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Put Twitter To Work With Tweet My Blog

July 22nd, 2008Blogging, Social Marketing 1 Comment

Put Twitter to work with these two free tools:

Tweet My Blog is a painless to install plugin that does two things very well.

Gathers your Twitter Posts into a sidebar widget and makes the links back to Twitter clickable. This is the feature that the Twitter badge, provided by Twitter itself, is missing.
Posts to Twitter automatically when you post to your blog. There is no excuse now to forget about posting to Twitter for days on end, unless of course you don’t update your blog on a regular basis.

I like the first feature the best, as forgetting about posting to Twitter is not a problem I have. But it is nice to know that I don’t have to manually tweet my blog posts.

And let’s not forget the Twitter Counter. As you can see in the sidebar, I have this above my Tweet My Blog widget. It’s just a piece of code that goes into a text widget and you get the Twitter Counter at, where else? TwitterCounter.com.

So get to work and put Twitter to work with these two free resources.

Unblogging With WordPress

June 24th, 2008Blogging 4 Comments

Your WordPress blog doesn’t have to look like a blog. Many creative WordPress users make their installation look like a static site. I call this “unblogging.” Here’s how I did one at:

http://bizaddy.com

It’s easy to do with Wordpress 2.5’s new widgets and a few tricks in the control panel:

Change the front of the blog to a static page.
Use the posts widget to display plans (left sidebar.)
One post for each plan.
Set the posts shown in the widget to however many you want. In this case 5 plans, 5 posts.
Re-title the Pages and Posts widgets.
Write pages as you need them and use the pages widget to show them (left sidebar.)
Use the text widget to add the picture and sales message (right sidebar.)

Notice that I didn’t have to buy a special template or system. Everything needed is in the WordPress 2.5 control panel. As always, your comments are appreciated.

What To Do When Your Blog Breaks

May 29th, 2008Blogging No Comments

Recently I noticed a feed on one of my blogs, Bizaddy.com, was not coming up on Netvibes, which I use as my start page in Firefox. I have all the feeds from my blogs displayed there.

On going to the blog, both sidebars of a 3 column template had just disappeared. Luckily, all the post content was still there. I had installed WordPress from the Fantastico script in my cPanel hosting, which allows upgrading WordPress if originally installed by Fantastico.

After thinking about it for a while, taking in mind that I needed to update my WordPress anyway, and considering the best way to procede, this is what I did:

1. Backed up the blog MySQL database in cPanel.

2. Deactivated all plugins in the WP dashboard.

3. Found that my sidebars’ code was still in the theme editor, so copied that into notepad.

4. Clicked the Fantastico Upgrade for WordPress 2.5 in cPanel.

5. Checked the blog, all content remained, so no need to use the back up. Phew!

6. Installed a new theme and tweaked it.

7. Reactivated my plugins and updated those that the new Wordpress dashboard showed upgrades for.

8. Used the Widgets in WordPress 2.5 to add back my sidebar content, now newer and better, and much easier to change when needed.

9. Decided to let the site sit for a while before making any more changes.

The only thing remaining is to find some more pertinent header graphics for the site. And, as always, add more content.

I hope your blog never breaks. But if it does, make sure you have a backup. Then take your time, do things in a logical progression, and use it as an opportunity to make your blog better like I did at Bizaddy.com.

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Rosalind Gardner vs. Ken Evoy on Blogging

May 7th, 2008Blogging No Comments

Ken Evoy of SiteBuildIt stepped out on a breaking limb in his April 18 newsletter. He maintains that blogging is a dead end for most website builders. Here are some quotes:

“Blogging has reached lemming status.”
“Blogging is obviously wrong for small businesses with something to sell”
“Blogging is also the wrong choice for infopreneurs (ex.,those who earn affiliate and AdSense income,without selling anything directly to customers.)”

Successful Blogger and Super Affiliate Queen Rosalind Gardner jumped back at him with a few well placed shots:

“..at least we know that a blog IS a web site.”
“a blog is a web site that is built to find and deliver search engine traffic… immediately.”
“I LOVE blogging. I like it so much that nowadays when folks ask me what I do, I don’t say ‘author’, ’speaker’ or ‘consultant’. I say ‘I’m a blogger.’”

Ros has a lot more to say about it, but I’ll stop there.

Readers know I favor the blog platform for building most any web site. Wordpress is now, with the release of version 2.51, flexible enough to do almost any kind of content structure. Sites are indexed in hours. Google loves blogs.

Enough said. I’m with Ros on this one. Long live blogs. Goodbye to stale content sites. Blog on.

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