Blogging Tip – Credibility is hard to get. Color me orange.
According to an article in eMarketer, most people don’t believe most of what they read on the Internet.
Which, of course, means credibility can be harder to get than traffic or high ranking. Something to keep in mind, whether writing link bait or filler posts, is that everything you post can add to (or detract from) your credibility.
So… which group are you in? Color me orange.
Blog Themes and Topics of the Top 50 Technorati Blogs
One question I get asked a lot is whether it’s better to use a two column or a three column blog theme. Usually I say it’s a matter of preference balanced with the needs of your content. So, I decided to chart the top 50 blogs at Technorati, to see whether they use 2 or 3 column themes. I also noted the subject matter.
Here’s the result:
Turns out they’re about half and half split between 2 and 3 column. So – which is better? Depends on your preference and your content just as I thought. Meow!
Blog Resources; Promoting your Blog
So you have a new (or unvisited) blog and want to promote it.
First of all, are you using catagories or tags that match the directory tags at technorati, wordpress, etc? Most people just “make up” tags, but if you use tags that are used in blog directories, it’s a lot easier to get your posts found. Which leads to your blog titles. Are you using words people search for in your titles?
Yes? Doing all that? Have you submitted to MSN, Alexa, Gigablast, Jayde and MetaSeek? They’re all pretty solid directories that have been around a long time and can give you some link juice.
And have you signed up for a free technorati membership? And mybloglog, too? Every time you visit a site that has a mybloglog “visitor” screen posted will post your icon and a link to you as a recent visitor.
Make sure you’re pinging all the engines with your new posts, too. In Wordpress, go to Control Panel –> Options –> Writing, and add these;
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
You can get a whole bunch more ping urls from daily blog tips, here
Once you have a little link juice coming your way, go sign up for free at google.com/webmasters and submit a site map. Don’t submit using the “submit url” form… a site map is a much more efficient way to show Googlebot your blog pages. Plus, there’s some really funky tools in there to show you who’s visiting, how Google is doing at listing your site, etc.
Start submitting your blog to this Giant List of Blog Directories … but don’t do them all in one night. Here’s a neat tip. Paste the list into Word so they turn into links. Then submit to a couple a day and highlight each one you’ve done in yellow. When the whole list glows like a bright yellow happy face, you’re done.
Another way to get some traffic is to head over to BlogCarnival.com and look for carnivals on topics related to your blog. A carnival is a big blog post with lots of links to related resources. So, submit an article – and if it’s accepted, you’ll be promoted in the carnival. You can get a lot of mileage out of one post!
When you’ve worked your way through those, here’s a list of 101 Blog Tips. They’re not all blog promotion ideas. Some of them are just great ideas for building an awesome blog. There’s some good ones in there… we all should print it out and post it on the wall just as a reminder. Until it got covered in sticky notes.
