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Tips and Tricks for Better Blogging

I'm going to treat this page like a blog, and just drop in a new paragraph as I come across new things that I think you should know about. To make it easy for you, the newest material will appear at the top of the page as I add it. If the page gets too long, I'll just break it into several pages, with a link at the bottom so you can find the earliest posts.

If you know of something that should be mentioned here, drop me a line at

In addition to visiting this page now and then, you might want to keep an eye on Blogging For Profit, and/or Marketing With Blogs and RSS. Each one has an RSS feed you can subscribe to, also.

Follow up With Your Subscribers. This is way cool! Now you can add a series of personalized messages that will be inserted into your RSS feed based upon how long it has been since someone subscribed. It turns your RSS feed into a hybrid "autoresponder", mixing the pre-written messages in with your current content. This is a great way to use the RSS feed as a way to "upsell" your customers. Check it out here.

Avoid Making Your Blog a Blatant Sales Pitch. Surfers in general, and blog readers in particular, are turned off by a blatant sales pitch. They're reading your blog looking for credible information, not an obvious sales pitch. Some people are even going so far as to create single entries that are nothing more than sales pages, post them on a blogging site, and trying to pass it off as a blog. Cummon ...

Exchange Links With Other Bloggers. Just like a website, your blog will benefit from having relevant incoming and outgoing links. You'll notice a lot of blogs have links to five or ten other blogs right on the main page, or on the sidebar of all pages.

Submit to As Many Directories as You Can. Just like with link exchanges with other blogs, your directory listings will contribute to your page rank, search engine results, and traffic. Be sure to submit your blog to the major directories first, as they get most of the traffic. In my opinion, submissions to the lesser directories aren't as important, but still help. A link is a link, as long as its relevant.

"Optimize" your Blog or Feed for the Search Engines. If you want good search engine placement, pay attention to your use of key words and phrases, in you blog's name, title, and content. The same principles apply to optimizing a blog and its entries as would apply when optimizing a web page for the search engines. If you're focusing on a particular market, then you most likely have some key words in mind already, and you can use either the Wordtracker online service, or Ad Word Analyzer software to zero in on high traffic, low competition key words.

You might also want to sign up for this free email course that will teach you the basics of using keywords and other traffic techniques. Key words should appear liberally at the beginning and end of your blog entries, and, as often as possible, should be woven into the titles of your individual entries. All those key word rich links off the "index" page of your blog will tell the search engines and your visitors about the content and theme.

Update via Email or Autoresponder Account. Here's a service that allows you to post to your RSS feed via email. When you send an email to your account, it automatically updates your RSS feed. You can also now update RSS feeds from your GetResponse Autoresponder account.

Keep Your Blog Visitors Notified. This seems kind of silly and "low tech" to me, but there are services available whereby your blog visitors can sign up to be notified by email whenever you make a new post to your blog. Seems to me that it defeats the purpose of using blogs and RSS to get around all the problems associated with email, but go figure. Besides, the RSS feed should be the announcement vehicle for your blog, if you have both. Anyway, if you want to do this, sign up here for free.

Syndicated Content via RSS. As mentioned in the book, you can plug the content from RSS feeds into the pages of your website. For example, I use this to dynamically post the latest blogging news here on my site. It acts as a doorway page, and is ideal "spider food".

From the standpoint of your search engine rankings, it's pointless to do this using javascript, since the search engine spiders don't read it, and won't recognize the updated content on your pages.

But you can buy software that translates XML into HTML and inserts the result into your web page. That content is visible to the search engines, as well as to your site visitors. This is great for you, because frequently updated content gets you return visits from the search engine spiders, and human visitors. If you develop a popular feed, you may find that your own content gets used in this way, which is great for getting links and traffic back to your website! Here are the links to the software:

• RSS Equalizer (the software that I use)



• ExpressRSS