All Posts Tagged With: "blogging"
Do You Wish To Improve Your Blog?
Have you noticed? Everyone is blogging? Teenagers, moms, dads, grandmas, executives, salesman, preachers, celebrities and the list goes on. Blogging has increased enormously in 2008. With all of the blogs out there how is yours going to get noticed?
Maybe your desire is not to become the next supper blogger but to just have a blog that you can be excited about sharing with others. Maybe your goal is to make an income through your blog or because of it. Whatever place you are with your blog or goal you have for it HerProBlog.COM wants to help you improve.
The new year is a great time to gain focus and resolve to make changes. So lets start making some changes.
Over the next couple of months HerProBlog.COM will be focussing on help you make the changes you feel are necessary for improving your blog. We have some exciting plans to help you improve as a blogger.
We encourage you to subscribe to the site so you don't miss the exciting things coming.
HerProBlog.COM is Still Alive
Have you ever not spoken to a friend for a long time and after a certain amount of time passed it seemed almost awkward to call? This is the way I feel right now about HerProBlog.COM. I feel I have been so disconnected from this site that it feels a bit awkward to post. But the longer you let time pass the more awkward it gets so here I am posting.
It was never my intent to let this site get so far behind in content. It's been a rough couple of months for me. As soon as my kids started school life all of a sudden became really busy. Keeping up content on one blog is a challenge all on it's own but I have 5 blogs.
Gaida and I have been brain storming and thinking of things we can do to revitalize this website. Since the goal of HerProBlog.COM is to help women create and maintain professional quality blogs we have decided to focus on blog reviews, blogger interviews and blog makeovers. We will be holding a contest in January that will allow the winner to get a complete blog makeover. More details coming soon!
So HerProBlog.COM is still alive it's just laid dorment for a little while. I hope you will continue to check back here for updates.
Code You Can Use: Copyright Notice
In a recent post at Problogger a guest post by Mark Patterson brought up some important legal issues for bloggers: Intellectual Property Law Tips for Bloggers.
I highly recommend all bloggers, even people just thinking about blogging, to read this post. I imagine some of it will be over your head (some of it went way over my head anyway!) and may not be relevant to you right now - but you may very well need it at some point in the future. You can always skim through it now, make a mental note of what's in it and bookmark it for sometime in the
future.
Copyright
One of the topics discussed in the post was copyright. Anything you create you own the copyright to, but you should really include a copyright notice on you blog also. Mark noted:
I know that I don't really display my copyright properly on my blogs - I should really be using my full name, but to keep a little bit of privacy, I usually just use my first name or a nickname. The copyright notice should include either the copyright symbol or the word 'copyright' and also include the year the content was first published or the range or years.
The code I use
I used to hand edit my year range to include the present year sometime around the first of each year. But it is easy to forget to change it, and I've seen many, many sites of others where they have apparently forgotten to update theirs too.
Rather than hand editing it each year you can use PHP code to display the current year. My copyright notice is written like this:
& copy; 2003 - < ?php echo date("Y") ?> ideasforwomen.com
The ampersand and the word 'copy' with the semicolon after it will give you the copyright symbol (©)- but and this is important - you need to get rid of the space between the ampersand and the word 'copy' - I had to put the space in here so you could see how I did it. The first year I had my site was in 2003, so that is listed first. Then the code within the php tags should give you the current year. And, like I mentioned above, you should really use your first and last name if at all possible, instead of your domain name like I do.
If you use this code on your blog, you don't ever have to worry again about changing the current year to January by hand!
How do you make use of it?
Within the WordPress theme you are using, find the footer file and at the bottom right before the closing body and html - place the code. And that's it! I hope it makes your like easier, as it has mine!
Learning From Other Women Bloggers
If your goal is to have a successful blog it is important to learn as much about blogging as you can.
There are many, many places and ways to learn about blogging. HerProBlog.com is obviously one of them! It is especially nice to learn from women bloggers as they are more likely to be writing about the same topics we are and can speak to us in a way that may feel more familiar and comfortable.
And while many of the top pro blogs like Problogger and Copyblogger are written by men - there are also many women who are probloggers that we can learn from.
The following are just a few women who blog about blogging that I recommend:
Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress - Lorelle helped develop WordPress and in her blog shares information about blogging in general and has a lot of tips and advice about using WordPress.
Liz Strauss of Successful Blog- Liz writes about relationship blogging. Forming and maintain personal
relationships with others is what networking is all about and is needed to have a successful blog.
Skellie of Skelliewag - Skellie writes about "creating content your site's visitors will fall in love with
and gives "tips, tricks and ideas" to help you make a blog worth talking about.
Lisa Irby of 2 Create A WebSite - The Blog - Lisa's blog is a 'guide to building, promoting and
monetizing blogs and websites'.
There are also many women who have been very successful with their blogs, who don't blog about blogging. We can learn from them by studying the examples they have set. Here are a couple who have
inspired me recently:
Wendy Piersall of Sparkplugging - Wendy started out with one blog to help moms build internet businesses from home – and now, just 2 years later she has grown it into a blog network of around 15 blogs!
Tina Su of Think Simple Now - Tina started her blog less than a year ago (at the time of this writing)
and now has almost 7000 subscribers! She even explains exactly how she did it here!
Want to find more problogging women to learn from?
David Peralty made a list 15 Amazing Women in Blogging back in December and more recently
Jarkko Laine made a list of the Fifty Most Influential 'Female' Bloggers
And remember – everyone has something they are especially good at or a unique perspective that we can learn from – so look around yourself and find some more women bloggers that you can learn and grow from!
Blog Review – Social Web Tools – socialwebtools.info
This social media tool reviewer doesn't critique tools, but observes them objectively with the goal of helping readers make money online.
As mentioned in a recent Twitter status update, "I try out every tool. I'm not against any of them. Is it really a big deal?"
It is indeed a big deal when you're in such a big niche.
Social media and social media marketing have become buzz words over the past few years and people from tech geeks to the uber chic have come across a social media enabled tool, even if they didn't know what it was called.
Charnita's challenge in the months to come will be to differentiate her site from those of other social media enthusiasts. There are three basic ways to do this which are content, traffic and monetization.
Content is the first and best to set yourself apart in a big niche or establish yourself as the dominant player in a newer niche. Charnita writes several times per week to update readers on "Cool Tools." With a design layout that screams social media at every turn, Charnita demonstrates her credibility quickly.
Traffic peaks and valleys can often happen when relying on your own social media participation for visitors. As soon as you take a day off, your traffic suffers. A consideration may be to include some sticky content (like a regular series) or to co-host a community on one or more social networks. Either option will allow for the occasional business or leisure trip while generating growing traffic over time.
Monetization comes after both the content and qualified traffic but once both are in place, generating sustaining revenue is much easier. With spaces for sponsors and featured advertisers, Charnita may want to consider adding in-depth reviews with affiliate links - or other monetization option - to supplement the current banner icons.
With the basics laid down, Charnita is poised to become a social media tool critic on par with the best movie reviewers. Once a niche is chosen and a target market considered, it will be easy to differentiate both Charnita and the Social Web Tools blog.
STATS
Blog Name: Social Web Tools
Blog URL: http://socialwebtools.info/
Blogger(s): Charnita
Age: 3 months
Feed: http://socialwebtools.info/feed/
Review – SAHMilitaryWife.blogspot.com
At ease! Since this blog is written from the heartfelt experiences of a military wife, there's no need to stand at attention. In fact, things are pretty loose around here.
Patricia, also known as Military Wife, posts on topics ranging from her children along with tidbits about her life as a military wife (or, as she mentioned in an e-mail reply, a 'married single parent').
"My readers consist mostly of parents. I like to connect with other parents and give tips when I have them or compare stories and get advice. Kids do not come with instructions. All parents are kind of winging it and learning as we go along," Patricia mused on her readership.
Typically done several times each week, the number of posts depend the daily events of family life but Patricia finds the frequency perfect. "It fits my schedule a majority of the time," she stated.
Not only does the blog fit her schedule but it seems to also fit her ideal reader since more traffic appears over the weekend when parents the world over have a bit more down time.
There's a lot of content - from free to sponsored - available for them and this review focuses on ensuring that all of it is accessible to the right parent at the right time.
That would start a task a simple as moving the search box from the footer up above the scroll. That way, visitors could make more use of it and the extra data provided by Google's back end would help Patricia get another angle on her reader's interests.
Another consideration would be to have the horizontal, pink button navigation lead to her popular Labels as opposed to a mix of link exchange partners and housekeeping items.
Patricia's blog is a testament to how much stay at home and work at home parents - mother's in particular - network. With sidebars full of social network widgets, links and carnivals, it's easy to see why Patricia leads the troops of a blog linking event, or meme, called Musical Mondays while participating in a regular photo posting event called Wordless Wednesday.
More than a year in, though, it may be time to consider going AWOL on networks that don't perform by either bringing in traffic or leading joint venturing opportunities like Musical Mondays. Any remaining space in the sidebars and footer can be optimized with appealing monetization options that convert in addition to occasional sponsored post spots.
"I have paid advertising spots available on my blog and I have done a few paid posts. I would like for it to make more. I plan to keep blogging and hopefully increase my readers which will give me better opportunities for paid posts."
HerProBlog.com salutes you, Patrica, and encourages you to keep blogging to reach your goals!
STATS
Blog Name: Stay At Home Mom & Military Wife
Blog URL: http://sahmilitarywife.blogspot.com/
Blogger(s): Patricia
Platform: Blogger
Age: 1 year, 3 months
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/StayAtHomeMilitaryWife
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