Ladies and gentlemen, I have been selected to receive the Power of Schmooze Award! This honor is only given by others who have received it, and passed on to other deserving recipients. The Power of Schmooze award was created by Mike at Ordinary Folk and Danielle at Pink Reviews to help “recognize those people that were [are] exceptionally adept at creating relationships with other bloggers by making an effort to be part of a conversation, as opposed to monologue.”

The rules:
If, and only if, you get The Power of Schmooze Award, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think, or have schmoozed you into submission. Link to this post and Mike so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.

Optional:
Proudly display the ‘The Power of Schmooze Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

This honor was given to me by Dan at Management by God.

I pass this award on to:

• Melinda at the Stand to Reason blog. Stand to Reason (STR) is an apologetics organization based out of Southern California led by Greg Koukl who also sometimes posts to the STR blog. I think I got this email too.
• Christopher Neiswonger is a host of the Apologetics.com radio show. He is highly intelligent and is a great communicator of theological concepts. A conversation regarding Calvinism is going on here.
• Fred Sanders at Scriptorium Daily. Dr. Sanders was my Theology instructor at Biola University. He is a great communicator that uses art from history to effectively communicate to a wide variety of learning styles. He is an expert on the Trinity.
• Francis Beckwith at Right Reason. Maybe becoming a Catholic wasn’t right and I question his reason for it, but his contributions to moral and ethical issues are still relevant to Christians.
• Anyone at The Point, the blog of Prison Fellowship Ministries. Some very good discussions occur here.

Thanks to Dr. Gregory Tomlin for suggesting displaying the tagline of this blog in the original German.

“truth is unkillable”

becomes

“Die Wahrheit ist untödlich.”

A tried and true way to increase traffic to any Web site is through links on other sites. These links typically come through posting content good enough to be linked to. Another method is what is known as reciprocal linking. To put it simply, this is an agreement between two Web sites to link to one another. Traditionally, this increases Google’s estimation of how valuable your content is. After all, if more people who want to share your content with others, it must be valuable.

A bonus in the blogging world is Technorati authority. Each time a new blog links to you, your Technorati authority increases by one. In previous articles I have written about the things you can do, pretty much alone, that will increase traffic. This post relies upon us all working as a team. If you have a Christian blog with a post that you think suits the content of this site and you would like to link to one of my posts in return, please write a post about my content and then use my contact form to let me know about it. In the form, please also include a link to an article on your site that you think both me and my readers will enjoy and I’ll write a post about it. In turn, both of our Technorati authority numbers will increase and Google will like us even more.

Note, though, that this offer is only for content similar to mine. This is an opportunity for Christian bloggers to work together to get our content in front of more eyeballs.

Advice on how to do just that was presented at GodBlogCon, a convention for Christian bloggers at Biola University in 2006. The speaker is Pat Sikora from the blog Sometimes I Feel Like a Piece of Bologna.

The mp3 file of the lecture can be found here.

In this post I will discuss the benefits of combining two sources of blog traffic: Top Sites lists and Blog Traffic Exchanges.

Top Sites lists are great, but only if your site is at the top. I am a member of BlogTopList and TopBlogArea, but since I am a new member, my site appears pages deep into the lists of bloggers who have been using the sites for longer. These sites use either just the amount of unique visitors your site receives in the case of TopBlogArea or a combination of the unique visitors your site receives and the number of visitors who vote for you in the case of BlogTopList. But the problem is you won’t receive much traffic from these sites unless you already have traffic. How do you find traffic in order to increase your ratings? That’s where Blog Traffic Exchanges come in.

A Blog Traffic Exchange is a site where, quite frankly, blog members exchange traffic. For every site that you view on the exchange, someone will view yours. Some sites have different ratios, but this is the main concept. The problem is, though, that this traffic is typically untargeted. You will receive visits from people who have no interest in viewing a Christian blog. This might be a good thing if your focus is on evangelism, but a key problem with traffic exchanges in general is that no one really views the sites they are looking at. They just visit long enough for a timer to elapse that allows them to click on the next site and build more credits.

But this is not the most effective way for you to be viewing sites on these exchanges. As you view the sites you will see a variety of opinions, many of which are contrary to your own. These make for great post ideas for your blog as well as serve as places to make comments. Since comments typically include a link to your blog, this is an opportunity to leave links on blogs you would normally never visit. But what about all of that untargeted traffic to your site that consists of people who are not interested in your content, but in building up credits? They all will show up as unique visitors on your site, bumping up your ranking on the Top Sites lists provided that you joined the Top Sites lists first and already added their html codes. This is how these two resources work together to bring you more traffic and the secret to using them both.

I have experimented with a few Blog traffic Exchanges, but the most effective has been BlogMad. This site offers multiple ways to bring traffic to your site and seems to bring me more consistent traffic than Blog Soldiers.