As many of you know, I use the Headway WordPress theme on this blog and in my WordPress development work at Inbound Zombie. I also play a marginal role in promoting the theme on various social media sites.

After meeting up with Headway’s founder, Clay Griffiths at WordCamp Boston a few weeks ago, one thing has become glarlingly clear to me:

Headway is not a WordPress Theme

The more I use Headway, the more I realize that it’s actually a WordPress development engine. What I mean is that Headway’s visual editor allows for limitless design and site functionality choices. This is very different from your standard WordPress theme, which typically dictates a limited number of styles.

Why HeadwayVideos.Com?

I realize that many of my readers are not Headway fans or even WordPress users. I also realize that those who are interested in Headway / WordPress want me to continue to produce screencast tutorials.

And because Headway will be going through significant enhancements over the next year, I thought it was better to create a separate video site rather than piss some of you off.

So if you want to stay informed about Headway, follow @HeadwayVideos or visit HeadwayVideos.Com and subscribe by RSS or email.

And thanks!

One of the central benefits of social media is the ability to share content with just one or two mouse clicks. Your supporters are already sharing interesting content on Facebook. They’re retweeting it. They’re favoriting videos on YouTube as well.

All with one mouse click.

But you know all too well, that even though sharing has gotten easier, actually getting people to share can feel like pulling teeth. And when when you see other non-profits getting thousands of views on YouTube with what seems like no effort, you feel like stabbing yourself in the eye.

So how do you get people to share your content?

Five Tips On Sharing

1. Accept That Social Media Is Not Email

Having an email list of 80,000 people is a far cry from having an active, thriving community of adoring fans. The same goes for the 5,000 fans you have on Facebook, especially if they fanned your Page only for a chance at winning a free iPod (yawn). It’s all about vitality. So stop thinking so much about accumulating numbers. Instead, start thinking about nurturing the 1% who are already raving fans.

2. Understand The Powershift

If you’re thinking on some level (even subconsciously) that your job is to get people to do something, stop it. You can’t make people do anything today. Facebook, blogs and Twitter has tipped the power balance in favor of anyone with a blog who has something smart to say. The days of Mad Men are gone. Bloggers and Twitter junkies are now the new powerful media moguls. Twitter pummeled The New York Times last year. Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch have been castrated replaced by Perez Hilton.

3. Respect The Blogger

The powerful new media folks I mentioned above? Yeah, their really smart too. Respect that fact – or get your ass handed back to you. In other words, don’t hire an amateur do a mass copy-and-past blogger outreach campaign.

4. Think About How You Share

Think about the last time you shared a video on YouTube. How did you share it? Did you email it, tweet it or post it on Facebook? More importantly, why did you share it? Was it funny? Did it make you think of a specific person?

5. Give Them The Tools

Chances are you already have a growing number of supporters that talk you up at parties and on Facebook. What’s that? You don’t have a Facebook Page? Ok, fix that. In fact, optimize all your social media for sharing. And make your fundraising easy to share too.

What makes you share?

Following is an article by Tom Kulzer of Aweber communications, an email marketing firm in Huntingdon Valley, PA. Disclaimer: Aweber pays me a teeny weeny bonus for any business I refer to them.

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Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.Words/phrases: Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images: Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments: With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

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If you are interested in learning more about Aweber, please check out their 25% discount for non-profits.

This is last day of the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. I’ll be publishing a PDF containing the entire series, so stay tuned.

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Challenges and results

Following are “before and after” experiences by a few folks who took the 31 day challenge. Please share your experience in the comment section.

- Abbie Mood

Challenge: I didn’t understand how to use social media to effectively promote my blog/freelance career.

Results: I have learned about new tools (twitter karma, etc.) that I will definitely use. I’m excited for the second half of the challenge.

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- Wine Beer Washington

Challenge: Time management and prioritizing my strategies. Also working with being so nocturnal in a diurnal world.

Results: Looking at social media with a different set of eyes. The opportunity to try new strategies.

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-  Marcia and Mike

Challenge: Understanding the relationship between social media and how it linked to my blog.

Results: I’ve redesigned several aspects of the blog site to make it more social media friendly.

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- Are Morch

Challenge: The biggest challenge has been to get my visitor to interact the way I had planned. So in away I have not been 100% sure if I targeted the right market for my niche. Plus one of my biggest challenges actually has been to ask for help. I guess in a away I thought I could do it all by myself.

Results: After starting to optimize my blog I have started to ask for help from friends online, and offline. Let them give me their rough feedback, And I learned the way I see my blog, is not the way they see my blog.

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- Holly Salsman

Challenge: I wanted to understand from another person’s perspective how they engage followers, start meaningful conversations, and build authentic relationships that are based on their goals for using social media.

Results: I took some of your advice for “How to Engage Your Blog’s Community” (Day 13) and turned it around in my use of social media. I read a guest post on a blog I read regularly, and immediately started following the writer because she seemed like a person from whom I could learn. Over a few days the conversation turned into a fairly specific discussion about how we could help each other out, and we’re planning to chat on the phone next week.

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- David Petry

Challenge: I had no blog. The program jumpstarted me into creating one.

Results: My blog is up. I have good initial results. And now I can start creating a blog with wisdom rather than whimsy.

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- Paul Worswick

Challenge: My biggest challenge was wondering how I was going to grasp hold of the new technology and the mass of information that came with it. The size of the task looked impossible!!

Results: A clear focus on more realistic goals with a detailed plan and strategy to implement. I am now working more effectively and effeciently.

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- Gina and Barbara

Challenge: The biggest challenge was trying to rein in all the ideas my team had and figure out our SMART goals.

Results: I know that there is an audience, of course, but I need to be more in tune with their day-to-day interests.

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Be the first to get the free ebook!

I’ll be publishing the entire series in the form of an ebook. Be the first to receive a free copy by sharing your experience in the comments below.

This is day one of the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Yesterday we spoke about optimizing your LinkedIn profile. Today, we’ll look at wattage.

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Tomorrow is the last day of this 31 day series. You learned about setting goals. Why measuring is important. Setting up the connections to all your outposts. Optimizing your most read pages, and so on. And while each one of these strategies can create value by themselves, their real power is when they’re all brought together like the various instruments in an orchestra.

Now you might be wondering: “What is the constant that ties together all of these strategies?”

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up here.

This is day 29 of the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Today we’ll continue where Lewis Howes started when he showed you how to use LinkedIn to promote your blog.

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LinkedIn presents a wealth of untapped potential for non-profits. It’s the most respected professional social networking site with over 55 millions professionals from 200 different countries. Their tagline says it all: “Relationships Matter“.

Here are a few more tips on using LinkedIn to promote your blog.

Title Are Everything

The short title of your LinkedIn profile is the first thing that gets seen in searches. Make it interesting.

List Prior Lives

If your profile only lists your current position, you’re limiting the power of LinkedIn.

When you include past employers in your profile, LinkedIn automatically alerts you of past colleagues. Including your complete professional history will help you build a network of those prior connections.

LinkedIn Email Signature

An embedded email signature is an easy way to promote your skills and experience (and your blog) in the course of doing business.

Improve Your Google Rankings

Because LinkedIn profiles rank very high on Google, exposure for your blog goes along for the ride. However, to maximize this potential, select “Full View” in your profile settings. Also, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name – then put this link on your website and use this link when you comment on blogs.

Edit “My Website”

LinkedIn profiles allow you to list blogs or websites. Edit the “My Website” section and include your non-profit (multiple websites can be listed so make sure your board members list yours). In addition to your url, edit the text to include keywords for your organization. Again, this will help SEO.

Import Your Blog

LinkedIn has several applications, including a WordPress blog import. This allows you to feature your most recent blog posts on your LinkedIn profile.

Tweet Your Status

You can also post your tweets to your LinkedIn status. But be careful with this one – especially if you’re on Twitter a lot. Select the option that allows you to pick which tweets you wanted copied over to LinkedIn.

What cool thing have you done with LinkedIn?

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up here.

This is day 28 of the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Yesterday we spoke about distributing content with Posterous. Today we’ll talk about…well, you’ll see.

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So I was going to elaborate on the post I did on nichification over on Sarah’s blog. But I change my mind at 7:17AM this morning, when I saw a post from Danny Brown called “Audi and the Super Bowl Social Media Shit Storm“.

I noticed that he used one of my favorite words: “Shitstorm” (should that be hyphenated?). And because titles are everything, I clicked.

Come to find out, Audi has launched a YouTube campaign Called Green Police Force [http://greenpoliceforce.com] – series of comedic shorts designed to teach ways to protect the environment.

Sounds harmless until you realize that someone at Audi failed to Google “Green Police”.

And now they’re effed:

This is bad in so many ways. And the timing is horrible:

• Even though yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day,
• not many people know about the history of the Green Police, even though it ranks # 2 on Google.
• So this means that once people hear of this huge fail, they will start messing around on Google and eventually ask the question I asked in the title.

It’s not easy being Green

Today, being Green is in. Green soda cans, green emissions (such an oxymoron!), and even green sex. This fact magnifies the search implications of a blunder like Audi’s. For example, anyone knowing anything about the Holocaust, might eventually ask themselves a legitimate question:

Did Audi Help Exterminate The Jews?

It’s not a silly question. After all, BMW helped built the Luftwaffe aircraft. Audi (originally Audi Union) was started before Hitler, so any reasonable person (like me on most days), would naturally ask this question.

The difference now is that everyone asks Google.

Homework: You’ll notice that comments are closed on this post. That’s because  the conversation is over at Danny’s post. Please join.

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up here.

This is day 27 of the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Yesterday Lewis Howes showed us how to use LinkedIn. Today, we’ll take a look at Posterous.

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The other day we spoke about managing time on social media. One way to manage time is to batch tasks together. But even with this approach, it still gets crazy-making when you have to go from Flickr to WordPress to Facebook and back to Twitter.

What if you could cut down on the number of social media sites that you’re posting content on? Posterous allows you to do just that – entirely by email.

Distribute content by pushing “send”

Posterous has broken down barriers to blogging by allowing users to post various types of content via email. Video, photos, videos, and text are automatically formatted by Posterous. This allows you to automatically display short videos and audio files in their very own media player.

Target your sneeze

With Posterous, you can also repost to specific sites by tweaking the “send to” email:

Tagging by email

Tagging blog content increases utilization by allowing visitors to quickly find related items. For example, on my posterous blog, I talk a lot about being a dad. Interested readers can simply click “Fatherhood” to find related content. And I create these tags by including ((tags: tagname)) after the subject line (title). Read more about email tips in the Posterous FAQ.

Strategic Sneezing

This is the killer benefit of Posterous. Once you set up an account, you can set-up all your social media sites to “autopost” what you send to Posterous. So far, Posterous supports:

Facebook
Twitter
Flickr
Picasa
YouTube
Vimeo
Tumblr
Blogger
Wordpress