I recently discovered EmberApp which is a place to share and seek design inspiration. Check it out. It’s nicely designed itself, and you can just peruse, or you can upload, gather, and organize your design inspirations to share with others.

I’ve been designing/re-designing a couple sites and I’ve been using it to both save inspirational designs and to browse for new ones.

This post has been split into sections, and in today’s segment we’ll be covering the first 10 ways to drive traffic to your blog.

While there’s no right or wrong order to perform these tasks, I’ve tried to start with things you can do right off the bat the moment you create your first post. Some of the items further down the list will take more time, or can wait until a little further down the road.

So let’s get to it!

25. Submit your blog to search engines

Everyone knows that having your site appear in search results is an important factor. If any links exist out there to your site, then the search engines should in effect find and crawl your blog eventually. But help them out by submitting your URL to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing).

Here are the direct links:
Add your URL to Google
Submit your site to Bing

24. Create an RSS feed of your blog

By having an RSS feed of your blog, people can subscribe to it and get notified when you write a new post. If you use WordPress this is done automatically. Also, put the link in an easy-to-find place on your pages and encourage people to sign up, and make it easy for people to come back for more!

23. Submit your blog to blog directories

In addition to submitting your site to search engines, you can submit to blog directories. These are basically just like phone books for blogs. Some are well-respected and having your link on these sites can add up and contribute to making your site more “trusted” by the search engines. And of course hopefully people will find your blog on these sites as well.
This will have varying impact, but the more links you can get, the better. It’s all a matter of how much time and energy you want to put into it.

Here is a list of blog directories you might considering submitting to.

And here is a list of sites that accept RSS feed submissions.

22. Add your site to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools

If you don’t already have an account with Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, you should head on over and create one. Then add your site(s) and spend a little time looking around and getting familiar with what each offers. There are some useful tools in there that will help you make your site more friendly to search engines and users alike. And don’t get overwhelmed, the learning curve isn’t bad and it shouldn’t be too time-consuming. Oh, and it’s free.

21. Install Google Analytics

Add Google Analytics to all your pages. You can do this manually, or if you are using WordPress there are a bunch of plugins to choose from. I use Ultimate Google Analytics, and it’s a snap. Once a little time goes by and enough data has been collection you can start to learn a lot about your readers, how they’re finding your site, how long they are staying once they get there, what pages they are reading, and more. Definitely do this. It’s also free.

20. Ping sites

When you make changes to your pages or add a new page you should ping the major search engines with that URL. This lets them know that your content has changed and that they should re-index your site to pick up the new content and any new links you have. Again, if you don’t do this your pages will be re-crawled eventually but it’s worth tapping the engines on the shoulder to let them know they should check you out again now.

If you use WordPress you can have this done automatically. Otherwise you can find a tool like Blog Ping Tool.

But definitely avoid Pingler.

19. Claim your blog at Technorati

Technorati is a very popular and well-respected blog search engine. By claiming your blog on Technorati you are entering your site into their blog directory. You can also create a profile which could enable people to find you easier as well as find the link to your blog. Additionally, if you write excellent content and you get lucky, Technorati may feature your blog or one of your posts.

18. Signatures

No, I don’t mean go sign a bunch of autographs. Put the link to your blog in all your email signatures and forum signatures. Any email program will allow you to create a signature that will appear automatically at the bottom of every email you send. Same with any forums or newsgroups you may participate in.

For example, if you answer questions on Yahoo! Answers , then every-time you do so you’ll be adding a link to your blog for all to see. This way you are sharing your link everyday without even thinking about it. But don’t forget, this will only be effective if your post/answer is useful and informative. Nobody will follow the link of someone that posted garbage.

17. Comment on other blogs

Commenting on other blogs is great for two reasons. It gives you a chance to read others’ posts each day which helps you to keep current on whatever it is your niche is. Then once you find a post you have thoughts about you can contribute to the conversation in the comments. If your comment is thoughtful and useful, people will notice. The blogger will definitely notice, and many of the readers will as will. On a blog of any decent size you will have just gotten yourself a good number of people looking at your name, and potentially clicking on the link to your blog.

Photo courtesy of Gregg O'Connell

Additionally, if the comment section of the blog is ‘dofollow’, then the search engines will follow the link to your site as well, which will help your site rank higher in search engines. But please do not insist on only commenting on blogs with ‘dofollow’ links. Insert yourself in the conversation and make it more interesting by sharing your thoughts and opinions. Again, if it’s insightful, people will find it and find the link to your blog.

To help with this you can create an RSS feed of a Twitter search for relevant keywords to you niche, such as “user interface prototyping” or “plane-spotting in Portland”,  or whatever it may be. You can also do the same for Google Blog Search or just Google search in general. It’s very helpful in finding people who are talking about the same things you’re talking about in your blog. This leads you to comment on relevant blogs, which is good. They have the same the readers you want.

16. Ask people to do what it is you want them to do

If you want people to vote in a poll you made, ask them to do so. If you want them to subscribe to your RSS feed or sign up for your mailing list, ask them to do so. If you want them to comment on your blog, ask them to. If you want them to share your link, well, you should know what to do now. It may sound simple, but it works. You could even consider adding a signature to your posts so that each of your posts automatically gets appended with a request for readers to comment.

Conclusion

So there you have it, the first 10 ways to drive traffic to your blog or website!

Stay tuned for the rest, coming soon.

Now, let’s put #16 to use! Subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog to be notified when I post more ways to get traffic to your blog or website.

Please leave a comment below with your thoughts about any of these ideas or any new ones you may have.

I just discovered something interesting about the service Pingler. Okay, I hate suspense too, so I won’t leave you in it. What I realized today is that Pingler’s front-end leads me to believe it may not do any pinging.

Okay, my audience here is of all types, so let me back up.

What is ‘pinging’ anyway?

Pinging has long been a way for bloggers and website owners to notify search engines that you have a new page, or that the content on a page has been modified. The benefit is that the receiving search engine will crawl and index your page/site faster because it has specifically and immediately been notified of the change. This is as it seems, much faster than the alternative, which would basically just be to wait for whenever the search engine gets around to your pages which could be days or weeks or even months in some cases.

Ok, so what exactly is Pingler?

Well, sadly, it’s hard to say what it is at this point. But I can tell you what it claims to be. Pingler claims to be a service that will take a URL that you specify (your page that you want to have search engines re-index), and a specified list of ping services, and it will ping your page at each of those services to save you from having to do so manually.

So what’s the problem with Pingler?

There is a review from 2009 on imreportcard titled ‘Pingler Review: Legit or Scam’. The question raised in the review is whether or not webpage pinging is beneficial in helping that page climb higher in search engine rankings faster. To answer that in short, pinging search engines is still considered helpful in getting your pages index faster.

Tell me more

OK, so I’m a programmer and a geek. I like to know how things work and I like to look at code. I used Pingler a few times over the past few days to ping a few pages on some of my sites that I had recently updated.

After a few runs through I realized that it didn’t care at all what I entered into the captcha field. A captcha field is one of those annoying images with random, scrambled characters that you have to enter into the text field to prove you are a human and not a robot. Then I realized I could just completely leave it blank. Because I’m a curious programmer I decided to check out the code behind the page. It took about 5 seconds to see that Pingler is proving bogus feedback to the user.

Let me prove it.

When you go to pingler.com and enter a ‘title’ and a ‘url’, then click ‘Ping My Site’, you are taken to a new page where it starts outputting messages like

“api.my.yahoo.co.jp/RPC2 – Thanks for the ping.”,

and 88 more by default, one for each ping service. Now, feel free to play around and enter whatever nonsense you want into the ping site list field and you’ll notice Pingler will NEVER fail. So you can ping “BlahBluhBlahBlah” and it will appear to succeed. OK, this one we could let slip by. We could just assume it’s up to the user to make sure the ping URL’s are valid and working, and that if the URL is valid it’ll be pinged, otherwise it’ll silently fail and we’ll never know. Not great, but fine.

So carrying on, I then I whipped up my own quick script to ping some search engines, ran Pingler’s list of services through my script, and realized that some of the url’s they have in that list result in 404′s, meaning they don’t exist anymore. Yet, Pingler says it successfully pinged them. Like, check out http://ping.namaan.net and you’ll see there’s nothing there. That means there’s zero chance that Pingler successfully pinged that url.

OK, so maybe it’s just a poorly designed tool and doesn’t catch or report failures? Well, let’s carry on for the real proof. You can follow these steps or just see the final result here.

• Go to http://pingler.com/
• Fill in the fields with a title and url (sure, make them totally bogus), and press ‘Ping My Site’.
• View Source and copy the whole page
• Paste it in the HTML field (top left) of http://jsfiddle.net
• Click ‘Run’

RESULT: So, if you know how to read Javascript at all you’ll be thoroughly convinced at this point that the front-end at least is bogus. Otherwise, maybe just “quite” convinced. But you’ll notice that you’re seeing the same output as if you had carefully entered a title, url and your handcrafted list of Ping services, thinking you were being really productive.

A brief overview of the code shows a basic Javascript loop set to trigger at a random interval between 0 milliseconds and 1.5 seconds, and at each iteration output the hard-coded response message (ping site url) + “Thanks for the ping.”.

So, it’s hard to know if any pinging is happening in the background, but the results given to the user certainly are not a reflection any actual pinging. For a more simple test, start the pinging, then disconnect your internet connection. You will continue to get “success” messages all the way through. It’s definitely possible that there’s code running on the back-end (behind the scenes) that is actually pinging servers. However, mimicking varied response times, and always posting the same success message to the user is a sign of low quality standards. So in the event that there is back-end code pinging servers I’d expect that code to have the same level of quality standards. Regardless, if I’m using a service, I want real, honest results, not a representation of what may or may not be happening in the background.

Conclusion

This is the free portion of Pingler. They have a Premium account option which costs $2.99 / month and although I haven’t tried it I have a hunch it’s not too different. If anyone out there actually pays for this service, give this a shot and post back your findings. So I can’t claim that Pingler is a scam since I can’t see what may be running in the background. But regardless, the user has no idea if servers are getting pinged or whether or not any of them were successful. To me that’s not all that useful. But, hopefully there’s some working back-end code back there actually doing soe pinging, but I’d like to see them update the front-end to be actual results representing actual pings.

Actually, it’s not so much that it’s a nice design, it’s more that it was nicely “un-designed”. Stripping away everything that’s not crucial, leaving only what the reader is coming to see, and letting each piece lay where it wants to — where it can easily be found. You can find what you want before you even read anything. Beautiful.

Knowing that feeling of receiving, the feeling of giving is even greater. You know that you just made someone feel really good, that they have a friend in you, and that you were thinking about them. Maybe you’re building a new relationship or strengthening an old one. Either way, you’re paving your way to have a happy, fulfilling life and helping pave the same for someone else. I can imagine a happy life without friends as much as I can imagine a successful business without customers. Without them you’re bound to go under.

And in business, as in life, the act of giving, and giving back, has it’s ways of making new partnerships, and strengthening the relationships with the old ones. Making you visibly more trust-worthy with good morals and good intentions. Who doesn’t want to be friends with such people or work with such businesses?

On the surface it may seem the giving away hotel rooms is a form of un-business, considering, after all, the idea of business is to MAKE money. But depending on the circumstances it can work in ways that can be hard to see at first. And as we described above in regards to relationships and giving, it’s not always about material gain, but is often emotional. Or maybe it’s simply a form of recognition, or the building of trust in you or your brand. But unlike an investment in advertising, these are results that money cannot buy.

Two nights ago I attended a concert in Portland at the McMenamin’s Crystal Ballroom. The show was a benefit for the Portland Rescue Mission which “provides food, shelter and recovery care for men, women and children affected by homelessness, addiction, hunger and abuse.”, and the idea was that of drummer Brian Blade. You may not recognize his name, but I guarantee you’ve heard him play the hell out of some drums with the likes of Bob Dylan, Norah Jones, Bill Frisell, Wayne Shorter and Joni Mitchell. When he decided he wanted to give back to his community he called upon longtime friends Emmylou Harris, Daniel Lanois, Greg Leisz, and Chris Thomas. I’d have a hard time believing you haven’t heard of at least most of these names — these are among the cream of the crop of world-class musicians.

Emmylou Harris

After a few phone calls Brian was off to a good start. His band of choice had agreed to fly from their various parts of the country for a few days to rehearse and play a one-off benefit show and donate their time and talents for the cause. That is, without pay. Brian then managed to get McMenamin’s on-board to donate the use of the beautiful 1000 person capacity Crystal Ballroom for the event, and then Hotel Lucia to donate some hotel rooms for the band. And those are just the those in the forefront of the occasion. I’m sure there were at others behind the scenes that contributed greatly to making this happen.

Needless to say, the show was mind-blowing. There don’t exist better musicians than these, and as a group they are even harder to beat. It really was a special evening that I will never forget.

But similarly energizing was realizing how many people and businesses went out of their way to make this happen. And no, they weren’t making a big deal about it or seeking praise for their efforts in giving back. A gift of this much thought and effort is not done out of self-interest, but of sheer desire to do good and help out in their community. To give back when, where and how they can. At $50/seat, this gift to the Portland Rescue Mission is obviously really a gift to the hundreds of people it is going to feed and shelter that would otherwise be out hungry in the cold and the rain as we head into winter. We should all strive to be more like everyone mentioned here as individuals and as businesses. It truly makes the world a better place, and impacts a tremendous number of people in ways that most of us can’t imagine.

If you would like to read more about the event, there is an article from OregonLive here.

P.S. If you read this in time, Brian and Chris will be playing another benefit show for the Portland Rescue Mission this Saturday night, Nov. 6th at the Bagdad Theater with The Fellowship Band. Get out there, donate, and hear some amazing music.

Brian Blade and Chris Thomas

I recently had Hostgator switch over my MX settings to Google so that I could try out Google Apps for Business. I mainly wanted to check out the ability to manage multiple email accounts from right within the same space. After a day or two of testing it out the emails were very delayed in showing up there, which is obviously not how you want your business email to behave, so I decided to have my MX settings switched back and use my same ‘ol reliable Mac Mail setup with multiple separated accounts.

So I started a live chat with Hostgator to ask them to switch the MX settings back. They said it would be switched over shortly. I waited and waited, then finally called back. They said that the problem was definitely on my end since their work had all been done. But the settings and accounts in my Mac Mail had not been modified since the change over. Those accounts have been setup in there the same way for years, so if everything on their end was the same, and everything on my end was the same, why wouldn’t it work? Good question. I spent hours on it, finally calling back again and the person said their settings were never changed. Argh!

Hours go by, it’s still not fixed. I call back AGAIN! This time the guy actually fixes it on the spot, but says “I can understand why they thought it was set correctly. Because [blah, blah, blah].” Never says sorry, never takes the blame, never tried to make it up to me. This costs me hours of time, and them a decent amount of time as well. It’s okay to make a mistake every now and again, but several times in a row, and costing the customer hours of time for your mistake deserves at least some acknowledgment, preferably an apology, and ideally something something to really show you care (a month of free hosting? C’mon, my monthly bill is $9.95, I think they can afford to let that go just once). If they really cared about their customers they would do all these things. It’s really these simple things that go a long way. And it’s cheap. A simple “I’m sorry, it is something easily overlooked but it was our fault. I will make a note in our documentation to try to keep this from happening in the future.” would have been satisfactory.

Treat your customers with respect. Take responsibility, and show you learn from your mistakes. Trying to cover up your mistake is a bigger mistake than the mistake your trying to cover up. Own up!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk5uVv8JpM]

Here are the best  tips I got from the video, but I still recommend watching the whole thing. It’s a hour very well spent.

• Look up your keywords in a keyword tool such as Google Keywords. It will give you a list of related keywords. Now take some of those related keywords and incorporate them into your site in a meaningful way.
• Start a blog if you don’t already have one, and blog about topics that your market my be searching for.
• Use keywords in the URL. Separate words by ‘-’ instead of ‘_’, because Google views ‘A_B’ as ‘AB’, but ‘A-B’ as ‘A B’. WordPress does this by default.
• Keep WordPress up-to-date! Otherwise you are really risking getting hacked. Even go as far as making an .htaccess file to whitelist the IP’s that have access the ‘wp-admin’ directory.
• (Matt doesn’t mention this, but this made me think it might be a good idea to backup my WordPress more often)
• Another thing he didn’t say specifically, but I want to look into more, is to make sure not too much content is being written dynamically in a way that doesn’t show up in view source or won’t show up in SEO without trickery.
• Therefore, search on how to make ajax pages crawlable.
• Don’t worry about trophy phrases (i.e. “iphone apps”). Instead, look at what is in your server logs — what people are already typing to find your site. Then check your sites rank for those keywords in Google. If you aren’t on page one, it could be worth adding those phrases into your site another time or two in a natural way to move to the first page of results.
• Make videos, business listings, videos, picassa web, flickr, twitter, facebook — look at where the people all are online and try to go to them.
• Google Webmaster Tools show where you rank for keywords you might not know about.
• Show related posts, etc. in column on right. This hopefully will cause people to get distracted and stay awhile. That’s how YouTube keeps people around. Notice on the right there’s always a list of related videos — and I bet you’re guilty for having clicked on them a time or two!
• Google looks at meta description, but not keywords.
• Take the time to get a good meta description for each page. And if it’s automated, try to get it right so it’s readable, etc.
• Submit for site reviews as a another way to get publicity and drive traffic.
• Another thing I found interesting was to look at Matt’s blog and look at his page title, meta descriptions, etc. You’d have to assume someone like that is doing things right. After all, he’s around #8 in the Google results for “Matt”. That’s pretty impressive! I plan to dig up other Google employees blogs and also see what they do.

From this video I also discovered Vanessa Fox’s blog with lots of SEO and site optimization tips.

The other day I posted a comment on a post over there, and in response got an email in my Inbox that included this:

You’ll notice your comment also appears in the “Recent Comments” sidebar on every page of the site; that’s there to promote you and maybe get you a few extra clicks.

What a great example of a simple thing you can do to encourage readers to engage in conversation and leave comments on your blog!

I plan to do the same, but not until I find a two-column WordPress theme I like. I’ve been using the Manifest theme by Jim Barraud but it’s only a one-column theme (lending to why I like it so much — it’s minimal and simple, clean and neat) so the ‘Recent Comments’ section is never displayed, and I’m not ready to part with the theme yet. But I guess I’ll need to if I want to borrow this great idea from Jason, and I certainly plan to.

If you’re a chef who decides to open a restaurant, I don’t necessarily expect you to be super business savvy, or have amazing interior design skills, advertising skills, etc. I expect you to be a great cook, and find the right people to help you with the rest. But that can seem daunting, overwhelming and expensive.

When a customer consistently orders her dish “spicy” at a Thai restaurant and it literally has zero heat, that’s not good. When you have the oldest, coolest wooden bar in town, but you remove all the bar stools, it’s a real bummer. When you are a BBQ Food Cart and there’s never BBQ scent coming from the grill, you’re missing out on major sales. It’s worse when on top of that you are in your dark cart, with the door closed, and lights out, watching a movie. You have to understand this is not welcoming, and not many people will come knocking on the door. When the music in the pizza shop is so loud that you can’t think, you’re turning a lot of people away. This stuff isn’t hard to fix, but in some cases doing so could drastically improve business and the number of first-time AND repeat customers.

When you’re behind a business, or simply inside it, it’s easy to lose sight of some aspects of that business. You start to see things differently, and can’t necessarily view them the same way as your customers, especially your first-time customers.

Lucky for you, the best feedback you will ever get is from your customers, and they won’t even charge you for it. But, you have to give them an opportunity to provide that feedback, and it needs to be both easy and anonymous. There’s no better or easier way to do that than simply putting a comment card under the table’s bill, or on the counter, or by the door. Or if you’re an online store, make a comment form easily accessible and easily found. Put it in front of their face so that it’s easier for them to comment then not. This feedback is priceless. It doesn’t take much effort or money, but the feedback will be overwhelmingly helpful and beneficial to your business.

Other things, like getting your employees to smile, be helpful and friendly is a longer term project. But you should hear that stuff to. And work on it. And by the time you’ve implemented the comment cards you’ve already begun improving your employees, because of how easy it now is for their customers to report their bad service.

Seriously, it’s not just Google, but I think theirs are the worst. It usually takes me about four tries to get it right.