By now you have create a floor layout of your blog with the FREE BLOG Planning Form. You choose a host, have painted the walls by choosing a theme, and you hung up a sign letting folks know that an exciting thing is going to happen in this new home. You also called the Security Company and installed an alarm. The alarm for our WordPress.org Blog is Askismet.
Now it is time to call the Phone Company
The phone company I called was Feedburner. I created an RSS feed there and also a way for folks to subscribe to my blog. All they have to do is key in their email address and a call is placed to their email letting them know I just posted something new on my blog. How cool is that!
I have located a easy to understand video on how to do the subscription. Once again, I could have done it but she did such a great job! Plus, now I have time to go out and hula hoop.
Email subscription using feedburner
Oh, I know I can also call other venders and if you know of any please share. But for now Feedburner, which is owned by Google should do just fine. While you are there browse and look at the other features because it is simply powerful.
Reason 2 of Top Ten Reasons to Manage Your Own Websites and Blogs
Reason 2 – Saving Time on Quick and Easy Updates to Your Sites
By Toolie
One of the challenges entrepreneurs face when trying to grow their
business is the point at which they begin to acquire helpers. Some use
virtual assistants, some use their teenage or college-age children.
Like any employment situation (virtual or contractual), the
entrepreneur spends time managing the relationship as well as the
work.
It's no different when you've hired a web designer to maintain your
website for you. It takes time to decide what you want, communicate
your decisions, and manage the results. It's a necessary part of
delegating the work, and provided you have good communication, it
doesn't have to be time-consuming. I'll leave you to imagine what it's
like when your web designer is NOT a good communicator. Perhaps you
already know....
We've discussed how nice it is to have schedule independence from your
web designer: that is, you being able to make changes to your site
WHEN you want to, even if it's after hours. Now we're talking about
how much TIME it takes to manage the relationship with your designer,
and whether that time investment is appropriate for "the small stuff."
I was on the board of my speakers association chapter for 3 years, and
during that time I was directly involved with maintaining the website.
We had a web designer who handled our maintenance for us for a reduced
rate, and he was pretty good about handling the changes in a timely
manner. But by "handling changes", I mean we wrote everything out for
him, and even formatted the text in Microsoft Word the way we wanted
it to look on the site. We sent in a Word doc, and he reproduced the
changes in HTML on the website based on the text we had sent him.
It took 2 hours to prepare that Word document, and it probably took
him another 90 minutes to 2 hours to format the text in HTML and
upload it to the site. So a total of 4 hours went into those web pages
every month. If we'd had access to the site ourselves, we could have
made the changes directly in HTML (in 2 hours), and had them visible
to the public immediately instead of 4-24 hours later.
It was a better use of his time to work on tasks that we weren't
capable of doing, like the original design, or major updates to the
look and feel of the site. The kind of work he was performing was
simple edits that we were capable of handling. Consequently, our
chapter switched to a membership site that better served our needs as
an association, and one that we could manage ourselves.
Are you doing the same thing? Are sending your web designer text
formatted in Word and then having them do it over again on your site?
I can almost promise you that even if you're exporting your text as
HTML out of Microsoft Word, your designer is NOT using it directly.
Word produces notoriously bloated HTML, so most designers ignore it or
run it through a cleanup filter before posting the text on your
website.
Do it right the first time; as an entrepreneur you don't have TIME to
do it OVER again! Learn HTML and CSS, and handle these simple updates
yourself! With a combination of how-to videos, demos, website layouts,
one-on-one coaching, and the support forum, the "I Can Fix My Website"
program has what you need to learn these skills quickly and easily.
You'll save time by handling website and blog updates yourself, and
leave your web designer (if you have one) free to concentrate on the
big stuff they really enjoy.
Next: Reason 1 - Saving Money on Your Monthly Online Budget
Toolie®
Your blog is talking, but what is it saying? I just read an insightful post about how our site communicates to our readers. After reading it I decided to pay closer attention to what my site may be saying. When you review these simple, yet powerful points you will, like me, pay closer attention to what your site is saying.
