Several weeks ago in "Don’t Look Now, but You’re Being Followed," I wrote that I had turned off "nofollow" on this blog. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, please see the original post for more details. I think it's important that you know the background behind it.) Well now we're seeing more and more bloggers doing the same, and someone has even started a meme to spread the word. I was tagged by Stark ... Keep reading »
I ran into Labor Nurse when she submitted an essay for our scholarship contest over at Nursing Jobs.org. Her essay definitely stood out, and I spent some time reading her blog. Very, very entertaining, so I asked her if I could interview her for Ask Shane. She kindly agreed, and I think there's a little something for everyone in our conversation; we covered quite a bit of ground. I hope you enjoy it! Keep reading »
A month ago yesterday, I made a open attempt to start ranking for "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan" as part of an example of how important <title>s are. Well this morning I discovered that that was an even better idea than I thought it was. Not only am I now ranking fourth in Google (as of this writing), but 14 of the last 100 visitors to ... Keep reading »
Christine Kane has written a great piece about "18 Stupid Mistakes Bloggers Make in their First Year." It's an outstanding read and definitely worth a trip over there. I love it because she nails so many things. You can tell she's only been blogging a year because all those beginner mistakes are still so fresh in her mind. She's also got a great-looking blog to boot. It's worth a trip just to see that.
For those of you who are new to the site this week, I keep a list in my sidebar of the great things I've read through Google Reader. They have a Share function that makes it easy to -- well -- share particularly interesting posts. I try to always put them in a post when I've built up 10 or so so that you RSS subscribers see them as well, but regular readers will tell you that ... Keep reading »
Looks like John Chow's Technorati 100 blog has been hacked by ISKORPTIX (safe link), and Geek in Paradise is reporting that the hacker has hit several other blogs as well. Looks like it may be a server hack and not a WordPress hack. Update, 18:05 Eastern: Prompted by Tim in the comments below, I've read back through everything now, and it doesn't look like we know what the problem is at all. I can't believe ... Keep reading »
Two and a half weeks after StatCounter broke the story and it began to spread across the web, SiteMeter has begun to respond to the issue both in the comments of my post and at much greater length in the comments on Eric Odem's. Despite that, though, I can still not find not find the official response they say is on their own blog, nor have they directly addressed many of the specific issues that people ... Keep reading »
You've probably heard many times about all the free visitors you can get from search engines. Well SEO, or search engine optimization, is the science -- and art -- of getting a site to rank well in order to get as many of those visitors as possible. The great thing for you as a blogger is that you don't have to been an SEO expert to see quite a bit of search engine traffic to your site because most blogs are tailor-made for ranking well in search engines. Just take a look at the top ten search engine ranking factors and notice how many are naturally inherent in blogs. I count seven to nine, depending on how strict you want to be. Since blogs are almost always text-heavy, very community-driven and interlinked heavily, it's hard to find your blog not ranking for lots of things if it becomes popular. However, there are a few easy things that you do need to do to ensure that you're set up for search engine success. The basic principle behind all of them is that SEO, first and foremost, is about so much more than your homepage. Especially with blogs, you'll find that most of your search engine visitors come in on anything but your homepage. So almost all the basic SEO for a blog has to do with your individual pages. Keep reading »
If your blog is good and you're blogging consistently, you'll be successful. That's it. Two conditions. If it sounds simplistic, it's because we don't think enough about that second part: blogging consistently. Most bloggers start off with a passion and excitement, only to have it wane within a few weeks or a few months. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm a firm believer that you have to get out there and do something to find out if it's really something you like to do or something you're good at. You can't just read a book about it and know. So flaming out after trying something for just a little bit isn't necessarily a bad thing at all. I've started and abandoned too many projects to count, and I'm glad I did. It's only by trial and error that I've narrowed in on what I really want to do. So this guarantee isn't for those of you who have found out that you don't really enjoy blogging. It's for those of you you who do enjoy it and are looking to take your blog to the next level. Keep reading »
Back in February, I wrote about "The Top 3 Ways to Generate Revenue from Your Blog" -- number one being advertisers: Dedicated advertisers are usually your best source of revenue. They pay a much better rate, they’re a guaranteed revenue stream every month, and they tend to stick around. The only downside is that you usually need to have really healthy traffic levels to make it worthwhile for advertisers to work with you directly. I noted later in the comments that what constituted a "healthy traffic level" really varied from nice to niche -- some sites may be able to attract advertisers with a tenth of the traffic of others; it's just so dependent on what type of readers you're attracting. Additionally, you definitely want to avoid monetizing too soon. Very few things can kill a site quicker than letting your advertising overwhelm everything else. Let's suppose, though, that you do have healthy traffic levels for your niche and are indeed ready for advertisers. How do you go about finding them? Keep reading »
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