Spine tingling action is what we always expect when we go to an action adventure movie, and if we got something different, we would be very disappointed! The same is true for blogs, if you are on a blog dedicated to traffic and you read a story about puppy dogs and butterflies, you would be all over that exit button!
Luckily for me this blog is targeted to whatever I am interested in, but I do have some more targeted blogs. ProductInAWeekend.com delves into the world of InfoProduct Creation from the research to the launch, with lots of real world examples and tools that you can use to make your life easier! And YourDirectoryWebsite.Info is my blog about all things traffic.
Having a lot of blogs to send posts to can be a challenge, but I have a tool that allows me to send posts from one central location. PostLater.net is a tool that was originally designed for sending messages to Ping.fm to update the statuses of over 30 social networks from one location while being able to set up recurring and delayed posting. The real power for a blogger, however, is the ability to send your blog posts from PostLater.net and to post-date your posts… lol!
‘PostLater‘ -Scheduled submissions to Multiple Sites!
More Time To Fight Spam!
Spam comments are becoming a real pain, because they take up so much time. I had one blog that had only two posts in over a year that had over 100 comments one it because I kept forgetting to go in and clean them out. A side effect of the spam comments was that the spiders were coming over and visiting the blog almost daily because of the activity that the spammers were doing.
But the higher page rank was not worth the ads for viagra and porn sites, so I added a plugin called Spam-Karma 2 that eliminated 100% of the spam. Unfortunately, it also eliminated a couple of legit comments, too, so I had to find a different one and now I have two spam fighter plugins that work great. WP-Spamfree and Akismet are both highly effective spam killers that appear to leave good comments alone.
Using Akismet or WP-Spamfree plugins will
eliminate the need to carry firearms when
blogging.
So keep watching for more good stuff as tomorrow we talk about more tools for shooting your posts into the wild wild web!
Tomorrow Part 5: Too Much Time To Spread The Word About My Blog!
I am at an authoring workshop with Glenn Dietzel, Ken McArthur and a lot of great people here in Orlando Florida. Tonight at 6PM I will be doing a Florida Vacation Review Radio broadcast where I will discuss the Disney Dolphin Hotel and other attractions of this wonderful city! Join me here:
How To Socialize Your Blog On The Networks!
Social Media Marketing Tips – Automatically Ping
Your Blog
Pinging your blog through FeedBurner is a great way to get the search engines to come get your tasty content and let the world know about it. WordPress has a couple plugins to help you with that,Genki Feedburner SiteStats and FeedBurner Feed Stats are both plugins you can use to keep track of your feed downloads. I use the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin on my blog to help keep track of my FeedBurner feed activity. As you can tell, you can find a lot of help for FeedBurner, which is just about the best way to keep track of how many people are reading your blog. I learned that from Jack Humphrey WAY BACK in the late part of 2006 in an interview he did with Dearl Miller of Trafficology.
Of course, if you aren’t using FeedBurner, you might still want to make it as easy as possible for people to get your RSS feed. I use a plugin called FeedWordPress to handle that on my blog in addition to the FeedSmith plugin.
Pinging In My Ears
You want to be able to spread the word on your blog, and one way is for your readers to tell the world for you.Sociable has now added support for Ping.fm so that your readers can ping their friends with your posts! Plus sociable is outstanding in the other social bookmarking locations that it allows your readers to show you love! (hint hint)
With PingPressFM your readers will know when you have posted new content because it sends out pings to the 30+ social networks that ping.fm is connected to whenever you publish a blog post. You customize the message, but the plugin does the rest! It even supports future dated posts, so that you don’t have to hang around for the post to publish…
Another plugin that does almost the same thing is WPing.FM. This one even tells your readers (if they follow you on the social networks) that you are updating your posts, saving a new post (still unpublished) or just messing around on your blog. That may end up being too verbose for most people, but you have control over how much it talks to the world!
Don’t Be A Twit!
The Twitter Tools plugin is even more powerful! This places a widget on your sidebar that allows your fans to see what you tweet right on your blog! That is not all, it also gives you a suite of tools to allow you to work with your twitter account by downloading your tweets into your posts and your blog posts into your tweets!
The Twitme plugin allows you to do the latter portion by tweeting you recent posts so that people always know when you are releasing new content!
Tracy tells you all about how to use twitter tools!
That is all the time I have for today, I have to get going to the Impact Event in Orlando. So stay tuned for more good stuff!
Tomorrow Part 4: Too Much Time To Kill Spam Comments
Traffic Python just launched and it is a really cool way to use the websites you are already promoting to give your own advertising a boost. Lets say I am promoting EasyExitSplash.com and I wanted you to click on this link to get there, I would create a special link that includes the Traffic Python script and you would see about a 1.5″ ad on the bottom of the screen for about 10 seconds. The cool part about that is that your ad will be seen on someone else’s page!
This is a free service and as long as you are showing ads, your ads are showing on other people’s pages! This is a cool new service and I recommend you take a look at the OTO, because you have a chance to get amazing numbers of credits!
Here is how you can get it:
“i have too much time on my hands…”
Plugging In To WordPress’ Power To Save Time
Time is always limited when we try to get something done. I know that every time I start to write an article, it seems my brain is fighting with me to think about something else! The fun is that the more you make yourself do things the more it becomes a habit and eventually you start to like it (or at least tolerate it).
As you can tell from the title, we are talking about plugins! WordPress is very powerful BECAUSE it allows plugins to do a lot of the tasks that WordPress does not have to do on its own. I call it the lazy programmer syndrome. You write in a plugin interface to allow other people to write the code for the features you don’t feel like coding yourself!
Getting Down To Business!
As an author of a blog, you are in business, even if you are in it for fun. You are writing what people want to read, because if you didn’t want readers, you wouldn’t be publishing it on the World Wide Web, right? So testing and tracking is very important for blogging, since you really don’t know what people are doing when they come to your website.
Google Analyticator is a WordPress Plugin that easily adds the Google Analytics code throughout your blog to make it easy to track what your visitors are doing and how they came to be on your blog to begin with!
You can easily create a Google Analytics account using your gmail username and password, and you simply add your GA code to the Google Analyticator plugin and you are ready to track. With my tracking plugin in place, I was able to see how many visitors I had to my blog, how long they stayed and where they came from.
It is pretty cool, because you can even see what keywords they searched to find you! One person searched for “Ryan Deiss Affiliate Program” to get on my blog oddly enough. If you do adwords, this will also help you track which adds are converting better, but with a blog, this is not as necessary.
Using Google Analyticator – From Mike Paetzold, WordPress Expert.
As you can see from the above video, you can install it very easily. Not much setting up to do to get the results you need, which is tracking your visitors.
Attracting Comments – Like A Pork Chop Around The Neck To Get The Dog To Play With You!
I didn’t understand what the big deal with comments was when I first turned my attention to blogs. So nobody commented, why should I care? Until I started to see the social proof that comments add to a blog.
When I see a blog with a lot of comments, I know that this person can reach a lot of people, or they have really ticked off one person many, many times!
Comments also tell the spiders that this is a hot topic… spiders know that hot topics are relevant to people who search, so they move a highly commented blog up a few notches when they recognize that you are attracting comments from your readers.
How to make them do it?
The Comment Enforcer is a plugin that sends a guy to their house and makes them write and submit a comment under duress. (ok, kidding, but if you are a programmer…)
Comment Relish is a program that allows you to take good care of the people who comment on your blog. It allows you to send a personalized email to each person who comments on your blog for the first time. This welcome/thank you message helps create that relationship that you can build up over time. The commenter is happy, because someone acknowledged them, and the blog owner is happy because the site is getting some real people to leave real comments.
I was going to give you the link to it, but it appears the guy who wrote the plugin is falling on hard times, and his domain has expired. So here is where it would be if the site were operative:
http://www.justinshattuck.com/comment-relish/
Bribe Them With Fake Money?
CubePoints is a plugin that creates its own economy on your blog. It gives points to commenters (and deducts points from spam comments when they are deleted) and tracks them via their email address. You offer prizes to the person who reaches a particular level first with the stipulation that the comments will have to be very good content to be counted.
I always worry about the bribery deal, because if the site owner gets only the same group of people commenting, are they gaining anything?
One of the offers I would give is the first commenter to $100 can become a guest author. And the first author to reach $1000 can collaborate on a product together. Incentives like that could provide a lot of value to the blog, since more content is always good!
Riffly’s Believe It Or Not?
This is another one of those nifty plugins that make you ask, “Why do I want to add this to my blog?” Riffly Video/Audio Comments is a cool plugin that lets users record comments using their webcams, and stores it automatically!
Imagine having a following of people who leave you audio and video comments about your blog post. You just finished telling your readers that you are retiring from blogging. One of your readers grabs the webcam and gives you the rant of the century that says she has been counting on your blog for the last 3 years and how dare you take that away from her… This sets off a debate with the followers who are glad that you are finally going to be able to spend time with your family and travel all over the world.
The whole premise is cool and having all of the tools to keep your readers engaged is vital to keep people making comments. Now I am going to challenge you.
On last Friday’s post, I created a video comment, to prove that it works. So how about you do the same for me? Let’s see how many people can comment, either voice, webcam or text. I will choose the best comment to post their link in my sidebar for one year!
Time Is Almost Gone Again?
Hope you can download the plugins and try them out, hopefully Justin Shattuck got his domain back up so you can get Comment Relish, and I really recommend you give CubePoints a try, too!
Remember to leave a video, audio or text comment below so I can put your link on this blog for one year!
Tomorrow Part 3: Socializing From Your Blog
I am heading to the Impact Event on Wednesday afternoon, since the Free Author Workshop starts first thing in the morning on Thursday. Come join me at the event, I can give you an invitation if you ask for it. The price to enter the event is $97, but the workshop is free.
A tool we bloggers should have at our disposal is Dave Guindon’s Easy Exit Splash Script. This little line of code puts so much conversion power at your fingertips that some people are actually increasing sales by 325% in as little as 3 days! What it does is ask you if you are really sure you want to close this window (or navigate away from this page) and explains how to stay on the page as well as the why (extra bonus, free report, etc). This results in people spending a lot more time on the site, because they have taken that one step toward the destiny you had for them all along!
I know Dave is raising the price, but I just don’t know when that is going to happen, so go back and take a look at it one more time before you decide you don’t really need it. If you want opt-in subscribers, grabbing your readers before they leave and offering them a report or an audio for signing up is a great way to build your list fast without a lot of cash outlay!
As bloggers we need to stick together. We are a strange group, since folks look at us weird when we tell them that we blog for a living. Some asked me if that was legal, and others asked if I got messy doing that.
All kidding aside, when writing a blog, we should have some tools available that will help get the word out about our content, and also help us pull in a little green at the same time.
This series will cover the ways to get the word out to people who have already told me they wanted to know what I was up to. Social networks are a prime way of getting people to tell you that they are interested in your topic of conversation, since if you are doing the social networking right, you probably talk about what you blog about.
More Powerful Than A WordPress Editor
The latest version of the WordPress Editor is cool, but I still have some problems with the photo & video entry that I have solved with a Firefox plugin named ScribeFire. This plugin is cool in that it allows you to drag and drop text, photos and links into your blog post right from your browser, without being logged in to your blog. ScribeFire also has a great interface with Flickr, YouTube and Zemanta so that you can add media quickly and easily.
I use the Flickr search feature regularly, to add pictures that go along with what I am blogging about.
In the picture above, which I got from Flickr using the search function, I typed ScribeFire into the search box and this is one of many photos I found for the results. ScribeFire complies with the Flickr terms of use by making the photos link back to the Flickr site, so you know you are legal, unless, of course, the person who put the photo on Flickr is violating copyright!
The YouTube interface also lets you search for a term and it returns all videos having to do with that term.
ScribeFire In Use
I located the above video by searching for ScribeFire in the search box and ScribeFire returned a bunch of them. Turns out this is a good tutorial for using ScribeFire, so I am going to save a lot of time and let the video explain how to use it.
What Did You Do To My Blog?
Now please do not attempt to use ScribeFire to post to your WordPress Blog. I have not been able to get it to send the posts correctly to WordPress, it strips out the < and > from the HTML and I am left with a post that is filled with the HTML with no way for WordPress to interpret it. Oddly enough, nobody has complained about it to ScribeFire, or nobody else is having this problem, but I have yet to get my blog to post correctly with WordPress. It works beautifully with Blogger, but on my WordPress blog, I have to copy and paste the formatted post into the editor.
It is still easier than working with the WordPress editor…lol.
Did Someone Say Longwinded?
Since this post is already getting long, I am going to save some content for the rest of the week. Let me conclude this post by telling you that you can use ScribeFire to format your HTML for more than just blog posts. I use it to format my HTML emails and even one page websites when I am in a hurry. The interface is fast, and as long as FireFox is behaving, I am able to get my stuff done quickly!
Tomorrow Part 2 – Plug In To WordPress’ Power!
This last 2 week period has seen a lot of cool tools for making blogging fun and profitable. One tool that is at it’s lowest price is called Easy Exit Splash, and right now, the creator, Dave Guindon has released a video for you to see some of the cool uses for the Easy Exit Splash script.
Imagine having a blog reader about to click away from your blog, and your voice says to them, “Wait! Before you go, sign up for my newsletter and I will send you a CD of my best blog posts for the price of shipping! Just click cancel on the little dialog box to see what I mean!”
This is going to be used on one of my blogs for history ebooks on CD for homeschool families. So head over to see how Dave Guindon is making these tools available for the rest of us!
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