Snoskred – Life in the Country

This week I have collected some fantastic links to articles about blogging. I have added them all to the Bloggers Are Helpful list – Is yours there? If not email me a link to it and I’ll add it next week.

Why does Snoskred refer to herself as Snoskred?

Yes, you may have noticed this here on the blog. If you look to one sidebar you’ll see things like Snoskred Loves, Snoskred Scambaits, Snoskred On The Web. In that sidebar the word Snoskred appears over 20 times.

Don’t I know who I am? Is there a danger I might forget if it’s not written everywhere? Or is there a deeper plan at work?

Google for the word I = 1 – 100 of about 3,560,000,000 for I
Google for the word Me = 1 – 100 of about 2,120,000,000 for Me
Google for the word Snoskred – 1 – 100 of about 28,200 for snoskred

I am the number one search result for Snoskred. How I got there is partly because of referring to myself in the third person. It is a useful “white hat” (ie not illegal or dodgy) way to get your blog higher up in the ranking for your name.

Everyone knows who I am. I use the name Snoskred everywhere I go. If someone were looking for me and wasn’t sure how to find me they can google.

On the other hand, the name Snoskred is very unusual. So it wasn’t exactly difficult to get up to the top on search engines for it.

Snoskred = Norwegian for Avalanche.

Yes, very suitable! The real word has the funny ø in it. I stopped using the ø some time ago when I found it was causing issues – plus everyone wanted to copy and paste the o because nobody knew how to make it – not even me!

Sometimes people spell it wrong (I have google alerts set up for the common mis-spellings, ie snoskerd, snosekrd, snosekred etc) or mistype, that’s fine. I don’t mind. Well I do a little, because I always take care to either copy and paste the name of fellow bloggers or triple check I got it right, but we all make mistakes, even me sometimes. But I do still want to be able to thank people when they refer to me even if they mis-spell it.

Advice For Newer Bloggers -

One of the biggest pieces of advice I would give to any new blogger would be – make an unusual (nick) name for yourself and then refer to yourself using that name everywhere you go. Google the word first, and make sure there’s not too many hits for it.

If you can’t find a name you like, try this fantastic resource I often used for finding names – http://www.babynamenetwork.com/ – scroll down a little to see browse names by origin and find a country or culture that appeals to you.

Blog Stuff -

I found so many great blogging articles this week I thought I would post it separate from the weekly wrap up.

What Everybody Ought to Know About Blogging – 97 Blog Tips – At the end of the 31 days there is going to be a fantastic collection of articles all together in one place. Is yours there? If not, submit it here. But be quick, time is almost up.

10 Lessons in Blogging Learned on a Shopping Expedition – I love to blog, and I love to shop.. Darren Rowse combines both into a smart blog article. If I didn’t have to pack it, I’d go shopping too!

Added to the Bloggers Are Helpful list this week -

Blog Basics –

Catch New Readers Up On The Basics of Your Blog – We have to remember not everyone has been with us from day one. Once a month it is worth doing a blog post which links (using good relevant keywords for the search engines) new readers back to a few posts from our past.

When you talk about something on your blog that happened previously, link back to the post where you mentioned it. Keep your readers in the loop, don’t expect them to psychically know, or to have read your entire archives. There just isn’t the hours in the day.

Search Engine Optimization For Yahoo – So many of us bloggers focus on Google but Google is not the only fish in the sea. An excellent article, Court!

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs – SEO – This is a must read for anyone wanting to get more traffic from search engines.

If Your Blog Disappeared, Who Would Miss It? – Ya’all would, right?

10 Traits Of Successful Bloggers – Lucky me, I have pretty much all of them. I do think the most important one is time management, followed by a positive attitude.

10 Tips for Increasing Comments on Your Blog – Excellent article, Thomas.

How do you link to yourself? Anchor Text for Internal Links Matters – This is important reading for all bloggers because it DOES matter. That’s one reason I put in the “Snoskred Is” section. It also matters when you link to other people, so keep it in mind.

Use smart keywords – I usually use the title of the post that the author used – to link to people – instead of writing this post, write “Meg from Dipping Into The Blogpond wrote this great post about Social Petworking“. Fellow bloggers will thank you greatly for it! It’s also a lot quicker, I just copy and paste the title and then link it.

Fresh Badge Generator – An easy way to make good looking badges. Great find!

Food For Thought -

Converting Visitors Into Subscribers – We all want more subscribers, but how do we convince those precious visitors to subscribe?

50 Tips to Unclutter Your Blog – I had to do this recently.

10 Ways to Eliminate the Echo Chamber – Reading the Bumpzee community feeds you can see the echo chamber effect in action sometimes.

Top 10 Sins of Blog Usability – I agree with all of these.

Thirteen Blog Clichés – I changed my mind on a few of the things I do on my blog after reading this one.

Things To Avoid Series – This is an excellent guide to what NOT to do when blogging.

Writing & Blogging -

20 Surefire Ways To Beat Writer’s Block – Feeling a little.. blocked? Try this to jumpstart your writing.

25 Blog Topics to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing – Great stuff Julie! Inspiring for any blogger.

Writing Kick-Ass Posts When You’re In A Rush – I often find if I have too much time I over-edit, so this was helpful for me.

Find Your Blogging Voice – Some good questions to ask yourself as a blogger.

Plan When You Post Before You Publish – Do you know what days are the most busy on your blog? Do you consider these things when you post?

The Almighty Dollars -

6 Reasons Why I DON’T Use Adsense on Most of My Sites – I’ve never used Adsense and I never will – they don’t pay enough. I’m worth more than that, Google. So is every other blogger.

101 Ways to Monetize Your Website or Blog – Some of these you may never have heard of before.

I hope my fellow bloggers reading this found something useful in the list above. Let me know in the comments if you did! And of course if you have any posts and articles about blogging to add to the bloggers are helpful section of the sidebar, please email me with a link or leave your link in the comments.

If you liked this post, feel free to Stumble it – and don’t forget to come back tomorrow for my article Blog Design – Open Your Eyes.

Google, heatmaps, comments and spiders, oh my! There’s so much to know when you’re a blogger, so I keep putting together some of the little tips I am picking up to share with you. Blogger users take note, I have a couple of great ones for you here.

Have You Googled Your Blog Lately?

In order to get specific results for your blog put the following into the search box – site:www.snoskred.org – just replace the www.snoskred.org with your site URL.

If you want to search your own site only, you can also use Advanced Search and put your site in where it says Domain – Only return results from the site or domain. I use this all the time when looking for past things I wrote here.

For those of us getting frustrated with Technorati, it may be time to consider a Google search widget instead. I’m going to be checking further into this later today and may put a how to together for ya’all for future blogging tip goodness posts..

Find Out What Your Readers Click On

I read Create a Heatmap of Where Readers Click on Your Blog at Problogger and thought it might be something interesting to try. I put it on less than 24 hours ago and it is already showing me interesting information.

If you want to know more about your blog readers, this is an absolute must do. It is also really simple to do – and completely free!

Don’t Forget

I added a new section to my sidebar called Bloggers Are Helpful. It contains some of the best articles I have found about blogging. It is also constantly updated and in the weekly wrap up I will let you know what new articles have been added to it over the week.

If you have a helpful article which should appear in Bloggers Are Helpful, please email me or leave a comment linking to your article.

Blogger Issues.

Comments Policy.

Did you know you can add your comments policy to Blogger? It will show up just above the box where people enter their comments. Here’s a quick screenshot guide on how to do it.

From your Blogger Dashboard – click on settings. Click on Comments. Find the box that looks like this. Type your comments policy into the box – and don’t forget to click save when you’re done! Now when your blog readers want to comment, they will see what you typed into the box directly above the comments box. It will look like this – Or perhaps like this if you have your comments appear in a pop up box.

With Blogger you have a choice between a pop up comments box and a comments page – I prefer the comments page myself, which do you prefer as a commenter? and if you want your comments to be do follow I believe you can’t use the popup box. I’m not 100% sure on that one – anyone?

Where’s That Spider?

You may have read this post by Sephy where he talks about Blogger messing with the search engines. If you did not and you are using blogger, you need to know that Blogger has added a robots.txt file to your blog – without asking you, and without giving you any options of changing it.

What is a robots.txt? It simply tells the search spiders what to look at and what to ignore.

Blogger users are not able to submit a sitemap to Google – something ALL other bloggers can do, because it has to be on your site itself in .xml format and blogger does not allow you to upload .xml files to your blog. Blogger is telling the search spiders -

Sitemap: http://www.snoskred.org/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

That means my feed read becomes my site map. Not an ideal situation at all.

Bloggers on WordPress and some of the other blogging platforms have a huge advantage over us – they can tell Google what pages to look at, what pages to ignore, and also get their labels listed.

Get Smart

Therefore we Blogger users will need to become smarter about how we do things. That is what the Snoskred Is section is about.

I only had 297 of my 500 posts on google for some strange reason. Some of my much older posts which I used to get hits for on certain search terms seemed to stop getting those hits.

What I chose to do was take the time to go back through my posts and make a links list with keywords appropriate to the post. I put it in my sidebar. It is long (if you choose to do the same, you may need to use the scrolling html just to make it workable) and nobody may ever actually look at it other than the spiders. However I do hope that my readers find it useful as well, if they want to know more about me it’s pretty much all there.

You may want to consider doing something similar yourself. It’s your blog. At the very least my thought is that you should have your favourite 10 posts available in your sidebar for your readers to check out and get to know more about you.

Consider WordPress.

I am working on learning a bit about WordPress. I have it installed on another domain I own, and Sephy and I are just messing about with it, learning how it works.

I had been getting mixed messages on WordPress. Some people told me WordPress was difficult to use and for more technical type people. Some people told me it was the best thing since sliced bread. Having now messed about with it I can say both are true. It does require some technical knowledge, but it is also is the best thing since sliced bread.

Blogger is great for most bloggers, I completely agree with that. It is easy, simple to use and you can now get templates for Blogger that look fantastic. If you’re looking for a great Blogger template, I found this site the other day – Pannasmontata Templates – some of these are simply stunning.

For those of us who want a little more control – who want to be in charge – who don’t want Blogger making decisions on their behalf without asking them – WordPress may be the better option. Will I be moving this blog to WordPress? Probably not at the moment, but maybe in the future. I am going to use WordPress for the business blog, though.

If you have never heard of Google Alerts and how they can help you as a blogger, or you have seen bloggers leaving a URL after their name when they comment and wonder why, this is a post you’ll want to read.

As I travel around the blogosphere it often surprises me how people don’t seem to put thought into doing the little things that mean a lot – but then I stop and remember we’re not all reading the same blogs, and so it is unlikely you have picked up all the tips I have. So from time to time I’m going to post some of the good stuff I have found out.

How does Snoskred magically turn up when someone writes her name?

Snoskred uses Google Alerts. Basically this is like a google search that comes to you as a surprise in your email. They are incredibly simple to set up. Simply -

1) put the search term in
2) choose if you want all (comprehensive), or one of search, groups, news, blogs
3) how often – daily, as it happens, weekly
4) put your email in See how simple this is? One more reason to love Google.

For number 2, I went with all. For number 3, choosing as it happens will keep you very up to date but if you’re a busy blogger it might annoy you, too. Mine come to me daily. Of course it is a little easier for me, because my name is fairly unique. I also have alerts set up for Life in the Country, and 419 Scam which helps me stay on top of the latest news in scamming.

You can always use the Alert Management page where you can change all the options and delete any alerts you may be subscribed to. You can also change the formats of the emails you receive – either HTML or plain text.

Why does Snoskred always sign her name and put her blog URL under it?

Snoskred knows that not everyone in the world knows you can click on the name of a commenter to get back to their blog. I may know it, you may know it, but the person who read your comment and thought “wow, that was a great comment, I’d like to read their blog” may not know it.

Rule #1 – Never assume others know what you know!

Those of us with blogger profiles need to pay special attention to this when commenting on blogger blogs because the link blogger puts to your name is to your profile on blogger, not to your blog. If you have more than one blog in your profile people will be confused as to where to find you.

Cybercelt left me a great comment about that a while back, letting me know that you can go into your blogger profile (on your profile page when you are signed in, click edit my profile, then Show my blogs, then Select blogs to display) and choose which blogs are displayed in your profile. If you have more than one, I suggest you choose one to be the main blog, and link to your other blogs from that blog page rather than have them all listed in your profile to make it easier for people to find you, but it’s your profile.

On the other hand, when commenting on WordPress blogs, putting a link may mean your comment gets put into the spam bin. I don’t worry too much about that but it is something to be aware of especially with the busier bloggers who do not always have time to read all their comments. Perhaps you might choose to only leave a link under your name on a WordPress blog in certain circumstances.

I hope these tips are useful! Let me know if they are, I’ll consider doing some more posts like this.

Over in the sidebar you see a little logo called iReply. I’ve been struggling with the commenting thing for a while now. iReply is an idea which I think can work for me and I have joined the iReply movement.

I’m actually a lazy person at heart, so given the option I tend not to reply to comments people make here on the blog. I apologize for that, please forgive me, and I’m going to try and do better in the future. This is the first step towards change for me.

I’ve written most of a post and I’ll be back with it later, I have a few tasks on my plate today. I spent quite a bit of last night watching them trying to move a boat in the dark on the tv. Newsflash – I couldn’t see much.