Blog Content Provider .com

Audio blogging hasn’t caught on yet, but it will. It’s just a matter of time. All it requires is a microphone, which is built into most laptops now, and the software to record your voice. Audacity is a free software that can take care of that for you. With WordPress and its podcast plugin, you can have your very own audio blog.

To create an audio blog all you need to do is set up WordPress the way you would an ordinary blog and install PodPress, the plugin. Download Audacity then take an article that you’ve written and record yourself reading the article. You should also be able to find some free music that won’t require permission or a copyright notice to use as an and opening and closing theme. After you’ve got your podcast edited to your satisfaction, upload it through PodPress and write a description of 50-100 words to give the search spiders something to feed on. Otherwise, they won’t know your podcast is there. Save and publish and you now have an audio blog post. That simple.

Need a blog consultant?

Here are a few tips to help you turn those social bookmarking visitors into loyal readers:

• Make your RSS subscription icon highly visible - Don’t put your RSS button at the bottom of your blog. Put it at the top where people will look first and make it big enough to see.
• Allow subscriptions by e-mail - If you use Feedburner, you can add a subscribe by e-mail button in addition to your RSS by feed reader button. This will allow new Internet users who are not familiar with RSS to subscribe to your news feed and read your blog in their e-mail.
• Add a bookmark button to every post - Whether you use ShareThis, AddThis, or one of the other umpteen bookmarking buttons available, use one. This will encourage people to bookmark your posts and share with their friends. As an added bonus, allow your readers to send your posts to their friends via e-mail.
• Reply to comments - Quickly.
• Encourage comments - Allow readers to comment on your blog and make it easy for them to do so.
• Don’t talk down to your readers - Make your blog posts interesting and easy to read. People will stick around longer.

Need someone to manage your blog?

You’ve installed Google Analytics or you are using Sitemeter to look at your traffic stats. But how do you know that you are getting good traffic?

There are a number of indicators. Traffic source is one indicator, but you should also judge your traffic numbers by how old your own blog is and what your competitive benchmark is. Another thing to look at is the keywords people use to find your blog organically.

I’ve had blogs that attracted 3,000 readers after six months and some that have attracted 3,000 visitors in the first month with minimal marketing efforts. That as a lot to do with niche. If your blog is in a popular niche then you could get a flood of huge traffic quickly. A small niche blog might actually be doing well with modest traffic. That’s why it helps to know your niche.

But what about those stats? Your primary traffic sources should be organic and referrals. Take a look at your referral stats to see who is referring you. Is it social networking sites like StumbleUpon? You might get a lot of traffic from those types of general topic communities but your traffic may not be targeted. On the other hand, if your referral traffic is coming from another site or blog within your niche then you can bet that it is targeted traffic.

Organic traffic is usually targeted to your niche. Those are people who found you through an organic search engine search. Check your keywords to see which phrases people are finding you for. If there are any oddball phrases not related to your niche, you might want to find out which blog post generated those and stay away from blogging on that topic. But you may use that strategy also to draw in traffic on a general search term not related to your niche by blogging outside of your niche. If you have an art or entertainment blog, a political blog, or another type of blog that might appeal to a general audience or a broad cross section of people then that might be a valuable way to blog if you don’t overdo it.

One other thing you should be doing with your analytics package is looking at benchmarks. A benchmark is a rolled up stats that measures what other blogs in your niche are doing compositely. For instance, if there are 100 blogs in your niche then the benchmark stats will take the average or mean of those and compare them to yours so that you can see how you fare against the competition generally.

Blog Marketing Journal wrote a great blog post about social bookmarking sites that use do follow links instead of no follow. At the risk of spoiling it for you, I’d like to let the cat out of the bag:

• Furl
• Digg
• Propeller
• Technorati
• Slashdot

I can vouch for these, but I’d also like to say that social bookmarking is not necessarily about the links. At least, not the links that you can get from the social bookmarking site.

Link popularity is one of the most important measurements that you can make as a website owner. Link popularity is defined as the aggregate number of inbound links your website has pointing to it as reported by the various search engines. Most link popularity reports focus on the Big Three: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Although MSN, for the last year, has been unreliable and may report its links, or not, from one month to the next. That leaves us with Google and Yahoo!

Yahoo! is much more liberal in its link reporting policy than Google is. In many ways, Google, the primary motivator in the development of link popularity as a website metric, has clamped down on inbound link credits in recent years. Google is very concerned with link quality whereas Yahoo! seems to be much more concerned about link relevance - the actual relationship in topical value between a linking website and its link partner.

When checking link popularity, you take what each of the search engines report for your inbound links and add them together. So if Yahoo! reports that you have 4,531 inbound links and Google reports 123 - a disparity that is not at all uncommon - then your link popularity will be 4,531 + 123, or 4,654. A website with at least 5,000 inbound links is just starting to gain some link notoriety. A website with at least 20,000 inbound links is well on its way to becoming a powerhouse and a noteworthy authority in its niche. That’s how important link popularity is.

Social Bookmarking’s Real Value
Social bookmarking has the potential to help you increase your link popularity. If you focused entirely on the sites that gave you link value for your inbound links then you’d only bookmark your website or blog posts at five social bookmarking sites, but that would be a huge error. I repeat, that would be an outstanding miscalculation on the scale of Coca Cola changing its formula.

The real value of social bookmarking comes in getting your bookmarked items noticed by a community of interested persons who like your content. One bookmark at a well trafficked website like Digg or Propeller - or even StumbleUpon or del.icio.us, both very popular sites that do not give you any direct link value - can boost your link popularity by thousands of links within a single month. The way that happens is by making your content popular enough that people share it with their friends. Each person that visits your website or blog is a potential blogger. Every blogger that likes your content enough not only to bookmark it but also to write about it on his or her own blog becomes a one-way link partner for you and assists you in developing your link popularity.

I had an article on my poetry website last month, for instance, that drew more than 2,000 visitors. Before that, my daily traffic count was in the 40-50 range. But I had one blog post, bookmarked at StumbleUpon, that drew thousands of visitors because of its topical subject matter. That one blog post subsequently attracted hundreds of inbound links from other poetry bloggers who linked to my blog post, giving me additional link popularity. Seeing as how there are only a couple of thousand poetry bloggers, that’s not a bad run for one blog post. Now multiply that by hundreds of blog posts over the course of a year or two.

Of course, not every blog post can be that popular. But one very popular blog post in the midst of hundreds of blog posts with average or moderate link and traffic attention can give you a huge edge over the competition.

Social bookmarking is the new article marketing. Article marketing has long been a great way to develop inbound links and gain new traffic to a website. Social bookmarking offers the same benefits on a much bigger, grander scale. It’s article marketing on viagra. You can get more links faster and watch your link popularity soar! I’ve seen it and so have the clients who use our social bookmarking service for their blog content. If you try it, I know you’ll it too.

I’m continually amazed at the level of thickheadedness off some people online. There are users who will flock to one service solely to ignore another service that is better, but bigger. It seems that some people are so averse to doing business with big that they’d rather be with an inferior service just because. Such is the case with Bloglines.

WebProNews ran a news story saying Bloglines didn’t update any of its blogs one day. Evidently, they’ve been having problems since February 12.

I use Google Reader as my web-based RSS reader because it works. Google Reader has never had a problem. It’s not the only RSS feed reader that is worth having, but it is one of the best web-based feed readers online. Bloglines is owned by Ask.com, fourth in the search engine wars. That’s why some people like it - it’s not Google. That’s fine, but if they can’t provide a useful service then it doesn’t matter that they’re not Google. That’s like driving a Ford because it isn’t a Chevy only to find that your Ford won’t start every other day. You might as well drive a Chevy.

But here’s the kicker: WebProNews writer Doug Caverly feels it necessary to point out that the Google Reader blog hasn’t been updated in 18 days, as if that’s going to make a difference. His article began by pointing out that Bloglines hasn’t issued a press release since June 2005. I want to know what either of these two facts have to do about the issue of an RSS aggregator not working properly? People don’t use the product because they’re being communicated with properly. They use the product because it delivers quality service - Google Reader does, Bloglines doesn’t. Communication is only necessary when the product doesn’t work properly - again, Google Reader does, Bloglines doesn’t. It sounds like Bloglines not only has a techical issue, but they have a PR issue as well. Google Reader has no issues. Why bring up the non-existent?

I’m a big fan of Feedburner, especially since I started using it back in November. According to this article at Mashable, they’re upgrading, and it looks to be a big upgrade.

According to the news, Feedburner is making itself more scalable by writing its code according to Google’s standards and integrating with the search giant. That means a few things for bloggers and one big thing for Feedburner. For Feedburner, it likely means increased profitability. For bloggers it means better services. Here’s how Feedburner can increase your ability to publish useful information for your readers:

• Better integration with Google Reader and Blogger.com
• Increased opportunities for income with Google AdSense
• URL-configurable leads (whatever that means)
• Better e-mail integration (which I’m looking forward to)
• And I’m guessing it will also lead to improved metrics

Feedburner is already good, but moving to Google standards means getting better and that’s going to increase every blogger’s ability to be a better publisher. It’s something that I’m really looking forward to.

We use wordpress for all of our clients, but many times we get questions about different blogging platforms. My answer has always been simple. We have had great results for our clients and our own blogs by using wordpress as our blogging platform, so we don’t fix a wheel that isn’t broke.

Matt Cutts from Google was asked this same question. Here and watch what he has to say about wordpress and a couple of other seo tips as well.

Professional Management for Business Blogs

I like to use pictures in my blog posts on some blogs. I don’t do it on this blog much, but I have some on other topics that I like to add photos to. I found a pretty good list of places you can get photos from free or at a low cost to use in your blog.

20 Sources of Excellent Stock Photos for a Productive Blog Post

Whenever i am making a very long post, i tend to use >Flickr photos where i credit the user’s photograph which are used in my blog post and i will continue to do so, as and when i find great photos that could fit my content. Recently i am heavily sourcing for stock photos that i can use for free or pay them a nominal fee since i have a number of website projects to complete.

Now everyone loves to have a unique list of stock photos which they can use with rights only to their website and this might require you to engage a photographer/Designer who can cater to your needs or else be one yourself.

I love it when someone famous validates what I do. Such was the case recently when Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame printed a list of the most used blogging platforms:

1. Blogger - 34,104,000 users - up 58% from last year
2. Wordpress - 11,440,000 users - up 444% from last year (wow!)
3. Six Apart TypePad - 10,601,000 - up 20 % from last year
4. TMZ.com - 7,107,000 - up 10%
5. LiveJournal - 3,366,000 - up 27%

The numbers are according to recent Nielsen ratings. But you can see that WordPress is the fastest growing blogging platform on the market right now. Over 400% growth in one year. If they grow at the same rate this year (not likely, by the way) then WP could overtake Blogger within a year-and-a-half.

These statistics are not why BCP uses WordPress. We use the blogging platform because it has great features that allow us to serve our customers so well - to provide the SEO benefits we offer and to make writing and posting the blogs easier and more manageable. The validation from Beal came when he said:

Blogger has a huge lead but I wonder how many of those are active and not spam scraper sites? I remember the days when it seemed LiveJournal was the tool to use for blogging, but I instead went with Blogger. Now I’m a true Wordpress convert.

I agree with the statement about Blogger. I’ve got two Blogger accounts that I don’t even use any more. One has just been sitting there since August 2004. It’s still there and no one has used it. That begs the question, How many other abandoned Blogger blogs are out there that are being included in these user numbers? It’s possible that WordPress actually has more active users than Blogger. And it would be easy to see why.

Get More Out Of Your Blog Today

I’ve seen a lot of people writing posts about autobloggerpro being used as a scraper tool for stealing content. They are right. There are people using autobloggerpro to steal content.

But does that mean the software itself is bad because some people use it in a bad way? I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, I have two blogs that have autobloggerpro software installed in them.

I don’t use it to scrape content from anyone. But there are some features in the software that can really benefit you with your wordpress blog.

Here are some of the things you can do with Autobloggerpro.

1. If you own or manage multiple blogs, you can manage all of your feeds into one place. You set your feed to summary on all of your blogs and add the feeds to your autobloggerpro blog. Now every post you make will put a summary into your autobloggerpro blog with a link back to your blog post on your other blogs. It becomes an online newsreader.

2. it comes with relinker software built in. That means you can go into the admin panel and put in links to your affiliates, websites, or blogs and associate each link with a specific word for anchor text. Every time a post contains the word you associated with a link, it automatically links that word to wherever you assigned it. Your own contextual ad program.

3. It has it’s own sitemapper built in that will update as often as you want it to automatically.

4. Rewriter is built in. To help with seo you can put in specific words and associate them with the words you want to replace them with automatically. So you can make all synonyms change to the exact phrase you are targeting.

5. Header and Footer Customization for each post. You can put whatever you want into the header or footer of each post one time and every time you post it will add those automatically.

6. AutoMeta Plus; This module runs entirely on autopilot when it is enabled. It compiles a list of unique keywords from each article and places them on the top of the page in the meta keywords list. This optimizes your page daily for the keywords that are in your articles and search engines love this. A list of common words (known as ’stop words’) is included with AutoMeta Plus from which keyword are excluded.

7. Autoposter: You can upload your articles into the queue and schedule your articles to post whenever you want. Related to timestamping, but for posting articles.

Of course if you use autobloggerpro, you should still add original content every single day. Building the link popularity of your autobloggerpro blog means the links to all of the blogs you pull feeds from carry more weight.

So Autobloggerpro is not a replacement for writing your own blog. It has built-in tools that help you optimize your blog and make some tasks easier.

Autobloggerpro can be found here.