Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

A quick way of getting traffic to your blog or website

Jul 06, 2007 No Comments »

Maki discusses (incidentally I’m linking to this blog in quick successions, but I like the blog) some ways you can get some quick traffic to your new blog or website. Do the following:

• Provide baits: these baits are the incentives you give to your visitors to visit your blog again and again. The baits could be quality content, useful tips and tricks, some online free tools, interviews with achievers, etc.
• Generate traffic for your baits: you can do this by letting people know about your baits through social networking websites, user forums and by writing to other bloggers.
• Build a community and sustain it: gather a community of dedicated readers who value your content.

Maki rightly stresses that marketing is really important. He (I thought he was a she, but he is in fact a he) says there should be a 30-70 ratio of content writing and marketing which means you should spend 30% of your blogging time generating content and 70% time promoting your blog. I’m trying on a 50-50 target right now because for me generating content is as important as marketing my blog. But marketing cannot, in any way, be underestimated because once you start getting a decent number of visitors to your blog or website, it becomes a great motivation to write content regularly, with greater frequency.

Technorati Tags: blog marketing, blog promotion, internet marketing, promoting your blog

Are Blogging Jobs Available?

Jun 23, 2007 No Comments »

An article in the New York Times, titled Can Blogs Become a Big Source of Jobs says:

The bottom line is this: while running a Web log is a skill that more and more employers seek in their employees, finding full-time work in that world is still unusual.

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Are the RSS feeds really beneficial?

Jun 16, 2007 4 Comments »

Yesterday I was writing a small page on RSS feeds to tell my non-technical readers what RSS feeds are, how they can subscribe to them, and what are the benefits of subscribing to RSS feeds. It’s been just recently that I’ve started getting some decent traffic (more than a thousand visitors per day) at Writing Cave and it’s exciting/disturbing to see the RSS feed subscribers counter going up, all of a sudden, and plunging down, the very next day. So I was just wondering, is all this getting worked up about my RSS feed subscribers worth it? It seems completely a different world when I see the counts on other websites, take for instance, Problogger.net, that boast of more than 25,000 RSS feed subscribers. But what’s the use of stopping these 25,000, highly interested readers from coming to your blog because they can read your complete posts through their RSS feed readers? We try to write engaging posts regularly so that people come to our blogs to read them. From the readers’ point of view the RSS feeds make perfect sense, but of what benefit are they to the publishers, the bloggers? I did some research and found the following benefits of encouraging your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feeds:

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Google has bought Feedburner (and yes, I’m still around)

May 25, 2007 No Comments »

Google has bough Feedburner for $100 million. It seems more and more cool services are being bought by big companies. Two things happen when the big companies buy comparatively smaller products; the products are killed, the products expand and lose their niche markets, the popularity of these products gains newer heights and newer technologies and innovations are introduced into them. One example I can remember is Hotmail. Hotmail was bought by the Microsoft from Sabir Bhatia and then developed into a completely new email application.

What will happen to Feedburner? In a recent post on some blog (I’ve forgotten where) I read Google might just include the Adsense ads in the feeds and won’t allow 3rd-party ads. If that happens, it will be a set back, and it will also be an opportunity for some other feed distribution tool because publishers will be leaving Feedburner in hordes then. So I think Google won’t do it.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, google, google buys feedburner, rss feeds

Some Interesting Facts About Blogging

Apr 06, 2007 No Comments »

Technorati President David Sifry has posted the latest stats on blogging in a post titled The State of the Live Web and interestingly, 37% blogs are in Japanese — the highest, and English blogs come second at 33%. Another thing I noticed is that now Technorati is tracking 70 million blogs instead of 55 million.

The post further says that 1,20,000 blogs are being created everyday and every second 1.4 blogs are being created. Of these 3000-7000 are fake blogs, splogs, that are simply created to generate ad revenue. 1.5 million new  posts appear everyday that means 17 posts per second. He rightly says the volume of posts depends on what sort of crisis or burning issue we have at hand.

Being closely associated with blogging, both on professional level and personal level, I see this as a healthy trend. I’m not bothered much about those that discount blogging as merely a teenage fad. More and more people creating blogs means more and more people are finding a channel to communicate. Even if less than 1% of these bloggers actually blog, I think it can make a very big difference in how the world thinks and how opinions are formed. Whether it is corporate PR or social activism blogging renders voice to those who want to reach out but till now had no tool to do so.

There are different blogging communities on the Internet and mostly bloggers from one community hardly communicate with bloggers from another community, but still, small bridges are built and connections are made. For instance I communicate amidst copywriting bloggers, literary bloggers, web development bloggers and social bloggers and I think I’m not an exception. There could be similar one-to-many and many-to-many interactions happening around the blogsphere.

Technorati Tags: technorati stats, blogging trends