Do You Use Social Networking?
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And if so which one?
Social Networking is part of the new web 2.0 technologies and comes under the umbrella of Social Media which also includes blogs, forums, message boards, podcasts, video and pictures.
How does Social Networking work?
They use the collective view of the community to form an opinion, understanding or just share the information presented. You use social interaction through the new technologies on the web (web 2.0) to highlight and ‘vote’ for information you think is good or worthy (eg article, photo, video etc). Here are just a couple of the popular ones:
Digg
Del.icio.us
Stumble Upon
You Tube (video)
Flickr (photo)
MySpace
I have known about social networking since very early on in my blogging but I have never used it much or consistantly. Partly because I didn’t know enough about it to form an opinion and partly because I didn’t have the time.
A lot of bloggers use social networking for traffic generation, so because it was not part of my traffic generation strategy at the time I didn’t use it. But as my traffic generation strategy is refining I am starting to use it more and more for finding good content, traffic generation and to connect with other like minded bloggers.
Social Networking became more interesting to me when I started seeing it as more than just a traffic generation tool. It’s great for finding good sites or blogs in my niche that I can use for information, possible guest posts or comments. And getting to know other bloggers or people in my niche.
So I have started to use them more starting with Stumble Upon which I have been using regularly and getting to know it’s many features.
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:del.icio.us, digg, facebook, flickr, myspace, stumble upon, twitter, you tubeCase Study Blog Review
At the beginning of March my case study blog, The Photographer Blog will be 3 months old so I thought it would be a good time to do a quarterly review of how it is doing. I said I would report how it is going, but it does make me feel a little nervous being open and revealing all. Anyway here it goes!
Statistics
In mid January I started using Awstats so I am 2 days off having a complete month of data, but it has still given some good information to work with. So the figures I quote here are for visits and will be for February because it gives a better overall look at the month (minus 2 days).
Monthly visits: 776
Unique visits: 251
Daily visits: 50 (highest - avg 30)
Considering the amount of marketing I was able to do this month I am quite pleased with the results. I used comment marketing, forums, social networking which was Stumble Upon and a blog carnival.
Conclusion
Overall I am a little disappointed with the progress so far of the case study blog, I have learned so much since starting this blog and I was raring to use all the techniques regularly and see how well my second blog could start off life. But at the end of the day that is my fault because I haven’t been able to spend as much time on it as I had hoped, for one reason or another. Although that is life and I have to accept it and look to the future, all it means is it will take a little longer than I thought to get where I want to be.
Saying that it has performed a lot better than this blog did when it was 3 months old, so at least what I have learned about blogs works, and I have moved forward with blogs. All I have to do is find a couple more hours in the day and everything will be great.
Looking to the Future
I am looking forward to the future and the next 3 months. I enjoy my blogging and trying out new things. I want to put more time into the case study blog and see how much more it grows. Also I would like to start a weekly newsletter for it. It’s definitely an exciting time…
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:the photographer blogRSS Footer Plugin - An Essential Plugin
I have found some really good plugins recently that save a lot of time and effort on my part, like the Wordpress automatic upgrade plugin that I have just used to upgrade both blogs to version 2.3.3 with just one click!
And now I have just come across another extremely useful plugin, the RSS Footer plugin which adds a link back to your blog in your RSS feed. That is helpful in two ways:
1. To combat Scrapers, these are people that scrape the content off your blog and place it on theirs pretending that they produced it! So this plugin places a link back to your blog in the feed of your blog, telling everyone and more importantly the search engine bots who wrote the post originally.
2. It helps with rankings as each feed that is read with the back link in is helping with the blogs rankings.
RSS Footer Plugin
This is a really simple plugin to use and very effective. You just download the plugin and unzip, then upload the RSS Footer.php to your Wordpress plugin folder and activate. If you are not sure how to upload a plugin to Wordpress then take a look at the is article: How to install Wordpress themes and plugins.
Then you can choose where you want the link to appear in the feed, before or after and also if you want a link to the post itself as well as the blog.
I have just installed and activated this plugin on both of my blogs and I am amazed at how easy and quick it was to do. Just to make sure that Feedburner picks up the changes I also went to my Feedburner account and the troubleshootize page, and pinged Feedburner so it would go and check the blogs immediately.
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:RSS Footer plugin, wordpress automatic upgrade pluginAre Your Plugins Up To Date?
Updating your plugins
I got myself in a right pickle over this recently with the case study blog. I was setting the structure of the blog up and had already installed Wordpress which was version 2.3 (recently released) at the time. And I started to add plugins to it.
I had moved this blog from Blogspot to Wordpress (version 2.2) in July last year and added plugins to it then, so I just used the plugins I had already downloaded to my computer and added to this blog, for the new blog. What a mistake!
I thought it would save me loads of time by doing this. I remembered when I downloaded them that a lot of them had not been updated for a while, so I thought (wrongly) that I was ok to just add them again to the second blog.
What went wrong?
Well it seems since I had downloaded my plugins in July last year practically all of them have been updated and new versions released. I think some of them were having problems working with Wordpress 2.3. The problem was that I didn’t figure this out straight away.
My blog started to have problems and this escalated until it came up with fatal errors. I had never installed on a second blog before so I thought I had done something wrong with the install, I didn’t think it was the plugins for a while.
Then it dawned on me while working on this blog, I noticed a message on the plugin page saying there was a newer version of the plugin available. So I had to go and download the new versions and re-install nearly all the plugins for the case study blog. That thankfully solved the problems and it’s working fine now.
A hard lesson to learn and it took way longer than just going to the sites in the first place and downloading them again. A mistake I will not be making again that’s for sure!
So the moral of the story is check in on the plugins page every now and then to see if anything needs updating, especially if Wordpress has been updated recently. And never assume plugins you already use will be fine on another blog!
Mandy
PS. Another good reason to back up your blog!
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Site Search Tags:wordpress pluginsHave You Had Trouble with Adsense Plugins?
I don’t know about you but I have been having a terrible time trying to find an Adsense plugin to work on my blog. Or even to get Adsense to appear at all even if I put it in by hand.
I wondered if something had happened to my Adsense account but everything seemed fine. And trying to manually place it in the template didn’t work either, in fact it brought up some script errors and wouldn’t show posts on a single page.
What is the problem?
So then I started to draw my attention to the blog itself, were some of my other plugins conflicting with the Adsense one? The only problem with that question was working through all my plugins to find out which one it could be.
Then I heard that some themes can cause these kind of problems. I hoped it wasn’t that because I really like this theme, Sillouette which is by Brian Gardner. It’s the best theme I have ever used and it’s so nice to use. The formatting works really well and you can tell just by looking at the blog, it’s clean and tidy and is easy on the eye.
It handles images nicely and the text is always neatly wrapped around them. This also goes for my other blog which uses another Brian Gardner theme called Modern Paper. So there’s no way I was about to change the themes!
I was trying to add one of the most popular plugins Adsense Deluxe, and after seeking some help I found out it either works fine with the theme, or it just doesn’t work at all.
So I looked for another plugin, I came across the Shylock Adsense plugin which I had never heard of before. I tried it out and it worked straight away, thank goodness for that. And on top of all that it is really easy to use!
My initial thoughts on it
And what’s more it not only allows you to position and add adsense ads to your blog, it also lets you add other types of adverts all you need is the code. It also has an interesting feature where you can set a different adsense advert for older posts that will attract search engine traffic.
So far I like the simplicity of it, and the user friendly control panel. You don’t have to touch the theme files or templates at all. You can just choose the type of advert and the position you want it in, in the control panel and that’s it. No adding <–adsense–> stuff in your posts, it’s all done in the control panel under options.
I’ve only just started to use it so this is my first impression, which is good. I’ll let you know how it goes…
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Brian Gardner, shylock adsense pluginHow Well Are You Targeting Your Audience?
This is a good question and one I probably shy away from in case I’m not doing very well at it.
When I think back to planning my blogs I set out a plan for what I wanted the blogs to be about and what they would look like. And then I decided who my target audience would be taking into account what I will be writing about, what style of writing it will be and what level I will be writing at.
Now as a blog grows and takes shape it can move away a little from what I origoinally planned because it starts to naturally grow in another direction. But whether that happens or not it would be nice to know how my readers saw my blogs and whether I am targeting the group of people that I meant to?
The Blog Readability Test
I came across the Blog readability Test site a while ago and thought it was a bit of fun, which it is. But I found the results interesting, I entered both my blogs to see what it thought of them and here are the results:
Build a Blog Elementary School
The Photographer Blog Junior High School
Which kind of sits right with both of the blogs. I want Build a Blog to help beginner bloggers, and maybe stop them going through the nightmare of finding their way in the blogsphere that I did. And The Photographer Blog is a bit more in depth because I am looking at my journey as a photographer which is something I have done for years, and therefore tends to be more technical.
So I think it could be a handy little tool, just to see what type of people you are reaching, and then if you want to change your target audience it would be a good place to check that too. I don’t see it as an exact representation of how well my blogs are reaching the people I want, it’s just more of a guide that’s a bit of fun as well!
Try your blog out and see what it says…
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:blog readability testThe Best Way to Upgrade Wordpress
Have you upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 yet?
A couple of weeks ago I found a message in my Wordpress admin panel saying my Wordpress installation was out of date. And I should upgrade to version 2.3 as soon as possible, due to it having a lot of bug fixs in it.
Now that always sends a chill down my spine because I hate messing about with Wordpress in that way. I don’t now much about hosting or Wordpress for that fact, just what I have learned along the way. The blog is up and running fine, and I always think if it isn’t broke don’t fix it.
But this is an important upgrade with bug fixs in it so I have put it off long enough, I know I have to upgrade it. I have never upgraded Wordpress before and that’s the main reason I have been stalling.
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin
Until now, I have found a plugin which could save all my worrying. The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin by Techie Buzz. It does just what it says and automatically upgrade your Wordpress version to the latest one from wordpress.org.
I have just used it to upgrade this blog from Wordpress 2.1 to Wordpress 2.3 and it was fantastic, no problems it just did it! I thoroughly reccommend using this plugin, it makes a backup of the files and database (as well as cleaning it up), deactivates all plugins and then reactivates after the upgrade has been installed.
There are some amazing plugins out there that really make a bloggers life easier and the automatic upgrade plugin is certainly one of them.
Mandy
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