Day Four of ProBlogger’s 31 Days to Building a Better Blog concerns something called social bookmarking. Wikipedia defines the phenomenon as “an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others.”
ProBlogger says that the benefit of such sites to bloggers is that they “have the ability to push vast quantities of visitors around the web at the drop of a hat.” Most of them apparently allow you to submit posts which they then link to, thereby acting as sort of an online billboard, driving interested passers by to your site. According to ProBlogger, most accept all submissions provided that you don’t spam them, but some, like Slashdot are more selective. The traffic one might get from such a tool can apparently be quite dramatic, and while the increased traffic might be short-lived, it gives you an opportunity to catch a few regular readers.
ProBlogger specifically mentions and links to the following social bookmarking sites:
The Wikipedia Social Bookmarking entry, though, has a very comprehensive list.
I’m going to check out some of the links myself, submit some of my better posts to some of the sites, and I’ll report back.
Prior Posts on My Experience with ProBlogger’s 31 Days to Building a Better Blog
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Is the ten-year-old behind a kids life Tennessee’s youngest blogger?
Via Tennessee Jed, the kids’ step-father.
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The Vol Abroad does the unthinkable and blogs about his job. Follow the link for the incriminating details!
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Well, it only took a month, but I’ve finally fully implemented what I learned from Days 1 through 3 of ProBlogger’s 31 Days to a Better Blog.
Here’s a follow up to what I learned from Day 2 and Day 3:
Day 2
- I’m doing a bit better at posting more often, but time is still a factor there.
- I’ve taken to positioning the Google Adsense ads closer to the content, putting it at the beginning of each post.
- I’ve stopped using Blogger (can we still be friends?) and started using WordPress, which has been a good move. I really like the WordPress interface and its flexibility, especially how it allows bloggers to utilize post categories. I was also able to find a unique look and feel for the blog that distinguishes it from the handful that are available to the hordes of Blogger users. In addition, WordPress can do so much more than I know about at this point, and I’m looking forward to learning and unleashing its capabilities over the next several months.
- Finally, I’ve moved from the blogspot.com domain to my own joelhollingsworth.com domain. I’m going on faith right now that the move will reap rewards because search enginges prefer dedicated domains rather than easily available, commercial domains. I haven’t actually noticed a difference yet, but I do get the feeling that I’m taken more seriously having made the leap. The cost really isn’t that bad — I went with PowWeb.com for $7.77 a month for 5,000 meg storage and 300 gig transfer. I haven’t come close to using this much yet. Tech support when I needed it wasn’t bad, but I’ve had several hours of down time this past weekend, so the jury’s out on them for now, too. Again, the net effect is hard to get a handle on at this point, but I think over time, it will be a positive move.
Day 3
I’ve also been careful about placing keywords in titles, as I learned from the Day 3 post. One thing I had to figure out in WordPress, though, was to change the default setting to use permalinks. Basically, this means that links to individual posts are identified by title rather than by number. In theory, the posts will rank better in search engines because the name of the link itself contains keywords.
The net effect of all of these changes is difficult to measure at this point, but I think that over time, it will pay off. I’ve basically doubled my page visits and page views since implementation of these techniques, with a total of over 2,200 visits and over 7,100 page views as of today’s date. A lot of the increase in traffic, though, has actually gone to my blogspot.com address. I think that this is primarily due to my old domain having been around for awhile and my new domain spending some time in the Google Sandbox, which is a metaphor for the probation period the Google crawler and indexer imposes upon new sites until they prove themselves over time.
The bottom line is that the blog, for whatever reason, is trending positively.
Day 4 coming soon.
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A couple of weeks ago, I registered with the truth laid bear’s blogosphere ecosystem just for fun. Right out of the box, I was a lowly Insignificant Microbe, but after a few days I ascended to the status of Flippery Fish, bypassing completely the Slimy Molluscs, Lowly Insects, Crunchy Crustaceans, Wiggly Worms, and Multicellular Microorganisms.
After a few days as a Crawly Amphibian, I am proud to report that I am now a Slithering Reptile.
Thanks to n.z. bear for the fun.
You can keep track of my evolution on the sidebar over there, but I’m pretty sure that Slithering Reptiles is as high as lawyers get.
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Just completed my move from joelhollingsworth.blogspot.com to joelhollingsworth.com.
The metaphorical last box to be unpacked was re-directing all internal links to the non-blogspot URL. Just finished. It’s late. I’m going to bed.
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I just wanted to remind everybody that I have almost no control over the Google ads that show up on the site. They’re context-based, meaning that the ads should have some relation to what I write.
Based on the fact that my current Goggle ads are for night life and condos in Los Angeles, I’m guessing that Google hasn’t yet crawled the new site. Of course, now that I wrote that, who knows?
Soon, hopefully.
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I’ve migrated to joelhollingsworth.com! Please update your bookmarks and/or blogrolls. I’ll leave the blogspot posts active for a little while, but all new posts will be to the new site. For some reason, the comments aren’t making the transfer. Neither are some of the posts.
It will undoubtedly take some time to fine tune the new site. I’m sure the internal links need to be corrected, and I know I’ll need to keep searching for, customize an existing, and/or create from scratch, a new look or “theme” with Wordpress, which is what I’ll be using instead of Blogger.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the new site!
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Comment spam out of control. Started getting all sorts of stuff, so I’m turning them off.
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Just discovered Kobayashi Maru, thanks to Instapundit. The name is derived from a Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk beat a simulation, designed to be unwinnable to test the character of the participant, by re-programming the simulation.
The top four Kobayashi Maru posts at this time are all excellent, and rather than link to them all individually, I’m just going to pitch the site.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I’m attracting inordinate amounts of spam in my comments. I don’t know what I’ve done. Something akin to dumping buckets of blood and gore over the rail into the ocean, I guess.
I’m working on it.
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In what I think is Day 3 of Problogger’s 31 Days to a Better Blog series, Darren stresses the importance of including keywords in post titles. My first thought upon reading this was that I know how to do that. After all, as a lawyer, I spend a good portion of my time searching for information pertinent to whatever I’m working on at the time, and so I have had some practice at translating concepts into keywords. I’d like to think that I’m acutely aware of the fact that others will find my post or not depending on the words I choose to boil the content of the post down to its essence.
But I wonder whether I’m actually doing a very good job at it. Let’s take a look, shall we? A lot of my recent posts were on the opening game for UT football. I think I did a fair job of using the phrase “Tennessee football” intead of “UT” or just “football.” Let’s see if anything comes up on a Google query. Hold on a sec.
Okay, nothing on the first five pages for “Tennessee football” or “Tennessee football blog.” Yahoo! was no better. Oh well, there’s a lot of noise on this concept, and perhaps it’s a bit early. Let’s try something older and narrower.
How about the Sundry Perils of Bunk Bedding series? How’d I do there?
Hmmm. Maybe that wasn’t all that narrow. Neither Google nor Yahoo! turned up anything on a “bunk bed” query in the first five pages.
Really, though, my purpose here isn’t to drive people to my site so I can make a bunch of money. I’ve got a job I love, and this is just a hobby. But it’s nice to do things well, and so I’m going to be more aware of the words I choose for post titles in the future. Plus, I’d bet that there’s more to it than just the titles you choose. There appears to be a whole field known as “search engine optimization” or “SEO.” I’m looking foward to learning more.
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