Posted in Blog Promotion by Dave on the December 31st, 2007
The nice folks over at DailyBlogTips recently sponsored a group writing contest for bloggers and the theme was “Blogging Goals for 2008″ (link here). Unfortunately, I’ve been very busy with family over the holidays and didn’t notice this contest until it was already too late to submit but after reading through the comments I found several of the entrants articles to be very inspiring and interesting.
Well, the winners were announced on December 26th and here’s the winning entries.
I personally found Robert Hruzek’s post at Middle Zone Musings the most compelling of all because quite honestly, I agree with his philosophy about setting blogging goals and knowing my propensity for never realizing goals I set for myself, I feel, why bother ?
Posted in Blog Promotion by Dave on the December 12th, 2007
Many novice bloggers tend to scour the internet and other blogs looking for blog directories and placing the directories chicklet (the small banner images you see cluttering up many blogs) on somewhere on their sites. If you know anything about SEO and marketing your blog, you’ll know that placing a blog directories link on your site sends that directory “link juice” or an “authority vote” from your blog. What most bloggers are unaware of is that if you place that innocent looking little image on your sidebar or on your blogs footer, you could be sending that directory hundreds of valuable backlinks. If you’re getting nothing in return, why bother doing something such as tossing your valuable linking power away to somebody who doesn’t care if your blog exists? The point is that if you’re going to even bother signing up for a blog directory and place their link on your site, you deserve something in return. If you think you’re going to get traffic from a blog directory, guess again. The only people frequesting blog directories, for the most part, are other bloggers looking for the signup link to add their site. that being said, it is highly unlikely that you will ever receive any traffic from these blog directories except maybe a few hits if they have a “newest sites” list and the owners and operators of the directory themselves visit your site to see what you’ve added to their directory.
Over the last 6 months, I’ve been experimenting with over 30 of the most popular blog directories and rating services, and I’ve complied a list of blog directories that you should definitely avoid. It’s your decision in the end to put a blog directories link or chicklet on your blog and clutter it up, but in my opinion, the sites listed below are not worth your time, effort and valuable linking power. I’ve listed the sites and the reasons why they are on this blacklist.
Useless Blog Directories
blogadr.com - No traffic, no juice, Uses Popup link, cluttered with Adsense
blogburst.com - Absolutely usless spammy service
blogdigger.com - Plain junk, search engine doesn’t even work.
blogflux.com - No traffic, no juice, Uses jump link to link out
bloggernity.com - No traffic, no juice, Uses jump link to link out
blogrankers.com - No traffic, no juice, Uses jump link to link out
blogroll.net - No traffic, no juice, Uses jump link to link out
blogskinny.com - Never, ever submit here, they will spam you to death
blogtoplist.com - No traffic, no juice, Uses jump link to link out
fuelmyblog.com - No traffic, no juice, Uses jump link to link out
topblogarea.com - No traffic, no juice, Uses jump link to link out
topblogging.com - No traffic, no juice, Uses jump link to link out
top-blogs.com - No traffic, no juice, Uses jump link to link out
These Blog directories all flow “link juice” and are organized and not cluttered with junk ads in the viewing area. Don’t waste your time submitting to the blogs listed above and certainly don’t pass your valuable linking power to them. The blog directories below are your best bet for promoting your blog and for passing linking power (because they pass it back).
I just came across another blog directory that might be useful for your blog promotion as most of us are always appreciative of a free backlink. The MillionRSS Project’s goal is collect and organize over 1 million RSS feeds from bloggers worldwide. While it’s a quite ambitious effort, they have already collected over 146,000 feeds at this time of writing. I was quite impressed that when I went to add this blog to the directory, they had already found it and had an adequate listing for it (didn’t know I was that popular).
MillionRSS Project is indifferent to bloggers popularity and all blogs large and small are invited to submit their RSS feed after which MillionRSS Project will syndicate your feed for their readers and will give you a permanent link from our site. The site is organized by categories and they have done a good job of creating categories to cover the many ascpects and types of blogs that might submit to the directory. Blogs are ranked by user ratings and if you like a particular feed and want to “bump” it’s ranking in the drectory all you have to do is click the Digg style button to add one vote to the current score for the feed. The “bump” score applies within each individual category in addition to the overall listings. As an example, you can bump this wonderful blog by clicking the button below.
