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On April 21st, just a couple of weeks away, Google is scheduled to roll out a new search algorithm update. This update focuses on mobile searches, and Google will start using mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. What does this mean? If you get traffic from smartphones (it apparently doesn’t apply to tablet searches), and if your WordPress site isn’t mobile-friendly, you could take a significant
Many bloggers set up a single sidebar and then include that sidebar on every page of their blogs. But what happens if you have categories that would benefit from different sidebar content, or pages on your blog where you’d like a custom sidebar? Maybe you want to place hand-picked affiliate ads, or you want to promote different books on different sections of your blog. Whatever
I’ve been a customer of Elegant Themes for years, using their themes on several of my smaller sites and blogs. I loved their recent social media plugin, Monarch, which I use on my small business blog. And I was rather excited about their launch this week of Bloom, their new email opt-in plugin. While I was excited to test it out on a few of
Recently you might have noticed that I’ve been adding audio versions to some All Freelance Writing blog posts. One example is “Gamification: Make Freelance Writing More Fun.” Not only can new visitors read the original post, but they can choose to listen if that’s what they prefer. And now they have another option: a condensed version in a SlideShare presentation. Why would you want to
Do you suffer from the common blogging problem of never feeling like you have enough time to write? Do you type slower than you’d like? Do you wish there was a secret to faster blogging? There isn’t just one thing. But here’s something that might help: Let your computer (or phone or tablet) do your “writing” for you. How? Give voice-to-text apps a try. Let me
This isn’t the post I planned to publish today. This month’s blog editorial plan just began, and already I’m off-track. As mentioned over the weekend, I’ve been dealing with the aftermath of a minor plumbing disaster. And my husband and I have had contractors in and out of our house for the better part of two days. Sometimes things come up and we have to
This post was originally published on NakedPR.com (my now-retired blog featuring commentary on PR and social media issues). While I’m considering reviving my Naked PR brand this year, I’m considering taking it in a slightly different direction — back to its roots. In the meantime, I’m moving most of the original content to other sites I own, saving only a few key posts from the
It’s no secret that I usually have a lot going on as a writer. I run quite a few blogs of my own. I take on freelance writing projects for clients. I write nonfiction e-books. And I’m working on much more fiction this year as well. As a result, one of the biggest questions I get from colleagues in my network is “how do you
If you’ve been blogging with WordPress for a while, you probably know that WordPress saves several revisions of your posts as you create or edit them. These revision backups are saved when you save drafts or update live posts. WordPress revisions can come in handy if you made changes you aren’t happy with or if you accidentally delete something from a post draft. But they
The New Year will be here before you know it, and there’s no time like the present to prepare for it. Recently I shared three things to do this December to close out the current year. For this week’s quick tips, let’s expand upon that with some easy things you can do now that will have you ready to hit the ground running after the
For this week’s resource for writers, I’ve updated and re-released an oldie but goodie — my HTML cheat sheet for freelance writers and bloggers. The cheat sheet used to come with my now-retired e-book, The Web Writer’s Guide, which was released back in 2008. The new version will be available for free permanently in the All Freelance Writing Resources Collection. This download includes some of the most basic
Readers and colleagues often come to me with questions about problems they’re having with their websites or blogs. In some cases, such as sudden search engine ranking issues or site indexing problems, one of the first things I tend to ask them is to check Google Webmaster Tools. That’s when I sometimes get the mind-blowing responses of “What’s that?” or “I don’t use that.” Not good. So
A great feature of WordPress is its ability to save different versions of your posts as you go — such as when you hit the “save draft” or “preview” buttons. These saved versions are called “revisions,” and they give you restore points if anything goes wrong. Awesome, right? Well, it can be. But WordPress revisions have to be saved to your database just like your
Do you wish you could spend more time using social media to connect with colleagues, clients, or readers? Do you ever feel like trying is almost a waste of time because of all the noise? If so, here’s a simple solution for you on Twitter. Use the “Mute” feature. Why Mute Twitter Accounts? Twitter gives you a few different options for eliminating noise from users
Are you tired of competing with countless other bloggers for every advertised gig you find? Do you wish you could reliably earn $100, $200, $500, or even more per article as a freelance blogger? If you’re looking to build a more stable and higher-paying freelance blogging career, you can. Opportunities are practically endless, if you know how to look and how to make yourself stand out. Consider giving
No matter what kind of website you run, frequent backups are a necessity. With WordPress sites and blogs that’s especially true because of the frequent core, theme, and plugin updates you have to perform. Having a fresh backup means you can revert all, or a part, of your site if something goes wrong during the update process (or if you’re ever hacked). Whenever I would
Whether you’re a professional blogger or you simply have a blog attached to your freelance writer or author website, chances are good you have social media sharing buttons attached to each post. And if not, you should. They’re simple tools that allow your readers to easily spread the word about your posts. Yet I see bloggers make a common mistake when using these sharing plugins.
If you’re a WordPress blogger, chances are that you’re aware of the massive brute force attempts targeting WordPress sites lately. If you’re not sure what these are, basically it’s when someone attempts to hack your site by guessing your username and password. But they usually do this with bots that let them automate the process, and your site can be hit hundreds (if not thousands)
Today I’m kicking off a new weekly post series: Tuesday Quick Tips. Each Tuesday moving forward I’ll publish a short post with a simple tutorial, generally covering a common question or something you can do in just a few minutes. Let’s start by talking about Twitter. If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I recently changed my handle (the name I
This post was originally published on June 20, 2009. But I wanted to share it again today (and update it a bit) as the issue of blogging pay rates is hotter than ever as more and more freelance bloggers come onto the scene. As some background, this was originally written in response to Kevin Muldoon’s post, Bloggers Need to be Realistic About Blogging Rates. It
Recently I wrote about my decision to move to Scrivener for blogging. I also released a free scrivener template for bloggers that allows you to easily manage a single blog as its own project. But personally, I use Scrivener to manage multiple blogs, and I manage them all from a single project file so I can see all of my blogs’ content in one place.
Recently I shared some of the reasons I now use Scrivener for blogging. In the comments on that post I promised to look into creating a simple template you can use. Today I’d like to share that Scrivener blogging template with you. About the Scrivener Blogging Template This simple template was designed to be used in managing your content strategy for a single blog. The
All of my blogs are run in WordPress, and that’s been my blogging platform of choice since switching to it in 2006. WordPress offers fairly extensive writing and editing tools right within your site’s admin area. Over the years, I’ve written many of my blog posts directly in WordPress using these tools. That was probably a mistake. In my last post I mentioned that I
A while back I mentioned that I was giving Scrivener a try. My hope was to use that writing software during last year’s NaNoWriMo instead of a standard word processor. That didn’t happen. I was still uncomfortable with the software at the time, and I worried it would slow me down. I’m still a Scrivener beginner by a long shot, but I’m finally putting it
Have you ever seen custom quotes in a blog post with a “tweet this” link? It’s cool, right? Instead of focusing your Twitter links on your blog post title, you can have several tweets with unique content for each of your posts. And by highlighting your best quotes, you increase your chance that readers will share your posts. Here’s an example of a completely customized
I wish I knew why, but over the last month and a half or so I’ve noticed far more WordPress plugin updates than usual being pushed through. Perhaps developers are getting ready for the WordPress 3.9 core update. Whatever the reason, more plugin updates equals more risk for your website or blog. Plenty can go wrong when you update a plugin. Sometimes the updates will
Your blog’s content strategy is about more than the type of content you plan to write. It also includes your blog post schedule — when you post, and how often you post. Should you post daily? Just on weekdays? Once per week? Monthly? There’s no right answer to cover all blogs. You have to find the right post frequency and schedule for your blog. Picking Your Blog Post
There are many reasons to start a blog. One popular reason is to make money. When you do that, you treat your blog as a business model in its own right. Many people try to earn money from their blogs. Some succeed. Others fail. And much of that comes down to your strategy, your niche specialty, and the plan you come up with to monetize
In my post “4 Elements of Effective Freelance Writing Websites,” I suggested creating a custom 404 error page to help misdirected prospects find what they’re looking for. A 404 error is a “page not found” error message someone sees if they try to visit an address on your site that doesn’t exist. No one likes seeing an error message. So it’s a good idea to
When you graduated high school, you jumped for joy not because you were glad you made it, but because you thought you’d never have to learn another mathematical equation again. The Pythagorean Theorem? Forget about it! But there’s one formula you can’t pass up as a blogger: C(D+E+F)A+B Confused? Let’s break it down and look at each variable. A: A Valuable Idea It’s common sense