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Setting up a blog with Social, Viral and Digital Marketing in mind – Part 1

Introduction

I’m assuming you have installed your wordpress blog on your server. This post will guide you through some general settings and installations that will get your blog up and running and ready to be spread across the web. Obviously you are here so you can see how some things work but also take a look at my most successful installation, GfK TechTalk

First, choose, install and customize theme.

Add blog Information

Under settings > General fill in your title and tagline, the title will be the name of your website and the tagline what its about, be sure to use some keywords that you want to reach the search engines. Go through all the settings beyond general and make sure the posts, comments etc will behave in a way that suits your blogs intentions.

Widgets

Widgets can be found under the appearance heading on the left hand side of the control panel. They control the content that appears mainly the right hand column of the site but also header footer.

Favicon

If you don’t have any image editing software you can easily create a favicon by uploading it to a number of site such as Favicon.co.uk you can then simply download it and upload it to you sites top level folder (htdocs) for it to appear in a browsers address bar.

CSS

The Cascading Style Sheet is fully customisable and is accessible by clicking appearance > Editor > StyleSheet under Styling

Install Plugins

I’m going to give you a short overview of useful plugins I have tried and tested. It’s not everything I use and everyone’s blog will have different needs but this should give you a good start and save some time.

- Social Media and Viral Marketing

Digg Digg

Digg Digg provides convenient buttons by your post for your readers to market your articles on your behalf, essential for the viral marketing aspect of your blog, you may have seen these buttons on site like Mashable.

Twitter Tools AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Once you have established your social media platforms that work for your particular target audience then use Digg Digg for these platforms. It is important to remember that everyone has there own browsing habits and favourite bookmarking tools so make sure your blog facilitates them. AddToAny pretty much adds every other bookmarking link to your post.

SexyBookmarks

A very stylish plugin adding additional bookmarking to your post, I have started using this as an alternative to AddToAny.

Social Media Widget

While many seem to think that linking to your social media accounts means you are intergrating Social Media, as you may have picked up from the above plugins it is only a small part. However, this plugin simplifies the adding of icons to the navigational column and gets you to think about a few extra platforms at the same time.

FeedBurner FeedSmith (manual install)

The Feedburner plugin cannot be found on an add new plugin search, you need to download the plugin file from Google and upload the zip file to your server extract the file and refresh the plugin page in WordPress and activate the plugin. Next, got to your google feedburner account and in My Feeds fill in the address of the blog feed in the Burn a feed right this instant box. Navigate to settings and then feedburner and add your new Feedburner feed address.

- Analytics and Tracking

Google XML Sitemaps

Sign into webmaster tools, add new site, upload the html file although there other options for verification, verify the site,

Edit the settings and build the sitemap

Your sitemap was last built on August 17, 2010 8:51 am.
Your sitemap (zipped) was last built on August 17, 2010 8:51 am.
Google was successfully notified about changes.
Bing was successfully notified about changes.
Ask.com was successfully notified about changes.
The building process took about 0.53 seconds to complete and used 27.25 MB of memory.
If you changed something on your server or blog, you should rebuild the sitemap manually.
If you encounter any problems with the build process you can use the debug function to get more information.

WordPress.com Stats

In order to use the WordPress.com stats plugin you will need a wordpress API key, after you have installed the plugin you will be shown a red error message until you have resolved this, click on the error message and you arrive at a page showing the following “The WordPress.com Stats Plugin is not working because it needs to be linked to a WordPress.com account” click on the link to get an API key and sign up at the wordpress.com site, you only need to sign up for a username, a full blog is not necessary. Once you have gone through the motions got to my account and you will find the API. Copy the API and return your self hosted blog site, enter the key and you will be shown the wordpress account that the api is associated with, now just click and add your blog to the wordpress.com and you’re ready to go.

WP-UserOnline

WP-UserOnline is a handy little plugin that quickly allows you to assess our current users online and monitor marketing efforts in real time.

Ultimate Google Analytics

Go to your Google Analytics and add new website, enter the site address and you will be given some code to paste into your pages, fortunatley the settings for Ultimate GA allow you to just paste the UI code and you are up and running. Give it some time before you start to see your results in Google.

Instruction of accounts to set up

You’re going to need some accounts if you want some traffic and want to take advantage of free tools!

WordPress Account

For some of the stats programs and spam plugins you will need a API Key from your WordPress Account. You can set this up at the WordPress site, see above.

Facebook page

Rather than bug your mates posting links to your personal profile and to make sure you have the facebook followers that are actually interested in what you have to say, set up a Facebook page for your blog and put your links in there.

Twitter and Twitter developer account

Your Twitter account is going to be important in pushing out your posts once you have established your following. Use plugins such as Twitter Tools to automate the process.

Google, Analytics, Feedburner, Webmaster Tools

You’re going to need a Google account and a few of their products.

Gravatar

Gravatar is a sister site to wordpress and is a handy way to add an avatar to your email address . Sign up for a Gravatar account, upload your photo, then on any participating site you use that use that email address your avatar will be displayed.

bit.ly

Contact me if you would like more detailed advice, more plugins and information on how this fits into a marketing strategy.

Establishing your online voice, blogging and your readership

My good friend Merrin Wake emailed me the other day for some advice on getting traffic through to her blog secretsofmotherhood after reading a few pages I established that identifying the readership in this situation would be slightly different than I am used to as the users are not business users and not consumers. Merrin said that the blog was set up with social media tools, in this situation is key to go an extra mile when talking to your readers. Establish your voice and create conversations with your readers, this way passive absorbers of your information start to become your brand advocates. It only takes a couple of power users of your website pushing your message to feel like you have a mini marketing team working for you and you are laying down the foundations to facilitate some viral marketing.

Remember that no two people browse the Internet in the same way! We all have our favorite platforms, our favorite browser plugins and we all use social media in different ways so make sure your blog caters for as many of these people as possible not just your preferences. Share buttons with limited clicks is essential for the reader to spread the word. Subscribe Fields for those who wish to be sent a email digest. Follow and Like Buttons for those who passively watch you through social media platforms. RSS feeds (in particular Feedburner) for those who will watch you from their email client.

Link exchange,
Obviously, search engine optimization should be at the for front of your mind not just during site design but on every post, every keyword and every heading. Link exchange is vital to your SEO and I don’t just mean sending out annoying emails to similar sites asking to swap links I mean, where are your potential readers? Are they on Facebook? If so, have they joined a group in which you can start a discussion that links back to your pages, can you get them discussing and spreading the conversation to various other platforms such as digg, delicious, yahoo buzz etc? Inbound links are important not just for traffic but also for search engine bots to find your site. Outbound links have to quality sites have similar effects.

The paid way
If your site is making some money then the quick way is to incorporate some pay per click adverting or direct advertising on websites you would like to be seen. There is an art to this so don’t take it on lightly but here are some starting points to get you thinking. See my Digital Marketing posts.

Media Streaming, MacBook Pro, PS3, Xbox 360, MediaLink, iTunes Part 2

Ok, I didn’t manage to get this to work completely but as I think it might be down to the network I am going to post it anyway. I almost managed to stream the music from my MacBook Pro (iTunes) through the Xbox 360. The idea of this is to have all music in one central location to avoid duplication of songs and double handling when it comes to updates.

Also, if you don’t have your mac set up to run a Windows environment or need to improve your Bootcamp set up follow my blog post that talked about an easy installation of VM Fusion using your Bootcamp partitioned drive. I did need to import the Bootcamp Partition in order to mirror the music folder in OSX and Windows.

I didn’t use the medialink streaming server software, instead I opened up VMFusion and loaded Windows Media Player. In the VMFusion Setting found under Virtual Machine I then turned on folder sharing and mirrored the music folder where the iTunes Media folder resides. By doing this I was able to use the Add to Media Library under File In Windows media player in order list all my music without actually copying anything over into this environment.

Next, make sure all you media sharing is turned on in the windows environment (I’m using Vista) you can do this via Library > Media Sharing > Share my media to: in Windows Media Player, the Xbox 360 icon should appear in the box below, or choose Control Panel > Classic View > Networking and sharing > Media Sharing > Change.

With everything on, turn on your XBox 360. Go to My Xbox > Music Library and select your computer, you should see your playlists…. problem is, mine won’t play!!

If anyone can get ths working please expand in the comments area?

See how I got this to work on the PS3