Stickiness is a primary goal for most websites. A site that is sticky gets people coming back again and again, and staying longer too.
It is easier to build a relationship and engage your reader if your site is sticky. My blog’s reasonably sticky because the author is so good and has such insightful things to say.
But seriously though, there are things you can do to engage your readers in some of the dialog. For instance, you can form a community where they are all talking to each other — most blogs are really abysmal at that. Even my blog really doesn’t do a very good job of bringing readers together and getting them to talk to each other.
So how do you get off your soapbox as a blogger and start conversations without finishing them, and let your readers take over?
Performancing has a nice list of practical things you can do to build online community of your blog:
Every email marketer’s biggest challenge is getting their emails delivered, opened and read. Don’t worry, advanced tools and tactics like whitelisting services, domain verification, and spam scorers can help save the day!
Don’t want to get caught in spam filters, alienate your recipients, or burn your list? Then come to this session and learn the fundamentals of successful email marketing.
Branding campaigns appear in many forms online besides the ubiquitous banner ad. There are blogs, RSS feeds, paid search ads (e.g. Google AdWords), contextual ads, natural (organic) search listings, text link ads, microsites, and podcasts, to name a few.
Gain an understanding of each of these channel’s unique benefits and where each fit in your brand strategy
Learn best practice techniques applicable to these new channels, with numerous examples
Since my list of WordPress plugins was so well-received, I’ve got another list to share. This time it’s my favorite Firefox extensions…
Tab Mix Plus - saves your tabs and windows and will restore them if you quit out of your browser or it crashes, allows you to undo the closing of a tab, and lots more
Performancing for Firefox - a blog editor for your WordPress, Movable Type, or Blogger blog that features integration with del.icio.us and Technorati, spellchecking, etc.
All-in-One Gestures - execute commands by making certain movements with your mouse without having to use the keyboard, menus or toolbars — like going back a page, closing a tab, etc.
User Agent Switcher - masquerade as Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, or msnbot etc. to see if a site is doing bot detection
Web Developer - tool for doing CSS coding, building web forms, etc.
SEO-Links - hover over a link and it displays link popularity and rankings for the anchor text from Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. I’ve got a screencast on using SEO-Links too.
Copy Plain Text - copy-and-paste from a web page into Microsoft Word so that the formatting isn’t carried over
ViewSourceWith - view the page’s HTML source using an external editor (WordPad, BBEdit, etc.)
ShowIP - displays the IP address of the web server in the bottom right corner
StumbleUpon - get recommendations of related pages to check out from friends and like–minded individuals
Search engines for the Search Bar - add your own favorite search engines to the search box in the top right, such as: MSN Search, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Technorati, Creative Commons, etc.
Here’s a tip that isn’t quite an extension, but over time it’s a huge time-saver. And it works in IE too.
When you want to type in a URL into the address bar, you can leave off the the www. in front and the .com at the end, because, by hitting Ctrl Enter, the browser will automatically add the www. and the .com to the address for you!
This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of useful Firefox extensions. Check out the new FirefoxFacts ebook for a bigger list of recommended extensions and tips for Firefox. And if there’s an extension you feel should be added to the above list of favorites, please leave me a comment!
I’ve posted onto BusinessBlogConsulting.com a list of my favorite WordPress plugins and what they do and why I like them. If you’re blogging under the WordPress platform, you might want to trick out your blog with some of these great plugins.
The list includes: PodPress, Popularity Contest, Google Sitemaps Generator, Akismet, Adhesive, Ultimate Tag Warrior, EmailShroud, Transpose Email, WP-EMail, WP-Print, Subscribe2, In-Series, Permalink Redirect, Gravatars, Subscribe to Comments. WP-Notable, A Different Monthly Archive, Related Posts, Related Posts for your 404.
That’s not quite 20, so I’ll add one more to that list — a suggestion from commenter Neville Hobson (thanks, Neville!) — FeedBurner Feed Replacement, which makes it easy to “migrate” your pre-existing RSS subscribers over to Feedburner once you sign up for the service (which is excellent, btw).
What follows below are some of my favorite WordPress plugins and why. Many of them I have in common with Cavemonkey’s excellent Top Ten WordPress Plugins list. Here’s my list, in no particular order:
PodPress - makes it super-simple to post podcasts; includes an inline media player
Popularity Contest - offer a leaderboard of your Most Popular posts based on views and ratings
Google Sitemaps Generator - creates a Google Sitemaps XML file. What’s killer about this is that it uses Popularity Contest’s ratings for the priority scoring that Google uses to determine how frequently to spider your pages
Akismet - you’d be a fool to run a blog with comments turned on and not use this plugin to stop the flood of comment spam. ’nuff said!
Adhesive - gives you the ability to flag certain posts as “Sticky” so they float to the top of the category page regardless of whether it’s the most recent
EmailShroud - an email address obfuscator to thwart those evil email harvesters. Scans for email addresses in posts, but won’t work on email addresses hard-coded into your theme.
Transpose Email - another email address obfuscator. Doesn’t automatically scan for email addresses, but can be used from within your theme files.
WP-EMail - “Email this post to a friend” functionality
Subscribe2 - let your readers subscribe to your blog updates via email
In-Series - link posts together into a series, regardless of dates posted or categories selected
Permalink Redirect - fixes the canonicalization problem where the same page loads whether the slash is there or not. Important for SEO.
Gravatars - puts the commenter’s “Gravatar” image next to their comment
Subscribe to Comments - a commenter can check a box on the comment form so that they get notified of further comments to that post
WP-Notable - places a row of buttons alongside your posts so the reader can easily add your post to their favorite social bookmarks service (del.icio.us, digg, etc.)
A report conducted by the recruitment firm OfficeTeam, the Office of the Future: 2020, looks ahead to the future of office work and the kinds of jobs that will be invented in the coming years, which they purport will include such things as Virtual Meetings Organizer, Human Resource Coordinator, and Information Integrator/Abstractor.
It was the Information Integrator/Abstractor role that intrigued me the most. According to the report, the job will include the collecting, compiling, and indexing of text, data and images in order that this content can be searched in a variety of ways.
It occurred to me that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the information integrator/abstractor of the future. After all, what does a business blogger do but the following:
identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world
This could be the job description for a Corporate Blogger in 2006 as much as it could be one for an Information Integrator/Abstractor in 2020!
You’ve probably heard it before, that the vast majority of the jobs that our children will hold when they grow up haven’t been invented yet. But what you may not have heard yet are some example future job functions being postulated.
Virtual Meetings Organizer
who will help employees schedule conferences and set up the required cameras, projection systems, electronic whiteboards, meeting software, audio equipment and related tools
Contract Resource Coordinator
who will bring together the right contract workers for a given project, like a movie producer assembling a cast, camera crew and production team
Information Integrator/Abstractor
who will collect, compile, and index text, data and images so this content can be searched in a variety of ways
It was this last role that most intrigued me, since I am a search geek after all! I just imagine a scene from The Minority Report where the Information Integrator waves his/her hands in the air purposefully and talks to a computer while within a virtual world of information projected onto the back of his/her retinas. In this world he/she categorizes schemas for datasets, slices and dices incoming datastreams into more manageable segments, gives directions to an AI to do further categorization on its own, and so on.
As a business blogger, I also got to thinking that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the “Information Integrator/Abstractor” of the future.
Think about this, what does a business blogger do but the following:
identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world
Sounds like a plausible job description for an Information Integrator/Abstractor of the Year 2020!
There’s an art to making an effective link request. For starters, you should not propose a reciprocal link, for 2 reasons: 1) the reciprocal nature of the link will basically nullify the SEO benefit you would have gotten, and 2) all the link request spams flooding webmasters’ inboxes are of a reciprocal nature and you need to differentiate yourself as much as possible from that rubbish. Say these sorts of things and rest assured that your link request will go straight into the recipient’s Trash:
“Hi, Let’s swap links!”
“I’ve already linked to you.”
“Great site!”
“You already link to our competitor XYZ.com and we offer a better/complementary product.”
“Please use the following text in your link…”
When requesting links, think and act like a PR professional or a biz dev director, not an SEO. Or even think and act like an end-user of their site. “Hi, I found a broken link on _____. Have you thought about adding features like _____ to your ______ on your site? BTW, you might want to add xyz.com and abc.com as links.” Just don’t be disingenuous; provide real value with your suggestions. Even suggest links to competitors or sites that you have no vested interest in.
We all get link request spams, even Google engineers! (such as this one posted by Matt Cutts). Here’s one I got recently:
Subject: Quality link request
Hello,
I found your website www.stephanspencer.com on Google.
We have a quality website at www.ace-mobility.com that will be well ranked on Google.
We are happy to upload a link onto this website in any way you request in exchange for a return link. I’m sure you appreciate that this would be of great benefit to us both.
To go ahead with this exchange please upload our link information below to your links page.
Please reply to to say where you have uploaded it.
If you would like your return link presenting in a particular way please include this information in your email.
I will then arrange for your link to be uploaded and email you again to let you know.
Thank you.
Regards
Jessica
Please note, the link needs to be set out as below in order for it to be returned.
[rest of email ommitted]
All I’ve got to say to that is, “Yeah, right!”
Eric Ward shared some secrets on how he crafts link requests that work in Thursday’s link building webinar for MarketingProfs which Eric and I co-presented. MarketingProfs will post the archive of the webinar in their Premium Library soon. And for those of you who aren’t MarketingProfs premium subscribers (you should join, btw, it’s well worth it!), I’ll see if I can get permission from MarketingProfs to post an archive of the webinar here on my blog.
