This week our comment friday received a cool 24 comments. Not bad! I’ve noticed some really great and thorough comments lately, and we appreciate all of them!

Most all bloggers know how valuable social bookmarking can be. The majority of our commentors wrote that they all use stumbleupon. If you aren’t using stumbleupon yet you are missing out on some good traffic. If you write a good article just add me as a stumbleupon friend, send me a message and I’ll stumble it! (don’t be shy) If you’re looking more information on stumbleupon Blog-Op has a great article on it that he wrote a while back.

Charles Lau is a newer blogger who hasn’t had much experience with social bookmarking. I figured he was the perfect candidate for this weeks blog of the week! I found him not too long ago and left him a few comments, seems he has found his way to our blog. Charles writes some interesting articles, the one that caught my eye was How to Market Your Uploaded YouTube Videos. Charles has some pretty good quality posts on his blog, definitely worth a check out.

Comment Friday back again so soon. I look forward to Fridays, getting so much response from everyone. This week I am going to try to comment more myself, so there should be more discussion. Don’t forget to check back a couple of times for everyone else’s comment!

If this is your first comment friday, the idea is pretty simple. Leave us a comment about anything you want. I will select one lucky commentor that really stands out, and I will give a free link to them. Not only that, but they will get a one week free blogroll spot for a week.

This week I’d like to know which social bookmarking you use. Do you try your luck on digg or are you banned like a lot of us? Are you just a stumbler or do you consider other bookmarking as well?

Lastly, have you had any success with social bookmarking?

Recently I changed around some of our social bookmarking links. I removed digg and reddit completely and added sphinn and plugim. The removal of digg was a simple decision, we are banned. Reddit was also removed because none of our articles ever got votes. It was basically a waste of space.

I was talking to Matt of Blogging Fingers about this briefly. He is also considering switching to social bookmarking sites that are more blogger friendly. He asked how much traffic we received from Plug-Im. I answered that we get several visitors per article.

That’s pretty low.

Five is Better than None

It is low, but if you consider what we removed for it, it’s 500% better. I can’t remember the last time we received traffic from a reddit article.

Another plus is that nearly every plug-im article that is submitted from our blog gets to the front page. This gives us maximum exposure for each article on that website.

Better yet, you don’t even need to be logged in to vote. Don’t forget to give us a plug!

Limit Your Bookmarking

This is a great follow up for Clean Up Your Blog. The more bookmarking you offer, the less chance I am going to vote for your blog. If you have 10 sites and each have one vote, that isn’t going to help you. It’s better to focus on one or two, rather than twelve. By promoting one service you have a better chance of getting featured which in turn should result in 10x traffic you would receive.

Make sure to list the ones that are going to give you the most traffic.

Internet shopping is all about convenience. You don’t even have to leave your comfy computer seat to buy what you want and need. Especially with the ever growing online services available, online shopping can be addictive.

Since the online market has become so big, you can often find promo codes, which urges you to shop at a certain place. This usually gives you a discount or something free.

Websites like couponmall247.com offer savings like their Buy.Com Promotion Code. These range anywhere from a few dollars in savings to 20$. If you are already going to buy such products, you might as well save money. I often use coupon codes for purchasing domains and web hosting.

To continually attract new and reliable customers, websites often offer these deals to get your business. A Buy.Com coupon shouldn’t be hard to come by. Internet shopping already offers a generally lower price, they don’t have to pay employees, rent, insurance, the list goes on. They then pass that savings onto you.

Just watch out for those shipping costs!

Not many bloggers utilize craigslist to promote their blogs. I have been using it for a few months now. I often publish several ads per week in different cities. Why should you use craigslist?

It’s Free

Free advertising is always good. It’s usually rare, but when you find it you should definitely take advantage of it. Creating an account takes only a few minutes. If you don’t already have one you definitely should register.

Sell Something

Whether you are selling a service or a product you should definitely post an ad. It’s hard to really promote a product besides blogging about it. Craigslist is like a super-forum. Whether you are offering your SEO services, website design, or something else you may just get a few more customers by listing a short ad.

Why should you post your craigslist ad?

By posting your ads there are many other ways to promote your website or blog. You can publish your ad in multiple city listings to get full optimization of your ad. I generally choose bigger U.S cities for the most results. Try San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, and Las Vegas.

Looking for Guest Bloggers?

This is the ad that I publish. Under “writing gigs” I ask for bloggers looking to publish work on our blog. I choose the “no pay” option and state that by posting with Blog about your Blog they can generate traffic and links to their own blogs. Each ad I publish generally get several hits, some even hundreds. This has resulted in dozens of inquiries.

If your traffic stats are stuck and you need a little boost you never know what results you can get with craigslist. Posting an ad weekly and especially daily can give you a nice steady flow of traffic.

Does anyone currently use Craigslist for website promotion?

France This Way is a blog they share their life about being an expat family in France.

What Is an Expat?

Well I had no idea either so I asked wikipedia

An expatriate (in abbreviated form, expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of the person’s upbringing or legal residence

So Mr.B is on vacation? Not exactly!

Making Money as an Expat

Mr.B recently wrote about ways expats make money in France. Among the jobs listed he mentions website designer and website publishing, or professional blogging. I think I guessed which he is working on!

His Expat France blog which goes all the way back to March of 2006 is only the beginning to his website.

France This Way is his own France Travel and Guide site. Whether your looking for Car Hire in France (which is like a car rental) or places to visit like Languedoc he’s got it all covered.

French Phrases and Food

I like the French Phrases section. A definite must to pick up some quick french. You never know when you may need it, au cas ou (“just in case”).

If you are a cook and like to try new things like me take a look at the variety of French Recipes. Lunch, Dinner, Duck and Dessert!

This website and blog is very complete and could be a great model for someone looking to start their own travel blog. Being unique and offering different features like the sections I mention really set it apart. Make your website different so people will continue coming back.

You have a blog and you have been studiously writing useful posts and steadfastly replying to your readers’ comments. You have a good habit of linking to fellow bloggers and get delighted when someone links to you. You have also been working to get your posts to appear in search engines.

All these actions are very commendable and you will be rewarded for your efforts in time. But, it is good to check the overall health of your blog in terms of SEO, backlinks, Google Pagerank, etc. Here are a couple of ways to get a quick overlook of your blog’s health.

Website Grader

Website Grader is very easy to use. You just enter your blog URL, keywords you want to get metrics on and enter a competitors website to get a comparison and hit submit. Website Grader crawls the web and gathers all sorts of information about your website and gives you a nice report with some suggestions to implement.

Some of the points, it reports on:

• Score: It gives you a measure based on all the other facts. Useful to compare other sites and yours over time as you implement improvements.
  
• Score Summary: This section gives you nice overview of stats like Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Technorati Rank, Google Inbound Links, Yahoo Inbound Links, Delicious Saved Count, Google Indexed Pages.
• Web Page Structure: Shows your current title, description and Meta keywords in use. Very important for SEO and has a link to a great article to learn more on this topic. Also, looks to see if you utilize Google Analytics.
• Domain Info: Shows you when and whom you registered with and when your domain name is expiring. It’s worth it just for that. Never let your domain name expire.
  Plus, it also checks to see if you domain redirect enabled as search engines regard www.shankrila.com and shankrila.com as 2 different websites and you would be diluting your link juice.
• Heading and Image Summary: Gives you a good idea about the headings and images a search engine will see in your site.
• Google Indexed Pages: It is pretty important to generate a Sitemap for your blog and submit it to Google so it can index your site. You can also see the pages in Supplemental Index as a high number might indicate duplicate content in your site. WordPress blogs encounter this often as there are more ways to get to post and Google doesn’t know that.
• Search Ranking: You can see how rank for the keywords you were going for if you are in the top 100. Or you will see a ranking of 100+.
• Pro Feature: You get all the above features for free but with a pro account you can compare your previous runs in this site to get a historical data. I think the free service is more than enough for most personal blogs.

For a free service, this tool is excellent and gives you a great overall picture of the health of your blog.

Xinu

Xinu is like Website Grader but it is more focused on providing a quick view of a lot of stats in one page in an easy to read layout. But, it provides fewer recommendations but more metrics than Website Grader.

Xinu was developed by an individual but the source code has been made public for anyone to use. It is available for download and it can be hosted by anyone. One such hosted spot where you can go to use it is Xinu Returns.

Let’s look at some of the metrics Xinu has to offer:

• Diagnosis: This is where you will see a few recommendations on your URL, title, keywords, description, html size, html tags and favicon.
• Domain: Your IP address, online time, author and country information.
• Ranking: Google Pagerank, Technorati Authority and Rank, Alexa and DMOZ ranking.
  
• Syndication: Shows RSS subscriber numbers, visitors and Bloglines subscribers.
• Social Bookmarks: Shows the number of your pages bookmarked in a few popular social bookmarking services.
• Validations: Shows XHTML, CSS and RSS validations and errors if any.
• Indexed pages: Shows number of pages indexed by Google, Google Images, Yahoo and MSN Live.
• Backlinks: Shows the number of backlinks for your blog as seen by a variety of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Alexa, Live, Technorati, Webcrawler, Clusty, Orange, Lycos, Altavista, AlltheWeb, Ask Jeeves, & HotBot.

As you can see, you can use Xinu alongside Website Grader and get a nice overview of your blog’s health. Writing great posts are essential but it is good to monitor the health of your blog periodically just to make sure you are in the right track.

I hate to repeat this cliche but a blog is like a living plant. You have to nurture it, water it, prune it and take care of it and over time you will reap the fruits of your labor.

I would love to hear your Website Grader scores and any qyestions you may have about increasing your scores and in turn the overall health of your blog.

I write about more technology related topics at ShanKri-la – where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable.

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