Posted by scoop on November 29th, 2009 in Tips | No Comments »
Have you ever regretted posting a comment on anyone’s blog and really really wanted to delete it?
Having made a mistake of clicking on the SUBMIT COMMENT button just a few minutes ago and then realizing I have more to say (no problem I just left another comment), I remembered an incident a couple of year back. A tragedy happened to a friend’s family when their baby died. They announced it on their blog a few days later to tell people the funeral service schedule and to assure everyone they were coping fine despite the grief. Comments started pouring in and while I was scanning through them a comment that was so completely out of place caught my eye. This guy (a close friend of the dad) left a comment that was not only really cheeky but was also calling the blogger out for backing out of their supposed night out. Everyone was appalled but none more than the commenter. Apparently he was multi-tasking and ended up switching comments on the two blogs he was reading simultaneously. He ended up scampering around for a way to delete his comment but since the blog was hosted by Wordpress there was no way to do so. In the end he left another comment apologizing for his mistake and asking the blogger to delete his comment as soon as he had time for inane stuff like that. The blogger did moderate his comments weeks later (understandably he went on a hiatus to mourn his loss) and deleted the comments to his friend’s relief, but not until everyone read the booboo.
My point in this long story is simple. When commenting on blogs make sure you double check not only the contents of your comment (from wording to spelling) but also make sure that you are leaving your comment on the right blog.
Most of the time our comment mistakes will not be as embarrassing as the one above but remember leaving an unprofessional comment will reflect on you as a blogger.
Posted by scoop on October 30th, 2009 in Design, Technical, Tips, Writing | No Comments »
Time and again advice is given to bloggers to know or identify their target audience. This is sound advice. However, you should also remember that the reason why you need to know who your target audience/readers are is to be able to adjust to their needs. Here are a several aspects you should consider when thinking of adjusting to your readers’ needs.
Technical knowhow and capabilities – Consider your readers’ technical limitations. If your target audience are techies chances are that you won’t have to consider limiting your blog design to accommodate slow internet connections. However, since they know more about technical matters they will also be more critical of such facts and will probably be using a more varied set of web browsers. If you have audience from the older generation do consider internet connection speed and possible outdated browsers and computer specs. Make sure you also consider the user interface for the sake of usability.
Tone – If you have an industry-specific blog make sure your blog has a tone suitable to the general personality of the people in that industry. For example, a law blog means formal and deep content. An entertainment blog, on the other hand, calls for a laid back writing style.
Length – The length of your blog posts will also be determined by your target audience. In general blog posts shouldn’t be long but if your audience expects in depth discussions then you have to adjust accordingly. A kids blog will obviously need consistently short posts using age-appropriate words.
These are just some of the ways knowing your audience will help you adjust to make your blog more suitable and appealing to your readers. The important thing is that, as soon as you realize that there’s an aspect of your blog you can tweak to serve your readers better, you do something to address your readers’ needs.
Posted by scoop on September 30th, 2009 in Professional Blogging | No Comments »
Tomorrow’s THE day when Google Wave will be landing and sweeping more people off their feet, unfortunately not everyone will still have access to the Wave. Makes me think back to the days when a Gmail invite was still oh so precious and sold like pancakes online.
Google Wave team announced the preview to thousands of users yesterday morning. Here’s what they said…
“ Starting Wednesday, September 30 we’ll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:
*Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
*The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
*Select customers of Google Apps
We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.”
They also said that Google Wave is (of course) not fully ready yet and has lots of features that they still haven’t rolled out. I don’t know if it will already be possible to comment on blog posts via Google Wave but am pretty certain that collaboration on a post and posting via Google Wave is already possible since as they said “we [Google Wave team] collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.”
Now I just need to get an invite and start playing around.
Posted by scoop on September 17th, 2009 in Design, Word Press | No Comments »
Want to spruce up your comment section but out of ideas? One simple way you can spruce it up is by styling your (the author’s) comment. This tip may seem a little useless but it really has some benefits including:
Setting apart the author comments – This is an advantage to your readers because it will make it a whole lot easier to scan comments so that at a glance they can pick out your responses to their and fellow reader’s questions and comments. This is even more important when the comment section gets really busy and threaded comments appear making it harder to see which reply is the author’s.
Showing the readers your extra effort – As I said it is pretty easy to do, which means no real hard work on your part, but to readers the extra effort will reflect on how much you pay attention to details and how much you want to make things more user friendly to your readers.
As I have mentioned above the main purpose of stylized author comments is a better UI for your readers. Now this means that when styling your comments you should keep it simple. Highlighting your comments is the usual way to do it. You can also add an image that will really easy to spot and is distinctively you but make sure that it is not overdone to keep the professional look.
Here’s a couple of useful links to help you style your author comments:
Highlight Author Comments
Style Author Comments in WP 2.7
Posted by scoop on August 31st, 2009 in Tips, Writing, Writing Content | No Comments »
Blogging on a regular basis can be really tiresome. One of the main problems of bloggers is that we often fall into a rut. When this happens one of the things that immediately suffer is our post quality. This is especially true if your blog topic is very specific. After all how does one keep on finding new things to write about every week, even everyday for some. To keep the juices flowing some of the things you can do include:
Subscribing to news feeds – It’s unrealistic for anyone to scan every single bit of news that come out each day just to see if it contains anything that might be of interest to your readers so make sure you subscribe to news feeds where you can filter results to target very specific keywords and phrases.
Holiday posts – Take advantage of the holidays and put up holiday posts where you can deviate from your usual topic. If you want everything to be related to your topic what you can do is to come up with comparison between that holiday and your theme.
Cartoons/Random shots – Once in a while post a cartoon or random picture (may be yours or may be borrowed) that is related to your theme. Even unrelated images can be posted as long as you tweak the caption to make it related. The good thing about this is that not only will you get out of writing a few paragraphs but that it will provide a much needed break to you and your readers
Posted by scoop on August 25th, 2009 in Blog basics, Design, Professional Blogging, SEO, Tips | No Comments »
I once had a blog that I decided to revamp and change titles. However, that blog is a personal blog so there’s no real problem when it comes to switching titles. So what do you do if you feel like your business blog has gone stale? What if you feel like it needs a revamp?
First of all, what you need to do is go through an evaluation process wherein you should answer the following questions:
Is your blog doing well in terms of traffic and/or revenue generation?
If not ask why but be more specific.
Do you need to do SEO?
Is it the GUI?
Is it the content?
Or is it the entire concept?
After you have pinpointed the areas that should be focused on it is time to get even more detailed. When it comes to SEO and GUI it is a good a idea to call in the experts. Hire an experienced firm to evaluate your site according to their metrics and then ask for a proposal. You need not go with the first firm but see what different service providers have to say.
If it is the content or the entire concept that is lacking it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Rethink your goals and map out a plan to achieve it step by step. Probably one of the mistakes committed was going pro-blogger blindly. You might want to keep your domain name though, unless it already has a stigma attached to it, because you don’t want to waste the readership you’ve already got as well as the domain age (unless you can get an older more reputable domain).
