Musings and things that amuse us

This week’s review is of Lani Giesen’s post: A personal blog is art, at Blogging Personal.

Blogging Personal is about personal blogging, a subject many people still consider nothing more than an online diary, and consequently oftentimes scorn.  However, given that Technorati currently tracks in excess of 112 million blogs, many of which are personal, it is time someone addressed the issues and misconceptions associated with personal blogs, and Blogging Personal is doing it beautifully.

The content is well written and thought out, and the blog itself has an obvious and clear goal.  As the blog is still fairly young (launched January 2008) it is impressive; and it already has a decent following.  If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favour and check it out.

I cannot fault the writing but for the occasional typo (spell check woman! ) and the post is so neatly divided into sections that it makes it a pleasure to read.  But I would recommend one thing; more care with the lead (or lede) – the introductory section of the story.

Why is a lead important?

The first paragraph or two should tell the story; who, what, where, when, why, and how.  This is important because if you don’t win the reader in the lead, they go away – you need to give them a reason to continue reading.

More importantly, in this case, where you need to entice more readers, you need to show them, in the lead, what they can expect.  Show, don’t tell, and Lani does this particularly well. 

Much like the term link bait, the idea of a lead is to hook the reader.

Writing the perfect lead

• Does the lead give your readers specific information, or is the language too general and vague?
• Is the lead too long?  Could you include some of the information later on?
• Why is this story different/better/more useful than any other out there?
• Go back and check your lead; don’t settle for “it’s good enough”
• Make every word serve a purpose
• Do you have the necessary information to back up everything you say in the lead?
• Always ask yourself: Would you continue reading?

The only change I would make with Lani’s post is to take the first paragraph and make it the second paragraph – reworded a tad to fit.

I wish you so many good things Lani!  Keep going, you’re doing great!

A Personal Blog is Art: Edited 

A personal blog is Art. And personal blogging is an artform.

Some people might have an immediate negative reaction to that statement: The idea “Art” has a lot of baggage. It might seem elitist, it might seem like hubris, it might even seem daunting, but for any of you struggling to make connections between some of the advice written for bloggers and the work (Yes, work!) you do, I think that you’ll come closer to something you can hold on to by considering yourself an artist. Or, at a minimum, an apprentice artist.

This is my answer to the question I posed: What is a personal blog? and I expect it comes as no surprise.

Reading through all the responses to my question, there were a number of common threads. One of the strongest was how indefinable a personal blog actually is, that it was unique to each individual, to each blog, subjective and without limitation. I agree.

I’d love to hear what anyone else has to say about Blogging Personal, or any ideas on how Lani could make it greater still.

Many thanks to Tricia and Lani for letting me take a look at their blogs; this experiment has been interesting and informative for me, and hopefully for you too!

Photo credit: nruboc

While providing great content is critical if you want to establish a loyal audience, it is only one of a variety of ingredients. Other factors come into play; most importantly, your visitors need to see that you’ve made every effort to accommodate their needs; that you’ve put much thought into their experience on your site.

To create a blog that stands out from the others, use this list of useful WordPress plugins to show your readers that you have made the effort, and you’ll be rewarded with return visitors and growth.

So what do your visitors really want?

Visitors want answers

Visitors turn up at your site through search engines or links. If they don’t find the answer to their question within your post – they’re off. You need to give them every opportunity to find what they are looking for through your site, rather than sending them back to the search engines – or worse – sending them away unhappy with both your site, and the site that directed them to you.

Although these plugins may ultimately send your visitor another site, they are useful because your visitor won’t need to go back to the search engine and start all over again – and they will remember you for trying to make life a little easier for them.

Search Everything

The default search utility in WordPress allows visitors to search your posts only. This may not always be enough; what if you have a resource page that holds the answer to the question posed? You don’t want your visitors to miss that.

Written by Dan Cameron, Search Everything gives your visitors more options in search by allowing them to search pages, attachments, comments, and custom fields.

Sphere Related Content

Sphere mixes content from mainstream media with content from blogs. Although this plugin will ultimately send your visitor to another site, it is useful because it means your visitor doesn’t need to go to the search engines and start all over again. They will remember you for making life a little easier for them.

By putting the widget on your site, your visitors get to see a list of related content from around the Web. This list is divided into two sections, one showing related content from the blogosphere, the other showing related content from mainstream media. Both provide the title, date, and source. The date is an especially nice feature – how often have you searched on something only to be directed to a page that is 3 years old and no longer current?

Note: Sphere can be used on most blogging platforms.

Visitors want an easy way to revisit a post

While many visitors will visit a site and add it to their favorites, more and more people are using online bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Furl, and Diigo to create links to posts they want to return to. And, while many of these folk have added the various buttons to their browser, some are removing them to make space for a larger viewable area on their screen.

Other visitors, who are not comfortable with bookmarking sites, may need a way to easily send themselves the link, or print the page up to keep a hard copy. Your job is to provide every option to your visitor in the most unobtrusive and simple way.

Consider these WordPress plugins to help your visitor refer back to your post:

Share This

Written by Alex King, the Share This plugin lets your visitors mark a post for revisiting by providing a link, at the end of each post, to various bookmarking sites. This plugin also offers your visitors the ability to send, via e-mail, a link to your post.

WP E-mail

Rather than just send a link to the post via e-mail, Lester Chan’s WP E-mail lets you send the entire post or page to yourself, or to a friend. This is particularly useful for less tech/Web inclined of your visitors – almost everyone knows how to use e-mail.

WP Print

Another great plugin by Lester Chan, WP Print displays a nicely formatted, printable version of your post. Once you enable the plugin, it will put a link to the printable page on each post.

This is particularly useful for readers that want to print up a tutorial or how to.

Visitors want to read replies to their comments easily

More people are commenting on the Web than every before, and most of them want a simple and easy way to see whether their comment has been responded to.

Additionally, if they have taken the time to comment, it means that they are interested in the subject matter, and may be interested in what others think about the same topic.

Rather than make them come back to your site regularly to check if there are additional comments, offer them the chance to subscribe to the comments only.

Subscribe to Comments

Subscribe to Comments is a plugin that allows visitors that comment, an opportunity to subscribe to e-mail notifications of subsequent comments. Written by Mark Jaquith, the plugin also allows your visitors to unsubscribe from specific posts, block all notifications, and change their e-mail address.

Visitors don’t like their mistakes broadcast to the world

How many times have you been to a site, submitted a comment, and just as you press the submit button (or while you are rereading your comment), you find a typo, or an incomplete sentence?

Give your readers the opportunity to edit their mistakes before their comment is published; there is no nicer way to show reader appreciation.

Edit comments TX

Michael Woehrer‘s Edit Comments TX plugin gives your visitors a 30 minute (customizable) time frame to edit any comment they leave.

Sexy Comments

Written by Matthew Batchelder, Sexy Comments lets your visitors preview comments, but offers you a whole lot more. It replaces the standard WordPress comments section with a much prettier one, and has additional features that include the option to highlight author comments, and a way to reply to specific comments.

Visitors like to be noticed

Not long ago, I left a comment on a blog I had not visited before. Within the hour, I received an e-mail from the blogger thanking me for visiting and commenting. It was a simple thing, one that I suspected was automated, but it still made me smile.

People like to feel important. They like to be acknowledged. If you don’t have the time to personally send an e-mail to each new commenter, consider Comment Relish.

Comment Relish

Comment Relish is a WordPress plugin developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your site who have never commented before. The message is defined within the plugin’s preferences, and numerous tags have been included that let you select the information for the message easily (e.g. timestamp, author name, comment, etc.). Written by Justin Shattuck.

Visitors like to contact you in a variety of ways

While most sites have a contact page that offers a contact form, e-mail address, telephone number, or physical location, few offer the ability for instant SMS.

Admittedly this is not for everyone, but you just may find that your visitors like to contact you this way. In any case, it is a nice extra to offer your visitors; the option to contact you wherever you are, and whenever they want.

Quick SMS

Quick SMS, written by Martin Fitzpatrick, lets visitors to your site send an instant SMS message to your mobile.

Do you know what people are saying about your company, your product, you, online?

With the power of today’s Internet, and the huge growth in user generated content, your brand can turn up in all nooks and crannies of the Web (forums, social networking sites, blogs, etc.).

When the comments are favorable, all is good. But, what about those irate customers, disenchanted employees, and competitors, who, with a few quick and nasty words, can cause serious problems for your online reputation?

While your first reaction to bad press might be to get angry and send off an e-mail, don’t do it until you’ve calmed down. Emotive letters sometimes end up on the Web too, and this will only fuel the fire.

The best defense is a good offence. Monitor your online reputation, incorporate a few SEO tweaks, and consider beginning a company blog if you don’t have one already.

Monitor your brand

Google Alerts makes it easy for you to stay up to date with what is being said about you online by sending you an e-mail every time your designated keywords appear in Google product.

Set alerts for your name, your company name, your product name; anything that you want to keep track of, then tell Google how often you want an e-mail. Simple.

Although Yahoo and Microsoft have alerts, the alerts are for what they think you should read (CNN, Fox Sports, Stocks, etc.) rather than what you want to read. The best way to see if you are turning up in their results is to type your keywords into the search engines themselves.

If you are tracking this way, the other useful place to check (assuming people are tagging your keywords) is Technorati; currently tracking 112.8 million blogs.

Is your site indexed by search engines?

I’ve talked about what the Googlebot sees when it visits your site in an earlier post, but before it can see your site, you first need to ensure that your site has been indexed. If it hasn’t been indexed, find out why and fix it. This is important because when people search for your brand, you need to be found easily. If you have created a reputable online presence, anyone writing negative remarks about your brand turns up below you in search results – rather than above you.

To find out if Google is indexing your site, go to Site Status

To find out if Yahoo is indexing your site go to Site Explorer

To find out if Live is indexing your site, go to Live type “site:your URL” (e.g. site:blog-well.com )and click search.

To find out if Ask has visited your site, check your server logs. Specifically, you should be looking for the following user-agent string: User-Agent: Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma)

If you are not being indexed by the search engines, the best thing to do is create a sitemap and get links to your site.

How does your site fare in different search products?

Search engines offer users the ability to search through various products such as images, video, blogs, books, news, etc. While most companies are too busy to worry about including their brand in the various product categories, some are realizing the importance of turning up under their keywords/phrases, especially since Google’s Universal Search was launched.

Go ahead, try it out. Go to Google Images and type in your company name and see what happens. Then try search for it under blogs, video, news and books. If your brand is turning up, but is not associated with you, it’s time to put your thinking cap on and come up with ideas on how to get noticed under these products.

Additionally, if you are on the receiving end of negative publicity, you can use these search products to push down some of the bad results by adding and optimizing your own images, video, blogs etc, ensuring your content appears above the bad press.

How to optimize your images from Dosh Dosh

How to optimize your blog from ProBlogger

How to optimize your video information from Google

With news and books however, it’s a little different. For you to turn up under news, you need to be mentioned in the mainstream media; to turn up under books you need to have authored one. Both of these products should not negatively impact your brand; however, they are a great way to promote your brand online. So, if you’ve done something newsworthy, write a press release, if you’ve written a book, let Google Books know about it.

The importance of blogs for business

Blogging is a low cost tool that can pay off in a big way if you do it right. You can use it to promote your company, foster loyalty, get feedback, develop a community, and directly promote your product/service. While most small companies are still hesitant to blog, others are realizing its massive potential.

The other nice thing about blogs is that search engines love them. Because the content is updated more often than on a standard Web site (and search engines love frequently updated content), each post has the potential to appear in search results. This means if someone is attacking your credibility online, you have the ability to quickly push the results down.

Although technology has now given even the most non techie person the opportunity to run their own site, don’t do it just for the sake of getting into search results. Your posts need to be thought out and useful to your customers, and you need to love the subject if you’re going to be writing about it regularly – which – if you want your blog to be successful, you’ll need to do.

If you have found this post useful, please consider subscribing to our feed

Last week, I offered to edit, for readability and SEO purposes, posts that readers felt could be better written.  Today I’ll be looking at a post by Tricia Lawrence, Moving with kids in tow, on her blog Relocating to Silicon Valley.

Next week, I’ll take a look at Blogging Personal, a blog by Lani Giesen, and her post A Personal Blog is Art – stay tuned.

Editorial and SEO Review for Relocating to Silicon Valley: Moving with kids in tow

Overall, Tricia writes well, breaks up her paragraphs, and is clear so she really needs very little help in terms of writing, but I would like to offer a few lessons in the art of linking.  You can read my rewrite of Tricia’s article at the end of this post.

Linking strategy

The first thing I noticed is Tricia’s linking strategy.  She has three external links, and I’ll discuss each one, but first, I’d like to talk about linking in general.

The Web is made up of links.  Links are great to get you noticed (via pings and trackbacks) by other bloggers; they are great for visitors that need further information, and search engines use them to determine how useful a post is.  When you link to another site, the site owner will notice you, and if you write well and offer quality content, that site owner just may return the favor and link to you when the opportunity arises.  If you have links going out to related content, search engines deem it a useful resource, and link to it.  So link much, but link well; make sure your links are useful for your readers.

To link well, I’ll examine the three links Tricia has used in her article:

Blog: Tricia has used the word blog as her anchor text to a post titled: Are there optimal ages for a move or relocation.  The search engines see “blog” and it means nothing as there are millions of blogs out there.  A better way to link to the post is to use the title of the post; it serves two purposes:

• It names the article for Tricia’s visitors, so they don’t need to hover over the link to see whether it would be useful to them.
• The text lets the search engines associate the words in her heading “Moving with kids in tow” with “Are there optimal ages for a move or relocation” and find a commonality.  If it is related, it is good for SEO.

Single Parent’s site: Again, the anchor text shows a link to someone’s single parent’s site, rather than the name of the site which is “Single Parents Blog” on the “Family” network; both of these sites can be linked to.  This is more about good etiquette, and good habits.

Specializes in relocation: Tricia has used this text to link to her business, California Concierges.  While it is good business sense to link to your own site, it is far better to consistently use the same anchor text because over time, search engines will associate specific keywords with specific sites and send other searchers there too.  Tricia ends that paragraph with the words “…didn’t want to move to Silicon Valley.”  It would be better to link the text “…move to Silicon Valley” to the California Concierges home page; better still to use the exact keywords she wants California Concierges to be found under, which I believe are “Relocating to Silicon Valley,” it just means tweaking the copy a bit.

Internal linking

There is very little internal linking to Relocating to Silicon Valley itself.  A long post, such as this (540 words), offers ample opportunity to link back to previously written articles on the blog. This is important as it will direct new readers to previous articles that they may not have seen on a blog, it is also significant as it is noticed by the search engines.

Sub Headings (H1, H2, H3)

When a post is longer than 200 – 300 words, it is useful to divide it into sub headings.  Not only does it benefit the reader who, at a glance, can see what the article is about, it is also good SEO strategy.  The major search engines pay attention to these sub headings; if you think it is important to point something out, search engines will think it is important to point it out too.  Of course, you can go too far and have too many sub headings, but when used properly, they certainly help with site promotion.

Finally, the phrase “in my opinion” seems to pop up a few times too many.  It’s your blog, so it’s a given that it is your opinion.  You are a specialist in this field, don’t diminish your authority!  Speak up woman!

I would love reader feedback, let me know if you have any other suggestions for Tricia.

Edited: Moving with Kids in Tow

I just read a post:  Are there optimal ages for a move or relocation? on the Single Parents Blog of the Families network, about when, if ever, is the best time to relocate kids to a new home. The writer correctly stated that every kid is different as far as readjusting is concerned, but sometimes it can get harder as they move into their teens and have established strong roots of friendship and familiarity.

Many of us have moved with kids in tow and have encountered all types of problems – new schools, making new friendships, finding new interests, or just being plain sullen and miserable at having left their friends behind and blaming it all on Mom and Dad.

What to think about when moving with kids

For elementary and middle schoolers, try not to move them just after the summer holidays have started. Two reasons:

1. You will be faced with some long weeks of entertaining kids who have not made any friends yet, as they haven’t been able to attend the local school.

2. They will start the fall semester along with every other new kid and no one will be making any special effort to make them feel at home. If they start school soon after the beginning of the school year they become the “new kids” and can be made special and probably be buddied up with someone by the teacher.

So the best option would be to move them into their new school a few weeks before the end of the school year so they have time to make some new friends with whom they can spend more time in the summer.

Or if that timing doesn’t work for your new job, don’t worry about possibly starting the new term a little late. The benefits of being made “special” and looked after by the other students outweigh the disadvantages of arriving a little late into the school year and having to catch up.

And, the other thought is, as someone who specializes in relocation, I encourage every parent relocating with kids to make sure that they find out where and how they can continue to participate in their sports or pursue their interests. We have totally turned several families around whose kids were adamant relocating to Silicon Valley was a horrid idea.

An example from California Concierges

One I remember in particular was a family with two boys, not at all happy about leaving their friends behind in North Carolina. They came over for a visit before making the final decision. The wife, too, was reluctant but we found out that she loved sailing, so a trip to Santa Cruz won her over; the teenage boy was mad about lacrosse, so we found and introduced him to one of the few lacrosse coaches around at that time (this was several years ago) and his younger brother was a crazy skateboarder so a tour of the local skateparks convinced him this was the place to be!

So get to know someone in your new area, or better still, a relocation expert who can find the answers to your kids’ questions; someone that will reassure them that life does go on after the big move.

If you’re on the move to Silicon Valley, please feel free to leave question in the comments below or send me an e-mail.

Image: AODdesign

Yes it can be done.

Forget what you have read in the forums (Why can’t I redirect my blog? and Can I redirect my blog?) and don’t bother trying to get your head around the too technical product announcement (New Feature: Domains).

We have written a step by step guide on how to redirect your established WordPress.com blog to your own self-hosted blog on your own domain – Redirecting a WordPress.com Blog (PDF 739 KB).

Why do this?

We just like WordPress – that’s all.

Update: Based on the excellent comments, we have updated the original document to include a section on setting the permalink style to that used by WordPress.com – thank you everyone for helping us make this better.