Pillar #3 Blog Technology
So, I’d like to cover what is a blog; blog platforms, blog pinging and RSS feeds. Okay so, what is a blog? A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blog is short for web blog.
So how useful is a blog? A blog is the easiest way to create fresh, new information in your site. Search engines, remember rank you higher if your website continually offers new, relevant, great new information.
The popular blogging platforms or as blogging software that you can actually use; one is blogger which is posted L square and one is Wordpress where you can either actually get a blog on your website or install the software on your own server on your own website. That’s blogger, that’s actually owned by Google. Oh it’s a great way to actually go and test blogging for the first time and see what blogging can do for you. And that’s Wordpress. Wordpress.org is their website address and that is probably the best piece of open source blogging technology available. Open source, free, you can actually download it, you can amend the code, your website designer is accessed to the code and change any aspects about to actually relate specific link to your brand.
Okay, Wordpress themes. You can easily personalize a Wordpress blog by using a pre-designed theme. There are thousands of people out there who have actually designed themes already that you can actually use with Wordpress, completely free of charge. That’s an example of the theme. You go into the wordpress.org website, search for themes then load in onto your website. It’s fair to simply, you don’t have to be a really technical coder to actually pull this one of. That’s an example of a theme. That’s the theme ‘almost spring.’ The blog is there and towards the left hand side and it’s also incorporated into the side bars you know but the theme again looks completely different to lots of other blogs. You can get something and completely personalize it to your own needs. You can get a theme that you like and adapt it, maybe slightly to your own needs.
A blog is an excellent content management tool. Now what this means is if you use Wordpress, you can get a great content management system just by using it. You can use Wordpress to update your own pages and without actually having to know the coding behind it. That for example is the back office of Purple Internet Marketing. It’s the Wordpress blog. All you do is you change the page title, change the content of the page, very much an editor just like Microsoft Word. You can upload different files onto the page, different images and simply press publish, decide what categories to actually have everything in. So it’s a great content management system, completely free of charge.
Now, you can also get something called Wordpress plug-ins. Plug-ins are small software programs designed by independent coders that add functionality to a Wordpress blog. What this means is there are lots of little programs that you can actually add onto your Wordpress theme to really personalize it. Again these are pieces of code, already designed by people and completely free of charge to use.
So here’s a selection of different plug-ins available. You might be able to see administration, business, monastery and monetizing, designed layout, links, adds, poster and lots of different plug-in categories, really worthwhile having a look at that, having a think about how you actually want to personalize your blog.
Blog pinging. Now pinging is also an automated process that’s lets the website or a number of websites to know when a blogger has published a new post. This is a superb part of blog technology when you’re talking about internet marketing.
As you see here, there are a list of update services in the back office of my Wordpress blog. Now I’d simply type in what website I wand to tell as soon as I published a new post in the website and that could be a 100 different websites and your new post will suddenly be published on a 100 different websites, a fantastic way of automatically marketing your blog post.
Now it’s important to host incorporates, something called RSS feed into your blog. Now RSS feeds are technology that, it’s actually stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and it allows you to see new posts when you post to be added to blog with it, actually having to visit.
Now RSS feeds are basically a link on someone else’s home page directly to your site. It’s automatically updated with your latest headlines on it. Now when this link is submitted to any site that supports the RSS standard, your latest posts are displayed. What it means is, someone can subscribe to your update.
If you’ve got an RSS feed on your site, ‘subscribe to out feeds’, some people might call it then. What happens is people are aware. It seems you actually publish a new post on your blog. An essential part of marketing and actually having often users to your latest updates.
Now one of the most popular RSS readers is actually something called Google Reader. There are lots of versions have popped but this is a good example to show you.
Now you can also get this on your mobile phone as you see but if someone subscribes to your RSS feed, this is something like what they’d get. They’ll get a summary of your titles and sometimes a little bit content of your latest blog post. Now the interest people will click through, they will develop a stronger relationship with your website and they’ll be more likely to actually purchase from you in the future. It’s great way of letting people often by themselves without actually having to give an e-mail address and not in via e-mail updates. A lot of people are scared of actually giving their e-mail address.
Okay so it has Blog Technology. What is a blog; we’ve covered. Different blog types, that is Wordpress and blogger, blog pinging, highly automatically letting lots of other websites aware, made aware of the fact that you’ve actually suddenly updated your website and RSS feeds. That’s letting people subscribe to update from your site.
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