Promoting New Blog

what is all this stuff?

[sundaridevi]

I've finally got around to adding a blog to one of my sites. I have about 4 or 5 posts ready to go and I'm thinking of starting with two then adding one per week and getting some guest bloggers on once per month. But I'm confused by some of the things that i've seen people talking about.

I'll soon get the blog up and running hosting on our server. I'm probably going to use WordPress but I'm also wondering if anybody knows the pros and cons of LiveJournal?

Also, what is pinging the blog? How do you do this and what are the benefits?

And for the RSS feed, do i need to submit it anyplace or just have it there for people to sign up? And what about FeedBurner. Do I need this? Does FeedBurner give any benefits other than tracking?

thanks!

[tangor]

Your content should be fresh, at least weekly if not daily, compelling and with sufficient pic/vid to attract users. 500 words to 1500 words to avoid "thin" content ala Panda. Then find marketing methods to get the blog name out so that users of interest can find you. WordPress is ubiquitous, which provides some familiarity for visitors, but also opens site to hack attacks because of it's popularlity. Expend time/dollars as necessary to secure the installation. If User Generated Content (UGC) is allowed, filter and secure that input to avoid hack attacks/spam.

LiveJournal fall into the same category as above.

In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated.

In recent months a number of folks have dropped their RSS feeds, finding them detrimental in some adsense/adwords conversions. These reports are varied, some speculative, YMMV. Do more research in that regard.

[Fabt]

tangor has some good points.

I'm wondering however, if you are asking the right questions. Pinging and submitting RSS feeds are post blog creation issues. If you are just setting them up, of course add the option of the RSS on your site, but mostly I would focus on the data generation and kw targeting.

I would stick to wordpress compared to livejournal (more verifiability).

There are mostly time investment concerns; I have worked on in the past-most of my sites have benefited exponentially due to pre planning and focus, and then offsite promotion.

1. Get your blog plan in place
2. Develop 20-30 quality SEO/shareable posts
3. Get 5-10 authority guest posts (spaced out within your posts)
4. Add/start submitting your content (in this case later is better than sooner, as your quality will be more easily verified).
5. feedburner only helps sites that will generate longterm traffic, and will probably be less relevant in the next few years, so don't make it the focus of your efforts.

[sundaridevi]

@tangor: Thanks for the security tips. Any specific plugins you would recommend?

@Fabt: So you are saying that at the beginning it is very important to produce a high quality stream of posts, so they should all be prepared in advance?

I still don't understand how I ping, or what benefits are offered by Feedburnder other than tracking the number of subscribers.

[johnwags]

Word press would be best for blogs, because it has SEO Friendly features as well as Coding techniques, but i am too upset because my word press blog hacked by someone and i was helpless cant't do anything.
Now i have intention to create the blog again.
Friends please recommend me any anti hacking tools or plugins which will safe my blog from hackers.
help would really appreciated.

[tedster]

welcome to the forums, johnwags.

The most important anti-hacking stpe you can take with a Wordpress blog is to update your Wordpress installation the minute a new version or patch is released. The "dark forces" jump all over blogs that use outdated code.

This kind of vigilance is the price we all pay for using any widely employed platform, and I doubt that any plug-in can work. The minute such a plug-in was available, the dark forces would be poking it for hackable areas. It wouldn't last any longer than any Wordpress version does.

[alexwood]

Free advertising is great for new blogs with low readerships who are looking to build some followers. All of the free advertisers I have seen run off of a ad for ad program. You run an ad for someone, they run one for you.

[blackhatsejournalist]

Make a signature with the url of your new blog, spread the word.

[Robert Charlton]

Make a signature with the url of your new blog, spread the word.

Indiscriminately spreading signature links, on blogs or on forums, is not a good promotional method, and the approach will come back to bite you. It's also frowned upon by forums, like WebmasterWorld, which like to keep their content promotion-free.

Building forum profile links falls into a similar category.

[swapnil]

Wordpress is the best, for RSS you need to submit your feed to various RSS submission Directories and Yes if you are planning to go for blogging, be sure that you blog atleast 2 a week and the content should be original and unique and not copied and more than 500 words would be even better if goes upto 1000-1500 words.

[mobilio]

Well i can give you this advice. First be sure that your blog posts are search engine optimized. Use longtail keywords and keywords relevant to your post in you titles, tags, meta tags then use them and their synonyms in the post itself. Make sure that even your pictures have a commonly searcher words or phrases (relevant to the post of course). Also link you site with Facebook and start announcing there whenever you post something in you blog or site. This will draw more people to the site and your ranking in the search engines will rise. I haven't used RSS before but it will boost you ratings if you have RSS followers as well. Good luck!

[imbIMBimb]

Promote your blog, unfortunately requires time and you need a lot of hard work in good content creating. According to me, the most effective way is to find a number of popular blogs with similar content, and commenting on them. However, it should be fair and constructive comments to the subject. After a few months, you forget this question.

[sundaridevi]

I feel a lot more comfortable with RSS now, so I actually got around to automating the RSS feed creation on our movie sites so all updates are instant, rather than about 1x/month. Now the feeds are submitted to about 10 RSS directories. That seemed to result in a few extra sites linking to the website as well as some additional traffic.

I also read that a lot of scrapers use RSS feeds to scrape content, but I'm not feeding enough text to make it worthwhile.

With respect to the Blog, any thoughts on how to get good and worthwhile guest bloggers? Any other blog promotion techniques?

[not2easy]

Sorry, I did not see how old this question was..

[topr8]

while this topic is back on top.

imho, having a rss feed is like handing out candy to scrapers

[sundaridevi]

RSS has brought lots of benefits. If you minimize the text snippet that you include in your feed to just a few words, or include unique text then you can defeat scrapers.

[Dether]

I guess wordpress is one of the best cms for making a blog, a lot of plugins can make Your webpage look really good and so on. You should add a new contest like 3 times a week. Remember to do SEO frendly contest.