PureBlogging

If you are either a new blogger just getting introduced to the blogosphere, or you’ve been blogging for a long time and want to gain more visibility and attention to your blog, I have provided a few tips to give your site a better audience.

• Learn SEO – SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is key for the placement and appearance of your site on search engines. There are specific rules and guidelines to placing your blog higher within search engine results pages. Want to know more about SEO? WebProWorld is a great resource and forum for everything SEO-wise, and a great place to ask SEO-related questions.
• Social Media/Networking – If you are involved in social media/networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, these are great places to help promote and advertise your blog. A trend that I have been seeing on Facebook is that users have been syncing their blog posts to the Facebook Notes section of their profile, and adding applications to their profile page like Blog It!
• RSS Feeds – RSS feeds are always beneficial to add to your blog. These allow people who read a lot of blog posts to view and organize them all in one place. This helps keep the user interested in the content of your blog.
• Article Directories – Submitting your articles to various article directories will help the publicity of your blog, and compete with other writers as your articles will be placed by category. If you would like to submit to a vast amount of directories in a small amount of time, you will need to subscribe to a submission service (e.g. SubmitterBot) that will automatically submit your article to different article directories for you.

Happy Blogging!

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I have provided this week’s cut of Thursday Links below:

Breaking The Rules Of Blogging and Succeeding

Is Your Neighbor On Twitter?

Are There Any Good Domains Left? The Importance of Keyword Search and Findability

We Can Learn From E-mail Spammers

Promoting Your Blog During The Holidays

Feedback is always welcomed!

Happy Blogging

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A few months ago, Chris wrote an article about some common blog-related Firefox add-ons in his post, “Five Firefox Faves For Blogging,” so I thought I would mention a few of mine that I find useful for my blogging habits that might also benefits yours too:

• TwitterFox – Notifies you of your friend’s tweets and messages in real-time on your status bar. You can also: check other Twitter accounts that you have, post tweets and review private messages sent to you. Great for the Twitter addict.
• HeadlinesTicker – If you are subscribed to a quantity of RSS feeds and want to see them all progressively, this may be the add-on that you are looking for. This add-on shows you your up-to-date RSS feeds in a “stock market ticker” fashion at the bottom of your Firefox window. You may also click on the name of the feed, and it will bring you straight to the RSS article.
• ScribeFire – This add-on allows you to write blog posts straight from your status bar. It also allows you to drag text in from another source, and post to various blog sites. Great for the blogger on the go.

Your feedback on these are surely welcomed.

Happy Blogging!

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For several days, I’ve been trying to spend a little time getting more organized to increase the efficiency of my work. What I have mostly been doing is reorganizing my Google Reader account.

As a writer/blogger, I have plenty of sources to draw from, and I subscribe to a ton of RSS feeds. I also write for a variety of different blogs/sites, and they’re not all in the exact same niche (plus I have other interests and subscriptions that don’t have much to do with my writing at all). I have been working for a while with pretty much a jumbled mess of all of these things. Don’t get me wrong. I had it organized to a certain extent. I had my work stuff separate from my non-work stuff, although as I take on new writing projects, the line on some of that begins to blur a bit.

But I have been breaking down my organizational structure as far as I can take it. For example, I have a folder dedicated to only blogging-related sources, that I will draw from for this blog in the future. This way, when I know it’s time to write something for PureBlogging.com, I can easily peruse this folder and find a topic that I wish to discuss (if I’m having writers block) or a reference that I can cite. I follow a similar pattern for my other writing projects.

I have also been going around seeking out new sources of information. The more sources the better as far as I’m concerned. The more information coming in, the more informed I am likely to be, which can only enhance my writing.

This is all probably common sense to a lot of you, and it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but it can be a bit time consuming. That’s just the thing. I think sometimes we get caught up in our work (and non-work lives for that matter) and don’t take the time to get organized, which in the long run will likely save you a lot of time and increase your productivity.

I’ve been doing it a little at a time, from day to day as to not take too big a chunk out of my day. When it’s all said and done, my Reader is going to be a well-oiled machine and my writing quantity and quality should increase as a product of that.

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Flock is a web browser, which is built on Mozilla Firefox, and it has just left beta. The draw to Flock as opposed to other browsers is its social integration, which includes that for MySpace, Facebook, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket and Twitter. Mike Sachoff talks a bit about it here.

what’s probably most intersting to bloggers though, is that Flock also includes a built-in blog editor, which is compatible with TypePad, Blogger, WordPress, Blogsome, LiveJournal, and Xanga (Flock recommends WordPress, TypePad or Blogger).

According to Flock:

Once configured, Flock remembers your username and password for one or more blog accounts. To confirm that your account information has been saved, open the accounts and services menu by clicking on the Display Accounts and Services button in the top bar. The button is represented by a picture of a key. If the account was added successfully, the account will appear in the My Accounts section of the Accounts and Services sidebar.

Your browser can also automatically publish blog posts to a notification service, such as Technorati. A notification service alerts people when you post a new blog.

I haven’t used Flock yet, but I have to admit it sounds kind of cool. They have more details about the blogging capabilities here.

What are your thoughts on Flock? Anybody used it for blogging?

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Big news from StumbleUpon today!

Not only has the social bookmarking site (or “personalized recommendation engine” as they call it) announced a new partnership program that will see sites implement internal stumblability, but they are rolling out a new design that will no longer require users to install the toolbar into their browsers.

What does this mean besides added convenience for users?

It means that many more people are likely to start using it, and that means a whole lot more content. It also means a whole lot more potential fuel for bloggers (as I mentioned, it’s one of my favorite tools for overcoming writer’s block).

I think both of these announcements are going to turn into something really big for StumbleUpon, and they are announcements that are long overdue (particularly the non-toolbar one).

For more about it, I wrote a piece on it for WebProNews this morning.

Popularity: 12% [?]