“How to Keep Your Blog Active While Traveling” plus 1 more

How to Keep Your Blog Active While Traveling

Posted: 21 Jun 2011 01:06 PM PDT

This guest post is by Norbert Figueroa of GloboTreks.

For many, keeping a blog is a full-time commitment, especially if you want to keep your readers active and engaged with what you have to say. This often means spending long hours day after day creating content, commenting, promoting, and networking with other bloggers.

Then the time comes when you need a small break to step back and relax. A vacation sounds nice, right? But, will taking that time off have a negative effect on your blog? Will you lose your readers or will your traffic die during your trip? Will it set you a few steps back on all the work you've achieved so far?

The answer is, not necessarily; and the key is preparation. Since you won't want to spend your entire trip keeping up with the blog, or since there's a chance you might travel somewhere with unreliable internet connection or no internet at all, you have to know how to prepare beforehand in order to keep your blog as active as possible.

1. Write and schedule your posts in advance

Before leaving on your trip, write and schedule all the posts you would like to have published while you're away. Also, try to write an extra post or two so that you can have a cushion after your trip, in case you return too tired to write a new post right away.

2. Bring guest bloggers

If you're open to having guest posts, this is a great way to feature new content that will spark activity in you blog. Ask guest bloggers to submit their content beforehand so you can schedule it before leaving. Ask each of them to respond to comments in their post, and even in Facebook (if you promote there). Just be sure that they are approved to comment, or else their comments will not go live until you moderate them.

3. Schedule or syndicate your social networks

Use tools like Hootsuite or su.pr to schedule tweets and Facebook status of your scheduled content. Personalize your tweets or Facebook posts with a sentence or question that sparks interaction that goes beyond just clicking and reading the promoted content. Alternatively, you can syndicate your RSS content with RSS graffiti and Hootsuite so that it is promoted immediately after publishing. The only down side of this method is the lack of personalization.

4. Promote others through your social networks

Your blog can be active even if you don't produce new content. Use tools like Hootsuite to schedule tweets and Facebook status of valuable content you've read on other sites. This is to keep your profiles interactive because once you go dormant people will forget you easily. In addition, it is always good to promote others; not only because it helps them, but it can also help you attract new readers to your blog.

5. Don't be afraid to look back (promote old posts)

Schedule to promote some of your best "old" content through Twitter and Facebook. There's a high chance many of your readers haven't read it yet, especially if you've grown your following consistently.

6. Keep an eye on your comments and status every once in a while

It helps if you travel with a smartphone, iPhone, iPad or computer, but almost everywhere you will be able to find an internet café where you could spend an hour every day or so to moderate comments, input your comments, and schedule a few tweets or posts if needed.

7. Know your peak times

Promote your content and post your new articles during your peak times to get better results from your efforts. Use Timely (previously featured here on ProBlogger) to learn your best times to publish your tweets. Likewise, use Clicky to know your blog's peak traffic hours and su.pr to know your best times to promote your content through Stumbleupon. If you're going to spend time online while traveling, try to do it at the time you have the maximum impact.

8. Optimize your blogging time on the road

If you decide to blog during your trip, do it in a way that doesn't take much time of your vacation. Write your post during your down time, like when traveling on a bus, plane, or just sitting around. Choose all your pictures, resize them, and write your excerpt, tags, and description before time. The point is to have everything ready to just copy and paste at the time of scheduling, thus reducing your online time to the bare minimum. This is essential if your destination has bad internet service.

9. Last but not least, enjoy your vacation!

Enjoy your time off and relax! That's why you're traveling, right?! It will give you a fresh energy that will be reflected in your blog, one way or another.

As you can see, it is extremely important to keep the traffic coming, even while you're traveling, since you don't want to make it easy for your readers to lose the attention and forget you. But keeping your readers engaged and in the loop by staying active and visible through your blog and various social media sites will help keep their attention and promote interaction.

Do you have other ways to keep your blog active while traveling? Or ways to save time while blogging on the road?

Norbert Figueroa is an architect who shares his process of achieving a location independent and adventurous lifestyle through his travel blog, GloboTreks. Follow him through his facebook fan page or subscribe to the RSS feed to inspire your wanderlust.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Keep Your Blog Active While Traveling

Top 20 iPhone Apps for Bloggers

Posted: 21 Jun 2011 07:00 AM PDT

This guest post is by Daniel Scocco of Next iPhone News.

The Internet changes pretty fast, and if you want to have a popular blog, you must keep up with it. What if you get an awesome idea for a new post while at dinner? What if an important news breaks while you are at a birthday party? The bottom line is: you should be able to work on your blog all day long, even if you are not sitting in front of your computer.

How do you do that? With an iPhone! The 20 apps below will help you blog on the go, find ideas and images for your posts, track your analytics, promote your posts on social media and so on. Enjoy!

1. WordPress

If you are reading this blog I am guessing you use WordPress, right? The WordPress app for iPhone gives you everything you need to make a quick post, edit previous posts, edit pages, reply to comments and the like. In other words, it lets you manage your blog even while you’re commuting on a train or taking a break from driving on a highway. Just recently, the app was updated to version 8, bringing one essential feature suited for mobile bloggers: the ability to post photos that you’ve taken using your iPhone’s camera. Perfect!

2. Evernote

Literature on being a successful blogger will always tell you to be organized with your thoughts and to keep notes for your ideas. With Evernote, which is a very popular getting-things-done application, you can do that quite efficiently with your iPhone. You’ll find it’s an awesome tool for organizing your digital life.

3. TypePad

Okay, so your blog is not on WordPress? Then it must be using TypePad. This app lets you do things that you can normally do on your blog using your computer—write new posts, post photos to your blog, and alert your friends when you’ve published a new post, You know what’s great? The TypePad app integrates with the desktop client, too.

4. PayPal

PayPal is a must-have for bloggers and online entrepreneurs. When you want to check your balance, withdraw your hard-earned money, or pay-off a contracting service, you can do so now through the PayPal iPhone app. I’ve used this app many times before, and it’s secure, fast, and reliable.

5. Instapaper

Instapaper is an useful app to keep track of interesting posts and pages you found online. I mean, being a blogger, I’m sure you do a lot of web surfing using your iPhone. Since you’re on the move, though, you won’t have time to finish reading all those articles, so using this app becomes quite handy.

6. Twitter

Find me a blogger who doesn’t have a Twitter account and I will quickly say that the person is not a true-blue blogger. If PayPal is the official financial service of bloggers, Twitter is the official microblogging service. In fact, it’s not a microblogging service anymore. It has become an official communication medium for online geeks. There are many Twitter apps for iPhone, but why bother with third-party apps if there is this official one?

7. Analytics App

Once you start using Google Analytics it’s easy to get addicted. If you already are, then you’ll certainly want to install the official Google Analytics iPhone app. This should also save you from boredom in those situations you have nothing else to do.

8. iEarn

Useful if you’re running Google AdSense on your blog, this iPhone app will let you check your earnings and statistics with all the AdSense aggregate data (including revenues for today, revenues for yesterday, last seven days, this month, and last month). The app also gives you statistics on your AdSense impressions, clicks, eCPM, and CTR.

9. Byline

A useful tool for getting the latest news from your favorite sites and blogs, which you can use as a reference for blog posts, new ideas and outbound links. What’s good about this app is that it syncs with your Google Reader account and delivers the latest and most updated news feeds to your iPhone.

10. Blogpress

If you need to manage several blogs hosted on several blogging platforms, you definitely need this app. It supports Blogger, WordPress, TypaPad, and others. It also integrates well with social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Picasa. The app lets you do most of the things that you will normally do while log-in to your blog using your computer. One thing that you will most likely appreciate from this app is that you can cross-publish a post to different blogs on different platforms.

11. CoverItLive

Sooner or later in your blogging career you’ll be prompted to live blog a certain event. If you don’t feel like bringing your laptop to said event, you can still cover it using your iPhone. Get this app and you’ll be able to launch and run live events, publish live commentary, publish photos, audio and video, email event links, and more.

12. ShoZu

This app is best described as a social media hub. That is because will let you connect with more than 50 social networking. For bloggers like us, this app also supports WordPress, Blogger and TypePad. It lets you upload photos and videos to multiple sites with one click, update status and tweets, and geotag photos.

13. Photoshop Express

We all need to edit photos and images once in a while, so Photoshop’s app for the iPhone comes in handy. It has several nifty features that we could otherwise enjoy only on our computer. This app gives you the ability to perform several photo editing functions to your images or photos—from simple cropping to filtering and applying special effects. It’s free as well.

14. Air Sharing

Let’s say you’re drafting a post while on your way home. When you finally arrive home, what’s the best and fastest way to transfer your draft to your Mac or PC to fine-tune the post some more? Well, this app of course. Air Sharing lets you mount your iPhone as a Wi-Fi device on your computer. Once mounted, you can drag and drop files from your iPhone to your computers and open them using the appropriate app.

15. Posterous

This app made it to the list because of its seamless autoposting feature that works with most blogging platforms. It’s useful to integrate different blogs, Twitter streams, and to make sure that your posts are going directly to all your online channels.

16. Tumblr

Tumblr is also known as the “other” microblogging service, which thankfully didn’t follow Twitter’s path and remained true to what it was created for. If you have a Tumblr account and you want to regularly update it with text, image, video or link posts, this app should be sitting on your iPhone’s app screen. It’s completely free.

17. WriteRoom

This app (which is the iPhone version of a popular desktop software) has one goal: to give you a distraction free writing environment. No fancy menus, options, formatting features and the like. Just plain and straight-out writing with an even more useful full-screen writing feature.

18. Photobucket

Not only is this app is useful for posting photos you’ve taken using your iPhone, but it also allows you to search for images and photos from the Photobucket website. And if you find something that you can use for a blog post, you can save the photo or image and then use it right after. It’s great for sourcing images.

19. iBlogger

The first thing you’ll notice when checking out this app from the App Store is the relatively expensive price (i.e., $10). However, this app has several nice features that make it worthy of its price. For example, it makes adding links to posts easier and it allows the integration with Google Maps and other location based services (using the iPhone’s GPS).

20. Facebook

We couldn’t leave the Facebook app for the iPhone out of the list, right? After all Facebook and blogging go hand in hand. With this app you can easily share links to your recent posts, write new updates for your followers and readers and so on.

Do you use these apps? What others can you share?

Daniel Scocco is the owner of Next iPhone News, a website that tracks the latest news, rumors and tips about the iPhone!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Top 20 iPhone Apps for Bloggers

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