Blog Promotion with Zemanta

Image via CrunchBase

My experience with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ had been awful when it comes to getting shares or even hits. I think it’s partly luck as my post gets pushed down by a wave of cute kitten memes, political rants, and timewasting, but very interesting videos. It’s also partly because I don’t feel comfortable spamming people with links to my blog.

I had better luck with a plugin called “Zemanta”. It inserts a sidebar that allows you to quickly find images for your blog as well as articles that are related. When you click on the articles, sometimes, you get clicked-back. Almost all of my comments came from these links.

I had stopped using Zemanta as it is a bit flakey with Windows Live Writer (WLW). WLW is something I use when I want to blog offline. I can’t get to blogger when I’m in the car and there’s no free wi-fi around. When I get home, I usually would connect to the internet, allow Zemanta to load, add all of the extras, then publish it to my blog.

At one point, WLW started to crash before I could type anything, so I finally just turned off the plugin. Sure enough, my legitimate hits went down.

A couple of days ago, I tried Zemanta again on live writer and found that it worked – somewhat. It seems that when WLW cannot connect to the internet, which happens frequently, it crashes.

That said, I manage to get a few more posts up using Zemanta (mostly on my newer blog) and sure enough, my legitimate clicks went up again.

Even if I have to edit my blog later in blogger online to include Zemanta content, I will continue using it.

Related articles

• Using Zemanta with any blogging platform (zemanta.com)
• Post-Release reviews (zemanta.com)
• Offline WordPress Editor for Mac - PixelPumper (hongkiat.com)
• My interview on Zemanta's blog (brandsandfilms.com)
• Zemanta’s Website (added by me)

Free Stuff: Evernote

Image via CrunchBase
Possibly one of the most useful free program you will ever find.  Considering that I've tried many, MANY different programs, that's saying a lot.  You can check it out here at http://www.evernote.com

Now, suppose you see some really interesting page on the web that you are absolutely sure that you are going to use in the future. Of course, we all know that it will just get buried in your bookmarks and you will probably never use it again.  If you do, you end up just searching for it because you can't seem to find it.  Worse, if you do find it, the page is gone.

Enter Evernote Web Clipper.  You sign up for an account (important if you have more than one device/computer) then install the software on your computer and whatever device you own.  Then when you come across the site you want the notes from, you simply highlight the text you want to save, right click on the highlighted text (or click on the icon in the toolbar), and add it to Evernote.  Now it's available to all of your devices and computers.  Add your tags to the note to make it even more easy to search.

One feature that I found the best was the text recognition in photos.  Take a photo with your smartphone and the text in the photo becomes searchable.  I have been using my Blackberry Curve to take photos of posters and text since it's much faster than typing it.

This is a great tool for everyone, including stay-at-home moms who have a lot going on.

Add-ons For Firefox: DownThemAll

In the days of dial-up, I had a downloader that sped things along.  Now with cable, speeding up downloads isn't necessary anymore - or is it?

Enter DownThemAll.  This includes DTAoneClick which allows you to download any file in one click.  DownThemAll give you the option of downloading everything on the web page or just downloading one at a time.  Use the manager (my favorite part) to manage when and how many files you download at a time.

Considering that many of my posts will be about free files that you can use, this tool will come in handy.

Add-ons for Firefox: Intro

The main reason why I mostly use Firefox is because of the handy add-ons you can get for it.  The only downside for this is that you can have too many.  Too many add-ons will slow the browser down.  In the next few posts, I will talk about the ones that I use consistently.

Click here to check out the many add-ons available.

A Blogging Tool anyone can Use

I have eight blogs. I really don't post to all of them.  One is only for testing blog layouts (I worked on this blog layout last).  One I've been wanting to delete, but hadn't gotten around to it.  I have two on tumblr in during an insanity bit.  What was I thinking?  I don't have time to make free templates!  And being random, well, is too random.

I have one on Friendster, mainly an attempt to separate my personal whims from my family blog - turns out that was difficult to do.  My personal life overlaps most of my family life.  So there's not much there - yet.

Then finally, the two newest ones, my health blog and this one.   I bet you are wondering how do I manage it all.  Well, first of all, I post mainly to three.  My family, by health blog, and this one, so that helps, but what also helps is Scribefire.

Scribefire is a tool that works IN your browser.  You go to Scribefire.com, then follow the instructions to install it, restart your browser and voilà!  All you have to do is add a blog and start blogging.  You can check out "Getting Started with Scribefire" to help you get started.

Powered by ScribeFire.

No money was made linking to Scribefire.  I just like it that much!