By setting a consistent publishing schedule you prevent people from having to check often and you build patterns in visitorship and readership. For months now I have set two of my blogs to publish new articles every morning at 7am consistently and rarely deviate. I do sometimes publish more than one article a day, but I always have a new post every morning at 7am.

If you publish weekly then setting the same day of the week and time weekly will also help keep an established pattern of expectation from readers. This tactic applies especially true for blogs devoted to bringing information articles but certain exceptions can be made. Personal diaries can be updated as often as the reader desires so as long as it is updated routinely for some of the posts. Blog posts about breaking news or news stories will want to be published immediately as today’s news can quickly become yesterday’s history if you don’t publish and capture the immediate attention to the article.

Let your readers know how often you typically plan to publish and let them know what time you typically publish so readers who visit can know when the next article will be available and will check back. The next article will talk about promotion of your article and bringing in readership to your “power” articles which are ones designed to attract more attention than everyday posts.

-Dragon Blogger

No related posts.

I installed the plug-in and recycled Firefox, immediately noticing an Alexa bar show up at bottom of Firefox, and the new rankquest bar up at top under my bookmarks.

Click on image for larger picture:

You can see right next to the RankQuest logo is the PageRank, which will display the pagerank on any site you are visiting by hovering over it.  It also has green color bars indicating the pagerank level.  In addition to this, there are numerous SEO buttons and tools you can click on.

One of the most useful to me was under the “Meta” menu, click on the Meta Tag Analyzer for your site, and you will see a link to RankQuest site open up displaying your description and Meta Keyword Tags for your site.  It will also identify whether or not they are good, warning, or error.  I learned from this tool it says you shouldn’t have more than 20 keywords for your pages.  Though I have seen this number 10, 20, 30 in different search engines, and recommendations so I don’t know how accurate that is.

Click on Image for larger picture:

Another useful feature is the Validation Menu, where you can choose from Server Header, Link Checker and HTML Validator. Link Checker will go out and find all links associated with that page online. This is actually appears to be an identical list to Google WebMasterTools, but it is nice to have this information for any single page, by browsing the page and then using this tool. This allows you to see this information for websites you do not own and administrate through Google WebMasterTools.

I continue to experiment and learn with this very feature laden plug-in for Firefox. It claims to have all the SEO Tools you need at your fingertips for your sites.

As I discover new uses for the plug-in I will post about them, let me know if any of you use this plug-in, or have heard of it.

-Dragon Blogger

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Here is an overview of Entrecard.

First you have an entrecard account, I recommend an account for each and every one of your blogs, but you can link them all together (more on that a little later).

You create a 125×125 pixel ad for your blog, make sure you have your blog’s name or URL inside the 125×125 ad.  Having a picture with no blog name or URL makes it hard for people to know who you are or what your blog URL is.  You want this to stick in their mind even after they see and recognize your entrecard picture.

Once you create an account you will go into your dashboard as seen here:

The biggest thing to note about your dashboard are the following:

1. The amount of credits you have (this is your advertising credits, EC’s)
2. The amount of cards you dropped today / all time
3. The amount of credits it costs to advertise on your blog
4. The amount of cards dropped on you today / all time

• Entrecard Credits (ECs)

These are advertiser credits, like online dollars. Each site you want to display your entrecard on costs a certain amount of ECs per day. You purchase advertising in 24 hour chunks for a set # of ECs from a blog site.
The more popular a blog is (the more drops it receives) the more it costs to advertise on that blog.
You get 1 EC for each drop you perform on someones blog, and you also get 1 EC for each drop that is made on your blog. You also get ECs from advertisers who purchase spots on your blog, but these ECs are paid only when the advertisers AD is displayed not at time of purchase.

• Dropping Cards

Dropping cards is one of the best ways to get ECs as well as get your blog visited by other Entrecard users.  When you first start out and link a blog, you will use the “Campaign” button at the top and do a search for blogs related to your blogs topic.  If you write poetry, do searches for “Poem, Poetry, Writing”…etc and then visit each and every one of these blogs sites and drop on them.

Tip:  Hover over the little Entrecard of the Site and hold Control Key and then click on “Visit Site”.  This will open the site in a new Firefox or Google Chrome tab.  This allows you to mass open a bunch of sites at the same time, then flip to each of the taps with Control – Page Up or Control – Page Down, click the drop, then Control + W to close the tab.  This is a little trick which allows me to make dozens of drops very quickly.

Here is another note, look for sites that say “Drop For Life” or “Drop U Back”.  You know these people will almost always pay you back with a drop.  Secondly, look at blog post before you drop.  If you visit a blog that has a last post > 30 days ago, pretty much assume there is a good chance it is a less than active blog.  Drop if you like the topic but don’t necessarily expect a drop back.

I always try to read some of my dropper’s posts on their main page before dropping, and I comment where appropriate.  This is because even though they appreciate the drop, dropping and running will give the blog a high “Bounce Rate” and though they get the Unique Visits, it shows that their content isn’t keeping people on the site for a follow up click.

• Drops Inbox

After you have done many drops and you notice people start dropping on your site, go to your Drops Inbox as often as possible, at least daily.  Remember you can only drop once time per 24 hours, and if people are doing 2 drops on your blog but you are only returning 1, they aren’t inclined to keep dropping as often.  Entrecard requires a little bit of work, try to drop on all people who drop on you every day.  I set aside 1 hour per day to just perform entrecard drops and advertisements.

The funny thing is, when I was doing multiple Entrecard drops per day, I was losing track of which droppers I was returning the favor on.  I now use the “Show only people I haven’t dropped on” drop down menu, to show all the Entrecards of visitors who I haven’t dropped in the last 24 hours.  This way if you check your Entrecard several times a day, you know who is left to drop on for that day.

• Advertising

Okay here is the fun part, when you start off a new blog you need to advertise it, but you won’t have very many EC’s so you want to click on Campain, and click on Search, then Sort by Cheapest. But beware, many of the cheap blogs either are decomissioned or have never updated in months so they are cheap for a reason. New blogs sometimes don’t have a badge setup yet. Visit every site before you pay to advertise on the site, make sure the site is up, the site works, and doesn’t have content that conflicts with yours. Also visit their profile and see how often they accept or respond to advertisers, and note what their reject rate is.

When people advertise on your blog, visit their site first before just accepting.  Make sure its content is appropriate.  Secondly, reject some way off topic advertisers.  By doing some rejections, you actually make your blog more popular in the long run as you don’t look like you pander to just anyone.  But don’t reject too many or people won’t even try to advertise.

• Handling Multiple Blogs

This is one of my favorite parts about Entrecard is the ability to have multiple accounts and link all of the blogs together so you can switch back and forth between your Entrecard accounts.  You can only do 300 drops per day on one account, but if you have multiple accounts you can drop up to 600 cards per day.  I often try to get 300 drops per day, and I usually do at least 20-30 additional for my secondary blogs for about 400 drops per day.

The switch tab near your email at the top is very useful, this lets you see linked accounts and transfer ECs between your blogs so you can give your baby blogs more advertiser credits.  This also allows you to easily switch back and forth between your accounts, to check their dashboards for advertisers, and visit the drops inbox to return drop favors.

• Dragon Blogger Tips

Last but not least now I will explain how I use Entrecard.
I always drop everyone who drops on me, and if there wasn’t enough people dropping on me to fill up 300 drops, then I start campaign browsing. Honestly, I sometimes do Random searches, and drop on random people. I always give preference to bloggers who list “Drop U Back” or who list their Top Droppers on their blog, as these people tend to show more odds to return the favor. Secondly I drop on my advertisers, even if they aren’t in my drops inbox, because they advertised with me, I drop them. I also sometimes blog chain, and I can knock off lots of drops this way. This is when you visit a blogger’s site, and open the entrecard ad in their site to another site, then do the same over and over again. Dropping on each site as you go. This causes me to reach out to random blogs, but it also lets me see the blogs who really are advertising like crazy out there. When I see one blog having ten or twenty ads on other blogs I know they are heavily promoted.

I buy advertisments on expensive sites where I can, and cheap sites when I don’t have the credits for the big sites.  If I don’t have any ads running in the next 24 hours, I will sort my searches looking for blogs that have no ADs in the queue.  I try to have at least 3-4 ads running every day on someones blog somewhere.

I do visit the Statistics page and look at top droppers…etc and I will do a follow up blog on leveraging the Entrecard Analytics.

Happy Dropping my friends,

-Dragon Blogger

No related posts.

For everyone out there who stumbles across my blog I consider my blog successful for being only 34 days and I put hard work into making it more so.  I have several tips for new blogger’s and even bloggers looking to try something different.  Look at my “Blogging” category and read all of my posts on blog promotion, design, analytics and my methods for bringing my blog from 0 – an average of 176 viewers per day for the past week.

I have said this before and I will reprint it, the three most valuable social networking tools I find myself using every night are:

Entrecard – This is a must have for your blog, create a good appealing 125×125 ad, don’t use a generic one from Entrecard, it must say your blog’s name on it as well, don’t just have a picture without at least saying your blogs name on the logo.  Drop often and find people who have “Drop For Life” or “I will Drop You Back” on their sites, these people will return drops.  Join my Entrecard Generator, and use it.  It will open many quick links to Entrecard sites for easy drops.  (My generator is still being build, I add new links every few days)

SocialSpark – This is another must in my opinion, not only do you get the analytics, but you also get to browse other peoples blogs by category and link up with people in like genre’s.  Many people are helpful and I get alot of my viewership from SocialSpark people checking out my blog.

Zimbio – This is a really nice way to get your blog promoted, and to find nice articles and well written blogs.  I don’t get alot of traffic from Zimbio, but when you post your articles, you can easily get 90+ links on Google External Links from Zimbio.  I like the concept of Zimbio, the whole blogs turned into online magazine articles.  I am still trying to figure out how to leverage it to get more traffic flow, but I think Zimbio will be a more major player as more people start to use it.

Remember don’t get discouraged, it is easy to get euphoric when you see your blog have 200+ visits one day, and then get depressed when you see the next day it drops down to 20 visits.  You want to remember to have quality content posted, keep readers coming back with unique topics.   I also believe in some variety, there is benefit to specialized blogs, but if you make a technology blog and focus too specifically without somewhat reaching out to other topics once and a while, you will have such a restricted audience.

I advertise my blog over and over as 50% Internet & Technology (I consider posting about blogging, promoting analytics Technology), 25% Entertainment (My Heroes Reviews, TV Shows, Comics…etc), 15% Personal (Local reviews, social life…etc) and 10% Advertising (Paid Posts and Sponsorships).

This is a healthy mix in my opinion, as I try keep a little bit for everyone, but people who are interested in blogging, science, technology and politics will come back to read my latest on these topics.  Ironically, I have 101 posts, and my 5 most popular posts by far are:

1. Mozilla Songbird – Managing your iPOD with Ubuntu Hardy Heron
2. Dragon Bloggers Review of Heroes Season 3 Premiere – Part 1
3. Downloading YouTube Video’s to your iPOD Nano
4. Dragon Blogger Review of TNT Network’s Raising the Bar
5. Dragon Bloggers Review of Heroes Season 3 Premiere – Part 2

No related posts.

This is in part due to my posts of the NBC Heroes website. I wrote 2 reviews of the first 2 episodes of Season 1 and Season 2 (you can search for them in my search bar). I also posted my reviews on some NBC Forums and IMDB.com and I have jumped from my average of 100 Unique visitors per day to almost 300 unique visitors yesterday. Most of them have come to read my review of the NBC Heroes TV Show.

That being said, I have decided to write a post each and every Monday night or Tuesday morning devoted to each Heroes Episode, since it clearly is very popular and is a good thing to blog about. I realize spikes in traffic come and go depending on the popularity of your articles and genre of topic so I don’t expect my numbers to stay at 300 per day.

I notice my Bounce Back rates are very high, Entrecard brings in many unique visitors, but they just click the Drop button and move on (as I do on most of my drop sites). This does bring in unique visitors, but also gives you a high bounce rate, which means people aren’t staying more than to casually scan your front page and are moving on.

Here is a snapshot of my Google Analytics from this morning showing my blog over the past 30 days. I only started with analytics in early September and had a 2 day outage due to analytics code being wrong on my site. (See my Analytics Blogs) for how to setup analytics properly.

My good friend Damien Riley who runs 3 blogs including Postcards From the Funny Farm showed me a tip with analytics this morning, if you click on the email symbol at the top, and email yourself a PDF output of your statistics, you get all the information you want without having to sift through the HTML links.

Thank you Damien for the tip.

Here is my current statistics, click on image to view it larger and in more detail.

-Dragon Blogger

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