My Big Blog Secrets

Why Blogs Fail (Including This One)

danoah — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:34:36 +0000

Unfortunately, it’s time to pull the plug on future blog posts here on My Big Blog Secrets.

I could probably just explain that it’s getting almost no traffic, hardly anyone is interested, and so it’s time to say goodbye.

But, I think it’s actually important to end with a discussion about the reasons why blogs fail, including this one.

Bloggers have to enjoy what they’re doing. When I first started this blog (as WW4F), I really enjoyed it. I was doing more of what I wanted to do with it. Now, I’m so busy with other stuff, and the traffic is so low, I just throw something out there every now and then to keep it breathing. There’s nothing enjoyable about that.
Bloggers have to post consistently if they want to have a blog that people actually follow. When I started this blog, I posted 3-5 times each week.
Bloggers have to put their heart into their posts if they want people to share and come back. When I started this blog, that’s exactly what I did. Every single time.

Those are three of the top rules of big blogging for sure, and I’ve been breaking all of them here for a while now, on this blog about big blogging.

And, it failed

Continue reading: Why Blogs Fail (Including This One)

Don’t Blog the Obvious

danoah — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 15:30:21 +0000

Have you ever had a post that you thought was just so dang good that as soon as people started reading it, it would start spreading like wildfire?

And then it didn’t?

Every blogger has, trust me.

I’ve had way more of these than I have had viral posts. And every time I have one, I can almost always guarantee that my biggest problem was that I wrote too much of the obvious.

You see, people don’t care about the obvious because… it’s obvious! There’s no reason to share or even read more than a few paragraphs of something that’s obvious. It’s why I really hate writing things with titles like, “10 great things to do with your kids this summer.”

Some of my readers would read that and click in. Some might even think it’s cute. I doubt very many at all would share it.

Fun stuff during the summer is obvious, and even though I think my list might be unique, it’s not. The title is boring. The content is boring. The format is boring.

Now, what if instead I wrote one and called it, “My Don’t Be a Lame Dad List.” A lot more people would click in, for sure.

And then, instead of a list of 10 things I’m going to do, make it less obvious. 10 things I’m going to groin-kick myself for if I don’t do them with my kid by the end of summer.

That’s not obvious

Continue reading: Don’t Blog the Obvious

Top 15 Best Most Essential Plugins for Self-Hosted WordPress

danoah — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 15:00:35 +0000

Currently there are more than 21,000 plugins available for self-hosted WordPress sites, and they aren’t all created equal.

I have been experimenting with plugins since making the switch from Blogger, and there is no doubt that some plugins will save your life and some will make you want to pull your hair out.

And, if you want a really cool site, you’ve got to learn which plugins are best. So, I’ve decided to share the 15 plugins that have made my life as a blogger SO much easier. Most of them are free, the few that aren’t are well worth the investment. Have fun!

Top 15 Best Most Essential Plugins for Self-Hosted WordPress

SharePress - There are a lot of plugins that do all sorts of cool things with Facebook. SharePress wins top spot because not only does it automatically publish your posts to your Facebook page (something you’ll need sometimes), it lets you fill in the comment section of that post. This helps your Facebook posts stay personable and fresh and will drive a lot more traffic. I have yet to see another plugin that will do it.
Tweetily - Tweeting is an essential part of blogging, and Tweetily takes a random post from the past and tweets it every day (or on whatever schedule you choose). It lets you customize the text and choose lots of other parameters. It’s a great traffic driver.
W3 Total Cache - The very fact that plugins exist mean that your server is going to experience extra load every time somebody visits your page. Caching plugins capture a static version of your webpage so that the server doesn’t have to run all the scripts every time somebody visits. This speeds up your site significantly. W3 Total Cache is my favorite because of all the ways it lets you customize the caching (very important for larger sites). It also is pretty well configured right out of the box.
WP-PageNavi - For some reason, WordPress doesn’t come with built-in pagination (numbers at the bottom of blog pages). This plugin adds pagination making it a lot easier for your guests to scroll through old posts, search results, category pages, and more.
Related Posts Thumbnails - You’ll see a 10-30% jump in page views if you have a visually grabbing related posts plugin, and this one is my favorite because of the way it displays thumbnails (most plugins for related posts are simple lists without plugins).

Continue reading: Top 15 Best Most Essential Plugins for Self-Hosted WordPress

Best Stock Photography Website for Bloggers

danoah — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:00:43 +0000

If you follow along with any of my blogs (including Single Dad Laughing), you know that I use a lot of stock photography. And why shouldn’t I? Awesome images make any post ten times more grabbing when a user clicks in, and chances are, other people have already taken the perfect shot for my message.

I’ve tried several different stock photography sites, and I think that for almost every blogger, their best bet is going to be Deposit Photos, as seen in this ad here (you can click it and try downloading a few for free):

Let me tell you why they are now my number one go-to for stock photography (for all my blogs).

First, they have a subscription service for low-volume downloaders that is reasonable. I have yet to find any other stock photography site that offers that. There are some sites with a bigger selection of images, images of celebrities, etc., but you’re also going to be paying three to eight times more to be members.

Subscriptions are also nice to have because you aren’t as limited as you are with pay-per-download options. For example, on DepositPhotos, I can download five images per day. Any image. I can also throw vector images into the mix.

And while that’s nice, it doesn’t necessarily set them apart. What really makes them my go-to is that with my subscription, I can download any image in ANY size that it’s offered.

When it comes to pay-per-download options, I was always finding myself purchasing images that were much smaller than what I actually wanted to use to make my blog posts look awesome. They didn’t stretch across my entire main column, which sucked. But, it was always better than paying a couple extra bucks for the next size up. With DespositPhotos, I don’t have to worry about that. I can download images that are high enough resolution to put on huge posters or park benches if I wanted.

Of course, if you’d rather pay image by image because the subscription service is too pricy for you, they offer credit packages at a buck per credit. One credit will download the smallest image, usually about 400-450 pixels on the longest side.

As for selection, they have millions and millions of photos available to search through. I was curious how many photos there were of women with red peppers in their mouths, so I did a search. They had nine pages of results, including the image I’ve included to the left. Click it. You’ll notice that you can view it at a full 1400 pixels, which is only a fraction of the 5,616 pixels I downloaded it at.

They also make it easy to filter the results so that if you type in something like “smile” you can narrow it down to men by telling it to remove any photos that are also tagged “woman.”

So, if you’re ready to make the investment and move away from the subpar free images that you can find (or even the illegal images you’re using without permission), try DepositPhotos. Take it from me, I’ve saved you a lot of work with this recommendation.

Dan Pearce, My Big Blog Secrets

How to Update the Facebook Thumbnail & Description for Your Blog Posts

danoah — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:00:53 +0000

You’ve all been there.

You write something. You post it. You share it on Facebook. And then…

OH CRAP! You decide a different image would be better. You realize you should have written something different as a description. So, you hurry and change it, republish it, delete the old link on Facebook and…

OH CRAP! It pulls up the old information. Same thumbnail you used originally. Same description.

You try again. And again. And again. Still, it won’t update.

You can dance this dance for days. It’s stuck in Facebook’s cache server and it’s not going to change.

UNLESS…

Continue reading: How to Update the Facebook Thumbnail & Description for Your Blog Posts

Why Every Blogger Should Use Feedburner (or Feedblitz)

danoah — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 14:00:15 +0000

Feedburner. Have you heard of it?

If you have a blog, you should be using it (or the costly but more functional feedblitz).

But if you’re like a lot of bloggers, you don’t really understand why Feedburner is so important. RSS feeds in general can be very confusing. So let’s see if we can simplify it all for you right now.

If you have a blog, you have an RSS feed built-in automatically (on certain platforms like Blogger you may need to enable the RSS feed in your settings).

An RSS feed is simply a condensed/simplified version of your blog that runs in the background (once it’s setup, you rarely have to do anything with it). People with RSS readers (such as Google reader, email programs, etc.) then click on your RSS link and they add your feed so that they can get all the updates to your blog.

People who follow lots of blogs almost always do so via RSS readers. It’s the only really effective way to follow along without forgetting their favorites. Because of that, a pretty big percentage of blog followers (not necessarily visitors) will subscribe to your RSS feed.

In other words, it’s something you should care about

Continue reading: Why Every Blogger Should Use Feedburner (or Feedblitz)

Should You Switch to Self-Hosted WordPress?

danoah — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:00:05 +0000

About a year ago, I bit the bullet and finally made the switch from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress. Since then I have built five different sites using it, and I have learned enough about it that I can give you all a very real idea now of the whats/whys/and shoulds of switching over. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, self-hosted WordPress isn’t for everyone.

As a blogger, there are basically two kinds of blogging content management systems (blogging platforms) available to you:

1) Web-hosted platforms

2) Self-hosted platforms

The most popular web-hosted platforms are Blogger, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. They all have their pros and cons, but all of them are made to make life for you, the blogger, as easy as possible. With all of them you can be up and running within minutes.

There’s really only one widely used and excellent self-hosted blogging platform, and that’s self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org). It also has many pros and cons which I’ll get into below, and is not necessarily super user-friendly (though there are certain tools that make it more so).

As a fellow-blogger, I can tell you this. When your blog gets a big enough following, you will want/need to switch to self-hosted WordPress eventually. And when that time comes, you’ll probably wish you had done it long before (I’m speaking from experience here).

But before we dive into specifics, let’s look at what it actually is, starting with the difference between web-hosted WordPress and self-hosted WordPress.

The two are completely different, and you’d do well to immediately put a connection out of your mind. The only real thing they really have in common is their name.

Self-hosted WordPress is a software that you install on a server. Your server. That means you have to either buy a server, or pay for a hosting service.

Don’t buy a server

Continue reading: Should You Switch to Self-Hosted WordPress?

Today’s Newspapers Will Line Tomorrow’s Rubbish Bins

danoah — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:00:22 +0000

Have you ever seen the (greatly under-appreciated) movie Notting Hill? In it, super famous movie star Anna Scott experiences a publicity disaster while staying with bookshop owner Hugh Grant (I can’t remember his name in the movie). Minutes before, things seemed perfect. She had basically confessed her love to him, and they had talked about being together forever. Faster than you can say “paparazzi,” things went out of control, she lost her temper, and blamed all of her life problems on Hugh.

Or something like that.

In the heat of it all, a very discomforted yet calm Hugh Grant tells her, “today’s newspapers will line tomorrow’s rubbish bins.”

She either doesn’t listen or doesn’t care, but that really doesn’t have anything to do with today’s post. What Hugh said in the heat of chaos was one of the most powerful lessons any blogger can learn. Today’s newspapers will be lining tomorrow’s trash bins.

It’s an interesting lesson to learn that what happens today really doesn’t matter long-term. And that goes for both the good and the bad

Continue reading: Today’s Newspapers Will Line Tomorrow’s Rubbish Bins

Good vs. Incredible: Giving Great Titles to Your Blog Posts

danoah — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 07:00:00 +0000

You just wrote the most incredible blog post of your life. It’s raw. It’s honest. It’s funny. It’s triple-coated with viral potential, and you are certain that it’s going to be the piece that finally brings you that blogging recognition you deserve. You scour over it repeatedly before you go to bed, set it to publish the next morning, and then have trouble sleeping as you imagine the incredible response you’re about to get.

Then you check it in the morning and… nothing. Or almost nothing.

Almost every blogger has experienced this. We write pieces that are so deeply meaningful to us and that we think others will appreciate en masse, and we become convinced that they will go viral. When they don’t, we’re left scratching our heads over it, wondering where things went wrong. Wondering why people didn’t get it. Telling ourselves, if any decent amount of traffic would have come, it would have gone viral.

When day two passes and traffic slows down instead of speeding up, we start looking at all the reasons our “big posts” didn’t gain momentum. We question our timing. We scrutinize some of the things we wrote which just hours before were perfect to us. We even blame outside events and forces for our posts not spreading. But how often do we blame the title? After all, shouldn’t a title be secondary to the content?

The answer is no.

And the truth is, you could have one of the greatest posts on earth sitting on your homepage, but if you don’t title it correctly, very few people are ever going to see it

Continue reading: Good vs. Incredible: Giving Great Titles to Your Blog Posts

Livefyre, IntenseDebate, Disqus. What’s the Best Blog Comment System?

danoah — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:00:21 +0000

In my opinion, there are really only four options for comments systems you should be looking at for your blog. Native comments (those built into your blog), Livefyre, Intense Debate, and Disqus. I’ve now tried all four, and here’s my opinion of what’s best…

The native comments built-into blogging platforms is okay, but very limited. Having long discussions within the comments is often difficult and on most platforms it is easy to get lost. The plus-side to these comment systems is that the comments become a “part of the webpage,” meaning that they load with the page and are picked up by all search engines as part of your searchable content. Of course, this could be a down-side if people get side-tracked from the topic at hand.

Disqus is a very easy system both to install and to use. It’s also java-based which means that the major search engines will probably include the comments in search results (this is relatively new, and very nice). Your users can sign-in with the major social networks (something visitors are becoming used to) and it’s very easy to have longer discussions. The big downside of Disqus is that it saves all the comments on the Disqus server, not on your server. This often adds to loading time and makes it difficult to transfer a blog sometimes

Continue reading: Livefyre, IntenseDebate, Disqus. What’s the Best Blog Comment System?