Over the summer, I was lucky enough to receive an iPhone 4, despite all the fuss of shipping problems. It was a long wait, but when I finally got the thing I could not put it down. One of the first things I did with my new iPhone was start looking for some Apps.

I use my iPhone for a lot of things. Games for when I’m bored, something to read when I’m in the mood, or something that will just make me look cool walking in a public place (yes, iPhone’s make you sexier ).

But the one thing I was excited to use my iPhone for was blogging. I knew there were plenty of apps a blogger could use right off the bat, as I also own an iPod Touch (first generation, so nothing special).

I searched the web for as many “Best iPhone apps for bloggers” lists as I could, and many of them were plagued with apps that were meant to help you write blog posts.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t plan on writing 1,000+ word articles on my iPhone. So those lists were no help to me.

So I have actually found a pretty good deal of apps on my own by browsing the App Store. It’s insane what you will find in there, and yes, there really is an app for everything.

If you want to get your iPhone more involved with your blog, then you may want to check out some of the apps I have found below.

Awesome Note

Price: $3.99 | Lite Version | View Website

This is probably the most gorgeous app in the entire store. It’s a todo manager/note taker/organizer/calendar and is extremely customization. Just about every aspect of this app can be changed by you. This is literally the best $4 I have ever spent in the App Store.

Reeder

Price: $2.99 | View Website

This is probably the best RSS Reader I can find. It syncs automatically with your Google Reader account, and makes reading your latest items simple. Simple organization, easy sharing options and a well-designed user interface makes this app my RSS reader of choice.

ExpenseTracker

Price: $2.99 | Lite Version | View Website

It’s a good habit to start tracking your expenses and income coming in. You know, for those things called taxes that not even us blogger’s are exempt from. I use this app to keep track of all the money I spend, and all the money I make. It’s great for more than just staying organized, I also use it to get inspired every time I make money.

SimpleMindX

Price: Free | View Website

One of the best ways to collect thoughts is through mind mapping. This app is probably the best mind mapping solution for your iPhone. It is simple to use, customizable and just a pleasure to use. The first time I made a mind map in this app, it was very simple to get a hang of. Now I use it to develop just about any idea I have on-the-go.

BAM Analytics

Price: $1.99 [Limited Time Only] | View Website

Honestly, I have never seen an app as information loaded as this one. You can see just about any piece of information from your Google Analytics account in just this one app. Every report is highly detailed, so all of you stat junkies will go crazy over this app (I think just using this app turned me into a stat junkie).

But the Apps Don’t Stop Coming

There are plenty of things on the iPhone, 3rd party app or not, that allow you to make blogging easier. Take notes in Apple’s Notes app, take photos and shoot HD videos for your posts, remember blogging events with the Calendar, stay connected with your blogging buddies via SMS messaging and more.

Now, I failed to mention some of the more obvious apps. There is WordPress for iPhone which every blogger probably has already. If you want to get social, download the Facebook and Twitter app. Literally every major social network has an official app, or can be viewed in Safari.

If you use PayPal, I recommend you go ahead and download the free PayPal app. That way, when you go on a PayPal spending spree thanks to the easy-to-use interface this app has, at least you’ll get your money’s worth constantly updating ExpenseTracker.

iPhone Users, What Apps do you Use?
Now I’m curious, what are some of the apps you use to help you maintain your blog/business? Share them all here, because I [we] can never have too many apps for our phone. Seriously, I bought the 32GB model and have absolutely no idea what to do with all of that space. If you’d even like to, feel free to show us a screenshot of your iPhone’s home screen. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

Blogging Discussion, Tips & Tricks Copyright 2010 Blogussion.com. All Rights Reserved.

iPhone Apps for Bloggers Who Want to do More Than Just Write

Almost every time I use the word “secret” when writing a blog post, I really mean “common sense that most people don’t do.”

Shhhh.

Beyond the content, there are a lot of things I like about Jason Falls’s Social Media Explorer. First, I like his very thin header bar. It gives me lots more “top of the fold” for his site. I like his choice of navigation at the top. (That’s number one.)

The Top Right

I like the top right area where Jason makes it clear that he’d love to further connect and extend the relationship. The entire sidebar is full of awesome like this, but right at the very top, Jason does a great job of showing us that he wants to get in touch.

I really like the custom graphics and the layout he chose, too. It does a lot to tie together the look and feel of the site.

The Category Thing

I really like a recent design choice of Jason’s to put categories front and center on his blog:

Watch for me to incorporate something like this into my next blog design, because I’m so enamored of how Jason did it. It’s so much smarter than just linear blog content. That’s the kind of thinking that he puts behind giving us consistent effort, and because it’s displayed like this, it’s even easier to find the good stuff.

The Video Thing

Jason has cleverly put a video box right on the front page. It draws you in faster. It tells you that he’s available to speak and ready to go. I think it’s another smart move.

Good Ad Placement

Jason is an affiliate for some good products and he promotes these on his primary page. I like his “front and center but below the fold” placement, as it says, “I like these products and think they’re helpful, but my content comes first.” It’s a nice statement.

Content Obviously Matters

Jason’s content is spot on. I’m not working around that. Instead, I’m pointing out how his design elements really do a lot to support the environment around his content. Jason’s been around for a bit, and he’s doing lots of interesting stuff. His blog shows the results of that.

The Exercise Overall

What you might do (besides get into Jason’s blog) is do what I did by visiting and thinking through how some of the blogs you like do what they do. Get in there, look everything over, and see what is useful to you. Determine what might work for you, and what you could do differently for your audience.

It’s a good one to practice.

I’ve written a lot in the last few posts about business. That was the goal: to help people better understand some of these tools and their impact on doing business. However, I should be really clear that business isn’t all work.

Business, especially human business, can be relationship-minded, can be sustainable, and can even be fun. Sure, transactions have to happen and value has to change hands, but a lot of doing business is about making relationships.

Now, translate the word “business” to mean something a little more broad-minded, and you can see how all these ideas would relate to your nonprofit, to your church, to your homeschooling project.

If you’re lucky, and I am, a good deal of business can be made in the trade of handshakes, smiles, and future encouragement. Mix that with an eye for understanding where value can transfer to the benefit of more than one, and you’re on to something. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that business is all about work.

What’s the fun in that?

Of all topics, this is one of the perennials. People want more traffic, more attention, more awareness to their blog. It’s fair. We work hard on our blogs. We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, if you’re using ads). Getting traffic is a tricky business, and it requires a lot of experimentation. I’ll tell you what’s worked for me, so far, and I’ll tell you what you might try. Maybe others will educate us both in the comments on their best methods.

Great Titles Help

The first few seconds of someone’s attention are the hardest to pass. If you have a lame blog post title, no one’s going to want to read the post. For whatever reason, we react to “how to,” we react to “7 great,” we react to all kinds of things. Not sure where to look? I stole this advice from Brian Clark years ago: go to the grocery store, buy some ladies’ magazines like Cosmopolitan, and learn how THEY write headlines on the front page.

Graphics Don’t Hurt

This entire series (and most of my blog posts) use graphics to catch your eye. It’s an easy way to get one’s attention. Screen captures help. Video helps. There are tons of ways to get people into a receptive space with your material, and graphics are just the easiest one.

Now that we’ve got a decent title, decent graphics, let’s be quick about your content.

Brevity Is the Game

Keep your posts brief (unless you want tons and tons of bookmarks). People don’t have all day to read. If you can keep your posts between 250-500 words, that’s in alignment with most people’s attention spans. Hey, you’re welcome to write whatever length you want. You asked me how to grow traffic to your blog. I can only give you results that I’ve tested. When I write a super long piece, I get much less involvement with it.

Share Your Blog

I’ve written about making shareability a priority. If you don’t have easy-to-share buttons on your blog, you’re missing the easiest way for people to see your stuff on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and all the other sites where it would matter. Sharing out is a great way to make some more traffic happen. I also automatically push my posts into Facebook with their notes feature. I have an automated post into twitter via @broganmedia, but don’t do this same effect on my primary @chrisbrogan account.

Subscriptions or No?

In my case, subscriptions to my blog matter. I want people to subscribe, because I don’t necessarily survive on ad revenue. If you’re trying to monetize via ad revenue, and if your ads are in the header and the sidebar, a subscription really won’t help you get more traffic. If for whatever reason you want people to come to your website directly instead of via your RSS feed, you might want to obfuscate where you put your subscription information.

If you’re like me, you ask for the subscription all the time. In fact, I’ll ask now. You’re not yet subscribed? Enter your email (I respect your privacy):

Guest Posts

Over in the Third Tribe, we talk about guest posts quite often as a great traffic-builder to your blog. Find someone who has a very similar kind of blog topic to yours (not sure where to start? Check out Alltop), and offer a guest blog post. Oh, and then actually follow through. I have heard recently from my friends who accept guest posts that often, people ask for something, get approval, and then don’t take an action. That doesn’t sound like a good plan. Just FYI.

Consistency

This is one of those points where people disagree. I blog daily. Truth be told, I’m up to 2x a day most days. Why? Because the more I blog, the more people subscribe. I learned it from some of the larger blogger sites out there.

Lots of people justify once a week, or once every two weeks. That’s fine. But if you want to grow traffic to your blog, that’s a very long slow crawl towards that growth. That said, no matter which frequency you’ve chosen, stick to it. The moment you drop off the map, people who haven’t yet subscribed to you lose sight and move on.

Market Your Blog

You can always market your blog the good old fashioned way. I’ve had people hand me business cards at events that had a compelling question or interesting graphic, and then a URL to their blog. More often than not, I’ll at least check out the post. You might make postcards and bring them to the places where your prospective readers might congregate. For instance, if you write a restaurant blog, why not have a business card tray by the mints? Make an offer, just like you do with any other kind of marketing.

Often times, we sit around inside the fishbowl of social media and hope people from outside will find us. Here’s a hint, hero: the people you need are out there wondering what they can do to learn more about the thing you’re talking about. Go get ‘em, tiger.

How Do You Grow Traffic To Your Blog?

I’m a big fan of the basics: write about what they need, make sure they see that you wrote about it, make it easy to carry on the relationship, make it easy for them to promote you to others.

Seems like a simple formula, and yet, we go through all kinds of hoops to come up with trickier methods. Try this one first. What do you say?

I had a strange dream last night, but oddly, it had a lesson in it. I dreamed that I went to a place to sell wool. There was one buyer. They decided whether my product was worth buying. Then, they turned it into yarn. They carded it, they dyed it, they put it on different spools and sold it to hundreds of people.

Which business is harder? In some ways, selling wool is harder. I have to convince one person instead of several. In other ways, selling yarn is harder. I need to sell lots of it to a lot of varied people to make it worth it.

And yet, both require sales. Both require trust. Both require a relationship, a quality of product, a distribution channel.

B2B, B2C.

Can social media be used for both kinds of sales?

Sure. Absolutely.

Stage 1

On [chrisbrogan.com], I have a lot of ways one can share. At the top and bottom of each post, I’ve got the Facebook Like functionality added:

When someone pushes that little button, it sends off an instance of my post to Facebook to that person’s wall, thus giving all of that person’s followers a chance to read the post, and giving me a chance to get some new visitors. When those visitors are new, I use a plugin called WWSGD to display this to them for the first few times they visit my site:

Thus, I encourage people to “like” something, and I encourage newcomers visiting from that action to become subscribers to my blog.

Stage 2

At the bottom of every post, I include the following:

I use the ShareThis plug-in, the Facebook Like Plug-in, and Tweetmeme, to give people three ways to extend out from my blog. Of these, the most used (near as my stats let me know) is the Tweetmeme button.

Stage 3

Inside Disqus, my commenting system, there are a few more ways to share and extend my community’s relationship with my post:

Of these, I imagine that people most often click to subscribe to comments, as I don’t yet have accurate stats to know that for sure, but have some anecdotal evidence.

Make Shareability a Priority

If you’re hoping to grow your blogging community (and/or distribute ideas beyond your small circle), then shareability is the key factor. It should become part of your formula for how you do everything you do. Back in 2006, I coined this phrase: ” Give your ideas handles.” It’s still just as pertinent.

Oh, and be sure that you’re making good use of Creative Commons as your document licensing of choice. For instance, share your Flickr photos, please.

And with this, we’ll all grow. Yes?

So, that got me looking around.

I realized just how much I could do without asking for help. For instance, if I switched [chrisbrogan.com] over to be a multi-author blog, I could toss in an “author box” to tell you who wrote which piece without much fuss. (All these kinds of options exist in different ways on all kinds of other premium WordPress themes, by the way. I’m just talking about this one because it’s what runs my site right now).

I also found that I could do more with SEO, if I wanted to improve my search engine efforts on the site. This actually led me to find a few things I wanted to change, and will now research so that I don’t break anything.

Finally, in the widgets area, I found that there were a lot of drag and drop opportunities to add functionality (and remove it) at will. This is partly because WordPress 3 is much easier to use than ever before, but also because some of what Genesis threw in there appealed to things I might need at any given moment.

For instance, the question I asked Brian Gardner? It was already answered for me here on the widgets page:

Premium Themes Rule

I’m getting ready to launch some projects on some other themes, but the lessons I learned the other day while trying out Genesis a bit more were really useful.

There are plenty out there, and you have your favorites, I’m sure. I’m not voting for favorites any more. I just like that well-developed themes really count for something. There are some real winners out there that help me do my job much better. If you haven’t made the switch to something a little more custom, give it some thought.

Look at the graphic I’ve put in this post. Look at all the links. There are links to Chris’s projects, to several other networks where Chris and John want you to participate, to affiliate products, and links to even more useful information.

If you’re going to do a podcast, make sure you load up the show notes with really good links and liner information. And reference that in the podcast over and over. Make sure that people know to get in deep and that there’s lots to do on the site that relates to your podcast.

Oh podcasting isn’t dead. It’s just a crazy divide between big media companies using the technology as a distribution channel, and people doing it right like Chris and John. If you’re still interested in the podcasting game, I think that you’d learn tons from paying attention to how they do it at Marketing Over Coffee.