Day 1: FeedBlitz, SEO, and Post Series

17 Jun, 2007 Updates, Incorporation Brian Armstrong

This is the first day of the marketing challenge. Here are the three things I got done today. These aren’t the sort of real traffic building activities I’d like to get to, but are more like pre-requisites to get the site together properly.

1. I moved the email newsletter service from Zookoda to FeedBlitz. There were a few reasons for this, namely that Zookoda is really buggy and appears to have no-one supporting or correcting it anymore. It’s a shame because they had the best service out there (and it was free), but a little neglect here and there and the whole thing became unusable. They must be focused on other activities. Feedblitz is quite good as well, but costs some money.

If you see an email from FeedBlitz, don’t be alarmed. Hopefully this change will allow the email newsletter to operate smoothly and draw people to the website with excerpts that grab their attention, and entice them to click “Read More”.

2. I did some SEO. Namely installing the MetaTagz and SEO Title Tag plugins. And I finished going through some old posts to update the description, keyword, and title meta tags.

This will hopefully help the pages rank higher in Google over time to bring in more traffic. SEO is an important part of building any business website. It can get complicated and boring, so in most cases I suggest outsourcing to have a pro do it. Your time is better spent elsewhere.

3. I installed the post series plugin, which you can see at the end of this page. It helps generate more links for a series of posts so people keep reading longer.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

6 Comments so far »

Derrek said,

Wrote on July 13, 2007 @ 10:43 am

Brian,

You wrote, “I installed the post series plugin,” but which one did you install? Would you post a link to it?

Thanks,
Derrek

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 13, 2007 @ 10:49 am

Sure, I used this one. I tried a bunch, and none were perfect but this one as the best. THanks!
Brian

[Reply]
Quandary said,

Wrote on October 19, 2007 @ 12:03 am

If you could let me know what would help move In Series from “the best” to “perfect,” I’d be happy to listen. ;)

Thanks for the mention!

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on October 22, 2007 @ 5:29 pm

Hi Quandary, it was good I just recall that it required some configuration to get it to work how I have it now, which was the desired look, feel, wording, etc. I thought the way I have it now should be the default, the default just seemed strange. But its a great plugin, thanks!

[Reply]
Quandary said,

Wrote on October 22, 2007 @ 5:53 pm

If the only issue is the default layout, then I’m pretty happy ;). You clearly navigated the configuration well, which requires a little bit of work in 3.0, and is probably more of a hassle than it needs to be. I’ve made sure to make the two major tasks you performed (changing the location of the table of contents, and changing the title of the table of contents) as simple and obvious as I can for the 3.1 basic configuration mode.

[Reply]
ca8efe0f0f4d said,

Wrote on May 10, 2008 @ 8:05 am

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