To promote his site, he got dressed up in one of Shoe’s t-shirts and had friends fire some live rounds at him point blank.

Naturally, Shoe had to post that on his site.  Honestly, who wouldn’t post a video of a guy taking a dozen paintballs to the chest at pointblank range just to get your attention.  Go check out the video on Shoe’s site.

If you’ve ever tried to get your site listed in Best of the Web, you know it requires a bit of effort and often a peice of change.

Well, BOTW just launched a local version of their directory, called BOTW Local.  The basic listing is free, so you might as well sign up for it.

It allows searchers to locate businesses based on geography.  So if you offer a local product or service, this is the answer to the broader national directory.

Oh, and there’s always BOTW Blogs too.  But that will run you $50 once the 60 day trial is up.

So sign up today…can’t hurt.

I had seen it in action before on the front end of a different website, but didn’t know that was what I was seeing.

Basically, the idea is to plop a special line of text at the top of your blog post when a user comes to your site through Digg, Stumble, etc.  The plugin knows when people came to your site from one of the social voting sites, and it knows which one.  It then, for example, will remind the Digg user to digg your post.

However, users that just browse your site the good old fashioned way won’t see anything.

The idea is to give the reader just a little reminder to give you a vote.  As a result, you should get more social votes.

So, I’m going to test it on a few other sites and see how it goes.

Pop in your blog URL and the site will instantly crawl and score your site on a variety of metrics.  Some of them include meta tags, linkbacks, content evaluation, page rank, and a whole lot more.

It can take a few minutes for the system to process your site, so be patient.  You can then read through all the details of your site’s score.

And it’s free!

What’s your site’s score?

All you have to do is search for your stuff and see if it shows up right? Well that would probably take all day. So here’s how you get there a little faster. Let’s use iCastLimited.com as the example.

Log onto Google. In the search field, do each of these searches individually.

site:icastlimited.com
link:icastlimited.com
cache:icastlimited.com
info:icastlimited.com
related:icastlimited.com

What does each search mean?

First, when you do the search, make sure to have the qualifier in before your domain. So your search should look like site:YOURWEBSITE.com. Note the “site:” part. There is no space between the “:” and your URL.

site: Will pull all of the pages that Google has listed for you in their system. All the pages will be pages from your site.

link: Will pull a list of all the sites/pages from other websites that link to you. Especially handy.

cache: A snaphot of the last time Google crawled your site.

info: See what info Google has registered for your site.

related: Pulls up sites that have similar content to you. Check out the competition.

The theory is that adding these buttons will encourage people to bookmark and share your post with others if they think it is especially noteworthy.  Great concecept in theory.

In reality, the clicks on these buttons are fairly low.  However, every little bit of incremental traffic generated from them helps, right?  So why not.  Plus, you never know if a whale will bookmark you and bring a ton of traffic.

Anyway, the last thing you want to do is litter the bottom of your site with 100 little bookmark chicklets.  It looks bad and makes your site load slower.  So what’s the alternative?  ShareThis

ShareThis is a bookmarking tool for your blog or website that also does a simple “Email This to a Friend” function.

Right out of the box, it comes with all the most popular social networking sites and bookmarking sites.  In about 5 minutes, you can have this configured and launched on your blog.  It also comes with a handy little plugin for Wordpress that makes the implementation slightly easier.  However, you don’t need the plugin portion if you are compfortable with it on your own.

You are left with a clean, small button on the bottom of your posts that says ShareThis with a little icon.  That’s it.  Nice and clean.  When clicked, it pops open to reveal your sharing options.

For you as the site owner, you can track the usage of these networking tools through the ShareThis website.  That way, you can see if people are actually using it!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch, enjoy, and learn.

Eventually, your blog will become popular enough to necessitate upgrading your hosting plan. However, there’s a lot you can do to put that day off for quite a while.

One of the first and most powerful things you can do is cache your homepage and posts.

What is a “cache” ?

To understand how caching works, you first have to understand a little about how Wordpress works. Without caching, here’s how your blog works. When someone browses over to your site, Wordpress immediately queries your Wordpress database for all of the content and settings on the page.

A query is like a search. The site script searches the database for the appropriate content to display on the page. Every time the page is called upon by a user, the database is queried again and again. This repeated database query will eventually cause a tremendous amount of stress to the server.

The result is that pages start to load slower. Eventually, they may start timing out all together. 

Here’s where caching kicks in. You are probably not updating your site thousands of times a second, right? So why should the system have to query the database over and over again for each new user that comes to the site? For example, the homepage is going to look the same for me as it did two seconds ago when you checked it. It will probably still be the same 10 minutes from now when the next guy checks.

So, what if you could query the database, and then show just the results over and over again without re-querying the database? Well, that’s what a cache is.

Your site cache will save the results as a new file, and just reserve it to the next user in line. If an update to the site is made in the mean time, the cache will be cleared out for that page to reflect the new pages.

The cache will then conserve some of the load that your server faces.

Wordpress has a great plugin called WP-CACHE that handles all of this for you.

Another way to save valuable load time is to limit the amount of external content feeding into the site. If you have a lot of third party widgets and banners, they will cause your site to load slower. Loading all of that external content will slow your site because it needs to leave your server to fetch the content. Cut back on the number of ads and outsize sources you use, and you should be in better shape.

Blog pros usually spend up to an hour a day digging through their website analytics. I know, that sounds absolutely insane, but it’s true. Pro bloggers are blogging for a living, so it is very important that they understand every heartbeat of their site.

One (of many) ways to track the success of your site is to see how many other sites are linking to you. Google and other search engines actually look at these links as implicit endorsements of your content. Them more links to your site there are, the more “important” search engines believe your site to be.

Naturally, you’ll want to have as many high quality sites link to you as possible. When they do, a quick “thank you” note back is always appreciated. Also, linking back is encouraged if you find thier site valuable as well, however it is not required.

Also, when a site links to yours, one way to digitally thank them is to head over to their site, browse, and comment where appropriate.

So how do you know how many sites are linking back to you?

Look at your site analytics. Hopefully, you have some sort of system set up to track your site usage. This allows you to see how many individuals are coming to your site, and how many pages they look at. It also allows you to see how they reached your site. If they clicked a link on a site to get to yours, it should show up in your analytics. If you don’t have a stats package on your site, Google offers a good system, and it’s free. Your web host probably offers pre-installed systems as well such as AWStats.

Technorati. After your site has been kicking around the web for a month or more, it will likely be crawled by Technorati.com, especially if it has been linked to by another blog. You can go there and do a search for your site. Technorati will then show you your “Authority” rank. That number represents the number of blogs that currently contain links back to your site. Technorati updates their numbers regularly so you can accurately track the links back.

Technorati also shows you a brief excerpt of each post where your site was linked. This allows you to quickly and easily browse the context in which your site is being talked about. You can also compare your rank to others blogging on the same topic.

Google Blog Search. Blogsearch also crawls blogs constantly, and will tell you how many sites link to your blog if you know how to ask. Simply log onto Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com) and do a search like this:

Type this into the search field

link:http://www.YOUR-BLOG-DOMAIN.com

By typing “link:” in front of your site address in the google search engine, Google will return all of the sites that link to that address.

What if your site doesn’t show up at all in Technorati or Google?

Perhaps it is too soon. If you’ve only been blogging for a few days or weeks, your site may not have been ingested into the index just yet. Or, perhaps no on has linked to your site yet. You can speed your inclusion up a little bit if you can get an established site(s) to link to your blog. That will draw the search spiders into your site.

Tip 3 was worth highlighting:

Finally, I made effective use of trackback links to popular sites. If I commented on a post on another site I would make sure that I set up the appropriate trackback for it. The results from this are varied depending on the site and post that you are linking to but since I liked to comment and interact with the wider blogosphere anyway, it was free traffic!

Even though this is from 2005, it is still true today. If you want to gain respect in the blogosphere, you have to earn it. Just writing your posts and sitting around waiting for the readers to flock in doesn’t work. You need to proactively get out there and make your name known.

However, I caution you against belatedly plugging yourself where ever you go. Don’t just comment on someone else’s post because you are looking to get clicks back to your site. And don’t make your comments into a big advertisement for yourself.

Instead, actually contribute something worthwhile to the conversation. That will gain you more blogging street cred