Blogussion

Does Your Post Frequency Bring in the Best Results?

Alex — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:00:55 +0000

The rate at which you publish blog posts is a very important factor towards building a solid readership. Believe it or not, adding a post a random day of the week and not sticking to a consistent schedule can really have an impact on the reaction it gets from your community.

Just recently, we changed our post schedule here. That would be the third time in under a year we did that, and we have found new benefits each time we switched.

We realized that our content may not always be getting maximum visibility if we continued with our former posting frequencies, so after some analyzing and discussion – we came to the conclusion that we could achieve best results with our posts if we switched.

For new bloggers especially, determining how many times a week they want to post on their blog can be tricky as there isn’t much statistical information to work off of. But even those of us who have been publishing for months – are we on the right track when it comes to getting our posts out to the public? Could our blog be performing better if we made a simple adjustment to our post schedule?

Ever since we changed our post schedule for the third time, we have seen great results. It really got me thinking too: it took us ten months to come up with the smartest post frequency for our blog, what about others? So I want to help you guys out and share with you my ideas about choosing the ideal posting schedule for your blog.

The 3 Most Common Frequencies

I read about 20-30 blogs and I can pretty much tell when a blog is going to update because of how frequent they post. On all of the blogs I read, these are the three most common ones I see:

Every day publishers - People who update their blog at least one time a day.
Second day publishers - People who update their blog every other (second) day.
Day Schedulers - People who update their blog on set days (not the most creative name for them!)

So which is the best? Unfortunately there is no straight answer because there are just too many factors to consider. However, the one factor the remains the same in each of the frequencies above is consistency.

The frequency that has more posts published isn’t necessarily the most useful if it’s not consistent. So does that mean that only posting on your blog on Monday and Wednesday is bad? Not at all! As long as you can post every single Monday and Wednesday, then you have a consistent, working posting frequency.

So that brings me to my next point: is posting more times a week better than posting less? Posting more isn’t necessarily better than posting less (and vice-versa) just because you put more content out onto your blog. And maybe in some niches, quality isn’t better than quantity.

Benefits of Posting More

More content is published to the blog, more content gets indexed in search engines.
Your readers will have plenty of information at their fingertips.
Your traffic will remain consistent through readers sharing more content.
Your blog will look good with more posts coming out in shorter periods of time.
Writing more helps keep you in the same momentum to keep posting.

Benefits of Posting Less

You can put more quality into a single post since you write blog entries less.
Gives your community more time to digest and react to past articles.
Posts often get higher pageviews and are talked about longer since they remain at the top of your blog longer.
Less of a burden on you and gives you more relax time to focus on other things.
Posting less keeps more of your older articles on the page for a longer time which can help driving traffic back to older posts.

It’s up to you to decide what sounds best for your blog – posting more or posting less. Of course, you can figure things out by experimenting like we have here. But, there are even more crucial variables that you should analyze. The thing that is extremely important in measuring your success – numbers.

There are four very important numbers you need to be aware of at all times when you publish an article. Just remember to embrace these numbers and do not let them harm you.

1. Traffic sent to your blog

Use a web app like Google Analytics or a plugin like WordPress.com Stats (or just use both) to track the amount of traffic coming in to your blog from these posts.

It’s really important to track the number of pageviews a single post brings in, because if you track posts for a few weeks you can determine quite a few things that will aid you in picking a posting frequency:

You can find out your busiest day(s) of the week: If you find out your busiest day of the week is Monday, publish your best article for the entire week on that day. More people will see it as more people are visiting your blog that day, and may be encouraged to stick around since you wrote such a great article.
Learn what topics are the most well received by visitors: Maybe posts about SEO do better than posts about your newborn kittens. Compare a few posts in one category to a few posts in another category and see which brought more traffic.
Discover traffic trends: For example, maybe on some days Twitter traffic is greater than other days. This is very valuable information to know, and if you can take advantage of any kind of traffic source by just knowing when it’s at its highest, you can really bring in some high numbers.

As I mentioned above, there is a great tool for tracking traffic sent to your blog. Google Analytics provides many detailed graphs and charts about your sites and it’s a tool that every blogger should use.

2. Comment averages per post

The amount of comments your posts get shows how your community reacts to what you wrote. Your rate of posting really can have a big impact on how many comments your posts get.

We have found here that if you post at least once a day, you may not get as many comments as you could if you published every second day, or took a break for the weekend. This is because when you post more there is more content for a reader to analyze that there is less of a chance you will get consistent comment averages on your posts.

If you want to encourage more discussion within your community, then break down the following things about your post schedule:

Number of posts per week - Consider the age of your blog and how many times a week you are publishing. If you are starting out, I always recommended posting about three good articles a week, then over time expanding to 5 or more.
Length of posts - Do you write massive 1,000+ word posts like this one, or shorter, maybe 500-700 words? Compare the comment averages of short and long posts and see which has more.
Comments per post - I would make a chart of some kind and take all of the posts in a week and find the average of comments per post. This can be a great way to look back and see how you are improving the discussion in your community.
Quality of discussion - Do your posts get comments like “nice post” or “good work,” or do you see debates forming and questions being asked? If the discussion in your comments section isn’t anything special, you may need to make your posts more user friendly.

3. Social Media Reactions

Sharing content on sites like Twitter, Digg, or Delicious is one of the best ways to get new information. Every blogger should be active on at least two of the three links I just mentioned, not just to get new information but to share your own.

If you use a plugin like the Tweetmeme button, you can track how many times an article is shared on Twitter by other people. Learning how many times an article has been shared on a site like Twitter is important because it shows how a community outside your blog likes your post.

From the Tweetmeme button alone, we really have learned some important things that helped us improve the posts we schedule each week here.

We learned that the best posts to get retweeted are articles about Twitter.
We discovered that the shorter and catchier your headline is, the better it spreads on Twitter.
If we tweet about a recent post, it will always get tweeted again if we ask people to do it.
The more tweets a post gets, the more appealing it looks to retweet and even read.

So with this information in mind, we really do our best to make the best of Twitter. As a result, Twitter is one of our highest sources of traffic.

What’s your rate?

So, there is really a lot of information here about picking your rate of posting. I hope you guys understand the importance of how often you publish and have learned enough from this post to discover the best way of figuring it out.

Tell me – how often do you post?

I really wish our poll worked, but I am curious as to how many times a week you update your blog? And, what is your frequency of posting?

Here at Blogussion, we post five times a week Monday-Friday and skip Saturday and Sunday. Previously, we published seven times a week with a post every day, then we changed it to posting every second day with 3-4 posts a week.

Photo by CgDesign

Bloggin Discussion, Tips & Tricks Copyright 2009 Blogussion. All Rights Reserved.

Does Your Post Frequency Bring in the Best Results?

Little Known Ways Darren Rowse Makes Money Blogging

Seth — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:01:08 +0000

Before Darren Rowse became “the Problogger” we all know as the face of the Blogging tips world, he was a full-time blogger earning a six-figure income.

Today we are going to talk about how he earned a full-time income from blogging before he became the famous blogging authority.

Darren Rowse “Problogger”

No matter your opinion of Darren Rowse as the most influential blogger in the blog tips niche, everyone must admit he is the branded authority for this topic. When Darren’s name is attached to something it does two things, succeeds and sells. He is a trusted authority for any new blogger and an old friend to many advanced bloggers.

His blog’s range from the ultimate in blogging tips to cool tutorials and Twitter news. Here are the profiles of his most well-known projects and blogs. These blogs are all created since 2005 and surprisingly all of them but Problogger.net have been created after Darren made six-figures.

When Problogger.net (Darren’s signature blog) was launched in 2005 it was not more than 9 months before Darren became a legitimate problogger who made six figures – $XXX,XXX. The article where Darren announces this monumental event can be read here - Darren Hits Six-Figures

Here are the profiles of Darren’s most well known blogs:

Problogger.net

Since 2005, Darren’s most influential blog has provided important tips and topical news to encourage and educate bloggers. As the face of Darren’s brand online, Problogger has become more than an income stream and far more as a resume for Darren’s authority as the problogger. - Problogger.net
Pageviews per day: 27,975 / Total Pageviews: 29,649,731 (in 5 years)

Digital Photography School

Started in 2006, Darren’s fun and tutorial rich photography blog has excelled at driving traffic and getting lots of subscribers. In addition to the tutorials and blog posts, digital photography school is unique because of its interactive forum community. - Digital Photography School
Subscribers: 345,030 / Alexa Rank: 7,156

Twitip

A recent addition to Darren’s arsenal, Twitip features awesome articles on how to use Twitter to drive traffic to your blogs and sites or how to use Twitter as a stand alone social media platform for networking. The blog just had a recent redesign and is looking good and getting more content posted every day - Twitip
Alexa Rank: 17,112 / Subscribers: 33,183 / Twitter: 81,102

Problogger.com

Problogger readers have long begged for a chance to have a forum on Darren’s blogging tips blog. After having a very successful mini series to make bloggers better, Darren decided to give it a try. So far the project has been a success with lots of posts, active members, and a full-time moderator – Problogger.com
Members: 2,080 / Total Posts: 15,000+

The most important point in this article is this…. Darren became a six-figure blogger before his books, before Problogger had more than 700 subscribers, and before his widely popular TwiTips and Digital Photography School blogs. Darren was a Problogger from other blogs.

Those blogs and his strategy are what we are going to explore today. Too often bloggers try to emulate Darren’s strategy by creating a huge tips blog and becoming an authority on one site. While this may work, Darren’s trusted strategy.. because it obviously worked is far better. First lets look at his income sources at the time of his six-figure income.

Note: Problogger.net was very small at the time, comments were low, and traffic was no where near its current milestones. Its important to understand this was 5 years ago and the other major blogs I listed above did not exist.

Six Figure Blogging

Darren’s income can be traced [with a bit of investigative journalism] back to a variety of blogs coming from 2 major domain names. The two domains are breakingnewsblog.com and livingroom.org. If you go to the main page of either domain you can see very basic graphics, limited text and no monetization. So how did he do it?

The key was each of these domains had many sub-domains. Each sub-domain was very targeted to specific topics like digital cameras, printers, camera phones, and even unmanned aerial vehicles. The blogs were then very keyword specific and advertising inundated. The blogs brought in lots of search engine traffic and if you look at them today they are still bringing more traffic then 80% of other blogs even though many have not been updated for years.

Does this sound not only interesting but weird? Yes the blogs are not pretty, the designs are generally bad, and some are not even on wordpress (oh no!), but this gives us a great example of making money online. Here’s a visual for how Darren was doing it:

Darren’s Strategy

The 3 major pillars in Darren’s strategy that I can tell from looking at the blogs and review some of their statistical information are these:

1. Keyword Rich Content – Articles on site about printers, robotics, or other random topics are both specific and targeted. Post topics are very detailed and the reviews are precisely what both search engines and users would look for on the subject. The keywords are also linked throughout the site to each other and all of his sub-domains are linked in the footers of his blogs, making his blogs search engine optimized (SEO).

What You Should Do

The visualization helps us to realize to make six-figures it is much more realistic if there are multiple sources of income coming in from a variety of monetization methods. What this means to you is that if you want to be a six-figure blogger or even just a full-time blogger for that matter you should diversify your income and learn from a Problogger.

I would start now by getting yourself a blog if you don’t have one [if you need help contact us and we'll help] and then get writing. Start producing as much content as you can for your blog and when you start to see search engine traffic coming into your blog then begin another blog and do the same. As you build traffic on one blog and start earning money on it, find a writer for the blog and start to pay them for content and regular posting. Then all you have to do is write a post a week [based on the topic] and adminster the blog.

Every time you reach this point of success then start a new blog. The writer you hire will continue to produce content for your blog while you build up the content on a new site. This way you do not have to spend any money you do not have. Over time the writer will put so much content on your blog you will not only be paying for their services but you will start making a profit. After you have built up a few blogs with lots of content, its time to ramp up the monetization.

To monetize you can check out some of these tips for making money blogging, or just find a great way to make money from your niche topic. The possibilities are endless and the financial investment is minimal. If you are willing to put the time into your blogs you can be a six-figure blogger too, just like Darren Rowse!

Bloggin Discussion, Tips & Tricks Copyright 2009 Blogussion. All Rights Reserved.

Little Known Ways Darren Rowse Makes Money Blogging

Twitter Apps To Make Your Blogging Easier

Seth — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:00:43 +0000

Twitter is one of the most popular sites on the web (over 40,000,000 users) and if you have not gotten an account yet, stop wasting your time and get one. What happens next is the most important part of this process — what you do with your account.

Who cares if there are over 40 Million users on Twitter if you don’t know how to reach out to them? Today we are going to have a simple discussion about not only what Twitter is, but also how to use it effectively to accomplish your goals.

What is Twitter?

If you already know the answer to this… skip down below and find some of the great tools you can start using to make Twitter more effective. If Twitter is something unfamiliar to you and very foreign.. watch the video below. Its a simple explanation of what Twitter is and what its purpose is.

Twitter Applications

Understanding what Twitter is a necessary first step to mastering it to meet your goals. The next step is to develop a strategy to reach them. I prefer to use the old fashioned advertising approach.. reach as many potential clients as possible. I’m not a spammer, I don’t follow everyone, and I still have a very large amount of followers who click on my tweets (messages). You see I use twitter methods which are both important and easy to do.

I have also compiled and categorized a list of the most useful Twitter applications to help you tweet successfully. There are multiple options for every category and sometimes they do the same thing, so use what you feel comfortable with. Also, you might notice I didn’t add everything to this article that some sites have and that is on purpose. The applications I chose do almost everything you would want and even a lot of what other applications do alone. So find one or two good applications and stick with them. The easier it is the more you will use it.

Networking & Management

Applications in this category focus on conversation, messages, and connecting. These tools make it easier to use Twitter for what it was made for… connecting with other people. These are not spam tools and if you are looking for automated following (which is a scam and should be avoided) then you wont find them here.

Tweet Deck

Excellent tool for mastering the intricate network of Twitter. With its very custom and flexible dashboard you can chat, link, view, and retweet friends, followers, and complete twitter strangers. One of the best features is the internal Twitter Directory and search capabilities. The functions available make TweetDeck the ultimate twitter dashboard for beginners and pros alike. – TweetDeck

HootSuite

Similar to TweetDeck in many of the options available but with a few extra features that might make HootSuite the best for managing Twitter. Features like in program statistics, pending tweets, scheduled tweets, and adding blog feeds to your Twitter Account. When it comes to managing Twitter, HootSuite has it all. – HootSuite

Follower/Following Management

Building your followers and learning how to follow are important parts of Twitter. These applications make following, unfollowing, and crossfollowing really simple. Just check out the videos to learn how easy it is.

Refollow

Refollow is the best program for getting rid of followers who are either (1) Spammy (2) Not willing to follow you back (3) Not active on Twitter anymore. Using refollow is simple and in my opinion the very best way to clean up your followers without giving out your password or messing your account up. Just be careful and actually think about what you are doing and what it could mean to the people following you. – Refollow

Buzzom

Any easy way to grow your account is by using Buzzom. It allows you to actually target who you follow with out just randomly picking and also gives you some choice in the matter. Its very simple to use too!

Other Application Lists

The Most Twitter Apps Anyone Would Ever Need! – Seriously there are 275 Applications at the moment. Many of them do the same thing or are completely useless, but if you want to explore and also be amazed.. this is a great list to learn about Twitter.

Top 20 Twitter Applications – Great list of Apps by TechCrunch based upon traffic rankings. Some of the applications do the same thing and/or obsolete with new changes in Twitter or management tools. Great list though and very interesting to see who is picking up the most traffic outside of Twitter themselves.

There are many other “programs”, “software” and scams to get you followers and allow you to “make money” using Twitter. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Also, unless you are on the official Twitter page or directly connecting into it… never give out your Twitter password to shady sites.

Conclusion

Using Twitter is a powerful way to build traffic, get rid of pesky spammers and create a social media brand. Just make sure you are not missing out because you haven’t started using the right apps yet.

What do you think? Are these apps really the best or am I dead wrong?

Bloggin Discussion, Tips & Tricks Copyright 2009 Blogussion. All Rights Reserved.

Twitter Apps To Make Your Blogging Easier

Wired Weekend #2: The Best Blogging Tips From Around the Web

Alex — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:00:52 +0000

Another Friday calls for our second installment of our awesome Wired Weekend series where we bring you our favorite blogging tips from around the web.

The thing that makes this series so great (besides how useful these links are) is that we select articles from our community and feature them in the post. We collect our favorite articles from your web/blogging blog and post them here.

All you need to do is participate in our community throughout the week for us to notice your blog, and if we like your stuff – consider it added to our Wired Weekend series.

Notable Mentions of Blogussion

Check out what blogs are talking about Blogussion this week!

Creative Bookmarks: Best of the Web October 2009

Tutorial9 featured our article How to prepare a guest post in 5 simple steps in their monthly link roundup post.

80+ High Quality And useful Resources – Best of the Web October

Smashing Apps also featured How to prepare a guest post in 5 simple steps in their monthly link roundup post.

Add a Custom Feedburner Count to your Wordpress Blog

Shane Jeffers expands on our tutorial How to display your Twitter and RSS count on your blog with some cool CSS tricks.

InternetHow’s favorite blog posts of the week

A great roundup post where two of our posts (169 marketing tips and how to connect with your community) were featured.

Talented Thesis Theme Designer For Hire: Live Portfolio Here Now

A post that showcases the design of Blogussion and other works by myself. Also, this blog is going to put up a list of 100 Reasons Why Blogussion is an Amazingly Successful Site soon. We cannot wait for this list to come out!

Blogging Tips From the Community

Amazing articles hand picked from our community of commentators.

Personal Branding with Photos and your name

An article that stresses the importance of getting personal with your community and the impacts of not sharing basic info such as your name and photo!

My blog’s 2 month journey so far

A fun type of post to read, check up on what the Teen Blogger Kid is up to and how his blog is doing after two months. When I read this, it really made me remember starting this blog and how much fun that was!

5 Kill WordPress plugins

A list of really great plugins for WordPress. My favorite from the list is called After the Deadline which is the best spell check around right now.

Top 5 myths about making money blogging

Making money blogging is no easy task for most of us, and with so much advice out there about how to succeed in earning – what’s right and wrong? Well, I’m pretty sure this post is dead on with the myths it exposes.

Do Unto Others’ Blogs As You Would Have Them Do Unto Yours

A great post that explains how important it is to get active on other peoples blogs. Another idea this post makes me think of is the concept of giving more, and hope to get something in return.

Want to Become a Problogger? Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone

A post that shows how unlikely it will be for your blog to find any success if you do not get out there and try new things.

Blogging Tips From Twitter

A collection of great blogging tips that we found on Twitter this week.

Let Google Tell You What Topics to Write About

A great article by @Dennisyu where he talks about learning what Google already gives you authority for and maximizing it.

Market It Write

@Laynefisher tells us 4 valuable lessons she’s learned about writing and marketing from trying to write a novel in a month.

Five Ways to Immediately Enhance Your Online Productivity

@MattChevy is not only a good friend but also an excellent blogger. These tips are invaluable for blogging well.

8% of the Internet Account for 80% of the Clicks

Tweeted by @JeffWend This article changes the way I look at the internet for sure.

Falling Off the Shoulders of a Giant

@Simplicitysqd Talks about the changing landscape of the internet and its effect on bloggers.

Blogussion Weekly Recap

Just in case you missed them, here are the four posts that were published into Blogussion this week.

Five Points to a Successful Blogging Event

A guest post by Arie Rich where she talked about how to plan a working blogging event.

How Bloggers can prepare for the Future of Journalism

Blogging is changing rapidly every day, and Everett Bogue talks about how you can prepare your blog for these changes.

The Best users are the Biggest Winners

A post that talks about how important it is to get involved with your readers and how you always get back what you give out!

How to setup a “Favorite” posts section and bring life back to old posts

A highly detailed tutorial about how to create a “favorite posts” section just like ours and bring traffic back to older posts.

That’ll do it!

I hope you guys enjoyed this roundup! We found a lot of great articles from around our community this week and are really glad we have such intelligent bloggers participating in our community.

Stick around because Monday we will start publishing new, great content! Then, as soon as you know it – another Friday comes by and it’s another Wired Weekend all over again!

Bloggin Discussion, Tips & Tricks Copyright 2009 Blogussion. All Rights Reserved.

Wired Weekend #2: The Best Blogging Tips From Around the Web

How to Setup a “Favorite Posts” Section to Bring Old Posts Back to Life

Alex — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:00:35 +0000

One very well received new feature of our new design here was the “Favorites” section that I setup in our sidebar. Basically, it is a part of our blog where we selected our favorite articles that were no longer in plain view for our readers and made them more easily accessible.

Before I redesigned Blogussion, I wrote a little about this idea of creating a favorite post section in my article with tips on how to drive traffic to old posts. Some people really liked the idea, and I loved the idea myself – so I implemented it here.

I really think this is just an amazing way to keep old posts into circulation, and it has proven itself to do so. The two major effects we have seen so far from posts listed on this page are:

Posts on this page have received more views and comments
Their activity on social networking sites such as StumbleUpon was up from before this page was created

Charts are always a great way to back statements up, and here is a screenshot from Analytics for posts with the highest pageviews this week:

Posts buried pages back are now within the top 5 most viewed posts for the week

I hope that the above is motivation enough for you to follow this tutorial and implement this idea onto your blog. This is a really great way to put the spotlight back onto old posts. Now, I’m going to teach you how exactly to do it! It’s a pretty simple thing to setup really, so it shouldn’t take you very long. Alright, let’s get started!

Step 1: Create a Category

I told you this was going to be easy. For step one, all you need to do is create a category! Call it something like “Favorites.” This category is the key to setting up your favorite posts section on your blog.

Once you have setup this category, it’s time for you to start populating it with posts. So, what you need to do now is go through your articles and pick out your favorite ones. Once you find your favorite posts, just add them to your “Favorites” category.

This process may sound tedious, especially if you have almost 250 posts like we did (I love bragging). But, oddly enough I found it rather enjoyable to go through all of the old posts on this blog and pick out the best of the best.

Step 2: Downloading the “Latest Posts by Category” Plugin

I chose to use a plugin by a blogger I respect a lot, Alex Cristache from Blogsessive. I use his plugin both here on Blogussion, and my other blog Asnio. It’s a super plugin, and makes setting something like a favorite posts section in your sidebar super easy!

Just click the awesome box below to go over to Blogsessive page and download it real quick. Don’t forget to come back now!

Setting the plugin up is easy, and lucky for all of us Alex has written a highly detailed instruction manual for using the plugin. Don’t forget to check that out in the plugin folder included in the download.

Step 3: Setting the Plugin up

If you have a widgetized sidebar, then you can simply throw in the widget wherever you want. If you don’t use widgetized sidebars, I recommend you read the documentation over at Blogsessive so you can find all of the codes for inserting this manually.

Configuring the Widget Options

Lucky for those of us with widgets, customizing the output of this plugin is as simple as checking a few boxes.

In your Widgets panel, you will find all of the options for customizing this widget. But, the one important thing that you do is select your “Favorites” category under the Categories to display: section in the options.

Now that you have checked the box and saved the settings, you should see the list of your favorite posts on your blog. Like I said, there are many other options you may want to check out to make the best use of this plugin.

A great thing about this plugin is that it leaves plenty of room for customization. By default, you just have a simple list of these posts. But, with a little CSS you can make the output look great. I’ll share with you a few tricks I did to make my list look so great here.

Again, I highly recommend you read the documentation Alex wrote so you can get the full idea of how this plugin woks.

Can now hold more content with less scrolling

Splitting the list into two columns

All it takes to split these posts into multiple columns is a little CSS. Lucky for us, this plugin comes with its very own class names which makes styling it extremely easy. Alex really thought of everything when he created this plugin, I’ll tell you that much!

So to split these lists into columns, open up your stylesheet (usually style.css) and add the following lines of CSS in there:

li.lpbcWidgetPost {
	float: left;
	padding: 0 0 1em 1em;	/* adds spacing to the right and bottom of each item */
	width: 45%;		/* will probably need adjusting depending on the width of its parent */
}

Now, this is the part where I think I will lose some people – so don’t be afraid to ask me any questions about this in the comments section.

But basically the whole idea is to float all of the content within the

tag to the left, which will then align everything horizontally rather than vertically. You add a little padding to separate the content, and add a width so you can limit how many posts show per line. You can decrease this width so you can have three or more columns if you wish.

Thesis Users: Add Special Styling to your “Favorites” page

As you can see, the formatting at the top of our favorite posts page has a different formatting at the top then the rest of the category pages here have. I added these extra things to that page so people who visit it knew what kind of content was there.

Luckily this is very easy to change around and if you use the wonderful Thesis Framework, all you need to do is add a little code to your custom_functions.php file:

function custom_archive_info() { if (is_category('favorites')) { ?>
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Code used from Sugarrae’s tutorial
Hoping for Similar Results
This technique has worked pretty well for us so far, and I would love to know what you guys think of it as well! I do hope that this was an easy tutorial to follow, and I am trying to improve my tutorial writing skills since the last one I wrote about how to create the orange RSS box we have here.
Good luck, and let us know how this technique has effected the traffic to old posts on your blog!
  
Bloggin Discussion, Tips & Tricks Copyright 2009 Blogussion. All Rights Reserved.

How to Setup a “Favorite Posts” Section to Bring Old Posts Back to Life

The Best User is the Biggest Winner

Seth — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:45:30 +0000

Blog owners get a lot from having an active community. For some bloggers they pay the bills from the purchases and clicks of their readers. So of course blog owners try to build a blog with an active community they can build trust on.

What might be surprising is the users who are the most active can often gain more from their efforts then the blog owners.

An Example

To explain this I am going to use Blogussion’s User of the Week from our last newsletter, Rob Rammuny. Now if you did not get our newsletter you are really missing out because we share some very valuable tips. Last week we shared some of our plans for Blogussion’s future exclusively with our subscribers. [Sign up for our free weekly email by clicking on "Newsletter" in the sidebar]

Our newsletter also posted a brief introduction to Rob, his contact information, and why we chose him as a “User of the Week”. Here is part of what we said in our email:

Rob wrote an amazing guest post about Twitter Marketing, a variety of guest posts on Unique Blog, and promoted our posts excellently. Rob set himself apart by going out of his way to promote our content throughout the week with Stumbles, Tweets, and Diggs. You can also find a comment from Rob on most of the recent posts.

Look at the reasons we chose Rob for our feature in the newsletter. He was helpful in providing us with great content, promoting our work, and connecting with other readers. For blog owners, that is a big deal. For Rob, its an even bigger deal.

Active Presence Has Its Perks

Being active has its perks for users. These perks are important as the blog you participate on grows in traffic and authority. If you stay consistent your activity will include a few of these benefits:

Trust - As blog owners we trust those that take part in contributing to our blog. We see your efforts to work hard and build your own blog and often we respect that and help you in your efforts.
Links -We link to your articles if we know who you are and what you are writing about. For example, in our Weekend Wire post we linked to a lot of our readers. Many of the links were to readers that contribute regularly to our blog by commenting, stumbling, or writing.
Projects - When we undertake a new project often our closest community members get first dibs on seeing the new projects results and a chance to communicate with us personally. In other occasions we might even outsource to you, invite you into a partnership, or ask your advice. Being active on our blog and others could get you some very unique results.
Partnerships - Rob’s active presence eventually led us to invite him to be an author on Unique Blog. He posts short articles whenever he wants and can link to his own articles pretty freely. Its a great thing for him and he even gets a link and a picture in Blogussion’s footer.

Promotion Always Pays

Readers who promote the blog’s they read to others through Stumbleupon, Twitter, Digg or Delicious almost always get the favor returned. It is not uncommon for Alex or I to get an email asking for a favor from someone who regularly promotes our content. We then promote their work and hope to build traffic to the posts they ask for help with. You see what you give you usually get.

When it comes to being active you usually get more than you put into it. If you already read the articles here, drop a quick line in the comment box and we will not only remember your name, but respond. Often our responses lead to personal emails and a quick look at your most recent posts. If we like what we see we spread the wealth by promoting your content and linking to it.

Kindness Always Pays

This phrase works for blog owners too, but kindness always pays for readers. Most bloggers read blogs that get more traffic then they do. Many bloggers use there comments to drive traffic. There is no better way to make your presence known and get some promotional help then by connecting with the Blog Owners you read by connecting over a variety of mediums.

Here is What I Do for Other Bloggers:

Comment Regularly
Stumble Their Posts
Digg Posts
Bookmark Posts on Delicious
Twitter Their Posts
Ask a Question on Twitter

After spending no more than 5-10 minutes doing these tasks you have suddenly become a very trustworthy reader the blog owner is going to like and connect with. If you spend only 10 minutes a day doing this for a blog owner you will find your network of bloggers growing, your relationships increasing, and your traffic going through the roof!

Bloggin Discussion, Tips & Tricks Copyright 2009 Blogussion. All Rights Reserved.

The Best User is the Biggest Winner

How Bloggers can Prepare for the Future of Journalism

Everett Bogue — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:00:32 +0000

Everett Bogue writes about the developing media world at The Future of Journalism. Follow him on Twitter. Want to write for us too?

The media world is changing, in this month alone writers and readers everywhere watched helplessly as magazine giant Conde Nast folded four magazines (including the food favorite Gourmet) in one week and laid off over 500 people. The New York Times announced this month that they’d have to cut back 100 newsroom jobs.

It’s becoming readily apparent that aspiring journalists aren’t going to be able to take the tried and true road to journalistic success.

It’s time for a new approach

Journalists everywhere are starting blogs and entering the next phase in the history of journalism. Whether you call it Journalism 2.0, or a shift in media consciousness. It’s pretty clear, the game has completely transformed.

Transformation for the Better

As the future of journalism unfolds, we’re beginning to see just how beneficial this shift is for the writers out there.

We can interact directly with our audience.
We can write for a small audience, about what we care about.
We can profit directly, and immediately, from our writing.
We can build a reputation for ourselves, outside of an institution.

The challenge is that journalists have to overcome a radical shift in thinking: whereas in the past we just concentrated in writing, and our business did all of our marketing and publishing. Us journalists of the future have to become a one-man journalistic machine. We have to take our writing from the idea to the audience all by ourselves.

In blogging, there are a lot of things you need to consider to hit that mark of success. Suddenly, it isn’t as easy to just write and publish blog posts! Know these most important tasks you need to do for your blog:

Blog Marketing - Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc. are all ways to get posts out. I will talk about this more later on, but know that just because you write good content doesn’t mean anyone will ever see it without your intervention.
Community Maintenance - The community, being the people who read your blog need constant attention so you can keep your readers happy and active within your blog.
Expansion - At some point, you need to do more than just “blog.” If you have a growing and stable audience, maybe putting out products for sale or adding on a forum to your blog will switch things up a bit and make your site more memorable.

The good news is that the tools for succeeding are here are are ready for prime time.

Your future publishing platform

Journalists of the future aren’t publishing in newspapers or magazines. As was illustrated above, these forms are dying. The journalist of the modern age launches a blog for their writing.

WordPress is the modern blogging platform of choice, it’s flexible, extensible, and extremely easy to use. You can be up and running with your own journalistic platform in a matter of hours.

Don’t forget there are alternatives to WordPress as well! Check them out in a past post here listing of 20 blogging platforms.

WordPress templates are completely customizable, and there are thousands of options to choose from. You can go minimal, make your blog look like a newspaper, you can even launch a professional-looking magazine using Wordpress. The possibilities are endless, and you can play with them until you’re happy.

Going Beyond Publishing

A blog opens a lot of opportunities, which include more than just writing and publishing a post. With a huge community of plugin developers creating new ways to make WordPress act more like a CMS rather than a blog, there are many things you can do to “amp up” a readers experience.

Your future editor

In the past, journalists got used to working with an editor. This person usually gets paid more than them, commanded more respect with them, and traditionally a journalist had to endlessly argue with their editor about little unimportant aspects of their stories before they get published.

Well, you’re in luck. There are a lot less editors in journalism’s future. Everyone is responsible for their own content, this means you have a lot of freedom, but a lot of responsibility and accountability.

The internet will find out if your story isn’t true, and the repercussions could be pretty harsh. Don’t make up stories, unless you want it to be your thing.

If you don’t know how to write coherent sentences, you’d best learn now.

If you really think you might have a problem with the copy-editing, maybe ask a friend or blog-counterpart to read over your copy before you press the publish button.

Your future marketing department

In the past, journalists relied on two things to get their stories out.

their newspaper landed on their audience’s doorstep every morning.
their company employed a marketing department to get the word out if they wrote a really big story.

But you’d be hard pressed to find a job at any of the places that are still using these methods.

The journalist of the future has to be their own marketing department. This means directly reaching out to their audience using social networking tools and networking with other bloggers.

You’ve probably heard of today’s most popular marketing tools. They are: Twitter, RSS, Facebook, the list goes on and on. But also traditional methods still work: hand out business cards, work the face-to-face, go to events that match your interests.

Get on Twitter right now, if you’re not already. Chances are that if you’re not on Twitter, than you don’t understand why it’s useful, I certainly didn’t until I signed up. I gave myself a 30 day trial, and let Twitter prove the rest. It’s an invaluable way to market yourself.

More on Twitter Marketing:

View all our posts on blog marketing →

Your future audience

In the past your audience was whoever read the newspaper, it was defined by which magazine you worked for. Journalists within this framework had the write about the same subjects over and over, cover the same court cases, write the same story about purple eyeliner, day in and day out.

Now the future is up to you. There is an audience for every writer, you just have to find it. Take a deep look at yourself and ask:

What peaks your interest on a daily basis?
What really gets your blood flowing in the morning?
What subject will make you wake up in the middle of the night and bang out a post?
What will make you write so passionately that the audience can’t help but listen?

Figured it out? That’s your beat, that’s what your new blog will be about. That subject is your niche audience, and it’s what’s going to be paying your bills from now on. So go forth and write, journalist of the future.

Discuss:

Are you a journalist making the transition to a new media landscape? Let us know about your obstacles and your triumphs in the comments.

Photo by Kasaa

Five Points to a Successful Blogging Event

Seth — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:08:30 +0000

Today, Arie Rich of KMPBLOG.com teaches us how to successfully plan and carry out a blogging event. You can catch Arie on Twitter at @ArieRich. Want to write for us too? Read here for more details.

Blog promotion can be very tedious and time-consuming at times, and the worst is getting discouraged because of lack of results. Before I begin, I would like to thank Seth for the opportunity to write this guest post, and for his informative post on Blog Promotion: 169 Ways to Build Traffic Like a Ninja. Earlier this summer I thought of a way not only to increase traffic, but to also network with other bloggers in my area.

We know about bloggers and their websites but do we know what our bloggers look like in person? What are they like when they are away from their Macs and PCs? What about our readers? Don’t you think they have questions to ask or are curious to know who their bloggers are? After some thought it then hit me to come up with: A Blog Networking Event, where bloggers meet readers.

Planning this by myself was a little difficult but worth the work. The best part about having an idea is seeing it unfold before your eyes and being proud of yourself for taking that risk to do it. Sometimes you just have to add in your fears and do it anyway.

The event was planned for 2 ½ months, and October 2^nd was the day of the event, which to my surprise was a success for being the first Blog Networking Event.

Below are some key points to follow if you want to start a blog networking event in your area:

Brainstorm the Idea

Start with the end in mind. Visualize the idea write it down on paper and take it from there. Will the event be public or private? Is there a limit on attendees, free or cover charge, 21 and over, indoor or outdoors?!

These are things to have in mind and on paper before you start reaching out to other bloggers. This is your idea, and you are going to present it to others so they can participate in it.

Do some research on the internet on Blog networking events.

When I first started working on my networking event I came across an article that gave me an idea on where to start and how to reach people.

Propose the Idea to Others

Contact bloggers in your area/town, whether is via Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, in person, or going to every bloggers website.

Send them an email or a private message and ask them if they would be interested in participating in a blog networking event which you are hosting. Please make sure to state that you’ll follow-up with further details if they are interested.

Create a distribution list of the participating bloggers and email them with further details about the event.

My event idea was to create a networking event for bloggers and readers and have the bloggers come with promotional items, optional, as well as business cards. The promo items were used for the gift bags to give to the guests to take home.

Organize/Marketing

This is when you should start to finalize your venue, set a date and time. Once you have that information, then you start working on the invitation/flyer.

As a bonus you can include the participating bloggers’ logos on the invitations, that helps with promoting their blog.

Once the invitation is complete, let the distribution begin!
I asked all the participating bloggers to share the invitation with their readers; we also promoted via our blogsites, Twitter, Facebook events, Myspace bulletins, emails, etc…

A successful networking event involves a lot of marketing. You have to get the word out!

Socialize/Network

The day of the event get there early to set up and welcome the guests. Name tags worked well for my event. I purchased name tags for everyone and asked them to put their Name or Twitter name as well as their blog.
Walk around and introduce yourself to the bloggers and the readers, also introduce everyone to each other as they come in; eventually everyone will start to mingle with each other and find out more about each other’s blog.

Walk around the room to keep everyone entertained and welcomed.

Follow Up

Thank everyone for attending the event and make sure to follow-up with an email thanking everyone that came out to support.

One thing that I did a few days after the event; I sent everyone a thank you email with links to photos taken that night as well as a link to a quick survey about the event. The survey was used to keep track of everyone’s reactions about the event, good or bad, and if they’ll be interested in participating in next year’s event.

If you follow the steps above and incorporated your own unique style, creativity, and personality you are guaranteed a successful networking event.

I hope you have found this post to be helpful with promoting your site. Let us know if you have a Blog Networking Event in your town.

Wired Weekend #1: The Best Blogging Tips From Around the Web

Seth — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:15:07 +0000

We are all about sharing the love with our readers and having fun. With the new schedule we want to highlight some of our readers work because we believe link love is great for our community.

Feel free to read and enjoy some of these great posts we have found this week and then spread the love with stumbles, tweets, diggs, and links to this article and theirs!

Game Changers

These are posts with extra important ideas in them that will definitely help you go to the next level.

Seize Your Vision – Its not enough to just do something well, you have to have a vision and then achieve it!
Six Figure Blogging – Learn what it really takes to make six-figures online.
Avoiding Failure – Blogging has many challenges, learn how you can’t fail.
Don’t Back Down – Being inspired is great for blogging, go get inspired to conquer the world!

Great Blogging Tips From Around the Community

Our collection of our favorite posts from around the web. All posts were picked from our Twitter account, and our community. If you want to get listed here, comment around the community and when we are looking for articles for this series – your blog will have a chance of making it on!

5 Things Bloggers Should Do on the Weekend – Taking a break is important for bloggers, so make sure you know what to do on the weekend. It’s also the time to get ahead.
169 New Ways to Promote Like a Ninja – Has over 70+ Tweets!
Write Faster With Wordpress Shortcodes – Writing takes time, so learn how to make it faster and easier.
10 Steps to Creating a Comfortable Workspace - Loving what you do is important, so make sure you love where you are doing it at. Learn how to make your workspace friendlier to blogging.
The Birth of the Internet – A quick history of the internet’s life.
Blog Like You’re Writing for a 14 yr. Old Girl – Blogging for the right audience with the right style is essential, find out how.
Are You More than a Logo? – Become more than just an image, become a brand.
5 Popular Blogging Myths Revealed – There are a lot of things bloggers believe just make sure they are all true.
You’re the World’s Coolest Blogger, If only… – A very fun blog and extra funny post. Definitely worth a read.
Connect Better with Your Readers – Valuable resource for connecting with your readers.
6 Tips To Writing Effective Article Headlines
Headlines are what makes or breaks an article. Read 18 more tips here.
Five Clichés to Create Quick Content
Not feeling any creativity? It is still possible to conjure up a great article by learning these five quick tips.
5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours
Getting indexed in search engines are crucial for SEO success. Try the suggestions mentioned in this post to speed up the time it takes to get indexed.
100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images
Images are very important to make your post more appealing, but sometimes finding a great image is not an easy task. Hopefully with a list as comprehensive as this, finding an image for your post will become much easier.
Wordpress Custom Fields and Hacks for Bloggers
Custom fields are a very powerful tool and open up a lot of possibilities as to what kind of information can be shared about a post.
How To Make Deals With Bigshots in Less Than 10 Minutes
A post proving that regardless of someone’s social status in the blogosphere, collaborations and friendships are possible.
16 Reasons Commenting on your blog sucks
An amusing post where the author goes over 16 things that piss him off while commenting on other blogs. Do your best to make sure you make your commenting system is flawless!

Mentions Around the Web

We have recently redesigned our blog, and it has gotten some attention from other bloggers. Here are what others are saying about Blogussion and its authors this week.

Reviews

Interviews

Melvin’s Blog – Help us out, we are in a contest with HowToMakeMyBlog.com so go and vote for us!
Teenius – An awesome interview with Alex on Simon’s blog over at Teenius.
KMP Blog – Seth answer’s the question, “How Do I Get Loyal Readers?”

Want to be Listed?

When we form this list, we really dig through our comments and see what kind of articles you, our reader has written. If you want to get your articles and site seen by us, simply comment around the community and leave your blog URL. The plugin, CommentLuv will pick up your latest article, and if we like it enough we will most definitely include it in the next Wired Weekend.

Don’t see the awesome article you wrote? Let us know by contacting us and we’ll see if its worthy of being posted next week.

How to Connect Better With Your Community and See Results

Alex — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:49 +0000

Without readership on your blog, what exactly is the point of running a successful, money-making blog? Have you ever heard bloggers say “It’s not my blog, but yours”? Well, whoever came up with that is exactly right.

Okay, so we both know that since you own the domain, have access to the sites internal files that technically the blog is yours. But that saying has a deeper meaning to it.

My interpretation is that as a blogger, you write for an audience and are giving them knowledge within blog posts. Since content is king and content is what makes a blog go round, your readers also have a certain degree of ownership. It’s really a saying that can have many sides to it.

Since your readers are what make your blog, don’t they deserve something more than just great knowledge? Sure they do, they deserve acknowledgment.

If there is one thing I can say that I am good about in terms of blogging, it’s the fact that I keep up to date with the people who visit my blog and leave comments about my articles. It’s not just me, anyone who has ever written for this blog has always given back to the community, in more ways than just sharing an article with them.

Because I feel I am so good with the community on my blog, I am going to go over with you a few of the things I do to better connect with you as my blog reader.

1. Reply to comments

I figured I would just get this out-of-the-way early as this is a given. It is very important that you respond to the comments your readers take the time to write out. Seriously, you may not understand how lucky you are to be getting any comments on your blog. Many bloggers have difficulties with this, so be courteous and don’t take the fact that someone has spent their time to talk to you for granted!

I have been replying to the comments on this blog ever since the beginning, and I have to tell you that getting comments like this really makes me feel like I am on the right track in communicating with my community:

…I read a lot of articles about but never comment on them. The reason I commented on yours was because I noticed that you responded to EVERY comment someone left on your article. Your attention to detail really stood out to me and motivated me to do the same thing when I start mine.

This was posted by a very cool graphics designer, Raven Bedenfield in a past article where I explained how you can kick start your freelance business through blogging. Comments I get just like that just keep motivating me farther and farther to get more involved within my community.

2. User of the Week

This is a fun idea I took from a forum, and we are planning on doing this in our upcoming newsletter. This will be a great way to really make certain members of your community stand out, and I am going to explain why right after this little plug:

If you want to sign up for our new blogging tips newsletter, you can do so in the sidebar. Our first newsletter goes out this Sunday, November 1st. Don’t miss it guys!

So the idea behind this “user of the week” thing is to basically find someone who has made some kind of contribution to Blogussion in the past week. As I explained in our recent redesign announcements, the things we look for are:

Participates in the comment sections of the posts, even with other users
Writes constructive comments and advice
Guest posting for the blog helps too
Interacting in older posts on the blog
Sharing posts on social media sites (Twitter, Digg, etc.)

And after we select our user of the week, we will be writing a little about them and their contributions, as well as putting a link to their blog in it.

This is a really great way to start making more connections within your community. Don’t you think if you did this week after week, building your list of dedicated readers one by one, you could have a very solid community in the works?

This is an idea that we are sure to write a post about in the future as we start announcing our users of the week. Stay tuned, and don’t be afraid to sign-up to our newsletter!

3. Getting Involved in their community

This may be a little tedious at first, and if you have a lot of people who comment on your blog – a little hard. But, it’s incredibly valuable if you can get yourself involved in some of your reader’s community just as they have done for you. There are a three major ways we get involved in our friends communities here:

1. Commenting

A good comment every once in a while on our friends blogs really can make a difference in your relationship. If you leave your blog URL behind, there’s a great chance that the author will comment back.

2. Guest Posting

We are guest posting nuts here, and we have built much of our readership that is here today through guest posting. Take for example, Nick from SiteSketch 101. Seth being the friendly guy he is decided to write a great guest post on Nick’s blog about friendly competition. The community over at Nick’s blog appreciated it, just as we’re sure Nick did.

3. Link Loving

I have linked out to two bloggers so far in this article and it’s really a great way to show that I appreciate their contributions to my blog. It never hurts to link out to others, especially if you link to content that can support your ideas and beliefs.

Have you ever contributed to someone else’s community? Have you commented on their posts, guest written for them, linked out or done something else?

4. Connect on Social Networks

Everyone uses Twitter now right? I can guarantee you that the majority of bloggers you find in your community will have a link to their Twitter account on their blog.

Chatting on Twitter for example is easy and doesn’t take much effort. But you aren’t limited to just interacting on Twitter. You can send sites you want your friends to stumble on StumbleUpon, make friends with other people on Digg and a lot more.

A while back on Blogussion, I posted an article where the readers in my community could post their Twitter accounts. I have closed that topic for new comments, but I think it may be interesting to reopen it and try it again with our now much larger readership. See it here.

5. Ask Readers Questions, Get Feedback

This is an idea just built off of the whole “this is your blog, not mine” concept. At the end of many posts I write here, I always ask a question regarding the topic. For example, if I were to write about how to increase traffic from Digg, I would ask something like What have you done to improve your social media presence? at the end.

Also, if you have noticed I have been asking questions at the end of a few paragraphs in this post. It can get you more involved with the idea of this article, which in return will help you learn more from it.

When I wrote the tutorial about how to recreate the subscribe box on Blogussion, I asked for your opinion on the hierarchy of it. As a result, I found out that many people who read the post followed it with no problem and came out with a great result. I also learned that I misspelled a few words, but that made my article better by two words!

How do you get involved with your community?

So I am asking you now – what do you do to create better relationships with your readers? I just told you things that we do here to get involved, and now we have about 4,000 Twitter followers, and a strong community where each post gets over 25 or more comments on average. That’s all earned through a little dedication and friendliness.

Don’t be afraid to share your thoughts no matter how much effort (or how little) it takes!