BlogCraving

Being as “Local” as you can with your blogging will yield big dividends.  By local, I mean incorporating as much geo-specific content as possible.

First of all, you can see that the local game is hot right now.  Sites like Yelp are cashing in on these opportunities.  Even Google has continued to drive their local search focus.  Local is starting to spread across multiple products within Google, including:

• Local Search
• Google Maps
• Google Directory
• Adsense
• Adwords
• Google Voice
• Goog411

All of these products rely on the thirst for local content and information.  Sites like Yelp are cashing in on the local directory and review market where users generate local content about everything from restaurants to dry cleaners.

How to cash in on “local” with your blog?

Try to incorporate a local element with every post you write.  It does not have to be local to you, but local to the post.

For example, right now I am posting about the importance of localizing content.  For this post, a great example of what I am talking about would be a blog called Hoboken411.  This site is all about the city of Hoboken, NJ, right outside New York City.  By mentioning how great this local site is and talking about their content in a local sense, I will increase my odds of someone finding this post when Hoboken is typed into the search query.

Ok, maybe not the best example.  Here’s a few more.

Running blog. When you review that new pair of Nike running shoes for your blog, you should consider talking about the stores, cities, addresses, and websites of the stores that are going to get the first shipments of these hot shoes.  (A great example)

Reality TV blog. When you’re giving the play by play review of last night’s episode of The Apprentice, you should try to find out the name and address of the diner that the episode was shot.  Or the corner that they setup their street cart.  Or really any major landmark/scene from the episode.  There will be a lot of people out there that want to find out the name of the place.  They may be able to figure out that it was New York, but they won’t know much more than that.  If your post answers the “where” question, you will rank well for that search term.

Baseball blog. Let’s say that you write a blog about the New York Mets.  Each time the team hits the road, you could incorporate a post about the most “Mets Friendly” bar in that town to watch the game.  You’d be surprised how many displaced fans are spread all over the country looking for places to watch their favorite out-of-state teams. Here’s a good example of what I mean.  Here is where you can see Yelp cashing in on this idea.

In most cases, you should be able to come up with a local angle for your post.

For anyone looking to start a new blog, starting as a local blog is the place to go.  Most small or even mid-sized towns/cities are in desperate need for good local content.  You could dominate the niche by turning out great content focused on that local audience.

It is much easier to start local and attempt to expand than it is to start with a national focus.  There are a lot more players in the national game right now.  Local is the place to be!

Video.

Are you tired of hearing about it yet?  Well that is unfortunate because it is not going away in our lifetime.   As the cost of video production continues to head towards zero, more and more videos are being uploaded to the web.

Why is this important for you?

If you’re business (or blog) plans to compete in this space, you need to embrace video.

So, are you going to do some video blogging or are you going to put some video on your blog.  There is a huge difference.

Video for your Blog (Meh).

What I’ve done below is put some video on my blog.  It happens to be a very cool video called, The Machine is us\ing us.  It is a 5 minute clip that sums up the coolness of the Internet.

Normally, you would want this video clip to have some significance for being in your post.  In this case, I just thought it was a cool clip.

However, video is great for demonstrating your point, talking about a current event, showing and explaining a complex point, conveying humor, etc.  There’s no shortage of great video clips for you to include in your posts.

Adding video to your site will increase user engagement, and make your content even more valuable (provided you are finding great clips). (more…)

A client of mine called today in an absolute panic today because he realized his Wordpress blog was not very mobile friendly.

I was able to talk him off the ledge quickly because there are a lot of quick plugins to handle making a mobile version of your site.  More on those in a minute.  But it made me think, how important is it really that he have a smoking hot mobile version of his theme?

In his case, it turned out to be pretty important.  He runs a popular baseball blog in the New York/Tri-State area.  Through some dives into his website analytics, we discovered that there is a fairly sizable audience checking out his site in the morning from mobile devices.  We attributed this to people riding mass transit to work and checking in on their teams during their ride to work. (more…)

The greatest single feature of Wordpress is how easily it can be customized.  As a matter of fact, you’ve probably been on websites that you did not even realize were powered by Wordpress.

WP is much more than a blogging platform.  It can be a full-blown CMS.  All it takes is some elbow grease.

With that in mind, the other great thing about Wordpress is open-source coding.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that 90% of the functions, designs, and layouts you want for your Wordpress site already exist somewhere else.  If you want it, chances are that someone has already made it happen.

When creating your template, do not reinvent the wheel.

My advice is to find a prebuilt template that accomplishes the majority of what you want on your site.  It does not have to be exactly what you want, just somewhat in the neighborhood.

Get that template in your hands (either paid or free), and use it as your “launch pad.” (more…)

We all know that Wordpress is the best CMS and blogging platform on the market today.  No argument there.  However, it can sometimes be tricky to embed videos into your posts with the stock version of Wordpress.

So what’s the best video plugin to handle all of your video embed needs?  Viper’s Video Quicktags is the absolute best.

I’ve been using this plugin for years now.  It is regularly updated and improved.  Each time Wordpress itself is updated, the plugin is always compatible.

The plugin is so good that the creator was just recently hired by Automatic.  (He’s made many other plugins as well.)

If you would like to start embedding videos from various major video hosting providers, get Viper’s plugin installed ASAP.

Video embed possibilities with this plugin include:

• YouTube
• Google Video
• Daily Motion
• Vimeo
• Veoh
• Viddler
• Metacafe
• Blip.tv
• Flickr Video
• Spike
• MySpace Video
• Generic FLV or Mov files (self hosted)

Twitter integrations into Wordpress blogs are all the rage these days.  It is the most commonly asked for feature among our clients.

With that, here are the Top 5 Twitter Plugins for Wordpress.

1) Twitter Widget Pro:

This plugin creates a sidebar widget with tons of configurable controls to adjust the Twitter feed’s display.  You can also control things like showing the date/time stamps, etc.  This is great for pulling your Tweets right into your site, or pulling in Tweets from a group of people based on a subject.  It is also a great way to keep some fresh, active content going on your site until your next post.

2) Twitter Feed:

Got friends? Ha.  By that I mean do you have multiple people working on your blog?  Or do you have multiple Twitter followers/accounts that you would like to display on your site’s sidebar?  This is the plugin for you.  Easily pull in Tweets from multiple users and control the slick graphic display of them on your site.  Includes the Twitter user picture and more. (more…)

Twitter CEO Evan Williams (@eV) finally announced the new @anywhere service today at SXSW during his keynote.

Will this become a game changer in the social media world?  If you are Twitter, hell yes.

The Twitter “At Anywhere” concept is simple, logical, and easy which is why it will probably be a huge success.  By just dropping some simple javascript code onto your website, Twitter will automatically link names of individuals or brands with their Twitter accounts.

Twitter has already signed a hearty bunch of major publishers to sign on at launch, not the least of which include the New York Times, YouTube, Huffington Post, Amazon, Bing, Digg, and eBay.

The proposed functions will work something like this.  Let’s say a New York Times columnist has a story posted on the NYTimes.com.  The byline in the article will automatically contain a link from the columnist’s name to the columnist’s Twitter profile.  Additionally, the people and companies (brands) that are mentioned in the article will also contain auto generated links to the Twitter profiles of those folks.

Upon hovering over the link, a small “info card” will come up showing you some details about the individual or brand’s profile.  From there, you can easily choose to follow the person.

The idea is to allow you to discover more Twitter profiles and interact with them without the need to leave the publisher’s website.

Historically, looking up a writer or blogger’s Twitter page was somewhat of a manual process.  You would have to search for that person’s twitter account, verify it is actually them, and then follow them.

This will serve to limit the amount of work required by each user to interact with these Twitter users.

As for Twitter’s potential growth, this will expose hundreds of thousands of Twitter profiles to the unsuspecting masses.  You might not know that your elected official has a Twitter account, or that a certain celebrity is a regular Tweeter.

The coming @anywhere system will streamline the discovery of new Twitter content for current and non-Twitter users.

How big is the email list for your blog?

Wait…what do you mean you don’t have a list?

You have no idea how much traffic, loyalty, and revenue you have already missed.

If you have a fairly new blog, you’re off the hook.  I will just assume you did not know any better.

However, if your site has been around a for while and you’re getting over a thousand visits a day, you should already be in the process of building an email list.

The benefits of good old-fashioned, home-grown email lists cannot be understated.

So how do you start your list?

First, you need an email system to manage your list. At BlogCraving, we use Aweber to run our mini courses and newsletters. Constant Contact is another good one that I’ve used in the past. I just prefer Aweber.

Once you’ve signed up, I believe both will allow you a 30 day free trial, so there’s no risk.

The next thing you have to do is start getting your blog readers to subscribe. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as it sounds. You could throw up a post that says, “Hey…sign up for my newsletter.”  You’ll probably get a few people to actually sign up, but not the volume that you are looking for. (more…)