The site which is seen as just another Digg Clone by many people, does have an added twist though. The most popular stories will get to be featured on the Yahoo home page (the most popular homepage in the world).

Yahoo uses a ranking system called a Buzz Score which takes into account things like trends in search queries on Yahoo! Search, and the number of times that content is shared with friends by email. This then generates a “Buzz Score” (just above the Buzz Up button on the content).

At the Top of the Buzz homepage there is a section called Just Added. This module contains the latest content that has recently been submitted to Yahoo! Buzz from publishers.

At the moment the site is in ‘Beta’ which means that while all the features are being tested, Yahoo will not accept any new publishers to submit stories to the site, other than the pre-approved news publishers that were invited to take part by Yahoo.

To help prevent anyone abusing the voting system you must be logged in to be able to vote on any of the stories submitted. To log in you just need your ‘Yahoo! ID.

Please leave a comment regarding this post. I would love to hear about all your experiences of using Yahoo! Buzz.

Technorati Tags: digg, social content, yahoo, yahoo buzz

One way you could go about this is by encouraging your readers to leave useful comments on the articles that you write. I have just found a great little wordpress plugin that could help with that.

The plugin is called CommentLuv and can be found here at FiddyP’s site.

What is so useful about this plugin you may ask.

When a reader leaves a comment on your blog they get a link back to the Site that they entered in the Website or URI field in your blog posts comment box. This is all well and good for your reader, especially if you use the Dofollow plugin on your blog, as this May help them to receive some extra page rank for their site. It could be better though, by making use of the CommentLuv plugin there is a new tickbox added to the comments section that says:

Enable CommentLuv which will try and get your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you.

What happens is that the CommentLuv Wordpress Plugin visits the feed of the comment author and then it attempts to scrape the last post they made and display it as an Extra Link under their comment.

This is much better for your reader as now they have an Extra Link pointing back to their site, and better for your blog as more poeple leave comments for you.

There is some more in depth information on the use of the plugin over at the plugins Homepage.

Go ahead and try it out below by leaving a comment to this article.

Talk to you soon.

Technorati Tags: dofollow, plugin, Wordpress

What I mean is, if your readers were to perform a search on your blog for the example term ’social marketing’, you would not know about it would you! Therefore if that searched for term does not appear in any of your blog posts your reader could go elsewhere for their information.

It would be far better if you could provide the information that your readers were searching for.

Enter Psychic Search a Free Wordpress Plugin from Pawan Agrawal of MaxBlogPress.

This great plugin can secretly reveal to you what is being searched for on your blog. This would then give you the advantage of being in a position to give your readers the exact information that they want to read.

The plugin (once installed and activated) will record for you in real time all the terms searched for on your blog.

As you can see from the screen shot above, here is an overview on all the searches that have been made over specific amounts of time. Either the last 24 hours, last 7 days, or the last 30 days.

If you look at the results, it also shows you how many times your reader has found the term they searched for on your blog.

The screen shot below shows the searches made on your blog that have no results. This then tells you what your readers want from you but cannot find!

Therefore it helps to give you topics to write about that you know would be popular with your readers.

The setup and configuration of the plugin is as easy as pie!

More detailed information about the Psychic Search Wordpress plugin and free download instructions can be found on the Plugins Homepage.

Technorati Tags: Free Wordpress Plugin, MaxBlogPress, Psychic Search

When you first start out on your Blogging journey, getting more traffic to your new blog is a very high priority. There are various ways you can go out this, such as:

• Use Paid Advertising.
• Comment on other blogs in the same niche as yours.
• Write Posts That other People Will Want To Read
• Submit Your Blog To Directories or Traffic Exchanges.
• Use the power of Social Bookmarking and Social Networking.

Over the next few posts I am going to concentrate on using Social Bookmarking and Social Networking to help establish your blog.

Why use these techniques I hear you say!

Well if you look at the Traffic rankings section of sites such as Alexa you will see that some of the most visited sites in the world today are either Social Networking or Social Bookmarking sites. In fact sites such as You Tube, My Space and Facebook generate as much, if not more traffic than the Top search engines.

I was lucky enough recently to be invited to join the latest brainchild of Jack Humphrey of ‘The Friday Traffic Report‘. His new Social Marketing Central Network helps people build their social authority on sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Squidoo and HubPages. This in turn helps to drive traffic and then hopefully loyal readers back to your blog.

Jack provides some of the best tips on how to use these sites effectively.

Stay tuned for the next part in this series

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, social networking

StumbleUpon Profile

Social Marketing Central

Squidoo

HubPages

del.icio.us

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, social networking

Here is a round up of my some of my Favorite WordPress Plugins (in no particular order) that I use.

1. Akismet:

Akismet is a free for personal use plugin that does a great job in helping to protect your blog from spam. You will first need to get an API key (available when you register for a Free WordPress.com user account) in order to activate and use Akismet. You can find out more info about Akismet here.

2. Do-Follow:

A great plugin (I use it on this blog) that helps to give your readers an extra incentive to leave comments on your blog. This is done rewarding them with “dofollow” backlinks back to their blogs. This could help boost their ranks in search engines. You can find out more about the Do-Follow plugin (that I use on this blog) over at Semiologic.

3. Enforce www. Preference:

Do you decide if you want to make your website accessible through http://www.domain.com or http://domain.com? It may cause problems if you use both, as it could split your backlink count and maybe even your page rank. The easiest way to solve this is with the help of the Enforce www. Preference plugin. A bonus with this plugin is that it will strip off index.php from the end of your URIs.

4. Subscribe To Comments:

This plugin helps to keep the conversation in your comments alive. It allows anyone that comments on your blog to check a tickbox before leaving their comment, they can then receive e-mail updates of further comments to the post that they have subscribed to. Find out more about this plugin here.

This is only a small sample of the plugins that are available for WordPress. You will all have your favorites that you use on your own blogs. Please feel free to leave a comment below, as I would love to hear all about them.

Thanks for reading! If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Technorati Tags: favorite wordpress plugins, plugins, Wordpress

I think that sometimes I have a problem with motivating myself to Post to a blog on a regular basis, this competition is a great way to kick things off with a new blog as the rules are very simple.

• First off you need to create the equivalent of a page of content for each day in February (29 pages this year as we have a leap year). This could be a blog post or any other web page, an article or even a comment on a blog.

• Each of the pages must contain at least 200 words, so that it makes each post worth reading.

• Each of the 29 pages need to be linked to the corresponding day entry over at Eric’s blog by means of a comment with a link back to your page of content.

After the contest ends Eric will verify that all 29 pages have been created and linked to the posts on his blog.

Everyone that has participated in the contest will receive a free copy of Uncommon AdSense. One lucky person will also win a copy of PLRSiteBuilder.

I registered for the contest on the last day of entry (February 8), so I have a little bit of catching up to do. Please check back over the next few days to see how things are progressing, or you could follow along by subscribing to my RSS feed.

See you all for my next post.

Technorati Tags: adsense, blog, contest, Eric Giguere