Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Blogging 101: DEL.ICIO.US & Social Bookmarking Explained

Blogging 101: DEL.ICIO.US & Social Bookmarking Explained

by Gobala Krishnan, IAHBE Staff Writer

The World Wide Web’s number one problem is, and always has been, managing information. From early Yahoo-style Web directories to Google and DMOZ (an acronym referring to Open Directory Project, derived from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), people have been scrambling to review, categorize and publish information into forms that make sense. “Social Bookmarking” is nothing more than a new way to do exactly that. In this article we look at the trend of human-managed directories and how it can benefit your business.

History Of Social Bookmarking

Every Web browser comes with a bookmark function. By clicking on “Bookmark” or pressing CTRL+D (on a PC), your browser stores the title and URL of the Website into categorized folders for later viewing. That’s the basics of bookmarking – not too exciting, right?

The next evolution of bookmarking came about when people started to realize a few underutilized concepts of bookmarks:

1) Most bookmarks are computer-dependent – The bookmarks that you store exist on your PC only. If you were to use someone else’s PC, you can’t access those sites that you have bookmarked.

2) You can’t share bookmarks – What if you could share all the best bookmarks you’ve stored with your friends, family or business associates? Wouldn’t it be better (and easier) if bookmarking was done at a higher “community” level?

3) No review & evaluation system – How can you be sure that the sites you have bookmarked are worth your time and attention? How do you easily find great sites that have already been bookmarked by others?

These limitations called for a community-based bookmarking system where you can bookmark a great site independent of your operating system and computer, share it with your friends, and let it be reviewed and approved by others. This phenomenon came to be know as “Social Bookmarking” and it gave birth to a few new massive services like Del.icio.us and tons of smaller yet highly-trafficked “bookmarking sites”

According to Wikipedia.org:

The concept of shared online bookmarking dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList.com. Within the next three years online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies like Backflip, Blink, Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, and others entering the market. Lacking viable models for making money, most of this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst. The contemporary concepts of social bookmarking and tagging took root with the launch of the Web site del.icio.us, in September of 2003.

The Advantages & Disadvantages

Although social bookmarking started as an informal collection of personal bookmarks, its significance and ability to generate Website traffic grows rapidly by the day. Here’s why is social bookmarking can be significant to your business blog or Website, according to ConsultantCommons.org:

1) Enables like-minded people to find each other and create new communities of users around a topic.

2) Allows a specific group of people (staff members in an organization for example) to share resources efficiently.

3) Can help you find new insights about a topic by seeing how others think and connect to it.

4) Creates contextual taxonomies (classifications) that have meaning for a particular community/group of people (good for different cultural contexts).

5) Most tools incorporate various mechanisms for sharing information outside of the tools (via RSS, integration with other tools such as blogging software).

As good as it may sound, there are several drawbacks (and some potential hazards) to the social bookmarking phenomenon as well:

1) Tools are still evolving, and not all of these social bookmarking sites have polished, user-friendly interfaces. In fact, some of them may require extensive technical know-how to be useful at all.

2) There is no consistent oversight to how a resource is tagged - e.g. tag London could stand for Julie London, City of London, or Jack London

3) The stream of specific resources on a topic is as good as the community who has joined the service. Some topic are naturally easier to bookmark due to the sheer fact that most of the people interested in it are tech-savvy (for example gadgets) and some are just not.

4) There is the possibility of tagging spam as more online marketers automate the process of bookmarking for easy traffic and fast money.

Bookmarking Gets Del.icio.us

Almost synonymous to the term “social bookmarking”, Del.icio.us is one of the largest online bookmarking service around. You can get your own Del.icio.us account for free by visiting http://del.icio.us/ and setting up your account. When you’re done, Del.icio.us will give you instructions on putting some browser buttons to quickly and easily add pages to Del.icio.us as you’re browsing the Internet.

You now have your own Del.icio.us page, where you can display all your bookmarks for the rest of the world to see.

Every time you click on the “Add to Del.icio.us” button on your browser, you’ll be asked for this additional information:

1) Notes – Description of the URL you just bookmarked. This description will appear on the page that displays your bookmarks, as well higher-tier pages of all the other people who have bookmarked the same URL.

2) Tags – A tags is a keyword that describes the link or URL. Refer to my earlier IAHBE article titled “Blogging 101: Tagging And Technorati Explained” for more information on tags and tagging. In Del.icio.us however, you can only tag single words, so if you’re planning on tagging a URL with the keyword “holiday resort” you need to tag “holiday” and “resort” individually, or tag “holidayresort.”

Now you can add pages easily to Del.icio.us every time you find something interesting. If other people are also bookmarking the exact URL, Del.icio.us will display the bookmark in its main page which hosts its “Hotlist.”

The Del.icio.us “Hotlist” is a list of the hottest bookmarks in the past few hours. Generally, your bookmark should get here if it is also bookmarked by 20 – 50 other people.

How do you tag your bookmarks? Logically you can tag a URL with any keyword you want, but if you’re talking about getting traffic, you have to make sure that your tags will be noticed. Here are the two main approaches to achieving that:

1) Use the most popular tags – On the Del.icio.us hotlist you can see a “cloud” of the most popular tag terms. You can start to bookmark your sites and your own blog using these tag (they have to make sense of course). If you want to avoid stiff competition, go for the second-tier, less popular but equally effective tags. Just make sure the tags you use appear in the cloud.

2) Create your own tag – This is a more challenging route, but can be rewarding. Let’s say that you create a tag called “mynewtag” and on each blog post, you tag your pages in Del.icio.us using this. You also encourage others to tag your blog using the same tag.

As more people tag the same URL with “mynewtag” you start to get a higher tag ranking within Del.icio.us, and more traffic coming your way.

While Del.icio.us may be the biggest social bookmarking site around, there are others worth mentioning. These sites operate almost identical to the way Del.icio.us does, so signing up and using them should be a breeze if you’re already familiar with Del.icio.us.

Creating A “Bookmark Network”

There are two ways you can create your own Del.icio.us network. The first is to get other Del.icio.us users (friends, family and co-workers) to add your Del.icio.us username to their own network, therefore sharing your collection of bookmarks with them. Del.icio.us lets you do this using their “network” tool.

The second is to have multiple Del.icio.us account and interlink each other. You can connect each Del.icio.us account to another by adding it to your network and sharing your bookmarks to create some kind of personal “Bookmark Directory.”

Other Bookmarking Sites

Here are the other big social bookmarking sites:

1) Furl – http://www.furl.net
2) Spurl – http://www.spurl.net/
3) Digg – http://www.digg.com/
4) Blinklist – http://www.blinklist.com/
5) Jots - http://www.jots.com/

Here are some less popular social bookmarking sites (you can expect to see many more in the future):

1) Backflip - http://www.backflip.com
2) Blogmarks- http://www.blogmarks.net
3) Connotea - http://www.connotea.org
4) de.lirio.us – http://www.del.irio.us
5) Feedmarker - http://www.feedmaker.com
6) Frassle – http://www.frassle.net
7) Lookmarks - http://www.lookmarks.com
8) Scuttle - http://www.scuttle.org
9) Unalog – http://www.unalog.com
10) Simpy - http://www.simpy.com
11) Wists – http;//www.wists.com
12) Yahoo! My Web 2.0 - http://myWeb2.search.yahoo.com

Connecting Your Business Blog

Now that you’ve understood social bookmarking, let’s see how you can add this to your blog and get people to bookmark your URL into their own Del.icio.us (or other) accounts. For the sake of simplicity, I’m only going to cite Wordpress as a blogging tool, although there are others such as MovableType, LiveJournal, Blogger and more.

One of the most popular tools used for Wordpress is the Sociable plugin, developed by Peter Harkins. This plugin allows you to display most of the popular bookmarking services, although you don’t really need to use them all. Here’s how the Sociable plugin displays the “bookmarklets” as they’re called:

By installing the plugin, the bookmarklets appear on all your blog posts, and users can easier add your posts to their favorite bookmarking services. Another service you can use is Feedburner although it only allows Del.icio.us bookmarking. The advantage of using Feedburner is that you can also display Del.icio.us bookmarklets in your RSS feed, something that Sociable currently does not support.

Managing Expectations & Making It Work

Social bookmarking is no magic pill for Website traffic. You can’t expect overnight results with bookmarking. Instead, expect to see more PageRank (Google’s measure of a Web site’s popularity) and better search engine ranking as a result from getting incoming links from all these high-rated bookmarking service. Even that doesn’t happen overnight, so just keep on bookmarking interesting sites you see while browsing the Internet, and eventually your personal bookmark page on Del.icio.us (and other sites) will start building up its value.

References

1)Consultant Commons, “Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison”

2)Wikipedia.org, “Social Bookmarking”

Gobala Krishnan is a staff writer for the IAHBE and a home based entrepreneur in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His company helps frustrated and underpaid employees transform their passion into a profitable home based Internet business. For more info visit http://www.OneDollarCoaching.com.

Blogging 101: Mass Generation Of Blogs

Blogging 101: Mass Generation Of Blogs

by Gobala Krishnan, IAHBE Staff Writer

What if, at the click of a button you can create 1,000 blogs that update automatically every day while you sleep? What if, by end of the month your network of 1,000 blogs generates one million visitors and makes you a cool $15,000 with Google Adsense or affiliate programs?

No, it’s not a dream and it’s not a scam either. With certain “mass-generation” tools on the market today, you can do this for a moderate investment.

As easy as it may sound, no one can guarantee that it will work for you. Some people call these mass-generated Blogger or Wordpress sites “spam blogs,” “splogs” or “scraper sites.” These people claim that it’s just a waste of time, since Google and other search engines will eventually ban your sites.

Others can prove that it works and are even willing to teach you how to do it properly. Therefore, take this article as an educational experience, and do your due diligence before dishing out your hard earned cash.

How Does It Work?

In general, free blogging tools like Blogger are easy to set-up and use. So easy in fact, that certain processes can be automated. When you can automate the process of creating and posting, then it won’t take long for someone to create software that enables you to create as many blogs and blog posts as you want with the click of a button.

That’s how mass-generated blogs got started. Here’s the process in general:

1. Upload Keyword List—Using a centralized control panel, you can import a list of keywords into your account, and the software automatically creates blogs using those keywords. These blogs will either be created on Blogger.com or on your own hosting using subdomains.

2. Multiple Templates—For every blog you create, you can assign a different template to it. In fact, some of the software explained below even allows you to randomly assign templates from a set of pre-designed generic templates to your mass-generated blogs.

3. Grab RSS Feeds—The software will then use the list of keywords to find and syndicate RSS feeds from:

a.Popular news sites like:
i.Google News
ii.Yahoo News

b.Blog directories and search engines like:
i.Google Blog Search
ii.Yahoo blog Search
iii.Technorati
iv.Bloglines

4. Post to Blogs—Once the RSS feeds are syndicated, the software will then post the content of the feed into your blogs, with a link back to the original source. The posts themselves appear as individual pages on your blog, adding to your blog content and size.

5. Ping Process—After each post is created, the software automatically pings popular ping sites. When a “ping” is made, your post summary usually appears on the ping site, and search engine spiders that already visit the ping sites everyday start to follow the links to your blogs and start to index them.

6. Automate Tagging—Some software also enables you to “tag” popular blog services like Technorati, resulting in links from the sites to your blogs.

7. Cron Jobs—A “cron job” is a script that allows your Web hosting server to do routine tasks at a specified date and time. You can specify cron jobs to run every day, every hour or even every minute. Using cron jobs, the software can put the steps 2-4 (above) completely on auto-pilot.

8. Inter-Linking—All your sub-domains are set to link back to your main domain name, or randomly to other blogs in your blog network. Although the linking method was quite obvious at first, newer versions have complex linking systems to make it appear more natural.

9. Easy Adsense Insertion—The software also allows you to easily insert your Adsense codes. In fact, most of the templates already contain pre-defined areas for your codes. All you have to do is insert your code, save it, and refresh your main blog to see the Adsense codes.

10. Automate Article Posting—Some of the advanced software allows you to pull articles (in TXT format) from any folder on your Webhost and post them to your blogs as if a real person had posted it. Most of these articles are generic and contain no author name or copyright.

That’s basically how all mass-generation software work. However, to really understand in detail you’ll probably need to try a few yourself. For the benefit of IAHBE readers, I have tested and listed two of the market leaders, and listed a few alternatives that I have not personally tried.

Blog Solution & Content Solution

Blog Solution developed by HalfAgain Marketing LLC is probably the best example that has all the features mentioned above. Retailing at $297 for the script, once you’ve purchased Blog Solution you can upload the script to as many domains as you want.

Blog Solution creates multiple subdomains on your main domain name and mimics the programming structure of Wordpress. However, the blog software itself is proprietary, not the open-source version of Wordpress.

The toughest parts in installing and using Blog Solution:

1. Getting Your Own Server—If you have 100 blogs posting 10 articles a day, by the end of the month your server account could be so clogged up that you may be shut down by your hosting provider. I don’t mean to scare anyone, but it’s the truth. If you’re just testing the concept you can use whatever host you’re on right now, but to have a full-fledged Blog Solution system you need to spend a little bit more. The best way to do it is to get your own server:

a. Dedicated Server - Since you own the entire server, no one will ever shut you down for taking up too much space. Of course, if space does run out you’ll need to get more.

b. Virtual Private Server - A cheaper option that still maintains most of the control and feature you get with a dedicated version.

2. Getting wildcard domains—The “wildcard domains” or “catchall” domains feature allows you to create domain names automatically. This functions needs some custom programming on many Web hosting plans. Personally, I had to contact my Web host with this requirement and they got it done within a day.

The rest of the set-up process is fairly simple, and their user guide is helpful. Once you passed the set-up stage, you can just paste of list or keywords, select the RSS feed source, and your entire blog system is set-up.

Half Again LLC has another product in their line, called the Content Solution. Content Solution (CS) basically acts as a central depository for text files that are added to your Blog Solution sites as new posts and articles. In other words, instead of just getting RSS feed summaries on your Website, you can also add real articles (minus images) to your mass-generated blogs.

Here’s how a Blog Solution site may look like, based on the default templates:

RSS To Blog

RSS to Blog by itself is not a mass-generation software. It’s a software that enables you to publish RSS feeds as new posts in your Blogger or Wordpress blogs. For this purpose, it does an excellent job and justifies the hefty $297 price tag.

A newer addition to RSStoBlog however, enables mass-generation. Called the “RSStoBlog Mass Installer,” it does exactly that. It allows you to create many Wordpress blogs or Blogger accounts and uses the original software to feed content via RSS. This is stated on their Website:

You do not need to have RSS to Blog to use R2BMI, but it does work better if you have the RSS to Blog companion tool to top off the blog creation process.

R2BMI costs $297 as well. Getting both solutions together will cost you around $540, a discount of approximately 10%. To get this offer you need to click on the link at the bottom of their Website.

If you’re not ready for such an investment, you can just get RSS To Blog, and set-up your own blogs one at a time. Otherwise, you could try Blog Solution mentioned above.

Other Generation Software

Here’s a list other mass-generation software that I know of but have not tried personally. You can explore these services at your own time and space:

1. WP Burner (WP Only): http://www.wpburner.com
2. WP Mass Installer: http://www.wpmassinstaller.com
3. Manager DX (Wordpress only): http://wpmanagerdx.com
4. Blog Generator: http://www.bloggergenerator.com
5. Auto Blog Generator: http://www.autobloggenerator.com
6. Fast Blog Generator: http://www.fastbloggenerator.com

Ideas On Making It Work

To achieve better results with Blog Solution, RSS To Blog or any other mass-generation software, I strongly recommend that you follow these strategies:

1. Get Your Own Templates—Don’t use the standard templates. Hundreds of other BS site owners are using them. Pay someone to develop a few simple yet beautiful templates for you, and if possible put more images on them to increase the attraction of an otherwise text-only blog.

2. Get Rid Of Footprints—There’s some generic text on your Blog Solution templates. Get rid of them as soon as possible to stand out and remain undetectable by search engines and prying eyes.

3. Get Better RSS Feeds—Although Blog Solution already gets feeds from Google, don’t depend on this default feed source. Browse the Internet and look for other lesser known and lesser used RSS feeds. Sticking to the default will only get you “default” results.

If you don’t make these simple changes as soon as possible, you’ll be easily identifiable as part of a group consisting of all other users of the software, and it would be easier for search engines to block or even ban your sites.

I can hear you say “What? I can get banned?”

Well, of course. There’s a possibility of that happening, especially if your blogs have zero value and only take up more space in Google’s data storage servers.

Conclusion

The bottom line in using mass-generation software is that you need to be prepared to do some extra modification work before unleashing your “army” of blogs into cyberspace. While it’s easy to create 1,000 blogs by tomorrow, you should not do it.
Instead, let your mass-generation software create blogs slowly and naturally, and even though it may take you more time to get indexed and start making money from Adsense or affiliate program, you’ll be the last one laughing when your sites perform well in the long run.

Gobala Krishnan is a staff writer for the IAHBE and a home based entrepreneur in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His company helps frustrated and underpaid employees transform their passion into a profitable home based Internet business. For more info visit http://www.OneDollarCoaching.com.

Blogging 101

Blogging 101: Search Engine Optimization For Wordpress

by Gobala Krishnan, IAHBE Staff Writer

If you’re using Wordpress as a platform for your business website, or even for the sole purpose of making money from Google Adsense, proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help you achieve your goals faster.

Search Engine Optimization is important, but it’s not worth your time to fuss over the details and end up as a “SEO Zombie.” I recommend that you follow the basic strategies mentioned in this chapter and forget about trying to force your way up the search engines to the coveted first page of the search engine results.

For the purpose of improving your ranking on the search engines, you need to:

1. Create a search-engine-friendly Permalink and URL structure.
2. Create a search-engine-friendly Title Tag.
3. Create keyword-focused Post Slugs.

It all starts with your blog name and description. Although you can name your blog anything you want, remember that it will show up in your blog title and many other places as well.

Here’s the strategy I use:

1. Weblog Title: Your Main Keyword
2. Tagline: Your Secondary Keyword

You’ll be able to select your title and tagline under the Options tab in your Wordpress account. Naming your blog this way has several advantages, including:

1. It lets you automatically insert your primary keyword at the end of each post.

2. Secondly, it lets you use both your primary and secondary keywords on your index page (default page of your Wordpress blog) instead of just one.

Since your blog is new, your Title will only have your primary keyword on it until we “genetically modify” your Wordpress account in the next few steps.

Permanent Link Structures

The first important SEO strategy is changing your “Permalinks.”

Permalinks or permanent links are how your individual pages appear to the search engines. Let’s say you create your first post and call it “Welcome To My Blog.” By default, your permalink will look something like this:

www.YourDomain.com/?p=123

Although this is OK, in terms of search engine optimization, it’s not the ideal thing to do, because by looking at it, I can’t tell what your post is about. The search engines can’t either!

So Wordpress gives you the option of modifying the permalinks into more search-engine friendly formats. Here are a few options I recommend:

Option 1: Great For Beginners

If you’re new to Wordpress, you might end up changing, moving, and deleting content constantly. Therefore, the best permalink option you should consider is this:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

Each post or page you create in Wordpress will be assigned a permanent “Post ID,” which is a number. This will change your post into:

www.YourDomain.com/123/welcome-to-my-blog/

The screenshot below shows how to edit your Permalinks. You need to click on the tabs Options > Permalinks and you’ll see this:

Type in the codes and click on “Update Permalink Structure” to change all previous and future posts into this format.

Option 2: Advanced SEO

If you’ve been using Wordpress for a while, you basically know where to post content, how to categorize it properly, and how to name your categories. You also tend to leave this unchanged for a long time. Therefore, this option would be suitable for you:

/%category%/%postname%/

Each post or page you create in Wordpress will be assigned to a “Category,” which is a number. This will change your post into:

www.YourDomain.com/mycategory/welcome-to-my-blog/

Please note that if you use this type of permalink, you should only assign one category to each post. You should also NEVER change your categories once you’ve created them, since this is equivalent to creating a new post. This structure is better because you can use your main keyword in your category name, and secondary keywords in your post name. However, if you’re doing this for the first time, you’re bound to make mistakes with naming categories and you may want to change them later. That’s the reason why I recommend that you go for Option 1 if you’re a beginner, and only use this more advanced type of permalink on your second Wordpress blog.

If you’re getting an error message when you try to update your permalink structure, it means you need to modify the access permissions for your .htaccess files.

Once you have chosen a permalink structure, NEVER EVER change it again, especially if your Website is already indexed in Google or other search engines. Doing so will only cause your existing pages to be considered invalid, and you'll have to go through the process of indexing your pages all over again.

Genetic Modification Of Title Tags

The second most important SEO strategy is modifying your title tags. Most search engines still read your title tags first to find out what your content is about and how to rank it when someone does a search related to what you’ve written.

By default, here’s how Wordpress displays the title of your post:

Your Site Name >> Your Post Name

All you have to do is to reverse that order and put your page name first, like this:

Your Post Name at Your Site Name

This gives you the advantage of putting your post title (with your keywords in them) first, increasing your chances of getting ranked higher. To do this, you’ll need to use a plugin called “Optimal Title,” which you can download for free here. Once you’ve installed it, check to see if it’s already activated under the “Plugin Manager” tab. If for some reason it’s not activated, click on “Activate” which should do the job.

and """ Then, click on the “Presentation” tab and proceed to the “Theme Editor” tab. Highlight the entire code between and replace it with this code:

at

Then click on Update and your blog title will change. The title of all your previous posts will also change.

Now your title tag is much more meaningful to both humans and search engines. Here’s how you new title will display individual posts:

Post Name at Blog Name
For the home page, it will display the following:
Blog Description at Blog Name

Optimizing Post Slugs

The final On-Page Optimization trick you need to learn is how to create compact, keyword-focused Post Slugs. What are post slugs? In layman terms, it’s the name of your post.

Let's say you’re creating a post called “I Finally Finished Creating My First Adsense Site Yesterday.” If you publish this post, you will get a permalink that looks like this:

www.MyDomain.com/12/i-finally-finished-creating-my-first-Adsense-site yesterday/

Now, not only is that permalink painful to my eyes, it also takes some time for me to figure out what your page is about. Whenever you’re writing a new post, before you publish it make sure that you’re creating a compact, keyword-focused Post Slug which will be more meaningful to humans and search engines alike.

Assuming that the keyword you’re targeting is ”Adsense site,” you should manually modify your slug to be something like this:

www.MyDomain.com/12/my-first-Adsense-site/

The general rule of thumb is to make sure at first glance that the gist of your post is visible on your permalink.

Conclusion

With these basic search engine optimization tricks, your Wordpress blog will be more attractive and meaningful to search engines. Remember that you should avoid falling into the SEO trap at all costs. Once you’ve optimized your site, your time will be better spent creating new content, instead of trying to tweak and modify your blog.

Gobala Krishnan is a staff writer for the IAHBE and a home based entrepreneur in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His company helps frustrated and underpaid employees transform their passion into a profitable home based Internet business. For more info visit http://www.OneDollarCoaching.com.