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When to time your latest blog post ?

ashish — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:00:25 +0000

You are already trying your best to write on a regular basis, and you may have learnt that it makes a lot of difference if you write a post per day. However, it can sometimes be a challenge to just get to meeting this daily basis concept; after all, unless you are dedicated towards your blog in a true sense, there can be many interruptions in getting the content for your blog on a daily basis. Getting your posts out on a regular (or a daily) basis can make a huge difference to attracting more readers to your blog. Now suppose, you are able to get onto a regular pattern of publishing a post at a particular time, the next item would be to optimize the time of your posts. Does this matter ? You could after all have a software that picks up the feed from your post only at a specific interval, and so ensures that your readers get the post at a specific period of time. But as your popularity grows, there are some advantages to be gained from posting at a specific point of time.
On the basis of your posts, you have picked up a number of people who visit your blog every day, and you think that a lot of your work is done. However, over a period of time, you would have also learnt that these same blog posts can be also be circulated on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, as well as other means such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, and so on. These are all means to get more people to read your posts, and with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook being picked up by a large number of readers, making sure that your posts get to people on these networks is also very important.
So, you have configured your posts to get posted to these social networks, and feel that you have covered all your bases. What next ? Well, the next thing you need to do is to time your posts. This is especially true for social networks such as Twitter and Facebook where there can be a large number of posts / updates flowing past readers every minute. You want your post to be flowing past potential readers when they are reading these posts, rather than happening when your prospective readers are not looking at them. So, if you have a topic that relates to women at home, then you better make sure that your posts happen only at a time when they are done with the daily chores and have some time for themselves and are looking at their computers / tablets / smartphones. This is especially true for Twitter and Facebook where the amount of competition can be intense, and nobody really looks at updates that have already gone by. Similarly, if your post is meant for computer geeks, your post may be better suited to go live after dinner, when most geeks stay up on the computer and start their reading.
All blogging software allows you to time your posts, what you need to do is to determine the best time that your prospective audience is online, and ensure that your posts are live at around that time.

Selectively updating your Twits on Facebook – “Selective Tweets”

ashish — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:15:21 +0000

Using social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter is an important part of how to promote your blog, but one of the challenges is how to ensure that your updates make it to all these tools. There are a variety of tools that are used to update your social networking sites; you can use Twitterfeed to update your Twitter presences from your blog posts, and you can use Networked Blogs to update your Facebook Fan Page. In addition, inside Facebook, you can update your Twitter through sending your Facebook Fan Page updates in the form of tweets to your Twitter account.
However, consider the case where you use your Twitter account to tweet, and your tweets are not only your automatic blog posts, but you manually add stuff to your Twitter account. In such cases, these tweets will not make it to your Facebook account, and you are missing out some important cross-tool promotion. In such cases, welcome to the concept of a tool called “Selective Tweets”, which takes your unprotected Twitter account (it does not work if your tweets are protected), and then these updates (marked with a #fb) are then picked up for posting to your Facebook Fan Page.
Refer to the following App page on Facebook (link)

Selective Tweet Status lets you update your Facebook status from Twitter –
BUT you can choose which tweets you want – just end a tweet with #fb when you want to post it as your Facebook status – simple!

You need to add the app to your Fan Page, and then you are set to go.
Refer to the FAQ for Selective Tweets if you need some help or have some issue (link)

Using Photos in your blog posts

ashish — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 19:49:06 +0000

I believe I have mentioned this in past blog posts, but more in the nature of a tip rather than an actual focused post. For some time now, I have been reviewing the sources of page visits on the Gadgets blog that I maintain, called Ultra Cool Gadgets (link). Sitemeter provides a simple set of statistics for how the users come to the blog, and if you look at the following Sitemeter site (link), you will get an idea of where a large section of users come to my site from.
Surprisingly, a number of users to my site come from URL’s starting with http://images.google.com …; these are people coming from Google’s Image search. How do I manage to get people to come to my site from searching for images ? This was not intentional when I started, but I had made it a point to ensure that with every gadget that I posted, I also posted an image. But it was not just an image, I also made sure that I did the following:
1. Made sure that the image contained an alt description. Most tools that allow you to upload an image to your Blogger blog do not provide a default to add the alt tag (although I believe posting the URL for an image in WordPress gives you an option for entering the description of the image). You need to modify the code for the image to ensure that the alt keyword has a description added to it.
2. This tip is slightly lower in importance from the previous tip, but try and make sure that the name of the image is also relevant. This is also starting to matter in terms of the discoverability of your images via Google Image search.
Once you follow these simple rules and ensure that images are posted along with the blog post, you increase the chances of making your images being found by more people, leading to a higher traffic for your blog. However, do not stuff images that are not relevant, and do not add description in the alt tag that is false, since that might lead to your images getting a penalty associated with them.
Over a period of time, Google automatically finds these images and adds them to its Images search database.

Learning how to use the Google Webmasters Tool

ashish — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:45:43 +0000

The Google Webmasters Tool is a very useful tool for webmasters eager to ensure that their sites are quickly indexed by the Google Search Engine, that new posts / content is quickly indexed by the GoogleBot, and overall, their posts have a much higher ranking in the search engine. Now, using the Google Webmasters tool does not guarantee a higher ranking, but it does ensure that your content is available in the Google Search database, and new content is quickly added to the search database. Now that you know the advantages, how do you actually go about using the Google Webmasters tool ? If you are an advanced user, then you already know how to use the Tool. However, if you have heard about the benefits of the Google Webmaster package, then things may be a bit confusing for you.
Once you start using the Webmaster tools, they will be pretty clear. At the same time, Google has also defined a checklist that users of the Webmaster tool should use (link to checklist). Here some excerpts from this page, and you should really also go to the page and read in more detail:

To Google, http://example.com and http://www.example.com are completely different sites and can display completely different content. You can avoid potential problems (and get a better view of your data) by specifying your preferred domain. (Make sure you’ve added each version of your site to your account.)
Adding a Sitemap is optional, but we strongly recommend it. Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about the pages you own, and how often they are updated or changed.