Category Archives: Blogging

Blogging

When “Less is More”: aka What Would Seth Do? [Briefly Stated]

8 Comments

Stripping a sentence down to its barest essentials is great advice, but building a community requires more than a Bare Bones effort.

My online friend and blog role model Adam Singer, whose creative thoughts have always inspired me, just wrote a post entitled “The Critical Few” in which he advocates paring down, rather than ramping up, the number of online touch points you (or your company) uses.

Here was my comment to that post:

As an English/journalism/marketing professor, I always tell my students:
“Sometimes Less is More, and sometimes More is More.”

When it comes to any one “sentence,” then YES, stripping a sentence to its cleanest, most essential components is necessary for the clearest communication — which SHOULD be the first objective in writing.

However, sometimes — in fact — More will be More; one example would be that More Engagement with community members will reap better results than simply “putting something out there,” even if that something is stated concisely

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging, Sharisax Is Out There

Do you want to be an A-List Influencer?

5 Comments

A year and a half ago I met Steve Rubel at a panel discussion I blogged about: Beyond the Hype – Roadmap for Social Media’s Future. Steve is the Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman, the world’s largest independent PR firm — Steve is very, very influential.

He was considered an A-List Blogger at the time. I told him that he was my role model, and I, too, wanted to be an A-List Blogger. Steve suggested that, instead, I should aim to be an A-List INFLUENCER.

So I’ve started to study “influence.”

Here’s a definition from the Free Online Dictionary:

in·flu·ence  (nfl–ns) n.

1. A power affecting a person, thing, or course of events, especially one that operates without any direct or apparent effort: relaxed under the influence of the music; the influence of television on modern life.

2. Power to sway or affect based on prestige, wealth, ability, or position: used her parent’s influence to get the job.

3.

a. A person who exerts influence: My parents considered my friend to be a bad influence on me.

b. An effect or change produced by influence.

4.

a. A determining factor believed by some to affect individual tendencies and characteristics understood to be caused by the positions of the stars and planets at the time of one’s birth.

b. Factors believed to be caused by the changing positions of the stars and planets in relation to their positions at the time of one’s birth.

[from the FreeOnlineDictionary]

I wrote two articles on the topic: What’s wrong with the LIKE buttons? for my own blog and Popularity and Influence as they are Manifested in Social Media for CompuKol Communications.

Here’s the conclusion for the CompuKol post:

In the discussion or controversy or strategic planning around the concepts of popularity and influence, especially in this new world of business and marketing, one factor needs to be abundantly clear, and that stems from the intention to offer people products and services that can truly help them lead better lives as well as enhancing their business lives.

How can you improve your influence?

The main reason for this post is an article I just read by Chris Brogan, a very popular, productive, and influential blogger and strategist. Chris discussed five ways to improve your influence. Here is the list in brief:

1 – Start with a Solid Platform — Be Helpful

2 – Get Seen — Connect and Communicate

3 – Share the Spotlight — Talk about other people

4 – Working the Numbers — Encourage subscribers

5 – Influence isn’t Handed Over — Leverage new opportunities

Chris’s Conclusion:

Work on learning how to be most helpful to those in your segment of the universe that will grow your reach.

Click here to read Chris’s entire post

Are there subject areas where you believe you are an influencer? Please share your expertise and maybe we’ll be able to help you increase your reach.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging, Sharisax Is Out There

Why do people read blogs? To find personal opinions and insights on topics they care about

8 Comments

When deciding if you, too, should become a blogger, then tons of questions come to mind — and one of the first should be “Why do people read blogs?”

After all, if you are going to spend time and energy writing on the Global Whiteboard, you do want readers. So your blog plan needs to aim at a specific types of readers and give them what they want. That’s both Common Sense and Smart Marketing, i.e., define your target market and listen to what it is asking for.

The Science of Blogging: research for your blog’s strategic plan

The link in the subtitle above points to a data-rich webinar on blogging presented by Dan Zarrella, author of The Social Media Marketing Book and one of the Web’s online Go-To people for facts & figures on social media behavior. Currently a marketing product owner at HubSpot, Dan presented his latest research in a 60-minute Blogging webinar and slideshow. An hour listening to the webinar would be well worth your time; in the meantime however, you can read my Top Ten Takeaways from Dan’s research:

1. Relevance: People find blogs for the personal opinions and insights on topics they are particularly interested in — from people they have grown to trust.

2. Authority: Bloggers need to establish their credibility by delivering sound content and showing relevant background, education, and experience: however, calling oneself an “expert” or a “guru” is pretentious — and often sneered at.

3. SEO: Blogs offer great search engine optimization opportunities, particularly in helping consumers make purchasing decisions. Growing numbers of people are checking online and reading blogs to find information on items they want to buy.

4. Positivity: People do not go online to be brought down; they prefer the positive to the negative.

5. Avoid self-reference: Best practice is to talk AS yourself, not ABOUT yourself. People want to read your opinions, insights and unique point of view — not your minute-to-minute activities.

6. KISS: [Keep It Simple Stupid]: Avoid technical jargon; simplify, simplify, simply (as Thoreau) advises.

7. Novelty: Do not be boring, especially by regurgitating what others keep talking out. Try to provide content that is uniquely yours.

8. Social Proof: Use words like you, how, why, giveaway, money, etc. that are most often LIKED, SHARED, and ReTWEETED. You can find Dan’s lists of these words in the slides accompanying the webinar.

9. Frequency: The more often you post, the more readers you are likely to attract. Publishing once a day — or more — is the fastest way to become the Go-To Source for your area of expertise.

10. Know your audience: Are they mostly male? female? What are their schedules? How can you best serve their needs?

For further information about WHY and HOW to blog, check out some of my past articles:

To Blog . . . or Not To Blog . . . that is a good First Question

How to start a blog — Step by Step

How to write your first blog post on WordPress.com

What should your first blog post be about?

Use your blog to become the Go-To Source for information in your area of expertise

Avoid these NINE Blogging Errors

Beginning Bloggers Workshop: what should you blog about?

Will a blog help  you build your business and other typical blog questions

10 Lessons I learned about blogging from my first 6-part series

Any more questions? Perhaps I’ll do a blog to answer.



Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging, Sharisax Is Out There

10 Lessons I learned about blogging from writing my first 6-part series: Saying NO to New Business

8 Comments

Writing my first 6-part series on this blog was like doing lab work for a college class.

Post #1: Saying NO to a prospective client may be the Best Business Move

Post #2: Avoid future problems by saying NO Now

Post #3: Investigate client/project before saying Yes — or making it a NO.

Post #4: Three main reasons to say NO to new client

Post #5: Saying NO is easy

Post #6: How to use LinkedIn to say NO to new business

It was a lot of work, but it wasn’t too difficult because I was following a plan decided upon ahead of time, and that plan was based on much of what I’ve learned blogging these 20 months.

So here goes:


10 blogging lessons from 20 months as a blogger

1. Success: Nothing is more inspirational than Success. How you define “success” is key. So just Doing It was “success” enough to keep Doing It.

2. Crowdsource: It is easier to come up with opinions of your own when you ask others for theirs first. That’s how I got a lot of content for the series from posting questions on LinkedIn and on my Facebook page.

3. Guest Posting: When you are assigned a topic by someone whom you respect, you feel responsible to do the best job you can do. I’ve been guest posting for Michael Cohn’s CompuKol blog for a few months now, and he wanted the story on How to Say NO to New Business. I admire his work and so I take his assignments very seriously.

4. Blog Length: People will read longer content if you break it up in some way. That can be with subtitles, lists, and quotes OR you can simply divide it up into six daily posts. [If you post a series with too many days in between, i.e., not daily, a regular reader may lose interest. That being said, how many of your readers are “regular” readers and how many just find you on any particular day because they used the “right” keywords to find your article.

5. Independence: “That” being said, when writing a series, each article needs to be able to stand alone . . . because it just may “stand alone” in someone’s visit to your blog.

6. Persistence: Writing is compulsory thought: stick with it and the words will come.

7. Education: You really learn something. As a teacher I came to realize early on that I never learned as much or as “deeply” until I taught a topic or skill. Same with blogging. When you write something, you come to know it better than if you simply read or talk about something.

8. Mastery: It’s easy to become something of an expert. A friend just blogged the definition of expertise from Wikipedia:  ” … a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study.” Works for me.

9. Flexibility: The best laid plans may need to make room for better ideas if you are lucky enough for them to come along. I started with the idea of only doing three posts in the series, but new ideas and new content kept cropping up.

10. Sometimes Less is More: Any series with more than six posts — or list with more than 10 items — may get short shrift;. either the writer runs out of steam or the reader gets bored.

What’s your experience writing or reading a series of posts? Do you like them? Why or why not?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging, Sharisax Is Out There

The Art of Social Change [begins new blog category “Briefly Stated”]

1 Comment

just heard on Nov 1 FIR podcast:

5 tips to trigger Social Change

from Michael Netzley’s Singapore report:

1) Create a sense of urgency

2) Respect all sides

3) Attract local influencers

4) Create institutions, not just rhetoric

5) Aim for widespread application

Click here to read full article

Note: One key to the evolution of communication strategy is that we are continually “making it up as we go along.” In my 1.5 years blogging, I have learned that some people need short posts in order to even want to read  — while others demand longer more thoughtful articles to spark their interest. [Great titles are essential in either case.]

Beginning today, I plan to share “briefly stated” posts of things I read, hear, and/or think about.

If you do take a moment to read this post, please take another moment to write down one thing that comes to mind. Thanks.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging

How to put Excerpts & Thumbnails on 1st page of 2010 WP blog

6 Comments

I’ve decided to use the 2010 default WordPress theme for my new blog DRIVING MISS SHARI. But I wasn’t happy with the Home page: readers had to scroll through the entire recent article to get to the previous one – and so on and so on.

When you come to SHARISAX IS OUT THERE, you see a thumbnail and a brief description with a clickable link to “Read More” for each post. That was simply a handy feature of this blog’s theme.

But how to change the Home page on my new blog?

I’m not a web developer and depend on a few friends to help me with the back end, but I thought I might try to “do it myself” with a little online help:

**First I posed the question in the WordPress.org Forum: No Response

**Then I posted the question on LinkedIn’s Q & A: The two responders convinced me that I’d never figure it out on my own.

**So I went to my wonderful Australian friend James Hilton who is truly my behind-the-scenes genius.

Guess what? It’s really a breeze:

1. After you create each post, you place your cursor in the position where you want to end the description. Then you click on the “Insert More tag (Alt+Shift+T)” which is just to the right of the spell check on the first row of your edit icons. [Looks like a wide thin rectangle above a boxier shape].

2. Then you scroll down the right sidebar, and you will see a menu item that says “Featured Image.” [It is right below “Post Tags”] Click on “Set featured image” and you will get the same menu screen where you insert photos into the post itself. After selecting your image, be certain to click the instruction below the size selection that says “set featured image.”

VOILA! Your thumbnail is set.

PS If you set the “more tag” after a photo in the introduction of the post, you may not want/need a thumbnail.

PPS Check out DRIVING MISS SHARI and leave a comment on my first post to help me reach my goal of 500 comments. THX


Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging, Guest Post, LinkedIn

Are Blog Carnivals Worth the Trouble?

3 Comments

What’s a blog carnival anyway? I read about them in a chapter of Patrick Schwerdtfeger’s book Webify Your Business and so I signed up for one. But it didn’t seem like there was much going on, so I posted the question on LinkedIn:

Who’s had experience with Blog Carnivals?

The Best Answer came from Stevie Wilson, a seasoned journalist and editor-in-chief of the popular blog called LA-Story.com. It is about Southern California and Los Angeles as a lifestyle, state of mind and style center: “So no matter where you are in the world, you can live the So. Calif lifestyle by knowing what’s hot in LA!”

Pluses & Minuses at the Blog Carnival

Guest Post by Stevie Wilson

A blog carnival is where you have somewhat related blogs/sites — each  contributing a post on a specific day to create a list that would be posted on every participating site/blog. I have had experience in 3-4 blog carnivals.

While often blog carnivals are narrow in scope, featuring posts in  certain sectors: beauty, fashion, (or both), food, spirits, tech/gadgets or games — others can have a wider range and allow people to be creative and more diverse in their content.

Some of the negatives:

  • Moderator problems: The people who create or moderate the carnivals can at times be very harsh in how they determine what works or doesn’t (a) within the scope of the posts,(b) the timing of submission, (c) how the posts are written so the linkage isn’t screwed up.  (All this takes some time to learn for newbies.)
  • Unbalanced weight of participation is also a huge negative– if you have one or two big sites that participate and the others that are participating, it’s all about the numbers or reach of the various blogs. The bigger ones tend to dominate, so their voice carries more weight (hypothetically it should be equal voice) in determining how something is run.
  • Irregular participation: If there’s no commitment, you may have people posting randomly — in other words, you can’t count on having at least 4-5 different posts each week; there could be 12 different submissions one week and seven the next. That makes for irregular readership . . .  and less readership of the collective audience of the aggregate blogs. This is particularly important and relevant when the blog carnivals have unbalanced weight in readership.

But here are the Good Points:

1) Everyone gets some extra content and it’s great to get a diverse audience exposure.

2) You have a chance to test out things and talk to others about what works on these kinds of posts, so that you can learn and tweak your links and blogs.

3) It’s all about the group dynamic.

Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t After all, things happen in your life that might have you missing a post or 3 (a car accident, working late, illness) but a once-a-month participation isn’t enough.

Look at the quality of the blogs, their content, their voices and how you all mesh

**

Here’s one additional insight from Bret Itskowitch [in response to the LinkedIn question]

“A blog carnival is a way to grow/share readership among a group of bloggers writing about a similar topic. I am a travel contributor to a group of Lonely Planet bloggers. Every two weeks someone picks a topic and hosts a carnival on their blog. Other bloggers write and post on the topic, linking to the host. The carnival host writes a broader summary on the topic and includes links to all of the contributing bloggers.”

**

What’s your experience been. The jury is definitely out for me — so far. Please convince me.

FURTHER READING:

9 Ways to Go to a Blog Carnival

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging

Five Lessons We Bloggers Can Learn From Soap Operas

2 Comments

I remember way back when soap opera fans were not held in high esteem by me . . . until I had two babies in diapers and appreciated the company of the characters and their many problems.

Many years later I learned that some well-respected literary types wrote a book about the value of soaps after one of them had spent an extended time in the hospital watching the shows and getting hooked.

Here are 5 tips to take from the soaps

1. Companies advertise on soaps to reach stay-at-home moms, but the actual audience is a whole lot more diverse.

2. The success of soaps is really all about the writing, the conversation, the engagement, and some “I can’t believe they said/did that!”

3. If viewers get hooked [and become part of the community], they don’t want to miss an episode.

4. The best episodes are “page turners” and fans need to keep up.

5. And the Last Lesson (the primary reason for this post): Viewers will follow the cast from one show to a second one. That’s why I tuned into “Bold and the Beautiful” when characters from “Young and the Restless” traveled from Genoa City to Los Angeles.

So I hope my wonderful subscribers — and all my new readers — will join the conversation on my new blog DRIVING MISS SHARI, which I just began to chronicle my adventures of being Vehicle-less in Suburbia.

Hope to see you here:


Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging, Guest Post

WordPress is Fast Becoming WORLD-Press for Websites & Blogs

2 Comments

WordPress is The Bomb!

You read a lot about WordPress on this WordPress blog and you’ll be reading lots more. I’m convinced that WP is the easiest and best way for most of us to do our online publishing, and so does freelance website designer Todd E. Jones. A blogger and a social media nerd, Todd writes a blog that helps small business owners utilize their websites more effectively.

3 Reasons to build your website on WordPress

Guest Post by Todd E. Jones

WordPress was originally built to be the framework for blogs.  However, over the years, many website designers have begun to understand the power and flexibility it has to built a complete website.  Now, website designers all over the world are using WordPress to power their websites from the most basic blog to highly complex websites.

The WordPress framework is very feature-rich.  There are many good reasons to build your website on WordPress; however, in this article we are going to focus on three.

1.  SEO Friendly, Standards Compliant

SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization.  Optimization is the act of maximizing one’s effort.  SEO is the act of maximizing a website’s visibility effort in the search engines, particularly in the big three: Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Designers and other exports “optimize” websites for the purpose of attaining higher rankings in the search engines to increase the amount of traffic to the website.

The WordPress framework is inherently built to be SEO-friendly.  More technical tasks such as adding meta tags to pages and submitting a sitemap to the search engines can be automated easily in the WordPress control panel.  WordPress also has an automatic system to contact directories and search engines when your website is updated with a new article or post.

Further, the original WordPress themes are built standards compliant.  Standards compliant refers to the web standards that have evolved in the design community and which many of the search engines, such as Google, use to help find websites easier.  Google has said in its own documentation that the more standards compliant your website is, the better it will be indexed and crawled by its automated robots, known sometimes as spiders.  The result is a higher ranking for your website.

SEO involves a lot of different tasks, but a large part of them are accomplished simply by building your website on WordPress.

2.  User-Friendly CMS

CMS stands for content management system or software.  Website designers have been using content management software for websites for several years now.  A CMS allows the organization to update certain areas of its own website without having to pay additional fees to get the designer to update the website.

Several years ago, when designers started using CMS, the cost was very expensive.  However, the initial cost seems to offset the ongoing cost of maintenance by the designer, saving the designer time so that he or she could work on new projects.

WordPress is a CMS by nature.  Since it was built for the average user to blog, the framework allows for easy publishing.  WordPress also makes it easy to add new pages.

If you can use Microsoft Word, or some other word processor, you can be trained to use WordPress.

3.  Syndication

In the online publishing world, syndication, or web syndication is powerful.  Syndication helps you get your message or your articles in front of a larger number of people.  Using the technology RSS, which means Really Simple Syndication, a website is able to share its content with other readers all over the world wide web.  It is an automated process.

Some users take advantage of RSS Feeds, as they are called, through sites such as Yahoo Home, Google Home and feed readers like Google Feed Reader.  This allows web users to keep up with a variety of websites on a daily basis in one place.  There are also desktop feed readers such as RSSOwl.

RSS feeds can be delivered to readers such as mentioned above or to their email inbox through services such as feedburner.  RSS feeds give your website syndication and a larger audience.

Another benefit of RSS feeds is the ability to repost your articles via Facebook.  Facebook will let you integrate your articles into your profile through the use of RSS feeds giving your articles or posts a wider audience base.

WordPress, has this feature built in its framework.  It automatically builds the necessary file and data to syndicate your content.  All that has to be done, is make sure that readers know how they can access the RSS Feed.  Usually a icon with a link to the feed is sufficient.  Further, a website owner can submit his or her feed to other websites like Technorati, which distribute the feed automatically.

WordPress is a powerful, feature-rich framework for building easy-to-publish websites which are well indexed in the search engines.

Add to this its price tag, and it is no wonder business owners all over the world are using WordPress to run their websites. Are you next?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging, Guest Post, Sharisax Is Out There

Why Your Website Really Needs a Blog

13 Comments

“Blogs provide a dimension to content that you can’t get from your website.”

. . . and that is only one of the insights in a great article I found online in a blog post by Michael Cohn, the Chief Technology Officer of CompuKol Communications. He has over 25 years of experience in IT and web technologies.

Michael is one of a team of writers who cover the gamut of Social Media and Internet Marketing issues on their blog CompuKol , which I read with great regularity.

This article has two primary audiences:

(1) Bloggers who like to read about how necessary they are to build online traffic

AND

(2) Businesses with websites that are NOT generating the kind of traffic and profits they had expected with an online site.


Blog vs Website: What’s the Difference?

Guest Post by Michael Cohn

Many people have websites (for their businesses as well as for personal use) and many people have blogs. The issue is whether people truly understand the difference between a website and a blog. They certainly are not the same thing. The following explains the basic differences between a blog and a website:

Blog

  • Content is regularly updated.
  • Not formal.
  • Interactive.
  • Informative and educational.
  • Interactivity about industry/customer issues.
  • Some people have a blog.

Website

  • Content is static.
  • Formal/professional.
  • Interactivity does not exist. There is only one-way communication.
  • Transactional.
  • Communication about products and/or services.
  • Almost everyone has a website. In fact, it is almost a requirement in business today.

A good way to think about a website is in terms of it being a virtual store that sells products and/or services. A website is the perfect forum to self-promote and advertise.

Promotion and buying and selling are exactly what people expect when they visit a website. When they are at the point of making a purchase of some kind, they go to a website that will satisfy their needs. They can either purchase something online directly from your website or they can use your website to find out exactly where your bricks and mortar store is located so that they can come and purchase products and/or services from you in person.

Once a customer has bought something from you, there is a very high likelihood that they will not return to your store again. It is also basically impossible to build relationships with your potential customers and existing customers on your website because the website is static. Once a person has purchased something from you, there is no potential for interactivity so the relationship will never have a chance to develop and grow.

Blog

A blog, however, is constantly supplying potential customers and existing customers with interesting and useful content, and the blog enables them to interact with the blogger. The discussions they have together can be potentially unending.

Not only can you and your customers have discussions, but they can also ask questions that you can answer. Blogs also provide a dimension to the content that you can’t get from your website content.

Through your consistent and regular blog content, you will eventually be regarded as a subject matter expert in your niche and people will turn to you for answers. This will promote more and more discussions.

What is really being done in this case is that relationships are being developed and strengthened. Some of the people with whom you interact on your blog will never become your customers. That is perfectly acceptable. They can interact with you as much as they like and do not have to worry about any pressure to buy anything.

A very important fact is that the people with whom you interact are getting to know you as a person, which includes your level of integrity, your passion for what you are doing and offering and your knowledge, knowledge that you impart to them.

Blogs have a lot of useful features that are very helpful in promoting interactivity. Blogs enable visitors to subscribe to them so they can receive updates on a very regular basis. They will always be informed when new content is added or there has been some update to the social media profiles of the people with whom they interact.

In order to really be effective, blogs should have new postings at least once or twice a week. Fresh, original content is very important. The content is exactly what attracts and retains people and many of those people will eventually become customers.

The true purpose of a blog is to provide helpful, valuable, informative and interesting content that helps other people and that they find interesting. A blog’s purpose is definitely not to advertise or to do a hard sell on anyone. If you try to use your blog in that way, you will be very disappointed with the results. You will not be able to build relationships with anyone and you most likely won’t sell very much.

People don’t buy from people whom they don’t trust. The only way that they will trust you is if they get to know you.

All in one

One approach that has proven very effective is building your website with blog software, such as WordPress. Blog software has the capability of providing you with both static web pages (pages) and blog pages (posts). Since both are necessary for the success of your online exposure, this allows you to design a web presence that contains a traditional website and a blog using one tool. Among the other benefits are:

  • One homogenous look and feel.
  • Ease of optimization for SEO.
  • Sharing of add-on plugins between the pages and posts.
  • Ease and speed of designing and developing the web presence.
  • Ease of maintenance and updating of content since the entire web infrastructure is based on a content management system (CMS).

Conclusion

Blogs and websites work in very different ways, serve very different purposes and produce different short-term results. However, they are both necessary to increase your online exposure and to strengthen your online business reputation. It is important to have both as part of your online presence. They function well together and undeniably, you will see positive results over the long term if they are a part of your business online.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging, Guest Post, Sharisax Is Out There

Teaching with Blogs and Twitter — When “Student Help” Means the Students Are Helping: What are you likely to learn?

1 Comment

My English students are practicing their writing skills on personal blogs for class assignments. A few of the students still “didn’t get it,” i.e. what was this blogging stuff all about?

So I asked them all to write a paragraph with this topic sentence:

“Blogs are a great way for people to build an online presence as an expert.”

Here is the paragraph that I liked so much I wanted to share it with my readers:

Expertise Is Just a Click Away

Guest Post by Natasha Hart-Wong

Blogs are a great way for people to build an online presence as an expert. When I don’t know how to do something, my first instinct is to ask someone who does know: I ask my husband computer problems. I go to my sister for pet and animal inquiries, and my stepmother always has the answer for any question about organic gardening. Blogging has that personal reference feel for any topic you can think of. So a simple internet search can yield experts in any field you have an interest in. If you feel you are an expert on something, then starting your own blog is a great way to share your expertise with the world.

*     *     *

With Social Media still in its Evolutionary Stages — especially where education is concerned, we teachers are creating new ways to communicate with our students . . . and learn from/with them.

My Freshman Composition students will be writing research papers using Twitter Search and Tweetdeck [to capture the Twitter Search Streams]. Natasha will be writing about Blogging for Business, and if you want to know more about the subject, click on the links she found and posted during our online class “discussion” #Laney1A:

Natasha’s First Tweets

  1. RT @sweta_s_patel: The most effective micro-blogging tools for your business http://ow.ly/2bsEU #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  2. http://bit.ly/acFSXF 10 Big Blogging benefits for small Business#Laney1a via TweetDeck

  3. RT @LittleXpert: Blogging Advice for Small Business http://bte.tc/aK9 #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  4. RT @infomediadotcom: Can blogging really help your business? The answer is… http://ow.ly/2bnwu #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  5. RT @nataliajones: Basics of business blogging http://ht.ly/2aV98 #bloggingtips #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  6. RT @Kevin__Chan: rt @copyblogger How to Find Thousands More Prospects for Your Business: http://bit.ly/coW8CF #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  7. RT @dkspeaks: 5 Business Blogging Tips | Freelance Blogging http://bit.ly/dfC3bx #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  8. RT @savvy_writer: Blogging for Business, Part I: http://tiny.cc/ybf0i #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  9. RT @visualpeople: regular blogging makes a difference:http://bit.ly/dsQ91y #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  10. RT @G0utham: WordPress Instant Online Money Making Theme http://bit.ly/anL6XV #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  11. RT @Acidhedz: Why Google Adsense Can Help Your Online Business Succeed http://bit.ly/cdag8Q #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  12. RT @JupiterCyclone: How to quickly and easily create a blog for your business http://bit.ly/cdUeJt #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  13. RT @LynnZettler: Good tips for blogging for businesses http://ow.ly/29F1k #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  14. RT @michael_n: Keep up your business blog: http://bit.ly/dwx8LZ #Laney1A via TweetDeck

  15. RT @ChadBooker03: Three Tips to Get You Started Blogging for Business http://bit.ly/9CBOVA #Laney1A

    Fellow teachers AND students, how have social media sites enriched your educational experiences?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Blogging, Guest Post, Sharisax Is Out There

Will a FREE WordPress Theme Work for Your Blog?

8 Comments

When my WordPress Meetup group discussed the new features of WordPress 3.0, I was gungho to get started. Not only did I download the upgrade, but I also decided to test out a new theme.

Good thing I “tested” it on a training blog . . . because OOOPS my new theme crashed my site.

Good thing Hostgator was able to restore everything.

But where to turn next? Actually, as I’ve written before, LinkedIn Answers are ideal to find an expert for just about everything I want to know.

Here was my question:


My LinkedIn Experts did not fail me. In fact Sallie Goetsch, who runs our WordPress Meetup group wrote such a great response that I asked to publish it as a Guest Post:

Three Checkpoints for New WP Themes

Guest Post by Sallie Goetsch

Themes do have to pass certain tests to get into the theme repository on WordPress.org–they need to be licensed under the GPL and be free from spam links and malware. So even if you find the theme elsewhere, it’s good to check to see whether it’s available from WordPress.org.

Second, check to see how recently the theme has been updated and what kind of support the developer is offering. (You can usually find this on the home page of the theme developer. There should be a link to this in the style.css file, which you can open in Notepad.) Theme updates are often released as blog posts, with comments from users that let you know about problems.

Run the Theme Authenticity Checker (TAC) plugin. This checks your themes for suspicious links.

Themes from developer sites are likely to be more trustworthy than themes from spammy-looking sites with thousands of free themes. Many of those will be out of date and won’t work well with newer versions of WordPress, even if there’s no malicious code in them.

If the theme is a complex one with theme options and built-in functions like slideshows, check to see whether it relies on certain plugins, or might conflict with them. (And check to see whether those plugins work under your version of WordPress.)

There’s always some trial and error involved with themes, especially now with WP 3.0. If the theme passes the other tests, install it and see what happens. If it doesn’t work properly, deactivate and delete it, and try a different one.

If you have a favorite theme that doesn’t take advantage of all the new WP 3.0 features, there are several articles out there for theme developers on how to upgrade your theme.

Links:

If you ‘d like to read the rest of the great answers, please check out the other responses I’m adding to the Comment section.

And please feel free to add your own experiences and tips, as well.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email