]]> Part of the Inchoo team just spent awesome two days on a conference in Novi Sad, Serbia called BlogOpen. This is the largest regional conference for bloggers and, as of this year, social networkers. Those that were not fortunate enough to come and attend the conference personally were able to follow it through Twitter and live stream. According to the numbers I saw tweeted, the live stream was viewed by ~800 people on day one and ~600 people on day two.

One of the most awesome things we saw in Novi Sad was this billboard, right next to the bus station:

I’m sorry, but as far as I know, “spiritity” is NOT a word.

The conference itself is very relaxed with unusual audience set-up which makes you feel more like you’re in a bar than in the conference audience.

Picture by Igor Mitrovic

The lectures were not something groundbreaking, but they were fun and enjoyable. I only attended several, since I like to spend my time on a conference like this networking. Nothing around BlogOpen is like a usual conference. For example, instead of name tags, people were wearing aprons. Yes, aprons, I wore one over a suit. Fun times!

Picture by Igor Mitrovic

I enjoyed DedaBor‘s presentation, which made me laugh several times and made me think about bloggers that are not in this for the money. I also liked Ivan Brezak Brkan’s theory about profiling people on social networks. I can say that entire Inchoo team enjoyed the networking part of the conference. I’d like to thank Dragan Varagic, Jelena Jovanovic, Milos Petrovic, Danijel Sivinjski, Pedja Puselja, people from our hosting company (Plus Hosting) who were also attending, and everyone else we talked with for awesome time we spent together and I hope we’ll be seeing each other next year.

The nightlife in Novi Sad is pure awesomeness. We hit a few exclusive clubs and had lots of fun, listening to live music, dancing, and generally enjoying our stay.

Long story short, this was time well spent. If you get a chance, you should visit this conference next year. I know I’ll be back.

]]> Writers, developers rejoice for some new features like Internal linking, Front-end Admin Bar and some pretty good advancements on taxonomy queries and post templates. Hit the button, read the rundown.

Features expected in WordPress 3.1:

Internal linking – After years of expectations WordPress will gain more on CMS functionality then ever and make wordpress even more SEO efficient.

Writers will now have the ability to browse thru posts and pages from the admin and add the internal links directly while writing the post. Guess I’ll stop using dedicated desktop apps that don’t support that.

Front-End Admin Bar – Having the back-end on the front-end in terms of a on-top placed administration bar will provide easy access to the dashboard, post writing etc.

This would come in handy for multisite wordpress sites and for those who like having some bar sitting on top Judging by the community feedback it’s a very welcomed feature.

Admin Screens on AJAX – This one will allow reordering/sorting columns for the admin interface. One great application of this is with the sorting, pagination and most importantly searching. Hope this one gets applied to comments also but as they state on their dev blog “it’s still being reviewed for inclusion”.

Next presented features are more interesting to developers and advanced users since they bring WordPress even closer to that CMS flavor:

Advanced taxonomy queries – The taxonomy queries, as announced, should be easier to create and enable sorting posts and pages a lot easier. I guess that recreating multiple taxonomies through categories should be a thing of the past.

Something like: “I’d like a list of all your cars without the stereo please”. “Yes sir, here you are.” but without wordpress actually talking with the user

Post templates / Post styles – This feature brings WordPress a few steps closer to an actual CMS with the ability for the user to select a pre-defined post template or post style, carefully prepared by a developer and accessible via drop-down.

All of these improvements are also accompanied with bug fixes and of course, some UI changes and enhancements. This will also be the last version to support PHP 4.

The release is scheduled for December 15, a month after the Beta release.

You can read their full process and scope at their dev blog.

]]> I’ve been involved with Blog Action Day since it first started in the summer 2007. It’s a one day in a year when bloggers all around the world unite to spread the word about a certain humanity-wide problem.

This year’s topic is climate change. It’s still not late for you to participate, go to Blog Action Day 2009 website and register your blog, join the conversation, and help raise awareness of human impact on climate change!

Since I’m not really an expert on the topic of climate change and non of my colleagues here in office are, I’m not gonna lecture you about it. However, our colleagues over at Surgeworks Blog will deliver an expert article on the topic of climate change today.

In the moment I’m writing this, there are ~8000 blogs participating in over 140 countries with over 11 million RSS readers. Some of the biggest blogs of the world are participating in this event including: The Official Google Blog, Mashable, TMZ.com, and Global Voices.

I just hope I’ll get more bloggers involved. Here’s a touching video from YouTube – Stop Global Warming:

]]> If you are an online store owner that ever went seeking advice on promoting your website and gaining more targeted visitors, you’ve probably heard you need a blog. You might wonder how does blog actually help you in gaining more visitors and ultimately earn more money with your online store.

Having a blog by default will not help you at all. It’s what you do with your blog that’s going to effect both your SEO and other aspects of inbound marketing. It’s a long process but once you start experiencing the benefits of your work you will see it was the right thing to do.

To understand how blog will help you, you must first understand what’s your online store missing:

• Online store is missing content – Most online stores have really low amount of actual content for search engine spiders to index. There are usually just a few lines of text that represent your product’s description and an image or few images at it’s best. Some stores go one step further and allow their visitors to post ratings and reviews of their products. This might generate useful content, but in order to have any reviews (and if you’re in this business, you know it’s not that easy to motivate visitors to write them), you first need to get a significant amount of traffic and customers. If you’re starting a new online store, don’t expect to have lots of reviews any time soon. This brings us to conclusion that when we’re dealing with online stores, we can’t really rely on user generated content to satisfy all of our content marketing needs.

• Online store is missing viral potential – Sure, you could have some crazy products that might go viral and links to them could be spread all over the internet, but in most cases, you’re an serious business that doesn’t really sell crazy and funny products. You need some useful quality content that will attract backlinks and will make people spread it via social networks.

• Online store is missing non commercial content – People really don’t like to be sold to. Sure, some of your visitors will be interested in buying your products and that’s exactly why they came. The problem is, most of your online store’s visitors will be people who are casually surfing or just exploring options, exploring prices and so on. If you have nothing to offer to them except your product’s image and description they will most likely just bounce of your store. But, imagine you had some interesting articles useful to such visitors. They might read it and decide to subscribe to your newsletter or follow you on social networks such as twitter or facebook. One day these visitors might be in need of your products and you already have a way to attract them back to your store.

So this is where your blog kicks in. It’s a tool that will enable you to create all of the things your store is actually missing. It’s a perfect tool for all of your inbound marketing needs. A place where you can write about your products or your niche. A place that will attract search engine traffic from much broader targeted audience that one day might be interested in buying your products. A place that will get you more backlinks and more social media exposure. A place where your visitors can interact and connect with you.

This is why marketers and SEOs usually advise you to start a blog. It’s the useful content you create with your blog that’s going to help you, not the fact that you have a blog. Having a blog and not writing often or not writing interesting and useful post is the same as not having a blog at all.

Inchoo offers services of WordPress and Magento integration. There is also another solution we provide for integrating online store with blog – WordPress + eCommerce.

Adding additional information to support the argument: HubSpot’s Study shows that small businesses that blog gain 55% more website visitors, 97% more backlinks (inbound links – links from other websites to your website) and have 434% more indexed pages on average compared to those that do not blog.

]]> Yesterday I came across an article that somewhere between the lines mentions the topic of subscribing to “professional” articles in certain field of interest. Reading it, got me thinking why and when would I pay for article subscription. Here are my thoughts and views. First lets define “professional”. At certain level articles can be of two types: “HowTo” and “My thoughts or overviews” type. To be honest, the more I am into the development, the more I like the second ones. Then there is the “credibility” of the author. Is he a PhD “talk only” person or practitioner without any significant official education but with extreme knowledge in his field. Personally I like the other one more. Not to say that “talk only” people are not important as well.

Writing a good and useful article can be a tedious and time consuming tasks. Personal overview here, sometimes it takes me 2-4 hours to write an article here at Inchoo.net and Ajzele.net. Most of them are far from what I see as “professional” level. Writing good stuff takes time, effort and knowledge. Most of people have no second thoughts when it comes to taking out money for their favorite magazine, but when it comes to paying articles online things are different. I guess that paying something that you cannot touch and feel is generally always tricky.

Here is how I see professional content. If its released periodically as magazine then it should follow certain “layout pattern”, should have some minimum content length, should have clear and concise intro, “the core” and conclusion, should make me “think and rethink” after reading it.

Would I pay for article subscription myself? Probably not. Not because of the price, since most of the subscriptions are quite cheap, but because of the “I only take free” approach we tend to have for content on web.

Would I love to be subscribed to “professional” articles. Yes!

The article subscription is something I see more suitable for businesses. If my company has 5, 10… or more developers and we are all experts in certain area, then I would most definitely enjoy having subscription model that guaranties me 10-20 “out of field of business” articles each month. Its more then just reading a “HowTo” on certain topic. Having heard (read) other people opinions can make us “see” things we might have overlooked due to narrowed views and different approach in everyday work.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this subject.

]]> If you already have a wordpress powered website, you should consider the Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin by Sociable. It’s a very well documented community builder, that will enable people that have Facebook account to register and sign in to your blog using their Facebook identity.

The plug-in will also import the basic profile for the user to your blog, and provide public profile pages for each of your members. A sidebar widget will keep track of recent additions to your community, Facebook-style, and a members page will also give you an overview of all your blog users.

This is an easy and quick way to generate a user community around your personal brand/blog integrating the powerful tools and functionalities Facebook is offering today.

Facebook Connect is a good alternative turning around the common integration approach with the Social Networks Applications.

The main advantages of this plug-in are:

1. A visitor can access (login) your WordPress powered site with his Facebook credentials (Facebook validates the username without asking for the password if the user is already logged into Facebook).
2. The user does not need to register in the blog because thanks to the plugin the user can utilize his complete profile information from Facebook. This is tremendously useful as the user does not have to register and create profiles over and over again! At the same time, the plugin creates a WordPress blog user with the same Facebook profile informations so you can keep track of your community members.
3. You and all registered users may generate invitations to all their Facebook friends to join your Blog/Site.
4. Your registered visitors activity in the blog/site, such as comments or posts, can be sent to Facebook mini-feed of the users profile and is then visible in Facebook in the user’s lifestream.

]]> If you are into internet advertising you probably already considered or already tried out advertising on some popular or targeted blogs. Blogs can be valuable traffic generators however in most cases you will see that conversion rates and click through rates of advertising on blogs will be much worse and more expensive then advertising on search engine’s search results (Google AdWords and similar). The reason for this is pretty obvious, the content surrounding the add can not be as targeted as the keywords you can target via search engine advertising.

Why would one buy add space on blogs if search engine advertising is more cost efficient?

Sometimes, if handling a very targeted and low search volume niche, search engines just don’t fill your marketing appetite. You want more visitors then search engines targeted keyword volumes can provide and thus for you turn to targeted or semi-targeted blogs to serve your adds.

Also, if your product is something completely new on market and there is absolutely no search volume for your product, you can’t use search engine advertising effectively. Instead, you should try to find semi-targeted blogs, related to your product or service to push your marketing message.

Blogs are also in many cases very good for branding your company, product or service. The branding effects are often much greater then the branding effects resulted by search engine advertising campaigns.

How can one advertise on blogs?

There are many ways to advertise on blogs. Most bloggers, however, are joined into some advertising programs where you can view more blogs (their stats and prices) at once and decide to buy adds on any of them. One of such networks is BlogAds. Once you register for an account there, you will be able to purchase add space on 1500 of America’s most influential blogs (according to their website). Some of the worlds most influential blogs are available on BlogAds such as PerezHilton, CuteOverload, Dailykos and many others.

]]> Building backlinks is the most important part of SEO work. The only thing more important is how relevant the becklinks you build are. You could actually rank at number one spot on Google for a keyword you don’t have anywhere in your content solely based on your backlinks. This have been proven in practice many times and I have personally done this on several keywords.

How do you build quality relevant backlinks for your targeted keywords?

Most of you will first think of specialized web directory listings which can actually be good for your ranking, however, in most cases it just isn’t enough to give you first page listing on major search engines for your targeted keywords.

Next thing people tend to try is link exchange with relevant web sites. This is also a grate way to gather some relevant backlinks but in case you are promoting a new website with no page rank or visits it’s pretty hard to find good relevant websites willing to exchange links with you.

The only thing that’s left to you is to build your own quality relevant content with backlinks. The technique I love to use to provide myself with relevant backlinks is building blogs with relevant content. This can be a pretty hard job but it really pays of in the long run. There are some tips that could help you speed up the process:

1. Use wordpress.com for creating your blogs. – WordPress has grate on-site SEO and blogs on WordPress.com get indexed pretty quickly. Once you create an account there, you can create unlimited number of blogs without having to register any new accounts.
2. Write more then one post per blog. – Google loves backlinks that look natural and active blog that has your link in blogrol seems pretty natural. You can also include some backlinks inside blog posts linking to relevant parts of the website you are building backlinks for.
3. Use Scribefire – Scribefire is grate firefox plugin that will allow you to write into your wordpress blogs from your browser. It helps a lot to have all your blogs listed in it and be able to drag-and-drop pictures from the web directly into your blog posts.
4. Your blog posts don’t have to be masterpieces – Remember you are not writing content for readers, you are writing it for spiders so it only has to seem relevant to the topic.
5. Promote your blogs – You won’t have much use of these backlinks if you don’t build backlinks for the blog. Luckily, building these backlinks is not so hard as you can use all the benefits provided by RSS feed. Submit your blogs RSS feed to as many services as you can that will create some backlinks out of it. It is also easier to do this when you have more blogs to submit at once.