Written on September 21st, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 06:09 am by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking 21 September 2006
- Chris has a good post exploring the topic of whether you should use Sitemaps or not
- Get 10 Free MiniCards with your Flickr pictures on them from moo.com (get in quick because there’s only 10,000 free packs).
- Neil shares some thoughts on using digg and Netscape to get traffic
- Lorelle has started a series on writing good headlines and titles on your blog (part 2 here)
- 9rules has launched network wide search
Written on September 21st, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:09 am by Darren Rowse
20 Linkbaiting Techniques
As I’ve mentioned numerous times already in this series on linkbaiting - ‘linkbait’ is a term that is used to describe a variety of practices that have the purpose of generating links to your site.
It is impossible to come up with a definitive list of what these practices are as they are only limited to the imagination of website and blog owners.
Below I outline 20 of the more common linkbaiting techniques that I’ve seen (and used).
A couple of things first:
- Please note that in describing them I don’t necessarily endorse them all. It’s worth saying up front that like many aspects of the web, the tactics that people use vary quite a bit in terms of what they see as ethical or acceptable behaviour.
- Also note that some people use these techniques with the motivation of getting links where as others do them without such motivation. While they are described by some as linkbait many of them are just activities that bloggers and webmasters use in their day to day work.
Here are 20 linkbaiting techniques that are commonly used (please note - points in the following list are not mutually exclusive, there is overlap between many of them).
- Tools - give other website owners a useful, fun or cool tool that they can use on their blog that points back to your own. A prime example of this was the blog worth tool that Dane from Business Opportunities developed that tells how much a blog is worth based on Technorati’s API (used by thousands of bloggers (google shows 27,000+ links pointing to it) - most of whom posted the button that the tool provides (with a link back to his blog).
- Quizzes - quizzes, surveys and tests have long been popular with web users and if you’re smart about the way you design them (giving people a button to place on their site for example) they can be quite viral. I ran my recent enternetusers quiz as a quick test of a plugin and saw it bring in quite a few links - if I’d given participants a button and given it some more thought it would have been even more successful).
- Contests - organise something for people to participate in and you’ll find that some will. Add a competitive element to it and offer a worthwhile prize and you might just find the participation rate increases. My recent group writing projects (with prizes) is an illustration of this (although they’re not strictly competitions). Over 300 people submitted entries in my lists project and in the current one there’s already 150+, most of whom linked back to enternetusers to show their participation (even though I didn’t make it compulsory to do so).
- Be First - if you’re the first in your niche to do, say or be something you’re likely to be linked to heavily by others in your niche. Being second, third, forth…. in your niche to do, say or be something will generally have less impact. For example take a look at the success of the Million Dollar Homepage in contrast to the main thousands of copycat pixel advertising sites that followed. Another example was the One Red Paperclip guy.
- Scoops - related to being first is breaking a story in your niche. Break a big enough story and the amount of others that link to you giving you credit for being the source of their own news posts can be quite massive.
- Exposé - similarly - expose a fraud or scammer and you can create a real buzz around your blog and become part of the news itself. I’m sure there are a few political bloggers out there that would identify their ‘big break’ as exposé blogging when they exposed one politician or another of doing or saying something that showed them for what they’re worth.
- Awards - At the beginning and end of every year in blogging circles a silly season of awards happens (last year there were so many that I created enternetusers’s Awards for Blog Awards). While not all awards work well, many do particularly well at generating a buzz (with lots of traffic and lots of incoming links). They do it on a number of levels. In the first part they generate links from those hoping to be nominated - then they generate links from people who have been nominated who try to get votes - then they generate links from winners showing off and others complaining about the winners…. the waves of incoming links to a good awards can be quite fascinating to watch.
- Lists - I’ve written extensively on lists before so won’t go into it in much detail - but of late many examples of blog posts that seem to get a lot of link attention are very list oriented pieces. There is just something about a list that people latch onto, digest and want to pass on to others (just check out digg and delicious and you’ll see plenty of examples). Of course these days list posts are a dime a dozen so you’ll need to make your list useful and stand out in some way. If you do (and you have a little luck) you’ll be well on the way to being linked to.
- Humor - some of the best linkbait that I’ve seen has a humorous edge to it. Whether it be a cartoon (Hugh does this well - I’ve seen his blog linked to numerous time today alone), a funny photo, a story or even a title that gets a laugh - people enjoy humor and like to pass it on (it’s something we’ve been doing for centuries in the stories/jokes we tell).
- Make someone famous - I’m still trying to get my head around this one but one of the reasons why I think my group projects seem to do well is that they offer people the opportunity the chance of being discovered (of course the prizes help - but some people feed back to me that the main reason they participate is the traffic and incoming links that it can potentially bring). Another example of this is BlogTopSites.com (and other sites like it) which rank pages in different categories. I suspect that a lot of people participate in these sites (and link to them) because they want to see how they rank with other blogs and have hopes of climbing the rankings.
- Create belonging/community - people like to belong and they desire community. Give them a place where they do have community (or at least feel that they have it) and they’ll quite often link to it from their blogs. For example, I find here at enternetusers that people quite often link to the comments sections of my posts (more specifically to comment threads that they themselves have participated in) rather than the post itself. I also see this illustrated by a lot of bloggers who participate in (and link to) discussion forums.
- Design - those people clever enough to design something that others use in large numbers can do quite well out of it in terms of incoming links. For example a good blog theme/template (with an inbuilt link to it’s designer) that is picked up and used widely can create an avalanche of incoming links. I’ve seen a number of designers who have had their work picked up as default themes at WordPress.com comment upon the many many thousands of links that this brought them.
- Rants - there is something about a well written, well argued and passionate rant that is very link worthy. People get stirred up when you get passionate and the links will often flow as a result. Of course when you write a rant you need to expect that people will react both positively and negatively (and there is often fallout).
- Controversy - similarly, controversial posts tend to get strong reactions from those reading your posts. I discovered this very early in my blogging when I innocently wrote a short piece with some of my thoughts on the Iraq war on a Christian blog I was running at the time. I didn’t expect any reaction and was surprised to wake up the following morning to find it had caused a massive stir in the ‘God Blog’ community with hundreds of bloggers linking up either to support or criticise what I’d written. Again - controversy brings in all kinds of responses. Don’t do it just for the sake of being controversial unless you have very thick skin!
- Attack - while we’re talking about controversy - another common way to get attention for yourself is to pick a fight with another blogger in the hope of tempting them (and others) to ‘bite’ back. I’ve seen this approach get a number of emerging bloggers on the map in the past 12 months - but would warn those wanting to give it a go that there can be significant fallout from the approach and that you’ll want to consider whether you want to build your reputation around your snarkyness or some other characteristic. If you’re going to build a blog purely on snark you need to be ready for the snark to come back at you and should realize that it’s difficult to sustain.
- Shock - ok, I’m obviously pooling these together but using shock tactics is yet another linkbaiting technique that some people use quite effectively. People have been doing this for years in other mediums (’shock jocks’ in Radio for example) so it is no wonder that they’re doing it on the web as well. Shocking via language, extreme views, showing controversial or titillating pictures or video etc all fall into this category. Once again, I’m not really into this type of blogging and wouldn’t want to build a reputation around it - but it’s definitely a tactic that some use with real effect.
- Research and Statistics - researching a topic that has popularity and that people can use in some way is another effective way to generate incoming links. While it’s may not be strictly research - Dave Sifry’s periodic ‘state of the blogosphere‘ posts are widely linked to and quoted from because he is presenting interesting statistics that directly apply to something people are passionate about.
- Give something away - think about the buzz that Oprah created when she gave every audience member a car a couple of years back and you see the power of what happens when you give something away. While giving every reader you have an extravagant gift like that might not be possible - the clever giving of gifts can definitely create a buzz.
- Usefulness - writing something ‘useful’ is a pretty general thing to say (and would be incorporated above in many places) however I think it’s worth saying. The more useful your content is to people the more likely they are to want to pass it on to others. Show someone how to do something, give them knowledge, entertain them and/or improve their lives and/or be better at something and you’ll be amazed at how they’ll rave about you.
- Cool Factor - as I look at what seems to get linked to by bloggers I’d say that a fair proportion of it isn’t particularly ‘useful’ (or anything else in this list) - it’s just ‘cool’. Of course ‘coolness’ is difficult to define or achieve (it seems to just happen) but if you are cool (or do something that is) you might just find yourself getting linked up to.
Like I said in my introductory paragraphs - a definitive list of linkbaiting techniques (and examples) is impossible to achieve. The above 20 types of linkbait are just the beginning of the ways that bloggers get links from other sites (sometimes they do it intentionally with the motivation to get links and sometimes its just byproduct). I’d love to hear your suggestions on linkbaiting techniques that you’ve seen used (or used yourself). Feel free to give an example or two also.
Written on September 20th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 06:09 pm by Darren Rowse
88 More ‘How To’ Articles - Group Writing Project Submission Part 2
It’s day 2 of this week’s group writing project and below you’ll find another 88 submissions (a total of 151 so far in the full list).
Thanks again to this week’s sponsors (New Homes, Webmaster-Talk.com forums, Google Tutor and OwnMySeat.com) of the gifts that will be awarded to 5 random participants (full details of the $1800 of gifts up for grabs at the bottom of this post).
As usual - the submissions below are varied. We have a few non english blogs participating in this round which is great and a massive diversity in topics covered. I hope you enjoy them - I know I did when I surfed through them all this afternoon.
It’s not too late to participate - you’ve got two more days to get your submissions in by following the process outlined here. Enjoy!
- How to Attach and Save Files Faster by James
- How to recognize it’s time for Repat by Lori
- Creating Great Cartoons with Your Pencil and Computer - Part 1 by Matt
- Corn Meal Beer by Ben
- How to avoid pumping gas for 28 years by Musing
- (1-800-HART)
- Solving Customer Service Problems by nickel
- A Simple Formula for Weight Loss and Long-Term Maintenance by Steve
- IF Internet Explorer THEN Do Something Else (A How To…) by Phil
- Tips Revealed: My Low Light Photography Technique by Curt
- How To Make Meetings Fun! by Allen
- How to Cure your Blogging Addiction in 7 Easy Steps by Martin
- How to survive the first year of living gluten free by Lucy
- The Art of the Credit Card App-O-Rama by Jason
- How to Live with Teenagers by churchpundit
- How to Become a Mind Control Expert by Graham
- How to Master the Art of Blogging by Karthik
- The Coolest House in the Neighborhood by Mike
- How to Visit a Sick Friend by SB
- How Not to Sell A Screenplay by Annie
- How to Stop Wasting Your Life and Start Playing Games by Yehuda
- Charity - Not just a Girl’s Name by More Bread
- How to Make the Perfect Chicken Soup by Lynn
- How To: The Basics of the Breaststroke by Scott
- How to Accept Mistakes and Don’t Blame Others by cjcm
- Seven Prayer Suggestions for Use With the Snooze Button by Helen
- 19 Ways to Annoy People by Brad
- How to Ineffectively Use Your Church Website by Greg
- How to Run a Red Light by Bill
- Everyday Gifts - How You Can Show Your Love Without Spending a Dime by Shonnie
- How to Live a Short, Miserable, Unhealthy Life by karishma
- How to Shop Like My Mother-in-Law by SP
- How to Lock Your Hair by Renata
- How to Use Beautiful Women For Website Traffic Increase by Miha
- Ex-Car Salesman Tells All: How to Beat the Auto Dealerships at Their Own Game by David
- rotando cabezas by Nicolas
- EAS’ Helpful Info for Small Businesses by Jennifer
- Choosing secure passwords that are easy to remember by John
- How to be a Miserable Failure at eBay Selling by The Wizard of Auctions
- How Club Cricketers Can Train Like Professionals by David
- Beaded “Awareness Ribbon” Pen Cover by Mandi
- For Real Estate Promotion, the Business Card Form Factor is Tiny Little Workhorse by Greg
- Write a Directory Submission that Gets Accepted by Lara
- How to enrage the Chinese People by fiLi
- Lost Ball in the High Weeds Webmaster Skills by Splork
- How to get out of life alive by Rolio
- 1-900-STALKER by dan
- How to Meet a Star by Gray
- Como escribir una entrada by Sacha
- Account Security by Stropp
- How to Increase Your Sales by Larry
- How to Destroy the Earth With a Coffee Can by Tony
- Exploiting Alien Technology for Fun and Profit by Eric
- How to Have a Better Banking Experience in Honduras by La Gringa
- Make New Plants… by Taking Cuttings by Corinne
- How to Earn More from your Website by Paul
- 6 Steps to Writing a Fantasy Blockbuster by Eoghann
- How not to Ruin Your Day While Driving to Work (the Philippine Connection) by aczafra
- Top 10 tips to survive laptop disaster: what to do if your laptop is dropped, catches fire, gets ripped off, is smashed, or just plain won’t boot by Mary
- How to FTP something by Shawn
- Power Searching Libraries by Dave
- You Tube University: the worlds largest textbook by Sean
- How to give a prostate massage by Lisa
- Achieve Big Audacious Goals that SMART Way by Nneka
- How to Survive a Roll Over by Thom
- How to Have a Mental Breakdown by Jason
- Skills for Listening to your Kids by Pass the Torch
- Essential Software List by Julien
- How to Convert LPs to MP3s by Kent
- How to “buy” happiness by Shuchetana
- Establish Your Business Credibility by Tom
- How to Simplify Your Life with Technology by Rob
- How to Travel by Nick
- How to Get Your Site on the Front Page of Digg by Michael
- How to Jump Start a New Healthy Lifestyle by Bill
- Teaching Your Children How to Save by MNC
- How to grow a business you love by Tim
- Beating the Sale Mentality by Adam
- How to look like you have been cooking the whole day by Yi Chen Sim
- Happier Life by yenjai
- How to find your style -Martial Art for smart people by Kris
- How to Customize Your Google Homepage by Robert
- How to Make Money Reselling New Console Systems by Ian
- How to comparison shop on eBay by John
- Love your passion and money will roll in by Mark
- How to enjoy a beer by Coopz
- How to use Firefox’s Smart Keywords more effectively by Ross
Prizes
At the end of the week once all submissions are in I’ll randomly select five submissions who will each receive one of the following five prizes:
- One week complimentary stay (for up to 4 people) at a beach front apartment in Estepona on the Costa del Sol Spain (pictured above). This prize must be taken in the next 12 months and the winner must cover all their own costs in getting to Spain (ie this is for the cost of the accommodation only). If the prize cannot be taken by the winner they can also take an iPod (video) instead (by negotiation with the sponsor). This prize (valued at 1000 euros if taken in the peak season) has been kindly donated by New Homes on Nubricks.com. Thanks to Adam and Chintan.
- $100 Cash (in your paypal account) OR a month long text link in the Webmaster-Talk.com forums. This prize sponsored by Webmaster-Talk.com forums - thanks to Tim and his team.
- A Personal license for ExpressionEngine including a personal license for the forums module (worth $149). This prize is sponsored by Marcus from Nanoblogs.de
- A $149 yearly plan to Audible.com OR a $100 gift voucher to iTunes (your choice). This gift has been donated by Google Tutor. Thanks to Craig for this gift.
- $200 gift voucher from Amazon to spend on anything you like. Its been kindly donated by OwnMySeat.com. Thanks to Jason for his kind donation.
Written on September 20th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:09 pm by Darren Rowse
Opening Paragraphs that Hook Your Readers
Great post (as usual) by Brian over at Copyblogger titled 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang.
While we all agree that the title is the most important element of a blog post in terms of getting it attention - it’s the opening paragraph that hooks people right in. Brian shares 5 techniques for doing this.
Written on September 20th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:09 am by Darren Rowse
Motivations for Linkbaiting - Why Links are Good for Your Blog
This post is a continuation in this week’s series on linkbaiting. Previously we’ve talked about ‘what is linkbaiting’ and have asked ‘Is Linkbaiting good or bad?’ and today I’d like us to turn our attention to some of the reasons people do it.
While it’s worth remembering that linkbaiting is a term that describes many different practices there are a number of direct benefits of getting incoming links to your blog or website that come from most (if not all) of them.
Why do people engage in trying to attract links to their blogs? Here’s the two main reasons:
A. Direct and immediate Traffic
The most immediate benefit of an incoming link is the direct traffic that that link can bring you. This initial rush of traffic in turn leads to a variety of other benefits depending upon the blog including:
- increased earnings (if you have a commercial blog)
- new subscribers (to RSS feeds and/or newsletters)
- new loyal readers (others will bookmark you and become regular readers)
- secondary traffic (often after you get a link from one site you’ll notice a secondary round of links from others who came from the first links and have their own sites. They in turn send traffic and so it goes on)
This initial direct incoming trafffic is also an opportunity to win new loyal readers for your site (we’ll cover how to do this later in the series).
B. Search Engine Juice
A longer term benefit of an incoming link (after the initial ‘rush’ of incoming traffic) is that the links gained will help to grow your search engine ranking (often referred to as Google Juice).
While there are many factors that search engines use to determine how they will rank a web page - one of the most powerful elements is how many links point to it. Search Engines treat incoming links to your site like votes - (I’m over simplifying here) the more votes you get the more they’ll see others as valuing your page.
While there are also many other factors at play (including the ranking of the site linking to you, the words that they use and many more elements (more on SEO here) the number of links you get is a factor also.
Of course the higher your individual pages (and whole blog) rank the more ongoing traffic you’ll have.
Most linkbaiting techniques are particularly good for SEO (search engine optimisation) because the links are non reciprocal (ie they are one way, something else SE’s like) and they are generally incoming links with good anchor text (ie the words used to link to you are usually keywords relevant to your page - we’ll cover how to improve the chances of this in our tips section later).
Traffic vs Search Engine Juice?
As I’ve chatted to a variety of bloggers about linkbaiting over the last few months I’ve been very interested to find that many of them only focus upon one or the other of the above two elements. There are those that are quite obsessive with the initial rush of traffic and focus on their blog’s visitor count or page views while others get caught up in SEO and how many backlinks their site has and how it’s impacting their page rank.
I guess I’d say to both groups two main things:
1. it’s not an either or equation - getting links for your site benefits it in both of the above ways. While there are people who argue that the best traffic is Search Engine traffic and others that argue that the best traffic is referral traffic from other sites (a third group argue that it’s loyal repeat readers) my own opinion is that there are benefits of all kinds of traffic and it’s worth being holistic about this aspect of your blog (read more on the benefits of different types of traffic).
2. obsession can be dangerous - similarly, if you become obsessive with any one kind of traffic (or for that matter if you become obsessed about traffic in general) you run the risk of building a one dimensional blog. I’ve come across many bloggers who obsess about generating incoming links (for whatever reason) to the point where it begins to destroy their blog. They end up forgetting about the readers they currently have and let other elements of their blog slip (like building community, writing quality and deeper content instead of lighter posts that are just about getting link attention).
My Advice to these bloggers is to blog in a balanced and holistic way. By all means think about how you promote yourself and even think strategically about building links - but build a quality blog that actually helps people and a lot of the links will come anyway. Don’t just rely upon the tricks and controversy or you run the risk of becoming a one trick pony and won’t build a model that is sustainable for the long haul.
With that in mind, tomorrow I’m going to turn my attention to link baiting techniques.
Written on September 19th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 05:09 pm by Darren Rowse
63 ‘How to’ Posts to Add Spice to Your Day - Group Writing Project Day 1
udpate: This project is now closed. See all 343 submissions to it here.
Today is Day 1 of our latest enternetusers Group Writing Project and like last time the response has been very cool. The project topic was announced around 24 hours ago and I’ve accepted 63 submissions already (I say accepted because a surprising amount of people (around 10%) didn’t follow the guidelines for submissions and I had to say no - please remember to submit new posts not previously written ones - this is a project to practice your writing styles rather than just highlight old posts).
The quality of submissions so far is great and I’m sure you’ll enjoy surfing them. It reminds me just how much expertise there is in the blogosphere on a wide variety of topics.
Before I get onto the first round of submissions a quick mention of the sponsors of this week’s project. They are New Homes, Webmaster-Talk.com forums, Google Tutor and OwnMySeat.com (full details of the $1800 of prizes below). Thanks again to them for making this project all the more fun.
So here are the first round of submissions. As you’ll see the ‘How to…’ theme gives a wide scope for topics - never before have I assembled such a diverse list. It’s not too late to join the fun - do so by following the guidelines here. Here’s the first round of submissions:
- How to Survive Your Young Husband’s First (Unexpected) Heart Attack by Olivia
- How to Overcome Fear by Scott
- How to Be Bald by Dave
- How to get promoted when you work from home by Home Office Blues
- Quieting the Monsters… or how to feed your Children by Miscellaneous Mum
- LJP - the Treo 600 Gameboy Emulator by Tam
- Make a simple diagonal page background using photoshop and css by Ben
- How to Be a Parent and Still Have Fun by Mama Duck
- Manage Your Manager - How to cope with Ineffectual leadership by Katy
- How to Dress Like a Desperate Housewife by Leora
- How to Make a Rubbish Website by Tim
- How To Participate in the Blogging Community by Ray
- The Great Flood by Jude
- How to Jam a Printer and Settle for Tie-Dye by Deb
- How to Get Rich in Three Easy Steps by FMF
- How do I get a job in the Car Industry by Gary
- Become a Blogging Maniac by Tammy
- How to Dangerously Inflate your Ego via Blogging by Wendy
- How to Proofread Your Own Writing by Anne
- How to Sell Your Home for Sale by Owner by Rob
- The Inside Scoop on How to Get Published by Tasra
- Don’t get caught misunderstanding the difference between APR and APY by Ricemutt
- Set up your blog using Textpattern by Jaro
- How to write a great blog post by Leroy
- Integrating a Forum with WordPress by ZMAng
- The Process of Making a Stock Trade by Blain
- How to Keep Your Relationship Healthy With your Wife by Matt
- Take Your Cell Phone to the Next Level by Eltan
- How to Make Buyers Fall in Love With Your Home by Paul
- How to have Fun Programming: BounceF*ck by Tim
- 6 Ways to Improve Navigation and Increase Page Views by Joe
- How to Enhance Mac Security by fcodc
- How to Have a Relationship with God for Eternity by Scott
- How to Set Up Tor and Privoxy on Ubuntu Linux by Corvillus
- How to Save Money at the Grocery Store by Shannon
- How to Make Your Retirement Money Last by Arieanna
- How to Help Find a Cure for Diseases with Your Computer’s Unused Processing Time by Brent
- Quit smoking (or not) one flaw at a time by Northern Girl
- Harness the Power of Word Cross-References for Mammoth Documents by Andrew
- How to Let Go and Move on by Milo
- How to Make Time for the Important by Basil
- Get Healthy in 30 days! by Rt @ Real Muscle Online
- How To Turn The Greatest Idea Ever Into Reality by Ben
- How to load Garmin TOPO maps to your hard drive by Rich
- One simple knot that keeps your shoes tied by Blaine
- How to Tame the Caps Lock key by Jhay
- How to Make a Thai Girl Laugh by Tom
- How to Bring Art to the Unwashed Masses by Jennie
- How to Choose a Bad Martial Arts Instructor by Chris
- Position your Fish Tank for Prosperity and Growth by Renée
- How to have a successful career in politics (Jamaican style) by Xaymaca
- Hair for Sale by Billy
- Showing Posts When there’s no Related Posts by Ken
- Learning the basics about Sharpening by Steve
- How to Make it Big in the NBA if You’re Small by Easterangel
- How to Find Your Niche by Alsuran
- Do Blackbirds Swoop? How to Deal with Aggressive Bird Behavior by Trevor
- How to Make a Family Documentary by Ron
Thanks everyone - great work!
The Prizes
At the end of the week once all submissions are in I’ll randomly select five submissions who will each receive one of the following five prizes:
- One week complimentary stay (for up to 4 people) at a beach front apartment in Estepona on the Costa del Sol Spain (pictured above). This prize must be taken in the next 12 months and the winner must cover all their own costs in getting to Spain (ie this is for the cost of the accommodation only). If the prize cannot be taken by the winner they can also take an iPod (video) instead (by negotiation with the sponsor). This prize (valued at 1000 euros if taken in the peak season) has been kindly donated by New Homes on Nubricks.com. Thanks to Adam and Chintan.
- $100 Cash (in your paypal account) OR a month long text link in the Webmaster-Talk.com forums. This prize sponsored by Webmaster-Talk.com forums - thanks to Tim and his team.
- A Personal license for ExpressionEngine including a personal license for the forums module (worth $149). This prize is sponsored by Marcus from Nanoblogs.de
- A $149 yearly plan to Audible.com OR a $100 gift voucher to iTunes (your choice). This gift has been donated by Google Tutor. Thanks to Craig for this gift.
- $200 gift voucher from Amazon to spend on anything you like. Its been kindly donated by OwnMySeat.com. Thanks to Jason for his kind donation.
Written on September 19th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 04:09 pm by Darren Rowse
How to Integrate a Forum with WordPress
BlogHelper continues a great series of posts on WordPress with one on a topic that I get asked about quite a bit - Integrating a Forum with WordPress (it’s part of the group writing project - but so on topic for this blog that I thought it deserved a post of its own).
In the post ZMAng runs through a variety of options that bloggers have for such an integration including using external forum software and using WP forum plugins. It’s a really helpful outline of the options.
Written on September 19th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 01:09 pm by Darren Rowse
Chitika eMiniMalls Advice from Chitika
Ryan over at the Chitika Blog has posted some helpful tips for bloggers just starting out with Chitika in his Chitika eMiniMalls Blogging Toolkit post. It includes some nice tips for getting set up on different platforms as well as some more general tips.
Written on September 19th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 09:09 am by Darren Rowse
An Introduction to Linkbaiting
Linkbaiting (link baiting, linkbait, link bait etc) is a term that has increasingly being used around the blogosphere.
You can see in the following technorati graph the increase in its use (this one is for the term ‘link bait’) in the blogs that they track over the past 360 days (source)
As the term is used more and more I’ve also noticed an interesting debate emerge among bloggers (and search engine optimization types) over the idea of ‘link baiting’ and whether it’s a good thing or not. Some SEO companies have started to offer link baiting services while others are against the idea and believe that the benefits of link baiting are the same benefits of good web practices.
As the term’s crept into blogging more and more over the past months I thought it might be a good topic for a series.
Over the next few days I’ll be writing a series of posts covering:
- What is Link Baiting?
- Is Link Bait bad?
- What are the Benefits of Linkbaiting?
- What types of Linkbait are there?
- Techniques and strategies for Good link baiting
I’m sure I’ll cover more ground as we go along - but lets start with the first couple.
‘What is Link Baiting?’
A lot could (and has been) said about it. So I’ll make just a few basic points to keep things simple.
The term linkbaiting is a one that seems to have surfaced over the past 12 or so months and that is used by webmasters to describe a variety of practices - all of which seek to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other sites.
It is actually a difficult term to be definative about as it covers a lot of different practices ranging from running awards or competitions, through to writing attacking posts on high profile bloggers in the hope of them biting back and linking to you, through to providing other bloggers or site owners with tools (with embedded links back to your own site) that they can put on their blogs (we’ll run through more linkbaiting techniques in one of my next posts in this series).
In reality the term ‘linkbaiting’ is a new term for something that webmasters have been doing for many years. From my earliest days of blogging four years ago I know I saw people doing lots of things to get links (even though the term was never used).
Is Linkbaiting Good or Bad?
Linkbaiting is often written about in negative terms. I regularly see people writing off a post that others have written or a comment others have left as ‘just being linkbait’.
I personally don’t like the term ‘linkbaiting’ on some levels as it does seem to have negative connotations. ‘Baiting’ has a sense of trying to trick or trap an unsuspecting person or thing into doing something that they don’t really want to do. While this is accurate with some forms of linkbaiting it is not true with others.
There is a lot of debate around both the term ‘linkbaiting’ and some of the practices that people talk about it incorporating. Some argue strongly that it is just a by-product of quality content, others argue that many linkbaiting strategies border on spam, others seem to talk about linkbait as being the answer to all web promotional problems (increasingly SEO companies are offering linkbaiting services).
My own opinion on whether link bait is good or bad is that it depends upon the type of link baiting that you’re talking about. I think some techniques that people use are just good standard blogging techniques - while other things that people do in the pursuit of links are destructive to the blogging community and I’d argue against them.
Like almost anything online, people use linkbaiting strategies for good and healthy purposes but also for dubious and ‘evil’. I guess in part we each need to think about our priorities, values and even ethics as we go about our blogging and explore this topic.
Have Your Say
- How would you define link baiting?
- What has been your experience of it?
- Would you consider it to be good, bad or some combination of each?
Read the rest of this series as it’s written at:
Written on September 18th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 07:09 pm by Darren Rowse
enternetusers Group Writing Project - ‘How To…’
It’s time for another enternetusers Group Writing Project - and this time we’ve got prizes worth around $1800 USD (see below for details)!
Update: PLEASE READ ALL OF THE INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE SUBMITTING. Particularly pay attention to the instruction to submit NEW posts not previously written ones. Old posts (written before today) won’t be accepted and will not be eligable for a gift. Thanks for your understanding.
See the full list of submissions in this project as they’re added here.
The Topic
This week’s topic is ‘HOW TO….’.
Your task is to write a new ‘how to…. post’ (please don’t submit old posts you’ve written before today).
By ‘How To….’ I mean some sort of a post that gives advice, tips or a tutorial on how to do something. What it’s about is totally up to you. I’ve chosen this topic because it’s adaptable to most topics and should be something you could do on almost any blog. It need not be titled as a ‘how to…’ post but in content it should be this type of post. I’m looking forward to seeing the wide array of topics that you all choose to cover.
Once you’ve written your how to post simply follow the process for participating that I’ve outlined below (please note - to be eligible for the gifts from our sponsors you need to follow the guidelines below).
The Prizes
This week’s group writing project is proudly sponsored by the following companies and individuals. Five random participants (ie - this is not a competition) in this week’s project will receive one of the following gifts (listed here in no particular order - all values are in USD unless otherwise mentioned):
- One week complimentary stay (for up to 4 people) at a beach front apartment in Estepona on the Costa del Sol Spain (pictured above). This prize must be taken in the next 12 months and the winner must cover all their own costs in getting to Spain (ie this is for the cost of the accommodation only). If the prize cannot be taken by the winner they can also take an iPod (video) instead (by negotiation with the sponsor). This prize (valued at 1000 euros if taken in the peak season) has been kindly donated by New Homes on Nubricks.com. Thanks to Adam and Chintan.
- $100 Cash (in your paypal account) OR a month long text link in the Webmaster-Talk.com forums. This prize sponsored by Webmaster-Talk.com forums - thanks to Tim and his team.
- A Personal license for ExpressionEngine including a personal license for the forums module (worth $149). This prize is sponsored by Marcus from Nanoblogs.de
- A $149 yearly plan to Audible.com OR a $100 gift voucher to iTunes (your choice). This gift has been donated by Google Tutor. Thanks to Craig for this gift.
- $200 gift voucher from Amazon to spend on anything you like. Its been kindly donated by OwnMySeat.com. Thanks to Jason for his kind donation.
Thanks also to those others who offered to sponsor this week. As I mentioned - there were 30 offers of prizes which was quite overwhelming. I’ll continue to run these projects in future and hopefully we can feature more of the offers next time.
How To Participate
Here’s how to participate and put yourself in the running for a gift (please note - one entry per person - not per blog and please only submit NEW posts).
1. Write a ‘how to’ post
- Be as creative as you’d like - take it in any direction you want - it can be on any topic (keep it clean and ‘family friendly please), it can be any length, it can be serious, funny, it can be a list post, a rant, an essay, a pictorial or video post… etc
- Give your post a good title. Once all the posts are listed it’ll only be your title that sets it apart from others. It doesn’t have to have the words ‘how to’ in the title - but if can if you wish.
- Feel free to write your post in your own first language - I’ve previously included a number of non-english posts and am excited by the prospect of making this a multi-lingual project.
- Please consider putting a link back to this post on your post so that your readers know you’re participating. You don’t have to do this - but it’d be appreaciated to help grow the project.
2. Let us Know about your post
- Once you’ve posted your How To post let me know about it by sending me an email via my contact form.
- Make sure you include your name (as you want it to appear in my list), your post title and the URL to your post (not just to your blog’s front page).
- Submissions must be received by me the the end of Thursday 21 September (as long as it’s still Thursday where you send it from I’ll accept it). If they come in after Thursday they won’t be included in the list and will not be in the running for the gifts.
3. I will post 2 links to your post
- In the day or two after you let me know about your post I’ll post a link to it in two places. Firstly there will be a daily (ish) list of the submissions from the last 24 hours. Secondly there will be a central list of all submissions for the project so we can see everything on one page.
- I’ll post my final list of submissions on Friday and will announce those who receive the gifts then.
4. Surf Surf Surf
- This is where you take over. Surf the submissions received. Leave comments, make connections with other enternetusers readers and enjoy reading what others have to say.
5. Link Link Link
- There is no formal ‘judging’ as this is not a competition. Instead - I encourage you to surf through the submissions at the end of the week and announce your own winners on your own blog. Name a top 5 or so and share the link love.
- Probably the best part of the last group project was the amount of inter-linking I see happening between participating bloggers as a result of their posts. It’s obvious that people found new blogs through it and that the benefits of participating was way beyond getting a link from me but flowed on to a lot of new connections and links between other bloggers.
6. Gifts
- On Friday I’ll randomly select 5 participants to win the 5 gifts and will post the winners at this point. The rest of us can muse over what could have been and then we’ll get ourselves ready for next months project.
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