Blog production toolkit: quick summary of tools
In the Blog Production Toolkit Series, we’ve gone into some detail on the why’s and wherefore’s of using various tools to enhance our blogging productivity. In the final post of the series, I’ll simply round up all the tools we’ve mentioned so you have them in a single handy list. Of coure, these are just the tools that make MY blogging more productive and efficient – if you have other favorites, be sure to mention them in the comments!
Blog Architecture and Mechanics
WordPress software – self-hosted version (www.wordpress.org)
Domain Registration and website hosting services (www.bluegravity.com)
FTP software for transferring files to your webhost (WS-FTP by Ipswitch)
Essential WordPress Plugins
Akismet – fights comment spam
FeedSmith – RSS feed management
SubscribeRemind – Builds your subscriber list
All-In-One SEO Pack – optimizes content for search engines
Sociable – Reminds readers to share
WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Upgrades your software quickly
WP-DB-Backup – manages database backups
Writing Tools
MS Works – free Windows word processor
Windows Notepad – free Windows text editor
WordPress Visual Editor – built into WordPress
Photo/Image editing Tools
Picnik.com – free web-based photo and image editing
Corel Paint Shop Pro – cheaper, leaner version of Adobe Photoshop
Blog production toolkit: writing and image editing tools
So far in the Blog Production Toolkit series we’ve looked at the basic technical tools you need to run self-hosted WordPress, and we’ve studied my list of must-have WordPress plugins for increased blog functionality.
Now let’s turn to the creative side of things. These tools help you manage your writing and images more efficiently so updating the blog doesn’t become a chore.
Posts and Pages – the Writing
WordPress Visual Editor – of course, the WordPress software is centered around a console where you can write and edit your individual posts and pages, upload photos or graphics from your computer, and click to publish. For quick posts, this is the one and only stop you need.
I don’t do a lot of “quick posts,” though, so I have a three-step process that I call “write-strip-post.”
Write – I use the built-in free word-processing software that comes with Windows, called MS Works, to compose my posts. That’s primarily because for me, the writing is still the most important part of the process and I want to be able to focus on it and give each post the attention it deserves. Personally, I can’t do that with all of WordPress’s bells and whistles surrounding my composition area.
Strip – I then copy and paste my finished post into Windows’s free text editor, Notepad, to strip out any formatting that MS Works may have added.
Post – I then copy and paste the clean text from Notepad into the composition window in WordPress. I add any necessary formatting and effects such as bullet points or italics, add an image (or 2 or 6, depending), check my tags and assign a category, preview, and click the Publish button all in WordPress. This step usually takes me about two minutes, unless the preview reveals some necessary editing.
Photos and Graphics – the Imagery
No question that photos and graphics enhance all but the shortest posts – they can provide a visual representation of the concepts you’re writing about, they can help draw the reader in to actually read the post, and they can serve simply as a way to break up a sea of words in a longer post.
Most likely, you’ll need to crop and possibly re-size your images before uploading them into WordPress. I use two tools for this:
Picnik.com – a free web-based photo editing system that performs simple functions quickly and easily without installing software.
Corel Paint Shop Pro – Yes, Adobe Photoshop’s the industry standard. But I’ve been using PSP since I first started building sites in 1996 – it’s cheaper, and later versions rival the more expensive products in terms of features. In fact, I still run an older version of this program because it’s lean and simple.
Once a photo is cropped and sized appropriately and saved to your computer, you can upload it directly into your post using WordPress’s image-loading feature. Personally, I use my FTP software to upload the image into my image directory, then use WordPress’s “add image from URL” feature.
Should your small business blog?
From SmallBizTrends.com - creating and maintaining a quality blog on your small business’s website can increase your site traffic by 55 percent, improve your search engine rankings, and increase your number of incoming links.
I would add that by using Twitter and a Facebook Fan Page to provide resources to your friends and followers, and to promote your blog, you’re harnessing the power of social media to help achieve business goals.
Blog production toolkit: essential WordPress plugins
One of the neat things about WordPress is that there’s a whole slew of programmers out there writing “improvements” for it in the form of plug-ins. A plugin is a bit of stand-alone code that adds a new or enhanced function to your WordPress blog. Plugins might be used to control spam comments, remind visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, or even pull in headlines from the feed of another website. Over the past couple of years I’ve added and removed plenty of WordPress plugins, and have found the following to be the most useful and trouble-free:
Akismet – this is spam-comment fighting plugin and it comes with the WordPress software.
FeedSmith – runs the RSS feed from the blog through Google’s FeedBurner service, which allows you to track your number of feed subscribers and otherwise maximize the power of your feed.
SubscribeRemind – Reminds readers to subscribe to your blog’s RSS Feed.
All-In-One SEO Pack – allows you to optimize your blog’s posts and pages for exposure in the search engines.
Sociable – Reminds readers to share your content with favorite ‘social’ sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Technorati.
WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Whenever a new version of WordPress comes out, WPAU helps you update in a flash. (I recently upgraded four blogs to the latest version of WordPress in under 10 minutes, with no glitches.)
WP-DB-Backup – Lets you schedule backups of your WordPress Database at regular intervals.
Each of these plugins is free – you simply download the code, then upload it into your wp-contents/plugin folder, and activate it in the WP dashboard.
Blog production toolkit: self-hosting with WordPress
It’s no secret that I love the WordPress blogging platform. I use it on all four of my personal blogs, and I use it as the sole platform for my business website. One of the things I like about WordPress is that there is a large and vibrant community of developers who support it – not only the folks who work on WP itself, but thousands of others who write plugins and create design themes. There are entire excellent blogs devoted to WordPress and its features. There is no shortage of help if a problem arises.
I’ve said before that there are times when a free-hosted blog is just what you need. For my present situation, however, I use what’s called “self-hosted WordPress.” What’s the difference?
A free-hosted blog is one where your blog sits on a server owned and operated by the company that makes the software. The URL of the blog will look something like this: http://nameofyourblog.wordpress.com. WordPress doesn’t charge you anything to use their software, or to store and back up your site. The range of site design templates is somewhat limited for free-hosted WP blogs.
A self-hosted blog is where you go out and find a web hosting company, install the blogging software on their server (and likely pay them a fee to do so), and manage the site yourself. There are many more design templates available for free-hosted WP blogs – in fact, you can write your own or edit an existing one if you’re so inclined.
Of course, self-hosting my own blogs means I’m responsible for updating the software when notifications come out, for backing up my sites on a regular basis, and for paying my web host each month to keep the lights turned on. (Fortunately there are tools that automate almost all of these tasks, but that’s another post!)
In case you’re considering a switch to self-hosted WordPress, I thought it might be useful to share my personal blog production toolbox. Here are the basics for self-hosting:
- WordPress software, self-hosted version
- Domain registration and Website hosting services through Blue Gravity.com
- WS-FTP software from Ipswitch, for transferring files from my computer to the webhost
In future posts I’ll share other tools that enhance my blogging productivity. Those mentioned above are the bare minimum needed to self-host WordPress.
You can't cook if you don't turn up the heat
They say a watched pot never boils, but of course that isn’t true. As long as the water reaches the right temperature, it’s going to boil whether you’re watching it or not.
A blog is kind of like that pot – you put it out there and turn up the heat, and wait for it to boil. Unfortunately, when I left the blog for so many months without new content, I essentially turned off the heat. When I came back to it today, I expected to find cold water - in the form of readership that had peaked in May and then plummeted. It’s interesting that that isn’t what happened.
Instead, I found that the number of site visitors peaked in June – a full month after the last post – and has only been declining slowly since then.
The number of feed subscribers has remained fairly steady. In fact, it reached a high mark on July 14… dipped and then hit the same high mark again on July 27… dipped again and then exceeded that mark, setting a new one, on August 5 – four months and a day since the most recent post was added.
What does that mean?
First, the number of site visitors reflects the fact that by not updating the blog I am indeed losing steam in the search engines, if perhaps more slowly than I expected. Posts that might have ranked well in their first few weeks are now pages down the list, because newer posts by other people who do regularly update their blogs have come along. Lesson: Frequent updates keep the search engines interested.
Second, if readers find something they like, they’ll subscribe to your feed – expecting you’ll deliver more gems as time goes on. The subscribers I have in August may not be the same ones I had in May, but people are still willing to give me a chance to inform based on the quality of something they’ve read. The ones who’ve already unsubscribed, well I let those folks down – they saw nothing more of value coming from me, and left. I don’t blame them. The newer ones, they are still hopeful that they’ll be rewarded. Lesson: people who use RSS feed readers are optimistic.
Third, and finally, it means the concept of the long tail is alive and well on the web. You can publish something to your blog in May and still have readers finding it on the web four months later, even though you’ve added nothing further to the blog in all that time. Lesson: Your words and your ideas remain, even if you have left the building.
I won’t insult you by claiming that the silence around here was some sort of grand experiment in blog traffic analysis. It wasn’t – it was a mistake, and I’m grateful to still have the readers I have.
I’m also ready to turn up the heat. Let’s get this sucker boiling.
When a free-hosted blog is the right choice
Conventional blogging wisdom says that self-hosted blogs – those that are located at their own domain such as www.birdtech.net – are far better than their free-hosted counterparts such as Best of Chamber Management. Why? Most of the reasons center around the notions of professionalism and permanency – having a domain name looks more professional and suggests that with something invested in a blog you are less likely to abandon it.
The truth is, there are circumstances where a free-hosted blog is exactly the right choice. Here are a few of them:
- You are just starting out, and don’t want to invest time and learning into self-hosting until you know you are sticking with blogging.
- You’ve been blogging for awhile, but are not the least bit technical and don’t want to learn about FTP programs or editing blog themes in PHP.
- A free-host is where your readers gather. A blog can exist happily (and solely) on MySpace if that’s where the audience is.
- You are the type of person who does something precisely because conventional wisdom says something else. I know of free-hosted blogs that have been around for years and show no signs of impending abandonment.
There may be other reasons, too, that speak to your own invidivual situation. A couple reasons I’ve chosen free-hosted blogs, apart from several of the above?
- I’m cheap. The hosting account I do have allows me to host five domains (individual websites) for $10 per month. There was a day when I wanted to add a sixth blog, but didn’t want to spring for the extra hosting because the sixth blog was just a “placeholder” for some links and other detritus I wanted to keep.
- I longed for simpler days. I went through a period where I seemed to be reading a lot of free-hosted blogs, and there was certainly nothing lacking or less valuable about the content just because they were free-hosted. I started a free-hosted blog during that time just because I wanted to see if the free-hosted version of my blogging software was simpler than the self-hosted version.
The thing to remember is, even if you’re brand new to blogging, you know best what your needs and intentions are with your blog. Consider your unique situation before making a decision about where and how to host.
Five Easy, Free Ways to Reward Your Favorite Blogs
Editor’s note: Although this post is really aimed at Blog readers, bloggers should consider sharing it wherever their readers congregate to help them understand that their participation in the blog is crucial to its success.
You might not have 20 bucks to spend on the latest e-book from your favorite hard-working, always-helpful-or-interesting, frequently-posting blogger – or even five bucks to put in their virtual “tip jar.” But if you’d still like to do something tangible that rewards them for providing you with consistently good content, here are a few “old-school” ideas they’ll really appreciate.
1. Comment on their posts. Whether or not you’ve commented on their blog before, do it today and often. Bloggers want interactivity on their blogs – it’s one of the main reasons they’re blogging, to engage readers in conversation. But don’t just type “Nice post” and call it a comment. Write one or two well-thought-out sentences that show why it was a “nice post,” what you got out of it, or that share a story from your own experience that illustrates the same (or opposite) theme expressed in the post. Do this regularly, and feel free to link back to your own blog (if you have one) in the comment submission form.
2. Digg or Stumble their post. Join one of the popular page-sharing websites and share the best work of your favorite blogger. Bloggers seek to build an audience for their blogs, and having one of their pages recommended by a third party (you!) is like the difference between a business telling you how great they are vs. a satisfied customer giving a spontaneous testimonial.
3. Introduce them to your Facebook community. Use the “notes” feature, or the “links” tab within your status update to share a link to a favorite post and give a brief introduction/review to your FB friends. You’re not only helping the blogger build their audience, you’re also giving your FB friends a glimpse into who you are, what you like to read, what you find interesting. This strategy has the added benefit of helping you become a resource for your friends, providing them with interesting, informative links.
4. Tweet their link to your Twitter followers, for the same reasons you shared them on Facebook. Bloggers dream about getting that endless “retweet,” but it’ll never happen unless somebody (preferably that third party – you!) gets it started.
5. Share them on your own blog. Expand on, agree or disagree with, or relate to your own life one of the points from their recent “nice post,” and post your thoughts as an item on your own blog with a link back to their post. Come back to their blog and leave a comment on their post, letting them know about your follow-up. You might also add them to your published blogroll.
Now it’s your turn: what other no-cost methods do you use for rewarding the blogs you love to read?
Image seen at MGITSolutions.com blog
How to find relevant blog posts to link out to
I’ve talked a little before about the importance of linking out to other blogs as often as possible. But, how on earth does one find relevant posts to link to? Since my goal is to become a resource for my readers, I always want to steer them to quality blogs that might improve their blogging or some other aspect of their lives. It’s important to me, therefore, to find quality links worthy of receiving my link.
The first way to find relevant links is to search the blogs you currently subscribe to in your niche. Visit the blog’s main page and look for a search this site feature. Type in a few key words or a whole phrase, click Search, and see what you find. This can be a good way to find a quick worthy link, or it can also be a good fall-back strategy for when you can’t find anything else.
To find other quality blogs to which you can link out, just try the Google Blog Search feature. By visiting Google.com, and under the “More” link clicking “Blogs” before you do your search, you’ll end up searching Google’s exhaustive blog directory for any phrase you wish. I use this strategy all the time.
For example, if I want to write a post about updating the “About page” on your blog, I can head over to the Google Blog Search and search for a phrase like improve about page. (Notice I leave words like “the” or “your” out of my search, as including them could limit my results.) I click to search, then can review the results of recent blog posts on this topic. A quick perusal of not only the relevant post but also of the rest of the website tells me if it’s a blog worth linking to (and not just a link-bait or “scraper” blog), and voila - I’ve got a blogger to link out to, a new resource to share with readers, and probably a new blog to add to my own RSS Feed Reader.
Finally, it’s important to note that you don’t always have to link out to other blogs in your own niche. If you come upon a post from a blog in a completely different niche that you think would be valuable to your readers, by all means link to it!
And, if you don’t find a link immediately that you want to use, go ahead and publish without it. If you do find a great link in the future, you can always update the post later to include the new-found link.
Tell a story: how to add depth to your blog posts
When I was blogging about small business marketing, one of my favorite ways to add depth and value to my instructional posts was to tell a story and then relate it back to marketing principles in some way. Although that blog no longer exists, here’s an example from one of the posts:
I was making the point that a business owner shouldn’t hurry through the steps of planning a marketing effort, and related this concept to my efforts at home to grow marigolds from bedding plants vs. sowing directly from seeds. I told the story this way:
I struggled for a long time to get marigolds to grow in my garden. They should have been easy: they are not a picky plant, and they bloom all season long. But for sixteen years, I spent untold dollars on lovely little bedding plants that simply refused to grow.
Then one year, I received a solicitation from my Alumni Association which included a packet of marigold seeds. Long about the end of May, I threw these seeds rather haphazardly into a sunny spot - mostly as an after thought, because I didn’t want them to go to waste.
What happened was that the seeds took root and flourished where no marigolds had done so before.
The anecdote is only part of the overall post, of course. The trick is to tie the story back into the general topic of the blog, which was small business marketing. I wrapped it up this way:
What’s this got to do with marketing? Simple: it’s the difference between throwing money and time at something in anticipation of instant results, versus taking time to work through the natural cycle of things and find value in the process as much as the result.
(It) seems likely that if you make the choice to do things well, completely, and right, you’ll flourish in a way you never have before.
Here’s why this is valuable:
Anecdotes help personalize the blog, making the reader feel that they are connecting with a person rather than a faceless “teacher entity.”
Anecdotes help you make your point without being preachy. Use a story to illustrate your point, and the post becomes more about a lesson you learned and are sharing, rather than a lesson you are trying to teach.
Fiction writers are admonished to “show, don’t tell.” By sharing an anecdote that makes your point, you’re showing readers why something is true rather than just asking them to take your word for it.
Story-telling fosters the kind of lively back-and-forth exchange that makes for great conversation.
A relevant story not only illustrates your point but also illustrates the universality of the problem being addressed.
Each of these benefits is bound makes readers a little more likely to interact with you, to share their own experiences via your comment section, and to contribute to the greater conversation around your central theme.
photo from the Flickr stream of Adwriter.
