In Can I Get My Blog Noticed Without Digg’s Help? I asked whether social sites were indeed the "silver bullet" to quickly gain a large and lasting audience for a fledgling blog.  To test the theory I proposed using my own blog to measure the impact produced by different techniques.  As part of this experiment I have outlined how I plan to track changes in a blog’s popularity and how I’m planning to use active social bookmarking to promote my blog.  Unfortunately I’ve discovered that services for tracking a social site popularity metrics aren’t quite as reliable as I had hoped.

What is Wrong With This Picture?

To illustrate my point I’ll analyse results from services I have been using to track blog performance.

popuri.us provides an overview of a website’s traffic, search engine position, and social site position.  Most of the results seem plausible at first glance, but upon further investigation:

• Live Search backlinks don’t match up with results obtained by the Webmaster Live
• Technorati Links appears to be broken, when it should be returning a value of 0 instead.  A number of other entries also return N/A values instead of the 0, and may indicate this metric can no longer be retrieved.
• Overall the results are for a single URL within a site, where as the results would be more useful if they could be returned for the site as a whole.

Socialmeter  provides visibility of the social site uptake of your blog, with some additional search engine metrics to back those up.  The results are problematic:

• Delicious has not reflected the bookmark I know exists for the main website and individual posts within it.  The same comment also applies to Furl and Spurl.
• At least one post on the site has been Dugg before so the figures must only reflect a single URL not the whole site.  Metrics for the whole site would be more useful for my purposes.
• As previously mentioned the Sphere metric is not an indicator of popularity because it counts posts that might be considered to compete with yours, rather than reflecting metrics for your content.  It is almost be an inverse indicator of popularity as it shows how difficult it will be to find your site amongst all of the related content on the web.

Blog Influence provides a subset of the metrics available via popuri.us.  As you can see the Technorati metrics are no longer operational which doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.  The Yahoo result is interesting but its hard to ascertain exactly which information it is retrieving from the site.  It has been steadily rising over the course of the experiment so I’d like to think it is accurate.

How Will I Track Popularity Now?

As you can see none of the services I’ve been using are reliable.  So I have to revisit how I will track popularity for the remainder of the experiment.

A new search for blog statistics sites returned iBlogstats.  It seems to provide fairly comprehensive information for blog owners, but are the results reliable?

• Delicious has not reflected the bookmark I know exists for the main website or those for individual posts within it.
• I know an individual post has been Dugg, not the main site, so the figure seems to reflect the whole site.  This is the way I’d prefer all statistics to be reported.
• Mister Wong metric doesn’t seem right.  I would have expected something within the 10 to 20 range..
• Yahoo and Live indexed page values aren’t accurate.  I also believe the Live backlink count is inaccurate.

So once again I find myself with no reliable social metrics to work with.

I had originally hoped to look for relationships between social site feedback, site metrics and site analytics.  Now that it would be extremely difficult to measure social feedback I plan to compensate for this by extracting site analytics for referrals from social sites. This is a change in tack from measuring the social site links to my blog, to measuring the effectiveness of those links (i.e. how many people wanted to visit after seeing them).  This seems entirely consistent with the experiment so I’m happy to proceed on that basis.

Next Steps

Next steps are to continue as I had planned last week.  i.e. continue active social bookmarking, monitor any progress and devise an approach for submitting posts to social news sites.  Hopefully next week I’ll have some interesting (and reliable) results to share with you!

In Can I Get My Blog Noticed Without Digg’s Help? I asked whether social sites were indeed the "silver bullet" to quickly gain a large and lasting audience for a fledgling blog.  To test the theory I proposed using my own blog to measure the impact produced by different techniques.  Last week we discussed how to track changes in your blog’s popularity.  Today we’ll explore pragmatic approaches to active social bookmarking, to test if they will increase your blog’s audience.

Step 3 – Bookmarking

Why Active Social Bookmarking?

Before using active social bookmarking techniques you must first understand what you are hoping to achieve with them.   Toprankblog describes active bookmarking as:

For more aggressive online marketers, waiting for visitors to find your content and then decide to bookmark isn’t enough. Building up profiles and networks of friends to introduce and share content with can drive great traffic that folds well with an active bookmarking strategy. Creating content and then purposefully sharing and promoting it with likeminded networks provides value to the community and also enhances content distribution.

While I wouldn’t class myself as aggressive marketer, I believe an active bookmarking approach could help my blog gain some public awareness while it is too small to be easily found by natural means i.e. search engines and contextual links from other sites.  So my goals for using active bookmarking are:

• Improve SEO through the creation of DoFollow links
• Increase referrals from bookmark site users utilising summary page, tag page or search facilities on the sites I am using
• Make it easier for my readers to bookmark my content by seeding descriptions, tags, and titles that should be used for posts (i.e. help specify "recommended tags" to appear during the bookmarking process)

Where Should I Bookmark?

There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites available so manually submitting to all of them would be extremely tedious, and absorb significant amounts of time you should be using to generate content. 

To pick my bookmark site shortlist I’ve decided to examine social bookmarking submission tools first, then choose sites that are compatible with those tools.  Additional criteria for selecting sites:

• Prioritise sites generating DoFollow links
• Prioritise sites with better PageRank and Alexa ratings, and have a sizeable and active user base
• Avoid sites that include adult material
• Avoid sites that appear overrun with advertising or are merely link exchange sites
• Avoid sites where technology focused bookmarks or English content will not be appropriate

The criteria are aligned with my previously stated goals, and are intended to increase bookmark relevance to the community while avoiding sites that would negatively impact SEO.

What Should I Bookmark?

There are three main items you should bookmark:

1. Your blog’s homepage
2. Permalinks for each blog post
3. Pages likely to attract visitors

Most popularity tracking tools consider a single URL rather than a complete site or directory tree.  These measures can have a knock-on effect (i.e. influence sites that may generate secondary traffic for your blog) so it is worth bookmarking all content that might lead a visitor to your website.

How Should I Bookmark?

There are three main approaches I could use here:

1. Automatic submission via software or a service
2. Assisted submission via web based services
3. Manually submission

Option 1 normally means buying software or paying for a service, which I’m not ready to do until I’m convinced the approach has merit.  Option 3 is impractical so I’ll be considering assisted submission sites during the remainder of this article.

After examining options suggested by Toprankblog, LiewCF and others, I’ve selected the following tools:

1. SocialPoster supports a variety of bookmarking sites, and lists the PageRank, Alexa rating, registration link and login links for each making it easier to choose appropriate sites.  Functionality is simple to use and effective..
   Note: The generator page still works after being saved by the Scrapbook Firefox extension, allowing you to save your preferred sites in your Scrapbook.
2. PostToaster supports an extensive range of bookmarking sites including a number not available on SocialPoster. It also provides a Bookmark and DoFollow selection options to simplify choosing appropriate sites.  This is a beta site and its functionality is less polished than SocialPoster, though it is effective as well.

Other tools considered:

• Socialmarker looked promising but didn’t have any compelling features or bookmark site choices beyond those listed above.  I’ll keep this as a backup in case either service is discontinued or encounters issues.
• OnlyWire is an automatic submission service (option 1 above) that I expected to become my first choice.  Unfortunately it is ineffective, with multiple attempts to use the tool failing to bookmark against any of my selected sites.
• Socializer only submits the Title and URL to each bookmarking site so it would require considerable manual effort to add tags and description information using this tool.  I need this information posted to meet all of my goals listed previously.

You still need to manually register for and sign into each bookmarking site to use the submission tools chosen so it pays to be selective.  Below is a table containing the available bookmarking sites I’ve chosen to use, along with which tools support them and whether they use NoFollow on their links (based upon advice from PostToaster).

Step 4 – Check Popularity

I’ve only started implementing active social bookmarking techniques today so will not be able to report on their impact until next week’s post.  The blog’s popularity hasn’t changed significantly in the past week, with any changes easily explained by organic growth and posting of new content.

Next Steps

Next steps are to continue active social bookmarking, monitor any progress and devise an approach for submitting posts to social news sites.  I hope to see you back here next week as we continue our experiment into getting a fledgling blog noticed!

Updates:

• Simpy has been removed from the bookmarking site selections because of site stability issues, its recent refusal to accept new bookmarks, and influx of marketing/spam.
• Please note that to gain the DoFollow links offered by various bookmarking sites you often have to adjust account settings to publish your links. Without making this setting change there will likely be no improvements to your site’s audience size.

In Can I Get My Blog Noticed Without Digg’s Help? I asked whether social sites were indeed the "silver bullet" to quickly gain a large and lasting audience for a fledgling blog.  To test the theory I proposed using my own blog to measure the impact produced by different techniques.  Today we’ll tackle the first part of the experiment – baseline current blog performance, and establish an approach for measuring any change in its popularity.

Step 1 – Measures

A quick search on Google turned up some useful articles on measuring blog performance.  The two I found most interesting were Tips For Measuring Success Of Your Blog (365 Days In Numbers) and Measuring your blog rank.  Based upon their advice I’ve decided to measure the following:

Site Metrics

• Contribution: The timing and raw metrics of my posts.  Measured by post quantity and word count.
• Conversations: The level of feedback per post.  Given I’m mostly planning to write technical how to and tip style articles I don’t really know how relevant this is, but I’ll capture it anyway.  Measure is average comments per post.

Site Analytics

• Readers: The number of unique readers for blog posts.  Measured via unique visitor counts, page views and feed subscriptions.

Social Feedback

• Blog Ranking: The relative standings of blogs as calculated by sites such as Technorati.  This will be used as a competitive measure of blog popularity.
• Bookmarking: The number of links to my blog from sites such as del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and furl.  This will be treated as a rough measure of quality, assuming readers only bookmark pages they believe worthy of being revisited.
• Readers: The number of unique readers for blog posts.  Alexa, Compete and similar sites extrapolate these figures from the web surfing habits of a representative sample of users.  I’m only monitoring this out of curiosity as I don’t believe it will be relevant for either my blog niche or location (they tend to be biased towards US readership)..

Site metrics will be gathered using the GeneralStats WordPress plugin.  The remaining measurement techniques will be discussed below, with thanks to suggestions from "6 key ways to measure your blog’s success" by Mashable. 

Site Analytics

Google Analytics is already installed so this will be the mainstay of the site analytics measurement.  In addition I will be trying two of Mashable’s suggestions:  QuantCast and Spotplex.  At this stage its unclear what advantages (if any) they will provide over my existing analytics tool but I’m willing to review them to find out.

Feedburner is also in use so RSS reader statistics will be gathered using this service.

Social Feedback

Due to the effort involved in individually capturing results from the numerous social sites I’ll be using, social feedback measurement will be via results obtained from aggregator services.  SocialMeter captures ratings from a selection of bookmark sites, social sites, and search engines and turns them into a single social rating,  popuri.us has some overlap with SocialMeter but includes other big players mentioned by Mashable so will be monitored as well.  The use of aggregator sites does mean I will only directly track some of the social sites I’m planning to use, but it should still provide a pretty good snapshot of social standing so I don’t see this being a problem.

Please note I will not be using the SocialMeter score itself.  Given my blog is starting up the Sphere ranking is significantly skewing the results with a "related posts" count, without reflecting blog popularity.  In fact I’d go so far as to say the score would be inversely proportional to popularity as a high Sphere ranking means I have lots of blogs to compete with, where as a lower Sphere score means better chances of my posts being found via a search engine.

Step 2 – Baseline

Time for a sobering look at the current blog position.  As this is only my 7th post I didn’t expect much and the results match expectations.   On the positive side the only way to go is up! 

Next Steps

Now I understand my current blog ranking and how I will track changes in its popularity, the next step is to submit posts to social bookmarking sites and track the impact to my blog’s standing.  I look forward to sharing those results with you next week!

Best practice for self-hosted blogs is to install your software in the site’s main directory instead of a subdirectory. It may seem a small issue but not doing so dilutes the value of your site identity and brand. After all a site called http://tech.niques.info/blog/ would indicate the blog is just a part of a larger site, not its primary focus. That would send mixed messages to your audience.

Unfortunately I was thinking about technical maintenance instead of branding when I originally setup this site and installed into a subdirectory. While WordPress gives you options to cloak this fact, I was beginning to find that some plugins didn’t cope well with the configuration. So I decided to “bite the bullet” and move the installation to the root directory for the site for technical as well as branding reasons..

A quick scouring of the net turned up madteckhead’s WordPress 2.2 Server Migration. While some other articles seemed to more closely mirror my problem I found them to be a little too simplistic and wasn’t confident they would work. So I’ll be describing how I adapted madteckhead’s instructions to safely migrate WordPress between directories on the same server.

The instructions will assume WordPress is installed immediately below the root directory for the website (e.g. in http://tech.niques.info/blog/), and you have write access to the directory containing the root directory for the website. The examples will use the following directory structure.

. /
./oldrootdir/
./oldrootdir/currentwordpressdir/
./newrootdir/
./oldrootdir-backup/

Instructions

Note: You will need to adjust the instructions to reflect the directory structure of your site.

1. ssh to your server and navigate to the parent directory for your WordPress installation. Backup the current installation files using a command like:

   cd ./oldrootdir/
tar -cvf ../wordpressbackup.tar currentwordpressdir/

2. Move up a directory level (i.e. to the directory above the website), then restore the files. Rename the resultant directory to be the new root directory for the website: cd ..
tar -xvf wordpressbackup.tar
mv currentwordpressdir/ newrootdir/
3. Copy the contents of the current website root directory across to the new directory. This ensures your .htaccess, robots.txt and other key files make it across to the new directory: cp oldrootdir/* newrootdir/
cp oldrootdir/.* newrootdir/
4. Change to the new website root directory. cd newrootdir/ The following line needs to be changed in the wp-config.php file to reflect the new database we will create: define('DB_NAME', 'newdatabasename'); // The name of the database
5. Log into phpMyAdmin for your database server. Select the Export option, ensure the current WordPress database is selected and that the export uses the SQL format, then export the database to a file. For safety’s sake I would recommend that you do not use the “Add DROP DATABASE” option.
6. Take a copy of the export file. Using your favourite text editor, you will need to find and replace a number of items in the file:
   

   Reason	Old Value	New Value
   Create a new database	CREATE DATABASE `olddatabasename’`	CREATE DATABASE `’newdatabasename’`
   Change directory	server/currentwordpressdir/	server/
   Update Blog Address option	’siteurl’, ‘http://server/currentwordpressdir	’siteurl’, ‘http://server’

   If you didn’t use the WordPress Blog Address option then you can skip the last change above.

7. In phpMyAdmin go back to the home page and select the Import option. Import the file you have just edited and it will create the new database referred to in step 4), and populate it with your current WordPress data.
8. Move up a directory level (i.e. to the parent directory for the website), then switch the swap the old and new versions of the website: cd ..
mv oldrootdir/ oldrootdir-backup/
mv newrootdir/ oldrootdir/
9. Test you blog. Make sure that:
   • Your homepage functions
   • Individual posts display correctly, including the pictures
   • Individual pages display correctly, including the pictures
   • RSS feeds are valid
   • Admin pages are accessible

   When testing pay particular attention to any plugins that rewrite URLs to make sure they are still operating OK.

10. If something is broken normal troubleshooting rules apply. Slowly disable extensions in the impacted area until things are working again, then either update the configuration for the plugin or widget, reinstall it, or find an alternative that does work. In my case my sidebar died, but after removing widgets one at a time I discovered the “Text 1″ widget was the culprit. Removing the widget then adding it again resolved the problem.

Note: If you encounter an issue you are unable to resolve, reversing the changes made in step 8 will restore your previous installation to working order,

Once you have successfully moved your WordPress installation there are a couple of other items you will need to consider:

• If you have a robots.txt file you will need to confirm it is still valid given the changed website layout Google Webmaster Tools can help you with this.
• If you did not use the WordPress Blog Address option to hide the previous location of your installation, your permalink structure will be broken by this move. You can either try Scott Yang’s Permalink Redirect plugin to redirect requests from the old Permalink structure, update your Permalink structure to reflect the old location of your archives, or manually update your .htaccess file to redirect old permalink requests to the new location.

There have been other posts describing how to move WordPress between directories but these tend to be destructive processes that are difficult to back out if things go wrong.

What should part time bloggers do to get some exposure? How can we gain new readers when no-one knows we exist? Search Engine Optimisation of our blogs is crucial, but getting noticed this way relies upon the benevolence of Google and other major search engines and there is only so much you can do to influence how and when they index your site. If you are new to the game, chances are hundreds of search results will be ahead of you and most won’t be patient enough to find your nuggets of wisdom amongst all of the options available.

Social sites are seen by many as the “silver bullet” that can help your blog achieve fame and glory without first having to serve your time developing an extensive archive of content, or relationships with your fellow bloggers to get those valuable offsite links. Unfortunately it appears that one of the better known “silver bullets” – Digg – might be the wrong calibre for people like myself. In Do Small Bloggers Have A Chance With Digg?, Steven states:

The Digg voting system is intended to allow the most popular stories to get the most exposure and to prevent users from gaming the system. But one of the results of this system is that it heavily favors blogs and websites with huge audiences while those with smaller audiences are left with much more difficult odds of gaining exposure from Digg.

He also mentions that Digg traffic tends to be transitory and won’t necessarily increase your readership longer term. There are some suggestions for increasing the Digg rates of your posts, but all in all it paints a pretty bleak picture for us part-time bloggers.

Some of Steven’s readers suggest alternatives to Digg they believe work around these issues: Thoof, Mixx, Reddit, Plime and Stumble Upon. They might all be great options but the question still remains: will these or other social sites really help small blogs get exposure and attract new and lasting readership?

To answer my own question I’m going to conduct an experiment. I plan to:

1. Establish a baseline: Determine the best way to establish and track my blog’s popularity during the experiment.
2. Submit to social bookmarking sites: Simultaneously submit to a group of social bookmarking sites and monitor the resultant traffic
3. Submit to social blog watching sites: Simultaneously submit to a group of social blog watching sites and monitor the resultant traffic.
4. Review the results: Analyse the changes in traffic patterns.

At each stage I will choose the sites to be evaluated from Steven’s reader suggestions, the options provided by my AddThis plugin, and the top 20 hits returned from Google. While this won’t be the most rigorous scientific experiment ever performed, as I will continue posting throughout and the results won’t be statistically significant, it should be indicative of what a part time blogger can expect by using these tools.

Hopefully the results will help us part-timers determine how best to promote the content we are working so hard to produce! Please leave a comment it there is anything I can change to make the experiment more relevant to you.