Starting a Blog: Feeds, Measurement & Widgets – Oh My!

This if the 4th in my series about starting a blog. I started off with questions to ask before starting a blog, choosing a blog platform and branding your blog. Now that we’ve covered those heady topics, it’s time for the fun stuff–blog accessories! In this post I’m going to talk about promoting, measuring and adding navigation and widgets to your blog.

Step 4. – Promoting Your Blog (And Yourself)

If you’re going to bother dedicating your time to blogging, then you should make it easy for people to find and read your content. The truth is that blogging is a slow meritocracy and you have to earn your readership with relevant, well written posts consistently produced over time. That said, there are some fundamentals to remember:

1. Syndicate Your Content With RSS – I was reading the blog of a usability research company and a I was shocked to see that there was no easy link to subscribe to their blog’s RSS feed. It seem like a direct violation of the don’t make me think school of usability. For those of you who don’t know, RSS stands for really simple syndication. For blogs, it lets users subscribe to your blog and receive content directly through email or an RSS reader like Google Reader or BlogLines (Still confused? Check out this explanatory video).Make sure you include an RSS feed on your blog. Feedburner, acquired by Google, is a popular and free service. Feedblitz is another option. Some people may not know about RSS feeds or may prefer an email newsletter, so it’s in your best interest to provide that option (also available through Feedburner or Zookoda). The additional benefit of collecting email addresses is that should you have a special announcement, say a new business or blog, you have a built in audience to email.
   • Add your RSS feed in your left or right navigation near the top of your blog so people can easily find and subscribe to your feed. You can get the standard RSS icon here. If you’re using Wordpress, you add this in the Presentation tab under widgets. I recommend against using the built in RSS widget (when I added text it kept redirecting my visitors to a non-existent page). Instead, simply use the Text widget and past the code from Feedburner.
   • If you’re into bedazzling your blog, you can also add chiclets. These are small buttons, usually on the side nav, that act like mini-banners to advertise anything you want, often different ways to subscribe to your RSS feed, e.g. . There is a Wordpress plugin to create these for you.
2. Plant A Flag! (Claim Your Blog on Technorati) -Many people have sounded the death knell for Technorati, the blog ranking and search engine site. For the moment it remains a force in the blogosphere and can help people discover your blog. Once you’ve setup your blog, make sure you claim it on Technorati, ping it when you update (see the next bullet) and include tags when you write posts. (more on that further in this post).
3. Pinging – Announce New Content To The World – When you “ping” you are notifying blog indexing tools that you have updated your blog. It makes sure your fresh, fascinating content is represented in their service. Ping-o-matic pings automatically pings a lot of services when you notify them (which Wordpress does automatically and you should also add these).
4. Be Shameless – Link To Your Blog Elsewhere – If you’re going to put your blog out there, then you might as promote it where you can: your email signature, IM profile, Facebook\MySpace account, on your LinkedIn profile, etc. I even put it as my “away” message in Gmail and I’m surprised at the number of my non-marketing friends who are actually reading this (Happy Birthday Cat!)
5. Who The Heck Are You? – Blogging is a part of social media and it’s much easier to connect with a real person. If yours is a professional blog, then details some of your professional background. Include a link to your LinkedIn account or similar networking service. If it’s a personal blog, write a summary of the blog’s topics and so on.
6. Make It Easy To Contact You – This assumes, of course, that you want to be contacted. If you do indeed want people to contact you about blog story ideas, new opportunities or, say, to review a product then they shouldn’t have to hunt to figure out how to reach you. Put your email address prominently in the side bar or include it on your About or Contact pages. Don’t forget to format it like this alex @ alexlcohen . com or some variation to make sure only humans send you email (you can also put it in an image). If you don’t want to list your email address, you can use contact forms like cForms.

Keep reading this post to read about measuring your blog and accessorizing your blog with widgets…

Who Loves Numbers? – Measuring Your Blog

I have to admit that I’m a bit partial to numbers because of my background and profession, but measuring your blog is a great way to see what impact you’re having and how you can improve.

1. Google Analytics – The web analytics community has varied opinions about this tool, but it is arguably the most powerful and intuitive free tool on the market and a no-brainer for anyone who wants to begin measurement. Installation only takes about 10 minutes. If you’re using Wordpress (.org not .com), I recommend the Google Analyticator which will keep you from having to mess too much with the code and automatically tags outgoing links.
2. Feedburner – In addition to syndicating your RSS feed, Feedburner will also provide you with stats about your subscribers (#, programs, used, reach, etc.). Google bought FeedBurner, so hopefully the two will be fused in the future.
3. Measure EVERYthing – Those two tools should get you pretty far, especially if you’re new to web analytics. You might also want to check out some other tools like
   1. Crazy Egg – a cool, simple way to see a visual overlay of where people are clicking
   2. MyBlogLog – it lets you see who is reading your blog if they’ve installed the application
   3. Quantcast & Compete - Both companies are angling to provide overall statistics about sites on the web and competitive intelligence, similar to what Hitwise does. If you’re writing a blog in hopes of gathering advertising revenue, these services will let you provide advertisers with a more objective, standardized way of comparing you to other site. Obviously, there’s no benefit to a business blog who wants to keep their stats proprietary.
   4. MeasureMap -Currently, the program is closed to new users, because the company was acquired by Google and used to revamp Google Analytics. Hopefully they’ll either reopen or integrate the features right into Google Analytics…

Widgets, Plugins & Navigation – Blog Accessories

Widgets and plugins are ways to extend the functionality of your blog beyond what’s available out of the box with your platform. Plugin is a Wordpress term for 3rd party software that adds features to your blog (think applications on Facebook). Widgets can do the same thing, but the term is also used to describe tools that push your content out onto other people’s websites. There are endless ways to customize your blog. So many that it’s easy to get carried away (of course, you could choose the opposite direction). Here are some ideas to get you started.

1. Widgetize Your Blog – You or anyone can easily add scrolling list of your blog’s content to any site with a blog widget (aka blidget–a terrible name if you ask me). I used Widgetbox and you can see it in action on this blog, just look for the black box in the right nav.
2. Plugins/Widgets: WYSIWYG 2.0 – If you’re chafing against the limits of your blogging platform’s out-of-the-box options, you might want to consider dipping into the community’s own pool of useful plugins. The benefit is that once you go through the steps of adding a widget/plugin, you can get all manner of functionality without having to do a lick of code (great for the non-technical among us). For example, check out the widgets for Typepad and Wordpress.org. If you’re using Wordpress, I highly recommend you use the PlugInstaller. It’s a fantastic plugin that takes out many of the manual steps of getting a widget up and running.
3. Make It Easy For Readers To Find Content – When you first start blogging, it’s a few quaint posts. Once you get the bug, you’ll be pumping out content over the months and it’s going to be harder and harder for a new visitor to find the most important information. Some basic navigation can help.
   1. Include a search box so users can find specific content.
   2. Categorize your posts and include a list of the categories in the navigation
   3. Show a list of recent posts
   4. Tag your posts and display a tag cloud – This is like an extended version of categorizing them. Most platforms support tagging natively, though you may need to download a widget/plugin.

By now your blog should be humming along. Do you have any steps or revisions to suggest? Email me at alex @ alexlcohen . com. I’ll be writing one more post in this series about being a good blogger. In the meantime, check out the other posts in the Starting A Blog series, questions to ask before starting a blog, choosing a blog platform and branding your blog.

Tagged as: blog-measurement, Blogging, compete, crazy-egg, feedburner, mybloglog, ping-o-matic, pinging, plugins, quantcast, rss-feeds, starting-a-blog, technorate, typepad, widgets, wordpress