Blogging

I was invited aboard the Technorati Train by Char at Essential Keystrokes. (Char blogs about design and marketing, and she's written some great stuff, be sure to check her out.)

If you haven't seen this meme making the rounds, the idea is to build your number of "favorites" on Technorati and discover some new blogs in the process. I'm usually a bit hesitant to jump on the latest blog meme, but I find this one appealling for a few reasons:

• It brings some attention to Technorati, a site which I use and like, but seems lately to have fallen by the wayside as Google has jumped into blog search and MyBlogLog has rolled out better community features.
• This widespread "gaming" of the Technorati's Top Favorited Blogs list will hopefully nudge them into improving their community features instead of wasting their developers talents on yet another Digg clone.

The rules for participating are below, but first, a brief introduction to the 3 blogs I'm tagging:

• J David Macor blogs about web design and tutorials. Don't forget to check out his collection of beautifully done valid XHTML templates.
• Sean Dinner is a design student writing about blogging and graphic design. And while it may be a bit off-topic, his Day in the Life of a Pizza Delivery Boy posts are great, and will make you feel bad about undertipping for your pie.
• The Antman at Cre8Buzz blogs about word-of-mouth marketing. Word has it that Cre8Buzz will be launching their Word-Of-Mouth Engine very soon, head over to their home page if you'd like to be notified when it goes live.

Those are my adds; all of them deserve a place in your faves (and your feedreader) in my opinion. Read on for the rules and the full list.

-----Start Copying Here-----

Here are the rules:

1) Write a short introduction paragraph about what how you found the list and include a link to the blog that referred you to the list.

2) COPY the Rules and ENTIRE List below and post it to your own blog. You may want to change the titles of the blogs to help avoid duplicate content issues, and increase the amount of keywords your site can accessible for.. Just don't change the actual links to the blogs.

3) Take My New Faves and move them into the The Original Faves list.

4) Add 3 new blogs that you've added to your Technorati Favorites to the My New Faves section. Remember to also add the "Fave Me" link next to the blogs you add. (i.e. http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn &add=http://www.yourfavesdomain.com)

5) Add Everyone on this list to your Technorati Favorites List by clicking on "Fave This." Those who want good karma will fave you back. If not, you will for sure get the benefits of faves from the bloggers who continue this list after you.

My New Faves

• J David Macor - Fave This
• Sean Dinner - Fave This
• Cre8Buzz Blog- Fave This

The Original List

• Grow Your Writing Business - Fave This
• Quartz Mountain - Fave This
• Prime Advertising Blog - Fave This
• Dawud Miracle - Fave This
• Gary Lee - Fave This
• Dosh Dosh - Fave This
• Nate Whitehill - Fave This
• Jeff Kee - Fave This
• Scribble on the Wall - Fave This
• Jimi Morrisons Head - Fave This
• Jon Lee - Fave This
• Samanathon - Fave This
• Eat Drink & Be Merry - Fave This
• The Man of Silver - Fave This
• Hannes Johnson - Fave This
• My Dandelion Patch - Fave This
• Nathan Drach - Fave This
• SiteLogic - Fave This
• Julies Journal - Fave This
• Tea & Slippers - Fave This
• The Thinking Blog - Fave This
• Pencil Thin - Fave This
• Essential Keystrokes - Fave This
• Mom Gadget - Fave This
• Engaging the Disquiet - Fave This
• Monk at Work - Fave This
• Converstations - Fave This
• The Kiss Business Too - Fave This
• HomeMom3 - Fave This

-----End Copying Here-----

And thanks to ReformatThis for the train graphic used above (used by permission, of course).

How much thought do you give to the anchor text used on your blog or web site? I'm not talking about the anchor text of your incoming links, but the anchor text you use in every post to link out to your fellow bloggers.

All of us are guilty, from time to time, of being lazy with our anchor text. Using descriptive words in your links can actually have many benefits for your readers, your peers, and the search engines. When your anchor text accurately describes the resource you're linking to:

• Your readers gain a better idea of what they'll see when they follow the link.
• The sites you link to may get better search engine rankings (and thus more targeted traffic) for the keywords used in your links.
• Search engines can use your anchor text to better understand what the site or page you link to is really about.

Still, many of us construct our links with less descriptive text such as names (of people and companies), post titles, and generic terms. For example, it's common to use a company name as the link to their web site, such as:

My friend runs Wayfire Web Design, a Half Moon Bay web design company ...

That's certainly an accurate use of anchor text, but it doesn't really give the reader (or the search engines) much information about the site we're linking to. What if we use the description of the site as the link, rather than the company name:

My friend runs Wayfire Web Design, a Half Moon Bay web design company ...

Now we've given our readers a bit more information about the site on the other end of the link, and we've helped the search engines understand what the site is about.

Linking with post titles can also be problematic, especially when when titles are written more to arouse curiosity than to be descriptive.

Check out this great post from Rob Watts called "What’s your tumbleweed ratio?", about using comment counts to measure the success of your blog posts ...

That sentence tells you what the post is about, but not until you've already read past the link. And the title, while it may make you curious, doesn't really tell you anything about what you're going to see on the other end of the link. How about this instead:

Check out this great post from Rob Watts about using comment counts to measure the success of your blog posts ...

The second version conveys the same basic information to the reader, but the new choice of anchor text will help search engines understand what the post is really about. I doubt many people have ever typed "Tumbleweed ratio" into a search engine, but there are probably some people looking for a way to measure their blog's success. Your choice of anchor text can help the search engines return more relevant results, which benefits both searchers and the blogs you're linking to.

The best anchor text simply describes the target of your link accurately. It's usually easy to describe a specific blog post in a few words, but it can be a bit more difficult when you're linking to the front page of a web site that may cover a variety of subjects. Sometimes you may want a little help in choosing your anchor text.

Francesco Mapelli suggests asking bloggers for their anchor text preference. It sounds like an effective tactic, but it's not always practical. I actually sent an email to Francesco to ask what anchor text he prefers, but it must have gotten eaten by his spam filter. Fortunately, most web sites contain very obvious clues to the keywords they're focused on.

Just by looking at the title tags on his blog's front page, I can guess that Francesco would appreciate "blogging tips" as the anchor text when linking to his blog. Similarly, a glance at my front page would reveal that I'm partial to "california web design" for links to the front page. But the best anchor text is your own concise description of the resource you're linking to. It's helpful to your readers and beneficial to the recipient of the link.

Just something to think about the next time you link to another site.

It's been one month since I added the top commentators links to the sidebar, and it clearly impacted the number of comments on this blog. Despite my less-than-prolific output lately (only 3 posts in the month of March), there were 3 times as many comments in the past month as in any previous month.

There's no doubt in my mind that the top commentators contributed to the increase. Why?

• 14 visitors found this blog via a search for the phrase "top commentators", about half of these immediately left one or more comments.
• 6 visitors left multiple comments in quick succession (usually exactly the number needed to get a link in the sidebar)

So if you want to increase the number of comments on your own blog, adding links to the top commentators is definitely worthwhile. If you're more interested in rewarding your existing audience and don't want folks commenting just for the links, I suggest titling your links with something other than "top commentators" and don't mention that phrase anywhere on your site - that way link hunters won't find you on Google.

Regardless of motivation, most of the comments were at least topical and showed that the commenter had read the post, so I don't mind if they were driven by the desire for a free PR5 link. Especially given my lackluster posting schedule last month - at least someone was adding new content here ; )

It's great to learn from your mistakes, but it's even better when you can learn from the mistakes of others. Here (in no particular order) are 47 posts from bloggers who share their blogging mistakes, and what they've done to correct them:

• I Almost Ruined Everything by Annie
• Mr. Frisky Retreats with his Tail Between his Legs by Rory
• My Biggest Blogging Mistake is not Updating Often Enough by Julian
• Lack of Persistence by Blake
• The Ad King by Jason
• The Biggest Blogging Mistake I did was not Blogging by Francesco
• Copying, Mimicking, Duplication by Paper Bull
• Don't Ignore the Basics of SEO by Simonne
• Lack of Predictability on Your Posts by Roberto
• 5 Things I Regret About March by Bill
• Should've Gone WP Yesterday! by Jimbo
• DYH isn't perfect? by Cory O'Brien
• Not Commenting Enough on other People's Blogs by Somu
• Why Blogs and Blogging Will Ruin your Self Discipline by Dave
• Don't Underestimate the Commitment by Andrew
• Delete Your First Blog Post by Mark Alves
• Don't Handle Important Matters Lightly by Amanda
• How to Not Run a Contest by Robert
• Move to your Own Domain Now by Gaurav
• Starting Too Many Blogs by Mohammed
• Common Blogging Mistakes by Vijay
• I should have included media contents by Madhur
• Failing to Realize the Importance of Relationships with Readers by Ronald
• Always Install Wordpress on the Root Diretory by Daniel
• Careful on How You Tag your Posts by Shankar
• Why this Blog Looks this Way by Ben
• Not Having Drafts Saved for Rainy Days by Inspirationbit
• Don't Forget to Use Blog Carnivals by Andrea
• A Star for a day. What I learned by Clever Dude
• Don't Change the Name by Denise
• What is Wrong with my Blog. An Honest Self-Assessment by Bret
• My Blogging Mistake: Too Many Blogs by Green Llama
• A Clear Point of View is Crucial to Increase your Blog Traffic by George
• My Biggest Blogging Mistake: Posting Frequency by Chris
• Internet Explorer vs. Firefox Issues by Mark Paddock
• What to Do When You don't Have Anything to Say by Philip Liu
• My Blogging Mistakes and Their Outcome by Thilak
• Get your Own Domain and Wordpress for your Blog by Andrew Flusche
• Be Careful how you Choose your Domain Name by Calvin
• Don't Make the Mistake of Monetizing your Blog Too Early by Maki
• Spending Too Much Time Link-Begging by David Paul
• Use a Smart Permalink Structure on your Blog by Leftblank
• Why you Should Own your Domain Name by Engtech
• Trying to Promote my Blog without enough Traffic by Nathan
• Leaving the Amateur League of Blogging: the Hosting Lesson by Rene
• Your Blog Will Perish for Lack of Vision by Shawn
• Learning from Mistakes: Opening Links in New Windows by Nirmal

Whether you've been blogging for years or just started today, you're bound to learn something from such a variety of stories, or at least be reminded of some tips you've forgotten. Visit, comment, and enjoy.

One of my earliest blogging mistakes was underestimating the importance of RSS feeds, both for readers and for my own sanity. I'd never used a feed reader, and I didn't know anyone who had.

Having never subscribed to a feed myself, I did nothing to promote my own feed - it was practically invisible. Fortunately I soon saw the light.  Building a base of feed subscribers can have many benefits:

• Visitors who subscribe are making a commitment to read your future posts.
• Subscribers aren't just passive readers - they're taking action to subscribe and they're likely to take action in the future to comment or link to your posts.
• Subscribers are less impacted by your posting frequency - they get your latest as soon as you post it, and they're not checking back daily to see if you've posted anything new.

Make your feed address a prominent part of your blog, and offer email subscriptions as well for those who haven't discovered RSS (FeedBurner makes this easy). Also, offer full feeds. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger recently found that partial feeds were one of the top reasons users unsubscribe. Don't worry that you'll lose a few page views - regular, committed readers are far more important to your blog's success.

And if you're still not using a feed reader yourself, you should seriously consider it.  It may take a while to get used to it, but your productivity will soar and you'll be able track many more blogs than you ever could with a list of bookmarks.

This is my contribution to the “Blogging Mistakes” project from Daily Blog Tips. I'll be posting links to all the other tips soon, so watch this space.

Forrester Research has released a new report on The ROI Of Blogging, available to anyone with $379 burning a hole in their pocket. For those of us who don't want to spend that kind of cash on a 15 page report, Forrester blogger Charlene Li provides a summary and excerpt. While the value of business blogging is widely accepted, it can be difficult to quantify that value, and Forrester's aim here is to provide businesses with a method for measuring the value of their blogging efforts.

Some potential benefits mentioned in the summary are increased brand visibility, increased sales efficiency, and savings on customer insight. Charlene reveals some interesting details on this last benefit, regarding the value of customer insight in their case study of General Motor's FastLane blog:

FastLane has about 100 people commenting on the blog each month, which is equivalent to gaining customer insight on products and brands from a traditional focus group. We estimated that the value of this was equivalent to running a focus group every month at the cost of $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year. Voila – there’s the value of the blogging benefit laid out in black and white.

Small businesses may not have the budget to run focus groups in order to learn what their customers want, but a simple blog is within the reach of everyone. There's no need to limit yourself to posting news and announcements on your business blog. Instead, consider telling your customers about a new product you're considering and solicit their feedback. Ask visitors to comment about what they think of your new service offering.

The important thing is to actively encourage participation among the customers who visit your blog. If you make it easy for customers to tell you what they want, and what they think of your business, you'll be able to get significant value from your blogging efforts.