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Tag Archive: other social media

The difference between static and interactive websites

Written on Monday 1 November 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

Websites are not the same throughout the world. Apparently in Europe they are mainly what we call ‘static’ websites, online business brochures, somewhere the visitor can confirm a business after a networking experience or a referral. They do not interact with their visitors, and many are on the way to becoming obsolete because they do not compete with the whizz-bang websites from the States.

America has taken on the interactive website by storm. There are so many different kinds of CMS (content management systems) that allow the owners to update the contents themselves without having to rely on a webmaster to do it for them, and also allow the visitors to contribute their comments and ideas to the website with immediate publishing effect.

Blogs are a form of CMS website. They are extremely easy to maintain, and positively encourage visitors to interact with them. Their programming is extremely enticing to search engine spiders, who crawl the internet looking for new material to feast on, and blogs are a plentiful supply of fresh content. They are designed to be updated on a regular basis (from several times a day to once a week), and even the visitors who comment on them are considered to be fresh spider meat.

This constant new content is exaggerated by the social sharing sites (Digg, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc) who rely on computer techies who have nothing better to do than to read tonnes of blogs and share them with their pals. The more interaction you get from these sites, the more visitors, comments, spider interaction and ultimately higher indexing by the search engines. And the sharing concept is continued on ordinary social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), with retweeting and feeding galore, all with a ready supply of new content to spread across the internet.

Static websites do absolutely nothing for the businesses they represent, apart from looking pretty with out-of-date material, and only visited when someone types in their URL and bothers to get past the first page. Blogs and other CMS websites are perfectly tuned towards getting passing search engine traffic, continuously being updated with new stuff that is worthwhile reading, interacting with their readers and social media – actually being a presence on the internet that surpasses their expenditure and actually gets in business without having to try really hard.

Now which one would you prefer to represent you business?

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, online marketing, social networking - Tags: blogs and blogging, CMS, content management systems, interact with visitors, online brochures, other social media, search engine spiders, search engine traffic, social networking sites, social sharing sites, websites - 2 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

10 ways to get your blog to catch on

Written on Wednesday 8 September 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

Sorry to break your bubble, but unless you are extremely lucky, a top notch celebrity or are posting on a subject that is incredibly popular, it will take some time before your blog starts to build an audience.

The usual time-frame is from 6-12 months, and this does depend on how you treat your blog. Neglect it, and nobody, not even the search engine spiders, will bother to visit. Stuff it full of top quality posts, and your following will grow accordingly. Blog every day, even several times a day, and of course you will get lots of traffic, especially if you are canny with your use of keywords, subject matter, frequency and timings of your posts, and a multitude of plugins and other apps designed to increase your blog’s exposure.

Here are some factors you could put into play to help your blog to catch on:

1. Keep on posting. Patience, persistence, consistency and quality will all contribute towards gaining a loyal audience. They will require and need continuous fresh material if you are to encourage them to return.

2. Promote your blog widely. Add in your blog’s URL in your social networking profiles, as well as feeding your blog into them so every time you post your fans and followers will get a chance to read your blog’s latest contribution. Use appropriate apps and plugins to make it easier for them to share or recommend.

3. Contribute on social media. Paste your posts on LinkedIn Groups, feed onto Facebook Fanpages, and answer a question in LinkedIn Answers with a link back to a relevant post on your blog.

4. Allocate tags and categories to your posts. Be aware of the keywords that are not only relevant to your post’s subject, but are also popular in the search criteria at that particular moment. Blogs are ideal for search engine optimisation, as long as you use it effectively.

5. Comment on other blogs. Choose the ones in your niche or relevant to your blog’s subject, as your contribution will have a link back to your blog. This will also give you the opportunity to build an identity or further your expertise in your chosen field. You can give your blog a head-start by adding in the plugin CommentLUV which helps towards leaving and hosting comments to further your blog.

6. Submit to blogging directories. Apart from the obvious, like Technorati.com, there are plenty of other directories to consider, such as bloglisting.net, blogcatalog.com, blogged.com – do some research, see what others use, or ask around for recommendations as to the best ones to use.

7. Participate and share. There are a number of social networking sites, such as Digg, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Delicious and many more, that are designed to share blog posts through a voting system. Just like Facebook and Twitter, you build a following and comment, share or recommend each others’ blogs, and the most popular, or the ones with recommendations from a higher source, will gain in social levels and therefore visitor rates. This will work for high posting and quality contributions, as well as consistent participation on others’ blogs rather than promoting your own.

8. Become a guest blogger. Submit to MyBlogGuest.com to offer your services as a guest blogger, in which you can (subtly) link back to your blog with relevant references to the subject you are writing about. Don’t forget about blog carnivals, as contributing to them can certainly help your blog traffic.

9. Submit your blog’s URL elsewhere online. Promote your blog’s URL in your stationery, email signatures, newsletter publications, tweets and other social media updates, submit your posts to online magazines such as iSnare, EasyArticles, EzineArticles and ArticleDashboard (though make sure each contribution is slightly changed to avoid repetition penalties), and anywhere else people will get a chance to click on your blog’s URL.

10. Make RSS prominent. To encourage a loyal audience and maintain your readership, use RSS for subscriptions for email notifications or newsreaders in search engines. Place the sign up form or link high up on the sidebar to capture the attention of interested visitors, and the RSS URL itself can be used to help feed your blog posts onto social media.

Let me know if you can think of any more to add.

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, other social media, social networking - Tags: blog, blog's exposure, build an audience, consistent posting, keywords, newsreaders, other social media, RSS, search engine optimisation, search engine spiders, search engine traffic, subject matter, subscription, top quality posts - 3 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

How often should you post in your blog?

Written on Wednesday 11 August 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

At my brother’s 40th birthday party last month my father came up to me and said I was looking podgy, just like my great aunt Margaret. Well, that raised my ire (if not my blood pressure), partly because my great aunt was morbidly obese and a hypochondriac, and partly because it was true (ideally I should lose three stone or 42 pounds).

So since then I have been down the gym every week day (can’t quite manage the weekend), pounding away on the treadmill in the hope of losing a bit of weight, the spectre of my terrifying relative looming up to goad me to keep wobbling on…

Treadmills are great places to think, and I wondered if all this consistent activity was doing any good (though the scales said otherwise). With my brain switched into blog mode, I remembered I’d recently read that blogs become more successful the more you post. This is obviously true, as all this new material constantly being churned out is like a continuous buffet for the search engine spiders, who feast on this content before returning it to be indexed.

Prolific bloggers post several times a day. Woah, why? I hear you ask. Well, if your blog’s purpose is to make money through the advertising and affiliate links it contains, this can only be achieved through a constant flow of traffic, and continuous indexing of your posts, combined with your audiences subscribing to RSS feeds and newsreaders, traffic alert systems and social media scrutinising, will bring in the necessary quota of readers to make your financial ventures successful.

But what is the optimum minimum? Three times a week – quite a respectable and achievable goal. I manage this for my boss’s blog, but not my own, partly because I have other commitments after work (going down the gym for example) that take up my time. You can see from your blog stats that consistent posting will easily maintain your traffic and readership loyalty much more than a flurry of activity followed by a period of famine. Spiders are hungry and need continuous feeding, and if neglected may easily search their nourishment from elsewhere.

And what if you want to start up a blog or resurrect it from a period of abandonment? Then you need to publish as many days as you can (a bit like me going down the gym) as consistently as you can manage with the correct kind of content (or diet) that will sustain interest and build up a following. Reduce the size of your blogs (I’m sure mine are far too long) by breaking them down into many subjects that can be posted independently, and keep an editorial diary to stimulate and store new ideas to prevent a post drought. Watch out for another post about what to write about soon – there, I’ve given myself another subject to research and deliver to you!

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, social networking - Tags: achievable goal, blog posts, bloggers, consistent new material, constant flow of traffic, editorial diary, other social media, quality and consistency of posts, readership loyalty, regularly posting on your blog, RSS feeds, search engine spiders - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

10 things a blogging mentoring service should provide

Written on Tuesday 6 July 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

I keep an eye on many LinkedIn Groups, especially those about blogging, and one post caught my eye. It was from someone who wanted to know about forming a blogging mentoring service, and being the altruistic kind of person I am, I gave him my 10 opinions of what a blogging mentoring service should provide:

1. You need to be aware of business’s blogging needs; this includes explaining how blogging can benefit a business, small or large, to increase its online visibility and its audience on the net;

2. You need to research into why people have blogs (or don’t have blogs); blogs are created for a myriad of uses, business and personal, and therefore have very different styles – alternatively there may be many potential bloggers who need encouragement to start one;

3. You need to understand what blogs are used for, and whether they are used properly; similarly to above, blogs fall under many categories, but you need to understand their purposes to advise on the best practices;

4. You need to explain blogs need to be regularly updated, and to find out whether help is required with writing posts; blogs aren’t really blogs without consistent new material, so ideas for post subjects and writing styles are usually welcome;

5. You need to find out whether bloggers fully understand SEO and explain how keywords can help their blogs; this subject, once properly aired, stimulate a vast change in a blog’s performance towards its success;

6. You need to check whether they have they fully optimised sidebars; so many blogs have neglected sidebars and don’t use their widgets adequately, mainly because they don’t understand or appreciate their functions;

7. You need to advise on which plugins they need; for WordPress.org blogs these applications help enhance the blog’s performance to further it towards popularity and success;

8. You need to talk about integrating their blog’s design with their website or corporate image; using the myriad of themes available, some of which can be adapted or redesigned to match an existing style or personality through specialised blog designers (the Fairy Blog Mother is one);

9. You need to show how to get RSS and see if is it being used to its full extent; once acquired, the online world is opened up to automation of post publishing, feeding to social media and other related websites, and visibly interactive headline links;

10. You need to explain how to integrate blogs with social media; related to above, your blog should be the hub of your social networking strategy, fully optimised to interact with your audience, and present and potential customers.

I’m sure there are many more things I need to include (and if you know them, tell me in the comment box below). But in the meantime these 10 will have to do.

Fairy Blog Mother aims to offer much of this advice in this blog, and eventually through her book which she plans to publish in the future. She benefits from people asking her questions, especially specific things you would like to know about blogging and particularly from blogging beginners who may have a selection of questions they are too embarrassed to ask elsewhere.

I plan to change my style in future posts to a more advisory nature, in concise, focused subjects, and if the subject is large, to break it down into smaller posts for easier understanding. The Fairy Blog Mother was formed to explain blogging in easy to understand, visual e-courses, using non-jargon and everyday language, step-by-step with no assumptions that the reader understands technical blogging requirements. She doesn’t mean to be condescending, just informative and educational.

So, what questions about blogging do you have?

How I put a Facebook share icon on my blog

Written on Monday 19 April 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

I’m constantly reading and researching anything about blogging so I can find new stuff I can relate to you, my readers. But it’s not only content I notice, but design as well. WordPress supplies plenty of applications or plug-ins that perform functions to make blogs more usable, practical, SEO efficient and compatible with social media to bring in traffic or increase your online visibility.

Twitter and Facebook plug-ins

refers to WP.org

One thing I noticed was a Facebook share plug-in. (Now before all you WordPress.com users get too excited, I’m afraid plug-ins are only for WordPress.org blogs.) I already had the Tweetmeme plug-in set up on my posts to encourage re-tweets, and I wanted this second icon to complete the pair, so I set about finding it and adding it to my blog.

So I moused over the icon to see what the URL was, and it said ‘facebook.com/sharer.php’ which I put into Google to see what would come up:

You can see I was diverted and led on a wild-goose chase by the first link, but eventually the second link rang true:

I downloaded the plug-in onto my desktop on my Mac. Then I opened up FileZilla for my blog:

Now this is starting to get a bit techie, but if you have a WordPress.org blog you’ll know what I mean from now on.

Open up WP-content:

And select plugins:

Drag the Facebook share plug-in from your computer’s desktop into the plug-in directory and wait for it to upload.

Then go back to your dashboard in your blog:

In the left sidebar, select Plugins > Installed and find your plug-in and activate it. Then click on the new link at the bottom of your sidebar called ‘Facebook Share’:

Here are all the settings for your Facebook share plug-in. Use mine from the picture above, or have a play to find what you want. When finished, click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom, and go and have a look at your blog to see your results:

At first I was disappointed, because it didn’t have the counter box above it, as shown in my first picture at the top of this post. But then I realised it has to be activated with a click to bring the counter up:

Now to keep me happy with my Facebook share plug-in counter always active, don’t forget to share my posts on your Facebook profiles to let all your followers know about my posts so they can become readers of this blog too!

blogs and blogging, design makes a difference, other social media, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs - Tags: applications, blogging, bring in traffic, content, Facebook, Facebook Share, increase online visibility, other social media, plugins, Tweetmeme, Wordpress - 5 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

Why do you need a blog?

Written on Tuesday 30 March 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

It’s amazing how many businesses don’t have a blog, or if they do, it lies neglected and forgotten. Only recently I helped resuscitate a website by rewriting the copy to bring back the customer focus. One of the links went to something that was called a blog, but hardly resembled one…

It’s great that they had a blog, but it’s certainly not good to misuse it. To them it was a page where reference points were listed, or articles were recorded. Hmm, apart from being very boring, it certainly didn’t encourage visitor interaction, which is what blogs are all about.

Blogs are all about increasing the visibility of your business online. It is an extra place on the web that allows a different and wider audience to find out more about you. It is an extremely flexible medium that enables a business to express themselves outside the rigid format of a brochure website. Within its pages you can show off your expertise, explain areas of your business in either greater detail or in a more sociable and communicative method to encourage visitor response. You are able to let your hair down, take off your tie or kick off your heels, and really show social media what you’re made of.

Now we’re entering the second decade of the millennium, the way business is done online is changing. Social networking is rising, and business practices are taking it on board within their marketing strategies. Gone are the days of stiff presentations, say hello to more social interaction, making way for customer’s and reader’s comments, feedback, suggestions, questions, even their own content. A blog is certainly one method of achieving this, using technology that is improving all the time to increase the easiness of use, friendliness of action and encouragement of participation.

So my next task is to carefully educate this website’s business to start using their blog again, making them understand its true purpose so it can perform effectively. It’s lack of knowledge about social media that result in poor management of online marketing tools, and this blog aims to rectify this as soon as possible. Watch this space…

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, online marketing - Tags: articles, blog, businesses, customer focus, expertise, increasing business visibility, other social media, social networking, visitor interaction, website - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

What do widgets do on your blog?

Written on Thursday 14 January 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

I’ve just uploaded my free e-course ‘What and how to use widgets’ which explains what widgets are, what they are for and how to put them on your blog.

So what are widgets? Well, look at your sidebar and see all the various elements that are situated there. These are widgets, individual applications or programme processes that allow you to put up a picture, add in a subscription form, show which pages and posts I have written, list my comments, show feeds to my social media and many other things.

Both kinds of blog

Usually you mention the word ‘widget’ and the uninitiated will wince and look worried, but really it is very easy to cope with widgets once you understand them, and that is exactly what my free widget e-course does.

I have seen many blogs, not even new ones, who have not fully taken on what their widgets can do for them. To me, to see an unpopulated sidebar missing vital elements that enhance a blog as regards search engine optimisation (SEO), allowing readers to find past posts and participate in comments, even to realise there are other pages to be read, is a wasted opportunity.

The widgets that are really needed are:

a method for your reader to subscribe to your blog (either a sign up form for emails or chicklit logo to subscribe to a Google reader)
show which posts you have written recently
show the comments people have left
show your categories (topics)
show your tags (keywords)
show your links to other websites or blogs you recommend reading
how to access your blog

And then there are widgets to make your blog more usable for both your readers and the search engine spiders:

access to other pages
links to your social media profiles
RSS feeds to your Twitter stream, other blogs, delicious or other social networks
see who has visited recently
pictures, either on their own or as links to elsewhere
archive details
search mechanisms

If you have a WordPress.com blog, widgets are already available to you (dependent upon which theme you have chosen). If you’ve used WordPress.org to create your blog then some widgets will need to be added via plug-ins, of which there are many thousands to choose from, including the option to retweet posts you want to recommend and share the post with other social networking sites.

Find out how to add widgets to your blog, or just brush up on the ones you haven’t used yet – the widget world is really worth exploring!

blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs - Tags: blog elements, blogging, blogs and blogging, other social media, plug-ins, SEO, sidebars, subscription, widgets - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

Elements for a successful blog

Written on Monday 11 January 2010 by Alice

Successful blog elements

It’s important that readers should be able to understand what your blog’s subject is from first glance, and this is usually accomplished through a graphic header of some kind. Its ingredients should include the name of the blog, the tagline (descriptive sentence), if not already stated the main subject matter and who the author is, preferably with a picture or logo of some kind.

The next thing that should be noticeable is how your readers can subscribe to your blog. There are many methods of doing this, but the most prominent one should be a form for email notifications of your new posts. It’s much easier to receive emails than to regularly go to your Google Reader or glance through the cookies on your personal iGoogle homepage. Make sure the subscription invitations are placed high up on your sidebar.

Both kinds of blog

Is your About Page up-to date? If a reader is interested in your blog, he might well want to know who the author is, and if he finds an incomplete About Page, imagine how disappointed or put off he might be. Make sure you include as much information about you or your business that you can, including a good quality picture of you.

Improve the visual impression of your blog by using multiple forms of media. Even if you are a bit tentative about this, simply adding in relevant pictures can accomplish this. And if you are technologically minded, add in video and audio to provide your message in different ways that would appeal to a larger audience.

I’ve banged on before about using white space in my other blog articles, but again it is extremely useful to aid readability for your blog. Use short paragraphs, subheads to break up the text and graphic images to add to the visual interest. Don’t make your posts too long either. And if you have your blog professionally designed, take into consideration that your template should not be cluttered or too busy.

Use various plug-ins to share your content, especially within social media. For example, use a retweet button to entice readers to feed your post onto their twitter streams, and add in a share-this button for the other social networks, such as technorati, digg, stumble upon, delicious, reddit, tumbr, flickr, to name but a few.

And lastly, provide a method for readers to connect with you on social networking sites. It is quite common to see various icons that link to the author’s social networking profiles, so make sure you have them in place to encourage increasing your connection numbers.

I shall be taking each element individually to elaborate on them in future posts, accompanied with visuals and recommendations – watch this space.

How to use Feedburner to feed into Twitter

Written on Monday 21 December 2009 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

This is yet another way to feed your blog posts into Twitter, along with Tweetmeme, Twitterfeed.com and a plug-in called ‘WP to Twitter’.

You should subscribe to Feedburner to activate subscriptions to your blog. Any followers who want to keep an eye on your blogging activities will then be able to receive new posts once they are published, either direct into their search engine readers or as emails into their in-boxes.

The ‘Publicize’ tag makes available a number of extras to help promote your blog, and one of them is called ‘Socialize’ (the highlighted one in the left hand sidebar in the picture below) which allows your new posts to be published in Twitter.

Your Twitter followers will then be able to read your latest blog post, which is automatically tweeted with a shortened link. As you can see at the bottom, you can adapt the tweet with a pre-text message if necessary.

You will need to allow Feedburner to communicate with your Twitter account, and tick the ‘include link’ and ‘leave room for retweets’ boxes. Don’t forget to activate the application, and the job is done!

So why should you feed your posts into Twitter? This increases your blog’s audience through your Twitter followers, therefore exposing it to a higher number of possible subscribers and commenters.

Never be worried about multiple tweets of your blog posts, as Twitter is an ever-moving phenomenon that has continuous traffic (a bit like a train station) that never stands still, so mass tweeting will always catch someone new who is passing by who might just appreciate your post enough to subscribe to your blog.

blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, increasing business visibility, online marketing - Tags: activate subscriptions, automatically, blog's audience, blogging, blogs and blogging, continuous traffic, feedburner, feeds, latest blog post, other social media, Socialize, subscribe to your blog, Twitter - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

RSS simply explained

Written on Monday 31 August 2009 by Alice

When I asked for feedback on what people wanted to know about blogs and blogging, many of them wanted to know about RSS. The main question being what is RSS?

So here is an explanation of those who do not know:

Subscribe for email updates

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is easily recognisable through the orange square icon found at the top of most blogs’ sidebars.

It is like a subscription service, enabling your followers to receive any new material you’ve written as soon as it’s published. It saves you time and makes it easy for you to keep up with new stuff without having to search all your favourite blogs for it.

Think of it like subscribing to a magazine: the new post (or message) gets delivered straight to you, either via email into your in-box, or into search engine readers if you’ve subscribed via that method.

Cookies from a reader

A search engine reader provides pages with links to newly available posts, or individual ‘cookies’ on the search engine homepage which lists the last three posts of that blog through headline links.

Apart from allowing your followers to keep track of your new material, RSS also has other uses, mainly through social media.

When you publish a new blog post, it can be ‘fed’ into your social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. This means that each new message appears as a link automatically in these sites. The RSS feed delivers your new content in this format for your followers to read.

Feeds into Facebook

In Facebook the whole post is published in the Notes pages, and your Homepage or Status page shows the headline link (known as a permalink) with perhaps the first few lines of the post as a taster.

In Twitter your post is listed as the title and the first few words, followed by a tinyurl (or reduced link) to the blog post. As a Twitter message uses only 140 characters, there will not be room for the whole permalink, so various methods are used to shorten it.

Feeds into Twitter

RSS is important if you wish to increase your readership or encourage more interest from search engines. It is a piece of software that encourages the search engine spiders to follow your blog, and automatically spreads your news throughout the web. Without it your blog would appear lifeless as only those who are invited would get a chance to read it, and only if they bothered to visit it regularly. RSS automatically delivers your messages without effort, saves time and encourages a new readership, especially through social media.

If you want to find out how to include RSS into your blog, I have written a blogging visual e-course on the subject, called “Setting up a RSS feed = how to set up RSS feed so others can follow your blog posts”. You can view it from my blogging pages, and will be available to buy, along with the other e-courses, from September, so watch this space!

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility - Tags: blogging, blogs and blogging, Facebook, links, messages, new content, other social media, permalinks, published, RSS, RSS feeds, subscription service, Twitter - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?