Pajama Market week in review: May 4-May 10, 2008

This was a much more fun week than last week. I managed to fix the layout for Pajama Market by re-coding the style sheet and had the chance to write some pretty fun posts.

I started out the week with some suggestions on writing posts that strike very deep, spiritual aspects of blogging.

• 5 blog posts to write before you die

Then I moved on to a "Help Wanted" advertisement. Although I'm not hiring, I wanted to illustrate what the job of "blogger" entails.

• Wanted: Blogger for full time position

The next post went back to the basics. It's been a while since I wrote a piece of good solid blogging advice.

• 10 Business blog guidelines

Finally, I finished the week off with a quick review of a web site that is making moves in the social media world. Dot Dash Create has signed up more than 100,000 blogs in its short beta life, and darned if I know what it does.

• Dot Dash Create, another social media question mark

Have a great weekend everyone!

10 Business Blog Guidelines

1) Spelling
Use your blog platform's spell check. Even better, use the automatic spell check included with Firefox. To enable, choose Tools > Options > Advanced > General tab > check the check box for 'Check my spelling as I type.' Firefox automatically underlines misspelled words with a red dotted line just like typing in a fancy shmancy word processor.

2) Grammar
Equally important to spelling, grammar is a little more difficult to wrangle. Word processors like MS Word include a grammar check, but who wants to write their blog posts in Word and then copy and paste them into your blog program?

Instead, write conversationally, the way you would talk. Then, before you publish your blog post, save a copy as a draft and view the draft in the Opera browser. Use the 'speak' function in Opera to read the blog post back to you. This will usually expose any large grammatical errors, much better than simply rereading your post.

3) Write an effective headline
The vast majority of your readers on a given day will view your blog post in an RSS reader, or through a social media outlet like StumbleUpon, Digg, or Delicious. They are sifting through dozens or even hundreds of stories and deciding which ones to read based on your headline. Your headline must succinctly reveal what your story is about in a way that attracts readers to click on it. I've written more about headlines here.

4) Use a photo at the very top of your story
After headlines, photos are the main reason a person might begin to read your post. You should have a photo at the very top of your post because it will appear directly below the headline when viewed in an RSS reader. This one-two punch gives you the maximum chance to have someone click on your story. I've written more about photos here.

Wanted: Blogger for full time position

Lets get this straight. I'm not offering a job (I can hear the thousands of back buttons being clicked now).

But if you are a company that does not yet have a blogger on staff (or maybe you've given the job to an already overloaded marketing peon), then you'd better put this ad in your local paper (or on problogger.net) soon:

WANTED: Blogger for full time position
Our super-duper company wishes to hire a person in the position of "blogger." Until yesterday, we didn't really know what this meant, but we did some research on the internets and realized we are really missing the boat here.

Writing
What we're looking for is someone who is good at writing. You might have a degree in English or communications or something, but the really important thing is that you can write. This includes spelling and grammar. We don't really care how educated you are as long as what you write doesn't make us cringe every time you use the word 'your' when you mean the word 'you're.'

Photography
Next, you should know how to take a photo. We've heard that photos really add value to a blog. Many people are much more likely to read a post if it begins with an attractive blog photo.

For this reason, you need to get out from behind a desk and explore our company. Look for interesting things to take pictures of. People are great subjects for photos because it shows we have real people working here with real names.

Reporter
You should have good interviewing skills. Perhaps you were once a beat reporter, or you've always dreamed of being one. You need to call people up, send them emails, and most importantly, walk into their office and interview them. We're not looking for news-breaking hard-hitting interviews. We want human interest stories. The kind that make readers really feel good about our company.

Editor
You will invite prominent experts in our industry to write reports and articles for the blog. You will be in charge of assigning them subjects to write about and editing their final drafts before they go live.

Engineer
You need to understand our products completely. You will be writing about how to use them, why our readers need them, how they can't live without them, and why ours are better than anyone else's.

Teacher
While you gain product knowledge, we want you to use what you've learned to create tutorials for our customers. The blog will be a tremendous resource for those who have purchased our products because you will be able to take a customer question from email and write up a tutorial that answers their question, and potentially the same question hundreds of others will have, all in the same day.

Spokesperson
Although you won't be the "official" PR spokesperson for the company, you will be expected to respond to company problems, scandals, or news items in a professional and timely manner through the blog. We recognize that our readers want honest information ASAP and you are one of the quickest direct links to the company. 

5 blog posts to write before you die

So you're cruising through life, carefree, sipping a Coke, and then I slam this title on your screen. Sorry to break it to you, but you're going to die.

I know you spend most of your time denying this fact. You've got your new red convertible, you've added ten friends on MySpace in the past week, and you get all the jokes about Smallville. But someday, you're going to drop like a rock and your soul is going to pass its time somewhere else.

Before that happens, think about your blog, and how completely unsatisfying it would be if you hadn't written these 5 world-changing posts:

1) "I wish I were somewhere else"
This is the post where you confess that for the moment, you are sick of blogging, your eyes are cracking because you haven't blinked in the last ten minutes, and if you have to deal with one more tag, you'll gag...one more stumble, you'll crumble...one more digg, you'll wig...one more feed, you'll bleed...and one more tweet, you'll jump off a bridge.

I'm not saying you always feel like this. I'm just saying that the one time you do, write about it. It will be totally off-topic and entirely entertaining.

Blogging Dos #14: Go after niche traffic

Niche traffic on your blog is the holy grail of having a blog in the first place. If you get thousands of visitors a day who don't care about what you're selling, it's wasted. If you get 100 visitors a day, five of which turn into life-long customers, you've got a gold mine.

Here's an example. Digg.com is a "social media" website that generates tons of traffic for anyone who makes it to one of their top tier pages. Think of Digg like a news website where the readers vote on each story, the stories that get the most votes get closer and closer to the top tier pages which is where most of Digg's visitors are. Getting "dugg," as it's called in the industry, can literally drive tens of thousands of people to your website in a matter of hours and has been known to crash servers hosting unprepared websites.

The problem is that very few of these visitors ever return or buy anything. Furthermore, it's a lot of work and luck to get your page "dugg."

Instead, work to get a steady flow of traffic from people who are genuinely interested in the subject matter you care about. Slowly, but surely, you will build a monster list of repeat customers who will likely subscribe to your RSS feed, or join your newsletter.

There are even a couple of examples of what not to do on Pajama Market. There are two articles off the top of my head that I shouldn't have wasted my time on. One was writing about a YouTube video that featured tons of online "stars." The other was writing about my Gmail getting hacked. Although these were fun to write, and they've generated some of the biggest traffic to this site, they bring in only casual visitors that don't really care about blogging for their small business. The time I spent writing the articles could easily have been put to better use.

I should have been writing a killer article on blogging, leaving comments on someone else's great blog post, or working on a video

[Photo: richardmasoner at Flickr. Used under creative commons copyright. Click photo to see more of his work.]

Andrew Keen, the enemy of blogging, uses terrible example

Andrew Keen is the author of The Cult of the Amateur, a book that takes a very critical view of Web 2.0 technologies.

In the article titled Blogged Down in this month's Entrepreneur Magazine, Keen describes how blogging is destroying big brands in the marketplace.

The article mentions a "damaging crusade" against Dell Computer by blogger Jeff Jarvis. The article then quotes Keen on ways to protect yourself: "don't allow anyone to post on your site anonymously."

Um...gee, Andrew. Jarvis published under his real name on his own blog. If Dell wasn't letting anyone publish anonymously on their blog, it wouldn't have made a bit of difference.

Give the article a read. It's short.

Also check out the reviews of his book on Amazon. This may be the first time I've seen a bestselling book rate 2.5 stars. If you look carefully, you will find my review of the book, which isn't complimentary.

BlogRush creating legitimate blog traffic free?

On September 9, a new service to drive traffic to blogs was created called BlogRush. The idea is that if you display their widget on your blog, your blog headlines will appear on other people's blogs. Supposedly, your headlines only appear on "related" websites, but I found the categories that BlogRush uses are somewhat limited. For example, I chose "Marketing" for Pajama Market, which makes sense, but is a pretty big category.

Here is a video that explains how it works:

The service is free.

I'm going to try it for a few weeks and see if it has any real impact on my traffic.

Note: Links in this post are referral links. Traffic photo provided by SqueakyMarmot under Creative Commons Copyright.

The first place to advertise your blog

Advertising your blog to build traffic is almost as important as creating and maintaining the blog to begin with. So, what's the first step for promotion?

Get new business cards with the blog address on them.

This is one of the cheapest, and most effective ways to advertise to the people who are most likely to benefit from reading your blog...your current customers, and people you come into personal contact with.

The rule of thumb is that it's something like ten times more expensive to get a new customer than it is to get a current customer to continue buying from you. So don't spend money trying to get totally new people to visit your blog until you have done everything you can to advertise to people you are already doing business with.

Later, you can publicize your blog by getting your blog address in the signature of your email, leaving comments and trackbacks on other's blogs, or advertising your blog through online ads or with conventional advertising.

But first, get it on your business card.

RSS and Newsreader Tutorial, Part 5: Using the OPML to load and export multiple feeds

Suppose you want to switch Newsreaders. You don't like yours anymore or perhaps you just want to try a different one. You might be thinking, "What a pain it's going to be to add all of my feeds all over again from scratch."

That's what OPML was made for.

OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language and is used to import or export all of your feeds from one Newsreader to another. You can use this to take your feeds to a different RSS Newsreader than you are currently using, or you can use this to share your RSS feeds with other people. (For a more detailed explanation, see the Wikipedia article on OPML.)

In your Newsreader, there will be an option in your menus for 'Export.' Use this option and a file will be placed on your computer in OPML format. If this option isn't available as a link in your Newsreader, it is probably available in your drop-down menus. You know the ones at the top of your Newsreader program...File, Edit, View, etc. In Bloglines, the option is a link below my list of feeds and is called "Export Subscriptions." Nearly every type of Newsreader has this option available.

Once the file is saved, you can email the file or put it on your website to share with other people. To use the file, simply open the Newsreader and find the option for 'Import,' again either a link, or available in a drop-down menu.

Importing will load the feeds into your new Newsreader, although you will have to recreate the file/folder structure you were using in your old reader.

Please let me know if you have any questions with the basic use of OPML.

RSS and Newsreader Tutorial, Part 4: Loading the news feed into your newsreader

Certain types of websites create an RSS feed. What types? Nearly every blog, most news websites, many search websites, and "social media" websites where the public is constantly updating the content of the site. A great example of a social media website is Flickr.com where the public can upload and share photos. This website creates an RSS feed that allows you to subscribe to photos from, say, Janesville, Wisconsin. That way, whenever someone uploads a photo and "tags" the photo as being a photo of Janesville, I can automatically be informed of it in my RSS newsreader.

Regardless of what type of website you want to keep track of, in order to track it you need to load its RSS feed into your RSS newsreader. There are hundreds of RSS newsreader programs, most of them are free to use. My current favorite is Bloglines because there is nothing to download (it is web-based) and because it is straight-forward.

Keep in mind that no matter which newsreader you choose, you are not locked into that newsreader. There is a very easy way to transfer all your feeds from one newsreader to another which I'll talk about in Part 6.

How to get the feed into your newsreader
As I mentioned in the last part of this series, browsers are making it easier and easier to subscribe to your favorite websites' RSS feeds. If you use Firefox or Internet Explorer and find yourself on a page that produces an RSS feed, you will see the RSS icon appear in the address bar. Clicking on this icon allows you add the page's feed to your favorite RSS reader, assuming your favorite RSS reader is in the list that Firefox or IE provides.

What if your reader isn't in the list? Don't worry, you can always add a feed manually.

First, you need to find the feed for the website you wish to track. We tackled this in Part 4: Identifying the RSS feed on a blog, news website, or search.

But what...exactly...is a feed?
The feed itself is a webpage. What you are loading into your RSS reader is the webpage's address. When you find a feed on a blog and click on it, you might notice that you get taken to a plain text page with very little formatting that contains the same content as the blog you were reading. This page is the feed.

What's special about the feed is that it is automatically updated whenever the site it is linked to is updated. If a new story is added on a blog, it's feed automatically adds the new story as well. It's like a second version of the original website.

The difference between a website and its feed can be seen in the formatting. A feed has to meet very strict criteria that includes plain text, date and author information, and simplified formatting. This standardization is what allows it to be viewed in a hundred different RSS readers. But this also means most of the formatting and design of the original website disappears. A story from one blog looks pretty much the same, format-wise, as a story from any other blog.

Manually adding the feed
Once you find this page that displays the feed for a website, copy the URL of the webpage. In your RSS reader, find a link called "Add feed" or something along these lines. It will open up a form that asks you to type in the feed's URL. Simply paste the feed you have copied and your feed is now loaded into your RSS reader. Some readers may ask you to configure the feed just the way you like it, but this is essentially all there is to it.

1. Find a feed
2. Copy the URL
3. Click 'Add Feed' in your RSS reader
4. Paste the URL

Finally, some RSS readers don't even require you to locate the specific web page that contains the RSS feed. You can just use the URL for the homepage of the site, and the RSS reader is smart enough to search the website until it finds the feed associated with it. Not every reader works this way, but between manually loading the feed, using Firefox's and IE's shortcuts, and using newsreaders that find the feed for you, you will have a solution that produces tons of content for your reading pleasure in no time.

Next time we will look at transporting your feeds from one newsreader to another, or adding someone else's list of feeds into your list using a format called OPML.

RSS and Newsreader Tutorial, Part 3: Identifying the RSS feed on a blog, news website, or search

The three main types of websites that use RSS (really simple syndication) technology are blogs, news websites, and search engines. These are not the only websites that use them, but these are the websites with the most use for a business owner, at least right now.

Furthermore, while most blogs, news sites, and search engines use RSS, not all of them do. So how can you tell if the site you are looking at offers an RSS feed for your Newsreader?

Some RSS Newsreaders are able to detect whether or not there is a feed available on a website. Simply copy and paste the web address (URL) of the page you are on into your Newsreader, and it will tell you whether or not this page has a feed. Beware though, not every Newsreader is capable of doing this, and even if the website has a feed, the particular page you are on may not indicate the existence of the feed to your Newsreader.

For example, when I am on the internet, I use the Google toolbar in my Firefox browser. There is a 'Subscribe' button on the toolbar that appears orange when there is an RSS feed available for the page I'm on, gray when there isn't.

Clicking the button automatically adds the feed to one of seven Newsreaders that you select from a list. In addition to the Google toolbar, Firefox has a similar RSS feed indicator in the address bar:

Internet Explorer (version 7+) includes an RSS button near the tabs:

If you haven't noticed a common theme here, it's that a webpage with an RSS feed is represented by the little orange square that is now a standard on the internet.

If the options above are not indicating the page you are reading has an RSS feed (or if you don't use these options), you can usually manually find the feed on the page if it offers one. For example, on this blog, you will find the icon for the feed in the sidebar under the heading 'subscribe.'

Subscribe means one of two things on a webpage: 1) the page has an RSS feed and this link leads you to that feed, or 2) this page can be subscribed to through daily emails. Sometimes it means both. Usually this is the link to the page's RSS feed.

Some webpages don't use the standard icon to indicate a feed. This is usually due to the author of a blog using one type of RSS Reader (like My Yahoo! for example) and believing that most of the world uses the same RSS Reader (not a good thing to assume). In this case, the blogger might use the Yahoo! feed icon instead of the standard icon:

While this may mean something to those readers who actually use My Yahoo! to track RSS feeds, it means nothing to the rest of us who track feeds with a different reader. As a result, you may find sites that list multiple icons:

This approach tends to clutter a blog and isn't as useful as the author of the blog might hope. Displaying the standard RSS icon is just fine, more elegant than this collage of icons, and isn't likely to frustrate the person who uses the one RSS Reader you have forgotten to include.

Finally, RSS may not even be called 'RSS' on some webpages. It may be called 'Atom,' or 'RDF,' or 'XML' on some webpages. Don't be fooled, they are still RSS, just specific types of RSS. Every major Newsreader can use these types of feeds and produce the same end result with them.

Some websites even offer you a choice of two of these technologies (RSS or Atom, for example), but your RSS Reader really doesn't care which you choose. Why do they offer a choice? Because they can. In the old days (2 years ago), it may have made a difference in what the feed would produce. These days, it doesn't really matter.

When you click on one of these links, whether it's the RSS icon, the word 'Atom', or the word 'subscribe,' you are usually brought to the RSS feed for that website. It looks like the page you were on, just stripped of some of its format. When you reach this page, copy and paste the web address (URL) of this page and load it into your Newsreader. This is the page the Newsreader is going to display from now on. Load 20 blogs, or a Google Blog search, or the top stories from your favorite paper this way, and you may never have to visit the actual sites they came from ever again.

Next time, we'll look at exactly how the RSS feed is loaded into your Newsreader.

What is comment spam?

El Jefe of El Bloggo Torcido left a comment the other day that included a link back to his blog. This got me thinking about comment spam. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't consider El Jefe's comment as comment spam, but I realized it might be helpful to write about identifying and pointing out why it wasn't comment spam. [note: you can see the comment I'm referring to, and some witty banter, at the bottom of this post.]

Comment spam is when someone leaves a comment on your blog for the sole purpose of creating a link back to their blog. The theory is that this creates a link to their blog from another website and will boost search engine rankings, which is somewhat true.

The gray area is that it is OK to include a link back to your blog in the comments of another blog as long as it contributes to the conversations being discussed on the post and in the comments.

That's why El Jefe's comment is perfectly fine, although it might not obviously appear that way. Taken out of context, it looks like El Jefe's comment is a blatant attempt at comment spam. However, El Jefe is a frequent commenter on PJ and when he says to check his blog out for great examples of what I'm talking about in my post (which happens to be the use of comments!), he's adding value to my readers because his blog is  a great example of how readers use comments to create a conversation.

Had I not been familiar with El Jefe and his blog, I may have flagged his post as comment spam. This means the comment would be deleted as 'junk' and his computer's IP address would be banned from ever leaving a comment on this blog again (fairly straightforward things to do on a Typepad blog). But since I've "spoken" with El Jefe many times, I know he's leaving the link to add value to my post, not for selfish reasons. Well, maybe a little for selfish reasons, but that's fine because it still adds value to my readers.

The real problem comes when computer programs are leaving spam comments. Your blog might end up with 100 comments a day that aren't even being written by real people, just to add links to someone else's website. Fortunately, the major blog platforms use methods to thwart such nastiness. Typepad has a nice feature called CAPTCHA, for example, which requires you to type in a secret code that is displayed on the monitor to ensure you are a real live human being.

As a result, most blogs on Typepad and Wordpress receive very little comment spam, and when we do, it's pretty easy to take care of.

Finally, the proper way to publicize your blog on other people's blogs is to leave good, constructive comments. As long as you are adding value to the conversations, it's pretty acceptable to add a link back to your blog if there is a particular post you've written that ties into the subject of conversation. Keep in mind that every comment you leave does not have to contain a link back to your site. Just add one when it's helpful and the numbers of visitors on your blog will steadily grow.

RSS and Newsreader tutorial: Part 2, Reading Feeds in a Newsreader

As I mentioned yesterday in Part 1, a Newsreader emulates email programs by providing a folder structure in the left-hand column, and the content of feeds in the wide right-hand column. Here is an example of the Newsreader Bloglines where I have a few feeds loaded on the left-hand side, and I am displaying the content of the "Small Business Blog of the Day" feed in the right-hand column (click on the image for a larger view).

In the left-hand column, you can see that your feeds may be organized into folders. For example, I have a local news folder that contains the RSS feeds for the Google News search for "Janesville, Wisconsin." Any time something gets posted to Google News with those keywords, it appears in my folder. Also, I have loaded the RSS feed to my local newspaper back home in Vermont. Many newspapers feature an RSS feed on their websites so you can do this. Unfortunately, my local paper in Janesville does not, so I use the Google News search instead.

You will notice that in addition to the Burlington Free Press feeds and Janesville Google News feed, there is a feed called "AES." This stands for Applied Ecological Services, the firm my girlfriend works for. Using RSS allows me to track any news about her company as soon as it hits the web.

Notice that AES is displayed in bold with the number (35) next to it. Bold indicates there is something new to read in this feed and 35 is the number of new stories in this feed. This is just like how a folder tells you there are 35 new emails from a person in your email program.

Clicking on the feed displays the content of the feed in the right column. Notice in the first graphic that the content of "Small Business Blog of the Day" (the feed for Pajama Market) displays the same thing that is on the Pajama Market website (for March 8, 2007). After I save this post, this post will appear in the "Small Business Blog of the Day" folder about 15 minutes after I've saved it.

As you can see, the right column is kind of like a browser. It displays the same information that's on my blog, but with some of the design stripped away. For example, it doesn't display my logo at the top of the page, nor does it display my navigation bars. It only displays the most recent story I've written. That's what an RSS feed is, it's a stripped-down version of the stories you write on a blog. The RSS Newsreader displays this stripped-down version.

After I've read the story in the right-hand column, the story will disappear. This means the stories that appear are always new, things you haven't read yet. If you want to bring up an old story, you can always find it by searching, or by changing a setting that allows you to read stories you've already read.

This feature is great because you don't have to remember if you've read something or not. I've been on blogs where I get half way through the blog post and realized I'd already read it in the past. But if I read the post in my RSS Reader, I know the post is fresh.

Sometimes you won't be able to read the entire post. The author of the post will often have an option to allow the entire post to display in RSS Readers, or to only allow the first 200 words, or even just the headline to appear. I hate it when they do this because it requires you visit their site to read the whole story which very much defeats the purpose of using RSS feeds with RSS Readers.

Finally, although the Newsreader displays a stripped-down version of the story, it still includes the photos and the active links for the post. In fact, you can always click on the headline or the name of the feed's source and you will be brought directly to that blog/news website/search. But the beauty of a Newsreader is that in many cases you don't have to leave the reader to read the post. You can skim it and quickly go the next post on your list, reading several blogs in the same time it would otherwise take you to read just a few.

In Part 3, we'll take a look at how to find an RSS feed on a blog, a news site, or on a search website.

RSS and Newsreader tutorial: Part 1, What is a Newsreader? (Why would I want to use one?)

A Newsreader, also called an RSS Reader, is a program that allows you to read dozens of blogs, news websites, and searches, in the time it would normally take to read a couple.

The main thing is that Newsreaders save time. A lot of time.

How a Newsreader works
For most readers, they simulate an email program by using a two-pane system, folders in the left pane, content in the right. Folders contain the feeds you are tracking. When someone writes a new post in the feed you are tracking, it becomes bold and displays a number next to it showing how many posts are unread. This is just like receiving an email in your email program.

When the reader shows that someone has written a new post, you simply click on the folder containing that feed and the post appears in the right hand pane. You don't have to actually visit the blog to read the post, the content of the post appears in the reader. In this way, you can quickly skim headlines and posts without actually having to visit dozens of feeds individually.

Every blog produces an RSS feed (though it may be called an Atom feed, or RDF feed or XML feed among others). In addition to blogs, these RSS feeds may be found at news websites, searches (Google News, Technorati), and with other websites where content is constantly being updated or changed by its users (Flickr for example). Any site that has a feed can be loaded into an RSS reader.

The benefit of tracking blogs this way is obvious...it cuts down on the time it takes to read several blogs at once. But using the RSS feed for searches can be even more useful.

For example, do a search for your company in Google News. This will list any articles written recently that include the name of your company. This search has an RSS feed that you can load into your Newsreader. Now, whenever someone writes an article that includes your company's name in the future, you will automatically receive a notice in your Newsreader that there is a new article.

Use this method to keep track of articles about your company, your competitor's company, or for individuals. Also, use this method to track keywords that important to your industry. Whenever someone writes an article containing those keywords, you know about it. It's completely customizable news.

Two great Newsreaders: Bloglines (web-based), and Great News (download the program to your computer).

In Part 2, we'll take a close up look at the components of a Newsreader to see how it works.

How to use RSS and newsreaders: 5 part tutorial

A new client of mine inspired me to write a short series on RSS and newsreaders. The client hired me to set up a newsreader for their company so they could keep track of any news related to their company and their competitors.

The tutorial will appear in four parts:
Part 1: What is a newsreader? (why do I want to use one?)
Part 2: Reading feeds in a newsreader
Part 3: Identifying the RSS feed on a blog, news website, or search
Part 4: Loading the RSS feed into your newsreader
Part 5: Using the OPML to load and export multiple feeds

Hopefully, this tutorial series will be thorough and clear enough to understand. I will rely on my readers to ask me questions in the comments if something doesn't work for them.

What's a Permalink?

Des Walsh mentioned the other day that when he first began blogging he wasn't real sure what a permalink was and how it was different from a trackback. Here's my confession...when I first started blogging I had no idea what either of these were.

I went over trackbacks a couple of days ago, so today I wanted to give you my straightforward explanation of a permalink.

When you write a post on a blog, it gets sent to the top of the home page. If someone else reads your post and wants to link to it, there's a problem, because if they link to the home page, a few weeks from now your article will no longer be on the home page!

The permalink comes to the rescue. The permalink is the website address that goes to that one individual article you have written. That's the link the other blog should use to link to your story. It will always go exactly to that one story.

You can find the permalink to a blog post at the very bottom of the blog. It's usually a link called "permalink" and oftentimes is near the "comments" link. Also, the title of the blog post is often the permalink to the story. To find out, just click on the title. If this brings you to a page that displays the article all by itself, it's the permalink, and you can copy and paste the URL in the address bar and use that to link directly to the individual story.

Sometimes the title isn't a link to anything. This used to be the case with Typepad (until they changed their format just a couple of months ago) and is still the case with some blogging formats. To make it even more difficult, some blogs don't call the permalink a "permalink." It might be the date and time at the very bottom of the article. If you can click on the date and time and it brings you to a page that displays only that blog post, it is a permalink.

Finally, the permalink can be deactivated on a blog, usually by accident. This stinks because it makes it extremely difficult to link specifically to that story. The last thing you want to do when linking to a story is make your reader go to a page that has 100 posts on it and make them wade through it to find the exact post you are writing about.

You can find out how I use permalinks to create links in my blog posts by reading my article called, Blog Dos #5: Link to websites within posts.

Comments: a business blogging weapon

Comments are one of the real weapons of blogging. "Traditional" websites don't have them. This is the reason that blogs create conversations instead of lectures.

While attending the University of Vermont, I sat through dozens of lectures in auditoriums with 200+ other students. It wasn't very personal, and frankly, they weren't very interesting. Each year, the classes got smaller and smaller until you were actually having a conversation with the professor and the other students. This is the time where you could ask questions, contribute your own ideas, and actually learn something.

Blogs are the equivalent of the "senior year" on the web. No longer are customers forced to sit through the lecture of a website where all you can do is receive the information the website wants you to, which usually isn't very much.

Blogs allow you to participate by clicking the 'comment' link found at the bottom of every article on a blog and adding your own thoughts and asking questions. Sometimes the author of the article will answer your question or further the conversation, and often times other readers will do the answering and the continuing.

This feedback results in tremendous value for your company when your readers:

• ask questions you haven't thought of yourself
• point out problems in your products or services you hadn't noticed
• give you ideas for new products
• start developing a relationship with you that eventually translates into sales

Negative Comments: the greatest weapon
The big fear my clients have with comments is the negative comment. No one likes to be criticized, particularly in such a public way. I will ask the client at this point if they are committed to customer service and they always answer, "Of course."

"Than it isn't a problem," I tell them. After I let them have a funny look on their face for a few seconds I explain that negative comments can be the best weapon of all. They allow you to address a problem in a very public and permanent way and show the world what a good guy/gal you are. Furthermore, your other readers will often jump in and defend you without you having to lift a finger yourself. And that's an awesome feeling when your customers come to your own defense!

Finally, should a comment go over the line and include profanity or really offensive language, you can always delete it (you can even pre-screen comments before they are 'live'). But don't delete the ones from folks who are just upset for a valid reason. Address their concerns and let the comment and your response become a testimonial of how committed you are to having happy customers.

Blog Dos #13: Use Trackbacks

One of the most difficult parts of blogging for me to explain to clients is trackbacks. A major reason I'm writing this post is to clarify it for myself and provide a resource for my clients down the road (in the future I can just tell my clients, "Read my post on trackbacks," instead of trying to explain it to them on the spot, LOL).

What is a trackback?
It's best explained by telling you when you would use trackbacks...

Let's say you're reading someone else's blog. You find a post that you really like, and it inspires you to write a post on your own blog that elaborates on one of the ideas from the other blog. You will probably include a link to the other blog somewhere in your post that your readers will use to expand their knowledge of the subject and see where your inspiration came from.

But wouldn't it be cool if the readers of the other blog somehow knew you had written something further about that post's subject?

You could leave a comment on the other blog and link back to your new article to send readers to your story. That's very risky though, as this is often considered to be blog spam and may get you banned from ever leaving a comment on the other blog again.

Instead, you would use a trackback. A trackback places a short excerpt of your blog post on the other person's blog to let their readers know you have written further about this subject. The blogger at the other blog either approves the trackback, if they think it's appropriate, or deletes it. If they approve it, part of your blog post actually appears on their blog!

An example of a trackback
Des Walsh has added a trackback on my post titled A Perfect Blog Post. You will see the trackback at the bottom of the post, just above the comments. He wrote an article that linked back to my post, and adding a trackback allows my readers to know about it and read more at his blog.

How to use a trackback
First, keep in mind that the author of the other blog has the power to approve or delete your trackback request. For this reason, I recommend always linking to their post somewhere in your article. That's only fair, right?

Second, the trackback feature has to do with a blog's programming. Some blogs offer trackbacks, some don't. Typepad and Wordpress, for example, offer trackbacks. You will know if the blog you are writing about offers trackbacks if the word 'trackbacks' appears at the end of the post next to 'comments.'

Third, click on the word 'trackbacks' on the other post and it will show you other posts that are using a trackback with this article (if there are any), and it will also show you the trackback URL. Copy this URL.

Finally, add this URL to the trackback section of the post you are writing. Whether you are using Typepad, or Wordpress, or another blogging platform, there is usually a an area to type in a trackback URL. This is where you paste the URL you have copied.

In Typepad, this area is labeled "Send a Trackback to these addresses" and appears below the area where you type the body of your post.

After you submit a trackback, the author of the other blog usually has to approve it before it appears on the other blog. This can take 5 minutes or it may take months.

But once it's active, you have created a two-way street for your readers. Your readers find the other blog through a link, and their readers find your blog through the trackback. Very cool.

Formatting photos on your blog post

El Jefe from El Bloggo Torcido (one of my favorite small business blogs...a winery), left a comment this morning on how difficult Typepad is to format photos in a blog post.

I wanted to address this issue in a post of its own, because it's so important. Specifically, El Jefe expressed frustration with a particular post he wrote on February 18 that contains several photos (warning: this post contains some, ah, adultish material). The problem was getting the text to wrap correctly around the photos was a pain in the butt.

Do you remember when the first line of a paragraph used to be indented? If you pull a book off your book shelf and read it, you will see that the first line of paragraphs is always indented to give the reader a visual reference to begin a new paragraph.

But something happened on the way to the web. It turns out that creating code to express that first-paragraph-indent on a webpage is very difficult. So over the years, a new convention appeared, which is simply to have a line space between paragraphs when you are reading something on the web.

Now you might be asking what all this has to do with photos? It's the same problem...displaying photos and how text wraps around photos is straightforward in print, but exceedingly difficult on the web. The web, and particularly blogs, have come up with its own rules as a result.

For this reason, I recommend not getting too frustrated over formatting, and keep to a few simple conventions. After all, people are not reading your blog because it looks cool. They are reading it because the writing, and the photos, are cool (at least to them). I don't know a single person who returned to a slick-looking blog because they liked the graphics!

One or two small photos
Feel free to wrap text to the left or right of photos if there are only one or two photos in your post, and there is enough room so that your text doesn't look scrunched. I like to leave at least a 200 pixel wide space for text if I'm going to have text next to a photo.

A large photo or multiple photos
When a photo is large enough to take up most the width of your blog post, then turn off the "wrap text" option in Typepad so that text automatically goes beneath the photo instead of next to it. (Technically, the text begins next to the photo at the very bottom, but hitting 'enter' once drops it below the photo.)

When using multiple photos to tell a story (a very effective type of post on a blog), don't try to wrap text. It's a pain, and you spend a lot of time trying to get the photo size just right so that the text next to it applies just to that photo (I believe this was the source of El Jefe's frustration).

Instead, introduce the photo with a paragraph, then add the photo beneath the introductory paragraph. Turn the 'text wrap' feature off, and write the next paragraph to introduce the next photo. Repeat.

This is a linear approach, no fancy formatting, but it's very effective and easy for a reader to understand. More importantly, it's easy for the blog writer to do and contains zero frustration.

Captions
If you are using "text wrap", save your captions for the end of your post. If you have turned "text wrap" off, you can add photo captions directly beneath each photo.

I've probably opened a can of worms here, so if you have a particular post that you have a question on, let me know in the comments and I'll take a look.

Remember, the main goal is to keep your blog posts simple, and stress-free. If writing posts is painful, you will never enjoy blogging enough to have a successful one.

How to add Google search to your blog

Adding Google search for your blog is easy. Real easy. See the search box on Pajama Market? It's a Google search, but it only searches Pajama Market. Google is great and returns very accurate and relevant results for your search terms.

Not everyone can use Google search on their blog. You can only use it if Google is currently listing your blog in their regular searches, a process called "indexing." As long as your blog is "indexed" by Google, your blog can use a Google search. Being indexed by Google can take up to six months, but many blogs get indexed much faster, sometimes in as little as a week after they've been started.

Finding out if your blog is indexed by Google
Simply visit Google.com and do a search for your blog's name...like "pajamamarket". If your blog appears for this search, or for any search, then your blog has been indexed. Another way to tell is by checking your site statistics. If you notice that visitors are arriving at your blog because of a search they did in Google, then it must mean you are being indexed by Google (this is often how bloggers first discover that Google has indexed them).

Add the Google Search Typelist for Typepad blogs
To place a Google search on your blog, create a new notes-style Typelist called something like "Search" and add the following code for the Typelist's item:

<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">
<div>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr><td>
<input type="text"   name="q" size="20"
maxlength="255" value="" /><br>
<input type="submit" value="Search" /></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">
<input type="checkbox"  name="sitesearch"
value="www.pajamamarket.com" checked /> only search PJ<br />
</td></tr></table>
</div>
</form>

Replace "www.pajamamarket.com" with your blog's URL, and replace "only search PJ" with "only search YOUR BLOG'S NAME." Click "Save" and you've just created your Typelist. After activating the typelist and deciding where in your sidebar you would like the search to appear (I recommend the very top), you can start using your new search tool.

That's it. You're done. Enjoy!

(PS: If you need some instruction on activating or ordering Typelists, just let me know in the comments. I'll be happy to point out where to go.)

Writing a blog post is as easy as writing an email

I received a comment this morning from Gabe where he made the point that "usability is key" for clients having success with a blog. If a blog is difficult to post to, it's not going to have a lot of posts.

I have found that many of my clients are intimidated by a blog when I first introduce the idea to them. So I pull out my favorite phrase to explain how hard it is:

Writing a blog post is as easy as writing an email.

And I mean it! Take a look at the Typepad interface:

Like writing an email, there is an area to write your post, some text formatting options for things like bold or italic, and a button to add a photo (similar to adding an attachment in an email). Click save at the bottom (like clicking 'send' in an email), and BOOM, you've created a blog post.

Of course this assumes the blog already looks the way you want it to look, has the features you want it to have, and is getting the exposure you want it to get. Also, you need to have something to write about.

But that's why you might hire a blog consultant (me) to design the blog, maximize the exposure tools, and even show you where to find things to write about. In the end, all you should have to worry about is writing the post, which really is as easy as writing an email.

Your post title can be costing you search engine rank

I've written before about how important your headline, or title, is for getting people to read your post. Headlines and photos are the two main reasons people stop to read a post you have written.

But there is a technical side to titles as well.

You may have never noticed it before, but the title of your post appears in the "Title Bar" of your browser, at the very top of the program. Here is the Title Bar from a post I wrote for one of my other blogs, JPAC blog:

The problem is that the name of your blog appears first, then the title of your post. This is bad. Your post's title is the key information search engines are looking for. When it sees 200 posts that begin with "Your Blog Name," the search engine sometimes believes that all 200 posts are the same post...duplicated 200 times! Search engines hate duplicate posts and strongly penalize sites that have them.

Instead, your blog program should list the name of the post first, then the blog name:

When formatted this way, search engines immediately know they are dealing with a new post and are likely to promote the new post to the top of relevant searches.

For Typepad users, this change currently requires modifying the Advanced Templates which require the top tiered "Pro" account ($15/mo).

Matching your blog's design to the company website

Marcia Brubeck contacted me a couple of nights ago with an interesting problem. While she has been blogging for nearly eight months now, her blog design has been somewhat of a challenge. We featured her blog as the Small Business Blog of the Day back in August, and since we featured the blog, I have noticed that everything I suggested was taken to heart as Marcia made every small change I mentioned.

Furthermore, when Marcia decided to get some help with the design of the blog, she thought of me (Ya!).

Basically, Marcia wanted her blog to match her main website. Here is what her main website looks like (click for larger view):

Her blog looked something like this:

So I changed the design to look like this:

Keep in mind that the first photo and the third photo are entirely different. One is Marcia's main website, and the other is her new blog.

Other than basic design, which is pretty intense with Typepad since you can customize so much out of the box, I met with some unique challenges to Marcia's blog.

First, the standard width of a Typepad blog did not match the width of Marcia's main website. This meant I had to alter the width of the blog and each column in the blog to get these things to match. This can only be done in the Advanced Templates of Typepad (you must have a "Pro" account to edit the Advanced Templates).

Second, Marcia has a patterned background for her left sidebar on her main website. I was able to duplicate this by inserting a background in the Typepad blog, again utilizing the Advanced Templates.

Figuring out these little tricks takes some experience, research, and experimenting. I was able to completely match Marcia's original website design on her blog in about 2 hours.

Marcia was pretty happy. Here's what she had to say:

It looks great!...I am just thrilled that you managed to do this so fast. Thank you so much!

Learning all the ins and outs of Typepad's design structure is not for everyone. If you would like some assistance, let me know and I'll be happy to help. I've been designing websites for over six years now, and designing exclusively with Typepad for nearly a year. Just let me know if I can help you. I'd be happy to.

Typepad widgets have a major flaw

What is a widget? It's a pre-designed block for your sidebar (blocks are called Typelists in Typepad).

All of these blocks that appear in the sidebars of blogs have to be made by someone. Some come with the blogging platform (like 'Recent Comments'), some are created by the blogger (like 'Small Business Blogs Reviewed') and some are made with "widgets" (I have no examples of a widget on Pajama Market because I don't use them).

All sorts of companies have created widgets for Typepad blogs (and Wordpress blogs for that matter). Feedburner is a good example as they have a widget for subscribing to their services. All you have to do is follow a couple of easy instructions and *poof* there is a block in your sidebar that has a link for people to subscribe to your RSS feed through Feedburner.

You may notice that I have this option on Pajama Market. But it is not a widget, it is hand-made. Why? Simple. For some unknown reason, Typepad did not give widgets the same design structure as their normal blocks (Typelists). The difference is that a widget does not have a title like all the other blocks. It just appears on the sidebar unannounced, without a title or nice horizontal line to separate it from the other blocks.

This amounts to confusing design, or at the very least, inconsistent design. For this reason, I don't use widgets. I wish Typepad would fix this, because the idea of widgets is really cool. Adding content to your sidebars from other websites with just a few easy clicks is a great idea. For now, I'll do the extra work so that it looks good too.

A blogger who prefers Wordpress

Yesterday, I received an email from a blogger I featured a while back for his company Carolina Adirondack. The furniture company uses Typepad to create a blog that is used to display the company's products. Kevin indicated that he wasn't 100% satisfied with Typepad and was strongly considering switching to Wordpress.

Wordpress has always been #2 on my list of blog platforms. It's a great platform to use, and those that are using it genuinely seem to love it. As Kevin mentions, Wordpress is "free" while Typepad runs $15/month for the souped up version with all the bells and whistles.

For a business, I would consider $15/month a non-issue, so what are the advantages of running Wordpress? For Kevin, his main concern is working with photos on the blog. Carolina Adirondack is a unique blog in that it does not contain frequently updated posts, rather it is used more as a standard "traditional" website. Kevin wants a format that allows him more flexibility and ease of use with these photos. He may well find a better format with Wordpress.

Also, Kevin isn't too worried about SPAM hitting his blog. The comments feature is turned off on Carolina Adirondack, so there is no need to be concerned with how well the blog platform deals with SPAM. Typepad is really excellent with filtering SPAM from both the comments and the trackbacks and is one of the main reasons I suggest going with Typepad when you first create your blog. But lets give someone else a say today. Here is Kevin's email which he graciously agreed to let me post on PJ:

Hi Brian:

Just ran across your post about my blog at Carolina Adirondack (www.adirondax.com). (I was looking in my stats and saw that someone had visited my site from your blog.) This line caught my eye: "You might be wondering why I'm featuring a blog that is rarely updated, doesn't tell you much about the company, includes only a handful of posts, and lacks most of traditional blogging conventions." It was a gentle rebuke, but I liked it nonetheless!

You are absolutely right about blogging and e-commerce. I think blogging is the way to go for a small business like mine. When I was more active on the blog, my page rank was pretty high and still is in some search combos. But I think Typepad is a bit problematic as a blogging platform, and I'm considering a move to Wordpress in the near future. You might want to consider doing the same and expand your consulting services to that platform as well.

I say this because it took more than a "minimal amount of effort" to get my site set up on Typepad. I began with a multimedia template to take advantage of photos, but the photos in the right column were deleted after 30 days in TP by default. (I discovered this when I went to the site after a month's absence and found that all the photos were gone. An unpleasant discovery.) So I had to rework a standard template based on the multimedia template and put a table in the right column with photos populating the cells in the table. This table also allowed me to retain some control over the photos I uploaded. Using TP's upload service meant that I couldn't get access to the files on the TP server. I didn't know how to hack TP and wasn't interested in learning.

I'm seriously considering Wordpress because it gives you the ability to create static pages easily (something I'd like to have), posting is much faster (doesn't republish everything--not that I post enough to complain about that)and there are lots of templates available that can be tweaked to get the look you want. And it's free! It comes in two flavors: (1) A free-hosted blog that doesn't give you access to templates, and (2) a free downloadable version that can be run on the webhost of your choice. If you opt for number 2, you still have to know some HTML and CSS but it's not difficult. Of course, you may know all this. I've been playing around with it awhile and like it a lot.

My site has a lot of potential and I'd love to post more but I've got my fingers in too many pies at the moment. I could say a lot more about the shop, the designs, the building process, interesting customer requests, interesting projects, etc... when I have more time . . . .!!!

Still, I thought you might be interested to know a little more about the blog.

Cheers and good luck with your business.

Kevin Morton
Carolina Adirondack