Using categories and tags on your blog posts can be a good way to keep your visitors reading your blog. They serve to give your blog some structure, and can help people find what they are looking for.

It is up to you how you use categories and tags, but a good way of doing it is to see categories like the contents of a book, while tags are like the index.

So to work out what categories to use, think of your blog as a book – what main topics do you write about?

Say if you have a gardening blog, you might have categories of plant types, such as trees, shrubs, flowers and vegetables. Or things such as planting, fertilising, seedlings and various seasons. Or both. But you would not have a category of something specific like ‘carrots’ (unless your entire blog is about root vegetables).

There would be no point in having a category ‘Gardening’, if your whole blog is about gardening.

It really is best if each post is in only one category, two at the most. It might take some ingenuity to accomplish this, such as keeping your post topics to mainly one category, or being clever with your category naming.

You can have sub-categories as well, I suggest you keep things as simple as possible.

Tags are where you get more specific, with tags such as roses, ferns, fertiliser, and you would generally put in a few tags on each post. Don’t overdo it though. If you put in lots, they look messy and the reader isn’t going to see them easily. Three or 4 are enough.

Archive pages

We want the reader to see the categories and tags at the end of your posts, because if they click on one, they are taken to a page listing all your posts in that category, or with that tag. These pages are called category or tag archives.

For example, if they like your writing and they want to know more about tomatoes, they could well click on the tomatoes tag and see all your posts tagged with tomatoes.

Or you can install a plugin that links to a few posts in the same category at the end of each post, such as WordPress Related Posts (by Zemanta).

This is very attractive to the visitor, as there will be a thumbnail image as well as an excerpt, and they are quite likely to click through if they are interested in the topic.

You can also place an archive in the menu of your blog, if you have a category you particularly want to emphasise to your visitors.

You can also place a list of categories in your sidebar, using the Categories widget that comes with WordPress, and give it a title such as ‘Blog topics’. If people see a topic they are interested in they will click though and see the archive page.

You can show off your tags in a widget area such as a sidebar by using the tag cloud widget. I’ve heard doing this has gone out of fashion, but it all depends on what you like and what works for your blog.

If your blog is on the Genesis framework, you will be able to write a custom heading and introduction for each category archive page. In the backend go to the Categories section under “Posts’, then click on the category name, and fill in the Category Archive Settings found down the page. Your theme may support other settings as well.

You can do all of this for tags as well, if you use Genesis.

Genesis also has a Featured Posts widget, which gives you another way of showing off some categories in your sidebar.

How to add categories and tags.

If you are just starting your blog and you do not know how to put categories and tags on your posts, this is for you.

When you have written up your post in WordPress and are nearly ready to publish, look for the Categories and Tags panel in the right sidebar.

Check the appropriate category, and if it is not in the list, click on the Add New Category link, and write in a category for your post. Then click on the grey Add New Category button that has appeared, which will add your new category to the list and check it as well.

If you don’t choose a category, your post will be filed in the ‘Uncategorised’ category. WordPress puts every post into a category.

For tags, write your tags in and click Add.

You can always edit your posts if you want to use different categories and tags later, and you can change the names of categories and tags by accessing them from the left sidebar of the backend, under Posts. Hover over the category or tag name and click Edit.

If you are super-organised and know what you are going to write about you can create a list of categories for future use from the Categories page , too.

Categories and tags for SEO

One last thing is that you can find your archive pages do well in web searches. Someone searching for your category word or words may well find your category archive page ahead of a post of yours about the topic.

This can really increase the number of visitors to your blog.

That’s it – happy categorising and tagging!

Robin

The post Use Categories And Tags To Get More Engagement On Your Blog appeared first on Robin Birch.

Here’s how to tell if your domain name contact information is public or private:

Go to this website:

https://who.is

Plug your domain name into the search field and hit the search button – no need for the http://

You might need to wait a bit for the information to come up – you are looking for Registrant (that’s you), Administrative and Technical contact information. Wait and reload the page if necessary.

If you can see your personal name, address, phone number and email, and you don’t want them to be public, then you need to get some privacy on these contact details.

When we register a domain name we have to give accurate contact information – this is to deter spammers (though they do seem to find ways of getting around it) and so our registration company can reach us and we can pay them.

If you are a bricks and mortar business this will probably not be an issue – you just use your business details for the contact information. But if you have given your home and personal information, you would probably want to make it known only to your registrar, and that takes extra action.

I have registered the domain name for this website (robinbirch.com) with Dreamhost, who provide privacy at no extra cost, which is great – all I have to do is tick a box saying I want privacy. When I do the Whois lookup I get this for my contact data:

You will see it includes phone number and email address, and if someone uses them to try to contact me, Dreamhost can contact me about the issue if they want.

For most other domain name companies you need to buy privacy as an extra, and it is around $10 per year. This is not a lot, just one more thing you need to set up.

Be careful if you take up an offer of free privacy for the first year of registration, not to forget to buy it after the year is up. And if you buy privacy don’t forget to renew it.

This is not a WordPress matter, it is to do with your domain name, but deciding whether to make this information private is part of setting up a website as far as I am concerned, so I am including it in my WordPress Setup series.

For more information about Whois, and for an alternative lookup site, go here:
ICANN WHOIS

Cheers – Robin

The post Does Your Website Give Away Your Home Address, Phone And Email? appeared first on Robin Birch.

Recently I needed to put a Facebook video onto a client’s WordPress site, and I must confess I had not done that before – I wasn’t even sure it was possible. The video was perfect for the task, and it wasn’t on YouTube – I have embedded millions of YouTube videos (it seems).

I soon found the video’s embed code, and stuck it on the WordPress post, but I didn’t get it to work straight away. Maybe I needed instructions?

Actually, placing a Facebook video onto a WordPress page or post is so ridiculously easy it doesn’t need instructions.

But if like me you find it is taking longer than 1 minute to achieve it, you might find yourself searching for how-tos. Unfortunately Facebook changes its methods so often that a lot of tutorials have accumulated online that are full of misinformation and red herrings such as plugins, or are unnecesarily complicated. Here’s how I would put it…

Step 1 – get the embed code

Let’s say you have found a public video to embed, like this one shared by a friend of mine:

The easiest way to get the embed code is via the little grey dropdown on the top right:

If you have clicked on the video to bring it up in a larger view, you can also get the embed code from a nearly invisible dropdown on the top right. When I did this a few days ago there was ‘Options’ written underneath the video, which is where I got the code, but literally the next day it had moved to top right – such is the world of Facebook.

Lastly you can always get the code via the video’s link – click on the word ‘video’, here:

This takes you to the following page, find the embed code bottom right:

Step 2 – insert the code

You have now found the code, as in this image, copy it.

To put the code into your WordPress page or post, paste it into the ‘Text’ view of the editor, not the ‘Visual’ view.

Also, be aware that Facebook videos do not show up in the Preview (but YouTube videos do) – when I did it, it was on a post that had already been published and was getting a lot of views, so I was keen to preview changes before hitting Update, and I got thrown when the video wasn’t there in the preview. They do show up on the Visual editor.

That’s it, I hope this is helpful – these instructions will probably last 5 minutes knowing Facebook :)

Cheers – Robin

The post How To Embed A Facebook Video Into WordPress. appeared first on Robin Birch.

After posting a new blog post, you want to share it on social media, and it is often a good idea to share it in your next newsletter as well.

Some of you might like to have each new blog post sent out automatically to your newsletter list, and that is where MailChimp’s RSS campaign feature comes in. 

MailChimp’s instructions are right here: Create an RSS Campaign, but I’ll run through some instructions for you here, anyway.

Step 1
Log in to your MailChimp account, find your Dashboard if you aren’t already there. Click on ‘Create Campaign’ on the top right of the page. You will be able to choose which list to send to later in the process.

Step 2
Select ‘RSS campaign’ from the list of campaign types.

Step 3
Find your Blog’s RSS feed URL, and copy and paste it into the field provided. My feed’s URL, for example, is http://feeds.feedburner.com/RobinBirchBlog

Set your sending day and time settings – one suggestion is to set them to ‘Every day’ and choose a time that is in the early hours for yourself, such as 4 am – this gives you a chance to look at your published post and fix up any problems before you go to bed, and this will be before your subscribers get the email (unless you work all night, that is, lol).

Alternatively, choose a time and days that best suits the majority of your audience, such as early mornings on week days (if like me you live in a vastly different time zone from the majority of your readers, this involves some calculation).

Mailchimp will only send out the emails when you have published a new blog post, setting to send all days makes sure the email will go out within 24 hours of you posting.

Step 4
Click Next, on bottom right of page. On the next page choose which list you want the emails to go to – you can only choose one list. If you want to send to more lists, you could set up an RSS campaign for each list.

Step 5
Hit Next and fill in your Campaign information.

Step 6
Next you will find the ‘Select a template’ page. It’s easiest to choose a template pre-made for RSS campaigns, look through the templates on the ‘Basic’ page and on the ‘Themes’ page. For example, there is one called ‘Basic RSS’ on the Basic page, I’ll choose that one for this article.

Step 7
You may want to edit your template. Upload a header image if you want one, or delete the photo block by hovering over it and clicking the bin icon.

The rest of the template will be unintelligible, but you can soon make sense of it by going to ‘Preview and Test’ on the top right, then ‘Enter preview mode’.

You might like to add something else such as a text box where you write some information about yourself, your services, and so on, which will appear on all the emails, for every new blog post – drag the text box into your template (before or after your RSS content) and click the edit button, the editor appears on the right side of the page. Put in your material, click Save & Close and preview your creation. Close the preview and move your blocks around if you need to.

At the very top of your template is a small header, you will need to edit the text on the left, you can write something like “New blog post”, or just delete the existing text.

You can send yourself a test email if you like, it’s fun! This is also found under Preview & Test.

Step 8
Next review your campaign, and if all is good, hit ‘Start RSS’. Your campaign is now launched!

From now on, every time you publish a blog post, whether it is once a day or once in a blue moon, an email featuring it will automatically go out to your subscribers at the time of day you specified, when it next occurs. Awesome! Of course you can still send regular campaigns (newsletters) to the same list any time you like.

Other email services also provide RSS campaigns, find them by doing a search for “rss to email” along with the name of your email service.

Cheers – Robin

The post Send Blog Posts Out Automatically To Your MailChimp Lists appeared first on Robin Birch.

To chiropractors (and people in many other types of businesses, really),

Blogging can help chiropractors achieve two things:

1. it can help you get more clients
2. it can help you deepen your relationship with existing clients

Here are some ideas for how to do that:

Firstly set up a blog on your business website if you don’t already have one – WordPress is by far the best platform for a blog, so preferably you should have a WordPress website for your business, if you are blogging.

I suggest you publish one post a week – this may seem a bit too much work if you have a sole practice, especially if you are not a natural writer, but as you read on you might find it isn’t as much work as you think.

If you have two or more chiropractors in the practice you could take it in turns to publish posts, and if you have other staff at the practice who are personable and have solid chiropractic knowledge, such as a receptionist who is also a chiropractic student, they could do regular posts, too.

Sharing the load will make it easier for each person and you can support each other as well. And blogging is such a great marketing tool you really should be giving it a go.

Here are three places you could look for blog topic ideas:

1. Blog topic ideas – from discussions with clients

Probably the best things to write about are things you have been discussing with your clients recently. This gives your writing a natural sense of immediacy and relevance, and posts will be easier to write. Here are two examples:

Example 1. You may have been suggesting a client sleeps with a contour pillow, and you may have suggested a particular brand as well. Then write down what you told them, including the brand. When someone does a web search (usually on Google) for “pillows”, “contour pillows” or that particular brand of contour pillows, there’s a good chance your blog post will come up in the search results, and they may well click through and read your post.

When non-clients find your article through a web search or though a share on social media, they could become clients, or at least start thinking about it if they live near enough. Or they may suggest you to someone they know.

Getting found in search results (called SEO) will be more likely if you publish regularly, because Google “likes” websites that update often.

When you share your blog post on your business Facebook Page, some of your current clients will read it, so they will get the benefit of the discussion you had as well. And they may well talk to you about your article, giving you an extra opportunity to engage with them.

And of course many of your current clients will be glad to share your post with their friends, furthering your reach. It’s a matter of giving them something to share.

If you write that you sell that brand of contour pillows, with a picture of them, that’s extra effective (actually, you could write about discussions you’ve had about any products you sell, as long as you are complying with your local regulations.)

Example 2. Another example is that a client may have asked you about the pain in their lower back and what they could do for it. If you made particular suggestions, write about those, even write a series about lower back pain. Then people searching on the internet for solutions to back pain, and your other clients, may read the article(s), possibly leading to new clients and more engagement with current ones.

2. Blog topic ideas – from chiropractic newsletters

Your industry newsletters will have an abundance of topics you can use as inspiration.

For example, here is Australia, most chiropractors have attractive printed newsletters sitting in their rooms, that are personalised to their business.

You could look through newsletters like these for ideas – here’s a list of articles I’ve made from a browse through some of these Australian newsletters:

Surviving summer travels
Wise walking
Stay positive
A stronger better you
Your personal smoke alarm
Christmas challenges
Text neck
Finding the sun
Sizing up symptoms
Tendons versus ligaments
The mind/body connection
Pain has a purpose
Step into spring
Where is your wallet?
Sitting down on the job
Dreaming of a good night’s sleep
Winter’s woes
A breath of fresh air
Chiropractic care helping hamstring injuries
Eating the Mediterranean way
Reducing your baby’s allergies
Strengthening your back
What is Trochanteric Bursitis?

…you get the idea.

You may be able to get permission to reprint some articles, I don’t know about that, you would have to ask the publishers. But I don’t think you would need to – it would actually be better to look at articles like this and write your own thoughts, anyway.

3. Blog topic ideas – personal news

It certainly doesn’t hurt to share some personal news now and then – you are human and have a life, and so are your clients and potential clients, and they are going to feel closer to you if they know something about you personally.

Of course use common sense here, don’t share everything, and not too often, but news about births, marriages, your sports/fitness and major holidays away from home (with photos!) are nice for clients to read.

If you ran in a marathon, write a story about that – what happened, your feelings, your pals, your training, plans for your next marathon. Include a photo or two.

Also write about your professional development activity – seminars, workshops, and courses you participate in, organisations and groups you belong to, and what you get out of it. And how this benefits your clients.

Successful blogging

The thing is, for a blog to be successful you don’t have to write a lot of words, and your articles don’t have to be masterpieces – people don’t actually want to read too many words on a computer, phone or tablet, what they want is a succinct, take-away, friendly message.

And what Google likes is a website that has regular updates (and a few other factors, but that’s another story). So weekly short posts are better than occasional long posts or no posts. You could post fortnightly if you really can’t manage weekly.

Suggestions

Your articles will be more effective if they have at least one good-sized image in them, this makes the post more engaging for the reader and more sharable on social media, and Google likes it, too.

For your post titles, do make them descriptive of your main points. For example, say ‘Contour pillows to help with neck pain’, rather than ‘Dreaming of a good night’s sleep’, the latter we saw in my examples from newsletters, above. Print is a different animal from web – having focussed titles will help enormously with getting your post promoted by Google (the Google robot which crawls around websites takes a lot of notice of titles, as well).

I would suggest that you check spelling and grammar before posting, you could ask someone who you think is a pretty good writer to run their eye over your creation – and they are going to be happier about doing this if your posts are not too long :)

If you do have a blog idea that is quite long, consider breaking it up into a series of 2 or 3 parts, making sure the reader understands there will be more to come next week.

If you have any questions, please go ahead and ask me in the comments section below.

Cheers – Robin

The post Blog Post Ideas For Chiropractors appeared first on Robin Birch.

The other day I signed up for the email service GetResponse, and I couldn’t find recent instructions for how to connect it to the Genesis eNews Extended signup form on my website – GetResponse has updated their service with new interfaces and new methods, so instructions I found were not quite accurate, and GetResponse doesn’t officially support the eNews Extended WordPress plugin.

Once I got it sorted out, I thought I’d write up the instructions for anyone else who might be looking for them. So here they are…

Instructions

Firstly get your GetResponse account set up and an email address added into a Campaign (GetResponse’s name for a list of people and email addresses). If you are planning an autoresponder series to go out after signup to that campaign/list, set those messages up too (I suggest you make sure they are turned on).

Then set up your Genesis eNews Extended plugin.

Install it (it may be already part of your theme) and add the widget to your sidebar of choice, then you need to fill in some fields.

My setup is over on the right.

To find out what to put into the ‘Form Action’ and ‘Hidden Fields’ fields, you need to head back to your GetResponse account.

In the Dashboard, make sure you have chosen the campaign you want people to sign up to, by going to ‘Your current campaign’ on the top right and choosing it (if you have more than one campaign).

Then go to ‘Forms’ at the top of the page, then ‘Create Form’, then choose ‘Plain HTML Editor’.

Choose your options in the right-hand column, here are mine:

*Very important* – if you want your subscribers to go straight into an autoresponder series, you need to check the ‘Add to the cycle on day’ box, and choose a day: choose Day 0 if you have got your first autoresponder message going out on the day of signup.

Copy and paste the form’s html code into a text editor such as TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad (Windows) to save it, as you cannot save these types of forms within GetResponse. Here’s mine:

Back to eNews Extended…
For the Form Action field use the code in yellow, being careful to take the code between the quote marks. For the Hidden Fields field, use the green code. If you have checked the little box linking your form to an autoresponder, put in both the codes marked in green, just put them in one after the other.

One thing to be careful of is to fill in the E-Mail field and the Name Fields with lower case words that match your code, as I have in the first image above. If you need first and last names in your form you can manage that with custom fields in GetResponse.

Fill out the rest of the eNews settings, these are just the words displayed on your form. See mine here:

Save your eNews widget, and test out your form by signing up with a spare email address.

Good luck!

Cheers – Robin

*I’d just like to say thanks to Robert, the live chat person at GetResponse who helped me get things sorted, even though they don’t officially support eNews Extended.

The post How To Use Genesis eNews Extended Plugin With GetResponse In 2015 appeared first on Robin Birch.

Once you have published your new WordPress blog post, the next thing to do is share it on your favourite social media sites – for most people these include Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Google+.

But HOW ANNOYING is it when you share the post on Facebook and you don’t like the image that goes up? And you can’t change it!

Rather than your carefully-chosen main image, up goes a different image that is less than wonderful, and Facebook keeps sharing that one. You may have carelessly shared the post for the first time without taking much notice of whether you definitely want that image being shared, or you simply may have found a better image to use after the first time you or someone else shared the post

The problem is that Facebook has a little habit of remembering which image was shared the very first time, so after that, every time that post is shared by you or your readers, the same image is shared along with it. This is because Facebook stores the image in its cache.

Luckily Facebook has a tool for website owners to clear the cache, it is called Facebook Debugger.

Debugging for WordPress users

Firstly, you need to prescribe which image you want shared with your post. If you are only planning to have one image in the post, and the new image you have chosen has large enough dimensions, you could probably get away with just changing to the new image, and then debugging.

If that doesn’t work, you need to manually specify the image. WordPress doesn’t have a native way of doing this, but an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO does. If you don’t have Yoast SEO, install it (you can use the free version) and head to the edit page of your blog post. In the SEO section down near the bottom of the page is a Share icon, go to that and paste the URL of the image you want shared into the ‘Facebook image’ field (you can get this URL from clicking on the image in your media library).

Now go to Facebook Debugger, here:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Put the URL of your blog post into the URL field, click on Debug.

Then click on ‘Fetch new scrape information’, and have a look through the results you get, especially the ‘Warnings’ section, in case there’s anything you need to know.

The ‘When shared, this is what will be included’ image displayed may still be the same, but the cache still gets cleared.

It may take a little while for debugging to work, so wait a bit before sharing the post again. If you continue to have problems, your selected image might not be large enough for Facebook. And the problem could mysteriously right itself after a few hours or by the next day.

But basically, from now on you should see the image you have chosen when you share that post on Facebook.

Good luck!

Cheers – Robin

The post Use Facebook Debugger To Change Your Share Image appeared first on Robin Birch.

Musicians.

As a musician you deserve to be successful in your art, but marketing yourself and your music doesn’t always bring results. Blogging is one way you can build a posse of fans who are genuinely engaged with you.

You may think blogging is a waste of time for musicians, and it can be, if you don’t do it “right”.

Here are some tips to get you blogging effectively:

1. Write about your culture. Blogging is a way of sharing your culture… when you share your culture you attract like-minded people who are more likely to buy your music and come to your shows.

So write about the music and artists you like, the venues, parties and festivals you go to, the goings-on when you are touring, the stuff you use (instruments, gear, clothing), places you like, films you see, books you read, political issues that stir you, causes you care about, anything you care about.

You don’t have to write like Amanda Palmer, and say how you don’t wash your underwear, but you can be yourself.

2. Interview other musicians. This is a great way to get more readers, because the person you are interviewing will put the intervew out on their networks.

Also, it subtly shows your website visitors more about who you are as a person and an artist.

The interviews could be text based, where you send the person questions and they send back their answers, or audio or video of a face-to-face interview. Or you could go high-tech and record a Skype call, audio or video. Personally I find video interviews more engaging than audio, but it depends on what you find works.

3. Invite guest posts. Ask other musicians to contribute a “guest post” now and then. They could write about anything you think your readers (or potential readers) could relate to.

They will most likely publicise the post to their own followers, and it helps you get content on your site. Also, along with interviews, it makes you a “hub” in your chosen community.

4. Write about other musicians. Do a whole post that is a review of a gig you enjoyed, or a recording you love.

Include a link to the artist’s website, and send them a message with a link to the review. They will probably tell their friends, bringing you some visitors.

5. Write about music festivals, from small one-day ones to large ones. If you have been to a festival, this is an awesome thing to write about – lots of people want to know all about festivals, everything from the music and the people to the stalls and camping ground.

And you took some good photos you can use, didn’t you?

6. Use a light background for your text, preferably white. Musicians often go for dark websites, because they think it looks groovier.

If you have a black or dark-anything background, your text will be more difficult to read. This isn’t such a problem if you only have small chunks of information on your website, that people skim over, but if you have extended text that people settle in to read, the dark background makes it so difficult many simply won’t.

That’s the last thing you want when you are trying to encourage visitors to read your well-chosen words.

7. Use short paragraphs, only a few lines long. Long blocks of text are very difficult to read on a computer screen, and will discourage readers even more than a dark background.

8. Give your articles a visual structure, so the reader can see where they are on the screen easily, and they’ll be more inclined to keep reading. And the sad fact is that most people reading your blog, including your friends, won’t read every word – instead they will skim over your text. So you’ll need to give them visual hooks, to hook them in. Like the hook of a song.

You can do all this in a few ways:
a. vary the length of the paragraphs
b. use sub-headings
c. include quote or highlight boxes
d. occasionally put smaller images on the left or right of the text
e. put some of your info into a list

9. Open comments on your blog. Comments help you develop a relationship with your readers – for a musician these are potential fans who, if you engage them, might buy your music or come to a gig. Also, getting comments is very encouraging… you know how much better it feels to get lots of comments on your Facebook updates than not get any.

A healthy number of comments is also very important for giving you as an artist “social proof” i.e. it shows that lots of people are interested in you, so therefore you must be good! Having a Facebook Page badge on your website with a large number of Likes does the same thing. Often people just need a little bit of social permission to take action (i.e. take the time to read your post, to leave a comment, to buy something).

Comments means you will have to deal with comment spam, but there are numerous plugins that do a good job of this. I use Akismet and WP Spamshield for WordPress, and I have always found spam manageable.

10. Encourage comments. It helps to encourage comments – you can say things at the end of each post like “Please leave a comment”, or “I would love to hear from you in the comments section below”.

You can ask a question at the end of each post. Don’t be over-specific – if you ask “what’s the best music festival you have been to?” and the reader has never been to one, they might be suddenly struggling for something to say, when they had actually been planning to say something else. Invent a question that’s easy for everyone to answer, e.g. “Have you been to a music festival?”

Also, conscript you friends, cousins and aunts to leave comments, until you have a regular readership. People are more likely to leave a comment if there is already one or two there.

Having said all this, don’t stress if you don’t get any comments, we can’t all do everything.

11. Reply to each comment that you get (unless you are getting hundreds or something, in which case you don’t need to read this post). You can reply to each one separately, or you can do all your replies in one comment. e.g. Hi John… Hi Jan… Hi Billy…

This makes commenters feel they are being heard, and encourages commenters to come back to your website to see if you have replied to them. It also gives other readers the impression you are accessible – it’s like watching someone being interviewed on the telly… you feel more familiar with them even though you did not speak to them yourself.

12. Leave comments on other people’s blogs, and leave your URL in the ‘website’ box (not in the comment). Your comment should be about the article you are commenting on, rather then being self-promotional.

You can start practising by leaving a comment on this article :)

Target other niches as well as music – everyone like music. Such as: mummy or daddy blogs, clothes/style blogs, vegetarian, craft, sustainability, simple living, writing, self-development, tech and personal blogs. These bloggers are likely to be more experienced with blogging than the average musician, and might be more likely to engage with you.

This is actually the FASTEST way to get comments on your own blog, because usually the other blog owner will reciprocate by leaving a comment on your blog. And make sure that when someone comments on your blog, that you check out their URL, and if they have a blog, you leave a comment.

Include the http:// when you leave your URL with comments.

Some of the other blog’s readers could well come and comment on your blog, too, because they liked your interesting comment and your little picture (Gravatar), and have clicked through to your blog.

13. Set up a Gravatar. Go to gravatar.com and set up your little picture which will be your signature on most of the blogs you comment on, including your replies on your own blog. A friendly or interesting face probably works best for this, rather than something arty and elusive, and you might want to prepare your 80px X 80px image first and sharpen it if it is blurry.

Having a good Gravatar makes it MUCH more likely people will click through when they see your comment on other people’s blogs.

14. Get visitors from search engines. If you write about, say, a music festival you played at, and people out there on the internet do a Google search for that festival, there’s a chance your article will appear in their list of search results, and a chance they’ll click through to your blog post, and enjoy what you have to say.

It’s GREAT when this happens – you potentially have a new fan, or at least someone who comments on your blog.

You can encourage this to happen with the wording you use. For example, if you are writing about a festival, have the name of the festival in the title of the post, rather than something like “Had A Great Time Last Weekend”. Search engine robots crawling your blog can pick out the difference between a title and regular text, and they pay more attention to titles.

Also name your image files and titles with something relevant to the topic you are writing about e.g. gibson-guitar.jpg rather than photo3.jpg. This is all behind-the-scenes, but the robots see it, and someone searching for gibson guitar might land on your post because they found your nice picture of a guitar.

It also helps you get search engine traffic if you write about things people are likely to be searching for information about e.g. festivals, instruments, venues, bands, genres, gear, recording, mixing, songwriting, making videos.

15. Install statistics on your blog, and look at them regularly. I have both StatCounter (free version) and Google Analytics (free) set up on all my websites.

These tell you how many visitors you have each day, the pages they are looking at, and whether they have come from a web search or another website. If visitors are coming in from a link on another website, you want to know about that.

16. Write out your posts in a plain text document, not MS Word, and copy and paste them into your post editor when you are ready. Word puts all sorts of invisible code into its documents, which can play havoc when pasted into a blog – that’s why some blog articles have weird little symbols in them, or odd formatting.

Mac users can use TextEdit and Windows users can use NotePad – both set to Plain Text format (do bold, italics etc once your text is in the post editor).

17. Your posting frequency. I’d suggest you post once a week or at least once a month, if you want to keep momentum up, but I don’t believe it’s the end of the world if a musician leaves their blog resting for some time.

18. Publicise your posts on Facebook, Twitter etc (well… that’s a no brainer).

Why do a blog

Writing a blog and doing commenting is quite a lot of work. But as long as you are predisposed to it, I’d suggest it is an excellent way to go if you wish to market your music.

I have seen musicians be quite uninterested in even the most simple of DIY internet marketing tasks, yet they will spend a LOT if time and go to HEAPS of effort trying the old-fashioned approach, such as doing radio interviews, getting their music on radio, getting themselves written up somewhere, but it all gets them not very far – maybe they get a few downloads on iTunes.

They can’t get past the idea they need to get “out there” to the masses, that they need “exposure”, but they don’t have any way of gathering those masses into their fold so they can develop a relationship with them, such as by interesting them in their blog and newsletter.

Cheers – Robin

Guitar photo by fernando garcia

The post 18 Blogging Tips For Musicians appeared first on Robin Birch.

Let’s say you have an event at the Fitzroy Town Hall, in Melbourne, and you would like to put a Google map on your site showing the town hall’s location.

Here are the steps:

1. Firstly, do a Google search for Fitzroy Town Hall, and go to the map. If you don’t want the marker on your map, or their isn’t one for the place you are looking for, simply navigate to the place you want from a general map.

2. Zoom in or out until you have the resolution you would like.

3. On the white information box that appears on the top left of the map is a small 3-bar menu icon, click on that.

4. Go to ‘Share or embed map’. Choose the ‘Embed map’ tab.

5. See how the different map sizes look, choose which one you want – choose a custom size if you like. If it turns out you would have preferred a different resolution, go back to the beginnning (but remember the visitor can zoom in and out, and can also view a full version of the map).

7. Highlight and copy the code, it starts with an angle bracket and ‘iframe’.

8. Paste the code onto your website. If you have a WordPress site, copy it onto the ‘Text’ view of your page or post editor, or in a text widget – wherever you would like the map. Other types of websites also have somewhere you can paste code.

That’s it – here’s the small size in action:

I hope you have lots of people come to your event!

Cheers – Robin

The post How To Put A Google Map On Your Website appeared first on Robin Birch.