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Shylock Adsense is a WordPress plugin that allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template. More then that, you can set it up to show different Adsense ads for articles older then X days (x is the number of days you decide)
Greywolf has a rant on Partial Feeds. I’m going to follow suit. I put my blog on a partial feed for 2 days and then looked how it was coming into my reader and I stopped the partial feed.
I read over 100 sites through my reader and if you are only pushing the partial feed then I am removing you. Sorry, but it’s a pain to go to your site to see the complete feed.
Are there other things that matter in creating a successful blog? Sure there are, but they don’t matter nearly as much as some people think they do. Let’s take a look at a few examples:
Which leaves us with the question: how do you write great content? It’s actually very simple in concept, but takes a lot of practice to perfect. I’m still trying to perfect these things myself, but in general, there are four pillars of exceptional blogwriting:
It all starts with the topic of the post. You need to consider your reader, and center the topic of your post on your reader — not on yourself, your ads, your blogger friends, or anyone else but the reader. What are his needs, wants, hopes and dreams? What problems does he have in his daily life that you can solve?
Now choose a topic that will solve one of his problems, help him achieve something he’s always wanted to achieve. Create a resource for him: an extremely useful set of practical tips, links, tools to solve that problem.
The more practical your tips, the better. It’s not enough to say that the keys to losing weight are eating less and exercising more. Those are both difficult things to do. Give the reader extremely useful ways of doing those things, and you’ve created a resource.
Once you’ve got a useful topic, crystalize your main point in the headline. You should write the headline first (and then come back to it to make it better later) so you know in your mind the main point of the post. It helps you keep the post focused.
The few words that make up the headline are the most important few words in your post. Why? Because most readers will read your post in a feed reader (think Bloglines or Google Reader) or come across it on a site like Digg or another blog that links to your post. In all of these examples, just about the only thing they’ll see before making a decision about whether to read the post is your headline. If the headline is catchy, they’ll read more. If it’s not, you’ve just lost a reader.
You’ve got your great topic, your killer headline, and an extremely useful post. Your reader decides to give your post a few seconds of his time.
But then he comes upon the post, and it’s a huge block of undifferentiated text, and he thinks to himself, “This is going to take a good chunk of my time.” Your reader, of course, is a very busy person, and doesn’t have 20 minutes to devote to each post. In fact, even if he does have a spare 20 minutes to spend on a single post, he won’t give those 20 minutes to yours unless he’s convinced that it’s going to be extremely useful — and he can’t do that unless he knows what’s in the content.
Don’t make your reader dig through paragraph after paragraph to know what your post has to offer. He won’t do it — he’ll move on quickly to the next item in his feed reader.
Make your post scannable — your reader should be able to quickly glance through the post and pick up the main points without reading too deeply. The best ways to do that are with lists, but other great methods are subheds (the smaller headlines for sections within a post), block quotes, images and graphics, and the use of bold or italics.
Once your reader decides to spend some time with your post, he’s going to want to get through it without too much work. The key to that: simplicity.
The great writing manual, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, instructs us to write in a way that comes naturally. It also says to avoid fancy words and to omit unnecessary words. Readers enjoy writing that is conversational, without being wordy. Write in a way that speaks to your reader, not down to him, and doesn’t confuse him with jargon and acronyms and technical stuff.
Pretend that you’re having a conversation with a friend, and write like that. Then go back and edit out sentences and words that are unnecessary, and revise sentences that aren’t clear.
Daily Blog Tips has the ultimate blog tip post
The Successful-Blog has a great guide to blog promotion
monetizing your web site takes:
more at Essential Keystrokes
You don’t need to know much about SEO to realize links are the golden road to blog promotion. But how do we go about getting them? Which link building methods produce the best results?
I recently did an in-depth analysis of my site’s (http://www.projectparadox.com/) inbound links, their relative value, and the methods that produced them. Here are the link building methods that I found to be most effective (below you will also find the methodology used).
1. Blog Carnivals (13 links, 16.26 value, 1.25 average value per link)
Putting time and energy into evergreen posts can pay off even greater dividends when you submit them to appropriate blog carnivals. The resulting links are valuable, relevant, and good for attracting comments.
2. Friends & Partners (5 links, 14.13 value, 2.83 average value per link)
Got a friend who blogs? See about getting on his or her blogroll. If one of your favorite bloggers submits an open call for post submissions, jump on it. You may not get a large volume of links, but the few you get can be worth their weight in gold.
3. Group Writing Projects (11 links, 9.17 value, 0.83 average value per link)
Specifically, Darren’s “Top 5? group writing project. The volume of links was outstanding, although their relative value was diminished by the large number of outgoing links on each page. Considering it didn’t take long to write the post, however, I’d say it was well worth the minimal effort involved.
4. Links to Quality Posts (5 links, 7.44 value, 1.49 average value per link)
Writing quality posts is a good way to get links without ever having to ask for them. As a blog gets more readership and exposure, the value of quality posting increases exponentially.
5. Free Directory Submissions (5 links, 5.49 value, 1.1 average value per link)
Not surprisingly, free directories tend to have lots of links and low PR because of deeply-nested categories. I’ve made several dozen submissions to achieve minimal returns with this method. The three directories that showed any value were Dmoz, SoMuch.com, and Globe of Blogs.
It’s worth noting that several link building tactics did not produce results. Leaving comments, for example, is only good for referral traffic and exposure; almost all blogs tag comment links with rel=”nofollow”, so commenting is practically useless for link building purposes. Likewise, old school webrings often use deceptive redirect code that eliminates their value; don’t bother with them.
So, what are the take-home lessons from this analysis? First and foremost, participation is key. Blog carnivals and group writing projects are both excellent opportunities for link building.
Second, take every chance to network. Ask to get on your friends’ blogrolls. Reach out and connect with other bloggers in your niche. Offer to guest post in exchange for some bio links. Commenting can be an excellent route to developing these relationships, but they’re more like stepping stones to the goal than the goal itself.
Last, submit your site to blog indices and directories. Just don’t kill yourself to get in every single one you can find, since most won’t be worth the effort.
For those interested in how I arrived at the numbers above, here is my methodology. First, I went to my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard and downloaded all of the external links Google had found for my site. I then plugged these URLs into a multiple PageRank Lookup utility to determine their PR values, removing URLs with a PageRank lower than 1.
Next came the manual review. I went to each of the URLs and checked to see if the link to my site was present and followed (i.e., not tagged with rel=”nofollow”), removing URLs where it wasn’t. For those that were, I used the Firefox Web Developer plugin to count the number of outbound links on the page.
Last, I computed a relative link value from each link’s PageRank and outbound links using the formula: PageRank / Outbound Links Count * 85 (related to Google’s dampening factor, multiplied by 100 for the sake of easy comparison). I then grouped the links by their method of acquisition and tallied their overall values.
For those schooled enough in SEO to know that PageRank isn’t everything, I couldn’t agree more. I use it here only as a measurement of each link’s relative importance. Frankly, I don’t regard it as a very reliable value. However, it remains one of the only visible metrics that we have to work with.