To find out what your blogis about, search engines like Google and MSN Search use programs called Web crawlers or spiders. These programs analyze millions of Web pages including blogs, then decide which sites and pages are most relevant for various search terms.

Every search engine has its own formula for ranking Web sites which are kept secret!

Don’t get too caught up with trying to write for search engines, write for people but tag your post correctly.

Also, use links properly - search engines factor in the links from other sites to your site, including the number of links to your site which influences your popularity. They analyse the text in those links, and the quality of the sites that link to yours.

Blog Syndication

Blog syndication is the use of your blog’s feed to deliver your blog’s content to other blogs, feed readers and aggregators. It’s a way of bringing the content directly to the reader. FeedBurner and FeedBlitz, among others, offer email subscriptions of your blog’s feeds, delivering feeds directly to your email inbox. This is especially useful for those who are unfamiliar with feeds.

Why do you need a feed?

A feed automatically delivers your blog post to your readers. Feeds therefore extend your reach. They allow the reader to read your blog content at their leisure, on their terms. The choice of feed reader controls how they view your feed, in a way, giving them control over your blog content. Readers cam click to go to your page in a moment, to read more, find more information, or to comment.

There are two ways a visitor can subscribe to your blog. They can subscribe through the feed via their feed reader, or have the feed emailed to them.

Feeds can also be limited to a specific category of posts, giving your readers a chance to monitor specific topics you blog about, or set for specific authors. To increase feed subscriptions, make your RSS icon visible on your blog. Place it near the top of each page, at the bottom of each post in the post meta data section, and even in the footer.

Your blog readers may not be familiar with feed technology, introduce them to it. It’s a great time-saving method for monitoring the news, weather, and your blog.

5 GOLDEN TIPS TO GREAT POSTS

Use magnetic headlines

Be personal

Post regularly

Respond to comments

Use links in every post

3 WAYS TO KILL YOUR BLOG

Spelling mistakes

Catchy titles unrelated to content

Rudeness or dishonesty

START CONVERSATIONS

You need to interact with your audience for them to return again and again to your blog. They interact with you through comments and there are a few simple ways to attract comments. The easiest way is just ask people to comment! Eg.

“Do you agree?”

“What do you think?”

“Would you do that?”

“Do you know more?”

Give your post depth

To give your post depth you need to do research and get other opinions.

1. Ask Your Readers – Just ask your blog readers for their opinions. Posts that are simply questions are great ways of getting comments on your blog but their real potential is to learn what your readers think.

2. Research Your Topic - One of the most obvious ways to get a quote for a post you’re writing is to Google the topic and see what others have written on it previously. It makes  good sense to research your topics before you post.

3. Target Specific Bloggers/Readers - the last method is where you ask a question of specific people. Send an email out to 4-5 people, experts in their niche to ask them for a quote or to do a ‘one question interview’. Then include these short quotes in your post - giving it more depth and also can add some expertise to your post.

10 ways to create GREAT CONTENT

1. Be useful and unique. For a blog to be successful your content needs to be useful and unique to your readers 2. Find out what your readers want and give it to them.

3. Express yourself. Let loose with your own passions, experiences and knowledge in a way that your readers want - create content that will add something to their lives.

4. Entertainment – Remember that your blog is a form of entertainment. People may come to read it for laughs, for gossip and for fun conversation.
5. Education – you are an expert in your field, attract readers who are primarily interested in learning something about your topic.
6. Information – You are reporting from the front lines. You have may be the most informed person out there on an issue, product or topic. Be the first to tell it.
7. Debate - some blog readers want to have a good old fashioned dialogue, debate or even a fight over an issue
8. News - many blog readers just want to be kept up to date in a field
9. Community The most important purpose of your blog which will contribute to success is if you can tap into the need that people have to connect and belong.

10. Unique and original content Your blog can be GREAT if you can guarantee ‘unique’ content to your readers. Distinguish yourself by creating your own niche. Either with the topic or your style.

Personality is everything

If I told you that your blog is a personal diary then I lied. Your blog is so much more than just a diary, it’s a conversation between you and your readers. You want them to not just read your posts, but to feel compelled to take action. The action could be to comment on the post, or preferably to make a sizeable donation. Always keep this goal in mind while you develop your blog.

I’m no expert but these tips below may everyone, from beginners to the experienced and especially the fatigued to get started/restarted, to energize your blog posts and drive up traffic and donations.

It’s not only what you write, its how you write

Yes you do need to tell a compelling story with every post, content is important. But to turn a good post into a GREAT post, the recipe needs a dose of your own personality.

1.      Be personal– every reader likes to get inside your skin, feel the magic of the post.

2.      Be yourself – not too stiff or formal. Think of your audience as a good friend, write to your readers so it sounds natural, the way it would if we were chatting with each other over a coffee.

3.      Write about what you love and let us feel your passion. Use emotion (The sad death of a gentle elephant http://elephantvoices.wildlifedirect.org/2008/02/25/the-sad-death-of-a-gentle-elephant/

4.      Remember that you are having a conversation with your readers, they will respond and interact with you like an audience, so don’t be afraid to perform.

5.      Leave out the jargon and technical language.

6.      Be honest

7.      State an opinion about a news item and include the opinions of others on the topics that you’re exploring.  eg. “I think this is the stupidest thing but Joe Smith in his blog (hyperlink it to his URL) has  a totally different opinion”

To generate interest in your blog, what you is to maximize interactions with your readers through their comments. Most of your visitors will simply leave a message. You should read the comments and respond to any questions there in, or just join the conversation.

In addition, authors of other blogs can leave comments without even visiting the blog! These are called “pingbacks” or “trackbacks”, and they basically inform other bloggers whenever they cite an article from another site in their own articles. This means tht online conversations are painless among various site users and websites.

Managing Comments

Sometimes you will get weird comments and you may need to moderate and manage comments and deal with the annoying trend in “comment spam”, when unwanted comments are posted to your blog.

We’ve set the system on WildlifeDirect to hold in moderation any comment with more than 1 URL. These comments are highlighted in the dashboard and you can check them and delete the spam and approve any genuine

Trackbacks

TrackBack provides notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B. A better explanation is this:

Person A writes something on their blog.

Person B wants to comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog

Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A’s blog

Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B’s post Most trackbacks send to Person A only a small portion (called an “excerpt”) of what Person B had to say. This is meant to act as a “teaser”, letting Person A (and his readers) see some of what Person B had to say, and encouraging them all to click over to Person B’s site to read the rest (and possibly comment).

Person B’s trackback to Person A’s blog gets posted along with all the comments.

Pingbacks 

These are similar to trackbacks but do not contain any content. The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments: A Pingback is another type of Linkback, or methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Wordpress have automatic ones so that all the links included in a blog post can be pinged when it is published to related links . You can learn more about trackbacks and pingbacks here

If you are like me, you were given a password but your brain can’t fathom it and so you set your computer to remember it. Easy right. Dangerous I promise.  You have to change it to something you’ll always remember. I’ll tell you why.

Many of us stick with the random password we’re given when we start a new blog and since it’s an impossible string of numbers and letters, we choose the easy option and tell the computer to ‘remember me’. This can be fatal if you are traveling need to upload a post from an internet café or someone else’s computer which happens if there’s some breaking news you need to relay when you computer is back at the office. You don’t have to wait just because you don’t remember your password.

 This is important guys because it can be maddening to your readers when stand them up, you don’t show up, don’t post for a while. Don’t underestimate how annoyed and rebellious your readers will get if you change your posting frequency or abandon your blog for a few weeks. And for you it means starting from scratch and building up the readership all over again when you get back. Why bother when there’s an easy solution?  Just change your password to something you will always remember.

To change your password to something you will remember log in as normal, login as usual, go to Manage and Password options, type in your new password twice in the boxes and upload the changes. Hey Presto it’s done! Now you will have no problem posting from anywhere.

For those with a wildlifedirect.org blog, if you can’t remember your wildlifedirect password and can’t login – just email us on partnerships@wildlifedirect.org and we will immediately change your password for you from our end.

Comments are a critical means of having that important conversation with your visitors. You need to mange the comments in your blog to avoid receiving spam or hate mail.

Bloggers have several options for setting the way comments are to be handled and whether they should be moderated or not (that means whether they should be approved by the blog owner or not).

At WildlifeDirect we set all blogs not to be moderated unless a commentator attempts to leave 2 or more links. This is just one mechanism to prevent spam (we also have other tools). However, you might still have a valid commentator trying to leave more than 2 links because they have some important contribution to a conversation.

You need to monitor these comments which will not appear on the blog, but can be viewed and approved in the back end.

To do this simply log in and look at the right hand side of the dashboard. It will give you information on latest comments. Look at whether there are any comments in moderation. If there are comments in moderation, go to Comments and click on Awaiting moderation. This will allow you to approve, or delete any comment. It’s a good practice to clear your comments in moderation every week or so.

If you are getting comments that are disturbing, hate mail or that kind of thing, or just plain rubbish, you can turn on the moderation by going to Options, and then click on Discussion – here you can change various settings

To make it easy for you to track what’s happening I recommend you try the following settings which will minimize your need to actively manage or moderate

Usual settings for an article:
(These settings may be overridden for individual articles.)

• Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)
• Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)
• Allow people to post comments on the article