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Web Design and Blogging

Finding Out Who Links To Your Site

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Open Site Explorer is a “Link Popularity & Backlink Analysis Tool”, which means it tells you what sites link back to you, and how valuable or popular those sites are. You have to get a pro account to get full data on the value of all your backlinks, but they will show you the links themselves for free.

While you can see who has sent you traffic recently via your referrer logs/site stats/analytics tool, that won’t necessarily show you all the sites that link to you overall. I have a few sites that are older (read:out-of-date) and a lot of the sites that link to them may be a bit dormant, which means they probably won’t all turn up in a given month’s site stats. But Open Site Explorer seems to be keeping track of the big picture.

For example, it shows PNAC.info having 4,825 links to it, which includes all the various pages on all the various sites that have linked to it over the 8 years it’s been up (I’m assuming). By comparison, my relatively-unknown and newer lancebrown.org (this site) shows 605 links altogether (which sounds better than it is; they’re only from 47 “root domains”).

Open Site Explorer seems like a pretty good tool for checking out your site’s overall connectedness on the Web. Do you have other similar tools you can recommend?

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets

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The New York Times did an investigative piece on how JCPenney.com was able to cheat Google for months, giving it top-ranking listings in dozens of widely-varied commercial terms: Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets. Depending on your perspective and whether you like dangerous shortcuts, this is either an inspirational or cautionary tale about using “black hat” tactics in your search engine optimization efforts.

(NYT tends to phase out free access to their articles over time, so I can’t promise that article will be available forever. If it’s not, you can try a Google search for the article’s title; someone has probably archived a copy of it.)

Building Up Your New Social Media Audience

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Clare Lancaster at ProBloggingTools has been nice enough to compile a simple checklist of the 9 most straightforward ways to draw attention to your social media accounts. The short answer is: “promote it in various places”, but Clare has nailed the most important places, and explains why they are important quickly and concisely.

Print Clare’s list out if you must and use it as a checklist; make sure you are taking advantage of most of these methods, or you can’t say you are seriously supporting your own social media efforts: 9 Practical Ways to Start Attracting an Audience to Your New Social Media Account.

100 Sources of Blogging Inspiration from Diana Adams

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Not much to be said here…Diana Adams at Ink Rebels has compiled a tremendous list of prompts to help you get unstuck if you ever don’t know what to blog about: 100 Sources of Blogging Inspiration

I’ve been planning on writing one of these “things to post about” posts myself, but it’s becoming increasingly unnecessary. Between Diana’s awesome list and the resources I linked to in this blog post here, the pool of potential content ideas is growing very wide and very deep. We may need to reclassify it as a pond soon.

Here’s a tip: bookmark this post, so you can find Diana’s list as well as my other post with three other lists on it. That should keep you busy for a while…unless you’re posting like 10 times a day or something (in which case you probably don’t need our help coming up with ideas anyway).

"24 Ways to Promote Your Blog With NO Budget, NO Time & NO Resources” (and the truth)

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I hate to be a stickler here, but before I praise Heidi Cohen’s excellent list of affordable ways to pervasively promote your local business blog, I have to take issue with her title:

24 Ways to Promote Your Blog With NO Budget, NO Time & NO Resources

A reasonable person could think from reading that title that the “24 Ways” mentioned could be achieved with no budget, no time, and no resources. But that reasonable person would be getting deceived by hype. And upon discovering, after briefly suspending disbelief enough to think the title’s promise could be true, that in fact it is the exact sort of hyperbolic overstatement that the reasonable person quietly suspected it would end up being, the reasonable person would have his mass-media-cultivated shell of righteous cynicism hardened by at least one additional layer.

I’m the reasonable person in that scenario, by the way. As are you. And we shouldn’t be toyed with. That’s all I’m saying.

The reality of that title is as sad as it is obvious: there’s not a single one of those 24 things that can be done with NO budget, NO time, and NO resources. Each item on the list involves an action verb–which, as an editor, I applaud. But, as an amateur scientist, I can tell you that nothing which involves an action verb can be accomplished without using either time or resources, or both. “Make”, “Use”, “Work”, “Write”, “Offer to help”, “Place a computer”…these are not things that do themselves.

So I deduct major style points for the over-the-top hyperbolic title, and for reinforcing the cynicism of an already-cynical generation. It puts an unfortunate cloud over things–but I still think the list itself is worth checking out.

The true promise of the article is stated in the second paragraph, which has the more grounded and accurate heading “24 Low cost tips to promote your blog”:

“The most important step is to start looking for low cost/no cost promotional opportunities for your blog. It’s easy but it’s not always obvious. Here are twenty-four low cost ideas to help you get started.”

Low cost. Not zero time or money, which is impossible, but low cost, which is both possible and desirable. (But which does not make for as exciting a headline, unfortunately. Stupid boring reality!)

OK, good-natured (but serious) ribbing aside, Heidi’s article has some really great ways to up the ante on your blog promotion efforts. A lot of them involve putting a promo blurb about your blog in places you might not have thought of,  some others involve local outreach and partnerships, and still others deal with squeezing more win-win juice from your existing customers and foot traffic. They are 24 solid suggestions…and while every single one takes time or resources, and most of them will cost at least a little money (unless you own your own print shop), they are all definitely in the low-to-no cost range. And some require as little as a pen and a piece of paper.

Pick a handful of those things to do now, and make sure all the print-material-related ones get worked into your next print shop order, and you’ll have a lot less to worry about when it comes to promoting your web site locally.

Have more low–or-no cost ways for local businesses to promote their blogs? Might as well post them in the comments at Heidi’s post, since I’m suggesting we all go check that out anyway.

I might go post a comment about linking to your neighbors and getting listed in the web business directories, both of which I posted about here recently.

If you want to comment here, you could chime in on article titles that overstate their promise. Do you think I’m being too hard on Heidi regarding her hyperbolic title?

Find Sites That are Like Other Sites

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Just a quick post to mention two resources I bumped into recently: MoreofIt and SitesLike. Both sites do basically the same thing, which is suggesting sites that are similar to the one you provide. I first stumbled onto MoreofIt when looking for alternatives to ToonDoo, the online comic creator that I use to make my comic The Little Things. (Turns out that Toondoo appears to be as good as the others, as far as I can tell. If you have a favorite online comic creator tool, let me know what it is and why you like it, please.)

I lost track of MoreofIt later that week (and didn’t remember the name), so I did a Google search to try and find it again–and that’s how I found SitesLike, which does essentially the same thing. Come to think of it, you could presumably find more of similar-site finders by entering either of these sites into the other one. ;-)

Aside from finding sites with these tools, if you have a website, there is another action item you can take: SitesLike has an add site tool.  (I couldn’t find one at MoreofIt; if you know of one for them, please let me know.) So you should probably take a second to add yours, if there’s a chance it might not be in there already.

How to Become a Celebrity in the Eyes of Your Niche

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David Garland at Small Business Trends has a nice succinct post about becoming a new kind of “celebrity” – the entrepreneurial niche celebrity (or “trusted resource”, which he suggests as a less hype-driven descriptor).

It’s funny – I’ve gotten so used to the list-style articles that are so popular these days, that when I discovered that David’s list ended after 3 items, I felt like it was abrupt or short. But when I looked back at the piece I realized he covers a lot of ground in his “short” list–each item has a lot of sub-points, especially the first two.

I read (or skim) so many articles these days that if I shared them all it would be overwhelming for both of us. So I’ve started using a rule of thumb that I’ll only post articles that taught me something, or moved me to action. David’s article gave me the final push to get my picture up on my site, and to work on infusing a little more Lance into things. (Stuff I tell all my clients to do of course, but you know, do as I say…) So maybe his quick run-through will give you a needed kick in the pants too…or provide you with a starting blueprint for your own rise to “celebrity” in your niche.

Do as I say, not as I do

I missed blogging the other night, because I got bogged down working on more than one post at once. I’m going to try and make it up by posting four posts this weekend. That’s my new policy when it comes to posting daily–if I miss a day, I have to make up for it the next day, plus an extra penalty post. That’ll teach me!

And no, this post doesn’t count. It could, since I made it about the whole blogging daily challenge, and suggested an approach to fixing the missing of a day. But no, I’m not going to count my post about how I didn’t blog as one of my make-up posts. I don’t need to cheat. (I just need to be allowed to break the rules whenever it suits me.)

The title of this post is in reference to my insistence earlier this month that you should post even if you can’t post on a given day. In other words, I should have posted this post that night when I was too bogged down to get one of those other posts done in time. Sleep had different plans for me, unfortunately, and the next day (today) was all go-go-go…so I decided to go with the “extra make-up post” approach discussed above.

Speaking of which, I better finish this post now before it really does start looking real, and I get mad at myself for saying I wasn’t going to count it. ;-)

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