Alice's blogging blog

Hello Alice,

I do have a blog but I am not sure if I use it correctly. I created my blog to promote my business and to benefit from Google ranking. I am afraid I am not writing as much as I wanted … my excuse not enough time, but the real reason is I don’t really know how to use it correctly and benefit from it.

I am open to suggestions. Please visit www.penelopesweddings.com/blog.

Penelope

–oo00oo–

Hi Penelope

Yes, you’re on the way to producing a great blog! But we need to make it more interesting, for both your readers and the internet spiders.

As a wedding business I’m sure you have some great images you can share – beautiful brides, sumptuous cakes, fabulous dresses, elegant receptions, giggling bridesmaids – advertise and promote your business through pictures! If you have a great set of photos to share you needn’t write that much to go with it, they will speak for themselves.

You need to upload an image that resembles the header on your website so that your blog looks more like its extension. You can do this through the Appearance link on the Dashboard and go down to Custom Header and download a header image. Wordpress give instructions on how to do this, alternatively you could use my blogging package ‘Creating a visual identity’ which is part of my ‘Beautifying your Blog’ series I’m creating on my new blogsite.

I’m glad to see you’ve created categories and blogs, but I think you should vary your tags to capture a wider audience for search engine optimisation. I imagine you got these keywords from Wordtracker or some similar provider – great – but other words that are relevant to your post will increase spider activity and therefore traffic to your blog, and ultimately your website. And don’t forget to put the tag cloud widget onto your sidebar along with one for your recent posts.

Post a nice picture of you on your About page, plus a bit more about you and some links to your website. People like a personal touch, especially for the service industry.

And if you want to accumulate a following, get a RSS feed URL from feedburner.com or feedblitz.com and put the code for the chicklit button or new post subscription link into a text widget and place it at the top of your sidebar.

There’s quite a lot to be getting on with here, so take it step by step. But the best way to promote your blog is to keep putting up new posts, preferably short, concise and relevant, regularly rather than frequently, with content gathered from your day-to-day activities that you think will interest your readers and potential customers.

Alice

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Hi Penelope

On further inspection I’ve worked out that your blog is actually a self-hosted Wordpress blog attached to your existing website!

To accomplish what I said in my last post, uploading your matching header will have to be done through your ftp provider into an images file, and then allocated to that particular area of the .css within the theme. This is quite techie, so if you are not inclined in that department you will have to get your webmaster to do this for you.

The widget stuff is the same, except that because it is a self-hosted blog you can upload forms into your text widgets and posts, something you cannot do in a ‘free’ Wordpress blog. Take advantage of this with a new post subscription sign-up box which is included with your blog’s RSS feed – encourage your followers to keep in the loop with any new information you post.

Alice