Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was Wordpress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

If you missed the announcement just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, FeedBurner Pro is now free. That’s one of those good things about a Google acquisition; things become free. All users now get Pro stats and MyBrand for feeds.

Honestly, I never quite saw why the Pro features were so great. MyBrand is a cool thing, but I prefer to promote and use my own feed URL that has been redirected to the FeedBurner version.  I do this with the FeedSmith Wordpress plugin from FeedBurner.

The two additional stats items do sound nice though. Reach estimates the number of users that interact with our feed (including feed search engine or news filter sites) and we get better click though stats.

Now everyone is a Pro at FeedBurner thanks to Google.

[tags]FeedBurner,Google[/tags]

Not every host has the ability to install and run Wordpress. Some hosts use Windows servers where PHP and MySQL are not usually included. So then what? What is the next best blogging software?

My first thought is Blogger. Since the new version was released, it’s back in the running. It has the ability to post to an external site in a directory which is a plus. I’d rather stay away from sub-domains if possible. Blogger also has labels (aka categories), editable templates and enough features for most bloggers. Plus it’s free. The downsides is that Blogger isn’t realy seen as a professional platform and when they have problems, you won’t be able to do much about.

Another one is TypePad. It has a domain mapping feature but I don’t think it can map to a folder. It has to be routed to either a domain or a sub-domain which is unfortunate. If I’m wrong, someone please tell me. I’d love be wrong in this case. Either way, to get domain mapping you need at least a Plus account ($8.95/m) and access to update your DNS records though your domain registrar. Other than that, it’s a pretty decent choice.

I’m declaring the 13th of each month as the unofficial blog backup day. Meaning that you should login to your blog software and download a backup of all posts. Also, if you have access to the template files, back those up too.

Avoiding issues are much easier than trying to fix them once they happen. I’ve never seen a blog just delete itself, but I have heard of people’s hosting accounts suddenly having a hardware failure and are non-recoverable. If you don’t have a backup of your files, who does?

Yes, a good host will make backups, but that’s placing your trust fully in a third party. What if their backups are in the same office as your website and they have a fire? All is lost. If you do have a good host, then a secondary set of backups never hurt and you’ll have them at your fingertips at all times.

Ok, so this is a perfect gloom post for Friday the 13th, but you must realize that technology isn’t perfect. Your blog could go down and if you have no backup, then you’ll have to start from zero. All your hard work down the drain.

How do you backup a blog?

For Wordpress blogs, use the the WordPress Database Backup plugin. This plugin is included with all installs of Wordpress starting with version 2 I believe. Once enabled, you just go tot he backups section of the manage screen, make a few selections and it’ll backup your blog posts to your desktop or email. I wouldn’t suggest backing up to the server as that won’t do you any good if your web server goes down.

For Wordpress.com blogs, click on Manage and then Export.

With TypePad just got to the Import/Export area on the Manage tab of your admin area. Here you’ll be able to export all posts to your desktop. [backup support page]

Movable Type users can login to their admin area and click on Import/Export and then select Export.

Blogger doesn’t allow an export of all your posts like other services. However, you can edit your template with a bit of custom code to output all posts on one page, then save that page and revert back to your old template. Not the best solution but it should work. [Blogger How-To Page]