If you're a new writer, just entering the blogosphere, you'll find an overwhelming amount of advice telling how to blog, how to monetize your site, what rules to follow for search engines, how to create passionate readers, and how to boost your traffic. One element that's often missing is the all-important subject of what to blog about in the first place. Let me urge you to follow this simple f...
Let's take this from the point of view of a normal person who is just wading around the internet looking for something to read on a specific subject. We'll call this guy Bob. Bob heads over to Yahoo (It could be Google or some other search engine) and types in 'how to make waffles'. Here's what he sees: ...
The task of corporate blogging encapsulates a plethora of pitfalls. Recently, my consulting work and a number of colleagues have illustrated some of the worst problems plaguing...
What type of blog manager are you? Mr. Packrat? Miss Self-Contained? Your style of blog management can make your blog an SEO powerhouse, a great resource for visitors, or an intellectual property graveyard. Check out these management styles and comment on which one you think is best! 1) PACK RAT:Blogs at full speed ahead. Never checks to see if h...
It may come as a surprise to some that I'm in direct opposition to Rebecca's viewpoint in her post from last week - Hey, I'm Blogging! Pay Attention to Me! She wrote: ...another (obvious) reason for the increasing onslaught of blogs (currently nearly 60 million tracked by Tec...
Rand sent me the above comic strip and instructed me to let it inspire me (it seems he enjoys giving me the occasional homework assignment), and the first thing I thought of when I read it was, "Why do people blog?" I read a lot of SEO blogs (arou...
Wow! At least one (probably the only one, hehe) of Rand's predictions is already coming true. There has been, for a while now (more than a year from what I heard), a CMS that allows you to build Digg-like platforms: PLIGG. And let me tell you, there is a bizarre TREND in most of the names - most of them are utterly funny with their &q...
At work today, Matt noted that he found Digg's algorithm far more interesting than Google's. I was shocked - after all, Digg isn't nearly as complex or widely used as Google, but with its rising popularity in the tech space, I could, at least, empathize with why he might feel that way. I also took it as a challenge to expose all the possible elements that might be in an algorithm at ...
Most folks who hadn't heard of Reddit before November certainly have now. With the sale to Conde Nast, Reddit has joined the ranks of social media property successes (congrats, BTW to Paul Graham & Y Combinator). To a web marketer, though, Reddit remains an enigma shrouded in a mystery, encapsulated in a cute little robot: ...
The Stanford publishing conference has a fascinating group of participants. Today I've met editors and executives from Time Out, Martha Stewart, the Univ. of CA, TruthDig, ESPN and dozens more. My speech this morning centered around how major brands like these can leverage blogging to create passionate fans and a personal face for their company. Sadly, a lot of the rules of old media still...
Last week, Neil Patel reported that Digg is making it harder to get Dugg. I can certainly vouch for that. An ex-client and friend of ours launched what was (at least in my opinion) a highly Digg-worthy article on the Ten Servers ...
At the 37 Signals blog, Matt is discussing the efficacy of having buttons for Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc. listed on the bottom of article pages or blog posts. Here's what he had to say: Given the Ebola-like spread of these things they must be reall...
In order to remain in their audience's good graces, bloggers need great posts - and that means they need great ideas. SEOmoz has produced an average of more than 2 unique posts each day for the last couple years (~1500 posts over ~740 days) - but it's no easy task. Sometimes ideas for content come to you and it feels as though you can't write enough. Other days, yo...
I was completely blown away by Jeremy's recent release of his site statistics. Since coming to popularity in the Spring of this year, Jeremy has been one of the most succesful traffic-growth stories in the blogosphere and certainly the search community. Below, I've taken his numbers and added our own: ...