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Archives for May 2009

Do You Blog From One Of These Countries?

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The Committee to Protect Journalists has published what they consider to be the ten worst countries to blog from. Burma leads the pack at number one with a number of Middle Eastern and Asian countries rounding out the top ten.

Relying on a mix of detentions, regulations, and intimidation, authorities in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Egypt have emerged as the leading online oppressors in the Middle East and North Africa. China and Vietnam, where burgeoning blogging cultures have encountered extensive monitoring and restriction, are among Asia’s worst blogging nations. Cuba and Turkmenistan, nations where Internet access is heavily restricted, round out the dishonor roll.

The report was released on May 3rd to celebrate World Press Freedom Day and to call attention to online repression. Let me know if you blog from any of these countries or if you know someone who does. I’m interested in reading your story.

Autoblogging And Misconceptions

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There is a pretty good discussion taking place over in the SitePoint forums around the topic of Autoblogging. The thread starts off like this:

What do you think about Auto Blogging to posts? Is it work getting software to do it?

Is anyone doing it with success in terms of an increase in traffic/SEO results?

Within the discussion, someone mentions that Autoblogging is content theft. The truth is, no it’s not. However, if you set up your autoblog to publish content from RSS feeds that you do not own or have the permission to use, that is content theft. Here is another misconception published in that thread:

Auto Blogging isn’t content theft. What do you think the RSS feeds are for? The writers want their content distributed.

Are you kidding me? Yes, most bloggers want their content distributed but on their terms. You can’t just go around using anyone’s RSS feed anyway you like. Lets keep in mind that the content within RSS feeds is copyrighted by the content author. Besides, do you really want to be called a human scraper?

So what I’m wondering is this. Do you autoblog? Is there any situation in where autoblogging makes sense? What are your thoughts on autoblogging?

How Do You Advertise Affiliates?

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Since the launch of WPTavern.com, I’ve received numerous offers from companies asking if I would like to join a higher tiered part of their affiliate program which offers higher than average payouts when compared to a normal affiliate. I’ve always had a problem with affiliate advertising in that, I don’t think you should advertise just for the sake of advertising. I’d much rather someone paid me directly for display advertising rather than placing an ad on my site, hoping people click through and then hoping even more that they make a purchase.

However, where affiliate advertising makes complete sense is when you advertise for a product or service you have used and can stand by. This enables you to have that trust factor, stand by your claims for the product/service and chances are, you’ll probably have an easier time convincing people to purchase through you.

So how do you handle affiliate advertising on your site? Do you advertise for anyone/everyone or only those things you can vouch for?

Automation: Spend time now to save time in the future

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Setting up systems that automatically control certain aspects of your blog can be a great timesaver down the line, even though the initial time (and possibly monetary) investment may be difficult to swallow.

The great thing about many self-host blog platforms (WordPress and Movable Type in particular) is that they offer a great range of customisation options.

It’s possible to change a lot more than the basic layout if you know what you’re doing (or can hire/coerce someone who does).

Here are a few ideas for automating tasks so that you don’t have to spend time thinking about them and can focus on content creation:

Advertising

Ensuring that advertising slots are displayed in the correct place is simple if you have a good grasp of the design template your blog is using, but it’s also possible to use a plugin to handle the moving or rotating of adverts, or to only display them on certain types/ages of posts.

Related Posts

Many people use a related posts plugin to automatically display links to similar articles based upon keywords.

This doesn’t stop you from manually linking to related content, but it does mean you can encourage readers to click through to other entries without any real effort on your part, other than accurately and consistently tagging posts.

Special Content

Most blog platforms allow you to include additional fields (WordPress calls them “Custom Fields”). With some nifty programming (or installation of existing plugins) these can allow you a great deal of publishing flexibility.

Instead of having to hard code repetitive content into the post itself, using these custom fields allows the blog software to insert new content.

Link List Posts

It’s possible to tie up your Google Reader account to automatically publish a list of links from your new shared items. If you do this sort of thing regularly and you get a lot of links via RSS feeds it can be a great way of sharing them without additional work on your part.

Front Page Updates

Some blog templates have quite a distinct front page, often used as a showcase for the rest of the blog (I’m thinking of Brian Gardner’s Revolution themes, for example).

It can be good to include static text blocks as well as dynamically generating the latest headlines, but at first glance the only way of changing this is to edit the home.php (WordPress) template.

In fact, there are plugins (Get-a-Post for example) that allow you to specify where on the front page static text (or HTML) blocks should go, and then insert the content of a page or post.

These are just a few ideas that immediately sprang to mind. The fact is, if there’s something you are doing repetitively on your blog (apart from creating original content, that is) then there’s a good chance that task can be automated.

It may take a while to find the right plugin or to hone the design so that it does what you want, but imagine what it could do for your productivity if you were able to save even five or ten minutes per post and improve the visitor experience.

What things have you automated on your blog?