Blogs are amazing forms of communication that allow and encourage the proliferation of information across multiple platforms. The question is are you optimizing your blog for your web readers?
We at Magicomm are planning a complete website overhaul however I thought it would be nice to give our blog a jump start. We didn’t give it a complete overhaul but rather took a close look at some of its functions and contemplated their purpose.
Social Bookmarking Links
We were previously using sociable as an easy solution however, it ultimately presented two problems:
- No one was clicking on the links because they were small and not actionable
- We couldn’t track who was clicking on the links
We in turn narrowed the social bookmarking sites down to Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicous as they were ultimately the most used. We also used the provided widgets from Digg and Reddit as well as custom programmed AddThis analytics functionality to the StumbleUpon and Delicous links.
Post Collections
Some of our most popular posts were part if ‘Printer Tweet Tips‘ or ‘The Dead Series‘ yet we weren’t pushing people to the series overview pages. This was easily solved with some new visual links in the sidebar.
Contributors
You can see which Magicomm employee composed a specific post by looking at the bottom of any specific page however, there was no list of all blog contributors anywhere in the site. Once again, this was easily resolved by replacing the rarely used ‘Archive’ section of the sidebar with a ‘Contributors’ section.
New Plugins
There is always someone working on something that’s going to bring social media to a new level. It’s everyone else’s job to find these new services, plugins and products and put them to good use. We feel passionately about providing more value to Tweets about blog posts and therefore installed the CommenTwitter plugin. The idea is that people can tweet their comments to a post right from the comment form. This generates traffic to that users comment as well as the blog …. basically a win-win.
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So when is the last time you looked at your blog and made some changes for the better?
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Magicomm Series
Testing the CommenTwitter plugin on the Magicomm Blog