Postcards from the Funny Farm

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I’ve read through a mountain of books and posts on how to blog and get more backlinks. A backlink is your url on another blog or website that takes a clicker back to you. These help in generating traffic and in establishing your rank on many platforms like Google or Technorati.

Some pages have hundreds of suggestions, others just a few. I’ve found that most only have a handful that are worth their salt. That brings up the first one: the WORTH of your link.

1. Make sure your blog is worth something. If I am driving down a hot freeway dying of thirst with a bunch of BAIL BONDS signs and shops, am I going to stop? Hell no. Now … BE THE A&W SIGN and watch hpw many people start linking to you. If you have further questions on this, contact me through the form at the foot of this post.
2. Post as much as you possibly can with dexterity. Post 2 or 3 times a day if you can. If the content is good and you write them well, you can never do this too much. Don’t listen to people who say you can post too much or that you should only post once a day. It’s hogwash. I’ve had some of my hugest months traffic and earnings-wise when I posted this frequently and more. I’d be happy to discuss this further with you if anyone sees it differently. Leave a comment and let’s start a dialogue.
3. Create list-posts. These cater to the short attention span yet high intelligence of the blogger who is bouncing through the web. These draw attention and more often than not get read. The post you are readintg now is a list-style post. The bread and butter of Web 2.0.
4. Comment on the blogs on your blogroll. Every day. Not always easy, but it is like taking your vitamins … you gain through this exercise.
5. Respond to comments.
6. Offer to be a guest blogger. In the future I plan to do a list-post on the ten things I have learned through being a guest blogger. This is worth tons more than just the guaranteed backlink. NOTE: I am available to guest blog on your site for free. Leave me a comment by using the contact form in this post. :)
7. Do a Q&A recurring series.
8. Do a weekly link-love post (ie; Blog Safari).
9. Mentor aspiring bloggers and be patient in answering questions.
10. Use forums and discussion boards to link to your site.

Best Sources I have Run Across:
courtneytuttle.com/2007/04/09/102-ways-to-make-you...
socialmediadaily.com
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I couldn’t get this out Sunday for 2 reasons: #1) I was busy getting my theme and layout all sorted and #2) I hadn’t done that much time in the jeep! What you have here is a collection of the stuff that made me oooh and aaah last week. Fasten your seatbelts and thank you for riding Funny Farm tours.

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Kimberly Clay asks the question: SEO or personal c...

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Check how many backlinks you have …

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Katy started talking about Social Spark at the lau...

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Thanks to all the animals on the 3 hour tour this week. As always, each got a well-deserved Stumble.

I’d say there are three main types of bloggers:

1. Online Authors
2. Service/AD Promoters -and-
3. Purely Personal Bloggers

I am a mixture of 1 and 3 and I am working daily to become mostly a 1. I would say for types 2 and 3, online publishing is not really a necessary concern. But if you are trying to develop on online name as an author, then it should be a priority in your blogging week.

A commenter asked me today the following question that I am choosing to answer in this post. She wrote:

How do you go about getting published on the web? Do you approach people, or do they approach you?

Great question. The answer is: BOTH, but mostly you ask them. Lately I have been working on guest blogging on sites I respect and that I feel have a similar audience to my blog. In doing so I have the chance to attract new readers and give the host blog my traffic for the day I have the guest blog up. They get a link from my announcement of the post and I of course get a backlink from the post in the short bio credits. Guest blogging is the best way I have found to publish on the web. I recommend you frequently let your readers know you are interested in doing it and then that you approach specific bloggers through email with your proposal. If they say no, don’t be crushed. But mostly they say yes in my experience.

In addition to guest blogging, there are many web publishing blogs and ezines that will publish your writing. Two that I write for on a regular basis are:

BlogCritics -and-

Associated Content (AC)

You must apply to BlogCritics and AC approves on a post by post basis.

As I said, there are many many services and blogs you can publish online to. Have a look around the web and see what’s right for your style. In publishing your work other places than your primary blog you get your name around the web. These create backlinks to your blog thereby giving it better seo authority (ie; your posts come up higher in the searches) and advertisers see you as a better value when they consider paying you to show off their products.

The other benefit, which is to me most paramount, is it gets you more familiar with the worldwide audience that is the web. I like to get out of my blog comfort zone and challenge myself to write for new audiences. Ultimately, the “writer” type of blogger, as opposed to the commercial or strictly diarist type, should be challenging him/herself with new writing situations as this will improve her/his ability to attract and engage readers for the lifetime of their blog. (I hope mine is as long as my own lifetime ;) Actually one of my secret dreams is to make enough money through online publishing to be able to buy some Briggs and Riley fine luggage and take my wife to Ireland on a romantic vacation. Who knows, stranger things have happened right? If nothing else, whether the online publishing pays out or not, I know I’ll be a better writer and since I started, that has always been what it is all about for me.

Do you know of some other online publishing avenues out there I haven’t mentioned?

I noticed on my incoming links self-made widget* this morning that Fuel my Blog has declared Postcards from the Funny Farm to be their Blog of the Day. This is truly exciting for me since I recently joined their service and have been checking it out. Thank you to Fuel My Blog for saying that my blog is “well-manged” throughout. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated reading that since I am always reorganizing and trying to get it as reader-friendly as possible.

If you, my reader, are interested in their service for your blog, why not use this opportunity to click over there , read what they wrote about my blog, and sign up. You can give Postcards some fuel in the process if you want! I’ll be sure and give you some fuel back.

____

*NOTE: Usually when I add or remove widgets, the helpful reasons get left out like pulling down roller shades. I want to record here in the footer of this post that my self-made “incoming links” widget has done more for my blog than several months of using some commonly used blog widgets out there. For example it is how I noticed the mention on Fuel my Blog this morning. Though I have blogged on this a few times already, Please note dear blogger that while they have their place, sometimes you don’t need the big social serv.... Often, they just take up precious space. Analyze whether they are helping you and if not, get rid of them. The simple stuff is often what link building and traffic is all about: You show their stuff off and they mention yours. If you’d like to put an incoming links widget like mine on your blog I recommend this one highly, it is called Kramer.

Technorati is currently, without doubt providing fresher results than Google - refreshing a Google blog search page tracking results sorted by date was providing 10 results in the last 2 hours.
In contrast, Technorati is providing 10 results… in the last 10 minutes… and they are not spam.

-Andy Beard

I find it interesting to see that the almighty Google still hasn’t beat Technorati in freshness of blogsearches. Read the article, it’s very informative on which engines do what best for blog searching. Add another “upgrade” to my boycott Google adventures list.

The expression: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” seems especially appropriate for Google here at the beginning of 2008. I am no seo or blogging mmol genius but I do know a few things about logic and ethics and setting PayPerPost writers’ pagerank to zero is a choice lacking in both.

Under the guise of weeding out vacuous content from searches, they claim all blogs that have PayPerPost articles on them are less helpful than those who don’t and thus set their PageRank to zero. This is an example of a company thinking they will reinvent natural law to suit them because they can, not because they should. It’s going to bite them, the internet did not evolve to this point to be defined by one company.

I recall when I first got into using Google, it seemed like such a cool enterprise. The page was white with no ads and it had applications that were all utility, no fluff (ie; analytics, gmail …). Now, they have decided they know based on one criteria if a blog is helpful to the internet, this is ignorance at its height and I hope Google stops this practice. My how Google’s “feel” has changed for me.

As for me? I will continue to be a postie because it’s something I am good at and it’s something I profit from. That’s why Walt Disney, Rod Serling, Ray Kroc, Richard Carlso... did what they did. Last week I lost my PageRank of 4/10 when it was set to zero. I had a feeling this might happen when I read the news about what Google was doing to posties. But has my readership changed? It has gone up. Has my content changed? It has gotten better. The way I see it is this: Google figured the blogosphere would appreciate it if they targeted posties, and for the most part, they are probably right (check out Duncan Riley’s tone on Tech Crunch). But that doesn’t mean that weeding out all blogs with PayPerPosts on them will increase the value of a search. In fact, in many cases, it will keep good information out of a search. Is the only information we want on the internet that which is written without compensation? You might as well stop watching TV as far back as I Love Lucy.

To quote Michael Stipe: “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.” Emphasize: I feel fine.

I predict Izea (PayPerPost’s rebranding) and SocialSpark will revolutionize rankings in 3-6 months. You can come and tell me I was wrong if they don’t, but as for now I am making sure I focus 100% on my idea of what a good ranking is:

1. Monthly Traffic Goals
2. Inbound links
3. Comment counts, and
4. Quality content (paid or unpaid)

If I can succeed in these areas (which I can and do already) then I’ll take my PR0 with pride and look to other ranking systems like Izea’s RealRank to determine how I’m doing. To my fans/readers: fear not, I am neither down nor out. I will get better through moving away from Google’s PageRank system, not worse. Whether you like PayPerPost or not, I hope you see how throwing every blog out that uses it is harmful to the blogosphere.

Now, to close, I have a question and I promise not to pigeonhole you or throw YOU out if I don’t like your answer:

What do you think about Google setting blogs to zero for participating in PayPerPost?

This is a continuation of my prior article on categories. It seems I’ve gathered more information on tags and I feel it would be helpful to my readers’ seo if I shared it. We are moving toward a tagging net generation more and more it seems. Wordpress now has internal tagging and I read about it being on other platforms. So what is the difference between tags and categries? The simple answer is: tags are a lot of work!

As a Problogger article points out: Categories are linear filing of your blog posts and tags are “granular.” This means your posts have better seo if you category and tag them as opposed to just categorizing them.

If you look at human communication from a distance you hear dissonant terms pop up within any given conversation. Someone may be talking about transportation and throw in Osama bin Laden as a related anecdote. Someone searching for a post on him might not reach that article in a transportation category unless it was tagged. I hope that made sense.

Since Wordpress 2.3 came out I have started the often tedious process of tagging all my old posts (well, the most popular ones anyway). The simple tagging plugin as well as the advanced tagging plugin are a big help for this since they generate clickable suggestions. From what I can gather, Google will crawl up to 50 tags without flagging. This means you shouldn’t worry about having too many tags. I would be concerned #1 in the tags’ relevance to the content. After that I would look for the most common tags both internally and externally as suggested by the plugins. Do you spend time tagging your posts?