Lesson two: Start the press

This week we'll dig into the basics that launch a healthy blog from headlines to links and art alignment. For anyone feeling tech-anxious, this lecture will walk you through the set-up. Remember that you don't have to master all these tools at once ... and Mike and I are here to cheer, cajole and handhold, as required.

More advanced students can look forward to some serious opt-in geekery soon, as well as line-critiques and literary-technique discussions.

Whatever your level, enjoy! – Amanda

1. Target audience
2. Keep the home court advantage
3. Who was that masked blogger?
4. Bios: should you claim that blog?
5. Kicky bios and other profile tactics
6. SEO starter-kit – Master the headline
7. Oh, behave, with your bad headline self!
8. Organizing blog material
9. Intro to blog design: template primer
10. Search capacities for your blog
11. Adding, deleting and repositioning sidebar elements
12. Archiving your blog
13. Hang on, what's a blogroll? Sushi?
14. Stop skeezy link farms now!
15. Hey, I want one of those blogroll things!
16. Feature context and original content high
17. Matching design to content
18. Linktasia – connecting your blog to the larger world
19. How to link and create permalinks
20. The importance of art
21. Photo preparation for your blog
22. How to upload an image
23. Hear Amanda's headcold in almost real-time!
24. Assignment week two

Note, for the geek-enthusiastic, Mike and I posted five new tips and tricks. As he explains, these files are meaty, tech-tastic extravaganzas. Think of them as help documents or extra-curricular reading...

Blogger Settings Explained
Tools for Writing Posts
Photo Software Advice
Web-friendly Image Formats and Compression
Troubleshooting Image Compression

Just a reminder: your first critiques will post by midnight PST on Thursday. From here out, please submit your homework in that same Assignments folder under Forums.

Target audience

The first week's assignment asked you to consider your readers – and nutshell your demographic in 25 words or less (a la elevator pitch). As the course continues, keep refining that concept. Whom are you talking to? Are you venting and pondering at friends? Showing peers how to savor life and explore new horizons? Sharing advice on a specific medical condition? Exciting customers about a business?

Pulitzer-winner and famed author-coach Jacqui Banaszynski stresses: "Writing is personal. Direct. It needs to be from me to you." She elaborated at the National Writers Workshop in 2007: "When I'm writing a story, I'm really writing a letter I'm getting in [readers'] heads and thinking, 'what do they need to know to understand this, what education do they need to understand the moment of emotion?'" .

As a newspaper reporter, Banaszynski went down to the circulation department and picked up a handful of reader profiles. "I matched them to people in my life. I put pictures of them in my cubicle. My five people kept me honest, when I got too involved with my sources or too in love with my own prose."

Blogging is no different. Anyone may stumble across your open letters to the world, but they will only resonate for some. Make them sing, shimmy and play jazz for that cohort.

Know your readers. Maybe even befriend them – or at least interact via comments. Make your blog a conversation, not a monologue, and its chance of success will soar.

Keep the home court advantage

"Write what you know" is the oldest advice in the trade – for a reason. Your unique life experiences will always illuminate your prose: more so when you’re enjoying the home court advantage. Try to pick topics that exploit your expertise. For example, when I wrote a piece on driving a moped in Rome, where I lived for two years, I didn’t just bemoan the manic Mediterranean traffic: I introduced the Italian concept – menefreghismo, the "state of not caring" – that fuels some of their wild driving habits. Such wealth of detail is hard to come by without being there, saturating in your subject, living it.

Writers bring much of themselves to any text. An advertising executive in Taiwan has quite a different perspective from a Denver mountaineer or a French homemaker. Even if all three blogged the same topic, their responses would be diverse. And that's the beauty of the web, really. With great ease, we can explore others' experiences and reactions ... satisfying that primal human urge to rubberneck. Dangerous as that can be, we're hardwired to learn through observation. Happily the information highway is a safer place to looky-loo.

Don’t parrot or “echo chamber,” as the blogosphere calls it. Jeff Atwood sagely points out: “we have the whole of human history to talk about, and most people can't get past what happened today. If I wanted news, I'd visit one of the hundreds of news sites that do nothing but news every day. Putting yourself in the news business is a thankless, unending grind. Don't do it.”

Who was that masked blogger?

As we discussed on the class forum, a blog can be private (invite-only) or public (indexed by Google and other search engines).

Even folks who blog for glory and riches often maintain a hidden test site. A scratch pad lets you tinker and perfect projects before launching 'em. In Blogger, go to Settings>Permissions>Blog Readers. Click the radio button "only people I choose". Then include your list of emails, separated by commas.

Many blogs, like Boing Boing, cram a lot of cooks into the kitchen (yet somehow serve great broth). Should you decide upon a group-authored site, head to that same Settings>Permissions page. Enter up to 100 collaborators' email addresses into the top Blog Authors panel. (See Mike's Tips & Tricks: Blogger Settings Explained for a wild romp through the entire dashboard panel. We'll discuss further options in depth as they arise.)

Bios: should you claim that blog?

Blogs are a more intimate, subjective media experience than traditional journalism. Readers are curious who's speaking – and often why. Even if you decide to conceal your real identity like Superman, give some context in the "About This Site" section. Possible elements to include:

• Name or nome de plume
• Location or at least region
• Expertise (if applicable)
• Motivation

Some folks link the visible text to their Blogger profiles – as Mike and I have done here – which can contain vast amounts of info, including favorite books, movies, astrological sign, age, etc. Ours are both pretty minimal, because we maintain personal websites. But fleshed-out ones can help readers connect.

I would recommend a picture of some sorts, as these icons (aka "avatars") appear on comments threads. Visually, they make the conversation easier to follow, even when someone's just represented by a snapshot of a poodle or a snowflake.

Many bloggers prefer a nome de plume, like Mimi Smartypants, another superstar who made the leap from pixels to print. Being anonymous can permit more frank chat, certainly … but are you prepared to be outed? Employers now tap into MySpace profiles, for example, and already applicants have lost job offers to that duct-tape fetish or underage drunken snapshot.

(Mimi, in fact, was quasi-exposed when she agreed to a New York Times interview under her real name. But she continues to write under her "handle" – a decision perhaps influenced by security for her young daughter Nora. As you can see from this photo, which ran on Road Remedies, I am conservative about kid pix, though not a parent. I'd lucked into a stunning shot of the gorilla girl sans mask and in panda ears. But I censored it for her safety and privacy. We'll talk more about these issues in week eight.)

Heather B. Armstrong is the poster-child of big-mouth bloggers. She explains: "I started this website in February 2001. A year later I was fired from my job for this website because I had written stories that included people in my workplace. My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID. Never write about work on the Internet unless your boss knows and sanctions the fact that YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT WORK ON THE INTERNET If you are the boss, however, you should be aware that when you order Prada online and then talk about it out loud that you are making it very hard for those around you to take you seriously."

Her site's name even inspired a new word, "dooced," meaning to be sacked for indiscreet web chatter.

Many professional authors rely on blogs as a branding tool – bait for editors and readers: an argument for transparency. Beth Whitman, the Wanderlust and Lipstick diva, is a good example of this. Her lovely face beams out at readers from the masthead. In her travel genre – like many others – personality sells, from Arthur Frommer to Bill Bryson. And that's why many readers are blogsurfing in the first place: they crave a more intimate, opinionated perspective. So think about how to create an authentic blogging persona, whether or not you slap your "meatspace street name" on it...

I'll sign off with a screed by cyber-pioneer Cameron Barrett, master and commander of Camworld, one of the longest-running blogs to date. In 1999, he declared the genre needed: "Less senseless hype. Less gratuitous linking. Less focus on the sensationalistic journalism that's crowding our brains and turning them into mush. More focus on the truly exceptional content out there on the web that only a few of us manage to dig up. More personal essays. More professional essays. And yes, even the occasional rant.

"You see, CamWorld is about me. It's about who I am, what I know, and what I think. And it's about my place in the New Media society. CamWorld is a peek into the subconsciousness that makes me tick. It's not about finding the most links, the fastest, automated archiving, or searchable personal websites. It's about educating those who have come to know me … about the increasingly complex world we live in, both online and off."

Kicky Bios and other profile tactics

To edit your bio section, go to Layout>Page Element. In the righthand column (sidebar) is a box titled "About this site". Click edit, then get writing. Either be straight-up informative or make with the funny. Or both.

Some faves:

Louche: Tall, slightly too well dressed and in command of some excellent brogues. I'm a fop, a dandy, a cad and a rake. Often tempted, rarely accused, never caught Occasionally I get accused of being a bit of a bounder but when faced with trouble I always ask myself 'What would Flashman do?’

Claire Woodward: London lady writer, GSOH, desperate for attention, seeks readers for friendship, comments, possibly more. Likes: staying in, going out, hovering hesitantly on the doorstep, records from the 10p basement, courtesy, frocks. Dislikes: pretty much everything else, otherwise I'd have nothing to write about, would I?

LC: Good in bed, shit at everything else.

SEO starter-kit – Master the headline

Post frequency is a huge factor in your site's ranking, which determines how high it appears on search engine indexes. Naturally, prominence there builds readership. In week six, we'll explore nuances of this voodoo, called search engine optimization (SEO). But for now, let's focus on a few simple steps to juice up your blogs:

• Write early. Write often. Unlike your instructors' personal blogs. (Do as we say...)
• Shorter linked entries – published daily – are preferable to a long essay weekly.
• Kick off with enticing language, rich with specifics – especially the keywords folks might search upon. Soup up those headlines!
• Ditto the first 25 words, which also appear on the search engine's index pages. Make 'em count.

“On a value-per-word basis, headline writing is the most important writing you do, explains Jakob Nielsen of Weblog Usability. “Descriptive headlines are especially important for representing your weblog in search engines, newsfeeds (RSS), and other external environments. In those contexts, users often see only the headline and use it to determine whether to click into the full posting.”

One-deck headlines are preferable. Employ precise language – or poetic, if that's more your thing. But think about baiting readers away from their tax returns, tennis matches and the latest Tina Fey vehicle.

Some of the best headlines spring fully-formed from the ether. But certain formulas exist for less inspired moments. As the travel-writing teacher Louise Purwin Zobel points out: "Everybody likes a title that talks about saving money or time; a title that promises improvement in health, creativity, or prestige; a title that hints of the newest, the latest, the most up to date; a title that tells you the article will tell you how to do something. You – either spelled out or implied – is a very important word. The title should be intriguing, startling, or thought-provoking and usually no longer than six words."

Engaging headlines ask a question, use clever punctuation, alliteration, a pun, or onomatopoeia, advises Poynter's Sara Quinn.

Oh, behave, with your bad headline self!

1. Search for action, rather than verbs of being (is, has, was).
2. Avoid word repetition: The worse headline I've ever personally witnessed: Town Plan Planning Gets Go Ahead.
3. Be descriptive. A header hooks the reader. Don't "bait and switch" with a misleading statement in 48-point type.
4. Omit unnecessary words like prepositions, helping verbs (is, are) or articles (a, an, the).
5. Strive for words that are short, common, colorful, powerful, specific.

As David Michelmore, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editor, notes: "Heads are a little like poetry. (Not a lot, but a little.) There's no room for extraneous words. The formats are uncompromising. How they sound counts. How they look counts. And getting just the right word is what makes them fun."

Good uns

• Pictures from Die Hunns and Black Halos show
• Office Depot Pays United States $4.75 Million to Resolve False Claims Act Allegations (too long, but even if you only read the first few words,
• you have an idea of what it's about)
• Ice cream trucks as church marketing

Cruddy headlines
Vague and bland, poor captions don't express the story or its urgency. They're unlikely to rank high on search-engines or to inspire clicks when they do. Cases in point:

• What Is It That You Want?
• Hey, kids! Comics!
• Victims Abandoned

Gotcha!
Fake-out headlines promise one thing (usually sex, drugs and rock and roll), then deliver another (death, taxes). While this can result in a bunch of click-throughs, temporarily spiking traffic, it doesn't build a solid readership. Still, sometimes writers just can't help themselves...

• It may not boost your libido or take cellulite off your thighs, but… (about the latest issue of Serendipity) –Tamara’s Big Blog of Marvel
• Fat Tits (about birds) – Bowlserised
• Dawn Porter in the Nude (about, well, Dawn Porter naked, but in a documentary-reviewing sort of way)– Louche, I’m Not Gay

Marie Javins, author of the blog No Hurry in JC, doesn’t write these, but they still happen: “I get loads of link-throughs from people searching for "lion porn" from the Simba Love entry. Go figure.

“Also tons of hits from people searching for JC Marie, who is apparently some sexy model.”

The search-engine hilarity doesn't stop there. Javins authored the travelogue book Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik, so she suffers "hits all the time from people searching for dik, hot dik, big dik, and other variations. Because the world is full of bad spellers.”

Many bloggers monitor search terms and post or riff on the most amusing ones. It creates something of a feedback loop, but seems like mostly harmless amusement...

Other headline gurus speak out

• Rhythm Makes Your Headlines Sing (Doo Dah, Doo Dah)
• Rhymes and Reason
• The art of writing headlines
• So Many Headlines, So Few Zingers
• Readers Consume What They See
• Writing Headlines

Organizing blog material

By now, you've all begun publishing posts with exquisite, click-inspiring, audience-luring headlines. Yay! Go team!

Now, let's talk about how to wrangle all your content. Oh, it doesn't seem like much now. But 435 posts later, you'll wish those images and rough drafts and final versions were corralled neatly together.

Obviously, create a system intuitive to you. Here's my suggestion, however, based on bitter, bitter experience. Keep a folder with original text (then copied-and-pasted into the post form). Maintain copies of all images, before you resize, crop and caption them for the blog – as well as final compressed versions.

For extra gold stars, once you've polished a post, grab the code (click "edit html" on Blogger's top-right tab above the entry submission field). Back this up on your hard drive. Should you ever accidentally wipe your site – or, say, sell an e-book based on your blog – you will be so, so, so very happy to have the components assembled.

Intro to blog design: template primer

Blog platforms are the stuff of awesome because they allow any computer-competent person to publish professional-looking sites without programming chops. A critical, early step in all this is selecting a look and feel apt for your topic. So dig into Blogger's chocolate-box of designs and see what suits.

A template controls the look of your blog via cascading style sheets (css): its width, number of columns, header style, and so forth. Some aspects – like colors and fonts – can be adjusted further via Blogger's control panels. But the first step is deciding what, roughly, your site should look like.

Under Layout is the link "pick a new template". Experiment here, if you're not committed to the design you chose when it launched.

You'll notice that Blogger, lamely, offers only two-column styles. Three-column ones exist, but you need to source the code from a reliable third-party, then customize your template. We'll talk about how to do this – and manage it safely – later in the course.

Once you've chosen a template, you can start modifying it. Click on Layout>Page Elements. A boxy schematic of your site will appear (a "wireframe" in jargonese).

Here you can "Add a Gadget," such as a sidebar text box, blogroll and widgets (which we discuss below in depth). You can also drag and drop items to rearrange them. The "Edit" buttons are pretty self-explanatory. The header one allows you to change the title and tagline, drop an image behind the text or upload a custom header (more on that later).

Make sure you hit the orange "save" button on the top right!

The next element to play with is Fonts and Colors, also in blue on the beige bar under Layout.

Scroll down that left-hand control panel. Weirdly, it has different options for items' color and their font, which can be hard for DTP-savvy people to grasp. But Blogger is a basic, free platform, so things are clunky on occasion.

OK, there's loads of fun stuff to goof around with here. A few tips:

• Reversed-out text – light on a dark background – is considerably harder to read, especially on-screen. If you take that route, consider making the text larger and bolder.
  
• Don't go crazy with the paintbox. A palette of five to six should suit all your needs, from background hue to sidebar text. Use color to direct the eye, not distract it. Ditto fonts.
  
• Sans serif fonts – without the little "feet" – work best on-screen for body text. The class blog employs Arial, which is a little more narrow (and sophisticated) than the common Verdana. To maintain a consistent, not-distracting style, stick with 2-3 fonts and 2-3 font sizes.
  
• Settle onto a template before you tinker here exhaustively. Color and font details will be lost if you switch. But it's easy to note the palette and recreate it... Each color has a hex code a six-character mix of numbers and letters.
  
  
  
  
• Remember to save changes. Big ole orange button again.

The final Layout element is "Edit html". Here you can peek at the code and, if you're really brave, wade in and edit the css, after backing it up. That's pretty advanced stuff, so Mike will address it later in class – and coach ambitious folks on issues.

Search capacities for your blog

Wise bloggers include some search capacity, so readers don't have to leave the site to track a specific topic. In Blogspot, this is built into the tippy-top nav-bar. You can delete that element in "Layout" – and some people do this to look less "off the shelf". But week two, really, let's stick with the easy solution...

Adding, deleting and repositioning sidebar elements

Design-wise, the skinnier column is called a sidebar – and generally houses elements like:

• About
• Ads
• Archive
• Blogroll
• Greatest hits
• Suscription box
• Syndicated content via RSS feeds (headlines, tweets, and so on)
• Widgets, aka "gadgets" (embedded programlets – often interactive – like clocks, calendars, Flickr slideshows, etc.)

Bloggers can manipulate these elements easily without knowing a scrap of code. We'll walk you through some basic options this week.

Archiving your blog

The bottom of each page contains an "older posts" link, but will people read in a backwards and linear fashion? Not necessarily. So you need a more nimble system. Enter the Blog Archive. Different formats exist. Under "Settings," click the central blue "Archiving" link. Determine the time intervals (whatever suits your style). Enable post pages: this gives each post a unique web page and that's how peeps link to you... Now click "save settings". The archive "box" appears on that Layout page, and can be dragged and dropped into various positions.

Hang on, what's a blogroll? Sushi?

n. A list of blogs. A blogger features a list of their favorite blogs in the sidebar. Derived, it would seem, as a pun on logrolling.

These can be a powerful network-building tool, as Ink on My Fingers proved. My British friend Susannah Conway began this blog while mourning a lover's sudden death. Her style was highly poetic and confidential. "It became a refuge for me," she confesses, "a place I could share my heart while also finding my way."

Conway unfurled a mighty list of online comrades. Comments poured in. Intimacies blossomed. "I discovered an incredible community in blogland, and it was a trip to the States to meet up with some blog friends in 2006 that rekindled my passion for photography, something that had started many years ago." She wound up switching careers and now tries to share more passions than sorrows.

Her blogroll's shrunk by 60–70% since 2005, I'd wager. She splits it into two components – photography and inspiring – one for each sidebar. Note their placement, midway down the page. That's wise. For a diary-style blog, readers should first encounter information about the author and what to expect (descriptions, tag clouds etc.). Once they're hooked and scrolling, then give your peeps a shout-out.

Good in moderation, don't let your blogroll reach absurd lengths or you'll resemble a link-farm. Devoid of content, these sites are the equivalent of ghost-nets, adrift and tangled with the drowned corpses of baby porpoises and narwhal "unicorn" whales.

OK, maybe I exaggerated a little... But they are pretty annoying. Their architects feed off the creative energy of others. They write a program that harvests headlines and wispy excerpts – usually under 25 words – with hyperlinks to the original material. And ads. Lots and lots of ads, which is how these talentless ghouls piggyback profit.

Stop skeezy link farms now!

Wouldn't that be nice? Unfortunately, this form of spamming isn't illegal.

Hey, I want one of those blogroll things!

Happy news: you don't have to program this wondrous thing yourself! Blogger – and other platforms – have plug n' play "widgets". Here's how to set one up.

1. Click the Layout tab
2. Just under the header lies a powder-blue link "Add a Gadget" Do it!
3. A pop-up window appears.
4. Blog List is smack at the top. Click that plus sign.
5. Pick a title. Enter this in the top data field. I've gone with "Student Shout-out," since it's a little zippier than just "Blogroll".
6. Pick a sorting option from the drop-down menu. I prefer alphabetically: it's easier for repeat readers to navigate.
7. Decide what else you want to reveal (icon, snippets, titles). I just run with titles, because I don't want to distract readers too much. Mike really digs viewing the most recent post time and date. Each to their own...
8. Hit the button "Add to list" at the bottom left.
9. Paste in URL. Make sure you get the whole thing, including the "http://" bit.
10. The "Edit" link – beside each blog title – allows you to do just that.
11. Click save.
12. Back on the Layout Page, your blogroll's probably popped up at the top of the sidebar. This is bad. You should be the star there with the "About Me" section at the top: visitors need this information to evaluate what they're reading. So it's time to drag and drop. Click on that box and shuffle it into a better space.
13. Click the big ole orange "save" button, top right.

On the class blog here, we've added some students' URLs already (more to come). The blogroll is exclusively for sites being workshopped in class (one per person). I'll note other projects or additional test blogs under "Other Online Efforts".

Comments below, if we've overlooked your submission, please!

Feature context and original content high

Design-wise, think about how to showcase your fresh, unique material in the main text area. When a reader lands on your blog, does original content draw their eye? Or is half the page taken up by a header (a static element), followed by a headline and someone else's Flickr photo? Do the first 25 words – which also appear in search indexes, inviting traffic – convey excitement and the gist of the post, including as many specific details as possible?

You'll often hear the dead-tree media term "above the fold" in regards to this space. Like any first impression, you want to dazzle quickly. Some elements that aid this:

1. A shallow header: the "masthead" box or image across the top. Most templates are between 660 pixels and 770 pixels wide, but the header will stretch in height to match the art you place there.
   
   We'll talk about how to prep and place images later in this lecture. For now, just ponder photos much wider than they are tall. Ones cropped to "landscape" proportions work best. (Tip: Go to Dashboard -> Layout -> Page Elements and click the "Edit" link in the header area. Check the bottom of the dialogue box for the width of your template, measured in pixels.)
2. An "about me" box, top right, giving context.
3. Horizontal images at the top of posts, not vertical (those work best dotted into the text, drawing the eye down the page and breaking up large "grey" chunks of text).
4. Body copy starting "above the fold".
5. Datelines, placing the story geographically if your prose wanders. Associated Press style is most often used: a city name, entirely in capital letters, followed in most cases by the name of the state, county or territory, and country (if not immediately clear). These also help cue the searchbots and ad-generators into your topic.
6. Specific headlines that highlight your original content.

We'll explore these concepts in more detail throughout the class, through feedback and lectures.

Matching design to content

While you're deep in the guts of your blog, take a moment to consider your layout. Some questions to guide your self-critique:

1. Is the design clear, directing the eye smoothly, as opposed to cluttered?

2. How readable is the content?

3. How useful are the sidebars?

4. How will readers discover your finest content? Would a "greatest hits" link box direct them to your best samples? To create one in the sidebar, go to Layout>Add Gadget>Link List, then insert the permalink URLs.

5. How is the quality of design compared to other blogs and sites in the niche?

6. Does the color scheme suit your subject? A whole psychology of hues exists out there (red, for example, conveys intensity, from passion to anger and excitement, while blue soothes). Also, remember that reversed out text (white on black) is challenging to read on-screen.

7. Is the theme unique? Should you consider customizing the template for more distinctive branding?

8. How quickly does the blog load?

9. Does it quickly communicate to new visitors?

10. How intrusive are any ads?

Linktasia – connecting your blog to the larger world

A blog without readers is the sound of one hand clapping. A veritable cul-de-sac on the information superhighway... Blogs wilt in a vacuum and thrive on community. And the quickest way to build that is via links.

As CUNY media professor Jeff Jarvis notes in The Guardian, we are “witnessing the millennial clash of media models: the content economy v the link economy. Online, content is valueless if no one sees it: content that isn't linked is the tree that fell in the forest no one heard (or turned into print).”

And so. Link. Linklinklink.

Link to your old posts, creating a conversation, a camaraderie. (These are internal links.)

Link to others with specific click-through terms. (These are outbound links on your site, inbound on the recipient's).

Link to friends and resources. But avoid long spammy blogrolls: too much is too much, not the new black.

How to link and create permalinks

Oh yeah, we really should discuss that.

1. Make sure you're in "Compose" mode on the Posting page. Click that top righthand tab if you're not.
2. Type the word you want to display.
3. Select it with the mouse.
4. Click the green globe icon on the beige bar above. It displays "Link" if you mouseover.
5. A new window pops up. Paste in the URL.
6. Hit "OK".

You can also handcode the html or generate it via a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) program. More on those later.

To encourage inbound links, give each post a unique URL address (permalink). That way webmasters and other bloggers can direct readers to a specific entry like Tremolo Lovesong of the Yukon Mosquito instead of the main Road Remedies page, which features the post du jour.

To make all this magic happen, go to Blogger's Settings>Archiving, then select "enable post pages".

Students often ask, "how do I encourage people to link to me?" The workshop will explore various strategies over the next eight weeks, but following are a few places to start:

• Write specific, original posts. Don't echo chamber.
• Link to notable blogs. Drop the author a note, thanking them for a great entry and alerting them to the headcheck.
• Make thoughtful comments on sites with similar or relevant content. Your profile links back to your blog, encouraging traffic.