I’m late with this today. All the other bloggers taking part in Blogger Appreciation Day seem to have gone live hours ago. I have the flu, so excuse me for bringing up the rear on this.

It’s about time devoted bloggers got a bit of appreciation! The whole idea was born out of a flash of inspiration Darren Rowse had this morning, but seems to have caught on like lightning–It was in full rage when I woke up, which was nighttime still in the US.

I’m going to list all the great bloggers I admire, and especially those I have learned the most from or network with.

Makakmedia Blog

DoshDosh

Problogger

Ittybiz Blog

Chris Garrett the Business of Blogging and New Media

Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

Copyblogger

Ask Dave Taylor

SEOMoz

SEO Rant

Comhacker

Hamlet Batista

The Well Fed Writer blog

Cornwall SEO

Of course, there are loads more really excellent bloggers out there. To all of you I wish a wonderful Blogger Appreciation Day, and an enhanced online presence!

• Add this to Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

I researched this list to motivate myself as much as anything else. No matter how long you’ve been blogging there’s always room for improvement. To improve my own blogging skills I’ve looked to outstanding bloggers for inspiration. You’ll find a list at the bottom of this post.

1. Successful bloggers are truthful: you can be confident that a little research won’t turn up gaping holes in their testimony.
2. They passionately adore their subject. This is a must. Your passion must also ignite your reader’s passion. Never try and blog about something you don’t love.
3. They are ambitious. Building a popular blog takes a lot of work and determination. Long hours spent writing and long hours spent learning the craft of blogging.
4. Their writing is conversational and easy-to-read. While most readerships are forgiving of the odd typo, copy that is riddled with spelling mistakes and missing words is just as off-putting as writing that doesn’t speak to the reader. Spend a little time perfecting your writing style. Examine the writing style of bloggers you find most interesting to read. Your byword should be ‘proofread.’
5. They make their blog look nice.There’s no excuse not to do this. Now you can get literally hundreds of nice-looking templates if you use a platform like WordPress. It’s easy and free, so pick one that will appeal to your target niche. Also, don’t forget to dig out an interesting picture or photo to accompany your blog posts. It’s well known that pictures make your posts a lot more attractive to a lot more people.
6. They blog regularly. This is quite possibly the most difficult thing of all to achieve. Blogging is a long-term commitment, and when you have eager readers and sponsors (advertisers) depending on you, you can’t just take a holiday whenever it pleases you.
7. Their posts are of more-or-less uniform quality. Research and care leave traces. There’s a huge difference to the reader between an article that has been lovingly crafted and a few paragraphs hurriedly strung together. This is another difficult habit to nail down. Sometimes you just don’t feel like blogging. I’ve found that it’s better to just leave a gap in your blogs rather than post any old junk. A good trick is to always have three or four draft posts ready to be dusted off and posted if you’re pushed for time, or just plain don’t feel like it.
8. Bloggers are, almost without exception, nice people. Even if they thrive on controversy, they’re not mean or insulting. To take this point a little further, the most popular bloggers are the nicest ones, like Darren Rowse of Problogger, or Maki of DoshDosh.
9. They love to learn. Blogging is a craft that needs to be learned. It takes a great deal of experimentation and reading to get to the point where you’re gaining readers on a daily basis and making your way into people’s RSS readers. To get you started in the right direction, consume this list by Problogger.
10. Successful bloggers network. Having a circle of others who know their subject and who are prepared to give opinions and otherwise help out is an invaluable aid to the blogging process. Their favorite haunts are sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, twitter, FaceBook, FriendFeed and others.
11. They are heavily into social media and social networking for the potential extra exposure. See list in bullet above.
12. The more popular a blog becomes, the more you’ll notice that the blogger is frequently seen in SEO circles. There are even a number of notable bloggers whose opinions on SEO are widely respected. Search engine optimization is essential for your blogging success, and the most important part of optimizing your blog is getting inbound links. You can do this by having great content that others want to link to, and by commenting on other good blogs. Don’t forget linking between your blog posts for legitimate links too. Beyond that, here are some great tips for optimizing your blog from Search Engine Land, and another from Pronet Advertising.
13. Successful bloggers give their readers information that is not just interesting–it has to be useful too. If you can help your readers out in their daily work or lives they’ll be back again and again.
14. For the most part, successful blogs deal with a niche–a specific part of a subject. There are a few examples of blogs that deal with a wide range of subjects though. One I love is Lifehacker.
15. They are prepared to spend literally hours a day to post, network and improve their blog. I would say that two-three hours a day is the minimum you’ll get by on if you want a remarkably successful blog. Just being honest here, for all those who think they can get by on twenty minutes a day!
16. The most successful blogs are those that form a community. Good bloggers are good community leaders, and for many blogs this is key. Over to Guy Kawasaki for more on building a community.
17. Create dialog with other top bloggers. It’s no coincidence that all the top blogs regularly refer to posts on other blogs, and even engage in conversation with other bloggers through their posts. This takes the concept of community building to a higher level and provides readerships with further resources that will be useful to them.

Bloggers I find Outstanding

(In no particular order)

• Darren Rowse of Problogger
• Maki of DoshDosh
• Chiropractic of Planet Chiropractic
• Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz
• Dave Taylor of Ask Dave Taylor
• Brian Clark of Copyblogger
• Michael Gray of Wolf Howl
• Rae Hoffman of SugarRae
• Lyndon Antcliff of Cornwall SEO
• Chris Garrett of ChrisG.com
• Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog
• Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void
• Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz

• Add this to Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

Ever noticed how sometimes a few straggling birdies get left behind each year when all the others are migrating to better climates? Chances are those that get left behind end up not making it at all.

I hate to be a drama queen (not known for it), but if you are stubborn about not getting involved with twitter, you might just find yourself wishing you’d joined the rest of the flock, especially if you work online.

I know there are a number of online personalities who, like me in the beginning, see twitter as just one more social-media drain on our time, but I’m happy to admit that I was wrong on that score. I’m now a self-confessed twitter-holic.

The twitter world is fast developing into a hub for the various industries. All you need do to ensure permanent access to professional opinions, great company, and breaking news, is open an account and search for all the people in your industry you wish you had access to. You’ll probably be surprised how many are already on twitter. Join as many communities you want, and you’re all set.

Remember though, that if you want to use twitter for family and friends too, you’d be better off opening more than one account so that your professional associates can’t end up reading your family small talk.

Like many others in the SEO industry in particular, I’ve discovered that twitter is wonderful for keeping me in touch with what’s going on. We’re even privy to breaking news as it’s actually breaking, and I love hearing about stuff before anyone else does!

There are a number of twitter clients designed to help you get the most of your micro-blogging experience. Instead of exhausting (and boring) myself, I’m going to send you over to this brilliant list. That should be plenty to keep you going for a while. My favorite (and the only one I use) is Twhirl. It’s easy, non-intrusive, meaning I can work while I’m using it, and it seems to have few bugs. In the bargain, you can log onto multiple accounts and read them all from the same tiny window. Brilliant.

My one pet peeve with Twhirl, however, was that it opened links in IE instead of FireFox, which is my default browser. I tweeted about it a couple of times but no one answered my cries for help. Then yesterday Andy Beard encountered the same problem, so my eyes were glued to his tweets until he came up with an answer, which I knew he would. So it is with full credit going to Andy that I present to you the solution here! I’m so happy that now when I click on a link in a tweet, it comes up in FireFox. I HATE IE!

Just in case any twitter people get to read this, one thing both twitter and Twhirl are lacking is an efficient search mechanism. If you just know you saw a tweet about something important a few days ago, you can’t find it in search (well not reliably). You need to go back through all the tweets, which can be an extreme headache, particularly if you’re pushed for time which we all are.

But I love twitter, and even the attractions of FriendFeed can’t lure me away, well not for now anyway.

So what do I mean by ‘don’t miss the twitter migration?’ It seems to me that at some point they’ll probably have to change the rules for twitter, when it gets too big to manage in its present format. Maybe there will come a time when you can’t just decide to ‘follow’ any person of your choice. For me this is a totally valid reason to get in now before things do change (of course, then again they might not). And then there’s always the fact that some pretty impressive individuals are still willing to follow you back. Once they’ve got upwards of 10,000 followers that’s unlikely to be the case.

Oh, and if you love the little birdie with attitude featured in the twitter logo, you’ll be impressed to know that it’s the work of another twitter-holic, non other than cartoonist Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void.

If you want to start somewhere, follow me on twitter!

• Add this to Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

Just recently we’ve seen a number of new applications appear on the web to help online business, and in particular bloggers.

In my last couple of posts you heard about how important it is to track your web stats, and a few carefully considered suggestions from me. I promised to let you know about a new tracking program I just discovered called GoingUp. Well, the verdict’s in: I LOVE IT! Trust me, you should try this one. I’m using the free version which tells me just about everything I want to know about where my traffic is coming from, how much, and what they look at when they arrive at my blog. Heck, this free program even has heat maps, which as you know can be vital to successful online marketing.

Now the next tool is going to please you if you’ve ever wanted to post some information in PDF form on your blog or website. This absolutely beautiful little gadget from Issuu not only does the job efficiently, it makes your web page look so impressive. You can see it in action here in my copywriting secrets post on my other blog. I’m sure you’ll want to start using Issuu yourself right away, and when you’ve seen for yourself how great it is, please go and vote for it in the SXSW awards.

Many bloggers are getting a bit jaded about commenting because so many blog owners don’t realize that they’re depriving commenters from that all-important link goody by not changing WordPress’s default no-follow arrangement. If you’d like to encourage your visitors to leave comments (you should-they’re the life-blood of a blog), then check out the several so-called link-love plugins offered for WordPress users. I use Lucia’s Linky Love do-follow plugin. Don’t forget to adjust the plugin settings to give link goodness after a certain number of visits–3 seems to be optimal.

Well, I think that should be enough to be going on with for now. Please remember to comment (yes, you’ll get link goodness), and I’d also really appreciate a stumble. Thanks.

• Add this to Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

if your blog is typical it’s nice–clean lines, easy to understand navigation, and useful content. But it doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from the millions of other blogs out there.

If you want to really stand out from the crowd, you have to get some kind of a buzz going. The ways to do this are:

• Write about something outrageous before anyone else does (like Britney shaving her head for example)
• Write something so useful that millions of people will want to bookmark it and link to it
• Offer readers something for free that will keep them coming back for more. Examples of this might be software, such as how much is your blog worth, or an offer to do something for a reader–something they’d find really useful. The sky’s the limit really–the point is you gotta offer them something they really want.

One important thing: a blog is only as important as its comments, so encourage people. Ask them to comment, and give them link love. Make sure they realize that you don’t employ no-follow. So many people are doing that these days and it doesn’t make sense when you’re trying to establish a blog. WordPress actually has a plugin called LinkLove which I employ to help in this direction.Try and get a few good incoming links. I got a good .edu link, and I’ve been trying to find the wonderful little blog post that helped me to do that. when I track it down I’ll pass it on to you.

Try and get people to favorite you on Technorati too. That can really make a difference. Make sure you include your little icons so readers can write you up to Digg, Delicous and all the others.

• Add this to Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

Blogging is a complex business. It’s not just a matter of throwing your words up on a web page and you’re done. Not by a long shot. You have to learn how to make your blog interesting and get noticed by the search engines. To make it even more complex, the SEO that you’d use for a regular website, while not totally irrelevant, has to be modified a bit for blogs, especially if they’re hosted on one of the major platforms like WordPress or TypePad. Just so you know, I use hosted WordPress, which means I use WordPress software hosted with my own personal webhosting provider, and using my own domain name.

A few days ago I came across this interesting website where the owner, Frank Carr was generously offering to do a blog review upon request. So I submitted my request and forgot all about it. Imagine my surprise this morning when I was checking my standing with Technorati (every blogger should have an account at Technorati–it’s a prerequisite), when I discovered that the review was already posted.

I feverishly clicked through to see what the verdict was. Click through to Optempo and you can read it too.

I’ve already implemented most of Frank’s suggestions, but I have yet to upload an RSS icon that would meet with his approval, and I’m wondering about removing the ‘more’ feature from my posts. I only recently started using this because I discovered that it can help you avoid duplicate content issues with the SEs. Now I’m stumped. I don’t know what to do. It’s true that they don’t use ‘more’ over at SEOmoz, but they probably don’t care about impressing the search engines as much as I do. If you have an opinion on whether or not it’s best to use the ‘more’ feature, do leave a comment and let’s all discuss it. You can do this without registering now, as I removed that requirement as per Frank’s suggestions.

Also, my choice of theme did not pass muster with Frank. I’m standing by that one Frank, I happen to like pink! I also think that visual diversity is essential on the Internet. Again, whaddya think?

I’m leaving off the ‘more’ feature now until I can nail down a decision one way or the other.

Thanks so much Frank, I really appreciate you taking the time to write the review for me. Best of luck to you!

• Add this to Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

I have had a terrible time in the past few days. I can’t convey the entire experience to you, but I will outline the bare bones of it. It all started when I got an email citing ‘abuse’ from my Web host provider.

(more…)

• Add this to Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

I’ve seen a remarkable increase in my blog traffic in the past couple of months, and if you’re a sane person doing business online, you should be interested in the reasons why.

(more…)

• Add this to Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

It’s never easy to locate the right source of help when you need it. Building a list of online resources that will truly support your business takes a great deal of time, not to mention trial and error. So whenever I come across a resource worth mentioning, I make a point of mentioning it.

Recently I needed to revamp the contact page for my main business website for SEO consulting. This time I wanted to make sure I got a page that looked great, made a good impression, and if possible scuttled spam in the bargain. That’s a tall order, I know, but I’m a demanding person. So I went over to one of my favorite forums, SEO Best Practices Search Engine Forums, to see what I could find.

Withing moments of posting my cry for help, WebSavvy, AKA Deb, made me an offer. I accepted. I am now a very happy customer and will continue to sing her praises. If you’re looking for PHP programming help, I hope she has time to help you. If not, in my opinion, you’ll be taking second best whoever you hire.

<ckey=”2E4295F4″>

• Add this to Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati

I’ve been quiet lately. So much to do, suffering from overwhelm! One of these days I’m going to have to give in and hire an assistant so I can take care of the really important stuff like family and SEO. Lol.

I’ve been holding out on you all: Coming up is a fabulous interview with Rand Fishkin, as a follow up to the interview I published a couple of months back. Stand by to be impressed!
Before I rush off to take care of some errands, let me tell you about an exciting source of free traffic for your blog. Blogrush is a free service that is already being used by a lot of successful bloggers and even SEO people. They had some issues with the usual spammers and jerks, so they’ve taken the time to rebuild their operation to allow only sincere and honest bloggers to take part. So if you’re a spammer, do yourself a favor and don’t bother to click on that link!

I really admire founder John Reese for his determination to keep Blogrush free of Internet lowlife and I sincerely wish him well in this attempt.

• Add this to Social Bookmarking
  
  • Subscribe
  • Blinklist
  • Bloglines
  • Blogmarks
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati