Before you choose a blog template, consider form and function. Keep in mind that the Web is evolving all the time and we are always experimenting with new ways to display our content. And remember that content is king. The blog design is there to enhance your content, to provide a good experience to your readers and to convey what your brand/blog stands for.

Based on my experience and what I see in the blogosphere as of autumn 2009, I feel that:

1. Pictures sell. The trend is to go with bigger images. Aim for 500 pixels in width.
2. The the blog is becoming the hub of your social media activities. The blog layout is morphing and designers are experimenting with different options. There are no clear winner at this point. The multimedia blog template is an option. But clearly, we look for what will replace the magazine layout and the classic blog layout for your home page.
3. Make sure to display where to find you on other social media sites. Put a link to your Flickr and You tube account, a Follow me on Twitter link or a Twitter widget. The Fan box from Facebook works well to grow your fan base. You must leverage your participation in social networking sites.
4. Make sure your posts display well in Facebook when people add the link to their profile. You want to show the title, show the contextual picture and display the first sentences of your post. Click here for explanations. Any blogger should leverage the power of popular social networking sites to grow their traffic.
5. Assume that your readers use a screen resolution of at least 1024×768. On at my At Home blog, I get less than 2% of my readers with a 800×600 screen resolution or lower.
6. If you still prefer the classic blog layout (no harm in that), opt for a 2-column design since it allows your content to breathe. Allow a content column of 500 pixels or more to publish big pictures and properly embed You Tube videos. To give you an idea, the white section of my blog measures 1002 pixels in width.
7. If you publish many posts per week, display blog excerpts on your home page. This way, if a reader is not interested by the first post, you may grab his or her attention with the second or third post.

Make your Image Google-friendly

Do not forget to fill a short description of what the picture represents, think of describing the scene on the ALT attribute of the image. I am telling you, it makes a huge difference. As a bonus, putting ALT attribute helps on accessibility.

+ photo: Aperture multimedia blog template from WooThemes

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Like many of you, I lost control of my inbox over the last months. I received too many emails every day. Once in a while, I would try to sort everything but I often gave up after an hour due to this immense task. Not anymore! My inbox is empty and it will stay that way.

Sort Your Emails by Priority

If you switch to the priority technique, you will never have to deal with a full inbox. The revelation came from the fact that you need two sorting systems for your emails. First, you sort your emails by assigning a priority level to every email. Once a task is done (email is answered), you move the email in the right filing category. This way, your inbox stays empty at all time. As a bonus, you will not forget important and urgent things.

Make it Fit Your Needs

Define your own priority level. Do it in function of what you do for living. You could have 3 levels: Urgent, Important but can wait, Later. This is the simplest and quickest way. You can find inspirations on organization office supplies, like the Make it Work bundle that I am showing you.

I define instead a 7-priority level system that is task oriented for my work as a blogger.

• Rush
• Must respond
• Daily Reads – I create a filter on Gmail to immediately send my favorite newsletters to my daily reads
• To Do – it is a mix of current meetings and tasks
• To Write About – to remind me of potential stories
• To Read when time
• Project.

Everything else is deemed trivial. I either archive the email, with or without further classification, or delete the email right away. I went over my full inbox in 2 hours using these rules.

My inbox was full because my old classification system required too much thinking to determine how to file each email. Plus, it failed on the urgency of the emails. Assigning by priority forces you to take an easy decision. I am convinced my inbox will stay clean from now on.

I wish to thank my good friend Nathalie Rivard for telling me about the task oriented sorting mechanisms. Nathalie got that advice from Isabelle Lopez, who got it from a friend. We can all learn from each other.

SOURCING:
+ Make it Work Bundle by Knock Knock $30.60 USD

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One thing that is difficult for many bloggers is to define their niche. As the competition on the blogosphere becomes fiercer, you need to position your blog in order to stand out. People needs to quick get what your blog is about and how it is different from the pack.

Whether you talk about one topic or many topics in your blog, you need to find one direction that summarizes what your blog is about.

Give Room to Your Niche to Evolve

If you are starting out, think about how to categorize your blogs in directories. Take my At Home blog. It is a design blog for women well positioned as a stylish living blog. It started in 2007 as a blog about entertaining at home with style. In time, I found out that it is the stylish living aspect that my readers are attached to.

Think about directories

In a real conversation, people would easily describe the scope of At Home. But I have a hard time selecting a category for it in Web directories. Lifestyle blogs are not exactly what I am since I do not cover cultural events or musics. I am not only about food or home decor. I also touch family life without being about kids and parenting. Women magazines are rarely there and when they are, it is often filled by feminist blogs or women issues blogs.

There is also another impact. I consider myself a design blog. But when they are blog awards on specific topics (interior design, food, etc), I realized that people would not instinctively think about my blog. I am not complaining. I am happy with my positioning. I just point it out so you could fully grasp the extent of your decision.

Examine Your Content

Ask yourself that question: Are you mainly

• a creator of new content – ex: a crafter,
• a collector  – blog is about what you like,
• a curator  – like I am
• a news publisher – being the source of all the news about a specific topic
• a problem solver
• one that inspires people to act or create
• a commentator, someone who shares his/her perspectives on issues and ideas, etc…

The content you produce may also influence how you define your niche. Lastly, you need to consider your competition since you need to differentiate yourself.

Remember that helps growth and maintain a readership:

1. Regularly write posts with original content
2. Concentrate on being useful for your readers
3. Be active in the social media community, not just in the blogosphere

For the last point, I refer you to an excellent post about how to get noticed by the right people written by my friend Lara McCulloch of Ready 2 Spark.

+ photo that I took when I went to the after-party of the Social Gaming Summit 2009 in San Francisco

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A reader asked me to tell him how he can post text on a fan page. The same way that you can decide if your Facebook friends are allowed to post comments on your wall, the owner of a fan page can define their wall settings. In short, a fan can post text, photos, videos and links on a fan page if the page owner has granted permissions to their fans.

To not allow your fans to write or post content on the fan wall is a big no-no on my book. I will go as far as saying that if this is your philosophy, your brand is not ready to be on Facebook. I encourage your brand to go over its fear since you are missing out a big opportunity.

Encourage Participation with the right Wall Settings on your Fan Page

Web 2.0 is based on interactions. The value of a fan page is to have a true dialogue with your fans. For that to happen, they need the power to express themselves. I advise any brand or blogger to use the above settings for their fan page.

There are two elements that you can customize. The first are the View Settings. To not miss any intervention by your fans, set the Default view for wall at “Post by Page and Fans”. For the Fan Permissions, I allow my fans to post anything on my page fans. As the fan page administrator, know that you can always delete inappropriate or unsolicited marketing (spam) material.

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I put that story on hold after the long weekend. Plus, the summer vacations are at our door. I am writing this now because it is always after a vacation or a break that it is the hardest to get back to our blogging schedule.

People often ask me if I get the writer’s block. I don’t! I always have more stories than time on my hands. Many elements contribute to that fact. Let’s explore the ones that could be useful to you.

Frequency

The main reason in my mind is the fact that I write every day. The more you write, the easier it gets but most importantly, the more ideas pop up. But that does not mean that you have no chance to succeed if you do not write every day. There are other ways to achieve frequency.

You can write a few tweets about your topic every day, have a conversation with peers, post a few comments on related blogs. The idea is to concentrate on your blog topic for at least 15 to 20 minutes every day.

Do not waste any ideas

Develop a fast system to track potential story lines. I use the notes on my iPhone to do that. Audio notes will work too. Before my iPhone, I used the old fashioned way where I scribbled my thoughts on a pocket notebook that I carried around everywhere.

When you are hooked to your computer, create a draft post on Wordpress or Blogger for each future topic.  They will be there whenever you need it.

If you do that daily, it is enough to keep the creative flow active.

RSS Feeds

When I started blogging four years ago, I used to read my RSS feeds every morning before writing my first post. I bookmarked my favorite posts. Sometimes, I would write a post about the best of what you read that day. Most of the times, simply reading your RSS feeds puts your brain in the right set of mind and a story will emerge from nowhere.

Be sure to select a wide enough niche

The key to my inspiration is not only that I write about what I am passionate about. The fact that my topics (home design, entertaining and social media) are very dynamic universes helps a lot. There are always new ideas, new products, practical tips or solutions, sharing experiences to talk about.

If you have problems finding good stories all year long, ask yourself if the angle of your blog confines you. Analyze if it would be appropriate to add a new dimension to your talk.

With everyone having a busy life, people are also looking for curators. Examine how and if you can write useful short posts (75 words or less) a few times a week. Ask yourself what will be useful to your readers may be the only question you should answer to release the creative juice.

For a boost of creativity, watch the handmade video portraits of an inspiring etsy seller, birdhouseaccents.

PHOTO CREDITS:
+ Birdhouses created by Fred and Lynn of Birdhouseaccents on etsy

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I selected the Wordpress Related Posts plugin which assigns the related posts based on the higher number of matching Wordpress tags. If you are good at tagging properly your posts, you will see that that this method is quite effective. I typically detailed the content of my categories using tags.

Installation Tips

I am lucky to have a test version of my blog. So I tested the results first to make sure the look and feel were the way I want it. It took me less 2 minutes, including testing, to add a Related Posts section at the bottom on every post to On the Web with Kim Vallee. For my design blog, At Home, my programmer modified that same plugin to show thumbnails arranged in a row instead of a bullet list. I did not use the image option for my social media blog since not every post has a picture.

You simply search for Related Posts on Plugin Browser/Installer of your Wordpress interface. Selected the one developed by Denis. Pay attention to the developer name since there are more than one plugin called Wordpress Related Posts. Like you do for any plugin, install it and activate it. Then, configure the preferences (available via the Settings menu once the plugin is installed).

Related posts is one of many methods that you can use to create serendipity in your blog and increase the page views.

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I prefer reading blogs through Google Reader. Still, they are people who prefer getting my posts through an email subscription. This is why I provide the option. With Google Feedburner is so simple to do and once you set up the service, it runs by itself.

Use it to Build Loyalty

The popularity of email subscriptions varies per blog. Between 15% to 25% of my subscribed readers (email + RSS feed) opt for the email subscription. Readers can opt to receive an email for every day where you published something.

Since it only takes a few minutes to set up the service on Feedburner and add the proper link to your blog, I advice all bloggers to add this feature. Instead of a link, you could add an email subcription form directly on your blog. The instructions are on Feedburner.

Immediate Access to a Backup

To make sure the system always works fine, I subscribed to my feed by email. This afternoon, I found an unanticipated advantage for me as a blogger. I wanted to delete a draft post. By mistake, I delete a published post. I was desperate since I have no clues about which post I deleted by error. I could have recovered the post via our backup but I was looking for a faster solution.  Simply opening on my inbox gave me all the information to reconstitute the post.

I verify that the post kept the previous URL. It is important to keep any links and trackbacks that refer to your original post (the deleted one). And to fully correct my mistake, I edited the publish date of the post to the original date and time. The information was on the email sent by Feedburner.

Because of my email subscription, my blog is back to  what it was before I made the wrong deletion. I made the corrections in less time that it took me to write this post.

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Every publication has a defined scope that they covered. It is important to define the boundaries of what you cover and what you do not cover. To complicate matters, bloggers are more and more solicited by a number of people to write about their story. The first thing I do after I like an idea is to test it against my blog bible. If it passed the test, then I can think about how I could talk about the story or the product. I also evaluate when and if it would fit within my editorial schedule.

Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers

Copyblogger gave that advice today. I told you that before: always keep in mind your readers. Your blog should provide a consistent whole experience if you want your readers to come back. Maintaining the content quality is crucial. You should aim for the best all the time. In a design blog, you also need consistency in the style you showcase.

Take my At Home with Kim Vallee’s property. It is about my design style and the way I like to entertain. My readers have certain expectations when it comes to the content and what products or design they will see. I make sure that my stories fit both agenda.

Be Consistent even if you get it for free

A few weeks ago a retailer wanted to host a giveaway for my AHWKV’s readers. The prices were valuable but their products were something that I would never put on my table. My readers would have spotted that right away. Although a giveaway costs me nothing and can attract new readers to my site, I said no because the pictures of the prizes will clash with my style. This would have impaired the whole experience and hurt my brand.

You invest a lot of time in writing your blog. Today’s lesson was to grow your audience and stay at the top of your game, you need to provide a consistent experience.  Having a blog bible helps you maintain the cap.

+ Zen and the Art of remarkable blogging on Copyblogger

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Roberto Rocca wrote for the Gazette that the tech-savvy crowd now exchanges Twitter accounts instead of paper cards. Roberto is wondering if Twitter is becoming the new business card. This was certainly the case at PodCamp Toronto last February when many wrote their Twitter account name with the @ sign on their name tag.

I always ask people that I meet for the first time if they are on Twitter. As a Twitter devotee, I try to convert as many people as possible on being active on Twitter. If you are new to Twitter, familiarize yourself with the basic Twitter commands. I wrote this post to help you understand the culture behind Twitter.

Broadcasting to the World

You protect your privacy in Twitter by knowing that what you say can be seen and read by anyone in the World. Your tweets will end up on Google. I will go as far as saying that if you cannot overcome the urge of protecting your tweets, Twitter is not necessary for you. Look at Twitter as your public forum. Therefore, you do not post family photos and other personal life items on Twitter. You leave that for Facebook.

Chose Who To Follow

You do not select who decide to follow you and there is no obligation to follow back. A stranger can like what you are saying but you may not be interested by what they are saying. It is OK. I select my followers based on the goal of my brand and my interests.

Update: Having said that, I follow back lots of people. I follow everyone manually. It may happen that I forgot someone interesting once in a while. But I do not want to automatize the process. I do so because  I wish to have a true conversation with the people I follow.

What To Say in Your Tweets

I believe that your tweets should mix 5 things. It holds true for anyone, even if the Twitter account is a business. Twitter is a place where you can:

1. get informed about what is a happening very fast. It is great to receive local and international news. By  following the right crowd, you will get news about your industry or your hobbies
2. listen; learn what people care about, what are their opinions.
3. share your and other ideas, facts and knowledge. Share things that adds value. Always make sure to give the credits to the source. Retweet a tweet; don’t simply copy
4. engage in small talks. TV shows, music, sports and food often get good responses.
5. promote events, a cause, yourself, your blog and even your products. Plus participate in #followfriday and other online Twitter activities

BONUS items:

• access the knowledge of the crowd: you can ask for help or ask a question on Twitter
• plan meet ups or other informal get-together meeting with your friends or the Tweeple in your area.

It is important that you create a balance on your tweets. At the end of the day, the secret is to have interesting stories, add value with your insights and participate in other conversations.

+ Follow me on Twitter
+ Add me as a Facebook friend

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Set up a self-hosted Wordpress

The blogging platform of choice these days are a self-hosted Wordpress infrastructure. It unites flexibility and a vast array of functionality.

If your blog complements a Web site, add a /blog directory as the blog URL (i.e. mainsiteURL.com/blog). This will enhance the SEO of your main Web site.

Plugins and Other Programs To Install Before Your Launch

Use AKISNET from the start since it will catch most spams. Since Wordpress is extremely popular, spammers target us. I suggest not moderating the comments; readers prefer the immediate feedback. Allow time on your agenda to review the comments and remove the undesirable comments. The new comment email notification of Wordpress saves me time. This way, I log in to the WP admin software only if I want to mark as spam or delete a comment.

Set up your RSS feed with Feedburner. You get basic stats on your RSS subscribers (not that useful). The most important reason to use Feedburner is if you ever need to change your blog URL (it happens more than you think), your readers will follow you automatically. It is worth to setup a link (or a form) for Email subscription to your feed with Feedburner.

Start collecting statistics from day one. Install both Sitemeter and Google Analytics. Both software is used for different purposes. Any serious blogger uses both; I will tell you why in another post (long to explain).

Necessary Content Before the Launch

Take the time to finalize 5 to 7 posts before launching your blog. Publish 3 to 5 posts and keep the rest in reserve before you open your blog. Having several posts at the inset let your readers know what to expect. As a result they will be more inclined to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Writing several posts gives you a chance to see if you can produce content for your niche. Having a few posts in reserve will reduce the initial pressure and adjustments that come with running a blog.

Disclose your publishing schedule to build reader loyalty. Be realistic. It does not really matter at first if you publish a post once a week or once a day; the important thing is to select a publishing schedule that you can follow.

Nice photos sell a story. Put a big photo immediately after the title. If appropriate, add 1 or 2 more photos spread inside the post.

MORE stories here:
+ A new adventure in blogging 101 (the first post of this blog)
+ How to Write Great Blog Content
+ 5 simple and free ways to grow your traffic when you are launching a blog

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When I first read about The Ideas Campaign I was excited. An Irish businesswoman launched the campaign two weeks ago. The goal is to ask Irish citizens what can be done to stimulate the economy. My deception comes from the lack of proper social networking skills. As I researched the story, this post transformed into “What a great idea” to “What NOT to do”.

The Great Idea

Forget the long public meetings all over the country. In these days of age, a social networking Web site can serve that purpose more rapidly and more effectively. The fact that you can give your opinions 24 hours a day over a few weeks means that more people can participate than with the traditional ways. This is another example of how the Web improves our life.

Besides the reported popularity of the site, lessons can be learned about how The Idea Campaign missed the target on different fronts. I believe that they could be more popular if they done things right. And it would not have cost more.

A Need for a True Social Networking Site

First of all, I wonder why they did not use a proper social networking application to build their Web site. They are many free open source tools to build such a site. You will need some customizations but it is still inexpensive if you stick to basic needs. Take Pligg for example. Citizens could submit their ideas and anyone could browse them. People could write a comment or vote a la Digg on the ideas.

Building a true community site stimulates people who submitted their ideas to spread the word about your project since they want to reach the Top Ideas status. Moreover, people could develop their ideas on their blogs, which spread the word further and build you page rank.

If you wish to build something like this, you must use the right tools for the job. They are no excuses for not using social networking software. It will be easier for you to manage and more engaging for your users.

My Two cents

How does The Idea Campaign perform on using social media for marketing? Let say that they still have a few things to learn on the art of using social media. They need a skilled Community manager to better promote their brand.

Use the above pointers to create awareness about your personal or corporate brand on Twitter or Facebook. First, start by following more people on Twitter. It is beyond me why any organization does not follow back most of their followers.

To be successful on Twitter, you need to engage in conversations. Do not rely on predictable marketing pitches like “Visit http://www.IdeasCampaign.ie today to submit your ideas that will help rebuild the Irish economy!”.

Instead, stimulate the discussions in your tweets. You could:

• summarize an idea and ask for comments to refine the idea (would be easy to do if they had a social networking site)
• provide external links to economic news happening in Ireland, the European Community and the World
• request people to contribute in a category where you are missing fresh ideas
• Retweet (RT) stories of members of your community that are on Twitter
• these are only the tips of the iceberg.

I would not even start on how they mismanage their Facebook presence since they created a user profile instead of a Facebook page for their campaign. Even a group would have been better. The fact that they need to approve me as a friend is against marketing 101 for any organization.

Even with these drawbacks, over 2500 ideas were submitted in the first two weeks (but we cannot verify these numbers since we do not see most submitted ideas). The appeal for crowdsourcing on economical issues is there. If you wish to send your ideas, you have until March 31, 2009 to do it.

+ Via Springwise

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• Twitter 101 | Basic Commands

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, officially launched yesterday a service called WeFollow. The idea is that you fill 3, only 3 hash tags to describe your interests. The idea is to find people with similar interests. If you tweet a new series of 3 hash tags, they will replace the old ones. The semantic on Twitter is @wefollow #hashtag1 #hashtag2 #hastag3

The need to use external tools comes from a weakness in the Twitter profile; no searchable fields where we can state our interests. Twellow tries to extrapolate our interests based on our bio with mixed results. On that chapter, WeFollow is a definite improvement on helping me find new people to follow.

Where WeFollow fails is that, like Digg, the system is biased to the people with the most traffic. I do not mind that they show me the people with more followers. Since I am following people in niches, the effect is not as bad but still he gives an unfair advantage to the major players.

I would like that WeFollow let me see the list sorted by other criteria. Give to the users the power to decide what is a relevant metric for them. Then, WeFollow would bring me something valuable. By the way, I tried again Mr. Tweet tonight and I discovered a bunch of people to follow. Remember that list on Mr. Tweet is updated once or twice a week, so you may find people you are currently following. Read what I said earlier about Mr. Tweet.

Having said that, I am on WeFollow. My advice to you is to forget the obvious words (used as hash tags) like bloggers and social media. Instead, fous on other facets defining your involvement in Twitter as your 3 hash tags.

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• Mr. Tweet may be useful after all. We will see