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7 Frustrating Things About Blogging (and solutions for each one)

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frustrating things about blogging
Blogging is a great thing. Blogging for a living (or for a partial income) is really great! however, it does come with frustrations. Here are some of the more common frustrations that happen while blogging. I’ve provided solutions for each frustration in an effort to make blogging less stressful for you!

Problem: explaining to your friends and family what it is that you do.
It can be tough sometimes explaining the fact that you earn an income from a blog. A lot of people simply don’t understand how that is possible and many don’t even know what a blog is. It really is tough to explain anything about the blogging world to anyone who is not in it themselves.
Solution: I like to keep it simple and just say that we own and operate a few websites. Usually people just nod and say something like, “cool”. If they start asking questions, I just say we make money via online advertising. That usually satisfies their curiosity.

Problem: websites that are down.

Doesn't this picture make you cringe??
Doesn’t this picture make you cringe??
Whether it is your own blog, or a social network that you frequent, websites being down can feel crippling to your blog and your business. The good news is that they tend to get back up quickly, although it certainly doesn’t feel quick at the time.
Solution: stay calm and try and find something else productive to do. If your blog is down, go to other blogs and leave comments, or interact on social media. If a social network is down, go to a different one for the time being or again, go blog commenting. Also, check DownforEveryoneOrJustMe to make sure it’s not something on your end that is causing the site to be down.

Problem: high resolution product photos
I used to hear several bloggers complain about this happening and didn’t think much of it. Then it started happening to us. PR companies send a great pitch and by the end of the email, we’re all excited to work with them only to find out the sole source of “compensation” being offered are hi-res photos of their products. Not only is this a ridiculous offer, but we like to take our own high-quality photos to use on our blogs to have a more personal feel. I truly hope these pitches don’t work very often.
Solution:  we respond to the ones that interest us telling them that we’d love to work with them, followed by our rates. We usually don’t hear back, but there have been a few cases where we have turned it into a nice business relationship.

drop by
Problem: surprise visits
Just because we work from home, doesn’t mean that we are available 24/7. I’ve talked with a lot of bloggers who say that this is their biggest frustration. It takes a TON of discipline to be self-employed and when your income relies on hard work, you can’t just go do this and that at the drop of a hat. Bloggers who earn a full-time income spend upwards of 60 hours a week working and it’s frustrating when others don’t realize this.
Solution: I feel like this is the toughest one, but you just have to keep reminding whoever needs it that even though you work from home, you give yourself a strict work schedule and you have to stick to it or your business will suffer.

Problem: bad lighting
A huge part of many blogs are high-quality photos. It’s tough to make that happen with bad lighting and photos in perfect daylight are not always possible.
Solution: if you can’t do everything during the daytime try and at least stock up on photos at that time. Now, when you go to write your post at night, you’ll have nice, well-lit photos to go with it. You could also invest in lighting systems, but that might not be in your budget. We have “daylight” light bulbs in many rooms in our house which provide a nice, natural-looking light.

Problem: changing affiliates
Companies have their own agendas, which is fine. That doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly frustrating getting an email saying “our company is moving from x affiliate network to y affiliate network”. For a blogger who uses their links, this means applying for their program with the new network, getting links and going back and changing out all of their old links. You see, the old links will no longer generate income once a company has moved on from the network, so it has to be addressed.
Solution: WordPress has a nice Find and Replace plugin to handle the changing of the links, but the rest doesn’t really come with a solution – it’s just annoying.

Problem: writer’s block
This one kinda speaks for itself. When your business is based on writing and you can’t think of things to write, it sucks.
Solution: don’t force the issue. Make sure to stick to your quality standards when it comes to content. This list of 101 blog post ideas should jog your brain a bit.

What is your biggest frustration when it comes to blogging?




Filed Under: Blog, General Blogging Tips, Motivation

Shareaholic WordPress Plugin Hijacking Affiliate Links

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shareaholic hack
The Shareaholic WordPress plugin has recently begun hijacking affiliate links. On September 4th, 2014, without any update required, or any notification to the users of the plugin, Shareaholic began overriding links and placing Viglink affiliate links on sites that use their social sharing plugin.

PS. scroll toward the end of this post to learn how to delete this plugin and for similar plugin suggestions.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting…

According to Shareaholic, “Shareaholic is introducing an additional way for publishers to receive compensation for traffic they drive to e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay.”

LOL

Rightfully so, Shareaholic is getting blasted on the plugin page, on their blog post, and anywhere else that they can be reached. There are so many things wrong with this it’s not even funny. Let me first say that apparently you can go into your online account and turn off this “feature” if you want. To me, that changes nothing.

First, what they are really doing is preying on sites that do not know about this and don’t have a PayPal email listed in their account. Shareaholic can’t pay them, so where would the money go if this is the case? Charity? Doubt it.

Second, a lot of bloggers have contracts with companies that they have done sponsored posts for to either have no affiliate links in a single post, or to have specific direct links to the sponsor’s website in the post. Now, Viglink is “helping” by changing those links and effectively breaking the contractual agreement that the blogger has with the sponsor.
Example: we recently did a sponsored post where a company paid us and sent us clothing for a post. They wanted direct links to their website and product pages. We did that. (Nofollow of course!) Now those links are being run through VigLink and we get to explain to the advertiser why.

Third, it’s just slimy. Don’t change links on another website with your software, especially without notifying the users first. That’s hacking.

Fourth, it is overwriting existing links!! So if you have a relationship with a company and another affiliate network for a higher payout, too bad! Shareaholic will swap out that link with a VigLink affiliate link instead! Example: We use a personal referral link for my wife’s blog for ThredUp and get $10 for each referral. The plugin swapped out the link for a link that generates 30% of sales for new customers. This means that unless the customer places a $35+ order, we are losing money. We realize this fact and choose to use the referral link instead of the affiliate link. It’s a choice we made and some plugin should not change it.

Fifth, many people don’t have access to their online account because a designer set it up for them. I set my own up and found there was really no need for the online account, so I forgot my login info. For people like this, there is no way of turning off this “helpful” feature.

Sixth, without notification, bloggers are finding these links and thinking their sites have been hacked and spending hours trying to figure out the source. To that I say, your sites WERE hacked – it just happened to be by a hacked that you opened the door for when you installed Shareaholic on your site.

Seventh, many users who now have automatic affiliate links placed on their sites do not know what proper disclosure is. So, by placing links on their site in this “helpful” manner, Shareaholic is causing sites to violate the FTC guidelines for disclosure. My, how helpful Shareaholic is!

There is just so much wrong with what Shareaholic did by making this change. They have violated the trust of their users and have lost countless customers. One thing that every company should realize is that you don’t want to mess with people’s income. That is a very quick way to send your business into an avalanche.

Take a look at a response from Shareaholic regarding the concern of not making this an opt-in feature as opposed to forcing it on all users: “We went with convenience with easy opt-out, so you can benefit out of the gate.”
Come on! Shouldn’t it be the users’ choice!? What a joke.

Something like this really makes you wonder what else Shareaholic has up their sleeve with regard to “helping” its users out. Get out while you can.

On another note, I have reached out to VigLink to let them know what is going on. I mean, if this is happening to all Shareaholic users (which it is), that could be dangerous to VigLink’s relationship wit its partners. I’m sure some of the affected sites have a subject matter (like drugs, guns, porn, etc.) that many of VigLink’s partners would not want their affiliate links on.

The moral of this post is to make you realize that you need to deactivate and delete your Shareaholic plugin and stay far, far away from anything that they ever develop. These events have shown them to be shady, not at all transparent, and willing to make changes to your site without your consent to profit.

————————————————-
Want to delete the Shareaholic plugin? Me too! Here’s how:
Head to your plugins page and scroll until you find it. You’ll see it like this:
deavtivate shareaholic pluginClick “deactivate” and the screen will re-load. Scroll back down to the plugin to see this:

delete shareaholic wordpress pluginClick “delete”.
Then you’ll be brought to this screen:
delete shareaholic plugin
Click yes, delete all files and don’t look back!

Now, to find a comparable plugin. Here’s a few that I have used and currently use: Flare, ShareThis and Social Count Plus. Finding the right social sharing plugin can be a pain, so I recommend looking into these before you install. Read the reviews and make sure you install a plugin with a lot of high ratings. Also remember, you can always install and remove plugins pretty easily, so try a couple out if necessary.

Filed Under: Blog

How to Put Ads on Your Website

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how to put ads on your blog


Note: this post is assuming you have access to ads to put on your site. You can either put ads that you sell directly, or ads that are part of an ad network.

Now let’s talk about placing ads on you website. I’ll break this post into 2 parts – WordPress and Blogger.

Up first,

How to put ads on your BLOGGER blog

It’s actually very simple. I’ll start with AdSense, since it is the absolute easiest.
Head to your layout screen by clicking “layout” on the left side of your dashboard. The screen will look like this:
blogger layoutWherever you want to put an AdSense ad, click the “add gadget” text to get to the gadget list. Find the AdSense gadget:
adsense gadgetAfter clicking the AdSense option, you’ll be brought to a screen where you can quickly customize the look of your ad.
how to set up adsense in bloggerNote: if you don’t have an AdSense account set up, you will have to do that first.
Make sure the text and image option is selected. More ads, and better quality ads will show if you choose that option. If you click the dropdown menu, you’ll be able to set the size of the ad. Make sure it’s something that will fit where you want it. The optimum size for the area you chose will be selected. Change it if you need to.

Then, you can change the color scheme of your ads. I recommend trying to blend it with your blog’s color scheme so it looks better. As you change things around, you’ll see the preview (shown at the bottom of the window) change, which is great for showing you how an ad will look on your site.

And that’s it! Click “Save”, then save your arrangement and your ads will appear within a few minutes to a few hours.

But Zack, what if I don’t want to place an AdSense ad, but instead an ad from somewhere else?

No problem!

Assuming you have the HTML code for the ad, follow the steps below:
(If you need to create the code for placement, follow the steps here and just replace the social icons idea with the ad)
Head to the layout section and click add gadget where you want to place your ad (just like above).
Instead of choosing the AdSense gadget, choose the HTML/Javascript one.
html blogger gadgetThis will bring up a box where you can enter some HTML code. There will also be a box at the top for “Name”, just leave that alone.
Simply paste your ad code in the HTML box, hit “save” and you’re good to go!
preview changesAlways make sure to preview your changes before saving arrangement!

That’s all you need to know for the basics on placing an ad on your Blogger blog.

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But Zack! I’m on WordPress!

Ok ok, it’s your turn now.

How to put ads on a WordPress blog

WordPress themes are all different, so I will try to cover them all by being slightly general.

Head to the widgets screen:
wordpress widgets
Take a look at the right side of this screen. Those are your widget areas.
widgetsDepending on your theme, you will have different widget areas than the ones shown above. Most likely, if you’re a beginner, you’ll just be putting ads in your sidebar. The sidebar (if there are multiple) you probably want to put the text widget in is the “Primary Sidebar”.

When you have found the widget area that you will be placing the ad in, click the little downward pointing arrow to expand the widget. Then from the left side of the screen, drag the button titled “text” and drop it in the widget area:
widget drag and drop
That will open up a box where you can add your code:
wordpress ad placementAs with Blogger, avoid the title box unless you want your ad to be titled on your site.
Hit save and you’re good to go! Your ad should be live on your site!

If you want to place your ads in other areas, you’ll have to be familiar with HTML code, CSS code and possibly even PHP code.

Hopefully that helped show you how to put ads on your website!

Filed Under: Blog, Make Money Blogging

How to Make Your Website Load Faster

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how to make your website load faster



While you may not always be thinking about it, your website’s load speed is quite important. Think about it – how long do you let a site try and load before getting annoyed? Maybe 5 seconds? If you’re a really patient person, 10 seconds?

The truth is, it’s around 5 seconds for most people. How long does it take your site to fully load? Are you losing visitors because it’s too slow?

Since user experience is now a focus of Google, a site’s load time is more important than ever. You want people to stay on your site. There are many SEO people who believe site load speed directly effects SEO.

For this post, I am going to be taking my How to Start a Blog post, and making changes to improve the speed.

I’ll walk you through step-by-step what I am doing, so you can follow right along! I’ll also add some other ways (that I did not use) to speed up your site’s load time.

The tools I am using to test the site for speed are pingdom and gtmetrix. They are both free.

Here are our results before this post:
GTmetrix
how to speed up your site

Pingdom
pingdom test

As you can see, this post is actually loading pretty quickly already, but there are some things we can do to speed it up even more.

Now, both free speed test sites shown above provide a ton of insight about specific elements of your site and how they are affecting load speed. Feel free to delve into those reasons, but I will cover many of the common things that slow down sites in this post.

GTmetrix gives you grades on specific categories, while Pingdom shows you how long each element took to load, how large each element is and how long it waited to connect to each element.

A quick look at GTmetrix shoes that they give image optimization a D grade.
gtmetrix
Obviously, there are other issues there as well, but we’ll focus on images first.

So I see the D grade from GTmetrix and head over to Pingdom. Sure enough, I see a couple of images over 145kb in size.
images
Now, if you’ve got nice, high quality photos, you’re going to need to have images that are larger than this. However, you can see the images on my post are just screenshots. They don’t need to be top quality.

One thing to note here: if you’re going to re-size images in existing posts, keep in mind the metadata of those images such as file name and alt tags. If you upload new images, keep that stuff the same to avoid negative SEO impact.

Ok, time to work though the post image by image.

First up, I’ll go over some image re-sizing tools.
PicMonkey – easily resize images in jpeg format in 3 size/quality options. Also crop out unnecessary parts of images with this tool.
Picresize.com – upload pics right on the site, resize, crop, add effects or simple save as a lower quality.
Irfanview – free software that allows you to save images at lower size/quality options. Be sure to download the software and the plugins, so you have the “save for web” function.
Photoshop – the premier photo editor, but very costly and complex. (tutorial here)

The first image in the post was 80kb. A quick downgrade in quality via picresize.com and we’re at 66kb. Not fully satisfied, I took this image into Irfanview and was able to reduce the quality (you can’t tell in the published version) to 50% and it brought the image size down to a tiny 25.43kb. That’s over 2/3 smaller of a file. You can imagine how doing this for the rest of the images will improve load time.

The next image was 84kb and I reduced it in Irfanview to 28kb by just downgrading the quality from 100% to 90%. (I am using the “save for web” option shown here:
sfw1
I started to see quality changes after that, so I kept it at 90%. The point is to reduce file sizes without reducing noticeable quality. You have to be aware of the line and always choose quality of image over size reduction.

Some images may already be optimized and you’ll find that the tools don’t reduce the sizes. These cases will be rare, but they do happen.

By just reducing all of the image sizes on that post, I reduced the load time by about half of a second according to the testing tools. GTmetrix also upgraded my image optimization grade from a D to a C.

If you want to get serious about image optimization, take a look at your sidebar images, header images and any other images that you have which load on every page. Reducing those can make some serious improvements to load time.
———————————————-
Another thing you can do to reduce your site’s load time is to minify your css file. To many of you, that sounded like another language. The truth about this one is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you might mess up your site’s design, so consider hiring this one out.

I use http://cssminifier.com/ and throw the minified css onto a test site. You can also hire someone to do this for you.

Basically, what it does is it makes it easier for web browsers to read your css file quickly. The faster it can read your css file (which tells it how to make your website display), the faster the site can load.
———————————————-
Host ads on your own server. Upon checking the speed of my site again on pingdom, I also noticed this disturbing thing: the Hostgator 125×125 pixel GIF in my sidebar took 15 seconds to load! Fifteen seconds! This is because it just happened to take a while to connect to their servers. It definitely doesn’t happen often, but these things happen and the more ads you have hosted on other sites, the greater your chance of this happening.

Download the images for the ads, upload them to your own site and add them back to your sidebar that way.
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This one may be the most obvious: get a caching plugin. A caching plugin will generate HTML files that are called upon to load when a visitor comes to your site as opposed to each visitor calling upon the server (webhost) to load a website.

Basically, caching reduced site load speed and reduces the load on your host.

The two most popular WordPress caching plugins are W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. I use them both and find the very user friendly.

Note: caching can get tricky. While most people will be able to install these plugins without issue, things happen. Issues with caching plugins can be difficult to figure out, so I recommend leaving it to a pro if you can afford it. It shouldn’t take a pro more than 30 minutes in install and set up either of these plugins.
———————————————-
Similar to a caching plugin, you can also opt for a CDN (content delivery network) service to help your load speeds. MaxCDN and CloudFlare are the 2 most popular.

You can also use CloudFlare’s security services to prevent bots and spammers from accessing your site, this reducing the load and increasing your speed.
———————————————-
A few other general ideas:

  • Reduce the number of plugins you have.
  • Reduce the number of scripts that are running on your site
  • Remove unnecessary images or change them to text
  • Reduce the number of full posts that show on your homepage

To expand on that last point. The less full posts that you have showing on your homepage, the better. If you’ve got 5-7 pictures per post and 10 posts showing up on your homepage, visitors are loading up to 70 images each time they visit your homepage!

Consider showing one or two posts and then 3-4 additional snippets of posts instead.

Bonus: this will also increase your pageviews, since people will have to click the posts snippets to read the full post!
———————————————–
Final tests:
Pingdom
test
GTmetrix
speed test

As you can see, a little bit of attention as to what is holding your site up can make a big difference in load speed time.

Also, as I mentioned in the post, there are a ton of other little ways to reduce your site’s load time. I encourage you to explore deeper into the testing tools if you’re interested in further reducing your site’s load speed. I just thought 1400 words was enough for today’s post. 🙂

Don’t have much time or money? Head to fiverr and search “speed up my site” to find several gigs for this exact thing. Just be sure and choose someone with a healthy amount of 5-star reviews.

How fast does your site load according to pingdom?

Filed Under: Blog

How to Make a Blog Header

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how to make a blog header



I wrote about how to make a blog header a while back and thought I’d polish the post a bit and make it more 2014 friendly.

No matter where you are in your blogging life, your blog’s header is of the utmost importance. If you’ve already got a header, I challenge you to take a look at it with an editorial eye Is it optimized for mobile? Does it accomplish what you want it to for new site visitors?

My favorite part from my previous post about headers was the basic tips that I led off with.

Tips on creating a website or blog header:
• keep it clean
• minimal pictures
• make sure it fits
• don’t make it too tall
• make it look professional
• don’t make it look cheap

As I mentioned above, the header is a very important part of your blog. It’s basically like the job interviews outfit you pick out: it’ll be people’s first visual impression of you, so you want to make it good.

If you’re not creative, or are not good with graphic design, hire someone to do it. There are designers throughout blogland who do a great job for $20-$50. Even better, you can check out Fiverr to find hundreds of people who will create you a header for $5! You can see their work and any feedback they have before ordering. Do your research there, find a good one and you’ll land a great header for $5!

I’ve gotten some great design work done through fiverr and can’t believe I only paid $5 for it once it’s done! It’s definitely worth a shot.

If you decide to make a blog header yourself, here’s an easy way to do it:

1. Assuming you’re in WordPress and have a header function, simply hover over “appearance” in you dashboard and click “header”. Your header’s dimensions will be listed on the next screen. In Blogger, the easiest way to find your header’s dimensions is to visit your blog and save your current header as an image on your computer. Then open the image with a photo editing program (I use Paint) and look at the dimensions.

2. Create a blank jpeg file of your exact header dimensions. Note: if you want to change the size of your header, you’ll need limited php knowledge.

3. Go to PicMonkey and open the blank file that you created.

4. From there, you’re on your own as far as creating the header. Use the tips above, familiarize yourself with the tools that PicMonkey has to offer and play around with it until you come up with something you like. Note: now would be a good time to “spring” for the paid subscription (something like $3/month) so you can use the premium fonts and graphics. Don’t skimp on your header!

5. Once you have a header created, it’s time to upload it. WordPress users will simply upload it under the “header” section and you’re good to go. In Blogger, head to the layout section of your dashboard and click edit in the header scetion. (see below)
blogger header

6. If you have an existing header image, click “remove image” and you’ll see an option to upload your new header.

7. Find the file on your computer and upload it.

8. For “placement” choose “Instead of title and description” if all you want to show in your header is your image (this is usually the case).

9. Check your blog!

That should be it! The tough part about this whole process is coming up with a header that you are happy with.

Again, get creative and keep it clean! Find out what works for you. Look around at other blog’s headers and get inspiration. Don’t copy though. Experiment with real images and text, graphics and text, or text only. Shift things around and ask the opinions of others. This is a very serious task in terms of setting up your blog, so give it the time (or investment) needed to produce a nice-looking header.

Filed Under: Blog, General Blogging Tips, Setting up Your Blog

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