Online Marketing Diary for Bloggers

After reviewing my Google Analytics data, I noticed a very high bounce rate. This means that people are looking at my blog and then promptly leaving without viewing another page. I believe my first step to solve this problem is to enhance my blog appearance and presentation.

I was using the Redband Wordpress theme for the last 3 weeks, and after 3 hours of research, I chose a new theme by CSSRockstars.com called Charade.

I really like the Web 2.0 feeling, the social media links, and the email rss functionality. I did make some edits to fonts as well as some html tweaking as the bottom footer did not show well with Internet Explorer. Basically I deleted a couple span tags in the footer and sidebar and all was well.

I can see paying a few dollars for a premium theme the next time I feel the need, but for now my goal is to see what can be accomplished without spending a dollar on this site.

I recently became the target of blog spam. Someone is sending me a plethora of comments on my articles that have no use or relevance whatsoever to my blog.  Let me assure you, deleting spam everyday is something I do not want to add to my list of daily activities.

I did a Google search of what to do and found that my version of Wordpress (version 2.7) already has a plugin called Akismet that just needed to be activated to work. This was good news, however it required an API key to function which I found by signing up with Wordpress.com (not .org).

One item to note is that Akismet recommends you mark spam comments as “spam” rather than “delete” them. This educates the spam software to make it smarter for next time.

Since I have been using Akismet my comments spam has been much more manageable.

Some bloggers use a CAPTCHA method before a comment can be submitted. While this is common for many websites requiring a login or signup feature, I have not commonly seen this for commenting on blogs. One website I found this method was The Internet Marketing Driver, which seems to be an even more effective method of controlling spam. Akismet will be good enough for me at this time however.

Here is what I have been working on the last few days.

- Signed up with aboutus.org,  Alexa.com and Quantcast.com to let them know this site exists.

- Registered with Topblogarea.com and addme.com. The last one here was interesting, it was free but then they send you quite a few emails to get you premium listing with various search directories. I didn’t pay anything and cancelled myself from all the email lists. I wonder if they really added me anywhere.

- Noticed that the Cogno template I was using didn’t have an RSS feed and email signup feature.  There was a RSS feed signup but it was only a text line near the middle of the blog. I checked out my Google Feedburner account and found some code to add. This was a massive oversight and should have been done days ago.

It has been one month since I started onlinemarketingdiary.net which is all about keeping a public, detailed diary of how I promote and popularize this blog.

There was a lot of learning, tweaking, and reading happening over the past month. As well, I took a week off to go to Playa Del Carmen, Mexico with my wife to shake off the winter chills. This stopped my marketing and blogging momentum for quite a few days.

January 2009 - Measures of Performance (MOPs)

The following picture shows what I plan on tracking each month to measure the progress of this site.

Not much to see, but the baseline is set. Next month will be interesting.

Firefox Rank Checker results

It’s funny how search engines work. A few days ago this blog was listed in MSN’s Live, today it’s gone.  It’ll come back. Google has made me #1 for the search term “online marketing diary” which is nice. Not many people enter this as a search term however.

Thoughts and Monthly Wrapup

Overall I am happy with the search engine results for just one month. It was a nice surprise to see Google and Yahoo index my site so quickly. I guess they really do love blogs.

I would have like more traffic however…seems a little low for all the effort that was put in. That’s just part of my learning curve I suppose.

I am eager to continue so please join me as I walk down this path to a land unknown.

Good news today! MSN’s Search Engine, Live.com, is now listing my blog in their database. Let’s take a quick look at my Firefox Rank Checker results. I told you I was addicted to this tool!

My best search term across the board is “online marketing diary” which makes sense because this is the title of my blog and the url of my website. I am happy to see the #8 Live.com ranking for the search term “internet marketing diary”. Good stuff!

Since the last post, I have done the following;

- Updated my wordpress Permalinks to show a more search friendly URL.

How to do this? Go to your dashboard, click on “settings”, then click on “permalinks”. Under “Common settings”, click “Custom Structure” and then add the following “/%postname%/” (don’t add the quotes). Click “Save Changes” and you are done.

Now your url will say something like “http://www.onlinemarketingdiary.net/managing-your-time/” rather than “http://www.onlinemarketingdiary.net/?P=49”

- Signed up with Furl.net and Backflip.com.

Over the last couple days I have signed up with the following social media website.

Social Media
Mixx.com
Reddit.com
LinkedIn.com
30Boxes.com
Myspace.com
Digg.com
Disqus.com
Delicious.com
Bebo.com
Brightkite.com
LiveJournal.com

There likely isn’t alot of value signing up with a social site and then promptly leaving….instead of being social. I will come back to these sites in a few weeks to explore and use them in more detail.

Directories
Blogs.com
Blogsdirs.com
DMOZ.org
MyBlogLog.com

I noticed that Rank Checker showed a worse placement for Yahoo today then yesterday. For instance, I was ranked #2 for “online marketing diary” yesterday and this morning it is ranked #43. I hope this is just because the site is so new and still propagating throughout the web. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

It’s been 2 weeks since my first post on this blog and last night while all was quiet, Yahoo indexed my blog into their search directory. This is great news as my traffic is very low still and I am the type of person that needs to see progress.

I must confess, I am addicted to checking my search engine results with Rank Checker every morning. Perhaps this is natural. Here are the results this morning.

Notice that MSN (Live) has still added this website yet.

I found another tool that is very handy. It is the SEO Toolbar plugin for Firefox.

Note that I do not usually install plugins to my wordpress log OR my browser, as I do not want to “complicate” it and end up with silly problems that I don’t have time for. However, I do like this plug in. Try it out!

Here are a few things I have done in the last couple of days.

Changed blog title (yet again!) to “A diary of an internet marketing blog from vision to reality”.

Technorati.com
Signed up blog at Technorati…placed a image link on site. Apparently
I am ranked 4,735,312 here.

Feedburner.com
Signed up blog at Feedburner..placed a image link on site.

Changed my theme from “CognoBlue” to “Redband” as it seems much more modern. The red, black, grey colors are bit more intense which I like.

Added a picture or avatar of myself to this blog as well as any third party accounts I have. I read that it was a good idea to have a standard picture throughout all your social media accounts.

Discovered Google Sktool which is a search based keyword tool. It shows an approximate cost of each term to advertise on Google Adwords.

Updated tags for this post and all previous posts. I wasn’t quite clear the value of them when I first started.

Well,  my new website is starting to be enveloped by the web.  Google crawlers came back to re-index Jan 7 which was fortunate because the first time it cached a page with absolutely no content whatsoever.

I found a wicked tool called “Rank Checker” which is an add on to Firefox web browser.

Just put in the domain name, type in some search terms, press start and the results are shown. Here is the output of my check right now.  Note: I exported into Excel and tidied it up.

Nothing worth speaking of but remember the website is just over a week old. Notice that Yahoo and MSN (Live) has not even acknowledged my site’s existence yet.

Wow Factor!! I am really impressed with Firefox Rank Checker, note that you can save all the terms you are tracking to a file.  This means with just a few clicks I will be able to check again tomorrow..without typing in all the terms again.

Yesterday was the day I checked out Twitter.com, even though just the name “Twitter” annoyed me. I can’t explain why…perhaps it’s the “twit” part.

Anyways, I signed up…..posted a few lines of what I was doing and tried to figure out how it all works.

Twitter is comparable to Facebook’s  “What am I doing now?” feature which, admittedly, I find myself using once in a while.

I updated my Twitter profile linking this blog and posted a few more comments before going to bed.

Turns out that I already I received 2 followers since then. They seem to also be in the online marketing business.

I found some useful links around the internet regarding Twitter.

Top 100 Twitterholics Based on Friends

Comprehensive Guide to Twitter