Tumblr is easy to set up – follow the wizard and get started. Create either a public or private or even limit certain readers Tumblr account. Once you’re set up, you can customize your site with themes, include your avatar, and link to your other social media accounts.

• Tumblr offers a bookmarklet you can drag to your browser’s toolbar and use to add links and media to your Tumblr site.
• There’s also a Facebook application that allows you to cross-post your Tumblr items to your Facebook account.
• You can download the iPhone application so you can take photos or record video while you’re out and about and post those directly to your Tumblr page.
• If you have a Mac, you can download a dashboard widget so you can share things directly from your desktop without going to your browser.
• You can choose to automatically or selectively share your Tumblr posts on Twitter.
• You can even post to Tumblr via text or e-mail from your phone.

There are so many third-party applications for Tumblr it would be a shame to not take advantage of this great service!

Use Twitter as your RSS feed. Twitterfeed allows you set it and forget it. By associating your blog’s RSS with your Twitterfeed account, any time you publish a new article on your blog, the URL is shortened via bit.ly and fed directly to Twitter via your Twitter account – you can also feed it to Facebook or Ping.fm.

To set up a Twitterfeed account:

1. Go to Twitterfeed.com.
2. Complete the sign-up form with an email address and password.
3. Choose whether you’d like your feed to be sent to Twitter or Facebook.
4. Connect with the appropriate account by clicking either the Authenticate Twitter (to send your feed to Twitter) or Connect with Facebook (to send your feed to Facebook) button.
5. Type in the name of the feed you want to send out.
6. Type in the URL of the feed you want to send out.
7. Click Update Feed.

If you want to be even more detailed, you can use advance settings:

• update frequency (every 30 minutes, every hour, on up to every day)
• whether to include the title and/or post description
• which service to use to shorten your links (e.g., bit.ly, SnipURL, TinyURL, etc.)
• post prefixes and suffixes

This seems like a common sense thing – not to long, not too short – but it’s not always that easy. As a blogger, there are a few elements you want to make sure you have going for you every time you post. As a reader, you don’t want the ‘behind the scene’ elements to intrude on what you’re reading.

A main concern for many bloggers is SEO (search engine optimization) – you want your post to be picked up by search engines as legitimate. It seems that both extremely short and extremely long web pages are not ranked as highly as pages that are of a reasonable length. A reasonable assessment is to have a page of at least 250 words and probably no more than 1,000 words.

Remember, this depends on the topic you’re writing on. Writing reviews may create a longer post than say, if you’re just reporting a recent news item.

What about quantity of posts? The consensus seems to be that shorter posts mean you will write more posts and writing more posts are better for generating readership with RSS and in Search Engines.

Most importantly, remember reader attention spans. It’s fair to say that the typical internet reader has a short attention span. The attention span is less than 2 minutes – on an interesting topic. Keeping posts short, interesting and informative is your best bet!

Looks like new media will now be treated like old media.  The FTC has now decided that bloggers must now be upfront about receiving products from businesses, or if they are being paid to promote a specific product.  For more information, please see the FTC article here, or contact one of our SEO experts who can help you better understand how this new ruling may affect you.

Google loves fresh content, but how often and let alone how practical is it to change your site content constantly? Sometimes you need a quicker and more effective avenue to provide fresh content to your site, and one of the easiest ways is to post on your blog. A single post offers so many benefits that even reach beyond SEO that one would be hard pressed not to add a post here and there. Fresh new content, a marketing platform, an ability to stay in tune with your customers, and a brand control/ company standpoint platform are all benefits… blog today and if you dont have a blog you ca always get a blog design here.