A community of bloggers who serve the MicroBusiness/Small Business arena. Personal, Business, Tech, and Whimsy.
March 5, 2008
Social bookmarking icons on your blog posts can help people to feel encouraged to bookmark your pages. This is a help in gaining additional search engine positioning through good quality backlinks.
We have a social bookmarking plugin available for you to activate. Go into your Plugins in the Admin area of your blog, and look for Social Bookmarking. Click the Activate button.
This plugin creates a row or two of icons below each post, for the bookmarking sites that you select from the list.
After the plugin is activated, click the Options tab, and then the Social Bookmarking link. This plugin gives you some configuration options, including a long list of bookmarking sites to select from. You’ll want to deactivate those that are not really appropriate for your target market. In this instance, more is not better. Select some of the top sites, and let the rest go.
If you require a social bookmarking plugin that we do not have installed, you can email us and ask us to install it. Once you do, it will be available to the general membership for MicroWebmaster Alliance Blogging community.
March 4, 2008
When you belong to a blog community, you can gain valuable marketing benefits. It helps to understand how they work though, so that you can take advantage of them. When you leverage a benefit, you are making the most of it - using it to provide benefits in peripheral ways as well as directly.
Your biggest advantage is in being part of a group of bloggers who have a common interest. That brings in visitors with a similar focus. If they find one, they are likely to find others.
The MicroWebmaster Blog Community has the option for you to leverage the community in the following ways:
- If you have elected to have a public blog, your posts will show up on the home page of the MicroWebmaster Blog website. It will scroll down and move off the page as other posts from other bloggers appear.
- If you elect to show your blog on other blogs, your site will show up in a blog list on other sites that enabled that option.
- If you elect to show other blogs on your website, then you will provide more value to your visitors, allowing them to check many blogs from a single stopping point (your site).
This means you have the option to benefit from the marketing of other members, and of the organization.
If you post regularly, your chances of better exposure increase. If you market your blog, then everyone else benefits also - in the same way you benefit from their marketing.
Take advantage of the community, and your marketing power is increased.
February 19, 2008
Well, we aren’t completely finished tinkering with this - customizing the template, adding instructional resources, and all those things that seem to be an ongoing thing. But the setup, and essentials are done.
It has been a busy week. But a very productive one. C’mon in and take advantage of our effort - if you aren’t a MicroWebmasters Alliance Gold member, then mosey on over to the MicroWebmasters Alliance website and get an account! We’ll still be here when you get back!
February 16, 2008
I’ve found WordPress to be simple enough for blogging, but easily expandable. Now, I’m not a rabid WordPress fan - I don’t believe in warping it into something it was never meant to be. I like real Content Management Systems instead of a blog pushed out of shape to try to make it one.
But for blogging, I’m happy with it.
I tried B2Evolution for our MicroWebmaster Blogs. I found it confusing, and limited in ways that I just cannot deal with. I don’t want to have to create php pages and hack files just to put in a static page! And the backend is not at all intuitive - it is never quite clear whether you are setting global settings or individual blog settings, and spam control is quite limited. I WANTED to make it work! I’m not opposed to learning new things, but this one just could not stretch to provide the simplicity and flexibility that I needed for this system.
We are going with WordPress MU. It was my first choice, but some of the documentation is out of date, which makes it appear to be much harder to set up than it really is. Newer forum posts cleared up the issue though, after I went back to research a second time. The entire install took just the upload time, and about 3 minutes to set up the database and run a quick installer.
I’m liking this… familiar, and choices are clearly labeled. The volume of experience and direction behind this is clearly evident.
