This is part of the series 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media.

In the above 2-minute video, I talk about why guest blogging could be a critical addition to your blog.

One benefit of guest posts is to further a relationship. You both build a relationship with other bloggers and expose your blog to a completely new audience — a great way to attract new readers and get new RSS subscribers.

Here are some guest post strategies I’ve used:

1. Read the blog of the person who you want partner with. Get to know his or her readers and content.
2. Be sincere and genuine with your interest. A long-term partnership will not blossom if you lead with a hidden, personal agenda.
3. Add valuable comments to their blog – and not “Great post, here’s a cool link.”

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This is part of the series 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media.

Guest post by Danny Brown
DannyBrown.me

There has been much written about what makes a good blog community. So I’m not going to talk about that today.

Instead, I’d like to offer some ideas on how you can best engage your blog community once you’ve started to grow one. The great news is, with social media it’s never been easier to really connect with your readers and visitors. And since I’m a big believer that even just one single regular reader or subscriber is a community, then even if you’re a new blogger this should help.

It doesn’t end with the comments

One of the most immediate ways for any blogger to engage his or her community is via the comments section. After all, this is where you should be spending the majority of your blogging time — yes, much more than the actual blog writing itself.

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Creative Commons photo by AndYaDontStop on Flickr

This is day 12 of the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media.

If you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you’ve probably been commenting less on blogs. It’s just plain easier and quicker than commenting and creates more exposure for that post than commenting ever could.

But let’s face it. You love it when people comment on your blog – especially when you get hordes of thoughtful comments.

Comments rule because of the following:

• Solid social proof – Think about the blog posts you read. Whenever you come across one that has a few dozen comments, you suddenly pay closer attention. You start looking for the value that lots of other people have found.
• Snowballs roll downhill – Brian Clark, who publishes Copyblogger, has no problem attracting comments. He’ll publish a post, and within an hour, he’s got 100 comments. The more comments his posts get, the more likely a new reader will add their comment.
• Shelf life – When your blog posts get retweeted, they gets massive exposure. But that exposure has a short shelf-life. The tweets get buried with a few days. Comments, on the other hand, stick around for years.

Getting more comments has a lot to do with the content and how inviting the post is to make comments. So how do you get more comments with social media?

1. Comment on other blogs

This is the most important thing you can do to get comments. Well, actually there is one thing that’s more important, but let’s save that for last. Commenting on blogs shows you’re “one of us” and that you’re sincere in your commitment to the blogging community. That in turn will have other bloggers promoting your blog, sending commenters your way. Beyond that, it’s just good blogging sense. Look at how Grant Griffiths responds to comments on his guest post.

2. Ask for comments

Tweet your post and ask for comments. Really – it’s ok to ask. There are a few plug-ins that will tweet your latest post as soon as it’s published.  If you’re using one of these plugins, set the prefix to ask for comments.

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Welcome to the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Today we’ll talk about how to optimize your blog with mission-critical social media plug-ins.

The WordPress community consists of thousands of software developers who create free software for your blog, called plug-ins. There are hundreds of social media plug-ins, designed to display your Twitter friends, pull in your Delicious tags or even import comments on a Facebook Note back into the blog post.

Don’t go crazy with plug-ins

A word of caution with plug-ins. If you’re like me, you want to add the latest shiny plug-in to your blog. And before you know it, your blog looks like downtown Tokyo.

Two problems with adding too many plug-ins:

• You could drive away visitors who get blinded by an abundance of shiny objects.
• Too many plug-ins can cause performance issues on your site.

The good news about plug-ins is that you can try them out for free, and deactivate them if you run into any problems. The important thing is to focus on your blog strategy and not the latest cool gadget.

Mission-critical social media plug-ins for your blog

I used the term “mission critical” to point out several plug-ins that are important and why you should consider using them.

1TweetMeme – Guy Kawasaki loves this plug-in because it lets people easily “spread the word about your websites and blogs.” This plug-in also allows you to collect stats on how people are tweeting about your blog posts. Why mission critical? Because how people tweet about your content informs your content strategy.

2AddThis – This lets folks bookmark your post on pretty much any social media site. This plug-in is critical to help you see how people share your content (which sites they’re sharing on and which posts are shared the most). Social Bookmarks, Sociable (100+ different social bookmarking sites), ShareThis, SexyBookmarks are also great bookmarking plug-ins, but don’t have the reporting that AddThis does. Why mission critical? Because you need to be active on the sites where your content is being shared.

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Welcome to the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Today we’ll talk about how to make your blogs commenting system more social media friendly.

You can tell a lot about the impact you have on  your readers by the number, diversity and quality of your comments. For example, if you get a flood of comments when you first publish a post, you know that your readers are highly responsive. You also can see how much they trust you by what they share in those comments. In this sense, comments are a a window into then soul of your readers – and a guide for your blog strategy.

But what if you are unknowingly creating barriers to comments?

Common barriers to comments

CAPTCHAS – Get rid of these. Visual CAPTCHAs are “no blind people allowed” signs.

Requiring registration – I’ve seen a few blogs that require registration in order to comment. Don’t do this unless you have a very good reason – and I can’t think of one.

Blogging tools for better comments

Now that those barriers are gone, you want to find ways of encouraging comments and making them more social. There are two ways blog technology can help:

• Get the right commenting system
• Get the right comment plug-ins

Get the right commenting system

Comment systems have come a long way over the past year to include social media conversations into your blogs comments. These are the four most popular commenting systems for WordPress bloggers:

1. WordPress commenting system

WordPress comments (standard on all hosted and self-hosted WordPress blogs) are highly customizable and allow you to easily add functionality either with custom coding or with plug-ins (WordPress Thread Comment, Highlight Author Comments, Comment Redirect, Social Profiles, Email Commenters, Subscribe To Comments, and WP Ajax Edit Comments and a few that enhance functionality) Themes also add features. For example, Headway allows for threaded comments.

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Welcome to the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Today guest contributor Frank Barry talks about optimizing donation pages.

Guest post by Frank Barry

CC photo by cambodia4kidsorg

Here are a few things to get you started. Hopefully they’ll give you ideas about how you can make the online giving experience more social for your donors! Once you’ve put some thought into it, I’d love to hear what you’ve decided to do (or please share a link in the comments if you are already doing some of these things).

Follow the rules

There are some well defined guidelines that everyone needs to know, but I’m not going to rehash this because it’s been covered well by the industry leading  Nielsen Norman Group in their study Donation Usability: 58 Design Guidelines for Improving the Donation Process and the Usability of Essential Information on Charity and Non-Profit Websites. You can read more about it on Steve MacLaughlin’s Blog.

For now, here are a few key points you can’t miss when it comes to making the online giving process more social.

• Explain why someone would be interested in donating.
• Use real examples of people you have helped and situations you have improved.
• Provide information about your organization’s presence on social outlets so users can connect with you on them.
• All this info shouldn’t live right on the page where the donation form is. Just make it easily accessible from the donation form.

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Creative Commons photo by D Sharon Pruitt

How to harness the power of the crowd for a quick & easy campaign

Yesterday was a very exciting day: we threw a surprise party for Beth Kanter online. It was a bit of fun mixed with experiment, and I think it was really successful. Here are some reflections about how we used crowdsourcing techniques for a very fast-moving campaign and lessons learned that may apply to your work.

Lesson #1: Design an action and invitation that’s doable and interesting — while focused on your goal.

Stacey Monk and I exchanged messages last week, brainstorming the idea of pulling bloggers together to support Beth’s birthday campaign.  We wanted it to be something fun and interesting, so people would want to join – a surprise party!  And we wanted it to be easy to do – write a blog post!

First, we created an open Google Doc where we put in the introduction language, so anyone that clicked through from someone’s blog or Twitter post would have context about what was happening (and included a numbered list up to 53, so people could easily see where to add their name and blog address).

Next, I sent out an invitation that included a simple explanation and invitation to join with easy steps for those interested.  When sending out an invitation, it’s important to remember that the language you use needs to be appropriate for those you’re inviting, as well as to their audience as they could easily repurpose the language or calls to action you use to more quickly and easily share/spread the campaign.

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eBay shoppers donated $50 million to nonprofits in 2009 — a record

Right before the holidays, eBay released 2009 figures for its Giving Works fundraising program — and marked a historic record for total funds raised for non-profits through ebay.com. According to the report, the eBay community gave $50 million to nonprofits, a 17% jump over 2008 despite the ongoing recession. The program allows individuals to donate while using eBay.

I was lucky enough to do a quick email interview with Robert Chatwani, eBay’s head of Global Citizenship, to learn more behind the numbers.

1. Give me your elevator pitch

At eBay, we think about citizenship and sustainability in terms of People, Planet, and Communities. Our focus is on harnessing the reach and scale of our core businesses – eBay and PayPal – to create a positive impact. By fostering entrepreneurship for global sellers, keeping goods out of landfills through the sale of pre-owned products, and raising funds for nonprofits through sales on eBay, we’re growing our business and enabling millions of eBay users to participate by voting with their dollars. Plus we have 15,000 employees around the world who get to think about changing the world through their everyday work, which is really exciting.

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Welcome to the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Today guest contributor Grant Griffiths offers tips on how to optimize your blog’s RSS and email subscriptions.

Guest post by Grant Griffiths
Blog For Profit

The people who subscribe to our blogs are, more likely than not, regular readers who visit us whenever we post new content. Our subscribers feel we are trustworthy enough that they feel we have built a relationship with them. And they come to trust us to the point they may actually buy something from us. Either our products or services.

A lot of what we are going to talk about here will also apply across different areas we should focus on when we are building our blog. One of the key considerations to think about when you are trying to build up subscribers on your blog is the relationship you should be building. And you need to remember you want your readers to come to trust you as a valuable and reliable source of information. A source of information that is fed to them in a form and fashion they can use and understand. And a source of information that is up-to-date and relevant.

Here are six actions you can take to optimize subscriptions to your blog:

1Design – You have seen them, the default template provided by WordPress or Typepad. Or those Blogger blogs that all look alike too. If you are serious about building an audience of regular readers on your blog, you have to have more than a default template. Spend some time looking into some of the great free or premium WordPress frameworks and themes available.

Design does matter. People tend to be shallow and want things to look nice. And this same factor even applies to whether they may or may not subscribe to your blog. Consider: When we are standing at the magazine rack at our favorite book store, we always look at the cover design of the magazine. Admit it: If the magazine doesn’t look nice, we tend to not pick it up to read. The same applies to blogs. If the blog is not attractive to look at or easy on the eyes, we tend to not come back. And we darn sure don’t subscribe.

I know the argument against this premise. “Don’t most blogs get read in an RSS reader or email?” Not all of them do and even so, our design still needs to be appealing to the eye. Getting people to come back time and time again certainly does depend on how are blog looks and feels to them. And those people who come back will someday become our regular readers and subscribers.

2Make it easy – Make it simple for your readers to subscribe to your blog. In other words, provide a clear and very visible way for your visitors to subscribe to your blog.

You want your visitors to turn into readers. Accomplishing this is quite easy. If your blogging platform does not have this built in, go to Feedburner and burn your feed and get the buttons and email sign-ups. Put them in the top right hand corner of your blog, as close to the top as you can. Subscribing is one of those call to actions we want our visitors and readers to do. And it is recommended by experts in Internet marketing — calls to action should be top right.

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