If you’re using Google Analytics, you probably already know what a massively helpful tool it is for bloggers. But when it’s recording your own views, it can totally skew things (and either make you think you’re suddenly super popular, or that your visitors have really weird reading habits…). Either way, it won’t leave you with…
Your website–just like all of the internet–is made up of pages of code. Those pages get filed into folders so we developers can keep everything neat and tidy. It’s your internet browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, hopefully not Internet Explorer) that translates those thousands of lines of code to an interactive and good-looking website. So to…
For bloggers who want to go pro (or already are), site speed is HUGE. And it’s one of the things I’m asked to help with on blogs weekly. There are SO many factors that go into site speed, and I plan on blogging about a lot of them, but I wanted to start with my…
Want to know why your first time visitors leave your blog and never come back? Let me tell you a first-hand story. I recently clicked a Pinterest pin to a read a blog post about a specific hair problem I’ve always had. It was a fantastic tip. I was excited. So I went to see…
Categories are super important to your blog. Unfortunately, almost nobody tells that to new bloggers (especially those “Start a blog in 20 minutes!” posts). Special side-note request since I can’t help it: please don’t ever start your blog in 20 minutes. Take a proper amount of time, do research, and plan before you dive in…
Short cuts: The right structurePlan your categoriesFree printable category planner When most bloggers start blogging, categories are kind of an afterthought. Nobody explained how or why to set up categories strategically and so many food blogs end up with a disjointed list of both broad and narrow subjects. It’s never too late to get your…
Don’t care about details? Skip to the 2 second summary. It’s a little tricky to understand at first, but I’m going to try to make the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org easy. Let’s start at the beginning. Forget about .com and .org right now and let’s talk about WordPress alone. What is WordPress? WordPress itself…
Guys. Does your blog need any upgrades? 4 of my very favorite website and business tools are having huge Black Friday sales. And I may be jealous if you get to take advantage. Here they are (and they are affiliate links): SiteGround If your site is slow, if you’re having security issues, or are just…
At some point, you will receive a meta tag or tracking code that you will need to add to your blog. If your site is built on the Genesis framework, as all the ones I build are, adding that code is super-easy. In your dashboard, just hover over “Appearance” then click “Customize.” In there, scroll…
You got your RSS feed set up (woohoo!). But when you test it, there’s a line at the bottom that says “The post appeared first on” It shows in your MailChimp emails, MailerLite, in feed readers. And it’s annoying. Mostly because you can’t where it’s coming from. So where did the text come from? The Yoast…
A blog series is a great way to build engagement and create repeat visitors for your blog. What exactly is a series? Remember how TV shows used to occasionally end an episode in “To be continued…”? And then you couldn’t wait until next week to see what happened? Each episode was still an episode, but those…
UPDATE: While Tasty Recipes is a fine plugin, I do now definitely recommend WP Recipe Maker over it. While it’s still not quite as easy to set up, there are SO many more options for customizing it, and the customer service is AMAZING. Plus, there is a free version you can get started with. Before…
Before I tell you how to change your domain name’s DNS info, I want to give you a quick explanation of what it all means. That way what you’re doing will make sense and if the particular company you’re using does things a little different than my instructions, you’ll be able to figure it out…
Moving the labels on a contact form to inside the fields is as easy as replacing the word “Label” with the word “Placeholder.” Really. We’ll use a simple Jetpack contact form as our example, but it’s basically the same procedure for MailChimp sign up forms or any other forms you can access the HTML or…
On average, I get an email about once a month asking “Why aren’t my latest blog posts showing on my home page? The blog post is there, but it won’t show up on the home page.” It’s a maddening issue that is becoming a pretty common problem. Every single time someone has asked me that,…
When you use the Read More links on your blogger blog, it just adds a tiny text link to the bottom of your posts that can be pretty easy for readers to miss. And it’s not very pretty either. By default, the Blogger read more link will look like this: Not very noticeable. Click on…
It’s pretty easy to add your Pinterest profile to your Blogger sidebar. (If you prefer to watch me do it rather than read, there is a quick video tutorial below the instructions!) To add Pinterest to your Blogger blog, we’ll first create the Widget on Pinterest’s website, then we’ll just copy and paste the code…
In this quick tutorial, I’ll show you how to add your Instagram pictures to Blogger. It’s free, it’s fast, and it’s easy. (If you learn better from watching, there is a video tutorial at the bottom of the post.) Here are the instructions for adding Instagram to Blogger: First, we’re going to create the widget…