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A friendly place to find help & encourage one another |
Well, the site is live, you’ve given me great feedback, and I first of all want to thank everyone for your input and patience as everything gets finalized.
I wanted to share with you some of the highlights of the things I have been working on over the last few weeks:
- Most importantly, I want to let you know about the new “Get Link Love, Give Link Love” campaign:
- I’ve removed the ‘nofollow’ tags from comments on this blog, so if you just join the conversation, you get a link. It’s the least I can do for you awesome folks.
- The Guest Bloggers project was a huge hit. I’m now going to offer a guest post spot once a week. Ponn Sabra and I landed an interview with a prominent UK small business podcaster because of her post. For post submission guidelines, please check out the Get Link Love page.
- I’ll be adding that Mr. Linky widget to the Monday Motivation meme, to foster more, well, ‘Motivation’ on Mondays… (thanks for the idea, Char!)
- The BlogJolt is still up and running, the weekly meme for mom bloggers in which we pick a person and the whole group sends link love. But more news on that to come!
- The sidebar has been changing, and still needs a little help with the spacing, but you probably noticed the addition of a few new things:
- Top Commentators, offering up a link to the talkative bunch
- I’ve moved my blogging articles to the section boxes on the main page
- I’ve added links to my favorite monetization tools
- I’ve added a box at the top to highlight companies and products I really believe in. For now, it’s TextLinkAds and WordPressTutorials.com. I’ll also use this spot to let you know about new things I’m offering around here. Yes, it’s advertising. But I’m a choosy blogger, and choosy bloggers chose Jif - I mean, GREAT products to push.
- Under great reader resources, I’ve added a monetization page that puts all of the ad networks in one spot. Well, not all of them, but I’ll be constantly adding to it. I’ll be adding other online marketing resources here in the future as well.
- Also, I’ve put together a page called the Tech Help Desk, with the tech tools I’ve used to build this site, from FeedBurner to a list of the best plugins I’ve been able to find.
Now, for some of my plans to let you in on what’s to come:
- The BlogJolt will get rolled out to other niches. This will be a big project, so if anyone is interested in being a moderator for your particular niche, puh-lease let me know!
- I’m setting up a pay-per-lead affiliate program, paying you to get people to sign up for the free Blogging eCourse. I’ve updated the eCourse as well.
- My first information product, How to Start a Mom Blog, is underway. It’s about half-way done, maybe a little more. MAN, it’s a ton of work! It’s something I will also set up with an affiliate program, so that any of you interested in promoting it to your readers will earn a healthy commission on it.
And HUGE kudos to Sarah Lewis from Blogging Expertise, who has done all the hard work to bring this design to life!
Now I’d better shut up before I overload you with information - enjoy the new site!
Just wanted to pop in here and tell you I love your new look! You also appear to be busy busy busy! Keep up the good work!
OK, I’m tired just reading this!
Thnx for this link!
Btw can you tell me how you go about making money with amazon?
Oh I manged to hopscotch over to your blog from Johnchow.com. I haven’t looked through it much yet but I do like what I see as a first impression!
Also love the little blur at the top of page too, the one next to the title.
:)
Seems like do follow comments is the latest trend. Everybody loves free links. It will be interesting to see if it catches on and everyone starts doing it.
Sania, to makes money with Amazon affiliates you need to sign up at Amazon.com, do a search for affiliates and the link will be the first thing you see.
Then (if you use Wordpress) get the Amazon plugin. This makes it incredibly easy to insert affiliate links.
I agree, John - it’s been talked about a lot lately, and definitely contributed to my decision to go with the plugin.
And Sania, John’s right - there’s a link to the Amazon Associates program on my new Monetize page.
id like to use the do follow comments plugin but it clashes with my livejournal x-post plugin and i get all kinds of errors.
but neato site you have. definately wanna keep reading it.
Very nice site (found it from your comments at Problogger). Glad to see more girl power in the blogosphere!
I am so looking forward to what’s coming up for eMoms! I’m grateful to have found your site.
Love the redesign Wendy. You’ve given me some great ideas for my - sometime in the future - redesign.
One comment: The comments seem a bit plain. Maybe some stying on the header would spruce it up a bit.
And finally, I’d love to see you post individual entries about all the great new offerings you mentioned in this post. As you noted, it was a lot of information to absorb, and a lot of it probably went unabsorbed.
Beautiful new design Wendy. Very clean and fresh. It really pops. I especially love the big orange RSS all the way at the top of your blog. Very excellent. Kudos to you!
One thought for improvement…Perhaps you would want to make a printer friendly version of your posts?
It’s cool that this is catching on. Nice blog, btw. Please keep the great posts coming.
Want to tell everyone that you’ve turned off the nofollow in your comments? Check out my new “ifollow” logos- grab one for your sidebar!
http://randaclay.com/archives/the-i-follow-movement