Problogger Diary

After all the effort you put into your blog, you can’t allow it to fade into darkness, can you? There are two aspects to keeping your blog in the public eye, so to speak—getting famous with people, and getting famous with the search engines. Both can be tricky.

1. Hello, World!
When you start a new blog, it’s automatically listed on the provider’s (Blogger or WordPress, for example) directory listing, unless you’ve explicitly asked for your blog to be kept private (in which case, why are you reading this?). There are, however, spe cialised directory services—Technorati is one name that should sound familiar—that are dedicated to the cause of telling the world about all the blogs they can read and enjoy. Visitors to such sites can search for blogs on topics they want to read about and rate them; naturally, you want to be one of these blogs.

2. Technorati (www.technorati.com).
It wasn’t very famous even a year ago, but Technorati’s importance in getting your blog noticed has increased to the point of being crucial. It indexes and categorises blogs on the Web, and also tracks statistics such as the number of Web pages linking to your blog.

Getting Started.
You need to sign up to use Technorati; on the Join screen, you have Technorati has become a necessity for bloggers everywhere the option to “claim” your blog—basically informing it of the blog(s) you own. Once you’ve claimed your blog, you need to add a bunch of information about it so that Technorati can index it according to its subject and keywords or tags. What you put in here will play a key role in Technorati visitors’ inclination to read your blog, so
write your blog description to grab attention—nothing inaccurate, mind you—a wacky introduction to your site will pique curiosity and get you more visitors. You also get to use 20 tags, where you should put in keywords or keyphrases indicative of your blog’s content. These could be “technology,” “holiday in Australia,” and so on.

Once you’ve done this, Technorati will begin tracking your blog for new posts and check how many people are linking to your blog or posts in your blog. Now all you can do is hope that visitors to Technorati end up at your blog. You can claim your blog either by providing your blog’s username and password, or pasting the supplied code into a post.

Technorati categorises blogs by tags, so make sure that every one of your posts has one. It’s not difficult—just make sure you’re cat egorising your posts, and Technorati will use these categories as tags. If your blog host doesn’t give you this feature, insert the fol lowing HTML code at the end of your post:

Some Text

This tells Technorati to file this post under the tag “yourtag”. This needn’t be limited to just a Technorati link, though. For example, using this code:

Some Text

will file the post under the tag “forum”—the text after the last slash in the URL will be interpreted as the tag. Most blog hosts now automatically “ping” Technorati every time you make a new post. If yours doesn’t, then you can use a pinging service like Ping-o-matic (www.pingomatic.com) to ping
Technorati and all other blog directory listings.

3. FeedBurner (www.feedburner.com).
Your blog-host no doubt creates an RSS feed for your blog (ditch it if it doesn’t), so readers don’t need to constantly visit the site to read your content, instead doing so from the comfort of their default RSS reader. FeedBurner takes the simple functionality of RSS and “burns” your feed by adding a host of options to help you snag more subscribers.

The Burning Feed
Once you’ve completed the ridiculously simple registration process, you’ll be asked to burn your feed by supplying the URL of your blog’s RSS feed. Configure your feed title, and your feed will be assigned a FeedBurner URL instead—http://feeds.feedburner. com/yourfeedaddress, for example, letting you customise the“yourfeedaddress” part.

Once you’ve claimed your blog, FeedBurner enables the BrowserFriendly and StandardStats services to make your feed more readable in browsers and track your feed statistics respectively. The next page lets you configure StandardStats, and we rec ommend checking the Clickthrough option. This lets you track the number of times a link in your post is clicked; if you’re linking to corporate Web sites, these statistics should play a role in snag ging advertisers.

Optimising Your Feed.
When you login to FeedBurner, click on the title of your blog to be taken to the control panel, from where you can select the various ways to configure the way your feed looks in an RSS reader. Here are the options you have:

a. SmartFeed:This has quite a simple purpose—to ensure that your feed is compatible with virtually any RSS reader available. Recommended, because you never know what reader someone is using.

b. FeedFlare:Enabling this feature lets you put links into your feed posts that will help users give you feedback or tell their friends about your blog—“E-mail the Author”, “Digg This”, “Post to Del.icio.us”, and so on. At the bottom of the page, you need to use FeedFlare so it’s easier for readers to tell their friends about your blog select your blog host, and the site will give you a piece of code to insert into your blog template to make the FeedFlare links appear on your Web pages.

c. Link Splicer: This lets you include your favourites from net working sites like Digg and Del.icio.us and tell your readers what you like to read about. It doesn’t play any role in driving traffic to your blog directly, but it will give people a sense of knowing you, which will in turn keep them visiting your blog with the same, if not greater, regularity. Overall, though, there’s no pressing reason for you to have this enabled.

d. Splicer: Much like the link splicer, this lets you include your photo feeds from Flickr, Buzznet or Webshots in your feeds. Again, no direct role in getting you more traffic.

e. Geotag your feed: This lets you add your geographical latitude and longitude to your feed. Mostly pointless; if you find any use for this, do write in.

f. Feed Image Burner: Lets you add a “Powered by FeedBurner” image or any custom logo to your feed.
g. Title/Description Burner: Lets you change the title of your feed without having to change the title of your blog (something you’d have to do otherwise).

h. Convert Format Burner:Lets you select a specific format (RSS or Atom) to convert your feed to. It’s best to avoid activating this— SmartFeed will do all the dirty work of making your feed stan dards-compatible anyway.

i. Content Type Burner: This lets you choose a custom MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) type for the feed. If you’re not sure what to do with this, leave it alone.

h. Summary Burner: This lets you add a little teaser about your blog to your feed. We recommend using this—a well-written description will draw in the crowds.

Publicising Your Feed.
FeedBurner also offers services to help you increase the number of subscribers for your feed.

a. BuzzBoost: This publishes your blog’s feed as plain old HTML, which you can then use on any site you control, and thus drive more visitors to your blog.

b. Headline Animator: The Headline Animator gives you the code for a scrolling display of your latest posts that you can paste in the template of your site, or better yet, in your e-mail signature. On online forums that allow it, use this code as your signature to get people to take note of your blog.

c. FeedCount:This is a simple bit of code that displays the current number of subscribers to your feed. It has little or no role to play in actually getting you traffic, but is good to use for bragging, nonetheless.

d. E-Mail Subscriptions: Enabling this option gives you the HTML code required to offer readers the option of subscribing to your blog’s feed via e-mail. Once you’ve got enough content and subscribers to your feed, you will qualify for the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN), which allows you to use your feed to make money.

4. BlogExplosion (www.blogexplosion.com).
BlogExplosion is a unique service that drives traffic towards your blog in exchange for spending some time reading others’ blogs.

Using BlogExplosion.
Registration is simple enough, after which you’re ready to start earning “credits”—one BlogExplosion credit is the equivalent of one person visiting your site. When signed in, click on Surf Member Blogs. You’ll be taken to a member’s blog, and there will also be a frame at the top with a countdown and an image with a bunch of numbers (to prove you’re not a bot). You need to stay on this blog till the countdown says Go, and then click on the number indicated to move ahead to the next blog. For every blog you visit, you get 0.5 credits.

Increase traffic for your blog by spending some time on BlogExplosion.You could go ahead and earn credits gratuitously by just spending an hour or so on the service without reading the blogs you’re presented, but it’s always a good idea to spend some time posting reviews about others blogs—they might feel compelled to return the favour, and a good review can help boost your readership. When you’ve amassed the credits you want for a session, go back to My Account and choose Assign Traffic. Indicative by name, this lets you distribute your credits to any number of blogs that you own and increase their traffic by that much. Hit enough cred its, and you’ll also be allowed to include your own ad in the BlogExplosion top banner. Another way to rack up the credits is to rent out ad space on your blog. The Rent My Blog option lasts a week at a time, and lets other BlogExplosion members use your blog for their ads.

5. Other Services Online.
Nothing on the Web is complete without a bunch of clones, of course. Here are some other blog directories and services that you should be a part of:

a. Weblogs (www.weblogs.com): Another blog directory, though not as deep as Technorati. It simply tracks newly-updated blogs.

b. Moreover (w.moreover.com): This is a service that tracks news goings-on all over the world. If you own a news-related blog, get yourself listed here.

c. BlogStreet (www.blogstreet.com): This is a directory of Indian blogs, so you need to register here, especially if your content is India-centric. Blogs are classified by city and language, and there’s a Digg-like “Buzz it” link for every blog too.

Continue to Part2...

Posted by Problogger Diary at Thursday, March 26, 2009