Promote Your Blog Via Syndication Services

One way to increase your blog's exposure is via syndication services that will make your posts available to other websites to republish. If a high-profile website decides to feature your content, you'll get a prominent byline with a link back to your blog, which can potentially generate significant amounts of traffic and increase your online readership.

The best-known blog syndication service is probably BlogBurst, which boasts such notable publishers as USA Today, Gannett, Reuters, and The Houston Chronicle among its clients. By joining BlogBurst, you'll agree to make your blog's content freely available for these publishers to include on their websites, in return for that byline and link back to your blog. If your blog joins the ranks of BlogBurst's top performers, you'll be eligible for their cash rewards program as well, with payouts ranging from $50 to $1500 for the most widely syndicated blogs.

Another syndication service worth considering is Feedzilla, which operates on a slightly different model from BlogBurst. For syndication fees ranging from $9.95/month to $199.95/month, publishers can pay to receive access to Feedzilla's content "widgets". They can then install these widgets on their sites to display news feeds from up to 150 content providers. Like BlogBurst, Feedzilla enables bloggers to tap into a network of major publishers to increase their visibility. Publishers currently using Feedzilla to display blog and news feeds on their sites include BBC, About.com, The Sun, Reuters, and News Corporation. By joining Feedzilla you also get a chance to earn a share of revenues from advertising they display in those content widgets - in addition to any you earn from the extra traffic they send your way.

The third and final syndication service I'll cover today is Moreover's Webfeed Wizard. Like Feedzilla, the Wizard is an interface for publishers to add feeds of the latest blog content to their own sites. The benefit to the blogger, as with the other syndication services, is increased visibility and traffic back to their blog from links embedded in the syndicated content. Moreover offers a couple other services for bloggers worth checking out as well: their Custom Content Aggregation Services and XML Conversion Services, both featured on the same page.

Key terms: RSS, R.S.S., content, sindication, sindicate, distirbution, trafic, blog-burst, feed zilla, morover, more-over, web-feed

Start a Blogroll

Actually, before you start one let's define what a blogroll is. Basically, it's a list of blogs you link to from your own blog. Usually your blogroll would go in the sidebar of your blog, and would include links to blogs you read frequently, or wish you read frequently. It could also include blogs you've exchanged links with - they add your blog to their blogroll, and in return you link to them from yours. Exchanging links between blogrolls can be an easy way to begin generating traffic to your blog and building visibility in a community of like-minded bloggers.

If you like, you can also organize your blogroll in various ways. Alphabetically is the simplest and most obvious, but you can also create categories for the different types of blogs based on their subject matter, personal or professional focus, writing style and quality, frequency of updates, or any other criteria that will make your blogroll more useful, comprehensive, and comprehensible.

You can make updating, maintaining and enhancing your blogroll an easier process with a blogroll manager like Blogrolling.com. Their tool allows you to add new blogs to your blogroll by simply clicking a link in your web browser, a much quicker process than going into your blog template and manually adding new links. The Blogrolling tool also lets you categorize your blog list and keeps track of when each blog was last updated. If a blog's gone stale and hasn't been updated for years, you might want to replace it with a more current one.

If you add a new blog to your blogroll, it's always a good idea to let them know by emailing them or posting a comment on the blog. They'll appreciate hearing about the new link, and may even reciprocate by adding your blog to their blogroll. With each new connection you make, you're expanding your network of readers a little further. And it all starts with that first little link in your sidebar...

Key terms: blogroll, blog-roll, blogrole, blogrolling, blogroling, blog-rolling, blog-roling

Moderate Your Comments!

Any blog that's been up for a while, allows comments, and has at least a reasonable amount of online visibility will eventually run into the problem of unwanted comments being posted by complete strangers. These commenters are usually out to accomplish one thing: get a link back to their own blog or website and siphon away some of your visitors. They're often running automated scripts or software that allow them to post comments on a vast scale, leaving their spammy messages and links throughout the blogosphere, and annoying bloggers and their readers by introducing a jarring and unpleasant distraction to their blog enjoyment.

It used to be that leaving comments with a link back to your own site would help your search engine rankings, since they counted each comment as a new backlink and therefore a virtual "vote" in favor of that site's importance. But since this led to a deluge of blog spam, Google and other search engines have cracked down by adding a "no follow" tag to blog comment links, which prevents them from being tracked by the search engine crawlers and therefore negates the search optimization angle for blog comment spammers.

But they're still out there, looking for the free traffic that thousands of comment links can bring them. How do you catch them before they stink up your comments sections with the spammy ravings? Turn on your comment moderation feature! Any decent blog software should offer this option. In Blogger, for example, you can find it in the Comments section of the Settings tab on your blog dashboard. Switch it on and all potential comments will be routed to your email for you to review and approve or disapprove before being posted on your blog. This will help ensure that every comment added to your blog posts is a wanted comment, and not some weirdo spammer trying to sell your readers cheap Viagra or fraudulent stock tips or a second mortgage or larger genitalia. Do your readers need these things? In general, probably not.

Key terms: comments, moderation, spam, scripts, software, backlinks, search optimization, moderater, moderateing