Trip Around the Blogosphere - May 19, 2008

I’m a day late on the Trip because I decided to spend yesterday completely unplugged. Well, except for a bit of TV. Mostly I just read and painted and it was great. Here are just a few of my favorites posts from around the blogosphere last week.

• Mark from 45n5 has a great overview (both video and text version - but the video is definitely worth watching) of staple traffic-building methods. There’s nothing new here, but there might be something you forgot about or haven’t been using lately. Just remember that with traffic tactics, like income streams, the more you have the more you’ll get.
• This week Pawan Agrawal from MaxBlogPress released the SEO Post Link Wordpress Plug-In. This nifty (and free!) little tool takes all the annoying work out of optimizing your Wordpress post slugs for the search engines. For those of you who aren’t sure what I am talking about, the post slug is the part of the URL created by Wordpress based on the title of your blog post. These slugs can often get very long and be full of useless words. The SEO Post Link plug-in will remove unecessary words and characters, let you set a specific length and essentially just make the search engines much more inclined to gobble up your posts.
• Okay, this is another link from Mark. He has had some really killer content lately so if you aren’t a subscriber you ought to be. In this video (and accompanying text), Mark explains a new way to get more pages in the google index. This is something that Google discussed themselves recently, but Mark really zeroes in on the possibilities of this new development.
• I’m not a man, but I do have an interest in both gender identity issues and Steve Pavlina’s blog. This week he wrote a post with some thoughts on How to be a Man. Steve asks: “How can men consciously express their masculinity without becoming cold or closed-hearted on the one hand… or wimpy and emasculated on the other?” It’s a great question given the very fine distinction for guys these days between being emotionally available and getting walked all over. Women put a lot of pressure on men to meet a very tenuous set of criteria. As a lesbian, I have an interesting outsider’s view of the new male/female dynamic that asks for equality without the absence of chivalry and closeness without co-dependence. Anyway, Steve’s article is very thought-provoking and I really enjoyed it. I especially like how he shows readers that he follows his own rules by ending the article: “If you happen to be offended by all or part of this article, you should be able to find plenty more articles that offend you in the Archives.” Very nice.
• Liz Strauss called for nominations this week for Wildly Sticky Successful and Outstanding Blogs. She kicked it off with a list of ten blogs about blogging. Now it’s up to you (and me) to nominate the rest (just in case you’re not sure, it’s spelled p-a-j-a-m-a-p-r-o-f-e-s-s-i-o-n-a-l-.-c-o-m).
• Over at Performancing, Raj Dash asks bloggers, Why Write Reviews? He clearly lays out some great points in favor of including short, constructively critical reviews on your blog.

Kris Larson hands out some great advice at Blogging Tips about how to Keep up with your Blogs While Keeping your Cool. For many of us, blogging doesn’t mean a couple of posts a week at one domain. I would say that the vast majority of bloggers have multiple blogs to manage. Kris goes over some basic tactics you can use to avoid burnout and stay at the top of your blogging game

I think I’m gonna call it now. It’s late as it is due to my unplugged Sunday. I hope you enjoy the articles.

If you enjoyed this post make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed