Personally Deliver Recommended Links to Your Friends with Handpick

Handpick is a simple tool with a huge benefit: it lets you personally handpick links from the Web and deliver them to your friends via a daily digest. If you’re someone who is often sharing links with specific friends individually, you’ll love the convenience of using Handpick. It stops you from bombarding your friends with numerous emails of recommended links service, plus it lets you email all of your friends at once.

Let’s see just how Handpick works.

Of course you’ll need a way to actually “handpick” links on the Web, so you’ll need to install the bookmarklet or Chrome extension.

You can also add a Handpick bookmark to your iPhone or iPad. Just visit this page on your device and follow the directions so that you can “handpick” links on your mobile device.

The second step is to create a group of people to “handpick” for. These should be all people that will like the types of links you’ll be sharing; therefore they should have a common interest. You’ll be able to create as many groups as you want. Each group will show up as a check-box when sharing and you’ll be able to choose which groups you want to share to.

All that is needed to create a group is a name and time that you want the group members to receive their daily email digest.

Next you’ll need to add members to your group. As mentioned above, those members will receive a daily email digest of all of the links that you handpick for the day. Members are added by manually entering their name and email one-by-one. Just keep adding members until you’ve got everyone that you want to share with in that specific group. Since Handpick is in early beta, I’m sure that this method of adding members will change since it would surely be so much easier to import your email contacts or choose friends from Facebook or Twitter.

You can also manage your group and change the name, delivery time, and email subject for the daily digest. Additionally, you can choose to turn on/off delivery via BCC. If you turn it on, all members of the group will be able to see the email address of each group member. This is a very bad idea if the members do not know each other. However, if you’re all friends then this shouldn’t be an issue since you’ll more than likely have each others email addresses and probably correspond with each other frequently.

There is also a feature called “Contributable” which you can also turn on/off. With this on, you will allow all members in the group to handpick content for that specific group. So if they have a Handpick account, your group will show up in their accounts as well so that they can also send links to it.

All that’s left is to browse the Web and “handpick” links. When you find something you want to share, click the bookmarklet or browser icon in Chrome and you’ll get a small window with sharing options.

You can change the title and enter a description. Don’t forget to choose the group that you want to share to! Finally click on “share” and you’re all done.

As you can see, it has never bee easier to share links with specific friends. I not only love the concept of Handpick, but I love how easy it is to set up and share to people that I usually have to email individually. I do, however, hope to see an improvement in the design of the site and also in the way that you add members to the group.

Handpick is currently in private beta, so you will need an invite to try it out.

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Boosting your Blog # 11: Link to Hosts and theme Providers with Affiliate Links

Continuing our discussion of things you would need to do now to improve your blog, and today it tip:

I was talking with a craft blogger recently who has a small and medium-sized blog and told me that her third-strongest revenue stream came via two links in its sidebar that just people on her blog host, pointed this out, and they used to the WordPress theme. Each was an affiliate link.

Around the links gives them a short blurb on why they use the services, along with a no-pressure call to action for other bloggers in her niche who are looking for such services. They also contains a note to say that the links are affiliate links, and that the sale helped her run her site.

She saw by sales of each link and, over a year, they added up to a five-figure income (especially if the hosting committees were recurring).

You create a link to your blog theme or host provider with affiliate links?

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Use external Links to boost your credibility

Bloggers are always happy to link to a resource that is good for us, or a product or service with which we are attached.

But there are other forms of external links that use too few bloggers:

links to sources of information we have for content creators we foundlinks citinglinks to more detailed information on a topic that we are not in the depth entry, but in a post cover.

Citing sources is a basic element of professional writing. As well as reflect your professionalism, the:

helps build your authority on a topichelps helps you to get respect by association with quality profile and sourcesactively readers to take advantage of your content.

Especially, citing external sources of information increases your credibility. By linking to a quality, reliable external source, you Show that you proudly stand behind the information that you give your readers. And what blogger does not want to do that?

When should a blogger a link as a kind of citation? When are you on information you have learned elsewhere. Let's look at the most common types of statements for which external links to their original sources.

If you quote someone else, you should add a link to the place where she said the words that you included in your quote.

After the legal implications of someone without mentioning the source of that quote quote, is the main reason for referencing quotes really logical.

If you are quoting a person, it makes sense that your readers can be inspired or intrigued by this quote, so you will want to help them by providing them with easy access to the complete story. Right? Right!

If you mention or a concept that someone else has come up with an idea, include a link to the relevant person of material on that subject.

So, for example, if you wrote a post that Darren's approach to social media, including "home bases" and "outposts", you would like to include a link to the article in which he explains those concepts.

Links like this:

Show readers that you care about them with any information necessary to get information about the topics you the potential to drive traffic to send to the abouthave authors write have you learned from — and readers that you honestly and fairly loveshow ' tour, and that you are not trying to give out the ideas of others as your own.

This is the most common problem I see with external links: many bloggers present opinion as fact, often without even realizing it. FeelGooder on the Web site that Darren is running, we get many submissions that are perfectly reasonable-sounding claims that, when the authors are asked to research or studies for credentials, they prove to be FALSE.

A lot of the time full articles via dropped because the central claim the author has made turned out to be purely Internet confection. Recently, we removed a section from an article claiming that smiling endorphins in the brain releases because, try as we can, we couldn't find all evidence — research reports, and so on — for this argument. Sure, it written on the Web pages from one end of the Internet to the other, but that's not a reference: not one of them referenced a research (or even all researchers) who ever this link have been proven.

Don't believe what you've heard as fact. If you are including information in a post, make sure you mention the original sources.

A good candidate for an external link for the information that you included in your message is:

original, where possible (so if you have an article that is linked to the original source, link to the original source first of all, and the reference to article if you also want to) reliable and well-regardedindependent (not supported by a company that push a particular agenda) high quality — a source that is complete, comprehensive, and links to other sources such as requiredspecialized (not a content aggregator or generalist "answers" Web Portal).

Of course, some sources of information (gasp!) not online. It happens! What do you do in those cases? Add a footnote. A perfect footnote was given by author Angela Irvin FeelGooder in her post, develop a mindset for social good. And its readers appreciated, too.

Angela wanted to call an article from a printed magazine. No problem: they gave a standard academic reference so if its readers would like to see the research itself, they could go to their library and check it out. Pretty handy!

How are your last few posts looking for? You have cited references and your readers pointed to more information where that is sensible, logical or required? I would like to know of your approach to external informative links and quotations in the comments.

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