I include a series of "How-Tos" for managing the content of the site.
POSTS
BASIC POST INSTRUCTIONS
So to summarize, a checklist! When posting on hbhblog:
1. Apply a title (can be done even when you put multiple thoughts in one post, though only the first title will go into the field labelled "Title").
2. Choose an appropriate label (or more than one label, separated by commas)
3. If you refer to another post elsewhere on the hbh****, then put the hyperlink in to make it easy for the reader to find.
4. Breaklong posts into 2 pieces. Instructions are below, but it is self-explanatory in the body of the post. Look at the book reviews for an example.
-Paul
HOW TO BREAK A BLOG POST
>John,
>
>After our conversation today, Wednesday, I made a bunch of changes to hbhblog. Most will be obvious. One change that you will soon encounter in hbhblog, is that I put a mechanism in to break up each post into two pieces - the front (short) and back (longer). This is per your request.
>
>The mechanism is manual, in that the author must decide which part of the post is in which piece. Now, when you create a new post in hbhblog, you will see a template. Simply replace the "Here is the beginning of my post." with the first part of your post, and replace "And here is the rest of it." with the rest of the post.
>
>The reader will see only the short part of the post until they press the "Read more!" link.
>
>Pretty cool!
CONTENT STRATEGY
John,
Were you able to view the analytics data? Regardless, there is declining and tiny readership, following the WSJournal spike. As I have mentioned before, this is due to no emails from you that notify the mailing list of new content. I suspect that sending an email perhaps every 2 or 3 times you post, would be appropriate and not annoy people. As it is, trees continue to fall in the forest. This will bring in ~50 people each day.
However, the 4 billion people do not know you exist, because we are getting no google search referrals. That's the problem I am interested in solving. To work on that problem, I setup a feed from hbhblog, to google's search engine using what is called a site map. The way that works, and why you should care, is that it automatically detects a new posting, and updates the site map. Each time google crawls the site, it consults the site map so that it can find the latest content (otherwise google may not find it). ----> that is what will attract the 4 billion people.
Therefore, it seems logical that a strategy is on order. It might have these elements:
Be prolific as heck on hbhblog. Lots of posts, lots of content in each. That makes it more likely that people will find your content with searches.
Try to make the posts contemporary, referencing current events or at least topics that are current - searchers search now about things they are interested in, now.
- Paul
TRAFFIC ANALYSIS
Traffic from the World. The big traffic will have to occur by getting enough and compelling content out there to cause strangers to search for stuff and get one of your hbhblog posts in the search results. We are getting a small amount of that now (less than 10 hits, total). Except for the odd news article spike. The other and probably larger factor in traffic, is cross-linking with other sites. You are referring to lots of sites in your news roundup, which is good. What we are missing, is other sites linking to your content - that results in those sites' readers coming to hbhblog. Plug this into the google search bar: link:www.hbhblog.blogspot.com - you'll get nothing. That is very bad. No sites link to us.
Cross-linking can be accomplished by having you publish comments to content on high-traffic blogs, or by publishing posts on those blogs. So I believe you should also add that activity to your list. Find some sites that are interesting to you, and post a comment just like we are asking people to do on hbhblog. When you publish, it is critical that you include hbhblog.blogspot.com in your post, typically around your signature.
You may also want to consider putting in your posts, links to content on smaller sites with which we want to develop cross-linking relationships. BBC, for example, is never going to publish a link to us. But LewRockwell might.- Paul
BOOK REVIEW POSTING INSTRUCTIONS
Good, glad you like it. Maybe some step-by-step instructions are in order (you following this would minimize my rework effort, too).
Summary:
1 - John publishes backdated review in hbhblog, notifies Paul
2 - Paul installs Amazon ad, notifies John
3 - John publishes post on hbhblog (mandatory) referring to the review. Optional: publish post on hbhmain referring to hbhblog post.
Details:
1a - On hbhblog, John publishes book review in a post normally, except at the bottom, change the date to January 2, 2000, time does not matter.
1b - Send Paul an email that you are complete
2a - Paul puts up the Amazon ads, and connects them to the review.
2b - Paul connects the review, to the ad (the other direction)
2c - Paul sends John an email that he is complete
3a - John publishes normal post on hbhblog briefly describing the review.
3b - That normal post must provide a link to the review. Do that by opening a new window to hbhblog and using the archives, identify the January 2, 2000 post. Right-click on the post title and copy the address. Then come back to the normal post, type in the book title in a logical place, highlight the book title, then create a link to the review by pasting the address from the copy buffer.
3c- If you want, you can publish a news item on hbhmain that points to either the book review or the hbhblog item. Use same technique as 3b.
3d - John moderates the spiersegroup item that results from the hbhblog post (as per normal processing).
Sunday, January 2, 2000
How To Manage Site Content
