Bringing more traffic to your blog - 11th Ed.




Welcome to the February 27, 2009 edition of bringing more traffic to your blog.

Welcome to the 11-th, February 27, 2009 edition of "Bringing more traffic to your blog" Blog Carnival. Some statistics: Submitted Articles - 87. Published
Articles - 40. I want to thank all the authors contributing to the issue. Some articles were excluded from the review, since their topic of discussion did not match the main target of the carnival. I am sorry, that not all submissions were accepted, as some of the excluded articles carried a significant value.

American Entrepreneurship presents 3 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website posted at American Entrepreneurship.

Viraj Sawant presents Blogging and Online Entrepreneur Interview - Leo Babauta of Zenhabits.net posted at New-web-business.com.

Tim Grice presents Seo Advice - Link Building posted at Search Engine Optimisation, saying, "It is familiar seo advice to hear how important inbound links are to your site and site ranking. Both reciprocal and inbound links have the potential to bring you a lot of traffic and not just from the search engines. Both reciprocal and inbound links can effect your current rankings within the major search engines, however they somewhat differ in strengh."

Leo D presents 114 Things I Wished I Knew as an Internet Marketer When I First Started posted at Strategic Internet Marketing Blog.

Kevin Dawson presents Case Study: Controversy in Marketing Part 1 posted at Kevin Dawson’s Copywriting & Traffic, saying, "Using controversy in marketing"

Thursday Bram presents Comment Response: Three Thoughts posted at thursdaybram.com, saying, "Responding to comments can be important - but how much is too much?"

Tim Grice presents Seo Expert Services - Site Visibility Issues posted at Search Engine Optimisation, saying, "Any form of expert seo services should also include a service which detects and fixes potential site visibility issues. When we talk about site visibility what we are really referring to is the compliance of a page’s source code with the requirements of the search engine spiders or bots."

Burak Bilgin presents Offer Your Best to Your Readers posted at Distiller’s Corner, saying, "Why are the best of links are one of the most important ingredients of any blog, and how can you maintain them in a proper way?"

Andy presents Micro Blogging | Personal Hack posted at Personal Hack, saying, "Micro blogging is simply writing smaller blog posts. It kinda of started with twitter and now is becoming more popular online."

Peter Jones presents Bauu Institute: Resources for website page rank building posted at Bauu Institute and Press.

Leo D presents Take Back Your Life…How to Get More Traffic to your Site With Just One Post a Week.. posted at Strategic Internet Marketing Blog.

Kelli-Ann Hopewell presents 4 Steps To Effective Forum Marketing posted at Internet Business Make Money Online With Welly Mulia.

Tim Grice presents Search Engine Optimisation and Outbound Links posted at Search Engine Optimisation, saying, "OK I was in a consultation with a UK client over the phone yesterday, he explained he had attempted to rank high on Google by learning SEO himself and had lost the will to live. (Fairly common problem :) )"

Jesse presents Blog Keywords: How They Can Help You posted at insideWebmaster.

Andy presents How to Easily Get Tons of Free Targeted Traffic To Your Blog posted at Personal Hack, saying, "This is a great technique that I learned about from other bloggers."

Donald Latumahina presents A Simple Tip for Finding Good Ideas posted at Life Optimizer.

Raivyn presents Why Should I Subscribe to Your Blog? posted at Idiot’s Guide to Blogging.

Tim Grice presents Is SEO A Dieing Art? posted at Search Engine Optimisation, saying, "There has been a lot of talk recently in the SEO world about Google’s new personalised search and how it will affect the industry."

Erika Collin presents 100 Inspirational Posts to Make You a Better Writer posted at Online Best Colleges.com.

Guffin Mopes presents The Art of Deception: Writing a Good Title posted at Guffinmopes.com, saying, "This post is for the uninitiated. When writing online it’s easy to overlook the importance of the title. It’s the attention grabber, and many new to publishing content online don’t realize how they may be handicapping themselves. This post focuses on the three main aspects of writing a title for online content."

Thursday Bram presents Alphabetizing Doesn’t Work Online posted at Hyper Modern Writing, saying, "Alphabetizing is one of the print writing models that don’t translate well to the web - knowing these models can help improve your blogging."

Jim DeSantis presents The Web’s Best-Kept Traffic Secret! posted at On Line Tribune | You Can Blog Too, saying, "The Web’s Best-Kept Traffic Secret! Here is a guest article from syndicated newspaper columnist, Jim Edwards. It outlines, in my opinion, the best way to get consistent, targeted traffic to virtually any type of website without costing you any money up front, no matter what product or service you sell! It’s my main method to generate traffic, as well."

Leanie Belle presents 4 Steps To Effective Forum Marketing posted at Internet Business Make Money Online With Welly Mulia.

Leanie Belle presents 1 Simple Reason Why Nobody Wants To Buy Your Product posted at Internet Business Make Money Online With Welly Mulia.

Viraj Sawant presents 5 Lessons that Hitler taught me about blogging posted at New-web-business.com, saying, "How Adolf Hitler taught me valuable blogging lessons and improved my website business"

Kathryn presents 25 Ways to Get Links to your Blog posted at Kathryn Vercillo on HubPages, saying, "Methods of getting links to your blog to increase traffic."

Tim Grice presents SEO - Clearly Defining Black-Hat Techniques posted at Search Engine Optimisation, saying, "As an SEO consultant there is nothing strange in speaking to a potential client who has never heard of black hat seo. This is slightly worrying as many unsuspecting online business owners may fall into the black-hat trap and find their sites banned."

Niels Hoven presents SEO Keyword Analysis: How to Use Data Visualization to Make it Quick and Easy posted at Official Blog of Tableau Software.

DebbieDragon presents Freelance Writers Starting Out Without a Portfolio posted at Freelance Sprout.

Raily Arena presents Make Money Online with Blogging posted at Make Money Easy Online.

Andrew Rondeau presents How To Choose A Website Name posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "Check out this short video to see and hear the do’s and don’ts of website names. Getting your website name right is crucial to your future website success...here’s how to get it right"

C.F. Jackson presents Website Makeover Monday - Choosing Your Keywords For Google posted at Website Makeover Workshop, saying, "So in this week’s Website Makeover Workshop, we’re talking about choosing keywords in order for Google to help you reach your market, your buyer, or where you want to be on this World Wide Web!"

Pinyo presents Improve Search Ranking With Google Analytics Advanced Segments posted at Blogthority.

Isaac Yassar presents Free Text Ads Here posted at Yassar Ads, saying, "Put your text ads here free, fast, permanent, and do-followed. Increase your traffic and pagerank now!"

Isaac Yassar presents Post Title First + Blog Title Later = Traffic (Blogger) posted at Isaac Yassar’s Overture.

Thursday Bram presents Ebook Review: Any Lucky Day posted at Hyper Modern Writing.

Sam presents Ten Fantastic FREE Ways to Market Your New Online Business posted at Surfer Sam and Friends, saying, "Thanks for including my article."

Raily Arena presents Cash Those Words: Making Money Online with Your Blog posted at Make Money Easy Online.

Jim DeSantis presents 4 Ways I Have Improved My Adsense Earnings posted at On Line Tribune | Internet Marketing Blog, saying, "Here are 4 easy changes I have made to improve my Adsense earnings on the blog your are viewing right now."

Tim Grice presents A Few SEO Issues posted at Search Engine Optimisation, saying, "After doing my usual SEO reading over the weekend (like a good SEO consultant should) I stumbled across a few things that a) I don’t agree with and b) provoked thought."

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of bringing more traffic to your blog using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Collecting all online traces at personal Web page

In one of my previous posts I have presented Sweetcron as automatic lifestreaming solution for bloggers http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2009/02/automated-open-source-life-stream.html).

If you did not like the presented solution at the time, Frindo might cover your needs. Take a look!

FriendFeed is an excellent web service that collects your online activity to share with others in a social setting. It automatically picks up the stuff you share on over 40 web sites, like YouTube and Flickr.




But you may want to embed this information at your virtual home and have people that visit your website to get all of your Diggs, Tweets, YouTubes, Flickrs, etc. So Frindo is just a simple script that uses the FriendFeed API to put your life stream on your website in a highly customizable way.

An example of Frindo in action can be seen on the home page at http://screwtheman.com

Requirements

  • Web server running PHP4
  • Friend Feed account
  • Minor knowledge of CSS, HTML, and web servers
Directions
1. Download the zip file and unzip it. The result should be a folder named ’frindo’.
2. Upload this folder intact on to your web server to a place that it can be seen by a web browser.
3. Temporarily make this folder writable.
4. Further information on embedding frindo into your site is on the configuration page when you run it. Frindo will detect that that it has not been configured and will show the configuration and usage interface.
5. Fill out the form and hit submit.
6. If everything is fine change the permissions on the frindo folder and frindosettings.php back to read only. If you ever want to reconfigure it, just remove or rename the frindosettings.php in your folder and follow the configuration process again.
Note: For additional security, you may want to put those files in a differently named folder than ’frindo’. As long as they’re together, it doesn’t matter what the folder name is.
Developers: http://code.google.com/p/frindo/

A new way to express yourself with Sketchcast

If you are an active blogger, you know that you operate in highly competitive environment. In order to attract, surprise, and keep your readers through your content, interface, and useful features. One of them is ability to add a quick drawing or sketch, related to a topic of discussion. Visualization might save you a lot of explanation and give your readers better and faster understanding of all details. Yes, you can prepare and add your images offline, but that will take a lot of time and efforts. If the illustration is simple, or if you have strong artistic abilities, cool Web2 application Sketchcast will be your valuable assistant.

Here is a brief tutorial of how to use this free service in three simple steps

STEP 1:
Register for a new account at Sketchcast.

STEP 2:
Filling out all the required info, you can start to draw (optionally, with your voice speaking).


image001
STEP 3:
After drawing you can embed the sketch player in your blog.


image002 

Simple, isn’t it?

Any sketch can then be embedded on your blog/ homepage for people to play-back, and you can also point people to your sketchcast channel on the developers website (or let them subscribe to your sketchcast RSS feed).

How to Add Element under Header in Blogger Blog

Usually, when you are new to the World of Blogging, you start from scratch. You use on of the default templates offered by Blogger on their site. Little-by-little, you realize that there are so many blogs in blogospere that look like yours, and you want to distinguish you blog from others. You can choose one of the free or paid templates available online to change the blog interface. Later on, you can experiment even more, tweaking the GUI to your particular needs. The following simple tweak will show you how to add an extra element under your blog Header in 9 steps. The credit goes to BlogSpotTutorial:

1. Login to Blogger with your ID.
2. Click Layout.
3. Click tab Edit HTML.
4. Click sentence Download Full Template, it is very important for you to backup this!
5. Copy the code below, then paste it before code ]]>

#under_header{ margin:10px 0; padding:1%; width:98%; }
6. Find out code which look exactly like this :


7. Copy the code below, and paste it exactly after that code :


8. Click SAVE TEMPLATE buttons, and wait until your template saved.
9. Now you already have an element which placed exactly below your header. Feel free to add any elements do you wanted to. Want some Google Advertise, or maybe some photos, it’s all up to you!

Automated Open-Source Life-stream Blogging Software

You have a rich Web 2 life and complicated online presence. Would not it be great if all your Internet activities (you choose) are reflected on your blog automatically? Uploaded a photo to Flickr? Bookmarked a new site? In a few minutes, it will show up on your blog!

There have been a lot of "life-stream" services popping up lately that aim to collect all of your Web 2.0 newly created posts, uploaded materials, or certain performed actions, and assemble all this in one place that is central to your online life. It sounds as a great idea, but the downside is that most of the offered solutions are closed source and externally hosted applications, so you are essentially directing all your data into yet another system that you have no control over.






Sweetcron application, created by Tokyo-based web developer Yongfook, represents a completely open-source solution, self-hosted take on the life stream idea. Like most of the similar services, it is essentially a blog that also pulls your real-time participation data from sites like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, and Youtube. Unlike most of other competitive service models, however, you can download the software, skin it, and modify it to suit your needs. You will definitely need a server to run it on, of course; therefore this solution is not for everyone.

Developers website: http://sweetcron.com/

Direct Downloading links: http://code.google.com/p/sweetcron/downloads/list

Additional Information, Detailed Features and Installation Procedures:

http://www.mytestbox.com/new-web-software-releases/sweetcron-friendfeed-automated-lifestream-blog-software/
http://lifestreamblog.com/interview-with-yongfook-on-sweetcron-automated-lifestream-blog-software/
http://socialwebtools.info/2008/08/29/sweetcron-best-automated-lifestreaming-blogging-software/

Read Books Online and Share your Library with Others

Hey, did you know about the Google Books site? I did not before I read the related presentation at Beautiful Beta blog. Somehow, that slipped my attention. No, I do not read books on my computer; I prefer old fashion paper copies with real pages. But, the site will be my additional source of reference books for my MBA college study. You have also a long list of magazines. Remember, that reading online will help to extend green solutions to the magazines publishing. How often the magazine goes to the paper trash basket with pages never flipped?

But, that is more. In Google Books you can create your own Library; you can easily share with your friends. To giving you an example, I created a small test library with several books on the topic of Google AdSense. Take a look here to see it. Creating your own Google Books Library is simple and fast. First of all, you need to have a Google account. As a Blogger user, you probably have one. After signing in on your Google account, select "more" from the menu bar on the Google main page. This opens a small pop-up menu, where you can select "Books". Or you can go directly to the address: http://books.google.com/.

This brings you to the Books-page, where you start creating your Library by "Importing Books". You can easily add books to your Library by entering a list of ISBN-numbers. Google will look up all book data. After importing several books, return to the main page and click on "My Library" in the menu bar to see your Library Listing. Now you can add comments, reviews, and a ranking (0-5 stars) to your books.

But you might be interested to share your books collection with readers of your own blog. After you set up your Library, you can create the special Widget to display the Google Books Library nicely. The easiest way to create the widget is through Yahoo! Pipes.

It will take just a minute to set it up.

1. Get your Google Books Library URL
Go to your Google Books Library page. Select the contents from your browser’s address bar by right-clicking on it and selecting "copy" from the popup menu.

2. Create the Widget with Yahoo Pipes
Go to my Google Books Library Pipe by clinking on the link. In the entry-field, enter the URL by right-clicking and pasting the URL you just copied. Click the "Run Pipe" button. Your Library data are retrieved, and displayed as a list of titles and descriptions.

If the output is as you expected, go on to the next step.

3. Add the Widget to your Blog
Now click on "Get as a Badge". Badge is the Yahoo-word for Widgets. This will bring up the Badge Configuration Window. In this window, click on "Customize the size, type and settings of your Badge". In the entry-field again paste your Google Books URL and click "Next". Now select "Blogger" as the destination for your Badge. This brings you to the familiar Blogger-screen, where you can select the Blog, and enter the heading for the new Page Element. Click on "Add Widget", and afterwards view your Blog.

Yahoo Pipes + Google Books

Improve Headlines Effectiveness Using Free Optimizer Tool

You have interesting genuine content, but if your title is not attractive enough, bypassing readers might not stop to read it. You have to capture, you have to catch, and you have to surprise. There is free online assistant that might help you to generate titles, attractive enough both for readers and search engines.




What is it?
Headline Analyzer evaluates the headline which you have written on your site or decided to write and tells you how efficient it is. You can use the tool and write many headlines and choose the best one. The tool will give you a result in percentage. What the system says is that normally gifted freelance writers have the ability to create headlines of 50%-70%.

How Does It Work?
They have done pretty good research and finally put up a system. The system will check for the emotional, emphatic, and eye-catchy words and then give you a result based on it. You can check on how it works here.

How to Improve?
This is easy to answer. All you have to do is, try typing different headlines and see which one gives the best score and use it. While you may not get above 80% at your first try, you can get above 50% with little hard.

Few Defects
Most of the things you use in life have its own advantages and disadvantages. Like that, this tool has few defects too. Try typing the following things and see the result:

I Love Google - 0%
Probably - 400%

Though the second one is not a headline, it is not something which can constitute a headline. Likewise, I Love Google can be a headline and in fact and eye-catchy headline but it gives 0%.




Evaluation

I decided to evaluate the tool by working on the headline to the post you are reading now.

The first title I tried was a simple and informational one: "Using Headlines Optimizer Service". The service did not like the title much and gave pretty low score of 25%. Adding the magic word Free without changing anything else "Using Free Headlines Optimizer Service" improved the rating, raising it to 40%, which is considered solid average score. Changing a word Service to word Tool as "Using Free Headlines Optimizer Tool" significantly improved the score, brining it to professional level of 60%. The result is pretty good already, but it definitely can be improved. The question is of how much time you can allow yourself working on every post title.

Making the post concept stronger with title "Improve Headlines Effectiveness Using Free Optimizer Tool" brings the score 71.43%. At this moment I will stop and let you play with this free simple and useful service.




Where to Start
Before trying the optimizer, you need to understand basics on how to make the post title attractive. Here, you can review the model developed by RealEstateTomato. There are titles offered as good and bad examples. I will use each title to check the score, so we can verify that author’s improvement advices aligned with automatic tool recommendations.

1. Emotion - Make your audience feel something they can relate to. Emotion can be brought out in several ways:

- Extreme words: best, most, never, crucial, perfect
- Emotional words: scary, sad, mean, fun
- Playful words: secret, hidden, unknown, forgotten, exciting…
- Curiosities: celebrities, well known people, news items, buzz words…
- Use something attention grabbing.
Bad Title: Interest Rates Are Unpredictable (25%).
Good Title: The 4 Crucial Reasons You Don’t Want To Wait On Interest Rates (50%).


2. Call To Action - What am I going to take away from this article? Don’t hide it in the body.

- Improve on something.
- Teach something.
- Overcome something.
- Uncover something.
- Just offer something.
Bad Title: The Real Estate Loan Broken Down (16.67%).
Good Title: 5 Simple Solutions to Getting Organized For a Real Estate Loan (27.27%).

3. Description - Lay it all out there.

- Tell the whole story in a sentence.
- Avoid confusion with description.
- Avoid assumptions; your audience shouldn’t have to guess what your writing about.
Bad Title: The Real Estate Transaction Is Not That Difficult (25%).
Good Title: Exactly Why The Real Estate Transaction Process Is Easier Than Getting A Tattoo (38.46%).

4. Keywords - Make sure you are being found for terms that match your focus.

- Work your focus into your titles
- The Title is the most weighted element in your articles search engine success
- Search engines aren’t going to give you credit for keywords, unless you include them.
Bad Title: Friends Don’t Let Friends Pay 6% (0%).
Good Title: Friends Don’t Let Friends Pay 6% In Real Estate Commissions (10%).

Make your headlines look like headlines that are important, but not obnoxious. Avoid using all CAPS and avoid writing in lower case. That can be considered as lack of respect to your readers.

As you see, a Good Title score is always higher than a Bad Title, even though the “good and bad” consideration differs every time.

Webpage: http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm
More recommendations on the Blog Title generation:
http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2008/09/need-killing-blog-title-template.html



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