There is a small group meeting on Fridays at CrossRoads restaurant (at the Golf Course) at 1pm to share ideas to help each other develop income potential through the web. If your interested come, share and learn.

Great Questions by the way. Keep em coming.

Mr. Conley,

Re: Driving Traffic to a site
This is a much tougher answer. More traffic does not always mean better. You can buy traffic from ads, but if your not advertising properly it is wasted money. Similarly if your linking from places where those users don’t have a reason to follow your link (ie, unrelated, over advertised or that site already fulfills their needs) traffic won’t necessarily follow those links. If those links are somewhere where search engines can see them (ie. doesn’t require a login), then those links should contain words that reinforce what your site is about and at the same time be useful to the users that may be interested in clicking them.

Short synopsis of link to increase placement in search engines.
1. Link = a vote for your site.
2. Words in link = What your site is about
3. Search Terms look for Votes to a page/site plus words pointing to a page/site plus content on the page to be listed higher up.

Of course there is much more going on but this is the basics. Hope this helps.

Mr. Conely,

Re: Duplicate Content
Yes, Cut n Paste is really no different from importing the RSS feed directly and keeping it exactly the same. If you are ”Moving” the site and removing the other than it is fine. If you are trying to keep both sites and would like a start with ”similar content” then go ahead and import the site initially and then edit the content by ”summarizing” the initial one or doing a rewrite so very few sentences are exactly the same but can have the same meaning. By doing this, you are not going to experience a ”Duplicate Content Penalty”. And unfortunately usually one site that has the duplicate content is usually
chosen as the ”primary source” but it may not always be the one you would hope.

Re: Linking Direct to the blog
If you link to BlogWalla, it would be http://blogwalla.com.
If you link direct to your blog on blogwalla it would be http://blogwalla.com/beginnersmind/
If you link direct to a page within your blog it would be http://blogwalla.com/beginnersmind/archives/19

It is good for your content on BlogWalla or Other sites to get links directly to the content page that is relevant for the link.not always the home page.

Hope this helps. Also the link text should be a good description of that page which helps tell Google and other search engines what that page is about. I see your other site is a Martial Arts School in Walla Walla. Reinforcing what kind of ”school” you have and where it is located within links will help a lot.

Heck, while we’re here (and as long as I’m not bothering you too much), I have been watching the traffic and such onanother site of mine and have been trying to get more links to it from other sites (which is what I am assuming you are talking about with the ’direct links’ deal) and am meeting only failure.
Do you have pointers or tips on how to drive traffic in that sense?

Of course, I am thinking about it and that is not directly related to Blogwalla so it might not be proper to expect an answer. If your answer even explained how I can improve traffic to my blogs here, I will be most grateful.