eBestAgent

My Blogcatalog friend SiteFever is having a new contest. The prize is Western Digital’s My Book 1TB external hard drive! That’s $400 worth at this time.

All you’ve got to do is make a post on your blog linking to this contest and tell everyone what you would do with a free 1TB hard drive! Everyone has equal chance of winning this beautiful external drive. The contest ends on October 13, 2006

What should I do with 1TB drive? I’ll actually put it in my book shelf like a real book. I have an extra 12 ft. long usb cable and it’ll blend right into my book shelf. I don’t have to worry about foot print of this external drive on my desktop and it’ll beautify my book shelf with glowing blue light.

SiteFever is one of the well known SEO blog run by John Robinson. John Robinson is the author of famous “Blog Traffic Made Easy” eBook. It’s the best eBook on generating blog traffic and SEO without costing you a cent. That’s right it’s free eBook and no additional purchase whatsoever. Don’t forget to download while visiting SiteFever.com It’ll double and quadruple your blog traffic.

Technorati Tags: sitefever, contest, 1TB external drive

Humble Blog Review #2: A Cool Little Blog

Mr. Holliman of A Cool Little Blog, aka “American Genius” asked me to critique his blog. He claimed 4 blogs in Technorati, I just picked the first one. Here’s my honest opinion and suggestion.

First thing that I noticed was you’re looking for right template for your blog. I don’t blame you. I’ve tried 40-50 themes until I found Mandigo theme. If you post your requirements for your theme on blogger discussion forum, you’ll get plenty of suggestions from contributors.

Second thing, I was looking for a category or label list. It will make readers navigate your blog better.

Third thing, I think you should read this post. That’s about it, wait here’s more.

It’s very nice to see an artist’s blog that actually updated regularly. You know, artist and blog doesn’t mix well. I’ve seen many artists start blogging and just disappear after few days. Very disappointing but you got to respect their schedule.

I’ve seen your artworks and wish you posted more information about your paintings. I’d like to see title, size of painting, medium, and date. You’re an expressionist artist. I’m pretty sure your blog readers want to hear more stories about your paintings. You’ve got great reviews from eBay buyers and you’ll have no problem getting clients in the future.

Last thing, after reading few posts, it seems to me that you worry too much. Either you’re a perfectionist or have too many thoughts crossing your mind. Artist block? Send me some inspiration? That’s not what I’d like to hear from an artist like you. There is no such a thing as artist block period.

Nelson Shanks said, “Don’t wait for the mood to strike. Paint anyway. If you’re an artist, you’ll get into that mood in no time. Once you get a brush in your hand you’re inspired.” There it is, my friend.

Honestly, I’m not a fan of expressionism. I’m more like traditional, classical painting guy. My favorite artists are J.C. Leyendecker, Morgan Weistling, Jeffery Watts, and Robert Liberace. There you go, you asked for links to other artists. You probably know them already.

I enjoyed reading your posts and some of the links. I subscribed to your RSS feed already.

Good Luck and happy painting~!!!

Technorati Tags: blog review, artist blog, expressionist, artist, J.C. Leyendecker, Morgan Weistling, Jeffery Watts, Robert Liberace

Do you want quality or quantity blog traffic?

I’ll take quality over quantity anytime.  Don’t get me wrong, I love large volume of blog traffic.  Who doesn’t like double or triple their blog traffic?  It’s one of the joy of blogging. Blog traffic is the most important aspect of your blogging success.

There are so many blogs about how to make money blogging, monetize your blog, and SEO.  You’ll definitely find blog traffic is the hottest topic.  They all say do this and that to immediately increase your blog traffic.  They don’t really talk about what kind of traffic you gonna get.  If you have followed their get traffic quick advice, you will end up with large volume of low quality traffic.

What do you mean by low quality traffic?

Basically it’s “stop and go” kind of traffic.  They come, look around and leave right away.

Stumbleupon traffic is good example of low quality traffic.  If you analyze Stumbleupon traffic, first thing you’ll notice is a huge spike on your Google Analytics graph.  It’s almost unbelievable.   Second thing you’ll notice is average time on site, less than 7 seconds.  The third, bounce rate (percentage of single-page visits) is higher than 80%.  They enter and exit.

Stumblers are looking for surprises.  They just click on the “Stumble!” button and very anxious to move on to the next site.  It seems like stumblers are trying to stumble or race through as many site as possible.  Honestly, I’m one of “surprise me” type of the Stumbler.  There it is, I confessed. I don’t even stick around if flash intro takes too slow to load.

What about quality traffic?

Quality traffic from sites from with similar type of blogs or targeted visitors from search engines.  Readers that will be interested in your content, check more categories, and read related posts is the best traffic you want to get.  These type of visitors will more likely contribute to your blog or become regular readers.

How to get more quality traffic?

Bringing wave of quality traffic is very challenging task.  It’s not going to happen overnight.  Don’t rush and don’t stop prospecting for new visitors.  You must develop your own routing to drive traffic to your blog.  If your blog traffic has been increased compared to previous month, you’re on a right track.

• Find the most popular posts:  Write similar posts or write something totally opposite to that particular post.
• Optimize your blog and posts:  Include keyword in your URL & title.  Use secondary keywords in first paragraph.
• Trackback to other blogs in your posts: Readers will come to your site to find out what you have to say about the topic.
• Post good comments on other blogs:  Write interesting comments on related topics.

Technorati Tags: Quality blog traffic, blog traffic, traffic blog, stumbleupon, increase traffic

We all want publicity. We submit our site to Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. We ask readers to subscribe full, snippet or e-mail newsletters. Our nice WordPress automatically ping search engines whenever our blogs are updated. We even let anyone to comment on our blogs. We let search engines to index every single word and link. Why? Because we want them back and back for more.

Now the trouble comes in. You provided a feed or syndication RSS on your blog, found out that your posts are popping up on other people’s blogs everywhere. Basically they syndicated or republished your posts.

Did they violated your rights? Is it illegal? Why didn’t they ask for permission? Well, true answer lies between whether you provided a web syndication or not.

Here’s the quote from Wikipedia:

“Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use. This could be simply by licensing the content so that other people can use it; however, in general, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website’s recently added content (for example, the latest news or forum posts). ”

Here’s the LiveJournal’s take syndication on LiveJournal through a feed. Question FAQ #155

“My content is being syndicated onto LiveJournal and I don’t want it there. What can I do?

You must first take server-side action to block the content from being syndicated to a LiveJournal account. For instance, if the syndicated account on LiveJournal is using your site’s RSS or Atom feed, you could either disable that feed or block LiveJournal’s IP address (204.9.177.18) from accessing your server. Either will prevent your content from being syndicated onto LiveJournal.

Syndicated accounts retain entries for two weeks to allow LiveJournal users time to view them; after that period, the entries are automatically deleted. Content may continue to be visible on the syndicated account after you have disabled access to the feed, but there is no way to accelerate the automatic deletion process.

LiveJournal will not take action if the syndicated account is using a feed provided by your site. However, if you are unable to disable the feed or block LiveJournal’s IP address, you should contact the LiveJournal Abuse Prevention Team for further assistance. Similarly, if your site does not offer a RSS or Atom feed, but the content is being “screenscraped” and syndicated onto LiveJournal, please file a report with the Abuse Prevention Team.”

Basically LiveJournal will republish your feed if you provide a feed on your site. Do you use FeedBurner? Read FeedBurner’s terms of use before use its services.

Here’s how to protect your contents or add copyright disclosure to your RSS feeds. If you’re using WordPress, you can get a plugin from wordpress to add or embed copyrights so that you can trackdown who’s violating your rights. The plugin is called Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter. You can read his post on how to protect your RSS feed.

My final answer to the question?

Don’t be afraid to syndicate your full post or half feed. In long term, you’ll win. Go ahead let them republish your posts. You’ll get free advertisement. Usually the syndicating side benefits more than republishing side. Because many people, including me want to get to the source of the story.

Here’s the quote from Wikipedia:

“Syndication benefits both the websites providing information and the websites displaying it. For the receiving site, content syndication is an effective way of adding greater depth and immediacy of information to its pages, making it more attractive to users. For the transmitting site, syndication drives exposure across numerous online platforms. This generates new traffic for the transmitting site — making syndication a free and easy form of advertisement.”

Happy Syndication~!!!

Technorati Tags: syndication, RSS feed, rss legal, rss rights, wordpress, copyright, copyright plugin, web syndication