The Real Ryan J. Parker

If you require that your reader’s login to comment on your blog then you might be missing out on valuable discussion.

As a reader, it’s a real pain when I want to leave a comment, but instead I’m presented with a You must be logged in to comment message.

I never quite realized how much of a pain this is when I started my sports handicapping blog in December of 2005, but I required that readers login to comment because of all the spam comments I was receiving (and deleting).

Since that time, however, I’ve come to know and love the power of Akismet for catching comment spam, and when you combine Akismet with the WordPress option to moderate any comments with links in them, you’re not likely to see any spam comments make it through with you seeing them first.

So if you require your readers login to comment, why exactly are you doing it? Are you hoping for little to no discussion?

Thankfully I don’t run into this too much, but while trying to comment on the AuctionAds blog about their new window targeting option I had to go through the mind numbing process of registering for an account just so I could leave a comment.

Don’t do that to your readers. Who knows how much valuable conversation you’re missing.

Tags: wordpress, require login to comment

Every couple of weeks (or so it seems) I come across a blog that mentions the drawbacks of showing your FeedBurner FeedCount before you have a large number of subscribers.

I most recently came across this topic at JohnTP.com and HarpzOn.com, and both of these websites agree with the popular consensus that showing your FeedBurner FeedCount when you’ve got few subscribers actually hurts you.

I don’t know about you, but I can only respond to this notion with:

Are You Kidding Me?

I fully agree with the idea that we live in a me too society, and that by showing you have a large number of subscribers a reader is more likely to subscribe to your feed based on this number alone (this is one of the reasons why I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of Copyblogger sooner).

I don’t, however, buy into the notion that showing your FeedCount when you’ve got a small number of readers will actually hinder your efforts in obtaining subscribers.

If someone doesn’t want to subscribe because I’ve only got 30 or so subscribers then this blog probably isn’t for them. I have subscribed to plenty of small blogs because of their content, not the size of their ego (I mean FeedCount).

This now leads me to the point of this post: Why do you show your FeedBurner FeedCount?

I show my FeedCount because I like giving everyone a rough idea as to how many subscribers I’ve got. When I say everyone I include myself, as I hate having to login to FeedBurner to see this stat.

Why do you show your FeedCount? Do you think that having a small FeedCount is hurting your efforts in obtaining subscribers?

Tags: feedburner, feedcount, hurts, blog, are you kidding me?

If you’re looking to get content ideas for your website consider using SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool as a starting point.

If you’re not familiar with this tool, it provides a list of related keyword phrases to a keyword phrase you enter, and its primary target is for people trying to find keyword phrases to use in a PPC advertising campaign.

PPC advertising campaigns, however, aren’t the only applications this tool can be used for. By entering your own website’s keyword phrases you can find other keyword phrases people are searching for that will help you come up with content ideas that might be beneficial to have on your website.

Depending on how competitive the market is for some of the keyword phrases, you can potentially attract a lot of free traffic if you can fill a void in information people are looking for.

I’ve used this tool to add to my roadmap for implementing more related content at Which Team Wins?, as I’m currently in a competitive keyword nightmare. Adding some not so competitive content that people are looking for should help the website from a SEO perspective.

I’m interested in hearing if anyone else has had much success using a keyword suggestion tool like this one to come up with content ideas for your website, and I’m also interested in hearing about any success you may have found with it.

Tags: seo book, keyword suggestion tool, content ideas

I’m going to share with you something I do when working on my websites that I hope you can apply to your own website development and growth.

This isn’t some special website design or a neat coding trick, but rather it’s a way of looking at the hard work you’re doing and making sure it’s going to prove worthwhile over the long haul.

All you have to do is ask yourself this simple question when building new content for your website: Is this something that’s unique?

If you answer yes to this question then your organic growth will be much better than if you answer no.

If you’ve ever tried to build a website in a highly competitive market then you know it’s very hard to do without spending a lot of money to drive traffic to your website. These are the types of websites that typically answer no to this question, and they’re hard to organically build a sound user base.

You can use this question to help you focus on the pieces of your website in which you answer yes to. There will be times in which you need to incorporate some necessary pieces that aren’t unique, but by focusing on the unique pieces you can expect your website to grow much faster than it would otherwise.

A majority of people on the web visit your website for the information it provides, and if you don’t have something unique then they’ll find their way to someone else’s website.

This is something that shows itself in two websites I’m currently developing:

The first website, Which Team Wins?, does not get much organic traffic at the moment because a majority of the content I have on the website isn’t all that unique. This will change as I build something worth visiting, but if you’ve got a website that requires you to lay a foundation without unique content then to get traffic in the early stages you’ll need to advertise because not much organic traffic will be sent your way.

The second website, Probability Calculators, isn’t as old, and it doesn’t have any working probability calculators at the moment. It does, however, get three times the organic traffic that Which Team Wins? does. Why? Because the content is unique.

The same holds true for other websites I work on, and I’m sure it does for your websites, too.

If you’re stuck in a rut and are running out of ideas as to how you can generate traffic to your website then try coming up with some content and see if they pass the Is this something that’s unique? test. If they do then build them in and patiently wait as the organic traffic slowly starts to build!

When I made my first post about Kontera, Why Are You Not Using Kontera?, some of you asked about how to customize the ads.

We all want to know how to limit (or increase) the number of in-text links for Kontera places inside of your content, how to block specific keywords from being used as advertisements, and how to block specific advertisers from showing up on your website.

The Answer

I wish there was an easier way to do these things, but the reality is that the answer to all of these questions lies in the Kontera Support Group, also known as support at kontera dot com. They promise to take care of your needs, but you’ve got to e-mail them.

This is where Kontera has yet to catch up with their sudden growth, and by growth I mean the large influx of new, although small, publishers. When dealing with a set of large websites I imagine these types of requests were few and far between. Now, however, they’re going to have to change their game if they expect to keep up.

I suggest you contact Kontera and urge them to implement a way for the publisher to modify this configuration at his or her discretion. I doubt this will come anytime soon, but if enough new publishers request these features then Kontera is likely to get the hint.

If you’ve had success (or failure) contacting Kontera support to customize your website I’d like to hear about your experience.

Tags: kontera, support, limit links, block keywords, block advertisers