Ms. Ileane Speaks wrote this great informative guest post highlighting a great Google Chrome plug-in. I hope you will take a moment to watch the video as she briefly shows you how Zemanta can save you time and help you blog more efficiently.

Zemanta Extension for Google Chrome

Guest post by Ms. Ileane Speaks

Google Chrome is one of the hottest new offerings from Google. Because of its lightening fast speed and extensive library of Google Chrome plugins (also called extensions) many users are making Chrome their browser of choice.

I decided to send out a Tweet to see what some of my followers favorite extensions are. Read more »

We Blog Better has afforded me a pretty amazing journey up to this point. It’s provided a wonderful outlet for expressing many of my thoughts about blogging and social media. But the time has come for me to turn it over to someone whom I specifically sought out for the role of owning and editing this blog.

I began We Blog Better when I was writing only occasionally for Fuel Your Blogging and had far too many thoughts to share there. But with some recent developments in my own life, I’ve felt the need to regain focus and concentrate more energy on fewer projects. In particular, I’m going to be pouring more effort into Fuel Your Blogging and reviving the blog section of my web and logo design site as well.

I have loved getting to know the community of bloggers that surrounds this site. I’ve appreciated your feedback and support along the way and am grateful for the trust of We Blog Better’s subscribers and regular readers. I believe that you’re going to love Kiesha!

Kiesha Easley currently blogs personally at Highly Favored. She holds a Master of Arts in English. She is a graduate of the University of Toledo and has been published on Twitip.com, Examiner.com, Associate Programs, EzineArticles.com and other sites, as well as guest posting for Fuel Your Blogging.

I do have to tell the story here of what caught my attention about Kiesha. I had emailed her asking for a guest post for Fuel Your Blogging. I mentioned that something about her writing had “peaked” my interest. Her response was kind and engaging and she happened to correct my spelling (it should have been “piqued”) but never drew attention to my error. This struck me as cool. One of the things I value highly in blogging is a commitment to excellent writing, and Kiesha fits the bill.

I hope you’ll lend your ear and your support as Kiesha takes the reins and makes this blog her own. She’s going to do a fantastic job and I’m going to be around for a long time to promote her work here.

Thanks again for reading and supporting We Blog Better – you guys are all the best!

Hint: It’s not to “make money online.”

It’s because blogging represents a much larger principle – that people and organizations have the power to publish content into the stream of all that people consume. Whether you have a divine or humanitarian message to proclaim or a product to market, online publishing is the future.

Mitch Joel agrees…

Read more »

For the past few days, I’ve been offering some video posts here about the cloud that surrounds content consumers today…

• Get Your Content Into the Cloud
• Infiltrating the Cloud In Which People Breathe
• Decrease the Distance by Growing Your Network

Today, I want to get a bit more specific about how to understand the cloud and begin to infiltrate it. The secret boils down to shifting your thinking. Your site doesn’t exist to consume users, it exists to feed users where they hang out.

And here’s the Youtube link to Your Site Is Just a Launching Pad Into the Cloud.

People who are active online have determined the size of the cloud in which they consume content and have a tendency not to venture outside of it. How then do you connect with them? By growing your own network and decreasing the distance of separation.

Here’s a Youtube link to Decrease the Distance by Growing Your Network

Today’s challenge is simple: reach out. Find a new blogger with whom you haven’t connected before and visit their site. Subscribe, comment, or send them an encouraging note. In my next post, I’d like to talk about optimizing your blog for getting your content into the cloud.

If you are a content provider, you have to stop thinking about how to get people to arrive at your website and start asking how you can get your content integrated into the cloud in which people live their daily lives.

This is what I discuss in this video, but I’ll be breaking this idea down in future posts to talk about some of the specifics.

Here’s a link to the YouTube version of Get Your Content Into the Cloud.

Also check out my new Better Blogging Vimeo channel.

“Social media marketing” is a fad, a trend, and it’s raging with popularity right now. Will it last? Absolutely, but not as we know it today. Some of the buzz words will eventually be dropped and social media marketing will finally be seen for what it is – a very effective single prong of a multi-faceted way of sharing news about a person, product, or organization. But it still won’t reach my grandmother.

Read more »

I’ll be brief. I’ve created a Google group. The purpose is simple – ask other bloggers to promote your posts that you feel are worthy of the world’s attention. There are several important catches though that will hopefully make it worth while…

• I’m going to close new memberships after 100 bloggers have joined so it never becomes overwhelming.
• I’m allowing anyone to apply since I want participation to be voluntary, but I’m only going to approve people who are unselfish, will give a moment now and then to promote another blogger, and who produce useful and valuable content.
• Members can invite other members, but it still stops at 100.

Participating is as simple as sending a single email and reading one email per day.

If you don’t get in, I’d recommend you start your own group and limit it to 100 also, for all the same reasons.

Ready? Here’s the link: Worthy of Attention Google group.

After the group fills up, this message will self-destruct.

In this short video, I’ve shared some thoughts about the single greatest threat to your blog, or even your entire blogging career. A few notes are below…

The single greatest threat to your blogging career is YOU!

Four ways you can kill your own blog…

• Greed – getting anxious to see the return can cause you to mess up early on.
• Self-doubt – negative thinking can kill your blog.
• Laziness – success ALWAYS involves hard work.
• Stupidity – just don’t do anything stupid!

This is kind of an editorial take on a particular issue, but I’m not entirely sure where I stand. Michael Arrington has just published a piece on TechCrunch about the tyranny of government and our duty of confidentiality as bloggers. I don’t necessarily disagree with Arrington’s conclusion – that bloggers should have the guts to keep confidences. I simply wonder what I would do in the situation he describes.

Read more »