Redirecting Feed Readers Back To Your Site

Feed Syndication

Feeds are a great way to spread your ideas and posts throughout the blogosphere and the internet.  There is also a downside to publishing feeds.  If you have good content, then it will sure by syndicated.  When someone is syndicating every one of your posts along with similar niche feed syndications, there can exist a very useful site for readers within your niche.  The feed syndicating hubs may be posting your entire article on their site and reading the traffic benefits of all your hard work!  So how do you direct traffic back to your site from these syndication hubs?

Turn Feed Readers Into Traffic

• Contact the admin of the hub site and ask them to truncate your posts to only show a summary with a "Continue Reading" link back to the original post on your site.
• Contact the hub admin and ask to lock comments and add a note:  Please Leave Comments On Author's Site.
• Change your feed settings to only show summary posts that link back to the original article.  I tend not to do this as it limits the number of people who can read your full feed at work.
• Add a note to all of your feeds that asks for comments to be placed on the original site.  *See Below.
• Include internal links in your daily posts.

Adding A Note To Your Feedburner Feed*

Adding a note to all of your feeds is easy.  This example shows how to set up your note in Feedburner. 

1.  Open Your Feedburner Account and Select Your Site's Feed
2.  Choose The Optimize Tab Up Top.

3.  Select the BrowserFriendly Tab In The Left Column.  Activite Browser Friendly If Needed.
4.  Scroll Down The Page.

5.  Click the Personal Message [ ] to Enable.
6.  Add Your Comment As Your Personal Message (Shown Above).
7.  Click Save.

Hopefully this will help redirect some of the viewers of your syndicated feed back to your site, where they can become subscribers, commentors, buyers, and advertisement clickers.

Deep Linking and Summary Posts

Crunch Time

So here I sit starting this entry 5 minutes before it would normally go live.  It's not that I don't Pre-Write and Auto Queue Posts, but sometimes unforseen circumstances do happen.  Sometimes you will still end up trying to crank a post out the night or morning before it goes live.  It is a great idea to have extra guest posts waiting in the wing for days such as these.  Trying to be consistent with post times and days is important, but occasionally you may be facing crunch-time.  Just relax and don't force out a poor quality post.

Summary Posts

Summary posts can come in handy, if you are down to crunch time or are facing a mean case of bloggage.  Bloggage is the term bloggers use to describe writer's block.  A summary post is also great way to wrap up a week or month.  Summary posts are pretty easy to write and can help you meet your deadline, while working out that case of bloggage. 

Some things you can summarize in a post

• The 5 or 10 most popular topics for the month.
• Your favorites posts of the week, year, or month.
• Top favorites reads on your blogroll.
• Top comments from the month or week's comment section.
• Summarize any recent products you may have purchased within your niche.  Be sure to include your affilliate marketing links if you are an affiliate of that product or service.
• Summarize top selling items for a given range of dates.
• Guest posts you have written on other sites work very well as a quick summary and helps your readers find places to read your content outside of your home domain.

Deep Linking

If you are writing a summary post or article about information on your own site, then it is a great time to also practice deep linking.  Deep linking is the practice of linking some of your posts with other posts or links on your site.  Notice how I have been creating internal links this entire post?  I am deep linking by having this post contain links to other posts that also contain links.  This is just one way to help build relevance and increase your page rankings of both your site and your individual posts. 

Deep linking helps to:

• Build Relevance With Search Engines
• Increase Page Rank
• Increase Visitor Time On Site
• Lower Bounce Rate
• Increase Chance of Ad Clicks
• Increase Page Views
• Get Traffic Back to Your Site From Feeds and Syndications of Your Posts
• Easily Provide Relevant Content

So the next time you have a mean case of bloggage or are down to crunch time, try writing a great summary post containing some great deep links.

Anyone else have any great ideas for summary posts?

Copyblogger's Top 10 Blogs For Writers

Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2010

The Top 10 Blogs for Writers contest is always fun to watch, and a great way to add some new favorites to your own list of must-read blogs.

The winners are a talented and creative bunch, with lots of strong fiction blogs appearing on the list. Congratulations to all the finalists and winners!

1. Storyfix by Larry Brooks, with invaluable tips on how to get your manuscript to “better than perfect” so you can snag that book contract.
2. Men with Pens by James Chartrand for comprehensive advice on writing, blogging, and business.
3. Make a Living Writing, a new blog by Carol Tice, gives frank advice to writers about what it really takes to make a living in this business.
4. Cats Eye Writer by Judy Dunn, about social media copywriting, branding, and how to get more visitors coming to your blog.
5. The Renegade Writer by Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell gives the real scoop on why the usual advice for freelance writers is B.S. (and what you should do instead)
6. Writer Unboxed, a popular multi-author blog on the craft and business of genre fiction, with advice on agents, editors, and of course writing.
7. Wordplay by K.M. Weiland helps writers become authors by giving insightful advice in a down-to-earth, friendly style her readers love.
8. The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn offers solid writing advice from her personal experience. Readers call her podcast interviews with authors “as addictive as potato chips.”
9. Victoria Mixon is both a professional writer and editor, and she brings her breadth of experience to the art and craft of writing fiction.
10. Courage to Create by Ollin Morales is a passionate, personal blog about one writer’s journey as he writes his first novel.

******************************

I wanted to pass along this great post that I was clued into via Twitter.  This is an excellent article that originally appear at CopyBlogger.com : Top 10 Blogs For Writers 2010.  These are some great sites to learn from and add to your blogroll, RSS, or daily read.  -Cold

Preventing Ad Blindness

What is Ad Blindness?

The Wikipedia entry for Ad Blindness is:

Ad Blindness is a term used to denote the state of conscious or subconscious ignorance of advertisements placed in a web page by visitors due to various reasons like irrelevance, vanilla design and familiarization of the webpage layout. For example, ad blindness is a behavioral challenge presented by frequently re-visited portals like news portals, discussion forums and blogs.

So to make it simpler, Ad Blindness is when the advertisements on your site are being completely ignored by your usual visitors.  If you always have an advertisement in the upper right hand corner, your repeat visitors will learn that the upper right corner is for ad space and will start to ignore that area all together.  Countering Ad Blindness is an important strategy for keeping those advertising profits up.  It also can cause heavy ad areas to become blindspots, even when their is content or links added to the area.

Tips For Countering Ad Blindness

Here a few things you should experiment with on your site to help prevent add blindness. 

1. Change the Colors of your Ads.
2. Change the Locations of Your Ads.
3. Change the Types of Ads.
4. Swap some Picture Ads to Link Ads.
5. Change from Blended Ads to Contrasted Ads.

Often times you may notice a spike in ad clicks just by changing something as simple as the ads background color.  Make sure to test out locations and colors and keep good notes.  That way you can compare what works best and in what locations.

These tips help for all sorts of ads, whether it is AdSense, AdWords, Pay per click, or Affiliate advertising.

Do You Carry A Pad Of Paper?

Is there a pad of paper in your pocket when you need it?  Do you tend to carry paper or something to write on?  Maybe you carry a laptop, an iphone, or a stenography device.  Any way you look at it we are all writers.  And writer's need fresh ideas.

I like to always have a pad of paper on me in case I get a creative idea or spark for an outline or a series to write about.  Without a way to make your ideas concrete on some sort of note taking device, your best inventions or sparks of imagination can be gone in a fleeting moment.  Don't lose your ideas and always carrying something to take notes with.  Having the notes handy may also spur you to brainstorm more since you will be able to takes the notes and not lose those ideas.

Books On Blogging

Merry Christmas From Blogging Vitals!

So it's Christmas and you have all that Christmas cash to spend.  Why not invest a little of it on a book or two to help you with your blogging or online marketing?  Invest a little of that holiday cash instead of blowing it all.  Have a Great Holiday! 

Click on any book to follow the affiliate link straight to amazon.com!

Importance of Prewriting and Queueing Posts

You don't write all of your posts the night before do you?

Customizing Your Post Times

Many of the popular blogging tools offer the ability customize when your post is going to go live on your site.  This is an excellent feature to use when working on your posts.  You can set all of your daily posts to go live at the same time each day.  Blogging consistency is important if you want to keep and grow your reader base.  Here are a few of the benefits of writing ahead and time and queueing your articles for a later time or date.  Queueing posts up for later release can be beneficial:

• When you have a sick day and can't get out of bed to write.
• When you are on vacation or are taking a refreshing break.
• Have a stroke of great inspiration and can write multiple posts in one sitting.
• Want every post to appear live at a specific time.
• Have certain time sensitive topics.
• When working up a series with multiple posts on a specific topic.
• Have guest posts to space apart.
• Hosting a blogging carnival and are adding links to the hosting carnival page.

I do highly recommend writing your posts ahead of time and setting them in the queue for the dates and times that you would like.  It is much less stressful, knowing that you have a cushion of articles already written waiting to go live.  Having to crank out a post on the fly with little time to edit and proofread is a recipe for a poor post.  Save yourself the hassle and work up a few posts ahead of time.

Creating Raving Fans With The Fish Philosophy

The Fish! Philosophy


The Fish! Philosophy was based off of Seattle's Pike Place Fish Market.  The philosphy became a world known business training book, seminar, and sets of instructional videos.


The Pike Place Fish Market, founded in 1930, is an open air fish market located in Seattle, Washington's Pike Place Market, at the corner of Pike Street and Pike Place. It is known for their tradition of fishmongers throwing fish that customers have purchased, before they are wrapped.^[1] After nearing bankruptcy in 1986, the fish market owner and employees decided to become "world famous", changing their way of doing business by introducing their flying fish, games, and customer performances. Four years later, they were featured repeatedly in the national media and television shows.^[2] The store is now a popular tourist destination in Seattle, attracting up to 10,000 daily visitors, and is often billed as world-famous.  (From Wikipedia)


 But how did they get so popular?  It's from not just providing good service to their customers.  They created raving fans!

Creating Raving Fans

Creating raving fans is a concept that we all should be pushing towards.  Creating raving fans is about more than just providing a good product, good customer service, or a good buying experience.

Which is better for growing your business?

• A Satisfied Customer
• A Satisfied Customer That Tells All His or Her Friends About Your Site Or Product

See the difference?  When creating ravings fans we are striving to create customers that are so blown away that they want to tell everyone they know about how great and wonderful our product is.  

Applying Raving Fans To Your Online Site

In a perfect world, every reader to your site, would retweet to Twitter, send a like to Facebook, or forward your post to a friend.  It just doesn't work that way online for the majority of readers.  What can you do to assist in helping create raving fans and help them spread the message about your site or product?

• Have a great contact me or biography page that also asks for helping to grow your site.
• Always provide your best content.
• Add social media buttons to your site that are easy to find (such as the ones at the top of my page).
• Grow your followers on all social media platforms you are involved in.
• Hold a contest or giveaway to drive traffic to your site.
• Swap guest posts with others.
• Host and participate in blogging carnivals.

Any other ideas for creating raving fans to spread the word about your site?

Driving Traffic With Contests

Contests and Giveaways Can Get You Traffic


Contests and giveaways are excellent ways to not only reward your readers, but also to build traffic.  Everybody loves getting something for free.  If you put a little thought into a contest or giveaway it could be one of the better ways to spend some advertising dollars.  I recently created a giveaway contest on my main blog for it's one year anniversary.  I am giving away a couple of items randomly to any of my readers that left a comment on the contest page.  The rules stated:

"Leave a comment on THIS PAGE - 1 entry per person.  Please comment with what your favorite thing is about Cold's Gold Factory or a testimonial of a tip I provided that you implemented." 

Using Contests To Get Subscribers

Sometimes your best was of marketing yourself, is to hear what your raving fans having to say about you or your site.  I added that each entry must be a comment about a tip of mine that the reader has put to use.  This helps to increase your trust factor as far as content is concerned.  Any new visitor arriving on the site because of the contest will have a list of testimonials about all the great things happening on the site.  This helps to convert new visitors into subscribers.  Some of the people that come just for the contest will be retained as readers and potential customers.

Reaching Out To Other Sites

Contests are also a great way to get noticed by others in your niche.  A great contest spreads like wildfire.  Contests are also some of the most re-tweetable posts you can send to others in your niche market.  I did notice that my contest tweet was the most re-tweeted of all my tweets I have sent out for re-tweet on Twitter.  If someone likes your site after reviewing a Twitter link, you may not only get a subscriber to your blog, you may also get a follower on Twitter.

Be sure to send links to your contests to major sites so that they can retweet or link to them as well.  I listed in the contest rules that any blogger or site owner that posted a link to my contest page would receive an extra bonus entry into the contest.  This assured that many in the niche would link to my contest, which would help build that page's ranking and relevance.  So be sure to send the contest link and information out to other sites as well.

Have you seen any traffic surges from hosting a contest?

Social Media Mega List

The Social Media Mega List at Wikipedia gives tons of information on various social media sites, their enrollment numbers, and what niche they are focused towards.

Social media is an excellent tool for growing your site.  Sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook have plenty of users that you can reach out to for growing your site.  Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit can bring you tons of new page views in a moment's notice.  Some sites may be more useful than others depending on your business strategy or your marketing niche.

What I suggest is start off with just one social media site.  Join up and learn how it works.  Then you can start to relay posts to your social media site, or send tweets to your blog posts.  Just start off to learn and grow your follower base.  Once you understand how the site works, you can start using it as a tool to grow your site.

Twitter is probably the easiest to start out on as it is the least complex of the major 3 social media sites.

How To Create A Text Link

Linking

Linking is one of the basic concepts that some bloggers have trouble with.  Here is a simple template for creating any text based link on your site.  It is a simple task once you know you to do it. 

Every link is based off of the 3 things:

• HTML Tags
• Destination URL Link
• Anchor Text

It is very important that you use strong keyword rich anchor text that is relevant to the article or page you will be linking.  Review the Importance of Proper Anchor Text*, if you need assistance with linking properly.


Creating Text Links

The standard code for a basic text link is as follows:

<a href="InsertURLLinkHere"/>AnchorTextHere</a>

*An example of the proper way to link above actually looks like this as the HTML Code:

<a href="http://bloggingvitals.blogspot.com/2010/12/anchor-text-and-proper-linking.html"/>Importance of Proper Anchor Text</a>

Make sure to properly link for text links as this will be an important tool when:

• Leaving Comments With Links On Other Sites
• Creating Internal Links
• Creating Affiliate Links To Products
• Linking To Your Own Site When Guest Posting

Monetizing With Affiliate Marketing

What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an excellent way to monetize your site.  Affiliate marketing as defined by Wikipedia:

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network, the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

The basic process of affiliate marketing works as follows:

1. You sign up to be an affiliate of a program.
2. You place ads on your site that link to products or the merchant's site (with your affiliate ID in the tracking code).
3. A visitor on your site clicks an ad on your site for the merchant.
4. They purchase a product from the merchant.
5. You earn a commission (usually a percentage of the sale).
6. The company pays your commission to you for your referral sale.

Those are the basic steps involved in an affiliate transaction.  Some merchants require that you meet a certain payment threshold before your commissions are released.  Others will pay you monthly regardless of your total commission earned.  A few may only award store credit for their merchant site instead of a cash commission.  Be sure to know what you are signing up for before starting to promote for an affiliate merchant program.  The commission earned will vary depending on the program you enroll in. 

The 2 Main Types Of Affiliate Programs

Direct Affiliates

You can sign up for an affiliate program directly from some merchant sites.  Amazon.com is an excellent example of a site that promotes an affiliate program from their own page.  They have a tiered commission structure that increases to a higher commission based on the number of sales you refer in a given month.

Affiliate Networks

Other sites such as shareasale.com and LinkShare.com are affiliate network programs.  Affiliate networks may have thousands of affiliate programs available through their one site.  This allows for some excellent opportunities to promote various products from multiple merchants with one major commission location.

When selecting products to promote be sure to choose products and merchants that are related to whatever niche you are in.  Also remember that placing too many ads on your main page can instantly scare away readers regardless of how great your content is.