Blogs | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blogging 117: Attracting Blog Visitors through Comments

Blogs are a conversational medium. As we learned in Blogging 101, a blog is essentially a newspaper. Two major factors that set blogs apart are:

Anyone can be a publisher, and
Within reason, every letter to the editor is published.

I say “within reason” because some people go out and leave meaningless or off-topic comments as a way of driving traffic to their sites. Thankfully, as a wordpress.com site, SMUG is protected against comment spam automatically by Akismet. But still, sometimes one sneaks through, with an innocuous comment like, “Great site. Keep up the good work” that includes a link to a Russian porn site. When that happens, I mark the comment as spam, which deletes the comment and makes it more likely Akismet will prevent that person from infecting other wordpress blogs.

But comment spam isn’t the main point of this post. This post is about how you can legitimately engage in discussions through comments on other related blogs, and as a natural byproduct attract visitors to what you’ve written.

If you’re commenting just to attract blog traffic through that single link, people will sniff it out and you won’t get much out of it. But if you’re contributing meaningfully to the conversation, you not only will get some visitors via the link in your comment (as described below); you also make it likely that the blog’s author will take notice of your blog and possibly link to it in a future post.

Continue reading “Blogging 117: Attracting Blog Visitors through Comments”

Social Media 111: Customizing Your iGoogle Page

In Social Media 102 we introduced you to RSS, which is a powerful way for you to keep tabs on what’s new in dozens (if not 100 or more) of Web sites and blogs that provide RSS feeds. Instead of having to go to the sites, you can use Newsgator or NetNewswire or Google Reader, and have the updates sent to you.

iGoogle is an alternative that enables you to embed what Google calls “gadgets” featuring the latest content from your favorite sites, all on a single page. It lets you, in effect, create a simple, free blog monitoring dashboard.

I recently heard that Yahoo! said as many as half of all MyYahoo! users never customize it from the default settings. I expect that may also be true of iGoogle. That’s why I made this video screencast, to show just how easy it is to customize iGoogle, to have the latest posts from the key blogs you’re monitoring available to you with a single click.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B7u49Ky_oo]

Homework Assignment:

Sign into your gmail account (or get one if you haven’t yet)
Go to iGoogle.
Click the “Add Stuff” link (on the right side), and then the “Add feed or gadget” link in the left column.
When the box pops up, paste in a URL from any blog post. If you like, for example, you could use this one: https://www.social-media-university-global.org/2008/10/27/smug-reading-list-102708/ then hit the “Add” button.
When you get the confirmation that the feed has been added, click the “Back to iGoogle Home” link, and you will see that the gadget containing this RSS feed has been placed in the upper left corner of your page.
Repeat the steps for each blog you want added to your monitoring dashboard.

Please note that while iGoogle lets you just enter the URL from a single blog post, and figures out the related RSS feed you want to monitor, you also can paste in the URL from an RSS feed in step 4. So, for example, I did a Blogpulse search for posts mentioning “Mayo Clinic” and got this URL:

http://blogpulse.com/rss?query=%22Mayo+Clinic%22&sort=date&operator=

Which I pasted into a gadget and now it sits on the front page of my iGoogle.

Please note also that you can edit the number of feeds that go into your gadget, increasing to up to 9:

This will be most helpful for those feeds (like Blogpulse or Technorati searches on keywords) for which you expect more frequent updates.

Alltop has several pre-configured pages like this, as described in this post. But you can’t tailor those. You can configure iGoogle to exactly meet your needs, though, and as our SMUG motto says:

It’s Not That Hard!

Blogging 305: Domain Mapping

Domain mapping enables you to choose any available URL for your blog, regardless of the physical server you use to host your blog.

So, for instance, I started this blog at leeaase.wordpress.com, but when I decided to convert from a blog to a virtual university I mapped it to https://www.social-media-university-global.org/ (because getting the .edu domain would have been too much of a hassle.)

You’ll note that if you click either of the links above, it will take you to the front page of this blog. The purpose of this course is to show you how you can do something similar for your blog that is hosted on wordpress.com, and how that gives you and your blog room to grow for the future.

Here’s the slideshow that takes you through the process, step by step:

The example I used for the demonstration is a blog I helped my septuagenarian parents and their friends start for their local Republican party volunteers to have a means of expression. It was originally at sixissues.wordpress.com and now is mapped to sixbigissues.com.

If you have started a blog on wordpress.com and would like to get wordpress.com out of your blog’s URL, this is how you do it. For businesses and organizations, it’s an important way to have your URL reflect your brand. Either way, if you think you might just get serious about blogging and want to protect your ability to move your blog to a different server where you would have more flexibility and control, spending the $19.19 for a domain and mapping is a good investment.

If you found this post helpful, please share it on Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or one of the other services featured in the toolbar below:

Blogging 110: Private Blogs

This course could have been called Blogging for Cowards. It’s a way of test-driving WordPress without letting anyone else see what you’re doing. But there actually are some legitimate reasons why you might want to consider a private blog to accomplish your goals.

First, I will show you how to create a private blog. It’s really simple.

Start a WordPress.com blog. If you already have a WordPress.com blog, it’s easy to register another one.

Then go to your dashboard and click the Settings link,

Then choose the Privacy Tab,

and select the “I would like my blog to be visible only to users I choose” option.

It’s that simple.

So why would you use this option?

In addition to being a risk-free way for you to experiment with blogging and learn how to do it without anyone else seeing, it could also be a way to have the equivalent of an intranet blog for your organization, but without needing IT support to install blogging software on your servers. You just need to have everyone who wants to have access to the blog sign up for a wordpress.com account. They don’t need to have their own blogs; they can simply get an account.

Then, on your blog’s administrative dashboard, click the “Users” link (which is right next to the “Settings” link) and scroll to the bottom, where you can “Add User from the Community”

Just enter their e-mail addresses and choose what level of access you want to give them (Contributor, Author, Editor or Administrator) and they will be able to participate in your blog. But no one else can.

I’ve used this method as a way to introduce colleagues to blogging so they could get hands-on experience. It takes away the mystery and fear of the unknown.

But particularly if you work for a small organization, it could be a way to in essence create the equivalent of an intranet if you don’t already have one…and without any IT expense.

So you can use this approach either to take away your own trepidation (by creating a private blog that only you can see) or to allay the fears of others in your organization or workgroup who don’t want to be blogging out there on the internet for all to see. And you can have up to 35 users (I believe) for your private blog on wordpress.com without paying for an upgrade. The upgrade to allow unlimited private users is $30 a year.

If such fears have been keeping you from experimenting with blogging, start a private wordpress.com blog today. And if you later overcome your blogophobia and want to make your blog public, it’s as simple as going back to the dashboard and changing the privacy settings.

Get started today!

Blogging 204: WordPress.com Social Sharing

Long-time SMUGgles will note something new at the bottom of each new post (and I will be adding these retroactively as I am able.) It looks like this:

This social sharing toolbar lets readers quickly and easily share interesting posts quickly and easily with specific friends or with the wider Web, through Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Blinklist, Ma.gnolia.com, Technorati, Furl and Newsvine.

So if you see something you want to share, like the 10 Steps to Your Own FREE Podcast post (which is featured in the screencast below) or this podcast on Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), it’s easy to spread the word.

And it’s easy for you as a blogger to add these buttons to make your content easy to share. The screencast below takes you through the process of adding the buttons a post and also using the buttons to share.

But before we do that, I want to take a moment to thank Jan from the Typepad vs. WordPress blog (who will soon debut as a SMUG visiting professor) for sharing how to add this functionality. Because WordPress.com doesn’t allow import of Flash-based widgets, I had thought it was impossible to have these social sharing buttons on my posts. Another friend, Monty, calls WordPress.com “Digg-proof” and I think that’s why.

But no more. I saw these buttons on Jan’s blog (which is on WordPress.com) and asked how it was done. Jan sent the link to where I could download the GetSocial program, along with a tutorial.

But I thought a show-and-tell screencast would be simpler, so here it is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCnVpj6XCYs]