Blogging 112: Pages vs. Posts

The great thing about blogs is that the newest and freshest material is always right at the top.

And the bad thing about blogs is that the newest material is always right at the top.

So you can write a great post, but over time it gets pushed further away from the front page, accessible only through the monthly archives and via Google.

That’s why Pages are a helpful alternative to Posts.

Pages become the overall high-level structure of your blog. So, for example, on this blog the Pages are

The Curriculum page is the “Parent” page for the Blogging, Core Courses, Facebook, Podcasting and Twitter curricula.

Then each page can have links to posts that have been done over time. So, for example, the Podcasting page has links to courses from Podcasting 101 through 110. These posts were written between March 31, 2008 and July 29, 2008. During that same time, I probably wrote a couple of dozen other posts, and I didn’t write the podcasting posts in numerical order.

By creating the Podcasting page, though, I could bring links to all of the podcasting-related posts together in one place, so that people stumbling upon SMUG (or one of the podcasting posts) can work through the related posts in a sequential manner.

As I write this post (part of the Blogging curriculum), it is Sept. 30, 2008. Soon it will be part of a previous month’s archive, and within a couple of weeks will be off the front page. But several months from now, when someone is wanting to learn all about blogging, she will start at Blogging 101 and work her way through.

Creating Pages is easy. In your WordPress dashboard, click the Write link:

Writing a Post is the default, but if you then click the Page link, you’ll be able to write a Page.

From that point, it’s just like writing a post, except a Page becomes part of your overall navigational structure.

Use Pages with care; once you start them you shouldn’t get rid of them. But if you need to bring order to your blog, Pages are important tools.

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Blogging 114: Categories vs. Tags

It’s fun to work with people who are new to social media, because they often have good, fresh questions that aren’t colored by familiarity with these tools. And they make me take a minute to think through some basic explanations.

For example, I was helping a colleague get started with a blog yesterday, and he asked me:

What’s the difference between categories and tags when I’m doing a blog post?

Great question! And it gave me a chance to combine two SMUG courses (I had planned to cover these topics separately) into a single post.

Category Coolness

Categories are internally focused for your blog, to help users navigate and find posts on similar topics. Once a user has found your blog, categories provide organizational structure to help them discover what your blog is about and to navigate efficiently.

So, for example, I have categories for Blogging, Facebook, Book Reviews, Marketing, Advertising, News Media, Conferences, Personal and a few more. So if people want to see all the posts I’ve live-blogged from conferences, they can click “Conferences” under the Category heading. Or they can click the Book Reviews category to read about all the books I’ve highlighted on SMUG.

A post can belong to more than category, but generally you would want to limit the number of categories you have and how many categories are selected for each post. One category I don’t use much any more is Social Media. Ever since I renamed this blog “Social Media University, Global” it hasn’t made much sense to put posts in the Social Media category; almost every post would belong there, and if the whole blog is about a topic it doesn’t makes sense to use that as a category.

This particular post, as you can see below, is in the Blogging category.

Categories are like the Dewey Decimal System for your blog: they’re your way of organizing content in a way that makes sense to you and hopefully your users. Except you don’t have the funky numbers like 330.94 for European economics. And while there’s no limit on the number of categories you can have, I would advise you to limit them. If you can’t see yourself doing several posts that would fit a category, use a broader one instead. So, for example, I have a News Media category instead of having separate categories for Radio, Print, and TV. That’s because the major division in this blog is between traditional, mainstream media (what I categorize as News Media) and Social Media. (But again, since most of the posts are about social media, I don’t use that category very often.)

After you’ve done a few posts, you might discover some themes emerging. Then you can go back and apply whatever category labels seem to make sense, like the apocryphal college that didn’t lay down its sidewalks until it saw where students had worn paths through the grass.

Tremendous Tags

Tags, by contrast, are externally focused. They’re aimed at the people who haven’t yet found your blog (and the search engines that guide them.) So instead of trying to find the one or two labels that best describe your post (as you do with categories) you can and should apply multiple tags to a post, based on words others might use to describe your post…or words they might be searching on to find relevant content.

So for this post I used not only the tags blog, blogs and blogging, but also social media, socialmedia, tags, tagging, categories, vlog, vlogging and others. While social media isn’t a particularly useful category for this blog, it is a good tag (and so is socialmedia, because some users doing a Technorati, Google, Blogpulse or WordPress.com search might leave out the space between social and media.)

If you click on any of the tags at the bottom of this post, you will find a list of blog posts on WordPress.com that used that tag. This is really helpful to users exploring a topic, because they can easily find a group of relevant posts. And if you use several related word variations, you’re not requiring users to choose your exact tag (e.g. blogs vs. blogging) in order to find your post.

So, within reason, with Tags it’s a case of “the more, the merrier.” If you add tags like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Barack Obama, John McCain, Justin Timberlake or other famous names to your posts in hopes of attracting more visitors, it won’t do you any good. Unless, of course, you happen to be doing a post about one of those people. If you “trick” people into visiting your blog by using irrelevant tags, they won’t stay long.

Another benefit of Tags is that you can use a “tag cloud” (see example above or in the sidebar at right) to graphically show visitors to your blog the main topics you cover. The most frequently used tags are bigger, and if people click in your tag cloud (at least on WordPress.com), they get a list of all your posts that included that tag.

Assignment:

  1. Write a post on your own blog, and assign it to one or two categories and add multiple tags.
  2. Include a sentence at the end (with a link to this post) that says something like, “I sure am learning a lot from Social Media University, Global…including how to add tags and categories for my blog posts.”
  3. Following those two steps will create a comment on this post (via Trackback, to be discussed in a future course), so that your fellow SMUGglers (the phrase Jim Streed coined) can follow it back and see how you’re doing in applying what you’re learning about categories and tags.


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10 Steps to Your Own FREE Podcast

10-steps-podcast-free

A podcast is the perfect vehicle for providing in-depth audio and video information to an interested audience. And not just an “audience,” but a community: if you use a blog to distribute your podcast, listeners can provide feedback through their comments. This post is a recap of Social Media University, Global’s 100-level Podcasting courses, and will take you step-by-step through everything you need to create your own podcast

Best of all, the education is completely FREE. SMUG has no tuition, and all of the tools to create and distribute your podcast used and recommended in these courses are free.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Subscribe to podcasts for FREE using iTunes
  • Record your audio files for FREE using Audacity
  • Use WordPress.com as your FREE server for delivering podcasts (a $20 savings over typical costs, exclusively for SMUG students)
  • Enhance your podcast feed through Feedburner so you can get traffic and usage data, and so your users can more easily subscribe, and
  • Get your podcast listed in the major podcast directories like the iTunes Store and Podcast Alley.

You’ll do all of this without spending a penny, but just investing your time, assuming you have access to a computer with a built-in microphone. Then, after you’ve experimented with your own personal podcast, you will have the confidence born of first-hand knowledge and hands-on experience that will enable you to make decisions on how and whether to use podcasting in your work or volunteer organizations. Here are the 10 steps to your free podcast:

  1. Podcasting 101/Social Media 106: Introduction to Podcasting
  2. Podcasting 102: Becoming a Podcaster
  3. Podcasting 103: Creating Audio Files Takes Audacity
  4. Podcasting 104: Adding ID3 Tags to Your Audio Files
  5. Podcasting 105: WordPress.com is My Podcast Server (and Yours)
  6. Podcasting 106: Creating an RSS Podcast Feed
  7. Podcasting 107: Posting a Podcast Episode
  8. Podcasting 108: Subscribing to Your Podcast
  9. Podcasting 109: Hotter Podcast Feeds through Feedburner
  10. Podcasting 110: Listing Your Podcast in iTunes and Other Directories

Upon completion of these 10 steps, you will receive your non-accredited Associate of Arts in Podcastology and will be added to the SMUG Dean’s List. Then you’ll be ready to explore advanced courses at the 200-level and above, learning about production enhancements like better recording devices, adding music to your podcast without going to jail, conducting interviews remotely through Skype, mixing tracks and adjusting recording levels, and otherwise making your podcast more professional.

Please give your feedback on this 10-step free podcast program, either in the comments below or on the individual courses. We’re always open to suggestions on how we can improve the educational experience.

And if you find the program helpful, please use your blog, Twitter, Facebook — or the buttons below — to share it with your friends and colleagues.

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YouTube 101: 7 Steps to Getting the Most Out of YouTube

In a way, this course isn’t completely necessary because:

  1. You’ve undoubtedly watched YouTube videos
  2. The interface in YouTube is so well designed that most people “get” it

In fact, my daughter Rebekah just said, “Dad, you’re such a nerd. Seven steps to getting the most out of YouTube..who needs that?” But SMUG exists to provide background, explanation and training in social media even for those of the 30+ generation who aren’t so-called “digital natives.” So here are seven ways you can get the most out of YouTube.

1. Share a Video. Suppose you’re out surfing through YouTube and you come across this interesting one from Mayo Clinic on Coblation Tonsillectomy, which is a cool (pardon the pun) alternative to cutting out tonsils.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX0DCVXAE4I]

After you’ve watched this, you may think, “That’s just what my nephew Justin with the raspy voice and chronic sore throat needs.” Just click on the “share” button, enter your sister’s e-mail address and a personal note, and hit “send.”

Continue reading “YouTube 101: 7 Steps to Getting the Most Out of YouTube”

Podcasting 109: Hotter Podcast Feeds through Feedburner

Note: This post is part of the Podcasting curriculum for Social Media University, Global.

In Podcasting 105 through 108 we demonstrated how you can use a WordPress.com blog as a server to create an RSS feed for your podcast, and can subscribe to your podcast by cutting and pasting that feed URL into your iTunes program. But using the native RSS feed from WordPress.com has a couple of disadvantages:

  1. It doesn’t give you feed statistics, so you don’t know how many people are subscribing. That’s fine if you are doing a personal podcast just for fun, but if you’re doing this in a work environment your employer will likely expect better statistics so you can determine whether the podcast is worthwhile.
  2. Cutting and pasting is a little clunky for your users. They have to know how to subscribe manually in iTunes, and it would be a lot better if there was a nice interface to guide them through the process.

“Burning” your feed through Feedburner.com provides solutions to both of those problems, as you will see and hear below:


Homework Assignments:

  1. Go to Feedburner and set up an account. You will be able to use this to burn your RSS feeds for your WordPress.com blog as well (to be described in a future post in the Blogging curriculum), but it all starts from having a Feedburner account (as Toby Palmer now does).
  2. Go back through the earlier courses in the Podcasting curriculum so you can record an audio file and launch your own student podcast. As you will see in Podcasting 105, we have a standing offer for any SMUG student to  create a free podcast hosted from the SMUG Podcast Blog (and thereby avoid paying the $20/year additional fee to WordPress.com in order to experiment with your own podcast.)

After you’ve learned how to do a personal podcast, you’ll be ready and confident in your abilities to launch one for your business or non-profit organization. You’ll probably want to spend a little money on better recording equipment, and at that point paying the $20 to be able to podcast from your own blog will be well worth it.

But our goal at SMUG is to let you experiment with all of these tools without spending even a penny of your own money, only investing your time in the on-line education process. So please take advantage of the opportunity and start your own podcast today.