Blogging

Everyone who writes a business blog ultimately wants the same thing—more traffic. The posts below, some of the best of the past year on business blogging, provide helpful guidance on launching a new blog successfully; techniques for increasing visits to an existing blog; sources of free and cheap images to help your blog posts stand out; increasing your exposure through blog directories and RSS sites; and developing relationships with other influential bloggers in your industry.

How To Launch A Successful Blog In The First 90 Days by Influential Marketing Blog

Rohit Bhargava provides a list of tasks for new bloggers to focus on in the first three months of the blog, broken down into discrete time periods—for example, days 1-15 (find a good name, match your blog name and URL), days 15-30 (establish your blog “brand,” get it listed in the major blog directories), and days 30-60 (reach out to other bloggers).

5 Ways To Optimize Your Blog and Capture More Repeat Visitors by ProBlogger

Rich Page recommends practices like tracking your internal search results (to help determine what topics are most important to your readers), surveying your readers, and building an online community into your site in order to increase repeat visits. All good ideas, though you’ll need fairly substantial traffic to begin with for these techniques to be practical. A more broadly helpful post from this blog is 7 Steps to Better Business Blogging guest contributor Ann Handley of MarketingProfs. Among Ann’s quick tips: be “scan friendly” by using bullet points, link to other blog posts on the same topic, and engage your readers in conversation by responding to comments.

The Lazy Blogger’s Guide to Finding Great Post Images by Copyblogger

This guest post from the brilliant Sonia Simone provides both thoughtful guidance on how to choose relevant images for your blog posts and links to a couple of her favorite sources for free or cheap yet high-quality images.

5 Sources for Free and Legal Images by The Blog Herald

Copyright expert Jonathan Bailey offers detailed reviews of five services, such as Photo Dropper and Zemanta, that “will not cost you a dime to use and, if used correctly, can let you fill up your blog posts with as many images as your heart desires.” Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but the primary benefit of all of them is that they simplify the licensing requirements for using free, high-quality images.

TopRank Best List of RSS Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog and Feed by TopRank Online Marketing Blog

An outstanding list of blog directories, RSS and ping sites to help spread the fame of your blog. There are a few dead links in here and a few service with strange terms of use, but most of these links are active and useful.

Networking 101 – Building Relationships with Bloggers by Blogsessive

Alina Popescu provides an invaluable roadmap for establishing relationships, starting with commenting on their blog and actively participating in the conversation, through connecting on social media sites, linking, contacting directly, and writing guest posts. As she notes, “It (building relationships with other bloggers) doesn’t work like magic! Networking takes time and effort. Ongoing effort!” But the payoff can be well worth it, in terms of new relationships, higher blog traffic and increased exposure for you and your blog.

Previous posts in this series:

Best of 2008: SEO Guidance, Part 1
Best of 2008: Interactive PR, Part 1
Best of 2008: SEO Tools, Part 1
Best of 2008: Search Engine Marketing
Best of 2008: Web Analytics
Best of 2008: Email Marketing Tips
Best of 2008: SEO Keyword Tips & Tools
Best of 2008: Sales & Marketing Copywriting
Best of 2008: SEO Link Building
Best of 2008: Website Design
Best of 2008: WordPress Tools and Tips
Best of 2008: Web & SEO Copywriting
Best of 2008: SEO Guidance, Part 2
Best of 2008: Social Media Optimization, Part 1
Best of 2008: AdWords Tips and Tactics, Part 1
Best of 2008: SEO Tools, Part 2
Best of 2008: SEM Landing Pages
Best of 2008: Blogging for Business, Part 1
Best of 2008: Interactive PR, Part 2
Best of 2008: SEO Guidance, Part 3
Best of 2008: Social Media Optimization, Part 2
Best of 2008: AdWords Tips and Tactics, Part 2
Best of 2008: Strategy and Branding, Part 1
Best of 2008: Cool Web Tools, Part 1

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

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Best of 2008: Blogging for Business, Part 2

Desktop or browser-integrated blogging applications have been around for some time now and many are quite similar in function. Blogging suggestion tools that will suggest related articles, images and links based on what you are writing are also not new. But a partnership between ScribeFire and Zemanta bring the two together in an single browser add-on setup.

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ScribeFire and Zemanta Partner for Smarter Blogging

Zemanta, a very useful utility that makes blog posts easier to write, is now setting its sights on Web e-mail. Its browser plug-in, which works with both Firefox and Internet Explorer, has been updated to do the same thing in both Gmail and Yahoo’s Web mail.

Once installed, you just hit a button in your Web mail client and the tool goes through what you’re written for related links and content worth adding. It’s very fast at doing this, even if your message is on the long side. In my case, a three paragraph e-mail took less than five seconds to be processed, and Zemanta came up with ten different suggested links that could be automatically added to my message.

The images that you can insert into your e-mails come from various places, but I found the most helpful option to be Flickr. You can plug in your user name and it goes through any shots you’ve taken (assuming you’ve named them) and lets you easily insert them. For instance, in my e-mail I had referenced going to the de Young museum in San Fransisco, and it pulled up both photos from the Web and my Flickr shots from the weekend in question.

I look at this as a fantastic way to make e-mails to friends and family a little more accessible. If you don’t feel like going back after writing to plug in links for things that might need explaining, there’s a good chance the tool has already prepared them for you.

Here’s a demo of how it works in Gmail. There’s also a video of it working in Yahoo mail after the break.

Zemanta on Gmail from zemanta on Vimeo.

Zemanta on Yahoo! Mail from zemanta on Vimeo.

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Zemanta now helps you write e-mails

Hot on the heels of Monday’s look at Apture, competitor Zemanta has pushed out an update to include several new publishing platforms–one of them being MySpace, a site with over 100 million registered users. It’s a good bet a chunk of those active users are taking advantage of the service’s built-in blogging tool instead of going to another service like WordPress or LiveJournal.

Once installed, writing a blog post on the popular social network can be sped up if you take advantage of its auto-linking, tagging, and image finding capabilities.

The core service still remains largely the same, but Tuesday morning the re-blog feature, which was introduced early last month, has been tweaked. Re-blogging someone else’s post using Zemanta is now a one-click effort, down from a small series of menus. It also better integrates with Tumblr, one of the new publishing platforms introduced Tuesday from which the feature was already borrowed and uses the same large quotation marks to set off what you’re pulling from a source. This will also show up better in feed readers, where it would previously not be set apart from regular blog musings.

Other services added besides MySpace and Tumblr include Ning and Drupal–the latter requiring the use of a plug-in which works the same way as the ones for WordPress and MovableType.

Make MySpace blogging a quicker affair with Zemanta, which adds links and photos from the Web for you.

(Credit: Zemanta Ltd.)

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Lazy blogger tool Zemanta adds MySpace support and more

One of blogging’s biggest barriers is how much work you have to do to get a post out the door. You can stick to straight text, but adding links, pictures, tags, and related stories makes it more engaging for your readers. But let’s face it, doing all that on every post is time consuming. In fact, the length of time required to write a decent blog post is what spawned services like Tumblr and Twitter–the ultimate lazy man’s blogging tools.

Enter Zemanta, a brilliant product for lazy or otherwise time-focused bloggers who simply don’t want to spend extra time looking up related links, tracking down properly licensed photos, or coming up with tags for what they’re writing. The tool plugs into all the popular blogging platforms and will scan over whatever you’ve written and provide a bevy of related links. These links don’t just go on a dump at the end of your post though, it’ll spot mentions within the post and give you the option to add a URL to the first mention from a handful of popular sites. This works for company and celebrity names; it will also pick up on simple domains like anything with a .com at the end.

Another tool that does this to a certain extent is Yahoo Shortcuts, which we looked at back in December of last year. The big difference between Zemanta and Shortcuts is that it’s not just Yahoo content–it comes from all over the Web. Zemanta COO Bostjan Spetic tells me the tool is pulling in links from a live index of 600 blogs which have been picked from multiple ranking sites, including Technorati. In addition to that listing, it’s also pulling in another 400 popular news and entertainment sites like CNN.com and The New York Times.

Tired of adding links to blogs or finding pictures? Check out Zemanta, a tool that goes through your post to find tags, links, pictures and more.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Maybe one of Zemanta’s coolest features is that it gives you freely-licensed photos you can drop into your posts (see the screenshot above). It will automatically pull them in from Flickr if they’ve been given the proper Creative Commons usage rights. You can sort through them and just stick them into your post. Spetic tells me he’s working on deals with a few stock photo services to let bloggers grab beautiful stock photography for free. The photos will be limited in size, but bloggers are free to use them on their posts as long as they link back to the shot’s product page.

This morning the company is unveiling a handful of new features including re-blogging, a feature that Spetic admits has been “borrowed” from nanoblogging service Tumblr. With it enabled, other bloggers with Zemanta installed can take your entire post and quote it on their own blog. Each post automatically comes with proper attribution linking back to the post, but they can make small changes too.

Also new is a popularity page highlighting the most linked to or mentioned content on Zemanta networked blogs. Spetic says it’s not a competitor to sites like TechMeme, and instead is just a simple way to see what’s getting the most chatter. Eventually, Spetic says the tracker will be spun off into different sections so that people can monitor areas of news that interest them the most. Spetic also told me it might become a tracker for other conversation mediums that will become Zemanta-enabled, like blog comments and forum posts.

For now, Zemanta works on all the major blogging platforms. There are also Firefox and IE extensions that let you get the same handy tool without having to install it on your blog. Users can also give it a spin on this demo page and get the same results. Once Zemanta is installed, users see a similar interface, but with a tighter integration into a blogging tool’s existing tag and image libraries. To see the tool in action, check out the demo, or simply watch the video below.

Zemanta Blogger integration from zemanta on Vimeo.

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Make blogging effortless with Zemanta