Q&A

Q: Is it necessary to make your blog design match your website?

A:Good question and one commonly asked. It really depends. Anytime a blog is tied to your business, try to go for a blog design that compliments your website or your brand.

This doesn’t mean your websites and blogs must look exactly alike. Find a color palette that would represent your brand and try keeping the basic color scheme. You can always play around with the header and actual graphics, but as much as possible, maintain a similar look and feel. Generally, it’s good for people to feel like they are in the same family of sites as they move from one place to another.

A client couldn’t figure out why her RSS feeds were loading into the browser nicely but all the directories and FeedBurner kept rejecting her feed. When you’re up against an RSS feed error, the best thing to do is to see if it validates. Basically, you run your RSS feed through a service that tells you if it’s properly formatted or not. 99% of the time, feeds don’t work properly because they don’t validate.

But what does it all mean? Usually, it just means you have some invalid characters. This happens a lot if you type your post up in a word processor like Microsoft Word and then paste it into your blog. Generally, typing anything into a word processor and pasting it anywhere online is a bad idea because when you copy the text, you’re not only copy plain text, you copy some formatting along with it which gets pasted into your blog, website etc. This will almost always cause errors in your RSS feed.

That was what happened to my client. So, she had to go back into all her old blog posts and edit out the invalid characters and all is well now.

To validate your feed, just go to Feed Validator, type in your RSS feed URL and click Validate. If there are errors, it’ll show you where they are.

Q: When setting up a web site, can I use Linux with WordPress?

A: Absolutely! WordPress was built on systems that work best on Linux. That doesn’t mean you can’t put it on a Windows web host. As long as your web host has PHP and MySQL (you don’t have to know the nitty gritty technical parts just as long as they have it) you’re good to go.

If you need a web host, I recommend Arvixe - I’ve run countless WordPress installs on them for years without issues and don’t let their super low prices fool you either. Or, try MomWebs. They gets lot’s of praises from happy users.

Q: How do I incorporate affiliate links within the text of my wordpress blog?

A: Adding links to a blog post is as simple as hitting the link button in the editor when you’re writing a new blog post, and pasting the affiliate link provided to you by the merchant. But, if you’re asking how to have the affiliate links appear automatically linked whenever you post a certain word or phrase, then you’ll need something else like Intellitext or ContextCash.

Other than that, there is a software that I use - BlogAutoPublisher that does this as well. It’s not a monthly service and it can do a lot more than just linking your keywords to affiliate products.

If you’re referring to other affiliate codes for example, Commission Junction and Linkshare have special codes where an image is embedded in the link. Again, it’s as simple as pasting it into the post while writing. If you’re using WordPress and have the WYSIWYG editor turned on, click the HTML button to reveal the raw HTML codes and paste it in there.

Q: Do you have any suggestions to where to start a blog for a business?

A: This quite a large question and I’m not sure I understand what exactly you’re asking, but here are some suggestions.

If you’re asking what you can use, I’ll say WordPress. Yes, even though there are other blogging systems you can use, WordPress is versatile, highly customizable, has a large number of plugins so you can make your blog do *almost* anything and more importantly the blog is on your site - not someone else’s.

If you’re asking how to start one - that’s a huge topic which I cannot cover in a post. But this is also why I created the Blogging Starter Pack for small businesses. In the course, we go through the very beginning. Understanding why exactly you need one and how it helps your business, to what to use, how to set it up, the proper settings so you get the most exposure including SEO and more.

Q: Blogger is free; is it sufficiently intuitive to figure out, and does it have the means to capture names and email addresses?

A: The answer is no (and in case you’re wondering Wordpress doesn’t have it built in either but you can get free plugins to do so). You can also add email and name capture to any blog using a email list manager you are already using like Aweber or you can signup for a free one if you don’t have on already at Email Aces or FeedBlitz. These services will provide you with HTML code which you simply paste into your blog template.

I highly advise you use a service as opposed to a plugin to manage your newsletters. This is because some plugins do not have the ability to schedule your newsletter or put them on a autoresponder list. Furthermore, you should be collecting contact information from more places than your blog. But, you should put the signup forms on your blog as well to maximize your newsletter’s exposure.

Second reason is, it’s all too easy for you to run into deliverability problems running a list from your own servers and finally, if you’re going to do so, you must keep your plugins up to date or risk having people use it to spam your list or other people because there is a security hole running an older version.

One of my newsletter subscribers recently sent me a copy of blogging advise someone had given her. She has an online store and has started blogging but would like to make her blog more effective. Being unsure, what to do she came to me for a second opinion. Here’s some bits of what she was told. There are other bits of pro arguments too and overall pretty balanced but I would like to highlight two points that jumped up.

if the blog is on your site, it takes up database space — which slows down your shopping cart. No biggie for a person who isn’t selling stuff — but, as you know, time is a huge factor in online shopping and if it takes too long for pages to load are carts to get products into them, you lose your audience really fast

with your site hosted by someone else, you also get the benefits of their blogroll — meaning the links to other blogs that you and others put on your sites….others can easily blogroll you to give you those coveted return-links

Here’s what I think:
Database speed is a valid concern of course but a good web host will be able to handle multiple database queries at once without a hitch. Many a times if you look at the execution time of the scripts, including shopping carts, many of them are done in 10ths or 100’s of a second. It’s not something an average shopper will notice.

Despite it all, a blog is usually pretty lean and run with minimal of resources. Out of the many blogs I’ve helped people set up, I have not encountered a problem with this and one of the sites I run is a hosted shopping cart. If your database or script is slow, it’s more likely something you’d take up with your host. That said, to optimize things, it’s always better to have the shopping cart on one database and any other scripts like a blog on another database. This cuts down the queries on one database. Alternatively, you can always use Blogger to publish your blog to your site. Blogger does not use any database but rather builds regular HTML pages and copies it over to your site.

The biggest reason you want the blog on your site is because you will be building traffic for your site. If you build a blog on blogstream, blogspot or any place where you don’t own the domain, you’re building traffic for other people’s site, not yours. If that company decides not to offer that service anymore or you outgrow it, you’ll lose all that hard earned traffic immediately.

That same rule applies to link backs you have built. The links people use to link back to you doesn’t belong to you if you don’t own the domain. Besides, you can build a blogroll on a blog that’s hosted on your site. The key thing here is building for long term. When we’re in business, we’re in it for the long term, so why build a blog for the short term?

If you’re hoping to get traffic from a network of blogs who are using the same blogging system, you need to consider, how valuable that kind of traffic is. I would rather have 100 people who are really interested in my niche, who I have a better chance to convert into a lead or customer than 1000 people who are just blog hopping. Wouldn’t you?

Here’s two very interesting questions I received.

I’m a financial advsior. My lawyers sent a huge disclaimer, insisting it be on the front page and on the very top of the blog. I feel it’s unreasonable since their own blog links to a disclaimer page not on the front page. I’d love to start a blog but this has prevented me from doing so. - Tom

Fo you have any experience or knowledge in working with “full disclosure” and blogs in the heavily regulated financial services sector? - Doug

Well thank you for the questions guys. Whoo! You really gave me a tough one didn’t ya? Ok… let me first cover my legal stuff ;-). I’m not a lawyer (but you already knew that) and when dealing with legal matters, please consult an attorney. I’m also not familiar with the financial sector but… what I do know is this.

I agree with you Tom, that does seem very extreme. I’ve seen many financial blogs that of course have disclaimers and notices but none of them have it up on the very top and if they do… it’ll most likely be a link not a huge chapter size one. I think if I were you, I’d ask for a second or third opinion from of course other attorneys.

If they all still recommend it, the time has come for negotiation. Could you have a link to the disclaimers or maybe a prominent button or banner that gives a quick explanation and can be clicked through to a full length disclaimer page. You can put these in your templates so that it appears on every page or even at the bottom of every post.

You know, blog readers are unlike regular Internet crowd. They are smarter and more technologically savvy all around. I would say most know to take the things they read online especially on a blog with a pinch of salt and they understand when it comes to legal and financial stuff it’s best to speak with their own lawyers and consultants. But guess I’m preaching to the choir huh? All the best and I hope you find a middle ground with your lawyers.

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Oh no! This post is for members only. We’d love to have you. Join Us. If you are already a member and think this is a mistake, shoot us an email. We’ll be happy to help you out.