Archive for May, 2009
Happy Memorial Day all you bloggers in bloggerland
Take a day off from your blogs and be sure to get some sun. Remember to flip the steaks every ten minutes or so for about one hour and they will taste great with some potato salad and a nice ice cold beer.
Happy Memorial Day -
![[del.icio.us]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Feed Me Links]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/feedmelinks.png)
![[Google]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[Kaboodle]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/kaboodle.png)
![[LinkedIn]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/linkedin.png)
![[Reddit]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.png)
![[Squidoo]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/squidoo.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Twitter]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
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Filed under Blogging
Top three free blogging themes with a magazine design
Having the right blogging theme for your site allows you to ensure there is room for everything you want to do or cover. Many blogs talk about various topics and therefore look for a magazine design for their blogging theme. These themes usually are broken down into columns where each section is driven by a category of the post.
These magazine design blogging themes are sometimes viewed as premium themes and can be expensive however there are many free themes available. I think these are the best three free blogging themes out there for a magazine design. Remember, these are just templates. It is up to you to customize the theme by adding in your own images, logo’s and plugins to make the template personal to you and your content of the blog.
Mimbo Theme: This is an easy to use layout that has images to break out each section. Provides a side bar that is widget friendly and has room for advertisements. The navigation allows for easy use of both pages and posts and has is very intuitive when you go to set it up. Here is the link to the Mimbo magazine blogging theme.
The Morning After: The three column layout gives you plenty of room for widgets, plugins and advertisements with plenty of room for the content to be read. There is some image locations you can use to personal the site as well. Here is the link for The Morning After magazine blogging theme
Hamasaki Theme: Has a very clean look to it with plenty of room to emphasis your content and the various sections of your magazine. You have a featured section up front and plenty of space in the right side bar to put advertisements or widgets you would want to add in. Here is the link for the Hamasaki Theme magazine blogging theme.
There are tons and tons of free magazine blogging themes out there if these three do not work for you. A good place to start is at this place which seems to have an endless supply if you can’t find what you are looking for.
What is your favorite magazine blogging theme?
Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
Three quick fixes to Improve search engine optimization for your blog
Search engine optimization is not an overnight action where you do one thing and the next day you are ranked on the first page. SEO takes a long time of constantly working on your blog both within building content but also outside building links. However, here are three quick fixes to improve search engine optimization for your blog that you can do right now that will help your chances.
1. Improve search engine optimization by having organized and well structured code. Spiders like clean code and while you may be using a freeware theme for your blog you are now the owner of it and need to ensure that it is bug free. Run your website through a validator to see if there are any quick fixes you feel comfortable taking care of on your blog. The cleaner your code, the more spiders like you, the higher your rank on search engines becomes. Run your blog through this validator and check over the errors.
2. Creating a site map for your blog will help spiders crawl your content and ensure your blog pages are indexed properly. The result will be an improved search engine rank. Site maps are simply a listing of all of the pages and posts on your site in one big file. Spiders follow links to your content to index it. A site map ensures all of your content can be accessed by at least one link. If you don’t have a sitemap, a good place to start is by joining Google’s Webmaster Tools. Here you can create one and google webmaster tools will tell you where to upload it to.
3. Create and/or update your robots.txt file to ensure it represents your blog accurately. The robots.txt file should be stored at the top level of your domain and if you are specifically allowing or disallowing files for inclusion you should update based on your new content. If you are new to the idea of a robots.txt file and have not created one, here is how google suggests you create one and a tutorial to follow.
These three simple things you can do at any time and should plan to do so every quarter or so to ensure your blog is efficient and it will improve your search engine optimization greatly.
Defining your blogging goals can make life easier on yourself
Blogs can be created for a variety of reasons from making money, to serve as a personal journal or to share information about a specific topic. Whatever the reason is, each person should be clear on what their blogging goals are when they first create their blog.
When I created this blog my goals is to create one place where I can talk about what I learned from running five other blogs, ways to increase traffic to blogs and to see more of a challenge on how far up the search engine rank I can get. To me, this is my challenge blog as the theme has a great deal of competition and identifying keywords that have not been targeted is all but impossible. Yet, going into it, I understand that and willing to go for it anyways.
Many times I see people create personal blogs and then sort of quit because they do not get traffic to the site. Well, how many strangers are really interested in a personal blog? Or I see personal blogs that try to monetize themselves. To me this seems like a waste of time. Why put google adsense on a personal blog. Your goal was to write about your life so that most likely your friends and family can read about what is new with you. Why try to make money then? Why not fill up that space with pictures or small clips of movies about your family and friends?
Having defined goals for a blog I think really makes the experience more unifying so that your content, your theme and style are all united. If you are trying to convey serious information then you need to write in a more formal tone. If you are trying to convey information but not really in a serious fashion as part of your blogging goals then you can be informal and use funny images and video. Everything should be aligned with your goals.
Take a look at your blog today and look at your content, your theme, your use of the sidebar and plugins. Do they all say the same thing and push a common idea to the audience? If not, change things up. Blogs do not have to be static and can be changed to improve the user experience.
Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
How to get traffic to your blog on the first week
So I started this blog a week ago and my goal was to get 50 visitors in the first week. I think this is a modest goal but achievable. There are some of the big names in blogging that can create a new blog, link to an existing high traffic blog and the next thing they know they have thousands of readers in the first week. I am not that guy. I have five blogs and one of them averages a few thousand a week but the topic of the blog is completely different.
If you are going to create a second blog that is not related to the first, it is a tough to cross sell the traffic as the audience would not be interested in the new one. With that said, if you were going to start a brand new blog without any “flagship blog” to draw an audience from, how do you get traffic to your blog on the first week? Well here is what I have done and what has worked so far.
I submitted the URL to google and other search engines but this will take weeks if not months before it registers. Also with a competitive topic like blogging, I don’t expect to rank on the first few pages too soon so really need to get traffic in other avenues.
I wrote an article and submitted it to a few article directories. Again, this is more about creating backlinks to my blog then it is on getting traffic to the blog in the first week. Eventually maybe some websites might publish the articles and get me more backlinks but in the meantime, I am happy with the backlinks.
So what has worked to get traffic to my blog during week one? Two things:
1. Social Media: I have posted at least one article each day and when it goes live I stumble and digg it. Surprisingly this has resulted in a few readers coming my way. I think week one this is the most important way to get readers to your blog as it does not require the google spiders to read your content and can be done right away.
2. Comment on other blogs: I have tried to read and comment on at least five blogs each day and while this has only provided some of my traffic it has increased it some which in the first week is all you can ask for.
I think for week two I will set a goal to get 50 readers again. After that I will try and double it to 100 readers for weeks three and four.
Filed under Blogging, Traffic and Blogs
Bloggers Tips – Find out if your blog is popular on Digg
Social Media Optimization I think is just as important as SEO techniques when it comes to building traffic to a blog, especially early on. Social Media sites like del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg can really help drive traffic to a site especially if they land in the top of a category if even for just one day.
If you have ever been curious to see if any of your blog posts have been Dugg by your readers well now you can find out with a quick and easy google search. This is just a really simple bloggers tips that you can apply to many of the Social Media sites out there.
1. Open up a new browser. Copy and paste the following as the address:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Adigg.com+yoursite.com
2. Replace “yoursite.com” with your actual domain name for example for me:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Adigg.com+thebloggingcenter.com
3. Hit go
What you see is all that Digg has on record for your blog. Are you getting any good exposure in there? Use this type of research to figure out where you should be spending your blog marketing time. If you are doing really well on one Social Media site then spend more time there to maximize your exposure where possible.
