Advertising

In my opinion, one of the most interesting aspects of analytical software such as Pmetrics would have to be the referral logs. Referral logs store important data which allows you to determine how someone happens to come across your web site. So far, I’ve seen a wide assortment of referrals, mostly from some variation of Google. But I’ve also had the privilege to discover a referral site called Link River where someone who had an account within that site was sharing my content across the network. I think that would make any blogger feel pretty good.

Outside of the usual suspects, I’ve only come across a few interesting and unique ways of stumbling across my blog. For instance, not too long ago, I received a referral from the StumbleUpon demo page rather than the site itself. Another site I discovered through my referrals called EasySearch is a search engine based in the U.K. which takes the best of the Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask.com search engines and puts them together to be accessed from one location.

Those are just some of the places I’ve discovered thanks to my referral logs. Referrals serve as an excellent source of information in terms of figuring out where your audience is hanging out and sharing your content amongst themselves.

Regardless if you use Pmetrics or not, what are some of the coolest or most unique ways in which a browser has stumbled across your blog?

I was pretty impressed to see that RocketBoom, the daily video blog which was initially hosted by Amanda Cogdon has obtained a 7 figure distribution and ad sales deal with Sony Pictures Television. This deal will place RocketBoom all over the map as the show will be distributed through Crackle, Sony’s own video site as well as the PS3, PSP, and Bravia I-Link TVs.

Congrats to RocketBoom and Andrew Baron.

To be honest, I’ve never really enjoyed watching RocketBoom. Asides from that, I wonder if this has given hope to video bloggers across the web?

What do you think of this deal?

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.

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)

Here is my favorite method for increasing your writing speed without sacrificing quality. In fact, this method may actually help you create higher quality, more organized, better flowing posts.

Many bloggers don’t realize writing is a two step process.

1. Creating
2. Editing

Both are needed to create a quality piece of content. However, if you try to do both at the same time, you’ll get bogged down. Your mind is less efficient when it’s multitasking.

If you think about it, creating and editing are quite different tasks.

The creating process is where you come up with raw ideas. This often happens in the weirdest moments. You could be eating, driving, or taking a shower when you think of a blog post you think your audience would love.

In this step, the most important thing to aim for is quantity not quality. All the ideas you think of may not be that great. If you’ve ever thought of a good idea and then started writing and realized it wasn’t so good, you know what I’m talking about. Therefore, come up with a lot of ideas for your post before moving on.

You’ll evaluate and organize your ideas during the editing stage. For now, you just want a lot of raw content to work with. The more content, the better.

The editing process is where you prune, organize, and reword your ideas to create a quality post.

In this step, delete ideas that don’t support your main point. Prune sentences with unnecessary words. Rephrase unclear sentences. Spell and grammar check. Add other ideas as they come to mind. And organize the post so it flows logically.

Practical Ways of Separating the Two Steps

Write a sh**ty first draft. Here’s mine for this blog post. Read this classic essay by Anne Lamott. She destroys the myth that world class writers create perfect first drafts. She writes:

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really sh**ty first drafts.

Separate yourself into two identities, one is the idea generator and one is the editor. Every time you feel like editing during the creating step, tell the editor not to interrupt the idea generator until he’s finished generating ideas.

Don’t hit the backspace or delete key until you write at least 400 words.

Close your eyes or cover the screen while you type. It’s hard to edit when you can’t see the words 🙂

Write your blog post in list format. It doesn’t even need to have complete sentences. Just a list. Once you’ve got a lot of list items, then start fleshing out complete sentences and editing.

Brainstorm. Get a pen and paper and write down anything that comes to mind about your post – phrases, sentences, bullet points. Fill at least half the page before editing.

Why This Method Works

As with many things, the most important thing is to get started.

By putting the editing process off until you have some raw content, you force yourself to take that small step of writing the first couple of words. You may not even use those words but those words will give you momentum to write more words. And then, those words lead to more words.

Soon, you’re in the zone and the words are flowing more naturally. Most importantly, you’ll have enough content to make the editing step worthwhile.

The ScribeFire FireFox extension which enables you to blog from your browser has been updated to version 2.3.

New Features

• Added “Live Preview” feature: see how your post will look on your blog before you publish it.
• Added support for scheduling posts to Blogger
• New “Publish” dialog to remove some confusion about publishing as edit/draft/page/etc.
• Source editor now uses fixed-width font.
• Added a “Preview” button next to the “Publish” button.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug related to categories with commas in their names
• Fixed a bug related to categories with ampersands in their names
• Fixed bug where Quickblogging toolbar cannot be recovered
• Fixed bug in File Upload that was restricting upload to images only.
• Pressing “Tab” while in the source editor now inserts a tab.

Other

• Fixed an incorrect translation of “Post as edit” in the German locale
• Wrote new installations scripts for SeaMonkey to fix a bug related to upgrading.

You can install the new version by visiting the official ScribeFire website, downloading and then installing the new update or, if you have ScribeFire already installed, FireFox should notify you of the update and provide a method of automatically installing it.

If you are unsure as to what ScribeFire is, check out my screencast review as it provides a walkthrough of what this extension is capable of doing.

I remember Chris Garret mentioning in the Hive that if you want to add on to your social networks or get with the IN crowd, that it’s best to hang out at the watering holes where your audience is. Traffikd has published a great post which highlights 10 different niche social news sites that you should keep note of. These sites include:

Design Float – For Designers of course
Health Ranker – For health related content
Kritsy – A social site targeted towards women.

Be sure to check out their article for the rest of the list. As Traffikd mentions, don’t submit content to these sites if it’s not related. You are doing that social news site and yourself a dis-service.

Last but not least, I just discovered another gem where Traffikd has a list of 400 different Social Media/Networking sites all categorized for your submitting pleasure. If you happen to gain any measurable success using any of those sites listed, come back and let us know about them!