Archive for March 12th, 2010

Most recent posts links are in almost every blog theme, but they are not the most efficient way of channeling visitors and page rank around the site. Read why I think you should replace it with different page navigation.

Most blogs that I visit proudly display a list of most recent posts. But is there any point in this? Could it even be an unecessary distraction that loses traffic for you? Lets look at it from the point of view of humans and search engines.

Humans visitor

To start with, brand new visitors to your website need to be sold on your website. Your most recent posts might be your best ever work, but more likely they are just average. Instead you want to alert them to your best writing, which is probably your most read writing. So a list of your most popular posts could just attract the attention of a few new readers and persuade them to read on.

The problem is there is limited space on a screen and if you have a recent posts and a most popular posts set of links, you are giving your visitors too much information. You need to steer them towards those posts that attract attention and hope this will get them to subscribe to your writings.

But what about existing readers? These do need to be told of your latest posts. But these will probably be following your RSS feeds or subscribing to your newsletter. Both of these will be alerting them to the new writings. Also, existing readers coming directly to your website are most likely to land on your homepage rather than a post. If your homepage has the links to your newest work, then that satisfies their needs.

So for human visitors, whether they are new to you and have arrived on a post or existing readers arriving from your RSS read, then steering them to your most popular work is the best way of ensuring more page views.

Search Engines

But surely for search engines it is far better to link to new posts from every page of your website? That way as soon as a search engine visits any page of your website then they are alerted to the presence of new posts? This ensures rapid caching of the pages? Right?

Wrong!

For a start, if you are using any descent sort of blogging platform new posts will ping the search engines. This is where you tell the search engines that the new post exists. Secondly, there are far better ways of doing this function without distracting from guiding your visitors around the site.

To make sure that search engines do pick up all new posts it is better to install a sitemap plugin. These will tell search engines which pages are new and updated in the format that they prefer to work with. You can also use services such as Twitter to announce the arrival of new pages.

Also, by removing the list of new posts from every page, you are helping to channel the page rank around the site. Instead of it always pointing temprarily to new posts you are pointing it to the most valuable posts in your arsenal. This might just lift these posts slightly higher in the search engines and increase your traffic even more.

So get rid of your most recent posts list and replace it with a most popular posts list.

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Ethical or not, for bloggers, being paid to write a post can be a good way to earn some extra cash. On a very good blog, it can be a decent income. But how do you get started?

If you are blogging, either for fun or with the aim of earning a decent income, then one of the methods that you might look at for earning an income is sponsored posts.

Is sponsored posting ethical?
There is a great debate as to whether these are ethical or not. You are selling to your audience a website, company or a link on the pretense that you are recommending it out of interest. But in actual fact, you might only have first heard of the website 5 minutes ago when you were asked to write about them.

Finding work
That aside, they can be a good earning potential. You can deal directly with various contacts for sponsored posts, or use one of the many main providers on the marketplace. Dealing direct does earn a lot more cash, but it is more difficult to find the people wanting to advertise on your website.

So, how do you go about it? Well, find a site or two that you like the looks of and sign up. You give them your basic blog details, the address, a description etc, and then they quite often give you a claim sentence to publish in a post, e.g.

The road gladdens the obsessed ghost.

This sentence is utter nonsense and is designed just to prove that you do actually have permissions to update the blog. You add the sentence to a recent post that appears on the home page and then you are away.

Posting sponsored content
After that, you just have to sit down and wait for some opportunities to arrive. As they do, and they will if your blog is good enough, you read the requirements, write a post and then tell the system the URL of the new post. There will probably be an automated check of the correct links and then the advertiser gets to review your post. If everything passes, you then receive payment a month later.

On site disclosure
It sounds easy, and usually is. But you to have to be wary that a recent change to advertising standards mean that you have to disclose that you are being paid to write that post so that your readers know it is not just a website that you have found and want to promote. They have the right to know there is a financial incentive for you to write that post.

How this is dealt with varies from scheme to scheme. Some insist that every post carries a disclosure whilst others insist that your site carries a disclosure page. Personally, I try to do both as much as possible.

Variations
Not all sponsored posts schemes work the same way. For example, the one I work with the most just suggests what to do, a minimum word count and the links and lets you get on with it. Another scheme just wants a link in a post of relevant content.

These schemes are mainly about tricking the search engines into seeing more inbound links, again a little dubious, but there is also another system in which all links are nofollowed. This is quite a clever set-up, which I have only just started to use and there is currently little work available. If it starts to grow it will get it’s own write-up, but its main aim is just to get bloggers talking about their advertisers.

Keith Lunt

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