Tag Archives: sharing

Magic Moment: Adding a Pinterest button #1

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

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It’s so nice that WordPress.com does everything for your blog without you having to worry. Whenever something new comes onto the market, you can be sure that the latest version will automatically provide your blog with the application ready for you to activate.

PinterestPinterest is taking the visual side of social media by storm. Therefore it seemed natural that bloggers Settings going to Sharingshould want to share their posts on this platform. But beware, Pinterest works with pictures, so ideally your post should contain a suitable picture for Pinterest to capture and link back to your post.

And if your post doesn’t have this sharing Pinterest option available at the bottom, activating it is so easy!

In the Dashboard, click on ‘Settings’ and then on ‘Sharing’. This will take you to the Sharing Settings page:

Sharing Settings buttons

Here you can see which sharing buttons have been activated and which haven’t. All you need to do is to drag the Pinterest button down from the ‘Available Services’ section to the ‘Enabled Services’ area and the ‘Live Preview’ will automatically show you what it will look like at the bottom of your posts. Rearranging them is as simple as dragging the button to its desired position.

Sharing Buttons 2

Next you decide how and where you want your sharing buttons to be:

Sharing Button Settings

And don’t forget to save your changes! If you don’t like these settings, change them and save before viewing them until you are happy.

Now the Pinterest button will show underneath your posts:

Share Buttons 3

This will allow the reader to pin your post onto their most appropriate board.

The next Magic Moment post will be about how to set up the Pinterest sharing button in WordPress.org.

Are you becoming cookie compliant?

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Click my logo to ask me a question!

I’ve been aware of the EU Cookie Laws for some time, notwithstanding because I have been doing a diploma in digital marketing and this subject has been brought up occasionally.

Unfortunately it was not discussed in detail, so I felt it was my duty to find out more and pass this knowledge onto my readers.

From the 26 May 2012, all website users will have to provide their visitors the option to approve the use of cookies on the website. This will mean a separate page or pop-up is required to provide the opt-in or opt-out mechanisms for each visitor’s access to the website.

The problem is the cookies, or to be more accurate, the applications on my website that use my visitors’ information. The EU Cookies Law is all about preserving customers’ right to impart their details, e.g. maintaining their privacy rights.

This is Enchilada Digital‘s definition of a cookie:

A Cookie is a text file that browser places on your computer’s hard drive on behalf of the website being served. The Cookie usually contains information, such as a user or session ID, that allows the website to remember who you are across multiple page views or browsing sessions. Most websites have 10 or more cookies. See this website for more information on cookies.

Now I use cookies (unwittingly until I found out recently) to track my visitors’ activities to Google Analytics. This is not a horrible use of technology, and it certainly doesn’t provide me with intimate details of those who read my posts. Apparently I also use cookies to request sharing of my posts on social media, as this is also a form of tracking user behaviour – again hardly intrusive into my follower’s lives.

Of course many websites use cookies as part of the running or function of the website, such as e-commerce or payment systems for products and goods. This use of cookies is considered OK, as the website would not be able to exist without them. But if you wanted to participate in CRM (customer relationship marketing) with your readers, then you’d have to ask their permission to use cookies first.

The biggest problem business will have is that a huge proportion of website visitors will not know or understand about cookies. Even if they realise it refers to the innards of a website, because it is technical the alarm bells will immediately start to ring. This mass misunderstanding will reduce the amount of visits, and even if my readers are compliant with access procedures, the statistics that are allowed into the analytic programmes will be severely disrupted.

Now I could take away my Google Analytics application and not track my visitors, but then I wouldn’t have vital information on what my readers liked or didn’t like, and how to improve my website to make it better for them in the future. I also could remove the share buttons, but then I wouldn’t know how many kind people liked what I have written and have showed their appreciation by sharing my information with their friends and followers, severely limiting the amount of new audiences I could reach, which allows me to spread my messages further afield.

I will be activating a plugin for the EU Cookie Laws regulation just before 26 May. Hopefully it will adequately explain why the visitor needs to approve the use of cookies, so you will click ‘yes’ and continue to enjoy this website. And hopefully this action will become second nature to all website visitors, unless the powers that be see sense and review the law accordingly.

You need to share to get more traffic

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

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I’ve had a lot of questions recently about how to get lots of traffic to a blog and whether it is worth participating in social media to do this.

Unfortunately, if you want to promote your blog successfully, you need to think in the long-term. As with all marketing methods, nothing can be done properly overnight, and that does include using social networking sites.

You need to use social media to build up your reputation and your readers’ understanding about you. We all can’t be blessed with instant recognition and a truly magnetic personality that instantly attracts thousands of followers – those that appear to have these qualities have worked really hard behind the scenes before unleashing themselves on their public. Even those that seem to ‘pop out of the woodwork’ really have been slaving away at their promotional tactics and business presentation.

So to go back to the original concept, yes, you do need to use social media to increase your blog’s traffic. The cold, hard reality is that you need to work at gaining followers. This can be accomplished by becoming the best in your field, your niche, or whatever area your blog’s subject is about.

The 80/20 rule also applies here. Give away 80% of what you know and retain the truly best bits within the 20% you charge for. Win followers on your side by sharing your knowledge; help people, let them get to know you and trust in you, gain from the added value you have given them to improve their lives, and make them believe there is much more to have if they maintain their connection with you.

And while you are succeeding in collecting a huge number of followers, friends and subscribers, you’ll be feeding your new posts regularly into your social networking profiles and Twitter stream. It is there you will have a potential audience to read your wonderful new content, which will allow your blog traffic stats to go up and up.

To make these stats even better, participate in some sharing activities of your own. Nobody tolerates a one-sided relationship, so start reading other people’s blogs, comment on their posts, retweet them on Twitter, share them on Facebook, recommend them on social bookmarking sites, refer readers to them, offer to write guest posts and interview them for your own blog.

And after a while you’ll start to enjoy this social networking lark that so frightened you in the beginning – and as well as making lots of friends, associates, contacts and business prospects, your blog’s traffic will be improving all the time!

Why bees and wasps would make good (and bad) bloggers

A busy honey bee (iStockPhoto)

Sitting in my garden, soaking up some much-needed vitamin D, I had time to look up from my book to marvel at the industriousness of the insects amongst my flowers.

We have quite a number of flowers in bloom, in spite of lack of rain recently, and the bees were busily visiting every invitingly-open, brightly-coloured geranium, black-eyed susan and marigold that adorn the side of the lawn. Their persistence was amazing, unwittingly busy in their quest for food and pollen, darting from flower to flower, expertly extracting what they needed.

Of course other insects are equally persistent, as were those pesky wasps that ruined our lunch in the garden when our friends came round. Unphased by waving hands, squeaks and squeals (mainly from me), their aim was to get to the source of available food, unaware of how annoying their presence was to us.

I suppose bees and wasps have to be persistent in order to survive. Bees can be contributed to good bloggers, who regularly provide worthwhile material to read, their hard work providing a source of nourishment that feeds our desire to learn more and improve our lives. Their persistence will maintain the health of the hive (compare that to your niche or business), and when carefully harvested can ensure the survival of your objectives in years to come.

Wasps also have a community to maintain, which in this case is not so desirable. Their maliciousness is unparalleled, and they will use their weaponry in such a way that bees cannot. They will bother and annoy us for their own purposes, and spread havoc wherever they go, leaving behind continuous destruction. Wasps could be compared to spammers, who litter our comment inboxes, bother us with hard-selling tactics and even destroy livelihoods with malware and other unfortunate occurrences.

Persistence is a very good thing if properly managed with the best intent, but it can also be detrimental to all concerned if used inappropriately and without consideration for others. If you want to pursue the persistence path, make sure that what you provide is full of added value, providing material that will help others rather than crowing about yourself, and offering material that is worth sharing and won’t get eliminated by a click of the delete button (accompanied with a scowl).

Magic Moment: How to publicise from the publish menu

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

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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.

Sharing is easy on WordPress.com

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Click my logo to ask me a question!

In the past it was always a bit of a hassle to sort out how to connect, or feed (the technical term), your blog to your social media profiles. It required creating a RSS URL and going to external application websites to enter your details of your blog, so that your posts would be published simultaneously in your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn account or whatever.

But not any more! Sharing has become so much easier in the new WordPress.com version, as now they do all the processes for you! And they’ve also improved on their sharing buttons as well, methods of encouraging your readers to share your post on their social media profiles, thus increasing the exposure of your posts to a larger audience.

Let’s start with the ability to share your post on your social media profiles. First, go to your Dashboard (usually through YourBlogURL/wp-login.php and entering your username and password):

Settings > Sharing

Look for ‘Settings’ in the left hand sidebar, and click on ‘Sharing’, to go to the Sharing Settings page below:

 

 

 

 

 

Here you can see where you can sort out how to publicise your posts and where to regulate which sharing buttons you need.

Let’s set up publicising your posts on Twitter:

Make sure you are already logged into your Twitter account on your computer, or that your computer remembers your Twitter account by default.

Then click on the ‘Connect to Twitter’ link under the Twitter logo:

Here we go through the process of authorising the connection between your WordPress.com account and your Twitter account:

Here you can read all the things this application will allow you to do – pretty impressive, eh?

Click on ‘Authorize App’:

Right, now you’re connected to Twitter, and whenever you publish a post, it will be automatically posted on your Twitter stream. I told you it was easy! Next time after you’ve published, go check the tweet that has been created for you, and know that your post has a better chance of being read by a lot more people than before.

Do the same thing with the other social networking profile apps that you have accounts with – enjoy!

Now to sort out your sharing buttons that will appear after your posts and at the bottom of your pages. Span further down the Sharing Settings page to find the ‘Share Button’ section:

After you’ve decided which social sharing buttons you would like, drag them down into the space below:

There is also the option of dragging them into the collective share button box, where all the services will be stored behind a multi-purpose sharing button, if you want this facility to be more tidy on your blog.

After you’ve finished selecting and dragging your share buttons, it will look like this:

Decide to keep the like button box ticked if you want your readers to ‘like’ your post; you will be notified via email when somebody does!

The next stage allows you to play with the presentation of your buttons. It might be a good idea to have the buttons opening up in a new or different window when clicked on, so change the settings to ‘New Window’ from the drop down menu.

You can also decide where (which posts, pages or index pages) you want your buttons to be displayed, by selecting from the options available from the final drop down menu.

And don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Now go and have a look at a post you have written to see the effect:

And if you’re not happy, go back to the Share Settings page to change everything to how you want it to be; it’s always easy to rearrange WordPress.com to perfect your blog!