Import your blog to Facebook

I find it easier to write when I have an idea in my head of who I am writing to. If you already have an audience of friends and colleagues who are gathered at Facebook, that's a perfect starting audience for you to write to as you let your creative juices begin to flow on your new blog.

You can configure Facebook to show a new note on your profile every time you post to your blog. Keep in mind that importing your blog to facebook does not increase visitors to your actual blog pages, but it does offer your friends on facebook a convenient way to interact with you on what you've posted.

To import your blog to facebook, go to your facebook profile and complete the following steps:

1. Near the top, under the tabs, click on "Write Note"

2. A form will open on the page; look below the form and click on "Settings"

3. Find the sentence that says You can automatically import activity from YouTube, Flickr and other services to your profile. Click on the words I've put in in bold.

4. You now get another box with some icons in it. Look for the feed icon and click on it.

5. Paste your feed address where it says "public URL"

The steps above should import your most recent blog post and every future post. If you also want to import up to 25 previous posts, then click "update now" under the feed address.

As a new blogger, your blog needs content. If you're in the habit of posting notes on Facebook, consider posting them to your imported blog instead of at facebook directly so that you kill two birds with one stone. That way, the interesting thoughts, links and other media you post in your facebook notes will also be available to a wider audience that includes folks that are not connected to you there.

2 essential tools for monitoring the growth of your blog

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, then did it really make any noise? How do you know? Similarly, if you write your heart out on your blog but nobody reads your words, have you really used your voice? We've already said you'll need to spend time building an audience by letting people know what you've written is there to read. But how will you know if anyone is reading?

Naturally, the internet makes it simple.

In fact, you absolutely cannot build a sustainable blog that grows in value to you unless you are monitoring your visitor flow. Over time, you will learn and implement many techniques for letting people on the web know that your content is out there and encouraging them to visit. Monitoring your site visitors helps you see whether those efforts are working or not.

This post covers two essential tools for monitoring your blog's traffic growth that we're using on the ourwwworld team blogs: Sitemeter (which you need to install yourself) for monitoring daily visitor traffic, and Feedburner (which I'm planning to install for you) for monitoring the number of those visitors who choose to become your blog's regular followers.

1. Sitemeter

Sitemeter is a free and easy statistics tracking service that I've used for years. Since I personally want to track how much traffic we're getting as a team, I've already installed an ourwwworld team sitemeter on this blog and all of the team blogs at the bottom of your sidebar.

If you click on where it says "xx visitors since October 27, 2008" in the sidebar of your blog, you'll come to the summary page for all of our traffic together. From there if you look on the left for "page ranking" and click on entry pages, you can get a quick idea of how many visitors (out of the last 100) entered the ourwwworld team pages at your site. Referrals is another link I use often, since it allows me to see where on the web our traffic is coming from. If I share a link to a post on one of our blogs at facebook, for example, I can see at sitemeter whether anyone has clicked on it.

Since I'm also interested in seeing information about traffic to my own blog in finer detail, I've installed a second sitemeter at the bottom of my sidebar that's only monitoring my own pages. I would highly recommend that you also install a second sitemeter that monitors only YOUR blog, and the earlier the better. It will take you about 5 minutes to sign up for a free sitemeter account, get the html code for blogger and install it on your blog.

Installing gadgets on your blog is something you need to get used to doing. This one is easy practice (and chances are by the time you read this, sitemeter and blogger will have conspired to make it even easier). When you've signed up at sitemeter, you'll need to find the link in the manager panel to get your html code and copy it. Be sure to get the code that's for blogger. To install the code on your blog, follow the steps below:

1. log into blogger and view your blog
2. click customize at the top right of your screen
3. click on add a gadget in your sidebar
4. a window will open. In that window, choose "html/javascript"
5. paste in the html code from your sitemeter account into the box that appears
6. add a title similar to "christinaswwworld stats" if you want
7. click save.
   

Important to remember is that on blogger, any new gadget you install will always appear at the TOP of your sidebar. On the customize page, you can drag the elements in your sidebar up or down to reorder them. Once you've moved your new sitemeter code down to the bottom, click save again. Then view your blog to make sure it looks like you want it to, and you're almost done.

If you are usually on the same computer when you work on your blog, it's a good idea to exclude your own visits from being counted. If you are working from webcafes or always changing computers, then this isn't possible. But if you're regularly using the same computer then click "ignore visits" in the sitemeter manager panel. There, you can and should set your account to ignore visits from your browser, visits from your IP address, or both. Now, whenever anyone (including you) visits your blog and clicks on the sitemeter icon you just installed, they'll be able to monitor and analyze the growth of your blog's traffic from people other than you.

(btw - from 15 September until yesterday, I was monitoring all of us through the christinaswwworld sitemeter, where you can still see our history from the past 30 days. As of yesterday, though, that account is now only monitoring traffic to my christinaswwworld blog.)

2. Feedburner

While Sitemeter can tell us a lot about who has visited your blog, feedburner can tell you how many of your visitors are choosing to follow your blog and be alerted whenever you post something new. Feedburner also helps you deliver your content to those people in a number of ways, including by email (which blogger doesn't automatically do), and tries to help you consolidate statistics on people who are following your blog feed through all kinds of websites and services that it can be accessed through.

In the blogging world, the number of people following your feed is a key measure of your blog's financial value. If your blog has many followers, it becomes easier to generate a response to fundraising or income generating activities through your blog. You can even sell your blog if you're ever tired of it someday and earn thousands of dollars if your feed has a healthy list of followers. Of course, your number of followers will grow much more slowly than your traffic, so it's never too soon to offer your visitors as many ways as possible to start following you. In fact, one of my pet peeves is finding a blog that I want to follow, and not finding a way to easily do that. Offering your feed to your visitors is critically important.

Setting up feedburner to work for your blog is a bit technical (which is another way of saying I don't know how to explain it to you well.) The first time I used it, someone else set it up for me. Now that I've learned how to do it myself, I'll be installing it for you on the ourwwworld team blogs this week.

Once it's installed, it will be important for you to know where to find your feed address. It's often asked for when you are signing up for the various blog widgets, communities and directories that you'll come across while building a sustainable blog. Look in the sidebar of this blog, and scroll down until you see a link that looks like this:

subscribe in a reader

I'll be installing a very similar looking link on your blog.

In the future, whenever you are asked to provide your blog's feed address anywhere on the web, simply right click on that link to copy the link location, and paste it wherever you need it. Your feed link will undoubtedly look something similar to this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ourwwworld.

I'm going to play for a while with ways that feedburner can help us to promote your content on other websites like LifeInAfrica.com, and at the end of our experiment (more on that in an upcoming post) I'll be transferring the feed's ownership to you for continued monitoring of your subscriber growth. In the meantime, I'll try to post regular screenshots of how all of our feeds are doing that can help you get an idea of how we're all doing on subscriber growth.

Please post any questions, challenges, or comments on any of the above in the comments section below. I'm happy to help further if I can.

Here's to your blog's sustainable growth!

.

Go Grace, Go! to Entrecard

Oh my goodness, I've just been reading Grace Ayaa's blog "Awakening." She's posted today about a visit to our friend Fred Kayiwa's project and it's just written beautifully. I want more!

Now that Grace has 5+ quality posts up would be a great time for her to think about joining the Entrecard community. They've recently disabled the income generating aspects of entrecard, and the forums are not that great, but getting my feet wet there has been extremely worthwhile nonetheless.

The number one reason why I like entrecard and wholeheartedly recommend it for any new blogger is because it's the only community for bloggers I've found so far where I am forced to go look at other blogs. The educational value of my journeys around the community "dropping my card" and occasionally commenting at blogs of all shapes and sizes for the past couple of weeks has been worth it's weight in gold.

The traffic back to pArtY @ christinaswwworld has also been good, and there's a few from the EC community who have started to follow my posts and comment. There are also quite a few blogs I've found that I'm now following, and I look eagerly for new posts whenever I log in.

I've made badges for all of the ourwwworld team blogs that you can use as your card that you upload to entrecard. They are all in the sidebar of your blog. You can right click to get the url of your image when entrecard asks for it at sign-up.

Grace, I really think the folks at Entrecard will love what you are doing. Hope to see you (and other ourwwworld team members once you've got 5 quality posts) at entrecard soon. Keep up the great work!

100 EC CREDIT BONUS - I've been building up credits at entrecard so I can share them with the ourwwworld team. If you're a team member, then once you've signed up at entrecard, drop your card at my blog and I'll send you 100 Entrecard credits. That will let you get started advertising on EC member blogs right away.

Becoming sustainable bloggers

There are lots of folks out there who will tell you that they are earning thousands of dollars per month blogging. Many will sell you their secrets, but almost all of the people who are worth listening to will tell you that it didn't happen for them and it's not going to happen to you without work.

Blogging CAN earn some very ingenious people a lot of money within a very short time. For the vast majority of people like me and you who are struggling to keep up with the information overload, however, blogging is not going to earn significant amounts of money without an investment in learning time and energy in doing the groundwork it takes to put the components of a sustainable blog in place.

The good news is, if you're willing to learn how to do the work that sustainable bloggers do, your blog most certainly can develop into a rewarding hobby that not only pays for itself, but also pays you a salary for nurturing it that can increase over time.

There are four basic categories of blog-related work that any blogger concerned with sustainability must be prepared to get done in equal measures:

1. Produce content

2. Let audiences know your content is available

3. Identify, implement, test & manage revenue streams

4. Learn constantly about 1, 2, and 3 by interacting with other bloggers

As I delve into the blogosphere of late in search of knowledge about how it all works, my quest is to find ways that the ourwwworld team can collaborate effectively as a team, to help each other get the 4 main parts of the work involved in sustainable blogging done, and maximize the value of the scarce time we each have to spend online. Ever present in my mind are the language, time and cost constraints that our non-US team members face.

In future posts here, my plan is to offer knowledge, time-saving tips and collaborative ideas for each of the 4 categories of stuff that needs to be done to create blogs that increase in value over time. Though I will certainly share whatever I think I'm learning I honestly don't have all the answers for us by a longshot. I'm thinking about interviewing some guest bloggers who I believe will have some useful experience to share in helping us understand the work involved in all of these areas, and tips for getting it done efficiently. I'll also be pointing you in the direction of bloggers I am learning from in a number of different spheres.

Please let's use the comment space here at the ourwwworld blog to discuss (with each other and other bloggers who will hopefully pass by) the different strategy options available to us as we explore the path to sustainable blogging as a team.

Blog Action Day 2008: ourwwworld roundup

Awakening, by Grace Ayaa (East Africa)
"...When I look at Africa, most of its land is fertile and very good for any kind of agriculture , but there are the people who are going hungry and have to live on handouts. It puzzles me a lot. So I feel that the agricultural sector should be the most looked at area. lots and lots of food should be grown by a family to feed themselves and then the surplus sold ." full post


Darkness2Light, by Norbert Okec (East Africa)
"If a child in a poor nation gets infected with some disease but the parents, friends and neighbours are all convinced that the child is sick because he/she climbed a mango tree belonging to the local traditional healer/spirit medium.... and the poor child dies do we say that the child died because of the disease or because of lack of correct information?..." full post


In Search of Mindfulness, by Linda Nowakowski (S.E. Asia)
"...There is enough food in the world to feed every person. That is a distribution problem. If you look at the wealth in the world, I suspect that there is enough wealth in the world to eliminate poverty as well. It's a distribution problem." full post


Kireka Concerns, by Peter Ndelo (East Africa)
Remember I mentioned we're all learning to blog? Well, Peter posted his thoughts at the Blog Action Day website instead of on his blog :-) "poverty is lack of knowledge, ability, cooperation and spirit of helping each other to come out from this problem. No body wants to be poor but how can one come out of this?" You can see the full comment here, and as soon as Peter gets it moved to his blog I'll edit this bit and put a link here.


Shawnstudio, by Shawn Kelly (North America)
"...bottom-up strategies seem to me the only way to create real change, as it has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that top-down economics leads only to disaster. The battle is exponentially more difficult in Africa, where government corruption is the norm and enriching oneself at the expense of the citizens has been the prevailing leadership strategy for decades." full post



pArtY @ christinaswwworld, by Christina Jordan
"Please join me in welcoming the ourwwworld team officially to the blogosphere!" full post

Welcoming new global voices to the blogosphere

from http://christinaswwworld.com: It's Blog Action Day today - bloggers around the world are asked to post about poverty. I tend to write about poverty quite a bit anyway, so instead of trying to synthesize all of my thoughts on the subject into one post, I've been working on something a bit different today.... I've pulled some new voices from my world into the dialogue.

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Sustainable blogging, from and for Africa

Just in time for Blog Action Day 2008, we've redesigned the ourwwworld team blogs to have our say about poverty, and to start using our blogs to raise money for a poverty-related cause.

The ourwwworld team is a small global group of people who are learning to blog together. More than half of our team is blogging from East Africa, where poverty is rampant and the costs of blogging are very high. The ourwwworld team blogs are monetized with the double intention of raising money for Life in Africa - the cause that binds our team together - and sharing revenues with the bloggers to offset their costs. Ideally, we'll develop a way that can make it financially feasible for more people who are affected by poverty to participate actively in the online world, and possibly even some extra income.

As we begin on this blogging journey, the ourwwworld team revenue sharing plan is as follows:

Team revenues will be earned through adsense, the sale of electronic books related to sustainable living, and other jointly promoted income generating mechanisms to be introduced at a later date. All team funds raised though the end of December 2008 will be subject to the following split:

• 20% to the blogger who raised the funds
• 20% for the bloggers' monthly cash prize fund
• 20% for ourwwworld site administration & promotion
• 20% to Life in Africa USA for overhead and admin support
• 20% to Life in Africa USA for disbursal to community projects in Africa

(Donations made directly to Life in Africa and/or craft sales made through ourwwworld team blogs shall not be subject to the split above.)

In order to make this revenue sharing model meaningful, the ourwwworld team blogs will need broad exposure to audiences that will read, click, purchase and resonate with the social message that each of the blogs has to offer. This blog will explore promotional and cross-promotional techniques that others in the blogosphere are using to develop their audience, and post regular round-ups of content created by the team. Cash prize contests designed to encourage team members to cross-promote each other will be announced at the ourwwworld blog monthly. The first round of ourwwworld team promotion contests will be announced on 1 November 2008.

Until then, the focus is on content! Ourwwworld bloggers must make at least 4 new posts between 16 and 31 October in order to participate in the November contests.

Blog building communities: MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Entrecard

Ourwwworld players, we'll be altering our game soon. Over the past week I've been exploring a number of communities for bloggers. I'm excited about what I see and would love for you to take a look

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