Change of Layout

If you’ve been reading PlanetSaedel for quite sometime now, you will notice that I’ve changed the posting layout of my page. Each single page now consists of 5 posts in FULL read, unlike before where you have to click “Continue Reading…” to read the rest of the topic. I know this will sound a little selfish but the reason for this is because I want my blog to be accepted by PayPerPost. One of their requirements is to have the post displayed on the page completely. If I get accepted, I only plan to write reviews related to my interests or niche. PayPerPost (PPP), in simple words, is a company that pays bloggers to write reviews. If you want to learn more about PPP, you can read my previous post here.

Traffic

In relation to to that, If you are a subscriber – either by RSS Reader or Email – my post will be delivered to you in Full Read as well. A lot of bloggers utilize RSS because it is extremely useful and time-saving. And that’s exactly the reason why I turned off the “Continue Reading…” feature. Most bloggers are busy but they want to keep updated to other blogs, so they subscribe to a lot of sites that offer RSS. I’ve read that the only time they visit the site to read the entire post is when the title and the first few paragraphs are interesting. So I figured, why not give them a chance to read the complete post via their reader before they completely skip my post?

Enabling FULL READ is a risk, as far as my traffic is concerned. As much as possible, I want readers to go to my relatively new site and give me a “hit”. But then I thought, one way to do it is to write insightful, useful, and interesting posts. So that’s what I’m going to do.

So how am I going to send traffic to my 9-week old site?

Enter the Feedburner.

RSS FeedBurner and its FeedFlare Feature

I use FeedBurner to burn my posts and deliver them to my readers. It has a feature called FeedFlare, which I found out allows interactivity to your site. If you have an RSS reader, you can check that I am able to show the following: How many Comments are there in my posts; Links to Technorati, Digg, StumbleUpon; and many more. For my non-technical readers, these simply mean a way to encourage the readers to click on my site to generate traffic, and to share my posts/articles to other social sites if they find them interesting and discussion-worthy.

How cool is that?

However, I am unsure if FeedFlare only works for WordPress or other blog software installed in bloggers’ OWN domain. Therefore, bloggers whose sites are hosted by blogspot.com and other similar free bloghosts, will have to verify on their own if they are able to avail of this service.

MORE

I’m thinking of a better site description to replace my current one. Right now, it reads: “Beginner’s guide to practical things and more“, but the more I write, the more the description becomes irrelevant. My girlfriend Andie, thought so, too. So if you have suggestions, kindly post them in the message box below; or if you are too shy, you can simply shoot me an email at: saedel@planetsaedel.com ( saedel[at]planetsaedel[dot]com ). All suggestions will be appreciated.