Connor Wilson

Guest Blogging, Woe and Dismay

August 27, 2007 By Connor Wilson

Recently, more and more blogs are voicing their not-so constructive thoughts on guest blogging. What’s the beef? Some say the quality just isn’t there, but whose fault is that? You know, having another blogger write an article for you doesn’t have to be a half-assed attempt at link bait.

Guest blogging is to write, free of charge, one or more articles on a known contact’s blog as a favour. Benefits include a little traffic and recognition, maybe a link or two if you can make it relevant.

That said, to assure the quality of content remains and your readers don’t get bent out of shape, I present you with some tips, as a guest and as a host. For this to work both sides must be in mutual competence. Before we get into that, let me share with you my definition of guest blogging.

For the Guest

Being paid to write a post and guest posting are two different things. If you’re getting paid, you’re a writer for that site. If you’re guest posting, you’re simply a friend doing another friend a favour.

If you’re emailing another blogging asking to write a post for them, have a headline or topic in mind. On the other end of things, if a blogger asks you to help them out, work with them to come to a mutual agreement on a topic you both agree you can write a great article on.

The whole link bait and guest posts ordeal is one myth I wish I could abolish. Unfortunately there is a trend of guest bloggers making poor attempts at gaining traffic from Digg and other viral sites. I don’t want to take any shots here, but in the commentary category my creative freedom somehow needs to be heard. The ‘make money online’ niche is a big one. The guest blogging in this niche is absolutely horrendous and because this whole area reaches such a wide audience, everyone gets a piece of it.

The poor guest posts in the MMO sector are due to misunderstandings between inexperienced bloggers. I’ll say it: 95% of MMO online blogs are John Chow rip offs thinking they’re going to be rich tomorrow. This produces hundreds of incompetent people without blogging common sense. I know you were thinking it 😉

For the Host

First thing is first: should you squeeze a contact for a guest post? Keep in mind, while pulling a favour in, you might be called to return it in the future, if your guest isn’t returning it to you. This isn’t always the case. Personally, my blog is under my name and I would never have someone write a post at their own discretion for me. On the other hand, I do the occasional guest post, asking nothing in return. That’s just me though, many people are quite on the contrary.

Next, you’re not going to want to pick just anyone. Somebody in your niche, or close to it, is obviously the best bet. As someone who is design/blogging focused, it is a little awkward trying to fulfill expectations on a business blog.

For the record, when a guest post is quite sub par and readers know it, it’s on the host. Why? As a host (the blog owner for the not so observant) it was you who chose the writer, or approved it. Don’t pick any random person who asks.

Look at their previous guest posts if any.
Read their blog. I say skip it if they don’t have one.
Do they have something to plug? If they have an ulterior motive for leveraging your site, skip it.

The perfect candidate is one who writes eloquently with experience without being intimidated by the myths surrounding guest posting. Added bonus for having a popular blog in the same niche.

In the End

Don’t be afraid of guest blogging. It can be a three way of pleasure (err, in the blogging sense) for the guest, the host and the readers. It’s not for everyone, but if you think it is for you, do it right. It seems as if the present is a shaky time for guest blogging, but a little common sense goes a long way.

Connor Wilson is surprisingly enough a blogger also working as a freelance designer.

5 Reasons I Don’t Read Your Blog and How to Change That

July 6, 2007 By Connor Wilson

Blogging, in the long term is all about growing and getting better. Everyone wants to be read by more people, get more comments and have a huge blog, but not everyone can do that. There are many things you can do to turn a reader away very quickly, and you should really avoid these things. A select few that have me closing my browser faster than you can resize it follow.

5. Widget City

Social bookmarking and networks are great, but when I come to your site for the first time I don’t want to be bombarded by what you Digg, your del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr pictures, Facebook profile, or a big image of how many blogs link to you on Technorati. I’ll admit, I’m guilty of having my latest 10 diggs on my blog, but it’s totally unobtrusive and at the bottom of the page. Things like your Twitter and Pownce status can be integrated very nicely but they will slow you down, keep that in mind.

How to fix this? Just integrate them nicely. Make sure they don’t break up the flow or ruin your layout like those horrible MyBlogLog widgets.

4. Too Many Ads/Monetized too Soon

Many web savvy users are “ad blind”, including my self. I don’t care if a site has a couple ads trying to make some money but if I’m beaten over the head with AdSense, text links, banners, images, ads in the content and PayPerPost, then I’m leaving your site likely to never return. The worst is when all this happens when the site is still young and doesn’t see a lot of visitors. Not everyone is the next John Chow! Just because you put ads on your site doesn’t mean you’ll make money. Every time you put an advertisement on your site, it cheapens what you have to say. That’s not to say advertisements are bad, of course, as they can always be used tastefully.

How to fix this? Don’t cram all your ads above the fold, maybe take a couple out and if your site isn’t ready, don’t monetize!

3. Generic Free Template

When you use a WordPress theme, Blogger template or whatever, and it’s been used thousands of times before you, you’re automatically losing the battle. If readers have seen the design before, the content isn’t going to matter much because they might not even get there.

How to fix this? Even if you can’t afford to have one made for you, there are still great free themes that aren’t used widely. Google it, but look farther into the search. Use the blog search too, to find the release notes from bloggers, this is where the good stuff is.

2. Poor Writing Skills

No one is perfect, and everyone understands that, but a little effort goes a long way. Things like mixing up words, totally misspelling words beyond comprehension and the small stuff. Capitalizing your “I”s and sparing your readers the Leet Speak. Some words that you really shouldn’t mix up:

your and you’re
there, they’re and their
sense, cents and all their misspellings
scene, seen, etc…

It may be redundant, but mistakes like that are made everyday, even by the most read bloggers.

How to fix this? Just a simple spell check, but even that won’t catch everything, you still need to proofread.

1. Fake Comments or Reader Count

The number one thing that has me closing faster than anything else is when you fake numbers. Faking comment amounts, actual comments and feed numbers in an attempt to get people to think your site is popular and in turn subscribe kills me inside. I have the SearchStatus FireFox plugin that tells me the Alexa Rank and PageRank of each site I visit. If I see PR0, Alexa in the millions and thousands of subscribers, paired by 50 comments on each post, it’s too obvious. Simply checking if their FeedBurner feed chiclet is actually theirs or a static image will usually show their ‘sneakiness’. Doing this doesn’t really work at all, because if you have to do it in the first place chances are your site isn’t worth reading anyways.

How to fix this? Either show the real numbers or don’t show them at all.

Connor Wilson is a freelance web designer writing his own blog with many blogging tips.

SEO and Personal Blogs, What to Do?

June 24, 2007 By Connor Wilson

Running a personal blog can be great. You have total free reign on the topics, you can build relationships with readers and you can express yourself in any way you like.

Running a well read, well visited personal blog is even better. It’s no secret that the best traffic is organic traffic, from search engines.

The reason why SE traffic converts so well and is held on such a high pedestal is the SE user is essentially looking for your site. They might not know it, and you certainly don’t but once they do find your site they’re happy. They’ll look at some other pages, maybe subscribe or buy something.

But a personal blog doesn’t have anything to sell, except for your self, of course. The thing with personal blogs and search engines are that you’ll be getting mostly long tail terms or your name popping up in Mint, or your favourite analytics app.

There are exceptions like everything else, where people may target certain terms that are mildly relevant, but the main purpose is for that oh-so-golden traffic.

What Should you do With Your Personal Blog?

There are tons of things you can do to better optimize your blog for search engines. After all, if you’re not getting that one juicy term, then you’re going to be relying on the inevitable long tail.

First, let me explain long tail search terms to those no savvy at the moment. The term simply refers to search terms, usually three or more words, that can seem random but the user finds a post or page from your blog that has the aforementioned words scattered on the page. Basically you’re getting refined terms. A searcher looking for “design blog” might refine their search by looking for “web design and development tips blog”.

So, lets get down to it, shall we? You want to optimize your blog to increase SE traffic which will in turn raise your overall traffic, readership and earnings if you’ve monetized. Sounds like a good idea to me.

The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup is exactly what it says it is. Tell search engines what parts are important and in what order is very important, and will help your site in terms of SEO. Post titles are back links, and when they’re served in <H1>’s they really increase the long tail possibilities.

When you’re writing your headlines, you also have to think about search terms. I’ve personally written a couple of posts with titles laser targeted at range of long tail terms. While these posts are stale to my current readers, they bring in SE hits every day. Blog post titles can come from a couple categories, you just need to choose clever, concise or made for Google.

Another great article made to set you on your way to SEO heaven is “Search Engine Optimization for Blogs“. SEO is something most personal bloggers don’t know about, but it’s something that is really simple at the basic levels. After you start developing, meaning more posts, better posts, more backlinks, more link exchanges and relationships, you’ll notice your traffic increase.

Connor Wilson is a freelance web designer living in Toronto, Ontario writing his own personal blog.

Traffic: Quality vs. Quantity

April 7, 2007 By Connor Wilson

Traffic is one thing that people strive for. Whether it’s using the pillar technique of building traffic over time, or a spike technique to create bursts of heavy hits for a day or two, traffic rules not only the way your website is seen, but it can affect how likely repeat visitors are.

People are like sheep. Lemmings, if you will. People go where other people go. It’s like having a favorite sports team. You either choose it by location, or because someone else, or a group of people have already. You might hear a lot of people saying, “If you have less than 50 subscribers don’t display the number“. I don’t personally go by this theory, but it’s true. If someone likes the content, but sees only 10 other people read it regularly, they’re less likely to subscribe themselves.

Same goes for traffic. You’ll find the less traveled sites need to virally build up traffic to get going. Other sites prefer to use pillar traffic to start up.

Pillar Traffic is when you write quality content over time and your stats and traffic rise slowly but surly. This is more of a ‘sticking it out’ method, but is more likely to work in the long run than any other method.

Spike and Viral traffic are when you get massive bursts that last for a day. This can happen when one of your pillar articles gets a lucky break on a social bookmarking site, or other aggregator. Things return to normal very quickly.

Another option that I’ve seen quite a bit of lately is buying traffic. This simply consists of paying a company/person who will send you a guaranteed amount of visitors your way, everyday. You can get 250 unique hits a day which is very good by any standards, or you can pay the extra buck for 10,000.

The problem with this however is that this traffic is very thin and the visitors do not convert to readers/subscribers, ad clickers, clients/buyers or comments. It’s just dummy traffic that you can do absolutely nothing with. It’s great if you’re trying to sell a site, until the potential buyer asks for your referral logs.

So how do you build traffic, or Pillar Traffic?

There are a variety of ways. But remember: this is not a short term solution. If you’re itching for 50,000 hits a day and now, you better start writing bad stuff about Microsoft and Reddit hoping to get on Digg.

Use search engines to generate organic traffic. Organic traffic is the most likely to come back, or convert. Certain search terms, where people are looking for an answer convert well for ad clicks (contextual), and the new reader will likely come back later to read some of your other content. But…
Make sure the content is there. Don’t even try to get good traffic without good content. This is what I mean by pillar articles. People don’t come back for no reason. You need to give them a reason to come back. It’s like moving away from home. If you move out and make a better life for yourself, then there’s no reason to go back to where you won’t be as happy. (Weak, I know :P)
Getting Spike Traffic is OK. No one will look at you differently for trying to throw in some Digg-bait with your good content. If you get on Digg and receive 50,000 hits that day, at least 50 are going to come back, most likely more.
Get links from sites on the same topic. Who’s most likely to subscribe to Devlounge: someone from a webmaster site like DigitalPoint or a stray HabboHotel player?

The quality traffic that you build is better than thin traffic that you buy. 100 hits of quality visitors will do you more good than 1000 hits of bots and 1 second visits.

In the end it’s all up to you: do you want 10,000 hits today, or do you want to be getting 10,000 hits everyday in a year? Sometimes its better in the long run to forget about the stats now. You’ll also be surprised how fast these pillar techniques work.

Conclusion:

Write good content.
SEO for organic traffic.
Contextual links.
Pillar over Spike.
Spikes are OK every now and then.

My name is Connor Wilson and this is my first post at Devlounge. I hope you enjoyed it and get something out of it. I’ll answer anything in the comments, or email me using the staff contact form.