Make your blog posts dynamic, thought provoking, and unforgettable.

When it comes right down to it, there isn’t a lot of difference between speaking and writing. One uses the voice, the other uses written words. It boils down to basic communication.

Whether you speak in public or not, the same strategies can be applied to the written word in your blog.

One key point to blogging (and public speaking) is to maximize the audience’s attention and retain their attention.

Tips from the realm of public speaking that you can apply to writing and getting your message across.

1. Establish a pattern- In blogging, this means to have a schedule for updating your blog. People are creatures of habit. They like patterns.

Use associations in your writing. People have better memory retention if they can associate what you’re saying (or writing) to something else.

2. KISS- This is an acronym meaning, “Keep it Simple, Stupid” or “Keep it Simple, Silly.” This isn’t saying you can’t use technical language, just make sure your readers understand it. Clarify and reinforce the information.

3. Add variety- Break out of the shell once in awhile and have fun. Entertain your audience.

4. Motivate your audience- The material you’re presenting to them must be important or they wouldn’t be reading it. If it’s not important to every reader, then give them reasons why it should be important to them.

5. Use a strong opening- A reader usually decides if they want to read the material by the end of the first sentence. You’ve grabbed their attention with the headline or title–keep their attention with a killer intro.

6. Use vivid words and descriptions- If it’s possible with the material you’re presenting, bring the reader’s senses into play. Give them something more than words on the screen. Help them visualize it, feel it, smell it–whatever sense you can invoke with the reader.

7. End with a firm statement- Leave the readers with a clear message. Make sure that message is stated again in the end to reinforce its importance.

Open strong. Finish strong. Have a good time and give great information in between.

Image courtesy: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2176/2537006017_1bbf1ce65a.jpg

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Public Speaking Tips to Improve Your Blog


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Do you use Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, FFFFound, Picasa, YouTube and/or Vimeo? Well Some Lemonade is a new service that puts all of these sites together to make a “sexy” web image and video viewer. It does this by pulling out all of the posts that contain image and video links. Best of all, there’s no signing up required because you use your Twitter account to login (via Twitter OAuth). From there you can then connect your Tumblr account.

The default view is a stream of all posts from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, FFFFound, Picasa, YouTube and Vimeo. You can then “filter your lemons” to show just one service. Since you only connect your Twitter and Tumblr account, the media from the other services are actually taken from those 2 accounts. For each item on your stream you can share it on Twitter or Tumblr, “love it” or retweet it. You’ll also see who posted the item and can view that person’s stream by clicking on their name.

Want to “share some lemonade with your friends”? That’s possible too. Clicking on the pencil icon in the navigation (pictured above) will let you share an image with optional text on Twitter or Tumblr. At this time, it doesn’t appear that you can share on both at the same time. Media is shared by either uploading it from your computer or via a direct web link. Wondering what happens to all the posts you “love”? They can be seen by clicking on the heart in the navigation (pictured above).

The search feature is also nice because it lets you search Twitter through all of the integrated site for any keyword. Also, if you have some searches saved on Twitter, those will show up in a drop down when you hover over the search icon. This makes it really easy to keep up with your saved search terms.

If your’e a fan of FFFFound! you’ll definitely like that integration as well. FFFFound! is an image bookmarking service that is great for sharing pictures across the web. Clicking on the FFFF icon will let you see the latest submissions to the site.

The interface for the site is very simple yet eye catching. It’s not only easy to use but it’s also just as easy to share. So, whenever you’re needing a break, why not have “some lemonade” and check out the latest images and videos shared by your social media friends.

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Enjoy Some Lemonade While Browsing Images and Videos


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

It’s a situation nearly every blogger has faced. You come up with a great idea for a new post, perhaps while writing a different one, and you rush to jot it down. However, inevitably, you lose the paper or toss the note in the trash on accident, only to lose the idea forever.

Others, myself included, have resulted to hammering out a quick post with just the title and marking that as an idea with a promise to come back to it later. However, as newer posts get dumped on top of it the idea gets bumped down the page until the only way to see it is to check the “drafts” folder.

What WordPress needs is a way to keep track of post ideas separate from actual posts. Fortunately, Matt Hobbs has a great plugin to help you keep track of your post ideas so you don’t forget a thing. Called Post Ideas+, it is built on a previous plugin, simply called Post Ideas, by Aaron Robbins, who stopped work on the plugin in 2008.

The plugin may not be the most feature-rich but it is certainly one of the most useful I have encountered and it is one that I am using proudly on my blogs to help me keep track of what I’m writing about next.

The Basics

Post Idea+ installs like any other WordPress plugin. You can either download and install it from the backend or do it manually from the plugin repository.

Once you have it set up and activated, it creates two widgets for your dashboard. The first is a list of your existing post ideas, entitled “Latest Post Ideas”, and the second is simply a means to add a new one.

When you create a new post idea, the plugin allows you to track five different pieces of information including:

1. Title: The proposed title of the post.
2. Description: A brief synopsis of what the post is about.
3. Tags: A list of tags for the post.
4. Links: Any URLs you may need to remember to write the new post.
5. Priority: A 1-99 score on how important the post is, used for sorting.

All you have to do is, when you think of a good idea for a post, simply fill in the form on the dashboard and then hit save. The idea will go into the list, which can be sorted based on whatever criteria you choose (priority is the default) and you will be able to view the list in your dashboard any time you log in.

From the dashboard, you can either “Write” the post, which deletes the post idea from the list and opens up a new post with the title prepopulated, or you can delete/edit the idea. Also, from the tools menu, you can alter how the list is sorted and the number of items displayed.

All in all, the system is simple, elegant and efficient, it is nearly the perfect way to keep track of your post ideas, keeping them close to where you’re going to actually be working on them. That being said though, there are a few minor kinks I would like to see worked out.

Some Things to Watch

As great as the plugin is, there are a few hiccups that you may want to watch out for when using it.

For one, though the plugin pre-populates the title of the post when you write a post idea, it doesn’t seem to carry over the other information. The tags are not put in as tags, and the other elements, including the links and description, disappear. This can be very frustrating if you forget to open the links you were saving before hitting the “Write” link.

Also, when you’re using the widgets on the dashboard, every action takes you to the plugin’s page under tools. This breaks the workflow a bit but is a relatively minor hassle. Also, this one may not be possible to fix given the nature of WordPress widgets.

Finally, this plugin is currently not for sites with multiple authors. Though it will work and authors can see the admin’s post ideas, there is little control or correspondence about how these ideas work with multiple authors. As such, it may be best to hold off until a later version addresses this.

Bottom Line

Still, despite these hiccups, it’s clear that Post Ideas+ is a must-have plugin for anyone wanting to keep track of their story ideas. It is simple to use, fast to install and virtually headache free. Future versions can easily fix most of these issues, making it a near-perfect plugin for the purpose.

Even now it is more than worthwhile because, even though we say ideas a dime a dozen, the truth is that we can not afford to forget them.

Ideas may not be worth anything, but with work and time, they can be crafted into something that is very valuable. That alone makes them worth protecting and nurturing.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

Post Idea+ Plugin: Simple Idea Tracking


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Michael Martine has started an open discussion on his blog: what do you wish you’d known earlier? Since it’s always good to see where you are and what you’ve learned, I thought I’d respond here.

Blog hosting

One of the first things I wish I’d known was the value of self-hosting your blog. I think free blogs are a great way to find out if you like blogging, but then you should host your own blog as soon as you can. That’s because you have slightly more control over what happens to your blog, both in terms of design and actual presence (well, most of the time, anyway). One of the first sites where I blogged had tremendous problems and eventually disappeared, leaving me to locate posts any way I could so I could rebuild. Which brings me to my second lesson …

Backup

You can’t have too many backups. Having had to rebuild my blog on more than one occasion (once because of a hosting snafu), I learned to backup in a number of ways. I backup online, to a portable hard drive, by email and also subscribe to my own feed by email. And to make sure I never lose anything, I also retain a text copy of all the posts I write. Redundant? Maybe, but I won’t ever have to tear my hair out if my blog suddenly goes belly-up.

Analytics

When I first started blogging, I couldn’t see the point of analytics – after all, I wasn’t getting enough traffic to be worth analyzing. However, that was short-sighted, as analytics helps you to know who’s visiting what on your blog and what they do next. This is valuable – or invaluable – information. These days I use analytics to help me create blog posts that readers will be interested in so it’s extremely valuable indeed. Checking the stats has also helped me with …

Traffic

… which always seems like the holy grail for the new blogger. In my experience, sites that bring you traffic that doesn’t stay are often a waste of time.  In my early days of blogging, I experimented with traffic exchange and traffic boosting sites, but they didn’t do much for me (at the time blogging and tech were the ‘hot’ niches, as well as assorted medical complaints) and just wasted my time. I learned that you have to build traffic by creating good content and promoting it in the places where your audience is.

Content creation

What I really wish I’d thought about earlier – and it’s still something I tend to procrastinate on – is how to create information products from blog content. I’ve written thousands of posts but have lagged on repackaging them, with only a couple of ebooks to show for years of blogging. That’s not really good enough, as there are all kinds of tools you can use. I admire the people who create a series of posts which they turn into an ebook and workbook or a series of videos – that’s something I plan to do more of.

Now, it’s over to you. Answer here, or head over to Michael’s discussion thread – what do you wish you’d known earlier?

(Photo credit)

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

Blogging – Five Things I Wish I’d Known Earlier


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Podcasts are everywhere these days. They allow people to get information while being portable. Maybe you run a website that could benefit from podcasts but you feel your voice isn’t up to the challenge or you suffer from vocal anxiety.

We all talk with ease–it’s second nature. But as soon as you see the record light come on, your vocal cords tighten up and you become painfully aware that you don’t always pronounce words correctly. This is common and it’s natural for most people. For others, they just take to it naturally and run with it.

You could hire someone to do your podcasts for you, but that can get expensive. The better solution is to just train your own voice so you sound natural and relaxed and work on techniques to help overcome anxiety.

Dealing with Nervousness

Most of us hate to be put on the spot. We tense up, get butterflies and dread can take over. Learning to accept and work through those nervous jitters is more affective than trying to just get over it. It’s going to happen–especially the first few times you have to speak. Learn to use it to your advantage.

Having nervous energy can actually lead to you being more creative and giving a better performance. The problem arises when you allow the nervousness to take over and cause panic.

How do you control nervousness?

You learn to control the body and mind. Not always an easy task but it can be mastered sufficiently enough to allow you to be a dynamic speaker.

Learn to sustain a calm body with an alert mind

Controlling the breath will help you keep your mind alert while calming the body. The body responds to changes in respiration. If you’re nervous and upset and breathing erratically, the body will respond with sweating and tension. Its part of the body’s defense mechanism in the fight or flight response.

Learning to breathe properly and calming yourself with the breath will help a great deal. There’s a plethora of information on the Internet to learn breathing techniques, meditation, relaxation and self hypnosis. Search for programs that you’re comfortable with and give them a try.

Controlling the mind can be a bit more tricky. We all have fears, especially when it comes to speaking. We’re afraid we may pronounce words wrong, leave out key information, speak with a monotone voice instead of our natural voice–and we’re afraid people will notice these things.

The best way to overcome those fears is to practice speaking. Record yourself so you know exactly what areas you need to work on. Listen to some self hypnosis tapes that are aimed at fear of public speaking.

Vocal training is also a great way to learn how to control the vocal cords and how to relax them. Again, there are many programs available online to choose from.

You may not master these things overnight, but taking steps to overcome your fears and improve your speaking voice can open many doors for you and your website. Give it a try.

Image courtesy: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/j893nMv-eZSOsng49ITOtA

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

Overcoming Verbal Performance Anxiety


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

You hear all kinds of excuses to why someone wont’ get into blogging. Some people say that they have nothing interesting to say. Others say that they don’t have the time. Others still say that they are intimidated by the terminology and technology.

Let’s face it. Most of us aren’t coding experts and, for some, even the “simple” installation of WordPress can be quite daunting. Thankfully, there are services out there than can streamline the process, making blogging accessible to even the newbiest of newbies.

One such service is the WordPress web hosting offered by HostGator. In addition to offering a number of different hosting plans, HostGator also allows for near one-click installation of WordPress.

Easy and Affordable Web Hosting

I haven’t used HostGator’s services myself, but I’ve heard good things about their reliability and price.

For the beginning blogger, the smallest hosting plans (which start at $4.95 a month) are probably a good place to start. These allow for plenty of storage space and plenty of bandwidth. Heavier users can look into virtual private servers (VPS) and dedicated servers when the time comes.

What About WordPress?

The main hosting plan offered by HostGator that caters to the WordPress market starts at $7.95 a month. With this price, you are provided with the ability to host unlimited domains, have unlimited disk space, and set up unlimited MySQL databases.

I’m always a little apprehensive about hosts who claim to provide you with unlimited disk space and bandwidth, since that can never be completely true. That said, for the purposes of the average starting blogger, it doesn’t matter.

WordPress Installations Made Easy

So, what’s all this talk about an easy one-click installation of WordPress? Under normal circumstances, you would have to manually create your own database, edit the appropriate files in a text editor, and upload the WordPress directories via FTP to your web server.

The process is reasonably straightforward for people who are already savvy to these types of technologies and standards, but they can be intimidating to just about everyone else. To help ease the process, HostGator offers Fantastico-based installations.

When you access your HostGator account via cPanel, you will see an icon designated as Fantastico De Luxe. Clicking on this reveals the page shown above. Rather than going through the manual process of setting up databases and uploading files, Fantastico does the work automatically for you.

This interface is not unique to HostGator — several other hosts offer Fantastico — but it is a feature that you’ll want to look for if you want an easy way to get into “professional” blogging with WordPress.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

HostGator and Fantastico Make WordPress Easy


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

April 21, 2010 5:34pm my blogging world went to help. My blogs were hacked. Every single .PHP file I had was rewritten with malicious code which made my blogs dangerous places to visit. Some of my blogs have yet to be recovered because all of my focus was on my main blog BenSpark.com. I think the reason that my blog was hacked easily was for a few reasons.

Why did this happen to my blogs?

I was reading a post that explains a bit about what happened, because I was not the only one it happened to. Looking at that post here are a few security steps I should have taken.

1. Blogs targeted were running on a Go Daddy Linux hosted account

My blogs are hosted on a Go Daddy Linux account. This was targeted but I’m not going to leave Go Daddy at this point.

2. I was running PHP 4.x not 5.x.

This one is my big issue. I’ve had my blog for a long time and it has been on a PHP 4.x database that whole time. When WordPress updated to 2.9.x or, even lower I think, I was unable to upgrade because I was on a 4.x database. I kept putting off the move because I was afraid of losing my blog (It has been around since 2003). This was my biggest security breach point.

3. Permissions of blogs were set to 777 and/or 755 on some or all directories and/or files.

This was not the case with my blogs, I did not have many files set to those permissions.

4. Wp-config.php files had weak or no Authentication Unique Keys (secret keys) added.

I didn’t even know what that was but the wp.config file explains it so I will have to get those added as well.

5. Weak passwords were used for the database, FTP/Hosting and wp-admin.

I don’t think my passwords are weak but I will sure as hell create some new ones.

So far I was able to recover BenSpark.com and that has taken a while. What I did first was go through every single .php file and remove the offending code. It was tedious, it was painstaking and it was stupid. It was stupid because if I had done a simple search to see if anyone else had the problem I would have found this great post by WPSecuirtyLock titled Cechriecom.com.js.php – WordPress Hacked | Case Study. This post talked about what was happening and has continued to update with new information. It also gave steps that I could have taken to restore all of my blogs quickly and easily. Well, maybe not quickly but in a lot less time than it took to look through hundreds of .php files.

So, if you have found yourself suddenly hacked collect yourself and don’t panic. I certainly know how years of hard work can be ruined in an instant and I also know that if I read more, learned more and calmed myself I would have done much better than if I had gone off half cocked and wasted so much time.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

It All Went to Hell, Now What?


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

One of the great things about starting a business on the Internet is it doesn’t require a lot of capital.  To get started all you really need is a good idea, a computer and a bit of knowledge about the kind of Internet advertising and website design that will get you going.

But there’s a downside too.  You need to remember that as the direct result of the economic recession there are more people than ever before trying to start a business on the Web.  That means you’ll need to have a unique idea and be willing to put in some long hours to make sure that your voice can be heard above the din on the web.

Web Design Is Important

Of course what kind of website you have designed is a critical element of your business.  It’s important to remember that the website is a new business card for a global economy, but you want to be sure that doesn’t intimidate you into getting stuck into an endless cycle of revamping your choices.

You need to remember that the content that you put on a site is just as critical as the banner and actual graphics, but at the same time you want to have navigation that allows people to move around freely to get to the information they want without too much trouble.

Personally I think keeping it simple is the right idea.  Make sure that you spend just as much time deciding on the kind of content you want because the text on a homepage is the first critical element that people will start with. You’ve only got a few seconds to capture reader’s interest here so you want to get right to the point with a clarity and brevity that would rival Hemingway himself.

Content : Mean What You Say And Say What You Mean

Get to the point with the content and make sure that you’ve got a good call to action in there somewhere as well.  People need to be told ‘click here’ or ‘subscribe to this newsletter’ or something similar.

Search Engine Optimized

It’s also important to remember that when web pages were static you often ran into a brick wall where seo was concerned because you either needed to decide on the keywords you were going to use once or abandon that part of the project altogether. Now, with the freeware packages that are available like WordPress and Joomla, you have the option of changing your keywords as the search engines dictate and even reworking the content on all of your pages.

Of course here it’s best to hire a professional content writer and web designer who understands the implications of search engine optimization and has a good knowledge of all the different options that exist to get your company or blog the kind of exposure that will get it noticed.

Starting a business on the Internet takes a lot of time but not always the same amount of money as a brick-and-mortar store. You need to invest in a bit of patience as well because any decent Internet advertising campaign can take up to six months to show excellent results.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

Starting A Business On The Internet


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/