If you read to the bottom of Mitch Joel's blog post, Watching Me Blog, then you know he issued a challenge to many of his blogging buddies. This post answers the challenge.
Brass Tack Thinking's Amber Naslund, shares her philosophy and how she puts a blog post together. I admire her process.
What I really learned from this is that our blog posts have a shelf life of about 48 hours. 
I have three online talk shows (podcasts) a week. On one of my shows, Syndicating Your Content, my podcasts are 15 mins long. Why? For SEO reasons. I can take a broad topic and chunk it down to 15 min segments. I have blogs that support my shows, so chunking my podcast allows me to link, internally, on my blog. Search engines love internal links. So what does that mean? Each week I create my blog post about the upcoming episode of the show. If the show is part of a series, I can provide links to the previous episodes in my blog posts. Those links would take my listener to any of the previous episodes through "internal links." Make sure when you use those internal links, you try to use one or two keywords in the phrase you'll be highlighting and linking. The search engines really love that! 
This piece was written by Mia Pearson.for The Globe and Mail.
To say Pinterest is growing quickly is an understatement.
Brands have opportunity to capitalize on new sites that celebrate online content in a personal way and Pinterest leads content curation boom
Here are a few highlights:
**According to a report from Shareaholic, Pinterest now drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined.
**It recently became the fastest website to attract more than 10 million unique monthly visitors.
**Time magazine named it one of the 50 best websites of 2011 and Techcrunch named it the best new startup of 2011.
Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond
Read full article here: [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/authors/mia-pearson/]
Via janlgordon ![[Infographic] What are the Best Times to Blog? | Dan Zarrella | Blogging with WordPress | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/kayYP8qclGsmssOfItLsVjl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
Dan Zarrella breaks down the best times to post to your blog via an infographic, which seem to be growing in popularity. 
I've encouraged small business owners to start at WordPress.com, the free blog platform, and if they fall in love with blogging and see the benefits, move to a self hosted blog. In part, until now, it's been because you can't use your WordPress.com blog to generate income. It's been taboo.
It looks like that's about to change. WordAds can help you make some money on your WordPress.com blog. It's about time. Some minimalist blogs look plain and uninspired simply because their owners can't figure out how to inject a little personality. Here are some simple tips to add personality to your bland blog. 
Complete guide to creating premium WordPress themes: how to gain a solid user-base, what to include, and most importantly what to leave out. |
I just had to share this post from Twist Image. In fact, I just finished his book, Six Pixels of Separation, which is an excellent book. Go buy it, or get it from the library.
First of all, I've never seen a "blogging philosophy" so that was refreshing and made me stop and think about why I blog.
Then he follows up with the steps he takes to pull together research and notes, then writing the post. You've got to see what he thinks about tagging too. Love this post. 
6 social plugins that will help your Wordpress blog generate traffic, clicks, social sharing, and more. There's are a ton of social plugins, these are the top 6.
Plugins let our blogs have some additional functionality, or "cool stuff" without having to know how to program.
You should have a share plugin, allowing your visitors to share your content with their community, and an SEO plugin to hand feed the search engines.
Personally, I'm going to incorporate the Facebook Social Plugins because I've seen them used very effectively in blog posts. We all need more friends, right?
I'm also curious about the Photo Dropper, especially in light of Pinterest and the question about copyright and attribution. This plugin offers images for your blog posts with proper credit to the photographer.
So, do you use any of these plugins, and if so what are your favorites? Or maybe you have a favorite plugin not listed here you'd like to share.
Plugins add functionality to your WordPress blog. They can be utilitarian, like Spam Free WordPress a spam comment plugin. Or they can add fun and interactive "stuff" to your blog.
I love the idea of a Welcome Message and will be "testing" (playing) with that one. Of great interest is the WP Google Fonts. Now you can have more flexibilty in your fonts, outside of helvetica, tahoma, verdana, and of course, times new roman. I have a couple of clients sites, for which, this plug in may be perfect!
Image resizing is another feature that many bloggers appreciate. Not everyone has an image program to resize images and WordPress' built in resize is very basic.
Are you using a plug in that you'd like to give a shout out for? Let us know! 
I've been a blog evangelist for years now. In this post John Paul shares 20 reasons to start a blog. I think reason number one is for more online visibility. My second reason would be the search engine optimization benefits of blogging.
Do you have a blog? If so, are you posting regularly? 
This excellent article was written by Romain Goday for Darwin Ecosystems.
After presenting some facts showing the immense and burgeoning amount of data available on the web, Romain goes into a little detail on the types of tools that use the Social Graph to filter content: Social Networks Search Engines Discovery Engines
He then details 5 limitations to Social Media Discovery, opeing this section of the article:
**It is increasingly easier to publish information and increasingly difficult to consume it.
What most caught my attention:
**Excessive attention to what is being said within the user’s circle of trust limits the scope of the information consumption.
**The user’s perspective is not challenged, instead it is reinforced
**Users generally follow people that they respect at a personal level.
**It is understandable that they don’t have the desire to follow people that they dislike or that have the opposite view
**Lists, Circles and Subscriptions aren’t reducing the noise
**Following more people still equals a broader information scope and even more noise.
I agree wholeheartedly that it is our inclination to seek validation. We must choose our sources and our curators very carefully to avoid seeing only what we are hoping to find. But choose, we must! The volume is just too great for anyone to do otherwise for a sustainable period of time.
If you're not careful you can escape the Google filter bubble to one of your own making. To avoid this, you may have to follow people who's views you may not agree with but at least you'll get the broader picture.
Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"
Read the full article here: [http://bit.ly/yKZdG6] Via janlgordon 
I believe that content syndication starts with your WordPress website. Using it as a hub, you can easily syndicate your content to your social media sites. It's the next wave!
So you have a Web site, blog or fan page and you need to tell the world and invite them to hear what you have to say. Content syndication is a content sharing strategy that you can use to get the word out. |
