Just came back from my first trip to the golf course. Went ot the driving range and hit a large bucket of balls. I now hurt – badly.

See it has been a long snowy winter here in Pennsylvania and the weather has finally changed. Usually enjoy the exercise I get from going out to golf but the first couple of times each season I find pains in places I didn’t know I have.

Another week or two and it will feel good to get the exercise as my muscles that have not been used over the course of the winter get back in shape. The muscle memory will start to come back and I will hit the ball better. (Notice the use of words better not good).

This is something that I knew would happen and I know that I need to go through it to be able to enjoy my time out on the golf course.

Writing causes the same thing. When I first started wring a blog 5 years ago it was often painful to try and come up with a topic. Create a post and get it formatted the way I wanted and finally hit the publish button.

Not quite the same pain as I am feeling in my muscles but a pain none the less. Part of that was the striving for perfection we discussed yesterday.

If you find writing painful and we all do at times you need to just do it. If you are in the perfection mode go create a blogger blog and make it private. Go post every day for 20 minutes about anything there for 2 weeks.

No one will see it and you can delete it when you are done but if you actually exercise your writing muscles they will get stronger. Will it be painful? Probably will but it won’t take long for you to get in “writing shape”.

Take the time to exercise your writing muscles and you will be surprised how much easier it will become to write your blog regularly.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

 

 Exercise your writing muscles [3:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Technorati Tags: blog post, blogger, writing, writing blog post

Related posts

• Using Blog Desk to post your blog (11)
• Question on using and optimizing Blogger (0)
• Plugins for blogger?? (0)
• Increase your visitors with 5 free services (3)
• If I host my blog will it still have the same PR? (2)

Todays question:

If I host a blogger blog or a wordpress blog on my own hosting account will I still have the same Page Rank as if it were hosted by blogger and wordpress?

Well this is a bit of a tough question because only Google knows what goes into your page rank. We get hints from results and what we see along with some of their patent filings but nobody but Google knows for sure and they try their best to keep it that way.

That being said for the most part your page rank is helped by incoming links and having the same linking to each type should generate the same page rank.

There is a big difference between hosting a Blogger blog and using the WordPress software on your own domain unless blogger has changed (I don’t stay up to date with blogger). You are still using their data base and software and it is primarily just a redirect when you host a blogger blog on your domain.

This leaves you open to them removing your blog at their discretion. Both Blogger and WordPress.com are not always affiliate friendly which is why I prefer if I am going to host it to use WordPress software on my site with my data base where I have complete control.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blogger, host blog, page rank, wordpress

Related posts

• Question on using and optimizing Blogger (0)
• Plugins for blogger?? (0)
• Increase your visitors with 5 free services (3)
• WordPress.com, or self hosted WordPress blog – what should I choose? (9)
• WordPress Wednesday Times 3 (9)

You need to take advantage of the many free services to help get your blog started.

Caveat: The center of your hub should always a WordPress blog or a squeeze page on a domain that you control and own in my opinion.

Now that we have gotten rid of the caveat, lets look at some of the free tools that are available.

• Squidoo – my absolute favorite
• Hub Pages
• Blogger
• WordPress.com
• MSN Live

For the purposes of illustration we will pick a topic and use a bad word in my vocabulary ass/u/me that you have done the research and found to have profit potential about Turtles. (Turtles are my marketing topic of the day today bare with me here.)

You buy a domain, create your blog and start putting content there to draw traffic. You are posting at least daily to get started and more often if Turtles is a very competitive keyword. (Yes, I know I just picked that and have no idea if it is a competitive word. Boo hiss on me.)

Now go to Squidoo and create a lens on your topic. Add your RSS feed to your blog as one of the modules and make sure that use at least 20 tags. (You did keyword research before you entered this market didn’t you?) Add a short text article or two. Grab a You Tube module, a Flcikr module on your topic and add a guest book..

Go to Hub Pages, create a new Hub on your topic and add your RSS feed again. Make sure that you add tags here too. (For both of these you can do a quick re-write of your content to meet the content requirements . Do not use the same content on both sites or what you posted on the blog.)

Create a Blogger blog using your main keyword in the title you sign up with and create a short post about the great article you just found that links to a specific post on your blog with the keyword that post was focused on as your anchor text.

At WordPress.com and MSN Live you will be doing the same basic tasks except you will link to a different post on your blog with the corresponding anchor text for that keyword phrase.

Once a week you will want to add something to each of these sites. When you visit Squidoo you can add a module or just add a few more keywords and re-publish the lens plus the rss feed from your blog will be constantly updated.

Hub Pages will follow the same pattern as Squidoo. I usually add a new content module every other week.

Each week you will link to a new post from each of the free blog services with the anchor text for that post.

This allows you to take 5 minutes extra a day 5 days a week and keep a constant stream of links coming into your interior pages on a regular basis.

Want to take it up another level? Add a commenting and bookmarking strategy along with this you can easily increase the traffic and ranking to your blog quite quickly with very little extra effort. Add in article marketing and you may have to pay more for your server

There are many more of these types of sites that you can use to get even more links. If you have a favorite share with us and leave a comment below.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blogger, hub pages, increase traffic, linking, seo, squidoo, wordpress

Related posts

• WordPress.com, or self hosted WordPress blog – what should I choose? (9)
• Question on using and optimizing Blogger (0)
• WordPress Tag-alicious (2)
• WordPress SEO is ready (5)
• WordPress SEO Call – Have you signed up for it yet? (8)

Today’s question is:

I know you are a big wordpress fan but I believe you mentioned using blogger on occasion. On what occasion do you use blogger instead of wordpress? Also, are there any tutorials you can recommend on setting up and optimizing blogger?

I never use Blogger for a primary site. I want to own any primary site and the easiest way to do that is by having a WordPress blog on a domain I own. Blogger is not easy to optimize unless you are going to make major changes. I don’t bother for what I use it for which is primarily back linking.

Have not seen but then again I haven’t really looked for tutorials on optimizing Blogger. I am sure that there are some but personally would not put the effort into something I did not control.

When I was creating various niche Adsense sites it was easy to get your site spidered by Google by using a Blogger blog. Because Google owns Blogger they spider those sites quite regularly and a good link to a new site will get the spider to your site extremely quickly.

Likewise if you are looking to open an Adsense account the easiest way is to create a Blogger blog, make a couple posts and apply through Blogger.

I still use Blogger as part of a network of sites to rank for a keyword but don’t spend much time optimizing them just using them to push links with the anchor text for the keyword I am trying to rank for. You can use some other services the same way to create your network. Sites like MSN, Yahoo, MySpace and some others all have blog type platforms to create links going to your primary site with your anchor text.

Creating a series of these along with a lens or two at Squidoo, some Hub Pages on your topic can all help to drive traffic and help you rank for your keyword often times multiple times from the various platforms. That is how I use Blogger but would never depend on it for a primary site.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

 

 Using and optimizing Blogger [2:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, blogging, msn live, myspace, squidoo, wordpress

Related posts

• WordPress.com, or self hosted WordPress blog – what should I choose? (9)
• Plugins for blogger?? (0)
• Low on questions so…. (0)
• Increase your visitors with 5 free services (3)
• Blog Talk Radio today (1)

Well it has been a while as I have been extremely busy with a few projects that have taken priority over posting here. (I know shame on me.) Back to questions today.

I read the report “Get your blog going” which was very interesting. You refer to several tools such as plug-ins with reference to Wordpress. All my 8 blogs are in Blogger. I tried Wordpress once but got stuck so went back to the easier Blogger. Can I still use these techniques in Blogger? If so, how?

Not that I know of. There are two reasons that I don’t care for Blogger for any primary blog. The lack of automation and customization of the structure of the blog.

I mean you can make them look unique and do some nice things with pulling feeds but…

(First I am not an expert on Blogger and there may be things to do this that I am not aware of) you can’t automate the pinging, create custom title tags and things that I feel are necessary to make your blog more powerful.

My other problem with Blogger (actually any site I don’t own and control) is that you can have your account disappear and have no recourse. You also don’t own the domain (yes I know you can forward to your own domain) and it takes work to create backlinks, bookmark posts etc and that can disappear with no recourse on your part.

Now before you get too mad Blogger does have some good things and can and should be used as part of your overall blogging just not for your primary blogs (in my humble opinion.) If someone that is more expert in Blogger blogs can let me know if I am missing things I would appreciate it as even Old Bald Guys can learn new things.

Please use the comments or survey form to ask your questions about WordPress in particular and blogging in general.

Have a great day.

 

 Plugins for Blogger [3:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Technorati Tags: blogger, blogging, plugin, wordpress

Related posts

• Question on using and optimizing Blogger (0)
• WordPress.com, or self hosted WordPress blog – what should I choose? (9)
• WordPress Releases 2.9 (8)
• WordPress Q and A Replay Now Up (4)
• WordPress Q and A Replay (1)