Wordpress.com Archives - Fairy Blog Mother

Matching up a WordPress.com blog

Posted on Friday 1 March 2013 by Alice • 3 Comments

There is a small drawback to creating a WordPress.com blog to accompany your existing website. Even though there are over 200 themes available, if you want to keep the costs down it’s advisable to choose a free theme and adapt it as best as you can.

This isn’t as difficult as you think, as long as you are able to see the bigger picture. I usually have about five themes in the back of my mind that I know what can be done with them, and bring them out one by one to try and adapt them to suit the client’s needs.

Here’s the result of my latest project. I wasn’t able to exactly recreate the blog to match the website, but the owner was very pleased with the result.

Here’s the website:

And its accompanying blog:

Now I know they’re not identical, but they’re close enough to recognise they belong to each other. Using a WordPress.com blog will enable the owner to start her blogging career, which she will be able to continue to promote her business and draw in more traffic and potential customers.

Filed Under: blogging encouragement, blogs and blogging, design makes a difference, Free Wordpress blogs

Evidence that WordPress stats don’t show everything

Posted on Tuesday 22 January 2013 by Alice • 0 Comments

Here’s a dilemma. I get notifications by email whenever a blogger ‘likes’ my post in WordPress.com, which is very nice and gratifying and makes you feel worth while.

Here’s my stats for a blog I wrote earlier today (note its title at the top and its date at the bottom):

And you can see I have had six nice bloggers give me a ‘like’. But when I go into the WordPress stats for that blog, there seems to be no evidence of these bloggers visiting.

These stats register that I have had seven visits for 22 January, yet none of them are for the post in question (note my post’s title in the top image).

This therefore shows that whatever statistics you get from WordPress you must take with a pinch of salt, as you are definitely not getting the whole story.

So don’t bemoan that nobody is visiting your blog, they probably are in droves, it’s just that WordPress has failed to pick them up and acknowledge them!

Filed Under: blogging encouragement, blogging success, blogs and blogging

Magic Moment: Adding a Pinterest button #1

Posted on Monday 25 June 2012 by Alice • 0 Comments

Click my logo to ask me a question!

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.

Pinterest is taking the visual side of social media by storm. Therefore it seemed natural that bloggers should 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:

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.

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

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:

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.

Filed Under: Blogging help, Free Wordpress blogs, increasing business visibility, other social media

Viewing stats is changing

Posted on Friday 23 March 2012 by Alice • 0 Comments

Click my logo to ask me a question!

WordPress.com automatically gives you the statistics of your blog activity, which is great fun to keep an eye on your performance.

refers to .com blog

But now they have decided to detract the Stats function from each individual blog to only allow access from the WordPress.com homepage.

This is where it is usually located:

But there is now this statement from WordPress:

…announcing its move to newer realms:

…in their all-encompassing homepage. By selecting the ‘My Stats’ tag, you arrive at this page:

…which allows you to choose which blog you want to see the stats for via this drop down menu:

The new addition to the stats is now which countries your readers come from for that post:

…along with top posts and pages, referrers, top recent commenters, and which search engine terms were typed in to reach the post – excellent information to analyse what readers were looking for on that day:

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs

Magic Moment: Quick subscription in WordPress.com

Posted on Monday 25 July 2011 by Alice • 0 Comments

I’ve started a new facility, my Magic Moments. These are going to be quick-fire top tips that I’ve found out from WordPress.com (and .org if necessary) that I want to share with you.

Here is Magic Moment #1: How to quickly subscribe to a blog through the comments box.

At the bottom you see that I’ve checked both boxes, the first for WordPress to let me know if anybody else comments on this post, so I can choose to continue the conversation, and the second to send any new posts to my inbox that this blog publishes.

This is a very simple way of getting people to subscribe to your blog, as long as they leave a comment. But… this method is only visible (and therefore available) on the post’s permalinked page (each post’s personal page) when the comment boxes are shown, and it is not visible from the blog’s index page.

There are other methods to obtain subscribers, but I will talk about those in other Magic Moments… watch this space!

Filed Under: Blogging help, Free Wordpress blogs, non-jargon

Sharing is easy on WordPress.com

Posted on Wednesday 20 July 2011 by Alice • 0 Comments

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!

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

How many people are reading your posts?

Posted on Wednesday 27 April 2011 by Alice • 1 Comment

Fairy Blog Mother

The good thing about WordPress.com is that there are a lot of applications already added which you don’t need to worry about – one of which is statistics of how many people have looked at your blog posts.

If you have a WordPress.org blog, you can add all sorts of fancy plugins to monitor your visitors’ statistics, such as Google Analytics, but as this is not possible for a WordPress.com blog there is a perfectly adequate statistics alternative provided – which I find easier to understand, and much more accessible.

And another thing to note, these stats are updated progressively, so you can track your performance throughout the day, whereas with Google Analytics only the results from the previous day are viewable. For WordPress.org users, there is a plugin that copies these kinds of stats, but I am unable to use it on this blog as for some reason it fails to work for me.

You can find it in the left sidebar in Dashboard and by clicking on ‘Site Stats’:

And when you click on it you’ll visit the Stats page:

This is such an exciting page, even if you aren’t familiar with statistics. Every time you get a higher block, there is such an overwhelming sense of achievement, and comparing them with past days to see the overall trend can result in a kind of competitiveness.

Timeline

The stats are spread over a month if viewed via days, and you can alter how you look at these stats by changing them to weeks and months with the tabs in the top left corner of the graph.

This shows a spread-out version of how your posts are performing, and hopefully they will show a steady increase in traffic as your blog get older and you become more adept at writing posts.

Another thing to note are how the peaks and troughs conform to the times when you are posting. For example, if you don’t post at the weekends, there is more likely to be a dip at that point, and if you have written a post that appeals to a large number of people, or has triggered a response from the search engines, there will be a peak.

Below this are more details of your statistics:

And this is where you can have a field-day if you are into this sort of thing. On the right just below the graph you can see which top posts and pages have been viewed:

And by clicking on ‘Yesterday’ you can compare the previous day’s stats as well. Each one of these headlines is a link (you can tell because it is blue), which will take you to the post in question, so you can read the content and see why it has been so successful.

To the left of these are the referrers, places elsewhere on the web which have a link to your blog, and this shows the where the visitor came from. Some of them may seem incomprehensible, as that is due to search engine criteria, but you will recognise many of them, such as your website or social networking sites like Twitter.

Below this are stats which show which key-phrases were typed into the search engines, which were matched up with posts from your blog. This can be quite interesting, as it is good to compare whether they match your post’s headlines, or whether other words were used to find your blog. It is also a good way of finding out what’s popular in search criteria at the time, which you could monopolise by writing another post with that subject matter to see if you can capture the next search wave.

This is just a quick summary of how to use these free statistics provide by WordPress.com. If you are mathematically-minded you could happily spend time interpreting the different figures and forming strategies and campaigns to monitor your progress and improvement. Alternatively you could just watch the peaks and troughs go up and down, and aim to maintain a constant level or a steady rise.

And whatever you do, don’t forget it should be fun!

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, non-jargon

How to add a content form to your contacts page

Posted on Friday 25 March 2011 by Alice • 0 Comments

Fairy Blog Mother

The beauty of WordPress.com is that you can still accomplish quite sophisticated tasks, like adding a content form to your contacts page for more targeted information gathering.

An owner of a blog asked me to add such a form to her contacts page, and this is how I did it:

First, access your blog (via http://URL/wp-login.php plus username and password) to go into the Dashboard:

Select ‘Pages’ in the left sidebar and find the page you with to edit:

Mouse over the title and select ‘Edit’:

Place your cursor where you want your form to be, and select the form icon at the end of the Upload/Insert menu icons:

You will then be presented with a default form:

Each of the grey areas that receive the required information to be typed in are called ‘fields’. Click on ‘Add a new field’ to create a new field to work on:

Now you can start to edit the form to suit your desired objectives. Write in the title of the new field in the box on the right:

The new field has been automatically edited. Next select the kind of field you require from the pull-down menu; we have chosen ‘textfield’ here to create a large text field to fill in lots of information:

When you mouse over your new field, various extras will appear. You can edit it from the resulting link, move it by dragging it to your required space, and delete it by clicking on the minus sign on the right side. Next you can allocated the field to be ‘required to be filled in’ by selecting the ‘required’ button:

And don’t forget to click the ‘Save this field’ button. Now we have to update which email this form will send its information to by selecting ‘Email notifications’:

And this will lead you to another form where you can add in the email and subject details:

Once you’ve added in the correct details, don’t forget to Click on the ‘Save and go back to form builder’ link:

Click the ‘Add this form to my post’ link:

Now don’t worry that all you see is a load of code instead of a form. WordPress as allowed the use of this HTML, and it looks like this until it is published. Click on the ‘Update’ button and then click on the resulting ‘View page’ link:

And there is your form in all its glory!

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, marketing methods

Why you need to write two headlines for your posts

Posted on Thursday 17 March 2011 by Alice • 1 Comment

Fairy Blog Mother

Just as you thought it was difficult enough to write just one satisfactory headline for your post, now I’m telling you to think of two! (Don’t worry if you’re a WordPress.com blogger, this requisite is for those on WordPress.org blogs.)

But even so, I can’t stress enough the importance of the headline. It has many roles, all which are vital for both humans and internet robots alike. It needs to capture the attention of both, and satisfy the needs of each.

For humans it needs to connect with the reason why they want to read this information. You need to present the subject matter in such a way it relates to their search criteria, provides a solution to their problem, stimulates a desire, maybe tickles their sense of humour, and sticks out like a sore thumb so they can’t fail to notice it.

This is the same for the search engine spiders, but in a different way. You’re not dealing with psychology here, but with logarithms that are programmed to search for particular words. The answer is to give those words to them – find out what people are searching for, and if they are suitable, high quality and much sought after, stick them in your headlines (and the rest of the post too).

The clever bit comes with how you combine these fabulous words the spiders desire within a headline that grabs the attention of your readers. And nobody says this is easy – headline writers in newspapers are paid well for their ability to compose such things.

So why two headlines? Well, if you have installed the plugin ‘All-in-one-SEO-pack’ in your WordPress.org post, you will see at the bottom of your Post Editor page some more fields to fill in, and one of them is marked ‘Title’.

What I suggest is that you create your human-biased headline for the title of the post, and your spider-influenced headline for the ‘Title’ field at the bottom of the Post Editor page.

The human-headline will appear in RSS feeds in Twitter and Google Readers, whereas the spider-headline appears in the title at the top of your browser window and also in search engine indexes and RSS feeds into social media such as LinkedIn Groups (usually accompanied with what goes into the ‘Description’ field that follows after).

And as each have a good chance of being seen by humans and spiders alike, they need to be understandable by both, which makes their composition all that much harder!

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, marketing methods, Writing tips

How to create a WordPress account

Posted on Monday 7 March 2011 by Alice • 4 Comments

Fairy Blog Mother

When you start using WordPress, in whatever format (.com or .org), it is necessary to create a WordPress account. This involves creating a username, but this can be often confused with creating a blog in WordPress.com.

Two of my friends asked me for advice in blogging, so I suggested they create WordPress.com blogs to learn how to blog effectively. They dutifully went to WordPress.com and clicked on the ‘Sign up now’ button (see below):

Then they were confronted with this page:

Now WordPress.com sneakily make the first option a darker blue so that you fill in that field first before you realise what you are doing. This is what happened to one of my friends, and he ended up creating a blog before he knew what was happening.

But I advise creating a username first before creating a blog. This is because you can add on as many blogs as you like onto your username, and it doesn’t have to be part of the URL or web-address of your first blog. Neither do you need to worry about keywords or search engine optimisation, as your username will not be scrutinised by spiders. Just make sure it’s relevant to you and is memorable.

My username is ‘alicedesigns’, because I created my first blog http://alicedesigns.wordpress.com, but it would have been more appropriate to have my username as ‘aliceelliott’ and create my first blog with a separate web-address coming off it. As it happens I now have 13 blogs hanging off my username.

So to create your username without creating a blog, click on the next section and the link ‘Sign up for just a username’:

This will then give you this page:

Now you have to fill in the fields with the information you require. If WordPress says your desired username is already taken, try again with a memorable number after it. It doesn’t matter if you add initial capitals, WordPress will ignore them.

Then create a strong password (WordPress will indicate its strength) using the same procedure: use memberable numbers and maybe even symbols like an exclamation mark. Repeat it to confirm its the right one, and make a note of your username and password somewhere safe in case you forget it.

Next add in a relevant email address, because after you’ve clicked the ‘Sign up’ button, WordPress will immediately send you an email with a link that will activate your username, so stand by your email account ready to confirm.

It will then automatically go to a webpage saying your username is yours! And now you have a WordPress account, ready to create as many blogs as you would like. Go to WordPress.com, sign in at the very top with your new username and password, and go to ‘Your Profile’ under ‘Users’ in the left sidebar and fill in your details. I will write a post about that very soon.

Filed Under: blogs and blogging, Free Wordpress blogs

Tag Archives: Wordpress.com