Continuing on with our series of page ranking – here’s another site which I visited and found informative, easy to use as well as understand.

popuri.us, “A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more!”

Remember that a domain with the “www.” prefix will show different results than the same domain without it. You should try both.

MorganLighter

One of the things I’m going to talk about in today’s Traffic Thursdays is how having an open site, or being an open member of a social community, is a good way to get traffic that yields much better results than attempting to game the systems that exists. To the surprise of many, I’m sure, I’m going to start off with some information about Technorati.

Now, you guys probably know that Technorati, formally among one of my favorite lovers, is pretty much in the dog house with me. Technorati is not a web 2.0 utility per se, as the only true user-generated content in it is in WTF.

However, if you can get Technorati to work for you, there are plenty of good networking, traffic and expert-ization opportunties. Since I am not alone among the people who have on-going problems with Technorati, instead of making a premium guide and charging for it, I’m making a free video series on it that will soon be available through our kyte channel in video.

(Once it’s ready, you can cheat on your blog posts by embedding the channel on your own blog.)

I’m going to talk about a bunch of other social traffic communities and opportunities as well, culminating with an interview with the owner of a popular social news site. For each type of site, I’ll be going into pros, cons, things I’d like to see, and a few quick tips. These aren’t the in-depth tips that are going to be in the update to my blogging traffic package next week, but it will be enough to get you well on your way.

I’d guesstimate we’ll be getting on with all this around 10 am Pacific, but it could be before.

We’re still broken up. But I got a nice letter apologizing for the delay in fixing my problem. Apparently my blog Was indeed flagged for review as I suspected and insisted. After no answers, when I finally blogged about it, my problem was fixed. Coincidence? I doubt it, but that doesn’t mean I think any less of them than I already do.

Sure, anyone who Googles me knows I have a big mouth. But I doubt anyone over there was threatened by the possibility that my yammerings would end up on About.com or in Google News, because I don’t use my influence for evil. (I’m not a saint or anything – just not influential enough to waste my cool points on stuff like that.)

So, yes you can now favorite me. Thanks to Andy Beard for telling me about the problem. And no, I’m not actively participating at Technorati anymore. We’re going to be friends, eventually, but it’s just too little, too late for us to get back together…

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.

Well. If you’re a blogger anyway…. it means yet another way you can increase your blog traffic is by covering the news.

No, it’s not a new concept – I’ve been harping on that for at least two years, as all you regulars know. What’s new is that Technorati is helping blogs get featured on AP News sites.

After having the pleasure of witnessing a friend of mine hit the Associated Press newswire last year, it’s great to see that Technorati is going to be partnering with Associated Press member sites. That means that the next time a friend of mine is covered by AP, I can blog about it and possibly appear in one of the links to the stories.

From Technorati’s Weblog Post:

The new service will bring blogger commentary about AP news stories to communities large and small throughout the USA, giving bloggers a voice in trusted local papers throughout the nation. For many news readers, this will be their first exposure to the blogosphere with national, international, business and sports news presented along side links to blogger commentary and perspective.

So what does that mean to you? If you have any reason to cover stories that pop up on the AP wire, then sugar… dumpling … blog about them. Link naturally, and not just because of the traffic – it’s an extra boost, not the whole point.

What I’m really hoping is that this bold venture will help build bridges between bloggers and reporters. In some trades and local dailies, you can almost feel the animosity towards bloggers coming off the page. I just had a conversation about this with the folks over at Real Estate Blog Sites, who set up MyST Blog sites specifcally for the high end real estate industry. It seems that in some online newspapers, you still see a blog backlash – some play down their effectiveness in generating leads, others warn big companies to fear the blogosphere instead of reach out to it.

Anyway. Before I dive headlong into that tangent, just though you should know.

Is it me or is Technorati working especially well lately? I have blogs in all different kinds of format, and on all of them, they’ve really been on time these past few weeks, even with Blogger. I mean, I hope I’m not jinxing it or anything, but it seems like they’re doing a great job right now.

Okay. I have to stop and do the rest of this later. The video for Sade’s Cherish the Day is on. Life must come to a screeching halt for four minutes.

*Edit* Okay, I’m back. I was wondering how everyone else is finding Technorati. The next video I’m going to add to the Blog Optimization Package is about tricks to getting more traffic out of Technorati. There’s so much about the site that people don’t notice, or don’t know because it’s not on the FAQ. I think I just have traffic-colored glasses on half the time – stuff that seems obvious to me, cats tell me is some amazing discovery.

I’ll do an abridged version of the video for Traffic Reality too.

So, again, tell me what YOU think – how is Technorati doin’ right now? Are they picking up your blog? Do they always? Please be a dear and give us a link.

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.

Since Technorati sends me quite a fair share of traffic, I was happy to read that they are attracting some big dollars.