Archive for the ‘How Tos’ Category:
Spy On Your Blogging Rivals with SpyFu Kombat
SpyFu is one of the most powerful and most affordable spying tools on the market. Many bloggers make the mistake of not watching what their competitors are doing. While I am not suggesting that bloggers should copy what others are doing in their niche, it’s always nice to know what your competitors are working towards. Maybe you can offer more value in the areas your competitors are focusing on. SpyFu Kombat is a cool tool that lets you figure out what other bloggers are advertising on and what organic keywords they are going after.
SpyFu Kombat is a part of SpyFu membership program that lets you compare your own organic and paid campaigns against those of your competitors. Let’s say I want to compare bloggingOT against Problogger. It would certainly be nice to have a tool that could tell me what areas I need to work on to catch up to Problogger in the search engines. That’s what SpyFu Kombat offers and then some. It not only shows you what areas you need to work on to take your blog to the next level, it also shows you what areas you have in common with blogs you are competing against. Read more »
5 Ways To Add Enhanced Comments On Your Blog
So how do you measure success when it comes to your blog? One way to do that is by determining whether you are reaching out to people and getting them to engage in conversations on your blog. A weblog that does not get any comments is not necessarily a failure, but it’s certainly not a success either. If your posts don’t make people want to comment and participate in your community, then you’ve got trouble. In that case, you want to make sure you do more research and address topics that people want to hear about.
What if you are already getting a decent number of comments on your blog? If that is the case, you should try to provide your readers with even more tools to comment on your blog. Whether it’s allowing them to leave you a video comment or rate other people’s comments, giving people more tools can only help take your blog to the next level. If you are looking for ways to enhance your blog’s comment section, here are 5 services that you should try:
Disqus: one of the most flexible services around that takes over your comment section on your blog and makes it possible for you readers to post video comments, connect to your blog via Facebook connect, and do a whole lot more on your blog. It works with the most popular blogging platforms which is a plus.
JS-Kit Echo: one of the best third party comment systems around. It not only comes with an advanced comment editor, it allows your readers to post more dynamic comments to your blog. The service is growing fast and has a bright future.
Intense Debate: a nice alternative to Disqus and Echo. It’s currently being used by a lot of Wordpress bloggers. The fact that the developers have opened up the platform to others means you are going to get a lot of enhancements through third party services.
Backtype Connect: a social media and conversation search engine that lets you know what people are talking about (based on your URL or article). You can install it on your Wordpress blog to let you users find out about the conversations going on about your content in the social media.
Facebook Connect: if you don’t want to mess with your blog and add services such as Disqus to enhance your comments, the least you can do is add Facebook Connect capability to your blog. The service can help you build a more solid community and take advantage of Facebook to go viral with your content.
These services may not improve the quality of your content, but they certainly do improve the quality and quantity of conversations on your blog. What more can you ask?
How To Get Started With Google Wave – Part I: Basics
Google Wave is the latest sensation by Google that is destined to change the way we communicate and collaborate with others. Think of Google Wave as e-mail on steroids. While there are still a lot of people who are getting used to e-mail technology, e-mail has been around for a while and has its own short-coming. For starters, e-mail is very limited in the type of content you can send and receive from others. You can’t easily share multi-media files through e-mail. E-mail also keeps holding on to multiple copies of the messages you send back and forth. So it’s not very efficient in that regard.
E-mail is a limited form of communication. You can only respond to messages and not sentences or a portion of a message. You also can’t edit your messages easily. That’s not the case with Google Wave. Wave is an innovative protocol that facilitates more engaging conversations online and makes it much easier to collaborate and share information across a small community or a large enterprise.
In order to take advantage of Google Wave, you will need to apply for a Google Wave preview account. Google Wave is not open to the public yet, so you have to wait a bit to get accepted to the program. Keep in mind that Wave is not exclusive to Google, but it’ll take a while before Wave goes mainstream.
