Orble News - by jon

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Orble News - August 2007

Writers Wanted for more DiaryStar Blogs

August 30th 2007 12:35

I'm looking for bloggers to take on the equivalent of Sydney DiaryStar for other Australian, US, and UK cities.

You will need to spend around 1 hour 40 minutes per week on the blog (20 minutes for two posts per weekday) which could be done all at once (using post-dating). The author's share of Sydney DiaryStar revenue at the moment is just over $30 AU per week. It would probably take a couple of months for a new site to reach this level though.

You don't have to live in the city you write for however it would obviously help.

To apply create an example post on melbourne.diarystar.com.au. Try to keep the same format as Sydney DiaryStar and make the post about a real event. Create a comment underneath your Post to let me know which city you would like to write for. If people want to team up for a particular city then that's fine too.

Thanks,
Jon.

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The importance of links

August 30th 2007 02:15

This is a quick post to remind everyone how important incoming links (from sites outside of Orble) to your blog are to generating search engine traffic. Most of the top Orble sites have made some effort to acquire incoming links and it really does make a huge difference. Even a couple of good links can double or triple your search engine traffic.

The best ways to acquire incoming links from outside of Orble that I know of are:

1) Get all the people you know who have a website or blog to link to you.

2) Comment on forums. Many forums allow you to have a signature which links to your website. It's best to comment on forums which are related to your blog and those which are public (you don't need to login to view them) are best. Sometimes you may need to build up some kind of kudos before the forum moderator will let you link to your blog.

3) Submit your posts to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious or any of the other bookmarking sites. Technorati is another one. Most have rules about submitting nothing but your own content so you may have to show a bit of cunning.

4) Swap links with other sites/blogs which have related content -- commonly called a BlogRoll. You can find out how to set up a blogroll here. Remember to only link to blogs which are of a related topic and which have outstanding content. You are doing them a huge favour as all Orble blogs which are more than a few months old have good PageRank. You can find out the pagerank of other websites using either the Google Toolbar. Make sure any sites you place on your BlogRoll also link back to you on their homepage. You will also need to check each link occasionally as some sites will agree to swap a link and then remove it a few weeks later.

Also remember that getting a whole lot of links at once is not a good idea as it can be viewed as suspicious. For the best results you should try to spend a little time every week working on your incoming links so there is a steady trickle rather than a sudden flood.

If you know of any other good ways of getting incoming links let me know!

A couple of thinks NOT to do which could get you in trouble with the search engines:

1) Use a linkswapping market like linkmarket.net
2) Buy links.
3) Another other kind of scheme which promises to get you lots of links easily or quickly or both!
4) If in doubt post a comment here first. Once your blog is banned from Google it's pretty much game over so always be conservative.

Thanks,
Jon.

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Orble Profile and Tags

August 9th 2007 01:33

There have been a few additions to the Orble Profile pages.

You can now search all of a particular writer's posts from their profile page rather than just blog by blog. Very useful if you are trying to find an old post by someone but can't remember which blog it was on.

Profile pages now also display a writer's most popular tags (keywords) and most popular posts. Seeing which tags people have used most is actually quite an interesting exercise

You can also specify a set of Bookmark Tags for your profile page. So if you created a bookmark tag called "Fashion Sites" then all of the posts that you have tagged with "Fashion Sites" will appear underneath this tag. Note that for the moment you have to actually click on the tag for the listed sites to appear. An example can be found on my profile. This should enable Orblers to share their favourite websites.

You can tag (label) a post with a keyword either by using that keyword in the title of the post or in the Tags field (formerly known as the keywords field). You can specify up to eight tags for each post.

Jon.

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Linking

August 7th 2007 05:56

It is now possible to link a Post to another Post within Orble or a webpage outside of Orble.

It's not really anything new, you could always link to any webpage within the content of a post, this just puts the link up next to the title where it's more obvious like this post
[ Click here to read more ]

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Blogs listed under posting image

August 7th 2007 05:17

You can now choose which blogs are listing underneath your posting image (the thumbnail image that appears when you comment).

All your blogs are listed by default, however you can bar a blog by going to it's "Settings" page and selecting "No" under the "Posting Image Link" section

[ Click here to read more ]

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