Assessments Blog

Archive for September, 2011

Blogging is an effective way to express yourself and be heard on your favorite topics. Facebook social networking, on the other hand, is becoming the most popular way to connect with people, share and make friends. Is it possible to tap into the power of the Facebook social graph to launch a career in blogging? Maybe. While Facebook may lack the tools that a professional blogger would need, it has enough to get a novice started. And with hundreds of millions of users and your own friends and family there, it is perhaps the best venue to be in– you know without doubt there’s someone there reading.

So how do you blog with Facebook?

Blogging with Facebook Notes

The proper blogging tool to use on Facebook is the Notes application. It isn’t directly accessible like the Status feature is. You find Notes in the list of applications on your Facebook home page, on the left column (click More if it doesn’t appear at first). To publish a blog post or “Note” as it’s called in Facebook:

Open the Notes tab. Click Write a Note. Compose your Note in the Notes editor. Click Publish.

It can’t be simpler than that. You can format your text in bold, italic, underline, bullets or numbers and quotes. You can insert hyperlinks and attach photos. Each Note can be saved as a draft, deleted and previewed. You can tag friends in your Notes and they can tag you as well.

Blogging with Facebook Statuses

Until recently, the Facebook Status feature was good enough only for a few hundred characters— just enough to make a short update. However in late 2011, Facebook lifted this restriction. Now you can write Statuses as long as 60,000 characters. That’s more than enough for a blog entry!

This change is beneficial for people who like to disclose lengthy thoughts. Because Statuses get more exposure than Notes, your blog posts stand a better chance of getting attention than the old Notes.

To blog with Statuses:

Go to the News Feed on the left column of the Facebook home page, or go to your Profile. Click in the box that says “What’s on your mind?” Type your blog post. Click Post.

And that’s all there is to it. Nothing fancy. But beware of using the Status feature too much for blogging. People are used to short updates in the News Feed. Don’t publish a thousand-word post and expect your friends to read every word of it. Use the new character limit wisely.

Are you tired of the regular templates that come with Blogger? Well never fear because this article will show you how you can change the colors and layout of your chosen template into something that’s unique and attractive. You can add different headers, change the background, and even change the font style and the best thing is that it’s actually very simple. So let’s get started so you can learn how to edit your Blogger templates.

We will start with the easy stuff first and change the fonts and colors of your template. Head to your Blogger Dashboard and click the layout tab. From there you’ll see four links. Choose the font’s and colors link and you’ll be taken to a page that is split into two sections. The top section contains the items that you can edit and change and the bottom section gives you a preview of what that change will look like. Feel free to change and play around as much as you like because nothing with actually be changed until you press the Save Changes button, so if you choose a color or font that you don’t like you can always cancel those changes. Once you are happy with your template then save your changes and you are done.

Next let’s add a custom header to our page. Most Blogger template headers are defaulted to display just text but you can easily add an image behind the text or even to replace the text at the top. Go to the Layout Tab and click on the Page Elements link. You’ll see a page that shows the basic layout of your blog. Find your header at the top and click the Edit link to bring up the Configure Header display. From here you can upload your image and choose to have it behind your test or instead of your text. Most Blogger header sizes are 730 pixels wide so keep this in mind when making your header graphic.

Advanced editing can also be done to your template however you will need some html and css knowledge before you decide to try and rewrite any code. However there are some simple things that you can do that shouldn’t be too hard. The first is changing the background color of your page. Scroll down until you see the body stylesheet of the template. This is where you’ll find the basic information about your template such as background color, line-height and general font-size. If you know the hexadecimal color that you want for your background then just replace the hex number (the number that starts with a hash (#)) with your new hex number.

In the advanced editing section you can also add your Google Analytics code at the bottom of the template before the /body tag if you would like to track your visitors.

To get people to start noticing and visiting a blog, ongoing marketing has to be in place, otherwise it will never be found by anyone. There are many ways in which it can be promoted and one of the most effective ways is by promoting it with Networked Blogs.

This is a Facebook application so the only other thing needed is a Facebook account. Using them together consistently will help to increase visibility and from there, new customers and clients can be found. To market effectively only requires a few steps.

Get the application by going to its page. Place a tab on any personal profile or business page so that visitors will be able to click on it and read a post whenever it is updated. Before doing this however, claim ownership by either getting no less than 10 friends to help or by adding some html. Adding the html code is the quickest and easiest way.

Once claimed, start inviting family and friends on Facebook; they are more likely to join first. Remember to always send an invite to any new friends too. This will enable them to not only read all posts, both old and new, but rate them as well. A good idea would be to find a way to encourage them to invite their friends to join. This will help to continually increase readership.

To get the most people to agree to join, get to know them first. Talk to them, ask questions and take a genuine interest. After a short while, tell them about it and also tell them how to join as it may not be immediately obvious. Establish the know, like and trust factor and they will be more likely to read each time.

Take the Networked Blog widget and place this on the blog. Visitors will then be able to join via this method instead of having to find it via Facebook. This is also a great way to increase social proof because some people like to see that others are interested in something before they even consider joining. The good news is, the more people who join, the more who will be willing to copy them and do the same.

Ensure that every new post is being fed directly on to the business page’s wall automatically. This will save lots of time and each and every day, as well as using Facebook, engage with friends, mention the blog as much as possible on forums, Twitter and leave valuable comments on other people’s blogs too. Promote the blog in this way alongside Networked Blogs and more and more people will start to notice.