Blogger Help
I'm putting this here from Blogger Help because we may be able to use and check these features and advice...just for the sake of noting those items of interest...only those items we were not already aware of...or may be aware of and just don't know it :D
"Install Email This Post. News sites like The New York Times Online have had a feature like this for years, it allows people to simply forward an article to a friend via email. If you use Email This Post on your blog, people will be able to forward your posts to friends. This may not have an immediate impact on your site stats but it enables others to publicize your blog for you. That's good stuff.
Turn on Post Pages. If you're still only archiving by day, week, or month you are living in the past man. You've got to make sure you are publishing every post as its very own web page with Post Pages. That makes your entries way more link-able and more attractive to search engines. Links to your blog means traffic to your blog. This is an easy setting in Blogger.
Turn on your site feed. When people subscribe to your site feed in their newsreaders, it means they are definitely going to read your post. The folks who subscribe to site feeds are the type of people Malcolm Gladwell calls "mavens" in his book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Long story short: these people will help you get more traffic so turn on your site feed.
Add your blog to Blogger's listings. This is a really obvious one but at some point during the blog creation process there's a chance many of you initially thought "Oh, I'm not sure I want to be public just yet. I'll mark that as 'no.'" Go back in there and mark it "yes." When you add your blog to our listings then it shows up in Nextblog, Recently Updated, and other places. It's like opting-in to traffic. Do it.Keep search engines in mind. Note that sometimes your "audience" is whoever stumbles into your site from a web search. Search is a great way to bring in new visitors and there are a few things you can do to make your blog more search engine friendly. Use post titles and blog page title tags along with your post page archiving. This will automatically give each of your post pages an intelligent name based on the title of your post. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search. For example, a Google search for "Book Cover Design" features this blog post by the illustrious Jason Kottke complete with reader comments.
Put your blog URL in your email signature. Whenever I see a blog url in an email signature, I always click on it to see who I'm dealing with. Especially if it's someone I've never met. Email gets forwarded all the time so even if you only send out a five notes a day to friends, the potential number of people clicking over to your blog is in the thousands. (That is of course completely theoretical, but you get my drift—it's worth it.) I can't give you specific instructions on how to edit your email client's signature because I don't know which one you use, but poke around. It's somewhere in the settings.
Sumbit your address to blog search sites and directories. People look for blog content at Technorati every day, are you on their list? You should be. Submit your blog's url to Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, Popdex, and any other site of that ilk you come across. With the exception of Technorati, many of these sites are hobby or graduate student projects but they continue to gain visitors looking for interesting blogs to read, bookmark, and revisit. Not all of them have the power to crawl ever blog in existence so you can help them help you by dropping your url in the appropriate field.
Participate in meme games. A meme is an idea transmitted from person to person like a virus. If the flu was a blog, it would get crazy traffic. With all the sickness and disease analogies, blog induced memes are actually fun and can win you some extra traffic. How do they work? Basically a blogger will propose an idea like "Hey, let's post the first sentence of our favorite book!" and it will catch on like crazy with people linking to each other's submissions obsessively until the game dies down. A favorite meme for years was the Friday Five, if you're looking for something new, try The Daily Meme.
Advertise. If keyword advertising were affordable enough, I'd say go for it. For now, free is a good way to go. BlogSnob is a network of free, text-based blog advertisers that you can join right now. Host ads, place ads, it's all traffic. BlogSnob ads blend right into your site and are fully customizable. Bloggers who join the network can place free ads, while sometime in the near future real advertisers will have to dish out to get noticed. It pays to be a blogger.
Install a blogroll. This is similar to linking. Well actually, it's the same but different. Blog posts eventually drop off the front page and get archived. A blogroll is more of personal statement: these are the bloggers I like. Or, this is the crowd I'd like to be associated with. It's a very simple yet effective social networking scheme and it has the same result as a simple link if not stronger: traffic! So if you don't have one yet, sign up for a blogroll and get that link-list going.
Biz Stone works at Google on Blogger and writes books about blogging.
posted by Security News Media @ 2:53 PM
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