“Use Email to Post to Your WordPress.org Blog” plus 1 more

Use Email to Post to Your WordPress.org Blog

Posted: 23 May 2012 01:07 PM PDT

This guest post is by Anurag Bansal of Techacker.

Owners of WordPress.org blogs don’t get the flexibility to post by email through a WordPress service. It’s very surprising to see that such a popular platform doesn’t offer a native way of creating blog post by sending an email—especially since WordPress.com owners can update their blogs using native WordPress functionality.

If you have a blog on Tumblr or Posterous (which was recently acquired by Twitter), you know how convenient it is to update your blog using email. It naturally increases the frequency with which you update your blog.

Today I’m going to introduce you to an easy way to post by email to your WordPress.org blog using a service I am a big fan of—ifttt.

ifttt stands for If This, Then That. This service, which was introduced recently on ProBlogger, makes it really easy to do many online tasks, some of which are mentioned below.

How to post by email to a WordPress.org blog

Create an ifttt account if you don’t already have one.
Activate and authorize the WordPress.org blog you want to post by email to. To do this, click on WordPress logo under Channels on ifttt. Then add the appropriate details to authorize your WordPress blog to use with ifttt. Once activated, you will see a similar screen to the one shown below.
Activate the email channel connection to the email account from which you’d like to send posts. All you need is to click on Email icon and enter your email address. ifttt will immediately send a PIN to this email address. Copy that PIN from the email into the box on ifttt. Once your account’s confirmed, you’ll have successfully activated the email channel.
Use this recipe to create a task. While creating the task, you can edit the details shown in the screenshot below to suit your needs.
Once the task is activated, all you have to do is send an email from the email account you confirmed in Step 3 to trigger@ifttt.com with the specified # tag in the subject line. In ifttt terms, that tag says, “if email is received from the account specified earlier, then post it to the WordPress blog set up earlier.”
ifttt will create a post on your WordPress.org blog, using the email details as follows:
1. The subject of the email becomes the title of the blog post.
2. The body of the email becomes the content of the blog post.
3. Tags for the post are specified in the recipe. You can change these in the task details on ifttt.
4. Categories for the post are also specified by you in the ifttt recipe.

There are many other recipes I use to update my WordPress.org blog, including:

I have been able to successfully post many updates to my blog using this process. It’s easy, painless and quick. All it takes to update your blog is an email!

Stop postponing that great blog post idea just because you didn’t have the right tools at the time. Now, there’s no need to install any plugins—just use email.

How do you update your WordPress blog now? Do you think email updates would make it easier for you to update your blog? If you’re already using emil updates on another platform, is it helpful? Let us know in the comments.

Anurag Bansal is a technology enthusiasts and internet addict. He reviews various internet services, Android and iPhone apps and provide tips on many technology related topics on his blog at Techacker. Anurag also releases a FREE Monthly Magazine - THM - on his blog. You may follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Use Email to Post to Your WordPress.org Blog

5 Lessons Steve Jobs Could Teach You About Creating a Popular Blog

Posted: 23 May 2012 07:03 AM PDT

This guest post is by Greg Digneo of Sales Leads in 30 Days.

"What can I learn from the business life of Steve Jobs that will help me grow my blog?"

We've all asked ourselves the question. Because the public nature of blogging goes against his strict privacy policy, this isn't an easy question to answer. But it's one that I couldn't get out of my head.

There has to be something to learn from a guy who revolutionized multiple industries and created two iconic companies. Look beyond his temperamental management style and the black turtlenecks, and analyze the way he built companies and gave presentations. You will find several principles that you can apply to your own business.

Below are five lessons that Steve Jobs could teach us about creating popular a blog.

"Make a dent in the universe"—Steve Jobs

In Walter Isaacson's book Steve Jobs, Pepsi CEO John Scully recounts Jobs's pitch to come work for Apple.

Scully remarks: "Steve's head dropped as he stared at his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for days. 'Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?'"

Apple products aren't created to make money in an industry. They are created to redefine the way the industry does business. The Apple II gave birth to the PC industry. The iPod and iTunes combination remade the music industry. And the iPhone redefined the way a phone is made.

Likewise, the most popular blogs in the world create a "dent" in their niche.

Ask yourself this: if someone were to read every article you've written, how would their life improve one year from now?

Once you answer that question, you will create a higher sense of purpose, and stand out from the countless blogs in your niche.

For instance, one of my favorite blogs is Pam Slim's Escape from Cubicle Nation. There are millions of entrepreneurship, marketing, and career blogs on the web, but Pam packages her expertise to create the higher purpose of "helping frustrated employees in corporate jobs break out and start their own businesses."

So, go ahead and be bold. Find your blog's purpose. And put a dent in the universe.

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"—Leonardo DaVinci

Apple products are famous for being simple and intuitive to use. As Steve Job's said in Walter Isaacson's book: "The way we're running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let's make it simple. Really simple."

The iPhone has only one button on its face. The iPod has only a scroll wheel. You don't need an instruction manual to operate either of these devices.

When Derek Halpern launched his blog Social Triggers, he took this advice to heart. When you visit his blog, there are only two things you can do:

Read his content.
Enter your email address and sign up for his newsletter.

And the results speak for themselves. In a little over one year, Derek has taken Social Triggers from brand new to over 12,000 subscribers.

Yet so many blogs do just the opposite. They have navigation bars with too many options. The design of the blog is often cluttered, leaving the reader feeling lost and overwhelmed.

Do you want the reader to download your ebook? Connect with you on social media? Subscribe to your RSS? Make your blog more intuitive and pick the one thing you want your readers to do.

Be "amazingly zippy"

As Carmine Gallo says in his book Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: "Jobs is one of the few business leaders who could confidently call a product 'amazingly zippy.'"

He used these types of words to communicate complex products and features to the masses. For instance, when describing the buttons on the screen of the iMac, he said they "look so good you’ll want to lick them." (Fortune magazine 4 January 2000). He could have described them as having the perfect dimensions, the perfect color, and the perfect gloss, but he knew that his primary audience wouldn't care.

As bloggers, we often communicate highly complex ideas, and our job is to speak in a language that our audiences can understand. It can be easy to get caught in the echo chamber and forget that most readers who visit your blog have very little knowledge of your niche.

Here's a simple way to ensure that you create content the majority of your readers will understand. After every post you write, ask yourself this: "Will my mom get it?" If your mom can't understand it, then there is a good chance that you will alienate large segments of your audience.

"Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life"—Steve Jobs

So began Jobs’s famous Stanford Commencement address.

Steve Jobs was a masterful story teller. Every keynote he gave was a triumph of good over evil. The audience had a problem and Apple was going to save the day.

Before he introduced the iPhone, Jobs explained why current smartphone products were so bad, and how Apple would come to the rescue. For instance, the keys were permanently fixed into the plastic case of the phone. But that wouldn't happen to the iPhone. The iPhone's keys were built directly into the software, allowing each application to have the perfect user interface.

By telling stories, Jobs allowed his audience to become a part of the presentation. Bloggers can use this same tactic.

You can use case studies and customers to show how they have succeeded by using your products and implementing your ideas. And there is a simple formula you can use to create an engaging case study:

First, you describe in vivid detail your customer's life before buying the product.
Then you explain exactly how your customer implemented your product or idea.
Finally, you show how much better your customer's life is after you've saved the day.

Stay hungry, stay foolish

In the 1960's Jobs read the Whole Earth Catalog, which he described as the Google in paperback. He said "It was idealistic and full of tools that you could use."

On the back cover of the final issue from the mid 1970s, were the words “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” Jobs' Stanford Commencement speech concluded with him urging the graduates to do the same.

Part of being a blogger is to have an insatiable curiosity. You scour the web and books for new theories, new ideas, and new innovations that pertain to your niche. Then you take these new concepts and apply them to what we already know.

And you know what? Sometimes it gets messy. Your mistakes are made in public for the entire world to see.

Those of us in the trenches know that we're going to ruffle feathers. We know that there are times we're going to be wrong. Often, we need to take one step back before we can move two steps forward. To build a popular blog, you must constantly indulge your curiosity and keep pushing forward.

And one more thing…

Finally, I want to recall one of the stories from Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs.

Steve Jobs had an argument with one of his engineers about the boot up time for the Macintosh operating system. To quickly resolve the argument, he asked the engineer, "If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" The engineer responded that he probably could, and wound up reducing the boot time of the operating system by 28 seconds.

Now I turn the question to you: "If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to implement these lessons and improve your blog?" I'm serious.

Your marketing blog can save a business and a livelihood. Your personal finance blog can save a family from going under. Your fitness blog can save a life (literally).

So what are you waiting for? Get started. Right now.

Greg Digneo teaches businesses how to get more traffic and increase online sales in 30 days. Click here to download his free ebook How to Generate 100 Sales Leads in 30 Days.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

5 Lessons Steve Jobs Could Teach You About Creating a Popular Blog

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Vetting Your Writers: Why It’s Hard to Find the Creative Needle in the Haystack of Crap

Posted: 23 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT

Last fall Demand Media announced they were cutting back on the number of freelancers they were paying to churn out thousands of articles for their websites. Until then they had been well known for their “content farm,” but the company decided to shift their focus to “more targeted categories and other forms of content such as slide shows, video series and feature articles.” They wanted to build on existing content and make it better rather than continue to pump out a bunch of new basic content. The move is unsurprising–at the end of the day, I feel that the quality of content is more important than the quantity, which is why it is so damn hard to find halfway decent writers.

For a while, the company I work for tasked me with hiring freelance writers to contribute original content for one of our websites (I’ve previously blogged about the vetting process and have also given some tips to freelance writers applying for blogging jobs). It was quite a learning experience, to say the least–I started with a huge pool of writers and whittled a vast majority of them down because most of them weren’t great.

Some of the biggest problems with finding quality talent include:

1. Bad writers, even if they’re free or cheap, still won’t be worth your time. If you don’t care about the quality of the piece you’re about to publish on your site and don’t mind broken or improperly sized images, numerous typos, and formatting issues, then feel free to skip this part. I, however, like having a semi-professional looking website and think shoddy work reflects poorly on the company. The amount of time I was saving by not writing an article was wasted on having to spend an hour cleaning up weaker writers’ work–fixing typos, resizing images, breaking huge walls of text into easily readable chunks, tweaking confusing sentences, etc.

2. Your expectations often won’t be met. A good pitch or a foolproof idea is easily ruined by the execution. I can’t tell you how many times I got excited by an idea proposed by one of my freelance writers, only to have the concept pretty much ruined by weak content and a poor end result. I’d try to guide the writer to a better end product by making some suggestions, but I eventually found out that poor writers, no matter how much guidance or feedback you give them, still can’t spin gold as effortlessly as a naturally gifted one. Eventually I’d cut these writers loose because although I liked their ideas, their execution was consistently lacking and it did me no good to essentially rewrite their work (see Point #1) every time to meet standards.

3. Weak writers lack a voice. Think of your favorite writers. They all have a distinct voice or tone–you could practically pick it out of a crowd or correctly attribute something they’ve anonymously written because you know it so well. Good writers have a natural voice you can quickly pick up and become attracted to. You can feel their frustration, their anger, their humor, their elation. Bad writers, on the other hand, feel stale and stilted. Every sentence feels like you’re running into a wall–it feels disjointed and impersonal. I can tell when a weak writer is unable to establish a voice and when one is trying too hard to force a voice, at which point it just comes off as fake and over the top. You can’t force natural talent.

4. Good writers can be bad, too. Writing is a difficult discipline that requires consistency, even when you don’t feel like it. I’ll be the first to raise my hand and confess to being lazy and uninspired from time to time–my guest posts go through dry spells and my personal blogs occasionally collect dust. It’s difficult, therefore, to rely on contributors for good consistent work. I had a lot of good writers who would go AWOL for a while before occasionally emerging with a good piece of content. Good writing is hard to come by, but so is frequent writing. Combine those two and you’ve practically got a mythical creature that a few rednecks have sworn they’ve seen but leaves you only partially convinced.

It’s extremely difficult to find contributors who you can trust, who won’t link out to shady sites or steal images, who know how your content is supposed to look and feel and can abide by those rules, who can bust out insightful, well-written content in a unique and compelling voice on a regular basis. You can find thousands of writers who would jump at the chance to build their portfolio and write for your site. But ask yourself whether it’s worth your time and your audience’s time to rely on mediocre or so-so content just for the sake of having it. Try to find that mythical Sasquatch writer or someone as close to it as possible, because when you do find him or her, you’ll have a rare talent indeed and your site will benefit greatly.

photo credit: t_buchtele via photo pin cc

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