all the news that's fit to blog, tweet & post

I hate getting behind in updating my blog.  I really do. But the good news is that I have had a number of posts on other sites in the interim and several posts which are still waiting to be published.

The ones which have gone live in the past few weeks include posts on WebDesigner Depot, GigCoin and Technorati. One of the things I love about writing these posts is doing the research and learning about a particular topic, and of course, I love the writing.

In several posts on GigCoin, I put out requests for information on HARO and had the opportunity to hear from 40+ business people who have run Facebook contests, created Facebook ad campaigns and use Facebook pages for their businesses. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from the research for these posts and from the contributors.

• 9 Steps for Getting Started with a Facebook Page for Your Business
• Is a Facebook Contest or Sweepstakes Right for Your Business
• Reflections on Facebook Company Pages: What the New Changes Mean for Businesses
• Facebook Ads: What You Need to Know to Create a Successful Campaign

My post on WebDesigner Depot on The Art of Facebook Page Design was very enjoyable to do. It was a round-up of the 50 brand Facebook pages with the most fans and a look at how they’ve created the artwork for their pages. Very eye-opening!

And, I had the opportunity to read Phil Simon’s new book, The New Small, and wrote a review of the book which was published on Technorati. The New Small is a refreshing take on technology and small business, and portrays how passionate people can be about their work when technology truly supports their efforts.

There are several posts already submitted, which will be published in the next couple of weeks and more posts in process. I’ll keep you posted on the new titles.

What are you working on?

In a recent post, 26 Twitter Tips for Enhancing Your Tweets, I published on Social Media Examiner, I wrote, “Almost anyone these days can throw together 140 characters and call it a tweet. But to use Twitter for maximum business impact there are many tried and true content sources ready to be used.published a post on how to use good content for your tweets, everything from A to Z.”

I use Twitter in a variety of ways everyday both for myself and on behalf of clients. I post original 140 character tweets and do a fair amount of re-tweeting, too. When I tweet, I generally look for facts, links and keywords which I think will be of interest.

Here are three recent tweets and why I posted them:

1. In the first example, I came across a study about how shoppers are expected to be relying on mobile phones more this year.  Interesting.

Study: Shoppers to rely more on mobile phones this year http://sbne.ws/r/651A

2. This next tweet is about Vaseline and how they reached out to bloggers who had been already been writing about dry skin and asked them to write for them. A friend forwarded it to me—knowing I’d be interested in seeing how some companies are actively monitoring and reading keywords of relevance to their products and services. I decided to share it further.

Goes to show, some companies are listening. Vaseline’s Ad Campaign Against Dry Skin – http://nyti.ms/cyDL10

3. And in third example, the keywords “infographics”, “marketers” and “social media” were germane in my decision to post this tweet. These are three words which come up frequently in my blog posts and social networking updates.

Excellent Infographic from @flowtown–How Marketers are Utilizing Social Media in 2010. http://fb.me/NIB59Fcn

Check out the post on Social Media Examiner for 26 Twitter content ideas.

What are some examples of why you tweet, what you tweet? Share your thoughts in the comment box below. You can also follow me on Twitter.

Twitter image credit

Whether you’re newcomer to online writing or have been in the field for a while there are many great insights to glean from the book, Writing for the Internet: A Guide to Real Communication by Craig Baehr and Bob Schaller.  The book addresses issues applicable to writers of all types of online content, but as a blogger I found it particularly helpful to apply the messages to the writing of blog posts.

The authors point out that there are many challenges for writers of online content and that by being aware and paying attention to the readability and usability of your material, the overall experience for readers will be improved. For purposes of this post, I’m going to stay focused more specifically on four good practices for bloggers to adhere to:

1) Remember content is not limited to the written word.

Content is composed of mixed media forms, and it is the Internet writer’s challenge to make them work together seamlessly.  This means that including images, video and audio clips, and staples such as hyperlinks can all work in sync with one another within a blog post.

This might be the longest break I’ve ever taken from blogging. Scratch that. It IS the longest break!

Even though I haven’t sat down to compose posts now for a couple of weeks, I’ve found myself musing on topics and actually writing the content in my head. I’m always looking for ideas–in the media, person-to-person exchanges, as I’m perusing bookstores and magazine racks, online and offline. Why? Simply, because I love it.

When I first discovered blogging a few years ago it had come at time when I was beginning to take myself more seriously as a non-fiction essay writer and blogging became a natural extension of that writing. I’ve become enamored of the medium. The short form. The casual writing style. The ability to link and include photos and videos. To have an opportunity to interact with readers and other writers.

I’m still writing creative non-fiction essays and in fact, I’m working on a new piece simultaneously as I work on a longer blog post for a client. Blogging helps my non-fiction writing and vice versa.

I had to smile when I saw the link to Don Martelli’s post, Five Tips to Kill Bloggers Block, in my Google Alert the other day. As Don says, “If you have a blog, you’ve been there before.” I took it as an omen that I was supposed to be cracking my blogging block wide open.

As I write this Labor Day post, I’m thinking about all the ways the Fall brings change and ramping up in day-to-day schedules which were more laid back and on a summer hiatus. I’m ready to get back to the work which has fallen (I have to admit) a little to the wayside in these last days of summer. I’m hoping that the time my writing ideas have been spent simmering on low will be ready to come to a full and fruitful boil.

Wishing you a Happy Labor Day and Happy Blogging!

Article first published as The Blog is Alive and Well on Technorati.

If you ask me, the last two lines of “An empire gives way” an article in the June 24th issue of The Economist, about the state of the blogosphere, sounds ominous. The piece cites research from media-research firm, Nielsen, on how traffic to blog-hosting sites, Blogger and WordPress, are stagnating and how by contrast, Facebook’s traffic grew by 66% last year and Twitter’s by 47%.  Okay, I get it–but to be honest– I was alarmed by the article’s projection: “Where will that end? Perhaps in a single, hugely long blog posting about the death of blogs.”

Can Facebook, Twitter and blogs play nicely together? Can they co-exist without one sending the other to their Internet grave? I think so. I think the forms compliment one another and feed off of each other very well.

Blogger, Cory Doctorow, writes, “I still blog 10-15 items a day, just as I’ve done for 10 years now on Boing Boing. But I also tweet and retweet 30-50 times a day. Almost all of that material is stuff that wouldn’t be a good fit for the blog – material I just wouldn’t have published at all before Twitter came along. But a few of those tweets might have been stretched into a blogpost in years gone by, and now they can live as a short thought.”

I share links to material I find valuable on Facebook and use the comment field to make a brief point or to ask a question and initiate a discussion. On Twitter, I often re-tweet when I’m reading an article on a blog or online newspaper. It’s a quick way to say to Twitter followers, here’s something I think you’ll like. But when it comes to covering a topic in more detail, there’s still nothing in my opinion that beats the blog post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Poet, Mark Strand

Poet Mark Strand, former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner, was presented the New England Poetry Club’s Golden Rose Award today in a well attended reading at the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge, MA.

Mark Strand signing copies of his books following the reading.

In the new book, The Yahoo! Style Guide, bloggers are advised to “write for the world.” We’re reminded that the web is a worldwide medium and “site visitors probably come from more than one country and more than one culture. Collectively, they probably speak several languages.”

So what’s a blogger to do? Read the full post on Impressions through Media.

Article first published as The Yahoo! Style Guide: Write Digital Content Everyone Will Read on Technorati.

There’s a lot of information packed into The Yahoo! Style Guide a new book from Yahoo!. While other style guides and manuals have kept the topics of writing, user-interface, webpage coding, and SEO separate–The Yahoo! Style Guide brings it all together–making it a one-stop-guide for every member of your digital team.

One of the most useful chapters in the book is on copywriting for search engine optimization (SEO), and includes tips about keywords, links, page titles and metatags. People and search engines don’t scan pages in the exact same way but there are some similarities to keep in mind, e.g. both need to know: what a page is about, what’s important, options for acquiring more information.

There are excellent suggestions too, about how to “write for the world.” We’re reminded that the Web is a worldwide medium and “site visitors probably come from more than one country and more than one culture. Collectively, they probably speak several languages. It’s a good practice to make the text on your site clear to as many people as possible.” Five best practices we’re urged to put into practice are: 1) Keep the sentence structure simple, 2) Include “signposts”: words that help readers see how the parts of a sentence relate, 3) Eliminate ambiguity, 4) Avoid uncommon words and nonliteral usages, and 5) Rewrite text that doesn’t translate literally.

You can read through the style guide from beginning to end and use it as a reference when stumped with a punctuation question, wondering how to write a perfect title for your email newsletter or streamlined text for mobile devices. The book is filled with loads of great tips. One of my favorites is on editing with screen-reading software so you can hear the page read aloud to you. (In Windows, Narrator or Ease of Use in Windows Vista and on the Mac, Text-to-Speech.)

The Yahoo! Style Guide is also available online with a companion website and includes additional resources and updates. You’ll find a good companion in The Yahoo! Style Guide.

Article first published as 10 Steps for Writing a New Blog Post on Technorati.

Recently I was at a get-together with a group of writers. It was a beautiful June day and the conversation took a sudden, unexpected turned to the topic of gardens. It seemed that everyone except me was an experienced gardener and not only that, they all had a great love for gardening. When it became apparent that I wasn’t joining in the conversation, a friend suggested that I tended to my blog and writing the same way others tended to their garden. Hmm, I thought. Interesting. What is the connection between planting a garden and writing a blog post?

I did what I often do in situations like this and turned to Google where I discovered this post by Marie Iannotti,with ten steps for how to start a new garden— and discovered much to my surprise—there are great similarities. So, with that in mind, I offer you gardening as an analogy for how to write a new blog post:

1. Start Small: Like the backyard gardener your post doesn’t have to be that big (or long, in this case). A blog post isn’t a white paper, a research report or a treatise. It can be a  few lines and possibly a few paragraphs. Some suggest keeping the word count from 250-500. If you decide to write a longer post you can always format so the post will be more readable e.g. chunked content in lists, shorter sentences, utilizing “read more” to move the content to a second page.

2. Evaluate and Choose a Site: This step is akin to choosing your topic. This can be influenced by questions your customers have asked you, conversations you’ve heard discussed in the blogosphere, something you’ve been thinking about writing, a response to another post which inspired your thinking.

3. Check the Soil: I think of this step as being similar to searching the internet to see what else has been written about the topic and coming to the topic with knowledge and your fresh perspective.

4. Prepare the Bed: Not too dissimilar from taking the time to read the posts and giving yourself ample time to incorporate and synthesize what you’ve read.

5. Choosing What You’d Like to Grow: After reading posts on the topic now comes time to narrow down what you’d like to write on the subject, what points you’d like to make.

6. Planting: This step is really a lot like the actual act of writing. It’s the time you spend composing the post, tending to the words, asking yourself if the words are optimized for search engines. Paying attention to grammar, punctuation and how well the sentences read.

7. Mulching: Ah, this sounds a lot like editing to me. What can you pull? What’s not necessary to be there in the post. Even though it started out as a healthy line it may ultimately crowd the post. When it doubt, take it out. This step also includes checking your links and spell checking.

8. Label your Plants and Keep Garden Records: This gardening step makes sense to the writer in me since blog posts require tags and assigning categories. It’s also similar to keep records or in mind what posts did better than others. That’s where looking over your analytics on a regular basis will pay off.

9. Garden Maintenance: A blog post does require some work after it has been written and published. The maintenance assures that people will find the post which requires tweeting it out, updating your facebook page, submitting to directories. In other words helping to promote your piece as best you can.

10. Enjoy: My gardener friends like to think of this as “stopping to smell the roses.” Hopefully bloggers take the time to kick back and enjoy reading and responding to comments, and seeing the viral nature of their posts.

Image via Wikipedia