Three Sticks — Moses on Life

My first attempt a blogging started in January 2006. It lasted approximately 1 month. The blog lacked focus so it was basically a random collection of interesting bits. After month I abandoned it through negligence. Quite frankly without an overarching purpose for the blog, I found my time being absorbed by the demands of my former job as Chief Architect for the State of Georgia. A year later I relaunched the blog as an expression of my greater purpose to help people.

I have spent the last 2 months writing articles and learning about the fine art of blogging. I have been amazed at how quickly the blog has developed a readership and it’s vast improvement in the technorati ranking. When I first relaunched Three Sticks its ranking was approximately 1.8 million and as of 3/24/2007 its ranking is approximately 130,000. To see the current ranking of Three Sticks click here. For an explanation of how technorati’s ranking system work click here.

I thought it would be useful to share what I have learned with other bloggers and potential bloggers.

First, for new bloggers I want you to know that this will take time. I spent 1 month full-time reading, writing and working on the mechanics of my blog. Although it’s not hard it was time consuming.

Enough with the introduction, here are the steps I took to improve my blog. Below the recommendations are links to other articles like this one. Rather than plagiarize the content from those articles I just gave you the original articles. I applied many of the suggestions in those articles to Three Sticks.

1. Pick a blogging platform that has a lot of third party support. A good way to measure if the blog platform has a lot of support is the number of plugins that are available for the platform. I use wordpress as my platform.
2. Decide your purpose for blogging. Is it to make money, provide value to others or to provide an outlet for your ideas, thoughts and frustrations. This helps you set your expectations and will keep you motivated when you do not feel like writing.
3. Do what’s best for your readers and you will be rewarded both financially (if that is what you want) and personally.
4. Write articles first. Before everything else make sure that you have content that you want to share. Don’t worry about making your blog popular until there is content that others want to read.
5. Determine if making money is important to you. If it is, sign up for Google’s AdSense, Amazon Associates and any other programs you want to try. You should continue to experiment as there are always new avenues being created to generate online revenue. Submit your applications early as it may take several days for you to be accepted by the program.
6. Claim your blog at blog registries such as technorati, bloghop, daypop, globeofblogs, top100blogs, blogdigger, blogcatalog, blogflux, feedshark and rhyswynne.co.uk.
7. Submit your articles to blog carnivals. Blog Carnivals give you exposure to other like minded bloggers, writers and readers. Use the multi-carnival submission engine BlogCarnival.com. Be sure to only submit articles to carnivals that are relevant to your article. It’s best to review some of the earlier editions of the blogcarnivals that you are interested in to make sure that you want your blog to be associated with them.
8. Sign-up for Feed Burner. My article 5 Free Tools to Track the Success of Your Blog describes why feedburner is such a powerful tool.
9. Create a sitemap to make it easier for search engines to locate your posts. I use the Google SiteMap Generator it’s a wordpress plugin.
10. Register your blog with search engines such as Yahoo, Google, MSN, Alexa, GigaBlast, A9. This is very important. There are millions of blogs out there and if you want your blog to be indexed and included in the results of search engines you have to make your blog explicitly known. The benefit of doing this can be pretty rewarding. Click here to see where this blog shows up in a Google search for Three Sticks.
11. Sign-up for Google Business Solutions. Google has a number of powerful tools for webmasters. An example is Google Analytics, this provides rich visualizations of all sorts of information about your site and its readers. For more information check out 5 Tools to Track the Success of Your Blog.
12. Allow for trackbacks and pings to create mutual links between your blog and other bloggers commenting on your posts. I recommend allowing trackbacks , pings and comments for a limited time perhaps 30 days or so. If you don’t you may find your blog targeted by sploggers.
13. Join the blogrolls of blogs with liberal blogroll policies like those here.
14. Get involved with the blog community that focuses on your subject area. This may mean hosting a blogcarnival or participating in other online events. It is important to build these connections. Connecting with others will help you refine your ideas allowing you to create more valuable content for readers. And quite frankly is personally enriching.
15. Review your sites statistics to understand what articles your readers read and what posts are their exit points from your blog. For tools to help you track your sites statistics click here.
16. Constantly review your site to make sure that it is optimized for both human readers and machine readers. The SearchGrit site will review your site for free. I did it and it helped tremendously. See the changes I made here.
17. Submit your best articles to social networking sites like reddit, digg, blinklink and stumbleupon. I caution the use of this step. It helps with creating traffic to your site, but it can backfire if you use it too often. Most of these sites have a point system that can degrade the value of your participation if you abuse the tool.
18. Link up using blog link sites such as alinksblog, 1000000links and misterlinker. I’m currently doing this but I’m not so sure I will continue doing it in the future. It feels a little wrong. There is some controversy about the practice.
19. Track search terms and links to your blog using egosurf.
20. Create unique tags, keywords and descriptions for each article and category. This is critical because it helps search engines distinguish between the different posts and category section. If you fail to do many blogging tools like wordpress will use the your blog description as the description for each post and category section making the content appear to be the same. This can cause search engines to falsely conclude that you are attempting to manipulate the system and give your blog a lower rank or kick your blog out of its results entirely. I use two plugins to provide this functionality. The first is Another Wordpress Meta Plugin which provides meta description and meta keyword tags. The second is Simple Tagging which provides the technorati style tags for each article.

Other articles with additional recommendations

Here are some other articles that I read along the way that really helped me improve the ranking of my blog.

1. 10 Blogging Mistakes to Avoid
2. 23 Ideas for Finding New Readers for Your Blog
3. 10 Quick Ways to Improve Your Business Blog
4. How to Build A High Traffic Website or Blog
5. 11 Ways to Find New RSS Subscribers for Your Blog
6. 10 Sure Fire Ways to Get RSS Readers Visiting Your Blog
7. Getting Relevant Traffic for Your New Blog

And lastly for a little inspiration here is what you can achieve. I’m not there yet, but I’m on my way :-). I hope this helps. Good Luck.

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