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- Use Email to Post to Your WordPress.org Blog
This guest post is by Anurag Bansal of Techacker.
Owners of WordPress.org blogs don’t get the flexibility to post by email through a WordPress service. It’s very surprising to see that such a popular platform doesn’t offer a native way of creating blog post by sending an email—especially since WordPress.com owners can update their blogs using native WordPress functionality.
If you have a blog on Tumblr or Posterous (which was recently acquired by Twitter), you know how convenient it is to update your blog using email. It naturally increases the frequency with which you update your blog.
Today I’m going to introduce you to an easy way to post by email to your WordPress.org blog using a service I am a big fan of—ifttt.
ifttt stands for If This, Then That. This service, which was introduced recently on ProBlogger, makes it really easy to do many online tasks, some of which are mentioned below.
How to post by email to a WordPress.org blog
- Create an ifttt account if you don’t already have one.
- Activate and authorize the WordPress.org blog you want to post by email to. To do this, click on WordPress logo under Channels on ifttt. Then add the appropriate details to authorize your WordPress blog to use with ifttt. Once activated, you will see a similar screen to the one shown below.
- Activate the email channel connection to the email account from which you’d like to send posts. All you need is to click on Email icon and enter your email address. ifttt will immediately send a PIN to this email address. Copy that PIN from the email into the box on ifttt. Once your account’s confirmed, you’ll have successfully activated the email channel.
- Use this recipe to create a task. While creating the task, you can edit the details shown in the screenshot below to suit your needs.
- Once the task is activated, all you have to do is send an email from the email account you confirmed in Step 3 to trigger@ifttt.com with the specified # tag in the subject line. In ifttt terms, that tag says, “if email is received from the account specified earlier, then post it to the WordPress blog set up earlier.”
- ifttt will create a post on your WordPress.org blog, using the email details as follows:
- The subject of the email becomes the title of the blog post.
- The body of the email becomes the content of the blog post.
- Tags for the post are specified in the recipe. You can change these in the task details on ifttt.
- Categories for the post are also specified by you in the ifttt recipe.
There are many other recipes I use to update my WordPress.org blog, including:
- Post photos simultaneously on Instagram and a WordPress blog.
- Cross-post from a Tumblr blog to WordPress blog.
I have been able to successfully post many updates to my blog using this process. It’s easy, painless and quick. All it takes to update your blog is an email!
Stop postponing that great blog post idea just because you didn’t have the right tools at the time. Now, there’s no need to install any plugins—just use email.
How do you update your WordPress blog now? Do you think email updates would make it easier for you to update your blog? If you’re already using emil updates on another platform, is it helpful? Let us know in the comments.
Anurag Bansal is a technology enthusiasts and internet addict. He reviews various internet services, Android and iPhone apps and provide tips on many technology related topics on his blog at Techacker. Anurag also releases a FREE Monthly Magazine - THM - on his blog. You may follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Use Email to Post to Your WordPress.org Blog
Переслать - 5 Lessons Steve Jobs Could Teach You About Creating a Popular Blog
This guest post is by Greg Digneo of Sales Leads in 30 Days.
"What can I learn from the business life of Steve Jobs that will help me grow my blog?"
We've all asked ourselves the question. Because the public nature of blogging goes against his strict privacy policy, this isn't an easy question to answer. But it's one that I couldn't get out of my head.
There has to be something to learn from a guy who revolutionized multiple industries and created two iconic companies. Look beyond his temperamental management style and the black turtlenecks, and analyze the way he built companies and gave presentations. You will find several principles that you can apply to your own business.
Below are five lessons that Steve Jobs could teach us about creating popular a blog.
"Make a dent in the universe"—Steve Jobs
In Walter Isaacson's book Steve Jobs, Pepsi CEO John Scully recounts Jobs's pitch to come work for Apple.
Scully remarks: "Steve's head dropped as he stared at his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for days. 'Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?'"
Apple products aren't created to make money in an industry. They are created to redefine the way the industry does business. The Apple II gave birth to the PC industry. The iPod and iTunes combination remade the music industry. And the iPhone redefined the way a phone is made.
Likewise, the most popular blogs in the world create a "dent" in their niche.
Ask yourself this: if someone were to read every article you've written, how would their life improve one year from now?
Once you answer that question, you will create a higher sense of purpose, and stand out from the countless blogs in your niche.
For instance, one of my favorite blogs is Pam Slim's Escape from Cubicle Nation. There are millions of entrepreneurship, marketing, and career blogs on the web, but Pam packages her expertise to create the higher purpose of "helping frustrated employees in corporate jobs break out and start their own businesses."
So, go ahead and be bold. Find your blog's purpose. And put a dent in the universe.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"—Leonardo DaVinci
Apple products are famous for being simple and intuitive to use. As Steve Job's said in Walter Isaacson's book: "The way we're running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let's make it simple. Really simple."
The iPhone has only one button on its face. The iPod has only a scroll wheel. You don't need an instruction manual to operate either of these devices.
When Derek Halpern launched his blog Social Triggers, he took this advice to heart. When you visit his blog, there are only two things you can do:
- Read his content.
- Enter your email address and sign up for his newsletter.
And the results speak for themselves. In a little over one year, Derek has taken Social Triggers from brand new to over 12,000 subscribers.
Yet so many blogs do just the opposite. They have navigation bars with too many options. The design of the blog is often cluttered, leaving the reader feeling lost and overwhelmed.
Do you want the reader to download your ebook? Connect with you on social media? Subscribe to your RSS? Make your blog more intuitive and pick the one thing you want your readers to do.
Be "amazingly zippy"
As Carmine Gallo says in his book Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: "Jobs is one of the few business leaders who could confidently call a product 'amazingly zippy.'"
He used these types of words to communicate complex products and features to the masses. For instance, when describing the buttons on the screen of the iMac, he said they "look so good you’ll want to lick them." (Fortune magazine 4 January 2000). He could have described them as having the perfect dimensions, the perfect color, and the perfect gloss, but he knew that his primary audience wouldn't care.
As bloggers, we often communicate highly complex ideas, and our job is to speak in a language that our audiences can understand. It can be easy to get caught in the echo chamber and forget that most readers who visit your blog have very little knowledge of your niche.
Here's a simple way to ensure that you create content the majority of your readers will understand. After every post you write, ask yourself this: "Will my mom get it?" If your mom can't understand it, then there is a good chance that you will alienate large segments of your audience.
"Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life"—Steve Jobs
So began Jobs’s famous Stanford Commencement address.
Steve Jobs was a masterful story teller. Every keynote he gave was a triumph of good over evil. The audience had a problem and Apple was going to save the day.
Before he introduced the iPhone, Jobs explained why current smartphone products were so bad, and how Apple would come to the rescue. For instance, the keys were permanently fixed into the plastic case of the phone. But that wouldn't happen to the iPhone. The iPhone's keys were built directly into the software, allowing each application to have the perfect user interface.
By telling stories, Jobs allowed his audience to become a part of the presentation. Bloggers can use this same tactic.
You can use case studies and customers to show how they have succeeded by using your products and implementing your ideas. And there is a simple formula you can use to create an engaging case study:
- First, you describe in vivid detail your customer's life before buying the product.
- Then you explain exactly how your customer implemented your product or idea.
- Finally, you show how much better your customer's life is after you've saved the day.
Stay hungry, stay foolish
In the 1960's Jobs read the Whole Earth Catalog, which he described as the Google in paperback. He said "It was idealistic and full of tools that you could use."
On the back cover of the final issue from the mid 1970s, were the words “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” Jobs' Stanford Commencement speech concluded with him urging the graduates to do the same.
Part of being a blogger is to have an insatiable curiosity. You scour the web and books for new theories, new ideas, and new innovations that pertain to your niche. Then you take these new concepts and apply them to what we already know.
And you know what? Sometimes it gets messy. Your mistakes are made in public for the entire world to see.
Those of us in the trenches know that we're going to ruffle feathers. We know that there are times we're going to be wrong. Often, we need to take one step back before we can move two steps forward. To build a popular blog, you must constantly indulge your curiosity and keep pushing forward.
And one more thing…
Finally, I want to recall one of the stories from Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs.
Steve Jobs had an argument with one of his engineers about the boot up time for the Macintosh operating system. To quickly resolve the argument, he asked the engineer, "If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" The engineer responded that he probably could, and wound up reducing the boot time of the operating system by 28 seconds.
Now I turn the question to you: "If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to implement these lessons and improve your blog?" I'm serious.
Your marketing blog can save a business and a livelihood. Your personal finance blog can save a family from going under. Your fitness blog can save a life (literally).
So what are you waiting for? Get started. Right now.
Greg Digneo teaches businesses how to get more traffic and increase online sales in 30 days. Click here to download his free ebook How to Generate 100 Sales Leads in 30 Days.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
5 Lessons Steve Jobs Could Teach You About Creating a Popular Blog
Переслать - How to SEO Your Blog Post Series
This guest post is by Keith Bishop of Online Digital Junkie.
Google’s Panda Update, as well as the recent post from Darren about hosting a guest post series, has prompted me to take a deeper look into the implementation and search benefits associated with putting series on my own sites.
What I found tells me that publishing a series can be a good move if it’s done correctly. So let's look at when a series is a good idea, as well as some of the issues that need to be avoided for the optimal search performance of the series you publish.
When to use a series
A series is best used when you have a lot of material and media that would slow your page load time if you published it all in one article. Long load times can have a negative effect on your search ranking, as well as causing users to hit the Back button before your post ever finishes loading.
You can check page download speeds on sites like Pingdom. My personal goals are to have all of my main landing pages load with 1.5 seconds, and the rest no longer than two seconds.
Another great time to use series is if you find a group of posts on your site that have similar content with overlapping keywords. This scenario causes your own pages to compete with each other and suffer in search rank. Under these circumstances it would be beneficial to rework your content into a series and allow it to build upon itself. The result of this, as I will explain later, will harness all of the combined SEO benefits and push your series up in the SERP.
The last, and probably most applicable, reason to publish series is when you have a lengthy subject that you are covering over an extended period of time. I certainly don't want to read a 10,000 word article on the same subject—or have it delivered to my email. Everyone needs a little variety.
The negative aspects of series
Series have their downsides, as far as usability and search rank go. The worst part is the increased load time that the user experiences while navigating to each article, instead of having it load all at once on a single page. Most of the time, this is a good trade-off—the only exception being a long text article which will likely load quickly as a single post, and won’t benefit from being split into parts.
Another issue arises when the middle or last part of the series ranks better in the search results than the first part, and that becomes the landing page for search users. This is sort of like showing a guest your home by walking them through the garage first, and it’s something you want to avoid. The solution? Optimizing your series navigation.
How to link your series for greatest SEO and usability
Proper linking is accomplished by using the [link] element in the [head] section of the post page. This hints to Google that the page is part of a series, and also indicates the position of the document within the series.
To accomplish page ordering, we use the [rel="prev" and rel="next"] attributes that in the [link] pagination. This will ensure that the first part of your series will almost always be the one to show up in the search results. Note, though, that Google says “almost always” when it discusses this, so there must be occasions where the search engine likes an article deeper in the series for some reason.
Pagination is easy in WordPress, and there are probably some short codes for the other content management systems that will make it easy to implement in those as well.
Let’s imagine that you want to publish all the material in a series at once. All you need to do in WP is to put the entire series of articles into one post, then add [<!--nextpage-->] wherever you want to break the content up into separate pages or parts. You can then modify the look of your pagination links with CSS.
If you want to drip-feed your series to users over an extended period of time—perhaps in weekly installments—use a head injection plugin that will allow you to add the
[]information to the series manually as you publish each article.A good WordPress plugin that takes care of this is HiFi (Head injection / Foot injection).
Hand-coded blogs will need to have this information added manually into the head section. Here is an example of what the code looks like.
<head>
<title>Your Page Title</title>
<link rel=”prev” href=”http://yoursite.com/previouspage/”>
<link rel=”next” href=”http://yoursite.com/nextpage/”>
</head>
Naturally, the first page in the series will not have a [prev] attribute and the last page will not have a [next] attribute. This is how the search bots know where the series starts and ends. Clickable navigation links will also need to be coded at the end of each article in the series.
The most beneficial reason to use the [prev/next] attributes is that the search engines will count the series as one article and funnel all the SEO benefits from the series through to the page that’s shown in the search results.
This means that all of the likes, G+, tweets, and links back from the entire series will count together, instead of competing with one another. I don't know about you, but that gets me excited.
What not to do
You may still find information about this online, but what you do not want to do is link your series using the [rel="canonical"] attribute on your links.
This method will prevent the wrong post (e.g. a later part in a series) from ranking higher than the one you wanted (the first part in the series), but it also tells the search engine that this is duplicate content and it shouldn’t be indexed. The canonical attribute was used in the past under a slightly different set of circumstances, and is no longer applicable to series.
Too bad there isn't some way to certify our content so that we could get the SEO benefits from our content when it gets scraped or syndicated. That would be awesome, but it is likely a dream for another day…
Keith currently writes for Beauty & Bandaids and is currently obsessed with his new outdoor adventure watch. Watch obsession to new blog is OCD at its finest.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to SEO Your Blog Post Series
Переслать - The "On Fire" Blogging Success Formula [Case Study]
This guest post is by Stephen Guise of Deep Existence.
It was July, 2011. My personal development blog, Deep Existence, was flying high. Every new post I published would get at least 20-30 comments and a good number of social shares. Not world-class blogger numbers, but pretty good for a young blog (five months) and with solid forward momentum.
Later that month, a spider bit me, and a chain of health problems ensued. I also got a full-time job. Between the two distractions, Deep Existence wound up being mostly ignored for the next seven months.
When I was ready to jump back in, I figured I just needed to post consistently again to reignite the community.
Wrong. So wrong.
No matter how fantastic I thought a post was or how many hours I spent researching and crafting it, the response to my blog was tepid at best—not even close to the “good old days.”
Even when I revamped the site to be more attractive (including a pricey new logo), and initiated a consistent one-post-per-week schedule, it didn’t matter. Finally, I understood why.
Quality can’t fend for itself
If anyone tells you that great content attracts readers, they’re fibbing. There is false information out there that says if your content is good enough, people will come.
I will dispel that myth with a simple, hypothetical example. Let’s compare ProBlogger to Papa Joe’s blog.
- ProBlogger: Thousands of people are visiting, sharing articles, and commenting every day.
- Papa Joe’s blog: A few dozen people per day find his articles, and notice that they are not commented on or shared.
Now imagine if exactly the same, high quality article was posted on these two sites. The ProBlogger article would go viral. Papa Joe’s article might be tweeted once (by him).
And what if the next 300 articles were duplicated in the same way on both blogs over the next year? The results would stay mostly the same. Papa Joe would be ignored as ProBlogger soared.
The difference is that ProBlogger is sensitive to quality (a good thing) because this blog has high exposure and a favorable perception. But Papa Joe’s article quality doesn’t matter much. Visitors don’t know who Papa Joe is and he sure doesn’t seem popular, so his content will get an unfair docking. And yet, his articles are amazing. Poor Papa.
The blogging success formula
My blog fell from success to failure, and then I failed to return it to success. Through this process, I discovered the false belief that continues to circle in the blogosphere today: that quality content is good enough.
Even if you have a decent number of readers, it’s not enough.
There’s a reason this article isn’t on my blog. I am Papa Joe right now. The quality of my content has remained high, but people forgot I existed when I took a lengthy leave of absence. This is fascinating, considering that by then I had more subscribers and traffic than ever before.
In hindsight, I noticed something interesting about how my blog became popular the first time. The response to my articles was directly related to my activity outside my blog. And as I gained greater exposure, the perception of Deep Existence changed for the better, and people began to give my content a fair chance (and they liked it).
The perception shift was critical, but it grew rather methodically with my consistent exposure—just like a fire as it’s just getting started. But before too long, the flames were building upon themselves. So even when I stopped seeking exposure, the fire was strong enough to be sustained by quality articles.
But a fire without fuel dies, as did mine.
I stopped writing, and the fire faded lower and lower until Deep Existence was just a firepit of cold ashes. Months later, I began to add firewood—quality content—to the cold ash pit, but there was no flame to consume it. I needed a spark.
So here I am, striking the flint once again. Does anyone have a lighter?
- Use sparks of blog exposure to…
- Ignite the flames of improved perception.
- Build firewood made of quality content to keep your blog on fire!
Has this formula of blogging success matched your experience?
Stephen Guise exists in real life and on twitter. He is now a doubleblogger™ at Deep Existence – Personal Development’s Deep End and Irrational Humor – Moderately Good Website. Stephen speaks in 3rd person fluently.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
The “On Fire” Blogging Success Formula [Case Study]
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