Tag: Blogging

0

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!

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
0

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…

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
1

via makeuseof.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source if you’re looking for a way to quickly and easily jumpstart a blog. Caution! Most of these tools are best suited for personal blogging — not corporate stuff. Questions? Feedback?

1

This one might surprise some of you, but a huge number of websites are built on or around a blogging platform. The reason for this is that many blogging platforms are very user-friendly and easy to work with from both a web designer’s perspective and the website owner’s perspective. Once the website is designed, the website owner is usually able to easily update and maintain the website themselves, which gives them more control over the site and saves them having to hire a designer for every little change.

If you are looking for a blogging platform that can also serve as your website, here are some things you want to look for:

  • A platform which is both easy for you to use and also very easy for your web designer to customize.
  • A platform which is highly functional and capable of growing and expanding to fit your needs and wants over time.
  • The ability to use your own domain name. Again, this looks more professional than having your blog on a sub-domain of the platform’s domain.
via bizchickblogs.com

We use and recommend WordPress for 97% of our projects and will discuss why in subsequent posts. In the meantime, you can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source if you want to know more about WHY you might want to start blogging. We have a drop dead simple methodology that can help you get going…

0
Posterous Logo
Image via Wikipedia

Garry Tan has announced that he is leaving Posterous, the ultra-simplistic microblogging company he helped found in 2008. Tan wrote on his blog today that it was time to move on and that he would be taking an advisory role with the company in order to do what he was most passionate about – work with startups.

“My greatest passions lie with the early stage of building world-changing consumer products,” writes Tan. “To that end, I’ve decided to join the team at Y Combinator as a designer-in-residence and help the dozens of top pre-seed startups in the newest Winter 2011 batch reach their potential through excellent user experience.”

via readwriteweb.com

Ruh roh! What does this mean for Posterous? I have been having concerns about the platform for a month or two due to lagging tech support responses and what I interpret as a lack of focus with Posterous groups and now this? Still, Posterous is the best tool in the universe for curating content and autoposting to my WordPress blogs — better than ‘press this’ which really stinks, imho. What now? In the words of the great philosophers .38 Special, “Hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose your soul”…

Related articles
0

via thingstodoingreenbay.com

There are few people I know that have leveraged the internet more effectively to build their personal brand than ‘Green Bay Greg‘ Dallaire. The video is one that he shot for a client of mine, Tailwind Flight Center, and it demonstrates the quality of the work he’s doing at ‘365 Things to do in Green Bay’ along with Tony Rouse from MindSeed Labs. If you want to know how to use the internet and social media to build your brand you don’t need to look much farther than Greg Dallaire…

Related articles
0

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…
Related articles
0

Leaving for Germany as I am tomorrow morning, I’m moving way too fast to do this justice, but if you’re a social media maven or online community manager [or both!], tumblr is a tool that you may have overlooked for it’s sheer simplicity. If that’s the case, look again. Here are at leas 5 reasons why I’m adding tumblr to my social media utility belt..

  1. Simple yet powerful…
  2. It can auto-publish to both Facebook profiles and fan pages making it a great community manager tool
  3. It has a great iPhone interface making it the perfect onsite reporting tool
  4. It works with Shareaholic or it’s own bookmarklet making it a perfect page sharing tool
  5. Marc LaFountain, the Community Ambassador. He’s a god amongst men in the social media space…

This is just a partial list of all the cool things that tumblr can do — you’ll want to go here to get a more complete inventory. As I head to Germany to cover the Agritechnica show for AGCO, I’ll be liveblogging the trip as well as the event. Track me on my Dashboard and see how well it works as I run it through my FriendFeed…

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
1
Darren Rowse - Photography Blogger Extrodinaire
Image by kk+ via Flickr

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!

Related articles by Zemanta
1

How Bloggers Make Money Blogging

via problogger.net

1

How To Create Link Bait Content

LINK BAIT - Tsavo Media
Image by Somewhat Frank via Flickr

Throughout my blogging career, I’ve worked hard on my writing style. I’ve improved over time, and I’m at a point now where I believe I have perfected my ability to write link bait articles. A link bait article is an article that makes many readers want to reference it within their articles, or link to it as a general resource.

The thing I love about link baiting is that it allows your blog to build some quality backlinks and increase search rank over time. It also means additional targeted traffic is attracted to your blog, which can mean more subscribers. Let’s see how you can start writing such articles, and increasing your presence on the web.

via problogger.net

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in learning more…

Related articles
1

Stuff I saved in ‘Reader’ on December 29, 2010

0

Stuff I saved in ‘Reader’ on December 24, 2010

0

Stuff I saved in ‘Reader’ on December 23, 2010

1

Writing a killer blog

…without killing yourself in the process. Good thoughts from Louis Gray…

0

Posterous Group Tool Makes Small Business Sense?

via ducttapemarketing.com

I didn’t get Posterous when it first came out and I’m sorry, Posterous, but I don’t get this. imho, Posterous has some fatal flaws in its blogging platform that it should have taken care of before moving into a new space. I’ll be elaborating more on this in a future post…

0

The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services on the Web

You can read the whole article here: royal.pingdom.com

0

Social Media Productivity – 13 Tips to Maximize Your Time

It’s pretty common knowledge that implementing an effective social media strategy takes time. That makes tips on how to maximize your social media productivity, such as those shared by Todd Schnick, co-founder of #Innochat, on his strategy for allocating your time very valuable. Todd’s recommendation was to divide your social media participation time into thirds, with 1/3 of your time within each category:

  • Observing / listening in others’ social media outlets
  • Participating in others’ outlets through commenting, guest blogging, etc.
  • Creating content and being active within your own outlets

Ever since Todd shared that concept in early 2009, his social media productivity strategy has been front and center in my mind (and ensconced in my social media strategy presentations). The truth is I rarely come close to this balanced approach since creating Brainzooming content definitely represents the majority of my time.

One way of improving your time allocation though is by investing your effort in activities which contribute to more than one of these categories. The following list includes some of the multi-category approaches I have tried.

via brainzooming.com

You’ll have to follow the ‘via’ link to get the 13 tips…

0

The State of the Blogosphere 2010

via briansolis.com

Me? I’m thinking that if you’re interested in blogging, you’ll be following the ‘via’ link to read Brian Solis’ great posts about the state of the blogosphere…

0

A Tale of Three Websites

Here’s a case study — unscientific as it may be — about 3 websites. One is 12 years old, one 7 years old, the other was launched a little over two months ago. The first belongs to radio station WORQ, the second belongs to WTAQ, the third also belongs to WORQ — both stations serve the Northeast Wisconsin market. All three sites serve a similar demographic, although the WORQ properties have an added ‘spiritual element’ that WTAQ does not have…

Here are the Alexa snapshots for each of the websites…

Here’s what I find interesting. WTAQ has the highest traffic rank as well they should — they are a large and successful part of Midwest Communications and they are the local outlet for Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and my good friend Jerry Bader, who regularly outperforms them both in the Arbitron ratings. I don’t know what the budget was for the recent overhaul of the website, but it has yielded them great results in the Alexa rankings — until the ‘total beauty makeover’, WTAQ’s site was ranked in the top 5 million or so. Today they rank at 173,161.

WORQ’s website has been up almost since the dawn of the internet — 5 years longer than WTAQ and their Alexa ranking is a respectable 410,018. Not bad considering they are a Christian radio station that runs on donations. Their developer, Virtualtech, is doing a nice job for them and the station leverages the website well. I do not know the budget for the site…

Now for the upstart ‘Standupforthetruth.com‘. The site was launched two months ago as a companion site to a program called ‘Stand up for the Truth’ which airs M-F, for one hour at 9 CDT [listen here, either online or via podcast]. The show was launched December 6 and the site had a hard launch just 5 days before that. Here’s what I find noteworthy: Standupforthetruth.com is closing in on WTAQ’s Alexa rankings at 175,558 and should pass them up this week on their current trajectory. Pretty impressive considering the total budget for technology and training was less than $1,250!

In the spirit of full disclosure, I developed the social media hub for Stand Up for the Truth. The technologies implemented are all what I refer to as “good, fast, and cheap” free, open source tools:

  • Gmail
  • Google Reader + Feedly
  • Chrome + Shareaholic
  • Posterous
  • Facebook Page
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • MailChimp

All these “good, fast, and cheap” technologies are rolled up in the ‘e1evation workflow‘ — a ‘thought leadership’ methodology that produces great results online. Program host and station General Manager Mike LeMay has been trained in the ‘art’ of ‘consume, create, communicate’ and has done quite well considering he is an admitted technology neophyte. He would be the first to admit that program co-host Amy Spreeman and Hopenet360 director Jeff Strommen have been tremendous assets on the project, but he has come a long way himself demonstrating that the ‘e1evation workflow’ is truly ‘Mike-proof’!

There’s a fine line between blowing your own horn and sharing a story and I hope I haven’t crossed it here. I do believe, however, that it’s a sad dog that can’t wag it’s own tail from time to time. I don’t take credit for Mike’s great thinking, but he has confirmed again that the ‘e1evation workflow’ may be the shortest path to thought leadership on the internet. Mike perspective? “This just shows how hungry some Christians are for Truth. Lord willing He will be glorified as we move forward.” Ouch. I’m humbled — so much for my dog’s tail. I’ll put it between my legs where it belongs…

Bottom line? You don’t need to spend a lot of money to get your point across on the online — a ‘little guy’ like Mike bringing in the same traffic as a ‘big guy’ like Jerry Bader in such a short period of time and with so little money spent is an internet marketing success story of ‘David and Goliath’ proportions. Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business…

Related articles
1

Start a Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑