Starting a new blog wherever you are is no longer a hard task. Many new bloggers jump into the blogging field mostly because they are passionate about something or simply want to share their Kayak business or band website with the world.
Others just want to try something new and this is fine because it is really easy to get into as most blogs are built on the WordPress platform which is basically free. Add some content, a few pictures, a video, a couple social media plugins to give it a customized feel, and a way you go.
It wasn’t quite this easy back in the day (1990’s) when I personally had to secure a web hosting account locally, purchase web design tools and spend countless days just to put up the simplest of websites. A discussion for another time perhaps? I feel like this is the second or third coming of the web.. well I guess that’s where Web 2.0 comes in…. or Web 3.0 if you believe that Social Media or Social Networking has taken the web hostage.
Anyway, back to what I was saying. Most bloggers still get frustrated these days and quit very soon no matter if you are putting together a Cape Breton music site or tourism site.
So I decided to share this post “Cape Breton Blogging Tips for Beginners” to help out fellow bloggers in Cape Breton or anywhere you may be across Canada as well as globally.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t started a blog yet, or if you’re a professional blogger or ghost blogger. Just follow some of the basic blogging tips below and it can make a big difference in in your overall blogging experience.
- Plan your blog carefully before starting.
- Choose your blogging market wisely; choose a niche in which you are expert and speak from experience.
- Register a unique and easy to remember domain name for your blog from GoDaddy or NameCheap.
- Signup with some affordable and cheap Web hosting like Hostgator.
- Use WordPress, It’s the best blogging platform with lots of features like free themes and plugins for SEO and Social Media.
- Choose a simple fast loading theme for your blog. I recommend Elegant Themes and WooThemes for their design appeal.
- Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as it is important that your viewers and audience find you easily on the web.
- Be authentic and don’t copy from anyone else’s website or blog. Always post unique content with your keywords and anchor text.
- Build a strong Social Presence by adding plugins for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube and other social media marketing avenues to your blog to increase your online presence.
- Update your blog regularly or you will lose followers. Publish something that your viewers will love and want to share on Facebook.
- Start guest blogging or ghost blogging by writing guest posts on other blogs to increase your website traffic, Backlinks and exposure.
- It’s OK to dream big, but set goals and stick to them until all your steps are achieved.
- Don’t choose topics from other blogs but be original and stick to your niche and personal experiences.
- Build a mailing list to grow your fan base. It is really important. Use LocalFans.netemail marketing service, it’s free up to 2000 subscribers and it’s cheaper than aweber.
- Keep your posts simple and write for readers and not the search engines. Readers are the ones who can make your blog post go viral.
- Be kind and try to solve the problems of your readers. Provide them with tips and helpful advice. A funny story with video and silly pictures never hurts. Keep it light and funny and your readership will grow quickly.
- Blogging requires a lot of time and is never an over night success. Be passionate about what you write and it won’t seem like work.
- Don’t overload your website/blog with plugins and widgets. Use a simple clutter-free minimalist theme.
- Link to other Cape Breton blogs because more often, they will return the favor.
- Ask the opinions of your readers. It will spark a commentary back and forth and may want others to get involved in the discussion.
- Read and reply to every comment on your blog because no one wants to get left out. Keep the conversation going. It’s important!
- Reply to most emails that you get from blog readers. It is here that you can try to help them as much as possible. They have taken the time to write so write back.
- Remember your readers are here to check out your latest post and don’t want to be looking at ads or popups. Don’t post too may ads.
- Make your own images and don’t just copy them from other websites. You can use free images on Google if they don’t don’t have a watermark or copyright stamp on them.
- This is important. Quality of your content (articles, videos, press releases) matters, not quantity. Write the best content you can and put a lot of detail in the article with pictures and a video or two if you have them. I make my own videos all the time and put them on YouTube. Some of them have gone viral such as “Moose falls on Ice” last year. I think right now it is close to 300K hits.
- Subscribe to other websites and blogs in your market or area of interest. Don’t just focus on your attention and time on your blog. Interact with other blogs and when you do, don’t forget to post a link back to your own blog. This builds valuable authority backlinks.
- Add other pages in your blog such as the About Us, Contact, Sitemap, or Portfolio pages.
- Build your following by adding funny pics, contests, recipes, etc and your readers will reward you by sharing your posts.
- Don’t quit blogging just because it’s tough or you can’t figure something out. One of my favorite sayings is.. “Google is your friend”.
- If you really get stumped on something and can’t find it in Google, help is just around the corner. Simple post on Facebook and others will come to your aid. Also don’t be afraid to ask questions, that’s how most of us learn. One step ahead, never quit!
Need a little help with your next web design project or help with social marketing or SEO? Contact a web expert with over 15+ years of experience in the business at support@webdesigncapebreton.com
The web design process usually begins with a free consultation which gives us both an opportunity to share information in order to come up with a website tailored to your organizations needs. Just have a couple of questions? Feel free to contact us, and we will be more than happy to assist you.
Quotes and Questions are free 🙂
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Great news for a famous Cape Bretoner!
Allister MacGillivray will be Invested into the Order of Canada on December 13, 2013. The Office of the Secretary to the Governor General is pleased to announce that a “live” webcast of the Order of Canada Investiture ceremony will be available on December 13, 2013, at 10:30 a.m. (Eastern standard time). Please tune in at www.gg.ca,
At 12 noon on December 14 (2013), the lilting strains of “Away From The Roll Of The Sea”, penned by Allister MacGillivray back in the 70’s, will resound from The Peace Tower on Parliament Hill in our nation’s capital. The official carilloneur, Andrea McCrady, has offered to perform the song on the clock tower’s massive 53-bell, multi-tonne mechanism in honour of Allister’s visit to Ottawa to receive the Order Of Canada.
As an added bonus, the MacGillivray family has been invited to sit with Dr. McCrady in the belfry during her performance of the work.
One proud Caper to another… Good on ya Allister!!
About Allister MacGillivray:
Allister MacGillivray: renowned songwriter, guitarist, record producer, folklorist and author from the Island of Cape Breton in the province of Nova Scotia, in eastern Canada. He was born and raised in the coal-mining/fishing town of Glace Bay. His grandparents on the MacGillivray side were Gaelic-speaking, and various cousins played violin, guitar or accordion at weekly family-music-sessions — before the intrusion of television.
Following graduation from St. F.X U. in Antigonish, he toured two years with a trio headed by Cape Breton folksinger John Allan Cameron. Besides its own dedicated following, the group opened for Anne Murray and The Irish Rovers, bringing the house down in a 1970 appearance at “The Grand Ole Opry” in Nashville, Tennessee.
On “Ceilidh”, Cameron’s Canadian national television program, Allister served as guitarist and musical director.
During the mid seventies, Allister performed as a full-time guitarist with the Irish/Newfoundland group Ryan’s Fancy, which toured Canada and Ireland.
He recorded and co-produced several albums with this trio, and again was musical director on both regional and national television programs.
At this point his songwriting career began to blossom. Ryan’s Fancy recorded Allister’s “Sea People”, “Tie Me Down” and “Coal Town Road”, and the group featured “Song For The Mira” during many of their live performances.
A particular highlight of Allister’s performing career was accompanying Irish superstars Tommy Makem & Liam Clancy, in television series and several extended tours of the eastern United States and Canada.
Allister left “the road” around 1980, choosing to settle in rural Cape Breton to concentrate on an eclectic career of songwriting, composing and documenting the Cape Breton experience.
During the last several years, Allister has worked as researcher and artistic director on a series of short films on the Cape Breton style of traditional Scottish fiddling (see the Highland Legacy DVD), and continued his intuitive songwriting.
Among the recent honours he received:
- •The province of Nova Scotia “for the gift of music and promoting Celtic culture”
- •The Cape Breton Tourist Association “for writing beautiful songs which promote the traditions, the culture and the heritage of Cape Breton”.
- •Official Bard of Clan MacGillivray, Canada
- •Honorary Doctorate of Letters from The University College of Cape Breton, May 1997
Today, Allister MacGillivray lives and works on Cape Breton Island with his wife, Beverly, and two children (Ciarán & Fiona of the Celtic band, The Cottars).
Some new social media and social networking companies may become the giants of tomorrow like Twitter or Pinterest. And it is for this reason that it is worth checking out some of the new tools for social media marketing.
Your Cape Breton web design business will benefit right now if you invest some time in searching out and testing some of these new social media tools.
By creating a fantastic looking website and interconnecting it with several social networking sites, your message can be potentially shared with millions of people. Some of these tools are designed to share locally, and are great for aspiring musicians, artists and photographers alike.
- BeFunky. This is an Instagram competitor and is both a social media and software app. This easy-to-use social tool lets you modify your photographs using a wide variety of built-in filters and overlays. When you have got your pics the way you want them, use this tool to share them on Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Twitter. There’s also a BeFunky gallery where you can display your best photos. A basic account is free, but limits the use of higher resolution. Paid premium accounts are also available.
- Bloomfire. This is a community based social tool and is really all about sharing information. It is not free at the moment although they do offer a free trial. Technically, the social media company refers to their product as a knowledgebase, not as social networking site. It also integrates and shares your info with many established social networking sites, if you choose to do so. This type of paid sharing site may well be the future of online social communities.
- Branch. The purpose of Branch is to create high quality conversations thru social sharing similar to the typical status updates found on most social media sites today. The social connect platform makes use of other social media tools like Twitter. Altho users can see all conversations, you must be invited to participate. You can then share the conversation, embed the conversation into a post.
- Flipboard. This is a mobile friendly app that lets you aggregate your online favorite social network posts in a simple magazine style format. It really is a new twist on social bookmarking and is designed for a mobile environment.
- Ghost. Ghost is an open source blogging platform that launched in 2013. The concept is to make blogging and journalism easier and more accessible and is also mobile-friendly. Right now it is free and is designed to compete directly with WordPress. Keep an eye on this on as it has some pretty big names behind it.
- Inbound.org. This site is content based merely on inbound marketing related topics such as SEO, article marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing. This social tool works in conjunction with Twitter and you can actually use your Twitter account to create an account and sign in.
- Medium. Medium is a new collaborative writing platform founded by some of the same folks who originally created Twitter. Like many of the new social media networks out there, it is a unique new way of presenting your ideas to the mass media.
- Nextdoor. This social media network tool is limited to those who live in your neighborhood, which is not necessarily a bad thing if you are into SEO and advertising your product or service on the local level. Getting to know your closest neighbors is a great idea from a business perspective.
- Pheed. This free mobile social micro-blogging platform, popular with teens, was launched in 2012 and allows users to share a wide variety of information including images, videos, texts, audio, and more. It can aggregate all your social media posts in one location. Most users tend to like either the slick and easy-to-use interface or the ability to promote and sell content. It also has the reputation of being popular with teens.
- Sgrouples. It’s main strengths lie in its ability to create social groups with a strong commitment to privacy. In fact, their commitment to privacy is a big part of their online brand. You can use the platform’s group feature to connect with clients, colleagues, or prospects as well as friends and family. This social tool includes personal cloud storage for each user as well as the ability to aggregate content from other social media sites like Facebook.
- SlideShare. Having been founded in 2006, SlideShare’s not exactly new, but was designed to create presentations to be embedded in blogs and making their way onto other social media platforms. Maybe because SlideShare partners with most social media platforms is the reason this tool is large, with over 51+ million viewers a month and counting. It is widely used by everyone from the White House to NASA.
- Thumb. This mobile social site was designed for artists, photographers, and musicians alike. The goal of Thumb is to allow people to ask questions and get quick answers. When you log in you are immediately given the opportunity to ask for an opinion or give an opinion in various categories. Art, Design & Photography is a category. You can also participate by voting (thumbs up, thumbs down, or neutral).
- Vine. This new mobile social tool from the owners of Twitter allows you to create and share short videos which are limited to under seven seconds. Once a video is created, it can be shared and then posted on Vine, Twitter, or Facebook. This social tool was recently updated and is not only gaining in popularity, is still free.
Share..
If I missed any new social media marketing tools or new social networking sites then feel free to mention it here in the comments section.
Moose Falls on Face in Cape Breton – Goes Viral!
This is an example of the power of social media and sharing your message, product or services on the web. This is what we can do for you! Start off with something funny or worthy of sharing by friends and family. Then get it into the right channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and yes right on your website, assuming you have one.
This is where we come in.
Cape Breton Web Design can create your website as well as all your
social media accounts and interlink them as to create a linkwheel effect. This is great for
SEO and getting found in search engines as well as making your product or website go viral!
Contact Tom at support@webdesigncapebreton.com with any web design or social media questions.
© Copyright Tom Mills – Moose video can be shared but not downloaded or edited in any way.
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November 6, 2013 Tom Mills
canada, cape breton, cape breton web design, seo, social media, tom mills, web design
cape breton web design,SEO,Social Marketing,Web Design
Well…there are more than 150 billion searchable indexed web pages on the Internet!
That’s right! Check out some of the new infographic stats from Bloxx that shares more on just how big the Web has become.
Some of our favorite highlights include:
– If you downloaded every bit of Web content from your computer, it would take 11 trillion years.
– If you packed 450 2-terabyte storage drives into a single 8’ x 10’ room, you’d need 1,000 drive-packed rooms to equal the estimated “Exabyte” of data on the Web
– The amount of data traveling over the Internet in just three minutes is the digital equivalent of every motion picture ever made in the last 120 years.
“Our ‘Big Web’ infographic shows the dramatic size, and threat, of accessing the more than 700* million Web sites offering some trillion terabytes of data,” said Charles Sweeney, CEO of Bloxx, a Web content filtering and email security company. “Next generation real-time Web content filters that analyze and categorize the content of web pages at the point-of-request, are the only way to stay ahead of the avalanche of new, and often malicious, sites created every day.”
*reference material from Website Magazine
Recent stats from Worldwidewebsize.com show the following information:
The Indexed Web contains at least 2.96 billion pages (Wednesday, 06 November, 2013).
The Dutch Indexed Web contains at least 214.08 million pages (Wednesday, 06 November, 2013)
How is the size of the World Wide Web (The Internet) estimated?
The estimated minimal size of the indexed World Wide Web is based on the estimations of the numbers of pages indexed by Google, Bing, Yahoo Search. From the sum of these estimations, an estimated overlap between these search engines is subtracted. The overlap is an overestimation; hence, the total estimated size of the indexed World Wide Web is an underestimation.
Since the overlap is subtracted in sequence, starting from one of the four search engines, several orderings (and total estimations) are possible. We present two total estimates, one starting with Bing (BG) and one starting with Google (GB). The figure reported at the top of the page refers to the GB estimation.
So just how fast is the internet growing then?
There are a few governing bodies and there is no real central control system for the Internet. No one really knows with 100% certainty exactly how many websites exist or just how many new websites are set up each day.
However, a few organizations do make it their business to keep an eye on the domain names that make up the Internet as the web continues to grow. Although their data isn’t infallible, it does give us a pretty good idea of the size and growth of the web.
This trend is true worldwide especially in Canada where there are now many more local brands and companies starting up each day. If you are looking to get a website built by a professional in Canada look no further than Cape Breton Web Design. We’d be happy to help with your Cape Breton Website needs.
October 23, 2013 Tom Mills
backlinks, seo services, social media company, social media marketing, web design blogs, web site companies
cape breton web design,local SEO,Social Marketing,social media,Sydney Nova Scotia Web Design,web design cape breton,web design nova scotia
After you’ve got your website designed and online the next step is to get it in front of as many people as possible, especially if you are a business. This can actually be the most difficult part of the web development process, so we’ll cover a few details here along with some tips and suggestions for getting your website noticed in Nova Scotia.
Create a Unique Design:
If you have a new website that looks great and you want to get a lot of traffic and links, then there are countless web design gallery sites out there such as CSS Mania, Best Web Gallery, SiteInspire, CssDsgn that exist for the purpose of showcasing great web design companies. You can submit your site for consideration and if it gets approved you can get instant exposure and links. The website traffic that you get directly from these galleries will mostly be other designers who are browsing the galleries for inspiration.
Despite the fact that these visitors might not fall into your target audience this can still be a helpful thing because of the networking factor. It can be a way to get valuable backlinks to your site that will eventually help with SEO (search engine optimization). Also, many of the websites that get showcased in these galleries will also be showcased on various other web design blogs as a result, leading to even more backlinks and website traffic.
In order to get backlinks and website traffic from web gallery sites and web design blogs you’ll need to create a well design website high in quality that stands out from the competition. Take your time and don’t rush thru with the web design part. Then, when it comes to submitting your website it can be a little time consuming so get a professional social media company to do the work for you at minimal costs. If you don’t mind spending a few advertising dollars to save time, you can pay for a service SocialFanExpert.com to do the job of Social Media Marketing as well as SEO services for you.
Include a Blog To Get More Traffic:
One of the best ways to get website traffic to your website is to include a blog. If you’re using say WordPress as your main CMS, the blogging and posting functionality will already be included and is very simple to use. Website Blogs are great for building traffic from search engines and also connecting with the various social networking sites out there like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Need Help With Social Media Marketing?
Social media and social networking are a great source of traffic for your website or your blog. The first step is to get us help you build social profiles and get them linked to your website.
After this you can just watch your traffic double right off the bat! Most social network sites will allow you to link social account right to your website and then use connect code to view fan profiles, posts, likes, etc, so take advantage of this amazing opportunity.
Whether you have social profiles or not, you may just need help with the promotion part. That’s where we come in. We are a Social Media Marketing company located in Canada and can help you get more traffic by connecting you website with the world. Contact us today – http://socialfanexpert.com
