Do you use Hootsuite? It is a social media dashboard that lets you manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts in one place. There are other services and programs out there that will do this – such as Tweetdeck – so why use Hootsuite?

In a recent post blogger Joe Hackman offers reasons why he has opted for the paid “Pro” version of Hootsuite:

…so why do I love Hootsuite?:

1. The platforms it supports (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping.fm etc)
2. The custom dashboards (must have, seriously!)
3. Ability to access customers accounts and collaborate.
4. Scheduling.
5. RSS/Atom feed support. (This is a absolute must for some of my clients accounts)

These features are available with the free version. The Pro version gives you expanded capabilities such as inclusion of unlimited social network accounts, unlimited stats history (rather than just 30 days, and integration of Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.

More information about Hootsuite:

Determining the business value of HootSuite Pro
Hootsuite Gets a Facelift

So you’ve written a great new post in your blog and now you want to let the world know about it. Is there a “check list” of things to do to get traffic to your new blog post. In the article Traffic Generation Step by Step: So You Published a New Post, Now What? blogger Ana Hoffman offers a list of suggestions such as:

• Share it on Twitter and Facebook
• Send an email to your list
• Turn it into an article and post it on EzineArticles.com
• Engage in social communities such as BlogEngage, BizSugar, BetterNetworker, Bloggersbase and SERPd.com
• Build links specifically to your post through blog commenting

To read Ana’s post go to Traffic Generation Step by Step: So You Published a New Post, Now What?

Adding Ajax functionality to your WordPress blog can improve its performance, take fewer resources, speed up page loads, and let your users do things that out-of-the-box WordPress will not do.

An article called How to Ajaxify Your WordPress Site by Jeff Star on ProBlogger.net details some of the things Ajax WordPress plugins can do for you. As Jeff says,

Beyond the “coolness” factor, Ajax can also improve the responsiveness and performance of your site. Instead of loading new pages to leave comments, view posts, and share content, Ajax empowers users to interact with your site with greater intimacy and efficiency than ever before. By eliminating page loads, Ajax helps to save valuable server resources and bandwidth, resulting in improved performance for your site. And you can “ajaxify” just about anything: from logins and comments to navigation and updates, Ajax can speed things up, save resources, and make your site better than ever.

The article discusses numerous Ajax plugins for functions like faster logins, slicker commenting, and better navigation.

Resources:
How to Ajaxify Your WordPress Site
Digging Into WordPress

In this guest post on JohnChow.com the author called Lior offers some advice on finding guest bloggers to add content to your blog. As Lior says,

The advantages of additional, long-term bloggers on your site are many, including additional personalities to attract new readers, more content for your site and less pressure on you to produce constantly.

His top suggestions:

• Search your friends
• Look at LinkedIn
• Look at related blogs
• Check your comments

Read more – How to Find Additional Bloggers for Your Blog

I’ve been thinking a bit about blogging and the different ways blogs can be used. We can get really hung up on one specific model – and it might be useful to enumerate the different “models” available to bloggers – and forget that a blog can be used for other purposes you may not have thought of.

In this video Darren Rouse of ProBlogger.net talks of a couple of instances he is aware of where people have created “temporary” blogs. In one case the blogger wanted to use the blog for publishing stuff to impress potential employers.

The idea of the “temporary” blog is pretty interesting, and potentially very useful. However, I suspect that it would not achieve its objective if it wasn’t approached in the same way a person should approach any business blog:

- Plan objectives
- Create good content to achieve those objectives
- Promote, promote, promote

If you are an online entrepreneur or any kind of entrepreneur for that matter (offline, bricks and mortar, professional, whatever) you may have wondered if you should start a blog.

I’m not going to enumerate the pros and cons of blogging. Instead I want to suggest what an effective business-oriented blog is, and the attitude you should have when you consider creating one. This may help you decide if you should put in the effort to create a business blog.

Business Blogging is Marketing

For our purposes here I am using the term “business” in a fairly broad sense. As I see it when you start engaging in activities for some organized or focused ulterior motive you are engaging in a “business”.

If you have a shoe store, for example, you generally are not selling shoes because you enjoy it. Selling shoes is not like going to the gym, reading a good book, or watching a baseball game on TV. Selling shoes has a point – to make money, earn a living, or whatever else you want to call it.

So first, not to sound too dogmatic about this, people in business have blogs for some marketing objective – they have a “focused ulterior motive” – to “sell” a message.

That doesn’t mean your business blog has to continually hawk products or talk about special deals for your services. But it does mean that it should reflect your business objectives and offer relevant information to your primary target market – your customers and prospective customers.

Sometimes the “marketing” objective of a blog is not very obvious. To take a fairly extreme example, let’s say you are a writer or a “commentator” type – you know, the kind of person who likes to express opinions, “rant”, or just hear him or herself talk.

In that case having a blog gives you a platform for getting out your message and enhancing your professional persona. It doesn’t have to be your only soapbox – you may also want to post videos on Youtube or start a radio program on BlogTalkRadio. But a blog can be the focal point of your empire – the thing that ties it all together and helps you establish a consistent presence.

In other words, business blogging is about marketing. Which means you should figure out your business objectives before starting a business blog. And then fit your blog into those objectives.

Business Blogging is about Publishing

Second, business bloggers should view themselves as publishers. The distinctive thing about “publishing” as opposed to just writing stuff, is that it is done in an organized and focused way with the intention of appealing to specific readers.

Unlike a diary, or even a traditional blog (which is sort of like a diary) you are not primarily writing for yourself in a business blog. A diary is specifically meant not to be read by others. A business blog is the opposite. A primary objective is to give as many readers as possible something interesting to read, watch or listen to.

There is a parallel here with book publishing. Traditional publishers will only publish a book if they think it has a chance of recouping costs and (hopefully) making a profit. When you submit a written work to a traditional publisher you are subjecting your work to the evaluation of a somewhat detached third party. Their primary concern is not to spread your message, but rather to sell your book in order to stay in business.

On the other hand, when you self-publish you pay the costs up front and are not willing to accept some third party’s opinion of the marketability of your writing. This is often called the vanity press because people who self-publish are prepared to pay to have works printed that have no hope of making a traditional publisher any money.

Blogs have been compared to the vanity press because they are self-published, have virtually no cost of entry, and often have no chance of getting a lot of readers.

But business blogs – at least as I have described them here – are more akin to traditional publishing. You should not waste your time and effort on a business blog if it has no chance of giving you some kind of return.

In other words, as a publisher you should be prepared to do what it takes to make your business blog a worthwhile investment. First, that means evaluating your target market and coming up with a game plan. Second, it means creating content that has a chance of getting readers. And third it means promoting your blog because you recognize that without readers you are basically wasting your time and the resources of your business.

In a recent blog post successful internet marketer and blogger John Chow revealed one of the most important money making secrets about blogging in the “make money online” niche. His advice:

Don’t blog about making money online if you’ve never made money online.

He admits he and other successful bloggers like Shoemoney and ProBlogger may be part of the problem, since they focus on “how to make money by blogging”.

But what most get-rich-quick types don’t understand is that successful bloggers already have a serious leg up on newbies who start from scratch. They already know how to make money online, and they probably already know how to run a business. As he says:

If you look at all the big make money online bloggers, you’ll discovered that they were all making money online before they started their make money online blogs. Shoemoney was a search engine marketer making over $100K a month off Google. Darren Rowse makes far more from his Digital Photography School blog than he does from his blog.

Judging from the number of “make money online blogs” out there, this is not as obvious as it should be. Consider this golf instruction analogy: What are the chances of a “learn to play golf” website being successful if the person starting it doesn’t know how to play golf? Not very good.

Of course, it might be possible to teach golf fundamentals from a book, at least to complete golf newbies. But nobody who is serious about golf is going to pay someone to teach them about the game if the would-be teacher has not demonstrated that they actually know how to play it.

Why would we think making money online is any different?

I recently posted about guest blogging, explaining the obvious fact that it is a great way to get exposure for your own ideas, profile and blog. Here’s another good resource if you’re interested in this very powerful technique.

It’s a post by, you guessed it, a guest blogger, Onibalusi Bamidele on JohnChow.com and it’s called 5 Ways to Make Sure Your Guest Post Gets Published. Onibalusi Bamidele claims to have written more than 260 guest posts in the last year, so he should know what he’s talking about. His tips boil down to the following points:

1. Read the guidelines. This is especially the case with A-list blogs (the ones with a lot of traffic.)

2. Read previous guest posts to see what kind of thing gets accepted.

3. Write a good headline – even if your article isn’t that great the blogger may like the headline and either publish the post or ask you to rewrite it.

4. Give your best stuff in guest posts. Don’t expect they will publish just anything.

5. Go ahead and submit. You’re not going to get it published if you don’t submit it. The worst that can happen is that your post will be rejected. You can always submit it to someone else.

Following these suggestions is not going to mean your posts will be automatically accepted. It is very much like trying to get your newest novel accepted by a publisher. If your writing is not very good, or if your ideas are mediocre it doesn’t matter how well you follow the guidelines.

Building links is an important part of promoting your website(s) and building an online presence. The more you get involved in different places around the web the more you will be noticed and the more traffic you will ultimately get. This is what you might call the “Prolific Principle”. The more prolific you are, the more your “presence” will grow.

This applies to content – publish as much fresh, original content as you can – and it applies to links pointing to your web properties. Be prolific – get out there – a lot.

In an article published a couple years ago on the HubSpot Blog Peter Caputa compares the link building process to passing through the “grades” you go through in high school. The article is called Did You Graduate From Link Building High School Yet?

Peter suggests to really master this process will take 4 years (like it does in high school), and that you have to move through the stages gradually. I think this is probably an exaggeration. If you get good advice you should be able to move through the stages quite a bit more quickly than that, and I believe the stages overlap more than he suggests. Nevertheless, the article makes some good suggestions. Here is my summary with comments of my own…

In Stage 1 (Grade 9) you should build links that don’t require anyone else’s help. These links include directory listings, many of which you can get for free, and references on social media sites where (among other things) you can create a profile – also for free.

I would add to this you should try to get at least one or two links from established sites that will result in your site being indexed as quickly as possible – perhaps from a friend or colleague. If you own a local business look for local business directories. Not only can you get listed there, but you can find other people you might exchange links with.

In Stage 2 (Grade 10) you should launch a business blog and begin adding content on a regular basis. Then start publishing articles on sites like Ezinearticles.com, GoArticles.com and others. You can use a submission service like SubmitYourArticle.com for distribution to a large number of sites.

As I outline in a previous post about article marketing this is a good way to get links (by adding them to your “resource box” on each article) and to build a reputation as an “expert” in your field. Of course this requires writing original, interesting articles. If you are stumped for original content you can just do reviews of other people’s articles or products (like this article) or you might consider using an article writing service like Textbrokers.

In Stage 3 (Grade 11) you should start networking with as many people as possible who share your interests. The object is to make yourself visible. This requires participation and “engagement”.

One way of doing this is to find a number of bloggers in your niche and start making meaningful comments on their posts. This is called blog commenting.

This will gradually introduce you to fellow bloggers and your link in each comment will attract a small amount of traffic from other commenters or readers. Once you gain enough confidence you can approach some of the bloggers you have met this way to do a guest post on their blog. That way you can leverage their readership to enhance your own visibility.

By this stage your blog should have a fair bit of valuable content so you should register it with as many blog networks as possible. MyBlogLog.com is a good place to start. This will help you meet other bloggers with similar interests and will give you some tools for tracking your traffic as it gradually grows.

You can also use other social media to gain visibility for specific blog posts. Digg and Stumbleupon are good places to start. You can also post references (and links) to specific blog posts on your Facebook wall, Twitter, and wherever else is appropriate.

Remember, the objective here is to build connections with key people and use the connections to build visibility. Content is the key. Build content on your blogs, in articles, and with guest posts.

In Stage 4 (Grade 12) you become a power blogger creating all kinds of content: articles, training courses, white papers, webinars and videos. All of these things attract readers, links, and subscribers. If you have done it correctly you should be an important, highly visible part of a vibrant community, and you should be at the top of the search engine results for your most important keywords.

I stumbled onto a post by Diane Corriette in her blog Mindset of a Blogger about Amplify – Traffic Generation tip using the new Amplify plugin for WordPress blogs.

At Amplify you can set up your own blog where you post things that you clip from other sources around the web – blog posts, videos, news stories, etc. Your post normally includes a comment or two of yours. This gives you a chance to share opinions and ideas with other members.

The important action at Amplify (as it is at most social networking sites) is sharing with other members. You are encouraged to follow others, and hopefully some of them will follow you in return. You then comment on their entries and they comment on yours.

Who is Amplify for?

I suspect Amplify is best suited for bloggers, technophiles and people who want to express opinions on specific areas of interest. It has taken features from Facebook, Twitter, and Clipmarks but is more focused on somewhat more intensive conversation. At least that is my initial take on it. That’s on the conversation or “social” side.

But on the publishing side it looks like it would work very well for would-be bloggers who have a difficult time coming up with content (like the rest of us). You can create an entire blog focused on a specific theme – even a “local” theme if you’re a local entrepreneur – and just clip news stories about your theme.

Here is my Amplify blog – Rick Hendershot’s Amplify blog to give you an idea of the kind of content I’m posting.

Referring again to Diane Corriette’s blog post, it contains a couple of videos describing how Amplify works. Here’s one of them: