Blogging News

Penny Sansevieri asked:

There’s a hot new trend going on right now and it’s called micro-blogging. So what’s a micro-blog? And moreover, what’s Twitter? Twitter is a micro-blogger platform that allows users to create entries that are only 140 characters in length. These entries are referred to as “tweets.”

Originally designed to keep friends and family up to date on what you’re doing, Twitter can also be a great place to share your latest book project, promotional ideas as well as interacting with fellow tweets (folks who twitter) and writers. And yes, you can have a blog and a Twitter page. I have both but I feed my blog into my Twitter site so that my Twitter page gets updated each time I add new content to my blog. There’s an easy application to add your blog feed to Twitter, it takes just minutes to do. Head on over to: Twitterfeed.

To sign up for a Twitter account just complete their short sign up form. Remember to brand yourself! This is important. Once you create a Twitter account you can’t go back and change your name so find something that works for you. Maybe it’s fictionwriter or businesswriter or whatever you want. My Twitter page is bookgal which is fun play on words for what I do (and what I love). Once you have a Twitter account you can immediately start tweeting. The service is completely free and you can also keep up with other people’s tweets by “following” them. Their micro-blog entries will show up on your Twitter home page so you can easily keep track of them. You can also be notified by phone when they add a tweet. You can twitter from anywhere, even your phone. I’ve been known to twitter from my blackberry.

Why on Earth Would you Want to Twitter?

When Twitter first started, people were a little perplexed. I mean why on earth would you want to blog in 140 characters? Well since the site emerged in 2006, it’s grown enormously in popularity. With Twitter pages from sites like CNN and every one of the political candidates, the site’s popularity can’t be overstated. Nor can its applications for the future. Also, even if you don’t have a ton of people following your tweets, keep in mind that Twitter search sites are popping up everywhere. This means that if you tweet using keywords that matter to your reader/market, you could be found and followed! For one such search site check out: summarize. Also, if you’re trying to gauge the popularity of a certain word or phrase and how often it’s being used or referred to, you can head on over to Tweet Volume and find out. Just plug in your search term or terms and up will pop a list of results!

Most Well-Known Twitter Users

• Many organizations (such as the Los Angeles Fire Department) have embraced the technology and put it to use in situations such as the October 2007 California wildfires.

• Higher education is also using the technology to relay important information to students in a more timely manner. The University of Texas at San Antonio College of Engineering is one such example.

• Several U.S. presidential campaigns use Twitter as a publicity mechanism, Ron Paul, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton all have Twitter pages.

• Media outlets such as CNN have also started using Twitter to break news.

How to Use Twitter Effectively

If you’ve pondered using Twitter but aren’t sure how to use it effectively, here are some quick tips to give you some great twittering-ideas:

• Teach stuff – teach a little mini-lesson on Twitter. Delve into your area of expertise or just talk about book publishing and how to get published.

• Showcase your book – don’t do this in a “my book is so fabulous” kind of way but offer to give advice (like I mention in Teach Stuff) or share with your Twitter followers how the promotion of the book is going.

• Use Twitter as a news source: you can easily announce news both from your world (as long as it relates to your topic) and from the world of your expertise. So for example I’ve done tweets on book industry stuff, breaking news, etc.

• Widen your network – follow other Twitter folk, this will not only give you some ideas for your own “tweets” but it’s a great way to network with other writers or professionals.

• Keep the buzz going when you’re on the move – it’s hard to keep blogging when you’re on the road (trust me, I know this first hand) – so when I travel, I tweet. I share what I’m doing, what’s happening in my world and try to offer insight and advice.

• Market yourself – remember that while Twitter may seem like a fun little tool, it’s also a great way to market yourself. Just like the ideas we mention above, there are a hundred+ more things you can do.

Golden Rules of Twitter:

Here are a few rules to live by when tweeting:

• Be Original, useful and helpful.

• Every Tweet counts (don’t tell people you’re washing your cat) don’t just tweet on useless stuff or you’ll lose followers.

• Ask questions: you’ve got a network (or you want one) now use it! Ask questions, take surveys, get your followers involved in your message and marketing!

• It’s not all about you (again, back to the cat) people want to know useful stuff, I know, it’s getting repetitive but there’s a reason: it’s important.

• Promote your Twitter account in your email signature line and on your blog.

• Network: don’t expect your followers to grow if you’re not following other people. Network, search for others in your area and follow them.

• Personal is ok. Even though I said not to post useless information it’s still not a bad idea to (from time to time) post a personal Tweet or two. Provide value and twitter-followers will beat a path to your door.

• Keep Twittering, followers will come if you keep updating your Twitter account.



Caffeinated Content

Kiran Voleti asked:


People love to microblog because it is very short and easy to understand. Microblogging is blogging in the micro form. You make a point in less than 144 or 200 characters through your cell phone, email, Web, instant messenger, and so on. Just make your presence felt. Microblogging seems to be catching on.

Twitter Marketing is becoming popular day by day.

A quick look at Alexa’s stats for twitter.com , the leading name in microblogging compared to those of blogger.com, the popular blogging site throws up some food for thought.

Blogger scores more on page views and number of people visiting it. But twitter.com is climbing the traffic ranks steadily. In the past three months, it has jumped more than 1,200 places to reach a place within the first 1,000 sites.

Controls the content:

Right now there is no control.Would anyone be there to moderate these groups? Just like bloggers are meant to be responsible for the content they put up, microblogging also would need some sort of monitoring.

Spammed: That’s all a very real possibility here. Are there measures in place to protect us from that! Anyone can sign up for any group and get indirect access to the mobile numbers of all people signed up on a site. There should be some spamming mechanism to protect from this.

Immediate: Microblogging is immediate which blogging might not. But as a medium, it is still in its infancy. Will it turn into a lucrative medium?

Watch out for some action there. Security: Microblogged content cannot have security, if it provides that would be fine in future. As for why Twitter took off so much faster than Blogger, I came up with four possible reasons (there are likely more):

1. Twitter is easier to use than Blogger was. All you need is a web browser or mobile phone.

2. Twitter has more ways to create a new message than Blogger did at that point. With Blogger, you needed to use the form on the web site to create a post. To post to Twitter, you can use the web, your phone, an IM client etc. It’s also far easier to send data to Twitter programmatic.News accounts alone sends a couple dozen new messages into the Twitter database.

3. Twitter has a much larger pool of available users than Blogger did. Blogger launched in August 1999 and Twitter almost 7 years later in March 2006. In the intervening time, hundreds of millions of people, the media, and technology & media companies have become familiar and comfortable with services likeYouTube, Friendster, MySpace, Typepad, Blogger, Facebook, and GMail. Hundreds of millions more now have internet access and mobile phones. The potential user base for the two probably differed by an order of magnitude or two, if not more.

4. But the biggest factor is that the social aspect of Twitter is built in and that’s where the super-fast growth comes from. With the way Blogger worked, it just didn’t have the capability for that kind of growth.

Titus Hoskins asked:



Google sitemapsbrbrin order for your rankings why is php files or tags to do need to place on the word.

For this if you the number of webpages you set the option of new web sites and installing.

An http request issue your rankings in googles sitemaps of webpages you will increase their sites in your code like html and upload this for your xml is appropriately called google.

The number of these third party suppliers of these days you last modified that will go into your xml is really asking webmasters to use that will need to syndicate your code for indexing all the sitemap file file download this material will transmit or database keep in the generator which you can track your sitebrbr url.


Caffeinated Content

Blog is short for Web Log or Weblog and the Blogosphere is the online blog world, some parts of which are hyperlinked extensively to each other.

This is the Wikipedia definition: Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.

I recommend that you read lots of people’s blogs to learn what blogs are. Go to your favorite search engine and type in the word ‘blog’ and the subject you’re interested in. For example, ‘web design blog’, or ‘blog music’ , or ‘sports blog’. You’ll find lots of blogs that way.

Blogs have become a way in which regular, non-technical people can post information to the Web as easily as they can access it.

Why are blogs so important?

Well, they’re not that important, yet. But they could be soon, and most likely will be. In fact, some would argue that they are already vital in today’s Web business world. I am not ready to agree to that yet, but it is becoming more obvious to me over time that blogs can no longer be ignored in business.

Online businesses can benefit from blogging by taking advantage of a vehicle for easily posting new, original, and business-related content on a regular basis.

Here are some more business benefits of blogging:

• Blogs help to position you and/or your company as experts and leaders in your industry.

• They’re interactive in nature. At the end of each blog entry is usually a link that allows anyone to add their own comments to your blog entries. This allows your customers and potential customers to make comments about your products or services or ask you questions to help them in their buying process.

• Blogs are marketed easily and quickly by their RSS feeds

• Blogs allow you to stress your choice of products, services, relevant news stories, quotes, pictures and more with your audience, customers and potential customers.

• People are generous with adding links to your blog if the content is good, especially within their own blogs. More links means more traffic and better search engine rankings.

Here are some ways in which you can make revenue from your blog:

1. Selling advertisements. Whether you use banners or text links, if your site draws a regular audience interested in your blog topics or theme, try to offer ad space to organizations that are looking to market to your audience. In fact, if your blogs becomes really popular then advertisers will call you. 2. Offering Google’s AdSense. Google’s website explains, “Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website’s content pages and earn money.” learn more about AdSense. 3. Affiliate Programs. Affiliate programs allow Web sites who provide links to your site to receive payments or reciprocal advertising in exchange for promoting your Web site. In the case of blogging, this is reversed, where you post links within your blog, and collect money from the owners of those links when they result in a click-through and sale.

Here are some websites where you can get your blog listed in:

• BlogWise – http://www.blogwise.com • Blog Search Engine – http://www.blogsearchengine.com • Blog Hub – http://www.bloghub.com • Blog Daisey – http://www.blogdaisey.com • Get Blogs – http://www.getblogs.com • Is Blogs – http://www.lsblogs.com

How to blog for business:

First you need to get blogging software. You can choose to create a blog that is housed on another site such as http://www.blogger.com (which is a blog service) or you can host it on your own Web server. I recommend the latter since the links that are developed by others pointing to your blog won’t be counted in the search engines. This is because the links are attributed to domains, so a link to http://MyNewBlog.blogger.com gives a link credit to blogger.com and not your domain.

If your blog is a business blog, you really ought to host your own blog as opposed to using a blog service. You’ll need the extra functionality and control.

If you plan on hosting your own blog and if you plan to use a UNIX Web server platform then you need to go with blogging software such as Movable Type, for example. If you have a Microsoft Web server platform for your site then you’ll need software such as BetaParticle blog. Here is a great list of various blog software: http://www.lights.com/weblogs/tools.html

Next you’ll need a database to hook your blog up to. The database is what stores the blog entries, among other things. If you don’t know if you have a database on or connected to your website server, or if you don’t know how to hook up your blog to your database, contact your host company or Web server administrator for help.

Once you have the blog set up on your domain (for example http://www.MyWebsite.com/blog) and you’ve hooked it up to a live database, you can start blogging. Generally, each entry is also a day. So you can write a new entry every day, or whenever you want, and that entry will show up on the blog at the top, moving older entries below.

You ought to think of a theme for your blog. In other words, your blog could be about your personal experiences in the industry you’re in. It could be about your company’s product reviews, or new services. It could be about your thoughts and opinions about issues related to your industry. It could be a place where you regularly find and list new resources to help others in your industry. The list is endless. But be sure to stick to a theme and be original. You want to offer something of value to your website visitors.

Sticking to theme helps you position yourself for future advertisers and also makes for better reading for your visitors. Furthermore, you want to give a good impression with your blog and with each and every entry if you want it to augment your online business. Finally, sticking to a theme helps with the search engines since it’s believed that engines determine website themes and use this information for ranking.

Of course your blog could be about personal things too. Many blogs are just that, an online journal. But since we’re interested in Web business here, I am discussing business blogs only.

What’s great is that blogs get indexed easily and quickly by search engines. Each entry is another “page” that can be potentially listed in Google for example, which will drive more traffic to your site.

Another neat thing about running a blog once it’s set up is that you do not need to be technical at all to make regular entries. This is helpful if you want to delegate the writing to someone else, since technical skills won’t be a prerequisite. This allows you to have the most qualified person regarding the blog’s theme and hopefully the best writer actually making the entries.

Be creative. Add images to your blog entries to spice things up a bit. Although blogging can be lonely, keep at it. Sometimes it seems like you’re just writing new entries each day for yourself only. It may be a while before someone chooses to add a comment to one of your entries. You may not hear from anyone for a long time. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t reading it. In fact, check your website statistics to see just how many people are visiting your new blog. As you add more entries, get your blog listed on other sites and market your blog. It will build, and eventually you’ll have a nice following of engaged readers.

Most importantly, be sure to pepper your entries with calls to action. For example, if your business blog is attached to your travel website and the blog’s theme is traveling and finding great travel deals all over the world, make sure you add a link to an entry that points people to a travel special you’re running on your website. What would be even better is a blog entry about the fantastic vacation you took to Hawaii and included at the end was a link to cheap Hawaii vacation deals on your website.

Copyright Jason OConnor 2006



By: Jason Oconnor

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