Today is my “blogiversary”—the anniversary of my very first post on this blog. In my first year of blogging, I’ve become a professional Internet marketing blogger. I’ve participated in memes and blog carnivals and launched a pretty successful group writing project.
If you’re a “personal” blogger—mom blogger, craft blogger or just blog as a hobby—you deserve the same help that business bloggers and professional bloggers receive. However, business and professional blog consulting is often out of the price range of personal bloggers. Now it doesn’t have to be, with services starting at $30. My services can help you with:
Have you noticed the “U Comment, I Follow” badges on many blogs? Even if you’re on Blogger, you can join the “Dofollow” movement.
What’s “Dofollow”? It’s a reaction to the automatic code that most blogging platforms attach to comment links (both the names of your commenters and any links they include in their comments). This code, rel=”nofollow”, was created to tell search engines that you don’t really trust this link, so they shouldn’t take this link as a “vote” for or endorsement of it.
Why should you remove “nofollow”? It’s like a nice little gift to give your commenters (and possibly an incentive for people to comment on your blog!). Here on MamaBlogga, our current policy is to remove the “nofollow” tags from your name link in the comments after you’ve made ten comments (handled via plugin). You can share the link love, too!
How to Remove Nofollow
You can remove the nofollow tag pretty easily. In fact, if you’re on WordPress, there’s an abundance of plugins that will do this for you quite painlessly (Andy Beard has an “ultimate” list of these). Other programs require a little bit of programming work, but it’s well worth it.
Moveable Type/TypePad
Moveable Type-based platforms are a little more tricky. In addition to adding a “nofollow,” they also implement a redirect. For example, instead of a link going straight to “MamaBlogga.com” it goes first to “http://www.typepad.com/t/comments?__mode=red&user_id=715412&id=72558418” (I made the numbers up) and then to “MamaBlogga.com.” Once again, this isn’t very nice as far as search engines go. For removing the nofollow and this redirect on Moveable Type, see Now is a Long Time Too. For TypePad, see ConverStations.
Blogger
For Blogger, go to Layout>Edit HTML. Check the little “Expand Widgets Templates” box. Scroll down to the comments section (it would probably be useful to paste your code into Notepad and use the Find function). Find this code: <a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’ rel=’nofollow’> . Delete the “rel=’nofollow'” portion and save your layout.
Update: this will remove the nofollow from comments when viewed on a single post, but not when viewed in a popup or separate window from Blogger. For example, when you view a single post on Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum, the “nofolllow” is removed from the comments. However, if you view the same comments in a separate page or popup window, the nofollow is still there. Those second windows are on a Blogger domain, and as far as I know, there’s nothing you can do about it. 🙁
(If you’re on the old Blogger template, this is found under Template>Edit HTML. The code to replace is <a href=”>$BlogBacklinkURL$>” rel=”nofollow”><$BlogBacklinkTitle$></a> you can’t remove nofollow from commenters .)
When making a comment on a Blogger/BlogSpot blog
Blogger will still use a similar redirect scheme to TypePad, only the link leads to something like “http://www.blogger.com/profile/16523599384736451872.” However, as a commenter, you can get around this. If the blog allows, you’ll have three options on the comments: your blogger profile, Other and Anonymous. Your blogger profile is the default, but it creates a link to your blogger profile, and not your blog. However, if you select Other, you can enter whatever name and URL that you like.
Be sure to stay tuned next week for another helpful blogging tip and an exciting MamaBlogga announcement!
“Stickiness” on a blog (or website) is getting visitors to stay longer, read more, subscribe and leave comments. Now, isn’t that something we all want?
So today, three tips that I’ve heard only about a billion times to help increase your blog’s stickiness:
Link to related posts. I know with WordPress there’s a way to do this automatically (with a plugin), but even if you have to do it manually, it’s worth it. Before posting, brainstorm posts on similar topics. You can also look through labels or categories in your archives to see if there’s something related. At the end of your post, list a few (three is a good number) of these related posts. If someone has read that far, chances are they’ll want to read more stuff just like it!
Make it easy to find similar posts. As with above, if someone is reading your site, chances are they’re interested in what you’re saying. Use some sort of categorization and/or tagging system (categories, tags, labels, etc.) to help them find similar posts on your blog. If applicable, list your categories/tags/labels in the sidebar to help people explore your blog.
Tell visitors what to do. You want your visitors to subscribe to your blog or comment? Tell them! At the end of every entry, invite readers to subscribe to your feed (code the invitation into your template!). Ask for comments; put a subscribe button in a prominent place on your blog. If someone arrives at your site and doesn’t know what to do next, they’ll probably leave instead of hunting for something to do on your site.
Would you like to know more about developing your blog’s stickiness? I’ve written a free guide to increasing your blog’s stickiness, “Get Your Visitors to Stick!”
I just made a Rachael Ray recipe for dinner tonight, and now I have 3/4 of a bottle of curry paste leftover—and nothing to use it in (unless I want to roast 8 cups of vegetables to make this again).
What to do?
Hooray, I get to save like an entire minute with this little gadget:
That’s my built in search engine box in Firefox (highly recommended browser, by the way!). Want an ingredient search? Look at this page. The ingredient search is the second one listed; the plain AllRecipes search is first. I use both.
Blogging Tip
Do you have a recipe blog? You can submit your recipe blog feed to Google Base (with some formatting) and get a pretty decent likelihood of being ranked for relevant recipe searches.
RSS is an important acronym in the blogosphere. It’s usually interpreted as Really Simple Syndication, so we’ll start with the really simple and work our way up. I think we have something for even the most seasoned blogger here.
Basic
First, an excellent explanation of the easiest way to keep up with dozens (hundreds!) of blogs from Common Craft:
Also under “basics,” your blog generates an RSS feed automatically (unless you’ve disabled this feature).
Novice FeedBurner “burns” your blog feed for you, making it easy for your readers to subscribe in any feed reader. If you click on the green “Subscribe” button in the sidebar, you’ll be taken to a page to choose your feed reader.
FeedBurner can also add a lot of cool features to your feed. You can add information at the end of messages in a feed reader like copyrights, number of comments, social bookmarking stuff—there are more than 100 “FeedFlares.” FeedBurner can also track visitors to your site and show you how many subscribers you have.
Intermediate
Many people use only partial feeds for their sites, sending only excerpts or summaries to their readers. There are a few reasons for this; among them is the legitimate concern about unscrupulous people republishing your blog with zero effort—and making money off your hard wraught writing.
However, the benefits of full feeds outweigh the risks. [UPDATE: the full story on full feeds] Also note that many people publish excerpt feeds believing that more people will visit their site to read their full posts—but FeedBurner CEO Rick Klau says they’ve seen no evidence to support that. See Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors at Marketing Pilgrim for more on the subject.
In Blogger, you can switch from excerpts to full feeds by going to Settings > Site Feed. From the pull down menu, select “Full.” (If you’re in Advanced Mode, the second and third options are at your discretion.)
In WordPress, select Options > Reading.
Under “Syndication Feeds,” for the option “For each article, show,” select “Full text.”
Advanced
Make sure your readers find your FeedBurner feed (instead of the default, less user-friendly feed Blogger, WordPress or Typepad creates). You may have to code it into your site. For example, in Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML. In your code, find the line:
<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>
Delete it and replace it with the following (after you’ve customized it):
<meta content=’text/html; charset=UTF-8′ http-equiv=’Content-Type’/>
<meta content=’true’ name=’MSSmartTagsPreventParsing’/>
<meta content=’blogger’ name=’generator’/>
<link href=’http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR FEEDBURNER FEED NAME HERE’ rel=’alternate’ title=’YOUR BLOG NAME HERE RSS Feed’ type=’application/rss+xml’/>
Total pro
If you’re comfortable in Apache, consider Daniel’s strategy for making sure that your subscribers are using the correct feed even if you leave FeedBurner (from Daily Blog Tips). (To tell the truth, I can only vaguely understand this one.)
Also, look at another post from Marketing Pilgrim (and no, this one’s not by me, it’s by Jeremy Luebke) on why you should not use click tracking on FeedBurner (read on the comments to see how to fix that).
Anybody out there quite proficient in MT/Typepad? I started on Blogger and had to learn WordPress for work before I made the switch to WordPress here on MamaBlogga. If anyone can give some pointers on the same issues on TypePad, it would be appreciated!
UPDATE: A big thank you to Jen once again at Semantically driven for explaining how to set your feed to full posts on Typepad. She had got screenshots and everything. Man, I should’ve thought of that. I’ll have to fix this. Screenshots added. Thank you, Jen!!
As I did my research for the Popular Parent Bloggers list, I was surprised at a few of the trends I found. As an Internet marketer, I could see a few things that definitely needed attention repeated over and over again. So, here’s some general, technical advice to all mom bloggers (and please don’t feel targeted if you’re on the PPB list; I think you’re already awesome).
Although every blogger and his/her dog will tell you that if you’re serious, you should be on your own domain, I don’t think that it really hurts your blog’s popularity if you’re a momblogger. Sacrilege, I know. However, nearly 50% of the original Popular Parent Bloggers list are hosted on BlogSpot (12) or Typepad (2), including 3 of the top 10. However, you may still want to have your own domain, if it’s available. That topic deserves its own post, maybe next week.
If you have your blog on your own domain, and you have control over your hosting, implement a 301 redirect to create a canonical URL inmediatamente (immediately).UPDATE (27 June 2007): If you run your blog on WordPress, UrbanGiraffe has a handy plugin that will do all this for you, Redirection. (This particular trick is found under Manage>Redirection>Options.)
If you don’t have WordPress, don’t worry, I’ll tell you how. Probably the most general way I can tell you to do this is to get into whatever kind of file manager your hosting service offers and find a file named .htaccess . Edit it, adding this:
(For some reason, mine only worked if I put it after the WordPress stuff already in my .htaccess file, without the first two lines above.) Of course, if your site isn’t .com, change it to the correct extension.
What does that do? That makes it so when someone types in or links to “yourdomain.com,” it’s automatically redirected to “www.yourdomain.com.”
Don’t want the www? Use this code to redirect www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com:
Why does that really make any difference? Your traffic, links and search engine ranking are divided between the www and non-www versions of the site until you implement a 301 (permanent) redirect like this.
