We all know that having a blog is an important part of keeping our audience (perhaps our customers) up to date with recent news and anything we’ve found and want to share. Sometimes the problem becomes a lack of time, ambition, or inspiration while writing. There are a lot of tips we’ve collected for helping to write blog posts (and write better posts too) that we would like to share.

In this article we’re going to discuss some recent tips from 2010 to help with keeping on top of your blog but without sacrificing time taken from your normal life. It can be difficult to keep up with the changes when everything is changing so fast; Google is working on rolling out a new feature for Google Maps in some locations, by hiring out local freelancers to capture 3D panoramic photographs from the interior of businesses who agree. One of our clients from the Twin Cities in Minnesota opted-in, this link currently opens a street-view  of the storefront, imagine being able to walk in the store from there! Knowing about tools and techniques like creating and managing Facebook pages, connecting with Twitter, installing and configuring the countless widgets and plugins available, creating applications, and the benefits of each depending on usage will all factor into your chances of success.

Image via Wikipedia

For example: We just installed a plug-in that helps us find related information about the subject we post, it comes from a service called Zemanta. They offer a great way to help you find related graphics/photos and articles, with the WordPress plugin you can start writing your post and additional content appears on the right which is related to what you have typed. The plugin also automatically determines which text could be linked up and will even apply the links for you!

So for those who haven’t watched the video, it is a talk given by Tim Ferriss called “How to Blog without Killing Yourself”, he posted the video on his own blog on a post called How to Build a High-Traffic Blog Without Killing Yourself which contains a list of the topics below the embed. I highly recommend that you read that post and the rest of his blog (and don’t forget to buy his book, The 4-Hour Workweek).

Do The Math

If you’re blogging away and wondering why it’s not working out, the honest truth is that you’re not doing something (perhaps many things) right. Let’s say you’re spending an hour each day writing posts even posting every day; I need only to quote Lincoln to explain why there is much more to having a successful blog than writing posts and getting back-links.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Paying attention to statistics is crucial, your understanding and usage of the information available about the reaction of your visitors will determine your chances at success. First you must determine key performance indicators (KPI) and increase your ability to monitor them. On August 30th 2010 Tim Ferriss wrote up an article called Blogging by Numbers explaining this much better than I could, he’s obviously spent a lot of time learning about the factors of success and how to get great results in efficient ways.

So the point here is that every little thing matters when you’re studying, but what you end up focusing on is what counts most.

Word of mouth is one of those key factors you should be thinking about, this is what proper usage of social networking tools is all about, this socializing process is what moves knowledge about you to those who don’t know already and from a trusted source. You need to provide a way for people to pass along information about you easily; another great WordPress plugin that we use is called Disqus, which is a replacement for the built-in / standard commenting. With Disqus you can quickly get a wide range of great tools that your visitors can use, from a simple “like” to a fully automated trackback system. Check it out today if you haven’t already.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 50 Blogging Tips for Beginners (quickonlinetips.com)
• Zemanta is for Bloggers (baconbytes.wordpress.com)
• WordPress Speed and Optimization Guide (thesocialmediaguide.com.au)
• 3 Habits to Avoid While Writing a Blog Post (shoutmeloud.com)
• Top 10 Tips To Promote Your Blog Using Social Media! (socialmediadudes.com)
• 4 Tips to Create More Blog Content in Less Time (quickonlinetips.com)
• 6 Useful Tips to Brand your Blog (shoutmeloud.com)
• Zemanta Makes Your Blogging More Efficient (tesarn.blogspot.com)
• Disqus Rolls Out Improved Global Profiles, Community Box, And More (techcrunch.com)

“The Writer” had that vision, and a designer that knew just how to put it all into characters with unique illustrations.

AllStruck took those illustrations to the code ninja’s to be put on a 100% animated Flash website, but without losing the ability for mobile and other non-Flash browsers to get the same content. By using the WordPress as a framework for the standard site and pulling the content from here for display in the Flash version, The Wine Thief got the best of both worlds.

Take a look for yourself, visit WineThief.net now!

All while completely updating the website and various other parts of their St. Paul MN store, The Wine Thief recently broke out to the other half of the building with the all new Ale Jail, and yes we designed that into the site too! Check out the Ale Jail today at AleJail.com!

Seth Godin’s book The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) peaked at #5 on The New York Times Best Seller List. We consider it to be required reading, and it’s well worth the $10 for any entrepreneur, marketer, manager, or even non business types. If you’re familiar and agree with the 10,000 hour rule, you’ll be comfortable absorbing the material, yet Seth makes this quite clear and throws the words of people like Vince Lombardi – who said, “Quitters never win and winners never quit” – back in their face with real world advice related to real world examples; To counter Lombardi, Godin starts off his book to say, “[Not quitting is] bad advice. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.”

What better example could be set than to release Creative Commons material to introduce the concepts in the book freely, download the PDF (Pushing Through the dip: How to Become the Best in the World) now, print it, give it away, anything but sell it.

via Mozilla Labs builds add-on to bring address book to Firefox.

It’s true, Facebook.com is growing popularity, experiencing a boom in growth (73.27% over the last year as reported by Compete) and is surpassing Google.com in overall traffic (page views). The entire article is no more than one paragraph and a visual graph representing Facebook’s traffic compared with Google’s, of course with Facebook taking the lead just recently. Take a look…

Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week. Facebook.com recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.

via Hitwise Intelligence – Heather Dougherty – North America.

Where is the real information here? I see yes, Facebook beats Google, great headline. But where is the story? Where are the facts? Experian Hitwise spoon feeds their data as a little teaser to get you on their website, but without more information this news doesn’t really provide the insight into what is happening recently with both Google and Facebook. There is no reason to get into specifics about business models and visitor types even, obviously this all takes a large part in these statistics, but Experian first of all should at least be providing more numbers and a little more explanation about the origin of this data (at least link to a data-sheet explaining the process for gathering these numbers). Even an experienced reader is likely to ask; What do these numbers mean exactly? Even today saying “Visits” to someone can be misleading. Even experts differ on opinion sometimes about the meaning of several website statistics terms; Visit / page view, visitor, unique visitor, hit… obviously this new field has some confusion about it that needs to be sorted out, also exhibited in the confusion over the term SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

I don’t expect every news article referencing web statistics to give a complete guide to online marketing in text (a link wouldn’t hurt) but there is a minimal amount of material required for any article to be considered anything more than simply smarmy sales technique. It’s understood that Experian would not want to publish anything referencing a competitor, especially when there is so much variation in website statistics from source to source and so much confusion in web analytics.

Take a look for yourself if you’re looking for real facts, you could spend your entire life studying the many stories behind just the last year of the growth of Facebook. Important facts are sometimes hidden between the lines in the graph, one of the many reasons I love to use Google Trends to see deeper into the popularity of anything. There are also many other sources of comparison data to the Hitwise statistics, I often use Alexa and Compete for a quick analysis of any large scale websites. If you look at any of these tools make sure you look around, viewing any one graph alone can be deceiving, make sure to see all of the statistics and you should quickly learn the following things; Facebook.com has been beating Google.com at keeping visitors on their site for a very long time now, Google.com still receives more unique visitors than Facebook.com, and finally, comparing Google.com to Facebook.com is like comparing Microsoft Word to Adobe Photoshop… Google.com began as a search engine although it has become the hub for a wide variety of personal and business internet tools (online documents, email, statistics, and more) and actually has separate pages appear for different countries (google.ca, google.cn, etc.). Facebook on the other hand began as a social network, they have been doing this longer than Google (orkut) and have always been ahead of them in market share for this field, not in any way competing with Google’s core products until recently.

Now we are at the best part, this is what the story should have been about (really this is what it’s about no matter how deep you look at it); Facebook is stealing a market, and that market is online advertising. Basically there are two things these two companies are focusing on; Acquiring large volumes of traffic (and keeping them engaged as long as possible), and learning as many useful details about the visitors as possible in order to build algorithms and software to perform the most accurate product-to-customer matching possible for business customer use. In case you didn’t know already, Facebook has not only gathered a lot of visitors and kept them online, but they keep track of a lot of great data about everyone (age, sex, location, etc.) and open it up for easy access to customers looking to place purchased advertisements.

In conclusion, Facebook is unique in how it requires users to log in to view most of the content and doesn’t offer first time visitors search or any other functions before creating an account and logging in. By creating a feeling of more privacy (and other practices) Facebook fosters more user growth than on most sites. Facebook has truly taken the idea of sharing software in the same way we share our other media (text, audio, images, and video) and the level of interactivity experienced by Facebook users is unlike that of Google in many ways.

Facebook remaining a closed system (in appearance and philosophy) and not offering a true content delivery network (as Blogger would foster public communication, Facebook fosters communication withing the FB social network), both helps and hurts it. Facebook can single out visitors more easily, a great thing for advertisers. How this hurts Facebook is in sharing, requiring API usage rather than using RSS syndication as a primary source of sharing information slows information and will lead to increased bottlenecks for Facebook and its users. The real bottleneck will be in managing the network, Facebook’s proprietary system requires more engineering time than does Google’s usage of existing and open standards which are managed primarily by third-parties and often by the community.

Being trapped in work recently I’ve only been keeping up with these services by using them and reading usage policies and other company provided documentation, but I’ve over-heard much of the chatter over Facebook’s advertising service and the better experience users are having with it compared to Google AdWords (if you wonder where Google makes money, see AdWords). I’m not going to compare these two services in any way which imposes the ideology that each are similar enough to group into the same Class. Facebook ads have emerged and grown rapidly in a market that is very much different than that of Google’s AdWords (and AdSense). I call these public and private online advertising, since the Facebook system is primary a closed login-based community any advertising placed there can be much more targeted than with Google AdWords, while AdWords will reach a wider audience.

Hector gives a great speech that details his personal life and background, as well as his amazing work with AMD, a program called 50×15 with which they intend to connect 50% of the world population by 2015 using internet and related technologies. They are developing a product which you can learn more about in the video or on the 50×12 Foundation’s website.

You can draw slices in Adobe CS4 after a mockup has been approved, and use the Save for Web & Devices window to fine tune the name and type of each slice, as well as select the format for each image slice (png, jpg, etc.). For more in depth instruction and details see the Adobe help article.

The example graphic here shows a blank website template that has been sliced into the appropriate portions needed in the XHTML/CSS layout code. Typically we create our mockups for a design like this in Illustrator, and being able to then clean-up, finalize, slice, and save, right in Illustrator, is certainly a handy process to know about.

Here comes CS5, are you ready?