Archive for the ‘Blogging Mistakes’ Category

• If you have a Word Press blog, which is the platform for this particular blog, you may be excluding your blog from the Google Index without even realizing it.  Two of my clients were being excluded and I was left puzzled and questioning what I KNEW to be true.  Goes to show that you learn something new every day…and today I learned something new about Word Press.

• One of my clients has a Word Press blog, which he built himself using the free guide “blogging for buyers“.  He hired me to help him find a domain name and I felt really good about the domain we chose.  Based on all the research I did, it seemed as though the domain name alone would help him to yield good search results once he added some good content to the site.   Not So Much!  (learn more about how to chose a good domain name here.)

• No matter what we did and how I coached him, we couldn’t get Google to index his blog.  We have all of the SEO tools installed, had hand submitted the site to the Google Index and NOTHING! I hope this will all change with what I discovered today.  I wanted to bring it to your attention as well to make sure you have your Word Press blog set up properly to be indexed and crawled by Google, Technorati, etc.

• Follow these steps to make sure you are in good shape:

• On the left side of your Word Press screen, you will see “settings”, click on it.  A list of options will drop down, and one of those options is “privacy”, click on it. This is what you will see:
  

• Make sure that your site is set TO BE CRAWLED, and not set to block the search engines.  I am 100% sure that both of my clients who had their settings set to “block the search engines” did not choose that setting, which leads me to believe that it is the default setting.   I can’t think of any other way that it would have ended up “blocking” the search engines and I am very hopeful that now that it is fixed, Google will begin to crawl the site and we will see some activity.

• There is much more information regarding getting found on Google in the Getting Found On Google Section.  Good luck to you on finding your place in the Google Index.

P.S. Thank you for taking your time to visit and hope you find the information useful. I hope to help you learn everything you want and need to know about blogging. I welcome your questions (site specific is good) and definitely your suggestions. I hope to answer your questions before they come up or when you find that you have one. By clicking on the Orange RSS Feed button on the left side of the screen, you will be automatically updated of new information available without having to "check in" to see what's new. It's the easiest way to keep up to date. Thanks again for stopping in, I value your time!

• Today, the FTC released updated guidelines for bloggers who endorse products and services.

• The updated guidelines from the FTC say the following:

• The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.”

• Read the complete press release from the FTC here. To see the   complete guide published by the FTC, click here.  It is 81 pages and makes for great reading in the evenings you find it difficult to fall asleep. LOL

• It will be important to make sure people who read your blog know you are being compensated when you endorse a product.

• As I learn more about these new guidelines, I will post more.

Don’t hide content from your visitors

I love visiting the sites of other bloggers who really offer great content and sometimes what I read, really sticks with me in a way that I want to return again and again to re-read it.   I may mention it to other people in conversation, retweet it, or simply want to refer back to it because it was a great lesson!

One of my favorite bloggers, who shall remain nameless, because he really is a GREAT blogger who offers great content.   I visit his blog daily to see what other little tid bits of information he has for me today in the world of blogging.  His tid bits are “gold nuggets” and I so appreciate them.

I recently read a post on his blog about the importance of your headline.  He mentioned in his post that the heading of your post is as important than the blog itself. So important that you should invest as much time in the heading as in the blog post itself.

He also offered GREAT tips on what a good heading includes, buzz words that are important, etc.  I was having a conversation with a friend regarding some issues she was having getting people to open her email blasts and I thought about this post!  This post included just what she needed to improve her open rate!

I have since then, visited this blog no less than 6 times to try and find this “golden post”, but can’t find it because he has no “search box” on his blog that I can find.  He offers related articles, which I was fortunate to read while “hunting” for the one article I really wanted, but after six visits…still can’t find that one post! Gosh Darnit!

Lesson Learned – MAKE SURE YOUR BLOG HAS A SEARCH on it, so people who return and want to find a past article CAN find it.  It is the simple things that we often forget.

Happy blogging.  And…because what this particular blogger talked about, read this article about writing headlines and good “copy”.