I just wanted to take a moment to wish everybody a Merry Christmas!  I’m traveling in South America right now visiting family, so don’t expect too much from me over the next two weeks.  Hope everyone is having great holidays.  -Cesar

Building a blog audience and maintaining a conversation on your blog is hard work.  And in many ways we make it harder on ourselves by not installing the plugins that others are using successfully.  Today I want to quickly share three of those wordpress plugins, and why they’re worth the 4-minute installation.

1. Related Entries - This old standby of a WordPress plugin helps to increase your blog’s stickiness and pageviews.  When a visitor finishes reading an entry, they’ll naturally be looking for their next “click” and if you provide them with a list of articles, they’re more likely to stick around and read a little more.
2. Subscribe to Comments - How many times have you left a comment or a question somewhere and then forgotten to go back to check on the answer?  Many readers will be happy to subscribe to the comments in order to follow along with the conversation making many one-time commenters repeat visitors.
3. DoFollow - You can do the people commenting on your blog a favor by letting them get search engine credit, or “google juice” for their comments.  Most blog platforms tag comments with “nofollow” by default, and this unobstrusive little plugin puts an end to that.  Read more about this issue at YesFollow.org

Technorati Tags: blog_software, blogging, linklove, productivity, wordpress_plugins, wordpress, yesfollow

There is a marked stigma on in the blogosphere against blogging for business and profit, probably stemming from the highly personal roots or blogging.  Blogging emerged as a way to easily share thoughts and opinions on the web, and bloggers took (and still do take) great pride in the time and thoughts that they contribute to the web, usually all for free.  So it is understandable that when entrepreneurs started to jump on the blogging bandwagon and hired bloggers as a way to cheaply and easily create content and build an audience ( in order to monetize it ), the blogosphere balked.  Those days are fading, but the thought of hiring someone to blog for you is still alien to most bloggers - it feels taboo and somehow opportunistic and wrong.  Or at least that’s what it felt like to me.

When I started Argentina’s Travel Blog I knew I was going to need a lot of content.  Fresh content.  Entertaining content.  New content.  Content that I definitely couldn’t create myself.  But there are already some hard-working bloggers in the Argentina space, wouldn’t they look down on a for-profit tourism blog?  The answer is, it doesn’t matter!  Does hiring bloggers make sense for you?

When I ask the question ”should you hire bloggers?” I’m really just trying to get you to ask yourself that question, if you haven’t already.  It’s not a bad thing.  And in my opinion, it’s not that hard to answer. You just have to break it down into some simpler questions.  For Argentina’s Travel Blog, this is how the process went for me.

• Am I blogging for profit?  Yes.


• Is this my personal site?  No.


• Is my time best spent as a writer?  No.


• Do I have a weekly budget?  Yes.


• So should I hire bloggers? Yes siree!

If you intend for your blog to become a source or income, that’s your first hint.  If writing (or writing efficiently) is not your strength, that’s your second hint.  And if you can set aside a small budget (as little as $5-10 a post), either from blog revenue or seed money, that’s your third hint.

I personally found my writers through craigslist, but there are many different ways to hire bloggers, including the great job boards on Problogger.net.

Technorati Tags: blog_network, blogging, blogosphere, hire_bloggers

Are traffic spikes a good way to build long-term, sustainable traffic?  At first glance, I would say no.  Sure, they mean exposure, but are those people going to come back?  Where are the backlinks that are going to get them there?  Some A-list blogger links to you and sends a flood of his visitors your way.  Technorati happens to feature you for a day (usually when you first claim your blog).  One of your articles gets picked up by Digg, Reddit, or del.icio.us.  Great, it’s fun to think there’s a flood of new eyes on your blog, but what we’re all striving for is to build is sustainable traffic.

Well, on second glance, I’ve decided that traffic spikes have their place in building sustainable traffic.  But only if your blog makes a great first impression.  And that’s because you only get one chance to make those fleeting readers click the RSS button, their “Post to del.icio.us” bookmarklet, or Ctrl+D.

I recently had a traffic spike myself, which arrived through StumbleUpon, a cool social bookmarking tool that works like channel surfing.  (Don’t install it unless you’re ready for 3 hours to disappear from your life).  It was interesting to see the effect, as I recently moved my RSS feed button up from the bottom of my page.  (See it over there by my picture?  Doesn’t it just make you want to click it?  Go on...click!) I moved it up in the hopes that it would be more immediately apparent to casual surfers, and also on the advice from Copyblogger that you should always ask nicely for the subscription.

Well, the traffic spike combined with the new position of the RSS button seems to have paid off.  It looks like I was stumbled-upon sometime around Sunday to Monday, and sure enough, there is a rise in the number of subscribers right around that time.  The neat part is that while the traffic numbers start to fall off (see above) the subscribes, at least for now, are holding steady.

So what can you do to benefit from traffic spikes?

• Write good content.
• Keep an obvious RSS subscribe button above the fold.
• Have a design that you’re proud of.
• Have obvious links to your best content (I’m working on it...)
• (insert your suggestion in the comments)

And as Brian Clark would say, this is where I ask you to sign up for free Flee The Cube updates via RSS.