Guest Posts

If you haven’t heard of it before, Twitter is a micro blogging tool that allows you to write short messages (up to 140 characters at a time) that can be exchanged between friends, and posted for all to see. You can access Twitter via Web, Desktop Applications and even SMS.  Here are 5 ways to use Twitter to generate more traffic.

1.Network with people in your niche – add them as friends and ask them to do the same, so they’ll get your updates when you tweet them. Don’t friend random people, try and create a beneficial relationship
with all parties involved.

 2. Use a Twitter Search tool like Summize to see who is talking about your topic. Find out what the buzz is about your topic, who is talking about it, and then join in on the conversation and share your expertise and knowledge. Also use Summize to see what’s popular in the Twitter world, and try and create targeted content around that topic.

3. Let your followers and friends know about your new content – you can use a tool like Twitterfeed or manually update your twitter account when you post a new article, blog post or other piece of content. Your follower list is highly targeted – so they’ll want to know and read new content you’ve published. Not enough followers? Try creating Twitter exclusive content that will attract more followers and friends.

4. Solicit feedback on Twitter – ask friends and followers to give you feedback on new content, get their reactions, and continue the conversation on your blog or on Twitter.

5. Embed a Twitter box on your web page. Let visitors to your web site know that they can always be instantly updated – install a twitter box on your web site that updates with your latest tweets, and invite your website visitors to follow you on Twitter.

Twitter is a great way for getting in touch with other bloggers, promoting content, and increasing stickiness - use it well and you will increase your traffic, create buzz and establish a loyal following.

This post was contributed by Maya Richard, a writer  on the topic of high speed internet. You can email her at mayarichard@gmail.com with your feedback.

If you’re looking for a tool to promote your website(s), the buck stops with social bookmarking. With the advent of Web 2.0 and its focus on the social aspect of the Internet, listing your pages on bookmarking sites is a surefire way to get visitors to your pages – they either get there by directly clicking on your link, or if your page is ranked highly enough, it turns up on a Google search depending on how trusted your site is.

Since it’s tedious and time consuming to manually add bookmarks to various bookmarking sites, most people turn to automated software that is able to do this for them. While there are many options available, some free and others at a cost, the thing to remember when choosing automated social bookmarking software is to make sure your site is not blacklisted as spam.

Automated software that creates a large number of profiles and continually posts all your pages to every social bookmarking site there is, runs the risk of getting your site(s) labeled as spam. You also abuse your Internet Service Provider by running this tool continuously and risk cancellation of your service. And finally, the bookmarking sites you post to will end up blocking you and putting an end to your posting days.

The key to selecting a good social bookmarking tool is to look for one that does not send out your bookmarks on a continuous basis, but which posts tags gradually and once every few days. You must be able to set the time frame for the posting. You must also look for software that is server based and does not run on your PC. It’s more complicated to install but the difficulty is worth it when you consider the savings on your resources.

The bookmarking tool you use must randomly select tags and bookmarking sites so that the posting process looks like it’s been done by human beings and not a machine. Some tools even offer to post from proxy servers thus reducing the possibility of your sites being blacklisted and blocked as spam.

Automated social bookmarking tools are useful only when used judiciously – after all, there’s no use for a bookmarking strategy or tool when your sites are all blocked out as spam.

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of dial up Internet.   She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

Guest Post: Trish Jones

Trish Jones, MBA, is an online marketing consultant and has created and managed her own Internet business, since 2004. Trish teaches entrepreneurs, independent professionals and small business owners how to attract more clients and make more money using a simple blog. For more blogging tips, go to www.trishjones.com

Techno Who!?

This is the response I usually get from my clients when I suggest that they need to link their blog to Technorati.

But, if you have a blog, or you are thinking of adding one to an existing website, Technorati, the largest blog search engine is definately a site you'll want to romance with. This specialized search engine is devoted entirely to searching through blogs, and lately, it has started to seriously compete with search engine giants such as Google and Yahoo.

So, What Does Technorati Do?

Essentially, Technorati can index your blogs, whether they are about cooking, financing, engineering or entertainment. The name itself is based on a joining of the words technology and literati, the later referring to a group of critical intellectuals (I didn't feature in the latter group!). By tagging Technorati throughout your post e.g. this post is about commercial financing, you'll keep your posts at or near the top of the list at Technorati. And, to simplify this process, you can use a plugin called Tagalize It which makes tagging throughout your blog posts a really simple task.

I'm sure your next question is how can Technorati benefit my business?

At the most basic, you'll find that Technorati is one more way to let the people looking for your service find you. When people search using Technorati, they are searching for information that has a personal bent to it, and has a presentation that they find easy to read. In other words, people who search Technorati are looking for good information, and if they can find you and you can provide that information they are looking for, you will be one giant step closer to getting a customer, client or subscriber.

In terms of optimizing your blog for Technorati, be aware that the first and best thing that you can do is to tag your entries as I've explained earlier. If you haven't done this yet for your older entries, take the time to go back and tag them. Although this can be time consuming if you're working through a long backlog, you'll find that it will pay off once the hits start coming in. While you shouldn't go overboard, you'll find that you can use several tags on a single blog entry to help people find what they are looking for. For instance, if you have a cooking blog, an Italian recipe could easily have the tags, “Italian,” “vegetarian,” and “mozzarella.”

Although Technocrati has been criticized for not taking into account the 56 million blogs on MySpace, you'll find that it can still be quite useful to you and has some attractive search engine benefits particularly when you get ranked at or near the top.

Until next time,

Source: optimizing your blog

From: Andy Beard andybeard.eu

I was honestly wondering when someone would come up with a service like Share-A-Post, because it is one of those "no brainer" ideas that I have thought of doing, but never got around to.

When to a huge amount of disbelief I blocked some of my high ranking paid reviews with robots.txt, and hinted that syndication would be a perfect loophole in Google's penalties, no one fully understood what I meant - many SEO experts thought I was bonkers.

This is what I meant - widespread syndication with editorial control

The Limits of Traditional Article Marketing

Article marketing is all well and good, but is extremely limited

• You can only use a fixed number of links in a post
• Article directories are quite inflexible over affiliate links even if you have created
• HTML formatting is frowned upon because the articles are often intended for email use
• You can't use pictures
• Most of the articles end up on very low value sites that have no readers
• Whilst they often use categories, tag support is limited

Jonathan Ledger has come up with what at first glance seems to be the perfect service for submission and syndication of quality blog articles.

Article Submission

• You sign up and add your blog - If you are smart, you will create a new user on your blog with username and password with low level privileges - don't enter your admin username and password - I trust Jonathan, but even large websites get hacked, why take the risk?
• You make sure your blog is posting full content feeds
• You add an entry to your ping list, so that when you update your blog, your article is automatically added to Share-A-Post
• You use Technorati tags as normal, though only the first 5 will be used - that avoids tag spam
• You can add multiple blogs

RSS Article Syndication

When you are short of content for one of your blogs, you can visit Share A Post, search for an appropriate article, and have it posted either as a draft or published article directly to one of your blogs.

The service uses XML-RPC to connect automatically, just like popular blogging software such as Microsoft Windows Live Writer, but that does require a username and password - hence why I suggested precautions when setting up.

The other advantage is that when you are posting a guest article on your blog, because it is posted as a different user, it can be given different emphasis, maybe a different symbol etc.

Duplicate Content

Lots of people will be worried about duplicate content due to syndication

Syndication is a good thing, and Google does a fairly good job of determining the original author, and the link that is being given back to your post will help - it even has good anchor text - at least I think a link is given back to the permalink - to be sure, you should probably use an RSS footer plugin, and maybe even create a smart looking author byline for each article that includes a link.

If you want some assurance that syndication is a good thing, one of the most authoritative I can think of is Vanessa Fox, who until recently was working for Google on Webmaster Central at SEO and Webmaster conferences. If the "book" we follow are Google's webmaster guidelines… guess what? She helped write it!

Recently on her personal blog she wrote a great article on how to rank as the original source for content you syndicate

With Jonathan's system you are not going to be able to ensure that content gets blocked with Robots.txt, and that has a negative aspect as well, because the links wouldn't count… you do want links don't you?
You are also not going to be able to ensure a different version of your article is published, unless you somehow specify in a license that your articles can be modified, such as a Creative Commons License that allows derivative and Commercial use or better.

Hopefully you will always get a link, but just like with article marketing, that can never be guaranteed

You will find situations if you have a new blog with not much authority that Google makes mistakes - that will most often be when a high authority blog picks up your article.

In a situation like that… just be happy, you will get great links, and your content will be exposed to 100s, or 1000s of new readers, and if enough blogs pick the article up, you will get more authority quicker from all the links, and hopefully lots of traffic and new subscribers.

Proof-reading

Just like article marketing, you are going to have to use just a little bit more care before you post, as any errors you make might not be fixable if your articles get syndicated.

Hopefully anyone syndicating an article will check back with the original blog to ensure the article is up-to-date, and I suggest they do that anyway, as you want to always ensure you are promoting content from what is a reputable blog that is well established.

Competitors?

It is so obvious… but none really

• Well ok, I know Stompernet has some kind of content syndication network
• I know Jack Humphrey used to syndicate his clients article content on a network, but not blog posts
• There are various services which syndicate spun articles, but not blog posts
• There are services that have their own blogs, where you post snippets of articles
• Portal feeder has something similar for articles, I am not sure what is in Traffic Kahuna
• There are plugins which feed articles from article banks to WordPress blogs

So whilst the idea is simple, you have to have confidence in content syndication and how duplicate content works before you think of doing something like this, which is why someone probably didn't do it before.

Powertip

If you are using standard tagging plugins, they will probably output tags in alphabetical order. That isn't a huge problem for the 5 tags that will be used to catalogue your post, but it is a factor for your backlink, because the anchortext used will be from your first tag.

The easy answer? Add a manual tag somewhere within your article

If you look closely you will see that I have linked through earlier in this post to my "syndication" tag on my blog, and I have manually added rel="tag" to the link.

Hopefully when this article is posted, the backlink to my blog will be "syndication". That is fairly powerful stuff.

OK Andy, How Much?

Jonathan says the following:-

BETA TESTERS WANTED
===================

This service is now up and running, and I'm looking for beta testers
to create free accounts and try it out. I need folks with blogs
who want to syndicate their content to super-charge their link
building, and I need folks who need top-notch content to post to
their own blogs.

As a beta tester, your account will always be 100% free. Syndicating
other folks content will always be free anyway, but I'm working on
a business model that MAY charge a monthly fee for being able to
have your content syndicated in this way. Or it may stay free
for everyone, I haven't decided.

At any rate, as a beta tester, you'll never pay a dime for the
service.

So why not go give it a try right now?

I hope Jonathan keeps it free

If he doesn't, I am sure there will be competitors who will do it for free, so it is much better keeping it free and advertising supported. If needed, get some VC money to cover operations, but that is unlikely to be needed.

This is beta, I haven't yet tested everything, I am going to see if I can find a guest post on Share A Post to try out.

Another Reason To Applaud Jonathan

I think anyone else who would have launched this, other than maybe myself, would have included some kind of spammy "viral" link back to the blog article syndication directory, in the footer of every article.
I have just seen my first article syndicated on a blog, and there is no link to Share A Post - that is a cool move.

Please don't syndicate posts without minor editing to at least remove all the related posts - whilst I love receiving 10+ links every time one of my articles is syndicated, I am not going to approve 10 pingbacks - I will just flag them as spam to avoid the annoyance in the future.
Single pingbacks are fine (I don't have nofollow on pingback links), or even to each editorial link within an article - you give me a link, you get a link back.

Sign Up!

If you sign up to Share A Post, you will find this article in their library - an easy way to share Share A Post with your readers is just syndicating this article.

Special note from Andy: To add some additional incentive to try out Share A Post, if you have written a very high quality paid review recently that would be suitable for my readers, I will gladly syndicate it on my primary domain as well - oh, and I won't be nofollowing any of the links, as it will be an editorial decision to publish it.