There are certainly a lot of directories available for site submissions and most of them are either blog directories or they accept blogs. An article on human edited directories by Chris Crum at Small Business Newz makes for interesting reading and raises several interesting points.

To summarize the article, Chris focuses on two issues with directories;

• Human edited listings:  These directories edit every listing that is submitted ensuring they are not only quality sites, they are also relevant to the category they are submitted in.

• Automatically approved listings: These are generally accepted using an email response. There is no quality control and sites may end up being listed in categories that are totally unrelated.

Does it make any real difference? A directory is a directory and all listings provide some value don’t they? This may be true. However if your site or your blog is listed in the wrong category then you may not receive the real benefit that could have been provided by a more relevant category. Not only that, if your entry has been accepted into the wrong category, how many others have as well?

Human edited directories at least ensure that you are in the correct category and that all the other sites are also in the correct category. More importantly, human edited directories are able to filter out the spammy and parked sites that offer no real value to the community. Automated directories accept all sites. As Chris says in his article:

[source]Don’t you think search engines would value a link that is listed among other quality links higher than one that is listed with a bunch of spammy ones?

I cannot help but agree with his argument although I think other issues still need to be considered. Some directories, although claiming to be human edited, leave me wondering when you see the type of sites included and the lack of quality control when it comes to category selection. I have seen XXX rated sited listed in Family or Parenting categories - so much for human editing.

Other issues include timing. I have sites listed with DMOZ and even after six months, they have still not been approved.  Like all things related to the internet, before submitting your site to a directory check that you are in the right category. Also check out the category to see what sort of sites are listed there - make sure they are relevant.

A blog directories are blog directories and you are always going to gain some benefit from them.  Chris’ points are valid. You will get more benefit from a human edited directory than an automated one. In fact it is well worth the extra time preparing an accurate submission to a human edited directory. It is also worth the extra time waiting for approval. But man is it galling when they knock you back because they think you have selected the wrong category - and they don’t advise you on the right one.

Blogging income is difficult to generate these days. There is the constant problem of banner blindness to contend with. Often what are supposed to be context based ads appear to be totally unrelated. Affiliate advertising can be hit and miss and can often depend on trends.

The question is, what can you do to maximize any opportunities that come along. These tips may just help a little.

• Remove any under performing ad units, particularly Adsense. Adsense will pay all ads in your account based on the poorest performing. If you do receive a click, you want to receive the maximum benefit for it. If you have any Adsense ad units that have less than a 2% CTR, remove them.

• If you have affiliate ads running, take a moment ever now and then to write about them - promote them a little. A 125 x 125 banner sitting in your side bar will not often sell itself. A little promotion goes a long way.

• Rotate your banner ads. Take a moment every now and then to rotate your banner ads. When using affiliate banners, check and see if they have a range of banners available. Rotate through the range until you find one that is more successful than the others, or just keep rotating them. This helps to ease banner blindness.

• Change the location of the ad units. Trial different places on your site to see which area has the highest return - you may be surprised.

Be selective in your advertisers. If after trying out some of the above, the ad unit is still not earning, remove it and try something else. Not all ads suit all sites.

By following these blogging tips you may at least increase your blogging income opportunities. The key is to maximize the available space to get the best return possible.

One final tip - make sure your site is attractive and welcoming to your visitor and that there is something there for them, that is, content. If you don’t have content and you site looks over commercialized, they will not come back and no visitors equals no blogging income no matter how well placed the ads are.

Social bookmarking seems to be dividing into two distinct groups who are then using social bookmarking sites for different reasons.

The first group join social bookmarking sites that best reflect their genre and their interests. They interact within that social community slowly developing a group of friends (or at least acquaintances). Bookmarking is done on the basis of quality and interests and does not often reflect their own sites content. These users are more like your social butterflies in the offline world. If they find something new and interesting they like to be the first to tell others.

Part of this online socializing includes visiting other blogs from within your sphere of friends. If an article stands out then you will signal that fact to others by flagging it in someway. This then sets of a chain reaction where your friends refer that article to their friends. This of course is the viral principle at work.

The second group join as many sites as possible and make as many friends as possible. Their aim is to promotes their own content and get as much traffic to their site as quickly as possible. The quality of the article is not considered, in fact almost every article is either thumbed, dugg or flagged in some way in the hope that it will go ‘viral’.

Smart operators have found a way to have a foot in both camps. They sign up to as many good social bookmarking sites as possible. Spend as much time as they can to socialize and build a network. Once established, they then start to promote their own articles, often by getting their closest ‘friends’ to flag the article for them.

Which camp are you in? Social bookmarking that has been done carefully and with consideration to the friends list will generally drive more quality traffic, traffic that will stay and read and perhaps even subscribe.

Traffic that is driven from an artificially created viral exercise may be useful in pushing up the articles authority and search engine rankings. The traffic generated in this manner will generally have a high bounce rate and a very low conversion rate.

What is your preference? The buzz created from a close group of ‘friends’ that generates a reasonable conversion rate, or the buzz created from an artificial viral campaign that may boost your search engine ranking but has a low conversion rate?

Both can be effective. By gaining a higher search engine ranking the traffic derived will be quality traffic with a potentially high conversion rate. If you are smart, and can have one foot firmly planted in both camps, you will have the best of all worlds. A viral campaign that brings in traffic with a moderate conversion rate whilst boosting your search engine rankings. This intern leads to further traffic with higher conversion rates. Learn to work both ends of the social bookmarking scene. There are plenty of benefits to be gained.

Feedburner is, without doubt, the biggest server of RSS feeds on the internet. Using Feedburner to provide your content is easy to set up and is just as easy for your readers to subscribe to. The question is, my RSS feed is available straight from my blog, so why use Feedburner?

This is a fair enough question and you would be right, your feed is available straight from your blog. Feedburner however adds a little value to your feed, both for you the publisher, and for your reader.

For you the publisher, Feedburner provides a statistical analysis of your subscribers. While fairly basic, the statistics are still interesting provide an interesting look at your subscribers. Feedburner also makes it very easy for your readers to subscribe via email.

For your readers, Feedburner provides a feed that is easy to read and well set our. For email subscriptions, the feed can arrive with social buttons in place so they can bookmark the post with a single click.

Feedburner has now incorporated several ways to jazz up your feeds making them easier to use, easier to read and most importantly, easier to subscribe to. Their are numerous different widgets that you can place on your site to display feeds from any site you subscribe to.

RSS is now an important part of the blog world. With Feedburner, your  RSS feed can be modified to include advertising, special messages and bookmarking buttons - all managed from the one control panel. Feedburner, it is easy and it is free.

Blog software takes on many different forms and some would argue that a widget is not software. I differ. I feel that any piece of code that is run to gain an effect is software. This widget can be used anywhere, on a blog or on a web site.

The widget I am referring to is from Ezine Articles. This widget can be formated to display short extracts from articles from whichever category you select. Every time the page is refreshed a new set of articles are displayed. Is this fresh content? When a search engine spider visits it will read the data in the widget. The next time it visits the data will have changed and so the search engine will update its data. To that end, it is fresh content - just not in the format that we are used to.

The widget can be customized when it comes to colors and sits quite nicely in your side bar. The content can be customized to fit in with the genre of your blog. This of course provides additional reading material once your visitor has finished on your site. A little tip, don’t place the widget to close to the top. You want your visitors reading your work before spotting something else and moving on to that article.

Interesting question.  Do you concentrate on the various blog directories or do you concentrate on blog SEO? The real answer is most likely, ‘both’.

If you are wondering where you should concentrate your efforts then I suggest you forget the terminology for now. The real question becomes, do you concentrate on people (blog directories) or search engines and their spiders (blog SEO).

If you are looking to concentrate on people then your blog needs to reflect that. The content needs to be written in a user friendly manner. If your main focus is search engine rankings, your content needs to be keyword rich. Whilst you can write friendly keyword rich articles, it can become very taxing trying to produce it on a daily basis.

I hate to sound like I am sitting on the fence, however in this case I going to have to suffer a few splinters. I don’t see why you cannot do both, but in a less taxing manner. Write your articles in a user friendly manner; make sure there are an adequate supply of keywords within the articles. Whenever possible, write a full keyword rich article.

The user friendly articles, whilst still containing keywords, are going to keep your readers coming back. If you have the occasional keyword rich but slightly reader unfriendly, your reader are not going to be to troubled. It is the overall image that is going to be important.

What is your preference and does your blog reflect it. Writing for the masses enables you to use the various blog directories to their fullest. Writing for search engine spiders may not attract the masses but it will place you highly on the results pages for the various search engines. Write for both, and you will have one of those special blogs that attracts thousands of visitors each and every day.

Blog design refers of course to the design of your blog. Do you hire a professional to build a blog from scratch or simply buy a template. Even if you prefer to buy a good template, someone still had to design the template in the first place. In fact, if you decide to build a blog from scratch, chances are the designer will start with a template and modify it to your requirements.

There is nothing new about blog design. Web design has been around for a long time and blog design is simply an extension of that. In fact, blog design is more like a cross between good print design, particularly magazine design and web design.

If you look closely at a lot of blogs you will see some similarity with magazines or newspapers. Like all good print media, the look is important. The ads are carefully placed for maximum results. The content carefully crafted and placed to effect.

What the print media does not need to consider are the intricacies of the web. Blog design needs to allow for SEO policies; they also need to consider page loading speeds; and of course user interactivity like comments and click throughs.

When looking at your blog design, does it resemble a magazine, a newspaper, a web page or is it quite individual in its design? Or is it a blog that has just grown out of hand over time? It’s never to late to update your blog design.

It should be. Blog SEO should be a part of your everyday blogging. It’s strange as just about everyone knows what is involved with good blog SEO practices, or at least some of the minimum requirements. So why don’t they do it? I am not going to go through what is good blog SEO practices, we have many articles on the topic already. I want to look at your blogging habits  - or rather, I want you to look at your blogging habits.

Laziness? I think not. I think the problem is more a joint case of lack of motivation and poor habits. For many people, when they first start blogging, blog SEO is the last thing on their mind. So they blog away. Often ad-hoc, often off topic - if they have a specific genre that is, and generally with very poor blog SEO practices.

It becomes a habit - a poor blog SEO habit

Habits can be broken. They say it takes a week to form a habit and four weeks to break it. If you have fallen into the habit of not looking at the requirements for good blog SEO, then spend the next four weeks religiously following them. At the end of the four weeks you will find that you have now formed a new blogging habit - hopefully one that is good for your blog’s SEO.

Sometimes it can be difficult to come up with good quality fresh blog content each and every day. One solution is to use the occasional guest writers. The difficulty is knowing where to find them.

I know several blogs that advertise for guest writers however this option is fraught with several difficulties. The major difficulty is telling someone that you do not require their services (because you don’t consider their quality, experience or knowledge good enough). If you don’t handle this correctly you risk alienating them and any of their followers. The best way to handle this situation is use the ‘little white lie’ philosophy and advise them that you have already found sufficient writers.

Rather than advertising, there are two options that are far better. The first is to look at those that are advertising themselves as guest writers. You can visit their blog, look at the quality of their articles and get an understanding of their knowledge and skills.

The second method is to visit blogs that you enjoy reading and ask them if they would be willing to write a guest blog. If you use any of the social widgets that show your visitors then check out those that visit regularly. They obviously have an interest in your blog content and if they write in a similar genre then they may be quite happy to write a guest post for you.

There are several benefits to using guest writers. First the guest writer provides some degree of importance to your blog. Other think your blog is important enough to write a guest post on. For the author, they have their name and blog URL placed onto another site providing free links and exposure.

One of the biggest benefits is freshness that a guest writer can bring to your blog. I like guest writers that are a little controversial, who don’t mind speaking out. It creates an online conversation and of course they can be as controversial as they like, it is not you making the statements. You can often ‘feed’ of this type of post for several days with comments and follow up posts of your own.

A guest writer can be a great asset to your blog content providing a different perspective, a change in direction and a little controversy. All good for the continued life of your blog.

How do you measure the success of your blog? The are many blog metric tools available however when it comes to measuring the success of your blog, sometimes the simplest statistics are the best. An interesting article by Paul Wright at Fish and Clicks titled ‘The Best Blog Metric” was rather thought provoking.

Paul’s take is to use his RSS statistics as a gauge of his blogs success. To extract a quote from his article:

……in my opinion 1 subscriber is worth way more than 1000’s of irrelevant uniques. If this blog were an e-commerce site 1 subscriber would be the equivalent to a sale.

I cannot help but agree with the last part of that statement, for a blog, each subscriber is the equivalent of a sale.

Take a step back and consider what a blog is. I may be wrong, however my interpretation of a blog is that it is a vehicle that enables me to broadcast information to the masses. However the masses have to want to view what I am broadcasting. A blog metric tool needs to be able to measure that desire.

I can have a thousand visitors in a day. How many actually stop and read and how many drop in and just as quickly drop out again? There are blog metric tools that measure things like bounce rates, length of stay and pages viewed. Those measurements are not really a measurement of the popularity of your blog. Return visitor rates would be but they are not as easy to measure.

The one measurement that is a good indicator of your blogs popularity is, as Paul Wright suggest, your RSS statistic. It takes a conscious effort to subscribe and you are only going to take that step if there is some attraction, or as I describe it, a desire to read.

Using a service such as Feedburner has the added benefit of providing a limited range of statistics. It also has the facility to value add to the feed with advertising and dedicated feed messages.

How do you measure the success of your blog? Is there a blog metric tool that you rely on? Are your RSS numbers an important indicator of your blogs success?

There are many very successful business people running very successful businesses and some of these businesses include websites. Although their websites are already successful I still often suggest they start writing a blog as a customer service and marketing tool. The answer I get back runs along the lines of this articles title, ‘I just don’t have the time’.  My response, you don’t need the time. There are many blog and website services around that will do the job for you - and at a reasonable price.

Whether your business and web site is  successful or  you are just starting out, having professionals develop a blog and then  provide the content can  actually be a very cost effective  proposal.  There is little doubt that an effective blog can help to boost your business particularly if the articles are well written and relevant to your business and effective social marketing is undertaken.

Brick Marketing provide a wide range of blog and website services that are designed to help you develop  a professional blog. We can also provide quality articles on regular basis that will engage your readers and help bring more traffic to your business.

Do you have a business? Are you thinking of creating a web site? I suggest you include a blog that has been professionally optimized for your business by a blog and website services provider. The extra service it provides to your customers together with the extra business it can help develop make it an extremely attractive and affordable option.

If you write frequently or if you write for more than one blog then this lazy little blogging tip may not only save some time, it may help boost your reader numbers. The terms ‘content is king‘ and ‘avoid duplicate content’ are probably going to ring loudly after reading this blogging tip, just give it some thought before being too critical.

One of the joys of blogging is when you write that post that not spikes your traffic a little, it also gets a  decent response in the comments area as well.  One option you have is to try and follow up the post with a new one that builds on the previous. If you are a good writer and have plenty of material, this is fine. If you don’t, then just like in the movies, the sequel is often a disappointment.

You can however use the success of the article further down the track. This can be done on either the posts blog or on one of your other blogs. Using a second blog has several benefits. It not only increases the traffic on the second blog, it can also drive traffic back to the original article.

I am of course talking about republishing but republishing with a twist. Rather than republishing in full, you need to be able to republish a really good teaser together with an introduction and of course deep link to the original article.

This tactic introduces new readers to the article and refreshes the memory of those who have been before. If you do get that good article that can be used in this way, wait for the right moment to republish. Some of the best bloggers have the knack of grouping some of their old posts and writing a post that simply links them together.

This blogging tip can serve several purposes. It does of course provide a suggestion for a quick and easier blog when your stuck for time or inspiration. If you use this tactic then you are also going to provide your article with either deep links or good internal links - all of which are good SEO practices. What a lazy way to get more traffic.

This WordPress tip covers a subject that has been written about many times over the years. Over the last week I have probably spent more time rescuing sites than actually working on the content. Two of my friends had their WordPress self hosted blogs hacked in what I can only describe as a very curious way. Never the less it was devastating.

It seem that someone had been able to download the latest WordPress upgrade files and rather than installing them into a sub-directory, they had installed them straight into the route directory. Of course this overwrote all their files and made access of their WordPress blog all but impossible. Fortunately I had backed up their blogs the week before. The net loss was a weeks worth of posting.

Having resolved those problems I found that all the domains on the host I use had been hacked with a particular radical page. Fortunately this only involved the removal of the offending index file and renaming of the original file.

Backing up any work is so important in this day and age. If your blog is valuable then back up daily. If possible use a host that provides a daily backup service. If you are doing it yourself, it only takes five minutes at the end of the day to back up your files, particularly your database and store away from your blog. You can safely store it on your PC where it will be safe from any potential problems.

Every day we read plenty of WordPress tips, this is one WordPress you don’t want to ignore. Backup frequently. Backup for peace of mind.

I quite like the concept of writing posts in the form of a series, either sequentially over several days or by releasing each edition at a set time, for example weekly. The concept of posting a topic as a serial is not new and can be a great tactic to entice your visitors back. Of course the content of the series needs to be such that it lends itself to serial release and is written well enough to encourage return visits. This WordPress plugin makes the process of series writing so much easier.

The WordPress plugin is In Series from Rem State and to quote their blurb:

[source]In Series is a plugin that lets you write series of posts in WordPress, without having to deal with the hassle of manually writing up tables of contents or “next” and “previous” links in each post. It adds a new set of controls to the post editing screen, allowing you to add the post to a series (new or existing), re-order the post within a series it’s already in, or remove the post from a series entirely

When writing a series using this WordPress plugin you can smoothly connect all the parts with relevant links. This of course is a very useful SEO strategy for internal link building.

If you like the idea of writing posts as a series then this WordPress plugin is for you. It is easy to install, easy to use, and makes the life of a content writer so much easier.

One of the fastest growth industries at present is that of the blog and the potential for blogging income. The question is going to be asked sooner rather than later as to the sustainability of this income. Blogging income can be derived from a diverse range of methods. These include your standard Pay Per Click advertising campaigns; Pay Per Action which seems to be gaining some momentum; and Pay Per View which appears to fading as a form of advertising. Emerging now are Pay Per View video formats and Pay Per Play audio advertising campaigns.

Along side those are the pay per post campaigns; the buying and selling of text links (although more SEO than advertising but income producing never the less); the buying and selling of advertising banner space and the never ending supply of affiliate advertising. Adding to this is the often dubious multi level marketing advertising campaigns that are sprouting up everywhere.

These all represent potential areas for blogging income. However, how long can the market sustain these forms of advertising? I ask this question since it is often more of a benefit to the publisher than it is to the advertiser particularly when click fraud and other illegal or at least immoral activities are undertaken. Are we reaching saturation point and is the blog the right place to advertise? I know from my experience in the blogging network, most bloggers don’t click on ads. Clicking on an ad takes them away from what they are doing, and that is reading blogs then moving on to the next blog.

Pay per post and paid links are currently out of favor with Google. Most bloggers are finding it difficult to generate pay per click revenues and the new pay per play video and audio advertising campaigns are having mixed reactions particularly if they slow the loading speed of a blog.

The older well known blogs are able to gain a good return on their efforts. New bloggers are struggling and often resort to the pay per post income streams then hit the panic button when Google drops their rankings.

Will we ever see a return to the more traditional buying of advertising space as in the off line publishing industry? I doubt it.  One area that I can see opening up, particularly for blogs with high traffic and good reputations, is the pay for recommendation style of posts. These will have a no-follow attribute as they are not looking to create link juice - they are looking for the recommendation and the click through to the advertisers site. Once marketing guru’s get their heads around this form of advertising it may well take off. When you think about it, it is no different to getting a well known individual to promote your product on TV. In this case you would be using a well known blogger to promote your product through their blog. The plus for advertisers, using a  TV commercial you wont see results until the viewer next visits a shop; with a blog you are going to see immediate click throughs.

As with most things in life, the more popular (or more famous/infamous) you are the more blogging income you are going to be able to generate. If you are new to blogging, concentrate on blogging. Build a reputation; build your traffic; ultimately, build a following of readers that come back time and again and who happily recommend your blog to others. Once you have built your ‘business name’, then you can think about your blogging income. Treat your blog like a business; most new businesses take anything from six to twelve months before they becomes profitable - your blog is no different. Put in that effort and there may well be a future for blogging income for your blog.