Posts Tagged ‘blogging’
If blatantly taking a blog’s RSS and republishing on their domain, plastering the post with adsense wasn’t enough, sploggers (spam bloggers) have started using a new WordPress plugin to do their dirty work.
Enter the “Related Blogs” plugin, an otherwise somewhat useful plugin that works like a “Related Blog Posts” plugin, except that it will point outside the blog to other blogs in the blogosphere, attempting to fire off a trackback in the other blog’s comments section in the process.
While writing a content-filled post and looking for related blogs using relevant keywords/keyphrases can provide value to the reader and help create an inter-blog conversation, merely throwing in high traffic keywords into the plugin and accompanying that with little or no blog content does not create any value for your readers.
Take a look at these examples:
The example above shows the classical layout of a MFA (made-for-adsense) blog with a Google adsense block, followed by content below. In this case “content” was generated by doing (more…)
With the multitude of functions that blogging platforms are currently being appropriated for (especially WordPress software), is blogging in danger of losing its identity.
It’s no surprise that blogs are highly optimized for search engines, tend to be the weapon of choice for linkbait campaigns and are usually the chosen weapon when a single individual (or marketer) decides to take on an airline, supermarket chain, or budget airline.
Add to that the fact that affiliate marketers are also employing it’s flexible architecture to construct landing pages, opt-in forms, affiliate content sites, shopping/shopping comparison sites, coupon sites, customer loyalty sites (plus the occasional or maybe not so occasional affiliate cookie stuffing site) and you’d realize that it’s not just a diarying platform anymore.
In a tweet yesterday, Top Ranking Marketing CEO Lee Odden fired (more…)
The answer to an old question whether it’s more important to focus on style or content (also sometimes refered to as “form or function”) when it comes to content publishing on the internet will have most listeners responding “You need both quality content and an interesting way to generate traffic and monetize it.”
Easier said than done though.
From my research, most podcasters and video bloggers who generate “interesting” (ie not boring) content tend to be clever/witty, use cool background music, broadcast/guerilla-style video effects and transitions, to the point of being Seinfeld-ish (ie being about nothing) in nature.
If anything, the message is (more…)
I’m in the process of developing websites in a couple of different niches and going through the process of building sites from scratch has been instructional, especially since the process has changed with the availability of new technologies, here’re a couple of steps to help accelerate your site development.
Choice of niche:
Obviously an important choice which will affect your daily/weekly routine for at least the next couple of months. It’s never a good idea to go into a vertical/industry solely by the perceived high payouts or bonuses you’re being offered.
Choosing a niche based on your affinity and interest seems to work for me, and I don’t feel that passing up on a number of “lucrative” niches has hurt me.
Working the Grind
Any vertical will have a period of “grinding” or what gamers refer to a period where you have to go through some repetitive, potentially painful effort. Any site will require more than (more…)
Since it’s been almost a year since I set up my last blog, it’s been a somewhat nostalgic experience looking at how the platform has changed since I started using it in 2006 with it’s 1.x incarnation.
Having played with a WP 2.7.1 install, it seems to chug along slower compared to it’s 2.5.1 predecessor, and hopefully this doesn’t signal a path down the bloatware route, even if it comes with lots of shiny bells and whistles, compared to before.
WordPress has become much easier to use now for the most part, with several functions accessible behind the browse-based point-and-click interface. In the past you had to FTP files down, edit them with a text editor and upload them, or use the clunky “theme editor” function and edit the text from there.
I started out in 1997 writing HTML on a text editor and created tables writing raw table, tr,td,/td,/tr, /table tags. I later progressed on to using WYSIWYG text editors and software like XSite Pro. These days I do almost everything exclusively with WordPress only or in tandem with other software like vBulletin forum software, Aweber email autoresponder software, Joomla or some of the new CMSes I’ve been working with recently.
HTML editors have gone to the scrapheap for me. That’s not to say that WordPress is the final word in creating new niche affiliate sites though.
Here is my wishlist:
Here are a couple of things that WordPress has done well:
- Spam control: Akismet works hard to keep trackback spam, comment spam out of the woodwork. I use a couple more for good measure so very little spam is sitting in the moderation basket each day.
- Tagging: Keywords and tags help readers find relevant content, especially with the millions of blogs floating in the blogosphere. They’re one step further towards relevant and have made older plugins like Tag Warrior float into lesser prominence.
- Native embedding of video and other embed code: While you had to jump through hoops to place a YouTube video in a blog post, the process is a pretty seamless copy-and-paste job now.
Here are a couple of things that would help WordPress become (more…)
Chris Pearson is a smart designer/developer who’s latched on to the emerging trend in publishing – the move away from elaborate, bandwidth-heavy, ornate websites to the more subtle, clean design that’s seeing its way on more progressive blogs.
Is this an influence of the minimalist style micro-blogging platforms like Twitter? It’s hard to say, but having a simple, yet intuitive design will give blog visitors easier access to your content and reduce the distraction that a cluttered blog template can create.
Chris’ Thesis WordPress template has been around since last year, so it’s not exactly a new kid on the block. In that time, it’s made its way on a number of blogs, especially based on its strengths.
I’d been looking for a clean and SEO-optimized template for use on a number of new content sites I’m in the process of developing and after reading a Thesis review by Rae Hoffman AKA SugarRae, it sealed the deal for me.
Here’s what the default installation looks like:
As you can see, it consists of a text area on the left and a prominent (more…)
