fully understand how these metric tools measure the time spent on your page and site, see this article: Standard Metrics Revisited: #4 : Time on Page & Time on Site

Also, other social networking sites, besides entrecard, are one of the main culprits for huge bounce rates websites get. Digg, Stumble, and several other social media traffic are usually one time drop only. This is because they will only try to read or scan through your post or blog if it’s worth their review and vote or not. Perhaps it’s possible that some of these entrecard users are submitting your posts to these social medias which in turn gives you traffic that are always bouncing.

With these things in mind, I would say you shouldn’t be that worried about bounce rates. Of course, it’s worth looking for some loopholes in your blog design, navigation, and content etc; but if all of these are okay, then maybe your subscribers and comments will tell a different story don’t you think? Finally, here are some helpful articles about bounce rates and stuff: Stop Whining About Bounce Rates; Bounce Rate as a Ranking Signal; Measuring Visitor Engagement: Tools + Tips; How to Reduce Entrecard’s High Bounce Rate.

If in any way you felt that I'm wrong about something, or just want to add to the conversation, please leave a comment below. Thanks.



technorati tags: bounce rate, metrics, web analytics

Why Bloggers Need to Join Blogsvine

Get voted, get traffic, and get income. Those three reasons should sum it all I guess. I found this site through Entrecard. Yes, they’re really using entrecard. Blogsvine is a new social media site which gives you free blog promotion by submitting stories which its users vote on. The voting system is very much like Digg where your news gets more exposure when you’re voted more; just like its tagline: submit your blogs and start climbing. Currently, the site is still in its beta stage so there will still be more room for changes and further improvements.

So what’s in it for you? Like in other social media sites, votes here count. From my experience in using it, the theory is very much the same with the rest of them socializin’ sites: cook up a good headline and a good post and it will definitely catch other users’ attention. A good post, I believe, always has a potential for good traffic, you just have to send it out there for others to see and that’s what Blogsvine is for. When you submit your blog post here, you’ll get free promotion plus an extra back link to your post page which can help you in your SEO. Regarding traffic, if you’re barely getting any from StumbleUpon, Digg, or Delicious, you’re definitely going to get more here everytime you post. I’m not sure why, but it seems it’s easier to get attention here since most or all of its users are bloggers.

Regarding the earning stuff, Blogsvine shares with you 65% of the earnings produced by Google Adsense Ads shown on your submitted pages. You just have to enter your Adsense publisher id in your profile page, click “save”, and that’s it. It might not be that much but it’s good to have some extra streams in your adsense coming from other sources besides your site/s.

One of its features that caught my attention is the Top Users section where you can see its most active users and the not so active ones.

What’s good about this is that you are able to sort the listed users alphabetically, the total of their submitted posts, their total votes, and comments. I just want to emphasize this one because I believe this is an important feature to get the active users rewarded.

Joining Blogsvine is free. You just have to register, provide your profile information, and get the “Blogsvine bookmarklet” to be able to submit your posts. Currently, there is an available wordpress plugin which enables one to vote externally and maybe submit their posts too. I don’t know. I’m a Blogspot user so I have no idea about this one.

Basically, the best way to get exposure here is to get a link from the front page. And there are four ways to get it:

The best way. Get your post voted.

The entrecard. Be ready to spend 256 - 512 credits here.

Get some comments in your submitted page.

Or, get your self featured.

A nicely written and interesting post always get high votes in here. I’ll get one of my fingers cut if it ain’t true. Regarding entrecard, well, prepare your credits. The more Blogsvine gets popular the more its credit cost will soar up.

Here comes the interesting part. When your submitted article receives a comment, a link to it appears here.
The link lands in your submitted page where the link to your blog lies. How do you get comment you may ask? Submit something really interesting. Or maybe, something really outrageous that it will rouse Blogsvine members to say something about it (or maybe get you out of Blogsvine for good, LOLz). Or, if you’re willing to trade your reputation for it, comment on your own submitted page (good luck to you).

Another interesting way to get great exposure from the site is to have your profile displayed on the upper banner. How? Do what I’m doing. Make a nice review of Blogsvine and if it’s good enough you’re getting your slot up there. And after publishing your post, submit it to Blogsvine immediately to get their attention which I’ll also be doing right after I finish this.

Lastly, if you truly want to benefit from Blogsvine, spread the word and get more people to join it. The more users there are, the more visitors you’ll receive from Blogsvine.



technorati tags: blogsvine, social media

Promote Your Feeds with rssHugger

I’m joining rssHugger today to promote my blog’s feed. And I believe you should do the same to get more visitors and readers to your blog. The idea is simple, get your blog’s feed and URL someplace for an exposure to get other bloggers and non-bloggers attention, and rssHugger is one such place. By getting your blog’s feed in rssHugger, you don’t only get visitors and loyal readers to your blog; you’re also going to get a free back link to your blog and some deep links to your recent posts which could greatly benefit your search engine ranking. Remember what I told you about deep links last time?

RssHugger was created by Collin LaHay, an experienced entrepreneur, search engine optimizer, and internet marketer looking to expand his portfolio. His goal is to get as many blogs signed up as possible to bring blog writers and blog readers closer together through the power of internet and viral marketing. He will use the money from this project to pay off college expenses, invest in his other internet startup companies, sponsor like-minded business folk, and continue to support Kiva, who supports entrepreneurs in the developing world.

It’s easy to join, actually. Just sign-up for free then from here, you have two options to get your blog’s feed listed in rssHugger. Either pay for the one-time review fee of $20 or write an honest review of the site on the blog you’re registering. Your pending review should appear within 48 hours. So what are you waiting for, I believe this is the right time to join start-up sites like this, while they are still free. Join rssHugger now and get more exposure for your blog.

To know more about rssHugger and how to get better exposure in their listings, please see their About Page.



technorati tags: SEO, rss

Top 8 Techniques to Unlock Entrecard’s Full Potential

Entrecard has been proven many times over that it produces more traffic compared to other free traffic and free link exchange services and widgets in the internet. But, sad to say, some of its users find the traffic it produces as lacking quality; solely because they believe many of entrecard users are just after dropping their cards for credits, most of which resort to chain dropping and employing techniques to increase the frequency of their drops in a short period of time. Although there is some truth to it, I believe the majority of entrecard users don’t necessarily employ chain dropping without the attempt to take a moment and scan through what the blog in front of them is all about. The problem perhaps lies not in the intention of entrecard users but, with such a short attention span to jump from one blog to another, in the capacity of one’s blog to capture the interest of its visitor.

How then do you convert this constantly bouncing traffic from entrecard to the benefit of your blog? Here are the techniques I found through some hours of searches to help in taming entrecard and unlocking its full potential.


1. Lessen entrecard traffic’s high bounce rate – This is the primary problem why some discontented entrecard users leave entrecard. Entrecard traffic are just bouncing like balls without the slightest sign that people are reading anything you wrote at all. There are reasons why entrecard users are doing that, which might also be true for the search engine traffic you’re getting. Your site design and layout must be giving them a hard time to focus on your content or it’s taking an eternity to load including your most valuable post. Your topics must be either too boring, or too old news that they don’t want to read at all. Or, your headings or post title is so plain that nobody takes the time to read even how interesting its content might be.

Address the problem by taking the time to look at your site’s design. Don’t make your sidebar look more important than your post section. Also, arrange your blog’s template so that your posts load first than your sidebar’s “too interactive” features. Find your widgets or design elements that aren’t responsive or are too large taking a long time to load-up in browsers and remove it. Write about what’s the buzz in your niche; or if you can’t avoid recycling old topics, learn how to make catchy titles and headings and easy to read posts; you can head to copyblogger and learn just that.

Another trick I see working most of the time is to contradict what most entrecard users are expecting of your blog. Put your entrecard widget somewhere in the middle or the last part of your blog’s sidebar instead of the top fold so that it will take some time to load after all your blog’s nice features load up. That way, they will have some time to look around while waiting and looking for your entrecard. Even if they didn’t take interest in your blog’s content, at least they stayed for something like a minute or so. Additionally, Felex Tan dot com has a write-up on How to Reduce Entrecard’s High Bounce rate.


2. Learn how to advertise on entrecard efficiently – I believe there are three types of entrecard advertisers. There is the cheap one who goes after the cheapest and the newest blogs around. Then, there’s the opportunist who looks for high priced and well trafficked blogs to advertise in while supporting his efforts with massive chain drops. And, then there’s the smart one who knows how to efficiently spend his credits on blogs by researching on the blogs they advertise in and doing some cost / benefit assessments. Although it has little to do with fixing your blog’s internal problems about reining the wild traffic it’s getting, this will influence greatly in managing your credits without wasting too much in exchange of poor traffic.

Are you advertising in the right blog; is the price too much for the actual benefit you’ll be getting; is the blog strict about the advertisements it runs; these are just some of the questions that a smart advertiser should think about before spending their credit for an advertisement slot. In theory, an advertisement in blogs within the same or relevant niche will yield visitors who’ll be interested in what your blog’s about. So if you have a cat blog, you’ll have to advertise in pet, animal, or nature oriented blogs right? If the blog has a price range of 500 to 1000+ credits, are you willing to spend that much for that blog to advertise, or maybe you’ll come back later to see if its price goes down? Or maybe you can assess if the price is just right or is over inflated by the false demand for its ad slot which really has nothing for you in it.

Turnip of Power has an article about the proper strategies on Entrecard Advertising.


3. Create Attention Grabbing 125 x 125 banners – Are your cards too flat and boring. It might not directly affect how long people will stay in your blog, but it will play an essential part in people’s expectations of your blog and the number of drops you’ll receive. When your ad says little about what people will see in your blog or presents little punch to grab their attention, don’t expect them to click to it either. It should be an eye catcher. What’s great about it is when it’s really an attention getter, not only will entrecard users want to click it but other non-entrecard users as well.

Take these banners as an example. I believe they best explain what an attention grabber should look like.

I find a banner interesting if its one of the following: it calls you to action, it has a thought provoking concept be it image or words, it’s funny, or it offers something you really want. Also, like it or not, even how moralists condone it, sex sells. Beautiful girls in bikinis like it or not, will always get more clicks than other conventional images.

If you want a real guide on how to build banners with higher click-through rates, please read this article from BANNERDESIGNBLOG.COM about
10 Effective Ways to Boost Banner Click-through.


4. Run EC Contests – People always like the idea of winning. Running contests and placing it in your card or somewhere in your blog where your visitors will immediately see it will hold them back from changing page. Give them something where they can greatly benefit even if they don’t win the contest at all such as a link by mentioning their entries for example. A successful contest will give you more than entrecard attention. Tons of back links, increased traffic, increased readership, and definitely increased search engine, alexa, and technorati rankings; who wouldn’t want it. Always make sure though that your prize isn’t so insignificant that nobody would want to participate either.

Problogger has a must read guide about running blog contests, and don’t forget WaywardGirls.org’s Your Secret Weapon – Contests.


5. Feature Your Droppers – Droppers will be consistent with their drops to your widget, stop for a while to look for something, and perhaps leave comments as well - that is if they see something favorable for them in your blog. Take Entrecard Favorites for example. Although I wasn’t able to see any Google pagerank yet, look at its Alexa (299,276) and Technorati (186,136) stats. And it’s all because the blog is devoted to entrecard and those that frequently drops to the site. Although you can do just that, there are also simple ways to reward your droppers. You can install a recent droppers widget in your blog (see how in entrecard’s help section). Or install a Top Dropper Widget which you can learn via Turnip of Power.

Additionally, maybe you can spare a piece of your time to write about your frequent droppers or perhaps your favorite entrecard blogs. Don’t forget to tell them about it and watch your comment section for a thank you note, which I consider reward enough, or maybe, if they’re kind enough, a link back to your post of them.


6. Participate in EC contests – It’s not only in making contests that a blogger benefits. Joining them will also give you something. Besides the prize, more often than not, simply participating in contests will give you a link back to your blog. It’s that simple. What, don’t you want an extra inbound link? What more if you win, you’ll get tons of credits to use for advertising and getting other bloggers to do something for you (which I’ll tackle next) or maybe real bucks plus links coming from the blog holding the contest and several other partner or sponsor blogs. The possibilities are endless and it’s just joining contests.


7. Offer credits in exchange for something – I believe most of you are aware of the power of credits today as compared to when entrecard first started. People are offering services and goods in exchange for credits now. You can do the same. Offer credits for a stumble, dig, review, subscribers or anything possible that would help your blog grow and get traffic in exchange for credits. Yes these things are simply against some TOAs and Google’s guidelines, but I believe that it depends on how often and how strongly you rely on this form of popularity building. If your goal is to get a bit of an exposure that’s fine but if it’s the rule of your game to game the system then that’s certainly contemptible.


8. Network with Your Fellow Entrecarders – It’s possible with forums and social networking medias, I don’t see a reason why not in entrecard. Form interesting partnerships with your fellow entrecard users especially when conducting contests, gimmicks, advertising, or you need help on certain things about your blog. Send them messages if you’re launching something new for their participation or assistance, or whatever it is that you have to network with them for. You can also join the entrecard forums and bond with other entrecard users to learn something new from them.


Do you think my article can be of any help to improving your entrecard experience? Please leave your comments or suggestions below. Thanks.



technorati tags: entrecard, boost traffic, quality traffic

Soge Shirts

Are you getting tired of those same old shirts you’re wearing, you know, those signature shirts without a life? Do you want something that stimulates the brain and stuff, you know, those thought provoking ideas and jokes? I believe you’re not getting what I’m trying to impart to you. Okay, just put it this way; if you want shirts that rock and kick ass, this is for you. Visit Soge Shirts and look around. There are many unique and funny designs you won’t get anywhere else. Wear it and people will not see you the same way again. If you want people to start noticing you or maybe just get a good laugh, dude this is for you. Buy Soge Shirts. Available in different colors and sizes.

Like that one? Actually I’m supposed to do a review of this site but I thought it’s a lot better if I sort of sell it through copywriting. This is my 6th time to do it actually (the others are in my other blog) and, I believe, it still needs a lot more practice. Anyways, if you really want funny and unique shirts I think you should give this one a try. I believe there’s something for everybody in it. I particularly liked the designs in “Shirts that Offend” category. There are also other available merchandises besides shirts where the designs are printed like caps, bags, and even mugs. The prices range below $20 to something around $42. Also, this site has a blog in Blogger and Myspace where you’ll get to know the guys behind these shirts a lot better.



technorati tags: shirts, shirt design, copywriting

Why Deep Linking is better than Simple Reciprocal Linking

Deep Linking means linking to a specific page or image of a website instead of that site’s index or home page. On the contrary, reciprocal linking is done by exchanging links which are only pointing to the sites’ index or home page. Both links count to search engines most especially if the back link or referring link is coming from a relevant blog, post, or keyword. But what’s great about deep linking is that, when you have lots of it, it helps in your overall page rank which is reflected in your index page.

From how I understand it, besides the link popularity of your index page, search engines reward you for the incoming deep links to your site. It’s another way of showing them that your site has relevant content and not a spam site that’s why you’re getting all these deep links. Links pointing only to your index page can be viewed by search engine algorithms as a product of schemes meant to trick them; whereas deep links are less subject to that. Additionally, it doesn’t take that many links to get a specific deep page ranked as compared to the index page.

From what I noticed also, this blog of mine produces organic search engine traffic (search engine users) through my deep pages as compared to my front page. With this observation, I believe it’s a lot easier to build page rank for your blog through your deep pages as compared to your front page; because, to put it simply, I haven’t done any deep linking technique yet and I’m already getting visibility through my old posts, what more if I employ deep linking? I am not saying that you withdraw from promoting your site via the index page and shift to deep linking; but you should give both strategies equal importance. That way, your SEO strategy will have a more long-term and stronger effect.

And now the bulleted part!!! :) Here are the reasons why you should give more weight to deep linking as compared to simple generic linking to your homepage:

• It has the potential to rank your blog higher in search engines when partnered with other linking strategies as compared to linking to your home page alone.
• Your older posts will get more exposure, especially if they are really valuable content-wise and have good headlines or post titles.
• You’ll get more subscribers if they find your post really helpful. Just make sure that you’ll make follow-up posts on your most visited deep pages.
• If your front page quickly dropped from the ranking, your deep pages might still save your traffic since it is ranked differently, although there might be some minor effects.
• All your pages link back to your main page, so it’s just another jump before your visitors know what you’re recently up to and decide to participate.
• I said it earlier, but I won’t mind stating it again. If Google sees 1000 links to your homepage and 0 links to the rest of your site; it is very likely they will sense that something is amiss. You know, a black hat scheme maybe.

Now, how do you get deep links?

Basically, if your blog posts are well-written, good headlines, clear and well thought out content, etc, these deep links will just come in naturally. But take note that simply waiting isn’t going to guarantee how long you’ll have to wait or if it’s going to be seen at all. So you’ll have to actively promote and market your posts out there. Here are the easy ways I could think of for you to get your needed deep links:

1. Comment on a blog post similar to your post, place the link to your related post and state how it’s relevant or something to that effect. From here, just hope that the author of the blog can either add a link to your post in his post or on the following posts he’ll make, or perhaps the readers will decide to link to it if they find it equally or more interesting. Theoretically, though, it’s a deep link in itself except if the blog is using a no follow plug-in in the comment section.
2. Drop your deep page’s URL here (don’t spam please) if you think it can help in the conversation. The idea is similar to “leaving your comment” above.
3. Submit your post to social bookmarking sites and get one temporary deep-link, plus more permanent ones (if people rate your post well) and more traffic.
4. You can ask your fellow bloggers if you can swap deep-links, of course don’t expect many to respond positively.
5. Find online syndication services that will display an RSS feed as a web page. These will typically contain deep links to pages on to the originating website, which is a valuable source of backlinks.
6. Find blogs that let you contribute to its content even if it’s just summaries of your original post. Sign-up and write a summary or a teaser which will link to your intended post.
7. Submit your post to blog carnivals.
8. Guest blog and write an article that links to your old posts as references.
9. There are deep link directories around the net. Google it and try at your own risk.

And finally, here are some articles I’ve found which could help you to understand deep linking more. I have to admit that I’m fairly new to the concept so there might be some things about it that I barely or haven’t touched at all.

Deep Linking – Wikipedia
Deep Linking is Good Linking
Deep Linking Strategy for Content Sites
Deep Linking, Or Rethink Your Site Promotion Strategy
Increase Your Search Engine Rankings by Deep Linking (internal deep-linking)
Why You Should Deep-Link Your Blog (internal deep-linking)
Deep Links and the Power of Anchor Text!



technorati tags: deep linking, SEO

ReviewBack

Today I’m getting my hands on reviewback.com as part of my quest to improve this blog’s search engine ranking. This site or swap review service has been around since April 2007 by Nick Maza and Kyle Johnson (see their About Page for more info). Basically, it’s free to join and signing-up is, as they say, a snap. The idea is to do reciprocal reviews and benefit from it. It’s a nice idea but I’m not sure if the blogs here are all active. I tried to browse through and I see quite a number of blogs that have not been updated since December last year. But persistent with what I have in mind, which is to get as many inbound links to my blog as possible, I still pushed my luck and tried to include my blog in the said review exchange site. I sent several trade requests to some blogs to see if they will react to my humble messages. I guess I’ll just have to wait until maybe one of them will reply and say ‘yes’, although I’m still confused about how they’ll contact me back (I mean there’s no FAQ page about it).

Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to check the site everyday and see if there will be some changes or signs that the review swapping is a success. And to those whom I’ve made trade requests in reviewback, if in case you happen to read this post, please leave your comment here if you’d like to trade reviews with me. And to those who’d like to give this review swapping thing a try please visit here: www.reviewback.com. And yes, if in case you have any experience or any ideas about reviewback.com, please leave your comments here also so that we could learn from each other. Thanks.



technorati tags: review back, review exchange

Formula for Effective Commenting

In my two years of experience as a blogger, leaving comments in other people’s blogs is a very important part of blogging, especially if you’re just starting your blog. Comments, as all of us bloggers know, are the life and blood of a blog besides traffic and subscriber count. It’s a sign that there’s activity going on inside your blog. Without it, people will easily think that your blog is already dead. Take this blog for example. When my post doesn’t have any comment at all, it just means one thing. I didn’t make my usual rounds of leaving comments to my favorite blogs (which is becoming quite often these hectic days).

For bloggers, the habit of leaving comments was designed to convey any or all of the following: your interest in the written article, your interest in the blogger who wrote the article, your point of view about the article, your desire to be noticed by the writer of the article, your desire to get your blog noticed and get a reciprocal comment or get linked to, and as a requirement for something (like a competition). Either these or they’re spam. But for me which I think is also true for other bloggers, I usually drop my comments because I use them to also get comments and visitors to my blog. Search for tips on how to boost your blog’s traffic and I’m very sure that almost all of them will tell you that making lots of comments is part of it.

But not just any comments will get you what you want. Although it’s possible to get some reaction from other bloggers with just a simple hi or hello, it’s definitely going to fail to convert into any reasonable traffic or comment to your blog. How then do you form a comment that will get you traffic and reciprocal comments? There are several things that you must observe when making your comments. Although it’s not always guaranteed to draw in lots of visitors, it’s always guaranteed to get you a comment or two. At least your blog doesn’t look sorry with “0 comments” staring blankly at your face.

1. Add to the conversation – Don’t just leave a “hi” or “hello”. Bloggers won’t hate you for doing so but you’re not going to get any attention either. Usually, sharing examples are the best way to do it but if you think adding an item or two which you think the author forgot to mention is equally fine then go ahead.

2. Link to your blog or post only when necessary – Bloggers hate spammers and sploggers. When you constantly leave your blog’s URL with your comment text, you are one. Do so only if it has something to do with the post and state in your comment why it’s relevant. Most bloggers delete comments with too much self-promotion involved so beware of that unnecessary signature in your comments which link to your blog.

3. Be different or intelligent – Although impossible from time to time, try to stand-out from the rest. You want attention right? Say something intelligent. Say something different. Sometimes the conversation gets too monotonous that readers just scroll down to the bottom of it. Break the repetition and strike a new chord. Sometimes a really insightful and/or unusual (but relevant) comment can do lots of great stuff.

4. Ask a question – When you ask, people answer. When it’s not the blogger who’ll answer you, maybe it’ll be your fellow commenters. Asking is one of the best ways to solicit attention. But when everyone’s asking, maybe it won’t help asking too but providing some answer or clarification just might do.

5. Object appropriately – Trolling around won’t lead to anything but getting your comment removed. If you find something objectionable about somebody else’s post, state it civilly and don’t forget your reason why. Sometimes objecting or disagreeing can also guarantee attention from the readers only if you state your case calmly and intelligently.

6. Join the conversation – Besides adding to the topic of the conversation, be part of the community. Don’t forget about what the rest are talking about. Evaluate or highlight the good points in their comment too. By doing this, the other commenters might also develop an interest in visiting your blog as well.

7. Too long comments – Don’t write comments that are as long as the post themselves. If you’re going to do that, why not just post it in your blog and trackback or link back to the original post. When comments get too long, even how important you might think it is, people will just scan through it because it’s simply boring and too much.

8. Be early – When you’re the first guy to ever make the comment, it’s hard to miss what you have to say. What more if it’s really important? This is especially true with popular blogs that gets 100 comments per post. People hardly read the comments below the 20th.

9. Add humor – A good laugh will not only capture people’s attention but their hearts as well. But be careful about your jokes, sometimes people easily get offended without you being aware of it. I think the safest way to use it is to make fun of your self. But then again, be careful with this as to much can affect your reputation as well.

10. Be genuine – Don’t pretend what you are not. Don’t comment if you don’t feel that you can add to the conversation (there are still other blogs waiting for your precious words – he he he). Faking will always reflect in your comments.

And lastly, please feel free to leave your insights about making comments if they are effective on driving traffic to your blogs or not.

By the way, before I forget, here are the resources where I get several of the ideas that I wrote here. Please feel free to read them as they also touch some topics that I didn't include here.

The Power of Commenting on Blogs
11 Tips for Getting Your Comments Noticed on a Popular Blog
How To: Leave Quality Comments
How NOT to Comment on Comments
How to comment like a king (or queen!)
Blog Comments Still Matter


technorati tags: commenting, formula

I'm in Million Blog List

I'm number 398 in Million Blog List. If you want a free backlink to your site, and a free promotion as well, join this fast growing project and help its developer reach the millionth mark of blog listing.

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Million Blog List

technorati tags: million blog, miscellaneous

Top 5 Reasons Why Exchanging Links Is Good for You

Have you given up on exchanging links lately? It’s hard work, I know but I believe you should reconsider. If your site is barely making any traffic or it’s just a new kid on the block, doing exchange links properly will benefit you more than give you harm. Here are the 5 reasons why:

1. It will improve your search engine ranking immediately. Besides traffic, keywords, and content, search engines also look at your site’s link popularity or the amount of sites linking to you. The theory is: the more there is, the better you will rank. Of course, there are other things associated with the sources of links that must also be weighed before the whole thing adds to your pagerank. Always exchange links with blogs within your niche or at least more with them than others. That’s because SEO experts all agree that links coming from a site dealing with a completely different topic is considered useless by search engines.

2. It will generate traffic. Your high pagerank will yield more traffic compared to what you had previously. Additionally, the sites that link to you will also drive traffic to your site.

3. You will gain more authority. The more sites point to you, the more your content gets an exposure, and the more you become an authority to what you’re talking about. Your visitors will start returning once they understand that your blog is a valuable resource for something that they are looking for, especially if you’re also linking to other sites that are valuable resources as well.

4. More popularity means more opportunities. I’ve said this in my previous post but I believe it’s still worth mentioning. When you get more exposure and popularity because of your higher pagerank, the more opportunities will come to you. Advertisers willing to be your blog’s sponsor will find you. Most importantly, other bloggers will also start approaching you for proposals which can further your blogging career. And if you get big enough, A-list bloggers will also start noticing you, in case they haven’t. There will be links coming from them which could lead to an even better search engine ranking and higher traffic.

5. More earnings. If you’re running ads, obviously, the traffic you’re producing will lead to more clicks to them, or more impressions which means more generated earnings. It’s that simple.

So, if you’re not interested with what I’ve stated above, or you simply don’t believe me, then you could forget about exchanging links.


technorati tags: link exchange, boost traffic, link popularity

Rave-Up Your Traffic with Reviews

If you haven’t noticed yet, writing reviews have been too prevalent in the blogosphere these days. Companies are spending bucks to get a lot of reviews, and bloggers on the other hand get involved with these paid reviews to earn money. Why is it that companies are willing to pay just to have their reviews? Simple, it generates buzz, it generates traffic, and it improves their ranking in the search engines. The very same reason why you should opt getting reviews as much as possible.

From how I see it, I believe there are 4 reasons why you need to have your blog reviewed a lot:

• It will improve your blog’s Google Pagerank – Basically, if all else fails, I believe this would be the last one to go down the drain. The theory is, if your blog is making buzz around the web, even the slightest hint of it, links will start converging and point to you. Of course, this will generate traffic. But most importantly, these links will make Google think that your site is valuable at the moment because of the buzz it’s generating. And so to make the news get to people faster, you’ll get higher page rank and better search engine results, the very same reason why spammers try to replicate the idea by automating their link production and targeting forums, social networking sites, technorati, and comment sections of your blog. How is this related to you, you may ask? By getting reviewed by a bunch of review making blogs, your inbound links increases hence, you better your chance of getting search engines indexi you better leading to a higher pagerank. It’s like making your own buzz yourself.


• It will boost your traffic – Same as the above explanation; but this time, your better visibility in the search engines will get you more visitors plus the traffic referred by these sites that made your review.


• It will boost your readership – If the review is done to your advantage, highlighting your blog’s best points and tells exactly what your blog is about; it’s possible that people who share the same interest will decide to check you out, browse through your articles, and subscribe to your feed


• You will learn a great deal about your blog from a different perspective – Often times, even how much we hate to admit it, we fall in love with our blogs much too quickly that we often overlook or be blinded to see the weaknesses of the different aspects of our blog. Again, if the blog review is done correctly, we’ll be able to see what’s wrong with what we thought as perfect. This way, we could optimize our blogs better for our readers and visitors.

Compared to being in the front page of social networking sites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit and several others, blog reviews usually don’t have the same potential to produce huge traffic unless the review comes from a prominent and highly trafficked blog such as Problogger. But in some ways, blog reviews can be a lot better than links coming from social networking sites. When your blog gets reviewed, the inbound link coming from it will not be easily dismissed as spam by most search engines (unless the site making the review is somewhat spammy). Social networking sites can easily be manipulated by spammers. Blog reviews are permanent and have the ability to continually refer traffic to you unlike the social networking sites which are often times a one shot deal. Also, the links contained in these blog reviews, when they age, are given more weight by search engines which kinda help your page ranking too.

So, have I changed your mind about giving that extra effort to get a blog review for your blog? But before heading out there and start submitting your blogs for blog review like raving mad, always remember that it helps to do it politely. Do what they’re requesting you in exchange of a free review or a paid review (if you’re willing to spend for it). And always do a little favor for them such as Stumbling, Digging, leaving a comment, and/or writing about them and their service to leave a better impression or as a token of appreciation.


technorati tags: boost traffic, blog review

Why you need blog networking in your blogging career

I’m happy today. It’s because our blog has just been reviewed in Our Blog Review and in Free Blog Reviews. It might not be obvious for now but these links coming from outside will do its magic later on when they start pulling-in visitors and changing our page rank status. In case you don’t know, this is related to our topic which is all about networking your blog.

As it is called, blog networking has something to do with connections. And those connections are with your fellow bloggers. Linking with other blogs, visiting and dropping comments, guest blogging, getting and making reviews, exchanging favors with fellow bloggers, etc, it’s all part of building networks. It’s like creating a community wherein you interact and benefit from each other. The idea behind networking is to let others discover us and gain audience to whom we shall write for which is the very idea of blogs these days.

What are the benefits of blog networking?

If you think blogging as if you’re in isolation like what other top-bloggers claimed they have been doing all these time will get you to success, think again. If you don’t write as good as they do and if nobody took notice and spread the word that you’re producing quality content, do you think Google’s indexing alone will save you? I don’t think so. In truth it will be easier to elevate your visibility in Google’s search results if you resort to a good networking strategy, which is an equivalent or perhaps SEO in itself, rather than relying on Google’s indexing capability.

With that said, here are the possible benefits you could get out of blog networking:

• More visitors – With all the links from blogs you have connected to it’s only logical that there will be referral traffic from their site to yours.
• More readers – And with all those visitors, certainly there would be those who’d want to hear more from you.
• More comments – Of course, if you’re able to catch their attention, they’ll most certainly comment.
• Higher Pagerank – Those referral traffic and inbound links only mean one thing: Good SEO technique.
• Learn something new – Your connections and the community you’re building will teach you a thing or two. It’s almost impossible to not learn anything from them.
• More opportunities – The more connections you have, the more possibility of getting opportunities to further your blogging cause.
• More earnings – The traffic, the SEO, the readers, and you still doubt that you’ll earn anything.

If you’re really dedicated in boosting your blog’s overall performance, then by all means give networking a try.

How to do blog networking?

If you’ve been blogging for sometime now, blog networking is nothing new. If you look from one blogging tip to another you’d instantly recognize that it’s nothing different, it might be a “boost your traffic” topic, or “how to start blogging” tip. But, if you’re new to blogging, or perhaps you want to refresh what you’ve learned before, then read on.

• Link prodigiously. Blog about other’s blog or post and link to it, create a blogroll of your favorite blogs, ask for link exchanges, it’s all about linking to others to get links from them in return, but don’t expect too much too quick. There will be some who’ll be more than willing to link to you while others won’t. If you really think a particular blog deserves to get linked to, it doesn’t matter if that blog links to you or not. Just link to it and perhaps that blog will also link back later.


• Get reviewed. Having the opportunity to be reviewed by other sites is a great idea. More than having a link from the reviewing site, it’s also a form of recommendation that your blog can benefit from. Additionally, you’ll know how other people see your blog. If there’s any negative feedback, than you’ll be able to spot and change it. Don’t forget to link to the reviewing site also, or maybe write about how great they reviewed you so that others will know where to get the same raving reviews you’ve had.


• Visit blogs and leave a comment. If you want to get comments flooding your comment section, don’t you think other bloggers desire the same? Leave comments if you find interesting blogs or if you wish to share your knowledge on a certain topic. Don’t spam. Comment from one blog to another and, surely, you’ll also get comments in your blog. Who knows, they might decide to link or write about your blog as well. Confucius said; “Do unto others what you want others to do to you” (or something like that); so don’t forget to answer their comments and/or comment back to their blog.


• Interact with people in your niche. This is the best way to get to know new friends who could perhaps help you on a particular topic that you don’t understand. You could also learn new things from them or, maybe, they could help you promote your blog. Try to subscribe to their feeds; this will keep you updated on what’s the buzz in your niche for the moment.


• Socialize within communities. Join and participate in social networks and forums relevant to your niche where you can pitch your ideas or get new ideas from your fellow bloggers. There’s blog catalog where you could get additional traffic to your blog depending on how active you participate in the forums. Additionally, you could boost your subscriber count or your technorati faves or perhaps get as many link exchanges here. There are many things in store for you here depending on the groups you join inside. There’s also twitter where many bloggers get a lot of traffic and exposure by twitting their ideas or answering the twits of others. I personally haven’t tried it yet; but with all the reviews and buzz about its highly addictive features and power to considerably improve your traffic, I believe it’s worth giving a try.


• Guest blog. I’m giving this a try next time. Why? It’s because doing guest blogging will greatly affect your traffic, readership, and reputation as a blogger. By guest blogging you’re showcasing your talent and giving your blog an exposure outside your blog. Bloggers do this to boost their traffic and to build alliance with the blogger or the blog to whom they guest blog.


• Offer your service. If you have skills which you could offer to others, why not voluntarily offer your service. It always makes a good impression from others if you could help them out of their quick sands. Are you good at graphic design? Offer your help to entrecarders who are in need of 125x125 designs or to bloggers who are in need of a good banner or graphic icon. Offer free reviews if you’re good at it. Offer free consultations when you have the time. Simply offering help when needed will get you a lot of network connection in no time.

For my last comment about blog networking, if possible give more attention to smaller bloggers than the A-listers. Everyday, these big time bloggers get all forms of requests to connect, as attested by the A-listers themselves. It will therefore be difficult for them to notice your plead for connection and they will also often times be choosy about to whom they’ll be connecting with. These smaller bloggers might not be able to match the prestige and the amount of traffic these A-listers can provide but where do you think these hard-working small bloggers will be heading in the future? They might be on their way to becoming A-listers and won’t it be sweet to be the one of the first to register on their blogrolls when that day finally comes?

These are just the easiest ways to do blog networking that I could think of. I am sure there are a lot of other ways to network your way to success. You may leave it in the comment section if you have more ideas about blog networking. For now, I’ll be leaving you with great resources that I found and where I based my article from. Enjoy.

How to Promote Your Blog through Networking
Networking within your Blog Niche: 7 Essential Tips for Bloggers
9 keys to networking via blogs for introverts
How to Blog: 4. Blog Networking
Benefits of Offline Blog Networking



technorati tags: blogging tips, networking

Blogging Made Easy, My New Catch Phrase

I changed my entrecard widget in a hope that the cards I approved will finally show up (but they still don’t). I contacted entrecard about it but I guess the reply will be available some hours or a day later, or none at all. I also installed a “top commenters widget” which I found here (Blogger Buster) and the “recent comments widget” here (Blogger Templates). Yes, those are basically the things I did before writing this post.

Anyway, have you noticed the new catch phrase and image I used to replace the old “sidebar-header”? It looks simple and straight to the point. ULUPONGDOTCOM, Blogging made easy, or perhaps, monetized-blogging made easy. After all, if you’re just going to blog just for the sake of making an online diary without any motives of earning from it or anything, blogging will be simply easy. I’m sure there are other blogs who have made the same “blogging made easy” line but haven’t made anything easy for most pro-blogger wannabes. I wonder how many of us are competing for the idea that monetized blogging can be made easy through us?

When you’re blogging to earn money online, it’s true that it has its fair share of rewards but the process will definitely not be easy. It needs a lot of effort to turn your blog into a money maker. All those techniques to promote and drive traffic to your blog, boost the readership, enhance its keyword performance, etc are simply nothing like a walk in a park. I’m not sure about others, but running a monetized blog is something like a full-time job and nothing like what most online marketers are presenting as easy-pickings even if you buy this and that e-book. Of course you learn and gain insights about blogging, but you’re not going to earn anything from your blog immediately. That’s why it’s really amazing how fast the population of blogs with adsense and other affiliate programs grow these days. A lot of people want to get in but only a few will really get something decent out of what they’ve started.

I guess the only way you could make things easy about monetized blogging is to give them tips that won’t enumerate endless steps they have to accomplish but make them understand how many of those steps are easy to accomplish. Inspiring them to continue refining their actions is a lot better than just drawing them with false promises to take action. If you make them feel that monetized blogging is difficult but fun instead of telling them to buzz off if they can’t bear the hardship, then I guess you’re successful at making blogging easy.

Tough words from someone who’s barely making any income online don’t you think? Maybe it is, but I already set this as my goal when we started this blog. It’s finding ways to make readers understand things easily. I just wish I’ll be able to live up to it for the rest of my blogging life.



technorati tags: ramblings, tagline

Tips in Running Project Wonderful Ads on Your Blog

It’s been 4 days since I’ve started advertising in Project Wonderful and I’d say it’s proving quite effective. I haven’t spent more than $1 but to date, I’m getting at least 2 clicks everyday from the blogs where I made my bids. And there’s about 8 or so blogs where my ad for this blog is currently the highest bidder.

As an advertiser though, I’m somewhat compelled to check whether my ads will get enough exposure from site to site since some Project Wonderful users will just throw their ad boxes in places where their visitors barely look at. Also, there are some who price their minimum bids so high but the benefit you’ll be getting from them doesn’t match the price they’re setting. And so, I came up with these tips on how you could set-up your Project Wonderful ads to make it advertiser-friendly and get the most out of it at the same time.

1. Set your ad format to 125x125. I guess this is the ad format that’s just the right size but not too small that people will tend to ignore. Banners, leaderboard, and sky-scraper formats are fine also but I don’t think pricing it below 1$ is a good idea since it occupies a lot of space and people tend to shy away from sites that looks ugly because of huge ads floating everywhere they look at.

2. Don’t place more than 6 squares. Yes they are just the right size, but once you put them together they manage to occupy a lot of space also. Additionally, Project Wonderful is about economy. If you place too many, there won’t be much competition in the bidding, and the price of your ad space might take a long time to take-off.

3. Place relevant tags. When setting up your ad boxes, Project Wonderful usually asks for tags or keywords of your site. Place all relevant keywords you could think of so it’ll be easier to find you via tags. There are some bloggers who recommends putting the word “entrecard” in your tags to be seen easily. Although I haven’t tried it personally yet, it makes sense because there are a lot of entrecard users who are also using Project Wonderful.

4. Make an accurate description. Along with the tags, they will also ask you to describe the site where your ad box will be seen. Provide the exact place where you plan to put the ad box. Also, tell what your site is about so that they will have a basic idea of what your visitors and readers look for in your site.

5. Give a minimum bid amount other than $0. It’s okay to have a 0 minimum bid, but if you’re looking to get something decent out of Project Wonderful you must at least place a realistic value of how much your ad space should cost per day. But be sure that you don’t over-price since it’s really difficult to get “blogger-advertisers” with a starting amount of 1$ or more.

6. Auto-approve your ads. It’s not recommended to approve each ad that comes your way manually. Besides losing money from potential ads that could have started early on and the bidding that will soon follow, it will really deter most advertisers from ever placing a bid without knowing when and if their ads will ever appear on your site.

7. Place your ad box where your visitors will immediately see them. Advertisers hate it when they can’t see their ads after a few scrolls from the top. Unless people read your comments, it’s not a good idea to place your ad box in your blog’s footer. Place your ad box on the top fold or somewhere near to get more paying advertisers.



technorati tags: blog tips, ads, monetization

Low-cost Advertising Using Project Wonderful

I’ve been a Project Wonderful user for about a month and 8 days already. I used it first in my other blog to test if it can compete with adsense when it comes to monetizing your site. Unfortunately, it barely scratched the amount which adsense manage to squeeze out of my blog. One thing to note though, is that you can use your small earnings from it (instead of just taking it) to advertise on other blogs, after all it doesn’t usually take that much to advertise in this ad network. But before I go on spending my hard-earned bucks to bid for an advertising spot, I decided to do some research first.

Basically, the whole concept of advertising in Project Wonderful is to bid for an ad spot in a blog running Project Wonderful in one of its available space. (For more information about this, click here.) There are blogs that cost more than a dollar and a lot more that costs less for a day. If you’re lucky enough, you can run an ad here for $0.30 in a month. The usual ad formats advertisers use are 125x125 squares since most of its advertisers are bloggers like me who might also be using entrecard at the same time, but other size formats are also available.

From my observations of the ads running in my Project Wonderful boxes, most of them are only bidding for a daily basis which means they expire after one day. Also, a lot of bloggers I’ve come across get their ads in the network via bidding instead of the other advertising feature which is through campaigns where there will be more money involved since you’ll be spreading your ads across the network based on certain criteria (tags, maximum bid, page views, etc.)

From what I’ve read, it seems that campaigns take lesser time to set up and monitor and yields a far better result as compared to manual bidding from site to site. Of course, it all depends on the amount you’re willing to dish out which is additionally true for manual bidding. Take EZMoneyOn.Net as an example:

We advertised for about 3 weeks through Project Wonderful. We’ve manually chosen 22 sites, with ads above the fold, with enough visitors. We’ve spent about $75. Our ads were displayed for 16,387 times and our ads were clicked for 187 times. That’s a CTR of 1.14%.

Yesterday, because we had another $15 in our PW account, we decided to setup a campaign. So we’ve chosen all sites with 125×125 ads, tagged with money, with a current bid between $0 and $0.2. Our ad was displayed on about 188 sites, was viewed for about 45795 times and was clicked for about 128 times. Our campaign last until our money ended, about 13 hours. Although the CTR was only 0.3%, much smaller than in the first case, the cost per visit was much better: $0.12, compared to $0.40 in the first case.

Statistics show that is better to setup a campaign instead of choosing sites manually. But for a campaign you must have some budget, because there are many sites involved, so you can easily spend about $20/day. Between those sites there are also sites with ads below the fold, so you will not receive any click, or very few…

For the moment, I don’t think I can afford running campaigns. Perhaps, I’ll be sticking to manual bidding for now until I earn enough from running Project Wonderful ads. After some Googling for answers, I’m not able to find any tips on how to effectively spread the advertising potential of something like 10$ or less through manual bidding in Project Wonderful. In that case, I guess it’s all up to me to test if I’ll be able to get something good out of a few dollars.

Now, how to do it? I guess the strategy should be very much similar to EZMoneyOn.Net’s approach in campaign bidding. I’ll just have to do it manually with a much shorter budget. Start hunting for blogs within the $0.01 – $0.03 max bid and run my ad for 3 to 4 days perhaps and see if there will be any favorable result. Of course, I’ll have to make sure also that the blog is producing favorable page views per day and the ad box should be above the fold. I’m not sure if I’ll manage to get it done because I’ve read of some guy warning about getting a carpal tunnel’s syndrome if you do it manually due to its over tedious nature. Maybe he’s just exaggerating things.

Anyways, if you guys have any experience about Project Wonderful and running advertisements in it that you’d like to share, please leave your comment so that we can learn from each other.

By the way, here are some links to the great resources I found about running Project Wonderful ads in your blog and advertising using it which I hope will be of help to you.


4 Tips for use with Project Wonderful
Project Wonderful Review and Tips
Tips For Project Wonderful Publishers
Project Wonderful Provides Cheap, Targeted Advertising!
Does Project Wonderful Live Up to the Hype?
Project Wonderful Advertising Campaigns
Advertising Through Project Wonderful
ProjectWonderful: Advertise and make some bucks
Getting Targeted Traffic At 1 Cent Per Visitor



technorati tags: advertising, marketing, traffic

Get the most out of entrecard in a short period of time

If you’re one of the bloggers who barely get the time to spend on using entrecard, you’re not alone. There are many of us around who can barely use entrecard except for approving the advertisement requests and reciprocating a few drops here and there and that’s it. But you should also be aware that being in this stage all the time won’t get you what you’re expecting out of entrecard. You might as well remove entrecard out of your blog since, obviously, it’s not going to help you by leaving it stagnant all the time.

If you truly want entrecard to work for you, then you must at least do something, even how little, to expand your reach within the system from time to time. Now, how do we do it? Basically, I have here a few notes of my own on how I plan to change the direction of my entrecard utilization. If you’re looking for hack solutions then I’m sorry to disappoint you but I’m not very well versed in such. Basically what I’m proposing to solve the dilemma we’re under is through the prioritization of our actions in entrecard. You must prioritize which actions you must do first, do together, or do without in order to get the most out of your time.


Step # 1 (Reciprocate)
See your drop inbox all the time and your advertisers too. Reciprocate or drop them back. It’s a mutual activity where the guy who gave you 1 ec should also get one from you. Also, you might’ve dropped to some people before and the cards in your inbox were the rest of them who decided to drop back. That means it’s ok to drop them back again and again; and one drop to them will give you 2ec. Why? It’s because they’ll almost always reciprocate back when you do. Oh yeah, don’t ever forget opening each link in tabs so that you’ll be able to deal with them simultaneously. Close the tabs when you’re through.


Step # 2 (Advertise)
You’ll get more drops back to you once you advertise. You’ll get more opportunities for traffic when your card is not just in somebody else’s inbox. Now, where to advertise? Basically, try advertising on blogs related to your niche since you’ll seldom get denied with them compared to others. Try to also advertise in blogs advertising in yours if you can afford them. Well, they have the guts to advertise in your “flower” blog. Why the hell can’t you advertise in their “sports” blog? I can’t recommend advertising in the newcomers nowadays since there’s so many who’s after the cheaper ones that it often gets difficult to spot a newcomer without having a “spot full” or an “ad queue full”. You can also try to spot blogs not related to your niche but is willing to have your card shown in their sidebar which will be discussed next.


Step # 3 (Pay attention)
There are many ways to drop plenty of your cards and get 300 or more entrecredits out of it in a short period of time. But if you’re just going to do some “hit and run” where you just visit the site and drop your card without even bothering to get the slightest idea what it’s all about then you’re just firing aimlessly to the sky. Try to at least see what’s going on in there and if it’s worthwhile. Of course, you are in a limited time so try to look for some key features that should determine if you’re staying or not. It should be something that should benefit your entrecard activity, or your interests. Here’s what I look at when I get to a blog from entrecard:

• The position of entrecard widget – It should be in a place where it’s easy to spot so that your card will be easily noticed if you decide to advertise in it.
• What is currently running in it – When the blog’s about health and it features a make-money-online blog in its EC widget, you’ll have more chances of getting your advertisement accepted.
• It talks about something that captures my interest – makes me want to comment and read more from it so I’ll subscribe.
• Link Exchange – Are there any mention of link exchange anywhere? Some say it’s spam to do reciprocal links. I don’t care. As long as it’s a real blog, not a splog and related to my niche then I’ll definitely exchange links.
• EC contests – Not that often but if it’s really easy and my chances of winning is high what should keep me from joining. More ec more advertising power.
• Other programs – there are blogs who are promoting some form of program or cause that could help boost your blog’s performance in some arena such as technorati or StumbleUpon. If it doesn’t feel like over-rated cheating, then I might consider joining.
• Pagerank – I won’t be a hypocrite, one important factor that I take into consideration when to be active in a blog is its pagerank. I have a google toolbar installed so I know. If it’s 3 and above, I know my blog will benefit from it in some way even outside the entrecard system.

Step # 4 (Bookmark)
Bookmark blogs that drop back and the ones that keep on returning drops. Bookmark your advertisers. Bookmark your entrecard friends. Bookmark your commenters (if they are entrecard users). Organize them in folder groups according to niche, their loading speed, position of EC widget, etc, depending on your own volition so that you could open a group in tabs to save you time instead of hunting your drop inbox forever. Then drop your card to all of them and so on and so forth. Just keep on bookmarking those that does something back. This is all about saving time and effort in dropping your precious cards.


Step # 5 (Organize your action)
Your priority is to drop your entrecard on the right places and see if it’s possible to advertise. Everything else follows while you’re dropping your cards. If you can manage to squeeze-in a few things right there and then, it’s always up to you.

You can do these steps in an hour or perhaps less since it only focuses on the efficient use of card dropping and advertising power. Everything else is omitted. I didn’t include exploring other blogs that you haven’t seen and haven’t seen you since, I myself can’t find the time to do it except when I’m researching for a topic to write, in which case I frequently forget to sign-in to my entrecard account to be able do some drops. Any how, I still manage to get new cards in my inbox despite it.

Eventually, as you progress, you’ll need more time to attend to your growing list of bookmarks and entrecard droppers, the time which you don’t have. I haven’t come to this situation yet but I think when this time occurs you might want to schedule your card dropping activity in batches.

Finally, I will not say that this is the perfect plan for you since it’s what I plan to do myself after all which I’m sharing to you. Maybe you might have some working tips yourself on how you manage using entrecard efficiently, in which case you can share in the comments below.



technorati tags: entrecard tips, efficient techniques

7 Tips to Boost Your Traffic Using Entrecard

It’s been said again and again, but it’s still worth mentioning that people are joining entrecard because they hope to boost their traffic using it. The sad truth, though, is that you won’t be getting the traffic you wanted or dreaming of if you’re not going to use entrecard effectively – effectively, as in actively participating in the system. I’m quite new to the system so along with the readers that I hope to reach with this post I’m also bound to follow what I’ll be writing here.

If you’re just going to watch your entrecard widget perform by itself after you installed it, it’s possible that you’ll only be getting 30 or less visits from entrecard everyday. And more likely, these visits will be what others call as “low quality traffic” since their only intention will be to drop their entrecard in your widget and then move on to the next blog.

And so to really get the most traffic out of your widget, you have to get out there and show the entrecard community that you exist and actively participates in the entrecard game.

To really boost your traffic using entrecard, here are the things you must do.

Drop all you can.

Drop your entrecard to blogs that also have the widget. You can start by navigating your dashboard. Visit your "drop inbox" and reciprocate to the people who have been dropping theirs to yours. Look into the "campaign" section and you’ll have loads of other blogs to drop your bomb upon.

Then there are other ways that will effectively give you the advantage of dropping when you don’t have that much time to go searching for entrecard blogs. There is chain dropping where you drop your entrecard to a widget, click the ad running in it, drop your card to the blog that you’ll be landing into, then click again the ad to land someplace, and so on and so forth.

Some entrecard power players find this style of card dropping to be quite limiting and time-consuming, and so came the advent of “bookmarking and labeling” where you bookmark/favorite the blogs you get into every now and then into labels and groups, then open/visit them in groups also to save time. This technique works effectively in browsers that offer tabbed browsing. (Click here for more info on this.)

And then, there’s Power Dropping. Where you have to visit Powerdropping.com and see top 300 sites there that loads fast enough so that you can open a lot of them at once within a few seconds or minutes depending on your connection speed and drop your bomb like wild fire. (Tip for Firefox users: Ctrl + Click when clicking the links so that they open in tabs instead of hitting “back” every time to return to the list.)

The last is an Entrecard Browser where you can browse through the entrecard blogs randomly. All you have to do is visit their site containing the browser and you’re good to go.

Advertise often

Then, spend the credits you’ve earned. That’s what it’s made for. Start advertising on entrecard blogs that are new to the system and those with low credit costs. Sooner or later you’ll be advertising to those with moderate costs, and then later still when you’ve gathered enough credits you’ll be able to advertise on well-known blogs. The more often you do this, the more exposure you get to non-entrecard users which might convert to another source of traffic.

Get an attractive and/or thought provoking 125x125 card

You only have a 125x125 pixel space to say that you want traffic and readers. Get the one that will catch your potential visitor’s eye. Red is a color that immediately speaks out loud but there are also other color combinations that has the same effect. Or maybe, create a very suggestive graphics or photo. I’m always a sucker for hot chicks in bikinis, you know.

Blog about entrecard

That’s what I’m doing right now. But it’s quite difficult to do for blogs that are outside the entrecard related niche. Search engines will index you. People interested in entrecard and entrecard users will easily find you. That’s traffic.

Join entrecard forums

Introduce yourself and get involved in the community. It’s also another way of getting more exposure to those who still didn’t know that you are in the entrecard community. Additionally, when you are able to help people in their problems, like what’s true in other forums across the net, the more benefits you’ll get.

Participate in entrecard contests

Stay tuned in forums all the time and you’ll be surprised at how many people are into doing contests offering entrecredits. Participate and give your best foot forward to win or at least leave a good impression. If you win, then the more credits you’ll get to advertise to your hearts content.

Run entrecard contests

Well, effective executions of contests are able to spike traffic stats. That’s why these people are conducting these contests in the first place. Run your own and provide a reasonable amount of credits as prize and see your traffic stats soar high.

The basic idea around these tips is to get as much exposure as possible. Of course, there are other approaches around which can also get you the most out of entrecard. It’s always up to you how you’ll manage using entrecard to your adavantage.



technorati tags: boost traffic, entrecard tips

How to Earn Money Using Entrecard

I’m new to the entrecard system. I joined about 2 weeks ago but the idea of getting something from entrecard more than just the traffic is something that keeps on recurring in my random thoughts about making money online.

It is undoubtedly the traffic which entrecard generate that gets more and more bloggers to get hooked into it. Because of this it has also become a great tool for most of its users to market their blog without the huge monetary cost involved when you do the same marketing outside.

By getting sufficient exposure within the entrecard community, you better your chance of getting more visitors, more readers, and perhaps more earnings from your CPC, CPM, or Sponsor ads. This is one of the ways to generate earnings from entrecard indirectly. This is why, to get more attention, there had been countless efforts made (be it creative or simply copying), such as contests, which involves entrecard points in exchange for doing something for the one conducting the bonanza. All of it in exchange for a highly-trafficked and highly profitable blog.

Besides getting traffic to increase their ad earnings, some have resorted to selling their entrecard credits for a monetary value, usually within the range of $10 per 1000ec and sometimes lower. This is how you earn using entrecard directly. Before, the selling isn’t too easy to spot. Some say there’re in e-bay (have seen only 5 to date), but most of the time you’ll see it announced in the entrecard user’s blog if he’s selling or not and how you’ll be transacting. Today though, there are sites dedicated to buying and selling entrecard credits such as entrecash and entrecredits. Then there’s entrebank, where according to sources, you can loan entrecard credits (I don’t know personally how this works. I’ve attempted to visit the site but can’t see any word about "loaning" or "borrowing").

Then there are those who offer their services for entrecard credits. Entrecard design, blog reviews, professional consultations, guest blogging, the list goes on and on. See the entrecard shop for examples. It’s like free publicity at the same time. I think this also falls in the indirect monetization of entrecard system.

If you’re really interested in making raw bucks out of entrecard or just getting the most out of it, here are some great reads that I’ve discovered which could help you a lot:

• 5 Entrecard tips to generate credits
• How to drop your Entrecard quick and fast
• EntreCard tips
• 10 Entrecard Traffic Tips for Success
• How to make the most out of Entrecard?
• Top 5 Entrecard Tips and Tricks

So far I still have no plans of selling entrecard credits since I only have 400ec in my account. I guess I still have to focus on marketing my blog better within the entrecard community to get more credits and improve my traffic.


technorati tags: entrecard, earn money

SEO tips for blogging beginners

Finally, this series is complete.

You've encountered a new word: SEO. You decided to look it at Wikipedia and other sites yet it's really hard to understand. But you want to use it on your blog. Then, if you haven't been to the other sites which provides almost the same content as I do, then I welcome you. You've come to the right place. The list provided below will lead you to the resources I've compiled about SEO which will definitely help you understand and use it effectively. Happy reading :)

• Introduction to SEO
• Better writing is SEO
• Keywords are your friends
• Manage your onsite links
• Quality inbound links
• Blog's maturity
• Make your blog crawler / indexing friendly
• Other things you should observe

technorati tags: SEO tips, blogging tips

SEO Tip Number 7: Other things to do and not to do

Besides writing better, using keywords, optimizing your inbound and outbound links, and doing other stuffs you’ve been hearing from me these past series, well, there are also other additional things that you might consider observing to really optimize your blog for search engines and get a better ranking.

Submit your blog URL to search engines

You might’ve been doing a lot of work within your blog but then you notice that you’re barely getting any traffic from search engines. The problem perhaps lies in the fact that search engines haven’t indexed your site yet. If your site is still in its starting stage then that’s probably true. (If you’re using Blogger/Blogspot though you don’t have to worry that much since Google will definitely index you.)

You can try submitting your Blog URL to search engines manually, or use those sites that offer free search engine submissions. Check this article for the links to free search engine submissions that I recommend. Take note that Google, Yahoo, and MSN aren’t the only search engines around and used by everybody.

Also, if you want Yahoo to index your blog faster, the easiest way around this is to get a Yahoo account and sign-up for a “My Yahoo Page”. There you can subscribe to the RSS feed of your blog.

Things to avoid

• Links “from” and “to” spam sites. This is bad for your blog. Because if you have lots of these, the search engines might be led into thinking that you’re also involved in spamming. Always check your comments section for spam and remove it once you spot one.
• Participation in Link-Schemes. If you’re buying or selling links, there might be some problem. If caught, your SERP rating and page rank will drop since you sort of compromised Google’s trust in you because of active participation in selling/buying links instead of linking to really valuable sites that could help your readers.
• Over-stuffing of keywords. Why? It’s because when you do this, it’s pretty obvious that you’re not after quality content but for tricking search engines into ranking you better because of tons of keywords. And that’s where you’re wrong. Search engines will see through your game and see you as a spammer.
• Misspellings and bad grammar. It doesn’t play that much role in your search engine ranking; but if it does, it might be that your visitors aren’t very fond of paying attention to what you’re saying. If your blog is teeming with wrong spellings and hard to understand grammar, it can cause massive brain hemorrhage. What more if you do it on your keywords? Well, people won’t be able to find it in their related searches all because it is indexed as “kayward” instead of “keyword”, right?

technorati tags: SEO Tips, blogging tips, others

SEO Tip Number 6: Blog Pages’ Crawling/Ranking Attributes

Your blog’s page ranking can also be affected by factors that prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your blog pages properly. Factors such as the amount of indexable text, coding, server accessibility, and content duplications; all have the capacity to pull your page rank down if you’re not careful and mindful about it.

• Indexable Content
  According to most SEO experts, pages that are “all” images, flash, frames, or java scripts rarely rank well. It is because search engines will find it hard to textually index a particular page if it contains no HTML text to associate the page with. (This is where the “image filename”, “alt”, and “title” attributes of images, --if it’s image-based not flash or java--, comes in handy.) If you have a blog post that happens to fall into this category, try putting in relevant textual descriptions, or tags to help it get indexed properly. But for better results, the next time you post, try keeping it simple and clean and their spiders will index your site a lot faster and more accurately. Of course, I don’t mean to avoid it altogether. A balance in using texts and other visual more interactive medias will always be the best way to go.


• HTML Code Structure
  Messy, malformed HTML makes bad-impressions from your visitors and search engines. Not only will readers find some portions of your blog hard to understand, the search engines will also find it hard to index these. Fix it once you spotted one to avoid getting underrated search engine rankings all the time.


• Duplicate Contents
  Content stealing is fast becoming a problem these days especially in the internet, and blog contents are frequently becoming a victim. What’s also bad is that some or maybe most of them make more money from it than you do. This is the reason why search engines try to curb these practices by giving lesser value to sites that produces replicated contents. And to avoid getting your post branded as a duplicate content, don’t copy and paste content from others. Also try to research on what you’re writing first to see if there’re other blogs or sites out there which might be something like 90% similar to what you’ll be writing. What’s bad though is if you’re the one that got stolen from and your page rank gets affected because of it. To combat “blog scrapers” kindly check these links: The Growing Trends in Content Theft, More small steps to combat content theft, Six Steps to Prevent Content Theft and Combat Copyright Infringement on Your Business Blog, Stop Content Theft Buttons and Badges.


• Dead / Broken Links
  Although a few of these wouldn’t hurt you, having a sizable amount of dead rotting links in your site can be dangerously detrimental. There’s nothing wrong with dead and broken links per se but your site’s credibility will eventually fall down if search engines will always find “dead-end” links which should have been pointing to a valuable resource. Additionally, it wouldn’t help your readers if the resource link you’re pointing them to is broken or dead. It’s always best to always make an effort to keep your blog free from dead/broken/dangling links. All the more if you have an old blog with tons of archived posts.


• Server Performance
  When your server is always down or search engines always have difficulties connecting to it, the consequence is: your ranking will suffer. It’s just simple logic actually. If search engines will always get “nothing” when they try to access your site, why do you think should they present it to people who would end up getting the same “nothing” when they access it? If your server’s always down all the time, then maybe it’s about time that you find a new server to host your site.

If you have anything to add, let me hear about it in the comments section.



technorati tags: SEO tips, blogging tips, page attributes, page rank

SEO Tip Number 5: Blog’s Maturity

Nope it’s not about being a mature writer. It’s about the age, performance, and content of your blog. Actually, “blog maturity” per se is not a tip in itself but a characteristic that your blog should have. The tip that we could use here is, perhaps, be patient, consistent, and dedicated in blogging.

Okay, to understand it better let’s just say that search engines would prefer indexing older domains and pages as compared to new ones. Also, they tend to favor sites with more content produced as compared to those who only have a few. It just means that the older and bulkier your site gets, the better it will rank in search engines (unless you’re always fooling around using dirty SEO tricks). Why search engines are employing this technique in their indexing algorithms is to filter out the spam sites that plague our online world today.

Basically, all you have to do here is to wait and persevere in your blogging path for in the long run your efforts will always be rewarded. Equally, there are also a few things you could do, while your blog is still aging to perfection. The first, second, third, and fourth tips in this series are worthwhile techniques that you should use constantly through time. Additionally, here’re the other things you could do:

Write meaty posts
According to some SEO debates going on, pages with more indexable texts can get higher page rank as compared to those that have less. Although, disagreements exist there are proofs that blogs with more comprehensive content get a higher rank as compared to those with usually one or three lines of text per post. If you want your blog to rank better, try to give your posts more meatiness in terms of supporting details with what you’re saying. But always keep it to an optimal level since very long posts always get less attention from readers and focus in the overall keyword density.

Write more posts
This is totally going against what I have written about blogging frequency in “How to Get More Comments to Your Blog”. But if you’re really after getting a higher page rank then, by all means, write lots of content (although you can still achieve this in time without burning yourself out – nothing, just a reminder –). This is because search engines will see your site as a comprehensive one if you have more content. You also better your odds of being found in search engine results pages if you have more pages. Of course, be aware that junk content produced by over eagerness will not perform better like the true comprehensive ones.

There’s also another factor that I think is worth mentioning here. Although it’s only a speculation among SEO experts, there is reason to believe that your site’s historical performance such as the measured time spent by visitors in your page, clickthroughs from SERPs, direct visits, referrals, etc will always play an important role in how the search engines rank you. After a long time, if your stats in these respects are not performing better, even how old your site gets, it’s still not going to rank any higher as compared to a newer site with better stats.

With that said, it’s really stupid to say that; “all you have to do is wait”. That’s why you have to be a more dedicated and effective blogger if you really want success from it. Give it more time and effort; and, like what I said earlier, eventually, there will be no reason for you to not like the rewards afterwards.



technorati tags: SEO tips, blogging tips, maturity

SEO Tip Number 4: Generate Inbound Links

Similar to our previous topic which deals about onsite links (outbound and internal link structure), inbound links, or those referral links, will also generate higher ranking in search engines.

SEO experts mostly agree that links pointing to your site are the most powerful and important way of climbing search engine results pages (SERPs). Think of it as a vote of confidence and trust the online community vests on you. The more sites link to you, the more popular and credible you become in the eyes of search engines.

But before anything else, not every link pointing at you will work best for you. As Darren of Problogger puts it:

The best inbound links have three main qualities to them:

• They are from higher ranked sites than your own
• They are relevant to the topic you are writing about
• They link to you using relevant keywords to your page

Links coming from higher ranked sites are always best for you because it always translate to more unique hits referred by those sites. Also, albeit a theory circulating around several SEO enthusiasts, like a domino effect, once you’re linked by these sites, there will be more sites linking to you because of the authority these sites can produce.

Relevant sites or blogs are also a plus since both of you share the same topic or niche; hence their patrons or readers can also become your readers if they find your site useful and informative.

The relevant keywords they put into your links is also a form of label by which the traffic they refer to you recognizes you. If he used the word “make money online” as the anchor text of his link towards you, the visitors he will direct to your blog will be disappointed if you’re in a different theme, such as gadgets. Conversely, gadget fans who might be interested to what you can offer will never head to your blog simply because they recognize you as make money online blog.

How to Generate Inbound Links?

With all that said, how do you generate quality inbound links? Basically, who will link to us and how they would link to us is pretty much beyond our control. But it’s not all that out of hand. There are also some things which we can do to get other sites to notice us and, hopefully, link to us.

• Create better content
  Most bloggers will always say the best and the cheapest way to generate traffic and get noticed in the blogosphere is to generate quality content that people will want to read. This is also the first SEO tip I wrote in this series. People are always a sucker on things that would stimulate their thoughts and imagination. Practice writing better everyday and what better way to do that than blogging. Eventually, you’ll get there. It might not be true that you’re able to hook people with all your articles but hooking them in from time to time will basically do the same effect. It’s like a “Machiavelli effect”. A little every time will get you a long way.


• Inform related bloggers about your content
  It’s a follow up to the above tip. Tell your fellow bloggers who share the same niche about your great content. There are many ways to do this. You can e-mail them about your new content (of course, the whole polite introductory and ass-kissing part is all up to you). You can also comment in a relevant post, add to the conversation, and set up a link back to your post url. If the blogger is a close friend or acquaintance, why not IM him or her.


• Submit your articles
  You can also consider writing for others as an option. Submit articles to e-zine publishers, of course don’t forget to attach your site url. They will most often provide a link back to you in your member profile area but it’s better to provide that url where people will see it immediately which is within the article. Submit your blog post to blog carnivals you’re definitely going to get at least an inbound link from here, and of course traffic from people who are curious about your post. Also, how about guest blogging. Here you’re free to link back to your blog or post from the article you’ve submitted. By doing these things regularly you’re not only generating inbound links and traffic, but building your profile as a blogger as well.


• Exchange links
  This is the most common technique most bloggers utilize to get links from other people, asking for reciprocal links. Usually, they hop from one blog to another to entertain the resident blogger with a simple “hi” at first and then requesting for a “reciprocal link” on the next. Usually, these efforts are gratified immediately and the swapping of links is made instantly. If you are to resort to this, I would advise that you should only swap links with relevant blogs if you’re after getting that high page rank in search engines.


• Interlink your blogs
  Do you have many blogs like I do; or at least, plans to have? Why not try interlinking your blogs like a network. This act in itself is considered generating inbound links to your blogs.


• Generate inbound links manually
  Great, if you’re feeling like a spammer why not generate your very own inbound links, just kidding. Yes, you have to generate inbound links manually in an attempt to get your content noticed by others and not to spam. Try submitting your blog url to blog directories. People are using them these days to look for blogs related to theirs to do a bunch of things. And one of them is, perhaps, asking for a reciprocal link from someone related. Tag your blog with all the social bookmarking and social network sites you can lay your hands on. This is one way to get noticed to be linked at or better, be voted to greatness!!! Just don’t overdo it and get branded as spammer, okay? Lastly, you can join forums. Choose a topic or thread where you can share your thoughts and get your posts or blog url posted to provide additional resource. If you’re after using this technique to just spam your way to greatness, I’ll tell you you’ll eventually taste the bitter fruit of your own medicine, a short lived success since Google and the rest of the search engines and internet community will discover eventually and shun the likes of you.

Generating inbound links is not easy. Like the other SEO tips, it takes time to make people link to you. But once you’re finally there, it’s definitely a rewarding experience monetarily and as a blogger. Also, it can be a worthwhile and fun experience; because along the way, you’ll be learning a lot of things from interacting with your fellow bloggers and readers, and you’ll be gaining more friends in the process. (Of course, there will be occasional enemies, but that’s what life is all about right?)



technorati tags: SEO tips, blogging tips, inbound links

SEO Tip Number 3: Manage Your Onsite Links

Onsite links are the links found in your site, be it a link pointing to one of your pages or a link pointing to another site. Managing your site’s links is one of the many factors that contribute to higher SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). In theory, the more well-formed your site’s link-structure is and the more you link out to other people, the better your page rank will be. Sharing your love for linking to valuable and related sites will always do you good. At the same time, getting your best posts linked from your blog’s home or index page as well as the rest of your content will get you the same benefit besides giving your visitors better navigation.


Internal Link Structure

It is important that your blog must have internal links pointing to your older posts. All of your “post pages”, especially the old ones, must get a chance to be found by a visitor from your homepage. That’s why SEO experts always emphasize that all your blog’s pages must be just a link or two away from one another. By doing this, not only are you giving your visitors the opportunity to discover more from your blog but you’re also providing the search engines some sort of emphasis to your most important pages. Often times, this is a critical factor in getting a better position in search engine rankings.

Here are some ideas which can help you in this area:

• Get your categories, labels, or tags up and running somewhere it’s easy to see – from here your past posts within a particular category, label, or tag gets seen a click or two away from your main page.
• Your archives must also be present all the time – same as the first one but your very old pages will benefit from this one.
• Show-off your best post or series – get your best works linked where it’s accessible. There are also widgets and plug-ins available to do it automatically for you.
• Link to your previous posts that are relevant to what you’re currently writing
• Get a “related topics” section at the bottom of your post.

Outbound Links

Always remember to link to relevant sources when publishing your posts. This is one way of providing your readers useful information on the topic. Some SEO experts also agree that search engines reward you through your page rank for linking out to another useful site as proven by countless bloggers who are doing it.

But before going “ga-ga” over linking to other people, there’s nothing search engines hate, specifically Google, than being a link farm for no reason at all. Your blog is not a portal site or a web directory so practice linking wisely. Linking too much can hurt your sites page rank. Some say keep your links in a single page under a hundred, I’d say link only to reputable, informative, and relevant sites.

Also, before linking to other sites and blogs, always evaluate if your readers will benefit from it when they follow your link, and if it would affect your reputation as a blogger. Nothing hurts as much and make you wanna swear all the time as having links that will drag you down to the bottom of SERPs.

But if you can’t avoid giving out link-loves most of the time, you might try another alternative such as using the rel=“nofollow” in your anchor tags, especially if you don’t trust the site that much. Watch out also for the comment spammers. Their links are also counted as outbound links. Blogger has already implemented the “nofollow” attribute to their comment section. I’m not sure if it’s available for other platforms. Anyways, the best way to avoid these spammers, I think, is to actively moderate your own comment section.


Onsite links are invaluable sources of high page rank; so always use and manage them wisely. Always link your pages tightly and link to useful, relevant, and reputable sources. Keep doing it and eventually, it will work in your favor.

If you have anything to add or say, please feel free to leave your comments below.



technorati tags: SEO tips, onsite links, external links

SEO Tip number 2: Use Keywords as Much as Possible

Last time, we emphasized how writing better can help boost your blog’s search engine ranking. This time we’ll be talking about keywords. Keywords help search engines understand what your content is all about. When you have chocolates for a keyword, then it’s clear to them that your blog is about chocolates.


Basically, these are what keywords do to your blog:

• Search engines index your blog using these keywords
• People will find your blog easily
• Search engines will rank you better (depends on how you’re using your keywords)
  

The last part comes with a pair of parenthesis because if you’re just putting too many keywords with the intention of getting more traffic and more visibility on those keywords with an absent or weak consistency with your actual content then you’ll end up in “Google’s sandbox” where you either get less indexing or no indexing at all.


Maximize the benefits you get from keywords by putting them in some or all of these areas depending on what best fit your blog:

***Arranged in order of importance***

• Keywords in the title tag
  This is the title that appears in your browser’s topmost portion or, in tabbed cases, in the tabs. This can be your blog’s title or your post’s title. It’s best if you have a blog title that serves as a keyword for what your blog is generally all about. Also, every time you write a post, make sure that it contains keywords relevant to your post’s body.


• Keywords in the body text
  Your keywords must also be found in your post’s body text, especially in the opening paragraph. This is where you’ll generally form other related keywords and keyword phrases. Always remember that they should help make sense of your post and not stand out as if accidentally placed in there. However, if too many keywords would demise your post’s reader experience, don’t sacrifice it. Readers should always come first.


• Keywords in H1 tags
  They are also called header tags along with H2, H3, and H4. They add emphasis to your blog’s headings and sub-headings similar to bold (b/strong) or italics (i/em). Although it’s not too necessary, it must be emphasized in well optimized page and very useful for organizing page content.


• Keyword in your domain name
  Okay, this part hits me clearly. What’s “ulupong” got to do with earning money online or blogging? Anyways, if you’re just about to buy a new domain or start a new blog, think of a name that makes sense with the general topic or niche of your blog.


• Keywords in anchor texts
  Anchor texts are weighed highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is supposed to be relevant to the landing page.


• Keywords in images
  The Alt and Title attributes are usually the ones involved here. Their values should contain keywords also. The image filename also has to be, at least, relevant to your post. It might not help you that much in rankings but when it comes to image searches, which most search engines incorporate nowadays, it’s definitely a plus.


• Keywords in bold tags
  Not critically important but try using it at least once or twice in your posts.


• Keywords in meta tags
  Back when the search engines were still young and naïve, these tags were heavily used to index every site available in the web. Today, although there are still who argue that it’s still useful, SEO leaders hardly believe they have any importance at all. These are “meta description” and “meta keyword” tags which is found in your blog’s head tags.

Keywords can be a pain in the ass if you’re not used in actively incorporating them in your blog but the reward will always be great as long as you use them wisely and appropriately.

The only thing that’s a big “DON’T” in keywords is overusing them which basically tears your blog’s value apart unless yours is a “splog”.

If you have anything else to add here, please feel free to do so in the comments area.



technorati tags: SEO tips, keywords

SEO Tip number 1: Write Better

Okay, like what I said the last time, here we are again telling you what I know about SEO. Like the title indicates, to get ranked high in your favorite or any other search engine, you must learn how to write better. By better, this means writing something with quality and of value to your readers and visitors. Write with the intention that your readers will pick something up from your post after they’ve read it. Also, your writing frequency must not be so sporadic (like what I’m doing) leaving your readers clueless about when you’ll be posting next.


Write quality content

By writing articles that people will want to read, it’s easy to get inbound links from other people, especially bloggers like you, without actively asking them. It’s like flowers in the park, the more colorful and attractive it is, the more it steals the passerbies’ attention. By having other sites to refer you, the more your blog’s profile will be picked up and crawled by search engines. By writing quality content, the possibility of referral links from other blogs (especially high-profile blogs) and websites (what more if it’s the front page of well known social bookmarking sites such as Digg) is high.


Write niche-focused posts

Make it a habit to write tightly focused posts relevant to your blog’s theme or topic. Try to avoid posts that have a very wide coverage that it even goes beyond what your topic asks of you. Smaller more focused pieces will help search engines index your posts into a more specific keyword related to your blog. Also, the more streamlined your blog becomes at a particular niche the more search engines will find keywords in it which can help you get higher page rank on searches based on those keywords and the more search engines will find you as an authority on that same topic.


Write regularly

Don’t even consider writing something like 3 posts this day and then write again on the next month. Besides losing your loyal readers that way, it will also be bad for search engines’ indexing frequency on your blog. If you keep on doing that, instead of having them crawl your site every time you post something, they might index your new post on the following month. Of course it’s only in theory but it’s a possibility. After all, search engines work based on your blog’s update behavior. Without a fixed schedule on when you’ll be updating your content, the more unlikely and unexpected indexing patterns you’ll get from them.

The best way to avoid this is by writing at least three or four times a week; of course there will be some bloggers who’ll be disagreeing since they have their own share of successes in search ranking without doing the same. Okay, it might be true for them but I believe that it’s always best to play it safe.


Tagging and Pinging

Okay, it’s got nothing to do with writing better but what’s wrong with a hefty helping from a few tricks to help your hard-work get indexed faster. Tagging and pinging is a technique used by many marketers and SEO experts (black, blue, or white) to keep their content served fresh to many organic visitors (“organic” means those visits referred directly by search engines).

How is it done you may ask? It’s simple actually. First, after you’ve finished writing and proof-reading your post, place tag/tags beneath the post by means of Technorati. A tag is a keyword or anything significant which you think best describe, categorize, or represent your post. From what I remember back in 2006, people insert this code in their posts html before they publish it: <a href=“http://technorati.com/tag/tagname” rel=“tag”>tagname</a> (just replace the instances of “tagname” **without the quote** with your desired keyword). Today, I still see people use this; you can also see me using one under this post. Technoratti use it to categorize your post so when a person searches for a tag such as “love”, if your post is also tagged the same then you’ll end up in his search results. The built-in labeling or categorizing system which your blog platform provides is also used by Technorati to tag your post in case you’re not using their tag code.

Okay, enough of that. After you placed the technorati tag and published your post you can tag it further through the social book-marking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. You can use the same tags you used on technorati here. It’s best to keep your tags similar to your keyword or topic since search engines will also consider indexing your post through these tags.

After that, you’ll have to ping. Pinging is something like sending a message to the search engines and blog searches that your blog has updated already and they are free to crawl and index it. Blogspot (Blogger) blogs ping Weblog.com and Google when they publish. Wordpress has plugins to ping also. Feedburner also offers a service which lets you ping search engines and blog searches. If you’re still not satisfied, go to http://pingomatic.com.

How does these all work? Basically, it’s spreading your message in the right places that your blog is already serving new content. The tags serve as links that will point back to your blog, a sort of technique to give the search engines a hint where they should be crawling since your trails are scattered in all directions. The pinging on the other hand tells the search engines that you have a fresh content and they must index it. So tagging + pinging equals an opportunity to get noticed and ranked by search engines.


Before I go finish this post, be advised that tagging and pinging, if abused, may lead to disastrous and dire consequences. Your rankings will drop, search engines will stop indexing you, etc. all because they will consider you as spam because you’re showing irregular behavior characterized by a spam site. Don’t overdo the tagging such as signing in using different accounts in Digg or other social bookmarking sites to Digg and tag your site just to get high traffic and higher page rank. It’s always best that your traffic and search engine ranking boosted because you deserved it not because you forced it.


technorati tags: SEO tips, better writing

SEO tips for your blog (series)

I’ve been planning to write this series for a long time. And after about two weeks of absence, I finally got a hold of my schedule to address this itch to start it at least.

Here we go SEO. Okay, first the definition. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. I’m sorry I can’t provide you with a very accurate definition but from what I understand, it’s meant to give your blog or site a lot of traffic, a lot of traffic because you ranked better in search engines. When you rank high in search engines, you will end up among the first results of what people are searching for giving you more presence to your potential visitors compared to those who end up in the last pages which people hardly even browse at.

As an example, let’s put it this way. Let’s say you have a blog about “80s new wave music”. When people search for the keyword 80s, new wave, 80s music, 80s new wave, etc (any keyword related to your blog’s niche), the possibility of your blog ending up in the first few result pages of their search depends upon how you rank in that particular keyword in the search engine they are using. SEO will help you get in the first three result pages, if not in the immediate ones, where people will more likely click and get sent to your blog. That means you’ll get more traffic. When you rank low or perhaps have no ranking at all, you’ll inevitably land in the forgotten realms of the “last result pages” which I doubt you even look at when doing your own searches. I assure you that you wouldn’t like being in it.

If you want to have a really sizeable number of traffic which you could proudly claim as “your blog’s traffic”, then you definitely have to use SEO. Of course, there are other methods to get traffic into your blog besides search engines but they are usually the ones that bring bulk visits and potential customers (if you’re into professional blogging).

Now, how do you use SEO to get a better ranking? First and foremost, there are some things you have to understand about SEO. It’s nothing easy. Yes, there are easy ways to do it, but certainly there are also the difficult ones although not impossible. SEO also takes time. It’s nothing like magic that works instantly over night. It’s an aggregate effect of your constant hard work that piles up to get you higher and higher into what you want to achieve.

One thing to take note also is that the older your blog becomes the better search engines will index it, hence an additional factor to have a better ranking in them. This is one measure search engines use to combat spamming and one of the reasons why I say that it’s nothing instant.

Also, the more comprehensive, relevant, and keyword rich your blog gets, the better its ranking will also be. With SEO you’ll be able to achieve such.

And lastly, I hope you’re getting what I’m trying to tell you. SEO is not a piece of code or a tool that you’ll just copy and paste into your blog’s HTML code. It’s something that you need to do. Something that you have to constantly adhere to although there will be some occasions where you may opt not to have to; that’s okay.

I’m not sure how long or short this series will run, but I’ll try to be as informative albeit not too comprehensive about each SEO tips that I’ll be posting. So, if you’re really interested in what I have to say later on, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

And before I leave you, I’ll be leaving you with one SEO tip that will be part of my next post. “Post Regularly” – Hell, yes and something that I should really be doing one of these days. Just do what I say, okay, not the things that I do.



technorati tags: SEO, tips

6 More Tips to Get More Comments in Your Not So New Blog

Last time I wrote about how you’ll get people to comment on your new blog. To tell you the truth, I haven’t done any of it here but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t either. I have my reasons why I choose not to just yet. You see my application for “domain registration” is currently a pending process and I’ve still to make a few more posts before I decide to get public which means I’d still be doing it but in a much later date.

Now, what if you’re already getting comments, maybe five or six, and still you felt that you need more in order for people to say that you’ve got one busy and popular blog. Basically, you’ll just have to continue doing what I’ve written earlier but there will be some changes since you’re no longer asking for just “someone” to comment but you want more “someones” to comment.

Here are the things that, again, I’ve managed to put together after reading several… (yea, yea, yea, they all know that already):

1. Write a compelling headline. I’ve been an avid reader of copyblogger lately and that’s one of the many lessons I learned from Brian Clark (also one of the unique things that got me into reading his blog which I barely find being emphasized on other blogs). You should write a grabber headline for your post that people will want to read it. Capturing their attention, and what more if it’s their imagination, will definitely get them to comment in your post, or perhaps subscribe to your blog. Either way, you still got them. Headlines that address their desire, their problems, or lead them into something exclusive or a secret will definitely be a head turner. Also “whys” and “how tos” are an effective attention grabbers especially if they’re relevant. See more of these here.
   


2. Write better content. Definitely, content is king. People should learn from you. Your content becomes valuable to people if it teaches them something or they learn something from it. Of course, don’t try to mislead them into false information you made up. They’ll know about it later, and you’ll be in a very bad position once they do. From my experience also, your content will not only be valuable but more memorable if there’s a bit of humor in it. If content is king, humor is like its queen or something…


3. Be controversial. Also called “link-baiting”, if your content can’t attract too much attention from being better (in your own point of view of course), why not be aggressive enough to be controversial. Putting in controversy has worked for some bloggers in getting a deluge of comments although I’m less likely to resort in this form of comment generation. One drawback of this technique, which I can’t bare having all the time, is the negative responses you’ll get everytime.


4. Reward your commenters. Nothing gets into the heart of your readers especially those who leave their comments than being appreciated. I believe it makes them feel warm and all fuzzy inside. One way of doing it is by dedicating a post to answer one or several comments that strike you the most, quote the comment/s of course. You can also try placing a “top commentator” portion in your blog. There are still many ways to acknowledge and encourage their participation which you can try.


5. Observe blogs and message boards that discuss your industry. From observing them, you might get a chance to get some valuable tricks of the trade on how to get more comments and readers. You might also see which topics or trends are increasingly becoming popular and highly commented. And as often as possible, leave comments on these sites. Just make sure that your comments will add value to the discussion. This will not only make the blogger more likely to read and comment on your blog, but will give their readers a reason to check out your blog as well.

What do you think? Any ideas you can add? Share it here.



technorati tags: comment generation, blogging tips

How to Get Comments on Your New Blog

Okay, so you’ve got a new blog like I do, what do you do in case you wanted to have people commenting in it, at least to keep you inspired to write better each day? After reading 30 posts or so (really, no kidding, most of them say the same things anyway) about making your blog comment-friendly, I managed to put together at least 10 tips that will prove really useful in giving you the comments you desperately need. (Please remind me to do these things also. XD)

1. Find topics that people can’t stop talking about. There are some topics that simply put people dumbfounded or out of opinion. And yet, there are also those where they seem to be more inclined at talking about. Find topics that your readers can easily relate to. Perhaps, reading blogs similar to your niche that gets commented fairly will give you some ideas.


2. Hint your readers that you need them to comment. Write in an open-ended manner that will make them feel like sharing their views each step of the way. You can start your headline with a question, put one or several within your post, or perhaps wrap your post up with something as common as; “what do you think?” This will encourage them to leave their comments.


3. Invite your readers to comment. Maybe they didn’t get your hints a while ago. Try asking them to comment literally. Instead of showing “0 comments” in your post-footer, how about changing it into “it’s always free to comment here”, or “add your views to the conversation”. Additionally, you can always ask them up front in your post to drop their comments to give them a sense that it’s ok for them to share their thoughts.


4. Intentionally leave your post less comprehensive or a bit incomplete. People like it when they become expert at times and they get to point out things. Leaving a few things out will always guarantee you someone commenting about how stupid you are at missing some things. Of course, you can always forgive them for that. The point here is that you’re giving them the opportunity to share their expertise on the matter. You could also do this more directly, and challenge them to add what you’ve missed.


5. Keep your posts short. Whenever I encounter a very long post, I’ll always (guaranteed 100%) skip it and look for something more “dummy-friendly” (ok, not that dummy-friendly, but something that takes less effort to read). It always intimidates readers to continue reading through a lengthy post. Skimming inevitably always sets in where they almost often miss the information they really want, the information that’s going to get them to comment.


6. Write less frequently. 1 to 2 posts is enough to call it a day. This is the best way to give attention and focus to your posts from the readers. Too many posts will give your readers a hard time to follow-up leading to less engagement from them, hence fewer comments. Of course, there are always exceptions; but for the most part it has always been the case. The less post, the more you and your readers can interact substantially.


7. Be active in your own comment threads. If there’s nobody commenting in your blog, maybe your readers are just waiting for someone to begin the conversation. Comment first like adding additional notes about what you’ve just written. If you feel like you’re just talking to yourself, how about leaving a comment as somebody else just to start things going. Also, don’t forget to respond to your readers’ comments in case things aren’t clear to them. It just shows that you’re reading and acknowledging what they’ve just left.


8. Be welcoming. When replying to your commenters, don’t be tactless and/or harsh. This will scare them away. Always be humble and civil. Alternatively, you can be humorous but be sure that you’re not hurting or humiliating any of your commenters when you do. They must feel welcomed and able to relate and talk to you. Of course you can’t avoid occasional trolls here and there. It’s best to ignore them, but when they get too personal, just delete their unsolicited antagonism.


9. Comment back. If you like to get comments in your humble little blog shack, the same goes for the rest of the humble bloggers out there. So why not comment on other blogs. Most definitely there will be those who will reply back and possibly become a frequent commenter in yours. Also, follow your commenters back into their blogs and leave a comment in one or two of their post. This will make a great impression on them, and it shows that you appreciate their comment enough to want to contribute your own.


10. Make it easy to comment. Lastly, don’t give your readers a burden commenting into your blog. Remove registrations, and extra features that will consume a lot of time to get through before they could leave a simple “hello”. It’s understandable that everybody’s fearful of spams these days but there are always other means to combat these abominations without giving your readers hurdles that would intimidate most to communicate with you.

Hmm. I guess that’s it. I’d like to believe that you’re now already itching to leave your comments in here. Let me be the first to assure you that it’s ok to do so. All views are welcome and will be accepted gratefully. (oh, how I desperately need someone to comment…)



technorati tags: comments, new blog

10 Easy Ways to Boost Your Blog’s Traffic

First off, a disclaimer; this post will not increase your blog traffic unless you take action and do it. The same applies to me. I won’t gain traffic unless I take action and do what I’m saying here. Damn, when will I do it? Okay, all set, here we go.

1. Content
   All “How to-Blogs” including those that aren’t but decided to post one anyway will always tell you to post regularly to improve your traffic. It’s true. Now, post regularly.
   Create useful or informative content. People use the internet most of the time to get information; so it would really be nice if they could say things like: “hey, this stuff’s informative and useful (LOL)” when they visit your blog. Another tip on content that you’ll find bloggers saying is “be original”, “be unique”, “be different”, or “be daring and confrontational” etc. Being unique is a good thing and should be practiced every time, but being wild and behaving differently is another matter. Although there’s some truth to it, I believe there’s always a way around this. It’s ok if you think being controversial is good for you but I’m not comfortable doing it that way you see. I think being mindful of your readers, and writing things for their sake will definitely do.


2. Feed your readers
   It’s not food. Give them a way to subscribe to your blog in one easy click. Set up an RSS feed button. Use FeedBurner. Some people like to read through emails instead of the standard RSS readers. FeedBurner can also handle that.


3. Link to your sources
   If your content was inspired by another work online, or it was written to add to the conversation of the day, link to your source. If you are using somebody else’s information, link to the source. If you feel that others may want to read other related articles, link to the great resources you’ll find or have found. Give your readers additional source of information. Give some link love. Additionally, you may ask your fellow bloggers if they could exchange links with you in your blog roll. The more “inbound-links” you have, the better you’ll be in search engine rankings. It’s an SEO technique which you’ll also find below. Of course, it’s always better to exchange links with blogs within your niche.


4. Search Engine Optimization
   Yep, it’s a whole lot of explaining if you ask me. But basically, SEO (search engine optimization) is meant to make your blog search engine friendly and would rank better than others who are not into SEO. If your blog is search engine optimized, it will be easy for people to Google, Yahoo, or MSN search it. It would take one lengthy post to explain it in detail that even I would find hard to understand but, for your sake, here’s an easy one. Keywords are your friend. Like my point in making a great blog post, find a way to place relevant keywords anywhere along your blog post such as the heading, subheadings, images, bold and quote tags, etc. For a better understanding of SEO try these sources (but please only after you finished reading this post): Problogger SEO, Pronet Advertising SEO, SEOmoz.org, Wikipedia.


5. Send your URL to search engines
   This should have been included in the SEO but I think emphasis must be given to it since it’s one important part of traffic generation and anyone can just easily do it these days with the following: Submit Express, Free Web Submission.


6. Send your URL to Blog Directories
   Blog directories or blog rings, as they are called, are blog communities where you can register your blog and get categorized, tagged, or whatever. They have their own style of classifying and organizing their list of blogs these days. People use these communities to look for blogs that share the same niche as theirs.
   


7. Send your articles to Blog Carnivals
   I haven’t tried it before, but a lot are saying it does generate traffic so I added it here. A blog carnival is a blog community where they collect permalinks to articles submitted by bloggers like us and they publish it on a certain date on a blog who volunteers to host the said carnival. Submit your article to the carnival that best fits your niche. For more info try Blog Carnival FAQ.


8. Use social bookmarking sites
   Ever heard of Del.icio.us, Digg, or StumbleUpon? Nowadays, a lot of internet users are heading to these sites to know what the hottest news is and buzz in the web. There are many social bookmarking sites around but these three are frequently talked about and two of them I use. Get on the front page of these sites and it’s instant traffic for you. Try submitting your article to them via Stumbling, Digging, or “Del.icio.using” (I don’t know how it’s called in del.icio.us) it. Alternatively, you can make it easy for your readers to bookmark your blog by placing social bookmark links after your posts. It’s one way also of saying that you’re “social bookmarking aware” and are asking your readers to share their love by bookmarking your content. Here’s an easy way to setup those social bookmark links: AddThis.com.


9. Comment on other blogs
   Comment on other people’s blogs be they newbies or veterans in the field of blogging. Of course, don’t comment on those who don’t want to receive comments (who doesn’t?). Comment something relevant and not just a simple “hi” or “hello”. You should add to the conversation and hopefully, if people find you useful they might check your blog too; which points me to another must in commenting, drop your link along with your comment. If you don’t comment appropriately, people might just think of you as an opportunist or worst: a splog or a spammer. Also, don’t forget to reply to those who’d comment back on your blog, or ask questions about things, or when they email you.


10. Join communities
    Join forums relevant to your niche. Search engines index their threads so people who are searching for something actually lands inside these sites if their content is relevant. Share in your views and create a footer signature linking to your blog. If you find that one of your posts would help in an ongoing conversation of your fellow forumers, don’t be afraid to drop-in that post’s permalinks URL.

Other tips that I haven’t included in the 10 but are also useful in improving your traffic

• Become a guest blogger. There are blogs looking for guest bloggers all the time, and they usually have high page ranks, which mean more traffic. Contact the blog author or administrator (they always provide contact information, don’t worry) and tell them your interest to become a guest blogger. When you guest blog, you are always free to place your blog/website’s link in your post (the number one reason why you want to guest blog in the first place).
• You can have your blog reviewed, some ask for payment, others for free. I’d go for the free ones. There are blogs who offer free reviews in exchange for something such as a reciprocal review or perhaps a link, others offer reviews as a price in competitions. Choose which one you’d like but it’s always best to get reviewed by those with high page ranks.
• There are other programs that were said to generate traffic like Entrecard, Blog Rush, Blog Explosion, Link2Blogs, etc. They’re free, that’s all I can say since I haven’t given time to explore them yet.

technorati tags: blog traffic, SEO

How to Write a Great Blog Post

Every blogger understands that it’s hard to produce great posts. Sometimes you make one, sometimes you’re almost there, but most times it’s never that great. What does it take to make compelling, engaging, and informative posts; in other words, a great blog post?

Great, good, killer, it’s always subject to how we perceive something as great. We all know what is great when we see one. I, on the other hand, refuse to call it as “great”. I’d rather call it “quality” since it’s a lot easier to define it that way.

Based on the research that I’ve made before I wrote this post and on my own understanding of what is great or quality, I came up with these 10 tips on how to write “great” or “quality” posts.

• Make a terrific headline – Before anything else, people will have to read the headline or title of your post. That’s where their eyes first land in order to make sense of the post. Due to this, make your headline reflect what people will see in your content or post. Be catchy, make them ask and feel the need to read your content without feeling disconnected and confused.


• Write with passion – Write like it counts. Make people understand what you really mean. When you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’ll be consistent all throughout while enjoying at it. You’ll be able to voice out your opinions clearly and people will know what you think.


• Don’t forget your sense of humor – What people hates the most are people who makes things so heavy and boring. It’s ok if you don’t laugh but make sure that they laugh while you’re at it. I don’t know but in most cases people like it and easily buys it if it’s light and funny. Of course, humor doesn’t mean making a clown of yourself.


• Tell a story – People love an engaging story. Now, you don’t want to tell a long story but a short and catchy anecdote that illustrates your main point. By telling a story and painting them a vivid detail of what you want to say in their minds, you will often get your reader wanting to read more.


• Write Less – Ever heard of the saying “less is more”? It’s not applicable in some cases but when it comes to blogs writing less often gets more people to read it. Some people say its best to keep it under 500 words, others would say 800 and still some would insist that it’s 250. I say you’ll know when it’s long enough. When you encounter a blog post that spans 5 to10 times your monitor’s height, intimidates you to read it, and makes you wanna look for another post, now that’s definitely a LOOOONG post. A long post is easier to forget and harder to get into. A short post is the opposite.


• Keep it Simple – Avoid jargons and complicated terminologies. Avoid complex sentence and thought structures. Not all your readers share the same intellect as you. Make your thoughts easy to understand. Use the simplest possible word and sentence structure but not at the cost of over-simplifying it. Also, avoid very long descriptive sentences that will eventually mislead your reader. Cut to the chase and get to the point.


• Make your posts easy to scan – Use sub headings if possible to better understand the flow of thought in the post. Use white spaces to avoid strain on the eyes and intimidation. Use bullet point lists to convert your information into an easily digestible format. Don’t forget to use quotes, bold text and italics for emphasis on words and phrases.


• Litter the post with keywords – These keywords will help readers search for your post easily. Think of keywords that are relevant to your post and place them seamlessly within your body text and headers.


• Link out to outside sources – Link prodigiously. Link to any other blog, website, and materials on other sites that you mentioned in your blog. This will help your readers understand what you’re talking about.


• Proof read your post – Before you hit the submit button, take a few minutes to re-read your post and check for wrong spelling and grammar. If the need arises, restructure or rewrite your post once again if you feel that it‘s not working.

In all of the tips listed, I remember my “cadet military training” days. We have a motto back then when relaying a message to our superiors: “Use the three Cs. Be Clear, Complete, and Concise”. I guess it’s also true for blogging.


Want more great reads? Click here:
How to Write Great Blog Content | Problogger.com
Copyblogger.com (a whole blog about effective blog writing, copywriting, SEO and internet marketing)
10 Killer Post Ideas | Performancing.com
How to Write Killer Blog Posts and More Compelling Comments | FrugalMarketing.com



technorati tags: effective writing, blog post