Blogging

In this new age of social media, consolidation has become a very popular tactic to streamline workflow. With so much information to create and so many channels to promote on, we are all looking for ways to automate our tasks and make our work day more efficient.

Adding your blog posts to Facebook is a great way to get more exposure to your content and thus more visitors to your website (and we all want that. Don't we?). Using an ATOM or RSS feed, you can have your Facebook page automatically update whenever you make a new post on your blog or website.

We have done this for several of our clients, but seeing as how Facebook tends to change things quite frequently and their interface is not the most intuitive, I have decided to write down my steps to add an RSS feed to Facebook pages.

Introduction:
Some initial items to consider before getting started.

• You must have a feed for your content. You can learn how to setup feeds for your blog or site here.
• Facebook uses the Notes App to pull in your feed

So lets get started setting up your Feeds on Facebook:

OK, so it is actually 14 (ten just sounds so nice).

Actually, our friends over at SEOmoz have complied a list of tips for link building for personal bloggers. These guys know their stuff and I strongly recommend their SEO tools for anyone seriously considering working in the wonderful world of SEO. This applies to in-house SEO or as an agency or consultant.

On with the list then.

I am going to give all 14 points here, if you would like a more elaborate definition, Rand has done a fine job on his website to clarify and answer most any concern you may have on any of these. As is usual with SEO, this list is informative yet the work can be very labor intensive. Be forewarned... Bloggin aint easy!

Just to make things easier for all of us, we are posting a quick reference to standard ad unit sizes. We are asked quite frequently about this and of course since a picture is worth a thousand words it will be much easier to refer our clients to this than to find a new website to link to each time.

The following standard ad dimendions have been obtained from the IAB.net website.

With the proliferation of bloggers dominating the news media as of late (so much so that we now refer to the term "the blogosphere") there is an interesting shift in how we obtain our news and what we actually consider "news" and journalism. There has been much discussion on the topics of Blogger vs. Journalist but this whole concept has actually shed light on the idea of the credibility of the source. Just because the article was published by, what we may consider a credible source, doesn't mean that the actual writer is a credible source or a well written journalist. Just as much as an independent blogger is not a credible source or well written journalist. We seem to be moving away from our traditional news channels (at least the traditional media channels) and as the technology escalates, we are consuming our news from many more independent sources. Maybe this will shed light on that fact that just because we thought we were getting credible journalism all along, maybe we were not. We had nothing else to compare it to. At least now we can obtain our news by "consensus". If everyone is talking about it... It must be news.

Google's Matt Cutts provides advice for Company Blogs. Matt Cutts is a google software engineer who frequently blogs about many things effecting the many businesses influenced by Google (just about everyone online at this point). Recently he posted Three Tips for Company Blogging on his own blog. While these tips seem to be common sense to many, they are sometimes overlooked and its worth mentioning again. Also bear in mind that although he is speaking to a more corporate audience (as you will see from his first tip), the basic principles apply to small business as well.

1. First he states not to make open (hard) promises about the future. You never know what will happen as a product or service you are intending to roll out comes near. Outside influences can easily delay or even cancel your plans. There is nothing wrong in using terms like "plan to" or "should".

Well almost a week into my phone switch and I am in heaven (as close as I can get to heaven at the Newark airport). Being a devoted Treo fan for years, I was scared of making the change to an iPhone. The browser sealed the deal though. No other mobile device comes close. Not to mention all of the apps and the interface. While it has taken a few days to get used to typing on the screen, I actually feel this is superior to my last Treo 680 (I haven't tried a blackberry to compare). But the HTML rendering of email is much more eye appealing than the plain text of most blackberrys. There is not a mobile device available that is suitable for anything more than microblogging, however I would have never attempted blogging from my treo at all and I have had data access for years. Even if there was a way to do it (other than the wordpress email plugin).