Some might think that my recent post about Nashville Star doesn’t really “fit” with the overall point of this blog but I think that because it’s a currently very popular topic that it fits just fine in the “Hot Topics” and “Current Events” categories.

I created those categories for two reasons:

1) I think that any blogger, regardless of the primary focus of their blog, needs to have the freedom to write about anything they like that they have something to say about.

2) When you’re trying to write stuff that people are interested in, you’ll seldom go wrong with a subject that’s getting a lot of attention at the time… especially if you can do so ahead of mos of the crowd. This makes current events topics good for building traffic because you’re more likely to have people referring others to your blog “look what so and so said about [fill in the blank]”. And of course, the more visitors your blog has, the better your efforts to monetize your blog will be. Remember, no visitors = no clicks.

With that in mind, looking around just a bit will show you a wealth of topics to write about that there’s lots of people interested in. Just a few of these sources include the news media, whether you watch it on television, listen to the radio or get it in email or online there is always topics in the news that can be the seeds for something.

In addition to the news, there’s several whole worlds of stuff in various entertainment related categories. My post about Nashville Star was just one example of this kind of thing. It’s something that has a large audience (enough so to end up in an NBC prime time slot on a weekly basis.)

Technorati Tags: nbc, prime time, news media, reality tv, blogging, hot topics, current events, categories, country music, nashville star, blogger, blogging tips, blog

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It’s a competition / reality show where “ordinary folk” audition to compete for the prize which is a Country music recording contract with Warner Bros and will also perform on stage at the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing

The show is in it’s sixth season and having spent it’s first five seasons on USA network, it’s now moving to Monday nights on NBC. This year it’s hosted by Billy Ray Cyrus and the judges are John Rich, Jeffery Steele and Jewel.

This weeks show starts with nine contestants remaining. They were called to the stage to perform according to the number of votes they received after the end of last week’s episode. I’m going to go over them in the order they performed.

The person with the most votes last week was Ashlee Hewit. I honestly don’t understand this one at all. While her voice is capable of plenty of power and range, I found it literally impossible to understand the lyrics of what she was singing and I wasn’t along in this either, my wife couldn’t understand her any better than I could. That she managed to get the most votes that was is a total mystery to both of us.

The second performer of the night was Coffey. If Ashlee is a mystery, I can’t begin to say what Coffey is. His voice has a quality about it that’s making everyone in our house crazy. It’s a “WARBLE”. This is something that might work in pop music but unfortunately, he’s using that warble the way Hank Williams used the classic Country Music “Twang” and it just plain doesn’t work. What I don’t get is why it is that the judges either don’t notice this or are unwilling to talk about it.

Number three tonight was Tommy Stanley. He’s got a good overall sound and is a very capable singer. He even managed to recover from his voice cracking during his first song tonight, however he’s really more pop than country and it shows in everything he’s sung so far.

Pearl Heart is number four. A group of three women that sound good but lack a certain important level of feeling in their music.

Melissa Lawson came in at number five. She’s got a very good, powerful voice and has shown the ability to express a lot of feeling in her music. There’s a lot of potential in her and in our house, she’s considered the best female vocalist among the contestants.

Shawn Mayer was number six tonight. She was another one that I had a great deal of trouble understanding the lyrics in the song she was singing. She projected considerable emotion but her low voice made understanding her a problem.

Gabe Garcia was the number seven performer. The only mystery is why he hasn’t gotten a lot more votes. This was the last position that scored high enough to not be in the two lowest vote getters. His performance is all Texas and his voice sounds to me like a Garth Brooks kinda thing and has a lot of potential. In our house he is considered the best male vocalist among contestants.

Number eight was Alyson Gilbert who has a good voice overall, yet there is a lack of feeling in her singing. Her song tonight came off sounding more like a “Saloon song” style performance than a Nashville one.

The ninth act tonight was Laura and Sophie. They have shown a lot of improvement since they started. Tonight they were singing more to the audience instead of appearing to be singing to each other like they’ve done before. They have a lot of range and potential but still manage to come off really young. Very “little girl”, which shows how inexperienced they are.

Eliminated from the competition tonight was Alyson Gilbert. Next week they will be eliminating TWO contestants. One at the end of the show as usual and another will be cut in the first five minutes.

We’re sitting here hoping that at the very least, Coffey is one of those eliminated, taking that God-Awful warble with him.

Technorati Tags: twang, music recording, hank williams, warner bros, billy ray cyrus, jeffery steele, Coffey, pearl heart, usa network, Tommy Stanley, Melissa Lawson, plenty of power, warble, reality show, nashville star, classic country music, recording contract, Gabe Garcia, olympic games, sixth season

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Whether you use Google or other search engine tools to track your visitors and their referring urls or you look through your server logs, the url that they come to your site from, if it’s a search engine, will usually contain the keywords that they searched. Those keywords are an invaluable resource. They tell you what visitors are looking for.

Even more valuable are the keywords that people use when they use the search box on your blog because this is a visitor that has already come to your site and those keywords and phrases tell you what they’re looking for when they get there.

“Psychic Search” by MaxBlogPress is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to find out exactly what visitors to your blog are searching for. Most importantly, it shows you what search terms that people are using that do not get any results.

What value to searches without results have? They’ve a Huge value! They represent things that visitors to your blog are looking for. Using this information allows you to fill those gaps and provide content for those search terms.

Of course, there’s times when you look at the plugin’s report and see that there are no terms that didn’t have results. That’s when you pick a term that has fewer results than the rest and write something on-topic for that search term. This increases the likelihood that visitors will find material that they’re looking for and it will also serve to make your site more of an “authority site” for those search terms.

Not only will you get those benefits, but this also increases the chance that somebody will link to your blog in general and “deeplink” to the entry’s permalink url as well.

So if you’re using a WordPress blog, I assure you that it’s worth the time to get, install and learn how to use the “Psychic Search” Plugin. The ONLY complaint I have about it is it’s name and that’s because I’m a Christian and do not believe in “Psychic” anything. However, since it’s not actually purporting to be “psychic” in nature, I’m more than willing to use, and advocate, it’s ability to give a WordPress blogger valuable information about their visitors and what they are looking for.

Technorati Tags: psychic search, referring url, keywords, search engine tools, keyphrase, track visitors, wordpress plugin, maxblogpress, maxblogpress plugin, no results, search engine, wordpress, search term, visitor search, search engine results, search results, blog search

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For example I’ve seen blogs that are so heavily monetized that it’s actually difficult to find the blog entries themselves. I think it’s important to not overload with advertising because it’s actually very easy to turn an otherwise good blog into an ad-farm that nobody wants to wade through in order to find the content.

Most advertising is best placed in one or two sidebars, either in the form of some number of 125×125 banner/button blocks and / or adsense blocks. Another good place is across the header at the top of the blog. I prefer a discreet link bar because it provides relevant links for the page it’s on without being so large that it hides my posts.

Having a ad block within a post is, in my opinion, a touchy thing. On the one side of the coin it’s too easy for the in-post ad blocks to detract from the content, on the other side, having it within the post makes it positioned good for a higher chance of getting those all-important clicks. My take on it would be that if there is to be an ad block in the first post or two on a page, then the size of the block needs to be LESS than half of the width of the column containing the post. You could also get away with putting two such blocks in a single post but only if there is at least two unbroken paragraphs of text between them. Otherwise it starts to invade the post content too much.

Technorati Tags: header, in post, advertising, sidebar, links, pay per click, ad blocks, adsense, overcrowding

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I’ll address link text in another post, for now I’ll cover the seven main link building techniques.

Social Bookmarking Links: Submitting your blog entries to social Bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and other news sharing and bookmarking sites.

Text Link Advertising: Buying Text Links on relevant websites and blogs. This can be useful but it’s also important to make sure that purchased links don’t LOOK purchased. Arrange for the links to be presented in a “natural” manner and avoid any mention of the fact that the link has been paid for.

Editorial Text Links: You inform writers about your site and services and politely asking them to write about your site.

Directory Links: Web directories classify sites into organized subjects and listings. There are enough free directories around that there isn’t any real need to pay for inclusion. It’s also a good idea to avoid any that require reciprocal links.

Blogger Reviews: Similar to editorial links, other bloggers, paid or not, take the time to write an honest review about your blog, product, or business website. These reviews will typically contain at least one link to your site and sometimes will also include deeplinks to specific blog entries or product pages. These links are seen not only by search engines, but also by the readers and subscribers of these bloggers. Again, if the reviews are paid, it’s best to avoid mention of that fact if at all possible.

Privately Solicited Links: You contact individual site owners and negotiate private linking deals.

Blog Comments: By intelligently adding to blog comment conversations on blogs that have “dofollow” comment links, you can build inbound links by using your blog’s url in the comment form. Even better is to comment on WordPress blogs that have the “CommentLuv” plugin, which will also retrieve the link to your most recent post. This way you get a top level url link AND a deeplink for better search engine visibilty

Technorati Tags: deep link, commentluv, blog comments, editorial links, natural links, private solicitation, paid links, text link advertising, deeplink, social bookmarking, directory links, blogger reviews, inbound links, links, link building, top level link, text links

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I tried it and while it’s not that hard to deal with, I have a problem with captchas in the first place. I understand that there’s a need to verify that somebody is a human and not a robot, but visual captchas are often very difficult to read. Entirely too many of them use super light, faded misshapen letters on a light pastel / off-white background. Talk about a recipe for eyestrain!

If I have to have a captcha, and I do in the comments of several blogs, I prefer the kind that doesn’t require eyestrain in order to read them. Hopefully the anti-comment-spam plugin that I use for WordPress, Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, will continue to use the non-eyestrain images that it has so far.

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1) There are things like the Media Library which has a lot of potential for people that use a lot of pictures, music or video in their blogs.

2) A lot of the controls, most in fact, have been either changed, or just plain moved. I’m one of those ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ kind of people and I really like unnecessary changes.

3) This brings me to the Admin panel or Dashboard as many like to call it.

I hate it.

Not only have things been moved around and some have even been renamed for no good reason that I can think of but they also had to go and “Wigetize” the thing. Widgets wouldn’t be all that bad if it was at least possible to add new widgets to the dashboard.

Up to version 2.2, there was incoming links displayed from both Technorati and Google. In 2.3 they took out the Technorati inbounds. I didn’t care for that so I figured out how to put the Techorati Inbound links back on the dashboard and then posted how to do it on my main blog. I know I wasn’t alone in this opinion because that how to post got a LOT of traffic over the next few months.

I also don’t like it’s color scheme at all. The fact that you can go to the users panel and select between two color schemes just doesn’t do it for me. Yeah, it lets you change to the same classic WordPress colors, but the layout is still wrong and THAT’s what I’d like to be able to change in addition to the colors.

So now I’m going to leave this blog at 2.5 for now and it’s not going anywhere near any of my other blogs until I have the ability to make this thing behave the way I want it to.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress+upgrade, wordpress+2.5, review, colors, layout, admin+panel, dashboard

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For example, the first several entries were definitions of terms like CTR (Click through rate), Impression count, CPC (Cost per click) and advice to spend time reading the AdSense Program Policies and the Terms and Conditions.

This is all valid, even useful, information but it hardly qualifies as “Adsense Tips”.

If you’re going to write a “tips” post, then cut to the chase and actually write genuine tips, something that can actually help the reader who does what you advise. Frankly, I would much rather have a list of 23 really useful tips than to have a list of 100 things, most of which are there only to increase the number of entries.

Technorati Tags: adsense, tips, adsense+tips, top+100+lists, tips+posts, useful+informaiton, writing+technique

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Each time you do this earns you a credit. You also earn credits every time somebody drops their card on your widget. The third way to earn credits is by selling advertising space in your widget for other people’s sites. The price (in Entre Credits) is calculated based on the number of drops on your card by other people so the more people dropping on your card, the more credits you can earn for advertising.

I signed up for this with Tinfoil Chef (my relatively new cooking blog) and in just the first two days the traffic has gone from an average of 40 to 60 page views a day as of a couple days ago to 188 page loads as of 10:45pm on 3/10/08.

Granted, it does take a bit of time visiting other sites to drop your card, but there’s an answer for that too. At OBlife.com you’ll find an “Entrecard Blogs Browser“. It’s a handy tool that allows you to quickly drop your card on the widgets of lots of other Entrecard users quickly. I’ve seen reports that it’s possible to drop a hundred or more cards an hour. I personally have been able to do about 60 or so without a problem (I keep stopping to read interesting items instead of bookmark them for later)

It’s new and as yet there’s no telling where it’ll go but for now it’s certainly a good traffic machine. Yes, it means spending some time dropping cards but there is also a growing market of Entre Credits for sale

Technorati Tags: advertising,, blog,, blogs,, browse,, browser,, build, traffic,, building, traffic,, entre, card,, entrecard,, generate, traffic,, making, money,, monetizing, blogs,, promotion,, traffic,, traffic, tools,, widget

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I’m talking about a plan that’s been talked about on GMA and other places in the last few days. I find myself in total agreement with “401k Debit Cards? What Will They Think Of Next?” in that this entire concept is a dangerous one

So, what is the 401K debit card is all about? Say you’ve been doing ok for a while and you’ve built up a decent sum in your 401K retirement plan. Then along comes some kind of financial trouble and you’re strapped for cash. There is a company that’s making it possible to get a debit card that allows you to spend money out of your retirement fund.

Essentially you’re borrowing money from yourself, which you have to pay back or it’ll hurt your retirement plans. The lenders and such all make money on the deal because they’re charging processing fees both ways. Lenders are going to really love this idea because it allows them to lend you your own money which means that they assume zero risk.

The big problem comes when you start counting the costs involved. If you borrow against your retirement plan, then more than likely while you’re paying it back you are not contributing nearly what you could be (if anything) to your retirement fund. This card also makes it entirely too easy to use up your retirement funds because it’s just a debit card and it’s too easy to overuse it and find yourself without any retirement funds at all.

Then there’s a real kicker… this whole thing is built on the premise that you’re going to be in the same job the whole time. If you lose your job for whatever reason (or just change jobs depending on the details of your 401K plan), then all of the money that you’ve pulled out of the 401K plan becomes due in full right then and there.

There are times when something like this can be considered a good way to do something, but only if it’s an absolute emergency and you do it in a single lump sum to cover some unexpected catastrophic debt situation. The thing to remember here is that you’re borrowing your own financial future and you need to set the bar VERY high. This sort of thing should be absolutely a last ditch effort.

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