Plugins are available to embed Vanilla Forums in WordPress (please see disclosure at the end of this post), Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal, and Squarespace sites. The WordPress plugin can automatically log WP users into Vanilla without having to sign in again, or to create a separate account. Vanilla also has tools available to import forum content from phpBB and vBulletin.

The cost of the hosted version of Vanilla Forums ranges from a free, advertising-supported plan, to a “premium” plan with unlimited users and 15 GB of storage, costing $199 per month. If you wish to host a forum on your own server, an open-source version is available, for which there are a large number of add-ons available to customize the forum.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Focusing only on traffic numbers, instead of the concentrating  on sharing content and building relationships will send you down the path to burnout. Here at WebWorkerDaily, we have multiple writers contributing  to help keep the content fresh. But for one-person blogs, blogging daily works for some and not for others.

If I had been blogging daily since the day I wrote my first blog entry back in 2000, I would have quit long ago. I know this because I’ve been burned out by blogging many times — and I’ve never blogged more than a few times a week.

It’s natural for bloggers to want many people to stop by, read and comment. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with pressuring yourself to churn out content daily like a machine for the sake of traffic when blogging is just one of many things you do. If you do that, you’ll sacrifice quality and your mental state.

So how do you decide how often to blog ? What’s the magic formula? There’s no definitive approach to figuring this out. Instead, take time to ponder these questions to help you find what will work for your blog.

• Review your business goals. Increasing blog readership is a worthy goal, but how does the blog support your business’ goals? If your web site itself is the income generator, then you’ll need frequent fresh content. If the blog is for promoting you as an expert in your field, which in turns supports your consulting business, then you probably don’t need to blog daily.
• Know your audience. What jobs do your readers have? How much of their time do they have for reading blogs? How active are they on blogs and social media? What industry do your readers come from? Are they reading during the workday or after hours?
• Identify your contributors. Is your publication a a one-person blog or a group blog? Group blogs cut the chances of burnout.
• Look at the length of your posts. Some people with large followings write 1,000+ word posts; these people tend to publish less often. Readers may better tolerate daily posts when they’re shorter: 200-400 words. Some bloggers mix it up with longer posts on a weekly basis, with shorter posts filling in the other days.
• Check web site stats. After adjusting your blogging frequency, check to see if the stats have changed. Remember that while a change could be associated just with the frequency or posting, it could also be because the content quality or level of blog promotion changed.

If social media teaches us one thing, it’s this: There are no rules. This doesn’t mean all those “golden rules” and “commandments” are off the mark; these give folks an idea of what works. But blogging endlessly blinded to your goals gets you nowhere. Stay on the path and steer clear of burnout by knowing your goals and audience.

What other factors help you decide how often to blog?

Photo by stock.xchng user Jorge Vicente.

In the study, bloggers cautioned PR professionals that traditional outreach methods would not be effective with them; they were adamant that a smart, well-researched approach would work best. The study goes on to say that “most bloggers tend to write about subjects they are passionate about. And most of the time, the product (blog) is wholly owned by them. Therefore, their blog and the subject matter are extremely personal endeavors.”

I haven’t seen a more recent study of a similar type to show what has changed, but as someone who engages both in blogger outreach with my company and blogging, I feel that the landscape has fundamentally shifted.

I’ve noticed a significant decrease, year over year, in how responsive bloggers are — or more accurately, are not — even to individualized, customized and thoughtful outreach. In 2007, response rates were between 20-25 percent positive (the percentage of bloggers who published information provided to them or responding to our outreach). Toward the end of 2009, I began to see a marked drop-off of in acknowledgments from bloggers, much less actual published responses to email outreach. In my company’s experience, we’ve found the response rate to decrease to less than 10 percent, even less than five percent in some cases. This poor response rate is even despite the fact that our relationships with individual bloggers have strengthened over the years.

The decrease in blogger outreach effectiveness can be attributed to a myriad of factors including

1. The recent FTC rulings on marketing firms and blogs
2. A glut of PR requests to bloggers, so most no longer get opened
3. The realization by many bloggers that they now hold an increasing degree of power and influence in terms of information distribution, so they are becoming more selective
4. The fact that many bloggers are still not businesspeople, and don’t even look to PR as a source of fodder for their blogs
5. A continued misunderstanding about blogging culture and what bloggers need or want by marketers
6. There’s a misconception that all bloggers want to be approached by PR reps or to receive press releases, so firms keep throwing stuff out there to see what sticks
7. The fact that not everyone who blogs is open to blogging about things other than their own lives or work, especially products they don’t actually use.

Putting On My Blogger Hat

As a professional blogger as well as a personal blogger, I find myself drowning in pitches from PR firms. On the personal side, I find that unless they use the correct email to pitch me and keep the pitches very short, to the point, and on target with my blog topics, I pretty much ignore the emails. I simply don’t have the bandwidth. Plus, my personal blogs aren’t really commercial endeavors.

On the professional side, I look for a prominent mention of the blog they’re pitching me for (such as WebWorkerDaily); exactly what they are pitching (a new application to help web workers do something better, for example); and how familiar they are with what I write. There is nothing more effective in pitches to me than one with a highly targeted phrase like “I noticed your blog post about RSS feeds last week and wanted to let you know about my client’s new app that would really benefit web workers by helping manage their feeds.” Bingo!

I can’t say that I read every email pitched to me — it is just not humanly possible. I can say that the PR people who politely but regularly nudge me several times to gauge my interest in their pitch have gotten a lot farther with me than the ones who threw a pitch at me like spaghetti to a wall. Kindness and consideration along with persistence wins the ink. Getting annoyed that I haven’t responded, or that I’ve had to switch a demo call at the last minute isn’t going to win any brownie points. We’re all just people trying to make a living, and we all have a life.

The other thing I find incredibly effective in terms of pitching me on behalf of a client is not only the thoughtfully targeted pitch but regular pitches that can provide me with ideas for new blog posts. I look forward to those emails and count the PR people who help to make my professional blogging life just a little bit easier as important contacts. That’s the power of relationships. You care, I care, we work together, everyone wins.

Alternative Ways of Engaging Bloggers

Because of the decrease in effectiveness of blogger outreach carried out in the manner of traditional media outreach, there needs to be alternative ways to engage bloggers to help produce valuable and educational content for our clients; build greater awareness of client brands; and have a measurable impact in the blogosphere. Some of these tactics include:

1. Blog panels. Select bloggers who are knowledgeable in a given area to provide guidance on a company or organization’s blog editorial calendar that can be syndicated on their own blogs in a coordinated fashion. This is a more credible and effective tactic when the participation is a voluntary and non-compensated position; however, there must be a mutual exchange of value and all value exchange must be disclosed.
2. Blogger pools. Select bloggers who can be guest authors of a company or organization’s blog by identifying a pool of qualified, expert and diverse bloggers who can contribute content – with or without compensation – for the exposure. Again, if compensation is involved, it must be disclosed.
3. Blog sponsorship. Identify key blogs and bloggers reaching the “right” audience and offering to pay them to sponsor content that meets particular guidelines. For the bloggers who are in the business of blogging, this can be a more attractive relationship, and both parties must make sure a paid sponsorship is properly and prominently labeled as such.

As the blogging landscape continues to change, it is important for us to engage bloggers in the conversations about best practices in blogger outreach and continue to build more meaningful relationships with bloggers similar to the way we’ve cultivated relationships with the media but realizing the differences. If I feel we have a strong base of blogger relationships in a given industry or area, I may recommend blogger outreach to a client in the future. However, building a targeted blogger list from scratch without relationships solidly in place is proving to be a less effective and more expensive endeavor than it was three years ago.

Do you engage in blogger outreach? Or are you a blogger being approached by marketing types? What are your thoughts on the topic of blogger outreach as an online marketing tactic?

There are so many people who influence us in our businesses, from the bloggers who consistently provide us with helpful information to keep our businesses growing and thriving to the people in our spheres of influence who rave about us and keep clients and customers coming our way. They help us every day, and it is important to reach out and say “thank you” every now and then.

Even when you think it will fall on deaf ears, that it won’t matter to the person, or that he or she is probably inundated with messages every day, let the person know how he or she helps you in your business and that you appreciate his or her efforts. Say what’s on your mind and make it heartfelt — because for most people, it really will matter.

Someone sent me a thoughtful thank you note a couple of weeks ago, and I have thought about her message several times since then. She said my help and support had been “wind in her sails” that week; little did she know that that note would be wind in mine for weeks to come.

Take the time to thank the people who inspire you, motivate you and teach you. Instead of passing over the comment sections of their blogs again, thinking you have nothing of value to add, let them know how their posts are making a difference in your business. With so many jerks in the world these days, it’s really nice to come across someone who actually takes the time to be, well, nice.

And, to my favorite bloggers (The Bloggess, Chris Brogan, Dumb Little Man and Gary Vaynerchuk, to name a few), thank you.

What was the most heartfelt or meaningful “thank you” you ever received?

Photo by Flickr user vistamommy, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

skimmer is a cross-platform desktop client, built using Adobe AIR, that gives you a single interface to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and Blogger. Even in beta it works pretty well, and has some nice touches, such as displaying Twitpic images inline so you don’t have to open another browser tab. Think of it as a Tweetdeck-like app that also allows you to keep an eye on what’s happening with your friends on Flickr, Youtube and Blogger. You can also use it to upload photos and video. It is a very elegantly designed application that looks great.

If I wanted a full-screen Twitter/lifestreaming client I would probably consider using skimmer, but it’s a bit too heavyweight for me. I prefer having a small, unobtrusive twhirl window at the side of my screen to keep up-to-date with what’s happening on Twitter. While you can set skimmer up in a “widget”-size window, it still takes quite a lot of screen real estate; it’s probably best to run skimmer on a second screen.

I’d also caution that the app takes a lot of memory to run (a common problem with AIR applications). skimmer is currently using nearly 200MB of memory on my machine – hopefully this is something that will be addressed in a future version.

Have you tried skimmer? What did you think?

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Doing what we do here at WebWorkerDaily, it is sometimes easy to forget from whence we came. That is to say, everything has a beginning, including a career, or part of a career, devoted to working online. For many of us already in the field, the starting point may have been a natural inclination towards technology that gradually blossomed into a full-fledged professional pursuit.

But for those just getting their feet wet, the process might not be so organic. You might be showing up late to the game, and with only a basic grasp of the rules to begin with. Let’s take some of the pressure off by taking an introductory look at two of the basic tools of the trade.

Blogs

Blogs (or weblogs, to give them their original name), are a web worker’s best friend. They help with research, networking, sales, and brand establishment (personal or corporate). Once upon a time, you could just put up a web site and forget it, or maybe go back and update content once a quarter, or once every two quarters. That was fine when the Internet was just a supplement to real-world business, but it’s become much more than that. In web working, your web site is the social face you present to the client, and having a blog helps keep you relevant.

Imagine a salesperson who checks in with a prospect once a quarter. Now imagine that salesperson provides exactly the same information in exactly the same way to exactly the same stakeholder every time. That’s what you’re doing if you’re not providing frequently-updated content on your web site. With a blog, which you might update on a daily or weekly basis with articles about new developments and trends in your field, you can show prospects that you’re engaged, excited about your field, and always aware of shifts in the business landscape.

That’s the “why”, but what about the “how”? The best way to get started is to become familiar with some basic blog publishing software. Try out a free WordPress.com (disclosure: WebWorkerDaily is hosted on WordPress; see additional disclosure related to WordPress below) or Blogger account, both of which offer visual editing and preset templates; leaving you to concentrate on the content, not the geeky back-end stuff. Read around so you get familiar with the blog writing style. Note the average length of posts, where paragraph breaks occur, the use of hyperlinking, etc. You don’t have to share your blogging with the public until you’re comfortable doing so. Take your time and build competence first.

Twitter

You’ve probably heard about it, but you may not yet have gone so far as to sign up for an account. Twitter is a relatively new kind of social network, that, unlike its popular predecessors MySpace and Facebook, is focused primarily on users’ content and less on users’ profiles or identities.

When I first discovered Twitter, which was not all that long ago, I had no idea what to do with it. I couldn’t figure out how to find people to add, no one I knew was using it, and the 140-character limit seemed arbitrary and somewhat cruel. I came to realize that it is a valuable way to expand your network of potential clients, collaborators and service providers, and to conduct spot research and enhance your reputation as an online professional.

Nowadays, you will find that most professionals working online who have active blogs will also have a “Follow me” button or at least link to their Twitter profile in some way. Twitter takes the concepts I talked about with blogging to the next level. To successfully use your account to further your professional goals, you have to provide updated content with a frequency previously unheard of, and with significant brevity, as well. Those in advertising will probably relish the challenge of drilling down meaningful content to 140 characters, as I soon came to.

How to use Twitter succesfully is a topic that is still subject to fervent debate. If you’re looking for a good starting point, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net is frequently considered an expert in the field, and you can find his Twitter-oriented blog at Twitip.com. With Twitter, as with blogs, the key is to follow others and take in as much as possible, in order to get comfortable with the unique form of communication it presents.

I know the “watch and learn” method of gaining familiarity with these basic web working tools might not appeal to those newcomers who’ve been forced by the loss of employment to seek work online, rather than chosen it themselves. But like starting any new career, there will be ramp up time, and training and orientation are required if you want to become truly successful. Hopefully our Web Work 101 series of articles will help cut down the time on that learning curve.

(Disclosure: WordPress is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.)

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The lawyer. Contracts and legal documents are part of every web worker’s life. We often need to sign non-disclosure agreements, independent contractor documents, and telecommuting agreements. Having a lawyer as a contact can be handy, especially if you want to start a business, translate legalese, or draft your own contracts when templates just won’t do.

The financial expert. Whether it’s managing your own money, finding stable investments, or computing yoru home office as a tax deduction, you’ll need a go-to person for your financial questions. This could be a hired accountant, financial advisor, or simply a friend who is wise about money. Even if they might not be able to answer all your questions, they can certainly point you to the resources and experts you need.

The website network owner. This contact is probably more important to freelancers than telecommuting employees. Basically, this person owns or manages several websites and blogs. Having a contact like this can prove to be useful, whether you’re a designer, writer, SEO practitioner, or programmer. The most obvious reason is that there’s a good chance that this contact will give you extra opportunities for work, since she has several web projects that need maintenance and updates. Also, if she really likes your work, you might be tapped for any new projects that come along.

The colleague. Web working is like a rat race where you don’t get to meet the other rats. No matter how much you love solitude and independence, you’ll need to network with others who are doing the kind of work that you do. Why is this important? First of all, it’s always good to have someone who faces the same challenges as you do. You get to exchange ideas and help each other out when facing problems that are unique to teleworking. Also, it allows for opportunities to collaborate in the future.

For telecommuting employees, you can establish rapport with other telecommuters in your department. For freelancers, you could get in touch with the people you work with on a regular basis, or hang out in online communities where freelancers talk about the issues that matter to them.

The popular blogger. Blogs are fast becoming one of the most common resources that people turn to for current events and expert opinions. Their position gives bloggers some amount of authority when recommending a product or service. This makes it good to have blogger contacts from a marketing perspective, especially if you work with them and they blog about how happy they are with your work. I think that kind of recommendation beats a regular testimonial.

While having these five contacts is beneficial to your career, you shouldn’t depend on them for everything. After all, the quality of your work is still up to you. These contacts will just add to the work, opportunities, and know how that you already have.

Which of these contacts do you have? What value do they bring to your career?

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In order to have some of the Word Processor features in my blog editor, I often compose my blog posts in Google Docs, then paste them into my blogging software.  Well as bavatuesdays has pointed out, Google Documents now features the ability to post directly to your blog software.

To use this quietly rolled out feature, type in your Google Doc as you normally would and hit the “Publish” button.  One of the options is to post to your blog.  You’re presented with the following screen:

As you can see, the window asks for your blog type, username, password, and blog name.  The support a large number of blog engines including WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type, and more.

Once you’ve set up your blog information, you can easily post the Google Doc to your blog.  In my testing, the result was plain looking posts that appear just as they do inside Google Documents.

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