Tag: Blog

Alexandra Samuel
Image by Will Pate via Flickr

Part of a series. Original version at AlexandraSamuel.com.

In my recent blog post about how to sustain your social media presence in just 3 hours a week, I advise drafting 3 blog posts in under one hour. That may sound unimaginable if (like me) you’ve fallen into the habit of turning each blog post you write into a mini-manual or philosophical essay.

But back in the day — you know, before Twitter — a lot of blog posts consisted of simply sharing a link and saying, hey, here’s something useful you should read. Now that we’ve got Facebook and Twitter, people tend to share links in 140 characters or less, and the blog-post-as-link-share has largely disappeared.

I’m all for sharing links in an efficient way, through Twitter or Facebook or even delicious. But we’ve lost something in this rapid-fire micro-sharing: we’ve lost the conversation about why something is worth sharing (or reading). We’ve lost the reflections on what we learned by reading the post we’re about to share.

And we’ve lost a great, valuable route to sustaining a blog. My 3-hour social media method relies on bringing back the “I read this and so should you” blog post. But in the era of Twitter et al., just sharing the link is not enough. You’ve got to provide some additional value….something that makes the reader glad to read your blog post, and not just annoyed you didn’t point them towards the original.

Here are seven ways to add value to a blog post you are sharing:

  1. Summarize the main argument of the post (but in a way that still encourages the reader to read the full post)
  2. Share a (brief) excerpt or two from the original post that you think was exceptionally interesting or useful
  3. Explain why you think it’s worth reading, or what you enjoyed about it
  4. Suggest another way to apply the original post’s advice or insight
  5. Raise a concern, criticism or missing piece of information
  6. Ask a question prompted by the blog post
  7. Point to another related or complementary resource, or draw a thematic connection between multiple blog posts

If you can add value to the post you are sharing in one (or more) of these ways, you can draft a useful, legitimate blog post in 10 minutes or less. Don’t believe me? Then watch this video, which records the process of writing yesterday’s blog post about digital fasts.

via feedproxy.google.com

The excerpt above is longer than most of my curation posts, but Alexandra Samuel’s perspective is a good one that summarizes from another perspective what I was discussing with clients in a executive briefing on Friday and I wanted to accomplish three objectives here. First, show them how I first post things to my own site before sharing them with anyone. Second, how you can effectively curate content from other sources to prove your own point and third, ask people to interact with you based on the information you’ve shared. Comment below or ‘connect’ above so we can talk about how this applies to your business…

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Image via CrunchBase

I’m talking social media with a barrista named John in the Starbucks in York, NE. Yes, there is one thank God — it’s one of the few redeeming features of this intersection called York where I have been sleeping while attending Husker Harvest Days. John noticed my Wisconsin license plate and asked where I was from. Turns out we’re from opposite ends of Kewaunee County and we’re chatting at a Starbucks in York. Small world…

Starbucks has the only reliable wireless internet connection for me to upload my content for AGCO so I have been a better customer than usual as yesterday I had over 2.5GB of content from the show to upload for the Envano team back in Green Bay. The social media campaign we have been doing for AGCO has been wildly successful. There are over 2,000 fans in Facebook now and we just added a beautiful YouTube channel for Husker Harvest Days.

I’m looking forward to heading back to Algoma with stops in Des Moines, IA and Galena, IL along the way. Soon I’ll be sharing some thoughts on the technology behind the AGCO social media success — including my huge disappointment with the iPhone and the way it performed on the trip! Be sure to fan AGCO in Facebook and follow the new YouTube channel in the meantime. If you’re curious about how all this works, give me a call @ (920) 486-4798. I’ll be happy to talk with you — I have 12 hours of driving time to kill on the way home… ;-)

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With job satisfaction rates at record lows and more and more people looking to enjoy a higher quality of life, millions of people are desperately trying to leave their miserable jobs and are flocking to the world of blogging and Internet marketing.If you’re already a blogger, chances are you’ve heard of Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, and Leo Babauta. These names are synonymous with blogging success and the dream of living the “Internet lifestyle”.

On the surface, blogging as a business seems like a dream job. You get to set your own hours, work from anywhere with little more than a laptop, connect with fascinating people from all over the world, and potentially have an impact on the entire world.

Now THAT’S a job!

The Truth

Don’t get me wrong, blogging does offer all these things and more and beats the hell out of sitting in a cubicle working for the man every day of the week.

Given how many people are drawn to this lifestyle, the competition to stand out and become noticed is enormous. Millions of blogs are started each day and cover every conceivable topic imaginable.

What often begins as the thought of a life working on your iPad while sitting on a sandy beach, slowly transforms into the harsh reality of what goes into building a successful and profitable business from your blog.

Before you embark on a journey to quit your job and become the next pro blogger, you need to fully understand what goes into creating a sustainable business.

via dumblittleman.com

This article, while primarily written for those who can to build a sustainable business on blogging has some ‘truths’ that you need to consider. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source if you want to drill down on the 10 hard truths. Business blogging to promote your existing business is an altogether different topic — comment below or ‘connect’ above so we can talk about how this applies to your business…

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via lifehacker.com

I use 4 out of the 5 platforms daily. WordPress is the hands down favorite of most people in this poll, but the real winner is anyone who uses both Posterous and WordPress together to drive traffic…

Posted via web from e1evation, llc

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Category:Wikipedians who use WordPress
Image via Wikipedia

It’s called wp-cumulus [it’s in the sidebar and it looks like a spinning globe of metadata!] and you can install it on your WordPress blog, too! Have a great weekend…

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So I launched my blog this past Monday and announced it to the Twitter world…got many retweets and congrats, and at least one blog mention (thanks again, Maggie!).

Now the reality sets in. I actually have to write this thing…it ain’t gonna write itself. After all, I don’t want to be like the bride who loves weddings and hates being married. I confess: this might be a big reason I haven’t started a blog before now. After all, it’s a commitment. I value my integrity, and now I’ve publicly said I’m gonna do this thing, I darn well better do it!

Sometimes, putting “it” out there, making it public, is a very good thing. I guess that’s why they tell you writing down your goals is so important. I think this blog is going to do some really good things for me.

• It will help me be more disciplined in when and how I write. Writing is hard work…just ask any writer who makes it look effortless (and there are a lot of them out there!). You can’t wing it; you can’t “mail it in.” Every writing teacher I ever had (not to mention every book in my writer’s library) told me the key to success in writing is to sit down and write. Regularly.

• It will force me to prioritize (or at least take a stab at it) what I want to think and write about. My really big challenge is that I have lots to learn and lots of things I want to learn, and lots of things I want to write about here. Even within the topic of learning – not to mention the peripherally related things that might end up on this blog. Ten minutes on Twitter and I’ve found 20 new websites to read…an hour on a live Twitter chat brings me new tweeps and a whole new set of links to explore. Simply by going through the process of prioritizing what’s important to this blog, I’ll get increasingly better at deciding where to focus, what to write about.

• It will help me refine my ideas. When I’m figuring things out, I’ll frequently “think out loud” (if you’ve ever been in conversation with me, you’ve likely heard me do it!). I “write out loud,” too…a sort of stream-of-consciousness process that helps me capture ideas and then mold them into something that makes sense (to me, anyway).

So even as I blog, I’m learning. Learning to be more disciplined, better at prioritizing, better at refining ideas. My big ‘ah-ha’ for the day…what was yours? Spend a little time thinking about it; you might surprise yourself.

via learningevangelist.com

I loved this post so much that I grabbed the whole post as a quote. The ‘learning evangelist’ nailed it! I blog as much for myself as I do my readers and clients — blogging is a discipline that benefits me. Far from being a waste of time, I find it actually makes me more efficient about doing ‘marketing’ because it allows me to chip away at it a little bit at time…

When someone asks me a question, if I answer them via email, I benefit only that person and perhaps the people in their circle. If I take the same content, however, and create an ’email to the world’ via a blog post, I can reexpress my own content over and over again to people and in ways I never dreamed possible!

Kudos to the ‘learning evangelist’. You get ‘it’ whatever ‘it’ is and I predict a long and happy blogging career for you…

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Image representing Alexa as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

I have a lot of preconceived notions about blogging and one of them is that blogs drive traffic to your site, especially if you update them on a regular basis. Along comes HubSpot — one of the best social media sites on the internet — with a great blog post about websites and blogs and what a blog adds to your business. The HubSpot content was difficult to bring into this post in a way that made sense so I encourage you to go to the site and read the whole article — it only takes a minute or two — but it demonstrates in a graphic way why blogging is good for business…

I’ve seen this happen in a very graphic way in my own political blog. By using tools that update search engines and drive content into social media, my blog continues to rise in the rankings. Last week for example I was ranked 7th most influential in the State of Wisconsin and my one week Alexa ranking average was 1,077,607 in the world — not bad for a little political blog!

What’s my secret? I use WordPress to custom design websites that have blogs and use blogging combined with a well thought out strategy using search engine optimization and social media. You can check out some of my projects here. If you’ve got a point that you’d like to get across, I’d love to show you how you can do the same things I do easily and economically!

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The logo of the blogging software WordPress.
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If, like many bloggers, you started out using a free hosting platform, there may come a time when you want the increased flexibility of a self-hosted paid platform.

The question many bloggers ask is: “Which blogging platform is the right one for my needs?” but the answer may be far from simple.

For a start there will rarely be just the one best platform for you to choose but you will often be confronted with a range of options which could fit the bill.

It may be that  you just want to  avoid some of the restrictions associated with your previous free blog such as limits over they type of content you can publish or restrictions on placing adverts on the blog.

If that is your only concern then you may not be too fussy about your new platform and your only consideration may be how easy it is to transfer your old blog to the new host.

via blogdesignjournal.com

We use a combination of Posterous + WordPress to accomplish our blogging objectives, but we’re well versed in many forms of Content Management Systems. Comment below or ‘connect’ above so we can talk about how this applies to your business…

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…Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has some suggestions for getting back into blogging after a vacation…

“Yesterday was my first day back at blogging after a 10 day vacation with my family and on Twitter I commented that I was finding it a little hard to get my brain back into blogging mode. @Mikeachim responded by suggesting I write a post on the daily rituals that I use to get my mind into gear. 

I thought I’d take his suggestion and jot down a few notes – both as a way of getting my head back into blogging but also because looking at the tweets I received this morning it’s a problem many bloggers face.” Source: 13 Ways I Get Back into Blogging after a Vacation

While technically I wasn’t on vacation in Europe [I was managing the ACGO online community from Agritechnica] I was so busy coordinating social media for my client that it probably LOOKED like I was on vacation based on the number of posts to the site…

Lesson learned? Tending a blog is like tending a farm or raising animals — it requires constant care and feeding! I was in Europe 11 days starting on the 6th — even though I posted a couple of times and my blog automatically recycles old posts using ‘Old Post Promoter’ my traffic suffered a pretty good hit…

That’s why I say blogging is not something that you do, it’s something you are. It’s more of a lifestyle than anything else and requires a little bit of attention every day…

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There’s an 800-pound gorilla in the room and we haven’t really addressed it yet. We talk about how to blog and some techniques to make it easier. We even talk about some places and ways to get ideas for blogs, but one thing we don’t talk about a lot is that sometimes you just don’t want to blog.

You don’t feel like sitting down at the keys and pumping out good content for your audience. There are a million other things to take care off, why not just take some time off?

We’ve all given you hundreds of reasons to blog. Well, I’m going to take a different approach and give you 23 things that shouldn’t stop you from blogging. How many of these excuses have you used before?

via bestbloggingtipsonline.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source if you’d like the list…

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When it comes to blogging, executives have a unique problem. It has to do with the fact that the risk and cost of failure for executives are greater than they are for other employees.

Blogging is a personal affair. The learning curve requires the blogger to open up to the world, create content, build relationships, develop readership, get feedback, make modifications, and repeat.

That can be a lot of risk for anyone. But for the corporate executive, the pressure to “nail it” right out of the gate is more extreme…

via jasonseiden.com

Follow the ‘via’ link to go to the source if you’d like to read ‘the rest of the story’…

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There’s a blogging faceoff going on over at Mashable [you can participate here]. When I voted, these were the results…

33% of the top blogs in the world use WordPress and so do I!

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Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has been reading my mail. Or attending my seminars. Or both. Seriously, he does a great job in this video of explaining some of the tactics that I use to drive traffic to my blog…

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via blog.hubspot.com. If you’re concerned about Search Engine Optimization [SEO], you’ll want to follow the ‘via’ link to drill down on these findings from HubSpot…
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Tamar Weinberg and Garrett Camp
Image by Tamar Weinberg via Flickr

Every year, I spend hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours reading articles on Internet Marketing for my annual Best Internet Marketing Posts blog post. The effort to find these posts, read them thoroughly, identify whether they meet certain criteria, and categorize them takes an incredibly huge toll on me, but at the end of the day, I’ve been proud to provide regular content to my readers. Over the last five years, hundreds of URLs have been carefully collected and selected for inclusion in this post.

The posts for the last five years are:

Each year, this post has gotten bigger and better, and for my 30th birthday, I offered 300 great links that can most certainly act as the only internet marketing schooling you’ll ever need.

via techipedia.com

If Tamar says this is the best, I’m all in!

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Darren Rowse - Photography Blogger Extrodinaire
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Whenever I present on the topic of ‘practical, tactical social media’ organizational leaders usually like what they hear about social media and how to implement it to build their brands online until they hear that in order to achieve maximum results, they’ll have to post a thought every day for at least three months. The response is usually IMNOTAWRITER. If you’re one of those people, read on…

“Have you ever accidentally slammed your hand in a car door? OUCH!

I think that very unpleasant feeling can be compared to how some small business owners feel about blogging. Until very recently, I would never have published anything on the Internet because I have never considered myself a writer.

Well, that all changed when I purchased my small business and suddenly I was forced to start producing content so that I could try to rank in Google, educate customers, and develop my backstory.

However, even though I started producing content, I still suffered from the inferiority complex that can only be associated with IMNOTAWRITER syndrome.

This syndrome, I’ve found, can be deadly to your small business blogging and it can cause countless hours of wasted time and frustration.

Plus, telling yourself, IMNOTAWRITER, is a very easy and convenient excuse not to blog, isn’t it?” Source: How to Blog When You’re Not a Writer

You can go to the source if you want to read more, but what amazes me is the number of organization leaders that have time to write the same emails over and over, but don’t understand how much more efficient they could be and how many more people they could attract by posting the same email content on a blog and then sending the link to the post to their correspondents! Not only would it save them time, but also drive traffic to their sites. Fine, they say, but they don’t want to learn new technology to update their sites. For those people in particular, I allow all the sites I create to be updated via email — a skill which even the most technophobic organizational leader has mastered at this point. Now what’s your excuse? Please comment!

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10 Reasons Why New Blogs Fail

Many bloggers don’t even make it to a full year. The truth is, blogging is much more difficult than most people realize. It seems easy enough, keep an online diary on a topic you love and people will read it, right? Wrong. I’ve witnessed so many blogs rev up…and burn right back down. Avoid these common pitfalls to stick around for the long haul!

via quickonlinetips.com

If you’re interested in blogging, you’ll want to follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article — it’s worth the price of a click… :-D

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Turn Your Expertise Into Dollars Online

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Small business owners possess a wealth of knowledge about their industry or sector, and when they share this knowledge with Internet (Internet) searchers, it lends credibility to their business and attracts new customers. Blogging is a key medium for sharing your expertise. The most recent Merchant Confidence Index, a survey of 10,000 small business owners conducted by my company found that nearly 30% are blogging and 35% plan to blog in the next three months. Those who are blogging have found that creating impactful content that people can find online is one of the best marketing tools available — and it’s free. According to data published by Internet marketing firm HubSpot, companies that blogged realized 55% more visitors to their site, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages.

Michele Gorham, owner of the Andover, Mass.-based Cookie Central bakery, is one small business owner who has turned her expertise into dollars online. She has created hundreds of blog entries about how to build a business, run a bakery, and other helpful topics; and she continuously answers customers’ direct questions through various social media platforms, including Facebook (Facebook), Twitter (Twitter) and Yelp (Yelp). Because of Gorham’s rich content contributions, her listings on various sites are highly trafficked and regularly found by search engines — generating more sales for her business.

via mashable.com

If you’re as interested in thought leadership marketing, you’ll want to follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article…

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Five Key Ingredients for a Successful Corporate Blog

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So what are the keys to a successful corporate blog? Here are five tips:

1. Content that provides insight, perspective and information. At its core, a corporate blog has to give its readers information they can use to increase their knowledge, learn new things or receive insight.

2. It has need to be well written. A blog with spelling and grammatical mistakes reflects badly on the person writing it and their employer. As well, a blog posts need to have good flow and provide an engaging narrative that makes it easy to read.

This is particularly important given many people scan content online as opposed to reading it. This is why a good headline so important to capture someone’s attention.

3. Posts have to happen on a regular basis. It could be one, two or five posts/week. Whatever the editorial plan, it needs to be consistent to establish expectations within the company and among the blog’s readers.

The worse thing a company can do is post four or five times a week for a few weeks, and then once a week or not at all afterward. When the audience doesn’t know what to expect, they start to drift away.

4. It can’t operate as a standalone entity. There are two angles to this advice. One, a blog needs to be supported and nurtured within a company. It needs to be actively promoted within communications, marketing and sales collateral, business cards, letterhead and email signatures.

It should also be promoted on social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. A blog needs to be seen as an integral part of a company’s brand and identity as opposed to be left alone to its own devices.

Second, a corporate blog needs to be integrated into the blogosphere and the blogging community. The people writing a blog need to be reading and commenting on other blogs. You can’t write a blog in isolation otherwise there are no connections with the “outside” world.

5. It needs to look good and have a user-friendly design. As much as a company will spend time and money to create a good Web site, its blog also need to be functional and attractive. In many senses, it is a public marketing vehicle that reflects a company’s brand, culture and approach to business.

A good blog should follow best practices by including things such as an RSS feed (both through an RSS reader and via e-mail), information about the writers, the ability to leave comments, links to social media services, and links to other corporate resources.

via socialmediatoday.com

This quote is a little longer than the content I normally curate, but it’s such good stuff, I grabbed almost the whole post for you…

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6 Easy Ways to Get More Visitors to Your Blog

Image representing HubSpot as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

A blog is an important asset to any business. It allows you to gain visibility as a thought leader, engages your audience in conversation, and acts as link bait. But you can only reap these benefits if you can actually get visitors to your blog. By now, we all know that content is king and that creating remarkable content on a regular basis will pay off sooner or later. But here are some simple strategies you can apply to each of your blog posts that will make your blog traffic soar quickly.

Click here to go to the source of the quote: blog.hubspot.com

Good stuff from HubSpot — one of my favorite internet marketing resources. Go the source if you’re interested in discovering the ‘6 ways’…

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How To Provide Attribution in the Blogging World

John Maxwell Speaks at Grand Nationals
Image by Old Shoe Woman via Flickr

Though the Internet has no set guidelines for how to provide attribution, one rule is clear: Links are the currency of the Web.

If you use someone else’s content, whether licensed directly or through fair use, it is important to be sure to provide a clickable link to the original site if at all possible. This not only helps visitors to your site find the original work, but also provide SEO benefits for the creator of the content and guards against your site from being mistaken by the search engines as the original work.

With that in mind, let us take a look at several common situations many bloggers find themselves in and the way most feel is appropriate to attribute them.

  1. Quoting: If the original work is part of a larger work, for example block quoting part of another article, an inline link is usually all that is required. Typically, when inline linking, you mention the person’s name and/or the site they write for and link to the original article. This can be done very easily in any blogging application and takes only seconds to do.
Go to the source of the quote here: blogherald.com

Many of my students ask me about my curation style. My understanding is based on articles like the one I quoted here. To date, only two people have ever complained about being quoted on my blog; John Maxwell and an obscure blogger from South Dakota. With over 2,700 posts I’m satisfied that I’m compliant with internet standards. Questions? Feedback?

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