I was encouraged by Ryan’s conclusions on “How To Inflate Your Social Media Statistics” to stop looking too much on my visitor stats, and start making concrete strategies on how to establish myself in the blogger community. So, that’s what I am going to do. I start gathering my thoughts on how to increase the exposure of my blog to the online community. I admitted that it’s not easy to establish myself, since I consider myself as a newbie in this subject. However, I got so many knowledge that I want to share with my beloved reader like you, so that you can, at least, benefit from it. Before you are posting your next blog post, plan your move first on what are you going to do with your blog. It’s better to start as early as possible to get the best result.
Yesterday, I start putting my thoughts together in a piece of paper. I’m sorry for my bad handwritings 🙂 I’ll explain this more thorough below.
As you can see, everything revolves around http://myinternetcorner.com. I will break this down in my next several blog posts. I was planning to break everything down in this one blog post, but it was too long, so I will break this chart into several posts. For now, I will only discuss about RSS.
RSS
It’s a great tool to increase your site’s exposure. I found out that visiting every site one by one is just not efficient. When you are following more than five websites, it will be really frustrating to check each sites every time for new updates. What I did was that I subscribed to their RSS using my RSS reader to check their updates. The most popular RSS reader is Google Reader. However, I prefer to use Mozilla Thunderbird to check my RSS.Â
Your visitors will do the same thing. They will see if your blog bring them any value or not, and then, they will decide if they will follow your blog or not. Most likely, if they follow your blog, they will subscribe to your RSS. To enable some sort of tracking to my RSS spread, I used Feedburner to monitor my feed count and RSS subscribers. It’s easy, free to use, and one of Google’s product, so its quality is guaranteed.
Your RSS is also crawled by search engine and other services as an easy way to tell them that you have new content on your site. Therefore, I always “ping” every time I publish a post. Currrently, the two services that I use are pingoat and pingomatic. What they do is they will notify major RSS crawlers engines (Technorati, FeedBurner, Google blogsearch, etc.) that you have new post, so that your new post will be crawled and be included in their list.
My next “Blogging 101” post will be about social networking. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS Feed so that you can be notified whenever the next blog post out.
I subscribe to this, and 109 other blogs, with http://www.bloglines.com 🙂
hmm…Bloglines.com It’s an interesting piece of application. I’ll try it to see which one is better, Google Reader, Mozilla Thundebird or Bloglines. Thanks Fiona.