Blogging Sueblimely

Welcome to Blogging Sueblimely. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

The things we do to entice visitors to our blogs! Now I am hugging RSS feeds in an attempt to get some link love. I only give my affection to those who deserve it though.. I have never been paid for it!! I have not yet to sold my blog body. (I did lend the sidebar of my old blog to Google Adsense for a while - does that count? I say ‘lend’ because of the pittance I earned). If there are any spammy kerb crawlers reading this please take note.

Ok enough puns, back to the topic (I think I have just broken the SEO rule of ensuring your post topic is included right at the start of the post too. Looking back over what I wrote, I do have some reasonably good keywords in the first two sentences - pure luck).

I have joined rssHugger in an attempt to entice more subscriptions as well as to find out more about the service; so that I can let you know if it may be of help in promoting your blogs. Their aim is to

” bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader”

By writing this post I am now eligible for my feed to be considered for promotion by rssHugger. If and when accepted my RSS feed headlines will be displayed on my own page on RSSHugger.

I would normally try something out longer before introducing you to it but there is a good reason to join up right now. At the moment, at least, it is free to get a permanent RSS page on rssHugger if you write a review like this. Otherwise it costs $20 for a ten year listing.

It was not easy to research rssHugger as it is something new and of course many blog posts are being written to qualify to join. However, because the aim is to only include quality content and not to allow spam blogs, I do think it has potential. It could be of more use than the other RSS directories and probably more so if you join up before the membership becomes too large and your blog gets lost in the crowd. One good feature that does help get round this problem is that the top 100 list is reset each month in order to give everyone a fair chance. As you can see some of the ‘bigger’ blogs are members which can be seen as a good recommendation. Mashable has posted a review at rssHugger Avoiding Technorati’s Pitfalls?

Of course it does not matter how many visitors these linking schemes generate, your blog needs to have quality content, of interest to at least some of the visitors. This way they will want to link to you and and return again to become readers who are a part of your blogging community.

I will keep you up to date as I find out more. I will be checking to see if my trusted guru in such matters, Andy Beard, posts on the topic. Andy always strikes me as being honest and objective. I mention this here because of his recent post Do You Trust My Advice? and the animated comment discussion that ensued.

If you have joined any RSS directories that have proved useful please do let us know about them. I am off to hug something real now - it is nearly time to get my son up for school.

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Apologies for the title, I could not resist. What I have been dropping is my Entrecard - a kind of internet calling card. You can see where Entrecard members drop theirs for me - in my right sidebar. Once I have built up enough credits by pressing on the “drop yours’ button on other member sites I can then use these to advertise my site. I also earn credits when others drop in on me.

It is too early to say if this will just bring some one off visitors or returning readers but I will keep you informed. In the meantime I think the concept is clever and it appealed to me as being a fun way of gaining some more recognition for this new blog. I only need to visit and drop on sites that interest me, giving kudos where it is due. I only have to accept ads and place ads on sites I choose. I can avoid spammy sites and even if they visit this site they are not leaving - “will you drop on me/fav me, vote for me’ type pleas.

I suspect I should have a site logo on my calling card rather than my image but I did not realize it at the time. At least I did not use the Christmas hat picture I have put on MyBlogLog

Have any of you found such link exchange type schemes effective?

PS. I forgot mention that it was Mark of Me and My Drum that put me on to this. Thanks Mark. I showed my appreciation by buying a text link for the first time ever, on your Top Spots.

Popularity: 2% [?]

When I first looked at BlogRush I was reasonably interested in what it had to offer. When I discovered that it involved adding a widget to my page my reaction was “No way am I going to join up, after just culling a host of other widgets from my site.” BlogRush kept appearing in posts I was reading and I succumbed to the temptation. I just had to find out for myself what it was all about, widget and all.

What is BlogRush

A blog syndication network designed to bring more readers to your blog.. The widget that you are required to put on your site will display headlines coming from the blogs on the network. You can of course see an example of this in my sidebar (if you scroll down)

How BlogRush Works

Your own post headlines appear on other blogs in proportion to the amount of page views you have had and the number of bloggers you have referred. For example if you have 500 page views a day (I wish) your own headlines will be shown on other member blogs 500 times. If you refer another blog to Blogrush and they get say 500 views per day then your headlines are shown another 500 times. This passes on down the line referrer to referrer for 10 generations - a viral marketing concept. For me this means that to substantially gain traffic from BlogRush I need to sign up someone with much more traffic than myself. Any takers

What’s the Gossip

As I have only just joined up and cannot give my own impression of the worth of BlogRush I thought I would have a look round and see what others were saying. I searched for posts via Digg. I discovered a very mixed reaction, some in favor others not. Here are some examples but please keep in mind that Blogrush has announced that click through rates are low at present because spam bloggers have been cheating the system and stealing traffic from legitimate users:

John Chow has relegated the BlogRush widget to the bottom of his sidebar, He reported in My BlogRush Stats that BlogRush has shown his headlines 27,293 times and produced a very low click rate of 91 You would expect his network to be thriving and at 445 blogger referrals and 247,892 credits earned from his refferal network and his own traffic it is. He says “The key to doing well with BlogRush will be to use really enticing headlines and build up a lot of syndication credits. Just running the Widget should get you some referrals, but you will get much better results by blogging about it.” Interesting I will be watching to see if this post makes a difference to my own referrals.

Darren Rowse of Problogger in What are your BlogRush Statistics Like? gives a similar picture of his BlogRush statistics - only 39 clicks despite his headlines having been shown 70,000 times.He has asked for comments from others using BlogRush regarding their own experiences. This makes interesting reading in itself. Darren is going to try some of the tips in his own post Tips for Using BlogRush to Generate Traffic for Your Blog to see their effect on his figures. This may will be interesting to follow.

Andy Beard has an interesting article Blogrush Testing and Tracking (Updated - John Reese Quote) which counters some of the negative criticism BlogRush has had.

Talking of which here are a few posts that do criticize Blog Rush Blog Rush: 3 Fatal Reasons to Nuke it Right Now, Blog Rush = Blog Trickle? and Jim Kukral’s

Don’t Waste Your Time With Blogrush, It Won’t Work For Your Blog I disagree with his comment ” Bloggers don’t want, or crave “more traffic”” in reference to the 99% of blogs with low traffic who just do it because the want to blog. Does he think we like talking to ourselves? If we did not want traffic we may as well be using pen and paper.

I then got a little bored of my research mainly because most of the talk is based on supposition. BlogRush has not been around long enough to speak for itself. I think I will hang around a little longer and see what it has to say.

If however they introduce the rule, as mentioned on a blog post at income.com of having to place your BlogRush widget “in the fold” of your blog (the top area of your blog that is visible without having to scroll down) then I will be out of there - Unless I am getting zillions of new readers that is - oh dear I seem to be going against my principles with that statement. Am I being turned by all the stuff I read on zations (optimization, monetization etc). Maybe I should revert to pen and paper and talking to myself.

I cannot refer you to the post I mentioned above regarding BlogRush considering making it a requirement that the widget be placed above the fold. As you can read here - Feedback - the post in question was accidentally deleted. I suspect most people commenting on the post, including myself, indicated their objection: that way it was leaning when I read the comments.

Traffic alexa

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Having worked out your individual needs for your blog, (view part one of this series) think about your content presentation

Write content that will be of interest to the audience you are trying to reach.

It is unlikely that all of your posts will be of interest to all of your readers of course, but aim to captivate as many as you can.

What sort of content is of most interest may take some time to work out, although research will help you get started. Visit popular blogs about a similar topic. Find them by doing search engine searches, Google blog searches, visiting popular bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, technorati. Deduce from this what you think are popular topics, or sub topics of your particular subject area. Even if your content is quite unique, visiting successful blogs can provide you with useful information.. Once your blog gains readership, popularity of posts is easier to determine. You have such tools as backlinks, comments, bookmarked posts and email subscriptions and site statistics to guide you.

Present your content well

I will cover the layout/design and writing styles in more details in later articles but for this purpose I will talk about some basic steps. From the top down:

Your post title and post URL

Capture attention with your title. Research by doing blog searches and see what titles raise your own curiosity, what sort of titles have high ratings in e.g. digg and technorati or directory/popularity sites related to your own topic.

• Be succinct but descriptive.
• Use keywords that relate to your post or blog to attract readers and for search engine optimization.
• Follow trends. e.g. The Top 10 (20/30….) reasons/ best/worst ……. (fill in the blanks yourself). A quick blog search revealed quite a selection of these. Just a couple:
  • TOP 5 Reasons WHY You Should Consider Social Bookmarking As Another Means Of Generating FreeTargeted Traffic
  • Top Ten Reasons Bloggers Should Avoid Social Bookmarking

(The dichotomy of these two titles appealed to me.)

Post Body

• Use your keywords and secondary keywords for search engine optimization.
• Make good use of headings to delinieate your post content
• Use white space wisely. Don’t crowd your post.
• Use lists where possible for ease of reading and quick content scanning.

Post Footer

• Tag or Categorize your post with keywords relating to its content. Most blog software has either inbuilt options or extensions that allow this.
• Give your readers easy ways to revisit your blog.
• Allow them to easily:
  • bookmark/favorite your site.
  • add your RSS feed.

  I prefer to offer options as to what service to save bookmarks to by using, for example, the Addthis.com buttons
  
  and

Increase your Blog Readership - Part 1

Tags: Traffic, Social Networking, Blogging sueblimely

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I cannot start a series about this topic without stressing that whatever methods you use to increase traffic, none will be truly effective if the content and presentation of your blog is not compelling enough to bring people back. This is a whole topic in itself and I will cover this in more detail later.

You could spend so much time attempting to get your blog known that it detracts from the time you have to post articles, which is self defeating. I know I have been guilty of this. I suppose in my case it is one of the research topics I have been following so without it I probably would not have been able to write this series. (I have justified not following my own advise so feel better now.)

So where do you start?

Work out your individual needs

Before you throw your efforts into methods for increasing your readership save yourself time in the long run by doing some planning and thinking about:

• Why do you want to increase traffic? This will influence what methods you use. For example, is it because you wish to create a social network on a particular topic, are you hoping to make money by advertising, selling a product etc.
• What sort of readership are you aiming for? Do you want to attract others that are blogging about or interested in the same subject, are you trying to get customers or clients for a business, are you aiming at a particular age range, are you trying to widely spread your message …?
• Where do you want your readership based geographically? Is your topic only of interest to those in a particular country or city?

Research

Find out about the tools and techniques that will satisfy the criteria you have worked out while planning your needs. Reading such articles as this will save you a lot of time rather than doing your own research from scratch.

To meet any unique needs you have, you will need to do some more surfing. Visit sites that cover similar topics to yours. Browse some blog catalogues or social networking sites that have well defined categories. More on this subject later.

When you have done your planning and research, you can now begin to work out what resources, methods and tools you are going to utilize - and there are many!

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