Self-hosted Wordpress blogs Archives

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

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

Why the mis-use of WordPress annoys me

Posted on Monday 19 November 2012 by Alice • 2 Comments

I’m not a person who usually gets on their high-horse to make a stand, but recently I have come across two instances involving WordPress that have made me angry.

I like to help people to succeed through advice so they travel down the most appropriate road. I don’t like placing barriers in the way to hinder their progress forward. Some people find technology confusing enough without anybody making it difficult for them. So why do some web developers (not designers, as their results show they obviously aren’t that breed) become so protective of their ‘work’ they destroy the very medium they are working with?

WordPress is an open source tool that is available for free to make blogs and websites using a content management system. It has been carefully constructed and designed during the past decade by some clever people in the US to make it as simple as possible to use. It is this simplicity as well as its effectiveness that has made it so popular, and the content management system in place is designed for anyone to edit and make changes wherever needed.

These two incidents I’m referring to consist of blogs that don’t allow their owners to make such changes. When they enter via WordPress’s CMS front doors into the Dashboard, they cannot see the content they wish to amend. The pages are either invisible through what I call ‘back door coding’, or the content within them is not available for editing.

WordPress’s language is .php, which is a usefully simple script that can easily be adapted. It seems to me that web-developers, with all their prior knowledge, like to flex their coding muscles to make their changes and put their ‘slant’ on a WordPress website. This is absolutely fine if a good job is done, but it is not fair if pages and other applications are created in ‘custom’ mode which is not visible via the front door CMS access.

I can’t understand why this CMS that is widely accepted by millions of users is ignored in this way. Is it beneath them to enter the website via the normal methods? CSS is readily available for coding changes, and by all means enter via a FTP browser application, but not to the detriment of the non-technical user.

The website’s owner must be able to make their own changes. If you don’t think they’re capable, then teach them how. It’s not difficult to learn WordPress’s CMS (that is why Fairy Blog Mother was created), especially with a bit of patience and understanding.

Any web developer who is ‘precious’ of their website construction ought to realise that this is detrimental to their continuing relationship with their client, who may resent having to fork out a large amount of money each time a typo needs correcting. They should be only offering professional help wherever it is valid and necessary, particularly if it could further the use of the website in the future.

Filed Under: blogging success, blogs and blogging, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs

Magic Moment: How Google Analytics reveals your blog’s sociability

Posted on Wednesday 15 August 2012 by Alice • 0 Comments

It’s great to take advantage of the social side of Google Analytics – or is it? Quite revealing (August is a bad month to demonstrate this to you, as I’ve been a bit inactive, but there is still enough data to make it interesting) in what the statistics show about your blog’s interaction with the social networks, and this has spurred me to create new suitable remedies for this.

Once you’re into Google Analytics, look under ‘Traffic Sources’ in the left sidebar for the ‘Social’ link, and click on it to make the menu extend downwards. The resulting page-links are excellent if you are undertaking a social media campaign, as you will be able to track how the public is reacting to your efforts and how or where you need to make adjustments or revisions.

In this post we shall explore the ‘Sources’ link. You will be greeted by a graph:

which show peaks when there is a lot of social media interaction (if you mouse over, more details are revealed like dates and numbers, which can be tracked back to specific posts you have written or actions you may have put in place).

The idea is to get a lot more peaks at regular intervals, all relating to your marketing activities. It’s also quite interesting to compare the social visits (blue) with all the visits (orange), which shows the relationship your blog has with search criteria and social referral, or first time visitors versus returning followers and fans. I’d like to concentrate more on the latter, as marketing to warm leads is much easier.

Below this graph are details of where the social referrals came from:

and here LinkedIn has superseded Twitter – which is interesting to me! I have been using both platforms a lot longer than the others, but it’s nice to know where I should be concentrating to get more visitors. The pageview statistics are also revealing as well.

And finally when you click further down the left sidebar onto ‘Social Visitors Flow’, here is some more interesting information:

as here you will be able to view which posts attracted the most attention from which platform, and then what happened next – did visitors move onto other pages, or did they ‘drop off’ as Google Analytics so delicately describes it!

The concept of ‘what happened next’ will be my priority in the autumn (and will be revealed in more Magic Moments). It is very important to be able to guide your visitors through your blog so they go where you want them to. There are various persuasive tactics I am currently exploring to use within my new design and navigation, as I will want prospective customers to visit my new product pages. Visitors should have an enjoyable journey, effortlessly executed, throughout my blog to get as much information as they can. After all, the Fairy Blog Mother is an educational resource, and this blog needs to be able to share it as much as possible!

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

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: Where does your blog traffic come from?

Posted on Monday 23 July 2012 by Alice • 1 Comment

Click above to ask me a question

It’s always a good idea to know where your blog traffic is coming from, whether your last flurry of social media activity resulted in lots of clicks, or whether that link you placed on a particular website has brought in a few new visitors.

This Magic Moment begins the investigation of this section in Google Analytics that shows how your visitors have accessed your blog. If you click on Traffic Sources > Overview in the left sidebar, you will see this page:

But it is this pie-chart that shows the most interesting information:

Over 70% found my blog through the search engines. This means they had asked a question or used particular keywords that were directed to my blog.

Now I could get quite excited about this, as it does lend the idea as to which search keywords they used, and perhaps I could write some more posts using those keywords to get more traffic. We shall see what the real story is later in another Magic Moment, and how I could encourage these visitors to use my blog further.

Over 11% of traffic comes from referrals. I would like this to become a lot more in the future, so I will investigate which referral sites have been used and how or whether I can explore more effective use of them to increase more focused traffic back to my blog.

17% direct traffic shows that people know my blog’s URL or at least its name, and by typing it in have successfully gained access to my blog.

And finally campaigns – this is interesting, as I have yet to set up any proper campaigns, so those five visits are very intriguing!

So now I will quickly glance at the first 10 referral sites that sent traffic to my blog (click on Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals to access this page):

I will go into more detail in another Magic Moment, as there is a lot to explore here, but I want to show you the top 10 referral sites I am currently getting:

The top one, t.co, is Twitter. I am presuming this amount of traffic has resulted from the use of the plugin ‘Tweet Old Post’ that automatically sends out past posts at irregular intervals throughout the day, which helps to keep my blog alive for those who are on Twitter at that moment. Ideally I should be investigating into more activity on Twitter, both automated and spontaneous, to generate some more traffic back to my blog.

LinkedIn and Facebook are also doing quite well, and there is certainly much more I could do on these social media platforms to increase traffic (part of my marketing plan that begins in the autumn).

The others trickle in, and unless you want to do a concerted effort in a particular referral site, or through a special tinyurl associated with a social media platform such as bit.ly or su.pr, it’s probably just worth noting which ones provide how many each month, and raise an eyebrow if necessary at any unusual ones that pop up, especially when viewing the extended list.

More demystifying in the next set of Magic Moments to come…

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

Magic Moment: What you first see in Google Analytics

Posted on Wednesday 18 July 2012 by Alice • 0 Comments

Click my logo to ask me a question!

So far in this Magic Moment series we have seen how to upload a Google Analytics plugin and connect it to your Google Analytics account.

Then I showed you how to go into your blog’s Analytics account and you would have been confronted with the Visitors Overview page which always greets you when you first enter into Google Analytics.

There is quite a lot of information presented here. This blog has been going some time, so I have managed to accumulate a relatively consistent line of visit data. OK, there are peaks and troughs, and it is always interesting to investigate what made these (a weekend day, a popular post, lack of posting, etc).

This data is presented over a month. (Later I will show you how to compare months so you can see how your visitor trend is performing.) But your first glance always rests on the number of visitors you have had (in this case 1,481) as that is positioned at the top. If you go in sometime later that tally will have changed (hopefully to a higher number and more towards your visitor goal).

This pie chart is quite revealing. It shows I have a lot of new traffic coming to my site, but luckily I do have just over 9% of loyal fans who regularly return to see my posts. It would be better if I was able to convert these new visitors into returning again, but to do this I need to provide a good reason to do so, which might not only be my scintillating posts (!).

Delving further will reveal why these guys only visit once, but that is for a later Magic Moment.

The number I would like to see increase here is for ‘Visits’, and not necessarily the ‘Unique Visitors’. That would mean they are returning because they like what they see, and that could be accomplished by getting them to subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed.

But what is encouraging is the number of page views, the average page per visit (1.42 means that nearly half are going to another page rather than the one they landed on) and the average visit duration (1 minute means those that do stay are reading my posts).

The Bounce rate measures visitors who don’t stay and immediately leave, even after a couple of seconds. Obviously these visitors didn’t like what they saw, or realised this was the wrong blog for them. I would like to bring this rate lower, by writing more valuable posts and providing a good reason for them to stay and explore my blog further.

In the next Magic Moment we will dig a little deeper to see what we will find (which I hope won’t be too embarrassing!).

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

Magic Moment: Look at your Analytics

Posted on Monday 16 July 2012 by Alice • 0 Comments

Click my logo to ask me a question!

It’s all very well setting up Google Analytics for your blog, but you need to go in to see the results from time to time. This needn’t be a scary prospect, you should view it with anticipation and a desire to be nosy, for whatever is presented to you should be taken as an opportunity to find out exactly what is happening to your blog.

After you have logged into Google, you need to access your account to find your Analytics connection.

On the next page select the link ‘Products’ on the left sidebar:

And this will take you to the page that lists all the Google applications you are associated with.

By clicking on the Google Analytics icon you’ll be greeted with the links to the blogs you have connected Google Analytics to.

Click on the link that is associated with your blog, and then on the second link that appears that is your blog’s URL, and the Analytics will be revealed to you.

As this series of Magic Moments unfolds we will go into more detail about what you can see here, and much more.

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

Magic Moments: Adding your blog to Google Analytics

Posted on Thursday 12 July 2012 by Alice • 0 Comments

Click my logo to ask me a question!

As I said in my previous post, it’s very easy to add your blog to Google Analytics if you’ve got a WordPress.org blog. The ingredients you need are an appropriate plugin and a Google Account.

First, select a Google Analytics plugin. This can be done either by going straight to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins and typing in Google Analytics for WordPress in the search bar:

which brings up all the plugins related to this search. The top three I saw were:

and you can investigate them further by clicking on the title links and reading the information about them.

Once you’ve made your choice (I’ve used the top one), you can either download your plugin there and then, to upload into your plugins folder in your FTP platform, or you can upload it from your blog itself.

The latter is much easier, so go to the Plugin link located in the left hand sidebar and select the ‘Add New’ link from the extended menu.

It will bring up the page where you can search for your plugin via the request field:

and then automatically upload it into your plugin directory by clicking ‘Install Now”:

Your new plugin will be added to your plugin’s list where you can activate it by clicking on the ‘Activate’ link under its name.

But before you click on the ‘Settings’ link, you need to create a Google Analytics Account.

Go to http://www.google.com/analytics and click on the orange box ‘Create an account’. Follow the instructions (I haven’t time to go through it with you now) and you will end up with an entry for your blog that gives you a UA-code that is unique to your blog. It usually looks like this: UA-1234567-8 (obviously the numbers will be different). This UA-code is what you need to insert into the settings area of your Google Analytics plugin.

Copy your UA-code, log back into your blog, go to your plugin listings, locate the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin and click on ‘Settings’ link underneath its name to open your plugin’s settings page:

Click on the box next to ‘Manually enter your UA code’:

and paste in the UA-code you’ve copied from your Google Analytics account. Leave the location of the tracking code at default, and don’t forget to update your settings.

Now the code for your Google Analytics has automatically been placed on every page in your blog. It will start to record your blog’s statistics within 24 hours, and that is when the fun really starts!

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

How many visitors do you get to your blog?

Posted on Tuesday 10 July 2012 by Alice • 1 Comment

Click my logo to ask me a question!

These are permanent questions on every blogger’s mind: how many visitors do I get to my blog? And what kind of visitors are they? Are they really interested in what I have to say, or have they got there by accident?

And how about these questions: how much traffic did my last tweet bring in? Was it worth doing that concerted effort on Facebook? Did posting on that LinkedIn group make any difference?

And then there are these: which keywords stimulate more traffic? Which subject matter gets more attention, and why? Did changing that headline really increase my ratings?

If you have a WordPress.org blog, then ideally you should have installed a Google Analytics plugin. There are many to choose from, and they all should make the process of adding your blog as simple as possible.

Gone are the days when you needed to add the special code in exactly the right place in your website’s header code, and on every page you wanted tracked and recorded. Now all you need is a Google Account, and once you’ve registered your blog or website, just copy the UA-code allocated to it.

Paste this into the plugin’s setting pages, save and wait for your stats to start rolling in. It usually takes about a day to get any results, and longer if they are to become meaningful.

The next set of Magic Moments will show you how to set up Google Analytics on your blog (note this is only for the WordPress.org ones) and what you should be looking out for in the stats. I shall be using my own, which will be very embarrassing, as they aren’t as good as they should be, so I shall be exploring what I need to do to improve my situation at the same time.

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

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