Day 10: Publicizing your blog

For me, the way I've improved my blog is by reading other blogs. The really good ones have the following features:

• Great & relevant content
• Great visuals -- whether in posts, e.g. photos or images
• Good blog layout, easy to use 
• New blog posts regularly

Here are three blogs I draw inspiration from:

A Cup of Jo by Joanna Goddard hosted on Blogger. I love the simplicity and elegance of her posts. They all follow the same format. She finds the most incredible fashionable things around the web. She also blogs about her family and cute son, Toby.

Extra Petite by Jean hosted on Blogger. Her content is always relevant to petite clothing/fashion. Her photos are beautiful. Her blog layout is clean and easy to use.

From Me to You by Jamie hosted on tumblr. I love the graphics on this blog. Her photos are also gorgeous!

Ok, now onto the nitty gritty technical details of...

Expanding readership

• How to "burn" your feed (or blog url) so that people can subscribe to new posts using an RSS reader (I use Google Feedburner) -- Read more about feeds and RSS
• Other things to do in Feedburner: allow people to subscribe by email -- automatically add links like "email this" or "share on facebook" to the bottom of your feeds -- automatically tweet your posts
• Automatically share posts on Facebook

Of course, this is only one way to do all of these things. I decided to use Google products because it puts everything in one place -- easy peesy. If you have comments or other suggestions, please share them in the comments below or email me. 


I originally wanted to record a video of my computer/screen clicks, so that the following steps might be more tolerable, but I gave up -- the recordings were messed up. So here it goes.

Allowing people to easily subscribe to your blog
If you use Blogger, you can easily add RSS and Email Subscription "gadgets", as they call 'em:

1. Go to your dashboard, choose your blog, and then go to "Layout".
2. Click on "Add a Gadget".
3. Select "Subscription Links".
4. To add Email Subscription link, select "Follow by Email".
5. Presto, you're done! "View blog" to see the results, and go to your Layout to move the gadgets around.
   Click to enlarge
   

The funny thing about the Email Subscriptions link is that you have to activate it first in a feed burner service. Well, at least I had to. I use Google Feedburner because it's got all I need in one place, plus, I heart Google products.

1. Log-in to Google Feedburner. Your blog's feed will already be listed if you're using Blogger. Click on your blog name. If you don't use Blogger (or if your blog name isn't showing up), enter your blog's url. Choose either "RSS" or "Atom" (format decision. I chose RSS because I feel that format is more common). Keep clicking "Next" until you get to the "Congrats!" screen.
2. Your feed url can be found under "Edit feed details" at the top. You can edit your feed's url (if name is available). Be sure to press "Save"!
3. To allow people to subscribe to your blog by email, click on the "Publicize" tab on the top.
4. On the left menu, click "Email subscriptions" and activate it.
5. Now the email form already on your blog should work! FeedBurner also has its own Blogger widgets. Test them out, you can always remove them later!
6. Lastly, you can also activate the "Ping Shot" so that FeedBurner will update your feed in almost real-time. Otherwise, FeedBurner checks every 30 min. or so for a new post. 
7. UPDATE:  On the "Optimize" tab on top, click on FeedFlare. You can automatically add links like "Email this" and "Share on Facebook" that will appear at the bottom of your feeds. It will make it that much easier for readers to share them!

Tweet your blog posts and post them to Facebook ...automatically!

1. To automatically tweet your posts, activate on "Socialize" in FeedBurner. Link your Twitter account. Whenever you publish a new post, it'll tweet about it too!
2. To automatically tweet your posts to Facebook, just log in to Twitter. Under "Profile", link your Facebook account.
3. And voila, all done!

Since I drafted this post, I stopped using the automatic tweet and Facebook options for the following reasons:

1. FeedBurner allows you to either add words to the beginning or end of your tweet. For example, I could add "New blog post!" to the beginning of each tweet (which would be my post title and url) or add hashtags to end of each tweet. But I wanted both, so I'll just tweet posts myself. Plus, I can customize each post's hashtags. I just recently learned what a hashtag does!
2. I like to include a thumbnail when I post to Facebook, which Twitter can't do.

Like I said before, these suggestions are only my way of doing things. You may have other and probably better ones, so please share so I can blog better :)! Since this post is rather long, I'll share additional ways to expand blog readership next time.



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