“5 Ways to Harness Your Online Reputation For Blogging Success” plus 1 more

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5 Ways to Harness Your Online Reputation For Blogging Success Posted: 27 Jan 2013 11:02 AM PST This guest post is by Valerie Wilson. Quick: Picture that bad choice for a prom or bridesmaid’s dress years ago. Or the haircut that your mom made you get—the one that looked like a Tupperware bowl had been placed on your head. The one that didn't go over very well at school. Some memories do last forever, don't they? This is true. But, hey, they are just memories. All good. No real damage, right? Quicker: Remember one rumor that floated around your high school years ago. Who was doing what with whom>?! Remember how it spread like wild fire? And how old are you now? How long has that rumor stuck with you? Those were rumors. No proof! But your Facebook political blurt-out a few years ago—or last week? A scathing reaction you made or to which you responded? Or—the biggie—a "little comment" about a previous account or client or employer with whom you worked? Brace yourself. That "just having a bad day" comment can have a long-lasting effect. That's the stuff that can be cut and pasted and repeated and posted—everywhere. Don't let that happen to you. The good news is that there are some strong strategies you may employ to improve your online reputation: Always tell the truth. Remember those rules you learned as a kid? This was one of the most important ones. To increase your readership, don’t embellish. Your blog will succeed if you establish this intention. For example, International Growth does a great job of establishing credibility. Build positive relationships. When you blog, you're building relationships with people and organizations. Be aware of building as many of these positive relationships as possible. Follow other blogs; they'll reply in kind. Appreciate them by directly commenting to them and about them, and keep the language fun and enjoyable. Upbeat blogs such as RapidBuyr’s exemplify this technique really well! Keep calm and carry on. If you do get that occasional negative poster, be sure to keep calm and carry on, just like the t-shirt says. The goal is to make it right. Do it quickly, or the number of your blog followers could dramatically decrease. Your reaction can and will be around for a long time. Act accordingly. One particular blog, Socialnomics, shares even more insight about how to handle negative feedback on your blog. Damage control can be painless if you pay attention to just a few key strategies. Go viral, go viral, and then … go viral. The more viral your blog goes, the stronger your reputation and following will be. Bigger is better. Get that blog up on every social media site you're connected to, and consider providing incentives for folks who "share" your blog through their own social media. An angel investor, Haig Kayserian, shares the story of how his blog went viral, and it's filled with great insights about how to get yours to do the same. "Word of mouth," move over. There's a new kid in town! Spread good karma! We all know that it just takes 30 seconds with the news, a newspaper, or a headline on your phone or tablet to remind you that life can present some pretty ugly stuff. Let people take a break from that by logging on and spending some time with your fun, upbeat, charismatic, and charming blog. When they like you, they'll follow you. Just ask Oprah. Or Jimmy Fallon. They got the goods!  A personal favorite for spreading good vibes is the Etsy blog. These five strategies can help you to attain and maintain a favorable reputation, and the great news is that there are now easy and efficient websites that you can use that will keep an eye on that reputation. Sites like Reputation.com are fantastic for addressing the challenge of tracking your online reputation. They can monitor and guide you through reputation management for your businesses and your blog, and they have figured out how to make it easy for you! That's a good day at the office right there! Valerie Wilson is a freelance writer who writes on a variety of topics including creating strong workplace communications and spreading some good karma. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger 5 Ways to Harness Your Online Reputation For Blogging Success

7 Reasons Your New Blog Visitors Bounce, and How to Stop Them Posted: 27 Jan 2013 05:05 AM PST This guest post is by Christian Schappel of Progressive Business Publications. The last thing you want is for people to land on your website or blog only to immediately hit the Back button. The vast majority of the time, it's an avoidable scenario. Something on the page turned the visitor off to make him or her move on to another site. To find out how likely your site or blog is to drive visitors away, consult this list of the top eight blunders that spark abandons and see if your blog guilty of any. Your blog requires browser plugins (from the start) Making visitors install new software just to access your site is the biggest turnoff of them all. From the time a person lands on your site, you've got about four seconds to connect with them, or they're gone. Four seconds! That's never going to happen if they have to install a plugin. If you have to require a plugin to show off a product—or to satisfy a web designer's lust to show off his or her creativity—don't require it on a landing page. Make sure your content gets visitors interested before you start making demands. It asks for a browser upgrade Unless someone's using a browser from 2004, they should be able to view your content without any major problems. It's great that you're on the cutting edge, but requiring a browser upgrade not only keeps you from connecting with visitors in four seconds or less, it sends the message that you're not compatible with them. It also tells them they've done something wrong. Test to make sure your site renders well on most semi-modern web browsers. It auto-plays multimedia Ever landed on a site that automatically started to play music and not reached for the volume controls to turn it down? Music, sound effects and video that play automatically trigger people's instincts to hit the Back button—even if just to spare those around them from the noise. If these elements are vital to your introduction, add a button that says, Click to listen, rather than just assuming visitors want to hear them. It presents long-winded introductory copy Of course you have to explain what you do, but at a certain point your introductory copy begins to have a negative effect. That point is at about 100 words. Large blocks of gray text look daunting, and people would rather move on to the next site or blog than read a novel about what it is you do. Even at 100 words, you've got to break copy up into bite-sized chunks. Then make sure you use bullet points to make the rest of your website and blog copy scannable and easy to digest. Finally, don't be afraid to use short, one-sentence paragraphs. It doesn’t provide full contact details Three things that need to be on your site/blog, without question: a phone number your email address a full postal address. If the first page visitors land on is missing one of these, it gives them the impression that you're hiding something. They begin to think, "Why don't they want me to call or email?" Bonus: Search engines love to see each of these elements on websites and blogs. They'll improve your organic search ranking—especially for local searches. It displays old dates Your site or blog may have been built pre-Y2K, but it shouldn't look like it. Check the bottom of your pages. Do any say copyright 2011? If so, it's time to update. The only places dates 2011 or older are acceptable are buried deep in your blog or news feed. Keeping an old copyright date tells visitors you're asleep at the wheel. It’s full of dead ends Horizontal rules and separators, changes in background color, and even too much white space reduce scannability. Remove anything that disrupts the flow of your blog. You don't want anything to disrupt a visitor's train of thought. You'll also want to check that each page of your site or blog links back to the homepage and contains navigation buttons of some kind. Pages that lead to a dead end and fail to include navigation options result in abandons. Is your blog guilty of any of these issues? Do you have high bounce rates? Tell us in the comments. Christian Schappel is the Editor-in-Chief of The Internet & Marketing Report newsletter, which is published by Progressive Business Publications (PBP) to provide marketers with news, research and ideas to help them increase revenue. Connect with PBP on LinkedIn. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger 7 Reasons Your New Blog Visitors Bounce, and How to Stop Them

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“Must-have Joomla Blog Extensions” plus 1 more

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Must-have Joomla Blog Extensions Posted: 26 Jan 2013 11:03 AM PST This guest post is by Gere Jordan of Holony Media. At first glance, Joomla isn't the best platform for blogging. Actually, it's probably not even in your top five. But that doesn't negate all the strengths Joomla brings to the table as a content management system. In fact, with the help of a few free extensions, it can rival some of the best blog platforms out there. Why even give Joomla a chance? I know what you're thinking: why on earth would you even consider blogging with Joomla? It lacks core functionality that comes standard with WordPress, so why not use WP in the first place? Well, without turning this post into a debate over the merits of Joomla versus WordPress, or any platform for that matter, let me just say this: Joomla is a powerful, mature content management system utilized by millions of websites worldwide. Millions of sites that would otherwise lack the ability to effectively run a blog. Knowing the revenue and marketing potential of blogging, I think we can at least agree that Joomla users deserve the chance to make a go of it using their platform of choice. And that's what this post is all about. Not everything is missing When you first set about creating a blog in Joomla, it takes a moment before you realize you're in trouble. Adding posts (called “articles” in Joomla), organizing them by category, setting up multiple users, adding a blog area, sharing your RSS feed—all of this stuff is easy. Once your first post is up, however, you start to notice things. Where's the comment form? Why isn't your profile information attached to my posts? How do users share your content? A few Google searches later and you realize the truth: Joomla lacks some very important blog functionality. Extensions to the rescue Thankfully, like WordPress, Joomla has a vibrant community of developers creating plugins to expand upon its standard capabilities. These plugins are collectively known as extensions, and they're easily accessible through the Joomla Extension Directory (JED). Let's dive into the JED and find the extensions we need to power our blog. Comments The most obvious blogging feature that Joomla lacks is the ability for visitors to comment on your posts. At present, several dozen comment extensions are available, spread across two categories in the extension directory. Two of the top-rated comment extensions that you can get for free are JComments and Komento. Both are compatible with Joomla 2.5 and have received the illustrious "community choice" designation given by the Joomla Magazine team. Author information Another standard blog function that Joomla lacks is the ability to display author information within articles. All that you can show by default is the author's name. This capability is built into WordPress, but whether it shows or not is dependent on your theme. To add this capability in Joomla, check out the Author Info Box plugin. It's free and compatible with Joomla 2.5. With this plugin, you can display a name, email address, image, and description for each author. Social sharing A final piece that's important for a successful blog is social sharing, which allows readers to easily share your articles via social media. This is something that a standard WordPress install lacks as well. As of this writing, two of the highest rated social sharing extensions in the JED are AddThis for Joomla and Facebook-Twitter-Google+1. Both are compatible with Joomla 2.5 and bring in the ability to share your articles via the most popular social channels. Joomla all-in-one blogging extensions If you're looking to turn Joomla into a blog without installing multiple extensions, there are a few products that will do the job. You can find most of them in the blog category in the Joomla Extensions Directory, but the best ones will cost you some cash. The best free all-in-one extension for blogging with Joomla is K2, which is an extremely powerful content construction component that gives you absolute control over your Joomla content. Not only does it do everything discussed in this post, it adds even more functionality like tags, item images, image galleries, user pages, and more. The only downside to K2 is that there's slightly more work involved to configure everything (nothing too difficult, just more time-intensive). However, if you're looking to do a lot of publishing on your site and need more flexibility with your content, K2 is definitely worth the extra effort. In conclusion Just like WordPress and other platforms, a lot of Joomla's power is derived from third-party extensions. By utilizing these extensions to add missing functionality, it's relatively easy to turn Joomla into a blogging powerhouse. Are there any noteworthy extensions that I am missing? Functionality that I left out? Please share in the comments! Gere Jordan is a web designer, SEO, and internet marketing professional at Holony Media, a digital consulting company he founded in 2006. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Must-have Joomla Blog Extensions

3 Lessons for Bloggers, Gangnam Style Posted: 26 Jan 2013 05:06 AM PST This guest post is by Ali Zia Khan of http://zedblogger.com. The PSY Gangnam Style video: you watched it … but missed some key points about blogging. That’s right, blogging. As bloggers, we can learn extremely useful lessons from things that are unrelated to our topic. Yesterday, I listened to the song. Replayed it, and replayed it again. I kept listening to the song for around half an hour. Why did I keep listening to the song? Was there a marketing trick hidden in it? I did some research and discovered three aspects of Gangnam Style which can be applied to your blog. 1. Innovate Innovation was a major reason for my addiction to the song. I’d never seen anyone getting inspiration from horse-back riders, and turn it into a dance move. That move is completely new, and people love new. Look at your blog. Look at your competition. Is there a difference between you? When you are the same as others, how can you stand out of the crowd? Innovation takes effort, but it doesn’t need to be difficult. Focus on doing something extra that can be loved by your readers. Yes, you will have to think hard, but if your mind is caught by the right idea, you will be on fire like Gangnam style… 2. Never take anything as insignificant, even if it’s small Another big cause of Gangnam Style’s popularity is Gangnam itself. Gangnam is a city in Korea which is not big. People never proclaim that they are from there. But now, everybody wants to be from Gangnam, and to have Gangnam Style. It’s a case of the small thing gone big. Most of the bloggers follow the big trends that are mostly created by the top blogs in their niche. Yes, those topics might be trending, but there is problem: everyone is writing about the same topic, so it’s difficult to get attention by writing on it. If you start writing about something else that is given little importance, you have the chance to create a new trend in your industry. This also leads back to innovation. The more innovative your idea is, the better your chances are that it will go viral. 3. Inspire the influencers PSY was not a big pop star before. The thing that took him to that position was the fact that he inspired the influencers in the music world, who spread it all over social media. You made an innovation. You’ve spent time thinking about it and developing it, but now you’re wasting that effort by keeping it limited to your blog only. Step outside your blog! Tell the big names in your niche. They might like it and tell their audience, too. In a nutshell: you can learn a lot of things from the famous song Gangnam Style including the importance of innovation, never under-estimating the power of small things, and the potential to inspire the influencers in your niche. Tell me now. Have you learned anything from Gangnam Style? This guest post is by Ali Zia Khan who gives blogging tips on his blog. Recently, he also started a guide about starting a blog and his eBook is launching on 20th February. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger 3 Lessons for Bloggers, Gangnam Style

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