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In recent weeks I have been focused on having mobile-ready blogs because there is so much traffic coming to sites from mobile devices these days. Mobile devices, smart phones, internet ready tablets , etc. are all gaining in popularity for web browsing, so it makes sense to have a site that is viewable by those devices. If your site is not mobile compatible, you are losing a ton of potential blog readers and customers.
I've added the Wordpress Mobile Pack plugin to
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Hey Blog Guru! Where's Your Blog?
Image via Wikipedia
There are many people who profess to being blogging gurus out there. They have all of the answers to every question and supposedly make tons of money with their blogs each and every day. Do they really make all of this money from their blog or is the main source of their income the blogging products that they develop and feed you through Clickbank?
I get proposals to be a Joint Venture partner on many blog related products and most of them I turn down. I turn them
There are many people who profess to being blogging gurus out there. They have all of the answers to every question and supposedly make tons of money with their blogs each and every day. Do they really make all of this money from their blog or is the main source of their income the blogging products that they develop and feed you through Clickbank?
I get proposals to be a Joint Venture partner on many blog related products and most of them I turn down. I turn them
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
With Wordpress, The Learning Never Ends
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There are so many different options for Wordpress that learning every little thing about it and what it can do is nearly impossible. You may think you have everything mastered and then something comes along that is either new or you just have overlooked it in the past. Even though I have been blogging for six or so years and have been using the Wordpress CMS engine for at least four of those, I still learn new things about it everyday.
Plugins is one of the areas
There are so many different options for Wordpress that learning every little thing about it and what it can do is nearly impossible. You may think you have everything mastered and then something comes along that is either new or you just have overlooked it in the past. Even though I have been blogging for six or so years and have been using the Wordpress CMS engine for at least four of those, I still learn new things about it everyday.
Plugins is one of the areas
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Brand New Must Have Tool for Wordpress Bloggers – WPSyndicator
If you have a blog, you already know the importance of traffic. What if you had a way to syndicate your blog posts across an assortment of Web 2.0 sites, where interested readers could get a taste of your content and then click on a link to go to your blog? Well, guess what – now you do! It's a brand new plug-in called WPSyndicator, developed by Andy Fletcher.
WPSyndicator takes an excerpt of your blog post and posts it for you to 14 popular Web 2.0 sites plus will automatically tweet it for you to your Twitter account. Of course, along with the excerpt will be a link back to your blog for the viewer to read the rest of the post. Brilliant, isn't it? Not only do you get direct traffic but a very valuable backlink as well, if you use anchor text for the link.
You have the choice of what to set the excerpt to, with the default being 500 characters (around a paragraph or two). The key is to give the reader just enough to get them hooked and be eager to go to your blog to read the rest. You can easily adjust the length of the excerpt, depending on the content you are syndicating, so you'll always be able to have just the right amount out there as bait.
Andy does offer lifetime updates to WPSyndicator, which makes it even more of a bargain. He's already issued a couple of updates that incorporated features suggested by his beta testers and pre-launch customers. The latest update added the ability to syndicate pages as well as posts, auto-syndication capability and rate limiting so you don't get booted off the Web 2.0 sites for spamming.
The plug-in itself is very easy to install and activate, just like other WordPress plug-ins. It will take an hour or so the first time you use it because you'll have to set up all your accounts for the various sites that your content gets syndicated to. To make it very easy for you, Andy has included instructions right in the menu plus some helpful videos to walk you through many of the steps. He even built in the bit.ly connection so your links are automatically shortened for the micro-blogging sites like Twitter.
One of the favorite features for many of the early users is the ability to syndicate past posts. Once the plug-in is installed and set up, you will see a link that says “click here to syndicate” whenever you go to edit a post. You can syndicate old or new posts at the click of a button.
Do be careful not to overdo it as you will look like a spammer. Andy recommends doing just a couple posts per day, perhaps one new and one old. This will also give your readers time to see what you have to offer on the Web 2.0 sites instead of drowning them the first day out.
I've been using it on a couple of my blogs and the results are unbelievable... Check it out here.
WPSyndicator takes an excerpt of your blog post and posts it for you to 14 popular Web 2.0 sites plus will automatically tweet it for you to your Twitter account. Of course, along with the excerpt will be a link back to your blog for the viewer to read the rest of the post. Brilliant, isn't it? Not only do you get direct traffic but a very valuable backlink as well, if you use anchor text for the link.
You have the choice of what to set the excerpt to, with the default being 500 characters (around a paragraph or two). The key is to give the reader just enough to get them hooked and be eager to go to your blog to read the rest. You can easily adjust the length of the excerpt, depending on the content you are syndicating, so you'll always be able to have just the right amount out there as bait.
Andy does offer lifetime updates to WPSyndicator, which makes it even more of a bargain. He's already issued a couple of updates that incorporated features suggested by his beta testers and pre-launch customers. The latest update added the ability to syndicate pages as well as posts, auto-syndication capability and rate limiting so you don't get booted off the Web 2.0 sites for spamming.
The plug-in itself is very easy to install and activate, just like other WordPress plug-ins. It will take an hour or so the first time you use it because you'll have to set up all your accounts for the various sites that your content gets syndicated to. To make it very easy for you, Andy has included instructions right in the menu plus some helpful videos to walk you through many of the steps. He even built in the bit.ly connection so your links are automatically shortened for the micro-blogging sites like Twitter.
One of the favorite features for many of the early users is the ability to syndicate past posts. Once the plug-in is installed and set up, you will see a link that says “click here to syndicate” whenever you go to edit a post. You can syndicate old or new posts at the click of a button.
Do be careful not to overdo it as you will look like a spammer. Andy recommends doing just a couple posts per day, perhaps one new and one old. This will also give your readers time to see what you have to offer on the Web 2.0 sites instead of drowning them the first day out.
I've been using it on a couple of my blogs and the results are unbelievable... Check it out here.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Mobile Blogging is Happening Now
Mobile blogging is an exciting phenomenon that is sweeping the blogosphere. One of the reasons why a lot of bloggers are attracted to the medium of blogging in the first place is that they enjoy being able to make frequent updates and posts that keep all of their visitors up to speed with current situations. Mobile blogs, or "moblogs," take this to the extreme by allowing users to post things literally as they happen. This new wave of moblogs and mobloggers keep web surfers up to date with good and bad events of importance as they occur all over the world, helping to make international communication faster and more accurate.
Many people feel that the limitations of blogging have a lot to do with geography. After all, there is only so current that a blog can be when you need to run home and boot up in order to update it. However, mobile blogging marks the beginning of an thrilling new era when web-based communication can happen spontaneously from any location. Moblogging devices mean that there is almost nowhere on the planet that remains off-limits for bloggers.
Mobile blogging is still in its infancy because the technology that makes it possible has only recently hit the global market. The first moblog technology became available over a decade ago, but it is only the past two or three years that mobile web devices have become user-friendly enough to appeal to most consumers. As camera phones and other mobile technology become more popular, more and more bloggers are getting away from their desks and are hitting the streets. Moblogging is becoming much more widespread that it was even a few months ago, and mobloggers are quickly attracting a lot of attention with the blogging community. It is not yet clear whether moblogs will become the dominant kinds of blogs in the years to come, but the current trend seems to imply that moblogs are here to stay.
Mobile devices make it possible to blog from the sites where current events are unfolding, which is one of the reasons why mobile blogging has so much thrilling potential to revolutionize the blogosphere. A moblogger with a camera phone can post blog entries from, say, the foot of the podium at a presidential speech, or from the stands during the final moments of the world series. This enables bloggers to experience the same real time thrills that live television coverage provides, but in a more democratic medium. The combination of mobility and individual control that moblogging provides certainly places mobloggers on the cutting edge of today's communications technology, and it is hard to imagine that the number and prestige of moblogs will not continue to grow in the coming years.
You can check out more on mobile blogging here.
Many people feel that the limitations of blogging have a lot to do with geography. After all, there is only so current that a blog can be when you need to run home and boot up in order to update it. However, mobile blogging marks the beginning of an thrilling new era when web-based communication can happen spontaneously from any location. Moblogging devices mean that there is almost nowhere on the planet that remains off-limits for bloggers.
Mobile blogging is still in its infancy because the technology that makes it possible has only recently hit the global market. The first moblog technology became available over a decade ago, but it is only the past two or three years that mobile web devices have become user-friendly enough to appeal to most consumers. As camera phones and other mobile technology become more popular, more and more bloggers are getting away from their desks and are hitting the streets. Moblogging is becoming much more widespread that it was even a few months ago, and mobloggers are quickly attracting a lot of attention with the blogging community. It is not yet clear whether moblogs will become the dominant kinds of blogs in the years to come, but the current trend seems to imply that moblogs are here to stay.
Mobile devices make it possible to blog from the sites where current events are unfolding, which is one of the reasons why mobile blogging has so much thrilling potential to revolutionize the blogosphere. A moblogger with a camera phone can post blog entries from, say, the foot of the podium at a presidential speech, or from the stands during the final moments of the world series. This enables bloggers to experience the same real time thrills that live television coverage provides, but in a more democratic medium. The combination of mobility and individual control that moblogging provides certainly places mobloggers on the cutting edge of today's communications technology, and it is hard to imagine that the number and prestige of moblogs will not continue to grow in the coming years.
You can check out more on mobile blogging here.
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