Making Blogging Easier With Zemanta

Posted on Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 10:38 am.

Blogging can enhance a business site on so many levels and a lot of business are using them to enhance their websites and increase their natural traffic.

A blog can:

Bring more traffic to your site
Give you greater search engine visibility for a number of keywords
Allow you to become an expert in your niche
Help your site get indexed by Google more frequently

Blogs are great for business but a common issue raised by businesses is that they don’t have time to create truly compelling blog content – the sort that gets linked and tweeted about. Often it is just a question about the amount of time you can dedicate to blogging – can you make blogging a little bit easier?

With that in mind I thought I would share with you this great little FREE tool that can download and add to your browser. It is called Zemanta and it allows you to easily add the little extras that make blog posts interesting and sharable. You will, of course, have to write or outsource the content yourself – but then it all gets easier.

So what does Zemanta do?

When you have Zemanta added on to your browser you simply turn it on and within your blog dashboard appears several Zemanta boxes with recommendation. These recommendations will be for photos, related articles, in text links and tags. Zemanta will allow you to preview these recommendations and, if suitable, insert them into your post. Let us break them down with images so you can see what you get:

Image recommendations for your blog post:

To make a blog post really compelling you should have images to break up the text and make the post more visually compelling. Searching for images can be a pain but this great little is on hand to help out. After you have written your post Zemanta analyses the text and provides you with image recommendation based on what you have typed in:

Simply click on the image that you think fits best with article and it will magically appear in the blog post.

How else can Zemanta make my blogging schedule easier?

It can also add in in text links to other sites and it will generate tags for your blog to allow the article to get found by searchers. Adding text links and tags are jobs that bloggers on a schedule usually bypass, with Zemanta its only one click and they are in:

So what will a final post look like?

Hopefully better than one that is all text and not visually compelling or particularly useful for the reader. This mock up below took me a minute to create:

This tool is free and can save you loads of time when you are blogging for business – download it and give it a try.

As a footnote this tool is available for all common browsers and is compatible with all the major blogging platforms – so have no fear, whatever you are using Zemanata should support it!