Entries from October 2009 ↓

One of the frustrating factors of owning a blog is dealing with SPAM comments. But, if we bloggers don’t take steps to prevent them from posting to our blogs, they’ll be there for all the world to view. Your WordPress installation comes with a few default plugins. One of them is an excellent SPAM filter called Akismet. Today’s Techie Tip will teach you how to set up this plugin.

And now for something completely different . . . Continue reading →

Those of you who have known me for a while may be smirking that I’m blogging about branding. My friends are asking (using the distinctive voice of  Beverly Hills Cop’s Chief Hubbard):

• Is this the writer who pitched ideas from four genres on a single one sheet?
• Is this the writer who argued the point of branding with a best-selling author during a mentoring session?
• Is this the writer who rolls her eyes whenever a branding question is discussed during a conference’s proverbial editor/agent panel?
• Is this the writer who has more categories on her personal blog than she has posts? Continue reading →

Photo Contest! If a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s see whose pic is telling the best story. Upload a picture into the photo section of On Blogging Well’s Facebook page that you’ve used on your blog and tag it with your name. “Votes” will be cast by most unique commenters (if you make more than one comment on a photo, you only get counted once per picture — but you can still comment on as many pictures as you want, as many times as you want).

Oh — you must be a fan of On Blogging Well’s Facebook page to enter. And sure, feel free to enter more than one picture if you want. The main stipulation is, since this is a BLOG photo contest, the picture must have appeared on your blog (and you should have the rights to distribute it if it’s not free domain). Got an awesome pic that hasn’t appeared on your blog yet? Well, you’ve got a week — post it and then enter it!

The winner will receive a free copy of my upcoming eBook The Well-fed Blogger, which will include Facebook marketing strategies. Deadline is midnight (central time) Oct. 31, 2009.

I’ll start off by creating the album (Photo Contest #1) and uploading a picture.

GO!

You’ve launched your blog using the step-by-step plan laid out a few posts ago. Now you’re in orbit, circling the blogosphere, when suddenly, something goes wrong. Maybe you’re stuck. Maybe you’re scared. Maybe you feel overwhelmed by the whole process. Relax. Even Apollo 13′ s technical malfunction turned out okay in the end and was dubbed Nasa’s “successful failure.” Let’s go over some things that can cause blog failure, and trust me, these issues are much easier to repair than a ruptured oxygen tank.

Reasons Blogs Fail (and how to avoid them): Continue reading →

Your target audience may not even know your blog exists. Many bloggers stuff their posts with “key words” thinking this will help steer that audience toward their blog. Most blog readers, however, neither know nor care about key words. They care about whatever specific issue or problem led them to type a phrase into Google’s big search box. In other words, they aren’t looking for “key words” — they’re looking Continue reading →