What Are Your Options?

Google +1

The Google +1 button essentially socializes your search results and keeps tabs of your personal +1′s on your Google profile. If you needed proof of social signals affecting search results this is it.  A link in your search engine results will get a little boost if someone you know +1′d that link or if a large part of the general population +1′d that link.

This button is still pretty new but you will certainly see it often. This is Google’s direct answer to the Facebook Like button so expect to see the two together.

Facebook Like

Facebook has changed the way you share content a few times however the Facebook Like button is their most recent toy. It makes use of the open graph to identify and connect your liked content to Facebook pages, activities, music, movies, etc.

From the AOL/Nielsen Content Sharing study, we know people prefer to share content with friends and family. That makes Facebook an important place to make your content easily shareable on. Make sure to make use of the open graph to fine tune how your content is shared and to claim your stake in the open graph.

Twitter Retweet

Twitter didn’t always have it’s own retweet button. In the beginning there was TweetMeme. A few tried to copy what Tweetmeme had created however only BackType and Topsy succeeded where others failed. Finally Twitter released it’s own button that gives you the option of choosing a Twitter profile to recommend after a user shares your content. Each retweet button has it’s perks but make sure you display one on your site.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn button is still fairly new but a great way to easily enable readers to share your content with their relevant networks on LinkedIn. This button will probably perform best with business, marketing and assorted internet related sites.

Email

That AOL/Nielsen Content Sharing study mentioned earlier stated 66% of the population use email as primary method of sharing. Offer an easy way to share your content via email because people seem to like doing that. I’m not fully convinced you need to display a button or link to encourage sharing over email because people are probably already used to just copying and pasting into email. However it never hurts to make things easier.

Social Bookmarking sites

I personally get waves of traffic from Stumbleupon and Reddit and some steady traffic from Delicious. Look at your analytics to figure out which sites your content is getting shared on and only display social bookmarking buttons that are performing well.

Some sites to consider are:

• Reddit
• Stumbleupon
• Digg
• Delicious
• Sphinn

So Which Buttons Should I Use?

Most sites seem to stick to Facebook and Twitter because the share counts are traditionally higher because of the nature of the services. You might also want to experiment with LinkedIn and the Google +1 button as they increase in popularity.

I suggest only using buttons that display share counts. Displaying buttons with higher share counts creates a form of social proof that might encourage other readers to share your content. Also, displaying too many buttons can slow down your site which can in turn result in readers leaving your site while waiting for the page to load.

Socialize WordPress Plugin

The Socialize plugin for WordPress is a social bookmarking plugin that makes it easy to insert popular social sharing buttons into your content. The plugin is unique in that you can easily select which button to display on a page to page basis as well as rearrange the order of the buttons on that page. The plugin also encourages using actionable buttons recognized by the community as popular methods of sharing content. The plugin includes the new Google +1 button, 4 Twitter buttons, 2 Facebook buttons, a custom Delicious button, the LinkedIn button and a few more widgets and buttons from popular social media sites. Learn more on the WordPress plugin page.

The purpose of this post is to educate my clients and readers on some of the best practices concerning HTML in their WordPress posts and pages. Sure you can just write blocks of text and hope the content is compelling enough to stick but knowing a little HTML can go a long way in making your posts easier to read.

Learn Basic HTML

Paragraphs and Line Breaks:

The WordPress editor automatically removes <br> and <p> tags that don’t have any attributes and  replaces them when your WordPress theme displays your content. This causes a lot of confusion when people who already know some HTML start trying to use the WordPress HTML editor and their paragraph tags keep disappearing. WordPress interprets a single line break as <br> and a double line break as <p>.

Headers:

Headers are a great way to tell your readers (and search engines) what the next block of text is about. Us humans have become accustomed to scanning posts rather than reading every little word. For this reason headers are a great way to help a reader find exactly what they’re looking for within your post.

<h1>Most Important Header</h1>
<h2>Second Most Important Header</h2>
<h3>Third Most Important Header</h3>
...
<h6>Least Important Header</h6>

I usually try to pick up where my theme left off. So if my post title is using <h2> tags I will use <h3> tags to punctuate my main points in my post.

Images:

I personally think images are the most important part of a post next to its content. You are best off using the Upload/Insert functionality in your post editor. If your theme supports featured images you should most definitely be using them.

One of my WordPress image pet peeves is when people don’t use the built in CSS classes to align their images to the content.  These are classes that the WordPress post editor uses by default and most quality themes will support.

A basic left aligned image in WordPress would look like:

<img src="example.jpg" class="alignleft" />

And there you have it. I’ll talk about the importance of additional tags like Alt and Title in a bit. For now let’s move on.

Lists:

Lists are a very important part of making your post scannable. I try and use them whenever I want to highlight key points because I know the reader is more likely to read them. There are two types of lists; ordered and unordered.

Ordered lists are exactly what they sound like:

1. First
2. Second
3. Third

And alternatively, an unordered list looks as follows:

• Something
• Something Else
• And More

Your sidebar and navigation menus are most likely already making use of lists because of their ability to efficiently organize information. The basic syntax of a list is pretty straightforward.

First you need to declare what type of list you are using

• <ol> – Ordered List
• <ul> – Unordered List

And then you need to wrap your list items with the <li> tag.

A completed unordered list could look like this:

<ul>
<li>Something</li>
<li>Something Else</li>
<li>And More</li>
</ul>

Formatting:

You’ve got your main points highlighted with headers, lists and images to draw your readers eye. Now you can run though your post and do any additional needed styling to accentuate any remaining key ideas.

<strong> – Makes your content bold. Use instead of <b> to help search engines give extra weight.
<em> – Makes your content italic. Use instead of <i> to help search engines give extra weight.
<a href=""> – The anchor tag can be used to link to other websites or within your site. The href attribute specifies the destination of a link.
<blockquote> – Most themes will indent and emphasize blockquote text so this is a great way to emphasize chunks of text and quotes.
<pre> – By default, this tag maintains a text format. Good for bits of text where you want to preserve line breaks and spaces.
<code> – This tag distinguishes text that is computer code from normal language
<del> –  This tag is useful for chunks of text you want to delete after a post has been published. Most browsers will render it as the original text with a line through it.
<ins> –  This tag is useful for chunks of text you may want to add to your post after it has been published. Most browsers will render it as the original text with a line under it.

Accessibility

Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities via Wikipedia. WordPress recommends that you use Alt and Title tags on images as well as Title tags on links.

Example:

<a href="example.html" title="Example"><img src="example.jpg" alt="Example" title="Example" /></a>

Using The HTML Editor (Video)

Conclusion

This is only a small sampling of the HTML tags you can use based on the ones I thought were most important. All of these HTML tags are either built into the WordPress editor or supported by popular WordPress themes. Of course focus more on the quality of your posts than using as many HTML tags as possible. Look at some of your favorite blogs to get an idea of how you might want to structure your posts. With a better understanding of whats possible you can create a more personal style.

Further Reading

Here are some sites and posts worth checking out to learn more about HTML and blogging on WordPress.

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts
• http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
• http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/20/basic-in-post-html/
• http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/quicktags/

- Image by cdsessums

First off, we have an excellent article by Devlounge which poses some great questions:

• Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS

Next we have a series of articles from Noupe convering some excellent WordPress as a CMS plugins, techniques and unique uses:

• 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress
• 40 Exceptional “CMS Enabling” WordPress Plugins
• 25 Unique uses of WordPress as CMS

Now WordPress isn’t the perfect CMS solution right out of the box, so NoScope.com discusses it’s shortcomings and some possible improvements:

• 10 Changes To WordPress That Would Make It A Killer CMS

It would also be nice if you took the time to keep your WordPress CMS somewhat user friendly so we’ll turn to Stylizedweb for that:

• 10 Steps to a Client Friendly WordPress CMS

And finally, a few lists of plugins that can help you successfully turn your WordPress blog into a fully functional content management system:

• 31 WordPress CMS Plugins via Jon Bishop (me)
• The Autopsy Of WordPress As CMS With 25 Great WP Plugins & Designs via Onextrapixel
• Use WordPress As a CMS: Plugins, The Bare Minimum via Themeshaper
• Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins via Blueprint Design Studio

Get Strategies, Tips and Free Plugins to make your WordPress site perform above all the rest. There are plenty of tutorials to get you started using WordPress, but what are the next steps? Lean how to optimize your time and your website within the WordPress environment by subscribing to a bi-weekly newsletter made for business owners with little time to manage and learn about WordPress. It’s a one top resource with actionable topics that will help your site become more successful.

Did I mention it’s Free?

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Your blog should really evolve right along side you. A few things to consider as you learn more about your readers are:

• Is it easy for readers to contact you? Can you make it easier?
• Is it easy for readers to find you on other networks, like on Twitter?
• Is it easy for you readers to find some of your more popular articles?
• Do you offer anything worth promoting to your sidebar or home page?
• Are people using your search and are they finding what they’re looking for?
• Can people easily subscribe to your RSS feed?

Keeping your content fresh can go beyond just posting regularly. Keeping your blog fresh as a whole is an easy way to keep people interested. Just remember not to go overboard.

How Have I Put This Into Action?

First of all I acknowledged the fact that certain posts perform better on some days than others due to trending topics on Twitter and in social media. So I added a ‘Popular Posts’ section in my sidebar that shows the most popular posts over the past 2 days. This is just an easy way to take advantage of the spikes of traffic I get from social media by taking full advantage of a topics popularity within a time frame.

I also added buttons that link directly to the WordPress plugins I created from the sidebar because I recognize that this is one of the main reasons people visit my site and I want an easy way for them to find what they’re looking for.

Speaking of my plugins, my Socialize plugin allows me to selectively add social bookmarking buttons to my posts. After awhile it’s pretty easy to see which button are being used more than others and with my plugin I can easily go in and remove unneeded buttons. This is just to increase the overall user experience as well as to encourage more shares on the services that are already doing well.

And finally, I use the feedback of my readers through comments and on Twitter to come up with new topic ideas. It’s probably my main source of inspiration aside from my spontaneous brain bursts.

How Can You Put This Into Action?

Ask you readers! Seriously. If you can’t figure out what needs to be done through previous interactions with your reader base why not formulate a post asking for ideas and direction. Don’t just let your blog become a place to spill your thoughts, let your readers milk your brain for all it’s worth … maybe that’s where the gold is.

- Photo by Diogo Martins.

To do this, I would need to:

• Suppress all video posts from being displayed with other posts
• Create an archive of all video posts
• Resize and place my most recent video in the sidebar

The first step was pretty easy. I just created a new category called “Video Post” and assigned it to all of my video posts. This would become a fairly intuitive list of videos people could access at their will.

Next I wanted to remove all video posts from being displayed among other posts on the home page. However, I still wanted my videos to be displayed in RSS feeds as well as archives and search pages. To do this, I just modified the default WordPress query used to pull the most recent posts by placing the following code before “The Loop”.

Be sure to change ‘-66′ to the id of whatever category you are trying to hide. How do I find the category IDs?

Also, if you are not sure where the WordPress Loop begins, it is usually located inside of index.php in your theme folder and starts with:

The last step is to display my most recent video in the sidebar. To do this I decided my best course of action was to save the embed code of my videos into a custom field as well as within the content of the post. This would allow me to easily pull the embed code and I would still be able to add text along with my video within the content.

In the example below I used the custom field ‘embed’ in my posts. Just paste this code in your sidebar where you would like your video to be displayed.

You will notice I also included a link to my last video however you can remove this or replace it with a link to your video archive. This code should work with most video embed codes. Be sure to change the width and height so everything fits nicely into your sidebar.

And that’s it. Now all you need to do when adding a new video post is:

1. Assign the post to your video category
2. Paste your embed code into the content and your ‘embed’ custom field
3. And Publish Your Post!

• SEO
• Awesome Layout
• It’s constantly being optimized

I guess what originally hooked me was the fact that most of the blogs I was reading by professionals within my industry were already on the Thesis theme. You’ve got Chris Brogan (who wrote about it here), Darren Rowse (who wrote about it here), Brian Clark (who wrote about i here), Matt Cutts and more.

So now a little about what makes it so great.

Matt Cutts recently spoke at WordCamp San Francisco 2009 where he discussed WordPress’s ability to satisfy 90% of your websites SEO. WordPress itself takes care of the obvious things like pretty URLs, syndication, interlinking pages, hiding duplicate content, etc. However, one thing WordPress does not control is the layout of the theme you are using. This is where Thesis comes in and satisfies several immediate needs:

• Cleanly laid out HTML for easy indexing by search engines
• Extra fields that allow editing of header meta on a page to page basis
• Clean, easy to read typography

But if everyone had the same theme, wouldn’t that get kind of dull?

Sure, if everyone was using the same settings. Thesis comes with two new settings pages under the appearance tab of your admin panel. You can move sidebars around, change major content area, and control all your fonts across the entire site.

Now while every other theme out there may eventually become outdated, I know I’m safe with Thesis because they are consistently releasing new versions. Their unique method for customizing the theme allows for easy upgrades and a lot more control. They have even added several new wordpress hooks that developers have already begun integrating into their plugins for easy one-step setup.

But I like it for the cutting edge look and feel

This was probably the culprit for the themes instant appeal in my eyes. Out of the box, the home page of the theme allows you to display excerpts in a slick boxlike fashion. You also get a dynamic content area in your sidebar that you can change on a post to post basis, great for promoting services relevant to the content your readers are viewing. Finally, they’ve added options to your posts and pages that allow you to display images in your posts that are automatically resized for the excerpts on the home page.

I’ve never promoted a product on my blog because I feel money can dilute an honest review by making it slightly more biased in any one direction. However, with Thesis I will make an exception. Ever since I’ve started using it I’ve been able to focus a lot more on content creation and less about SEO and blog maintenance. I very much look forward to future releases and hope you can too.

Disclaimer: All links to Thesis from this blog are an affiliate link. If you purchase the theme through one of these links I will receive a percentage as commission. This is the first (and probably only) product I would ever endorse for money.

1) Test your blogs speed first and get it primed

Use tools like iWebTool’s Speed Test and Pingdom’s Full Page test to visually see your blogs weaknesses and identify any key areas to focus on.

You should also be sure that your HTML adheres to W3C guidelines by validating your website and fixing any problems.

2) Make sure you have reliable hosting

Choose a reliable host that has the most recent versions of PHP and MYsql installed as well as enough space/bandwidth to handle large loads. WordPress has it’s own list of recommended hosts.

Here are a few others worth checking out:

• HostGator
• Fat Cow
• GoDaddy
• Lunar Pages
• Host Monster

3) Handle your images properly

Images can put a huge strain on your server’s load time if not managed properly. Your images don’t need to be any higher than 72 DPI and should be resized before being inserted into your post. Resizing images with HTML can distort the image and increase it’s loading time.

It also might be a good idea to disable hotlinking so no one outside of your website is using up your resources. All you have to do is navigate to your .htaccess file and insert the following code. (Note: If you are unfamiliar with how htaccess works, you may want to skip this step or contact a web developer for help)

It also wouldn’t hurt to cache your commenter’s gravatar images if you are currently displaying them on your site.

4) Easy with the javscript calls

Calls to 3rd party javascripts seem to be the main culprit in slowing down WordPress blogs. Between all the analytics packages available and social media enhancements you can make, their are tons of ways to slow down your blog. It really comes down to just choosing wisely. Do you really need that nifty little MyBlogLog widget? Is Google friend connect that important to your blogs strategy?

Two easy ways to cut down on the amount of time is takes to load whatever scripts you deem are necessary is to:

• Move javascript to an external file so browsers can cache the scripts.
• Move any remaining scripts to your WordPress’s footer.php

5) Don’t load too many videos at once

Too many flash videos on one page is a sure way to use up all of someones memory trying to load your page. I worked around this problem by assigning all video posts to the same category and not displaying any posts from that category on the home page. I just placed the following code above my “WordPress loop”:

Another easy fix would be to use the <!–more–> tag above your code that embeds the video in your post. This would only prevent the video itself from displaying on your home page.

6) Control your plugins

Only make calls to plugins when you need them by only calling them on the pages they will be used on.

This code only displays “function code here” when you are viewing the “archives” page. A full list of all the conditional tags can be found here.

Also be careful not to install too many plugins in general and disable and remove any plugins that are not being used.

7) Cache Your Pages

The WP Super Cache plugin is probably the easiest way to seemingly increase your blogs loading time. It saves a copy of your website to a file on your server so WordPress only need to call that file rather than all the SQL and PHP it normally has to run. It comes in very useful when you have traffic spikes from certain social media sites.

8) Reduce SQL queries and PHP calls

Yoast has a great post that can help significantly reduce the number of calls your blog makes to your database. It also wouldn’t hurt to clean up your database either manually or with a plugin like WP DB Manager.

Another thing you can do that might speed up your database is to disable post revisions.

-

I hope someone finds this useful. Are there anymore tips you would recommend for speeding up a WordPress blog’s loading time?

- Photo by kevindean

• Ubervu
• BackType
• TweetBacks
• Disqus
• ChatCatcher
• IntenseDebate

The idea is to bring all comments about your posts into the posts themselves in an effort to centralize the conversation. This seems like a great idea until you put it into practice.

The main problem with most, if not all, of these solutions is that Twitter tends to overpower the rest. What we need is an effective means of filtering Twitter for quality comments, otherwise they should not be pulled into the post at all.

Are people seriously going through the “Social Media Comments” of the comments section and scanning through them for quality input? Good luck finding any quality input from Twitter. Just for kicks, go to this mashable post and count the number of quality comments from Twitter about that post. You more than likely saw the ridiculous number of trackbacks and didn’t even bother counting.

But what if, for the time being, we just excluded Twitter from this count. I mean, what benefit, if any, are they providing to the discussion. The only tweets worth including in comments are usually the comments that were sent to Twitter using Disqus, IntenseDebate or CommenTwitter.

However, there are sites that do provide quality comments worth importing into your posts, like StumbleUpon and Digg. These sites separate the promotion of the content (Digging/linking) from the commentary. ReTweeting is like Digging something. You wouldn’t display each individual Digg on your site below the comments, but you might use the Digg widget to represent the total number of Diggs received and then display any comments about the Digg in the comments of your post. This is how we should handle ReTweets. Use a site like TweetMeme to display your total RT count and then leave the ReTweets out of the comments.

As the filtering and organization of commentary across the web becomes more centralized we will hopefully see great improvements in the way we go about displaying them on our blogs. Until then, let’s just be smart about it.

-Photo by victoriapeckham

This is just the icing on the cake as ProBlogger had already pointed out a few issues with FeedBurner prior to this new change. He brings up some valid points that ultimately led to me writing this post.

So now the question becomes, why do we even need FeedBurner anymore?

FeedBurner was originally created as a means of resyndicating your content in multiple XML formats to suit the needs of different RSS readers. At least that was the pitch that originally got me on board. Now it seems as if the main reasons people are using FeedBurner is to:

• Track RSS Subscriptions
• Allow people to subscribe to RSS via email
• Post process feeds with additional content (sharing links, custom footers, etc)

But now that RSS is reaching maturity, is there any need for this 3rd party service to control our feeds? I mean the whole point of RSS was to create a standardized XML file format that allowed information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The truth is that most if not all RSS readers can handle the shottiest RSS feeds (I’ve created some pretty shotty feeds in the past).

So what about all the stats, email and flair? Well if you have a wordpress blog and do not mind the extra load on your server, why not just manage your feed yourself with a couple new plugins. A quick Google search brought up this little gem: “How to assemble a Feedburner alternative using WordPress plugins“. The post is a bit old but still very relevant. There are also 200+ RSS plugins in the WordPress plugin directory that are sure to meet whatever needs you can come up with. Now it’s on us to push the development of these and new plugins to give us more control of our RSS feeds.

I left out a lot of my emotions concerning the new changes that have been made to FeedBurner because I didn’t want to just echo the cries of others and instead wanted to propose a possible solution. Long story short, the FeedBurner RSS chicklet used to be an easy way to gauge a blogs popularity. Now that it can be manipulated it has lost its usefulness.

- Photo by striatic

Social Icons hand drawned

Polaroid icon set

Page Peel – A Free Social Media Iconset

IconTexto Web 2.0 User

Icons Cloud

LoonDesign Vector Icons Set

Handycons

Handycons 2

Social Media Icons Pack in 3 Sizes

Aquaticus Social Icons

WebDev Social Bookmark

Extended Set of Social Icons

Starry Site V1 from Evohosting

Set of Social Icons

Web Social Icons

Web 2.0rigami

Social Icons Made of Wood

Socialize Icons

Cheers

Heart: A Free Social Icon Set

The Leaves Fall: A Social Icon Set For Bloggers

Function Free Social Media Icons

IconsETC Black Inlay on Steel Social Media Icons

Elegant Social Media Icons Version 2.0

Social Post Stamps: Free icon set

Social Media Stars Icon Set: 26 Free Icons

FreeHand ColorStroked icon pack

The truth is you will probably get little to no activity on your posts regardless of what plugins you are using, especially if you are the new blog on the block.

So How Do I Go Viral?

Well, you don’t just “go viral” as there are a bunch of factors that go into the viral potential of content. However, there are certain things you can do to your blog that can help encourage the sharing of your content. I personally made these changes to my blog about 2 months ago and watched my number of Diggs, Stumbles and ReTweets double if not triple.

They key is to create actionable social bookmarking and sharing buttons.

What does that mean? Focus on the top social media sites that drive traffic to your site and use the official widgets or buttons of that site if they are available. Another equally viable solution is to create your own buttons or find some striking alternatives.

I think the problem is that people are so used to seeing small sharing icons or tiny AddThis and ShareThis buttons that they are starting to skip right over them. I’ve found that simply using the official Digg button over a smaller unofficial alternative has given me a reasonable boost of Diggs on some of my better posts. I’ve also begun to see a lot more activity from StumbleUpon as it only takes a few good stumbles to get a lot of relevant traffic.

So Where Do I Start?

AddThis has already started making moves to adapt to the changing needs of social media enthusiast’s. You can now bring your buttons outside of their little widget and create larger trackable buttons that are sure to have higher click rates.

I still think the best method is to use the recognizable official buttons and widgets of the selected sites you wish to use to share your posts.

Some you may want to consider are:

• Digg This button
• Reddit button
• TweetMeme button
• Stumble button

Be selective in deciding what sites to use and provide your readers with the BEST tools to properly share your content.

TweetSuite is an excellent plugin developed by ‘social & viral marketing scientist’ Dan Zarrella. It started off as a plugin that returned all ReTweets of a post and has turned into a complete Twitter/Wordpress solution.

Features include:

• Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
• ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
• A digg-like Tweet-This Button
• Automatic Tweeting of new posts
• A Most-Tweeted Widget
• A Recently-Tweeted Widget
• A My-Last-Tweets Widget
• A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget

CommenTwitter

I designed CommenTwitter to both increase the quality of tweets about posts as well as generate traffic to that post. I believe people should be just as proud of their comments on other peoples blogs as they are of their own blog posts.

Basically what you do is input your Twitter Credentials before you submit a comment. This in turn tweets an excerpt of your comment along with a link back to the original comment in it’s entirety.

TweetStats

TweetStats is a nifty little plugin that works alongside the TweetBacks plugin. It ultimately allows you to add a widget to the sidebar of your most recent and most popular tweets. I’m hoping this is the beginning of a new generation of plugins working together to present the best content to it’s readers.

Automagic Twitter Profile URI

This is a great plugin that uses a commenters email address to ping the Twitter API and retrieve their Twitter username. It then “automagically” adds the commenters Twitter name next to their name in their comment.

Tweet This

I’m not a huge fan of setting up wordpress to automatically update your Twitter feed every time you post. I think it should be on the publisher to write tweets that are both personal and more attractive to draw in their followers. However I do think it is important to allow other to easily tweet your post.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is another one of those complete WordPress/Twitter solutions.

Features include:

• Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes)
• Create a blog post from each of your tweets
• Create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets
• Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post
• Post a tweet from your sidebar
• Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens
• Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

Twitter Remote

While not technically a WordPress plugin, I’ve always been a fan of the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget and this would be the Twitter alternative. It basically just display a list of the most recent Tweeps to visit your blog.

I think these plugins best represent the potential when discussing Twitter/Blog integration. It’s time we start working on more practical uses and stop reinventing the wheel. I hope you enjoyed my list and please feel free to add your favorite Twitter/Wordpress plugins in a comment below.

You need to remember that the content is the main reason someone might be reading your blog at any one point in time. If your blog takes 5 minutes to load there is a good chance they are going to bail.

I’ve set up a development blog for the purpose of testing my blogs speed when adding and updating plugins. The goal is to keep the load time down to seconds. This way I know my blog can handle the load when getting a rush of new readers from a social bookmarking site or high profile twitterer.

My basic rule of thumb is if the plugin isn’t beneficial to the reader I don’t use it. I have since removed all back links to blog directories and any traffic boosting programs. I even got rid of sociable because it added a half a second load time to the page.

There’s nothing I need to put in my sidebar I can’t create a new page for and its not worth the hassle.

So please use plugins that direct me to your best content and focus on helping me, the reader.

- Photo by Editor B

Twitter

I feel like Twitter is the easiest one to do right and somehow so many people do it wrong.

First you have your spray and prayers. They follow everyone on TwitterPacks and post one link in their feed that sends them to their website. If very little untargetted traffic is your thing then by all means go for it. You won’t last very long as Twitter is slowly getting better at filtering out the trash in its intertubes.

So the easiest way to use Twitter for business is to develop a following through honest communication.

Wondering why no one’s following you back?

• You’re following too many people
• You never filled out your profile
• You never post anything
• You only post things from your blog
• You’re too hot to be real (or too ugly to be followed)
• You sound like a robot

Key to Success: Reach out to others

I find that those that become resources in their communities often thrive at building trust as well as followers.

Facebook and LinkedIn

Facebook and LinkedIn are great places to network by using their groups and micro communities to find like minded individuals. However, people often overlook the potential in niche community sites outside of the main stream social media. These smaller communities are filled with people that might actually like your service and even welcome it.

Another reason why your marketing efforts won’t work on Facebook is simply because they are not welcome. Facebook is a platform to connect with friends, not your brand. If you once again focus your efforts on becoming a resource rather than just throwing yourself out there, you may see better results.

Key to Success: Be yourself

Like I said, “Facebook is a platform to connect with friends, not your brand”. Use these tools to network the same way you would at a party or any other networking event.

Blog

Blogging can be the foundation of your companies online reputation or it can get overlooked completely. There’s no shortcut to developing quality content for your posts. Blog about things you actually know about.

Wondering why no one is subscribing to your feed?

• Your posts are too long
• Your topics don’t provide value
• Your layout compromises your post
• Your title isn’t appealing
• No one knows your blog exists

Key to Success: Focus on writing unique content for a specific audience. Also be sure to seek out your target audience and connect with them honestly and openly.

Wrap Up

There are a lot of specifics you can get into when identifying your target audience online and how you can best reach them. I look at all of my social media conversations and try to be as completely transparent as possible. I also try to maintain a healthy mix of personal and business interactions as I do in life. Remember that social media is just a tool that helps extend our real life beyond it physical limits and it should be treated as such.

So what do you think? What else might be holding back someone’s social media efforts from seeing any results?

- Photo by coxy

First, I do believe you will start seeing twitter handles in comments. My favorite implementation of this so far is Twittar. Twittar actually has the potential to do two things that I think will be big in 2009.

1. It will bring us one step closer to centralizing our online representations of ourselves via avatars.
2. It will allow people to easily follow not only the author of a great blog post, but it’s commenters as well.

Twittar is only starting to scratch the surface of bringing our Twitter identities to the blogosphere.

Another thing I believe will start happening is the usage of the Twitters API to optimize “Popular Posts” and “Suggested Posts”. These lists are traditionally generated off the number of comments, tags, page views, etc. However, what if you also generated these lists based on the number of retweets it got. Twitter is providing valuable information about how readers enjoy our content and it’s about time we start using that data for functional purposes rather than just looking at it in pretty graphs.

The last thing I believe will start to pick up in ’09′ is the ability for our blogs to Tweet. No I am not talking about Twitter Feed. I am talking about using Twitter’s API to:

• Thank commenters
• Allow users to @reply you from your blog
• Display your most active followers
• Display your retweets
• and the list goes on

Conclusion

Twitter has provided us with more than enough tools to start coming up with fresher ways to engage each other. I think part of moving forward is to talk about the possibilities. Conversation encourages innovation.

Now I want to discuss some of the ways we contribute to a more organic form of learning. Social media provides its own set of E-Learning tools in the form of online communities that, once fully understood, can be a mecca of untapped knowledge. Between blogging, social bookmarking, micro-blogging and social networking we have multiple avenues through which to tap into this wealth of information. Once one learns how to efficiently navigate the virtual scholastic tubes, the possibilities are endless.

Our Learning Tools

First lets look at Twitter. I like to see it as a collection of experts. What they’re experts in is of little matter to me because I am not approaching them directly. All I have to do is bring up a topic and those closest to it will speak up and present their two cents and possibly point me to resources. Another approach is to only follow those who are experts in a topic that I am interested in. Like minded individuals sharing knowledge in real time 24/7.

Now I’m off to my virtual library. Or in the case, a social bookmarking site. I could go check out the most popular section on Digg or head over to see what StumbleUpon recommends for me today. These technologies are evolving to become reliable means of obtaining the information I want …. and fast.

And finally we have Blogs. Be it personal or on a specific topic, the blogospehere is notorious for putting out abundant information across multiple topics in epic proportions. Main stream media has already begun to tap into this emerging resource.

Can’t schools also use this information?

College’s and Universities are starting to tap into this massive resource. More specifically, a group of UMass students were instructed to monitor Twitter traffic concerning the presidential debates. It may still be early in the micro-blogging game to call Twitter a reliable means of obtaining and filtering information but it is truly a great start.

Problems?

There is reason to be weary however. I mean how can we validate any ones expertise online. How do I know your not just feeding me crap. Well I am a firm believer that the crap filters itself out when you have millions of users sorting through this content daily. This is where the means through which you find the blog becomes important.

Social Media is well on its way to becoming one of our main means of communication with the world. The potential is greater than ever for those willing to seek it out. The sky is finally the limit.

- Photo by foundphotoslj

Plurk and Twitter have been great fun as have Identi.ca, Kwippy and Pownce. But there’s a new guy on the block, yes another one, with another funny sounding name. Rejaw .

Once again it is too early to tell how successful this new micro-blogging platform will be. It’s up to the community to decide, which is partly why Twitter is still so popular, it has a large community.

But what does Rejaw have the Twitter and Plurk doesn’t. Let’s take a look at some of ReJaw’s features.

Top selling points:

• Real time chat – This is one of it’s top selling points
• Images and movies – Just like in Plurk
  
• Guests – Guests can comment on shouts without having an account
  

Standard functionality

• Permalinks - Just like in Plurk and Twitter
• Shouts and whispers -  Rejaw maxes out at 1000 chars
  
• API
• Follow favorite users
  

Limited functionality

• Find friends – Can only find friends from facebook and gmail
• Desktop app – Currently only available on Mac but is being extended to PC and iPhone

So what makes ReJaw worth your time?

Well Plurk’s revolutionary commenting system increased communication by making it easy to use. Rejaw takes this same idea and allows unregistered guests to comment on your posts. This brings Micro-Blogging to a new level as anonymity comes into play.

The sky’s the limit.

So what do we have here? A Twitter clone with a commenting system and the ability to easily embed Video and Images. Furthermore, the character limit has been increased to 1000 characters.

Despite it’s few shortcomings there is a bright future for this new platform. It’s only a matter of time before the Rejaw API gives birth to intuitive new applications that will challenge Twitter’s prominence.

Follow me on rejaw

Blogger

Blogger was a great, easy to set up service.

All of my posts were automatically included in Google’s Blog Search as well as it’s organic results. Adding new templates was very easy to do and the XML templates allow a lot of flexibility. I also received a good amount of traffic from people just browsing the Blogger blogs.

WordPress

WordPress is also pretty great. It does require a few extra steps to get started but everything is very well documented.

My favorite part about WordPress is all of the plugins that are available. There were a few problems I ran into with my Blogger blog that were easily solved with my WordPress blog; like displaying code and filtering spam. Another great thing is the WYSIWYG. Blogger’s WYSIWYG was very glitchy for me and I did not like how it formated everything. WordPress also provides you with a pinging service which, once set up, provides greater indexing capabilities than blogger.

So which one is better?

It depends on your level of experience blogging and your knowledge about web technologies. Blogger is easier to use and setup and if you have a GMail account, your already half way there. You can also personalize the URL and it gives very detailed instructions to do this. However, if you have your own web host and domain name I would go with WordPress. It isn’t to hard too set up and in the long run it has a lot more features to play with.

So now the goal of this entry. When it came time to output the data into your common blog format I found that their were some small things that helped my blog get indexed by popular blog directories as well as other assorted social media aggregations.

So ultimately I’m assuming you understand the general format and benefits of a blog. You’ve got your title, author, timestamp, and a post of some sort. Other optional features include keywords, permalinks, comments, and an RSS feed.
Now I want to go into a little more detail about the code side of this and show you where some simple HTML syntax separates the blog from the..um… not-blog.

Rel-tag

First I’ll talk a little about my favorite blogging feature, the ‘rel-tag‘. Rel-tag is basically a keyword that physically sits on your screen as apposed to META keywords which hide in your page’s header. Now when you’re displaying ‘rel-tag’ that relate to a specific post you use the relationship attribute of the anchor tag to define the hypertext as a ‘tag’.

As you can see it it pretty simple to establish a tag. Basically rel-tag is a MicroFormat and what you are doing is declaring that this link is an author-designated keyword for this post. Also note that in the URL of the link I’ve separated the two words with a + sign instead of a space (You could also use %20). You want to try and be sure that your tags relate and are appropriate for your post. Alot of social media aggregators use this information along with specific information in your RSS feed to categorize your post and you can often see your tags displayed on sites such as technorati.com and mybloglog.com.

Permalinks

The second thing I would like to talk about are permalinks which are also often called bookmarks. Permalinks are basically links back to a specific entry that will never change. This makes them ideal for bookmarking which is why it comes as no surprise that the following helps you establish a permalink/bookmark.

As you can see we once again use the relationship tag to define the Permalink. This is not always necessary however Ive found that certain social media sites use the bookmark relationship to determine if this link is a permalink or not.

RSS

Now last but not least there is the RSS feed. I could go on forever about the different formats and everything you can stuff into a solid feed, but i wont. The only thing i want to mention here is how to make your feed available to social media sites (seems to be the theme here). Basically what you do is use a combination of rel=”alternate” and type=”application/rss+xml” to define a META link to an RSS file.

Thats pretty much it. I hope that between the 3 things I’ve showed you and some of the resources ive presented you should have a social media friendly blog thats ready for the masses.