Business Blogging Pros

Using MS-Word to Compose Blog Posts

This topic has come up three times in the past two weeks.

Almost everyone is comfortable using MS-Word. Spell-check and all the editing and formatting features make it seem like a great way to compose and format a blog post, right?

Wrong. Or Maybe.

It is easy to be fooled. You can copy and paste directly from MS-Word into the 'New Post' or 'edit Post' form and it looks like it will work just fine. The problem is that the code that MS-Word creates is not web-compatible.

The biggest offender is Word's ability to change straight quotes into curly quotes. (Look for "Replace straight quotes with Smart Quotes" on the AutoCorrect dialog box.) Those curly quotes are not web-compatible characters and will play havoc with your RSS feed, among other things.

It is possible though to use MS-Word as a blog composition tool.

Option 1: Use MS-Word to Compose, Format in Typepad

Use this option when you are mainly interested in using Word for spell-checking and getting your thoughts out of your brain and onto the screen.

Before you copy-and-past your entry from MS-Word into Typepad, locate the Display Options link on Typepad's 'New Post' or 'Edit Post' form. click on it and select 'Markdown'. (None of Word's formatting will be copied to Typepad.)

Then click on Display Options again and select 'Rich Text + HTML' instead of 'Markdown'. You can then use Typepad's controls to format your post.

Option 2: Office 2007

The Word Blogging Tool - included in the new Microsoft Word as part of Microsoft Office 2007 - lets you publish to your blog from inside the familiar Word environment with a single click. TypePad is a default option in Microsoft Word, which makes it simple and straightforward; all you'll need is your Typepad username and password. Better yet, the HTML the tool writes to your blog is in a simple, blog-friendly format.

To use Word 2007 to Compose your posts and publish them right within Word:

1. Open MS-Word 2007
2. Click File -> New -> New Blog Post
3. Enter the information about your blog
4. Write your post
5. Click 'Publish'

Option 3: Other Options

Microsoft has a great new free tool called Windows Live Writer that makes it easy to publish rich content to your blog. If you are familiar with MS-Word, you'll have no trouble with Windows Live Writer:

http://get.live.com/writer/overview

There are several other options and Typepad has a Knowledge Base article describing some of them:

http://kb.typepad.com/id/87

Add Twitter to your Reputation Monitoring

There is a lot of conversation going on using Twitter. tons of conversations. For Twitter users, it is often the first place they turn to vent when they are unhappy about a product or service.

I have long advocated using search-driven RSS feeds to monitor what is being said about you, your company, your products, services, website, etc. Twitter searches should be a part of it.

You don't have to understand Twitter or even be a Twitter user. Use TweetScan to search twitter, click on the RSS link, then save the feed URL as part of your drifnet.

Admitting Guilt

David Meerman Scott's Web Ink Now is one of my favorite blogs on the subjects of marketing and PR. He recently wrote a great post about Olympic athlete Marion Jones' emotional admission of guilt.

No matter what your feelings about Ms Jones' and her offense, you can't help but feel differently after watching the video. You can't help but feel a little more empathy and perhaps a little less judgmental. I know I am generalizing but I think we Americans as a culture are quick to forgive when presented with a heartfelt mea culpa.

Good businesses that 'get' blogging use their blogs this way: to say, "We made a mistake", "We have learned from it", and "Here is how we are going to do better next time" .

Sadly, a lot of companies when faced with the question, "Should we put this on our blog?" will respond with "If we don't put it on our blog then fewer people will find out about it". Wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer.

Markets are conversations. Believe me, the world will find out about it. And they will talk about it. Given that the conversation will take place anyway, it is better for that conversation to be on your own blog than somewhere over which you have no control. And you have a better chance to get your side of the story told and get your message out on you own blog.

On the other hand, suppose that by reading about it on your blog, someone does learn of your faux pas who would otherwise have remained ignorant? They'll come away with a positive impression of your company's honesty and integrity.

There is another benefit but it is more insidious. Changing the culture in a company - to one in which airing the dirty laundry is not only OK but is actualy advantageous - can be very disruptive. Once accomplished however, the company is better for it. The company doesn't just appear to be more honest and open, it actually is more honest and open. And then the entire relationship with the customer undergoes a welcome change too.

Technorati Tags: What They Are, Why They Are Important, and How to Use Them

Long, long ago, on a galaxy far, far away, in a time before The Empire, we had web directories. You would submit your website to the directory and along with the URL, you would provide a list of words or phrases that described what your website was about. When someone searched the directory and entered your matching keyword, the directory would serve up your site’s url. In a way, life was good then. Those primitive tools based their results not upon what some algorithm thought was important about your web page using keyword density and voodoo; they based their results upon what a real human being said the site was important about the site.

Technorati tags give us this same humanized approach today. When you configure your ‘Compose Post’ page to display the Technorati Tags field, it gives you the change to tell Google and other search engines what your blog post is about. Google recognizes that you, a genuine intelligent human being, are far better at determining what a blog post is about than Google can, even though Google’s brain is reportedly the size of a small planet.

If your post is about widgets, it will rank much more highly for the search term ‘widgets’ with a Technorati tag ‘widgets’ than it will without. Much more highly.

Do you want an example? Ok, I’ll give you one. My house is presently for sale and to prove I could do it, I created a blog that is essentially a brochure about my house. I tagged every post in that blog “85302 real estate”. After two weeks of posting twice a day, that blog was number one for the search term “85302 real estate”. (CAVEAT: Don’t interpret this as my recommendation that you try to sell houses this way. I did this only to demonstrate the power of Technorati Tags and a blog’s Google Juice.)

The lesson learned from this is that Technorati Tags and frequent postings can be combined into a powerful tool for boosting your search engine rankings.

Strategy

I recommend that you decide upon a small number of themes. These should topics that you write about frequently. You may write about many topics, but your themes are the topics you always return to. From your readers’ perspective your themes are your blog is about.

Then create a tag for each of those themes. The tag can be a single work or a phrase. Each time you write a blog post on one of your themes, tag it. You can include multiple tags by separating them with commas.

Be consistent in your use of theme tags. Always use the same word or phrase. Over time then, Google will see a large body of work tagged with the same search term and as a result your blog will rank higher in Google.

“What about Categories?”, you ask. For all intents and purposes, Technorati Tags and Categories perform the same function. My recommendation is to pursue the following methodology:

• Your Categories should be broad and less specific that your Technorati Tags.
• Your theme-related Technorati Tags should provide the next level of specificity.
• Include one or more additional tags or keywords in a posts Technorati Tag field that are very specific to that particular post.

One final caveat: Google is much less interested in Technorati tags that do not appear somewhere on the page. If you use a term or phrase as a Technorati Tag make sure that same term or phrase appears elsewhere too, even if it is in the sidebar.

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What Your Business Blog Needs

Many web hosting companies are now offering a blolg as part of the package. In my opinion, most are - unfortunately - not really suitable platforms for a professional business blog. They provide the basic functions of an online diary or journal but a blog for your business needs to be more than that.

Here are some of the features and functions that a blog for your business must have:

• RSS Feed. The most desirable readers (the ones you want in your sphere of influence) don't read your blog by bringing it up in their browser. Instead they subscribe to your blog's RSS feed and read it in their Feed reader. If you don't have an RSS feed then your blog won't be read. I describe RSS feeds and their significance in a little more detail here.


• Your RSS Feed should be easy to subscribe to.The Mac Browser (Safari) and Internet Explorer 7 have their own buttons that are live when the browser detects that a blog has an RSS feed and allow me to subscribe to your feed wiith a single click. Other people are not so lucky. Google Reader is probably the most popular RSS feed reader today. You should strive to make it as easy as possible for users of Google Reader - and other online feed readers - to subscribe. That's why you see the chicklets in the sidebar of this blog under the heading Subscribe. A Google Reader user can simply click on the 'Google' chicklet to subscribe.


• Connection to Feedburner. Feedburner is the premier aggregator of RSS feeds. They also do a lot more. They provide great stats about your feed subscribers. They can integrate podcasts into your RSS feed and make it easy to publish on iTunes. Any blog that has an RSS feed can be connected to Feedburner, but some blogging platforms make it easier than others.


• Email Subscriptions. Your readers should be able to subscribe to your blog via email. I predict that newsletters will someday go the way of the Dodo bird thanks to this function. (Bringing you this capability is one of the great things Feedburner does for you).


• Technorati Tags. The combination of frequent postings and Technorati Tags is what enables your block to quickly climb to the top of the Google rankings for any given search term. Your blog should have a field on its 'Compose Post' page that allows you to easily enter Technorati Tags.


• Categories.You should be able to group your posts into categories - and you should publish the list of categories in your blog's sidebar. Readers can click on a category name in your sidebar and see everything you have written on that topic. In time, your blog will become a reference site. I often send people to the Blogging 101 category of my blog to give them a place to start learning about blogs.


• A Link to Your Website. Not only do you want interested readers to be able to easily find your website, consider this: Every time you create a new blog post it looks like a new web page to Google. If every one of those pages has a link to your website...


• Recent Posts. If your sidebar contains a list of recent posts, a new visitor can quickly get a feel for what your blog is about. (Yes, I know. I have no 'Recent Posts' section in my sidebar. That and other things going to change soon.)


• Trackbacks. The most important factor in the success of your blog is for you to engage in conversation with the blogosphere. Find other bloggers speaking to the same audience as you. Read their blogs regularly. Leave insightful comments. Write articles on your blog about what you've read and include trackbacks and hyperlinks in those posts. If you go to your own blog and write about this post here on my blog, and you trackback to this post, I receive notification that you have written about it. That notification includes the URL of your blog. When I approve the trackback, an excerpt of your post appears in the 'comments and trackbacks' section of my blog's post. You must be able to do trackbacks.


• Accept Comments. Don't just accept feedback, welcome it. (That's why you won't see CAPTCHA or other forms of authentication on blogs I configure.) Not only that, the comment form should have fields for the commenters name, email address, and website/blog URL.


• Comment and Trackback Moderation. You do however, want to make sure that inappropriate comments never see the light of day. You should be able to configure your blog so it holds all comments for your review and approval prior to publication. The same is true for trackbacks.


• Google Pinging. The other day at one of our Real Estate Blogging Seminars, Jay Thompson was live-blogging during the event. Before the seminar was over his blog post was on Google. You don't want to wait the 4-6 weeks for Google's spider to get around to reading your blog. You want your blog to automatically and immediately notify (we call it a ping) Google each time you publish a new blog post. The same is true for Technorati, Feedburner, blo.gs, and weblogs.com .


• Social Bookmarking. The social bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us can be powerful tools for spreading your message virally. For that to happen, you must have three things: (1) You must write good content that other people want to read. (2) Create engaging titles for your content, and (3) Make it as easy as possible for people to bookmark you. -- The first two are up to you. Your blog should take care of the third one for you.

You are going to be spending a lot of time and energy on your business blog. In return, it needs to do the best possible job for you. In order to do that I believe these features and functions must be present.

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes may solve a problem I have been complaining about a lot lately.

When I do Reputation Monitoring or erecting a Driftnet, I basically create several RSS feeds of searches. Let's say that I want to monitor references to my name, Dave Barnhart. I'll set up a Google Blog Search and a Google News Search on "Dave Barnhart". But because Google doesn't catch everything, I'll also use Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, BlogDigger, and other blog search tools.

While that better insures that I don't miss anything, it also means that I have to wade through a lot of duplicates. I've often said, "Wouldn't it be nice if I could run all these RSS Feeds through some sort of filter that would remove the dupes?".

Enter Yahoo! Pipes. I haven't given it a rigorous test but I've played with it a little and the interface is so intuitive that I didn't even have to read the documentation to figure out how to build a pipe to do just what I was looking for.

You simply drag tools or modules from the left sidebar, configure them, and then drag a connector between them. Cool and easy.

I'll experiment with it more over the next few days and let you know how it is working out. I bet that Pipes will become a regular part of my toolset.

Speed-Reading the Blogosphere

I get a lot of questions about how to use RSS to track and read blogs and so I thought it would be a good subject of a post. I touched on this a bit in an earlier post.

Want to make it easy to keep up with multiple blogs? (I currently track over a hundred blogs) Use the blog's RSS Feed.

Every blog is published in two formats. One is the familiar HTML that you see here in your web browser. The second format, called RSS, strips out all the graphics, styling, and formatting and delivers pure text. The interesting part is that MSIE 7 (Microsoft Internet Explorer version 7) knows about RSS, and it will tell you if there are any new posts on blog since the last time you visited and how many.

It gets better. MSIE 7 (as well as most other RSS Feed Readers) can aggregate the feeds from multiple blogs onto a single page. The beauty of this is that at a glance you can see if there are any new posts on any blog you read, and you can also see the first few sentences of each new post. The result is that you can quickly keep up with what's going on.

Here's how to use RSS in MSIE 7:

1. Look on MSIE's toolbar over on the right and locate the small orange square icon shown here. Click on it.
2. My blog's RSS feed will be displayed. Near the top of the page there is a yellow box with the blog's name and the words 'You are viewing a feed that contains frequently updated content...'.
3. Just below that paragraph is Subscribe to this feed link. Click on it. A pop-up dialog box will apppear. Leave the 'Name' and 'Create In' fields as is and click on Subscribe. There. That's all there is to it.

To check and read a Feed:

1. Locate the Favorites Center icon (the gold star) on the toolbar. Click on it.
2. Click on the Feeds tab near the top of the Favorites list.
3. Mouse over an entry and the tool tip will show you how many posts have been added to that blog since the last time you looked.
4. Click on it and the new blog posts will be displayed.

Want to have new blog posts delivered to your inbox instead?

Many blogs like mine now take advantage of Feedburner's ability to reliver feeds via email. Look for the 'Subscribe via Email' box in the blog's sidebar and enter your email address into the field.

Adding Search to your Blog

Brian at Pajama Market talked today about adding Google Search to your blog. We're not talking about searching the internet. We're talking about searching your previous blog posts.

If youare striving to develop professional trust, be seen as and authority, and have your blog be viewed as a reference, then the ability to search your previous posts is important.

While Brian describes how to accomplish this with Google but I have been setting all my client's blog up using the new Technorati Widget. You can see it in action in my left sidebar under Technorati Tools. Simply type in the search term and click Search. You will be taken to a Technorati page that displays all the posts on my blog in which contain the search term.

I also typically enable the "Blogs that link here" feature of the Technorati Widget. If readers come to your blog looking for information, helping them find it - even if it is on a colleague's blog - is doing them a service.