Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Blogging Networks

Mar 20, 2007 No Comments »

Does creating a blogging network get you more (and of course, relevant) traffic? Darren at Blog Republic talks about blogging networks in a post titled Blogs As Social Networks. Whereas he mostly talks about building communities and making the blogs socially interactive, when I think of creating blogging social networks, I think more of creating “blog groups” like b5media or 9rules where blogs with similar themes come together and directly or indirectly promote each other’s blogs.

Creating blogging networks may or may not get you quality traffic — it depends on the quality of what you publish on your blog and how regularly. But in a generic sense, you can get relevant traffic because people browsing through the blog displaying your link are already interested in the specific subject. If a blog is written around a theme, there is a greater chance that readers would like to read what other linked bloggers are saying about that theme. For instance, when I’m reading a literary blog, and if that blog publishes links to other literary blogs, then I often click on those links. For that matter, if you are looking for lots of content on a specific topic, for instance, say SEO, it’s time-saving to visit blogs that belong to a group/network of SEO bloggers.

Technorati Tags: blogging seo, seo, blog promotion, traffic

Should it be lots of content or relevant content?

Mar 15, 2007 2 Comments »

What gets you more links, lots of content or relevant, well-written, quality content? Rand over SEOMoz has written a very detailed post on the relevance the search engines give to your content and link-popularity growth. I think this is a very logical step towards real and deserved relevancy. In order to rank well a website should firstmost contain relevant information and then, new information should be regularly added to the website.

I think regular content doesn’t mean you add 3-4 new pages everyday or you needlessly keep editing your pages. This way you may even end up spoiling what’s already working for you. The best policy is to stick to relevancy and have compelling, linkable content on your website. Even if you write one post in a week and if that post is remarkable and has great linkbait value, I think it it’s worth far more than 4-posts-a-day with no quality post appearing on your website or blog.

Technorati Tags: blogging, content publishing, seo

Republishing others’ content

Mar 12, 2007 No Comments »

Blogging most often than not involves taking “cues” from other sources and then publishing your own views on your blog. This sometimes involves copy/pasting chunks of text from other sources. We all do that, and nobody minds as long as the entire thing is not published and you mention a link to the original piece.

The Blog Herald has a post titled Better ways to re-hash other people’s content where Abe refers to another post on Online Marketing Blog titled 4 Ways to Successfully Re-Post Others Content and Abe’s post caught my fancy because on Friday I wrote something similar for a client of mine. I think this is what makes blogging great — this coming together of different minds irrespective of caste, race and social status to talk about ideas and issues. No matter who you are, if you have a blog and an opinion, you can easily share your words with others. Even if you don’t have blog of your own, you can still convey your opinions by participating in the comment sections of popular, subject-specific blogs.

Coming back to using content from other blogs. Some blogs simply publish external links, and unless it is a link directory like popurls.com, it is not very inspiring to read those blogs. Some people copy/paste the entire post with a small, perfunctory link in the end. People want to read what you think of the entire matter. By the time they come to your blog they might have already read about the topic on various blogs, and unless you offer some unique perspective they are not going to stay on your blog and worse, they may never return to your blog thinking that you post nothing original and worth-reading. It’s the worse form of self-promotion I think because you actually draw people to your unoriginal posts because of your trackbacks appearing on the popular posts you link to.

The best way to publish others’ content is, as both the posts talk about, publish the main highlights accompanied by your text carrying your thoughts on the subject.

Technorati Tags: content publishing, blogging

Long hiatus

Mar 05, 2007 7 Comments »

What to write after such a long time? Not writing my blog posts for such a long time was certainly heart-breaking, especially when I had worked hard in December and almost hard in January. Actually, I worked harder during the previous month but most of the time I was turning in assignments. Consequently, I made some good money (I had been in a crunch for the past 8-9 months) but ended up not writing for my blog.

I know this is not good for the health of my blog, but I needed to make some tough decisions. I think my approach to my blog is quite unorganized. Either there is a flurry of posts for a couple of months, or there are no posts for a couple of months. No wonder I don’t have permanent readers, and I do exactly what I advise other not to do: be haphazard in my posts. The best approach would be, don’t get carried away, keep it to one post per day, and do it regularly. OK, now I’ll tell you what has kept me away from blogging this past month.

Lots of work: It’s hard to blog, especially in my condition, when you know you could be spending that time making some money. Fortunately I’ve been getting 4-5 queries every week and this trend has fetched me good work. Along with that I regularly need to work on a PHP application I’m creating for an old client.

Some time with family: Working from home gives everybody an impression that I’m always with my family. This is not so because I was working even during weekends. There was no “holiday” and I had begun to get on my wife’s nerves because she was always, consciously or unconsciously, worrying about not to disturb me. Although I’m always there when she needs me, the problem was, I was there only when she needed me.

Literary reading: Running a successful blog is after all not the primary goal of my life. It’s true I earn a living writing online content, my true aim in life is to become an author, a writer, a fiction writer. But my literary reading has been almost nil for the past few years. I’ve started reading again. I created a small dark corner for myself with a lamp facing the wall so that I could read in that dim, inward atmosphere.

So all this has been keeping me away from blogging. But they are not to be blamed. I was overdoing. From now onwards I’ll stick to one, or two posts a day, and post regularly. Thanks for reading this.