Tag Archives ⇒ blogging

The Power of Flickr

· Brandon Hann

Happy Memorial Day! Consider yourself autoblogged because like you probably are, I’m relaxing and enjoying my day off from work. With that said, today I wanted to write up a simple post regarding my newfound love, Flickr.

I’m fairly sure at this point in time, every single person that has ever searched for an image online has seen one or more Flickr accounts out there! So what’s so special about it? Let me tell you.

The Power of Flickr

If you’re a photographer or just someone who likes to take pictures and video of life, consider Flickr to be the equivalent of Facebook for you. The premise is simple: you upload photos, tag them, describe them, organize them and let the world have them.

There are two types of memberships, free and pro. The pro costs $24.95 per year and gives you some added benefits, which I’ll go over below. Once you setup your account, you’ve just created your Photostream. This is where all of your photos show up in the order they were uploaded, new ones first. It is basically your homepage:
Flickr Homepage

The best part of Flickr is how well it integrates with all of your existing social media sites and/or blogs. You can link it to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, LiveJournal and any WordPress-enabled site. By linking everything together, you can now take your photos to a worldwide stage and bring the visitors to you. From there, if they like what you have, you will likely start receiving new visitors to your site(s).

A perfect example of this would be if you’re already running a photography website, but you’re not getting many hits. That’s because you have to market that site on its own using all the SEO tricks you can find, but even that might not be enough. Instead, move (or copy) your portfolio(s) over to Flickr and you’re basically dumping your pictures into a digital world full of people searching and browsing for images!

Free vs Pro

As with everything free, there’s always a catch! Free accounts have the following limitations: 300mb upload limit per month for photos, 2 video upload limit per month, only the first 200 images appear on your photostream, limited to posting images in 10 groups and only your smaller size images are shown.

My advice is to get the Pro account. It’s not much money when you break it down per month: only about $2, but so worth it.

Copyrights

Flickr also supports the use of Creative Commons copyright restrictions. You can place these restrictions on one image or all of them. Better yet, each image can have a different copyright than the next one. You are always in full control over how your images can be used online!

My two cents

Since I’m starting to get into photography, I love the idea that I can share my photos with the world. In time, the goal is to continue gaining more and more momentum with the quality that I’m bringing to the table. In turn , I’m hoping this will lead more people to me, which I’m really hoping will turn into actual business. There’s so much more to Flickr—I feel like I just scratched the surface, so go check out the Flickr FAQ page to answer all your questions.

Dashes, En Dashes, Em Dashes and more Dashes

· Brandon Hann

Commanding your chosen language is essential to everything your blog is and will be. Poor grammar, mis-spelled words and inappropriate use of words will not only make your readers confused, but it can also damage your reputation. Throughout history, these bad traits have made writers seem uneducated or just plain dumb.

Today, I was dealing with an issue that I’ve often wondered about, but never really took the time to figure out. I was writing in Microsoft® Word and I wanted to use a “double-dash” which I knew to be an element that allows you to separate two very distinct phrases, but not distinct enough on their own to create two different sentences. Naturally, Word will do this for you if you type in the two dashes and continue to your next word. My question was simply, when do you use this dash and are there any other variations. I was surprised to learn that there was.

Hyphen ( – )

The hyphen is your standard dash line that you can use to separate compound adjectives, verbs or adverbs. Some examples of proper usage are:

This site runs on an Linux-based server.
Creating a WordPress-powered website is easy.
The German-designed car was much faster.

Hyphens can also be used to separate proper names as well as any other wordbreaks that may be required.

En Dash ( – )

For some reason, you can’t see the length in the title, but the En Dash is slightly longer than a hyphen and is used to show range between something. For example:

The Lakers beat the Heat 91–87.
The Los Angeles–New York flight was about 6 hours.

The reason it’s called an En Dash is because it’s approximately one ‘N’ long. To get the En Dash to show up in HTML, the code is – or –. In Word, you have to click on Insert → Symbol. The En Dash can also be used in conjunction with hyphens too, such as in:

Dual-core–64-bit processors are much faster than 32-bit–single-core processors.

Em Dash ( — )

The longest of the dash family is named accordingly due to its size being that of about one ‘M’ long. As previously mentioned, in Microsoft® Word, this symbol is created when typing in two hyphens together. In HTML, you can get this by using — or —. It’s used to separate parenthetical elements that tend to be abrupt.

This is contrary to commas, which separate parenthetical elements that are not abrupt. Some examples of proper Em Dash usage:

The cake—with chocolate sprinkles and all—was amazing!
There were many people at the reunion—most of which were old classmates of mine.

My two cents

Great writers aren’t made overnight and even though some people have a knack for their native language, anyone can become great at writing. The first step is to be aware of how the language works. Avoid slang and other non-conventional ways of writing. Learn how to spot errors and always, always proof-read your work before posting! I think one of the biggest mistakes bloggers often make is that they write with their audience in mind. While that is great strategy for topical content, it’s not a good move for grammar. In other words, just because your Internet audience often types like this: “hey u, wats up? hows ur day been goin so far!?” doesn’t mean your blog should reflect that same style.

What can BlogGlue do for you?

· Brandon Hann

UPDATE: BlueGlue is no longer in service. Per an email I received yesterday, the company running BlogGlue has decided to shut down the service and seek some sort of buyout. It’s possible that this service could be resurrected under a new owner, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It was fun while it lasted! I’m leaving this article up for historical purposes, but will be removing all outgoing links. This was the email sent out to all users:

BlogGlue Closed

Original article:

Just over 1 year ago, I joined a little known website called Arkayne. I even wrote about how to drive focused traffic to your site with Arkayne being the central topic. The purpose of Arkayne was to enhance your blog’s presence by connecting the posts you create with other blog owners who write about similar topics. It was such a simple concept; one that has helped my site grow in ways I didn’t think were possible. Today, Arkayne is now BlogGlue and their concept has remained simple, but has become much more powerful.

For me, blogging isn’t about ranking high in search engines or making thousands of dollars a day selling useless information or products—it’s about sharing ideas and providing valuable information about the things I know with people who want to learn. Of course, if I made thousands of dollars doing this, that would be great, but I don’t intend to sacrifice quality for quantity. This is where BlogGlue really helps out.

BlogGlue Partnerships

The give and take process of BlogGlue starts with a recommendation. As you browse the ever-growing community of blogs, you’ll start noticing many websites that share some common interests with your site. As you click through each one, you can choose the ones you like based on how well they complement your site and submit a recommendation.

The site owners you recommended are then notified of your recommendation and have the option to review your site. If they like what they see and recommend you back, you both become partners. At that point, your blogs are linked.

The plugin

The BlogGlue plugin on your site will add Related Links at the bottom of each post. It gets these links from your partners, so it’s important not to just add every partner under the sun to increase your count. Your site, your partners’ sites and your visitors will all benefit from these partnerships.

The process works both ways as well. Your links will start appearing on partner’s sites in the same location. This is the main function of BlogGlue and it works really well! The more partners you have, the most choices the plugin will have in pulling quality content. And as you would imagine, if you don’t like a particular site’s content, simply delete them as a partner and their links will never show up again!

When writing a post, the plugin also offers some instant help with basic SEO tips. After you saved your first draft, you can click the Test Now button and see exactly what you might be missing and how you can improve the page’s optimization.

The costs

There are three service plans available.

  • Free – $0.00/month – You accept up to 5 partners, but you can have unlimited recommendations. Your site content is limited to 200 pages/posts.
  • Basic – $9.97/month – You can have up 15 partners and still have unlimited recommendations. Your site content is limited to 1000 pages/posts.
  • Unlimited – $19.97/month – You can have unlimited partners and unlimited recommendations. Your site content is limited to 5000 pages/posts.

The best part about these plans is that you can grow into them. Start out free and as you start to notice your traffic increasing, just upgrade instantly to the next plan. At some point, your site will be getting hundreds or thousands of hits a day and the unlimited plan will be needed, but you’ll likely be making money at that point!

There are no contracts, hidden fees, cancellation charges, upgrade charges, taxes, etc, etc.! What you see is what you get.

My two cents

I’ve been using BlogGlue for over a year now and I can tell you just by looking at my stats, they have helped my site grow almost 300% and the numbers continue to rise as I become partners with more and more quality blogs. Their customer support has been super gracious and exceptionally fast with any issues I’ve had and I haven’t had many…that’s for sure.

I can’t say enough great things about the operation they’re running over there. Check them out over at www.blogglue.com.

Social Bookmarking – Facebook

· Brandon Hann

I doubt I need to explain to you what Facebook is, but I thought I’d give you some pointers on how you can maximize your Facebook experience while promoting your website at the same time.

Use Facebook to promote your site


If you’ve ever used Facebook to post blogs, you’re already at an advantage. The first thing to know is what each of the different Facebook pages are and how they can further help your cause. There are three types of Facebook pages:

  • Profile Page — This is your standard Facebook profile. If you have an account, this is was you’re already familiar with. Beyond all the normal profile features you get, you can use a profile page to post blogs and events. This tools can be used to submit articles (as blog posts) and showcase this content on you profile wall.
  • Fan Page — I wrote an entire article about how to use a Facebook fan page to advertise and promote your business. Before creating a fan page or even a group page, read it because there are some significant differences between them. A fan page is basically a public profile that you set up for your business and people will become fans of it instead of friends.
  • Facebook Group — A group page is basically the same as a fan page except that you can’t promote it via social ads. Another difference is that Facebook users have to join your group to become a “friend”. Group pages tend to be used more for actual groups such as clubs and organizations.

Blogging tools

Another advantage to using WordPress is that there are many plugins that allow you to post links on your wall that lead back to your blog site automatically. What this means is that if you post an article on your WordPress blog, the plugin will automatically post the link on your profile page.

All of your friends will then be able to see your post with a small introduction of text that describes what the content is about. If you posted any images on the site, it’ll show a thumbnail on Facebook. The top WordPress Facebook plugins:

  • Facebook dashboard widget — This is a simple solution to bring the Facebook data to you. Using the dashboard widgets available in WordPress 2.5 and above, this plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed, your posted items feeds and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard. So now you can keep up with whats going on in your friends lives from anywhere without needing to access Facebook!
  • Add to Facebook — This plugin adds a footer link to add the current post or page to a Facebook Mini-Feed. While the plugin is activated a link will appear after the content of the post with the text “Share on Facebook” or the Facebook icon or both. Clicking this link will bring the user to the Facebook site. If the user isn’t logged in they will be prompted to do so. Once logged into Facebook the post will be added to the Mini-Feed of the account.
  • Wordbooker — This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. You can also “cross polinate” comments between Facebook and your Wordpres blog.

    Various options including “attribute” lines and polling for comments and automatic re-posting on edit can be configured.

Facebook ads

Facebook ads works just like Google AdWords where you purchase ad space based on keywords which makes your site visible to a targeted audience. This is a great way to get your business in front of millions of users. I was reading a blog post that showed the 10 rules for advertising on Facebook and I think it’s some of the best information I’ve seen on this topic. Check it out now.

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The power of 'autoblogging'

· Brandon Hann

Whether you know it or not, the key to the success of your blog is post consistency. Imagine if you went to MSN.com every time you opened your browser and for three days straight, you saw the same news stories, videos, etc. Would that make you want to go back? Probably not, and for your visitors, this is more of a reality! You’re not MSN, you don’t have the manpower or resources to be MSN, so you have to work especially hard to keep your visitors coming back.

Welcome to the power of autoblogging! What this is, is a simple plugin that you install within WordPress that enables you to configure automated keyword searches throughout the entire Internet and have content posted directly to your blog. No longer do you have to try and fit consistant blog posts into your busy schedule!

Although I don’t use this plugin on ledfrog.com, I do have a couple of other blogs that I use it on and I can tell you first-hand, this thing is amazing! It’s almost like I have a full-time writing staff constantly updating and adding new things to my site. The best part is that I can control everything such as when the posts appear, how many per day, what topics I want to include, etc.

Advantages of autoblogging

  • Your blog populates content about whatever you choose based on keywords
  • You determine post frequency
  • You can customize the actual post times
  • Content is fresh and always sourced from the latest articles online

Just the first reason alone makes this software worth it. But, this software is EXTREMELY powerful as you can imagine and you want to be careful about how you use it!

DIS-Advantages of autoblogging

  • Your blog can become “polluted” with recycled content
  • Some keywords can pull up mis-information (i.e. you want in article on Windows 7 and it pulls up an article about 7 different window treatments you can buy for your home)
  • Since the content is not entirely original, your blog can suffer in the rankings if you don’t add your own content
  • You will become a lazy blogger!

All-in-all, I love auto blogging software because I do it the right way. I’ll have it scour the Internet for me, grab a few articles and once they’re posted, I’ll go back into them and write up some additional notes or commentary. However, I never use content from any other source without given the original author credit. For example, in every single case where I might use someone else’s content, I’ll post a backlink and some very obvious text that clearly states I’m not the creator of the content.

Doing this will ensure that people know you’re not copying content and information just to try and rank higher in the search engines.

My advice is if you want to increase your post frequency, but you just don’t have the time, use PowerAutoblog and let it build your blog for you!

There’s a limited time offer (ONLY $47!!) on this software, but you’ll have to act now to get it. I’m kind of upset really, because I had to pay $150 for this when it first came out!

Download PowerAutoblog Now

Social Bookmarking – Technorati

· Brandon Hann

I’m sure at some point in your blogging career, you’ve seen an article or two that pops up on the mega blog site, Technorati.com, but you probably didn’t know much about it. Don’t feel bad; neither did I.

We all know and love Google for they’ve been able to accomplish in the Internet industry (it’s amazing that we can now call this an industry!), and now we can love Technorati for doing great things just for blogs. As a reader, you’re able to search some millions of blogs all around the world talking about anything you can imagine. From there, you can leave comments, Digg articles, re-tweet your favorite bits of information, write for the site as a free lancer and even advertise your business there.

Freelance Writing

But as a writer, you can do one more important thing: promote your blog. Everywhere on this site, you read about posting quality content, finding backlinks and getting ranked high in Google. Well, here’s another way to promote and all it requires you to do is create an account. You can use Technorati to promote your blog and gain exposure and web traffic for your site.

Once you create your account, you “claim” your blog by adding a link to it and then Technorati will have you place some random text somewhere on your site. Within a few days, they will have found your site, verified you’re the author of it and then added it to your account. Now, whenever you post an article on your site, it will be referenced in your account and therefore, searchable. The more you post, the more likely your stuff will be found and that equals more traffic for your blog.

The advantage here is that you are listing your content specifically to a blog community. Being listed here can only help your cause over at Google. One thing to remember is that above and beyond any tips you’re going to find about how to create a successful blog, the most important one is whether you’re credible or not. I’ve said it many times before, but I’ll say it again. You can have a wonderful site with tons of content, but if nobody cares about what you have to say, then you’re lost and your site is considered dead.

Technorati Ranking

Technorati will also rank your blog against every listed blog in the database so you can watch your site gain popularity as your rank climbs higher and higher. Here’s a screenshot of my account page showing my claimed blog and ranking:

As you can see, at the time of this writing, I’m ranked at 40,606! I plan to drop this number as fast as possible and if/when I do, I’ll post a follow-up to this post to give you an idea of how long (and how many posts later) it took to get to that position. I may also post the traffic/rank ratio to help you get an idea of where your site ranks.

I think another great thing about Technorati is that you can claim multiple blogs. Just keep adding them to your account and you can then compare ranks between them to find out which ones are more popular. You mix this site together with your WordPress stats and Google Analytics, you will know exactly how to fix your blog if you need to.

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