Whether you just started your Twitter account, or you started tweeting a month after Twitter launched in 2006, the thought has probably crossed  your mind…’How on Earth do I make the most of these 140 characters?” You’re smart, your tweets are great, you engage, but somehow you’ve hit a plateau.

While Twitter isn’t a popularity contest, Twitter does require grooming to provide the most meaningful experience. Those with the most followers don’t always have the best community, but at the same time building a solid following base will help give you meaningful contact with your readers as well as helping your blog’s traffic grow. So how do you do it? If you’ve been twittering for a while and you still have less followers than you feel comfortable with, there are a few things you can do to maximize your presence on  Twitter.

Give it lots of light

Make your Twitter account easy to find on your blog.

If someone is reading your blog, chances are they will be pleased to follow you on twitter. I don’t know how many times I wanted to tweet someone’s post and they didn’t have a proper twitter widget, they didn’t have their account listed somewhere in their sidebar, the handle isn’t the name of the blog and so I couldn’t @fashionblogger them when I tweeted their post. That’s the perfect opportunity for other people to spread the word about you!

• Tweetmeme button - a button that you can install on your post that allows readers to RT your posts with your Twitter handle. It’s super easy to use and it’s easy to track  how many people tweet your posts, and look up who’s tweeting your posts. They might be good people to follow.
• Go2Web20 Twitter Badge- a cute customizable tab that goes on the side the browser (as opposed to the side bar or header), therefore visible through any page no matter where your readers scroll. I installed this on my blog yesterday and got something like 30 new Twitter followers that day.
• Twitter Widget- This you can put on your sidebar so your readers can see you have an account and you use it actively.
• Write a post about your new account, or refer to one of your tweets in a post.
• Place a link to your account in the footer of your post.

Publicize, publicize, publicize

Part of it is putting on your blog..but here are some other places you can publicize your Twitter account

• Email signature
• Business card
• Facebook, flickr, Etsy, friendfeed….  you get the drift, everywhere that you have a profile.

Make it pretty

As a fashion blogger you are probably well aware of how important it is to be presentable. Whatever you do, don’t skimp on your Twitter presence. First impressions make all the difference, and you never know how much time someone will give you if you don’t catch their eye right in the very beginning.

• Your Icon/Avatar … what does it say about you? Is it a logo? Is it a computer rendering of a girl? Does it communicate what  your blog is about, what you’re about? Icons do matter, people do pay attention to them, so make sure your icon sends the right message. I just updated mine the other day, and people really did notice.
• Your Twitter Background… I like to have it match my brand, but not necessarily since I use the same account for both my blog and for IFB. However, it’s important, like your icon that it’s also pretty to look at, and not generic.

Sew more seeds, follow people

It’s kinda weird when someone doesn’t follow anyone back, but what are you going to do? Yeah, they may say that they don’t follow people back because how do you keep track of everyone? Well I have news for you… Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and even Twitter lists make it easy to filter out the people you want to follow every single tweet from the people you may want to catch up every once in a while. I admit sometimes I fall behind on following people back…and sometimes I don’t follow back if there is a high chance you will un-follow me (ie. spammers or make money online people) but I always try. Some people can get away with following back the few and get large masses hanging on their every tweet, but I’m not one of them, nor do I want to be.

Here are some ways I use to find others to follow

• Invite people from your email- this has it’s plusses and minuses, on the plus, it’s a good way to let your contacts know you’re on twitter. On the minus, there may be that email in your contacts from someone you would prefer not to get in touch with (ie. that guy…what’s his name.. you went on two dates with five years ago)
• Other blogs (see point one)
• Follow the people your favorite twitterers are following…they could be interesting
• Follow the people who are following  your peers. You might have the same interests
• Follow people who are tweet key words you’re interested in, run a Twitter search, see who comes up.

Because  of spammers and Twitterers who’ve developed ways to tricking the system with aggressive following/following tactics Twitter has clamped down on aggressive following. You can’t follow too many more than are following you…which leads me to my next point.

Be sure to water, fertilize, and talk to your Twitter garden

There are loads of Do’s and Don’ts out there on the net.. and be sure to give your followers lots of love. You can’t be a taker in this world and the more you engage in Twitter the more it has to offer you.

• Reply when you can, engage in conversations.
• Follow Friday them.
• Retweet.
• Have fun.
• Don’t be a robot.

Weed…Unfollow Deadbeats

I’m not saying that you should unfollow people who don’t follow you, but if they don’t provide  value to your Twitter experience, or haven’t tweeted since 2008, it’s time to let them go. I have only done this once or twice in three years, but it’s good to do it every now and then.  I usually go to Google to find the latest and best bulk unfollow tools. Also, if you see someone who is blatantly spam, or just bothers you, don’t be afraid to unfollow. Remember this is your Twitter experience, you have to love it if you want it to grow.

By the way, my Twitter account is @thecoveted follow me if you like!

Image by muffmuff / CC BY 2.0

Hi there again, Icy of IndividualChic.com here. I hope you found my last post on how to make your Blogger blog more searchable useful. Thanks very much for all the lovely comments and suggestions, they’ve inspired me to write another post.

Are you the sort of person who uses a consistent sign-off on every post? Or perhaps like me, you might have a repeated line of text in every post; you’ll see on IndividualChic.com each post finishes with a RELATED line. If you are, Blogger has a feature that can make your life easier for you. It’s call a Post Template and you can set it up any way you like.

The easiest way to do this, is to write a temporary post, formatted exactly the way you want it, and then to copy the HTML off to the Post Template.

Prepare your Post Template:

1. Create a new post and make sure it has all of the formatting and text in it that you want to appear in every post. You might want to have a consistent sign-off like “Thanks for reading” or a signature image, or a related link like I do. Copy and paste from an existing post if that’s quicker
2. If it’s an existing post, make sure you delete any information you don’t want to appear. You might also consider replacing text with placeholder words for where you expect to type later. I use things like “Text here” and “Link here”
3. Check once more the post looks exactly the way you want it too
4. Click the Edit Html tab above your post
5. Select and copy all of the HTML code in the window

Create your Post Template:

1. Open your Blogger Dashboard in a new browser window or tab
2. Click on Settings beside the Blog you want to create a Post Template for
3. Click on the Formatting link at the top of the page
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page till you find the Post Template section
5. Paste the HTML you copied earlier into the Post Template box and press the Save Settings button

Test your Post Template:

1. Switch back to the Posting tab
2. Create a new post
3. Check the Post Template has automatically inserted your default format into the post
4. Finish writing your witty and informative post
5. Publish the post and check the whole thing looks the way it should
6. If you’re happy, congratulations on making your blogging just that bit easier
7. If you’re not happy, keep fiddling until you get it just the way you want (it will be worth the effort)

Once again, I hope you’ve found this post useful. Let me know what you think in the comments. I’d love to hear from you all.

Thanks,

Icy.

image by Sabrina Eras

A Blogger blog is a fairly simple thing. It’s easy to get up and going and it’s quick to post articles. However, there are a few simple things you can do if you want to make it easier to find your blog in the Interwebs.

The first two things you can do are really simple and require no knowledge of HTML or the back end of Blogger. These instructions work for whichever blogging platform you use.

Descriptive titles

Yep, you’d thing this one should be easy, but many people (including myself) forget this really simple step. Make your titles really descriptive and they’ll be more likely to be indexed by Google and the other search engines. For example, Special Report: CHOICE clothing sizes is a good title but Great vest is really pretty boring. What I should have used as a title was something like Dramatically tailored vest (in-fact, I might just rename it).

Descriptive links

This is another one where people (including me) get lazy. A link that points here is far less likely to be indexed than a link that points to a post on Icy’s shoe rules.

The next three things require you to start playing around a little bit with HTML, don’t be afraid though, you can do it ^_^.

Use headings within your posts

Now this is one I use rarely (except perhaps the headings within this post) but it is just as effective as the first two. In-fact, any text within any HTML tag is treated with higher priority in a search engine, than the normal text in a post, so this goes for bolded text, numbered and un-numbered lists as well. Here’s how to use a heading in Blogger.

1. Write your new witty, informative and interesting post
2. Click on the Edit Html tab at the top of the post
3. Find the text you want to format as a heading
4. At the start of the text type <h1> and at the end type </h1>. All HTML tags use the left and right angle brackets and the closing tag always uses the / symbol (that way you know it is the closing pair of the tab.
5. Switch back to the Compose tab and check the result. If the text is too big, switch back and try using the <h2> </h2> tags, or even h3 or less until you get a look that works for you.
6. Save or publish your post!

Alt tags for pictures

Alt tags for pictures are more likely to be indexed by a search engine, just the same as links and headings. IFB has talked about this before. Here is how to do it specifically in Blogger.

1. Write another witty, informative and interesting post.
2. Upload your photos into your post and position them to your liking.
3. Click on the Edit Html tab at the top of new post.
4. Look for the images in the text, they start with the code <img…
5. Scroll along each <img> tag looking for the text alt=”” (use the search function in your browser if this makes it easier.
6. Add your descriptive text within the quotes, including your site name. I might have something like alt=”Fabulous fashion @ Individual Chic”.
7. Save or publish your post.

Meta tags

Way back in 2007 Jeannine went into what Meta tags are and how to use them. They’re pretty simple, just a way to add keywords and descriptions to your blog. For instructions on how to add the tags to Blogger, see below.

1. Go to your Blogger Dashboard
2. Click on the Layout tab and then Edit HTML
3. Click on the link that says Download Full Template. Save the template somewhere on your hard drive with a nice descriptive name. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. If you screw things up, you want to be able to go back to a working copy
4. Look for the <head> tag. It should be right at the top of the Edit Template window. Put a couple of blank lines below it
5. Type in the tag below, substituting your name of course ^_^
   <meta content=’Icy’ name=’author’/>
6. Add another line and type in
   <meta content=’Your blog description here.’ name=’description’/>
7. Add a last line and type in
   <meta content=’all of the keywords you can think of, separated by commas’ name=’keywords’/>
8. Click the Save Template button
9. Load up your page and check it all works.

I hope you’ve found these tips helpful. Let me know in the comments.

Thanks, Icy.

image by ClickFlashPhotos

This post is written by Miss Elle of Broke and Beautiful

Oh, the wide world of open-source software…

It’s brought pleasure and pain to the lives of aspiring bloggers everywhere. The leader of the pack for bloggers-going-pro? Wordpress, that magical publishing platform that allows full customization as well as a squeaky clean user interface that so many of us hold dear to our hearts.

Wordpress understands our needs for a categorized dashboard, a clean color palette, and WYSIWYG, well, everything. As we are fashion bloggers, I’m pleased to note that Wordpress also understands our need for unique style and a tailored fit, which is precisely why plugins are a fashion blogger’s best friend.

But which to choose? The Wordpress Plugin Archive boasts over 4,000 plugins from users who know the software from the inside out. Well, take it from a girl whose plugin addiction runs rampant – I’ve already done the trial-and-error for you.

There are four major categories of plugins that I deem absolutely necessary: Monetization and Traffic Building, Readability, Relationships, and Back End. Regardless of how long your blog has or hasn’t been around – you need these.

Traffic Building & Monetization

You don’t really have much of a blog if people aren’t visiting it. In a similar vein, you’ll likely never “go pro” without monetization… So this category is fairly important.

LinkWithin
This little gem of a plugin is not only has easiest installation process I’ve ever seen, but the work it does is invaluable. After installation and activation, the plugin pulls three related posts from your archive and displays them at the bottom of each post, complete with a thumbnail image from each related post. The setup takes 30 seconds, and the results are top notch.

ShareThis
Displays a button that allows readers to share your post via social network, email, instant message, or text message.

Events Calendar
Allows you to build and display a calendar of upcoming sales, shopping events, etc. via sidebar widget, or its own page. Giving readers a credible, one-look summary of all the sample sales will keep them coming back. (Plus, the link out of the calendar could easily be your referring URL, earning you a few bucks of spending cash!)

Post Footer
A simple plugin that places an ad (of your choice) between your content and the comments on a single post page. The in-dash user interface allows you to skip the code-skimming to replace or change the ad.

WP-Affiliate
If you’re a regular user of affiliate programs, this plugin will definitely ease your mind. Along with integration of Commision Junction’s database, this plugin allows you to mask those crazy affiliate URLs by using your own URL to redirect the reader.

Readability

Even if you have the best content out there, your message won’t come across if your readability is off. These plugins not only keep things on the aesthetically pleasing side, but also offer major functionality. You can only improve your blog by installing them.

iMax Width
Fashion bloggers love a hi-res image. Prevent your layout from getting screwed up by oversized photos by setting a maximum image width.

Google Translate
One of the greatest things about fashion is its international appeal and influence. This plugin allows readers from all over the world to translate your site via Google.

Ajax Edit Comments
This plugin gives your readers the ability to go back and edit their comments within a certain window of time after they’ve posted, you specify the amount. This eliminates the need for “correction comments” by your readers, as well as gives your commentators control.

Exclude Pages from Navigation
Well, this plugin is pretty self explanitory. If you’ve got pages that definitely belong on your site, but don’t necessarily belong in the main navigation bar, this plugin provides a check box which, when unchecked, removes pages and child pages from the main navigation bar.

Back End

These plugins aren’t pretty, and they don’t smell nice, but the work that they do on the inner workings of your blog is priceless.

Article Templates
If you’re like me, you have “columns” – or regular themes that you post on each week. This plugin allows you to store templates of these posts so you don’t need to format an empty post with your headers/footers/whatever when its time for your regularly scheduled feature.

Future Calendar
This plugin is especially good if you a) have your blog organized to the point where you only make x posts per day, or b) manage a multi-author blog. It allows you to see what days you have posts scheduled for from the edit post page. It’s also available as a widget to show your readers when they should expect to see posts.

Maintenance Mode
While it’s (hopefully) not a plugin you’ll use regularly, when it’s time to redesign your ever-changing layout, activating this plugin will put a simple “Under Construction” notice on the front page of your site, making it unavailable to everyone except for logged-in administrators.

Shortcut Macros
Is it super nerdy to have a favorite plugin? Well, regardless of the answer, this is mine. If you’re constantly adding the same code for the same links in different posts, you know it can be pretty annoying/time consuming/frustrating. Shortcut Macros allows you to use “codes” that are linked to text/HTML  (specified by you) to easily throw images, links, or text into your posts without having to enter the same 256 character HTML codes. For instance, “##ifb” could be a shortcut macro that, when inserted into a post as-is, would (when saved) populate the HTML code which would create this: Independent Fashion Bloggers.

Relationships

Building relationships could, quite possibly, be the most important part of becoming a succesful blogger. Forming and maintaining communicative relationships with your readers builds trust, credibility, and offers a more enjoyable experience for your readers – these plugins make building relationships a cinch.

Brian’s Threaded Comments
Brian and his threaded comments have really done a number for reader-blogger interaction. This plugin gives you the ability to respond to individual comments in a “nested” format.

WP Enhanced Form
Often times, when you invite readers to contact you, the site of an email address can ignite the laziness in some people – having to open up email programs, copy/click the link, format the email… When you just want to drop a note, it can seem a little time consuming to send an email. (Hey, I said for some people!) This plugin gives you a contact box that doesn’t require anything but your reader’s email address, their name, and their note.

CommentLuv
Bloggers love to comment to other bloggers – this is a fact. Why not show them some “luv” by using this plugin, which lists their last post (via RSS) as a link directly below their comment?

Comment Relish
This plugin sends off a customizable “Thanks for commenting!” email to each new reader who makes their first comment on your site. A great way to promote your RSS feed, an upcoming event, or a popular post.

WP Polls
I’m consistently baffled as to why Wordpress doesn’t include this feature in their builds. WP Polls gives you an extremely user-friendly, effective system of polling your readers. No registration is needed – just a click. It’s particularly good for obtaining demographic information about your readers.

Obvious-but-Honorable Mentions

These plugins definitely get an A+ from me, but they’re pretty standard fare, and only being included for any newbies who might be out there reading.

WordPress.com Stats – Gives you a full-featured view of how many people are reading your site. Includes referring site, out-click, search terms, and which posts were most viewed.

Akismet – An excellent spam filter for comments. (Included in your installation of Wordpress.)

Exec-PHP – Nearly idential to a regular text widget, installing this plugin will allow you to execute PHP commands from your sidebar and posts.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that “21 Essential Plugins” is a bit of a stretch for the common blogger; however, I guarantee that once they’re all installed, configured and activated, you’ll be shocked at how smoothly your blog runs, and how much time you save. If you’re still uncomfortable with the idea of configuring 20+ plugins, I urge you to go through your blog, find out what you’re missing from your perfection of a mental image, and return to this list to see if any of these plugins fit the bill. Don’t be afraid to search for a specific plugin if you don’t see one here, either. Some of the best plugins I’ve found have been discovered via my googling “WP plugin makes images all the same size and stuff”.

Do you have a favorite plugin that’s not featured here? What is it and why do you love it?

Photos by: yonderlove & Patrice Speed

Originally uploaded by icanteachyouhowtodoit

Let’s face it… there’s not a whole lot of money in fashion blogging. At first anyway. You have to work hard, work smart and be in the know.

You also have to have nice looking content, good writing, and be persistent.

Unfortunately… the nice content can be a challenge if you want to make your blog original. There are lots of free resources out there if you take the time to learn about internet culture, programming and professional blogging. One concept I’ve only recently come across is open source. If you are running your blog on Wordpress.org, you are probably aware of the amazing capabilities of this concept.

Open source is a set of principle around developing software, more specifically to us, it’s code that’s openly available. I find this topic really interesting, but for now… we can stick to the fact it’s free software… it’s free, but you can donate to the programmers if you like. I use WordPress and an open source template… the good part is it’s free, and I can customize it. The bad part is, I’m the one who has to do all the work.

Finding good programs to use is another issue so here are some places to look:

Images: Blogs like Just JR and Miss Dior Couture make wonderful collages with found images. I don’t know what software comes standard on you computer, but chances are, you may not have Photoshop. It’s an essential tool for blogging. I used it for nearly every post. If you can’t shell out the $1000 for a licence for CS2… try GIMP, it still has a bit of devlopment to do… but you can give it a try. I’ve seen the features, and it looks pretty extensive particularly for what we do as bloggers, so if you have a super old copy of Photoshop… you might want to give this a try.

Email: I don’t know what kind of blogger doesn’t need a good email program. I use gmail for all my accounts. I recently bought a domain name, and didn’t want to have to pay for the extra hosting for the emails, so I used google apps. With that, you can have like 100 email addresses and it uses the gmail interface, so I didn’t have to learn anything new. I’ve also heard that Mozilla Thunderbird is a great email application.

Hosting: If you are just starting out, and are intimidated by paying up front for hosting (many companies give a discount if you pay up front) going to NearlyFreeSpeech allows you to pay for what you use. A beginning blogger may not use too much space… so it’s worth a dabble. As you learn what you need, you’ll feel more comfortable about investing in your website. Again… I know I should have said this earlier, but it helps to have your own domain name. They aren’t expensive… but after I had to move from Blogger to Wordpress, it was a hastle to inform everyone… change all my feeds, etc… I lost traffic, and my new site doesn’t have the same pagerank as my old one. But now I have way more traffic than before… pagerank… well.. that’ will change too.

Templates: When I moved, it was because I couldn’t find the right templates to with my old platform. Wordpress has tons of open source templates it was just a matter of finding one I liked with a support forum that I gelled with. Once I got my site up and running the author of the code complimented on the work I did! It was really nice.

Tracking your blog: I used to use Technorati, but lately I’ve lost interest in them because I knew that there were links that weren’t showing up. Google now has a blog search that you can Google your blog address and it will search the entire internet for every link that pops up. It also has an RSS feed option so it can also email you when someone links to you!

Image by icanteachyouhowtodoit

A few weeks ago, I tuned into Cotorture’s blog radio show Fashion Blogging and SEO With Vyque of Fasshonaburu.com Vyque gave several great tips on how to increase traffic by making your site more searchable. Some of her tips included tagging your images, linking to other blogs and adding a meta tags in your site.

I decided to do some research on meta tags, and implement them on my sites, mostly because I was already practicing some other tips, and frankly I found the whole subject of meta-anything confusing. If you are just getting into the wonderful and enchanting world of HTML code… SEO type stuff, you’ll hear about meta tags.

Meta tags have been around for a long time, thier function is basically to define the webpage.
A meta tag is inserted after the HEAD tag, it’s where your page title is, many blog platforms has that already included in the template, so I left mine out. The “keywords” element was popularized back in the 90’s and a few search engines used them, until spam sites took advantage of this and used keywords to mislead users. Most search engines have stopped using the keywords element of the meta tag BUT the “description” element is still useful to us, it’s where we can write a description of the webpage.

After getting all gung ho over the the whole meta tag, page description thing, I went to go put the code on my page, only to realize that XHTML always needs every tag to be closed. Blogger Tips and Tricks gave some very good suggestions on this topic…

So in the end, your code should look like this:

This way, you can better control what page descriptions go out there… oh dear, many times I searched my blog, only to find random bits of whatever post Google picked up. Hopefully it wasn’t embarrassing. Either way, I threw in the keywords element in my own, just out of superstition, perhaps I’ll get some extra traffic, but more importantly, I have a better understanding of my website.

Here’s a fantastic post from Lesley @ Fashiontribes.

The mystery of how Google ranks the quality of a particular website is – like the whereabouts of Osama, how Promises stays in business…& Paris Hilton – developing one of the great unsolved puzzles of our time. The subject of countless articles, blog posts, and even an entire industry devoted to making your site sexier in the eyes of Google, PageRank (PR) was devised by co-founder Larry Page during his Stanford days spent researching a new breed of search engine. PageRank (yes, it’s spelled that way, and yes, it’s a trademark of Google) denotes whether Google deems your site valuable & where on their food chain
you rate on a scale of 1-10; ten = good, one or less = bad (& very bad). Not only does PR affect what you can charge for advertising, but it directly impacts where you place in a Google
search and your corresponding Google traffic.

Lucrative Linkwhoring
Naturally, an industry has sprung up to help lesser sites buy their way to a higher PR. Although ethically questionable, a number of larger blogs have been accepting payment in exchange for linking to lesser sites – solely for the purpose of boosting the smaller site’s PR. Linkwhores & so-called Blog Link Farms fill their sites with these lucrative links to the lower foodchain sites, regardless of whether the content of the lesser site actually relates in any way or is deserving of a higher PR.

As a result, Google recently penalized a number of high profile, popular sites by significantly lowering their PR. Forbes, The Washington Post, Chicago Sun Times, San Francisco Chronicle & Engadget all dropped from PR7 to PR5; ProBlogger & CopyBlogger from PR6 to PR4, and the longtime #1 listing in the Google search “Make money online” -

John Chow - was completely removed from the index; search for “John Chow” now & JohnChow.com comes up around page 7 notes Courtney Tuttle. (Search Engine Land has a more complete list of the major sites who lost PR ranking.)

A Google-Sized Hypocrite
According to Google, the official reason for the PageRank adjustment is to preserve the quality of links & ensure they lead to relevant editorial content rather than a “bad neighborhood”; ie. to help protect users from inadvertently clicking on an unrelated site (essentially like clicking on an ad) or ending up on a web-spamming site. It is their search engine so they have every right to penalize you for selling links, points out Search Engine Land about the fact that Google isn’t actually dictating to people what to do with their sites. “Don’t care about Google?” they ask. “Sell all the links you want…If Google traffic is important to you, don’t sell links.”

However, the tech-centric bloggers have identified the real issue as this: these links are supplanting Google’s cut of the link business; if you want to earn link revenue, they want you to use their AdWords.

Mashable illustrates the hypocrisy of Google’s PageRank punishment by showing how your typical Google search yields well-placed AdWords which lead straight to an impressive quantity of link spam. And the company’s apparent lack of loyalty has offended a googol-sized group of early adopters whose enthusiastic word-of-mouth rave reviews initially helped sell Google to the non-tech masses. “The people who supported you in your early years and the people who have the ability to influence the non-tech folks…those are the exact same people you are currently attacking,” warns a disappointed Twenty Steps. “It’s not a wise move to piss them off in great numbers. Sure, you’re currently top of the pile but with every one of your snidey little digs at the SEO community or the web development community or the blogging community, you chip away at your power base.”

In a delightfully dramatic flourish, he even quotes the lyrics from an 80s Human League hit:

You were working as a
waitress in a cocktail bar
When I met you
I picked you out,
I shook you up and turned you around
Turned you into someone
new
Now five years later on you’ve got the world at your feet
Success has been so easy for you
But don’t forget it’s me who
put you where you are now
And I can put you back down
too

And Now for the Good News!

The banned Mr. Chow shrugs off his disastrous PR penalty by pointing out that link sellers will simply come up with a new pricing structure that has nothing to do with PageRank. Courtney Tuttle agrees, asking: “Does Google want PageRank to be irrelevant? If they do, they’re doing a fine job.”

And TechWag finds a silver lining in the fact that the downgrade against massive sites, combined with the fact that good content is now a more valuable tool for luring people to your site, is actually good news for smaller blogs. Why? It rewards what we do best – blogging. “Pretend like search engines are not even a traffic option, and instead focus on repeat traffic and referral sources that no one can take away,” advises CopyBlogger, explaining that the real reason for their success has been to ignore SEO gymnastics & subterfuge, and focus instead on producing high quality content. “While people work hard to attract links to rank better in search engines, you’ve got to realize that some of the highest quality traffic comes directly from the links.”

Shopalicious! asks a very good question….

I was wondering if anyone had any comments/thoughts on the recent Google Page Rank adjustments?

from Fashion IQ:

Hi all,

It seems the majority of fashion blogs are on the blogspot platform. Till recently, that has meant a lot of complications when using Feedburner to track subscriptions and feed activity. No more. Now pretty much any blogger can integrate Feedburner without too much fuss.

But why should you use Feedburner?

• Your feed subscribers are your biggest fans…see exactly what they are interested in. Get view and click data on each of your posts.
• See who’s stealing your content. Feedburner has a “Uncommon Uses” report which will show you all of the sites republishing your content. (I’ll get you yet fashionspy.info!)
• See your subscriber counts.
• Offer feeds via email.
• Notify a bunch of blog search engines (including Technorati) that your content has been updated. (Note: I once got a hit from Google four minutes after publishing!)
• Put your latest blog posts in your email signature. Spam your friends! Spam your enemies!
• Create widgets that can be put on any page.
• Create interactivity in every post. (see above) This allows you to add snippets to every post exhorting people to subscribe, email the post, hop on one foot, whatever!
• Add a branding image to your site feed. This will help your feed stand out in feed readers.
• Monitor the status of your site and feed. You’ll receive an email whenever your feed stops responding.

Ok… ready to go?

Here’s quick start instructions for Blogger (blogspot), Wordpress (selfhosted), Wordpress.com and Typepad. Feel free to contact the Feedburner Team if you have questions or issues.

Till Next Time,
Chris