My friend the Baron of Brown Thoughts has tagged me with another writing challenge: what are my favorite unpopular posts on my blog?

If the lack of comments were the only factor being considered here, that would include quite a few posts on my blog as it’s still young. So I’m going to add to that: posts that I was hoping for more comments based on my hope that they would generate more discussion.

One such post was a recent one I made for ProBlogger’s writing contest: 5 Sympathies For The Devil. It did receive a few comments from some of my regulars (cool, I can actually say that I have regulars on my blog!), it was actually more successful with the trackbacks — very successful. The reason for that kind of popularity is because quite a few people copied all the entries for that contest onto their blogs. I don’t mind that kind of attention. 🙂

I really put a lot of thought into that one and was expecting (hoping for?) a wide range of responses, from supporters to nay-sayers. At first I thought the title would put people off. But I decided to keep it in the end on account of it’s appropriateness to the topic and the inevitable response of, “What the…?”

Another one of my posts was Credit Cards to Illegal Immigrants? What’s Next? It’s topics like this that really strike a chord with me and was hoping for (again) to find other like-minded readers. But I suppose I was a little too eager to expect that sort of thing simply because my blog had only been 3 days old at the time I wrote it. 🙂

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I was lucky to include a submission in ProBloggers Top 5 Project. Yes, you read that right, I was lucky. To be one of the 800 something entries, I was lucky to be able to participate, and I will tell you why. First, however, I would like to thank This Eclectic Life for telling me about it through a comment. I didn’t read ProBlogger (I do now), so I had no idea what it was, but I figured I’d give it a shot.

Huge Exposure

Blog about your Blog got over 30 linkbacks by submitting just one article, Top Five Reasons for Blogging. This will not only hopefully give that article a nice page rank, but it gave us a lot of incoming links.

Traffic

The traffic portion wasn’t huge from the contest, as we were mostly published on a big list. However I did notice our RSS Feed numbers increased slightly. We were also chosen seperately for peoples “favorite” articles, which is always good.

Technorati Rank

This is the best gift from entering the Project. BAYB soared down the ranks from 12-13,000 to now well under 10,000. This not only gives us monetary opportunities, it’s a great feat to accomplish.

Why Did I Wait?

The ProBlogger Project has been over for a week-ish now, so why wait so long to blog about it? I wanted to find the overall effects it may have on this blog. We’ve been receiving linkbacks all week with people re-publishing the lists on different blogs. Just today we received two more links from the contest.

We Didn’t Win…

I never thought there would be so many entries, but I didn’t count on winning. 1000 Dollars would have been nice, but it wasn’t something I was aiming for. I never would imagine so many people would republish the list. By submitting an article that took very little time and thought to write and getting so much exposure for that… we definitely won.

Thank you to ProBlogger and all of the bloggers who took part in the project. Especially those who republished Day 3 (or the entire list).

It’s going to happen to you some time: blogger’s block.

The dreaded moment when you stare endlessly into your monitor thinking to yourself, “What can I write about?” Well, you’ve likely discovered many interesting things on the Web that you could write about, so maybe you just need a way to store all that knowledge to refer to. Here are two tips I use that you may find useful as well.

Google Notebook sits in the lower right corner of my Firefox browser. As I do my browsing and find something of interest, I activate it’s pop-up window and “clip” the URL and/or any content that I highlight. (This is how I take note of my Drum Corps candidates.:) ).

Managing my account is easy. I can rearrange items to other notebooks of mine or simply reorder the ones that I’ve already categorized. Comments can even be added to ensure nothing gets lost.

Another tool I find useful is Diigo (pronounced “dee-go”). True, it’s one of many social bookmarking offerings, but I find this one to offer a few more features, or maybe it’s just that it works well for me.

When I’m viewing a page I like — any web page — I can highlight content and also have it stored in my account along with the bookmark. What I find nifty if the ability to add sticky notes on the page for future reference. I can make these notes for my eyes only, or viewable by other Diigo users who have configured their toolbar to view other people’s sticky notes when they visit the same page.

Adding a special tag to my discoveries (e.g., “articles”, “posts”, “to-write-about”…whatever) can make it easy for me to find them again, thus de-cluttering my browser’s bookmarks.

So no more excuses about not knowing what to write about. 🙂

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Hi, this is a last call for my Golden Goal Competition, which is due to end around 9am tomorrow morning (UK Time). The prize fund has increased with a little extra something which I’m keeping a surprise! To enter, please fill in this entry form, and good luck!

As you may know Matt is handling some family stuff right now so this week I’m hosting Comments Friday because it has become such a great institution and I, like you guys hang out for it each week (maybe that’s just Friday). I know that Matt’s goal the other week was 50 comments so it would be awesome if we could hit that mark for him!

Now there was some talk over the last couple of weeks too of trying to put a theme together for each week so here goes:

What song do you always get stuck in your head?

Now it may be a song that when you hear it you can’t get rid of it or it may just be one that you think of often or it may even be the first song you thought of now!!! Twenty points if you can use it in a sentence as a bad pun.

If you don’t have one don’t worry (be happy) and feel free to leave a comment about anything!

JUST LEAVE A COMMENT AND HELP US GET TO 50!!!
(now my throat is sore!)

Advanced programmers and casual bloggers alike can benefit from Firebug. An extension for Firefox, Firebug enables you to tweak code without actually committing the changes until you’re happy with it. You can even use it on other web sites.

While you’re viewing any web page you can activate Firebug to display its screen. On this screen you can view the HTML, CSS and scripts of the page you’re looking at.

Want to change the color scheme? No problem. Just enter the new values and you see the changes immediately. Changing text, placement, padding and more is done by simply changing the values. It’s important to note that you’re not actually changing the files on the website; you’re just viewing the cached files that you have on your computer.

Feeling mischievous? Well, you could go to a website and change the subject matter to, say, your friend. Hide the Firebug window to display the site as it would normally appear and, assuming that your friend is present, ask your friend how they got in the news.

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Just to quickly make sense of what I am going to say, open an article in your site and see what it says in the top of the browser bar. If it doesn’t show the article title within the first 10 to 60 characters, you have got a duff title. (10 to 60 characters in a title equates to what is seen in Google search results.)

Titles that don’t add up

If you search Google for references to Zwinky, the results will include articles from The Pisstakers on page 5! Wow wee, not bad for a satire site, but the trouble is, the page title listed in Google isn’t “Zwinky drag and drop into the trash”, but The Pisstakers daily web search for computer hardware, software .. So what? Job done! The article may get seen by a few of the millions into Zwinky.

Well, yes and no. It would be easy to say that being ranked on page 5 for a popular search term is good enough, and maybe that is all it is worth, but if the title isn’t obvious, you run the risk that even the few readers persistent enough to look at page 5 will miss your fab article. Essentially, if your title in the search results doesn’t equate even remotely to what the searcher was searching for, the article is worth almost nothing to anyone – what a waste of an insightful Zwinky article that could change the world of MySpace.

Titles and SEO

And following on from there, ethical SEO helped me demystify the SEO title issue a little further, as well as outline a general SEO strategy. Search engines like logical flow. If your site is called The Alphabet, Google would like to see an article entitled “ABC”, with H1, H2 etc paragraph headings that include ABC, followed by a handful of keywords related to ABC included in the main content, plus anchor text linking in- and off-site to relevant articles that add to the story of ABC. Hopefully you can see that the whole SEO flow is sort of messed up if the page title, ie the highest level of this logical chain, is wrong!

SEO plug-ins

I cannot help thinking that with my current page titling approach (dictated to by the blogging software) I am working with one hand behind my back. WordPress had this issue too, maybe someone can clarify if it still does, and I know the person who inspired this post, It’s Phishie, was horrified to see all his articles with the same title. He found an SEO plug-in for Joomla blogs to rectify the issue, maybe you need to double check your blog software and maximise your titles too?