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Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

Social Links

30 juin

Back in my last post here that I entitled Link to Your Success, I talked about some extra ways of obtaining good, strong keyword anchored backlinks for your sites. Well in this instalment, I’m going to follow that on with another useful way of obtaining links directly for your blogs as well as helping their SERPs ranking at the same time.

Most bloggers have heard of Digg, or the many clones that are available to submit your posts to in order to boost traffic. Such sites that emulate Digg are driven by software that comes from pligg.com and are known as « pligg » sites. I’ll tell you a little more about pligg in a moment. But how many bloggers know that by submitting posts to some of the lesser well known social bookmarking sites can actually benefit your blog more?

Some, like Blogging Zoom are getting big and more popular, but are still very useful for building links and boosting SERPs authority for individual blog posts. They do that by publishing your submitted posts on their main page after your post gets a certain number of votes from othe rmembers of the site. With Blogging Zoom that number is currently 15. So if you join a site like that, it pays to make friends!

But that idea can be followed on to the next level by the smart Internet Marketer. How?

Build your own social pligg site!

Yes, if you have your own web host, then you can build your own pligg site, publicise it and attract new members to build the site from the ground up. Pligg.com provide the software free of charge, so its just a case of downloading it, creating a new MySQL database in your cPanel, following their instructions and uploading the files to your server. You can also download a free template if you don’t like the original and with some cosmetic tweaking, you can have your very own, Google friendly social site up and running within a few hours.

The benefits of running your own pligg site are obvious – you can submit all your own posts to it and build up lots of links to your blogs as well as boost their SERPs rankings. In the early stages, you can set the number of votes to 5 to get your posts onto the front page fast, so their links carry with them any Page Rank your new site has.

A timely tip is to buy an expired domain that already comes with some Page Rank and established links to ensure it keeps it. You, of course can promote your new pligg site and get it more backlinks to further establish its authority quickly.

As you may have guessed by now, I have done exactly what I have been telling you about, so that the information is coming straight from the horse’s mouth! Yep, I built my own pligg site called TheFB and you can easily register for free and then submit blog posts to it directly from the site.

TheFB can be found by clicking on this link: TheFB

TheFB is a PR2 site at present, which I am building links for to improve its ranking over time. So feel free to sign up and make use of this valuable link building resource and get in on the ground floor. It takes only 5 votes to get your post to the front page at TheFB, so what have you got to lose?

And much to gain!

Terry Didcott
Owner of The Honest Way Forum

 
5 Comments

Posted in Blogging, Guest Authors, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

 

Domains vs Free Blogs

29 avr

There are many people who like to use free blogs not just for the enjoyment and personal satisfaction of writing down their thoughts and publishing them on the web, but also for Internet Marketing purposes in the pursuit of making money. Likewise, there are many people who prefer to buy their own domains and host them on a professional server, for much the same purpose.

So is one really better than the other?

As this is an Internet Marketing flavoured blog, we’ll leave the bloggers who blog for enjoyments sake to their own and take a look at the avantages and disadvantages of the two options open to those that want to use these different outlets as vehicles for making money.

First up, lets take initial startup and running costs of the two sides of this debate.

A free blog will cost you zero dollars to acquire, zero dollars to set up and zero dollars to run. Ok, that’s pretty convincing for anyone without much cash to start their own online enterprise.

A hosted domain will cost you the price of buying and registering the domain, currently you can buy and register a .com for less than $10. Then there’s the cost of hosting, although currently you can get good hosting for as little as $4.95 a month, although you might want to pay a little more and get a package with more features. Either way, you can find very good professional hosting for less than $10 a month. The other running cost is the annual registration of the domain, which is currently less than $10. So for an outlay in your first year of around $130 you can have all the benefits and control that a hosted account will give you. Even if you are short of cash, that is one expense that is easy enough to cover as the hosting part isn’t paid all in one go, but spread over 12 monthly payments.

So far so good. Now lets look at the fringe benefits.

Free blogs have great, easy to use templates and are the simplest things set up and start writing. Ads are easy to include with Blogger blogs, although some platforms, notably WordPress won’t let you put any ads up at all.

A self hosted blog is also fairly straightforward to set up, with a huge selection of free templates. There is no problem over displaying ads, its your site so you can put up whatever you want.

Now lets look at the stickier point of control and ownership.

I’ve heard using free blogs as opposed to self hosted domains likened to the difference between renting an apartment and owning your own home. Nice comparison and it fits very well.

With a free blog, you’re only renting the space. If the owner (Blogger, for instance) decides they don’t like your face, they can at their discretion, suspend or even delete your blog. The content on that free blog may be yours in principle, but when it comes to what the search engines see, that content belongs to Blogger.

With a self hosted domain, you own that piece of cyberspace like its a piece of real estate. No one can take it away from you and the content is yours. If you’ve worked real hard on your site and gained a lot of authority, just like a home that you own you can sell that site with the domain for a hefty profit down the line.

With a free blog, as with a rented apartment, no matter how hard you work on it and how much authority and value it gets, you can never sell it.

There are other advantages and disadvantages to both, such as guaranteed uptime, storage space and bandwidth limits that self hosted beats free hosted hands down, but the main advantage of self hosted over free hosted has to be the real estate value, which, just as with the argument for renting or buying a property, you have to ask yourself this question. Do you want to have the option to sell it down the line and profit from it?

I prefer to own my own home rather than rent. Likewise, I prefer to own my own cyber real estate too.

Terry Didcott

Author of The Honest Way

 
No Comments

Posted in Blogging, Guest Authors

 

Comment Your Way to the Top!

24 oct

Hi, I’d like to introduce myself here in my first guest appearance. I’m Terry Didcott and I write rather a lot! You’ll get to better know me and my own special brand of scribblings over time!

Being an avid blogger with a perpetually growing menagerie of blogs, Squidoo lenses and websites, I know full well the importance of promoting those windows onto the various rooms in my creative writer’s mind. There are several methods of getting the word out to the general content hungry public and I’ll cover each of them over a series of posts.

To cover them all in one post will likely take a lot of time and end up being so long it’d probably put you to sleep!

So. what do I mean by comment your way to the top?

Blogs are very special media, in that they allow a two way interaction between blogger and reader in the form of comments. If a visitor to a blog likes what they are reading, they may feel moved to comment on a particular post. If the blogger is enthusiastic about what he does, he’ll reply to the comment. Other readers may also get involved in the conversation and what you end up with is a social meeting place of like minded people who are all able, thanks to the beauty of the comment box, to exchange thoughts, ideas and information.

So a blog can also become a social networking platform.

So far, so good. How does the blogger (like me) take advantage of this?

By getting into the bloggosphere and visiting lots of other blogs that inhabit the same niche, a blogger can not only get a good deal of inspiration and alternative viewpoints on a variety of subjects, but he can comment on other bloggers’ posts.

That has a severalfold positive effect.

  1. He becomes known to the blog owner he just commented in – more so if he comments regularly
  2. He becomes known to the regular readers of the blog
  3. Those readers may well click his link back to his own blog out of interest
  4. If the blog is a « Do Follow » supporter, he gets a free, one-way back-link to his blog

Let’s analyze these points a little.

Points 1 and 2 are obvious – networking gets you known and raises your online profile and that of your blogs/sites.

Point 3 is a major benefit, because it means more targeted traffic to your blog. If you write well and your posts are interesting and entertaining enough those people may well become regular readers of your blog too.

Point 4 is the killer benefit. There is a growing number of « Do Follow » supporters and a good number of higher PR blogs are joining the movement.

Note: For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, « Do Follow » is a plugin that cancels out the hard-coded « rel=nofollow » in the HTML of most blogs which effectively blocks the search engines from accrediting you with the back-link from your comments. In other words, « Do Follow » blogs give you back-links from your comments.

This means that newer bloggers have an incredible chance to not only get indexed by the search engines fast by commenting on these higher PR blogs, but they also boost their chances of a higher page rank for their own blogs by creating enough of them from lots of different sources.

This in itself makes it so worth while writing and hosting an excellently written blog and making friends with high PR « Do Follow » bloggers by writing good, relevant, creative and thought provoking comments in their blogs. Because don’t forget, « Do Follow » bloggers strictly moderate their comments and simply won’t approve any old rubbish. Spammers don’t get a look in!

It also helps to be a « Do Follow » blogger yourself – give and take is the buzz phrase here. Don’t expect to receive if you’re not prepared to give in kind. You’ll gain more respect amongst your peers and make a lot of friends along the way to your own blogging success.

Is this a great way to promote yourself and your blog(s)?

You bet!

Terry Didcott

Author of The Honest Way Blog amongst many others!

 
2 Comments

Posted in Internet Marketing