Watering Holes and Quid Pro Quo – WIAW Week in Review

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

So I was down at my favorite watering hole the other day, waiting on a client to get finished with her acupuncture treatment (the acupuncturist was late).

One of my favorites, A____, was working the bar.

She looked really tired.

Dragged out. Needed sleep, badly.

So I told her she looked like she needed some sleep. Then we went a couple of rounds until she got that I don’t BS around. For better or worse, she can always trust me to tell it like I see it.

That applies to the interwebs as well.

Here’s how I deal with commenting, twittering, retweeting, whatever: I do as much of it as catches my attention, when I have the time. Basically, I won’t do quid pro quo on anything, because I’m almost incapable of keeping track of it all. I simply can’t remember who I would owe what. So I don’t worry about it.

Instead, I subscribe to a bajillion blogs, and I comment on everything I feel I can contribute on. I don’t worry about whether that blogger comments back or not. Same with twitter and retweets: I try and remember to retweet stuff, but I usually forget. On the other hand, I do make an effort to comment on everyone’s blog who comments here. Sometimes, when I just can’t think of what to say, I don’t leave any comments. If you have commented here, you’re highly likely to be in my RSS feed.

Same with linking to other blogs. I won’t always return a link right away. On the other hand, I do tend to link promiscuously within the context of whatever I’m writing about, and I don’t expect to be linked in return.

All this is the function of my attention span, which was last seen heading east at a high rate of speed. 25 years ago.

I know, I could load all of this into a spreadsheet and keep track.

But I would rather write more blog posts and program more WordPress plugins.

And work with my very cool clients. (More on clients later.)

Writing a Week in Review

The Week in Review articles on Website In A Weekend are fairly difficult to write. Not quite as difficult as some of the technical articles where I have to verify the example code actually runs, but much more involved than the “average” blog post (whatever “average” means).

In the Week in Review, I don’t just link a bunch of posts together.

Instead, all the links are conceptually supported.

Furthermore, I generally attempt to find a theme for each Week in Review. This week’s theme is “week in review.”

For example, a few weeks ago in “News of the New,” I profiled a few young websites by up and coming bloggers. I read many high quality articles on each website, and summarized key information on why you might find the website interesting. The link to each site is anchored with relevant text, and well-supported by surrounding text. This creates value on both ends of the transaction.

For my own articles, I typically anchor the link with the article title, and support it with the SEO description. You can do the same for your weekly reviews: grab your SEO description for teaser text.

For articles on other blogs, if you’re really lazy, you can find the article in your SERPs (query on the title) and use the SERP description. The SERP description may or may not be the same as the SEO description for that article, and you might want to clean it up if the search engine returned a fragmentary excerpt. Having this extra teaser text helps both readers and search engines. Otherwise you’re delivering a solid block of text same color as your links. Boring.

Remember, in the long term, delight your readers first, so both your buddies and search engines will benefit from the traffic.

At this point I could review any number of “Smashes,” “Recaps,” “Reviews,” “Summaries” or whatever else these kinds of articles are titled. But I won’t. There really isn’t a right or wrong way.

Instead, if you would like some help defining a concept for your own weekly review, let’s talk. I’ll help you create a template you can use every week, which provides the internal deep linking benefits of a weekly review while fitting in with your vision of your blog.

Whose tweeting your stuff?

Yeah, I’m not the world’s greatest Twitter expert. In fact, I consider myself pretty lame with respect to Twitter. But, progress in inches… I just ran across Backtweets, which is a list of people that have tweeted or retweeted your webpages.

That’s pretty cool.

So I went on a “following” spree. Thanks @yourgirlamy, @jimcaro, @directmaestro, @AceConcierge, @SophieZo, @nyctech, @andrewhyde, @Danorator, @KindCanine, @LadyProgrammer, @barbaraling, @webpagelottery for tweeting my stuff. And lots more too, but it got out of hand, too many to list here. You’re now in my followers list.

I’m still stuck on the notion that Twitter will help me engage with people. We’ll see how that works out.

There’s probably hundreds of these tools similar to backtweet there. Truth be told, I ignore them until I’m ready to dig in and learn. Otherwise, too much information.

New articles

Short week this week, clients keeping me busy.

• Playing The Host: A Quick Intro to Wordpress MU. Josh Kohlbach nails it again with fresh content, information about WordPress MU that’s hard to find anywhere on the web. Find out if WordPress MU will help you.
• How NOT to Comment on Blogs (Dude, you’re busted). Jan Geronimo finds unexpected flattery in a recycled comment on ProBlogger. Pretty bold, really, you gotta see this to believe it.
• Blog post #200! DIY WordPress: Unraveling Quicktags for WordPress Plugins. When you need to add a Quicktag to your WordPress plugin, this article will walk you through every step of adding the quicktag button to your editor toolbar.

The Week In Review Series

Last WIAW Week in Review

Holiday Season Kicks Off – 2 Weeks in Review! We take on Smashing Magazine, boring blog posts and render an opinion on WordPress comment plugin snarkery. It’s that time again: the WIAW Week in Review.

Next WIAW Week in Review

Stay tuned…

I was going to get all fancy and coy about that new social media application I’m having fun with, but I’m too busy. The application is called Four Square. It has gobs of potential marketing applications, especially if you’re in the brick and mortar world. They have an iPhone application! Get an account and let’s friend up on Four Square.

Tagged as: Backlinking, Twitter, Week in review