eXtra For Every Publisher

Kevin Muldoon, owner and editor of BloggingTips has added a new feature called Blog Critiques to his site where the readers will critique blogs in return for some small prizes. The idea of the event is more to inspire creativity, teach each other, and help out bloggers, and I hope people will keep that initial idea alive as they help Kevin fine tune many blogs.

The first blog up for the critiquing process is this one: Reader Blog Critique : Xfep.com.

Kevin asked me what main issues I wanted people to cover, and so I gave him my insecure list of questions.

Please, if you have any opinions on this blog, jump on over to BloggingTips, and leave a comment. You have a chance at one in three $10 prizes, or a domain registered at eNom.

Thanks again to Kevin and everyone that comments over on BloggingTips.

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Recently, I was called by Godaddy. They wanted to see how I was doing, if I had any questions or concerns, and ask what I was using my domains for.

The Happy Feeling

My initial reaction was a positive one. Being contacted by a big company to see how I am doing is nice. Asking me what I am up to and if there was anything I needed was also very nice.

Of course the conversation didn’t end there.

The Upsell

After asking how I was doing, the gentleman from Godaddy let me know about all sorts of value added services that I could take advantage of for one nominal fee or another.

Naturally, I wasn’t very interested at this point, and it sort of tainted the phone call, changing it from a friendly connection into a sales call.

The Conclusion

I would have loved to have been given some free product or an ultra discount.

I didn’t find the sales call to be very high pressure which was very nice for someone like me, as I really hate the strong sales tactics that some businesses do.

Overall, I was left with a positive feeling. Godaddy didn’t have to reach out and contact me. I do business with at least four other domain registrars and none of them have contacted me for any purpose.

Also, being able to give feedback on a service to a human is something that is becoming an increasing rarity in our world today, and so I valued the opportunity.

Customer support is more and more important as we see and truly interact with less and less people every day and that is why, despite the sales angle of the second half of the conversation, I am still awarding a +1 to Godaddy today.

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Blog World Expo is quickly approaching, and as you might have noticed, I will be speaking at two different panels now.

The first one, as I mentioned before is the How to be More than a Blog: New Media Integration with Deb Ng and Tris Hussey. I am very excited about talking about adding more than just text to your blog, though for my readers here, I am sure you are amused by my seat on this panel as there aren’t many new media additions to this site (especially if you excluded my podcasts).

The point to remember though is that I haven’t always just wrote on this blog, and so I think I will have plenty to say regarding adding images, video, audio and widgets to your blogs to attract attention.

The second panel I am on isn’t the one I thought I was going to be one. I thought I was going to be on a panel with Jim Kukral, John Chow, Brian Clark and Zac Johnson, but when I saw that Darren Rowse was added to the line up, I know that the Making Money Online with a Blog panel was full, and rightly so.

Thankfully, Jim is an amazing guy and got me placed on another amazing panel entitled, How to Sell Direct Advertising on Your Blog. I will be sitting next Steve Hall, Wendy Piersall, Dave Taylor, and Lynn Truong. The line-up has me saying, “I’m not worthy!”

I almost would rather be part of the audience as these amazing people say what they need to on the subject.

Blog World Expo is going to be amazing. The only issues that I am going to have is that I am nervous about speaking, and there are too many great sessions running concurrently.

If you are attending, please let me know, as I would love to meet as many people as possible.

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I really wish I understood exactly what went into creating a better Alexa rank. Yes, I want to manipulate my rank, but in what is considered a “white hat” way by attracting the type of traffic that naturally increases my rank.

Why is this important to me? Well, I was as high as seventh in the a top list, and now have dropped to tenth thanks to the continual fight I am having to try to increase my Alexa rank.

There are competing blogs in the list that have a much lower Alexa rank than me, with similar or lower monthly traffic. Could they be manipulating their rank in “bad” ways? I am not sure, but it sure is frustrating as having as many ranks as high as possible helps make it easier to sell advertising, despite Alexa not being considered the most accurate ranking system.

Are there any new techniques, since Alexa changed their data sources, relating to increasing your rank in a non-technology niche?

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So many people have been asking me what my new job is, and it really hasn’t been ready to talk about, but today I wanted to cover a bit about the project, and so I have to talk directly about it. So, for all of you wondering what site I am working on, you can find me over at College Crunch, where I am today working on The College Crunch Gazette, a blog that will focus on getting a university degree.

To run this site, and its blog, I have needed to add two dozen plugins to the WordPress installation, and while we are still waiting on the custom design to take advantage of some of these plugins, I have already started producing content for the site.

This will be the largest single site I have ever worked on. For comparison’s sake, I have created over five hundred posts on this blog over the last year, and the required content pages alone will come to more than half that amount, with the blog building out a content index of around five hundred posts in the next six to eight months or so.

The amount of research I have to do for this topic is also immense, as I learn the differences between the American and Canadian educational systems, as well as their relationship for those grabbing their education across country borders.

Starting a new blog from scratch is something I haven’t done very often, as I only took over Blogging Pro, and Forever Geek as well as being a single contributor on many multi-author blogs.

I am very excited about the challenge and hope that you will all check out The College Crunch Gazette, leave comments, and ping me if you have any post-secondary stories you would love to share.

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