If you guest post as much as I do, you are (1) probably guest blogging too much and (2) already losing track of what, where and when.

My guest posts are usually the best of what I can. It’s unfair to this blog readers if I am not sharing my best articles with them. Besides, sharing your guest posts on your own blog gives you much more:

• Link to your guest posts to give more exposure to them;
• Share your guest posts with your loyal community and readers;
• Create your guest posting portfolio for your clients and partners to check.

At MyBlogGuest.com one of our PRO features allows our users to automatically share all their guest posts via a customized widget (you can see the sample here in the right sidebar).

Besides, one of my old posts shares two more wicked ways to share your guest post on your blog.

This post adds to the above tips: let’s try to create a master feed of my main guest accounts and publicize the feed here!

1. Create a Feed Where You Don’t Have One

Some of the blogs I contribute to have no separate RSS feed for the author page. For those pages I have to create an RSS feed.

There are quite a few tools that can do that, but the one that has proved to be the most effective is Feed43

It requires no registration but it did require some considerable brain effort from my part. I don’t pretend to be too tech-savvy, nor am I too stupid, but I spent like 40 minutes trying to figure it out. I was quite happy with the result though!

RSS feed for the author pages should be no-brainer: the page consists of links to your articles – all those links have the same HTML markup, so all you need to so is to learn to extract that repetitive markup and turn it into the RSS feed.

Note: While creating your own author feeds is a good way out, it’s not the best option (most of your self-created feeds will lack “date” parameter). So whenever you can, use original author RSS feeds. In many cases, you can find your author RSS feed here: http://www.blogdomain.com/author/author-name/feed/

Also, “Fetch Feed” module inside Yahoo! Pipes will help you find an RSS feed where you lack one. Here’s Kristi’s guide on using the module.

In case neither of the above works, you’ll have to create a feed for your author page. To make your life easier, here’s what I did at Feed43 to create RSS feeds for my author page at MakeUseOf. All you need to do is to replicate these steps while adapting them to the HTML markup of your own author page:

Step 1: Specify your direct author page URL.

For me that’s:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/author/annsmarty/

Step 2: Identify the repetitive code:

Obviously, in my RSS feed I want:

• My article title
• My article direct link.

Looking at the source code of my MUO author page, I see that both the link and the title are wrapped up with <h2 class=”entry-title”> code:

Step 3: Define extraction rules at Feed43:

In this step we point the tool to the repeatable HTML patterns to extract the info we want to be present in our RSS feed.

All text you want to be extracted to the RSS feed should be substituted with {%} variable, see:

Step 4: Identify which parts exactly you want to make it to the feed

If you have done everything right in the above step, you should see the following:

Obviously, we need the following elements in our RSS feed:

• {%1} (direct link to the post)
• {%2} (the post title)

That’s what we specify to the tool:

Now preview:

And get the link to the RSS feed:

Note: the feed will be updated every 6 hours and there will be “– Delivered by Feed43 service” as long as you are using the free version. If you try to use the feed and love the service, you may want to upgrade (that’s what I did eventually).

2. Combine All Your RSS Feeds in One

OK, now take a deep breath. The hardest part is passed. Now to the easier step: combine all your author feeds in one master feed.

There have always been quite a few RSS feed mergers. Unfortunately most of them are unreliable or even discontinued due to massive use.

Yahoo! Pipes is still the most reliable one. I do hope Yahoo! will keep it alive!

So to merge all our author feeds, let’s do the following:

Step 1: Sign in to Yahoo! and click “Create a Pipe”

Step 2: Add “Fetch Feed” module to your dashboard and add all your author feeds in it:

Step 3: Connect it to “Pipe Output” module and click “Save”.

Step 5: (Optional) Sort the updates by date

If you want to just aggregate your guest articles, you may miss that step. However if you want to share this combined feed to let your readers keep track of your articles elsewhere, it is essential to sort all the updates by date.

For that click “Operations” section in the left-side panel and add “Sort” module. Put it in-between your feeds and the output feed and elect sort by “item.pubDate”:

Note: Why this step is “optional” while still being quite important is simple: if most of your feeds are “self-created”, most of them will lack the “date” and the filter will move them up or down.

Step 6: (Optional) Truncate most active feeds

In some places I blog (or used to blog) weekly, so they started dominating my author master feed. I used “Truncate” module + “Union” module to cut some of my most active feeds, then unite them and offer my dear followers some variety:

Step 7: Click “Run Feed” and grab your feed URL (HERE’S MY PIPE – feel free to clone it and create your own):

Note: This WordPress plugin seems to also combine various feeds and even publicize them on your blog automatically as round-ups. Feel free to try it if you only want to use your Master feed for your blog.

3. Import Your Feed into a Page

Update: eventually I ended up with the PRO features of this tool to publicize my feed. But you can use the tips below which are free:

Create a page which will be automatically updated whenever you have a new post published.

Don’t worry, our tutorial is getting easier step by step

Step 1: Install RSS Just Better WordPress plugin.

Step 2: Create a separate page where you want to aggregate all your guest articles and contributions and use the following code to embed your feed:


Feed URL not provided. This shortcode does require an attribute as feed = 'http://your-rss-or-atom-feed'. Please, enter one.

Where:

• RSSjb feed=”YOUR MASTER RSS FEED LINK”
• list=”ul” (for the bullet-style list)
• target=”_blank” (to open links to my guest posts in a new window)
• pubauthor=”false” (to remove the plugin credit link; I am crediting it in this post)

Note: I had to edit the plugin source code as well as it seemed to force the 5-post-from-feed limit. I edited this part:

The Result?

***Here’s my page listing all pages where I guest post and featuring a self-updating list of links to my contributions***.

What are your thoughts?

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by Open Kitchen España

Related posts:

1. Where I Contribute and Guest Post
2. How to Create a Useful Twitter Retweet Bot
3. The Ethics of Guest Posting – Am I Wrong?

When you “share” a page on Facebook, you will – in most cases – have the range of various image thumbnails to choose from. More often than not, these thumbnails will be random, to say at least: banners from the sidebar, commenter’s Gravatar photos, etc. Obviously, you can always choose the best image, but will your readers do the same?

What is more, when a reader “likes” your article (which most users are more likely to do as that’s just so much easier), there will be no option to choose the thumbnail and your post will be placed on that user’s Facebook stream with an absolutely random and (in most cases) irrelevant image.

How much more interest could you great article result in if it *always* had a great and relevant thumbnail to go with the update?

Unlike Google Plus (which is much smarter at marking up the page and grabbing the most relevant information from the page), Facebook should be clearly “pointed” to what should make it to the update. Like it or not, it benefits you (in the first place) if you spend an effort to explain your page in a language Facebook understands.

For the lucky WordPress bloggers, there are a few plugins that will help you point Facebook to the best image to go in your Facebook “likers’” updates:

First Things First: Clear Facebook Cache!

If you try experimenting with different images as a thumbnail, you will instantly face a problem: Facebook page caching. Facebook would cache your page as soon as you (or anyone else) like it and will show you the same thumbnail each time (no matter which image you have in the meta tag).

Use this tool that clears Facebook cache of the page and creates a new one.

You can also use that tool to preview how Facebook “sees” your page before you even try to “like” it:

1. Custom Image SRC: the Simplest Option

Custom Image SRC is a handy plugin that lets you specify the image you want to be in the page preview on Facebook when anyone “likes” your post. The plugin works on the “Edit post” level:

Basically, the plugin adds the following code in the individual page <head> section:

<link rel=”image_src” href=”preview-image-here.jpg” />

With this code in the header, the random preview image is overridden by the image that you specify.

Let’s see if it works!

Here’s what the page we are “liking” on Facebook looks like:

Before activating the plugin:

(Absolutely random image from the sidebar is grabbed as the page thumbnail after someone likes your page)

After:

(The image *you* want is grabbed as the page preview):

2. Facebook: Open Graph Plugin

There’s another way to control your page Facebook “snippets”: WP Facebook Open Graph protocol which adds Facebook Meta information to your blog pages (the plugin requires your a Facebook User ID or App ID for it to work).

When it comes to generating the image preview, the plugin will:

• Try to use the page “featured” image;
• If you don’t have a “featured” image, it will pull the first image in the post/page content;
• If there are no images in the post, it will default to using the image you put into the plugin settings in the admin panel.

Besides, controlling the post thumbnails on Facebook, the plugin will also handle the proper title / description within the snippet on Facebook user’s wall:

Here’s the info the plugin has added to my post:

3. Also:

• It’s rather a speculation (but one I myself have seen evidence of), but Facebook seems to prefer .JPG images
• In order for the plugins above to work properly, make sure your image is self-hosted
• The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. Facebook will make it square if you don’t.

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by joannapoe

No related posts.

One of the most frequent issues we have faced at our guest blogging platform is the deleted / “nofollowed” links (or articles). Imagine the disappointment: you have spent time and effort creating a good post and had it placed at a good blog to then discover that your author byline (together with your links) or your whole post was removed. Unfortunately, this can happen very often for various reasons:

• Blogs can get neglected, domains expired (with the new owner creating new content for it);
• Blogs can be redesigned (and the author bylines may be forgotten);
• New “SEO” plugins can be installed and all blog external links nofollowed (I can’t imagine who could recommend bloggers installing these stupid plugins and why, but that does happen very often!)
• etc. etc.

While we of course don’t guarantee all the guest posts will remain intact for the life being (we are community after all, we only help to connect; we can’t promise anything like that won’t happen), we do our best to alert our users if any of the articles or links were removed and even help them handle the situation.

Here’s how the MyBlogGuest Tracker was born. It tracks all links in the guest posts placed through the Articles Gallery and alerts the authors if anything strange is going on (for example, the site is down, redesigned, etc).

The author can then go ahead and contact the blog owner, and in most cases the problem is fixed very quickly. Even if the article was removed on purpose (for any reasons) and the blog owner refuses to put it back, the author will still be able to use the removed article again and let other blog have it (this way the content creation effort won;t be wasted).

We have had great feedback on this tool and decided to launch it as a standalone app.

***So welcome my next little project: Guest Blogging and Link Tracking Tool!***

The tool is brand new, still in alpha but you can go ahead and play with it. Mind that the tool does require considerable hosting and development costs, so it’s paid but very cheap (for now all we really need is to cover expenses).

How Does the Backlink Monitoring Tool Work?

We probably don’t do anything new, but we are the cheapest and simplest alternative I am aware of:

• Receive instant emails if any of your links were removed or nofollowed;
• Track your guest post social popularity (Likes and Tweets)
• Measure traffic from each of your guest posts (for that you’ll need to install a tracking code)
• Identify most efficient backlink sources (for example, to find places where you can guest post again).

To start tracking your guest posts or links, you’ll need to create a new project and specify your base URL. For all pages you add within one project, this very base URL will be monitored automatically (even if you don’t specify which link within a given page you want to track).

You can add / remove columns from the table (to adjust a clearer view) and sort by each column. You will also receive weekly summaries of your missing links and most popular link sources.

Please try the tool and let me know where we can improve it. We love feedback!

I will add your suggestions to our TO-DO list below:

Upcoming Features (our TO-DO list)

• Guest Post Widget (we have one within MyBlogGuest): a highly customizable, easily installed widget to easily share your recent guest posts on your own blog (something you see here in the sidebar)
• A Customizable .PDF Export: I do track all the placed guest posts fro my clients and I think our users may want to add that service as well. With our tool this will be an included bonus!
• More to Come!

***Test the tool here***

No related posts.

The following is the guest article by Dan Almond, at Piranha Internet, a  Preston SEO Company. If you want an awesome guest article like this, join our guest blogging platform MyBlogGuest.com

Since 2004 Google has been in widespread use, and there are now generations of people who have grown up using Google on a daily basis. These are the same people that have grown up in an age of technology, using mobile phones and specifically SMS text messaging. It has long been argued that text messaging has negatively impacted people’s ability to spell and use grammar correctly, particularly in formal writing.

Google is similarly positioned to exert such negative influence and I’ll attempt to show how it could be doing using an example from the world of retail.

I was actually working for a client in the retail sector who sells clothing when I came across some shocking examples of the use, or rather misuse, of the apostrophe within meta titles and descriptions belonging to some of the major UK retailers.

Sorry if you find this next section a little patronising, but I’m going to assume that everyone reading this has had their understanding of grammar impaired by the continued use of search engines and mobile phones.

Which is Correct:

{Mens Clothing}

or

{Men’s Clothing}

or

{Mens’ Clothing}

?

I’ll get the first one out of the way immediately, there is no such word as “mens”. “Men” is already a plural and so does not need pluralising in this way. This also makes “mens’…” inaccurate. The correct plural possessive (as the clothing ‘belongs’ to men) is therefore “men’s”.

Now let’s see which of the top 7 retailers got this one right in their meta title and description:

As we can see, all of the retailers have used the grammatically incorrect version, although interestingly Republic has chosen to optimise for both “mens” and “men’s”.

Womens Clothing, Women’s Clothing or Womens’ Clothing?

The rule for “women” is exactly the same as for “men” above. The correct use is therefore “women’s clothing”.

Again let’s see which of the top 7 ranking retailers got this one correct in their meta title and description:

Many more retailers seem to have got this correct, the reason for which I shall return to later.

Ladies Clothing, Lady’s Clothing, Ladies’ Clothing?

This is probably the most tricky one of the three examples I’ve provided. “Ladies” refers to more than one ‘lady’, whilst “lady’s clothing” would refer to one particular lady’s clothing. The correct choice is “ladies’ clothing” with the apostrophe after the ‘s’ being used to signify possession (the clothing ‘belongs’ to the ladies).

Not many of the major retailers seem to be targeting this keyword, but those that were all seemed to have opted for “ladies…” and not “ladies’…”

Why Do Google Not Auto-correct?

This confused me somewhat. Normally if you spell something incorrectly Google will either automatically correct your spelling, or at least suggest what it thinks you might mean. Enter “mens clothing” however and… nothing. Not a sausage.

Why is this?

Do Google not know that “mens” is not a word? Do they not have a good grasp of grammar? It’s difficult to believe that this is the case, though I’m at pains to offer an alternative explanation. This is made all the more confusing when you search for “womens clothing” and Google asks if you meant “women’s clothing” – why do it for ‘womens’ and not ‘mens’!?

Why Are Retailers Getting it Wrong?

The first thing to establish here is, are retailers actually getting it wrong, or are they purposefully using incorrect constructions in order to target the most popular search terms? According to Adwords, “mens clothing” is searched for 40,500 times monthly (locally in the UK, using exact match), compared to just 73 times for “men’s clothing”. That is a staggering statistic.

The SERPs for “mens clothing” and “men’s clothing” are different too, so Google are definitely not ignoring the apostrophe in this instance. From this perspective you can completely understand why retailers are using incorrect spellings within their meta titles. Some retailers, such as Republic even use both “mens” and “men’s”. One can only assume that the misspellings within the meta descriptions represent a lack of SEO knowledge (meta descriptions aren’t used for rankings), or are an attempt to maintain consistency (I’m probably being generous here).

I guess that retailers, or at least the people who do their SEO, have to decide whether it is more important to be correct, or to use the construction that most people use. I suspect that the latter option will win on most occasions when sales are at stake, at least when the difference in search volumes between the two is so pronounced. I just really thought that as an industry, we’d got beyond the whole incorrect spelling for SEO thing.

Chicken or Egg?

So who is to blame? Do retailers spell incorrectly deliberately because customers do? Do customers spell incorrectly because they’ve been badly educated by Google and the retailers? I suspect that both are true to an extent. It’s a chicken and egg situation and the only party involved that can actually fix this, is Google.

If they autocorrected searches for “mens clothing” to “men’s clothing”, and their autocomplete also selected the correct variant, people would begin to search in this way and retailers would have to optimise for the correct spelling. You can already see evidence of this above, with many more retailers using the grammatically correct “women’s clothing”, quite probably because Google suggests that particular spelling.

Does Search Illiteracy Equal Illiteracy?

So far I’ve spoken only of the influence upon people’s search behaviour, but it’s possible that repeated incorrect grammar use online could spread beyond search engines and into general language use. The aforementioned links between text message speak and a decline in literacy are often disputed. Indeed, renowned linguist David Crystal has categorically stated that he believes any such link is a myth.

I would argue that there is a clear distinction between txt spk and standard language use though, whereas the distinction between “mens” and “men’s” is less clear. Children and impressionable adults are much more likely to believe that “mens” is acceptable language use, and to use it themselves, than they are likely to think that “gr8” is fine to use in formal writing. People often learn by imitation, and Google along with retailers and SEOs, are not setting the best possible example.

So come on Google, you can do better.

Dan Almond studied English at The University of Liverpool and works at Piranha Internet, a  Preston SEO Company. He regularly blogs about all things SEO and social media on the Piranha Internet blog.

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by quinn.anya

No related posts.

Managing a huge and active guest blogging community is exciting. I never stop discovering new and new things.

In fact, the scam I am going to share today isn’t new at all.

It’s been around for ages, but considering I’ve been involved in the content marketing for quite some time and have never seen this before, I’ve figured it may be new to you as well.

If you accept guest articles or outsource content creation, you’ll be as surprised to hear about this scam as I was. It’s almost impossible to catch!

The scam is not easy to explain, so let’s start with a short exercise:

Well, they are not… Let’s compare the source code in the editor:

“This post looks at one type of content re-packaging: turning your old content into an image…”	“This pоst lооks at оne type оf cоntent re-packaging: turning yоur оld cоntent intо an image…”

Note: If you select the source code in the second column and click “View Selection Source”, you are most likely to be unable to see the wicked symbols even there (the above screenshots are made from the HTML editor).

Now try also searching Google by directly copy-pasting each text from *each* column:

“This post looks at one type of content re-packaging: turning your old content into an image…”	“This pоst lооks at оne type оf cоntent re-packaging: turning yоur оld cоntent intо an image…”

Wicked, huh?

Like Google, no duplicate content checker will ever recognize that line of text as a copy from the existing text.

How the Heck Could This Happen?

Simple. The text from the second column contains Cyrillic character “о” which looks exactly the same as the English “o” but, taken from another language, it forms a new word.

Here a better explanation:

every word is actually a mix of Western European and Cyrillic characters. Cyrillic is made of unique characters, as well as characters that look exactly like ours. E.g. the letters “M” “o” “c” “b” etc. display the same in Russian and in English, but they actually have a different code

How Do I Detect the Scam?

>>>Search Google: as in the screenshot above, Google won’t find *anything*, even a very common word, when it has foreign characters. Or at least it’ll treat it as a mistyped word:

>>>Use UTF Converters (this one for example) to any errors:

>>>Try Google Translate: It won’t be able to either read the phrase in voice or translate it:

WordPress plugin: There’s absolutely cool new plugin that can decode your WordPress content to UTF-8. lease download it and always get alarmed of stolen content:

How Can the “Alien” Characters Be Stripped?

If you have identified the scam and want to find where the article was initially published, that’s not going to be easy. Simply put, there are hardly any…

WYSIWYG editor - Our very-much-loved WordPress Editor not only fails to strip the alien characters (which is quite natural as who knows what they should be converted into), but also fails to signal about them in any way (it turns the corresponding code into normally-looking characters). So if you are using WordPress and copy-paste the text from the second column into the “Visual” editor, you won’t notice anything. This makes the scam even more dangerous and easier to go away with. My WordPress even didn’t highlight the words with foreign characters as errors.

Notepads (or any clipping utility that is meant to strip the code): not all of them. Unicode Notepad (any modern Windows or Mac version now runs them) won’t strip the alien characters unless you save the file and choose to save ASCII (not Unicode), then close the file and re-open it. The words having alien characters might be highlighted as errors in some cases:

Conclusion

The best advice here: search Google! Even if the article you are going to publish passes Copyscape, grab a long phrase from it and search for the exact match to make sure Google understands it.

Good luck!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by alancleaver_2000

Related posts:

1. FireFox Plugins To Make Your Life Easier

This is not the first time I am doing a post on content re-packaging in different forms and types. Thus, I have already shared why giving your great articles a new life is so effective for content marketing:

✔ It brings traffic to your old content (and reanimates your old linkbait);

✔ It lets you share your guest post at your own site creatively;

✔ It brings links to both old content and its re-packaged version (which means at least twice as many links);

✔ It spurs your creativity and lets you test different types of content link bait (without the need to create new content and conduct any additional research).

This post looks at one type of content re-packaging: turning your old content into an image (and thus allowing it for download and easier spreading).

1. Create a Comic

Comics always go great and most of your content can become the source of inspiration for a great link-baity comic. Here’s the recipe that is sure to help:

• Get inspired: Read your own archives and browse through existing awesome comic collections: 1, 2, 3
• Find the best free tool: There are quite a few but my personal favorite is Strip Generator
• Create a few drafts and the idea will arrive!

Example please!

Here’s mine. I am not that great at humor (especially humor in a foreign English) but I got inspired by my own post on how blocking on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus works:

2. Create a Flowchart

A flowchart makes a great infographic especially when it is based on a detailed instruction. It makes things so much easier to follow and understand, and moreover, it will better explain the whole process. Therefore, a flowchart is a great idea for a how-to article, manual and tutorial (even if it’s a how-to on your own product or service!)

• Get inspired: Here’s a great collection of flowchart-based infographics.
• Find the best free tool: You can use this tool as a decent flowchart generator. This one is paid, but it’s free to try. Alternatively, you can just use a pen and paper (or a whiteboard) which (for me) somehow frees the creativity.

Example please!

It’s been always hard to prompt our MyBlogGuest members to follow the rules on creating and formatting a guest post. So I created a checklist to help them, and then later visualized the guest article quality check process using the flow chart on my whiteboard. If you write a lot of guest posts, that’s something you should do as well!

3. Create a Comparison Chart

You probably know I love comparison charts. I frequently make them and the feedback is always that they make the content much easier to digest and remember. So if you want to create a downloadable freebie to please your readers, here’s a great idea: throw your product review in a table, turn it into a .jpeg image and share it. If your content is useful, if doesn’t have to be well-designed!

• Get inspired: Here’s one comparing popular models of cameras. Here’s another good example that compares apples to oranges (in both cases, scroll down a bit to the actual table).
• Find the best free tool: Any HTML editor you are using that can insert and customize tables.

Example please!

Do you want to train your team to remember the difference between article marketing and guest blogging, let them save this table, print it and use for reference.

4. Create a Mind Map

Like a flowchart, a mind map is a great way to visualize the information structure, but while a flowchart is better for explaining the process, a mind map is perfect for structuring any content.

• Get inspired: Here’s a great collection of mind-map-based infographics.
• Find the best free tool: Here’s my old post that lists some tools and tips on mind-mapping (but as you’ll see from the comments, the preferred way is still to use pen and paper!). If you can come up with a cool idea, just use What Do You Suggest which is based on Google Suggestions.

Example please!

It has just occurred to me that you can use “What Do You Suggest” to tell your Google search story (similarly to the Youtube project of the same name):

5. Create a Typographic Image

While all the 4 four ideas above are perfect for better explaining what you meant to say, this one is purely for fun. But fun is a great content marketing tool as well!

• Get inspired: Here’s an awesome collection compiled by PsPrint for Inspired Magazine
• Find the best free tool: Both of these are totally awesome: Wordle and Tagxedo.

Example please!

Here’s one I have built based on one of my old posts on what guest blogging is NOT (notice how it almost looks like one of our brand elements (a cloud)):

Let’s Recap, Shall We?

Any more ideas here? Please share them in the comments!

Image credits: 1, 2

Related posts:

1. HOW TO: Re-package Your Best Content for More Exposure (and Links)
2. Find Your Most Useful Content with Help of Copy Heat Map
3. Quick SEO Company Evaluation – Don’t Buy it…

I haven’t watched MySpace or Digg evolve, however I can proudly say that I’ve witnessed the three other giants develop: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – and moreover, I’ve been an early adopter.

It’s fun to look back one day and remember how it has started and unfolded. It’s impossible to remember and describe everything that has happened in one post but at least we can watch their designs evolve. The three sites have much in common:

• At the beginning, the home page had to explain the concept;
• The sites are total mysteries for the outsiders (unregistered users);
• They are all user-generated and have been growing (in terms of features and options) together with the user base.

I have got nostalgic and collected the screenshots of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn home page designs through the years and compiled them into short presentations. Enjoy!

Update: Looks like Slideshare decreased the quality of the screenshots (they are a bit blurred in full-screen view), so please preview there and download the original presentations here: Facebook evolution, Twitter evolution and LinkedIn evolution (all .pptx files)

1. Facebook

Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates and fellow computer science students Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes.

The website membership was initially limited to Harward and then expanded to the Ivy League, Stanford University and the Boston area.

Milestones:

• In 2004 Facebook was incorporated, moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California and received its first investment from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel;
• In 2005 the current domain facebook.com was purchased (it dropped “the”)
• In January 2009 Facebook was ranked as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace (Compete.com)
• On September 26, 2006, Facebook was opened for everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.
• In October 2008, Facebook announced that, for the first time, it earned more money than it spent last quarter.
• In March 2011, more people visited Facebook than Google for the week (according to Hitwise)

2. LinkedIn

LinkedIn was launched by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from PayPal in May 2003 with strong focus on business networking for career development. LinkedIn’s CEO is Jeff Weiner, previously a Yahoo! Inc. employer.

Milestones:

• In November 2003 and October 2004, LinkedIn closed venture capital rounds of $4.7 million and $10 million
• In 2005 LinkedIn Premium services were launched. Premium services ranged from
• In March 2006 (just seven months after the introduction of premium services) LinkedIn announced it finally became profitable
• In October 2008 an “applications platform” was launched. The platform allowed selected third-party developers create application to embed other online services within a member’s profile page.
• In February 2008 the mobile-friendly version of the website was launched;
• In June 2010, LinkedIn a European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland was opened.

The LinkedIn home page has reflected the platform evolution:

3. Twitter

Twitter was launched in July 2006 by Jack Dorsey. The idea of “daylong brainstorming session” is said to have been inspired by Flickr (originally the project was called twttr) and the five-character length of American SMS short codes.

Milestones:

• 2007 on South by Southwest (SXSW) festival the usage of Twitter increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. At the event, for the first time, huge screens were installed to broadcast Twitter updates;
• On January 22, 2010 the first off-Earth Tweet was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer
• 2010, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans published 2,940 tweets per second
• September through October 2010, the company began rolling out “New Twitter”.

Noticed Any Similar Trends?

It seems that the modern trend requires that we give the option to join the site without any extra clicks (registration forms instead of large buttons). Besides, all the three designs have notably become minimal and laconic. In any case, it’s fun watching the huge sites evolve!

Note: History outlines from Wikipedia.org, most screenshots from Archive.org. Image credit

Related posts:

1. Special Symbols (Wingdings) for Social Media Branding (Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus)
2. How Blocking Users on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus Works
3. HOW TO: Force Facebook to Grab the Best Image from Your Page (WordPress)

One thing I have clearly realized while being a full-time guest post editor at SEJ is that most (guest) contributors (no matter how much we love them) are terrible at formatting.

It very seldom happens that a guest blogger will browse your blog for a few minutes and copy your obvious formatting preferences to his own post. Or even that he tries to make the article formatting web-friendly at all.

While your guest post style guide is up to you (by “style guide”, I mean the required article length, preferred topics, writing manner, good article samples, etc), formatting is usually similar across the blogs: we need clear code, readable paragraphs, working links, etc.

A properly written formatting guide won’t let you fire your editor: most contributors will still fail to follow all the steps properly, but you’ll be amazed at how easier your editor’s (or your own) work will become.

A good formatting checklist should be:

• As short as possible (The longer it is, the more chances there are that none of your contributors will follow all the steps);
• As concise as possible (Avoid explaining the reason why you want it to be formatted that way. The more you explain, the less obvious your point becomes. Just list your requirements)
• As easy to understand as possible (Add a few screenshots, bold most important points, etc).

Now, here’s my formatting checklist for guest bloggers and paid contributors. Feel free to download it, edit minor details (like the preferred width of images) and use it to edit your blog. It will be suitable and (hopefully) useful for:

• Guest-contributor-driven blog;
• A blog network with multiple co-authors;
• A business managing multiple paid contributors;
• A business owner outsourcing content to ghost writers, etc.

Attention: This guide requires that your blog contributor has a wp-admin (Contributor) access to your blog. Otherwise, you may ask to send you the articles in HTML.

*Download the formatting guidelines here. Read some explanations below*

Structuring Standards

We know that breaking the article into sections is very important: blog readers tend to scan through the articles jumping from a subheading to a subheading (and probably reading the sections that seem most relevant to them).

One of the most efficient ways to capture your readers’ attention is to provide catchy subheadings that would summarize your article content nicely. Ideally, the reader of the article should understand what it is about by just scanning through the subheadings which should effectively summarize the article content while still encouraging the reader to go more indepth. Here’s a short but sweet checklist for using subheadings for SEO and usability I did a couple of years ago.

Other important guidelines that (may) go in this section:

• Make your sentences and paragraphs short (that makes the whole article easier to read)
• Introduce your article effectively in the opening paragraphs and encourage a discussion in the conclusion (by asking some questions)

Adding Links

Links are always great (unless links are brutally self-serving and anchor-text-dirty). I always encourage all my authors include links to any app, business or person they are mentioning. Links are user-friendly, so in my guidelines I always prompt contributors to:

• Link to relevant articles on my blog;
• Link to others relevant articles elsewhere (as well as sources of information, apps, etc)
• Normally link words (not image files or subheadings)
• Always make sure they are using the full URL and the original “clean” link (now a shortened version, stripping all tracking parameters, etc).

If that’s *guest posting* guidelines, consider also adding a caution against self-serving links in the content of your body. Here’s a post that explains my attitude to them.

Lists

Including lists is also highly appreciated. A well-formatted list is likely to draw readers’ attention and make them stay.

Sadly, contributors tend to format lists in all possible ways using -, *, or any other inappropriate symbols instead proper <ul><li> coding. Therefore it’s a good idea to remind them of proper formatting here.

Images

Another very important element of any blog post. Images will never be added unless you clearly ask for them.

Here I specify the proper style and size of the images as well as encourage authors to include a relevant, catchy and properly attributed Creative Commons image.

If you find the guidelines useful or have any improvements to suggest, please comment below!

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by mt 23

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When I click through the email notifications of my recent Twitter followers, I can’t help noticing one trend: people have widely started using special symbols – Wingdings – to grab viewer’s instant attention.

Wingdings are a series of dingbat fonts which render letters as a variety of symbols.

That being said, a “winding” is a tiny image symbol that looks exactly the same in the source code of the page and in the front end.

While, essentially, there’s nothing new in using them, when it comes to social media profile branding, it appears you could achieve some positive results (there’s no substantial testing behind this assumption, by the way. I only rely on my own impressions).

1. How to Insert Wingdings on Your Social Media Profile

Here are a few noteworthy examples of Wingdings which can be used both in your “Name” and “Description” fields of your social media profile (we’ll see the actual examples of that below).

**** To use any of them in your Twitter description or LinkedIn display name, just copy-paste:

Here’s a huge list of them together with their Unicode equivalents.

2. Wingdings: Browser Compatibility

• Web developers advise against using Wingdings in web pages (and recommend using Unicode instead). Obviously Unicode is not the option for social media profile editing;
• Wingdings are not available on all computers, and so the symbols may not appear on computers running non-Microsoft operating systems such as Mac OS 9, Mac OS X 10 or Linux. (I am on MAC and I am able to see most of them though);
• The only browser that should display all Wingdings as they should be is Internet Explorer. Others might have a problem with them. However I tried in Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. And all seems to be working fine.

3. Examples of Using Wingdings to Brand Social Media Profiles

While Wingdings have been around for ages, the rise of social media has resulted in the font re-birth. The lack of characters available for a social media update and the quick associations the tiny lightweight symbols are able to create – these are the two main reasons why Wingdings are being used more and more often.

Let’s take a look at real-life examples:

Twitter

To create a quick association (in a profile name):

To create a quick association (in a description field):

To fake Twitter profile verification:

LinkedIn

To stand out is social media search results:

Google Plus

For “Name” field, Wingdings won’t work:

But it will work for the “Description” field:

Facebook

Not supported for Profile Names: When you attempt to insert a symbol in your “Name field” on Facebook, you’ll get “The name contains too many apostrophes.” error.

4. Google SERPs Branding?

Google won’t let your social media profile listing dominate SERP users’ attention through Wingdings (It will display nothing in place for a symbol).

But the symbol will still make it to the meta description as well as the search listing snippet:

Conclusion?

In some cases, Wingdings seem to be a good thing to experiment with. They are widely supported nowadays and are actually becoming a popular trend. You don’t want to overdo, but if you find a good one creating a quick association with your business niche, why not try using it?

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I know, I know, that sounds so awfully familiar. But this post is *not* about using your keywords in title tags. We’ve talked enough about title tag SEO (and most of those old tips still apply btw!)

Today’s post is about making your title tags retweet-friendly, about encouraging Twitter comments and making it to Twitter trends.

1. Simple Mathematics

This one is pretty simple and obvious: be short, be catchy.

We only have as many as 140 characters to fit the title + URL + your credit to the twit without it to be stripped. And the more character are left, the more flexibility your promoters have!

See:

The (shortened) URL of the tweet will contain minimum 13 characters.

Now add your Twitter handle that follows the tweet: at least 7-8 characters (mine is 10 including @) + 3 characters for RT

Now add your post title (for example, this post would result in 45 characters and it is not long at all!)

What do we have now?

13+10+3+45=71 (min!)

Thus your most valued readers and promoters have maximum 69 characters to share their thoughts, ask for RTs, include references, etc

And remember that Tweets containing personal comments and feedback are the ones that get the largest number of retweets, shares and other types of interaction. And the shorter your post title ( that gets grabbed by the Twitter button and turned into the Tweet), the higher probability is that the reader will want to add a comment.

Look how much your readers can do if they have character-flexibility!

1. They might add a call-to-action (which means more clicks!)
2. They might add hashtags (which means wider reach!)
3. They might add comments (which means more retweets!)

So make your readers’ lives easier: make it easy for them to tweet, retweet and tweet-comment your blog updates!

****If you plan a linkbait, make sure to come up with the shortest title possible while keeping it catchy and original (that’s obviously hard but very essential).

**** Another bright idea: Would you like more Tweet-comments (Tweets of your post that contain a personal comment)? Ask a question in your title.

2. Using @ and # in the Title Tag

One Golden lesson in branding: when blogging about your business or event, don’t forget to use @your-business-handle or #youreventhashtag in the title tag.

This way, they are most likely to make it to the tweet (even if the Twitter user will *not* use your Twitter button, and will Tweet through his browser tools or even copy-paste instead!) and if you are lucky enough will make the daily Twitter trend!

Example:

An SEO WordPress plugin (like wpSEO) that allows to set a custom title tag for each particular post works great for that:

Results in this:

You can actually go even further and use hashtags to brand important sections of your site. For example, instead of “SEOmoz QA”, this could be

@SEOmoz #QA

Which could result in a much more interesting Tweet:

****(Again: This way @SEOmoz makes it to the tweet even when a user doesn’t use your button but instead creates a tweet using Bit.ly bookmarklet, HootSuite button, etc).

As for Google search results branding, that doesn’t hurt at all, as Google doesn’t care if it’s a hashtag, a Twitter @username or a word.

Quick common sense note: While using hashtags and Twitter usernames may be a bright idea in some instances, you don’t want to overdo with it. I’d suggest experimenting with it only for social-media-essential parts of your sites, for even-specific and brand-focused pages or articles, etc.

Takeaways:

Now, what is your experience? I am sure you’ve been playing with blog post titles a lot and couldn’t help noticing its impact on social media shares. Let me know your opinion!

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by quinn.anya

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