SocialMouths is turning one year and to celebrate, I’m launching my first product.

It’s called “Launch Your Awesomeness – Your own kick-ass blog in only 48 hours” and I would absolutely love it if you can take a couple of minutes to read this post to understand what it is, why I created it, for who and how you can hopefully benefit from it.

Also, I’m leaving the comments open if you want to give me feedback, if you have some ideas to improve it or to simply ask questions.

So What Is It?

It’s a packaged solution to speed up the process of launching your blog, a successful one, either for your business or for your own personal brand.

I figured that every new blogger needs 5 essential elements to have any chance to success:

• Full control. In other words, eliminate the webmaster
• A kick-ass first impression, which today means a few seconds
• Some SEO basics to be search engine friendly and don’t invisible
• Social media integration to amplify the message
• And traffic analysis for better performance

So I came up with a solution that provides all that by implementing the necessary tools. Your blog is ready to perform at its best and at the same time, I’m eliminating the learning curve. These tools I’m talking about include WordPress, Thesis, Disqus comments, Tweetmeme buttons, sharing systems like ShareThis, Facebook and Twitter widgets and others. These are the tools you have already seen being used by successful bloggers out there.

A true powerhouse, ready for you to come in and start dropping your awesome content.

Also, I have put together a couple of designs so you can pick your choice. The trick here was to create something that looks good and at the same time it’s simple enough to be usable in any kind of business or industry. You can’t just base your online presence on good design BUT (notice I used the big “but”…), don’t you agree that a decent design build that initial trust any website needs? I thought so, you have been in that situation when you hit the back button in a matter of seconds too, right?

What’s NOT

It’s not a WordPress “Premium Theme”. Period.

Who Is This For?

Well, being an entrepreneur myself, I understand beginnings are not easy specially in the financial department. This means that while we’re looking to launch something of quality, we don’t always have the necessary budgets and resources to build from scratch. I see this with some of my clients. Launch Your Awesomeness is a solution for those people.

The reason I didn’t conduct a survey to have a more crowdsourcing approach to the whole thing, which is something I plan to do in the future, is because I had already enough feedback from over a year of working with clients. I have listened carefully all this time to the needs and objectives of people launching their first blog, redesigning an existing one or even going for a second one.

This Is Your Chance

If you have been postponing the launch of your blog because you didn’t have enough money, you didn’t know how to implement all that technology or your cat is looking at you weird, this is your chance to stop those excuses that build up an unreal sense of fear in you and… Launch Your Awesomeness!

Go visit the site at LaunchYourAwesomeness.com

Thank you!

You still there? Go!

One of the toughest parts of starting a new blog is getting some visibility.

The problem with doing your initial promotion post-launch is that at that point you have already develop a new series of activities such as content management or front-end interaction. These tasks will considerably reduce your time and resources.

What if you could instead create buzz around your blog even before its launch and before you drop a line of content in it? In this post I’ll share with you a few ways you can build hype about your launch and go live with traffic already coming in your door.

When it comes to planning, this is no different than doing so for your actual blogging in which we’ll assume you have a strategy for content generation, scheduling and stuff like that. In this case, you should also write a little pre-launch strategy.

So here are some of the ideas and hopefully you find them of value:

“Coming Soon” Landing Page

First you need to create a very simple but attractive landing page with the domain name you will be using. Until the day of the launch, this is going to act as your online hub. Don’t think of it as a dead end for your traffic, instead be creative and focus on getting people excited about it.

A plain “Under Construction” page does nothing but annoy people. Give them a little taste of what’s coming.

Start Building Your Email List

Yes, it is possible. Getting people to give you their email address is not easy even having an existing blog with lots of content, doing so for a blog that doesn’t even exist is even harder.

The main element on your “coming soon” landing page will be an email signup box to get updates on the launch of the blog. In order for this to work, it needs to be attractive enough for people to get excited. Focus on great copy and great design.

Guest Blogging

In order to start building up a name for yourself without having your own platform, you should offer to guest post on related blogs. There are a couple of things to consider here:

• Most bloggers will be happy to get a hand with content so don’t be afraid to ask.
• Try to guest post for a relevant blog. If the blog gets no decent traffic it will probably not do much for you either.
• Stay in your field. You don’t want to write for your direct competitor but make sure you find a blogger in your niche, where you know what your talking about and people in your industry can start recognizing your name.

Comment On Other Blogs

I’m not talking about “Hey John, great post” kind of comment, I’m talking about significant contributions to the conversation and obviously staying on topic. Remember that at this point these are the only opportunities you have to express your thoughts.

Also important is to make your comments friendly, create profiles at Disqus and IntenseDebate so you can be compatible with the rest of the planet and make sure you include your future blog address as it will be visible on every comment you make.

Build Some Twitter Muscle

Twitter will be your blog’s best friend but in order to really leverage from this relationship form the beginning is better to start tweeting in advance. Here are the main reasons:

• Twitter will help you establish relationships, by the time you launch, you will already have a small community to go to.
• Being resourceful by sharing good content in your industry will build some initial trust.

By the time you announce the launch on Twitter, people will already be listening to you.

Get Some Celebrity Hype

Announce some kick-ass content to start with a big splash, a good way to do this is by getting somebody with rockstar status in your industry to do an interview with you. There are many ways of doing an interview, it can be written or video over Skype (Read: “How To Produce Video Interviews For Your Blog Using Skype“) if there is some distance in between but if you have the chance to do this interview physically present, you can very easily go for a very nice quality product without losing your shirt.

Last year I saw a couple of blogs do this successfully by leveraging from Gary Vaynerchuck’s popularity.

The good thing is that these kind of leaders in your industry usually need the exposure too, see who’s getting a book published for example. Don’t be afraid to ask.

Give Stuff Away

Another way of getting attention is by giving stuff away, nobody cares if you have published any content if you are giving something for free. Don’t think you need to give away an iPad, you can also do other interesting things like a few copies of a good book related to your niche.

Contests are very powerful if you know how to ask for something in exchange. You can ask people to follow you, to subscribe or to simply tweet to participate but the point in this particular case is to get your blog on the map. Read my post “How To Run Successful Contests On Twitter” to get some ideas.

Facebook Ads

I can already see your face now. A lot of people won’t even consider this but let me tell you that Facebook ad campaigns not only can be very affordable but you have full control of daily limits and even when to stop, there are no long-term commitments.

Even if the campaign is a failure, it is good that you become familiar with these kind of things and get some experience under your belt. After all, this is a testing game.

Ask For Help!

Yes, believe or not, getting help is also on the menu. Ask your peeps to help you amplify the message. Everybody can get some additional support. To give you an example, every time I have an interest on promoting something online, even if it’s not myself, I have the @nakedelephant (my wife), my team at the office and a few online relationships ready to spread some love.

Depending on who you got in your corner or how much support, the message can be easily amplified by 10 times or more…

Your Turn Now…

Share some others ideas, other methods you have used in the past or seen other people do successfully. What was your experience launching your blog?

Or… If you are planning on launching your blog soon, ask any questions!



Do you really have an idea of where you or your company stand online today?

There are several conversations on how to develop a social media strategy but in this case, we are suggesting you take a step back to look at who you are online, where you’re standing today. What kind of reach do you have? Are you an influencer in your segment? Do people know about you in your industry?

Figure this out first and then move forward, plan, set up goals, compare.

With this post, I’m starting a series called “Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence” that will be published in 5 parts in the next week or so as it follows:

• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 1]: The Hub – You are here.
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 2]: Content Performance – We’ll take a look at your hottest pieces of content and how users are engaging with it.
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 3]: Your Network – The size, the growth and even some demographics.
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 4]: Impact – Influence, sentiment, reach and more…
• Snapshot Of Your Social Media Presence [Part 5]: Dashboard On A Spreadsheet – How to build your own dashboard to have full visibility of your progress.

Objective

The goal here is to establish a way of measuring your online presence, this is not a business objective, your business objective should be to convert more prospects to sales. Some of the numbers we are going to take in consideration here are not relevant to your bottom line directly. What I mean by directly is that you will not get a check in the mail by getting more traffic to your site or you won’t get any commissions based on how many times you get retweeted.

So what’s the point? learning about your presence online and how to improve it will allow you to:

• Position yourself in the marketplace
• Build credibility
• Expose yourself to larger networks

The benefits are huge, they’re just not directly attached to money, which will come automatically.

Again to make it very clear: If you’re thinking “shouldn’t we be measuring ROI instead?”, your are correct but in this case we are trying to figure out something different, you social web presence that will help us get to more relevant statistics.

Let me give you an example, most people agrees that the Alexa Ranking is not as relevant as it used to be in the past and I can tell you that it will not directly affect your business in any way. I don’t want you to make it a goal to improve it, I’m just suggesting that we take a look once a month to track it as a way to measure our presence along with other figures.

There is also data that you should take very seriously…

Analytics

Some of that data is processed to you by Google Analytics. This is a must-have, it stopped being an option years ago so if you’re either a small business or a brand, you better have it in your toolbox. Take it easy if you are starting with it, this is a powerful tool, start by tracking the main numbers such as monthly Visits, Pageviews, Average Time and Bounce Rate.

I’m not going to get into definitions but if you don’t know what some of these terms mean, you should read my post “Start Understanding Your Website Traffic” and take it from there.

Take the last 3 months worth of data so you can also look at the trend.

Another thing that is very important we get from Analytics is the the traffic sources but we’ll look at that later.

Alexa

The Alexa Traffic Rank is taken as the official list of sites by some while others argue that it’s not accurate… I had people write reviews for my site on it and they don’t show up, have submitted my site info twice and nothing so… who knows. We don’t care about that, we’ll just use it as a measurement of progress. Let’s grab that number called “Alexa Traffic Rank” and make a note of the date.

Alexa provides other information such as regional rankings (I know SocialMouths is huge in New Zealand…), your top search queries, sites linking back to you, etc. For now, we’ll take the official ranking.

Compete

Same thing with Compete.com, some say it replaced Alexa and others don’t even care to register. There is a chance your site will not have enough data to show up on Compete, if this is the case then register first by opening a free account.

You will notice that the figures are completely off, in this case the Compete Rank for SocialMouths is 85,907 while the Alexa Rank is 68,709. This is not important since we are not doing this to compare the two, they’re apples and oranges. Don’t try to figure this out either, unless you’re an analytic freak that wants to know how each digit is created.

Compete also offers a premium service that includes search analytics, demographics and much more. Let’s stick with that rank…

Quantcast

Quantcast is a little different because you are actually letting it quantify your traffic by installing its code on your blog, that is supposed to make it more reliable when it comes to traffic numbers. Some of these metrics are more relevant for marketers trying to find advertising venues.

Again, you’ll grab the rank. We’ll come back to grab those nice demographics later on…

Your Own “Analytic Dashboard” On A Spreadsheet

Now that you have gathered the data we need to measure, we’ll establish a starting point and monthly check points to be able to measure our progress, set up reminders on your calendar to spend an hour every month to build this.

Why a spreadsheet? To centralize everything and provide you with full visibility, it’s kind of having a dashboard on your own that doesn’t update automatically. Make it very easy, you can use MS Excel or a Google Spreadsheet to do this. We’ll continue to add other data in the upcoming posts. Here is an example in the following images:

Basic data from Google Analytics:

And the different ranking from Alexa, Quantcast and Compete, all in one place.

PageRank

The last digit we’ll collect in this phase will be Google Pagerank, this one is way more relevant than the other ranks, this is directly related to the SEO of your blog/site. You can install a toolbar that includes this information on your browser, there are plenty of them out there, in the following image I’m showing the extension for Google Chrome.

In the next post (probably my favorite one) we’ll analyze content performance and we’ll also keep adding stuff to our spreadsheet.

Now It’s Your Turn…

Is your blog the hub of your social media presence? what are you doing to measure its performance and how often do you stop to analyze it? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Happy Analyzing!

We had a couple of conversations last week on both our Twitter and Fan Page about how we subscribe to online content, in this case from blogs. One of the things I find interesting is that all the responses came with at least 2 options, usually following on Twitter and RSS or combining Twitter and Facebook. In some cases even connecting in 3 different platforms at the same time.

In my case, I first follow on Twitter, then depending on the content and if I consider worth subscribing I do it via RSS. If we are talking about a singular post then I’ll give it some bookmarking love on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, depending on what’s appropriate.

So share with us, you can actually choose 2 options and also feel free to add comments too…

To kick it up a notch at your blog, why not ask your audience how they would like to subscribe to your content? Or even, what do they want to see in their subscription…

Thank you!

There is a community building around your blog, people signing up via RSS or email, some of them following you on Twitter or even joining your Facebook fan page.

But what is your main focus? Do you have a clear strategy of how you want to lead that community and help it grow.

Let’s see what we find in the results… Thanks for participating!

Enter our 1st. contest of 2010 and win a blog in exchange of a simple Tweet. Seriously.

But… aren’t there like a million free themes available everywhere? This is not a theme, this is your Ready-To-Rock, unique and fully-loaded blog.

So get all the details right here…

What Does “Fully-Loaded” Mean Anyways?

While it has a very simple design, this blog is loaded with all the tools you need. Here are the specs. Besides changing the logo and your pic, you get:

• It’s built over Thesis Workframe so the license is included (your welcome…)
• Your social profiles are linked to the blog and displayed on the sidebar
• Sharing options: Tweetmeme button and ShareThis System
• Disqus Commenting System (the default is just weak sauce)
• FeedBurner RSS & Email subscriptions
• Social feeds (Twitter and Facebook)
• I’ll setup and configure Google Analytics (I’m not kidding)

Seriously… Just A Tweet?

Yes, all you need to do is:

1. Follow @SocialMouths on Twitter and…
2. Tweet this message exactly as it reads here (just copy and paste and you’ll be good):

“Follow @socialmouths and Retweet to WIN the FREE Fully-Loaded Blog contest – http://bit.ly/ceS384“

Important: Do not change the URL. The tweet must be exactly like that.

How Is The Winner Announced?

The last day to enter is Monday February 22nd and the winner will be announced on a post at SocialMouths on Friday February 26th. Don’t forget.

Just Making Clear That…

• I’ll be cool and work with you to get setup, but this offer doesn’t include customer service, customization or tech support. You can hire me for a couple of hours if you like.
• You need to have a domain and a hosting package, if you don’t I suggest you get everything from GoDaddy.
• This is WordPress self-hosted version.
• I’ll leave everything ready so you can input your content. I do NOT put in the content for you.

You still here? Go Tweet…

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I’m not talking about turning your blog into an iPhone application but rather making it more friendly for the iPhone browser. In other words, when a user is visiting your blog from the device.

This is done for WordPress blogs with a very simple and free plugin called WPTouch (created by Brave New Code) that you can install and configure yourself in just a few minutes. There is nothing else to it, you do everything from your WordPress dashboard.

You can also download the plugin here.

If you are looking into having an actual application built out of your blog, there are services like MotherApp or iSites that can do that for less than $100/year.

I’m sharing some images here so you can get a better idea of how it looks and works. The first image shows the homepage (left) and how it actually looks like an app. To the right is the post, it displays all images and… yes, the tweetmeme button works!

Yes, this is all happening in the browser. Other features that are very useful are the access to the RSS and the menus, in the next image (right), I’m showing how “Categories” are displayed.

The commenting system, Disqus in this case, is fully functional.

Final Thought

What is the point of all this? We are moving into making ourselves available in different forms, if you can turn your blog into a more user-friendly format for your readers AND for free… why not?

Share your thoughts.

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Ever wonder how to make your site or blog perform better? What do you change so it can help you reach the results you expect?

Sure, you can ask some friends for their opinion but, what if you could experience how a real person behaves, what they do or where they click.

Think of retail stores or supermarkets and how they position every single product on their floor according to a strategy based on extensive customer behavior studies. Things are not just placed there to see what happens.

This is the second installment of the “Social Power Tools To Kick It Up A Notch” series. This time we’ll talk about a service that will let you watch how people behave when they visit your site or blog. Yes, I said “watch”. This application is called ClickTale and I will tell you how to benefit from it.

But let’s start from the beginning…

What Are The Objectives?

• The first thing we need is clarity about our objectives. What do we want our website/blog to do? You might be trying to increase your mailing list or generate more traffic, maybe convert visitors to potential clients.
• Once that is clear, look at how are you doing in those areas. Are people signing up for your newsletter or visiting your “Services” page after reading your latest post?
• Before we start moving things around or making our “Subscribe” button twice as big with a flashing effect, let’s take the time to observe.

And that’s where a tool like ClickTale comes in. Now we can move on to the main features and how you can leverage from them…

Record Your Visitors

ClickTale records whatever is happening on the screen when a visitor comes in your site. You can actually experience how the visitor scrolls down the page and observe the behavior through the mouse. See if your visitor hovers any sections or is actually clicking on them or if he/she scrolls down all the way or bounces before finishing your post.

You can also set the video viewing speed, it’s pretty easy to tell if the person is actually reading the post or just scanning it.

Heatmaps

Watching how a real user behaves in your site is truly an eye-opener but we need the big picture in order to make a significant change. Heatmaps are a great visualization tool for that. You can run heatmaps based on a specific URL within your site by a date range to see what are the areas where that group of visitors are hovering, clicking or whether they are scrolling down or not on separate maps. The next image shows you where visitors are mostly going over with their mouse.

Next is the Scroll heatmap. You can see how the temperature goes down as you scroll and what’s the hottest piece of real estate on the page. I’m not showing the entire image here.

Tip: Take a picture of the entire heatmap and download it. If you use Firefox this is as easy as installing the Screengrab! plugin, it takes a screenshot of the entire page even below the fold.

Reports

ClickTale also provides a series of valuable reports displaying data you can analyze if you’re trying to step up your game. These reports tell you what are the most engaging pages, the most clicked, the least scrolled and even the slowest loading, which is by the way one of the main reasons a visitor will surf away from your site.

So Now You Know What’s Up… What’s Next?

After paying attention to some videos and heatmaps you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. Now you know if people are just not seeing your Subscribe button, perhaps because it’s on the opposite side from where all the action is happening. You will be able to better position the different elements.

ClickTale has different pricing packages depending on your needs and it also has a free basic package.

What I learned…

I learned a couple of things after just watching a few videos, one is that people were looking for the top navigation bar and my blog only had the one on the sidebar. The other one is that I get better scrolls when the post has images.

If you find yourself screaming at the screen “don’t go yet! look at the pretty navigation on the right! tweet it dude, tweet it!”, maybe you should take a break.

See what you find out. Be curious and question everything. Don’t be afraid to make changes, it’s the only way to improve. Make your site do what it is supposed to do.

And visit the first post of the series: Social Power Tools To Kick It Up A Notch (Tool #1): ObjectiveMarketer

Photo Credit: Jerry Cook

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Videos are everywhere lately, specially interviews. I mean bloggers are really taking it to the next level and why not, it’s a great way to engage your visitor and make them stay a little longer. Are you asking yourself if this is hard to put together?

I’m going to show you how to produce your own video interview guerilla style… I mean, without losing an arm and a leg and without hiring anybody. First let’s review the ingredients:

The Ingredients

• Webcam
• Screen capture software
• Skype
• Basic video editing software
• Video sharing website

Record A Little Intro

With just a simple webcam, record yourself doing a short introduction for your guest, tell people what they are about to see. Make it short because your viewer will not stick forever to see you hook it up.

When you are done save it, you will need it later to edit the final piece.

Screen Capture

When doing an interview you will face two possible scenarios, is the person you are interviewing physically reachable or on the other side of the planet. In this case we’ll talk about a long distance interview and since this is going to happen over the internet, what we need to record is what’s happening on the screen, this is called Screen Capturing. This software will also take care of the audio part.

I personally like iShowU from ShinyWhiteBox, but there are plenty of options out there. Depending of your choice, you should expect to pay up to $100, don’t pay more than that (iShowU is about $30).

Skype

Oh, the beautiful and FREE Skype… If you don’t have an account you should probably make the time to get one, today. In my opinion, the only thing Skype doesn’t do is record, that’s why you need to use screen capture software. Other than that, it makes everything much more simple. Setup your appointment, make sure you have a good connection for the call, make a couple of tests and you are ready.

Consider that your interview should probably not exceed the 10 minutes but try to record more material to play with at the editing stage.

Editing Your Video

The term “Video Editing” is probably the one that scares everybody, but don’t complicate things. Remember that you are producing something for the Internet, not for TV. While there are many options in this field, I recommend you stay in the lower end, the basics. I’m using iMovie but if you are on the PC side, Windows Movie Maker should be the equivalent.

These programs are very easy to learn because they are meant to help beginners like you and me. If you take a couple of tutorials, you’ll be on your way pretty fast (These links are for tutorials on both iMovie and Movie Maker).

During the editing stage, you want to play with adding different elements like pictures, text, effects and music. You will also be able to chop the raw video in pieces and paste them together.

Video Sharing Service

Now that you have your video edited and saved on your computer (usually on a MP4 format), you need to share it with the world and for this you will need to create an account with a service like Vimeo or YouTube if you don’t already have one. I prefer Vimeo but that’s just me, there are plenty options out there for you to find a good fit.

Once you have your account setup you just need to upload your file, be patient, it’ll take a while. Set up a title, a description, tags and whatever you can do to make it a little more friendly. Publish your video and make sure everything is looking good.

Embed To Your Post

The last step is to bring it to your blog, where you want to place it on your next post. Wherever your video lives now (Vimeo, YouTube or other…), copy the “Embed Code” (read my post: “Mini-Tutorial: How To Embed A You-Tube Video On Your Blog“) and insert it into your post. Preview and test everything before hitting the “Publish” button.

It’s A Wrap!

It’s not rocket science, anybody can do a video interview and while the technical part is very important and entertaining at the same time, make sure the main focus is on delivering good quality in the content. People will forgive a technical difficulty if the content is of value.

(2 mentions before I go: Sorry Andrea for using you as an example… and thanks Glenn Sakamoto for the idea for the post).

Share your comments…

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Having a blog is only step one if you are trying to provide any kind of content. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote the post 5 Social Tools To Help You Spread Your Awesomeness Outside Your Site in which I talked about coming out to spread your content and generate some traffic back to your site. This week we’ll go over some tools to implement inside.

The objectives of implementing these tools are:

• Build a better user experience.
• Promote user interaction, after all, a blog is a conversation platform.
• Make it easy for your visitor to share and promote your content.
• Make you look like a real pro.

So here is the list of tools, they are all fairly easy to install:

1. Facebook and Twitter Sharing Buttons

While you want to provide the possibility to share to a wide variety of networks, it has been proven that displaying individual buttons for the two most popular sites increases the chances of getting your content shared. Also, if you have been active on Facebook and Twitter and other sites, you have already experienced that most of your traffic is coming from these two sites.

Facebook provides its own code to install directly into your content and while Twitter doesn’t provide its own, you can use Tweetmeme, which is the one you have probably seen already in the majority of sites.

2. Sharing To The Rest Of The Web

Of course Facebook and Twitter are not the only sites and your visitor very well can move in other circles, make it easy for them to share your content to any network. Applications such as ShareThis or AddThis make very easy to implement, usually through a plugin that you can install from your dashboard and a little configuration.

Look for a service that can give a little more, in this case, both services provide analytics.

3. “Follow Me” Links

Another very common practice and a great way to stay connected to your tribe when they are not on your site. If a new visitor likes your content, he/she would most likely love to network with you in other places. Make it very visible on your site and include only the main ones, if you have profiles in 15 different networks it can get a little confusing.

4. Commenting Systems

Commenting systems are a great way to take the conversation to the next level. Services like Disqus or IntenseDebate are now very popular and their installation is as easy as creating a profile and adding a plugin on your blog dashboard. The main feature is that they take the conversation out of your blog into common places making it easier for your visitor to keep the interaction flowing instead of being just a single comment that they can otherwise forget.

Another great tool in this field is Echo, integrating activity from different social networks.

5. Facebook Widgets

Leverage form the most popular network in the planet. Facebook now allows you to display different widgets inside your blog. These widgets include commenting boxes, fan page badges, live streams, fan boxes and, in case you didn’t know, you can now connect your Facebook status to update your Twitter.

6. Promote Inside Navigation

One of the things bloggers usually watch is their “Bounce Rate”, visitors that come in, read one article and surf away from your site. A great way of engaging the reader into navigating your blog a little more before he/she leaves is by promoting related articles. LinkWithin is a plugin that inserts links with images to other content inside your blog at the bottom of each post.

Your visitor mostly likely go for a couple of more clicks if he/she enjoyed your article and is presented with similar stories.

7. Crowdsourcing

If you use your blog to promote a product or a service, social media allows you to give your customers a voice. Crowdsourcing is a fairly new concept that allows a community to become part of the development process by sharing their ideas, feedback and even voting for the best ideas on how to make your services better.

If you are concerned about having a complaint made public think about this, social media is about honesty and transparency, and there is nothing better that solving a problem in front of everybody…

UserVoice lets you create a forum where your customer can express that feedback and easily integrate it into your site.

8. Polls

Another way to provide different kind of content and engage your reader to participate. PollDaddy is a free and very user-friendly service you can use to configure any kind of poll and generates the code to just grab and dump right into your content. The truth is that people love expressing themselves and finding out what others think about the same topic.

Create a post that features a poll or display one to your blog’s sidebar.

9. Social Toolbars

You have probably seen them at the bottom of a blog, they not only add sharing capabilities to networking sites but can also integrate external tools such as your Facebook Fan Page or a Twitter feed come live in your site. Great examples of these bars are Gigya and Wibiya, both free and made available through simple plugins you can install directly from your blog’s dashboard.

Another popular toolbar is Meebo, which integrates instant messaging right on your site. Just be careful and make sure these services are not making your site too slow to annoy your readers.

10. Use Of Other Media

User other forms of media when possible, video for example has proven to be an excellent way to engage the user. Other ways are to use clever photography or even add podcasting to your site. Blogging platforms have made it very easy to add these types of files to your content and you can probably add some rich content with just a couple of clicks.

Don’t limit yourself to text, give your visitor a more visual experience.

Final Thought

Content will always be king, focus first on providing value through it. Having the latest technology will not compensate for not having it.