Free Wordpress blogs Archives - Fairy Blog Mother

Grab my sidebar badge now!

Posted on Friday 17 May 2013 by Alice • 1 Comment

I’m so excited! I’ve just created a sidebar badge for you!

If you like this and want to include it in your sidebar, find the code under this example:

(You can increase the code area by grabbing and pulling down the bottom right hand corner.)

Then you need highlight and copy the code, go to Appearance > Widgets, drag a text widget into an appropriate place in your sidebar (near the top would be great!), and when it has opened, paste in the code and save it.

Now go back to your blog and check your sidebar and your new widget will look like the badge above! Enjoy!

And why not tell all your friends and colleagues about your new blog widget badge and where you got it from!

And if you want to create your own sidebar widget badge, I learned how from this post – except that I used Photoshop and this blog’s server instead.

Filed Under: blogging encouragement, blogging success, Free Wordpress blogs

Magic Moment: Creating an easily viewable gallery

Posted on Wednesday 6 March 2013 by Alice • 1 Comment

This post is for all your bloggers out there who deal with pictures or photographs in your businesses. You will, of course, be fully aware how brilliant blogs are at displaying your wonderful images, and I expect your blogs are bursting at the seams showing off your sumptuous fare.

There are many plugins available to create a gallery in your blog, professionally providing a slide show or a fancy fanfare of imagery. But I find these moving applications a bit annoying, and anyway, once a picture has gone by you won’t see it again until it comes around the next time.

So I wanted to work out another way of showcasing to potential clients without any complicated technical stuff, and it works simply on WordPress’s existing ‘Library’ in your ‘Media’ section, located through the left sidebar while you are in ‘admin’ mode.

This is where WordPress stores all the pictures you’ve used in your posts and pages, ready to be used again whenever you need them. Each image is given its own URL, which you can use in many ways to display throughout your blog, for example, in a text or image widget in the sidebar.

So, why not take advantage of this to display your images? You could upload a large version of your perfect picture (suitably watermarked to preserve your copyright) into the gallery. Once published, when somebody clicks on the picture they will be able to view it in its own personal page (click on any image to see what I mean).

If you can’t display this picture in its original size, you could resize it before you paste it in your gallery page. When you upload your picture, the Attachment Display Settings menu will provide the option to paste it as the thumbnail size if this is applicable.

Otherwise you will need to resize it when it is in situ. The picture’s editing menu is reached by clicking on the image in ‘edit mode’ to show the editing icons in the top left corner. Click on the mountain icon to access the edit menus, and then select ‘Advanced Settings’ in the tabs above.

You can resize your picture by by selecting the desired percentage in the sidebar, as shown above, or by changing the number of pixels.

Remember you only need to change one dimension, as WordPress will calculate the other for you.

Now you can display your pictures as icons that can be clicked on to show the picture in its true dimensions and detail in its own page. As these pages are created automatically, there is no extra work for you, but there is the inconvenience that you cannot edit these pages to include navigation or a call to action to further your business, and the visitor will have to click on the ‘back’ button to return to your website.

Filed Under: blogging encouragement, Blogging help, blogging success, design makes a difference, Free Wordpress blogs, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs

Matching up a WordPress.com blog

Posted on Friday 1 March 2013 by Alice • 3 Comments

There is a small drawback to creating a WordPress.com blog to accompany your existing website. Even though there are over 200 themes available, if you want to keep the costs down it’s advisable to choose a free theme and adapt it as best as you can.

This isn’t as difficult as you think, as long as you are able to see the bigger picture. I usually have about five themes in the back of my mind that I know what can be done with them, and bring them out one by one to try and adapt them to suit the client’s needs.

Here’s the result of my latest project. I wasn’t able to exactly recreate the blog to match the website, but the owner was very pleased with the result.

Here’s the website:

And its accompanying blog:

Now I know they’re not identical, but they’re close enough to recognise they belong to each other. Using a WordPress.com blog will enable the owner to start her blogging career, which she will be able to continue to promote her business and draw in more traffic and potential customers.

Filed Under: blogging encouragement, blogs and blogging, design makes a difference, Free Wordpress blogs

Why simplicity, clarity and transparency?

Posted on Thursday 21 February 2013 by Alice • 0 Comments

I don’t believe that WordPress is complicated. It only seems so if you don’t understand it.

So this is where the Fairy Blog Mother comes in. Over the years I have specialised in understanding blogging jargon, translating it from the American into ordinary, everyday English, using words that normal people say, and incorporating it into my training programmes.

WordPress is, in fact, very simple to use. Certainly it is if you compare it with other blogging platforms like Joomla. It uses a content management system (CMS) that is designed to be easy to edit and create new material yourself. If you can use Word, you will understand WordPress, as there are many features that are the same.

Instructions should be made as clear as possible. No transaction should be left out or merely assumed. What may be obvious to you might not be so for another, so not only do I show what to do next in my training, I also reveal what happens as a result, to provide reassurance that everything has been done correctly.

When I create a website in WordPress, I enter it via the admin access, or front door. This is important, as this is how the owner or main user will see it. Very rarely will anybody need to use code or FTP, if they understand what that is, so I make a point of creating it without that so that everything is totally visible. This means no custom pages or any similar untoward systems, which the owner will not understand, make them confused or anxious.

Websites need to be simple, clear and uncomplicated. The navigation should be obvious, easy to follow and uncluttered. Each page should contain one message so to not confuse both the visitors and the search engines. The content should not stretch much ‘below the fold’, so that the most important stuff is visible at the top of the page. The sidebars should contain relevant call to actions to get the readers to ‘do’ something positive and useful to you and your business. And any additional material should be placed in a blog, which will explain the business in detail that cannot be accommodated within the website.

For information based first websites I suggest using WordPress.com as a method of cutting your blogging teeth. Once you’ve mastered the concept of blogs and how they work, and your business has successfully expanded, then you can move onto the next level (WordPress.org) which is where the fun really starts – especially if you learn how to understand it properly from me. Learning the foundations correctly from the beginning will save you time and angst when you want to start getting technical, use sophisticated digital marketing strategies and fully extend your business expectations. There is so much more you can do with a blog…

Filed Under: Blogging education, blogging encouragement, Blogging help, blogging success, blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, non-jargon, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs

Magic Moments: All about reblogging

Posted on Tuesday 12 February 2013 by Alice • 0 Comments

Ready for 2013 Google has changed its algorithms to disadvantage people who blithely copy their material around the net. This means it is more difficult to expose your posts to a larger audience merely by reproducing them word for word.

Ironically WordPress recognises that people will want to share their articles on other people’s sites, as this is a great way of getting more readers and ultimately more comments and followers. And it has done this through the reblog tab in WordPress.com.

Here is a post I wrote in another blog and I have ringed the ‘reblog’ tab in the black bar at the top which is visible once you have logged in:

This post is written by me, so I can reblog it on any other WordPress.com blog I am associated with.

Clicking on the reblog tab brings up a menu:

This allows you to choose the destination blog from the drop down menu and add a comment in the status update field if applicable.

Then once completed, click on the ‘Reblog Post’ button:

And click on the link to go view your post reblogged on your other blog!

I can only presume that Google will accept this method of sharing blog posts, because when you click on the ‘Read more…’ link you are directed back to the original post. This is not a method of recreating existing material, merely how to place it on a guest blog to find more readers or expose your writing to a different audience.

Filed Under: Blogging education, blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, guest posts, increasing business visibility

Results of my blogging experiment so far

Posted on Thursday 17 January 2013 by Alice • 4 Comments

I have been working on my experiment blog now for over two weeks, with very encouraging results. My aim is to post every day for a year (from the 1 January) to see what happens. I will be doing very limited promotion, relying on the power of WordPress and organic search engine reaction to get traffic.

The most amount of views in one day has been 12 so far, and since the third day I have always had traffic (I’m up to 70 views so far). I’m not sure about the reliability of WordPress’s statistics, as when I have received email notifications about ‘likes’ from readers, these have not been picked up. Therefore I suggest you treat these results with a pinch of salt, and don’t take them as ‘gospel’.

One of the main indicators of a successful blog is the amount of interaction you receive, whether it’s in the form of comments or ‘likes’. Even though the latter is gratifying, the former is the most desired (so far I’ve got two), as it shows you have moved the reader enough to express themselves in words rather than just pressing a button.

I have set up the sharing buttons to allow readers to share my posts, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this yet. But it is early days… However, the RSS system is set up to syndicate or feed my posts onto Twitter and Facebook, and the stats do show if anybody does click through from these to view my posts.

Frequency is certainly a good indicator to get regular traffic, but so is good content. Visitors need to know that whenever they visit they will get something worthwhile to read, as well as something new each time. Pictures make blog posts more interesting, and can say a lot more than words, so you can create a satisfactory post quite quickly and easily. I will be investigating how to make this process more efficient using various technological advances that are becoming available – watch this space.

Another thing to mention is that I take as much care with my categories and tags as with the quality of content and pictures. Adequate keyword usage stimulates the search engines and helps new visitors to find you. And it’s important to include the alt tags behind your images too, not only for the spiders to read, but to help any partially sighted visitors to understand your blog better.

If you want to take a look at the blog in question, feel free: http://aspiringcountrywoman.wordpress.com

Filed Under: blogging success, blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs

Experimenting with a New Year

Posted on Wednesday 2 January 2013 by Alice • 2 Comments

As it’s now the New Year I’m going to do a little experiment. I’ve heard on the grapevine that things are going to change for the better for bloggers, allowing them to write how they feel rather than how they think they ought to.

So I’m going to put this to the test. I’ve created another little blog using WordPress.com to write about nature and what I find in the countryside.

I know this probably belies my age, but it is something I have been thinking about for some time. I regularly go for walks in the country, trudging up and down muddy lanes noticing how the seasons change as the days go by. I remember my grandmother receiving a book one Christmas about an Edwardian Lady’s Diary, in which the author had written and drawn about the flowers and animals in her immediate surroundings 100 years ago. I was an enchanting present to give an old lady, but I found it fascinating, and somehow the idea has stuck with me all this time.

So now I’m going to create a 21st century version using a blog. The aim is to try and post something as regularly as possible (ie every day if I can) and see what effect that has, such as consistency and frequency, combined with free speech and relaxation of writing, as well as using a WordPress hosted blog with all the trimmings available, and in a non-American environment (believe me this is important, as European attitudes to blogs have yet to catch up).

I want to monitor what response I get and whether I generate any interest and what kind it is. This experiment will also evaluate whether a simple blog using WordPress.com can compete with a fancy, full-blown WordPress.org blog with all the plugins that are available for it. I will be relying totally on what WordPress give me regarding statistics, search engine compatibility, exposure to other bloggers and feeds to social media. The result will be simple, but I want to see if it is effective.

I still advocate that all blogging beginners should start with a WordPress.com blog to get used to blogging before they progress further. There is no easier way than this, as you can’t go wrong and everything is totally set up for you. It is regularly updated with lots of volunteer geeks striving to make it as simple and easy as possible (though recently I think they have overdone it and it is starting to get a bit too complicated again).

I definitely still want to see if regular posting does make a difference, regarding what subject you blog about. Certainly talking about what I see and find in the British countryside will only appeal to a selection of readers, but isn’t that what many bloggers start with? And I also want to occasionally inform you about my progress and what I have learned along the way, especially the concept of ‘free writing’ once more.

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, successful blogging

Should you have a stand-alone blog?

Posted on Monday 1 October 2012 by Alice • 0 Comments

As I said in my previous post, back in the old days blogs and websites used different kinds of programming platforms, and were therefore considered totally separate identities.

Therefore for those up-and-coming digital marketers who realised the potential of blogs for business, it was necessary to create a blog sitting alongside your website.

But with the development of CMS and the birth of the blogsite (a blog that has become a website, and therefore already has a blog incorporated within it), there was no need to have a separate blog.

Nevertheless not all websites are made with CMS such as WordPress, which is, of course, a blogging platform. There are still some die-hard programmers who prefer to build websites using coding language or another form of website design package. And in this case a WordPress.com blog would be an ideal solution, free, easy to set up and use, and requires next to no specialist knowledge to create or maintain.

But there is the problem of making your blog look like your website, or as close to it as possible. This is in spite of WordPress.com providing its users with over 200 themes (or templates) to improve the blog’s presentation and look, none of them will match your website exactly. So the art is to recognise an existing theme that has potential and can be adapted to resemble what you are looking for as closely as possible.

Here is an example of what I mean – first the website:

and the WordPress.com blog made to go alongside it:

It’s not the same, but it’s not far off!

So back to the question in the headline – a separate blog will work if there is regular content with suitable contextual links back to the website, whereas a blogsite won’t require these links because it is already part of the website. Both will work better with excellent search engine optimisation and plenty of fantastic posted material, and although the WordPress.com will have WordPress behind it to help with its indexing, a blogsite suitably armed bristling with SEO plugins and other helpful applications will probably perform better.

But don’t let that put you off creating a separate blog, as it would be far worse if you had no blog at all!

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, design makes a difference, Free Wordpress blogs, increasing business visibility

18 uses of keywords within blog posts

Posted on Wednesday 25 July 2012 by Alice • 2 Comments

I thought we’d take a break from my Magic Moment series about Google Analytics today and give you something else to think about.

This blog will be undergoing a transformation very soon (perhaps you’ve already noticed my new logos) and as this includes enhancement and optimising your blog, here’s a post about keywords:

Find out what your keywords are. These are particular words or phrases that people are searching for at this moment. By putting them in your posts it will make them more attractive to the search engines. Use Google Adwords and Wordtracker to find them for you.
Choose the best 10 keywords and plan out your posts within an editorial calendar. Remember they are only valid for the next week or so, so select some suitable subject matter from them and compose a few drafts.
Read other blog posts that are in vogue (use Google Alerts and other RSS feeds to research into this) to find out what subjects are being talked about and use their keywords.
Your post’s title is a highly important element of your post, so make sure your keyword is placed within it. Your headline also needs to be attractive, enticing, contain added value, a question that resonates with your reader’s needs, or a controversial statement that demands a reaction.
Edit the permalink (also known as a post slug) of your post. This is the automatically generated URL each post receives once it’s published. Abbreviate it to include the most important keywords purely for search engine indexing purposes.
Liberally use the keywords throughout your post. The most prominent areas should be the first line of the first paragraph, somewhere in the middle and in the last paragraph. Don’t use more then 10% saturation of keywords or you will upset both your readers and the search engines.
You can vary how you use the keywords within your post. Remember spiders don’t understand punctuation like we do, so you could separate your keyphrase with a full stop (period) for added variation.
The use of keywords in a list (like this post) works well, as they are easily scannable, making the content more digestible. It also avoids heavy, long paragraphs. Bullet points are a good alternative.
Use sub-headlines to break up a post for easier reading. These should also be packed with secondary keywords for extra emphasis, but don’t make them monotonous.
Using links within your post has many advantages. They provide access to other posts or pages within your blog, forcing spider activity and allowing readers to venture further to find out more. This also helps to reduce the bounce rate within your blog’s statistics.
There is also a plugin available called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin that automatically generates links to suitable relevant posts related to the subject at the bottom of your post. Sometimes it struggles or gets it wrong, but this is better than nothing!
Make sure the wording within your post’s links, whether they are internal or external, are contextual. This means the links contain the keywords that are relevant to where it is directed. Search engine spiders award brownie points if keyworded links successfully connect with its destination’s relevance, ultimately much better than just ‘click here’.
When using pictures in your posts, remember to include keywords in the title, alternative text and caption. The first two are not visible to the reader, but are to spiders, and picture captions are the third most read item on a blog behind the headline and subheaders.
A post’s tags are in fact keywords, and definitely should be relevant to the post. Apart from your chosen ones for the post, search out other relevant words and phrases within your post’s content to use as tags.
If you have set up categories based around your keywords, then that will be an added boost to your keyword saturation.
Install a plugin such as the All in one SEO Pack, which allows you to write another keyword rich headline, submit more keyword laiden tags and provide a keyword filled description for search engine indexing.
If you can arrange it, make sure any incoming links to your blog from external sources contain keywords within their textual makeup (see point 12). These may include blog carnivals, guest blogging, social networking feeds and sharing, posting on social media groups and associated pages, and links from other relevant websites, including your own.
Work out the best time of day to publish your posts. It may be when your target audience is most likely to be online, or at a time when the search engines will not be distracted by other competitive posts.

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs, Writing tips

Magic Moment: How to make your posts sticky

Posted on Thursday 5 July 2012 by Alice • 2 Comments

Click my logo to ask me a question!

Have you noticed that some posts seem to be permanently placed at the top of the blog page, and newer posts are forced to appear beneath it? This is because they have been ‘stuck’ there, a phenomenon that is not confined to blogging, but can be found in Facebook and similar social media platforms.

It is very easy to make your posts ‘sticky’, it just requires ticking a certain box. But unfortunately the duration of this ‘stickiness’ cannot be scheduled or automated, it does require a manual action by the blogger to activate and deactivate it.

In the page where you write your posts, you will be familiar with the menu for saving, previewing and publishing (located top right).

Click on the Edit link after ‘Visibility: Public‘ and the menu will extend downwards, revealing more options. This Publish menu has many exciting things hiding in it!

Below the default checked ‘Public’ button an indented box will have appeared marked ‘Stick this post to the front page’.

When you click in the box a tick will appear, which means the post you are currently writing will be placed at the top of your post hierarchical system when it is published.

When you don’t want your post to be ‘sticky’ any more, this can be simply cancelled by clicking on the same ticked box again to make the tick disappear, and then update your post. It’s as simple as that!

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, increasing business visibility, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs

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