I’ve been seeing advice all over popular blogs about the benefits of guest blogging. Everyone seems to agree (and rightly so) that it’s a good strategy to get traffic, and more than that, name recognition.
But looking at the latest Problogger poll, the majority of Problogger readers haven’t written any guest posts. This is interesting to me, because that is the group of people I would most expect to be active guest bloggers—they know the benefits and have the motivation of growing a blog and going pro.
Some of the comments on that post hint at the reasons for not guest posting, and I’m curious to find out more specifics, so if you’re not guest posting, I’d love it if you’d take this quick poll.
You’ve probably been there: you spend hours writing a great blog post, get some good feedback on it, and (justifiably) feel like a brilliant blogger. But then, a week or two later, the post has been replaced by newer entries on the front page, effectively relegating it to the dark corners where readers seldom venture.
Sure, you might still get a little Google traffic, and if it was a really good post, hopefully some other bloggers linked to it and you’re still getting a few visitors clicking through. But wouldn’t it be nice to keep the post alive and kicking on your own blog?
Fortunately, it’s not that hard, especially if you’re using WordPress (I mention some plugins below that are for WordPress blogs, but you might be able to find equivalent ways of doing these things on other platforms, too). Read on to discover a few tricks you can use today. Continue reading "3 Easy Ways To Get More Mileage From Your Blog Posts"
Since my last post about how I add followers on Twitter, I’ve received some questions about the metrics I use to choose who to follow back (or not). Then I posted a tweet that generated a much bigger response than I expected:
Can’t believe how many “Internet Marketing experts” follow me who obviously have no concept of Twitter etiquette. Not so impressive.
Having been on Twitter for a while, I find that a dozen or so new people follow me every day. To be honest, I’m not sure why they follow me (I’m only moderately interesting and tend to talk about work too much), but still, they do, so I’ve had to decide what to do about it.
When people follow me, I like to take a moment and view their profile, and decide if I’d like to follow them as well. I have a pretty open attitude towards following people; if they’re interesting, I’ll follow. I use tweetdeck to organize people of particular interest into groups so I don’t get overwhelmed with general chatter, and then rely on serendipity for the rest.
The time management pit of managing Twitter followers
The haphazard nature of new followers makes it easy to waste a lot of time. If I checked out a profile every time I got a new follow notice, I’d never get anything else done—because if I’m being haphazard about it, I don’t just look at the profile… I also click links, follow @replies, and generally wander (delightfully but aimlessly). Continue reading "How I Follow People on Twitter"
Many of the designers I work with are bloggers themselves, but some are not, so this is intended to be an introduction to what goes into a blog design.
When I refer to blog design on this page, I’m specifically talking about the part of the process that happens in a graphics program like Photoshop or Fireworks. The part that happens after that (where I take the design file and turn it into a working design) is what I refer to as coding—and a lot of designers aren’t interested in that at all (which is fine by me!).
If you have a question about blogging or getting more traffic to your blog, ask it below. I will choose some of the submitted questions to answer on the blog.
