I have been discussing comments for the last few posts and today lets talk about finding blogs to comment on.

Now there are lists and various posts showing you exactly which blogs are do follow and some people swear by those. If all you are looking for is back links maybe that makes sense but not to me.

Worrying about the do follow or whether or not they use Comment Luv may make you better for SEO purposes but I prefer to find blogs that are on my topic.

Those blogs are much more likely to have people clicking through to my blogs and possibly becoming regular readers.

So even though I would prefer to only comment on blogs that do follow and use Comment Luv the topic is more important.

To do this I go to Google News. Put in my topic and add the rss feed to my Google Reader. This way I see all the newest information on my topic. I can use this to find very current posts on topics I am interested in.

As I find blogs that show up regularly and frequently I add their feed to my reader. Just checking my reader a few times a day and I can find all of their newest posts and go comment.

The closer you are to being the first comment the more people that will see your comment. The more that see it the more traffic you are likely to get.

This is also a good way to find information to share with your Twitter followers too and if you add in Friend Feed you can automate your Twitter posting to build an even better relationship with your Twitter followers.

Twitter Time Saver will show you exactly how to automate that into an easy to use system.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blog, blog comments, Google News, Google Reader, rss feed, seo, twitter

This past week Nicole Dean was guest blogging on one of my other blogs and her topic for the week was How To Get Ideas For Your Next Blog Post.

I will be going into more detail on occasion here. Today we will look at this tip.

11. RSS Feed Swipe File.
This idea came from my friend, Susanne of HillbillyHousewife.com – Set up a Google reader account which is a RSS feed reader/aggregator. Then, go and sign up for the RSS feeds for several competing sites. (If you don’t know of any competing sites yet, the feed reader will allow you to search for them.) Then, log into your feed reader any time you need ideas for a blog post. Alternatively, you can log into the feed reader once per week or per month and jot those ideas into your idea notebook for later.

Two things to do here to take advantage of this tip.

1. Set up a Google Reader account
2. Find and add the feed url for a blog to it

Google love them or hate them has some really excellent free tools. One of those that I use regularly is the Reader. Getting it set up is easy.

Open a Gmail account or use your existing account. You may want to have more than one if you are working across various niches so you can keep them separated..

At the top of your Gmail account you can click on Reader.

Once you do that the Reader will open up then you can add the url of the feed by clicking the Add a subscription button.

Then you can either add a search term to find feeds on your topic or add the actual feed url from a blog you wish to follow. This will also work for any rss feed you may wish to add. This can include news feeds, article site feeds or any place else that has an rss feed.

Here is what I got from a search of the term WordPress. You can just click the subscribe button to add each one to your Reader.

You can also add the feed url in direct through the Add subscription box. Most sites that have an rss feed will use the feed button or a hyperlink of RSS.

Clicking either the button or the link will usually open up the feed in a browser and you can just copy and paste the url into the add box. You can also find it by right clicking and selecting properties to get the url.

You now have the details so it is up to you to take action and use this technique for blog post ideas.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: Add feed to Google Reader, add rss feed, Google Reader, rss feed, rss feed swipe file

This is the last post in the blog traffic series this time through .

Quite often I see people not use the most powerful part of their blog – the feed.

Here are just a few places and sites that you may be using where you can add in your feed and give people a chance to find your blog from things you are already doing. (This is not an all inclusive list by any means.)

• Facebook Profile
• Friend feed
• Squidoo pages
• Hub Pages
• Wet Paint pages

In almost all of these you just need to add the url to your feed and they will start updating your listing on all of those pages each time you update your blog.

If you have not set up feed burner or done anything special with plugins the default feed url for your self hosted WordPress blog will be http://yourdomain.com/folder/feed.

Now if that is not your feed look for the feed link, right click and check properties and you can see exactly what your feed url is.

Adding your feed into all these places will give more people the chance to find your blog while just doing what you normally do anyhow.

Even better especially for the various sites like Squidoo, et al your lens is getting new content added each time you post to your blog. Gotta love things that allow you to automate updating and we all know how much Google loves fresh content when the spiders visit.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blog traffic, Facebook, FriendFeed, hub pages, rss, rss feed, squidoo, traffic

Just found a neat site that I am testing out – Feedsr.us. See the sample below.

feedsr.us – RSS-Feeds als Signatur

This links directly to my marketing blog. It changes the titles as I post new items to my blog.

It took me less than 5 minutes to create it and gives you the code in regular html and billboard code (what most forums use).

The steps were quite easy.

1. Sign up
2. Confirm your email
3. Put in your blog’s feed
4. Copy and paste the code where you want your banner to show.

That’s all you need to do and the banner will change automatically each time you update your blog. Now one caveat it only updates a few times a day so there will be a delay before your latest post shows on the banner.

Be interesting to see how well this does in forums where I am active to draw additional readers.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: feeds for forum signature, feedsr.us, forum signature, rss feed

The noise online makes it very easy for your message to get lost easily. Someone visits your blog, likes your content and bookmarks your site. They really do intent to come back but do they?

The answer is a great big maybe. If they grabbed your feed and added it to a reader like Google Reader they just may depending on how many people they follow. (My average new posts in my reader is huge). If they bookmarked your site the odds are much, much lower.

Think about it. Go check your bookmarks and see how many of them you actually use or even better remember why you bookmarked them. I have and if you were to force me at gun point I would be lucky to remember half of them and outside of a dozen or so have never used the majority of them even once.

That is one of the reasons that I like to have a subscribe form on my blogs. This lets me remind people to come back again and again.

Now there are multiple ways to do this and you can use a service like Feedblitz but I prefer using my own autoresponder (Aweber because they automate delivery off of my feed). The reason is that I can easily send other messages too with an autoresponder.

This allows me to offer an ethical bribe for signing up to receive updates. For this blog I use a piece of software that most bloggers would find useful. As my topic here is WordPress and blogging that is something of value for my readers.

Previously I gave away some tips on generating blog traffic. Both of these target the reader that will want to come back again and again.

As people return and get value they are more likely to comment and take part in the discussion. You build trust and loyalty by continuing to provide valuable content. The comments create even more valuable content for my blog and build a community here.

I can also use the list to get questions as that is the primary focus of my content here. On another note it is almost time to resend as the questions have slowed down but because I am using Aweber I can send out a gentle nudge to get the questions coming in again (hint, hint use the survey form above or comment).

In conclusion if you are looking to increase your blog traffic (and who isn’t?) then you really need to be asking people to subscribe and giving them a reason to do so.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: autoresponder, aweber, blog traffic, feedblitz, rss feed

RSS is probably one of the most confused areas for people starting to blog. Everyone has heard the term either RSS, feed or the two combined RSS feed. Quite a few though don’t understand them or the power that having a feed gives you when using a blog.

Lets start with a definition from Wikipedia of RSS.

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format.[2] An RSS document (which is called a “feed,” “web feed,”[3] or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.[3]

The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of content from multiple web sources in one place. RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader,” “feed reader,” or an “aggregator,” which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

I am not going to cover the technical aspects of the various modes. For most it is only important to understand how they work and what they can do for you. It is a transmission that is sent automatically when you update that others can subscribe to through a feed reader. This allows people to see in one place all of the new items from various sources that they wish to use.

Here are just a few of the more popular feed readers and is far from being an inclusive list.

• Google reader
• My Yahoo
• My MSN
• My AOL

All of these will allow you to get the latest information on any RSS feed you may want to keep track of easily.

Most blogs will either have little icons that list various readers like My Yahoo, My MSN, etc (like you will find in the sidebar of this blog) or you will see the image that is shown to the left. If you click on them they will give you the necessary information to add the feed to your reader.

A feed can also be used to trigger an email alert to those that have subscribed. There are a few different services that will do this. We will cover two of the more popular here.

The first is feed burner. Go to Feedburner and create your feed with them. Then click publicize and select email subscriptions. Then you can create the feed and they will give you the HTML to add the form to your site.

This is good if you are using Feedburner for your stats. This is important if you are selling advertising based on the subscriber stats. Because I don’t sell advertising on my blogs this is not important for me.

The other option is to use an autoresponder and I recommend AWeber. They will allow you to automate and send an update each time you add a new post to your blog.

This is easy to do by just creating a new list and then click on the messages – blog broadcast button. You will then add in your feed and edit the template to send each time that you post your blog.

The big advantage to using a service like AWeber is that you can send other messages to this list besides just your blog updates. You can also use the automation to deliver an e-course or other series as your gift for subscribing which you can’t do with the Feedburner option.

This should give you a better concept of the power of RSS, what a feed is and how it can benefit you but…

If you have questions or comments they are always welcomed here.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: aweber, feedburner, rss feed, use rss feed

Today’s question:

Hey Mike–I have a two part question about list-building. First, I know you like AWeber as an autoresponder, but are there any free or cheaper services that would suffice for someone who is frugal? And if someone did use an alternate autoresponder, is it possible/reasonable to transfer your list to a different autoresponder down the road after building a decent list?

Yes there is no doubt that Aweber is my favorite.

Feedburner has a service that will allow you to collect emails and have your updates emailed for you like AWeberr does. To the best of my knowledge you can’t send any other emails through it though.

For example when you sign up here I send out a series of blog traffic tips along with the updates from the blog. I also have the capability to send a broadcast when ever I want to. I don’t but I could.

The problem of moving a list from any autoresponder service to another is a different issue.

Any good service will require an imported list to re-confirm. This will cause you to lose the majority of the list usually. Now that is not necessarily a bad thing.

It will allow you to sort out those that are really interested.

Now the final point is about being penny wise pound foolish. My personal feeling is that if you can’t make the cost of AWeber work for you in very short order you need to really look at what you are doing. I have been doing a whole series at Mike Paetzold Recommends on business building and setting up business systems.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: autoresponder, aweber, build system, feedburner, list building, rss feed

Today’s question:

How do I get RSS feeds to my blog please?

Now this can be answered a few different ways as it is not clear what you are asking.

WordPress automatically creates a feed for your blog. It is found by appending /feed to the URL for your blog. So if you are looking for your own feed that is the easy way with WordPress.

Now you might want to add your feed to feedburner especially if you want to use the feed blitz email service. Go to feedburner and get an account and add your feed there then promote your feedburner feed.

This can be important if you want to sell text links or advertising because most sites base fees off of PR, visitor traffic and RSS subscribers listed at feedburner.

Now the other question that could be being asked is how to import RSS feeds for content. Now if all you are looking for is a news feed or similar content to enhance your sidebar there are plugins that will allow that.

If you are looking to scrape content and use someone’s content to populate your blog my answer is don’t.

Technorati Tags: add rss feed, import rss feed, rss, rss feed

Pinging [ 3:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A few similar questions have come in:

Do you use Submit Em Now in place of or in addition to UP Smart Update Pinger? What are the advantages / disadvantages to using each?

I want to know more about RSS feeds to and from my blog. I have a blog at ccblog. Also, with my ccblog, can I use different services to ping it or is it already done automatically?

First lets address SubmitEm Now – This is a plugin for Firefox. It is used to submit your RSS feed to the various RSS directories. It saves you time by allowing you to fill in a form and then use that information at each of the sites without having to retype it each time. It is not part of your blog.

Now the Smart Update Pinger plugin is part of your blog. It’s purpose is to keep you from over pinging. It checks to see if a specific post has been pinged before and if it haves does not ping it again.

This overcomes a problem if you are editing posts. For example – I don’t know why but quite often I will type ofr instead of for. I usually don’t catch it until after I publish the post. If I did not use the plugin then when I hit the edit button to fix it the post would ping again. Keep pinging quickly back to back and your feed will be dropped as a spammer.

Now the pinging is done automatically by the WordPress software. You can and should add additional ping services to your ping list. You can add to your ping list by using settings (options if you are not using v2.5) – writing. At the bottom of the page you will see a box where you can add these sources and click the update button.

You can also find a link to a complete list of ping services in the text above the box.

Hopefully this sheds some light on the differences but if not your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: ping, pinging, rss, rss directories, rss feed

This is a continuation of yesterdays post. Wanted to go through step by step how to set your feed.

The default option is to send the full feed. If that is what you want you probably won’t have to do anything. If you only want to send a summary follow these steps.

1. Log in to dashboard
2. Click Options
3. Click reading

4. Click the summary box and update

That is all it takes.

As always your comments and questions are welcomed. Throat is still sore so no podcast again. Sorry.

Mike

Technorati Tags: rss feed, set-rss-feed