I, as the creator and admin of this blog, have decided to make it as a social network for bloggers. It was a long series of hesitations and thinking before I finally decided to make it as a blogging venue for those who want to share their thoughts about blogging, particularly SEO and Social Media Marketing.

So to all my readers, blogmates, and regular visitors, you can register to this blog as a contributor, admin or simply an account holder. The advantages are apparent for you will have the chance to share and discuss your opinions about Internet Marketing. You can also have the chance to ask any question that concerns blogging. Even regular Internet users can use it just for fun. They can make it as a place to gain friends on the World Wide Web; for interaction, knowledge and experience. This way you will not only have the pleasure of having to get to know a lot of friends online, but also to discover what really blogging is all about.

Depite of this, I would still continue to write posts about blogging and writing. I’m just going to give you a chance to contribute articles for guest postings. Guest posting is a great way to increase traffic to your blog by linking your blog from your post here. You can post as many as you can.

Although this blog has still a page rank of 1, it doesn’t matter because of the Google Panda update. As we bloggers all know that PRs are no more relevant today. So by spreading the news to your friends on your network, there is a big possibility that this blog is going to increase traffic in no time. Right now it has a regular 100 visitors; this will increase as more users sign up, along with my post updates.

You can leave your comments, suggestions and violent reactions below if you don’t find the interface attractive. If more users can attest to that, then I will redesign this blog’s theme. But if you’re contented with the design, then I will retain it. It depends on how many users or bloggers suggest. The majority wins, of course.

Right now the design has lots of features where you can post a shoutout just like any social networking site; you can add friends, send messages, edit your profile, upload a picture or gravatar, and among others.

So begin now by signing up here.

Let’s keep on blogging on the free world!

I have personal experience about this but not on this blog, at least not yet. What I will be talking about is how I increase my subscribers on my other blog Cebu and Davao Journey. I wanted to post the tips there, but since I remember that I should update this blog regularly, I’ve decided to post it here.

As you might notice the number of subscribers on cebuanddavao.com has been increasing everyday. I started this strategy just last month, June. It began with 36 subscribers, now they’ve increased to 479. That’s a quick increase for only over a month.

The number of subscribers on Cebu and Davao has increased rapidly because of only one thing: love. I’m not kidding. You got to give love to your readers so they can subscribe to you in return. What love did I give to my readers? Well, I gave it on different ways such as a free eBook or free downloadable links.

While at this, you should also be able to assure your readers that your gifts are going to work. What I mean, you must not trick your readers into believing that they can get something out of their subscription, but then in the end they won’t get what they are expecting. You will lose them, and you will lose readers’ loyalty. Here are some few tips I can give you how to increase your RSS subscribers quickly.

Engage in Email Marketing

Email marketing is very useful to gain subscribers. You can make newsletters or an auto responder. Newsletters are useful for seasoned bloggers, and for websites that already have a huge following. Most company websites have their blogs like Google has Google blog or Adsense has its newsletters. For young blogs or blog publishers you might try the auto responder. Auto responder is an automated email sent to those who subscribe to a blog. This can be done using online software such as Aweber.com and Constantcontact.com. Include a welcome message along with the gift that you’re going to offer.

Offer Your Own eBook

Even though you’re still not confident on publishing your eBook, it is still wise to start early. Say, a one-year-old blog with sufficient number of posts can already engage on it. You can rewrite or revise your existing blog posts for your eBook. The most important thing is you have to build trust from your readers. You can be sure that you’ll get subscribers more than you can expect.

How to make your eBook? Okay. It’s not difficult. After revising your existing posts on your blog, save them all in a word document file. You can make a cover of the book or a design of your logo, or just about anything you want to put; just be creative. After saving your posts in a word document, save again as pdf file. If you don’t have a pdf feature on your Microsoft Word, you can download it on the Net. When you’re eBook has already been saved as pdf, then it’s ready to publish on the Net. Convert it as a zipped file before uploading it on your server. Get the download link and send it to your subscribers through your auto responder email.

Put the Subscription Form at the Bottom of Your Posts

The two tips above are useless without implementing your subscription form. So the perfect spot to place your form is at the bottom of your posts, as in every post. This is the easiest area for your subscribers to enter their email addresses and subscribe. When someone reads your post in its entirety, it will be easier for them to subscribe once they like your post.

Having said these, it is still very important that you have a high quality contents on your blog. You need to work hard in making your blog posts as high quality as possible before engaging in any of the tips above.

[Image Credit: techinfoblog.com

It’s pretty obvious that it has been three months since the last time I posted. I never had the chance to update it because of my other blog, cebuanddavao.com. Since my other blog has already acquired a PageRank of 3, I will probably update this blog more frequently.

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Speaking of updating a blog more frequently, I came upon a post which discusses about this topic, written by Eric Kintz, Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy and Excellence for Hewlett-Packard. I’ve been searching for this topic because I’m curious about whether frequent posting is really necessary.

Eric says that traffic is not just one-way. While traffic is relevant to most sites, it doesn’t mean you get all of it by posting everyday. Traffic cannot only be acquired through search engines, it can also be acquired through readers’ loyalty. And you can’t get readers’ loyalty by posting frequently. You can gain readers’ loyalty from subscribers who, in fact, did subscribe not because you update regularly but because they find your post relevant to them. You will lose loyalty of readers if you keep on posting everyday because it’ll take a lot of their time being overwhelmed by your everyday posts. Frequent posts even drive poor quality content. When you’re providing poor quality content everyday, your subscribers are most likely to unsubscribe.

This topic becomes more relevant to me with regard to my travel blog cebuanddavao.com and this blog Blogirature. As you can see my last post–before this–was in March. Since I’ve acquired a PR from cebuanddavao.com, I’ve been thinking to take a breather, and focuse more on this blog.

Based on experience, Blogirature didn’t get the traffic that it wants for the past three months, as in almost zero visitor. Even though this 13-month-old blog indeed didn’t update more regularly that it should since it began, it gained traffic for the first six months, because it did update at least once a week. But this doesn’t mean it is contrary to Eric’s opinion.

This simply means infrequent posts won’t apply for a young blog. Say, a one-day-old blog should update more regularly, of course, because it needs a considerable amount of posts to become established. For instance, one hundred high-quality posts can gain you also a hundred visitors a day if one visitor search for each of your post’s keyword and land into it, and so forth and so on.

Blogirature is still a young blog not in terms of age but in terms of its size. It only has 24 posts plus this one. So it’s still not yet established. It still needs hundreds, if not thousands of posts to gain considerable amount of traffic. Infrequent posting, in the meantime, won’t apply for this blog.

With regard to my travel blog, it only started to update more frequently after one year, right after it transferred from Blogger to WordPress, a one-year-and-a-half blog. It’s been six months now after the transfer; it got a PR of 3. That’s six months of updating everyday with considerable SEO and social media marketing. It proves that frequent posting is only important in order for a blog to become established. But when a blog is starting to become popular, for instance by having PR 3 or PR 5, then there’s no need to update it everyday. Once a week or even once a month would be enough.

I have proven this on one instance when I didn’t post for almost a week on my travel blog (cebuanddavao.com). This was last month, from June 11 to June 17 when the blog was temporarily broken due to a wrong implementation of some PHP codes. When the link was broken for a couple of days it came back with a rapid increase of 100 + visitors when it was fixed. From 310 to 440, without any post for one week.

Although this doesn’t mean anything about readers’ loyalty nor a blog change, a ping or a tweek, the average traffic did actually maintain. It didn’t lose the visitors it needs. It actually increased. This means it doesn’t need frequent posts.

Based on these experiences, I can conclude that an established blog doesn’t have to update more regularly. It doesn’t have to update everyday, much more several posts everyday. Eric says, the more blogs update, the more they confuse the search engines because of the clutter. For example when new blogs emerge everyday and they also post everyday, it brings more clutter when the old ones also update everyday. Who would a user want to view for which post? What else is new other than the everyday news? It weakens the blogosphere in this case.

You can read Eric Kintz’s post here: Why Blog Frequency Doesn’t Matter Anymore.

[Image Credit: iammommahearmeroar.blogspot.com]