The Tlog - a technology blog » Blogging tips

Blogging tips #4.8 – Avoid premature promotion

Pedro Timóteo — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 16:25:38 +0000

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

I thought about calling this part “prevent premature promotion”, but I’m not Stan Lee. Anyway…

“Promotion”, in this case, is adding your blog to search engines and directories, asking friends and other people to link to it, linking to it yourself in your other blogs or sites (if you have any), adding it to sites like Technorati, Blogshares, etc….

And “premature”, of course, means “before the right time”. “What do you mean, right time? Shouldn’t I do everything in my power to promote my new blog, as soon as the blogging equivalent of a “Hello World” program is in there?”, you may ask.

Nope. It’s a bad idea. It’s not the end of the world, but it will harm you in the long run, and may take some time to recover from.

Premature promotion of a blog is the equivalent of newspaper ads for a new store, saying “open now!”, which, when people go there, is still under construction, with a sign saying “opening soon”. Nobody with half a brain would do that, right? (which means that only people who wear ties would do it.)

Think about it this way: anyone who goes to your blog or site and sees nothing of interest there… will probably never come back. That’s a lost visitor. Forever. Someone who could have become a regular visitor if only he or she had come there after there was something interesting to see.

So, when should you promote your site? At least, consider the following:

The site should have a couple of articles – 5 or more, if possible, but at least a couple of them. And most of them should be actual content, not a “welcome to my blog” message.
The site should be search-engine friendly. That means, among other things, no broken links, proper HTML, all the site’s sections in working order…
You should be using the definitive theme, not the original one which “came with the software” (unless that’s the one you’ll be using). “Definitive” doesn’t have to mean that you’ll never change it – just that you won’t change it tomorrow.
In general, your blog should no longer be “in testing”. If you’re still trying out plugins, enable and disabling features, testing stuff… it’s too early. Finish those tests first.

After all of that, unleash hell! Unless you’re a small child, or a Christian fundamentalist, in which case, unleash heck!

EDIT: An important exception: suppose you have just registered your domain, but the site won’t be “live” for some time; in that case, add it to Google (at least) as soon as the domain is up and you have something there – even a simple “Under construction” page. The reason for this is the Google Sandbox – it usually affects “new” sites, and if Google has known about yours for months, it won’t be seen as “new”. But do all the submitting again when your site goes “live”.

Blogging tips #15: Making money from your blog – AdSense: the competitive filter

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 10:15:07 +0000

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

AdSense’s competitive ad filter is, as the name suggests, a way to prevent some ads from appearing in your blog/site. While it’s targeted towards companies, especially commercial sites, in order to prevent absurdities such as a Coca Cola ad in Pepsi’s web site , it can also be useful for blogs – even personal ones. There are two reasons for it: one which will apply to some people, and one which should matter to everyone.

It’s possible that you find some ads offensive, insulting to your site or to your readers, or simply totally in opposition to what you’re trying to say in your site. For instance: an atheism site will probably include words like “religion” and “god”, and those words will attract many religious ads – for churches, faiths, and religious web sites in general. That brilliant piece you wrote denouncing astrology will probably have many ads for horoscope sites around it. A technical article about Firefox and its advantages over Internet Explorer will probably get ads for IE toolbars, IE “optimizers”, IE spyware removers, and so on. It’s likely that you simply don’t want those ads – just like you don’t tend to see “free viagra” ads in the New York Times web site. (at least, I don’t think you do – I don’t visit that site )
Independently of the above, there’s a more pragmatic reason for preventing some ads from appearing in your site: you want ads to be clicked on! Think about it: what earns you money? It’s not showing the ads, it’s having people click on them! So, naturally, you want them to be relevant, sure, but you also want them to be of interest to your readers. Since they are your readers, it must be because they like the way you write, or because they agree with you, or because they are interested in the subject, or because they find useful information or tips in your blog. Therefore, the banners shouldn’t be in total opposition to what you write. Using an example from above: if you have a blog about atheism, your visitors aren’t likely to click on a banner for “The Holy Church of XXXX”, right? Or maybe you get ads, from time to time, that are obviously hoaxes, and that nobody with half a brain would click on. So, if you can prevent that one banner from appearing, you improve your chances of getting a “clickable” one in that place.

Now, how to use the filter? The AdSense competitive ads page has the following tips, which should be self-explanatory:

Examples:
example.com 			block all ads across all subdomains
sports.example.com 		block only ads across the 'sports' subdomain
sports.example.com/widgets 	block all ads below a specific directory
sports.example.com/index.html 	block all ads for a specific page

But one important thing about this: it’s the URLs that you should type, right? But which ones? AdSense banners tend to have URLs on them, but they may not be (and usually aren’t) the real ones, they’re just there to attract attention. For instance, an ad may say “www.free-spyware-remover.com”, but it may link to a completely different address from that. And it’s that real one that you should add to the competitive ad filter.

How to find it? One way is, indeed, by clicking on the ad yourself. But Google may not like you if you do it too much – especially if always from the same IP address. So, don’t abuse it.

Blogging tips #5: Adding your blog to search engines and directories

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 15:57:07 +0000

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

(WARNING: you really should read, at least, #3 – valid HTML and #4 – making your blog search engine-friendly before you do this one)

Now, the fun begins. Your blog is already interesting, you love doing it, its HTML is valid, and its ready for search engines. So, let them come!

To begin with, go to your favorite search engines, look for the “Submit URL” or “Add URL” or “Add Link” or… link, and submit your blog. Sometimes, the links are slightly hidden; for instance, Google’s is here.

This way will eventually work. But it works much better and more quickly if your site is linked from other (already indexed) pages, especially popular ones. (That will also help your PageRank value, but that’s for a future article.). Maybe you already have/control some. Maybe some of your friends have blogs or other web sites of their own. There are other lists where you can add your URL, if its subject is appropriate. Commenting in other related blogs, and including a link to your blog when appropriate (otherwise, it’s spam) can also help.

To put it short: if at all possible, make sure your site is linked from many others. But don’t spam! Not only is that unethical, it can end up being harmful to your site, its popularity and its reputation. Search engines can even unlist your blog because of it. So, don’t just go adding your link to every site or blog you see even though it’s totally unrelated to your blog.

Now, other than search engines, there are also directories. From my experience, you can’t expect a huge amount of traffic from them, but some is better than nothing, right? I’ve included a bunch of them, to which I’ve added my blog, on the right sidebar (visible only on the main page). They are the banners below the Blogshares one. Just go to each one, find the appropriate section, and add your blog. They’re directories, so that’s exactly what they want you to do – a directory is nothing without entries, right? Just make sure, again, that you’re adding your blog to the correct section, and note also that some directories are restricted to a theme (such as technology), so, if your blog doesn’t fit that theme, don’t add it there.

One final note: all of these things can take time. Don’t expect to submit your blog to Google today and start getting visitors from there tomorrow. Even after search engines have indexed your site, they still take time to follow your updates – don’t be surprised if only your older articles seem to receive people coming from search engines. Be patient, they’ll soon catch up.

Blogging tips #3: Valid HTML

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 08:15:47 +0000

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

I’m sure a lot of people won’t think this one is relevant, but my experience says it is.

You know what HTML is, right? Most of you probably do. You don’t have to know it to have a blog, though, especially if you use a service like Blogger or LiveJournal – they mostly take care of the hard work. That’s why blogging is for everyone, not just “computer people”.

Still, it won’t take a lot of time or work to ensure your blog – every part of it – is made of valid HTML. I’ll talk about the advantages of it in a moment.

How to validate it? Well, it just so happens that the World Wide Web Consortium, which develops and maintains all those nice standards like HTML, XHTML and such, has a nice HTML validator. Come on, try it. Just open that link, type the address of your blog in the first box, click on “Check”, and wait a couple of seconds.

If it validated, great! But it probably didn’t, right? Well, check the errors, it usually explains what the problem was. If you use one of those blogging services, they usually have their own parts well coded, so maybe it’s something you wrote, like a malformed link, a tag (like or

) you forgot to close, an image link () without an “alt="something"” description, or possibly some code you copied from a badly designed page (maybe created with FrontPage or some other horror). Correct those if you can – like I said, it’s not a lot of time or work, and, when fixed, it stays fixed. If you really can’t correct some error, ask a more technical friend – if he’s good and cares about doing things right, he’ll beam with pleasure and say something like “I wish more people cared about this, you don’t believe what I have to put up with”.

A tip: a lot of blogging-related sites give you code to put links or banners to them. Some of them are fine, but others give non-validating code. With experience, you can spot them easily. For instance, maybe they don’t put values between quotes (width=50% (wrong) instead of width="50%" (right)). The validator will warn you of those, but you will be able to easily see them by yourself, and fix them, after a while.

Why is this important?

You may say something like my blog shows up fine in my Internet Explorer, so why all this work to fix errors I can’t even see?. Maybe you can’t, but it’s very likely that other people can. People with other browsers like Firefox or Opera, people with other systems like MacOS or Linux. Even the next version of Internet Explorer may be (we can only hope) more demanding about valid code, and then your blog won’t be seen as you intend it to.

Besides, people are increasingly browsing the web with devices other than a PC or a Mac. Cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs, Sony PSPs… and you almost surely can’t test your site on all of those. But respecting standards ensures all of them can display, and navigate around, your site, properly.

If a couple of minutes of work mean that your blog can be seen correctly by 100% of users instead of 85%, why not take the time to do it right?

Also, it’s not just a question of browsers. Your blog will probably have an RSS feed (I’ll talk about those later in this series), and guess what, it’s generated from the HTML code. And those, being in XML, are much stricter – a simple error usually means that feed readers refuse your feed, marking it as invalid.

And search engine bots? Well, they interpret HTML too. Maybe they won’t “eat up” some invalid code that Internet Explorer did.

Lastly (and this one is mostly a personal opinion), you should take pride in whatever you do. Even something you do just for fun. If there’s a right way and a lazy way, choose the right way. Bad HTML is like bad spelling – sure, most people will understand what you meant, but…