blog posts Archives - Fairy Blog Mother

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

Passion pushes you forward to achieve your goals

Posted on Monday 9 July 2012 by Alice • 2 Comments

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We all felt for Andy Murray’s anguish when he came runner up at Wimbledon 2012 yesterday. Such a blow to hit a young man with incredible passion to win this amazing tennis championship. So near and yet not far enough: his quote “I’m getting closer!” says it all.

Let’s hope his passion will not diminish to allow him to try again next year. Andy has to combine his passion with persistence, focus and constant practise, continuously toning his body and mind to compete with the incredible pressures to win such a tournament. And of course he has the Olympics in just over two weeks, another chance to do his country proud, so needs to concentrate on an appropriate mindset for that.

Passion is an incredible driving force. It is the focus that keeps us going, provides food for thought, content and planning the next stage, fuelling the desire to create what we set out to do, to help, educate, entertain and inform our readers through our posts.

Blogging thrives on passion. It is the base ingredient of a successful post. Your readers will sense, understand and appreciate your passion, especially if you are skilled in revealing it within your words and language. It provides positivity, a centrepoint for your raison d’être, and if you can share with your readers your passion, goals and aspirations, they will ride the journey with you, and if you let them, encourage and boost you along the way.

This blog is a vehicle for my passion and what it represents. The Fairy Blog Mother aims to improve her educational status in teaching bloggers about how to blog, create a blog, improve their blog and write better posts. My journey has gone up several notches after creating a proper marketing plan, and there will be many exciting and valuable times ahead. Meanwhile I will gird my lions, fasten my seat-belt and don protective clothing as I venture forth to catch up with my passion and to meet its needs.

Filed Under: blogs and blogging

Get a faithful friend to help you post content

Posted on Tuesday 17 April 2012 by Alice • 1 Comment

Allow 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…

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Writing tips

Writing a post has just got easier!

Posted on Friday 2 March 2012 by Alice • 0 Comments

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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!

Filed Under: Blogging help, Free Wordpress blogs

Magic Moment: How to publicise from the publish menu

Posted on Tuesday 2 August 2011 by Alice • 2 Comments

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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.

Filed Under: Blogging help, blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, social networking

What is the ideal length for a blog post?

Posted on Wednesday 30 March 2011 by Alice • 0 Comments

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!

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

Reveal your passion when you post

Posted on Tuesday 24 August 2010 by Alice • 0 Comments

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.

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Writing tips

How often should you post in your blog?

Posted on Wednesday 11 August 2010 by Alice • 0 Comments

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!

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, social networking

6 ways to find inspiration for your blog posts

Posted on Monday 12 July 2010 by Alice • 0 Comments

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.

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Writing tips

After the muffin blog post was eaten…

Posted on Tuesday 15 September 2009 by Alice • 0 Comments

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?

Filed Under: blogs and blogging

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