My Social Media Enchilada

Posted on November 9, 2012 by daniel

temporary: just 1 line to claim my own blog on Technorati: WS5HV6J75V3D

Hello! It’s Me!

So hey, I have not paid attention to my blog, or twitter, or much of Facebook for pretty much “forever” in Internet Time.  I gots to monetize and brand and be coherent!

Motivation

I’d recently been asked to look into how blogs are monetized.  It’s always been something I’d wanted to do, but then I would think “oh no, I’d be selling out.. it’s not pure writing for the joy of it, etc”.   Well, to use the technical term: pfft!  I think I can write on the tech and creative sides without selling out (you know, Campbells Soup really is “mmm mmm good”  — see how I slipped that one in there?)

So anyway, I’d like to tie together my social media presence (presences?  presenceii?), have them funnel into my blog, sell a bunch of ads, and make scads of moolah.

The other big motivation is to be skilled at it, technically and creatively.  I’ve ignored the whole blogging aspect for way too long.  I really think it should be the long-form “hub” of what I do online.

Implementing Online Coherence

Ok, that is a deliberate heading there… kinda meant to be indexed to send some SEO tool into some fit of joy …

I’m basically using some WordPress plugins to make is easier to:

Sharing Blog Posts

The sharing aspect was relatively easy to implement.  I recommend using the Sharing module of Jetpack.  It lets you drag and drop the services you want.  I enabled Email, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.  I’m sure I will enable more as I get all brave and bold and so on.

Google AdSense & Amazon Associates

Getting these two set up was a headache joyous experience that I recommend wholeheartedly.  I’m still waiting for final approval from Adsense.  They are wonderful people over there.  I dont usually fall in love with strangers, but, that bunch, yeah… they’ve got it going on!  So anway, am sure you are just dying to know the entry points:

  •  Amazon Associates – chances are you have an Amazon Account.  With that, you can add on an Amazon Associates ID.  Once you are set up, you can point to your favorite products from anywhere in your blog.  If people buy them, you get a referral fee.
  • Google Adsense – Go to the Google AdSense Entry Point and sign up.  The basic idea is to have ads that appear in your blog that are related to the keywords / phrases you are using.  You get paid when they are clicked on.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

This is a huge topic, and I am very new to it.  Two ways I can tackle it are to be more aware of how I write (without breaking my style, selling out, or being a dork), and to use good tools to see how things measure up as I am writing.  I am just getting going with the plugin: WordPress SEO by Yoast.  A two part series that I enjoyed on SEO, which helped me wake up to the importance of little tweaks that can help boost readership:

The Enchilada

So, my personal enchilada goes something like:

  • have my facebook and twitter posts show up here
  • when I post here, broadcast to FB and twitter (and elsewhere) to encourage readership
  • make it easy to share posts
  • do well in search rankings
  • have relevant ads, but dont have them distract from the site.
  • be incredibly nice to the wonderful people at Google AdSense, now and *after* they approve of my account.  Hey! Google Person!  That looks heavy – may I carry that for you?  Oh, it’s no problem – I drive 90 miles down here every day just to help you folks out.  Doesn’t everyone!?
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3 Responses to My Social Media Enchilada

  1. Canary Beck says:
    November 10, 2012 at 7:22 pm

    Thanks very much for linking to my articles on iRez! And good luck with your new blog 🙂

  2. daniel says:
    November 10, 2012 at 9:01 pm

    You are welcome Canary – it’s fun to reboot into writing, and thinking about how to tie all of the pieces together. The blog has some of the functionality now, but looks terrible (wont stay that way 😉 How do you deal with tying together the RL and SL sides? Just let it all blur together?

    • Canary Beck says:
      November 10, 2012 at 11:55 pm

      I write for two blogs and I tend to let the edges blur on my personal blog a lot more than I do on iRez. But then, my iRez writing tends to be more outwardly analytical, about stuff I see and experience in SL, whereas my personal blog tends to be more introspective. Or, to put it another way, iRez is my living room, and Songs (my personal blog) is my bedroom.

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