CIAO9to5

I found a program that allows me to automatically add you to my Technorati favorites, if you add me. It runs on my desktop and continuously checks to see who has added me to their favorites. Once it finds someone, it adds them to my favorites.

You can download it here:

http://technorati-favorite-fans.googlecode.com/files/technoratiff-070523.zip

To install just unzip the file. After the file is unzipped, run the technoratiff file. Put your information in the designated spaces and tell it to run.

This version should work. There are other ones, but this one is the one that worked for me first.

Enjoy!

PS: Thanks to Internet Duct Tape for development of this program.

EDIT:  Actually, you have to click Run every time you want it to check.  Sorry for the wrong information.

We’ve all heard a good advertisement for your online business is to put the link in your forum signature. Well, there are right and wrong ways to go about this. Yeah, you can put your link in your signature and join heated debates on some forum where hundreds of people read it. But, what good will that do? How many people will see it? Not many.

Don’t be a follower, be a leader. You be the one to create the thread that is going to start a heated debate. If you own a blog that you have in your signature, start a thread that is interesting enough to get others interested enough to post in it.

Lately, I’ve been getting multiple hits from SitePoint. These are mainly coming from 2 threads that were created by me, not threads that I replied in.

See, if I hadn’t started the topic, I would of left the risk of having somebody get bored after reading the first page. All the while, my post was on the second page. By starting the topic myself, everybody who reads the first thread, sees my link. And, the fact that my topics create discussion means more people see them the other topics.

Note to self:  Remember to put at least one trackback link in each post so I don’t have to go back and edit it.

I was reading around the internet, trying to figure out how to increase my Technorati rating. I assume if I can do this, it will increase my traffic as well.

Technorati Ratings are determined by “Authority.” This works much the same way as Google’s PR search engine placement. It is a little different, though. As far as I can tell, Authority does not care about who links you, the number of links on the page that linked you or how close the content on either site is related.

This makes Technorati seem like an easy enough place to increase your rating. All you need for authority are incoming links.

How are we going to get those incoming links? Glad you’ve asked. I found this method called ViraLink. What happens is: I will post the link to 5 blogs I enjoy, including my own, under this post. Those 4 blogs that aren’t owned by me will see their Technorati ranking increase and look to find out who linked them. Actually, it would probably be best to link smaller blogs that will look to see who linked them. Anyways, when they find this post, they are to copy the post and add another 5 blogs onto the list. It kind of starts a chain. I see no harm in trying it out, so here we go:

1. CIAO9to5
2. TylerCruz
3. Jon Waraas
4. BigOak Blog
5. Practical Blogging

Wish me luck with this attempt at a Technorati rating increase. I hope this works for you.

I’m looking for some blogs to exchange links with. Put your blog in the comments section or this post or email me and I’ll put you on my blog roll if you do the same for me.

Both of these are great tools to help promote your blog.  They make it easy to get the word out by adding friends on their sites and such.  I guess they are sort of like social networking sites.  But, we’re going to use them for site promotion ;).

I think that each of these sites have their advantages.  MyBlogLog seems to send more visitors to my blog.  But, MyBlogLog has a major disadvantage that makes, in my opinion, BlogCatalog the better site.  MyBlogLog allows you to only add 15 friends a day whereas BlogCatalog has no limit.  This no limit thing is very helpful when you’re wanting to get some traffic coming to your blog early in the game.  By adding a lot of friends, the majority are going to check out your blog because you’ve added them.  The site is also decently smooth.  So, you can add probably 50 friends every 5 minutes, which is a good deal.  Lets say that 50% of those 50 visit your blog.  That’s 25 people.

Basically, with BlogCatalog, you can almost guarantee 25 new people to your blog every 5 minutes.  It might not happen every 5 minutes.  But, if the people you’re adding do log on from time to time, it should even out to be about right.

I also like BlogCatalog because of it’s ease of finding blogs about a certain topic.  This is extremely helpful when looking for parts of my post to TrackBack.

On another note, do these services like Blogger and Blogspot not allow TrackBack?  It seems that every blog that I go to, that is hosted by one of those two, doesn’t have it.

I know I write about ways to find ideas on what to write about a lot. But, I thought of another, sigh.

I was signing up for Google Analytics last night and some how or another, I came across Google Alerts. I have no clue how I got there from Analytics. Regardless, I did get there. What are Google Alerts? Google Alerts are basically emails that are sent to you real time as they are reported in the news. This is good because you can give your opinion early on something that has happened.

All you have to do to sign up is have a Gmail account. If you don’t have any means of getting an invite(do they even still do it this way anymore?), I have around 5 accounts with full invites. So, just post in the comments your email if you want one.

Anyways, after you sign up to Gmail, go to http://google.com/alerts. Just fill in the form on the side and pick comprehensive, so that you get everything about the topic.

After I signed up, I put a label on the emails I received so that it’s nice and organized.

I’m not going to lie, I haven’t been spending my last 24 hours like this holiday was given to me for.

My blog has officially been online for 24 hours, as of now.  During these 24 hours, I slept for 9 and worked the rest.  That means I’ve spent around 15 hours on this blog during the last 24 hours and written 13(including this one) post.  That’s a lot of hours and even though it may not sound like a lot of post, it really seems to drain you.

Why?  Because I want to see how quickly I can make this blog successful.  I believe that all it takes is a lot of hard work.  Many people don’t realize this when they begin blogging and soon grow tired of the idea of continuing the routine everyday.

However, there is a remedy for this sickness:  persistence.  If you are persistent about your blog and continue to work on it, it will be successful.  This applies to anything in life.  You have to want it bad enough.

So, now the only question is:  are you going to be a success or a failure?

Learn something new everyday. I didn’t know what TrackBack links were until a few minutes ago. Apparently, these things add your site onto some other blog’s comments section when you link one of their post from your post. It’s really easy to go through BlogCatalog or something and find a blog that has posted about something mentioned in your blog. Just link it and you’re good to go.

Related Links:

1. Using trackback links
2. Increase your traffic using trackbacks

I was going through various blogs and reading what they post. I think that the best way to find good things to write about, is to find out what gets the most comments on other bloggers site’s. Just look around the web. If you’re going through a bloggers site and notice one of his post has 20 or 30 comments where as the others have none, it’s safe to say that s/he hit a good topic of discussion and you can also probably benefit from discussing something similar.

Related Post:

1. Thinking About What to Write
   
2. 10 Tips to Improve Your Blog Post Quality

But, only if that is the dragon of non-subscription-people-to-your-rss. And, when it comes down to it, these are some dragons that need to be slain. You can do it with a sword and a shield(you actually can’t), but I prefer a more modern method. That is the method of a contest. BloggerNoob started a contest a little while ago(it is over now) to help boost his subscription readers. It seems to have worked out very well, boosting his subscription quickly to over 100. This may not sound phenomenal, but his site is nay(keeping with the medieval) 2 months old.

How’d he do it?

BloggerNoob had a prize of a Sansa 1GB MP3 player. After a quick Google search, I found out that these run no more than $10.00. Not a bad price to pay for good advertising. Not bad at all. If you were to spend this $10.00 on PPC from AdWords, I doubt it would go as well. But, on to how it was done: Everybody who signed up for his RSS was put into a hat. All it required was signing up and it was all handled by the trusty honor system. After the designated time period was up, he gave out the prize(obviously). I also hear he’s going to start another contest soon, so you might want to go try that out.