Firstly let’s take a look at what we are going to try to replicate:

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This large ‘Call-to-action’ has a clear purpose, to be noticed and to get people to subscribe!

Note: You will need to be using a Self-hosted WordPress site for this to work

Creating Your RSS Sign-off Image

The first thing you will need to do is create your RSS sign off image. Although you can quite easily use a copyright-free image, creating your own give you full reign over the design – you can also then tailor the design to your blog’s theme.

If you aren’t able to create your own image, but find the quality of the free RSS buttons available quite poor – you can find some good quality buttons such as these for as little as $2.

If you don’t have Photoshop, or similar photo-editing software, try Pixlr – a free, browser based alternative.

Here are some tips to bear in mind whilst creating your image:

• Do you want your RSS sign-off to fit the width of the page? If so, you will need to measure the width of your content area. You can easily achieve this with browser extensions such as Measureit for Firefox or Chrome
• For the best user experience, you will need to make at least 2 designs, one of which being for when the someone hovers over the original image. This helps people recognise the image is a link – if you are creating a button, one simple way of doing this is to reverse the gradient you used on the button
• People are familiar with the orange RSS logo and what it means – by all means be creative but don’t deviate too far – you can download the RSS icon from Wikipedia to use in your design here
• Have a strong call to action to encourage people to click – Why not try: Subscribe Now, Follow Us, Read More, Click to Subscribe etc.
• In terms of dimensions – you don’t want too large an image, although you don’t want something too small either. Try playing around to see what you think looks best, but generally a height of 50-100px will work best

Using Shortcodes to Display Your RSS Sign-off

Now this is image is going to work best when we add it to the end of our posts as  a sign-off. The easiest way to do this is to download a plugin such as My Shortcodes. Note: We are going to complete the next stage of this tutorial using My Shortcodes

Install My Shortcodes

If you are familiar with FTP, then you can download My Shortcodes and upload it to the plug-in directory of your WordPress install – The easier way is to open up your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to the ‘Plugins’ page, click add new and then simply search ‘My Shortcodes’, then hit install.

Configuring Your RSS Sign-Off with My Shortcodes

Navigate to the ‘My Shortcodes’ settings page that has been added to your WordPress admin sidebar, you will then see something like this:

Element Name: Here we choose the name for our shortcode – it can be anything, but keep it relevant

Category: Again, this can be anything, it just dictates how your shortcodes are organised in My Shortcodes

Shortcode: This is the important one – what you type here is what you will need to type in to your WordPress post (in square brackets) to show the RSS sign-off. Make sure it is something you will remember!

Type: Leave this at the default shortcode selection

Creating the HTML for Your Sign-off

Now, to actually create our custom RSS sign-off shortcode, we need to add the following to the ‘Template’ section:

<a class="rss-so" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/startyourstory"></a>

This is a link to your feed (remember to change the link to your own RSS feed), with a class defined to it. Here we have defined the class as rss-so, this will allow us to style it with CSS in the next step.

Styling Your Sign-off with CSS

To the CSS section, you will need to add the following:

.rss-so {
display:block;
background-image:url(http://your image url);
width:528px;
height:92px;
}
.rss-so:hover {
background-image:url(http://your image url);
}

Here you will need to change the width and height defined above to match that of your image – and you will also need to point to your image’s URL. (For this you will need to have uploaded your image to your server.)

The second section .rss-so:hover simply tells the browser to display a different image when a users hovers over the original image. Feel free to remove this section if you have not created two separate images.

Using Your Shortcode

You’ve now created your RSS sign-off, so go ahead and click save. Now whenever want to add it to a post, simply type whatever you entered in to the Shortcode box (in the shortcode settings tab) surrounded by [ ] brackets and your image will appear!

Look what happens when we put square brackets around rss-so (our short code):

[rss-so]

Let us know how you got on with this – feel free to leave a link to where you have used it or if something hasn’t quite worked out right, leave your problem below and we’ll try our best to help you!

You could always ‘take your blog with you’ – find a Wi-Fi spot and carry on writing, but unless you are a travel blogger – that kinda defeats the purpose of a holiday.

In this article, we are going to be taking a look at how you can automate your wordpress blog and social media accounts whilst still engaging with your community. Some of these techniques you’ll be able to apply to other blogging platforms too, such as Blogger. We’ll also be taking at look at how professional blogger Darren Rowse managed to maintain his blog, Problogger during his vacation to the gorgeous, Queensland.

You Don’t Have to Leave Your Blog Unattended this Vacation

You may be jetting off to the other side of the world for a week or two, or maybe you’re just heading to a different county or state, but either way – it can sometimes be a daunting experience leaving your blog to tick over by itself while you are away enjoying yourself.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways you can maintain your blog and even get it to automate itself – so it’s like you never left! There is no doubt that your readers like consistency, so if you normally post 2 or 3 times a week and then disappear for 2 weeks – they might start to get a bit concerned…

Don’t feel like you have to leave your blog to its own devices entirely, in fact I’d discourage that. We’ll shortly be looking at how often you should check in whilst on holiday and how you should be spending your time online without eating in to too much of your vacation time.

But first, let’s take a look at some of the ways you can automate your WordPress blog whilst you are away.

Automate Your WordPress Blog Using These Simple Techniques

Schedule Posts

Now this is the staple tool of the vacationing blogger. Scheduling posts allows you to simply make sure your article goes out at a certain time instead of instantly. Both WordPress and Blogger offer this simple ability, which is great news for when you are planning your vacation.

Scheduling a post with WordPress

Of course, you have to write the posts first! This can mean a little extra work during the run up to your holiday as you will need to prepare those extra articles. Try and stay in keeping with your usually posting pattern – for example, if you’re going away for a week and normally post everyday – prepare 7 extra articles and schedule one of these to go out every day you are away.

If you are going to find it difficult to prepare all the extra posts needed whilst you are away, then you might want to consider the next option, guest posts.

Guest Posts

If you need articles fast, one of the best way to get them is to ask for guest posts. You might want to ask members of your community, or head to a guest post site such as MyBlogGuest. However you go about it, just be sure the authors of these posts are aware of the times that the posts are scheduled to go out on.

When you schedule a post, you will be given its URL – but the contents are only visible to you – others will get a 404 error. Despite this, give this URL to your guest authors and be sure to tell them to share the URL with their social media communities once the post goes live.

Schedule Tweets

Just like scheduling blog posts, you can also schedule tweets. You can use this technique to share interesting stories, articles or your own posts whilst you are away. There are two main methods of doing this – directly schedule each tweet and time individually or add a number of tweets to a ‘buffer’ and let a web application send them out over a timely period.

Schedule Tweets Manually

Some of the better tweet-scheduling web apps include:

• Cotweet
• SocialOomph
• Hootsuite
• Gremln

All these services have paid options and plans, but the free plan for each service is more than adequate for what you will need whilst you’re away.

Buffer Your Tweets

What I personally prefer to do is ‘buffer’ my tweets. By doing this, you take all the hard work out of scheduling and let the web apps do the hard work for you. My personal favourites include:

• Buffer
• Timely

Note that the Buffer free account has a limit of 10 tweets – but has much better integration with other applications and services, whereas the Timely service can schedule many more tweets but doesn’t yet integrate with other apps. See Timely in action below:

Dealing with Discussions on Your Blog

Whilst you are away, you might want to consider disabling comment moderation. If people have to wait a week or two for their comment to be approved, this could put them off commenting on your site again. On the other hand, by disabling moderation you are opening up your blog to spam or negative comments.

Fortunately, the spam problem is quite minimal as both Blogger and WordPress are great at catching it (make sure you have Akismet enabled on your WordPress blog if you are disabling comment moderation). In my opinion, you are better turning off moderation and deleting any rogue comments when you get back.

Let People Know You’re Away

If you can, let your Twitter followers and Facebook fans know that you’re away. At least your regular readers will then know you are away. You might get a few offers of help by doing this as well – and members of the community may be more willing to engage with people in discussions on articles in your absence.

Letting people know that you are off on vacation also ensures people know that you might not be able to answer emails, tweets or comments and can save a lot of frustration.

Can Anyone Watch Your Blog for You?

If you have any close friends who you trust and are computer-savvy, it might be worth asking them if they will watch over your blog for you. Of course, you will need to fully brief them on how to handle your blog and it might be worth making a backup of your blog just in case…

If you have WordPress, you could create them their own login and edit their user capabilities with the user roles plugin (or a similar plugin). A plugin like this means that you can allow them access only to things that you think they will need. For example, you might want to make them able to moderate comments but not to add new posts.

The most important thing when passing over such a large responsibility to a friend is that you have tried to make the process as easy as possible by following some or all of the above tips above. You will also need to be able to trust the individual! Don’t go handing over access to your blog to a random Twitter follower, just because they said they’d help (however genuine they may appear).

Things to Check Before You Leave

If you’ve followed the above tips, then you will of course want to check that you have tweets and posts scheduled – but what about the actual maintenance of your blog.

If your blog is self hosted or you have a custom domain – make sure none of these things are due to expire whilst you are away! You wouldn’t want to come back to your blog to find that the hosting had expired and no-one has been able to access your blog for 2 weeks!

How Darren Rowse Did it

Problogger, Darren Rowse managed to maintain his blog excellently whilst he was away. Basically, he did the above – scheduled a combination of guest posts and his own posts – also getting them to be tweeted out automatically, but he also did a little something else.

Whilst vacationing in Queensland, Darren still managed to keep in touch with Twitter, posting updates on his vacation and some great Instagram pics. If you can access the internet whilst away, I’d recommend doing the same too, as it adds a touch of personality to your Twitter feed that may otherwise appear a bit robotic whilst you are away.

Not only this though – Darren actually managed to document his vacation in a blog post whilst away. Now not everyone will want to do this and not everyone may be able to – but if you can it’s worth it.

If you can work on a vacation blog post (like Darren’s on his Great Barrier Reef experience), be sure to take plenty of photos during the day as they’ll look great in the article. Don’t otherwise worry about the article whilst you are busy during the day or if you head out to enjoy the nightlife – but if you get a couple of spare minutes before winding down for bed, try and write down a few words and add some of the better photos.

Not only will this make great reading for your blog’s followers, it also looks vibrant and helps you reflect on your time away!

Don’t Forget…

At the end of the day, you’re on holiday, so enjoy it! Don’t worry too much about your blog, as if you’ve automated your WordPress blog, it will be fine. In fact, it will be fine if you don’t! But automating it, will keep it ticking over just long enough until it can have the pleasure of welcoming you back.

Image Credit

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We may notice this when browsing through our own Twitter streams, but how do we know other people aren’t thinking exactly the same thing about our tweets? How do we know that we aren’t clogging up another user’s timeline and losing their interest?

Often we don’t. But there is a tool we can use to spread out our bursts of Twitter activity and that tool is Buffer.

The Problem

Whether we’re reading through our RSS feeds or simply browsing our Twitter timeline, it is quite easy to share many articles or retweet a bunch of tweets in short succession. When we do this, we start to flood our follower’s timelines with what we share – which can be a little annoying. Of course, many people won’t mind, but there are some who do and in the worst case scenario, these people are more inclined to hit unfollow.

When we start flooding Twitter, it is very easy for people to start skipping your tweets – they see multiple tweets from the same author in a row and just glance over them, unless there is something truly eye-catching of course!

If people start glancing over your tweets, it becomes increasingly likely that they are going to miss the link to your article, or your product amongst all the noise.

You also have to consider the fact that you might have Twitter followers from around the globe! If you restrict yourself to posting in short bursts, some of your followers may miss what you tweet completely.

What is Buffer?

So I mentioned Buffer can help. But what exactly is Buffer? Well, a few months ago I was asking exactly the same question. Buffer isn’t something new and seems to be underestimated by a lot of Twitter users. Originally I thought Buffer was a new form of social media site or something similar – but how wrong I was.

Buffer integrates with your Twitter account and acts as a reservoir of tweets. This pool of tweets that you build up is known as your buffer.You can add tweets to your buffer manually or automatically through integration with other applications.

Instead of you tweeting with rapid succession, Buffer allows you to pace your tweets – drip feeding them in to your followers’ timelines. Buffer also offers an insight in to the number of people who click the links in your tweets and how many people they reached.

Instead of tweeting instantly, every tweet you make can be added to your ‘buffer’. You set a number of intervals throughout the day – say 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 7pm, 7.30pm 9pm and let Buffer take care of the rest. Each tweet will now be posted at these times instead of instantly. Of course, these times are completely customisable by you – you could tweet just once a day at 3pm if you wanted to!

Why not take a look at our ‘buffer’ to get a better idea:

For example, let’s say we’re checking our RSS feeds in the morning and share 10 great articles with our followers within the space of 10 minutes. If we used Buffer to share these articles instead, the tweets could be spaced anywhere from a minute to an hour apart, depending on the frequency you set from your Buffer dashboard.

The free version of Buffer allows up to 10 tweets in your buffer at a time – a paid, $10 upgrade allows up to 50 unlimited tweets. We’ve been getting by perfectly fine with the free version though and only Twitter power users or businesses/companies will feel limited by the 10 tweet restriction. You don’t have to solely use Buffer either, you can use ‘immediate tweets’ and buffered tweets to get maximum impact from your free account.

How Can Buffer Help?

The benefits of drip-feeding your tweets are numerous. Thought the primary reason is – people are much more likely to read your tweets! Not only this, but you can set up when you tweets get published – with this in mind, you can cater to your followers around the globe.

Buffer will also add consistency to your tweeting, something some users will look out for. You can use Buffer to ensure you continue to maintain a Twitter presence whilst you are on vacation or away from Twitter during the day – whilst at work for example.

How Does Buffer Integrate with Twitter?

Twitter can be integrated with Buffer in a number of ways, each method adds another tweet to your ‘buffer’:

• You can use Buffer directly to add to your tweet reservoir
• Many sites that use social media sharing buttons will have a Buffer button, if you use this instead of the ‘Tweet’ button, the article gets added to your buffer instead of being tweeted instantly
• A number of iOS and Android apps (particularly RSS readers) integrate with Buffer, allowing you to store a link in your reservoir instead of going out instantly – there is also an official Buffer app
• ifttt has many recipes that allow you to automatically add retweets, favourited tweets, starred articles in readability, read articles on pocket, etc. to your buffer
• Twylah’s power tweet function has built in Buffer compatability
• There are browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, which allow you to save webpages to your buffer
• WordPress has a downloadable Buffer plugin
• Many more apps, plugins, share bars, buttons etc. all of which add an article, or tweet to your buffer instead of posting instantly to Twitter

How Are You Using Buffer?

Are you using Buffer? What scheduling do you find works best? Are you using apps, ifttt recipes or share bars or are you just using the Buffer website?

We’d love to hear some of the creative ways in which you are using or intend to use Buffer – let us know in the comments below.

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It’s the same with your blog. You can write beautiful, interesting content, but if the layout is bad, people are just going to bounce, and all that hard work will go to waste. Today, I’m going to teach you how to make your blog pleasing to the eye and easy to look at.

Black on white is better.

If your blog is reading-oriented, black text on a white background is the way to go. It’s just easier to read and look at, and will leave readers with the stamina to read another post. Who knows, maybe they’ll share the next post with a friend.

Use pictures.

Humans are visual creatures, so of course pictures will help. Now, I’m not saying to put pictures of Megan Fox everywhere if you run a gardening blog, but maybe some tomatoes or raspberries would be a good idea. However, be careful not to go overboard.

Split things up.

Lists are always a good idea. Chances are, you didn’t read the first two paragraphs (if you did, kudos to you). Why? Because honestly, they’re intimidating. No one likes big blocks of text, and smaller pieces are much more digestible.

Lay off the widgets.

Sure, it’s important to have a navigation bar somewhere, but does your car blog really need and interactive koi pond? Try to avoid extraneous widgets. All they do is distract readers and make the page feel cluttered.

Put links in posts.

After reading an article, I’m usually left thinking, “what’s next?” The truth is I want to know more about the supposed iToilet (if that’s what the post is about). Providing links to websites helps engage readers and can reduce the amount you have to write. As a bonus, other websites may link back to you if you link to them.

Don’t be pathetic.

If your pageviews are lacking, don’t display it for everyone to see! It will make readers feel as if the blog is unpopular due to bad writing or information. It can also clutter up the page.

Use a theme that matches.

A dark theme doesn’t match a blog about My Little Pony, just as a cute puppy theme doesn’t match a blog about your favorite death metal band. For example, my writing blog has a light natural theme, which fits the idea that you can just sit back and enjoy good writing.

Spelling matters.

Please use good spelling and grammar. No one wants to try and decipher “tenz I wentz too da plAce were teh beetels plaied.” Although it usually isn’t that bad, bad spelling and grammar can get people to leave your blog very quickly.

The little things are the biggest.

Is the text centered? Are you consistent in format? Are you using little CSS tricks like this to spruce up your design? All these little things can influence whether or not viewers come back to your blog.

Well, that’s it. I hope that, through reading and applying these tips, you will reduce you blog’s bounce rate and watch it grow. Which would you rather be: the restaurant by the dump or the one in the country? Remember, the one in the country always gets more visitors.

About Joseph Radke: I am a trumpet teacher with (at least I think so) a knack for writing. I’d really appreciate it if you could take a look at my writing blog.

Image Credit

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