PureBlogging

UPDATE: This contest is over… the post announcing the winners can be found here.

I think it’s time to have another little contest. What do you think?

As of today, 3335 comments have been posted on PureBlogging.com and we should hit the 3500 comment mark very soon so I thought I would give you 2 chances to earn a little cash and some Entrecard credits…

PART 1 (Comment # 3500):
Whoever posts comment # 3500 (excluding me, our staff writers, and trackbacks) will win $100 CASH via PayPal and 500 Entrecard credits. During this time, comments will be strictly moderated and short irrelevant comments will be deleted. That means no comments like “Hey, nice site.” or “Yeah, me too.”, or “You’re so cool!”, etc. Only comments that contribute to the discussion will be counted.

PART 2 (Spread the Word):
Anyone who writes a blog post about this contest will be entered into a random drawing for $100 CASH via PayPal and 500 Entrecard credits.

If you decide to enter Part 2 of the contest, please keep in mind that your post must be a new post and cannot be added to any other post. The post must contain a link back to PureBlogging, this post, and mention that I am giving away $100 CASH and 500 Entrecard Credits to the person who posts comment #3500 and anyone who blogs about the contest will be entered in a random drawing for another $100 CASH prize and 500 Entrecard credits.

Here is an example of what I am looking for:

PureBlogging.com is holding 2 separate cash giveaway contests this month. They are awarding $100 CASH and 500 Entrecard credits to whoever posts blog comment #3500. They are also randomly drawing a name for another $100 CASH plus 500 Entrecard credits and all you have to do to enter is blog about the contest. Visit PureBlogging.com for some great blogging tips and to find more information about how you can win.

This contest is open to everyone. It doesn’t matter where you are or what language your blog is in. You can enter one part of the contest or both. If you are entering part 2 of the contest, please make sure you email me the link to your blog post.

This contest is being held until we receive comment #3500, which should be sometime in the next two weeks. Good luck!

Update: PureBlogging.com staff writers are eligible to enter part 2 of the contest.

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This is the 2nd post in a two-part series about common challenges that bloggers face. If you haven’t already read the first part, you can find it here. This post will continue and complete the series with the additional challenges.

6. Consistency

The most successful blogs publish new posts at least somewhat consistently. They may not post on an exact schedule, but they also do not have large gaps without any new content. This can be a challenge for a lot of bloggers, as work, family, and life in general tend to “get in the way.”

One of the keys to overcoming the challenge of consistency is to treat your blog like a business. That’s essentially what it is, so why not give it the same respect that you would give a brick and mortar business? If you see your blog as a business and an asset, you’ll have less trouble finding the time to publish new posts consistently.

Last week I mentioned the need to work ahead and plan your time, and these are both helpful for overcoming this challenge as well. Publishing consistently is much easier if you always have a few spare blog posts ready to go in case you find yourself with no time to write new content. I always try to have something ready for times like these.

7. Getting Links from Other Blogs

Link building is important for a few reasons, including search engine rankings, click-through traffic, and increased exposure. Some bloggers are able to gain piles of new links while others struggle to get any.

Any easy way to get started with link building is by participating in blog carnivals. A blog carnival is essentially a group of links to blog posts on a specific topic published on a host blog. Anyone can submit a link for inclusion in the carnival, although the carnival organizer will make the decision on which links are included. In just a few minutes you can easily find some relevant carnivals and submit several links.

Another strategy that you will read about is linking out to other bloggers, in hopes that they will return the favor. Many new bloggers make the mistake of linking out to the biggest, most popular blogs and hoping that they will reciprocate. The chances of this happening are slim. You’ll be better off (at least as a new blogger) to link out to other small blogs, they’ll be much more likely to notice and appreciate the gesture.

Reciprocal linking gets a bad rap from a lot of bloggers and marketers today, but when done in moderation it can still be effective. While Google may penalize those who go overboard and exchange links with hundreds of sites, a smaller number of reciprocal links can do more good than harm. Find a few bloggers with a similar audience as yours and exchange blogroll links or links to specific blog posts.

Directory submissions are another easy way to gain some links. There are plenty of directories to submit to, and all it takes is a little bit of time (or you can visit a forum and hire someone to do it for you).

Creating linkbait and marketing it with social media is a method used successfully by many bloggers. For this to work you will need to create something interesting and compelling that will make others decide to link to you, and you’ll need to use social media websites to get your linkbait in front of as many people as possible.

8. Drawing Comments from Readers

Getting a lot of comments and valuable feedback is a goal of every blogger, but sometimes it feels like pulling teeth to get any comments. When new visitors arrive at your blog, the quantity and quality of comments will typically be a gauge for judging the type of community that your blog has developed.

One of the easiest ways to get more comments is to simply ask for them. Let readers know that you value their opinions and ask them what they think about the topics discussed in your blog posts. You may be surprised at how much of a difference a simple question can make.

Commenting on other blogs is another way to generate comments on your own blog. If you comment on small blogs in your niche, many of them will click through to your blog and return the favor. It’s also important to reply to the comments that readers leave so that you can develop more meaningful conversations and so that readers know you are paying attention to their feedback.

The topics that you write about can also have a big influence on the comments that you get. Posts that are on hot topics, breaking news, or controversial issues will usually draw significantly more comments than your average blog post. In addition to what you write about, the frequency can also be a contributing factor. If you publish posts very frequently, readers may not have as much time to comment on any one post, and as a result they’ll all get fewer comments.

9. First Exposure

Often times the most difficult part of blogging is getting the initial exposure that is needed to get the blog successfully off the ground. Even if you are creating very high quality content, it really doesn’t make of difference if there is no one to read it.

Fortunately, there are a number of different ways to gain some much needed exposure for your new blog. From my experience, writing guest posts for other blogs is one of the best things you can do. When I was new to blogging this was one of my most effective methods for getting my writing in front of others and networking with other bloggers.

Additionally, social media can provide a great deal of traffic for you, although it will be lower quality than most other types of traffic. For new bloggers, StumbleUpon is a great place to start. With SU great content will get noticed even if you do not have a lot of “friends” or an established profile.

10. Continual Learning

As a blogger you will face the challenge to be continually learning and developing. Be sure to allow time to read other blogs in your niche and find great content with social media. Many bloggers find themselves subscribing to hundreds of other blogs, which of course limits how many they can actually read and digest. Rather than subscribing to a huge number of blogs and always flipping through your feed reader without giving much attention to any of the posts, why not subscribe to a smaller number of blogs and focus on those that you will learn the most from?

In addition to learning by reading other blogs, you can also learn a lot through the posts that you write for your own blog. Be sure to choose some topics that will challenge and stretch you. Don’t settle for covering only basic topics that you could write about in your sleep. The writing and research process is a great learning tool.

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Last week I put up a link to my DIY Moleskine PDA video. Part of the process, of course, was finding a good site to host the video. Here are the three finalists.

YouTube. Ladies love him, men want to be his friend, give a big Las Vegas welcome to a dear old friend of mine, you all know his name: YouTube. (Wild sustained applause.) Truth be told, I don’t like YouTube much. It’s like Sears — first on the scene, it was a respected powerhouse for many years, and still commands pretty strong name recognition. But at the end of the day, I’d rather stick with its competitors.

What’s great about YouTube is that people spend a lot of time on it, just looking at video after video, so you’re guaranteed some views of your work simply by the law of averages. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into people visiting your site; they may be more likely to simply check out the next suggested video.

YouTube’s performance is also finicky to a degree that’s pretty unacceptable, considering how well its competitors work and the general state of technology today. I’d wager that I’ve had to reload about half of all the YT pages I’ve looked at, simply because the media player refused to load the video all the way. I expect that from some crappy embedded Yahoo! player; I can’t believe the granddaddy of all Web video doesn’t have a better interface. When it comes to posting videos, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that someone might not be able to watch the whole thing.

Metacafe. Metacafe is sort of the opposite of YouTube, with very little name recognition but a much more dependable interface. I feel like users probably associate Metacafe with cheesy, ebaumsworld-esque videos of guys in banana suits setting themselves on fire, and thus don’t give it the propers it deserves.

But MC has a great user interface and relatively quick upload time. The drawback is that it takes a bit longer for your video to show up online than if you use YouTube, where it pretty much shows up moments after it finishes uploading. The wait isn’t terribly long, but if you’re liveblogging and need to get something up NOW, you might run into trouble.

Revver. The best thing about Revver is that allows you to monetize your video based on the number of views it gets. I’ve never used Revver, so I’d be interested to hear about anyone’s experience with it.

Revver’s page seems a little light on details as to how exactly its users get paid. And the hardest part of Revver — speaking from a creator’s standpoint — is that Revver’s panel of admins has to approve your video… and approval can take a few days. I found this out a little too late; last week’s video was my first foray into Revver territory, and my deadline would have approached faster than the admins’ approval. This is a great security measure from Revver’s point of view, and I have no arguments with it, but it does require the artist to do a little creative planning.

Oh, and embedding any of these on your blog will require a plug-in based on your blogging platform and video host… just a reminder.

In the end, I went with Metacafe, simply because of the great interface. I also posted to YouTube, since I already had an account there, but overall I think Metacafe will be my #1 choice for future videoblogs.

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When I first started reading blogs, I used to spend time visiting each one every day just to see what was new. It was fun, but as I got busier and started reading more blogs, it soon became impractical. Too many blogs and too little time left me feeling overwhelmed by the task of keeping up with the bloggers. Then I discovered RSS feeds. RSS – really simple syndication, rich site summary, RDF site summary. Whatever you want to call it, those three letters and the little orange and white symbol are the answer for every busy blogger. But there’s one decision left – what’s the best way to access those feeds? It’s a choice of two – either you get your RSS updates by email, or you get them in a reader.

RSS By Email

I can see several benefits of subscribing to RSS by email. Instead of being confronted with hundreds of posts in a reader, you can get them one at a time as they happen. With some email subscription services, you can choose a daily update which sends a single email with all the posts from the blogs you are tracking. I still get an email from Feedblitz, which I used before Feedburner offered its own email subscription service. It gives me the latest postings from a number of sites.

You can’t beat having the text in front of you as soon as you’re ready to read it. In most cases, it is beautifully and attractively laid out and a pleasure to read. So, why don’t I use email subscriptions any more? One reason is that I don’t want on the fly updates in my inbox. I get enough email as it is, thank you very much, so adding daily updates – or even weekly updates – from the 100+ blogs that I track would give me far too much extra reading to do.

Feed Readers

Instead, I prefer to use a feed reader. Until recently, my reader of choice was Google Reader. What I liked about it was that I could divide the blogs I was tracking by category. I had a category for writing blogs, blogging blogs, friends’ blogs and my own blogs (just so I could see how they look to others). I could see at a glance how many new posts there were, and if I was pressed for time I could select the categories that seemed most important. Even better, I could star content that I wanted to come back to.

I’m now doing much the same thing, but I’m using Netvibes. That’s because I finally decided that an internet start page made sense, and I imported all my feeds into it. I’ve divided the blogs into various tabs, so I can get an at-a-glance view of what’s been updated on what topics. I’ve added a tab for job feeds, and another for places where I post, so that I can follow what’s happening on those blogs and contribute to them. It works well.

Dealing With Information Overload

I like using a reader because my inbox is not flooded. Of course, it doesn’t protect me from information overload. I still have to face updates on the blogs that I follow. However, with several blogs on a page, it’s easy for me to skim the page and see which headlines catch my eye. I can skip over the posts with boring titles, or about topics which don’t interest me and go straight for the ones which do. I can save posts for later so that I can use them in a roundup or share them through social networking. I’ve found it an efficient way to deal with my feeds, though it still isn’t perfect.

It may be a mistake to ask one program to do everything, so I could still be in the market for a feed reader with lots of features. Do you prefer email or a reader to keep up with your RSS subscriptions, and why? And if you use a reader, what’s your top pick?

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Bloggers who are successful at their jobs are people who are good at networking. The pure and simple fact is that blogging requires being able to market your writing to a growing readership. In many cases, your readers are going to be other bloggers. Because of this, it’s a good idea to start putting yourself in the places where other bloggers are located.

Sure, you’re going to do a lot of your networking online through blog comments and social networking sites. But you should also work on meeting bloggers in the real world. Bloggers who attend conventions and expos give themselves the opportunity to meet a number of other active bloggers while simultaneously learning new blogging skills that can improve their own work.

Here are some of the top conventions and events that bloggers may consider booking a ticket to attend this year:

• SOBCon08. Chicago, May 2-4, 2008. This blog convention is hosted by awesome blogger Liz Strauss. In addition to Liz, speakers will include representatives of Technorati and MyBlogLog.
• Blog World and New Media Expo. Las Vegas, September 20-21, 2008. This blog convention is one of the most well-known. It’s not just good for bloggers but also for vloggers, podcasters and social networking divas.
• Web 2.0 Expo. Multiple dates and locations. This one is not specifically for bloggers but more for people who are interested in design and development on the web. Bloggers can certainly benefit.
• SMX Social Media, Long Beach, April 22-23, 2008. Bloggers who are interested in learning internet marketing skills may find that this is a good place to get started.
• Social Networking Conference. Multiple dates and locations. This is an interesting one because it’s got a big emphasis on online dating. However, there are some social networking skills to be learned here and there are certainly people in the industry to meet. It never hurts to know more folks with good social networking skills!

Of course, you might not have an interest in traveling to one of the cities that hosts a blog expo. An interesting alternative would be to host a blog event of your own. A small one-day event isn’t difficult to set up and gives you a chance to market yourself as an expert in blogging. It requires that you put some effort into organizing other local bloggers but that effort will pay off in an automatic network of local connections.

Question of the Day: What blog events have you attended and how have they impacted your blog?

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I came across an interesting article at SEOmoz.org the other day that talked about the top 35 factors that SEO experts believe Google uses in it’s page rank algorithm.  While no one is exactly sure how Google ranks pages (most experts seem to think that there are over 200 factors in all), there is some agreement on many of the major factors that influence that ranking.  If getting a Google ranking is something you are hoping to accomplish for your blog, this knowledge is gold.

When trying to figure out what counted for and what counted against your site, each expert gave the factor a rank between 1 and 5, with 1 representing low or no influence, and 5 being high influence.  The results were averaged to come up with the final score.

What Google Loves

1.) Keyword Use in Title Tag (Score: 4.9) – This was an almost unanimous choice as the number one factor.  If you want your site to rank well for your chosen keyword, you better get those keywords into your pages title.  If you really want to optimize this, make sure that you not only use the words, but use them grouped like you think people will be searching for them.  If your blog is about Facebook Widgets, use the phrase that way, not “Widgets for Facebook”  You may still get some love from Google when you use the words in the wrong order, but not nearly as much.

2.) Anchor Text of Inbound Link (Score: 4,4) – What this means is that while inbound links influence your pages ranking, the biggest boost will come from getting inbound links that contain your keyword phrase.  A link with the “Facebook Widgets” will mean more valuable than a link from “Facebook Add-ons.”

3.) Global Link Popularity of Site (Score: 4.4) – If you want to rise in the rankings, you have to make friends that
are more influential than you are.  You will never soar if you are tied to a rock.  I’m not exactly sure how you can program an ego into an algorithm, but Google seems to have found a way.  If it likes a page, it expects you to like that page as well.  And if a page that Google thinks highly of likes you, then Google will assume you must have something going for you.

4.)  Age of Site (Score: 4.1) – For Google’s purposes, your sites age is when Google first started indexing the content.  When you are brand new, you will spend a little time in the sandbox before Google lets you go out and play with the other kids.  There seems to be a belief that while Google has always factored age into it’s rankings, this has become more of a factor over the past couple of years.

5.) Link Popularity within the Site (Score: 4.0) – I’ve always heard that linking to yourself is important, but this is a little more specific.  What this means is that if a lot of your internal links point to one page, that page will get more of a boost.  This gives you the ability to focus your articles toward a particular phrase, and consistently linking back to an anchor page that you want to rank well on Google.

What Google Hates

1.) Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots (Score: 3.8) – Not only does Google want it’s bots to be able to see your page, it wants to be able to see it every time it looks.  When the bot looks and your page isn’t there, you will drop in the rankings.  If you have used code that instructs bots how to look at your page, you want to make sure that it is formatted correctly, and that Google can see what you want it to see.

2.) Content is Very Similar or Duplicate of Content Already in the Index (Score: 3.6) – Write original content for everything you post on the internet.  I’m not talking about copying material from someone else’s site (if you do that, you deserve to dwell in the Google basement).  I am talking about not posting your article in more than one place.  I don’t care how good you think the piece is, it only gets posted one time!

3.) External Links are of Low Quality (Score: 3.6) – I wrote before about Google liking links from sites that rank higher than yours.  This is the other side of that coin.  Too many links from sites that rank lower than you will drag you down.  When doing link exchanges, make sure you are targeting quality sites, and not just agreeing to tie yourself to anyone who comes along.  The better the link quality, the more your ranking will be helped

4.) Participation in Link Schemes (Score: 3.3) – There are a lot of “link farms” and “buy-a-link” sites that tell you that the more links you get, the more Google likes you.  That is true for quality links, but Google doesn’t really seem to care a whole lot for massive pages that are just a collection of outbound links.  In fact Google dislikes them so much that it will ding your rankings if you take part in one of these programs.

5.) Duplicate Title or Meta Tags on Many Pages (Score: 3.3) – Give each of your pages a unique name.  If your permalink settings title the page the same as the title of your blog post, make sure each post has a unique name.  Don’t title every post “Facebook Widgets.”  Show a little creativity (after all, you are a writer).  You can still use your keyword phrase as much as possible, but do it with some variety: “Track Friends with Facebook Widgets” or “Facebook Widgets for Twitter.”  I think you get the point.

Google’s goal is to look for relevant content on the web.  If you are focused on producing a quality web site, and you make friends with other quality web sites, you’ll do alright with Google.  As soon as you start trying to scam the system, or running tricks to increase your rankings, you run the risk making Google angry, and you won’t like Google when it gets angry.

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