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The Ins and Outs of Blogging: Episode 3 Developing Content [Podcast]

December 1, 2011 By 1 Comment

Ins and Outs of Blogging LogoThinking about starting a blog? Want to get more out of your current one? Check out episode 3 of 3 “Developing Content” on the ins and outs of blogging with my featured guest Gini Dietrich of Arment Dietrich and the Spinsucks blog.

Listen

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Summary

In this episode you will learn about developing content for your blog and other social networks. One of the key aspects discussed is the importance of creating original content and avoiding the pitfall of providing un-original thoughts and ideas. You may also want to review this article written by Tim Otis, it was mentioned during the podcast.

See also:

Episode 1: “Getting Started”

Episode 2: “Building Community”

This episode was live on Blog Talk Radio on 11/30/2011.

Browser or RSS Reader doesn’t support flash? Download/Listen to this episode 

You can also signup to be notified when I have new Podcasts scheduled by clicking the “follow” button for my show on Blog Talk Radio.

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Interviews, Podcasts, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Is the Rise of Word Press Killing off Jobs?

November 1, 2011 By 18 Comments

Is Word Press killing of jobs? That’s what a new connection of mine on Twitter suggested to me just last week:

Wordpress Kills JobsThe minute I read Monica’s Tweet, the wheels in my head started spinning. One of them was wondering if it was true, and the second was what can (or should) be done about it. Before we go there, I learned that Monica’s opinion is an informed one, she started writing about WordPress in 2009, about the same time I started working with it (we share that too, she’s done WordPress web development too).

Is it True the WordPress is Killing Jobs?

This would be hard to prove, because during the rise of WordPress there was a corresponding fall in the economy that appears to be unrelated. WordPress does make web development and website maintenance easier and more available to more people to both develop and maintain with less technical skills however. Almost anyone can setup and maintain a WordPress based website. One thing is certain it’s still progress and it must be creating opportunities elsewhere. WordPress actually got me excited about web development after a very long hiatus.

What should we do about it?

It’s never fun to end up on the disrupted end of disruptive technology but the fact remains that innovation and value are important qualities in any business. If people are losing jobs from the rise of Word Press, they probably have some marketable skills that can be re-purposed. Web development takes a mix of creativity, technical and business skills, and there is always room for people with these skills. The challenge might have more to do with the discomfort of the disruption and the change that might be involved.

Do you think WordPress is really putting web firms out of business?

Filed Under: Business, Twitter, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,

The Ins and Outs of Blogging: Episode 2 Building Community [Podcast]

October 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Ins and Outs of Blogging LogoThinking about starting a blog? Want to get more out of your current one? Check out episode 2 of 3 “Building Community” on the ins and outs of blogging with my featured guest Gini Dietrich of Arment Dietrich and the Spinsucks blog.

Listen

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Summary

This episode helps you evaluate the value of a community for your blogging objectives and provides you with some guidance on how to do it effectively if you do determine it’s important for your mission. You may also want to read this Resource of the Day feature by my friend and past guest @Tinu who honored us by doing a great review of this episode. You might also want to check out Episode 1, “Getting Started“.

This episode was live on Blog Talk Radio on 10/26/2011.

Browser or RSS Reader doesn’t support flash? Download/Listen to this episode 

You can also signup to be notified when I have new Podcasts scheduled by clicking the “follow” button for my show on Blog Talk Radio.

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Interviews, Podcasts, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Expand your content sharing with Print Friendly and PDF

October 21, 2011 By 8 Comments

As bloggers we’re always looking for ways to make our content more friendly, encourage conversation and encouraging distribution of the content to amplify our voice. I recall seeing the Print Friendly plugin for the first time over at Waxing Unlyrical. I thought it was interesting but didn’t connect the dots until yesterday that is.

Why some of your readers will love this plugin

Think for a moment about your less tech savvy readers, the ones who may not even have a Twitter account or won’t bother to click the LinkedIn share because they rarely log in. Or think about the friends and connections of your tech savvy readers that won’t want content delivered anywhere but the old tried and true – Email. This is where the true power of Print Friendly lies. In this video I demonstrate how the plugin works and describe in more detail why I think it is great for the web 1.0/Email crowd.

Video not showing up? Try this direct link.

Filed Under: Productivity, Technology, Video, Wordpress, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The ins and outs of Blogging Episode 1 [Podcast]

September 30, 2011 By 5 Comments

Young BloggerThinking about starting a blog? Check out episode 1 of 3 “Getting Started” on the ins and outs of blogging with my featured guest Gini Dietrich of Arment Dietrich and the Spinsucks blog.

Listen

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Summary

This episode takes you from “I am interested in blogging” to “I am blogging” with some excellent tips to save you time and get you started on the right foot.

This episode was live on Blog Talk Radio on 9/28/2011.

Browser or RSS Reader doesn’t support flash? Download/Listen to this episode 

You can also signup to be notified when I have new Podcasts scheduled by clicking the “follow” button for my show on Blog Talk Radio.

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Interviews, Podcasts, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Bye Headup it was nice knowing you

February 15, 2011 By 11 Comments

Good ByeHeadup makers of a Wikipedia info popup information utility are calling it quits on 2/28/2011. Citing lack of success in an Email sent to users of Headup (including moi) early this morning:

Hi there,

Following our previous email, we wanted to let you know that by the end of February we’re going to discontinue the Headup Widget for websites service.
We appreciate the time and effort that you took to use it. It’s been a great experience for us, and we hope you enjoyed the product as well.
There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is that it just wasn’t successful enough to warrant future development.
The Headup widget will stop functioning on February 28th, 2011.

If you are a WordPress or Joomla user, we highly recommend that you uninstall it from the plugins page before the end of the month.
Other users should simply remove the script from their HTML files.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Thanks for the feedback and support along the way, you’ve all been great.

All the best,
The Headup team.

I use the Headup widget here on my blog to allow people to get popup information on keywords such as Email, Facebook, Notifications, Life, NBC, Community (picked randomly from recent posts). According to the WordPress Codex site Headup has as of this publishing 10,754 downloads. So there are at least that many people like me seeking alternatives. I am going to start looking at alternatives but Wikipop is looking the most promising right now.

“Lack of success” = Lack of Profit

With the pressures to provide everything for free these days, many people are raising the question about free content and free applications. In fact if you follow @GiniDietrich’s blog she did a piece recently about charging for content. In that article she cited a recent Harvard Business Review podcast “Finding Profit in a World of Free” which is a very interesting piece that discusses the topic in depth.

Good bye Headup, it was indeed nice knowing you. Thanks for the free software and good luck to everyone. I only wish that your monetization strategy had worked because I thought you had a pretty awesome tool.

Photo Credit Peter Kaminski

Filed Under: New Media, News, Tools, Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

Why do you blog?

January 19, 2011 By 97 Comments

Blogger Tag Cloud by Joe Hackman (via Tagxedo)I was reading a comment today from Ileane and she was sharing with me that her daughter got her into blogging. I also learned not too long ago that Gini Dietrich started Spinsucks because she was frustrated by the way that many PR professionals created a very poor impression of the PR industry. This inspired me to write this post, because I suspect the answers to the question “Why do you blog” will be far more interesting than the post itself.

Why do I blog?

I started blogging years ago on my company website in the late 1990’s, I didn’t realize what I was doing would be called blogging one day. I mostly wrote stories to inform my company’s clients about changes occurring in the IT industry that might affect them, and I actually still do that on Facebook and at Managed Solutions. I continued to do that for a number of years and eventually in 2008 I started blogging using wordpress.com on my blog called “Reasonable Ideas”. On that blog I wrote mostly about non-profits and science. This experiment would carry over into my next blog Joegonesocial.com, the blog you are most likely reading this story at. When I decided to embrace social media it was not an easy transition from paranoid IT Security minded guy to the more open and public Internet footprint that comes with being a blogger. In light of that I made the decision to wholly embrace social media and to add it to my “must do’s” in my business. Bottom line, I blog for a lot of reasons but the core (and intentionally vague!) reasons I blog are:

  • For business reasons.
  • For personal reasons.

Why do you blog?

I am intentionally not giving a lot of detail about my reasons, I really want this post to be more about you and why you blog. What do you blog about and why? I look forward to hearing about you.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How to use Tagxedo to embed a cool tag cloud on your Blog

January 3, 2011 By 3 Comments

Tagxedo Tag Cloud of Joe's Gone SocialHave you tried Tagxedo? It’s a pretty nifty little app I spotted on @liendi11′s  Amplog recently. While playing around with it I realized that it was more difficult to get the clouds to work in WordPress than one would think so when I found a way to get it to work I also created a video to explain it. The method that I demonstrate shows you how to create a tagxedo cloud that is usable in both pages, posts and even as a widget. The main thing that needs to be modified is the size of the iframe code that is provided in the tagxedo code snippet. Here is the video followed by a live example of the tag cloud.

In the live example of a Tagxedo Tag cloud below you’ll note that all of the links go to the default function in the setup – a Google search page. Ideally a blog specific search should be used. I’d imagine someone will get creative and port it to a WordPress plugin before too long but until now you can see the possibilities. (Note: If you click the tags it will take you off my site and to Google search, apologies I should have adapted it to my site search!)

Filed Under: Blogging, Images, Social Media Strategy, Video, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Uses of the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin for WordPress (Video)

September 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Whenever we post things on a website the search engines index the page based on the address of that content. What happens if you move it? People will no longer be able to access it using your old link and the search engines will start fresh with the new page once (if?) they find it. This video shows you how you can use the Quick Page/Post Redirect to prevent losing referring traffic when you rename a permalink in WordPress. This plugin also has a number of great other uses, in fact I demonstrate how it was used to redirect old links from my Joomla based website to a WordPress based revision of the site as well. Don’t lose your SEO juice when you make changes, let your content be found.

Filed Under: SEO, Tools, Video, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,

Adding the Twitter Tweet Button to WordPress

August 12, 2010 By 4 Comments

Update 8/13/2010 – there is now a plug in called Twitter Tweet Button 1.0 that can be installed and enabled via WordPress Plugins. I am still using this original method described below because for me the formatting is off with the button.

I recorded this screencast for people who don’t want to wait for a decent plugin for the Twitter Tweet Button. There are some ways to add this to the single post template manually but with my template it was a complete nightmare to do. Until a plugin is released I this might help you add the new button to your WordPress blog:

This video does provide information on how to use the append plugin to add code or text to every page/post or both:

Filed Under: Technology, Twitter, Video, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , ,
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