Caroline’s Favourite Links #1

This is the first in a series of weekly posts where I do a roundup of other people’s blog posts that I have enjoyed over the week. I wasn’t able to do this during my first month as I was so behind on my blog reading but I’ve started the catching up process now - only 1884 unread posts to get through! Note that because I’m clearing my backlog, some of these posts are a bit older than a week old, but they’re useful.

[1] Using FeedBurner Pro to Your Advantage - I have been using FeedBurner to manage my RSS feed and count subscribers since I launched the blog. However, I didn’t realise that the Pro features were free! So when I encountered this post I turned on the Pro features and now I can track things like exactly which posts people are reading in my feed. This will be very cool for me when I do my stats next month.

[2] BlogRush - The First 7 Days and What it Can Teach You - This post is from the creator of BlogRush, John Reese. I really liked this post, the attitude that John has comes out as being really inspirational to me. It doesn’t matter what you think of BlogRush itself, this post is a must read in terms of business and attitude in general. I love this quote in particular :-

If you never just “go for it” and try some of your ideas (no matter how crazy they might be) something is guaranteed…
YOUR LIFE WILL NEVER CHANGE.
You cannot be afraid that other people might yell and scream, “your idea is stupid!”

[3] Five Tips for Getting Traffic From Stumble - Once I realised that I was getting the majority of my traffic from StumbleUpon, I began to read up on it and over the last couple of weeks I have read at least a dozen posts about this topic. This post by Lucia of BigBucksBlogger, stood out because not only does she have some tips that I had not seen before, by clearly explains why we should use them.

Lucia later followed this post with a follow-up called [4] StumbleUpon: Powerful Pulse which reveals some stats and goes into further depth on the earlier tips. Great Stuff!

[5] Building Your Blog with StumbleUpon - More SU goodness from Skellie guest-posting at ProBlogger. There are 10 tips here, a couple of them are fillers like “have fun”, but there is some solid advice here. I am going to be digesting every word of this and the previous SU posts and incorporating it into my daily routine.

[6] My First High Dollar Niche Site is Now Online - I am not the only 30 Day Challenger to start thinking about high paying niches! Rich Gilchrest of Aiming for Independence has dived into the diamond market and has kindly posted a link to his content site for us all to see. I’ll be really interested to see how Rich does with his niche.

[7] Customize Your RSS Feed for BlogRush - Mark at SMOBlog came up with an excellent idea - a way to create an RSS feed just for BlogRush so that you don’t have to have every one of your posts syndicated across the network. BlogRush themselves have since introduced a filter system that lets you exclude certain posts but I still think this method is useful depending on the ratio of posts that you want going out to BlogRush.

I would say, if you want most of your posts syndicated then use the filter system to exclude just those that you don’t, but if you only want a few posts to be syndicated then use Mark’s method.

[BONUS] The Funniest Cat Video in the Entire Known Universe - Seriously! Ok so I made up that title and I know that I will be smitten down by the Gods for committing the worlds worst blogging crime - blogging about your cat, BUT… Firstly it’s not my cat(s) and really, everybody must watch this video. It matters not whether you like cats or not, if this does not make you laugh I will um… I don’t know. Just watch it already :-)

Stumble it!