Synchronicity is a great thing isn’t it? Weird too! I’d been thinking about blog audio for a while now and thought a post was kind of overdue when, all of a sudden, some new options came to my attention.

Hmmm, thinks I – maybe a post showing the options is in order here…

Essentially what happened was that I got informed, via two separate sources, about two new blog audio embedding applications on the same day – and this all tied in with my trying to create an online audio for a pal ‘down under’ – but more on that later – first things first…

If, like me, you have a ‘face for radio’ (but do I? See the video on this post).

But if you are not as ‘comely’ as me and you have decided that you want to post audios on your blog – or even become a blog audio only type person here are some of your options for embedding audio on a blog:

[N.B.For Audio Recording and Editing options see Addendum below this post]

1) Plugins

The only audio plugin I recommend is the fab Audio Player Plugin – this requires you setting up a folder in your hosting account – best is yourdomain.com/audio and upload your .mp3 files there ( yep only MP3 files – no .wav’s or crap like that) and then link to them using code in your posts like this:

or, more likely, this:

and you’ll end up, all being well, with something like this:

2) Embed via Podcast Sites

On investigation I discovered this was a good way to waste a lot of time! While there are loads of podcast sites out there to which you can upload your audio files for SEO purposes it’s a bugger to embed a player into your blog so I wouldn’t bother. AND, even if you do find a podcast site that makes it easy, your audio will sit on their servers and so you will be vulnerable to potential advertising/bandwidth/ “send us your money!” issues.

3) I Like Easy Video Player

Because it does Audio too as below.

Lot’s of different Audio Player formats to choose from and you can, as I do, upload your videos and audios to Amazon’s Cloud Storage ( costs literally pennies!) so come the day your blog and amazing podcasts are featured on Oprah and the world beats a path to your blog it won’t explode!

BUT: One of the issues with embedding audios into a WordPress blog using Easy Video Player is that you want to post the ‘embed’ code when in HTML mode in your WordPress post’s text box. If you switch to Visual mode at any stage this will break the embed code so be sure to save the embed code, in a text .doc, while writing and editing your post for easy reference should you inadvertently forget that – I often do!

TIP: If you are going to be adding lots of audio/video embed code to your posts it’s a good idea to turn off the Visual editor via: Users > Your Profile via your Dashboard left hand navigation bar.

4) Blog Radio

I came across BlogTalkRadio.com some time ago and, if you are thinking about having a regular ‘radio style’ show on your blog ( and on the BlogTalk Radio site they are very cool looking gizmo/players)…

5) Posting ‘snippets’ of Audio on your Blog via an online application

Two funky online applications I came across  recently, which are just for a bit of fun I’d suggest:

Vocaroo.com – simply record yourself and, when done, email the audio file to somebody or embed on your site as in…

Conclusion:

While the online apps above are a bit of fun and podcasts can be great for ‘spreading’ the (spoken) word I’m a great believer in being in control of your own destiny ( and files) so Option #1 – The Audio Player plugin and Option #3 – Easy Video Player (ready for the day when you get famous and takes care of your video stuff too!) are the best as you are in total control of your content.

Plus with either of those you could have an online radio show on your blog. But BlogTalk radio does have a neat setup which easily allows visitors/listeners to access previous shows and subscribe for new ones.

P.S. Re those rather nice ‘Butler’ audios featured in some of the audios above they come from my ‘alarm clock’ available from the nice people at:

http://www.voco.uk.com/

This, I know, has been a long post so maybe you should now have a little sleep… sleep… sleep…

ADDENDUM

As for recording/editing software and microphones: I did use the free open source software from Audacity which is fine, as it’s free, if you are just getting started.

I have also used Propaganda for quite some time now ( I’ve even bought it twice, when an old version was lost in a computer crash!). It’s about $47 but there is a free trial version – however you get ‘audio’ overlays on your free recordings with that i.e. randomly placed ads for the product.

I like Propaganda’s interface (see screenshot below) but I did find that my first version ‘crashed’ quite often – so far this hasn’t happened with my second purchase so was most likely the computer ( the one that died on me that I mentioned earlier) that caused the problem

Re microphones I just use one of those headset with microphone attached type thingamajigs – mine’s the Plantronics DSP-500 USB Headset from Amazon as I found desk microphones, to my cost, would pick up too much extraneous noise ( hard drives whirring, bird song, snoring dogs etc.)

Sure I’d love one of those ‘boom’ DJ style mic’s – it’s on my Christmas Wish list! See Amazon widget below…

As you know ( or should) there are many ways to find out how your visitors found your site, or a specific page on it, using Google Analytics or Market Samurai’s Rank Checker Module – both of which I use. It’s always good to know that you are ranking high in Google for your preferred ‘search terms’ but what about if somebody found you on page #5 ( or #10) of Google for a term you hadn’t even targeted?

This is kind of looking at things in reverse – not so much how our targeted Keywords are ranking but rather, “How the heck did somebody find us using that weird search phrase?” – Hmmm, sounds like an opportunity to me!

Here’s the thing – what if you are getting a handful of visitors who find you on page #5+ of Google for an obscure search term that you’d never thought of? If you had this info at your fingertips what would you do?

Well I’ll tell you what I’d do: I’d write a post on my site supremely optimized for that search term to get onto page #1 instead of page #5 or whatever! Do you think that might get me a few more visitors?

OK, I’d do some research first, using Market Samurai or similar, to check if this weird search term could actually generate some new targeted visitors to my site. I’ll come back to Market Samurai later. But first things first…

Here’s me using the very cool WordPress Rank Checker plugin recently built by my mate Paul Forcey…

Now I also use Market Samurai’s Rank Checker Module that will show me the results, over time, on how my rankings ( in all the Search Engines) are progressing….

Useful Links for this post:

Paul’s Rank Checker plugin
Market Samurai
Rank Checker Add-On for Firefox browser (check this out if you don’t have Market Samurai) see video below:

I really like this funky plugin, mainly for the reason that your regular visitors will never see it!

Put it this way: If a visitor finds you via: Stumbleupon/Google Search/Twitter or an RSS Feed whatever that your site ‘welcomes’ them accordingly, knowing how they found you!Possibly suggest that they Bookmark you somehow? OK the majority won’t be that giving but Hey! why not ask?

Check this out:

For example:

And there’s plenty more where that came from – if they came across your site via Delicious, Digg, Twitter, and too many others to mention here, then your site welcomes them as such and, let’s be honest here, begs for a link!

Extra good news re this funky plugin is that you can choose to include, or not, sites like Facebook, MySpace and a dozen+ others.

My view is that the more the merrier and any way you can personalize your visitors, and ask them for a ‘recommendation’, is a GOOD THING!

So, as I say, regular visitors won’t see this at the top of a post or page – just those who have found you by chance or a recommendation and might like what they see and so pass along the good news. Another tool, in other words, to get your message across!

Here’s the link to the plugin;

• WP Greet Box
  

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) remains a mystery to most bloggers – how does it work and what’s the point of it? I kind of covered that in a RSS Tutorial post here. In this tutorial we’re looking to really grab RSS by the horns to promote our sites.

When you propagate your RSS feed via Google’s Feedburner ( which is what I recommend) you can have a maximum of just 2 feeds – 1 for your posts and another (if you choose) for the blog ‘comments’ visitors leave on your site – that’s it!

When you post something new on your blog the various RSS aggregator sites get ‘pinged’ by your WordPress blog and they update the feed of your site that they index to include that new post. All good stuff!

In my tutorial about tweaking your blog I explained how to get your RSS feed submitted to multiple RSS sites by adding lots of them to the relevant section in your WordPress Dashboard – I also included a list of RSS sites you can cut and paste to your blog.

But the fact remains, no matter how many RSS sites are indexing and updating your feed(s) – it’s all backlinks folks! – you still have just the one or two feeds. OK, maybe three if your WordPress theme creates a feed for your Categories too ( more about that in the video).

You can now change that state of affairs!

Find out how in these video tutorials – you can do it yourself or automate most of it with a funky plugin…

Links mentioned in the tutorials:

• Feedburner
• Dapper
• RSS Bomber

If you’re like me you are constantly ‘tweaking’ and editing your blog posts. Problem is that every time you do so your previous posts are saved as ‘previous revisions‘ that you can revert to if you screw up or something goes pear-shaped!

All well and good of course, and maybe in future WordPress upgrades they’ll allow you to set the number of previous revisions you want to save. But I noticed the other day that here, on a relatively new site, I had a total of over 2000 revisions that I’d never use or revert to! Blimey!

Don’t forget that WordPress also ‘saves as it goes’ so this too adds to the load.

I reckon that slows down my site’s loading time and uses up a lot of resources so they had to go – but how?

As usual it’s a funky WordPress plugin!

In this instance it’s one that was recommended to me on the Solostream Forum:

• The ‘Delete-Revisions’ plugin

N.B. Be sure you’re happy, on the whole, with all your posts and pages as this WILL delete all your previous revisions.

P.S. As usual I’m just talking about plugins that I use on this site, and others, that have worked for me. Do your own due diligence, always backup your database and don’t coming screaming for my head if a plugin doesn’t work for you!

If you click around the Category menu above and look at the right hand side bar you’ll see that the ads / links / imagery is not the same on every page, as it normally is on a WordPress blog. Clever stuff!

This helps avoid ‘Ad Blindness’ as your visitors click around your site. It’s also a way of ensuring the Ad or Video or Image etc. in the Sidebar is relevant to the content of the post or page.

For example on this site the links that appear in the ‘Getting Started’ category relate to Hosting and Domain Names etc. but in the ‘Link Building & SEO’ category they relate to SEO products and info.

This is thanks to a rather clever plugin that I talk about in the video below:

Links mentioned in this tutorial:

• TS Custom Widgets

It took me ages to discover how I could record my Skype conversations for free – mind you I’m talking about 6 years back when Pamela had just come of age!

.

NOW, with ‘Pamela‘ software, recording Skype is super simple – just watch out for the 15 minute cut off!

I now only use Skype as my telecommunication tool of choice. I only have, and pay for, a  landline phone connection in the UK and France to ensure a nice high speed broadband connection to the WWW. I’m a pioneer Skype Guy and have been since 2003 – when it was just getting started.

It’s a must have tool if you are considering interviewing people on your blog or creating podcasts to upload to various podcasting sites for marketing purposes and/or back links. In this video we’re going to check out Pamela, find our audio file, and upload it to our site ( and get it to play on our post/page using the Audio Player plugin).

While I’m at it I’ll show you where to get an updating Skype ‘badge’ that you can put on your site that shows your current Skype status e.g. Online,  Away, Offline etc.

Links for this tutorial:

• Skype
• Pamela – get the free 30 day trial.
• Get a Skype Button for your site
• Audacity audio editing software (free)
  
• Audio Player Plugin
  

Now this is something that, so far, looks very cool to me – a plugin that allows your site visitors to leave Audio or Video comments on your posts.

Now if you’ve got your ‘Comments’ options set up correctly as I mention in  a previous tutorial and here too,you won’t have to worry about somebody leaving an obscene Audio! Ain’t going to happen!

What if it does anyway? I think that would be fun!

OK, the plugin is called Riffly and it’s quite simply gobsmacking! As you can see below in the Comments section. Whether it’s going to take off, who knows? But I think it deserves to.

Of COURSE it’s monetized with Ads over which you and I have no control, natch, but no surprise there right?

But I’m OK with that, even though I dislike text ads on videos, as it’s their hosting servers that are soaking up that video bandwidth (which also explains the low video quality). I think they offer an Ad Free version but of course that’ll costs money.

Anyway, I’m not too worried about the ads aspect since it’s purely in the Comments.

I need to play with this a bit more to discover, for example, whether if you leave a video comment here can I grab it and use it in another post, maybe answering your question – which would be very cool don’t you think?

UPDATE: Yep there’s a link under the video which takes me to the Riffly video sharing site where I can grab the video embed code.

Plugins, and using good ones, are what will make your WordPress blog stand out from the crowd – not just in your visitor’s eyes but in Google’s too!

WordPress Plugins are essentially add on applications that you can strap on to your WordPress blog to give it extra functionality – sometimes ‘behind the scenes’ or, at other times, the ‘in your face’ type of thing that gives your blog’s visitor a cooler experience! They are created by all sorts of people but vary in quality and functionality. Many are great, some are crap!

The thing I found in the past, when trying to find out what the best Plugins to use on my first blog might be, was that I got fed too much generic information – the pros, cons and a hundred and one alternatives.

Absolutely NO use to a blogger just getting started. I just wanted somebody I trusted to say, “Hey, use these!” In effect I needed to be better informed and not given multiple choices that I, at that time, could not understand.

So how about I tell you about the plugins that I install on ALL my blogs ( and those of my clients and customers)? Make sense?

There’s no secret, they’re freely available, but I’m talking about the Plugins that I consider essential to having a cool and working blog ( I’ll discuss more advanced ones for more specific blogging purposes another time). I personally use every one of these plugins on every blog I build.

There are others that I use, for example here on Blog Briefing, but I don’t consider them ‘essential’ for every blog out there on the Intertube.

ALSO there is an argument that says the more plugins you use the slower your blog loads so that’s something to take into account. I’m undecided. Certainly don’t install, and activate, plugins that you don’t use!

Now these plugins I talk about are not mine – I did not create them – but I have, when given the option, donated some cash to the people that did create them to say thanks ( if they work well for you I suggest you do the same).

As this site is all about letting you know what I, personally, do with my blogs rather than giving you all the alternatives that will just muddy the waters ( and perhaps confuse you, as I was confused initially) look over on the right of this post and, if you wish, download that ‘Zip’ File of my recommended Plugins and I’ll run through what to do next in the video below…

Useful Links for this tutorial:

• Software to unzip zipped folders: Download 7 Zip