Blogging 101

[baddog]

Originally Posted by Boogie

Why would anyone trade links with a blog that's 24 hours old?

Thank you. I can't believe the number of trade requests I get from brand new blogs.

The hardest part about blogging is keeping it up, and as far as I am concerned, you need to show me that you have what it takes to keep posting every day. It isn't as easy as it sounds, trying to come up with new topics can be a real PITA.

[blind]

I have a question about WordPress option to change links like /?cat=3 etc. to /name-of-category/. It's an option called Permalinks in the admin area and when I change it to let say "/&category&/&postname&/" everything works fine, besides the Pages. When i click on Page created by me it keep giving me 404 error.

----------
Oke found out. It was a .htaccess issue

[docholly]

This is a GREAT post. Before the board crash of 2003, Boogie had posted he was starting a blog. I'd heard of them and really had read quite a few mostly by my indie camdollies.

Well because of Boogie's post, I now have 7 active blogs, on all different topics and despite all my efforts at other traffic sources, my #1 referrer to my main site is my Live Journal.

So thanks Boogie, for the original idea and for this great refresher course!!



PS: i def think MML should do a Boob-hat blog:

[blind]

So let everyone show us your blogs
What do you think?

[Boogie]

Hey Docholly.

Thank you so much for your praise! I'm flattered beyond belief. Email me via my sig and lets do exchanges on a couple of your blogs. Traffic trades and link pop never hurt

As for showing blogs, if you want to share, share! Obviously mine is in my sig so take a look!

[Boogie]

Your RSS Feed

If you used any of the major systems for creating your blog, you should already have an RSS feed (atom feed, xml or other) built right in.

What is RSS? RSS stands for Real Simple Sindication. Its a 'whats new' feed for your blog. What this allows is for other websites to see whats new at your site and quickly and easily incorporate whats in your RSS into their sites, whether it be their search engines, the reprinting blog, their news readers, or otherwise.

What it means, in the end, is more viewers for your blog and more eyes on your text.

Read your blogging programs documentation and find its RSS feed. Once you've done this you're going to want to find places to start submitting it to.

There are plenty of important places, most can be found by a google search, but here are just a few of the more common places.

technorati.com
bloglines.com
Feedster.com
Weblogs.com
syndic8.com
........

Well, fortunately, our good friends at Ping O Matic make it a little easier for you.

For the price of zero dollars and no link back, you can plug your feed into pingomatic and let it submit your rss feed to some of the biggest syndication sites on the internet.

Some require you to visit the site firsthand and submit it by yourself the first time, but after that, each time you update your site (and your rss feed) you can hop over to pingomatic and let them know that your feed is updated, to send the bots over, and syndicate your text.

This may or may not be something you'll want to do, but for most scenarios, this is a great way to get people writing your blog, especially if you're writing about interesting topics that are being searched for. Hungry eyes want information and these sites can lead those readers to you.

Now, one of the neater features of Wordpress and Typepad, is the built in autopinging system. If you're using one of these systems you're probably already automatically pinging pingomatic each time you publish to your blog.

If not, read your blogging softwares help documents and find out how easy it is to set this up automatically. I've never been able to set it up with blogger but you'll find that with most other scripts its fairly simple to achieve.

Blogger already pings weblogs.com

There are also hundreds of other sites out there on the net that are pingable, and perhaps this would be an interesting turn for your blogging career.

Perhaps you'd like to have a site that republishes peoples rss feeds and is pingable. There are many facets to the blogging industry, choose your space wisely!

Now that you've gotten some entries on your blog, and your RSS feed is syndicated, if you're writing interesting articles the readers should start showing up...

the syndication bots are aware of your new space on the web and are watching it with hungry mouths ready to regurgitate it into the monitors of the world....

and the search engines bots cant be far away.....

[blind]

Oke, my blog created yesterday is Gonzo Blog Now, question to Boggie
I submitted it to Pingomatic.com, what more can I do to get some bloggers traffic?

[Boogie]

Hi blind, that's the topic of tomorrow's topic.

I took a look at your blog. Its a nice start for sure. You'll run out of sponsor stuff though soon enough if you stick to just that one gonzo sponsor. There are definately quite a few others out there. Diversity always helps

Next section will be on the other places to get traffic for a blog.

[Boogie]

More Traffic

so now you're RSS feed is active. you've set it up at pingomatic and you've done some google and yahoo searches looking for the newest and hottest places to feed your feed.

You should be seeing some traffic now each time you update with your topic. IF you're using wordpress you should be seeing traffic from your categories tag via technorati. These hits are good and, like search engine hits, targeted. Nothing better than a pre filter.

One of the goals here is to be updating often enough and writing good enough content and having a solid enough site design that the surfers who find your site from these places remember it. Was it your catchy logo? Was it your sizzling content? Was it your unique writing style?

Whatever the reason, the important thing is to have something that makes these folks think to themselves "this site is worth viewing". The reason is twofold.

First, bookmarks are invaluable to a blog. The idea that someone will come in every day and read what you write, INCLUDING YOUR ADS, and click what you link to, INCLUDING YOUR SPONSORS.... well, that's pretty much the heart and soul of blogging.

The second reason is that your blog absolutely has to grow organically. Links have to appear in other blogs, not just as link exchanges, but simply because people like your content. If people are not linking to your articles, you'll need to change something soon, because this is the lifeblood of blogging.

There is little more success to be had in the game of blogging than when a big name blogger links to one of your articles and gives it the thumbs up, not because he was going to get a traffic or hardlink from you, but because they genuinely liked your articles.

The single most valuable traffic source for a blogger is other bloggers.

They're sending you over their trusted, bookmarked, and favorite readers because they like what you're doing in a day. That's pure gold.

One of the most confusing part for most bloggers is that, they dont realize that if all they do is link to offsite content, there is little to no reason for a blogger to link to their BLOG, rather than the content itself.

Sure, its great if some dude out there pics up your hosted gallery and sends a few hundred hits that way, but isnt it so much nicer if that content is on site and you get a few bookmarkers out of it in the process?

Another trick is to have weekly features. I do "movie monday" and "flash fridays" as a way to remind the viewer that each friday or monday when you come back there will be more of what brought you here in the first place. That's the kind of thing that really encourages bookmarks.

So, start working on creating valuable linkable content. Start working on getting eyes on your blog. Start finding other bloggers to read your content and if they like it, link it.

This will open the gateway into our next topic, link trades.

[blind]

Thanks for kind words Boogie, I'll work mostly with this Gonzo stuff (they have enough content in their members areas for some time). I can't still find out how this RSS thing works in WordPress...

[Boogie]

Traffic From Other Blogs

Now that youv'e started your site, put the finishing touches on your script, written some nice interesting entries, and published your RSS feed to the best of your ability, you should even have a trickle of hits coming in.

Now is the time to turn on the juice.

First off, its pretty unfair to ask for traffic trades if your traffic is currently zero. List your blog on your own feeder sites to get at least a little bit of traffic in there.

Alternatively if you dont have any of your own traffic to use, consider purchasing a small feed to get you started. (See one of any number of threads on this topic right here at GG and J)

Now its time to start working on link exchanges.

Sites like GG and Jim make it easy to exchange links with blogs. In fact I started a thread on this topic, pop on over and get started. Post your blog and find others interested in listing yours

Beyond that, contacting a webmaster through their websites most days can be taboo. But in the blogsphere, this is still common. Get your link up to their blog if you're interested, find their contact information and let them know you're interested in a swap. It doesnt hurt to write an entry about their blog.

Some blog scripts (hi word press) allow for "trackbacking". This is a very common thing to do within the blogsphere.

If you like someone's article enough to write about it in your own blog, you can add their trackback url to the proper spot in your script to autoping their script and let them know you're talking about them.

Most scripts that allow trackbacking notify the owner of the blog that a trackback attempt is taking place and they can moderate it if they wish.

If a trackback is approved a automatically created linkback to the site who sent the TB is created along with a small snippet of article. Want to see an example? Check out my article on Give Me Pink

If this is done in moderation, it is a welcome part of the blogging lifestyle. Many blogs do not allow trackbacking after they get to a certain size though due to spam. This is always a consideration when allowing trackbacking on your blogs! A good script with good moderating tools is very important if you want your blog to grow.

Top lists for adult sites are almost dead, but top lists for blogs are just starting to emerge. There are some decent ones that I use.

http://www.top-blogs.com/cgi-bin/rankem.cgi?id=boogie
http://blogs.freeadult100.com/in.php?ref=146

Both are providing a steady stream of traffic.... not just traffic but blogger traffic.

So, between top lists, search engines, blog link trades, and trackbacking, it shouldnt be long before you're blog has begun to grow organically. You should be seeing more url's in your stats each day, you should be seeing a constant traffic growth.

Remember its not uncommon to trade links with 20, 30 , 40 blogs in your niche. Its not uncommon to write about and link to other blogs (which they may do in return for yours).

Dont be afraid to send your traffic to a similar blog. If you're linking to other blogs you serve as a 'hub' of the blogsphere and can earn bookmarkers for that alone!

Now this is how I've built my traffic up. Gaining mass traffic was never exactly my area of expertise. I would love for some of you good folks to chime in with ideas of your own!

[Boogie]

Our next section, btw is the Question and Answer section.

If you've got questions you'd like me or anyone else to answer, ask away. I'll answer as many as I can in one long FAQ.

[blind]

Hmm i wonder how to put a toplist's button in my left column and how to write some welcome text above all blog entries.

[Boogie]

Link Exchanges

Now that you've created some articifial link exchanges, have done some trackbacks, and have written some other blogs lookin for link swaps your traffic should be fairly reasonable.

500 hits a day? 700? 1000?

Once you've seen a reasonable influx of daily hits from various sources you should now begin to recieve emails from other folks who are looking for link swaps... presuming you're using a pretty obvious way to conact yourself.

One of the hardest decisions is to pick which blogs you'll want to swap with. The link list/TGP mentality says 'anyone with traffic' but that's not always the case with blogging.

First off you'll want to get an diea about their traffic. Check their alexa.com rating.

Secondly you'll want to get an idea of their PR and google backlinks (as well as yahoo backlinks). Use the google toolbar for this, or, use some smart googling techniques. See how many pages they've got indexed in google. check how recent their cache is. Check how many backlinks are pointing towards their site.

All of these should be important factors in who you decide to swap with.

Most importantly, however, is that your link outs to blogs should be valuable content as well as hard link exchanges.

Lets say for example I'm running a blog on gay sex. Should I link to straight sites? Should I link to a Gonzo blog?

Generally its best to exchange with blogs that either are the same theme or are directly connected to your theme. For example if you're doing a 'babe blog', it would be natural to link to any 'solo girl' blogs, or even an amateur girls blog. Perhaps its not so far fetched of an idea to link to a hardcore blog either. But know where to draw the line.

This way you're swapped surfers are generally always going to be into the topic of both your blog and theirs. No reason to send lesbian hits over to a hardcore site most days, they're just going to hit the back button. You want the folks who are going to stick around, add you to their RSS reader, and click all of your links. That's where the real fun is

[Jim]

Boogie, Great Work
I can't belive I never really noticed this thread.

[Boogie]

Hey jim,

I'm very glad you like it. I figured it would add value to your board and I owed you guys that after a few years of a very valuable service. That plus up my post count and get me a buddy christ! woo



Honestly though I get asked a ton of questions about blogging so I figured it'd be good to lump it here. glad you like it bud.

[Jim]

If you don't mind, I will include this in the newsletter with a link to your site.

[Boogie]

that'd be great jim, thanks

[blind]

Boogie, could you explain how trackbacks work?
I'm trying to figure it out, but would be thankful if you write something more about it

[baddog]

make sure you cover the nofollow tag when discussing trackbacks

[baddog]

and congrats on the promotion

[Ms Naughty]

Boogie, great tutorials

[stuveltje]

i have to say great thread, my problem is only i am to lazy to post on my own blogs, i have believe 5 of those things and i oly post in one....yeah i know bad me

[JenC]

Baddog, I know what you meant......too much information being given out on the industry's best kept secret.

Shut up boogie!

Just teasin, I hope to help others in this forum too.

[Boogie]

JenC,

dont worry. I only covered the basics here to get people started making quality blogs! The real secrets are still up in the 'ol noggin

well for now anyways