Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Not Just Your Creepy Next Door Neighbors Blogosphere Anymore
Sure some of you cringe every time you hear any thing that sounds like the word “blog”, and conjure up the image of your weird next door neighbor typing away at her keyboard all hours of the night writing cat poetry. Well she’s still here, but so are lots of other folks too, like Business Week, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Yes lots of blogs are nothing but pure drivel but then again so are lots of websites.
Blogging platforms and software have made great strides in the past few years and have really grown up from the online journals that they once were. Most of them are fully fledged content management systems now, with lots of bells and whistles. Here’s the great part, most of them are dirt cheap or even free!
Why You Should Buy into the Blogosphere
Ok I hear some of you out there, I know how to program in PHP/HTML/ASP/JSP use templates and include files to crank out a website in three shakes of a lamb’s tail, why the heck do I need blog software to do it for me? Well here’s the secret, if you want some link love from your blogging brethren you gotta’ play in their playground and with their toys.
Bloggers are a vain bunch, they may not all admit it, but they do get a rush when someone writes about them, quotes them, or links to them. Some blogging software will tell you when you log into the control panel what other bloggers recently linked to you. For more in depth searches, bloggers use blog search engines like Technoraiti, Feedster, Google Blog Search, or Yahoo Blog Search (currently only part of Yahoo News)
Making the Most of the Blog Playground
Ready to give it a try here’s my quick primer. Spend some time looking around your niche and try to come up with a list of 20 or so high to medium quality bloggers. Pay attention to their style, what they write about, who they link to, and why. Now get started on your own blog, after you have about 20 or so entries you’re ready to start getting involved. After reading others blogs make some relevant meaningful NON SPAMMY comments. Don’t screw it up by dropping an obvious keyword stuffed URL. After making a few comments and seeing how they are received, see who’s most interested in carrying on conversations in their comments. Chances are it will be someone from the middle of the pack but you might get lucky and get a blogebrity who is “chatty”. Every few days make a post and quote one or two of them and link back to them. One thing, before you do this make sure you have trackback enabled for your blog. Basically a trackback will notify the other person’s blog that you quoted and linked to them (remember bloggers are vain and love to be quoted and linked to). Now if you’re a crafty devil you might even click the link a few times to make sure they see traffic coming from you. Keep up the cycle of posting and linking to other bloggers. As long as you keep at it, and have something meaningful to say in your blog, eventually they will start to link back to you. Keep it up until you figure out what type of posts get you the most links, lather, rinse repeat.
Bean Counting and Link Monkeys
Now I’m sure one or two of you out there are saying something like, ok so I spend a month blogging or having someone else blog for me and all I get is like a dozen links. I have a link monkey who can get me 500 links in the same amount of time so what’s the point? If you’re getting 500 links in one month I’ll wager most of those links aren’t really good quality links, and probably don’t look very natural either. Nothing is going to look more like natural linking than well … natural linking. In addition to these natural links you’ve now also got content to boot. Once you’ve got the link love flowing freely, resist the temptation to drop affiliate links and adsense on every nook and cranny. The occasional affiliate link in the main body will probably be tolerated without convincing your fellow bloggers you’re a sell out. However this would be a great time to use the programming skills you mentioned earlier to have adsense or affiliate links “magically” appear on older posts.
Getting Blog Links Recap
Thanks for sharing.
They should be. If in no other manner than sending visitors to your money makers, they should be contributing. This assumes, of course, that you are trying to make money on the web.
Freq---
Most of them are fully fledged content management systems now, with lots of bells and whistles.
It does seem like the lines are becoming a little blurred between blogs and CMS's.
Are any of the "CMS" sytems like Drupal or Joomla capable of blogging for SEO?
Which traditional blog software do you like? Seems like WordPress is pretty popular at the moment.
I found a cool domain and I wrote about 100 posts in my head.
Mr Wolf has been preaching the merits of a blog for a while now. Let's see how it goes.
Great tip, thanks.
As a new blogger, I recently converted two content sites that I had been "commenting" on to v1.5 Wordpress blogs. Took only a few hours (most of that was copy-&-pasting); the "5 minute install" and plugins make it easy for sure.
The new 2.0 WP AJAX/DHTML/Larry "Duke" [wordpress.org] is even better.
The other PR6 blog is listed in DMOZ and also the Yahoo directory. It gets only 100 hits a day, nearly all from Google. The Yahoo search engine hates it despite being in the Yahoo directory. The subject of the blog is not at all conducive to making any money.
I wish I could get my money making site listed in DMOZ. I wish I could get Yahoo to unban my sites.
I wish I could get my money making site listed in DMOZ.
You could always shift the focus on a website that's already in DMOZ ...
You could always shift the focus on a website that's already in DMOZ ...
Believe it or not, DMOZ is monitored by editors
redirect based on the referrer
redirect based on the referrer
I can't remember if it was DMOZ or Zeal but editors would tag sites to look at them after a month or so to make sure the sites did not change.
If you can't get your "money site" listed create some "content" sites to get listed in DMOZ and then link to your money site.
If you can't get your "money site" listed create some "content" sites to get listed in DMOZ and then link to your money site.
Small Website Guy I don't know what software you are using or how your blogs are set up but is it posiible that this has something to do with the absence of the keyword and description metas?
