Apr 23, 03:47 am: Week 6: Fine tuning the blog

Last week, we did some blog set up.

I told you to play and I hope that you did. Spent some time writing some posts and thinking out loud. Maybe deleted some of them but maybe you kept some of them. I hope you kept some them. There’s nothing wrong with thinking out loud. In fact, that’s one of the best ways to get comments.

This week is going to be pretty easy actually. You have a couple more configuration things to do and then you are get ready to push the blog out into the world. Not quite yet. So don’t worry too much. Let’s build up some content first.

Okay, the configuration. Go back to your Feedburner account. Don’t worry about any of the numbers, by the way. Don’t even pay attention to them. We’re just diving in quickly to make sure that people who subscribe to your feed will get your bookmarks from Ma.gnolia.com too. I know that we put the bookmarks on the sidebar of your site. But a lot of people won’t come to your site more than once. They will hang out with you in their feedreader and you want to make sure to bring the bookmarks to the party.

So. In Feedburner, go into your feed information. Then hit the optimize tab. You’ll see Link Splicer on the left column. It’s pretty obvious what do from there. In “Splice Links,” I’d choose “As a once-a-day summary only.” But there’s no math in that. Choose what suits you.

Now that’s done. Back to the blog. Look at your posts. And think, for just a minute, about how you’d categorize what you’ve written. Sure, you have the topic that you are thinking about, the issue that you are working on but if you were filing this stuff away, how would you identify it? Add the various categories that apply to the posts that you’ve written in “Categories” under the “Manage” tab.

Add two more: “off topic” and “housekeeping”. You won’t use ‘em often but you will use them.

Now, very quietly, you are going to start connecting your blog to your other accounts and networks. Go to ma.gnolia and Twitter and add your blog to your profile. And your blog to signature file. You aren’t shouting about it. Yet. It’s a soft launch.

Keep up with reading feeds, bookmarking and twittering as you have been. And use the blog to stretch out. To build the thoughts that serve as connective tissue between those three activities. Don’t worry, yet, about getting feedback on your posts. Don’t worry about the stats. Just build up content and let yourself get found. You should be trying to work, by the way, so that you are spending about an hour a day on these activities. I know that’s what I said at the beginning too but you will have gotten more efficient in all of this. Maybe, if you are really into it, you are spending 1.5 hours. But not too much more.

Next week, we’re going to see if we can bring some of this into the 3D world. And we’ll get a little louder about your blogging.

This is part of 52 Weeks to Social Change: Using the Social Web to Make Good Things Happen.

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Marnie Webb  |