Wordpress Archives - Diane Hamilton

Blog Overload: Who Has Time to Read it All?

There is no question that the blogosphere is growing. According to webdesignerdepot “WordPress has statistics for both WordPress.com (15.1 million blogs and counting) and self-hosted WordPress installations (17.4 million active installations), which gives part of the picture. There are more than 10 million tumblogs on Tumblr. Blogger doesn’t offer any public statistics on how many blogs they host. Technorati is currently tracking more than 1.2 million blogs. And there are likely millions of other blogs out there hosted on other services like Movable Type, TypePad, Expression Engine, and other CMSs.”

There is no shortage of blog search engines to find blogs that contain information of interest. There are also lots of articles by sites like Forbes and others who occasionally list their idea of top blogging sites. Google and Google News features can be incorporated into an iGoogle page, and can be another way to keep up with topics to follow.

With all of this information out there, who has time to read it all? Bloggers know it can be good form to make comments on others’ blogs. However, finding the time to not only read these blogs but formulate insightful comments may be difficult. Even if people find a good blog to follow and subscribe to their RSS feed, as sites continue to be added to the feed, the feed reader may have more information than people have time to visit.

There has been speculation about when blogging popularity will die down. The latest discussion is whether Facebook will replace blogging and company websites. Cnet reported, “Even if Facebook doesn’t somehow supplant lots of Web sites, though, there’s no denying the social network is becoming more important to marketing, and it’s adapting to the idea.

How to Market You or Your Product Using Social Media

Today’s Ask Dr. Diane: I just wrote a book that is available through Amazon. I’m just not sure about the best way to market it? Any suggestions?

That is a good question. The tips I’m about to give can also be used to market things other than a book.

You could market it through several ways. I would create a link to it on your site like I have links on my main website to Amazon. If you don’t want to do that, you could offer it directly from you as a PDF through your site and charge them using PayPal.

You might want to make a video (3-4 minutes at most) and put it on Youtube. At the end of the video make mention of a free offer or newsletter and where to go for more information. If they go to that site, it should be a capture page to get people signed up to receive free newsletters (through a site like aweber.com) to get them interested in you and your book.

You definitely need to be on Facebook and create fan pages like the ones I have for each of my books there. See:

How to Reinvent Your Career Facebook Page

It’s Not You It’s Your Personality Facebook Page

The Online Student User’s Manual Facebook Page

I would be on Twitter as well. You can tie all of your Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc. accounts into one area on sites like Hootsuite . . . but I like to use Posterous a lot. It is like a blog but it has a great share information toolbar that you can get that and it also allows you to share your updates on multiple sites like Hootsuite does.

If you want to learn about social networking and “how to do it” . . .for a reasonable price you can go to Letsgetsocial and sign up to get their videos. I watched them and they are really very informative. They are designed to teach people how to be media managers but people who don’t want to do the job of media management can learn how to do their own media management from them.

I gave a presentation yesterday to a local group here where others were presenting to career-seekers … they all agreed that Youtube is one of the biggest things you can do to get noticed.

I watched a video a while back on Pitchengine.com about videos and they had some good information. They are more costly though. You might watch their video for information. If you are going to spend that kind of money, you need to have a major product to promote. Books probably won’t have the return to support that.

Talks are another great way to promote your book . . . so are radio interviews. You can go to radioguestlist.com or other sites like that to find people looking to interview you.

Blogging is one of the best ways to get your name out there. I like to use WordPress because it is free and uncomplicated.

You can also release press releases on prweb or other such sites. I am on wooeb who also has press releases that are not as expensive. You can send out free releases on pitchengine.

You might check out some books . . . .I liked a book called Career Renegade . . . had some good ideas. (on a different side topic . . .I liked the book The Happiness Advantage written by ex Harvard professor – very entertaining)

PitchEngine Launches Newsroom for Facebook (mediabistro.com)
Social Media Marketing: 5 Lessons From Business Leaders Who Get It (mashable.com)
Advice: How Do I Get People To Read My Blog? (drdianehamilton.wordpress.com)

WordPress To Introduce New Stats Features For Authors

Many blogs on WordPress are large enough that they have several authors writing for them. Wouldn’t it be nice to see which author is bringing in the most views? Well now you can.

According to TimesoftheInternet.com, “Now, WordPress is introducing a stats feature which will allow the admin to see which posts are profitable and which authors are bringing in the most profit. This way, they can ask their authors to change their styles to bring in more profit for the site. This is one feature that is very useful for WordPress blog admins. They can easily manage their top authors from their dashboard and make necessary changes.This feature should be available very soon, probably in the next beta release of WordPress. So if you’re running a WordPress blog, you could make good use of this feature which will help you manage your site authors.”

Authority Pro: Promises More Than the Typical WordPress Theme Engine

image via netmarketingcourse.net

Authority Pro has positioned itself as a theme engine unlike any other currently available for WordPress. The intent of the engine is to maximize the ability to have content delivered as needed and to drive conversations. They offer 24 customizable widgets to increase functionality.

I’ve been reading some reviews of Authority Pro since it debuts today.

Promotedprofits.com stated, “The promise of Authority Pro is this: you get targeted traffic, and it’ll work to get you the very best conversions possible, on as many of your pages and posts as possible. It can continuously split-test for you, so that you’re always finding better and more profitable ways of configuring your site. If you have low levels of traffic, Authority Pro might be critical for you, as you need to really maximize the ROI of each visitor that comes to your site. If you get moderate to high levels of traffic, then it’s obvious that you have a lot to gain from Authority Pro.”

Netmarketingcourse.net lists the following capabilities as part of Authority Pro:

Video Fake Out
Google Analytics
Google Website Optimizer (split testing)
Built In Squeeze Page Graphics
Multiple Squeeze Page Templates
Aweber & Get Response Intagration
Custom Exit Page Redirect
Custom CSS Coding

James Morgan at Articlebase.com claims he was skeptical about this product due to all of the hype, but found the product to be much more than a theme. He stated, “It comes pre-installed with a bunch of different squeeze page templates that make your sites indistinguishable from the ones the pros spend thousands and thousands of dollars testing.”

They are offering this product for $97 and you can get it by clicking here.

If anyone has used this and wants to fill me in on their experience, I’d love to hear about it.