Simple Ways to Expand Your Blog Through Social Media

How are you sharing your blog? How are you making sure your content is found and then shared?
Are you promoting yourself via social networks, or are you leaving that to your readers? Do you make sure potential clients know about your blog, if you’re using it as a business platform?
Are you simply using the standard sharing options - Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc – or are you thinking of ways you can be a little creative when it comes to sharing your blog socially?
Let’s face it, if you’re using your blog as a business platform then the more eyeballs it gets, the better for finding potential new clients or customers. Even a personal blog can benefit from extra visitors.
So here are a few ways you can get outside the normal views of retweets and shares, and promote your blog to a bigger crowd that may miss it otherwise.

Social Sharing Groups

The most oft-used method of sharing a blog post is via social sharing buttons on the post itself.
These are either located at the top and/or bottom of the post, or to the side. But why not take this a little further, and create a social sharing group?
For example, one of the best resources for traffic to this blog is Stumbleupon. This is a great social sharing platform that lets you “stumble” the web, and allows you to give either a thumbs up or down to the site you’re currently on (you can also leave a review if you like).

What happens then is that the site is put into the Stumbleupon library, so anyone else using the stumble option could land on your blog. If they then like it, they give you a thumbs up and your currency increases on Stumbleupon. It’s easier than it sounds, and it’s a great passive traffic generator.
So create a Stumble group.
Grab about 10 of your online friends, and help promote each other’s blogs. Anytime a new post is published, have one of the group stumble it, then you can give it a thumbs up.
You can then take this idea to other social bookmarks - Reddit, Digg, etc. Just make sure you also highlight a lot of other great sites too – don’t create the group just to promote your work, that’s just spammy.
Side note: While traffic from Stumbleupon can be great, bounce rates can be affected (the amount of time someone stays on your site), so keep an eye on that in your analytics.

Turn Posts into Ebooks

You blog. You write. A lot. Depending on whether you’re a niche blogger or not, you might have a lot of posts on similar topics, or even run a blog series of interconnected posts.
So why not turn them into an ebook?
The market for ebooks is huge, and offers a great way for you to either give back to your blog community for reading you, or sell them as part of your business offerings.
Write a crafts blog? Put together some of your favourite tips and publish as an ebook. Chef? Collate some of your favourite recipes and sell them via your blog. And so on – the possibilities for what’s in your ebook are endless.
I put together a bunch of my short form posts on Posterous as a free ebook with some simple marketing ideas, and so far it’s been downloaded just over 3,000 times. So ebooks are definitely a great way to both give back and get back.

Turn Your Blog into a Slide

One of the best platforms around at the moment is Slideshare. Essentially taking PowerPoint presentations to the next level, Slideshare also allows uploads of PDF’s, documents and other presentations.

It then turns these into slideshows that you can either grab the embed code for or download to your hard drive, as well as the normal sharing options on Twitter and Facebook, etc.
You can even add audio or talk tracks, or turn your slides into mini-movies.
So working from your ebook idea, collate some of your best posts on a topic and create a presentation. Edit the posts accordingly to make the best use of Slideshare’s capabilities (perhaps a connecting image, statistic or similar), and then upload and choose your sharing settings.
If folks like it and decide to embed on their own blog, you instantly have a new audience. That could go one step further, and businesses could pick up your kick-ass presentation and use it as a training resource.
The next potential step from that is to bring you on board to expand on your initial ideas – so now your original blog post has become both a training resource and a client lead.

Just Getting Started

These are just three ways that you could take the normal social sharing option, and add a little extra to help promote your blog.
You could also use the WordPress application on LinkedIn, or Networked Blogs for Facebook as another couple of alternatives. Or you could re-purpose old posts for publication elsewhere.
The thing is, just because you already have sharing options in place doesn’t mean you need to stop there. The great thing with blogs is that they can be essentially timeless, given the right post and topic. Why not use that?
How about you – what are you doing to extend the reach of your blog? Feel free to share your tips on what works for you in the comments.

Website Optimization Basics - Search Engines

As search engine optimizers we hear the term "optimization" all the time. We optimize our content, websites, pages, forms, click paths, designs, strategies, links, and so on.

Do we ever ask ourselves what it means to be a search engine optimizer? And just how do we optimize in the world of Pandas and Penguins? In the end how does this change what we do as SEOs?

Optimization is such a common term and used so generally, it is almost without meaning. Take a moment to think about it. What does it mean to optimize?

A Lesson in Real World Optimization

I recently traveled to Seattle. If you haven’t been there, in Seattle you have a few ways to make your way from the airport to the hotels, but none as touted as the Seattle Light Rail. For a mere few dollars, you can ride all the way from the airport to your hotel downtown.

Since the taxi and hire cars were running $40+, this seemed like the best way to make my way to my hotel.

This seemed like a great idea – seemed being the operative word.

Before I even got past the train station exit, I was presented with what seemed to be some odd choices for a train station: a Nordstrom’s, a Macy’s, and a Nordstrom’s Rack. See, Seattle was ready for me. They had “optimized” the path from the train door to the exit and had strategically placed three stores in my route.

Mind you. I hadn’t left the station yet when I ran across these three stores that reminded me that it might have been 105 degrees when I left Las Vegas, but it was 52 degrees now and me without a jacket. Oh a jacket, I must get a jacket. Just as I am sure many other travelers are left with the thought of “I must get (insert item) soon!”

Of course I left with a bit more than a jacket (and now need to hit returns at the Vegas Nordstrom Rack).

But I must say – brilliant! Seattle optimized the light rail station and I left a few dollars lighter.

Three stores, three price points, all there ready for the traveler, like me who was unprepared or perhaps forgot something. Not outside the station, not in a hard to get to spot in a corner, down a hallway, but literally while you walked to the train station exit. BOOM! Now that is real world optimization.

Imagine if your website was so well optimized for your users. In, Out, Purchase complete! Everyone should design their site as well as the Seattle Light Rail Train Station.

Never Dine With SEOs – Or More Real World Optimization.

I once went to dinner with a group of fellow SEOs and the conversation was lagging. OK, it was dead as a doornail.

We were set to embark on one of those awkward uncomfortable evenings where you can’t eat your food or slurp your drink fast enough.

Just in time one of the SEOs said, “You know what, we need to optimize this table”.

“What?” “Optimize the table?” We all looked at him like he lost his mind, but he was right. The people who knew each other weren’t sitting next to each other, the conservators weren’t next to the quiet ones, the flow of the table was broken.

Once we moved some people around the table to create conversational flow – once we “optimized” our table – the conversation was easy and fun. To this day most everyone is still friends.

This is the same was what we do as search engine optimizers. Our job is to make it easy for someone or some thing (say a search engine spider) to flow through our sites, to read our content, to understand our message, to interact, to buy, to convert, to achieve whatever goal we have set forth.

We make it easy not only to find our sites, but also to do what it is they came to do. We are site optimizers now, not just SEOs.

So What is Optimization?

Optimization is about making the simplest path to the most desirable goals.

For example, during my train station experience, I was never taken out of the station path, never walked down a long hallway, or moved to the outside. The process was very simple. Exit train, see store logos, enter store, buy, sent back to train station hallway, exit station. Beautiful!

What if you applied these examples to your websites?

When working with optimization, ask yourself, are your site tasks simple? Is your content easy to read? Are your forms this easy to work with? Does your design guide me to a goal?

Important Optimization Reminder

Google’s Penguin Update wasn’t about penalizing sites because of optimization. It wasn’t even about over optimization. It was about bad SEO practices, like keyword stuffing links and titles, link buying, link selling – the gamut.

Google wants good product. Make good websites. Create good content. You will be OK.

There is so much to know post-Panda, post-Penguin. It’s impossible to cover it all in one article, so here’s a basic guide to get you started on your new journey as a site optimizer.

Basic Site Optimization Tips

What follows are general tips that can apply to any website. These are intended as guides to help better the SEO of a site, and are for once you have implemented basic SEO.

Design

Make sure your design:

• Doesn’t create a negative user interaction Experience
• Site quality issues
• Is NOT in Flash
• Yes Google reads some Flash
• Flash still isn't good for SEO
• Flash is definitely bad for mobile
• Follows the 80/20 rule
• 80 percent of user activity is above the fold, so keep important items there
• Loads in 3 seconds or less
• 40 percent of users abandon sites that take longer
• Follows Matt Cutts rules for advertising
• These are specific amounts of space a site can use

Code

Make your code:

• Clean
• Separate Presentation (CSS) from Structure (HTML)
• Don’t rely on Google being able to read AJAX
• Put all inline CSS & JS in external files
• Fast
• Check it using the Page Speed plug-in
• 85 percent is a good number
• 90 percent is an awesome number
• Yes Google says it affects only 1 percent of sites
• But from my client sites, I don’t believe it; make your sites faster for better results.
• W3C compliant
• Validate your code
• NOTE Schema Tags will not validate this is OK
• Accessible
• Mobile Ready
• Smartphones receive the desktop Google index now
• Use Responsive Design if possible
• If you can’t Google will still crawl your site, but make efforts to move towards RD

Content

Make your content:

• 500+ words per page.
• Don’t appear thin.
• Scannable
• Website users scan text, they don’t read
• NOTE users read small text, scan large
• Clear
• Concise
• Original & Unique
• Keyword as part of Natural Language
• Simple Sentence Constructs
• If using more than one conjunction in sentence (and, but etc.) probably need to rewrite.

Structure

Make sure your structure contains:

• Canonical tags
• Breadcrumbs for listings with site links
• Topic focus
• Pages should be specific, not general
• Exception topic level pages
• Clear Site Architecture
• Clear Navigation
• Schema tagging, do not pass go, add schemas NOW!

Links

Make sure your links

• Are natural
• Use diversification strategies
• Limit Keyword Rich Anchor Text to 20-30 percent or less
• And vary the text
• Watch your C Class, IP Blocks and Domains of links coming into your site for negative SEO
• AND FINALLY
• Be very careful if you purchase links
• Very, very careful
• Like escaping from Supermax prison careful

Skate to Where the Puck is Going

Panda and Penguin and whatever update comes next will continue to change the SERPs and how we do what we do – sometimes, radically. Traditional SEO just isn’t enough any more.
The time has come! If you haven’t learned how to be a site optimizer, now is the time. Don’t let the next Google update leave you in the cold.
Google has made a clear statement where it’s going. As retired NHL great Wayne Gretzky once said of his success, "I skate where the puck is going." As a site optimizer, you should do the same!

The Information Diet - Book and Tools for going on an Information Diet

Tools
Information dieting requires an arsenal of tools and tricks – and while we can constantly peruse sites like LifeHacker to give us an hour by hour dose of productivity porn, sometimes we just need to get straight to brass tacks.

This page attempts to collect everything you need in order to set up your system, presuming that you’ve read The Information Diet. It also catalogs other software tools that may be necessary. For many, just installing the software in the QuickStart section will be useful.

Keep in mind that installing these applications and setting things up like this will not put you on an information diet. Just like cleaning the junk-food out of your kitchen won’t make you lose weight if you simply choose to eat out all the time, an information diet is less about installing tools and more about making conscious decisions about the information you consume. First build good habits, then rely on software.

QuickStart

The quickstart section is a selection of tools to install and start using right away if you just want to get started on your information diet, and don’t want to shop for different kinds of tools. Simply grab the tools you need and get started.

AdBlock

AdBlock Plus is available for both the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox web browsers, as well as Safari. It’s a simple browser extension that blocks advertisements on major websites. If you so desire, you can always turn the back on – but at least you’re opting in to view advertisements, rather than having them thrown at you all the time. If you’re an Internet Explorer user by choice, I strongly suggest you switch to Chrome or Firefox. If you’re not an Internet Explorer user by choice, and are instead compelled to use Internet Explorer, then it’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to install IE Plugins – but here’s an ad blocker for IE.

AwayFind

AwayFind helps you spend less time in your inbox while staying responsive to the people who are most important to you. It does this by letting you “follow” important people and topics, then notifying you (SMS, iPhone/Android push, etc) when you get matching emails. Another handy feature is Calendar Alerts: it can notify you if someone you’re meeting with emails you just before. Free and paid versions are available.

BlockPlus

The Red Notification on all Google pages, if you’re a Google+ user, is a recipe for disaster. Every web search becomes an opportunity to get sucked in to Google’s social network. While Google gives you the ability to control what notifications get sent to you via email, the ability to control what’s in that red box is not BlockPlus is a Google Chrome extension to simply remove that Red Box.

RescueTime

Mentioned in the book, RescueTime helps track what you’re working on, keeping a diligent count of what’s happening on your computer. While it cannot track and account for your every moment, for those that are spending most of their time in front of a computer, RescueTime is the best tool. There’s a free version available, and if you want to “go pro” it costs between $6-$9/mo. Be warned – what you’ll be doing is sending every “Window Title” (the words in the titles of the windows for every application you use) to the RescueTime servers – while the data is secure, for those that are very concerned about their privacy, you may want to seek other options (see the Time Tracking Tools below for other options). RescueTime is cross platform – available for both Windows and OS X.

SaneBox*

Sanebox is like Google’s Priority Inbox on steroids. Sanebox filters your emails and learns from your reading habits to make sure that only the emails you need to see right now make it to your inbox. It takes the emails that don’t need your immediate attention and puts them into a folder called “SaneLater” – and close to the end of every day, it’ll email you a digest of those email messages so that you can give them your attention. It’s compatible with GMail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook and IMAP email providers.

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Application Settings

Facebook Settings

Let’s take Facebook out of our email inboxes. While SaneBox should filter much of that stuff out, Facebook still makes your inbox a distraction trap. Visit Facebook’s Notification Settings and uncheck the box next to “Send me important updates and summary emails instead of individual notification email.” Then, visit each section of notifications on Facebook, and uncheck every box.

Twitter Settings

Same with Twitter. Uncheck every box on this page. Make Twitter something you have to check, not something that’s pushed at you.

Desktop Notification Settings

Turn off all desktop notifications on your computer. If you’re an Outlook user, turn its desktop alerts off. If you’re an OS X User, and have somehow ended up with Growl installed on your computer, turn off all notifications.

Browser Settings

Whichever browser you use, set your homepage URL to “about:blank.” This will make it so that whenever your browser starts, it starts with a blank page, not a lure to your most visited sites. I also add about:blank to my bookmarks bar in my browser so that I can quickly “turn off” the web from my screen while keeping the web open.

Gmail Settings

If you’re a Gmail user, go ahead and hide your unread counts. It might take you a while to get used to not seeing these numbers beckon for you, but they’re hurting your productivity more than helping it. Enable the Hide Unread Counts setting in Gmail’s Settings. It’s in the Labs section about halfway down the page.

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Other Applications

OS X: Think helps you focus on one particular application at a time on the Mac – it’s like the Full Screen setting in OS X Lion, but more versatile.
OS X: Concentrate is a compelling application that allows you to launch and quit apps by activity. When you want to work at a particular thing, Concentrate will launch the applications needed for that activity, quit the applications that are not needed for it, and start a timer to measure how long you’re working.
OS X, Windows: Freedom locks the Internet down on your Mac or Windows computer for up to 8 hours. You turn it on, and you cannot get the Internet back until the timer is finished unless you reboot your computer.
OS X: SelfControl lets you lock down parts of the internet while leaving the rest open for useful work. Cannot be stopped by killing the app, deleting it, or even rebooting. You actually have to wait for the timer to end.
OS X: Time Sink is a an application that tracks how you use applications on your Mac. Like RescueTime, it stores window titles and the time spent with them, but it does it locally. Might be an option for people who don’t want their data on someone else’s server.
Python, PHP: Get Shit Done - For the command-line types out there, Get Shit Done is a small command line program that blocks websites known to distract us from our work. Configurable by an easy to edit text file.

10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer

Tono Stano White Shadow - YouTube