December 9, 2005

Blogging for Hits

Tony Pierce, easily one of the top 10 bloggers, talks about how he would blog for hits. Funny examples of how to get people to want to read or link at your stuff, and then Tony ends off with

if i wanted hits id change everything about this blog and do everything differently but i dont think about hits any more than i think about ads and i dont think about pussy either

which is why i get all three and then some

and then some.

Voice probably matters more than anything else.

And this goes to show why SEO really does not matter as much for blogs

New Blog Established Blog
Assumptions

  • new to the web
  • new to blogging
  • somewhat new to your topic
 Assumptions

  • been around a while
  • learned your community and topic well
Strategy

  • since few people will read new blogs write literal using descriptive post titles
  • spend tons of time reading other blogs…the best blogs are the best because they have personality and because they distill a ton of information
  • after your site ages and if enough people like your posts as you get more into blogging then your literal titled posts will rank well for many terms
Strategy

  • write post titles and contents to elicit links, comments, viral marketing, and / or an emotional response
  • after you have a share of market attention it is important to try to remain unique if you want to keep your market position if your field is competititive
  • if people find your posts interesting they will link at them and you will rank well for many related queries without needing to focus so much on being literal
  • keep in mind though that many people will link to your site using your post title as the anchor text. you still may want some of your post titles to be a bit literal here and there

December 8, 2005

Everyone is so Shite, and I Love Everyone, etc.

It is easy to link at a site that says everyone sucks.
It is easy to link at a site that calls out one particular well known person as being full of shite.
Self congradulatory industry specific coverage and awards are easy to link at.
It is easy to link at the person who tells me I spelled congratulatory incorrectly.

People want to post about something…sometimes you can create an idea that is easy to talk about or steal someone else’s idea by adding controversy.

December 1, 2005

Typepad Down Again, Suggests Faketypepad.com?

I typically like to keep my stuff out of networks. A friend of mine who goes by the nickname Lots0 pointed out many times how he was once burned by being part of a network.

Sure sometimes your host will have problems, but if you pick hosts based on reliability then odds are pretty good your host will be up more often then most distributed system.

Blogger has the following issues

  • huge splog problem
  • lack of portability of link popularity
  • makes your blogs seem less professional by being hosted there
  • occassionally down for extended periods of time

TypePad has the following problems

  • if you dynamically remap your hosting some of the registrar partners (such as GoDaddy) place an ad page at the root non www. version of your URL
  • some people use their default URLs, but I do not like the lack of portability of link popularity
  • last month their hosting was down so much that they let users decide how much free hosting they wanted to receive to make up for it
  • this morning I am not sure if they had something wrong with their servers, but the sorry faketypepad.com unavailable messages this morning did not make me feel the service is all that trustworthy

Having said all of that I recently set up a number of blogs on Typepad and am wondering if I screwed the pooch. Should I have just put Wordpress on a wide variety of domains?

A few minutes here and there don’t mean much, but they do start to add up if you are building out a large network.

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