About Kelly

Blogs run by moms tend to be graphic heavy and that’s to be expected. Moms, even those who are blogging as a business, often think of their blog as an extension of their home. That means they decorate it like they would a room in their house. The focal point? The blog header graphic!

From a strategic viewpoint, many mom blog header graphics are too big. They take up valuable real estate on the site and do little to earn it’s keep.

More and more though, we’re impressed with blog headers we’re seeing.

Today’s example: More with Less Today

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Click on the image to see it full size on the site

The graphic is attractive, contemporary and useful – from the navigation to the social media and subscription area.

Good job Lori! Please pass along our kudos to your graphic artist!

We all like to display a series of Social Media icons on our sidebar so our visitors can find and follow us on social networks, right?  (We do!)

Showing the icons is a great idea but making space for them on our sidebar starts to be challenging as the number of interesting social networks grow.

The Sticky Social Profiles plugin takes care of the problem for us.  It moves all of our social icons over to the side of our blog – visible but not obtrusive.  When a visitor arrives, they notice the little graphic on the left (or right – depending on how you configure it) and they click to access all of the social network links.

You may not consider the space saved on our sidebar a big deal, but when you need to keep an ad network graphic ‘above the fold’ like we do, every inch counts.

The plugin is set up to display these icons: Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, RSS, Tumblr, Twitter.  You use what you like and leave those you’re not active with empty.  (If you have a favorite network you’d like to see added, leave a request in the comments below and we’ll pass it along to the plugin creator, Lynette Chandler.)

By the way, if you have your own favorite social media icons, the plugin can be configured to display them.

Download the Sticky Social Profiles here.

Do you know that most blog visitors don’t come to your site through the home page?

Sure, if they’re referred by a direct link to the home page, that’s where they’ll arrive. That isn’t how we get most of our traffic though.  Many arrive from search engines to an internal page, landing on a single post on your blog.

We want these visitors to click around and investigate other content on our site and decide they like us, right?

If they like us, hopefully they subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on social media or click on one of our products, services, affiliate links or ads.  It’s why we blog after all. (Well, most of us.)

How to keep a visitor clicking around?

Here are some ideas for holding on to your visitors, presented in no particular order of importance.

Make sure your blog header graphic links to your home page. 

There are a few blog themes that aren’t set up that way so check for it.  Also see that you have a ‘Home’ link in your navigation. [Read more...]

I had an opportunity to talk with Jonathan Cardella of Site Brains recently, enjoy the transcript here:

Kelly: Jonathan, I just stumbled across your website SiteBrains.com and your spam-fighting plugin and I am so curious about where did you come up with the idea for this?

There are lots of spam plugins on the web that say that they fight spam but yours fights it in real time – can you explain that?

Jonathan: Well, we thought it was really important to do that because not only do we want to fight spam but we wanted to encourage productive behaviors. The idea was to give the user feedback in real time. That’s kind of where we are going with things but the idea is that some people just make mistakes. They don’t realize they are breaking the community’s rules and so it helps them to let them know kind of in real time because then they have an ability to fix what they are doing and still make the submission. [Read more...]

This is a guest blog post written in a fun quirky way – it took me a minute to realize she was writing from the point of view of a child for part of it.  A very wise child indeed!

Some days ago, I asked my mommy if her blog still wasn’t generating any money. She nodded and looked sad. I told her there was no point wasting time and that she should stop blogging. If was only then that she startled me with a question. She said, “Do you know anything else, I could do instead?” The sad face of my mother made me think that there has to be something which my mom needs to know before expecting good money from her blog.

When I was born, my mother quit her bank job to stay at home with me. Later on, somebody told her, you could still make money by blogging. She started blogging and whatever little money she earned from it, was spent on us. I believe she is a superwoman indeed.

The sad face of my mother motivated me to help her research and figure out some weak areas which she could work on. I figured them out and brought them to her notice. The blog’s been better since. Here are some key points of my finding which you too can use to turn your flop blog into a money spinning machine.

Consistency is a key to success.

The biggest thing I noticed is that my mother was not consistent. If you blog once a week, then it should be once a weak in real and if you publish a post daily, then it has to be daily – no excuses. If a reader follows you strictly and you miss a day of posting, you may lose that one reader who logs on to your website to read what you have to say. Therefore, be consistence and see how it begins to reward you. [Read more...]

We are big fans of StudioPress and their Genesis Framework for WordPress.  We’re using the Lifestyle Child Theme here on Mom Blogger Pro.

If you’re used to using free WordPress themes it may seem like a leap to start paying for ‘Premium’ themes.  Your investment to get started with Genesis and one Child theme is $99.95.  (If you want access to all of their themes, you’ll spend $299.95.)  It’s a lot of money – we know!

So why did we gladly invest in StudioPress? 

Well, their themes are fantastic.  They’re beautiful to look at and they’re packed with all of the latest WordPress bells and whistles.  They have lots of widgets to work with and help us keep our plugin needs down to a minimum.  And – they have a thriving support forum where we’re able to stop in and ask questions anytime.

There are plenty of pretty free themes out there, but free means no support.  It’s been our experience that it’s common to run into trouble and not have anywhere to turn.

Newer StudioPress Themes We Think Moms Might Like:

Luscious Child Theme & Fabric Child Theme

The all access license ($299) is worth choosing if you have several blogs or like to redecorate your blog often.  StudioPress releases new themes fairly often and you get access to them at no extra cost.

They also have this new StudioPress Marketplace where freelance designers submit their own child theme designs for Genesis.  These themes aren’t covered under the regular license but they are priced low, just $24.95 each.  We see a lot of cute designs there and look forward to more.

We love exploring WordPress themes. Well, truth be told, we lose great chunks of time exploring free WordPress themes LOL!

Here are a few we’re really liking these days…

WordPress Anniversary Theme

[Read more...]

The mom bloggers are raging this week, here are a few links to help you stay abreast of the action.

Mom bloggers need PR people.  PR people need mom bloggers.  The relationship between these two camps is valued but sometimes resented. Mom bloggers don’t like being approached with completely non-relevant opportunities but I think we get used it to some extent.  I have to say though, someone done did it now. (<–Profanity warning)

Might be a good time for PR peeps to review this old post by Kelby Carr.

Here are a few interesting mom blog/pr infographics.

Susan Peyton says (and we agree) that mom bloggers are starting to realize they should be paid for their time spent on product reviews.

We joke about stalking someone we admire.  I got an email from a gal last year who confessed to being my stalker.  She wanted me to know she’d been following me on social media, reading all of my websites, listening to my podcasts, etc.

What she called stalking – I call a good content marketing funnel in action.

I wish all stalking activity on the web were positive in nature – it certainly is not.  Some recent posts I’ve read about stalkers has opened my eyes.

First a friend drew my attention to this post at IttyBiz.  Scary stuff!!

Then a tweet brought me to read about this gal’s experience with a stalker.

It’s not just women who attract stalkers.

Scott Ginsberg had me holding my breath reading about his in person meeting with a stalker.

Darren Rouse of ProBlogger shared a bit about his experiences with a stalker back in 2006.  He also gives some very good food for thought for all bloggers that can be helpful in protecting yourself.

What if a stalker focused on you? 

I’m not ultra self protective on the internet but I do have a post office box so I don’t need to share my mailing address – though I’ll admit I’ve given dozens of online friends my real address.  I use a Skype number for my business telephone so I don’t share my personal phone number anywhere.

I hope you’re taking these smart and easy steps to hide your personal contact information as well.

Icon Finder is a search engine for icons of all sorts.  Our favorite use is searching for social media icons – like the view above where we searched for Google+ icons.  We especially like how we can narrow our search for a specific icon size.

Over on the Mom Giveaways blog we’ve been accepting user submissions for years and free plugin (TDO Mini Forms) we’d been relying on for years stopped working for us.  When you get several dozen user submitted posts every day, if you have to manually process them, it’s a big time absorber. We were losing about 10-15 minutes every day just messing around with the user submitted giveaways that were coming in badly formatted and needing corrections.

This week, we bought Formidable Pro, a premium WordPress plugin that promised to re-automate the process for us and display our user submitted content nicely.

With some trepidation (learning new tech can be such a chore),  we dug in and created the form (see it here). It was easy.  Really easy.  The form creation process was smooth – unlike some clunky plugins that have gobbled up my time in the past.

Then the next step was to set up publishing rules – the part of the plugin that tells your blog how to display the user submitted content on your site.  In our case, each submission is a post of its own and we want to display their title, description and image with a live link back to their site – with the title used as link anchor text (see example). This was not nearly as hard as we’d expected, there was a video to watch that demonstrated the process and the configuration took less than 15 minutes of our time. [Read more...]