Day 8: FeedFlares, Reciprocal Links, Broken Links

25 Jun, 2007 Education, Marketing Brian Armstrong

It’s day 8 of my 30 day marketing challenge to drive more traffic to this website!

By the way, I realize that the nitty gritty technical details of this process may not be interesting to everyone. Even if you aren’t the type of person who would do this yourself, my goal is just to prove that blogging can be a simple and profitable business to start. You could hire someone to go through this entire 30 day process for very little money. Its the idea of getting a business started that I want to impress upon you.

Today…
1. I added FeedFlares to the bottom of posts (both in RSS and single post pages on this website). This allows users to submit the page to Digg, De.licio.us, and StumbleUpon (all popular Web2.0 sites) as well as email the article to a friend.

2. I added about a dozen new reciprocal links through a program I installed previously called, LinkMachine.

3. I installed a plugin to email me whenever someone tries to access a broken link on this website. You can find the plugin on this page. Given my recent site overhaul and all the changes I’ve been making, there were a lot of broken links and my inbox was quickly filling. This was a big area to improve, because I had no idea how much traffic I losing just to broken links. It’s a shame to go to all the work to market your site only to have people come and leave right away seeing a 404 page! So I did two things. I setup a more friendly 404 error page that allows people to search for what they were looking for (instead of the standard 404 page of death). Secondly, and more importantly, I started adding 301 redirects in a .htaccess file based on the emails coming in (sounds complicated I know). Basically, a fancy way of saying that when a user came to the site to a page that no longer existed, they were automatically sent to the right page.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing