This video from Holly is an oldie but goodie. The information she talks about and the Twitter resources she shares still apply in today’s blogging world. And brands still care about engagement on Twitter. If you want to make money blogging, you have to be on Twitter and you have to be using it regularly to connect with your audience.

Some of the Twitter topics Holly discusses in the video are:

• How to make your Twitter account easy to find
• How to measure the reach of your Twitter network
• How to connect with brands on Twitter
• How to use TweetReach.com

The video is only about 15 minutes so it won’t take a lot of your time and it has some really great Twitter information for you.

After watching the video, here are some great posts for you to read on Twitter:

Basics of Twitter

How to use Twitter hashtags

How to use Twitter lists {and why you should use them}

About the big Twitter management clients

Twitter apps for mobile devices

3 Tweaks to personalize your Twitter page

I hope that after watching this video you realize how important Twitter is for bloggers and you set up an account if you don’t already have one.

The post Holly talks Twitter and other Twitter resources appeared first on Business 2 Blogger.

Now, if you have been living under a blogging rock, SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s something you want to do for your blog to increase your traffic and your passive income.

One really easy way to help improve your SEO is to use a SEO plugin for your WordPress blog. Today, I’m going to tell you about the SEO plugin for WordPress that we use here on Business 2 Blogger and that I use on my other blogs… WordPress SEO by Yoast.

SEO plugin for WordPress

First, I’m going to remind you to backup your blog before adding any plugins. You never, ever, ever want to add a plugin without first backing up your blog. Understand, okay. Moving on…

After installing WordPress SEO by Yoast, you will see a new item in the menu on the left that’s titled “SEO.” This is where you can change the settings for the plugin.

In the dashboard tab, there is an introduction tour you can take if you so desire to learn more about the plugin.

There are a lot of other settings in the SEO tab but I don’t recommend changing any of them unless you know what you are doing.

The area you are going to be most concerned with for this SEO plugin is in your “Add New Post” section.

Here you will see a new section called “WordPress SEO by Yoast.” If you don’t see this after installing the plugin, go to screen options at the top of the screen and make sure that WordPress SEO by Yoast is checked. It should show up after that.

When I go to write a new post, I usually research my keyword first using the Google Adwords Keywords tool. Then I enter that keyword in “Focus Keyword” section.

After that, I go through and write my post like normal and upload any images. Save the post.

Once that is done, the plugin will evaluate the SEO in your post based on the focus keyword you selected. In the “Publish” box on the right you will see a colored circle next to “SEO.” Red means bad, yellow means okay and green is good.

If you scroll down to the WordPress SEO by Yoast section, and select “Page Analysis” you will see exactly how your post scores and what areas you might need to improve on to make your SEO better.

Make changes as needed. To recheck the SEO, save the post.

Easy, right?

Since I’ve been using this SEO plugin for WordPress on my cocktail recipes blog, my search results have increased and so has my ad income (passive income, baby!).

I’ve even started going through some of my older posts and updating the SEO using this plugin.

If you aren’t already using this SEO plugin or another one, you should. But remember to backup your blog first.

For more tips on how to make money blogging and increase your blog traffic, sign up for the Mom Blog Money Blog course. It’s invaluable!

The post You, SEO and your WordPress blog appeared first on Business 2 Blogger.

Summer messes with that schedule.

If you are like me you may find yourself scrambling to fit in some work hours amid family activities.

While I am a strong advocate for child boredom – letting them figure out something to entertain themselves – there is a point where adding in a little direction can be win-win.

The kids love doing something new and different.

I love that once they are engaged in something, it gives me the freedom to sneak in a little extra work time without sacrificing family.

That is one of the reasons why I am so proud of being part of 20 Moms {one of my dearest blog tribes}.  We {and by we, I mean mostly people who are way smarter than me} have pulled together a Summer Activities Pack {affiliate link} called Camp Mom {also an affiliate link…the same one if you are counting}.

Camp Mom:  Summer Activities Pack – $14.99 - Camp Mom can help YOU create a summer of memories with your kids.  It is chock full of mom-tested, kid-loved activities that are easily done at home without a bunch of extra supplies…

• 86 pages of Summer SOLUTIONS like summer bucket list, summer routine sheet, theme activity planner, summer survival page.
• Full activity instructions & list for water, art and nature themed weeks
• Bonus:  Sensory Play Everyday theme with printable ideas
• Quick Play Ideas for last minute fun

Plus when you order in the month of May, you get:

• FREE {$4.99 savings} – Positive Parenting:  The Basics by Amanda Morgan
• 50% off {$2.50 savings} – Project Organize Your Entire Life:  The Quick Start Guide pdf from Modern Parents Messy Kids
• 50% off {$3.50 savings} – Freezy Peasy:  Freezer Cooking Made Easy pdf also from Modern Parents Messy Kids
• 50% off {$4.00 savings} – Alphabet Crafts by Allison McDonald
• 40% off {$49.20 savings} – Parenting with Positive Guidance eCourse by Amanda Morgan
• 40% off {$3.60 savings} – Parenting with Positive Guidance eBook by Amanda Morgan
• 20% off {$1.58 savings} – Raising a Creative Kid:  Simple Strategies for Igniting and Nurturing that Creative Spark by Jillian Riley

Whew!

If you would like a chance to win a copy, please join us tonight for a Twitter Party:

It will be great fun with a ton of strategies as to how to keep kids out of trouble allowing you to carve out a little time for guilt-free work!  I will be working from both @quirkymommasite and @texasholly twitter accounts at the party.

RSVP here to be eligible to win all sorts of fun prizes like copies of Camp Mom and a craft supply grab bag.

See ya tonight!

If you can’t join us tonight, I hope you will check out Camp Mom.

I have used my affiliate link throughout this post and also receive income from sales of this book. – Holly

The post Because at Some Point this Summer You Will Need to Entertain Kids appeared first on Business 2 Blogger.

For this week’s Hangout, Holly welcomed Kelli Miller to the virtual stage.

Kelli Miller is a mom of three and can be found at 3 Boys and a Dog and Southern Mom Cooks. She co-hosts a Google Plus series called Learn to Blog (on Tuesdays at 10am CST) and was one of the contributors to the Mom Blog Money Blog series we ran at here at Business 2 Blogger. She started blogging after quitting her full time job and very quickly after that began reaching out to brands. Kelli can also be found on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.

Kelli is a big, big, big fan of the editorial calendar (and regular calendars) and stays very organized with her many online ventures. She is also very involved with different blog tribes.

Holly and Kelli discussed how they use specific blog tribes to promote themselves and others online. Kelli defines herself as mean in her blog tribes but acts this way for a reason as she explains in the hangout. She also talks about how open everyone is in some of the blog groups and how this helps everyone involved. If you’ve been nervous about joining a blog tribe, I think Kelli will help you understand why they are important.

Since Holly and Kelli both host Google Plus hangouts, they spent some time discussing why they do hangouts and how those are becoming a blog tribe in themselves.

They also talked a little bit about their lives as bloggers and how it affects their families. You know, like when everyone has to pause before eating dinner so you can photograph food.

Enjoy the hangout!

After watching the video, here are some good follow-up posts for you to read:

Connect with your blog tribe

Time saving tips for bloggers

How to pitch back to PR companies and make affiliate income

Stay tuned for the next Blogprenuer hangout with Holly Holly which will air on Monday 5/20/13 at 7pm CST.

Want to be featured on Blogpreneur? Take a few seconds and fill out this form!

The post Blogpreneuer: Holly Homer and Kelli Miller appeared first on Business 2 Blogger.

As Holly and Melissa Taylor talked about in their online hangout about Pinterest, you need that one perfect photo for each blog post. This is especially true if you are a food, craft, activity, something else useful blogger. Personally, I spend hours taking and editing pictures of my cocktail recipes each week.

That one good image can really take off on Pinterest and suddenly your post is viral and your traffic has doubled, tripled or more. And more traffic equals more money.

So, get out your DSLR camera and check out these photography resources. Your blog will thank you.

Photography resources for bloggers

Digital Photography School

Digital Photography School is loaded with tips, tricks, tutorials and more for improving your photography. While there are no classes in this school, there is plenty of information along with a forum that you can use to connect with others and get help. I also suggest signing up for their newsletter. Each time I open the newsletter email, I learn something new.

Clickin Moms

Clickin Moms is a community of female photographers with a passion for photography. There are forums for everything related to photography and they offer several different photography courses.

I just finished the study along version of Shooting 101: The Best Darn Beginner Course Ever. There are other courses for Photoshop, Lightroom, macro shooting and more.

Gina Kleinworth 

Another resource I found for taking better pictures is a fellow blogger/photographer. Gina Kleinworth offers a 7-week photography course that covers the basics of photography along with weekly assignments.

Gina also offers a 4-week photography mentoring workshop where she works one on one with you. I signed up for the personal mentoring and it has been invaluable. She helped me figure out a better location to take my pictures and has given me many tips for setting up my shots, manually selecting my focal point, editing with Camera Raw and Photoshop and so much more.

Photography Books

In addition to the online resources listed above, I have read several photography books. These three have been the most useful for me:

Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson is all about the mysteries of the exposure triangle. After the first few pages of the book, I had learned something new and my photographs were looking better.

Plate to Pixel by Helene Dujardin was the first photography book I purchased. After reading it, I was brave enough to switch from auto to manual and my life is so much better. If you are a food photography, it’s a must have.

Food Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots by Nicole S. Young is another must have book for food photographers. She talks about everything from exposure to editing. I like that she breaks down how she sets up some of her shots and her postprocessing steps.

Whether your taking pictures of your kids, crafts, food or something entirely different you must have good pictures on your blog. I hope these resources help you to improve your photography. They have definitely helped me.

What are your favorite photography resources? 

More on photographs for your blog

Brand and protect your online photos
The basics of picture sizes and social media sites
How to use pictures effectively in your blog posts

Links for books are affiliate links.

The post Say Cheese! Resources for improving your photography appeared first on Business 2 Blogger.

Tonight on Blogpreneur:  Kelli Miller

The LIVE video broadcast will be embedded HERE {last week’s episode will appear here until it is replaced at air time}:

Tonight’s guest is Kelli Miller from 3 Boys and a Dog, 3BD and Southern Mom Cooks and the co-host of Learn to Blog – a series of G+ Hangouts.  She is going to talk about her blogging journey and then I will grill her on how she keeps up with multiple sites and chat about her passion of blog tribes {which is one of my passions too!}.  Every time I chat with Kelli I learn something.

If you have questions for Kelli, please leave them in the comments of this post.  That can be done prior to the LIVE event or during the show.

Next Time on Blogpreneur:  YOU!

I am learning so much from the experts that appear on Blogpreneur, but the funny thing is that a lot of my guests don’t perceive themselves as experts.

But they ARE!

And so are you.

There are things that you are good at, that you are passionate about, that you ROCK online.

Tell me about them by filling out this form.

I want to interview you.  I want to learn what you have to teach.  Let’s chat!

If you are nervous about being the ONLY guest, don’t let that stop you from filling out the form.  There are nights where I will have more than one guest per topic.  We can change things up a bit…I am making this up as we go.

Full disclosure:  You will not actually be on the VERY next Blogpreneur because some dates are already booked.  And based on the response, it might take a few episodes to get to your specific topic!

Thanks so much!

The post This Week on Blogpreneur appeared first on Business 2 Blogger.

For this week’s Hangout, Holly welcomed Alissa Marquess to the virtual stage.

Alissa Marquees is a homeschooling mom of 3 and runs the blog, Creative With Kids. She started blogging about 5 years ago and has since changed her path in the online world. She discusses her blogging journey, her struggle being okay with the fact that she can’t do everything and her attempts to balance work, homeschooling and life each day. I think many of us can relate to what she’s saying. You can also find Alissa on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

The real nuts and bolts of the hangout start when Alissa talks about her blog email newsletter and how and why she uses it. In the Mom Blog Money Blog series, we discussed creating a newsletter for your blog as a way to increase blog readers. It was really interesting to hear what Alissa had to say about her newsletter and how it works for her to connect with her readers. Listening to her talk, I’m inspired to start a newsletter for my blog. Especially because it can help to make Pinterest readers sticky in a sense.

There’s lots of other good information in the hangout and you’ll want to watch the whole thing. And then you’ll want to go start a newsletter for your blog if you don’t have one already.

After watching the video, here are some good follow-up posts for you to read:

How to find and connect with a blogging tribe

How to get email subscriber list from Feedburner

What did motivate the click?

Stay tuned for the next Blogprenuer hangout with Holly Holly which will air on Monday 5/13/13 at 7pm CST.

The post Blogpreneur: Holly Homer and Alissa Marquess appeared first on Business 2 Blogger.

So many questions! So little time!

Lucky for you, I’m here to answer these questions for you.

For years I have been using a text only related post plugin on my blogs. I would tell you which one but the plugin hasn’t been updated in a long time so I don’t recommend using it.

A few weeks ago, I decided to switch to a thumbnail plugin for my related posts. I went with LinkWithin since it’s the one I see used on many of the blogs I frequent.

I made the switch because I spend so much time on images for my blogs that I wanted to show those images off as much as possible. Plus, I thought that people would be more likely to click through on a picture rather than the post name.

Text versus Thumbnail – How they look

To show you the difference between text and thumbnail plugins, I took a screenshot of how each one looks on my cocktail recipe blog. Both came from the ginger mojito recipe post.

Text Only

Thumbnail with post name

Now, which of the two are you more likely to click on?

For me, it’s the images.

Click throughs on related posts

I didn’t plan to make this an experiment when I switched my related post plugin. But, once I saw the increase in traffic, I knew I had done a good thing.

With the old plugin I couldn’t see what related links people were clicking on or even if they were clicking on related posts. Since I switched plugins, I am seeing a lot of older posts get traffic that didn’t used to. Since search traffic hasn’t increased from these posts, I’m assuming it’s from the related post section.

Also, with LinkWithin I can see what people are clicking on in my referrer stats.

I can use this information as another way to multiply my blog traffic because it tells me what images are capturing people’s attention.

Winner of best related post plugin

Between the two plugins, I would say LinkWithin wins the award for best related post plugin. It has accomplished its goal of increasing my traffic which helps to increase the amount of money I make blogging.

And we all want to make more money blogging, right?

Other thumbnail related post plugins

If you don’t want to use LinkWithin for your related posts, here are some other thumbnail plugins to check out. I recommend thumbnail over text only (in case that wasn’t clear already).

Related Posts Thumbnails

nrelate Related Content

Tell me… what related post plugin do you use and how is it working for you? 

Psst… if you want to really figure out how to make money blogging, sign up for the Mom Blog Money Blog workshop (affiliate link). It’s worth it.

The post Related Post Plugins – Thumbnails versus Text appeared first on Business 2 Blogger.

For this week’s Hangout, Holly welcomed Peg Fitzpatrick to the virtual stage.

Peg Fitzpatrick can be found online at PegFitzpatrick.com and 12 Most. She also works with Guy Kawasaki on social media marketing strategy and is the director of marketing and social media manager for Kreussler Inc. In addition to all of that, she hosts a Twitter book club chat with the hashtag #MyBookClub, manages different Facebook and Google Plus accounts and has contributed to a couple books. Of course, she’s also on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.

Peggy talks about her start to blogging which is a little unusual compared to other bloggers. After getting started, she used Twitter to grow and connect with people (such as Guy Kawasaki) in the beginning and has been on Google Plus since the very beginning.

Because Peggy has been on Google Plus for so long, she has some really great information for using the social networking site. They answered questions from people watching the hangout, including whether or not to share from your personal or blog page Google Plus account.

After a lengthy discussion on G+, they moved on to the book, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur – How to Publish a Book, by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch. Peggy played a role in the writing of the book which has grown into a community.

There’s a lot more information in the video, including talk about writing your own book (which apparently a lot of people want to do). Watch the video, take notes and learn lots!

After watching the video, here are some good follow-up posts for you to read:

Basic Twitter tips to make you a tweeting champ

How to setup your Google Plus profile page

Blogpreneur Hangout: Holly Homer and Amy Lynn Andrews (they talk more about book writing and Amazon).

Stay tuned for the next Blogprenuer hangout with Holly Holly which will air on Monday 5/6/13 at 7pm CST.

The post Blogpreneur: Holly Homer and Peg Fitzpatrick appeared first on Business 2 Blogger.

I personally have five different email accounts. One for each of my blogs, a work email and two personal accounts. As an iPhone addict, each one of these email accounts is connected on my phone and would notify me whenever I  had a new email. Of course, I had to check said email right when it came in. What if I missed something important?

Does any of this sound familiar to you? My guess is yes, it does. 

In Day 10 of the Mom Blog Money Blog course, Laurie Turk talks about working smarter, not harder. One of the tips was to only check email two times a day. Also, in the final hangout of the series we did covering the Mom Blog Money Blog course, Laurie mentioned that she only checks her email twice a day at 9am and 2pm and that she deletes a lot of emails that don’t fit with what she is doing.

Laurie’s words really got me thinking. It made me take a look at how much time I was spending checking emails on my phone. And those emails usually required me to do something else so I was getting really wrapped up in doing things that I hadn’t planned on doing. My to-do list kept growing and growing and the things I really wanted to focus on were getting lost.

Since then I have shifted the way I handle my emails and I spend a lot less time on my phone and more time doing other things I love like spending time with my kids and improving my photography (and maybe taking the occasional nap).

So, to help you break your email addiction here are few tips:

Understand IT CAN WAIT

We have shifted to a culture that thinks everything needs to be done right away. This, along with advances in technology, has made it so easy to become addicted to checking emails. But you need to tell yourself that it can wait. That company wanting you to do a product review doesn’t need an answer five minutes after they sent you the email. They can wait a few hours.

By understanding that you don’t have to check your emails and reply right away you are taking the first step to breaking the addiction and getting back your life.

Set dedicated email times

Laurie said she checks her emails at 9am and 2pm everyday. This works for her. It doesn’t work for me. I homeschool my kids and we are usually just getting started on schoolwork at 9am. Instead, I’ve found that 7am works for me in the mornings and I have to be flexible with my afternoon time because what I do each day changes.

Figure out what times work best for you to check your email and stick with those.

Delete, delete, delete

After you understand that the emails can wait, it’s time to know that it’s okay to delete emails that don’t apply to you. You don’t have to reply to every single request. If the request isn’t a good match, delete the email and move on. You can delete newsletters that you don’t want to read, you don’t have to fill out every survey sent to you.

Also, unsubscribe from those newsletters that you don’t want to receive anymore. That will eliminate some of the emails that you find yourself deleting all the time.

Flag for follow-up

If you only have 30 minutes to check your email and can’t reply to everything that needs your attention, flag the rest for follow-up. The next time you check your email, start with those.

Disconnect from your phone (or turn off notifications)

Your cellphone might be with you all day long but that doesn’t mean you have to be using it for email. Either disconnect your email accounts from the phone or turn off notifications for new emails. This will help you resist the temptation, especially in the beginning.

I hope that these tips help you break the email addiction. It really will free up a lot of time in your day that you can use to spend more time doing other things that you enjoy.

For more really awesome advice on blogging, purchase the Mom Blog Money Blog workshop. It’s a wise investment for serious bloggers.

What are your best tips for managing your email? 

Above links for workshop are affiliate links.

The post 5 Ways to break the email addiction appeared first on Business 2 Blogger.