AgentMapIt.com is a program used by Real Estate Agents looking for referrals from other agents from across North America. If you are a Real Estate Agent, by getting listed in AgentMapIt.com you become the “go to” agent for your location.

If it is a video of your own, the easiest way to get it into a blog post is to first upload it to Youtube or one of the other video-sharing sites.

Once it is uploaded to Youtube and has been published, get the embed code and just copy it into your blog post (use html mode when copying code). Here’s an example of a video embedded from Youtube.

If you want a link pointing to a different website, just add a line or two of text and embed the link in the text. I want to link this video to my own site about effective blogging.

Method 1: Reprint an article written by someone else - There are different types of “content” on the web. Most articles, blog posts, reports, etc. are written by someone and are not available for reprinting. The author does not want his or her stuff just copied and reprinted.

But then there are articles written specifically for the purposes of being reprinted. You will find these in “article directories” like EzineArticles.com and many others. Authors created these articles for the sole purpose of getting them reprinted by others. This gives them free publicity because each of these articles contains the author information and a link or two pointing to websites being promoted by the author.

To find articles for republishing, just go to a site like Ezinearticles.com, Ideamarketers.com, GoArticles.com, etc. and do a search for the keywords you are looking for (e.g., mortgage financing). You will be given a list of recently published articles. Then just copy and paste the content into a blog post - along with the author info and links.

Method 2: Blog skimming technique - Try writing about what other people are saying about your topic or niche. Find two or three other blogs in your niche…read what they have to say…and if you find an interesting post, write about it. I call this blog skimming.

Say your blog is about real estate in your local community. A typical blog skimming post will read something like this:

I found this great post over in The Real Estate Blog called “When Will Real Estate Values Begin to Appreciate Again?” by Aubrey Clark. Aubrey claims that the current slump is forcing us to return to values held by our parents’ generation. In his opinion the cheap credit of the last decade actually devalued our homes by making it much too easy to get into home ownership.

As he says, “I cannot predict when the real estate market will bounce back, but I can tell you what needs to happen before it does. America needs to reinvest in herself by getting back to solid buying and selling principles.”

In other words, we need to start caring about the value we ourselves have invested in our homes, and less about how much we can make by flipping them.

This sounds like very sound advice to me.

Just make sure to give credit where credit is due. Give a direct link to the posts you are skimming. The other bloggers will very likely return the favor some day. And don’t just lift the content. Include a short summary, a quotation, a link to the original, and then add a comment or two of your own.

There’s no easier way to create really interesting and useful content for your blog.

Some people advocate you try to dream up “link bait” - short provocative articles that are likely to get links from other bloggers or article writers. This is easier said than done. If your objective is to get noticed by other bloggers, or to get Diggs from readers, then you might do well to study the kind of posts that are likely to get this kind of reaction. I wrote a blog post about this a while ago called “Making Social Sites Like Digg Work For You.”

Being a bit of a contrarian and a closet academic/elitist I find this idea of appealing to the sensational difficult to do and generally phoney. It’s not me… which brings me to a major point: try to be yourself. Express your opinion - but please, try to be a bit more original than going for self-indulgent “rants”.

Generally people appreciate useful information, so talk about things you know something about. You don’t have to be an “expert”, but it definitely helps to speak from experience. If there is some topic you know something about - it doesn’t really matter what it is - just remember there are probably many people out there who know a lot less than you do and will find your stuff interesting enough to read and perhaps comment on.

Look for other interesting blogs or websites that share your interests. Use articles or posts you find on these sites as a jumping off point for your own posts. But don’t just summarize them for your readers. Pick out interesting points and then add your own commentary.

Some self-proclaimed blogging “experts” claim they have discoverd the formula for writing effective blog posts. For instance, one such authority suggests you always open your blog post with a story to get your reader’s interest and attention.

Let’s say I want to write something about the recent Canadian election (yes, there was a Canadian federal election earlier this month). This formula would have me start with a story that might tweak my readers’ interest. For instance I might describe the time 30 years ago when I attended a Pierre Trudeau rally (he was then the Prime Minister of Canada) in the hotel ballroom where my son and new daughter-in-law just held their wedding reception.

Ok, that’s boring. Well maybe the story about how Robert Stanfield (also running for Prime Minister a few decades ago) was caught by a reporter’s camera missing a ceremonial kickoff at a football game, and that photo essentially lost the election for him.

Or how about some innane comment by Rush Limbaugh to illustrate how tame, rational and moderate we are in comparison, or perhaps a story about how the Canadian health care system saves people from the kind of health-care induced bankruptcy they suffered from just a few decades ago.

On second thought maybe stories like that might alienate half your readers. Better stay away from them unless you’re really sure they work. In other words, if you’re going to tell stories, express opinions, or try to be a bit controversial, make sure it accomplishes what you want it to accomplish.

On the other hand, if you write new material every couple of days, and you encourage an active dialogue with your readers, then they will come back more often and you will gain a loyal following of regular readers.

At one end of the spectrum, some bloggers like to write detailed and fairly complicated articles. In that case it is unrealistic to think you can create new posts every day. You will find it is just not possible.

This is one good reason to make the tone and approach of your blog less formal and more conversational. Make your posts less like “articles” and more like comments or “thoughts”.

When blogs were first developed a few years ago they were a way for people to share ideas quickly. An important feature of early blogging was the way bloggers would link to other resources - other blogs, articles, websites of interest, etc. So these blogs contained a lot of quick “reviews” and links to other bloggers who were writing about mutually interesting stuff.

In some ways this conversational function of blogging has been overtaken by other social networking sites such as Twitter and Myspace where the emphasis is on “here’s what I am doing right now”. These sites are not meant to contain deep and involved content. They are generally light and often frivolous by design.

The best blog content is probably somewhere between detailed “articles” and frivolous content. Think of a blog post not as an article, and not as a random thought either, but more as a “report” or “comment” on some topic.

Stay with your general theme as much as you can. Look for other blogs that share your focus, news items about your areas of interest, or original articles on some topic within your niche. Keep your posts relatively short - say, about 150 to 300 words. Express your opinion rather than just regurgitating what other people say.

That way you’ll find lots to write about, and you will be able to create interesting posts more often - to keep your readers coming back.

It is quite easy to add images - photographs or graphics - to Wordpress posts, but it is important to keep a few things in mind. First, add images that are properly sized before being embedded in your blog posts. For example, if you want to embed an image you just recently shot with your digital camera, don’t just bring it in at 800 x 600 pixels, or whatever was its original size. That is too large for the typical blog column width.

Rather, downsize it to a more manageable 400 x 300, or some other similar size. Here is a sample of an image that is 400 x 300 pixels:

You might even think this is too large. If so, downsize it using image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop. Or use one of the many online image resizing sites such as resizr.com or picresize.com - many of these sites will also let you crop your image too. And some will help you make adjustments to brightness and contrast, and sometimes even to the color balance of the image.

Once your picture is properly sized, cropped and adjusted, be sure to save it on your local computer so it is available for uploading.

To embed the image in a Wordpress post you will have to upload it to a web server - either the server where you blog is located, or to another server where you can “hotlink” it. “Hotlinking” is a technique where an image already online located on a server somewhere is placed into to your own webpage.

For example, if you wanted to show an image found on some other site, you could just drag and drop from the original location into the “Write Post” form and it would then show up in your blog post. Here is an example of an image brought in from a completely different website:

You can do the same thing in HTML view by finding the address of the image you want to embed and then entering the code as follows:

<img src=”http://www.linknet-promotions.com/images/LBN-membership-250.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Membership Card for Link Builder Network” />

Hot linking like this should only be done when there are no restrictions against doing it for a specific image. Many images are copyright and should therefore not be hotlinked. In other cases the owners of the originating website object to the practice of hotlinking because it increases their bandwidth usage. The best way to hotlink an image is to upload it to a website of your own.

When you want to add a link (or more properly, a “hyperlink”) to a post you should remember that a link has two parts:

The anchor text - these are the actual words that the link is applied to. For example, if you want to create a link to an article about “barcode scanners”, it will usually be found in a string of text like this:

“Check out this article about barcode scanners.”

The words “barcode scanners” are called the anchor text because these are the words you want to apply the link to.

The target URL - this is the web address you want your readers to be taken to when they click on the linked anchor text. In the above example, if the words “barcode scanners” are linked to the address - http://www.waspbarcode.com, then this is is the target URL.

While in “Visual” mode, to apply a target URL to a specific anchor text within your post do the following:

1. Select the anchor text with your mouse.
2. Click on the “link” symbol in the top toolbar.
3. Type the target URL address in the “Link URL” field.

While in “HTML” mode add the html code before and after the anchor text as follows:

<a href=”http://www.targetdomain.com”>Your anchor text</a>

Now when you go back to “Visual” mode the anchor text should be in the standard link blue color, and be underlined. That indicates that it is an active link.

Adding a link to an image

You can also add a hyperlink to an image. The procedure is the same:

1. Select the image by clicking on it with your mouse.
2. Click on the “link” symbol in the top toolbar.
3. Type the target URL address in the “Link URL” field.

Bear in mind that often when you add a link to an image Wordpress may automatically put a (fairly ugly) border around the image. You can get rid of this image by adding to the code in HTML view. The code for the image below would look like this:

<img style=”float: left; padding-right:15px; border: 0″ src=”http://www.etdemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/auto-blog-175.jpg” alt=”Autoblog logo” />

This image is manually added to float left, no border, with “padding” set to 15 pixels to put white space on the right side of the image. Note that this image is “hotlinked” from another site (etdemo.com).

Once you’ve logged in to Wordpress, click on the “Write” tab along the the top. This will take you to the “Write Post” screen where you can create an original post.

There are basically 4 parts to each post…

1. Post Body - Most people will enter their post with the “Visual” tab clicked on. However, if you know a bit of html code - such as how to create a hyperlink using html - you might want to click on the HTML tab over on the right side of the form and do it that way.

Either way, it is often best to create your post in a Notepad or Google Docs document beforehand. That way you’ll have a clear text version of it that you can use in different places later.

However, you definitely should not copy from a MS Word or Adobe Acrobat document right into Wordpress. Doing that will almost always bring in odd characters and formatting instructions - things such as curly quote marks, hyphens, copyright and registered symbols that tend to create problems in Wordpress. If you want to bring material in from a MS Word or an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) doc, then copy it first into Notepad or Google Docs, clean up the oddball characters, and then copy it into Wordpress.

Of course you can always create your post right in Wordpress (like I am doing right now), but if you are bringing in text from an external source, clean it up as described above, then just copy it from the original document and paste it into the form.

You can also copy text right from web pages and paste it into the “visual” form. Generally this will bring in some of the formatting correctly, and almost always it will bring in the links. But complicated formatting from web pages will most likely not reproduce correctly because your are not bringing the formatting rules in with the copy and paste operation. We recommend copying and pasting only from very simple pages. If you want more complicated pages it is best to construct the html document in an html editor and import the completed html pages. Just bear in mind that the vast majority of blog pages are simple text with very limited formatting, and that’s what we recommend you do as well.

2. Post Title - This goes in the Title field at the top of the post. Often it is best to create your title after the post is completed. Titles are very important for SEO purposes, because it is what the search engines generally assume your article is about. So if you care about how the search engines index your posts, you should include an important keyword near the beginning of the title, and don’t make it more than 6 or 7 words long.

3. Categories - The blog administrator has set up “categories” to help organize posts according to subject matter. Choose the most appropriate category, or if there isn’t one, choose “General” or “Uncategorized”. It is often difficult to find just the right category for your posts, but don’t worry too much about it. Categories are not as important as “tags” (discussed in the next point).

4. Tags - These are generally keywords that you (the author) enter to give the blog search tools and the Search Engines like Google an idea what your post is about. For example, if your post is about “building dog houses”, you should tag it with whatever words you think a person might look for when searching for information on this topic. You would probably use tags such as: “dog houses, pet houses, pets, dogs…” and anything else you think is relevant. Tags can be single words or strings of words (phrases), and should be separated by a comma.

Formatting Tools

Along the top of the “Write Post” form are a series of buttons. These will let you automatically apply basic formatting to specific blocks of text without having to know any html code. For instance, you can make a selected block of text bold, italic, struckthru. You can add bullets, create a numbered list, and create a “block quote” which is often used to quote someone else in an extensive way. Experiment with these different settings, but keep in mind that, generally, the simpler you post, the better.

Of course, if you know html, you can also apply formatting by going to the HTML view and adding the html code.

In order to do anything in Wordpress that involves adding  or changing something that shows up in the browser, you first have to log in to your own “SiteAdmin” area.

The link that takes you into the “SiteAdmin” area is normally somewhere in the right sidebar, usually near the bottom.

You will have to log in using your login ID and Password - the one given to you when your blog was initially set up.

Once you are in you will see different things you can do, depending on the user privileges assigned to you when you became a member. Here are the four most frequently used levels of member privileges:

Subscriber - View posts, create and edit your own profile.
Author - Create original posts and edit your own.
Editor - Create original posts as well as edit others in the system.
Administrator - Create posts, edit posts, approve, edit or delete comments, make all available configuration changes.

The first time you login you should have a look at your profile. Add some information to it if you would like blog readers to learn something about you.

PLEASE NOTE: The Wordpress information is based on the user interface use in version ->2.6

After Jan 1, 2009 all our new blogs will be using v2.7 or higher. Version 2.7 included many changes to the user interface, so the instructions included in these posts will not reflect these changes until we get around to updating them.

The consolation is that v2.7 is easier to use and more intuitive, so you should be able to figure it out more easily.