As I’m not a professional blogger, I need to maintain my blog while having a full-time job ( and a life for that matter -)). I’ve been looking into several ways to become more effective in maintaining and writing a blog. All the time I spend with blogging can actually be divided in 4 large chunks :

1. Setup and maintenance of my blog : setting up the blog, installing plugins, blog design, …
2. Traffic generation and analysis: search engine & directory submission, search engine optimization ,..
3. Sourcing : finding good sources or material to write about
4. Writing posts : writing new posts from the collected information

After your blogs construction phase, there is obviously ongoing work on maintenance & traffic generation but relatively less then time spent with sourcing and article writing. Especially so when unique content is intended as a traffic generator ! Sourcing is the most obvious part to save time and involves :

1. Collecting enough relevant fixed sources ( writing about related content) which are typically RSS feeds, mails or links to sites.
2. Collecting link or RSS directories as a starting point to new related sources
3. Search engines

Of course, finding the right sources can be time consuming but even more is reading through all your existing sources. Although I used some very good tools to read E-mail, browse RSS feeds and organize bookmarks, I have been looking for the one tool that bundles all of these ( for free ). I found this combination in My Yahoo and more …

If you sign up for a Yahoo account, you start immediately by customizing your own My Yahoo page ! You define your own layout and theme, create one or more pages and select the content of your interest for each page. Reordering can be done by simple drag & drop. To understand how powerful this tool can be in optimizing your sourcing productivity, I’ll explain how I optimized my own page to optimize productivity :

To start, I divide My Yahoo in several pages : a home page where all my key content appears and some side pages where I put focussed content on.

The home page is divided in 3 columns : 2 sidebars and a larger middle section.

The left sidebar contains 2 modules :

1. A Search box which allows you to immediately start searching topics using the Yahoo search engine. Searches can be personalized in order to find the most relevant content according your preferences.
2. A Calendar that lists your tasks to do, Eg. Plan to research on a certain topic or to write a new article at a certain day. Besides using it as a blog time management tool, it can also be synchronized with your existing appointments on your palm or outlook.

The middle column contains :

1. A mail preview box to preview your incoming mail
2. A notepad to list new ideas or draft concepts for your next posts
3. A list of modules previewing the latest posts from your key RSS sources

The right sidebar contains :

1. A module to Add content from Yahoo’s listings or any other RSS feed. An even more valuable sourcing technique is the possibility to create your own custom RSS feeds based on keywords !
2. A message center to list incoming messages
3. A bookmarks section where you can links to your favorite blogs or sites
4. A module that allows to browse Yahoo’s directory

Besides my home page, I’ve created a number of pages which contain news for specific topics. For these pages, I choose to have a two-column layout with only a right sidebar which is pretty much the same sidebar as on the home page, except that I also inserted the search box. The left part contains only news items on a specific topic, from an existing RSS feed or one or more custom feeds containing keywords, relevant to that topic, Eg. Adsense.

Last I’d like to sum-up what I believe to be the key benefits of using My Yahoo as a blogging productivity tool :

1. It bundles several tools in one : mail reader, RSS news reader & aggregator, agenda, sticky notes, search engine, online bookmarking and browsing Yahoo directories.
2. RSS feeds can be easily added and categorized using pages, preview preferences can be easily customized ( Eg. Preview posts from last 3 days ). A single topic can be completely previewed by scrolling down which I find more responsive then browsing different folders and clicking an RSS feed to preview it’s topics as most RSS readers do.
3. It is web-based and thus can be easily accessed from any pc you are working on. On top of that, the tool is very performing and responsive, in contrary to most web-based applications !
4. Yahoo is continuously developing new amazing programs which provide more and more usefull tools like alerts when new content is found on a topic of interest, Yahoo 360 which includes the ability to blog, Yahoo groups to build your community and much more …
5. Last but not least : it is completely free !!!

James Collins posts tips, tricks and tutorials at Lucrative tips on making some money on the web. No promises for big fortune, no automated-lay-back-and-become-a-millionaire-scams here, but serious ways to make an additional income or living on the web.

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Even though I’ve had several personal blogs for years, I’ve only been officially business blogging since 2003. So in going back over expenses for the last quarter, you can imagine my shock when I realized that my overall business costs were down about 19%. What saved me so much money? Surprisingly, blogging.

How can you save money with your blog? It’s pretty simple, so I’ll be brief.

Attract search engine traffic without paying the big bucks

If you want Google, Yahoo and MSN to pay attention to you, blog.

It doesn’t have to be a whole new site, just add a directory to your existing site and start blogging. Most blog software solutions are either cheap or free.

And you can find out most basic blog information online for free (really, sometimes just typing your question into Google will do it.) by people who’ve actually done it. For less than $100, you can build a small library of blog tips and secrets, written by successful business bloggers.

Instead of buying links, get one-way links from blog search engines and directories, as well as getting your RSS feed content displayed at other sites.

Linking is a great way to get search engine attention and click traffic. Some people get links by trading; others by including their links at the end of freely distributed articles. Others pay to be listed, or to get linked.

In each of these scenarios, some type of trade takes place, money, free content, or a link back.

When you blog, you’ll find plenty of search engines and directories that are willing to list you free of charge. For the most part you won’t need to link back - you’ll get a one-way link from site favored by search engines, often using text that you select yourself.

If 90 or more of these free, legitimate links back to your site is worth your time, then get you blog in motion.

Not only that, if you update frequently, other sites may want to display your RSS feed content on their sites. To encourage them to do so, put a link on your page with instructions on how to do so. Ever since I put one on the front of my site, various feeds from my main site have turned up in the most unexpected places.

Cheaper way to study your audience.

As your blog gets more popular, you may start to find that on any given day, you have a representative cross-section of prospects and clients at your site. If you have a question for them, you can just… ask.

True, you can post a link to a survey in your newsletter or on your site, but these are not as interactive as the ability for your audience to comment. They will comment, and you can reply to ask them to expand, or clarify. Conversation gets going and before you know it, a bond is formed, a much stronger bond than occurs in a one-way conversation.

Cheaper (and faster) way to start a resource or authority site.

Five years ago, if you wanted to start an authority site, your best bet was to build a portal with a specialized directory at its core. Three years ago, you were better off starting a forum with a resource section attached to it. Last year, your top bet was a feed-enabled content management system, especially as more parts of content management systems began to have content feeds related to them. (I have 12 feeds for each of my PHP-Nuke based sites, though they don’t work as well with Google Tap.)

Now, if you want to be the expert, you want to start a blog.

If you’re blogging consistently, you have a hub of information collected that will inspire return traffic. You have a collection of links to articles, sites, and tools. You can constantly write up your own opinion editorials on each of these items, as well as fact-based analysis of news and events that can help your audience make better choices.

As blog software matures you can now categorize, and alphabetize your links, and with the ability to ping multiple sources as well as leave trackback links to other sites, you can send your readers through a ring of related, freshly updated information that ultimately leads back to you.

Spend less money on advertising as your blog becomes more popular

I can’t promise you that you’ll never spend another red cent on advertising costs. However, the amount of free advertising you get from having your blog link or RSS feed listed in dozens of search engines and directories, and popping up in feed readers is not to be underestimated.

You’ll probably still want to do some ezine advertising when your new ebook or software release is debuted. But you may not need to buy as much advertising or purchase as often.

Then there is the fact that many newsletters that are also published to RSS feeds have wider reach. I’ve found that it’s worth the extra money to appear in both versions - ask your favorite publisher for details. For publications that allow this, it’s normally only 20% extra

Save money by retaining visitors

You’ve probably heard a thousand times that it is easier to sell repeatedly to an existing client than it is to find a new one. So how do you get that visitor to come back, and possibly buy again?

A constant stream of new information on a particular topic work is enough to keep people buying a daily newspaper, subscribing to a magazine or viewing a television series.

Frequent updates can work the same way for your site.

With bloggers being named People of the Year by Time magazine last year, if you’re not blogging in 2005, you’re going to be left in the dust by other sites in your industry that do. It doesn’t have to take up a lot of extra time, and the time it does takes is made up for in the money you can save.

Read more about how a blog can help you get spidered by search engines within 24 hours at http://www.freetraffictip.com/gbc .

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Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds?

No matter what you market on the internet at some point you’ll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don’t know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we’ll focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to your site using a blog.

The third most overlooked way to bring traffic to your site with a blog is to read and comment on other blogs.

Now, maybe you’ve done this before but stopped, because you’re

becoming concerned about being considered a link-spammer. In

that case, leave a link to your site after your comments, instead of in the comment form that hot links it.

In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this will become less of a concern.

Besides, getting clicks from people who read comments, or visits from search engine spiders through your comments, isn’t necessarily your direct objective, though it’s definitely a plus.

What you want to do via commenting is to enter the blog community that corresponds to your target market. Get to know who the players are and make agreements with them to cycle traffic between you.

Or lurk to find out where your target market typically hangs out when they’re online - you’d be surprised at how many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can find through this method.

(If you’re looking to get linked, there’s another way that we’ll go over next.)

This tip alone has earned me a few dozen links from prominent blogs in the past four days alone.

These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because they send targeted traffic from established sources, and come from experts with records of proven results.

You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the quality of the information they share.

The second method to more blog traffic is the most confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason its benefits remain overlooked.

In the simplest of terms, Trackback is kind of a remote commenting system that incorporates linking. It allows the reader to follow a topic around the web to see other bloggers remark on the same subject. It enables the publisher to remotely cite references to the issue on which they’ve written.

Once you’ve made yourself familiar with the blogging community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse of conversations within your site’s theme. Then, when you see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the other site a notification to let them know you cited them on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and often draws visitors to you.

Bloggers who use Trackback often enjoy greater control over

this function in their blogs than they do over linking, as they have the option to reject your reference - so there is a lesser incidence of fraudulent linking. That also gives your link a greater chance of being displayed.

So why don’t more people use Trackback?

One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free blog system, Blogger, doesn’t have Trackback. However, Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service - it’s a cut and paste away.

Many new bloggers don’t get what it is and how it differs from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a little more complex than I’ve stated. But learn to use Trackback properly, and you won’t need to beg for links to your site ever again.

It’s harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to your site three times a week, by the end of the year you’d have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are more valued by search engines than a typical link trade with an unrelated site.

The most overlooked source of traffic for a blog is through article submission. To start with, turn your longer posts into articles and submitting them to ezines or directories. Look especially for directories that ask for the direct link to the article on your own site, and input the permanent link to the post on your blog.

Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers.

It’s a shame this is the one of the least used traffic methods for most sites, let alone for blogs. In four days, this method generated just over 1000 visitors. 157 newsletter leads, 98 new feed subscribers, and 206 links to my site. You may not get these same results right away, but using these simple strategies can still get you more exposure than you have now.

These aren’t normally the highest quality links, as they rarely make sure of anchor text. However, bloggers are citing me using Trackback, sometimes in lieu of linking to the site where they originally found the article.

To see this in action, do a search on “Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings”, the title of an article I submitted earlier this week.

That article was published within a week of this one- the results speak for themselves. Many of these sites aren’t the ones where my articles are normally published.

There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can leverage the content in your blog or RSS feed to increase the traffic to your site. The methods outlined here may be a bit outside the norm, but, as you’ll soon find, that’s part of the reason they are so effective.

Copyright © 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

Still not blogging yet? Don’t quite get RSS? Take the free

course on RSS and blogging at http://www.freetraffictip.com

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