Blogging and microblogging

How to get your project online quickly and cheaply

by Andy

When I first set up my consultancy firm Sociability in 2007, I used a combination of 123-reg, Wordpress and Google for Domains to create a website and e-mail addresses quickly – and all for a grand total of £20. 

1. First, buy a web domain for your project (eg. www.socialbysocial.com) from 123-reg.co.uk. (.com or .org domains are best, and try to choose something that’s short and easy to spell over the phone.) Resist their attempts to sell you hosting, e-mail addresses etc.
2. Sign up for a free blog at Wordpress.com, and under Appearance -> Themes, choose a theme that fits with the feel of your project. Write an 'About us' page, a 'Contact us' page, and maybe a 'Who we are' page too. Put a contact e-mail on the contact page so people can get in touch.
3. Here’s the tricky bit: you also need point your domain at Wordpress.com’s servers. Go to your 123-reg ‘control panel’ and find your domain. Unlock it first using ‘Manage domain locking’, and then choose ‘Change nameservers’. You need to enter the Wordpress nameservers in the first 3 boxes: ns1.wordpress.com, ns2.wordpress.com and ns3.wordpress.com (check Wordpress.com’s help section for more on how to do this.)
4. Now go back to Wordpress so you can upgrade your blog. Under Upgrades – Domains, enter your chosen domain and click ‘Add’. (You’ll be prompted to buy 10 credits.) After that, select it as ‘Primary’ and click ‘Update Primary Domain’. This makes the blog appear as the homepage for your website.
5. Now, sign up for Google for Domains, which lets you create Gmail addresses for each of your team members at your own domain (and extra ones for general public enquiries, such as 'hello@yourdomain.org').
6. When it’s time to ‘verify domain ownership’, choose the ‘Upload an HTML file’ option. You’ll see a verification code that starts with ‘google’ and ends with a series of random characters.
7. Go back to Wordpress.com and under ‘Upgrades -> Domains’, select ‘Enable Google MX’ and paste the Google code into the box. Then go back to your Google control panel and click the link to complete the verification process. (It will take a couple of days to sort itself out.)
8. If you want, you can also create a Facebook group, a MySpace page and Twitter account, and put links to them on the sidebar of your site. If you tag content with a keyword for your project (eg. 'social-by-social' or ‘SXS’) on Delicious, Flickr and School of Everything, you can also embed widgets and RSS feeds to pull in that content to your main website, like Colalife did (check out Appearance -> Widgets in the Wordpress admin). 

If that's too complicated, why not find a nice tech-savvy friend to do it all for you? It’ll take them less than a day. And if you need more options, there are lots of other tools you can use too, like Squarespace and Blogger.

How to use blogging to improve your search engine position

By Lucy Langdon, Search Marketer at Distilled

Blogging is a great opportunity to interact with your visitors, but it also presents several opportunities to improve your rankings in the search engines.

1. A blog is a great place to naturally add a lot more spiderable content to your site so post regularly on a wide range of subjects. This will help your site rank for lots of different terms – what's known as the 'longtail' of search. Recent stats actually suggest that ranking well for longtail brings in at least as much as, if not more traffic, than ranking well for headtail search (the most competitive keywords in your industry).
2. If you're writing good, regular content, you may as well make it SEO friendly while you're at it. Include the keywords of what you're writing about in the title of the post and put other important words/phrases in header tags or the strong tag.
3. There's nothing worse than an abandoned blog. If you're going to start one, make sure you have time to post regular quality content on there. This will keep your readers and the search engine spiders happy.
4. Internal linking is an important part of building a strong site. If you blog about something and it's natural to link elsewhere on your site, then go for it. Remember to use optimised anchor text if you can.
5. Blogging is a form of conversation. Don't make the mistake of thinking the job's done as soon as the post goes live. It's often in the comments of a post that you'll find some of the most interesting discussions so make sure you set aside time to interact with your readers properly.
6. Spend time thinking about the kind of content you can create that people will actually link to. Can you break any news? Or provide a useful resource or definitive guide of any kind? If you ever submit Press Releases online, make sure to blog about those that are interesting to your readers.
7. Once you've written this linkable content (it's known as 'linkbait'), tell all your friends and contacts! As long as it's good, people won't mind.
8. Write a blog post that summarises all the other key bloggers in your niche. Talk about how much you've learnt from them and make sure you link to their blogs. Top bloggers will often monitor who links to them (as you should too), and, as long as your post is genuine, will often get in touch, link to you or comment on your post.
9. Playing the social media crowd can backfire. Instead of trying to get cheap links and traffic, engage honestly with your audience. There's absolutely no harm in talking about your blog and/or company on social media sites like Digg and Reddit, as long as what you're offering is useful, interesting or amusing in some way.
10. One way to attract positive attention online is to give something away. This can be a simple prize, some free advice or an experience; whatever suits your company. You should check out competition rules first, and bear in mind that insisting people link to you to take part is against Google guidelines.