So you’ve spent all night writing a blog post that can only be described as the pièce de résistance to your dedicated followers. Clearly, you’re proud of what you’ve produced and you’ve poured some serious effort into developing an outstanding representation of what great content truly is.

But what do you do once you’ve posted that bright, shiny new blog entry and it’s dashed to bits in the comment section? First off, don’t be offended by the feedback about your masterpiece. Instead consider following some of these suggestions to help you work through any negative comments.

It’s Not Personal

Harsh comments can be tough pills to swallow, but remember that it’s not about you. It’s just about perspective. You’ll never be able to make your blog satisfy the opinions of all your subscribers. Plus, being able to produce content that sparks a debate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You’re setting up a place to inspire conversation and that’s a good thing.

Keep Calm

Take a deep breath and a step back before your respond to any negative blog comments. Remember that you’ve created a blog to exchange information with readers and ultimately, your readers come first. Take an objective stance and respond openly. If you find this person continually engaging in negative, abrasive or combative commenting consider flagging their comments and remove them from future posts.

Embrace The Feedback

Hate to say it, but comments on a blog post, both good and bad, demonstrate that you’re developing and sharing insightful topics that readers are connecting with. Brush your ego aside and roll with the punches. Use the comments from your readers as learning opportunities to help you create better posts and acknowledge different views.

Give Thanks

Strange as it may seem, thanking people for leaving blog comments is a great way to show that you’re focused on creating a transparent blog, not to mention that it is an easy way to involve readers by encouraging them to offer alternative ideas or solutions.

Depending upon how active and passionate your blog following is they may jump in and answer the negative comments for you. Make sure that you follow-up to show that you’re listening and open to discussion. It will show everyone that your blog community is a place where people can be themselves.

Have you experienced any tough situations with your own blog comments? Share with us.

Aside from the pre-installed Hello Dolly plugin that comes with your WordPress blog, there are thousands of other super useful add-ons that can boost the power and presence of your blog. Because your blog is the central feed to your social media efforts using these plugins will definitey help kick start it into gear. So, if your blog needs a little pick-me-up consider adding some of these fantastic finds and watch your traffic and subscriber numbers soar.

1. Akismet

If your blog is the castle, then Akismet is the fortress that surrounds it. Hands down Akismet is the best anti-spam plugin available for WordPress. It’s like the ‘sorting hat‘ from Harry Potter (a reference that reveals my true geek nature) – it knows what’s good, bad and questionable in the blink of an eye. Set-up is easy and it keeps the spammers out plain and simple.

2. WP Super Cache

This plugin uses a static HTML version of your blog to reduce the browser’s load time. This means that users can view your blog more quickly and it minimizes CPU processing compared to WordPress on its own. When users experience a faster blog load time they tend to stick around longer and explore a bit more too.

3. WordPress Related Posts

Keep your blog readers interested in what you’ve written by showing them similar posts. Through a tagging identification feature, related posts are gathered and appear at the bottom of corresponding entries. Related posts are a great way to encourage your blog subscribers to delve into other topics that you’ve blogged about.

4. Disqus Comments

Pronounced discuss, this powerful comment system and moderation tool is essential for any blog. Disqus provides SEO-friendly comments, automatic backup to WordPress and accepts imports of existing comments without a hitch. A fantastic plugin that also alerts you to new comments so that you can welcome people to your blog and thank them for providing feedback.

5. Google Analyticator

Instead of having to view Google Analytic data outside of WordPress you can install this handy plugin and see it on your dashboard. You can choose from several different widgets that can be used display various analytic information in the admin section of your blog.

6. Google XML Sitemap

Another powerful plugin that helps the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com) find and index your blog is XML Sitemap. You need to index in order to be found and with the creation of a sitemap you’re making it much simpler for the crawlers to see a complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

7. FD Feedburner Plugin

Without subscribers your blog is like a compass without direction, pretty pointless. Give your readers a reason to stick around and read what you produce by creating an RSS feed (and including a subscribe button). Use this plugin for an effortless set-up that seamlessly connect your Feedburner feed and your blog together. No fuss, no muss.

8. Sociable

Choose from more than 99 different social media networks to display with your blog posts and give readers the opportunity to share with others. There are a ton of social media plugins on WordPress, but this one’s great because it’s compact, features simple settings and it connects to just about any social network that you can think of.

9. Comment Luv

A nice way to thank your blog’s comment contributors is to let them show a link to the last post from their own blog. This is a super way to help share some link juice with the people who are supporting your blog. The only downfall is that Comment Luv cannot be used in tandem with Disqus Comments. Sigh.

10. WP-Stats Dashboard

A-mazing! Display your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more. Once you install this plugin you’ll wonder how you ever managed to track your social media worth without it.

11. Post Video and Photo Galleries

An all-in-one plugin from Cincopa that let’s you add image galleries, slideshows, video, music playlists, podcasts and more to your blog. You get automatic photo resizing, video transcribing and mobile solutions for all things multimedia. This plugin can transform your blog into a visual and audible masterpiece.

12. Brokenlink Checker

Use this plugin to detect any links that are broken or missing from posts, pages, blogrolls and custom fields. It even seeks out missing images and alerts you when it finds them. As your blog grows and you’re connecting more and more internal pages with one another, as well as external, this plugin can be an enormous help in maintaining a clean and error free blog for your readers.

13. Platinum SEO Pack

The uber popular All-in-One-SEO plugin is good, but Platinum SEO is even better. Download this plugin and optimize your website with all the awesome features of All-in-One plus a few extras like generating SEO-relevant metadata, avoid duplication of content and optimize page and post titles for better visibility among the search engines.

14. SEO Friendly Images

Don’t overlook the power of images used in your blog. They can be a boon to your search engine rankings if you take the time to optimize the ALT and TITLE attributes. Using keywords in these two fields allow search engines to pull your blog up when user searches for a certain image or phrase. This plugin makes managing your images easy as pie.

15. Revision Control

For every change, edit or update that you make to a blog post, WordPress saves a backup. These revision backups can multiply quickly and turn the size of a small single post into a large file. The Revision Control plugin let’s you restrict the number of revisions to only the most recent few.

16. PostMash – Custom Post Order

WordPress lists your blog posts in chronological order, but sometimes you might find that you’d like to have a bit more control on how posts are ordered. That’s where PostMash comes in. This little plugin let’s  you customize the order of your posts with a drag-and-drop feature. Let’s say you wrote a popular post that you want to display prominently and continuously above all newly created posts – PostMash can make that happen.

17. No Self Pings

When you internally link articles and posts to each other within your blog it creates pings. Unfortunately, these pings hit your comment area and it can make it frustrating to track external pingbacks compared to the ones that you’ve generated on your own. This plugin stops the self pings so that you’re left with a trail of pings generated purely from your fans.

18. Post Ideas

You never know when inspiration is going to grab you and feed you with an idea for a new blog topic. Use Post Ideas to manage your thoughts, sort your ideas and track them through keywords and research URLs. It comes complete with edit, delete and write options so that your ideas stay organized.

Starting up a blog is pretty simple, but maintaining and cultivating a following for it can be a bit more challenging. If you’ve got the ambition to begin a blog, invest some time and thought into making it a solid one and cover all your bases. Whether you’re launching your first company blog, beginning one for a client or setting up a personal blog spot for yourself, avoiding some of these common mistakes will give your blog a fighting chance in a sea of many.

1. Not being consistent. You don’t have to post multiple times in a day. Leave that to the news sites. You should try to post on a regular basis. Without fresh content, your readers will move on to greener blog pastures. Give your fans something to read and try to do it weekly.

2. Forgetting your subscribe button. Syndication feeds allow your subscribers to keep track of your blog’s new posts and updates. Make it easy for your readers and passers-by to follow your blog with a simple click. Blogs that aren’t prominently displaying an RSS button are missing out on potential fans.

3. No promotional efforts. Your blog is an extension of you, and perhaps, even your business. Market and promote it just like you would for any other product or service. Integrate your blog into your social media profiles. Sync your posts with social media status updates to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Bookmark some of your favorite blog posts (don’t bookmark all of them or it will come across as being to self-serving and spammy).

4. Lacking persistence. The world’s top bloggers didn’t find themselves there overnight. It’s taken them years to build a following, establish a blog persona and produce content that their blog audience relates to and identifies with. Don’t compare your blog to others. Focus on bringing new and timely information to your readers that they’ll appreciate and want.

5. Not having good headlines. The headline of your blog post is what people will see and read first before anything else. You don’t need to make it clever or catchy. Be succinct and summarize exactly what you’ve written. Less is more when it comes to blog headlines. Try to aim for less than 10 words.

Writing a blog requires time, dedication and patience. Blogs are a great way to interact with others and build wonderful social connections. This is especially true when you create a well-written post that resonates with others. It’s a rewarding feeling to receive feedback on how your post has been received, as well as how it’s perceived. Stick with your blog and don’t give up.

What are some other blog mistakes that should be avoided? Please share and add below.

You might be one of the most talented writers in the world with some of the most innovative ideas for blog posts, but all of it means zilch if you don’t have an audience. You need to get your blog noticed if you want to grow your readership base and sometimes that’s more easily said than done. Below are some tips to get you moving in the right direction, however, it is not a comprehensive list and there are certainly many other ways to increase traffic. But for now, we thought sharing a few of the basics would be a good place to start.

1. RSS Feed

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is the format used to deliver changing web content. Prominently feature an RSS button on your blog so that people can subscribe to your posts. Surprisingly, there are many blogs that have buried their RSS buttons among the sidebar clutter and others that have neglected to include a RSS button entirely. Make sure that you’ve got yours front and center.

2. Index Your Blog

A super important step, but sometimes overlooked one, is indexing. Folks, you do this for your website and your blog is no exception. You deserve to be noticed and read by search engines. Don’t cheat yourself from search engine page rankings and the opportunity for people to find you through Google, Yahoo! or what have you. At the risk of sounding like Martha Stewart, indexing is a good thing.

3. Grab ‘Em With A Headline

Headlines are important because it’s your big chance to hook your readers. Think of headlines as synopsis of your blog post in 10 words or less. No need to get clever or sales pitchy. Just let people know exactly what you’ve written and what they can expect to read. Since most internet users are looking for info, including blog posts with ‘how to‘ in their titles can pull in readers quite well.

4. Publish Frequently

Far too often, blogs start out with a heap of motivation and drive, but end in neglect. Keeping readers engaged means posting often and routinely. Without regular content, readers lose interest. Blogging takes some commitment and a certain level of care regarding the readers that you’re producing for. Treat them well and they’ll reward you back as loyal subscribers and promoters of your blog.

5. Shameless Email Promotion

Chances are you probably only update your blog once a day, but you probably email multiple times in an hour. Include a link to your blog in the signature of all your emails. Consider using a service like Wisestamp to create an electronic signature that features a link to your blog. Easy and effective marketing.

6. Link to Other Blogs

The sidebars of most blogs are a mecca of data and details, one in particular is the blogroll. Blogrolls are link collections to other blogs that you find to be inspiring, resourceful or humorous. However you choose to organize your blogroll, featuring links to other related blogs gives your readers additional places to go to for more information. Blogroll etiquette states that when you link someone in your blogroll that they should reciprocate in theirs. A nice way to expand your social circle. It also gets you recognized by other bloggers who track the blogroll universe and that can help you build your social network. Which leads us to tip numero siete.

7. Guest Blogging and Bloggers

Use your social network to invite other well-known bloggers to contribute an exclusive post to your blog site. This is a nice way to generate some buzz about who you are and share some of your guest blogger’s vigilant fans. On that same token, volunteer yourself to guest blog for a fellow colleague in your industry. Try not to think of blogging as a competition, but instead as a place to help others by sharing your expertise and empowering them to experiment and implement on their own.

8. Syndication

The power of social media ranks right up their with the Jedi masters (ok, maybe not quite, but it’s pretty strong). When you publish fresh content to your blog make sure that you send and share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and your other social media sites. There are tons of fantastic social media aggregator tools available that can help you syndicate your blog feed with just a simple click of your mouse.

9. Use Share Buttons

Share buttons like the tweetmeme give your readers additional opportunities to share your content with others. There are many different plugins, add-ons and widgets available that you can include in your blog to make it easy for others to spread the good word about your latest publishings.

Hope these suggested tips are helpful. Please let us know about others that you’ve tried or are currently using.

Less than two years old, the blogging platform Posterous (pronounced PO-sterous) has quickly become a major part of the social media world. It’s completely reinvented the way that people upload and share blog posts, videos, photos and more. Because of its simplicity, Posterous makes blog updating completely effortless. Here’s a rundown on Posterous and why you should be using it.

To understand what Posterous is pretend that you have a line and on one end is traditional blogging, think WordPress and Moveable Type, and on the other end is micro-blogging, like Twitter. In between these two formats is Posterous, which can best be described as mini-blogging. And, when Posterous says that it’s ‘the dead simple place to post everything’ they aren’t kidding around.

Using your own email account users can submit MP3s, photos, videos, files, blogs and just about anything else that you can think of. Whatever you write or attach to your email is automatically posted to your Posterous account with the push of a ‘send’ button. We’ve put together 10 useful tips and highlights to help you get the most out of Posterous and to get you up and running with Posterous in no time.

1.  A Social Media Posting Roundup

By using your personal email account, you can submit posts via Posterous to an array of social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, Xanga and more. You can even do a test run just to see what a post would look like before you join the community. Through a very simple email address system, users can pick and choose where they’d like share their content.

• post@posterous.com creates a public post and automatically shares to the social medias services you’ve set up.
• private@posterous.com creates a non-public post.
• post.posterous@posterous.com makes a public post that is not automatically tweeted.

Here’s where you can get creative with your posting. By combining different social media recipients, you can direct your posts to specific platforms. For instance:

• twitter@posterous.com spreads your post only via Twitter.
• twitter+facebook@posterous.com spreads your post via Twitter and Facebook.
• wordpress@posterous.com delivers to your traditional blog.

You can even post to different Posterous blogs that you’ve created. For example, xanga@janesmith.posterous.com will  send a post to Xanga and Jane’s Posterous site at http://janesmith.posterous.com. Pretty cool.

2. Kicking Code To The Curb

Another convenient Posterous feature is the elimination of copy and pasting embed code for photos and videos that you want to share in your posts. This makes integrating clips from YouTube and pictures from Flickr a breeze. Posterous automatically takes the URL of the item that you’ve selected and converts and embeds for you. All you have to do is email a link and Posterous takes care of the rest. Nice.

3.  Select And Share It

The bookmarklet option can be installed on your browser with a simple drag and drop. Once it’s there you’ll be able to instantly post anything that you find on the web. Highlight text, share a show from Hulu or a song from SoundCloud – the Posterous bookmarklet takes a quick click and your internet find is instantly included.

4.  Come One, Come All

Do you have multiple blog contributors? Well, Posterous can help with that too. Your various bloggers don’t need to create individual accounts. Yep, you heard it right. They use the primary Posterous site that you created and email posts straight from their own email accounts by sending to post@sitename.posterous.com. Each contributor will be notified when a new post is made or when a comment is left.

5.  It’s All About Me, Me, Me

Users can choose from a handful of standard layouts and templates to customize their sites. But, if you’re searching for something more personalized, you can use the CSS/HTML options available to dress things up to your liking.

A standard domain name is assigned with each Posterous account (sitename.posterous.com), however you can make a vanity URL that points the address in your name server to Posterous’ web servers.

Further customization ties into inline picture posting. When users post photos Posterous automatically converts them to gallery view (where readers click from picture to picture), but if that’s not your style you can include ‘((no gallery))’ in the subject line and voila! – photos can be viewed one after the next.

6.  Tag, You’re It

Tagging is used to organize information and make it easier to for others to identify what they’re looking for during general searches. Think of tagging like anindex in the back of a book. When you post from your email account you can specify what tags you want associated with your post. In the subject line include ‘((tags: coffee, latte, Colorado))’ and you’re done.

7.  It’s So Nice To Meet You

It’s tough for many businesses to adapt to social media. There’s so much out there and deciding what’s best for their company can be difficult. Posterous lets businesses connect their current website to a new social media service. It’s a wonderful way to introduce social media to your business and your audience.

8.  Testing 1, 2, 3

With a traditional blog, you’re limited in terms of what type of content can be shared and with what audience. For instance, if you blog about butterflies and their migration habits and that’s what your blog base has come to know and rely on, it might be tricky to test out blog posts about wing colors or fluttering patterns. With Posterous, you can test out different angles and sub-topics that wouldn’t necessarily float (pathetic pun with the butterfly example) with your readers.

9.  Seeing Is Believing

An added bonus with Posterous is how quickly Google indexes their blogs. That added exposure might be just enough bump that a business needs to climb the search ranking ladder.

10.  Let Yourself Be Heard

Engage with different audiences by expanding different social content. Try using a different tone and style to reach new people and express your views.

On a side note, if you have a built-in signature in your email that you don’t want included when you email your posts just type ‘#end’ after your content in the body of the email. Posterous will not post beyond that hashtag. Definitely give Posterous a try and let us know what you think and how you’re using it. We’d love to hear from you.

By the way, this entire post was published to the company blog and Posterous blog site using our email account.