Every crowd has “that guy” or “that gal” who are often the subject of annoyance, and the blogging community is no exception. Here is just a small lists of don’ts, and we’d love to hear some of your annoyances in the comments below…

Don’t Ask To Exchange Links

If you have a good or decently ranked blog, chances are you’ve received requests to “exchange links,” which is basically a fancy way of saying promote me on your blog, and I’ll promote you back. Link exchanges happen all the time, and is often to help with SEO even though Google has openly commented on such practices. Other times, it’s just to try and get free promotion.

However, it’s an incredibly ineffective approach, and 99 percent of the time, the site that someone wants linked is complete crap. Back in the day, I remember getting requests for sites that had absolutely nothing to do with my own. If someone naturally enjoys your blog, and/or is inspired by something you write, they will link to you. That’s not always the case though, and asking to “exchange links” is a quick way for someone to exchange your email for something more important, like a chain email from their Aunt Betty.

Don’t Comment Using Your Blog Name

Here at Blog Herald, we see this one just about all the time. In theory, it makes sense, but in reality, nobody wants to talk to a brand or thing, they want to talk to an actual human being. Yes, I get that you’re blogging about making money on blogs while blogging about making money, but it would be really great to just talk to Todd.

Simply be yourself, and when you do that, you’ll find that more people will interact with you, and there will be less chances of your comment ending up in the spam folder.

Don’t Stuff Your Header With “As Seen On”

Showing authority and building authority are very important, not just in the blogging community, but life and business in general. To help with this, thousands of people litter their blog’s header with images of logos of popular publications, claiming they’ve been seen on them.

Unfortunately, with 28 different logos and a bright red “As Seen On” sticker, your blog now looks like the beginning of an infomercial. But wait, there’s more! It’s easy for anyone to throw up some images even though they weren’t technically “seen.” For example, I once commented on Forbes.com, and someone saw and replied to that comment. In many cases, people have actually appeared in certain publications, but it’s always good to have a healthy dose of skepticism.

Don’t Always Do What Everyone Else Is Doing

To put it bluntly, a lot of people in the blogging community are copycats. There’s nothing wrong with emulating other successful bloggers, but you have to be unique and different in your own way. Just because everyone is doing one thing, doesn’t mean you have to tag along, and jump on the bandwagon. Carve your own path, and do what you want to do.

Photo credit: miguelb

The post How to Not be ‘That Guy’ in the Blogging Community appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Chris Ducker is an entrepreneur, and Founder/CEO of Virtual Staff Finder and Live2Sell. In 2010, Chris ventured into blogging, and quickly became the outsourcing authority. In this interview, we talk about how he amassed a large following, the biggest blogging mistakes and more.

You’ve been very successful in business, most notably with Live2Sell, and it wasn’t until 2010 that you got serious about blogging. Were there tips/best practices that you applied from the business world?

Being original is number one in business. If you want to do anything in business now, you’ve got to be as original as possible because it’s becoming more and more complex. The second thing is just be consistent in what you’re doing whether it’s a podcast, building out a YouTube channel, or creating a blog.

I decided to make a quality design of the blog (Virtual Business Lifestyle) apparent from the outset. I didn’t want it to look just like any other blog out there. I wanted to try and stand out, and be as original as I possibly could. When I first started Virtual Business Lifestyle, I was blogging three times a week pretty religiously for almost a year, and it certainly helped to drive more traffic to the site, increase opt-ins, and overall get the blog in front of as many people as possible.

I remember discovering Virtual Business Lifestyle (now ChrisDucker.com) mid-2010, and you had already amassed a pretty large following. What do you attribute to your early success?

Other than just the originality and consistency of the content I was producing, I think the other thing that attributed to that early success was the fact I was out there. I was making an effort to connect with other bloggers, to travel from the Philippines to America to conferences like BlogWorld (now New Media Expo) even though I’d only been blogging for eight or nine months or so. I also made an effort to reply to every comment, and converse with people properly on social media.

What are some of the most common mistakes you see bloggers make?

One of the biggest mistakes I see bloggers make all the time is not listening to their audience. They start a blog on ABC niche, and think that’s what they’re going to write about forever. That’s not always the case, and 9 times out of 10, your readers will tell you EXACTLY what they want to hear from you. They’ll tell you in the comments section of your blog, by email, by social media or anywhere else for that matter.

Your audience will ask questions, and when people ask questions, it’s the perfect opportunity for you to be able to create content, and answer that question. Another mistake is trying to be everywhere online too soon. A lot of people think it’s important to be on every single social media platform every single day, but that’s not the case. I have a presence on every platform, but only really use two, Twitter and Facebook, which work best for me.

While some bloggers may frown on outsourcing content creation, what are other areas a virtual assistant can help with?

I’ve never said that you should outsource content creation. I believe that your content is the one thing you cannot, and should not virtually outsource. However, that doesn’t mean that once you’ve created that original piece of content you can’t utilize virtual assistants to help you repurpose it. For example, writing a 1000 word blog post which you can also record as a podcast episode. You could also have a virtual assistant create a SlideShare from certain parts of that blog post, or have them incorporate the post into an ebook which you giveaway on your website.

There’s just so many different areas a virtual assistant can help you on the marketing side of your content. You’re absolutely mad if you think that you can do all the marketing of your content yourself. A virtual assistant can help you produce a marketing plan, and then help you execute it.

Do you have any favorite tools or plugins?

The first one is Dropbox. All my files there are instantly updated, and backed up. It’s a real life saver. I also love Skype for communicating, not only with my virtual assistants, but people I interview for my podcast. As far as plugins, I really love Pretty Link. It’s great particular for sharing stuff on social media. Another plugin I like a lot is the Scrolling Social Sharebar. It scrolls along with the reader as they read content on your site, and it gives them the opportunity to share that content instantly.

Where can people learn more about you, and check out your stuff?

You can go to ChrisDucker.com, and my podcast is The New Business Podcast.

The post Blogging Like a Rockstar with Chris Ducker appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Founded in 2009, Kickstarter is one of the world’s largest crowdfunding sites, with over 51,000 projects successfully funded, and nearly $900 million raised. It, like many other similar sites, has helped thousands of people make ideas or concepts a reality. Our sister site, ForeverGeek, covers exactly what you’d expect: geeky news from Doctor Who to cool gaming setups.

Last week, ForeverGeek launched its Kickstarter store, and here’s the basic idea:

While you may like to get in early and fund projects yourself, there is something to be said about being able to make purchases and receive the goods without waiting for the Kickstarter campaign to end, production to finish, and shipping to commence. That’s why we took it upon ourselves to look at Kickstarter to find cool projects that have been successfully funded and ready to ship their products.

All products in the store share the geeky coat of arms, and are split into eight different categories:

• Art
• Comics & Books
• Film & Video
• Computer & Video Games
• Board & Card Games
• Music
• Technology
• Design & Fashion

Here are just a few cool products currently available…

Puzzlebox Orbit Helicopter

You know those remote-controlled helicopters they sell at mall kiosks? Well, the Puzzlebox Orbit is sort of like that, except you can control it with your mind. No, really.

It’s linked by signals from your mobile device or its own dedicated “Puzzlebox Pyramid” transmitter to Neurosky EEG headset that detects the effects of the electrical impulses of brain activity on your scalp, translating your thoughts directly into commands that steer the Puzzlebox Orbit through the air.

The blades sit inside a sphere, preventing them from being shattered if you happen to bump into something, and it can fly seven to nine minutes on a single charge.

Final Fantasy VI Balance and Ruin (Remix)

The Final Fantasy series feature great soundtracks, and Final Fantasy VI is no exception. OCRemix.org is one of the top sites for video game music, and its users have remixed thousands of tracks over the years. In the fall of 2012, OCRemix launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $30,000 to help fund the production of Balance and Ruin, which spanned five discs. In the end, they raised nearly $153,633, over five times their original goal. The best part about the remix? Thanks to the overwhelming support from fans, all the music is available to download for free!

Super Sesame Street Fighter

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the muppets from Sesame Street started duking it out in the streets? Probably not, but artist/graphic designer Matt Crane felt the need to reimagine the beloved muppets as Street Fighter characters. The end result is pretty fantastic, and not only can you buy posters of each muppet as a character from Street Fighter, but also buy t-shirts, stickers and even iPhone cases.

Matt surpassed his Kickstarter goal of $1000 back in February to bring the characters to life, and here was his inspiration:

When I was a kid I loved Sesame Street. When I became a teen I loved Street Fighter II. Somewhere in my deranged teenage mind I got the idea to combine the two, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, that idea has stuck with me throughout the years.

The post Geek Out with ForeverGeek’s Kickstarter Store appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Google+ Hangouts enable anyone to host a group video chat, and with the On Air component, anyone can record and stream live to their YouTube account. When I first joined Google+ on its second day of existence, Hangouts really stood out. While, let’s be honest, a lot of the functionality of Google’s own social network is similar to Facebook and Twitter, no other social network offers such a robust group video chat tool…for absolutely free.

In the early days, the service had its ups and downs. There would be crashes, performance issues on Macs, and were even some cases of Hangouts On Airs completely failing to record. Yeah, not something you’re happy to find out after having an hour long conversation that’s now in Internet purgatory. However, those days have quickly been left in the dust, and Google+ Hangouts are more robust than ever.

In the past several years, bloggers have really embraced podcasting. With faster broadband connections, including affordable mics and high quality webcams, many have also incorporated video. While you can use a service like Skype to chat with guests, it comes at a price. You have to buy software to record conversations, the connection quality can be hit or miss, and video chat with more than two people requires a paid Premium account.

No Additional Software

With Google+ Hangouts, everything exists inside the browser. This makes it easy for anyone to hop in, and get going. Granted, you need a Google+ account, but if you already have a Gmail or Google Apps account, setup takes no time at all.

Direct Recording To YouTube

There are regular Hangouts, and Hangouts On Air. I’ll let you guess which one allows you to record, and stream live to YouTube. It ties directly to the YouTube account attached to your Google account, and it’s one of the simplest ways to stream and record a group discussion. Hangouts automatically switch to the person that’s currently talking, and apps like Hangout Lower Third allow you to add a nice graphic to the bottom of your video so people can easily see who you are, and what your website is for example. Once your Hangout On Air is over, the recording is sitting right on your YouTube account, ready to be shared or downloaded to edit.

HD Support

Back in August, Google rolled out a new video codec called VP8. Previously H.264, here are the benefits according to Gigaom:

“One of the key advantages of VP8 is that it will enable Hangouts in HD, something that Chew said simply wasn’t possible with H.264, because handling HD streams from 10 participants would have required too much processing power. The new video format also makes it possible for Google to serve up better-looking streams at low bit rates, which is especially important when it comes to mobile video chats.”

HD Hangouts will not work for everyone, and here are the requirements:

• An HD 720p capable camera
• A CPU with at least four logical cores (for example an i5 with HyperThreading)
• A network connection with at least a 1.2 Mbps upload speed (1.5 Mbps recommended)
• To set your bandwidth setting to Auto HD.

Of course, you don’t have to stream in HD, and if someone else is in the Hangout it won’t affect you. Eventually, Google+ Hangouts will allow you to switch which YouTube account to stream/record to, and you’ll be able to stream privately versus publicly, but for now, it has a lot to offer podcasters.

The post How Google+ Hangouts Can Enhance Podcasts appeared first on The Blog Herald.

John Pettitt is the founder and CEO of Repost, a content syndication platform that allows you to easily republish content without it losing attribution, advertising and more. A veteran of the tech space, John has successfully lead two companies into an IPO, including CyberSource which was acquired by Visa for $2 billion.

What makes Repost a great tool for content creators?

Repost means you don’t have to create all the content yourself, and your original content can serve you beyond your own site generating audience and revenue. There is a very clear relationship between posting more and getting more traffic. In fact, traffic scales pretty linearly with the number of posts you make. Repost gives you a way of adding more content easily and quickly. Some examples – a hyperlocal site could add movie reviews from Fandango or a news site could add analysis from the Christian Science Monitor or The Economist. Sports sites can add national coverage from Fox Sports, SB Nation, FanIQ, and Bloomberg Sports.

On the outbound side, the best ad for your content is your content. Every time somebody embeds one of your articles it generates ad revenue, traffic, and brand exposure. Readers of embedded articles are 95%+ new to that publisher’s content. Where else can you get that exposure and great CTR’s with an asset you’ve already paid for?

One issue that people may have with reposting content is the issue of duplicate content, and its potential effect on SEO. How does Repost combat this, and what have your findings been so far across thousands of publishers?

We’ve not had any reports from publishers of negative SEO related to Repost, and we don’t expect to. When we designed Repost, we intentionally constructed the embed code so that it contains the title of the article linked back to the original as an inbound, “do follow” link.

However, the embed doesn’t contain the full article text; that’s loaded by our script in an iframe. Right now the search engines are not running our script so they don’t even see full content. If and when they do run our script, they will find the iframe has both a meta “no-index” and a canonical header to ensure that the content is not seen a duplicative.

Today, most online publishers make their money through advertising. Do you see that model staying the same, or will it evolve? If so, how do you see it evolving?

That’s a hard one to answer. Display advertising is still king, and we’re seeing publishers with strong RP/M’s from display where they have a good audience demographic. We’re watching closely the “native” ad space, our technology is ideally suited to delivering native ads and content marketing. Because our embeds reformat automatically, update in real time, and allow publishers/marketers to attach their own analytics tags, it opens up some opportunities for real creativity.

We’re also seeing a lot of publishers embracing or at least flirting with paywalls and subscriptions. The thing about paywalls is that the best ad for your content is your content, but when you wall it off, you lose that benefit. We have a few paywalled publications in the Repost system who are selectively syndicating content to drive audience acquisition. We regularly see 5% CTR from embedded articles back to the originating site, and one publisher averaged 11% over a three month period.

You’ve been involved in a lot of major technology companies, including BitTorrent and CyberSource which was acquired by Visa for $2 billion. What technologies are you keeping an eye on? What’s “the next big thing” in your opinion?

The next big thing? Well that’s the 64-billion-dollar question: look to science fiction for ideas. Seriously, pretty much every blockbuster product has appeared in science fiction way before the technology allowed its actual creation: computers you can talk to, tablets, and ubiquitous mobile communication using smart, location aware, devices. Wearable looks interesting although I’m skeptical about Google Glass. I suspect (showing my age) it’s the Lisa or Alto of wearable computing.

Great startups do one of two things: they solve a problem you didn’t know you had, or they solve an old problem in a radically new way. Closer to home, and not so much about technology per se as the social issues surrounding technology, I’m a pretty active supporter of EFF (the Electronic Frontier Foundation). I’m on their fundraising advisory board, and my foundation is a regular donor. They do amazing work protecting all our online rights and deserve way more recognition and funding than they get.

Where can people learn more about you?

You can find more about Repost at http://www.repost.us/, and I blog about technology and security on my personal site at http://p.tt/. My professional bio is on Linkedin at http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpettitt/.

The post The Power of Repost with Founder and CEO John Pettitt appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Spam may be a delicious treat depending on who you ask, but in its digital form by way of your WordPress blog, not so much. No matter what you do, spammers will find your blog. Granted, you can easily blacklist IP addresses, but that doesn’t always keep them from coming back. When most people think of a spammer, they think of some person sitting behind a keyboard. However, with the power of software and sophisticated systems, many spammers are actually scripts or bots that automate the work which used to be done manually.

Akismet

Akismet needs no introduction. Included in every WordPress install, it is the original comment spam blocker. According to its website, Akismet has blocked nearly 100 billion comments. Free for personal use, there are several paid plans to choose from, starting as low as $5 per month for businesses. For many bloggers, Akismet gets the job done, but it offers very basic functionality.

Antispam Bee

While the plugin page is in German, don’t let that deter you from checking it out. Antispam Bee currently has a rating of 4.4 stars out of 5, and offers more functionality than what you get with Akismet. Here are some of its features:

• Stricter inspection for comments and pings.
• Consider comments which are already marked as spam.
• Do not check if the comment author has already approved.
• Do not check trackbacks / pingbacks.
• Block comments and pings from specific countries.
• Allow comments only in a certain language.
• Search comment spammers in Project Honey Pot, the web’s largest community tracking online fraud and abuse.

Like any WordPress plugin, Antispam Bee is not perfect. Some users like Kim Castleberry found it to be overly aggressive, so your experience may vary.

NoSpamNX

Although captcha codes and other tactics are used to combat spammers, it’s good to get a little creative. NoSpamNX combats automated spambots by adding invisible formfields to your comment form, essentially tricking them.

From the plugin page:

NoSpamNX automatically adds additional formfields to your comment form, invisible to human users. If a spambot fills these fields blindly (which most of all spambots do), the comment will not be saved. You can decide if you want to block these spambots or mark them as spam. Furthermore, you can put common spam-phrases on a local Blacklist or (if you have multiple Blogs) on a global Blacklist. This comes very handy when fighting against “handmade” Spam.

Simple Trackback Validation with Topsy Blocker

Trackback spam can be just as widespread as comment spam, and on my personal blog, I see it multiple times on a daily basis. This plugin is a replacement of the original Simple Trackback Validation plugin, and works like a charm. However, it does seem to be pretty aggressive as I’ve often found it blocking my own trackbacks. In my opinion though, it’s a small price to pay.

Livefyre

Wait…isn’t Livefyre a commenting system? Why yes, it absolutely is, and you go about installing it just like you would any other WordPress plugins. It deserves an honorable mention not because of its ability to load in real-time and solid social media integration, but what goes on behind the scenes. Livefyre has spam protection built-in, which also includes a real-time profanity filter. Your readers can also flag comments as spam if they happen to slip through, or flag as offensive if it happens to be inappropriate.

Photo credit: a.cantu

The post Top 5 WordPress Plugins to Kill Spam appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Google Authorship made its first appearance in June 2011, and allows writers or bloggers to “connect” with their content across the web. Any webpage that has the proper Authorship markup will display basic info from your public Google+ profile, including your photo. Now, before you start worrying, the good news is you don’t have to be active on Google+ in order to take advantage of this feature. It’s a great social network, but definitely not necessary. All you need is a properly filled out profile, and you’re ready to rock.

Despite being available for over two years, there are still many who have yet to add the necessary code to their website or websites. Is it because setting it all up is too difficult? If that’s the case, we’ll be diving into a method which requires zero coding at all. If it’s because many still don’t know about it, that could definitely be the case, too. Earlier this month, Jeff Bullas published a post by Joana Ferreira titled, “Why Aren’t More Bloggers Claiming Ownership of Their Content?”

While Joana arrived at similar conclusions as the one’s mentioned above, she shared results from many different search queries, the first of which related to search marketing:

I started by searching for search marketing related queries such as “tips for improving traffic to your site” or “on site optimisation best practice”. I knew full well that most of the results would lead to blog articles written by “industry experts”. You can clearly see that results varied but the ones at the bottom of the scale were definitely surprising.

• Only 10% of results for “online advertising how to” had claimed authorship.
• 32% of results were for blog articles with a clear author.
• On the other end of the scale “Recovering from a Google penalty” resulted in 46% of results with claimed authorship (which seemed amazing to me).
• 86% of the results shown in the SERP were blog articles so, actually the numbers weren’t that great.

Although the numbers were actually much higher than initially expected, I wasn’t blown away. Actually, the further in I delved the more I started to notice a repetition in the profiles that were showing up. I kept seeing the same profile photos again and again. Do we really only have a handful of “industry experts” in this field?

Search is not going anywhere anytime soon, and Google Authorship has one serious benefit if you write online: Instant credibility. Previously, when you were looking for a certain website or webpage, you were presented with the title, URL and brief description. While that was okay, now you can see the actual person behind an article or webpage, complete with who they are and a photo of them that is hopefully not of their pet or child.

This helps others to better trust a result, and according to a study published by Catalyst Search Marketing, increased click-throughs by over 150 percent. So that brings us to actually setting up Google Authorship. You can always embed a little snippet of code using this method, or you can take advantage of a feature built into one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. WordPress SEO by Yoast helps you to better optimize your blog and its posts, but can also help you easily setup Authorship.

First, you need to make sure your Google+ profile URL has been added to your user profile. Once logged into your WordPress dashboard, scroll over top “Users” and then click “Your Profile.” Where it says Google+, enter your profile URL and click “Update Profile” at the very bottom. Once you have downloaded and activated WordPress SEO by Yoast, scroll over “SEO” right below “Settings,” and select “Social.” Click on the Google+ tab, and where it says “Author for homepage,” select the appropriate profile from the drop-down menu. Hit “Save Settings” once you’re finished, and you have successfully setup Google Authorship!

The post The Big Benefit of Google Authorship and How to Setup in Seconds appeared first on The Blog Herald.

WordPress powers millions of blogs, and is used in a wide variety of situations. Thanks to its flexibility, many companies use it in place of a traditionally designed website, and with the many themes and plugins available, you can do some pretty cool stuff with multimedia. If you’ve been on the interwebs for any length of time, you’re familiar with the sales page. Usually it starts out with bold, bright text, and is followed by pages of why you need to buy XYZ product or service.

For the average blogger, if you’re trying to sell your own product or service, having a dedicated sales page may be a bit overkill. In fact, there are many sales pages that are just whipped up on a new page. However, if you’d like a bit more control with something, there is an easy way to create a WordPress-powered sales page. As with any self-hosted blog, you’ll need to pay for hosting, but the theme mentioned in this post is free. Created by Syamsul Alam, it installs just like any other theme. First, you’ll need to go here, and click the download link at the very top. I’ve inspected the code, and nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary.

The only thing that might need fixing is the text for the 404 page. Depending on your audience, saying “Sorry dude” may not be the best way of putting it :-) Once you’ve downloaded the theme, upload it to your themes folder on the appropriate WordPress install. Then, go to “Appearance,” “Themes,” and you should now see “Paper Sales Page Theme.” Click “Activate” and you’re ready to go. Your site, having not been customized yet, will look like this:

Now, we begin work on the actual sales page. With this theme, you don’t have to write it among all sorts of code, but write it under a new page. The title of your page will serve as the SEO title, and the body will serve as the actual sales page. Any text (headlines) wrapped in an h1 title tag will appear bold red. Here’s a quick example I whipped up:

Not half bad huh? The possibilities are endless, and it’s especially an easy way to create a sales page without needing to know how to code. Once your sales page is ready to go live, hit “Publish” and we now need to make sure it actually shows up. To do this, on the left-hand sidebar, click on “Settings” and then “Reading.” For the sales page to display on your homepage, you have to display a static page. Where it says “Front page displays,” check the box next to “A static page” and from the drop-down menu, pick the page you just created. Once you’re finished, don’t forget to click “Save changes” at the bottom.

If you recall, there are still links at the bottom of the sales page that may or may not be necessary depending on your situation. There’s also an area to enter your name, company name, and so on. To edit this area, go back to “Appearance,” but this time click “Editor.” On the right-hand side under “Templates” you want to click on “Footer”. You can now change all the links or text, and insert more appropriate company details. Also worth mentioning, it probably wouldn’t hurt to make the copyright date more modern.

This is a simple, free way to create a WordPress-powered sales page, but if you want far more customization, and even more uses, it may be worth investing in a product like OptimizePress.

Photo credit: acjetter

The post How to Easily Create a WordPress-Powered Sales Page appeared first on The Blog Herald.

WordPress plugins come in all different shapes, and sizes. Whether you need to rotate ads or better protect your blog from hackers, there is something for everyone. SEO still has a stranglehold on every website hoping to get in front of the right people, and algorithms are constantly changing. While the algorithms may be outside of your control, making sure your blog can rank well is not.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

This is by far one of the top WordPress plugins for SEO, and currently has a rating of 4.7 stars. Primarily, it’s used to optimize your posts, ensuring you are ranking well for a specific keyword. However, it can also be used to override the title, description, etc. of your site. Whenever you go to write a new post, you will see a box directly below it. There, you can see a preview of how your post will appear in search engines, add a focus keyword, SEO title and meta description.

It’s very straightforward, and once you are finished with a post and ready to save it as a draft, if you get a green button, that lets you know it’s ready to rock. If you don’t, clicking on “Page Analysis” will give you more insight as to what you should do.

All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is very similar to WordPress SEO by Yoast, and the name really speaks for itself. While it offers the ability to optimize your posts, you can also optimize SEO for your homepage, choose how you want to handle keywords and customize titles. One feature that’s nice about All in One is its website verification, making it super easy for anyone to verify they own a site without having to add code manually elsewhere. Also, you can add your Google+ profile URL under “Google Settings” to quickly setup Google Authorship.

SEO Plugin by Squirrly

While either of the previous two WordPress plugins can get the job done, Squirrly helps to better guide users throughout the process. If SEO isn’t your strong suite, it’s well worth checking out. It’s mostly geared towards optimizing your posts, but from the plugin page, you can also make basic changes, change your website icon (favicon) and setup Google Authorship.

Similar to WordPress SEO by Yoast, green means great, and the Squirrly LIVE Assistant will let you know if something needs worked. One feature I really like is that you can easily add/quote content from other websites or Twitter.

Google XML Sitemaps

When search engines crawl your website, there can be hundreds, even thousands of pages they have to sift through. An XML sitemap is very important because it lists all of your site URLs, and provides such details as when a page was last updated. This is valuable information to search engines, and it’s just easier to index your site when a sitemap exists. It’s worth mentioning that if you use WordPress SEO by Yoast, this plugin isn’t necessary.

W3 Total Cache

You may be asking yourself why this made the list of top WordPress plugins for SEO. Back in April 2010, Google announced it would now be factoring in site speed. The relevancy of content is still top priority, but it basically sent out the message that if your site is slow, it could hurt your rankings. There does seem to be a debate of if speed really has that big of an impact, and this independent study published on Moz claims “there is no correlation between “page load time” and ranking on Google’s search results page.”

While that may or may not be the case, from a user perspective, speed definitely has a huge impact. In 2009, Akamai found that 47 percent of people expect a page to load in two seconds or less, and 40 percent will abandon a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. With faster computers today, and smartphones on the same level as PCs, I’m kinda scared to know what those percentages are today.

W3 Total Cache essentially caches your pages, serving the cached version every time a visitor lands on your blog, instead of generating a new page which requires more resources. It’s pretty straightforward, and for many blogs, can offer serious speed improvements.

Are there any other WordPress plugins you would add?

Photo credit: Danny Sullivan

The post Top 5 WordPress Plugins for SEO appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Creating great videos may not be easy, but Amy Schmittauer makes it look easy. President of Vlog Boss Studios, an agency specializing in video content marketing, Amy has also created a following on YouTube where she talks about social media, marketing and more.

What advice would you to give to someone starting video, and getting over the fear of being on camera?

It’s so much easier to talk to people directly right? Stop thinking about the lens, and start thinking about your audience. Picture one person that you would be sharing this information with, and speak to them. It’s a completely different feeling when you have the mindset that you’re helping someone with your content versus just being another recording on the Internet.

Your videos on Savvy Sexy Social are very entertaining. How do you keep people’s attention in an age when attention spans are spread so thin?

I inject a lot of personality in my videos. That’s the best way to start. If you think you can grow in this medium by being just another talking head, you have another thing coming. So people know exactly what I’m like in the real world because I’m not putting up a rouse for my videos. I also pay a lot of attention to my analytics, and my audience retention. Anything I can do to keep my video flowing quickly with non-stop information, and entertainment so they are only watching as long as they need to, increases my ability to build a relationship with them. You’ll rarely hear a pause or an “umm” because I do a lot of cutting, so we’re constantly going from point to point. There is no downtime in my videos.

What planning, and structure goes into your videos? Are there some best practices to follow?

The best thing I did to get to a place where regular videos were not difficult for me to justify, and execute, was to come up with a theme for each new video. Savvy Tuesday, Sexy Wednesday and Social Thursday. This helped me incorporate the blog name, define my schedule that my audience can depend on and give me some direction for the kind of video I should do on each of those days. We always want to say we don’t know what to blog about but by having my own outline of what “savvy”, “sexy” and “social” means it helps me narrow down the topic that I can approach for those particular videos each week. The more you can structure your approach, the less likely you’ll get writers block to get the content created.

While I don’t believe anyone HAS to do video, I think it can be particularly useful for bloggers to break up the monotony. What do you feel is so appealing about video? After all, YouTube has over one billion monthly unique visitors.

That’s exactly it. The audience on YouTube is enormous, and more loyal than anyone I’ve ever encountered in the digital content creation world. People want to see HOW to do something. They want to witness it with their own eyes. So if something isn’t being “Googled,” it’s being “YouTubed”. Actually, the YouTube results show up in Google, and that’s an amazing way to optimize the content.

You don’t have to create video, but you don’t have to do anything else you’re not going to do well, either. You have to have the patience, and the formula to make it work for you.

Out of all the mistakes people make when creating videos, can you maybe name the top five?

1. Mistaking authenticity for an unedited video. You may think rambling on for as long as you want and posting as is is the best way to show your true personality, but you’re losing people from the very distracting Internet.
2. Really long intros/theme songs. The longer you take to get to the content, the more likely no one is watching long enough to get to it.
3. Waiting too long to post from being too critical of your first videos. If you’re new to vlogging, you may not love the first ones you post, but it’s the only way to get better. Do some practice runs, and then commit to it. The best way to not be embarrassed by old videos is to post new, and better ones to push them into your archives.
4. Loud music throughout the video. It’s not background music if I can’t hear what you’re saying. This takes some practice. I had to work on this as well.
5. Not taking advantage of all the tools that YouTube has to offer that will optimize your presence. Change isn’t always bad. If not for the new features like In Video Programming, Associated Website Annotations and Playlists, I wouldn’t have the regular growth of my channel that I do today, and I definitely wouldn’t have as many conversions to the most important call-to-action: getting YouTube viewers to go to my website. As of this year, YouTube is the #1 referral source to SavvySexySocial.com because of these features, beating both Facebook and Twitter.

Where can people learn more about you, and check out your stuff?

Visit SavvySexySocial.com for all of my content. I make videos regularly as stated above, but I also do the occasional written post and podcast. I also love to tweet: @Schmittastic is my personal account, and @SavvySexySocial is where you can follow along with the blog updates.

The post Creating Killer Videos with Amy Schmittauer appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Despite what some people say, email is far from dead. Although social media has become an incredibly popular way for us to communicate, use of email is still growing. According to The Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, as of April 2013 there are 3.9 billion active email accounts, with 182.9 billion emails sent and received each day. Email subscription tools help keep us updated with our favorite companies or blogs, and chances are your readers would like the option to subscribe via email.

Recently, avid reader Andrew Kayode got in touch with us, and had this to say:

Why is it that you don’t have a subscriber’s list via e-mail? Please I need to be included if you have one.

While our RSS feed is linked at the bottom of every post, the ability to subscribe via email is not. However, thanks to FeedBurner, one of the first email subscription tools we will be getting into, the ability to subscribe via email has been here all along. Oops.

Click here to get the latest posts delivered straight to your inbox! (opens in new tab)

FeedBurner

This free RSS tool has been around since 2004, and was acquired by Google in 2007. While rumors of shutting down have circulated quite a bit in the past few years, it’s still ticking. FeedBurner is still used by thousands of popular blogs, and when you add your blog, it also gives you the ability to let readers subscribe via email. Under “Publicize,” “Email Subscriptions,” and then “Email Branding,” you can easily customize how new email will appear.

When you make changes, you can get a preview of how emails will appear. Despite the customization being very basic, it gets the job done. Once you are satisfied with the changes, you can grab the HTML code to embed an email subscription form on your blog.

Follow Blog Widget

This widget is geared specifically for WordPress.com users, those who don’t have a self-hosted WordPress blog. It can be found under “Appearance” and “Widgets,” and offers the ability to customize what text will appear for WordPress.com users, and those who are not signed in.

People who don’t use WordPress.com or are not logged in, will simply see an email subscription form, and those who are signed in will see a button with whatever text you used under “Follow Button Text.” It’s a quick and easy way to add email subscription to your WordPress.com blog, plus there is no need to work with any HTML code.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of many paid email subscription tools out there, but did you know they also offer a free account? The free account allows up to 2,000 subscribers, and a total of 12,000 sent emails each month. For example, if you had 1200 subscribers, that means you could send out 10 emails to all subscribers every month. Getting started with MailChimp could be a post in of itself, but here is the official resource page to get you up to speed.

Now, you could manually send out an email every time a new blog post is up, but the RSS-to-Email feature helps you automatically send out beautiful emails whenever a new post is published. There is a bit of a learning curve with getting everything setup, but MailChimp is a rock solid solution that gives you far more customization than FeedBurner for example. And if you ever go beyond 2000 subscribers, the monthly plans are very affordable.

Blogtrottr

Unlike the other email subscription tools, Blogtrottr does not offer the ability to add an email subscription form to your site. Instead, it’s geared towards readers who want to get email updates from a site, but the option is not there. All you have to do is enter the URL of the site, your email address, and the frequency to send emails. Blogtrottr offers a free ad-supported version with unlimited subscriptions, but if you want to remove ads, plus get more customization options, its €4.00 ($5.41) per month plan includes up to 250 subscriptions, and €7.00 ($9.47) per month plan includes unlimited subscriptions.

The post 4 Free Email Subscription Tools to Keep Readers in the Loop appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Called the Chuck Norris of branding, John Morgan has worked with Fortune 500 companies, celebrities, and entrepreneurs. Also an author, John’s book Brand Against The Machine currently has 4.8 out of 5 stars on Amazon.

A lot of people see a brand as a logo or design, but it’s actually more than that. What is, and what makes up a brand?

A brand is certainly not a logo or color scheme or marketing campaign. It is people’s perception of you. It represents the level of trust people have with your company. What makes up a brand is quite simply, everything. Everything you do is branding. Your attitude, clothes, service, systems, and so on, all make up your brand. That’s why so many businesses fail to build a lasting brand. They believe that their brand is based on the product, or the logo. They forget the little things. Every great brand is made of tiny little things they do well.

I’m sure there are some people reading this who never seriously considered what their brand exactly was. How do you come up with a brand? Where do you even begin?

Everyone already has a brand because everyone you’ve met has a perception of you. You might not have considered how you’re positioned in the marketplace, but it’s not too late. I recommend beginning by focusing on what you do that your competition doesn’t. It’s an instant way to stand out. In addition to that, give your brand room to breathe and grow over time. Apple was once defined as a computer company, yet today their brand is perceived differently than that.

When you visit someone’s website or social media profiles, what are some of the most common branding mistakes?

The biggest mistakes I see is that it’s confusing. They don’t let the visitor know that they found what they’re looking for. I think great marketing pulls the right people in and pushes the wrong people away. Most websites, social media profiles, etc do a poor job of explaining what to expect. If you can’t clearly articulate your brand’s message, don’t expect anyone else to be able to.

In your book Brand Against The Machine, you mention that content alone is not enough, and you must make yourself visible online. With social media, and millions of others competing for attention, how do you break through the noise?

First decide why you want to break through the noise. There’s a lot of money to be made by focusing on the smaller pockets of people who are in need of your product/service. Like you mentioned, content alone isn’t enough. You must think like a marketer. If you don’t promote your content then there’s no point to it. Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’re coming. This isn’t the Field Of Dreams.

Why do you think Miley Cyrus is such a better musician than Jack White?

Stop it. I hope you had tears in your eyes as you typed that.

Where can people learn more about you, and check out your stuff?

People can find me at http://www.JohnMichaelMorgan.com, and also shout at me @JohnMorgan.

The post Branding Like a Boss with John Morgan appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Kicking off a new blog can be exciting, and that alone can help you stay motivated. You have these ideas, you get to work creating the site, designing it and creating content. However, that excitement can get the best of us, and things come crashing down when you are not seeing the results you had hoped for. We all have certain expectations, and we all want to see massive success from whatever project we are working on. In the blogging world though, success is far from an overnight process. In fact, it’s more of a work-till-your-hands-bleed kind of process, requiring hundreds, even thousands of hours.

Several times I can easily recall just wanting to give up. I had put together what I felt to be a great blog, and written many what I felt to be great posts. Unfortunately, traffic was far from great, and it seemed like I had created yet another blog to get pushed aside from all the noise coming at every which direction. If you are trying to get a blog off the ground, or have but are struggling to stay motivated, here are several tips:

Have A Plan

The majority of problems stem from improper planning, or lack thereof. If you don’t know where you are going, how can you expect to get there? (Tweet This) Naturally, I’m a big procrastinator, and when it comes to putting a plan together, I want to gravitate towards flying by the seat of my pants. “Things will work themselves out” or “You can work on that tomorrow” are common thoughts that pop in my head. However, the lack of a plan is one of the quickest paths to failure.

You need to have a serious, legitimate plan to guide yourself along the way. You don’t want to be crazy unrealistic, but you also don’t want average, ordinary objectives either. That will just bore you, and it will be harder to stay motivated. Also, a plan will help you to stay focused, and focus is important for a couple good reasons.

Number one, you are able to get work done on what matters most. Second, your mind will not wander as much. I find that on days when I’m not following the plan, whatever that may be, my mind is more all over the place, and anything negative is amplified. Focus helps to distract me from the things that don’t really matter, and I’m able to put more of myself into my work.

Attack The Plan

Simply put, attack the plan, and do it every single day. Your plan may change from day to day, but that’s a good thing. Consistency helps to keep up momentum, and it also helps prevent you from falling off the wagon. In a way, it’s kind of like exercise. If you convince yourself to skip going to the gym, it’s going to be even easier to skip the next time. Soon enough, you’ve put on five extra pounds, are eating your feelings and haven’t been to the gym in three weeks.

Get Inspired

It’s so easy to look at, and dwell on the negative. Despite them appearing to be all rainbows and unicorns, even the greatest bloggers deal with some sort of disappointment. There are tons of great articles and people out there who can help you stay motivated, and inspired. Ever read a post that made you say “WOW!” before? Of course you have. Spend more time exploring content and listening to people that are inspiring, not tiring.

Photo credit: Luis Sarabia

The post How to Stay Motivated While Getting Your Blog Off the Ground appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Your average commenting system has evolved quite a bit over the years, but sadly many blogs are still stuck in the dark ages. While blog comments aren’t a measure of success, that doesn’t mean you should not encourage them. Platforms like WordPress come with commenting ready to rock, and you are probably very familiar with the setup. Someone enters their name, email, website address and then says whatever they want to say. Depending on your theme, the comment form can be designed differently, but the functionality still remains the same.

Using the built-in commenting system is totally fine, and tends to get the job done. However, I feel you can do better with a more advanced setup like Livefyre or Disqus, and here’s why:

Good Lookin’

This can be chopped up to a matter of personal opinion, but the reality is that many basic comment forms are not lookers. Functionality is of utmost importance, but design should also be considered. To be honest, I am not a fan of the commenting system currently in place here on Blog Herald, but hey, that’s not my call. Setups from Livefyre or Disqus are very clean and simple, and they automatically adjust to the fonts or colors of your blog.

Multiple Login Options

Now, not everyone is a fan of having to login in order to comment. It can be a serious annoyance, and potentially lose you many comments. However, social login is growing with 52 percent of users preferring Facebook. Instead of filling out some details, in a couple clicks you can be ready to comment, and some people enjoy that. And if you don’t, you can still comment the old fashioned way.

Comments Load In Real-Time

One downside of a traditional commenting system is that when someone leaves a comment, you have to refresh the page in order to see it. With Disqus and especially Livefyre, comments appear on the screen as they are posted. This gives your comment section more of a live chat feel, and can boost interaction.

Social Media Integration

Social networks have benefited blogs in a number of ways, the biggest being a great way to share your content, helping it to be seen. In October 2011, Livefyre rolled out “SocialSync” which automatically pulls in public posts from Twitter and Facebook around a specific blog post. People can also tag others from Facebook or Twitter within comments which will then let that person know they were mentioned, helping to drive more people to your post.

Built-In Spam Protection

Akismet is every WordPress user’s best friend, and can help keep spammers from overloading your posts. Both Disqus and Livefyre have spam protection built-in, and from my experience, does a pretty good job. Anything suspicious is simply added to your spam folder, and if a comment requires moderation, you can view it under the Comments dashboard.

Rich Text

Customization can be a good thing, and Livefyre allows commenters to bold, italicize or underline text, and also list bullet points. It’s a great way of breaking up the monotony that typically comes with blog comments, and helps readers to better get their points across. Time and time again, it’s been shown that we tend to skim over content, and are gravitated towards bold text or headings. While the rich text feature could definitely be overused, I think it’s a great addition.

What commenting system do you use and prefer?

The post Six Reasons to Upgrade Your Commenting System appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Chris Reimer is a longtime Twitter evangelist, and when not posting far more than 140 characters, he’s got his game face on as VP of Social Media at Falk Harrison.

Why is Twitter a great platform, and how is it different from other social networks?

Twitter is brilliant. It allows for direct, one-on-one engagement and outreach to anyone on Earth (who uses Twitter). Humans love to communicate, and want to be heard. There are countless case studies of people using Twitter to move mountains – to launch products, to gain exposure via someone famous, to sell products, to reconnect with old friends, to build something out of nothing with no ad budget whatsoever!

This is a dumb example, but I was watching Piers Morgan interview Kyra Sedgwick. I can’t remember what they talked about, but it was a great discussion. I was able to tweet “Hey @kyrasedgwick, I really enjoyed your interview on @piersmorgan.” In this case neither responded, and yet I still was very pleased to be able to say this to them. I don’t know why – it’s just how we as humans roll. I hope to be a guest on Piers’ show some day (seriously, why not). Could it help even a little bit that I tweeted him about his Kyra Sedgwick interview? I don’t know, and herein lies the problem for people.

They want PROOF that something’s going to work. Sorry, social media just doesn’t work that way. I am perfectly comfortable tweeting with Piers Morgan, Jon Stewart, anchors from Al Jazeera America, and countless others because one of these days something will shake loose. See how that works? I have no proof. I just keep on talking with people. Seriously, I am going to appear on Al Jazeera America soon (I hope). What is the ROI of that? How would I even calculate this? Who cares, you know?

ESPN is currently publishing their annual ranking of the top 500 basketball players in the NBA. Here’s their first reveal: 401 through 500. Look at how many of the players have Twitter accounts! Perhaps more importantly, note the decision by ESPN to include the Twitter names of these players. They’re not linking to their Facebook fan pages or a Google Plus page. They’re sending ESPN.com readers off to these players’ Twitter accounts. Watch a sporting event – as the announcers introduce the game, their Twitter usernames are often down below their names. Live TV events put a static footer on the screen with a hashtag. All Twitter, all the time.

Ask yourself: if Facebook has so many more users, why would all of these outlets focus on Twitter instead? If it’s the stupid social media platform that no one understands (you’ve heard, “I just don’t get Twitter.”) or cares about, why are really smart people including Twitter as part of their strategy? The answer is because Twitter has built a brilliantly easy service to use, and as far as electronic communication goes, it’s a superior tool. Finally, the people that use it are passionate about other people, and passionate about what they believe. I think they more often tend to be glass-is-half-full kind of people. Frankly, that’s another great reason to be on Twitter. If you’re passionate about something, Twitter is full of similarly passionate people.

For the most part, we’ve gotten past the stereotypical days of people tweeting about what they ate, but there still is some skepticism. Was there a turning point for you when you realized that Twitter wasn’t “just another social network?”

Please, do continue tweeting what you ate. That was and is the most dumb complaint about Twitter, and in my opinion, the complainers are afraid of something. Of what, I don’t know – we’d have to ask them. Maybe they’re afraid of real relationships online. Maybe they’re afraid everyone will discover they’re a fraud (Seth Godin reminds us of this deep-seated fear we all have) – exposed as the uninteresting people that they are? “Too busy” to bother with communicating with strangers online? It’s hard to say.

“Why would I wanna know what someone’s eating for lunch? Twitter’s so stupid.” Meanwhile, you get to work and go waste 30 minutes by the proverbial watercooler, talking about last night’s Breaking Bad episode and the great sushi place you just tried. Equally inane banter! However, in this case, Twitter is judged by a different standard. That’s so silly. You most definitely want to know what I’m eating – plus, I provide pictures!

I joined Twitter on November 5, 2008. My t-shirt website, Rizzo Tees, had debuted five days prior, and I was kind of freaking out. How was I going to get the word out about my fledgling business? Seems silly to ask today – social media, Kickstarter, videos made with inexpensive DSLRs, etc etc. Back then, it was a bit of a mystery to me. I thought I was going to drop a bomb on the t-shirt world with my designs, and all of my strategically-placed banner ads. Yeah, not so much. I had heard of Twitter, and decided to give it a try.

Somehow, some way, my first tweets were NOT “buy my product, buy my product, did you hear about my t-shirts?” I’m actually proud of that. I suppose the turning point you asked about was when I received a t-shirt order from someone I had made friends with on Twitter. I was like, “WHOA,” and then thought, “Oh, yeah, that’s supposed to happen!” When those orders started coming in via Twitter, I thought, “This is changing the world.”

Anyone can tweet out their latest blog post, but what do you think separates the crème de la crème from your average person?

People that care about you and not just their share of your wallet. Everyone is not a “mark,” waiting to be profited from.

Out of all the mistakes you see, what are maybe the top five?

#1: Tweeting from the wrong account. This is such an easy mistake to make. I’m talking about social media community managers sending tweets from the corporate account they’re managing instead of their personal one. Like Kitchen-Aid talking about Obama’s dead grandmother, or Chrysler lamenting the lack of driving skills of Detroit citizens [WARNING: graphic language].

I preach the Five Second Rule. Yes, that’s all the time we have! But it’s better than nothing. Construct a tweet, and then just look at it for five seconds. Check spelling – make sure iPhone didn’t autocorrect some word into something horribly embarrassing. Make sure you’re in the right Twitter account. Be really careful.

#2: Pretty obvious one, but being too salesy. Readers of the great Mike Stenger, ask yourself: Who boots up their social media accounts in the morning in order to be marketed to? Anyone? Does anyone do that? Short of maybe drooling over a Groupon … No! No one does that. So why do marketers act like they do? They talk about their products constantly. Sometimes, that’s all they talk about. I call it “brute force marketing.” Just bring the avalanche and turn that same old predictable conversion rate. No, we can do better than that. Broken record alert: consumers buy from those they like, know and trust. Use social media to tell stories, to take people into your manufacturing and R&D process, to connect with those that have problems to solve, to explain “why” you do what you do. That’s how you get people to like you, to know who you are, and eventually to trust you as THE problem solver in the industry. That’s who I buy from, anyway.

#3: Quitting. Once you start using Twitter, don’t quit! You’ve heard it, I’ve heard it. “I just don’t get Twitter.” Well, here’s the thing. It’s just a big group of awesome people – talking, sharing, learning, laughing, lamenting, inspiring, and yes, marketing. All of those things make sense to me. So people don’t get Twitter, and they quit. Two things: one, it is quite possible that you’re just sitting at the wrong table. It’s like being at a party. People over here are talking about their sailboats and boarding schools, and you’re like, “Whoa, wrong party.” Nope, turns out your good friends are just over on the other side of the room. Walk over there instead. Change your scenery and change your enjoyment of the party.

Same with Twitter. Your experience will largely be a product of who you’re following. If you aren’t following an appropriate group of people, what can you expect to get out of the experience? Two, and I don’t mean to be rude, but I think “not getting” Twitter often says something more about the person than the service. I have talked to potential clients about social media, and they’ve said, “I just don’t care what other people think.” Well, EXACTLY.

#4: Treating so-called “social media influencers” as your “jumper cables” – blunt instruments ready to be wielded at a moment’s notice. Without a pretty strong relationship, I think it is ill-advised to start trying to tap other people’s networks. It’s just spammy and icky. Related to this, it is grossly inaccurate to think that a few tweets from even the most famous online influencers are really going to rock your product’s boat. Mark Schaefer talks about this in his book “Return on Influence.” Mentions from even famous people often have zero effect on a product or societal movement.

#5: Tweeting stuff like, “Hey, have you subscribed to our email newsletter yet?” I most certainly did not, and I’m thinking about starting an email newsletter whose sole purpose is to get people to unsubscribe from your email newsletter. You might as well stand naked on a street corner wearing a sandwich board. People can smell desperation – don’t smell like that. And do not clog the arteries of Twitter with such exhortations! Give me value, not a guilt trip because I don’t want to receive your email newsletter.

I think Twitter lists are highly underrated, and there’s a lot of creative ways you can use them. Is there an aspect or feature of Twitter that you feel the same way about?

YES to Lists! Twitter lists are massively underrated. I use my lists everyday, including the lists “The Brotherhood” for good friends, and “fait attention” (“pay attention” in French) for people I learn from. This is how I distill the noise down into a list of tweets I can read and respond to. I follow 17,000 people, and don’t really have time to work on culling it down. People don’t realize that you can put people on a list, and therefore follow along with their comings and goings, without following them. You don’t have to follow people to have them in a list. You can also make lists private. So, you can set up a list of your ten most hated competitors and follow along WITHOUT following them, and WITHOUT them knowing that you put them in a list. And no one can look at your list except you. Pretty cool corporate intelligence tool, if you ask me.

Ultimately, Twitter is about making connections you probably would not have otherwise made. THAT is what enhances life. I would never have had the chance to get to know Julio Varela without Twitter. We’ve been Twitter friends since the beginning. He’s from Boston and loves the Red Sox (nobody’s perfect). I’m in St. Louis. We’ve chatted on the phone and Skype a few times, but most of our communication is via Twitter – both tweets and DMs. I had always wanted to travel to Boston and meet this guy in person.

Back in 2010, my family was at Disneyworld in Orlando, and I was (of course) tweeting about it. He saw my tweets and said, “I’m in Orlando right now, too!” So after the family got to bed that night, I jumped in a cab and went drinking with him and his dad. What an unbelievable experience. Three and a half years later, I’m cheering on Julio’s opera singing brother Fernando – he’s part of the trio “Forte” on America’s Got Talent. Twitter just makes life more interesting, and that is because people are interesting.

What are your absolute favorite Twitter tools or apps?

• Twitter for iPhone
• JustUnfollow.com
• Hootsuite
• Twitter.com – yeah, just the website
• Making lists on Twitter
• I used to use Twilert, but it stopped working due to the API change and I just haven’t gone in to fix it

I’m not big into analytics or whiz-bangy tools. I just like talking to people, helping people, inspiring them to do cool stuff and be nice to others, and educating myself on our changing world.

Where can people learn more about you, and check out your stuff?

I am probably best known for Twitter, and you can find me @RizzoTees. I work with a great crew of creatives at Falk Harrison where we help companies with branding, design and social media. My website is ChrisReimer.com, and in the about section about halfway down, I have a big list of resources your readers might find useful. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

The post Why Twitter is Awesome Like Bacon with Chris Reimer appeared first on The Blog Herald.

As blogs started to evolve, so did the level of interaction around them. The rise of search engines made content easy to discover for the first time ever, and commenting systems made it so that posts were no longer one-sided. Now, thanks to the age of social media, search engines are no longer the main source of discovery. Despite getting my start at blogging around 2008 when Facebook and Twitter were really beginning to gain traction, I always valued comments.

I would see other blogs with lots of comments, and by putting two and two together, assumed that comments are a good measure of a blog’s success. However, as the years went by, and averaging around 2,500 visitors per month when I was very active, comments just never did flood in as I had hoped. In fact, there were more than a handful of posts that did not receive a single comment, yet did okay traffic wise.

Paying attention to what other bloggers were doing, I asked open ended questions, and made it easy for anyone to leave a comment, also ditching the standard commenting system that comes with WordPress. Little seemed to work, and that assumption ended up turning into feelings of failure. Eventually, I reached a simple, yet very important conclusion…

It Doesn’t Matter How Many Comments Your Posts Receive. What Matters Is The Total Impact Your Posts Have On Others. (Tweet This)

With social media, replies, comments and shares would come in from several different avenues. Occasionally, I would get messages or emails from those who enjoyed a particular post or what I had to say, and ultimately, would land new business. Sometimes through learning from others, we pick up thoughts or set expectations that just aren’t accurate.

Comments or no comments, we should focus more on delivering our best work possible. As times have changed, so has the measure of a blog’s success and there is no real true measure since everyone has a different definition of success. Maybe it is traffic, X amount of email subscribers or so many ebook sales.

Today’s blogging platforms have created a better experience for everyone, and commenting systems like Livefyre make standard setups look like they were built in 1995. While, yes, creating new content and getting it out there is easier than ever, just because you are not getting tens of comments every post or 50 Facebook shares, does not make your blog posts not successful. Sometimes, it is not all about numbers.

Are your expectations accurate, or are you relying on preconceived notions?

Photo credit: premasagar

The post Are Comments a Measure of a Blog’s Success? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

When it comes to competition, we often look at people or businesses in our respective niches as enemies, and those we must beat. No matter what you blog about, chances are there is more than a small handful of people writing about the same thing. And if you sell ebooks, courses, consulting, etc., you can be sure others are as well. Naturally, we are designed to compete because before the days of modern science and technology, if we lost, we died.

Quite frankly, looking at your competition as enemies or “the bad guys,” is an absolutely backwards line of thinking. It is perfectly normal to think that way, but you are doing yourself and your blog a total disservice by not using competition to your benefit.

Gain Valuable Insight

No matter how smart or “on top of things” you think you are, there are people out there who will prove you wrong. Sometimes, there might be areas that you have overlooked, or ways of interacting with your audience for example that you never thought about before. Also, there could be valuable tools you never heard of, and maybe even ways of crafting your content to keep readers more engaged.

Instead of asking “How can I beat the competition?”, you should be asking “How can I learn from the competition?” (Tweet This). There is a good reason why some people are where they are today, and you can learn from their successes if you just open your eyes, letting your ego take a seat for a few minutes.

Access Their Audience

Anytime you visit an influential blog, there is an active community of people commenting, sharing and even buying directly, that is if that blog makes its money from more than just advertising. While getting you and your blog in front of those people is no easy task, thanks to social media, you can start a dialogue.

Since they are already engaging with people or blogs that offer content similar to yours, what you have to offer could also prove to be valuable. Now, this is not a time where you should start spamming, tweeting people links to your content before you have actually gotten to know them.

Be a human being, not some robot, and actually show some interest in their lives. Using social media to grow your blog does take time, but thanks to your competition, you are able to tap into an audience that you may have otherwise never known about.

Motivation To Do Better

Going back to one of the first points I made, we are not always as good as we think we are. To be honest, you can probably do much better, and your competition can help make you fully aware of that. Maybe they have built their blog in a way that you wish you had, or maybe their posts are incredibly good. Whatever it is, they can serve as motivation, and inspiration for you to become even better. Of course, actions speak louder than words, but what I am getting at with all of this is that your competition can be a serious asset, not a serious pain in the butt.

Photo credit: clydeorama

The post How Competition Actually Benefits Your Blog appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Finding the right WordPress theme is like shopping for a car. There are tons of choices, and you can end up going back and forth before settling on the right one. Fortunately though, unlike taking out a loan for a new car, you can grab a new theme for as low as the price of free! However, just because WordPress is so customizable, and there are thousands of simple to install themes right at your fingerprints, does not make the process any easier.

Your website design is a very serious investment, and your first impression to grabbing a visitor’s attention, and directing them to where you want them to go. Also, you have to factor in speed, functionality, and something that is optimized for SEO, not contributing to any problems down the road. To pick out the perfect WordPress theme, follow these five tips:

Stick With Reliable Sources

There are hundreds of marketplaces offering up themes for the taking, but do you truly know what you are getting? Some themes can be full of messy code, while others can potentially contain malware, hurting your visitors, and your reputation. Personally, I’ve had good success with Elegant Themes, WooThemes, and Theme Forest. All their themes are paid, but you tend to know that you are getting a high quality product, which is worth the rather small price to pay.

Ready To Rock Versus Ready To Customize

Since a theme is an investment after all, you want to make sure that it can do what you want it to do. This includes any changes you may want to make down the line. Sure, you can customize just about any WordPress theme, though some are easier than others. If you are completely satisfied with what one has to offer “out of the box” so to speak, then great. If you are satisfied, but want to make changes, make sure you know its limitations, and what you’re getting into before making a serious commitment.

Are There Any Updates?

Not all themes are created equal, and with the online landscape constantly evolving, you want something that isn’t going to be left behind. While a lot of theme updates are rather small, they can help increase speed, fix bugs, and even patch security holes.

Is It Mobile Friendly?

According to Pew Research Center, 56 percent of U.S. adults own a smartphone. More people are consuming content on their mobile devices, and if your site is not properly optimized, you are making it dead easy for people to click away. Now, you can totally use a plugin like WPtouch to offer a mobile-optimized experience, but there are more and more WordPress themes that are already optimized for mobile.

A theme not mobile friendly is not a deal breaker by any means, but it is a plus for one very good reason: It offers a consistent, familiar experience across both desktops, and smartphones or tablets.

Reviews Are Your Best Friend

Just like with shopping, reviews help separate the losers from the winners. On Theme Forest for example, buyers are able to leave comments, and rate the seller on a scale from one to five. This helps to ensure if you are getting a good quality product or not, saving you hours of frustration down the line. If you don’t happen to see any chatter about a specific WordPress theme that you are considering, simply hop on over to Google, and see what you can come up with.

Photo credit: mkhmarketing

The post How to Pick Out the Perfect WordPress Theme appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The blogging realm is constantly buzzing along, and according to Technorati, two new blogs are creating every second. The craziest part is that statistic was published in 2006, a time when blogs were in their infancy, and very few were creating successful businesses from them. I’m not sure about you, but when I had my first idea for a blog, or any ideas for that matter, I get really excited. I start thinking of possibilities, how to structure the site, and so on.

Also, my aspirations can get the best of me, and I feel that it’s going to be a huge success right out of the gate. However, success is not something that just happens, but takes time to manifest based on a bunch of different factors. Before kicking off your next blogging adventure, don’t go too crazy, and jump off the deep end. First, ask yourself these three questions:

Do I want to make money, or do I just want to build something for fun?

Depending on your goals, you may want to monetize, or just start up a new pet project. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with monetizing a blog, but if your main aspiration is to make money, you’re going to have a bad time. Making money blogging has no eight step program, and there sure as heck is no such thing as a “set and forget” system.

Unless you have already built up a significant audience, generating a decent income can take years, not weeks or even months. This is not counting all sorts of different factors such as consistency, who you are targeting, quality of content, strategy, etc. Now, simply building something for fun is great, but like with wanting to monetize, you need to be realistic. Is this idea something you are truly passionate, and interested in? If not, your “fun” project could see an untimely death.

Who is my target audience, and what makes them tick?

The better you can understand your audience, the deeper you can connect with them (Tweet This). Sadly, people often to fail to figure out who their target audience is, and try to grab the attention of a broad group. For example, you can build a blog targeting small business owners, but that comes out to 23 million in the U.S. alone. Competition is insanely fierce, but if you can figure out how to get more specific, you can better grab the attention of those who matter most.

What sacrifices am I willing to make to help my blog become a success?

In every part of life, there are sacrifices that have to be made. If you want your next blogging adventure to be a runaway success, you can bet that you will have to make many. Want to build a profitable business? Be prepared to stop watching hours of television each night. Want more people to read your blog? Be prepared to spend hours not just creating content, but getting in the trenches of social media, and networking across the web.

Want people to actually give a crap? Work your butt off creating the best content possible, and be consistent even when you feel you have nothing else to give. Great things come to those who put in serious effort. If you are not willing to make sacrifices, and just stay in your comfort zone, then put an end to your blogging adventure right now before you create a new disappointment.

Photo credit: Sean Kelly

The post Three Quick Questions Before Starting Your Next Blogging Adventure appeared first on The Blog Herald.

People like to say content is king, but how important is design in the overall process?

If they can’t read your content, then it doesn’t matter how great your content is. Many blogs a few years ago, in trying to make a full-time living, got cluttered with ads, and images that made the reading experience horrible. I think the internet has grown to where there’s a great balance of content, and other items that help pay the bills. Ultimately, we’re seeing a trend in going back to simpler designs because a simple design gets to the point, and that point is good quality content.

Through years of owning a blog, a lot of bloggers have taught themselves how to do basic design, and many how to code. Do you think everyone should learn or do you think it requires a certain kind of person?

Everyone CAN learn how to code, and it’d probably save some bloggers some money in the long run to read up on some basic HTML and CSS skills. I say go for it, but always keep in mind the tasks that you are passionate about. If editing your website layout isn’t your thing, then leave that up to someone that is driven by creating, and editing design elements for the web.

There is something to be said though of a person that does have a special eye for design. For bloggers who want to focus on their writing, they may learn the skills to make edits to their blog layout, but major redesigns and creating a great user experience takes someone that has the knowledge to create something fantastic.

What are some of the most common design mistakes you see?

Here recently, not thinking about mobile. Mobile devices usage has skyrocketed in the last few years. There are some sites I manage that the majority of visitors are on their phone. That’s a huge difference than what we saw just 4 years ago. So having a website now, you need it to look nice on a mobile device. There’s no way around that anymore.

But commonly, what I keep seeing over the years is clutter. There’s so much information out there, and so many websites want to display it all “above the fold” that it gets cluttered at the sacrifice of design, and usability. A big part of web design is displaying content in the best way possible for the visitor, and for one reason or another, things get lost and visitors have nowhere to rest their eyes on something. That’s a problem that should be fixed immediately.

On the flipside, what do you feel makes an awesome design, well, awesome?

Simple, simple, simple. The best designs are ones that have just the right amount of color, and structure to stay out of the way. Nothing is more important than to create a structure that reaches a common goal. Subtle colors, a nice grid of lines placed in order to direct people’s glances, and tastefully positioned imagery/photos are the things that make me happy.

With WordPress, a lot of people go with a ready made theme. Are there advantages to having a custom design?

There are plenty of great themes out there. I recommend people to look around, and see if some catch their eye. The reason I say that is most people will find what they need, and what they want in their theme after they’ve used a few different ones. Once someone understands what they’d like to have, then they can go on a hunting spree for a theme with those elements. In my experience, people will find something that they kind of like, but not really what they envisioned, and that’s where a custom design comes in.

Theme designers make templates for the masses, and they’re trying to please a general audience, so when you start needing specific things and functions, then you can call me :)

I’m a fan of Clients From Hell which is a Tumblr full of horror stories from designers. It’s pretty hilarious. Do you have any horror stories to share? Also, when working with a designer, how can people make the process go much smoother?

Really, my stories are nothing out of the ordinary that you won’t see on that site. A common joke among designers is that it always seems that clients want their logo to be bigger and “pop” more. As soon as I figure out how to make things “pop,” I’ll retire.

I think those working with a designer need to understand that it’s a relationship of sorts. When a designer starts cranking out some designs, and it’s not quite to your liking, communicate that, and work together. The more your designer knows your plans and goals, the more they’ll knock your socks off with something you didn’t even know you would love until you saw it.

Where can people learn more about you, and check out your stuff?

My main website is the best place for sure. It contains some of my recent work. Also, you can follow me on Twitter and Google+. I’m always down for a good conversation, so tweet at me and I’ll be sure to respond.

The post Awesome Blog Design with Dano Hart appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Popular bloggers can be a great inspiration, and good people to learn from. They have built a successful business around a typically simple idea, and have an active community of loyal supporters. Getting on the radar of anyone with some sort of notoriety, is no easy task. The reality is, most people completely blow it. They try too hard, come off as a stalker, or maybe ask for way too many favors..

Now, you might be thinking: why should I care about getting on the radar of popular bloggers? Well, first things first, you do not have to be interested. However, if you are active in the blogging world, and understand the value of networking, it can open doors to new opportunities. You can get access to their audience through opportunities like guest posting, for example. Most importantly though, you can forge a new relationship, which in of itself can be priceless.

Stop Being Generic

Every blog has its generic comments. “Great thoughts!,” “Really enjoyed this post!,” “Thanks for sharing!,” and the list goes on. These comments do nothing more than to serve as filler. They do not really add any value to the discussion, and do not drive discussion. To really stand out, move beyond the generic, and truly give your two cents. Also, do not be afraid to disagree. Disagreeing is a good thing, and makes conversations a heck of a lot more interesting.

Hang Out, But Don’t Be THAT Guy

It is one thing to leave a comment here and there. You need to establish yourself as an active community member, not an occasional stumbler. However, by no means become THAT guy, meaning a suck up. Sure, it can be flattering to hear great things all the time, but as I am sure many popular bloggers can agree, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth when the person is simply trying to get something out of you for their own personal gain. In order to get value, you must first give value, and give a heck of a lot (Tweet This).

Become A Roadie

Roadies are the backbone of any band, and help put together the show. As you become more of an established, active community member, help out. For example, if people are asking questions, step in. If people are spamming a Facebook post or group, report it and lay down the law. When you run a popular blog, and have an active community spread across the web, it can be a serious hassle keeping up with everything. While popular bloggers may not explicitly come out and thank you, it really is a big help if you can save them a few seconds here and there.

Connect Beyond The Blog

Social media helps to drive traffic in a world that used to be specifically dominated by email and search engines. Chances are, you have a Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ account, and so does the person who’s blog you actively follow.

You’re Human, So Talk About Human Stuff

This is probably one of the most underutilized tips, but oh so important in building relationships with anyone really, not just popular bloggers. Step away from the typical conversation, and get more personal. If you see them post a tweet, ask how they’re doing. Get to understand their interests, and talk about that. Some of the best conversations I have had with people in the industry have had absolutely nothing to do with either of our respective fields.

Photo credit: Camper

The post Top Five Tips to Get on Popular Bloggers’ Radar appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Blog comments are welcomed by all, and give us an opportunity to create a discussion, further building a community in the process. Most of the time, they’re cool and collective, sometimes disagreeing with what you have to say, which is great. If we all agreed on everything, conversations would get pretty boring, pretty fast. However, things can go south, and the bigger your blog is or the more popular you are, the more you have to deal with “haters.”

Haters have no better way to spend their time than to spew nonsense, and not add any value to the conversation whatsoever. They move beyond criticism, and can get personal by calling you names. They are an unfortunate part of life, and really seem to enjoy spending a lot of time on YouTube. Haters have one simple goal: to get a rise out of you, and to get attention.

Understanding The Mindset

Haters are simply broken human beings, and usually going through some sort of problems in their own life. Just like a school bully, they unnecessarily take things out on other people. It is easy to get upset over blog comments that are uncalled for, and wanting to lash out. However, when you start to realize that the person spewing such hate is broken, and probably needs to be hugged more often, it kinda starts to get sad.

Dealing With The Hate

You really have one of two options. You can either ignore the blog comments or respond to them. The majority of the time, it is best to simply ignore it. By responding, you are only fueling the fire, and if there is one thing that rings true with all haters, it is that they always have to have the last word. No matter how good your response is, they will always and I mean always come back with something else. Sooner or later, you will realize just how much time you have wasted, time that could have been better spent towards working on something far more productive.

If you find the same person is routinely posting bad things on your blog, your best course of action would be to block them. Whenever someone leaves a comment, their IP address is included. If you use WordPress, login to your dashboard, select “Settings,” and then “Discussion.” Scroll down to where it says “Comment Blacklist,” and add their IP address. Now, whenever they leave a comment, it will automatically go to the spam folder.

To go even further, you can have your blog appear to not load for someone, blocking them completely. Simply check with your web hosting provider to figure out how to do so.

Distinguishing Hate And Criticism

Just because someone leaves blog comments criticizing you and/or your work, does not necessarily make them a hater. This is a big misunderstanding, and many chalk up criticism as hate. However, criticism can be a good thing. Nobody wants to hear the bad or what’s wrong with something, especially after they have potentially put hours upon hours, and hard work into it. But, criticism helps you to become better. If you are constantly being told how great you or something you did is, a bubble starts to form.

Many stop improving, and start to become too comfortable. Criticism keeps you on your toes, and it helps to keep you humble. You know that you are not the greatest, and can see that there is more room for improvement. If more people were simply honest, and didn’t lie because they were afraid to hurt people’s feelings, the world would be a far better place.

How do you manage negative blog comments?

Photo credit: Lotus Carroll

The post How to Deal with Negative Blog Comments appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, and breaking through the noise is harder than ever. How do you get past the images with quotes, and reshares of funny photos?

I think it all depends on your goals for Facebook. Often times we fall into a pattern of just copying what everyone else is doing because that “worked”. But just because posting idiotic memes works for George Takei doesn’t mean it will work for me!

You have to be yourself and be consistent with that message. The challenge however is avoid the temptation to always post links to your product or company, especially when you’re in the online marketing world. Be human and interact with your followers/friends, and then every once in a while mix in a link or two. And yeah, sometimes posting a silly cat video is needed!

Personal profiles, like pages, have went through several changes over the years, the biggest of which is the ability for people to “follow” you. With the follow functionality being similar to “liking” a Facebook page, is a personal profile sufficient? What are the advantages of having a page?

That’s a tough question. It all depends on your brand I think. As an online “entrepreneur”, you usually are the brand so having a page may be necessary. But for bloggers, artists, speakers, athletes and etc just having a personal profile should be enough. The main advantages with using a page is to run ads to posts, your apps on the page and etc. You can’t do any of that with a profile.

But if you don’t care about collecting emails and etc. then a profile may be all you need. That’s what I’ve personally chosen to do. I deleted the 2-3 pages I had that were really just about the stuff I was doing or promoting and just deal with my profile now. It allows me to be human and still at times “sell” stuff. The best at running a personal profile and page at the same time with the same name is Mari Smith. She has it figured out. I covered how well she does this in a recent blog post you can check out here.

Quite often I come across a blog who’s Facebook page is automatically feeding in new posts through a tool like NetworkedBlogs. Is that a good move or are people leaving a lot of engagement on the table?

I personally don’t like to automatically feed blog posts to pages on Facebook. It’s okay to do to Twitter, but not Facebook. Facebook is all about timing and having space between posts. If you push your blog out 3 minutes after you just posted something else on Facebook, your post likely won’t be seen. Or worse yet, because you’re overwhelming the news feed of your fans, they get pissed off, hide the post or unlike you.

You lose too much control when posting this way IMHO. Now, planning your post is smart and everyone running a page should do it, I’ve been doing that for years. But when you plan your posts, you know when it’s going to hit your page, and are ensured that the posts are spaced out appropriately.

Speaking of engagement, Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm impacts all posts, and with pages, on average only 16% of their fans actually see their posts. How do you get this number up, and is it worth investing into things such as Sponsored posts?

Well, Edgerank is technically dead now, but there is still an algorithm in play on the news feed. The latest news from Facebook seems to point to the fact that a different algorithm is being used for posts from people and from pages, which makes things rather difficult to understand. You get this number up by strategically posting updates that get engagement. Regardless of your brand, people typically don’t only want to hear about your brand or product. They may love you to death, but won’t comment on every update if it’s just about yourself or your industry.

I personally would suggest posting Questions, Fill-in the blanks, and funny images to get engagement up. Then, mix in link posts between them to your site or updates about your industry. I’m not saying flood Facebook with junk posts though. Figure out your audience and find out what they are more likely to engage in. Also, keep in mind that when you post a link post, engagement will be almost zero as you’re driving traffic to your site, and that’s good news. But don’t expect Likes, Comments and Shares to be high when posting links.

If simply posting isn’t working for your page, you’ll need to try running Sponsored Stories from time to time. Again, it all depends on your page and your audience. If you run a Sponsored story on a crappy post that didn’t get any engagement to begin with, you’re wasting your money, but if a post starts to get some traction, it’s a good idea to run an ad with it to get more engagement.

You also should be running ads to get targeted fans to your page. I think too many times page owners beg, borrow and steal fans to increase the Like count, but end up with a bunch of people that could care less about their product or page. I’d rather have 100 engaged fans than 1000 that will never comment. So make sure you target ads towards people that will be interested in your product. Your mom probably doesn’t need to like your page!

Aside from Post Planner of course, what are some of your favorite Facebook related tools or apps?

I love ShortStack, not just because they have great apps for pages, but because they are great people. Very laid back, not pretentious and provide great content. Jon Loomer is my go-to guy when I want to learn more about Facebook ads. By far, he’s the leading expert on this currently in our space. I also love the new updates to the Page Manager app for Android. You can now create a shortcut on your phone that is specifically just for your page, which makes it super quick to access and manage comments, messages and posts.

Where can people learn more about you, and check out your stuff?

They can follow me on Facebook of course, check out my podcasts or The Social Media Buzz.

The post Facebook for Bloggers with Scott Ayres appeared first on The Blog Herald.

No one is perfect, and writing mistakes can number into the hundreds. Even established professionals have their days, and writing is constantly a learning experience. Maybe it’s punctuation, sentence structure or something as little as forgetting to add a comma in a couple places. Unlike our Grammar for Bloggers post, I’m not going to get super technical, and talk about things like pronouns or subject/verb disagreements.

In fact, I’m a walking contradiction, having done horribly in English class all through my school years, yet eventually becoming a writer. Rather than diving into the most basic of writing mistakes, here are six that can have a serious impact on your blog posts:

Writing For Search Engines, Not People

I touched on this topic briefly, and it is one of the easiest ways to kill interest. People can tell when you are forcing out some awkwardly worded, SEO-optimized mess of words. It has been drilled into our heads how important SEO is (which it is), and many take things a bit too far.

You do not need to have eight of the same keyword in a 350 word blog post, or always have the main keyword at the beginning of your title, often churning out yawn-inducing results. While search engines are your friend, they are not your target demographic.

Dragging On And On And On

Have you ever found yourself reading a post, and wondering when the heck they were going to get to the point? Yeah, me too. Now, rambling can turn out okay in certain situations, but it is one of several writing mistakes that will have people clicking away. Attention spans are shorter than ever, and the longer it takes you to get to the point, the more people will lose interest.

You Travel In A Zigzag

Unless you are running away from a crazed gunman, traveling in a zigzag in your blog posts are one of the more common ways of not staying on topic. Posts do not properly flow, and there is bouncing from one subject to another. Everyone runs into this mistake, and with I having an attention span of a squirrel, it requires constant awareness to keep things in line.

Whatever you are writing about, stick to your main subject, and several bullet points. Unless it has something to do with the topic at hand, stop stringing your readers all over the place.

Dull Text, Long Paragraphs

There is a good reason we have the ability to bold or italicize text. It helps to better organize our content, and bring attention to certain areas. If your blog runs on WordPress, you have the ability to easily create bullet points, and headline text. Most of us tend to quickly skim over content, and the use of bolding, bullet points or headlines, help guide your readers.

Also, long running paragraphs can give off the illusion that there is far more to read than what is actually there.

Titles Suck, Are Too Long

As harsh as it may sound, most titles are simply not that good. They invoke zero emotion or interest, and end up dying among eight gazillion other posts on a similar subject. Again, it all comes back to attention spans, and when you can create great headlines, you can increase traffic to your posts. You also need to consider the length of titles, not only for search engines which only display up to 70 characters, but social networks like Twitter where the character limit gives little room to work with.

You Believe The Saying, “Build It And They Will Come”

I considered not including this among all the other writing mistakes since it doesn’t technically have to do with writing, but felt it at least deserved an honorable mention. Although content may be king, creating that content is really only about 20 percent of the whole process. Where many people go wrong is believing that great content alone will get them noticed, drive traffic, build a community, and so on.

However, you could write the most amazing, phenomenal blog post ever, but if you are not putting in the effort to promote your content, and engage with relevant people, your work will forever remain unseen.

What other writing mistakes would you add to this?

Photo credit: Sue Richards

The post Are You Making These Six Deadly Writing Mistakes? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

One great example that most comes to mind is popular snack brand Oreo during Super Bowl XLVII. If you tuned in, towards the beginning of the third quarter, there was a power outage at the New Orleans’ Superdome. It lasted for 34 minutes, and a faulty power relay was later found to be the culprit. While the power outage left football fans sitting in the dark so to speak, Oreo posted this brilliant tweet:

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

It received thousands of retweets in minutes, and reached untold millions during the biggest television event of the year. Now, Oreo is a huge brand, and it’s safe to call it a household name. This definitely helped it with newsjacking such a major event, but the idea is really open to everyone.

Attach Yourself To Something Popular

It all starts with a popular topic or discussion. Depending on your angle, you can make it relevant to your business or what you normally write about it. By doing so, you are able to hopefully bring a unique spin to a topic that is on the top of many people’s minds.

Casting A Net Vs. A Hook

By newsjacking, you are casting out a net instead of a hook. This can result in far more eyeballs, visitors, comments and shares. However, by casting out a net, this gets us into our first con…

Can Attract The Wrong Crowd

Often times the popular topic or discussion that people try to capitalize on, is very different from their core message. While you can grab more attention, more attention isn’t always a good thing. After all, if you are trying to run a business, 5000 untargeted visitors to your blog is far less valuable than 500 highly targeted visitors.

Time Sensitive

Timing is everything when it comes to newsjacking, and the quicker you can effectively capitalize on a topic, the better. Unfortunately, popular topics or discussions generally have a very short lifespan, giving your posts a very short time to grab attention. You may see an initial rush to your content, but once that topic has died off, traffic to your posts will likely die off as well.

Could Backfire Horribly

Some people simply don’t fully think things through, and there are a slew of businesses trying to profit off tragedy. For example, when Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast in the fall of 2012, American Apparel thought it would be a great time to run a 20% off sale. Posting an image to its Facebook page with the title “In case you’re bored during the storm,” residents in select states could enter “SANDYSALE” at checkout to save some cash.

Needless to say, American Apparel was demonized, and suffered serious backlash. Newsjacking can be used in an effective manner, but the proper planning and consideration is essential in making sure you don’t create a serious mess.

Photo credit: Demond Henderson

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The post Five Pros and Cons of Newsjacking appeared first on The Blog Herald.