More from your blog

RESOURCES FOR BLOGGERS

  • Bloglovin
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • CHOOSE YOUR BLOGGING LEVEL
    • I DON’T HAVE A BLOG YET
    • I AM A NEW BLOGGER
    • BLOGGING IS MY BUSINESS
  • HOW TO START A WORDPRESS BLOG
  • BLOGGING TOOLS
  • OUR MAIN BLOG — KATIE DID WHAT
  • READ THE OLD BLOG

Setting up Your Blog?

Take a look at the posts below, which contain tips and advice for setting up your blog.

How to Place Social Icons in Your WordPress.com Site’s Sidebar

1 Comment

social icons
This is a tutorial for people who have WordPress hosted WordPress.com blogs. This video will show you how to manually add a social media icon and link it to your applicable social media profile. In the video, you’ll see me add a Pinterest icon and link it to my Pinterest account. You can use this as a guide when adding any graphic that you want to link to somewhere in your sidebar. This is just a basic guide. Again, if you have a self-hosted WordPress site and have access to plugins, download the Simple Social Icons plugin. It is a perfect solution to social icon needs. This video tutorial is for people who don’t have access to plugins because they are on a WordPress hosted site.

Hope that helped! Comment here if you have any questions and share it if you know anyone who could use it! 🙂

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

Blogger or WordPress: Pros and Cons of Each

4 Comments


I just got an email with a great question and figured there must be a lot of people wondering this same thing.
Which is better? Blogger or WordPress?

This is a tricky question because it depends on what you consider better and what you are personally looking for.
For this post, I am considering Blogger as it is and WordPress as a self-hosted site, as opposed to a .wordpress.com free site. If you’re going to be using a free platform to blog, stick with Blogger. This article is explaining the difference between a Blogger hosted site and a self-hosted WordPress site.

Initial note: if you are on Blogger, get a premium domain name. I believe it is $10 and it’s super easy to do. Companies will take you a lot more seriously if you remove the “.blogspot” from your url. This is not to say you won’t get opportunities if you don’t do it, but you will come off as more serious about your business if you have a premium url. In Blogger, click “settings” and look for your url. Right under that, there will be a link labeled “+ Add a custom domain name”, click that and follow instructions and you’ll be off and running!

If you are looking to increase your following…
Unfortunately for WordPress, the “Join this site” that Blogger blogs have is not available on WordPress sites. Since this is the most commonly used “following” mechanism on most blogs, you are at a slight disadvantage when it comes to gaining followers. However, you can do things to get that advantage back. Set up a BlogLovin account, make sure your social icons are prevalent so you gain followers that way and be active on social media. A great example of someone who is on WordPress, but has a huge following is Hungry Runner Girl. She’s a WP site, but has a tremendous following, getting 80+ comments on every post (she posts twice a day). She has her social icons right at the top of her site in addition to being at the end of every post. She has over 6,000 Twitter followers and almost 5,000 fans on her Facebook page! So while WordPress sites cannot have the GFC follow option, there are definitely other ways to grow your following on WordPress. You just have to decide if you’re ready to lose the GFC Follow option.

If you are looking to increase your income stream…
Blogger used to have restrictions on what kind of ads (mostly Google only) you could place on your Blogger blogs. They don’t anymore. However, if you are going to be placing any ads other than Adsense, you’re going to have to know a little bit of HTML code. Adsense ads are easier to place on Blogger. Any other kind of ads are just as easy to place on WordPress as they are on Blogger. It should be noted that Google can change their rules as to what kinds of advertising can be placed on Blogger blogs, while there are no restrictions with your own WordPress site.

If you are looking for ease of use…
When starting out, running a website can seem daunting. HTML code is a frightening thing at first. So Blogger takes the hard to learn stuff out and makes it very easy for anyone to set up and run a blog. This is great for people who are just starting out or who don’t want to learn the nitty gritty behind websites. However, if you get to a point where you want more features from your site and more customization, WordPress then becomes the best option.

An additional bonus of Blogger is that it is the most cost effective platform to run. You don’t have to pay for hosting. The thing is, with companies like BlueHost offering hosting for $7 per month (sometimes even less!), it’s not going to cost a fortune to have a WP site. So I pretty much ignore the financial aspect. What I like the best about Blogger is that you will have virtually NO downtime. Any site hosted on another host may “go down” or become unavailable to access due to server errors, updates or any number of reasons. Blogger blogs stay up all of the time. I will say that in my years of owning and operating websites on their own hosting plans, I’ve only experienced downtime a few times and they have lasted for just minutes each time.

If you’re thinking long-term in general…
Wordpress all the way! When you are on Blogger, you certainly do own your content, but while it’s on a Blogger server Google (they own Blogger) can reproduce, modify, publish and distribute your content however they want. Additionally, as I touched on earlier, you are at the mercy of Blogger’s changes. WordPress has updates as well, but they never change the appearance of a website to your readers. It’s all stuff on the back end of the site. I should also note here that there are a few people out there who have literally had their Blogger accounts shut down in the blink of an eye for seemingly no reason. The thing about being on Blogger is that you are at the mercy of someone else. If you are on WordPress, you own your domain, you choose whatever host you want, so you are much more in control.

Additionally, WordPress has a much more complete array of useful plugins and add-ons that will be come useful as your blog grows. There are plugins that make post-by-post SEO a breeze. There are better comment spam protections available. There are plugins that literally solve just about every problem or want you could have on WordPress. Also, once you do get your feet wet in HTML editing, you’ll find that WordPress is easier.

My preference.
I prefer WordPress. For anyone who is thinking about starting up a site, I encourage WordPress. I have blogs on both platforms and there is nothing wrong with either, it’s all a matter of personal preference. I prefer WordPress because I have a moderate knowledge of HTML and like how easy it is to make HTML customization (once you know HTML, of course).

What I think speaks volumes about the argument is how often you hear “I’m making the switch to WordPress” and how you never really hear, “I’m making the switch to Blogger.” Generally, people consider a switch to WordPress as taking their blog to the next level. As I mentioned earlier, this is because they then have full 100% ownership and rights to the site, content and whatnot. Also, they now have flexibility in every aspect of their site. The more deep you are willing to dig into the nuts and bolts of your site, the more you will appreciate WordPress. If you’re looking for ease of use, Blogger is probably your best bet.

What do you have? Blogger or WordPress?


Filed Under: Blog, Setting up Your Blog

Go Easy on Your Website Background!

Leave a Comment

Go Easy on Your Website Background!
This is intentionally the busiest background that you should ever see.

Have you ever been to a website whose background makes you dizzy? Maybe not. Hopefully not. I don’t wish dizziness on anyone. However, I have. My eyes are not super sensitive, but crazy backgrounds do bother me. Certain patterns look like an optical illusion when scrolled. You may not realize it, but they do. I see countless blogs where I literally want to close my eyes while scrolling. I have clicked out of many sites before the content even loaded because the background hurts my eyes. It’s either waaay too bright, or the patterns appear to be illusions. One of the worst things that can happen to you as a blogger is to lose a reader before they ever read! Plus, you don’t want the focus of your site to be the background do you? It’s your content that you want people looking at. I like to tell people to follow the KISS principle when creating their website background. Keep it Stupid Simple. (Or Keep it Simple, Stupid – but that’s not as friendly!) What’s the point of a crazy busy background anyway? Make other aspects of your blog visually appealing and they will stand out way more with a simple background. Your background should be just that, a background. A simple, less than noticeable pattern (or not) that lies behind your great content, taking nothing away from the reason your readers are there – you.

Just remember, go easy on your website background.

Filed Under: Blog, Grow Your Blog's Audience, Setting up Your Blog

Why Having Advertising Rates on Your Blog Makes Life Easier

Leave a Comment

Having a page that you can send potential advertisers to makes your life a lot easier. Since the goal is to have advertisers and businesses chomping at the bit to advertise on your site, it’s nice to be able to quickly send them to a source where they can look at all of the available ways that they can spend their money on your website. Once the inquiries start coming in, you’ll be wasting a ton of time if you spend time individually responding to each query with a personalized response. You can make your life a lot easier if you have a “hub” of sorts to send potential business to. Pictured below is a very (very very) rough draft of an advertising rates page.
advertising rates on your blog
I have had great luck with a page like this on one of my other sites (LookBeforeSpending.com) as has Katie from Katie Did What. See her page here.

You want to complete two main goals with your page. First, you want to show why you will be of some value to a potential advertiser. Including your traffic statistics and social reach will accomplish this. Second, you want to leave no doubt in a potential advertiser’s mind in what they are getting for their money. Where will their ad be? How long will it display? How large can that ad be? Answer all of the basic questions in your advertising rates page.

Are you worried about your regular readers seeing your company advertising rates page, then (in Blogger) make it a page instead of a post. As long as you don’t have the setting turned on to include every page in your menu (see how to turn that off here), then no one will be able to see it unless they have the direct link to that page. Therefore, you can simply reply to advertising inquiries with a “Thank you for the email. Please take a look at my advertising rates page found here: [Insert Link Here]” and you’re good to go! In WordPress, you can make it a page, or take it one step further and under “visibility” make the post password protected.

Now, you’ve got a private page set up just for advertisers! Every time you send someone to that page, you’re saving your own valuable time!

Filed Under: Blog, Make Money Blogging, Setting up Your Blog

How to Make Private Pages in Blogger

Leave a Comment

By default, most Blogger themes will display all new pages (not posts) in the menu at the top of the site. This can be a very annoying thing when you are making pages for things that you don’t necessarily want to advertise to the whole world. One example of this is when you are creating an advertising rates page for businesses. If you don’t want to display the page for everyone, follow the steps below. The graphic will also help.

Head to the “pages” section of your blog in Blogger.
See the dropdown menu? In the image above, it says “don’t show” but on your blog, it might say “top tabs” or “side links”. If that is the case, all pages are set to show up in that location when published. Change it to “don’t show” and you’re good to go!

Happy blogging!

Filed Under: Blog, Make Money Blogging, Setting up Your Blog

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • Next Page »

Disclosure Policy

As of December 2009, the FTC requires all Blogs generating any source of income to have an official … Read More

  • Bloglovin
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
---> Registry Must Haves
---> How to Start a Lifestyle Blog
---> What's in My Hospital Bag

How to Start a WordPress Blog

There are many reasons why you might want to know how to start a blog. Maybe you have a business and want to supplement your online activity with a blog. Good idea! Maybe you want to start an online diary of your life. That's fun too! Maybe you want to start a fashion blog, or a … Read More