A personal brand is often overlooked by many bloggers trying to create a powerful business look for themselves. But, the way you advertise yourself, meaning getting a little personal, is more important than many people think it to be. How does telling people simple details about your life help you?

It all goes back to your personal brand. Some people know me as the kid who runs Blogussion, and others know me as that obnoxious Patriots fan from New Jersey. No, announcing my favorite sports team to the world isn’t necessarily helping my business, but it is making me look more personable and more of a human being rather than a blogging machine.

Your personal brand is extremely important, and is just as important as your businesses brand. It may be even more important in some cases.

Take a quote from Gary Vaynerchuk, the author of the book Crush it!, which really taught me the importance of personal branding:

I think that it is important to build a personal brand because it’s the only thing you’re going to have. Your reputation online, and in the new business world is pretty much the game, so you’ve got to be a good person. You can’t hide anything, and more importantly, you’ve got to be out there at some level.

Now, Gary is probably the most personable successful entrepreneurs on the web. He replies to as many emails from his readers as he can, connects on social media websites, makes videos and really gives us major insight into his life. My only peeve is he’s a Jets fan, but what are you going to do?

Gary’s personal brand is so strong, it was the way I discovered him. I didn’t find him through his primary business, Wine Library, but I found him over at his more personal video blog where I just thought he was some cool entrepreneur talking business. I had no idea about Wine Library until I did a little digging.

By reading Gary’s book, I learned about these great tools and networks you can use to find what other people are saying about you, your blog and pretty much anything else about your personal brand.

It’s important to know what people are saying about you so you know what kind of a job you are doing. If people don’t like you, they’ll have a lot of bad things to say. If they like you, then you’re doing a good job. But you’ll never know until you try out these great networks.

Google’s BlogSearch

Find & Spread Your Brand

This free tool by Google is an excellent way to find blogs in your own niche and connect with them. You will find blogs of all different sizes, with different communities, and it’s up to you to take advantage of these findings.

This is a small-scale way of promoting your brand, but nevertheless, an important on. Once you find these blogs, visit them and leave a comment or two on their blog. Talk to other people who have commented on an article and just try to leave a mark in what you say. The smaller the bloggers, the better the chance you have of them visiting your blog and them leaving a comment.

Generally, the following happens when I do this method:

• I get a little traffic to my site from the comment link.
• The owner of the blog will leave a comment on Blogussion, and maybe we’ll even become friends later on.

That sounds like a good deal to me for just leaving one comment on someone else’s blog. Do this on a larger scale, and you will see results with Google’s BlogSearch.

Twitter Search

Find & Spread Your Brand

First of all, if you don’t use Twitter you’re missing out on a huge opportunity and need to signup for an account now. If you’re using Twitter already and not monitoring your brand, you’re also missing a giant opportunity.

All of the people who read and share your content through Twitter almost always has something else to say about your brand and blog. Twitter offers a very comprehensive search system and can find any tweets that mention a keyword of your choice.

Use this tool excessively and effectively. Search for your name, your blog(s) name, anything that relates to you directly. You can find a good deal of feedback from your readers that they don’t always send directly to you.

Ping.Fm

Spread Your Personal Brand

Ping.fm is an incredible tool. It’s hard to balance all of your social network/media accounts and keep everyone up-to-date with your content. That’s where Ping.fm comes in – it acts as a tool for updating all of your social network accounts in one shot.

So if you have a Twitter account, a profile on Facebook and a Delicious account, you can use Ping.fm to update them all and share your content throughout your whole social media collection simply.

This message will be displayed on the social media profiles I choose.

How do you find & spread brand awareness?
Creating a personal brand for yourself is one of the most fun things to do when it comes to building an audience. I have shared with you the tools I use, now I am curious to see what you do. How do you make sure you’re building your brand the right way, and what do you do to actually build it?

Related posts:

1. Are You an Effective Tweeter or Just Another Bird on the Wire?

2. 5 Common Uses for Social Networking and the effect on your target audience

3. Pingoat, gone to the slaughter house?

An important part of good SEO, and general usability of your blog is the permalink structure on your blog. You know, the nonsense in your address bar that takes you from website to website. In WordPress, a permalink structure is often set after installing blog for the first time. Then, it is most likely never touched again. But, did you choose the right structure for your blog?

By default, WordPress sets your permalink structure to http://domain.com/?p=123. In other words “ugly permalinks.” Most bloggers are sensible enough to change this to a more “prettier” solution. Luckily it is simple to change a permalink structure and can be done from your admin panel (Settings → Permalinks).

The Importance of a Good Permalink Structure

I have seen it all too many times – a blogger choosing their permalink structure when they first start their blog, only to realize months later they chose poorly. A bad structure can have an effect on your site almost as ugly as the permalink is itself.

What’s so important about a good structure?

• They do have an impact on the SEO of an article.
• The more readable it is by a human, the easier it is for a search engine to read it.
• It’s part of what “good blog navigation” is about.
• Clean structures make it easier to link back to old articles for both yourself and others.
• It even adds a bit of a professional look to your blog.

A pretty permalink structure is not something that has a huge impact on the success of your blog. It’s not something that will very often turn people away from reading your blog either. You can almost consider this a “minor detail,” but like minor details in design – they are worth perfection.

Best Permalink Practices

There are three main characteristics of what I would consider a good permalink structure to have. They are all simple and easy to achieve, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping up with them as you write more and more blog posts.

1. Filled with keywords

   A good permalink structure will have keywords in it. If you write a post called How to build your very own bookshelf from scratch, the words build, bookshelf and even yourself should be in it. Those are keywords, and are worth spending the extra 10 seconds to come up with, even if they only have a minimal impact on SEO.

2. Clean

   A clean permalink structure uses only what it needs to use and nothing more. No extra words, no extensions (.php, .html, etc.) and doesn’t have any useless information like the date or post number in it.

   It is worth mentioning that words such as “is,” “it,” “the,” “then,” “a/an” etc. are left out of your permalinks. Really focus on including a few keywords only.

3. Short

   The fewer words you can use, the better it usually looks. Shorter links are what most search engines prefer to look at when scanning your site, and makes it easier for other people to link back to you in articles of their own.

The stronger keywords, the cleaner and shorter you make your URL’s, the more optimized your site will be for all of the benefits I mentioned at the start of this article.

Depending on the permalink structure you chose, you may or may not follow those practices above. There are certain options WordPress gives you when choosing your permalinks that can really interfere with those 3 principles above.

Common Structures

Below are the most common permalink structures I have seen throughout the blogosphere. The structure you choose can be for plenty of different reasons. You can choose it out of personal preference (you like the look), or you just see one structure to be the best for your blog. The amount of content your blog has can actually have an impact on your decision.

• http://domain.com/post-name/
  This is one of the most common, cleanest ways to display your permalinks. I highly recommend you have the title of your post included in your permalink. If nothing else, this is all you need for a good permalink. Believe it or not, I have seen bloggers exclude this from their permalinks, and the URL’s were probably unbearable to work with.
• http://domain.com/category/post-name/
  This is the structure I use here, and my favorite. This is a structure you will see on more high-content blogs, and is probably the best choice for blogs like that. It keeps things a little more organized, and can maximize the SEO of your permalink.
• http://domain.com/year/month/day/post-name
  This is my least favorite permalink structure. It adds a lot of clutter to the permalink, and can make it longer than it needs to be. In my personal opinion, it’s best to advertise the date of the article as little as you can (I include the date AFTER the article) if you write timeless content. Sometimes when people see a date on an old post, they may doubt it is still relevant, when it could very well be.

Now, there are many other ways you can organize your permalinks. The WordPress Codex lists quite a few tags you can include in your permalinks. I can’t believe people would even consider adding the minute or second the post was published into their permalink. But, if you want – it’s possible (but stupid).

Changing Your Permalink Structure

This is where things get messy. If you are that blogger who has written hundreds of articles and then want to change the permalink to them, you might be in a little trouble.

It’s not that it isn’t easy to change the permalink. All you need to do is change the tags you want included in your structure from your Permalinks options page. But, when that happens, you will have a lot of broken URL’s throughout your blog.

Look at it this way:

If your want to change your permalink structure from http://domain.com/year/month/day/post-name to http://domain.com/category/post-name/, you will have an entirely different URL. The article will still be accessible, just not through the same URL. And this causes problems in search engines because the old URL will be indexed, not your new one.

That means, you could lose quite a bit of traffic to your blog.

Resources for Changing Your Permalinks

This often takes a couple of steps to do, but there are safe ways to change your permalink structure without losing a single visitor. Bruce Keener did it, and even wrote about it. So, it is very possible to change your permalinks at any time without harming your traffic.

Here are some useful resources I found about doing it:

• Paul Stamatiou changed his permalink structure from one that had the date, followed by the post name to one that only has the post name. Here’s what he did.
• There is a plugin for WordPress that can try to migrate your old URL’s to your new URL’s. See: Permalink Redirect.
• The same author who wrote the plugin above also wrote an article on doing it yourself, in case the plugin yields no results.
• There is another plugin for permalink migration called Dean’s Permalink Migration.

More Resources for Permalinks

I have found a few useful plugins and guides for you to check out that can help you better the current permalink structure of your site.

• Redirection Plugin

  Need to only change a few URL’s? This plugin by John Godley can make changing single URL’s on your blog simple, and it’s all done right from the admin panel.

• SEO Title Tag

  This plugin makes it easy to select the best, most relevant keywords from your post title and include them in your permalink.

• WordPress Codex

  For everything you need to know about permalinks, check out what the WordPress Codex has to say.

Related posts:

1. WP Robot – Powerful Content Generation for WordPress

2. WordPress just got more friendly: Hello WordPress.tv!

3. 5 WordPress.tv Videos Worth A Watch!

Blogging is not something that “stands still,” it is always changing. Trends, strategies and beliefs are always shifting and how you stay up to date with it is your decision.

But some people are never really “alerted” to these developments in the blogosphere. Because there are already quite a large number of things to worry about on your blog, it’s probably best that you try to cut that number down as much as possible. If you’re worrying about trends and strategies that aren’t really important to your blog anymore, you will be wasting a lot of much-needed time for nothing.

I took a moment and tried to remember back to the days where this blog started, and even at past blogging ventures. I tried to remember things I worried about back in 2007 and 2008 when I really first started blogging, and how irrelevant they are now in 2010.

You don’t worry about any of the following now, right?

1. Google PageRank

I think this is the biggest thing that most bloggers and webmasters in general have stopped worrying about. I remember the days where everyone would be trying to build as many back links as possible for the sake of having a higher PageRank. At one point in time, you could use PageRank as a selling point for a domain name. Now? Not so much.

The only thing you can gain nowadays from a high PageRank is bragging rights. My buddy Rob and I were talking about the PageRank of our blogs a few weeks ago, and we both rank 4. I would like to see Blogussion hit 5 as a ranking (just to rub it in his face), but I won’t be spending even a minute trying to do it, or a second worrying about it.

Why do you think PageRank has lost its value? What was once a defining factor of a “successful website” has now been deemed virtually useless. What happened?

2. Negativity

I remember back when I created my first blog that receiving negative comments, or hearing people disagree with what I wrote about was the end of the world. Controversy was the last thing I wanted to write about, and negativity was one of my biggest fears. I think I feared it because I didn’t know how much it could help me.

I used to think that negativity and disagreement were problems, but it’s actually pure positivity and agreement that were the actual problems. When you write an article that everyone agrees with, one of the two things probably happened:

1. You wrote about a dead-obvious subject that has been overly talked about in your niche.
2. You didn’t add a unique point of view to the subject you talked about.

When I see disagreement within the comment section here, I also see success. It shows that people actually read my article, and actually took time to analyze what I said and write out an opposing opinion. That’s a lot better than seeing those comments where all anyone says is “I agree, nice post!”

3. Aggressive Competition

Is it just me, or are bloggers in the same niche actually nice to each other? Maybe I just don’t know any mean bloggers, but it seems to me that we would much rather help our “competition” than slam them nowadays.

I remember reading SEO articles that warned you not to stuff your meta tags with keywords as a blogger in your niche would report you to Google and get your site penalized. I just can’t imagine any of my friends (and most of them are in the same niche as me) doing that to me. But I don’t see myself keyword stuffing either.

Yes, competition still serves a purpose: to inspire you to keep doing good. But, your “competitors” also help you a lot too. They link back to your articles, they include you in their Blogroll, retweet you on Twitter and even want to connect with you on a more personal level. That isn’t what I remember first starting out.

4. Content Thieves

Alright, so they still bring up some worry to many of us. But nothing nearly as bad it was even a few years ago.

Content thieves (aka scrapers) are people who take your content, oftentimes word for word, and publish it to their own blog. Most do it out of ignorance and think it’s okay, and some just think they are sneaky and that it’s actually helping their site.

When content gets stolen, it becomes duplicate content, and duplicate content causes a bunch of negative effects to your SEO. So why do I think content thieves aren’t anything to worry about?

Luckily, things have changed a little. Most of the time when you contact the owner of the blog (the person who stole your content), and ask them to remove what they have stolen, they will listen. Some just need to hear you ask them to remove it, some need a warning, but there are also the few who won’t take it down. In my experience, I have never been declined when asking someone to take down what they have stolen, so some of these people do actually have a conscience.

I can’t back this up entirely, but I believe search engines have also gotten smarter when it comes to duplicate content and can often determine a scraper from a legitimate source. So, if the site that has stolen your site seems spammy, I wouldn’t worry even the slightest bit about penalization in the search engines.

5. Simple Marketing

It’s become extremely easy to carry out even the simplest marketing techniques. So there is no excuse for you to not bring in even a few readers to your blog.

Marketing has literally become as easy as signing up for a Twitter account, following a few people and tweeting. It has become as easy as leaving a comment on a blog. Those are just simple techniques, yes, but many forms marketing has become such an easy task with the web becoming a better place for bloggers.

What’s there to worry about?

I think my blogging life has become a little easier since I stopped worrying about the things I talked about above. They all were pretty important things to me when I first started, but are now trivial and meaningless to me.

So, what are some things you have stopped worrying about? I find that the more experiences you get with your blog, the fewer things you worry about believe it or not. What are your current fears and woes? I’m sure we can talk about them all day.

Related posts:

1. 8 discouragements that should be looked at as encouragements

2. Build Your Community, Stop Begging for One

3. The Advantages and Disadvantages of Short and Long Term Projects: Some Notes on Blog Flipping

In an ever changing approach by bloggers to keep up with the Google SERP algorithms, many of us get carried away with our “SEO Techniques.” It’s not a surprise nor a shame, because without this experimentation, we are bound to hit a plateau in progress.

Unquestionably, even here at Blogussion – we try many new things, in combination with the old to help build on the traffic from search engines. Whether it be validating the site using the W3C Markup or just typing a new category-description, Search Engine Optimization is a never-ending process that evolves on a regular basis and it is our duty to keep up with it.

However, in trying new things – we shouldn’t forget that some techniques will never die out and must be practiced as regularly as possible. I would just like to outline 45 tips that will help you build quality back-links to your site, with minimal to no costs!

Quality back-links serve two main purposes. Firstly, it helps crawlers find and locate your site. Once this is accomplished, the search engine crawler goes about indexing your site. The next purpose; back-links help crawlers identify how important your blog really is.

The first purpose obviously only applies to new blogs, but the second one will still be valid even 10 years down the track. These back-links also help the Google Crawler to assign your pages with a Google PageRank. Simply to put, the more authoritative websites that are linked to your site, the more important it is perceived to be.

List of 45. Starts Here.

Getting Links for Writing Content

1. Write content that is useful – Writing resourceful content will always attract links, hands down. If you write an article that is overflowing with useful and resourceful information – people will link to it.

2. Don’t forget trackbacks – This handy feature for WordPress can be great way of returning the compliment for a dedicated link.

3. Remind your readers to link to you – After each posts, just throw in a quick reminder that your article can be socially bookmarked or linked to.

4. Make a Top “X” List – Alex’s post on “100 Lists To Become A Better Blogger” is the most successful post on Blogussion, to-date. This just goes to prove how much people love “lists posts” such as your “Top X [Something]”

5. Debunk a Myth – There’s only one thing better than coming up with an idea, is to prove someone else one wrong. People love opposition and to see a debate bubble up, so don’t be afraid to challenge other people’s opinions.

6. Write with a touch of conspiracy – Just reinforcing tip #5. If you can create that atmosphere of retaliation, it will always raise a few eyebrows.

7. Spread the Love – Dedicate a post or two per week to link to other blogger’s posts that you found useful. More often than not, they will tell their readers “Mr.X linked to my post, how cool!”

8. Trade articles with webmasters – Similar to guest posting, just swap articles with a fellow webmaster.

9. Release a Press Release – This guide shows you how to write + submit a good Press Release.

Freebies/Giveaways for Link-Baiting

10. Hold a contest with an incentive. Contests are great for link-baiting because when people talk about it, there will always be “Check it out here” tagged along with it.

11. Release a free design. If you can make/buy a custom WP-Theme then release it for free to your guests, you can really kick off on a viral market. Just don’t forget the “Designed by [YOUR LINK]”

12. Release a free plugin. This serves a similar purpose as a design, but not so much with a direct back-link. Instead, if your plugin is useful, the incoming links will just grow exponentially.

13. When running a contest, reward your referees that bring the most referrals. This will encourage them to blog about your contest.

Connecting With Communities

14. Become active and post on relevant forums

15. Become active and comment on relevant blogs.

16. Try not to forget your signature on forums, otherwise the whole thing is an epic fail.

17. When commenting on blogs, try to use post URLs instead of just your Blog URL – This can help regulate your links evenly amongst your blog, and not just solely to your front page.

18. DON’T spam communities with your links to your site, offer a reason for them to visit and contribute with a purpose.

19. Submit your blog to directories – These are still helpful when it comes to getting indexed, especially these directories listed here.

20. Search up DoFollow Blogs/Forums – These will carry the most significant back-links.

21. Browse Craigslists and they can provide you with a free or cheap link.

22. Build on your Technorati Profile

23. Become a Sponsor – Whether it be a theme, whole website or a small project; the sponsors always get mentioned.

24. Run for Charity, and request others to help spread the word.

25. DON’T spam. This tip cannot be reinforced enough. A deleted comment will server no purpose.

Directories, Social Bookmarking + Discussion Groups.

26. Write content for Article directories – Publish content for directories such as eZineArticles, GoArticles or iSnare. In the “About Author’s” area, you can leave a link to your website.

27. Build a Squidoo Page – It’s easy and if you have the time to develop it, it can be very authoritative. If you don’t there’s heaps of services out there to help you out.

28. Join Discussions over at Yahoo! Answers – Providing useful answers, along with a link is an easy way to earn a back-link.

29. There’s also Google Groups – It’s almost the same as Yahoo! Answers, but owned by Google.

30. Submit your voice on Digg – First build a solid profile, where you have a network of loyal diggers. If you can hit the Digg front page, you are likely to get linked to by a lot of web-masters.

31. Build on your Twitter profile then link to your site using your “Bio Area.”

32. Tweet about your posts using Twitter, then request retweets from your followers.

33. Offer a “Tweet This Post” link on every post your write, this will make Tweeters easier to tweet about your article.

Direct Link Building

34. Contact your fellow bloggers with a personalized email – asking for an reciprocal link exchange. However, keep this to a minimal and be very selective in who you choose to trade with.

35. Post around on forums asking for reciprocal link exchanges, but yet again be warned on your selection.

36. If you are a part of organizations, clubs or schools – Ask them if they can link to you, because these types of websites are more often than not; authoritative.

37. DON’T ask Darren Rowse, ShoeMoney, Matt Cutts or Yahoo, MSN and Google for back-links. It’s just a waste of time, especially the last three “contacts”

Paid Link Building

38. Buy a Review – Most sites that offer reviews will naturally link to the reviewed product/site.

39. Many webmasters buy links on popular blogs for authority, even though it’s against the Google TOS (Use at your own risk)

40. Rent links from others website – Text-Link-Ads is most likely your best option.

Using Blogussion for Link Building

41 Leave a comment – All our comments are do-follow, so the link you chose as your URL will get link-love automatically.

42. Top Commentators  – As you can see on the sidebar, we use this awesome plugin. Every month, our most contributing members will be rewarded with a link.

43. We use CommentLuv – Every comment you post, will carry a link to your latest blog posts.

44. Link to our posts – We utilize the uses of ‘trackbacks.’ Hence any links to our posts, will automatically be rewarded with a back-link to them! So, Why not share this post with your readers and followers?

45. Buy a Paid Review – We link to our reviewed sites/products.

That’s it!

There’s many more link building techniques and tips that I haven’t mentioned in this post, but these are just some of the ways you can always rely on for Link Building.

Naturally, following these tips will reward you with a higher PageRank too!

Lastly, is there anything you want to add to this list? Please leave us a comment below

Related posts:

1. Boost Your SERPs with these Link Building Techniques

2. Press Release Submissions

3. 49 Tips to Become a Better Blogger

With the ever-increasing concerns on the global economic crisis, everyone’s feeling their fair-share of pain. On a personal level; I don’t even get pocket money anymore. That’s both from my parents and Mr. Google.

Ever since the global economic slump, there has been a non-stop stream of complaints that are tainted with earnings plummeting and advertisers zipping up their pockets. In such desperate times, where everyone’s strangled in their own struggles – what hope do us bloggers have?

If you have read Alex’s profound recommendation on the WordPress Plugin OIOPublisher – you might just have an idea where I’m heading with this post too.

As clearly as the post title highlights, I want to dedicate this post to help explain to our readers why Google Adsense is just isn’t as effective as it used to be for us small-time bloggers. Hence, it’ll help you understand why the Private Ad Sales alternative is much more viable for most small-time bloggers.

A quick visit over to the DigitalPoint or V7N Forums or even the Google Webmaster’s forum – you will realize just how seriously the complaints have been going around. Almost every other thread, in the Adsense Categories seem to be about earnings falling.

We can’t just play the blame-game because no-one within the blogoshphere is at fault (unless of course the rampant fools around the world that are in/directly responsible for economical crashes are blogging too). Unfortunately, many uninformed Adsense users have blamed Google, accusing them of taking too much of the share as a middleman. While is may/may not be true, there are much more feasible reasons behind the sudden slump.

9 reasons why ‘Private Ad Sales’ are better than ‘Google Adsense’

1. More Revenue – This is one of the most obvious points. Dealing directly with your sponsors, you are effectively cutting out the middle-man and hence eliminating any percentage shared with them and/or  dreadful fees.
2. You can be Clint Eastwood with the target – One of the biggest let downs in Google Adsense, is the randomness of advertisements appearing next to your content. Sure, you can target your keywords and utilize the “Keyword Filter” but there will always be an ad or two that turn up totally unrelated. With Private Ads, you can hand-pick the ones that appear on your blog.
3. You are in control – By selecting the type, size, color and even the behavior of the advertisements – you are in full control of what your readers view. Customizing the limited range of sizes and other visual features on Google ads can be sometimes be unnecessarily time-consuming.
4. You decided how much you earn – Theoretically speaking, if you can find the sponsors – then you can earn as much as you like. If you only want a couple of ads, that’s fine but if you’re willing to display more ads you will simply earn more. However, be careful that you don’t spam your own site – because your number one priority is to satisfy your readers’ needs and not your advertisers’ pleads.
5. Direct Contact with your sponsors – If you have been following Blogussion lately, you must have realized the emphasis we put on ‘making friends.’ When it comes to blogging – almost everything is social. Fundamentally, you are sharing your opinion with people and therefore creating a community of inquiry. By directly dealing with your sponsors, you are effectively making friends – and this can really help pick up the word-of-mouth viral marketing.
6. Contextual Networks literally suck for small-time bloggers – Programs that offer incentives for clicks such as Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher can be an extremely profitable, but that only works if you have a huge daily reach and lot of daily pageviews.
7. Sponsor’s Ease of Payment – We all know that Google only offers a direct deposit to your bank account or a check mailed to your address. Offering only these two types of payment methods is a bit of a let down, but with Private Ad Sales you can decided how your advertisers meet their payments. Just like a couple of points earlier, this one too – reinforces the fact “you are your own boss“
8. OIOPublisher – Enough said. This is one of the best plugins released for WordPress. If you want a much more detail run through of the plugin and its details – please check out Alex’s recent post on it.
9. It’s just consistent -Once you find a handful of loyal sponsors, for a constant monthly price – you are guaranteed an income from your blog. Nothing more, nothing less – this can really help you plan ahead and make decisions on-site without worrying if you will get paid this month to adequately cover the costs. To protect yourself even more, you can perhaps ask your sponsors to sign a minimum contract or provide a month’s notice before cancellation.

In conclusion, Private Ad Sales are better for small-time bloggers and until you reach a significant amount of surfers everyday – constantly – it should be more profitable than any CPC Programs.

Of course, you should experiment everything for yourself because every blog performs differently. Don’t be afraid to play around with the colors, sizes and ad-placements for your Google Adsense ads because if thing’s don’t work out; you can always return back to Private Ad Sales.

Related posts:

1. Why Google’s new favicon gets more attention than your blog

2. Official GOOGLE SEO Guide Released!

Okay, the world isn’t destroyed but if you haven’t realized – our subscriber count shows a big fat ugly zero! Everything is back to normal now thankfully.

When I saw it for the first time, I was seriously contemplating the fact that I might have written something so awful that it scared away ALL our subscribers – but luckily when common sense settled in, I figured out that was just a stupid thought.

Anyways, after ‘some’ thinking, the question that snowballed into a rage was ‘Why FeedBurner, Why?!’

It varies from showing “zero” to “N/A” at different times, even though they are pretty much the same thing. Well technically they aren’t the same thing, in fact I would actually appreciate it if they showed N/A. Then at least our new visitors can see something’s wrong.

Our blog wasn’t the only tell-tale sign of FeedBurner going awry. Alex confirmed that logging into the FeedBurner Admin Panel – even that showed null stats! At least we eliminated the fact that we done something to the coding accidentally or something like that.

I looked up on the issue and there has been similar problems dating all the way back to mid-2005! Nearly four years later, they are still facing the same problem. Time and time again, Google reps have just said “We tried something new, it didn’t work out and hopefully your stats will return after we fix this.”

I suppose that would be a generic reply, but still a reply none the less.

I shouldn’t be so harsh on the Big G. I mean they offer a lot of services for free and a lot of opportunity for many individuals across the globe. Still, they are pretty inconsistent when it comes to FeedBurner.

Hopefully they can fix it but till then none of our readers will get any RSS updates nor email updates – we are extremely sorry for the inconvenience.

Thanking You

Blogussion Duo

Related posts:

1. Official GOOGLE SEO Guide Released!

As I’m sure you have noticed, Google has gotten a new favicon. It has gotten a lot of attention on the web, and even TechCrunch wrote a post about it. How is it that a stupid little thing such as a new favicon can spark so much discussion throughout the web? And why isn’t it that your blog is getting talked about on big blogs like TechCrunch?

The answer I’m going to give you for that question is not because Google is the most visited site on the internet because that would be really boring and wouldn’t make much of a great blog post (no matter how true it is).

Google has helped people in the past. It continues to do so now, just like it will be doing tomorrow

Bottom Line: Google isn’t going anywhere. If I asked you when Google will shut down, you would tell me “Never”. If I asked you when a starting blogger will close their blog, you would probably tell me “Within its first month”. But what does any of that have to do with Google’s new favicon?

Google provides users with consistent and accurate information

Every time you search on Google, you get search results. Google provides you with 3rd party content, and it is by far the most accurate search engine to date. You can’t just leave a company who gives like that alone. Everything they do has to be written about and criticized.

They’re always working to give their users more: New Services, Upgrades to current services, etc.

They’re like a giant blog (excluding their “official” blog), they’re always updating and improving how their readers learn and use their system. If your blog can do that, then success can (not always) come. Obviously I’m not talking about creating web tools like they do, and I’m definitely not saying your site will grow as big as Google.

Because Google always keeps their user base updated with current web standards, and setting them, they got where they are now. That’s what you should be doing in your blog: setting a standard on how content should be reached across to different readers.

Like all news stories, you want to be the first one to report it

News spreads like wildfire on the Internet. They say that you should always try to be the first one to report on a potentially top story. Being the first to blog about it could result in sending pings/trackbacks to other blogs (which can bring you traffic, and other things), getting linked to from other blogs, and plenty of other scenarios.

So with that information, you want to be the one to tell the web about this story. A story about that humongous web beast called Google will surely do great as Google is a resource that everyone uses, and will be something you will undoubtedly go back to when they have a question.

An example of being the first one to write about a news, take the release of WordPress 2.7. Before Janith and I merged our blogs, I had written a post about the WordPress 2.7. My blog (kolakube.com) was the first one to send the WordPress Development blog a pingback. As a result, I got some decent traffic.

So imagine getting a link to an article on the Official Google Blog and all the traffic that could come your way.

How can I apply all of that information to my blog?

We all know in reality that Google getting a new favicon isn’t anything special. It’s just how people react to it, making it a bigger deal than it should truly be.

The point I have been trying to get across in this whole post is this: if you want your blog to get talked about on the web, just be a great blogger. Use the information I highlighted above and apply it to your blog. Just to sum up what was covered:

• Provide users with consistent and accurate information.
  Simply enough, keep writing up to date, useful information.
• Always work for more.
  Keep messing with your design until it’s perfect. Always write new posts, build a strong social media profile. Work like you’ve never worked before, and don’t live in another bloggers shadow.
• Break the news.
  Blog your way to the top of the trackback lists. Always report on topics in your niche, and you could get noticed if you provide the most useful information in your story.

If the web isn’t talking about your blog, then go out there and get them talking! Even if it’s about you having the best designed favicon, when the web talks about you, you will certainly feel the impact!

Related posts:

1. Official GOOGLE SEO Guide Released!

Finally, it is here. It’s been nearly 11 years since Google launched their search engine, and finally we have an “Official Guide” to manipulate the system to work for ourselves!

I was merely breezing over it, however sadly there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of new information. Just the same old basic tactics been repeated and re-released in a 22 page PDF File.

Having said that though, there’s a couple of things that might interest you and it’s worth a look. Besides, it was published by Google themselves, so just reading it reassures you that SEO is still alive.

No related posts.