Blogging Insider

How to a Build Content Rich Website

steven — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 01:20:10 +0000

We don’t like to repeat things just to repeat things, linking out is more useful (and easier) on both of us. We found excellent articles on how to build content rich websites. SEO elite focuses on the Adsense angle, but is filled with such good info you should ignore the monetization aspect. Make your site content rich and there’ll be plenty of ways to monetize - direct sales for example.

Sitepoint has a good overview of the basics of building a quality content rich website.

WARNING: there are alot of fly-by-night hucksters out there selling “instant massive blog content” automaters and such. While they are often quite clever at gaining links, content, and essentially gaming Google, they are on the wrong side of Google’s spiders, and A: they’ll eventually get caught and punished with lower PageRank and Quality Score, and B: everyone else is doing it so the competition heats up pretty quickly anyways and C: You’re not really contributing to good internet content, and instead to the info-junk that’s out there. Google makes their money by weeding such results out of the system. D: The software usually costs a few bucks, and whenever in doubt, follow the money!

How do you Make Your Blog a Google News Site?

steven — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 02:32:16 +0000

If your blog is a google news source (news.google.com) you’re in luck, because google will start indexing you for their highly popular news page and not only will you get a ton more traffic, but you’ll look like a newspaper!

Here’s how.

Add Amazon Content to Your Blog

steven — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:59:19 +0000

Associate Feed Generator is way for you to

Instantly Generate Your Very Own Keyword Rich,
Money Making RSS Feeds. Add Images
and Unique Customizable Affiliate Content To Your
Web Pages And Blogs With Ease.

We couldn’t of said it better ourselves. Find it here and let us know what you think.

How to Use Wordpress for User Generated Content

steven — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:25:36 +0000

Verne Ho, a creative director based out of Toronto, has a nice case study on how to create user-generated-content using Wordpress. We encourage you to read the full article because its quite detailed, but in essence, the concept is to isolate and re-brand the comments so that they are the primary content of the site. We’ve said before that comments are the main user-generated-content by blog platforms like wordpress.

The system presented by Verne Ho offers a way to organize and make the comments more “contenty” and useful. Smart article, although the people behind Wordpress need to do a better job iat making their site more social-network and user-generated-content friendly, don’t you think? For now, a smart hack.

Mini Forms Wordpress Plugin

steven — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:16:29 +0000

Wordpress is brilliant in most respects but weak in one major regard. Its not conducive to user-generated-content. About the best user-generated-content you can get out of your blog is all of the comments. In an effort to make it easier for people to jump in and write an actual post for you, thedeadone.net has put together the excellent Mini Forms Wordpress plugin, which can be found here:

Some Features of the Mini Forms Wordpress Plugin:

Highly customisable: Create your form using a Widget interface.
Create as many forms as you like.
Put a form in your sidebar using a widget for your Theme.
Submit pages instead of posts.
Simple Question and/or Image Captcha.
Posting Policy.
Add Custom Fields to your Form.
QuickTags support for Forms.
Upload Files and can be attached to posts. Uses Wordpress’ core to create thumbnails if applicable.
Submitters can be notified if post approved or rejected.
Allow users to select category and tags.
Ban users and IPs.
Control what roles can access the form.
Can automatically create a page with form for you.
Can automatically modified author template tag with info about submitter.
Can, optionally, automatically allow submissions to be published.
Will walk your dog. (just kidding)

It’s free so there’s no excuse to not give it a shot, especially if you have a potentially interactive or “flammable” blog niche, such as politics.