Welcome back! Today’s tip is a carry over from an earlier one. Use FeedBurner.
Use FeedBurner (http://www.feedburner.com) for your feeds. Feedburner allows a lot of tracking options. They track the number of readers of your feed (updated, up to the moment), the number of click throughs to specific entries, and a plethroa of other statistics.
Not only does FeedBurner allow for tracking, it also allows you to add things like “add to del.icio.us” links, and “e-mail to a friend” links, greatly increasing the opportunity for social and viral linking.
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Welcome back! Todays tip is about posts. Use a recent posts plugin.
Using a recent posts plugin allows you to highlight your recent posts on every page. This way, people who are viewing an individual entry page can see the topics (or subjects) of your recent posts, and be able to click directly to them. I suggest highlighting the latest ten posts, although if you have limited space, highlight at least the lastest five.
The reason for using this plugin is, very simply, keeping people reading on your blog. Increase the time people spend on your blog, increase the likelyhood of them clicking on ads, participating in discussions, or just generally reading more content.
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Welcome back! Today’s tip is all about meta! Use meta tags… keywords, description, and whatnot.
Meta tags are one of the cornerstones of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A strong meta keywords tag, and a strong meta description tag are imperitive to your SEO technique.
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Welcome back! Today’s tip is, sign up for news alerts from Google, et al.
Google News is a great method on keeping up with what’s going on with your blog’s topic, in mainstream media.
Signing up for some Google news alerts will keep you aprised of the latest info out there. You can set up a news alert on pretty much any topic you desire, and on specific media sources. Go give it a look.
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Welcome back! Today’s tip goes right along with this series. Write a series.
Writing a series is a great way to get return visitors to your blog. After all, chances are, you might be coming back to catch this series, regularly.
Not to mention, a good series is a great way to get links back. Plus, it’s a great way to promote your blog on other blogs - in comments. Something like: Assume a blogger was discussing monetization tips. In comments, “Oh yes, I wrote a [link]series[/link] about monetization. I covered everything your talking about, plus SEO techniques, etc… You might benefit from some of the tips in it - specifically, ____, ____, and ____. Check it out and let me know what you think. (If you consider this a spam comment, feel free to delete, but I’d appreciate you letting me know, so I don’t do the same in the future.)”
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Welcome Back! Today’s tip is still about e-mail. Offer e-mail subscription to your blog posts.
This is different from a newsleter. In a sense it’s like RSS, via e-mail. Your blog posts will be sent via e-mail to anyone who signs up. This enables people who don’t understand RSS to receive your posts in a syndicated format, each day. Some services send each one, as it’s posted. The majority of them - and the one I reccommend - send out a single e-mail each day containing all of your posts from that day.
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Welcome back! Today’s tip is full of news (and I’ll bet you’re getting tired of these cheesy introduction sentences). The tip? Start an e-mail newsletter.
Ever been a member of an e-mail newsletter? They’re often full of tips that don’t make it into the regular blog. Newsletters also are a great place to feature posts that you think should get more attention.
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Welcome back! Today’s tip goes social! Add yourself to Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking systems.
First step, set up an account at del.icio.us.
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Welcome back! Today’s tip is Really Simple (Syndication). Publish full RSS feeds.
RSS. Every blog has it (or, should). But should you publish partial feeds, or full feeds?
My suggestion? Full. Absolutely.
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Justin Shattuck (of justinshattuck.com), has released a WWW Redirect plugin. Almost the direct opposite of Matt’s no-www plugin, Justin’s plugin adds back in the www, and insures that all variants (http, https, index.php, etc…) are directed to the appropriate central URL.
In short, http://domain.com becomes http://www.domain.com.
http://domain.com/index.php becomes http://www.domain.com
and https://domain.com/index.php becomes https://www.domain.com/index.php
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