Fine Tips of Blogging: Adding Images to Blog It

Many bloggers keep multiple blogs and often would like to post the same content on each. But who wants to keep posting the same entry over and over again?

The options for cross-platform blogging are nearly non-existent, but one option Blog It, from Six Apart, allows you to post the same post to any WordPress powered blog, Blogger, Vox, Type Pad and Live Journal, plus it will do updates to your Twitter and Facebook page. It is available as a free app in Facebook. For the most part it is a beautiful thing. It has one flaw, and for serious bloggers it is a fatal one. It does not support adding images.

For a while, this has keep this blogger from using this very useful tool, but being at the bottom of the Google search pile because of the newness of this network has forced me to look at this again. Then an idea hit me, Picassa Web Albums.

Picassa Web Albums is Google’s free photo sharing application. Uploading images is as easy as uploading an image in WordPress. With Picassa, you can add an image to any web platform you can edit by copy and pasting the html coded provided for each image.

To access the HTML code click on “Link to this album” then copy and paste the code under “Paste HTML to embed in website”. Once you copy the code, you paste it right in to Blog It and it is there, once you paste it and post your entry, the image is there for world to see on all your blogs.

You can fiddle with the code to make it align right, center, or left, but the different platforms do handle the coding differently. Live Journal in particular is a bit fussy, the coding translating to right, center, or left within the picture frame itself. You can’t win them all, but at least with Picassa and Blog It, the bulk of the battle is won.

Social Media: Using Twitter Trending Topics to Boost Readership

Like most of you, I’ve been ignoring the Trending Topics on the sidebar of my Twitter page. In a real Homer Simpson moment, I hit my head and moaned “doh!” when I realized the opportunities missed by not utilizing this free and totally useful tool.

Looking at October 21sts’ trending topics I saw two related topics to posts that were already online. One was “Halloween” the other was the “Google Wave”. While I haven’t written anything on the Google Wave itself, Astroblogging has two posts on using Google Analytics. No matter that these posts were already in the blogosphere, people want to know about these things NOW. So it was off to the tinyurl page to make bite sized Twitter friendly links to the posts and up they go.

To get your two seconds of fame on Twitter make sure that you post tags about your content. Tags are very easy, the sign “#” signifying a tag plus your keyword. For A Neptune Tale: The Devil You Know the tag looks like this #astrology, #Halloween.

Let me know if this works for you.

An Introduction to Using Google Analytics

Jeffrey’s article on using Google Analytics has been very popular. YouTube surfing unearthed this find:

SEO: The News Cycle and How it Affects Readership of Your Posts

It’s three AM. Do you know where your daily post is today?

Rolling out of bed at 8:00 or 9:00 AM, downing your cup of morning coffee and thinking about what your post might be for the day is not going to help you get the most readers. In fact, if you do not have your post up before 8:00 AM, you’ve lost half your traffic for the day. Let me explain.

In the labor intensive traditional print newsroom, the reporters come in at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, have a meeting with their editor to decide the on stories to be worked on, do research, attend meetings and start working on their stories. Incredibly, and most of you do not know this, they may also have their eye on a television to keep track of the news stories cycling in news stream. By 10:00 PM if the reporters make the deadline, everything is written, the pages set up, and the whole thing is sent electronically to make the plates for the presses. If everything goes well, (and many days it does not) then your daily newspaper rolls off the presses before 1:00 AM. After some time spent in what is called the mailroom, the papers are inserted, bundled and sent off to their ultimate destination to arrive at your door early morning. This is the origin of the modern news day and for the first half of the last century it was the only game in town. Enter television and the advent of the instant news stream. Over the next two decades, the six o’clock and 11 o’clock news were expanded to more frequent offerings as broadcasting companies were faced with filling an expanding broadcast schedule with cost effective content. News broadcast inventors like Don Hewitt brought television news from staid “talking head” formats to dynamic presentations. By the seventies, news shows were on a constant cycle of morning, noon, evening and late night shows. Following in the footsteps of the morning newspaper delivery, the morning news became the kick-off of the daily cycle as reporters followed the development of a story through out the day. If there are no new developments viewer interest wanes and the story dies.

Whether we like it or not, the four generations alive today have been fed at the teat of this news cycle. It is a part of our daily lives and it what we expect. By the time we are off to work we’ve digested the first parts of the daily news feed. We don’t have time during the day to absorb anything else. Regardless of whether or not you have the best content in the world just if you haven’t posted early in the morning you missed the readership boat for the day.

The moral of this post is that while blogging allows you the luxury of posting whenever you like, if you want to build your readership, you will have your post up at the beginning of the day to capture the greatest number of readers.

Photo published under a Creative Commons License from Flickr.