Tools for measuring and managing your blog-site's progress

This article lists tools and suggestions that I want to remember for promoting and measuring the "success" of blogs and blogsites ("real" web-sites made with blogging tools).

Measurement Tools and Techniques

Website Grader by HubSpot
Free.  Gives you a mark out of 100, and a report with suggestions for improvements.  You need to give them an email address, but the report is provided on-line.

Blog-grader by HubSpot
Free.  Gives you a mark, but it's not quite clear what it's out off.   Ranks based on how often you post, and how many words per post.  Includes a table of number of posts by week-day and time-of-day.


Promotional Ideas

Link your blog and the social networks

Write about local businesses that don't have websites of their own

Submit listings to search engines:

Submit listings to directories:

• The Yahoo! Directory

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Related Articles: 



Linking your blog and the social networks

Tools for linking your blog and social media sites.

Tools for Linking Blogger and Social Network sites

Previously I've described the approaches for linking your blog and the social networks. This article is about specific tools that can be used for each approach.

"Follow-me"

Inviting readers to connect your account to theirs on ...

• Facebook: 
  Adding a Facebook personal account badge to your blog
  Putting a Facebook Page badge into your blog
  

• Twitter:     Put a Following Me on Twitter button into your blog

• LinkedIn:  There must be a way - not found it yet.

"Look at This"

Giving readers a tool to talk about or recommend your blog-post in their account in:

• Facebook   Put the Post 2 Profile gadget, in your blog, inviting people to share your post

• Twitter   Put the Tweet button into your blog, inviting readers to share either your whole blog, or a specific post

• LinkedIn   Put a Share this to LinkedIn button onto your blog.

• Google:     Put a customised +1 button into your blog

• Email-this-post:
  Turn this on using Design > Page Elements > Blog Posts - tick the Show Email Post Links button.  You have some options deciding where in the post it goes.  

A Word about Third Party Tools:

Untill recently, a common approach has been to use a 3rd party tool, eg AddThis.

But there have been some less than well-behaved tools which are effectively hackerware (eg the TweetMe widget) - so it's been hard to work out what to trust.

Personally, I almost jumped out of my skin the day I first used an AddThis button on a newspaper site to put a link to an article about me onto my Google blog:  half-an-hour later I suddenly realised that I'd just given my main google account password to a 3rd party that I knew nothing about.  I couldn't get to a computer to change it fast enough!.

I don't recommend installing any tool that asks a reader to enter their password for a social networking site anywhere except on that social networking site.

"Look-what-I-wrote"

Showing content from your blog on ...

• Facebook:  Automatically updating Facebook every time you publish your Blog (coming soon)

• Twitter:  One approach is to use Feedburner's Socialise your Feed option

• LinkedIn  Automatically updating LinkedIn every time you publish your Blog (coming soon)

"Look what I said over there"

This options is about updating your blog with content from your social media site(s), and has a few possible approaches.

1 Use an RSS feed:

Burn (or just get the address of) a feed from your Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn etc account, than then:

• Display it in an RSS Gadget in your blog, or
• Use a service like feed2js.org to convert the feed into Javascript, and put the resulting Javascript into the post.

2 For Facebook, use a page badge:

Make a badge for your Facebook Page choosing to show the stream but hide the Faces and Header - this will show what was posted in the Page on your blog.    It's especially useful if you can put it in a place (eg a post or page) where the badge can be quite wide.

3 Manual update:

This won't be a popular approach.

But personally I've found that different networking tools respond best to different messages, so generally I try to do cross-platform promotion (ie from Blogs to Social Networks ad back again) in a way that customises the message for the platform - and manual is the only realistic way to do this at the moment.

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Related Articles:

Approaches for linking your blog and the social networks

Using the Post 2 Profile gadget,

Making a Facebook personal account badge

Making a Facebook Page badge 

Putting the tweet button into your blog.

Deciding if a new-blog idea is any good

This article is about how to review an idea that you have for a new blog, in order to decide whether to go ahead with it.

Overview:

After I'd set up my first blog-site, I started having ideas for other sites.  

Some came from discovering features in Blogger ("ahh, since it does this, I could do that with it").   Others came from observing problems and seeing ways to fix them, or even by chance:  For example, Blogger-hints-and-tips started as a place to keep my working notes about solutions I'd found.  When I discovered that other people were searching for solutions to the same problems and reading what I'd written, I decided I should put in a bit more effort to make the notes more reader-friendly.

I quickly learned that while it's easy to have ideas, making and feeding a blog takes time and energy:  some of my ideas would probably be successful eventually, but would need a huge amount of effort to get them started.   And some ideas have occurred to other people already, too.

So I developed a couple of guidelines for myself, and apply these no matter how good an idea seems:

1) Sleep on it

Very, very few ideas are so groundbreaking and urgent that they need to be acted on immediately.

A couple of days spent just mulling on an idea are not wasted:  quite often new possibilities (or difficulties) occur to me at the strangest times.

2) Do a formal assessment

Write up a short (1 page is usually enough) description of what the idea will involve.  Not just think about it, but actually write it down.

Doing this makes me face up to the immediately problems that I'll have with taking an idea and turning it into a blog, and decide if I can work around them or not.  I've found that if I don't write them down, I gloss over the problems - and I've more than once started a blog only to find that I've spend days working on something that will never succeed because of some fundamental problem that I knew about in the back of my mind all along.

I've developed the BIA (Blog Idea Assessment) as a simple tool to help me to do this.   You can download it (in MS Word) here, and the following section has notes about using each part of it.

What's in the Blog-Idea-Assessment Tool

1 Working Title:

Every blog needs a name, and I find that giving an idea a name early in process helps me to work out if it will have a life of its own:  If I can't work out a name, then perhaps the idea is just a topic that I could write one article about, but not a whole blog.

The name is a working title though.  It can, and often does, change as I work through the other stages.

2 Purpose / Aim:

This is a description of what the blog is - and is not - about.   It describes what the blog will do, and what problems it will solve or what opportunites it will take advantage of.  

It also looks at:

• Where the content will come from - eg is it creative writing (fiction), opinion (whose?) or fact (where will the info be gathered from).  
• How it will be presented (eg does it involve maps, calendars, custom search engines)

It usually takes about 3 paragraphs, maybe more for a complicated blog, or less for a very simple one with all posts being entered inside Blogger.

3 Competitor research:

This is a very important stage.   I sit down with Google and a thesaurus (for alternative words to describe my idea), and look at who else is publishing (blogs and other websites) on the topic.  For an idea to be worth proceeding with, it generally needs to be either First (to get readers before any else does the same thing) or Best (so that readers from elsewhere will start coming to my site instead).

Then I do some research about potential domain names:

• Decide whether the blog can have a .blogspot.com URL, or whether it needs to look like a "real" and if so, what sort of URL it needs (.com  .net  .info   .co.uk    etc)
• Brainstorm possible brands / names for the blog
• Research what domains are available   (but don't purchase until after doing the next step

I also think about copyright:  can I really create unique, interesting content about the topic without breaking copyright laws.

4 Audience and Promotions:

List the potential readers of the blog - in more detail than just "people who are interested in XXXX".

I need to know who might be interested (or who I might be able to make interested), and why.    Sometimes thinking about this questions changes the answer in Point 2) - identifying a new potential audience changes how I do things.

Then I need to know how I'll tell them that the blog is available - and I need to be sure that it's possible for me to do this in the time I have available.

There are lots of websites with suggestions about how to promote websites, so I'm not going to repeat them here.   But in general, the answer to "how to promote?" comes directly from "who is the audience?".   And it usually involves a mixture of approaches:  very few blogs can be promoted successfully using only one too.

It is possible to build a successful blog based on search results alone, but it can take a good 6-12 months to get readers - or so I'm told.  For a niche area, I'm even sceptical about this, and think that it may take longer, and have a high chance that the audience don't arrive before the content is out-dated.

Personally I prefer to have some early feedback about how well the blog is doing, and whether it's solving the problems I set out to solve.  This means I need ways to promote the blog and get readers (and feedback) sooner rather than later.

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Related Articles: 

Getting Started with Blogger

Blogs, Blogger and bloggers - some basic definitions

Copyright, blogs and bloggers

How blogs in Blogger are organised

Putting a Blog into Facebook, changing the title and descrption

This article is about putting a note about your blog (or any other website) onto Facebook using their share tool, and controlling the heading and text that are shown.

Overview

There are many ways to link a blog and your Facebook account.  The simplest options are manual:

• If the blog has a Share-this-on-Facebook button or Facebook Like or Send buttons, click this button, if necessary log into Facebook in the window that opens, and a post is automatically made.   (see Putting a Facebook "share this" badge on your blog for more about this.)
  
• If the blog doesn't have these tools, then you need to manually copy the URL from the blog, and paste it into your Facebook wall or status field.  

No matter which option you use, Facebook suggests what title, text and picture from the blog shoul be shown in the Facebook entry.  They've got better and better at choosing appropriate text and images, but in come cases options suggests are  not appropriate.

Fortunately, you can  change the suggested title and description..


Follow these steps:

1  Click the Share / Like / Send button, or copy the URL for the blog that you want to link to.

2   If prompted, log in to Facebook and / or past the link - otherwise it will come up automatically.

3  Click on the link item (it's in the Attach bar, looks like a drawing-pin)), and when the window opens, paste in the web-address (URL) that you copied in step 1)

4  Click on Attach, and you will see a preview of the default values that Facebook is suggesting, based on what it finds on the blog:

5  If you hover over the title and description part of this preview, you will notice that they are highlighted.  This means that you can click on them and edit them.

6  Choose a thumbnail-picture (using the arrow buttons at the bottom left, and edit the title and description by hovering and then clicking on them.

What your readers see:

Your readers will not know that you have changed the title and description suggested by Facebook - they simply see the values that you entered.

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Related Articles:




Putting a Facebook "share this" badge on your blog.

Tools for linking Blogger and the social networking sites

Sharing on Facebook to Page intead of your personal Profile

Automatically sending your posts to Twitter

Blogs, Blogger, bloggers, Posts, Pages and Screens - some basic definitions

This article defines some of the basic words if you are using Google Blogger.  It is helpful if you are just getting started, and need to accurately describe a problem you are having.   It is part of a series of articles about getting started with Blogger.

Google, Blogger and Blogging, Posts

Google, the noun, (sometimes called Google Inc or Google Ltd) is a company.  They became famous by creating a very, very useful search engine.  Since then, as well as making the search engine even better, they've created (or purchased) lots of other tools as well, and become rich by selling on-line advertising space inside their tools.

Using their most-popular tool (www.google.com or your local version eg www.google.co.uk), you can google (a verb), ie search, for things.    (The same way that you can hoover the floor, or xerox a piece of paper

A blog is a "binary log" - geek-ese for "a diary you keep on the internet".   A blog can contain anything you want to write, for example:

• a fantasy story that you made up, 
• a factual account of your life, 
• your opinions about politics
• newsletters from a club you belong to
• information about your business and the services you offer
• and many many more

Blogger is a piece of software (ie a computer program) provided by Google, which lets you create a a blog.

A blogger (small b) is a person who writes a blog.  They may use Blogger, or various other types of blogging software (eg WordPress, TypePad)

A Post is the basic item that you publish onto your blog.   After you have been blogging (writing a blog) for a while, you blog will (usually) have many Posts.


Pages - AKA Static Pages

In regular websites, a page is roughly the same as a screen (at least as far as anyone who reads this article needs to know).

Until recently, most documentation about Blogger talked about Pages as through a Page was something that showed one or more Posts.  (More about these soon.)

However Google introduced a new feature, called Pages, into Blogger in early 2010.

These Pages are intended for bloggers who want some material on their blog which is slightly different from the rest:  it's not part of the usual material that they publish, and stays current and relevant in a way that older posts in a blog don't.   Typical pages content includes contact-details, frequently-asked-questions, or "about this blog" statements.

Pages are edited using a tool that is similar to the Posts editor, but they have some small differences:  eg they don't have a publication-date so they don't appear in the Archive.  I have previously written a full description of the difference between Pages and Posts.

Pages also have a gadget all of their own (called the Pages Gadget), which can be used to give a "menu bar" at the top, or bottom, or in the sidebar of your blog.   

A key difference between regular websites and blogs is that Posts don't go onto Pages:  all your Posts go onto what feels like the "main page", and the other pages are for reference materials only.   There are ways around this, eg using labels to categorise your blog, and making it look like you have put posts into pages by making a horizontal linked-list of label-search statements instead of the standard pages gadget, but even this isn't quite what many people expect.

Some people refer to Pages as Static-pages, to try to avoid the confusion.  I don't use that term because:

1. It's not the term that Google/Blggger uses, and
2. Some of the target information (eg contact details for a club) is not static - it could change many times over the life of the blog.

Templates and Collections of Posts

A Template is a control file that says how a Blog will look.  Blogs that are about different topics may use the same template:  their content will be different, but they will look very similar to a person who reads them.

I have recently started using Screen to refer the display that Blogger generates each time that someone looks at your blog.

A Posts Screen may show 1,2, 3 or even dozens of Posts.   The number of posts shown is controlled by an option that the blogger sets (in either the Design > Page Elements > Blog Posts, or Settings > Formatting options) and by a (relatively new) feature called auto-pagination, which restricts overly large collections of Posts, so that Blogger works more quickly overall.
 
If a Blog has a Layout or Designer template (see Types of Blogger template), then there are links near the end of each screen for Newer Posts and Older Posts:  clicking them take the user to a new Screen, which shows a set of newer or older posts.

There are other types of Screen also:

• If a blog has a Labels gadget, then clicking as option in it opens a List of Posts screen showing all published Posts in the blog that have the corresponding Label.
• If a blog has an Archive gadget, then clicking an option in it opens a List of Posts screen showing all published Posts in the blog that were published in that time period.

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Related Articles: 



Getting started with Blogger

The difference between Pages and Posts

Types of Blogger template

Using labels to categorise your blog

Making it look like you have put posts into pages.

Get Dilbert for your Blog

This article is about how to get the Official Dilbert widget for your blog.

A 3rd party widget?

Normally, I don't recommend 3rd party widgets:  far too many are involve giving some hacker access to your blog.

But I trust some eg, Amazon.    And of course Dilbert - though I still don't think it's a good idea to give him your Google password.   Read on to see how to insert the code without doing so.


Follow these steps:

Go to    http://widget.dilbert.com/

Choose the size you want
The Dilbert cartoon in my sidebar is 160x300 - but if your blog is about any aspect of office politics, you may want a larger one, eg 400x300 - if you like, you could even put it above your post area and show it on the home page only, so people come back every day to look at it!)

Click on "Click here for today's strip" on the chosen size.

Click Grab-it on the top right corner of that strip.

DON'T click on the Blogger icon in the window that opens:  I trust Dilbert - butl not enough to give him my Google account password!

Click on Copy (to the right or perhaps just about the embed code in the window that opens)

Go to your blog, and add the HTML code to it.

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Related Articles: 




Show a gadget on the home page only.

Understanding Google accounts

Adding 3rd party HTML to your blog

Centering gadgets on your blog

Advertising and Blogger - some things to consider