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Archives for August 2008

How To Inflate Your FeedBurner Subscription Numbers

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The fine folks over at theNEXTweb has published a video showcasing just how easy it is to manipulate your subscriber numbers in FeedBurner.

Apparently, it’s as easy as creating an OPML file, placing your FeedBurner URL into the file about 1,000 times or however many new subscribers you want, then importing this OPML file into Netvibes. Each module in NetVibes which loads your RSS feed will count as an RSS Subscriber to FeedBurner.


Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.

This is definitely not the way to go about increasing your RSS numbers. However, I’m willing to bet that there are a few bloggers out their who will take advantage of this opportunity. I’m pretty sure, thanks to this video highlighting the hack that Google/FeedBurner will do something about this in the not to distant future. Once that happens, keep an eye out on your favorite blogs and see if their RSS subscriber count goes downhill.

I strongly recommend staying away from this hack. Instead, organically grow your subscriber count. If you need a jump start on how to do that, check out these great articles on Performancing.com which provide you the information and tactics you need to juice your RSS.

What Makes You Want To Subscribe
Feed Placement and Design Tips
How NOT to Sell RSS
RSS & CB Radio
If RSS Subscriptions Are Gold, Why Treat Them Like Dirt?

Do you have a tip or suggestion on how to organically increase RSS subscribers? If so, let us know in the comments. Lets talk about it and share some tactics.

Tinyurl now with URL keyword power a.k.a. custom alias!

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Some competitors on the ‘make a long URL short’ market had the ‘URL keyword power’ feature long time ago but now Tinyurl.com also followed the market demands.

Tinyurl now also offers a custom alias (optional) a.k.a. URL keyword power!

In the past the long URL at the bottom would have been shortened to some tailing cryptic expression. Now you can create a less efficient but more powerful ‘speaking’ URL.


tinyurl.com/tinyurl-alterantive-services

Trap: Double check your alias for typos!!! Otherwise Tinyurl will throw “The custom alias could not be made because you’ve already created an alias for this URL” at you. Maybe you have to clean your cookies to get around that error message but I am too lazy now to check that. Just make sure you know how to spell right 🙂

Related: TinyURL service is down – 4 alternative services + 44 pictures (plain text version)

Live Stream Of New Media Expo

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Just a few days ago, I had mentioned that the Blog World Expo was right around the corner and that some of our members from the Hive would be attending the event. There is actually another expo which is right around the corner called the New Media Expo. This event takes place between August 14-16th and will be held in the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I won’t be able to attend the event and I know many of you are in the same boat. Thankfully, Leo Laporte has stated in his Net@Nite netcast that he will be streaming live from the event. So keep an eye out on the TWiT Live homepage around the time of the expo so you don’t miss a thing!

WordPress SEO – The Basics

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WordPress is known by many to provide SEO qualities right out of the box. Thanks to the clean code base, search engine spiders have an easy time crawling your archives, categories, and pages. However, thats not to say that the SEO qualities with which WordPress contains out of the box can not be improved upon. Here are some tips and tricks on how to boost your WordPress installations SEO.

Custom Permalinks – WordPress gives users the ability to define custom permalinks. Permalinks are permanent links to content. Out of the box, WordPress uses a mundane linking structure which is not recommended. Instead, configure permalinks to use any option other than the default. As for myself, I use the post title as my permalink url since my post headlines always contain keywords that are relevant to the post.

Posts and Page Titles – When creating a new post or page, make sure you use descriptive titles. These descriptive titles will act as highly relevant keywords for your blog.

If you’re doing a blog post on a certain topic, make sure that the title of your blog post contains at least one or two keywords about that particular topic. This gives search engines more ammunition to list your site in search results for that topic. For instance, if you write a blog post and give it the title, I Saw A Movie Yesterday, search engines have very little to go off of when listing a series of search results. However, if you replace that titles with I Saw “Title Of Movie” Yesterday, this will list your blog post along with all of the others that deal with that particular movie.

Text – Probably the most important aspect of SEO and the one with the most influence. The Text or Content of your blog is what search engine spiders crave the most. This is where you want to provide relevant keywords as it relates to your niche. Keeping your blog updated on a regular basis with these keywords and relevant niche keywords is a good way to maintain your rankings in the search engines.

Category Names – WordPress provides you the opportunity to create categories in which you can name. These categories are also crawled by the search engines. Again, using descriptive and identifying names for the categories you create in WordPress will provide keywords into the URL structure of your blog. However, unless your custom permalink structure includes the category name of the post inside the URL, you won’t see much benefit from this. Services such as Technorati use blog categories as tags.

Tags – Tags are like keywords for a blog post. After a number of tags have been created on a number of different posts, relationships are formed between the various posts on your blog. Each tag you create in WordPress will have it’s own dedicated page filled with content that shares the same tag. I’ve noticed many people browsing through my blog via tags while also seeing search engine queries turn up through the use of tags.

Images And ALT Tags – Some may scoff at Alt tags which is an HTML tag that when defined, describes what the image is, in case the image does not load. These Alt tags are text meaning they are crawled by the search engines. More specifically, search engines which offer an image search. When filling in your Alt tags, provide descriptive keywords that are relevant to the image. You’ll be surprised how much traffic you get when performing this technique from Google Image Search.

My SEO philosophy has always been, write for the readers and everything else will take care of itself. Although the best combination is writing great content for your readers that naturally has relevant keywords sprinkled into it.

If you are still looking for an easy way to manage some of the SEO aspects of your blog, look no further than the tried and true All In One SEO Plugin. This particular plugin has been used by a large number of WordPress users who have claimed the plugin works.

All In One SEO Pack –

* Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
* Generates META tags automatically
* Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
* For WordPress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
* You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
* You can fine-tune everything
* Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Don’t Forget About Your Personal Blog!

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In a time where we have Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, Facebook, and all kinds of services to socialize with, it is far too easy to forget about the value of a personal blog. For some of us, a personal blog might be a place to express ourselves in our free time, but for others, it is an excellent opportunity to create quite a following. However, many of us have neglected our personal blogs, some of us don’t update our personal blogs, and a few of us don’t even have personal blogs! Regardless, there are a few great reasons as to why you should have one and keep it updated.

It’s All About You!

If your personal blog is popular, that means people are interested in you, and that should be quite the confidence booster. Some people use their blog as a way to share things that happen in their life. Others use personal blogs as a place of useful information and ideas (like me at OnlyJames), and, further more, others use their personal blog as a “life aggregator” that contains all your activity from around the web.

Personal Experience

One of the greatest benefits of a personal blog is that it allows your followers to connect with you on a fairly personal level. Your blog is like your home. You welcome them into your home, you share information about yourself, and you generate relationships with bloggers. When these people leave your blog, perhaps they will mention you around the blogosphere, and that is obviously a good thing—a very good thing.

Credibility and Understanding

A personal blog serves yet another purpose: it provides you with a level of credibility. You put your name out there, you let people get involved with you on a personal level, and you generate a community around yourself. There is much power and respect held when thousands of people are subscribed to your personal blog. It has all the makings of success written all over it if you can optimize this traffic.

Maintaining Attention

A personal blog can also act as a hub for all of a person’s projects and works. It might serve as a place for a blogger to raise awareness for a special project that only a few people know about. Think of this as a jump-start for future projects. Combine all this with a strong presence on Twitter, and there is some amazing potential ready to explode.

You, On The Internet

Entertain this idea for a few moments: put yourself in the shoes of a professional race car driver. Let’s say you represent team ABC and drive car #01. Fans always purchase team ABC’s merchandise and are glad to buy your lunch-boxes. But let’s assume that next season you are moving over to team XYZ. Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that all those people were really fans of you instead of the car you drive and team you race for? Apply this very same concept to you and a blog you write for, and you now understand why marketing yourself is just as important.

Essentially, your personal blog is your own little chunk of the web that should be all about you. This is a place that you will, hopefully, keep for a long time, never sell, and show interest and appreciation to your followers. After all, every time a blogger writes an article, that blogger is, essentially, marketing himself or herself to the world.

If you have a personal blog, why not let us know where we can find out more about you?

Proposed Fix For Podpress Released

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When WordPress 2.6 was released, quite a number of plugins worked out of the box while others broke. Unfortunately, PodPress was one of those plugins which broke. It has been discovered that PodPress has some sort of incompatibility with the new post revisions feature found within 2.6. Mightyseek, the author of the plugin claims that he is working on a new version and that it was going to be released within that weekend, or the next 10 days. Both have passed with no sign of an update. Also, the podPress forums don’t contain any information in terms of when the next release will be rolled out.

Considering how popular podPress is, it’s great to see that Andrew Ozz has published an article that details a fix for the plugin until the next version is released. The fix involves a snippet of code that you copy and paste into a podPress related file. This allows the podcast to be attached to blog posts. Hopefully, this works for the majority of podPressers out their.

Speaking of podPress, how many of you are using this particular plugin? It’s a great way to dabble with podcasting without having much to worry about. If you are using this plugin, link me in the comments to your work as I’d like to take a listen and perhaps feature your show in a future post.