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The weekly winner contest is an ongoing contest that I run here on my blog. Every week, I give away $25 as well as free donated prizes to a different person inside the blog raffle. If you would like to enter for a chance to win $25 as well as a variety of free donated prizes every week, please read the official contest post about the weekly winner contest. The earlier you enter the raffle, the better your chances are at winning your free $25!

It is Sunday again, which means that the next prize winner is chosen! The fifth weekly winner is ContestBytes. Congratulations on winning your free $25 as well as all the great bonus prizes. You can read ContestByte’s entry here.

Bonus Prizes

A free license to FruitfulTime task list software ($29.99 on sale value)
FruitfulTime has generously offered you a free license to the FruitfulTime software.  FruitfulTime is a complex time-management software that aims to remind you for when you have tasks to be completed. For example, I gave myself a task titled “don’t forget to write your weekly winner post this Sunday!” so that I would remember to write this post on time! If you are interested in testing out the software, a 10 day free trial is available. If you would like more information I recommend you read the page on the to do list software as well as the one that has a general overview on the task list software.

1 Year Subscription to Create the Dream Magazine ($24 value)
Traci, the kind vice president/publisher of Create The Dream, has sponsored a free yearly subscription to their magazine. Create the Dream publishes 6 issues per year, which costs $24. Anyone can download the January issue for free, so you can see the quality they put into their work. You can read more about Create the Dream on their website, or my previous blog post called Create the Dream magazine.

Previous Weekly Winners

Weekly Winner Number 1
Weekly Winner Number 2
Weekly Winner Number 3
Weekly Winner Number 4

If you would like to donate a prize for an upcoming weekly winner, feel free to contact me. You will get a completely free plug in return for your generosity.

This guest post was submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from PiggyBankPie.

If you’re going to have a successful blog, you need to get smart with setting goals. Success does not just happen; you have to plan for it. I’ve found it to be a process of trial and error. I know a lot more about getting a new blog started now than I did two years ago - and I’ve made plenty of mistakes on the way. Here’s what I’ve learned about goal setting.

You’ve probably come across the acronym SMART before. It refers to setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. You can’t get much better advice than that. How does this apply to your blog? Let’s take a look.

Let’s say you want to build the number of feed subscribers. It helps to know exactly how many subscribers will meet your goal. This may change over time. When you start a new blog, you may be happy if your feed subscribers get into double digits. If your blog has been running longer, then only triple digits will do.

Setting a specific goal makes it easy to have something to shoot for, and you can still exceed it. Being specific also helps you with the second part of goal setting, which is making your goals measurable. If you can’t measure them, how will you know when you have achieved success? For example, you might want to attract a certain number of visitors to your blog, and you can use a stats program to measure when you have met that goal.

Next, your blogging goals need to be achievable and realistic. I always start my goal setting process by thinking big about what my perfect blog would look like. That’s the dreaming phase, where I think about what my ideal blog would look like. I write down my aims, and get rid of the ones that are unrealistic. Then I divide them up into short, medium and long term goals. That gives me targets to meet and realistic time frames in which to meet them. I also need to think about my own time. If I need to do something time consuming, like submitting my blog to 100 directories, I need to set that goal for a time when I can actually doing it - otherwise it isn’t achievable.

It also helps to break these goals down into little steps that you need to complete. For example, if I want to increase the number of email subscribers to my blog, I first need to burn my feed with Feedburner. Then I need to get an email subscription form and add it to my blog’s template. Finally, I need to let people know that they can now subscribe by email. I might do this by writing a post, and by adding a reminder to the end of each post.

Finally, your blogging goals need to be timely. Here’s how that might work. If you want to attract attention with a Diggable post, then don’t post it on a day when you have low traffic, or on a holiday when your regular readers might be away. The post might get lost in the shuffle and you will have wasted some really great writing. Instead, find out when your best traffic day is. Find out who else might be posting on something similar and tell them about your post. Sometimes that’s all it takes to build a buzz.

So when you’re ready to promote your blog, assess your goals and see if they are SMART. It will help you to focus and will save a lot of wasted time.

Grazr is a web2.0 service that allows you to create widgets to “monitor online sources and share the results.”  What the heck does that mean?!? Other than sounding a lot like an RSS clone, I have no idea.  If you really want to figure out what the heck they do, go visit it, but being the vigorous internet marketer and link building deviant that I am, I only see the great link building capabilities. Grazr is a pagerank 6 authority site in the eyes of the search engines, and you can easily get a few pages on the site that link to every new post you make. In a nutshell, it is like an untapped RSS syndication that links to your blog posts the moment you write them. It is this site, along with the other popular ones in my RSS feed directory list that allow my blog posts to be cached by Google in under three hours.

Steps to getting your own free power links:

1. Register on Grazr.com
2. Visit the big “create” button.
3. Hit the “data” button and enter your RSS feed URL.
4. Go to “info” and make a title and hit save.
5. Go to “share” at the top. It should have a page with some links in it.
6. If you see the links, you now have three separate pages that link to your RSS feed.

As an extra bonus, you will get a temporary link to your RSS feed pages on the PR6 homepage. This will help those pages get indexed and cached very quickly, which is good for you. Make sure to welcome Google when it visits you more often now! I would like to thank EB for showing me this site in the first place.

This is part 24 of my series called the link building cookbook that aims to be the ultimate free guide on how to build massive amounts of links without paying one penny!

If you are wondering why there has been a larger-than-usual time lapse in my post, it is because I was doing a case study on my last post about simple blogging seo tweaks and how to maximize your search engine rankings with simple changes in your blogging config.

I received an email arguing that removing your blog keyword(s) from your title improves relevancy. Now instead of arguing point vs point, I thought I would give it a simple test. Please know that this is only a FOUR DAY case study on my blog, and results may vary.   My short-term conclusion is that my traffic increased by quite a bit.  Feel free to try both with keyword titles and without, and see which brings more search engine traffic for you.

I had not posted a single post in four days, and the final conclusion for my case study was that my search engine traffic went up 3.30% according to Google Analytics. I think this is a major improvement because many of my pages are still cached with the old title, so if everything moved over I might even get lucky enough to get a 5-15% increase in search engine traffic.

While I saw a massive increase in my own experiment, feel free to argue in the comments if you like seeing your keywords on every page. For me, I will stick to using only the relevant title because it is sending me additional traffic.

On another note, my popular post about link building with Flickr seems to have caught the attention of the big folk over at Yahoo. They have added ‘nofollow’ to all external links, so the Google search engine benefit has been nuked. I still feel it is a great idea to comment on images that get popular on Digg because of all the traffic and for the little benefit on the non-Google search engines.