Another question for you today. I used to subscribe to blogs by email only. I check my email every hour or so when I’m at the computer, so when new blog posts would come in, I’d quickly scan the email, and then pop open the post in my Google Chrome browser if I wanted to add a comment to it later. Then I’d delete the email and move on.

But I ended up subscribing to so many blogs—about fifty—and that meant I had too many browser tabs open. And then, too…some of the blogs are hard for me to read, because of size of font or color of text/background combo. I figured if I subscribed to all in Google reader, I could read easily and quickly, and I could treat the reader like I’d been treating the emails. I figured I’d click open the posts I wanted to comment on.

Sounded like a good plan. Unfortunately, I now have 885 unread posts in Google reader, and blogs I used to read every day have gone unread over a week. The upside is that I have a lot more time for reading books, cooking, and cleaning the house. The downside is that I am out of touch with what people are saying. Not only am I out of touch with other bloggers, I don’t care about updating my own blog. There is something about interacting with others that makes you want to write your own posts. I get ideas from other bloggers all the time.

Why am I not using Google reader like email? I got so many emails every day that if I didn’t check it hourly and delete what I didn’t want and file what I did want, I’d end up buried under piles and piles of spam. But I can’t remember to check Google reader every hour. Over there I don’t have pressing private message I need to look for. I can ignore it for days if I want.

Help! What do you do? How do you subscribe? How many blogs do you subscribe to? How many hours a day do you devote to reading blog posts? Is there some way for me to manage all my lovely blogger friends and still have a life?

Several months ago I read on Kristen Lamb’s blog that authors needed get rid of the cutesy blog names and just have their own names on their blog headers. And, yeah, I can see her point. It’s all about branding.

Becoming a Household Name

The thing that struck me recently, though, is that when my blog is named Sally Apokedak, then any time someone searches for Sally Apokedak they find me right away. But when they search for YA books, they don’t find me.

How many people are searching for Sally Apokedak? Only people who already know how to spell my name and they will find me no matter what my blog is called.

It’s one thing to want your name to be a brand name, but wanting a thing isn’t enough. You have to do something that is noteworthy before people begin to remember who you are. And once you do something noteworthy, does it matter if they know your name? Many people know Randy Ingermanson’s name. But many just call him the snowflake guy. Why would Randy care if they know his name or not, as long as they are finding his site and buying his “how to write” products?

On the other hand, I remembered Kristen Lamb’s name because she makes sure we know that name. What made me find her in the first place, was not that I searched for her name. I found her because someone linked to a post she did on marketing. I was never looking for Kristen Lamb and if her blog was called Warrior Writers, it wouldn’t make any difference to me. She wants me to remember her name so if I see a book of hers in the bookstore—written by Kristen Lamb, not Warrior Writer—I’ll recognize her name on the cover. Of course, if you’re known as the snowflake guy or the Warrior Writer woman, you might have your publisher put that on the cover of the book. So does it really matter if your blog readers know your name?

Selling Yourself or Serving Your Reader?

Obviously we want to do both of these things. If we serve our readers, we will be selling ourselves, but I think the first goal is to get people to the blog, and the second goal is to hook them on the blog content. I don’t think the blog is about selling books. It’s about selling the blog. If we look at our blogs from the standpoint of the blog visitor it seems clear that titling the blog so the visitor can easily tell what the blog is about would serve him better than telling him your name (unless you’re already a household name, of course).

So if any of you have noticed that the name of my blog changes all the time, this is why. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I’m trying to figure out who my audience is and what kind of name and content will help them find me and stay with me.

Key Words in Titles Will Help Some People Find You

Last month I used YA Fantasy with a Fairy Tale Flavor and when people searched for YA fantasy fairy tales my site was coming up on the first page. But is my blog about YA fantasy with a fairy tale flavor? Those are the novels I’m writing, but my blog isn’t really focused on those. This month I’m trying Young Adult Books. The competition is too tough for those key words. There are huge sites that come up when you search for young adult books. So next month I will tweak my title again.

How the search engines work is somewhat mysterious. They keep it that way to try to keep people from cheating, but I suspect they give some credit for anchor text still, even though some say this no longer matters. If so, what we title our blogs matters a lot, because many bloggers link to us using our blog titles as anchor text. If someone links to Sally Apokedak at Sally Apokedak that’s going to tell search engines and readers that http://www.sally-apokedak.com/whispers_of_dawn is about Sally Apokedak—which means nothing to people who don’t know me. If someone links to Sally Apokedak at YA Fantasy Novels for Girls  that will tell the search engines and readers that http://www.sally-apokedak.com/whispers_of_dawn is about YA fantasy novels for girls.

Experimenting a Little Probably Won’t Kill You

As long as the URL stays the same, you don’t lose traffic or links or readers when you change your blog name (though you might confuse your readers some by switching names). What you don’t want to do is change the URL, if you can help it.

Thoughts? Do you have people surfing in from search engine terms and staying? Have you ever found a blog via a search and subscribed to it?

Last month I linked to a whole lot of posts.

I was going fast. My links were not quality links. I didn’t put in any description of what I was linking to. I didn’t put keywords in the links. Sometimes, I didn’t even use the whole title of the article I was linking to. My goal was to read fast, comment fast, and link fast, so I could see what effect this had on the blogs I was linking to and what effect it had on my own blog.

I kept track of my Alexa traffic numbers. I also kept track of six blogs I was linking to and five blogs I wasn’t linking to, for comparison.

I recorded the numbers every day.

Halfway through the experiment, I read a number of blog posts that said Alexa traffic numbers are worthless.

I’m not sure how true that is. I’ve read other posts that say Alexa ranking is important if you want to monetize your blog.  Besides, I didn’t have any other way to guage what I was doing. Google doesn’t update their PageRank publicly but once every several months.

I also read several posts that told me linking to too many sites would hurt my ranking with search engines.

I’m not sure how true that is, either. I think when you link a lot, your links are worth less. When I link to one blog a week, that blogger will get credit for having my little blog giving 100% of my “vote of confidence” to his blog. But I linked to 200 posts last month. So each post only got .5% of my vote confidence. The search engines, it seems, take my limited link juice and split it between all my links.

Linking a lot is sort of like being the party girl in high school, I guess. No one really respects her. If I link too much, the search engines will look at me and say, “She’s just loose. She’ll link-up with anyone. We can’t trust that the blogs she’s linking to are any good.”

So, I’m not helping others too much by linking to lots of sites. But am I hurting myself?

Whether the search engines will be offended by promiscuous linking, remains to be seen. My guess is that linking too broadly will earn you a bad reputation. On the other hand, search engines will view you as a content-rich and helpful site if you link well. Many years ago I wrote at Suite 101 and I went through training at About.com, and I know that search engines like to see sites that are linking to other relevant sites that have great content. That’s just common sense. They want to give searchers the best sites, because when they return good search results people continue to use them. If your site is full of good content and great links of interest to your readers, the search engines are going to see you as a good search return.

From what I can see so far, the linking has helped me.

Here are my starting and ending figures. I won’t give you the stats of the other blogs, but all the blogs I linked to gained ground. The sites that had lower PageRanks than I had gained the most, some of them as much as 4 million places. The sites that were already more powerful than I was, gained from 300,000 to a million places. On average, the sites I linked to moved up 1,598,416 spots globally and 238,862 spots in the US (none lost ground), while sites I didn’t link to moved up an average of 420,589 spots globally and 29,205 in the US (some lost ground).

And here are my Alexa stats:

• Start—August 11:

• Global   1,475,047
• US   171,420
• Links coming back to me   39
• Google PageRank   3

• End—August 31:

• Global   778,133
• US   68,549
• Links coming back to me   77
• Google PageRank   3

On September 1st, for the next phase of my experiment, I stopped linking. We’ll see what happens.

Trying to practice what I preached in my post on how to improve search engine placement, I entered four blog posts from the last couple of months, into four different blog carnivals. I entered posts on teen novels and how to promote your novel. The benefit to me, if my posts are accepted, will be that I get links from the carnival pages back to my blog.

For a couple of reasons, I chose carnivals that had to do with my blog’s focus. I want to have my blog associated with other blogs that focus on teen novels and author promotions because that helps the search engines to understand what I’m all about. Also, I didn’t have to write any new posts to enter the carnivals. I already had the posts written and it took me only a couple of minutes to enter the carnivals.

Then I took it a step farther and I set up a carnival for a topic I couldn’t find in the list of established carnivals.

I give to you, The Carnival of Young Adult Literature. The carnival will run on the last Monday of every month. Usually posts will be due by the third Monday of every month, but this month, since I just set it up, it’s fine to get your posts in any time this week, if you’re interested. So, if you have a post that is related to YA lit and you want to enter the carnival, you may enter it here. Then just add a link to the bottom of the post directing readers of your post to the carnival. The link this month will read something like this: This post is part of the Carnival of Young Adult Literature. You can copy and paste that, or word it however you want. The link for this month is: http://www.sally-apokedak.com/whispers_of_dawn/2011/08/carnival-of-ya-lit-august/ .

This carnival is open to all—authors of YA books, readers of YA books, sellers of YA books, posts about people representing young adult authors, or editing, covering, defending, or attacking young adult literature. Whatever.

I hope you have something you can throw in to the carnival even with such late notice, and if you are interested in hosting the carnival in the future, let me know. Hosting takes a bigger time investment, but I think you’ll find it’s fun and profitable (in regards to blog traffic).

For more details, go to the Carnival page. If you want to see a published carnival, please check out this Carnival of Children’s Literature post. 

Thanks!

I’ve been collecting some blogging and tech-type tips. I thought I’d mention a couple at a time.

qr-code

If you have a smart phone and you take a shot of my qr-code you will be whisked off to my website’s homepage. There you will see that my homepage doesn’t really work well on a smart phone. I didn’t know that until just now. That’s something I’ll need to rethink one day (I hope—one day I hope to be wildly popular and have oodles and oodles of people clicking on my qr-code, wanting to find out more about me and needing the info right now on their smart phones!)

What about you? First, how does your site look on a smart phone? And secondly, how can you promote your “nifty-looking-on-a-smart-phone” site by slapping your qr-code onto stuff? Meg Moseley, a friend with a recent debut novel, gave out bookmarks at her launch. On the bookmarks was a qr-code which took me to her page at her publisher. Pretty slick.

Do you want a qr-code? Go get one.

Favorite Plugins

I love WordPress. Before I started blogging, I made test blogs on about six different platforms and WordPress was so far above the others I couldn’t believe anyone would not use it. The love affair continues. One reason is that people keep making better and better plugins for my blog. I spend a lot of time loading and unloading plugins simply because I love dinking on this stuff. I have so many lovely plugins to share, but today I’ll limit myself to two that have to do with building traffic:

• WordPress SEO by Yoast
  • I love this plugin because it pushes me to title my posts using keywords and to add the keywords into my content and summary.
• Comment Luv
  • It helps build community, and it encourages people to comment, because they get an automatic link back to their last post (or a post of their choosing). And it make sense that your readers, who all love you, will enjoy each other’s blogs, too, so you are doing a great service by making it easy for them to find one another.