Back to blogging 2

Following on from my previous post on this topic, here are some of the tools I have used to raise my blogs' visibility and to promote it externally:

Feedburner: Feedburner is a service which provides several different tools to help promote and manage your blog.  There are other individual services that will allow you to do similar things to Feedburner but I prefer Feedburner as it provides all these services under one roof.  For example, the optimize tab of Feedburner features several services to enhance your blog and reach a wider audience.  Activate them and let Feedburner do the work for you.  Plus now it is owned by Google I don't have to remember a separate username and password to my Blogger account- always a bonus. In addition, Feedburner provides stats for your blog and you can also manage more than one blog from your Feedburner account. There's lots to explore on Feedburner, but I will mention the parts I have found most useful.

To do: Sign in to Feedburner using your Google username and password or register for an account. In Feedburner enter the URL to your blog where prompted, select your RSS feed, Feedburner will then give you the option to choose a name for your feed and a new feed address.  For example I chose http://feeds.feedburner.com/evolutio as my feedburner feed URL for this blog.

Email subscription:  It is a good idea to put a link on your blog offering subscription by RSS but some people may not use RSS or may prefer to get the updates straight to their email inbox. Feedburner allows you to offer an email subscription to your blog; every time you post your subcribers will get the new post delivered to their inbox.

To do: Click on the Publicize tab and from the menu choose "subscription  management".

This will give you some HTML code which you can copy and paste into your blog, I chose to also add this into my Google site "profile page" so readers can automatically subscribe from there, without even having to go to the blog.  But the easiest thing to do, if you use Blogger like me, is to automatically add a widget- in "use as a widget in..." choose Blogger and this will set up your "subscribe via email" widget for you on your blog.  You can see mine (and subscribe) in the right-hand menu of this blog. Feedburner also provides a URL link which you can add to your email signature, offering email subscription from there.  Under your analyze tab you can see how many have subscribed and get a list of email addresses of your subscribers.

Automatic posting to Twitter: I already have a "work" Twitter account to which I post snippets of info and forward on things I have found, some of my academics follow me on Twitter so I am able to push content to them through this channel.  Feedburner allows you to automatically update your Twitter account every time you post to your blog.  Under their "socialize" tab you can add a Twitter account and then choose how you want your automatic posts to look. For example, for the business librarians' blog,  I chose for it to tweet the title of the post, a link back to the blog and for every tweet to be prefaced by "From WBS Librarians" to make it clear where the content originated.  The tweets appear like this: From WBS Librarians: Featured resource: FAME: How to do a peer analysis http://goo.gl/fb/abcd And that's it- content pushed to my Twitter audience, re-directing people back to the blog, and with no extra effort from me.  Services such as Twitterfeed also offer this, if you prefer not to use Feedburner.

To do: Click on the "publicize" tab and then from the menu choose "socialize".  Add your Twitter name (you need to register with Twitter beforehand) and then choose your formatting options, such as whether you want any text automatically added to the start or end of each Tweet.  For Tweets from this blog I have chosen to add #wmin23 before each Tweet as this is the Twitter tag we chose for the Westminster 23 things programme.

It just so happens that the next thing I was going to mention, Technorati, is our next "Thing" so stay tuned for the next post about that and Wikio......

Photo: on board Adventure of the Seas, somewhere in the Med., taken by Ellie