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How Do I Link Thee, Let Me Count The Ways

When your site gains links from other sites, its authority and ranking can increase. I say can because the authority of sites linking to you has some influence on the ranking you receive (though there are many other factors). I’m not going to claim to be an SEO. Still, it’s safe to say that linkbuilding is something you want to do, and regularly.

Many bloggers have covered ways to build links to your site. I’d like to discuss it in the hopes of hearing what you have tried and whether it’s worked for you. Here is a shortlist of linkbuilding techniques. I’m not commenting on whether or not I think these are any good because I’m hoping you’ll say what’s worked for you.

  1. Comments.
    Some sites apply a nofollow to links in comments, so you may not benefit SEO-wise. However, your comments, if intelligent (or sometimes controversial), will draw visitors. If these visitors are bloggers, they might link to you after visiting. (Use tools to track comments.) Unless of course you’re an anonymous commenter.

  2. Trackbacks.
    Trackbacks are an automated technology that most of the bigger blogging platforms have. If you write about and link to someone’s blog post, your platform will notify the other one. The other blog will then display a snippet of your post, with a link. While trackbacks are still prone to spam, they seem to generate less than comments might on some sites. (Yet some bloggers say it’s worse.) Blogs can have any combination of commenting and trackbacks turned on or off. Note that some trackbacks may have nofollow as well, and may be moderated.

  3. Conversations.
    The VoIP bloggers seem to have this down to a pratice. I write about VoIP (ghosted) and subscribe to something close to 80 blogs that discuss communications, mostly VoIP. There’s a small group that regularly write posts that bounce off of topics another one of them wrote. So they link to each other almost daily. Personally, I think they should diversify their outbound links, but that’s their call. Liz Strauss has talked about link leaking on her Successful-Blog, and I’m definitely a link leaker, linking to relevant posts on as many blogs as possible, hoping to strike up a blogversation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. (It helps if you do it from a blog where your name appears on each post – not so much if you ghostwrite.)

  4. Purchased reviews.
    In addition to PayperPost and ReviewMe, there are also at least LoudLaunch and SponsoredReviews, and others I’m forgetting. Some people are using these for linkbuilding campaigns, by paying people to review their site. For example, fans of John Chow have been purchasing reviews from him through ReviewMe.

  5. Link exchange/ request.
    While not everyone is comfortable doing so, people sometimes just ask for a link or offer a swap. Darren Rowse tells you how to go about requesting links.

  6. Purchased links.
    This amounts to either offering a blogger money for a link, or doing it indirectly through a service like Text-Link-Ads or Text Link Brokers.

  7. Linkbait and social bookmarking.
    This is combo technique. Publish compelling flagship content, including linkbait, then have someone “seed” the URL on a social bookmarking network such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Fark, etc.

  8. Blog carnivals.
    Blog carnivals are an incredbly good way not only to get known in your niche but to also get and give links, and build visitors.

Did I miss anything? Which of these have you tried? Did it work? Which technique do you prefer? Which one would you like to try but are not sure how to go about it?

How Great Is WordPress?

Mark at Search-This writes about how much he loves WordPress, not just as a blogging platform but as a CMS (Content Management System) in general. (His post also lists some ways to trick out your WordPress installation.) It’s arguably one of the most accessible yet powerful blogging platforms out there, and it’s free, as are many hundreds of themes and plugins. What’s more, anyone that does not want a blog can use it to manage a regular website. In my post the dangers of too many sites, I talked about converting a blog to a regular website as an option to reduce your blogging commitment.

Some CMS History

Compare free to the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars that “corporate” CMS packages can cost. For my clients and/or employers, I’ve used, evaluated and even written (rudimentary) CMSes. The commercial packages I’ve evaluated or used have cost anywhere from $200,000 to over a million.

There’s an enormous market for web content management, with many millions of dollars at stake. But then along comes a whole slew of free Open Source CMS packages for blogging, including WordPress – which is one of the more robust platforms. [The irony that I’m posting this article on a Drupal platform is not lost on me. I love the power of Drupal, but cannot use it for any of my own blogs as the host does not provide the necessary database privileges. It’s also a rather complex install process compared to WordPress. WordPress is thus a far more accessible platform to the average blogger or small business.]

WordPress As General CMS

The fact is, WordPress can be used as a near industrial strength CMS for regular websites, and there are a couple of ways to give the semblance of a regular website.

  1. Undated URLs.
    Look at the URL of the average WordPress blog and you’ll usually see the year, month and day as part of the (virtual) directory structure. It is also possible, in the “Permalinks” section of the WordPress control panel, to use URLs that leave out the date. This way, you can still display the freshest content upfront, without the site appearing to be a blog.

  2. Posts vs pages.
    Wordpress has two types of content: posts and pages. Posts are displayed reverse chronologically. Pages are only accessible through the navigation bar. Pages can thus be used instead of posts to produce a regular website. For such use, the home page could have static content, with excerpts of pages and the necessary links. There would be no “post of the day”, or any posts for that matter.

  3. Contact forms.
    While many blogs don’t have one, the Contact page is an important of a business website. A variety of contact form plugins exist for WordPress. Just install the plugin, and activate and configure it. Now create a page, then embed the necessary code in the page. Voila, visitors can communicate with you without seeing your email address.

  4. About Us page.
    An About Us page is a suitable complement to a Contact form. Of course, you could combine the two. Or this page can also double as a sitemap for the rest of your content

While a free package cannot compete with a corporate-level CMS, WordPress is a fine platform for blogging, as well as a satisfactory basic CMS for a small business. The beauty of it is that if you decide to start a weblog, all you have to do is start publishing “posts” in addition to “pages”. Add a web feed link, and visitors can subscribe in their favorite feed reader.

New Scribefire for Firefox Version

What’s Nick Doing?

Nick Wilson, former CEO of Performancing and ever the resourceful web jedi, has pretty much relaunched Scribefire (formerly PFF – Performancing for Firefox) from his Twitter blog. Of course, he explains why he joined Twitter (and unsubscribed from over 100 blogs) over at his Clickinfluence blog. Twitter, if you don’t already know, is a new social phenomenon where you report on your goings on, up to the minute if you like. (You should see his list of influential friends over there.) Of course, Nick also has his Communicontent blog, whose future he’s not sure about.

What’s Scribefire?

Scribefire is of course the new name for PFF, the amazing Performancing for Firefox blog editor that lets you compose from your browser, then post to your blogs. Jed Brown had a big hand in how great PFF is, though apparently he’s gone awol. Chris Fincke, a former Netscape developer, has been signed on to work on Scribefire. And there’s already a new version of Scribefire that Nick says was quietly snuck out. There will be a Scribefire blog, though there’s not much there yet.

Why Scribefire?

I can’t tell you why the name change, though it has to do with the sale of Performancing. What I can tell you is that I personally feel it is one of the most productive blogging tools available, primarily because it has a split-pane option that lets you view a web page while you’re writing – all in the same browser window. I don’t know if the new Scribefire version will conflict with an existing installation of PFF, but I’ll look into it and report back.

Pro Blogging: Managing Your Work Schedule

Sharon Sarmiento writes over at 901am, 5 ways to work less and get more done online. This is good advice that may help you if you’re having a hard time managing your blogging schedule, whether you work full time at it or not. Particularly useful to me is point #1: restrict your work hours to increase efficiency. Kathy Sierra also talked about this over at the Headrush blog. If you’re trying to learn in limited time, check out hacking knowledge: 77 ways to learn faster, deeper, and better.

Now, I guess I’m bad for this. Since 2005, I’ve been putting in 10-17 hour days blogging. When I first shrank the time spent in late 2005, I found that I got my work done regardless. The trick is that I had to leave my workspace and go do other things. So sometimes I’d shoot off to the local Farmer’s Market or go see a movie or whatever. And I’d still get my scheduled blogging done (this was all my own work then). But when I started getting (ghost)blogging contracts in 2006, I started feeling guilty that I wasn’t spending more time for my clients. Big mistake. So I did, and I allowed all sorts of distractions, getting less done in more time. And so I ended up in the same 10-17 hr/day trap.

Part of the problem in work for yourself is that it’s easy to think you have the whole day to finish work. This is a mistake because your work will expand to fill that void, if you let it. You have to discipline yourself to structure your time – something I struggle with constantly.

Finally, as of two weeks ago, I got sick of blogging 7 days a week. How different was this when I was a workaholic in the “real” world? So I decided to shrink my work week to M-F, and leave Sat/Sundays for my own blogging. I just started this last week and it’s getting better — and I’m actually starting to get more work done than when I spent more time.

I experienced the same phenomenon when I designed and co-wrote a book on web programming in 2002. I was spending 16 hrs a day writing and feeling like I was getting nowhere – sometimes staring at the computer screen. When I told myself it was okay to go shopping, okay to see a movie, visit friends, etc., I found that not only did I get my quota of at least 3000 words/day of technical writing done, but I managed to do it in only 10 hrs per day, as well as fire off some programming and diagrams.

Change of scenery is especially important for creative endeavours such as writing, especially if you’re stagnating in ideas. I managed to produce 900 pages of text, code and diagrams in only 3 months, plus a month of editing. Had I not taken breaks, I doubt I would have produced that much content in that amount of time.

As for the here and now, my next step is to shrink down to an 8 hour/day schedule, then maybe 6 after that, so that I can start doing other activities that I’ve forgotten about. Like having a life outside blogging. I find that I have to try different scheduling and productivity techniques regularly, to see which method fits at the time. I’m great at planning and writing down what “needs to be done today”, as Sharon suggests, but when it comes to getting it all done, I often get distracted by the millions of administrative details that need to be taken care of.

But I am learning and at least trying, which ensure that I keep blogging as a profession. Save for a bit of overlap with Sharon’s tips, here are a few of my own tips:

  1. Change the medium.
    E.g., switch from typing on the computer to planning on paper, or vice versa.

  2. Change your viewpoint.
    If you have a laptop, try working in another room. Some experts suggest you don’t work in your bedrom, else insomnia may set in. But not everyone has the option.

  3. Change stimulus.
    Listen to some music for a while, or the TV. (But do turn the TV off when you start to write again, else the visuals may distract you and reduce productivity.) I find that watching comedy for at least an hour a day helps me loosen up my writing style. If I’m suffering the screaming blue meanies (seasonal depression), I’ll watch two hours or more.

  4. Change of scenery.
    Put down your laptop and go somewhere else, do something else. I’ll sometimes go walk in the forest with the dogs. Watching a movie at a theatre also very often helps me get creative.

  5. Change your schedule.
    If your current schedule isn’t working, try something different. I’m a night bird, but when I can manage it, I like to do most of my reading either late night (after 10 pm) or early in the morning. When I was working solely on my short stories and novellas in 2002, I found that if I wrote at least 500 words before 10 am, I could often write 3000 words that day. But if for whatever reason I put off doing any writing (even just garbage doodling) until after that time, I usually couldn’t get more than 1000 words. Similarly, I tend to be ultra productive on some Saturdays, if I first spend the morning and afternoon in pure reading, with no distractions.

Not all of these tips will work for everyone, so you have to discover it for yourself. What blogging productivity techniques do you use that work for you?

6 Ways to Build a Core Fan Base Any Rock Group Would Love

A hit on digg, reddit, or any of the vote-em-up sites, will bring traffic, but that traffic is worse than fickle. Most such visitors click in and out faster than we can measure. They don’t stop to read. They don’t look around. Some don’t stop even to glimpse or gander.

A great blog builds traffic from loyal readers who keep coming back. Those returning readers help to form the blog’s identity and give it a sense of place that is more than just a page of content. Get to know those readers and they become your core fans, and even better than that — they tell their friends that they have found the blog of blogs.

Blogs where readers take the time to what we write have one important trait in common — they make readers the center of the blog. The blog is designed and configured to support the readers’ experience. Readers aren’t asked to adjust for the blog. Instead they find a place they like and without thinking they begin to hang out there.

Core fans are those who travel hundreds of miles to see a rock group. Folks who hang out at our blogs are our core readers. They are the leaders and influencers. They build the community for the folks who visit next. Here are six ways to build that same core loyalty in the readers of your blog.

  1. Know your brand and your vision. Blog with a passion for your vision, and make sure that it has room for readers. Folks will take notice of your passion, and some who share it will become your greatest evangelists. Plan a role in your blog’s vision for your readers to have a part. Share your vision and ssk for their feedback –- get their ideas not their votes. No blog needs to be a popularity contest. Yet, it silly not to tap the information that our readers know about our blogs that we don’t.
  2. Promote your readers. Talk about them and what they do. Link out often to them, showing that you support their work too.
  3. Blog your best ideas. Being free with information and generous with the time you spend helping readers solve problems. A generous resource that has their interests in mind is a place where folks feel at home, even when they don’t have problems.
  4. Empower the leaders and influencers among your core fans. Offer natural leaders opportunities to help you plan. Collaborate with them on projects that involve their blogs and yours. Participate in ideas they suggest and offer ways to get their participation more deeply in workings of your blog. You might invite them to start a regular posting on a topic of their expertise or interview them in ways that show off their best skills. People who feel like they belong talk about the places that make them feel that way.
  5. Blog generously –- link love is for sharing. Link out on every post. Link for relationships, not just for traffic, and link to draw your blog closer to blogs like your own. Be generous. A link is really just a bit of code. Link blogs who will grow with you. You’ll get your Google juice soon enough.
  6. Prove that you are their greatest fan. Talk to your readers in the comments. Listen to what they have to say. People remember how you make them feel. Let them know that you’ll always choose for them before Google and before an easier way.

Put out the backstage pass and invite readers to hang out for a while. Smile at the folks who click and go, but concentrate on those core fans who’d drive 200 miles to see you play.

Liz Strauss

Six Ways to Build a Core Group of Fans to Start Community on Your Blog

A hit on digg, reddit, or any of the vote-em-up sites, will bring traffic, but that traffic is worse than fickle. Most such visitors click in and out faster than we can measure. They don’t stop to read. They don’t look around. Some don’t stop even to glimpse or gander.

A great blog builds traffic from loyal readers who keep coming back. Those returning readers help to form the blog’s identity and give it a sense of place that is more than just a page of content. Get to know those readers and they become your core fans, and even better than that — they tell their friends that they have found the blog of blogs.

Blogs where readers take the time to what we write have one important trait in common — they make readers the center of the blog. The blog is designed and configured to support the readers’ experience. Readers aren’t asked to adjust for the blog. Instead they find a place they like and without thinking they begin to hang out there.

Core fans are those who travel hundreds of miles to see a rock group. Folks who hang out at our blogs are our core readers. They are the leaders and influencers. They build the community for the folks who visit next. Here are six ways to build that same core loyalty in the readers of your blog.

  1. Know your brand and your vision. Blog with a passion for your vision, and make sure that it has room for readers. Folks will take notice of your passion, and some who share it will become your greatest evangelists. Plan a role in your blog’s vision for your readers to have a part. Share your vision and ssk for their feedback –- get their ideas not their votes. No blog needs to be a popularity contest. Yet, it silly not to tap the information that our readers know about our blogs that we don’t.
  2. Promote your readers. Talk about them and what they do. Link out often to them, showing that you support their work too.
  3. Blog your best ideas. Being free with information and generous with the time you spend helping readers solve problems. A generous resource that has their interests in mind is a place where folks feel at home, even when they don’t have problems.
  4. Empower the leaders and influencers among your core fans. Offer natural leaders opportunities to help you plan. Collaborate with them on projects that involve their blogs and yours. Participate in ideas they suggest and offer ways to get their participation more deeply in workings of your blog. You might invite them to start a regular posting on a topic of their expertise or interview them in ways that show off their best skills. People who feel like they belong talk about the places that make them feel that way.
  5. Blog generously –- link love is for sharing. Link out on every post. Link for relationships, not just for traffic, and link to draw your blog closer to blogs like your own. Be generous. A link is really just a bit of code. Link blogs who will grow with you. You’ll get your Google juice soon enough.
  6. Prove that you are their greatest fan. Talk to your readers in the comments. Listen to what they have to say. People remember how you make them feel. Let them know that you’ll always choose for them before Google and before an easier way.

Put out the welcome mat and invite readers to find a favorite chair to read for a while. Smile at the folks who click and go, but concentrrate on making a place your readers who want to hang out at your blog.

Liz Strauss

The Dangers Of Too Many Sites: Blogger’s Dilemma

So you’ve started too many blogs on too many topics all too soon, and you find you can’t maintain them all after all. And you’re loathe to let go of your babies, even the free-hosted ones. What do you do?

I’ve struggled with this problem since getting heavy into blogging nearly two years ago. I have way too many sites and can barely find writers for the sites that earn a bit of money, let alone for the ones that could earn money. I’ve toyed with what to do with them, since if I have them, I feel compelled to do something. Here are some options for your extra blogs. I’m giving them a very superficial treatment, as prep for future discussions.

  1. Ditch/sell them.
    Just focus on 2-3 blogs, with 3-5 posts per day per blog [updated]. Once they’re up and running, and you have a few guest/regular writers and regular readers as well as regular search engine traffic, you can expand to more blogs.

  2. Go zombie.
    Let the extra blogs stagnate. If you’re running PPC (Pay Per Click) ads, get rid of them on the zombie sites so that your over all CTR (Click Through Rate) doesn’t drop. [Use some other way to record traffic – such as metrics code.]

  3. Gift them.
    Maybe you know someone that can do something with the sites.

  4. Park them. Ditch the hosting and park the domains for free. I use Sedo.com, but there are lots of others. I haven’t received any ad clicks yet, but I can still see how much traffic each parked domain is getting. So if want to sell just the domain, I have better gauge for the price.
  5. Burn out.
    Be like me and try to do everything, burn out and get pissed that none of them are earning much money.

  6. Turn them into forums.
    There’s both free and paid forum script code out there. While a forum is not easy to get kickstarted, if you choose a popular topic and luck out with some good members, the forum could run itself. You might consider doing a revenue share with members as motivation for participate.

  7. Web 2.0 community.
    Slap on some suitable code and turn the site into a self-running web 2.0 community. Ning.com used to have an option where you could host a community on your own site.

  8. Turn them into resources.
    Not every site has to be a blog. Decide to sacrifice the regular readership (if any) and go for search engine traffic. Build out the site with 50-100 pages (not posts) of solid content focused on a niche and let it loose. You can actually use WordPress as a regular CMS (Content Management System) to publish a non-blog website. [I’ll get into that in a future article, but if I forget, someone please remind me.] The beauty of this solution, if you execute it right, is that you can create authority sites this way that don’t need to be updated as regularly as a blog. Could you manage 10 or more sites this way, as compared to 10 or more blogs?

This isn’t by any means a comprehensive list, and I haven’t yet provided a lot of detail. That’ll come, as I manage to remember. Got any suggestions for what to do with excess domains/ sites? Have sites or domains to sell? Go list them in Performancing’s Blogger Marketplace. Just remember: you can’t sell blogspot.com blogs.

Relationship Linking Part 1 — The Hows and Whys

Great bloggers are always on the lookout for opportunities to link to other blogs. Linking for traffic and incoming links is a good thing. Sometimes an idea offers more than one opportunity. In like manner, often a blogger has a choice of ideas to write about.

The very word linking implies a relationship, but I’m talking about more than a one-link stand. Long-term relationships with other bloggers offer support and visibilty that short-term, high-traffic links will probably never deliver.

Many bloggers begin their blogging day by reading feeds. They link to the article that sparks the idea they will be blogging about that day. If this is your style of blogging, take a moment to review your feeds. Add in blogs at your level that have the same values and quality standards as those you hold for your own blog. Remove all that don’t meet your standards. Have a 70% ratio of blogs at your level or one level higher — don’t read only A List blogs.

Sometimes we blog in the opposite direction. We write the article. Then we look for a links and quotes to support what we have said. Use the same standards to choose the links you’ll share with readers. Find the strongest example from a blog that you hope to have a relationship with as your blog grows.

Here’s how to put this relationship linking strategy in action.

  • Sort your feeds to include only blogs that have the same values and quality standards as those you hold for your own blog.
  • When you choose to use an idea from one of these, leave a comment to show that you were mindful and attending.
  • When you write your post, be mindful of the anchor text and words around the link you set for the trackback. Choose words that pique the interest if you can. Between the previous comment and the well-chosen anchor test, your trackback will be almost magnetic . . . the blogger who wrote the original will want to see what someone who is so interested in his article wrote. Now you have moved from being another blogger to being a person with a blog that bloger knows.

    • If you’ve chosen well, soon you and a new blogger friend will be exchanging post links when appropriate and sharing thoughts and ideas through the comment box, email, and even voice.

    As each of your blogs grows, you’ll both be stronger for the links. You’ll introduce that blogger to your readers, and the same will happen for you. This one long-term relatiosnship will add lasting value to your blog long after a one-shot link to a blog that has interesting content.

    Liz Strauss