You can file this one under miscellaneous. 😉 If you don’t have a blog, you can probably skip this post.
If you do have a blog, you will most likely find one (if not all) of these tips really useful! I started off the post wanting to tell you about one thing that I recently found out (which is absolutely amazing) and I realised that there are quite a few other things I wanted to share with you too.
Let’s get started shall we?
1.) Disqus commenting is a popular way to manage comments on your site. Unfortunately, there’s no app so it’s hard to reply to comments on the move – especially on your mobile. Well, it turns out you can now reply to Disqus comments but just replying to the email notification from Disqus containing the comments. Reply like your would to regular emails and it will get updated instantly. Pretty nifty right. (If you’re also interested, you can also moderate comments by replying to the email. For instance if you get a spam comment, simply reply with “spam” and it’ll handle it for you.
2.) Facebook shares can people who read your blog share your posts with a wider audience however, not all sites look good on Facebook when shared. If you don’t it’s best to look for a way to sort this out (e.g. implementing the Facebook opengraph plugin – where available). That isn’t the tip here though – the tip here is that if your site doesn’t look good when shared on Facebook you can find out why by debugging it on Facebook directly. Follow the Facebook link here to do so – https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/
3.) Site speed is very important and for blogs, one important thing you need to do to make your site faster is to optimise & resize the images for the internet. I’m not talking about cropping or just regular ol’ resizing. I’m talking about optimising the images so that they’re a fraction of the size that they were before while still retaining their quality. The tools to do so are free – for Apple Macs or Macbooks use iResize and for Windows PC use the free edition of Fotosizer (it does all you need it to)
4.) Did you know Twitter now has analytics? You might – in which case, good on you… or you might not – in which case head over to analytics.twitter.com to get started.
5.) Google analytics has demographics information in it (age, gender…etc) but if your info is too skewed, some of these details will be hidden from you (e.g. if most people who read your blog are women… or men… etc).
6.) Speaking of Google, Google page rank doesn’t exist anymore. It was noted last year that they would probably stop updating it and now they have. (See articles here, here and here). The ranking algorithm probably still exists within Google so keep doing all that good SEO stuff you’re doing, Google are just not sharing it publicly anymore so you will see an increase in Google traffic on your site even without the pagerank increasing if you do your SEO just right!
7.) Adding your BlogLovin deets to your posts is a great way to grow your blog. As an avid blog reader, I always find it so handy to have a nice reminder at the top, bottom or side of blog posts after discovering a new blog I have just discovered and fallen deep in lust with (with lots of great photos, stories and tips) so that I can follow whichever blog it is. It is frustrating to fall in love with a blog and having to look around for way to subscribe to the blog so make it easy for people who want to read more of your blog by adding an obvious and easy to find BlogLovin widget to your posts.
Also, I’ve been looking for a reason to share this video for ages! It’s a parody of travel in general and I just couldn’t help but laugh at some of the stuff she said. Awwwww, who am I kidding, I laughed at everything! This is a light hearted take on travel so do take it in the context in which it was meant – as a nice little way to giggle over the idiosyncrasies of travel… 🙂 🙂 🙂 Enjoy!
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