Nathan Snell's Blog - Internet Strategist » Blogging

The number one rule of blogging

Nathan Snell — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:12:52 +0000

Should be don’t post inconsistently or don’t stop posting. At the very least it’s somewhere in-between those two ideas.

There’s a great reason for why you should post consistently. Namely, if you don’t post consistently it will cause your subscriber count to stagnate faster than Tiger Wood’s personal life. The analogy still works because numbers aren’t everything, even though Tiger had that too… unfortunately.

If you’re wondering what the number two rule of blogging is… it’s probably something like pick your niche. I’ll chalk my excuse up to The Curse of Knowledge.

Props to Leo Reynolds for the photo.

One wordrpress edit that will improve traffic to your blog.

Nathan Snell — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:10:20 +0000

I think search engine optimization has been blown way out of proportion. It’s been made this almost mystic art of gaming the search engines and learning to speak google. I don’t disagree that being great at SEO requires a good set of technical understanding and knowledge (both of Google and HTML/CSS/XHTML). There are some tweaks, however, that fit into the category of SEO, are greatly important, but hardly require a technical depth. The one I am about to explain is a great example.

How to add a meta description just to your blogs index page.

First off, a meta description is a tag that holds the description of what your blog (or website) is about. Taking it one step further, search engines often use the meta description you provide as the description for your blog in the search engines results page (the page you see that lists all of the results for your search). Simple, right?

Why should you care about having a meta description?

A great blog post title can be the difference between a post that brings in a ton of traffic, links, and new readers, and a dud. Even if the content is awesome on it, if the title sucks, no one will want to read your post. That’s why most good bloggers spend a fair amount of time thinking about the title of their blog posts.

Your meta description works in the same way . While not the title of your blog, it’s the additional descriptive [sales] copy that accompanies your title. And good sales copy can help to convince potential readers to come to your blog.

How to add your own meta description to your blog’s index page.

Goto the admin area of your blog, click on Appearance, goto editor, and click the link that says “header.php” or similar. That will load your header file and its respective code.

Now, in-between the tags there’s going to be a bunch of stuff. Insert the following code somewhere near the “meta http-equiv”:

{
?> }
?>

And save the file. Viola, you’re done. Just for clarification, this will only add the meta description you specify to your blogs main page (otherwise known as its index page). The reason we’re only adding it there is because the meta description is effectively auto-generated for every one of your posts. The “effectiveness” gets a bit dicey when it comes to your index page, though.

Why do you blog?

Nathan Snell — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:30:09 +0000

When I began blogging over 3 years ago I had a different purpose in mind, and I could define it. Now, not so much. So I need to redefine my purpose for blogging. At least when I wonder why I haven’t been blogging lately I think this is what I need to do.

Part of the reason I wonder now about my blogging purpose more than before is because I will be writing once a week over on Talk’s blog. The posts I write there will be more technical in nature, but still information you all might enjoy here. This brings to question how to not burn out my blogging juices, and how I can bring the most value to you, while also being careful not to cannibalize my own content.

That said, I think there are a number of reasons why people blog, For example, having a platform to think their thoughts out on, or wanting to develop a personal brand, or wanting to become more involved with a specific conversation online, and I know the list goes on.

But I’d really like to hear what others feel their purpose for blogging is, and if you haven’t been blogging much lately, maybe it’s because you’re in the same boat as I am. You’ve lost your blogging purpose. Not to worry. It’s easy to get back… at least I hope it is. You know, sometimes the most difficult part is finding the right question to ask, the kind of question that leads to an answer.

Now, I know there’s a number of awesome bloggers who read my blog (at least on occasion), so if nothing else, consider this a call to you! What’s your purpose for blogging? Leave a comment, and I’ll update this post with people’s answers accordingly!

Don’t let Jason get you, 6 ways to secure your wordpress blog!

Nathan Snell — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:02:36 +0000

After a busy day of interviewing, working on a business plan, and tennis (I finally got my service game back, so that was fun), I came home to the annoying realization of my blog having been hacked. I twittered/fb’d my new found frustration. Then about a minute or two after this realization, my friend Josh The Developer calls me, perplexed, and then Stacy calls me, giving the situation some perspective.

“How’s your day been going, love?” she asks me, she sounds sweet and happy.

“Good! Then meh,” I say. I was still partially concentrating on contacting the company that manages the server my blog is hosted on.

“Is everything OK?” she sounds worried.

“Yeah. My blog was hacked and the database corrupted, so unless there are backups from the server company, I just lost 2 years worth of content.”

“Not to say it’s not important… but is that all?” I laughed a little as Stacy gave the situation a bit of perspective. This really wasn’t the biggest deal, and I wasn’t greatly upset to begin with, I was mostly irritated. I was also pretty sure the server company made daily backups.

“Yes, that’s all, hon.” She asked a little more of what went on, and then we moved on to other, more fun topics.

So if your block was hacked, or if you’re worried about it, don’t fret too much. It’s really not the biggest of deals, and the majority of companies that you’re hosting your blog on do daily server backups.

The best part of the whole situation though is that after it was hacked, I received a lot of good tips and articles on how to secure wordpress more. Knowledge is power!

Here’s 6 ways to make your wordpress blog more secure. Now with more hat-tips!

1. While not exactly making your blog more secure, WP-DB-Backup will do daily, weekly, and by-weekly scheduled backups of your wordpress database, then e-mail it to you. This ensures that if your blog is hacked, you at least won’t lose all your posts. h/t to Andy Drish (thanks man!).

2. Josh The Developer sent me 10 Steps to Secure Your WordPress Admin Area by Smashing Magazine. My favorites from that article are putting a directory lock on your WP-Admin folder, and #3.

3. Install Login Lockdown to track invalid attempts and force lockouts.

4. Hide your plugins folder. People can navigate to http://yoursite.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/ and see all the plugins you have (then exploit one). To hide it, upload a “blank” index.htm to your plugins folder and that will force the index.htm to be displayed instead.

5. Install WP-Security-Scan, a plugin that allows you to scan your blog regularly for security holes in the software, and then helps patch them.

6. Make sure your software is up-to-date. I know, it sounds simple, but people are lazy sometimes. I was. h/t to Aaron Alexander.

Have any other suggestions on how to make someone’s wordpress blog more secure? Leave a comment!

Improve your blogging credibility by building a story

Nathan Snell — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:00:28 +0000

I realize it’s a bit narcissistic to blog about blogging, especially given that I haven’t been. But whenever I start reading some of my favorite bloggers like Penelope Trunk or Holly Hoffman, I always notice they both do one thing very well that really builds their credibility and authorial authority (I think that works).

That one thing is they build a story between their posts. What I mean is within the post that they’re writing, not only do the reference information outside their blog (which is another great way of adding authority) but they also reference other material they’ve written within their blog. Geek sidenote: This is actually called inlinking. For example, Penelope does a great job in inlinking in this post, and it really adds authenticity and authority to it. You can also see me starting to do it here.

Referencing other posts you’ve written shows consistency and it shows purpose. If you’re referencing something you wrote a week ago, or a month ago, then you’re probably not posting arbitrarily and what you’re writing is building on your past, meaning your concepts are consistent and accurate (unless of course you’re referencing a previous post saying that you were wrong…).

Additionally, inlinking to other posts of yours a great habit to get into as it increase the amount of time people spend on your site (always nice) and improves their experience as they get more information regarding what they first started reading about.

So as you’re writing your next few posts, or thinking just what you can write about, think not only about the story within the current post, but think too about the story you’re telling inbetween posts.

How to do a competitive blog analysis

Nathan Snell — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:56:23 +0000

I’m going to write a few posts on internet marketing. I generally like to avoid writing so directly on a topic, because it often comes off like a text book (and I was never a fan of school, so not being a fan of my own content doesn’t mesh to well with me). To be honest, with some of the information I want to share, I’m not quite sure how else to share it. I’ll make my attempt, though, and hopefully it will be valuable to you and something you can actually get through reading.

All of this, for the record, is sparked by the fact that I’ve found it incredibly difficult to find an internet marketer who is actually worth their weight. We need one here at National Speed, but half the time when I speak with consultants they go through a checklist of crap, often times asking me if I’ve done stuff that frankly either doesn’t work effectively enough for me to merit paying them tons an hour to set it up (which takes all of maybe 20 minutes if you are nice and assume they do their research). It’s also sparked by a few examples of research I received which, I’m sorry, were utter crap.

How to do a competitive blog analysis

Well start off with blogs. Before you even begin your blog, it’s important to analyze the competitive landscape for blogs in your industry. I think this as a first step trumps deciding on your target audience and deciding the purpose of your blog. The reason behind it is that by doing a competitive analysis, you will be able to better understand both the audience even is and the blogs currently satisfying them (and how). This allows you to find the gap that your blog can fill in your industry rather than just doing what you feel like.

When it comes to your competitive analysis, both in business and in blogs, you want to be as thorough as you possibly can. This helps you avoid being blind sided in business, and when it comes to blogs it will feed into your marketing plan. In the unique setting of blogs, your “competition” are actually your friends. They’ll be part of what organically gets you noticed.

Below are the steps I go through when doing a competitive blog analysis. As I go through each step, I add them to a master list for that industry. When I create a master list, my list includes the blog title, blog url, contact information (name and email), a comment rating, an activity rating, the number of subscribers to the blog, and whether the blog runs ads.

Finding blogs in your industry using Google Blog Search and Google Suggest
The first and most simple method is to use Google Blog Search to search for key words in your industry. For example, our company National Speed is in the automotive performance industry. So the first thing I did was a search for “automotive performance blogs”. From there, I did a number of other, similar searches such as “car performance blogs”, “autocross blogs”, and so forth. I also then took it one step further and used Google Suggest with the terms I just described to find other terms that people are using that I hadn’t thought of.

Finding blogs using tags on Technorati
Let’s face it. Technorati is not at all what it used to be. To be honest, soon this probably won’t even be in the equation. But in the meantime it still indexes blogs to a degree, and has still found me a few blogs I hadn’t found in my Google Blog Search run. Using Technorati to find blogs in your industry is different from a Google Blog Search because you’re using tags that relate to your industry rather than keywords. Think of tags like categories such as “cars”, “automotive”, “autocross”, “performance cars”, etc. In this case, you’re going to find blogs that wrote a post in respect to these categories. This is where the “second level” of technorati comes in to play.

Once you find a blog with a tag you were looking for, you’ve got your first piece of information: a blog in your industry (or that at least wrote one post that pertains to your industry). The second level of this post (or blog) is following the conversation. All blogs on technorati have a number of responses (people linking back to your post). When you find a blog that is in your industry that has responses, you also want to look at the blogs that wrote the responses. This allows you to dig down to a second level of conversational depth, allowing you to see a bit beyond what Google Blog Search allows (directly anyway) and find some potentially more niche but still valuable blogs. Each time you find a blog, add them to your list and include the number of responses they have (this will help you later in determining which blogs you want to look to as a source and for marketing purposes).

A quick side bit of information regarding responses: some blogs will have no responses, others will have a lot of responses. To give you an idea, if a blog has around 50 responses, they’re probably smaller in popularity. If they have 100-200 responses, they’re probably around medium sized in popularity. Around 500 is a pretty good sized blog in terms of popularity. It’s also based on the industry, however (tech blogs, for example, are usually larger thanks to the echo chamber).

Finding blogs using tags on Digg and Delicious

While Digg and Delicious don’t have the conversation option that Technorati does, they are still valuable sources for finding blogs through tags/categories. For example, Digg has an “auto” section which we follow at National Speed. The auto section lets us see what’s popular for the day (or several days since the auto section is a little slow on digg compared to some of the others). While I will cover marketing more in a different post, I would suggest that at the same time you start looking scanning for other blogs in your industry on digg, you also create an account and start using digg in relevance to your industry.

Note: by using I do not mean submitting your posts. I mean digging and commenting on what others have submitted. If you find something that you haven’t written, then submit it. Otherwise I would say hold off for a little bit before submitting your own content to be dugg.

Now, delicious is a bit of a different beast than digg. Where digg is broad categories, Delicious has a very long tail of tags that can pertain to your industry. In the case of delicious, it will be a lot like Technorati where you’re searching for tags that people may be using to save content that pertains to your industry. Delicious, like Digg, can also be used to spot the trends of what people are bookmarking/digging/searching for over the next few days. Using these sites to help you push out relative (and quality) content in reference to these trends will be part of your marketing plan and will help drive both organic search traffic and social media traffic to your site.

Backing into the blogs
Another method to finding the blogs in your industry (and especially those that have more “power”) is using a backlink checker to see what sites are linking to them. In this case, the process is very simple. Based on your list thus far, take some of the top blogs you’ve found in your industry thus far, and use the backlink checker to see just who is linking back to them. Realistically, this method is a less pretty but more thorough Technorati approach.

What’s next?
Once you’ve built your list of blogs (and forums if you find a few), the next step is to begin deciphering the value of each blog on your list. Ideally you’ve added enough information to your list as you’ve been doing your analysis so you don’t have to go back to each individual blog for evaluation. Really what your end goal of deciding the value of a blog is two fold: finding the blogs that your comments will have the most impact on (impact being the most exposure and social capital generation), and finding those blogs that you may want to build a relationship with or pitch in the future.

I’ll get more into the “What’s next” of deciding a value of a blog in a later post, as this one is already long enoug has it is. As you can tell, there’s no particular “magic” to it all. It’s really just being willing to put in the time, and really knowing how to use the tools to scour the internet in a more crawler kind of way. Also, if you happen to do something for your competitive blog research that works well for you and isn’t on my steps above, let me know. I’m always looking to strengthen my analysis : )

Update: Corrected blacklink checker link.

Gone to BS08

Nathan Snell — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:21:17 +0000

Blogger Social 2008 is finally here! At first it seemed like it was too far out, now it’s hard to believe I fly out to New York tomorrow (ahhh, NY, I am visiting you again so soon!).

It will be an amazing experience to meet so many of the awesome people I’ve interacted with for some time, as well as meeting new people, too!

If you’re curious as to what all is going on, you can check out the BS08 website (linked above) or Ryan Karpeles nifty googly summary (I did in fact manage to end all 3 words with “y”). Never seen that Google Maps feature before (if it is one), but I will definitely be utilizing it in the future.

Anyway, if you’re curious as to how it will all be going. I will be updating my flickr and twitter periodically while I am there. Also be sure to watch the BS08 flickr group.

The downside of heading to BS08 is my blog will be silent (at least on my end) until Monday or Tuesday of next week (I have to sleep at some point, we certainly aren’t doing it at the social!). Rest assured, I will resume to the best of my ability then :)

Understand SEO and Your Blog

Nathan Snell — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:41:04 +0000

There’s a great article on MarketingProfs about sculpting your sites page rank to improve your search engine ranking.

The act of optimizing your site for better results and higher ranks in search engines is commonly referred to as Search Engine O optimization. Working some SEO into your blog certainly has its benefits.

Before I go further, let me say I am still in the process of learning all this SEO jazz. Really, it works out well, because it allows me to pass the information on to you all. But I say that to let you know that while what I say may work, I have no reference as to how well, and so forth. So you all get to learn with me ;)

Now, there are 2 things to take away from the Marketing Profs’ link.

Every site has Google juice

Your site has a certain amount of Google juice, as defined by Google (the juice is raspberry, by the way). This “juice” makes up your Google PageRank. You can direct this juice or disperse this juice all across your site, causing more important pages to have more juice, and thus rank better in Google’s search results. One way to direct the Google juice is by using the “nofollow” indicator when creating a hyperlink.

It looks something like this:
< href="yoururl.com" rel="nofollow" >

Just like it sounds, the rel tag tells Google not to go to that page (follow the link) preventing your Google juice from being distributed to pages that otherwise would not benefit as much from it.

Google juice allows you to place a higher importance on relevant links

When having multiple links to a single page, you can use Google juice to control which link receives the largest flow, or no flow at all, focusing the flow of the juice.

How do I apply this?

The pages to apply the rel=”nofollow” tag are those pages of lesser importance for showing up in a search result. Here are a few: Copyright, Privacy Policy, and Comment Policy. Depending on whether you want your about page to show up in searches, that could be another. I have also applied them to my links that are outgoing to social networks like del.icio.us.

When applying the notion from takeaway #2 above, you can also focus your Google juice to each blog post by adding the rel=”nofollow” to multiple links that point to the same post that aren’t your permanent link (the link that’s in the title of the post).

For example:
The post you’re reading now has 2 links to the actual single page of this post. Those two links are the posts title (which is the permanent link), and the “Click to Comment” link at the bottom of this post. I can focus Google juice to this post by applying the rel=”nofollow” tag to the “Click to Comment” link, forcing all of the flow to go straight through the permanent link.

Hope this post benefited you all. If you haven’t read the MarketingProfs post above, I would encourage you to do so!

Blogger Social, Twitter info, 7 ways to stickify your blog, hacker news

Nathan Snell — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 02:58:01 +0000

Have a bunch of different stuff going on right now, so I am a bit pressed for time on posts. As such, here are a few things I’ve been holding in my head that I’ll share with you all real quick.

There are 80+ people confirmed for the blogger social.I am super excited to get to meet them all. Mark Goren put together a neat promo video for the event.

( Feed readers can click through to view the video )
You can also see everyone who is attending in list form. A neat list of attendees!
Susan Bird, Tim Brunelle, Katie Chatfield, Matt Dickman, Luc Debaisieux, Gianandrea Facchini, Mark Goren, Gavin Heaton, Sean Howard, CK, Valeria Maltoni, Drew McLellan, Doug Meacham, Marilyn Pratt, Steve Roesler, Greg Verdino, CB Whittemore, Steve Woodruff, Paul McEnany, Ann Handley, David Reich, Tangerine Toad, Kristin Gorski, Mack Collier, David Armano, Ryan Barrett, Lori Magno, Tim McHale, Gene DeWitt, Mario Vellandi, Arun Rajagopal, Joseph Jaffe, Rohit Bhargava, Anna Farmery, Marianne Richmond, Thomas Clifford, Lewis Green, Geoff Livingston, Kris Hoet, Connie Reece, CeCe Lee, Toby Bloomberg, Seni Thomas, Darryl Ohrt, Joe Kutchera, Paul Dunay, Marshall Sponder, Chris Kieff, Tara Anderson, Jason Falls, Paul Soldera, Roberta Rosenberg, Saul Colt, Todd Andrlik, Ryan Karpeles, Mike Sansone, Jennifer Laycock, Neil Vineberg, Cam Beck, Mike Arauz, Matthew Bailey, Heather Gorringe, John Rosen, Cathleen Rittereiser, Tamar Weinberg, Rita Perea, Linda Sherman, Matthew McDonald, Kaitlyn Wilkins, Terry Starbucker, Jennifer Berk, Jane Quigley, John Wall, Scott Monty, Kevin Horne, Virginia Miracle, Amanda Gravel, Susan Reynolds, David Polinchock, Shashi Bellamkonda, David Berkowitz, and Vahe Habeshian

I’ve been holding onto this link of examples of how non-profits use twitter for a little while now as I planned to write a bit more on it. I will write more later, but as of now, I shan’t horde it the link any longer! Some really great examples of how Twitter can be used are present there.

I’ve been trying to optimize my blog a bit more (ironic given my recent crunch on time, I know). I found these 7 tips from ProBlogger to include a few things I hadn’t read before.

Lastly, for those who are wanting to keep up with interesting tech stuff, but like to go a little more in-depth, or are into startup type stuff, hat tip to DoshDosh for linking Hacker News in Twitter. It’s a service similar to Reddit. The comments are gold as well. Great discussions and valuable links getting shared.

Update #1: Apologies to those who saw this post and then saw it get taken down. WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor has issues with embedding YouTube video, apparently. Embedding the video botched my entire site, so I took the post down until I could figure it out (which is now).

Optimize Your Blog Feed For Social Media

Nathan Snell — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:46:28 +0000

For those who read blogs through a reader, ever wonder how a blogger managed to get links like “Add to Delicious” or the number of comments to show up inside the reader itself? I know I certainly did. Thankfully, with the help of some productive Feedburner fumbling I am able to report to you all how to get your blogs feed to do the same thing (OK, so I was really looking for something else entirely and just came across it. But I’m still reporting to you all!). Don’t worry, it takes 4 super simple steps, slightly more if you don’t already have Feedburner.If you haven’t figured by now, you’ll need Feedburner. Feedburner is a tool that allows you to monitor a great deal of stats about your blogs — wait for it — feed! It is an incredibly helpful tool. In fact, if you don’t have Feedburner and you blog, get it. Right now. Once you’ve got Feedburner setup (if you had difficulty with this, let me know and I will help you through it) move on to the first step.

Step 1

After going into your Feed information area, you should see a horizontal navigation menu like the one above. Click the “Optimize” tab.

Step 2

From there you will see a list of services on your left. They all do particularly interesting things, but the one we are looking at specifically today is FeedFlare. Click FeedFlare.

Step 3

Clicking on FeedFlare will take you to a page with a whole lot of check boxes. What FeedFlare does is add some social media flare directly into your feed. Each piece of flare does something unique. To use any particular piece of flare, simply check the checkbox. In my case, I am only using “Add to Delicious”, “Comment Count”, and “Stumble It”.

You may notice there are usually 2 check boxes. The first causes your changes to apply to your feed. The second creates the widget that you have to add to your site. This means you actually have to copy and paste some code to get it work, versus the simplicity that was present for the feed.

Step 4

Once you’ve completed all of the above steps (You went to the Optimize tab, then the FeedFlare section, and select the flare you want to add) just click Activate. This will activate flare for your feeds. These changes will be applied to all posts in your feed, past, present, and future.

The end result will show up similar to the below (similar as you may be using different flare)