Jamdo Marketing Blog

On many web master forums there always seems to be a debate raging about whether people should build professional blogs using a free service like blogger.com

To be honest, I am always amazed that there is even an argument.

Who in their right mind would attempt to build a business that is totally at the mercy of another company? If something happens at blogger.com (or any free host) such as the company going broke or deciding to start charging for their services, then the business you have spent a long time (probably years) building is gone.

I have even heard of some people having their entire blog deleted when blogger mistakenly thought their blog to be spam (and I even have suspicions that vindictive competitors use the “flag this blog” option on blogger to falesly mark competing blogs as spam). Sure, in most cases the company will realise that the blog isn’t spam, but I am sure they make mistakes sometimes.

There are simply too many variables that are out of your hands for a serious blogger to consider using a free service when starting a new blog.

Now, you can get blog hosting from as little as a few dollars per month and to be brutally honest, if you think that this is too much for you, then you are probably not serious about this as a business anyway.

I know that some people have built very profitable sites using free hosting like blogger, but I also know that many more have built profitable businesses using paid hosting. Business is about having as much control over the money creation
process as possible - using a free host takes away some of that control
in return for saving a few cents a day.

Think carefully before you cede that control.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, pro blogging

Share This

You may have heard of the idea of linkbait before - as the name suggests it is when you make a site or a post that attracts a lot of links from other sites.

The trick is finding something that is such good quality that people are inclined to link to it.

One trick in this area is to make a list.

For some reason, people love lists.

For example, on Jamdo, you might remember a while back that I made a post about the Six Best Blogs on Blogging.

Besides getting on the front page of a social bookmarking site (which was nice), it also got a few incoming links from other blogs.

Those links seem to deliver traffic still now, more than a month after the post went up.

Lists seem to have this magical ability to spark interest.

So if you want a bit of link love and traffic, it might be a good idea to try making a list. Here are a few possiblities.

Make a “best of” or a “worst of” list related to your niche. Make sure you leave one or two places on your list for a controversial entry - this will spark debate and interest in your site which will bring more people. Don’t worry about criticism - it is part of the business.

You could also make a list of tools or resources that people in your niche might be interested in - if it is a list of tools that are of interest for continual reference, then you might be luck y enough to have people continually returning to your site to refer to your list.

You could also make a list of ways to achieve a certain goal - something like “10 ways to…” - these type of lists also seem to be pretty popular.

All of these type of lists seem to continually get voted onto the front of social bookmarking sites and get lots of traffic.

I suppose you just need a way to give people what they want to read!

Share This

Sometimes the aim of a blog is to create a community around a particular subject, and sometimes the aim to to provide straight information to assist a purchase decision.

Product blogs, more often than not, fall into the second category.

In fact it is pretty difficult to create a community of avid readers around the topic of a particular product or product niche.

For product blogs, the majority of your traffic will probably come from the search engines (rather than referals).

For that reason, it is especially important on those types of blogs to keep in mind good SEO principals when writing about the products - by doing that you give yourself the best chance of getting a reasonable amount of traffic to your blog and making a few affiliate sales.

Now I have written before on affiliate datafeeds and how you can use them to start automatically populating your blogs with RSS2Blog. One thing you can do with these automatically generated blogs is to rewrite the description of the products in your own words (thus avoiding any possible duplicate content penalty from Google). That way you can really leave the site on auto-pilot. A site like that will take a couple of days to set up, but the returns will be well worth it as the original descriptions will show up better in the search engines than the supplied descriptions that are being used by several other sites.

Write with good SEO principals in mind and the sky is the limit with search engine traffic.

Technorati Tags: RSS2Blog, SEO, search engines, product blogs, blogs

Share This

I finally got around to downloading and installing the DoFollow plugin for wordpress on Jamdo.

The reason I did this is that I found out over at Andre Chaperon’s blog that Wordpress automatically has a “nofollow” command in all of the comments - something that I didn’t know.

That means that any links in the comments will not pass on any search engine juice to the page they are pointing at. This was an attempt by Wordpress to combat the growing scourge of comment spam and I can certainly see their reasons for doing so.

To disadvantage legitimate commenters, however, I think this is a little unfair. I mean, if people are kind enough to stop by and contribute meaningful content to your blog in the form of comments, then why shouldn’t they get a little Google love in return? Install a comment spam catcher and there will be no great problems anyway!

Anyway, the plugin is very easy to install.

I’d also add that it may even draw an extra commenter or two to some of your blogs if they know that they can get some search engine love in retrun for their comments. A great way to help enhance the community of your blog!

Technorati Tags: DoFollow, NoFollow, comment spam, wordpress plugin

Share This

I have just been reading an exceptionally frustrating story about some fantastic blogs that are now broke.

Why frustrating?

Well, the content on these blogs was updated several times daily, was very original, entertaining and well written. The main writers behind each project had national profiles in their respective countries and enough media contacts to generate buzz anytime they felt like it.

Moreover, both blogs had PR6 and were attracting thousands of extremely loyal visitors daily (one of them one a very high paying keyword niche - technology). One of them, according to my web comments Firefox plugin, had had no fewer than 20 other blogs comment on it in the last 24 hours!!! In fact the success in link-baiting and traffic of these blogs was a dream for any internet or blog marketer.

Yet both of them recently announced that they were closing or severely curtailing further activities.

The more recent one was http://bayosphere.com/ and the other was http://webdiary.com.au (formerly http://margokingston.typepad.com which is the site they announced was going broke)

Look at their adsense placement!!

Bottom of the right hand collumn on both these sites! Possibly the worst place on the page! And the ads aren’t integrated - they stick out like dogs balls!!

Web Diary has a download button for Firefox - in what way, shape or form does that have anything to do with the topics they are discussing? I would be surprised if they managed a 0.01% CTR on that banner.

Webdiary is aimed at the political intelligentsia of Australia - a market that are amongst the most prolific book buyers in the world, and yet there isn’t a single Amazon (or any bookstore) affiliate link.

Bayosphere doesn’t appear to have any affiliate links either.

No advertising banners either.

I mean, how did these sites actually plan on making money?

Now, if these well intentioned journalists had bothered to consult an internet marketer before they staked their livelihood on these projects then I would be willing to bet that they would not be having to announce the demise of their sites.

Technorati Tags: blogs, monetization, ads

Share This

If you have been following my advice about blogging you will already be running a Feedburner feed for your blogs.

The great thing about Feedburner is that it allows you to get some statistics for your feed and see how many people are looking at your blog from their RSS aggregators / Bloglines etc etc.

If you have been doing this, then you will probably also have noticed a problem with Feedburner - that is that not every person who uses your feed will be using your Feedburner feed.

Many RSS tools and reader will “auto-discover” a feed on a page. That means that they will likely come up with your Wordpress blog’s automatically generated feeds as well as your Feedburner feed.

In turn that means that many people will select your blog’s automatic feed meaning that your Feedburner stats won’t be an accurate representation of how many people are actually reading your feed.

Luckily there is a solution!

I came accross this handy little Wordpress plugin that make feed “auto-dicscoverers” discover only your Feedburner feed (thanks to Darren at Pro Blogger).

That means that every person who uses your feed will be using your Feedburner feed.

That means you will have accurate statistics for your feed! Great!

Now it’s  avery easy 4 minute install and setup. You should get it.

Technorati Tags: RSS, Feedburner, Wordpress Plugin, XML

Share This