The Computer Zone

BREAKING NEWS!!! Google is currently updating PageRank’s (PR) around the world. After last weeks penalty PR updates it seems that Google is finally updating the PageRanks for everyones sites (and not in a negative way). Recently I’ve seen an increase in my tutorial site Easy C Tutorials (it went from unranked to PR 3), Sanctified Studios (went from a PR 0 to a PR 5) as well as a few other sites.

So what were these penalties?
After last weeks penalties to a few high profile websites, the blogosphere was up in arms against Google. There were people saying that the PR was now a joke after Google issued these penalties. Now before I start talking about the newest update I’ll explain what the penalties were for. It seems that Google has started a war against selling advertising links on your site. A number of high profile sites had their PR dropped, some by as high as 4 points.

These penalties now make it a harder choice for some websites whether or not to sell advertising. In one hand it can bring in precious income for your website (sometimes your only income). On the other hand Google will now penalize your website by dropping your PR.

Google’s newest update
Google’s last PR update was last April (almost 6 months ago). Considering the average update time was 3-4 months this extra wait had a lot of people worried. People were wondering whether Google was still going to use their PR algorithm or if they were switching to something new to calculate a websites authority.

This this recent update (both up and down) it shows people that Google is still going to use their PR algorithm. For some who are advertising this is bad news because their PR is going down. For those who don’t use advertising (or at least not in an obvious way) this can be a good thing.

Thoughts on the matter
Personally this update in the PageRank is a great thing for me. One of my sites has seen an update, however The Computer Zone is still too new for an update. I’m hoping in the future that updates will come a little more quickly in the future

I’ve always said that bloggers are addicted to their statistics and anyone I’ve ever talked to has confirmed this. One of my favourite statistics to look at is the number of subscribers to my feed. This number basically tells me how many people are reading my blog and how many people enjoy it.

A lot of people focus on the total number of visitors that they get to their blog but I feel that the number of feed subscribers is more important. It’s more important because people that subscribe to your feed will be constant readers. They’re the people that will return again and again. They’re the people that you want to write for and keep happy.

A challenge that I often have is increasing the number of subscribers that I have. I’ve compiled a list of tips that have helped me increase my numbers over the past few weeks.

Write Great Content
Most people would say that writing great content should be done anyways and I totally agree. The problem is that a lot of people don’t do this. If you’re just releasing filler posts people aren’t going to subscribe. They don’t care that you can regurgitate information thats already been written around the web.

Writing unique content is the number one way to increasing your feed subscribers. Keep the stuff interesting, unique and relevant to your blog.

Promote, Promote, Promote
If you don’t have any visitors you can’t expect to have many subscribers, easy as that. Promoting your blog will hopefully bring more visitors to your site, it’ll get you better known in the blogosphere and it can increase your readers. Promoting can take on many different forms. Maybe you like to “Stumble” your own articles. This will bring in a few visitors and hopefully you’re great content will be able to convert a few of these visitors to subscribers. If you don’t have content you shouldn’t bother to promote your blog. When people go to a site that doesn’t have anything there they tend to remember it and never return.

Display Your Feed
Displaying links to your feed(s) in a prominent area can help increase the number of subscribers. Most people don’t enjoy searching through a website to find what they want. If they want to subscribe to your feed but cannot find the link they’ll leave, plain and simple. This is the reason why I have my feed links above all else (I would even place them above advertising if I had any). Another thing you could do is at the end of each of your posts link to your feed. Try something like “If you’ve enjoyed reading this post how bout you subscribe to my feed so you don’t miss out on my other exciting stuff”, or something like that.

Provide Many Feed Options
For this site, I provide a post feed, a comment feed, and a email subscription. The reason why I provide so many different options is because people want different things. Some people don’t want tonnes of things going to their email inboxes whereas some people don’t have feed readers and want constant updates or your site to their email. Providing as many things as possible will let you please as many people as possible.

Submit Your Feed
This tip is from AdesBlog. Submitting your feed to feed directories is a great way to get people to see your feed. Basically these RSS aggregators let the masses see your feed. It’s a quick and easy way to get people to read your feed.

If you do these things I guarantee that the number of subscribers to your feed will increase. One important thing to keep in mind however, is that daily numbers really mean nothing. The number of subscribers to your feed is generally calculated by the number of people that poll your feed (view it). This means that if someone has subscribed to your feed but has not logged in to their favourite Feed viewer, they won’t be counted. Looking at the trends of your subscribers is more important. If the trend is upwards this means that on average more and more people are subscribing (which is a good thing).

Most days I spend a fair amount of time wading through the blogosphere.  I enjoy finding new and interesting blogs to comment on and read.  A couple days ago I came across an interesting concept called “Our Blog Review“.  Whats interesting about this website is that they give your website a free and honest review and all they ask in return is a link back to them.

I asked for a review and they gave me one.  Here’s their review on this site.

Overall its a great site.  They wrote it today so I don’t know what kind of traffic I’ll get but it was cool to have another persons opinion of the site.  The only bad thing they had to say was that the the title against the black was a bit overpowering and luckily thats being changed once the new design comes out.

Yesterday I posted “Why did you start blogging?” and it was the best post I’ve written to date (in my opinion of course). It was interesting, it was easy to write, it got the attention of other bloggers and it brought in a decent amount of traffic. Here are a few tips on writing a great post.

Think of Something New
In my post I went around and asked bloggers why they started blogging. I got a few responses and compiled them into a post, but what’s so new about this? Well I hadn’t seen anything like it in the blogosphere. There have been many posts about how individual bloggers started and even more posts listing things that other bloggers have said (interviews and such), but I hadn’t seen a single person compile a list of how a bunch of bloggers started blogging.

Thinking of fresh things to write about will bring in new readers and keep your existing ones satisfied, its a win-win situation. Thinking of new things is also hard. It’s kind of like movies, most movies are remakes of old ones, but the really great movies are all original creations. Try to think of things that haven’t been done, be creative and I’m sure you’ll be able to think of a few things. Taking something thats been done and adding your own twist on it can also work if you’ve run out of your own new ideas. Either way doing something that has been done a million times will push readers away.

Get Your Readers Involved
The best thing you can do is get your readers involved with the post. I sent out an email to a bunch of people telling them what I was doing and asking for their input. I got a lot of responses and wrote the post. The great thing was, once the post was done I was guaranteed at least as many visitors as there was responses. Because I got some of my readers (or soon to be readers) involved they wanted to come back and see what they said and what others said.

If you’re readers blog this can be helpful in another way. Ben Cook took the time out of his busy schedule to write “What an Interview Can Do For You“. The post was awesome because it gave tips to his readers and it gave some link love to me (thanks Ben). Getting your readers involved means that they’ll be more likely to write about what you did. This will help increase your reputation and get a few links back to your site.

Work Hard
A great post takes a lot of work, plain and simple. You need to think of an idea, execute it and write it. Generally the last two actions are easier but in this case executing it was the hardest for me. Coming up with the idea of asking people why they started blogging was fairly easy. I was sitting down one Sunday morning and it came to me that is what I should do. Executing the plan was by far the hardest post of the entire thing.

I emailed over 40 people individually, which is important, if you do a mass email you probably won’t get any responses. Of those 40+ emails I got 11 responses (10 yes, 1 no). For each of the responses I then sent back three replies, the first reply was a thank you for responding type of deal. The second reply was after I had written the post, I told them when it would be released (because I had a backlog), and where they could find it. The third reply was after it had been released telling them they could now view the post. All-in-all I wrote over 80 emails and it took probably 5 hours (finding peoples addresses, emailing, responding, etc…). I think it was well worth the time.

Results
After a few days of preparation and then a week or two of wait until the post went live I think it went extremely well. Here’s a few of the statistics from my site for yesterday.
Yesterday (Average)
Unique Visitors: 170 (54)
Page Views: 347 (83)
Visit Length: 2:08min (54sec)
Bounce Rate: 44.27% (72%)

Wow look at all those numbers, but what does it all really mean? Well basically because of my post yesterday I brought in 3x the number of unique visitors and on average each visitor visted 0.6 pages more than before. They also stayed on the site for an extra minute and only 44% of the people left without doing anything as oposed to 72%. Basically it means that people were looking at my stuff more than before.

Other things to note: The number of RSS subscribers also increase from 14 to 18 (and I hope it continues to rise), and the post also received the most amount of comments I have every gotten for a single post.

Conclusions
Overall, getting bloggers input was a great idea. Asking people why they started blogging brought in a lot of new readers, and was great. Would I do it again? Definitely not in the near future. Things like this get old quick, people get bored of them and don’t want to read any more. I’ll definitely keep in touch with the people that responded and I think it was a great adventure for my relatively new blog.

I’d like to thank Neil, Randy, Tony, Matt, Henry, Matthew, Caroline, Ben, Lorna, and Daniel for their participation. I’ve had a lot of fun and I hope everyone of them had fun responding and reading the other responses.

Every Sunday I sit down in a comfortable chair and brainstorm ideas for things to write about in this blog. I do this as part of my blogging schedule and it helps me post every day. A few weeks ago while I was braining storming I came up with a devious plan, the plan was to ask bloggers around the blogosphere why they started blogging. I thought it was a great idea because it meant I didn’t have to write as much and it was a great way to interact with the blogging community. Without further adieu here are there responses

Daniel Scocco from DailyBlogTips wrote:

I started blogging as a hobby. At the time I was doing a lot of research for my degree thesis, and I thought: “Why not share all that information on the Internet?”

At the worst of the scenarios no one would read my stuff but I would have an online place to store them electronically. Luckily some people did read it, and it motivated me to launch other blogs subsequently.

Lorna Timbah from WebGrrrl.net wrote:

I have a few reasons why I started blogging. However, my main reason for having a blog is to create a place as a bookmark to self. Back in 1998-9, I didn’t know what to do with all the fun and fantastic e-mails I get as well as amazing sites I’ve been through, and wanted some place to store it. I didn’t trust my browser’s Bookmark function because I had a knack of reformatting my computer every other month.

I ended up creating a manually updated, sort-of-a blog called Doodads which I still have (but left stagnant) in my personal Tripod web site. In 2002, I used Blogger to update the same site. When I decided to get my personal domain, I
chose a ready-to-go platform in my Fantastico option (WordPress) even before I consciously decided to “start blogging”. I didn’t realize my effort almost 10 years ago can be considered blogging until I’ve been doing so for a couple of months.

Ben Cook of Blogging Experiment wrote:

Basically I started blogging because I like an audience. I am a very opinionated person and feel like I have a lot to share. Blogging allows me to share what I have to say with more people than I could ever imagine. To think that 10,000 read an article when it hits the front page of Digg or sites like that is astounding to me. So basically, I started blogging because I needed a megaphone. I started BloggingExperiment because I had seen so many people making so much money through their blogs. I wanted to see if a “regular” guy could do the same thing starting from scratch.

Caroline Middlebrook wrote:

Just a few weeks ago I was working at a 9-5 day job which I liked, but didn’t give me the long term satisfaction that I knew I needed. I quit that day job so that I could devote my life to following my dreams. Really, the blog was started as a way of recording my journey. See unlike most sensible people, I had no secondary income, no savings and no master plan! I just thought “what the heck?” and took a massive risk.

I know there are tons of people out there who are trapped in day jobs that they don’t want to do and they’d love to just quit and work for themselves. With my blog I am showing people step by step what I am doing to make some money online. Hopefully I’ll be successful at that which will inspire other people to do the same.

Matthew from Blog About Your Blog wrote:

I started blogging because I was looking to earn money online, so I didn’t have to get a “real job”. A friend of mine earned money different ways online and recommended it. I started with blogging about fantasy football and soon developed the idea of Blog about your Blog.

Henry Legge wrote:

Well I started blogging because I read connor’s blog and thought hmm thats what I’m going to change my portfolio into. I originaly planned it to be a portfolio for me (still is) but I decided to add a blog to it. I am fairly new to the blogging background, but I plan to become a good blogger.

Matt Huggins wrote:

I created MattHuggins.com with the intention of writing about my efforts as an Internet entrepreneur. I always seem to be working on web projects, and I wanted to share my progress.

My blog has since grown to include informative articles not only on my projects and programming, but also on the topics of blogging, marketing, advertising, SEO, networking, and most recently Facebook. Much of the content comes back to the overall goal of making money online, which has been my intention from the start in documenting my programming efforts.

Tony Targonski from CompSci.ca wrote:

I’ve started my blog as a supplement to the compsci.ca community. There are completely different dynamics to blogs than there are to forums. I wanted a medium that would let me express myself, my thoughts, and my knowledge in an organized and presentable matter. I think since then, the blog has grown to be so much more, and it has gathered its own following.

Randy from GrownUpGeek wrote:

I started blogging primarily as an SEO tool for building a few deep-links into my website, GrownUpGeek.com. After approximately one-year I started treating the blog like a blog but still did not put much time or effort into it. Beginning in approximately July 2007 I dedicated myself to turning my blog into a “real” blog with the theme of “how I did it” as it relates to my success at GrownUPGeek.com.

Neil Duckett wrote:

I guess the main reason I started a personal blog was to communicate with friends back home in Australia. I wanted to avoid a group email every few weeks which would then promote replies i had to respond to. I find it easy to write my thoughts and messages down on a site and let people visit from time to time.

The answers from all of the bloggers are very diverse, it’s interesting to see the different ways people started blogging. I have personally started blogging because of my friend Alex from Sanctified Studios. He was writing flash tutorials and I decided that I wanted to write C programming tutorials. From that spawned the blog that you’re at today. I guess I’m kind of like Ben, I enjoy having people listen to what I have to say and I like it when people read stuff that I write.

Feel free to write down your own comments on why you started blogging.

If you’re blog relies on search engines for the majority of your traffic than this post is going to be fairly important. If most of your traffic comes from feeds or referral traffic than this information might be as relevant.

Anticipating seasonal search traffic (anything other than regular traffic) is the art of knowing what people will be searching in the future and capitalizing on that knowledge. Most of the large blogs already do this (Problogger comes to mind) and get thousands of hits every day from this extra search traffic. You may ask “How can I get this extra traffic?”, but there really isn’t one single answer. Here are a few tips for capitalizing on this seasonal traffic.

• Anticipate what’s going to happen in real life.
  A good part of the seasonal search traffic is knowing what is happening in real life. Lets say for example that its the middle of September and you know that Halloween’s coming up. You could write an article about ‘Safety Tips for Halloweening’ or something like that to capitalize on the search traffic coming from people searching about Halloween. Other things you could post about are: The Olympics, American Idol winners, Christmas (or other holidays), the Superbowl or Stanely Cup, etc…
• Stay inside your niche:
  Obviously some of the things you could write have nothing to do with your blog. While you could write about these things (for example I could cover the Superbowl but this blog is technology related) you probably wouldn’t get any returning visitors or readers. Think about things you can write about that relate to your blog, so your readers stay interested in your other content. If you’re blog is like this one you could write about the top 10 gadgets for this Christmas, or maybe the new technology in the latest Olympic games.
• Write great content:
  This point is extremely important when it comes to seasonal traffic. Unfortunately a lot of bloggers try to get their posts out too quickly without reading over what they wrote. This can lead to posts that are of poor quality and make the readers less interested in your blog.While writing posts to capitalize on seasonal search traffic gets the people to your site, if you’re content isn’t up to their standards than the readers will leave without reading any of your stuff. If you write great stuff than the readers will read more, and hopefully sign up to your feeds, or bookmark your site. The main goal for your site is to get pe ople returning and reading your articles.

I have a few ideas for up-and-coming posts that I’m going to write to try to get in on some seasonal traffic:

• 10 Geeky Halloween Costumes
• How to optimize your blog for Christmas
• Blogging in University
• 10 Must Have Gadgets for the Camping Geek in You

As Darren over at Problogger puts it “The key is to anticipate search traffic - but not to compromise on your reader experience.”

Here’s a list of five extremely useful Wordpress plugins that I use or have used.

1. Democracy Polls:
   Democracy Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that the polls runs the way you wanted. Democracy also has a built-in widget which is great for adding polls to the sidebar.
2. Google Sitemap Generator:
   This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. There latest release works with Wordpress 2.3
3. Ultimate Tag Warrior:
   This plugin allows you to add tags to each post and page. These tags can be used for meta keyword tags, tag clouds and tonnes of other things. I’ve been using this plugin since the start of this blog and love it. Now that Wordpress 2.3 incorporates tags this plugin is going to become history. For those who haven’t upgraded I would consider doing so.
4. TD Word Count:
   This plugin provides detailed published and unpublished word count stats for Wordpress authors. The output is on a single page which allows searching using the browser’s built in commands and can be sorted by date, post title, number of most and least words.
5. Related Posts:
   This great plugin allows you to add a “Related Posts” section to each of your posts. It’s great because it uses your existing tags to match related content. This is a great plugin because it gives your readers more options and keeps them on the page longer (hopefully)

I use most of these plugins and I love them. They’re a great way to keep your visitors on your site and hopefully convert them to lifetime readers.