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Microsoft Spaces Live Blog Review
Setup It was pretty easy to set up. It took me 10 to 15 minutes to create my profile and a basic blog entry. It can take longer, depending on how much you want to add. For example in the “My Favorite Sites”, you can add as many links as you want. If you want helpful descriptions for each link that could take some time to add, although, it’s not required.
Layout By layout, I mean how the various sections of your blog appear on the screen. They give you several choices of layout. I chose three column layout. However, each section can be moved around to best suite your taste. For example, I moved the visitor options section to the top of the page for easier access.
Blog Settings You can specify the number of entries you want to display at one time. For example, if you select 5 entries at a time, then on your blog page, the visitors will see your last 5 posts, and all other posts are archived in monthly buckets automatically.
Publishing One of the nicest features is email publishing. That means to update your blog space you simply send an email to it. You can set it up to publish directly or hold in draft until you review it. Publishing directly without going to draft first can save you a lot of time. However, depending on your email system you may find some formatting is required.
Statistics Having some sort of tracking or monitoring is a must to determine how many visitors come to your blog. Spaces live has a pretty good set of statistics about number of visitors and where they came from. This is helpful to know how your visitors found your blog. Checking the stats frequently can help you make adjustments to your blog based on what’s drawing the most visitors.
Syndication Producing your blog in a syndicated format can help increase your blogs visibility on the web. Spaces Live automatically converts your content into Real Simple Syndication (RSS) format. If you want to provide your content to other website, RSS is the way to go. RSS also allows your visitors to “subscribe” to your posts, so they don’t have to navigate to your site every time they want to read your content. Subscribing means they’ll receive an email version of your post and that can be very handy.
Search In terms of freeway driving the word traffic is a bad thing but for a blog having more traffic is great thing! The more traffic you have the more people are seeing your blog. If you’re trying to sell something, that’s a very good thing. To generate traffic, you’ve got to tell people you have a blog. One way to do this is to search for other blogs of similar interest as yours and invite them to your site.
Unfortunately, Spaces Live’s way of finding others to invite to your site, in my experience, is cumbersome and time consuming. If you’re willing to put a LOT of time into finding like-minded people to invite, then maybe this won’t be an issue for you. For me, it was a deal breaker.
Let me tell you a little more about the process. If you wrote daily Christian devotions to encourage believers in their relationship with Jesus Christ, like I do. Then, you’d be looking for people who believe in God, read the bible, need encouragement, and want to grow spiritually. How do you find people like that on Spaces Live? There’s two ways.
Starting at your blog’s profile section, you click on any of the “interests” you listed in your profile to provide a list of people with the same interests as you. However, the interests are limited to what you put in your profile and you may not want to keep updating your profile every time you think of a new keyword to search by.
The second way is to search from the main area of Spaces Live. You can search by interest and enter a keyword, which provides a list of other spaces that contain that keyword in their profiles. The problem is that list can be incredibly long and there’s really no good way to do an advanced search to narrow down the list.
It’s not just the length of the list that’s the issue. In order to contact someone on the list, you click their name, which takes you to their profile, you have to navigate to their blog (if they have one!), and depending on how they setup their blog, there might not be a way to leave a message, so then you have to add a comment to one of their posts and hope they read your comment. If they don’t have a blog, you have to return to the search list and click on another name and repeat the process. Another downside is you don’t know when someone has last visited their blogs until you get to their blog site. I found tons of people who haven’t updated their blogs. So it’s really takes time to find recent bloggers who are more likely to respond to your comments, if you leave one. This whole process is very exhausting!!
Linking Another way to drive traffic is to link to other sites and have them link back to your site. There is no easy way to do this in Spaces Live. Other blog applications have a handy bookmark or “add to my favorites” button that makes linking a whole lot easier.
To recap, Microsoft Spaces Live is easy to setup and customize but not the easiest to invite others to your blog. Therefore, I would only recommend Space Live for basic users who want an online place to share their experiences with friends and family. If you’re considering a blog to help drive traffic for your business, I do not recommend Space Live, unless you can dedicate time and effort to manually searching for like people interested in your business.
To find out more about blog options, see my other article “How to Choose the Right Blog for You” posted at http://www.ideamarketers.com.
Copyright Elizabeth Marks, author of ThinkOnIt Devotions, has a heart for helping others grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ. Do you need encouragement? Visit http://www.ThinkOnitDevotions.com today for daily devotions, book reviews, favorite websites and more!
If you’re considering creating a blog for online journaling or connecting with friends and family who are scattered across the world, then Microsoft Spaces Live may be an option for you. Before you go to http://spaces.live.com/, please consider my experience with this tool. It information in this article may help save you time and effort.
© Elizabeth Marks has 20+ years of business experience in sales, marketing, operations, Six Sigma, Strategic Planning, SharePoint Administration, and SEO. She enjoys sharing her knowledge to benefit others. As founder of ThinkOnIt Bible Ministries, she also has a heart for encouraging you with God’s Word. Visit us today at http://www.ThinkOnIt.org.
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