members

Get Peopleized and promote your site

I’ve just been Peopleized!

I’ll be you’re wondering what that means?

Well, to put it simply I’ve just signed up with a site called Peopleized-people interview people. I’m hoping that I’ll meet other website owners on the site and participate in some interviews which will help me promote my sites and get links on other peoples blogs and websites as a result of those interviews.

Most of the bloggers that I know are quite active on the web and often work on promoting their sites at least once a week if not daily in one way or another. Peopleized simply allows you to meet others who are also interested in exchanging links and helping one another promote their websites.

I signed up, quickly created my profile and added nine or ten of my websites in as little as 15 minutes. Now I can sit back and wait for someone to come along and request an interview or I can start looking through the website categories, browse People (site members) or do a search for a keyword to find members or websites who perhaps have similar interests to my own.

Once I find a person that I’d like to interview I’d simply need to click the interview button in their profile and begin creating an interview. While I’m looking at a persons profile I can also look at the interviews that they’ve completed and the ones that they’ve asked others to do.

Another great thing about Peopleized is that you can use the interviews that you’ve done as well as any interview on Peopleized to create new content on your website. In this way you’ll be promoting the person who was interviewed and hopefully giving your readers something interesting to read as well as a new site to visit.

What are you waiting for? Get Peopleized! If you join the site come say hello. My user name is dragonden.

Make sure your site is easy to navigate

by Tricia

I run a number of blogrolls and as I visit the sites that have requested that they be added to my various blogrolls – the do follow list, Green Thumb Sunday, I am Canadian Blogroll and the Toronto Bloggers blogroll just to name a few – I get a chance to examine the design and structure of a lot of blogs.

I must say, I get most frustrated when I’m looking at some of the sites that want to join the do follow blogroll because of course I have to check to see if their comments follow or not.

Here are a few things that make my job of checking sites a little more difficult:

A lot of links or ads where the comment link is located:

It’s very hard to find the comment link when it’s buried within a number of links requesting that visitors social bookmark the post.

If people can’t find the link to leave you a comment it’s no wonder that you have very few comments. Just think if the comment link was at the top of the post, or on it’s own line below the post how many more comments you’d get?

People that have their comments closed to registered members:

Well for one – if you want to be on the do follow blogroll you need to open your comments up so that your visitors can get a link that follows when they leave a comment.

A lot of people just wont sign up to leave a comment. Believe me, you’ll get a lot more comments if they are open to all.

Sites that have a few or several posts on the main page but no way of traveling through the site to see older posts:

Get some navigation on your site! If I like your site or if I’m searching for elusive comments so that I can clear your site for the do follow blogroll I want to be able to travel through your site easily.

If you have archives set up by date your visitors will have to click on a number of links just to read a few posts if you don’t post multiple times each day.

Give me a way to get to the single post page:

Some sites are set up so that you can click the title of the blog post and that will take you to the single page for that post where you can comment on the post. That’s great. I love sites that are set up that way.

My problem is with sites where you can only get into the post to leave a comment by clicking on the permanent link, if you can find it see my first point, or comment link.

On blogger sites sometimes clicking on the comment link takes you to the blogger comment form. I don’t always want that. It’s much nicer to read comments on your blog than on the blogger comment page. Especially if the comment form is a pop up that’s too small to show the whole comment. I’ve run into several of those lately and you can’t adjust the size so you can’t read the full comment.

My suggestion to all is for you to take a look at a few other blogs and compare the features on other blogs to the features on your own.

Is your site easy to navigate in a number of ways?

Are important things such as the ability to get to the comment area clearly visible so that your visitors can find them quickly and easily in order to tell you how much they love your post?

If your site doesn’t have some of the features that I’ve mentioned and you want them, but don’t know how to add them on your own do a Google search with the name of your blogging platform in the search term as well as what you want to learn how to do.

for example:

add navigation links to blogger blog?

I actually just used that search term and it brought up a lot of helpful results.

I believe that the easier your site is to navigate the longer a visitor might stay and the more likely it will be that they will take the time to leave a comment if your content is good. Test my theory, try it for yourself.

Promote your site with a Squidoo lens

by Tricia

Have you heard of Squidoo? I’ve been a member of Squidoo since 2005, shortly after the site opened it’s doors to those who wanted to promote their websites in a very different way.

Squidoo allows members to make what they call a lens. A lens is a window to promote perhaps another sites or a number of similar sites on the internet. You can add as much information to your lens as you like in order to point others towards your website.

I made my first lens, as I said, back in 2005. It was for my reptile and amphibian care website
. I have information on that site about a lot of different reptiles but the majority is for one type of lizard – the water dragon. So what I did was to add snippets of care information to the lens that I created that lead to specific pages on my website where my lens visitors could learn even more in depth information about the care of the water dragon lizard. I did the same thing on another lens for iguana care.

I was also able to add modules to my lens that allowed me to select items from online stores like overstock.com, Amazon and many others for which, if I sold any items through my lens I’d get a percentage of the royalties that Squidoo made off the sale. Profits from a lens can also be donated to a number of charities as well.

I didn’t do much with my lens over the last year, but I’ve recently gone back and given them an overhaul adding new modules and updating the information.

As I said you can do as much or as little to your lens as you’d like. If you were to create one for your website you might add your RSS feed so that visitors could see your latest posts, as well as write a summary of what your site is about. You can also add link modules in order to link to similar types of sites.

I’ve now created lens for all of the blogs that my husband and I run. Each one has a summary of the blog, RSS feeds, links, shopping modules and I’ve added as many tags to the lenses as possible that describe the site accurately so that people will be able to find my lens easily on Squidoo or perhaps even via a search engine.

Visitors to your lens can rank your lens from one to five stars, so if you create a lens try to do a good job so that you’ll get a good rating. I believe the rating system helps with a lens popularity on the site as well.

The people as squidoo also send out newsletters telling members of popular lenses each day and you can apply to have your own lens promoted in order to get more visitors and ratings for your lens.

Check it out for yourself. At the very least it’s another way to promote your website and at the most it’s a way to make a little bit of extra money if your lens does well!

Visit Squidoo to make your own Lens.

Meta

Pages

Search

Archives