Some webmasters and bloggers believe that appearances count a lot when you want to win some credibility on the Internet. They claim that if you aren’t that successful yet, you should pretend you are, until everyone believes you. Eventually, actual success will follow. In other words, this is the old “fake it til you make it” scheme applied to Internet marketing.

Should you apply this principle to your activities as a webmaster or blogger? I’m not totally sure that I can give a positive answer to this question. But I’m going to save my objections for last. Now I’m going to show you a few situations when you might consider doing some make-believing, if you really must. Read the rest of this entry »

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As briefly mentioned in my Statbrain review, many webmasters include competition monitoring in their overall strategy. I believe you’ll have a lot to gain if you do it too. Now, how can you identify sites and blogs that are truly worthy of your precious time?

Choosing the type of competitor you want to spy on

First of all, let me make one thing very clear: I’m not proposing that you engage in illegal activities. “Spy on” is just a fancy term in our case. I’m sure you get the idea.

That being said, let’s see the three types of competitor that you could/should be interested in: Read the rest of this entry »

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If we go back and remember the early days of blogging, web logs were primarily considered as online journals which we could share with our friends. It has come a long way today, but it has essentially retained the classic layout that still fits the original purpose – sequential posts with the most recent on top in a wide column, and a narrower column or two for navigation. Of course, this simple layout will not work with all types of content, and if your needs are more specialized than what the typical blogging platform can offer, you may want to consider using Expression Engine. Read the rest of this entry »

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Optimizing their site is quite a challenge for most small business owners. More often than not, they find it quite an overwhelming task. If you are one of the many such website owners, here is a brief sum up of what you can do to improvise upon your site.

Most search engines nowadays tend to browse through the actual content of the page being searched for, instead of sticking to the tags. Offer quality content on your website, for that is what attracts traffic. More traffic translates to a more popular website. The mantra is that you can never have too much of relevant content. Keep updating the content. Old content did no one any good. The search engines actually look into how old your content is. Fresh rank ensures a higher priority and therefore, higher ranking. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sometimes, what’s important is not what you do, but how you do it, and SquareSpace V5 is the perfect example of this philosophy. It’s by far the most polished-looking blogging platform I’ve seen, with a dashboard designed to let you blog in style. Kevin Rose of Digg described it as “like Typepad and WordPress on crack,” and after seeing what SquareSpace can do, I’d have to agree. Read the rest of this entry »

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One important thing to consider if you’d like to blog professionally is the platform you’ll use. There are many free and paid options out there, but for a number of years now, WordPress has been the platform of choice for professional bloggers. Six Apart is trying to change that with the recent release of it’s very own Movable Type Pro, which mixes blogging, content management and social networking. And did I mention that it’s free? Read the rest of this entry »

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There’s one thing you must admit if you want to have a stickier blog or site: most people don’t have the patience to read large blocks of text.

Pay attention to your own online reading habits. How do you react when you see long paragraphs? Don’t you feel discouraged to read on? Don’t you prefer reading shorter paragraphs? Even if you do feel comfortable reading long blocks of text, keep in mind that you’re the exception. The general Internet audience has different tastes. And in order to succeed as a webmaster or blogger, you must take into consideration the browsing and reading preferences of your visitors. Read the rest of this entry »

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It may sound like a phrase taken out of Stephen Hawking’s books, but “infinite space” on the web is simply defined as “very large numbers of links that usually provide little or no new content for Googlebot to index.” Needless to say, it’s a bad thing, and can lead to bandwidth congestion issues, or worse – Googlebot may not be able to index your site’s content completely.

A good example are calendars, which usually have a “Next Month” link. Since time is (almost) infinite, it’s possible to crawl through these links successively, onto a faraway future date, without much usuable content getting indexed. In effect, the search spider got trapped in “infinite space” instead of getting on to index your other content-filled pages. Now, Googlebot is smart, but apparently not smart enough just yet. It can figure out some of these types of URLs on its own, but it has its limits, and therefore needs human intervention some of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

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Preserving your site or blog’s credibility is much easier than you may think. I’m going to illustrate this with two personal examples:

1. After writing my recent article on StumbleUpon traffic, I took the time to review it and compare it to the sources of information it was based on. I thanked myself for doing this: I quickly spotted some inaccuracies in my post. All I had to do afterwards was to correct the wrong bits of info, rebuild some sentences and add a few others. Of course, I took these simples measures before hitting the “publish” button. Then I reread everything again and compared the fixed article to my sources one more time. I only published the post after making sure that there wasn’t a single piece of info in it that I couldn’t claim to be true to the best of my knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

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Not long after WordPress 2.6 came out, the talk of version 2.7 going public either in late September or early October has surfaced. For bloggers, it can be a challenge to keep up with this pace, and sometimes it just boils down to appreciation of the new features.

Here are the proposed changes for WordPress 2.7 taken from the WP Codex. Of course, we’ll have to wait for the final release to know which among these actually got in, but by just looking at this list, do you think it’s worth the trouble to upgrade? Or rather, what would it take to get you to upgrade your current WordPress installation? Read the rest of this entry »

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