May 7, 2013

Understand WordPress tags and categories

A quick, helpful guide for nonprofits using WordPress

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, WordPress users.

One of the most common questions about writing an effective blog post is the proper use of categories and tags.

What exactly are categories and tags? What purpose should they serve for the reader? Should they each just be one word? How do tags and categories relate to each other? And what does all this mean for optimizing your site for search (SEO)? Continue reading →

April 29, 2013

10 ways to optimize your website for Pinterest

Attract more visitors, encourage sharing through Pinterest

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, Pinterest users.

By now you’ve heard about Pinterest, the social site that allows people to share images and videos, follow boards and people, and re-pin stuff they find interesting.

But have you optimized your website for Pinterest? Continue reading →

January 23, 2013

Five tips to create powerful infographics

How nonprofits can use infographics to demonstrate supporters’ impact

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

People support your organization for one reason: They view your organization as the agent of change they seek.

If they had the resources, they’d make the changes they desire by themselves. But they don’t, which is why you’re in their lives.

So when you tell the story of your cause, you need to show how supporters ultimately create the outcomes. Continue reading →

November 7, 2012

How to make your nonprofit site more mobile-friendly

3 steps to developing a responsive website

Imagine for a moment that a supporter of yours is having dinner with one of their friends (let’s call her Amanda).

The cause you support comes up in conversation, and because Amanda is passionate about the work your nonprofit does, she pulls out her iPhone to show her friend.

But there’s a problem.

Your website is not looking so hot. Not a good first impression.

Now obviously Amanda will be able to overcome this hurdle because of the trust she’s earned with her friend. But why put hurdles in front of your core supporters to begin with? Continue reading →

January 15, 2010

6 essential social media plug-ins for your blog

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.

plug-in 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.

tweetmeme

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. Continue reading →

January 14, 2010

How to optimize your blog’s commenting system

Hand with wireless microphone

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. Continue reading →