In this guest article, writer Alvina Lopez highlights the benefits of writing guest posts to build your brand.

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As a freelance writer who has worked primarily online, I can think of no better, fairly recent phenomenon for bloggers of all sorts than guest posting. While most guest post gigs aren’t paid, it’s an incredible opportunity to grow your brand or spread the word about your writing organically.

What’s more, there are a host of other benefits that come with the territory. It truly is a win-win situation for bloggers who accept guest posts as well as for bloggers who write them. Here’s why you should get on the guest post bandwagon:

1. It brings more traffic to your site.
This is the most obvious draw of writing guest posts. When you submit a post to another blog, and in your byline you list your own blog, you’ll be potentially drawing an entirely new set of readers to discover the writing you put out on your own platform.

Of course, this means you have to place a strong emphasis on writing quality articles that directly appeal to the readers of the blog to which you are submitting. Just churning out tons of low-quality guest posts doesn’t by proxy equate to more traffic on your own site.

2. It establishes you as an expert in various fields.
Just as in the real world, on the blogosphere and the Internet at large, reputation is everything. If you write for high-quality, heavily trafficked sites in niches about which you know a lot, you’ll soon earn a solid reputation as your guest posts are retweeted and spread organically.

Establishing this sort of reputation as an expert is an instrumental part of growing your blog and your brand.

3. It improves your writing.
Writing guest posts poses a unique challenge that you won’t contend with writing for your own blog. When you write guest posts, you must learn to strike a balance between adhering to the general style and subject of the blog, while still giving the readers a fresh voice and perspective.

You’ll also have to read the blog extensively to figure out what, precisely, the typical reader wants. All these considerations naturally make you a more versatile and skilled writer.

4. It’s an easy way to build connections with other bloggers.
There’s an inherent community aspect to guest blogging that, at least in my opinion, is just as gratifying as receiving more traffic and establishing your reputation. Even if only virtually, writing guest posts will enable you to meet bloggers from all over the Internet.

The mutual exchange of fresh content for recognition is a wonderful way in which bloggers can learn from one another. Especially considering that there’s so much junk and black hat tricks out there on the Internet, guest blogging is an honest and wholesome breath of fresh air. It helps others, while in the process helping you as well. What could be better than that?

About this guest author
Alvina Lopez is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments, email her at alvina.lopez@gmail.com Image credit.

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Want to grow your brand? Start writing guest posts

Due to receiving a steady stream of enquiries about submitting guest articles, I thought an F.A.Q. was in order. If you are a writer interested in submitting content to www.andrewkeir.com, please read the following.

A few simple rules, I’m sure none of them will come as a surprise.

• Relevant subject matter – Submitted articles must obviously be relevant to this website. Topics discussed on www.andrewkeir.com include branding, logo design, stationery design, SEO & social networking, blogging, web design and other graphic design related topics. If you are looking to submit articles related to any of the above fields then this is the place for you.
• Outbound links – Outbound links are fine where appropriate and relevant to the subject at hand. Articles bloated with links/anchor text without editorial value will not be accepted. (All outbound links may have the rel="nofollow" tag at my discretion.)
• Unique, quality content – Articles must be of suitable quality and should be unique to www.andrewkeir.com. If you are submitting/syndicating the same article across loads of other websites then thank you, but no thank you.
• Author credit – Naturally you will be credited as the author for the article, and you’re welcome to include a short byline promoting your services and website.

  You’re obviously welcome (encouraged, in fact) to promote the article through your own channels for mutual benefit.

Good? Good.

If you’d like to become a guest author, contact me via this page; please don’t leave a comment here. Image credit.

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Information for guest authors

After months of neglect, andrewkeir.com gets a new WordPress theme design. The old design can be seen above, while the new site is all around you.

Why the change now? A few reasons, initially my site was designed with three columns to keep all site navigation above the fold ( as well as other reasons ). Without creating an unusually wide site this unfortunately restricts the body of the site to be relatively small. The body has gone from a modest 500px wide to a healthy 640px.

With the recent changes to the Google image search and some future plans not suitable for the original 500px wide body it was time for an upgrade. Big images obviously look great as well.

More to come!

More changes as well as a return to regular blog posts are due to start shortly. Any feedback on the changes are of course welcome.

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New WordPress theme, now bigger and better!

After deleting the daily dose of spam from my blog earlier, I got to thinking… Between the spam filters, nofollow links and site administrators defending their blogs, is any of it getting through?

Over the years I’ve visited hundreds of blogs, if not more, and only 2-3 occasions come to mind where an obviously spammed comment is actually displayed on a site. Just about everyone has spam protection or filters or some sort on their site, WordPress has shipped with one for quite some time now. At the least, comment spam is immediately recognisable in 99% of cases and easily dealt with.

The only place I can imagine said comments getting through to is the occasional abandoned site, which due to that very fact are less likely to be found. And when found any link left obviously won’t carry much weight from and SEO point of view.

I realise the majority of spam is automated bots, software etc. though initial set up is obviously required, and presumably some amount of ongoing work as well. However little the effort may be, with the absolute minimal amount of comments that get through, it would seem that doing just about anything else would be more productive.

What do you think?

If you’ve worked closely on combating spam in one way or another, or have any figures on the “miss” rate of filters etc. I’d be curious to know. Image credit.

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Are comment spammers getting anywhere?

After a friends WordPress blog/server was hacked recently I took a deeper look into securing my site beyond the default security available. While there are plenty of security enhancement plugins available on WordPress.org, essentially all that I saw had poor ratings, insufficient feedback, were untested with current WordPress versions or were otherwise not what I wanted.

Instead, there is a simple, fool-proof way to protect the admin section of your blog by restricting it to your unique IP with a .htaccess file. Be aware, this is not the .htaccess file in your root directory. Applying this information to that file will prevent anyone from accessing your blog at all.

To secure your admin pages, create a new .htaccess file in your http://www.domain.com/wp-admin/ directory and copy the following code.

order deny,allow
deny from all
#home
allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
#office
allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
#etc
allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Replace the descriptions and enter the IP addresses of your home, office, mobile etc. and you will deny any outsider access to this entire section of your blog. In the event your IP address changes, you will be locked out temporarily but simply have to update the file to reflect your new details.

Much easier.

In my opinion, using a plugin to achieve this is more complicated than it needs to be. By using a .htaccess file instead you’ll never have to worry about updates, version incompatibilities, bugs etc. Simple and secure. Image credit.

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It’s nearly two years ago now that I converted my static HTML website to the blog you see before you. As this was my first blog and also my first WordPress theme some mistakes were to be expected. In retrospect though, there’s a lot I could have done better.

#1 A finished WordPress theme design.

I knew when I started that I wanted a clean, simple, content focused design to my site. 3 column, header and footer as you see before you. I was overly eager in wanting to get content posted, and once I had this basic layout and my design was approaching completion I began spending more time writing blog posts instead of finalising the design.

Due to the division of attention little flaws went unnoticed, sections of coding were sloppy or invalid, basically my site wasn’t being all it could be. Once the initial frenzy of posts slowed down I fixed all the issues, but I’d had been better off delaying the blogging itself for a few weeks and finishing the design.

#2 Quality & quantity of content.

“Content is king” as they say, but in the race for quantity the quality of some posts was extremely lacking. Posts/comments on YouTube videos, single logos with a pinch of copy that basically boiled down to “I really like this logo”, anything that was reasonably quick, easy and design related.

While these posts might warrant a quick glance they weren’t going to inspire any conversation (which somewhat defeats the purpose of a blog), weren’t very original and definitely weren’t going to gain any social momentum or backlinks.

As time went by the quality of my articles got better and in comparison the rushed posts looked even worse. When I reached around the 150 post mark I went back and deleted at least 50 articles that weren’t contributing to the quality of my blog.

In the time I wasted churning out these 50 I could have written 5 quality, interesting articles that would have served me far better.

#3 Planning for potential advertising.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I had the thought of advertising on my blog for a passive income, though as the design came together it wasn’t really taken into consideration. There are many standard sizes of advertising available and planning a web design around them is pretty flexible.

When looking into advertising more at a later date, I later found that the columns of my blog were not the correct size to accommodate the closest available ad formats.

Luckily I was only a few pixels out and was able to change the widths without any negative impact on the design. If and when I decide to monetize my blog further they will now drop into the design fine, but again it would have been time saved if I’d done this in the beginning.

#4 Social networking / bookmarking.

I suppose it’s fair to say search engines are where you want your site to perform best, but social networking and bookmarking sites are such a huge part of online marketing now-a-days that they’re hard to ignore.

I was originally of the opinion that twitter etc. was little more than people following each other for the purpose of promoting there own content while not actually caring about anyone else. It was about 7 months before I got involved with Twitter and Digg etc. and they’ve since turned into sources of significant traffic, links and the occasional bit of work.

Who knows what opportunities might have been missed. A front page article on Digg certainly would have kicked my site into gear early.

C’est la vie.

It’s easy of course to look back and see all the things you could have done better, but what can you do. With 250+ decent articles attracting business and traffic growing since the launch things are going good.

I’m in the process of launching a second blog at the moment, and armed with hindsight it’s coming together at twice the speed of the first. Hopefully this blog advice helps you do the same. Image credit.

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So your web design is finished, you’ve got pages and pages of quality content with traffic and blog comments galore. If your anything like me, all that’s left to do now is obsess over every infinitesimal detail imaginable to improve your perfectly fine website.

If that sounds like you, you’ll probably be interested in minifying ( See, now the picture of the Morris Mini makes sense… ) your css/code.

The purpose of minifying your site is cut down unnecessary bandwidth usage/load times. The reduction in file size is usually around 20% – 40% which for a 10kb style sheet obviously isn’t a lot, but hey, every bit counts, especially for high traffic sites.

Take this code for example;

h1 {
font-size: 18px;
font-wei ght: bold;
font-family: Helvetica;}

h2 {
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: bold;
font-family: Helvetica;}

p {
font-size: 14px;
line-height: 18px;
font-family: Helvetica;}

a {
color:#D71920;
text-decoration:none;}

a:hover{
text-decoration: underline;}

Your CSS probably looks something like this and with good reason, it’s clean and easy to follow. Once you’re design is finished however there’s space to be saved here.

By changing your code to this;

h1{font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; font-family: Helvetica;}
h2{font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; font-family: Helvetica;}
p{font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; font-family: Helvetica;}
a{color:#D71920; text-decoration:none;}
a:hover{text-decoration: underline;}

You remove any unnecessary data while retaining all the required information for your stylesheet.

Tiny I know.

If you CSS isn’t laid out like this don’t panic, the more user-friendly layout works perfectly fine. But as I said, if your looking for something new to obsess over…

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Squeeze the last drop of performance from your site – Minify your CSS

With the boom of social networking over the last few years, there’s a lot more traffic to be squeezed out of your website beyond just having good search engine optimization.

Social network and bookmarking sites such as Twitter, StumbleUpon and Digg have the potential to bring in huge traffic. And while every site can be found through search engines not every one is using these tools, giving you a potential leg up on the competition.

The only downside is social networking requires regular work, and getting to the front page of Digg etc. for a huge boost in exposure requires a little luck. There’s a lot of competition on social bookmarking sites and writing a fantastic article doesn’t guarantee it won’t slip through the cracks.

If you are fortunate enough to have an article land on the front page however, the results are undeniable. It wouldn’t be the first time a web hosting server has been brought down by the huge traffic burst of an article featured on Digg.

Search engines are somewhat the opposite.

A search engine will crawl and index all your worthy content sooner or later without any input on your part, you can’t however put any extra effort into directly affecting search engine results even if you wanted to.

Your place in a search engines results is ultimately deciding by the engine based on your content, the more quality content the better your result, but unlike social networking you can repeatedly promote yourself to a search engine for increased traffic.

Search engine traffic is also slow to get going. In order to help prevent spam sites continually popping up, Google has what is commonly referred to as the sandbox. The reference is symbolic of children (new websites) playing in a sandbox until they’re all grown up and ready for the big wide world.

While there’s no official word on this from Google, it is believed that the sandbox effect lasts 4 months or so, during which you won’t see much traffic search engine wise. Once your out however, search engines provide a steady stream of targeted visitors with no additional work required on your behalf.

Ultimately it’s all good. If you don’t have the time/inclination to keep up the social front, search engines will bring you visitors but there’s plenty to gain from social sites if you can utilize them.

Where do you get your traffic from?

As a point of interest I’ve included the above graphic detailing my traffic sources for the last 3 months, for me social bookmarking plays a huge roll.

At the time of writing, Stumbleupon is bringing me 45% of my visitors, Twitter brings in about 11%, Google 35% while the last 9% is made up from blog comments, lesser search engines etc. How about you?

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It’s been a few months since I began blogging, and while I’m now getting regular quality comments, for every 1 there are 20+ spam. Most of them are either blatant adverting or gibberish, but occasionally you get a gem like these.

Kamikaze pilots have large helmets.

Wouldn’t want to bump your head as you fly a plane loaded with explosives into a battle ship.

I’m in oil!

Oh no!

Win the girl of your dreams, grow your tomatoes.

So tomatoes are the key to a woman’s heart, so much for chocolate and flowers.

Very insightful.
I especially like the tone.
All blogs should do this.
Great example you are setting here.
Really, I mean that sincerely.
All the best, from your friend.

Why do I get the feeling some subliminal messaging is at work here…

I just love your weblog! Very nice post! Still you can do many things to improve it.

Buy Viagrax.

Nothing helps you write like lead in your pencil.

Hello,
Did you ever think about creating your very own blog? There are many excellent platforms, but by far the best is WordPress.

I have thought about creating a wordpress blog, this one as it happens…

I won’t bore your with the rest of the message as its quite long, but it goes on to tell me all about this great service he is recommending that created his create his custom wordpress theme before forgetting to leave the address in his comment. Super.

What’s the time?

12:20 at the moment…

I wanted you to know that. I work with you, and I love you.

I’m self employed, so either I have schizophrenia or maybe my muse has a thing for me…

I know this has nothing to do with what you wrote, but I found this great website for free ring tones www.website.com.

P.S. Don’t be an ass, this is not spam.

Oh it’s not spam? My mistake, because I totally thought it was.

Hello,

Please check my blogs:
( Insert 10 website address’ here )

This is nooooo spam! Really!

See, again I’d have been wrong. It’s a good thing people are thoughtful enough to point out that they’re not spamming you.

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

Well, obviously.

Hmm…

They’re almost funny enough to make the spam worth while, almost…

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Bizarre blog comments

If you’re not familiar with the term, hot-linking refers to linking to images stored on another webpage that the linker doesn’t own/operate, this is a strict no-no of online etiquette. The reason is that by hot-linking, you’re essentially stealing the bandwidth that the original web operator is paying for.

At some point you’ve no doubt visited a website expecting to see a particular image, only to be greeted by an image that said something along the lines of “Hotlinking is not allowed. Please visit www.website.com to view this image.”

For website operators deciding whether or not to prevent hot-linking would seem like a no-brainer, but depending on your type of website it can have a downside.

If you have a static web page there’s no problem with stopping hot-linking, but if you’re running a blog and providing an RSS feed for your readers preventing hot-linking causes a problem.

The way the prevention works is by checking the site requesting the image. To protect my images I would prevent all sites except http://www.andrewkeir.com from accessing my images.

The problem is that this also block RSS readers such as Google reader, My Yahoo! & Newsgator etc. While you can specify which sites to allow, there are dozens of RSS readers out there, if not more and any not allowed to use your images will be filled with your blocking image only.

Obviously any readers using unspecified readers won’t be subscribed to your feed for long, therein lies the problem.

What to do, what to do.

Do you stop hot-linking? Has this had an effect on your RSS subscribers?

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When launching a new web page or blog, the design itself is only half the work. There’s also a lot of I’s to dot and T’s to cross when it comes to things like search engine optimization, traffic analysis and points of contact.

None of these factors have any effect on the appearance of your site and can be overlooked, here I’ve compiled a list of forget me nots for your next ( or recent ) web page or blog.

Search engine optimization

At a minimum you should need the basic SEO of title, description and keywords. e.g.

• Title : Andrew Keir – Logo designer, web designer, graphic designer.
• Description: Graphic designer from Sydney, Australia…
• Keywords: logo design, graphic design, web design etc…

You should also have a sitemap. A sitemap is a list of your entire sites content, this list is read by search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. and ensures all your content is promptly discovered.

There are 2 plug-ins, All in One SEO and Google XML sitemap which manage both these for you if your running a WordPress blog. You can read more about these and other useful plugins here.

Check your contact and form details

This ones pretty straight forward, check your email address and any mailto: links are correct and also any contact or submission forms are working.

I’m sure you’d hate to find 3 months down the track that your point of contact isn’t working.

Create a Favicon

A Favicon is the image that shows next to your web page address in internet browsers and also when your web page is bookmarked and adds to your branding.

On my page for example you can see I use a lowercase a in 1 of my corporate colours and typeface of my logo, Futura LT Medium Bold.

RSS and email subscriptions

Another blog only step, this is much the same as checking your email and contact forms, subscribe to both to ensure they are working. Also be sure to have a RSS icon, this is the standard symbol your readers will look for when subscribing to your site.

You could use either the standard orange RSS symbol, the feedburner count icon or there are a tonne of custom icons available if you search Google.

Check multiple browser compatibility

With the dozens of browsers out there what you see isn’t necessarily the same as the next person. At a minimum you probably want to check Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. These are the standard most common Windows, Mac and third party browsers.

There are more, Camino, Chrome, Opera etc. and each browser has a up to a dozen versions. Obviously your not going to be able to test every single possible browser but be sure to test a few.

W3C validation

The W3C Markup Validation webpage is a free service that checks the markup language of your web page for any problems with your code.

This is useful because as explained previously not all browsers interpret code in the same way. While some may correct or ignore the error, others will not. The validation service will find any errors in your code and allow you to fix them without having to discover the problem yourself.

Google Analytics or other traffic monitoring service.

Google Analytics is code placed in the footer of your web page that tracks visits to your blog. It records facts such as unique visitors, returning visitors, their country of origin and how they found your site. Google Analytics will show whether they entered your URL directly, followed a link from a referring site or found you via search results in Google or other search engines.

Using this information you can track the improvement of your site as time goes by and work on any areas that could use some attention. Your web most may also provide a similar traffic monitoring program which you can use instead of or as well as Google Analytics.

An about or welcome page

While the posts your publish are what’s going to bring people to your site, it’s important to have an about page to give you’re visitors some insight into who you are and what your about.

This is particularly important if your selling a service, these pages will probably be your visitors next stop after the post that they arrived on.

Social networking / bookmarking icons

Social bookmarking is a great way to spread and promote your content. If you visitors like what they read, social booking icons are a call to action for your readers to easily bookmark your post on their preferred social network such as Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon etc.

Having your readers continually bookmark you posts to these networks builds your sites exposure and possibly back-links depending on the particular site. Without these icons your readers are otherwise unlikely to promote your content in this way. If you’re looking for a place to start, the plug-in used on this site is SexyBookmarks.

That ought to do it.

It’s a long tedious list I know, but getting it done first will give you the best start you can have. If I’ve missed anything you think should be here let me know.

Don’t forget to use my social networking buttons *hint hint*

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Many blogs achieve some measure of success by having an article featured on the front page of Digg, Slashdot or other social bookmarking website.

All too often though, the procedure goes like this:

• You publish an article
• Your article is featured on Digg ( hooray )
• Your site is then, what could only be called assaulted, by an enormous amount of simultaneous visitors ( hooray ? )
• Your web hosts SQL server then crashes ( not hooray… ) resulting in your website and the websites of anyone sharing your SQL server to go offline.
• You’re then contacted by the unhappy technical support person from your web hosting company who is responsible for fixing the server you just broke.

The ability of your blog to withstand such traffic will primarily depend on your hosting arrangement, whether you have dedicated or shared hosting, and various other factors. There is however something to help you survive, a caching plugin.

When someone visits your blog, your SQL server dynamically creates the page they have requested, when X amount of Digg visitors suddenly and simultaneously visit your site, your SQL server is likely to have a heart attack. What caching plugins do is create static copies of your articles, so that the pages are be sent without your SQL server having to create them for each individual visitor.

This doesn’t reduce the amount of bandwidth used or data transferred by your host, but it takes the stress off your SQL server reducing the likely hood of a crash.

A caching plug-in also regenerates the pages at regular intervals, so any changes your make or new comments left are updated, this is usually every 10 to 30 minutes depending on your settings.

As for what plugin to use there are a number of choices, two of the most popular are WP-Cache and WP Super Cache. Which one you pick is up to you though, personally I’m using WP Super Cache but that’s not to say WP-Cache isn’t just as good.

If your serious about your blogging and social bookmarking, have a look into these plugins and future proof your site for the day you hopefully hit the front page.

What are your thoughts?

Has your site crashed or survived a Digg front page listing? Can you suggest any better caching plug-ins?

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Make your blog “Digg Proof” with caching plugins

Monetizing your blog can be a little tricky. Most themes are designed around content and navigation rather than advertisements, and with Googles limited range of available Adsense sizes, things don’t always go together perfectly.

If your looking to monetize your WordPress blog, here are 10 Adsense ready wordpress themes to get you started. There are a variety of ad placement locations depending on your style, everything from 125×125 pixels boxes to 728×90 pixel leaderboards.

First up, DarkZen, a simple, clean and minimalist design.

Connections by Vanilla Mist.

BlueSensation is a clean theme with a traditional look: large content column on the left and a single sidebar, ready to display 125×125 ads.

Monetizing the web’s MW theme.

Decker comes with a 300×250 AdSense unit integrated. All you will need to do is to copy and paste your AdSense code on the advertisement.php file.

Prosense by Dosh Dosh. This blog run by Maki is dedicated to online marketing and has tonnes of useful information on the subject if your looking to further your knowledge.

Deep Blue includes a 336×280 Adsense unit on top of the sidebar, Googles best performing ad unit.

Passion duo comes with a 468×60 banner spot on the header, and 6 125×125 spots on top of the sidebar.

Studiopress comes with three units integrated already. A 468×60 unit on top, a 336×280 unit on top of the sidebar and a 120×600 unit on the bottom of the sidebar.

A quick note…

Now you’ve got range of themes to choose from, an important thing to consider is when to monetize your blog. As tempting as it might be start advertising a.s.a.p. you probably want to put it off until you’ve got a decent amount of content.

Nothing will put your visitors off more than a website full of ads and no information.

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If you’ve been writing a blog for a while and revisited any of your posts you might have noticed that they have many saved “revisions” accompanying them. The older the posts, they more they have, some are likely to have dozens of saves.

The reason is, WordPress continually saves post instances, even for published posts, so can you revert to them later if you so desire.

The problem is, these posts exponentially bloat your WordPress database file with otherwise useless data, which will inevitably slow the performance of your database.

When disabling this myself, I had around 130 posts and over 1400 revisions which made up around 80% of my database file. As time goes by you can imagine how much more redundant data is added.

If you wish to disable this feature for your own WordPress blog simply add the following code to your wp-config file in the root directory of your WordPress installation.

/** Stops WordPress continually saving revisions */
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Don’t forget!

As always, back up your database before making any changes. If you’re not confident, plenty of WordPress support information is available before you get started.

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At the time of writing, the current WordPress version is 2.7.1, to change the logo displayed in your login panel open the file /wp-admin/images/logo-login.gif and replace it with your own logo.

Some older versions used the files login-bkg-tile.gif and login-bkg-bottom.gif, and future versions may change again so you may have to look for these files instead if you are running a different version.

Easy peasy!

Changing the login graphic is a 10 second job that just helps to make your WordPress login panel feel like home.

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