Blogging Sueblimely

Following up from my last post about tasks to complete before and after publishing a blog post, Post Writing a Blog Post Post, as promised I am going to talk about my favorite tools that you can use to automate or speed up this process:

Spelling and Grammar

To automatically check your spelling and grammar “After the Deadline” is available as a stand alone plugin for WordPress or as an add-on to the Tiny MCE plugin, as an add on for Firefox and Chrome and as an OpenOffice.org extension.

Keywords and SEO

A WordPress SEO plugin is a must have to ensure you have the optimal information and keywords to help your post be listed and found. I use either WordPress SEO or All in One SEO.

Layout

I write and preview my posts in Firefox but to make sure that nothing is breaking the layout in the, not yet totally compliant, Internet Explorer I use the View in IE Firefox addin. This adds a “View in IE” item to the right click menu; click on this on any webpage and IE opens with the weppage loaded.

Sharing/Bookmarking a Blog Post

There are many tools available for sharing your post on bookmarking and social networking sites; some are browser toolbar buttons, some full toolbars. Use of a button or toolbar is a matter of personal preference although too many toolbars can slow your browser down and reduce your viewing area although Buttonizer for Firefox hides/displays your toolbars easily. I like the functionality of toolbars but only add a few and use different profiles with different toolbars for different internet uses (personal and business).

Don’t forget to make full use of tags where they are available to further enhance your keyword optimization.

• OnlyWire If you take the time to join up and add the supported bookmark and social networking sites this tool automatically sends your posts to all your services. A great time saver. The disadvantage is that if you are a free member you have to add the OnlyWire share button to the bottom of your posts. but you may have other share buttons that you prefer to use. OnlyWire works with most blog platforms by using a script and there is a plugin that adds it for you in WordPress.
• If you use WordPress and don’t want to use OnlyWire you can add a different share this type button that shows on each of your posts. You can make full use of this yourself and submit your own post. I am trying Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share as well as OnlyWire on this blog right now. Shareaholic and Add This for Firefox are other tools that allow you to submit your post to a wide range of sites at the click of a button. For links to these and to more resources for Firefox only please visit my Firefox Collection Sueblimely Social Networking Tools. This includes bookmarklets, toolbars and utilities for Stumbleupon, Digg, Facebook, Twitter and more. Please bear in mind that certain sites such as Stumbleupon do not approve of you submitting too much of your own content.
• I use the bit.ly url shortener service and their toolbar bookmarklet to share posts on Facebook and Twitter. Creating a free account allows you to add your FB and Twitter accounts. Clicking on the bookmarklet when on your post page will open bit.ly with your post title and the short link already entered in a box that you can add to or edit.. Click on publish and your message will be published to your choice of the FB and Twitter accounts you have set up.
• Delicious bookmarklets for all browsers and a toolbar. There are also various Firefox add-ins that have functions such as showing your bookmarks in the sidebar.
• Diigo tools – bookmarklets and toolbar available for FF, IE Chrome
• The Rockmelt browser had many social networking tools already built in to it. I use the browser although, because of the inbuilt updates from my friends, it can be a distraction if I am working.

Social Networking

Visit your blogging friends and contacts and leave a comment. This is one of the most pleasant sides of blogging. You get to know other bloggers, read content that interests you and, signing in to comment, automatically adds a backlink to your site. To speed up this process you can add a browser bookmarks folder or RSS reader folder that includes these blogs. Blogs that have a higher ranking are the most useful to comment on (such as this one with a rank of 3 – it was 4 until the latest Google update). I will do this for SEO purposes but most often comment on a blog because of its content and author. I enjoy giving encouragement by commenting on brand new blogs too.

Most of the blogs I look after have target markets and there are specific and individual ways that I promote their new content.

After being away from regular blogging here, I have had to remind myself of  various essential tasks and promotional methods; that used to come just naturally after I had written a blog post.

I wrote them down as a reminder to myself and to share with you:

Before publishing the blog post

1. Check spelling and grammar.
2. Look at the post and paragraph length and alter if necessary. Can I make better use of lists to emphasise points and make the post more easily readable
3. Have I put in too many links to external sources? If so could I reduce these.
4. Can I add any links to my previous posts to bring them to readers and search engine attention again.
5. Have I been keyword aware -
   • Am I sure that the relevant keywords are in the content and have I got the main ones at the beginning of the post? If I am not sure then I will use a keyword suggestion tool.
   • Have I categorized and tagged the post correctly?
6. Make sure the post appears as I want it in Search Engine Listings by using an SEO plugin tool to tweak titles, add a description and meta content.
7. Check the final draft to ensure the layout is what I intended and images are aligned and sized appropriately.

After Publishing

8. Create a short link to my post – I use a personalized bit.ly url.
9. Submission - (By this I do not mean giving up all hope that the post will be found and read). Submit my post to bookmarking sites delicious and diigo and to relevant diigo groups. You may have your own favorite bookmarking sites that are more suited to your niche.
• Share on major content submission sites such as Stumbleupon and Digg or ask friends to submit them for you.
• Share on my own personal pages on social networking sites such as Facebook, my Facebook Page, Google Reader.
• Share with groups  and forums I belong to where it is in context, where posting of links is acceptable and where the post is likely to be of the most interest to its readers.
10. Let it sing like a bird – Tweet it.
11. Let my closest blog contacts know that I have published a new post and ask kindly for their help in promoting it. Email them or leave messages on sites they frequent the most.
12. Visit other blogs and comment to let them know that I am still around. (I have been so busy with other matters lately I have neglected my blogging friends and for this I apologise)
13. Follow up. Repost a tweet, maybe using different but still content appropriate text. Answer any comments on my blog and any other place that has elicited a response.
14. Feel satisfied that I have completed the tasks involved in writing and publishing a post. This one is only for those of you who are suspicious over the number 13.

This sounds so time consuming doesn’t it and I hope I have not put off any beginning bloggers. In practice there are lots of tools to speed up the process. I will talk about these in my next post, but to get you started you could check on my post Firefox Collections and Social Networking

Now this post is written it is time for me to complete my tasks. I am looking forward to number 14.

Google Analytics and AweStats are the programs I use when I want to look in detail at my website statistics. Woopra gives me a regular quickly accessed overview of blog stats as the program comes on my PC start up. The start of the new year seemed a good time to do some analysis on my stats and my blogging methods. I came out with some very useful information including some surprises. Hopefully this analysis will be of some use to you too, as an indication of areas that are worth concentrating efforts on.

I am a member of a lot of Social Networking sites, although my degree of participation varies a great deal. It tends to be based on which sites I enjoy, especially the social aspects, although these are also communities where readers are more likely to result. I know that I could be much more systematic and organized in how I expend my efforts online, rather than fluttering from place to place without prior planning or without following the planning. There are just too many sites to be successful as an online social butterfly – the wings are just not large enough, being a social Albatross would be preferable.

I know the theory behind SEO and increasing visitors but tend to lack in the implementation of it. Being a bit of a net junkie the time and effort requirements do get fulfilled but matters such as keyword analysis take a back seat I find this tedious, although I do tend to use openings that are hopefully Google Getters. This has become more automatic rather than thought out, although on writing the first sentence here I did have this in mind and reworked it.

To the stats themselves – I compared 2008 annual figures from Awe Stats and Google Analytics. Although there was a lot of variations in the two sets of figures, when I grouped the numbers and looked at them both in percentage terms there was much less variation. I split the figures into groupings based on the type of networking involved.

Entrecard (+ related sites) 15% – I expected these to represent a fairly large proportion although I don’t think they necessarily translate to readers and bring few comments. After initial enthusiasm I no longer spend much time with Entrecard.

Lists and Blogrolls – The vast majority of this 4% is made up of lists I have qualified for rather than blog submission sites – Top 100 and top 50 women Australian Bloggers, a Do Follow list. Sitehopping has brought a small but steady stream of traffic too. The the blog directory sites were not doing anything at all and by mid year I had removed all of these buttons. I had joined these sites when I first started blogging and before Social Networking sites had taken off.

The amount of visitors arriving from Social Networking sites surprised me, especially how many referrals Stumbleupon had sent, as you can see below:

Stumbleupon sent me 23,500 visitors last year even though none of the submitted posts received huge amounts of thumbs up – no “Digg” effects are apparent. Although I do send my posts to contacts via the SU toolbar occasionally, many more were reviewed and given thumbs up without this. I do not enjoy Digg and have not had any enthusiasm for doing what is needed to get a post rated highly there.

As SU took up such a large proportion I have analyzed the other Social Networking Sites on their own without SU.

Although I expected Twitter to do well, I was surprised to see Blog Catalog in second place and Technorati in third. Considering I have not participated in Blog Soldiers and the Good Blogs for months, and no longer have the widgets installed, they performed quite highly. I do not use Mixx a great deal so that figure is not a true reflection on how well it could do for others. Nuffnang Australia has so far proved excellent considering the short period of time I have been a member, although that could be initial enthusiasm that comes along with something new. It will be interesting to see what results arise being featured blogger of the month on Nuffnang. I am pleased that diigo did so well as it is my favorite bookmarking site, with good social networking features thrown in.

Zimbio, which is not included above as I did not consider it a networking site as such, brought me 9674 referrals over a short period of time for just one contribution; my Best Sites For Good Free Stock Images post.

I also had a closer look at which posts were the most popular. (Publishing links to older popular posts is always a good strategy, not only for newer readers who may have missed them the first time round but to increase the number of links within your site.

• New Rules for Domain Names
• Add Borders to Images
• Excellent Free Online Image Editing Tools
• Add Widget Ready Sidebars to WordPress Footers
• Best Sites For Good Free Stock Images
• Adding a Favicon to your Blog

These vary from the Most Popular Posts listed in the sidebar because of different time periods used but both show how popular the image posts were. I believe I managed to get in quickly with the Domain Name post and it was a subject that attracted a lot of interest… The fact that the Favicon tutorial did so well is related to the nature of blogs. There are many posts and static website articles on this topic but this was much more recent than the others. It would be an interesting exercise to write another post on the same subject perhaps later this year, I suspect this too would do well..

So what does all this mean for the year ahead? I will concentrate my social networking efforts on the sites that have been the most useful in terms of visitors and most satisfying in terms of connecting with people. I will make an effort to participate more in Mixx. The Scoutle widget will reluctantly be removed from my footer. The concept is good but it has not proved effective visitor wise and the widget often causes very slow page loading times. I am going to continue giving Google Friend Connect a try – the poor lonely contact widget, which I recently installed, will have to be moved – again because of page loading issues. Nuffnang has yet to produce any ads and the widget’s intrusive size still bugs me.

I will also find time to do the full blog redesign that I have intended to do for a year, which I subequently planned to complete by today; to be installed in replacement of my Christmas theme. Instead I just quickly changed the colors and removed the Christmas images.

I hope these figures give you some indication of the worth of sites in relation to bringing in readers as, having read what others recommend, I do not think they are particularly out of the ordinary. If your experiences differ I would be interested in hearing about them.

When I read about ways to reward those who comment on blogs I always enthusiastically try them out. I see comments as the life blood of a blog, providing a distribution system for so many other aspects of blogging. Their are plenty of blog posts around about the benefits of leaving comments but what of the benefits we gain by receiving them?

Benefits of receiving comments:

Communication Needs

• Comments are a concrete way of showing that your blog has readers, particularly interested in your blog, rather than just passing trade. The passing trade do comment too but you can distinguish these from your regulars. A hello and thank you to my regulars.
• Satisfaction – Stating the obvious – no one wants to run a blog that is not read by others, for whatever reason we blog. – stats may indicate visitors and readers but figures do not provide the same sort of personal satisfaction.
• Motivation – to keep writing posts and to keep going with the blog itself – many blogs are abandoned (probably too early) because of receiving few or no comments.
• Egos are stroked – a natural human need to one extent or another (not because bloggers in general need ego strokes more than anyone else)
• Social advantages/Social Networking – we get to know others, we develop contacts outside of the blog itself, we can develop friendships, contacts can lead to more contacts and more friends who also come to comment on our blogs – the Blog Loop.
• Networking – again to develop contacts but done for business, professional or money making reasons rather to satisfy strictly personal needs.
• Networking + Social Networking – those who start blogging for the above reasons often find it is the social aspects that motivate them to keep on going.

The Blog Loop and how it goes wrong

This post is not just an off the top of my head type now – it has really got me thinking and I even created an image. Do some of your blog posts develop along these lines?

Feedback

• This includes the pat on the back type comments that help with the motivational and ego stroking needs mentioned above. We know deep down that some of these type are not sincere but how many of us ignore this and choose to appreciate them anyway? This does not include the "nice post", "well done", "I am not adding saying anything else because I just want you to visit my blog" type. These are just a drag and for delete or the spam folder. I notice some of these have snuck into some of my older posts – they will be ex-comments soon.
• Learning which of our posts are popular with our readers. It does not necessarily mean posts that draw the most comments but also those which elicit the more valuable comments – what is valuable depends of course on your own particular blog and your own blogging needs. Being aware of which posts fit these criteria is an enormous help in showing us how to improve and meet the needs of our readers. By aware I mean not just knowing which posts they are but thinking about why they are popular and how to reproduce the success again. Looking at our unpopular posts can be similarly helpful.

Research and learning

• Finding other blogs in our own niche areas can advance our learning of the particular subject we cover. Blogs tend to beget contact from similar blogs. Following your comments and the comments left on their author’s blog can be a source of valuable knowledge.
• Even if you blog on a particular topic by following comments you can find wonderful blogs to interest and entertain you; to satisfy leisure and personal learning needs.
• Comments that give us information, add to the topic, or add things we may have missed are a valuable learning tool (the latter is only of positive use for perfectionist types who do not beat themselves up about missing something.). And to prove that I am not a perfectionist I am going to end here and ask you to add any other positive things you can think of – (Ok the truth – I don’t particularly like missing things but I ran out of steam and ideas and I even like getting comments that tell me what I have missed, as well as ego stroking ones.)

Benefits of Leaving Comments

Simple – just take account of the benefits you gain from receiving comments and bestow these on others – not only will you feel good about yourself you will receive backlinks, kudos, recognition for your own blog, more visitors, readers, increased page rank and all the other stuff you can read one of the many blog posts already written on the subject.

I started this post only intending to tell you some news relating commenting tools but not wanting to lose your attention I will write about these next. I have a real talent for (problem with!) getting completely sidetracked.

My Scoutle scout is busy strolling round blogs that match my interest areas. You can see her in action in my footer. She is meeting up with other scouts who share my interests. Hopefully their creators will then come and visit my blog, be fascinated with its content, subscribe, comment regularly and become blogging contacts – time will tell.

Scoutle considers itself to be “Automated Social Networking” where there is no need for communication in order to connect and no real life obligations. I think they must be talking only about the initial method of connection here as, once you have connected with someone, there must be communication for a blogging relationship to develop and establish.The novelty of Scoutle is that you do not have to search for people to connect with, Scoutle’s search does that for you, filtering out sites that it considers not worthy – eg outdated sites or those just that only exist for advertising purposes. As well as finding contacts via the widget you can discover other members on the Scoutle website itself, – via contacts of contacts and through networks based on interest areas.

Scoutle is premised on the idea that it is the quality of connections that is important not the quantity. This appeals to me considering the masses of people I do not know that connect to me on sites such as MyBlogLog; many who have likely never visited this blog. Scoutle allows your Scout to walk twice for every time you have a visitor to your site – the more your Scout gets to walk the more it will appear on the sites of other Scoutle members. You make contact with other users by requesting to make a “Connection” with them via the Scoutle website. You score points based on your site visitor numbers and the number of Connections you make. The higher your point value the higher your place in the Scoutle Guide, which in turn should lead to more visitors.

This service has been available for a good few months now and, although as usual I joined as soon as I heard about it, I felt that I already took part in too many social networking activities and these were beginning to take time away from blogging: becoming counterproductive. I have since narrowed these down to networks I find the most use and enjoy using the most so I have some leeway to explore others.

I will report on Scoutle once I have had more opportunity to find out if it is working for me, although I suspect it is not attracting as many members as it deserves because of general social networking fatigue as well as the desire not to have too many widgets. I have already discovered a few very informative blogs that I had not come across before – one you may be interested in is Social Web Tools by ChaCha Fance – it sent me off in discovery of various new, interesting applications.

If you are a Scoutle member please leave a comment letting us know what you think of it.

(I placed the Scoutle widget in my footer because this reduces the impact of any increase in page load time it causes – the footer loads last so the rest of the page is visible even though the social networking widgets may not have fully loaded)