Blocking Spam

Luckily, WordPress has a plug-in that works great in capturing spam.  Askimet will flag any comment that it considers spam so that they won’t appear on your blog unless you mark them as approved.  Yes, this causes a little extra work for you because you should be checking to make sure that no valid comments have been incorrectly labelled as spam.  I’ve found this happens rarely, but I keep checking just so that I don’t alienate a reader who has taken the time to comments on my blog articles.

Turning Off Comments

Recently a blog follower of mine who is an avid blogger herself – Giuilietta “the muse”- noticed that most of the spam she was receiving was on older blog posts.  She asked me if there was a way to turn off the comments just on these older articles which were bringing in the bulk of her spam.

This is very easy to do with WordPress.  Just edit the article, scroll down to the “Discussion” section & uncheck the box labelled “Allow Comments.”  Remember to press the update button to save your changes.  The comments will be closed for that article only & hopefully this will reduce the amount of spam you receive.

Blogs & Spam go hand-in-hand, but hopefully these suggestions will make your life a little easier & a little more “Spam Free.”

To keep your readers interested, it’s important to mix things up on your blog. In additional to text and photos, videos are a great way to add some excitement to your blog. It can be your own video or one that you’ve found on the Internet. YouTube is a fabulous place to find videos on just about any topic. Today, I’ve chosen to share with you a YouTube video on How to Embed YouTube videos in your WordPress Blog.

The key points are:

1. Find a YouTube Video you’d like to embed in your blog article
2. Click on the button and copy the code to embed in WordPress
3. Edit your page in WordPress, making sure you have the HTML tab active and not the Visual Tab
4. Paste the code into your WordPress Post and Publish it

Ta Dah! You now have video in your blog post. I hope you (and your readers) have fun with this!

You may have noticed a 2 month gap between this post and the last one.  Wish I could say I was on an extended vacation, but I wasn’t.  And I haven’t given up on blogging either.  The reason I stopped blogging 2 months ago, is that I came to the realization that I was not happy with my current Content Management System and it was time to move on.  Since I was blogging on a weekly basis for about 9 months, that meant not only moving my web site but also moving all of the blog articles as well.  The more I blogged, the more pages I had to move, so I stopped.

The process was more painful than I thought and so this is why my first post back is to warn you – Be Picky.  Be Well Informed.  Choose your blogging software wisely.

My site was running on Hubspot – which by the way is a great product (I’ll save the details for a future post) – but it just wasn’t a good fit for me.  Because web sites are my business, I will often try new products and software before recommending them to my clients.  Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, but in the long run I always learn something and believe that I can provide better services to my clients because of my experience.

The move was to WordPress.  In my humble opinion, if you plan to blog then WordPress is the platform of choice.  I’ve been working with WordPress for a few years now and my clients love it!

OK.  Now for the pain.  I decided not to change the look & feel because I just updated my site last August and am still very happy with it.  But I still needed to rebuild the site for WordPress and spent some time updating the copy.  Then I had to tackle the blog.  Transferring all of the blog articles & photos, adding SEO, re-creating the tags and categories – this was just the start.  As I was doing this, I realized that every article, every tag, every category, every archive — was on a different page and all of these pages were in Google.  ARRRRRRRRG!

When you move your blog or website to a new CMS or blogging platform, chances are the new software will have its own naming conventions.  So even if you keep the same content, the pages will most likely have different names.  This is especially true for your blog articles.  So I had to do something to make sure that Google could find my newly relocated pages.  Otherwise people would receive Page not Found errors, I would lose valuable traffic and hurt my page rank in Google.  So for each of these pages, I set up a permanent redirect to tell Google where each page was.  Luckily for me, WordPress has a plug-in for this, but I still had to manually type in the old and new names for each page.

Other downfalls to moving your blog…

1. You’ll lose your subscriber list.  You need to contact everyone on your list and have them re-confirm their subscription due to anti-spam laws.  [So please enter your contact info in the subscribe box at the left if you want to keep receiving email notifications of new articles!]
2. You also lose your comments.  There really is no way to transfer comments.  Bummer.

So heed my advice.  Choose your blogging software wisely.  Think long-term and make sure your cms software will support any future features you are hoping to implement.  You’ll be happy you did!

 This very easy to do if your web site has been built on a Content Management System (see last week’s article on Adding Features to your CMS Web Site.)  The blog is a standard module on all content management systems, so all you have to do is install the blog module and start writing.  The blog should automatically take on the look & feel of your web site.

If you’re not on a CMS yet, no worries.  Most hosting companies offer free blogging software such as WordPress and often the blog installation is as simple as a push of a button.  Once it is installed, you need to add a link to your website menu so that people can access the blog and you’re off and running.

Yes, it’s that simple to add a blog to your web site but (Come on!  You knew a “but” was coming!) it won’t be pretty.  The standard WordPress web site is fairly blah and definitely won’t match the rest of your beautifully designed web site.  This is when you need to find a web developer who is skilled in CSS to customize your blog for you. 

WordPress is highly customizable.  In addition to customizing the look & feel to match the rest of your web site, there are lots of interesting WordPress modules that can be installed and customized to expand your blog’s functionality and make a visit to your blog a unique experience.  One example of a WordPress plug-in that I find invaluable is the email notification module.  Visitors to your blog can sign up to receive email notifications whenever you post a new blog article.  This not only keeps your readers informed of your latest posts, but also saves them time so that they don’t have to keep checking back to see if you’ve written anything new.

So why not add a blog to your web site and start building up your presence in the search engines.  The more posts you write, the greater your odds of being found.  Chances are that your competitors have already started blogging, so what are you waiting for?

A New Year’s Resolution

I was recently given some great advice that I think will make a great New Year’s Resolution.  Go offsite to a coffee shop once a week/month and write multiple blog articles at once.  So if you blog daily, write 5 articles every Monday or if you blog monthly write a month’s worth of blog articles.  By leaving the office and turning off your phone (this is key!) you’ll have fewer interruptions and will be able to spend your time more efficiently.  Plus, if your blog software has a scheduler, schedule your articles to go out automatically and check that task off the to-do list!

As far as social media goes, you should at a minimum promote your blog articles on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  There are even applications that can automate this task for you.

So no more excuses – businesses need to keep marketing during the busy times to keep business rolling in.

How do you keep up with blogging and social media when things get hectic?  Please share your tips in the comments below.

• I don’t have time to blog
• I don’t know what to blog about
• I’m not interesting enough
• Who would read my blog?
• The dog ate my blog

I’m sure there are many people out there who feel the same way.

So why the change or heart?  Well, I’ve finally realized that…

BLOGGING IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS!

Blogging is good for business on so many levels.  Writing a blog about your industry can help to establish you as an industry expert, which in turn can lead to more business.

Blogging is a great way to get feedback from your customers.  It allows them to start a conversation with you by leaving comments on your blog.  Make sure you reply to their comments, engage them in a dialog and find out as much as you can from them!  This is a unique opportunity for you to get to know your customers better.

Blogging is also key to improving your search engine rank.  Adding new content on a regular basis keeps your website fresh.   Updated content keeps potential customers, as well as the search engine robots, coming back for more!  And the more website content you have indexed in Google the better, because it increases your chances to rank higher for a wider set of keywords.

So stop making excuses!  Remember, “Content is King,” and blogging is one of the best ways to reach the “Royal Ranks.”

Please add a comment below and let us know why you like to blog and how it has helped your business.