Since I started this blog, many useful tools have been born: Entrecard, Spottt, BlogRush….. Now it is the time of Plurk!

What is Plurk?

Well Plurk is a pretty tool similar to Twitter. It is a site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life, in a dynamic screen where you can see every event posted by your friends. So as you can imagine, it is a great tool to expand your network, make more friends and get new readers!

I signed up two days ago, and I have received hundred friendship requests. Actually, I have 209 people who follow my events, making it a great broadcasting tool for bloggers.

Why to Use It?

When someone invited me to this new community, I reject the invitation. I thought that it was a totally waste of time, but after a minutes I reconsidered the idea and I visited the link. I liked how it looks and I could appreciated the potential for us, the bloggers! So, I signed up, receiving instantaneously several friend requests ( of course, I shared my profile’s link through twitter ).

the following one is a little list of reasons you should use Plurk:

• It Works As A Broadcasting Station: Due to the big amount of people in this community, it is perfect to broadcast your blog events. It’s perfect to promote a contest, polls, new posts and these kind of things.
• Brand Extender: As a good blogger, you need to expand your brand if you want to be easily recognizable in the web. By signing up in Plurk, your name will be spread between many people, who probably will be bloggers or internet marketers. In conclusion, it’s perfect to make new partnerships.
• Traffic Maker: For the same reasons commented above, it can be a new source of traffic. I have received some emails from people congratulating me for my blog, and then they made a little reference telling me that they saw my profile at Plurk. It works? I think so!

Basically, Plurk is a new social network which you can extend your brand through other bloggers, getting more traffic to your blog, increasing your readers and subscribers.

Add me at Plurk!
Do you haven’t an account? Sign up here

What do you think about Plurk? Share your opinions or tips here to feed this community…. By the way, don’t forget to participate in the Poll, which you can find in the sidebar, bellow the Skribit widget.

Bye Bye!

Yesterday I noticed my I went from 80k to 230k in Alexa, how was that possible? Well, I went to alexa.com and effectively, something has changed.

But these new rankings are better than the old ones? I think nobody can answer that question, because for someone, “better” can be to have a higher rank to its site. But for the people who develop Alexa Rankings, the best is to give us the most accurate information.

See image in its original size

They have optimized their code to provide to all internet community, the best rankings they can give. This don’t want to say that your old ranking was bad, it was just different. In my case, my ranking dropped from 80k to 230k, but I have not bad feelings about that. In fact, I have read that many rankings (specially of blogs) has decreased, but that is because their new algorithm.

For the new code, now they aggregate data from multiple sources, to give us a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

With this change, there are another changes you should know. For example, now you can only see the last 9 months data, but that’s for a mistake that they are working to fix in the next weeks. In their blog, they said they going to add new features in the coming weeks and months, but they keep them in secret.

What do you think about the new ranking? For me it is ok, you know I don’t really care about the rankings…

Hello bloggers, I have something for you. This morning I have found a new site which brings free blog promotion, with a voting system where you can submit your posts and start climbing to reach the top.

Blogsvine, in addition to provide you the resources to promote your blog, also it brings free traffic for blogs. You know how work this type of services, at the beginning they are not so popular, but after a time, they are a big community with several members. This mean the more people in the community, the more will be the traffic that you will get from it.

Although Blogsvine still being beta, it provides a good platform which you can interact with the other members of the community.

You can use this service to link the content that really matters to the other members. There is several information out there, and you don’t have all day to find the good stuff because many people work, study or simply don’t waste all their time blogging and researching the web . With categories from TV/Movies to Health, at Blogsvine you can add and share all these useful stuff to the network in the right place.

WordPress Support

Also, they provide support for wordpress blogs with their vote button plugin, which you can submit/rate any post externally.

Blogsvine could be another Digg or Mixx, who knows? You could try it and see how it works. Anyways, surely it will give you a good amount traffic and backlinks .

Hey bloggers, everyday I check my blog stats with Google Analytics, may be you do it with SiteMeter, both are pretty good. Both give you stats about your unique visitors, where they came from, which operative system they use etc etc… In this entry I’ll give you some webtools which you can not even check your main stats, also you could check your alexa rank, google page rank, amount of backlinks and more useful stuff.

Lastly I was participating on blogcatalog discussions and I found some useful tools. Due to this I was investigating on google for more tools like which I found, and I could make a little compilation, I hope you like :

• iWebTool: I found this service very useful, it provides you a lot of tools to check your website ranking, backlinks and others. Although this tools are very useful, are not too accurate. Tools particularly those which give ranking will usually provide different results than when you check yourself. This is because the server where the tool retrieves the data from is different to the server you retrieve the date from. Therefore, when the tool extracts the data, it will be different to when you check yourself. However, those tools are very good, check them for yourself .

Some features of iWebTool

• Xinu: This is another website which provide us a statistics about PageRank, Indexed Pages from the different search engines and backlinks from the different social networks. The difference with iWebTools is that this site provides you all those numbers at the same time, you only need to enter your url and it will give you all the data it can give you. Instead in iWebTools, all those tools are separated.

• GoingUp: I really like this one, if you’re interested in how your site is performing and how good your SEO efforts are, GoingUp! is for you. GoingUp! offers a wealth of information about your site from visitor tracking to SEO tools, they can help you to achieve great results by giving you cool stuff to track and manage your websites. This service is very similar to Google Analytics, I really recommend it!

• iWebTrack: with this you can track and monitor the activities of every individual visitor to your website, web statistics, visitor system information, advertising campaigns, conversion tracking, and graphical statistics with the fastest growing web analytics provider in North America and the U.K. Knowing what your web page statistics are is the key to successful online business. This service looks great but is not free =(, so you check your demo and then you can try their service 30 days Trial, then you need to pay, I don’t know how many because I don’t use it and I’m not interested on it, I think that with Goingup!, Site Meter and Google Analytics you can know everything you want for free .

Well my friends, you have four webmaster tools to enjoy and have fun , with them you can see all your data in the same place, for example alexa rank, technorati rank, backlinks… I found it very useful because you don’t need to load all those site individually to check your data , what do you think?

Happy blogging! and don’t forget to check my birthday contest .

Hey people, for those who follow me through my feed via email, probably noticed at the end of each post a line talking about my birthday contest. This is possible thanks a wordpress plugin called RSS Footer, which let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, but you can edit this with any html code:

How this plugin will help you to monetize your blog?

This plugin is very useful to add a copyright to your feed, also may be to do a contest, you only need to use your imagination to find the way to use it. Thinking on all the possibilities, I found it useful to monetize your blog. How? well you could sell a line at the end of your RSS Feed promoting a website or service by a low cost. Despite the fact that too many people ( all your subscribers ) will read this promotion on every post from your feed, this is something that can’t be expensive for 3 reasons:

1. Is not visible for everyone: unless you be John Chow or Darren Rowse, a handful of your readers will see the promotion instead the totality of your visitors. In my case, about 100 persons will see it daily vs 15k or 40k of Chow and Rowse respectively.
2. It’s just a line: this is a little text backlinking to other website, you can’t charge a lot for it. Unless you place a horizontal banner, you can’t charge more than a text link in your blog.
3. There’s no reason three, it’s just cheap!

Ok once you know how to monetize your blog with an RSS feed line, you need the plugin right? To install it, just download the plugin zip file, unzip it and upload the rss-footer.php file to your plugins folder. Then, go to the plugins panel and enable it, it’s quite simple and it has no complications.

Pinging is a very important action that every blogger should do everyday. Refreshing the concept of ping provided in the last post, ping is a computer’s network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network. When you ping a service, it means that you are sending a signal and it will answer with a “pong”, taking a look on your blog for new content and update it in the server.

As you can see, pinging is very important for us, the bloggers. With this tool you can refresh your content or feed across the web: search engines, technorati, social media networks and may be another service like web profiles, and you can use it to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. This gives you a big SEO advantage, it ensures that your content will be seen immediately by search engines and indexed quickly. This can help you to rank your posts for less-competitive keywords.

How To Ping ?

Pinging your blog is a really easy task and you can do it in different ways. When I started blogging the past year, I used the service provided by Ping-o-Matic!. It lets you ping your blog on many services like Technorati, Weblogs, FeedBurner, Blogrolling etc etc… You just need to put your blog URL and feed URL (optional), check the services which you want to ping and press the ping button. Then, Ping-o-Matic will send pings to all those services and your blog/feed content will be updated instantaneously on these sites!

That is a good way to do it, but it is boring because it’s manual. For our luck, there is a way to do it automatically with wordpress ( I’m don’t know about blogger or other platforms but probably is something similar ). WordPress automatically notifies to all those popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now, people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!

WordPress makes easy the manual task of checking all your services at ping-o-matic, by listing Ping-O-Matic’s server (rpc.pingomatic.com) by default. All you need to do is sit back and let it work for you!

Where to add or remove pings on wordpress?

By following this steps you will be able to add or remove pings to your wordpress blog:

1. Log in to your WordPress weblog.
2. Select “Options” from the top menu.
3. 
4. Select “Writing” from the sub-menu.
5. The last option on the page is “Update Services.” You will see a text box with probably the ping-o-matic ping by default "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping", but you can add more pings if you want.

Is recommendable to ping each service separately instead using Ping-o-Matic (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) ping. For example, I recommend you to ping Technorati directly with every new post and update, instead waiting for ping-o-matic to ping our blog. The following is a list of english blog pinging services:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

If you use one of thus services, place the related link into your Update Services text box to ping automatically your blog on it . If you are not using wordpress as blog platform, search in your panel of a pinging tool, I pretty sure it must be there, the only thing that you need to do is to add the url of your service and start to ping your blog across the web!.