Tips Tuesday and What Has Your Blog Done for Me Lately?
Hello Happy Site Owners! Spring is right around the corner and you know what that means. Time for a little spring cleaning and you can get an early jump on it right now. I’m running extended hours this week on my 20-point site evaluation and review special. Get the quick (and inexpensive) help you need clearing out the cobwebs that keep your site from running in top form.
Featured
Pam Moore has got the bead on bringing you back to why you blog in her post titled What has Your Blog Done for Me Lately?
WordPress Plugins
Recently Updated
The Share Buttons plugin has been around for some time and it still works great.
BackWPup has recently been updated. This is one of the few free plugins that ranked well in my free report How to Backup Your WordPress Site.
FoxyPress is a custom plugin made to integrate FoxyCart e-commerce functionality into your WordPress website.
Slick Social Share Buttons allows you to add Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Digg, Google Buzz, Linkedin, and Stumbledupon social media buttons in a floating or slide out tab. It now also includes Pinterest. Continue reading
Tips Tuesday and Leading with Your Heart in Business
Hello Happy Site Owners! It’s Valentine’s Day. Are you doing what you love with the kind of folks you enjoy doing it? As a small business owner online, that’s an important question to ask now and again. It’s way too much work if you don’t have some passion motivating you. Take a moment to remember why you love doing this and all of the great folks you get to mingle with in the process.
I dearly love all of the people, opportunities, and challenges that running BlogAid offers me
and so happy to be sharing it with you online and in person!
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A fitting post today from John Jantsch on his Duct Tape Marketing blog about leading with your heart in business titled This is a Message from Your Heart.
WordPress Plugins
Plugins to Check Out
The Touch Carousel Post Content Slider for WordPress is a featured post slider that is mobile friendly
Blog Tips
ProBlogger recently ran a survey of its readership and found some surprising results, plus how trends in how blogging have shifted since last year. You’ll want to read the results here in What 60% of ProBlogger Readers Don’t Do That’s Central to My Blogging Success. That particular tidbit is at the end, of course. Continue reading
Optimize Your WordPress Backup Intervals
As a site owner, one of the best ways to protect your investment is to install a good backup solution that is automated and allows you to set the interval. It’s important to match the frequency of the backups to how often you make changes to your site. But, you also have to consider how much space those backups take because you don’t want to overpay for storage. Here are a few tips to help you optimize your backup settings.
Two Interval Settings
A good backup strategy will include the option to set the fequency of how often your site is backed up. That’s one interval setting.
The other interval you will need to set concerns how many backups are stored before being overwritten. More is better, but storage space becomes a factor at that point to consider too.
Setting Backup Frequency
The optimal frequency setting for your site backups depends entirely on how often you make changes to your site.
There are backup solutions that auto-update everytime you make a change. That’s a little much for most site owners, but you’re always asured that you will never loose any info.
If you blog two or three times per week, set your backup to weekly. If you blog two or three times a month, set it to monthly. The point is, don’t let too many changes happen before you backup your site. Continue reading
BlogAid Podcast Online Promotion with Carolyn Howard Johnson
I’m delighted to have one of my favorite guests back on the podcast, Carolyn Howard-Johnson and we chat more in-depth about her latest book, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher.
In this podcast we discuss:
- The benefits of writing blogs, articles, and guest posts
- What should be in your author resource box
- Publishing your own newsletter
- Marketing from the heart
- Networking and collaborating for successful launches
- Direct email marketing and why you need a signature
- Ways to use an ebook for marketing
- What should be on your website
A few of the links you’ll hear in this podcast are below for easy reference.
The Frugal Book Promoter – 2nd Edition
CreateSpace.com
ChazDeSimone.com
Let me give you a little background on Carolyn and you’ll understand why she has the expertise to speak on this topic and why authors, bloggers, and folks who promote anything online should listen to this podcast. Continue reading
Tips Tuesday and What Makes an Insanely Great Blog Design
Hello Happy Site Owners! Bunches of great tips this week on site design, WordPress plugins, blogging, SEO, social media, and more, literally. There’s a section near the end titled More Tips.
Did you see the new video overview yesterday on the Advanced Text Editor for WordPress? And, you can catch the full-length version in the WordPress Video Tutorial Courses.
Featured
Read What Makes an Insanely Great Blog Design and re-read it and then go look at your site and see if it fits the criteria in this super post from Derek Halpern. As a site owner, if you haven’t spent at least twice as much time and money in learning about marketing and content as you did on the look of your theme, don’t be surprised if your site doesn’t help you make money.
WordPress Plugins
Recently Updated
WPTouch allows you to easily convert your blog into a mobile-friendly version.
Fast Secure Contact Form plugin was updated yet again. It has had its issues since the release of WordPress 3.3, but the developer is staying right on top of it.
Plugins to Check Out
Social Login for WordPress allows folks to use their social media account to login and place comments on your blog. It may be a great way to encourage folks to leave more comments because they don’t have to fill out a form to login. It recognizes IDs from Facebbok, Twitter, and G+ as well as 15 more. And you get social analytics of your users. What do you think? Would you use it? Continue reading
A Better WordPress Text Editor – Video Overview
In my opinion, the default text editor has long been the bane of WordPress. It was finally reworked in version 3.3, but not nearly enough. In this video you’ll see my favorite rich text editor plugin called TinyMCE Advanced. You’ll see how to install and configure it, plus some of the options it offers that will make your posts candy for both readers and search engines.
One word of caution. This is a powerful editor. Some of the tools in this editor affect your theme’s styles. I purposely left them out of the configuration example. Be careful if you choose to use them and be sure that you have a solid backup of your site, including your theme.
You can find the full-length version of this video that goes more in-depth into
how to use all of the tools in the Advanced section of the WordPress Video Tutorials Course.
MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.
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