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Mobile Friendly Project – Content

Published September 6, 2010 | By Blog Meister

Before I start really promoting MobileFriendly.net , I want to have at least ten articles posted to the site. Of those ten I want at least half of them to be something that will catch the casual readers attention and get them to bookmark them for later reference and, in a perfect world, share them with their friends. With these anchor posts in place, I can then feel comfortable about sending large amounts of traffic to the site and retaining some of them as long term readers and subscribers.

I have not done any real promotion for the site other than the article I wrote and the couple of backlinks that I mentioned in earlier installments of this blog development series. I have not listed the site in any directories, created a video to post on YouTube and other video sharing sites or done any big time article marketing. That will begin later in the week.

My main focus has been in creating content for the site that will engage the reader and create subscribers when I do begin marketing the site in earnest. I do have Twitter tools installed, so there is a small amount of promotion with the tweet that is sent when I publish the post, but that is about it for now.

If you begin sending too much traffic to a new site where there isn’t too much for them to read they will get turned off and develop a bad impression of your site from the outset. Having plenty of good content for them to read the first time they visit is a better way to entice them to return and read more at a later date or even subscribe to your feed or mailing list.

Now just because I have some good anchor content on the site does not mean I’m not going to continue to provide good content to the readers. I will still create new articles that gives value to those who subscribe.

One type of article not to include in your anchor content is a product review or promotional post (unless you are creating a review site). Building a blog readership is very similar to developing a relationship with a mailing list. Give them good content and they will come back for more. If you do happen to make an offer to them for a product, they are more likely to by from you than someone else if your relationship is good.

Content is king in the blog world. The more content that you have, the more pages that will be indexed in the search engines. The better your search engine presence, the more organic (targeted) traffic you will get. If the content is relevant and insightful, you will gain readers and subscribers from those visitors on a daily basis.

…In the next installment, I’ll cover the initial promotional push and how to attract readers fast.

BTW… the site is getting 500+ visitors each day without promotion…

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Posted in Blogging | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Your Blog Needs to Be Mobile Ready

Published August 26, 2010 | By Blog Meister
Person with PDA handheld device.
Image via Wikipedia

In recent weeks I have been focused on having mobile-ready blogs because there is so much traffic coming to sites from mobile devices these days. Mobile devices, smart phones, internet ready tablets , etc. are all gaining in popularity for web browsing, so it makes sense to have a site that is viewable by those devices. If your site is not mobile compatible, you are losing a ton of potential blog readers and customers.

I’ve added the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin to all of my blogs which converts them to a format that is mobile friendly. It also supplies basic stats that show the percentage of mobile users that are viewing your site. To show proof of the traffic that you are missing if your blog is not mobile-ready, here is a list of statitistics from a few of my sites and the number of mobile hits that they are getting:

  • 5% of your traffic is currently from mobile users. (this site first)

You’ve had 28941 desktop hits and 1780 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

  • 10% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 10730 desktop hits and 1233 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

  • 3% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 16185 desktop hits and 544 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

  • 10% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 3267 desktop hits and 365 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

  • 5% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 8045 desktop hits and 478 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

  • 7% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 3922 desktop hits and 326 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

That is 4300 plus hits that I would have missed out on in just the past nine days alone!

Included in the WordPress Mobile Pack is the ability to link your mobile-ready blog to their Mpexo directory for mobile sites. Having your site listed in that directory helps, but all sites get mobile hits. Here are the stats for a new site that I am developing for a client and just put online a week ago:

  • 1% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 1680 desktop hits and 25 mobile hits in the last 7.1 days.

This site has very little content (4 posts and 2 pages) and has not been added to the mobile directory but it has received 25 mobile hits in a week without any promotion.

Many popular websites like Twitter and Facebook are mobile friendly and actually encourage their users to interact with mobile devices. With the number of people using these devices on sites that you are (or at least should be) marketing your blog on, does it not make sense to have a site that they can move directly to and view while still using their smart phone or other mobile device?

Now you probably want to know how to monetize this traffic… Admob is a contextual ad site just for mobile devices. How big is the mobile ad market? Google recently paid $750 million for Admob! The money from your mobile ads is probably not going to be as good as your regular site where you have more flexibility in your ad types, but it is a way to profit from that traffic with relative ease.

To close I just have one question: “Is your blog mobile-ready?”

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Posted in Blogging, Social Marketing | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

With WordPress, The Learning Never Ends

Published August 18, 2010 | By Blog Meister
WordPress
Image via Wikipedia

There are so many different options for WordPress that learning every little thing about it and what it can do is nearly impossible. You may think you have everything mastered and then something comes along that is either new or you just have overlooked it in the past. Even though I have been blogging for six or so years and have been using the WordPress CMS engine for at least four of those, I still learn new things about it everyday.

Plugins is one of the areas where you can almost always learn something new. New plugins are constantly being created and updated for WordPress. Some are great, others so-so and some are just down right crap! These plugins make WordPress the most flexible, easy to use Content Management Solution out there.

Most WordPress plugins work nearly straight out of the box with a little bit of configuration to set your preferences. Some others take a bit more time and knowledge to set up. Either way, when you add a new plugin to your blog, you are doing so to improve the functionality of your site.

One of the perks of doing a blogging blog is that you tend to experiment with more plugins so that you can pass the knowledge that you gain in your trials on to your readers so that they may better their own sites. There are also times when you are recognized as a “blogging guru” (please don’t ever classify me this way ;-) I am the anti-guru), and developers send you their premium plugins to try out for free.

In addition to WP Syndicator, here are a couple more that I have been playing around with lately:

Zemanta is a cool free tool that analyzes your text and suggests images and other media sources to add into your post. While you are typing, they magically appear in a box to the right of your editor. You can scroll through them and pick the ones that are best suited for your article. If you are worried about copyright infringement, each source includes the type of license that is associated with it so that you can decide if it is usable for your purposes. Most of the media has some sort of GPL or Creative Commons license or may even be in the public domain.

In addition to the media hook-ups, Zemanta also picks sites related to your post to link back to. This makes linking to other blogs a breeze and generates good will from the sites you link to and probably a few reciprocal links back to your site. Its a win-win-win situation.

  • Your readers get additional sources.
  • Other blogs get links from your site.
  • You get links back in the form of pingbacks from other blogs
  • Plus, you get reciprocal links because of the good karma that you are putting out there.

If you register with Zemanta, you can also list your blog (or blogs) in their network of sites that other users of their plugin connect to. They will do a verification of your site to make sure that it is appropriate for their system, so you want to be sure and have a good content rich site ready before you submit it. But, if it is approved… Think of all of the backlinks that you are going to receive from the others using this plugin linking to your articles! Cool beans, huh!?!

The other free plugin that I have been experimenting with is Twitter Tools. Now this one is a bit more complicated and the documentation a bit on the lite side. But, if you can read between the lines a bit, you should have no problems in getting it set up…

The plugin integrates your blog with your Twitter account by you creating a Twitter application. Don’t worry… There is no programming involved. The application is built into the plugin, but to use it you have to register it with Twitter and get your app and OAuth keys. Its pretty simple to do, just be sure and read the directions very carefully.

What will it do? A lot… But here is a quick overview.

It allows you to send new blog posts to Twitter. I know, a lot of others do this. Here is the difference. Have you noticed the line under all tweets… “via the web”, via TweetDeck“, “via SocialOomph“, etc. Each of those lines are a backlink to that applications website. When you set up your app, you name the application (Your site name would be good) and enter the location of the app. This gives you a link to your new post, through the tweet you sent, plus a link to your main site though the “via your app” line.

Other stuff the Twitter Tools plugin does:

  • You can also set it up to send your tweets to your blog as posts
  • Send Tweets from your blogs dashboard
  • Create daily or weekly digests of your post
  • Adds a widget that you can use to display your latest tweets
  • Has an API hook that developers can use to pass your tweets onto other apps or sites

This is why I blog with WordPress. The tools that are available for it are constantly being developed, tweaked and improved. The uses for it as a CMS are unlimited. Sure, there is a learning curve involved… But, that is why I am here… To help bring that curve down to as close to level as I possibly can for you. Enjoy!

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