TypePad Traffic Tip #3. Invite Compliments with Favoriting

Two weeks ago, we added Favoriting to the all new TypePad because it's fun to recognize and recommend great posts. When someone "Favorites" your post, TypePad lets everyone in their network know to come check out your awesome-ness.

How to enable Favorites:

TypePad Traffic Tip #2. Turn on Google Sitemaps

Search engines are pretty smart, but they also like shortcuts to save time. To help more readers find your posts, the new TypePad lets you quickly add a Google Sitemap to your blog (Bing and Yahoo will also grab it). Got 60 seconds? We make it easy.

Here's how to enable your Google Sitemap:

TypePad Traffic Tip #1. Post More Often

Traffic gurus all have a million tricks to tell you about, but they often forget the most important one. In order to get traffic to your site, there has to be a site worth going to. The more content, the better. Every time you post you remind Google about your site. With the new TypePad, we've made it as easy as possible to post from anywhere you might be: from your dashboard, mobile phone, email or from anywhere online using the new TypePad Blog It bookmarklet. 

Here's a few shortcuts:

Top Ten TypePad Traffic Tips

There's no such thing as too much traffic. You could read SEO blogs until your eyes fall out but the truth is you don't need a PhD in statistics to build your blog's traffic. It's pretty simple, really. To help you out, we've got the top ten things we tell our best friends to do for their blogs.

We've chopped it up into one tip a day. One quick, practical, click-here-do-this thing to do in the morning before your cereal gets soggy or at night before you floss.

Check your blog's stats now to com to your results in just ten days - the Big Reveal.

Come back to the blog daily or you can stay tuned by following us on TypePad, joining our Facebook page, following us on Twitter or grabbing the feed.

Tips so far:

Tip #1: Post More Often

Tip #2: Turn On Google Sitemaps

Tip #3: Invite Compliments with Favoriting

Bikehugger in Motion

Long-time Movable Type community member DL Byron of BikeHugger.com recently set up TypePad Motion at http://travel.bikehugger.com. We thought we'd sit down with Byron for a quick Q&A about how easy it was to set up and run a TypePad Motion site.

Q: Who is Byron, and what's Textura Design all about?

A:  Textura Design is a creative agency, specializing in business blogs & social media, and web design.I'm the Principal of Textura Design, Inc. in Seattle. I wrote a book about blogging back in the day, invented Clip-n-Seal, speak at conferences, consult, etc.


Q: Man about town, then! So, why TypePad Motion?

A: TypePad Motion was simple to install, easy to use, and simple to integrate into the Bikehugger site.  Cool that the data and user profiles are stored in TypePad, while the front end templates and pages are locally-hosted Python and Django.

As a test, I built a quick site: "Mellow Clutter". The setup took me ~34 minutes on a Macbook Air. OS X ships with the necessary code, so it was just a matter of running some terminal commands and
editing some text files. I blogged about it too.

(And because it's like a freakin’ magical unicorn that fills your blog with sunshine.)

Q: How long did it take you to setup, create and launch your
travel.bikehugger.com?

It was about a day of work, and Strangecode and Six Apart worked with
us on it.

Q: What is your development setup (hardware/software)?

The software for the server is Virtual Machine running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Hardware is Dell 2U servers with dual 3.2 GHz dual-core Xeon processors, 4 GB RAM, hot-swappable SCSI RAID drives, etc

Q: What's the one feature you'd like to see added to TypePad Motion?
I want to bring in feeds from Twitter and the like.

Thanks, Byron!