Your network of contacts can be a powerful thing in a blogosphere full of ordinary blogs which stand alone waiting for people to read information which is often out-dated and over-reported.

Whilst a picture can say 1000 words, a contact can help spread those 1000’s of words all over the place through free publicity and can often support your blog by buying ads on your site.

But how do you meet these people and find the contacts that will help your blog?

There are a couple of methods I’ve used successfully to build up a base of reliable and friendly people who share similar traits and characteristics but who have like-minded goals.

1) Comment on similar sites: As mentioned, the blogosphere is a big place – we’re approaching 100 million of the things now! So there’s bound to be a few sites sharing the same niche or writing about similar themes. Search on Google or follow Blogroll links and then make useful comments on posts which appeal to you. The owners of the blog will be bound to check your site out to see who you are and what you write about. First impressions are everything, so make sure your site is looking spick and span!

2) Follow up with an email: Once you’ve established contact through a comment, shoot the blog owner an email through the contact page or form (which the site owner should have). Explain who you are briefly and link to your blog. Throw in links to a couple of your best posts and even ask to exchange links to help SEO and traffic.

3) Have a conversation: Talking to other bloggers via Instant Messenger can be a great way to show your enthusiasm for your subject and to connect with another person one-on-one. But be warned – don’t go around willy nilly asking for IM addresses as this will throw up caution flags. In the conversation, be yourself, be humorous and don’t plug your site every other sentence!

4) Social networking: Believe it or not, social networking sites aren’t only about flaming George Bush or loving up the iPhone. Sites like MyBlogLog are particularly useful – try commenting on their wall or adding yourself to their Communities. This will again get your name out.

I’ve only mentioned a few methods here, but the list really is up to you in terms of how much you want to seek out other bloggers and what other sites you can dig up in order to help you find those similar people. Try a few of these out for yourself today – like commenting on a new blog, or emailing someone that you’ve never spoken to before.

You never know, they might end up becoming your best online buddy!

Technorati Tags: network, contacts, blogosphere, Social networking

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The small handful of blogspot blogs I actually read cannot be used as much of a judge of the millions out there, but perhaps blogspot bloggers need a reminder about how important RSS feeds and feed readers really are.

It is far to easy to think that it’s not worth building RSS subscriber numbers when you would make more from CPC ads if they actually visited the blog itself. Although there is some truth in this, the Typical RSS subscriber is completely different to your average Joe AdSense clicker and brings different benefits.

The Value of RSS subscribers

An important point to make before diving into how RSS subscribers make you money, is that if a potential RSS subscriber cannot easily click a Feedburer subscription button there is a higher chance they will not return at all. It is simply not a case of, “would I rather my readers were RSS subscribers or visited the blog”. It is that if you don’t have an easily subscribe-able feed, those who wanted to subscribe may be lost for good.

RSS users are at least partially web savvy and so probably know what Google AdSense is and wont click on them. However their web-savvyness brings greater rewards:

For some the reward of blogging is from comments, (which are important to me) or from what another blogger says about them (also important to me) but the most important thing is the feed subscribers.

Conclusion

All of those points apply to Blogspot Bloggers as well. If you are a blogspot blogger looking to increase your readership and earnings then I highly recommended heading over to Feedburner. If your not sure where to start there is a guide on the hompage where it says, “Learn how to burn your Blogger feed”.

Learn how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your blog with the SEO book.

Technorati Tags: FeedBurner, blogspot bloggers, RSS subscriber

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How do I use RSS?

A Feed reader is similar to an email inbox. You subscribe to the feed of your favourite blogs with a few clicks, and the new posts from that blog are sent straight to you.

Really Simple Steps to get Started with RSS

I use a Google Reader, which I recommended (all this is free by the way).

1. Create a Google Account and sign-in.
2. Click on ‘Google Reader’
3. Start adding subscriptions! This can be done by visiting the blog you want to subscribe to and clicking on their RSS button, or by manually adding the feed address.
4. Subscribe to Blogging Fingers (of course)

Below: A screenshot of my Google Reader Inbox, you can see I’m having a read of Dosh Dosh’s RSS feed.

Why should all bloggers use an RSS reader?

Creating a Subscribe-able feed for your own blog using FeedBurner

This has never been easier than it is now. Simply visit Feedburner.com and enter the URL of your blog in the big box and click “next”. Be sure to read through all the sections such as “optimize” and “publiscize” and carefully chose the options you want.

Technorati Tags: Really Simple Syndication, Feed reader, Google Reader, RSS feed, FeedBurner

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Understanding and implementing the basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential for all bloggers looking to gain traffic. This information can be found at numerous sources but I have written this post especially for the readers of Blogging Fingers.

1. On-Site Optimisation

Keywords

This involves making your blog ’search engine friendly’. Keywords and keyword phrases play a very important part in this. A keyword phrase for your site is what someone types into a search engine (usually Google) to find your site. I.e. It is a phrase that you rank highly in the SERPS for (search engine results pages) and have content that is highly relevant to that phrase.

How do I chose Keywords?

Ultimately choosing a keyword phrase is about finding a keyword that has high numbers of people searching for it (per month) and little competition in Google, and is relevant to the content on your site.

There are lots of different tools available for this, I use the free SEO book keyword suggestion tool combined with a Google search. The trick is to start broad and work down until you have a suitable keyword phrase.

Example:

Imagine I were trying to find keywords for my Web hosting site. I would type in to the SEO Book tool “web hosting”.

“web hosting” is a highly searched for keyword (over 3million per month). A Google search for “web hosting” reveals there are already over 261 million competitors indexed for that phrase, which means it is not attainable.

If you are searching for the primary keyword, which will be in the URL and the Title of the page, having a few million competitors is acceptable, but if the phrase is only partially in the URL/Title and will be largely down to the content then 1 - 2 million competitors is pushing it.

*note this is from my experience only and may differ with other phrases, also the Seo Book tools is an imperfect estimation so don’t base a whole business plan on what it says, but it’s perfectly suitable for blogging.

Looking down the SEO Book tools results, there is no point in Googleing the other top terms because they will almost definitely have far to many competitors.

Further down the results, is “inexpensive web hosting”, which receives approximately 9,000 searches per month. Googleing that phrase reveals 1.3 million competitors. Bingo, that is a good keyword phrase for Web Hosting. Web hosting is a somewhat saturated niche and so it is very difficult to find a fantastic keyword phrase to go for, but this is not the case in all niches.

Below: Google reveals 1.3 million results for “inexpensive web hosting”

How to Rank Highly for a Keyword

Once you have found a suitable collection of keyword phrases it’s time to optimise the site for them. This involves the use of that keyword in every different part of the site. The two most important parts which are given the most weight in Google is the URL, which hopefully matches or partially matches a keyword phrase and the Title of the page (both of which are “Blogging Fingers” for this site.

If your homepage URL does not match a phrase it is not the end of the world. This is especially true because with WordPress, you can custom set the permalinks. This sounds scary but it really is very simply and is very important for SEO.

Customising Permalinks
In the WordPress Dashboard, you go to options-permalinks and select “custom”. Then enter this:

/%category%/%postname%/

To save the changes select “update permalink structure”.

What that does is change the makeup of the URL for each individual post so that it’s category and postname are included. Hopefully the category includes the keyword phrase and the postname (title of the post) does too. If you already have blog posts published you can use this permalink migration plugin which creates 301 redirects so you don’t end up with a whole load of broken links.

Content
Other than having the keyword phrase in the URL and title tags the keywords should be used in the content. They are given more weight by Google at the beginning and ends of a post or if they are in bold or using an heading tag. One of the lessons I have learnt from blogging is that it is always best to write for the readers and only for the search engines if it fits. Find out why below…

Internal Linking Structure
The Anchor text (see below) of links to your own posts is also important and should be descriptive, ideally containing some keywords.

2. Off-site Optimisation

The other important factor in SEO is attaining inbound links. This is why it is so important to write for the reader, because they may have a blog of their own and so if they like what they read may link to you. If they see your content is badly written with keyword phrases awkwardly shoved in you are unlikely to get any link-lovin’.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the part of the text in a hyperlink that is visible to both humans and web-crawling bots. This is important for all links, those that are inbound to your site, the internal linking structure as well as outbound links, which should be relevant to the topic of your site. Google has been cracking down on attempts to ‘game the system’ or by sponsored links with a certain anchor text and so it is important to vary the anchor text slightly, so that it still contains the keywords but perhaps in a different order.

Penalisation

This should not be something to be worried about. All of the above points should be done in moderation i.e. no keyword stuffing in any part of on-site optimisation. The most important thing is to not fully rely on traffic from the search engines because you never know when they will change their algorithm. This backs up the fact that with blogging is is best to write for the reader, and not for Google because eventually the ranking algorithm will be so good, attempts to game the system will fail more frequently.

Extras

I use the all in one SEO Plugin, which allows each post to be optimised for the search engines.

This Seo Book will teach you the rest of the ever evolving subject of search engine optimisation.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Keywords, keyword phrase, SEO Book tools

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