There’s a Blog in my Soup

I launched this blog a year ago this month, and when I first launched it my primary focus was to make money. I’ve learned a lot in that year, and made many mistakes. I actually gave up on this blog for about 7 months.

I came back to it on March 15th of this year. In fact I had lost all the previous posts, I’d done and had to start anew. (Roughly 130+ posts gone). My original theme was using the law of attraction to bring $1 Million into my life by the age of 30, which I believe was perhaps a bit over zealous.

My new goal - apply what I’ve learned in my year of blogging, and help other’s become successful. I’d also like to launch a few social related businesses eventually, that are currently in the ‘idea’ stages.

My 50 States Roadtrip / American Blogger Directory is just part of gaining an keeping an audience.

You’ll notice the most successful blogs out there aren’t just individual people talking while everyone listens. The most successful blogs are communities, where people interact with what the blogger is writing.

You’ll notice almost every post they write gets tons of comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, etc… It’s no coincidence - without this community atmosphere on your blog it is nearly impossible to keep your blogging growing.

Without interaction from your readers your blog will die. Just as a flower needs sunlight to live, a blog needs comments / reactions from the community at large.

Here are some tips to build your Community.

1. Tweet ALL posts to Twitter. There are some good wordpress plugins for this like Twitter Tools or Twitter Tools for Tweetburner. I highly recommend tweetburner because of it’s statistics and shorter urls.

2. Build your Social Presence. Many might call it spamming, but if you look at Robert Scoble, and Jason Calacanis this is how they got huge. They built up the max number of friends on facebook, and they have 15000+ followers, a lot of those were gained by initiating the follow, ie following first.

3. Comment Frequently on other blogs. There is a secret power method for this which I will mention in another upcoming post, I will show you how to build hundred of incoming links extremely fast and easy.

4. Respond to your Audience. If someone sends you an email, drops a comment, replies to a twitter comment you made, etc.. Take the time to respond. Now when you have 10,000 hits daily it can get hard, and you might miss a few here and there - in blogging you don’t need to be perfect, just do your best.

People like to know they’re being listened to, this will go along way towards building a large following.

5. Ask a lot of questions. People like to be heard, and asking your readers questions via blog posts is a great way to give them this opportunity to voice their opinions. This makes it more fun to visit your blog, and increases the interactivity of your blog.

A lot of times I will ask a specific question at the end of my blog posts, and it will usually garner a lot of comments.

6. Be kind to those who are kind to you.  When someone takes the time to follow you or add you on a social networking site - reciprocate. Also when someone takes the time to link to your site - go to the post and leave a thankyou comment.

7. Stumble incoming links. If you stumble all of your own links, you’ll eventually end up getting banned. One secret is stumbling any and all incoming links. If someone is kind enough to link to you in a post, go ahead and stumble or digg it, and you will get a lot of traffic, plus you’ll help them get traffic. It’s a win-win scenario.

8. Link to other blogs often. I’ve talked about this a lot - but linking to other blogs will get you on their radar as it shows in the dashboard on wordpress, and secondly you’ll get a pingback / trackback from their site.

9. Start a meme. My Twitter Meme: Feed the Twitter Monster, has taken off hugely and gained a ton of incoming links and traffic, be creative though, and make it your own idea. Do something unique.

10. Start a resource for bloggers or website owners. I’ve just launched my American Blogger Directory, but it has already received a ton of hits and results. This of course is also part of my 50 state roadtrip, which is looking to be getting a lot of acclaim online as well.

11. Network with other bloggers. Friends will always give you more attention, and having more blogger friends never hurt anyone.

You can use some tips from my article on becoming friends with A-listers, many of the tips relate to networking in general.

12. Build your subscriber feeds. Market it anyway possible. The simple fact is you need subscribers, if you haven’t read it - here’s 39 great ways to get more RSS Subscribers.

13. Make your posts simple to follow and you’ll have mass appeal. Make sure the text doesn’t run together, as most people have low-attention spans and can’t be bothered with reading whole paragraphs anymore. Lists are huge in fact I try to write 1 list every week, as they tend to bring me a lot of traffic just because they’re lists. - I know it’s crazy!

14. Get active in Forums. If you have the time, you might want to try being active in popular forums, or just answering questions on the different answer sites like yahoo answers, this will help build credibility, and lead to more traffic.

15. Share and share alike, then share some more! When you launch a new resource, pillar article, etc you definitely need to tweet / send it to your social networks. However, you should also retweet it, if it is bringing in traffic, and subscribers.

I generally send my rss feed link to twitter once every 3-4 days asking for more subscribers. Especially when I get close to the next big number like 200 - asking people to help you ‘break’ a number is a great way to get them to actually subscribe, it might be tricky but it works.

I also send my best links, resources, and posts to my followers on twitter and ask them to digg or stumble the posts. This usually brings in a huge amount of traffic. When doing this make it extremely simple, though. Send them the actual link to digg or stumbleupon, so they don’t have to work. People are lazy and want instant gratification.

Another good tip is to help out other bloggers by forwarding their promotions to your followers, they may do the same for you some day. This can lead to some very interesting viral marketing.

16. Write your damn content, already! Last and foremost the #1 method to building a community blog is frequent posts. The more the better, I’ve said it a hundred times the more content you have,  the more traffic, comments, and interactive your site will become.

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Twitter is a Monster of a Promotion Tool - Let’s Try an Experiment…

Over the past two weeks, I’ve learned a lot about maximizing twitter. Before, I didn’t know the point of Twitter, now because of Twitter, I’m getting steady traffic around 800-1000 hits per day. (Not too shabby after 15 days, being back up and live, and having roughly 30 blog posts so far.)

On top of the subscribers, the diggs, and the traffic - I’ve also met some wonderful people, found some interesting blogs, had some interesting conversations, and increased the conversation at my site. I’ve gotten a total of 88 comments on this blog, since March 17th.

March 17th was also the day my traffic began going up, up and away.

The next experiment is actually a Twitter Meme.

Goal: For each participant to receive the following:

1. More followers on Twitter.
2. More RSS Subscribers.

How this works:

1. Subscriber to my Feed. Via RSS, or Via Email.
2. Follow me on Twitter:  PatrickCurl
3. Put a comment stating that you subscribed & Followed. In your comment - provide your RSS FEED link, and your Twitter Profile Link.
4. Please follow / subscribe to those who have commented before you. If you like, you can come back regularly and subscribe to the new people on the list, it is highly recommended, but not mandatory.
5. Send this link out via Twitter, and See if we can’t get 100 subscribers / followers per person listed. (Here’s the tinyurl to make it easier: http://tinyurl.com/37k65m )
6. We would also ask that each person who joins this movement - write a quick blog post about it - and link to this post (as this is where all the subscription / follow links will be.)
7. You can also send out the blog link that you just wrote to Twitter, as well for added exposure.

As you can see this is a great way to promote your blog - but it is also an experiment, I’m excited to see the kind of momentum we can build on Twitter.

Other things you can do is stumble this post, digg it, sphinn it, favorite on delicious, etc…

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I’m just totally amazed. Last week I wrote a post, which I thought was good, and all my twitter buds, seemed to like it as well, as they gave me a good boost on Digg.

You can read and or Digg that post here: “7 Ways to Be Best Buds With an A-List Blogger“  or Digg it here.

Over the weekend, I had some huge traffic to my blog as a result of the digging, and twittering of that post.

My bandwidth was huge, and the most amazing part is my Subscriber Base went from 81 Subscribers on Friday - ALL the way to a whopping 1836 SUBSCRIBERS, as of Today!

I totally can’t believe how much twitter has increased my site’s reach.

Have you experienced a Digg & Twitter Boost? What were your results?

What’s the most new subscribers you’ve received in a short period of time?

Popularity: 45% [?]

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How to use RSS Feeds to break up Writers Topic…

I’ve written a lot lately about rss feeds, however this topic is more about getting over writer’s block, & speed blogging.

It’s a fact that more content = more search engine rankings / directory listings, and more visitors. Of course quality matters too — but I’m going to show you a quick way to write high quality articles fast.

First, I recommend google reader, as it’s my feed reader of choice. I’m currently signed up to all of the major blogs that interest me, a good site to see a list of blogs ranked by # of RSS subscribers is RatingBurner.

I recommend signing up for about 20+ blogs, the more the merrier. Then you will open your reader and just browse headlines that intrigue you, when you see one you like, click on the little star next to it, this will flag it. I generally do this about 3-4 times a day, sometimes more…

I generally pick 1-2 days a week where I speed-blog and write a majority of my posts, my goal is to write 3 blogs per day, of course with my busy schedule it’s hard to always hit that, but it’s something to shoot for.

Now, in your reader click on the ‘Starred Items’ link on the top left. It will show you all the posts you checked as your favorites. Now look for the headline that you think would be the funnest to write about. I subscriber to gizmodo, techcrunch, ars technica, and other tech blogs, and a lot of the time you will have posts that are almost identical. This is actually good - it means its a hot topic.

What I do is I pick the best keyword for that article, and search for it in the search form at the top of the reader, an example would be a post I found on all of the tech blogs about a PC Synching Elmo that after a battery change, started saying ‘Kill James’, James, being the 2 year old owner of the psychotic doll. Then you’ll notice, I linked to the posts it came from - this will build links back to your site, and increase your traffic, especially for blogs that remove no-follow.

If you’re not using your feed reader to help your blogging efforts you’re missing out on a lot of quality blog posts, and if you’re not writing at least one post per day it will take you a very long time to catch up with the likes of Darren Rowse and John Chow.

Another tip is to be sure if you’re writing late at night to set your post timestamp to the next morning, after 6am EST, I find this will net you the largest amount of traffic, as that’s when the world is most active, especially the english speaking world(no offense to Australians or Brits, )….

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Blogs gotta Eat Too! Here are 39 Great Ways to Feed Your blog so it Grows

1. Educate Your Readers - How can they subscribe to an RSS Feed, if they don’t KNOW what an RSS Feed is?It is essential to discuss what an rss feed is, what a feed reader is, and how to subscribe, don’t assume your readers are the most tech savvy, go slow and have patience with them. You may also want to give them some links to feed reader programs and sites.Examples:
   • What in Tarnation is an RSS FEED
   • Fak3r Subscribe
   • What is an RSS?
   • What in the Heck is an RSS Feed? 
2. Give them the Email Option. Feed readers are the rave, most of us know how to use them, and have a favorite feed reader, but not ALL of us. Some people aren’t comfortable with new software - so offer them something familiar - a way to subscribe via email. Feedburner, and Feedblitz, are two companies that make this easy.I highly recommend using feedburner, in fact I’d say that feedburner is a necessary tool for a successful blogger. Besides giving an email option, you can also use feedburner to track how many subscribers you have, and there are a myriad of great features inside feedburner that just make blogging easier. You can even make money with it!Feedburner Email Example:
   

   Enter your email address: Delivered by FeedBurner

3. Feedcount example:

   

4. Throw a Contest. A lot of blogs I’ve noticed are using this tactic more and more. Blog contests can drive a lot of traffic to your site, and making the only entry requirement, having them subscribe ensures that you will get a lot of entries, and each entry is a new subscriber. Here’s some good articles on running a good contest:
   • How to triple your blog’s street value, by throwing a Contest!
   • 3 Surefire ways to run a Radical Blog Contest
5. Give something away. Rewarding people for subscribing is a great way to build a large subscriber base, free hosting, free wordpress installation, entrecard credits, ebooks, etc…Here’s a good Wordpress plugin to help you along: WP RSS Sticky
   
6. Promote it Boldly, with a graphic. Above the fold. Like mine is! By the way if you haven’t subscribed yet, maybe you should now, before you forget!
7. Contribute to online communities. Promote the feed on forums / comments / email signatures, etc..wherever you can ethically post your link. Another good way to do this is answer a lot of questions on yahoo answers, and keep your feed subscription link in your signature, this is a wonderful way to build yourself up as an authority on an issue, and with credibility come the flock of subscribers.Maki - from Dosh Dosh - wrote “how you can increase your RSS subscriptions through comments alone.”
8. Use Full Feeds. I’m an American, I don’t know about the rest of the world but I’m lazy and most people are, people are also impatient, they do not want to have to visit your site, wait for it to load, etc…Make your feed a full feed, and your subscribers will love you, and they may stick around for the long haul.
9. Run an ad campaign. Use a special landing page designed to receive subscribers to your blog. Giving something away on this page could be a bonus, you could also use entrecard and promote a landing page as well, designed to drive people to subscribe to your blog, one thing you might do here is list some of your best blog posts.
10. Write compelling content. Of course when it all boils down, compelling content is the best surefire way to build and keep people coming back to your blog, and subscribing to your feed.
11. Be a Guest Blogging Pro. A good way to introduce yourself to new people, is via guest blogging on other’s blogs, especially if you can land a spot on a blog with a little more authority or reach than your own.
12. Start a Podcast. Podcasts are great way to gain more visitors, there are many people who love and follow podcasts, and for those who are camera shy, it beats youtube. Although youtube videos would be another method.
13. Network with other bloggers. Probably one of the biggest, the more friends you have the more people you have linking to your best posts. I know I don’t always have something to write about so I write a small overview of a post someone else wrote and link to the post(of course this benefits me because of the pingback/trackback)
14. Cross Promotional Deals. Using the blogs that you networked with in step 12, as a starting point you can show a link to their rss subscription link in your feed, and they can do the same for you. The biggest benefit of this is that everyone who sees your link, is seeing it because they are subscribed to an rss feed - or in other words, they are familiar with rss, and don’t need to be educated. Here are some plugins to help in setting up text ads on your feeds:
    • Feedvertising
    • Feed Footer
15. Use Feedflare. Feedflare is a built in plugin through feedburner which will make it easy for people to stumble, digg, or bookmark your blog.
16. Use Noindex. This will keep search engines from indexing your feed, and will thus help from getting duplicate content.
17. A little black hat for you. Find popular blogs not using feedburner and burn their feed as yours. Then have feedburner link the feed to yours, automatically you will have a large number of subscribers. This isn’t very ethical, but alas I figured I’d list it here, as I found it through another blog.
18. Get Social! Use the following social media sites, and be sure to bookmark your posts. You should also focus to building relationships on these sites and gathering friends.
    • Bumpzee
    • Digg
    • Reddit
    • Stumbleupon
    • Delicious
    • MyBlogLog
    • BlogCatalog
    • Sphinn
    • Bloggingzoom
19. Use catchy headlines. In the inundation of information, you only have 1-3 seconds to catch someone’s attention enough to make them click on your post, the more catchy, and un-boring the headline the more likely you are to win their attention for the next 5 minutes.
20. Enlist the help of friends. Sort of along the lines of networking, but instead of building new friends, use your existing network to spread the word about your blog.
21. SEO and SEM. It’s a no brainer if people find your site via search engines, and see a post they like, they are more likely to keep coming back, and might subscribe to your feed.
22. Post as if your life were on the line. The More posts, the more people will find your blog. Also the more valuable your blog will be, but keep the topics relevant.You really need to post at least one blog post per day, it doesn’t matter if you write them all during the week you should use the timestamp feature to make them post later on in the day or week, the best time a day for blog posts are usually between 8am and noon Eastern time, in my opinion.
23. Stick to your niche. At least try and stick to your niche as much as possible, it will keep your seo high, and your subscribers will be satisfied, after all - they subscribed because they like the stuff you’re writing about - don’t change niches, and expect them to stick around.
24. Citations from other bloggers in your niche. Or blog reviews. Getting write-ups from other bloggers is a good way to gain credibility and authority. If you can get some citations, whether by asking, trading, or just writing content that is so damn good everybody wants to link to it, you will see your subscriber count skyrocket.
25. Pillar Articles. You Must have 5 Pillar Articles as soon as possible, these will make or break you. I recommend writing one per week, or every two weeks at the least. You also will want to put a link to these prominently on your blog.
26. Linkbait & Traffic Bait. Link bait, is just something like a blog post, picture, video, etc that pulls in people, its sometimes viral and people share it with their friends, good examples of linkbait can be found at the front of digg, and reddit.
27. GEt listed in Blog / Rss Directories. Here are a few lists:
    • http://www.vandelaydesign.com/rss/rssdirectories.htm
    • http://www.vandelaydesign.com/blogging/blogdirectories.htm
    • 55 Active RSS Directories to Help Promote your Feeds
28. Be sure you’re pinging. Pinging basically notifies rss and blog directories that your blog has updated, and a lot of people check the rss sites when they are looking for topics to read. Two really good ping sites are ping-o-matic, and pingoat.
29. Share the link love(don’t let them know you’re really being greedy…). Include plenty of outbound links to blogs with relevant posts, this adds credibility to your post, provides your readers with more information on the topic they’re searching for, and also gives you some trackback and link love on the blog that you’re linking to. Especially if you link to blogs that remove nofollow on trackbacks / pingbacks.
30. Widgetize your Blog. Use mybloglog, blogcatalog, bumpzee, digg, and reddit widgets. Gregarious is a good wordpress plugin that helps with this.
31. Make sure your blogs’ autodiscovery feature is working. This is pretty simple you basically just need to add some html to your blog in the header file. Here’s the code that you should add:
    

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"   title="RSS Feed for theresabloginmysoup.com"   href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheresABlogInMySoup" mce_href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheresABlogInMySoup" />

32. Get personal! Send personalized emails to each commenter on your blog, and at the end of the email ask them to do you a favor and subscribe to your blog - make this as personal as possible and this is a great way to network. Also if any readers send you an email, please make sure to email them asap, and again ask them to subscribe.Also of course you definitely MUST answer and respond to ALL comments, asap. Your blog should feel more like a community site, or at the least a question and answer session.
33. Write easy to scan content.  Most people who use readers have limited attention and patience - they usually want the meat of what you have to say and they want it now! I bet half of you reading this now, are just reading the subtopics in bold, but that’s ok. I also know many of you have subscribed, or will subscribe.
34. Participate in Blog Carnivals. Blog carnivals are great ways to gain new subscribers, alas it is beyond the scope of this article, and this is actually one spot that I myself could use some more experience in, but here are some good articles on blog carnivals:
    • Problogger’s Introduction to Blog Carnivals
    • Five Questions (and Answers) About Blog Carnivals
    • Blog carnivals - a link building secret weapon
      
35. Hire Guest Bloggers. Encourage bloggers to post guest posts on your blog. Their fans will usually check out your blog, and they will usually link up their guest posts, plus it’s free totally unique high quality content for your blog. I don’t see how you can go wrong.
36. Become an Authority.  If you help people who have questions on sites like Yahoo Answers. Also becoming very active in Forums and linking to some of your pillar articles, and your RSS feed url, will drastically grow your feed. I recommend that you regularly post to 6-8 forums relating to your blog. I’d also recommend that you find the highest ranking forums for your niche, as not all forums are created equal. Don’t just rely on one ranking method though.I’d recommend checking their alexa ranking, google pr, and if they remove nofollow from signatures that’s a big bonus(if they don’t have signatures, then you should stay away from the forum altogether…from a marketing standpoint.)
37. Post a Series. Start a series of posts, if you grab your readers attention, then they will subscribe so that they don’t miss the conclusion.
38. Display your Subscriber Stats.  Once you reach 100 subscribers display your RSS Subscriber count, people like to follow, and seeing that you have a large following will push some into subscribing.
39. Collaborate with other bloggers. This can be a lot of fun you could co-write a series of posts, and alternate which blog you post it on, you can share ads with each other’s rss feed, you can start a business together, etc.. Anything’s possible.
40. Remind your Subscribers. Adding a ‘If you liked this post, please subscribe to my feed’ link at the end of each blog post is a good way to get a few more subscribers. There’s a really great plugin for this called Subscribe-Remind, check it out!

This list is by no means complete and full, I’m definitely going to be adding more as I learn more. I’ve scoured the net for the most accurate and up-to-date information on building RSS subscribers.

Below are some of the wonderful resources I’ve found regarding getting more rss subscribers:

•  How to increase Subscribers by 50% in 30 days!
• 11 Ways to find New Rss Subscribers for your Blog
• Shoemoney’s guide to getting more Rss Subscribers via Feedburner
• Subscribe Remind - A great plugin to remind your readers to subscribe.
• Top 5 Ways to Get More RSS Subscribers
• Get More RSS Feed Subscribers!
• What the Heck is RSS?
• How to get Traffic and Links from Popular Blogs
• 35 Guaranteed ways to increase your RSS Subscribers
• The Great Explanation of RSS
• Free Rss Feed Icon Generator
• 3 Reasons you Desparately NEED rss subscribers
• How to increase rss feedburner subscribers
• Join the 500 subscribers per month Challenge
• Why you should Want More Subscribers and How to Get them
• The Ultimate RSS ToolBox 120+ Resources for RSS
• 30+ Wordpress plugins to get More Blog Readers

Popularity: 78% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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