What To Do When You’re Tired Of Blogging

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes run out of ideas for my blog. When you have blogged for years, there may come a time when you feel you have nothing left to say, or when you need to recharge your batteries so you can keep the good content coming. The trouble is, what do you do with your blog while you’re recharging? A blog needs to be updated regularly, so you can’t let it vegetate. Here are a few ideas for keeping your blog full of fresh content, without too much work for you.

Guest Posts

One of the best ways to keep your blog fresh is to let your blog community have a voice on it. One way to do this is by soliciting guest posts related to the topic of your blog. Most people are happy to offer a guest post for free if they get a link back to their blog, and using guest posters has an added benefit. It brings your poster’s regular readers to your blog. This strategy is used all around the blogosphere and is very successful.

Group Writing Projects

For a group writing project, all you need to do is select a topic and ask people to contribute. You do a short post to introduce it, and depending on how long it lasts, you can post updates on some of the best ideas coming from it. Finally, you can do a wrap up post at the end. Problogger’s Darren Rowse has used this very effectively. An added bonus is that you will probably also get lots of ideas for blog content.

Social Media Links

The point of social media is that it’s social, so using the content you post there to generate content for your blog can be a good idea. Most social media sites make this easy, so that you can schedule regular posts of the links you share on Delicious, Digg or Twitter.  You can automate this process and just let it run, providing new stuff for your readers to see, without doing anything extra.

Together or singly, these three ideas can keep your blog going till you get your mojo back. Of the three, I’ve used guest posting the most and have run one group writing project. What methods do you use to generate content for your blog without writing it yourself?

Analytics - What’s The Point? Part 2

This continues our overview of site analytics. The first part was published on Monday.

That brings me to the next important site analytics information - traffic sources. It’s not just enough to know how many visitors you have; you also have to know where they have come from. This will tell you how much of an impact your various promotional efforts are making. On my main site, more than 70 per cent of my traffic comes from search engines, because I am lucky enough to have a site with good keywords in the domain name and the content. Many of my repeat visitors come to me direct, while the balance of the traffic comes from sources such as links from other blogs and social media sites. From this information, I can tell which of my content is most popular (so I can write other posts like it) and which keywords result in most traffic (so I can use them again in other posts). It’s a rinse and repeat approach to getting more visitors to your site.

With a good analytics package, you can also drill down into the content, examining the titles that have drawn visitors in. I can tell by looking at my analytics that my visitors are interested in writing portfolios, work at home issues, freelance writing jobs and, of course, getting paid to write. From the viewpoint of killer titles, my most successful post this year is called 19 Posts Writers Shouldn’t Ignore, which gets consistent traffic. You can go even deeper into your content and see which pages attract visitors in (landing pages) and which ones have them heading for the door (exit pages). With a little work, you can figure out how to create more landing pages and keep visitors around longer.

One of the powerful features, which I don’t actually use, is goals, which are pages that visitors go to after completing another action. It’s a way to see how effective your site is at encouraging people to register, subscribe or purchase. This type of data is also good for measuring the effectiveness of advertising.

Another thing to look for with analytics programs is real time information, which a few of them offer. It means that you can publish a post now and immediately see what reaction you are getting. (For a laugh, check this out after a post has been stumbled or dugg.) If a post is getting traffic, then you can build on that success, by submitting it to other social media, or mentioning how much attention it’s getting in your online interactions.  

So that’s how analytics can help you, but which programs do you choose? I have tried many, but here are my top three: Google Analytics, Clicky and Woopra. Which are your favorite analytics programs?

Analytics - What’s The Point?

Once upon a time, all site owners were interested in was finding out how many people came to their site. But as the web - and our use of it - got more advanced we wanted to know more. That’s where site analytics come in. Whether you are looking to find out how people interact with your site or how you can make money, they have a lot of information to offer. There are many analytics programs out there, and I’ll reveal my favorite ones later, but here are some of the features they have in common.

So what can you find out and how can you use that information? Some of the information is pretty straightforward, like how many people visited your site and how many pages they looked at. If people are looking at more than one page, it’s a sign that you are on your way to having a sticky site, with content that interests your visitors enough to keep them around. Match this up with the amount of time they spend on site and you will know for sure. Many visitors leave a site within 30 seconds or less, so if your visitors are hanging around for a couple of minutes or longer, then you’ve got a good site on your hands.

Other important information is the bounce rate, which is a measure of how many visitors leave your site quickly. On my site, I have seen this steadily fall, which means that about half of my visitors stay around. It’s also interesting to look at new visitors compared to repeat visitors. An authority site will usually have a lot of repeat visitors, because people know what to expect from the site and keep coming back. With a new site, it’s likely to take some time to build up a reputation. On one of my sites, about a quarter of the visitors are regulars, but I also pick up new visitors from search engine and other traffic.

Find out more about analytics in Wednesday’s post.

Better Comments Manager - WP Plugin Weekly

I can’t live without Better Comments Manager, at least, not on my writing blog. That’s because I usually get several replies to a post and Better Comments Manager provides an easy way to manage them all. The standard WordPress comments interface allows you to approve, unapprove, mark as spam or delete comments, but that’s it. With Better Comments Manager you can do so much more.

First of all, you can edit a comment from the same interface where you approve comments and your edits update immediately. You can reply to a comment from that same interface by clicking on a link. This brings up a plain box where you can type your reply. Click on the reply button to save your response. Once your reply has been saved, it appears at the top of the comments listing. Better Comments Manager offers a threaded reply option, though this has never worked for me. (Perhaps I need another plugin for that?)

Another option which I barely use, but which is very useful is mass edit mode, which shows directory listing with the name, email, IP and comment excerpt of each commenter, as well as options for dealing with the comments. When you click on reply in this interface, you see the comment, and the visual editor appears below it for you to type a reply. Finally, you can click on the View All link to work on all the comments for a particular post.

This plugin takes the hassle out of managing comments in WordPress. I am using version 1.5.1, which works fine with my WP 2.6 installation.

TwiTip - The Complete Twitter Resource

When problogger Darren Rowse speaks about blogging, it’s usually worth a listen, so when he said he was starting a blog about Twitter, I rushed out to subscribe to TwiTip.

I’m so glad I did. It’s a great place to find out about Twitter tools and tips, how to use Twitter for business, enhancing your blogging with Twitter and much more. Darren posts a few times a week and also includes guest posts which provide helpful information about Twitter. Some of the posts that I have found most useful include:

What Twitter Tools And Services Do You Use? - this pointed me to a couple of services I hadn’t seen, providing new ways of visualizing my Twitter interactions and new tools for using Twitter more effectively.

Monitter review - keyword tracking is always useful, and though I have since moved to TweetLater, Monitter was a really useful find.

Using Twitter For Your Business The Right Way - this appealed to me because I blog for a corporate client and it was a good check that my blogging strategy was on track.

Leverage Twitter For Your Job Search - since I live online (or so my friends and family believe, anyway) I thought this added some new ways of targeting future employment.

So far, this blog has answered my questions about Twitter, as well as some questions I didn’t even know I needed to ask, so I’ll be following the updates with interest. 

The Great Google Switcheroo

I’ve recently made a couple of major changes to my online tools. The first is that I’ve enabled Google Chrome as my default browser. Why? One of the main reasons is because Chrome loads most pages quickly and doesn’t hog system resources.

This is a big decision for me as I’ve been using Firefox forever (since version 0.2, since you ask), but on my laptop - which admittedly is no longer working at top speed - Firefox is clunky. I know that’s partly because of the add-ons I’ve enabled, but it used to be lightning-fast - and now it isn’t.

My other favorite tool is Remember The Milk for GMail, but I’ve found a way to access its functionality without using the Firefox add-on. That’s because I’ve gone back to IGoogle as a start page. IGoogle used to be unattractive and clunky, but it now works much better. The sidebar tabbed interface makes it easy to keep track of groups of widgets, and the large format preview now means that accessing my data is much easier.

I now have access to my tasks, calendar, personal email, weather and world clocks on my home tab, with tabs for Google stuff (links to Google and Google Apps services and Google Talk), feeds (reading feeds here is much nicer than in Google Reader itself) and news.

I haven’t given up Firefox altogether, though. I am still using it for IETab, Feedly and the StumbleUpon toolbar. I’ve also found a way to use Delicious in Google Chrome, which was one reason why I was hesitant about switching.

Of course, I have tried other browsers in the past, and probably will again (especially with news of triple-engine browser Lunascape), but for now I’m sticking with Chrome, which keeps system resource use at about 4% instead of 26% or more. 

All In One Seo Pack - WP Plugin Weekly

Some WordPress themes are optimized for search engine friendliness, others aren’t. All In One SEO Pack takes the guesswork out of the equation by doing exactly what it claims. It handles the on page ranking issues that the search engines will be looking for. It:

• optimizes your titles (putting your post titles first)
• optimizes your descriptions (by using post excerpts)
• includes keywords (by generating them from your categories or tags)
• removes duplicate content (not physically, but makes sure that the search engines will ignore it)

The good news is that all you have to do is install the plugin and it works out of the box.

For those who want to do more tweaking, there’s additional functionality which allows you to tweak what appears in your meta tags. Most people can ignore this, though, and just let the plugin do its work.

All In One SEO Pack has been around for a while, and it keeps getting better. The original developer, Uberdose, has now passed the mantle to Michael, who has continued to improve it.

If you have a WordPress blog and are at all bothered about search engine optimization, then you need this plugin. Nuff said!

Preparing For Interruptions

There are probably only a handful of places where the internet works the way it’s supposed to. We expect it to be fast, reliable and - most importantly - always on. Even in the US, with the world’s most active and connected internet population, that’s not the case everywhere. And that can be a problem if, like me, you make your living on the internet.

I was reminded of this just as I was about to research and write today’s blog post, because that’s when my ADSL connection dropped out. And it didn’t just drop out for a minute, but for a couple of hours. The lesson is that you need to have a backup.

Depending on where you live, you have several possible options. Some people travel around with a satphone, which means that they can connect from anywhere in the world, but for many of us that’s an expensive option. If you’re traveling in a remote area, however, it may be worth it.

A wireless enabled laptop or mobile device means that even if your own connection isn’t working, you can travel to where one is and you can still get connected if you need to. I’ve done this a few times in the past and it’s proved a lifesaver.

If you don’t have a laptop, then it’s worth having a backup internet account. If you don’t want to pay as much as you do for your primary account, get one that offers pay as you go access, where you can buy a few hours’ connection time to get you out of a hole. This is not too expensive and will let you do the essentials.

Failing that, put on your walking (or driving) shoes and hightail it to your nearest internet cafe. People who are selling internet access as a business often have working connections even when your domestic connection has gone down the tubes.

Lifestreaming With Storytlr

Storytlr is a lifestreaming site. Yes, another one. By now you know that lifestreaming is collecting all of your online activities in a single stream, and that’s what Storytlr does. Signing up for the site was easy. In fact, no sooner had I filled in my user details and pressed enter than the activation email arrived in my inbox. One click later, I was ready to set up my lifestream.

Setup

Storytlr works with Delicious, Flickr, Google Reader, Lastfm, Picasa, Qik, Seesmic, Twitter, Youtube and Digg. It also works with RSS feeds, so in theory you can import any content you want into your lifestream. Importing was quick and I was soon able to see my lifestream.

Features

I loved the layout. It showed posting dates and times, and automatically made my direct messages from Twitter private. You can comment and share from the same interface and can also see full blog posts (or as full as the author will allow) by clicking on a plus button. For Delicious, it included my comments on bookmarked items in quotes. And the sidebar showed archives which revealed how many items I had posted each month. (Apparently in 2007 I was too busy to post anything.)

Storytelling

You can also use your lifestream content to tell a story. You write a title and subtitle, set start and end dates and check the sources you want to use. Press create and you’re done. I think mine might have been more impressive if I’d had more than one source. Instead what I got was nine pages of slides (8 per page) showing my tweets. Not that inspiring, frankly, but I can see how it might be interesting. Luckily, stories are private till you make them public, so I’ll be keeping that one to myself.

More Features

Other features include:

• the ability to post directly to your account (text, links, audio and images)
• you can back up your items to CSV
• you can change the theme of your page
• there are many widgets available

The Verdict

Will Storytlr become my main lifestreaming site? The jury’s still out. Since it works with the sites I use most often, it reduces the clutter, but I’m still not sure that it can replace something like Friendfeed.

Vote For Your Favorite Firefox Add-On

We’ve been running the add-on of the week series for just over three months now. Next week, we’re going to broaden this Friday feature to look at some of our favorite Wordpress plugins. Before we do, we’d like to hear from you about your favorite Firefox add-ons. Here’s your chance to vote for the ones you’ve liked best of the add-ons we’ve covered, and to add your own if we haven’t covered it. Ready, steady, vote!