The invention of the phrase “Web 2.0″ was always a thinly disguised publicity stunt.
Supposedly Web 1.0 was about the type of websites first on the Net which were simply publishing content to their readers but nice clean web 2.0 is a new type of website that allows and encourages feedback and involvement.
And that sounds fine until you realise that the first types of website were Bulletin boards – now known as forums which are 100% user generated where feedback is sometimes, er, energetic and feedback is frequently fast and furious.
Anyhow we are stuck with the term and “2.0″ is even detaching itself because today I saw a book called “Barack 2.0″
Here at Expert List Building we are taking the “2.0″ tag as meaning “social” and we are taking a look at how you can make your blog more social.
A few obvious things to start off with:
- Enable commenting on your blog – many marketers want to control what appears and that’s natural. You have to consider your branding in all that you publish. Relax and let Akismet do it’s work!
- Ask people to guest post
- Join in Blog carnivals
And then get to the less obvious more tech side of the socialisation of your blog
- Use plugins such as Sharethis or Sociable to allow readers to bookmark or syndicate your posts to their friends
- A twitter plugin is so important that it’s worth mentioning seperatley
- RSS syndication is crucial and a way to encourage it must be part of your blog and the way you do this may depend on design and taste issues. If you take a look at the top left of this blog you’ll see the “Add to Any” subscription for RSS feeds – feel free
- And then notice the “Contact Us” option on the menu – that is provided by the Contact 7 plugin and gives a good way to er, contact us.
- Next we get to “Join Us – You are Welcome” – this is an invite to opt-in to our email list.
- Looking over to the right sidebar you can see another way to join our opt-in email list. This is a different plugin – MaxBlogPress Optin Form Adder
- The “Subscribe to comments” also encourages people to join in and take an interest rather than just surf by
We could continue but enough already, huh? The social dimension of your blog has to be a prime consideration of all you do.
The more you syndicate your content the greater will be your reach and influence leading to more leverage and profitability.
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Filed under Blogs by on Mar 9th, 2009. Comment. 
I intended to discuss Off Page SEO aka backlinks in the SEO Plugins post – but it was getting a bit too long. So let’s discuss it here…
The job of a search engine is to respond in the best way possible to a search phrase entered by someone looking for an answer.
To do that it has to index the web or catalogue the web so that it knows what is where.
Here comes the really interesting part of this…
The only way that a search engine can find web pages or blog posts is by following links. It stands to reason that if you make sure there are lots of links going to your web page or blog post the search engine will find it easily.
And we live in a democratic age…
Google regards each link going to your page or post to be like a vote. Think of it this way – if you are blogging about something and you think of a great resource (maybe a news story or a video) on a particular web site or blog you will put the link to that resource in your post -you have voted for the web page.
The more votes the better, right?
About now you might be wondering how this helps you to know all this?
There are 2 concrete ways in which this helps you
- If you know that votes / links help you then why not write the best quality material you can – whatever that means to you so that you attract attention and votes/ links to your material
- There’s an old saying that “if you want something done properly do it yourself” – so let’s just say that if you want links to your web site or blog why not make them?
What is stopping you in submitting articles with a link to your web page or blog to the article directories? What is stopping you creating a string of web pages / blogs at Squidoo, wetpaint, Weebly, blogger, wordpress etc to get some links?
Yes and the old favourites of posting in forums still works and new faves too such as twitter
It is simply a matter of putting in the time and effort. Helping the search engines to find you with a boatload of links is a clear and obvious activity that all bloggers and web masters engage in to get more links and visitors
That’s visitors as in readers and buyers. And whether you blog for income or influence you want attention. What we have found is that if you want attention you need to follow a plan of action to build links to your pages and posts.
As you build links you will see your visitor numbers increase – provided of course you have installed the shortstat plugin we discussed in the first post of this series
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Filed under WordPress Plugins by on Feb 27th, 2009. Comment.
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