John P. at One Mans Blog recently published 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog. You see these kinds of lists all over the place, but I think I should listen to this guy. He's the Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President for Layered Technologies, founder of HTMLHelp.com and former Vice President of Sales for SAVVIS Communications. If he knows enough to present information at WordCamp Dallas, and WordPress people actually listen to him, he must make a whole lot of sense.

I'm not going to repeat what he's written and I'm only going to list the subtopics I need to change and have control over. Here I go:

1. Use English Naming Conventions for Images

   This was something I wasn't paying much attention to until I read this. I named all my images myself, but I never made them descriptive on purpose. After seeing all the searches for "frog clipart" and "money clipart" (images I have on this blog) appearing in my logs, I'm convinced this is the way to go.

2. Use TITLE Elements on Hypertext Links

   Again, I failed to do it on purpose. If you saw titles when you hovered over a link, it was by chance and not intentional. From now on, it'll be intentional. However, with over 1200 pages on this blog, there's no way I'm going to go back and change all the links. Sure, I'll change them when I'm editing a page, but that's about it.

3. Pick the Right Theme

   I hacked the heck out of the theme I'm using for this blog. The original theme code is almost completely gone. What am I saying? Except for some stray strings, it IS all gone. I rewrote and compressed the CSS and I rewrote most of the theme code. I say most because I didn't need to rewrite the functions.

   I won't do it again, though, because someone has already done it for me with other themes. I'm talking about the themes available over at Court's Internet Marketing School. I've started two blogs using two of the themes he'd already gone through and I went through them again, looking for errors or missing functions.

4. Do You Have a Print Stylesheet?

   No. No, I don't. I'll have to investigate this and see what I can do.

5. WP Admin Bar Reloaded Speeds Up Blogging

   I'll get the plugin when it supports WordPress 2.5. Until then, I'll have to do it the hard way.

6. MyBlogLog Makes It Personal

   Maybe, but I was getting spammed by people on it, so I killed my account. Perhaps I'll set a new one up later on.

7. Show Recent and Top Commentators

   I show the top commenters on a separate page, not in the sidebar. I'm thinking of moving it back to the sidebar, but with it "nofollowed" on every page but the index page. I haven't implemented recent commenters yet, but I plan to do it soon.

8. Optimize and Resize Every Image

   I don't use many images, so I should be safe, and I almost always resize them. I'll have to check out the software he recommends.

9. Always Include At Least One Image

   I don't do it on every post and I have no intention of doing it on every post. I'm not a big image fan. Do YOU think I should?

10. Homepage Excerpts Increase Pageviews

    I don't agree with this at all. If you want to read the whole article on the home page, so be it. I get plenty of page views because of my content (7-9 per person average). Why make it any harder for you to read them? You're not clicking my ads, the searchers are. What do YOU think about it?

I reread and checked everything John P. suggested. I already do most of what he wrote, but I completely skipped the "VLogging, PodCasting and Multimedia" section. Because of my limited options here in the Philippines and because I can't keep a connection stable enough to view video from the 900-pound gorilla called "YouTube" without waiting for an hour, trying to get deeper into video authoring is foolhardy at this point.

Before you get your hair tied up in knots, this isn't a blog review. I wouldn't even know where to start on a review for blog like "Dosh Dosh". No, these are just some of my thoughts on some articles that Maki published.

Brand Associations

Maki's latest article on how brand associations help to promote your website and business is right on the money. When I made my thoughts on blog hosting, self-hosted and otherwise known, Todd Morris of "Success with Todd" made a comment that was also right on the money. He said, "With domain names being so inexpensive, I can't really see the sense in using sub-domains for new blogs … unless it's a branding thing."

In a nutshell, branding which has already taken place with one domain or subdomain (and yes, www is a subdomain) can carry over to other subdomains. In some cases, it's the next best thing to sliced bread. Couple it with the fact that a new subdomain will probably get indexed faster than a new domain, it's a win-win situation for some people (like me). I was hem-hawing over getting new domains, using free subdomains at other places, or using my own subdomains when I wrote that I was planning on opening up Pandora's box and moving a couple of categories from this blog to dedicated blogs. After much thought, I'll definitely be using subdomains and I plan to start in April.

If you don't think untwistedvortex.com is branded-associated with my name yet, why don't you ask prominent bloggers like Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) who RT Cunningham is? If he knows me by my name and my blog (which he does), I'm pretty sure a lot of other people do as well. I'm not bragging. My domain name isn't a household name like yahoo.com and its many subdomains, but it could be. My first and last name already are, but for the wrong reasons (and don't call me Richie, or I'll hunt you down). It all depends on how long and how hard I want to work at it.

Power Stumbling

Back in March of 2007, Maki wrote a comprehensive guide to StumbleUpon and how to use it to bring massive traffic to your website. He followed it up later with two other articles which amended some of the tactics he originally endorsed. There's a lot of good information on how to use StumbleUpon to your advantage, but I have my own condensed version:

It doesn't matter if you're a top stumbler or not. It doesn't matter if you use StumbleUpon every day or not. What matters is that you rate and review as many websites as possible, and try not to do it for your own. Do you want to be a power stumbler? It's simple. Every time you see a pingback or a Google Alert (and I hope you use both), visit that website and stumble the page that links to you, but don't stop there. Stumble as many pages as you like on that website. In essence, stumbling more than you're stumbled by other people and stumbling people that link to you makes you a power stumbler.

Brand Associations and Power Stumbling

StumbleUpon uses avatars to represent the people that stumble you. Even if a member name is different than the name they use on their blog, for example, do you recognize that person? On StumbleUpon, Maki is Autorave. I didn't have to know that, or read it anywhere, to recognize it as his avatar. I knew it was him the first time he stumbled one of my posts. The anime-style images he uses on his blog brand-associated his avatar with his blog. In fact, I would have been surprised if I'd made the association without it being the correct association, that's how powerfully he's associated anime-style images with his blog.

If I was a smart guy (and I make no claims to that), I'd be using the vortex image in my header as an avatar everywhere, or possibly a variation of it that I've been toying with. Hindsight is 20/20, as people like to say, and it would probably take a while for that association to form this late in the game. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to start, though, would it?

Maki is a power stumbler, even if he never admits it. Am I a power stumbler? People like Jonathan C. Phillips of Freelance Folder and AgentSully of Life Learning Today seem to think so, but I'm not too sure about it.

After reading Monika's article, "How Do YOU Deal With Blogger Agro?", I felt the need to air my own feelings along these lines.

Borders, Language and Culture

These are the things that define a nation. On the Internet, however, there are no borders and language and culture are perceived instead of known. The Internet is truly a global phenomenon. The English language is the most dominant language used on the Internet, and many people make assumptions about a person's native language based on their usage of it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Update 2008-01-26: I don't know when it came back up, but it's back up and better than ever.

I went to BloggingZoom to do my daily run through the posts and found… NOTHING.

Knowing that Courtney Tuttle of "Court's Internet Marketing School" is a cofounder, I checked his blog and found "BloggingZoom Hacked". I think Vic's "Blogger Unleashed" blog may be housed on the same server as BloggingZoom because his site won't come up either.

BloggingZoom is growing rapidly. It poses a threat to other social websites that rely on the traffic that's leaving them and heading over to BloggingZoom. It's obvious to me, and should be obvious to you, that this hack attack is an attempt to put it out of commission. Wrong answer. Both Vic and Court have the finances and the connections to make BZ bigger and better than the other, similar, social websites. In fact, a not-so-closely guarded secret is that they were preparing for a new design and interface launch on February 1st.

I think, and this is my thought only, that the competitors weren't worried about BloggingZoom as long as BZ continued to use the Pligg software (based on a very old copy of Digg). An improved design and interface changed all that.

Are you one of the many bloggers that never takes advantage of tools that are freely made available to you, in order to promote your blog articles? If you are, feel free to slap yourself around.

"BloggingZoom", which hasn't been around for very long, was designed with you in mind. Yes, you! While other social websites frown on self-submissions (and may even ban you), the founders of BloggingZoom encourage it. Who's the better judge of an article you wrote, you or someone else? Who makes the determination that your article is "zoom-worthy"?

Every time I go to BloggingZoom, I see pretty much the same bloggers submitting their articles (duh, including me). The amount of people using this free service is minuscule compared to the amount of bloggers there are out there. Why are you allowing us to hog all the glory?

By using BloggingZoom, you not only gain visitors (some will convert to regular visitors), but every single post submitted will appear on search engines and point back to the original post. That's a free backlink, baby! Anyone who doesn't want free backlinks, raise your hand. Ha! I thought so.

Do you want to make your blog more popular? Use this free service to your advantage. You know you want to, so just do it!

For bloggers, BloggingZoom is the new Digg and its popularity is increasing.

While blog articles can and do make it to the front page of Digg, it's a rare occasion. As bloggers craving traffic, we want to hit the front page even though it makes our blogs inaccessible for hours due to hundreds of connections that happen all at once.

BloggingZoom is all about the bloggers. As the blog author that knows what content you want submitted, it's no problem if you want to submit your own articles. They won't be marked as spam solely for that reason. Since bloggers have better things to do, unlike the 12-year olds that live at Digg, they won't be hitting our blogs all at the same time and driving our servers into submission.

Making Friends at BloggingZoom

If you wait for other people to befriend you, you may be waiting a long time. Go to your submitted posts, see who zoomed it and make them your friends. There's a very good chance they'll reciprocate. Just like it used to be on Digg, your chances of getting more zooms increases when you have a lot of friends.

Karma

I've always been a little confused by karma. I do know that when you have more of it, your zooms carry more weight. Making constructive comments on posts you zoom will encourage people to vote the comments up, raising your karma. Likewise, adversarial comments will cause your karma to go down. In my opinion, people with a karma of exactly 10 never comment (unless they're very new at BloggingZoom).

Submit and Run

Don't be guilty of submitting posts and never spending any time zooming and/or commenting on other posts. You submissions will start languishing at a grand total of 1 if you do it few times. I can't emphasize it any more that that.

The Front Page

Needless to say, not every post will make it to the front page. I have had 4 out of 7 make it there so far. Does it mean the other 3 aren't any good. No, but it does tell me that they're not interesting to the members. Rather than lament, I use it as a form of constructive criticism. You should too.

The BloggingZoom Bury Brigade

Digg has an option for burying posts. Posts for blogging articles frequently get buried for any number of reasons. At Digg, not only can you be undugg, you can be buried without being dugg. It's the double whammy of death for a post at Digg.

BloggingZoom doesn't have that option and I hope it never does. Remaining at a low "zoom" number is enough to prove your article isn't interesting.

Final Words

I haven't had the ability to practice what I preach very much at all due to circumstances beyond my control, but that should change in a week or so (when I change Internet connection providers).

Ranking factors and other metrics will come and go, but one thing remains a constant that we bloggers always need: Traffic. BloggingZoom can help to generate that traffic if you use it wisely. Remember that not every article you write is "zoom-worthy" and it can only help the ones that are.

My dastardly son submitted my article, Is Google Evil Now?, to Digg about an hour ago. I don't think you can delete a Digg submission, so I did the next best thing. I dugg it.

The first (and only, so far) commenter left this comment:

Sounds to me it's more like a bunch of bloggers whining about their pageranks being dropped than google actually being evil. One day when google decides to start a program known as "skynet" then I will be a little concerned. Until then I don't see much wrong, they are thriving in a capitalist market and making the internet better. Just because they are successful and wealthy doesn't make them evil.

Excuse me? There are millions of bloggers and more than just a "bunch" of bloggers discussing this issue. Google doesn't give out PageRank easily to begin with. With a maximum of 10 possible, both Technorati's most linked to blog (Engadget) and Technorati's most favorited blog (Boing Boing) only have PageRanks of 7. Can somebody point me to a blog that has a higher PageRank than 7? I'd like to see that.

The commenter is obviously not a blogger and doesn't care about bloggers, hence the "whining" comment. I won't be surprised if I see more "anti-blog" comments.

I have had it up to here (picture my hand above my head) with discussions on social websites. I'm weary of the kinds of discussions that seem to be the most popular. When I start a discussion where the final result is going to help others, I get the cold shoulder. I feel like I must have leprosy or something.

My self-created mission in life is to help others and as far as blogging is concerned, it's to help other bloggers either get started or increase their popularity. Anything else I get involved in seems to detract from that mission. I've made too many mistakes by getting involved in social website discussions that are unproductive. I'm not comfortable with self-promotion and that seems to be the order of the day at every social website that supports discussions.

I'm still going to remain a member of the social websites I belong to now. I'm just not going to be involved in the discussions (I can read without writing). When I announced my second logo contest, I said I would post it around the middle of the month on social websites. I've decided I'm not going to do that. If I don't get any responses to it directly from here, so be it.

With all the new social sites popping up left and right, it's hard to stand out from the crowd. Very few keep me interested long enough to stick around.

Although BlogCatalog is a relatively new player in the game, it's growing in leaps and bounds. They keep adding what the majority of the users want and removing things that start to annoy the users. Listening to feedback is a quality that's not shared by all of the social sites. Can you guess which ones listen?

BlogCatalog isn't perfect yet — not by a long shot. It's only natural that there's going to be growing pains and their growing pains were recently made evident with a publicly disclosed data loss.

I don't always have time to join in on the discussions, but I try to make my presence known as often as possible. I have a whole slew of "friends" and have joined a whole slew of "neighborhoods" since I became a member, over a hundred of each. That may not seem like much, but it's a lot for a service that hasn't been as widely publicized as some of the other popular social sites.

Why don't you pay them a visit and take a look around. You're welcome to poke around my profile there.

Months ago, after I added a "dofollow" plugin prompted by reading Andy Beard's Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks, Andy recommended that I join the "No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community" at BUMPzee!. I held off on it because I was spreading myself too thin with all the social sites I had already joined. I still didn't join after reading his article, DoFollow | No Nofollow – Highs & Lows.

I read a comment on my blog from Boris at Ecoshopper.net in June and still didn't join BUMPzee at the time. I've heard nothing but good things about BUMPzee.

I don't know what prompted me to do it, but I finally joined a few hours ago. After I joined, I noticed a lot of familiar avatars in the discussion threads. My avatar is nothing to write home about, but at least it's a picture of me. I took it myself, so cut me some slack.

I took all the JavaScript widgets off the sidebar of my blog but I plan to put some of them back on the blog, but at the bottom of the footer this time. That way, misbehaving widgets won't affect the rest of the display. I'm not sure which BUMPzee widget I'll put there yet, but I'll be putting something in later today.