Sharing Content with Dosh Dosh Readers (and a Link Roundup)
I am thinking about changing the way I share links and content with all of you. Up to now, I’ve shared links via a roundup like this or contextually within articles. Maybe it’s time to try something new.
I considered creating a separate link blog (like this) but am a little hesitant about it because it won’t really give these links adequate exposure. Instead of being on the main channel they are displayed on a less frequented part of the blog.
I was also thinking of doing a daily email newsletter or RSS-only post to share links because it offers certain advantages over the usual weekly or bi-weekly link roundup. For example, a daily link roundup allows you to immediately participate in the ongoing discussion via links/comments with the blogger or site in question.
It’s much more timely and it fosters conversation. Then again, Dosh Dosh isn’t really a news blog so I don’t really want to revamp it by putting out link posts every day. You might have noticed that I try to keep the noise down as much as possible. Heck, I’m even discussing this issue in a link roundup post. ^_^
In any case, do let me know if you’ll like a daily link roundup and please suggest a mode of delivery because I do come across more than enough excellent articles and links to make this work. The only issue is how I want to share the content.
I’ve blabbered on long enough, onto this week’s collection of links. Enjoy!
How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress.This comes a little late because I kept forgetting to mention it. Caroline Middlebrook has released a free ebook on developing money making niche sites using Wordpress. It’s a good read, especially if you are new to niche sites or Wordpress.
WordPress is a free and open source piece of software that is commonly used for developing blogs…What I have done to write the book is created my own little niche site from scratch and documented the whole process live, step-by-step with images. The resulting site is live and can be viewed as you work your way through the book.
A Guide to Social Marketing on Yahoo! Answers. Matt Mcgee recently wrote a great series of articles about marketing through Yahoo Answers. It’s targeted for beginners and I think it provides an excellent overview about how Yahoo Answers can be used to direct traffic to your site.
I’ve been using Yahoo! Answers for almost two years now; I started using it shortly after launching this blog. In that time, Yahoo! Answers has become a Top 5 source of referral traffic for me. Can it become the same for you? Perhaps. If you want to give it a try, I’ll share a plan of attack in this three-part series.
27 Secrets to Linking Like a Master Networker. I really liked this post because it covered a topic not mentioned often. Links are excellent networking tools and Tiffany lists some great ways you can utilize them to build online relationships.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best ways to build relationships online is using a combination of three strategies: 1) Comments 2) Links and 3) Contact. Here are 27 secrets to linking that will help you build lasting relationships, increase your Personal PR, expand your network, and increase your presence online.
Small Business Marketing Unleashed. Jennifer Laycock recently let me know about this conference held in April at Houston for small business owners. It aims to provide you with step by step guidance on the entire process of marketing your site. Reserve your seats if you’re interested in attending because tickets are limited.
What if you went to an online marketing conference and instead of going home with a notebook full of sound bites, you went home with a detailed plan of action to improve traffic and sales on your web site? That’s exactly what will happen for small businesses who gather together with some of the best and brightest minds in online marketing next spring.
100+ Useful Web Resources for Small Business and Non Profits. Lid does a great compilation of useful web resources which cover topics like site optimization, design and marketing. Worth a read and bookmark.
Creating Firefox Quick Search Bookmarks. Rae gives some instructions on how to use Firefox quick search bookmarks to speed up your online research process. She also includes some of her favorite SEO-related bookmarks for download.
A quick search is something that allows you to perform searches on sites directly from your address bar. So, you can search Google by typing in “google [keyword]” without having to actually *go* to google.com and then type in the search query (or have a Google search box installed in your browser).
13 Sure Signs Your Landing Page is a Turn-Off. Skellie explains some characteristics of poor landing pages and conversely, how you can improve you own sales pages for more conversions.
If you’re trying to sell a product or service through your website (or if you’re open to the possibility in future), here’s an opportunity to get inside the mind of your average prospect and learn the thirteen things that make good landing pages go bad.
The Ten Commandments of New Social Media. Sonia offers 10 instructions on how to adapt to and achieve success within social media.
A lot of people new to social media wonder if there are any rules, and if so, what are they? You’ll be glad to know that yes, this frontier isn’t quite as wild as it looks. Even in these relatively early days, there’s a healthy set of conventions, laws and norms. Just like the original ten, these won’t keep you out of every kind of trouble, but they cover the big stuff pretty well.
Web traffic - an offline example. Interesting post by Pete which compares off-line traffic with web traffic. I like the comparisons and thought it was a fresh way of approaching the topic.
The ‘cool’ areas to live are popular because people know about them - they aren’t tucked away at the back of a town that no one has ever heard of and the same is true for websites. If your site is sitting not being noticed by anyone, you’ll never become the popular online destination that people want to go to. The best way to gain exposure and build an online reputation is through social media.
Top Experts Dish with their Best Kept Marketing Secrets. Last by not least, this is a roundtable post which gives you the marketing secrets of several marketers, bloggers and small business experts. I gave a tip as well, which you’ll find in the article.
I asked some of the world’s top marketers, small business experts and bloggers one short and sweet question: “Please share one of your best kept marketing secrets” Are you are ready to share one of your own best-kept marketing secrets? We want to hear from you in the comments below. Tell us one of your marketing secrets that has worked well for you in business.
A very good post, have visited few of the sites and is very resourceful, will bookmark and revisit here later as the list is long..
yes i agree with you max, this really has a lot of information
Very helpful information. dosh dosh tips has help my traffic improve tremendously.
Great list. I actually prefer the link love posts just as you do them here. Provides a boost to the the sites that are listed and it also gives the readers enough information to decide if they want to read the link posts or not.
very useful sources, I have bookmark this page
Thanks as always for being such a supportive and useful fellow blogger, Maki!
Awesome list of post Maki… you set the bar very high for other bloggers who do round-ups
Hi,
Thanks for the round up… I am requesting if you could add the $5000 Graphic Design Prize Giveaway that we are holding at Just Creative Design over the next 2 weeks. There is a heap of prizes and is very easy to enter…
Much appreciated if you can add, if not this comment will do
The link is in my name.
Thanks, these are really useful links and I enjoyed reading them. You defiantly know how to pick out blog post for your readers.
Maki, thanks for including me in this excellent roundup. Found several resources pertinent to my needs.
I enjoy link posts like this one that give some context a bit beyond just the headline, because I don’t have a lot of time to click through posts that may or may not relate to my needs.
But you bring up an interesting issue regarding timeliness and conversation online. As a reader, I probably prefer seeing a minimal amount of link posts per week, because it’s hard to devote time to reading excellent recommendations. But as a blogger, I want to know about great articles while the conversation’s still happening so I can contribute. So this is a tricky issue. You could try a few approaches to frequency, and just monitor your click-thru rate for each post. Or, do whatever works best for your schedule!
Regardless of what you decide, it’s great to see bloggers with the level of following you have take seriously the social capital they have built and try to use it to the benefit advantage of the entire blogging community.
Hi Maki,
I hope that you’d continue to share your links contextually or through round-ups like this. I don’t think that there’s a need to change because in my case, I’m already subscribed to most if not all of these awesome blogs that you often mention. When you share content from a site which I haven’t seen, I try to look around and read the other articles there, if I find them good, I subscribe.
Furthermore, I don’t really read through link blogs because I find them visually unappealing and I’m often become overloaded with just redundant information.
Moreover, sharing these content only to your feed subscribers will be a good way to increase your readership, which I doubt is your main goal for doing this. In the long run, it won’t make much of a difference for subscribers like me. Exclusive content or not, the “experience” would appear and arrive the same.
I understand how you feel when you said that you want to share these information to your readers. Who won’t? These are truly good reading.
Anyway, to summarize my point - if a blog continually creates good content, you only need to mention it once or twice for your readers to subscribe to them. After that, a daily or frequent link round-up for these websites won’t really offer much except for us to know your opinion regarding the specific article.
Just my two cents.
I would really like if you would offer a daily roundup post. I don’t think that any blog in the blogging niche does this. So you’ll be the first and I’ll certainly like it
You can either do it under a sub domain or directly on this blog…
Just don’t mention the already famous blogs as I’m a subscriber of quite a few of them.
Maki,
My advice would be to not have a separate link blog. It would look like any other splog(spam blog) which has links. On the other hand you can very well use del.icio.us to make categories of your links. More people will subscribe to your del.icio.us feed than to the separate blog.
Yeah, but it sure sucks that Yahoo! has caught on and has started disabling external links in Answers.
I agree the link blog may not be the best way to do it but having the links in a newsletter would work pretty good I think and I know I would be joining the list.
-Scott
I like the idea of a daily newsletter for link roundup posts, that’s a unique one and other blogs usually do a weekly roundup. It’d be hard to read so much content on a daily basis and give even more reasons to procrastinate and not be productive, but I like the idea nonetheless.
Great link list!
Still have to go through some of them, but so far they rock
Some great posts there. In regards to your link posts, daily is too often I feel - at least in this blog. A separate blog would probably be a bit rubbish with nothing but links. A weekly round up is probably best.
I like the weekly link roundups, they give me chance to read some good content that I may have missed. Keep it up.
In keeping things simple, as you like, I think this is the best way to inform your readers of a link roundup. It’s reaching all of your subscribers and gives a concise excerpt of what they would be reading if clicked vs. giving one sentence or just the link of the article.
My vote goes to stay the same
Hey Maki,
Thank you for including me in your link roundup; what a wonderful surprise!
I too enjoy roundups - especially from people I trust; I know they will send me to useful and topical posts - effectively screening for me, and this is brilliant in my forever fast life. Because of this, it makes no difference to me how you present your links, whether you choose to do it like Jeremy or within a blog post.
The problem for me is there are quite a few bloggers I read regularly, and I want to see all the links they suggest, so often I find myself reading way too much and not working quite as much - this is not so good.
I also agree with Tiffany; it is terrific that you continue to look out for your readers and help the blogging community in general - huge lesson there - thank you.
A great post, I read them and utilize them Keep up the Work.
I like the round ups the best, have little time to read.
Thanks
I read soo much stuff everyday… I really do like the current format where the links have a content around them… I am not sure I would be clicking to then find out what it’s context is all about…
I like the idea of the separate “link blog”. I wonder if there’s an easy way to setup WordPress for that… Like, some sort of simple point-and-click interface just for the link blog. Then, you could pull in the feed into your sidebar so that it gets some exposure and it’s continuously updated.
I don’t think a separate link blog is necessary. Why make it confusing…
Thanks for the list, I’m bookmarking like mad and will review in a few.
A great list of helpful links thank you
I definitely don’t think a separate link blog is necessary either though.
Definitely a great list. How does one get on a list like this? I have a article that I would you at least check out titled “13 Blogging Forums You Should Join!”
Sorry if it sounded spammy, but if you never knew about it then you wouldn’t potentially read it, right?
Jay
The context beyond the headlines is absolutely excellent. Keep doing it =)
I think a daily link roundup would be a good idea - but at the same time, the disambiguation could be too much. Maybe you could do a mix of two ideas:
1. Publish all your links, as you get them, disorganized as they may be, to your newsletter.
2. Once a week, segment those links by subject and re-publish them here.
This way, those of us that already have too much email but will not forget your domain for the fact it is programmed into the muscles of our fingers for visiting so often (a-hem), still get your excellent links.
If I find the weekly roundup is not recent enough for me, I’ll deal with the disambiguation and information overflow to my inbox. Otherwise, I would rather have it neat, organized, and predictable.
By the way - thank you very much for asking. =)
How about a linkroll in the sidebar? You can bookmark your favorite links on del.icio.us under a certain tag, and fetch the links through RSS and show them in the sidebar.
I’ve been using this technique on and off on my blog to share reader submitted links successfully.
I like the way you are doing it now. But I know it take a lot of your time to create it. How much time do you spend just giving link backs on your blog?
maki,
Not bad of way doing link buildups.
~your friend bontb.
Very good and useful roundup!
You might also consider using Tumblr or Siphs for your link blog. I think both let you tag, search, and permit comments on posted links. Plus for those who want to subscribe either service should give DoshDosh readers an RSS feed. I have a public link blog on Siphs if your interested in checking it out. Just shoot me an email and I’d be happy to share.
I would prefer small daily lists of links to huge lists.
You could group and list the links into categories, i.e., marketing, traffic, etc. Then you could also do a site organized like the yellow pages.
Thank you very much for your helpful content.
@ Tiffany
You’re welcome! Thanks for your input as well.
@ Fitz
I will keep that in mind indeed… I do try to avoid linking to the same blogs all the time, especially the more popular blogs… the purpose of this is to really send traffic to sites that deserve and I would love people to get involved with other bloggers through my site.
@ nitinpai
I do use del.icio.us so I might consider using del.icio.us to share links. Thanks for the suggestion!
@ Lid
You’re welcome! From what I’ve read, I think the lack of time and the large amount of content available makes it difficult for everyone to keep up… I’ll definitely keep that in mind.
@Trisha
Some great ideas there… I think its quite useful to do maybe do a daily newsletter + a weekly recap. Sounds like something that would work.
@ Mohsin
I would prefer to have them in a more orderly format with additional context…sidebar might be a little too narrow/cramped for my liking…but yeah, thanks anyway!
@ Dwayne
I would say it takes me an hour or so (including bookmarking the links) to do a post like this… sometimes it could be faster though if I’ve already had everything organized in my bookmarks..
@ Arpan
I’ll check out Siphs and Tumblr in greater detail… I’m more interested in hosting the link blog on my own domain so I’ll see if either of them allow this… its either that or I’ll have to set up a tumblr-style wordpress blog on a subfolder or subdomain..
@ Ria Kennedy
Grouping the links is definitely something I’m interested in doing for future roundups… and you’re welcome!
@ Everyone
Thanks a lot for your comments!
I really enjoyed reading and looking over your precious tips.
The application of these tips will improve the writing of me or other writers.
handy tips,inspirational stories,forwards,affirmations