Being unique

All beings are unique by default. Seems pretty easy right? All you have to do is be born, and you’re unique – right there – instantly – on the stop –  for the rest of your life. Although some people try extra to separate themselves from others by getting a unique hairstyle or clothes combination and even if they fail at that, they are still unique.

So how do you do it on the Internet? How do you get a new hairstyle on your My Space page, your blog or your corporate website? Do you just learn how to be a professional web designer or is there something more to it? With all of the multilingual and multicultural differences, how do you communicate your message across the wire and staying unique and original in the process?

In my personal opinion, people lack the time and money to experiment – so they just go with whatever the know works. Why would I think of (and experiment with) a new blog layout when I know that a content column and a sidebar column works perfectly fine?

Tell me, how do YOU stay unique? Do you even try? What is more important to you, visual or intellectual uniqueness?

A while ago I come across a great posts from a blog-friend of mine called Bilal Rammuy (Rob) who wrote about “How To Stand Out As A Blogger” on his RobsWebTips blog, which you can check out on the link.

Are bloggers just recycling each others material?

When was the last time you read something you have never read before, anywhere else? It rarely to me but maybe I am not looking in the right places. Some people I know really have strong opinions and they express them frequently on their blogs. Those kinds of posts get a lot of attention, it seems. Being unique is something that could separate the success from the failure.

Is there a point where you could be trying to much? You want to be unique sooo bad that you are writing strange stuff, that people can not understand. You are writing curse words in your posts, making fun of people with jokes that often have questionable moral standards?

What I found particularly interesting is how people tend to read a blog post (or any text) somewhere in a foreign language, translate it to their own language and then post the exact article with some minor changes or just re-format the article where they would just write a summary about it. I imagine this is hard to figure out when trying to protect yourself against copy-writing, you would have to know the language. But this method is somewhat like a perfect crime, isn’t it?

Conclusion

I have asked a lot of questions in this blog posts hoping to get a lot of feedback and discussion from all my readers. Ping-back reply posts are welcome as well. Hope you have a nice Easter planed for yourself and your family. Have a nice (extended) weekend and don’t forget to share this post, if you like it!

Related posts:

1. Blogging On Autopilot During The Holidays

Spending additional time

If you are anything like me, you probably spend a few hours writing a blog post then another 30 minutes to up to an hour of submitting your new blog posts at various locations. The thing is, I don’t even use a lot of them and it takes up so much time. It would take up a lot more time if I decided to engage with the community a bit more, which I do as much as my free time permits.

Separating the good from the bad

Apparently it is easy to setup a social bookmarking website today. There are pre-made CMS systems and themese that can make it look very professional. Anyone can do it – but do you have what it takes to make it worth something on the Internet? Some people would say that there is no bad social bookmarking website, there is just exposure. Even if a social bookmarking website has 5 or 10 members, it’s some kind of exposure. So what is left to discuss?

The best way to determine if a social networking website is worth your time are the different categories in which you can submit an article. I find this hard to do on Digg – can never decide which category I want my submission in because they are so poorly segmented in my opinion. They definitely need mode categories.

Why are categories that important? Well they are – what good is your submission and millions of members if they can not find it. Picking the right category can mean the difference between your submitted article going viral or getting a few votes here and there. Don’t forget that next time you submit something to a social bookmarking website.

What’s so special about this one?

I’ve tried Digg and Reddit and they haven’t had a lot of good results for me. It is hard to get noticed on websites like that because there is so much good content moving around. My suggestion to you is to use less popular social bookmarking websites that are concentrated on your specific niche than on a bunch of topics. You have a better chance to get exposure and make new niche-buddies.

This is why I like Blogging Den. It’s small, simple and it’s like Digg but for bloggers! Another thing I like about it that is has all the right topics that I like to write about: Blogging, Making Money, Marketing, SEO, Design, Development, Content Management and even an Off beat section. Each topic is also segmented into more specific related themes.

Give it a shot

Why don’t you give it a shot and tell me how you like it in the comments? I hope you find it useful and thanks for reading!

You can give me your support on BloggerDen if you’d like. These are my articles that are currently submitted: http://www.bloggerden.com/user/history/McKnight

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Default WordPress scheduled publishing

Most bloggers that use WordPress already know about the post scheduling option. Most CMS platform have this feature as well, like for example I know Joomla has it.

In addition to explaining the obvious post scheduling option in WordPress I am going to give you some advice on how to do it with Twitter as well. Twitter and blogging have become an inseparable couple and you should definitely be using it if you’re not already.

WordPress post publish box

Every time you add a new post in WordPress, you will see a standard “Publish” box on your right sidebar at the top – unless you have moved it somewhere from the default location. This box allows you to save your currently written text in a draft for further editing, preview your post, change your post visibility and tell WordPress whether to publish your post immediately or at a scheduled date and time.

By clicking on the Edit link, you will be able to change the date and time when you would like your post to be published. Lets say you want to publish a post on the 25th of December at noon. You would set “Dec 25, 2009 @ 12:00″ and press the blue Publish button.

Shortening your post URL before it is published

After your post is published you will want to tweet it on Twitter as well. I don’t like to use auto-tweeting plug-ins for WordPress because I always prefer looking at my post after I publish it and before I tweet it so that I am sure everything looks OK. Another reason why I don’t use auto-tweeting plugins is because I like to add hashtags to my tweets and customize them a bit every time.

Before your post is published, you know exactly what it’s URL address will be by looking at the permalink option above the post editing toolbar. You can also click on the “Edit” button if your permalink is longer to see it’s structure.

WordPress permalink

In order to shorten your post address you will need a URL shortening service such as tinyurl.com, bit.ly or my personal favourite su.pr – the shortener that StumbleUpon uses.

Su.pr can also allow you to schedule a tweet right after you shorten it although it only has the option to schedule a tweet for within the next 13 days from the current day.

Su.pr URL shortener and poster

Scheduling tweets via Twitter browser clients

The best method for scheduling tweets and re-tweets would be various Twitter browser applications such as HootSuite and CoTweet. I am a big fan of CoTweet, I use it quite often to manage a few Twitter accounts that I own. What’s so great about it that it’s very simple without a lot of fancy features (unlike HootSuite) and allows you to have more than one person access and tweet from the accounts at the same time.

CoTweet "Post Update" box

Don’t forget that you CAN schedule more tweets about the same blog post. There is a fine line between marketing and spam and you have the right to advertise your content. Scheduling 1 original “New Blog Post: link” tweet along with 2 follow-up tweets about the same post only with hashtags and a different sentence structure is just fine.

Summary of the scheduling procedure

- Write a blog post
- Schedule the post for publishing
- Shorten the future post URL
- Schedule the tweet a few minutes after the post publish time that you have set
- Schedule a few more tweets of the same post (it’s link) with differently structured sentences and hashtags. (I usually write the first tweet as “New Blog post: link” second re-tweet is the same, third is “In case you missed it: link”, forth is “Read something about link”) Variety will make it look less like spam.

That’s about it! Repeat the process for every blog post you want to scheduel and enjoy your holidays! The only thing that you need to do is visit your blog once every few days and reply to some comments, let people know that you are still there.

The bad side of this method

It might look great and some people probably use scheduled publishing extensivly. But no matter how good your posts are and how great people think of them, it will hurt your credibility if they find out that your blog is just an automated robot. An automated robot that is programmed once a month with 5-6 posts and 10-20 re-tweets. Posting consistancy is important but so is social interaction with your readers.

Share this post with your bloging buddies and let them have some free time for these holidays as well! Have a great Christmas!

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