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Use a header to personalise your blog

Monday, January 18th, 2010

The first paragraph of my post Elements for a successful blog states your blog should suitably publicise its chosen subject or niche, and include a visual method of recognition through a designed header or banner.

You probably would have noticed this blog doesn’t have a personalised header with a photo of me on it. This is because my theme doesn’t allow it at the moment, due to being hacked into last summer, but I soon hope to rectify this.

To get round this problem, and for those who don’t have the techie know-how to resolve this situation themselves, popping a photograph into a text widget in the sidebar will provide recognition of the author (how to do this will be revealed through an e-course I’m writing very soon), and you can always make sure the title of the blog and its accompanying tagline is suitably descriptive, easily accomplished through the Settings menu from the Dashboard (learn how from the e-course ‘Setting the dashboard settings’).

How to personalise your header or banner of your Wordpress.com blog is the subject of the latest blogging e-course to be downloaded on this blog: ‘Creating a blog’s visual identity’. In it you will learn how to change the theme of your blog to something more suitable or to your liking, and how to adapt a theme, which has the provision of changing the header, to something that reflects your corporate identity.

It will certainly help to have the banner designed through Photoshop or some other similar software, and I stress it is important to make sure the final product is the correct size and resolution for your blog (Wordpress do provide information on how many pixels the banner should be) to make it easier to upload it successfully. My e-course provides those instructions too.

And keep an eye on my ever-growing e-course library list on my sidebar, which reveals the latest additions as soon as they are uploaded onto this blog, or subscribe to be kept informed of new information as it happens!

Oh, and if anybody does like my e-courses, don’t forget to send me a review through the fairy blog mother logo or in the comment box below.

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Posted in blogs, design | 6 Comments »

What do widgets do on your blog?

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

I’ve just uploaded my free e-course ‘What and how to use widgets’ which explains what widgets are, what they are for and how to put them on your blog.

So what are widgets? Well, look at your sidebar and see all the various elements that are situated there. These are widgets, individual applications or programme processes that allow you to put up a picture, add in a subscription form, show which pages and posts I have written, list my comments, show feeds to my social media and many other things.

Usually you mention the word ‘widget’ and the uninitiated will wince and look worried, but really it is very easy to cope with widgets once you understand them, and that is exactly what my free widget e-course does.

I have seen many blogs, not even new ones, who have not fully taken on what their widgets can do for them. To me, to see an unpopulated sidebar missing vital elements that enhance a blog as regards search engine optimisation (SEO), allowing readers to find past posts and participate in comments, even to realise there are other pages to be read, is a wasted opportunity.

The widgets that are really needed are:
• a method for your reader to subscribe to your blog (either a sign up form for emails or chicklit logo to subscribe to a Google reader)
• show which posts you have written recently
• show the comments people have left
• show your categories (topics)
• show your tags (keywords)
• show your links to other websites or blogs you recommend reading
• how to access your blog

And then there are widgets to make your blog more usable for both your readers and the search engine spiders:
• access to other pages
• links to your social media profiles
• RSS feeds to your Twitter stream, other blogs, delicious or other social networks
• see who has visited recently
• pictures, either on their own or as links to elsewhere
• archive details
• search mechanisms

If you have a Wordpress.com blog, widgets are already available to you (dependent upon which theme you have chosen). If you’ve used Wordpress.org to create your blog then some widgets will need to be added via plug-ins, of which there are many thousands to choose from, including the option to retweet posts you want to recommend and share the post with other social networking sites.

Find out how to add widgets to your blog, or just brush up on the ones you haven’t used yet – the widget world is really worth exploring!

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Elements for a successful blog

Monday, January 11th, 2010

It’s important that readers should be able to understand what your blog’s subject is from first glance, and this is usually accomplished through a graphic header of some kind. Its ingredients should include the name of the blog, the tagline (descriptive sentence), if not already stated the main subject matter and who the author is, preferably with a picture or logo of some kind.

The next thing that should be noticeable is how your readers can subscribe to your blog. There are many methods of doing this, but the most prominent one should be a form for email notifications of your new posts. It’s much easier to receive emails than to regularly go to your Google Reader or glance through the cookies on your personal iGoogle homepage. Make sure the subscription invitations are placed high up on your sidebar.

Is your About Page up-to date? If a reader is interested in your blog, he might well want to know who the author is, and if he finds an incomplete About Page, imagine how disappointed or put off he might be. Make sure you include as much information about you or your business that you can, including a good quality picture of you.

Improve the visual impression of your blog by using multiple forms of media. Even if you are a bit tentative about this, simply adding in relevant pictures can accomplish this. And if you are technologically minded, add in video and audio to provide your message in different ways that would appeal to a larger audience.

I’ve banged on before about using white space in my other blog articles, but again it is extremely useful to aid readability for your blog. Use short paragraphs, subheads to break up the text and graphic images to add to the visual interest. Don’t make your posts too long either. And if you have your blog professionally designed, take into consideration that your template should not be cluttered or too busy.

Use various plug-ins to share your content, especially within social media. For example, use a retweet button to entice readers to feed your post onto their twitter streams, and add in a share-this button for the other social networks, such as technorati, digg, stumble upon, delicious, reddit, tumbr, flickr, to name but a few.

And lastly, provide a method for readers to connect with you on social networking sites. It is quite common to see various icons that link to the author’s social networking profiles, so make sure you have them in place to encourage increasing your connection numbers.

I shall be taking each element individually to elaborate on them in future posts, accompanied with visuals and recommendations – watch this space.

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Posted in blogs, design | 4 Comments »

Dashing through the dashboard

Monday, January 4th, 2010

I’ve decided to make my blogging visual e-courses available for free, so gradually over the coming months I will be uploading each course onto its separate page accompanied with its downloadable pdf.

If you want to collect the complete library, subscribe to this blog through the form underneath my picture and wait until I have completed them one by one – and who knows, I might add some more later!

Meanwhile, these are available right now:
Create a blog
Understanding the main dashboard
Setting the dashboard settings

Enjoy!

And if you did, please leave a comment below showing your appreciation, or email me a review (by clicking on the fairy blog mother logo) so I can share it with everybody to let them know what they are missing.

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How to use Feedburner to feed into Twitter

Monday, December 21st, 2009

This is yet another way to feed your blog posts into Twitter, along with Tweetmeme, Twitterfeed.com and a plug-in called ‘WP to Twitter’.

You should subscribe to Feedburner to activate subscriptions to your blog.  Any followers who want to keep an eye on your blogging activities will then be able to receive new posts once they are published, either direct into their search engine readers or as emails into their in-boxes.

The ‘Publicize’ tag makes available a number of extras to help promote your blog, and one of them is called ‘Socialize’ (the highlighted one in the left hand sidebar in the picture below) which allows your new posts to be published in Twitter.

Your Twitter followers will then be able to read your latest blog post, which is automatically tweeted with a shortened link. As you can see at the bottom, you can adapt the tweet with a pre-text message if necessary.

You will need to allow Feedburner to communicate with your Twitter account, and tick the ‘include link’ and ‘leave room for retweets’ boxes. Don’t forget to activate the application, and the job is done!

So why should you feed your posts into Twitter? This increases your blog’s audience through your Twitter followers, therefore exposing it to a higher number of possible subscribers and commenters.

Never be worried about multiple tweets of your blog posts, as Twitter is an ever-moving phenomenon that has continuous traffic (a bit like a train station) that never stands still, so mass tweeting will always catch someone new who is passing by who might just appreciate your post enough to subscribe to your blog.

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Posted in blogs, online marketing, visibility | No Comments »

What 3 elements make up SEO?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the natural or organic method of getting your website placed higher in the search engines, as opposed to paying for online advertising.

As a result it is a task that is never ending, always requiring you to be one step ahead of your competitors, and any successes tend to be short lived, as Google responds to all new material that is posted online, and it is always the latest contributions that are indexed at the top.

But it is a process that should not be ignored. Even if your website or latest blog post reaches its desired placing for a short time, it has got there, and who knows will look at it or read it while it resides in its lofty position. The more times you manage to attain this prize, the higher the chances of recognition, acknowledgement and conversion through response.

To explain simply, SEO work on three main elements: new content, links and keywords. I know all SEO experts out there will be saying ‘Oh, but you’ve forgotten this element’, and of course they’re right, as experts they should have many tricks up their sleeves to attain the final goal: get as high as you can in Google. But if you understand these three elements, there is no reason why anybody can’t give it a try.

New Content: search engines rely on their spiders: mathematically driven robots that ‘crawl’ the net looking for new material that has been posted. Once found, they feed greedily on it before passing it onto their master, the search engine, to be indexed. If your website or blog, especially the blog, has regularly published new content, it stands a better chance of being placed higher than any old material from your competitors.

Links: spiders need to have a method of entering and leaving your website or blog. Think of links being the doors or portals spiders use to find new content. Incoming links allow spiders to enter and feed, and outgoing links (especially if they are relevant to the content and final destination) will enable them to leave and visit other suitable sites, giving you brownie points as they do so.

Keywords: relevance is vital for spiders to work effectively. Keywords should be relevant to the content, destinations of links, and popularity of searches, eg what people are searching for at that moment. It would be wise therefore to properly research suitable keywords that are not only popular but truly reflect your new material and business. It’s simply like a game of snap, and the best results are attained through correct recognition of a match!

Now that you know these three elements, take them into consideration next time you post up something new on the net.

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Posted in blogs, marketing | 3 Comments »

Learn how to link in to LinkedIn

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Here’s just a small visual e-course I quickly compiled to demonstrate how easy it is to submit articles into groups in LinkedIn:

http://www.designyourmarketing.co.uk/How to create submissions in the BinB LinkedIn group.pdf

Let me know if it helps to make it easier to contribute. The more activity there is in these groups, the more there is to read, the more promotion members can make, the more new material there is for the internet spiders, and the more interaction from members also contributes to search engine optimisation.

So how about it – go on, give it a go!

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Close your websites doors before someone gets in

Friday, October 9th, 2009

On 23 July 2009 my website was hacked into.

The result was that some malware was put into the code of my theme of my website.  This activated links to hundreds of pornographic sites whenever I uploaded new material.

Recently I have been quite busy uploading new pages about my blogging beginners self-help e-courses, so all my activities had been blasting off all this pornographic stuff left right and centre throughout the net.

I do have a wonderful brother who is a wizard in website programming, and he worked his magic behind the scenes, locating and removing the malware. Let’s just hope it doesn’t have secondary programming to reappear again later.

Meanwhile I have tried to submit my website for reconsideration by Google. I have contacted my server and have closed all my FTP access (which I will have to temporarily open every time I want to upload something). That was the back door that was wide open and allowed the hacker in.

So check all the portals of your website to make sure they are secure. Change all your passwords to everything regularly and use combinations of letters, numbers and punctuation to make them stronger.

Keep an eye out for anything suspicious or out of the ordinary with your website. This malware was totally invisible on my website, so it was the fact that I couldn’t see my theme that alerted me that something was wrong, but only after all the damage had been done.

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Posted in blogs | 2 Comments »

Want a Wordpress.com blog the easy way?

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Hooray!

After months of promising, I have finally done it. I have created the first sixteen of my blogging e-courses on how to create a Wordpress.com blog the really easy way – using visual e-courses that show you, step by step, with screen-shots of each procedure, the simplest way to create a fully functional blog – and they’re now ready to buy at incredibly reasonable prices! Just go to my make a blog! page to find out more.

And that’s not all, I still have two more e-courses to create, and I will be dotting around free pdfs with relevant top tips, time-saving methods and inside knowledge nuggets of how to make your blog and its posts all that more successful.

So if you know any start-up businesses, people who haven’t got a blog yet and are scared about starting one, or those who already have a blog and want to find out more about maximising its potential, then send them to my make a blog! page.

Oh, and leave a comment! I would really value your thoughts, and any questions are more than welcome!

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After the muffin blog post was eaten…

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

I presented my muffin post idea to a group of 30 women, and was pleasantly surprised when they appeared to ‘get’ my idea.

Some interesting questions arose:

“If you don’t follow this recipe for creating blog posts, what happens?’

“Well, you get a misshapen, tasteless, half-baked mound in the middle of your baking tray, in other words, not a good post.”

“Lots of people might not know how to create posts properly, so are there lots of badly baked muffins around?”

“Of course, take a look at other blogs and see if they have all the ingredients in them. You’ll soon know which ones are baked perfectly.”

One woman came up to me afterwards and revealed she had started a blog, and now realised her posts were lacking in flavour. “Thanks for letting me know what tags are for, can I go back and put them in?”

“Yes, blog posts can be rebaked with the correct flavourings (tags or keywords), unlike real muffins, which cannot be ‘undone’. That’s the beauty of blogging, and not baking. I suppose you could crumble up your bland muffins and add flavourings to it for another dish, such as a rewritten post.”

What thoughts or questions do you have that arise from my muffin blog post?

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