Well, as a blog marketer, I have to use the latest top-notch tools for promoting all of our blogs and here’s a couple of tools I have been experimenting with:
Zimbio - Zimbio is a news syndication site where you can feed your blog feeds. It’s basically an additional way to promote your content. I haven’t got that much traffic from Zimbio but you can basically strengthen your SEO and content exposure free simply by signing up and submitting your blogs.
ClipMarks - ClipMarks is a “clipping” tool that lets you easily clip images, text without having to upload images or use the default Wordpress platform. After you clip, you can easily link up your blog to publish automatically. Although they do not support tagging, I love Clipmarks as you can blog very, very fast. This isn’t for every blogger but it is great for any blogs that needs fast content. You can’t get any faster than this. You can see an example of how I use ClipMarks to promote my travel blog here.
One thing you need to check for is how “big” a social network is, if there’s no traffic, it’s probably a waste of your time to use it. There’s thousands of ways to promote your blog but you need to stick with the top-notch ones in order to get ahead. If you look at Zimbio’s traffic stats right now, they are going up a lot and it’s a great time to get your blog syndicated.
Well, I am in search of new ways to promote my blogs so if you know any good ones, please do leave a comment.
If you haven’t about the buzz, you will have to check it out as Yahoo Buzz just went public, meaning any blogger can have their blog posts up at Yahoo Buzz for millions of people to vote on.
If you make it to the first page, expect a LOT of traffic to your site, similar to Digg.
Yahoo! Buzz™gets your content on the Yahoo! network.
* Buzz pulls in content from publisher partners across the Web.
* Users vote for that content on Buzz and on publisher sites, which helps surface the most remarkable stories to the top of Buzz.
* The best content may be featured on the Yahoo! homepage, potentially driving millions of clicks to your site.
Who should partner with Buzz?
* Yahoo! Buzz welcomes ALL publishers, from large websites to niche bloggers.
* We feature all types of content, from entertainment to business.
* Yahoo! Buzz is currently focused on the U.S. audience.
Web 2.0 Expo is coming around the corner again in New York. For those of you Web 2.0ers who live near New York, I highly suggest you to check it out.
For free pass, try going to the press area and tell them that you are a blogger covering the show.
Web 2.0 Expo is a global annual gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next generation web. Web 2.0 Expo features the most innovative and successful Internet industry figures and companies providing attendees with examples of business models, development paradigms, and design strategies to enable mainstream businesses and new arrivals to the Web 2.0 world to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities. Web 2.0 Expo is co-produced by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media.
It seems like some of the bloggers on blogger.com with anti-obama blogs have been blocked.
Personally, I don’t have a political opinion here but it looks like Google is marking those blogs as “spam”.
I am not sure what Google’s policies are on political blogs but just as an advice, I wouldn’t host my blog on blogger if I seriously wanted a “free voice” or freedom.
The bloggers in question, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and all of them opposed to Senator Obama, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential “spam” blogs. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” the Google e-mail read.
Heck, the funny thing is, supporters of Clinton should now be supporting Obama, what is happening???
Well, this one’s pretty simple but a lot of people forget to put nofollow on links that are going out.
I don’t mean you should put nofollow on blogroll links but links like feedburner, flickr, and other free services you link to.
Don’t simply copy and paste as you are giving away valuable Pagerank to those free sites.
Well, that’s if you want to keep your PageRank as high as possible. It’s pretty much pointless to put a nofollow on those links anyways.
I know, I know, you want to thank those sites that give you the free service but realize that every link is valuable and if you are serious about gaining traction in the internet world, you should really pay attention here. Besides, those free services probably already got millions of free links from other bloggers who don’t give a shi*. I am just telling you if you do give a shi*.
Why do people forget about this simple fact?
Well, because most of the time, you end up copying and pasting the code from those free service sites. Now remember they don’t have a ToS that says you need to put a do-follow link in order to use their services. It’s only fair for you as a blogger to protect your Pagerank from going out to links like that. It’s actually very important that you watch out where your outlinks are going to as it will determine the number of search engine traffic you receive over the long term.
Now, don’t tell me you are on the do-follow campaign, that’s just something I won’t get into but it’s only hurting your blog. I think it’s smarter to play the safe side and make sure your do-follow links are only to those sites that you want it to go out and keep everything else, as I said before, a no-follow folks.
I maybe right or wrong but you might as well be safe than sorry.
Today, I will talk briefly about how to identify splogs and protect yourself from losing your precious little Pagerank.
First and foremost, if you are a blogger, (and this article is intended for a blogger) you need to be aware of trackbacks left on your blog.
Now, most trackbacks will show up on your comments list. Although Akismet does a pretty good job, sometimes you really gotta keep a keen eye on things and make sure splogs don’t leave you a trackback.
Now, when you get a trackback, to protect yourself, all you have to do is check the link and make sure it’s a blog written by a human being. If it’s not, simply mark it as spam and delete it.
There is a better way so you do less work by using some Wordpress plugins.
I use Simple Trackback Validation plugin which checks each trackback to see if there’s a valid website linking to it. This won’t stop splogs but will cut down on your spam checking and filter out most of trackback hackers.
If you have a blog with a pretty good blog, I actually recommended you disable trackbacks completely. I have seen some of my big blogger friends do this, and it works. Simply by limiting the links going out, you can raise your Pagerank, especially if your blog is getting big.
To turn off trackbacks, simply go to Settings->Discussion then unselect Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks).
To Google, trackbacks are nothing but links going out, it doesn’t really help your Pagerank unless you are just starting out.
Now, this probably beats the whole purpose of trackbacks but in this fast moving Web2.0 world, sometimes you gotta do what you need to do to get the job done.
I hope that helps you from losing Pagerank and next time I will show you how to protect yourself against Blog Post Theft and Splogs.
In this special post, we will tell you how you can increase your PageRank!
NOTE: Although we admit that there are many “standardized” methods, this method was learned through experience and actual trial-and-error by SEO experts at Zedomax Network.
So here’s your TOP5 List of Things to do and watch for when trying to increase your PageRank:
1. Link to high PR blogs and sites. (In other words, linking massively to websites with high PageRanks is a very good thing) Install the Google Toobar if you don’t know what PageRank is. (It’s that little bar that says PageRank.)
2. BE VERY AWARE OF incoming comments, pings, and trackbacks from other blogs and social networking sites.
In other words, you have to only let “real” blogs and “real” websites link to you. If you have any doubt the sites is a splog (spam blog), or a scraper site, you will want to not let that person, blog, or website leave any trace behind.
3. Google Algorithm is simple. The more links you have coming in, the better. The more links you have going out to high PRs, the better.
This is slightly different from the conventional, “the number of links coming in divided by the number of links going out.” Google somehow ranks you higher if you link to high PR sites and this is what “we” learned through time and trial/error.
Even splogs can help your PageRank as long as you are not linking back to them.
4. Write posts on recent “big” event that’s considered brand new. Doing this automatically gets you some traffic since it’s something new.
For example, if iPod just came out and you were the very first blogger who wrote about it, I bet you are still pulling in traffic from Google. This type of “iPod” keyword can easily boost your PageRank and get lots of traffic.
5. Use the above advices today and take action!
How do you know if it’s working? Well, using all the possible measurement systems today, you’d probably still wouldn’t be able to compute it. But, you will start to notice that you start getting more search terms from Google daily. (Yes, that means your PageRank IS going up.)
Higher PageRank = More Traffic
It’s that simple although there are exceptions with some high PR sites that don’t get as much traffic as others. But we theorize that PageRank is directly correlated with Traffic.
Right now, there’s the new project by Google, Knol Project. We will actually doing this on our older brother site, Zedomax.com. We are trying to see if we can show up #1 on Google for “Knol Project” since it’s so new.
I have been keeping a keen eye on the new project by creator of Million Dollar Wiki, Graham Langdon. His new EntreCard, a free widget for bloggers, allows bloggers to advertise and trade 125×125 pixel ads for free. The above is a Alexa web traffic charts comparing BlogRush and EntreCard. As you can see, BlogRush did get MASSIVE traffic in the beginning and slowly on its way downhill. On the other hand, EntreCard started very very SLOW, and seems to have caught up with BlogRush already. Once EntreCard gets out to even more bloggers, the viral effect will cause EntreCard to exponentially grow. Am I an EntreCard evangelist? Hell yes, because it’s a great advertising system built on great functionalities unlike BlogRush.
Now, you can see a close-up of what’s been happening between EntreCard and BlogRush in the last 4 weeks. I bet it won’t be more than 2 weeks before EntreCard eclipses BlogRush. What will happen to BlogRush? It will probably die and suffer massively while EntreCard “converts” BlogRush users to its own.
If you are a blogger and haven’t tried EntreCard, try it today. Our card is the one with One Buck Wiki and EntreWiki so, drop us a card!
