It’s day 20 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new readers/subscribers/book buyers to this website and demonstrate that blogging can be profitable.

Here are my three tasks for the day:

1. I’ve done this not only today, but every day of the challenge: putting meta keywords and descriptions into every post by hand. Brandon wrote in and reminded me of it.

> Message:
> Hey Brian,
>
> I’ve been following your 30 day challenge and besides the great information found there, I also noticed something completely unrelated: you’ve managed to include Meta Keywords and Titles for each individual post!
>
> How exactly did you pull this off? Is there a plugin of some sort that can accomplish this?
>
> If you could let me know, that would be an excellent feature to add to my blog at http://www.fitbuff.com
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Brandon

Check out my reply:

Hi Brandon,

Sure, I’m using a few plugins

Ultimate Tag Warrior (for the meta keywords)
http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior

SEO Title Tag (for the titles):
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-title-tag/#post-808

and MetaTagz (for the description):
http://www.brandonbuttars.com/2007/03/29/wordpress-meta-tags-plugin/

Seems like overkill, but I was using something called All in one SEO
in the past which didn’t do each one quite as well.

Good luck!
Brian

2. I wrote and sent my article on Why People Hate Cell Phone Companies to Seth Godin, because it falls directly in line with his type of thinking. Hopefully he will get a kick out of it (and may link to it). Something tells me that this is the type of article that could get picked up on sites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com given it’s wide appeal.

3. I sent a screen shot to the 37 Signals Blog for their “Screen Around Town” pages. Interestingly I sent these in the past without any intention of getting back links (here and here are examples) because I’ve always been interested in user interface design. However, they linked to me as a favor when I sent them the last one, so I’ve continued to send them. Getting a link from the Signal vs. Noise blog carries a lot of weight (it is a Google Page Rank 7 site) assuming you get on the home page.

Here is what I sent them:

Hi Jason,

This dialog in Firefox frustrates me. I don’t know if I typed in the correct login and password, and whether it’s worth saving my best guess.

If I tell Firefox to remember it, and I turn out to be wrong (or have made a typo), there is a lengthy process now to track down the incorrect login and password in the security settings and remove it. Otherwise it will bring back my mistake to taunt me every time I see the page.

This could all be solved by showing the dialog one screen later. Once the next page loads, I’ll know if my login was a success or failure, and whether it’s worth saving.

Brian Armstrong http://www.startbreakingfree.com/

P.S. thanks for including my link! Unexpected perk.

They enjoy this type of content for their blog, so I’m just helping them out in exchange for a link.

If you are following along with these steps to apply it to your own website, you probably shouldn’t copy this step exactly. But you can apply the principle. Go to Technorati and find a popular blog that interests you. Submit useful links, tips, or tricks to them and you may get a back link (but don’t ask for it).