Posts Tagged ‘content’
Track Visitor Interaction on your Blog with Tynt
Anybody can have a blog these days. Solutions such as Blogger or Wordpress make it so easy to set up a blog and start writing. In order to build a decent blog, you need to write good content and find a way to get people involved. In short, you’ve got to work at building relationships with your visitors and provide them with the value that makes them want to come back to you for more. Tynt Tracer is a cool tracking system designed for bloggers to allow them to track what their readers do on the site and what sections of it they found the most engaging.
Tracer makes it so easy to find out what people have been doing on your blog. You can easily figure out what keywords or images have been copied. Even when someone decides to highlight a portion of your content, Tracer will let you know about it. Tracer can also help you identify what pages people spend most of their time on. That can give you some more ideas about your future blog posts.
What I love about Tracer is its “credit” feature. It’s all too normal for folks to come to a site and copy/paste a portion of your content on their very own blog. You can always try to reach out to these folks and ask them to take your content down. But you can’t catch them all. With Tracer, every-time someone copies a piece of your content and pastes it to their blog, you are going to get a link back to your site. That way, you at least get credit for your work. And let’s not forget that you get traffic from all these links as well.
Overall, Tynt Tracer is a cool blog analytics platform that lets you find new ways to engage your users and build a more solid community around your blog. It also helps you fight content theft. If you are a blogger looking to get your site to the next level by engaging a larger number of your visitors, you should try Tynt. It’s free!
Find Content For Your Blog with Lizzer
You can’t expect to provide value to your users without using content that is available online. Whether you want to source a news story or share a video with your readers, you are going to need for content that you can share with your readers. Lizzer is a cool Web 2.0 service that has taken the Web by storm by providing bloggers with a super tool that makes it easy to find and insert content into blogs. We are not just talking about articles and news items, but videos and pictures as well.
Lizzer is compatible with Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, and Tumblr. And you are also covered with Facebook and Twitter. It’s one of the easiest tools that I have ever used, and it really makes finding cool content easy. Here is how it works. The folks behind Lizzer are working hard to add lots of content sources to their widget. But right now, you can add Google Blog Search, Flickr, Google Video, YouTube, and Google News to your Lizzer widget (there are many other sources available). Once you have done that, you can launch Lizzer on top of your favorite blogging platform and use the search functionality provided with the widget to find content on the fly.
As you can see, Lizzer sits atop of my Wordpress page and lets me find and post content to my blog easily. You can post videos directly to your blog or use the embed function available on the widget to get the code. If you like a piece of content, you can add it to your favorites and refer to it in the future.
Lizzer is still in its infancy. The sky is the limit for these guys. The more content sources they add to their widget and the more platforms they support, the more value bloggers can get out of it. If you haven’t tried Lizzer already, you owe it to yourself to do it today. It’s a life saver!
How To Become a More Effective Blogger with Ensembli
I’ve got to admit. I am a software junkie. I try everything there is under the sun to find anything that can help me become more effective. Recently, I came across yet another cool web solution that helps me blog more effectively. Ensembli, which was still in beta when I signed up for it, grabbed my attention as it was very easy to use, yet very helpful in giving me ideas for my own blog posts.
Ensembli is a content aggregator. Most people already use Google Reader, Google Alerts, Bloglines, or other web solutions to manage their content. With Ensembli, you have a smart aggregator that learns from your behavior and customizes the content that you want to see. All you have to do is provide it with a keyword phrase, and it goes to work for you. Let’s see how that works:
Ensembli scans, filters and collates stories, from across the web, that relate to the interests you define in your account. The more you read, discard, or even ignore the stories Ensembli finds, the more the system learns from you. It’s sort of like Google Reader on steroids. Now, the system is still in early stages, which means you can expect it to improve dramatically in the upcoming months, but that doesn’t mean you should not try it. I can’t tell you how many post ideas I have gotten after using Ensembli. It’s definintely worth a try, and it’s so simple to use even a caveman can do it!
