Make the most out of your time and blog more often

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, marketers, managers, journalists, general public.

One thing I’ve learned from years of blogging is that a blogging process saves time and headaches. My approach uses creative momentum at the beginning to blow through tasks that require linear thinking.

Above you’ll find a 6-minute video demonstration of exactly what I do, step-by-step, for each blog post:

Make an Outline – Assuming you’ve selected useful topic to write about, all you need at the beginning is a basic framework to support the copy. I use MindMiester to map out an outline.

Dictate Copy – I use the built in speech translator in my Macbook Pro to write copy. Begin with a brain dump, and then edit what you’ve written.

Edit the Copy – Eliminate as much copy as possible without eliminating your voice. Write like you speak, but keep it short and sweet.

Transfer the Copy – Copy the content from your plain text editor, and copy it in your blogging software. Most people use WordPress.

Tweak SEO – It’s my belief that when you write content that’s highly specific and useful to your audience, the SEO takes care of itself. That said, here are a few bonus tips on ranking higher in search.

Add Tags and Categories – Next, select the appropriate categories and tags for your blog post. Categories should represent the larger topics within your blog, and tags should represent specific elements that are within various categories.

Add Images – Images are honey, your readers are bees. They should trigger readers on an emotional level to stick around and read more.

Add links – Depending upon your goals, you might link to internal pages, or link to external pages. For example if you’re trying to promote an event, you might write a series of blog posts linking to the registration page.

Schedule the Post – Finally, schedule the blog post for a morning within the next day or two (bonus points if you know what time is best for your community).

The post Time-saving tips to write more blog posts (with video) appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Bloggers, nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists.

One thing I’ve learned from years of blogging is that a blogging process saves time and headaches. My approach uses creative momentum at the beginning to blow through tasks that require linear thinking.

Above you’ll find a 6-minute video demonstration of exactly what I do, step by step, for each blog post:

1. Make an outline – Assuming you’ve selected useful topic to write about, all you need at the beginning is a basic framework to support the copy. I use MindMeister to map out an outline.
2. Dictate copy – I use the built-in speech translator in my MacBook Pro to write copy. Begin with a brain dump, and then edit what you’ve written.
3. Edit the copy – Eliminate as much copy as possible without eliminating your voice. Write like you speak, but keep it short and sweet.
4. Transfer the copy – Copy the content from your plain text editor and copy it into your blogging software. Most people use WordPress.
5. Tweak SEO – It’s my belief that when you write content that’s highly specific and useful to your audience, the SEO takes care of itself. That said, here are a few bonus tips on ranking higher in search.
6. Add tags and categories – Next, select the appropriate categories and tags for your blog post. Categories should represent the larger topics within your blog, and tags should represent specific elements that are within various categories.
7. Add images – Images are honey, your readers are bees. Photos, illustrations or infographics should trigger an emotional response from readers to stick around and read more.
8. Add links – Depending upon your goals, you might link to internal pages or link to external pages. For example, if you’re trying to promote an event, you might write a series of blog posts linking to the registration page.
9. Schedule the post – Finally, schedule the blog post for a morning within the next day or two (bonus points if you know what time is best for your community).

What’s your process? What chu got?

The post 9 time-saving tips to write more blog posts appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, businesses, Web publishers, bloggers, individuals

4 Blog conference sessions. The surest way to attract a community is to be part of the community when events and conferences are happening. Live-blog sessions you attend, or ask others to do so and post to the blog. Use the session’s Twitter hashtag and tweet that you are live-blogging certain sessions. Those following the conference online will refer to your blog as a source of session content, expanding your organization’s usual reach.

5 Remember you ABCs: Always Be Commenting. Reply to (almost) every blog comment. Readers comment on your blog post because they want to be recognized, add to the conversation, and be considered. Replying to comments can lead to other interesting discussions within the blog posts’ comments, and deepening a reader’s engagement with your blog and its content. No need to reply to every person who writes, “great post!” Instead, comment after a few of these types of comments are up.

6 Ask for blog comments. Don’t be afraid to ask for comments. Send a DM on Twitter to people you know would be interested in a certain blog post. Ask Twitter and Facebook followers and fans to comment as you share the post. If there is a great discussion happening in the blog comments, tweet that out and ask for even more comments!

7 Friend and acknowledge your commenters. Once you begin to see regular readers commenting on the blog, seek them out and friend them in your social spaces. Follow them on Twitter, connect on Linkedin, comment on their blogs. Periodically send a public shout out to those who comment. You could even recognize them in a tweet such as this: “Great comment from @username on today’s blog. Thanks!”

8 Install an easy-to-use social commenting system. Disqus and Facebook comments are two very easy-to-use commenting systems that are inherently social. Once users are logged into Facebook or Disqus, the comments are publicly shown either on Facebook feeds or the Disqus network.

9 Include a “recent comments” widget on the sidebar of your blog. Highlighting recent comments sends the message that your blog already has a blog community. I’ve installed the Disqus “recent comments” widget within Community Organizer 2.0’s sidebar for that very reason.

10 Post the latest blog posts to your organization’s social spaces. A recent case study implied that autoposting to Facebook may decrease views, so be sure to post manually the latest from your blog to Facebook and Twitter. Consider also posting great blog comments to your Facebook Wall and other social spaces.

11 Show blog post retweets on the sidebar of your blog. Consider creating a Twitter feed that pulls in all the blog post retweets as a way to show that your blog already has a community of readers.

12 Give out some link love. Though linking out a lot is not always recommended as a good SEO practice, linking will get your blog noticed. Especially when your blog is relatively new or unknown, don’t be afraid to create links to other blogs your readers will recognize. When you link to others, the blog owner is usually notified of the link and will often take a look at your blog. This is a simple way to get your organization’s blog onto the radar of other industry blog owners.

The post 12 ways to develop a loyal community for your blog appeared first on Socialbrite.

Iwrite six to seven posts each week on four different websites, which might seem amazing. But I used to struggle to write just two posts every week (seven is still a struggle, which is a good thing).

Here are a few things I do that have helped me be more efficient (but still authentic) with my blogging:

1. Dragon Dictation – I wrote this post in 10 minutes using Dragon Dictation by Nuance Communications (two minutes dictating and eight minutes editing the post in WordPress).
 
2. Theme Calendar – I have a theme calendar in my head that looks like this:

• Monday – Strategy article at JohnHaydon.com (cross-posted to Socialbrite), video on Headway Videos.com
• Tuesday – Tactical article at NonprofitFacebookGuy.com
• Wednesday – Social fundraising article at Razoo, how-to article at JohnHaydon.com
• Thursday – Tactical article at NonprofitFacebookGuy.com
• Friday – Personal / thought piece at JohnHaydon.com
3. Mind mapping – This approach allows me to bounce freely between unrelated ideas, but anchor them together in a way that’s extremely organized. I wrote this post in 20 minutes using the MindMeister iPad app while I sat in a doctor’s waiting room.
 
4. Reuse emails – Many times I’ll be answering a question for someone in an email and realize that other people probably have the same question. Copy, paste, delete the guilty parties.
 
5. Reuse comments – Sometimes I’ll find myself leaving a thoughtful comment on a post and realize that I could blow it up into a blog post.
 
6. Write in batches – Writing requires creative muscle which, once warmed up, can be used for creative tasks beyond the one you planned for. Take advantage of an engine that’s warmed up.
7. Put up blinders – Often, I write posts in full-screen mode, which hides distractions in the dashboard.
 
8. Use a tomato – It’s so hard for me to focus sometimes that I think my ADD has ADD. However, I’ve learned to be productive by focusing in short 20-minute bursts using the Pomodoro technique.
 
9. Read lots of blogs – I read 20+ blogs every day. The blogs I read are informative and inspiring, and often lead to me firing up a mind-map or post soon after.
 
10. Read lots of books – The difference between a blog and a book is that a blog is a collection of someone’s insights, whereas a book is the whole mind. A blog tells me what someone is thinking that day, but a book tells me why they think the way they do.
 
11. Go for walks – It may sound crazy, but the rhythm of walking brings out new ideas and inspiration, which I can dictate into my Dragon iPhone app.
 
12. Write titles first – Blogging is easier when you learn to think in titles. Ask yourself, “Would I click on that title?” If yes, all you need is three paragraphs to go with that title.

The last thing I’ll say about all this is that I’ve kept at it, every single day for over three years. I have no special talents, just skills I’ve acquired with hard work.

So if you’re amazed at how much I blog each week, don’t be. If I can do it, so can you.
What helps you write blog posts?

The post 12 tips for writing more blog posts each week appeared first on Socialbrite.

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

Like many kids, I was involved in the Boy Scouts. The scout leader was Mr. Pertrazzio, who was an electrician.

Now, I’m sure he loved being involved with the Boy Scouts. But when you think about it, he had a clear marketing advantage over other electricians: Parents trusted him. And some parents trusted him enough to let him into their homes, which is important for an electrician.

3 reasons why you should do charity work on your blog

1. It shows you care about something greater.
2. Your blog and your outposts have power to create awareness around important issues.
3. You can meet new bloggers that you can network with.

Within your blog strategy, make a list of non-profits that you really care about (I blogged about KidsAreHeroes a few times). You can either reach out to them or hop onto existing social good campaigns like TweetsGiving and Blog Action Day.

What good have you done?

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up.

Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.

The post How to grow your blog with social media for social good appeared first on Socialbrite.

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

First of all, what’s the big deal about getting retweeted? If you have a ton of followers who are engaged, and you’re happy, then why should you care if they retweet your blog posts?

If you’re using Twitter for business reasons, you should care. And here’s why:

Measure engagement
Retweets are an indication of how engaged your followers are. If they aren’t retweeting any of your posts, chances are they don’t find them that interesting.

Follower attrition
Some of the folks who are singing your praises now will be gone in six months. That’s because you can’t be all things to all people all the time (and you shouldn’t being trying to). People grow, they change and have different needs as time goes on. New people who follow you because of a retweet they saw will take their place. It’s not personal, it’s just business.

Measure content
Getting retweeted is partially a function of good content. Or at least good headlines.

How to get retweeted

1. Be Relevant – A survey conducted by Dan Zarrella found that people share content because they thought it was relevant for someone they know. In other words, try and stay relevant to topics your followers want to hear about.
2. Write Pithy Headlines – On Twitter all we have is 140 characters. How would someone like Shel Silverstein tweet?
3. Include links – Dan also found that retweets tend to have more links. 56.69% of retweets contain a link versus 18.96% of normal tweets.
4. Add your own thoughts – One big limitation with Twitter’s retweets is that you can’t edit the tweet before retweeting. Tools like Seesmic and Tweetie give users a second option of “quoting” the tweet where you can edit it to your liking.
5. Break News – Be the first to share breaking news on a topic. Know beforehand what might be newsworthy before it trends by creating a Google or Tweetbeep alert.
6. Not About You – Dan also found that talking about the color of your underwear won’t get retweeted as much as talking about the color of Madonna’s underwear.
7. Nurture Community – People that create trust with their community tend to be retweeted more than those who lack any connection to their followers. Don’t forget the really simple mind map I showed you yesterday to frame community development.
8. DM a Retweet request – You can also send a private message asking for a retweet. This has to be used sparingly or you’ll quickly drain your social equity account. Also, make it easy and DM a link to the tweet you’d like retweeted.
9. Use your iPhone – The Retweet app lists the top retweets. Retweeting the valuable posts sparingly will increase your exposure to new users.
10. Embed Retweets – Put a “ClickToTweet” link in your email newsletters and particular blog pages. Read “How To Get More Email Subscribers With Embeded Retweets“ for more info.
11. Timing – Dan also found that 4:00PM is the when the most retweets happen. Especially on a Friday.
12. Say Please – Dan also found that saying please also increased the likelihood that someone would retweet your post.
13. Say Thank You – People like to be acknowledged when they retweet your post. Plus it’s just polite.

Homework: Retweet this post.

Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.

The post 13 ways to get your blog posts retweeted appeared first on Socialbrite.

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.

Yet so many bloggers invite comments, answer them, then that’s it. This is the equivalent of just having your voicemail on and never taking calls. To really engage, try some of the following:

• Valeria Maltoni frequently emails her commenters (manually – no auto-email program) to thank them for their comments. A great personal touch.
• Twitter is a great way to continuously engage your blog community. Offer the option for commenters to leave their Twitter IDs, and thank them via Twitter for their comment (with a link to the comment itself).
• If you see a particularly great comment, ask the author to guest post and expand on his or her views. What better way to engage with people than offering them the chance to engage further with the community itself?

Lead and be led

In his book Tribes, Seth Godin suggests that everyone has the capacity to be a leader. The same goes for your blog community – while you’re essentially “the leader” because it’s your community that people are becoming part of, why not offer everyone the chance to be a leader?

• Always ask what your community would like to read about. This doesn’t mean you have to lose your own voice, but it does mean you can offer one for so many others.
• Introduce polls to see what your community is thinking. This could be something as simple as a “Did you like this post” thumbs up or down, to a fully-fledged poll on the topic being discussed and what parts connected.
• Consider adding a forum where your community can engage not only you but your other community members too. This is simple to do as well – just set up a Ning community, for example, and link to it.

These are just some of the immediate ways you can start to engage your blog community. There are many more — ones that may be better suited to you. Google Friend Connect, for instance, also offers a hugely effective way for your community to engage each other.

The main thing is that you engage and really converse with the community that’s making your blog what it is. Otherwise, you may as well just have a static website. And where’s the fun in that?

Homework: Pick an idea from this post and try it. Note the results.

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up.

Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.

The post How to engage your blog’s community appeared first on Socialbrite.

Giving international bloggers a global voice from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

International bloggers network offers alternative perspectives on events around the world

Since 2005, the international bloggers network Global Voices has been one of the shining success stories in citizen media: a community of more than 200 bloggers around the world who offer perspectives frequently not heard in the traditional media.

Founded by former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief Rebecca MacKinnon and technologist and Africa expert Ethan Zuckerman while they were both fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (both are friends), the nonprofit organization with no physical offices offers reports and translations from blogs and citizen media everywhere.

I caught up with Rebecca several months ago to get an overview of the organization’s efforts. Global Voices’ importance and reach have grown even more pronounced during 2009 with the street demonstrations in Iran. Regular followers of Global Voices have been able to get a first-hand glimpse of events in all corners of the globe, from Africa and Southeast Asia to Oceana and South America. See their Special Coverage section and Top 10 video posts of 2009.

Rebecca, who also teaches journalism at the University of Hong Kong, describes Global Voices as a site where the editors curate the best of what bloggers are saying outside the Western blogosphere. “Where are the most interesting Middle Eastern and African bloggers and what are they talking about? What are Chinese bloggers saying?” The site’s bottom-line goal is to curate the most interesting conversations that will give you a different perspective on what’s happening around the world.

She also describes the goals of two Global Voices projects:

• Rising Voices: “One of the problems with blogs around the world is that bloggers tend to be the elites in many societies,” she says. So, with help from the Knight Foundation, they set up Rising Voices to give small grants to citizens groups around the world in disadvantaged communities to help people create citizen media, particularly blogs and videoblogs.

• Global Voices Advocacy: One problem is that when bloggers around the world start to speak out, some repressive governments have blocked sites and domain and put people in jail for blogging. The Advocacy arm of Global Voices advocates for the rights and interests of those bloggers.

Global Voices content is now translated by grassroots supporters into more than 15 languages.

Looking down the road, Rebecca says Global Voices is continuing to look at professional-amateur journalism partnerships. “How do we help professional journalists connect better with this global convnersation that’s taking place? How can they collaborate with bloggers to get stories out that aren’t getting reported?”

You should add a Global Voices RSS feed to your news reader — it’s a project that’s giving voice to people in some of the most disadvantaged spots on the globe.

Related

• My interview with Global Voices’ other co-founder, Ethan Zuckerman (2007)

• Check out the Kiva Fellows blog: Stories from the field

• Global Voices Online: Finding alternative revenue streams as a non-profit org (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

The post Global Voices: Lifting up the powerless & voiceless appeared first on Socialbrite.

Matt Mullenweg on the state of WordPress from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

At WordCamp San Francisco a few weeks ago, I managed to get a few minutes alone with Matt Mullwenweg, co-founder, chief coder and “Head of Bug Creation” for WordPress. (I self-host Socialbrite and Socialmedia.biz with code from WordPress.org; others use WordPress.com to host their blog.)

In this 5 1/2-minute video interview, Matt discusses the state of WordPress, its astonishing growth here and abroad, the vibrancy of the consumer open source movement and his estimate that about  8,000 coders are contributing code and themes to WordPress today. The recent release of WordPress 2.8.4 (fixing a security hole) makes WordPress, in my view, the best blogging software on the planet (with apologies to newcomer Posterous).

A few highlights from our conversation:

• Matt: “Some people think blogging is slowing down, but from everything we’ve seen, it seems blogging is accelerating just as fast as ever. ”

• Matt: “There’s no real killer feature in software anymore. There are 50 killer features, and everyone has a different 50.”

• WordPress fits into the consumer wave of open source tools. the first wave was purely development tools, the second was infrastructure and the third is consumer” applications like Firefox and Azureus.

• Why are there an estimated 8,000 coders contributing code and themes to WordPress? “WordPress belongs to everybody. Everybody owns WordPress,” Matt says.

• What has surprised him most about WordPress? “Internationalization,” he says. Some 42% of WordPress’s downloads come from overseas, compared with 27% last year. “People abroad are taking the code, adapting it, customizing it and making it their own and taking it to a new level.”

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

The first WordCamp was held in San Francisco three years ago, and since then dozens of WordCamps have sprung up around the world, from Vancouver to Dallas to Milan, Italy. It’s an amazing thing to watch and to be a part of. (Socialbrite and its developer have contributed a Creative Commons plug-in to the WordPress community.)

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A video tutorial that takes ‘manual’ out of the process

I recently spoke with a non-profit client who I’m working with on social web strategies. At the end of our call, she complained “We’ve been so busy recently. I can barely remember to paste our blog posts onto our Facebook Page.”

When I told her that she could automate the feed, she almost jumped through the phone with joy. I promised her that I’d make this video.

If you don’t have a Facebook Page yet, go watch How to create a Facebook Page in less than four minutes. I’ll wait right here.

This tutorial on how to import your blog posts into your Facebook Page covers the following steps:

• Adding the notes application to your Facebook Page
• Adding your blog’s RSS feed to the application
• Confirming and importing your blog posts

Did I miss anything? Add a comment below.

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