The Tlog - a technology blog

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

As I’ve mentioned before, having people (in blogs and other sites) linking to your blog is a Good Thing ™. Not only does it improve your ranking in Google (and other search engines)’s search results, but people may arrive at your blog through those links. Accordingly, if something can be done to cause more people to link to you, you should do it.

There are several things you can do, of course. You can ask people to link to you, for instance - either by asking your friends for a link, or by asking total strangers to exchange links (I’ll deal with the latter in a future part of the series). You can also simply write good content, and promote your blog in terms of SEO, pinging, and such, and wait for people to link to your blog, or to particular posts. It will happen. But it’s slow, and uncontrolled.

Hence the concept of “linkbaiting“, which is the art of writing posts that have increased chances of having people link to them.

Continue reading ‘Blogging tips #24: Linkbaiting’

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

A lot of bloggers, especially those who intend to earn some money with their blog(s), read a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), to make people visit their blogs for the first time, ensuring that their results appear as high as possible in Google and other search engines when people search for subjects they blog about. Directories can also help. This is, of course, a good idea - if people don’t find out about your blog, they won’t visit it, much less click on any ads.

Regular readers, as I’ve mentioned before, tend to earn you less money in the short term, because, as they get to know your site, they tend to unconsciously “filter” any ads (this effect can be lessened by moving ads around from time to time, or changing ad types). What they do earn you is new visitors, as they mention your articles in their own blogs, or simply link to your blogs (this also improves PageRank), or tell friends about them. That’s why being a good host is so important.

All of the above is (or should be) well known. But there’s another important making-money-from-blogging tip that many people forget about, or forget to mention: *keeping* first-time visitors on your blog.

Why is this important? Two reasons:

• the more articles of yours they read, the more likely they are to become regular readers
• any pages they browse to have new ads, which increases the chances of them seeing one that interests them

Next: how to actually do it.

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

This is completely optional; however, in my opinion, it’s a great idea, with lots of advantages and no disadvantages, as far as I can see.

After part 8 - Configuring the RSS feed, you should have a feed which aggregators can read. However, instead of telling people to subscribe directly to that feed, which, among other things, can use a lot of bandwidth (assuming you have your own server - that’s not a problem if you use Blogger or something like that), you have an alternative.

That alternative is to use FeedBurner. It works this way: you tell it the address of your feed. Then FeedBurner gives you a new address, which you then tell people to use, instead of the one your blog supplies. That way, only FeedBurner accesses your real feed - everyone else in the world accesses FeedBurner’s version instead.

So far, that’s already reason enough to use it. But there’s more. (I’m trying not to make this sound like I’m doing marketing for them - I’m not, and there are no affiliate links here. I really find their services useful, though.)

• first, statistics. They give you great stats about who accesses your feed - including real people, and what software or services they use, or which sites syndicate your feed, how many subscribers are there, which bots access it, etc.
• second, they have some services that can improve your feed, such as validating it, or showing the version any software expects - be it RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, Atom…
• another feature is making your feed include the necessary XHTML to also display in a normal browser - telling the user that it’s a feed, and what to do with it, but also allowing him/her to read the content.
• it also adds some features that I’m not using, such as Flickr integration, features for podcasters, etc..
• finally, if you subscribe to their paid service, it includes much more detailed stats, not just for each feed, but for every particular item on a feed - including clickthroughs from feed readers, which show you what links people click on.

After you’re using that service, remember to change every feed link in your blog to the FeedBurner version - it may even help if you specify separate links for the RSS feed, Atom feed, etc., but which all go to the same FeedBurner URL.

And remember to change the appropriate <link> tag, as shown in part 8 - this time, to the FeedBurner feed, instead of yours. Again, only FeedBurner itself should read your feed.

The FeedBurner site also has a “recipe” for configuring Apache to redirect accesses to your feed to the FB link, but that’s useful only if you’ve already publicized your old feed link, and have many people reading it - too many to tell to change the feed they’re subscribing to to the FB one. That way, you simply redirect them - and, in those cases, it may be useful to also change the real feed’s address to something more “hidden”, which you then tell FeedBurner about, but people can’t find.

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

After you have been blogging for a while, you may begin to notice this problem for yourself: some of your best posts are “buried” deep in your blog. Unless people arrive there from search engines or external (or internal) links to them, they’ll never be seen again.

Also, think about someone who’s just arrived at your blog for the first time. They may find your blog’s subject interesting (or, even, what they’ve been looking for). However, where to start? It may well be that your recent posts, naturally, don’t “reinvent the wheel” - don’t introduce what your blog is about, as if that was the first thing a reader saw (the waste of space would be scary…) On the other hand, what will the visitor do? Use the archives to read your first post, and read on from there? It’s really doubtful that anyone will read hundreds or thousands of posts in chronological order - how long would that take? Days?

The solution, then, is a “Top Posts” page (it may be called something different, such as “best posts” or “most popular articles”.)

That works mostly as a static page (in a way, much like the index for this series), where you list your top posts, with short (1-2 lines, not longer) descriptions of what they’re about. I said mostly static because, of course, you will be adding to it from time to time.

Which articles to include in it? There’s no “hard” criteria, but I suggest the following guidelines:

• Try to keep the number of posts at about 20. If there are about 100 “top posts”, that’s almost an entire, smaller blog, and almost nobody reads that much in a sitting.
• Take your time - add an article there only after it’s been away from the front page for a while. It should have been an article that has “stood the test of time”, so to speak.
• If possible, choose an article that has some user comments.
• If possible, too, choose a post that other blogs/sites have linked to.
• Choose “timeless” articles - guides, hints and tips, original content, etc.. Conversely, avoid posts that only make sense at that time, such as news or commentary about some event that has just happened.
• Try to pick “independent” articles, instead of posts that are continuations of others - or continued in others.

By the way, here are this blog’s top posts.

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

How do people blog?

In the most basic sense, there are two kinds of blogs: personal ones (also known as “everything but the kitchen sink” blogs), and topical ones.

Most people start with a personal blog, although they may not see it as such. They call it original names like “random thoughts”, and talk about what whatever they feel like. Nothing wrong with that… but those blogs tend to have one post a week, and after a year or two, the blogger gets tired and shuts it down, or it begins to have 6-month intervals between posts.

The other possibility is when you really have something to say, or have a subject you want to write about. A lot. Computer games, politics, cheese dip… You choose. Sometimes, a blog has more than one topic: for instance, there may be a blog about computer games and comic books, or about movies and music. The possibilities are limitless, which is a phrase that always sounds deep.

Continue reading ‘Blogging tips #17: when to start another blog’