Written on June 29th, 2005 at 08:06 am by JSLogan
Other Than Search Engines - Where Do You Get New Blog Traffic?
Yesterday was another typical Monday - back to work, back into the routine, another Carnival of the Capitalists. I’ve been participating in the Carnival of the Capitalists (CoTC) for some time, it’s pretty effective at drivng new readers to my blog. I usually pick-up a few new readers each week from CoTC, yesterday was no exception.
Other than CoTC, I routinely pick-up new readers from comments and trackbacks I do on other blogs. Obviously, you can pick-up referer traffic and new audience through trackbacks from your blog and references to your site or a particular post on other sites, but you can’t control those events…they just happen.
I’ve also had some luck in article submissions and noticed some traffic increases from e-zines I’ve given content to. On one ocassion, I even ran a paper direct mail campaign to bring more people to my blog…resulting in about 200 additional readers.
Other than those things I’ve listed above - and excluding search engine traffic - how do you get new readers to your blog? Are there any forums or Carnivals out there that work well for you?
Written on June 27th, 2005 at 06:06 pm by David Shawver Stanton
enternetusers - Reflections on Guest Blogging
I thought I’d give a quick update - we’ve finished our tour of Turkey (amazing) and are back in London for a couple of days. I’m slowly leaving holiday mode as I have a couple of meetings lined up over the next day or two. Some are blogging related, others are not.
On the blogging front I’m trying to hook up with some of the gang at Shiny Media tomorrow (update - just heard from Ashley and we’re doing it). I’ve been a big fan of some of their blogs for a while now and am looking forward to picking their brains and perhaps having a beer with them.
We’re only here for a couple of days so I’m also trying to fit in a bit of sight seeing and relaxation. I’m going to see Coldplay tonight which will be fun.
Tomorrow night we head for Singapore for a few last nights of holiday before heading home at the end of the week when normal blogging here at enternetusers will resume.
In the mean time I’m left pondering my ‘guest blogging’ experiment over the past month here at enternetusers and am interested to hear your reflections both as readers and guest bloggers. Have you enjoyed the change? How have you found the group blog experience? Has it added to the value of enternetusers? Would you like to see it continue in some way?
A couple of people have already emailed me to say they’ve both appreciated the new voices and to say that next time I go away perhaps I should only have one guest blogger. I’m interested in others opinions either in comment or via email. One person suggested I continue to allow this blog to be a group blog - another suggested I invite one guest blogger to join me each month so there is some rotation of new voices. I’m unsure as I’ve barely been online to follow how its gone. My only initial impressions have been:
- unique readers are a touch lower than normal (I suspect this is largely due to a slightly lower posting frequency than normal)
- comments levels are up (on a per post level) - the blog seems to have been more interActive in my absence. (I suspect this is partly due to less posts per day which means posts stay on the main page for longer - it also says something about the quality posting that has been done over the last few weeks).
Anyway - I’m not thinking too much about it until I get home - but am interested in your thoughts.
I’m also interested in the reflections of guest bloggers from my other blogs who’ve been doing an amazing job while I’ve been away.
Written on June 26th, 2005 at 08:06 am by Nicole Simon
Can I (auto)discover you?
Is your blog set up properly that I can use one click subscription with it?
As more and more people start using aggregators to follow their favorite blogs, many of them are using easy services like Bloglines or a tool build into their browser.
Yesterday for example, Microsoft showed at Gnomedex how their Internet Explorer 7 will read RSS feeds and make it subscribeable right out of IE.
Well, so far, nothing overwhelmingly new, because many tools are available to subscribe to RSS feeds. But the new thing with IE is, that suddenly a lot of not very tech savy people will discover the fun of subscribing to blogs and websites. They will get use to just hitting this new “subscribe” button and expect the blog to be in their IE favorites then and be updated automatically.
And will get disappointed at many blog sites, because the blogs are not “ready” for this. Will they be disappointed by your blog, too?
In order for the tools to auto-subscribe to your blog, your web page needs to deliver the information on how to do that in a special part of your website. Today, most of the RSS users know how to get around this, if a site does not offer autodiscovery (although it is annoying when the page does not provide it).
Unless the following snippet is presented in the web page, none of the ‘magic’ can happen. If you have a bloglines account, you can use their easy subscribe bookmarklet (info page here) to test it on your blogs. If you use Firefox, you might have wondered what this little orange icon at the lower right is - that is working autodiscovery.
How is autodiscovery implemented?
In the <head> segment of your html code, check if you have a statement like this in it:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml”
title=”Insert a title for your page” href=”link to your feed” >
If this is available, any autodiscovery tool knows what to do: Take the link given, put it into the favorites and do it under the title suggested.
If you offer different feeds (for example for different categories), you can duplicate those line and just adapt it to your needs. In case you can’t edit the templates for your blog - this might be a good time to think about changing to a software where you can. :)
Written on June 25th, 2005 at 05:06 am by Chrispian
Friday Fun - Productivity Tips
I’m often asked how I get so much done and I often think, I don’t get that much done. I know I could do more! I’ve had “notes” on this entry for a while, but seeing Darren’s post on Blogging and the Art Time Management made me want to finish it up.
I guess I do get a lot done. I work 8-5 Monday through Friday. I sleep from 12-6:45, workout for 30 minutes then off to work. At night I work out, fix dinner and do dishes from 5:30-7:00. That leaves just 7:00-11:00 for other stuff and 11:00-12:00 to get things ready to do it again the next day. Plus quite a bit more time on the weekends, and some time used at lunch or during lulls when I’m at various places (doctors office, work, parents etc.) This is my normal schedule. Right now it’s on I’ve turned it on it’s ass because my wife is currently fighting cancer. That’s our #1 priority, everything else comes last. Not second, not third, but last. I have a office at home, but I’ve moved out of it with the laptop and do must of my work sitting on the couch with Aeryn now.
There a couple of points I want to make before I get into how I do things. So many people complain about not having time to do stuff, or that their kids get in the way or that they are just too tired when they get home etc. The fact is, if you want to do more, or not even do more, but do something other than your’re doing (maybe your’re spending all your time watching kids, or working in the garden, whatever) then you need figure out what your priority is. You can tell me all day long that you want to be a writer, blogger or web developer and do more, like I do, but if you don’t make it a priority then you’ll never do any of it. If you really want to do it, then do it. It’s that simple. Don’t tell me about why you can’t do it. There are days when it’s hard for me. Don’t lecture me that it’s because I don’t have kids, Aeryn and I decided not to have kids. Don’t tell me you have other things to do. I do too. I just decide what’s most important to me. Watching TV, reading a book, going out to eat, laundry and the million other daily chores, or is my priority writing, blogging and working on my web sites? Sometimes I have just as much trouble getting to what I love to do because of life just as much as the next person. But at the end of the day, I want to be a writer. I want to blog. I want to build up my websites. So, before you decide that you need to get something done, you need to decide what that really is. That will make the rest of the decisions easy.
And speaking of all the little things that get in your way every day, like laundry, dishes, garbage etc., these are things you can control. If you stay on top of them in the first place you won’t spend but an extra minute here or there doing these things. Keep the dishes done so that your always loading the empty dishwasher. Once it’s full, run it an plan it so that you can empty it before the next time you use dishes (I do it while cooking the next meal). Stuff like that. Most people who complain about not having enough time to do something do have time, they just don’t use it wisely. If you want to do something in your life that you haven’t made time for yet, that’s not the same as not having time. People waste time. I waste time. But in the end, no one has time. We make it. Figure out what it is you want to give your time to and make time to do it.
That said, something can’t be avoided. Things will always come up. You don’t have to let it derail you. Just remember, if you really want to do something, come back to it. Make time to get back to doing what you say you want to. If you keep talking about doing it and never do, then your just not really interested in doing it. Otherwise you would be doing it.
So, I wanted to share some of my tips for getting more done. They’ll be obvious to a lot of you, but I mainly wanted to spark a conversation. This is how I get my stuff done. How do you get all yours done? I figure this could be a fun Friday type post, something to think about over the weekend and make some positive changes for the coming week. Anyway, here goes.
Publish to the Future
I tend to write in spurts, I know quite a few other writers do the same. Sometimes creativity hits when it hits. Use this time and write up entries and save them as drafts. You can either schedule them to go out at certain times in the future, or just save them for when you’re burned out or behind schedule and pull out one of your drafts
Get Hip
I fell in love with the Hipster PDA, which is nothing more than note cards with a binder clip (sometimes called a jim clip) holding them together. I always have them in my back pocket. Use them to jot down blog entry ideas, or parts of an entry so you can finish it later. You can also use the cards to write down urls, emails and other contact information when your out and about. This has come in so handy that I sold my Zire!
Use downtime wisely
We all get stuck waiting in lines or in Dr. Offices. Take your laptop, or at least a note pad and start writing a blog entry or other content for your site. I write quite a few of my non time sensitive posts this way. In the lulls between other things to do. Just don’t be that guy doing it while he’s driving. Nobody likes that guy!
Use your tools wisely.
Gathering content for you blogs is probably the biggest chore in the whole process. Get lots of sources for information and use them! Just some quick ones that I use daily:
- Newsletters
- RSS Reader (offline + online with Bloglines)
- Blogs
- Google Alerts
- Technorati
- del.icio.us
- Feedster
- Ecto/Mars Edit offline blog editor (works with all major blogs)
- Taks (I use an online todo list called “tasks” and I love it. Try it out!
- Tabbed Browsing (If you aren’t using tabbed a tabbed browser by now, I doubt your even reading this blog, but it is *must have* for serious surfers, especially power bloggers).
Among others. There are lots of tools to help you do more in less time. Use them!
Scheduling and Creativity
One of the common questions asked of published writers if they get writers block and most of them say no. Writers block is mostly being distracted and uninspired to do what you need to do. I’ve found the best way to keep from getting “burned” or “blocked” is to create a regular schedule for my writing and publishing. It helps train my mind that these times are creative times and making the transition from say, programming or marketing my sites is much easier. Make a schedule and stick to it and your creativity will flow much better.
Sometimes you’ll need to take a step back though. Go read something fun, like a good book or get outside and away from your computer. But make sure you get back to writing. Clearing your head often will do the trick.
Productivity
Productivity is all about getting organized and getting yourself set into a routine and schedule. Everyone works in different ways, but if you haven’t taken a look at the (cult) Getting Things Done book by David Allen, you need to. Getting Things Done, even if you don’t follow it 100% will change the way you get organized and improve your productivity as well as free your mind and let you relax knowing all your “stuff” is under control.
Have a plan and Goals
Make sure you have a long term plan with specific goals. You need something to work towards and a top level view of what your doing or you’ll end up spinning your wheels and never going anywhere. Make sure you know what your end goal is and make every move count towards moving you closer to reaching that goal.
Just Do It
I’ve lived by this simple philosophy for a while, unapologetically borrowed from Nike. Don’t talk about doing it, Just Do It. I know so many people who talk about doing this, or talk about doing this. And I fall victim to it from time to time myself. But that’s why I wear a Nike ball cap to help me remember that sometimes, you just have to do it to get it done.
Have Fun
If it’s not fun, your probably doing it wrong. Life is just too short to not love what your doing. Have fun, or move on to something that is. With all the opportunities out there it should be just a matter of finding what you love and then finding a way to make money doing it. If it feels like work and you dread doing it, you’ll never get it done. So find your passion! Have a blast.
And with that, I ask you, how do you handle all the stuff on your plate? These are just a few of the things I keep in mind trying to get all my stuff done. How do you manage?
Written on June 25th, 2005 at 04:06 am by Tris Hussey
Big news from Gnomedex
Written on June 24th, 2005 at 05:06 am by David Shawver Stanton
Blog Tip: Shake it Up
The following blog tip has been submitted by Jon Gales - the editor of the wonderful MobileTracker blog. Learn more about Jon from this interview we did with him earlier in the year.
Sometimes being a pro blogger means being a sole blogger, but that’s not always the best cawe. Try and bring in other contributors from time to time to shake things up and provide another voice for your readers.
If you can’t afford to pay people, that’s not always a problem. Writers need exposure, something that you can offer for free. This post itself is an example of unpaid writing, I decided to write it because I consider Darren a friend and I want to further the helpful relationship we have. In the future if I need a guest poster, I have full confidence that Darren would be happy to come to my aid.
Having multiple voices on a site helps equal out bias and stylisic monotony. It’s also nice to get a break :).
Written on June 23rd, 2005 at 01:06 pm by Stephan Spencer
Are you letting Feedburner hold you hostage?
I don’t have a problem with Feedburner (I use their service myself and I think it’s great), so please don’t think that I’m picking on them. But wouldn’t the last thing we would want to do as bloggers be to publish to the world an RSS feed URL that we don’t own? I see it as no different from handing out thousands of business cards with an @earthlink.net address proudly printed on it — rather than one @ your own domain name. Cuz then, you’re married to Earthlink (or in the case of your RSS feed… Feedburner). If you switched services, your existing subscribers would all need to update their feed URLs in their news readers. And what’s the likelihood of that happening!
So what can we do about it? Using a URL from your blog’s domain then having your webserver serve up a 301 “permanent redirect” that redirects to whatever your feeds.feedburner.com/[your-feed-here] URL could be a good option, except for the fact that some news readers choke on the redirect (such as NetNewsWire).
Hopefully the news readers and web-based aggregators will all realize that they need to handle redirects properly, just like all the web browsers have for years. Maybe they’ll read this post. ;-)
Why did I specifically recommend a 301 redirect, not a plain ol’ 302 redirect? Because a 301 — unlike the usual 302 temporary redirect that most everyone uses — lets the search engines like Google know that the redirect is pointing to a stable destination, and therefore the link juice (e.g. Google PageRank) should flow to the destination URL. Now this isn’t a big deal now, since the major search engines aren’t doing anything much with RSS feeds yet (indexing the content, crawling the item links, etc.), but it will come…
If you want to see this 301 in action, here’s a URL to my RSS feed, which redirects to Feedburner:
http://www.stephanspencer.com/feed/
Here’s how I set it up in my.htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^feed/$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/scatterings [R=301,L]
The URL of my feed that I told to Feedburner when setting up my account was:
http://www.stephanspencer.com/index.php?feed=rss2
Then if I ever want to move away from Feedburner to another service, I would simply adjust my RewriteRule (or RedirectPermanent, if you prefer to use that instead) directive in my.htaccess file to point to the new service.
Any thoughts on a path forward here? Or is this a non-issue to you folks?
Written on June 22nd, 2005 at 07:06 pm by Shai Coggins
TypePad Pro Turning In To ‘Real Pros’
It just came to my attention that bloggers with TypePad Pro accounts can now earn money from their blogs via an integrated service from Kanoodle, a contextual advertising company. They have one tiny catch, though: Earnings for the first 90 days can only go towards future TypePad subscription payments. It’s only after 90 days that bloggers can obtain or spend their money via PayPal.
Anyway, apparently, this is just the beginning. Six Apart is planning to integrate other ways to help TypePad bloggers to turn pro, including adding Tip Jars.
I blogged about this at Weblogs.About.com, but I thought I’d share it here as well seeing as this is all about pro-blogging.
Now, I’m just wondering if anyone here has a TypePad Pro account who can talk more about this? Yes, even though I have a batallion of blog accounts, I’m not subscribed to TypePad.
I wonder how many other blog services will follow this practice?
Written on June 22nd, 2005 at 05:06 am by supersusie
WOMMA Measuring Word of Mouth Conference
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association is holding a conference July 13 called “Measuring Word of Mouth.” Targeted to those interested in marketing metrics, WOMMA says the conference is the first-ever on measurement, metrics, and standards in word-of-mouth marketing.
It will be held in Chicago. Cost is $295 for WOMMA members, $545 for non-members. I’m happily able to pass on a $50 discount code WOMMA gave me to share with my readers. When you register, use the case-sensitive discount code “Blogsareawesome”
Written on June 21st, 2005 at 05:06 pm by duncan
WordPress vs Movable Type
Its a matter of history that I was a member of the Movable Type diaspora when the house that Mena built decided for better or worse to alienate a large number of their loyal user base with MT 3. Its been 12 months, and a lot of the old MT gang are writing WordPress plugins and helping out whilst Six Apart continues to chase the corporate dollar whilst protesting that it’s really a good corporate citizen at heart (eg: we support Open Source because we bought Live Journal).
But enough of my purposeful provocation in a blatant attempt to drive up poor Darren’s stats here whilst he is in Europe. Seriously, 12 months later, what’s better: WP or MT? Both have moved forward in terms of development. I’ll start the ball rolling, I prefer WP, and there is one gigantically large reason why: ITS FREE and no matter what happens the source code will be free for me to tweak and customise for ever more…and naturally it works a treat as well, quicker in my experience than Movable Bloat, sorry Type, and I reckon Matt’s a much nicer person than Mena as well :-)
You might use another piece of blogware that you’d prefer, and there is some great development happening there (Nucleus, Serendipity to name but a few) so if its something else for you let us know. Please though, share your thoughts on blogware (self installed scripts if you like) not hosted blogs.
Fire away!!!
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