Archive for October, 2008
Posted on October 14, 2008 - by Kelly Verge
Speed up Your Link Building
If you’re like most people, you spend a part of each day building backlinks for your various projects (or should). I’m a firm believer in automation or outsourcing, and parts of this process are perfect for this. However, when it comes to posting comments on bloggeries, I prefer to handle this task myself.
When I post comments on blogs, I do my best to find blogs related to my niche and will only post if I have something relevant to add to the discussion. I suppose that if you had an intelligent employee they could handle this task, but I like having control - especially when my name or site is attached to the comment.
Because of this, any little trick that speeds up this process helps shave time from my work day - freeing me up for other tasks.
I’ve found a Greasemonkey script that will automate filling in comment forms on Wordpress blogs. I’ve tweaked it a bit to allow me to use it with multiple sites, but if you’re working with one site primarily, you should be able to use the script as is.
Basically this script automatically fills in your name, email address, and URL. I know Roboform can do the same thing, but I’ve never been a fan of that program. Again, it’s a small tweak that can shave a few minutes off of your work every day. And who couldn’t use a few more minutes?
Here’s a link to the post where the script is located.
Posted on October 5, 2008 - by Kent Verge
How to Get Fifty Times More Visitors to Your Blog Overnight
Using posts on social media sites to get traffic to your blog isn’t anything new. However, most who try it never get the thousands of visitors they hope for when they make their posts. To hit traffic paydirt from sites like Digg or Stumble Upon, you need both great content and a compelling headline.
John Wesley did a case study over on Pick the Brain where he tested a new headline on an existing article to find out if he could increase the traffic to the post. His original headline, “The Two Types of Cognition,” got 100 visitors from the social sites. When he changed the title to “Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence“ and reposted it to the social sites, he received almost 5,000 visitors. This was almost fifty times more visitors to the same article!
John gives credit for the idea to a couple sites, but you can see more examples of compelling changes to headlines on the post he mentions from Brian Clark’s Copyblogger. Here Brian shows a before and after of five different headlines and explains why he changed them. You can really see the difference a few changes make in some real examples.
Although you really need great content to increase the social ratings of your post, your content just won’t get read without a compelling headline. With both, you can get lots of visitors to your site in a matter of hours.
