Archives for July 2007

I’ve been doing a little thinking lately about trying a little harder to promote some of my sites.  The easiest and arguably the best thing you can do when starting to promote a site is to amass as many backlinks as possible.

There are several ways you can go about this like adding the site to directories (which can be cumbersome), buying links (try TextLinkAds), and the easiest is by commenting on blogs that do not use the nofollow attribute.

There are several  lists available that contain blogs that use the dofollow plugin or some other way to turn off the nofollow attribute, but one of the coolest uses I’ve seen is Digerati Marketing’s Google custom dofollow search.   Simply head over there, type in the subject of your site (keywords likely) and viola!  You have a list of recent posts by sites that dofollow.  Go and leave good comments on all of them!

It’s important to leave a good comment that adds to the conversation.  If you don’t you risk getting yourself marked as spam or worse, if enough bad comments float in, the blogger might turn nofollow back on.  So add to the conversation.  It’s a good chance to build a readership for your new site as well by showing that you are able to hold a conversation on the subject.

How do you build links?

Technorati Tags: links, link building, dofollow, nofollow, google custom search

The folks behind WordPress and Weblog Tools Collection announced the launch of the beta of WordPress Jobs.  It’s a handy dandy little job board with jobs that are specifically related/dealing with the WordPress platform.  It’s a pretty good idea, but I wonder if it’s specificity won’t deal it a deadly strike.

With places like Problogger, Lifehacker, and TechCrunch already having job boards for bloggers and the web 2.0 set, will there be enough job listings to go around?  Or maybe a better question is, will the listers list on all of the above repeatedly?

The site design is nice and clean and makes for very easy navigation.  They have feeds for each of the categories which should make it really easy for filtering out the jobs you wouldn’t be interested in.  The listings themselves are also very clean and get right to the point.  There aren’t a lot of distracting graphics and the text is uber readable.  The one thing I noticed that would certainly annoy me as a job seeker is that there is no good way to contact the job lister.  There is a How to Apply section, but all the listings I looked at merely said “email” or “email or phone” with no listing of what the email or phone numbers were.  Apparently, you must be telepathic to apply for some of the jobs.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this site.  It has potential for being a good source for freelance work as well as a good place to list if I ever were to decide to hire someone.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, jobs, job board, wordpress jobs

Every so often (about every other month) I get a little jaded over my online goings on.  Something like my trouble with the captcha plugin from a few days ago brings me down and I get a bit blue about the whole thing.  It isn’t that I’m not qualified to do what I’m doing, it’s just getting over the bump in the road.  I find myself wondering if it’s worth doing at all.

Usually a few days will go by and that feeling gets a little less.  Or I fix the problem and it goes away completely.  In any case, so far in this little think I like to think of my digital empire, I have yet to really seriously consider quitting.  It’s taken too much of a root in my life to do so.  Maybe one day I won’t think so anymore and I’ll pull the shutters, but for now, I trudge on.

What do the rest of you do when you hit a bump?  What keeps you going?  Do you switch focus for a while and work on different projects?  I’d really like to know.  I’d like to try some new things and hopefully your answers will give me some ideas!

Oh, and a thank you to Mr. Robert Heinlein for the inspiration for the title of this post.  Sometimes you have to look beyond the screen for that.

Technorati Tags: web, digital empire, blogging