I’ve recently managed to get my grubby paws on a couple of Google AdWords vouchers which I’ve decided to give away to my readers. But I only have two, so I thought the fairest way of doing this is to make it into a competition; to enter all you have to do is:
- link to one of the posts on this blog from your site, and
- notify me via the contact form on my about me page
The closing date for entries is Saturday 20 October 2008 Saturday 27 September 2008 at 09:00 Central European Time, after which I’ll select the two best entries, notify the winners, and put up a post to announce who they are.
Continue reading ‘Competition: win a £30 AdWords voucher’
Blogging is at least as much about building your network of relationships as it is about producing great content. Of course quality content is a necessity – without it no amount of marketing will get you very far. But it’s not sufficient by itself, not when there are literally hundreds or thousands of other blogs competing for the same audience as you.
Image courtesy of pshutterbug
Now, one of the most common techniques for gaining exposure and building traffic is commenting on other blogs. Nothing new there – you’ve probably heard the same advice plenty of times already. But today I’d like to examine this in a little more detail, to maximise the benefits to you and your blog.
Continue reading ‘Strategic commenting’
Despite all best intentions, broken links are a fact of life on any website that’s been going for longer than a few months. Even if you rigorously follow the advice I gave a few days ago about redirecting urls, you can only control your own urls this way. But what about all those external pages you point to in your posts? If one of those sites closes down, or is less conscientious about maintaining the integrity of their site, broken links appear on your site!
Now, there is no shortage of link checkers on the internet, but for all you WordPress-ers, there’s an easier way – the broken link checker plugin. I recently installed and ran it on one of the sites I look after, and it came up with a list of more than 20 broken links – I had no idea!
Continue reading ‘Easiest way to manage broken links’
This morning I was checking out my stats in Google Analytics, and noticed that I’ve been getting a little traffic coming from StumbleUpon. Great stuff! But I wanted to know which article(s) were generating the buzz; unfortunately I had no idea how to find out. I tried the obvious: I tried searching StumbeUpon itself for my domain name, but that didn’t get me anywhere.
Now, I do happen to know how to find a specific page in Stumbleupon: simply navigate to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/ and append the url of the page you’re looking for (thanks to Terence Chang for the tip). This can be quite a handy way of finding out who submitted your article, what they said about it, what category it was put in, etc. But still, the thought of repeating this for each of my posts to try and find which one(s) had been stumbled didn’t fill me with great excitement. So I decided to try to find the answer elsewhere.
Continue reading ‘Where’s the StumbleUpon buzz on your site?’
So you’ve started your blog for whatever reason. You may have been going for awhile, or only started recently. Either way, have you considered your exit strategy?
It may sound like a strange thing to think about if you’ve only just begun blogging; chances are you’re far more concerned about where your next hit is going to come from (for your site, I mean 
). But the fact is, most of us are not going to be blogging until the day we die, so what are the choices for a graceful exit?
Continue reading ‘What’s your blogging exit strategy?’
