Web Development Blog

Day 6: Submit to blog and RSS directories

On Day 6, we submitted our blog to blog and RSS directories. Submitting your blog to directories is not only good for traffic, but it is also good for search engine optimisation. There are many blog and RSS directories but try to choose the ones that have good PageRank and Alexa traffic ranking. When submitting your blog to directories, be sure to select an appropriate category that your blog belongs to. For example, our blog is about web development and therefore, we submitted our blog to categories such as “Web 2.0″, “Internet -> Programming”, “Web Design & Development”, etc. Most directories allow free submission, but if you have a budget for it, you can pay for a premium or featured listing which guarantee a better click through rate.

So, what are some of the popular blog directories? You can either google for “blog directories + YOUR NICHE” or go through the following lists:

• 20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog To
• RSS – Blog Directories
• Top Blog Directories

Time spent: 2 hours

Read how it all started: 7 Days Traffic Building Exercise

Day 5: Write a round-up link post

On Day 5, we wrote a round-up blog post titled Weekly Round-up: 15 must read development, design and blogging articles. The idea of round-up post is not new, but it has become increasingly popular in recent years for a few reasons; 1) People find them useful (some of them are in fact more useful than your regular content post) 2) It facilitates communication between your blog and other relevant blogs 3) It is fairly easy to write. With our round-up blog post, we sent trackbacks to all those blogs that we linked to in order to create awareness and assist in traffic building exercise.

To better organise the links for your weekly round-up post, you can create a draft post at the beginning of the week, and update it whenever you read something you’d like to share. Another way to organise the links is to bookmark them in your social bookmarking accounts like Delicious and StumbleUpon and label/tag them appropriately.

Time spent: 1 hour

Read how it all started: 7 Days Traffic Building Exercise

Development

10 Stunning Examples of jQuery Animations

What’s Changed in jQuery UI 1.8

5 Groovy things you can do with htaccess

How To Use The Post Thumbnail Feature In WordPress 2.9

Understanding CSS – Padding, Positioning and CSS3

Design

Common elements on magazine websites

50 Incredible Asian Vector Portraits

4 Quick & Easy Design Theory Tips

Create a valentine’s day post card

30 High Quality Grunge Fonts for Web Designers

Blogging & Business

16+3 Brands You Should Consider For Your Next Startup

Things to consider before you start your blog

7 things to do on week ends to enhance your blog

What does treating your blog “Like a Business” really mean?

Buying Your First Website: A Case Study

Day 4: Install widgets / plugins

Day 4 required a bit of web knowledge but don’t be afraid because you don’t need to be a web professional to complete this task.

Firstly, we added Social Bookmarking and Networking widgets to the blog. Social networking sites are one of the best ways to promote anything (in our case, blog/website) for free. According to comScore Segment Metrix, 71.5% of the total Internet audience in Australia (which is nearly 9 million users) visited social networking sites in June last year.

Next, we installed TweetMeme Plugin to our blog to maximise twitter effect. There are many twitter plugins for WordPress but we chose TweetMeme because not only does it provide a free plugin, it also has its own website that aggregates all the popular links on Twitter and categorises them into Categories, Subcategories and Channels. Here is a step-by-step instruction on how to install and configure the plugin for your WordPress blog.

1. Download the Plugin from WordPress Plugins site
2. Unzip and upload /tweetmeme folder to /wp-content/plugins folder of your website via FTP/SSH
3. Login to your blog’s admin and activate the plugin from Manage Plugins page
4. Configure the plugin (The link to the plugin will be added automatically to Admin menu on the left after it’s installed). Remember to change the Source (RT @) to your twitter username. The rest can stay as they are.
5. Go to your blog and test the widget

We have already got Add This (Social Bookmarking and Sharing Service) widget on individual blog posts but it was placed at the end of the post and is not very prominent so we changed the positioning of the widget. Add This wiget allows users to share a link to many popular services such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, Google, StumpleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz.

Secondly, we looked at SEO related plugins for WordPress. We installed Head META Description plugin which automatically inserts meta description to posts and pages on your blog. Many people would argue that meta description doesn’t affect the search engine ranking of a page. Although this may be true, it should still be present to describe the content of the page. Moreover, the meta description is often used as the text snippet on search engine result pages (SERPs).

We also installed Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress. Installing this plugin is not hard, but there are some customisation involved, so be sure to read readme.txt file. The plugin automatically generates an XML sitemap which is used by major search engines such as Ask, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo!, enabling them to better index and crawl your blog. An XML Sitemap for this blog can be found at http://eisabainyo.net/weblog/sitemap.xml. Once the sitemap is created, remember to submit it to Google using Google webmaster tools.

Time spent: 2 hours

Read how it all started: 7 Days Traffic Building Exercise

Day 3: Give away something for free

Everybody loves freebies! So on Day 3, we decided to give something away for free. The best products to give away are usually digital products because it doesn’t require you to go through the hassle of organising a courier and instant delivery is guaranteed. And if you have the right type of product, you can give away the same product to as many people as you want without increasing the cost to produce or devaluing the product.

We gave away a free WordPress Theme. It is not compulsory to give away something that is related to the topic of your blog but it is recommended for an obvious reason – the target audience. For example, if you have a shopping blog, you might want to give away coupon codes, and if you are a designer, you might want to give away free icons. In order to ensure that we get as much traffic as possible for the free WordPress Theme, we talked about it on a few social networking sites.

Other digital products that you could give away are:

- e-books
- Plugins
- Widgets
- Ad spaces
- Websites
- Designs
- Photoshop brushes
- Services (eg: website review, SEO service, copywriting service)
- Web hosting
- Domain names
- Coupon codes
- Free reports
- Your original music

Time Spent: 1 hour *

* Note that this doesn’t include the theme design and development time because we have already got the theme designed and developed a while ago for one of our websites, Website Templates.

Read how it all started: 7 Days Traffic Building Exercise