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Hi,
I'm a freelance journalist and I've been generating some healthy traffic on my news site linking my posts to published articles and using social media to promote.
How do you kick it up to the next level, to get on Freshly Pressed, directory sites and aggregators? Is this the best way to boost traffic?
Cheers,
Andy
The blog I need help with is andrewmccorkell.wordpress.com.
All you seem to be doing is putting headlines from newspapers in a link. I don't see original content.
You might also review the TOS before you get too far along:
I'm a freelance journalist.
I wrote the articles I'm linking to, so it's also a portfolio and a contact point. I've read that linking to other sites is also useful in building an audience.
I can't see how I'm infringing my own intellectual property rights, or terms of service, though that might be an interesting point to blog on.
Thanks for the links.
I thought it best to blog a response to this question.
I'm with auxclass. I don't think a title and a link to a post that you have published elsewhere amounts to a blog post. I make an income freom research and writing and those are the kind of results that I gues in the SERPs and then b*tch to Google about. What useful service do they offer to reader? none because the original articles are already indexed. What you are doing IMHO is poluting the SERPs.
WordPress.com isn't a good home for an aggregator. Trust me, as someone who blogs to eight different sites on a regular basis, I know what I'm talking about.
You probably aren't violating the Terms of Service, but what you're doing isn't going to help you as much as getting one central independently-hosted site and making it clearly an umbrella site for yourself. WP.com can't post via RSS feeds, etc, whereas on an independent host you can draw all your content in automatically, either as snippets, images and a headline with link, or as the whole thing.
Friendfeed is free and you can aggregate 5 of your own sites there.
http://friendfeed.com/
Ah, I forgot: Staff have repeatedly said that if the primary purpose of a blog here is to direct traffic to other sites, they will consider that against the ToS. I have seen blogs like that shut down, although usually they're directing people to sales sites.
I wrote those articles. I've already been contacted with leads for stories. If someone wants to contact me they can because I've included contact details. And if if you check my response http://andrewmccorkell.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/getting-traffic-to-the-next-level-social-media-blogs-and-news/ you'll see I've started blogging. I'm new to this and there are issues around what I publish.
I think I may be getting the hang of this. Let me know if the quotes are a problem. It's meant to be funny.
My second blog post, in response what might be viewed as well founded criticism:
http://andrewmccorkell.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/welcome-to-the-blogosphere/
And more seriously, thanks. This is helping.
I'm a freelance photojournalist and in the time I wrote for my paper, The Brunei Times, I had access to my columns in PDF and from there, I produced screen shots in JPEG that I share on http://shimworld.wordpress.com/journalism/ with a link to the text version of the article on the publisher's website (in case readers or prospective clients need any kind of authentication). I'm fine with the traffic promotion via Twitter, Facebook, forum discussions linking to my blog posts etc.
Thanks for your views. It raises another issue though, which is copyright. I wouldn't be able to post PDFs or anything of that nature as I would be in breach of the ownership of the papers I work for. We all know that happens all the time. I can't count how many times I have seen my work ripped off and posted online by someone else via cut and paste.
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andrewmccorkell
shimworld