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Spring Cleaning

July 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

spring cleaningIt might be just slightly too late to call it spring cleaning, nonetheless it was time for some cleaning. I haven’t paid much attention to this particular site for the past couple of years while I worked on other cool projects, and it was long overdue for some renovations.

The main reason I hadn’t been posting much on this site was the huge pile of upfront work that had to be done before I could get back to writing – specifically switching web hosts, deleting old content, choosing a new theme, wading through spam comments, and doing a lot of design stuff.

Before I got back into posting I needed to make Fourth Floor Marketing into a home again, and that meant starting from scratch in many regards. Before I did anything else I decided that I needed to go through all of my old posts and either fix them up or simply delete them – the result was deleting more than half of my older content. The purpose of deleting all this content was to make it so that the only content on my site is stuff that I think serves a purpose – which also helps my SEO at the same time.

Google posted the following in regards to old content just after the Google Panda update:

“…if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”

After cleaning out all of the old stuff I also needed to update the theme, as the old one was from 2007 and it was pretty clear from looking at it. I decided this time around to get a theme that I won’t have to constantly try to fix. I decided to go with a child theme based on the Genesis Framework (StudioPress) which I edited a bit to look more blog-like (this theme was originally intended to be for newspapers/magazines).

Between editing content, redesigning the site, adding new widgets, social features, and analytics packages it took about 30 hours to get the site back in working order (it was pretty messed up). The upfront time investment was definitely worthwhile as it feels like I am home again (just in a cooler, more modern home) and I am certainly glad to be back. Expect some good stuff in the near future.

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Ways to Promote Your Blog

May 30, 2009 By 8 Comments

I just spent 10 hours straight doing the design for Easyonlinemoneymaking.com (still waiting for the dns to update for my Host Gator switch, I’ll post when the results are live).  I figured that since I spent such an extended period of time actually being productive I would make a post about some of the “time fillers” that you can do to promote your blog when you don’t feel like pumping out posts or articles.

When I have spare time I usually do some or all of the following, mixing them up every 5 minutes or so to keep myself interested.  I love internet marketing, but I don’t always have the attention span to keep churning out the content so it is fun to do moderately effective traffic driving techniques rather than the high power but highly boring techniques such as article creation/submission.

Here’s where my spare time goes:

  • Adding followers on Twitter and starting conversations with some of my followers when they have interesting status updates.  My twitter: James Spinosa
  • Adding contacts on MyBlogLog and joining communities.
  • Adding friends on BlogCatalog and joining groups, discussions, blogs, etc.
  • Posting on various forums that allow me to have a blog feed, this is mainly to build up name reputation but it doesn’t hurt to get some traffic.  Don’t just spam them, post useful content.
  • Commenting on a bunch of related niche blog posts.
  • Tinkering with my advertisements to find better converting programs so I can make some more money.
  • Creating link bait lists, such as “Top 100 dofollow blogs” so that I can get some free links from other bloggers.
  • Staring at the ClickBank marketplace trying to reverse engineer the success for some of the products that I have no idea why people buy them.

While these may seem like a waste of time I actually enjoy them, and they do yield results.  Most of these are designed to get a one time visitor, but about 10% of people that come to this site sign up to receive my blog posts, yielding long term traffic.

In terms of things like blog commenting and forum posting, this will yield permanent one way dofollow links, which will make me show up for more search results.  The other methods like adding twitter followers, friends, contacts, etc. make it so that I have another set of people that get updates each time I post.

If you have spare time, you might as well use it for something constructive.  There is always some way you can be promoting your blog even if it isn’t through the traditional methods.

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23 Link Building and Traffic Driving Tactics for Blogs

September 22, 2008 By 20 Comments

I am constantly seeing posts on various webmaster and marketing forums asking how to drive traffic or gain backlinks for a blog.  I find it funny since blogging in my opinion opens so many different doors that would otherwise be closed.  The social media, blogging community, marketing community, and many more are willing to be return visitors to your blog if you do it correctly.  This blog has only a couple posts so far, starting less than a week ago, yet I have already gotten around 1500 backlinks and well over 1k unique visitors.  It isn’t that hard, simply write good content and then find people that are interested in what you have to say and you’ll be on your way to blogging success.

One main point first is that the focus should always be on the content before worrying about how you market it, get links to it, etc.  If your content sucks, nobody will care about what you have to say, what you are promoting, or what you do in the future.  The better your content, the less leg work you have to put in yourself in getting visitors.

Ways to build links and drive traffic to your blog:

  1. Create link bait, people love “Top 10″ lists, quirky fact and cultural phenomenon, breaking industry news, etc.  Good content is also good link bait!
  2. Use social media such as Twitter, MyBlogLog, Facebook, etc. to your advantage.  Do not abuse the system, just use it as it is designed while marketing yourself.
  3. Relevant link exchanges with sites within your niche, especially blogroll trades for bloggers as it is seen on every page.
  4. Comment on DoFollow blogs *cough*  You won’t have to look far!  If you use your imagination, you might find a PR 7 blog that is very lightly moderated fully dofollow and millions of visits a month, I’ll tell you the answer in 43 days.  Type in “dofollow blog search engine” in Google and you will find quite a few nice tools.
  5. Submit your blog to blog directories and blog aggregating websites such as Technorati (Remember to favorite this post!) ;)
  6. Submit your blog to good old fashion link directories (yes, they do still work for links, and no, they don’t work as well as 5 years ago).
  7. Use social bookmarking websites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Sphinn, etc. to bring in big traffic and decent backlinks as many bloggers frequent these sites in search of content to link to.
  8. Link to other websites!  You would be surprised how many people check who is linking to them, and might give them a favorable mention later on.  I have found random people linking to me in my Yahoo Site Explorer backlinks before that I have decided to link to for the hell of it.
  9. Create articles and submit them to article directories such as Ezine Articles, Article Dashboard, iSnare, etc.
  10. Yahoo! Answers, this is a great way to get some visitors to your site as long as you don’t overtly spam them, the links are nofollow but a steady traffic flow is good for the health of any site.
  11. Start a contest and post it on popular forums and contest websites, this is a great way to get some interested visitors.  Make them work for it a little with comment contests, traffic contests, something creative.
  12. Create a WordPress theme and distribute it for free, if this doesn’t work pay somebody else to get a Sponser link stuck in the footer.
  13. Create a WordPress plugin that makes life easier for everyone (akismet anyone?).
  14. Find “Top Commentator” enabled blogs that will give you sitewide links for quality comments, and decent traffic from my experience.  ShoeMoney has this enabled, but this doesn’t mean you should go spam up his blog.
  15. Be a guest blogger on another blog, many people will be willing to allow other authors to share new insights in exchange for a couple links back to your site.
  16. Create a press release and distribute it to various PR sites, only do this if you have something that is actually news worthy but if played right it will work great.
  17. Keep your blog up to date!  By having an up to date blog it will make people far more likely to link to your site, and Google will love you for it.
  18. Create a Squidoo lens to build links and generate traffic (and hopefully earn some cash along the way).
  19. Use forums to boost your “expert” status while gaining quite a few backlinks, there are countless dofollow forums out there.
  20. Be creative, piss off a major industry expert such as ShoeMoney or John Chow to get them riled up, or sue a major corporation.
  21. Get your readers to participate in your site’s expansion, encourage them to use social media and to tell friends and family.  If your content is good enough, this will happen automatically!
  22. Create a good freebie such as an ebook to generate traffic, it will bring in people and if you do it right it will make them stick too.
  23. Flattery will get you everywhere, if you butter up some webmasters they will give you a link.  It never hurts to try….and no it won’t work with me :)

And now you are well on your way towards building links and gaining huge traffic for your blog.  Be creative, don’t be annoying and don’t go down to the level of spamming and you will be in a great position.  It is all about building long term visitors, traffic, links, and getting the word out.

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