A Week in Review at ThePlanetd Blog, August 3
August 3, 2009 by davendeb
Filed under Building a Better Blog, PlanetD News
Wow, has a week gone by already? Now that I have made a point of stating that I will be starting a regular segment at the Planetd, I suddenly worry that I won’t have enough to write about, and yet I have been writing this weekly update for over a month. So let’s give it a shot.
First of all I would like to thank twortw and lavieenchina for asking us to contribute to their series. Twortw had a fun post regarding What is on the Back of your Toilet and La Vie en China had a lovely idea of Favorite Travel Souvenirs. We enjoyed contributing to both and look forward to more in the future.
With all of the guest posts that we have done in the past, we feel that we should have a series or group contribution of our own in the near future. If only we could come up with an idea. That is definitely something we are going to explore this month.
Now onto business. I have to say that I am starting to feel a little vulnerable running a blog. It was one thing when we were simply writing our daily journal during the Tour d’Afrique, but now that we are putting an effort into making it a business and are started to gain more exposure, I am not enjoying all of the spam emails. I made the mistake a few weeks ago of answering a question regarding how much it would cost to travel to Europe. It was a quick response with not a lot of information, as whenever we have gone to Europe it has been to visit my sister, so we have always had a home base and really don’t know the actual cost. However, since replying, I have received a couple more similar emails. I looked this up in a google search and have read that many bloggers have had the same experience.
What these emails do is ask a question to a supposed expert, you answer and then they post your answer on their website with your name and email attached. I looked it up and sure enough, my answer is posted on a site along with another bogus answer attached to my name that I didn’t even write. I have no idea what recourse I have in this situation except to write about it on my blog and to hopefully deter other bloggers from answering similar emails. You are all probably not as stupid as I am, but I really have had a few legitimate questions sent my way.
So that is the downside to my week.
Now for the more positive steps we are taking.
We have stared submitting articles in earnest to article marketing networks. We subscribed to Unique Article Wizard to give it a try. We figure that we can afford the monthly fee while we are here in Canada working and hopefully over the next couple of months we can get our articles out there on the internet with a lot of links leading back to our site. I searched my name while writing this post and found a lot of articles are online now and it has only been a week. I first read about article marketing at thetravelwritersexchange and of course NomadicMatts How To Make Money With Your Travel Blog talked a lot about it. He goes into a lot of detail about article marketing among many other factors to kick start your travel website.
I hope I am doing everything right, it is a little scary to see your name all over the Internet. Google has so many rules and you don’t want to break anything for fear of being penalized, but I think that I am following the rules correctly. Does anyone else submit to article directories out there, what are your experiences.
Going back to some points that I touched on during earlier posts….
We have now added a “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” thanks to Anil’s suggestion at foxnomad
We have also added a little plugin at the end of our posts to “subscribe to our RSS.” We never really knew the value of subscribers until recently and we have realized that we haven’t made it very clear to people on how to subscribe. This rang true when my good friend who isn’t a blogger asked me if there is anyway to subscribe to my blog and I walked her through it on the phone step by step. At that moment it was clear to me, that for people who aren’t on the internet all of the time, that little “subscribe to us” at the top of the page isn’t very clear. She thought that the RSS button at the top right of our page was just a cute little piece of artwork. I tend to forget that 3 months ago, I had no idea what RSS meant and I was very confused about the whole thing.
We have also taken off the widget at the sidebar regarding comments. We didn’t reply to comments on our site in the past because I didn’t think that people revisited posts to see if there were follow up comments. But I now think that it is important to follow up and answer comments. So we took that recent comments widget out of the sidebar because it will probably be cluttered with our comments more than other peoples recent comments.
Let me know if you think I should put it back up or not.
We have also decided that we like su.pr for posting on twitter for scheduled tweets. I have seen a bit more traffic from stumble as well. I like what someone did with their su.pr account. When I clicked the link from twitter it went to their stumble homepage. There was a little blurb stating that “if you like this post make sure to give me a thumbs up.” I haven’t figured out how to do that, if anyone knows, I would love to hear about it. I asked that person how to do it, but they never got back to me.
We still haven’t really figured out how to make StumbleUpon work for us.
I also want to add my stumble homepage into my sidebar, but I can’t figure out that one either. I have had some people ask me what my stumble account is and that I should have it linked on our site, but all we have is the link to add our post to stumble. Apparently stumble is a very good tool, we just haven’t mastered it yet. But when we do, you will be the first to know.
Someone suggested that we discuss Social Bookmarking in a future post and that is something I definitely want to explore. So while you are here, check out our poll to help give us an idea on what works best for you and then we can share our results and information on what we have learned about bookmarking in our post next week.
OK, I am at 1000 words, so it is time to sign off for the week. So many things happen each week that I understand why there are so many blogs out there dedicated to running a website. But this is a travel site so I must remain focused.
See you out there on the internet and have a great week.
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