Category Archives: Blogging

Blogging

Do Images Increase Readership?

27 Comments

There’s been some conversation I’ve been reading lately about the effectiveness of adding images into one’s blog posts. Many people think it’s absolutely essential to add an image of some kind to break up all the white space of a post. Others think that if the images don’t match the content then what’s the point.

I have to admit that I’ve always belonged to the latter. I’ve rarely added images to my posts unless I happened to be talking about something in particular. Mainly, it’s because it’s just one more time consuming thing to try to do when I could be doing something else, like internal linking or eating dessert.

I decided to try something new. For my next seven posts, I’m going to be posting an image. The image probably won’t have anything to do with anything I’m writing about, because, well, most of the time what I’m writing about doesn’t have an appropriate image. Of course, me being me, I’m doing something a little bit different than many of the other people.

Y’all should know by now that one of my affiliate programs is Imagekind. That image to the left underneath my two books is from their site. People put up pictures on that site to sell them as prints, framed or not. They have all sorts of different prices. It’s actually a pretty neat little deal. I’m not a photographer, but I know what I think looks pretty cool. So, every image, or at least every image unless I say differently, for the next 7 posts, which includes this one, is going to be from their site. If you click on the image, it’ll take you to their site, where you can purchase this image, or search around and find something you like. I’m going to be posting some images I thought were particularly cool.

I’m only doing this initially for 7 days. I want to see if images really do bring more traffic, drive traffic away, or has no effect whatsoever. Also, I’m hoping that someone at least clicks on a few pictures, and who knows, might even buy one. Not only me, but the people who created the pictures will probably be extremely elated.

Of course, I’m also going to have to tweak the sizes of these images from time to time, because I need to make sure they don’t overwhelm the page. This one fits right into the middle of the content. I’ll have to figure out if it should be at the very top of the content, where I see a lot of images, or maybe shrink it some and make it a part of the content in some way, like I usually do. What do you think about this one, if you’re inclined to share?

Anyway, enjoy the images; it might be a recurring thing later down the road, or it’s a 7 post experiment. Let’s see how it all goes.

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Blogging

Maintaining Your Blog

8 Comments

Tuesday night I did something that I’m betting almost no one else ever does. Probably most people don’t have to do it as much as I do, but it’s something that they should think about doing in some way every once in awhile.


by Pete Birkinshaw

I spent a few hours doing maintenance on this blog. I think this is post #540, and I went through every post on this blog, looking for my ads that might be missing or that might have been altered in some fashion. As you know, I have either an affiliate link or a product at the end of almost every single post. I put products there because I’ve tried to figure out the types of things visitors to this blog might like every once in awhile. The thing isn’t so much that they might want to buy that particular thing as much as they might want to buy something similar to it. They, or you, can still click on that product link, look around the site for other things, and I still get paid from that.

However, what happens every once in awhile is one of three things. One, those advertisers are expired, which means those links are dead. Two, the images have changed and, though the link would still work, without a visual product who’d even think about clicking on it? And three, that product is discontinued, and therefore I have to change products.

So, I spent some time doing that. The next maintenance project will be activating Broken Link Checker, just to check all the links on the site, then deactivating it again. Some of you might remember when I wrote about that plugin and others that kept giving me server errors. It works great, but I don’t keep it running all the time on any of my blogs.

How often do you go back and check things on your blog to make sure they’re still working properly? It might take you some time, but most of you don’t have close to as many posts as I have, so go ahead, take some time, and while you’re at it, think about optimizing or monetizing your old posts in some fashion. Remember, the entire product of your blog helps your blog to rank better, and better rankings means potentially more visitors.

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by Swarovski

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Blogging

Fake Commenter Names

36 Comments

I’ve been thinking about the use of fake blog commenter names a lot lately. Actually, I’ve thought about it before, and probably for a long time. I really started thinking about it a lot more after I wrote my post on the person who was hiding behind a fake name and defaming the model; she got hers in the end. Earlier in the summer I also wrote on the anonymity of bloggers and how I will agree that, sometimes, a blogger has to keep their name secret to protect themselves, but how generally I don’t believe that’s the way to go.

I’ve also written many times on leaving valuable comments instead of throwaway comments. One such post was about commenting and not wasting people’s time with a terrible comment. Another post was a little rant about why it behooves you to comment on other blogs. People appreciate when you comment on their blogs, and if they like it you might get some love back; who doesn’t like that?

Anyway, back to this name thing. I’m someone who likes to respond back to people who leave pretty good comments on my blog. I don’t expect perfection, but I expect realism. I know to delete all those posts that ask me where I got my theme, especially when I haven’t ever written a post about blog themes here (well, that’s not quite true; I did write one that was more about gravatars than themes but mentioned it, and another one reminding people to move things after changing their theme, but that’s it).

When I don’t have a name to respond to, I feel a little bit silly if I want to comment and I have to use the fake name, which I know some people like to refer to as a keyword name. I will often look at the email address to see if there’s a name there, and if so I’ll respond to that email name and leave the keyword name. If not, then I change the keyword name to only initials, then I’ll comment on it. But that takes time that I shouldn’t have to deal with.

I’m easily not alone on this one. There are posts galore from people about hating keyword names, such as this one from Neil Shearing, this one from Success Creations, and this one from Blogging Startup. There was even a post from Remarkablogger on writing keywords in comment posts that I thought was very good. Even my friend Sire addresses this in his comment policy.

I’ve always deleted links in comments that have nothing to do with the topic I wrote on. They’re not needed; this always tells me that some folks have no idea what CommentLuv is all about, which they see at the bottom of every post. If you’re writing from a blog, CommentLuv will go and find your last blog post and add it automatically. If you go to the CommentLuv site and sign up for an account, it will find your last 10 and you get to select which one you want to highlight. I mean, that’s just a great thing.

If you’re not writing from a blog, then just post the link you want in where it asks for your domain address, and you’re good to go. I don’t have a real problem with that, unless it’s a TinyURL or to a site that’s easy to discern as bad; I will delete those, and have. I hate hidden links as a general rule, and it’s one of the things about Twitter that makes me wary at times.

Why do people use keywords as their comment name anyway? It seems that many years ago some people were writing and saying that it would help them with their SEO efforts to do it. Gang, that’s just not true. It only helps if you’re doing it on your own blog or website. By putting it on mine, all you’re doing it either helping or hurting me if your name does or does not equate to the topic I’ve just written about. And it generates a lot of spam; many other folks seem to say that they get way more blog commenting spam when they’ve been allowing fake names, and I do get quite a bit.

I’ve given people who comment on my blog a lot of benefits. I’ve added CommentLuv. I’ve made this a dofollow blog, which means you’ll get your little bit of juice by commenting. And I don’t turn comments off after a certain point in time either. I even respond to almost every comment (I mean, there’s a point at which I might have to determine who gets the last word, and it’s not always going to be me). All I ask is for a little bit of decorum coming back.

So, from today on, I ask everyone to at least give me a real name that I can respond to before you write your keyword name, if you really feel that you have to do it. Either that or put your real name at the end of your comment, which our friend Steve of Trade Show Guru fame does. It helps us develop a relationship, and keeps me from having to go in and edit names. And, if you can, use CommentLuv or the domain name area for your links, unless you’re adding a link in your comment to add to the discussion at hand.

From today on, I will be reducing those keyword names without a real name preceding it to one letter; if I’m going to work, I’m going to make it easy on myself. And we’ll proceed from there. I think it’s fair, and so would our friend Dennis, who also wrote a fairly good comment policy, which at the time I thought was pretty tough.

And there we go. Something for a Sunday morning before football starts, where I’m hoping my Cowboys will remember why they’re known as America’s team and actually starts playing some better football.


Blogging

Repurposing A Previous Post

14 Comments

In my 501st post the other day, I talked about possibly going back and repurposing previous posts for one reason or another. I’ve done just that very thing, I wanted to share with you that post and the reason why I did it.

Back in March of 2008, a friend of mine sent me some videos she found where the guy on the video offered solutions for how people could get out of their credit card problems. This wasn’t a quick fix thing, but real videos that were teaching people some long term solutions. Lucky for me I already knew how the process worked, but I thought the videos were neat enough to share, and since this is a sharing blog I decided to share them with others. I wrote a post called CreditCardSolutions.com to highlight them.

Somewhere along the line, the site must have changed hands, and all the old content was suddenly gone. Now I had broken links and a page that literally made no sense whatsoever. I could have just ignored it, until I was writing that 501st post. Though my original page didn’t make the top 5, it was number six. It means there were a lot of people looking for credit card solutions, coming to my site, and finding absolutely nothing to help. Me being me, I just couldn’t let that go on.

So, I’ve gone back and basically rewritten the entire post. What I also did was leave what I’d originally written, so people could see why I changed the page up. And I optimized it slightly, with only one little affiliate ad because it fit the change I made to the content. I also changed the title of the page to Credit Card Solutions, which fits better, and obviously it’s been drawing traffic anyway under that search term, so it just fits much better.

Anyway, I hope you check it out, even though it was an old post, because now it’s totally new. Even if you don’t need the assistance, just see what I did; it might spark an idea in your own mind for some of your older posts.


eFax

Blogging

Take Responsibility For Your Blogging

17 Comments

Some people have a lot of chutzpah. They do something they should have known better not to do. They get caught. Then, instead of owning up to the event, taking it like an adult, apologizing and moving on, they get stupid, look for a scapegoat, and act as if they never did anything wrong to begin with.

Such is the follow up to the post I wrote a couple of days ago when I talked about a blogger who hid behind a fake name and pretty much slandered this model. Through a court order, Google gave up the email address, the model learned who it was and talked to the woman, and all should have been over at that point.

Instead, said “slanderer”, named Rosemary Port, decided that not only was she wronged by Google for giving out her email address, but she’s now going to try to sue Google for $15 million dollars for violating her privacy in responding to that court order.

Okay, the obviously stupidity of the lawsuit aside, can anyone tell me what this woman is thinking, other than she wants her own little bit of publicity now? She stated that her original post only had two visitors before Liskula Cohen, the model she decided to slander, decided to sue to find out who she was. She’s trying to say that Cohen pretty much made a big deal of this, and in fact is the one who violated her privacy with the original lawsuit.

Oh come on now! This is beyond a pot calling a kettle black. This is definitely not taking any responsibility for one’s actions; can anyone say “clueless?” Google has never told anyone that they would have absolute privacy in using Blogger or anything else. We all have heard where, with a court order, Google will release search records of people being investigated by the police or other law enforcement groups. What makes this woman think she deserves any more immunity for what she did than what some of these other people have done?

Of course, there are some free speech advocates who believe this is the start of something bad. They say that, in many circumstances, people deserve to have their anonymity protected, so the rest of us can get information we might not otherwise get. I don’t dispute that, as I wrote elsewhere about someone who lost her job after being as a community blogger, a move I disagreed with because the woman hadn’t written anything disparaging, as far as I could see, about the company she was working for. The sensibilities of companies these days, who feel they have the right to control what workers do outside the workplace as much as within the workplace, is a slippery slope that people balance every day. In my previous post I talked about my own belief in privacy issues, which our friend Sire disagreed with and ended up writing a post on drug testing that’s gotten some very interesting responses both pro and con. It sometimes seems as if we’re moving in a direction where the divide between privacy and doing what’s right is getting wider.

Anyway, I don’t see this woman’s lawsuit going any further than being allowed to file it. She’s having her 15 minutes of fame right now, and she’s the only one responsible for it. If I were Cohen, with this latest move, I’d sue her for slander and defamation just to make a point. But I’m like that; what are your thoughts?

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