The Science of Blogging: Improving, Marketing and Tracking Your Blog
There is an excellent and very popular blog called Blog About Your Blog, that takes an in-depth look at all the ways to improve, promote and market your website. As an example, they look at thing like Why it is Important to Increase your StumbleUpon Network and other networking tools like Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Plugim and the pros and cons of each.
Also, they look at ways to monitor your blog activity, how to increase it and how to improve it, market it and make money from it.
Here is a list of some of their most popular posts, that includes such things like Writing a Great Blog Title, 5 Must-have Comment Plug-ins for WordPress, Optimize Your Blog and many others.
Another very interesting idea that they have implemented is a “Comment Friday”, where they ask their readers to post ideas about whatever topic they have picked. They have asked about things like What You have Been Blogging About Recently, SuperBlogging Tips, What You Think About SEO (search engine optimization) and How You Implement It and many other topics.
They use a very interesting incentive to get many comments, which helps them promote their website and helps the readers get a lot of good ideas. Here is what they say about Comment Friday: “If this is your first comment friday, the idea is pretty simple. Leave us a comment about anything you want. I will select one lucky commentor that really stands out, and I will give a free link to them. Not only that, but they will get a one week free blogroll spot.”
This not only improves their standings by increasing their comments on their posts, but also provides exposure to the person who is selected each Friday.
Besides the good information in their posts and comments, you can also learn a lot about promoting your blog just by looking at theirs and seeing how they go about promoting their own blog.
An example is the current contest they are running to increase their technorati score through linkbacks. A person just mentions their blog in a post and they can win one of three prizes, including an MP3 player, banner on their sidebar or full site review by Adsense Tracker on their blog. The contest ends Sept. 19.
Since I had planned to write about this blog for a while, the contest gave me the incentive to sit down and do it. I like prizes! 
Blog About Your Blog is filled with good ideas and advice and really is a must-read for anyone who is serious about their blogging.
~Susan Mellott
