Comments on: Blogging for Beginners Series – What’s Missing?

By: Jon Tillman

Jon Tillman — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 16:36:04 +0000

Heck, while we’re at it, some sort of (near) exhaustive list of blog/rss directories to ping would be nice…

By: Niall

Niall — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:59:15 +0000

I’d like to know about the efficacy of pinging/manually submitting to Technorati and/or other blog/RSS directories. Worthwhile, or will they find you anyway?

By: Wayne Hurlbert

Wayne Hurlbert — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 05:29:25 +0000

Getting indexed by the search engines in the first place can be accomplished in several ways. The most common technique is to receive an inbound link from another blog or traditional website that’s already indexed. The search engine spider program will follow the link to your blog and index it. If you have no such links, you can generate them yourself by submitting your blog to the many free for entry blog directories. They are indexed on a very frequent basis, and your blog will be indexed along with them.

Another method is to activate an RSS feed to your blog and then subscribe to your own feed. The spiders will crawl that feed. Keep pinging your blog as well to keep the spiders returning to your blog by reminding them of fresh posts all ready for inclusion in their index too.

Don’t submit your site to the search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN Search. Only submit to the directories and RSS feeds. The search engines will find your blog and index it faster that way.

By: Rich Owings

Rich Owings — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 04:53:12 +0000

Here’s a couple of ideas:

1. Keywords…For example, how many keywords should I list? A post can have 20 terms someone could search on. Should I list all 20 or only a few “key” ones.

2. Images…Should I resize images? If I load hi-res images (thumbnailed on my post), will it eat up bandwidth? How do I resize them?

Thanks for considering these. I love your blog and visit it every day.

By: Marty

Marty — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 13:26:20 +0000

Being new to the blogging fold, I’d like to know how the bloggers that do product reviews get the product to review. Surely they’re not buying everything they review. Do they get info from the manufacturer website, or have company news sent to them? I’d like to do some type of product review blog as I really enjoy reading some of them myself. My current blog is not good enough to get me accepted into Adsense or Chitika…I’ve tried.

By: Simon Townley

Simon Townley — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 09:36:41 +0000

It might be helpful to have something more on how to custmise templates. I know there are hundreds of templates out there for Wordpress – but, as a complete newbie, there’s nothng I actually want to use. So, instead of starting to blog, I’m spendings days and weeks learning CSS and PHP. (I know, I should pay a designer… but money’s tight and I want to be in control. Besides, I don’t actually know what I want yet, which is designer’s biggest nightmare).

Another possible topic is pictures / images in blogs. I don’t mean the design elements – I mean images inserted into everyday blog posts. How do bloggers deal with copyright? It looks to me like a lot ignore it. What are the ethics around linking to a picture on someone else’s site? You’re not ’stealing’ their pic by downloading and uploading it onto your own site. Instead, you ’steal’ their bandwidth.

I’m particulalry interested in this as I’m starting a blog about a particular sport, so there’s lots of great pics available on mainstream media sites. But I have no right to use them…

By: Cary

Cary — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 22:13:09 +0000

Jon’s got a great point here…I run a number of blogs now, but I’ve never seen anyone address just how they go about managing a full load of blogs.

I of course have my own process now, but I’d rather not re-invent the wheel any more than I have to!

;)

By: Jon Tillman

Jon Tillman — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 21:13:54 +0000

Firstly, I want to thank you for this series (and for this blog). It has gotten me off of the preblogger fence and down in the trenches, actually blogging.

However, I would like to see some information on how to manage the “many blogs” idea instead of the “one-blog-many-categories” style. I am working on getting several other blogs off the ground, all tightly focused, and some Beginner information on managing that process would be invaluable.

By: katiebird

katiebird — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:52:51 +0000

Well I guess I’ve got one answer. This place is officially on my list of important sights — I’m checking back every 20 minutes just to see if there’s something new. And sighing mightily when there isn’t. (and I know, RSS would tell me in a flash — but I’m not counting on it as the final authority yet)

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:01:21 +0000

Would love to see intermediate series; with posts about template creation/customization, plugins,increasing organic traffic,editing (after writing) articles,white hat seo.

Love the blog, interesting that others were commenting about the traffic levels – I found in the last couple days that I am deleting several from my reader without visiting. A couple weeks ago, I think I visited every post.

Keep up the great work!

By: Chris Albon

Chris Albon — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 14:35:50 +0000

I’d like to read about making money “because of your blog” instead of “from your blog”.

By: James Brown

James Brown — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 06:33:13 +0000

Great advice for newbies or pro’s!

Keep up the good work :)

Cheers
James

By: Vlad

Vlad — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 01:46:08 +0000

I think you should have an intermediate and an advanced series for more experienced bloggers.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 00:16:28 +0000

I like the idea that I read above about Google indexing your site. Maybe also about getting into the DMOZ and other such directories.

-Ryan

By: Gavin White

Gavin White — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 23:24:18 +0000

Very Interesting and Informative Site

Gavin

By: Leon

Leon — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 22:20:23 +0000

I would like to something on encouraging repeat readers (other than RSS and email subscriptions). I have both of them on my blog and people hardly use them, and I've seen plain ol' simple blogs that get several visits and like a dozen comments for each post!

By: Rich Owings

Rich Owings — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:39:38 +0000

Not what you asked, but how about an intermediate series? Maybe “Taking your blog to the next level.” I’ve been able to learn HTML pretty easily, but CSS is another beast entirely. Is it best to just pay someone to do that work for you if you’re not technically inclined? Another good intermediate topic would be internationalizing your revenue stream. A large percentage of my readers are outside the US. I believe AdSense is serving them, and Chitika is too (for the most part), but not Amazon. How can I capitalize on this traffic?

By: MarkB

MarkB — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:02:52 +0000

Hey Darren…

I wrote a nice (even if i say so myself :) article on SEO for blogs..in particular Wordpress blogs and how to get it done successfully, using a bunch of handy plugins etc that I’m sure are available on most platforms.

Feel free to contact me, if you think this article would be of use… I won’t post it here… not trying to spam your blog :D

Love your work.

Keep it up.
Mark.

By: Brion

Brion — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 19:42:27 +0000

How about the first 10 things you personally did to generate traffic?
Is it important to use a custom made template? How essential is SEO for blogs? At what point should you add advertising? If you have the money, should you try adwords PPC advertising to build a quick base of hits for your site? What should you look for in hosting providers for your blog?

By: Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 18:58:54 +0000

@KB:

Yep those probably play in too.