Make Money from Blogs » Post

When to time your latest blog post ?

ashish — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:00:25 +0000

You are already trying your best to write on a regular basis, and you may have learnt that it makes a lot of difference if you write a post per day. However, it can sometimes be a challenge to just get to meeting this daily basis concept; after all, unless you are dedicated towards your blog in a true sense, there can be many interruptions in getting the content for your blog on a daily basis. Getting your posts out on a regular (or a daily) basis can make a huge difference to attracting more readers to your blog. Now suppose, you are able to get onto a regular pattern of publishing a post at a particular time, the next item would be to optimize the time of your posts. Does this matter ? You could after all have a software that picks up the feed from your post only at a specific interval, and so ensures that your readers get the post at a specific period of time. But as your popularity grows, there are some advantages to be gained from posting at a specific point of time.
On the basis of your posts, you have picked up a number of people who visit your blog every day, and you think that a lot of your work is done. However, over a period of time, you would have also learnt that these same blog posts can be also be circulated on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, as well as other means such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, and so on. These are all means to get more people to read your posts, and with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook being picked up by a large number of readers, making sure that your posts get to people on these networks is also very important.
So, you have configured your posts to get posted to these social networks, and feel that you have covered all your bases. What next ? Well, the next thing you need to do is to time your posts. This is especially true for social networks such as Twitter and Facebook where there can be a large number of posts / updates flowing past readers every minute. You want your post to be flowing past potential readers when they are reading these posts, rather than happening when your prospective readers are not looking at them. So, if you have a topic that relates to women at home, then you better make sure that your posts happen only at a time when they are done with the daily chores and have some time for themselves and are looking at their computers / tablets / smartphones. This is especially true for Twitter and Facebook where the amount of competition can be intense, and nobody really looks at updates that have already gone by. Similarly, if your post is meant for computer geeks, your post may be better suited to go live after dinner, when most geeks stay up on the computer and start their reading.
All blogging software allows you to time your posts, what you need to do is to determine the best time that your prospective audience is online, and ensure that your posts are live at around that time.

SEO Tips: Part 36 – Optimizing Post Title for Search Engines

ashish — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:46:39 +0000

In this post, we talk about how the Title of the Post is something that needs a lot of careful attention. Till the time that I learnt how to be effective about the title of a post, I used to use large post titles, something that I learnt could be a waste of effort, and in some cases, could cause a penalty from the search engines (related to keyword stuffing). Let me provide an example from this post itself. If I was using my previous process of defining the title of a post, the post would have the following title “Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 36 – Ensuring the post title is optimized for Search Engines”. I used to think that the more descriptive a post title along with keywords in it, the better would the reception in the search engines. And I knew about keyword stuffing, and how search engines are using penalties for such stuffing rather than getting the user the benefit that they expect.
So, what is it about the title of a post ?
Well, most search engines look only at the first 60 characters of the title of a post, and ignore whatever comes after that. So if you consider the alternative lengthy title that was there in the previous paragraph, the search engines would have ignored the actual title of the post, which came near the end “Ensuring the post title is optimized for Search Engines”. Instead, the first part of the title, dealing with Optimization Tips and Tricks would have been used by the search engines, and we know how hotly contested those keywords are. Instead, by changing the post title, it is more likely that users searching specifically for why the post title is important for SEO would find your post, and they would also find the content valuable.
Next, if you look at the earlier proposed title, it contains the keywords ‘Search Engine’ 3 times. This is an absolute no-no, since search engines are getting much more efficient about penalizing sites that seem to do keyword stuffing, and this case would have fallen right into that bracket. Why take that chance, especially when you are not likely to get any benefits from this. And then the title is so long that it would get wrapped in many instances, especially if people are looking up search results from mobile phones and tablets, and likely to make it more difficult to read. You want people to be quickly able to read the title of your post when the search engines display a long list of search results, so that it is more likely that they will come to your site.
So, if you want your post to have a higher chance of being picked up in search engine results and also being selected by users peering through a whole page of search results, learn how to optimize the title of your post. Trust me, it will be well worth it, especially since the effort required is very minimal.

Keep your title of the blog as long as possible – for social networking tools

ashish — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:28:46 +0000

I have always believed in keeping the titles of my blog posts short and sweet, but then I started discovering something. I have an automatic process using Twitterfeed to update my blog posts to my Twitter account, and using Networked Blogs to update my Facebook Fan Page. On Twitter, what I found was that with my short beautiful title, only that much amount of the title was showing via the Tweet. Now, this is configurable, and you can set for the update to pick up the following text of the post if the title proves inadequate, but considering that people can find your blog post via Twitter search, and many more services which pick up Twitter posts, you should work to make sure that you have a title that looks sharp, and yet has enough text in it such that it can get picked up from Twitter posts. Craft your title so that on reading it, somebody can immediately see it as the answer to their question.
For example, if you consider the above title, the blog title could have been “Benefits of keeping a long title”, but I decided to keep a longer version of the title, as you can see above. When this shows up on Twitter and Facebook, somebody viewing it can immediately make out that the need for this title is because of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
Now, to get the exact correct title everytime that also contains the desired keywords will take some time and effort, and I am ready to make the required effort, it it means that I am able to get a title that causes benefits in terms of users coming to my blog from Twitter search. Usage of Twitter is only increasing, and it is better to spend time to learn about how to optimize ones usage of Twitter.

Selectively updating your Twits on Facebook – “Selective Tweets”

ashish — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:15:21 +0000

Using social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter is an important part of how to promote your blog, but one of the challenges is how to ensure that your updates make it to all these tools. There are a variety of tools that are used to update your social networking sites; you can use Twitterfeed to update your Twitter presences from your blog posts, and you can use Networked Blogs to update your Facebook Fan Page. In addition, inside Facebook, you can update your Twitter through sending your Facebook Fan Page updates in the form of tweets to your Twitter account.
However, consider the case where you use your Twitter account to tweet, and your tweets are not only your automatic blog posts, but you manually add stuff to your Twitter account. In such cases, these tweets will not make it to your Facebook account, and you are missing out some important cross-tool promotion. In such cases, welcome to the concept of a tool called “Selective Tweets”, which takes your unprotected Twitter account (it does not work if your tweets are protected), and then these updates (marked with a #fb) are then picked up for posting to your Facebook Fan Page.
Refer to the following App page on Facebook (link)

Selective Tweet Status lets you update your Facebook status from Twitter –
BUT you can choose which tweets you want – just end a tweet with #fb when you want to post it as your Facebook status – simple!

You need to add the app to your Fan Page, and then you are set to go.
Refer to the FAQ for Selective Tweets if you need some help or have some issue (link)

How to promote your Blog on Facebook – Some tips (contd..)

ashish — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 07:07:47 +0000

In an earlier post (link), I had outlined some steps to promote your blog using the Social Networking Tool, Facebook, specifically, using the Fan Page tool. Here are some more tips on the same subject, with the hope that you do your best to ensure that you use this tool to its optimum. With Facebook having an increasing number of users, and who are more sticky than other tools, you need to ensure that you do your optimum on this tool. Here are more tips and techniques:
1. If you have friends who are interested in the same area, then send them a link to the Page and invite them to become a Fan(for example, it would make a lot of sense to send a link to a travel Fan Page for somebody who likes to travel, or who has expressed an interest in knowing about different tourist locations)
2. When you enter a post directly to your wall, then a brief excerpt and thumbnail from the post appear next to the post link. At that time, Facebook gives an option to select the thumbnail that appears by giving a small selector. Select the best photo that you can find from the thumbnails that appears.
3. In order to get an initial set of fans, you can ‘encourage’ friends and relatives to become fans. People tend to become fans when they see other people have become fans; and if you get your friends and relatives to become fans, then it becomes easier for you to get more fans. It is only celebrities and important people who automatically have become people becoming fans, others have to struggle.
4. Add some personal touch to your blogs, such as your photo, a note to your readers, and information about the topics. This helps your readers feel more connected to your Fan Page (and to you), and also helps promote your Page by adding to keyword intensity.
5. It would seem like Facebook does not allow you any sort of customization, but that is not true. Facebook Pages now allow you to add customization through the use of 3rd party apps, and for adding Text / HTML, you can use an application such as Static FBML
6. I earlier mentioned using your Fan Page as a part of your signature, in addition, use an invitation to join as part of your status messages on various IM’s (such as setting this as part of your GTalk signature).
7. Claim a short name for your Facebook Fan Page (right now, the page can be a bit long). However, you need to ensure that you have atleast 25 Fans for this to happen (learn more).
Let me know if there are other tips that have helped you in the past. Thanks for reading.