Tools & Techniques for Effective Blogging

My presentation at Institute of Journalism on Effective Blogging Tools and Techniques

1. Tools and Techniques for Effective Blogging Hammad Siddiqui http://hammadsiddiquiblog.com http://twitter.com/hammads

2. Importance of Blogging How to blog How to market Blog How to customize your blog

3. Why Blog? Challenges before you start. How to find your niche. Which platform to chose from (blogger vs wordpress ) Watch trends. How to write quality content? Challenges as a blogger. Reaching out to readership. Key success factors.

4. Online is the Media for Today and Tomorrow. People are watching more television, reading more news, playing more video games , spending more time updating their social networking profiles and using more video on demand services than they were six months ago, according to a new survey published today, but their actual spending has plunged as increasingly consumers expect free access. Spending on 'traditional' media such as newspapers and magazines has dropped almost 20% in the last six months, while spending on digital media has almost halved. Online, social networking and blogging remains the most popular pastime with half of all respondents doing it compared with 47% six months ago. The big jump in usage most recently has been among 45 to 54 year olds, increasing from 37% to 45%. Source: KPMG Report

5. Why Blog?

6. Challenges Before U Start!

7. Finding Your Niche

8. How to get quick and crisp information READ READ READ Newspapers Blogs Books USE Google Alerts

9. Choosing a platform

10. Which Platform? Blogger vs Wordpress Serious blogging – host at your domain

11. Design Counts http://jongordon.com/blog http://hammadsiddiquiblog.com http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ http://t.co/IuoG4RYh http://www.humorcarbons.com/ http://wisdomfrombooks.com/

12. http://farihamunirshahtimes.blogspot.com/ 1. Title - Too big and not SEO Friendly (Keep it short and focus on key words such as Women Chamber, Multan etc - Its tricky stuff but check youtube videos on this topic) 2. Background design - Too clumsy (remove all those colorful stuff) 3. Font - too small (you need to build 1.5 line spacing) 4. Picture quality - Poor, you need relatively higher quality pics . AND Must be captioned - You have used captions in some previous posts 5. Missing Tags, keywords, labels (in blogger these are called Labels) - Labels help in improving search on google .

13. http://fahdhusain.blogspot.com http://naumanadil.blogspot.com Another thing that counts

14. Trends http://www.blogpulse.com/ http://www.ysearchblog.com/ http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends http://blogherald.com

15. Content is the King!

16. Quick and crisp information?

17. Challenges for Bloggers

18. Reaching out to readership Facebook (join groups, increase friend’s circle) 800 million Twitter (use #tags) 100 million active users Google+ over 100 million Linkedin Groups 140 million users Most traffic comes from facebook Tag with keywords Backlinks Tweet (and retweet ) Request

19. Be Creative

20. Making Money Through Blogging

21. Success Factors YOU and Your Commitment

22. Basic SEO Keywords Title SEO tools Bold Fonts Youtube Videos Slideshare Effective Backlinking Commenting on other blogs

23. Google Analytics Feedjit XML sitemap

24. Happy Blogging! [email protected] http://hammadsiddiquiblog.com Twiter : @ hammads