First, let’s agree that your audience is varied and you can’t please everyone – but they all follow your for some reasons (yes, in plural) and trying to understand those reasons is the key.

Your Blog Readership – Layers

One of the great speakers at BlueGlass LA was Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger Network – I think everyone reading now got it immediately: LOL cats! Now, the most important thing to know about the blogs is they are user-generated – which means the people behind the network managed to build a strong 100%-self-built community – the perfect example of great user engagement and interaction.

So how did they do that?

The answer is simple (no, it’s actually not that simple): understanding how your community is (being) built.

The first law of community you need to know is that it’s not all about “active” users. You need to grow both the commenters and the people who don’t talk. That’s the whole community. Your community is not just the people who generate content: it’s the people who read and use it.

Communities are made of up delicate layers of users: you should listen to ALL of them.

Whilst engaging with these “active” portions of your readership is certainly important, you need to keep in mind that they are (in most cases) the vocal minority. Most of your followers will be people who silently surf through your content, but who will never really feel the need to interact with you as you don’t take the time to actively appeal for them to do so.

Twitter or Facebook isn’t to everyone’s taste (believe it or not) and knee-jerk comments may prove to not be particularly useful, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still engage your audience to find out information that you can be used to better understand what kind of content they want you to produce.

A couple of my favorite ways for getting feedback from my readers are:

Setting Up “Personality Tests”

For some reason people just love taking these kinds of quizzes, which makes the ideal for finding out pretty much anything you want about your readership. You will need to adapt the titles of the quizzes to suite the type of blog you are running. On some blogs “What Kind of Computer Are You?” will go down very well, whilst on others you may need something more along the lines of “Which of the Disciples Do You Most Resemble?”.

Making a fun quiz that appeals to your specific target audience can be difficult, but it is vitally important, if you get it right you’ll be amazed just how many normally silent people you can get to participate.

My favorite tool for making these kinds of tests is ProProfs that has a nifty online testing utility, a really simple to use website which lets you make fully interactive quizzes, graphics and all, with very little effort. So for example using the site I set up a quiz labeled “Which Type of Twitter User You Are”, as an attempt to learn more about my audiences tweeting habits, but I did it in such a way so as to appeal to their inquisitive (and competitive) nature regarding where they ranked compared to my other readers.

Tests like these are really simple to set up, not to mention they can be a lot of fun to create, once you’re done you can embed them straight into your website ready for use. Analyzing the results can yield a real goldmine of information. The Quiz School stats pages give a complete overview of how each individual answered each specific question, as well as charts documenting the overall voting amongst all those who responded.

Below are the result analytics I got from my quiz maker – plenty of data to dig into. Here’s the report itself (notice that you can actually see the user names, details and result):

And here are some visualization tools to allow you to analyze the data better (for example, you can see the answer break-down for each particular question):

Using Survey’s

Survey’s often provide a most useful forms of customer feedback, especially ones which allow for users to leave their own comments regarding specific questions. Unfortunately long survey’s can be a lot more difficult to get people to fill in when compared to short quizzes which appeal to their sense of fun.

If you think you can entice enough of your users to fill in a Survey as to make it worthwhile, there are a couple of options available to you. Firstly you could use a third party website like Survey Monkey to set up and track the results of your survey. Alternatively if you are using Wordpress to run your blog then you could use a simple Wordpress plugin to do the job for you. The second option giving the advantage of maintaining full control of the survey through the back end of your site, as well as complete privacy when it comes to the information compiled.

Do you use any tools to get to know your blog readers better? Please share them in the comments!

Post image by B Rosen

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Do You Listen to Your “Silent” Blog Followers?

In this awkward stage people often become consumed with the tools available and value them over the principles that underly our work. But the underlying principle that makes social media such a vital part of the web is that people naturally long to relate to one another. They long to be deeply known.

Facebook and Twitter provide a means of reaching out and knowing someone. They offer points of access to others – points that didn’t exist before. But how do you explore those contacts more deeply? How do you take the next step beyond a tweet and really mine your established relationships for the kind of data that really connects people?

You can start with tools like these:

Gist

Gist takes the people you’re normally in contact with across the social web and shows you a cross-section of their online activity and an extended profile of them. Get Gist.

Rapportive

Rapportive replaces your Gmail sidebar ads with social web information about the person from whom the email you are reading was sent. It pulls from a variety of sources, shows recent tweets, and gives you a good picture of the person.

Threadsy

Threadsy does several things very well. It pulls together incoming messages from across various networks and puts them into a common inbox. This includes email, mentions, and direct messages. It also provides a networking client alongside the inbox and a sweet email signature to boot.

There are others. In fact, there are more added almost daily. We’re watching a positive trend in that there is a growing focus on building relationships and not just “follower counts.”

What do you use to deepen relationships across the social web?

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3 Tools for Exploring Your Social Networking Relationships

Boasting plugins for three major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and Safari), Scribefire is a pretty powerful tool. Check out the screenshot of my editing a post here on Fuel…

What impresses me is that everything I need to do in my normal post editing window is available through Scribefire. We would expect such a plugin to include secondary details such as categories and tags, but Scribefire even includes custom fields.

One of the more useful features is the ability to switch between blogs (assuming you manage multiple blogs) and write and edit instantaneously without logging into different backends. And the only disadvantage? There doesn’t seem to be a way to utilize Wordpress’ media uploading features. You can only add images by url.

My opinion of Scribefire is pretty high. If you’re looking for a very simple, in-browser tool for writing and editing on multiple blogs, it’s an excellent choice. But I’m still a control freak, so to write this review, I still logged in the old-fashioned way. Some habits die hard.

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Scribefire: A Fully Mature External Blog Editor

If feed readers and email lists aren’t your thing, perhaps these ten sites will be worthy of your bookmark for browsing. What I like about them is that I can glance at them and there is no “mark as read” button necessary. When I click away, I’m done.

TweetTabs.com

TweetTabs.com offers a sweet multi-column real-time tracker for trending topics and customized searches on Twitter.

Sency Real Time Search

Sency is a real-time search engine that offers much more, including the hottest trending topics in major cities, tying together the power of real-time search and geo-location.

Collecta

Collecta is another real-time search engine with a nice home page design offering the latest story on five popular topics along with some discussion surrounding that story.

Regator

Regator is kind of an aggregator for what’s being blogged about across a variety of topics, but you can create an account to personalize your results.

Guzzle.It

Want to roll your own Alltop or Popurls type interface? Guzzle.It lets you do just that with your own account.

RSSmeme

RSSmeme is an aggregator of what’s hot among rss feeds across the web. I like the quick ability to switch between “now,” “today,” and “this week.”

These are six, among so many! What’s your favorite way to consume news (other than email and a feed reader)?

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Six Cool Sites for Keeping Up With the Blogosphere

Source: The Posterous Blog

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Posterous Adds Pages for Static Content

For example, business contact forms that allows users to enter some data which are then sent to your email inbox. The problem is, it could be risky and you might loose valuable leads that gets thrown into your email’s spam folder. So, what’s the solution? Wordpress-to-lead plugin. This plugin is so useful to SME’s customers that Salesforce.com decided to sponsor its development and release. The result? A very effective website tool which if you combined with Salesforce CRM could make your website a great source of leads.

What’s good about Wordpress-to-lead is that it allows you to skip the task of finding lead information sent to your email inbox by your site’s contact forms. The plugin retrieves all the information from your contact forms and makes it useful for the Salesforce CRM. This totally erases any probability of error from occuring if you are going to do it manually, that is through copy and paste procedure. This plugin offers an efficient alternative to this otherwise crude process.

According to Yoast, the efficiency by which this plugin handles lead information from contact forms and integrates it with Salesforce CRM has lead the company to offer its sponsorship of the plugin.

This plugin is so effective in carrying out its task and also allows you to:

• Syncs effortlessly with Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo! and more
• Tracks all your interactions and conversions
• Keep all your information and tasks organized under one roof

Besides that the plugin is really easy to configure and it lets you create various types of forms:

Want to see this plugin in action? Watch the video and let us know what you think!

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Wordpress-to-Lead Contact Form for Salesforce CRM – Nice!

How young is too young for blogging? There are over 200,000,000 million blogs on the web and the artform and industry aren’t fading into oblivion anytime soon. I would even argue that while everyone is deciding whether Facebook or Google owns the web, bloggers are contenders too (but my reasons are best reserved for another post). The point is, blogging is worth learning along with other essential skills… like algebra!

To the rescue is Kidblog.org. Students in elementary and middle school can have their very own Wordpress-powered blog without disclosing any personal details at all. In light of recent news, it’s most likely safer than Facebook. And it’s made for teachers. In their own words…

Kidblog.org is designed for elementary and middle school teachers who want to provide each student with their own, unique blog.

Kidblog’s simple, yet powerful tools allow students to publish posts and participate in discussions within a secure classroom blogging community. Teachers maintain complete control over student blogs.

Set up your class with no student email addresses.

Provide your students with an authentic, engaging, and interactive learning experience with Kidblog.

And hear this testimony from Mr. Bennett, a fourth grade teacher from his own blog…

My students and I have recently taken the plunge into the world of blogging. I didn’t know how my students would react at first, because “writing” is the dreaded subject in my room. They will write if I ask them to, but I really wanted to help them develop an appreciation for expressing themselves through writing. After a little bit of searching and networking, I stumbled across KidBlogs and our class absolutely loves it!

And to think, while I was in high school, email was invented!

What do you think? Is blogging a good skill for your fourth grader to pick up?

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Hey Teachers, Kids Can Blog Too with Kidblog.org!

Picmeleo Alive spits out an embed code so that you can add it to any kind of site regardless of your platform.

I had a conversation with Shumeng Ye from the Picmeleo team and he had this to share:

We envision Picmeleo Alive for anyone with the need to mark details in photos, bloggers in particular. The service is an early beta and not complete yet. Eventually users will be able to add links to bubbles and to customize bubble icons. We also plan to provide photo hosting and all essential photo editing tools (as in the embeddable editor).

It’s easy-to-use and a nice addition to any blog.

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Picmeleo Alive: Tag Photos on Your Blog

Now you can share links, add images, delete your links, and re-share what you like in your stream. They’re also allowing the option between public and private sharing (I’m reminiscing to some recent Facebook headlines). You can also add shared items to your profile.

Also, shared links will sport a new shortened url: lnkd.in. Here’s a video posted on the LinkedIn blog today:

What do you think, does this make LinkedIn an even better network for bloggers?

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LinkedIn Just Got Even Better for Bloggers

When I read the news about the Ning community platform cutting not just staff, but also its free service, I had the same reaction Shel Holtz had — this is a betrayal of the company core promise and shatters customer trust.
via Conversation Agent

If you were utilizing Ning as a blogging or social network platform, Mashable offers a great list of alternatives to consider. In the list, you’ll see a couple of self-hosted solutions, which brings me to my point.

Though not too many well-known blogs ran on Ning, some online publishers and well-connected communities did come to depend upon it. Its shutdown raises the question of what happens when your platform dies? If you blog on a hosted service, like Blogger, Wordpress, etc. then your continuing work of blogging is dependent upon a company’s decisions, which are often motivated by the bottom line (and they have to be at times).

Even if your platform doesn’t die, it will most certainly change shape over time and you have to decide in advance that you’re okay going with the flow. In most cases, it’s far better to own your platform as much as possible by hosting your own site software on your own server and backing up often.

We can talk about how content is so important, but we can’t neglect the vitality of a great system for publishing that content either. If your platform died, went belly-up, or changed in ways to which you could not adapt, what would be your escape plan? How would you continue to build a brand in spite of losing the underlying support system? The sooner you address these questions, the better protected your content and reputation will be in the long run.

What do you think about Ning’s sudden and ill-prepared announcement? How could they have handled the situation differently? And what should bloggers learn from it all?

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What If Your Blogging Platform Dies?

Wordpress.com has perhaps gone farther than some competing platforms with new theme releases like Inuit, a theme offering drop down menus, a clean and classic look, and some other pretty features. The Wordpress.com scenery may be changing very soon with today’s announcement by Ian Stewart of Wordpress.com’s official Theme Team.

Apparently, some talented and creative people who care deeply about the Wordpress.com brand are committing their energy to providing some new and better themes with increased flexibility. Ian made six commitments in his post, but the last two are especially noteworthy…

5. We will teach WordPress developers to become the best theme developers in the world. If you’re a WordPress theme developer—commercial or 100% free—we want to help you be the best.

6. We will ensure all our improvements make it back to the open source community.

This is encouraging if you realize it means the Theme Team will not only benefit Wordpress.com users, but the entire Wordpress-loving community across the net. What is already one of the best and most flexible blogging platforms for designers and developers may be about to get a whole lot better.

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Wordpress.com Gets An Official Theme Team

Welcome Nachofoto to the scene, offering a real-time web search for images, bringing the best of two tools together.

And of course, one of the handiest features is a list of hot trending topics. As a matter of fact, trending photos are the only photos you’ll find in the search engine. For the moment, the usage of Nachofoto may be quite limited. It doesn’t seem to offer anything not already available in other tools. And while the interface is usable enough, it lacks a unique aesthetic identity.

Nontheless, you may find Nachofoto a nice addition to your blogging toolbox. What other tools do you use for finding photos across the web?

News Source: TechCrunch

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Use Nachofoto to Search for Images in Real Time

But today Posterous announced their new Post Editor 2.0 and they’re referring to it as “your universal posting tool.”

Posterous Post Editor 2.0

It does three things very well:

• Batch uploading.
• Easy text editing.
• Awesome image galleries.

So it doesn’t do everything as well as other platforms, but what it does do, it does with ease! An established favorite feature of Posterous is the ability to post anything by email simply by emailing post@posterous.com. You don’t even have to officially sign up – it creates a blog based on the email address from which you sent the email. This offers several advantages…

• It’s easy. If you know how to send an email, you can blog.
• It’s a great way to create multi-author blogs on the fly without assigning roles and passwords.
• It’s a great way to post content to multiple platforms simultaneously with their “post everywhere” feature, just by sending an email.

And now they’ve rounded out their features with a great web-based editor. Most of us will remain faithful to our chosen outlets, but if you’re getting started with blogging, Posterous is worth a look for sure!

Have a thought or critique? Share it. Have an experience to share with posterous? Share that too. Personally, I’ve come to love my “side blog” as I like to call it.

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Posterous Just Got A Lot More Awesome

Interested in integrating Google Buzz into your blog? Google’s new social network does a great job of letting you encourage readers to share your blog’s content. Unfortunately, until it gets more popular Buzz might not be included in many of the social media button sets and plugins that are available for most blogging platforms. Luckily, with the right plugins, modules and extensions, you can help your readers share your posts through Buzz or even send your own Buzz updates right to your blog. Read on for some options to integrate Google Buzz into the blogging software you already use.

1. Adding a Google Buzz Button in Wordpress

One of the first things most people will want to see when using Google Buzz is an option to use buzz to easily share the content of your post. The good news is there are already a wide variety of options available for adding a Google Buzz button to Wordpress blog posts. Installation is just like any Wordpress plugin: all you need to do is upload the downloaded plugin to the wp-content/plugins folder on your server and then activate and customise it from your admin area.

2. Adding a Google Buzz Button in Blogger

If you are interested in adding a Buzz button to your Blogger posts, it will be slightly more complicated than the Wordpress option. Luckily, there’s an easy-to-understand and reasonably generic plugin that looks good available for Blogger hosted blogs. To install the plugin, you’ll need to copy a little bit of code and paste it into a specific place in your Blogger template, which means you can integrate Google Buzz in minutes!

3. Setting Up a Google Buzz Button in Joomla

One of the best things about Joomla is how easy it is to add a wide variety of extensions to customise how your Joomla site looks and functions. There’s no exception when it comes to integrating Google Buzz, with several options for integrated buttons and links that allow your readers to quickly and easily share your content with their followers in an intuitive manner.

4. Setting Up a Google Buzz Button in Drupal

The active development community around the open source Drupal content management system made it likely that a Google Buzz button would show up fast – and as predicted, it did. Drupal has a standard button integrated into the main package already, with plans to include a count feature in the near future.

5. Adding Google Buzz to Your Blog’s Sidebar

Giving your readers a way to use Google Buzz to share your content with friends is great, but it may also be useful to post your own Buzz feed on the sidebar of your blog or website to help build a sense of community and allow your readers to easily interact with you. While some of the content management systems listed in this post don’t offer this feature (at the time of writing), there are a few that are currently available for Joomla and an equivalent Wordpress plugin.

Image Credit: Unhindered by Talent

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5 Ways to Integrate Google Buzz With Your Blog

There are some concerned about its privacy flaws and a lot of talk about what Buzz doesn’t offer… yet. Lifehacker offers up one of the best explanations of how Buzz works and how to use it, but the question I would raise is, can you afford to ignore it?

I was in a meeting yesterday with some editors of print magazines and we were discussing how social networking relates to the future of print publications. One of the statements made (which didn’t surprise me) was “we may not like these tools [i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc.] but we can’t ignore them.” I must agree.

Can you be a successful blogger and ignore Buzz (and all of the other similar tools being released daily on the net)? The answer depends on your approach to blogging. If you blog to share with family and friends news about your life – Buzz doesn’t even have to exist for you. But if you’re looking to expand your blog’s influence in the business or entrepreneurial world, then you really can’t afford to ignore one of the biggest releases from one of the biggest tech players on the planet.

Will it aid your blog by driving more traffic? I think we’ll know more in a matter of days, but sometimes that doesn’t matter. You just can’t afford to ignore the elephant in the room for very long.

We’d like to know your thoughts. Where is Buzz going? Will it help? Does it matter? What do you think of the tool, and feel free to leave your buzz link at the bottom of your content. It’s formatted as: http://www.google.com/buzz/yourgooglename.

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Do You Dare Ignore Google Buzz?