On Blogging and Social Media

Most of us who have blogs these days also participate in a range of other social networks and use a range of social networking tools. Tying these together can help you to promote all the things you do, build your profile and make visitors to one service aware of other services you provide and so help you to develop your network. I've been looking for a long time for a good tool for this job and finally I think I have found it with http://about.me .

Here's a quick look at my social profile page to see what it looks like. Be sure to have a look round a few others to get some design inspiration.


As you can see it is just a single page with a nice design, a bit of blurb about me and those all important links to all the things I do online. Below the surface though it also has a range of tools to help you track those services and it gives you information about how effective they are in building your network of contacts.

How to set up a social profile page

Let's start with the set up though. You'll need to go to: http://about.me register (for free) and you'll need a good high quality digital image of yourself that you can use as background (mine wasn't very good quality so I was forced to 'tile' it.

Once you are logged in you can start to design your background by choosing an image from your computer or selecting one from the site (best to have your own, but you can change it later).

Next you add your biography by simply typing your text into the fields. You then choose the colours and fonts for your text and the 'bio box' frame for the text. Be sure to use colours that make the text standout against the image background.


Lastly, the most important part is to start adding your services. This is simple to do. You just click on the service you want to add and then enter your username. If the service isn't there or you want to add a link to a website or another profile, just use the button that says 'Add URL or RSS' and you can add links to any web based site or service.


Once you have added your services, visitors to the page can have a peek at all the things you do. without leaving the page.

Building your network

This is all good stuff, but what is really great about this is the 'Dashboard' that gives you access to analytics information about your profile and some of the services you add there. You find out how many people click through to your profile and for how long. but you also get information about things like Twitter and find out which people retweet you the most or mention you etc. This can help to provide you with useful information about your network and find the best people to network with.
All in all I think http://about.me is a very useful free tool, whether you are building a network of friends colleagues or promoting your work.

How about you?

• What tools do you use to create synergy across your social networking activities?
• How do you reduce the amount of time you spend 'feeding' your networks?
• What are the best tools for promoting your network activities?

By all means leave a comment or a question.

With the number of blogs constantly growing it can become increasingly difficult to keep your audience and attract new readers, so it doesn't hurt every now and then to give your site a quick ping across the major search engines and directories.

Blogbuzzer is a free tool that can help you do this and give your sites' traffic a bit of a boost. It's very easy to use, just type in the name and URL of your blog and click on the 'Ping' button.
This will enable Blogbuzzer to send a message to many of the major blog directories and make sure that your site is indexed.

You can 'ping' up to 5 sites a day for free without registering or signing up. I've tried this a few times and each time it has brought a noticeable boost to my visitors stats. There is a premium service for $9 a year which automates the service for you and helps you monitor results etc. so if you are really serious about boosting numbers and don't mind spending some money, it might be worth thinking about (I won't be trying it).

This is a simple tool to use and it can be effective particularly if you haven't already got your blog or site registered.

I hope you find it useful.

How about you?

• How do you boost traffic to your website or blog?
• Is just writing good materials enough?
• Are there any free services you have found useful?

Please leave a comment or suggestion if you think you can help other bloggers.

Getting really useful feedback on your site or blog can be difficult and expensive, but there are some free tools which can help you to find out what you are doing right or wrong and help you to make technical improvements that may well boost your search engine optimisation (SEO) and so the visibility of your site to new visitors.

One tool that I have just tried is Website Grader and I was quite impressed by the amount of detailed information I was able to get about my blog without even parting with my email address.

How to grade your website

• To get your website's grade and report just got to: Website Grader and enter the URL of your site or blog. If you want to benchmark your site against others that you consider to be similar or competitors you can also enter their URLs too and generate a single report.

• Then just click on 'Generate Report' and your report will be created along with a grade which you can display on your site if you wish.

How to get SEO advice

• The site doesn't just analyse the content of your site and how well the pages are constructed, it also searches through different search engines and social networking sites to see what kind of impact your site is making.
• After a couple of minutes you can read through the report and find out where you are doing well and where you could make improvements.
• Where improvements are needed you are supplied with an explanation and some details so you can easily start making changes that will benefit your site immediately.

• All the information given is explained and you can dig more deeply into any areas you are unsure of simply by clicking on some of the links provided.

How to learn more about SEO

Website Grader is a great way to learn a bit more about your site and about some of the tricky sides of SEO that can at times seem rather complex. I'm already working on a few things I learned about my sites and making some improvements. I think though at the end of the day it's important to remember that however much you work on your SEO, the best way to bring traffic to your site and keep people coming back is to write good content.

How about you?

• How do you evaluate your site?
• Have you used other SEO tools?
• Have you ever had any SEO help from marketing companies?
• Did Website Grader tell you anything new about your site?

Related links:

• Compare your site using benchmarking
• Google Webmaster Tools
• How to track your site

Another good reason for having a Google Account is that you can also get free access to Google's Webmaster Tools. These can give you valuable information about your site or blog and also help you to make sure that Google is indexing the pages from your site to their search engine.

You have to register each individual site or blog to use the tools on it, but this only takes a few minutes, so here's how it's done.

• Log in to your Gmail or Google Analytics account and go to your Google Account. This is where you can manage all your Google services from.
• Look for the link to 'Webmaster Tools'
  

• Once you click on the link you will go to the Webmaster Tools Dashboard and here you just click on 'Add a site' (as you can see below I already have three sites added).

• You them copy and paste in the URL of the site you would like to add then click on 'Continue'

• You will then see that your site has been added but that it is not verified. You must verify your site to prove that it belongs to you. To do this you copy the verification script that you are given.

• You go to the template of your blog or the html code of your website and add the script to your site. This is easy to do on Blogger by going to the 'Layout' then clicking on 'Edit HTML'.

• You then past the code into the head of your code. That's between the and tags.

• Once you have done this make sure you save your template and then return to you Webmaster Tools Account and click to verify your code. If you have added the code correctly you should get a congratulations message.

• It will take a while for Google to start populating your account with information about your site, so you should come back and look after more than 24 hours. If you want to be extra sure that Google is getting all your pages you can also add a link to an xml Sitemap by clicking the Sitemap link.

If you have an Atom feed for your site or blog you can add that and it will help Google to crawl through your pages.

Well I hope this helps you get information about your site and makes sure that Google lists your pages.

How about you?

• What ways do you use to improve your traffic from search engines?
• Which search engines are the most important for you?

Related links:

• How to track your site
• Compare your site using benchmarking

One the most important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that the success of a website or blog can be judged upon is the time a visitor spends on your site. The longer the time spent on your site the more interested and engaged the visitor is with your content.


You can find out how sticky your site is using GoogleAnalytics. On the 'Dashboard' you should be able to find a section on 'Site usage' and this will give you the average time that each user spends on your site.


If you click on the text it will take you to an average for each day.

Deciding what a 'good' average time on site is will be difficult as it really depends on the type of site you have, but time on site is definitely important and you should try to improve it. As you can see the average time on site over the last month for my Daily English Activities blog has been around two and a half minutes, which I'm reasonably happy with.

‘Sticky’ content is one tools that bloggers and webmasters use to keep people on their site for longer. This usually takes the form of some kind of rich media like an interactive game, video or some form a of widget.

Many blogging platforms and web based services offer a range of widgets that you can add to your site or the side column of your blog to encourage users to stay around on the site for longer. They often look very nice and add a sense of dynamism to your site especially if your site is very text driven BUT..

• This kind of content should be used with care. Before you decide on whether to add this kind of rich content think carefully about your audience and what they come to your site for. Does the content or widget really enhance what you are offering on the site or does it just slow the site down and discourage your users from visiting again?
• I spend a lot of time looking round at various sites and blogs and what I’m really looking for is the main content. I’m much less interested in ‘edges’ of the page. What I want is for the page to load quickly so that I can get the information I’m looking for.
• The kind of ‘sticky’ or rich content that is useful, is usually materials that can be embedded into the actual main page and is relevant to what you are writing about. This could be a video tutorial, an interactive widget, a slide show, or an example of some materials or useful downloadable document. This kind of content can really enhance what you are offering on the site and is more likely to encourage users to return for more.
  

So my main question when thinking about adding ‘sticky’ content is;

• Does it really enhance what I’m offering?
  

Unless the answer is a definite yes, then I would stick with simple pages that load fast. They may look less appealing, but in the end the best sticky content you can have is good writing. It’s what brings people back to your site.

How about you?

• Do you use sticky content?
• What kind of content keeps users on your site longer?
• How do you try to improve the amount of time users spend on your site?

Please feel free to leave a comment.

Related links:

• How to track your site
• Compare your site using benchmarking
  

Writing a blog or creating a website is hard work. Keeping it up to date and keeping new content on your site is even harder, so if you are going to put all this time and work into your site, you will want to know that people are visiting it and reading your articles and enjoying your content. So you are going to need some kind of tracking.

There are lots of products on the market that you can add to your site to tell you how many people are visiting your site etc, but one of the best I've found is Google Analytics, and best of all it's free.

Google Analytics can tell you a lot more than how many people are visiting your site, it can give you very detailed information about where the people are, how many pages they view, how long they stay on your site and much more.


All this information can be very valuable and informative especially if your site is being developed for commercial purposes, so the sooner you add some form of tracking the sooner you are going to find out what your site is really achieving.

Here's a tutorial movie showing you exactly how to add Google Analytics tracking to your site. In order to do this you'll need to have a Gmail / Google account, but that is also free, so this doesn't cost you anything but your time.

• Download for i-Tunes/ i -Pod
• Watch the tutorial on YouTube
  

In future postings I'll be looking in more detail at the information that Google Analytics can give you and how you can use this information, but for now good luck with getting your account set up and your code added.

How about you?

• What tracking do you use?
• What are your KPI's (key performance indicators) that tell you how well your site is doing?
• Are you addicted to those web stats and checking them everyday?

Please leave comments, suggestions and opinions.