This is a question I find myself coming back to often. As longer form sharing starts to move to central platforms like Google+, should we be migrating our activities to where our friends’ eyeballs are? I dig what Google has done with plus. I think they’re opening the door for longer form content sharing in a way that Facebook or other social networks haven’t. From an interaction standpoint, posting to Google+ generates far more discussion, feedback and attention in real time (that’s been my experience so far). The flip side is that in the long term, you don’t really own your longer posts and after only a short time, they disappear into the stream, never to be found again. I suppose it comes down to personal preference and whether you’d rather have more real-time conversations than build a library of articles that you own and control.
To those of you who have subscribed to this blog, how would you rather consume long form (for this blog)? Thoughts or opinions either way?
I’ll be speaking at Connected Marketing Week tomorrow in a session called “Small Voices, Big Results” at 1pm. Specifically, I’ll be discussing blogging rules that I’ve seen work over the years.Since I started blogging publicly in 2007, I’ve learned a lot about blogging and blogging culture. Along with things I’ve learned about myself and my own style there are some universal rules to follow to be a successful blogger, no matter who you are or what you’re writing about. Today I thought I’d share a few lessons I’ve learned and start a discussion. If you’ve got any additional bits of advice you would have given yourself when you first started blogging, please share them in the comments. I’d love to hear them. I don’t pretend to be an expert. I’m always learning like the rest of you.
3.0 is here, and it’s packed with awesomeness. I do all of my website development on WordPress these days and there are a lot of great additions in this release that I’ve been waiting on for this site, as well as on client projects. They’ve made the maintenance easier with bulk update functionality for plugins and the software, you now have custom post types for products, newsletters and real estate listings, and you’ve got a heck of a lot more control in the widget area. Here’s a 3 minute video overview on the new release, as well as an hour long video (bottom) where Matt Mullenweg talks at length about some of the updates, why they went that way, and shares some of the vision and philosophy behind what Automattic sees in WordPress’s future.
[tweetmeme] Want a Facebook “Like” button for your WordPress blog like the one you see on this blog? It’s super simple. Todd Williams, Executive Developer at Media 1 Designs, got inspired by yesterday’s announcement at F8 about the Open Graph, and coded up a nifty lightweight “Facebook Like” WordPress plugin that you can use for your WordPress site! It was officially released today on the GunnJerkens blog.
Here’s what the options panel looks like:
Installation:
1. Head Over To the GunnJerkens blog (to make sure you’ve got the most up-to-date version)
2. Download the plugin (this link to the zip file will only work for the current version)
3. Unzip the file and place the Facebook Like plugin folder in your WP-Content –> Plugins Folder
4. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
5. Go to Plugins –> Installed
6. Activate the plugin
7. Go to The Facebook-Like options panel, configure the settings
8. Click save.
And you’re done! Simple. Lightweight. Awesome (and every time someone clicks “like” that activity will show up in their Facebook stream and bring traffic back to your blog.
This morning I got a pleasant surprise. The mail man dropped off a hardcover copy of Seth Godin‘s new book Linchpin sent from a new friend. Totally made my day. Luke, thanks for reminding me again why I love to write this blog, and why helping others and giving generously are the best ways to connect with others.
This lecture from Seth Godin is around 2 years old, but the ideas still resonate strongly, especially in the wake of recent discussions about Chris Anderson’s new book Free and the concepts of Freemium and Freeconomics. If you’re currently writing a book, or thinking of writing a book one day, you should get a lot out of this. The core concepts to keep in mind as you’re going through this are:
Books are souvenirs (give ideas away and people buy)
Permission is your only asset (relationships matter)
Conversations are (the best) marketing
Make words for readers, not readers for words (ideas that spread sell, so get the order right)
Blogs work (and continue to pay off over time), and
It’s not about selling books (it’s about spreading ideas)
I’m not a top blogger, a thought leader or industry expert, and probably won’t be any time soon. No big deal. I’m not out to take the internet by storm. I don’t worry about my daily traffic stats, I don’t stress out about posting every day and I don’t blog for money (although I do make money doing it that supports the habit). I originally started blogging just to become a better writer. I’ve been blogging consistently now for over 2 years and I’ve learned that blogging itself is not a means to any end. The real value is in the process – it’s about continuous learning, connecting, collaborating, and growing as a person. In many ways, it’s a lifestyle choice rather than an activity or a hobby, and the people who are doing it for the right reasons are generally in it for the long haul.
Seth Godin and Tom Peters recently weighed in on why they blog at an AMEX OPEN forum. There were some great points made by both on the value of blogging that really resonated with me — I particularly appreciated Seth’s comment on developing humility, and Tom’s on how it changes your emotional and intellectual outlook. These are two of the most successful bloggers on the web and even after years of blogging and thousands of posts they still site growth, dialogue and openness to change as the top reasons they’re still writing. I find a lot of comfort in that. I’ve included some video highlights from the forum below…
Let’s say you’ve recently moved to a new city. You’ve got a brand new apartment in an unfamiliar neighborhood and your friends and family are now hundreds of miles away.
A few weeks in, the rush of everything being new subsides and you start to feel lonely. No problem, you think. You make friends easily. It’s only a matter of time before you’ve got a bunch of great folks actively calling you to join them to hang out, right? All you have to do is muster the courage to get out of the house and meet people. The only question is, where do you go?
Assuming your goal is to meet people you’d actually want to get to know and build lasting relationships with, would you start by heading straight to the biggest, loudest night club in the city? Or would you head down to the neighborhood bar, cafe or coffee shop, where your neighbors were all hanging out after work? Given the choice between the two, my bet is that you’d chose the latter. So would I.
Starting a blog and being social online for the first time can feel a lot like a move to a new city. It’s lonely at the beginning and it takes a while to build a reputation and develop relationships with people who you like and respect, and who are genuinely interested in you and your content.
How you go about developing relationships online should closely mirror the way that you do it offline. You’ve got to go to a place where people share your passions and interests, introduce yourself and start a discussion. When deciding where to go, try to pick places the same way that you’d pick a place to hang out offline. Virtual spaces have distinct personalities and atmospheres all their own that reflect the collection of personalities of the community. Huge blogs like TechCrunch and Gizmodo will be just like a massive nightclub – tons of noise and lots of superficial interaction. On the other hand, smaller communities and personal blogs will feel more like a local watering hole – and with fewer people and less noise, you’re more likely to engage in higher quality discussions and build meaningful relationships quickly. If you find one of these spots where you meet people you like that feels like it’s got your kindof vibe, devote some time to visiting frequently and sticking around and interacting a lot when you do. You’ll find you have a lot more fun, build better relationships, and before long, it’ll be a spot where everybody knows your name.
Social scientists have a name for the incessant online contact we experience by consistently immersing ourselves in social media. They call it “ambient awareness.” For better or worse, the label accurately captures the main benefits of being social on the web; Using popular tools like Twitter and Friendfeed to engage groups of people online gives you an enhanced awareness of what’s going on within the digital ecosystem (for people and topics you care about) in near real time. The only problem is that it can feel a lot like drinking from a fire hose.
The benefits of social media, no doubt, far outweigh the costs. Being able to “follow people” instead of just “following blogs and news” is tremendously informative and fulfilling, and being able to actually engage people of like mind who are having an impact on the world who share passions in your fields of interest etc is rewarding. Social media has given us an unprecedented amount of access to people and ideas, and for that I love it.
But drinking from the fire hose isn’t all sunshine and roses (I wouldn’t use the fire hose analogy if it was) . Participating consistently comes with significant trade offs and cons that are important to be aware of and manage if we want to get the most out of our days. I’ve learned some lessons this year from being hyper connected that I’d like to share. I think they’ll resonate with many of you…
I’ve been using Lijit since the inception of the service and while I’ve added and removed many different “fad” widgets, Lijit remains a core widget I’ve kept because it continues to consistently bring me traffic and add value to my readers. As of today, Lijit has brought my blog over 7500 unique visitors via research (a feature that’s unique to Lijit) and I’m averaging one or two blog searches per day – not bad for a widget on a personal blog that only gets updated once or twice a week.
Lijit offers a variety of options for customizing the widget and there are a five simple things you can do to increase the number of times your readers use Lijit, which increases reader engagement, page views, and search revenue.
Tip 1: Add the Popular Searches Cloud. A small number of terms that display beneath the search box would not, on first glance, seem to do much, but on average, publishers see anywhere from a 200 – 500% increase in searches, according to Lijit – my experience is that this figure is accurate. The popular searches cloud does a lot to signal what types of content is popular on your blog and invites people to click on popular searches.
How does the Popular Searches Cloud work? It records repeat searches and displays the most popular ones. To appear in the cloud, a search must be performed a minimum of three times and come from different IPs. You can control the number of terms that appear in the cloud in your widget settings. You can also blacklist terms from appearing in your search cloud within the settings.
Tip 2: Move the Search Box to the Top of Your Blog. A simple rule is that if people see the search box, they will use the box. If it’s hidden among all the other items on the sidebar, people will miss out on the goodness that is Lijit. How much does moving the box above the fold mean in terms of searches? Another 200-300% increase. Nice!
Tip 3: Make it the Only Search Box. Ok, this one might not be such a revelation. If there is only one place to search, then, well, people will only use that one place to search. Amazing and simple.
Tip 4: Be an Expert. As a publisher, you know that writing about a specific topic will almost always increase readership and engagement. But did you know that the more expertise you develop around a specific topic, the more people want to search your content? I know! Weird.
Tip 5: Turn on Re-Search. There is a feature in your widget settings called Re-Search. What does this do? Well, when someone does a search on a search engine like Google, Yahoo! or MSN, and clicks on your result, Lijit does the same search in your search widget when they get to your site. Then, depending on your settings, Lijit displays those results either with your widget, on top of your blog, or below the post. Why is this good? About 1-2% of readers will click on a result in Re-Search, letting them read more of your content. This increased engagement helps readers trust you more, which leads them to read your content more, which leads them to trust you more…it’s a crazy cycle of goodness!
That’s it. The bottom line is, the more often people use Lijit on your site, the more often they will be able to discover your content whever you’re creating it, which is what we all want. Small tweaks can and will make a difference.
Note: Special Thanks to Tara at Lijit for providing the content and discusson that led to this post.
I’m pretty psyched about the direction that WordPress seems to be going with 2.7. Customized dashboard? Moderating comments right from the back end? Right on. Personalization and usability in the UI is where it’s at.
The web is evolving rapidly and it’s nice to see that social networking is evolving right along with it. If you frequent top tech sites like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, you’ve probably heard (or read) the term “Semantic Web” hundreds of times this year, but in this blogger’s humble opinion, all the hype and hoopla hasn’t produced much that most of us can actually use, especially not in the social networking arena. Until now. A New York-based tech startup called AdaptiveBlue has just released a FireFox browser add-on called Glue that just might turn traditional social networking on its head. In my estimation, Glue’s release represents a significant leap forward in social browsing and is likely the first of many semantic technologies that will begin changing the way people connect and have more meaningful interaction on the web. Here’s just a few reasons why Glue is a game-changer:
Semantic Technologies (Can) Put Our Networking Activities In Context
One of the key insights that Glue was built on is that the things we like and the content we consume say as much about us as anything else, and that connecting over things and content we love with others is meaningful and enjoyable. With Glue, AdaptiveBlue has built a contextual network that uses semantic technology across the web to automatically connect people around the everyday things they are interested in – books, music, movies, celebrities, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants and more. Here’s the awesome part…because the network is decentralized and distributed across popular sites using the AB Meta Markup, it doesn’t matter when or where the users visit things, Glue recognizes the object and connects people around it. For example, Glue recognizes a particular movie (like IronMan) as the same object on IMDB, Amazon, Netflix, RottenTomato, Fandango etc. and treats it the same way. If a friend on Glue interacts with that movie on any site using the AB Meta Markup, that interaction will show up on any other compliant site for that object in Glue. There is no destination site, the network is always in the user’s context anywhere they are interacting on the web. Here’s a quick video that illustrates exactly how Glue works and how it builds networks of people around objects:
If you’re an avid online social networker you’re aware of just how many social networking, tagging and microblogging platforms are out there. Most of us don’t have time to respond to voice mail and e-mail every day, let alone check our Twitter updates and Facebook accounts and Flickr friends. Simplicity is key. The beauty of Glue is that it doesn’t force you into a one-or-the other decision when it comes to the suite of services you use, and it doesn’t force you to build a new profile on a new site. Rather, it adds value to all your existing services by allowing you to dynamically build a portable profile as you browse the web that loads (for other Glue users) on all of the sites that you claim in Glue seamlessly. You don’t have to change your habits at all. The value here is that every Glue user that visits any of your sites (your blog, your Twitter stream, LinkedIn profile, Flickr strean etc) sees the Glue bar, adding variety, and context to every profile without you having to do anything but claim a page. For people who are into lifestreaming, this is a major value-add. Plus, it gives people an easy way to find all of your content on the web. The profile provides quick and easy hop links to all of your sites with just a few clicks. Here are a couple of screenshots of my various profiles around the web (you can see that the Glue bar shows on all of them)
Providing Meaningful Filters For People And Things
After spending a few months on Glue (in private beta), what I’ve found the most interesting is that I can use people as filters for (finding and analyzing) things and use things to help me filter and analyze people. The biggest problem I have when I interact with people I’ve never met on text-based platforms like Twitter or FriendFeed is that for the most part I’m doing so with very little personal context. The biggest frustration I have with social media in general when it comes to meeting new people is being able to answer one big question “What is this person like?”. Glue is awesome for giving someone’s suite of profiles “a common personality” because it rides on top of all of their profiles (as discussed above). Here’s what I mean…
Let’s say I find a guy named “JoeTweetalot” on twitter. All I know about Joe is that he’s got a short bio on his page that just says “I live in San Jose, I work at a software company and I’m awesome. DM me!”. Doesn’t really tell me much. BUT he’s on glue. Right on! So his profile drops down and I surf his stuff….now I know that Joe is interested in these things:
The stuff I can see in his Glue Profile acts as a great filter for his personality – I already have an idea of what Joe’s sense of humor might be like, I can guess his approximate age, I know he’s interested in similar topics as me, and his music and food tastes are also similar to mine. It says instantly “do I have stuff in common with this person or not?” Which is the most frequent question I have that rarely gets answered on the social web. Being able to share a bit of ourselves in this way allows us to find more meaningful connections with others and allows us to connect over the things we love.
Final Thoughts
With any luck, we’re going to start seeing smarter technologies for social browsing and networking that provide better context and meaning to our interactions online. Glue is the most noteworthy of such smart technologies available to date. While still in its infancy, the service represents a significant advance in how people can use semantic technologies to pull their many services together (meaningfully) and find new ways to find each other and connect over shared interests. The novelty, simplicity and portability of Glue is a major plus in such a cluttered social networking world and shows us the way forward. But don’t take my word for it…try it yourself. Get Glue.
I link, you link, we all link. So why not do it the right way? Following a few simple rules when you create links helps search engines, helps your site rank, and boosts your credibility as a blogger. If you’re still creating links that look like this – “You can read more about linking by clicking HERE“ – you’re going to look like a noob, insult the intelligence of your readers, confuse search engines and lose any SEO benefit you might have gotten from creating a quality link. Bottom line, how you link is just as important as what you link to. Here’s a few quick tips for good linking etiquette:
Search Engines Are Dumb. Help Them Out.
Fortunately, Google’s systems haven’t become self-aware yet, and while spiders can recognize and assign relevance scores to your links based on the words you use, they aren’t smart enough to derive meaning from language the way a reader can.
Let’s say you’ve just written a life-changing post about how hot Margaret Thatcher is. To add value for your readers, you decide to link out to Margaret Thatcher’s Wikipedia page (so that people can see her photo and instantly agree with you). If you link like this…”Check out Margaret Thatcher’s smoldering pic here“, web crawlers see this -
Any human can tell you that the relevance of the keyword “here” is ZIP, but the search engine’s can’t. So instead, you want the robot crawling your site to gobble up a nice keyword-rich link by using the most relevant keyword for what you’re pointing to like this -
<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_thatcher“> Margaret Thatcher</a>
Kudos to you. You just made the search engines a bit brighter by pointing them in the right direction. Same work, relevance = 100%.
Boost Your Rankings
If you link correctly, the quality and relevance of the links in your site can have a positive effect on SEO rankings. Search engines use algorithms to determine a site’s relevance and popularity in relation to what people are searching for. One of the factors affecting the site’s ranking for any given search term is how many relevant links are contained within the site.
There are two types of links – internal and external. Internal links are those which link one page of your site to another. Internal links show search engines the breadth and density of your site and highlight important sections for search terms people use. External links, by contrast, are those where your site links to another site, or when another site links to yours. Both types of links are important to search engines, but with rankings, relevant external links (both in-coming and out-going) matter more. In-coming links, of course, matter most, but relevant keyword-rich linking out definitely helps.
Readers Appreciate Good Linking Habits
Whenever I find a person using the phrase “click here” for a link, I cringe a little. Not only is it just a little too early 90′s, it insults my intelligence as a reader. Everyone gets how linking works. There’s no need to explicitly point a person to the link with your words. We all know what links look like. We all use them. Besides, when you change the flow of your sentences to include calls to action like “click here”, the whole thing just doesn’t flow as well.
Aside from not having their intelligence challenged, readers also appreciate being able to scan your posts for keywords. While it might be shocking to bloggers who are a liiiiittle bit too enamored with their own writing skills, not everyone reads every word. In fact, studies have shown that most people don’t read at all – they scan (I know, right? How dare they! pfff) – so making relevant keywords pop out of the text is a good thing because it allows visitors on your site to skip reading every word and find what they’re looking for fast.
Ok, netizens…go forth and link with style and purpose!
I’m humbled and excited by all the positive attention that the redesign of my blog’s been getting these past few weeks and I’m honored by how well the new look has been received by the WordPress community.
As many of you know, this blog’s proudly sporting a customized “Woo” Theme, so I was particularly psyched this weekend to have the new design included in the launch of the brand new WooThemes showcase. Of course, I was twice as psyched when Adii, one of the Web’s top WordPress theme designers, contacted me over the weekend to interview me and get some of my thoughts on the new design and WordPress Premium themes. Among other things, we discussed blog design and why the choice to go Premium is an important blogging decision. I also shared some breif thoughts on blogging trends like lifestreaming. Adii posted a transcript of the interview this morning on the WooThemes blog.
At first glance it might seem counter intuitive that microblogging could allow you to get to know someone more intimately than a regular blog. Closeness and familiarity in 140 characters or less? You might ask yourself: What could I possibly say in a series of text messages that would be meaningful enough for acquaintances to bother to keep reading? People everywhere are discovering that the answer is actually “a lot”.
A fundamental fact about microblogging platforms like Twitter is that the mobile devices we use and the speed we can post changes not only how we blog, but what we blog. Stuff that I’d never blog about makes it to Twitter, and I’m sure that’s true for most Twitter users. Even capping out at 140 characters per post, a stream of small posts about where you are, where you’re going, what you’re doing, eating, enjoying, reading, watching, feeling in near real time is actually far more personal and meaningful than reading a more lengthy article written by someone on the realities of, say, “microblogging.” :)
The recent rise and success of microblogging platforms like Twitter has shown us that people crave the personal, even in short snippets. Places you go, meals you enjoy, small comments and opinions on things you like as you’re experiencing them. These snippets of personal data matter in the blogging world. That they matter, coupled with the fact that microblogging allows us the speed and convenience to share this data with others conveniently, means that microblogging will only increase in popularity.
(Here’s my Twitter link for those curious folks interested in following me.)
Let’s say you’ve recently moved to a new city. You’ve got a brand new apartment in an unfamiliar neighborhood and your friends and family are now hundreds of miles away.
I’ve been using 
