Have you ever wanted to meet new bloggers? Have you ever wanted an insane amount of comments? Yea, I think we all have to be honest. If that’s the case, well, then you should check out the blog party going on over at 5 Minutes for Mom next month (April 9-16).
Every year for the past couple of years, the ladies over at 5MFM hold the Ultimate Blog Party. It’s an annual event where you can visit a shit’ton of bloggers and people, win prizes and make some new friends in the process. I’ve personally made some new friends in the 2 years I’ve participated in the party and gotten some new regular readers to my blog as well. But the awesome part is *leansinclose*, you don’t have to be a parent or a blogger to join either. Non-parents and non-bloggers are welcome to party as well.
If you wanna find out more about it, just check out their post here. I hope you do join. You’ll love it and you get so much out of it. 
The blogosphere is made up of countless blogs on an exuberant amount of different topics. There is literally about 500 different blogs that appeal to every one person. That is how big the blogosphere is. While there are so, so many different things people bring up, explore, dissect and discuss on their blogs, when you cut through all the clever wording used to describe what a particular blog is all about what type of content you would expect to find there, there are mainly two different types of blogs–those used to detail, rant and rave about one’s life and blogs built and written by and for corporations. As more and more people start opening up and divulging just about everything that goes through their heads to their prospective audiences and as more corporations seek to identify and connect with their consumers, the line between these two, seemingly separate blog types continues to blur where we, the blog readers, see our favorite blogs writing about and being sponsored by corporations. Before the most recent FTC guidelines have been put into place, most of the time, blog readers did not know when we, bloggers, were just sharing information or were being compensated in some way for what we wrote about products and businesses.
As this already very thin line continues to blur, people who began blogging to divulge, rant, rave and detail their lives on the internet are evolving their blogs into their businesses and in some, albeit rare cases, a person’s blog makes up their entire of the bulk of their household income. While most people put the emphasis of being compensated for blog posts, advertisements and the like on mommybloggers, this trend has and will continue amongst any and all blogs with a significant audience that is deemed a “target audience” by consumers.
Woman Tribune started out as a business-like blog. It was not created merely to divulge about my life, although I have done just that on several occasions and will undoubtedly continue to do so as long as Woman Tribune is up and running, but it was created more-so to provide information and to explore and discuss information that is important and significant in the lives of women everywhere. To put it bluntly, Woman Tribune was created as a business, rather than something fun to do in my down time and because of that, Woman Tribune has always operated with a business-like platform. One of the major things to keep in mind when creating a blog with the purpose of it being a business in mind is that it must always contain recent information. While I do my best to post about relevant, interesting and varied topics, if I let Woman Tribune sit for a few days with no content going up after a number of days, it is pretty much the equivalent of committing blogosphere suicide. It starts to become irrelevant, something easy to gloss over and it becomes forgettable. So obviously, knowing that not only is content king in the blogging world, but frequent content is also king and something that must be kept in mind to sustain your blogging/business, the thought of blogging schedules is guaranteed to come up in your mind at least, oh, about 150 times. A day.
Blogging schedules are tricky. Every “professional blogger” or “internet/blog marketer, “interblog marketer” if you will, repeatedly states in just about every five posts for about five years straight to post on your blog as many times as you’d like, but around the same time every day in order to set your readers on a schedule and give them something to look forward to. This is all well and good, in theory, but can become quite a mess in no time and without any effort.
Firstly, trying to get my readers on some sort of “schedule” of when to expect my new posts seems a little weird to me. A little like parenting and why would I start treating my readers like my children when most of them already have children of their own? To add to this, because most of my readers do have children of their own, that means that while they probably love, and even fantasize, about the thought of having some semblance of a schedule, in reality, that is really not given to most parents. Adding to that, for a blogger to be available at around the same, exact time every day in order to update their blog makes it sound like they are lacking a life, which then again may be why they make the money and can be considered interblog marketers in the first place. Just sayin’…
I have always been a night owl; there is just something about the dark and the quiet that really jump-starts my mojo and really puts me to work. I tip a significant hat to the night time as being a key factor in my web design/development talents and for putting my natural knack for the English language to work as a writer early. I have been on the internet, designing and developing websites, writing (mostly) bad poetry and blogging since I was 13 years old. That is an entire decade of this stuff and for the longest time, I honestly had no idea what I was doing, but it worked and I built a name for myself in the political and feminist blogging worlds early. I thought I had some sort of an idea of what I was doing, but as I founded Woman Tribune and found myself enthralled with this new “blogging business” everyone jumped on the bandwagon of over the course of the past few years, I realized that in order to treat this business like a legitimate business, I was going to have to adapt to some business hours. This is exactly where my blogging schedule goes a bit haywire. Because I am a night owl, I am very often up all night (it’s 5:11am here right now and I have not yet been to bed. You obviously get the picture.) and because of this, I am usually not awake during “business hours,” ie: 9am to 5pm. A lot other bloggers have come out quite frequently to say that they too are night owls or suffer from insomnia and in order to still operate under the disguise, for lack of a better word, of being awake during normal business hours, they simply schedule their blog posts that they have written in advance, to publish throughout the day. I could do this if my WordPress did not consistently refuse to publish scheduled posts, therefore making me believe that my installation of WordPress has developed some sort of technological personality and I am just not ready for my content management system to start taking over my life, and then of course, the world.
Just a few days ago I had stayed up all night and got so, completely tired, but wanted to force myself to stay up all day and “work,” also known as write blog posts which is very much work in my life, this website technically being my business regardless of how much I enjoy doing it, but something dawned on me–something that should have dawned on me quite a while ago. I created Woman Tribune in order to provide information to women and to explore and open discussion about the topics that interest me, and collectively other women around the world. If I stay up all night and sleep all day, yet still provide this same service, then I have essentially fulfilled my obligation. If Woman Tribune has become even the least bit important, or a daily stop on women’s blog hopping and internet stays throughout the day, then it technically should not matter when new posts hit the home page.
When small potatoes bloggers, and yes I do very much consider myself small potatoes, I do not have an ego in the least when it comes to my “online personality,” see the blogs of corporations or really, really big potatoes bloggers updating several times a day it is because most of them have a staff of writers. Most of them have pre-written posts to publish throughout the day to make themselves look more professional, again for lack of a better word, than they really are. Bloggers who have created their own websites and who are the sole bloggers on their websites cannot catch up to the amount of volume being presented on professional and corporate-backed blogs and it is about time that we stop trying to. We don’t have teams or staff, we just have ourselves and if people are still logging onto our websites, then it must be enough and it must be okay.
Do you keep to a blogging schedule? Do you think having a blogging schedule or posting at the same time every day is important?
While I and Woman Tribune, essentially is a “small potatoes” blog, I am very interested in its continued expansion and if any women out there are interested in contributing guest posts or weekly/daily columns to Woman Tribune, please feel free to contact me directly at holly[at]womantribune[dot]com to contribute your awesome blogging talents. I’m sure we could work something out and you would be in pretty good company because for the most part, I kick ass. Again, just sayin’…
Throughout the past week, Woman Tribune has been littered with hundreds, perhaps even verging on the thousands of spam comments that had outwitted my anti-spam plugin, Defensio. An absolute incredible amount of comments that did not consist of your usual spammy content, but of random words put together by no logical thought whatsoever. To say the least, it was very annoying having to go through pages of comments to mark the random-language comments as spam only to finish, go back to my dashboard and see yet another slew of spam comments appear that span over two to three pages. It was a never-ending process of spam deletion. Luckily, Defensio did catch on after a few hundred of these new type of spam comments were flagged and started keeping a few handfulls of them off the website, but a few handfuls of comments being held back was no match for the work that I had ahead of me every single time I pulled the administrator dashboard of this website up.
After a few searches through WordPress’ plugin directory I found the plugin that finally brought my spam comment hysteria to an end–Simple CAPTCHA!
Captcha image verification has been a staple on blogs small and large alike to cut down on the monstrous amount of spam comments an average blog accumulates. We hadn’t had this implemented on Woman Tribune because we did not have an absolute need for it. Sure, we did accumulate a great deal of spam comments, but it was pretty manageable–until now. So the time has come for captcha image verification to become a necessity for Woman Tribune and so I downloaded and installed Simple CAPTCHA, a simple and secure plugin that adds a little six letter/number combination field to your already existing comment structure.
As far as simplicity when installing the plugin goes, you cannot get any simpler than Simple CAPTCHA–which is probably why they put the word simple in the title of the plugin! It’s an easy upload process, click activate in your WordPress dashboard and you’re good to go! Yeah, that is it and since installing the plugin, I have not had one of these comments leak through and I did not lose one legitimate comment.
So if you’re looking for an image verification plugin that you do not have to set up at all that will do its job exactly as you want it to, check out Simple CAPTCHA.
People have been blogging for close to a decade, but never before have we seen something that attracted so many people so quickly before than the amount of people who have flocked to blogging and who have created internet-based spaces for themselves. People are very resourceful and it was only a matter of time before people realized they could make a nominal, or in some rare cases, could earn their sole household income from their blogs. In fact, the biggest blogging niche where bloggers are making the most money is by running blogs on how to make money blogging. And whenever people are making an income from doing what they love, it’s only a matter of time before the government turns its nose up at it and finds a way to discipline the people who have the nerve to not work a society-approved 9-5.
If you haven’t yet seen the Federal Trade Commission’s new 81-page document (or if you don’t have access to someone with the eccentric skill set needed to decipher the language) it basically means that starting December 1, 2009 if you are compensated in any way for a blog post you write (or info you share on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other new media outlet,) you must disclose that you have been compensated by the company that provided you either with cash, a free product, or any other type of compensation you received from the company.
If you bought the product or service you are reviewing or sharing your opinion on with your own money, then you are not required to disclose any information whatsoever. If you received a product for free from a company, you are now mandated to write a little blurb on the bottom of your blog post that goes something like ‘I received this product for free from X company and all information in this blog post regarding said product is is the sole opinion of myself and do not represent the thoughts of X company.’ Or you could be a little less-professional, which is what most bloggers will be doing come December 1, and just add a short and sweet ‘I received this product for free from X company.’ The only hole in this legislation is if you did buy a product you decided to review on your blog with your own money and you fall under siege of the FTC, how do you prove that you bought any products you reviewed on your website? How many of you actually keep the receipts of gifts you buy for your children and loved ones or apparel that you absolutely love after wearing and want to share a brand with your readers? No, in most cases you don’t and how else would you prove that you did buy a product that appeared on your site that could cost you up to $11,000 per post if you don’t disclose any business relationship.
However, semantics really does play a part in this conversation and not just because I am a blogger who is really not very happy with the new FTC mandates. For instance, Woman Tribune currently has a site-wide disclosure in place that distinctly states that I receive forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation. Granted, it also states that you, my readers, do not know which posts are sponsored by any company in most cases, but the policy of Woman Tribune that I am adamant about because it is my own, personal and ethical belief, is that whether or not a post is sponsored by a company, service, website, and so on, my blog posts are always honest and if I don’t like a product or service that I was asked if I would try, or I find anything misleading about a sponsor, I won’t think twice about reporting my findings; note the ‘ethical blogger’ badge in the footer of Woman Tribune. As far as I’ve seen, most bloggers who accept sponsorship of any kind feel the same, exact way.
I think the media, especially when targeting “mommy bloggers” who blog for profit or are often sponsored by companies or services, have blown blogging sponsorship way out of proportion and have basically represented women bloggers, who make up most bloggers who review products and are sponsored in any way by any company as people who sell their souls for freebies, which is completely not the case and is probably why the FTC felt the pressure to amend their legislation and place mandates on bloggers.
The FTC’s new mandates on bloggers are only subject to US bloggers, so those who live outside of the US who don’t have strict mandates over media or any other niche that free-thinkers and free-speakers thrive in, do not have anything to worry about. If you’re a blogger whose web host is located outside of the US I don’t believe should be subject to the new mandate, although I’m not a lawyer or a member of the FTC, so I could be mistakes and it’s always wise to double check. The bottom line is that bloggers who are endorsed by any company, service, etc. and whodo not disclose the relationship they have with the company are subject to fines equaling up to $11,000 per post.
Are you a blogger who feels under siege by the FTC? What are your thoughts on the new blogger mandates?
While surfing the mommysphere (mommy blogs), I came across a post that got me wondering. This article talked about adding your link(s) to web directories. It gave some good advice, and there was some stuff I didn’t know about that really helped me. But seeing as I run two myself, there was one thing that concerned me.
The author of this article stated that if a directory linked sites in this way…
http://www.yourlisting.com/click.php?linkname
instead of listing them this way…
http://www.yourdomain.com
that you should move on to the next. I can see the logic in this, I really can. It’s all about the link back, right? People are greedy for them, and they want good PR (even though Google won’t give more than three from what I’ve seen). Personally, I don’t care which way they do it. I’ll confess, my listings link sites in the /click.php?linkname manner, but that’s how the script creator wrote it. That’s not my fault, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Anyway, back to the rant…
So if they’re saying this to people looking for places to list their sites, then what about the top 100’s that people add their sites to that link site(s) in this way…
http://www.yourtoplistsite.com/out.php?id=101
There’s no link juice coming out of that, and people seem to be fine with it. I think people are too worried about PR and link popularity instead of who is seeing their links to begin with. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter how a directory or listing displays your link(s). Add them anyway. At least then you won’t be missing out on all that potential traffic.
What’s your opinion? Do you care? Do you have a preference? Share with us
So, we all want people to check out our blogs. Hell! People have come up with a lot of ways to get other bloggers and people in general to follow them in some way, be it through their site feed(s), Twitter accounts, Technorati favs (didn’t that go out of style?), site listings in online mags…the list goes on. I, myself, was looking at a few ways to get people to notice my blog since it seems to be slowly dying and going unnoticed. I haven’t run out of shit to say!! There was a lot of things to try out on Mom Bloggers Club, so I started poking into it further.
Aside from my idea of offering free WordPress themes, I found groups where you post your FaceBook Network Blogs url, groups where you post your Twitter profile and get followed by other people, and groups where you can get your posts voted up on social media sites (omg more of those please!). Even the idea of when people post contests and giveaways, they list following them in some way or another as a way to enter. We’ve all seen those, I’m sure. Now, that’s all well and good, but at the end of the day, unless your a high profile blogger with a well set group of roadies, you got nothing really. Just a lot of clutter in your profiles.
You know what I noticed? And I don’t know if this has happened to others. I’ve run two giveaways on this blog, one of them being unsuccessful which sucks cause it was awesome. People subscribed, followed, commented as they were told to do to enter. But when the deal was done and the giveaway was over, I started getting emails saying this person unsubscribed from my feed and/or that person unfollowed me on Twitter. I don’t think I’m the only one this is happening to, but what was the point in asking them to do so if they were gonna undo it later? It kind of defeats the purpose and it makes my site (and me) sad that people don’t think I’m worth keeping up with. They’re probably right, but still!!
So, in conclusion, unless your already popular and have been around for a while and are known, I don’t think it’s worth trying to get up to your eyeballs into all of this social business. Granted, it takes time to build readership, but personally, I don’t think it’s working out for myself (being the comment whore I am) and a lot of other people I’ve seen having the same issues. I’m not saying I’m giving up though. ‘Cause I’m not! I shall own the internet one day, you watch. And I’ll be the super networker everyone wishes they were. Mwahahaha!!
Chic Galleria and J-Vision Designs is giving away a FREE Basic Website to one lucky reader!
The FREE Basic Website consist of a 3 to 5 page design, basic header image, and an email contact form to be included on a page (if so desired). The contest winner may pay to upgrade services or may purchase additional services to go along with the contest prize.
Leave us your comments. Click here and let us know why you would like a new website design! Be sure to subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter to be automatically entered in all giveaways at Chic Galleria. Ends April 16th midnight EST.
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Beth is the Editor in Chief of Chic Galleria, a natural extension of her experience in retail sales and special personality – a sincerity that continues to attract business owners, designers, artists, and a plethora of wonderful readers. This veteran school teacher loves to make others feel special, and Chic Galleria is just one of her favorite places to do just that.
With the amount of conferences that take place regularly for bloggers all around the world, it is not only considered good business sense, but it has also become downright necessary for bloggers to get business cards that reflect their blog’s brand; especially if they take their business of blogging seriously. Business items that put your blog in the spotlight make business and social interactions a great deal easier when you have a card to give people instead of say, having to find a piece of paper and a pen and having to write down all of your information. They also come in handy during all of these great blogger conferences when you are meeting a ton of people you want to stay connected to.
But the way you market your blog and yourself “in real life” does not stop merely at business cards. A great scenario is when you host an in-house event or party for fellow bloggers in your areas. While you will most definitely be exchanging business cards during your event, it is the little things that make a big difference in any social or business exchange. A few days after your event, you could send the people who attended personalized postcards with your blog’s logo on them, thanking them for attending. It’s also a great idea to have your blog’s address as well as your contact information printed on the postcard just in case your business card was lost or damaged. This subtle but important touch lets your attendees know that you are thankful for their time and attention and you appreciated the time they took to attend your event and that you enjoyed being able to communicate with them on a face-to-face basis.
Don’t let your creativity be stifled in this process; VistaPrint is a great company that allows you to have the creative freedom you need to create promotional and business items for yourself, your brand, and your blog at an affordable price without any limitations, so you have the peace of mind, knowing exactly how your items will look when they arrive at your door.
We have all heard the phrase “time is money” when it comes to the business world, but in the blog world, to expect compensation for the exact amount of time you put into your blog is almost unheard of, especially when you’re new to blogging.
Whether you started your blog for personal use or to market your business, it is wise to think about your website as an additional relationship with a partner who is insanely jealous. It will need tender loving care, especially during the first three to four months and if you even think of giving something else your attention, even for a little while, your blog is going to be very upset with you, sitting there with no one paying attention to it.
With the amount of time you will spend writing your posts, advertising them as well as your blog as a whole, your blog will definitely take up a great deal of your time. If you started a blog to make money, give up your dream of making a living from blogging because it will firstly take a great deal of time to build your blog and start attracting loyal readers. While there are very few bloggers who can afford to quit their jobs and live freely collecting income from their blogs, such as Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, he tends to give people the illusion that it is easy if they just read his blog and follow what he teaches you. Even if you have been reading and following the advice Darren has given since ProBlogger’s conception, you may still be sitting there with a pagerank 0 blog (especially if you started doing paid posts or selling direct advertising on your blog, Google tends to hate when people start making money from their blogs) and an Alexa rank up in the millions. There is no such thing as overnight success in the blogging world and even if you worked diligently for months, or even years, your blog still may not go anywhere and that is a reality that all bloggers looking for some sort of payoff face and agree to when starting their blogs.
Although it seems like everyone already has a blog, it isn’t as easy as people elude to. Reading internet marketing blogs, taking professional blogger’s advice and buying books giving you the illusion that it is easy to earn a six-figure income from blogging alone isn’t going to work overnight and in some cases, not at all. Most importantly, you must remember the key points to blogging–You must have patience, don’t be afraid to spend time on it even if you’re not seeing any money from it and most importantly, love what you do because that is the only way you’re going to be able to spend so much time on something without any sort of payoff besides the sense of pride you have in yourself every time you hit ‘publish.’
Just under a week ago WordPress 2.7 hit the scene. With ample time to work with the new WordPress and get a feel for what has been changed (which is pretty much everything,) what do you think of it?
As soon as you go to log in to your WordPress admin panel after downloading 2.7 “Coltrane” named after John Coltrane, you will immediately notice the changes–and they don’t stop there. The entire WordPress dashboard has not only been changed, but if you don’t like it, you now have the power to move everything around to fit your most comfortable specifications. According to WordPress, version 2.7 is the product of the continuous feedback received by the community of people running WordPress on their websites. “Coltrane” aims to not only be sleek and pretty, which it completely nails on the head, but also faster–Every single thing you do in WordPress to manage your website should now take fewer clicks to accomplish speeding up the blogging process.
If you have been on the fence about upgrading to WordPress 2.7 due to being comfortable with the old interface or want to know more about how version 2.7 will work, check out this awesome video by WordPress taking you through the entire interface top to bottom and officially introducing you to “Coltrane.”
Have you been blogging with version 2.7? Upgraded and run into a few conflicting kinks with your design or the way your blog works? Does Coltrane satisfy your needs as far as a reliable, dynamic blogging platform? Whatever your thoughts and experiences are, leave them in the comments!
If you don’t currently blog with WordPress but have been interested in trying it out, I highly recommend it, it is what I use on all of my websites (including this one!) and you can download it right here.
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