Following the blogosphere’s trend on these days, I want to make a little recap of my best posts, for all my new visitors and subscribers. Thank you all for your visits, comments and your support.
September
• Embed YouTube Videos in WordPress 2.2.2
October
• Ad revenue sharing forums
• Little SEO guide
• Breast Cancer – Quick Overview
• New researches on breast cancer
November
• A must to know about RSS
• WordPress database error: [Got error 134 from storage engine]
• 10 tips for a cool blog
• 5 questions about running a contest
• Great articles that should be read
December
• Free traffic requires hard work
• Great Top 13 lists
I have also organized the Resource for Bloggers Carnival, which contains a collection of articles related to blog posts ideas, blogs traffic, tools and plugins for blogging, blog monetization, writing, online marketing, advertising and other articles that could improve the blogger’s life.
• Resource for Bloggers Carnival – Edition 1
• Resource for Bloggers Carnival – Edition 2
• Resource for Bloggers Carnival – Edition 3
• Resource for Bloggers Carnival – Edition 4
And some of my best photos:
• 13 Autumn Photos
• PhotoHunt: Light
I wish you a great party on this night! Happy New Year to all of you and see you in 2008 
December 31st, 2007
I’ve read several articles about how to answer to the commentators. And, in fact, I don’t even need to read them, because it’s common sense to give polite answers and not to offend your commentators. Until now this wasn’t a problem for me. But what do you do when there are comments that pissed you off?
Four days ago someone leaves me a comment on my post, Great Top 13 lists. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a collection of Top 13 lists, many of them with valuable information, many of them funny. I’ve choose 13, according to my blog’s theme. And the Joe’s comment was:
Your lists are ridiculous – whoever heard of a top 13? It is supposed to be top 10. I am a statistics major, so I know about these things and I am writing a book about top 10 lists too, so you see I know better than you. I am embarrassed for you.
And here was my answer:
Just because you write a book about top 10 lists it doesn’t mean that 10 are establishing by law. “whoever heard of a top 13?? Well, it seems that there are many people who heard about top 13 lists, who write top 13 lists and who likes top 13 lists. And that number could be whatever an author would be. You should check how many “top 17? lists there are, “top 26? or you can pick whatever number you want.
As a statistics major, you probably know more than me. But you can’t ignore the facts that 10 isn’t the only number for a top. And you can’t annul a top list, just because the number isn’t 10.
And when you say that you are embarrassed for me, it means that you are embarrassed for all these people who wrote these top 13 lists. Shame on them that they don’t wrote top 10 lists, so that you have what to write in your book 
Oh, and happy holidays for you, too
Of course that statistically speaking, there are much many Top 10 lists than any other Top n lists. But really, if I want to make a Top 13.5 of something, I’ll make that list and I don’t care that Top 10 lists are more popular. And I don’t feel ashamed about my list. In fact, I think that more important than the number is the content.
Well, I’m asking you: what did you do if someone leaves a negative comment on your blog? Do you delete that comment? Do you leave it and ignore it? Do you give him a polite answer? Or do you give an edgy answer?
December 30th, 2007
Free traffic with minimum effort is a fairy tale! In this 3 month of blogging, I’ve learned that free traffic requires hard work. And by this, I mean free traffic requires a lot of time to get it. Of course, there are many people and sites promising a large amount of traffic just by adding, for example, a widget in a sidebar. But this is crap. I fall in this trap at the beginning, with BlogRush. Despite its promises, it brings me 3 visits/month. Yay! A lot of visits
I’ve tried different ways to bring to my blog free traffic. I’ll list here what I’ve tried with some good results.
1. StumbleUpon
It’s no doubt for everyone that StumbleUpon brings more free traffic for a site than anything else. Though, you should know that if you submit (discover) many pages from a single site/blog one after another (nobody knows the exact number), you fall under their anti-spam policy and the further pages from that site will not receive anymore traffic (well, maybe just 5-10 visits/day) even if you have many thumbs up. For this not going to happened, you must discover other sites/pages as well. In order to do that, you must have many friends/fans to stumble through their favorites and more topics to stumble through them.
Writing this article, I’ve searched why is so important to become a Top stumbler, but I cannot find something interesting. Maybe someone will enlighten me 
. Instead, I’ve found an article who explains why not to bother to become a Top stumbler: How to Become a Top StumbleUpon User (or Why You Really Shouldn’t Bother).
So, I think I’ll not bother to become a top stumbler, but submitting/discovering articles/sites, stumbling other articles/sites and making friends takes time.
For the last 30 days I had from StumbleUpon 3240 visits.
2. BlogCatalog
Even if I’ve sign up to BlogCatalog about 3 month ago, I’ve begin to use it recently. I find a little hard to use it. But it’s really a good source of free traffic. Let’s see why (though many of you probably know all this stuff):
- You can make as many friends you want. About 30-40% will visit your blog to see who you are and what are you writing about and add you as their friends as well.
- To those who added you as friend, you have the possibility to send a broadcast. What is this? Broadcasts allow you to unobtrusively send a mass message to all users who have added you to their BlogCatalog friends list.
So, let’s say you’ve added about 2000 friends (you can reach this number in about a week). About 600-800 of them will add you back as their friends. That’s mean, when you send a broadcast, 600-800 people will receive an email saying that you have posted a new broadcast. About 10% will visit your broadcast and then visit your blog. That’s mean 60-80 visitors. It doesn’t seams too much, but if you send a broadcast with every post you write, it means something.
Another way you can get free traffic is to participate to discussions. There are many groups where you can participate and become an active member.
So, it’s all about creating a big network and to become an active member. That’s requires some time.
For the last 30 days I had from BlogCatalog 500 visits.
3. MyBlogLog
I can’t say how many visits I’ve got from MyBlogLog. Or should I say, because of MyBlogLog. Many MyBlogLog Members have that widget installed, where they can see who visit their blog. Many of them are curious to see who the new visitors are and return the visit. In order to receive a significant amount of traffic from MyBlogLog members, you should visit as many blogs as you can. This takes time.
4. BloggingZoom
I’ve subscribed to BloggingZoom just 4 days ago but I like it until know. You can promote on BloggingZoom all your articles, without any limitations. You can vote for other articles and in exchange, many users will vote for yours. And visit your blog. You need time to vote all upcoming articles which you find interesting; in that way you will get more visits and more votes. You should try it. I’ve found many interesting articles in BloggingZoom.
I had 60 visits from BloggingZoom in 4 days.
5. DigitalPoint Forum
Forums are another source for free traffic. I’ve choose DigitalPoint because there are many members asking for help or answering to your question. So it easy enough to be active on DP. You can put your blog in signature and your last post name is also displayed. But you must be very active in order to receive traffic from DP, because there are many member, as you all know, all are posting something and your own posts are going away from the first page very quickly, and you are harder to be found. Posting often takes time.
I had about 70 visits from DP in the last month, though I wasn’t very active.
6. LinkReferral
I’ve wrote some time ago about Linkreferral as a source of free traffic for your blog. You must make 5 reviews/day, visit 30 blogs/day, 1 post in forum/day in order to increase the rank of your blog and increase its visibility. Many people will return the visit or the review. But this also takes some time.
I had about 200 visits from LinkReferral in the last month, though I wasn’t active at all.
7. Comments
Commenting in other blogs is another source of free traffic. Many people will return to your blog and leave a comment too. But, of course, this means you have to read many articles and to comment on them. And I talk about meaningful comment, not “it’s nice”, “interesting” etc. And this takes time.
You see, I’ve tried many methods to bring free traffic to my blog, but at one point, I felt overwhelming and depressed, because I thought I never handle all these. So I’ve decided to make a daily schedule. If I spend at least a half an hour for every method, it means up to 4 hours. And if I make this every day, I think I’ll bring a lot of traffic to my blog. And if I’ll write some good articles, maybe I can keep them.
So, I’ll ask you: what method do you use to bring free traffic to your blog? What do you like more? And how do you handle all these stuff? Because I think many of you have also a job/business, kids and daily obligations.
December 22nd, 2007
