Posts

Posted on

The Five Deadliest Things You Do To Your Blog

Mind you I have learned these from experience both from long-term personal blogging and ghost blogging; here are five things you definitely DO NOT want to do on your blog.

  1. Never talk about real-world customers. Never if you change their names and circumstances. They will see themselves in your blog post and be angry. Don’t risk the bad blood.
  2. Never trash competitors or a product. Blog posts are forever, you can do a review and present pros and cons, but trashing is simply crossing that line of providing information. Being vindictive in a blog post can get you sued. Don’t waste time doing it, vent to your friends.
  3. Don’t stray from your main topic. If you are blogging for business stay tuned to that topic and your readership. If you start offering toe nail care tips when you should be talking about Internet marketing you will definitely turn off your readers. You can digress once or twice but get in the habit of digressing and readers will chop you.
  4. Don’t make your blog post a dissertation. Shorter is better, but not too short. My guideline is about 250 words on one thread. Need more space, break the thought up into parts.
  5. Don’t get hung up on comments or lack thereof. People do read your blog. If you are not getting comments or feed subscribers this does not mean that people are not reading. Still only 7% of all readers will be getting your news via feed technology. Just a few will choose to get your blog posts by email if you have this set up on Feedburner and your blog. Most will actually bookmark your blog’s home page and visit using a browser.

I’m sure I have more deadly blog crashers, but this post is getting long so that’ll be another post. :0)

Posted on

Are You Taking Credit Cards Online? Why Not?

Just about every website owner should be allowing online payments especially when PayPal makes it so terribly easy to help your customers pay you on time.

Some websites need a mini store, and some just need a user-selected amount payment option, but nearly every business should have a PayPal option.

When I started to do auto-billing for repeat business clients using their credit card on file with us, I cut the time that I had to track down late payments out of my work schedule. By making it easier to pay for my services not only did I get paid on time within my terms, but those who had been late payers before were able to become prompt payers with my new policies. This has allowed me to focus on selling and take less time and lower my frustration level with slow paying clients.

In fact as taking credit cards online has been so successful for my own business I now have a virtual terminal allowing me to take phone orders, repeat billing requests, and to process a client’s credit card without their intervention.

If you have a website you should really consider why you aren’t taking credit cards online. it’s easy just get your feet wet with PayPal and then if you need to look for other options after you have some success you can springboard from there.

Posted on

Don’t Defeat Accessibility on Your Website

Some people need extra help surfing the Web. Some use readers to actually read the content of a web page and others need to enlarge the text of websites using Tools >>Text Size. When your web designer creates your page design and uses a pixel size for fonts instead of a percentage or an em, you are defeating the ability for readers who need extra help to get it.

As a web designer myself I do like to have control, but now there are many new options that designers and site owners simply need to be aware of to help. One new option is to use a global style sheet that controls your fonts, font sizes, colors, and links all on one page for the entire website. Another one to be aware of is to describe font sizes in a percentage or as an em, which is the width of the letter m in any font. Using these font descriptions instead of using a pixel width description allows your reader to resize the font as needed.

Web designers need to design especially for use of font accessibility, it is not something that can be added as an after thought but rather as an integral part of a new design.

I am currently in the process of redesigning my 1221 page website and am incorporating improved accessibility features in my new website. So when you hit a website where the font doesn’t change even when you click largest font, you will now that the web designer has defeated one of the biggest tools on the Web that shouldn’t be tinkered with to help people who need it.