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Saturday 12 April 2008

5 more tips for blogging

Social Bookmarking (aka Going Viral)
6. Put chicklets in your template. Chicklets are ugly, and having too many “If you liked this story, submit it to Delicious” lines in a post looks plain spammy. That said, when you have a top-notch post that you hope is going to go viral, there is no better way to boost your votes than to add the Delicious link and Digg button right onto the post. When used correctly, chicklets can get you the coveted ‘double vote’ (when visitors who came to your post via Delicious, for example, then drop you a Digg vote once they are on the site). When you consider the tens of thousands of visitors that visit a good linkbait, those ‘double votes’ can be enough to carry you to the popular page of a second site, just by leveraging the traffic of the first.
7. Be your own promoter: Seed your best posts. Hundreds of thousands of content hungry readers are using social bookmarking sites every day, and many track specific keywords. By seeding your best articles, and by using a mixture of both popular and specific keywords as tags, you can bring a new crop of readers to your site on a weekly basis. The best way to select the tags for your article is to think of social bookmarking sites as a form of search engine. By including both broad keywords and narrower keywords you are certain to get a blend of both low quality/high volume readers (AdSense baby!) and high quality/low volume readers (links). The following is a list of the top 10 bookmarking sites which you should submit your top articles to:
Digg: Mammoth traffic; tech-focused; savvy users Delicious: Pretty big traffic; somewhat tech/design-focused; a lot of bloggers browse Delicious for “things to link to” Netscape: Pretty big traffic; a mix of topics; less savvy users Stumbleupon: Medium traffic; weird stuff/literary articles; normal users. Yahoo MyWeb: Medium traffic; general interest; normal users Reddit: Lower traffic; politics/random stuff; normal users. Furl: Lower traffic; tech-focused/some random stuff; normal users Newsvine: Lower traffic; politics and news; normal users. Lookmarks: Low traffic; gets spammed a lot; less savvy users Blinklist: Low traffic; gets spammed a lot; less savvy users
Getting networked8. Leave highly valuable comments on other blogs in your niche. Every niche within the blogosphere is made up of a few tightly knit communities. Like all communities, so much of what is actually going on (passing links, giving tips, etc.) is all done behind the scenes through email and IM. As a result, getting integrated into some of the communities in your niche is essential to growing your blog. New bloggers often try to integrate themselves through email solicitations, “Hi my name is Newbie, will you be my friend?…” This rarely works. You need to first make a name for yourself and make yourself valuable to the community. One way is to start commenting on the sites of community members within your niche. By being an initiator of, or contributor to, good conversations on other blogs, other webmasters will come to recognize your name. Note: This takes a bit of finesse, so don’t go around dropping your blog’s URL in the comments themselves. Rather, just type your URL in the URL field and let your ideas speak for the quality of your writing and your site.
9. Reload quickly: Take advantage of your initial launch buzz. A successful blog launch will give you two or three days of buzz (yes, that’s all you’ll get in the blogosphere). During that window, other bloggers in your niche will be checking out your site. Take advantage of those extra visitors by putting up some top-notch content within the first couple of days and updating your site frequently. Many webmasters will stop by during the first week to check out the ‘new kid on the block,’ so make sure they see you at your best. Launch buzz is a unique opportunity to gain easy links with no real extra marketing work, and it will not happen a second time. So don’t waste the opportunity by putting up garbage or sporadic content during your first week.
10. Include tons of outbound links in your posts. As a new blogger, your target audience is other bloggers. They have the links that you need to get to the top of the search engines and to get in front of other readers. So a big key is getting other bloggers in your niche to notice you. A good trick is to use website referrals to your advantage. Almost every blogger checks their site referrals list on a daily or weekly basis (which tells them the last page a visitor was on before they landed on their site). They use this list both to track new links and to see who is talking about their site. By putting a lot of outbound links in your posts to other blogs in your niche, you can start to raise your profile. When your readers click on those links your site will appear in the referrals list of the bloggers you link to. This is free marketing for you. When other bloggers see your site in their referrals list they will often visit your site and are also much more likely to return a link to you.

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