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I would like to touch the Social Media friendship subject very soon. Just to get you into the mood, I would like to know on which criteria you base your Social Media friends addition?

I really think that everybody have their own criteria and I won’t give any example here! I would like to have you idea about that. When are you adding friends? Why are you adding friends? Are you always befriended people that adding you? What is you friendship development strategy?

This week: On which criteria do you base your Social Media friends addition?

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Relationships are the basement and the foundation of blogging. Thus, if you want your blog to be successful, you first need to create true relationships to support your project. For those of you who didn’t read my article The Secret to Developing a Popular Blog published on SEJ, I would recommend you to read it to understand the whole story about developing a successful blog.

The article presented above shows you the basic concepts and the big picture of a successful blog. In the present article, I would like to focus on a precise and essential element to be successful: the communication!

As you probably notice, I added some space on the front page of my blog. I labeled this space “Latest News on CatchThePosts!”. My goal is simple: establish a more efficient communication with my readers. As a part time blogger, I’m conscious that readers may have some interrogations about me and my blog. This is especially right because I don’t publish anything if I don’t have enough time to create quality content. I already said this in the past and I think this is something appreciated by my readers. Quality is part of my personal values. Period! As a consequence, I don’t know in advance if I will be able to publish. This may lead to some periods of irregular post.

So, how could I reduce the bad effect of these periods? I think that the answer is on the communication! What about informing my readers about why I can’t publish? About what I’m doing? Or about what will come next? What about helping them to have a clear idea of what they could expect from me? I think this is legitimate questions that may be answered – at least partially – by my new section “Latest News on CatchThePosts!”.

Of course, this is my personal case study. You probably live something different. However, the question stays the same: How are your communications with your readers? If you care about engaging your readers, you would need to question your communications. An engaged reader is a reader that feel his/her membership to a specific community. How could your readers feel that membership if they are not aware of what happen on this community? They have to feel them on the game. In that context, I think that communication is the key!

Let me know how you improved your communication with your audience. It’s always a pleasure to read your feedback and your comment!

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Blog comments are known to be an efficient way to build targeted backlinks. In fact, commenting on a popular blog may lead to hundreds of people reading your comment in a single day. This may represent significant traffic for any new blogger. Moreover, the good news is that your comments won’t disappear; they will live as long as the commented blog will be online. In other words, comments are permanent! In that context, this means that you will get the benefits today, tomorrow, next week and hopefully next year.

Comments leave a trace wherever you drop it. How do you want people to perceive you when they read your comments? This should bring you to reconsider their importance and their impacts on your strategies. Personally, I really think that it would be in the best interest of every blogger to review this perception about comments. If commenting sounds to you like link dropping, I think you should consider changing your mindset!

Every comment you drop on a blog may be read by both the blog owner and the audience. Here are my personal thoughts about how you should take advantage of commenting when considering these 2 types of readers.

Build a Strong and a Long Term Relationship with Bloggers

Every blogger appreciate to receive new comments. Actually, this is a great way for them to interact with their audience and get a feedback about what people like and what they don’t. Also, this is a privileged way to share thoughts and a good place to argue about a specific topic.

In fact, I think that commenting should be seen as a great opportunity to build a strong and a long term relationship with the blog owner. Always keep in mind that blogging is all about relationship! Don’t hesitate to share your idea and your thoughts with the blog owner. Ask questions and demonstrate your interest for the subjects.

As for any kind of relationship, being constant and present is essential. Obviously, a single comment is not enough. Building a relationship require time and investment. In fact, the more present you are, the more attention you will get.

Commenting is a remarkable opportunity to get in touch with bloggers. This said, you are the only responsible of what you want to do with this opportunity. Link dropping? Relationship and network building? This is up to you!

Build Your Brand and Your Authority with the Audience

Commenting is a remarkable opportunity to build relationship but it is also a great opportunity to demonstrate your authority and to build your brand. Many blog readers don’t stop reading at the end the article; they continue reading and they take into consideration the comments. What do people think about this article? Do they agree? Do they disagree? What is my personal position? In fact, comments get a lot of exposure and this is precisely what you want to benefit of. The question now is: what content do you want to demonstrate?

I personally think that comments should be written the same way as you write your posts. In other words, there is no reason to consider your comments less important than your posts. The quality and the relevance are essential to leave a valuable trace on your favorite blogs. Don’t forget that this is a permanent trace; if you create an original and valuable comment, you’ll get the benefits on a long term view. And if you find a way to make them stand out of the crowd, you’ll get even more from it!

Commenting gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your authority and your personality. Don’t miss it! If your content is well structured and very relevant, you will most likely get some traffic from it and, hopefully, you’ll convert these new visitors into loyal readers.

Changing your mindset about blog comments may help you to create a more efficient branding strategy. Moreover, it may improve your content distribution by creating new relationships and expanding your contact network. Commenting is an opportunity available for everyone, but you are the only responsible on how you will exploit it. If you think long term, you’ll increase the quality of your comments and you’ll most likely harvest some priceless benefits like authority, branding and distribution network.

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We all know that original and valuable content is essential to develop a successful blog. Moreover, strategies based on social media networks, Forums and other community sites helps you to distribute this content and hopefully bring you significant traffic. However, this whole process must be repeated if you want to keep this traffic on a regular basis. One possible way to stabilize this traffic is to create backlinks. In fact, each backlinks is a road that lead readers to your blog’s door; instead of just pushing your content - which require lots of effort - it allow you to deploy a concrete and efficient pulling strategy.

This is my first “Ask The Reader” post. I really enjoy writing, but I really enjoy reading your comments as well. Since blogging is all about relationship, I would like to let you express yourself about some interesting subjects and topics. Let me know about your tips, tricks, experiences, successes, failures, etc. The voice is yours!

This week: What is your best strategy to create valuable backlinks?

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As a blogger, one of your main goals is to increase your visibility to build a powerful branding and to constantly increase your amount of traffic. To reach this goal you may focus your marketing strategy on publicity which means that you will center your attention on purchasing ad space on other blogs or by creating PPC ads campaigns.

Another strategy may be to focus on promotion which is more oriented on trying the product. In the blogging context, the promotion means to demonstrate your strength and your authority by presenting your articles and your knowledge to a wide range of readers. In fact, both strategies – the publicity and the promotion – will help you to reach your goal in a different way. In fact, the best tactic would probably be a particular mix of both strategies.

In this article I want to focus on one of the most popular and efficient way to promote your blog: the guest blogging strategy. As for any marketing strategy, the success of guest blogging relies on the application of several golden rules.

1. Find The Most Relevant and Major Blogs on Your Niche.

You may already know what are the 4 or 5 more major blogs on your niche. However, if you don’t, you’ll need to find them to properly understand your external environment and to create your guest blogging blog list. In fact, they should be findable pretty easily by typing your keywords on Google. When you’ll have them, I would recommend to prioritize them using the following criteria:

The most targeted blog first. The more targeted the more impact! If you don’t choose to guest blog on blogs that specifically target the same audience than you, you’ll be doing entertainment, not marketing!

The blog that receive the higher amount of traffic. Obviously, the more traffic, the better exposure! Guest blogging is a marketing strategy to promote your blog. Don’t be afraid to target the most popular blogs on your niche. Be audacious and persistent!

The blog that perform better on social media. As social media are fabulous places to brand your name and maximize your exposure, choosing blogs that perform well on social media increase your chance to reach your promotion goal.

2. Determine who Your Audience is And Find the Right Topic.

Of course, the audience should be relatively the same as yours if you selected the right blogs. However, they may have other concerns or other questions. If you want to have a big impact, you need to fill a need! The best way to find the right topic for your guest post is to analyze the following elements on the targeted blog:

Observe the most popular posts. The most popular posts is a great way to determine the topics that really concern the audience. Take the time to read these articles carefully. Also, bring your attention to the posts type; is it news posts? Is it in the list form? If you don’t find any popular posts section, just browse through the articles and find the most commented ones or those who received the higher number of social media votes.

Find the readers’ questions. In many major blogs, there are a post, a section or a widget (like Skribit) that aim to receive the readers’ questions. This kind of information is very useful to choose a relevant topic for your guest post. In fact, you couldn’t find anything better since it comes directly from the readers themselves!

Read the comments. Comments are also a good indicator to determine what is important to the targeted audience. Take the time to read a lot of comments from different articles on the blog. The chance is that you’ll need to read between the lines to find the readers’ concerns, but it really worth the time investment. Never hesitate to create a new comment to start a relevant discussion thread; it may help you a lot!

3. Write a Remarkable Article on a Relevant Topic.

If you really want to have the best exposure possible, you need to create a very valuable article. In fact, the more quality you’ll put in, the better distribution you will have and the best results you’ll get! This is as simple as that! Here are some other simple elements to follow if you want to maximize the impact:

Include 1 or 2 links that point to relevant articles on your blog. Including 1 or 2 links to relevant articles on your own blogs gives you 1 or 2 valuable backlinks. Moreover, it will give you the chance to demonstrate the readers what you publish on your own blog. In fact, it just throws the invitation to visit your site and to subscribe to your blog if they like what they read. Don’t insert more than 1 or 2 backlinks; more than that may work against you when you’ll contact the targeted blog owner.

Take the time to create an attractive headline. As usual, the headline is very important. The more creative and attractive, the more you’ll create a movement to read your article. Also, a very original headline has better chances to perform well on social media networks. So take the time to brainstorm and to choose the best one!

Include a credit line with a link to your blog. Even if most blogs insert a credit line themselves while posting a guest post, you better think about an original way to introduce yourself and to insert a link to your blog. The most important is to give the chance to each reader to know who you are and where they could reach you.

4. Ask With Respect and Confidence.

Doing guest blogging means that you’ll publish your own article on somebody else blog. And, most likely, this blog is actually well established which means that the owner invests lots of effort until now. Being accepted by a blogger to publish our article is a privilege! In fact, we always should consider this as a generous opportunity to gain more exposure. Now here are some simple rules to help you creating a good contact with a blog owner:

Demonstrate your respect. I don’t think I have to say much about this one. Hopefully, you are asking to publish your article on a blog you highly appreciate. Demonstrating your respect for the blog and the blogger seems to me like something natural. Of course, it doesn’t mean to write an whole page on how the blog is fabulous and wonderful (even if you really mean it); few lines to express how the blog is valuable to you is just great.

Include your complete article in attachment. Including your article in the first message will give you more chance to be accepted. Even if the blogger doesn’t have the habit to publish guest posts on a regular basis, it could be very difficult to refuse a remarkable and relevant article.

Ask the blogger to confirm the publication of your article. Some bloggers may accept to publish your article and some may not. The essential is to be aware about this decision. Ask the blogger to let you know about it. This way, you’ll be able to make the proposal to the next blog on your list if the previous blogger refuse it. Of course, if all bloggers refuse to publish your article, you may question it seriously; Is it relevant? Is it quality content? Try to find the true reasons behind this situation.

5. Respond to Every Comment.

Guest blogging is not a marketing strategy we throw away and wait. Guest blogging gives you the chance to demonstrate your authority and to interact with a new audience. As you already demonstrate your respect to the blog owner, I consider that the community of this blog worth the same respect from you. In fact, it’s one of the best opportunities to get in direct contact with a large amount of targeted people. Now if these people take the time to give you their feedback about your article, I think that getting back to them is just something obvious! Here are some points to remember while getting back to the commentators:

Demonstrate your gratitude. No matter how you express it, just make sure you do it! Only a very small ratio of readers leaves comments and feedbacks about the article they read. So when those people give you the opportunity to get in contact with them, take the time to show them your gratitude and respond to their comments.

Take the opportunity to show your authority. Getting back to comments is a terrific chance to show your authority. Take the time to create an original and valuable answer to every commentator. The article you publish is static, but your answers are alive because it is very personal and targeted for every commentator. Just ask yourself the following question for every commentator: is there a concrete action I could do to help him/her?

Focus on relationship. I said it, I say it and I’ll always repeat it: blogging is all about relationship! The commentator is not just a commentator. You must change your mind about that. Every commentator is a potential friend, a potential partner! Getting a comment about an article you write is a precious gift. In fact, you may see that as the first step of a potential communication that may lead to a great and valuable relationship. Never forget that loyal readers may be win one by one.

Don’t hesitate to give me your feedback about this article. Tell me about your personal experiences, your successes and even your failures. What works for you? What doesn’t works? As well, don’t hesitate to ask me questions or any additional information! I’ll always be pleased to help you.

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As a WordPress user, I think it is a real advantage to know how to create an extension for this platform. Of course, everybody may not have the same PHP knowledge, but writing a simple plugin may only require some basic skills. In fact, there are several mechanical code to include so the complexity is more on the functionality side. There are several resources online to help you with your first plugin implementation.

As a starting point, I would like to share with you this video that shows the basics:

Implementing a WordPress plugin is a great way to create some quality backlinks as well as to contribute in our community by offering a useful tool. You surely have plenty of good plugin ideas that may be related to your niche, but you probably never take into consideration to implement it your self! Obviously, there are a learning curve that may vary from a person to another. However, everybody could learn to make its own plugins. Just think about the benefits… Do it worth the investment? Personally, I guess so!

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At the end of April, I published an article titled Be Part Of My Core Audience And Get A Place On The Top! On this article, I was writing about how my audience is important to me and that I was planning to give 2 premium 125×125 spots. If you are not aware of this article, I recommend you to read it before going further in this article.

You may be aware that I did some theme redesign at the beginning of May. The implementation added some sections including the Core Audience’s Corner. I then reset the top commenter counter and here we are: May finished with 2 winners! I’m very proud to announce that the winners are Marc from CongressRatings.com and Amin from Sublime-Products.com. I would like to thank them for their support and their feedback. Thank you guys!

Marc and Amin are now present on my premium 125×125 spot (above my sponsors) for the next month. Since I reset the top commenter counter to zero each month, you always have a chance to get your place. All you need to do is being part of my core audience by subscribing and, thus, receive every post on your mailbox. You can do so by clicking here.

Never hesitate to contact me personally if you encountered problems. Note that I really enjoy hearing from you and your online projects. If you want to share idea or anything else, just contact me!

Also, you probably notice that I integrate the twitter update widget to my sidebar. Don’t hesitate to add me on Twitter. This is another way to contact me and to talk live!

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You know for sure - it’s not a secret for anyone - that social bookmarking sites are one of the most powerful tools for content distribution. The first plan or major players like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are distributing tons of new content each day. Those giants are gathering millions of members like you and me but also professional journalists and full time news writers. Thus, the competition for the front page story is hard. Let’s say only 500 000 members submit their content on Digg in a single day, what is the position of your article? In fact, 2 major factors work against you:

1. The big numbers.
2. The time available to spend on an article.

Of course, there are many other factors that may influence your position. For example: your niche, your headlines, your topics, your friends, etc. Nevertheless, let’s put that aside and let’s call a cat a cat: reaching the front page of Digg is an accomplishment in itself! Just as an example, only 2 articles from Skellie hit the front page of Digg. You probably know that Skellie is a blogger that I really like and respect for the quality of what she does. In fact, I personally think that she deserves more than 2 hits, but the only thing I have under my control is my right to vote for her and to ask all my friends to do the same!

While giants like Digg and Del.icio.us get tons and tons of submission, second tier sites like Furl and Ma.gnolia get significantly less than that. In fact, this is precisely where their strength is; your chance to hit their front page is notably better! The keyword here is positioning. Being well positioned on Digg is a challenge in itself. However, getting a good position on Furl or Ma.gnolia is relatively easier. Standing out of the crowd is a matter of quality but it is also a matter of number. The bigger the number, the harder it is!

There are several factors that may help you to succeed and be well positioned on second tier sites:

1. The quality of your content.

In fact, wherever you plan to promote, quality content is essential to succeed. Focusing on quality will positively influence your content distribution as well as links creation.

2. Your choice of second tier sites.

Some second tier sites are targeting particular niches. For example, Sphinn works well for SEO. Make your own observation and experimentation. Try to find the second tier site that gives you the best results.

3. Your understanding of second tier sites.

As soon as you chose your preferred second tier sites, be sure to well understand their mechanism. The more you master them, the more success you may have.

4. Your relationship.

Obviously, the more your develop relationships into these sites, the wider your content distribution may be. Blogging is all about relationship; be generous with the other bloggers and you’ll most likely be on their friend list!

5. Your presence and your activity.

The more you are active, the more you are visible! Presence and visibility are essential to build your branding. The other bloggers will recognize you as part of the community if you demonstrate your presence!

6. The awareness of your readers for second tier sites.

There is an educational part in that strategy. In fact, if your readers don’t know about the bookmarking sites you are using, they won’t vote for your articles even if they like it. The best would be to create an article that explains the bookmarking sites you are using and the benefits they can get from them.

7. The ease to submit your content.

The easier it will be to share your article, the better chances you have to distribute your content widely. To do so, just integrate easy links at the end of each article to share it.

Getting more and more traffic from second tier sites is excellent but the potential around them can be multiply by 2, 3 or even 10. In fact, second tier sites may be the starting point of a domino effect in term of traffic. Let me explain. Most of the time, people are users of many social media sites. For example, one may be an active member on Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit at the same time. Thus the chances are that this member will distribute his preferred content to all 3 networks. The same case is also possible for a member of Ma.gnolia or Sphinn. Let’s say, for instance, that a power user of Sphinn is aso a power user of Digg whom is friend with a power user of Del.icio.us; here comes the domino effect! Submitting your content to Sphinn may start the whole process and create a wave of content distribution which will lead to a very large amount of traffic.

In summary, never underestimate the potential of second tier sites. They may be your best source of traffic. Being active on Digg or Del.icio.us is desirable, but choosing 1 or 2 second tier sites is a must. Take the time to search and analyze the bookmarking sites related to your niche. This will help you to make the most judicious choice and to invest your time and effort on networks that will give you real and concrete benefits.

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Also, if you like what you read, I’ll really appreciate if you could share it on Delicious, StumbleUpon or Digg using the links below. Thanks!