Tag Archives: WordPress

When deciding if you, too, should become a blogger, then tons of questions come to mind — and one of the first should be “Why do people read blogs?”

After all, if you are going to spend time and energy writing on the Global Whiteboard, you do want readers. So your blog plan needs to aim at a specific types of readers and give them what they want. That’s both Common Sense and Smart Marketing, i.e., define your target market and listen to what it is asking for.

The Science of Blogging: research for your blog’s strategic plan

The link in the subtitle above points to a data-rich webinar on blogging presented by Dan Zarrella, author of The Social Media Marketing Book and one of the Web’s online Go-To people for facts & figures on social media behavior. Currently a marketing product owner at HubSpot, Dan presented his latest research in a 60-minute Blogging webinar and slideshow. An hour listening to the webinar would be well worth your time; in the meantime however, you can read my Top Ten Takeaways from Dan’s research:

1. Relevance: People find blogs for the personal opinions and insights on topics they are particularly interested in — from people they have grown to trust.

2. Authority: Bloggers need to establish their credibility by delivering sound content and showing relevant background, education, and experience: however, calling oneself an “expert” or a “guru” is pretentious — and often sneered at.

3. SEO: Blogs offer great search engine optimization opportunities, particularly in helping consumers make purchasing decisions. Growing numbers of people are checking online and reading blogs to find information on items they want to buy.

4. Positivity: People do not go online to be brought down; they prefer the positive to the negative.

5. Avoid self-reference: Best practice is to talk AS yourself, not ABOUT yourself. People want to read your opinions, insights and unique point of view — not your minute-to-minute activities.

6. KISS: [Keep It Simple Stupid]: Avoid technical jargon; simplify, simplify, simply (as Thoreau) advises.

7. Novelty: Do not be boring, especially by regurgitating what others keep talking out. Try to provide content that is uniquely yours.

8. Social Proof: Use words like you, how, why, giveaway, money, etc. that are most often LIKED, SHARED, and ReTWEETED. You can find Dan’s lists of these words in the slides accompanying the webinar.

9. Frequency: The more often you post, the more readers you are likely to attract. Publishing once a day — or more — is the fastest way to become the Go-To Source for your area of expertise.

10. Know your audience: Are they mostly male? female? What are their schedules? How can you best serve their needs?

For further information about WHY and HOW to blog, check out some of my past articles:

To Blog . . . or Not To Blog . . . that is a good First Question

How to start a blog — Step by Step

How to write your first blog post on WordPress.com

What should your first blog post be about?

Use your blog to become the Go-To Source for information in your area of expertise

Avoid these NINE Blogging Errors

Beginning Bloggers Workshop: what should you blog about?

Will a blog help you build your business and other typical blog questions

10 Lessons I learned about blogging from my first 6-part series

Any more questions? Perhaps I’ll do a blog to answer.

Blogging, Interview

Just Starting Your Blog? — Meet Lyndit, Who Just Didit

February 20, 2010 Shari Weiss 7 Comments

Lyndi Thompson is an M&M peanut-aholic and treehugger-wannabe, but she has also taken her nerdy HTML and CSS skills into the Blogosphere with her new blog lyndit.com.

I met Lyndit in Twitterville after she happened upon my article on 10 Mistakes Made by Social Media Newbies. Apparently Lyndit didn’t want to make any of them, and she even mentioned the article in her first post Listening — First Pillar of Social Media:

Whenever I am working with a new small business or even a larger company, my first advice to them is to listen. Listen to how people are currently talking about your business, products and competitors.
Listening is one of the core foundational skills that all people working within the marketing field must master. To effectively reach customers, we have to listen to them.
“Not listening enough at first to understand the workings and sentiments of a community” – 10 Mistakes Made by Social Media Newbies

I liked her personality right off and thought my readers might benefit from —

Lyndi Thompson’s Getting Started Blogging Story:

Q1: Lyndit [as she likes to be called], how did you get started in social media?

Lyndi: The precise moment that I went from a nerdy caterpillar into a social butterfly must have been when MySpace appeared on the scene. My geeky online coding skills had even the high school cheerleaders green-eyed with jealousy.

Seriously . . . over a MySpace page?

Soon after, I started helping small businesses create their own presence on MySpace.

Q2: Let’s talk about MySpace. I didn’t get techie until MySpace was on the way down . . . but, honestly, I think it’s a shame. I like the idea of being able to DESIGN your own space and not [like Facebook] have the same platform as all my “Friends.”

How do you feel about that?

Lyndit: MySpace was originally created for up&coming musicians to showcase their work. The flexibility of MySpace was appealing because you could customize your page to brand it exactly how you wanted.

But just think about it. Can you imagine that every time, you went to someone’s home, there was a different way to get in the door. Finding the bathroom might be like trying to make your way through a rowdy party.

Personal pages were littered with animated graphics, hundreds of quotes, videos, and tons of content. It became almost impossible to interact with the profile.

Facebook took the idea of interacting Front and Center with the Wall. Facebook appealed to me as a place for a different profile of a person. Gone were the spam-y friend requests and glittering distractions – just a place for me to interact with my friends and family.

Q3 Hmmm . . . I’m going to play with MySpace, but I’m happy to have the “back story.”

So Lyndit, why did you start your blog?

Lyndit: Developing a strong personal brand is definitely an asset that I wanted to invest in for the future.

What I was looking for was a place to serve as a sort of campfire – to share ideas and pass on stories that I’ve heard from marketing professionals. So my objective is to provide a place for me to share, listen, learn, engage, and be a true and genuine marketing professional.

Q4: How did you learn to start your blog, and what obstacles have you had to overcome?

Lyndit: For the past year, I had had the pleasure of getting my feet wet working with MazdasNW.com, a WordPress site on which I wrote blog posts and created banners for events. I really fell in love with the seemingly endless options that the WordPress community had created.

Initially, Blogger kept me satisfied with its simplistic editor, and I still recommend it for those who want an enjoyable, easy-to-use platform.

However, WordPress raises the bar, allowing more versatility.

On an almost daily basis, WordPress’s library of plug-ins and themes are increasing exponentially. If you can’t find a particular functionality, you just haven’t looked hard enough. By a simple installation of a plug-in, you cannot do a host of ecommerce functions including very complex accounts.

Q5: What do you think is the Number One struggle for new bloggers?

Lyndit: Creating space in our often jam-packed busy lives for writing, interviewing, finding photos, design and editing is a huge challenge. Stealing attention, focus, and energy away from the normal hustle and bustle of my life was essential to work on Lyndit.com.

I applaud all writers, artists, entrepreneurs and visionaries for following their passions, and I look to experts to find inspiration and encouragement — as well as comical ways to relate to the common mud puddles that bloggers sometimes seem to step in. Comedy is found in every corner of the creative world. We laugh together because we know it’s true.

Lyndit lives out “in the sticks” in Washington State. She is the proud owner of two border collies, a cat, a guinea pig, a dwarf rabbit, a horse, and a donkey. And even though she’s never lived outside the state, you’ll find her globally on Twitter @lyndit and lyndit.com

Blogging, Facebook, Guest Post, LinkedIn

Web designers more in demand now — even with the ease of blogging and pre-made themes

October 23, 2009 Shari Weiss 7 Comments

Migrating from wordpress.com to wp.org was one tough challenge — and then finding my ideal template was an even bigger one.

Thank heavens for all the support available online — especially via the LinkedIn Q&A feature. [See previous guest post.]

One question led to another once Australian problem solver James Hilton offered me his expertise to fix some early errors. When I found out that James had quit his job as Audio Visual Technician to focus on building websites, I wondered . . . and asked:

How will the ease of creating blogs affect businesses that build websites?

James’ answer surprised me in many ways — but mostly in how much effort and detail he put into his response.

Not wanting to keep all this knowledge and wisdom to myself, I asked James if I could republish his information as a GUEST POST on my blog. Fortunately for all of us, he said YES, and here we go:

Designers will be needed to “Make-over” pre-made blog themes

by James Hilton

I quit my last job so I could focus on building websites. I figured I should be doing what I’m passionate about regardless of whether I’m making money or not. If I’m good at it the money will come to me.

To answer your question, I believe the ease of creating blogs has increased the amount of jobs out there for web designers.

The easier blogs are to start, the more people will be starting blogs, and while there’s tens of thousands of premade themes out there to use, it’s so hard to find one that perfectly fits your idea for the blog so a lot of people hire designers to give their blog a make-over.

I’ve started many blogs and spent hours looking for the perfect theme but I can never find it. In some cases I find one that looks similar to what I envision then spend days modifying it to suit my needs.

What has changed is that web designers are leaning towards graphic design more these days

Anyone can code a basic website, and anyone can set up a website and put a basic theme on, so the web designer’s job is just to make a custom visual design that looks pretty, and that is the biggest job when it comes to building a website.

Personally, I can program a whole website in minutes. But doing the graphic design for it, now that takes many hours or days or even weeks!

I believe many graphic design courses are now including a bit of programming in them simply because the highest demand for graphic designers is on the internet!

Another way that easy blog creation will affect some web design businesses is that they will not have a future income from a client. In the past, a designer might charge a yearly or monthly fee to maintain the website and update it, but now with all these fancy blogging systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many others, the people who own the website can now update it themselves.

Can websites make money?

The type of websites I build are money making ones, but having said that, they’re not making much money!! When I started learning web design 2 years ago I built a website called www.Icanhasmotivation.com which was just about funny pictures. I was so proud about it and knew I was going to hit it big and be raking in the money. On the first day I showed my friends and they loved it and I made $1.50 from advertising income. The next day I made $2, the next day $1, the next day 50 cents, then 20cents, then nothing…

I gave up on that, and started working on other projects but none of them really hit it off. A year later my friend wanted to run a site so we had a go at running the motivational site again and we made it really really popular and got it a lot of traffic. But at the peak it was only making 50 cents per day. 15,000 people visited it in one day and we made $1. So far it’s made $65 so I can safely say it was a failure. (I just checked and it’s made $2 in the last 7 days from roughly 15000pv and 3000uv)

My latest project is the one I have the highest hopes for

I’m pretty confident that this one will hit it big and make me rich. I just need to finish it!!!

www.localendar.com.au is going to be a community calendar that will list every event in Australia and give anyone the opportunity to see what’s happening in their home town on any given day. Or even if they’re holidaying in another town they can see what events are happening. In the one month that I’ve been working on it I’ve changed the visual appearance sooo much! If you view it on Firefox or Safari it will look good but on Internet Explorer there’s a few glitches I need to fix. So far I’ve put about 40 hours into this project and most of that has been towards fixing glitches with the different browsers. Every time I change something about the site I need to fix a damn glitch.

I should be finished with the visual appearance in another few hours then be finished with all the behind the scenes programming in a week or two and I’ll be ready to market this website to the masses. I’m going to fill it up with every event in my home town then expand to the next town then to the next. If it becomes popular and well used I’ll expand it to every town in Australia. If it becomes popular throughout Australia I’ll be expanding to NZ UK USA etc.

So like I said, I have VERY HIGH hopes for this one. If you’ve got some time, (And you’re using any browser other than internet explorer) check it out and tell me what you think. 🙂

New website building options all over the Net

By the way, relating to your question, there are a bunch of new website building websites popping up all over the net. They allow you to create a website in flash format, and they seem pretty good. Although I disagree with the use of flash, I think the future for website building will be in online WYSIWYG editors. (just in case you haven’t heard of it, that just means What You See Is What You Get, and it’s a common term for a program where you drag shapes, text and images around a page and it automatically converts that into a website that anyone can view)

Ideally, what someone will have to create is a website like wordpress where you sign up and get your own page like http://wordpress.com/shari and you will then have an online editor like dreamweaver or front page, where you can paste boxes, text, and pictures onto the page and it will appear like that to other viewers. Of course you can already do that with dreamweaver and front page, but doing it all online so it’s instantly accessible will take it to the next level. From there you would be able to buy a domain name and link it directly to this page so that it appears as though you built it ON the domain that you’ve bought.

The secret will be in using position:absolute; in your CSS. This allows an item to appear ANYWHERE on the webpage and it can be layered below or above any other item you choose. Once someone creates a world wide standard doctype that makes every website appear the same on every browser, this will be possible and I reckon someone is going to get insanely rich from it. (that’ll be me if I have the time to do it! lol)

THX, James, from all of us.

Blogging

Want a cool, fancy, free design for your blog? Check out my students’ new blogs

October 12, 2009 Shari Weiss 5 Comments

Way back when . . . I first started blogging with WordPress.com in April of this year, I never changed my background from the Kubrick default theme. So for four months, my blog looked exactly like my husband Jack’s above.

HOWEVER, now that I know how EASY and how much FUN it is to see a more distinctive looking page, I wanted to help you beautiful your blogs as well. Take a look below at several of the student blogs created in ONE HOUR during class using these instructions and then STEP TWO: Choosing the Theme [or background].

You can click on any of the images below to get a closer look at the blogs. Below you’ll find directions how you can spice up your own Online Persona.

HERE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS

1. Sign into WordPress.com. [If you have not yet registered, then you’ll need to start with the previous post.]

2. The screen that pops up is the portal to your dashboard, i.e. where you make ALL the changes and additions to your blog. Here is Jack’s portal:

3. Click on the word DASHBOARD [beneath the title and to the lower right of the photo icon]. And the screen below appears:

4. On the left of this screen is a sidebar filled with great categories to explore, but for now Scroll Down to the word APPEARANCE. A little arrow brings a drop down box. Click on the word Themes. This brings the screen shown below where you will find 77 fancy free designs for your blog.

5. This step may take some time.

You can use the “Random” search,
an alphabetical listing of blog titles [which may only be helpful if you already KNOW the title of a blog design,
or do what post people do, select the “Popular” category.

When you see an icon that “talks to you,” click on the Kubrick theme or check out an entirely new theme. Below you can see the part of the Manage Theme screen with the “Preview” option below each thumbnail:

HAVE FUN!!

6. Here’s the one I picked for Jack ALTHOUGH he’ll probably change it later 🙂

I chose Ocean Mist because Jack likes Blue, and there is a Header Photo, which Jack can customize. Here is the way his Dashboard Manage Theme page looks now:

7. When you click on the “View Site” link on the top banner next to your Blog Title, you will get your new design. Here is Jack’s:

That’s all . . . for blogging Lesson Two.

In the future we will look at topics like (a) what to blog about, (b) what to put in your sidebar, and (c) features on your dashboard.

Of course you can already find tons of information on these topics all over the Web AND you can read WordPress.com Documents AND you can ask questions on the site Forums.

Lots of information is out there BUT here’s a caution: DON’T JUST READ . . . JUST “DO IT”

Blogging

How to start a Blog: Step-by-Step . . . and VOILA, you’re a publisher!

October 8, 2009 Shari Weiss 21 Comments

So you’re ready . . . to join the Blogosphere with your own individual views.

It’s not exactly a “piece of cake,” but as my many advisors told me — JUST DO IT, and you will learn a lot as you go.

GETTING STARTED is always the hardest part of a new endeavor. So here’s a step-by-step tutorial to help you use the most popular free online blogging platform — WordPress.com.

If you follow these directions, you can be an “official” published blogger in just about an hour or so, which includes up to 30 minutes to get an email confirmation after you sign in.

Be certain to use the comment section IF you have any questions after you try this process. And keep in mind that this is just the first Baby Step, so don’t be too hard on yourself.

To give you an idea of what you are in for, I’ll list the instructions first. Then I will repeat them with the screens you will be filling out. Here goes:

1. Go to WordPress.com

2. Click on the Sign Up Now screen.

3. Put in your domain name and blog title.

4. Retrieve your Email Confirmation.

5. Click on the first link.

6. Click on New Post AND WRITE . . . AND PUBLISH

GOOD LUCK . . . AND GET BLOGGING:

1. Go to WordPress.com

Here is your first screen

2. In upper right, you will click on the ORANGE “Sign up now” button

“Fill out the one-step form and you’ll be blogging seconds later”

3. Next screen – BE PREPARED to find a “domain” name AND a blog title.

** IMPORTANT. Give the “domain” name some thought . . . especially if you want to be found by search engines. Try to think of KEY WORDS [i.e., the words people would use to search for your information] for BOTH the domain name and Blog title:

4. The next screen is called Check Your Email to Complete registration.

On this screen — which I am not going to show — you may “update your profile” by adding your First Name, Last Name, and something ABOUT YOURSELF. You will be able to change any of that information later.

COOL! I want to call my blog Cars & Guitars and other sexy things -[my husband Jack]
WHOA, Jack. You might want to re-think that name. Did you really want to attract a slew of pornography seekers?

BUT you cannot move on until you receive an email from WordPress . . . so now’s the time to get out the chips and salsa.

ALERT: Your email confirmation will come from donotreply@wordpress.com. Be certain to check your SPAM folder before you panic.

Here is the email my husband Jack received to confirm his account:

5. If you click on the first link http://wordpress.com [in your email], then you will see a screen LIKE this, but with your blog’s information:

6. In the top left corner, you will see four headings: My Account — My Dashboard — New Post — Blog Info

[you will want to explore those options when you have time . . . ]

But for now, click on “New Post” so you can actually write something, post it, and take a well-deserved break.

7. Here is the screen where you will write that first post:

8. NOW IT’S YOUR TURN:

a) Think of a catchy title

b) Write your post

c) Publish [blue button on the right]

How do you add a photo?

How do you use boldface and italics?

There are buttons above the writing box. You can either try them out yourself OR ask a question in the comment section. But here is a screen shot of my husband’s first post:

Sharisax Is Out There