Outsourcing Your Blog Content Creation Overseas

The old adage you get what you pay for is exactly right when it comes to outsourcing your blog writing overseas. Indian and Philippine writers simply do not have the grasp of the American language to communicate properly with blog readers. When you are serious about communicating your message, you simply do not want a United Kingdom spelling of a common word that Americans may consider a misspelling as well or the strange use of everyday term.

Your website and blog content is about communicating your business message and should not have the distractions that a non-native speaker may include in an important post or online message. It is not as if they do it on purpose, clearly non-native speakers want and try to write and speak like a native speaker, but they can miss commonly used syntax or introduce strange wording or meanings without knowing that they are doing so.

I've seen some bloggers charge $5 a post for blog writing, but on analysis the post was worded strangely or included misspellings. There is simply no replacement for a native speaker when it comes to crafting your message for your blog or website.

Adobe Drops GoLive for Dreamweaver

I've expected this for a while but Adobe made it public yesterday. Adobe has decided to drop GoLive. In an email yesterday Adobe stated that there would be no new development, sales of the product or support for Adobe GoLive.

In addition Adobe finally offered an upgrade price to move from GoLive to Dreamweaver. It is unfortunate, but I bought Dreamweaver at the end of March for $399 and now Adobe is offering it to me as a GoLive user for $199.

Since I have been using Dreamweaver, I like it. I am taking a class to learn the ins and outs of the program. I do like that it makes it very easy to add JavaScript and CSS and the code seems pretty clean. But I sure do wish that Adobe would have allowed me to buy it as a GoLive upgrade in March when I asked the supervisor why they would not allow GoLive users to upgrade at the upgrade price.

I have asked Adobe for a credit or at least a store credit (I bought it at Adobe.com) for training or a book, but realistically I doubt they will respond. So if you are a GoLive user, look for your $199 upgrade link in your email or call Adobe and get Dreamweaver while you can at this special low price.

Looking for Posts

Now that Blogger has a new future publish date, we are able to post ahead and wanted to point out to you where you can find our content as we will no longer be providing teasers for our daily posts cross linking our blogs.

Monday and Thursday find our posts here at Blog-World Watch

Tuesday and Friday find our posts at Web-World Watch

Wednesday and Friday find our posts at Design-World Watch

We'll be watching our stats and making changes as needed. Right now Blog-World Watch is our most popular blog with readers using RSS subscriptions. Web-World Watch is our most syndicated blog on the Web; featuring our headlines on a variety of website, and Design-World Watch is our newest blog and is still building traffic.

The Web is Atwitter Over Twitter

Twitter is in the news and if you have not tried it, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Twitter is a new social networking site. If you click my post title, you will go to my Twitter home page and there you can see what I am doing and who I am following.

I think Twitter is easy to use and fun. Once I have gotten over the novelty and deleted people who were posting every five minutes drivel on their daily lives, I have actually picked up a few interesting tips and applications that others in my industry are checking out or watching. I have found out about Fire Eagle, Twitter Map, Twitter Feeds, just to name a few.

Although I have now gotten tired of seeing what someone posted for lunch, I am watching Twitter to see what others are watching and looking for. I am also using it to point to interesting articles and also as a platform for my blog. So once you get past the initial thrill, you can put Twitter to work for you as a social media tool.

Don't Use Blogger Custom FTP

We used to implement Blogger custom FTP for clients, but now are no longer recommending its use. Blogger custom FTP is where your blogger account is set up to allow your blog posts to be archived back on your own domain server using FTP for search engine benefits.

The problem with Blogger custom FTP is that it is easily crashed, sometimes can take hours for the FTP part to send the posts to your server, and if you have a custom template can be fraught with problems.

If you want the search engine benefits that a blog affords, I strongly recommend that you use WordPress back on your own server. Upload and posting time is very snappy and you won't end up at the mercy of Blogger when they do updates. We migrated several customers several months ago when Blogger had a reported bug for custom FTP clients as it took two days to publish blogs.

Another issue with Blogger custom FTP is label bloat. If you end of with many labels on your blog, get ready to spend hours deleting them as your publishing time will move to hours from seconds. The best option if you simply cannot use WordPress is to use Blogspot with a custom domain setting. We have found out that you really do not take a hit with the search engines when you are not using custom FTP blogging.

Podcasts and RSS News Feeds

This is an interesting tidbit of information for today. Did you know that only 7% of the Web market is actually reading news via RSS news feeds, but 9% of the market is listening to and downloading podcasts?

I found it interesting that RSS still has so little acceptance in the wider market. Personally I watch blogs that I am interested in with a My Live portal page and then if I am interested I click in to read the full post. I find it easy and practical to be able to scan large amounts of content at a glance and cherry pick the items for the day that warrant my attention. It is surprising to me that more simply have not embraced the true power of RSS and continue to manage large bookmark files and click in to every blog that they watch.

Why do I like My Live as my RSS news aggregate? Well I used to use My Yahoo, but now with My Live I have a cleaner interface without ads. I think that it looks less cluttered.

Auto Publishing Blog Posts

This is a test of the auto publish feature on Blogger. I am writing this post on Friday and have set it to publish on Saturday.

Let's see if this new feature really works!

Our May Newsletter is Out

Click to read our May newsletter. Topics are:

Getting Links the Easy Way with “Link Bait” Articles

Build Search Engine “Authority Links” with Press Releases

Become an Authority On the Web in Your Field by Blogging

Blogger Introduces Auto Future Publishing

Blogger has finally gotten the feature that we wanted most! Auto Publish.
Now you can enter your post in Blogger and set the date when you want to publish.

For some of us who write ahead and want to schedule posts this is a very welcome addition.
Thanks Blogger!

Building Blog Traffic - Best Practices

Our own blog is a case in point, maintaining and building readership is an important and tough job. In 2006 and early 2007 nearly 40% of all of our website visitors were reading our Web-World Watch blog (our only blog at the time). Then our business grew dramatically and we had some personnel related issues and our own blog got pushed to the bottom of our priority list. We lost major readership and blog traffic by the end of 2007 due to infrequent posting.

Since January 2008, we have been focused on building back what we lost and I have to tell you, it is a tough road to hoe. Here are some of the lessons that we have learned in the process that you may find helpful in regard to building your own blog traffic.

1. Don't get hung up on Feedburner subscriber stats. Stats here only reflect your blog readership using RSS news feeds which is still only a 7% reflection on the real marketplace. Yes, keep an eye on RSS subscribers, but know that the majority of your traffic will come from readers using browsers so make sure you have website analytics installed to track this larger portion of your readership.

2. Stick with it, to build traffic you really need to post 5 days a week. Yes, I know this is a real grind, but you've got to have content for people to read to want to follow and subscribe to your blog.

3. Don't get disappointed by the lack of comments. People are reading, I know this from experience, but rarely will they leave a comment unless you really hit a nerve, strike a chord, or have a controversial topic.

4. Make sure your content is good. This is crucial, you cannot build readers if you have drivel or derivative posts.

5. Leave comments on other blogs that you are following pointing to your blog. You may not get search engine benefits due to "no follow" tags, but you may point readers to your site. The other benefit is that you will connect with others in your field and keep tabs on what is happening in your industry and you may actually learn something new.

6. Embrace new things on your blog. Add widgets, test applications, use all these tools to not only keep your blog up-to-date, but give you fodder for new posts and new ways to engage readers.

7. Watch your stats and cater to your audience. If you don't watch your stats, you won't know what your readers consider important. I have learned that my readers like best practice blog posts and that out of my three blogs, this one Blog-World Watch is my most popular, and so this is the blog I invest the most time in, and use to publish my most interesting posts. Do you know what your blog readers want? Watch your stats to see what posts generated the most traffic and build on your success. What you find may totally surprise you, but use that information as a building block for building blog traffic.

If you have your own best practice approach for building blog traffic, leave a comment (really do it this time as I really want to know). Leave a link, and I'll make sure to visit your blog, possibly subscribe to follow it, and write about it one of my future posts. Good blogging everyone!