Various elements you can use to make your online life easier when using social media and blogging.

1. Making your online life easier
Attract Readers; Gain Impact

2. Remember the ‘social’ bit
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
Social media are platforms for social networking.
This thrives on people being sociable, rather than
promoting and advertising.
The process works by creating relationships with your
potential customers by giving rather than receiving.
It requires getting your followers, friends and
contacts, who may not be your customers, to know,
like and trust you.
And once they understand what you’re about, then
they can share, recommend and refer you to
potential customers.

3. Frequency versus consistency
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
Bombarding your social followers depends on these
factors:
• Which platform you’re using
Twitter works better with multiple updates, due to its fast
moving nature, whereas LinkedIn Groups require a more
leisurely pace to develop discussion and conversation.
• Repetition and duplication
Google tends to penalise duplication of written content,
whereas repetition in a variety of ways and formats can
attract audiences who respond better to different stimuli.

4. Spam alert!
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
Duplication, insistent repetition, limited content of no value,
over-use of links within content, links going to dubious
destinations – all this could cause you to be viewed as spam.
• Vary the content you produce to promote your blog
• Consider the other readers who may not be interested in
your blog; don’t annoy them unnecessarily
• Be aware of the longevity of your content’s visibility; leave
suitable time gaps before repeating your promotional
activities
• There are exceptions: in Twitter you can tweet your posts
as many times as you like!

5. Automation via RSS
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, allows content to be
distributed, or fed, to other locations immediately after
it has been published.
• Blog posts fed to subscribers as email notifications
(via Feedburner, Feedblitz or the JetPack plugin)
• Blog post updates in social media via sharing
applications or social sharing buttons
• Blog post links into listings in blogrolls or reader feeds

6. Share both outwards and inwards
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
Social sharing buttons are easily found on
WordPress blogs in many designs and formats.
There are many plugins that will enable you to
place them on your blog. You decide which
one you like best, or performs best.
RSS also brings up content from social
networking sites to show on your blog, such
as my Twitter feed here.
You can use RSS to showcase your other
content and display it on your blog, to gain
more followers and increase your reputation.

7. Read other blog posts
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
A successful blogger will read extensively, to gain more knowledge, get
inspiration for more ideas, and keep up to date.
You can access relevant blog posts in your industry or niche through
readers or syndicated sites.
• Feedly.com is a RSS reader site
• Pocket.com is somewhere to store posts to read or refer to later
• Scoop.it allows you to collect suggested blogs for others to read
• News360.com and Business2Community.com are
examples of syndicated sites where you can find information
to learn more and resources to help you curate better posts

8. Join the bookmarking community
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
Bookmarking is another kind of social networking.
Bookmarking sites (for example, Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit)
are venues where you can submit your posts to get readers.
However, the technique is to give before you receive:
• read blogs in your industry, niche, of interest, for knowledge,
news and resources
• provide helpful and constructive comments on them
• create a relationship with those authors
• then submit your post. Your friends will reciprocate your
comments and share it amongst their contacts

9. Monitor with Hootsuite
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
There are applications you can sign up to, to monitor your social media
activities in one place.
Hootsuite.com is the most
commonly used platform, which
allows you to monitor all your
social networking sites at once,
presented through columns or
‘streams’ that show the data in
real time and allow you to
respond accordingly.

10. Monitor with TweetDeck
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
For people who
prefer Twitter, there
is TweetDeck.com,
which also presents
activities in ‘stream’
columns, gained by
segregating your
contacts into lists or
following hashtags.

11. Share with Buffer
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
If you want to collect interesting posts and share them on social media,
the best tool for this is Buffer.com.
This application allows you to
schedule when you share content
on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
and Google+.
You can choose the optimum
times when your readers are
most likely to be online. This
knowledge can be acquired
through Tweriod.com.

12. Schedule with SocialOomph
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
Even though many people prefer to use Hootsuite, the tool I use to
schedule my tweets in advance is SocialOomph.com.
You can also schedule for your other social networking sites and much
more. I find it particularly useful to schedule a lot of tweets at specific
times, and it’s very easy to repeat the process on different days.

13. Shorten your post’s URL
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
You will need to shorten the URLs of your blog posts, not only to take up
less space in your updates, but also to avoid repetition and duplication
of content.
The most commonly used is
bitly.com, which also offers
tracking facilities to see who has
clicked on your tinyurl.
A lot of sharing and scheduling
applications offer their own
tinyurl service, but you can
search for others as well.
• tiny.cc
• tinyurl.com
• is.gd
• ow.ly

14. Action Time
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
Action 1: Add social sharing buttons to your blog, to make it easier for
your readers to share your content.
Action 2: Choose a bookmarking site, and start to make connections by
reading lots of blogs and commenting on them.
Action 3: Go to Tweriod.com to see when your followers are more likely
to be online. You will then know when is the optimum time to be active
on social media, or when to schedule your posts.