Archive for the ‘Blogging Tools’ Category
by Franky Branckaute on March 20th, 2010
Many people blog for fun while others blog to make money but at the end of the day most of us all have the same purpose in mind and the game is all about one thing, one word: traffic.
There are many different approaches to blogging and the best way to achieve long term success with your blog is to create valuable content but sometimes your entries need that small push to take off and you will have to promote your entries, often relying on friends/colleagues to get those first submissions/votes on social networks. On platforms such as StumbleUpon or Reddit verticals those first initial votes can make the difference between no referrals or thousands of visitors to your post.
So off you go hitting up all your friends on Twitter, Facebook and in Basecamp. Guilty as charged.
In this entry I am going to show you how you can easily set up a private network with WordPress and 3 plugins only, to promote your entries among, together with friends, hoping for those often crucial initial votes, submissions to the main social networks to maximally promote your awesome content. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tools, WordPress Tips
Tags: Promotion, Social Media, traffic, wordpress, WordPress Tips
by Franky Branckaute on March 18th, 2010
We all know it now, Facebook’s the new Myspace and Google all in one. There’s no way to escape it anymore. I have been sceptical about Facebook for years, especially because of privacy issues and occasionally strange changes to the ToS, but there’s no way round anymore. If you have a blog, your blog should be on Facebook.
No matter whether you like the platform or not. It’s a major traffic boost and recently even became the first social network users will check to discover breaking news.
I will continue to argue that not all content does as well on Facebook but you should at least have a Facebook page for your blog. The proof’s in the pudding.
Traffic
Facebook often can drive more traffic to your site, on the awesome ForeverGeek Facebook has replaced Twitter as second traffic referrer after StumbleUpon (and Google of course).
SEO
SEO benefits of Facebook pages are rather minimal because outgoing links are nofollow. But a quick Google search for bloggingpro explains why you should get your Facebook fan page. Similar results are seen for all our main blogs.
RSS Graffiti: Automated Smart Feed Import To Your Facebook Page
For a long time the main issue when deciding whether to use Facebook, and how to use your page, turned around what’s the best way to automate the import of my content to my page?. The Facebook RSS importer is a national disaster, Networked Blogs was an option, albeit a poor one. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tools
Tags: Blogging Tips, Blogging Tools, Facebook, RSS Graffiti, Social Media
by Darnell Clayton on March 4th, 2010
Perhaps one of the few multi-blogging iPhone apps still alive, BlogPress has recently added the ability to share posts immediately to Facebook, giving bloggers yet another way to easily reach the masses (or at least 400 million of them).
Even though bloggers could originally do this via the Facebook Note importer, Facebook unfortunately limits users to only importing one single blog.
Since BlogPress supports multiple blogs (across multiple platforms including WordPress, Movable Type and Blogger), bloggers can easily share their recent posts upon their Facebook wall from more than one blog, without having to use “work arounds” like Friendfeed.
Despite increased competition from companies releasing their own official apps (like WordPress and Squarespace), BlogPress continues to innovate itself by heavily embracing social networks such as Flickr, Twitter, YouTube–and now Facebook.
Categories: Blogging Tools
Tags: Facebook, iphone
by Franky Branckaute on January 28th, 2010
There, I said it. If you’re a serious blogger, proud of your blogging, you need an iPad.
Stop complaining about the lack of Flash because you’re off the mark. Don’t label the iPad as underwhelming without understanding the device, all while still being blinded by the pre-announcement Unicorn device hype.
Now the iPad has been unveiled we can accept its platform-changing role and look at how this device will change your routine. More than any smartphone before has.
There’s no way round it. Bite the bullet, shell out those $$$ and get your iPad. Here are more than seven reasons why you should get one.
The Perfect Second Screen, Dual Setup
Once you have tasted and gotten used to a dual screen setup you will not want to return to a single monitor setup anymore. No laptop, or software, is good enough to replace the luxury of having two screens. Neither Spaces nor virtual desktops can anywhere nearly emulate the experience of two screens side-by-side. Bill Gates has three monitors, Al Gore loves to show off his ridiculous three 30″ screen setup. Once you get used to multiple screens there’s no way back. The iPad makes this now possible AND portable. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tools
Tags: Apple, iPad, Mobile Blogging
by Dee Barizo on January 24th, 2010
The SEO Toolbar is easily one of my favorite tools. Franky makes a great point that the best SEO tip is simply create great content. But once you’re creating quality posts on a regular basis, you can boost your rankings by intentionally getting links from authoritative sites. This tactic is especially useful for blogs that don’t have a lot of traffic and subscribers. These blogs can get stuck with poor rankings because they don’t have the big audience that generates natural links.
The SEO Toolbar allows you to quickly tell how much link authority a site has. The more link authority, the more benefit you’ll get from their link.
To use this tool, you’ll first have to download the free Firefox browser since it’s a Firefox add-on. (Firefox should be your browser anyways. It’s more stable and secure than IE and it doesn’t have the privacy issue of Google’s Chrome.)
After you install the program, you’ll see the toolbar at the top of Firefox. Every time you surf to a new new page, you get SEO stats for the page and domain you’re visiting.
Read More
Categories: Blogging Tools
Tags: SEO for Firefox, Sunday Morning SEO, tools
by Darnell Clayton on January 12th, 2010
Five years ago if someone told me that we would be editing images on our cell phones and uploading them to our blogs just as easily as a laptop (or desktop), I probably would have laughed in their face.
Flash forward towards today and here I am now amazed that I am able to edit video (yes video!) at a fraction of the price I would have paid to place upon my laptop.
While the video editing apps are still in their infancy (at least upon the iPhone), here are seven of the best video apps that every video blogger blessed with the iDevice should own (plus a video of my ugly mug to help demonstrate their power). Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips, Blogging Tools
Tags: iphone, Mobile Software, video, Video Blogging
by Dee Barizo on December 27th, 2009
Rand Fishkin has an interesting prediction in his recent post, 8 Predictions for SEO in 2010. He believes that Twitter will become a part of Google’s ranking algorithm.
His argument is that Google has a history of innovating their algorithm to take account the most relevant link sources. And now it seems that Twitter has become the top place to share links instead of blogs and social news sites.
Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips, Blogging Tools
Tags: seo, Sunday Morning SEO, twitter
by Karlo Licudine on December 3rd, 2009
In their on-going effort in making the web faster, Google has just recently announced an experimental Webmaster Tools feature called Site Performance which shows how your site performs in terms of loading time and gives suggestions on how to make it more faster.
You can access this new feature on your Google Webmaster Tools account, under Labs > Site Performance. In this section, you are shown a performance overview of your whole site. It displays the average page load time, which refers to the amount of time it takes the entire page to fully display on your browser, as well as a comparison of it against other sites.
Site Performance tool in action showing the speed of one of the sites I handle.
Aside from the performance statistics, there is also a section called Page Speed Suggestions where it gives you suggestions on how to optimize the pages on your site. This feature is powered by Google’s Page Speed tool, a powerful program that runs a number of diagnostic tests against a web page, and analyzes the page’s performance according to a number of general page performance “rules” that are known to speed up page load times.
Since the Page Speed Suggestions evaluates only a few example pages from your site, you have the option to download and install the Page Speed FireFox Add-on which let’s you evaluate any web page and immediately get the result. (Important note: You need to have the FireBug FireFox add-on installed first before installing Page Speed).
Page Speed FireBug add-on showing the performance summary of BloggingPro’s homepage
As you can see on the screenshot above, Page Speed lists down suggestions like caching, gzip compression, optimizing CSS, and many more. Thanks to this, we can now be able to know where we should focus our attention on when we want to make our blogs load faster.
To learn more about the Site Performance Tool, go here. To learn more about Google Page Speed, go here.
Related Articles from the SplashPress Blog Network
Categories: Blog Statistics, Blogging Tools
by Darnell Clayton on November 25th, 2009
Regardless of whether you are a web designer, journalist or “Joe the Plumber” (note: I say that in love), your tools can define whether you succeed or not on your job.
The same is true for blogging, as having the proper software can help determine the difference between success and failure–or at least separate the pro bloggers from the rest of the noisy crowd.
But when it comes to the iPhone, there are a few apps that I have found that every serious iBlogging pro should have, regardless of what blogging platform you have (at least for the most part). Read More
Categories: Blogging Tools
Tags: iphone, Mobile Blogging
by Darnell Clayton on November 21st, 2009
Whenever I think of open sourced CMS (Content Management System), I often think of Drupal and Joomla which are used by web masters to make powerful websites without breaking the bank.
So you can imagine my surprise when WordPress–software created primarily for blogging–defeated Joomla and Drupal as the Overall Best Open Source CMS for 2009.
Update: Corrections made to article. See below for details.
Read More
Categories: Blogging News, Blogging Tools, WordPress News
Tags: drupal, joomla!, wordpress
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