How To Let Blog Visitors Social Bookmark Your Page

Is your blogger gaining in popularity? Have your happy readers help you back!

Do you have comments thanking you for your help? Great time to let commenters know that they can bookmark the page with their favorite bookmarking services. Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon are some of my favorites.

I have been using Onlywire bookmarking button on some of my blogs. This button is a bit overwhelmingly complicated so I decided to standardize on AddThis.com for my blogs. AddThis claim to be the one of the most popular bookmarking and sharing service on the net. I'm sure you must have seen their button in many places.

You will see the AddThis button on the bottom of this post. To see if this is something you want to add to your blog, try it out right now!

Locate the Bookmark button on the bottom of this post, hover over it, and select your favorite bookmarking service. Click! It is not as simple as bookmarking with your browser, is it!

However, it works and it will increase the visibility of your blog, both through referrals and through higher search engine rankings.

AddThis has made it very simple to include their bottom in various publishing media. Login or register at AddThis.com. For blogger, you will have two options.

First, include AddThis button as an element in your sidebar. That one is straightforward and highly automatized as you will see.

I recommend the second option. Here, add AddThis button on the bottom of each of your blog posts. To do so, you must add the button script as directed. To find the place they refer you to in your blogger template, go to Customize/Layout/Edit Html. You must select "Expand Widgets Templates". Use Ctrl-F or find to locate the <div class='post-footer'> tag as directed by AddThis. Insert the code.

You're done!

From now on just gently remind your happy commenters to bookmark the page they found useful.

What do you say? What bookmarking service do you use on your blog? Have you seen increase in traffic since you have implemented it? Have you seen referrals from social bookmarking sites? Let me know, please comment below!

Why You Need to Start Multiple Business Blogs?

Leaving a comment on someone's blog the other day I read another commenter write "I need to get back to my blogs now". I was taken aback a bit. A stay at home mom running multiple blogs? Hmmm.

If you are serious about making money with your business blog you need to run multiple business blogs.

There are opposing opinions out in the blogosphere about starting multiple business blogs. Some bloggers cautiously encourage starting several blogs and spreading the start dates out in time.

I'd say, forget cautiously. Forget spreading them out in time. Start a new business blog when you feel inspired. Don't let anyone tell you you'd spread yourself thin. When you start multiple business blogs you will find that, depending on the topic you were inspired to pick, each blog will have a completely different audience. You will be in for surprises. You'll find it easy to drive scores of new targeted visitor to one blog from day one through straight referrals from forums and blog comments. The other blog will do better with search engines, and build up audience over time. You will find that the best marketing approach will depend on the blog.

This is what I found with two of my new blogs. Another big difference was in monetization. Take google adsense's eCPM. eCPM stands for effective cost per thousand impressions. What represents cost to Google represents revenue for your blog. I found eCPM differed by more than a factor of 10, ranging from $0.5 on the low end to $11.00 on the high end. Big difference in eCPM. Big surprise.


You'll learn a lot running multiple blogs.

True, there is more management involved with starting a new blog. You need to tweak with the blog to make it user friendly, navigable. You need to market it to drive targeted traffic. You need to make it dofollow, of course. You need to encourage and reward commenting. These tweaks take some time.

However, learning how to do a certain tweak with one blog will help you do the same tweak for the next blog in half the time. Bringing in startup traffic for blog #2 will take much less time than for blog #1.

Depending on whether you blog one hour a day or 10 hours a day, you won't be able to keep up with all the blogs all the time. You won't be able to keep in touch with your audience for a while.

Don't worry, your blog audience, commentators, subscribers, even new visitors would rather not hear from you than get an uninspired piece of information from you. Writing inspired blog posts beats posting frequently. Plus, neglecting a single blog for a while has unintended advantages. You will see what the long-term residual influx of new visitors from forums, blog posts, and search engines. More on that in a future post on keeping track of your visitors with google analytics or similar services. When you leave a blog alone for a while, make sure you continue collecting the visitor information!

It turns out many successful bloggers run several blogs simultaneously. I'll write sometime about techniques to make operating several blogs more time effective such as Firefox Profiles, separate email accounts and the like.

Do you run multiple blogs? If you do, what were the surprising differences you found in running them? Comment ahead!