Top 3 Reasons to Allow Guest Blogging on your Blog

March 27, 2013 by 1 Comment

 The 3 top reasons to Allow Guest Blogging on your Blog

If you’re a dedicated blogger, you may resist the idea of allowing guest bloggers to write posts. You may even view guest bloggers as intruders attempting to benefit from the hard work you’ve put into building an audience for your blog.

However, you’re missing a wonderful opportunity to improve your blog and your own professional standing by taking such a position.

Rather than posing a threat, high quality guest blog posts from the right guest bloggers can actually improve your blog.
0 Top 3 Reasons to Allow Guest Blogging on your Blog

Expanded Reach

By allowing guest bloggers to post your blog, you increase your network. This is especially true if you encourage posts from subject matter experts or individuals who are not full time bloggers but who hold positions in companies or fields related to your blog. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With:

7 Reasons to Check Your Copy

November 14, 2012 by 1 Comment

Even if you’re not a writer by profession, most jobs and many other daily activities require at least some writing. A brief perusal of online articles suggests that large numbers of people don’t edit their writing as well as they should.

Actually, Internet participation seems to be dominated by two groups of people; those who are careless in their writing and those who think the careless ones should be shot, but I digress.

There is a plugin for WordPress called After the Deadline that can help with spelling, grammer, and context.  It is available as part of the free Jetpack set of plugins from WordPress.

Violence aside, error-free writing is more than a nitpicky thing. Small mistakes can lead to grave consequences. You should ensure your writing is error-free for the following seven reasons.

1. Avoid a Deeply Embarrassing Misunderstanding.

For example, say you want to earn some extra money cleaning houses. You post an ad that reads like this:

“Tired of cleaning yourself? Let me do it.”

If anyone offers you a cleaning gig based on this ad, you may find they have very different expectations of just what you are expected to clean.   [Read more...]

Filed Under: Don't Do It

URL Shortners: The Good, the Bad, the Evolution

November 9, 2012 by 1 Comment

With our love of condensing, speeding up and simplifying things, URL shorteners are now part of online mechanics and never more so than with social media sites such as Twitter. We’ve honed how we get our point across in 140 characters or less, and now, thanks to URL shorteners, we can add links into our conversations too.

The Good

The benefits of this link shortening is that it compresses and reduces, making sharing content easier. Gone are the lengthy titles which take up most of the characters, and in its place – space.

This leaves room for users to express their own opinion or take on articles, videos, images and everything else out there. It’s also been argued that shortened URLs make an article more readable, simply because clunky wordy titles are replaced with a more succinct version of less than 20 characters.

But aside from the aesthetics and share factors, shortening services are also valuable tools. That’s because some offer a built-in function to track and analyse who is sharing and reading content. Since sharing is the life blood of the internet, and more specifically social media, then for those who work in the industry, this helps with a necessary part of the job – monitoring.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With:

The WordPress SEO Guide

July 16, 2012 by 5 Comments

Using WordPress for your content management system is not only smart it’s recommended by most SEO Experts.  In order to rank well today in Google you need to have a blog and a powerful way to manage that content.  WordPress is close to prefect out of the box but there are still things you need to do.

If you are adding a new blog it is recommended to add the blog as a subfolder and not as a subdomain.  A subdomain is considered a new domain and will not carry the weight of your existing page.  Nor will you give your website the added bonus of links and content pages if you use a subdomain.

Subdomain: blog.domain.com

Subfolder: domain.com/blog/  (preferred method)

Tags & Categories

Once you have your blog installed and are ready to go you need to think about duplicate content and how you can prevent that.  The biggest problem with WordPress is the categories and tags it allows you to create.

Tags

If you have a large website with thousands of pages of content most of the time tags will help improve your SEO.  This creates additional pages that have keywords as titles.  The problem is when you have a smaller blog and not enough articles it creates pages with almost identical content.  Duplicate content is bad for SEO and will actually hurt your ranking potential in Google.

Categories

The same thing that happens with tags also happens with category pages.  Category pages can be near identical to tag created pages and can harm your SEO efforts.

To help solve these issues I recommend to all my clients to use the All in One SEO Pack.  This is a powerful plugin that has many features with the most useful is the ability to “no-index” tags or categories.  It is highly (do it) recommended you install this plugin and set up your blog to not allow search engines to index your tag pages.  This feature alone will solve most of your on-site SEO issues with WordPress.

Tip: When you categorize your blog post remember not to select too many categories for each blog post.  I always recommend one category.  If you start selecting several categories for each post then you run the risk of creating more duplicate content.   [Read more...]

Filed Under: Guest Post, Guides, How to..., Site Traffic, Wordpress Tagged With: ,

Publishing with WordPress iPhone App

June 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Writing and blogging via the WordPress App for iPhone (iOS) and iPad has evolved tremendously.

Screenshot I took while writing this actual post.

Saying that the early versions of this app were “clunky” would be a nice way of putting it. I would argue that using the WordPress iPhone App to publish or author content was a nightmare.

I, like many urban lifestylers, spend a good part of my day on some form of public transportation.  That used to be a time that I would spend writing blog content on my old Blackberry.  I would at least have time to get a good post started or nearly completed.  Often, I could have an entire post done by the time I got to work.

The dark ages.

At the time, I was using a post-by-email plugin that allowed me to email posts to a secret email account.  Any email sent to that address would automatically be converted to a blog post.

The email subject line became the post subject line, etc.

It worked well enough but the formatting was always a little wonky.  There was no way to insert links or other basic HTML markup.  At the time, there was no such thing as a Blackberry with a camera in it.  That meant no embedded photos in my mobile posts either.

Eventually, WordPress made post-by-email part of the core platform.  During that change over, formatting continued to get even more difficult to manage.  Also, if you changed devices from one phone to whatever was next, there was a good chance that there would be some extra markup in the email that would cause formatting to be a disaster.

Fast forward a few years to the debut of the iPhone.  I immediately could not wait.  Once I saw the potential of apps on this device, I knew that the WordPress community would build a WordPress CMS App for iPhone.

And they did.

Sadly, it sucked.

The first few times I attempted to use the iOS app, I was very disappointed.  Publishing, including links, adding images, tags, content categories, etc. were all difficult to manage or completely impossible.   [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology, Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

Most Popular Blog Subject Ever

March 23, 2012 by 3 Comments

What is the most popular blog subject ever?  What category gets the most draws the most traffic?  What topic generates the most revenue?

Answer: Whatever is the most original at the time.

Since the earliest days of blogging, the most popular sites have always been the most original.  I do not necessarily mean the most original writing, pictures, videos, or designs.  Although, that certainly helps.

The most popular blogs have always been the ones with the most focused, original subject matters.

Until the early 2000′s, there were no such thing as a “politics blog” or “tech blog.”  That meant that early political blogs like DailyKos and FireDogLake were extremely popular.  Why?  There wasn’t anyone doing it at the time.  As crazy as it sounds, a politics blog was something that would have been considered niche for a pseudo news site.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With: ,

Learning SEO More Important than AP Style

March 22, 2012 by 1 Comment

Do we really need to have such a big focus on AP Style in journalism school when SEO is going to be more valuable?

When I was taking my journalism classes in college, I haaaated AP Style.  For the record, I do not pretend to be a good writer at all.  In fact, I’m barely passable.

I wrote some pretty damn good stories in college but lost many grade points because of AP Style errors.  AP Style became the focus of my hatred for print media.  I enjoy reading print stories, but knew it would never be my profession.

Now that blogs, Twitter, and Facebook lead American news dissemination, how much does strict AP conformity really matter?

Not at all

There is an argument to be made that journalists should be taught both.  I can’t really disagree. However, that’s nearly impossible for many of us.

Most people have the capacity to learn one, maybe two writing styles, and actually be good at them.  Your first is the everyday email style of writing.  That’s really what I would consider most of my blogging; halfway decent streams of thought.

Second would be your more formal article style writing.  Straight forward and clear, but not worrying much about AP Style.

Then there is this third category of New York Times style.  The apex AP Style.   [Read more...]

Filed Under: Don't Do It Tagged With: , ,

Top 10: Web Analytics Platforms You Should Know

March 19, 2012 by 2 Comments

I was invited to speak at the College Media Association conference in New York City by my good friend Colin Donohue.  The CMA is similar to any other professional media consortium, but focuses exclusively on college and university media organizations.

This year, I was asked to speak about the importance of web analytics platforms.  One of my sessions featured my Top 10 web analytics platforms that I believe everyone should know.

The Top 10 Web Analytics Platforms are in no particular order.  Also, it is important to note that I do not think that you should use all of them.  Instead, you should pick your favorites, and go with it.  But make sure you know a little about all of them.

#1 – Google Analytics

google.com/analytics

Shockingly obvious, yes.  However, the analytics beginner may not fully appreciate the power of this platform since it is ubiquitous to the industry.  This fall, we saw GA release realtime analytics (finally!).  Realtime analysis makes the platform more appealing to “newsroom” style publishers.

#2 – GetClicky

getclicky.com

Still my favorite all around analytics platform.  I’ve used it for years, and it has never let me down.  GetClicky has offered realtime analytics since virtually day one.  The platform has continued to evolve including rich extensions such as an app for iPhone and iPad.  For “newsroom” applications, they have released a big screen mode that basically takes over the full screen of your machine with realtime site traffic.  Also has a robust solution for advertising and marketing tracking with no-fuss reporting.   [Read more...]

Filed Under: Site Traffic, Strategy, Technology Tagged With: , ,