Category: MetaBlogging

Free advice on blogging and mom blogging from the original affordable personal blog consulting services to help non-professional bloggers grow their blogs.

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MetaBlogging

You tell me: what’s your blog niche?

A while back, I did a few articles on blog niches—finding your blog niche and expressing your blog niche.

findniche

While I assume that most or all of us here are mom bloggers, have you found a narrower area of the blogosphere to call your own?

My niche is finding fulfillment, encouragement and value in motherhood, with a bit of professional blogging advice and family news thrown in.

What’s yours? Share your blog niche (or the blog niche you want or wish you could have) in the comments! If you’re still looking, feel free to share that, too!

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Kids/Parenting MetaBlogging

Saturday Evening Blog Post

Let me start with an announcement: Rebecca took her first steps this week!

Recently, Jennifer at Conversion Diary invited her readers to share an emblematic, defining blog post—a post that embodies the style and topic(s) of our blog.

sebpAs awesome and fantastic as that was, it’s getting better. Elizabeth Esther is taking this to a new level with the Saturday Evening Blog Post—a monthly feature where we share the most emblematic post from the previous month on our blog.

Go through your archives and participate today!

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MetaBlogging

Organizing your blog

Sure, you’ve got great posts, adorable pictures of your children, a custom header—but sometimes, despite the care we’ve put into designing them, our blogs can feel a little disorganized. Or maybe you’re just worried that visitors aren’t noticing the most important things on your blog.

Well, I have good news. Organizing the information on your blog can help make your site look and feel more put together—and you can feature your favorite stuff more prominently so all your visitors will understand your site.

what-blog-about

How do people see your blog?

When organizing your blog, look at your blog as if you’d never been there before. What can you tell about your blog from the first glance. What is the blog about? Where does your eye go?

This is hard to do for your own site, so if you have a friend who really hasn’t ever visited your blog before, they might be a great help. But even if you can’t get that kind of help, there are certain established patterns that users’ eyes follow. Here’s one such pattern from the Eyetrack III study

eyemovement

Obviously, your header and possibly your top stories are important—as are your sidebars and navigation.

Make your sidebar hot

Note that after the upper-left, the next place most people’s eyes go is the middle right—where your sidebar is. So what do you want to put there? The most important thing you want on every page of your site. Something that will draw visitors in, explain your site, and get them coming back for more.

I use my subscribe link to encourage visitors to subscribe (one of the goals for my blog). I’ve also put links to popular stories and a brief explanation of what my blog is about over there. Also prominent in my sidebar: my search box. It’s one of the first features I need on many sites that I visit, and I hate to have to search for it.

Other things that might be good: something that will be a touchstone for your readers—like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval-type thing. If you want to promote ads on your blog, that’s a find place to do it, too.

What shouldn’t you put there? Well, putting your main site navigation (i.e. links to your about page, etc.) in your sidebar takes up extra room—and your navigation will be more effective somewhere else.

Make your navigation work

The same eyetracking study indicated that “navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best — that is, it was seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration.” Top navigation (i.e. right below your header, like in a menu bar) is the most effective way to display deeper information about your site.

So what goes here? Links to pages that explain your site, who you are, your blog’s major features, etc.—so pages like About and Contact, pages for any major memes or themes to your site, etc. Make sure that the words in the links are succinct and descriptive, so we know where to find the features to your blog and know what we’re clicking on.

Drawing your visitors’ eyes

I think most people intuitively know that content “above the fold” (in the area of the page that’s visible without scrolling down) gets the most eye-time. Once people start scrolling, they’re either engaged in the content—or scanning and searching for something to engage them.

So how do you get the scanners engaged? You can work to make your posts scannable using engaging headlines, graphics, bold text, etc.

And how about your sidebars? Take a look at your sidebars as if this is the first time you’ve visited your blog. What do you find most interesting? What do you find confusing, or not easy to understand immediately?

Some things in sidebars can be moved to separate pages to reduce the feeling of clutter in sidebars, such as:

  • Awards
  • Badges
  • Blog rings
  • Favorite posts
  • Ways to contact you

If you create a page for your awards, badges, etc., you can still have a link in your sidebar so interested people can check those out, and you can still show off your memberships, but you can do it without overwhelming your visitors.

Believe it or not, a few changes in a short time can really change the way you and other people see your blog. So get organized!

More organizing tips from WFMW. Eye tracking study via ProBlogger.

Photo credit: Tread

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MetaBlogging

The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress

UPDATED 26 August 2009, with minor updates throughout, and a big change to step 3.

Want a full guide to setting up WordPress on BlueHost, an inexpensive, WordPress-recommended hosting company? Sign up for BlueHost with an affiliate link on this page, and email me (guide at mamablogga.com) for a free PDF guide on installation, set up, WordPress, add-ons and more!

I made the move from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress more than a year and a half ago. At the time, I wrote the original ultimate guide to migrating, but a few things have changed in the intervening months. So I present the fully updated, all new, ultimate guide to migrating from Blogger to WordPress!

Be sure to check out my article on deciding and preparing to switch your domain. Once you’re sure you’re ready, then here are 10 steps to transferring your blog safely, completely and . . . well, awesomely. This method preserves your links, your subscribers, your comments and your content, and makes the move search engine safe.

Get the goods: a domain, hosting, and the WordPress software

1. Get a domain, preferably “yourblog.com.” Don’t own a domain? I use either GoDaddy or Bluehost for domain registration. Their prices are okay. I recommend three things here:

  • Get private domain registration. No junk mail, no strangers getting your address from your whois info.
  • If available, get yourblog.com , yourblog.net and yourblog.org. Sometimes GoDaddy offers a deal where you can get free private registration when you register 3 domains. (Then redirect .org and .net to the .com using account management. Select 301 redirects.)
  • If you go with GoDaddy, search for “GoDaddy coupon.” Click on the first result and use whichever coupon will save you the most money (calculate out the % to see which one that is if you have to).

2. Get hosting. I recommend Bluehost.com; they came highly recommended and are a pretty good deal. Also, they’re one of WordPress’s recommended hosts and feature a very simple install for WordPress.

UPDATED 3. Install WordPress. With Bluehost, just login to your control panel, click on Fantastico under Addons/Plugins Simple Scripts under Software/Services, select WordPress from the list, and click the green Install Now button (under Install on an existing server—even if you’re importing your old blog, you’ll be using a new installation of WordPress). Fill in the forms and you’re done. If your host doesn’t have a similar install, you’ll have to install manually. It shouldn’t be too hard; WordPress gives you instructions (and they claim it takes five minutes!).

Prepare to transfer your feed: you don’t have to lose any subscribers

4. Blogger enables you to transfer your subscribers seamlessly as well. If you haven’t already, sign up for a FeedBurner account (if you need a walkthrough to FeedBurner, check it).

Then, login to Blogger and go to Settings > Site Feed. In the Post Feed Redirect URL box, enter your new FeedBurner address. This will help redirect your subscribers.

Prepare your new WordPress blog: with some fun stuff

5. Login to your WordPress (might take a little time for the installation to “take”). Select “Options” then “Permalinks.” Select “Custom” and type this line in the box:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

This is to match the post structure of your Blogger blog, to minimize the number of broken links and redirects. (It’s possible to change this structure, too, of course, but it’ll take additional steps.)

Wendy Piersall has a few more steps to setting up your initial WordPress installation and getting it off the ground. All good steps!

Move your posts and comments

6. This is the easy part! In WordPress, go to Manage (Tools in WP 2.7+) > Import. Select Blogger from the list and enter your login information. This should automatically transfer all your posts and comments for you. 😀

However, some of your links won’t work anymore because Blogger and WordPress convert post titles into URLs differently—Blogger leaves out stop words like “and” and “the.” You can fix this, too, with another handy plugin, Redirection. Upload it, activate it and you can use it to easily track and redirect individual broken links (for example, from “/this-best-post-ever.html” to “/and-this-is-the-best-post-ever.html”).

There are also some other plugins to do this automatically. To get these (or any) plugins, in WordPress go to Plugins>Add New. Search for the plugins by name or related terms. (Searching for “blogger permalinks” brings up some plugins that can help with this and some of the other technical stuff.)

Transfer your feed: keep all your subscribers

7. Login to FeedBurner, go into the feed and click on “Edit Feed Details.” Change your Original Feed to http://YOURNEWURL.com/feed/ .

8. In WordPress, you’ll probably want to use FeedBurner as well, and if so, there’s another plugin to integrate the two services perfectly, FeedSmith, owned by FeedBurner (which is owned by Google).

Change over the URL: the final steps to move your blog

9. Back in Blogger, select Settings for the blog you want to transfer. Select Publishing. Click the top link, “Custom domain.” Type in your new domain, www.yourblog.com. Save. Now your links will transfer automatically to your own domain (though sometimes Blogger will show visitors a page to make sure they’re not being taken to a different site accidentally), but you’ll need one more step to transfer your blog home page over.

10. Still in Blogger, go to Layout>Edit HTML. Place the following code anywhere after <head>:

<meta content='0; url=http://YOURNEWURL.com/' http-equiv='refresh'/>

This sends visitors to your blog homepage directly to your new URL, and, as Sebastian’s Pamphlets says, is a search-engine safe method of redirection.

Like the change in step 9, this can show visitors a warning page that they’re being taken to another domain. Some might think that it’s just as good to put a link to your new URL in your old blog and leave it up. However, it’s better for your search engine rankings to transfer it like this—if search engines see two copies of your content around the Internet, they may try to penalize one or both of your sites for “duplicate content.”

Be sure to test your main blog URL as well as some of your old post URLs to make sure everything is working, and of course, be subscribed to your feed to make sure that’s in order as well.

And you’re ready to blog on wit’ yo’ bad self.

Note: You might have to import your images to WordPress as well, but I haven’t.

Want a full guide to setting up WordPress on BlueHost, an inexpensive, WordPress-recommended hosting company? Sign up for BlueHost with an affiliate link on this page, and email me (guide at mamablogga.com ) for a free PDF guide on installation, set up, WordPress, add-ons and more! (Note: you must sign up with an affiliate link to receive the guide.)

Disclosure: the GoDaddy and Bluehost link is an affiliate link.

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MetaBlogging

What do you want out of your blog?

I’ve mentioned recently that I started this blog to help make a difference in moms’ lives—to help them find fulfillment.

But sometimes, it just feels like something else I have to do. It feels like I’m not reaching anyone, that the blog is just a chore that I keep up with . . . out of habit and not wanting to be a quitter.

When I was thinking about this the other day, I realized that I feel like I’ve lost my way with MamaBlogga. I often don’t feel like I’m really helping anyone anymore (and this isn’t a pity party or trolling for comments; it has as much to do with my ennui as it does with the tepid response).

I realized I don’t know what I want out of this blog. I wanted to help people, and I feel like I’ve done that, but that I lack the desire, the drive or the talent to keep doing that. Plus, I stopped writing about blogging for a long time and I don’t know if that’s something I should or even want to do anymore.

sigh

So, how do you recapture your blogging drive? What do you want from this blog? What do you want from your blog?

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MetaBlogging

Expressing your blog niche

So you’ve found your blog niche and you even know what you want to say in your niche—the more specific, the better. How can you convey that message to your visitors the first time they visit your site?

findniche

Tagline and title

Most blogs have a place for a tagline (in WordPress, for example, this is called the blog description). Find a catchy way to express who you are and/or what you say. It can help to focus on what you can do for your readers, and to keep it brief—short enough to fit in the title element of each page (the name that displays in the title bar and bookmarks of your site—more about headers).

  • Scribbit – Motherhood in Alaska
  • Problogger – Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging
  • Digital Photography School – Digital Photography Tips for You

Header and design

If you can, express your theme or at least your niche in your header through images, your blog name and your color choices. Put your tagline in the header image of your blog, too.

While the header is a great opportunity to express your theme, your content will do it even better. Don’t make your header so large that you can’t see your blog content on the very first page—don’t make people scroll down to get to your content!

About page

Have an about page, first of all. Here you can explain not only who you are and how you’re qualified to blog about this topic, but exactly what you’ll do to help your readers.

You can also put a short explanatory paragraph on your home page (above the fold—in the part of the page you can see without scrolling down). This seems to work best in the sidebar, but I’ve also seen it done in the main post column.

What do you think? How do your favorite blogs convey what they’re about before you even get to the posts?

Photo by Andronicus Riyono