Tag Archives: Blogging
WordPress basics for beginners
I’ve always had a passion for everything online and for the past 11 months I have learnt something new (about how to make use of and survive in the online world) everyday. The more I learn about the online world — whether it be social media, email marketing, blogging or online reputation management, the more my passion grows for this industry.
11 Months ago I started using a blogging platform called WordPress and I’ve never looked back. “WordPress is an open source CMS, often used as a blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plugin architecture and a templating system.”
I’ve always used the WordPress platform for blogging, but recently I started playing around with website design and I had no idea how much more I could do with this platform.
WordPress allows you to ad a custom theme (which can be downloaded or created), add plugins, set up a sidebar, add your own content and so much more when building your blog or website. The rate at which one can create an attractive blog or website is phenomenal. With so many effective plugins that can be installed by a simple click of a button, how can you NOT want to use WordPress to your advantage?
If you are a new blogger/website designer or simply enjoy blogging and building websites then WordPress is the perfect platform for you. Trust me, you’ll love it. Take a look at some of the videos below which contain basic WordPress tips to assist you when getting started.
Getting Started with WordPress:
How to design a Web Page in WordPress:
Learning WordPress Basics:
So if you are a web designer, online marketer or simply love blogging then why not give WordPress a try? Happy designing c”,
Four great ways to gain Facebook fans
Last week I published an article about “Why you must invest in a Facebook page instead of profile for your business”. This week I decided to touch on things you can do to gain more fans for your page on Facebook.
YouTube is a great tool to broadcast yourself or your business. The good thing about it is that it’s open to everyone and it gives you the option of posting the video to your Facebook page. There are people who are now famous because of YouTube. You must be creative with your video so that it can catch the attention of your fans and motivate them share it with their friends. You can introduce yourself and your business to the world. Don’t forget to include links to your Facebook page, Twitter page or Website.
If you have a website or blog, installing a Facebook page plug-in can really help you gain more followers. However, people will not like your Facebook page if the content of your website or blog is outdated or not interesting. Creativity is essential.
Have fliers around your shop, advertising your Facebook page. Put it on your business card or post it on a receipt. You must also make sure that your Facebook page user name is personalised. This makes it easy for people to find you on Facebook and to be able to remember your Facebook page URL.
Facebook ads are also another great way to gain more followers. There is a cost involved and the price depends on your targeting criteria, so you are in control of how much you spend.
The how to of Blogging
I’m sure many of you know what blogging is, but for the few of you who do not know what a blog is, allow me to enlighten you. A blog is a web page that serves as a journal for an individual which is freely accessible to internet users all over the globe. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?
Blogging is not as easy as many think. With millions of blogs out there, it’s hard to achieve true success. You can spend 15 hours a day working on your blog but, if you’re not doing the right things you’re just wasting your time. So what goes into having a successful blog you ask? There are many ways you can ensure your blog will be successful. There are a few important factors you need to determine before starting a blog, which include:
–> Goals
–> Target Audience
Below are a few other important elements you should take into consideration when creating and maintaining your own blog:
1. Name and URL Link
The name of your blog is very important. It should be unique and memorable so that visitors will remember it and return after the first visit.
When choosing a domain for your blog, select one that will represent your brand – which is you. Pick something that’s short and unforgettable. Anything too long will be hard to remember and easily forgotten. This may result in visitors not returning to your blog.
2. Design
The design is the first thing a visitor will notice when arriving on your blog. If you want to ‘wow’ your visitors then choose a design that stands out from the rest in order for your blog to be unforgettable. Remember, first impressions last.
Another important factor to take into consideration is navigation. Make sure that everything on your blog is easy to find and access. There’s nothing more annoying than spending hours trying to find recent posts, tags, a search box, etc.
3. Content
I’m sure you’ve heard the cliché, “Content is king.” Well, if you want a successful blog then you should live by it.
Content helps increase your traffic and improve your rankings. If you want readers to share your posts then you should put a lot of time and effort into your content.
4. Social Media Platforms
Social interactivity is fundamental for any blog. When creating your blog, add plugins or widgets in order to make it easy for your readers to share your content. Be sure to add a Facebook like button, a Twitter button for retweeting, and the new Google +1 button. If you create great content, people will share it on their social media platforms.
Blogging Heroes
Among more than 102 000 000 blogs, a few stand out as influential — they are called Blogging Heroes. Wired magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson is one of them with one of the most successful blogs in the world – “The Long Tail”.
Below are a few points by Chris Anderson that might help you when creating your own blog or increasing the quality of your blog:
A blog is a thinking tool, a means of collecting, composing, and amplifying your thoughts—while getting useful feedback. Ideas are enriched by the experiences of blog readers.
A personal blog presents a better platform for communicating honestly and transparently than a company blog, where a writer is constrained by commercial considerations. However, remember that self-promotion is more effective when it includes a value-added element.
A blog, especially one with a large community, can function as a distributed research project and become an efficient marketing platform.
When blogging, focus on specific interests. You don’t have to appeal to an overly diverse audience. Focused blogs are self-selecting, in that they draw readers who have a legitimate interest in the blogs’ subjects.
Such readers are more likely to forgive errors and omissions, and will contribute more than someone just passing through.
Every blog, and every blogger, can be improved. To maximize your blog’s audience, focus with laser precision on your subject.
If you want to hear Chris live, catch him at the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit on 21 September 2011.
How to boast your blog traffic
Last week I published an article on how to make your website work for you. Today I have decided to share a few tips that could help you increase your blog visitors and even convert them into regular readers, subscribers or even long-term customers.
Consider your title carefully
Remember the title is the first thing the visitors see. A poor title will not encourage people to visit your site and more importantly, the title is what tells the search engines the content of your blog.
Let’s say, there are two people writing about how to increase website traffic. The first one’s heading is “website traffic” and the second one’s title is “How to boast your website traffic. Whom do you think will have the most visitors?
Optimise your permanent link
You created your blog to have a lot of visitors’ right? WordPress default links are not effective for SEO (search engine optimisation) purposes as consist of letters and numbers and those numbers are not related to what you are writing about. See the difference below:
The wordpress default links looks like this www.emarketingblog.co.za/p?56, why not change it to something like this: www.emarketingblog.co.za/facebook-tips-for-your-fan-page/.
Read more about building quality links
Use tags
Tags are also very important in ranking your blog. Before hitting that publish button, consider searching for key words or phrases in your article and tag them. It doesn’t matter how many phrases you tag. Do not use the ones that are not related to what you are writing about. This will upset people when they are in your page to find out that you don’t have the information that they are looking for.
Comment on other blogs
Read other blogs and leave your comments. Some people might go to your site because of the suggestions you’ve left on other people’s blogs. The more you read and comment, likelihood increases the number of people visiting your blog.
Write Guest Posts
This is one of the most powerful tools that can help you generate more traffic to your site as well. The more guest posts you write, the more traffic you can generate.
Insert Social Media plug-in
There is a lot of Social Media plug-ins that are available for use. Make sure you only include the ones that involve where your target audience are and ask your visitors to share your posts.
Do you have any tips you could include? How about leaving a comment? Remember to share this post.
Do’s of Social Media Marketing
Most of the brands have become very powerful because of Social Media. Surely, they didn’t achieve this over night or by luck. Everything worthwhile comes with hard-work and dedication. There are important Strategies for Online Media success. I am going to share Do’s of Social Media that can help you get most out of your social media presence.
Do’s
1) Planning ahead
If you do not have Social Media Plan in place it’s rare that your business will make something out of it. Why waste your time investing it on something you didn’t even plan.
No Plan = Fail… Period
2) Genuinely engaging with your audience.
This is the most important part of Social media; regular contribution relevant information to you audience make them come back to your site again.
3) Listening
Listen to what they are saying, what interest them the most, what boring them and give information that they want to read about.
4) Make sure all the Brand Networks Platforms are consistent.
If your audience are confused; you will lose them. Make sure that there is same torn and vibe in all your Social Media platforms.
5) Access your Social Media success.
You entered into Social media because you have goal to achieve right? It’s advisable to check whether you are achieving your goals by accessing you success. Check out some of the ways to access it.
6) Check your errors.
People understand that human beings make mistakes. Always be eager to admit if you make one and correct it as soon as possible.
7) Call for action.
Once you have shared your pictures or content; ask your follower to like or share and thank them when they do.
Do you have any Online Social Media Strategies? Why don’t you share…?
Social Media Tools
Anyone who follows lots of people or who has lots of followers on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook knows how difficult and frustrating it is to keep track and manage all their Social Networks at once. I was very happy when I realised that these two powerful Social Media tools cater to this problem.
The first one is TweetDeck; my reasons for recommending this are:
1) TweetDeck allows you users to browse and stay in touch with what’s happening in the now; connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and many more, all in one application.
2) You can post your status updates, post photos or videos, comments, liking at once through TweetDeck.
3) You can also group your friends into columns to make it easier to follow only updates you would like to follow.
4) TweetDeck also lets you to create a column for anyone who “mentions” you; this helps you to keep track of everyone who mentions you in their tweets; how cool is that?
HootSuite is the second Social Media tool that can help you manage several streams of information in an efficient way.
A few of my reasons for recommending this are
1) HootSuite allows you to manage multiple networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook etc.
2) HootSuite allows you to manage multiple users over various social networks.
3) HootSuite also includes analytics to help you understand where traffics are coming from.
4) Multi-stream view- you will not miss any updates in your Social Networks.
5) Managing your blog followers.
6) HootSuite also allows you to schedule your tweets so that you can avoid time-zone or important tweets when you aren’t at your computer.
For more cool stuff you can check it out yourself. Click here.
Tips to improve your online marketing strategy.
People use social media for variety reason. I would like to focus more in people that use blog posts, Tweets, Facebook posts or emails with the purpose of marketing a business. The content in their site, blog or Facebook page must help them engage and maintain their customers. I am going to share few points to be considered in achieving this.
Your site should be simple. Make show that you:
1. Bold important phrases to make them stand out because internet readers like scanning.
2. Keep your paragraph short and straight to the point. The maximum of the paragraph should be 3-4 sentences.
3. Organise your information and break up section using subheading for the reader to be able to scan easily.
4. Keep your sentences very short.
5. Consider using bullets.
6. Text font is also very important, I advice you to use Arial, Veranda or Times New Roman.
7. Check you grammar and spellings
8. Avoid too much punctuation.
9. Do not try to impress readers.
10 Make show that you proofread before posting.
To increase the visibility of you site. The best way to do it is to use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website via natural or unpaid ways. Here are ways to improve you website writing through SEO usage.
1. You site must be 100% useful to the readers.
2. Place the keyword phrase within the title and subheadings where possible.
Click here for more tips. We would be happy to hear your suggestions.
Long and short of blogging
The thing about making marketing on the internet more effective, this is from the point of view of a consumer, is that the information needs to be interesting and not boring. It may seem as though I am repeating myself but there is a huge difference. For example, I was reading an article a while back about the growth of the internet and how it has become a part life. To me it was a very interesting topic and it was well brought across. The article was interesting and the point of the article was clear, but the thing is that it carried on for far too long. After a bit of reading it was almost as if I was reading the same thing over and over and that was where the whole thing became boring and lost my attention.
As a consumer you want to know what you want and if you don’t, you want to have clear indicators to lead you in the right direction. The thing is that there are so many confusing sites and though we ‘navigate’ them we are just playing around hoping that we find what we are looking for. A site that is direct and clear makes one feel that you are in control and you feel good about using the internet even though you know that the whole thing has nothing to do with how you did what you did.
So back to my point, people use the internet because it is easy and convenient not because they feel like reading and the library is doing stock take. You get what you need and the rest is left for the next person to come along. Reading a blog is to get away from the conformity of the news and the media, getting things from a different point of view and to make things a bit more interesting, people just tend to get too carried away with the whole thing.
The whole era of the internet is make things work and that is the long and short of it.
Live blogging demo
Here I am trying to compare the virtues of blogger, typepad, wordpress and drupal.
Any thoughts?
Top 10 worst countries to blog
In case you have not yet read this report on the Committee to Project Journalists’ web site, www.cpj.org below is the list of the top 10 worst countries to be blogging from. A no, it is not so due to slow connectivity but actual government harassment of bloggers.
According to CPJ, in these countries, relying on a mix of detentions, regulations, and intimidation, authorities in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Egypt have emerged as the leading online oppressors in the Middle East and North Africa. China and Vietnam, where burgeoning blogging cultures have encountered extensive monitoring and restriction, are among Asia’s worst blogging nations. Cuba and Turkmenistan, nations where Internet access is heavily restricted, round out the dishonor roll.
- Burma
- Iran
- Syria
- Cuba
- Saudi Arabia
- Vietnam
- Tunisia
- China
- Turkmenistan
- Egypt
So, if you dont reside in one of these countries and you’re a blogger, count your lucky stars and find a way of supporting those that aren’t as fortunate.
