Comment friday is a fun and simple idea. Leave us a comment about anything you want. By leaving a comment, you will have your blog visited by me, and you may even get a link out of it. I will select a blog from the comment list to be linked to and have their link on our blogroll, until next friday.

We have many of the same commentors participating weekly, we are getting some great and fun discussions. Not only am I visiting blogs, but other people are checking you out as well.

Last week we achieved our goal and got 30 comments. I am pretty excited as to what we can do today comments wise.

Last week John Murphy won from Invest Journal with a great comment, about commenting. This week it could be anyone.

Get commenting, thanks for stopping by!

We have received our blog review competition 7th entry. This time it comes from Theanand and you can read their review here.

The review competition has been slow, and will probably be ending soon, however whenever I say that, we get another entry. We are still aiming for 10 entries, but we may only get to 7.

Thanks all for participating, when the contest concludes everyone will get another link, and more linkbacks on other blogs (page rank 3’s and 4’s)

I see Link Referral as a modern website-directory. You list your website or blog in the desired category, as well as enter in a description. After that is done, what’s next? You want your website to rank as high as you can right? The higher the rank, the more visible it is, which means, more traffic!
Being on Page 1 is a lot better than being on page 200.

To rank your website higher, there are a few ways to do so.

First, you can visit up to 30 linkreferral websites per day, but thats only part of it. You can also review up to 5 websites per day. Each review you give and each website you visit will move your own website or blog higher in the ranking. Be careful though, you want to give quality reviews, because the link referral staff does grade them.

By doing these two things daily, you can be on page 1 or 2 in your category, having people looking at your own website, as well as reviewing it. So not only is Linkreferral getting you traffic, but it also giving you valuable reviews on about your website for free. You can get peoples first impressions, suggestions, likes and dislikes, all for free.

Isn’t it just a traffic exchange?

Yes and no. You are somewhat exchanging traffic, but it is a lot more targetted than a regular traffic exchange. You pick which websites you want to visit, based on their description. There are also several categories to fit your interest.

When I was using LinkReferral to promote Fantasy Football N’ Stuff I was mostly surfing the sports category. By doing so I found some great sports forums to promote my blog and talk sports.

Visiting 30 Websites and 5 Reviews a day seems like a lot.

It is a lot, and after a while I couldn’t keep up. Instead I purchased the #1 spot in the Miscellaneous category for Blog about your Blog.

Tomorrow I will reveal exactly how many hits we’ve received, and how much it is costing, as well as cost per visitor.

Is buying traffic worth it on Linkreferral.com? We will soon find out.

If you’re like me then you have a couple of blogs up your sleeve… actually if you’re like me you forego sleep, life and sunshine to feed your addiction to blogging and should really cut back (lol that’s not going to happen).

Now those of you who know me know that I have a distaste for blog exchanges. They are fine when you are first starting out but in my mind quickly become a waste of time and give you false dreams of how many hits you are getting (that’s of course an argument for a different day). The only positive after you’ve gotten your site exposed to a few people who actually stick around is that you should be able to see new blogs but this doesn’t happen in reality with the same blogs coming up all the time and… oh that’s right another day.

So if you do have a couple of blogs how can you let people know about them? Well obviously you come to Blog About Your Blog and post here! Duh. But once you’ve done what’s another way to let people know about your newest posts – you can’t just keep mentioning them all the time in your posts (well you can but what would be the point of having two blogs).

A trick I’m using over at Quit Your Day Job to help promote Urban Cultivation is by using the RSS widget for WordPress. The sidebar widget (a widget is a piece of code you can move around WordPress easily, you can generally use the same or similar code in static sidebars) gives you the option of a title, how many entries you want displayed and the feed address.

Well this is great because you add your second blog’s feed and have it automatically tell people what the latest post is on your other blog. On mine I’ve changed the optional title to read ‘What’s happening over at Urban Cultivation’. The only thing is though I use a different plugin to the one installed automatically in wordpress mainly because the optional image url etc.

Any other innovative (mind you this probably isn’t ground breaking but it’s just something I do) uses for your RSS field out there?

There’s quite a lot of talk on blogs about PageRank, Alexa and Technorati ratings. Some bloggers even seem to be trying to find ways to manipulate the rankings in their favour.

I was thinking though today, does this mean that many bloggers are perhaps forgetting why they started their blogs and what they hoped to achieve when they started out? Or perhaps you may think that the various rankings and goals go hand in hand.

As an example, in my own case my blog is about making money with free blogs. Therefore should it really concern me as to what my various rankings are if I am making money. That is after all the purpose of the blog.

I was wondering what other readers opinions are. Should we be going all out to increase our rankings by whatever means? Or should we stay true to the things we hoped to achieve when we first dipped our toe into the blogosphere?

Good luck,
Mike.
Mike’s Money Making Mission

Let me start by saying I have no objections to lurkers (people who read, but don’t comment) at all on my blogs. I’m pleased you’ve visited, I hope you find my various posts interesting/funny/useful and you’re more than welcome.

But de-lurking is one of the best things you can do, both for yourself and the blog owner. Why?

• Promotion: Want people to read your blog? Then comment on theirs. You don’t have to ask them to visit, you don’t have to leave extra links scattered through your comment and the comment doesn’t have to be the most profound, insightful thing ever written either. But if you say hello, 9 times out of 10 the blogger will visit your blog in return, and so will other commenters.
• Participation: What’s more fun than blogging to yourself? Chatting to people on other blogs. It links in to promotion, but I’ve had some great ‘chats’ to people on blogs other than my own, made new web acquaintances and just had more fun than sitting there reading.
• Linking Up: More and more blogs are implementing ‘DoFollow’ on their blog comments, which means that if you leave a comment on a blog, you pick up a Google-worthy linkback to your own. Don’t go spamming, otherwise you’ll earn a different reputation, but regular, contributory comments left on other blogs could do wonders for the number of backlinks to your blog. I have DoFollow on all 3 of my blogs, so comment away… 😉

As you can see, it’s beneficial for you to de-lurk, and it’s nice to receive as a blogger, as proof that you’re not just ‘talking to an empty room’.

So, anybody like to comment?

In between my bi-monthly postings on BAYB (Sorry Matt!) I am to be found prattling away on Thermal, posting tips and opinion on Blog-Op and putting photos on Autofocused. I also have a wife and 2 children that I see around the house occasionally….

We all know that we need to recycle.  It’s sensible for the environment, it’s unselfish and practical.  But you can also recycle your blog posts.  Think about posts that you’ve done before and you’ve been proud of only to have it knocked from the top spot by your next post until eventually it disappears from the homepage altogether – banished only to be read by the curious and the odd googler?

Well if you are running WordPress there are a few plugins that can help breathe new life into your older articles and perhaps give your newer readers the chance to catch up on some of your priceless or even cringe worthy material.

Popularity Contest Plugin

The first plugin that I myself am going to install possibly on Crypt Hunter (which is overdue for a template upgrade) is the popularity contest plugin (beta) which apparently ranks each of your posts on views, comments, trackbacks etc.  You can then add a list of the most popular posts along the sidebar which means if you have a post that is getting a fair bit of attention, it doesn’t have to drop away just because you’re continuing to post.

Random Post Plugin

This little piece of code puts a link in your sidebar to a random post in your archive.  This way if a reader clicks on it they’ll be treated to random look into your sordid blogging past.  Random Post Plugin

Archivist

Archivist is a great plugin that has a lot of user controlled settings and it allows you to feature an archived post on the first page with a title like ‘from the archive’.  You can set it to be the second post on the page or the third etc.

Are there any other plugins that you guys particularly those of you who use blogger or other platforms use to recycle your old posts?  Let us know!

Lee writes for or edits:

Quit Your Day Job
Crypt Hunter
Pop Culture Heroines
Urban Cultivation (only because sleep is a luxury)