Many people assume that they should only include a single element on their blog in one location. This makes logical sense, because why would you waste valuable screen real estate on the same information over and over again? Well, what if the reader misses the first mention? Then you may have lost an opportunity and you may have an opportunity to recapture that opportunity ever again.

Perhaps the best example of this is the emphasis of your RSS feed. There is nothing wrong with mentioning the availability of a full feed RSS in multiple locations, because it reminds casual users that there is an RSS feed available and they are free to subscribe whenever they’d like to. On the BlueFur blog, for example, you’ll notice that there is a button next to the search box at the top, but there is another reminder to subscribe to the RSS feed in the sidebar a little further down the page.

On Beyond the Rhetoric, there is a slightly different strategy that takes on a similar sentiment. A large RSS icon is placed in the sidebar, but within each individual post, there is a subtle reminder of the RSS feed just before the list of related posts. Two mentions of the RSS feed, but they’re both low-pressure and not “in your face.”

The next time you consider giving your blog a little makeover, consider including multiple mentions of your RSS feed to help maximize the number of subscribers.

Some of the most popular posts in the blogosphere are those that include video. Just about everyone has a broadband Internet connection these days, so watching videos online — through Google Video, YouTube, Revver, and so on — is pretty accessible. As such, you’ll notice that many bloggers embed videos in their posts. These could be in form of video reviews or maybe it’s just to highlight a funny clip that they found on YouTube.

The trouble with embedded video is that these videos are typically not viewable within the confines of an RSS aggregator and most definitely not within the confines of an email subscription. Worst still, because the video is not displayed at all, it can be a little confusing for the reader when they see the post making mention of “the video above” when there doesn’t appear to be anything there!

This is why it’s important that every video post that you make, you include a brief note to remind RSS subscribers and email subscribers that they need to go to your site to watch the video. At the same time, this brief note probably shouldn’t appear on the website itself. How do you do this? Simple. Just make use of the noscript tag. Here’s an example:

<noscript> Javascript required. Please visit the BlueFur Blog directly to view the embedded video. </noscript>

Of course, you can customize that message as you see fit. You can even replace it with a hyperlinked image if you prefer. Anything contained within the noscript tags will only appear when Javascript is not enabled (like inside an RSS aggregator).

It’s easy to get lost in the blogosphere, especially when you consider how many great blogs — and as a result, how many great blog posts — there are for readers to consider. That’s part of the reason why we do the In The Sphere segment every Friday. The hope is that we will simultaneously introduce BlueFur readers to some great content, as well as garner a little bit of attention from the blogs that are receiving the trackbacks.

When going through a standard feed aggregator like Google Reader, it’s very easy for your blog post to get lost in the mix. People typically subscribe to several RSS feeds, so they don’t really have the time to read each and every post. They may take a quick glance at the title and move on. How, then, can you grab the attention of your readers? If they’re skipping past your posts, they aren’t being exposed to your world class content!

One strategy that you may want to try is including an image at the top of every post. As you can see, the BlueFur blog already employs this strategy. Whether it be a Fantastico update or a WordPress Wednesdays, there is an image at the top that is designed to grab the attention of the reader (and to help separate the posts a little on the blog itself). If readers just skim the title, they may miss out on the topic you are covering. An eye-catching image, in this way, truly is worth 1000 words, because it draws the reader deeper into your post.

If you happen to be blogging about a new piece of technology, grab a picture of this product and place it at the top of your post. If you’re blogging about what you had for lunch, try to include a photograph of what you ate. No matter what the subject matter may be, there is always an opportunity to include a picture and, thus, an opportunity to draw a reader deeper into your post. Otherwise, you could just get lost in the never-ending stream of posts from around the ‘sphere.

When Jeremy Schoemaker (“Shoemoney”) co-founded AuctionAds, it represented one of the first times that eBay auctions could be easily implemented into the blogosphere. People found a new way to make money by promoting all the various auctions available on eBay and it was even possible to highlight a specific auction. But what if you wanted to sell something of your own? You could highlight your own eBay auction, but you were still on the hook for all those fees.

The same guy who runs John Cow dot Com has come up with a nifty WordPress plug-in that effectively integrates an auction right into your blog. The appropriately named WP Auctions is a free auction widget for WordPress blogs and it works in much the same way as eBay auctions except there are no fees.

People who bid on your auction do not have to register; they just bid based on an email address. This could prove to be a little problematic if the winner decides to flake, but it lowers any barrier to entry. Naturally, you will achieve the best success if your blog has a larger readership, but the WP Auctions site has a section for live auctions for extra promotion as well. Another nifty feature is the RSS feed to keep track of bids.

See WP Auctions in action on John Cow‘s site and then you can download the plug-in here.

If you monetize your blog using affiliate marketing techniques, you may already be making use of banners and other methods for driving traffic toward the deal page. On my blog, I have a link to the BlueFur affiliate program in the sidebar, for example. Even so, it has been demonstrated that in-post links tend to be among the most effective. Unfortunately, it can be quite a pain having to type out the link each and every time.

The Link A Dink WordPress plug-in addresses this issue directly, because it “replaces words in your posts with anything you want.” In this way, you can ensure that every instance of term “web hosting” is a hyperlink to your BlueFur affiliate URI. The same can be done for all the other affiliate deals that you may be running on your blog.

Even if you’re not in it for the money, you can use the Link A Dink plug-in to point visitors toward certain webpages on the net. For instance, if your blog has multiple authors, you could have each author’s name automatically link to their respective biography page. This is very handy and what’s more, the Link A Dink plug-in also appears to work with comments. If a visitor makes mention of one of your keywords, their text automatically turns into a link too.

Download Link A Dink here.

Customization is an important aspect of any blog. We’ve talked before about the importance of having a custom header image and how you should be tweaking the layout of your blog to best suit your needs, whether it be related to the color scheme or how you decide to arrange your sidebar. Another way that you can go about making your blog your own is to feed it with all of your latest photos. Everyone loves looking at pictures, after all.

Unfortunately for most people, this can be quite a tedious process. You probably already upload a photo or two when it seems appropriate for a particular post, but what about all those pictures you took that don’t exactly fit in with a blog post. Or maybe you just took some fun photos and they don’t warrant a blog post of their own. For times like those, you may want to have the ability to pull photos straight from your Flickr account and have them displayed on your blog as a standalone feature. For that, you can consider something like the flickrRSS plug-in for WordPress.

In a nutshell, this plugin will display photos from your Flickr account automatically, pulling these pictures from the RSS feed. It’ll support user, public, and group photostreams and you can configure your preferences through the options panel. It seems easy enough to use and the pictures can be displayed not unlike the popular 125 button ads that have started sprouting up in the blogosphere. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the flickrRSS plug-in does not allow for random images to be pulled from your Flickr photostream. Instead, it only shows the most recent photos as evidenced by the provided RSS feed. It also does not have support for sets. Even so, this appears to be a viable option for anyone looking to display their most recent photos. See it in action at Eightface.com.