10e20 Blog

We have heard numerous times how people skim articles and posts online, rarely reading everything, looking only for bits of information and then fine tuning focus on what looks important to them. Did you read all that? Good your still with me.

Lets dig into the way we read online and learn how to potentially format content that keeps the readers attention longer.

Last time you were in a book store, shopping for the next book, how did you go about this search? Assuming you didn’t have a title/author in mind maybe you cruised the non-fiction section looking at covers. Then a book cover with a picture of the president elect caught your eye, THE AUDACITY OF HOPE. What happened next?

You turn the book over and read the back, the synopsis, and get a feel if this is of interest to you. “Maybe this self-portrait of the next prez will be intriguing… or maybe I will wait till he writes the next one.”

Images are an important way to add that extra kick to your blog posts. They are often the first thing that attracts visitors to read further. But where do you find good image?

After completing your masterpiece, you begin to search endlessly around the internet for an image that depicts the core message of your post. When you finally find that perfect one, it is locked up in licenses and conditions that require a lawyer or a credit card. You are obviously frustrated and find yourself spending more time looking for another image than writing that post. Let’s explore some resources that will help you find that image!

Stock photography sites require a paid subscription and offer many choices and sometimes the best results. It can also be the most played out, overused, politically correct looking fluff out there. However, there are so many sources available, from the super expensive sites like Getty, to the middle of the road places like Shutter Stock and iStockPhoto.

The awards season has been a bust due to the writer’s strike and has left many people searching for a fun alternative. In direct response to this void in the marketplace, Matt McGee has created The SEMMYS:

The SEMMYS are an annual awards event honoring the great content produced across the search and online marketing industry. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has grown to include a variety of disciplines, including blogging, social media, reputation management, and more. The SEMMYS attempt to include all these elements into one awards event. We hope the SEMMYS serve as a complement to the excellent existing awards which honor blogs and bloggers.

I am judging two categories Google (along with Lisa Barone and Rand Fishkin) and LOL Funny! (along with Vanessa Fox). There are a ton of great nominees in both of these categories which will make it a tough job to be sure.

Keeping with the theme of the creative process and linkbait graphics it seems like a good time to see whats going on with blogs and some good uses of graphics and photography. Some bloggers don’t even use images, and this is fine because not everything needs it, but some do and here’s to the ones who do it really well!

There are lots of great resources being created everyday by bloggers in our industry and others. Aside from the obvious entertainment and Hollywood people watching sites like Perez and the like that have specific photos that are the pull, other bloggers, if they use images, have to get creative to a degree to give their content that edge.

This is sometimes supported by eye catching graphics or cool looking photography that draws the reader in further if they weren’t already sold by the title, idea or creator of the content alone.

What is RSS?
An RSS Reader is a simple and easy way to read your favorite news site or blogs. Instead of going out to these site to read the most recent stories or posts, the newest stuff comes to you, all in one simple page. Even more convenient is having a Reader which is online, reaching it from any place in the world.

In my eyes Google Reader is one of the best online RSS Readers on the web. For the first time user, just getting used to the whole RSS thing, this post will talk about: a) How to subscribe to a feed b) view your feeds c) the cool features built into Google Reader and d) just some nifty little tricks you can use while you’re at it. Remember, being a master of your RSS feeds is also a very important way to build up and maintain powerful social media accounts

If you’re blog is running on WordPress 2.1, there is a cool little trick that you can do to completely upgrade the built-in WYSIWYG editor.

This expanded WYSIWYG editor will give you the ability to easily control:

• Text styles
• Underlining
• Full paragraph alignment
• The color of your text
• Two varieties of paste (text and Word)
• Formatting removal
• Code cleanup
• Insert custom characters
• Undo/redo

The nice part if that there isn’t anything you need to install to get it. The next time you are writing a post in your WordPress blog – simply use one of these shortcuts (based on what browser you use);

Alt+Shift+V

Alt+V

Ctrl+V

via Just Some dot com

On the Internet, information gets outdated pretty darn quickly. Months pass and old blog owners consider pruning old posts that seem outdated. However, there’s one piece of information that has remained true and current for over a span of nearly a decade. The message comes from the Cluetrain Manifesto, which was written in 1999. The Cluetrain Manifesto was written well before its time; it is a precursor to social media of today. The Cluetrain Manifesto’s message is simple yet extremely powerful: markets converse with each other and the Internet facilitates that communication.

Here’s the opening paragraph to their key 95 theses:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

As presidential hopefuls are looking to strategize their political campaign, new media outlets are being explored as novel ways for these candidates to reach out to a different demographic. Candidates are looking at blogs, search engines, and other popular social networks to reach out to the tech-savvy and the youth that embraces the online social sphere.

Last month, John Edwards announced his candidacy on YouTube. When Barack Obama announced that he was joining the race this weekend, his website was launched with a social network, My.BarackObama.com, which is displayed prominently on his website. Hillary Clinton has a MySpace page, and as of this writing, has 22,310 friends.

While some things may change, others always remain the same. The recurring debate of whether you should use partial or full RSS feeds has been revisited time and time again, because if you have a blog (and it’s successful, usually), you’re also probably a victim of scraping.

Because it’s so easy to grab data from an RSS feed, blogs will arise and people will always try to make a quick buck off of your hard work and effort. This is why many bloggers provide partial feeds, though people who subscribe to hundreds of feeds (like myself) find this very inconvenient.

A lot of bloggers don’t realize that there are options to prevent scrapers from stealing the content off your site even when you have full-feeds enabled.

Here are a few things you can do that are relatively easy:

The benefit of blogging has been consistently questioned by people I encounter everyday. Within my social circle, new blogs emerge that are more personal in nature, and often resemble online diaries. The question often arises if there’s any value to blogs beyond personal ramblings and thoughts.

In a word, yes. Blogging is worth it for businesses.

A study from Forrester was recently released that discussed whether there really is ROI from blogging. Charlene Li discusses these findings with its application to a very well corporate blog. She writes:

…the most common benefits are; increased brand visibility, savings from customer insights, reduced impact from negative user-generated content, and increased sales efficiency.

Further, the report as summarized by Charlene goes on to say that the blog’s success involved community involvement (”about 100 people commenting on the blog each month”) as well as media exposure (”the number of press mentions it received”) as it relates to bringing new users to the attention of the blog.