Fairy Blog Mother

Welcome! If this your first visit, and you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to the RSS feed for more updates from the Fairy Blog Mother.

Tag Archive: social networking sites

You need to share to get more traffic

Written on Wednesday 31 August 2011 by Alice

Click my logo to ask me a question!

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!

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?

Reveal your passion when you post

Written on Tuesday 24 August 2010 by Alice

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.

blogs and blogging, Writing tips - Tags: blog posts, expertise, inspiring writing, more material, passion, RSS feed, search engine spiders, social networking sites, wider audience - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

6 ways to find inspiration for your blog posts

Written on Monday 12 July 2010 by Alice

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.

blogs and blogging, Writing tips - Tags: blog posts, blogging, blogs within your industry, Digg, Google Alerts, keywords, LinkedIn, new material, search engine optimisation, social networking sites, StumbleUpon - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

Widgets and more for WaltonPR

Written on Tuesday 6 April 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

I do like the chance to review a blog from time to time, so that I can show what elements of a blog could be added to enhance it and improve it to make it more successful.

But ‘successful’ is so subjective. It’s important never to lose sight of the fact that people have different perceptions of what their blog should be, what’s it for, what they are trying to achieve, what they think looks nice. Does your blog have to look nice to guarantee it does incredibly well? Usually success is due to the personality and reputation of the author, plus the quality and consistency of the posts, how old the blog is (longevity certainly stimulates the search engine index criteria), the subject matter or niche, and how extensively the blog has been fed to the blogging directories and other social networks.

I look forward to reviewing other blogs (with the author’s permission) in the future, but today I shall use a brand new blog to highlight a few things that could be done to enhance it.

Both kinds of blog

First of all I would like to congratulate Emma on starting her blog. This is a fantastic step she’s taken, and her first post is extremely good. She’s avoided the boring ‘welcome to my blog’ post, and has launched into her news with great gusto! Long may it continue Emma, I look forward to the next one. (Incidently, by the time you read this post I sincerely hope she will have written many more!)

The theme’s colour matches her website, and I note that she has a pink flamingo for her logo: perhaps some more attention could be drawn it. The descriptive header has a quote explaining her profession and her logo links back to her website.

RSS from Feedburner

I note she hasn’t put many widgets in her sidebar. One of the most important elements to include would be a RSS feed. Subscribe to Feedburner to create a RSS URL, and obtain a chicklit (the litttle orange square so commonly recognised as RSS) to feed her blog to a search engine reader page, plus a sign-up form to collect readers’ email addresses so they can receive her new posts in their in-boxes.

social media links

Emma, why not encourage your readers to connect with you on social networking sites? Use the relevant badges and buttons that are available, or alternatively use images of each social media and link them to your relevant profile page. You could also use a widget to show your latest Twitter feeds, obtainable from the ‘Goodies’ link right at the bottom of your Twitter profile, which can be customised accordingly.

Widgets used so far on her sidebar

If you’re new to blogging, think carefully about your categories, or topics, that subdivide your blog’s niche or subject into manageable chunks. These are used for archiving or finding posts within a particular area, and also help the search engines to search for new content. Once created they will be listed in the categories widget, and remember to allocate your posts to them before you publish. I also note you’ve included a tag (keywords) cloud widget; when you post more you’ll see the most frequently used tags increase in size to show their importance.

share your post on social media

Add to your recent posts widget one for the most popular posts, and one to show the comments your readers leave you. Text widgets are suitable for pictures, icons linking to elsewhere, to contain code for special effects or badges, list testimonials or quotes, and anything else you’d like to share with your readers. Use a plug-in (blog application available from WordPress.org) to enable your readers to share your post on social media if they like what they read, excellent for wider exposure and to increase your audience.

And last, but not least, don’t forget to update your About page. People like reading about the author, and it gives you a chance to plug your business, add in testimonials, and paste in a nice picture of yourself. And there is no reason why you can’t add in more pages that could enhance your blog’s subject matter, or explain your business further. This blog has over 20 pages (so far) to present my free blogging resources, so the world could be your oyster!

If you would like to learn more about any of these suggestions, ask the fairy blog mother by clicking on her logo at the top!

blogs and blogging, social networking - Tags: blog's niche or subject, blogs and blogging, categories, elements of a blog, feedburner, personality and reputation of the author, quality and consistency of posts, RSS feed, social networking sites, successful, Twitter profile, widgets in her sidebar - 1 Comment - Why not leave a comment?

Elements for a successful blog

Written on Monday 11 January 2010 by Alice

Successful blog elements

It’s important that readers should be able to understand what your blog’s subject is from first glance, and this is usually accomplished through a graphic header of some kind. Its ingredients should include the name of the blog, the tagline (descriptive sentence), if not already stated the main subject matter and who the author is, preferably with a picture or logo of some kind.

The next thing that should be noticeable is how your readers can subscribe to your blog. There are many methods of doing this, but the most prominent one should be a form for email notifications of your new posts. It’s much easier to receive emails than to regularly go to your Google Reader or glance through the cookies on your personal iGoogle homepage. Make sure the subscription invitations are placed high up on your sidebar.

Both kinds of blog

Is your About Page up-to date? If a reader is interested in your blog, he might well want to know who the author is, and if he finds an incomplete About Page, imagine how disappointed or put off he might be. Make sure you include as much information about you or your business that you can, including a good quality picture of you.

Improve the visual impression of your blog by using multiple forms of media. Even if you are a bit tentative about this, simply adding in relevant pictures can accomplish this. And if you are technologically minded, add in video and audio to provide your message in different ways that would appeal to a larger audience.

I’ve banged on before about using white space in my other blog articles, but again it is extremely useful to aid readability for your blog. Use short paragraphs, subheads to break up the text and graphic images to add to the visual interest. Don’t make your posts too long either. And if you have your blog professionally designed, take into consideration that your template should not be cluttered or too busy.

Use various plug-ins to share your content, especially within social media. For example, use a retweet button to entice readers to feed your post onto their twitter streams, and add in a share-this button for the other social networks, such as technorati, digg, stumble upon, delicious, reddit, tumbr, flickr, to name but a few.

And lastly, provide a method for readers to connect with you on social networking sites. It is quite common to see various icons that link to the author’s social networking profiles, so make sure you have them in place to encourage increasing your connection numbers.

I shall be taking each element individually to elaborate on them in future posts, accompanied with visuals and recommendations – watch this space.

Would you like to learn how blogs aren't scary?

Written on Wednesday 6 May 2009 by Alice

Live teleseminar: Thursday 14 May

• Have you been thinking about setting up a blog recently but have been putting it off?

• Do you want to know how a blog can help your business?

• Do you already have a blog but want some more tips on how to improve it?

Would having a blog help you market your business better?

Sometimes just having a website is not enough – you need to have somewhere where you can express yourself, providing on-going news about your business, educate your customers, promote new events or products – all in an environment that is publicly seen throughout the net.

A ‘brochure style’ website is far more difficult to update, needs the use of a webmaster and is seldom visited by the internet spiders. It’s a space on the web that just sits there, looking pretty, but doesn’t encourage interaction from your customers.

So what is different about a blog?

A blog is self-editing, thrives on regular input and spiders visit blogs hourly. It also uses applications to spread your word around the web easily, efficiently and automatically.

It encourages and succeeds on feedback and input from your readers, and can also be used as an archive for your articles and other information, as each post is allocated its individual URL.

The free software provided by the blogging platform is excellent for search engine optimisation, too.

So if you are interested in finding out more about blogs, then join me live for an hour’s teleseminar class (or if you can’t make the day a recording will be available).

You will discover how to:

• publicise your business to a wider audience

• increase your expert status

• let customers check you out before they buy

• bring more traffic to your website

• interact with potential customers

• provide an archive for your newsletter material

• work better with search engine optimisation

• help link you to social networking sites

But above all I want you to realise that blogs aren’t difficult technology to master, and that everybody can and should have one!

I will reassure you how unscary blogs are, and there will be a chance for those on the call to ask questions and provide their own opinions.

When is it? Thursday 14 May

What time is it? 8pm – 9pm (GMT+1)

What happens if you’re not free at this time? Register, and you will be automatically sent a recording of the teleseminar for you to listen at your leisure. Don’t forget if you have any questions, you are welcome to email them to me before the event.

What else is included? I will also send a pdf of the teleseminar’s notes and resource information so you won’t have to write everything down.

How much is it? The initial cost of this seminar is £27 -

but wait – if you book before Friday 8 May at 8pm you can register for only £17!

You will also be eligible for a competition to win my first two blogging packages for free!

• Book before 8pm on Friday 8 May to get the call for only £17 plus the recording

• Enter your name into a draw to receive first two blogging packages f*ree!

Click here NOW to register and reserve your place – and begin your journey to blogging success!

I really look forward to hearing you on this call.

Alice