All Entries Tagged With: "technorati"
3 For 3 With Chris Brogan
I have not read the rest of this series nor did I read the blog post by Chris Brogan upon which it is based. I do like Chris Brogan and read his blog when I can. All three of these suggestions are suggestions that we here at Blog Content Provider also recommend. In fact, whenever we optimize a client blog, this is precisely how we do it. Great article, but read it for yourself.
The 9 Days of Chris Brogan Blogging Secrets – Permalinks, Ways to Connect, and Technorati
By Stephanie ValentineThis article is about my experiences with day 4 of the 9 day experiment, where I implement each and every one of Chris Brogan’s blogging secrets on my home business blog (these secrets are from his “27 Blogging Secrets to Power Your Community” article). The three I tried for this article, numbers 11, 12, and 13, were all techie-type secrets, and while I’m not a total slouch in this department these secrets took a little longer than I thought. I will tell you exactly what went right and wrong with each secret, how long it took, and if any money was spent in the process.
Secret #13: Change Permalinks
Chris suggests changing the permalinks on your blog (a permalink is the link that goes with each specific blog post) so that they reflect the title of the post. Mine had been generic before I made the change and the permalinks tended to look like this: domain/blog/post=182. The good thing about these generic permalinks is that they are short. The bad thing is that they are not descriptive. Chris says changing the permalinks is a strictly personal preference thing and I think it probably also gives you a keyword advantage. I gave it try on my home business blog. It was as easy as going into the Settings menu in WordPress and clicking a button. The permalinks now look like this: domain/blog/ claiming-technorati-blog. This secret was simple to implement but it adds an extra step if I want to shorten the permalink for Twitter or other social media services.
Time Spent: 5 minutes (plus 1 minute every time I have to shorten a permalink)
Dinero Spent: $0Secret #11: Ways to Connect
Chris takes a proactive approach when it comes to connecting with people in his community. In the upper right corner of his blog you will find four ways to connect with him. You can subscribe to his newsletter, get his rRSS feed, follow him on Twitter, or get the blog delivered to your inbox. It looked great. I don’t have a newsletter on my site or home business blog so I skipped that step, but I did add an RSS feed link, a Twitter follow link, and an email subscription form for the blog. This secret took the longest to implement and was the most difficult of the three. Chris freely admits that he has someone putting many of his techie improvements on his blog, but I do my own so sometimes it means slogging through technical issues.
Adding the link to the RSS feed was the simplest. I just created an icon and linked it to my Feedburner link. I created another simple icon for the Twitter follow link. The most difficult was creating a form so people could receive my home business blog posts via email. Although Feedburner has a “101″ help section, I could not find instructions on how to install this feature so I actually Googled for help. I found several instruction guides on blogs and, using these instructions, was able to go back into Feedburner and get the email subscription code from the Publicize tab. I then had to create a text widget in the sidebar of my Thesis theme and paste the html code. It all worked fine. All in all, unless you are pretty savvy on blog technology, this secret can prove a little difficult to implement. I spent more time than I anticipated giving people extra ways to connect with my home business blog, and at the same time I really like the end result. Let’s see if my readers do, too.
Time Spent: 1 hour
Dinero Spent: $0Secret #12: Technorati
In this secret Chris suggests “claiming” your blog on Technorati, which just means registering your blog with Technorati. Technorati is a very popular search engine geared toward the needs of people wanting to search blogs. Once you “claim” your blog, the Technorati site will begin spidering and indexing your blog. This helps people find your blog and drive traffic there. I signed up for a Technorati account and claimed my home business blog. The process was simple but the Technorati site was busy several times and it took me about 45 minutes to finish the process. This included entering my blog address, posting a link on the front page of my blog so Technorati knew that I owned the blog, and then filling in the rest of my profile. Aside from the minor delays when Technorati was busy, this secret was easy to implement. According to Chris and other internet gurus this is worth doing!
Time Spent: 45 minutes
Dinero Spent: $0Results Update: So far, with 12 secrets implemented, traffic to my home business blog continues to be high and to climb steadily (not always quickly, though) daily. This means that Chris’ secrets do work.
Stephanie Valentine has been a successful network marketer for over a decade. She does her MLM business online and teaches others to do the same. For tips, tricks, rants, and raves about internet network marketing, or for a free consult on MLM marketing and tax deductions, visit http://www.gomlmonline.com/blog and http://www.gomlmonline.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Stephanie_Valentine
One thing we do a little differently than Chris Brogan is we create a customized permalink that also includes the date of the post. We want the keywords in the permalink to appear first so we have the domain/blog/name of blog post/date of blog post structure to blog posts. Why we do it this way? Because if you write about the same topic often then you never run the risk of two blog posts having the exact same permalink. That would create problems. Since each one is dated, that’s an issue we never deal with.
These other suggestions are also good suggestions. Claiming your blog on Technorati is one of the best ways in the world to promote your blog. And if you have a newsletter then you should put your opt-in box on your blog. You’ll get a lot more subscribers if you do.
If you are technologically challenged or don’t have the time to do your own blog optimization, hire someone to do it for you. The important thing is that your blog be optimized and ready for business.
Technorati’s State Of The Blogosphere Tells A Different Story
Every year, Technorati publishes its State of the Blogosphere report. While I don’t follow it religiously, I do think it provides some useful information. This year’s report tells a little different story than past reports have told. Here are some interesting stats in the first of the series (the report will be published as a series of five over the next few days):
- 63% of active bloggers are 25-44 years old
- U.S. bloggers have a higher education and earn more money than the general Internet population
- Bloggers are spread out geographically and not concentrated in large urban areas
- More than 50% of bloggers are non-U.S. residents
- More than 75,000 bloggers have a Technorati Authority over 50
- 45% of all blogs have a Technorati Authority of at least 1
- 46% of all bloggers are professional bloggers
- 12% of blogs are corporate blogs
- 51% of bloggers have set up more than one blog
Some of these measurements are difficult to analyze as a trend because Technorati didn’t measure them before now. But I like the 46% number for professional bloggers because that indicates a clear rise in professional blogging. I didn’t see a number for that category in last year’s report, but I’m quite certain that it wasn’t at 46%.
The growth of our own business since that time is an indication of that. Meanwhile, corporate blogs are growing too, but not nearly as fast as professional blogs on the whole. In October 2004, Technorati counted 5,000 corporate blogs. With Technorati tracking millions of blogs, that number has surely gone up since then. In April 2007, Technorati report tracking 70 million blogs, which would mean that 8.4 million were corporate blogs (12%) if the same percentage applied then (I’m betting that it was less than 12%).
What’s This Mean For Business Blogging?
So what does all of this mean? Well, I think it means two things for anyone in business who is also doing business online.
- No. 1, it means that competition is growing. By this time next year there will be a number of competitors in your niche no matter what niche you are in and there will be more competitors than there are today.
No. 2, business blogging is an essential marketing tool. You can say that blogging is now mainstream. But not just blogging, business blogging. Every day, more and more business blogs come online. By this time next year, if you haven’t started a blog to promote your business then ranking well in the search engines for your important keywords will be much more difficult than it is today.
