Experiments & Expressions

In addition to my blog feed, I have started a feed of CYBERSTARS® blogs. In doing so, I have found that subscribers are typically on services that do not have built-in ways to include an RSS feed. So the frequently asked question is “How do I place the RSS feed on my Blogger sidebar?”

For those that want to take the cheapest, easiest route to blogging, Blogger is it. However, with the simplicity of setup comes a lack of features that should be common in all blogging software including RSS feed inclusion. If you spent the money on the pro version of Blogger or use a personally installed system, you have an easier way to do this. If you have a free Blogger.com account or are using another free blogging service that doesn’t directly support including RSS feeds, read on.

For real estate professionals, or any profession-related site for that matter, it’s important to only include highly relevant links and have highly relevant information. One way to do this is by adding an RSS feed of headlines or links to your sidebar. Unfortunately, many of the turnkey hosted services do not provide an easy way to do this.

The two main ways of including an RSS feed in your sidebar are via:

1. A dynamic include via a server script (can’t be done on Blogger)
2. Javascript

RSS Feed via Server Script

The first way, although the best, is simply not possible on Blogger because they (and many of the free blog hosts) do not offer this option. Server-side scripting (usually written in PHP or ASP) is usually the best option for search engines. These scripts can deliver updated, via RSS, HTML links to your visitors AND to search engines. This can be a huge benefit to you and the sites that you link to. You can do this if you use your own software such as WordPress.

Using Javascript for RSS Feeds

If you’re using Blogger, javascript is your only option. To use javascript, you either need to know how to write some fancy javascript code, or know how to follow directions and use one of these services:

• Feed2JS
• FeedDigest
• JavaScript RSS box viewer

Need more help in getting setup? Do have other suggestions for getting feeds on your sidebar? If you’re already doing this, please share how you do it!

Which blog pinging service do you use? Do you know what one is? If you blog, a pinging service is one great way to drive traffic to your site by getting the word out. Here’s a run down of services that are available.

What is a blog pinging service?

First of all, you need to know what a ping is. There are many meanings depending on the context, but all have roughly the same basic principle. In blogging, a ping is when you notify another website that you have updated your blog. The primary places that you would do this with are sites that act as blog tracking services or news headline aggregators. Technorati is one good example.

Now that you know what a ping is (or now that you’re thoroughly confused about it), on to blog pinging services… It would be to your blog’s benefit to let every tracker and news alert service know that you have new content. But to ping each of them would take forev… well, a really long time.

Recommended blog pinging services

Here’s where pinging services come in. In a nutshell, you can ping multiple sites with one click and one submit. There are many blog pinging services available, but here are a few services that are the cream of the crop.

Pingoat

Pingoat is the one to watch. Many people have started migrating from other services to use this service because the improved speeds as well as the large list of sites it can ping. In addition to standard sites, you can specify options for pinging non-English sites and specialty sites.

Ping-O-Matic

This is one of the first (if not the first) ping services written by the WordPress lead developer. Pingomatic is also one of the most popular. Because of their popularity, they have outgrown servers and have been suffering some serious down time and speed issues. They have, however, received donated hardware to improve things. They have also made a number of performance improvements for their manual ping service. Even with all the improvements, Matt says that “Performance is nice, but availability is more important.”

http://pings.ws/

The features that make this ping service unique are the added ability to add trackbacks, comments, and counters to blogs. This is a nice service for those that do not have these features built into their blog.

Pong

This is the only desktop pinging utility. I haven’t downloaded this one yet, but it apparently is much faster than any of the web-based services. And I’m sure it is. Where the web-based services are serving multiple people, Pong is dedicated to you. This is an excellent choice for those that do not have automatic pinging capabilities built into their blog software.

Which service do you use? I would love for you to share what you use and why you like it so much. Thanks!

Are you looking for more exposure and want to provide yet another way for people to access your Atom feed? Well, BLO9S.com has just released a new tool (WordPress users only) to gain your blog more exposure. WordPress Button for GoogleBar.

According to their site, your visitors will be able to do all this from the toolbar:

• View your feed
• Search your blog via the search box
• Search your blog by selecting text on any website
• Have your custom icon (Can you say branding?)

There has been a lot of chatter today about what should be placed in blog sidebars. It apparently all started with BlogSEO’s Top 10 sidebar must-haves. Personally, I agree with a number of the points and am working on developing them personally. There are, however, a few things that I wouldn’t quite agree with [completely].

BlogSEO’s article demonstrates that the main issue is for search engine placement. So we need to keep that in mind. And if the purpose of a blog is to develop clientele (which it should be), it’s important to also concentrate on usability factors that affect your particular target audience.

Their Top 10 list includes:

1. RSS Button
2. Your Other Projects/Blogs
3. Short About Section
4. Contact Info
5. Most Popular Posts
6. Blog Categories
7. Recent Comments
8. Blogroll
9. Archives
10. Site Search

Again, I think this is a good list. What I would change is the implementation of blogrolling and archives. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger also has a few different ideas you might want to check out.

Sidebar Blogrolls

Blogrolls are like bookmarks that I formerly managed in my browser. Eventually they just get long, unwieldy, and lose it’s original purpose of revisiting the other site. Also from an SEO standpoint, the quanity of links probably gives very little benefit to the receiving site. Because of this, I am in the process of changing how I present my blogroll.

Instead of listing whatever hundreds of links I may have as part of my sidebar. It will be on a categorized link page with descriptions of each link. This page will be linked from my sidebar as “See everyone on my blogroll” or something to that effect.

My sidebar blogroll will be more like what I have currently labeled as “CyberStar Blogs.” This is a random display of just a few of the links that I have. The shorter list helps to:

• Clean up the sidebar
• Provide a wee-bit of power to the outgoing link
• Provide new sites to review with every page visit

Sidebar Archives

Archives are definitely a good SE-friendly feature. However, categorical links provide more structure for search engines ensuring topical relevancy. From a visitor standpoint, picking-n-clicking a category seems to be generally more intuitive. Whether the search engine reaches a page through archives or through a category link, the robot will still get there. My vote:

1. Dump the sidebar archives
2. Develop structured categories

Me in the Sidebar

I wouldn’t necessarily change this, but I thought I point out a concept I liked. Andrew Watson of Changing Way uses a nifty system called Squidoo to externally host is profile. If you have multiple blogs, this is a nice approach because of

• Centralized profile management
• Cross-selling opportunities (links to other blogs or sites)

There are probably a few other good reasons to externally host your profile, but those are the ones that really caught my attention.

Do you have a Top 10 list or have comments on what should be in the sidebar? Let me know and post a comment.

Disclaimer

Now for my disclaimer (which probably should have been placed at the top)… I’m currently implementing these ideas, but haven’t completed them yet. I use WordPress and am considering developing a custom plugin to do what I suggested above.

There’s always gotta be a “first post.” In my case this required post is due to reviewing different blogging systems and having moved from MovableType, to Drupal, and now to WordPress. I think each have there own place and for now WordPress is here. My clients have a combination of pure HTML sites editted in DreamWeaver to tweaked out versions of Drupal and MovableType. Since I have not used WordPress much in the past, I thought, “What better place than here!”
I chose to start from scratch and not import any of my old blog posts. This allows me to fully test out WordPress, recategorize my website, and see how fast I can rebuild my search engine placement. Now that WordPress is completely setup, my next few tasks for this project are:

1. Create a custom design template
2. Identify and install fun plugins
3. Start adding content
4. Market my blog

The last item (marketing my blog) seems a bit silly considering, at this point, I have very little plans to monetize this blog. However, part of my real job is Internet Marketing. I figure my own personal blog would be a great, safe place to test different linking strategies, community building efforts, and different advertising venues.

Before you start shouting that “every business is different, so strategies will be different…” Yes, I know. Again, this is meant to be a personal site, so I can do whatever I want!

As new posts are added, you will see this place morph into a place for my more than just rants and raves. You will see Technology updates, my portfolio of Photoshop experiments, and anything else that demonstrates who I am and what I do.

If you have suggestions of post topics that are related to real estate, technology, photoshop, or Internet marketing feel free to send me an email or leave a comment! I would love to hear from you.