A few thoughts on blogging
My friend LeeAnna wrote a brief post about being overwhelmed with all the techie stuff in building a blog and it made me do some thinking. It also reminded me of a techie tip I had read and wanted to try. I thought I had it figured out, but not all blogs cooperate with this trick. So I thought I'd write a few things about blogging today and see if I can help somebody or if we will all fall into the proverbial ditch.
Blogging
Do not fear blogging! Blogging can be very simple. Building a blog that has a big following is much, much harder. If all you want is to write or post photos, Blogger is very easy to use. WordPress has a bit of a learning curve, so I am told, but it is pretty user friendly too. I have only blogged with Blogger, so I speak to only that platform. You cannot monetize your blog on the free WordPress platform, but you can monetize to some extent on Blogger.
Word Verification
If you want to build relationships and get comments, make it easy to leave them. Ditch the word verification! I eliminated word verification shortly after this blog was started and have never had problems with 'robots' leaving comments. I did briefly switch to allowing anonymous comments and did see some spammers from that so I switched back.The fixes to this is found in the 'Settings' (with the wrench) on the left hand side of your Blogger Dashboard, in the subheading 'Posts and Comments'.
No-Reply
If you ask a question of a blogger in their comments, make sure you are not a "No Reply" blogger! If 'no-reply' is active in your account, I cannot reply to your comment unless I have your email from some other source. So I must answer your question in the comments and hope that you return to read them.This link is a good tute for changing your settings so you are not a no-reply blogger.
If you are trying to build your readership, leave comments under the "openID" or "name/url" profile instead of your google/blogger profile so anyone who clicks on your comment comes directly to your blog instead of to your Blogger or Google profile.
Content Theft
Another thing I have recently come accross is content scrapers or thieves. Make sure you have a copyright notice in place on your blog. This may not stop true theives, but it's a start. Recently I googled my own blog to see who had been linking to it, so I can visit and say "Hi" and to comment. But I also found two instances where another unrelated site was using my content on their spammy site. I'm crafting my copyright notice now.Monetizing
You may have noticed that I do have some ads and affiliate links in a few places on my blog and I also have a disclaimer stating that there are affiliate links on my blog. Putting a lot of effort into a blog is time consuming and I'd like a little money back from my efforts plus we are still digging ourselves out of a cancer induced financial hole. There may be more ads in the future, maybe my own ebook or a few patterns, but I have no desire for the main focus to be commercial.If you like what you see and read on the blog, I would be most appreciative of a thumbs up, share, like, 1+ or what ever social networking doo-hicky you use. As I said before, I am still learning this stuff and I am glad to share what I know, but you are probably better off doing a search for the topics you are interested in since I can't do these tech topics much justice, plus they take a long time to write. I'd rather quilt!
Ok, trying the Open ID. Let me know if it works. Tried to click on your link about being a no reply blogger, but it wouldn't come up. I think I fixed this once, but I can't remember. Very interesting. And congrats on your needle giveaway win;)
ReplyDeleteThanks for letting me know about the link. It's fixed now.
DeleteI hated trying to work with openID. I've found that it is best to stick to my google account for blogger blogs. One note of warning - if you're a frequent commenter, google will sometimes decided it best to turn off your email effectively making you a no-reply blogger. I think it has to do with spamming controls or something. I've had to switch myself back a few times in the blogger profile setting which is annoying because I'm a google+ user. One day - all of this stuff will integrate well!
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