Starting Again With Newsletters

Posted by Steve Kinsey on August 9, 2008

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

If you have read some of my old posts you would see that I wrote a few times about using newsletters to help boosts a sites traffic / user interaction. The site that used to have a fairly large subscriber list was my movie / game site. Sadly I’m ashamed to say that I let the list die off and I stopped publishing my newsletters, I think the site has suffered because of this too.

So I plan to start rebuilding a subscriber list with this site and get my newsletters going again. This time I am going to use a service I have seen used by many respected sites. In the past I’ve managed the list myself but it was a lot of work to maintain, publish and manage bounces. The service is called Aweber, I signed up quite recently and they do offer some great functions, like automated follow up messages and messages created from RSS Feeds.

I hope to start a series of articles here on how I will build this list up from scratch again and use it to promote and monetise the site more.

Just What Exactly Is Web 2.0

Posted by Steve Kinsey on August 8, 2008

We see the term Web 2.0 branded around a lot these days and used to describe all manner of things, social networking, syndication, page design, blogging, community and wiki’s. I think many people tend to use the term without really understanding what the concept is all about. There is a video on YouTube that I think really gets at the heart of what Web 2.0 means. I like this video not just because of the way it looks at the concept of Web 2.0 but also how it’s been put together, it’s very cleverly done.

Feel free to comment on this and any posts here, I operate a follow policy on my blog so you will get a real link back to your site.

Simple Free Way To Track Your Keyword Position With Firefox

Posted by Steve Kinsey on August 7, 2008

I can’t claim any credit for this, but I saw a cool blog post today on checking your rankings on keywords in Google without any costly SEO Tools, so I thought I’d share it with you.

In order to do this you need to have Firefox browser installed and a plugin called SEO Tools for Firefox. I am sure there are other tools and plugins for different browsers that will do the same but for this example these are the tools we will use.

So assuming we are using the tools listed above here is the process.

• First start up Firefox and if you haven’t done so already install the SEO Tools for Firefox. If they’re installed you will see a little SEO icon down in the bottom right of the browser, click this to turn them on or off.
• Go to the Google homepage, make sure your on the default home page not anything customised from your Google account. Click preference and set Google to display 100 results instead of the default.
• Search on your desired keyword / keywords combination, for example I decided to search using my entertainment site for a keyword I knew performed quite well (at time of writing). So for my example I search on “Mario Party”.
• Once you get your search results press CTRL+F to bring up the find function within Firefox, this usually appears at the bottom of the page. Now enter your domain in the find box, in my example digitallard.com. If your page is there Firefox will jump to it’s position and if the SEO tool is turned on you can quickly see which position you rank for that keyword example.

Now I know there are probably many other ways to achieve the same but as I use the SEO Tools anyway I found it a neat little tip and I hadn’t thought to use the tools this way. My thanks to The Unofficial Adsense Blog for the tip and for allowing me to reproduce it here.

Adding Some Comment Love To The DoFollow Plugin

Posted by Steve Kinsey on August 5, 2008

As a follow up to my recent post on allowing do follow in blog comments. I just today installed a nice new plugin that enhances the whole comment functionality in Worpress. The plugin in question is called CommentLuv and what it basically does is check the URL of the person commenting, if they have an RSS feed it pulls the title of the last post and adds it to the comment.

I like this, it’s a nice little feature and should hopefully encourage even more comments and interaction. Unfortunately it does not go back and alter previous comments but anyone that comments from now on will get their link included assuming the system can scrape the site properly.

The plugin can be found at fiddyp.co.uk.