When trying to describe link bait to someone outside the industry, it’s a bit hard to get the idea across. The problem is that link bait can be funny, sad, shocking, amazing and a bunch of other adjectives. Really, it’s not necessarily about what you create, it’s about the WOW factor.

The WOW factor is measured by your readers and how good they feel the story is. There is no way to know exactly how the public will react, even though sometimes you can estimate pretty well.

Think of it like the news. Millions of news events happen all the time, but how many do you actually see on TV? The big ones of course show up. With link bait, this is like taking someone that’s tops in your industry and having them do anything. More than likely, they’ll get lots of links out of it no matter how great it was. They have the following and so the WOW factor was imminent.

Then there are local stories that effect the people. I live in Minneapolis, so lots of news is about this area. If you are in a certain industry a good story can penetrate across your industry quite well. However, it still depends on how your readers can relate to the story. Do they feel it has value to them or their readers? Its it really worth sharing?

The SEO Title tag is a plugin that I’ve known about for a while, but never messed with. Boy was I missing out.

What SEO Title Tag does is add the ability to customize your blog’s title tags per post. No longer are they tied directly to the post title. You can customize almost any title tag across your blog giving your site a possible edge in search engines.

One can customize individual posts, categories or pages. The default Wordpress title tags are OK, Optimal Title makes them better, SEO Title Tag makes them into whatever you want them to be.

There is also the ability to customize the separator, create a shot blog name to show on post pages, remove the blog name from post pages, use category descriptions as titles on category pages and tie the Title tags into UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior).

Title tags are easy to customize too. They can be mass customized though the plugin options under the Manage tab or you can also create the titles as you create your post as it adds a custom ‘Title Tag’ field to the post screen.

Post slugs are one item that is commonly overlooked when setting up and writing to a blog. Either they are forgotten about all together, or they aren’t customized for usability sake. Optimized post slugs are not just for search engines, but people too.

The first thing we will talk about is search engines. Post slugs can also be referred to as permalinks. They are basically the URL that makes up the individual post page.

By default, Wordpress atomically uses IDs and not words. Here is an example: http://example.com/?p=52. Now it’s short and simple, but gives no indication of what the page is. What we want to do is turn on custom permalinks.

To enable custom permalinks, log in to the admin area of your Wordpress blog and go to Options -> Permalinks. Then go down to Custom and insert /%post_id%/%postname%/. Granted, you can use one of many different operators to define your post slugs, but I prefer the ID followed by the post name.

The second thing you need to consider is your users. Now that your post slugs are automatically generating URLs that contain words, you should to one step further and customize them per post.

A client asked me today for more control in their Wordpress control panel. Specifically, when posting they wanted to control the font sizes, colors and do a bit more. As a designer I always freak at that question as I think the code is going to be filled with massive amounts of font tags and out of order strong tags and ohhh the madness. But, then again, maybe I’m overreacting.

So, I did some researching and came up with one possible idea, Xinha4WP. It’s a Wordpress plugin that replaces the default text editor with a much more advanced version. It also needs the Text Control plugin to work so you need to install that too.

Xinha4WP gives bloggers many features including all font control (sizes and colors), tables, additional smilies, special characters and few more items. The coolest thing is the maximize button that lets you make the editor the size if your browser window.

The downside is that it is a rather large plugin weighing in at 5.5mb. It is also showing up above the built in Wordpress editor widow. This is not ideal to have two editor windows especially since the default Wordpress one is ignored. This could be a conflict with the video pugin they using too. Not sure.

This tutorial will run though the basics of posting to a Blogger blog. It’s intended for newbies and should give a quick overview to get you started.

Step 1: Login

There are actually two steps here. Since Blogger recently upgraded their services, they now have two different types of logins. One for all the new accounts that have been merged with Google accounts and one for all the original Blogger signups that haven’t converted over. If you don’t know which one you are, ask the person that setup the blog for you.

Once you have chosen New Blogger or Old Blogger you will be presented with the login boxes. Enter your username and password and hit Sign In.

Step 2: The Dashboard

This is the starting point for all Blogger accounts. It will list the blogs that you have the ability to post to and give you a few other options. Lets click on the New Post link to create a new blog entry.

Step 3: The Post

A lot of people get this idea that they are gong to start blogging, but then they don’t know how. They are either to scared or unsure of what to do. I agree that it can be a bit intimidating, but that can be easily rectified by starting off with a starter blog.

Here are 4 steps to start blogging.

1. Get an Account. Go to Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and get a free blog account. This is the first big step. Lots of people talk, but if you don’t have an account, you’ll never start posting.
2. Start Posting. Post once a day, or once a week. Post about your dog, your car or what you saw on TV last night. Anything. Two sentences or one short paragraph is fine. Just get posting. The more you post the more you’ll feel comfortable doing so.
3. Post Better. Once you get posting down, you can start posting more often and posting more thought out posts. Something like book or movie reviews, tutorials or anything more than you’d previously been doing. Shoot for three or four good paragraphs.

While at SES in Chicago, I got to hear Rick Klau of Feedburner talk a few times. While listening to him, I realized that Feedburner’s services are well worth the free account; not to mention the paid account.

Feedburner is a feed management service. It takes your blog generated feed and works with it to ensure maximum compatibility with all feed readers. It also help make sure that your podcast, images and video are all correctly embedded and then makes your feed user friendly by adding CSS and subscription buttons to your feed’s page.

Not only that, but you can put in your Amazon ID to ensure your Amazon links make you money, you can also tie your Flickr images into your feed, get click through counts, see how many subscribers you have, see how people are using your feed and that’s just a few features of the free account.

The Feedburner reader stats are one of the main reasons I’ve used Feedburner in the past. Unfortunately Wordpress doesn’t have that kind of information yet. (Unless you have a Wordpress.com account.) I’ve been a little wary of running all my feed traffic though Feedburner in the past and it turns out I was worried for nothing.

Going out of town? Can’t find time to blog each day? Have a time sensitive post? Just future date your posts in Wordpress and they will post when the time comes.

Future posting is a great feature for anyone who doesn’t want their blog to look deserted when they away for a week. Or those that have lots of time to write posts at 11pm, but want them to be published at different times throughout the day.

It’s quite simple to do. We just edit the time stamp on the write post page. Here are the details:

1. Login to your blog and click on the ‘Write’ Tab.
2. On the right side, expand the ‘Post Timestamp’ box.
   
3. Click on the ‘Edit timestamp’ checkbox.
4. Modify the date to be sometime in the future.
   
5. Publish the post.

Now, you’ll want to be careful when setting the time. It’s set off the 24 hour clock as there is no AM, PM indicator. It also runs off your servers time. So, if the time in the box doesn’t match up with your current time, you’ll need to calculate the difference or update your time settings in the ‘Options’ tab. (Find your time offset.)

Since I help a lot of people get up and running on blogging I thought I’d document the process of posting to a Wordpress blog.

1) Login to the blog: http://www.your-blog.com/wp-login.php

2) Click on the write tab.

3) Write your post title in the title box. Keep any important keywords or phrases related to this post in mind.

4) Write what you want to say in the post box.

I’d highly recommend not copying and pasting from any Microsoft product as it’ll bring in all the same formatting and special characters. This can cause havoc with formatting. If you are using Firefox, it’ll also keep the same formatting (colors, fonts, links) if you copy out of Thunderbird or off a webpage. Instead, copy any text to a plain texxt document (Notepad or TextEdit) to remove all the formatting.

5) Format, link and add images as you see fit.

6) Click on the + sign next to categories on the right side, blue area. Choose the categories to associate with this post or add new categories by entering them into the input box and hitting add.

This tutorial, on how to upload images to a Wordpress blog, has one prerequisite. That is that you must have a folder named Upload in your wp-content folder and it must have write permissions (777) set. Once that’s done, lets move on.
Step 1: Login to the admin area of your Wordpress blog.

Step 2: Click on the Write Post tab to create a new post.

Usually, I write (and save) my post before adding images, but that’s up to you.

Step 3: Scroll down until you see the Upload area.

Step 4: Click the Browse… button and it will allow you to find the image you want to use on your hard drive. Once you’ve found it, enter in a title and hit upload. Description is optional.

Once it’s been uploaded you’ll then see a Browse tab with the image you just uploaded in it.

Step 5: Click on the image to get the image options.

Options Overview:
‘Using Thumbnail’ means that when sent to the editor, it’ll be a small version of the image in the post. Click on that link and it’ll switch to ‘Using Original’. That means that when you send it to the editor, it’ll use the original size of the image.