Tag Archive: blog posts

Get a faithful friend to help you post content

Walk your dog for inspirationAllow me to introduce Shelley, one of my mother-in-law’s dogs. Sadly she is no longer with us, but we used to love going on long walks in the Lancashire countryside with her, and as long as she didn’t encounter any livestock to chase, or any cowpats to roll in, it was thoroughly enjoyable.

So how does a dog tie in with blogging? Take a look at item 6 in this post http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/6-ways-to-find-inspiration-for-your-blog-posts which suggests taking your dog for a walk to gain inspiration. This has certainly rung true with some people, particularly dog owners, so it is worth highlighting this idea again.

Of course, it needn’t only be walking your dog (though answering to their needs is always a good excuse to down tools and get out for a bit of fresh air). I go running most mornings to try and get a bit fitter and lose some inches, as being a blogger sitting down all day in front of the computer does nothing for my general health.

This is valuable thinking time. It’s not worth forcing yourself to stick to a scheduled thought pattern, as the effort of running up a hill will wipe it clean from your memory. Just let your mind provide its own agenda, and the most amazing things will pop into your head – some good, bad and downright annoying! If you can, find the earliest opportunity to write them down, to prevent the most fantastic idea you’ve ever had from evaporating away.

Of course aerobic exercise will drive oxygen to your brain to help clear it from extraneous material – literally brushing away the cobwebs. “A change of scene is as good as a rest” is a well-known quotation, and sometimes it’s worth putting an idea into your head and then going out to let the subconscious take over. If sleep eludes you because of a good idea, write it down to look at it again in the morning, allowing your brain to rest and work its magic once more.

And the idea of writing draft posts as a dumping ground for your thoughts and observations is another example of clearing the decks to allow your posts to develop and mature away from the computer screen. Not everybody has the ability to ‘just type’, and certainly it has been proven that immediate posting is not always a good idea – notwithstanding spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, but a turn of phrase or a particular word could cause offence or construe to a different meaning.

Hey, you could go running with your dog – good exercise for him too! Let’s hope one day I won’t be regularly disgraced by being passed by two older, fatter ladies happily chatting to each other as they jog along, while I lag behind red faced and puffing…

Writing a post has just got easier!

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Click my logo to ask me a question!

WordPress.com never stands still, they are constantly thinking of new ways to make a blogger’s life easier. Their latest announcement publicises another quicker way to write a post in WordPress.com, so Fairy Blog Mother has emerged from hibernation to check this out…

The idea is to be able to write a post without having to log into a specific blog first, or if you’re in one blog and have a desire to write a post for another one, you can do this without have to abandon the first.

First log into WordPress.com, and at the very top you will see a black bar with your gravatar (if you’ve created one) in the right corner. You can see the same thing on your dashboard of your blog:

And I have ringed the ‘New Post’ link, which will direct you to a page within WordPress. Here you will be able to write a post for any of your WordPress.com blogs without having to enter them first:

It’s been created to be very intuitive, so I won’t go through everything. In fact, it’s a perfect place for exploring! You can upload all sort of media really easily, and even tags to optimise your blog, but there is no provision for categories that I can see. I suppose if this really matters, you could edit your post later to allocate an appropriate category.

Then you allocate the blog you wish to post into from the drop down menu next to the ‘Publish’ button (I like the green suggesting Go!), and voilà, you’ve published a post!

Magic Moment: How to publicise from the publish menu

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Click my logo to ask me a question!

If you have been reading my posts, you will recollect one about how easy it is to share via WordPress.com. Here I showed you how to feed your blog posts into your Twitter stream, so that whenever you publish a post, a tweet immediately appears in Twitter with the post’s title and accompanying link back to your blog.

This Magic Moment #2 is a continuation from this (so this facility will only be in place if you have followed the procedures laid out in my previous post), and will show you how to customise what this tweet will look like, so optimise its performance within Twitter.

After you’ve finished writing your post, you will automatically go to your Publish Menu at the top right corner of the page:

Above the ‘Publish’ button you will notice ‘Publicize: Twitter Edit‘.

Click on ‘Edit‘:

Now the Publicize box has opened, which will allow you to add a ‘Custom Message’ to the tweet, either before and/or after the colon.

Let’s add in the Fairy Blog Mother hashtag:

Now when the post is published, and fed into my Twitter stream, the tweet will include my hashtag before the title and link. This is a way of personalising my post feeds so that tweeps know the post is from me.

Of course you can add anything you like, such as ‘Newly published post’ or whatever. And you can also add a hashtag, such as #blogging, after the colon if you are keen to capture a particular Twitter audience.

What is the ideal length for a blog post?

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Fairy Blog Mother

The Fairy Blog Mother loves questions (just click on her logo to ask one), and this one was asked yesterday by Susan Perloff, so here is my answer below:

Ideally a blog is meant to be is fast moving and newsy, so posts should not be long, but there are some people (myself included) who get carried away and waffle on for ages.

This is not good. If you have written a long article, it is not best to upload all of it into a post in one go. Divide it up into a series, each post about 5-6 paragraphs,  250-300 words long or within 4 minutes of reading time (this is just a guide), and post them in succession over a period of days. (You can schedule them in advance to do this, read my Scheduling Posts e-course.)

The advantage of scheduling your posts, especially if you can add a cliff-hanger at the end of each one, is that it will encourage your readers to come back to your blog, or subscribe to it via RSS, so they don’t miss the next installment!

As posts are usually read at speed, it’s best to present them so it is easy to glean the jist or subject matter quickly. Once the reader has established this is a post worth reading, and they have the time to do so, then they will settle down to read it properly.

To aid this further, divide your post into subheadings, or use bullet points for emphasis; this breaks up the prose to help the reader digest your post while they read it. Using short paragraphs also makes reading easier, and keep to one subject throughout.

And finally there are some prolific bloggers who only write small posts, preferring to present their nuggets of information and expertise in bite-sized portions. This successfully makes it easy for their followers to read their posts, easy for the writer to produce his posts, and easy for the search engines to index the posts to a higher status. Win win for everybody!

Reveal your passion when you post

Fairy Blog Mother

There is one thing that will get your blog’s audience going, and that is your passion for your subject. They may be inspired by your writing, revel in your enthusiasm, absorb your knowledge and be in awe of your expertise, but it will be your passion that makes them come back for more!

It will be your passion that will make you write more posts, which means more new material, and thus more information to entice the search engine spiders to visit to index your posts. This in turn will therefore publicise your blog to a wider audience. Your great content will also encourage more readers to subscribe to your RSS feed, which in turn can be fed into social networking sites, exposing it even further through viral marketing and sharing tactics.

Your blog needs to have a subject you really enjoy writing about. It needs to be as wide as possible to stimulate you to undertake relevant research for your readers, to transform this information into something new, taken from your experiences and expertise. If you find a subject that has been blogged about many times before, don’t be put off; write about your point of view, how you see the situation, what slant you can put on it, what you can recommend or what item you have found that you wish to share. This makes the subject far more interesting to read, rather than purely writing blandly about a much quoted theme.

Eventually posting passionately should become a way of life. You will learn to find new content wherever you are, something will stimulate a possible post, or your brain will be inspired to think in another way to express your thoughts or observations. This then needs to be reverted it into something relevant that will interest your readers, providing them with a passionately inspired post written with them in mind, designed to entertain them suitably to encourage them to either comment or return for more.

How often should you post in your blog?

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!

6 ways to find inspiration for your blog posts

Fairy Blog Mother

Many people ask this question – how do you find material to write about in your blog?

Well, once you start blogging, you need to change your mind-set. You need to be able to click onto blogging mode (my family hates it when I do) and you need to gradually train your mind to be always on the look out for possible blogging fodder or to become susceptible to recognising suitable post material wherever you go, what you read, what reacts with you or whatever you bump into.

There’s nothing more irritating than forgetting a brilliant idea, so I like to be able to scribble down the gist of this new concept which pops into my head so that I remember it later and can develop it into a blog post – just that I don’t always get the time to regurgitate or finally write it up!

So where can you find stuff to write about?

1. Look in your in- and out-boxes in your email system; you may be fending off questions at work all the time, and if you think you’ve managed to write a successful or relevant reply to a particular query, why not rewrite it as a post so that more people can benefit from your wisdom?

2. Subscribe to a myriad of blogs within your industry; reading what other people write about in similar subjected blogs as you should not be a daunting experience, you should derive inspiration and write about the same things in your own style, taking advantage in the fact that that’s what people are writing about at the moment – but remember, plagiarism is not advised under any circumstances.

3. Set up Google Alerts to receive prompts from other blog; this is another way to how you accomplish the second point, and certainly you’ll find out daily the main projects and topics that are successfully stimulating the search engines. Being aware of hot news and commenting on it yourself will not only draw attention to you, but show you are riding the wave of ‘now’.

4. Be vigilant on social networking sites; this is another way of finding out what’s happening, and I use LinkedIn to generate new content by answering Questions on my particular subjects and responding to discussions on the Groups I follow (this is how I got the idea for this post). Of course there are lots of other sites specifically created to watch and recommend other blogs, such as Digg and StumbleUpon, where there will be lots of new material to read, learn, respond to and share with others.

5. Researching which keywords are ‘a la mode’ right now; for Search Engine Optimisation to be truly effective, you need to find out the most effective and popular keywords or keyphrases that the search engines are responding to at this moment. Leave it any later and they will become yesterday’s news, and you will have missed the boat. Once you’ve found your likely keyword, base your blog post about it for the most effective results, but don’t saturate your post with more than 10% or you will turn off both spiders and human readers.

6. Go out for a nice walk with the dog to let the creative juices flow; there is always something to be said for a change of scene. Quite a lot of stuff outside your place of work will stimulate new ideas, and sleeping on a problem and allowing your subconscious to work overnight will result in new material in the morning. I don’t expect you go to out and start talking to trees and flowers, but even the process of speaking your ideas into a dictaphone or scribbling down all your ideas quickly in a notebook may be enough to generate the perfect post you are looking for.

After the muffin blog post was eaten…

I presented my muffin post idea to a group of 30 women, and was pleasantly surprised when they appeared to ‘get’ my idea.

Some interesting questions arose:

“If you don’t follow this recipe for creating blog posts, what happens?’

“Well, you get a misshapen, tasteless, half-baked mound in the middle of your baking tray, in other words, not a good post.”

“Lots of people might not know how to create posts properly, so are there lots of badly baked muffins around?”

“Of course, take a look at other blogs and see if they have all the ingredients in them. You’ll soon know which ones are baked perfectly.”

One woman came up to me afterwards and revealed she had started a blog, and now realised her posts were lacking in flavour. “Thanks for letting me know what tags are for, can I go back and put them in?”

“Yes, blog posts can be rebaked with the correct flavourings (tags or keywords), unlike real muffins, which cannot be ‘undone’. That’s the beauty of blogging, and not baking. I suppose you could crumble up your bland muffins and add flavourings to it for another dish, such as a rewritten post.”

What thoughts or questions do you have that arise from my muffin blog post?

How is a blog post like a chocolate muffin?

chocolate muffin

Let’s bake some muffins (the American ones that resemble large cup cakes) and compare the process to writing a blog post.

First, gather together the necessary equipment and ingredients. You will need a bowl, a saucepan, cooking scales, a bar of chocolate, flour, butter and sugar, an egg, vanilla essence and chocolate drops, muffin cases, a baking tray, an oven, some hungry people, and a recipe book.

mixing bowl

Your bowl represents your blog’s posting page. It’s empty, and needs the ingredients to be put in it to make your muffins. Likewise your edit post page needs some post material to be written into it.

cooking chocolate

The idea for your post is like deciding what flavour your muffins should be. It’s best to choose a subject that everybody will want to read, so we have chosen chocolate as this is usually a favourite. Melt your chocolate in a saucepan.

flour

Now weigh out your flour, or the words of your post. This is the bulk of the final product. But other ingredients need to be added, as flour alone won’t make a muffin.

butter

But before you add the flour to your bowl, you must cream together the butter and sugar. This mixture represents the headline or title of your post, as it needs to be done or thought of first. It can be hard work to create the correct consistency, but it will be worth it.

egg

sugar

Add a beaten egg to the mixture, or check that the headline has become a suitable permalink or URL for your post, and doesn’t read just as a page number. The permalink is important for search engine optimisation, to allow the mixture to rise during cooking, so it is a good idea to get it right.

vanilla essence

chocolate drops

Now you enhance the flavour of your muffin mixture with vanilla essence and chocolate drops (which represents the tags or keywords of your post). These will transform your muffins into tasty double chocolate samples rather than just ordinary chocolate ones.

Now you fold the flour into the mixture, or write the words with all the elements included above. Remember to add the melted chocolate (or retain the relevance of your post), or your muffins won’t turn out as expected.

muffin cases

Then spoon the mixture into your muffin cases, so they retain their shape and cook better on the baking tray. This is the equivalent of allocating your post to its category or topic page.

oven

Now you need to publish your post, or cook your muffins in the oven. Mmmm, wonderful chocolatety smells! Once the time is up, they should be ready to be devoured by hungry readers.

baker's shop

Oh, and I forgot to mention the baker’s shop. If you supply a baker’s shop to sell your muffins, more people who pass by or visit the shop will get a chance to buy and eat them. And if the shop provides a delivery service, regular customers will receive half a dozen as soon as they are baked. This is the equivalent of RSS feeding and subscribing your newly published posts.

And the last item is my recipe book, or Fairy Blog Mother blog, where you can learn more about blogs and how to create them.

To comment or not to comment, it’s all about interaction

Both kinds of blog

One of the aspects of a blog is that it is interactive. This means readers are able to contribute to your blog if they have something to say. Blogging programmes automatically add an area after posts where readers can add their point of view. The ability to comment is also part of the phenomenon Web2.0, which is about interaction on the web.

So, what is special about blogs and commenting? Ordinary websites don’t have areas to put your point across, unless it’s a form to leave your details or send an email. Therefore what you have written is not automatically showed to you afterward for others to read, something that naturally occurs on a blog (unless the blog’s administrator wants to moderate your comment first, to make sure it isn’t spam).

But why should you comment on blogs? Apart from sharing your opinions, your comment may increase the value of the blog post, making it more interest to other readers. The author may also be inclined to respond, and starting a conversation – all adding to the entertainment factor.

Another thing to note, comments are viewed by the search engine spiders as new material, so the more interaction, the more the blog post goes up the search engines.

Comments can vary in content, as their authors can agree or disagree with the topic of the post. As long as you continue to be polite and forthcoming, and your contribution is relevant and resourceful, any comment is good. Sometimes comments lead onto other blog posts, especially if backed up by links. As spiders thrive on links, there are opportunities for comment authors to leave their details.

How do you induce a comment? Simply ask for one, as sometimes it won’t occur to the reader to leave one otherwise. Positioning a question at the bottom of your post may also encourage a response, as well as controversial subject matter. Those who comment are usually used to interaction on the net, and are likely to be avid social networkers, but anything that stimulates a reader to take action is advantageous.

Why is it good to comment? If you want to find your way in your chosen field, visit as many relevant blogs and leave a comment where you can. Then you will begin to get noticed by other bloggers and blog readers, and commenting will also enable you to link back to your blog or website, thus increasing your visitor rate. If you get a name for yourself by leaving good quality comments, visitors are more likely to visit to read your articles, subscribe to your blog and even leave comments themselves.