Make a Top Posts List

There is a good post here about the importance of maintaining a Top (or Best or Favorite, whichever you prefer) Posts list on your blog. Todd writes:

Think of your best posts page as a sitemap for new users to check out your style. There are two things that will get people to subscribe when they visit – Personality (about page) and style (best posts page). Personally, it takes me less than five minutes to decide if I’ll ever visits a blog again and subscribe with bloglines. Please make a good impression to your first timers.

Indeed. With all the amazing blogs to read, determining which ones to follow can be a daunting task. First impression and accessibility to the best content helps convert casual visitors to loyal subscribers.

Since I use Wordpress, I can point you to a couple excellent plugins you can use to automate your Top Posts list.

• Popularity Contest for Wordpress
• Top Posts by Category for Wordpress

While plugins are super, sometimes your most visited/commented posts are not the ones that say the most about you or your blog. In that case – or in case you’re using a blog platform that doesn’t offer a good plugin – it’s simple to manually add links to your five or ten favorites posts in your sidebar. Just choose your best posts and put the links in your sidebar.

And don’t forget about that About page. Give your readers a little background on who you are and why you are blogging. If you reveal your personality and highlight your best content, subscribers will follow.

Finding Images For Your Blog

It’s a well-known fact that a blog post with a photo has more appeal, at least initially. Do you often find yourself spending more time looking for a photo than it took you to write the post to begin with?  Here are some great ways to find photos to use in your blog posts.

• Microsoft’s Clip Art: When I hear the words “clip art,” I’m prone to envision cheesy one-color illustrations or animated smiley faces. Not here. This site has a quality selection of graphics and photos to use on your blog.
• Stockvault: Free stock photos, decent selection.
• 123 Royalty Free: Very nice selection of free images. Images stay on the site for 30 days, then expire and new images are continually being added.
• Stock.xchng: Another free stock photography site. Also offers photos for as little as $1 each.
• PicFindr: Useful site that searches several sources of free stock photos simultaneously.
• The Photodropper Plugin: It searches for Creative Commons licensed photos – images that are licensed for shared use – and lets you drop them into your posts – right from your dashboard with just one click.
• Flickr: Until recently, I had no idea that there were photos on Flickr listed under a Creative Commons license, allowing you to use them on your blog with proper attribution. It might take some searching, but you could find something useful there.
• iStockPhoto.com and Dreamstime: While not free, I have to mention these awesome sources of stock photos. You’ll find high-quality graphics here and most cost as little as $1.

Photo attribution: pointnshoot’s photostream.

Originally posted at Blissfully Domestic.

Get More Out Of Google Reader: 5 Easy Tips

Google Reader is one of the most popular feed-reading tools on the web. If you are still reading blogs by visiting the sites one by one, you are missing out on a lot of time-saving functionality. Give Google Reader, and the tips below, a try.

1. Use the bookmarklet. In GReader, click on “manage subscriptions” and then “goodies.” Scroll down and drag the little “subscribe” button to the bookmarks toolbar. When you are on a blog you want to subscribe to, simply click the bookmarklet in your toolbar and you will be forwarded to GReader for subscription options.

2. Make use of the folders. If you are adding feeds to GReader and simply seeing a long list of items to wade through, you’re sure to be overwhelmed. I have a folder for A-list blogs – the ones that are most important to me – and I check that folder first. I also have folders by topic: Moms, Social Media, Blogging Tips, Homeschooling, Friends, and News. When I subscribe to a new feed, I add it to my “Testing” folder. I monitor these feeds for a week or two to see how often they are updated and if the information continues to be of interest to me. If I decide to keep the feed, I’ll then decide what folder to place it in. To set up folders, click on a feed, then select “feed settings” from the upper right corner of the page. You can then add the feed to an existing folder or create a new folder.

3. Try keyboard shortcuts to make navigating GReader faster and easier. Some of the most common shortcuts include:

• j/k: item down/up
• o: open/close item
• s: toggle star (another tip: use the star to track items you want to go back to or blog about)
• m: mark as read/unread

There’s an in-depth article covering keyboard shortcuts at LifeHacker.

4. Tweak GReader. For two-click subscribing, bypassing iGoogle’s choice page, changing fonts, and maximizing items on the page, check out the Better GReader add-on for Firefox.

5. Use Feedly Feedly is an awesome Firefox plugin that turns your Google Reader feeds into a personalized magazine-like home page. It offers several other perks such as sharing, annotating and managing your feeds.

I’ve heard people say they dropped GReader because they were overwhelmed by seeing the “1000+ new items” to read every day. I encourage you to read this post on Making the Most of Your RSS Reader, which says, “Life’s too short to worry about it, aren’t you glad you read what you were able to find the time to read?”

Originally posted at Blissfully Domestic.

Use Online Tools to Get More Done In Less Time

If you’re like me you spend A LOT of time online. I shop online, communicate online, socialize online, work online, listen to music online, read the news online, and find educational resources for my kids online. I love the internet, but one thing I don’t love is its constant beckoning to “check this out.” There are so many distractions!

While the web offers lots of fun, sometimes it’s important for me to stay focused. Here are a few ways I get more done in less time.

• Use a Start Page. Customize your own start page on a site like Netvibes or iGoogle and you can see the day’s top news stories, weather, important blogs, your to do list and more — all in one place.
• Set Up Email Filters. Most email clients allow you to create filters so emails from certain people or about certain subjects can be automatically put into a folder. For example, all my social network notifications (added friends, new followers, new messages, etc) go into a folder and I only need to look at them once a day. I don’t see them in my inbox, so I’m not tempted to go off and lose an hour at a social networking site. Another tip: check your email less frequently.
• Use a Web-Based Assistant. Manage your to-do lists, tasks, calendars and more through the web, email, IM, and/or mobile phone. Some to check out are Remember the Milk and Ta-Da Lists.
• Find a Good RSS Reader. Try out various feed readers and find one that works for you. Organize your feeds into folders by topic, importance, frequency of updating, or whatever works best for your needs.

Finally, a great way to stay focused is to have a workable “flow chart” of what you want to get done online each day. It can be as fancy or as simple as you desire. It could even be a simple list. For example: email, to-do list, read top news, check social networking sites, read blogs and browse as time allows.

I don’t always stick to my flow chart, get my to-dos finished, or read all the blogs I want to keep up with, but it definitely helps me to have a step-by-step process that keeps me focused when I’m tempted to stray off into the wonderful world of the web.

Originally posted at Blissfully Domestic.

Social Networking Online

Networking (n): the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions; the cultivation of productive relationships

Most of us realize the importance of networking for business and for our social lives. It’s also critical for blogging and developing supportive relationships online. Here’s a list of useful links to help you network more effectively.

• ProBlogger’s Ultimate Guide to Networking With Bloggers
• The Importance of Social Media Marketing
• Why Blog Commenting is So Important
• Effectively Using Social Networking Sites
• Five Steps to Become a Better Social Marketer
• Social Networking in Plain English (video)

In a nutshell: Comment a lot, pick your social networks wisely, be active and involved. Have fun!

Originally posted at Blissfully Domestic.

What is RSS and Why Do You Need It?

If you read any type of news or blogs online, you need to use RSS because it will save you valuable time and make your life easier.

What is RSS? It stands for Really Simple Syndication, which means its a simple way to get content out to a lot of people. RSS allows you to bring information to you, instead of visiting many different web sites to read the latest postings. Check out Common Crafts excellent video called RSS in Plain English.

Key Terms

• Feed: A feed (also called RSS feed) is simply the content from a web site, but it is coded in a special way (using RSS) so that it can be read by a feed reader.
• Feed Reader: A web site or desktop program that reads your feeds. These programs will look at the feeds you subscribe to and check those sites regularly for new content. The reader pulls the content in, allowing you to see all the latest information in one place. Feed readers are also known as aggregators. Google Reader and Bloglines are currently the most popular feed readers, although there are tons of options.
• Subscribe: You need to subscribe to feeds in your feed reader. Kinda like subscribing to magazines, but free. When you find a site you like, you can subscribe to its feed and the updates will come to your feed reader without you having to physically visit the site in your browser. Each reader has specific instructions for doing this, but once you set up your feed reader account you can usually click on the RSS icon on any blog or web page and you’ll be automagically subscribed.

Anyone beginning to see the value here? In addition to saving you from having to visit blogs one at a time and check for new content, there are also all kinds of cool ways to filter, save and share the posts you subscribe to.

You can also use RSS feeds to get a taste of what a blog is like and whether or not its something that will interest you in the long run. We’ve all come across a new blog and read a post or two that we like. But then what? Do you bookmark it and come back occasionally to see if you still like it (waste of time)? Do you add it to your blogroll (and possibly forget about it)? Try adding it to your feed reader. You’ll be able to scan posts over the next few weeks and easily see if its a keeper. If not, simply unsubscribe.

There’s nothing techie or mysterious or complicated about RSS. Your first step should be to find a feed reader. Just pick one and get started – its easy to move your feeds to a new reader should you want to change in the future (another advantage!). Then visit your favorite blogs and start subscribing. Soon you’ll wonder how you ever got through your day without RSS.