blogging tips

Assorted Blog Tip Goodness For Bloggers

7 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Google, heatmaps, comments and spiders, oh my! There’s so much to know when you’re a blogger, so I keep putting together some of the little tips I am picking up to share with you. Blogger users take note, I have a couple of great ones for you here.

Have You Googled Your Blog Lately?

In order to get specific results for your blog put the following into the search box – site:www.snoskred.org – just replace the www.snoskred.org with your site URL.

If you want to search your own site only, you can also use Advanced Search and put your site in where it says Domain – Only return results from the site or domain. I use this all the time when looking for past things I wrote here.

For those of us getting frustrated with Technorati, it may be time to consider a Google search widget instead. I’m going to be checking further into this later today and may put a how to together for ya’all for future blogging tip goodness posts..

Find Out What Your Readers Click On

I read Create a Heatmap of Where Readers Click on Your Blog at Problogger and thought it might be something interesting to try. I put it on less than 24 hours ago and it is already showing me interesting information.

If you want to know more about your blog readers, this is an absolute must do. It is also really simple to do – and completely free!

Don’t Forget

I added a new section to my sidebar called Bloggers Are Helpful. It contains some of the best articles I have found about blogging. It is also constantly updated and in the weekly wrap up I will let you know what new articles have been added to it over the week.

If you have a helpful article which should appear in Bloggers Are Helpful, please email me or leave a comment linking to your article.

Blogger Issues.

Comments Policy.

Did you know you can add your comments policy to Blogger? It will show up just above the box where people enter their comments. Here’s a quick screenshot guide on how to do it.

From your Blogger Dashboard – click on settings.

settings

Click on Comments.

comments

Find the box that looks like this.

comments2

Type your comments policy into the box – and don’t forget to click save when you’re done!

save

Now when your blog readers want to comment, they will see what you typed into the box directly above the comments box. It will look like this –

page

Or perhaps like this if you have your comments appear in a pop up box.

popup

With Blogger you have a choice between a pop up comments box and a comments page – I prefer the comments page myself, which do you prefer as a commenter? and if you want your comments to be do follow I believe you can’t use the popup box. I’m not 100% sure on that one – anyone?

Where’s That Spider?

You may have read this post by Sephy where he talks about Blogger messing with the search engines. If you did not and you are using blogger, you need to know that Blogger has added a robots.txt file to your blog – without asking you, and without giving you any options of changing it.

What is a robots.txt? It simply tells the search spiders what to look at and what to ignore.

Blogger users are not able to submit a sitemap to Google – something ALL other bloggers can do, because it has to be on your site itself in .xml format and blogger does not allow you to upload .xml files to your blog. Blogger is telling the search spiders to read my feed as my sitemap. That means my feed read becomes my site map. Not an ideal situation at all. :(

Bloggers on WordPress and some of the other blogging platforms have a huge advantage over us – they can tell Google what pages to look at, what pages to ignore, and also get their labels listed.

Get Smart

Therefore we Blogger users will need to become smarter about how we do things. That is what the Snoskred Is section is about.

I only had 297 of my 500 posts on google for some strange reason. Some of my much older posts which I used to get hits for on certain search terms seemed to stop getting those hits.

What I chose to do was take the time to go back through my posts and make a links list with keywords appropriate to the post. I put it in my sidebar. It is long and nobody may ever actually look at it other than the spiders. However I do hope that my readers find it useful as well, if they want to know more about me it’s pretty much all there.

You may want to consider doing something similar yourself. It’s your blog. :) At the very least my thought is that you should have your favourite 10 posts available in your sidebar for your readers to check out and get to know more about you.

Consider WordPress.

I am working on learning a bit about WordPress. I have it installed on another domain I own, and Sephy and I are just messing about with it, learning how it works.

I had been getting mixed messages on WordPress. Some people told me WordPress was difficult to use and for more technical type people. Some people told me it was the best thing since sliced bread. Having now messed about with it I can say both are true. It does require some technical knowledge, but it is also is the best thing since sliced bread.

Blogger is great for most bloggers, I completely agree with that. It is easy, simple to use and you can now get templates for Blogger that look fantastic.

For those of us who want a little more control – who want to be in charge – who don’t want Blogger making decisions on their behalf without asking them – WordPress may be the better option. Will I be moving this blog to WordPress? Probably not at the moment, but maybe in the future. I am going to use WordPress for the business blog, though.

blog template, blogging tips, commenting on blogs, how to guides, wordpress

Am I A Good Blogger?

16 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Kirsten from All About Me – And Then Some asked many interesting questions yesterday in her post Am I A Good Blogger? and it’s such an important topic that I felt a comment would not do justice to it. So today I am going to take on two of the important questions we bloggers should ask ourselves. Do I buy my own domain? What about social networking?

Do I Buy My Own Domain?

Absofreakinglutely! Kirsten is on Blogger, which makes it easy to use your own domain yet continue to enjoy all the benefits of using Blogger. There are many reasons why you need your own domain and here are some of the important ones –

– Wherever you go, there you are. People will always know exactly where to find you.
– You build links back to your blogspot domain – you could be building them to your domain name.
– You have absolutely no control over what the people at Blogger do.- If Blogger went haywire – would any of the people who read you regularly know how to find you again? If you have your own domain they can easily find you.
– If someone hacked into your blog, you would be able to redirect your domain to the new blog (this happens a lot more than people realise, don’t think it’s impossible) and people could still find you.
– You may decide later to change your blogging platform to WordPress, or create a portal instead of a blog (tinyportal is my favourite and one I have looked at using in the past) or do one of a million things, and by having links to your domain rather than a blogspot URL, you get a jumpstart on page rank, on links to you, etc..
– It gives you flexibility – you can decide to move, or not
– either way you’re *able* to make these decisions yourself.
– If you decide to take your blog down for whatever reasons you can leave a simple page with instructions on how to contact you.
– You cannot get your own Alexa ranking on a blogspot domain. You automatically get Blogger’s ranking. For the bloggers who do want to earn some money from blogging, an Alexa rank is a bit important. ;) It is one of the things advertisers look at. (Update – check the comments, you can have an alexa ranking on blogspot but you have to have a large-ish amount of traffic to get it, Thanks Meg!)

The only time you should not use your own domain is if you have been blogging for a very long time on the one you have now and have high rankings on that blog. Even then I would STILL consider it.

Now a few quick myths we need to get out of the way re owning your own domain name.

It’s Expensive.

No, it’s not. You can buy a .com domain for as little as $8.95USD a year – and some domains are even cheaper. I do recommend that you also purchase the privacy protection for $6.99USD per year – that means nobody knows your real name, address, phone number, just by looking up your whois information – worth a little extra money! For less than $16 you’re all set. We use Go Daddy for all our domains – all five of them. Meg from Dipping Into The Blogpond also wrote a great post about getting your own domain name and debunking the myths of .au domain names.

You Need Hosting.

No, you don’t. With Blogger all you need is the domain name. Blogger is going to do all the hosting for you. Later down the track, if you wanted to go to WordPress you may need to consider hosting – but Go Daddy provides hosting for as little as $2.99 a month and there are many excellent hosting packages out there on the internet.

It’s Not Worth Doing Now.

Any blogger who has moved from a blogspot domain to their own domain will tell you – the sooner you do it, the better. Even if you’re just blogging as a hobby you may change your mind about that later – and then have to go to all the effort of re-establishing page rank (which you may well have built to 6 or even higher) and Alexa rankings and backlinks and blogrolls etc.

When I changed from the blogspot domain, Sephy had just done it weeks before me, and he already had a list of the sites I needed to change my URL on. The list was long but it was a fast job and only took me an hour or so. However all the backlinks I lost.. whoa. I had the old domain on a 101 rating with Technorati. My new site was a 0. I had a google page rank of 4. My new site was (and still is) a 0. It was painful. I made the change on the 17th of July and my new domain name is up to a 78 on Technorati – without me having the time to devote to letting people know I’d moved by visiting their blogs personally. It’s still on my to do list. ;) The longer you leave it, the more painful it will be.

Blogging Is Just A Hobby.

Can you name one other hobby of yours that you can do completely for free? All my hobbies cost something. I can’t think of one hobby I do that I haven’t had to put some cash towards.

I’m Not Blogging For Money.

I’m not painting for money. I’m not reading for money. I’m not playing computer games for money. I’m not gardening for money. I’m not watching DVD’s for money. I’ve easily spent 3 times what I’ve spent on buying my own domain on all of the above – sometimes 30 times.

What About Social Networking?

Kirsten said – I don’t have time to dedicate to heavy social networking… If I did I’m sure I’d have more readers than I do now.

The only social networking tool that draws large amounts of traffic is probably StumbleUpon – Digg is not quite the same thing, that’s more a news and article network. The others are nice, and often leave pretty pictures in your sidebar but realistically don’t bring large amounts of traffic in the way StumbleUpon can. So in my opinion, StumbleUpon is an absolute MUST – I’ll talk more about StumbleUpon in a minute. I do still recommend you sign up to a couple of the networks, as follows.

Bumpzee –

Bumpzee is basically a series of blog communities. Each community has an RSS feed. That means whenever you post, your blog post goes out to a lot of people. If you can make your title and first 250 words eyecatching enough, you will get some traffic from it. However even better you will find that some absolutely legendary people within these communities – and you will build excellent relationships.

It does not require a lot of time to join Bumpzee, and once you have joined you can throw the community feeds into your reader. They do generate a fair bit of posting traffic but as time goes by you will figure out which blogs you can live without, and add your favourites into your reader on their own.

MyBlogLog –

One thing I love about MyBlogLog is the fact that it autoadds you to a bloggers community once you have visited their site 10 times. So just by cruising around the blogs you love, you are social networking too. I log in there once a week and add any new friends to my friends list, this takes maybe 5 minutes. They also have some great stats which come for free when you’re a member – outclicks is really useful for me.

BlogCatalog –

Very similar to MyBlogLog. I think if you have one you should have both, but maybe that’s just me. It doesn’t take much effort to sign up at these, and very little effort to maintain them unless you *want* to put more effort in. I wish BlogCatalog did the autoadding thing, too. (Jonathan, BlogCatalog’s new blogger liason team member, are you reading this?)

Make An Impression –

With all three of the above communities, you can put the little widgets in your sidebar and see when people have dropped by on sight. I personally love that. Make sure you get yourself a unique and eyecatching avatar – preferably an image you have taken yourself if possible because then it is less likely it will be copied. Use the same avatar on *all* social networking sites. People will click on your avatar to find out more about you, and they often end up at your blog. It’s not a huge amount of traffic but it is one way to find new readers.

StumbleUpon

The main thing you need to do for StumbleUpon is download a toolbar in order to use it. The toolbar is excellent. It contains everything you need in order to stumble. I’m not going to write a guide on how to stumble here, because Meg already did that much better than I can. ;) Beginners Guide To StumbleUpon – You do not need to absorb all the information in the guide at once. Bookmark the article, and go back to it once a week, learn something new. I still keep going back to it.

I stumble sometimes 5-10 minutes a week. If I find myself at an internet loose end, I tend to stumble rather than do anything else. Sometimes that happens – you’ve read everything in your feed reader, you’ve checked the news sites, youve done everything you wanted to do, and now you’re like.. hmm.. the internet is BORING. Then you see the toolbar, and you remember – no it isn’t! and you hit the stumble button.

The even better thing about stumbling is, you can give a blogger a bit of a traffic burst when they blog something you really enjoy – and you can do this with just ONE click. They deserve that – and they will appreciate it and thank you for it.

You *should* make sure to tag anything you stumble – take a couple of moments to do this and make sure to put it in all appropriate categories. A post like this for example would belong in blogs, internet, blogger. There’s a drop down box, adding tags is simple. Meg had to send me an email to let me know that one. ;) hehe thanks Meg!

So..

You don’t have to want to be an “A list” blogger to make the most of your blogging by having your own domain name. You just have to want to be the best blogger you can be. A lot of people don’t read blogs about blogging and when they *do* read blogs about blogging they feel a bit offended – I haven’t done that, I don’t need to do that, etc. You have to take the best bits of what the blogs about blogging are saying, the bits you can use, the bits that apply to you, the tips you want to try, and let the rest go. ;) I’m not going to just follow one persons advice on something, I want to read a lot of opinions, that’s why those blogs are so popular.

Social networking can seem time consuming but tends to be a lot less time consuming than you’d think. ;) Have I convinced you of the benefits of both, Kirsten? As long as you don’t use Facebook, which I am told is the temporal vortex of the Internet. I don’t know for sure, I haven’t signed up! :)

When I get time, I’m going to add a “best blogs about blogging” list of blogs to the sidebar. If you’re reading this and you have any suggestions on blogs that should be in that list, leave a comment with a link to the blog please. ;)

blogging tips, feed readers, internet

10 Easy Ways To Improve Your Blog Writing.

29 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I hate it when I see good bloggers say “I’m not a good writer”. If you’re not a good writer, I wouldn’t be reading your blog. If I’m not reading your blog, do I know about your blog? Drop by and leave me a link to it in the comments.

Having said that, there are some things I do now that I never did previous to blogging, and here’s 10 of them all neatly typed up for ya’all.

Write a summary –

Tell your reader why they want to read this post you have written in the first few sentences. Since getting on the Bumpzee Community RSS feeds, I have found that the first 250 characters of your post have to grab the reader in order for them to click through and read the rest. Basically this applies to anything you write – people need to be almost *teased* into reading the rest of your article.

Use the Thesaurus –

Tired of using all the same old words? Put the word you’d usually (commonly, consistently, customarily, frequently, generally, habitually, mainly, most often, mostly, normally, occasionally, ordinarily, regularly, routinely, sometimes) use in at the online thesaurus.

You can then take your pick of new, exciting (animating, appealing, arousing, arresting, astonishing, bracing, breathtaking, dangerous, dramatic, electrifying, exhilarant, eye-popping, far out, fine, flashy, groovy, hair-raising, heady, hectic, impressive, interesting, intoxicating, intriguing, lively, mind-blowing, moving, neat, overpowering, overwhelming, provocative, racy, rip-roaring, rousing, sensational, spine-tingling, stimulating, stirring, thrilling, titillating, wild, zestful), unusual words you don’t normally use that mean virtually the same thing!

Write ideas down –

I go nowhere these days without paper and a pen. NOWHERE. I have paper and a pen next to my bed, next to my recliner in the lounge, in the kitchen, in the car, in my handbag. Yes, even in the bathroom!! A lot of my best blogging ideas come to me as a surprise in the shower. I turn off the shower, even mid shampoo, step out, dry my hands, write it down. I find that if you do not seize the moment, that thought will vanish.

Record it –

Want to blog hands free? Do you have one of those little tape recorders students use for recording lectures? I have a Sony recording Walkman which uses cassette tapes but you can get digital voice recorders quite cheaply these days. So you can verbally blog while doing your chores around the house and when you get a chance to sit at the computer and type it up, you know where you’re going.

Edit it –

Cugat helped me learn how to simplify my writing when we were working on a website together a few months ago. I use a lot of extra words. Really and Actually are two such examples. Just doing a quick word search of the blog front page before posting this, the word really appears 6 times and once in the sidebar. Actually appears 3 times. This is a major improvement for me. I’m still working on it.

Don’t edit it too much –

Editing can be a temporal vortex. Like when I go to the hardware store and two hours go by without me even noticing it. I have sometimes spent up to three hours doing it on some posts. It’s better to limit yourself to a certain amount of time. For a longer article it may be appropriate to spend an hour tweaking words and cutting words out. My advice is use a timer with an alarm, set the time you’re happy to spend editing (that could be anywhere from 2 minutes to an hour) and when the bell rings hit publish.

Use Headlines –

If you think readers of your blog read everything you’ve written in a post, I am sorry to tell you that you may be wrong – some readers skim, some readers scroll before deciding to read something in depth. So you’ll see some of my blog posts these days use headlines, in particular the ones which are intended to be helpful to fellow bloggers or the general public. The one you’re reading now is a good example. Doing this makes it easier for readers to focus on the parts of your post that are relevant to them.

Use Paragraphs –

The larger the chunk of text, the less chance some readers will delve into it. Breaking things down into smaller more palatable chunks increases the chance of those things being read.

Size Matters –

There is nothing wrong with a short post. Don’t be afraid to post something brief. Embrace the pithy. On the other hand, long posts can be scary to post because you think people will not read them. If your content is good, people will. Have faith in your readers. But for longer posts try to use small paragraphs and headlines if you can, to make it more accessible to all readers.

Invite Comments –

Your blog is where you can express your views. Ideally you will want your readers to express their views in return. Unless you think your bowel movements don’t stink and your opinions are right, perfect, and not to be discussed, in which case you will turn comments off. This will offend people. If you don’t have comments on your blog, chances are I’m going to unsubscribe from your RSS feed. Just so you know.

A final thought –

Don’t ever say you’re a bad writer. I don’t believe there is any such thing. You may not be writing novels that stun the public but blogging isn’t about that.

Writing is about communicating ideas and connecting with people through words. If you’re on my blog roll, I think you’re a good writer. Take the compliment with grace – say thank you, don’t try to tell me my opinion is incorrect.

If you’re not on my blog roll yet, chances are I just haven’t found your blog. Comment on this post with a link to it, I’ll drop by and check you out.

blogging tips, how to guides, writing tips

Handy Blog Tips #1

12 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

If you have never heard of Google Alerts and how they can help you as a blogger, or you have seen bloggers leaving a URL after their name when they comment and wonder why, this is a post you’ll want to read.

As I travel around the blogosphere it often surprises me how people don’t seem to put thought into doing the little things that mean a lot – but then I stop and remember we’re not all reading the same blogs, and so it is unlikely you have picked up all the tips I have. So from time to time I’m going to post some of the good stuff I have found out.

How does Snoskred magically turn up when someone writes her name?

Snoskred uses Google Alerts. Basically this is like a google search that comes to you as a surprise in your email. They are incredibly simple to set up. Simply –

1) put the search term in
2) choose if you want all (comprehensive), or one of search, groups, news, blogs
3) how often – daily, as it happens, weekly
4) put your email in

alerts

See how simple this is? One more reason to love Google.

For number 2, I went with all. For number 3, choosing as it happens will keep you very up to date but if you’re a busy blogger it might annoy you, too. Mine come to me daily. Of course it is a little easier for me, because my name is fairly unique. I also have alerts set up for Life in the Country, and 419 Scam which helps me stay on top of the latest news in scamming.

You can always use the Alert Management page where you can change all the options and delete any alerts you may be subscribed to. You can also change the formats of the emails you receive – either HTML or plain text.

Why does Snoskred always sign her name and put her blog URL under it?

Snoskred knows that not everyone in the world knows you can click on the name of a commenter to get back to their blog. I may know it, you may know it, but the person who read your comment and thought “wow, that was a great comment, I’d like to read their blog” may not know it.

Rule #1 – Never assume others know what you know!

Those of us with blogger profiles need to pay special attention to this when commenting on blogger blogs because the link blogger puts to your name is to your profile on blogger, not to your blog. If you have more than one blog in your profile people will be confused as to where to find you.

Cybercelt left me a great comment about that a while back, letting me know that you can go into your blogger profile (on your profile page when you are signed in, click edit my profile, then Show my blogs, then Select blogs to display) and choose which blogs are displayed in your profile. If you have more than one, I suggest you choose one to be the main blog, and link to your other blogs from that blog page rather than have them all listed in your profile to make it easier for people to find you, but it’s your profile. ;)

On the other hand, when commenting on WordPress blogs, putting a link may mean your comment gets put into the spam bin. I don’t worry too much about that but it is something to be aware of especially with the busier bloggers who do not always have time to read all their comments. Perhaps you might choose to only leave a link under your name on a WordPress blog in certain circumstances.

I hope these tips are useful! :) Let me know if they are, I’ll consider doing some more posts like this.

blogging tips, commenting on blogs, how to guides

Blog Wrap Ups Made Simple And Easy..

8 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

For a while, every Sunday on the blog I did a “weekly wrap up” post. It became a firm favorite with my readers and people often emailed or left comments letting me know how much they enjoyed it. So, would you like to make a regular wrap up a part of your blog too? Here’s how to go about it. Note, this may get a little basic at times in order to help out the less technical of us. ;)

1. Decide what categories you want.

It’s a good idea to have a weekly wrap up follow a kind of “set format” or order. It makes it easier for the readers – they know what to expect each week. You can choose any kinds of categories you want – be creative. You could choose to wrap up what has been going on in your life, perhaps little things which didn’t rate a blog post of their own. You can break down some of the categories into smaller chunks, for example my Must Reads section has extra categories within it. My weekly wrap up includes –

Funny Search Terms This Week –
Must Reads – Post of the week – Funnies –
Great Stumbles this week –
Here On The Blog –
Blogs Added To The Sidebar –
Coming Up –

2. Never be afraid to add to your categories –

This week I am going to be adding a new section where I highlight an old blog post of mine each week. I’ve written some great blog posts in the past and newer readers to the blog may never have read those. If you think of something new don’t be afraid to try it out – and if it doesn’t work out that’s ok too. Some categories you might want to only use from time to time when something fits in them instead of weekly.

3. Create a weekly wrap up text file – with formatting included.

This is the key secret to writing the weekly wrap ups – the formatting part is a secret I only recently discovered. How do you do it? I do mine in blogger but what I’m about to say can be done with almost any blogging platform.

– create a new post
– put in your category titles
– format each category title as you want them to appear (larger text, bold, color etc) note you have to do each title separately because you’re going to add text in between the titles later.
– copy the HTML (in blogger just click edit html and copy that – wordpress users, how do you do this in wordpress?)
– paste the HTML into a text file

So now, you’ll have a text file which will look very strange to you because it has odd code in it, eg – (span style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: bold;”)

Save this text file as the BASE file. Then save it a second time as blogwrap(date) and use blogwrap(date) as the file you put your links in as the week goes by – this way once you’ve done a wrap up you can open the base file and then save it as blogwrap(next week’s date) and start putting links etc aside again without having to delete last week’s work. This saves you time and effort!

If you looked at the file, you’ll note I have html in there for the links to posts etc. That’s important when you get to number 4.

4. Have your weekly wrap up text file open when you’re online.

I’ve mentioned Editpad Lite here on the blog before as one of the best free things available on the net – a great little program that allows you to have text files in tabs so you can flick between them.

I always have Editpad running on my computer and I now always have blogwrap(date) open so when I find a great blog post or an article or anything I want to mention in the wrap up, I can add it – this is where the HTML comes in – (a href=”link”)text(/a)

– copy the link and paste that where it says link
– copy the title of the post as written by the author to where it says text.

Once you’ve done that, you have a link ready for posting in a weekly wrap up. Don’t forget to click save whenever you add in a new link – I lost a bunch of links one time when the power went out.

5. Write your thoughts as you go.

When you copy a link, make sure to put a little bit of text next to it on the spot, so you don’t have to spend time re-visiting the links when you’re writing the blogwrap post. An example from tomorrow’s upcoming blogwrap – with the html brackets changed to ( ) so you can see how it looks in the file –

(a href=”http://heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/gallery.html”)Hubble Heritage Gallery Of Images(/a) Sites like this are why I love Stumbleupon.

6. Comment before you leave the link.

I usually like to let bloggers know I’m going to be linking to their post in my next weekly wrap up, sort of as a heads up. This is a polite, considerate and friendly thing to do and a very good habit to get into. Sometimes I forget due to lack of talent, organization or skill. Apologies in advance, I never claimed to be a perfect blogger! ;)

7. Communicate updates to your blog.

The weekly wrap up is a great time to mention new widgets and gadgets you’ve added to the sidebar, as well as any changes you’ve made to the “face” of your blog and any new blogs you’ve added to your sidebar links. When you make a change, note it in your wrap up text file on the spot, so you don’t forget about it.

8. What’s on the horizon?

The weekly wrap up is a good time to let your readers know what may come their way over the next week – however be careful. Blogging happens all on its own sometimes, and sometimes I’ve said things were coming up but those things still have not arrived. I’d generally advise not to say too much, just a brief overview of potential possibilities and topics. However do make sure to let them know if you’re going to be participating in things like the Hump Day Hmmm or various other weekly type things.

Blog wrap ups are good for many reasons but the most important could be helping you to build relationships with other bloggers by showing them you like their work enough to link to it – and generally you will find the link love comes back to you over time.

We all find ourselves amazed, happy, excited, possibly a little scared when we start blogging and get our first comment, and we begin to connect with people. It’s a great feeling. It is a great way of showing your blog readers blogs that you enjoy – and a great way of showing bloggers you love their work which is something bloggers enjoy and like.

10. Click on the links.

Once you have published your weekly update, my advice is to click on all the links in your post. This gets the words out to bloggers that they have been linked to because all bloggers tend to check where incoming links are coming from, and generally they will drop over to your blog and check it out, sometimes leaving a comment, sometimes adding *your* blog to their list of blogs to read.

Pick a day! Let people know.

You should choose a day of the week that you’re comfortable with. I chose Sunday because it was a slow day here at the blog – it’s not anymore. ;) People drop by just to read the wrap up. It’s also made Mondays busier, too.

So there you have it –

How to create the blog wrap up and make it easy. Are you inspired? If you’re going to add one to your blog, make sure to comment and let me know, and send me a link when you write your first one, I’ll drop over to check it out.

Work Smarter –

Until recently my weekly blog wrap up was taking up a fair bit of time at the end of the week to put it together. While I was putting links and search terms aside during the week, it was more of a mish mash of stuff I’d put aside rather than anything organised. I would leave it till Sunday to format the post and lay out the links in some kind of order and in general it would take over an hour to finish writing it.

Now that I’ve decided to work smarter instead of harder, the blog wrap post comes together over the course of a week, and is ready to post on Sunday with only five minutes of checking and editing.

In Conclusion –

How many of us take the time to encourage other bloggers on a regular basis, and let people know we enjoy their blogs and enjoy their work? A weekly wrap up gives you the chance to do that – if you don’t want to do it weekly, you might consider once every two weeks, or even once a month.

blogging tips, how to guides, internet, weekly wrap up, writing tips

Blogrolling and Commercial Promotion

8 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

The first blog post I read on opening my google reader was Weekend: Blogistan by one of my favourite bloggers, Chani from Thailand Gal. While I adore her and her writings, on many topics we see very differently and this is one of them. It really got me thinking, especially some of the comments and her responses to them. So let me get into what I think, in the hope it may suggest other ways of thinking about these things.. Yeah, this one will be long, sorry about that, and I really would like to hear your thoughts and comments on it. Don’t forget there’s a weekly wrap up post below this one too. :)

Blogrolls.

I give out link love like there’s no tomorrow. I do it for various reasons –

– Blogs I read via my google reader – these are the blogs I am reading and enjoying. If I like them, and you like my blog, chances are you may enjoy them. But my tastes are wide and varied, and therefore you might find yourself surprised or even absolutely dislike what you find there. Once every 6-12 months I will go through this list and I may remove blogs I am no longer reading, blogs that have moved without beating my head up about the fact that they have a new location (tip, if you move blogs, post at your old blog at least once a week to let people know you have moved with a link to the new blog, so your feed-reading people can follow you), blogs that I’m not feeling the connection with anymore.

It is not done to offend anyone, it is not done so people link back to me (if they do, that is really lovely and much appreciated) and it is done to let people know I am reading them and that I love and appreciate their work. I believe it is the very least I can do in return for the enjoyment I get out of their blogging. A link in my sidebar is good for their Technorati ranking, their Google pagerank, and various other things.

– The links list to both the Australian and the US blog communities.Other people’s blogrolls –

– I understand that these things are not easily updated all the time. Most of the time I have all day every day to work on my blog. Not everyone has that.
– If you link to me, that is lovely and much appreciated but if I don’t know about it I can’t link to you in return. I always post a comment on a blog to let people know I am linking to them.
– If you link to me and you’re not in my sidebar, I recommend you let me know because I am happy to check out your blog. Comment on this post to mention you’d like me to check out your blog. I will as soon as I have the spare time, and if I like it, I’ll link to you.
– I appreciate someone asking to do a link exchange, and I will usually respect that by giving you a link back. If you get removed from my links bar at some later time, I do apologise, but it does mean I am no longer reading your blog. I read a lot of blogs, from time to time I have to re-evaluate my choices, and if you didn’t catch me with your content, if there was no connection, I’m sorry. It’s me, not you. ;)

Commercial Promotion

And now we get to the slightly more thorny topic. Let’s face a few facts up front.

1. I do not earn any money. I do not work, I have not applied for unemployment though I would be eligible for it, I do not want to receive it at this time. We live on The Other Half’s income. Though it is reasonable and enough to provide us with most everything we need, it also is nice to have my own money from time to time to buy little treats for me.

2. If I were to promote a product or website here on my blog, it would not be something I don’t already use and love. And I have given blatant free advertising to things that I use and love, places I shop, websites I adore, places I like to go and visit, etc, before here on the blog. So if someone wants to pay me to do it, that’s fine by me.

Pay per post –

I did recently sign up for pay per post, and was a bit disappointed to find that one product I do already love and use and a product I would love to be able to tell you guys about because I really feel it would help you to increase your internet security was paying people PLENTY of money to blog about them – we’re talking in the hundreds here just for one post. However they wanted people with a google pagerank of 6 and mine is only 4, so I could not earn anything for blogging about it. So for the time being, I’ve settled just for putting a “you can hire me” thing on the sidebar, and then if someone wants to hire me I’d only agree if it is something I really do love and use – or, if it were something new that I felt I would love and use.

Also, I have my own little rule (which as yet I’ve not had to implement) that if I wrote a sponsored post, I would immediately follow it up with some not sponsored content. This gives people a chance to skip the sponsored post if they feel like it.

My position on bloggers and commercial promotion.

So I guess my major bone to pick with Chani’s post was the part where she said commercial promotion on your blog means you get removed from her blogroll. I think commercial promotion can be done tastefully and without offending anyone, and as long as the blogger involved tells you that they’re being paid for that post. Money won’t buy my good opinion. I have to already have the good opinion first. If a company said to me – try our product, and if you like it we’ll pay you to blog about it – and I did like it so much that I intended to use it again, I’d be happy to blog about it.

If any of the companies which I use products from already came to me and asked me to promote their product here on the blog, well what’s wrong with that? I already use their stuff, I already love it, I was probably going to mention it at some point anyway (and I do have ideas for products I can’t live without blogs floating around already) and if I like it, chances are my readers might like it just as much as I do.

Just stop for one moment and think about this. You wash your hair, right? (One hopes so!)What if the company who manufacture your shampoo offered $10US for you to blog about their product. Would that tempt you, if you really loved their product, the feel of it, the smell of it, how clean your hair felt after washing it? What about $50US? What about $100US? What if they said a year’s free product? You’re already using it. What’s wrong with saying I love this, and the company is paying me money to tell you I love this?

Not to mention, it is actually good for me to tell people about things I love, because if I do that then maybe some of these companies will STOP TAKING PRODUCTS OFF THE SHELVES WHICH I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT. I have here on my desk right now an empty McCormick pepper steak seasoning bottle because I am intending to write them an email which says why can’t I find this on the shelves anymore? I love this product and so does the rest of my family, we’ve tried the other brands on the market and they don’t taste as good, so please bring it back!

As time goes on, I find I am writing more and more emails to companies. They fall into two categories – why can’t I find your product, can you tell me where I can get some more of it – and I love your product, it is fantastic. I feel it is important to let companies know when they’re doing something well. They probably get plenty of complaints, and there’s not enough people out there giving compliments. I like to take the time to give a compliment if I can.

I’ve already promoted plenty of stuff here on my blog for free. For example – Pitango Soup – Lean Cuisine – Rushfaster and their brilliant website – of course Ikea there’s been many posts about, and that is not even mentioning the movies I’ve written about, the blogs I’ve recommended, books I’ve written about, TV programs, music I love, DVD’s, I could keep going but I think you get my point.

Consider a-ha and Morten Harket, how many times have I posted their songs here and written about them? Why do I do it? Because I love their work, and I think people who enjoy my blog would love it too – and it’s not something you’re going to find on the (US) charts – too much (c)rap and not enough substance there these days. I hope that me talking about it here might inspire people to purchase their music, I won’t lie to you about that. I’m not making any money out of it, I’m just a fan.

In this world today, good service and good products and good books and good movies and good music really are not easy to find, especially if they’re not mainstream or promoted everywhere. If a good friend of mine says to me – wow, this is fantastic, you have to (see, hear, taste) it, I’m likely to do exactly that. I consider my fellow bloggers good friends of mine, and if they love a book or a product or a movie or some music, I want to know about it. :)

Shopping in an ocean of products.

I went into Borders while in the city, on the weekend. We spent probably two hours there. As I was browsing the shelves, I was trying to recall the titles of books which my fellow bloggers had mentioned they liked, and I failed miserably. I could only remember one title which someone had not liked (yes, it was The White Masai), so I wasn’t about to buy that one.

There were SO many books there, millions to choose from. I felt like I was drowning in an ocean of not knowing anything about these authors and whether I would like them. It was like a glittering cave of pretty book covers with no idea of what was behind them. Like the old Doug Antony Allstars joke along the lines of – do not judge a book by its cover, read the entire thing in the bookshop first and then decide if you wish to purchase it.

Books aren’t cheap, especially not at Borders. As more time went by, I began to feel under pressure to choose. I went right through the authors from A to Z and nothing jumped out and grabbed me, except books I already had, and books I remembered reading in English class many years ago. I already have a lot of the classics – I must finish that Library Thing list in my sidebar one day, it does not represent anything like the amount of books I own.

You know what I ended up buying? Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell, a book I remember enjoying from high school and the only book from the A to Z section which probably had a hundred thousand books to choose from. My Life So Far by Jane Fonda – I saw her on The Actor’s Studio recently where they talked a fair bit about this book she’d written and all of a sudden there it was in front of me (not hidden on the shelves, in a book stand) so I grabbed it. Failure Is Not An Option by Gene Kranz – I mentioned already that I’ve seen him interviewed and really adore him. He still can’t talk about Apollo 13 without getting emotional, you can see just how much it meant to him to get those guys home. I loved the Apollo 13 book and I knew I’d love his book too, but I had no idea it existed and I found it quite by accident while looking for books on Aviation.

I had more money to spend, I could have bought several more books, but I didn’t because I didn’t KNOW what was good in an ocean of many options. I’ve been burned before, you know? If I’d had time to prepare for going there, I’d have put together a list. I have a DVD list, which I take everywhere with me, and if I see anything on it for less than $10AUD, I usually pick it up. I’m now starting a book list, and if a fellow blogger gives a book a good review and it sounds like something I’d like, I’m writing it down so I can check it out in the store.

So I guess, I feel like bloggers promoting things – for the right reasons – is something I really want to see more of. Yes, I have seen blogs which blatantly post a sh*tload of pay per post things and you can tell they have never had anything to do with the product they speak of. It always turns me off – however if they have good content as well, it’s not going to put me off entirely. I’ve seen blogs where the content was great, then they got into pay per post and now won’t write anything other than paid posts, and yes I agree that sucks and I wouldn’t keep reading that kind of blog.

The reasons above is one reason why I have not done any paid posts yet – there’s nothing there at the moment which I use and love. There’s one opportunity there at the moment that appeals to me that is trying to get the word out about a non-profit service and you know what, I think that is truly a worthwhile thing to post about. I post here about scams and internet security and keeping yourself safe on the net. I’ve posted before about Lifeline and depression because these are things that have happened to me and Lifeline helped me and maybe those posts helped someone to get help, you know? If non-profits and legitimate charities can use pay per post to get the word out about things they do and services they offer, that is brilliant in my opinion. If it can benefit bloggers too, that is surely a good thing.

Make money from your blog.

There are plenty of blogs out there promoting make money from your blog type of things, many of them are in the Australian and US blog communities. I have mixed feelings about them. Some of the things they talk about, some of the tips they give are actually excellent for blogging in general – not necessarily for making money out of your blog. I do want to improve my writing and my blog, and I am happy to read peoples tips and ideas.

There are some blogs out there where stay-at-home Mom’s are trying to make enough to continue staying at home with their kids. Some of those blogs are brilliant and fantastic and I love them. Some of those blogs I find incredibly annoying but I still have to stand up and applaud the reasons they are trying to do it – if my Mom had this option years ago, she might have been able to be at home more with us. I’m one of a generation of kids who let themselves into the house after getting home from school.

I guess the bottom line is, I’m willing to overlook a few commercial posts from time to time as long as

– I believe the blogger is telling the truth and not just saying things in order to earn money
– The blog has enough content which is not sponsored and that content makes me love the blogger enough to keep reading
– The blogger isn’t in your face about it, they follow up a sponsored post with genuine unpaid content
– The blogger also has content which tells about things they love and use which is NOT paid for, so it does fit in with their blogging in general

As far as ads in the sidebar etc –

– they are not too overwhelming
– they do not flash, or make noises when I move my mouse over them
– we all work hard on our blogs and deserve to earn some money from them, but we also must respect our readers and not overwhelm them with commercial content. There’s such a thing as too much.

For me, it’s not a black or white thing.

I can’t say – if you post commercial content I’m removing you from my blogroll. I’m not in a position to judge other people on whether they are tempted into making a bit of money from their blog. In fact I’m in a position to *applaud* people if they do it in a way which respects their readers. The money is out there for the taking and I’d much rather see it go to a blogger I love and respect who needs the money than someone just doing it for the cash.

Your blog is a place for you. It is where you can express your thoughts and opinions about things you believe in, things you love, things you want to let others know about. I’m along for the ride and I’m going to be there for the good times as well as the bad, the good posts as well as the not so good ones, the paid posts as well as the unpaid ones. I’m a pretty loyal person once you’ve won my heart. If you can make money out of your blog, good on you. Just don’t forget that your readers will leave if they find it offensive, or too much. I’m thinking one pay per post per week is probably enough for most readers to overlook. If you start posting three a day and no worthwhile content in between, eat my dust cos I’m outa there.. ;)

If you never comment on a post of mine but you’ve managed to make it this far, please drop by and leave your thoughts in the comments. I really want to know what other people think about this.

a-ha, blogging tips, blogrolls, Morten Harket

Google Reader

4 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Have I been living in an internet cave, or something? How did I not know this existed until a few days ago when I spotted it in my referer list?

This Google Reader is going to save me an incredible amount of time checking blogs daily. Now, when you update your blog, it tells me. I can read what you’ve posted in the Google Reader, or I can click one button to be transported to your site to read the post and comment. Wicked! Yes, I am clearly behind the times on this, but I know I’m not the only one.

For Dr Anonymous who posted a while ago about bitacle stealing content – I think how bitacle is doing what they are doing is via an RSS feed. Bloglines do it as well as Google Reader. You can turn this off with your blog, if you like – that way if someone wants to read what you’ve written, they have to physically visit your page. Otherwise, they can use a tool like Bloglines or Google Reader (and there’s probably others I don’t know of too) to grab your posts and read them.

Other options include changing your blog to only show a few lines of your post and then people have to click on “continue reading” so they have to visit your blog to see the rest of your post. I personally don’t love blogs that do that but if I’m a reader of yours already I’m not going to stop reading you just because you do that. ;) However, if I’m visiting NaBloPoMo blogs, I’m generally not going to click on continue reading, I find that I click on the little red cross instead. It’s just annoying, no offense to anyone.

So with Google reader you can “share” posts with others. Have a look, for example, here. So I could put that link in my sidebar, and then people can read the posts of bloggers that I share. It’s done on a one by one basis, you can’t just pick a blogger and share all their posts, by the look of things.

If you’re a blogger that I read often (and you guys know who you are, in general) and you’d be ok with me sharing your posts in this manner, please either comment here or shoot me an email. I’m hoping I can eventually put the shared things into a box on the sidebar, when I work out how to do it, so people would be able to see the title of your post and it would have the most recently shared things.

So, don’t be surprised when I am commenting on your latest posts within nanoseconds, or wonder why you’re not seeing me on your site meter daily. I’ll be there, when you post, cos I love you guys and want to read what you have to say when you have to say it. As opposed to a daily check in like I used to do. ;)

blogging tips, feed readers, google reader