Being as “Local” as you can with your blogging will yield big dividends.  By local, I mean incorporating as much geo-specific content as possible.

First of all, you can see that the local game is hot right now.  Sites like Yelp are cashing in on these opportunities.  Even Google has continued to drive their local search focus.  Local is starting to spread across multiple products within Google, including:

• Local Search
• Google Maps
• Google Directory
• Adsense
• Adwords
• Google Voice
• Goog411

All of these products rely on the thirst for local content and information.  Sites like Yelp are cashing in on the local directory and review market where users generate local content about everything from restaurants to dry cleaners.

How to cash in on “local” with your blog?

Try to incorporate a local element with every post you write.  It does not have to be local to you, but local to the post.

For example, right now I am posting about the importance of localizing content.  For this post, a great example of what I am talking about would be a blog called Hoboken411.  This site is all about the city of Hoboken, NJ, right outside New York City.  By mentioning how great this local site is and talking about their content in a local sense, I will increase my odds of someone finding this post when Hoboken is typed into the search query.

Ok, maybe not the best example.  Here’s a few more.

Running blog. When you review that new pair of Nike running shoes for your blog, you should consider talking about the stores, cities, addresses, and websites of the stores that are going to get the first shipments of these hot shoes.  (A great example)

Reality TV blog. When you’re giving the play by play review of last night’s episode of The Apprentice, you should try to find out the name and address of the diner that the episode was shot.  Or the corner that they setup their street cart.  Or really any major landmark/scene from the episode.  There will be a lot of people out there that want to find out the name of the place.  They may be able to figure out that it was New York, but they won’t know much more than that.  If your post answers the “where” question, you will rank well for that search term.

Baseball blog. Let’s say that you write a blog about the New York Mets.  Each time the team hits the road, you could incorporate a post about the most “Mets Friendly” bar in that town to watch the game.  You’d be surprised how many displaced fans are spread all over the country looking for places to watch their favorite out-of-state teams. Here’s a good example of what I mean.  Here is where you can see Yelp cashing in on this idea.

In most cases, you should be able to come up with a local angle for your post.

For anyone looking to start a new blog, starting as a local blog is the place to go.  Most small or even mid-sized towns/cities are in desperate need for good local content.  You could dominate the niche by turning out great content focused on that local audience.

It is much easier to start local and attempt to expand than it is to start with a national focus.  There are a lot more players in the national game right now.  Local is the place to be!

Video.

Are you tired of hearing about it yet?  Well that is unfortunate because it is not going away in our lifetime.   As the cost of video production continues to head towards zero, more and more videos are being uploaded to the web.

Why is this important for you?

If you’re business (or blog) plans to compete in this space, you need to embrace video.

So, are you going to do some video blogging or are you going to put some video on your blog.  There is a huge difference.

Video for your Blog (Meh).

What I’ve done below is put some video on my blog.  It happens to be a very cool video called, The Machine is us\ing us.  It is a 5 minute clip that sums up the coolness of the Internet.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g[/youtube]

Normally, you would want this video clip to have some significance for being in your post.  In this case, I just thought it was a cool clip.

However, video is great for demonstrating your point, talking about a current event, showing and explaining a complex point, conveying humor, etc.  There’s no shortage of great video clips for you to include in your posts.

Adding video to your site will increase user engagement, and make your content even more valuable (provided you are finding great clips).

Video blogging (winner!)

If you’ve got the chops, video blogging is a great play for you to make.

Text is great.

Video is great.

Combine the two.  That’s awesome.

For bloggers and site owners, combining the power of well written text with a great, unique video cannot be beat.  The stuff is content gold.

The real trick is to produce the video yourself.  It is getting easier and cheaper to do with $150 cameras and free video editing software, but the prospect of being on camera intimidates most people.

That’s ok.  If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.  However, you still need to seriously consider it.

There is also an added search value when you create and publish video.  Users will find you through YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Facebook, etc. because of your videos.  They’ll eventually find their way back to your blog.

Keep in mind that most content can be made better with video.

Practice what you preach.

I know.  We don’t do much video (at all) here at BlogCraving.  But that is something we are quickly working to remedy.  We are planning on releasing some video training series on commonly asked questions when it comes to WordPress.  The goal will be to create a video based user guide for WordPress functions.

Each little lesson will be less than 60 seconds.  Just enough to show you what you need to know, and get it done.

More on that coming soon.

A client of mine called today in an absolute panic today because he realized his WordPress blog was not very mobile friendly.

I was able to talk him off the ledge quickly because there are a lot of quick plugins to handle making a mobile version of your site.  More on those in a minute.  But it made me think, how important is it really that he have a smoking hot mobile version of his theme?

In his case, it turned out to be pretty important.  He runs a popular baseball blog in the New York/Tri-State area.  Through some dives into his website analytics, we discovered that there is a fairly sizable audience checking out his site in the morning from mobile devices.  We attributed this to people riding mass transit to work and checking in on their teams during their ride to work.

He happens to write a pretty funny recap of every game.  He’s pretty good about getting it up late at night around the time the game ends.  He had done this simply to catch the SEO wave in time for it to get some SERPs results by the time the next morning rolled around.   Unknowingly, people were looking to get his posts on their mobile devices as well.

We had just completed a more graphically intense redesign of his site that was wreaking havoc on smart phones.

I think it is safe to say that publishers should be very concerned about their sites rendering properly on mobile devices.  Everything is going mobile, so it smart to get in the game early.

With that in mind, don’t panic if your site is note especially mobile friendly just yet.  It isn’t critically important for most publishers.  In the case of my client, there was a very time specific point where his content was being consumed.  However, for most publishers that will not be the case.

For now, we have implemented some simple plugins on his site to better accommodate his mobile users. Over the next few weeks, we will be building a custom mobile treatment for his site to better monetize this niche audience.

Here are the best mobile plugins for WordPress

• WPTouch – Primarily focused on touch based mobile devices such as iPhone, Andriod, Blackberry Storm, etc.
• WordPress Mobile Edition – Great generic mobile site.  Very text-based, therefore loads quickly.
• MobilePress – Cross platform compatible.
• WordPress Mobile Pack – Lots of configurable options.

Photo by Mike Licht via Flickr.

The greatest single feature of WordPress is how easily it can be customized.  As a matter of fact, you’ve probably been on websites that you did not even realize were powered by WordPress.

WP is much more than a blogging platform.  It can be a full-blown CMS.  All it takes is some elbow grease.

With that in mind, the other great thing about WordPress is open-source coding.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that 90% of the functions, designs, and layouts you want for your WordPress site already exist somewhere else.  If you want it, chances are that someone has already made it happen.

When creating your template, do not reinvent the wheel.

My advice is to find a prebuilt template that accomplishes the majority of what you want on your site.  It does not have to be exactly what you want, just somewhat in the neighborhood.

Get that template in your hands (either paid or free), and use it as your “launch pad.”

Next, go out and find the missing elements that you want.  Perhaps there’s a cool way of displaying author information in your WordPress posts, or a snazzy photo gallery function.  Just go out there and find it.

Then try to figure out how it was built.

If the template was built by a design shop, head over to that shop and see if you can buy the template.

You can also head over to the WordPress support forums.  They are free and can often tell you exactly how to achieve a certain function.

Take those cherry picked items back to your site and incorporate them into the template you previously purchased.  Often, it is as easy as copy/pasting some code and doing some light weight CSS work.

That should cover 90% of your design needs right there.  The remaining 10% will be what you have to build out from scratch.

Instead of building 80% or 100% of your template by hand, you’ve just cut the workload drastically.  Now you can focus your energy on those totally unique customizations instead of stuff that has been built 100 times over by other developers.

If you have taken the plunge and hired developer to help you, the same exercise will come in handy.  Get out there and look for the things that you want to have on your site.  Find designs you like.  Share all of this information with your developer, and it will make their life easier.  You will get what you are looking for much quicker if the developer has samples to work from.

We all know that WordPress is the best CMS and blogging platform on the market today.  No argument there.  However, it can sometimes be tricky to embed videos into your posts with the stock version of WordPress.

So what’s the best video plugin to handle all of your video embed needs?  Viper’s Video Quicktags is the absolute best.

I’ve been using this plugin for years now.  It is regularly updated and improved.  Each time WordPress itself is updated, the plugin is always compatible.

The plugin is so good that the creator was just recently hired by Automatic.  (He’s made many other plugins as well.)

If you would like to start embedding videos from various major video hosting providers, get Viper’s plugin installed ASAP.

Video embed possibilities with this plugin include:

• YouTube
• Google Video
• Daily Motion
• Vimeo
• Veoh
• Viddler
• Metacafe
• Blip.tv
• Flickr Video
• Spike
• MySpace Video
• Generic FLV or Mov files (self hosted)

Twitter integrations into WordPress blogs are all the rage these days.  It is the most commonly asked for feature among our clients.

With that, here are the Top 5 Twitter Plugins for WordPress.

1) Twitter Widget Pro:

This plugin creates a sidebar widget with tons of configurable controls to adjust the Twitter feed’s display.  You can also control things like showing the date/time stamps, etc.  This is great for pulling your Tweets right into your site, or pulling in Tweets from a group of people based on a subject.  It is also a great way to keep some fresh, active content going on your site until your next post.

2) Twitter Feed:

Got friends? Ha.  By that I mean do you have multiple people working on your blog?  Or do you have multiple Twitter followers/accounts that you would like to display on your site’s sidebar?  This is the plugin for you.  Easily pull in Tweets from multiple users and control the slick graphic display of them on your site.  Includes the Twitter user picture and more.

3) Twitter Friends:

Show the loooove!  This widget allows you to show who is following you on Twitter.  This is a great way to thank loyal followers and to encourage people to follow you.  This plugin will show the user’s Twitter photo, bio line, and most recent Tweet.  You can toggle on/off each feature as well allowing you to show more details about each person (or not).

4) Post to Twitter (and Twitter to Post)

Oh how magical a world it would be if you could somehow get your WordPress posts to automatically show up in your Twitter account as Tweets?  How insane would it be if you could turn your Tweets into actual posts within WordPress?  Dream no more my friends.  Post to Twitter does exactly that.  It allows you to control the direction of information  (Twitter to WP  vs  WP to Twitter).  Control the follow of Tweetalicious in either way you choose, or both!

5) Twitter Blaster:

Kind of a unique way to use Twitter and WordPress.  This plugin allows your users to publish to your Twitter account.  Their Tweets get held as a “pending” post for your review.  You can then approve the Tweet and have it show up in your Twitter feed.  You can also approve the Tweet as a page/post.

Have one you really enjoy?  Tell me about it!

Post links to your favorite Twitter plugins for WordPress in the comments below.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams (@eV) finally announced the new @anywhere service today at SXSW during his keynote.

Will this become a game changer in the social media world?  If you are Twitter, hell yes.

The Twitter “At Anywhere” concept is simple, logical, and easy which is why it will probably be a huge success.  By just dropping some simple javascript code onto your website, Twitter will automatically link names of individuals or brands with their Twitter accounts.

Twitter has already signed a hearty bunch of major publishers to sign on at launch, not the least of which include the New York Times, YouTube, Huffington Post, Amazon, Bing, Digg, and eBay.

The proposed functions will work something like this.  Let’s say a New York Times columnist has a story posted on the NYTimes.com.  The byline in the article will automatically contain a link from the columnist’s name to the columnist’s Twitter profile.  Additionally, the people and companies (brands) that are mentioned in the article will also contain auto generated links to the Twitter profiles of those folks.

Upon hovering over the link, a small “info card” will come up showing you some details about the individual or brand’s profile.  From there, you can easily choose to follow the person.

The idea is to allow you to discover more Twitter profiles and interact with them without the need to leave the publisher’s website.

Historically, looking up a writer or blogger’s Twitter page was somewhat of a manual process.  You would have to search for that person’s twitter account, verify it is actually them, and then follow them.

This will serve to limit the amount of work required by each user to interact with these Twitter users.

As for Twitter’s potential growth, this will expose hundreds of thousands of Twitter profiles to the unsuspecting masses.  You might not know that your elected official has a Twitter account, or that a certain celebrity is a regular Tweeter.

The coming @anywhere system will streamline the discovery of new Twitter content for current and non-Twitter users.

How big is the email list for your blog?

Wait…what do you mean you don’t have a list?

You have no idea how much traffic, loyalty, and revenue you have already missed.

If you have a fairly new blog, you’re off the hook.  I will just assume you did not know any better.

However, if your site has been around a for while and you’re getting over a thousand visits a day, you should already be in the process of building an email list.

The benefits of good old-fashioned, home-grown email lists cannot be understated.

So how do you start your list?

First, you need an email system to manage your list. At BlogCraving, we use Aweber to run our mini courses and newsletters. Constant Contact is another good one that I’ve used in the past. I just prefer Aweber.

Once you’ve signed up, I believe both will allow you a 30 day free trial, so there’s no risk.

The next thing you have to do is start getting your blog readers to subscribe. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as it sounds. You could throw up a post that says, “Hey…sign up for my newsletter.”  You’ll probably get a few people to actually sign up, but not the volume that you are looking for.

Instead, you have to put a nice juicy reason out there for people to join your list. You are asking people to give you something that they find very private and valuable: their email address. You had better give them a great reason for giving it to you.

Unfortunately, spammers have ruined the names of good, honest emailers.  People are very cautious when giving out an address.

Therefore, you must offer valuable content and incentives to join. Whatever your niche is, put together some killer content that will only be available to newsletter subscribers. Tell them about all the great stuff that subscribers are going to get sent, like insider tips, knowledge, and timely alerts.

Of course, you then have to deliver on that promise.

With programs like Aweber, you can automate the sending of your emails. For example, you can automate the sending of 5-part emails and spread them over 5 weeks.

When a user signs up, they instantly receive content piece #1. Then over the next 4 weeks, they get 4 more content nuggets sent to them automatically.

It could be anything, as long as you are delivering great content value.

Remember, great content is the name of the game.

If your content is no good, you’ll know right away because you will see your unsubscribe rates drop like a rock. You should really spend extra time with your email auto responders or broadcasts. Make sure that your emails are something that people are going to WANT to get in their inbox.

What’s the benefit for you?

Your emails will drive visitors back to your site. From the email itself, you can drive people back to articles, sections, photos, and more on your site.  Every time a broadcast goes out, you will see an influx of traffic back to your site.

You can also include advertising messages in your emails. You don’t want your emails to look like a big Penny Saver flyer, but you can include some monetization elements.

For example, if you are running a “mommy blog” and find an affiliate program that Baby Gap is having a sale this weekend, you can include a subtle affiliate link back to BabyGap.com. Some folks might click it and buy some stuff, earning you a commission.

In that case, sales on baby clothes are seen as valuable content/information since your site is a “mommy blog.” Good advertising can actually be valuable content for your audience.

It is very easy to tell if you are sending people information they want. Just look at your unsubscribe rate. If you’re unsubscribe rate is low, and you are getting a handful of new subscribers each day, you are in excellent shape.

As your list grows, so does the value of your online product.

[Photo Credit]

[viddler id=a6466150&w=545&h=349]

Most of the advice published here on BlogCraving comes from the perspective of taking your hobby blog and turning it into a small business.  Do we mean “quit your day job” type business?  That would be awesome, but no.

By business we mean a site that can easily pay for itself (hosting cost and what not) as well as put a few extra bucks in your pocket each month.

For those that are really dedicated, you can keep your forward momentum going right into the kind of business that becomes a full-time job.

Unfortunately, what most people don’t realize is the time it takes to reach these milestones.

Waking up one day and deciding that you want to turn your hobby blog into a money-making enterprise is definitely the first step.  Congratulations!

Step 2: Don’t stop.  It won’t happen in 3 months.  It might not happen in 6 months.  Honestly, it may be well over a year before your site really starts to get traction.   That’s totally normal.

The trick is to just keep going.  There are so many opportunities along the way just give up.  It can be depressing in the early days when you don’t have many people reading your great content.  That’s ok.  Just keep moving forward.

Patience is the key.  And if you don’t believe me, take it from social media and video blogger Gary Vaynerchuk in the clip above.

If one ad unit is good, two ad units must be twice as good.  Right?

Not exactly.  One common mistake made by noob bloggers looking to start monetizing their sites is getting over excited by how easy it is to put up ads.

9 time out of 10, the new blogger joins every ad network they find and starts putting up one skyscraper after another.  Before you know it, there’s 8 ads on a single page from 4 different ad networks.

It’s a flashy, animated, blinking, weight loss, acai berry drinking good time all right.

Unfortunately, that means they’ve made one of the critical mistakes in blog business.  They took their eyes off the ball.

Content is your #1 priority.  Your users come first.

Don’t get me wrong, it is really exciting.  Here’s all these companies that want to hand you money just for putting their ads on your website.  Who wouldn’t get excited.  That’s why I can’t believe everyone isn’t blogging.

However, focusing all your time and attention on stuffing every available inch of your site with ads is a proven way to drive away the traffic you have worked so hard to attain.

When users feel like they are being bombarded with advertisements, they are going to get distracted from your content.  Eventually, they will lose interest.

Another problem that is often overlooked is the page load time of your site.  If you have a lot of different ad networks running on your blog, you have to make sure that they are not causing any page load delays.

Remember that each time your website is loaded by a user, a number of call outs to the ad network server are happening.  Each call out can ad loadtime and overall page weight to your site.

You can pretty easily spot these issues when you visit a poorly optimized blog.  The body content will load almost immediately.  Then it might be another second or two of delay before the right sidebars finally load.  Or perhaps only part of the sidebar loads followed a couple seconds later by the rest of it.

Page load time is a great way to drive away even more users.  The longer someone has to wait to surf around your site, the less likely they become to ever do it again.

When you are first starting out, try to resist temptation and just go with one ad network.  You can always switch or add more later.  From there, just pick 2-3 ad units and leave it at that.

There is the IAB standard pack that includes:  729×90 Leaderboard, 160×600 Skyscraper, and a 300×250 Square.  Just go with those and you will have all of the basic IAB standard sizes covered.