Having a blog has become as essential as having a website. Everyone from the housewife down the block to the Fortune 500 company on Fifth Avenue has a blog. According to BlogPulse.com, there were 126 million (and counting…) blogs in 2009. This sudden burst of blogs has been made possible with applications such as Wordpress, Blogger, and Tumblr—which allow novices to whip up their own blogs in minutes.

However, not all blogs are created equal. If you don’t keep up with blogging trends, and think in a smart way about your blog, you may be lumped into the 126 million (and counting…) blogs and go totally unnoticed—and that would be a bummer!

Here are some tips to make your blog more intelligent:

1. Exchange Content for Emails

If your blog is already attracting an audience, why not offer exclusive content to your users in exchange for their email addresses? Sending an email newsletter with content not seen on your public blog, or offering an exclusive download, such as an eBook, will ensure that you give users a reason to hand over their addresses. By building an email list, you can keep track of how often your visitors frequent your site.

Example: I Heart Luxe’s weekly newsletters offers members exclusive content not found on its site.

Example: Travel blog Everything Everywhere gives subscribers a free eBook of blogger/professional travel enthusiast Gary Arnd’s 25 favorite travel photos (in high resolution) when they sign up for email updates.

2. Show Off Your Numbers
Displaying the number of Tweets, Diggs, or Shares your site or post has received will not only show that you have actual readers (hooray!), it will also encourage those readers to share your content and join those numbers.

Example: Smashing magazine displays the current tally of the hundreds of thousands of readers and Twitter followers it has accumulated.

Example: Mashable displays the number of Retweets, Shares, and Diggs for each post. 1,492 Retweets—now that’s just outright bragging!

3. Ask Your Readers for Content
Encourage users to engage in your blog by inviting them to send photos, tips, or thoughts on a particular subject. Most likely your readers are visiting your blog for a reason—and they may know just as much as you (or perhaps even more than you) about the subject of your blog. Inviting readers to submit content creates a sense of community and engages your audience.

Example: Gawker.com makes it inviting and simple to send a tip to its site.

Example: Consumer Reports wanted to predict what its members might want to know about the new iPad before it was reviewed. Readers were asked to post their questions in the comments section of any blog posting.

4. Make It Mobile Friendly
Since blogs have often become a source for instant updates and alerts, it’s important to make your blog mobile friendly. Mobify is a free service that translates your Wordpress blog into a mobile-friendly site supported on up to 500 mobile devices. Another alternative is Google Reader, which generates a mobile view of your RSS feed.

Example: Engadget offers iPhone and other mobile apps for its readers to download.

5. Integrate Facebook
Readers logged into their Facebook accounts will be able to see their friends’ activity on your blog. If there isn’t enough activity, posts with the most recommendations among all of your readers will be displayed. This a great feature for integrating personalized content into your blog—and it’s all in the hands of Facebook. Just fill out a simple form and paste the code on your blog. Set up your site here.

Example: The NHL displays Facebook-recommended posts—you can see what posts your buddies are reading and sharing about your favorite hockey teams and players.

6. Create a Widget You Can Share with Other Blogs
You can share a feed of your blog’s content by creating a grabbable widget for readers to put on their own sites or blogs. You don’t have to be a developer to create a widget—Widgetbox makes one for you as long as you have an RSS feed, or a feed from YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, or one of several other media sites.

Example: Readers or bloggers can post a feed of the latest news from MTV on their own Facebook, Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, or any of dozens of other personal sites.

7. Get Creative with Ad Space
In some cases advertising is an essential means of maintaining a blog. However, conscious consumers are becoming too savvy to click on an obvious ad, and bloggers are having to give up precious real estate for advertising instead of using it for content. There are more-innovative ways to make money with your blog while conserving space.

Example: Abduzeedo, a graphic design and photoshop tutorial blog, displays an ad wall in its footer—a series of 36 favicon-style GIFs that link to advertisers’ sites. This is a smart and space-saving method to display ads without cluttering your site. (It’s also quite lucrative!)

Example: Just Jared uses an ad network called Pixazza, which matches apparel seen in photos from online retailers such as Macy’s, BlueFly, and Shopbop. With just a click, readers can buy the very same outfit Gwen Stefani is wearing in a paparazzi photo. The ad network’s website doesn’t do a good job of explaining exactly how this works—so I’m just going to assume it’s magic!

8. Make It Fun to Share
Using the Meebo Bar, users can drag and drop stories into their favorite social media sites to share with friends. Instead of monotonously clicking one button, users feel that they are sharing and engaging by dragging and dropping posts.

Example: TMZ uses Meebo to share posts and can view statistics about shares all in one place.

If you own a successful brick-and-mortar store, you’ve built it by providing high-quality products or services to your customers. You’ve earned their trust for a variety of reasons: they found what they needed, they like your prices, their friends shop with you, you’ve been around for years…and so on. So how do you build the same trust and confidence with an online store?

Trust can be lost quickly, especially online. We ask a lot from online customers, and their suspicions are already on high alert for fraud, identity theft, hacking, spam and other risks. Not only do we want them to buy our product, but we also require their email, street address, credit card and any other info we can squeeze out of them – which is very different than walking into a store, dropping a few bills and leaving. So here are a few best practices that will put your online shoppers at ease, build customer loyalty and, most importantly, increase conversion rates.

Define your brand

Customers want to interact with distinctive and professional brands that they can believe in and be proud to shop.  Having a strong store name and domain is a great start. Try to avoid hyphens and cute misspellings when choosing a domain name – those can work well for content-driven or social media sites, but can be negative factors for selling products.

Your store’s visual design should be unique, and your messaging needs to be well written. Users can smell a purchased design template from a mile away and will suspect something fishy if they’ve seen stores similar to yours. Your store should be clean but not sterile, so look for ways to infuse your brand personality into your design and copywriting.

Seamless user experience

Your user interface design shouldn’t stray from what consumers have learned to expect from online shopping. As e-commerce has matured over the last decade, it’s established standards that shoppers rely on and demand. Don’t create funky new ways of browsing for products or checking out – continue to build trust with an experience that feels familiar and natural to your customers. There’s nothing wrong with taking cues from the best online stores and emulating their shopping process.

Pay close attention to every point where visitors interact with you. From product browsing through checkout, to email communications, packaging, reliable delivery and confirmation – consistency is essential for building trust. Detail the steps for completing a purchase and aim to under-promise and over-deliver.

That’s what they said

Spotlight your awards, success stories and security measures. Testimonials are great, but people are often suspicious of praise from unknown customers with no last name, so establish your success and reliability in other ways as well. Don’t be afraid to publicize your increase in sales, registered members or traffic. Back up your stats by linking them to reports provided by third-party tools like Alexa or Compete.com. Tout your privacy policies, seals of approval and security certificates.  All of this will help allay customers’ concerns, make them comfortable, and help them feel more secure about your business.

Doing press releases, thought leadership pieces and blogging can position your store as authoritative and sophisticated. You’d be surprised how many shoppers want to get the backstory on your store before they’re willing to enter their digits.

Community

Depending on your store and demographic, building Facebook, Twitter and other social media communities can ease doubt and enable customers to share stories about your shop and products. Be careful to keep a close eye on these communities and monitor the conversations. It’s likely you’ll get some negative comments that you’ll want to respond to quickly. You should always be open to criticism, fess up to your mistakes and explain what steps you’re taking to address them, and inform your customers about your plans for improvement.

Convey, build, and keep trust with your consumers, and they’ll return to your store again and again.

I’m a Verizon girl. I love having my cable, Internet, phone, and mobile service all under one roof. If I could buy my music or groceries from Verizon, I would. What’s troubled me recently is my curiosity about and envy of those iPhone owners who have all the coolest and most useful apps and features at their fingertips.

I recently began contemplating purchasing an iPhone and breaking my Verizon contract when I found out that Martha Stewart has an app. How cool would it be if, while frantically racing down the aisles at Whole Foods trying to figure out what to make for dinner, I could search thousands of recipes and create a shopping list on my iPhone?

What’s a Verizon lover to do?

After the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Verizon is in serious talks with Apple to produce an iPhone by the end of 2010, I realized that my long wait might just be over and I wouldn’t have to betray my faith in Big Red.

What does this mean for future Verizon iPhone users?

While some diehard iPhone fans are skeptical about the compatibility of apps with Verizon, analysts say that as long as the apps work with the Apple operating system there should be no problem. However, Verizon’s CDMA wireless network doesn’t support some of the iPhone’s advertised features, such as multiple-party conference calling and the ability to let customers talk while using data.

Analysts predict that Verizon could add as many as 3.5 million new iPhone users to the market within only six months of the Verizon iPhone release. For iPhone app designers and developers this means an exponential growth in the demand for apps, as well as an increase in iPhone advertising because of the surge in users.

As the official announcement of the release date for the Verizon iPhone draws near, there will be more details and reassurance from Verizon and Apple that we’ll have all the compatibility and features that AT&T has been offering with its iPhone.

For now I can rest assured that my options will apparently remain open and I will no longer be shut out of the iPhone experience.

There seems to be another scammy trend brewing in email marketing. Recently I’ve been receiving email promotions from brands with subject lines apologizing for a mistake or retracting a misstatement. I like to forgive and forget as much as the next guy, but when the apology requested is nothing more than a trick to get me to open an email, I’m opting out.

Okay, I admit it, I’ve fallen for the trick a few times. Most such emails are from smaller companies hurting for revenue, but some are from brands that are well established and trusted. Just recently I received an email apology from TripAdvisor (a site I always use when planning a trip, by the way).

TripAdvisor’s subject line was: “Oops we had a glitch.” Inside was a copy of an email I had received the day before about its Travelers’ Choice 2010 Awards, which I had clicked through earlier without a glitch. The message said:

“Our Travelers’ Choice announcement was so popular this week, many readers couldn’t access the results. They’re available now.

Apologies and many thanks,
TripAdvisor.”

It’s hard to believe that TripAdvisor’s sophisticated servers crashed due to the high volume of visitors from this email campaign, but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the company really had a “glitch” and should apologize. Was there a better way to handle this?

My first recommendation would be to make the subject line less ambiguous–and, in fact, less intriguing. If it’s really an apology, save me time and let me know directly in the subject line that there was a problem with the Travelers’ Choice 2010 Awards. Brands should be honest and accountable for their mistakes—but if this is a tactic to improve open rates disguised as an apology, it will ultimately diminish the site’s credibility.

TripAdvisor could easily have promoted its awards within another value-added email promotion, by using search marketing, on its website, or through other avenues. Brand loyalty must be earned over time, but it can be destroyed quickly through overzealous marketing.

Customers form their opinions of you based on your value and how you treat them. Treat them with respect and they’ll be loyal forever.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday may have come and gone but the spending season has just begun and if you have an iPhone, as nightmarish as it may seem, every minute of every day can be Cyber WhateverDay.

Like the DVR did away with having to clear your schedule to make it home to watch your favorite show at 9PM, dedicated shopping apps can let you shop whenever you feel like it without having to rush home to your laptop or even worse – the store.

Amazon Mobile

With about a year on the competition, Amazon Mobile has had some time to refine what was an already great app last holiday season. Being able to see an item in a b&m store, look it up on Amazon, find a better price and purchase it before you even make it back to your car is a pretty cool experience.

Best Buy

Best Buy’s app provides great interaction with their physical stores by allowing you to search inventory and reserve an item at a location close to you. I did find that I had to jump through as many hoops as I would have to on the desktop to actually place an order, which is something that the Amazon app managed to avoid. But still, being able to browse the weekly ad and see what they have on sale saves you a little time digging through the newspaper and a bunch of time actually going to the store.

Target

The Target app has the most limited purchasing options of the three. You can browse anything in the store and like the Best Buy app, see the weekly ad deals, but if you want to purchase an item, you are kicked over to the full-flavor html site which really defeats the whole purpose of mobile shopping. The coolest thing the Target app does though is allow you to set your local store and not only will it tell you if an item is in stock – it will tell you what aisle you can find it in.

Mobile shopping is still in it’s infancy but the experience is really beginning to take shape. Already there are expectations forming of just how the experience should work and it’s interesting to see all the major players take a stab to see what works.

For b&m stores, location awareness, stock checking and item reservation are a must because they save customers time and pull customers into the store. For online-only stores, robust personalization options and one-click purchasing (or as close as you can get to it) are important to recreating the impulse purchase, press-a-button-and-get-it experience that has worked so well for Apple’s iTunes and AppStore.

I’ve worked at Loewy Design for five years, and over time I’ve noticed a growing trend in requests for content management systems (CMS). After building out a handful, I noticed another trend that struck me as odd. Some of the clients wanted me to make edits to their sites post-launch, even though I had just handed them a fully functional, easy-to-use CMS.

How could this be? Did I do something wrong? Was the training I gave them on the software not good enough? A lot of thoughts like these ran through my mind. Maybe, or perhaps…there’s more to this trend.

I’ve noted that the clients who end up not using their new CMS software have these traits in common:

1. They’re terrified of breaking something.
   Even though it’s been explained to them that it would be very hard, if not impossible, to truly “break” the site, they still show tremendous trepidation about hitting that save button.
2. They’ve underestimated the learning curve
   Everything new has a learning curve to it. Although we strive to use the simplest systems out there, everyone learns at his or her own pace, and some people pick up things faster than others. Either frustration sets in, or it’s too costly for them to spend all day playing with new software. And some people just don’t want to learn anything new.
3. They generally work for larger companies
   Strangely enough, the companies that have larger budgets are the ones that don’t tend to use the systems. Clients like the idea of being able to manage their own websites, but quickly realize that although a CMS is easy to use it’s another task they need to add to their busy schedules.

My third point brings me to a question: “How do you, as the client, know when a CMS is needed?”

There are lots of possible scenarios, but in general, if you have a little time to invest in learning the software and a good development team supporting you along the way, you can’t beat the value and independence a CMS provides.

The recent widespread rise in popularity enjoyed by content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and MODx has changed the way clients feel about their websites. No longer are they just hiring someone to build something. They are now really part of the process: able to affect their websites directly, without needing any programming knowledge or having to pick up the phone.

So are you ready to move to a CMS?

The relentless commercials for remote backup almost had me convinced to retire my arcane system of external usb drives and cases of DVDs on my bookshelf. Then a couple of weeks ago that little bit of doubt I was feeling became a reality for users of the T-Mobile Sidekick when a server failure at Microsoft’s Danger division left them holding a dataless hunk of plastic. Sidekicks rely on the servers at Danger to store things like contacts, photographs, notes, to-do-lists and other important user data. Sidekick users could do little but wait for Microsoft to restore the data. The interruption was so bad that T-Mobile temporarily stopped selling Sidekicks.

Periodic outages of cloud based services are to be expected but you would never guess that with the dependency that many of us have on them. Take Gmail for instance – when it goes down for even a minute people freak out. (Hopefully Twitter is available for you to see that link.) Now imagine if your Gmail account just goes poof one day. Unlikely, but many of us would be crushed because backing up Gmail is just not something people do and as a result, our only copy of some of our most important information is in the hands of Google. And that’s the real crux of the problem – the instant gratification of not having to worry about physical media backup is at odds with the long term realization that our important data is in the hands of others. Is the Sidekick issue a hint of what’s to come? Are we doomed to an event of large scale data loss?

We’ve been trained that backing up our data is our responsibility, and I may feel like I am doing the responsible thing by utilizing a remote backup service as a safety net in case of fire or theft, but it’s looking like I may have to start – you guessed it – backing up my online data to physical media in my home. Think of the absurdity of remotely backing up my data to Carbonite for example and re-backing that up to over a hundred DVDs. Anybody looking for a job as a professional backer-upper?

Recently a client asked us for our opinion on a Digimag (or whatever-you-call-it) service called Ceros. I’ve seen this technology grow in popularity over the years, and I have to admit Ceros has taken it to a higher plane. Their product and experience is rich with video, animation and interactivity – but so what.

I can see how print publishers would really love for this page-flipping technology to take off. Their print advertising windows are closing quickly, yet their online advertising windows are not opening fast enough. With Digimags, they are offering an online add-on, attempting to close the deal with the advertiser on that expensive print inside cover or center spread.  In my opinion, this is just another way of putting off the inevitable transition from print to true online publishing – publishing that is centered around knowledge exchange, content that takes place on a variety of platforms and advertising programs based on audience relevance and brand engagement.

Furthermore, is there really a mass audience for Digimags? Nxtbook Media, another digital magazine service, has an interesting real-time map illustrating how often Digimags are read across the globe.  While this is a cool use of Google’s API, showing a reader or two per second – this map is an insult to a publisher’s intelligence.  According to their site, 1.3 million people read a Digimag per month.  That sounds like a lot – but it pales in comparison to the number of people who read online magazines every day.

Digimags are not the panacea for publishers’ woes.  They sacrifice the standards and best practices of web publishing. The content has poor search visibility; there is no room for user-generated content; you need to click and enlarge to read; and you have to drag your electronic paper around to navigate.  Perhaps their future is better suited to a different device, such as the Kindle, as stated in this article.

Finally, producing an issue of a Digimag can cost as much as $100 per page.  Why not put that towards building a sustainable online magazine for your audience and your advertisers?

If you haven’t seen it yet, Worth recently redesigned their website. Back in my magazine publishing days, I was a big fan of Worth from a design and editorial point of view. They consistently produced provocative covers and nicely designed features, and used innovative illustration. The new online version is a bit of a disappointment, especially in the innovation department.

I would give the new site a passing grade for design and branding, but an Incomplete for its business model and user experience. Some minor issues, starting from the top: the global navigation labels are a bit cryptic. When it comes to global navigation, say it like it is. Section titles that have double meanings, like “Live” (“Live long and prosper” or “Live, it’s Saturday Night”) and “Make” (I won’t get into the ambiguous meanings of that one) are too conceptual and not descriptive enough. Your audience wants to navigate quickly, so don’t make your road signs confusing.

Another mystery is why designate so much prime real estate to a stock market ticker in the top right corner? This affluent community is checking their live market reports through other sources, so I would use this space more wisely.

My biggest question relates to the sustainability of this model in today’s online marketplace. If you are going through a redesign, you need to think far beyond advertising as your only revenue stream. Worth has a nice advisor section which could require paid listings but where’s the community aspect to this site? Worth needs to make users their partners in their online operations.

For example, there’s no way a user can comment on a story, contribute to a blog, subscribe to an RSS feed or even an email newsletter.  Are they not building a database?  Where are the plans for bringing this audience of high-worth individuals together with forums, groups and mobile? Once you’ve got them together you can start monetizing and building different revenue streams.  Perhaps charging for listings in a vendor marketplace; posting jobs; offering premium research (leads) or tools; charging for whitepapers and reports; building affiliate programs…the list goes on. There are many different revenue opportunities for a site like this that should be tested.  Without the community tools and infrastructure in place, there’s nowhere to start.

The community aspect might be in future plans and can always be integrated later — but at this point in time, I don’t think this redesign was really Worth it.

With the recent release of the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, the lure to take your site mobile will be stronger than ever—but should you?

Loading up your site on a mobile browser can be a real eye-opener. In a best-case scenario, what you’re greeted with is a smaller version of the site you are used to seeing on your desktop. Although devices like the iPhone are more than capable of viewing “full” HTML websites, all that double tapping and pinching can get pretty tiresome.

The reality is that not all sites are particularly suited to having a “to go” version. Of course, there are the obvious ones—news, weather, finance—but most of these areas are pretty well served by the built-in apps on mobile devices. It takes some creativity to figure out what makes your particular business work on the go. So when considering the mobile option there are some important questions to ask:

What part of my site would be the most valuable to somebody on the go?
This could be as simple as your contact information—a mobile business card of sorts. I know I’ve been in situations where I was looking for a phone number or directions and went to a company’s homepage to find them. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes not so much. Ideally, a site will have a properly formatted phone number that becomes clickable allowing one-touch dialing. Adding in a link to your location on Google Maps will make you that much more accessible.

Am I doing email marketing?
One of the most common uses of mobile devices is for checking email. If somebody decides to follow a link in your email creative, it’s definitely at least worth a look to see what he or she would be presented with. Creating a mobile-specific landing page for your email creative could be a nice, low-impact way to experiment with incorporating mobile into your online strategy.

Could I trim my site down to just the basics and be happy with it?
Is it even possible to distill your site into small bite-sized chunks? Sites that are more information heavy, requiring users to spend time flipping through each section, fill out forms or pore through material in large PDFs are obviously not places somebody wants to visit on the go.

Do I want to maintain multiple versions of my site?
And you thought the early days of the web with browser-specific versions of your site were over. With browser detection and alternate CSS files used to serve up a mobile version of your site while keeping your full site intact for desktop visitors, the process is more manageable now. Still, you will have to consider the implications of any architectural changes across multiple platforms—although the statistics seem to support targeting iPhone if you just want to get your feet wet with mobile. According to Net Applications, of all mobile browsing platforms, iPhone has the largest market share with almost 65% as of May 2009. Google’s Android is in a distant second with almost 8.5%. As of this post, data still isn’t available for WebOS – the operating system use on the Palm Pre.

So is now the time to fire up the grill and get started on a mobile presence? It would seem so. At the  least it’s definitely time to start thinking about it.