… of the Year, is now online.

You have no idea how close it came to being the last one ever…

Whew!

In this Christmas Issue:

Five Seasons Freebies
Four Traffic Weapons
Three Blogger’s Resources
Two On-Going Contest
and a Funny Chirstmas Video of Me!

Can’t wait to see you there!

I know what you expect me to say. You expect me to say “oh, all that tag and ping stuff is rubbish, I taught you that already and if you buy that package it’s rubbish and you’re wasting your money.”

But that’s not what I was going to say at all. And I did teach you about tagging and pinging in 2004 and early 2005.

And I’ve been harping on responsible pinging since then, and I told you repeatedly that abusing pinging would not even bring quality short term traffic, and could get a site banned.

However, having bought the package so I could review it, and see what the fuss was about, I can’t bring myself to say it’s rubbish. Far from it. I actually think it would be useful for a beginner who just can’t wrap their mind around pinging. I couldn’t at first, and if I’d had it, it would have helped me. I think it’s overpriced, and I think that if you should try and figure it out on your own first.

But if you can’t, get the guide but Use It As Directed. If you have my book and you follow the directions in the pinging section, you’ll get great results, sure. But I don’t go into as much detail, at all.

Now if you’re an expert blogger and you’re expecting it to uncover some secret you don’t already know, it’s pretty much a waste of your money, unless, like me, $147 really isn’t a big deal to you. I won’t be totally gauche and say it’s not an expense to me or that I wipe my behind with wads of cash. But if I went on vacation and I didn’t stay in a timeshare property where there was a kitchen, I’d spend more than that eating during the course of a day. Not to mention the fact that if I use it in my business it’s a write-off. And here I am telling you about it, right?

What I feel the book was lacking that would make it a medium-level benefit for an expert blogger are all the sources you can use to tag a link, with or without pinging, and a really in-depth look at tagging from a search engine standpoint, with all the benefits it can bring if not abused.

So in Traffic Reality this week, the monthly Quick Report is going to be on Tagging and Pinging, and how I use it to get my blogging clients up to 43 no-guilt links any time I want, to any page, any time I like, without abusing any social bookmarking service.

Bottom Line Advice: If you’re a beginner and you need to be walked through the process, Tag and Ping will help you with that but it’s a bit pricey. Should you buy it? Weigh the cost of learning to do this right against lost traffic to your blog. If the free guides out there aren’t doing it for you, then it wouldn’t be a bad investment, though again, I feel it’s a little steep.

If you have my guide or package on blogging, turn to the ping section. That should do it for you. If you don’t have it, dude, don’t get it just for that.

If you’re an expert blogger, your money is best spent elsewhere unless the price tag doesn’t bother you. There are one or two tips in there that make it worth your while in that case, and the included software is kinda neat if you have a use for it.

Okay. Next I’m going to do a post about the teleseminar I’ll be at tomorrow, take a nap, then do a short series on article marketing, and then … do some other stuff that doesn’t concern you.

Nosy.

Just in time for all that talk about Tag and Ping (I’ll write a short blurb about that later.)

Yahoo officially announces changes to MyWeb. In a post to their MyWeb blog yesterday, they shared with us some of the updates they’ve been making.

Top Tags and Interesting Today
We haven’t figured out how the save the world yet, but we *can* show you what the world is saving. Specifically, our “top tags” section and “interesting today” tab show what’s hot in the system, and are a great way to start if you’re new.

Finding Friends
We’ve also turned up the “social” in social bookmarking by helping you connect to the people who share your interests — here’s how:

Those two are my favorites, but I also liked the new export feature, which makes it a lot more useful as a bookmarks management tool, not just for social bookmarking.

I read about this in the A Consuming Experience Blog. It’s a GreaseMonkey script that makes it easy to append Technorati tags to your posts if you use Blogger. Install the script, log into Blogger, type up your tags, comma or otherwse separated, publish, done. You can even make it set up your default tags, which I always did by using the default template box under Settings ->Formatting.

This makes it much easier to work with…. If you want to Google it for other user experiences, try Multiple Word Technorati tag creator for Blogger. That’s it’s proper name and it’s now compatible with Firefox 1.5, and Greasemonkey 0.6.4.

It comes as a surprise to many, but there are many sites out there that are willing to send traffic your way, and you don’t have to trick them or threaten them with the stink eye to get their help.

We’re not talking about search engines and specialized directories yet – we’ll soon come back to that.

First, let’s talk about what I call blog helper sites, for easy reference.

There are all kinds of resources out there for bloggers, you just have to know where to look, and figure out what works.

I tend to shy away from regular blog link exchanges, because despite all the free information, I’m running a commercial site. If you’re running one as well, you may find that regular blog exchanges don’t necessarily work to bring you buying traffic any better than link exchanges bring traffic to your site.

That’s not to say they don’t send traffic– they do. But do they send the right traffic, action-taking traffic at acceptable conversion rates? Not really.

So what other blog resources are out there to help you?

There are sites like Technorati, that bring blog readers and bloggers together. One of the ways they do this is through tagging. it might not appear like such a hot idea at first, inviting your audience to leave by posting links to tags.

But tagging also brings traffic into your site. And if you’re doing your best to capture traffic that subscribes, helping them find more material on the subject you’re writing about will still work in your favor.

People don’t like to constantly hunt for information – be the resource that tells them where they can get it, and they’ll come back.

There are also sites like Blog Top Sites and Blog Carnival that exist just to help you get more traffic, but in a way that serves both you and your readers.

What are Blog Carnivals? I first learned about them when Wayne Hulbert of Blog Business World invited me to one called Carnival of the Captialists. The basic idea is that a community of bloggers organizes efforts to blog on a topic they agree upon, taking the format of a blog-based mini-mag.

You can read the full definition in the Blog Carnival FAQ.

Tags: free traffic :: website promotion :: Blogging :: blog :: blog readership :: traffic :: blog traffic

Resources :: Wayne also talks about Blog Roundtable Discussions :: Learn more about increasing your Blog Traffic.

Thoughtskies ==> Yahoo gives you two more ways to create repeat visitors. First, you can now put a “Save to My Web” button on your site. Secondly, there’s a bunch more fun stuff you can do with tag clouds in My Web, My Web feeds, and the like.

Clipper==> “Save to My Web is a simple, sociable button you can add to any and every page of your blog or website. Users click to save your content and add it directly to their stored pages on My Web 2.0. From there, the page is easy to retrieve, and easy to share with others. You can try it out using the button below.”

“Want to do more cool stuff with your My Web links and tags? Extend My Web to your own web site and impress your friends with a My Web badge. You can display a feed of the stuff you’re saving publicly in My Web, or show off your My Web tag cloud. Or, you can show what everyone’s been saving and tagging.”

Linky ==> Yahoo! Search blog: From My Web to Your Website – A Button Share! from the 27th of October.

Tags: free traffic :: website promotion :: SEO :: Yahoo. ooo.