July 7, 2010
A friend recently asked about the Women at Home University website. (For those of you who are not familiar, WAHU is not an actual, degree-granting university, but a suggested list of resources for learning about a wide variety of home and family skills.) When I went to look it back up, I discovered that the site is apparently defunct – but I was able to find it using one of my favorite fall-back tools: the internet archive.
It’s been around for long enough that I guess I figured everyone knew about it, but apparently not everyone does, so let me share this wonderful tool with you. 
The internet archive is a project that seeks to archive every page on the internet. (You can opt out if you object, but this is such an amazing public service that I can’t imagine why you would want to unless the content of your site is private or restricted in some way. They don’t take credit for your content – just save a “snapshot” of it – and as far as I’m aware, they don’t make money off of it or anything. It’s just like having a copy of an out-of-print book stored in a library.) What this means is that when you mourn the loss of that great, informative site, you can take heart – you may still be able to scrounge up the information.
Head over to the internet archive at www.archive.org. Type the address of the defunct website into the “wayback machine” search box, and see what comes up. Chances are, there’s an archived copy of the page available. Now, site functionality (forms and other interactive features) will not be available, and images are hit-or-miss. But I think I’ve always found the basic information preserved intact.
(Go ahead and try it out. Look up www.womenathomeuniversity.org.) The internet archive definitely works for me!
May 19, 2010
I mentioned in a recent post that having important keywords in your domain name can help with search engine ranking. I also mentioned that this is not the only thing. For instance, when searching for best antiwrinkle eye cream, www.bestantiwrinkleeyecream.org doesn’t even show up on the first page of results! (Yes, that is an actual site. No, I have no idea why they would choose a .org domain.) Content is still king.
So…what would you like to see here? Which posts are your favorites? Do you have any burning questions about me and/or my household? When you read the Titus 2 Homemaker blog, what do you wonder about?
May 17, 2010
Have any of you reading been to a blogging conference before? Have you had sponsors? I’m curious about alternative/”specific” sponsorships – of, say, a camera, a laptop computer, or clothing. Things one would use at a conference, rather than general sponsorship of attendance. If you’ve done something like this, how did it come about? Did they approach you? Or did you think, “I wonder if I could get sponsored for the use of a Canon camera during the conference,” and write and ask? I don’t need any of these things – I will be doing well just get there – but I am curious about how this stuff works.
May 16, 2010
I should probably start by clarifying that this post is not about all paid blogging in any of its forms; rather, it’s about one particular “style” of paid blogging that I have been doing with one particular company. The way this works, I get paid on a per-post basis to insert a “context link” into one of my posts. I don’t have to write about anything in particular; I just have to use the keyword phrase given and link it to the URL given. So “golf clothing” could just be a phrase used in passing in a fashion post, for instance.
Pros
- The money. I would be lying if I said this wasn’t a factor. (Duh. It’s paid blogging.) I am already posting, so getting paid for inserting a link is a nice perk. And it has been a pretty steady, dependable income.
- Creative prompts. Having a specific keyword phrase to use stretches my creativity, as I have to figure out how to fit that phrase into what I’m writing. (Sometimes it’s easier than others.)
- Encouragement to post. If I have to write a post, I have to write a post. It keeps me writing.
Cons
- I can’t choose which assignments I take; it’s all-or-nothing. (On rare occasions, if something is truly offensive, I can ask that it be removed from my account, but I can’t just do the ones I like and skip the others.)
- In-post disclosures aren’t permitted. My site disclosure makes clear that I do these links, but I can’t spell out for you which links are the paid ones.
- Encouragement to post. Just because I can write doesn’t necessarily mean I have something to say worth saying. Sometimes, maybe I should just stay quiet.
And Why I’m Quitting
The balance of pros to cons here is influenced greatly by the quality of keyword phrases and links I’m given. As long as they’re pretty good, then it isn’t that big a deal that I have to do them all and can’t tell you, my readers, which specific links are which. But when the overall quality of links and keyword phrases deteriorates, the balance starts to visibly shift in the other direction. Unfortunately, I feel that the overall quality of the links is getting more and more what I call “spammy.” (Besides, weight loss links figure in heavily anymore, and how many ways are there of working things like “diet pills that work” naturally into posts on a blog where the owner is attempting to gain weight? It’s getting harder and harder to write these posts without sounding like an advertisement!)
So, I’m quitting. I want you to be able to know that when you see a link in one of my posts, it’s there because I hand-picked it. (Or, in the case of a review post or something, it’s obviously a link to the product being reviewed.) And I’m tired of seeing these “spammy” phrases on my blog. (In the beginning, they were fairly rare, with more “normal” phrases being, well, normal.) I do have a stack of assignments already in my queue that I will complete over the next week or so, but after that, these are gone.
(I may be willing to accept paid links in the future on an occasional, assignment-by-assignment basis, but not this all-or-nothing stuff, and only if I can clearly disclose that the post contains paid links.)
Thanks for bearing with me while I finish out this assignment queue, and please don’t leave me in the meantime!
April 29, 2010
I talked the other day about naming a blog or product. Going back to this issue of naming, consider the matter of domain names. A great domain name can be a huge boon to your traffic. See, when search engines sort their entries, their aim is to provide the most relevant results possible to the end user. Their algorithms take a number of factors into account, including things like how many other pages link to that site, and how high-ranked those sites are (the ones linking in). (The thinking is that if a lot of good sites are linking to it, it is probably also a good site.) One big factor, though, is a site’s domain name.
Google, Yahoo, and the others all assume that, for instance, insurancespecialists.com is going to be about insurance. So it should be highly relevant to people searching for insurance. Titus2homemaker.com should be very relevant to those searching for “titus 2 homemaker” (I’m the number one result.) or “titus 2″ “homemaker” (again, number one). So, if you can use one or more of your primary keywords in your domain name, that will give you an automatic boost in the search engines. (Obviously, though, use good judgment. It’s probably better to have a non-keyword domain name that fits than a domain name that’s a random string of keywords. Be sure it makes sense!)
Now, the hard work is still to come. I’m that number one result for those terms in the search engines, but I have a pretty high bounce rate. 
If you want to keep your traffic, it’s still necessary to produce good content that’s what people are looking for and, apparently, I’m not very good at that (yet!).
If you’ve had a blog for a while, and it’s growing steadily, I probably wouldn’t recommend suddenly renaming everything. But if you’re just getting started, that’s another little tip to keep in mind as you plan your site.
(reading chronologically)
