Lessons from the blogosphere - Week 1

This is the first installment of my new weekly endeavor in the world of blogging. That is to bring you the reader the best tips and information I have run across over the course of the past week on other blogs. This will serve three purposes. First and foremost it will provide my readers with additional information they may not have seen for themselves. Second it will drive traffic to other blogs out there. Third it will provide more exposure for this blog via trackbacks and pingbacks. In general I will be focusing on things relating to blogging, writing, monetization, plugins, and search engine optimization. If from time to time I stray from that I beg your indulgence and if necessary your forgiveness.

Wordpress Plugins

This week I was introduced to two plugins which I’m very pleased with. The first one called No Self Pings prevents you from pinging your own blog when you link back to a previous post. It was driving me crazy because I tend to do a fair amount of internal linking and it was pretty annoying see all the pingbacks to my own site in the comments. This plugin does a good job of eliminating them. I found this plugin through a search so I have no blog to give credit to.

The second plugin is called Ad Rotator and it allows you to serve multiple ads of the same size on the same piece of screen real estate. It does this by selecting from a list of ads you provide in an external text file each time a page is loaded. It keeps things fresh and allows you to use multiple partners that you would not have been able to use. I was introduced to this plugin by Maki over a Dosh Dosh in his post about reducing banner blindness.

Text Link Ads (TLA)

If you didn’t know TLA has been having a bit of a problem with Google lately. TLA is a link broker bringing together websites and advertisers. As a website owner I decide I want to offer some screen space to advertising. TLA hooks me up with the advertiser and I put the ad on my site and everyone is happy. Everyone except Google that is. At some point in the not so distant past Google decided that the selling of links should not be condoned because they believe it lowers the value of the links which of course they use as part of their algorithm for the (in)famous Google search engine.

Google, the mighty monopoly that it is terms of search and advertising decided to penalize everyone who uses TLA ads on their site. I’m not certain how this punishment manifests or if it is even a true story, but I do know that TLA has taken matters into their own hands by running their links through tinyurl.com to shorten *cough* cloak *cough* the link from prying eyes.

Good on them I say. Google while a great service really needs to come to terms with the fact that they don’t actually control the internet. Not yet at least. If you’re a TLA affiliate you should have recieved an email with this information. If you didn’t just go to your affiliate account and check out the links and banners.

On the other hand if you are not currently a TLA affiliate I strongly encourage you to join. For each FREE signup that people complete using your affiliate link you will get paid $25.00. I don’t know about you but for the 1.5 minutes it will take someone to signup I’m willing to bet a few people will sign up for TLA’s affiliate program.

I was made aware of the change by the TLA email I received as mentioned above. Blogging Experiment brought it to my attention why this is happening.

Improve your writing skills

Many bloggers are great sales people, but when it comes to finessing their words they are lacking something. I know to many this isn’t a big deal, but to those who want to improve I’ve rounded up a few websites that have helped me over the years. Before that I have a few tips of my own that I have learned (though I don’t always use them).

• Edit down - You should be editing so concisely that you turn one full printed page into a third of a page. This gets all of the “fluff” out leaving us with the essentials.
• Writers block - Get out of the house and go for a walk. The blog will be there when you get back. While you’re on the walk pick up something, anything at all and think up a story about it. If you find a clod of dirt think of a story that will make it your spouses most prized possesion when they hear it. Once you have that story in your mind, go home and get to work. On your blog not the dirt clod. The objective is to get your mind thinking about something aside from blogging so it “stretches” a little bit from time to time.
• Down time - Spend at least one full day a week NOT writing anything at all. Not even comments. Trust me your adoring public will wait a day for you. Perhaps not two, but one day they will wait.

Websites: writing.com, writing-world.com, oneofus.co.uk, writingforums.com

Eye exercises

Pick up this little tid-bit from April over at Natural Health Remedies. It seems with a little bit of eye exercise, don’t laugh there seems to be something to this you can actually strengthen your occular muscles and improve your sight! I’m going to begin my eye exercises at the conclusion of this post and see how things go. Beyond on that you get to watch Paul McCartney demonstrating eye yoga on a clip from Youtube that April has linked.

That’s it for this weeks installment. Thanks for reading. If anyone else tries those eye exercises I’d be interested in knowing how things improve (or don’t) with your eyesight.

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