When we talk blogging, we usually focus on the platform. Should I do WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous or even TypePad? So you get set up on the blog platform, you have your URL, you may have a hosting provider, but then what? Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to discuss with you the nuts and blots of the blog.

First off, to have a blog, you must know what you want to write about. I’m sure you’ve already done so because you have a URL set up. But yet when you sit down and want to start writing about how great your business is and why everyone should hire you, I’m sure you may encounter a bit of writer’s block.

The Editorial Calendar

You don’t have to have a “hard core” editorial calendar with every single blog post you plan to publish through the rest of the year. However, you at least should have a calendar somewhere (be it in Google, Outlook, or even a big tear-sheet calendar above your desk). This calendar should have themes. That’s right, themes. Each week you should write content focusing on a general topic or subject matter. In fact, take inspiration from your monthly newsletter or other publications you may have in-house. Have that editorial calendar influence your own; that way you can mention content that you’ve previously written to support your new content – thereby this also promotes your existing content. That’s always a winner! With these themes in play, write a blog post every Friday or Saturday “wrapping up” the week with a round-up of blog posts and online articles supporting that theme that include both your own blog’s and other’s content. This is fantastic for generating link-backs within your own site (great for SEO) and for providing a very strong round-up of content for your readership.

The Set-Up

Whatever blog platform you are on, most have Categories. Come up with five (and no more than five unless you absolutely need more than five) categories that focus on not just what content you are delivering, but also that are broad enough to fit in multiple topics. The more categories, the more confusing your blog is to navigate. As the K.I.S.S. acronym goes, “Keep It Simple Stupid”.

This also goes for plug-ins. The plug-in is mostly used with WordPress as this platform is very much viewed as a basic template with lots of nifty plug-ins available for you to tap into to make your blog just that much more awesome. There are a few plug-ins I definitely recommend. Here are a few for WordPress that I recommend using (please share your other favorites in the comments!):

• Akismet: Spam be gone! This plug-in helps get rid of all of those annoying spam bots commenting on your site.
• Feedburner: You know when you click on the RSS feed logo, you either see a nice set-up where you can choose which RSS reader you wish to read the feed through or you see a bunch of gobbledygook? Feedburner makes sure you get the nice set-up.
• Google XML Sitemaps: This creates a special XML sitemap that helps search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to better index your blog
• LinkWithin or Outbrain: Both of these show related posts at the end of each of your blog post from within your own site to promote people staying on your blog and to continue reading. Outbrain usually has one sponsored post that leads away from your site – but if you garner enough traffic you can reap the affiliate benefits from that!
• Livefyre: Finding the best commenting plug-in is a difficult one. Many people prefer Disqus, but I’m a Livefyre go for its functionality to bring in tweets and Facebook posts automatically as comments so people reading the blog can see people’s reactions from across multiple social channels.
• Platinum SEO Pack: This really kicks butt in optimizing your blog for SEO. Period.
• ShareThis: Definitely add this so people can share your content within your own interface without leaving your blog.
• Tweet Old Post: I love this plug-in in helping me tweet out past content that I don’t have time to manually go back and tweet out. It’s customizable and oh so very helpful.

Internal Searching

When you search on Google, you keep your searches pretty straight-forward right? Of course you do unless you are just genuinely curious on what happens if you type in a ridiculous search such as “ostrich roundabout popsicles” (and yes I did Google that after I typed it – pretty funny results!). But seriously, if you want to find out information on optimizing your website for search engines, you probably will Google something like, “SEO website optimization how-to”. You need to make sure your blog provides reliable search results for those searching within it. You can do this by trying to match these keywords and phrases within your title, content, tags and meta descriptions. (The meta description is the phrase that pops up underneath your blog title when it pops up in search engines and within your own blog search results. They are limited to 160 characters so be brief, otherwise you and others will see a “…” at the end of it.) By making sure your content is searchable, the titles may not be as fun, but they definitely will be effective.

The SEO Factor

This one has a few sub-bullet points under it, but let’s focus on the basics. I mentioned meta descriptions before and the few SEO plug-ins mentioned above really help with this, but just be aware of SEO with keywords, linking back to your own content, meta descriptions, tags, and what I feel is most important, not duplicating content! It is not good having your blog copied and pasted in its entirety onto another blog. Google flags that, calls it bad, and can shut your site down. Blogging can be a mad, mad world, so keep it content-focused on good quality and being original.

I could go on and on when it comes to blog set-up and maintenance, but these few steps can hopefully help get you started! Any questions or things to add? Please comment below and I’ll see what I can do to answer your questions!

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Social Media

Social media mama Rachel Yeomans has been pushing me out of the nest for a while now, and as I’ve been Tweeting more and more I’ve taken notice of the transparency Twitter brings to our waking lives.

As a working artist with a full time job, I spend a significant amount of time in meetings, side-meetings, meeting recaps, events, event planning meetings…you get the idea. And sure, there are many a time when I think “Gee, this meeting is a waste of my time. Why am I here? I could be doing something much more productive.” I have no doubt that every one of you readers thinks the same thing now and again. And in the pre-social media days, if you anticipated that your presence wasn’t necessary at a meeting, you could make up a legitimate-sounding excuse to not attend the meeting, or at least cut out early and no one would think the less of you.

But it’s all different when you’re Tweeting (and Facebooking). If you make up that legitimate excuse and excuse yourself early from a meeting, then tweet about how much fun you are having at a concert or performance, I hope you realize that you look like an irresponsible jerk.

So please, y’all, Tweet away, and make up your legitimate excuses for shirking responsibilities, but you’d best think twice before revealing to us all that you could care less.

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Sara Gorsky Categories: General, Social Media

When it comes to apps, I’ve tried my fair share of Twitter applications. Why would a Twitter app make my personal life easier? Because this is not just a Twitter app. It’s BoxCar! The app sends you push notifications of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google Voice, email, RSS feeds, and dozens of others. Once you receive the push notification, you can open in the native app automatically to respond.

The push notifications come across quicker than Echophon, Facebook, and Google Voice for me (the only ones I use currently). So how does this save time? As a community manager, I have several different accounts and campaigns that I manage. I can set up a unique stream in BoxCar, even with custom sounds, to see the things I need to see as they happen. And if I need to respond, the app takes me directly to the proper account. No worrying about sending a tweet from the wrong account. All this saves me time, makes it easier to manage and is free to use.

Of course there is a paid version that removes the ads from across the bottom. (And don’t be fooled by the ad that looks like a message indicator!) Here’s a link to the BoxCar app in iTunes.

Have you tried BoxCar yet? What do you think? Once you give it a try, come back and leave a comment so we can compare notes.

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Tim McDonald Categories: Gadget, General, Mobile, Social Media, Technology

When your passion aligns with your work, you are one lucky person. That’s what I consider myself. I’m Astek’s Senior Community Manager. What’s a community manager you ask? In simple terms, I’ll say it’s the voice of the brand to the community and the voice of the community to the brand. In even simplier terms, I sum it up as “Be helpful”
So why is community management my passion? And maybe more importantly, how did I know I wanted to do this for work?
I did not grow up wishing I would be a community manager (actually I wanted to be a surf bum in Baja California, but that’s a completely different story!). It was something that happened over the course of the last 5 years. Beginning with my days in residential real estate, where I learned about self branding, marketing and social media. My quest for learning lead me to Social Media Club Chicago, where I became director of communications and was responsible for growing and managing our community which has grown from 300 to over 3000 in the last 3 years.
As I transitioned out of real estate, I knew that this was what I wanted to do. I had the opportunity to work as Zaarly‘s Chicago Ambassordor last summer and had a meeting with Rachel Yeomans that started as an idea for a panel of speakers on community management, evolved into the Chicago Community Manager Group and then led me to form My Community Manager. (more details on the My Community Manager story here) And of course, but not least, begin discussion with Rachel and Andy about coming to work for Astek.
I still am actively involved with Social Media Club, am growing a community with My Community Manager and enjoy every day I get to work with Astek on community management for them and our clients as we continue to grow!

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Tim McDonald Categories: General, Social Media

Back in August Google first started piloting “Author information in search results” (Matt Cutts YouTube Videos 1 & 2) giving authors more prominence in SERPs

Here’s the how-to link – the original post by Google: Google Commandment #1,785,234,002

One of the final steps requires you to add the pubs you write for via the “Contributor to” link. The “Contributor to” link is not so easy to find so I embedded a screen grab of it here. Click the image for a larger version.

This should not take more than 15 minutes start to finish to set up.

It looks like Google is now also giving more favorable rankings to the Google+ profile accounts over other profile platforms in SERPs. More on that, a Techworld article expounding on a Danny Sullivan article.

To summarize all that – You need to get your profile up on Google+ ASAP!

After it’s set up with you’ve got your pic, pub links up, and your articles have your email address in them, (how that happens – see dev team) and Google waves their magic wand, your picture will pop up along side the search result, along with links to other articles you published, your Google+ profile, and social/sharing platforms, among other things.

Not only will you will be the coolest (and one of the most prominent) results in Google, but all your competing editors and authors will be very jealous. Do it for the bragging rights of increased traffic AND enhanced celebrity exposure.

You are going to have to get your email in your profile and that email address must appear in the post.  More spam – maybe. More web traffic – for sure.

There are other ways to comply but this might be the easiest for most companies. Either way you will need to involve your dev team.

And – You’ll need to get the dev teams on this soon so you are not the last one to the party.

How to Pitch Upper Management:
Push this deliverable hard with upper management as a high-value low-impact way to increase page views for existing and future website content. “Page views = sales boss!”

Get a meeting with the dev team, have them watch the Matt Cutts videos and read the full post on Google before.

How to Pitch the Dev Team:
You can tell the dev guys to think of Google as job security, if they don’t already realize this. “And our CMS should do this automatically so we are not bugging you every day to update our posts,” you’ll say to reinforce the benefit to prioritizing this project. Set a near-term deadline and make it happen.

Yes it’s just another thing that Google is making you do, but it is a must do – soon.

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Tom Lynch Categories: google, How To, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web

2011 was an amazing year of learning and growing at Astek. In our industry things change pretty much daily, even hourly. We are lucky to work with so many forward-thinking clients and partners who understand that building real success in this market takes time, discipline, and communication. Oh yeah, and we think life’s too short not to have a little fun along the way.

Early in the year, Rachel and I attended SXSW Interactive, a top-tier conference for all things Web, mobile and social in Austin, TX. One of our top goals was to find the ideal social media management/monitoring/analytics platform with enterprise capabilities and agency pricing. We’ve met some talented people along the way with some pretty cool products, but there is a lot of room for growth in this space. We’ll be rolling out a new social media event product of our own in the coming weeks — stay tuned!

Supporting an ongoing effort to get more social at Astek, we started video recording the strange and mystical things that happen at Astek staff meetings. Here’s a glimpse:

In June, we kicked our relationship with SIPA up a notch and have worked since then to increase their social media efforts. It’s greatly rewarding to work with a group that understands social media are about creating relationships, and just like relationships in the “real world,” there is no easy button or shortcut.

Who is SIPA, you may ask? SIPA, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, is the international trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of commercial information providers (paid content) serving niche communities. These are primarily B2B trade journals, but members also include consumer-oriented Kiplinger and publishers serving other markets. There are numerous SIPs (specialized information publishers) out there serving all kinds of niche community information needs, whether or not they identify themselves with this group.

We’ve been SIPA members for years, teaching and learning along with top publishing talent, and in June we started managing social media for SIPA’s annual publishing conference in Washington, D.C. We applied what we learned at SXSW and other places along the way, creating a robust social media event experience. More recently, it seems like a dream that I was swimming in the Atlantic just a few short weeks ago following the SIPA Miami Publishing Marketing Conference, where we had four Astek team members speaking, learning, and helping.

At the Miami conference last year, I led a roundtable discussion on mobile publishing and met a publisher called The Medical Letter, who needed help building mobile apps on all major platforms (iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry). We worked diligently with them and our friends at FanWide to create cutting edge publishing apps and successfully launched the iPhone/iPad and Android versions. In the spirit of mutual learning and sharing, my client and I presented a webinar hosted by SIPA to inform other publishers about how to step into the mobile space.

In the four years I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve seen it grow from an esoteric geek-oriented communication platform to a widely adopted and ubiquitous brand imprint on websites everywhere. Yet many people I talk to still question its worth for driving revenue. As we’ve embraced Twitter as the ideal communication platform for events and conferences, I’ve noticed that finally people are able to grasp the potential for this simple, yet powerful medium for enhancing communication at an event and also bridging the communication gap between cyclical events in ways not before seen at this scale.

As we continue to connect the dots for publishers and other event promoters, we continue our decade-long focus on content management solutions facilitating the digital publishing revolution. Astek’s own CMS, Webany, is ideally suited for the Web-first editorial trend that continues to gain momentum. Basically, rather than thinking about getting your print publication onto the Web, publish in real-time on the Web and build your print publication from there.

We’re so excited that our lady, Webany, is growing up right in the middle of the dramatic shifts in the publishing industry, and is flexible enough to handle them. Haven’t been introduced yet? Just ask. We’d love to show you some of her newest features including robust digital rights management and the ability to export articles and other information directly to Adobe InDesign, the preeminent desktop publishing platform, via XML.

Reversing a publisher’s workflow is not a task to be taken lightly, so we lend our expertise to the process in addition to the technology, which is a combination that’s future-proofing editorial teams around the globe. As publishers figure out the moves that work for them along the way, we enjoy learning and teaching as we go. 2011 brought many clients to Webany, including Wiley Publishing, The Alter Group and Staff Management.

Contributing to our community is a core mission at Astek, so recently we were proud to launch a new brand and website for Promethean Theatre Ensemble, our 2011 Astek Grant recipient. Along the way, we greatly expanded the digital marketing program for The Chicago Dancing Festival and got new websites launched for The Jeanine Sheridan Foundation, DanceWorks Chicago and Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) as well. Yep, we like to move.

And last but not least is a particularly rewarding combination of app dev and do-gooding. This multi-year project with My25, which is partially funded by the USDA, has engaged Astek to help tackle the growing obesity epidemic in America. My25’s approach is to use software and community tools to encourage better eating through realistic meal-planning based on simple and proven plate portioning techniques. We designed a prototype for the next generation of the software and created this video to help with fund-raising (yes, we spent more time on this than the staff meeting video).

Thanks for being a part of our ongoing exploration and we look forward to connecting you with your goals in 2012!

 This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other epiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media, Technology

A few weeks ago I was standing on the sidelines to cheer on a couple of friends running the Chicago Marathon. They both did very well!

While I was waiting for them to pass, I snapped this photo on my iPhone 4 of a guy wearing a tutu, which just seemed comical in the context of the race.

I uploaded it shortly thereafter from my iPhone to Facebook. Within minutes, a friend of mine spotted my Facebook post and commented, “I know him! That’s awesome!!!”

She tagged him in the photo, which notified him instantly. He responded, “I would have stopped to pose if you asked. What mile were you at? Thanks again for getting it. It’s fantastic.”

We had a bit of conversation and are now friends. This breaks my rule of Facebook friendship, which requires that I have spoken to you in person for at least 60 minutes, but I felt like making an exception.

I have to say as long as I’ve been on Facebook, this is one of the crazier small world moments I’ve had. With more than 45,000 people running, I took four photos and got one of someone two degrees of separation from me. And with Facebook, in a matter of hours I was connected with him.

Maybe oddballs just run in similar circles and another oddball caught my attention.

As we enter an age of facial recognition technology, things like this will become more commonplace. In this case, however, I’m not sure what tech could have recognized the tutu guy.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Mobile, Social Media, Technology

I have never been able to get into Digg or any of the other sharable interest-tracking type tools. This weekend I heard Pinterest mentioned to me at least 8 times so I figured I finally needed to check it out. What a FANTASTIC tool!

Pinterest is a service that allows you to create online “Pinboards” for things you are interested in. Looking for new curtains for your living room? Create a “Living Room Curtains” pinboard and each time you find one you like, “Pin it” from an easy button you can drag and drop into your browser tool bar. Afterwards you can go back to your board to view everything you pinned, make your final choice and follow the photo back to the original page.

When you create an account you can easily find your Facebook and/or Twitter friends and identify categories of stuff you are interested in (DIY/Crafts, Home Decor, Photography, etc.) and you will see the pins from prominent pinners in these categories.

This is a very easy site to use. I suggest you request an invite today! You will be glad you did!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

Not all of your online interactions with your customers happen on your website. Emails, social media, mobile – there are a plethora of ways you connect and more being invented all the time. Luckily, there are a wide range of analytics tools out there that make tracking

! Today, I’m going to cover two of these tools: one that is quick, easy and free and one that is full featured at a reasonable cost.

Bitly
Bitly is a URL shortener tool that also shows you excellent analytics about how your link is used. You can get a LOT of information from this awesome, free tool.

Let’s say you are having a sale or special on your website and you want to distribute a link via a regular email and on Facebook and on Twitter. But if you just start sending people to your homepage, you won’t know if they are coming because they were going to come anyway or because they saw you promoting your sale. Create a Bitly link using their URL shortener and always use the Bitly link when talking about your sale. Then after the sale is finished, you can log into Bitly and see how effective your promotions were!

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Using the Referrers Detail, you can see who came in from each website or social media platform you distributed the link on. The “direct” refers would be ones that came from emails. You can also see when people were clicking and where the people who clicked are located.

Bitly also plays nice with analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, Omniture, and Webtrends, as well as social media management platforms such as…

Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a full bodied social media management tool with excellent built-in analytics that allow you to view your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Analytics from one, beautiful interface. They also offer additional social media management tools like integrated feeds from multiple accounts, smart search to find new customers, contact management to track communication history, and a powerful scheduler tool. Accounts start as low as $9/mo.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web