blogging 102

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes The biggest means to increasing regular readership is involving your occasional readers through a better comment experience.  These five pugins will do just that if you do it right. 1) Nofollow Free:  Without going nofollow free few small blogs have a hope in hell of drawing lots of comments straight out of the box.  You will get some spam, but nothing worth having comes without a little bit of work.  there are easy ways around this too.  Akismet will block most spam.  Moderated comments will hold all of them until you can look at them.  You can also moderate them so regular commentators can post without moderation. You can also set it so the nofollow doesn’t kick until you have X number of approved comments.  At the very least the  plugin writes “Comments links could be nofollow free” to the end of the comment form, and this is a popular Google search phrase. convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes If you read my blog, it is most likely you are either a) a friend who is trying to get inside my head, or b) want to make money from blogging. I am going with the latter. You, like me, may be frustrated with Google for a variety of reasons that we won’t go into, but I am here to say there are alternatives. I am partial to BidVertiser myself, but I am looking into a number of affilate programs right now to replace Google on The Hart Blog Network blogs. The latest new affilate I have found is ScribeFire which I also see Darren Rowse has up on his website, Pro Blogger. John Cow wrote up about the soon to be gone Adsense Refferals. Instead of their Adsense Referral program they are now going to use the Google Affiliate Network. What this is going to allow is now publishers are going to apply for an advertiser program and then get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of the usual clicks or impressions. Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger has an... 

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes Something is up at Technorati. For more than a month now I have been having problems with them properly indexing one of my blogs. Despite the fact that it was being updated either manually or automatically with daily digest posts, http://www.bradsotherblog.com was simply not getting its ping through to Technorati. This just isn’t me, either. The first suggestion they made was to manually ping your blog at http://www.technorati.com/ping this works for all of my blogs except The Other Blog. After trying that and a ticket submitted with no answer I finally complained on the post board and the blog was quickly taken care of. They apparently want to take care of people who open their mouths in public a lot faster than they do those who wait patiently for returned emails. Well that one ping they did worked exactly once, the blog updated and jumped from an authority of 8 to 14 when all was said and done. I checked back a week later and nothing since that... 

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes All blogs have their problems and niche blogs are no exceptions, especially micro niche blogs. The biggest problem is the amount of content one person can write about. Darren Rowse of ProBlooger mentioned last week that one of the emerging trends were multiple author blogs for smaller blogs. This is one of the solutions to this problem, but it is only a stop gap in my opinion. Micro niche blogs, especially in the blogosphere of blogging will eventually run out of crap to blog about no matter how many authors they have. Many long time blogging bloggers I have been reading for a few years now are really just starting to repeat themselves. They aren’t simply giving a new take on an old subject; they are basically rewriting posts they wrote a couple of years back. In my less than humble opinion, this is when you know a blogger has started jumping sharks and needs to move on. As a blogger if you find yourself doing this, you need to realize if you can’t... 

Reading time: < 1 minute 5) Don’t Advertise On Your Noobie Blog. People who tell you not to advertise don’t usually have your best interest at heart. The first kind of people to give that advice are readers who want something for nothing. Second kind are bloggers who think if you don’t have ads their advertising will get a better click through ratio. 4) Gadets and Widgets are the bomb and you should use all the latest and greatest. The fact is unless it is unobtrusive and either useful to you or your readers it is pointless and slows down your load times. convey_source = "English"; Read More →