The Blogging Technique That No Marketers Talk About

I want to thank Pawan Agrawal for giving successful bloggers like myself to share with you successful blogging techniques you can apply to your benefit. I’ve enjoyed reading the other posts while I can’t wait to share with you my personal experience.

Take a look at my monthly average traffic volume for one of my Internet Marketing sites.

Looking back at the year 2008, I realize Web 2.0 was very much in its infancy and defined mainly by MySpace and Facebook. By this year, Web 2.0 properties have truly blossomed and through them I found a way to create a bigger impact with blogging. I must credit the persistent daily increase in traffic to content propagation via a micro-blogging/blogging combo strategy.

One aspect of blogging is blog submission; that goes without saying. Have you heard of crossblogging or crossposting? With the advent of Web 2.0 community sites, it is getting popular now. The tantalizing proposal is to duplicate your blog or microblog posts across as many blogging platforms as possible for the purposes of search indexing and increased readership among fellow community members, but it doesn’t make sense to do it manually by logging in and out one site after another. The crossblogging idea I’m referring here works on autopilot, which means the moment you publish something in your WordPress blog, it immediately appears in another without you having to login to this other blog.

It used to be that you can’t crosspost to as many platforms as possible due to legality, proprietary and technological issues, but the barriers are coming down. I’m going to cut to the chase and lay out step-by-step what you need to do immediately, but I’ll assume that you, the reader, have a WordPress blog. This is our starting point.

1. Create accounts and set up blogs in Multiply, Windows Live, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox, Blogger and Twitxr (microblog platform).

2. If there are options for you to import earlier blog posts, go ahead and backup your WordPress posts and restore them in your new blogs.

3. You need to install and activate crossposting plugins to link up your WordPress blog to the mirror blogs. These are:

a. Live Space Sync (Windows Live Space crossposter)

b. Live+Press For WordPress (LiveJournal crossposter)

c. CrossPress (crosspost via e-mail)

4. Enable crossposting in Multiply in this Posting Options page inside your account. You can also setup a post-via-email address here. Visualize that your blog posts are replicated from WordPress to LiveJournal to Multiply.

5. Setup more post-via-email addresses in Vox, Blogger, Twitxr. Fill in your addresses in the CrossPress plugin. For Multiply, if you find there are duplicate posts due to both crossposting and post-via-email enabled, disable one of them.

6. Sign up with Ping.fm and Hellotxt and hook up as many social networks to them as possible. Sign up with HelloTxtFeed and Twitterfeed. From Ping.fm, you can crosspost your microposts (or tweets). In Hellotxt, go to “Settings” → “Tools & API” and enable HelloTxtFeed and TwitterFeed. Fill your WordPress feed in HelloTxtFeed. In Twitterfeed, link up your feed to Twitter, identi.ca, Ping.fm and Hellotxt. Note that Ping.fm forwards your feed to Xanga. There’s also a post-via-email option in Hellotxt.

7. Optional: Ping.fm does not allow you to schedule your tweets, but you can do this through using Hootsuite. Link up Ping.fm from inside your Hootsuite account.

8. By now you should be able to get the hang of how your blog feed is being moved around through the various sites, both in direct and indirect manners to get the maximum possible exposure for your posts. Give yourself 3 days to a week to track whether or not the posts are getting published. Again, disable options to leave just one to prevent duplicates in a platform. 2 major drawbacks I found are that crossposted posts lose their format and become one big continuous line as compared to your original WordPress posts. Also, scheduled future posts may not get published.

9. Bonus step: “You Say Too” is a social network where you not only submit your blog feed for display, you can also refer a friend and get an additional 15% from his AdSense views and 10% more from his referred users. Yup, the site asks for your AdSense and Amazon affiliate IDs for revenue sharing purpose.

Also read this article for more than 30 WordPress plugins to get more blog readers. Current stand-alone Vox, Xanga and MySpace crossposters can’t work anymore.

There’s another solution to transplant your posts from WordPress to Blogger in the form of a software that imports your backed up XML file to your Blogger blog very quickly.

Look at the Blogger version of the Internet Mastery Center Blog. I have more than 1,000 posts to date. You wouldn’t think I have the luxury of time to manually post twice for each article, would you? And yet the blog got its first visitor on day 3 or 4.

Download Blogsync and read the details of the software here. Blogsync self-runs straight from file and needs no installation, but it needs to have Java Development Kit installed. I have tested that Java Runtime Environment works as well. You can download either JDK or JRE here.

The file to execute Blogsync is run.bat. When you open it in Notepad, it shows:

set CP=./build/blogsync.jar;./lib/ws-commons-util-1.0.1.jar;./lib/xmlrpc-client-3.0.jar;./lib/gdata-client-1.0.jar;./lib/xmlrpc-common-3.0.jar
rem set the parameters below and run now.
set path=e:/jdk1.5.0/bin
java -cp %CP% org.easter.blogsync.BlogSync

Depending on where you install your Java files, edit your correct path to their ‘/bin’ subdirectory. Save run.bat and run it.

You’ll find there are 2 ways to import your posts, and I still have problems reading directly from my WordPress blog. So I do an export from WordPress which generates an XML file and load it into Blogsync. You must know that Blogger publishes a maximum of 50 posts in 24 hours, so you’ve to time your imports to Blogger on a day-by-day basis. As you do so, keep track of the post IDs.

Blogsync can’t work properly if the export file is too large (above 8 MB). Use the WPSplitter program to split your exported file.

Remember that the whole purpose of crossblogging must come to achieve the end in mind; that is more visitors and sales conversion. No one is supposed to become more techie than is necessary. Have fun!

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com