Marketing With Blogs and RSS

2/28/2006

This Stuff Never Ceases to Amaze Me

Filed under:

Basic Blogging Info

— John @ 4:51 pm

Wow … it has been way too long since I’ve posted here. I haven’t lost interest in blogging … far from it. I just got overwhelmed with two new businesses, and got behind on my housekeeping. My apologies to those of you who were following this blog.

Now for the point of this post. I commented on this once before, but it’s happened again, and I wanted to give you a “heads up".

Here’s the deal … I started a new forum on one of my sites this week. Took me a few hours to put the thing together, but my customers had asked for it, and I thought it was a good idea.

The thing that blows my mind is how quickly I got it visited by the googlebot. HOURS.

People who don’t maintain blogs think we bloggers make this stuff up. I put up the forum, posted a link to it from the main site (which also contains a blog) and then dashed off a post on one of my other blogs, announcing the “grand opening".

That was this morning, maybe five or six hours ago. I logged back in to tweak a few things on the forum, and noticed there was an “unregistered guest” nosing around. A quick DNS trace on the IP address revealed it was … the googlebot.

An hour later, it was back again, and just before I logged in here to write this post, I noticed it was there again, spidering the forum for a third time. The forum only has maybe three posts in it, all my own, put there to “seed” it and get it going. ONE post to my own blog, and a static link on the main part of the site that contains the forum. And the dang thing is being spidered.

Are you blogging yet? Forgive me, but if your answer is “no” you’re out of your mind. My blogs get my sites spidered quickly, bring me newsletter subscribers and customers, “deep link” any page that I want to on my sites, and certainly can’t be hurting my search engine placements.

Folks, you can blog for *free* … and get all the benefits described above. Oh yeah, I just remembered – I also make a little extra revenue each month from those AdSense panels you see on my sidebar, and many of my posts.

Why aren’t YOU blogging?

John

10/30/2005

New Email Marketing Strategies Blog/Website

Filed under:

Blogging Advice

— John @ 11:52 am

I’ve written before about the trend toward creating websites using blog software. It’s a great idea, because when you do it right, you get the best of both worlds. I’ve even linked you to a couple of my favorite sites that were done this way.

I finally decided to do one myself. My new email marketing strategies site is actually a blog, but also has traditional links and static pages.

If you’re familiar with Wordpress, you’ll recognize the layout, as I have yet to customize it. I just used one of the simple templates, customized a bit of the CSS, and bingo – instant website.

By the way, people who really do a sophisticated job of this can actually completely hide the fact the site is a blog, if they want to. I didn’t bother with that, but I may play around with it in the future, since the latest version of WordPress allows instantaneous switching from one template to another, and full customization of the hundreds of templates that are available.

Why did I decide to do this? Well, over the past few months, I bought a business that sells email leads, and developed another “feeder” site to go with it. I also wrote an email marketing ebook that is tied in with the leads site.

The new blog/site is designed to be a “content site” with some links to my products and AdSense ads for a little extra revenue on the side. It’s a “feeder” that has value in and of itself, but in the long run will sell some of my ebooks, and/or encourage some sales at my business opportunity leads site.

The great thing about the new site is how quickly I got it up and running. With the quick install procedure, I actually had the shell of it there in well under half an hour. I spent a couple of hours tweaking things to get it looking just like I wanted, and another couple of hours writing and posting the first few articles, and submitting the new site to half a dozen or so blog directories.

A website in under 6 hours? Yup, that’s about how it worked out.

Of course, I have bigger plans for it in the long run, but I already have some pages up, and the spiders looking for me. I plan to add a post every day for the next week or two, both to “flesh out” the site, and to keep the spiders coming back.

I also have some “static pages” in mind that will be permanent, as opposed to the blog pages. But for now, I can just log on and write a new page in a short while, and keep adding them as frequently as I’m in the mood.

In my book, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

Happy Blogging!

John