Archive for the 'Efficient Blogging' Category

The holidays are a busy time for all of us, travel time, family gatherings, shopping, last minute deadlines before the new year. During this time a lot of us tend to neglect or put off our writing till after the new year. For those of you that have chosen to use the popular and highly recommended WordPress publishing platform, that doesn’t have to be the case. You can still relax and enjoy the holidays knowing that you are staying on top of your writing and ahead of the competition by scheduling posts for publication ahead of time.

I would recommend planning your posts a few weeks out. Depending on your topic you do not of course want to disappoint your readers with stale or out of date content. Before the holiday rush ensues grab yourself a little notepad and jot down 2 to 3 ideas that might make for good holiday reading. Don’t put it off, get to writing as soon as possible while the content is still fresh in your mind. Whether you compile your post directly in the WordPress editor or using another publisher such as Mars Edit, get something down and ready to go.

Now doesn’t that feel better, believe me you are now way ahead of the game.

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Getting Ahead by Using WordPress Post Scheduling

I’m one of those types that takes little blurbs from the “SEO Masters” of the blogosphere and tries to apply a little here and a little there. I think mostly it’s cause I don’t have the time to learn it all at once and then implement a great SEO plan. If you’re reading this blog regularly, you probably don’t have time to do that either.

However, you really should take the time to learn 5-10 good SEO techniques and then apply them to your blog or all the blogs you try and setup. Taking the time to do this will utilize your time better because you won’t be wasting your time building links, or adjusting you tags, or writing content, in ways that won’t help you in the long run

The best resource I’ve found and I found it over at Digital Point Forums is an eBook by Brad Callen and he’s allowed it to be freely distributed. That’s why I say DP forums because it’s in about 10 posts over there.

I’ve uploaded the book to my servers and will allow you to read it or download it at SEO Made Easy PDF by Brad Callen.

Read it and develop a good plan. It will optimize the time you spend link building for sure.

When you start anything new the easiest way to keep it going is by getting into a routine. Whether it be a diet, exercise, or school work, a routine is the best way to keep yourself doing it.

Routines help because it allows our mind to go on autopilot and not get sidetracked. If we work into our schedule that everyday at 5 pm we are to meet Cindy or Joe at the gym, we will go and meet them at the gym. Or maybe we have to be at the library everyday at 6 pm so we can make sure to get in an hour of studying.

After we do these things for a week or two it seems like old hat. We just do them without even thinking about it. It’s kinda like getting the mail. You can get the mail anytime after it’s delivered but I’m willing to bet that you get the mail at about the same time everyday. It’s just become routine.

That’s the way you should make your blogging if you want to blog more efficiently. If every morning you get up and turn  on your computer and write a small three paragraph blurb about whatever you niche is about, eventually it will become part of your daily routine.

This is a really easy way you can always have your blogging part of your day. Eventually it will seem as simple as getting the mail.

There are lots of people out there who swear by commenting as their form of advertising and marketing their blogs. They just wait for a new post on a popular blog and bam, their the first to comment and hopefully gain some attraction and traffic back to their blog.

Now as a part-time blogger you may not have all the time in the world to be both commenting and blogging, especially if you don’t know if commenting works. Does it really drive traffic back to you blog?

Yes and no. It all depends on the article, the amount of people that will read the article and the order in which your comment pops up from the top.

Some articles and blogs are better to comment on to get your blog traffic it’s plane and simple. Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be active in the blogging community and stop commenting on someones blog just cause it won’t send you traffic. That’s not right, you should comment where you have opinions because comments are really to open up a community like feel and a public dialogue on the bloggers articles.

However, if you are limited in time, you should focus on new articles at popular blogs related to your content. This will get you the most traffic back to your blog and help your SEO out the most (although it’s unsure how much a link in a comment helps, if that person has no-follow disabled). If you stick to similar material blogs you’ll drive the most traffic with commenting because when a reader of that blog passes over your linked text in the comment header and sees that your blogs url as golf in it, if it’s on a golf blog, chances are the reader is looking for golf related sites. But if you’re on a knitting related blog, you might not do as well.

With little time just remember to keep it similar to your blogs topic and go for new posts on high traffic blogs. Those are the most efficient places to comment.

Often times when we are trying to loose weight or improve our physical fitness we find a friend with a similar goal and sync up our schedules so that we can motivate each other to reach out goals. If one of you doesn’t want to work out, hopefully the other will and you won’t be able to easily justify not going to the gym.

This same motivational tool can be applied to blogging. If you got into blogging chances are you like to write. But writing everyday can be grueling and most people don’t follow through with their blogs after about 3 months.

An easy way to keep yourself blogging is by finding a friend who wants to do the same thing as you, blog. Begin to read each others blogs everyday. If one of you haven’t posted during the day, send a friendly email and say”Hey, just wondering what wonderful wisdom you had to spill on us about jogging today?” Or something along those lines.

Just a friendly reminder that says, why the heck haven’t you blogged today. By having someone else there wanting to know what your going to say next, even if they don’t really care about the words, (they might not share the same passion for cross-stitching as you do) you’ll have someone to motivate you through the tough times of blogging.

I’ve written before about ways to more efficiently check certain stats but how do you know if you are a stat junkie and check too often to begin with? Well I’ve compiled a somewhat commical list below to help you discern whether you are or not. You’ll never be a successful part-time blogger if you check your stats too much.

10. Your Google Adsense “Last Login” timer never reads more than 30 minutes.
9. You can tell me right now who your top referring link is.
8. You know the IP address of your last visitor.
7. You’ve worn out the S, I, T, E, M, and R keys on your keyboard.
6. You’ve worn out the S, I, T, E, M, and R keys on your friends keyboard.
5. You can tell me how much you’ve earned from Google Adsense already today.
4. You’ve written about your best stat day on your blog, in the last 5 days
3. You know your best commentor by their Host Name
2. You don’t know your social security number but if anyone asks your unique visitors for the year, you’ve got that covered.

And the number one way you can tell if you’re a stat junkie.

1. You haven’t blogged in days because your still trying to figure out why so many visitors are coming from Reston, Virgina.

 Enjoy the top 10 reasons and feel free to share them with anyone. By the way, I was only able to compile this list because I am guilty of all of them.

Do you spend too much of your time checking stats?

I’ve slowed my roll down in this aspect of blogging but when I first started out I was always checking my stats. Several times a day I would head over to statcounter, or adsense, or chitika, or namedrive, just to see if people were stopping by, or if people were “converting.”

I still check once or twice a day now, but not every hour, as I practically was previously. If you still do this maybe you can use a new tool mentioned by Darren over at problogger. It’s an add on for firefox that allows you to view your adsense stats in a browser bar “24/7.”

I’d just like to mention that there’s also one for flock that you can download, and Darren points toward an older adsense status bar for your Google Desktop Sidebar, if you use that.

It’s good to keep track of your stats, and anything you can do to minimize the time spent doing so will help you become a more efficient blogger, especially if your blogging on precious little time. I still check my stats to see where people are coming from and to, but having some of my stats in a status bar while I’m typing this post helps reduce that time considerably.

technorati tags:Blog, Blogging, Adsense, Firefox, Tools, Stats, Statistics, Tips

I can’t believe I blogged any other way.

I currently use wordpress on all my blogs, all 11 of them. But this blogging tool will work on all major blog software out there, read below to see which ones.
The Old Way:

To post I used go to the particular Blog’s Wordpress Dashboard, click on write, and go about my business. If I post about a news story or some other great tidbit I found on a website I have to open it (usually in a separate tab) and click back and forth, copying and pasting things I can’t memorize how to spell and generally spending a lot of time keeping my readers updated on the most current related information.

Uploading images, formating text, copying web addresses. Time Time Time. I would waste a lot of time doing a lot of things that I knew had to be possible some other way.

I was then pointed to the greatest Browser a Blogger could ever use.

The New Way:

Now I blog from my browser. As I surf the Internet and see articles I think you, my readers may like, I right click to “blog this,” Type or quote a little bit from my new “stuck” window, hit publish, choose which of my eleven blogs and categories I want to publish to, add some tags and presto, I just published some fresh new content for my blog.

It’s that easy. Flock is amazing. It’s a browser based off of Mozilla but with all the add-ins you could possibly want to be a great and efficient blogger. It literally has everything. I’ll outline some of the best here that deal with efficient blogging but there are a lot more you can use.

Built in Feed Reader

Flock has a built in feedreader. That’s right, no need to login to an account, check your feeds, go to your wordpress, blogger, or typepad dashboard and blog about what you read. Just organize your feeds into folders, it’ll tell you whats new, then right click “blog this.”

To add feeds just click on the RSS icon or link on any blog or news source and it’ll bring up that sources feed. Another great thing is that any site with a valid feed shows up with an RSS icon in the address bar that you can also click and add to your feeds.

Don’t worry if you have a bloglines or other feedreader account you can import back and forth your feeds so you can have the feeds on the go as well.

Web Snippets – Better than Google Notebook

Google Notebook is an interesting addition to your web browser but isn’t all that integrated. It’s still cumbersome to navigate through your stuff and hard to add to blog posts where most people would need it.

With Flock’s Web Snippets all you need to do is drag and drop or right click and add and your in business. The web snippets are saved in a nice expandable/collapsible toolbar at the bottom of your screen. You can then drag and drop the pictures you save, the text, or video feeds into any web application or “blog this” post.

It’s that easy.

Blog This – Finally Efficiency

You can finally have truly efficient blogging. Flock’s “Blog This” function allows you to blog about anything you’re reading or looking at. That’s right you can even do pictures. You can shape and resize pictures (I resized the picture above right in the “blog this” window.)

You can highlight text or pictures, right click to blog this, and your text along with a titled link to what you’re viewing is right there in the window for you and ready to go.
The “blog this” window is sticky, meaning it’s anchored to the screen and you can scroll, highlight, navigate whatever you want to the main browser window and it’s tabs. You can copy paste, drag drop, whatever you want.

You don’t have to log in anymore, all you have to do is setup each of your blogs with their passwords and Flock does the rest. It’ll find your blog, it’s settings, and it’s categories. You truly never have to log in again if you don’t want to. Just click publish!

One other cool thing about the “blog this” feature is that it allows you to tag your posts with technorati tags. No plugins, no coding, just add your tags in their tag box and they show up at the bottom of the post. Tags are quickly becoming vital to a bloggers toolbox and this is a no-brainer way of tagging your posts.

Don’t worry about blogging software support, flock currently works with all the major blog softwares out there like Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress, Moveable Type, Live Journal, MetaWeblog API, and Atom API based blogs.
Lack of Toolbar – No Problem

I can’t find a Google or MSN toolbar download support for it but that’s no problem. The built in search box lets you customize what base search engine to use and also lets you add other engines to the pop down search as you type option.

I would imagine you’ll see a toolbar soon as flock seems to be catching on. The one thing I miss is to check Google pagerank of the pages I visit but I’m sure I’ll get over it.
Finally

Flock has tons of other great photo features, favorites sharing, extensions, plugins whatever you want to call them, and it’s open source. Meaning the general public makes it better through extensions and updates. It’s also got a nice support forum and more that you’ll have to try out.
Flock is great and you have to give it a try for blogging and browsing. Just try it out and see what it can do for you. I know there are blogging tool additions for Firefox from groups like Performancing and other add ins that make IE and FF like Flock, but Flock has it all.

By the way this was blogged using Flock!

technorati tags:Flock, Blogging, Blog, Efficiency, Tools, Browser