Spark into Marketing » Wordpress

Keyword-rich search term for blog

jeanspark — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:38:09 +0000

Delighted to say the blog received the first real keyword-rich search phrase today.

Great news. This means that someone looking for what I offer
can find my site on the internet among the 90,000,000
my research is beginning to pay off
I have evidence that something is working!

It is all about celebrating the journey and not simply the destination. Focussing on small achievements.

Previous searched terms were in response to well-known organisations or topics which naturally are getting searched. They were more opportunistic (good for publicity) but it is satisfying to be getting the core message heard.
Yay!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Happy 1 month blog birthday

jeanspark — Sun, 10 May 2009 09:16:27 +0000

My Wordpress blog is four weeks old. Having had a few miscarriages of communication with previous blogs my idea this time was simply to behave as a real parent. My entirely new domain felt like a new domain in every sense.

My blogging aims for the first month were:

To provide the best care I could
To enjoy our time together
Not get phased by other blogs that were more developed, or behaved better.

Provide the best care
A well-cared for blog grows, looks healthy and appears to be thriving.
Having just looked again at my four week hosting stats I see that 377 visitors have come calling over a thousand time and each has visited us on 2. 7 ocasions. (Actually take 33 visitors off because, strictly speaking they are from today).

I am not entirely sure about the other metrics. 23,000 pages, 27,000 hits and about 88MB. 88 MB does it mean that the blog will smile early or is putting on the correct weight? Like an anxious parent I watch signs of progress simply for reassurance, and in times of uncertainty have taken confidence in the fact that these numbers are growing healthily.

Best care? I have had advice and help for technical things like FTP (Paul Saunders thanks) and uploading my own designs, and have dipped in and out of Darren Rowse’s excellent 31DBB31 days to build a better blog.

Posting regularly
Regular feeding. I made a commitment to post every working day. This did slip a little in the third week to twice but I am back on track now.

Enjoy our time together.
This is the real measure of achievement, and I am delighted to say it has been a real pleasure. I have found it very freeing having easy access to writing on the web. Unlike a more formal web site, or a sales letter page the opportunity to be more personal has been an unexpected joy! As in real life the initial exhilaration did leave me and there were a few days of blues (blog blues?) when I wasn’t so motivated. In its place has come a more thoughtful approach, and a clearer sense of my purpose.

Other blogs which are more developed
I deliberately chose to focus on my blog to start with. There is only so much energy and time, and I wanted to make sure we were happy together. The online world is very seductive and I thought if I were not careful I would always be wanting the next thing, whereas the real satisfaction lies in being happy where I am.

As a new mum I did consciously make the decision to not engage in baby competition, or in having the latest accessory or fashion item. Taking the time to love the baby worked in real life. Having started a blog before and stoppped because nobody visited it made me clearer about the way forward this time.

In fact it has been a real revelation to see the lovely people out there! Any comments that have come my way have been wonderful, and I am looking forward to giving back.

Twitter
At the same time I have been on twitter. Again in a straightforward way.. learning the etiquette. Haven’t touched any of the million apps to make your twitter life more productive, but just see what it was all about. I have 380 followers as of a moment ago. Satisfying, and I don’t feel that I have played a game… or wasted too much time. I am beginning to see where it is all leading.

So now I am off to get some bells, whistles (and rattles) to shake because we are at the next blog stage!

Complimentary spam comments on your blog Spam comments that told a story and did not appear...
End of the month emails One of the end-of-the-month jobs that I had identified was...
London is capital of twitter says founder @ev One of the three founders of twitter Evan Williams (@ev)...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Wordpress.org Wordpress.com – API key

jeanspark — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:02:47 +0000

When I first heard about Wordpress I assumed that it was one entity and similar to Blogger or Typepad.

You pick from your prescribed themes and off you go. This is true for Wordpress.com. At Wordpress.com your blog is hosted on the Wordpress.com site so effectively you have the benefit of the masses of traffic that goes to the site, it is extremely quick to set up but you don’t get your own domain name, and you are not building your own business asset.

Then it transpired that the place to go is Wordpress.org where you can sign up for a blog under your own domain name. So off I went, did it all, and have got juicy statistics about 2 weeks later of 13,000 hits. If I had been on the .com site they would all have gone to the greater Wordpress site not to my domain specifically.

Having got the .com / .org division clear in my mind at last I was completely bemused by the instruction to get an API key from Wordpress.com. Not being naturally technical I felt rather exhausted by the whole thing and procrastinated. I had separated the two Wordpress sites and couldn’t put them back together again. I thought I was going to be forcefully swept into some blog vault from which I would never appear… and my blog would be torn apart by ravening wolves.

I so completely didn’t trust the instruction that I put a comment on twitter and asked for help but none appeared. So a week later I decided to believe the instruction and obey it. I have just been over to Wordpress.com, filled out the profile and signed up, and now am the proud owner of an API key.

Wordpress.com - get the key

It was all easy in the end. As these things usually are, once you know how to do them!

The point of the API key is to help remove spam from your blog. I am glad to say I have had no spam yet, but know that the client blogs I work on get a lot. So spammers I am ready for you. Bring it on. Let’s test this API key – and make sure it is worth it!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Away for the weekend -blog visitors improve!

jeanspark — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:56:18 +0000

I went away for the weekend to a family reunion which was wonderful and forgot about work.

Beautiful countryside, good food, good conversations, visiting places I knew as a child, connecting with where I have come from. Great memory: sitting in the sunshine on the day before Easter in the company of about 25 relatives (not including my own family who had gone with me!).

Inspirational, relaxing and very satisfying to the soul. Plus so lovely to see wild country and stone houses built to withstand the weather. Six hundred miles of driving but I am remarkably relaxed! Why?

1. I took time off! (and genuinely had a break)

2. My blog posts written while I was in work mode went out while I was away.

3. Website statistics have gone up.

Note to self:

Can take more time off – it is fun and I work better afterwards!

Plan and group activities

More blogging!

Blogging Workshop on International Women’s Day 2010 Image by orangeacid via Flickr Blogging Workshop on International...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Postdating a post

jeanspark — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:05:33 +0000

I have just discovered that the date and time option allows you to specify a time in the past in Wordpress!

So if I want to relate the post to something that has happened, I can make the post current with the event.

Writing a post in advance and scheduling it for publication in the future is obviously a great tool, but I hadn’t realised we could go – if not back to the future – then forward to the past.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Success at joining the self hosted Wordpress.org blog party

jeanspark — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:34:35 +0000

What a sense of relief that this blog is seeing the light of day! All I have to do now is write up some good content, which I hope will prove valuable and useful. It was the technical stuff that was my stumbling block, and I did ask myself why I didn’t outsource it to somebody more qualified?

Apart from the money… which may not have been a big factor I really wanted to learn how to do it. I am fascinated by technology, and want to find out how it works so that it can do the best job possible. But it does mean that I have taken longer to get into the blog party than was necessary.

Still I now feel much more comfortable with registering domain names, setting up hosting, changing the DNS and downloading Wordpress. Oh yes and I am more familiar with the difference between Linux and Windows hosting and that lots of hosting companies in the UK do not offer Fantastico. This could have been an issue as I hear that it is better to have your site hosted in your resident country – but I didn’t want to manually install Wordpress so have gone for Hostgator which is based in the US.

It seems as though I have gone into the forest and personally grappled hand to hand with a bear and won!

From worrying about doing things wrong to having a lot more confidence that I can make the technical stuff work has been a fantastic learning experience. Geekdom is far away but I am a lot less geek-free! Yay!

In the past I had started blogs hosted on blogspot, as well as one on Wordpress.com. Even though they were simplicity itself I was less committed, and knew they they were not essentially my property. Perhaps the learning curve in itself is a valuable experience.

This time this blog and I are in it for the long haul, and completely confident that we will get there! Watch this space for the quality content as that is also part of the plan.

Complimentary spam comments on your blog Spam comments that told a story and did not appear...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.