Feedburner is, without doubt, the biggest server of RSS feeds on the internet. Using Feedburner to provide your content is easy to set up and is just as easy for your readers to subscribe to. The question is, my RSS feed is available straight from my blog, so why use Feedburner?
This is a fair enough question and you would be right, your feed is available straight from your blog. Feedburner however adds a little value to your feed, both for you the publisher, and for your reader.
For you the publisher, Feedburner provides a statistical analysis of your subscribers. While fairly basic, the statistics are still interesting provide an interesting look at your subscribers. Feedburner also makes it very easy for your readers to subscribe via email.
For your readers, Feedburner provides a feed that is easy to read and well set our. For email subscriptions, the feed can arrive with social buttons in place so they can bookmark the post with a single click.
Feedburner has now incorporated several ways to jazz up your feeds making them easier to use, easier to read and most importantly, easier to subscribe to. Their are numerous different widgets that you can place on your site to display feeds from any site you subscribe to.
RSS is now an important part of the blog world. With Feedburner, your RSS feed can be modified to include advertising, special messages and bookmarking buttons - all managed from the one control panel. Feedburner, it is easy and it is free.
Blog software takes on many different forms and some would argue that a widget is not software. I differ. I feel that any piece of code that is run to gain an effect is software. This widget can be used anywhere, on a blog or on a web site.
The widget I am referring to is from Ezine Articles. This widget can be formated to display short extracts from articles from whichever category you select. Every time the page is refreshed a new set of articles are displayed. Is this fresh content? When a search engine spider visits it will read the data in the widget. The next time it visits the data will have changed and so the search engine will update its data. To that end, it is fresh content - just not in the format that we are used to.
The widget can be customized when it comes to colors and sits quite nicely in your side bar. The content can be customized to fit in with the genre of your blog. This of course provides additional reading material once your visitor has finished on your site. A little tip, don’t place the widget to close to the top. You want your visitors reading your work before spotting something else and moving on to that article.
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Interesting question. Do you concentrate on the various blog directories or do you concentrate on blog SEO? The real answer is most likely, ‘both’.
If you are wondering where you should concentrate your efforts then I suggest you forget the terminology for now. The real question becomes, do you concentrate on people (blog directories) or search engines and their spiders (blog SEO).
If you are looking to concentrate on people then your blog needs to reflect that. The content needs to be written in a user friendly manner. If your main focus is search engine rankings, your content needs to be keyword rich. Whilst you can write friendly keyword rich articles, it can become very taxing trying to produce it on a daily basis.
I hate to sound like I am sitting on the fence, however in this case I going to have to suffer a few splinters. I don’t see why you cannot do both, but in a less taxing manner. Write your articles in a user friendly manner; make sure there are an adequate supply of keywords within the articles. Whenever possible, write a full keyword rich article.
The user friendly articles, whilst still containing keywords, are going to keep your readers coming back. If you have the occasional keyword rich but slightly reader unfriendly, your reader are not going to be to troubled. It is the overall image that is going to be important.
What is your preference and does your blog reflect it. Writing for the masses enables you to use the various blog directories to their fullest. Writing for search engine spiders may not attract the masses but it will place you highly on the results pages for the various search engines. Write for both, and you will have one of those special blogs that attracts thousands of visitors each and every day.
Blog design refers of course to the design of your blog. Do you hire a professional to build a blog from scratch or simply buy a template. Even if you prefer to buy a good template, someone still had to design the template in the first place. In fact, if you decide to build a blog from scratch, chances are the designer will start with a template and modify it to your requirements.
There is nothing new about blog design. Web design has been around for a long time and blog design is simply an extension of that. In fact, blog design is more like a cross between good print design, particularly magazine design and web design.
If you look closely at a lot of blogs you will see some similarity with magazines or newspapers. Like all good print media, the look is important. The ads are carefully placed for maximum results. The content carefully crafted and placed to effect.
What the print media does not need to consider are the intricacies of the web. Blog design needs to allow for SEO policies; they also need to consider page loading speeds; and of course user interactivity like comments and click throughs.
When looking at your blog design, does it resemble a magazine, a newspaper, a web page or is it quite individual in its design? Or is it a blog that has just grown out of hand over time? It’s never to late to update your blog design.
It should be. Blog SEO should be a part of your everyday blogging. It’s strange as just about everyone knows what is involved with good blog SEO practices, or at least some of the minimum requirements. So why don’t they do it? I am not going to go through what is good blog SEO practices, we have many articles on the topic already. I want to look at your blogging habits - or rather, I want you to look at your blogging habits.
Laziness? I think not. I think the problem is more a joint case of lack of motivation and poor habits. For many people, when they first start blogging, blog SEO is the last thing on their mind. So they blog away. Often ad-hoc, often off topic - if they have a specific genre that is, and generally with very poor blog SEO practices.
It becomes a habit - a poor blog SEO habit
Habits can be broken. They say it takes a week to form a habit and four weeks to break it. If you have fallen into the habit of not looking at the requirements for good blog SEO, then spend the next four weeks religiously following them. At the end of the four weeks you will find that you have now formed a new blogging habit - hopefully one that is good for your blog’s SEO.
Sometimes it can be difficult to come up with good quality fresh blog content each and every day. One solution is to use the occasional guest writers. The difficulty is knowing where to find them.
I know several blogs that advertise for guest writers however this option is fraught with several difficulties. The major difficulty is telling someone that you do not require their services (because you don’t consider their quality, experience or knowledge good enough). If you don’t handle this correctly you risk alienating them and any of their followers. The best way to handle this situation is use the ‘little white lie’ philosophy and advise them that you have already found sufficient writers.
Rather than advertising, there are two options that are far better. The first is to look at those that are advertising themselves as guest writers. You can visit their blog, look at the quality of their articles and get an understanding of their knowledge and skills.
The second method is to visit blogs that you enjoy reading and ask them if they would be willing to write a guest blog. If you use any of the social widgets that show your visitors then check out those that visit regularly. They obviously have an interest in your blog content and if they write in a similar genre then they may be quite happy to write a guest post for you.
There are several benefits to using guest writers. First the guest writer provides some degree of importance to your blog. Other think your blog is important enough to write a guest post on. For the author, they have their name and blog URL placed onto another site providing free links and exposure.
One of the biggest benefits is freshness that a guest writer can bring to your blog. I like guest writers that are a little controversial, who don’t mind speaking out. It creates an online conversation and of course they can be as controversial as they like, it is not you making the statements. You can often ‘feed’ of this type of post for several days with comments and follow up posts of your own.
A guest writer can be a great asset to your blog content providing a different perspective, a change in direction and a little controversy. All good for the continued life of your blog.
How do you measure the success of your blog? The are many blog metric tools available however when it comes to measuring the success of your blog, sometimes the simplest statistics are the best. An interesting article by Paul Wright at Fish and Clicks titled ‘The Best Blog Metric” was rather thought provoking.
Paul’s take is to use his RSS statistics as a gauge of his blogs success. To extract a quote from his article:
……in my opinion 1 subscriber is worth way more than 1000’s of irrelevant uniques. If this blog were an e-commerce site 1 subscriber would be the equivalent to a sale.
I cannot help but agree with the last part of that statement, for a blog, each subscriber is the equivalent of a sale.
Take a step back and consider what a blog is. I may be wrong, however my interpretation of a blog is that it is a vehicle that enables me to broadcast information to the masses. However the masses have to want to view what I am broadcasting. A blog metric tool needs to be able to measure that desire.
I can have a thousand visitors in a day. How many actually stop and read and how many drop in and just as quickly drop out again? There are blog metric tools that measure things like bounce rates, length of stay and pages viewed. Those measurements are not really a measurement of the popularity of your blog. Return visitor rates would be but they are not as easy to measure.
The one measurement that is a good indicator of your blogs popularity is, as Paul Wright suggest, your RSS statistic. It takes a conscious effort to subscribe and you are only going to take that step if there is some attraction, or as I describe it, a desire to read.
Using a service such as Feedburner has the added benefit of providing a limited range of statistics. It also has the facility to value add to the feed with advertising and dedicated feed messages.
How do you measure the success of your blog? Is there a blog metric tool that you rely on? Are your RSS numbers an important indicator of your blogs success?
There are many very successful business people running very successful businesses and some of these businesses include websites. Although their websites are already successful I still often suggest they start writing a blog as a customer service and marketing tool. The answer I get back runs along the lines of this articles title, ‘I just don’t have the time’. My response, you don’t need the time. There are many blog and website services around that will do the job for you - and at a reasonable price.
Whether your business and web site is successful or you are just starting out, having professionals develop a blog and then provide the content can actually be a very cost effective proposal. There is little doubt that an effective blog can help to boost your business particularly if the articles are well written and relevant to your business and effective social marketing is undertaken.
Brick Marketing provide a wide range of blog and website services that are designed to help you develop a professional blog. We can also provide quality articles on regular basis that will engage your readers and help bring more traffic to your business.
Do you have a business? Are you thinking of creating a web site? I suggest you include a blog that has been professionally optimized for your business by a blog and website services provider. The extra service it provides to your customers together with the extra business it can help develop make it an extremely attractive and affordable option.
If you write frequently or if you write for more than one blog then this lazy little blogging tip may not only save some time, it may help boost your reader numbers. The terms ‘content is king‘ and ‘avoid duplicate content’ are probably going to ring loudly after reading this blogging tip, just give it some thought before being too critical.
One of the joys of blogging is when you write that post that not spikes your traffic a little, it also gets a decent response in the comments area as well. One option you have is to try and follow up the post with a new one that builds on the previous. If you are a good writer and have plenty of material, this is fine. If you don’t, then just like in the movies, the sequel is often a disappointment.
You can however use the success of the article further down the track. This can be done on either the posts blog or on one of your other blogs. Using a second blog has several benefits. It not only increases the traffic on the second blog, it can also drive traffic back to the original article.
I am of course talking about republishing but republishing with a twist. Rather than republishing in full, you need to be able to republish a really good teaser together with an introduction and of course deep link to the original article.
This tactic introduces new readers to the article and refreshes the memory of those who have been before. If you do get that good article that can be used in this way, wait for the right moment to republish. Some of the best bloggers have the knack of grouping some of their old posts and writing a post that simply links them together.
This blogging tip can serve several purposes. It does of course provide a suggestion for a quick and easier blog when your stuck for time or inspiration. If you use this tactic then you are also going to provide your article with either deep links or good internal links - all of which are good SEO practices. What a lazy way to get more traffic.