Today, I came across entries at two different blogs for increasing traffic for your blogs. One is an amusing, tongue-in-cheek offering titled "The Ten Evilest and Mostly Unethical Blogging Hacks", by liberalcowboy at Jack of All Blogs (part of the Fine Fools network). This one talks about ways to boost traffic without getting in trouble. Some are actually acceptable, others are downright sneaky.

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Technorati : blog traffic, blogging, pro blogging, writing

Vinnie Garcia has a detailed review of WordPress, TextPattern, and MovableType, three of the most popular "advanced" blog CMS (Content Management System) packages, over at Australian publisher SitePoint's website.

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Technorati : blog management, blogging, cms, movable type, multi-blogs, pro blogging, textpattern, wordpress, writing

Google recently rolled out their Analytics service free of charge. If you've been hoping for a stats package to track your website or blog site statistics, this just may be what you're looking for. The service is free if you either have a Google AdWords account in good standing, or if your site(s) get less than 5 million pageviews per month. (Ah, that'd be something wouldn't it? In this case, I'll have a while to wait before I have to worry about paying.)

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Technorati : blogging, geo-plotting, pro blogging, web analytics, web metrics

In a recent post, I talked about BlogFlux's new free LinkLog service. Link logging refers to the tracking of the visitors and where the are going when they click on a link on your site, but where the link goes outside of your site. What I said in my last post was that this would be a way to track which ads your visitors are clicking on. Well, I was mistaken.

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Technorati : blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, tracking visitors

One of the fundamental differences between a regular website full of articles and an informational blogsite full of posted entries is that the latter shows articles on the home page posted in reverse chronological order. In other words, the most recent posting is shown first. As you go down the page, the entries get older. The problem with this is that when your blog is new, and your readers are few, the chances of having readers that come back every day is low.

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Technorati : blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, seo, serps, writing

I suspect that most people that read this blog more than likely already read Darren Rowse's excellent ProBlogger.net blog, whose content I always try to supplement instead of re-treading. But some of you may not know about JenSense. Jen does a fine job of covering the various and sundry issues related to specific contextual advertising programs.

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Technorati : ad revenue, adsense, blogging, multi-blogs, pro blogging, seo, serps, writing

Note: While this post is about blogging-related software, don't be scared away even if you are not a programmer, just a blogger. I'm talking about blogging software I'll be offering soon that anyone can use.

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Technorati : ajax, blogging, blogs, javascript, jst, managing blogs, morfik, multi-blogs, pro blogging

One of the biggest problems I'm finding is that, as a single-person blog "networker", it's impossible to do everything that needs to be done on a regular, daily basis. If you want to run custom templates and add non-blog web pages, guides, etc., it's nearly impossible to run it all by yourself. And that's just for a single, full-fledged hybrid blog-website. So what if you want to publish several blogs? Hoo boy. Fuggedabout it? (Sorry, watching too much TV.)

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Note: This post is a continuation of a series started on BlogSpinner-X/ V1.0 blog. Here is MultiBlogging Techniques Review Part III.

Technorati : arrggh, blogging, blogs, managing blogs, multi-blogging, pro blogging, writing

The move of the BlogSpinner blog has been an utter pain in the bee-hind. For several weeks, I've been debating with myself what the impact of the move is going to be, and for the most part, there are a lot of negatives:

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Technorati : blogger.com, blogging, blogspot, moving a blog, pro blogging, writing

After much thought, frustration, and implementation, I've finally set up BlogSpinner V2.0 on a new domain. The new domain, CountWordula.com, will also host other blogs about writing, communication/semiotics, literature, and more. Despite the possible high-brow perception, I've selected a playful domain name, courtesy of Dubs and Dash Group, and award-winning "green" advertising and design agency.

Please check out the new BlogSpinner. Comments are currently disable for purely technical reasons (and lack of sleep to configure things correctly), but will be turned on at some point. Watch for several free e-books and booklets about blogging, platforms, writing, and more.

ADDENDUM: Every entry posted more recently than this one is an excerpt of a longer entry on the new BlogSpinner V2.0.

cheers,

raj

Technorati : blogging, domain change, pro blogging, writing

Warning: This very long blog post is a summary of ongoing research and as such, may be incomplete.

New blogs almost always suffer from the same problem: lack of traffic. Of course, traffic decides whether or not a blog succeeds, just like circulation determines the success of a print magazine.So how do you increase web traffic?

Web and blog traffic comes from four primary sources:

1. Search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Links from blog directories.
3. Links from other web sites.
4. Bookmarks from regular readers.

The percentage of traffic from each source varies by blog, with factors include age of blog, type of blog, popularity, etc. One point of view maintains that all or most initial traffic to a blog comes from source #1, search engines. After this initial traffic, the quality and relevance of your blog content directly affects the traffic from sources #3 and #4. Traffic from source #2 has yet to prove its value, at least to me. Notice that I have not included traffic from "free traffic credits for surfing" websites. This source, too, has not so far proven to be of much long-term value.

So, it appears, then, that much of your blog promotion effort should be to increase traffic from search engines. How do you do this? There are numerous factors that affect your SERPs rankings, with each search engine using different rules. The diagram below shows some of the factors that I have noticed explicitly affecting blog rankings. (Click on the image for a larger version.)

I'll summarize each factor in this post, and expound upon each in later posts. (Start from the bottom-center factor and going clockwise to "Google Page Rank".) The factors below apply to most search engines, unless otherwise indicated.

1. Repetitive use of keywords/phrases over several entries: The more blog entries that you have that focus on the same topic, the more relevant your blog will be rated.
2. Number of clicks on any or all of your SERPs links: You may at some point rank high in the search engines for a certain keyword/phrase, but if no one clicks, or you get less clicks than another website's SERPs links, then some engines will eventually reduce your ranking.
3. Number of blog directories/ search engines pinged per post: The more blog directories and search engines you "ping" for each entry you post, the more often your blog gets indexed. The more you get indexed, the more visible you are in the blogosphere. Keep in mind that some engines/directories or pinging utilities have a daily ping frequency limit to deter splogs (spam blogs). My personal choices for pinging are Pingoat, Pingomatic, and Blogflux Pinger.
4. Number of new blog entries posted per day: The more entries you post daily, the more search engine referrals you are likely to get per day.
5. Title of entry: The title of your blog entry should use appropriate keywords/phrases to increase the relevance ranking of that particular entry. For example, if you are writing about "web metrics", then don't use "web analytics" in the title. Be very specific.
6. Filename/ URL of entry: If you are able to control the URL of each blog entry, take advantage of this. For example, check the title of this post: "Increasing Blog Traffic - ....". I'm very verbose in the titles of many of my blogs for a very specific reason: the more relevant keywords/phrases I have in an entry's URL, the higher the relevance of that entry. If the filename of this entry was "moreblogtips.html", the ranking will not be as high for "blog traffic" or "search engine rankings". The domain name of your blog also adds relevance to your SERPs rankings. If you are writing about blogging, your domain name should include the string "blog". If you are focusing on, say, AdSense revenue, include "adsense" in the domain name.
7. Title of blog: The title of your blog adds relevance, just as the filename of an entry does - just more so. If you cannot control the domain name of your blog, the next best thing is to use a relevant blog title.
8. Keyword density/ Location of keywords in entry: Some search engines index an entire entry, others do not. While there is a limit, the more often your keyword/phrase appears in an entry, the higher the entry ranks for that keyword. Some SEO experts say that a 4-8% frequency for your terms in each post is good. Less frequent occurrence of your terms gives you a lower ranking. More frequent occurrence might penalize you as being a spam blog. What's also important is that your terms appear as early as possible in an entry, in case a search engine only indexes a portion of each entry.
9. Presence of h1-h3 HTML heading tags in entry: Some search engines give higher ranking to entries that have HTML heading tags with keyword/phrases. But if you use h1-h3 tags in an entry, the terms in the headings should be the same as the rest of the entry.
10. Presence of bolded text: Some search engines also give higher ranking if an entry has keyword/phrases bolded.
11. Google page rank: This factor, of course, only affects your Google SERPs. In fact, your Google SERPs ranking affects your Google Page Rank, and vice versa. What affects your page rank? Several factors, including:

• Link text of outbound links: The hyperlinks in a blog entry should be attached to the keyword/phrase that you are optimizing for.
• Age of domain and duration of current registration: For Google, the longer your domain name has been registered, the better. You are less likely to be a spammer if your domain is older than 1 year. If you are about to register a new domain, it is to your advantage to register it for at least 2 years. However, that does not mean you will not get a page rank, eventually. (All of my domains, free or paid-for, had no page rank earlier this summer. When Google re-calculated page rank in early October, all of my sites went from 0 to 3-5. Not great, but a starting point for future ranking.)
• Quantity of content and duration of appearance: If you have thousands of content pages that suddenly appear on your website, this tells Google that you are more than likely to be a spammer. Real content does not appear this quickly, no matter how fast a person can type. However, having thousands of pages that appears in a more realistic, humanly-possibly duration gives your site much more relevance than a site with fewer pages but containing the same keywords/phrases.
• Page rank of inbound links: Simply put, the more high-pagerank sites that link to your site, the better. An older algorithm that Google published shows that a fraction of the page rank of each inbound link to your site is used to partially calculate your pagerank. There are other factors, although I'm still researching them and will report later.
• Bookmarks from Google toolbar: This is pure hypothesis, but my feeling is that data collected from Google's toolbar in the MS Internet Explorer and newer Mozilla browsers (at the time of writing) is used to enhance page rank. If two sites contain posts about the same topics, the one that is bookmarked more often might just get a higher page rank.

These are just some of the factors that affect your SERPs and thus likely the quantity of traffic your blog receives. I'll try to post revisions to a new entry whenever I collect new information.




(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.blogspot.com/

Technorati : blogging, pro blogging, search engine ranking, seo, serps, web traffic, writing

If you're reading this blog and wondering whether or not you should start your own blog, ask yourself one question: Why blog? Here are 8 reasons I've collected for why people - myself included - are blogging.

1. Build credentials. Openly display your knowledge on a particular topic, in the hopes of impressing a future boss or a client.
2. Educate people in a particular area of interest, just because.
3. Promote a product, service, or e-book by writing about related matters, or offering regular excerpts.
4. Increase the Google page rank of your main website. Having good, fresh content may bring in links from sites with higher page ranks. This will pay off the next time Google recalculates page ranks. This is done about every 2-3 months. I went from no rank (because all my sites were new) in the summer to 3-5 for all 20 or so of my blogs and websites. While that's not 7-10, it's a start.
5. Increase your search engine rankings by producing fresh, regular, targeted and optimized content. The search engines love blogs. And there are blog-specific engines and directories. The more often you post a blog entry and "ping" these engines and directories, the more visible your posts are in the blogosphere, nay the Internet in general.
6. Make a website "sticky". That is, have a reason for readers to come back regularly. While many blogs could just as well have been set up as a regular website, anyone who can manage to regularly (read "daily") produce new, niche-specific and useful content is going to eventually develop a loyal readership. And isn't that what every webmaster or web marketer dreams of?
7. Distribute regular news articles or summaries for an area of interest. (Although this reason usually is connected to one of the other reasons listed here.)
8. Earn revenue by displaying ads relevant to your blog content. Some people are earning more than any job they might otherwise have.

In fact, some people blog for any and all of the above reasons. If I've missed any reasons, please feel free to drop me a comment.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.blogspot.com/

Technorati : blogging, pro blogging, writing

One of the things that you may find happening after you've written 40 or 50 posts to a single blog is that you lose track of what you have written. I have a number of blogs for which I'm having trouble remembering what I have or haven't written.

I track my blogs in a number of ways, as a redundancy check, including a word processor file listing posted and not-posted entry titles, a spreadsheet listing posted entry titles by day and blog, and the built-in folder feature of Zoundry's BlogWriter blogging client software. That's in addition to any handwritten notes I may have listing posts for the future.

However, these are methods that I've been using more recently. I have numerous older posts that I didn't bother tracking, or just didn't find the time to. So what to do? Simple. Search for them. Use your own blog's search feature to find a certain keyword or phrase.

In fact, I recommend using "search" as it puts you into the role of a reader. How are they searching for you? After you use your own search feature, go straight to one of the search engines (or all of them), and search for your posts using the same terms and phrases. How are you ranking?

Whether you find your posts via your own blog's search feature or on a search engine, you now have a bird's eye view of what you've already written. Are there any related topics that you haven't covered? I find this method a great way to make sure I'm covering all the angles of a topic in my blogs. If you do this, too, just make sure that if you are using your own blog's Google Search, that you don't click on the advertiser links on the results pages.

Links: Zoundry (http://www.zoundry.com)

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.blogspot.com

Technorati : blogging, managing blogs, multi blogging, pro blogging, writing

During my "vacation" a few weeks ago, I sat down and sketched out ideas and notes for nearly 200 posts for close to 20 blogs. I initially had intended to reduce the number of active blogs I was writing from about 16 down to 8-10. Instead, I realized that with the topics I wanted to cover, I actually had to expand out to close to 20 blogs. That's including the amalgamation of several blogs, and the reinstatement of a couple I was going to ditch.

My writing and blogging style is such that I need to plan ahead. I'm actually an obsessive planner. But this year, I finally realized that I can't overplan, or else I get intimidated and abandon my "to do" list. But if I do a long-term general plan and a short-term detailed plan, I find this both manageable and motivating. While I'm writing posts for the short term, I have a reason to work on the next short-term plan.

As part of a plan to keep my blogging manageable, I decided that trying to write and maintain 20 blogs would be futile for a single person and that there must be a better way. Enter a more advanced blogging platform such as WordPress.

Note: I'm not ignoring other platforms; I just happen to like Wordpress and its impressive collection of page templates and advanced plugins, and the ease with which both can be set up. What's more, because of the simplicity of WordPress's design, it's relatively simple to customize templates and, for a programmer like myself, easy to write plugins.

Wordpress, and other advanced blogging platforms, allow categories. If you are writing, or planning to write, several blogs that have some common umbrella topic, you need to pick the right blogging platform. Don't make the mistake I did in setting up all of my early blogs on a platform that does not support post categories.

Having a blogging platform that supports categories means that I can once again fathom managing multiple topics with fewer blog accounts and URLs. What's more, combining multiple related blogs into a single URL may actually increase the amount of ad revenue earned by a blog.

According to a Jensense post about low-converting sites, a site with higher Google AdSense pageview counts will pay more for the exact same clicked ads than a site with lower pageview counts. Combining several blog URLs into one URL generally means a higher collective pageview count.

I've done this with my 4 cooking blogs, combining them into the single Curry Elvis multi-blog. Unfortunately, because the URLs have changed, this means that I have to rebuild my search engine rankings, as well as hope that any regular readers of my older cooking blogs will check out the new site. (I'll soon be posting a small series about moving your blogs around, whether it's from one platform to another, from one URL to another, or both, as well as deciding whether to copy your old content over.)

Oh, and in case you're wondering why blogSpinner is not on WordPress, the new version will be going live on countwordula.com very soon, along with several other writing-related blogs.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.blogspot.com/

Technorati : ad revenue, blogging, blogging platforms, multiple blogs, pro blogging

If you're running a web forum or any type of blog or website where more than one person is posting content, here's a handy piece of information. I checked with the AdSense team recently about the legitimacy of having more than one AdSense account's ads on the same website. I've been offered a chance to write three combined blogs about RSS + web content syndication, but no revenue. It's not for a blog network, just a single website. The owner of the site cannot pay me, but offered to let me post myAdSense ads, etc.

I agreed because this site, MarketingStudies.net, is quickly establishing itself as a source of expert information about RSS (Really Simple Syndication). I wanted to position myself as an expert about RSS as well, to supplement the articles on my main consulting site, chameleonintegration.com. Fortunately, the Google AdSense TOS (Terms of Service) allow you to have more than one publisher's account code showing in the ads of a single website.

Addendum: I checked with Michelle of Chitika's Customer Service and they, too, allow mutiple publisher ad codes on the same website.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.blogspot.com/

Technorati : ad revenue, adsense, blogging, pro blogging

Recently, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net recently asked his readers what their daily blogging routines were. There are numerous interesting comments posted to the original entry (see link at the end of this post ). Personally, my techniques and rituals are constantly changing to match the fact that I am always trying to refine my blogs and related websites. My personality is also such that I always need to do something different. It’s not that I’m bored easily per se; I just constantly enjoy a challenge.

Techniques that I was using only a month or two ago seem to have been abandoned altogether for older methods: pencil and paper for planning. I may be old-school, and a lifetime of handwritten notes may colour my opinion, but there's something to be said for the tactility of handwriting compared to notes.

I find it easier to plan when I write down my thoughts rather than typing them into some spreadsheet or word processor document. It's easier to add supplemental notes and comments - something that's incredibly difficult on most computers (unless they are PDAs or tablet computers). I can also easily add diagrams, sketch out blog page template layouts, and generally have no physical restrictions on a piece of paper.

It seems that no matter how many times I come up with a new (digital) routine for planning and recording my blogs, I eventually find myself going back to paper and pencil. (Although I still record my posts in word processors and spreadsheets.)

If you think I'm wrong that pen/pencil and paper are still an ideal way to plan your writing, then tell me why computer manufacturers are still making tablet PCs. The printing press didn't supplant the pen, and neither did the typewriter and computer.

Links:
Darren Rowse/ProBlogger, daily blogging routines post.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.blogspot.com/

Technorati : blogging, blogging techniques, pro blogging, writing