Full or Partial RSS Feeds?
April 26, 2008
@SeanBannister asks - “on Problogger your RSS shows the entire post but on DPS it only shows a teaser”
Whether to post excerpts or full feeds is something I’ve grappled with on and off for years now. I used on only do excerpts here on ProBlogger too but in the end decided to switch. The main thing that held me back from switching to full feeds on ProBlogger was the issue of duplicate content. I see a new blog scraping my content every day or two so there must be many sites with the same content as ProBlogger out there. This is frustrating and while I try to track down those who do so without any acknowledgement of source I can’t possibly stop them all.
The good thing now is that ProBlogger has authority in the eyes of Google as it’s been around for a few years and I’m pretty confident that Google ranks us as the original source of all the duplicate pages. I’m a little less confident of this with DPS so have kept it as an excerpt feed. Having said this - I’ll probably switch DPS to full feeds at sometime soonish as it’s got a fair ranking in Google now.
Further Reading on Full vs Partial RSS feeds: Read more
How Many Blogs Do You Write On? How Many Posts Per Day?
April 26, 2008
@SeanBannister asks “how many blogs do you write for and how many blog posts a day you make?”
These days I only write actively on two blogs - ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. At one point I was writing each week on around 25 blogs - but a lot of them were pretty much just watching what other blogs wrote and attempting to aggregate that content. The blogs have little original thought on them and didn’t take off so I didn’t continue to put time into them. I do also work for b5media as the VP Training - but this is just a part time role as my two main blogs take up considerable time.
In terms of posts per day - these days I try to publish one post per day on DPS. These posts are written largely by bloggers that I’ve hired. I was writing all of the content for this blog until a few months ago so now my role is more ‘editor’ although I do average 1-2 posts still a week. On ProBlogger my post frequency varies from day to day but I do have a minimum post target of 2 posts per day. I don’t mind if this drops to 1 post on weekend days but on weekdays stick to it religiously. On top of that I add other ‘newsy’ posts so probably average 3-4 posts a day on ProBlogger.
OK - so that’s my answer - I’d love to hear how many blogs you write on and how many blog posts per day that you average writing? Read more
How to Choose a Niche Topic for Your Blog
April 26, 2008
@jonathanguinn asks: “I am new to internet marketing and am struggling to find my niche. Maybe some pointers about that would be helpful.”
There are many factors to consider when choosing a niche. I’ve written about many of them in this post - but for me a lot of it comes back to choosing something that you know about, that you feel you can say something useful and interesting on - ie what are YOU about?.
After that I’d take a good hard look at tools like Google Trends where you can track the popularity of different search terms over time to see if they’ve been trending up or down. Ideally you want to find a popular niche that’s growing so that you can position yourself for the future growth.
Other factors of course come into play including the number of other blogs and websites on a topic already (ie competition), whether the topic has monetization streams (if you’re doing it for money) etc - but you can read more aobut them in my post on choosing a niche for your blog.
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Easier and Faster Ways to Upgrade to Wordpress 2.5.1
April 26, 2008
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When Self Promotion Tips into Spam
April 26, 2008
@jimgoldstein asks: “one things I see bloggers struggle with is blog spam. When self promotion goes to far. “
I agree Jim. There are different kinds of spam - the main stuff we see is the auto-generated stuff that fills our inboxes and hits our comment filters but then there is a more subtle kind of spam - where bloggers overstep the mark on other people’s blogs by promoting themselves to a point where they put others off. I see this every day in the comments on my blogs where the comments left are five words long and only slightly on topic and then there’s a list of 2-3 links as a signature. The comments left are obviously a thinly veiled attempt at self promotion.
The problem with this approach of self promotion is that you can do more harm for yourself than good. If you comments are allowed on your blog the reaction from others who see it can actually hurt your brand. I write about this in 10 Way s to Hurt Your Blog’s Brand by Commenting on Other Blogs.
The key to growing your blog is to create value. Create useful and unique content on your own blog (don’t get caught up in the self promotion game in every 2nd post) and to do the same thing on other people’s blogs. The people’s blogs that I visit from comments on my blog (and others) are those who have something interesting and useful to say - not those who leave links on dull and spammy comments).
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How to Build Community on Your Blog
April 25, 2008
@SmallFishMedia asks - “What can you do to make your blog more of a community?”
There are many things that you can do to build a sense of community on a blog. Here’s a short list of ideas that come to mind:
- Take the lead and be the community that you want your readers to be - readers follow the lead of bloggers in how they’ll interact with each other
- Ask Questions - the key to more comments and interaction on a blog
- Give readers homework - try it, it works
- Give readers a job to do on your blog - bizarre but it works
- Link to reader’s blogs - it’s amazing what impact this can have
- Answer Reader questions - this has real power
- Invite Readers to Take the lead with guest posts, giving advice to each other etc
- Make Readers Famous - celebrate your readers publicly
- Do projects where readers can participate, submit things and be active. The more you have them DO the more loyal they’ll become.
WordPress 2.5.1 is Out
April 25, 2008
Partner: MakeUseOf.com Amazing Websites and Tools you Never Knew About Read more
WordPress 2.5.1
April 25, 2008
- Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
- Better performance for those who have many categories
- Media Uploader fixes
- An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
- Widget Administration fixes
- Various usability improvements
- Layout fixes for IE
Blog Design - Does it Matter?
April 25, 2008
@mattpacker asks - how important is the design of your blog and how hard a decision do you think it would be to develop a new theme for it?
There will probably be a little debate over this one in the comments on this post because every time I see someone write about design there are two opposing arguments.
On the one side are some blogger who argue that design is secondary and not that important as that it’s content that is what draws people to a blog and keeps them there. This camp often argues that with a lot of people reading blogs these days through RSS that design is less important as people rarely see it.
On the flip side we have the argument that design is very important because it creates a first impression in the mind of potential readers and that it’s around this first impression that many readers base their decision about whether they will subscribe.
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Spy On Your Competition With Firefox’ s Search Status
April 25, 2008
- Google Page Rank
- Alexa Rank
- Keyword density
- Nofollow highlighting
- Backlinks in Google, Yahoo and MSN
- Whois Info
- Wayward Archive Info
- and much more on any website you are visiting,
