If you are a blogger who is on-the-go and do not have access or time for blogging from a PC, this post is for you. I have provided links to some handy applications that will help you blog from your iPhone or BlackBerry. These tools are great for blogging from anywhere, especially since these handheld devices are becoming so popular.

iPhone:

• BlogPress – This application comes with a rich-text WYSIWYG editor, multiple image support, YouTube integration, landscape editing mode, and WordPress/Blogger support.
• Kyte – Enables you to record video and post it directly to the web with ease, and also will allow you to do the same with images as well. This application is a great for a photo or video blogger!
• RSSPush – If you receive your blog posts by RSS, this is a great application to organize your feeds by keyword categorization.

BlackBerry:

• BBMetaBlog – Great WYSIWYG application that allows HTML support to help modify your blog post’s appearance.
• WordPress junkie? This application is for you, especially since it has comment and Gravatar support.
• ShoZu – Keep up to date with your social media and blogging platforms with this handy notification tool.

Please feel free to leave any feedback regarding any of these apps, or if you have an app that you would like to share the benefits your blogging, please feel free to share it and I will add it to the list. I do hope these apps help you blog on-the-go.

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As many of us know, Twitter is a great way to publicize blog posts. With this in mind, an efficient and convenient way to help spread word about your blog posts via this medium is by installing a service called TweetMeme. This is a site which acts like a social bookmarking niche for Twitter, but instead of the voting system, sites gain popularity by the method of retweeting.

TweetMeme is completely free, and can be added to your blog posts, so that you and/or other readers of your blog can retweet the subject and URL with just one click. With this service, you can see how many retweets the specific blog post has, along with other Twitter users that have retweeted it. As you can see, I have just added the service to this blog.

To install TweetMeme on your blog, I have provided a link to a quick tutorial from the W3CGallery Blog. WordPress users can add this as a plugin to their blog via the WordPress Plugin Directory and enabling it in the Plugins section of the admin panel.

This is a viral (and addictive) way of getting your blog (and blog posts) noticed on Twitter and the blogosphere!

Happy Blogging!

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One of the draw backs of using social media as a means of advertising, is updating the page(s) of the social media sites. A lot of the time, you may be to busy with another work related task, or you may just forget. You could depend on your audience to submit your blog posts to sites such as Digg, or Reddit, but that doesn’t mean that it will happen. Another option, you could pay someone to maintain your social media sites for you. This is however looked down upon by many of the social media members. So, how can you for sure your social media page stays up to date? You could allow plugins to do these tasks for you. Most of the more popular blogging software, like Wordpress, are designed to allow third party plugins, and most communities have a lot of very useful plugins that are free. Here are some plugins for Wordpress that allow you to connect to your blog and your social media pages.

Twitme – Twitme is a Twitter plugin which tweets for you whenever you post a new article. The great thing about this plugin is that it automatically creates a short URL for the tweet, and you can format tweet anyway you want. This plugin even allows you to tweet your older entries, which is great if you just created a Twitter account, or if you want to make for sure all your articles have been tweeted.

Twitter Tools – Twitter Tools can be summed up as a conversation between your blog and your Twitter account. Some of the features which Twitter Tools support are tweeting from the Admin panel, tweeting from a sidebar on your blog, create a blog entry from your tweets, and pass your tweets along to other services. Twitter Tools’ ability to create a blog entry from your tweets is really great, since there are times you may want to tweet about a website you saw, but don’t have time to write a full article about it. The only downfall to this plugin is that the author no longer supports the plugin, so you must rely on the community for any issues you may experience.

Social Profilr – If you ever wanted to display all your social profiles on your blog, this is the plugin for you. Social Profilr adds links to all your social profiles via a sidebar widget. This plugin seems to benefit the visitor more than you, but this isn’t the case. If the visitor chooses to follow you on a social media site, then their friends can see your profiles also. Which if your profile is about your site, then there is a chance the visitor’s friend will visit, thus spreading your site’s name.

Sociable – Sociable is a popular plugin that allows users to submit your site to multiple social sites via the click of a button. The plugin includes most of the popular social sites, like Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, but also includes less popular sites like Blogmarks. With Sociable, you are encouraging visitors to submit your site to their favorite social media site, it may also push those visitors who thinks it is to much work to submit articles also.

Digg Widget – This is a simple sidebar widget which allows users to see the last 10 articles from your site which have been submitted to Digg. If the visitor is a Digg user, this will make it easier for them to find posts which have already been submitted to Digg.

Digg This Badge – This plugin allows you to display the famous “Digg This” button in your article. Digg This Badge, interfaces with Digg’s API, and allows you to choose when to display the Digg badge, based on the number of diggs an article has. This is another great way to display how popular (or unpopular) an article is on digg.

We covered Digg, and Twitter heavily in this article. But if your site does well on Reddit, or Stumbleupon, then head over to Wordpress’s plugin page (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/) and search for specific plugins based on those social media sites. We just gave examples of what the community provides. There are way too many social sites for us to attempt to list a plugin for them all. If you have any other great social media plugins, tell us about them in the comment section.

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Welcome to this Thursday’s links post! Here are this week’s pick…

12 Reasons Why You Should Own Your Blog

Why and How to Join a Feedburner Network

How to Build Your Blog Using Good Old-Fashioned E-mail

Designing for RSS Feeds

The Ins And Outs Of Tweeting

Happy Blogging!

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This past week, WebProNews interviewed Matt Cutts of Google on his latest project, Google Friend Connect API. Cutts had some awesome things to say about his new project:

What got my attention was when Cutts referred to a WordPress plug-in that will be integrated using this API. This would be a great feature for bloggers, because you could jump from one WordPress blog to another without having to enter your name, e-mail, URL, etc. when leaving a comment. You would automatically be signed in using your Google, Yahoo, OpenID, or AIM account.

What are your thoughts on this new API from Google?

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For those of you out there who use the Twitter social-networking blogging site, I have specified some more tools that I have come across recently to enhance your Twittering experience:

• Twellow – Want to find friends/followers near you, or that share the same interest as you? This service acts as a Twitter directory of users that are sorted by categories, and you can find users near you using this service’s TwellowHood feature.
• Twply – Want your @replies forwarded to your e-mail? This opt in service will allow you to receive direct messages that are sent to your account also to your e-mail. This is a good service if you are a Twitterer on the go.
• @spellingbot – Need something spelled, and don’t have any spell checking software around? Send an direct message to @spellingbot and your word in question will instantly be corrected.

Happy Blogging!

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If you are either a new blogger just getting introduced to the blogosphere, or you’ve been blogging for a long time and want to gain more visibility and attention to your blog, I have provided a few tips to give your site a better audience.

• Learn SEO – SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is key for the placement and appearance of your site on search engines. There are specific rules and guidelines to placing your blog higher within search engine results pages. Want to know more about SEO? WebProWorld is a great resource and forum for everything SEO-wise, and a great place to ask SEO-related questions.
• Social Media/Networking – If you are involved in social media/networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, these are great places to help promote and advertise your blog. A trend that I have been seeing on Facebook is that users have been syncing their blog posts to the Facebook Notes section of their profile, and adding applications to their profile page like Blog It!
• RSS Feeds – RSS feeds are always beneficial to add to your blog. These allow people who read a lot of blog posts to view and organize them all in one place. This helps keep the user interested in the content of your blog.
• Article Directories – Submitting your articles to various article directories will help the publicity of your blog, and compete with other writers as your articles will be placed by category. If you would like to submit to a vast amount of directories in a small amount of time, you will need to subscribe to a submission service (e.g. SubmitterBot) that will automatically submit your article to different article directories for you.

Happy Blogging!

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I have provided this week’s cut of Thursday Links below:

Breaking The Rules Of Blogging and Succeeding

Is Your Neighbor On Twitter?

Are There Any Good Domains Left? The Importance of Keyword Search and Findability

We Can Learn From E-mail Spammers

Promoting Your Blog During The Holidays

Feedback is always welcomed!

Happy Blogging

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A few months ago, Chris wrote an article about some common blog-related Firefox add-ons in his post, “Five Firefox Faves For Blogging,” so I thought I would mention a few of mine that I find useful for my blogging habits that might also benefits yours too:

• TwitterFox – Notifies you of your friend’s tweets and messages in real-time on your status bar. You can also: check other Twitter accounts that you have, post tweets and review private messages sent to you. Great for the Twitter addict.
• HeadlinesTicker – If you are subscribed to a quantity of RSS feeds and want to see them all progressively, this may be the add-on that you are looking for. This add-on shows you your up-to-date RSS feeds in a “stock market ticker” fashion at the bottom of your Firefox window. You may also click on the name of the feed, and it will bring you straight to the RSS article.
• ScribeFire – This add-on allows you to write blog posts straight from your status bar. It also allows you to drag text in from another source, and post to various blog sites. Great for the blogger on the go.

Your feedback on these are surely welcomed.

Happy Blogging!

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For several days, I’ve been trying to spend a little time getting more organized to increase the efficiency of my work. What I have mostly been doing is reorganizing my Google Reader account.

As a writer/blogger, I have plenty of sources to draw from, and I subscribe to a ton of RSS feeds. I also write for a variety of different blogs/sites, and they’re not all in the exact same niche (plus I have other interests and subscriptions that don’t have much to do with my writing at all). I have been working for a while with pretty much a jumbled mess of all of these things. Don’t get me wrong. I had it organized to a certain extent. I had my work stuff separate from my non-work stuff, although as I take on new writing projects, the line on some of that begins to blur a bit.

But I have been breaking down my organizational structure as far as I can take it. For example, I have a folder dedicated to only blogging-related sources, that I will draw from for this blog in the future. This way, when I know it’s time to write something for PureBlogging.com, I can easily peruse this folder and find a topic that I wish to discuss (if I’m having writers block) or a reference that I can cite. I follow a similar pattern for my other writing projects.

I have also been going around seeking out new sources of information. The more sources the better as far as I’m concerned. The more information coming in, the more informed I am likely to be, which can only enhance my writing.

This is all probably common sense to a lot of you, and it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but it can be a bit time consuming. That’s just the thing. I think sometimes we get caught up in our work (and non-work lives for that matter) and don’t take the time to get organized, which in the long run will likely save you a lot of time and increase your productivity.

I’ve been doing it a little at a time, from day to day as to not take too big a chunk out of my day. When it’s all said and done, my Reader is going to be a well-oiled machine and my writing quantity and quality should increase as a product of that.

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