5 Handy Social Media Monitoring Tools for Bloggers
As a blogger, you’ll have to wear many hats. Spending time to plan your future posts, optimizing your website for the search engines, taking time to promote your posts, and engaging with your visitors are just a few things you will have to do. If you do a lot of these things by yourself, you are going to miss things. You don’t want to miss the coverage your blog gets (and the latest developments in your niche) in the social media. All bloggers should take time to monitor top social sites for story leads, things said about their brands, and everything in between. Thankfully, you won’t have to rely on the good old way of tracking things to keep up. There are many tools that can save you time tracking the social media. Here are 5 tracking tools to get you started:
Tweetwally: a very helpful tool that enables you to keep an eye out for topics that are important to you on Twitter. Pulls everything together and saves you time.
Twittorati: the name should ring a bell. This is Twitter meets Technorati. Bloggers can use this tool to find out about highly popular links. When you are stuck and have no idea what to write about, a trip to this site can help.
Tweetvisor: Tweetvisor is a powerful web-based solution that lets you manage your Twitter account more effectively. It makes it easy to manage your Twitter lists, gain more followers, keep track of what others are saying on Twitter, and even schedule future tweets.
5 More Ways To Take Your Podcast To The Next Level
Starting a podcast may look tough on paper but taking an existing podcast to the next level can be even more difficult.In the first part of this series, I talked about simple ways you can build a business around your podcast. Podcasting for fun is one thing, but you want to monetize your work at some point (preparing podcast episodes is not going to be exactly something you can do in 10 minutes or an hour). If you have taken the first few steps with your podcast and are ready to take it to the next level, these 5 steps should give you some ideas:
Get your community involved
Many small podcasting businesses leverage their community’s true power to get the word out about their product and grow their business. There are plenty of ways to get your community involved in efforts to push your business. You can throw cool contests for your fans. You can also ask them to display your brand on their shirts or other belongings. Some top podcasters that I know actually use the graphics and music created by their members to offer a unique experience to all their listeners. There is no reason not to take advantage if you have an audience that is willing to help you out. Read more »
Get Feedback From Your Visitors with Urtak
Bloggers who do not pay attention to what their readers have to say are never going to keep up with those who do. No matter how smart you are and how many years of experience you have, you can’t know or see everything. That’s why asking for your readers’ opinion can give you new things to think about. Urtak is a simple-to-use feedback solution for your blog that lets you ask multiple yes/no questions from your readers and get instant feedback in return.
Urtak is not your average web poll position. Not only it gives you the opportunity to ask your visitors multiple questions, it also lets them ask their own questions. Urtak will keep track of the answers you receive and gives you everything you need to analyze your results.
How To Add a Posterous Share Button To Your Blog
Adding share buttons to your website is the best way to increase your incoming traffic and leveraging your readership to spread your content around. All top bloggers have Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon buttons on their websites. But one shouldn’t stop with those. There are plenty of other communities that one can be a part of and encourage others to participate in as well. Posterous is one of those websites. It’s a fast rising community that can get your content some decent action if your visitors decide to submit your posts to it.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Posterous does not really give you too many options as far as those share buttons are concerned. I still have not been able to find a decent plugin that targets Posterous users. You do not really need a plugin to install a Posterous button on your website though. All you need is a button (which you can grab from Posterous.com or right at the top of this post) and this piece of code:
Why I Hate Blogs with Too Many Ads
Blogging could be a rewarding career, especially for those who find their voice and get to make a living talking about what they are passionate about. Unfortunately, not everyone actually gets to make a good living out of blogging. The top guys do make enough money to be comfortable and enjoy life. The rest will have to find ways to just stay afloat. Many new bloggers think they should start making the big bucks right from the start. That could be why some of them add all kinds of advertisements at the top of their blogs, thinking that ads are the best way to get those “big bucks.” In reality, some of these ads are the ugliest way to make money from a blog (especially those that are inside your content). Just to be clear, they do get the clicks if you put them in the right place. But you don’t want to be too aggressive with them.
There is nothing wrong with having a “sponsor” or “ad” section on your blog. I have them on this blog and almost all other bloggers have them too. But when you start adding advertisements inside your content (and all over the place), you want to be careful they don’t take away from your readers’ experience on your website. As a blogger I understand that people need to make money on their blogs, but here are the main reasons I hate those ad-filled websites:
- Too many ads could compromise reading experience: that’s just it. I find those big Adsense blocks that some use at the top of each post very annoying. Not only they are ugly, they make it tough to read those posts. Do those get clicks? You bet. I am just not sure they are worth the headaches they cause for readers. Read more »
10 Stupid Blogging Mistakes You Should Avoid
Nobody is perfect. Even the best bloggers in the world make small mistakes from time to time. As a blogger, I try everyday to minimize the number of mistakes that I make and learn from those I have made in the past. Unfortunately, some mistakes are harder to get rid of than others. Take typos for instance. Once you start typing a word a certain way (the wrong way), it almost becomes a habit. You may know how to spell the word “their,” but if you type “there” instead enough times, it will be tough to get it out of your system.
With that said, all bloggers should try their best to avoid those simple mistakes. Here are 10 avoidable mistakes that I have seen bloggers make all the time:
- Typo in headline: this seems to happen all the time. Most content management systems do not come with a spell-checker for the post title section. I have made enough of these mistakes. Unfortunately, I am not the only one doing it. I have seem many “super-bloggers” make the same mistakes. The best way to address is to read your title right before you are ready to publish your story.
- Typo in first sentence: that’s one of the most frustrating mistakes one can make. You try so hard to keep your copy clean and get the typos out. For some reason, some bloggers have typos in their very first sentence (and in a lot of cases nowhere else).
- Including broken images: always make sure you have the image you want to link to on a reliable server. It is just ugly to have broken images in a post.
- Posting under uncategorized category: this one is a biggie. Many new bloggers forget to set up the right categories for their blogs from the get go. There is simply no excuse for having the default “uncategorized” category on your blog. Read more »
5 Cool Blog Productivity Apps for iPad
I don’t know about you, but the iPad has been a life-saver to me. The iPad brings it all together for me. Doing research, reading other blogs, going through documents, and writing posts can’t be any easier on this tablet. It has made me more productive on the road too. Instead of managing multiple notebooks (and napkins), I get to do it all on one device. Adding the right apps has been helpful too.
While there are too many useful iPad apps to list here, these 5 applications have made my life easier:
Things for iPad: Things for iPad is a task manager on steroids. It makes it super easy to manage to-do lists and long projects. Saves you from the headache of dealing with paper notebooks.
Daily Notes: transforms your iPad into a colorful journal. Great for taking notes or record meeting minutes. Makes it easy to organize all your notes no matter how much information you are dealing with. Looking things up is easy too.
iThought HD: you never know when that next great idea is going to hit you. It does not hurt to be ready when you are in the mood. iThoughts HD is a very powerful mind map application just for those situations. It can be used to tackle your projects (divide and conquer complex problems).
How To Add a Q&A Section To Your Blog
One of the best ways to build a solid community around your blog is by getting your visitors engaged in discussion on your website. Everybody who comes to your blog has needs and will have questions. That’s why adding a Q&A section to your blog can help you take it to the next level. Thanks to WordPress, you can easily add such a functionality to your website (regardless of what platform your main website is run on). Instant Q&A is a super clean and dynamic theme that does just that without you having to make any changes to your main blog.
All you have to do is create a new folder (/answers) on your blog domain and install WordPress and Instant Q&A theme on it. That’s really all there is to it. Once done, your visitors can take advantage of this theme to ask and answer questions on your website. Why install it separately? Q&A sites do get attacked a lot. If you are not accepting user registrations on your blog for security reasons, you don’t have to make any compromise by taking this approach.
5 Excellent WordPress Frameworks for Pro Bloggers
WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms around. It makes managing content and creating super dynamic blogs very easy. Most new WordPress bloggers get started with those free themes before graduating to premium and custom design themes. Not everyone can afford to pay thousands of dollars to a designer to develop a new WordPress theme for their blog. Thankfully, there are many powerful frameworks that you can take advantage of to save yourself time and money. These WordPress frameworks act as a skeleton for your blog. You can still achieve a unique look and feel for your website and do it much faster than you would with a custom design theme.
These 5 powerful WordPress frameworks can save you money and time when developing a new design for your WordPress blog:
Headway Themes: a very powerful framework that can be easily customized to fit your blog’s needs. It has a powerful back-end and is search engine friendly too.
Thesis: one of the most popular frameworks for WordPress. It has been getting a lot of heat recently for its stance on GPL. Still, it has a very powerful back-end that you can take advantage of to optimize your website for SEO, customize its look and feel, and change those small details without touching your code. Read more »
5 Ways To Adopt a Freemium Business Model On Your Blog
When you are making money from your blog (and are new to it), it’s easy to get greedy and try to charge for every little thing that you offer. While you want to make money as a blogger (your bills are not going to pay themselves), you don’t want to focus on short-term gains at the expense of long-term growth. There are many affiliate marketers who do that. But many of those folks are just marketers and have no interest in becoming pro-bloggers. Instead of charging for everything, it’s better to give lots of stuff for free and ask your visitors to pay for “premium” content. What do I mean by premium content? We are not talking about more regular blog posts. If you want people to pay and become a paying member in your freemium community, you need to offer them something worth paying for.
Let’s face it. We all like free stuff. Most blogs offer most of their articles and content for free. While you may be able to get away with selling your regular content to your readers in the short-term, it’s not something you can sustain over the long run. You are going to need something unique to get people to join. If you are stuck and don’t know what type of content to offer to your potential paying members, here are 5 ideas that should help:
- Exclusive Videos: depending on your target market, you may be able to use your videos to get people to sign up for your membership program. We are talking about exclusive content here. A couple of websites were able to do just that with their BP oil coverage. You can do this in almost any niche. You just have to be a bit creative. The goal is to offer something people can not find anywhere else. It does not need to be earth-shattering, but it does need to be unique and exclusive to your paying members. Read more »
