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- Set Up Social Media to Give You Great Post Ideas
This guest post is by Douglas Lim of The 10 Habits of Highly Effective Social Media Marketing People.
Finding articles and ideas for blog posts is an important skill for bloggers to master—and one that can now be leveraged through the power of social media.
High-quality content is tweeted, liked, bookmarked, and shared around. That’s why social media is fantastic for sourcing great content: we know even before we look at it that it's probably of high quality, since people are sharing it with their friends and followers.
Spend just five minutes setting up your networks of choice to send you great content, and you’ll have no trouble translating and leveraging that inspiration to create your own blog post ideas.
Twitter
One of the nice features of Twitter is that it gives us the ability to create Lists of Twitter accounts.
For example, you can create a List, call it whatever you want, and then add to it all the Twitter accounts that tweet about a particular topic. It could be thought leaders in your field, or it may list brands that regularly write about your topic.
When you load that List in Twitter, you’ll only see tweets from thosepeople—it’s a perfectly curated suite of informationon your topic. Even better, Twitter allows you to subscribe to other people’s Lists. So you can get the benefits of someone else’s work—look especially to the Lists of thought leaders in your field, who know other people who provide great information.
To create a List, simply go to your Twitter homepage and click on the head-shot icon as in the image below. To complete your List, follow the prompts as directed.
Facebook
Facebook is another fantastic social network for sourcing great content. Similar to Twitter, you can create an Interest list and include Fan pages in it. Then, you can view that list and only see page updates from Fan pages you’ve included.
Many brands are now on Facebook, so you can source some great information. To create an Interest list, go to your Facebook home page, and on the bottom-left side click on Add interests, as in the screenshot below.
Next, click on Create List and follow the steps to create your curated list.
Google+
Google+ also allows you to curate social content through its Circles. On Google+ you can create a Circle (of friends, colleagues, thought leaders, etc.), adding Google+ profiles and brand pages to that circle. Then, when you need inspiration for a post, go to the Google+ home screen, and choose only to view a certain Circle by selecting that Circle’s tab.
LinkedIn
This is one of my favourite places to hang out and access great content. If you navigate to your LinkedIn home page, you can click on “See all Top Headlines for You” as in the screen shot below.
Here, you can customize your news according to what you want to read. You can follow industries such as Accounting or Entertainment, or sources such as CNN. LinkedIn will also send you email containing content from these various sources.
The great thing about these top news stories is that they are also tailored to you on the basis of what your connections, industry peers, and the wider professional audience are reading and sharing on LinkedIn. I have found that, with LinkedIn, you get a different spin on the content that’s shared, because most of your connections on LinkedIn will be professionals. This means you can find some real gems that you would not normally have found through Twitter and Facebook, which tend to have broader market appeal. I highly recommend LinkedIn.
Pinterest
At the time of writing, Pinterest doesn’t offer filtering of boards. But what you can do is set up a separate account, search for your blog’s topic, and subscribe to their boards through that account. Then you can view all their pins in a focused way.
Paper.li
This is a really fun way of tying all of the networks we’ve just talked about together. Paper.li is great for pulling in content from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, as well as YouTube and your RSS feeds. Paper.li displays all your selected content in a newspaper-style format; you can also find other people’s papers and subscribe to them.
Curating inspiration
There’s lots of great content that’s constantly being shared on each of the different social media channels. This information will hopefully assist you with sourcing and organising this information so you can curate and share the most relevant content with your followers—and get great inspiration for posts on your blog. Best of all, it’ll only take you a few minutes to set up!
If you have any suggestions or other great curating tips and ideas, do share them below in the comments section.
Douglas Lim is a social media marketing and search engine optimization evangelist. He is also passionate about business and owns his own web design company servicing thousands of clients. Douglas regularly writes about these topics on his blog at The 10 Habits of Highly Effective Social Media Marketing People. Alternatively you can find him living on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or Facebook.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Set Up Social Media to Give You Great Post Ideas
Переслать - Top 5 Google Chrome Extensions For Bloggers
This guest post is by Anthony Wijaya of techexperience.
Today, I’m going to share with you some of the Google Chrome extensions that have made my daily blogging tasks easier.
These are my top five.
1. SEO For Chrome
SEO For Chrome allows you to check, well, pretty much everything about SEO in your site. All you need to do is type in your URL and tons of information about your site’s SEO will pop out, from your indexed pages in Google and Bing, to your Pagerank and traffic levels.
Another good idea to use this extension for is to check your competitors’ SEO status—do a little competitive analysis. You can also do some quick keyword research within the extension itself!
2. Evernote Web Clipper
Have you ever seen an interesting article or piece of news that you might want to post about later? It's quite easy to get sidetracked and forget all about it while you’re browsing.
I usually take note of any ideas I see while browsing through the Evernote Web Clipper extension. Basically, all it does is note down the link for you through a darn simple click-and-drag selection function.
The Evernote Web Clipper also doubles as a handy screen capture for occasions when you see that awesome screencap you want to take.
3. Google Dictionary
Nothing is more embarrassing than a grammatically incorrect word or sentence in your article. Not only can readers see it, you might even get criticized for those errors!
For safety’s sake, I use the Google Dictionary extension.
With this extension, you can:
- double-click any word to view its meaning/definition
- view the complete definition of a whole phrase.
It supports a myriad of languages, including German, French, Italian, and so many more.
4. Ruul screen ruler
I use this for, well, those times when I need to measure something in my browser. The Ruul Screen ruler was quite handy in my blog's first week, since I want to have images on my blog at the perfect size.
You can also use it to find out which font size works for you without doing any trial-and-error corrections. Just use the extension and measure, on a blank page, how much space you want for your font. The result (in pixels) will show you your perfect font size. Mine is 13px.
5. G.lux
This is actually the Chrome’s version of F.lux, which is a tool for the desktop. G.lux functions basically the same way, changing your screen color’s temperature to the warmer side for easier viewing at night (midnight typing anyone?).
Ever notice your eyes getting tired in front of that monitor? It’s probably because of blue-ish monitor rays. This extension will at least reduce those blue rays to some effect, but keep in mind that it’s still not the perfect excuse for midnight blogging. If you want its big brother for the whole desktop, check out f.lux.
Do you use Chrome extensions in your daily blogging tasks? Show us your favourite options in the comments.
Anthony W. is a 17 year old who starts out blogging for fun and writes tips, news and reviews about technology in techexperience. He hopes that every post he write will be useful to that particular someone out there. Subscribe to his blog here or follow him on Twitter (@AnthonyNotStark) to get more of him.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Top 5 Google Chrome Extensions For Bloggers
Переслать - Fresh Ways to Handle Blog Criticism
This guest post is by Harry French of BloggingTips.com.
Sometimes being famous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
When a blogger writes a negative comment about you, or goes on an outright tirade, it can be hard to bite your tongue and move on.
Sometimes, however, that’s the best course of action. Sometimes, you need to put on your boxing gloves and get ready to duke it out.
Why readers post negative comments
Excitement? Jealousy? A clever ploy for attention? A Jedi craves not these things, but many bloggers do.
Criticisms and personal attacks don’t have to be legitimate or even coherent. In fact, many “rants” that visitors will leave in your comments section are just that: rants. They are often emotionally driven and they don’t make much sense when you stop to think about what’s really being said.
Sometimes, of course, criticism is warranted and the points being raised are legitimate. In that case, you can let the critic become your best friend.
But people can post negative comments for all sorts of reasons. It doesn’t even have to be about you or your article. It could be that they’re just having a bad day and decided to take it out on you.
Come to terms with this first, and it’ll be a lot easier to know when to respond and when to walk away.
When to respond, when to walk away
You should definitely respond to legitimate criticisms of something you’re written. With that said, it’s not necessary to repeat yourself like a broken record. If you’ve already answered an objection, you can usually just point any new objecters in the direction of your answer.
When it comes to derogatory, inappropriate, or nonsensical comments, you can ignore most of them.
Think about it: what’s the value of responding to these kinds of comments? Most of the time, it’s a waste of time to bother with them.
On occasion, however, you might be able to monetize someone else’s stupidity. That becomes an interesting decision to make. If you’re saying a lot of controversial things, and you get a decent amount of hate mail for it, you could use these hate comments to generate even more controversy. Take the most blatant offenders and show the world just how ridiculous they are, without coming right out and saying it directly.
Whenever you do need to respond to hate comments, you should do so with civility. Put yourself on moral high ground. This way, you could gain a lot of respect from your regular fans and demonstrate how you strive for rationality and objectivity, even when people say nasty things about you.
Showing your cool in the face of an attack also makes you look stronger (in fact, eventually, you’ll actually become stronger psychologically). It shows that while sticks and stones may break your bones, words really never do hurt you.
How to respond
When you’ve made the decision to respond to criticism, make sure you stay on point. Don’t veer off onto a tangent—that just makes you look a bit scatter-brained and can open you up to further criticism from the commenter.
Also, try to only address any essential aspects of any criticisms raised. For example, Matt Cutts came to Google’s defense by knocking down criticisms that Google’s search engine would favor TLD web addresses over “.com” equivalents.
Cutt’s didn’t respond directly on the website where the criticism was made. Instead, he posted his response to Google+.
Matt sticks to the essential points here, and doesn’t veer off onto tangents. He has a good track record of staying focused, even when criticisms of Google are irrational and emotionally driven.
Finally, don’t get sucked in to a long debate. “One-up-manship” is easy to get into and notoriously difficult to get out of. If you are sticking to facts and the essential points raised, you’ll never get into a back-and-forth argument that goes nowhere.
In fact, you could simply continue asking questions of your tormentor and hope he responds. He may draw out fans of yours who will gladly come to your defense. All the while, free content is being created for your blog.
The author of this blog post on rawfoodsos.com did not even need to get involved in the comments. A visitor dropped a hate comment:
Then, a fan responded for her:
In this example, the blogger’s post generates a heated debate. That debate spontaneously generates massive amounts of free content that is keyword-rich and highly relevant to the blog itself. It may not have been the blogger’s intent, but it happened all the same.
How do you respond to criticisms of your blog? If you have any tips to share, we’d all love to hear them!
This guest post was contributed by Harry French, on behalf of BloggingTips.com.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Fresh Ways to Handle Blog Criticism
Переслать - So You're Making Money Blogging … Now What?
You’ve started a blog, written great content, engaged with readers … and now you’re making a little money at it. Congratulations!
I started blogging seriously with the aim to make a living from it, but I know plenty of bloggers—probably the majority of those making money blogging—have less clear-cut ambitions to profit.
Many money-making bloggers started simply by trying out some monetization method (an affiliate product, perhaps, or advertising) and were pleasantly surprised by the fact that it worked.
If this description fits you, although you might not be quitting your day job any time soon, you’ve at least proven that you can make money from your blog.
That’s an exciting realisation.
So exciting, in fact, that the world of pro blogging focuses heavily on the questions of how to get to that point, rather than what you might do once you reach it.
Today I want to ask that question.
You’re making money … now what?
Let’s say you’ve made your first $20. Or $200, or $2000. What will you do with that money?
Treat yourself to a movie? Celebrate with a dinner in a nice restaurant? Put it into your holiday savings account?
Or will you look at how you could invest it back into your blog, with the aim to earn more next month?
While it mightn’t sound as exciting as any of the options above, I’d encourage you to consider investing at least some of the money you make back into your blog.
How much? That’s up to you. But it might be a good idea to put a set percentage of the money you make through your blog each month aside to reinvest this way.
That percentage may change over the life of your blog, and depending on your blogging goals at a given time. But the important thing is to commit yourself to a percentage that you’ll reinvest into your blog every time you make some money from it.
How will you invest it?
When you make your first few dollars (and it might literally be a few dollars!) blogging, you’ll probably feel the excitement that, wow, blogging really does work! Your efforts have paid off and that idea you decided to try succeeded in making some money. Great!
That elation can be a great springboard for your plans to use the money you’re reinvesting into your blog.
If you made the money through careful selection of an ad network and appropriate advertisers, for example, you may decide to leverage what you’ve learned in that process—this time with some financial backing. You could:
- have a designer change your blog interface to create ad space in different places
- try different ad networks, or change your blog’s listing so that the ads shown on your site are more targeted to specific topics or keywords
- buy advertising space yourself and pay a designer to create some eye-catching ads for you
- set yourself up to sell your own advertising space, if you have a large and targeted enough audience.
Of course you’ll want to spend the money you’re investing in your blog wisely. Rather than throwing it all at a one-shot tactic, try to build on the successes you’ve already had.
You might divide up your investment between two or three different trials or test tactics, to get a sense as to what might be the best way to direct your money-making efforts in the coming weeks and months.
Or, you might decide to spend a portion of the investment on something new, dedicating the rest to building momentum with what’s already working to generate income.
This way, you reduce the risk that you’ll get zero return on the investment you’re making in your blog, and maximize your chances of developing skills in the methods that are proven to work with your blog, niche, and audience. You also have the freedom to experiment with new ideas, to see if they might work for you too.
Hopefully, you’ll maintain the same baseline income you had this month next month, and be able to grow that income with some of these new ideas you’re trying out. So next month, you might even have a little more money to invest in growing your blog—and that monthly income—even further.
How are you spending the money you make?
Investing money into your blog can be a big shift for those who have been running their blogs on blood, sweat, and tears alone—but it’s an important one.
It can help you to understand that your blog has the potential to build your income, and to think practically about the implications that could have for you. It can also drive your day-to-day blogging and open you up to new opportunities to learn and engage with blogging as a rewarding challenge.
Do you reinvest some of the money you make from blogging into your blog itself? If not, how do you spend the money you make? Share your approach in the comments.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
So You’re Making Money Blogging … Now What?
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