Is your blog mobile friendly?
If you are always working from your desktop or laptop posting blog posts have you ever checked to see how your blog looks on a cell phone?
Some of the themes you choose may have done the work for you but it is always good to see for yourself. Here is a free tool by Google that allows you to run a short test.
I am half-way through listening to this insightful video report on digital trends for 2022. At the very beginning it explains why some of our blog posts may not be showing up well in Google. Guess what, it has nothing to do with our breath.
Social bookmarking is an online service which allows bloggers to add, comment, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. It is a critical tool to help pump up your search engine optimization. SEO)
Social bookmarking sites can make it easy for people to find blog sites and help you generate backlinks to your website. If you bookmark your website more in social bookmarking websites, you will get backlinks from each website. This results in a higher page rank for your webpage or website.
A backlink is a link from some other blog to another blog page or post. Backlink strategies have been an important part of online marketing for a long time now. They help improve your website’s traffic, rank, reputation, and even relationships. It is critical that you have quality content, with something valuable to say in order to earn your backlink.(Not anything that looks like spam or needs to be trashed.)
Please consider taking the time to join Social Bookmarking sites. I challenge you to try and join at least 20 sites before the end of the month. Let’s start with REDDIT
WIKIPEDIA states: As of February 2021, Reddit ranks as the 18th-most-visited website in the world and 7th most-visited website in the U.S., according to Alexa Internet About 42-49.3% of its user base comes from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom at 7.9-8.2% and Canada at 5.2-7.8%. 22 percent of U.S. adults aged 18 to 29 years, and 14 percent of U.S. adults aged 30 to 49 years, regularly use Reddit.
Please note the demographic. That means, my fellow babyboomer, that you should post stuff that the indicated age groups may feel is quality content. I personally feel that most of what we write about is “quality content” but must be perceived as such by others.
As with all the social bookmarking sites you must first register. With REDDIT you submit your content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called “communities” or “subreddits”, which cover a variety of topics such as news, politics, religion, science, movies, video games, music, books, sports, fitness, cooking, pets, and image-sharing. Submissions with more up-votes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough up-votes, ultimately on the site’s front page. Despite strict rules prohibiting harassment, Reddit’s administrators have to moderate the communities and, on occasion, close them
Reddit suggests that you join at least 5 communities. Once you do you can create posts, videos etc and select which community you want your content to be seen in. The interface is easy, very easy for this boomer to use.
As you begin this journey it is important that you document each site you join and keep a record of the passwords and the sites you join.
I decided to provide a FREE copy of the blog directory form for your use. Although it does not say social bookmarking, you can still use for that purpose.
Let’s make this happen.
A good way to get your blog out there in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Space is to use blog directories. Blog directories are websites which will categorize your blogs under many different categories. Usually the best blog directories are human edited, meaning that each submitted blog is reviewed by a person , not a robot, who will decide whether our blog belongs in their directory or not.
Now not only will blog directories help get your blog to people who are interested in the topic you write about but they will also provide strong back links and can help your posts get ranked in search engines. Also, note that many people search blog directories to research blogs that are similar to their blogs.
A backlink is a link that one blog site gets from another blog site or static website. Backlinks can make a big impact on a website’s ranking in search engine results. This is why they are considered so important for improving a blogs SEO ranking. Search engines will use their own methods to calculate rankings using multiple factors to display search results.
One of the many methods that can help your rankings is to submit your blog and article directories. I am only going to focus on three directories I have recently submitted this blog to. In another post I will talk about article directories and perhaps other blog directories..
I am only listing those sites that I recently submitted to in June of this year and have a easy user-friendly portal. So, check them out for yourself. As I continue with my research I may post about others later after I submit my sites.
The site is easy to navigate. It does not make you feel like it is a “spammy site”I was quite surprised that the site I listed was indexed so quickly. So I am encouraged to submit more sites.
Blogflux lets you know on the first page that they currently feature 157,056 blogs. So you get excited about adding your blogs to the number. They stress the type of blogs they WILL NOT accept. It is an easy submission process.
Is also stupidly easy to navigate. It has been around for a long time so their is a high level of reliability. Their blog directory tab when clicked does not allow you the opportunity to search the categories. But I they make it easy to contact them. So I will let them know that this boomer is concerned. I am sure it will be corrected.
I used one of my handy forms from the Blog Management System to record the name of the directory, user name and password plus the specific blog I submitted.
If you have other favorite blog directories please share.
A lot of folks are staying home and shopping online today, Black Friday. So, since I have not put a post on this blog in a minute thought I would share some blog posts that you can use to start your online shopping.
If you have more to add let me know. I will be checking for your comments while I watch the TV marathons or add more stuff to my Ebay Store.
Why Have a Subscription option on your blog?
The cool thing about placing a subscription option on your blog is that everyone who enters their email address will automatically get notified in their emails. This is real easy to do with Feedburner.
First you need to sign in with Feedburner. You will need a google account. A gmail email will work.
When in Feedburner visit the Tab that says Publicize.
Click on the ACTIVATE button at the bottom of the page.
Choose the option for TYPEPAD and COPY the HTML CODE
PASTE the code into a TEXT WIDGET and place into the SIDEBAR OF YOUR BLOG
As soon as you do this please let me know the url so I can go and put in my email to add to the many that will subscribe to your site.
I really never thought about sending someone a message on Pinterest. I always figured that if I made a comment on their boards they would see anything I had to say. Yet, as I think about it there may be times that you want your message to be private.
I mean you don’t want the whole Pinterest world to see your suggestion to another Pinner that they should use a better picture or that you thought their description needed improvement. Nor do you want everyone to see your attempt to negotiate a better price for those earrings they are selling on Etsy or Ebay.
Well, I saw this post on a great blog called Networkingtips4u on Creating Messages on Pinterest.
Remember your blogging 101 and leave a comment on the site.
Grab a cup of green tea and check out this video from a business blogger presenting at a WordPress conference.
Many of you already know about niche blogging. It is when you decide ahead of time what you are going to blog about. Except with niche blogging it is very focused on one topic. For example, if you are going to blog about blogging that is a broad niche. But if you narrow it to blogging for money then you are blogging about that niche.
I teach folks in my blogging class to take a good amount of time deciding on the area they are going to blog about. It is much like setting a goal. You try to be as specific as possible and refer to it often to see if you are on target.
This morning I read an article about niche marketing that had a very interesting perspective. These marketing gurus felt that you should go broad then narrow when deciding on a niche. For example, if you are thinking about blogging on gardening then you would search on the word gardening with different variations. They could include “rose gardening” “winter gardening” etc.
The key point the article made was to look at the word “gardening” and start with that then go deeper. My summary “go wide then deep and decide.”
I strongly suggest using the free Google keyword tool. When you want to do more extensive searches you can pay for a tool. But right now just go to Google and in the search box key in the words “Google keyword tool”.
The other thing it shows are the keywords “tags” you can use when you produce a blog post.If you are on a WordPress platform, there is a section on the dashboard that always allows you to key in tags. That is the same thing as keywords. The more relevant they are to your post the better.
The cool thing about us baby boomers is that we have a broad area of interests based on our broad area of expertise and experience. That can make for some great blogging. What do you think?
If you want me to do a tutorial on using the free keyword tool with some pictures let me know.
Now, many of you reading this post already have a deep understanding of this powerful strategy. You already know that Social Bookmarking is a great way for baby boomer bloggers to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of their web resources. But it differs from file sharing because the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.
Yes, you can. But when a real read blooded human being does the bookmarking he or she understands the contents of the resource. For an automated software system it is just mathematical data. YOU can locate web pages that have not been indexed by the search engine spiders.
For us baby boomer bloggers it is also a great way to provide a list of super content for our clients, family, friends and other readers. Does that make any sense?
Ok, well I have one of those real nice and basic even I can understand it videos. I like it and hope you do too. Please subscribe to this site because I am going to share some empowering stuff. Why? Because as I get empowered I am going to empower you! Then we can all be dynamic baby boomer bloggers the internet will know we are in the house!
NOTE: THIS VIDEO IS OLDER BUT STILL VERY GOOD. THE STATS HAVE CHANGED.