Sorta absurd that this isn’t built into the core of Wordpress given how popular the software is, but here is some Wordpress code for making page titles that are more search engine friendly.
My mom has got a few loyal readers on her blog now. She writes about weight loss and fitness, which is a topic that is easy to find content about and also an easy topic to discuss and comment on.
A friend of mine recently whined about not having many comments left on his blog. If you are truly passionate about your topic you can evangelize its value and extend the borders of your topic to relate it to more people, but quite often most topics are not going to have a huge base of people discussing them. If your topic is niched down or boring in nature you have to think of creative ways to make it relevant to other news issues and things you know people will be searching for.
Some people are writing for link popularity or distribution while others write with a different goal in mind. Web readers, on average, want to read and understand quick bytes of knowledge over long scrolling posts. Shorter faster stronger. Are good for posting. Many people write at a level above the comprehension of most readers. What is the point of the post? To make it really matter for the few who understand you? Or to try to get it seen by as many people as possible?
You also can’t reach everyone and still be relevant to a niche. I find many people end up being sad or frustrated because they make apples to oranges comparisons. My step dad’s blog on home security is going to be much harder to evangelize than my mother’s weight loss blog. You could have 50% of the home security market and not have as much traffic as a person pulling 5% of the weight loss market. To parallel it with the offline world, it is unrealistic for the average girl to compare here perceived beauty with doctored up photos on the cover of some magazine. Hopefully my step father does not read this and think I am calling him a plain girl. 
I don’t watch cable television much, but when getting a sandwich at the local shop they had a television on. The news program talked about blogging and how bloggers find something new to rant and rave about each week, outlining a bunch of out of context ultra biased ignorant sounding low quality one liners. This week covered bloggers whining about gas prices and saying that it wasn’t fair to place any blame on the gas companies that just had combined quarterly profits of over 10 billion dollars.
The program seemed like its only purpose was to undermine the perceived quality of content on blogs to try to make the newscast seem more viable and interesting than it is. Creating a weekly series that aims to play down other publishing models hardly seems a way to stay relevant.
So I have in the past done this a few times, but have not done it recently, but I have talked to many others who have done it. Have you ever leveraged your archives?
By this I mean:
Some people push blogger ethics, etc…but sometimes the content and ideas that sell are not the same ideas that regular readers would be interested in citing or reading. For example, if I had a few thousand SEO 101 pages on my SEO blog they would probably convert exceptionally well, but nobody would want to read about the same stuff over and over again. What would be the best way to introduce that content without offending regular readers who already knew a lot?
Should all new blog content come in through the home page? If so, why?
Since few people see the first posts on a new blog it is no big deal if they are a bit crappy, right?
I sorta thought that a bit, but I think that much less after working with a friend to start up a network. I wanted to start up a network of around 30 channels covering various topics. I thought so long as we eventually got to quality the start would not matter much, but some of the posts made me feel a bit like some of the writers were stealing money from my bank account.
Not to say that any of the writers are bad people though. If I were paid a flat rate for my work and was not being paid enough to be fully committed to the project I would slack off and write quick posts recapping any press release I could find on the topic.
When you break it down to that far of a level there is no value add, the equivalent can be automated via software, and you have nothing but a channel of noise and ads.
Starting around 30 channels at once means that you are not learning from the first few channels and applying it to the others right from the go. It is easy to take on too much to where you can get a bit overwhelmed with it all.
It may also be worth doing a large number of example posts on each channel. I told my friend that between he and I we could write the stuff ourselves, make about 15 posts a day across the network, and by the end of two weeks we would have enough of a archive history to be able to start marketing the sites. If you let others write the content and they do a less than stellar job it becomes much harder to market.
Bringing on others to do work is probably going to be important if you want to scale out some sort of a mini web based publishing house, but when quantity gets too far ahead of quality it may be hard to untread some of those steps.
Zoom…automation 
NickW and co created a Firefox extension that allows you to sync up all your blog accounts and edit or post to them from the browser.
At first I did not really understand it’s purpose, thinking it was sorta a solution looking for a problem, but then I became a bit of an unidiot and saw how it interfaced with all the blogging platforms. It pulls in the category data from each platform as well.
This is my first post testing it out, but so far looks cool. A few features I would love to see added are:
am sure there are a few other ideas but it is late and I am tired
I am a bit torn on the idea of all the various ways to make publishing quicker and easier. Short term it is great for bloggers because it allows them to work multiple revenue streams quickly. But long term as more people move on the web I wonder if the attention economy will kick in to where the top few voices in any market get the disproportionate share of return for their efforts.
I am trying to start up a blog network or two and also run a couple channels that literally take hours a day to do. Short term I think the network will do better than my high effort channels, but as the fields get more competitive I will have to change the underlying biz models to compensate for increasing competition.
I guess while I am ranting on I am trying to say that it is cool to have one well read high profile site which allows you to leverage that market position into many other channels. The people making serious profits though are probably those who own many uber niche channels. At least for now. This tool helps make the niche channels a quick process.
I tend to use some of the default settings a bit more frequently than one should. The problem with defaults is that when some people see them they may not take them seriously…thus new readers are less likely to trust or link to content since they initially saw it through a speculative eye.
When you are new to the web it can be a bit hard to edit the page code, but just a couple small changes to the site can turn something from a default piece of crap to something that makes it look like you care about it.
Here are my general rules:
My specific steps:
If you use Blogger to power your blog and plan to make it a serious longterm project make sure you do not use Blogspot as your host. Here’s why:
I would almost always opt for using a self hosted blog solution like WordPress or MovableType.
Log in attempts have failed and failed and failed again. TypePad has been down for hours today. Sick of seeing this POS screen.
Many blogs are driven by timeliness and some people own networks where downtime takes many many many man hours.
They should have a premium version where reliability does not blow. It’s not a real / honest business model to be unreliable and claim your solutions are geared toward professionals.
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
TypePad has the following problems
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.
