Fairy Blog Mother

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Category Archives: social networking

What should be your true reason for blogging?

Written on Thursday 14 April 2011 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

Notice I put in ‘should be’ – because I can’t dictate what you created your blog for. But I can advise you on your blogging style, and how it will relate to your readers.

There are plenty of blogs and their posts out in the blogosphere yabbering away about how to make money. And that is one of the reasons why people create blogs – to make a fast buck. Some do succeed, but you’ll find there are plenty of different ways to do this, and some find it easier than others.

I could include affiliate and sponsored advertising, but then I feel this blog would become too commercial and my readers would be turned off. If you want to make money fast, then by all means go down this route, but it does depend on the kind of readership you may want to attract, on the subject matter you’re blogging about, and how much you post every day. The idea is to create traffic to supply the advertising, and sometimes the quality of the posts do suffer as a result.

But when you come across a blog like that, isn’t it really unwelcoming, distracting, annoying and disturbing? I hate the fact you have to glean the posted material somewhere amongst all that hype and irrelevant material – and let’s face it, much of the advertising doesn’t relate to the post’s subject.

So without these interfering interruptions, you need to be more canny about why you are blogging and how you go about it. Without the advertising you won’t make your immediate fortune, so you’ll have to rely on good content, a scintillating and entertaining style, relevant and required subject matter with excellent, pertinent headlines to compensate.

And another thing, don’t try and sell in your content if you’ve decided not to include advertising. Having established that your blog won’t be commercially cluttered, don’t spoil your posts with hard-sell tactics, as that is not the true nature of blogging.

Blogs are a medium for expression, education, entertaining and example. They are an integral part of social networking, and you don’t sell on this kind of media as it isn’t tolerated. Your blog is a place to explain your ideas to your audience for free, as a gesture of goodwill and an altruistic attitude towards helping other people succeed or have a better life. It is somewhere to expose your expertise, show off your knowledge and spread the word, a resource that highlights the all important answers and provides the solutions for nothing – except for a following, subscriptions, sharing on social media and recommendations to others to come and read your posts.

And of course you reciprocate by thanking them, commenting on their blogs and acknowledging them on social networking and bookmarking sites – once they’ve scratched your back it’s definitely time to scratch theirs!

What is RSS and what does it do?

Written on Wednesday 13 April 2011 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

One of the things I mentioned in my last post was RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.

Some people ‘get’ RSS, and there are others that don’t. It took me a while, partly because of the word ‘syndication’. Myriam Webster’s Learning Dictionary’s definition is: “to sell (something, such as a piece of writing, comic strip, or photograph) to many different newspapers or magazines for publication at the same time”.

It’s the words “at the same time” that is the crux. By using RSS, you are able to publish your posts not only in your blog, but in many different places simultaneously. Everyone who has subscribed to your blog (sort of like a magazine) will have requested to receive a copy of your latest post delivered to their inboxes or their search engine readers.

It doesn’t have to be your subscribing readership, you can use RSS to deliver your post to other media where it will be read by new, different, uninvolved, exciting people. This is a brilliant way of exposing your post to a myriad of potential subscribers, if not followers, even if it is in passing.

This is where your headline comes into play – that is why I’ve been stressing it needs to be catchy, informative, intriguing, educational, pertinent, inviting – it must strike a chord with its potential audience immediately or the opportunity will be lost, especially in social media where the pace is so fast.

You can get a RSS URL (special domain name for your blog’s RSS feed) from Google Feedburner, but most blogs provide a simple version automatically. It depends what you want to do with it.

The simple version opens the facility for you to bookmark the post – something I find unsatisfactory because you have to make the effort to click on the link to find out the latest contribution.

The RSS URL not only sets up the subscription service, but allows you to activate posting applications throughout social media so you can ‘syndicate’ (publish immediately in several places at once) your latest post automatically to an alternative audience who wouldn’t get the chance to see it otherwise.

It also means you don’t have to actively go around all the social media sites you are connected to, pasting up your post’s URL manually every time you publish, saving you time, inconvenience and not forgetting their access details.

And if you schedule your posts to publish to a more appropriate or convenient time, they will automatically appear when you’re busy doing something else more profitable. (I have a scheduling your posts e-course for that too!)

Of course this blog is meant to be a resource, so you can find out more by using the search facility, or by clicking on the following links: RSS Simply Explained, Setting up a RSS feed, and How to use Feedburner to feed into Twitter – enjoy!

I’ve written a post – now what?

Written on Friday 8 April 2011 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

Well done for writing a post – after all, that’s what your blog is for. Now you’ve got to let people know so they can see and read it. This can either be done manually or through automated systems.

Here is a list of what can be done to spread the exposure of your post:

Set up a RSS feed: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which means automating a procedure for something to happen simultaneously in several places at once!

This means your subscribers will receive your latest post in their email inboxes, or view the latest feed in their search engine reader pages, immediately without you having to send it to them, or they remembering to visit your blog to find out your latest post.

Update your status: You can also use RSS to automatically feed your posts into Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and any other social media you’ve joined up with.

After you’ve published, your posts will automatically appear in your profiles via the special applications available, either with the headline, first paragraph and connecting link, or in Twitter as the headline accompanied with a tinyurl linking back to your post.

Allow readers to share: You can add applications to your blog to encourage people to share your post once they’ve read it, for example, there are the three boxes at the top of this post to encourage my readers to retweet in Twitter or share via Facebook and LinkedIn.

At the bottom of the post there is another button to encourage my more technical audience to share and save in any of the myriad of social bookmarking sites, which will boost the post’s exposure considerably.

Contribute your content: Sometimes it’s worth spending a bit of time manually promoting your post, especially if it’s performed with a personal touch, as that can set it apart from automated feeds. Start slowly with one or two locations, and build it up gradually.

If you’ve joined any relevant LinkedIn Groups, contribute to the discussion by posing a provactive question or statement, backed up with a link to your latest post, and do the same for LinkedIn Answers if you post qualifies and contributes to your answer.

Join in on other discussion groups and forums, either with helpful and relevant responses or by starting another thread with a link to your post. Comment on other blogs within your niche or industry, as that will automatically link back to your blog, as well as drawing attention to yourself, and some blogs will automatically show the last post you’ve written too.

Update your email signature: If you send out a lot of emails, you could be missing an excellent publicity slot if you don’t include your blog’s URL in your signature. You could even type in the latest post’s permalink for direct access.

That will do as a start. Automation will make your life easier, but don’t ignore manual contributions which can differentiate your post from others, and ensure its relevance to the environment it is posted into.

Sharing your blog is really sociable

Written on Monday 22 November 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

Blogs are meant to be shared. Interactive websites, as that what blogs are, should be seen as the hub of your business on the internet, as they are able to encourage your readers and visitors to interact with you on your own blog.

Blogs are perfectly designed to enable comments and feedback on what you have written, a chance to allow your audience to express themselves and share what they want to say. And the more interaction you get (and this means responding to your comments, perhaps even starting a conversation), the more likely the internet spiders will index this new content and raise both your visitor and search engine ratings.

But as well as comments, you need to encourage your readers to share your blog on social networking sites. This sharing encourages links, and links are like portals on the web, allowing access to visitors and spiders alike to enter your blog and read its contents. You shouldn’t be shy of encouraging links, because if they come from quality sources, they can boost your blog no end!

But first you need a method of sharing your posts, and that is done through RSS (really simple syndication, an American term that means putting it about in many different places at one time). Usually a blog’s theme will already have a RSS URL incorporated into the theme (template), located through the little orange square that signifies RSS. This provides a simple RSS URL like http://successnetwork.wordpress.com/feed.

This RSS URL will enable you to feed your newly written blog posts into your social networking profiles and your Twitter stream automatically as soon as they are published (all at once at the same time!). All you need to do is to set up the applications in each profile and add in the RSS URL and everything will just happen for you!

This self-sharing of your blog shouldn’t stop there, you need to encourage others to share for you too. You can add in applications that allow your readers to share your post into their social networking profiles and Twitter streams, all at a click of a button, and if they’re really technically minded they might share them in the social sharing networks like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Tumblr, Delicious and many more!

These sharing networks are primarily sites that thrive on their members sharing worthwhile posts with each other, recommending them to others, and voting on which ones they like the best. The most popular posts will result in more visitor traffic, and this activity and interaction will gain the attention of the search engine spiders to index these blogs, resulting in large peaks in your visitor stats and a lot of ‘retweeting’ and sharing on social networking sites.

As sharing is a nice, altruistic and caring thing to do, why not go out and share a blog post today, starting with this one?

The difference between static and interactive websites

Written on Monday 1 November 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

Websites are not the same throughout the world. Apparently in Europe they are mainly what we call ‘static’ websites, online business brochures, somewhere the visitor can confirm a business after a networking experience or a referral. They do not interact with their visitors, and many are on the way to becoming obsolete because they do not compete with the whizz-bang websites from the States.

America has taken on the interactive website by storm. There are so many different kinds of CMS (content management systems) that allow the owners to update the contents themselves without having to rely on a webmaster to do it for them, and also allow the visitors to contribute their comments and ideas to the website with immediate publishing effect.

Blogs are a form of CMS website. They are extremely easy to maintain, and positively encourage visitors to interact with them. Their programming is extremely enticing to search engine spiders, who crawl the internet looking for new material to feast on, and blogs are a plentiful supply of fresh content. They are designed to be updated on a regular basis (from several times a day to once a week), and even the visitors who comment on them are considered to be fresh spider meat.

This constant new content is exaggerated by the social sharing sites (Digg, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc) who rely on computer techies who have nothing better to do than to read tonnes of blogs and share them with their pals. The more interaction you get from these sites, the more visitors, comments, spider interaction and ultimately higher indexing by the search engines. And the sharing concept is continued on ordinary social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), with retweeting and feeding galore, all with a ready supply of new content to spread across the internet.

Static websites do absolutely nothing for the businesses they represent, apart from looking pretty with out-of-date material, and only visited when someone types in their URL and bothers to get past the first page. Blogs and other CMS websites are perfectly tuned towards getting passing search engine traffic, continuously being updated with new stuff that is worthwhile reading, interacting with their readers and social media – actually being a presence on the internet that surpasses their expenditure and actually gets in business without having to try really hard.

Now which one would you prefer to represent you business?

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, online marketing, social networking - Tags: blogs and blogging, CMS, content management systems, interact with visitors, online brochures, other social media, search engine spiders, search engine traffic, social networking sites, social sharing sites, websites - 2 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

10 ways to get your blog to catch on

Written on Wednesday 8 September 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

Sorry to break your bubble, but unless you are extremely lucky, a top notch celebrity or are posting on a subject that is incredibly popular, it will take some time before your blog starts to build an audience.

The usual time-frame is from 6-12 months, and this does depend on how you treat your blog. Neglect it, and nobody, not even the search engine spiders, will bother to visit. Stuff it full of top quality posts, and your following will grow accordingly. Blog every day, even several times a day, and of course you will get lots of traffic, especially if you are canny with your use of keywords, subject matter, frequency and timings of your posts, and a multitude of plugins and other apps designed to increase your blog’s exposure.

Here are some factors you could put into play to help your blog to catch on:

1. Keep on posting. Patience, persistence, consistency and quality will all contribute towards gaining a loyal audience. They will require and need continuous fresh material if you are to encourage them to return.

2. Promote your blog widely. Add in your blog’s URL in your social networking profiles, as well as feeding your blog into them so every time you post your fans and followers will get a chance to read your blog’s latest contribution. Use appropriate apps and plugins to make it easier for them to share or recommend.

3. Contribute on social media. Paste your posts on LinkedIn Groups, feed onto Facebook Fanpages, and answer a question in LinkedIn Answers with a link back to a relevant post on your blog.

4. Allocate tags and categories to your posts. Be aware of the keywords that are not only relevant to your post’s subject, but are also popular in the search criteria at that particular moment. Blogs are ideal for search engine optimisation, as long as you use it effectively.

5. Comment on other blogs. Choose the ones in your niche or relevant to your blog’s subject, as your contribution will have a link back to your blog. This will also give you the opportunity to build an identity or further your expertise in your chosen field. You can give your blog a head-start by adding in the plugin CommentLUV which helps towards leaving and hosting comments to further your blog.

6. Submit to blogging directories. Apart from the obvious, like Technorati.com, there are plenty of other directories to consider, such as bloglisting.net, blogcatalog.com, blogged.com – do some research, see what others use, or ask around for recommendations as to the best ones to use.

7. Participate and share. There are a number of social networking sites, such as Digg, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Delicious and many more, that are designed to share blog posts through a voting system. Just like Facebook and Twitter, you build a following and comment, share or recommend each others’ blogs, and the most popular, or the ones with recommendations from a higher source, will gain in social levels and therefore visitor rates. This will work for high posting and quality contributions, as well as consistent participation on others’ blogs rather than promoting your own.

8. Become a guest blogger. Submit to MyBlogGuest.com to offer your services as a guest blogger, in which you can (subtly) link back to your blog with relevant references to the subject you are writing about. Don’t forget about blog carnivals, as contributing to them can certainly help your blog traffic.

9. Submit your blog’s URL elsewhere online. Promote your blog’s URL in your stationery, email signatures, newsletter publications, tweets and other social media updates, submit your posts to online magazines such as iSnare, EasyArticles, EzineArticles and ArticleDashboard (though make sure each contribution is slightly changed to avoid repetition penalties), and anywhere else people will get a chance to click on your blog’s URL.

10. Make RSS prominent. To encourage a loyal audience and maintain your readership, use RSS for subscriptions for email notifications or newsreaders in search engines. Place the sign up form or link high up on the sidebar to capture the attention of interested visitors, and the RSS URL itself can be used to help feed your blog posts onto social media.

Let me know if you can think of any more to add.

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, other social media, social networking - Tags: blog, blog's exposure, build an audience, consistent posting, keywords, newsreaders, other social media, RSS, search engine optimisation, search engine spiders, search engine traffic, subject matter, subscription, top quality posts - 3 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

How often should you post in your blog?

Written on Wednesday 11 August 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

At my brother’s 40th birthday party last month my father came up to me and said I was looking podgy, just like my great aunt Margaret. Well, that raised my ire (if not my blood pressure), partly because my great aunt was morbidly obese and a hypochondriac, and partly because it was true (ideally I should lose three stone or 42 pounds).

So since then I have been down the gym every week day (can’t quite manage the weekend), pounding away on the treadmill in the hope of losing a bit of weight, the spectre of my terrifying relative looming up to goad me to keep wobbling on…

Treadmills are great places to think, and I wondered if all this consistent activity was doing any good (though the scales said otherwise). With my brain switched into blog mode, I remembered I’d recently read that blogs become more successful the more you post. This is obviously true, as all this new material constantly being churned out is like a continuous buffet for the search engine spiders, who feast on this content before returning it to be indexed.

Prolific bloggers post several times a day. Woah, why? I hear you ask. Well, if your blog’s purpose is to make money through the advertising and affiliate links it contains, this can only be achieved through a constant flow of traffic, and continuous indexing of your posts, combined with your audiences subscribing to RSS feeds and newsreaders, traffic alert systems and social media scrutinising, will bring in the necessary quota of readers to make your financial ventures successful.

But what is the optimum minimum? Three times a week – quite a respectable and achievable goal. I manage this for my boss’s blog, but not my own, partly because I have other commitments after work (going down the gym for example) that take up my time. You can see from your blog stats that consistent posting will easily maintain your traffic and readership loyalty much more than a flurry of activity followed by a period of famine. Spiders are hungry and need continuous feeding, and if neglected may easily search their nourishment from elsewhere.

And what if you want to start up a blog or resurrect it from a period of abandonment? Then you need to publish as many days as you can (a bit like me going down the gym) as consistently as you can manage with the correct kind of content (or diet) that will sustain interest and build up a following. Reduce the size of your blogs (I’m sure mine are far too long) by breaking them down into many subjects that can be posted independently, and keep an editorial diary to stimulate and store new ideas to prevent a post drought. Watch out for another post about what to write about soon – there, I’ve given myself another subject to research and deliver to you!

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, social networking - Tags: achievable goal, blog posts, bloggers, consistent new material, constant flow of traffic, editorial diary, other social media, quality and consistency of posts, readership loyalty, regularly posting on your blog, RSS feeds, search engine spiders - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

17 elements of blogging etiquette

Written on Wednesday 14 July 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

People have various concepts of what constitutes blogging etiquette. Of course there are the obvious ones like being nice to other bloggers, and much of these suggestions are just common sense, so no etiquette is set in stone and does rely on the goodwill of the bloggers themselves.

Here are some to consider (and some of these I own up to breaking throughout my blogging career, a fact I don’t relish in and am thoroughly ashamed of):

1. Don’t be rude, show respect and be polite to other bloggers and commenters.

2. Don’t copy other content without asking first. If you are given permission, fully acknowledge the author.

3. Remember to link to your resources and expert sources.

4. Don’t expect anything in return from linking to others, it’s not compulsory.

5. Respond to your comments in a cheerful, positive and thankful manner.

6. Don’t leave spammy comments on other people’s blogs.

7. Use your identity when blogging, don’t hide behind a persona.

8. Own up to your mistakes, it makes you more human and therefore likeable.

9. Stick to the subject of your posts or blog’s niche, don’t go off at a tangent.

10. Use correct punctuation, grammar and spelling, avoid text speak or colloquial language.

11. Don’t pepper your post with jargon.

12. Don’t overdo using keywords for SEO purposes, less than 10% is acceptable.

13. Check what you say is true by researching your facts properly, and never lay claim to content that isn’t yours.

14. Share good posts liberally on social networking sites.

15. Remember everything you publish is on public display, so check whether you really want to say it.

16. Don’t swear or use bad words, it isn’t impressive and can offend.

17. Make sure your pictures are suitably resized, to prevent lengthy downloading of your overlarge images.

How many others can you contribute to my list?

blogs and blogging, online marketing, social networking - Tags: be polite, bloggers, blogging etiquette, blogs and blogging, comments, content, keywords for SEO purposes, permission, show respect - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

10 things a blogging mentoring service should provide

Written on Tuesday 6 July 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

I keep an eye on many LinkedIn Groups, especially those about blogging, and one post caught my eye. It was from someone who wanted to know about forming a blogging mentoring service, and being the altruistic kind of person I am, I gave him my 10 opinions of what a blogging mentoring service should provide:

1. You need to be aware of business’s blogging needs; this includes explaining how blogging can benefit a business, small or large, to increase its online visibility and its audience on the net;

2. You need to research into why people have blogs (or don’t have blogs); blogs are created for a myriad of uses, business and personal, and therefore have very different styles – alternatively there may be many potential bloggers who need encouragement to start one;

3. You need to understand what blogs are used for, and whether they are used properly; similarly to above, blogs fall under many categories, but you need to understand their purposes to advise on the best practices;

4. You need to explain blogs need to be regularly updated, and to find out whether help is required with writing posts; blogs aren’t really blogs without consistent new material, so ideas for post subjects and writing styles are usually welcome;

5. You need to find out whether bloggers fully understand SEO and explain how keywords can help their blogs; this subject, once properly aired, stimulate a vast change in a blog’s performance towards its success;

6. You need to check whether they have they fully optimised sidebars; so many blogs have neglected sidebars and don’t use their widgets adequately, mainly because they don’t understand or appreciate their functions;

7. You need to advise on which plugins they need; for WordPress.org blogs these applications help enhance the blog’s performance to further it towards popularity and success;

8. You need to talk about integrating their blog’s design with their website or corporate image; using the myriad of themes available, some of which can be adapted or redesigned to match an existing style or personality through specialised blog designers (the Fairy Blog Mother is one);

9. You need to show how to get RSS and see if is it being used to its full extent; once acquired, the online world is opened up to automation of post publishing, feeding to social media and other related websites, and visibly interactive headline links;

10. You need to explain how to integrate blogs with social media; related to above, your blog should be the hub of your social networking strategy, fully optimised to interact with your audience, and present and potential customers.

I’m sure there are many more things I need to include (and if you know them, tell me in the comment box below). But in the meantime these 10 will have to do.

Fairy Blog Mother aims to offer much of this advice in this blog, and eventually through her book which she plans to publish in the future. She benefits from people asking her questions, especially specific things you would like to know about blogging and particularly from blogging beginners who may have a selection of questions they are too embarrassed to ask elsewhere.

I plan to change my style in future posts to a more advisory nature, in concise, focused subjects, and if the subject is large, to break it down into smaller posts for easier understanding. The Fairy Blog Mother was formed to explain blogging in easy to understand, visual e-courses, using non-jargon and everyday language, step-by-step with no assumptions that the reader understands technical blogging requirements. She doesn’t mean to be condescending, just informative and educational.

So, what questions about blogging do you have?

How to put a video onto a WordPress.com blog

Written on Tuesday 1 June 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

One thing about a WordPress.com blog is that generally it doesn’t accept HTML code or script if you want to add in special features such as a sign-in box for your newsletter in the sidebar, or a coded badge for your Twitter-stream, for example.

refers to .com blog

But there are exceptions. One is for the chicklit logo for RSS so subscribers can follow your posts through a search engine reader, and another is to post in videos from YouTube.com.

So how do you add a video to your post in a WordPress.com blog? Well, first you need to upload your video into YouTube.com because once this is accomplished, you will be given a URL for your video and code for your website (and also your blog).

I’m going to use an old video I made for my business many years ago, which I have buried away in YouTube.com.

Click on ‘Edit’:

And then ‘View on Video Page’:

And click on the ‘Embed’ button:

This is where you can get the code for your video. If you are posting it into your website, you can play around with the colour scheme and screen size too! But now we need to go into your blog’s dashboard (see ‘How to accessing a blog’):

Here is the WordPress.com blog I use to show the examples in my visual blogging e-courses you can access from the Free Resources Library in my sidebar. Let’s create a post (see ‘Writing Posts’):

I’m going to concentrate on using your video’s URL given to you by YouTube.com first. You can upload that via the Video icon at the top of the post-writing box:

Once you’ve clicked on that, go to the ‘From URL’ tab:

And you will see a space for your video’s URL. Go back to YouTube.com:

And copy your video’s URL from the browser at the top of your webpage. Then go back to your blog and post it into the URL box:

Click on ‘Insert into Post’:

Where you will see the URL correctly displayed. (If you just paste the URL directly into your post-writing box without doing this procedure, it will just become a link that goes directly back to your YouTube.com page which contains your video.)

Now click on ‘Preview’ to see the video window:

If you would like to use the code given by YouTube.com as an alternative method, here’s how. Go back to YouTube.com:

Highlight and copy the code of your video, and go back to your post-writing box in your blog and paste in the code where you want your video screen to be:

Here’s when WordPress.com allows HTML script to happen properly. Click on ‘Preview’ to see your video screen:

Although it looks the same, you’ll see the sentence before reminding you I’ve used code instead of the URL.

Now all you need to do is to finish writing your post, add in your tags and allocate your categories, and publish!

blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, increasing business visibility, social networking - Tags: blogs and blogging, code, link, post, special features, URL, videos, Wordpress.com, writing you post, YouTube - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?