How To Use Sulia For Blogging

I was so taken with Bottlenose, I went ahead and tried out another aggregate site. Sulia has a very attractive user interface as you can see from the screenshot of my account above.

Here’s how they describe what they do on their website:

We use a combination of editors and sophisticated algorithms to identify the best-regarded sources across thousands of topics. We then dynamically filter content from those sources, regardless of where it’s created (a blog, a social network, a media site, through Sulia’s publishing system, etc.), into high-quality, realtime “interest channels.” The result is streams of timely content from experts that is always on-topic, readable, and relevant.

Ease of Use

Simply link it to your Facebook or Twitter account and you are ready to start using it. It also has a handy bookmarklet, similar to Pinterest, which you pin to your bookmarks tool bar. Then simply click on it when you want to quickly post anything you find interesting directly to Sulia.

I love the interface and I really like that it aggregates sources from blogs, Facebook and Twitter. This is another example of how to stay up to date with the topics people are interested in so that you can write about it on your own blog. Are you tempted to try it?

Welcome to the Stream

I am a sucker for content curation and news aggregate sites, so I am curious to see what Bottlenose can offer. It is billed as “a real-time discovery engine for the social web.”

This section on their website caught my eye…

Welcome to the Stream

We are in a new era of the Internet. It’s not about static Web pages anymore, it’s about social networks, messages, conversations, and constantly flowing data. We call this the Stream.

As the Stream has emerged, the driving force of online attention has shifted from search to discovery, and from the Web to social networks. But social networks have also become increasingly noisy; it’s getting harder to find the good stuff in all the chatter.

How do we make sense of this new landscape? How do we filter signal from noise in the Stream?

Search engines are not the solution. They index the past, not the present. They’re great for finding Web pages, but no match for the real-time social Stream. We need a new approach: That’s where Bottlenose comes in.

Bottlenose is not a search engine, it’s a discovery engine. It scans the present, not the past. It makes sense of what’s happening now, and helps you discover what’s important.

Use Bottlenose to spot real-time trends, track interests, and dive in where and when you want to. Stop drowning in the stream and start surfing it!

Wondering how this would work for you?

I tried it out this morning, using small business blogs as a search term (see image above) and I was pleasantly surprised at the result. I like the visual aspect of the interface –  it shows you a live streaming view of what people are talking about online right now. It also gives you insights and analytics into what’s behind the trends and who is influencing the conversation

How do you get started?

• It’s easy. Just visit Bottlenose and search for topics that you want to track. No registration is necessary.
• But if you connect your social networks, you also get a personalized dashboard for tracking trends, news and interests around you.

Let us know if you do decide to try it out!

Related Post: 8 Google Tools To Rock Your Business Blog

Find It Friday! Does site speed affect my Google ranking?

Welcome to  Find It Friday in which we help you find the answers to your blogging questions. 

The Question

This week’s question may seem a bit techie..but bear with us..it is an important element of how your blog ranks in Google and enhances your reader experience.

I noticed that my blog took a while to load when I opened it up to show a friend on his computer recently.  He said that speed difference will affect my Google ranking. Is he right and if so, how fast should a page load and what can I do to make it load faster?

The Answer

Yes, he is right. Google uses site speed (i.e. how quickly a website responds to web requests) as part of their search ranking algorithms.

Here is what Google has to say:

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.

Blog expert, Heidi Cohen recommends that your pages should load in under two seconds and at most three. After checking the speed, determine which elements slow your page down. Google has a list of  free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site at code.google.com/speed.

Final word from Google…

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. (However) We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.

Do you have a question on how to blog effectively?

Leave a comment below and we will be happy to help you find the answer.

15 Questions To Ask Before You Publish Your Next Blog Post

Here’s a brilliant infographic from ProBlogger which neatly outlines the questions you should be asking before you hit publish on your next blog post.  We recommend you print it out or keep it on your desktop and refer to it each time you finish a blog post to keep you right on track with your blogging.

Click this link to view a larger version of this infographic.

The Top 9 Social Networks For Your Business (Infographic)

If you would like advice or guidance on how to get your business started on any of these social networking platforms, then contact us  for more information about our competitively priced training packages.

How to write the perfect blog post

Too hard to read? Click on image to see a larger version of this infographic

8 Google Tools To Rock Your Business Blog

A blog is a powerful way to grow your business online. A study by HubSpot showed that businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than those that do not have a blog. Blogging will help you build your brand online, enhance your trust and authority,  showcase your expertise, project your personality and attract more loyal customers. There are many online tools to help make your blogging more effective, and because Google dominates the Internet, what better place to start than by checking out this list of our favorite free Google tools to really rock your business blog.

(1) Google Alerts

Google Alerts is an indispensable tool for the business blogger. Automated messages are sent to your email account whenever Google indexes web content with your selected keywords or keyword phrases. You can control how often you receive these alerts (daily or weekly), whether you wish to receive all mentions, or limit it to the most relevant, and you can add new alerts, or delete old ones at any point.

How to use Google Alerts to rock your blog

• Keep updated on emerging trends in your industry to provide the latest information for your readers.
• Find new ideas for blog content.
• Provide backlinks to your site by adding (relevant) comments to other blogs in your niche.
• Track if your original content has been used on another website or blog without due attribution to you.
• Discover new bloggers in your field and build your network of contacts.

Top Tip: Use Google Alerts to monitor who’s talking about you or your blog. This is important so you can respond to any criticism, customer complaints or thank someone for writing something positive about you.

(2) Google Reader 

Google Reader for iphone

The idea of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is  to consolidate content from across the internet in one place, making it easy for you to stay up to date with all the latest news relevant to you. It means you don’t have to trawl the internet to find relevant content, or clog up your inbox with email alerts. There are several options when it comes to choosing an effective RSS (Feed) Reader. We’ve opted for the Google Reader since Google effectively own the online search market. It is simple to get started – you don’t need to download anything – simply sign in using your Google account and you are ready to start adding subscriptions to your favorite sites.

How to use Google Reader to rock your blog

• You’ve heard that content is king when it comes to blogging, so use your Google Reader to find new content and related  ideas  and industry news of interest to your readers.
• Using Google Reader allows you to scroll through a number of posts a lot quicker than clicking individual links from a ‘favourites’ folder or search engine results, thus saving you time.  Articles can be starred within Google Reader to read later.
• Use the keyboard shortcuts to save more time. Here is a full list for Google Reader
• Finally, don’t forget to activate your own RSS feed on your blog and display it prominently so that others can subscribe to it (note: RSS feed is already incorporated into the WordPress platform, so there is no need for an additional  feed).

Top Tip: You can access Google Reader on the go – a great way to catch up on your daily commute.

(3)  Google Adwords 

Driving  targeted traffic to your blog is a key factor to its success. The best way to do this is to get your blog pages ranking highly on search engine results pages, by including targeted keywords (the words people use to search online) in your blog posts.  Keywords are important because by including relevant keywords, it will be easier for people to find your blog when searching online. The Google Adwords tool is designed to gauge the effectiveness of keywords for using the google adwords service, but it works equally well for determining keywords for your blog post.

How to use Google Adwords to rock your blog

• Type in your keywords into the Google Adwords search tool.
• Google will search to find the information related to these keywords.
• You will be taken to a list showing the levels of estimated search traffic and competitiveness for your key words.
• The higher the rating, the more pages there are online that use that keyword, so try to use keywords/phrases that have LOW ‘Competition’, and HIGH Monthly Searches.

Top Tip: Each time you write a blog post, use the Google Adwords tool to ensure your post is SEO optimized.

(4) Google Analytics  

Tracking the number of visitors to your blog, where they came from, how they got there, and what they read on your blog can provide you with important insight to help you grow your blog. While there are many tools available to monitor and track your incoming traffic, the most comprehensive and free tool is Google Analytics.

How to use Google Analytics to rock your blog

• Measure blog traffic, bounce rate and page views with this tool.
• Determine the average time spent on your blog by visitors.
• Establish at which point visitors enter and exit your website.
• Use it to gather information about your customers (geographical location, time on site, search engine trends, etc).
• Monitor frequency of traffic from social networking sites and other websites.
• Use it to discover which keywords from search engines are driving traffic to your blog – you can then make more strategic use of these keywords throughout your posts.
• Find out which blog posts are most popular and choose to write more on these themes.

Top Tip: While it is easy to set up and start using this tool, be mindful that there is an art to correctly interpreting the data to suit your specific needs. Check out online articles on the topic for more information.

(5) Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search allows you to easily find what people are saying on any subject of your choice in the blogosphere. Because it is continually updated, you can be sure of the most accurate and up-to-date results from a variety of sources by subscribing either via email alert or by RSS.

How to use Google Blog Search to rock your blog

• Type in what you’re looking for in the search box and you’ll see a list of related blogs.
• You can filter these results for more relevance to your specific needs.
• Use it to find more blogs in your niche to build your bloggers network.
• Collect ideas for future blog posts.

Top Tip: Discover which topics are generating most interest in the blogosphere and comment on them or write about them on your own blog.

(6) Google Trends

Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

How to use Google Trends to rock your blog

• Determine how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News.
• Gather insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords.
• Use the Hot Searches functionality to discover what people are searching for on Google most recently.
• With this insight you can write great content on your blog.

Top Tip: Hot Searches highlights searches that experience sudden surges in popularity, and updates that information hourly, so you can be right up to date with this information on your blog.

(7) Google Insights for Search

Google Insights for Search shows you what people are searching for, where they are searching and when, allowing you to spot global trends in your industry and capitalize on new business opportunities as they present themselves.

How to use Google Insights to rock your blog

• Anticipate demand for your business so you can write posts based on the seasonal trends you can track with Google Insights.
• Use it to create subtle advertising messages for your product or service on your blog by capitalizing on search tends geographically.
• Identify which brands are doing best with the “Top Searches” and “Rising Searches” functionality.  You might discover some rising stars. Can you leverage this interest by stocking these products if you are a retailer and writing about them on your blog?

Top Tip: Google has some useful videos in YouTube that go into great detail about this tool.

(8) YouTube

We’ve included the Google owned YouTube in our list because it carries a lot of weight in Google’s search rankings (often appearing on the front page of Google). This being so, you really shouldn’t miss out on using YouTube to increase your audience,  drive traffic to your site, stand out in your niche, add personality to your blog and build your authority online.

How to use YouTube to rock your blog

• Optimize your videos to be easily found by viewers by choosing good keywords using Google’s Adword Tool (see (3) above).
• Place your keywords in the title, description, and tags of your video.
• Check out the competition and see which keywords they have used.
• Make your video short – viewers won’t stick around for long intros.
• However, do brand your video by flashing your logo at the start and end of your video.
• Add some music from a royalty free source like AudioJungle.
• Customize your YouTube profile (channel) by including your logo, brief info on your company and the url to your blog.
• Create Playlists to get more views on your channel.
• Encourage viewers to embed your video on their site,  share on social networking sites and subscribe to your YouTube channel.
• Invite viewers to check out your blog for more detailed information
• Don’t do a hard sell by asking people to buy your products.
• Plan your marketing funnel creatively for a better response.
• Promote your videos by embedding them on your blog and sharing them on popular social networking sites.

Top Tip: If the thought of appearing on a video is too intimidating for you, consider the option of  uploading a slideshow or screen capture video.

So there you have it –  our favorite free Google tools to enhance your blogging effectiveness.  It is by no means the complete list of Google’s handy tools, and some of them may seem to overlap in functionality, but by playing around with them you will discover which ones best suit your business blogging needs.

Have you tried any of these Google tools in your business blogging? Can you add to this list?

Find It Friday: How the wrong plugin can slow down your blog and how to fix it

Lorna wrote a post back in March outlining the benefits of installing the all in one seo  plugin for WordPress (note:  it isn’t available on wordpress.com). If you have chosen to go down the route of self hosting your blog, you will want to install some shiny new plugins. Now, while there are many great ones out there, there are also some not so great plugins, and be aware that by installing the wrong plugin,  you can compromise the speed at which your site loads.

Our advice is to choose quality over quantity.  Start with the all in one as recommended by Lorna, then test new ones until you find the best for your site that doesn’t compromise your speed.

To help you determine which plugins are slowing down you site, check out the P3 plugin on WordPress.org.  Often times, WordPress sites load slowly because of poorly configured plugins or because there are so many of them. By using the P3, you can narrow down anything causing slowness on your site.

The 7 Hidden Benefits Of Blogging

We write a lot here on Write On Track about the business benefits of having your own blog. We firmly believe that blogging is a fantastic way to profile your expertise, increase traffic to your website, humanize your brand, and sell your products or service. It’s worked for us and it can work for you too.

But today, we want to take you on a little side track from our main business blogging route.  We want to share some of what we have learned about the hidden benefits of blogging – the side benefits that we may not write about often,  but which nevertheless have given our business an added boost. We hope that by sharing these with you, it will encourage you to see even more benefits in starting your own business blog.

1. Blogging has made us more disciplined and organized

In the words of writer PD James “Don’t just plan to write—write.”  Sitting at our computers and writing blog posts every day has given us a disciplined approach to writing and helped us to become more organized in our thoughts.  It is true that you learn best by doing. Trust us! The more you write, the easier it becomes!

2. Blogging has helped us develop our own unique writing style

Our writing styles have evolved over the years and blogging has helped us find our own unique voice.  Your writing voice is not something you create; it is something you find, and it can take time. We now know what works for us and how best to connect with our readers. We write about the topics we are most passionate about and leave others to cover those we aren’t quite so attuned to.  Here’s what writer Jeff Goins has to say about finding your voice:

The bottom line is that finding your voice is the key to getting dedicated followers and fans and that it’s the only sustainable way to write. If you’re not being yourself, you’ll eventually burn out. A writing voice on your blog will strengthen your brand and give you focus. Furthermore, it will create a lasting impression with your readers, allowing you to better fulfill the long-term goals of your website in a more sustainable way.

3. Blogging has taught us how to research and evaluate information

We all think we know how to search online, but when you blog, you really learn how to hone your research skills. We want to provide you with the most up do date accurate information and the latest relevant findings, and in order to do that, we need to know how to gather the information, evaluate our online sources, synthesize the information and bring that information to you in an easy to digest and usable format.

4. Blogging has made us more creative thinkers

Blogging makes us think – a lot! It has made our minds sharper and our thinking more lateral and creative. As an added benefit, blogging has been shown to increase memory function. We are able to juggle many different things at once and have become expert multitaskers. We are always alert to new ideas and solutions to our business challenges.  We definitely think more outside the box these days.

5. Blogging has brought us great networking opportunities

Through blogging we have become networked to a supportive community of like-minded people.  This network has given us great tips and advice, valuable feedback and even provided us with new business contacts and work.

6. Blogging has brought us personal fulfillment

We continue to blog because we love it. We wouldn’t keep doing it if we weren’t passionate bloggers.  It has brought us both great personal fulfillment as a means of self-expression and given us a sense of accomplishment and purpose in our lives.

7. Blogging has led us to unexpected places

You never know where blogging will lead you. When we both started out on our respective blogging journeys, we never imagined that our paths would cross in the blogosphere and bring us together to form a successful business partnership. Consider what Chris Brogan has to say on the opportunities blogging can bring to you:

Every time you post, you build an opportunity. It might be for making business. It might be for sharing thought leadership. It might be the chance to build some new relationships. Mechanically, it might just be another attempt to gain better organic ranking from Google. But each post is an opportunity.

So, there you have our 7 hidden benefits of blogging. We are, as you can tell, passionate about the benefits of blogging – not just for business, but for life. Give it a try and you too may be amazed at where the blogging journey may take you.

Build Your Website With WordPress

True or False? WordPress is only for blogs

False. While WordPress may be primarily known as a blogging platform, you can use it to create a website too. We used it to create a simple design for our Write On Track website, and while we chose to incorporate a blog into the design, the fact is that you can create a stand-alone website with no blog if you prefer (although we always recommend incorporating a blog for fresh content and SEO).

Contact us to find out more about how we can help you create a simple, easy to manage website using WordPress.