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MirellaMcCracken's Blog

MirellaMcCracken's Blog

Category Archives: Technology

Beyond writing a good content, what makes people read your post?

06 Tuesday Apr 2010

Posted by Mirella McCracken in Autobiography, Social Behavior., Technology

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

tips for better writing a blog

[tweetmeme source=”mirellamcc” only_single=false]

Beside writing a good content, what makes people read your post?  What makes them come back and read it again?  What makes them leave a comment?  What makes them stick longer or even retweet it?

In fact you may write the most interesting post, but you don’t understand why people never read you, or even take more than few second to stay on your blog?

Your blog must be lacking major attractive components, or too much of visual effects.

Here are few tips from my own experience:

Let the reader visualize the content of your post: Try to be creative with fonts, spaces, bold and italics.  Underline the titles.  Separate with paragraphs.

Blogs are, for some people, like drive through in the fast food chains; readers take only few seconds to decide if they will stay longer or leave your blog (you can check it out in your blog statistics, how long most people stay on your blog after they open it?)

Some people like me, read “diagonally”, I hope you know what the term ‘”to read diagonally” means, if you don’t, I’ll give you an example:  Do you really think that one can finish reading a 200 page book in one night?  Or in few hours?  No matter how “light” the book is?  Scientifically it is impossible, this person must be reading it diagonally.  And it is way easier to read diagonally if the text is visually readable. Make your post a fast food for the eyes. Like in this post’s case, I bet you went through the titles highlighted in bold before you started reading the whole thing.

Write short posts: your post should not be longer than 50% of the page when your blog page opens.  The reader rarely scrolls down to the end of the article no matter how interesting it is. Not to mention that people read blogs while at work, dealing with their own writing and research.

In my life I had to read volumes of legislation working as a lawyer and the least I want to do now, during my leisure time, is to read more boring long articles on people’s blog.  If I want something serious I go to the source, to the library, but not to the blogs.  So make it short!

Never take your readers for granted: Your readers are family;  they are like your neighbors or your relative.  You have to love them, because after all you are writing for them.  Don’t assume if they stop by your post and take the time to leave a comment it is because you are the one and only shinning star on the web!  No, you are not!  No one is.

You have to respect them, write back and show your appreciation by turning the favor.  How do you turn the favor? You go to their website and leave a comment.  People who read your post, are equal to people who visit you at home in real life, and people who leave comments are like people who give you a present (unless they are terrorists and they throw a bomb at you).  So it is like in real life, you should pay them a visit in return and leave a present!

Don’t overwhelm your home page with side stuff: Unless you are selling something, your blog should focus on your posts.

The field of vision in our head is way narrower than we think.  When I see many pictures or texts on the side of a post, I loose concentration…maybe because I am a little bit ADHD (not really, I am joking) but aren’t we all to some degree?

Write from the heart: This sound like a cliché.  I read this motto when I first started my blog, but I only learned what it meant when my hits scored only on articles I wrote with passion.  The readers feel it, they know if you are just telling them BS or you are being genuine.  They know if you are just filling space because you haven’t been blogging for a while or because you enjoyed writing about the subject.  It is like when you stop at a cupcake shop just because it is famous and “in” you might never come back if it doesn’t taste good.

Not more than one post a day and, definitely more than one post a week: I have noticed from my blog that reading a blog go through few stages: readers look first at the blog and bookmark it (if they decide to read it later).  After they read it, some of them come back few hours later to leave a comment.  The process of reading a post takes at least 24 hours, if it is worth reading, or it will take few second to read it diagonally, or not at all.  If you publish more than one post a day, people can be overwhelmed, they will not know which post to read and they will give up.  Keep in mind that you are not the only blogger on the web and readers want to go to other blogs and read other posts.

Also, when you publish a new post, you are condemning the old one to being archived!  Yes!  Your old posts are history and will not be brought to light unless they are very interesting and you have good tags, that are easily detected by search engines.  So give your posts some times under the sun, and let your readers savor them.

Finally, instead of hiring companies or spending time looking at your blog’s statistics (like I do) just enjoy blogging and people will enjoy reading you.

I have more tips and secrets to share but I am not telling anymore (joking)

I hope you enjoyed my post today, have a good one:)

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The dirty game of following and unfollowing in the Twitter world.

26 Friday Mar 2010

Posted by Mirella McCracken in Autobiography, Technology

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Followings and Followers, Unfollow on twitter

[tweetmeme source=”mirellamcc” only_single=false]  After I finished writing my post about Organizing your twitter account by creating different lists, I went on my Twitter account to check how many followers I have so far.  Knowing that the night before I have reached 61.  I was surprised to find that only 59 people were following me.

I was shocked and I tried to understand why.

I have added more than 50 people recently, whom I don’t know, neither from my blog nor real life, only because they added me to their account.  So the numbers of “followers”, as of today, should almost equal the number of people I am following. But it wasn’t.  Not even close.

I know that I don’t tweet that much and I couldn’t have overwhelmed or annoyed anyone.  So I came to a conclusion that some of the people I followed after they followed me, ended up unfollowing me after I followed them, and those people must be the spammers.

I tried to see who did it, but it was impossible.  When I went on the list of people whom I am following, I couldn’t tell who is following me back, and I think Twitter should do something about it.  Twitter should add an option to see if the people who you are following are following you back (unless Twitter is doing it on purpose for some reason)

Anyway, so I decided to check every person whom I am following, if I still exist in their list by going to their Twitter account and see if they are still following me.  But it was an impossible task, especially that some of them follow over 44,000 people, and it will take hours to see if my name is still on their list.

Are you still following me? I know my post is a little bit complicated today:)

So where was I?

OK, so I decided to be a grown up, and not to make a big deal out of it. The “followers” are not bind by any obligation towards me, and they are free to do whatever they want.  So I decided to unfollow people myself, the one who tweets every 10 minutes and especially those who have over 3000 followers.  I thought that they would never know or even notice who unfollowed them.  So I went on my list of “followings” and removed some of them.

Few minutes after, I noticed that the number of my followers dropped even more, to 54.  So I knew that those people find out that I am not following them anymore so they decided to unfollow me, but HOW ON EARTH DID THEY KNOW?  I have been trying for hours to figure out who unfollowed me, and I couldn’t, they knew that I unfollowed them right away.  So I knew that there must be some way to do it.

I went on Google and searched for “How to know who is unfollowing you” and guess what? I landed on a company that does that.  It is called Qwitter and they promote their service this way:

“Qwitter is a service to notify twitter users whenever someone unfollows them on twitter. Qwitter helps you unfollow those who have been following you previously but started unfollowing you after some time.  It comes in handy in weeding out those who tend to first follow you on twitter and then unfollow once you start following them! Use Qwitter to be alerted whenever your followers quit. Qwitter sends you an email at regular intervals (only if there is a twitter user who has unfollowed you) and you can then unfollow such twitter users if you wish to.”

Can you believe it?

My God, this world of Twitter gets more and more interesting by the minute!

And then I found another company called chirpstats :

“Chirpstats.com* is a Twitter follower analytics package built to help you track and learn more about your follower-base. To use chirpstats, simply follow @chirpstats on Twitter and we will message you with your first update in a couple of days! Chirpstats will notify you when somebody stops following you and tell you who it is and your follower history is graphed out over time. Find out why you’re losing or gaining followers.”

And then I found hundred of other companies that offer the same service.

One of the bloggers (I am not gonna put the link to the source because I believe it is a spam) put what I call the dirty Followings in 3 categories:

1. SPAMMERS – who follow you to gain your attention and then silently unfollow you as a trick to get visitor on the link on their profile or increase their followers.

2. POTENTIAL FOLLOWERS – Human psychology refrains a potential follower from following you noticing the Following:Follower ratio in your profile.

3. FOLLOWER WANNABE FRIEND – One follower asks you “hey, I noticed you are not following me back?”. You do so to make him happy and get rid of his frequent requests. But, you are not interested in his talks and unfollow afterwards silently.

After finishing reading about this strange world of Tweeting, I went back on my Twitter account, and followed again the people I have unfollowed an hour ago.  Guess what?  My followers number jumped back again to 57 and they are getting higher by the minute!

I knew then that I was dealing with robot, not human, just marketing devices.

So I learned that it is all about spams,  and not about who ditch whom and why.  It is just business, and some people like to have more followers then  “followings”.

This is my Twitter information for the day and I will let you know if I make more discoveries:)

Have a great weekend!

Related topic: Organizing your twitter account by creating lists

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Organizing your Twitter account by creating different lists.

25 Thursday Mar 2010

Posted by Mirella McCracken in Technology

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

creating lists, Organizing Twitter account

[tweetmeme source=”mirellamcc” only_single=false]  I made a great discovery this morning, I am so happy and excited about it, so I decided to share it with you.  This might not be something new for some of you, but I bet most of us don’t know about it yet.  It is about how to organize the thousand of tweets you receive every day, and how to be able to read only the one you want.

We all love to have thousand of followers, right? We all dream to reach million of followers one day!  So we try to follow all the people who follow us, whether out of courtesy or because sometimes when we don’t follow the people who added us, they unfollow us sooner or later.

But don’t we hate when one of the twitter fellows overwhelms our account with his/her tweets?  Or when they retweet stories of another Twitter friend which you are not interested in?  Your account is invaded with irrelevant tweets and you don’t have room to see your own friend’s tweets.

Finally, I found a way to see only the tweets coming from the people I want.  This option on Twitter was here all the time but I never tried it before this morning.

I explain: So, I am now following around 131 people on Twitter, most of them overwhelm my Twitter account with boring tweets.  Knowing that the only tweets I care about are:

In the morning: my family and friends (like you Holly:), the Georgetown cupcakery, (to see the free cupcake of the day), the metro news to see the delays, and the news from Arlington county.

During the day: I am more interested in what is happening in the world, locally and on the international scene.  So I read the tweets of Huffington post, CNN, Dipnote, Astro Mike, foreign government, organizations…

At the end of the day: I like to read about personal blogs and private tweets of people whom I found interesting, funny or educational.

In the evening: I like to read the tweets of celebrities and TV shows, so I follow the Real housewives tweets, Ryan Seacrest, Padma Laksmi and Tom Colicchio to see what they are cooking (ok the level of knowledge drops in the evening, I have to admit:)

So I created three categories, or lists, in my Twitter account: Friends and family, News, and Entertainment.

If you want to create your own list this is how you do it:

1- You go to “Home” in your Twitter account.

2- You click on “lists”, you know on the right side of the page? after “Search”.

3- A window appears saying “create a list”.  You name it, for instance “friends and family” (you can add a description too, if you want to).  Then you click on private (versus public) if you don’t want people to join your list (or even to see it, I think), so you can keep total control of your lists.   You click “create list” to finish.

4- Then you go to “Home” page and you click on the people you are following; the list of  names appears, and next to each name you have the small square where you can add the name to the list previously created.

Once all the lists are filled, you can click on the list you want, to see the tweets of the people you want, and not the one who tweets the most or the fastest.

And that’s it folks!

For more information you can click on this link to check how Twitter help you create the list: http://help.twitter.com/entries/76460-how-to-use-twitter-lists

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How to add Digg button for dummies.

03 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by Mirella McCracken in Technology

≈ 51 Comments

Tags

retweet button, simple way to add Digg button, wordpress blogs

 [tweetmeme source=”mirellamcc” only_single=false]

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: Due to Digg.com’s recent changes of their website, this tutorial is no longer working for us. Thank you.

After the success of my  post about adding a retweet button, I decided to share how to add the Digg button to WordPress.com

The steps are simple, but a little bit longer than the retweet button, so be patient.

First part has to do with opening an account with Digg.com, second part has to do with adding the yellow Digg button to your posts.

Before starting the steps to add the Digg button,  your blog post should be already published.

First part; opening a Digg account:
1-Open your account at Digg.com
2-When you finish, click on Submit New on the right top of the page.
3-Go back to your blog post (the one you want to add the Digg button to) and copy the URL (you know the address on top, http://)
4-You go back to Submit New and you paste the URL of your post to where it says “Enter the URL”
5-Then you choose media (in our case it is News Article) and you click continue. (you also have to enter all the other information about description, topic etc..)
6-You wait until they process your information and when the page “Success, your story has been submitted” appears, you copy the URL on top of the web page (because later you are going to paste it to your blog)

Second part; to add the yellow button of Digg to your post:

7-Open your post on your blog to edit it.
8-On top of the text (or anywhere you choose for the Digg button to appear) you write .

Your yellow Digg button should look like that ————————————–>

Now go and try it, and let me know if it works for you.

Good Luck!


Related topic retweet button

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The new social networking: Chatroulette. Explained in a video.

25 Thursday Feb 2010

Posted by Mirella McCracken in Social Behavior., Technology

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Casey Neistat, Chatroulette how it works, Exhibitionist, Video, Voyeur

[tweetmeme source=”mirellamcc” only_single=false]

Have you ever try Chatroulette?  It is about chatting with total strangers, whom you don’t get to pick. The choices are random and the chatting time frame can last from less than a second to…as long as you want.  At any time, you can decide to end the conversation and go to the next chatter available.  Chatroulette is a combination of Twitter, MSM, Skype and the matchmaker events where you switch chairs every 4 minutes to talk to potential dates.

Casey Neistat made this video where he explain his experience with Chatroulette, in addition to explaining the new language of Chatroulette like “being nexted” (Somewhat similar to twitter language: to tweet, to retweet and the twitters) Enjoy the video, it has very clever analysis and nice soft music:)

If you want to try it, keep in mind that strangers are watching you and you better be decently dressed (Holly no PJ’s:)

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How to add a retweet button (Tweetmeme) for the WordPress.com blogs FOR DUMMIES. (Works also for Blogger)

15 Monday Feb 2010

Posted by Mirella McCracken in Technology

≈ 126 Comments

Tags

how to retweet, retweet button, Tweetmeme button, Twitter, wordpress blogs


[tweetmeme source=”mirellamcc” only_single=false]For the blogs hosted by WordPress.com (not the one with private domain) I have noticed that most of us don’t have the retweet button (you know, this little green square, where you can retweet the article you like, on your twitter account, and you can see how many times it was tweeted?) also called Tweetmeme button.

Well, after three days of researching, and almost destroying my entire blog’s URL and default settings, I found it.  It is soooooo simple! It was made by WordPress to simplify it for retard like me! (sorry, is it politically incorrect to say that?) ok, for mentally challenged people like me.

So all you need to do is;

Start by adding your twitter name (username) where it is marked in red

tweetmeme source=”yourtwittername” only_single=false

and then, close the sentence with brackets [  ]  (in other words put [ in front and ] at the end of the above sentence.)

Then, add the sentence to the page you want (after you finish writing your blog).

As simple as that![tweetmeme source=”mirellamcc” only_single=false]

and the Retweet Button or Tweetmeme button will appear! just like that —————————->

Retweet me please:)

related topic: How to add Digg button for dummies

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