Business Blogging Tip: Zemanta

 (www.businessandblogging.com) As a busy Business Professional and Blogger, have you ever longed for an assistant to help you with your blogging? 

Someone to search out related links and relevant photos to spice up the content in your blog? 

Do you ever think that if you could focus more time on writing and let someone else take care of those extras, you could churn out more posts with better content in less time?

Well, if you have, Zemanta might just be for you.

Zemanta is not a person – it’s the latest blogging software.

Zemanta works behind the scenes to find articles you might want to link to and pictures you might want to use. You, the blogger, remain in control of the final decisions on what goes in and what stays out.

Zemanta works with most blogging tools as a plug-in. It can also be used as an extension for blogging tools that don’t take plug-ins like blogger.com, livejournal and wordrpess.com.

To use Zemanta:

1) Write your post

2) Select suggested photos and articles and embed them in your text

3) Publish

Tips from Zemanta for best success in obtaining relevant links and photos:

• Use proper spelling and grammar 
• Focus mainly on one topic per post

(hmmm…. both of those are good blogging tips even if you don’t use Zemanta)

What else you should know about Zemanta:

• it works only in English
• it references 300 media and blog sites  (but currently finds most matches in wikipedia)
• photos are from wikipedia commons, flickr, and various stock photo providers (all are copyright cleared)

One last  insight: By using Zemanta,  it is also more likely that your blog posts will be referred to other bloggers for inclusion in their posts. 

In an upcoming post I will write using Zemanta as a tool.  We can check it out together to determine whether it adds value and saves time.

Let me know what you think of Zemanta.  Send me links to any articles that you write using the tool and I will link to them here.  It will be interesting to see a variety of posts that use the tool to evaluate how well it works.

photo credit: Or Hiltch