One of the biggest mistakes I see bloggers make is rushing to promoting their new blogs. Blogs by their very nature grow and develop over time. If you start to promote your site strongly from day one, then the chance is that you don’t have sufficient content in which to retain any visitors that you do attract to your site, you could also be damaging your blogs reputation early on.

In order to make the most of your blog promotion efforts you have to make sure that your blog is ready for the traffic you intend to send at it. When I say ready, what I mean is the ability to retain and hold visitors on your site and give them useful and insightful information.

In order to understand when your blog is ready you need to understand what makes a blog, a blog. Blogs generally differ from standard websites because they allow their visitors to comment on the information presented to them. They also usually provide an RSS feed which allows people to subscribe to the blog. This means that blogs have the ability to be ‘stickier’ than standard websites.

When Is A Blog Ready?

When I started ProTycoon.com I set up some benchmarks that I wanted to reach before I promoted my blog:

• 5 Pillar Articles – A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something.
• A Completed Blog Design – Nobody likes a design that is still under construction.
• An About Page Published – People want to know what the blog is about.
• RSS feed – Needs to be available and easy to find.
• Content – At least 30 Well Written Posts.
• Comments – Need to be enabled on Blog Posts, this is what makes blogs better than standard sites.

By having the pillar articles as well as a collection of well written posts I was offering valuable content to my blogs visitors giving them the ability to comment on what they were reading. Your blog needs to be offering something of quality that will make your visitors stick to your blog and subscribe.

Imagine if your local computer store tried selling you a laptop, they gave it a massive promotion, promised you a great laptop, but when you go to the store, it is just the same standard, boring old laptop you already have. It would leave you feeling a little disappointed, that is how your visitors will feel if you start promoting your webite without offering anything of quality.

You will find that you are able to hold visitors on your blog a lot easier if you are patient and make sure that your blog is ready before you start promoting it.

How do you judge when your blog is ready for promotion? What benchmarks would you use?

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All bloggers are trying to increase their RSS Subscriber count, that is why I have decided to write a post with 25 ways that you can increase your RSS Subscriber Count.

Let’s begin with the 25 ways to boost your blogs RSS subscriber count.

1. Publish Good Content - People are more likely to subscribe to a blog that offers valuable content. Make sure you are publishing content that people will want to read. This should be a priority.
2. Post Frequently – Once you are publishing good content, you then need to do it frequently. This will lead people to subscribe so that they do not miss any of your future posts.
3. Stay Focused – Stick to your niche and post content that relates to it. People subscribed to your blog because they want to read about news in your niche.
4. Visible RSS Button – Make sure you have a visible RSS button on your site, make sure it is above the fold. The top of your sidebar would be a good place for your RSS Button. Check out BloggingTips.com for a good example of this.
5. RSS by E-Mail – Make sure you allow your readers to subscribe by e-mail. Many people may not be comfortable with Feed Readers and may prefer to have your feed in the form of an email. Courtney Tuttle uses this method.
6. Full Posts on Feed – Make sure you show full post in your RSS feed, there is nothing more frustrating than a site that uses excerpts in their RSS feeds.
7. What is RSS? - Devote a post or page of your blog explaining to your readers what RSS is. Thy may not subscribe because they do not know what it is, or what the benefits are.
8. Ask Your Readers To Subscribe – This can be done most effectively at the end of posts. Have a short message at the end of your posts which says something along the lines of “If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my RSS Feed, to keep up with all future updates”. If they have just enjoyed the post they have just read, they may subscribe.
9. Auto-Discovery – Auto-Discovery is used by the Web Browsers to find your feed. If found it will display the small RSS icon in the address bar. Many people subscribe using this method, so make sure the browsers are finding your feed.
10. Give Something Away – Offer something free to people that subscribe to your feed, such as an E-book. Everyone loves a freebie.
11. Guest Post – Guest Posting is a great way of promoting yourself, your blog and your feed. Most guest posts allow you to link back to your site at the bottom, or top. Use this as a chance to ask people to subscribe to your feed. Make sure your guest post is on a blog in your niche. Check out one of my guest posts here.
12. Allow Guest Posts – By allowing people to guest post on your site , you are opening up the opportunity for that writer to bring their readers with them. You can then convert them to subscribe to your blog.
13. Use Forums – You can answer questions on forums and include a link back to your feed in the signature. If people think you are informative and an authority in your niche, they may subscribe to your blog. Also check out: Blog Premiere.
14. Link Love – Link to other blogs in your niche. You never know they may link back. They will most likely head over to your blog to see who is linking to them, they may also subscribe to your blog to keep up to date. I do Link Roundup posts on ProTycoon.com, feel free to link to me!
15. Submit Feed - Add your feed to RSS Directories. A List of Directories can be found here.
16. Show Your Count – Displaying your feed count on your blog may persuade others to join. Be weary, many bloggers believe you should not display your feed until you have at least 50 subscribers, some say 100. I would say, if you are proud of your subscriber count, show it off.
17. Network – By making friends with other bloggers, you are opening up the opportunity for them to subscribe to your feed, so that they can check out what you are up to.
18. Cross-Promotion – Once you have networked and made friends with other bloggers, you can then promote each others feeds. This can be done at the end of each others feeds, or by directly posting about each other.
19. What Would Seth Godin Do – This is a great little plugin that displays a small message to new visitors to your blog asking them to sign up to your feed.
20. Subscribe Me - This plugin displays small chicklets on your blog, asking people to subscribe using their favourite reader.
21. Subscribe Remind – As I mentioned above, it is good to ask people to subscribe to your feed at the end of each post. This plugin does just that.
22. FeedBurner – FeedBurner reduces the steps need to sign up to your feed, making it easier for your readers to subscribe.
23. Post Series – By writing a series of posts people will subscribe so that they do not miss the next post in the series. Darren Rowse has just finished another successful series.
24. Contests – Run a contest that requires people to sign up for your RSS feed to join.
25. ProTycoon.com – Subscribe to my feed for future updates and tips on increasing your RSS feed count, as well as other great blogging tips. This is by far the most important step in increasing your RSS count.

This post is a good guide for anyone currently competing in blogging idol. Blogs I would recommend subscribing to in the competition are:

• standoutblogger.com
• theuniversitykid.com
• melvinblog.com
• viperchill.com
• monkeyblogger.com
• teenblogger.net
• thenetfool.com

All of the above blogs are in a similar niche to ProTycoon.com so I believe you will find them all useful, don’t forget to subscribe to their RSS feeds as well as mine!

All diggs and stumbles are appreciated.

RSS Group Writing Project

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If you are like me then you are always looking to give your readers the content they are looking for on your blog, the problem is that it is not always easy to know what your visitors want to read.

Search Meter is a WordPress plugin that enables you to keep track of what your readers are searching for on your blog. This allows you to stay focused on the content that your readers are after.

If you have a search box on your blog (which most blogs SHOULD have), then Search Meter will record the stats of what is searched and present them back to you in your admin panel. The stats include searched terms from the last 2 days, last 7 days and the last 30 days, thus allowing you to see what your visitors are looking for on your blog.

It shows the amount of times a phrase is searched and how many posts the search returns. This will enable you to focus content towards your readers and should help to increase your RSS count, as people will be more interested in the content that you are providing.

As well as showing the summary of searches for the last 2, 7 and 30 days, you can also choose to view the stats by the last 100 and last 500 searches. This will allow you to see what the hot topics are at any given time.

I have been using this plugin on one of my other blogs for around a month and it has enabled me to provide content that is more focused on what my readers want and has led to a big rise in the sites RSS subscriber count.

The plugin can be download here: Search Meter

I would highly recommend this plugin to any blogger who is looking to build a blog full of relevant content that people want to read.

Have you used this plugin or a similar one on your blog? How do you judge what content your visitors will want to read?

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Technorati is a blog search engine, according to their site they track over 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

Here is a quote from the Technorati about page:

Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.”

Technorati uses several different methods for ranking blogs:

1. Authority
2. Number of Fans
3. Ranking

The Technorati Authority is the number of blogs that have linked to your blog in the last 6 months. The higher the number the better.

The number of fans is simply the number of people that have added you as a favourite on Technorati.

The Technorati Rank is based on the Authority of your blog, the blog with the highest authority is ranked #1, with the smaller the number being better.

Technorati also has a Top 100 section that lists the top 100 ranked blogs, the top 5 current blogs are:

1. The Huffington Post
2. TechCrunch
3. Gizmodo
4. Engadget
5. Boing Boing

All of these can be increased, and that is what I am looking to do. I am setting myself a target to reach by the end of July. July is going to be a big month for ProTycoon.com. I will be competing in Blogging Idol, I also have my blog redesign which should be ready in the coming weeks. I am now going to raise the bar by setting some extra goals to add that little extra motivation.

These are my current Technorati stats:

Authority: 23

Fans: 1

Rank: 293,031

I am looking to improve all three of these stats. The targets I have set myself are:

Authority: 200

Fans:20

Rank: 200,000

As you can see I am sticking with the number 2 a lot. These are just some rough targets to give myself something to work towards. I will assess how I have done at the end of July, then set some new targets for the following month.

Help me reach my targets, become a fan of ProTycoon.com. Why not share your blogs stats, do you have any goals or tips for Technorati.

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It is no secret, blogs that use images in their posts are more attractive than blogs that don’t. The use of images in blog posts is something that I have not done from the start, but something that I have started doing recently, as a way of adding something extra to my blog.

Images can draw the attention of your blogs readers to your posts and create an atmosphere for the post. They are also a great way to emphasize the content of your blog post.

The process of adding images to your blog posts however is not as easy as it sounds. There are some things that you need to consider before placing an image into your blog post:

1. Copyright
2. Is the Image Neccasary
3. Is the Image Useful

I believe that the majority of bloggers could and most of them probably do search Google for images and drop them into their posts. The problem with this is that the images may be under copyright, meaning that using them in your blog post could land you in some trouble, with the possibility of being sued. That is why great care needs to be taken when using images from unknown sources. The best way to over come this is to use images that are not under copyright, or ask the permission of the person who owns the image if you can use it on your blog. The best place to find images that are available for use on your blogs is Flickr. For more information on using Flickr to find images that you are allowed to use on your blog, I suggest you read: ‘A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images‘ by Skelliewag.org.

The next thing you need to consider is whether it is neccasary to use an image in your blog post. Don’t add an image for the sake of adding it, only add images that are going to add something to the post.

When you have decided that you are going to use an image in your post, make sure that it is useful and related to the content of the post. There is no point having a picture related to RSS feeds inside a post about Search Engine Optimisation. The image needs to backup the overall topic of the post.

Images can be a very powerful addition to a blog if used well, I want to know about how you use images in your blogs as well as any positive and negative feedback you have about blogs that use images.

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I was having a conversation with my mum the other day, and she asked the question: “What Exactly Is A Blog“. At first I was surprised that she had never heard about blogs, or knew much about them. This also made me realise that if she did not know then there may be many other people who don’t really know what a blog is.

So, What is a blog?

Wikipedia defines a blog as:

A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

A blog essentially is just like any other website to look at, it is built of posts that are ordered chronologially with the newest being found at the top of the blog and the older posts towards the bottom.

Blogs are usually run by a single person (ProTycoon.com for example) but there are blogs that have multi-authors such as bloggingtips.com. Blogs are now common in most niches on the internet and are usually updated on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

One of the main functions of a blog is that it allows the readers to participate by way of commenting on what they have read. This makes it stand out from normal news related sites, where the news is read and no feedback can be left. It creates a sense of community and gives the blogs readers the opportunity to express their opinions.

You should now have a clearer understanding of what a blog is and why they are different from standard news sites. For those of you that do not understand the following video should clear things up.

>What Is A Blog<

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DailyBlogTips owner Daniel Socco announced last week that Blogging Idol will begin on 1st July and run all the way through until 30th July. Blogging Idol is a competition which currently has over 50 participants, with the winner of the competition being the blogger who can increase their RSS feed count the most during the month of July.

I have entered the competition, so you can expect to see me working really hard through July in an attempt to increase my RSS subscriber count. I have previously posted about how to increase your subscriber count, so I will now be able to prove to you all what works and what does not.

You are more than welcome to enter the competition, just so long as your subscriber count it below 1000 subscribers, this is to give the smaller blogs a chance to make a name for themselves. If you would like more details head over to DailyBlogTips.

The current prize value stands at $1500 of which $800 is a cash prize and $700 comes as a complete SEO Consulting from Joost the Valk.

I would like to hear your ideas on how to increase the RSS subscriber count on a blog, I can then put all suggestions to the test in a hectic month, to see what works best.

My RSS Posts:

1. 8 Ways to Increase Your RSS Count
2. Increase Your RSS Subscribers
3. RSS Awareness Day
4. RSS Hugger: Promote Your Feed

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Starting a new blog is not an easy process and it is very easy to lose your motivation. Many blogs do not make it past the 6 month barrier because the blog owner loses their motivation when they don’t receive thousands of visitors, or earn the fortunes that are boasted about on many blogs.

The fact is that starting a new blog is not very difficult at all, most people can upload a blogging platform such as WordPress and publish content on the web, but only a small percentage of these people recieve substantial traffic to their blogs, allowing them to earn a decent income.

The first 6 months of any blog are the most difficult, you may be publishing fantastic content on a daily basis but may only be receiving 20-30 visits per day. This can lead many blog owners to lose their motivation. One way to keep your motivation and help get your blog past the 6 month barrier is to set yourself blogging goals.

Setting goals gives you a focus, it provides you with a target to work towards. The biggest mistake that most blogger’s make is to focus on getting 1000s of visitors to their blog from day one. This is an unrealistic target for a brand new blog.

I believe that if you want to build a successful blog, the unique visitors and visit count are the stats you want to avoid setting goals for. Sure, everyone has an idea of the visitors they want to achieve but for the first 6 months you should not look at these in much detail, as low levels of visitors can lead to a loss of morale.

Instead you should focus on building the blog itself, some goals I would suggest for a brand new blog may be:

1. Write at least 4 posts a week
2. Increase the average comments per post
3. Increase the number of RSS subscribers
4. Write a guest post at least once a month
5. Achieve 5 quality inbound links a week

By focusing on smaller goals such as the once mentioned above you can help grow your blog. If you post at least 4 posts per week, you are providing search engines such as Google with quality content that can increase your search engine traffic. Increasing the number of RSS subscribers on your blog allows you to build a community on your blog, which helps to draw new readers in. Guest posts are a great way of making yourself known, most guest posts will include a link back to your blog, which will help with point 5. Increasing your inbound links not only helps to bring some extra traffic to your site, it also helps to increase other aspects such as your Technorati rank.

Make sure the goals you set yourself are realistic, there is no point setting yourself a goal that you are not going to reach. You should also reward yourself when you reach a goal, maybe by buying yourself something nice. By building a positive outcome to reaching goals, it helps to motivate you to reach your new goals.

As this is a post about goals, I will share with you my current goals. This blog was launched in February 2008, so the blog is currently around 4-5 months old. I am close to the 6 month barrier and still going strong. My current goals are:

1. Reach 150 RSS Subscribers
2. Write at least 5 posts a week
3. Guest post at least once a month

I am currently reaching these small goals, which are helping me to reach my current big goal of receiving 25,000 hits in a month, which by my current growth should be the end of July.

I would love to hear about your current blogging goals, as they could provide great motivation for other blogger’s.

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When I started this blog I said to myself that I would test different approaches and give them all a fair shot and report the findings, I wanted to give honest and valued opinions to products and services, on the whole I think I have done this on this blog and on some of my others, but there is one service that I did not give a fair chance to and I am giving it another go, in terms of fairness.

I mid-February I wrote a post entitled ‘Crazy Traffic From BlogRush‘ where I told people that they could gain alot of traffic from BlogRush and that I was going to test it to see how good the service actually is.

By mid-March I still had the widget on my site and ask for people opinions on the widget itself on my blog (‘BlogRush: The Visitors Experience‘), the response was varied, some thought that the widget was fine on my site, others thought that it slowed page load times, many said that they have stop using the widget because of bad experiences with it, and within 3 days I said ‘Goodbye BlogRush‘.

After a week or to I remember the promise that I made myself when I started this blog and re-added the BlogRush widget to my site, without posting about it, just to take some stats and get a fuller understanding of the product.

I have now decided to share some of my findings. I guess the main reason people use BlogRush is to bring traffic to their site, so I will look at that aspect first.

My bes performing post to date is ‘Reinvesting Your Blogs Income‘ which has brought 503 visitors to my site. This is not a bad return, it is however alot higher than some of my other posts, but as an average I received around 28 visitors per post from BlogRush.

The page loads times are not majorly affect, I have loaded my page on many different PC’s with different specs and using different browsers and the load time is not as much of an issue as it has been previously.

Overall I am currently happy with the performance of BlogRush on my ProTycoon.com.

I would however be interested in your views a few months on from my previous posts, are you using BlogRush? What are your experiences with it?

If you have not tried it then you can sign up here: Register With BlogRush

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When many bloggers start out in blogging, they do so with very little in the way of funds to promote and improve their blog. Thanks to some hard work, they can get their blogs up and running, with traffic slowly filtering in as well as a steady stream of income. The income may not be huge but it is a start, you then have two options, the first being to pocket the money and buy yourself something nice. This option is appealing to many as they blog with a view to earning money to make their life more comfortable.

The second option is to reinvest the income back into your blog to enable you to raise the earning potential of your blog in the future. This is the most sensible option as $100 this month could be $200 next month and $400 the month after that. Of course there is the option to combine both approaches you could say that you will take 50% of the blogs earnings and the other 50% can be reinvested.

I will show you several ways in which you can reinvest money into your blog.

• Buy Advertising For Your Blog – Advertising spaces can be bought on blogs in most niches. Many blogs offer a 125×125px advertising system in their sidebars which can be bought at a reasonable price. By buying advertising on a site in your niche that receives a good level of traffic, you can improve the traffic to your blog as well as building your brand.

• Get Your Blog Re-Designed – This can help to give your blog a more professional look, this can make your blog look more creadible and reliable. You can also optimize your advertising which can lead to higher earnings in the future. If you can’t afford a full blog redesign, why not invest in some new logo’s or features that can benefit your blog. Unique Blog Designs have redesigned many of the top blogs.

• Buy Yourself A Second Blog – You put in the effort for your first blog and you have it earning money, you can just repeat the process with a 2nd blog. This is useful if you have a good knowledge in more than one niche. This is actually my second blog, my first was in the field of Fantasy Football (Soccer) ‘Fantasy Football Guru‘. My advice would be to only take this step if you have knowledge in a second niche, don’t make a blog in a niche in which you have little interest as you will lose your motivation on that blog very quickly.

• Buy Reviews – Buying a review on a top blog in your niche is a great way of bringing targeted traffic to your blog. It is a great way of increasing the readership on your blog.

• Buy Blog Authors – This is somewhat linked to my point of buying a second blog, you can buy authors for your second blog if you don’t have time to write on it yourself. Or you can buy authors for your current blog to increase the amount of content and to bring a fresh approach to your blog.

• Buy Products To Review – In some niches you can buy products that are big talking points and then review them on your blog. This is a great way of buying something nice related to your niche and using it to add extra depth to your blog.

The point to remember is that no matter how small your earnings, there is always a way to reinvest it into your blog, even if it is just adding it to an AdWords campaign to drive a few visitors to your site.

If you reinvest money back into your blog what approach do you take? How do you reinvest your blog earnings?

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