The Spinning Donut

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Chapter 4 - Blog Writing

Chapter four is all about writing blog content.  One of the hardest things to do in my opinion.  Even when you’re passionate about a topic, it takes time to write, edit, edit again and again, and then publish.  Only to want to edit and edit, again and again, the article you just published.

After defining good content, chapter four describes creating blog content that is useful and unique, researching your readers, following other blogs in your niche, and ways to distinguish yourself from all the other blogs out there in your niche.

Chapter four is excellent for beginning bloggers because it lists the different types of blog posts you might consider writing to attract readers to your blog.  This includes making your content scannable by effectively using lists, space, pictures, formatting, and headlines in your blog posts.

Chapter four continues with a lengthy discussion on titles and how they should grab attention and be written with regards to SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Other considerations chapter four discusses when writing blog content include:

• How Long Should a Blog Post Be?
• How Often Should a Blogger Post?
• 20 Types of Blog Posts
• 10 Steps to Writing a Successful Series on Your Blog

Chapter four concludes with 9 points on blog comments and how to get them and interact with them.

With 8 exercises for you to do and the different types of blog posts discussed in chapter four, you’ll be on your way to answering the questions What should I write? and How should I write it?

Purchase at Amazon.com:

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

Make sure you subscribe by RSS reader or by email to receive chapter by chapter reviews of this book.

There are 10 chapters to this book so I’ll probably end up putting 2-3 chapters in my next review. More to come…

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Summize is a very cool way to search Twitter conversations, it’s a search engine for Twitter. In their own words:

Summize’s mission is to search & discover the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations.

Here are some of the ways you can search those Twitter tweets for the gold you might be looking for:

1. Summize Your Handle

Search your Twitter handle - Enter your Twitter UserName in Summize to see what you find about yourself. Your username can be found in the Twitter settings screen when you’re logged in. It is your http://twitter.com/USERNAME.

2. What Are People Saying About Your Company?

Another way to use Summize is to search for your company name and see what, if anything people are saying. Recently there’s been discussion on the new thin Apple iPhone coming out and I wanted to know what folks were saying on Twitter so I entered Apple in Twitter as well as AAPL (the stock symbol for Apple - should have bought some call options on the dip - end of February - DANG!!).

3. Who’s Talking About That Link?

Find people who have linked to a URL on Twitter. Let’s say you have an article that you tweeted about and it ended up in a TinyURL formatted URL. Paste the originial long URL or a blog post into TinyURL (TinyURL should remember it) and then take the shortened URL and plug it into Summize. You should find everyone that has tweeted about that specific blog post. Source: Digital Inspiration

4. What’s Going On Near You?

Find Tweets about something near by or just tweeters near by somewhere. Search Summize to find happy hours wherever you’re at using a query like “happy hour” near:SF

5. What Updates Did He/She Send to Twitter?

Did you miss something someone said on Twitter in the last 24 hours? Let’s use Problogger for example, enter from:problogger in the Summize search box. Enter yesterday’s date in the Since this date field.

6. Find Weather Information

Enter this search to find out what folks within 15 miles are saying about the weather in San Francisco: weather near:”sf” within:15mi. Use your own parameters for other locations or just use the Summimze advanced search.

7. Interesting Links

Want to find some links on a specific topic or interesting links, or just some links to read? Pick a topic and search like this: apple filter:links. This search willl return tweets with the word apple in them and links. If you’re a fan of Scoble, use this search to find some of the links Scoble is talking about: from:scobleizer filter:links.

8. Who’s Talking to Who?

Trying to remember a conversation where you saw a couple folks talking to each other? Try this search: from:techcrunch to:scobleizer.

9. Movies that have positive tweets

This search will give you movies that have positive tweets - movies Or see what folks are saying out a camera you might be checking out.

10. Movies that have negative tweets

This search will give you movies that have negative tweets - movies Or see what folks are saying out a camera you might be checking out.

There’s also a Search Operators page with examples of the operators you can use to search Twitter and what those operators mean.

Summize also has an API (Application Programmer Interface). An API for any product allows outsiders to write software or somehow access the functionality of that product. Here are some apps that use the Summize API:

1. Hahlo - A Twitter client for the iPhone/iPod Touch using the Twitter API and the Summize API
2. Quotably - Provides an easier way to follow Twitter conversations
3. Get Satisfaction - A direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships.
4. StrawPoll - A dailly poll conducted on Twitter.
5. Addict-o-matic - “Inhale the Web” - searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images.
6. twistori - displays real time thoughts and feelings expressed on Twitter.
7. Twitturly - a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter.
8. Slandr - A mobile Twitter client
9. Twitter Spectrum - visualizes co-occurring words associated with Twittered topics.
10. HelloTwitFace - A Windows Mobile application for viewing and updating your status with Twitter and Facebook.

The Sidebar

The sidebar on a search results page at Summize lists the following:

• You can subscribe to the search results via RSS.
• You can Twitter the search results.
• Show the search results in another language.
• Summize lists Trending topics you can click on to catch up on what’s popular on Twitter.
• A Nifty queries section lists some example queries to try and alter as you see fit.

When you are viewing the search results from Summize, you’ll be able to see a conversation link next to the Twitter tweets that multiple people have responded to.

There’s also a plugin that allows you to add the summize search to your search box in Firefox and Internet Explorer. You’ll find it at the bottom of the Summize web pages.

Don’t forget the Summize Labs. Currently there is a Realtime Sentiment graphical representation on the sentiment of a subject. Kind of cool. The Summize folks seem to keep their blog updated as well.

Now go play!!  

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I received an email form Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs Journey blog and his blog mentoring program Blog Mastermind. I am a former student of Blog Mastermind and I still review all the materials we received as well as his freely available Blog Profits Blueprint ebook.

When I look in my Blog Mastermind folder on my PC I immediately see over 30 mp3s from the course. I used to listen to them going to work and coming home as well as when I was working out and walking.

The ebook alone will last you a long time while you blog. Written using a blogging strategies metaphor and the tactics to execute those strategies, there’s a lot of information to help you strategically start and maintain a blog.

Below are some of the blogging lessons Yaro taught when I took the course, and I’m sure there will be even more information as well as richer information since he’s already taught it before I can only imagine it will get better and better.

1. Blogging MIndset
2. Topic Selection
3. Blog Content
4. Marketing Your Blog
5. Blog Monetization
6. Blogging and Social Media
7. more and more and more…

That’s just a few topics in the course I took. Yaro also provides mp3s of interviews he does with successful bloggers as well as extra mp3s on course topic.

On top of all that, Yaro has a forum with sections of the forum dedicated to Blog Mastermind students. This is where you’ll meet fellow bloggers ranging from beginning bloggers to experienced bloggers. There is definitely a feeling of community and support in the forums alone to want to belong to the Blog Mastermind course.

If you’re not sure about joining and you would like to check out Yaro’s information first hand, then check out these free videos on starting a blog at BecomeABlogger.com.

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The other day I started working on a blog post about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and I wanted to see if there were any new thoughts on the subject since there is quite a bit about SEO scattered around already. I had my twhirl client running, when what popped up as a tweet? Shoemoney writes a blog post called What Is The Definition Of SEO?

“DOH!!”

Well, onward and upward. In the online world there is a thing called Search Engine Optimization - SEO for short. SEO will help you help others find your website or blog.

Showmoney’s definition came from a bunch of influential folks in the online world, 21 to be exact, which is cool because you’ll be introduced to some folks that maybe you hadn’t heard of before.

From a beginners point of view or someone new to SEO, I like Neil Patel’s definition:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of understanding search engines and using that knowledge to make a website rank high on search engines.

The next question from this definition might be, “Why do I need to rank high on search engines?” Well, you don’t have to but if you want more people showing up at your site, you’ll want to, especially if you’re selling something.

Another question is, “SEO takes so much time, do I really have to worry about this stuff?” Well, you don’t have to because you’ll be found some how and sometime, but to dramatically increase your chances of being found quicker and higher up in search results pages, you’ll want to pay attention to it and somehow automatically link SEO tasks in your blog or website workflow.

Here are 16 SEO sources from some of the folks in Showmoney’s blog post as well as some of my own findings:

1. Google’s Tips On How To Write A Good Meta Description by Search Engine Land and don’t forget about their SEO Tools.
2. What Google Knows About Spam by Matt Cutts
3. Beginner’s Guide To Search Engine Optimization by Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz
4. Optimal Titles: SEO Case Study
5. Plenty of stuff to check out at SEO Book and I especially like the vids.
6. Quick Keyword Research Tools by Practical eCommerce - Checkout the SEO Report Cards for various sites. Very informative.
7. WordPress SEO - The beginner’s guide by Joost de Valk
8. The Official Google Webmaster Centeral Blog
9. Yahoo! Search Blog
10. Live Search Webmaster Center Blog at MSDN
11. Stompernet - Going Natural 3

Here are some points from the video:

• A new Stompernet product will help you with SEO on your site.
• Title Tags
• Meta Description Tags
• Meta Keywords
• Heading Tags
• Images
• XML Sitemap
• Links
• Directories
• Web 2.0 Tracking

The video provides excellent detailed tasks you can do and use on your site’s SEO activities.

12. Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress - This is a pretty darn comprehensive guide on SEO. Extreme amounts of valuable information here.
13. SEO Title Tag
    

    Search engine optimize your blog’s title tags. Create a customized title tag for any post, static page, category page, UltimateTagWarrior tag page - indeed, any URL! And will auto-insert the tag name into the title on tag pages generated by UltimateTagWarrior plugin. Admin allows for mass editing of title tags. By Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts.

14. All in One SEO Pack

Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.

15. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

16. Wordpress SEO: First Steps by SEOnoob - Excellent SEO Tips for WordPress

Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »

There’s Gold In Them There Tweets!!

Here are twenty-one tweets in twelve hours from some terrific twitterers. These are links to good stuff from some of the twitterers I follow. I picked out some tweets that provided good information during a 12 hour time period. I hope you enjoy!!

1 - tweetshots
Turns your Tweet into an embeddable screenshot. Don’t know why I’d need this but hey, maybe it will come in useful someday.

2 - Livetweets
Livetweets allows you to tweet an event. It allows folks to follow that event by RSS as well.

3 - Hashtags.org
“Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags” - Use special characters in your tweets to provide “groupings” of tweets. You could use this for an event, like a conference. Everyone who uses Twitter and tweets about #myconf for example, will be able to follow all those tweets on Hashtags.org.

4 – Best Social Media From This Site – A blog post on some of Chris Brogan’s articles listed under these categories:

• Community Development
• Social Networks
• Social Media
• Twitter
• Personal Branding
• Making Media

5 – Free Accounting Software – Gnu Cash

6 - Google For Non-Profits
“You are changing the world. We want to help.” Learn how to use free Google tools to promote your work, raise money, and operate more efficiently.

7 - Digg – Town Hall Meeting #2
A video of the Digg guys talking about - Digg. More importantly the meeting was held on SocialBlade – “Your Social Web Site Tool Kit” and Social News Center - “A Community Gathering Place for Lovers of ALL social news sites”. Streaming video provided by ustream.tv.

8 – Paying for WordPress – Thought provoking

9 – Blip – What are you listening to?
The music equivalent to Twitter

10 – Brand new Google Reader for iPhone

11 – Make the scrapers work for you!

12 – Google brings Friend Connect to the masses

13 – How to Increase Engagement and Authority With Quotations

14 - Increase Conversation on Your WordPress Blog With These Two Free Firefox Tools

15 - Ten Ways to Write a Digg-worthy “Top Ten…” post

16 – BookJetty – Manage and share your reading lists with others

17 – ReadBurner – what’s shared on Google Reader

18 – RSSmeme – Most Popular Stories From The Last 24 Hours

19 - Marketing on a Startup Budget: 101 Free Offers and Coupons to Advertise Your New Site

20 – HelloTxt - is an aggregate of microblogging services through which the user can insert their messages on all main microblogging services in a simply and simultaneous way. Very Cool!!

21 – TweetWire

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Chapter 3 - Setting Up Your Blog

Chapter three walks us through choosing a blogging platform. There are many of them out there and a lot of folks start out with Blogger or WordPress.com, the free WordPress blogging platform.

Darren and Chris walk you through some of the questions to answer when you are deciding what platform to blog on, which include:

1. What are your goals for your blog?
2. What is your budget?
3. How technical are you?
4. What blogging platforms are others using?

With anyone who uses a computer, there are a wide range of computer skills out there. Technical forums seem to always be one of the most popular sections of a forum when it comes to almost any subject in the computer world and this includes blogging.

There’s a helpful graph that shows what blogging platform people are using. The information was gathered by one of Darren’s many surveys he does on his blog.

Hosted versus Self-Hosted

This section of the book has quite a bit of discussion among the eight sub-sections on the topic. From the advantages to the disadvantages as well as the benefits and who should consider using a hosted or self-hosted blog, there’s quite a bit of discussion and bullet-points that get you thinking about the things you consider in the beginning of your blog as well as later when you have some time under your belt to help narrow your presentation of your blog.

Your Blog’s Domain Name

One of the most important parts of your blog is to pick a domain name. Again, there are quite a few bullet points to consider and discuss amongst yourself when you decide to name your blog and get it registered.

There are many domain name services to see if your domain name is available. It’s always important to take some time and think about what your domain name will be.

Problogger then walks you through setting up a free WordPress.com blog as well as a self-hosted WordPress blog. There’s some good tips on how to tweak your blog’s look as well as the many design considerations you’ll be presented with when you setup your blog. A popular WordPress theme is used to show how you can tweak it to look the way you want it to look.

Five exercises scattered throughout chapter three help you get closer to the blog that fits you and your blogging intentions.

Purchase at Amazon.com:

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

Make sure you subscribe by RSS reader or by email to receive chapter by chapter reviews of this book.

There are 10 chapters to this book so I’ll probably end up putting 2-3 chapters in my next review. More to come…

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OpenOffice 3.0 beta is now available for you to download and give it whirl. If you don’t know what beta means, beta means it’s in testing and it’s not a final version.

OpenOffice.org is like Microsoft Office. However, it is a free alternative that runs in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and OpenSolaris. It might not have all the features of Microsoft Office but it has enough to make it an effective alternative.

Here’s a list of programs that make up OpenOffice.org:

1. Write (Word equivalent)
2. Calc (Excel equivalent)
3. Impress (Powerpoint equivalent)
4. Draw (Publisher equivalent)
5. Base (Access equivalent)
6. OpenOffice.org Extensions

Here are some of the new features you’ll find in OpenOffice.org:

1. A Start Center (shown below)
2. A New Zoom Control in the Status Bar
3. A New Solver Component in Calc
4. Spreadsheet Collaboration through WorkBook Sharing
5. Increased Columns to 1024 per WorkSheet
6. Writer has an improved Notes feature
7. Writer displays multiple pages while editing
8. Will support upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard
9. Reads and Writes Office 2007 Documents
10. Reads and Writes Office 2008 for Mac OS X
11. Creates PDFs
12. More and more and more - feature list here

Even though this is in beta, what I like to do is create a simple document in Microsoft Word 2007, save it and open it up in OpenOffice.org Write program and make sure everything came over or converted the way it’s suppose to look from Microsoft Word. You can do this in all the OpenOffice.org applications that have a Microsoft Office equivalent.

Then, I browse over to Microsoft Templates and pick a pretty good template that has quite a bit of formatting in it and test it by viewing it in Microsoft Word and then in OpenOffice.org Write. This will show you immediately how OpenOffice.org Write converts Microsoft Word documents.

This is important because if you’re going to use OpenOffice.org Write as your word processing program then you want to make sure Word documents that you receive from other people render correctly and also get formatted correctly when you save an OpenOffice.org Write document that you might end up sending off to someone else who works exclusively in Microsoft Word.

Did I mention OpenOffice.org is FREE!! Grab a copy of the beta here and don’t forget to report bugs you find here.

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I started writing this blog post in ScribeFire 2.0 and this week I’m continuing to write this blog post in ScribeFire 2.1. ScribeFire is a Firefox add-on that allows you to write a blog post and more while browsing the web in Firefox.

I have not used ScribeFire previous to this post. I’ve heard of it before but never took the time to check it out. I’ve always thought and felt that a full-fledged blog editor is the way to go. Besides, certainly there are too many restrictions writing a blog post in a browser.

But, after reading Chris Garrett’s review I thought I’d take some time to actually write a blog post with ScribeFire 2.1.

ScribeFire has quite a bit packed into it to make it a viable blogging editor alternative as well as a cool little feature I’ll talk about at the end of this article. Click on the screen shot below for a larger view of ScribeFire.

Click image for larger view (800 x 600)

Now that I’ve written a few sentences I want to save it as a draft so I can continue working later. However, the first thing I notice is the Draft check box which I don’t like. Does it actually save this post as a draft? A draft what? Page? Post? There’s a button bar at the bottom of the editor for:

• Save as Note
• Clear Content
• Draft (Checkbox)
• Publish as a page
• Publish to “The Spinning Donut”

What in your mind would tell you how to save a post as a draft? Why a check box? Why not a button that says Save as Draft and a radio button - Page or Post? After clicking the Draft check box, what should I do next? Will it save automatically? Will it save multiple versions of the same posts?

I’m assuming you check the Draft box and then click Publish to “The Spinning Donut”. So after doing that, the Publish as page button has changed to Publish as Edit. Which is good. A bit better than before but not exactly what I’m looking for since I typically use WordPress as my editor.

My point here is that I’m saving it as a draft and not publishing anything. I think it’s a minor detail but it did trip me up.

Other really nice features include multiple tabbed edit windows (below) so you can have multiple blog posts opened up at the same time. That is nice and something I’d like to see in WordPress.

There are tabs down the left side (below) of the editor to switch you between editor, “Share this page” which include nine social media sites for promoting, bookmarking and sharing your blog posts. Another tab allows you to set some individual settings and a help tab with links to the ScribeFire website.

Three tabs in the upper-left corner allow you to work in Rich Editing, Source Editing (code) and Live Preview.

ScribeFire also allows you to have multiple blogs, blog entries and categories as well as your options (in this example it’s my WordPress blog).

ScribeFire has many features and I especially like the Quickblogging feature where you browse to your own blog and a new toolbar magically appears for you to start working on various aspects of your blog. Check it out, very cool.

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