Category: MetaBlogging

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Blog Carnivals, Start to Finish

Table of contents for Blogging Add-ons

As one of the events in the BlogOlympics (at the silver medal level), you can choose to participate in a blog carnival. At the gold level, you can host a blog carnival. If you’re not sure how to do this, here’s your chance to learn!

Finding a Blog Carnival
To participate in a blog carnival, first you have to find one. BlogCarnival.com features a good list of blog carnivals. You can use their search functions to find carnivals on categories that you write on—parenting, family, homeschooling, etc.

One precaution you have to take as you screen potential carnivals—see if they’re current. A lot of the carnivals listed haven’t published in months. BlogCarnival.com lists lots of carnivals that have been marked as discontinued, but many others haven’t been officially discontinued but aren’t published anymore. Look at the date of the previous and next carnivals—if it’s coming up, you’re probably safe.

Of the carnivals listed on Blog Carnival, my favorite has definitely been the Carnival of Family Life. The brainchild of Kailani at An Island Life, it’s getting to be very popular!

Another way to find a blog carnival is word of mouth. That’s how I found out about Works-for-Me Wednesday, one of the most popular weekly carnivals out there! Every week, bloggers (mostly mothers) share tips on everything from shopping to cleaning to scrapbooking to blogging. Participate this week!

Participating in a Blog Carnival
It’s important when participating in a blog carnival to write an on-topic post. Find out the theme of the carnival, especially if there are special themed editions for holidays. Works-for-Me Wednesday has monthly themed editions on the first Wednesday. An off-topic post is unlikely to be included.

Finally, don’t forget to submit your post to the carnival! Use the method they ask: a Mr. Linky (WFMW Wed), the official BlogCarnival.com submission form (CoFL), or comments or forms on the site itself. When you’re dealing with dozens or even hundreds of entries, it’s difficult to track down all the entries submitted in “unorthodox” ways.

It’s generally best to submit recent posts to the carnival, if not new posts. Some carnivals have rules about the age of submitted posts; be sure to follow those guidelines.

If you’re targeting words people use in search engines (‘keywords’), be sure to include those in the title of your post. They’ll then be used in your link.

Hosting a Blog Carnival
If you volunteer to host a blog carnival (or start your own), there are a few guidelines that will make your hosting stand out.

If you’re using TypePad or WordPress, be sure to send trackbacks or pingbacks. This is often one of the first ways I know that my entry has been included in a carnival.

Try grouping entries in a new way. One of my favorite Carnivals of Family Life was hosted by Digital Rich Daily, where he took the time to categories entries by themes for each letter of the alphabet.

Make sure you use working HTML links. If you use a Mr Linky, it generates JavaScript links. Once you’ve completed your carnival, you can get the HTML code and paste it in the place of the JavaScript code to ensure that your participants get the links. If you’ve asked your participants to link to you, it’s only polite.

Conclusion
Participating in an on-topic blog carnival is a good way to drive traffic to your site and earn links—and hosting is even better! Find a good blog carnival to participate in and complete a silver medal event in the BlogOlympics!

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Setting goals for your blog

Table of contents for Blogging success

What is blogging success? Is it subscribers? Comments? Writing honestly? No matter what you define as blog success, it’s important to set out at least one specific goal for your blog so that you have something to work for and can see how far you’ve come.

So, what should your goals be? It depends on what you want to work on and where you want to grow. There are lots of areas that you can set goals in, for example:

  • Writing: more personal, more on-topic, more frequent, etc.
  • Organization: posting on a schedule, better using categories
  • Comments, visitors & subscribers: more.
  • External blog rankings: Technorati, Alexa, Google PageRank
  • Search engine visibility: ranking for your blog name (if it’s fairly unique), ranking for your name, ranking well for keywords that you’re targeting

Realize when you set goals that you can’t completely control all of these factors: you can’t make people subscribe to your feed or comment on your posts. So if you set more than one goal, be sure to include at least one goal that you have control over. On the other hand, don’t set more goals than you can handle or remember.

Your blogging goals should be:

Recorded
I’m sure you’ve heard the platitude that a goal that’s not written down is just a dream. So write them down. Put them in a place where you can find them, see them often, and hopefully be reminded of them often.

Specific
“More subscribers” is too vague—if one person more person subscribes tomorrow, is your blog a success forever? Use numbers where they make sense: the number of posts per week, the number of minutes your visitors spend on your site.

Measurable
Whether the measurement is quantitative (like pageviews) or qualitative (like more personal writing), make sure you can appreciate a difference. “Increase my blog’s stickiness” isn’t measurable; “Increase the average number of minutes my visitors spend on my site” is. On that note, if you’re measuring something like daily unique visitors, make sure you’re equipped: use a web analytics program, like Google Analytics. (See my Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers to learn more!)

Personal
You and your blog are unique. Set goals that are suited to you—things you want to achieve; things you know you need to work on.

Discrete
By that, I mean they need to have deadlines attached: in 30 days, in 3 months, in 1 year, etc. This is not as crucial, but really increases how hard you’ll work to achieve your goals.

Achievable
Set your goals high, but not so high that it’s nearly impossible to achieve. Going from 100 to 1000 readers in a month would be hard (depending on your blog, of course). Look at what you’ve achieved in the past: if it took you 30 days to go from 50 unique visitors a day to 75 unique visitors a day, it would be probably pretty easy to get to 100 unique visitors a day, but much harder to jump to 150 unique visitors a day. Set your goal somewhere between there, based on how much you want to challenge yourself.

Not the end of the world
Last year, ProBlogger wrote a lot about blogging goals (they even had a group writing project about it!). As he set New Year’s Resolutions for his blog goals, he said:

The goals are not things we whip ourselves over in the coming months when we fail – but they help us to focus on the year ahead and move into it with a positive outlook.

So set goals to help your blog grow. Work toward them. But, as in motherhood, work toward balance, too—don’t work so hard on them that you don’t enjoy blogging anymore!

For more tips from experienced moms, visit Works-for-me Wednesday at Rocks in my Dryer

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MamaBlogga’s Top 10

Whether you’re just visiting MamaBlogga for the first time or are an old friend, you may have missed some of the fun things that have been going on here. Here are the top ten most popular posts on MamaBlogga from July. After all, the summer time is vacation time and maybe you need some help catching up!

The most visited posts in July include posts on blogging, mom blogging, the monthly GWP and parenting—basically, everything I write about!

In Other News…
In other blogging news, yesterday er, today I reached my one thousandth actual comment! (The “actual” discounts the nearly 2000 spam comments I’ve received.)

Unfortunately, it had to be one by . . . me. How anticlimactic.

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Seven Ways to Master FeedBurner

Table of contents for Blogging Add-ons

Last week, I offered some basics of FeedBurner. This week, I have seven ways to master FeedBurner. You probably won’t need or even want all of them (I don’t), but they’re pretty cool and you never know what might come in handy!

1. MyBrand. This service, found under My Account, is absolutely great for anyone who owns his or her own domain. Instead of your feed address being http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedname, your address can be http://feeds.yourblog.net/feedname. Feedburner MyBrandWhy is that so cool? It means that, should something terrible happen to FeedBurner, your subscribers are all subscribed to your domain and it will be easy to keep your subscribers and move them. Although BlueHost hasn’t been very helpful (why can’t I just make my own CNAMEs?!), this should be very easy to do, if a bit technical. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land wrote a definitive tutorial on MyBrand back when the service charged a nominal fee; today the service is free!

2. Title/Description Burner. Found under the Optimize tab, FeedBurner’s Title/Description Burner let you change the title and description on your feed without altering your site in anyway. If the title of your blog is coming through garbled or would be displayed better in a different format on your feed, use this easy service to make them pop!

3. Feed Image Burner. Speaking of popping, FeedBurner also has a service to insert an image into your feed. Also found under the Optimize tab, the Feed Image Burner is great for adding a logo to your feed stories to distinguish your blog from the dozens of other identical-looking stories passing through your subscribers feed readers every day. It’s also a good way to brand your blog and quickly remind your visitors of what blog they’re reading. I know I’m not always the best about remembering which mommy (or search marketing) blog is which on name alone—but a logo might help!

4. Headline Animator. Another great way to brand your blog, the Headline Animator is found under the Publicize tab. Use the same colors and images that appear in your website and logo to create a custom animator, then include that graphic wherever appropriate. I’ve seen them in email signatures, blog sidebars and, as FeedBurner puts it, “anyplace you can put a snippet of HTML,” all promoting your blog.

5. Email Branding. Under Publicize>Email Subscriptions, Email Branding can help you make the email version of your feed stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes—and make your email subscription look more like your blog itself. Here you can customize the subject MamaBlogga logoline of your feed emails as well as their appearance. As with the Feed Image Burner, you can include a logo to remind readers what blog they’re reading. You can also customize your font (but you’re limited to the five major font families: Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia and Times New Roman), size and color of text and links. As with the Headline Animator, using images and colors from your blog can provide a sense of continuity for your readers. My own logo, at right, is a version of my header.

6. Link and/or Photo Splicer. Under the Optimize tab, these two options make it easy for you to include extras in your feed that you might not be able to otherwise: links from various social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Digg, etc.) and photo sharing sites (Flickr, Buzznet and Webshots only). No tweaks, no plugins, and you can even set them to update once an hour, once a day or once a week. If you tag your images in Flickr, you can set it to only include pictures with a particular tab, too—keeping the rest of your photos more private.

7. FeedBurner Ad Network. Found under Monetize tab, the FeedBurner Ad Network can help you make money from running ads in your RSS feed. I personally cannot vouch for how hard it is to be invited into the network, since I’ve never tried, nor can I vouch for how much you can make off the ads, but if that’s something you’re interested in doing, FeedBurner already has a way to do it set up.

feedburner edit feed detailsOne last capability that isn’t as neat-o as these seven, but is one of the major advantages of FeedBurner is the ability to change your blog address and easily transfer subscribers. Click on Edit Feed Details to find the box where you entered your feed address. Should you move your blog, you can easily update this address to your new one, without sacrificing your subscribers.

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5 Steps to Getting Started with FeedBurner

Table of contents for Blogging Add-ons

FeedBurner is an excellent blogging add-on service that makes your feeds more accessible to readers and easier to subscribe to. Plus, you can move your feed easily when you move to a different blog address without losing any subscribers. And (possibly my favorite part) you can see how many people subscribe to your blog (although the number isn’t exact). Or maybe this is my favorite part: it’s free.

ugly xmlHow many times have you clicked on a subscribe button and gotten something like this at right?

You don’t want to do that to your latest potential subscriber, do you? FeedBurner gives you a pretty subscribe page with tons of options:
pretty feedburner options

And it’s really easy to do. Just go to the FeedBurner homepage:

step 1
and type in your blog’s URL in the box (step 1).

step 2
It finds your feed (if you have more than one, you get to choose which one to use, and in my opinion it doesn’t really make a difference which one you choose) and moves you along the sign up process (step 2).

step 3
I recommend changing the name of your feed from (the second box, next to the red arrow above) to something more descriptive than /feedburner. (And the /caWa, as far as I know, isn’t necessary unless there’s another blog that’s already taken your desired feed name). Enter your information to create your account (steps 3 & 4).

step 4
The default settings already activated are very useful. The second step here, “Enhance Your Stats,” offers you options to gather even more information about your subscribers.

step 5
Additional options include tracking clickthroughs, to see which items your subscribers are clicking on. Generally, I recommend against using this, but the reason may not apply to you: using this service changes the actual link in feed readers (from, say, http://www.mamablogga.com/post-title-here/ to http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mamablogga/29057901384769018346/).

If you think people might link to your post using the URL from your feed (which happens a lot in professional blogs and link round ups, but not as much in the personal blogging arena), don’t allow clickthrough tracking. Otherwise, if you’re interested, you may check that box. If you’re podcasting, check the second box. The grey shaded box may function the same way the clickthrough tracking did; I haven’t tried that one myself yet (step 5).

Getting People to Subscribe to Your FeedBurner Feed
Now, even though you’ve “burned” your feed, you’ll need to make some changes on your blog to indicate that your subscribers shouldn’t use your default feed (which still exists on your blog and is the source for your FeedBurner feed).

Blogger
After Google’s recent acquisition of FeedBurner, Blogger has more fully integrated with FeedBurner.
blogger
Go to Settings>Site Feed. In the Post Feed Redirect URL box, type the address of your newly burned FeedBurner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/WhateverYouNamedIt). Save your settings.

self-hosted WordPress
Use FeedBurner’s own FeedSmith FeedBurner Replacement Plugin, which directs your subscribers to your FeedBurner Feed automatically (again, you’ll have to enter your FeedBurner address). Once your plugin is installed and activated, you enter the address under the Options>FeedBurner FeedSmith tab.

TypePad
Go to Configure>Feeds. Find the FeedBurner section and click on the button to connect your feed with your FeedBurner feed. You’ll have to enter your FeedBurner login information, then you’ll be given the options to choose which of your FeedBurner feeds you want to associate with your blog. Save the changes (twice).

All platforms
No matter what blogging program you’re using, you’ll want to prominently promote your feed and encourage your readers to subscribe. FeedBurner’s own Chicklet Chooser (found under the Publicize tab) is one way to get subscription graphics in your design. I’ve also downloaded RSS Subscription graphics, opened them in photo editors and tweaked the colors until they matched my blogs.

Don’t forget to link to your FeedBurner address so when your readers click the picture, they’ll be taken to the right place!

Also: it’s always a good idea to offer an email feed for your readers who don’t use RSS or feed readers. FeedBurner offers an email feed option (also under the Publicize tab). I recommend offering a link to subscribe by email right next to the subscribe by RSS button.

FeedFlare?
feedflare 1You can customize the way your feeds appear in feed readers with FeedBurner’s FeedFlares, found under the Optimize tag. You can add links to the bottom of your posts to add the story to social sites (like StumbleUpon or Digg), add a copyright notice, add a comment count, and lots more.

Additionally, you can add these to the bottom of posts on your site by checking the box in the ‘site’ column. Your on-site flares and your in-feed flares can be different.

Scroll down to customize the order your FeedFlares appear in by dragging and dropping them within the In Feed and On Site boxes (the first arrow below). Be sure to use the pull-down menu below the On Site box to get the code and instructions for adding the flare to your site (the second arrow below). Don’t forget to activate the service!
feedflare 2

Checking Your FeedBurner Stats
I check my FeedBurner stats at least once a day (I’m a data addict). I actually have a whole bookmarks folder of different stats and site measures that I use the “Open All in Tabs” option with at least once a day. The FeedBurner dashboard is one of those tabs, so I can see at a glance how many subscribers I have that day.

Check back next week to learn how to master FeedBurner!

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Take advantage of MamaBlogga

What I’d really like for you to be able to take away from MamaBlogga is a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment in motherhood. But on a more superficial level, I can also help to improve your blogging skills—and give you some links, too.

What does it take to get link love from MamaBlogga? Not a lot, actually—and you don’t even have to e-mail me begging for a link. Once you’ve made 10 (approved) comments on MamaBlogga, the “nofollow” tag is removed from your name (and, I think, any links you put in your comments).

Naturally, we wouldn’t want that to be abused, but I do want you to be able to take full advantage of (“leverage,” if you like buzz words) this.

Make the most of your comments
Once you’ve made your 10 comments, every comment you make on MamaBlogga is a real link back to your post. And as long as you use the same e-mail address, you can change the URL you’re linking to—which is handy if you have a post on the same topic that you’d like to share. Some guidelines for doing this:

  1. Add value to the conversation. No, I’m not asking for you to link only to PhD level posts, but if this is an opportunity to get visitors to your site, do pick a good post that’s on the same or similar topic as the post you’re commenting on. And say something in your comment other than just dropping a link.
  2. Brand yourself. Put the name of your blog in the “name” box. You can put it along with your real name (I usually comment as “Jordan (MamaBlogga)”) if you want. This builds up recognition for your site.
  3. Please don’t stuff the “name” box with keywords. Thanks.

Make the most of other opportunities
Of course, the easier way to get a link from MamaBlogga would be to enter the Group Writing Project next week!

To take full advantage of the Group Writing Project:

  1. Think about your post title carefully. Is there a term you’d like to rank better in search engines for? Does it work in the title and text of your post? Use it!
  2. Republish the final list—you have my permission. This helps to spread the link love to all the participants. The more people that republish the list, the more links we all get!
  3. Barring that, link to your favorite entries. Again, spreading the link love often comes back to help you.
  4. Pass the word along. During the project, tell your blogging friends about it. Ask them to participate (or at least mention it on their blogs), and maybe republished the final list. (Plus, especially for July’s topic, I’d love to see lots of responses to this universal theme!)
  5. Comment like crazy. I’m still impressed by Karen of PediaScribe, who created a Google Alert about the MamaBlogga Group Writing Project and commented on many of the entries before I could! Comments can get people checking out your blog and eventually maybe even linking to you (as I mentioned earlier this week).

Hope to see your entries next week!