WordPress Tutorials

Scheduling Your Blog Week in Only a Few Hours

How To Blog, Social Media Advisors, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

We do a lot of coaching with clients on how to start a blog and writing effective blog posts for SEO. Whenever I start the process of teaching the client how to do so, usually am met by the comment “I don’t have time” excuse, that I have to tackle instantly. Don’t get me wrong, I know writing blog posts can be time consuming, especially in the beginning when you are just starting. However, I always share that if you can set aside only 2-3 hours on a weekend while watching football, you can have a productive blog. Here’s how:

Before venturing into the world of WordPress, I used to share with clients to just place the posts into draft mode and then on Monday, Wednesday, & Friday Morning to just take a post and send it live. Then spend the rest of the day and a half just responding to the comments. For someone who is new to blogging, this is a good strategy because you are getting new content released every other day and starting to get you a build up of content which helps immensely with SEO.

Then I moved to the world of WordPress which helps make this strategy even easier. When you write inside WordPress, they have a scheduling function built inside the program. That means I can write this post on Saturday afternoon and schedule it to release on Monday Morning at 10:32 AM. By doing so, this means my post will now go live at that time and I don’t have to even be near my computer. In fact, I am nowhere around when this post went live in all actuality. I am out right now on a golf course doing my best impression of “lefty” Phil Mickelson. This is just one of many reasons why WordPress Rocks!

So give the scheduling function of WordPress a try if you never have before. It is a wonderful feature especially if you are on vacation, on the golf course, or tied up with clients. To your readers, they will never know the difference! 🙂

Increasing Blog Traffic Through Comments

How To Blog, How to Use Twitter, Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors, WordPress Tutorials

We all know that one great way to increase traffic into your site is to visit other people’s sites and leave valuable comments on specific topics. Leaving those comments shows that you care about whatever the topic might be, or you are able to share your knowledge answering a question that someone posed in a blog post. The other benefit is that some will allow you to get a backlink to your site which can help with the SEO end of things on your site.

So how can you find new blogs that are sharing information that will be helpful to your business or be great to connect with? One way I like is using Google Blog Search. I can quickly type in any subject I care to read about & find some of the most recent posts on that topic. Here is a brief video that will show you just how easy it is to find plenty of great blog content to read as well as some really awesome bloggers to connect with:

So get searching for other blogs and start connecting today. The power of these types of connections can be great for your business while also being a wonderful source of knowledge. The best part of this technique is that it only costs a little bit of time and energy to accomplish which is wonderful if you are optimizing a blog on a budget. I know when I started into social media a few years back I would start each morning by reading anywhere from 1-2 hours other people’s content. I would make a dedicated effort to leave valuable comments that would encourage the writer to want to connect with me.

After doing this for just over 6 months I had over 400 people subscribed into my old blog with great amounts of traffic coming daily from those subscribers. In addition, the posts were averaging around 20-30 comments. These people were not just finding me in the search engines, but they were mainly coming from the comments I left on their site.

Engaging the writer and other commenters

This part can be rather difficult at times. You have to be creative in thinking of ways to get the original writer of the blog as well as those who are commenting on the post to want to first read your comment and then secondly want to either reply to you or visit your site. This is a very delicate line to walk. If you go overboard in your comment, you might offend the originator of the post. One thing I would never do is leave a link in a comment, unless the writer asks specifically for that. If you think you have something that could help, send them a quick email with the link. Adding a link is widely recognized by most bloggers as a non accepted practice as well as highly discouraged. The writer has worked hard to get a reader to their site and they don’t appreciate someone trying to push them away to another site.

You also want to keep from sounding like a giant sales pitch. The minute someone feels that, they will automatically categorize you as a spammer which could result in being banned from a site completely. The final thing you want to skip are canned generic responses like: “Great post I really enjoyed it and look forward to future posts of yours.” This shows lack of interest and that you are only there to hopefully get exposure for you and your blog.

So what should you do? Start by adding value to the conversation. This might mean that you need to spend some time reading through all the comments before posting yours. If you can either answer a question, or supply additional information on a topic the commenters and writer will pay attention to you. The most effective thing you can do when commenting is to leave a genuine caring response that shows a level of interest on the subject. When you read about someone’s question about what is the best Twitter Application for a Blackberry and you can share what app you are using, they are more likely to come over to your blog and read your post on Twitter Applications.

So give Google Blog Search a try and start connecting with great blog posts on just about any subject you wish! And let me know in the comments below what you are searching for!

WordPress Plugins – Why the Facebook “Share” Button is Critical

Facebook, Facebook For Business, Social Media Advisors, WordPress Tutorials

Currently, it’s hard to think of a site more influential than Facebook. Google, Twitter, and YouTube are all in the mix, to be sure, but Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla of social media. As such, it seems more important than ever to have a presence there, both personal and professional.

One additional tool in your arsenal is one that you can place on your WordPress blog (and probably elsewhere, too, but since I’m familiar with WordPress, I’ll stick to what I know).

I’m referring to the “Share” button that you see on many WordPress posts these days. If you aren’t using it, you’re simply cheating yourself out of some potentially valuable exposure. Why not allow your readers to share your content with their friends? In the old days (read: pre-social media days), business owners would die for this kind of word-of-mouth advertising! Now it can be accomplished with a single click, along with a description (e.g. “Check out this interesting article I just found about nose hair!”).

The only equivalent that I can think of in the analog world would be for someone to call all of his/her friends to mention your post. Once the info is shared, it appears on the user’s wall as an endorsement that your post was worth reading.

The plugin itself is extremely easy to install in mere seconds. You can customize the location within your posts, too. On our blog here, you can see this button above the post and to the right. Feel free to use it liberally anytime you come here to read. 🙂 Along with the TweetMeme button, which is basically a “Share” for Twitter users, the Facebook Share feature is a must-have for bloggers.

But what about the “Like” button, Jason? Well, I think it’s handy, too, but I appreciate the “Share” feature even more, since it provides a deeper level of detail about the post, rather than just a link.

If you have any questions about the Facebook Share button or any other WordPress plugin which you’ve heard about or seen, we would love the opportunity to help. Ask away!

Thanks for reading!

Social Media Plugins- SexyBookmarks

Social Media Advisors, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

We are starting another series of posts today on the various plugins that are our personal favorites on our WordPress blog. Jason & I get asked often what are the best social media plugins for social media, so we thought this series might be helpful to many of you. The first plugin that is going to be discussed today is probably the one we get ask about the most often.

People are constantly using our chat with us function in our side bar to ask, “What is that social media plugin at the bottom of your posts? The one with all the little icons for various social media platforms.” The name of that plugin is SexyBookmarks by Shareaholic. The reason I really like this social media plugin is that it adds the slightest bit of animation to the bottom of each post. When you hover over any of the icons at the bottom of a post, they slide up and down making them stand out. Also, it has a great amount of customization.

With offering close to 90 different sharing services, you can enable just about any possible network sharing you wish. There are many that I have never even heard of! You can select all, the most popular, or customize to which services you want to show up to your audience. Some of my favorites other than your standard social networking sites include: Posterous, RSS, Google Reader, Gmail, FriendFeed, & Ping.fm.

Social Media Plugin- The technical side of installation SexyBookmarks

Like most of your plugins for WordPress, you can add this one onto your posts automatically by visiting the plugin library at WordPress and searching for SexyBookmarks. Or, if you prefer to install things via FTP, you can download SexyBookmarks here.

Once you install SexyBookmarks & activate the plugin, you will then need to visit your settings section of your dashboard and customize the plugin. This is where you choose which pages or posts you want SexyBookmarks to show up on, which services you want to activate, the title you want displayed, whether you want the links to be no followed, and if you want a specific URL shortener used for tracking.

In some instances you might be require to fix the “spritgen.” To do this, simply login to your site via FTP, locate the file within your plugin folder and then find the spritegen file. Right click on it and select to change permissions. Set them to 777 and save. Once you do this, your file will now be activated & ready to be used.

SexyBookmarks needs to fix:

The one thing that really annoys me when I am setting up this plugin for a client is that the most popular list is really not the most popular sites for here in the USA. The one that really blows my mind is that Facebook, the social media 800 LB gorilla is not chosen when you click most popular. I wish that they could at least add Facebook and a few others onto that list.

Summary of Social Media Plugin SexyBookmarks

There really isn’t anything else with the social media plugin that I would want to change. I think it is a great plugin that is powerful, looks great, and performs wonderfully. Now that I have shared with you how it works and what it does, feel free to go to the bottom of this post and test it out! Use any of the buttons below to share this post on your favorite social media platform. Of course, once you do, make sure you leave a comment telling us which one you used!