• “what are all these weird characters suddenly showing up all over my blog: Â â €™ ¢?”
• “I just upgraded my WordPress and now I see funny characters all over my posts – what gives?”
• “I just moved my blog to a new web host and now I see funny characters all over my posts – help”

I know, because we’ve been there… searching everywhere for a way to convert the data from one character set to another.

And most of the solutions we’ve found online have not been very helpful… stabs in the dark on average. The notable exceptions were these 2 very helpful posts in a sea of really scary guesses… MySQL latin1 → utf8 (WordPress upgrade) and Fixing mixed-encoding MySQL dumpfiles with WordPress.

The real problem is, I was asking the wrong question, so I kept finding solutions that didn’t work. Until now.

So let’s take a step back and better understand the problem…

What causes those funny characters in your WordPress posts upon upgrade / migration / whatever?

It’s a character encoding thing, and I won’t go into too much detail on it, but suffice to say: WordPress stores your content in a MySQL database, encoded in a character set called UTF8.

But if you installed your WordPress site before WordPress 2.3 (yeah, a while back), at that time WordPress didn’t specify that default character set when creating its storage tables (posts, etc.)… so the tables were created with whatever the default character set was in the MySQL installation. As it happens, back then it was Latin1.

“Yeah, so what” you say. Well, WordPress is still expecting the content to be in UTF8, which is why you’ll occasionally see those funny characters on your blog… Â â €™ ¢?

Sure, there’s a “fix”  for that (read: duct tape patch)… you can just tell WordPress in it’s wp-config.php file that your data is stored in Latin1, and those funny characters won’t show any more.

define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1');

But you’ve still got a database created with Latin1 encoding, storing your UTF8 data. Which in some cases will start causing you problems – such as when we tried to upgrade to WordPress 3 and enable WordPress MultiSite, and it will fail over and over again with no discernible error messages.

So how do you convert that data from Latin1 to UTF8?

Trick is, the content is (and still was back then) stored/encoded in UTF8… but MySQL “thinks” it’s in Latin1 because that’s how the tables were created.

So the better question is… how can you extract that UTF8 data from your MySQL database without corrupting it when MySQL dutifully attempts to convert it to UTF8 for you on export… essentially attempting to convert something that doesn’t need converting.

So how do you fix the Latin1 encoding, a.k.a. convert it to UTF8?

This situation can be fixed quite easily with just a few Linux commands performed on the server. Yes, it could technically be done through CPANEL & phpMyAdmin and using Windows tools to edit your data, but that’s far more likely to corrupt it. Your data is much less likely do get corrupted in this way.

Note: the fix below assumes at least a very basic familiarity with Linux (UNIX) and the ability to connect to your server command line (Telnet or ideally SSH) and run a few basic command.

“Whoa, what’s that?”, you say. Never fear, if you are not comfortable doing this, it’s likely that your web host will do it for you – the procedure is very quick and simple for someone familiar with these commands.

Also, if done correctly the approach below will create a whole new “clean” database, it will NOT change/fix/mangle your current database. That means you’ll be able to literally just edit the WordPress wp-config.php and “point” your WordPress from the old database to the fresh, clean new one. And you should be good to go.

That’s the tricky part.

Disclaimers: The following assumes at least a basic understanding of MySQL and WordPress config files and export functions. There is absolutely no warranty or guarantee of accuracy with anything you read here (or pretty much anywhere, lol). You and only you are responsible for any damage to your database, WordPress installation, mental health, ego, etc.  as a results of following these or any other suggested directions. Also, look both ways before crossing the street, and be advised the beverage you are about to enjoy may be hot, and never spit up-wind.

The actual step-by-step WordPress / MySQL fix…

1. Back up all your stuff first (likely using phpMyAdmin / CPANEL)

Before doing any of the following it strongly encouraged to back up all your data and files. Just to be safe. At the very least, your full database and the WordPress config file: wp-config.php

2. Note the settings that your WordPress is currently using (from wp-config.php)

Specifically, your MySQL database configuration, including DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, and also DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'database_name_here');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'username_here');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here');

3. Create a new MySQL database and create a new user with full privileges to that new database (both using phpMyAdmin)

After you export and “clean” you current data, you’re going to import it into this new database. Then you’ll be using this new database going forward.

4. Export your current WordPress database

The following exports all your data into a single text file (exp-my-database-latin1.sql).

mysqldump --opt --default-character-set=latin1 --skip-extended-insert --user my_db_user_here --password my_db_name_here -r exp-my-database-latin1.sql --log-error=log-mysqldump-my-database.txt

5. Change the character set in the output file (to the correct one)

replace "CHARSET=latin1" "CHARSET=utf8" "SET NAMES latin1" "SET NAMES utf8" < exp-my-database-latin1.sql > exp-my-database-utf8.sql

6. Run a compare script to sanity check your changes

diff exp-my-database-latin1.sql exp-my-database-utf8.sql

7. Import the cleaned data into the NEW database

mysql --default-character-set=utf8 --user=my_db_user_here --password='my_password_goes_here' my_db_name_here < exp-my-database-utf8.sql

8. Update your WordPress config to point at the shiny, clean, new database

Just update your wp-config.php file with the database name, login, and password of the clean, shiny new database.

Also, update your encoding settings in wp-config.php to reflect the new UTF character set:

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

9. Test your changes… browse your website thoroughly and look for those funny characters

If it didn’t “work”, you’ll have funny characters all over your posts; they’ll be quite obvious as you browse 10 to 20 posts looking for them.

That’s it, you should now be able to pull up your website and enjoy the yummy UTF8 goodness, no more Latin1.

IF for whatever reason you need to back out this change, that’s very easy to do… just point your WordPress back to the original database (that you didn’t mess with).

To do that, just edit your wp-config.php file and restore the information you noted in step 1: DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, and also DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE. Then bring up your website and all should be good again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Congratulations! You’ve made it this far. You’ve got your niche, figured out what you want to talk about, who the other players in the niche are, decided what you like about them, what you don’t like about them, and you’ve started interacting with their readers on their blog and you have begun to build up your presence. Now what?

Now you write your first blog post.

Oh, how this strikes fear in the hearts of many a blogger… “What will I write about?” They ask “How will I come up with a topic.” Writer’s block sets in at this point and for many, but really, it’s not a problem if you’re writing about something that you are passionate about.

Not satisfied? Fine. We’ll give you a sure-fire way to come up with your first subject.

Lock yourself in a room. Literally. No cell phone, no significant other, no T.V., nothing. Sit down in front of a pen and paper and write down every idea that you can think of. Don’t stop until you have a least 50-100. Then pick one. How do you pick you? You pick the one that speaks to you. How will you know which one speaks to you? It just does. Try not to over think this. Your first blog post is important, but the fate of the world doesn’t depend on it. Just your world. Kidding! Just relax, and pick one. You’ve got like a 100 to choose from, right? See, it wasn’t that hard. You’ve done it! You’ve chosen a topic. And now you have your first blog topic ready to write about to your heart’s content.

Here’s something to get your juices going: What keeps your audience up at night?

What are their hopes, dreams, problems, etc? Now pick one of these and write about it. Now we come to blog length. How long should it be? As long as a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the goods, but short to keep it interesting. Spell check it, and be sure to test any links in it you might have to say, your twitter account or a product page.

On a side note, always have a notebook handy.

You will often find yourself getting ideas at the most random times, when you least expect it. Write them down whenever they come to you. You may never actually use any of these ideas that you come up with on the go, but you will have them and it will help relieve any fear or pressure you feel about coming up with topics. You’ll never be stuck.

Once you have that first blog post written, when do you post it?

This is a bigger question than you think. The name of the game with posting is consistency. Do you post every hour or every day or every week? You have to set a schedule and stick to it. If you’re going to make money at this, you need to have people consistently coming to your site to check out your content. It has to be new, constantly updating content. They aren’t going to be checking out your greatest hits, either. They want new, fresh content. It’s not going to help if you post ten times a day for a week and then don’t post again for another month. If you do that, you’ll come off as flakey to your readers and that’s just death to bloggers. You won’t get those readers back, and you won’t be generating any traffic or making any money, either.

But it’s not just readers that hate inconsistency and flakiness. Search engines hate it too. You want to be on their good side, and you’ll need to be posting regularly. We’re talking at least once a week, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to manage that. The more posts the better, but don’t commit yourself to something you can’t deliver and end up flaking out. There’s plenty of scheduling software’s out there that can help you make sure you never miss a posting. WordPress even allows you to schedule a post to go live at a certain date and time. So there’s no excuse to not be posting regularly!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The first thing you have to do is know the four main types of web hosting out there, and they are:

Web Hosting Type #1: Shared Web Hosting

What exactly is shared web hosting? Just what it sounds like: a bunch of websites on one server, and everyone shares resources.

Pros of Shared Web Hosting: This is the cheapest option (some starting well under $10/month), and there are tons of providers for you to choose from. (Although there’s only one shared web host that we’ve relied on ourselves and actually recommend to our own friends and family – read on, we’ll tell you which one that is).

Cons of Shared Web Hosting: If someone else’s site goes down, yours goes down too. Or if someone screws up or gets a traffic spike you get affected by that too. Or you get a massive traffic spike (or you make a mistake) and you take everyone else down with you.

Basically, in web hosting, you get what you pay for. If you get anything out web hosting 101, we hope it is this: don’t cut corners. We’re not saying you should spend like a drunken sailor, but don’t cut your nose to spite your face, okay? It’s not pretty, trust me. And it does nothing for your blog.

Web Hosting Type #2: Dedicated Servers

Whoever invented the web hosting business must’ve been a big believer in truth in advertising, because again, this option is exactly what it says it is. A dedicated server is a server that is entirely dedicated to you and your website. You don’t share it, it’s all yours. This is not an option we, your illustrious hosts, recommend. Why? Well, first the good news:

Pros of a Dedicated Server: No neighbors to worry about, it’s all you. That results in better reliability.

Cons of a Dedicated Server: You have to buy the whole server, whether or not you need it. It’s not scalable which makes it very difficult when your website outgrows your current situation. It’s also very expensive for most of you just starting out in the world of blogging (costs $150/month to start)

Now you see why we don’t recommend it. Most of you can’t really afford to spend that kind of money on your web hosting solution (at least not initially), and even if you can you’re going to outgrow it at some point and then what? You can’t quickly and easy ramp up to the next level when you need to.

Web Hosting Type #3: VPS (Virtual Private Servers)

This is our preferred solution. VPS is what we use, and what we recommend you use as well. What is a virtual private server? Simply put, it’s a cross between a shared web hosting solution and a dedicated server. You still share, just not with as many people as you would if you went the shared web hosting route. We like to think of it as “high end” shared web hosting. We use it and we love it because it’s very easy, and you can just scale up to as much as you need, as soon as you need it.

Pros of a VPS (Virtual Private Server): Fast, easy, affordable ($50/month to start), you can ramp up later at the flip of a switch; and we use it (isn’t that reason enough for you?)

Con of a VPS (Virtual Private Server): You still have neighbors and you may still have to be very careful of VPS providers: they may over-sell the service, resulting in a flaky server for you. In fact many do, and there’s only one that we trust to power our own websites. (read on, we’ll tell you which one)

Web Hosting Type #4: Cloud Hosting

What is cloud web hosting? Hundreds of servers (many spread all over the globe) all working together to serve up your website (and the sites of all their other clients). If one of their servers goes down, no problem. The rest of their global servers will pick up the slack. It’s really great in theory, but not quite all the way there in real life. We don’t recommend using this as your sole web solution.

We use VPS coupled with cloud hosting for static content. Why? Because this combination decreased our page load speed time to less than half of what it was before – and that matters (a lot) to both your website visitors and to Google. Before it might take a couple of seconds to load our page, now it takes a matter of milliseconds, because our static content is on cloud servers all over the world. So someone from Japan gets our static content from a Japan based cloud server, for example.

Pros of Cloud Hosting: Pay only for what you need. Scales instantly. Global server network.

Cons of Cloud Hosting: You can but really shouldn’t offload your whole website to them (yet) – that technology just isn’t reliable enough yet. And you pay for all you eat – so a poorly written WordPress plugin or PHP script, or a denial of service attack, can drastically increase your web hosting cost.

By now, you’re probably wondering: which specific web hosts do you recommend Dan & Jennifer?

Well, we’re happy to tell you:

Our Recommended Shared Web Host:

HostGator - At just $7 (or less) per month for solid service this one is our first choice. It’s who we’ve used personally relied on for our websites, and the only shared web host we refer our friends and family to.

Our Recommended Dedicated Server Host:

N/A. We don’t recommend dedicated servers. Go with shared web hosting (above) or VPS (below) if you’ve outgrown shared web hosting.

Our Recommended VPS Host:

ServInt – Very solid VPS; they’re the ones we trust to power our websites today, serving just under a million page views per month (and growing fast!!) – all dynamic content, mostly WordPress and vBulletin.

Our Recommended Cloud Host:

Rackspace CloudFiles - Cost is less than Amazon S3, and it just works. We’ve been very happy with the service.

“This is a lot of information, just tell me what to do!” you say! Okay, fine. Here goes:

Keep it simple! If you’re just starting a site: go with a shared web host that’s solid, reliable, and cheap – just be careful to not go with a flaky one. (here is the shared web host we personally recommend).

Then when your traffic grows over 100k page views a month, jump to a VPS. As your traffic keeps growing, say around 300k page views a month, offload your static content (images, etc.) to a cloud host. That’s exactly what we did with Ask Dan & Jennifer and our other websites with amazing results.

Coming up in the Web Hosting 101 series, over the coming days we’re going to dig a little deeper for you…

• Web Hosting 101: What’s Shared Web Hosting?
• Web Hosting 101: What’s A Dedicated Server?
• Web Hosting 101: What’s A VPS?
• Web Hosting 101: What’s Cloud Hosting?

Click here to view the embedded video.

You need to have a topic for your blog and you need to make sure it’s something you’re deeply, truly passionate about.

“Without passion you don’t have energy, without energy you have nothing.”
– Donald Trump, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

This is absolutely critical. There is nothing else more important than this. You may not be ready to hear this or think that it could happen, but the fact is sooner or later you’re probably going to be making a living at this. This will be come your job. This is something that is going to consume a great deal of your time. You’ll be talking about it constantly. It might as well be something that you love. Something that you eat, sleep and breathe. Because then, it’s fun. If not, well, what’s the point?

Another really simple yet profound thing to consider is this: is this just a hobby, or do you plan on making money off of it?

Would you like it to become a source of income at some point? If you’re just looking to vent about something or indulge in your inner nerd, or talk about your favorite pro wrestler than you probably don’t need to worry too much about your niche. Because it just won’t matter. If your blog is your hobby then all you have to do is indulge your passion to your heart’s content and not say anything too stupid that will get you fired from you “real” job (and yes, that has happened to people before).

But if your blog is something you’d like to make money off of, you need to consider the market place. Some niches monetize better than others. Some just don’t offer than much money. Some are already well covered (that is, there are already a great number of people blogging g on that topic), while some are completely ignored or relatively underserved. If it’s a crowded space, then you really might want to rethink it. It’s always better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.

Once you’ve decided that, it’s time to jump right in!

Step one is doing your homework: research the blogs in your niche.

Learn the lay of the land. Find out who the players are in your space. Do all the research that you can. Google and other search engines are great for learning everything from how old the blogs are to who founded them, what kind of money are the generating, etc.

Next, make a list of the most popular blogs in your niche and study them closely.

At the end of the day, it’s all been done. There is not any reason to try to reinvent the wheel here. Just look at what other people are doing and copy what works, while placing your own personal spin on it.

Get to know the most successful authors in your space.

Read their blog, post comments, be part of the discussion. The more interactive you can become on their site(s) the better. Sooner or later, you will become known and that will lead people to becoming curious about you and what you have to say and ultimately lead people back to your blog. Increased presence means increased traffic which means increased revenue. For you.

Now go out there and do it! Get in the game people! You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Now you may be asking yourself “Should I even bother?”

“The niche I want to blog about is already so crowded and they say not to write in a crowded niche!” True, but then again, we started Ask Dan & Jennifer and that’s a love and sex site and that niche is about as crowded as it gets! And we do, in fact make a living off of it. So, it can be done. There are no absolute rules. These are only guidelines, so definitely, by all means go with your gut and your passion, but make it easy on yourself, too!

For example, we started Ask Dan & Jennifer to focus on all topics love & sex, but not long thereafter we also started Blog Success Journal to share all the fun stuff we were learning about blogging. And a while after that we kicked off yet another site, Today Is That Day, which is about all topics personal development.

See the trend? They’re multiplying!

So what’s the problem with starting multiple blogs?

Nothing really, it’s a great idea and in some cases works great, i.e. for us it’s a great thing. But even we have to be careful in balancing our time and effort between the 3 sites… you only have so much focused time you can invest every day.

Then there are the technical gotchas: managing the tech behind all those websites. Let’s say you have a great web host and they keep your server running smoothly (here’s the ONLY web host we recommend if you’re just getting started).

But you still need to install and run your website software, which for most blogs is (and really should be) WordPress. And until recently, you could only run 1 single blog / website from a WordPress installation. That means that every time you wanted to create a new blog / website  you had to do a brand new WordPress install… which leaves you with a bunch of WordPress installs to run. We have about 10 WordPress installs at this point, but more on that.

OK, so what’s the problem with running multiple WordPress installs?

No big deal right? Sure it may take 30 minutes to get it up and running, but that’s just the “down payment”; here’s where it gets hairy: you’ll have to maintain yet another new WordPress install going forward. That means regular WordPress updates, installing and configuring all the required plugins, updating those plugins regularly, etc. Pretty soon you’re a support slave to your several sites – argh! If only there was a better way…

So what is WordPress Multisite (formerly known as WordPress MU)?

Great news.. now there IS a better way! As of WordPress 3.0, the previously separate project called WordPress MU (WordPress Multi-User) has been fully integrated into WordPress so now it’s much easier to install and manage for the rest of us.

So that means that when you install WordPress you can now choose to install as a single site, OR create a “network” – meaning you can run and manage all your WordPress websites from one place. Awesome!

Benefits of WordPress Multisite over many standalone WordPress installations

1.) One WordPress is much easier to manage than 10 = better use of your valuable time

Installing, configuring, managing, and upgrading one instance of WordPress and all its plugins at one time for all your websites is a GOOD THING… much easier for you to do and keep track of than say, 10 WordPress installs. And when managing a system is easy and straightforward, you’re much more likely to do it right and do it consistently.

Time, friends, is the most valuable commodity you will ever have. You don’t so much spend your time as you invest it. And as the stock market has shown us all, some investments net better returns than others…

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff that life is made of.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

“To spend time is to pass it in a specified manner. To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to either spend or waste and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever.”
– Bruce Lee, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

2.) Better site performance = faster response time = more search engine traffic

Each WordPress installation takes a significant amount of resources on your server (that means CPU cycles and RAM, and a little disk space)… and you can pretty much multiply that requirement by the number of WordPress installations you’re running. Think of it this way: they leaner you run, the less your hosting bill will be, and the FASTER your website will be. Faster website = more search engine traffic – because Google absolutely cares and takes site response time into account when ranking your site compared to others.

Have you actually seen a working WordPress Multisite in the wild? Is it stable?

Absolutely! In true Dan & Jennifer fashion we put our money where our mouth is so to speak, and went “Multisite” on our site Today Is That Day.

Previously, Today Is That Day was made up of two WordPress installs:

1. The Today Is That Day Magazine – articles, videos, etc.
2. Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day – our hand-picked selecting of hundreds of the best Inspirational Quotes

Today those two WordPress installs have been combined and are running smoothly as 1 WordPress Multisite.

And don’t think that combining those two WordPress installs into one is not worth it… it absolutely is. Today Is That Day “for now” only had two WordPress installs running it, but we’d already planned two more for features to be added in the coming months.

And Ask Dan & Jennifer, which has been around significantly longer and is far more complex, is currently running on 4 WordPress installs, with more planned. So moving THAT to Multisite will be a great help.

One minor clarification: a Wordpres Multisite install an be for different domains (www.site1.com, www.site2.com), or for different “sections” of one website, which is how we use it (see example above for Today Is That Day: one is a “subdirectory” of the other).

You can also certainly install a single Multisite to manage your different WordPress domains… and at some point we’re going to do that for the several simpler WordPress website we’re running. But our current goal is consolidating all the different WordPress installs for each of our main websites into one WordPress per site.

So how DO you upgrade your existing WordPress installs to WordPress Multisite?

So now that we know about WordPress Multisite, the obvious next question is… how do I migrate my 10 WordPress installations into a single “easy to manage” WordPress Multisite?

Yes, between Ask Dan & Jennifer, Today Is That Day, and Blog Success Journal, we really do (or rather did) have about 10 active WordPress installs. And yes, it was quite a pain staying on top of them all. So we’re quite pleased to be migrating them all to the Multisite model.

First, you’ll want to be running the latest version of WordPress. You can even use WordPress auto install (or auto upgrade) for that, very easy.

But then comes the more involved process… enabling your “Multisite” and then migrating your other sites INTO it. Stay tuned, that answer along with all the gory and magical details of “how to do it” is coming up shortly…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Should you start an online video show? That’s like asking yourself if you want to lose weight or marry the person of your dreams! The answer, if you haven’t caught on yet is yes. We’ve been doing it for years, and it’s been huge for us! But recently we were talking to someone who said “Oh, there’s no point in me starting an online video show. You guys have been doing it for so long.”

That’s just bunk. It’s true, we have been doing it for years, but it’s not like we just woke up one day and said “let’s start an online video show!” and then presto! We became a huge success. It didn’t work that way. We started our first online video show (Ask Dan & Jennifer) a few years ago, and it grew and it grew and it grew and now it’s grown like 1000% in that time, but it didn’t happen overnight. It took time. Allow yourself the time to grow and just go off and do it. And whatever you do, don’t think it’s too late. It’s never too late.

And this is ESPECIALLY true if you have already started a blog – because a video show will get you a lot of extra visitors and much more credibility.

There are many reasons you should start your own online video show. Such as…

It creates trust

If you make posts to a blog, yes, it’s great and wonderful and all that, but it still doesn’t pack the same punch as an online video. People can look at your online video and say “Wow. He/She is a real person.” People will be able to relate better to you if they can see and hear you. It will allow you to better showcase your own particular brand of speech, humor, satire and the like. It also creates a deeper personal connection. Having a face and voice to associate with your content helps your audience feel like they know you and then they will be more invested in you and your success.

It helps you reach different people

Face it: in today’s world, we have way too much to do and way too little time to do it in. Reading a blog takes more time than listening to one. People want options with their content. They want to be able to put it on the iPod/iPhone/iPad and take it with them to the beach or the gym or to be able to listen to it in the car. Having a video blog gives people options. And people like their options.

It allows you to differentiate yourself in the market

We started askdanandjennifer.com a few years ago and it’s a love and relationship site, and that is a VERY crowded market place. It’s very difficult to stand out, and if you don’t stand out, you die. It’s just that simple. So we had to sit down and ask ourselves, “What can we do to stand out? What do we have that no one else does?” Simple! We have Dan and Jennifer. By posting our online video show we were able to showcase our most unique asset-ourselves. People could see us and connect with us and become part of our audience and then tell their friends about us. That helped increase our audience exponentially.

It opens up an entirely new audience

There are a mulitiude of video sites out there (youtube, hulu, funnyordie, etc) and they have their own audiences, and many of these people are not really that into reading blogs. Posting an online video show allows you to access and engage these people and potentially bring them back to your site or simply create a new online show only audience. There are millions of people on these video sharing sites and it’s also true that there are people on these sites that are going to be interested in whatever it is you have to say. They’re not going to go to you, you will have to go to them. The first rule of growing your fan base is simple: go where the people are. Not going to these sites is about as effective as opening up a surfboard shop in Utah. No one’s going to buy a surfboard there. Why? Because there’s nowhere to surf in Utah. Setting up your surf shop in say Southern California is going to be more effective. Even more effective would be setting it up right on the beach. You have to go where the people are.

You can be everywhere

Having an online video show gives your and your blog a life of its own outside your actual blog. You can be on multiple sites that each have a wide reach. The bigger your net, the bigger your catch.

Never, ever, try to do anything

We never try to do anything. We just haul off and do it. You’ll never hear us say “we’re going to try this and see what happens” we say “we’re going to do this.” Big difference.

“Do or do not, there is no try.” – Yoda, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

That crusty little muppet was right. If you “try” to do something, you’re just going to fail and but if you “do” something it’s different. You’ve “decided” to do it. The word “decide” has comes from the latin root which means “to cut off all other options.” If you want to be successful, say you’re going to do something, and then burn the bridge behind you so you have no other choice.

Never ever give up.

Of all the blogs that started around the same time as ours, we can name two still in existence. Most quit after about six months. The general rule of thumb is people quit right before they’re about to become successful. Don’t that make that mistake. Never give up. Just do whatever it is you want to be doing. Live that passion, live it daily and be consistent about it. You can’t help but succeed then.

Answer: not on your website. Yes, yes, we know. Every good web host (and even the not so good ones) gives this away for free when you host your site with them. This is exactly why you DON’T want to take them up on it. Think about it: if your website goes down (and trust us, it WILL) what’s going to happen to your email? Oh, that’s right. It’s down too. Why? Because you put all your eggs in one basket. So your website and your email server are BOTH down. How are you going to be notified? D’oh! You can’t be notified by email because that’s not working either. You’d better hope you get notified by SMS, and forget about receiving any important emails from perspective clients, fans or anyone else.

Think that’s enough reason not to host your own server? Well, we’ve got more. As if this wasn’t enough, hosting your own email can eat up half of your resources making your web page load slower. In the internet business that’s a fate worse than death. Because no first time visitor to your website is ever going to say “wow, that page loads really slow. I’ll come back later and give them another chance.” Doesn’t happen. Pure and simple. Also Google measures every millisecond it takes to load your website, and they track that daily. If you’re slow, Google will be happy to send their visitors to someone faster.

Your web server exists to load your website pages fast. Period. It exists to do nothing else. Anything that gets in the way of this is simply bad for business. That’s why you don’t ever, under any circumstances host your own email server. Period.

So, now that we’ve scared the pants of you and told you what not to do, what are your options? We’ll the truth is, you’ve only got two in our opinion. But they’re really good ones, so fret not, fledgling website owner. We’ve got you covered.

Email Hosting Option #1: Gmail

First and foremost is Gmail. They are simplest option. They are free, and for your domain they are the cheapest option which may be all you need to hear if your website is just getting started. Beyond having an unbeatable price, they also offer something else that’s much more attractive: piece of mind. See, Google has big, huge buckets of money to throw at, well everything. This means they’ve invested in the best people and technology money can buy to ensure that nothing bad ever happens. You won’t ever have to worry about your Gmail going down, because if that happened, a lot of insanely well paid people would lose their incredibly cushy and killer jobs unless they get it fixed FAST; and they just aren’t going to let that happen. So Gmail won’t let you down and it’s incredibly simple and easy to use. You don’t need a huge amount of technical knowledge. A few simple clicks and you are up and running.

Email Hosting Option #2: Rackspace

Rackspace (or as we like to refer to them “The Artist Formerly Known As Webmail.us) is our recommendation, and they are our email hosting provider. Why? Rackspace is comprised of rock stars. Their support people are awesome, and when you call or email them with a problem, they actually call or email you back – with an actual solution. People at Rackspace aren’t just passionate; they are, as they like to call it “fanatical.” And we mean that in a good, non cult-y way. Rackspace has created a culture (they refer to it as their ‘special sauce) where employees thrive and have been named one of the best companies to work for by Computer World and The Sunday Times. All of this means that your business is handled by happy people who actually want to go to work and not some disgruntled college kid sitting in a basement somewhere. You can probably tell by now that we’re pretty big fans of theirs. It’s really hard not to be, actually. They’re reasonably priced too! Give them a try and you’ll see why we love working with them.

As a small side not on Rackspace, we also use them for Cloud Hosting all the static content on our websites, but more on that soon in a separate article.

Whether you go with Gmail or Rackspace, your email will still be up and running if your website ever goes down… and you won’t be impacting your website load times every time you get an email with those huge NSFW pictures from your pervert friends and funny cat videos from your less perverted friends. FTW!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Question 1: Why are you starting a blog?

It’s the most profound question you will ever ask yourself, but also the most important. Why are you doing this? What do you hope to accomplish? Do you want to make money? Do you want to help people? Do you want to make people laugh? Do you want to vent about something (society, politics, your love life)? There are no wrong answers here, but you do need to have one. You need to know why you are doing it, but more than anything you need to be passionate about doing it, whatever it is. If you love Spam and you want to sing the praises of Spam on your blog, then you will be successful. But if you’re a Vegan and you hate spam and someone offers you a ton of cash to blog about Spam, it’s just not going to work. It’s a job at that point, and you’ll hate doing it, and more importantly, you’ll hate yourself for doing it.

Question 2: What’s your niche?

Everyone needs an angle. Whether you’re a writer blogging about being a stripper, or a stripper blogging being a writer, you need a hook, pure and simple. You can’t be all things to all people and you shouldn’t try. You will fail. You can only succeed if you can identify a portion of the market that is being underserved (ideally, they won’t be getting served at all) and then speaking and marketing to them. This isn’t as hard a question to answer as it might seem. Once you answer the first question, the second question will largely answer itself.

Question 3: How will you set yourself (and your new blog) apart?

Here’s the really tricky question. You know why you’re blogging, you know what your niche is, now what? How do you stand out in a sea of endless bloggers? What’s your angle on your angle? Maybe you’re giving relationship and dating advice from the Born Again Christian perspective, for example. Or maybe you’re a divorced dad offer dating and parenting tips. The point is, whatever your niche, there is probably someone already there serving it as there are very few new ideas under the sun. What makes you worth listening to? Tricky question, to be sure, but an important one.

Once you have the answers to these three questions, you’re good to go. Just be aware that the answers, may change over time, and probably should. Your answers to these three questions represent a snapshot of where you are at the time you answer them. If you have a vision and a goal of say, getting ten people a day to visit your blog, and then that happens, then what? What happens is your answer to these three questions will probably change. You’ll need to re-answer them, and that will affect why you are doing this and how you go about doing it.

Don’t worry about this. Don’t wait to have the perfect answers. You won’t. You’ll not only never get it “right,” but you never even get started either. It’s all about progress, not perfection. You must repeat “Progress over perfection” in your head one million times. Okay, actually only three. But you get the point, hopefully. Perfection is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It robs people. Of their hopes, of their dreams and of the chance of actually making those hopes and dreams a reality. If you don’t get in the game you’ll never get a chance to win it, but there are some that endlessly practice and attempt to perfect whatever it is they working on before they show it to the world. But it’s never perfect. Ever. I don’t even know if anyone knows what that means.

It’s vitally important that you have a plan, vision and something to shoot for. But don’t let the prep work consume you to the point where things are unhealthy. That’s as much a life lesson as it is a lesson about blogging, but it certainly applies here.

Don’t waste your time trying out each WordPress plugin to find out which one you want. Here are the top 10 WordPress plugins that you want your blog to have, hands down.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

W3 Total Cache

For top-notch website performance, you need the W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin. Both your blog visitors and search engines care about how fast your website is. If your pages take forever to load, you’ll lose readers and search engine traffic. In fact Google just announced this week that they are not officially taking site response time into consideration for rankings. Of course they are: speed means quality of experience for their users.

W3 Total Cache can reduce your page load time by as much as 50% or even more – something you definitely want to do. AND it will help you keep your site running and available instead of crashing if you get a major rush of traffic all at once, such as getting a popular story on Digg or a “StumbleUpon attack”.  Other major caching plugins like WP Cache and WP Super Cache are OK, but in our opinion they are not as versatile or as powerful as W3 Total Cache (and we’ve used/tested them all).

Google XML Sitemaps

You want search engines to know when you post new content so you get more traffic. Google XML Sitemaps automatically generates an updated sitemap and submits it to top search engines without you lifting a finger. Don’t rely on search engines to crawl your site and find new posts – use this plugin to automatically tell them the instant you post – before someone else copies your post and pretends they wrote it – which happens. And “original content” (i.e. where Google “finds” a post first) gets much more credit than duplicate content (i.e. other places Google finds that post).

GravityForms or cForms

Your readers need an easy way to contact you, whether it’s to ask you a question or to advertise on your site. Contact form plugins like GravityForms or cForms allow you to easily create a great-looking contact form for your website. Instead of putting your email address out there for everyone (including spam bots) to email you thousands of times, use GravityForms or cForms to allow your readers users to contact you easily without cluttering your inbox with lots of spam.

Disqus Comments

Another interactive tool for your blog readers is the all-important comment box. Disqus Comments is an excellent WordPress plugin that allows visitors to comment on your articles with a great looking social interface and great spam control. Use an advanced plugin like Disqus Comments instead of WordPress’s integrated comment tool. It looks much, much better and gives you more control over comments. It’s also a hosted comment plugin that automatically syncs the comments with your WordPress database, and provides great social interaction with your readers.

Two other very popular comment oriented WordPress plugins are JS-Kit Echo and IntenseDebate. We’ve tried them both and feel Disqus is currently the better choice. The backend comment management of JS-Kit Echo leaves a lot to be desired, and we feel the Disqus comment layout just looks better than the IntenseDebate option. Frankly, this is a matter of preference, they’re all good options!

Akismet

This plugin automatically comes with WordPress and does a great job catching comment and trackback spam. If you’re using a hosted comment service like Disqus, Akismet won’t apply to you. Actually you can still use the Akismet service through Disqus, just won’t need to enable the plugin.

FeedBurner Feedsmith

Redirect your RSS feed to FeedBurner and have your RSS subscribers poll Feedburner instead of your site. This WordPress plugin makes your feed much more usable, since it provides far more optimized RSS feed than WordPress alone does. It will also offload the feed reader traffic to Google (who now owns FeedBurner) so it’s much,  much faster than your web server, improving your blog’s performance even more. This will sound a little technical to a new blogger, but do it anyway, it’ll work better that way.

YARPP

This WordPress plugin is an excellent tool to use if you want readers who are interested in your topics to stay on your website longer. YARPP automatically displays the most closely related articles from your blog to your readers at the end of the article, allowing them to easily browse through the content they’re interested in on your site instead of allowing to look for what they want elsewhere.

After The Deadline

This easy to use spell and grammar checker for WordPress is available for free and is essential to use even if you feel like you’re spelling and grammar error-free. It doesn’t cost anything and will ensure each post is error free and looks as good as it is.

Sexy Bookmarks

A bookmarking tool is essential for your blog and Sexy Bookmarks is an excellent tool to use with great eye candy. It adds a nice visual appeal to your blog, while encouraging readers to share the article they’re reading with their friends on Twitter, Facebook and more. This means more linkbacks to your blog and more readers for you!

Viper’s Video Quicktags

To embed your YouTube video on your blog, you’ll need Viper’s Video Quicktags. Newer versions of WordPress (2.9 and above) allow you to embed videos without special plugins, but Viper’s Video Quicktags allows you much better control over how the videos look in your posts. You can set the format for all of your videos in one place instead of coding it in each post – and having to edit ALL your posts to make a change.

After building very successful WordPress blog and online magazine AskDanAndJennifer.com over the last four years, these WordPress plugins are our personal favorites – and for the most part, the only ones we actually use.

Do you have favorite “must have” WordPress plugins that aren’t in this list? Let us know! Leave a comment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Camcorder

One of the obvious things you need to start a successful video show is a camcorder, or possibly more than one if you have them. You don’t have to have an expensive camcorder – you can even use your webcam if you don’t have a more traditional camcorder. Regardless of whatever camcorder you have, make sure you have a stable place to set the camera up for filming. If you’re using a traditional camcorder, you’ll definitely need a tripod. Don’t have someone hold your camera for you – they’ll never be able to keep it steady enough to keep your viewers from getting motion sickness.

Good Lighting

Your living room overhead or a lamp just won’t work if you want good, even lighting for your online video show. Lamps and overheads create shadows, which look unprofessional in a video. Visit a camera store or browse online for some discount lighting fixtures or lighting kits. You don’t need super expensive lightboxes or anything like that. A simple bulb with a broad umbrella will do just fine.

Lapel Microphone

Strong, even sound is as important as good lighting. For a professional looking and sounding online video show, you want to minimize echos and static. Some computers and laptops have built-in microphones that may work, but your best bet is a lapel microphone, especially if you’re shooting your video on a set in front of a camera instead of with a webcam. Lapel microphones are very inexpensive, but they’re worth their weight in gold.

Video Editing Platform

Good video editing software is essential for a professional looking video show. There will be lots of things you want to edit out, without spending hours re-recording a video to be perfect because you don’t have editing software. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to have a Mac to have a great video editing platform. Adobe has some great options for Windows video editing, including Adobe Premiere Elements which is available for less than $100. However, their best program so far is Adobe Premiere Pro, which comes in at just over $700 – if that fits your budget.

Use Video Sharing Sites

Video sharing websites, like YouTube, are free and your most valuable tool for getting people to see your video show and start making money online. Create accounts with several of the most popular video sharing websites and start uploading your video show online regularly so people can start watching what you’ve created. Tubemogul is an excellent option if you want to upload one video to multiple video sharing websites without the hassle of uploading large files over and over to different sites. Tubemogul allows you to upload the video once and it will distribute your video to various video sharing websites for you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Staying Relevant In Your Niche

Using social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook is one of the easiest ways you can stay connected to your blog readers and relevant in your niche. Regular Tweets and Facebook posts keep people reading and keep people “in the know” about your favorite topics. Also, one of the best forms of advertisement is through word of mouth. Fans of your Facebook page will inadvertently direct their friends to your page via their Wall and so on and so on. Your Twitter followers might Tweet about a topic you’ve already Tweeted about and tell their friends about it and so on. Using social media outlets is a must if you really want to be a successful blogger and build your own brand.

The Benefits Of Scheduling Your Tweets

The benefits of scheduling your Tweets is that you don’t always have to be at your computer when you want something Tweeted. While there are applications that can allow you to Tweet from your cell phone, sometimes you just want to take some time off without completely withdrawing yourself from staying on top of things and staying relevant. That’s where scheduling your Tweets (and your blog posts) comes in handy.

Tweeting Responsibly

There is definitely a fine line between using Twitter and Facebook scheduling tools and abusing them. While you can schedule many of your Tweets, it quickly becomes obvious that all you’re doing is scheduling your Tweets and you’re not really relevant in your niche anyways. Your Twitter followers and Facebook fans will ask you questions, and it’s important that you answer them. Although you do schedule some of your Tweets, you should add to it by answering questions and having real conversations with people. This is the best way to build your brand and let people know that you’re available and interested in what your blog is about. Social media outlets give you the opportunity to actually be in the action instead of simply being behind the scenes. Use your Twitter and your Facebook pages to talk about your favorite topics, ask your fans and followers questions of your own and get them involved and interested in your blog topics. Not only will this generate tons of traffic for your blog, it will also generate real interest, and that’s something that can’t be bought. Be responsible with your Twitter and Facebook. Take the time to talk to your fans and followers, and schedule your Tweets and posts when you have to.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Content Is Key

You may have the best SEO keywords on your website or blog, but without quality content, the search engines are going to start overlooking you. You may get an influx of site traffic for awhile, but it will quickly cease as the search engines realize that people aren’t staying on your website very long. If you’re not offering people anything of value on your website, you won’t be getting traffic for long, if you ever got it at all. The key to a successful blog or website is to produce quality content that people want to read on a regular basis. Search engines will pick up on regular publishing and start taking a better look at your website or blog. If there’s good stuff on there that people are interested in and searching for, the search engines will start sending them to you. It’s as simple as that.

Search Engine De-Crappers

Search engines, especially Google, spend millions of dollars every year on technology that allows them to filter through websites that publish what is known as Internet “crap.” Search engines don’t want to send traffic to websites that don’t offer people anything of value. You can only fool search engines with SEO tricks and keywords for so long, if at all these days. Search engines are continuously working on ways to weed out the bad and useless content, regardless of how many fancy keywords and SEO there is. If you don’t produce quality content on a regular basis, search engines are going to figure it out and fast. Without quality content, you’re not going to get the traffic you need for a successful blog or website.

Regular Publishing

To take this #1 tip on blog and website success a little further, you must continue publishing good content that people want to read on a regular basis. You may have a great article up on your site or blog, but if you’ve only published one or two articles, the search engines aren’t going to know to look in your direction. Search engines want to send people to websites and blogs that regularly publish good content, not a website or blog that published one or two good articles. Search engines such as Google love websites that stay relevant and stay in the game by continuously posting content.

Ask yourself this question: do you publish information to your blog for yourself (just so you can say something) or so that other people can get value from What you have to say, what you’ve discovered, etc?

Do you discriminate against half (or more) of your website visitors?

So you build a great looking blog (or website), start publishing some great content, and you even make sure the website looks good.

But here’s the catch: it looks good to YOU, with your web browser (Firefox 3.0 or Internet Explorer 8.0), running on your operating system (i.e. Vista).

Here’s a fun fact: different people end up using different web browsers. For example, our Ask Dan & Jennifer love and sex online magazine and advice column gets 52% visitors using Internet Explorer, 33% visitors using Firefox, 9% using Safari, and so on.

And those break down further by browser release verions (ex. IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, and so on).

How can you know what web browsers your visitors are using?

Well you do use web analytics, right? That just means a (often free) web software that keeps track of who visitors your website so know how many visitors you have every day, where they’re coming from, what articles/pages they like, and so on.

And the good analytics services will give you a detailed breakdown of what web browsers (and operating systems) your visitors are using. Our absolutely favorite web analytics tool is Google Analytics: in our opinion the bar none best analytics tool out there. Plus, here’s a bonus: it’s free.

Not all web browsers are created equal

OK, so people use different browsers… so what? Well, the problem is that each of those browsers shows your website a little differently.

But no big deal right? Wrong. Just a few little differences can result in your site lookign completely messed up to half your visitors. Worst yet, it looks fine to you, so how can you even know?

How you can quickly and easily see how your website looks in the most popular web browsers

So what’s the solution? Do you just call up your friends who you know run the different web browsers and see if they’ll keep testing your website every time you make a change? No way!

Do you install all the browser versions on your own computer at home? Nope, you can’t run them all… and seriously, who has time to mess with that!

Here’s the smart and easy way: you use an online service that actually shows you what your website looks like in all the major browsers.

The original solution: online screenshot and web validation services

There have been services online offering this functionality for some years now. Here’s a list of them. With most of these services, you just type in the web address, and it shows you a screen capture of how your website and how it looks in 20 different browser editions.

The down side with many of these services is that they’re very slow: it can take an hour to get your screenshots. and if you’re going to make tweaks or fixes, that just won’t work.

Today’s better solution: Adobe BrowserLab

Yesterday I was looking for a better solution… and found our favorite one ever, which happens to be from Adobe (we love their software anyway, so that was an added bonus). It’s called Adobe BrowserLab. And according to Adobe, “BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand.”

Here’s why BrowserLab is the best tool for this that we’ve seen: it brings up your website in the top web browsers immediately: so in under 5 minutes you can just know what your website looks like to the vast majority of your visitors! And that frankly is a must for any web designer – or anyone really who has a website that gets more than a few thousand visitors a month. Also check out this recent PC World article on BrowserLab.

As an added bonus, Adobe BrowserLab is currently offered free by Adobe… but I suspect web designers would also pay for this service if they had to.

The downside of BrowserLab is that it (as of now) only shows you what your website looks in the top 5 or so browsers. But honestly unless you have a dedicated web design team that’s doing this for you, that meeds the goal of today’s test: making sure your website isn’t “broken” for half your visitors.

And with Adobe BrowserLab that’s become a very easy thing to do. If you know of other great tools for doing this, be sure to let us know in the comments what they are and why you like them!

What are these buttons? Usually they’re tiny logos representing a handful (or 20+) social media sharing sites.

But here’s the catch: for most people these social media buttons are confusing. At first glance the uninitiated (read: non-techie) reader has no darn idea what those buttons are. Once  you look closer you’ll see

Most people have just never heard of all those fancy social media sharing networks. But just about everybody and their dog has heard about Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

So should you really add these social media buttons to your site?

Absolutely! If you want people to bookmark your articles and share them with their friends, you have to give them a very easy way to do that.

But do it in a way that’s not confusing, focusing on just the top few sites that the readers of your site are likely to recognize.

Sadly we didn’t include these very visible buttons on our Ask Dan & Jennifer site or on our other sites… instead we opted for the “all social media buttons in one” Add-To-Any widget (more on this below). But ultimately it proved a little confusing and was too easy to ignore or just plain not notice.

So… we finally decided to add some social media buttons at the bottom of aritcles for our major sites: Ask Dan & Jennifer, Blog Success Journal, and our Personal Blog. Just to make it easy for people to share and bookmark stories they like on these sites.

What Social Media Buttons Should You Choose?

Ah, now to the rubber hitting the road… That’s a very fine line. Most people opt for showing every button available, to increase the odds that your visitor happens to have an account on one of those sites. In theory that’s a good startegy, but it can backfire.

Pretend you’re not a blogger, but a non-techie person who happened to stumble onto a great blog. Fact is, too many buttons can confuse non-techie readers. So you need to figure out what are your “big bang for the buck” sites… which sites best target your core readers base.

To find the rigth buttons for your site, Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you have a techie readership that prefers Digg or Reddit?
2. Do you have a more mainstream (non-techie) readership that prefers non-techie sites like StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz?
3. How about Facebook and Twitter… would your readers know what those are?
4. What’s  the primary language for your audience… are you perhaps popular in places that speak other languages? Think “Meneame” for example, the Spanish-language Digg-like site.
5. Out of the answers above, which sites are most likely to drive more traffic to your site if bookmarks are shared there?

For us, after significant deliberation (probably too much, LOL), we came up with our top list, in this order: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Buzz, Del.ici.ous,  Meneame, and StumbleUpon.

What’s the best way to install these buttons on your blog?

Probably the easiest way is to find a social media button service (such as AddToAny) that will give you a simple piece of Javascript you can add to your site.

If you’re running WordPress you can also choose from a myriad of plugins that will show these buttons. And there are LOTS of these types of plugins to choose from.

Which begs the question…

What are the best social media button plugins or services for your blog?

There are so many social media button options out there, it’s hard to even begin listing them. So we’re not going to. If you want to find all the options we didn’t choose after doing extensive research, you can search Google yourself for “social media button wordpress plugin” or something to that effect.

We’re just goint to tell you about the ones that we like enough to actually use ourselves.

AddToAny – A great one-size-fits-all social media button bar

AddToAny is a really cool, customizable, and easy to use widget that you can add to literally any blog. Oh, and it’s free too.

You just go to their site, customize how you want the button to look, etc. and they give you a piece of Javascript code to add to your site. It’s that simple.

Here’s what the AddToAny widget looks like:

And it works great, which is why we use it. We recommend AddToAny highly, you should definitely get it set up on your blog or website.

But here’s the question… is it enough? We used to think so, but no longer.

The problem with JUST having the AddToAny widget is that not everyone clicks on your pretty little “share or bookmark” button. Sure some will, but many won’t. They may not see it, or they may just not care.

SocioFluid – The first truly unique social bookmark button solution we’ve seen to date

So, we set out to find a good set of very pretty, polished, and unique social media buttons to add to the bottom of our posts… to make a facebook user say “hey, this was good, i’ll click on that facebook icon and share it with my friends”. Same for Twitter, etc.

When we started looking for the right social bookmark plugin / utility for our sites we were disappointed with all the blah, boring, all-the-same button options out there. And finally, finally we found one that is truly unique!

It’s called SocioFluid and it’s just plain and simply cool. It comes as a customizable WordPress plugin… and more recently, it’s also available as a simple javascript widget that you can add to any blog, even if it’s not WordPress (get that from SocioFluid.com).

Want to see this REALLY COOL tool in action? Just scroll down to the bottom of this article and hover over the nifty social bookmark icons… Facebook, Twitter!

OK, Now a question for you!

So what social bookmark / sharing plugins or widgets do you use for your blog? let us know in the comments below!

And be sure to Tweet this article or Share it on Facebook! Just click on one of the pretty sharing icons below!
Thanks! — Dan & Jennifer

If you’re like us, you hear about the latest and greatest Social Media tools every day – only to be disappointed.

We’ll we’ve found a few that we feel are actually useful. We found these three tools on Rhea Drysdale’s Refresh Jacksonville Social Media Presentation. Rhea has a fairly new blog out of Jacksonville, FL, but we like what we see so far…

In her presentation, she listed several Social Media Tips and Tools.

Here are three tools that we really liked and have add to our list of useful Social Media tools.

Web2Subbmitter

This is the only tool in the list that isn’t completely free, but it’s still a must have tool for us.  The sales letter sucks in my opinion, but Brandon Hall has been awesome to work with. They handled the Netscape to Propeller change within a few days.

If you submit to more than one Social Media website, you need this tool.

This tool allows you to enter your URL, Title, Desription, and Tags one time and then submit to the major Social Media Sites with a few mouse clicks. Think about it, if you submit a story (we submit at least 10 per day) to  the top 5-7 Social Media Sites – how many times do you have to copy paste?

This tool saves us so much time every day!

Social Media For Firefox Extension

The tool is the the ultimate time saver to building powerful social media accounts. One of the secrets of top Diggers, Stumblers, Navigators etc… is being the first to submit stories already becoming popular on other social news sites. For example you can browse Reddit to find good stories already submitted and be the first to submit them to Digg. You can browse Digg and be the first to Stumble pages that are becoming popular there. Most if not all articles on the front page of Digg are submitted to StumbleUpon and will get a lot of Thumbs up. If you were the first to Stumble that when the page reaches the Popular page for its tags and category on Stumble your account will be the one listed next to it, which will give you more friends and fans and so on.

This is a great tool! In additional to the above stuff, it also makes it easier to support your friends who may not have links or buttons on their blog posts. This tool will tell you if it’s been submitted on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious at a glance. It will also let you submit a link with the click of a button.

Digg Alerter

This is a great little tool that allows you to track the status of you recently submitted stories without having to log in to Digg. It show a list of your latest 1- 100 submissions with the number of votes and comments. The tools automatically updates the numbers for you at the interval you set. We have ours set to every 10 minutes. It even tells you when your story is made popular.

Digg Entourage

Ever wonder who’s got your back on Digg? The Digg Entourage tool checks the last 25 stories you submitted, figures out who dugg the most of them, and prints out your Digg Entourage along with tons of data on who your friends really are (or who should be)!

This is an interesting little tool that tells you who votes on your stories and how many times they’ve voted on your stories. The best thing about this little tool is that we found several people who support us that were not currently on our friend’s list. We never would have know about these people without this tool.