BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

1. Perpetually tag your content. Tagging can be a extensive way to classify your posts and will give you an edge over at Technorati.

2. Command a niche market. Choose a niche in which you have some experience or that which you are willing to learn. Can you continue writing for over 2 or 3 years on the topic? If so you found the sweet spot.

3. Submit (Bookmark) your posts to Digg, Technorati, Flickr (Flickr is a service offered by yahoo for uploading and sharing cartoon. Don’t get confused with flicker.com which surprisingly yahoo has not yet bought), Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon and other such sites to increase traffic to your blogging blog.

Submitting your articles to these and other such social networking sites will increase the number of individuals who shall view your content leading to an enlargement in traffic to your site. Enable your readers to bookmark your posts to such sites as well. There is a neat trick to bookmarking which you will find here. Read the rest of this entry →

BlogCatalog.com has come up with an interesting replacement for the BlogRush widget. It displays your own blog posts (on however many blogs you have registered with BlogCatalog) and some other activities such as Diggs. You’ll see one in the right-hand sidebar of this page.

You can choose from about eight colors, and you set the width (in pixels) and the number of items to display (so you effectively control the height as well). If you have several blogs, this is a great way to send traffic from one to another.

Besides the WordPress version, you can create BlogCatalog widgets that work with Blogger and TypePad blogs as well. It is easy and fun.

BlogCatalog offers four different widgets in all. If you scroll down, you will see their Recent Viewers widget (with dozens of tiny pictures). Those are also highly customizable. You can choose the size, number of pictures, color of the frame and the text, and so on.

Widgets are just one of the benefits of belonging to the BlogCatalog community. You can get great exposure for you blogs there, join groups, make friends, and find many interesting and entertaining blogs. I highly recommend it.

Below that is a similar widget, created at MyBlogLog.com, another online blog-listing community where you should list your blogs if you haven’t already.

As I’m currently updating my old blogs and developing new ones, I will be checking on all the old favorite blog registrars and trying out new ones. I’ll report back here on the best ones I find.