A unified feed for Facebook Notes

March 22, 2008 at 10:12 am · Filed under Social Media, Content, Social Networking

If you’re a Facebook user and you have more than once blog, you’ve likely noticed there’s no solution to having Facebook’s Notes functionality consume more than one RSS feed to display with your profile.  A simple solution is to aggregate all your feeds into a single source, and then provide that RSS feed to Notes.

I’ve tried a few free services and settled on one that does the job right.   It’s called readr.com.  The reason why I like this free solution the best is that it doesn’t monkey around with your feeds in a way that technically or aesthetically mucks up display on Facebook (which many other potential solutions did).  Setup is incredibly simple, and there’s more to aggregate than just RSS feeds.  Supported sites/sources include:

• MySpace
• Bebo
• Flickr
• Photobucket
• Blogger
• Wordpress
• Twitter
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• YouTube
• last.fm

Share This

Comments

Penny for your thoughts… $10 for…

December 17, 2007 at 3:30 pm · Filed under Content

For whatever reason I keep stumbling across sites this week which are willing to pay visitors to help build their content base.  The latest: Today I came across Epinions’ “10 for 10 Promotion” which is currently offering $10 for every 10 product/service reviews (I bet you saw that coming).

 How are they combatting automagic spam junk?  The community decides if content makes the mark or not:

At the time Epinions.com validates entries (some time shortly following the end of the submission period), each review must have an overall rating of at least “somewhat helpful”. Express reviews are not eligible. (Express reviews contain less than 200 words.)

Visit the site to help Epinions spend the remainder of their 2007 marketing budget.

Share This

Comments

How to promote a blog for free

September 11, 2007 at 1:17 am · Filed under Content, Analytics, Online Marketing, Social Networking

When a friend or colleague sets up a blog, I am often curious to see what they do to promote it. Unfortunately, they often don’t do some basic things that can give their blogs the opportunity to take off. If you’re committed to writing good content, it often takes no money at all to get the ball rolling.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, a quick caveat: We’re beyond the “How do I blog?”, “Why would I blog?” and the dreaded “What is a blog?” phase here. If you’re at that stage, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’m assuming you already know why you are blogging, and what it can offer you or your organization. You just might not know what you can do to give it a nudge so people can find it.
OK. So you’ve set yourself up a blog, and you want to be sure your efforts bear fruit. Here are some easy, basic, and FREE techniques to promote your blog:

Tags and Categories - Cost: $0.00

• Internet and blog search engines use the keyword/keyword phrases in tags and categories to file your postings so they’re ready can be served back to Internet searchers. Use them thoughtfully and creatively!
• If you use both tags and categories, your categories should be broad; your tags should be specific.

Submit Your Blog to Search Engines - Cost: $0.00

• Submit your blog to credible, qualified directories (Google, Yahoo, Live, ASK, DMOZ.org)
• For some sites (such as the Yahoo directory) you do have to pay. However, you can submit your site to Yahoo without submitting to their paid directory.
• If there are any niche RSS syndication services for your content, see if there are fees associated with adding your feed to their service. Often, aggregation and syndication services don’t charge a thing.

FeedBurner - Cost: $0.00

• FeedBurner allows reporting on the number of subscribers to your blog as well as some high-level web site traffic reporting. It is also useful to promote your blog.
• After doing the basic FeedBurner setup, enable the ‘PRO’ settings. The ‘PRO’ features previously cost money; they are now complimentary (thanks for buying FeedBurner Google!),
• Finally, go through each tab in FeedBurner and read the options that are available. Scores of additional options exist from pinging other aggregation/syndication sources when you post an entry to placing ads in your feed to monetize your syndication.

Technorati - Cost: $0.00

• Technorati is the Google of blogs and a great source of traffic.
• There’s no excuse to not sign-up with the basic information Technorati needs.
• Don’t stop at the bare minimum. Go ‘Favorite’ blogs you enjoy. Don’t forget to ‘Favorite’ your friends’ blogs; maybe they’ll stop by and ‘Favorite’ you too. Add a ‘Favorite on Technorati’ badge or link on your blog.
• Add a post to the Where’s the Fire (WTF) every now and again. Make sure they’re good posts. Even if you don’t get a lot of votes, you do get people coming by to see what your blog has to offer.

Google Analytics - Cost: $0.00

• Google Analytics allows you to get more detailed web site usage reporting than FeedBurner can supply. Free or not it’s a great tool.
• Figure out which reports help you the most. You can gauge affinity for your content based on how often articles are viewed, how long visitors stay on your site when they arrive at a specific individual article (etc.). Sky’s the limit. Get to know Google Analytics.
• Learn and adapt. Viewing reports on usage of your blog isn’t blog promotion. How you interpret and apply what you learn will provide a strong foundation for your future blogging and blog promotion efforts.

Link to your Blog - Cost: $0.00

• If you send out any regular communication (online or off) provide a link to your blog.
• If your email program allows it, place a link to your blog in your signature.
• When you comment on other people’s blogs, be sure to provide your blog’s URL if you are prompted.
• If you keep a LinkedIn or Facebook profile, be sure to add a link to your blog. Facebook also lets you import your blog’s RSS feed as “Notes” so they display on your Profile page.

Ping when you Post - Cost: $0.00

• If your blog doesn’t automatically do it for you, ping Technorati and other services when your blog is updated
• If you’re not sure if your blog platform pings aggregators and syndicators when you post, check your documentation (most good blog platforms do this automatically, such as WordPress and Blogger).
• FeedBurner also has a ping service. Be sure it is activated, and take advantage of their offer to let you specify more sources to ping.

Participate in the Greater Blog Community - Cost: $0.00

• You want people to interact with your blog, be sure to do the same yourself!
• When you provide meaningful commentary on others’ blogs, you will benefit from visitors and/or the author stopping by your blog to learn more about you.

Finally Write Good Content - Cost: $0.00

• This is the big one. Without good content, you’re toast.
• Write provoking titles that speak to your audience. If the title is good, you have a much better chance of drawing viewers to your content.
• Be sure to post regularly! Post as regularly as you can. Search engines (and your readers!) like to see stability and frequency in the amount of content that comes from your site.

I hope these tips help. They are all free, and they will promote your blog. If you write compelling content and use the methods above, you will get traffic. How much blogging and promotion of your blog you commit to will determine how popular your blog becomes.

Share This

Comments (5)

Goodbye Google AdSense ads

August 21, 2007 at 10:45 pm · Filed under Content, Advertising, Online Marketing, User Experience

I used to have Google Ads on my blog (via Google AdSense) but I removed them a few nights ago. Sure, I did get a few clicks here and there, but, all things considered, I decided, that it isn’t worth it to me.I put Google Ads on my blog as an afterthought.  I created this blog as a soapbox or sounding board, like most people, and then eventually thought “I should be compensated for my efforts.” And, that’s where the Google AdSense ads came in. Signing up and putting the code into my blog was quick and easy.That is when I started making a killing on Google AdSense ads. OK. That’s not true.Unless you have a site about hot teenage asthma laywers and/or have an incredible amount of traffic flowing through your site and/or are willing to place ads in somewhat mischievous places, you’re likely not going to make a lot of money off Google AdWords advertising. Creating an enjoyable user experience got the better of me. I made an effort to be sure my ads ‘felt right’ in their color scheme and placement on my blog so they wouldn’t be intrusive to the user. I wanted to be sure that my visitors could engage my content and not be bothered by the ads. A sympathetic approach like that calls for a simple solution: just get rid of the ads. I’m not pushing a ton of traffic through this site.  My content isn’t about ashthma lawsuits or Girls Gone Wild. And, I’m not willing to plaster ads in suspect places where someone might click by accident to line my pockets with pennies and nickels. So, I ripped the ads off of this site. For now. If there is an interesting, less obtrusive way that I can get some bounty for having this blog to offset operational costs like the cost of hosting, great. I’m in. Until then, a few cents here and there isn’t even close to worth bothering those who stop by.

Share This

Comments

Operation Gain Google Respect: What is with my PageRank?

August 19, 2007 at 10:07 pm · Filed under Content, Analytics, Online Marketing

I blogged awhile back about Google being less than excited about my blog. Since then, I’ve gotten some great advice, done some observation, and will continue to utilize my blog as an open mic as I hope to regain some respect in Google’s eyes. First things first-what’s with my incredibly disappearing PageRank?Maybe I’m overreacting to my loss of PageRank. To refresh everyone’s memories, I’ve lost my page rank for every page on my blog except my homepage, which, has the horrific rank of 2. It’s better than being blacklisted, but I’m certainly not on Google’s list of cool places to hang out. But, let me reiterate-although I’m in PageRank purgatory, I still receive the strong bulk of my traffic from Google. It’s not a lot of traffic, but the search traffic that I am receiving is highly relevant.For those of you that are new around the search engine landscape, here’s a bit on Page Rank straight from Google:

PageRank ExplainedPageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Sounds like PageRank is the juice—I’ve gotta have it to drive relevant traffic to my blog, right? From everything I’ve read (including claims that PageRank is actually almost completely irrelevant) I’d say, yes, PageRank is still absolutely important, maybe it is just harder to determine what my PageRank is at this exact moment.Let’s back up. How does one arrive at knowing what PageRank is assigned to any given page on a web site? Like many online marketers out there, I use the Goolge Toolbar (or a Firefox or IE extension) which pings Google HQ and reports back the PageRank of the page that is currently being viewed in the browser. This is where I’m getting the abysmal PageRanks for this blog. It’s straight from Google. I’m screwed, right? Maybe not. The quote below is allegedly straight from a Google Rep.

“The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is forentertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers toaccess this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequentlybecause is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in theGoogle Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR ofzero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn’t beenupdated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the GoogleToolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the webpage results sothere is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero. If asite is showing up in the search results, it doesn’t not have a real PRof zero, the Toolbar is just out of date”

Too broadly paraphrase the Google Rep: don’t necessarily trust the PageRank indicator in your browser. Which, in my scenario, does feel right. Google has likely raised its eyebrows at me for moving the blog from a hosted Blogger to a hosted Wordpress blog—not because I went away from a Google product (although it did cross my mind), but because I made slight changes site-wide (including utilizing a completely different presentation template, changing the permalink structure, and moving pages—301′d or not… and I get a B- in that department, but that’s another story).For now, I’m going to move my PageRank concerns off the critical list. It would seem the PageRank tools are likely reporting well out-of-date data, so how much credence can I give it in the short-term anyway?The good news: Google reports that I’m indexed well. I am coming up in the search results. So, I’ll take that as a nod that things are OK for now. If things go south insofar as incoming traffic from Google, I’ll definitely reignite my concerns. There are, however, other things that come into play that can help my blog get more respect from Google. I’ll continue to blog about about this subject under the “Operation Gain Google Respect” heading and tag.

Share This

Comments