Tag Archives: RSS

Energize Your Website Or Blog With A Google Gadget

: Image via CrunchBase

Given the enormous commitment of time and energy it takes to maintain an interesting and robust website or blog, I’ll take all the sophisticated, tech-savvy help I can get. I keep a keen eye out for those “widgets” or “gadgets” as Google calls them, those tiny pieces of automated code that you can install on your page to work tirelessly behind the scenes.

Google Gadgets For Your Webpage offers you everything from mundane functions, like clocks and weather, but also gadgets which can make your site a lot more interactive, like Desktop Chat, Google Talk, Twitter or Facebook, right from your own page.

Yesterday, I started experimenting with Google’s customized RSS feed, which can bring your favorite “stream of news and updates” from your favorite sites to your own webpage. It’s very simple. You just grab the code or tweak the colors, size etc., then grab the code. I started first by installing several customized RSS feeds, in different colors, or “color coded”, putting up social media, tech news and updates, and “5 minutes for Mom” on my site, AdvancingWomen.com. I am so pleased with that, I put on Twitter and Facebook. Next I will be adding Google Talk to a number of pages. Well, I’m pretty blown away with what Google offers so easily. I can tell you I’d been wrestling with some other RSS feeds for awhile, and having trouble to get them to look and act quite the way I wanted. So the simplicity and dynamism of Google’s Gadgets was a big hit with me. Give it a try. And let us know what you think and what gadgets worked particularly well for you.

Simple Tools To Make Your Web Site Or Blog More Social & Interactive

: Image via Wikipedia

All of us online are not only in Web 2.0 but in the increasingly powerful social networking era. Static information still has a place but the tsunami of web use is in the social networking space. So not only should you incorporate the sharing tools in your new work on the web, but you have the opportunity to go back and add a snippet of code to your static product pages which will make it become alive and interactive and more appealing to your users.

Duct Tape Marketing tells us how in Enhancing Social Funtions on Web Sites. So here’s the game plan:

“The web has become a terribly social place and that raises the expectation of most web site visitors. The ability to add content, comment, rate, review, interact and share information found when surfing the web has become standard fare.

By adding a few simple scripts and widgets you can easily add tremendous social functionality to any web page or blog. Giving your visitors, prospects and customers ways to share and amplify their voice is a great way to enhance their experience of your business online.

JS Kits – This is one of the dead simple easiest ways to add rating, navigation, polling, chat, reviewing and commenting to any web page. You simply copy a line of code and you are in business. Getting customer reviews and reader comments on web page, usually a blog function is great for static product pages.

Social Ad Units – Popular Media recently introduced something they call Influencer Ads. These banner ad type units allow you to place ads that contain an entire social media follow-up system. When someone clicks on an ad for your webinar, they can automatically post it to Facebook or send it to a friend with personalized follow-up. This is a great tool for contests and registration incentive campaigns. (You can see this in action here)

Meebo Me – This simple IM widget can be embedded on your site to allow visitors to initiate an IM chat instantly when they visit your site. This can be a great way to add customer feedback, help and interaction functionality.

Add to Any – These widget allows visitors to easily subscribe to RSS content, share, bookmark or email content using many of the commonly used services.”

Meebo Unveils Support For MySpace and Facebook IM (inquisitr.com)

Time Crunched? Put Tweet On Autopilot

Image via CrunchBase

Let’s face it. Sooner or later we’re all going to have to learn to tweet. We had to start blogging, even if some of the Net’s world class visionaries were not early adopters…..Guy Kawasaki ratted himself out on this recently on his late blooming blog… we all had to come around. We came around to Google. We will come around to Tweet, if we are not there yet.

It’s just hard for a start up entrepreneur, a serious webmaster, a dyed-in-the-wool blogger or just about anybody with a job, except a celebrity with a big staff, to find time to tweet. ( Of course, the answer is, I’m told, you soon get addicted and can’t help tweeting wherever you are or wherever you go, all hours of the day and sometimes night.) To get you started however, you can put your tweet on auto pilot and as people start following you, that may give you the inspiration you need to delve deeper into it and invest the time to put yourself more into it.

Automating Social Media Activity | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing has some excellent advice on this:

“Does automating some of your social media activity automatically make it, well, less social? That’s the question I’ve been batting around a bit with some social mediaists. See, I think that small business owners sometimes stay away from some new media tools because they seem like a lot of work with little immediate return.

I’ve long preached the middle ground that brings some relief for time strapped business owners trying to juggle it all and that middle ground includes the “smart” use of tools that help you get more done with less time invested.

Now, in most cases I suggest utilizing some of these tools in conjunction with good old fashion social networking that is individual and one to one. Automation is not a substitute, more of a supplement.

Here are a couple shortcuts and resources that come to mind.

1) TweetLater or EasyTweets – allows me to auto follow back anyone who follows me and auto send a welcome message via DM. – This one gets mixed reviews from Twitter maniacs as it can be abused – don’t use it to auto send your spam selling messages, use it to greet a new follower in a fun and engaging way. I get lots of messages back from my auto greets as many people don’t sense it’s an auto generated message. You’ve still got to reach out to people and connect, but this gets the ball rolling automatically and saves a great deal of time. (I’ll do a screencast on how to do this if I get some requests)
2) Twitter Tools – A WordPress plug-in that republishes my blog posts to Twitter, effectively letting followers know I have new content on my blog. Again, mixed in with twitter posts of a more organic nature this is a decent way to keep content flowing and generate some traffic to your blog.
3) Twitter application in Facebook – posts my Twitter updates to Facebook status. I seem to have a different network on Facebook than I do on Twitter so this helps spread the content. I don’t think this is a high level use of Facebook by any means, but I do get interaction from Facebook folks from this activity.
4) Feedheads application in Facebook – I read lots of RSS feeds and using Google Reader and the Feedheads application for Facebook I post my shared Reader items to my Facebook profile each day.
5) TweetDeck – Desktop application that allows me to show Twitter searches, DMs and Replies in one screen. There are any number of tools to get this done, but I like the interface of TweetDeck
6) Facebook Toolbar for Firefox – shows status updates of network in the background as I work. This can be annoying but it keeps you in touch easily with your network. I’ve snagged interviews with journalists looking for sources this way.

So, what are some of your socially accepted shortcuts?

How Do I Do This Faster & Easier? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

Image via CrunchBase

If you’re a “newbie” just wanting to “dip your toe” into the swirling waters of the blogosphere, presumably you’ve already read How do I Do This? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies which attempts to set out the very basics of how to get started. If you’ve gotten that far along and have a WordPress account and have your site installed and set up, I’m going to tell you an easy way to start writing your blog.

Writing your content on WordPress. Once you’ve gotten your feet wet and are comfortable with the program – perhaps a month of two from when you begin – you should probably try to put in greater originality and more of your own thoughts and stories. But to begin, I would suggest the following 3 support steps for you:

Set Up A Reader to scour the Net for material that interests you and about which you have some comment, thought or opinion to make.

Blogging takes time. And keeping up with news and other blogs so you have something to blog about takes time. So it’s highly recommended you set up a Google reader, or any other kind of reader to bring blogs or your favorite kind of information and news to you, instead of you going out and searching the Net to track it down. (This will also allow you to get more familiar with the blogosphere: the most popular blogs and bloggers, the most popular topics, the different styles which bloggers use.)

Just go to Google and create an account, or log in if you already have one and get the free reader. Go to your favorite sites and look for an orange button indicating a feed. Then you put the RSS feeds of your favorite sites into the Google Reader. Sometimes this process is automated so you will be asked how you want the feed delivered and in this instance you would select Google Reader. This will save an enormous amount of time for you. And I’m told successful bloggers peruse a huge number of sites daily. ( I could give you some numbers but it can get kind of scary how much the top bloggers read and how hard they work.)

Shortcut – Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

A Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog as you’re surfing the web:

The Press This bookmarklet is found at the right bottom of the Write Posts panel. Drag and drop it onto your Favorites, Bookmarks, or Links list or toolbar. To activate, simply click on the “Press It” bookmarklet link. A window will open with the URI of the current site displayed, and the site’s title as your post title. Here’s what it looks like:

For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. Not to mention using it with regular text posts where you just copy and paste the portions you want to comment on, write your own thoughts in and Voila! You’re done.

Well, not exactly, if you really want to take your blog to another level, make it more useful and have it stand out, consider using the Zemanta plug in, which I believe is an almost brand new release:

Zemanta enables you to blog smarter with instant smart links, pictures, tags and more. The ability to automatically add a relevant graphic to the top of your blog adds interest for your users. Also, as Zementa puts it:

Save Time…with relevant content from all over the web delivered instantly as you blog.
Build Traffic…with immediate tagged links created between your posts and others sharing related conversations.

These features bring increased value to your blog. Plus using these fast and easy techniques will build up your confidence and get you moving in the right direction…..towards a higher level level of blogging

AW WebBiz & Social Media Blog

Mentoring, Tools & Strategy To Succeed

Tag Archives: RSS

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta