Many people struggle with ideas for blogs. One good way to add content to your blog is to use video. And no, you don’t have to make the video yourself. You can use ones that are available for sharing on YouTube or the TED video series (which I highly recommend).

The great thing about using video is that somebody else creates the content for you. You just act as a go-between to share the content. I generally add a paragraph or two explaining why I like the particular post, drop in the video and I’m done.

The one thing that you might find hard about sharing video, is getting it into the post because it sometimes requires opening the HTML tab of your Blogging editor. It’s not as intimidating as it sounds. Just follow these simple steps.

1. Copy the embed code. It’s clearly labeled on the right side of every YouTube screen. In fact, if you’re not familiar with it, you might have wondered what it was, but it’s the code that lets you display and play the video inside your blog post. Don’t be afraid of the code. You just copy it and it paste it. (For TED and other videos look for embed code after video plays or look for a Sharing symbol to reveal the code.)
2. Open your blog post. Give it a title and write your introductory text.
3. Open your HTML tab, add a couple of returns and paste that embed code you copied in Step 1.
4. Save your post as a draft and give it a test run to make sure you’ve embedded it correctly.
5. Publish your post.

That’s it. You’ve got a nice post and I’ve found that these shared videos are often very popular. Give it a shot. You’ll be glad you did.

Photo by Jonnson on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

You may be wondering right about now, why I think bloggers should be cleaner than others, but I’m here to tell you, it’s because it’s where ideas are born. When you relax and open your mind, something wonderful happens. As that water rains down on your body, your mind clears and the ideas that have been locked away find their way free.

I’m a writer. It’s what I do, and I find ideas come at me out of nowhere all the time, but you don’t have to be a professional writer to experience this. You just have to be ready. The trick is to recognize the idea and respond, and never, ever ignore it. I’m still so pleasantly surprised when a seemingly spontaneous idea pops into my head almost fully formed. I’ve had it happen in the shower, emptying the dishwasher, out for a walk, in the car–any place my mind is open and the ideas are flowing.

But because I’m a writer I’ve trained myself to listen for these moments of clarity. You may be new to blogging or a regular blogger who struggles to find ideas. You just have to learn to look and listen and the ideas will come. They are out there all around you. You just have to be ready to detect them.

And when it happens, that magic moment, wherever you are, write it down, type a note or leave yourself a voice mail. Do something so you won’t forget. And pretty soon you’ll find that sometimes, when you get out of the shower, even before you dry off, you’ll find yourself sitting at your keyboard, writing that blog post. It’s why real bloggers shower regularly and write often.

I was with a client last week and we were setting up their blog. At every turn, they wanted to put the minimum up:

• Just their picture – no bio
• Cover of their book – no short summary
• RSS symbol – no invitation
• Envelope – no explanation
• …and on and on.

If you know for sure that your readers are totally blog savvy, then I think this is fine – leave out the directives. But, I’m not sure you could convince me that everyone that comes to your blog is. Not to mention the fact that, while us bloggers do have a lot in common, most every blog is unique in its layout, images and functionality.

I believe it’s best practice to assume people don’t know what to do and they need to be told, that they want to be told. Chris Brogan does a fantastic job of this on his site. Check out these screen shots…

Here’s Chris’s email alert invitation. It’s short and to the point, but still very directive and explanatory:

Here’s his subscription information with just enough copy to guide us on our way:

His bio lets any visitor to any page or post know exactly who he is and what he does (in otherwords, they won’t get lost and can contact him at any moment):

He even added a note by his retweeting plugin to help his readers understand what to do with this magical button and how to become further involved after they read the post (and it sure does seem to be working as this screen shot came on the heels of a post he had only recently published and there were already 37 comments):

Notice that Chris’s blog isn’t clogged up, there are no extra words. He’s always kind, sincere and supportive. Go through your blog: sidebars, subscriptions, sharing tools, comments. Can you add a little copy throughout to make your readers feel more comfortable and to show them the way towards optimal interaction? How can you welcome them better? How can you get them to do what you want them to do?

Image credit: Neilio

By Julie Roads

There is one thing that every blogger wants – across the board (besides fame and a book deal – or is that just me?). The answer? Readers. Daily traffic is delightful, but we want our readers to stick. We want them to read our blog, one post, the first sentence, the tagline and say to themselves, “I want to read every inch of this blog from this day forth.” As Aerosmith so aptly put it, they don’t want to miss a thing.

The way to offer your readers total access and awareness every time you post news or information on your blog is via your RSS Feed or through email subscriptions or alerts.

RSS Feeds

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication – and it is, sort of. Traditional syndication is the act of publishing or broadcasting your material simultaneously in a number of newspapers, television stations, etc. Blog RSS is the act of publishing or broadcasting your material simultaneously to an infinite number of readers.

When someone subscribes to your feed, they get ‘pinged’ every time you post new content. This allows the person to get your new content without having to go to the blog or web site every day to check manually. You can use an “RSS Reader” like Google Reader or Newsgator or a customization service like iGoogle or My Yahoo to subscribe to blogs. Some email clients also provide a way to subscribe to RSS feeds including Thunderbird and Mac Mail.

Feeds are powered by services like Google’s Feedburner or Feedblitz, Zookoda or AWeber. Or by Feed plug-ins and widgets that come standard in blogging software like WordPress, Blogger or Typepad. Using a service is beneficial because they tracks stats and offer people many options about how they’d like to view/recieve your Feed. And people really like to choose and customize.

Note: When you subscribe to someone’s RSS feed – the onus is on you to check the feed for updates. Personally, this doesn’t work for me – I like for new content and information to appear magically before my eyes without having to even think about it which is why I love….

Email Alerts

Throughout the day, I get emails that I’m just waiting for with breathless anticipation. These messages contain the recent posts of my favorite bloggers. Using a subscription service like Feedburner, Feedblitz, etc., the blog posts arrive in my inbox formatted, with pictures and live links – from the post and direct to the post’s web page.

Comments can’t be left on the email, you simply have to click through to the actual blog, but it’s simple enough to do as the blog’s name and the post’s title are live links.

The beauty of the email alert is that your readers don’t have to remember to think about you every day or once a week or however often you post. They only had to think about you that one time, click on the email link and sign-up with their email address and often, pass through a security captcha and a confirmation email.

After that, its up to you – the blogger – to show up in front of their eyeballs as often as you’d like with as much good information and value as you can fit on the screen.

Image credit: Violinha

Co-post by Julie Roads and Shauna Callaghan

So you’re starting a blog, or maybe you’re redesigning one. One of the first questions your designer asks is, ‘Send me some examples of blogs you don’t like and blogs you do like – and tell me why.’

Yikes, right? I mean, the ‘like’ and ‘don’t like’ piles are easy to make – but sometimes the ‘why’ is tough. You just get a certain feeling when you look at a site – it’s too busy, it makes you feel peaceful, it’s disorganized, it’s exciting. It’s all relative, it’s all personal.

Here are some what not to wear rules for your blog…

What’s In:

• Clean & simple
• Making sure visitors can find their way around easily
• Sidebars that are colorful and informative and useful
• A clear tagline – set the context, tell people where they are
• Inviting participation with prominent feed and email subscriptions
• Plugins that let you share information with the touch of a button (like retweet and sociable)
• WordPress themes that are easy to customize and offer great functionality (and offer customer support!)
• Solid Background Colors
• Image themes, e.g. the checklist theme on this site (see header and sidebar titles)
• Photos – beautiful images that illustrate your content and make your posts pop (try Creative Commons)
• Branding – what is your niche, who is your audience? What design matches perfectly? Each niche and brand will have different design needs.
• Good content (oh, whoops, that isn’t design, is it…)

What’s OUT:

• Busy backgrounds
• Lots and lots of stuff in your sidebars as filler
• Blogger
• Really tall header designs that take up your readers’ entire screen – keep it short and sleek, you want your readers to see at least some content on your site at first glance and you want them to have immediate access to your information
• Stuff that flashes, moves or spins
• Mixing styles – just choose one: professional, cartoony, modern, classic, etc…
• Crazy, unreadable fonts anywhere but in the header
• Font colors that are hard to read
• Dark backgrounds with white writing

Bottomline: If you don’t know what you’re doing, hire a designer. It’s not worth the time and energy to try and design your own site if you have no clue – trust us. If you simply can’t afford a blog designer, choose a theme that you love ‘out of the box’ – and make sure they offer user support. You may have to pay for one of these themes – but not very much – and it’s worth it. Free themes are free for a reason.

Another warning: web designers are not necessarily blog designers. If the best web designer in the world is not familiar with blogs, blogging software and blogging best practices, you won’t get the blog you want. Been there, done that.

Blog well!

Shauna Callaghan is a WordPress designer and blogger, check her out at seemydesignsbyshauna.com and burbmom.net.

Julie Roads is a writer, blogger, speaker, consultant & teacher – best places to find her? On Twitter and her own site, Writing Roads (or right here on Soc Media 101 pssst – check the right sidebar!).

Image credit: karen_d

> 19 Presence Awareness Chores You Could Do Every Day, Chris Brogan Blog

> Social Media is the New Punk Rock, Webinknow, David Meerman Scott Blog

> The Difference Between Strangers and Friends, Seth Godin Blog

> Who will be the John Lennon of Social Media, The Inquisitr

> Debunking Social Media Myths, HarvardBusiness.org

Picture courtesy of Paul.Carroll on Flickr

by Julie Roads

Blog writing is not essay writing, novel writing, poetry writing, speech writing – it’s blog writing. You can tell by the way it reads and you can tell by the way it looks. People move fairly fast within the blogosphere, and if your post looks long, they simply won’t take the time to read it.

Notice that the emphasis is on looks.  Typically, format trumps word counts. It’s true – looks really are everything…on a blog.

The key is to add variety; eye candy, if you will. No one wants to look at an endless flow of words. We want excitement, we want bite-sized and digestible – then we’ll be glued to the screen. (Oh, and please write well, provide value and information and don’t yell at us – otherwise, I don’t care how pretty your post is – and neither does anyone else.)

Blog Formatting Tips:

• Short paragraphs. Not long ones. Break things up. Readers will choose a 750 word post with small paragraphs over a 300 word post squished into one big paragraph.
• Bullet points. You can use numbers, circles, diamonds, arrows, whatever you want. Lists are helpful, readable and actionable.
• Quotes. Blogging software, found within the formatting tools, offers a quote function (quotation mark symbol in a box). It typically indents, shades and sets apart portions of your content. Use it for actual quotes, important points and images.
• Images and video. We’re all children at heart, and by that I mean, we like to look at pictures. I use Creative Commons to find images, photos, illustrations and video. Feel free to insert them at the top, bottom and anywhere in between. Audio podcasts? Yes, those too.
• Bold, underline, italics, alignment. Change it up, our eyes are getting bored. Speak with passion, let us hear you.
• Sub-headers. Break your posts down into sections and create bolded subheads to mark them as separate when appropriate.

How do your posts look? Don’t forget – blog posts live forever, so there’s always time to go back and reformat old posts. You’ll look mahvelous in no time.

Julie Roads is a writer, blogger, speaker, consultant & teacher – best places to find her? On Twitter and her own site, Writing Roads (or right here on Soc Media 101 pssst – check the right sidebar!).

Image credit: Still Burning

Guest post by Michelle Minch

I recently read a post by Daniel Scocco on his blog Daily Blog Tips, Is Twitter the New Digg? An important bit of information I took away was that Darren Rowse published a guest post by Alexander Moya Barquero on his blog TwiTips which got Tweeted, and then Re-Tweeted about 1,200 times. Based upon Bit.ly statistics, Darren got somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 visitors to that post from Twitter. That was just from Bit.ly and doesn’t include any other URL shortener used on Twitter.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t get anywhere near 50,000 visitors to my web site, MovingMountainsDesign.com. Before I discovered Twitter, 20 visitors was a good day. Then I started “Tweeting my posts”. I wrote a brief, pithy description of the post and a shortened Bit.ly URL all in 140 characters or less. Suddenly, my visitor count started to climb and I was up to 90 or 100 visitors per day. Holy Jamoley, that’s, like, 3,000 visitors per month, 36,000 visitors per year!

Then I tried an experiment. I stopped “Tweeting my posts” for 10 days. My numbers dropped down to 30 or 40 per day. Still better than before, but not great. I started “Tweeting my posts” again and the number of visitors climbed back up to the 90-100 range. My best day so far has been 140 visitors.

Here are a few tips for “tweeting your posts”:

• Don’t get spammy about it. The fastest way to lose readers (and Twitter followers) is to “Tweet your post” every 15 minutes. 5 times per day is probably plenty.
• Write a compelling lead in to make people want to click on the link you provide – all in 140 characters (including the shortened URL).
• Its OK to Tweet older posts or pages on your web site or blog if you think they didn’t get enough attention pre-Twitter
• Include a way to allow your readers to easily Re-Tweet your posts. My web site is built on a Word Press platform and I use a plug-in called Add To Any.
• Re-Tweet other’s posts. They’ll be more likely to Tweet yours.

How have you used Twitter to promote your blog or web site?

Michelle Minch writes on her home staging and interior design web site/blog MovingMountainsDesign.com. You can follow her on Twitter @HomeStagingPro.

Image credit: atbaker

Guest Post by Lesley Lambert

In the 1920’s the film industry was revolutionized when soundtracks were added to moving pictures turning them into talking pictures or “talkies”. Just as that technology added a new dimension and tangible layer of enjoyment for the audience in those days, adding video and multi-media to your blog will bring your news to the audience in a fresh new way.

I find that many people shy away from using video because they are concerned that the process is too difficult or technical. While the process does require some computer skills, it is really no more difficult than uploading or editing photos in most cases.

The second level of intimidation that people express to me is a fear of the camera. Most people have an impression that they need to present a video of the same quality as news agencies offer. I find that those “slick” videos are actually counterproductive and turn blog readers off.

In my experience the best videos are those that share the blogger’s personality and energy in a true to real life way. Most of my videos are posted in one take, mistakes and all. If the spirit of my message is conveyed in my own words and with my body language and facial expression to back it up, the viewers will have the sense of being in the room with me.

I use video for multiple applications in my blogging: here is a tutorial video from a series, this is a hyper-local introduction and this is review from PodCamp Western MA. This is the video I created to demonstrate the power of blogging and social media. Regardless of your business, adding video to your blogging will draw in a new audience. Everyone learns differently: some people prefer reading, others need the added visual and auditory stimulation that video brings to truly take in the information.

Hopefully I have convinced you that you should try adding video to your blog and by now you are asking, HOW?

#1- You need a camera. You can use a webcam, your digital camera with video option, traditional video camera or my preferred tool, The Flip.

#2- I recommend a tripod. You can get a table top tripod for as little as $1 (I got one at The Dollar Tree)!

#3- Outline your message and keep your talking points on the table in front of you.

#4- Try to shoot in one take and keep it short. Typically videos should be 2-3 minutes long for highest rate of conversion.

#5- Stay relaxed and speak normally, if you stumble, just keep moving on…shows you are human.

#6- Put the video on your computer hard drive.

#7- Edit the video using Windows Movie Maker (free on PC’s) or iMovie for Mac users.

#8- Upload the video to your preferred video server (YouTube is popular but there are many other options)

#9- Use the code provided to embed the video into your blog

#10- Wait for the feedback! Mine has been terrific with four new clients directly connected to one of my video series.

Now get out there and turn your silent blog into a “talkie” blog!

Lesley is a REALTOR and VP of TQ, Inc the social media consulting branch of the TwitterQueens social media empowerment network. Follow her on Twitter.

This is Part 2 in our three-part series on choosing a blogging platform. In Part 1 we looked at Typepad. In Part 2, guest poster Jeff Rutherford looks at Blogger. Check Part 3 for Shauna Callaghan on Wordrpess.

If you want to start a blog, Blogger offers a fast and easy way to get a blog up and running. Blogger, owned by Google, is often a starting point for many people when they’re first starting a blog.

Blogger’s advantages:

• Quick entry to blogging – you can create a blogger account in 3-5 minutes and start blogging immediately.
• Low cost – you can’t beat Blogger’s price – free.
• Easy to use – If you’re intimidated by HTML or CSS coding, Blogger has a simple web-based dashboard that allows you focus on the content of your blog without knowing any HTML.
• Google index – While Google has never confirmed or denied it, many search engine optimization experts believe that Blogger blogs are indexed by Google quicker than other blogging platforms.

Blogger’s disadvantages:

• URL – Many web branding/marketing experts recommend you focus on developing your personal brand online. When someone sees a blogger URL yourname.blogspot.com, it can take away from your personal brand. However, this disadvantage can be remedied. If you register the www.yourname.com domain, you can set up your Blogger blog to use that unique URL.
• Visual layout – It’s very hard to move beyond the basic Blogger visual style. Many people focused on building an online brand quickly outgrow that Blogger visual style.
• Google “juice” – if you start a blog via Blogger and you spend time building readers, in-bound links, and Google Page Rank, it’s a challenge to later move your blog to another blogging platform and keep the Google “juice” of your Blogger blog. Making that change is not impossible, but it’s not simple. If you do start using Blogger, and quickly decide that blogging suits you, then you may well consider moving to a self-hosted blog sooner rather than later.

Jeff Rutherford, a public relations consultant, works with technology, media, and marketing companies to secure press coverage both digitally and in traditional media.