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Firefox Extension That Enhances Your Blog

Are you working smarter or harder? Well today I am going to show you how to blog smarter. What does this mean exactly? I have always found that being organized have having my tools close at hand has always increased my productivity.

I just started using a fantastic little FREE Firefox addon that automatically gives me related links, photos, articles and tags as I type my blog posts. I use it to enhance the quality content and tags in my blog.

No more searching for related information to add to my posts. It appears right on my wordpress admin post page. Let me show you…

How to I get this? Easy! Head on over to Zemanta.com and click on the Download Zemanta Firefox Extension button.

How I Use Zemanta

I do not use the “Links” they provide in my blog posts. Why? It creates “leakage” on my site. I prefer for my readers to stay on my blog and read me articles. I have no control over what someone else puts on their site. I do use them to find more information to write about.

Secondly, I only use photos that are either licensed as Public Domain or I create them myself. Why? Because if they are Public Domain I don’t have to post a link to the source like I would with the other images.

As far as articles go, it is great that they do research for you and give you different articles related to your blog post. I often visit them and read what others are saying about the topic. It’s a treasure trove of ideas for your own blog.

I LOVE that they give me tags for my blog posts. I just need to click on the related tags and it does the work for me. This is awesome! I’ve been using tags since the beginning; but I always felt like I was overlooking some tags…but which ones? Now I know and can include them with the clickety-click of my mouse!

The BEST Part

Let me tell you the BEST part of Zemanta. Above all, this is the main reason I use it… It leaves a little symbol at the bottom of your blog posts that looks something like this:

This little button gets me more backlinks than articles posted to an article directory! However, this only works if you have really high quality blog content.

How it works: Someone visits your blog and falls in love with your posts. He or she clicks on the REBLOG button and is presented with a choice of different quotes from your blog post that they can post on their blog in exchange for a backlink to your post. You get to contribute to someone else’s success and you receive a back link in return. That’s a win/win situation!

This does not mean they get to copy your post. They can only choose one paragraph to quote and you gain a backlink and some free publicity and advertising for your blog.

So if you don’t use Zemanta for any other purpose, use it as link bait! Get your backlinks and increase your search engine rankings.

What are Backlinks and Why are They Important?

Google and other search engines often base your rankings depending on how popular your blog is. The more backlinks you have the more important your blog looks. You want to gain as many HIGH QUALITY backlinks as you can.

Blogging Economics and Disaster Recovery

By SoftwareGirl

Are you getting good value for the money you are spending to keep your blog up and running? Are you overspending on tools for the position your list is in this month?

Hosting can run anywhere between $0.01 (yes, you read that right) and $20.00 per month per website. An autoresponder can cost anywhere between free (yes, you read that right) and $75.00 per month or more depending on your list size. So if you’re beginning, do you think positively and buy the largest package available believing that you will grow exponentially this month or do you sign up for what you need today and upgrade as you need it?

Are there other factors to consider besides price in choosing your services? Some of the factors that might be worth considering would be ease of use, flexibility, support, availability, scalability and speed. Does the tool do what you need it to? If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter how much it costs – it’s not worth your time to mess with it!

For a beginner, support is essential! Do you enter a ticket into a help desk system to be answered …. someday (which is not a day of the week) or does a human with a pulse answer your request? When I’m learning something new, I find it to be quite nice to have a friendly voice on the other end of the phone. I don’t mind waiting 24 hours to get an answer; however, I’d like an acceptable answer within a reasonable time frame. If I’m paying a premium price, I’m expecting great service!

Quality in hosting is many times determined by service availability and speed. Did you know that you can get hosting that has 99.9% availability for less than $5 USD per month? That’s not the introductory offer.

What does 99.99% availability mean? Why is that important? Availability is defined by uptime. I.e. the time between failures. It is dependent upon

Downtime and
Recovery Time

Downtime is the amount of time that the system is unavailable due to either failures or scheduled maintenance. Recovery time is the average time it takes to recover from failures. This includes time for detection, isolation and resolution. This is important if you are expecting your website/blog/store to be open 24x7x365 days.

Well, if we consider a 24×7 environment like that of eBay, Amazon, etc then four nines would mean that in a year the total downtime + recovery time is approximately 52 minutes and 30 seconds. And three nines would mean downtime + recovery time of 8 hours and 45 minutes.

Simple math

3 nines –> (365×24) – .999(365×24) = 8760 -8751.24 = 8.76 hours = 8 hours and 45 minutes

2 nines -> (365×24) – .99(365×24) = 8760 -8672.4 = 87.6 hours = roughly 3.5 days!

1 nine – > (365×24) – .99(365×24) = 8760 -7884 = 876 hours = more than one month!!!

Just because you expect that a service will be available 24x7x365 doesn’t mean that it is available for that long. You need to look at your contract. Maybe it is only 24x5x365 (big difference)! That would allow for the system to be down for about 3 months out of a year without a raised eyebrow.

Will Google know who you are if your blog is offline for over a month? Do you have someone technical in your corner who is able to respond in case something technical happens or do you just have a helpdesk e-mail system that will be answered…someday? If your website/blog/store is your sole source of income either now or in the future, this would be considered a mission critical system.

Mission critical systems still fail but when they do there are knowledgeable people available to fix the system 24 hours a day everyday and give you an update of what is going on and when difficult decisions need to be made, they are knowledgeable enough to give you all the information for you to make a good business decision. Even if that means assisting you to move your website/blog/store from your backup (you DO have one, right?) to a different platform until theirs becomes available again.

For your autoresponder, think about what you are currently doing with your system today, especially if you are just starting out and don’t have that large of a list. It is possible to use a system to send 12,000 emails per month to a list of 2,000 subscribers completely free! If you are paying $20 – 75 per month to e-mail 10 people or even 50 people, it may not be the best use of your money this month.

Are you using your autoresponder as part of your membership program(s)? If your autoresponder went offline this afternoon, would that put a kink in your systems? I know it would kink my systems a bit! Once an issue is detected, it should take a very short period of time for you to switch to a different method of communication for your lists and programs. Not all systems that are readily at hand can send out large amounts of e-mail all at once.

The time to identify how to recover from such circumstances is before the issue arises so that you can respond calmly and orderly. Be aware of your contracts and use your resources wisely.

The Great Blog Checklist

By SoftwareGirl

We’ve all heard of blogs. There are free blogs. There are paid blogs. Blogs have been around for about 10 years. How are blogs judged? Are they judged by the number of unique visitors, amount of income they generate, amount of time a reader spends on the site, value they provide to readers? Are there different features that need to be included to achieve a given goal? What is it that makes a blog great? I’ve combined a list of basic elements that will launch your blog above the rest.

1. Create value for your reader! Your reader is usually looking for something in particular when they click upon your site. Determine what they are looking for by posting articles and watching to see what that does to your traffic and providing more if the traffic increases significantly. Provide the reader the ability to leave comments as they can provide valuable insight in this manner.

2. Use keywords to attract readers. Using Google Adwords, you can determine valuable keywords to include in your articles to drive traffic to your site.

3. Provide resources to your readers. What a valuable resource is to your reader will vary depending upon the niche chosen. Typically checklists, templates, diagrams, how to series are great resources.

4. Keep the blog active by posting articles every 2-3 days at a minimum. Blogging is not a set it and forget it method of making money. A lot of blogs are literal electronic ghost towns. It is very apparent to the reader when the date is not on the article and the information is outdated or they visit several times and nothing has changed in the last week or so. I’ve been guilty of this myself; however, a good way to work around this is to write several articles at once and schedule them to be released during your busy periods so that the site is still fresh and alive even though you may be basking on the beach in Maui.

5. Give something to your reader and provide an opt-in box. Provide the reader with valuable content and ask them to provide their name and e-mail so that you can open the communication channel to include e-mail as well as online communication.

6. Use Google Adsense. Google Adsense is a great way to earn a few pennies here and there to offset the cost of hosting. While you cannot click on your own Adsense ads, you can give others some “Google Love” by clicking on their ads. It only takes a moment and it helps the other guy out.

7. Use video. This is where blogs beat books hands down. Use video on your blog to further establish a connection with your reader. Video is a great way to convey your personality to your reader and I’ve seen statistics saying that it boosts readership by over 300%!

8. Know what sizes and colors to use when placing ads on your blog. In this particular case, size, placement and color do matter! Humans are sensitized to know what is an ad and typically will not click on it unless they are looking for that particular item. Ads within the body of the post should be 336×280 or 300×250 for best results. Ads at the bottom of the post should be 468×60 or 234×60 for best results. The leaderboard display panel which places advertising unit above your posts is best at 728×90 pixels. Colors of ads should blend into your theme, have no border (color FFFFFF) and the link needs to be blue because most humans are trained to believe that all links are blue.

9. Know who your competition is and what their keywords are. Use Google search to find some of your keywords. The blogs that show up in the top 5 results are your competition. Use SpyFu to determine not only what their keywords are but also for which AdWords they are currently paying. It’s a great tool!

10. Personalize the reader experience. Make the reader’s experience fun and valuable and you will create a great following. Create a contest to add some excitement. Recommend resources they may not be aware of. When writing speak to your reader as you would a friend at the coffee shop to create a closer connection. If you’re having fun chances are your readers are enjoying their experience as well!