1. Dont Spam

1. Keep in mind as you find college and university blogs, that you really ought to post highly relevant comments. Go out of your way to provide value when you post comments, or your comments will get killed.

2.: Do not post the same exact comments on every single blog. You want to avoid “blog spam” as you generate your links. If you’re not adding value and your comments are not unique enough, you run the risk of getting banned by Google.

3. Some people might feel that these tactics are “black hat” or “gray hat” search engine optimization
(SEO) but our position is that if you are providing value, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t enjoy links from .edu sites.

2. Find the right blogs

It isn’t enough to know about college and university blogs. You need a weapon to find the right blogs under the right circumstances.

The weapon of choice is definitely Google.

Here are the first two secrets:

site:
inurl:

So, your search query should start like this:

site:.edu inurl:blog

This tells Google to return a list of results that includes .edu sites that have blogs. Last I counted, this
will result in about 842,000 results. Here’s a small glimpse of what you’ll get with the search above:

3. Focus on the Good Blogs

You want the “sweet” .edu blogs. Ones that don’t cause you any pain or grief. Don’t do any work until
you know you’re going to strike gold.

Right now, your search query looks like this:

site:.edu inurl:blog

This is good, but it isn’t great. You want to narrow down your search to only those blogs that allow you to comment on them. There are plenty of closed blogs, i.e., blogs that are on .edu sites but you cannot post. These are a waste of your time. So, you need to adjust your search query to look like this:

site:.edu inurl:blog "post a comment"

This will drop your results down to 400-500K, depending on the day you search. I don’t know why it fluctuates, but it does. In any event, that’s still 400-500K blogs available to you.

4. Remove Useless Blogs

You still need more focus. To do that, you have to remove more garbage. You need to eliminate blogs that force you to log in. You need to ignore blogs where you cannot comment. At this point, you’ve narrowed your search using the following search parameters:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment”

The problem is that many blogs are not open to comments (i.e., they’re closed). So, you need to add another parameter. You need to add a subtraction parameter to eliminate blogs that are closed to comments:

-”comments closed”

So, as you can see, you are subtracting blogs where comments are closed by using the minus sign as well as the “comments closed” text. But, you’re not done! You also want to remove search results where the blog forces you to register and log in. Do you have time to create an account and log in just to leave a good comment on a blog? No way! So, you need to add another subtracting parameter…

-”you must be logged in”

When you do this, you filter out blogs that require you to register. This doesn’t always work, but it is very effective.

5. Find the right niche

You’ve got just the blogs you care about, but now it’s time for one last trick: finding the right blogs for
your niche.

Here’s the (almost) final result:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -"comments closed" -"you must be logged in”

We use this trick all the time to find outstanding .edu blogs. We then post high quality comments and we get excellent backlinks.

We also get good traffic from .edu blogs when we post high quality comments. So, if you make the investment, you will get good backlinks (i.e., Google Pagerank boost) but also direct traffic from smart, interested readers on your topic.

That leads me to the next point. You can add another word or two to your search to get exactly the right blog. For example, just add “seo” to the search string and you’ll find .edu blogs that are openly discussing the topic, where you can post your comments and get excellent backlinks. Result:

site:.edu inurl:blog "post a comment" -"comments closed" -"you must be logged in" "seo"


Utilize Google Toolbar

If you’re looking to rapidly fill out blog comments, give Google Toolbar a try. You can rapidly update Googl Toolbar with your name, email address and web site URL. Then, you can focus on your comments on the blog.

If you’re trying to whip through a bunch of blogs then Google Toolbar can help you work magic. However… It is important to post quality comments. If you don’t you’ll get them deleted. Also, remember that there is value in the traffic from the links alone. There’s more to consider than just backlinks.

Bonus: You can quickly determine the Pagerank of the blog using Google Toolbar. This is pretty obvious but it will help you decide if your postings is worth the effort or not.

So, start cranking out outstanding comments on .edu blogs and get the backlinks you want!

A combined tutorial on blogger, adsense and analytics. Learn how to use blogger.com’s free blogging facility to get your blog-site up and running and utilizing adsense to monetize the same. Also learn how Google Analytics can help you track your blog visitors (country, IP address, how they reached your blog etc) and provide you with hints on how to consolidate your blog.

The admin panel especially warrants a deserving mention. The dashboard has been completely overhauled, with what wordpress developers call a “cleaner, clutter free panel.”

Of course, prominent wordpressers had stuff to say on this all important release. Peter Westwood described it as a marathon achievment with the following stats:

• In development for 185 days (6 months 3 days to be precise).
• Changes to 364 files with 54008 insertions, and 29136 deletions for more detail you can view the diffstat output.
• Patches committed from over 110 different contributors.
• Over 1300 individual changes made for more detail you can view a complete changelog.

Dougal Cambell talks of his experience in testing the beat version of this milestone release and the fact that complex plugin update problem is solved in the stable release.

Matt and Lorelle enjoyed the WordCamp at Dallas and published the announcement from Dallas itself.

Apparently WordPress.com and MU users will get upgraded within the week.

And hopefully, we wont get another wordpress updates for the next 6 months! Just got to know that WordPress 2.6 is scheduled for an August 2008 release. Frankly, I have had enough of updating to a newer version every month during latter half of 2007. At least, this one is 5 months away.

An excellent tutorial for newbies out there to create their own free blog at blogger.com

A nice, short wordpress.com step-by-step blogging guide

You just need to have your ears in the right place, know how to research the net (read Google), and have a flair for writing.

What you can expect for being a part of the lughole team:

• We share 100% Adsense revenue with the post author. For the uninitiated, these are the ads that appear when you open a complete blog post (the ads are located just below the blog posts’ heading). You will need to have an Adsense account.
• Incentives if your blog posts get the highest traffic..we’ll make it a top 3 blog posts of the month competition. Haven’t decided the nitty gritties yet but awards would be cash incentives paid via paypal, amazon gift certificates and MRR products for interested webmasters.
• If you have no previous experience of blogging, you’ll obviously learn a lot here. Not just how to blog well, but also how to promote a blog, perform search engine optimization (seo), and a lot more. You can always include your writing experience here in your resume as well!

And of course, you’ll be part of a great team, and we’ll surely have a grand time.

Interested people may email me at: