Many of you may hear a buzz this weekend about Google's "PageRank update," so I wanted to clear up some misconceptions so that you don't lose focus on what's important. PageRank (or PR) is a measure of the link weight pointing to a page. The more links you get from pages that have more links to them, the higher your PageRank. PageRank is just one of more than 100 variables that determine where Google ranks a page in the search results. ... Keep reading »
Several weeks ago, I read Matt's "How I Got 283k Feed Subscribers in 1 Day." The way he did it was to take TechCrunch's FeedBurner FeedCount chicklet and put it on his own site. By changing the link on the image to point to his own RSS feed, though, few would realize that he didn't actually have that many subscribers. I found it very interesting, but that was about it since I knew I'd never have any reason to fake my feed count. Over the next few weeks, though, I found myself repeatedly coming back to this statement: I can see the logic behind someone wanting to use a more popular feed image. Showing a larger subscriber count than what your blog has naturally makes your site seem more popular which unfortunately makes new visitors more likely to stick. Keep reading »
If you're serious about your blogging, you should consider attending the upcoming Elite Retreat in Orlando. I went to the first one back in December, and it led directly to me getting to the point just three months later where I was working 100% for myself. If that's at all on your radar, I would highly recommend this conference over any other. Here's why. Keep reading »
One of the ways I mention in "11 Free, Easy Ways to Get Visitors to Your New Blog" is blog carnivals. Well, carnivals aren't always just grouped by blog topic. Mother Jones has a great post today listing a few carnivals in categories you may not have thought about.
Back in February, I mentioned that the MyBlogLog widget could possibly be something that would generate traffic to your blog all by itself just by virtue of you using it. Well two and a half months later, MyBlogLog (MBL) becomes more and more valuable to me every day so I wanted to revisit it and talk about why I've developed such a fondness for it. Keep reading »
Back in February, John Chow wrote about 10 Blogging Mistakes To Avoid. He's dead right on 9 of them (not sure about #10 ;) ), and it's definitely worth both a read now and a bookmark for reading at least once a week from now on. I know I will.
If you're active on the web for very long, you will screw up. It's inevitable. How you handle it can make you or break you, though. To show you what I mean, let's look at three different examples: one from last year in which a company dealt swiftly and expertly with a problem of their own making and two from this year where just the opposite was the case. I think the end results will be more than enough to convince you to be very proactive the next time you screw up. Keep reading »
A huge thanks goes out to Staska.Net who pointed me to Ronald's fix for the new "feature" in WordPress 2.1 that cuts off your RSS feeds at the <!-- more --> tag. I had to use that tag in order to format my homepage the way I wanted to, so I had just resigned myself to having to publish only a partial feed. Not anymore! Now I can have the best of both worlds, ... Keep reading »
Last week I ran across the Blog Posting Mantra. It was amazing. All these things I had come to realize on my own were right there in black and white. If only I had seen them sooner :D The author was Mike Sansone who blogs at ConverStations. As I began to read his site, I realized that he really knew what he was talking about, and he has a great writing style that makes the information so easy to grasp. So I was excited when he agreed to spend some time talking with me so that I could learn more about him and how ConverStations came to be. Keep reading »
We all know that search engines can bring us free traffic, so last week we covered the basics of how to SEO a blog. That's where you should start if you haven't already. The next step, though, is to start ranking well for terms that you already rank for somewhere in the results. Pages in the top 3 results can get ten times as much traffic (or more) than ... Keep reading »
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