I’ve just passed three years on YouTube and I’m really happy with what I’ve achieved so far.

But over the last few months I’ve become mates with a guy who owns one of the fastest growing channels in the UK—and he started just over a year ago. Dai Ling Ping has gone from zero to over 25,000 subscribers! It’s awesome for an individual to achieve this.

I’m blown away by how quickly his brand is growing and even though you may not be into video games, you will still be able to take some notes from his story and start something of your own. Get your pen and paper ready, here’s what Dai has done!

1. He uploads five videos a week

Most top YouTubers usually produce one video a week. I know that, within the animation industry, the top guys try to get one video live every calendar month, as their work is more time-consuming. But Dai is cranking them out. He’s not dwelling on the fact that some videos get a few hundred views and others are getting thousands, he just keeps on going!

2. He is part of something big

What ever subject you choose, you should always think of yourself as being part of something much bigger than you. For instance, Dai got involved with the Machinima network, which has a database of millions of gamers all over the world. If they like one of Dai’s videos, they can get it in front of hundreds of thousands of people very quickly.

3. He leverages his most popular video

Dai has a video titled “My House”—it even ranks top on the search engines, having racked up over 500,000 views. And his other videos are feeding off the success of this one.

On YouTube, you have two spaces beneath the video to promote your other works. Also, YouTube will line your other videos above and on the right hand side of the displayed video automatically. So, if you have a popular video, be sure to add others—don’t give those valuable spaces away to other YouTubers.

4. He is always looking for the next big thing

Because he’s organized with making videos, if something breaks out on the news, Dai can create a video on that topic within a few hours, and send it straight to his subscribers. Sometimes his videos rank next to the original news story on YouTube!

5. He is original

Many people are getting a bit stuck online now because they don’t know what information to read and what to do.

By keeping it simple, cranking out funny videos and illustrations, and chatting with his fans in the comments, Dai has built something that is growing faster than he could ever control. Because he invented the Dai Ling Ping character, he will eventually be able to make some big profits from original merchandise sales.

You may find some of Dai’s videos offensive, due to bad language. But if I was half as productive as Dai I would be sitting on a lot more subscribers today! Comedian Ricky Gervais once said “always produce more than you hope” and in the online market that has never been more true!

David Edwards is the founder of http://www.asittingduck.com and produces animations over at www.youtube.com/asittingducktv

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

5 Reasons Why Dai Ling Ping is Going to Win On YouTube in 2012

You know the situation: your site’s been slowing down for a while, but you just can’t put your finger on why. Then you get a tweet, an email, or a comment on your Facebook page mentioning it. Even worse, you see someone talking about your site in your niche’s main online forum—they’re not impressed with your sites performance.

What was once an amazingly quick-loading site has slowed and slowed to a crawl. Your visitors are growing unhappy and may even be starting to look for alternative sites. To be honest, who could blame them for wanting to seek out someone else that serves their needs better, in less time?

What makes things worse is that you’re not really a geek or a tech-head and you don’t know what to do about it.

You ask yourself:

• How can I find out what’s killing my sites performance?
• How do I know where the issues are?
• How can I give someone the right information to help me?

Well in this post, I want to help you do just that, by giving you a quick introduction to analyzing your site’s performance using one of the simplest, free, tool package of all—Google Chrome’s Developer Tools.

Now I appreciate that we’re not all geeks or tech heads, and that more than likely, this isn’t something that you’d do on a regular basis. But that needn’t stop you. You can be partially autonomous without being either a nerd or programmer.

So I am going to show you, quickly, just how easy it is to use the developer tools available in Google Chrome, to work out which components of your blog are causing you issues. With that information, you’ll be able to take action yourself if you host your own blog, or report this to your tech support if you don’t.

What are the Developer Tools?

The official Developer Tools blog describes them as follows:

The Developer Tools, bundled and available in Chrome, allows web developers and programmers deep access into the internals of the browser and their web application … The Developer Tools are organized into task-oriented groups that are represented by icons in the toolbar at the top of the window. Each toolbar item and corresponding panel lets you work with a specific type of page or app information, including DOM elements, resources, and scripts.

Now okay, there’s a bit to take in there, but if you’re not comfortable with all that, don’t worry: it simply means that these tools provide a way of finding out specific details about each component of the web page that you’re currently viewing.

They allow you to filter by category, and sort the available information by a simple set of key criteria, such as size, time and type. The image below shows you a working example.

Step 1. Open Developer Tools

The first thing that we want to do is to display the Developer Tools window in Google Chrome. After opening Google Chrome, click on the wrench icon on the right-hand side of the main Chrome window. In the menu that pops up, move your mouse over the Tools option and in the next window that pops up, click Developer Tools (this is second from the bottom).

Step 2. Get familiar with the Developer Tools window

All being well, you’ll see the Developer Tools main window, which looks similar to the screenshot above. You’ll see a set of tabs across the top, including:

• Elements
• Resources
• Network
• Scripts
• Timeline
• Profiles
• Audits
• Console.

The one that we’re focusing on is Network, so go ahead and click that tab. Now you’re going to see what seems like a large amount of information, but don’t worry—before you’ve finished this article, you’re going to be an ace at making sense of the parts that are most important.

Step 3. Filtering options

Now, take a closer look at the footer> of the window, right down the bottom. You’ll see a set of menus, which include:

• All: Displays all the components in the page
• Documents: Displays only HTML output
• Stylesheets: Display CSS stylesheets
• Images: Display all images (.png, .jpeg, .gif, etc.)
• Scripts: Display all Javascript (inline, external).

These options allow you to filter the components that make up the current page. In this case, it’s the Facebook fan page of my first blog, Malt Blue.

By default, the All option is selected. This shows you everything in the page. This is a bit much to work with, so go ahead and click each option and notice how the list can dramatically change in size.

Now take a closer look at the row under the main menu. It has a series of columns that allow you to sort the available information. They include:

• Name: the name of the HTML page, image, stylesheet, etc.
• Method: whether the item was requested with GET or POST
• Status: some information about status of the item
• Type: a text description of the item’s type
• Initiator: what requested the item
• Size: the size of the item
• Time: the time taken to retrieve the item displayed in text
• Timeline: the time taken to retrieve the item displayed as a graph.

The key columns, however, are Name, Size, Time, and Timeline. By focusing on these columns, you can see that of the eight displayed, the first one took 1.57 seconds to load with a size of 65.40KB. Not too bad overall. If you’re a visual person, like me, then sort using the Timeline tab.

Okay, so you’re now more familiar with the available options. But for the quickest assessment, the two key columns to look at are time and size. Let’s consider each in turn.

Step 4. Sort by time

This one is probably the best one to use when it comes to finding rogue components. It was a god-send recently when it was able to tell me that a MailChimp sign-up widget in my sidebar was taking over 15 seconds to fully load.

So click on the Time column until it has a downward facing arrow next to it. Then, you’ll see the components in the page, displayed from slowest to fastest. In the column, you’ll see two numbers for each component, one in grey and one in black.

The number that you want to focus on is the top number in the black font. This shows you the total time that the component took to load, right from when it was requested by the browser, to when it was displayed on the page.

Step 5. Sort by size

This is probably the second-best option to sort by, especially if you’re more of a numbers than a graphics person. As you did with sorting by Time, click on the Size column until it has a downward facing arrow next to it.

Then, you’ll see the components in the page, displayed from biggest to smallest. In the column, you’ll again see two numbers for each component. Once again, focus on the number in the black font. This is the total size of your component.

Step 6. What To Do

So far, we’ve opened the Developer Tools, familiarized ourselves with the Network window, played around with its key options, and finished up by getting to know the components in our web page.

But what do you do now?

Based on time and size, take an inventory of the biggest and slowest loading elements of your page. Then look to see what you can do to reduce these points. To save you time, here are my top suggestions for speeding up your site with this new knowledge:

• See if the elements relate to plugins or widgets that you’ve installed. If so, consider disabling them or finding an alternative that loads faster.
• Look at the slowest loading or biggest images. Maybe you’ve set the width and height to make them appear smaller. Could you:
  1. optimize them for displaying on the net?
  2. scale them down in size without losing quality?
  3. remove unnecessary parts of the image?
  4. use another image format, producing a smaller file size?
• Do you load a lot of CSS stylesheets or Javascript files? Could you:
  1. combine them in to one file?
  2. load some from external, faster, sources, such as Google?
  3. shrink the Javascript and CSS files with online services such as jscompress.com or minifycss.com?

Don’t manage the site?

What if your site’s managed for you by someone else?

In that case, get in touch with your tech support and tell them all that you can about the slow components that you’ve found. Tell them what they are, how long they’re taking to load, the size of them, and so on. An even simpler option may be to send them an annotated screenshot of the developer tools window where you’ve highlighted the results that you’ve found.

Experiment!

Like all new things, give yourself time to become familiar with the tool. As you do so, you’ll grow a proper appreciation for what’s fast and what’s not, what’s a good size for a file or an image and what’s not, and so on.

Then, as this knowledge builds, you’ll be increasingly autonomous and better informed about the state of your site.

I hope that you’ve found this helpful and that in future, when your site’s exhibiting poor performance, you’ll be in a much better position to perform the initial diagnostics yourself. You’ll be both better informed and more able to let your tech support know when issues need to be addressed and where.

Matthew Setter is a passionate writer, educator and software developer. He’s also the founder of Malt Blue, dedicated to helping people become better at web development.You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ anytime.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Know Which Plugins are Killing Your Site’s Performance

StudioPress Themes: 25% Discount

I’m often asked about the design here on ProBlogger and who created it. The answer is simple – it’s built upon the Genesis Framework by the team at StudioPress (a Copyblogger Media creation).

Genesis is a highly secure, fast loading and highly adaptable framework and the StudioPress designs are fantastic. I don’t regret switching to them earlier in the year at all. As a result I have no hesitation in recommending them and letting you know about their 25% off offer over the next few days.

Using the code THANKS at checkout, you can save 25% off of anything you’d like at StudioPress. For example you can get the following deals:

1. Get the Genesis Framework for only $45.
2. Snag most Genesis / design combos for a song and save close to $20.
3. Wipe the entire shop clean and get the StudioPress Pro Plus All-Theme Package. Get Genesis plus every design they’ve made, plus every design they make in the future, and save more than $74 off the regular price and over $875 off the retail price — and that’s just the existing 43 designs!

All you need to do is use the code THANKS when you check out and you’ll save 25% on anything and everything at StudioPress.com.

Premise Ultimate: 42% Discount

Readers of ProBlogger know that I have taught numerous times on the importance of ‘landing pages’ to help you convert readers to different types of actions. Landing pages are specifically designed pages to call your readers to action (whether that action might be to ‘subscribe’, ‘buy’, ‘advertise’ etc. I’ve written about the importance of landing pages here.

I’m also a big fan of Premise – a WordPress based software for developing landing pages by the team at CopyBlogger Media. Premise was very recently updated to version 1.2 and includes heaps of refinements including a new landing page type – the social sharing page.

Premise Ultimate usually sells for $165, as it gives you a heap of value:

1. All the landing pages you can build
2. Use on as many domains as you want
3. Access to ongoing optimization seminars
4. Copywriting advice from inside WordPress
5. 1,100+ custom graphics by Rafal
6. Unlimited technical support
7. Unlimited updates (you’ll thank yourself for this next year)

During their Thanksgiving sale, you can get Premise Ultimate for only $95.

Just use the code THANKS when you check out and you’ll save $70 on the best landing page software available for WordPress.

Both of these deals ends promptly at 7:00 pm Pacific time on Monday, November 28, 2011. Hurry up and get claim your new WordPress theme and Premise Ultimate before the CopyBlogger team come to their senses!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Get StudioPress Themes and Premise Landing Page Plugin for Big Discounts Today

n

Please answer for the platform you use most if you have multiple blogs (one selection per person). I’d also love to hear some of your “why?” responses below in the comments, along with mentions of any other platforms not listed here.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

What Blog Platform Do You Use Most? [POLL]

Secure Sockets Layer (or SSL to you and me) is an encryption standard most of us are familiar with using whenever we do something over the Internet that needs enhanced security.

Image copyright Evgeniya Ponomareva - Fotolia.com

Whether it be banking, email, signing into a personal account, purchasing something, or any one of the dozens of things we do online daily with the potential to have our private data compromised, most Internet users are familiar with that little padlock symbol that appears every time we use SSL.

How SSL affects blog owners

In a recent update on their official search blog, Google has outlined plans to apply SSL to user search queries. Under the guise of privacy, Google claims that the addition of SSL will:

recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver.

Increased privacy is all very well, but what will that mean for your blog?

Previously an opt-in option, it’s important to note that Google’s implementation of SSL in performed searches at this stage will only affect logged in users. That is, people with a Google Account who are logged intot hat account while searching.

So what kind of affected traffic are we talking about here?

Google’s Matt Cuts (head of web spam) told Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief at Search Engine Land, that he “estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.”

Less than 10% of Google search users have a Google Account? I can’t help but seriously question that.

Between Gmail, iGoogle, YouTube, and more recently Google+ (over 40 million at last count and climbing), pretty much anyone who uses a Google product has an account and, more than likely, will be signed in. Is this SSL implementation really only going to affect less than 10% of internet searches?

Leaving that doubt aside for a second, let’s get back to the question at hand: again, what does all of this mean for your blog?

The one thing you, the problogger, needs to take away from all this is that if you’re tracking your users via keywords (that is, seeing which keywords bring in the most traffic), the accuracy of your stats is going to take a massive hit.

Once Google flip the switch on SSL searches, logged in Google Account users who wind up your site via Google will no longer be passing on any keyword referral information.

In an industry where even a few percentage points can result in massive changes to SEO campaigns and blog content strategies, losing up to 10% of your keyword referral data is huge!

And you don’t need me to tell you how important traffic monitoring tools like Google Analytics are in managing and analysing your blog.

What can you do?

As a blog owner, what can you do about these upcoming SSL changes?

Unfortunately for now, not much.

Google seem to have made a final decision on this and will implement SSL searches for logged in Google Accounts over the coming weeks. Interestingly enough, despite Google citing increased privacy reasons as the backbone of their decision, keyword referral data will still be available to advertisers.

It appears that while your privacy is seemingly important to Google, it’s not important enough to cut off your search queries from advertisers’ prying eyes.

As a blog owners, all we can do for now is sit back and take the hit. A monthly report (30 days) of the top search queries that brought traffic to your site will be made available via Google Webmaster tools, but it’s a far cry from the level of data analysis most blog owners are used to.

That’s even more of an issue when you consider there’s only so much you can do with WebMaster Tools when compared to proper traffic analysis tools like Google Analytics.

Looking at the long-term effects here, if SSL encryption doesn’t cause any hiccups for logged-in users, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before it’s implemented permanently for every search Google processes.

Google themselves are clearly hinting at this on their own blog;

We hope that today’s move to increase the privacy and security of your web searches is only the next step in a broader industry effort to employ SSL encryption more widely and effectively.

What appears to be shaping up is a future divide between the needs of blog owners and the financial relationship between advertisers and search engines. And we all know who’s going to win that battle.

As blog owners, do we have a right to demand keyword referral information from the visitors browsing our blogs? Or, as the value of this referral information is slowly quantified and sold to advertisers, is it only a matter of time before we too will have to start paying for the stats we need to run our blogs as best we can?

Updated daily, OzSoapbox is a blog cataloguing life in Taiwan, the good times and the bad. Interrupted only by social commentary on current events facing Taiwan, feel free to drop on by and join Oz on his journey through this beautiful island.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

What Google Search’s SSL Change Means for Your Blog

“I have a pretty (un)healthy obsession with email lists. I’m constantly telling my readers to focus on growing a list of active, engaged, and interested email subscribers.”—Blog Tyrant

You can capture emails with only one ethical plan: the visitor will have to give you his or her email by typing it in.

How do you get your readers to type in their email addresses? Will you use a pop-up lightbox, a sidebar subscribe form, or a subscribe form below your posts? Maybe you’ll give your readers a small, ethical
“bribe.”

What do I use? All of them! Each and every one of my past and present blogs went through a quick elimination process to find which tactic captured the most emails.

Never ask someone which email capturing tactic works best for them. The answer depends on the style of your readers, and the niche your blog is in. Is the readers’ attention span short, do they get annoyed, and do they take time to look at their surroundings?

But on your own blog, there is a reliable way to find out which tactic works best.

Testing your email capturing tactics

Google Website Optimizer is a great tool you can use to increase email opt in conversions. It’s surprisingly easy to use and produces great feedback, graphs, charts, and results.

How do you get started? First, you obviously need to login, or create a Google account. Click the Get Started button, agree to their terms and get ready to capture so many emails other bloggers think you’re stealing them.

Getting started

Currently you should be at your dashboard looking something like this…

Google Website Optimizer dashboard

Once you’re at the dashboard, click Create a new experiment.

You have two option here, and one is a lot easier to use than the other. The first option is called the A/B Experiment. You shouldn’t choose that, because it will involve completely changing the page you test, and for this exercise, we only want to change the opt-in form on our page.

The Multivariate Experiment gives you the ability to change specific section(s) on the page in isolation. In this case, we want to change our subscribe form.

Google Website Optimizer multivariate experiment

Next, you need to enter in the URL of page that you’re trying to test. This could be your blog’s home page or a specific post or page you’ve created. If you’re really daring go straight into your themes files to edit them, allowing the testing to be done on your entire WordPress blog!

The Conversion page is the location where new subscribers land after the subscribe to your blog. Both Mail Chimp and Aweber give you the option to redirect visitors back to your website after subscribing.

Setting up the experiment

Now Google Website Optimizer knows the pages that are used in the conversion process. We need to give the service access to those pages by using a little bit of JavaScript. Google will give you some code snippets, and all you need to do is paste it inside the pages you specified above.

Google Website Optimizer provides the code

Once, you’ve added all of your JavaScript tags, click, Continue to verify the tags. A small lightbox should pop up to let you know that Google found the tags on your blog.

Click Continue to verify the tags

Making changes to test

Now it’s time to make changes to the areas of the page that you specified. You can change your opt-in form to produce a higher conversion in many ways.

• Change the headline.
• Add a picture.
• Reduce the amount of textboxes. (Instead of Name and Email fields, try just an Email textbox.)
• Change the background color.
• Edit the text.
• Change the Submit button to something less standard.

Once you’ve made the changes you want to test, you can sit back and wait to see which opt-in form converts the most visitors into subscribers.

The results

Below are the results for testing the opt-in form on my website. When I ran the test, I decided that whichever combination of visuals achieved the best results would be the combination I’d use on my blog.

Google Website Optimizer test results

As you can see, I created five different versions of my opt-in form. During this test, the original actually performed better than all of my other combinations, with an almost unreal 41.7% conversion rate. That’s almost one out of every two visitors signing up.

The combinations were different because of the headlines and descriptions I used. I used three different headlines along with two different descriptions:

• Headline #1: How Does It Work?
• Headline #2: Guest Blogging Rocks!
• Headline #3: Guest Blogging Never Fails.
• Description #1: Who’s Your Blogger is an online guest post exchanging platform. We make it easy to accept guest posts, and find blogs to guest post on. Best of all, it’s fast, easy, and free!
• Description #2: Who’s Your Blogger has helped me land my guest posts on ProBlogger, Copy Blogger, and even John Chow. Trust me, Who’s Your Blogger has tripled my guest post production rate!

The results were:

• Original: Headline #1 & Description #1 – Conversion Rate: 41.7%
• Combination #1: Headline #2 & Description #1 – Conversion Rate: 20%
• Combination #2: Headline #3 & Description #1 – Conversion Rate: 30.4%
• Combination #3: Headline #1 & Description #2 – Conversion Rate: 25%
• Combination #4: Headline #2 & Description #2 – Conversion Rate: 31%
• Combination #5: Headline #3 & Description #2 – Conversion Rate: 21.4%

As the results show, my original message outperformed all of my other combinations, so it would make no sense to change the headline and description.

What can I do now? Of course there are many different tests I can run on my site. I might want to do the same test over again, but spend some more time coming up with headlines and descriptions that really rock!

Have you used Google Website Optimizer before? How do you like it? Leave your opinion below…

Joe Burnett is an amazing guest blogger. He created Who’s Your Blogger? to help increase your chances of landing guest posts on popular blogs by over 534%, and to find free unique content to publish on your blog. He teaches you exactly how to guest post and build a popular blog at the Who’s Your Blogger? Guest Blogging Blog!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Increase Conversions With Google Website Optimizer

A few months ago, when I started working for AppsGeyser, a friend asked me if I could turn her blog into an app, to which I responded, “Yes.” Then she asked me the more important question: why would she want to do that?

There are loads of reasons. Here are just a few ways you can use an app to bring new readers to your blog and give more value to your current readers.

Raise the level of engagement

Copyright taka - Fotolia.com

Be found where mobile users are looking

Regular readers will have your blog in their RSS feeds on their mobile devices, but new mobile readers are much more likely to find your blog by searching for apps than by searching the Web. Having an app gives bloggers a whole additional avenue for discovery.

Form a “secret society”

Once people have downloaded the app, you can engage them in some really great ways, too. Provide unique content for app users, creating the sense that they’ve joined a “secret society,” just by downloading the app. Utilize the fact that it’s not just an RSS feed, and have them vote, fill out forms, and leave comments without having to use a different interface.

Push your message

Last, but definitely not least, is the idea of push messaging. With an app, it’s easy to send messages to people who’ve downloaded your app—even if they’re not checked in.

Push messages are just like text messages to everyone who has the app installed. For a craft blogger, this might be the way to tell people that the project everyone’s been asking about is finally completed, and the instructions are up.  Are you a mommy blogger in her ninth month? Push messaging is a great way to instantly let everyone know it’s a girl! Financial blogger? This is the way to tell everyone the mortgage is finally paid off! The possibilities to connect more closely are right there, the moment a blog becomes an app.

How to make your blog into an app

There are a number of ways to make a blog into an app.

1. You can have an app developer create a custom app for you. This is the most expensive option, but it will give you an app that looks perfect, works beautifully, and gives you all the special features you want to offer your readers.
2. You can use a service that turns an RSS feed into an app, such as Android Apps Maker or Mippin.
3. Our recommendation (and yes, we’re slightly biased) is to use AppsGeyser, because it gives you the full power of your blog in an app.

Distributing your app

Your blog app needs to be distributed in two main ways.

The first is on the blog itself. This is achieved by taking the app’s link information and adding it to the blog. It’s important to copy the QR code to make it easy for readers to download the app easily with just a click of their phone camera.

The second avenue of distribution is the Android Market. This is how new readers will find the app and, by extension, your blog. When adding the app to the Android Market, pay special attention to the app’s name and description. The name and description are what prospective readers will search when they are looking for new apps to download. Be especially careful about the name, as it’s a problem to change it later. You can change the description later if you’re not happy with it.

Don’t skimp on your icon and screenshots, either. We’ve put together a post on making an attractive icon without hiring a designer. An attractive-looking app is an important part of reaching a wider audience.

Does your blog have an app? How has it affected your readership? Share your experiences in the comments.

Leah Goodman is a Content and Community Manager at Abel Communications, managing the blog and community for AppsGeyser.com. She believes in a t-shirt economy and is an amateur juggler.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Make an App to Engage Your Blog’s Readers

Running a contest on your blog can be a great way to generate new readership, reactivate stagnant subscribers, and increase the engagement of your readers.

Competitions can be a lot of hard work for little or no results, unless you run them to a plan and have a clear objective in mind.

Here are five tips for running an awesome blog contest campaign.

1. Set a clear objective

As bloggers we love readers, we love engagement, we love community—a contest can help you achieve any or all of these things. When planning your contest, set a goal as to what you need to achieve.

Do you want more:

• email Subscribers
• RSS readers
• social media fans
• sales of your product
• comments and engagement?

Set your goals as numbers—if you wish to increase your email subscribers, how many do you want?

The true measure of a successful competition is in its metrics, and without a clear, numerical goal in place, you won’t know if your hard work is paying off.

2. Don’t go it alone

If youíre hoping to attract new readership to your blog, you want your contest to be seen by as many people as possible. You can do this using a few strategies:

Use a third-party social media competition platform to help send the contest viral

Increasing your contest’s visibility is the key to success, and the easiest medium to send your contest viral is social media.

A third-party app helps you to encourage your fans to share their entries on social media. You can either use a blog plugin to run your contest, or use a Facebook based application such as Binkd or Wildfire App. (Full disclosure here, Binkd is my product!)

Joint venture with partner

Leveraging someone else’s list is a powerful way to attract a fresh audience. Team up with a non-competing colleague in your niche and share the rewards of your contest. In exchange for the cross promotion, you could allow them to market to the list generated by the contest.

Approach sponsors

Getting a high-profile sponsor of your contest to assist in the promotion or in the donation of a prize is another way to help market your contest. It also adds credibility to your contest by transferring trust.

3. Choose your contest carefully

If you’re using a competition app, there are several types of contests available:

Skills contest

A skills contest requires your entrants to perform a task to be elligible to answer. Short story contests, answer a question contests, and write a jingle skills contests are popular. Entrants can then either be drawn randomly, or encouraged to share their entries to get their friends to vote. Skills contests are similar to sweepstakes, but the entrants can influence their success or failure in the competition.

You can select to have the entrant with the most votes win, or have each vote count for an entry, and drawn similar to a sweepstakes contest.

Photo contests

A visual form of skills contest, here, your entrants upload a photo, and then appeal to their contacts to vote for the photo. This is a really good way to visually promote your brand. Getting a photo of your fans using your product, or performing a stunt related to your brand spreads the word about you far and wide!

Challenge contests

A challenge contest can send your entrants on a virtual scavenger hunt around your site and social media pages, searching for answers to your questions. This type of contest is powerful for creating engaged and interactive entrants.

Sweepstakes

Your entrants submit their entry, and the winner(s) are randomly drawn. Sweepstakes are a game of chance, not skill.

4. Build engagement

Increase the stickiness of your contest by increasing the engagement of your entrants.

Multiple entry steps

Statistically, contests with multiple entry steps deliver more engaged and sticky entrants. A challenge contest gives your entrants the opportunity to explore your site, and interact with various articles on your blog.

Achievable goals

Make the contest goals achievable for your entrants to complete. For example, if you’re running an article contest to generate some awesome new articles, don’t set word counts or criteria too high or tight.

Don’t make your challenge contest questions too difficult to answer, or be too cryptic in your clues.

5. Automate the process

You can effectively run a contest just on your blog, or by a forum and email management system, but it’s a lot of hard work and can be an administrative nightmare!

There are several applications on the market that automate running a contest and allow you to keep the list of entrants to market to during and after the contest.

Some of the most popular are:

• Binkd a contest platform that offers a WordPress plugin and Facebook Sweepstakes and Challenge contests
• Wildfire App, for Facebook Sweepstakes, Photo Contests, and Vote to Win
• Bulbstorm, for Facebook Sweepstakes, Photo Contests, and Vote to Win.

Running a contest can really help you build up your readership and drive quality, qualified fans to your email subscriber list and social media platforms. You can simplify the job by using a third-party application to handle the grunt work of administering the contest.

Have you used a contest to promote your blog and engage readers? Share your experiences and tips in the comments.

Kiera Pedley is the CCO (Chief Caring Officer) at Binkd home of the Binkd Promotion Platform.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Run an Awesome Blog Contest in 5 Steps

Guest posting is a great way to market your brand. When you guest post you are able to demonstrate you expertise to a new audience. The short term benefits are a bump in traffic to your website. Longer term benefits are sees through quality backlinks which will help with search engine optimization.

One of the questions that comes up when guest posting is “Where should I post?” For me, the answer is often “Whoever will take me!”

As you begin to build a reputation you may become more selective on where you guest post. Part of your process might include research to find sites that are aligned with your brand.

Let’s say you’ve done the research and authored some guest posts. Now what? Well, like any good marketer, you must measure the results of your campaign. If you have Google Analytics installed, this is a snap.

Google Analytics

All of you should be running some analytics software on your website. If you’re not, stop reading and go install Google Analytics.

If you aren’t running Google Analytics, the fundamentals of what I’m explaining are the same even if the mechanics are different.

The secret sauce: campaign variables

When you insert the link back to your website you are going to add some extra information tags on the end of the link. This data will help you classify the traffic. Google calls these tags campaign variables.

Using campaign variables you can add extra information to your posts which will help you to answer questions like:

1. Which guest posts drove the most traffic to my site?
2. Which websites with guest posts drove the most traffic to to my site?
3. Which posts resulted in opt-ins to my email list?
4. Which websites gave me more opt-ins to my email list?
5. Which source of traffic is better for me? Facebook, guest posting or search engines?

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. Once you start using campaign variables on your guest posts you will come up with all sorts of cool ways to look at the data.

Tag your links

Google provides a number of campaign variables that you can use when you tag your links.

The following tags are available:

• Source: utm_src
• Medium: utm_medium
• Campaign: utm_campaign
• Term: utm _term
• Content: -tm_content

There isn’t a hard set of rules for what to put in these tags. What I’m going to show you is how I use the variables.

• utm_src: I set this to the website I’m posting on. In this case it would be problogger.net. Once I do this, then I can compare problogger.net to my other traffic sources, not just other site’s I’ve posted on but also Facebook, and Twitter.
• utm_medium: I set this to guestpost. Then, I can compare guest posting as a whole to my other marketing efforts.
• utm_campaign: I use the name of the article. If I post a couple of articles on problogger.net I can see how they compare to each other.

I can also look at all of the articles across multiple sites to see which ones are more effective. You might want to abbreviate your post title but that’s up to you.

I don’t use utm_content or utm_term.

Put together, the tags look like this:

?utm_src=SITENAME&utm_medium=guestpost&utm_campaign=POST-TITLE

I then apply this to each link back to my website:

http://www.newcustomerworkshop.com/about?utm_src=problogger.net&utm_medium=guestpost&utm_campaign=dash-of-analytics

If you don’t want to do this by hand each time Google provides a link building tool that will take care of all the messy work for you.

Check your data

After you publish your guest post, you’re going to want to look at your analytics dashboard to see what type of traffic the post is giving you. If you are using the new Analytics dashboard, you can find the information under Traffic Sources > All Traffic.

Select All Traffic, and you will see a report that shows visits by Source/Medium.

This will show you traffic from all referring sites and uses the value set in utm_source.

Select Medium to the right of Viewing, and you can see all of your guest posts.

This allows you to roll up your reports and compare guest posts as a group with your other traffic sources.

If you want to see what articles drove the most traffic, it’s easy. Click Other and then type Campaign in the Traffic Sources box.

This is just a very high-level overview of the kinds of reports you can create. Check out the book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics if you want to learn more.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is a great free resource that, when used effectively, will help you zero in on the effectiveness of your guest posting efforts.

Armed with this knowledge, you will understand which articles and websites drive the most traffic to your website.

I’d love to learn how you measure your guest posting efforts. Please share them in the comments.

Joe writes at New Customer Workshop and offers training for small business owners who want to increase their business through Internet marketing. Visit his blog for more information.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

A Dash of Analytics Takes the Guess Work Out of Guest Posting

Do you spend enough time looking at your stats?

What a statement to start with, given that the mantra seems to be to check once a week and don’t waste too much time on your stats. And I agree with what seems to be the reasoning—if you are spending all that time looking at your stats, what else could you be doing that’s more productive? There also seems to be an underlying feeling that for us little guys the stats might be just too darn depressing, so staying away might be good for your mental health and motivation.

Readers are people (image is author's own)

Your stats are the key to finding out what is important to all those people who have found you and like you but aren’t saying anything. I know it’s traditional to try to talk to those people and get them talking to you, but to get those comments in the first place you need to learn about the silent majority. The more you find out about them, the more likely you are to hit on what’s important to them.

Here are four ways your stats can help you learn about your community.

Nationality

It’s obvious, but can be important. Do you need to be aware of the seasons, holidays, and traditions of your readers? Even though I’m Australian, many of my readers come from the US and a large number are from Europe. This makes me consider how to balance my stories of running around in the bush and make sure I offer indoor activities too when my readers are snowed in. Plus it determines when I post and tweet—my posts go live in the early morning to catch US readers in their evening.

Origin

The big players are search engines and social media, but sometimes you get a spike in traffic from a specific forum or web community. If it’s public that’s great—you can get in and talk to the people thinking of visiting your site. But even if it’s private, it tells you something about your visitors—if you’re getting hits from a site on baby names, can you do some posts aimed at babies to capitalize on their interest?

What’s happening in their world?

One day I had a spike on a post called “13 Things to Do When it’s Raining.” Sometimes you can capitalize and sometimes you can’t. But the image of mothers all over the US East Coast being stuck inside and searching for something to do with their kids struck a chord. It made them into real people with real lives and problems that I could relate to, rather than “readers” or “hits.” And that’s at least as valuable as knowing which social media network they prefer, because it makes me write for them, rather than numbers.

I had another spike just after the earthquake in Japan on a piece I’d written earlier about plate tectonics and earthquakes. That was emotionally confronting—at once I felt horrible it was happening, and guilty for doing well out of it, but at the same time I was glad I could help explain it to people searching for an answer. It reminds me to take responsibility for what I write, because you never know when it might stop being interesting and fun, and become important.

What do they want?

One of my most popular posts of all time is about starfish babies. A bit of digging showed me that most of the information out there about starfish either doesn’t mention babies, or is fairly static. Looking at this and my other long-term popular posts taught me a lot about my audience and what they want to know. They are parents, teachers, people who are looking for understandable explanations of the quirky details kids demand. And they’ve secretly always wanted to know but none of the “official” information sources would give the information to them! The strange searches that bring people to your site are not just cause for amusement (although that can be fun too)—they tell you who your readers are and what they want from you.

Once you start getting readers who aren’t personally related to you, just looking at numbers is a waste of time. But don’t avoid your stats completely, because if you learn to listen they are your community talking to you.

If you’ve ever wondered why Daddies are bigger than Mummies or other weird and wonderful questions, Deb has the answer at Science@home. Plus lots of things to do with babies, toddlers and kids whether it’s raining or not.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Do You Spend Enough Time Looking at Your Stats?

After Google+ entered the social networking scene not so long ago, the number of online distractions hasn’t really decreased.

At the same time, innovations and smarter solutions to handle your actions online have fortunately continued to thrive too. Instead of the usual to-do lists, news readers, or sharing tools, they tackle things in new and more helpful ways.

What’s most important for me, is that they slot right into my workflow, and allow me to become more efficient without changing my behavior. A few apps recently managed to do so brilliantly.

Here are my favorite new tools to help you stay focused and use the Web more innovatively.

1. SimpleNote

Do you ever have that feeling of random thoughts and ideas floating around in your head, but there is no optimal solution to jot them down? With SimpleNote, I found a fantastic way to finally write down things in a very intuitive manner. The Chrome extension lets me write things down fast and easily. On top of this, it stores it very intelligently in folders, simply by adding tags.

Workflow tip: The app integrates with a lot of already existing apps to make note-taking inside them even easier.

SimpleNote

Try it out here: SimpleNote

2. Let’s Crate

If you think the likes of Dropbox or Box are making filesharing easy already, you might be surprised as what Let’s Crate can do. Without any signup or signin process, you can start adding your files right on the landing page. The service automatically generates a link that you can share, embed in blogpost, or send via email. It truly simplifies my online life.

Workflow tip: If you do decide to get an account with the app, you can easily turn it into your online storage system, add folders, and use it as a backup.

Let's Crate

Try it out here: Let’s Crate

3. Coolendar

This is one of the smartest inventions I’ve seen recently. The app is actually a to-do list that automatically turns into a calendar based on the entries you make. It uses super-simple syntax to understand the time and creates a calendar as you type a new to-do item. So, say for example, you write “Tomorrow, 5pm, blogpost due for Mrs. White” and the app automatically detects it and creates an entry in your calendar as well as a to-do item.

Workflow tip: The best part here is that you can set up a bot inside Google Talk, which will remind you right inside Gmail whenever a task is due.

Coolendar

Try it out here: Coolendar

4. Mockflow

As a full time blogger, my skills in design and programming are very limited. Yet, being able to express myself clearly is more vital than ever. A better blog layout is a crucial component of blogging success these days. With Mockflow, you can create powerful wireframes that facilitate working with designers and programmers a great deal. There exist a wide range of tools and templates to make them look pretty, and are easy to implement.

Workflow tip: What I like best is that the app also works offline, so if you are wireframing on the go, you never have to worry about connectivity.

Mockflow

Try it out here: Mockflow

5. StrawberryJ.am

As a blogger, my main focus is to produce the best content I can write each day. Of course, keeping up with the great posts my favorite blogs write is vital here. Yet knowing what the really good bits are is sometimes tricky. Help comes from StrawberryJ.am. The app orders all the Tweets from your stream on the basis of most mentioned and retweeted. So at one glance, you will see the hot and most-discussed news items in your timeline.

Workflow tip: If you really don’t want to open another site each day, simply subscribe to your own top news and the app will deliver updates straight to your inbox.

StrawberryJ.am

Try it out here: StrawberryJ.am

6. Do it Tomorrow

This is a piece of innovation I would never have thought could be useful. Yet Do It Tomorrow slots perfectly into my workflow. I am usually the kind of person that puts way to many to-do’s on the list for one day. With this neat Android app, I create a simple to-do list of the things I need to get done and never worry about putting too much on my plate.

Workflow tip: By simply tapping on the little arrow, a to-do gets pushed onto the next day. You’ll never lose to-do’s you didn’t get to.

Do It Tomorrow

Try it out here: Do it Tomorrow

7. Oh Life

You will most likely know that the benefits of writing are plentiful. One of the most important factors for me is to order my thoughts. Oh Life takes a very new approach to making it easy for you to write down your thoughts about life. Every evening, the app will send you an email asking “How did your day go?” By hitting Reply, your entries will be safely stored as an online journal.

Workflow tip: Going through my personal Oh Life stories every once in a while helps me a great deal to focus and recap what I am working on.

OhLife

Try it out here: Oh Life

8. Rapportive

I found that one of the most important things when speaking to someone via email is to really understand what the person is all about. Rapportive is a Chrome extension that slots right into Gmail and gives you a new tab of information all related to the person you are speaking to. This includes recent tweets, information from Facebook, LinkedIn data, and much more. You can build a rapport with them immediately and fully understand what they are all about.

Workflow tip: Very recently, the app has added a functionality to allow you to reply to tweets right from inside Gmail. This facilitates interaction a lot, I’ve found.

Rapportive

Try it out here: Rapportive

9. Skinnyo

This is my extra tool for you, as, different from all the others, it focuses on your physical shape. For a healthy online workflow, the Latin saying of “Mens sana, in corpore sano” (healthy mind, healthy body) is something I follow very closely. The app allows you to enter into online challenges with others, keep track of your weight, and have fun staying in shape with others. You can create teams, challenge each other, or use it strictly for personal use to keep track of your exercise.

Workflow tip: I particularly like the Social Network behavior of Skinnyo. It makes it easy to see how others are doing and keeps me motivated.

Skinnyo

Try it out here: Skinnyo

These are my favorite tools to make the most of my day online. How about you? Do you think some of them could be useful for you too? Are there others you can add?

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

9 New Productivity Tools to Simplify Your Online Life

“When you work with words … words are your work.”—Don Knotts

I assume you know a lot about blogging.

You know how to set up a blog, you know how to write. You know how to tweet and share.

Most importantly, you know how to build your email list.

Maybe you’re not as fanatical as I am. Maybe you haven’t hidden your RSS feed. Maybe you offer alternatives to email. But you understand the best results come from your emails. You baby your list.

Copyright Tommi - Fotolia.com

I’ve got a sneaking suspicion you aren’t doing it right. Don’t take it personally—some of my most brilliant clients weren’t either. It’s not your fault. No one’s ever told you how, that’s all.

Are you handling your email subscriptions in Feedburner?

When people subscribe to your blog via email, where’s that email address going? I hope it’s not going into Feedburner.

See, Feedburner is pretty lousy when it comes to email marketing.

• You can’t easily customize the subject line
• You can’t customize the design
• You can’t utilize auto-responders
• You can’t know who’s subscribing in real time
• You can’t know the open rates
• You can’t completely control when the broadcast goes out

Maybe you’re thinking, “I don’t care that much. Feedburner’s free. This is deep and scary, and I’m not going to worry about it. I’ll just blog.”

Let me remind you that your blog’s success hinges on how effectively you master email marketing.

This is important. Quit using Feedburner.

What are the other options?

I’ve worked with a lot of email marketing tools, but the best are MailChimp and AWeber. There are other options out there, but I recommend one of these two.

Which one should you chose? Mailchimp’s free for the first 500 subscribers while AWeber costs from from the start. They’re both excellent tools, but if you can possibly afford it, go with AWeber. It’s slightly better, and after all, ProBlogger uses AWeber.

Once you migrate your list to one of these services, you’re ready to send emails. Whenever you publish a blog post, you want to send it to your list.

You can always do it manually, of course. Whenever you publish content, you can copy and paste the article from your WordPress dashboard and blast it away. While it’s fun doing it this way for about two months, it starts getting old after a while. Really old. Trust me.

Here’s a better way

Unfortunately, this is where most bloggers run into trouble. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll frustrate yourself.

Luckily, I’ve done the heavy lifting for you. After successfully implementing this for myself and clients, I’ve put this article together for you. You’ll be rocking with the big boys in no time flat. I’ll even help you in comments if you get stuck. Deal?

Step 1: Prepare thyself

If you haven’t done so already, you’ll want to burn a feed for your blog at Feedburner.com.

Okay, I told you to quit using Feedburner. You’re probably confused.

While Feedburner is lousy at email marketing, it’s a great tool for creating a feed URL. You’ll use this feed’s URL in your email campaign, so this step is important. Since Google owns Feedburner, you only need a free Google account to use this service.

You may have already created a Feedburner feed and don’t know what the feed URL is. Log into Feedburner and click the grey RSS icon to the left of the feed title. The link it sends you to is your feed URL.

Make sure your feed URL shows the full content version of your posts. If you only see excerpts on this page, it means your email subscribers will only get excerpts in their inbox (usually a bad idea).

To change your blog’s feed to full content, log into WordPress and head over to Settings > Reading Settings. Make sure you’ve selected Full text instead of Summary. It can take Feedburner up to fifteen minutes to recognize these changes, so be patient if you don’t see immediate results. (Yes, I’ve learned this the hard way!)

If you’re using MailChimp …

1. Log in.
2. Click the large, orange button in the left column titled Create campaign. A drop-down menu will appear. Select RSS-driven campaign.
3. This will take you to a page where you enter your RSS Feed URL. Paste your Feedburner URL and hit next.
4. Select the list you want to send your campaign to. Hit next.
5. In the Message Subject field, paste this:

   *|RSSITEM:TITLE|*

   That pulls the title of your latest blog post into the email subject line. Fill out the other details and hit Next.

6. Select your template and edit the body copy. The default prose says “Heading 1 Heading 2″ etc. After deleting all this, select the Source tab and paste the following:

   <a href="*|RSSITEM:URL|*">*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*</a><br /><br />
*|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|*<br />
<a href="*|RSSITEM:URL|*">Click here to leave a comment</a>

   This funny-looking code dynamically pulls the the content from your latest blog post into the email. To see the magic in action, just hit the preview button to view how it will look in your inbox. Nifty, isn’t it?

   Hit Next.

7. Finalize your plain-text version. Hit next.
8. You’re now looking at your entire setup with all the glamorous details. Scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the orange “start RSS campaign” button. You’re all set!

If you’re using AWeber…

1. Log into AWeber
2. Hover over the Messages tab and click Blog Broadcast.
3. This sends you to a page with a green button that says Create a New Blog Broadcast. Click it.
4. Chose the list you want to use and prepare your email template. I recommend keeping the design as simple as possible, but you’re welcome to customize it to your heart’s content.
5. In the RSS feed URL, paste your feed URL you got from Feedburner.
6. In the subject line, paste this:

   {!rss_itemblock}{!rss_item_title}{!rss_itemblockend}

7. In the HTML message, paste this:

   {!rss_itemblock}
<p style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 30px; margin-bottom: 0px"><a href="{!rss_item_link}">{!rss_item_title}</a></p><span>{!rss_item_content}</span><br />
<h2><a href="{!rss_item_link}">Click here to leave a comment</a>.</h2>
{!rss_itemblockend}

   Be sure you’re on the Source tab when pasting this content. It won’t work in the design tab.

8. Hit the save button and you’re off!

Let’s wrap it up

In case you’ve wondered how the pro bloggers do it, now you know. It’s not that difficult, but no one tells you how to do it. Funny, isn’t it?

Let’s face it—getting your email campaign off the ground can be tricky. I remember when I first started doing this stuff, I had so many questions and I couldn’t talk to anyone (for free).

But today, it’s different. If you have any questions, I’ll answer them in comments. Let’s get started!

Martyn Chamberlin is a full-time web guy who blogs about the importance of web design and builds web sites that enhance great blogging. Learn what it takes to succeed online and join the growing number of passionate writers becoming better bloggers.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Email Your Blog Updates Like a ProBlogger

Optimizing the databases of your WordPress blog sounds like it might be a difficult task, but it’s a lot easier than it sounds. In most situations it can be done in just one or two clicks—no need for complicated steps or terminology.

You’re probably wondering why you would even want to optimize your database tables. Well, that’s easy: it can drastically speed up the load time of your blog. On top of that, it can help you with SEO and improve your rankings because “Google, along with the majority of other search engines, continues to place a high value on user experience.” We have seen this profound impact at a psd to html company I work for. No matter how old your blog is, there is sure to be some clutter in your MySQL database tables. If you’re not cleaning them on a regular basis, the backup can have a huge effect on your blog and slow it down drastically.

So, we’ll briefly look at five simple ways that you can quickly optimize your WordPress database for better performance.

WP-Optimize

This is a WordPress plugin that helps you clean up your database tables and optimize them within a few clicks. It does all of this without the use of phpMyAdmin (a program used to handle the administration of your MySQL servers). It will show you which tables are already optimized and the ones that need to be optimized.

WP Optimize

TentBlogger Optimize WordPress Database

With TentBlogger Optimize, you can quickly free up space and optimize your databases for faster loading, with just one click. It will let you know how much space you can free up and you can even view your databases if needed. That’s all there is to it. Additionally, it will also let you know if you ever need a “tune up” with a quick message.

TentBlogger Optimize

WP Database Optimizer

This is another plugin similar to WP-Optimize and TentBlogger Optimize, but with the addition of automatic scheduling. You can go in and set WP Database Optimizer to automatically optimize your tables every certain number of days. You’ll be able to see all of your tables and whether or not they have any overhead (in other words, whether or not they need to be optimized).

WordPress Database Optimizer

Via phpMyAdmin

The WordPress Experts has a great tutorial on optimizing your database tables using phpMyAdmin. While the plugins above focus on not using this method, it can be done without having to install any plugins on your blog. You’ll need to sign into phpMyAdmin and check your tables for overhead.

Via WordPress Database Repair

Many users are not aware of this option, but you can repair and optimize your database right from within your blog’s dashboard. This is done by going to /wp-admin/maint/repair.php on your blog and inserting the code shown at that page into your wp-config.php file.

WordPress Database Repair

Once you do that, you’ll see two options on that page: repair database, repair and optimize database. Simply click the option of your choice and WordPress will do the rest. If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide on this, you can find it on WPveda.

Now that you have five different ways of optimizing your WordPress tables, you’re well on your way to even faster blog. As a reminder, be sure that you always backup your databases before optimizing them. This way if something goes wrong, you can restore your databases back to the way they were before you changed them.

This was a post by Lior Levin who is a marketing advisor to Internet startups and companies. Lior advises to a neon signs store and many other business online.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Optimize Your WordPress Database for Better Performance

Whether you’re writing about changing diapers, improving your bowling score, finding a job in the travel industry or how you get pictures off your cellphone, I think it’s a universal truth that if you’re writing online, you want better search engine results placement.

Most likely you’ve installed some SEO plugins that promise to improve your results and they might even be working, but if your site’s been up any length of time, it’s quite probable that things have started to break behind the scenes and hurt your results without you ever being notified. A scary prospect, really, and if it’s dramatic enough, you can start to really sink down the search results without any further explanation.

That’s why Google has its Webmaster Tools and while they’re primarily designed for people who have complete control over their Web site it can even be useful if you’re on blogger.com, wordpress.com or typepad.com. in fact, you don’t need to be a blogger to find it helpful: problems hurt any site, regardless of its structure.

Proving your own site

The first thing you need to do with Google’s Webmaster Tools is verify that the site you want to analyze is your own. This is typically done by adding a special line of HTML to the head of your home page, as I detail here.

If you can’t change your header, there are some alternatives that Google offers, but if you have zero administrative rights on the site, you might well be out of luck. If so, check with your hosting company to see if it offers alternative administrative tools that let you know about broken links, etc.

Key elements of a Webmaster Tools report

Once you have verified ownership of your site, you’ll see on the left side that the major areas are Site configuration, Your site on the web, +1 Metrics, Diagnostics, and Labs. Below it there’s some help that really highlights what you can glean from the Tools: Crawl errors, Search queries, Links to your site and Sitemaps. All good stuff.

Google Webmaster Tools overview for APparenting.com

There’s good analytic data that appears to be somewhat of an overlap with what you can get from Google Analytics (or your favorite analytics package if that’s not your particular cup of tea) and sometimes it reveals things that perhaps you didn’t want to know, like “sexy girls” is the #1 search for people who get to my Attachment Parenting Blog. Yikes. Not what I write about on my site nor anything I want people to be seeking when they arrive on my blog.

The heart of the Webmaster Tools, however, are the diagnostics because it’s the primary way we can learn what Google’s search spider finds broke on the site. Go to Diagnostics and it further breaks down into Malware, Crawl errors, Crawl stats, Fetch as Googlebot and HTML suggestions.

All good stuff, but let’s go into Crawl errors as it offers great bang for your proverbial buck.

Crawl errors Webmaster Tools reports for APparenting.com

Not too bad. This blog has a few hundred pages but I’m only seeing 36 of the hated 404 not found errors. Look closely and you’ll see that the format is bad link, error encountered, linked from and date detected. The first one is illustrative:

Link: http://www.apparenting.com/cosleeping-cpsc.html
Error: 404 (Not found)
Linked From: 10 pages
Detected: Jul 30, 2011

The real value is that if you click on the link that shows how many pages have a link to the bad URL, it’ll show you exactly what pages need to be fixed on your site and, sometimes, on other sites too. Here’s an example:

Specific crawl errors for APparenting.com

The first link is from another site called bubhub.com.au but all the other pages that link to this bad URL are on my own site. That’s something I can fix immediately.

Where to go from here

You can see we’ve just touched on the tip of the iceberg with the Google Webmaster Tools. It’s deep, it’s complicated, but even if you just poke around and look at the 404 errors generated for your own blog and fix as many as possible, you’ll be pleased to see how your ranking improves and, perhaps even more importantly, you’ll be happy to know that you’ve just improved your readers experience. And in the end, there’s nothing more important than happy readers, is there?

Dave Taylor has been blogging since the tools first appeared online. This is his 31st year online. His primary blog is the popular Ask Dave Taylor! offering up free tech support on a wide variety of topics including blogging and SEO. You can find him on all the major social networks through DaveTaylorOnline.com.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Getting Started with Webmaster Tools: Fixing 404 Errors

When it comes to turning casual visitors into regular readers there are two main options—FeedBurner and Aweber.

FeedBurner uses Feed-based technology (RSS and Atom) to send updates to your blog subscribers. Owned by Google (Google bought it in 2007 for $100 million), FeedBurner is one of the biggest feed syndicators on the Internet.

It works like this: a site visitor subscribes to your feed and every time you add a new post, a message is sent to them alerting them of the addition. The subscriber needs special software (a feed reader) to access the feed.

For more information on feeds, see Darren’s post, What is RSS?

Aweber is email-based technology that allows you to send automated email messages to your subscribers. It works similarly to a feed but does not require special feed-reading software, only an email address to subscribe to a blog.

Aweber is the most popular autoresponder software system on the Internet. Other popular brands include Infusionsoft, MailChimp, and GetResponse.

Advantages of FeedBurner

• FeedBurner is free, Aweber costs money: The key advantage of using FeedBurner instead of Aweber (or other auto-responders) on your blog is that FeedBurner does not cost anything. Aweber, on the other hand, can cost $20-$100 a month depending on the number of subscribers you have.
• FeedBurner take less effort: Most popular blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad etc.) publish feeds automatically. There is nothing more to do on top of publishing a post. With auto-responders, however, you have to manually setup the messages and sequence them (but you can now set up a blog broadcast in Aweber, which creates an automatic email newsletter).
• FeedBurner supports both feed readers and email subscribers: The key advantage of auto-responders like Aweber used to be that you did not need special software to subscribe, only an email address. As millions of people still do not have feed readers or prefer email, this meant that you still needed an aut-responder to capture those readers. But FeedBurner changed all that by allowing people to subscribe to a feed using an email address. This means that while an autoresponder only supports email, FeedBurner supports both feed readers and email.

Given that FeedBurner is free, easy to set up, effortless to use, and supports both feed readers and email, why would you want to pay for an auto responder?

The fatal flaw in feeds

The key thing that you cannot do with a feed is sequence messages: you cannot create a series of messages to be sent to your subscribers. This means that your subscribers only get alerts for posts that are added after they subscribe.

For example, say you post four articles over four weeks, and a visitor subscribes to your blog after week three. This means they will only get alerted about the fourth post, and will not receive posts one to three, as shown in the image below.

In FeedBurner, you cannot send alerts for older posts

Now, if you post time-sensitive information (news or latest developments) on your blog, this doesn’t matter. But if you publish evergreen content, or you want to take your blog readers through a specific set of messages, the ability to sequence is crucial.

Autoresponders allow you to do just that. You can create a sequence of messages, set how long the wait is between each message, and the autoresponder will execute that for you for each subscriber, regardless of when they join, as shown below.

Aweber allows you to create a sequence of messages

Then there are the other benefits of auto-responders like Aweber—customization of look and feel of emails, personalization (“Hi John”), controlling the wait period between messages, solid delivery rates, split-test multiple lead capture forms, and so on.

The audience factor

A third factor in deciding which system to use is your audience. If you have tech-phobic audience, then an email-based system like Aweber is likely better for you.

For tech-savvy audiences, on the other hand, FeedBurner may be better. Technically inclined people are more likely to use and prefer to get their blog updates through feeds. Feeds also have the added benefit of allowing another blogger to include your feed on their blog, creating free exposure and traffic for your blog.

The best way to find out what your audience wants is to have both options on your site for a month and see what your readers prefer. You may even find that it is useful to have both.

The bottom line

If you have a small budget, publish time-sensitive information, and/or cater to a tech-savvy audience, FeedBurner will be sufficient for your blog.

If, on the other hand, you want to take your subscribers through a sequence of messages and control the wait periods between the messages, then Aweber is better suited to your blog.

What are you using: Aweber, FeedBurner … or something else? Tell us how you do it in the comments.

Aman Basanti writes about the psychology of buying and teaches you how you can use the principles of consumer psychology to boost your sales. Visit www.Ageofmarketing.com/free-ebook to get his new ebook—Marketing to the Pre-Historic Mind: How the Hot New Science of Behavioural Economics Can Help You Boost Your Sales—for FREE.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

FeedBurner vs. Aweber: Do You Really Need an Autoresponder for Your Blog?

Hacktivist groups Lulzsec and Anonymous are on the prowl again. Their actions have generated lots of attention for hacking, and you can be sure that many bored kids and shady characters are interested to start hacking too.

What if your blog was the target of a rookie hacker, honing his skills to make it to the big leagues? All of your hard work building a better blog, growing traffic and readership, and making money with your blog would be jeopardized—or, worse, lost forever.

Thankfully, WordPress is pretty secure out of the box and they provide frequent security updates. Even better are the following super-simple actions that you can take to make WordPress ten times more secure. (Not scientifically verified! Your mileage may vary.)

Move wp-config.php up one level

The wp-config.php file contains all of your WordPress configuration information and settings. It’s game over if hackers gain access to this file—they would be able to inject malware into your blog pages, or *gulp* delete all of your blog content.

A little-known feature of WordPress is that you can move the wp-config.php file one level above the WordPress root. On most Linux servers, wp-config.php would be located in:

~/home/user/public_html/wp-config.php

Simply FTP into your server, and then move wp-config.php above the public_html directory so that it is located in:

~/home/user/wp-config.php

This way, wp-config.php is outside of the public-facing web root, and no longer accessible to scripts and bots that hackers may employ over the Web.

There are no other settings to configure—WordPress will automatically know to look for wp-config.php one level above. Easy, right?

Caveat: This tip will not work if you install your blog in a subdirectory (e.g. public_html/blog) or as an add-on domain in cPanel (e.g. public_html/yourblog.com).

Time required: 1 minute

Delete the ‘admin’ account

The default Administrator account on WordPress has a username of ‘admin’. Every n00b hacker would know that, so using ‘admin’ as the username is like having a back door to your house that every thief knows about. Do not ever use this as the main account. Choose a different username when installing WordPress.

If you have been using the ‘admin’ username, go into the Dashboard » Users » Add New User screen. Create a new user with the role of Administrator. Now log out, and log back in as the new user.

Go to the Users screen again and delete ‘admin’. You can transfer all of the content created by ‘admin’ to your new user account before confirming deletion.

Time required: 1 minute

Update WordPress, plugins, and themes

WordPress makes it so easy to update itself, plus plugins, and themes, to the latest version. It’s so easy that you (almost) deserve to get hacked if you don’t stay updated. Spending one minute installing updates will save you hours or days of frustration and headaches if you ever do get hacked.

Plugins and themes should also be updated regularly. All plugins and themes from the WordPress directory integrate with the automatic update feature. Many premium plugins and themes also have automatic updates, which is another great reason to invest in a high-quality theme framework for your blog.

Time required: 1 minute

Install WP Security Scan and Secure WordPress

Finally, plugins that deal with security are another great way of reducing the likelihood of your blog getting hacked. Two really good plugins that do this are WP Security Scan and Secure WordPress by WebsiteDefender.

WP Security Scan comes with several tools to help make your blog more secure:

• The Scanner checks the permissions of the WordPress files and highlights any with the wrong permissions. FTP into your server and change the permissions accordingly.
• The Password Tool tells you the strength of your password, and also generates random and super-strong passwords that you can use.
• The Database tool allows you to backup the WordPress database and change the database prefix. Use it to change your database prefix to something like ‘7yhj2_‘. This makes it difficult for hackers to guess your database table names when trying to perform SQL injections.

Secure WordPress takes a different approach and helps improve security by removing clues that can help hackers detect vulnerabilities in your system. The plugin’s settings screen is a simple list of checkboxes that do everything from removing login error messages, removing WordPress version numbers and even blocking malicious URL requests. I recommend activating all the checkboxes, unless you have a specific need for one of the features that it blocks.

Time required: 2 minutes

Stay vigilant

The steps above will drastically improve your blog security and prevent it from becoming a target of opportunity for rookie hackers. However security is an ongoing process, and also involves practicing security as a habit.

Stay vigilant and make it a point to keep up with the latest security news for WordPress, especially if you use it to run your business. You should also learn as much about security as you can. The ProBlogger archives are full of great posts that contain much more information on keeping your blog hacker, spammer and spyware-free and even planning for a blog disaster!

Now, please take five minutes and perform all of the steps above. I wish you good luck and hope your blog stays hacker-free!

David Wang blogs about his journey to generate the majority of his revenue online at The ClickStarter. He is also a WordPress evangelist and recently launched a free online course called Getting Started with WordPress. Follow David on Twitter – @blogjunkie

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Take 5 Minutes to Make WordPress 10 Times More Secure

One of the biggest mistakes new bloggers and webmasters make is to check traffic stats and affiliate reports too often—often enough for it to stop them doing real work on their projects. That being said, it is still important to check stats from time to time.

A quick review once a week, and a slightly longer recap once a month, is more than sufficient for most bloggers (affiliate marketers will obviously check stats much more because of how closely their income is tied to converting campaigns). It’s very important to check your blog’s progress, particularly within the first year or two of its life. Tracking important metrics can not only show you how your blog is progressing, it can also highlight what needs to be addressed in order for your site to grow.

Tracking can also be a fantastic motivational device. By tracking your site correctly and setting achievable goals, you can spur yourself to work harder and make things happen.

Everyone uses different scripts and services to track traffic. Here, I’ll show you the metrics I track for a blog I’m developing, and how BuySellAds indirectly helps me achieve my goals.

What to track

The BuySellAds ad network lists the following information for websites that sell banners ads through them:

• Alexa Rank
• Compete Score
• number of Delicious bookmarks
• number of Yahoo inbound links
• number of RSS subscribers
• Twitter followers
• Facebook Fans
• Page Rank.

It is possible to add your blog to the BuySellAds network without adding any banner zones to your pages; if you do, you can automatically track these metrics with ease.

These stats are useful for two reasons. Firstly, by keeping note of your own score on a regular basis (e.g. via a spreadsheet), you can see the progress your site is making over time and predict future growth.

Secondly, by tracking metrics which are publicly listed in a directory, you can quickly and fairly accurately compare your blog to hundreds of competitors within your niche.

The BuySellAds metrics can be divided into three types:

• Traffic metrics: Alexa Rank and Compete Score
• Search engine and social media presence: number of Delicious bookmarks, number of Yahoo inbound links, and Page Rank.
• Followers: RSS Subscribers, Twitter followers and Facebook Fans.

It’s really up to you which metrics you track for your site. For example, if you are actively trying to increase the number of inbound links then you would track your Yahoo inbound links score.

I like Alexa and Compete to give me an external view on how my traffic is growing. Their figures can be quite erratic and unrealistic for low-traffic websites, however these are reliable metrics for established blogs. RSS subscribers is a metric which I also like to track. Like any metric, it’s not 100% accurate, however it’s one of the best ways of seeing how popular your blog is and how fast it is growing.

I don’t feel so strongly about some other metrics, though—search engine presence, for example. I do try and make sure that my blog design is SEO friendly, and link internally and externally frequently, however I strongly believe that for most bloggers it takes care of itself. That is, if traffic and readership grows, and you continue to write good content, your inbound links will increase. This is also true for social media bookmarks. Every single post on high-traffic blogs gets shared, dugg, retweeted, and stumbled; therefore it’s not something I believe you need to actively check (I know social media junkies will disagree with me on this, though).

I have, however, come to the conclusion that while I may value some metrics more than others, it’s worth tracking everything, as over time these values may prove incredibly useful and highlight areas which need to be addressed.

Another metric which I always track for myself is the number of daily uniques. For this I use Google Analytics and Webalizer (a traffic script which most hosting packages offer).

Once you have decided on what you are going to track every week or month, you should create a spreadsheet to store all this info. Spreadsheets are better than simply noting details down, as you can compare figures from month to month more easily, and you can import the data into charts for further analysis.

How I use BuySellAds advertisers to set my goals

You can of course track all of the metrics mentioned above without using BuySellAds (though adding your site to the directory will save you some hassle). What their marketplace does give you, though, is access to a lot of useful information on other blogs and websites within your niche. Not only can you easily view any website’s traffic, social media, and SEO presence, you can also see exactly how much they are making.

The BuySellAds marketplace has websites from a number of different niches including automotive, business, gaming, and travel. A high percentage of publishers are from the design and development niche, however everyone should be able to find at least a few websites within their own niche.

If you look at their advertising information page or a website you will see a description of the site, some traffic stats, and information about where you can advertise.

Above is a screenshot from the AngryBirdsNest information page. The page confirms that the site has two ad zones: a 260 x 125-pixel banner area on the right-hand side of the page, and a 75 x 75-pixel banner area to the right of that.

The 260 x 125-pixel banner costs $300 for 30 days whereas the 75 x 75-pixel banner costs $50 for 30 days. There are six slots available for the larger banner area and seven slots available for the smaller one. All advertising inventory has been sold; therefore the ad zones bring in $1,800 and $350 respectively for a total of $2,150 per month. BuySellAds takes a cut of 25% of any advertisements sold, so we know that the owners of AngryBirdsNest make $1,612.5 every month through the two banner positions on their sidebar.

This information is incredibly useful. For every website listed on BuySellAds you can find out the approximate traffic levels and the money generated from ad zones (though most sites generate income from other sources too). If you also track your own traffic levels regularly you are in a great position to work how much money your blog could potentially earn once it reaches a certain point.

Bear in mind, though, that websites with similar traffic levels cannot always charge the same rates, so reaching a certain traffic level isn’t a guarantee that you will make a given amount of money. The more sites in your niche there are on BuySellAds, the more accurate your estimate is likely to be.

For example, let’s say you start a brand new blog and want to get a rough idea of the sort of income you can expect in the future. You could track competitors through a number of metrics, but the most reliable is number of impressions. If you looked at 30 websites within your niche and noted their monthly impressions and the money they earn through BuySellAds (using the method I noted above), you may find:

• Those with an 50,000 impressions earn around $100 per month.
• Those with an 250,000 impressions earn around $800 per month.
• Those with an 1,000,000 impressions earn around $5,000 per month.

Once again, I remind you that stats from one source only tell you one part of the story, so it’s important to look at each website individually and see why some sites are selling ads and others aren’t.

Monitor your progress

It’s very difficult to gauge when your blog will start making good money, particularly if it’s in a niche you don’t have experience with. We should all be setting goals and tracking our blogs’ growth over time. What the BuySellAds marketplace does is give us an idea of the right time to start selling ads, and an indication of how much we could potentially earn at certain levels (BuySellAds could obviously be substituted with any ad network that displays ads and confirms the rates publishers are being paid).

It isn’t 100% accurate, but it’s a great way of monitoring your blog’s progress and I believe anyone who is still developing their blog will find this useful. It gives you a a tangible target that you can aim towards, which should inspire you and keep you focused on what you need to do to make your blog a success.

Kevin Muldoon is a webmaster and blogger from Scotland. His current project is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News and Modifications.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How I Use BuySellAds to Monitor Blog Traffic and Goals

The July 2011 WordPress WordCamp Boston rocked!  Hundreds of eager WordPress users gathered to watch more than 40 speakers who presented on topics from social media to themes to shortcodes to security.

I took detailed notes as I listened, watched and networked with blogging and WordPress geniuses and have gathered what I consider the most interesting tips and tricks.

Most recommended WordPress plugins

Plugins were a hot topic in every session, but only three rose to the top as the “most recommended”:

• Yoast SEO: allows you to optimize page titles, meta descriptions, keywords, XML sitemaps
• HubSpot Plugin: allows you to leverage HubSpot’s lead nurturing, website analytics and “call to action” post types
• Google Analytics for WordPress: allows you to synch up information with your Google analytics account and allows you to track custom variables and meta data.

Most recommended WordPress SEO tips

In addition to the hearing about the importance of fresh, high quality content (“content, content, content”), a number of experts reinforced these WordPress SEO tips:

• Change the Permalink default on blog posts to end with your post name, not the post number.
• Use images to break up your content, engage readers and help with SEO.
  • Be sure you own the image, or choose them from “creative commons”, with appropriate credit (one of my favorites is www.freedigitalphotos.net).
  • Use relevant keywords in the image name and alternate text
• Add an XML sitemap.
• Monitor and improve your site loading speed.
  • Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that, “We want the web to be faster, we want sites to load quickly,” so it’s very possible that Google could be looking to encourage and reward this through their ranking of sites.
  • In May 2011, Google added a Site Speed Report in Google Analytics.
  • For more detailed info, check out the recent blog post on Search Engine Watch, Why Marketers Must Care About Site Speed.
• Build link juice. Not random back links, but high quality links to and from other sites that offer relevant content. (One technique that has worked well on my Sales Operations Blog, is to build a page dedicated to linking to other sites with relevant, high quality content. Check out the Other Sales Ops Articles example. )

Social media … of course

I think it’s required that every 2011 conference, whether it’s about real estate, insurance, or cat food, must include several sessions on how to use social media, and WordCamp (WC) was part of that group.

However, there was an obvious division in the WC audience. Some WC attendees like me, were well versed in social media 101 and 102 and were looking for something new and advanced. The remaining attendees (seemed like 50% of humans) were beginners and were looking for advice on how to get started. One conference attendee was skewered on Twitter, hashtag #wcbos, for asking how to spell “Mashable.” Understandable!

The general themes on how to use social media to support your WordPress efforts were:

• Make it easy for readers to share your blog content by including sharing buttons within your posts. There are many plugin options to facilitate that.
• Use social media to share your content. You may only share it with 50 or 100 followers, but you need to consider the power of the retweet.
  • Per HubSpot, blog posts that are shared on Twitter have more page views, while blog posts shared on Facebook have more comments.
  • Try testing three headlines on Twitter and see which one gets the most clickthroughs.

Overall, WordCamp Boston was a great experience, and well worth the time and money investment. I saw some very talented speakers, networked with other WordPress users and learned many new things. I look forward to attending next year’s conference.

Have you attended a WordCamp event? What did you learn?

Marci Reynolds, based in Boston, MA, is an operations leader by day and an active blogger after-hours.

She enjoys writing about sales support, service operations, process improvement and social media best practices. Learn more about Marci.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

“Most Recommended” by Blogging Geniuses at WordCamp Boston

Have you noticed a decrease in the number of blog comments you get and an increase in Facebook likes and Twitter tweets about your posts?

Are you worried that you are loosing social proof about the validity of your posts to the social media conversation, rather than as direct comment on your site?

There is a way to get the best of both worlds and aggregate comments and social media responses on your site.

The problem

People are building social media presences, and part of that is sharing great blog content and their opinions on those posts.  It’s more public and gives better results to share on Twitter or Facebook than it is leave a comment.

Curating is the new black at the moment. Adding links to your own social media conversation adds great value to your followers, while leaving a comment on a blog where no-one but the avid readers will see it does not add any value to your social media stream.

Fewer comments seems provide less social proof that people like your content, but this is not necessarily true. People stil love your stuff, it’s just that they’re expressing their emotions in different places.

What’s the solution?

Th solution is to bring the comments made on social media into your comment stream so you can maintain all of that social proof in one place.

There are a number of plugins that will aggregate social media and traditional blog comments into one stream on your site. This post will focus on these plugins—specifically I will be focusing on WordPress plugins (sorry Joomla, Drupal and Tumblr people! Some of these pugins will work with your platform but I’m focusing on WordPress today).

Disqus

This is a cloud-hosted comment system, wich means that your comments are hosted on the Disqus platform, and by adding a plugin to WordPress you can show those comments alongside your posts.

Disqus is a complete commenting system that offers a number of social media functions including authentication using your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and the ability for people to add a comment to your post and their social media profile of choice. But more importantly it has a Reactions feature, which will search for and aggregate into your comment stream off-site comments from social media conversations about your post.

Intensedebate

Intensedebate is another hosted comment platform brought to you by the people behind WordPress Automattic.

Intensedebate has something it calls Social Commenting features.  Using these, users can log in with their Twitter or Facebook IDs, and post comments that are synced to their social media profiles.

LiveFyre

LiveFyre is another fully featured and hosted commenting system. Please note that this is a premium solution with  a free option for less than 20,000 page impressions per month.

This  plugin has the ability to post the comment onto your site and the social media platform of your site user’s choice.  It also has a neat function that lets them tag their social media friends in your comments.

Check out the social media options for more information.

A note on hosted comment systems

When you host your comments on a third-party site, you’ll need to export your comments into that service’s car. If you breach the service’s terms and conditions, there’s a chance you could be kicked off the platform and loose your comments.

I’ve not heard of this happening but it is a possibility, so think long and hard before you chose to have someone host part of your site.  I wrote about the same concept in my last post here at Problogger when I talked about loosing your email addresses in Are You Protecting Your Blog’s Most Valuable Asset?.

Facebook Comments for WordPress

If you want a solution that replaces your traditional blog commenting system with Facebook-only comments, then this plugin is for you.

It is a self-hosted solution that replaces traditional blog comments with something akin to a Facebook wall. People log in to Facebook, leave their comments on Facebook, and they’re replicated back on your site.

Twitter Mentions as Comments

This final plugin is again a self-hosted extension of WordPress. What is does is scan Twitter for any mentions of your posts, and pulls those tweets into your existing comment stream as if they were additional comments on your posts.

Other options

These are just some of the options available to you—there are many others. Check out the plugins under the Social Media tag on the WordPress plugin repository to see how vast your options are.

Make your comments social

Don’t worry that you’re losing blog comments to social media. Using these handy plugins, you can bring the conversation back from the social platforms, and retain social proof on your blog.

How is your blog faring with comments and social media? Could these plugins be helpful to you?

Neil Is  a WordPress coach and consultant, see his work at WPDude. He has also created a WordPress group coaching program called the WP Owners Club.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

WordPress Plugins that Make Your Blog Comments Social

You might have read my article about a business blogging platform called Compendium. Today, I wanted to share with you a fantastic Compendium tool called, Web to Post that allows customers or clients to tell stories about your products or services.

Web to Post turns your consumer’s advocacy into web content.

Of course, as Business Blog Writers, sometimes this writes us out of the picture, but at the same time, if we are used to supplement the Web to Post content, then we can also get a lot of content ideas from what customer or clients submit.

In addition to my blog writing business, I also have a Ragdoll cat blog and all images of Compendium’s Web to Post form come from that.

How does Web to Post work?

A Call to Action is put in the sidebar of the blog. The CTA usually says something like, “Share Your Story”.

This call to action can also be put on your Facebook fan page, in your newsletter, on your YouTube Channel or in an email to an existing database.

The customer sees the CTA and decides to submit a story. They click on the link and are taken to an online form that asks them things like their story title, the story, and their first and last name. They can also choose to upload a photo to include with their story. The forms are totally customizable to fit your campaign or story needs.

Once the stories are received, the administrator of the blog is sent an email letting him or her know there is content waiting in the system. The stories can be edited, approved or declined from there, just like internal blog posts on Compendium’s system. So in other words, the story isn’t instantly on your company website the second the customer or client hits “submit”. Rather, it has to go through an administrative layer for final approval. This is awesome, because it turns your advocates into your bloggers! [Share Your Story Submission on Dashboard.jpg]

Once the administrator has checked out the post and added a keyword rich title, then the admin approves it. At that point is the Compendium algorithm automatically categorizes or tags the story to the relevant, targeted keyword pages on your blog . The admin can also choose to promote it on your company’s social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Then, the viral effect kicks in. Each story is published on your company’s blog, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages.

The customer who submitted the story also gets an automatic email that says their story has been published on your company’s blog. Another link encourages them to share their featured story on their own social network profiles.

How Web to Post helps business blogs

Lee Jorgenson, an Account Manager at Compendium recently pointed out that Sears Outlet has generated over 5,000 posts in just three months by gathering content from five different channels.

Sears Outlet sends a great transactional email after someone purchases from their website that invites customers to share their stories. This email is timely and helps harvest stories while they are fresh in the customer’s mind. The email has a link that drives the customer to a web to post form to submit their story. They also use the Web to Post forms to capture stories from blog and website visitors. They also have one embed on their Facebook fan page tab and collect stories from Facebook fans that way.

The process is simple: Content → Exposure → Referrals → Sales

Another Compendium client, The College Network, was able to launch a contest asking nurses to share their stories. The prize? An iPad. They received nearly 100 user generated stories (that’s 100 free posts!). The stories got over 40 comments and over 1,500 Likes. They drove 3,500 unique visits to their story page and tracked an average of 35 additional Facebook fans per day from the campaign. It also increased their organic search traffic by 25%—all for the cost of an iPad.

How Web-to-Post helps smaller bloggers

As far as my site, Floppycats.com, is concerned, Web to Post has made my life incredibly easier. When I run a giveaway, I tell people that for an extra chance to win the prize, they can submit a photo of their cat as well as a description explaining why their cat needs to win the product.

This approach not only generates more activity on my site, but also creates more content for my blog. And readers love to see photos of their cats on my blog!

I also use Web to Post for Ragdoll breeders who want to advertise kittens for sale. It saves me the time involved in uploading them to the site, and entering all the information—and they’re hosted on Compendium’s server, not the one I am paying for.

I also use Web to Post to accept content from people who need to rehome their Ragdoll cats, and cat rescue groups that need to get the word out about cats available for adoption.

I give a lengthy explanation of what I want (this eliminates time-consuming emailing back and forth between the poster and me) and provide examples so readers know what information they need to submit.

So while Web to Post is great for sales and boosting social media buzz about your company, for the blogger who wants an active online community on their blog, Compendium’s Web to Post can also make your life a lot less busy. Just say “no” to too much right- and left-clicking!

What if you don’t have compendium?

If you don’t have Compendium, you can probably still put something like this together, but it would require more manpower and coordination to get it done.

Frankly, I don’t like to spend my time on the technicalities and would rather have it right from the get-go. Compendium’s business blogging platform simply takes care of the strategy, process and technology so your business can focus on the content and stories.

Jenny Dean is a 31-year-old-business owner and entrepreneur from Kansas City. Jenny is currently working on Business Blog Writers, a company that supplies blog content specifically for company’s blogs, Floppycats.com, an informational website about Ragdoll cats and Antioxidant-fruits.com, an informational website about the antioxidant powers of fruit. Follow Business Blog Writers on Twitter or on Facebook.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How Compendium’s Web to Post Generates Content and Community