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Guest Blogging Is A Great Thing—You Should Do It Too

Guest blogging is simply the act of contributing to another blog which you would not normally do so, and generally those guest bloggers are rewarded not with money but a link to their website with credit given to the author. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it can really be significant when considering it from an SEO standpoint.

Guest Blogging For Others

Let’s say you have agreed to post an article on a blog that is well established and has a very high PageRank as a guest blogger. You write the article, it is posted on the site, and you receive recognition and backlinks for your blog (maybe even the ability to promote your own content on other blogs as well). If your blog is not as well known, this could be a great opportunity to spread the word. Not only that, but the search engines will be taking notice as well.

It works out because the owner of the blog you posted on receives free content, and you receive links and recognition. It is practically a mutual benefit, and you might not receive a link otherwise. In other words, if you are dedicated enough to guest post on a wide variety of blogs with high PageRanks, you are helping your own blog indirectly, and you also show that you have experience by blogging at very many other recognizable blogs.

Allowing Guest Bloggers

If you allow other bloggers—particularly those that will post quality content or are well known—to post on your blog, you will receive great content at absolutely no cost (with the exception of possibly editing) to you. There really is little point in not allowing other bloggers to contribute to your own blogs.

Also, chances are high that the person in question will also link to his or her guest post from their own blog(s), and it could also benefit your own blog from an SEO’s standpoint. It really is a win-win situation. Some blogs around the blogosphere thrive on guest posts, and maybe it is time for you to consider opening up to others as well.

Socializing

The final benefit of guest posting is that it allows you to build up relationships with other bloggers. If you make a great impression on a blogger that is well known (or will eventually be as such), perhaps it can open the opportunity to blogging jobs or similar benefits.

As the blogosphere becomes more of an even playing field, it is slowly progressing to that famous “who you know” instead of “what you know” adage. This is an unfortunate truth that all bloggers must realize with passing time, and those that know the best will put themselves in a position to make it to the top.

The Blogosphere

Overall, I must say that guest blogging is good for the blogosphere, and good for the bloggers that actually participate. Both parties will generally benefit from the act of guest blogging, and it allows for great content to be distributed where it might not have been able to receive as many views otherwise.

Have you been a guest blogger before? Have you allowed others to post on your blog? How has it worked out for you? Let us know in the comments section.

Bring the Noise: Filter Your Social Media Lifestreams

With so many ways online to tell people what you’re up to/ what you’ve done, lifestream filtering is becoming a popular way to package all those personal-feed items. A lifestream is an aggregation of your social media feeds. A lifestream filter helps you to filter out the noise and create a custom stream of information. For example, you might want one lifestream that shows your Twitter tweets, your images and what you’re listening to on Last.fm. Then you might want a separate stream that just shows your blog posts from multiple sites and any YouTube videos you’ve created.

Lifestream Filtering in Dipity Timeline

There are a growing number of tools for lifestream filtering out there, but I like to see a visual representation of information whenever possible. After reading Markus Merz’s take on the Dipity Timeline web service, I signed up for an account (free).

Dipity makes it very easy to your filter your personal lifestream feeds. While you are signing up for your account, you’re presented with an easy-to-use form for entering a variety of social media details (usernames, email addresses, profile links, RSS feed URLs, etc.). At present, this is what you have to choose from:

Picasa
Twitter
Pandora
WordPress
Last.fm
Flickr
Yelp
Blogger
YouTube
miscellaneous RSS feed

(Note: you get these same options any time you create a new timeline and want to add feeds.)

A lot of popular social media sites are not in the list. However, you can use option #10 repeatedly, after the initial lifestream timeline is built, to add your other social media feeds. The result is a handy timeline representation of your aggregated lifestream items:

You can remove feeds or add feeds by using the “Manage Feeds” option on your personal lifestream timeline page. (You only get one of these, but you can use your Dipity account to build other lifestreams as regular Dipity Timelines with their own URLs.) You can view your lifestream in Timeline, List View, Flipbook or Map View modes. (The latter requires tagging stream items with geographical information – i.e., geocoding.)

Since Dipity Timeline lets you mix events and feeds, you can produce some very interesting lifestream timelines. For example, you could have one lifestream that contains your Twitter tweets and supplement those items with images or video “events”. So if you Twitter about movies and film, you can add an “I’ve just seen Iron Man” event, then include a poster image and video clip. The resulting is a custom lifestream timeline.

Have a go at Dipity and you’ll at least have a bit of fun. (There’s a developer API, if you want to get serious.) I had trouble adding my Last.fm and Flickr feeds, though. And the resulting timeline is really creaky while redrawing when switching duration view. (That is, if you change fom viewing your timeline over “1 year” to, say, “3 months”, some of the items do not redraw right away. So you might see an expanse of nothing for several seconds. Be patient and the items will pop up.)

Curriculum Vitae Timelines

It occurred to me there’s a special type of “lifestream” that might need to be interactive: your C.V. – Curriculum Vitae (aka “resume”). If your body of work (articles, podcasts, vodcasts, screencasts, etc.) is available online, a timeline might be a handy way to present it all. Since Dipity allows you to mix RSS feed items with manually-added events, you can always add details about jobs you’ve held, etc. The only thing Dipity doesn’t do – that I’ve seen – is allow “duration” information like SIMILE Timeline does. So you don’t “see” when one job ended and another started. Still, for those of you that freelance, this could be an excellent interactive way to present your CV to potential clients.

Groupstreams

Why build lifestreams for just one person? Dipity allows you to assign editors, so you can create “groupstreams” too. This could be for a group of friends, or for a team of employees. Here’s the process:

A group “manager” builds a timeline that includes Twitter feeds for all group members.
Each member is added as an editor.
Each member adds new events as desired. You can add images, video clips, description, a location, and a link to each event. The link, when clicked, opens a new window. So you could link to all kinds of web applications – including a live video feed, an online meeting room, Campfire, mind mapping, etc.

Since you can add future-dated items, groupstreams could be used to show schedules for a virtual team, plan get togethers and much more. (Note: future-dated events will not show before the actual date to anyone except Dipity members that have editing access to the timeline.)

Summary

Dipity does have a developer API, but its REST-based approach is very different than SIMILE Timeline’s interface. Of course, you can use either tool for more than just lifestreams. If you want to learn more about lifestreams and lifestreaming, visit Lifestream Blog.

Have fun, and enjoy this “Bring the Noise” video of Anthrax and Public Enemy. Flavor Flaaaav!

Bookmark The Web: A Few Tools To Keep Track of Great Content

We have been handed a double-edged sword when it comes to feed reading technology, but while that has its own problems, we need to find ways to save the content those great pieces of content we find on the web. Whether you use the bookmarking feature within your browser or a web-based service, you should still consider the alternatives available.

The Bookmarking Tools

ScrapBook

ScrapBook is not your conventional bookmarking tool. As a matter of fact, I would suggest several other tools for simple bookmarking tasks, but there is one reason why ScrapBook is very impressive—it allows you to capture and save entire webpages with ease. If you are asking yourself why you might want to save a webpage, you might want to pass on ScrapBook, but if you have ever had some content on a site you wanted to save locally, ScrapBook is a real winner.

Zotero

Zotero is a great tool developed for the scholars of the world, and can be valuable tool for any blogger that learns how to utilize it. Acting more like an intricate digital library for storing information, Zotero allows its users the ability to store webpages, media, links, and other documents, and the best thing is that they can all be labeled in a folder and/or tagging system. The only issue with Zotero is the fact that your information is not saved on a server, so be sure to create suitable backups.

Delicious

Delicious is the premiere social bookmarking service developed currently owned by Yahoo! It simply is one of the best straight up bookmarking tools that I have been able to find so far. However, it is after you install the Delicious Firefox extension when things really start getting interesting. I am only surprised that there hasn’t been any serious competition to Delicious thus far.

Firefox 3

Firefox 3 makes a great move with the built-in bookmarking functionality by giving users the ability to use tagging. This is far more superior to the bookmarking functionality available in Firefox 2. One of my favorite features is the ability to find the site you are looking for by typing in the name, description, or an associated tag of any site. All very handy features, but unfortunately, your bookmarks are always at risk. This brings me to my last option.

FoxMarks

FoxMarks compliments the built-in bookmarking feature of Firefox by storing them on a server. This means that those of you who are a bit paranoid (and for good reason) about losing your bookmarks can always have a backup online. FoxMarks also has another benefit, and that is the ability to access these bookmarks on multiple computers through the FoxMarks extension or the website.

Save It or Lose It

There is a lot of crap on the web, so the stuff that really stands out needs to be saved. You just never know when you might want to refer back to some content, but might have lost the link to only never find it again. Be prepared, and be sure to make use of these tools that will help you keep track of great and important content.

Why You Don’t Rank and What to Do About it

If you are looking at your analytics and wondering why you don’t get any search traffic, or looking at search results wondering why you are nowhere to be found, then read on.

There are fundamental reasons why one site ranks and another doesn’t, and sorry but it takes either effort or money to put right.

Your site is broken for search engines – If you can’t even get indexed then you will never rank, so that is the first thing to check. Next is your site being found with both www. and without? After that make sure your structure is correct and the content is well ordered and prioritized over markup.
You are not targeting the right keywords – If you do not target phrases then whatever you rank for, if anything, will be left to chance. What are the phrases that will bring the best traffic (not always the most, but the quality traffic you need).
You do not have enough links – Link building takes effort or you need to pay someone, but do not leave it to “build it and they will come”. If you are just hoping for links then you can be sure your competitors are actually doing something about it. Quality, on topic, good anchor text links = Rank

So what do you need to do? Get your site in order, work out what phrases you want to be found for, and start building links around those phrases!

If you want someone to do the link building for you, look no further than our own Performancing Services Link Building packages

Twitter: A Desktop Client Goes A Long Way

I keep noticing people questioning the usefulness of Twitter while using the service. The catch is that each of these people are—usually—using the website to “tweet” throughout the day. What fun is that? After all, if you were going to utilize a web browser, Jaiku would be the better option. The reason Twitter has become so popular is because of the third-party applications that have been developed for it, and if you’re not using, at the very least, a desktop client, you are missing a significant portion of the Twitter experience.

The desktop client gives you an almost instantaneous connection with your friends. In some sense, Twitter can act as a a huge resource for live news. People that provide links to great content on the web are worth following, and I am sure that, with time, Twitter will have tools developed for it to manage and save the information. Previously, I wrote about how useful Twitter can be to the dedicated blogger, and a desktop client is the way to maximize the usefulness.

Hopefully those of you that are still on the edge of your seat about Twitter will take my advice here and check out a desktop client. It will enhance the usefulness and fun with Twitter. I don’t think Twitter is worth much at all without these various applications, and it is no wonder why so many people that are new to Twitter think it is pointless; I did as well when I first started using it. So, I have decided to compile a simple listing of the various clients you can try. My favorite is Twhirl, but there are many great alternatives as well.

Desktop Clients

Twitter Clients for Windows:

Twitter Clients for Mac:

Twitterrific
TwitterPod

Twitter Clients for Linux:

Twitux
gTwitter

Multi-platform Twitter Clients:

Let me know what you think of Twitter after using one of these clients. It might possibly change your mind about Twitter’s usefulness if you are not a fan.

Even When You Are Gone, You Can Still Be There

Many professional bloggers have a broad schedule that they attempt to maintain. It creates interest within your readership, and it also gives your readers a great idea of when to expect new content. This also increases your chances of generating subscribers to your content. However, there are just those times when things do not work out as planned—it is times like those when preparation really can pay off. The ability to post content at a future point in time without having to do it yourself is a great way to ensure you are prepared, but you also need to have content readily available when you might not have it otherwise.

All bloggers should take the time to create a few extra posts that are not focused on news, but are more focused on opinions or similar to that. Depending on your niche and blogging style, this might be difficult, but once you have taken the time to use these posts when you really have to, you’ll realize that the extra effort is worth it. For Performancing, I already have had three articles prepared incase I ended up needing to use them. Coincidently, I am going to be using them this week. (If you were following me on Twitter, you would know why.)

A few other reasons for creating backup content:

Taking that wonderful vacation
Just needing a break from blogging
Feeling under the weather
The words just won’t add up (writer’s block)
Allowing extra effort for more complex articles

The primary reason for doing something like this is to maintain your consistency. Again, readers appreciate consistency, and we all have had our moments where we have slacked off in the past, but there are other times when serious problems can arise, and this is why you need to be prepared. So, are you prepared?

Another Timeline Tool: Dipity TimeTube

Last month, I wrote about various timeline tools and how they’re a great way to present temporally-based information. I’ve been using SIMILE Timeline and MyTimeline for a number of projects. (MyTimeline is built on SIMILE Timeline.) Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to embed videos into the timeline events in SIMILE Timeline.

Now there’s TimeTube from Dipity [via NewTeeVee], which is all about presenting videos on a timeline. Enter in keywords, click the Build TubeLine button, and you’ll get back an interactive timeline, aka a TubeLine, of YouTube videos tagged with your keywords.

TimeTube TubeLines have a very interesting presentation, which you can embed on a page, but there’s no refined control over it. For example, here’s a TubeLine for Saturday Night Live videos on YouTube:

You can actually link to specific events in the timeline – something you can’t do with SIMILE Timeline. However, what I’m really looking to do is to present a timeline of all the SNL cast members since 1975, with a select video – if available – of each member. So for getting finer control, I’m sticking with SIMILE Timeline. I just wish I could figure out how to embed videos in its events.

Practical Blogging Tips: Why Write Short Fiction?

As writing reviews teaches you brevity, writing short fiction helps you to develop non-fiction narratives that, if applied properly, could make your blogging more entertaining and/or inspiring. Brian Clark’s Copyblogger post, The Snowboard, the Subdural Hematoma, and the Secret of Life, as an exampler. That post is inspirational, and has many elements of fictional storytelling woven into it – a process that can also be applied to structuring your blog posts for more impact.

What Short Fiction Is Not

Note that short fiction is not shorter long fiction. There’s a whole different dynamic in short fiction than in a full-length novel or even a novella. In short fiction, the plot has to be tighter, and the events happen “faster” (in the time frame of the reading experience).

Short fiction is said by some to be harder to write than long fiction, though I find it’s much easier to map out the events and plot line in short fiction. (I’ve used the process to transform a few short stories into novelettes, but a complete novel escapes me still.)

Why Do This?

Keep in mind that the purpose here is not necessarily to write short fiction for publication but rather to learn the process and apply it to your blogging. There are two possible uses of the process you’ll learn:

Writing narrative posts.
Learning to structure your longer posts for more impact.

Use #1 isn’t appropriate for all types of blogs, but #2 is. I apply #1 to a personal/ inspirational blog that, which is maintained mostly as a writing exercise for me. I apply #2 for all of my longer posts/ linkbaits. If I’m lucky, I might manage to also apply a bit of storytelling style to propel readers through long posts – though that’s an art I haven’t consistently achieved quite yet.

What about you? Do you use storytelling in any of your non-fiction writing/ blogging?

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