(Reading time: 7 – 12 minutes)

Drama. Mystery. Excitement. It’s time again for the Week in Review.

By the time you read this, I may or may not be on the road to Tahoe with a group of people that I don’t know very well. So I may or may not be commenting much. Either way, I never kiss and tell.

Romance. Misery. The Perfect Couple

So I’m sitting around checking my email and generally minding my own business (generally) and I get this short note from one Claudia:

Hello! I see you’re using the Estimated Reading Time plugin and I also see you’ve been able to customize it with CSS. I was hoping you’d be able to share with me how you were able to do it. I’m a complete novice with PHP but am fairly comfortable with CSS. Any help you could give me would be sincerely appreciated. Thank you!

Hokay. A bit direct, which is good, but I’ve been “sincerely appreciated” a few too many times.

No matter. It’s a reasonable request. I sent a Claudia a link to the category, asking her to let me know how it worked out. (I do this too often and never hear back.)

Claudia, though, got right to work, implemented the CSS, and left a nice comment in sincere appreciation!

Awesome!

So who is Claudia?

She’s Claudia D. Christian and she writes miserable love stories.

Awesome awesome!

If you’ve been reading along for more than a couple of weeks, you might strongly suspect you’ll see a bit more of Claudia mentioned right here. I think you’re probably right.

Bob’s your uncle

So I was hanging around Twitterstan a couple of weeks ago. An IRL acquaintance, Catherine Grison, tweeted me over to Film Ladd, whence I found that CT Kingston Wants To Know if That’s a Hot Blog in Your Pants.

Immediately, I am hooked.

I blame Ladd, which is easy because I don’t know him: it’s all his fault. But he’s cool. He likes Benny Hill.

Anyway…

Are you having trouble visualizing happiness? Think sausage. You wanna learn to cook corn like a chick? Miss Christina has you covered. There’s more. But not enough. Not nearly enough!

Hey Christina,

We want more, dammit!

Here’s what’s cool: Christina Kingston loves her audience. She’s funny, and she engages with almost everyone that comments.

Are you engaging with your commentors? Don’t know how? Go read and be enlightened.

Another cool thing: Kingston really gets graphics; she pays attention to the details. I learned some interesting techniques… while falling out of my chair laughing.

By the way, if you want to get really high Google page rank, and completely dominate your niche, do as I say, not as I do. ’cause I link promiscuously and that’s bad juju for SEO Domination. Or so I hear.

Extreme John’s limo business competitors

Website In A Weekend gets a fair bit of spam – some real black hat SEO stuff – directed at siphoning off traffic from every article where pink limousines are mentioned. That’s part of the fun of linking to Extreme John: there’s always something interesting going on. If the spamming I get here from the Florida limousine business is any indication, John must be poking a pretty sharp stick in a lot of beady little eyes.

Now, recall last week I mentioned that if you wanted lots of really cool contextual links back from Website In A Weekend, you were going to have to pay attention. Here’s the deal:

And I’ll roll you up. I’ll pull little bits of your story into my story, and we’ll make it our story. That’s what you can do with hypertext. And what you can’t do using “MS Word On The Interwebs.”

But wait, there’s more! Interesting and visible are not enough for me to send my readers to your site. And make no mistake: every link bleeds me a little page rank link juice and send eyeballs away from my site to yours. I do this for my readers, not to kiss your butt (ok, maybe once in a while. For selected butts only). You need to demonstrate:

• Authority & Credibility. Not one or the other, both
• You need to be engaged with your readers. I’m sending you a potential member for your community.
• You need to make it easy for readers to engage. Provide incentives. Install CommentLuv. Don’t require comment pre-approval. Moderate comments for quality, choose quality over quantity. Require or heavily encourage gravatars.
• You need to be a real person. Have a picture. Or have such a stupendous amount of quality content that it renders the point moot.

I crave novelty. All serious readers crave novelty.

Maybe that’s why so much scannable content is the same old boring crap, because

More on this revelation soon.

In the meantime…

Bye bye scanners

According to the Echo Chamber, the recommend length of articles published in Blogistan is about 400 words.

This is because readers “are in a hurry,” and “can’t be bothered.” Supposedly, if a reader has to, uh, read an article, he or she won’t. Won’t read the article, that is. Does this make any sense at all? I didn’t think so.

At least 1200 words. If you’re scanning, there’s nothing here for you. It’s all meat and potatoes, no dessert. Bye bye.

If you find it worth reading, thank you.

If it’s not worth reading, and you read it anyway, I apologize for boring you. If you would be so kind, please take just 1 extra minute and let me know where you needed more than what you got. I’ll roll your suggestions into the next Week in Review.

Permalinkin

I’m green with envy over Valentina’s permalink for her January 2010 Month in Review. If you don’t quite understand contextual linking and anchor text, examine the anchor text I used here, then go take a look at her January 2010 review URL. If you still don’t get it, ask in the comments, someone will explain in more details. It’s good.

Valentina writes extensively on earning blog income. In fact, she’s starting to rank for the term “blog income.” I’m happy to give her hand.

Would you like to rank for a keyword or phrase? Are you interesting, visible and credible? Let me know.

How to write a blog post in less than 1200 words

I don’t know. Ask Seth Godin.

Updated posts

Every article in the Website In A Weekend eCourse has been updated with a course blurb. That’s 24 articles. Too many to list individually. You’ll know the blurb when you see it, it’s in a gray box and looks like this:

Jump right in!

Upcoming

Stay tuned for Carlos Velez with a 2 articles series on pre-writing drafts.

New articles

• Saturday Morning Surfing: Passion is NOT Enough – Your Landlord Doesn’t Give a Rat’s Patootie. Passion is no guarantee of success. It’s not even necessary. Find out what having both market and angle are required; get those and let passion give that edge.
• How To Rapidly Create Pillar Content For Your Blog. Writing the pillar content, or flagship content for your blog is really easy once you break the process down into simple steps.
• How Moderating Comments On Your Blog Destroys Conversation. Are you making it difficult for people to comment on your blog? Inspiring discussion requires making it easy for people to participate; Gordie tells you how.
• What the Heck is Pillar Content and Why Do I Need It?. Pillar content shows what your blog is about, and can help give you better search engine results. Here’s 4 tips for helping you find your pillar content.
• Your First AWeber Autoresponder Followup Series. It’s easy to write a mailing list followup series, shown here using AWeber system. Use these simple guidelines to make your first email campaign successful.
• Refreshing Your Pillar Content By Recycling Blog Posts. When your pillar content needs to be updated, here’s a few guidelines for determining whether to republish your blog post. You can take action on this fast.

The Week In Review Series

Last WIAW Week in Review

Got Blogging Blues? Dr Johnson Cures What Ails You (& Week in Review). Another Week in Review. With Burning Man. And Dr Johnson. And beating the blogging blues. You gotta read it, it’s just for you.

Next WIAW Week in Review

Stay tuned…