Go to their site and sign up for a free account. It’s a Beta site (still in testing) so there could be a cost introduced in the future, but hopefully that would come along with additional features. Once you are signed in, click the link to create a new list:

Enter in the name of your list. There is the option to select from either a standard type, or from a recurring theme. There are no instructions so I take the theme to be a way to group lists together and categorize them. You can either select from one you have already created, or create a new one easily.

Once your list is created, you will see the code displayed for your list. Copy it and then you can paste that into a web page or blog post:

When someone visits your site or blog post, they can easily add a link to the list. See the example below in this post. Once links are added, you will be able to review them from your Simply Linked account. Could be useful for follow up and review on your topic.

So, feel free! Give me the link to your blog, I would love to pay you a visit, and maybe others will too! I started the list going, so join in.

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This post is all about plugins to help with your different social media profiles:

http://mashable.com/2009/06/16/wordpress-social-media-profile/

This article shows 50 great widgets for your blog:

http://mashable.com/2007/09/06/widgets-2/

30 cool plugins:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/30-cool-wordpress-plugins-for-web-publishers/

10 Cool WordPress plugins to show your ratings:

http://www.geeksucks.com/showcases/10-cool-wordpress-plugins-for-ratings.htm

Plugins designed to get your readers to your blog:

http://mashable.com/2007/08/02/wordpress-readers/

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Once installed and activated, go back to the Plugins folder and click on Feedburner Configuration. Enter in the feed url that you created yesterday.

From the plugin, here is more information about how it works. Pretty simple!

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Feedburner.com will take you over to Google. They moved over recently and now it’s even easier to manage everything all under one account. If you don’t already have an account, you will be prompted to create an account. If you do have an account, go ahead and log in.  You will be prompted to enter in your feed address. Then click the Next button.

The feed can then be named. It will also show you a new feed address. You can modify the url slightly if you want to, to make it more user friendly. Click Next. Then walk through the rest of the screens for more options and information you can set up.

Finally, next time you log in, you can take a look at the statistics for your feed. You can view stats for the current day, past few days, months and so on. You will be able to see how many people on average are viewing your feed.

From the Feedburner website, here is how it defines Subscribers and Reach.

Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed.

How is it calculated?

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

What does it tell you?

Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight.

Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.

Reach aggregates both of these groups, providing an accurate and useful measurement of your true audience.

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Log into the Admin panel, then scroll down to the Settings section on the left side. From there, click on Discussion.

Scroll all the way down to the Avatar section. First you need to actually opt to Show Avatars. Without this, no images will ever be shown. Determine the maximum rating of Avatar that you will allow to be shown on your blog. Finally, select a default avatar that will be used for those people that don’t have their own Avatar set up already. Save the changes and you are done! Pretty simple right?

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Gravatars are linked to an e-mail address. This should be the same e-mail address that you will use to post with on others blogs.

You will receive a confirmation e-mail to click on. Once you have done this, you will be able to walk through and select the photograph or image you would like to use.

Once you image is uploaded, you will then be prompted to set a rating for your Gravatar. Once done, that’s it! Next time you add a note to a blog that has the Gravatar’s activated, your image will show up next to your name and comments!

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Social RSS seems to be doing the trick for me. Log into Facebook and then click on the following link: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=23798139265

It will take you directly to the application for Social RSS for Facebook. This application allows you to pull in your blog feed directly into Facebook. If you are using WordPress, there are several plugins that will do this for you, but I haven’t yet found one that has the same settings and flexibility of this app.

Once at the application, you will need to put in the settings. First, you can enter in a Description. Put in a little bit about you or your business. This is going to be used on your Facebook Profile, not your Page (more about how to set that up in a moment). Let people know about what it is that you do, or what your RSS feed is about. Why would it interest me? Who is it targeted at?

Next you can put in a website link. You can make this your home page if you wanted to. You will put the actual RSS Feed link further on down in the settings. Now onto the settings for the feed itself. If you need more guidance just hover your mouse over the title of the field and it will give you more info. These are all required fields and the tag can be something simple. The field is no more than 5 characters so just put in a combination of letters and numbers that makes sense to you and what the feed is about. This is really more critical if you have more than one feed. I just used an acronym of my business name, seemed simple enough!

The Title I just used my company name. When a new post is published to your wall, it states: New Story from, then the Title you entered, so put in something that makes sense. The URL is that of your RSS feed. If you are not sure what it is, click on the orange rss icon from your blog and it should take you to the url. If you are still not sure, ask a friendly web designer, I am sure they will tell you for free!!! Do not just use the url of a regular web page, it won’t work that way. The Alternative URL will be used when someone clicks on the Title of the feed. I have it taking people to my About page for more information.

Next click the Display Options tab.This allows for more settings to determine how the new posts from the RSS feed will look. Here are my settings below, feel free to copy, or use your own. You can click on the other two tabs but I haven’t changed anything on those. Finally, click on Add to Profile.

This will ask you if you want to add Social RSS to your Profile. You can add it to the boxes tab, or the Wall and Info Tab.

Once you have done this, click on Application settings from the top right of Facebook. Click to Edit the Social RSS Settings. Select your Profile settings, and also click on the Bookmark tab. By Bookmarking Social RSS, this means it will show up when you are on the Facebook home page. You will see it listed underneath News Feed, Messages and any Applications you have book marked. This makes it easier to get back to in the future.

Once you have this all configured, the next time you publish a blog post, you will see it listed on your Profile. Below is how mine looks.

And finally, if you want it to appear on your Facebook Fan Page, click on this link: http://apps.facebook.com/rss-connect/pageinfo.php?ref=tb If you have more than one page, it will ask you which one to add it to. Click to Add Social RSS and then you will be taken to the same settings page as before. It’s a pain to set it up twice, but you only need to through this once, and that’s it. I kept two windows open, one with my Profile settings and one for my Page and just copied and pasted from one to the other.

Had success with any other applications posting your RSS Feed to Facebook? Let us know about them below!

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We are excited to announce a great competition for the rest of this month! One lucky business will have a WordPress blog added to their website. This gives you the opportunity to keep your own clients informed about any specials or events you have coming up. You can write educational articles giving facts and helping teach others about your craft or field. You can share ideas and opinions easily. WordPress is accessed through an online portal you can log into directly.

So what do you have to do to win?

Creating a blog to fit in with your current website is a pretty big deal. For a small business owner, the cost of web design or site work can be a luxury. So, its not going to be as simple as just submitting your name, or signing up for a newsletter. What we are looking for is a little more creative. Tell us why you want a blog, what you will blog about and how you hope this will improve your own business. Must be at least 100 words, but can be as detailed and entertaining as you wish!

Simply click here to enter our WordPress Blog Contest

Be sure to read the Terms and Conditions of the contest

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The next guest blogger is really two bloggers! Both Melissa Casserly and Laura Fields take it in turn to post regularly on their blog.The  Baby Steps Online Blog is full of great information about babies, nursing, pregnancy and so much more. Below, Laura talks about journey from having blogs in the past to truly embracing the concept and making it work for them.

Our blog has been active for almost 2 months now. We’ve made an effort to add new entries to our blog regularly, and as a result our website has moved up on the search engines.  Depending on the search terms used, we’re often on the first or second page of results, which is extremely high compared to where we ranked before we started using our blog.

Blog: www.babystepsonline.net/blog/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Powder-Springs-GA/Baby-Steps

E-mail: babysteps@babystepsonline.net

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Our guest blogger for today is Valerie Pegg, a pet sitter, dog walker and all around animal lover in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Val has managed to use the blog to her advantage and truly push her site up the search engine rankings. Type ‘Pet Sitter in Gwinnett’ into Google and you will see exactly what I mean!

Megan has worked with me, one on one, to make sure my site got to the top, and stays at the top. First of all she set me up with WordPress so I could log in and make changes to my site whenever I want to. Second, she gave me a great document that explains how to log in, create a new post, and publish it out using the right keywords, titles and descriptions for search engine optimization. The biggest thing is that I feel I am in control of my own site. If I want to show up for some new keywords, I can just write a new post and keep those keywords in mind. I am at the top of Google at the moment, have more clients, and am very happy with where I am right now.

Blog: www.bestfitpetsit.com/pet-talk

Facebook: www.facebook.com/BestFitPetSitServices

E-mail: info@bestfitpetsit.com

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