Blogging Stuff

I spend a lot of time blogging here so it is a good thing that I LOVE it! I love making things to write about but I also love the tech side of running a website and making it function the way I want it to. Every now and again people ask me about how it works and I’m happy to share. I have taught myself with tutorials online which are free for everyone. Here are  some of the things I have been learning about lately.

Bounce Rate

I recently learnt more about bounce rate. The bounce rate of a website is a measure of how long people spend on your site. It is measured by Google Analytics, but I learnt that it is sometimes not all that accurate. Deby over at Moms Make Money has written more about the details and how you can add a snippet of code to your site which will help your bounce rate measurement. I added it to mine yesterday so I’ll let you know whether it makes a difference.

Scroll Triggered Boxes

If you’ve visited recently you may have had a little box pop up from the left hand corner as you scrolled down the page. It has a little message in it about signing up to the Weekly News. This box is powered by a plugin called Scroll Triggered Boxes. You can easily add this to a WordPress site and put any content you wish in it – a popular post, a special offer or a link to your Google+ profile – anything! Just put the name in the search bag on the page where you add new plugins to find it.

EDIT: I’ve moved the box over to the right side where it doesn’t cover the post text while I try to work out why it isn’t closing like it should when you click the ‘x’. Thanks to those readers who took a moment to tell me it wasn’t working correctly!

Auto Responder Messages

Speaking of my Weekly News, I recently added some more emails to the auto responder. An auto responder is an email system that sends out a series of emails to your subscribers over a period of time. One of the reasons I chose to use Aweber for my email newsletter was to have this function. In Aweber they are called Follow Up messages. I have a series of ten or so emails that go out every three weeks over and above my weekly updates. These extra messages include links to older posts on my website that newer readers may not have found yet. My most recent additions are collections of crochet projects and kids crafts, and I have another quilting one almost ready to add to the list. It is part of my mission to share the most useful posts with my new readers now that I have over 1000 posts.

Pinterest Rich Pins

Have you seen that some Pinterest pins are not like the others? There are some that have a lot more detail about the website that they came from at the bottom of them. These are called Rich Pins. They can be pins that include pricing and availability information from Etsy, or pins that have recipe details for food pins. Recently Pinterest introduced Article Rich Pins which apply to websites that write articles – or in my case tutorials and posts. I started out reading an article talking about adding a plugin to gather all the information needed for rich pins, but then I read this article and discovered that I already had everything to get rich pins. It took about 3 days for my site to be assessed and approved.

Check whether you have all the information already on your blog for Rich Pins by entering the URL of one of your blog posts on this page: Rich Pins Validator

Flares

 

My favourite new addition is probably this Flares code from Filament. It collects data about where your article has been shared on social media and displays it nicely in one little row. I’m loving this! It is fascinating to see how many times something has been shared and where. Once you have signed up for a free Filament account, you can grab the code to add to your site and you’re all set. This is the info from my Balloon Powered Lego Car post – who knew?!

Find more blogging and social media tips over at my Pinterest Board:

Tips for Blogging and Social Media

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