Visibility – or increased visibility – is what most bloggers are striving for. Whether we are blogging for business or for pleasure, visibility means that people are seeing what we write – and that’s a good thing.
So visibility is one of the primary goals that shapes how we set up our pages, create titles and tags, choose subjects to write about … and leads us to participate in events like the Ultimate Blog Challenge!
Maybe one day, if we are lucky, our blog will go viral, like Amy Young Miller’s blog vomitingchicken.com did earlier this month! But in the meantime, we do whatever we can to write good content and set things up to increase visibility as much as possible.
This Cyber Monday I am pleased to share with you 2 Visibility tools that I stumbled upon quite accidentally. They are called News 360 and Rebel Mouse. I cam upon them both about 10 days ago when I was checking my blog stats and noticed both, right at the top of my list of Referring Sites. Now THAT made me curious!
Visibility: 2 Tools to Check
News 360: This is billed as a smart news app that gets to know what you are interested in and then shares it with you. You first select categories of information for your feed (see graphic), and then, as stories are displayed, you give them a thumbs up or thumbs down – thereby teaching News 360 more and more specifically, what you are interested in seeing.
You can also link News 360 to some of your social networking accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus to help it better recognize your interests.
It is very gratifying to see that posts from The Time Finder are appearing in people’s News 360 feeds – and this is a visibility venue that we’ll be keeping an eye on (and learning more about) in the days ahead.
Rebel Mouse: This is billed more as a ‘personal publishing service.’ It offers you the option of creating a personal page that reflects content you have published on your blog and/or other of your social media venues.
Flexible and nice-to-look-at, Rebel Mouse offers lots of tools for curating your content and making it available on-line.
Here’s a screen print of the page that we quickly created for Finding Time, as an example of what you can do. (This is with their basic, free account.)
Both Rebel Mouse and News 360 are free and easy to use. They offer paths to increased visibility and on-line connection that, once set up, really require no effort on your part. That strikes me as a time-saving win-win. What do you think?
Here’s to your continued time success!
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have no material connection with the brands, topics, or products that are mentioned here, and have not received any compensation for writing this content.
Related articles
Paula, Thank you so much for the mention! The tools that you mention above look very interesting and I’m going to try to find the time to check them out! It sounds like they could really be time-savers, too.
Hi Amy – My pleasure (mentioning your blog) … and the tools do seem helpful – even if you just set them up and let them be. Hope you have a nice day!
They sound really interesting, although each of them require a blogger to spend more time setting them up and then participating—like News 360. I’ll look into them. Thank you for sharing.
Hi Francene – Good to hear from you! One of the things that I liked about these tools was that, once set up, they take care of themselves in some ways. So you can invest as much (or as little) time as you want as the days unfold. I have been pleased with the traffic they have brought my way.
Very interesting. I will check them out. I sometimes wonder about all this blogging and how many people are reading all the content that is being put up. It just seems like we are swimming in information, or drowning?
Hi Deb – And I agree with you about information overload. I think the key is to focus on the information that you want to share and on the circles that you want to be in touch with. And the tools we discussed today can help extend those circles – or help like minds find one another. But when all’s said and done, those circles are fluid – so staying true to one’s vision, goals, message, etc. is what’s fundamentally important.