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Blogging Fingers

Blogging ideas, tips, creativity and money making strategies for blogs


Updating A Blog Can Damage It’s Search Engine RankingsNovember 21

That might sound crazy, but its true. I have a number of niche blogs with just 5-10 posts on them which all receive a small but constant trickle of traffic from Google to earn about a dollar a day each. I have left some of them for upwards of 3 months without any new content because they were sitting there adding a few dollars to the pot quite nicely.

I’ve found that adding a single new post to a blog that hasn’t been updated for some time (at least a month) can “upset the balance”, causing a change in the keywords it ranks for - not always for the best.

As you probably know one of Google’s ranking factors is how new the content is. Generally a blog that is updated daily will be given slightly higher rankings for all their posts, simply because they are keeping up with the times and so are more likely to be relevant to what people are searching for. Adding one new post is not enough to gain this “freshness bonus”; all it serves is to alter the keyword ratios (retro!) on the Homepage by pushing a previous post off the Homepage.

This theory only applies to small niche blogs that are seemingly “dead” but where the owner knows differently. There’s no way adding a new post to a continuously updated site like Mashable would decrease its rankings

Guide To Planning A New BlogNovember 3

thinking_planning_monkeyMaybe you discovered a new hobby that you want to explore, maybe you have a new message to get across, maybe you just need some more money, or more likely a combination of all three. There are many reasons for starting a new blog, and depending on the reason for the blogs’ existence will determine how much planning and preparation needs doing before its launch.

For example, a quick niche blog based around a few keyword phrases doesn’t need as much planning as a flagship blog that you aim to devote at least one blog post a day towards.

Planning a new blog can be divided into two parts; the building of the blog and the launch of the blog in terms of marketing (and longer term marketing plans if necessary). This post will cover the planning of building a new blog.

Photography by Ben Pollard

What Do I Need To Think About When Planning A New Blog?

  • Purpose of the blog. Why are you building it? This means choosing the weighting in terms of money/labor of love.
  • Domain name, Brand Name, slogan/tag line. Will you use .com or something else? Will you include the “Dot Com” in the brand name? Could people easily misspell your domain name? Does the name capture what your blog is all about?
Impact Of Not Posting For 30 Days On Blog TrafficOctober 21

As you may have noticed it has now been 1 full month since the last post on Blogging Fingers. The reason?

A craftily timed experiment.

Having started University and finding myself with no Internet for a matter of weeks I needed a solution, and this experiment is it.

Posting Frequency and Blog Popularity

Posting frequency and traffic levels often go hand in hand, but not all the time. Generally as a rule, more blog posts equals more traffic because more pages get indexed in Google sending more search traffic. Also readers become accustomed to visiting back more often to check for more content and more sites will reference you the more content you have. Therefore you would expect a 30 day dry spell to result in horrific drops in traffic and subscribers, but this has not been the case:

september_traffic.png

As you can see throughout the last 30 days traffic levels have stayed relativity stable.

Why No Drop In Traffic?

  • 36% of Blogging Fingers traffic is from search engines, a very high percentage compared to most similar blogs. Search engines are the slowest to react (out of return visitors and referring sites) and so as a result this large chunk of traffic has not been affected.
  • The posting frequency had been “eased down”, with just 3 posts in September and 4 in August. Thi
All 100 Million Facebook Users Are BloggersSeptember 21

According to Facebook’s statistics page there are over 100 million active users. It seems to me more and more that the “New Facebook”, love it or hate it, has become a microblogging platform. The news feed dominates the profile page and is essentially the foundation of a blog.

Below is the definition of “blog” from Wikipedia

“A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log”) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual [1], with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order”

By that definition, the only aspect that prevents a Facebook profile being called a blog is… wait there isn’t one!

Indeed you wouldn’t call a Facebook profile a Web site, it is part of a Website, but then company blogs are only a part of their Website and yet they are still blogs. I am very surprised that few other bloggers haven’t made this connection. Facebook users, i.e. people we consider “normal” and “mainstream” are in fact bloggers too.

The question is, how far away is a decent app or Facebook update that lets you turn your Facebook profile into a blog as we know it with more text content? All that needs doing is the option to publish longer status updates combined with a

Planning A Blog Re-Design? Read This FirstSeptember 11

Lots of bloggers like to launch their blog into a the new academic year with a re-design. Three new blog designs I’ve observed recently are John Cow, Blog Storm and Tech Crunch. If you are planning a blog redesign I suggest visiting the links I posted above and observing the comments readers made about the new designs, in order to get a better idea of what your readers will be looking for.
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Reading Material About Blog Designs

Note that the comments readers made on these posts are often even more usual than what the original author wrote!