Tanner Hobin

In an effort to increase my community through MyBlogLog and maybe even win their contest, I’m offering all new community members a free personalized cup. Each cup is fire engine red and made of recyclable plastic. I’ll take this a step further and even personalize it with your name. There are five styles of personalization to choose from including my personal favorite “The Tanner” (pictured left), all uniquely designed by none other than starving artist and pumpkin carver extraordinaire Beth Sinak.

The other styles include:

Fabulous

Beer League

Frat Party

Cheerleader

Join the Community!

After joining, I will send you a private message via MyBlogLog with a link to the red cup request form. The offer will be available until 12:00am (CST) on November 30, 2007. Supplies are unlimited, so take your time and please only join if you like my blog. Unfortunately, at this time I can not ship outside the 48 contiguous United States. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen something worth posting in Sliced Bread. Brian, from NowSourcing, brought this new technology to my attention. I’m not totally convinced TrueKnowledge will give Google a run for its money as top internet search provider, but I do respect the level of technology they are developing. See for yourself:

So, would you use this unique search platform?

Champ from the Enjoy Life blog reached out to me through MyBlogLog wanting to get some ideas to improve his blog. Here are just a few improvements that are applicable to all bloggers.

1. Ad Heavy – Blogs that appear to be ad heavy take away from the users experience. Try to limit or remove all ads to force more attention towards what people came for in the first place, the articles. Monetizing a blog is important to most bloggers, but there are more unobtrusive and useful ways to accomplish this. For example, an Amazon.com feed of products that are related to the blog topic may interest users. Maybe even a marketplace of products that are specific to the blog. The key to blog advertising is relevancy. If the advertisements are heavy and not related to the blog topic, it will only have a negative affect on the readers experience.
2. Articles – Blogs are built around articles. They must be relevant and compelling enough for readers to be interested in. One important factor in producing articles is the title. Compelling well phrased title’s will engage readers and beg them to read more. Images and links to relevant sources within articles will also hold readers’ attention. Some ideas for more compelling articles could include: Lists (i.e. Top 10… or 21 of my favorite…), Offbeat/Extreme (i.e. Women had bullet in head for 64 years!), and Research/How-to’s (i.e. How to Build a Washers Set). The most important element of an article is again the title, so make it a good one.
3. SEO – Search engine optimization should be a serious focus for all bloggers. Optimizing the title and meta information of blog posts for specific keywords within the article will help to insure the posts are found when readers search. Inline text links to other posts when relevant is also a good tactic to take advantage of. With everything mentioned so far, relevancy is key. SEO is also all about the details. Insert relevant keywords into the link title attributes whenever applicable.
4. WordPress – Consider a better blogging platform. WordPress in my opinion is the best blog platform available today. They offer search friendly features as well as many plugin’s to enhance user experience. Their interface can be a bit cumbersome for novice bloggers, but it’s totally worth investing the time to learn.
5. Networking – Blogging is communal; leverage this by subscribing to other blogs and using tools like MyBlogLog to reach out to other bloggers. BE CAUTIOUS! Avoid self promotion at all costs, instead build relationships with bloggers of similar interest and engage in a mutually beneficial relationship. Quid pro quo.

This small list is a sure fire way of boosting traffic to a blog, but it will be short lived if not repeated in some consistency. If you want the fire to grow you must feed it.