Entries Tagged 'Blogging' ↓

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I have recently entered into a group writing project at Daily Blog Tips. I submitted my article on 10 Forums to Make You a Better Blogger. My article is in the Technology and Internet Category.  I am not sure that this is the most appropriate category for my article, but I hope people like it.

In addition to my article (a little cocky I know), I highly recommend reading the following articles.

1. How to Increase Your Blog Subscriber Number - TechnicalItch provide a really useful tip for encouraging people to subscribe to your blog.
2. Tips for Gaining Page Views and Returning Visitors Using Series Posts - Bluejar.com gives an awesome tip for increasing repeat visitors and RSS subscribers. By writing a series if you hook people into your topic with your first post, they will want to come back to you blog to read the next posts in your series.
3. 10 Ways to Show Reader Appreciation - Reader Appreciation Project has written a great article for how to show your readers that you appreciate them. Well, let me implement one of them here. If any of you would like to write an article here on Newest on the Net, please leave a comment below. I would love to show off your work here.
4. 5 Tips to Increase Comments - Ad Tracker writes a nice list of tips for increasing comments.  I really need help in this arena.  You are all so quiet.
5. 10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Blog Posts - While nothing in this list is profound, that is the point of this post.  These are some tried and true ways to improve your blog posts.  Every blog post would be much better if the writer followed these blogging tips.
6. 18 Ways For Writing Better Pay-Per-Click Ads - Derek Beau provides some great tips here for improving your PPC adds.
7. How I Improved My AdSense CTR by 51% Using Auction Ads - The Newspaper Blog has an ingenious idea for getting viewers to notice your AdSense Ads.  I will be adding AdSense to this blog shortly.
8. Simple SEO Tips to Improve Your Blog’s Search Rankings - Here are some simple tips for SEO optimizing your blog.  These are so simple and we should all implement these for our blogs.
9. Top 10 Tips For Driving Traffic AWAY From Your Website - These are some great tips for what to avoid doing.  Nice angle Binary Moon!!
10. 5 Tips to Being Interesting - This is a great article for all aspects of your life.  I must admit to you all that I have a habit of talking about myself too much.

As I am sure that you have all seen, a new widget was released last week called Blogrush. The Blogrush widget displays links to 5 blog articles. This service has been touted by many bloggers as a great way to attract traffic to your blog. I say HOGWASH!!! Ok, I hear you saying, “But Fred, ShoeMoney, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, Sarah Lewis, and John Chow have all stated that Blogrush will be a great way to drive traffic to their blogs!!!” Well, they are right, it will help them. But, it will not help 99% of bloggers.

Now don’t stop reading.  I know what you are thinking, “Why would you say that Fred?” Well, the inequality is due to Blogrush’s ten-tiered affiliate system. The more people a blog signs up to Blogrush, the number of times that blog’s posts will be displayed on the Blogrush widget goes up exponentially. Bloggers with more traffic will get a disproportional amount of traffic to their site because they will get more people to sign up for Blogrush through their site. Therefore, if you sign up one person to use blogrush on a blog, your posts will be displayed 1 time. However, if a higher traffic blog signs up 10 people, their posts will be displayed 100 times. Therefor the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

How can you prevent this?

While I hate to say this, the only way to prevent this is to not sign up for Blogrush through other people’s blogs. Just go directly to Blogrush and sign up directly with them.

In addition to bringing up the inherent unfairness in Blogrush’s affiliate system, I also predict that know one using the Blogrush widget will experience a large traffic increase.  I really doubt that people will click on the links displayed by the widget. When the widget becomes ubiquitous,blog readers will learn to overlook it like so many other diversions on blogs these days.

What do you think? Do you think that Blogrush’s tiered affiliate system is fair? Am I misreading it? Do you think readers of your blog will use the Blogrush widget?

Today I got to try my hand at guest blogging. Kevin Muldoon from Blogging Tips was nice enough to allow me to post an article on his blog. I felt like Wesley Crusher getting to take over the helm of the starship Enterprise.

My article on Blogging Tips is titled Using Video to Engage Your Readers. I ask you all to go over and check it out. If you aren’t already a fan of Blogging Tips, I highly encourage you to look through all of Kevin’s prior posts. Kevin is a great writer and his topics are always very interesting.

So, after you go over and check out my article, leave comment and then come back here and leave a comment here.

Whenever I start a new WordPress blog, one of the first things I do is install Google Analytics so that I can monitor my stats. However, when I first started using WordPress, I found this task to be very confusing. So as my first of many WordPress tips, here is my guide for how to install google analytics.

Step 1 - Download the Semiologic Google Analytics Plugin. If you need other WordPress Plugins, here is a recent article listing places to find WordPress plugins.

Step 2 - Extract the Plugin Folder from the .zip File

Step 3 - Upload The Plugin to Your /WP-contents/plugins/ Folder

Step 4 - Activate the Plugin in Your WordPress Administration Panel

Step 5 - Login to Google Analytics at http://google.com/analytics

Step 6 - Add Your WordPress Blog to Google Analytics

Step 7 - Copy Code Snippet Generated By Google Analytics

Step 8 - Go Back To The WordPress Dashboard and Add Code Snippet to Options > Google Analytics

Step 9 - Go Back to http://google.com/analytics and Verify That It Has Found the Code

I hope that this has helped!!

Reading forums and participating in forums is a great way to become a better blogger. Forums focused on blogging are the best means to get questions answered and become known within the blogging community. I don’t suggest that you participate in all of these, but instead pick one or two and become a valuable member. The real power of forums is to become well known within the forums’ community. You want to establish yourself as a valued member of the community and an authority blogger.

Here are my favorite blogging forums:

1. Authority Blogger Forum:

The Authority Blogger Forum is a forum created by Chris Garrett, the author of Chrisg.com. This Forum is pretty new, but I am finding it to be a great community of bloggers. It is also great for new bloggers.

2. Blog Traffic School Forums:

The Blog Traffic School Forums are forums provided by Yaro Starak. Yaro is the author of Entrepreneur’s-Journey blog. In addition to this blog, Yaro runs the Blog Mastermind blog mentoring program. If you are interested in being a professional blogger, I highly recommend join the Blog Mastermind program. I have been a participant since Yaro started it.

3. The Blog Experiment Forums:

The Blog Experiment Forums are an extension of The Blog Experiment, but the forums are the focus of the community. This is an excellent community of bloggers. The forums are very active and very helpful.

4. Bloggeries Blog Forum:

The Bloggeries Blog Forum is one of my favorite forums for blogging. Bloggeries has an awesome revenue sharing program with its participants. Participants earn 50% of the Adsense revenues generated from their threads. Bloggeries’ revenue sharing program is designed to create a very active community.

5. Blogger Forum:

The Blogger Forum is one of the most active forums. It is a great forum and I highly recommend participating in this forum. If you are new to blogging the Newbie Section is a great resource.

6. Bloggst Forum:

The Bloggst Forum offers a lot of great forums. One of the coolest things about Bloggst is that you can submit your blog’s feed to this site and they will publish your posts to their forums. This is a great way to generate traffic and exposure.

7. Blogging Tips Blogging Discussion Forums:

The Blogging Tips Blogging Discussion Forums are an extension of Kevin Muldoon’s blog, Blogging Tips. The forums are fairly new and at this point not too active. This presents a good opportunity to become a leading member of this community. Sometimes it is better to participate and establish yourself at these newer forums.

8. Performancing.com Forums:

The Performancing.com Forums are an extension of Performancing.com Blog. I read the Performancing.com Blog everyday.

9. Digital Point Blogging Forum:

The Digital Point Blogging Forum is a section of the famous Digital Point Forums. Digital Point is a hub for people making money (or hoping to make money) on the Internet. I encourage you to check out all of the forums at Digital Point. The amount of information on these forums is absolutely amazing.

10. The V7 Web Development Community Blogging Forum:

The V7 Web Development Community Blogging Forum is part of The V7 Web Development Community. The V7 Web Development Community focuses on Internet Marketing, Web Design and Blogging.