This morning we are starting a 12-hour drive back to sunshine from the cold, but beautiful Colorado.
12 hours in the car with a 4-year-old… that should be fun. 
However, I didn’t want to leave you without an assignment for today – as if you have nothing better to do than to hang out with me this Sunday, huh?
This one will be a bit different: a lot of food for thought, not many/any solutions, but has the potential to change your business for the better.
Do let me know what you think in the comments.
This is what you wanted to know in the past week:
Questions
1. Feedburner and CommentLuv Links
When Katie Goode from Living Anxiety Free made a comment on one of my latest posts, Rick LaPoint from Internet Marketing responded to her comment:
Hi Katie,
Do you intentional have your link going through feed burner?
Rick
I don’t know if Katie had a clue what Rick was talking about, but I did.
You see, 
unless you changed your default Feedburner setting, all your CommentLuv links point to Google. If what I just said doesn’t make any sense, take a look at the screen shot below:
I’ve known of this problem for a while and definitely fixed my settings, but never bothered to let my readers know that they needed to do the same. 
I saw so many post on the subject, I didn’t want to talk about it on TGC.
However, now that I see that some of my readers could use that knowledge, I’ll send you to where you can find the answers – where I originally found them.
One last thing: how do you know you have this problem? When you post a comment with your CommentLuv link, hover over that link and see if you see that funny feedproxy-blah-blah link instead of yours.
If you do, go over to Brian Rogel’s post and it’ll take you just a couple of minutes to fix it, if that.
2. Trackbacks the RIGHT way.
As I was working on linking the “parties involved in the previous question” (I am sure you’ve noticed that I always try to give a link to the person asking question, I noticed something on Rick’s blog that I wanted to bring your attention to.
You see, when I link to anyone’s blog, I ALWAYS link to a post, never to the home page (unless there’s a special reason for it).
The reason for that is trackbacks. If you have no idea what trackbacks or pingbacks for that matter are, read these posts:
- Trackback Spam Be Gone: What I Use to Cut Down on Junk Trackbacks
- Trackbacks vs Pingbacks Explained: Why You Should Definitely Read This Post
So I was looking for a blog post on Rick’s blog to link to and I found one of his latest:
- Popular Blogs to Generate Comment Traffic
Popular blogs? What’s up with that? – I immediately thought. Is Rick snubbing and not including me in the list of “popular blogs”?
So I scroll down – with baited breath, I am sure – to see if I am included and here it is! My pretty, if I may say so myself, face with a brief description of my blog.
Why didn’t I know about it?
Because Rick link to my HOME PAGE and home pages can’t receive trackbacks. So my blog was never notified that it was mentioned on a different blog, making Rick wonder if I, in turn, snubbed him.
Here’s the advice I give in one of the posts I refer you to above:
I noticed that many bloggers use trackbacks incorrectly.
Many of you mention other blogs and bloggers on your sites, but when you link to them, you link to THEIR HOME PAGE.
BIG mistake!
Home page doesn’t have comments, so those trackbacks have no way of showing up in their comment queue. That basically means they will most likely never know you linked to them.
Solution: ALWAYS link to a post. Any post.
Always.
3. Do comments REALLY bring traffic?
Truthfully, I have no idea.
BUT… I am going to find out.
Lisa Drubec of TheFriendlyBlogger.com is actually doing all the work; I am just the voice behind the throne.
You see I wasn’t happy to just assume that we are getting some traffic from commenting; I wanted PROOF.
So we set up an experiment with Google Analytics tracking and all to see what results we’ll actually get.
Why am I telling you that now?
Only because I am very excited about it. I’ll let you know when the post will be ready to be published.
4. Less better than more?
“I have 2 sites but now thinking about about merging my fine art and illustration/graphic and use WordPress. Do you this this is good or not?”
I would ALWAYS recommend to scale down. It’s hard enough to maintain one blog well; I can’t imagine how some of you have 2-3 blogs at a time.
The only way it makes sense as if you have small niche sites – in that case, the more the better is the name of the game.
5. Category Listings
“In wordpress, it’s good to have category or no category in our post, i mean on niche website..regarding to good SEO.” ~ Kyro
Good question and the answer goes against what I am doing on my own blog. (I will have to change it).
For SEO, it’s best not to display categories in your posts unless you want your category pages to rank for category keywords.
Speaking of which, I just read a great post on the subject; here’s the link and you should definitely check it out:
- Plug your link leaks!
I am planning on fixing up a few things around TGC based on that!
6. Podcasting
I am sure Hector Cuevas intrigued all of us with his guest post on podcasting and how we can use it for your businesses. If you have no idea what I am talking about, just take a look at this post:
Well, the smart dude that he is, he is taking it waaaay further than a bunch of guest posts and what he is doing with it goes to the very heart of the video you just watched (you did watch it, didn’t you?)
So after you are finished commenting on this post, head over to http://www.podcastingforbloggers.com/ and check out how Hector decided to take his business a step further than most of us ever will.
By the way, this is not an affiliate link and there’s nothing to buy there.
Traffic Generation Cafe Lineup
Here’s what’s coming up this week on TGC:
Monday: How Two Days Without Internet Made Me Stumble Upon a Great Idea
Self-explanatory title (gotta love those); read it and you’ll know what I am talking about. Hint: it has to do with a brilliant way to comment on other blogs.
Tuesday: Search Engine Ranking Tip: How to Search Google Incognito
When it comes down to finding out accurate search engine rankings of your site for any given keyword, you’ve got to turn to learn how to turn off Google infamous personalized search. I’ll show you how.
Wednesday: How KeywordLuv Can Get You on the First Page of Google
Not another KewordLuv post, although I do talk just a bit about what the plugin can do for your blog. There’s something very cool you’ll see in this post – free effortless search engine rankings.
Thursday: 3 Types of Blogs and 3 Ways to Handle Them
The post title sucks and I am still working on the draft, but the main idea will be to analyze the 3 main reasons to create a blog and help you decide what’s important and what isn’t base on your goals. That’s right: your reason for starting a blog can make a HUGE difference on how often you publish content, what kind of content, how much traffic you need to generate, etc.
Friday: No good post title yet
Remember that post I wrote last week about Why All Your Make Money Blogging Efforts Will Fail Without This? Well, in that post I asked you to fill out a short poll to determine where you stand with list building and what you need to lean to improve your stats. Some of the final numbers were very surprising, but what intrigued me was the fact that over 6% of you said that you list was growing by leaps and bounds. Also, about 37% said that the list is not growing as fast as you’d like to, BUT it’s growing.
Sooo… This is the time when you cough up the best list building secrets you have in the comments and I will compile a post based on that (with links to the original sources – you – of course).
Sunday: Sunday Coffee with Ana
I am hoping to resume the live broadcasts, so you’d better rally up the troops. Either way, I’ll see you at TGC!
List Building Week…
is coming after this one.
I already have some great list building experts sharing their wealth of knowledge on the topic. If you have anyone in mind who is great at list building and would love to see him/her on my blog, let me know.
Also, if you have anything incredible to contribute on the topic, I am all ears!
Marketing Takeaway
Have an incredibly great week, everyone, and please pray for our safe trip back – it looks like we might have to drive though some snow storms.
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/moonjazz/4777779656/
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