For example, some of the team behind Top Gear will often leak when the next season is going to start long before it’s officially announced on their website.

As these messages are usually straight from the horse’s mouth, they can be great reference material for a blog post. When discussing the particular ‘tweet’, you can simply type out the content of the message into your blog post but it’s a lot more visually appealing, and can appear to be more trustworthy, if you actually display the tweet itself within your post.

By the way, I feel like I’ve been using a lot of capital letters recently so for the purposes of this post I’m going to type tweet with a small ‘t’. This may or may not be correct. Sue me.

There are two methods to display a tweet in your blog. One is through taking a screenshot of that tweet and uploading that to your blog. This can help you to future-proof the tweet as it will be stored as your own image so even if that person then removes their tweet, you’ll still have a copy.

The second method is to use Twitter’s tools to embed the tweet in your post. This allows for a greater deal of interaction with the tweet itself – known as ‘web intents‘. In some ways, this can be quicker and easier than taking a screenshot and uploading an image at the correct dimensions. Here’s how this looks:

Worth travelling the world for the sale of a good New Zealand Flat White…

— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) February 16, 2012

Twitter often play around with their design and layout but the following gives you an idea of how to embed a tweet as at February 2012.

As an example, I’ll use a tweet from the fantastic Stephen Fry who is currently filming in New Zealand and, right about now, raving about how awesome our country is.

Step 1. Open the Tweet

On a Twitter user’s update stream, you can hover over a particular tweet to display a few options – reply, retweet, favorite, and finally, open.

Clicking on open expands the tweet window to display information about how and when the tweet was posted, as well as the conversation that took place in regards to that tweet (predominantly the people that clicked on ‘reply’ on that specific tweet – see why Twitter wants you to use its own reply and retweet buttons rather than compose your own tweets from scratch?). Quick tip: when clicking on ‘open’, if you open it in a new tab/window instead you’ll skip the next step.

With celebrities like Stephen Fry, you’ll generally see a lot of responses from other people and, occasionally, maybe even a follow up comment by the legend himself.

In this view, you’ll see a link called ‘Details’. Click that and you’ll be taken to the full URL specifically for the tweet. This should look something like this:

https://twitter.com/#!/stephenfry/status/170252353688182785

From this new view, you can see that the ‘Details’ link has changed to an ‘Embed this Tweet’ option. Click that.

Step 2. Choose Your Embed Options and Code

Click ‘Embed this Tweet’ and you’ll be given a few options as per the below screenshot.

Once you’ve selected an alignment, there are three options to embed the tweet within your blog post.

HTML

To be honest, this option can be the most future-proof option of the three as the tweet’s text is physically copied to your blog and, using Javascript, is simply presented in a nice way. Once you have this on your blog, the only content that is pulled from the actual tweet each time the page is loaded is the current Twitter profile photo. If Stephen Fry were to delete his tweet, the message itself should still remain on your blog post.

Disclaimer – I’m basing this assumption simply on an understanding of the code and I’m pretty confident that it’s the case. For that reason, I basically can’t be bothered testing it! If you’ve found that the embedded code is somehow broken when the user deletes their tweet, do let me know in the comments below!

The HTML code provided by Twitter includes the code for the tweet itself, as well as the JavaScript code that renders the tweet n the correct format. Simply copy the code, jump to the HTML view of your blog’s new post window and paste the code where you want the tweet to appear.

If embedding tweets in your blog post is going to be a fairly regular activity, you can instead take the script section of the code and paste it into a new line near the top of your websites header. This then runs the script every time the blog is loaded. It’s also a little tidier and a bit cleaner for Google to keep your script tags in the header of your website rather than half-way down the post itself.

To do this in a wordpress.org blog, jump into the ‘Appearance’ menu item, then ‘Editor’, click on the ‘header’ option and paste the script line into that file. If you see some other script tags near the top of your file, paste it just under those.

Quick tip: Even if you don’t want to mess with your header file, be aware that you only need to post the script section of the code once in your blog post. So if you’re embedding two or three tweets in one post, just delete the script section of the code from all but one of the tweets.

Shortcode

This option provides you with a special tidy shortcode version which ‘speaks’ to certain blog providers, like WordPress.com, and magically tells the blog how to display the tweet.

All you need to do is paste the shortcode, which looks like the below, into your blog post and WordPress will take care of the rest.

[tweet https://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/170252353688182785]

As you can see, this doesn’t actually work in this blog post (unless I’ve since changed something!) because this is a self-hosted wordpress.org blog rather than a free wordpress.com blog. Also note that the only content you have copied across to your blog is the URL of the tweet so, again, if the Twitter user deletes that tweet we can assume that it will no longer display on your blog.

Link

This option is actually a bit bollocks. All it does is provide you with the full URL of the tweet. If you are viewing this option on the Twitter website, the chances are that you’re already at that website address and so already have the full URL.

For that reason, you can basically ignore this option.

You’re done.

That’s pretty much it. You’re done. Be sure to preview your blog post before it goes live and make sure that the tweet is properly embedded.

More Examples and a Free Tip:

It can be hard to trawl back through a user’s tweets to find that specific update you saw them mention a few days back, so make use of the ‘favourite’ function to save the tweet for later use.

Here’s a few more examples from my own favourites. Note that if the tweet includes a Twitter photo (hosted on Photobucket or similar), the photo will be included when embedded. You can also see that if the tweet you are embedding is a reply, the original tweet will also be embedded.

@marklincoln *high five*

— Campbell Live (@CampbellLiveNZ) June 20, 2011

@marklincoln Great to hear Mark!

— Mark Inglis (@MarkInglis) February 5, 2010

I don’t think I will ever be able to fully rid myself of the suspicion that somewhere out there is an episode of Friends I haven’t seen.

— Simon Pegg (@simonpegg) February 10, 2012

They might miss all the time but even Stormtroopers have 20/20 vision in hindsight. #StarWars twitter.com/DeathStarPR/st…
— Death Star PR (@DeathStarPR) February 11, 2012

Note: for more advanced coders, there are a few more options for displaying tweets on your website. View the full list from Twitter themselves.

Featured image credit: Simon Pegg photo taken by Gage Skidmore.

Kim asked:

“I currently have a giveaway to help promote a friend’s business. I’ve had 69 views on the page but only 6 comments (entries for the giveaway). I’m wondering if the layout of the blog makes it difficult for people to leave a comment.

Can anyone leave a comment? I do have a friend who said that she couldn’t comment because she doesn’t have a Gmail account. Is this so? Thanks.”

Encouraging blog comments is a common problem, and one that’s emphasised when running a promotion. Attracting entries in this method can be risky as the entries (comments) themselves are public so it can be very easy for your readers to tell how well your promotion is running! In one sense that may encourage comments further – in the reader’s eyes, few comments equals a greater chance of winning – but it can also look a little like your promotion isn’t running all that well.

To address the question, let’s look at a few issues.

Increasing Pageviews

You say that your blog post (you can view this here on the Five Minutes’ Peace website) has had 69 views. This could be pageviews or unique views and it’s important to know the difference. Pageviews are the number of times the page has been viewed, no matter who it is that’s doing the viewing. Unique views (or unique visitors) is the number of unique people that have viewed the page. So if I were to visit that page, leave a comment and then visit the page again two more times to see how the competition is going, I’ve increased the number of pageviews by 3 but the number of unique visitors by just 1.

It’s worth noting that some statistics provided by blog services do ignore the blog owner’s activity when the owner is logged into the site, so your own views shouldn’t affect the stats.

In this example, either way 6 entries for 69 views isn’t all that bad (8.7% entry rate) but it could certainly be better. One way to improve your conversion of views to entries could be to make it easier to enter the promotion (I’ll look at this further down).

So increasing views is always a good way to help increase entries. To increase visitors to your blog, you could:

• discuss the competition on your Facebook Page or on Twitter and ask friends and family to share the post
• ask your friend to link to the blog post from their own online content
• list your blog in 2 or 3 New Zealand directories (try NZS.com, Finda.co.nz and Hot Frog – although you may need your own domain name rather than one hosted on blogspot)
• post some relevant comments on other New Zealand blogs that allow you to add your website address to your comment (although be sure to avoid spamming)

By increasing the number of visitors to your blog, you’ll naturally increase the chances of encouraging more entrants. Although before you put too much effort into this, it’s a good idea to make sure the entry process is as smooth as possible.

Make it as easy as possible to enter

Running promotions on your blog is a great way to encourage interactions from your website visitors, but can be a little tricky to get exactly right. In your case, the entry process is a little tricky, may make contacting the winner difficult, and in fact there are a number of ways to enter.

Specifically, you say to enter the promotion:

… please do the following:

• visit Chantal’s shop and choose your loveliest set.
• If you have a social networking page, please ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ her page.
• leave a comment telling me what set you would like to receive.

Or

• ‘Like’ my facebook page and tell me what set you would like.

I will then use an online number generator to choose the winner and I will get contact details from you.

It’s important to make any promotion as easy as possible to enter. When browsing the Internet, we often have short attention spans and, if we do decide to complete a website’s call to action, we expect the process to be as easy as possible or we may get bored and leave before the process is complete.

There are a few ways to make this promotion a little easier for people to enter:

1. Change the prize from a choice of set to a gift voucher, or to one specific set

Obviously this would need to be arranged by Chantal but doing this would instantly eliminate  the perceived effort that it would take to visit another website and choose a set. Especially as the link takes you to a section of Chantal’s website which has 4 pages of products to browse through. Changing this to a voucher or removing the choice and saying “this is the set you will win” will take away a lot of the time involved in entering.

2. Remove the ‘if you have a social networking page, please ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ her page

As this isn’t a requirement of entry, it could be a little confusing to mention this in the instructions. It also, again, adds a little extra perceived effort as it suggests that the reader has to log in to their own Facebook or Twitter profile and link to Chantal’s website in order to enter. Instead, you could leave this line out of the instructions area and add it as a suggestion elsewhere in your blog post.

Don’t be afraid to actually ask for help as well – New Zealanders love to help out fellow New Zealanders so you could simply say “Chantal has recently started her own business and it would be so nice if you could support her by mentioning her lovely items on your own Facebook profile or by giving her a shout on Twitter.”

3. Make the entry process specifically to leave a comment, and skip the Facebook Page option

By reducing the number of ways to enter, you’ll make the process more straight forward and you’ll be able to focus your efforts on increasing blog comments. Plus, by introducing Facebook as a promotion entry method, you actually step into a whole new world of rules and regulations and, in fact, your entry method of ‘Like us and leave a comment on our wall’ is actually against Facebook’s promotion guidelines in its current format. Check out these Facebook tips for more info on running Facebook Promotions and operating a Facebook Page in general.

As an example, a promotion that was more along the lines of “Be in to win a $20 Gift Voucher! Tell us where you’d place your butterfly set below and you’re in the draw” gives readers an easy entry method which allows them to simply say “My living room” in order to enter. In this case you would ideally need to write up some quick terms and conditions and perhaps link to those from your blog post. This would need to include an end date for the promotion and would need to say that entrants would have to choose to comment under an account or email sign-in rather than anonymously.

Which brings me to …

How can people leave comments?

Blog Comment Methods

As leaving comments is a core requirement of the promotion entry process, it’s important to have an understanding of how this works both in terms of how easy it is for your readers and what information you’ll have on the reader once the comment is placed.

First off, to answer your question about whether you need a Google account in order to leave a comment, one way for you to test this is simply to try leaving a comment yourself – or ask someone in your household to. When doing this, make sure you have logged out of your blog hosting service fully – in your case, Blogspot – and then visit your own post and leave a comment.

In your case however, it does appear that a reader can leave a comment in one of a fair few different ways. The ability to leave a comment anonymously or through logging into one of a few different accounts is fairly common.

I’ve taken a screenshot of your reader’s comment options, which you can see on the right. It looks like your friend may only have seen the first option – the Google Account (to be fair, this could have been the option that showed by default before the reader clicks the drop-down arrow. It’s worth seeing what this looks like in a couple of different browsers to be sure).

The problem here is that none of these methods are likely to result in the commenter providing you with their contact details. So they would leave a comment but you would have no way of letting them know that they have won other than by publicly replying to their comment on your blog and asking them to contact you – something that’s open to others contacting you in that person’s place. You’ll also be left in an awkward situation if you reply to them to let them know that they have won but you then hear nothing back from them as they haven’t received notification of their response. Plus, finally, if one of your reader’s was a little un-sporting, it would be fairly easy for someone to enter as many times as they liked under various names.

So, in this current set-up, despite what I’ve said above you would actually have to add another step to your entry process! You would have to ask people to leave a comment and then email you with their contact details so that you could contact them in the event of them winning. At the moment this would mean providing people with your email address within the blogpost which, unfortunately, exposes you to receiving spam.

The ideal solution would be to add a contact form to your blog. People could then provide you with their details privately without you ever revealing your own contact details. Unfortunately, with Blogspot’s free hosted blogs, it might not be possible to add a form to your blog. This may require plug-in functionality or extra coding that could only be available on a self-hosted blog or website (although please do correct me if I’m wrong and you find an option for it!).

What can be changed in the design?

Finally, you do ask whether there’s something in your blog’s design that’s making it harder to leave comments – and that’s a great question as the design of a website and of a blog post certainly has a large part to play.

In your case, on the blog post itself the comments area could be brought up the page a little so that it’s more prominent. To do this you could take out at least one row of photos. This would shorten the blog post content – and make it a little quicker to read – and also mean that the reader doesn’t have to scroll down too far before they find the comments area.

The website itself is set up in a way that if someone where to visit your home page, they would be able to read the entire blog post without actually clicking through to view the post itself on its own page. This can be good in some ways but does mean that someone could read your full post and then not understand how they could place a comment (as they would have to click on the ’7 comments’ link itself first). One way to address that would be to change how your website displays blog posts on its homepage – depending on your layout, there may be an option to display just a short summary with an image and a few lines of text for each post, thereby encouraging the reader to click through to view the blog post in its entirety on its own page – and so the comment box would also display properly. As an example, the home page for NZ Blogs is set up in this way – with a short summary for each post.

So, I hope I’ve helped you with your promotion in some way! I’ve certainly written a lot. Sorry about that. It’s Waitangi Day and I had a spare afternoon!

All the best of luck with your promotion and with Chantal’s business. Feel free to leave any feedback in the comments area below (see how I encouraged a comment there?) ;)

Featured image Flickr credit: joshjanssen

It’s a fair comment and one that actually makes sense when you find out more about Cate Owen’s day job. As the ‘social media strategist for many of New Zealand’s leading media brands, and the people who front them’, Cate spends a substantial part of her day online, although not necessarily as herself.

Cate’s blog is a chance for her to express her own personality and to speak without the restraints that go hand-in-hand with corporate social media. I’ve placed it in the ‘Social Media Blogs’ category as this is a common topic on her blog, although she also blogs about other topics such as entertainment and more.

What you’ll find on the blog

As mentioned, the blog features posts that are mainly related to Social Media or other aspects of the internet. Cate shares some interesting tips and insight into the use of Social Media in New Zealand, often including some insider information that only those in positions similar to her own would have access to.

In her own words, “This site is a mashup of many of the things I enjoy – arts, culture, memes, film, TV and my day job: Facebook and Twitter”. Cate also regularly publishes a Tweets of the Month post that features some of the best Twitter updates from that month.

Worth reading if …

… you’re in any way involved with the online presence of a New Zealand business or you have a keen interest in social media for any other reason. You’ll also love her take on the entertainment industry from a Kiwi perspective.

You can find Cate on …

As someone who’s day job is all about Social Media, it’s no surprise to see that Cate has an active Twitter account. This is probably the best place to catch up with her, if not through the blog itself.

You can follow Cate over on @CateOwen by clicking the follow button below.

Follow @CateOwen

Kirsty’s blog is entitled ‘Mummybrain’ with a tagline of ‘The how-not-to-do-it guide of marriage, miscarriage, children, divorce, step-children’. In her words, it’s a ‘bit of this, bit of that’ with a focus mainly on family and crafts.

Her blog (blog.mummybrain.com) is well written and she does a great job of getting her fun and caring personality across in her writing. As well as describing her blog, she also sums up herself well in her Twitter bio ‘Attempts to be an amusing, but sometimes serious, witty, but sometimes pathetic, person, about being a mother, a wicked step-mum, a divorcee, and fiancée.’ You can find her on Twitter here: @mummybrain.

What you’ll find on the blog

The blog is quite varied but I think I can possibly sum it up well by summarising the last three blog posts. These are:

• Guest Post: The Big “C”
  A blog post written by Heater; a mum and a cancer survivor. An amazing and heartfelt  insight into Heather’s life and a step by step account of what ran through her mind when she was first diagnosed with cancer at the age of 36.
• Pinterest Pins
  A quick snapshot of some cool and unique photos that Kirsty has found on Pinterest (a fast emerging website that I keep meaning to get into!)
• Do I Work?
  A smart and amusing look at a common scenario for many busy mothers.

Kristy’s blog posts are refreshingly short and readable. They’re just long enough to provide you with a smile or to just touch on your emotions without being so long that you lose interest. It also looks like she has a few dedicated followers that she interacts with through comments.

Bonus points for Social Media

I love a blogger that likes to make the most of social media and experiment with new channels as they become available. Kirsty appears to be one of these people as she not only has a Facebook Page but she also has a Twitter account (mentioned above) and even a Google+ Page. She has a respectable number of followers on Twitter with over 2,000 Tweeps/Twits following her updates.

Be sure to connect with Kirsty through the above channels and have a read of her blog. If you like what you see, you can subscribe through RSS or email. Great work Kirsty.

He’s quite popular in social media circles and is someone that I’ve been following on Twitter for some time now (if you’re not familiar with Twitter, don’t worry. Following someone on Twitter is not like following them down the street).

Bill owns a blog that he regularly keeps updated with news that’s often related to IT and new media. Perhaps one of the most popular sections of Bill’s blog is his brilliant directory of New Zealand media professionals on Twitter.

This directory features a list of NZ media-types and their Twitter accounts for a number of categories, such as newspapers, journalists, bloggers and more.

What’s on the blog?

As you’d expect from a journalist, the blog itself is well written and is highly readable. It mainly features posts related to the IT industry in New Zealand.

You’ll also find a number of posts related to blogging and social media, such as this post on why you shouldn’t tweet exclamation marks with some interesting insights on how to encourage retweeting of your updates.

Where else can you find the author?

As mentioned, Bill is a popular and frequent publisher on social media channels.

At this stage, one of the better places to follow his work in through his Twitter account, @billbennettnz.

Why? Search engines are just one way that people can find your blog. Another is through the use of social media.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past decade, you’ll know that social media is pretty big right now. Facebook has over 750 million users and each user has on average 130 friends. If one of those users visits your blog post and wants to share it with their friends, without sharing buttons they’ll have to copy the URL, visit the Facebook website and manually post it onto their wall.

Sure there’s a chance they would do this but why not make it easy for them by allowing them to share your content with a simple click of a button?

The same goes for many other social networks.

4 key social networks are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Google+

Google+ is the baby of these four and, at time or writing, is still only in testing stage. Despite that, it has thousands of users and is set to be a major contender for Facebook.

Google provide a sharing button in the form of “+1″. Adding that button to your blog is actually a little trickier than the others mentioned here so it might be worth checking out our other blog post on the +1 button.

For the remainder, there are two main ways to add them to your WordPress blog post.

One is in the form of WordPress plugins. There are a number of plugins that offer a simple way to add sharing buttons to your blog. However, for me at least, many of these feel quite dated and don’t allow a great deal of customisation.

The second way is to add them manually. Each of the big social networks has a resources page that provides you with the code to add the buttons to your blog posts. At first it might look like you have to manually add them in the ‘html’ tab of each blog post you write, but there is of course a much easier way to add them which means they will automatically display on each new blog post.

First off, if you want to check out the small customisations of these buttons for yourself, the resource pages can be accessed as follows:

• LinkedIn ‘Share’ button on the publishers page
• Facebook ‘Like’ button and more on the developers page
• Twitter ‘Tweet’ button on the resources page
• Google Plus 1 button on the webmasters page

You don’t actually have to have your own account in any of the above networks to display the code on your website or blog, but it’s a good idea to so that you can test the buttons for yourself once you have placed them.

The problem with using the above is that it can be tricky to get them display neatly on your post. Buttons could be out of line and with random spacing which can cause a real headache and make your blog look unprofessional.

One way to get them to line up correctly is through the use of a table.

html Code for Social Media Buttons

To save you a heap of effort, you can use the code below. This code is the code used to display the sharing buttons that appear at the bottom of this blog post.

<p><table width=”430″ border=”0″>
<tr>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle” width=”60″><div id=”fb-root”></div><script src=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=154603594613054&xfbml=1″></script><fb:like href=”" send=”false” layout=”button_count” width=”60″ show_faces=”true” font=”arial”></fb:like></td>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle” width=”50″><a href=”http://twitter.com/share” class=”twitter-share-button” data-count=”horizontal”>Tweet</a><script width=”50″ type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script></td>
<td>
<script width=”60″ src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”IN/Share” data-counter=”right”></script>
</td>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle”>
<g:plusone size=”medium”></g:plusone>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</p>

Just remember that the Google +1 button, used in the code above, won’t display correctly unless you use the extra code mentioned in our other blog post. If you’d rather forget about the Google +1 button, use the following code instead:

<p><table width=”430″ border=”0″>
<tr>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle” width=”60″><div id=”fb-root”></div><script src=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=154603594613054&xfbml=1″></script><fb:like href=”" send=”false” layout=”button_count” width=”60″ show_faces=”true” font=”arial”></fb:like></td>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle” width=”50″><a href=”http://twitter.com/share” class=”twitter-share-button” data-count=”horizontal”>Tweet</a><script width=”50″ type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script></td>
<td>
<script width=”60″ src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”IN/Share” data-counter=”right”></script>
</td>
<td align=”left” valign=”middle”>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</p>

This code only displays the Facebook Like, a LinkedIn share button and a Tweet button.

Where do I place the code?

As always, it’s not a good idea to try the following unless you have backed up your files. One way is to open Notepad and copy the full existing content of the .php file you’re about to edit into a new .txt file. Should anything go wrong, you can replace your modified code with the code you have saved in your Notepad file.

If in doubt, ask a web professional to help out.

1. On your WordPress dashboard, head to ‘Appearance’ and then ‘Editor’.
2. In the list of files on the right column, find the file called ‘single.php’ or ‘single-post.php’, depending on your theme.
3. Click on that file to load it in the central editor.
4. Find the line of text that, most likely, says ‘php the_content(”); ?>’
5. To place the sharing buttons at the bottom of your post (like in this blog post) paste the above code directly after the below the <?php the_content(”); ?>. To place the sharing buttons at the top of your post after the title, paste the code directly above the <?php the_content(”); ?>

Save the file and then head to one of your live blog posts to check that it has worked. If anything displays oddly on the page, restore your old file and find someone that can help you.

If they display correctly, give each one a go for yourself and then check out how it looks on the relevant social network.

Flickr Credit: Ed Yourdon

Many of us have searched for a recipe online, expecting perhaps to be shown a website for a huge corporate supermarket chain, only to come across some wondrous gem from the corners of the web.

Cooking is a hobby that invokes a great deal of passion and creativity in some people. That brings me nicely to a cooking blog by the name of ‘hungry and frozen’ by Wellington lass, Laura Vincent.

What’s the blog about?

The blog is an avenue for Laura to publish her various recipes and experiments in the kitchen. Her most recent blog post, at time of writing, is a fantastic collection of prose and photography which describes a delicate dish that’s seriously making me want to stop typing, go to the kitchen and get busy with some eggs.

Laura writes in a conversational tone with a quirky and witty edge. Towards the end of the blog post she asks…

…. does anyone have any particularly reliable tips for poaching eggs? Mine is to pay someone in a cafe to do it for you.

The blog appears to have a great following with an audience that love to interact through comments. Laura also appears to put a lot of work into the blog, which is created on Google’s blogspot platform, and writes regular, long and well thought-out blog posts.

Who’s behind the blog?

The blog was started in 2007 by Laura Vincent, a rural South Aucklander who now lives in Wellington.

Laura aims to one day wirte a cookbook and, judging from the content in her blog, I’m sure it will be a great success. In fact, Laura has already received a fair bit of attention in the media, including a mention as well as a feature and cover story in the Sunday Star times.

You can also find Laura on Twitter under the name HungryandFrozen.

Google are now starting to combat this with the introduction of ‘Google +1′ (plus one), although presently there’s a great deal of discussion as to whether a +1 for your blog post will rank your post higher in search results.

At this stage, it would appear that, yes, it would rank higher but only to those that have a Google account and are connected to someone who has given your post a plus one. In reality for New Zealand, this might be quite a small share of the market.

Not only do you require a Google account to give a search result a plus one, you also need a Google Profile. Try without a Google Profile on a Google Apps account and you receive this message:

For those Internet users to which it applies, the +1 service is designed to help searchers find content that is more relevant to them, based on their past likes and the likes of those in their network.

It’s similar in many ways to Facebook Likes. In fact, I’ve already used the term ‘likes’ in this paragraph but that’s because it’s quite difficult to say ‘based on their past plussed ones’. You can find out more about how the system works on Google’s own +1 page.

Google Plus One in Search Results

In Google’s words:

The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.”

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

At time of writing, the +1 button appears right next to a search result, but only when you are signed into your Google account and only on Google.com for an English language search. It looks like this:

Clicking on a +1 (remember you’ll need a Google account as well as a Google Profile) turns it blue and adds a message next to the search result to show that you have publicly +1′d it.

Searching again for the same term and a small icon from my Google Profile appears next to this message. I assume that if I find a search result that someone in my network has given a plus one, their own icon will appear next to this result. Google believes this familiar face and name will encourage me to visit the same website as it has effectively been endorsed by someone that I know.

In terms of your blog, in time this +1 icon will appear next to all search results so there’s nothing you need to go to add this to your site, unless you wish to have your own +1 button that shows on your website, as described next.

Google Plus One on your Blog

First off, why would you want to add Google’s +1 button to your blog? Particularly as it may not yet have a direct affect on search results for the majority of New Zealand Internet users (I’m speculating there – don’t go quoting stats at me!). Well, there’s a few reasons that you may choose to do this:

• It’s cool. Showing that you’re connected to social media and you’re up to date with Facebook Likes, Twitter shares and now Google’s +1 shows that you’re a modern blog writer who is in touch with social media. And in the Internet world, that’s cool.
• It’s relatively easy. Simply place some code in two different files on your WordPress blog and it’s done (I’ll show you how to do that next).
• It’s free attention. Once you’ve added the code to your site, you can sit back and let others spread the word about your work. Making this as easy as possible for your visitors is a good factor in getting your content noticed.
• It may mean a lot more in the future. Right now there may not be much of an advantage to have a +1 button on your blog post but there’s a good chance that Google will use this data to affect organic search results across the board at a later date. Originally Google didn’t care about how many Facebook Likes our Twitter shares a web page did but now they admit to using it to affect search results, particularly to find new content that is on a suddenly trending topic.

All of this adds up to the conclusion that it’s probably worth giving it a go. And with sharing on social networks becoming more and more common, it’s now almost expected that a blog post has some form of sharing button so that a reader can easily tell their network about your content or show their appreciation for a well written post.

Adding Google’s Plus One Button to your WordPress Blog

Generally, there are two styles of plus one button. One that gives a recommendation to the page on which it is displayed, another that gives a recommendation to a specific website address that you set.

In this fashion, it’s possible to have two plus one buttons on the same page that work independently of each other.

To set up a basic Google plus one button that appears at the end of your WordPress blog (one that you have installed rather than a WordPress.com blog) you can use this fairly simple process.

Note that editing these files can screw up your blog something chronic if you get it wrong. Copy the text in the file you’re about to edit and paste it into a Notepad txt file so that if you break something, you can restore the text from the Notepad file.

Here’s the files you need to edit:

1. Edit your Header File (header.php)

This is much easier than it might first appear. There’s no special editing software required and you don’t need a degree in web language programming stuff.

Just do the following:

Go to your WordPress dashboard and then click on the Editor menu item under the Appearance heading:

Next click on the ‘header.php’ link that appears on the far right. This should open the header.php file for editing in the main central window.

Now you’ll need to copy some code into your header.php file, after the ‘head’ tag. Nothing too complicated. The code that you need to copy is shown in the screenshot below (and can be copied from Google’s page here)

… and this shows where you need to paste it:

Note that your header file might look a bit different to this. For one, it probably won’t have ‘Typebased’ at the top. It’ll have the name of your theme instead. The key thing is to simply make sure you paste the line of code after the ‘head’ tag. Just make sure you don’t over-write any of the existing code.

Once you’re done, click ‘Update File’.

This file basically tells every page on your blog what to display at the top. In this case, the page tells the browser to run a script that prepares your page to display the Google +1 button. However, you still need to tell your blog post where to display the button.

To do that, there’s just one more file to update …

2. Edit your Single Post File (single.php)

There’s a chance that this file name may vary depending on the theme that you use for your WordPress blog, but hopefully it will be called something similar to this.

By using the guidelines above, go to the Editor menu item under Appearance again but this time click on the ‘single.php’ file. This will open the file for editing in the main text window.

Inside the file, you’ll need to find the tag that looks like this:

<?php the_content(”); ?>

This tells the browser to display your blog post. Immediately after this is what appears below your blog post, so add a line immediately after this tag and paste the following code into your file:

<g:plusone></g:plusone>

Once you’ve done this, hit ‘Update File’. Now just to one of your live blog posts and refresh the screen. You should be able to see the +1 button at the bottom of your post and before your comments.

Note that you can change some of the attributes of the button. If you already have Facebook Likes and Twitter buttons at the end of your post, you’ll noticed that the default +1 button is bigger. Clever marketing, that! To make it the same size as the Like and Tweet buttons, you can change the code to this:

<g:plusone size=”medium”></g:plusone>

You can find more variations on the size and view previews on the official Google +1 page.

Any questions? Leave a comment below and we’ll respond with assistance.

While you’re at it, why not give this post a +1? ;)

The blog not only provides an avenue for Jason to discuss web design but is also a place where Jason posts about other goings-on in the Internet world as well as the city of Christchurch where Jason is based.

What you’ll find on the blog

As mentioned, the blog is there not as a boring and rigid look into technical aspects of web design, but as an avenue for Jason to discuss his thoughts on business and life in general, with the odd post on web design thrown in every now and again to make sure he stays on topic!

Previously, Jason has been so involved with working on client’s websites that he hasn’t had a lot of time to invest in adding content to his blog. But a recent shift in focus will see a bit more development on his own website and so we may see yet more insights into his web design work in the future.

As a Christchurch business, Aotearoa Web Design is one of many businesses that strongly felt the affects of the earthquake. But this web design company was even more involved as Jason spent some time working on the official Canterbury Earthquake website itself.

Worth subscribing to if …

You currently have a website that you’d love to develop further or you’re interested in contracting a designer to create a new website for you or your business.

Also worth subscribing to if you happen to if you cruise the New Zealand web development conference circuit or if you happen to be a Nine Inch Nails fan!

You can find out more about Aotearoa Web Design’s services here.

NZ Blogs loves to support New Zealand business and if you’re a reader of NZ Blogs, you’ll no doubt be of the same mind-set. With that in mind, if you’re looking for something like Mother’s Day gifts or similar, Stoffels is one New Zealand company that would really love your business. Yes, yes, we know we’re supposed to be doing a blog review. Have no fear, Stoffels has a nifty blog that provides handy tips on things like Mother’s Day gift ideas and more.

Incidentally, if you’re reading this right now (not right now your time but right now my time which is in the run up to Mother’s Day) then be aware that you don’t have long to get a present for ya mum. If you’re reading this in the future, forget the Mother’s Day thing and check out they’re other products.

What you’ll find on the blog

Let’s be honest, the blog is there to promote the products that Stoffels sells. But that’s no bad thing as they sell a heap of different stuff for the home as well as all sorts of different gifts.

Subscribe to the Stoffels blog and you’ll be find that you’ll receive a timely reminder about upcoming events and public holidays that you could get in trouble for had you forgotten them. Things like the above mentioned Mother’s Day as well as Easter and other events.

You’ll also get the latest news from this funky Kiwi business and information on new products and the like.

About the blog author

In this case, the blog is specifically for a business, so the author is Stoffels themselves. Stoffels is run by a lady originally from Holland who came to New Zealand in 1981 (so she’s been here longer than me then!).

The peeps over at NZS.com have a great summary of their business as well as a Site Profile for Stoffels featuring the latest updates from the Stofells blog.