We have all heard horror stories about bloggers whose blogs have been hacked, their content was stolen, or they lost everything when a server error or some other computer malfunction occurred.  The chance of these things happening is small but there is a chance.  Your best option is to be protected and be prepared so you can bounce back quickly if something were to happen.

Today’s challenge is all about protecting your blog from hacking, content theft and losing all of your stuff.  While these tips do not guarantee the safety of your blog they will provide a safety net.

Protect Your Hard Work:Keep Your Blog Secure

Hacking

You can usually tell if your site has been hacked because when you load it in your browser it redirects to another site or some sort of “you’ve been hacked” message appears where all of your content should be.  This can be very scary and disconcerting but the best solution is to react calmly.  If you have taken precautions (such as those we will discuss today) it is possible to get your site up and running again, quickly.

Today we are not discussing how to come back from a hack but steps you can take to prevent a hack in the first place. Hacking can occur for a variety of reasons but most often occurs because of malware that was introduced through a compromised system therefore the best way to prevent a hack is to make sure your computer doesn’t become compromised.

Hacking Prevention Tasks 

1. Update and run your virus software, NOW, and run it frequently.
2. Update your blog platform to the most recent version.
3. Change your passwords frequently.
4. Select strong passwords that use a combination of upper and lower case letters and symbols or numbers.
5. Use different passwords for each aspect of your site.  For example, if you are self hosted, your Cpanel log-in should be different than your WordPress log-in.
6. If you need help keeping up with all your passwords do not store them in a file on your computer.  Write them down (if you ABSOLUTELY must) and place them in a secure location.

Content Theft

Content theft is a BIG issue for bloggers.  Whether it is pictures, a post, a tutorial or a recipe, blog theft is something that is likely to happen to all of us at one time or another.  Some blog theft is malicious (someone is trying to profit from your hard work) and some is done with good intentions(someone likes what you did and just wants to share).

Of course, the only way to totally prevent your content from being stolen is to keep it off of the internet but there are several things you can do to make it a little less difficult for someone to steal your content.

Content Theft Prevention Tasks

1. If you REALLY don’t want it stolen, don’t put it on the internet. 😉
2. Watermark your photos.
3. Use excerpts in your feeds instead of the full posts.
4. Set up Google Alerts.
5. Post a copyright statement on your blog.

Losing it All

Perhaps even worse than having your content hacked or stolen is to completely lose it all.  Think about the amount of time you have put into your blog.  How long did it take you to design your blog? How many hours have you spent writing posts? How many precious photos are embedded within the walls of your site?

BACK UP YOUR BLOG! Today! And then continue to back up on a weekly basis.

The directions for backing up your blog can vary depending on your platform (WordPress.com, WordPress.org, blogger, Type Pad  etc.) and based on your site host so we will not provide you with specific directions to back up your blog.  A Google search will provide you with simple directions based on your individual needs.  Additionally, there are a lot of plugins available that will automatically back up your blog on a regular basis.  In addition to backing up your content, it is also advisable to back up your blogs theme or template.  (Note: this really only applies to purchased themes and not the free ones that are not highly customizable.)

 

Are you participating in Kick-start My Blog? Please enter your blog in the link below so we may keep up with your progress.  You will only need to sign up once throughout the course of the challenge.

 

Welcome back! In yesterdays blog challenge, we encouraged you to complete 5 one-minute tasks to help improve the overall look and functionality of your blog.  Today, we will take that task a step further by maximizing the effectiveness of our search bars and newly submitted site maps by updating the categories and tags within our blogs.

Make Your Blog Posts Easier to Find

Categories

Misconception #1 – Categories are not important.

Many bloggers either believe that categories aren’t important and do not take the time to properly categorize their posts.

Truth – Blog posts have the tendency to get buried quickly if you are blogging on a regular basis.  Categories are like folders and can neatly organize your posts so that they are easily found by internal search bars and external search engines such as Google.

Misconception #2 – The more categories I have, the easier it will be to find my posts.

Many bloggers believe that placing a post in multiple categories will help a reader to find what they are looking for more easily.

Truth – Placing many posts into many categories has almost the same effect as using no categories at all.  If you were writing a post about Beef Stew it would be logical to categorize your post under “Soups and Stews” and possibly under “Beef”.  If you were to categorize this under Soups and Stews, Carrots, Beef, Main Dishes, Winter Food, Comfort Food, Potatoes, and so on it is likely that you have done the same with all of your other posts.  This indicates that when a reader searches a particular category on your blog they will find to many posts to weed through, once again causing the truly fitting posts to be lost in the shuffle.

Misconception #3 – The name of my categories are not really important.

Bloggers love to come up with cute little titles and acronyms for information on their blogs.  For example a blogger might have a weekly feature called “Craftsy Schmaftsy” and posts written for this feature are likely to be categorized as…you guessed it, “Craftsy Schmaftsy.”

Truth – Kitschy categories are perfect for your regular blog readers who will know to search for a particular term or phrase.  Newcomer will be searching for much more simple categories like “Crafts”.

Tags

Misconception #1 – Categories and tags are the same thing.

Many blogger believe that categories and tags are the same and do not value the use of both.

Truth – If categories are like folders then tags are like the staples that group certain papers together within the folders.  Tags help you to more specifically label the items found within your categories.

Misconception #2 – I need hundreds, if not thousands, of different tags.

Some bloggers believe that they must tag every word mentioned in their post.

Truth – Tagging can be tedious and maximizing the use of tags is just as important as maximizing the use of categories. Tagging helps searcher to narrow down a category that may contain hundreds of entries to something more specific but your search bar will also scan the words of your post.

 

Solutions

Limit the total number of categories that you use. People are more likely to use your categories if there are fewer of them.  A long list of categories is likely to be overlooked by a majority of your readers.

Don’t place posts into multiple categories.  If your categories are aptly named one will be sufficient for each post.  Never use more than 2.

Think like a reader.  Name your categories and tags appropriately.   Someone searching for a topic will choose a common, easy name not something cute and kitschy.

Use both categories and tags.  Tags help to better sort things within your categories and are the perfect complement to them.

Be selective.  Search engines are smarter than we give them credit for.  Both tags and categories should be used to assist search engines – not to trick them.  Search engines look for well used key words and overusing them can cause your posts to look like spam to the search engines thus eliminating the effectiveness of all of that hard work.

A Word of Caution

Be aware that making changes to your categories and tags will not only effect future posts but all of your archived posts as well.  If you have been blogging for any length of time it is advisable to not delete any categories until you have had the opportunity to re-categorize old posts.  Of course, this alone could be a huge undertaking if your blog has many archived posts.  Plan for future posts and deal with your archived posts as you have time.

Are you participating in Kick-start My Blog? Please enter your blog in the link below so we may keep up with your progress.  You will only need to sign up once throughout the course of the challenge.

Welcome to “Kick-start My Blog” the lastest AWB Blogging Challenge.

Have you ever felt burnt out on blogging? Unsure of your focus? Just plain tired of your space? The whole purpose of this challenge will be to clean-up, organize, revitalize, and “Kick-start” your blog!

We will have 5 challenges this week and then a series of challenges scattered throughout the month of February. We hope that by the end of the challenge you feel better about your blog, ready to write and better equipped to get through the times when you don’t feel like writing.

5 One-Minute Ways to Clean-up & Organize Your Blog

Our blogs are our virtual face and we want to do our best to make a great first impression. Your regular readers have grown to love you and in addition to already knowing how to find what they are looking for they are also willing to overlook a number of flaws that will stand out to first-time readers. Growing readership is all about getting those first- time visitors to stick around.  Today’s five tips will  guide you to make your blog look cleaner, more organized and easier to navigate.

1. Clean-up Your Sidebar Side bars are often designed, filled up with links and logos and then forgotten about.  It’s really likely that your sidebar is full of stuff that you no longer need.  For example: Links to blogs you no longer follow, ad units that have never made a penny, buttons that are out of date or no longer applicable. Take one-minute to scan your sidebar and remove, change or update your information.
2. Remove Captcha Code or Word Verification  It’s a fact that most blog readers hate leaving comments on blogs when they have to log-in, sign-up or spell out some ridiculous combination of letter and numbers that is impossible to read in the first place.  Take one minute to really evaluate if you need a captcha code or word verification.  If your not sure try turning it off for a week or two and then reevaluate your position again.  If you truly have an issue with spam- consider adding askimet or turning on the function that requires comment moderation for first-time commentors only.
3. Add a Search Bar  Have you ever visited a blog, found a really great article only to return later on unable to locate it again?  Or perhaps you visited a blog and discovered a really great chicken recipe and wondered if that blogger had a good pork chop recipe yet they have no way to search for it?  Take one minute to add a search bar to your blog so future readers have the ability to search your blog for things that interest them. (Both Blogger and WordPress have search bar widgets.)
4. Add Easy Links to Your Favorite Social Media Outlets  Do you use twitter, facebook and Pinterest? Do your blog readers know how to find you on these sites?  Take one minute to add links to your favorite social media sites in your sidebar.  If you already have them take one minute to click your links and make sure they actually go where you want them to go. (Both Blogger and WordPress have social media button widgets.)
5. Create a Sitemap and Submit it to Google  It is impossible to grow your readership if readers never find your site.  A sitemap is simple to do and will help improve your Google rank making your page more visible in search engines.  Take one minute (well, maybe five) to create a sitemap and submit it to Google.  Google has a tutorials on creating sitemaps and submitting a sitemap.  There is also a WordPress plugin available to make it even easier for you!

Well, there you have it! 5 one-minute ways to clean-up and organize your blog.  Come back tomorrow as we will be discussing how to make your blog posts easier to find.

Are you participating in Kick-start My Blog? Please enter your blog in the link below so we may keep up with your progress.  You will only need to sign up once throughout the course of the challenge.

Ladies, I am so excited to announce that we will be starting Kick-start My Blog TOMORROW!  Yay!

This blog challenge will be a bit different than the others we have had so far in that the daily tasks will be centered around bettering your blog rather than around writing a specific themed post.  The topics for the next few days include:

5 One-Minute Ways to Clean-up and Organize Your Blog

Make Your Blog Posts Easier to Find: Categories and Tags

Protecting Your Hard Work: Keep Your Blog Secure

Develop Your Blogs Image

Finding Blogging Motivation

Tomorrow we will provide a linky tool that you can join just to indicate you are participating.  The linky tool will be available through the end of February and will allow you to follow along with the progress of your fellow Arkansas Women Bloggers.

See you tomorrow!

Once again I am in awe over the level of participation in ThanksBlogging!  Especially considering the upcoming holiday and the sort-of short notice we gave you regarding the challenge.  We appreciate all of you who were able to participate and appreciate those of you who weren’t yet still took time out of your day to read posts and leave comments.  We hope these challenges have led you to new blogs and to find new online friends through social media.

We will not be having a blogging challenge in December.  The holidays are important family time and we want you to be able to focus on that.  We will return with another blogging challenge in mid-January that will be geared towards helping you kick-start your blog for 2013.    You will see more challenges similar to this months PicMonkey challenge where you are called to do something or learn something that could help you improve your blog.  As always we want AWB to be an open community so if you have ideas for future challenges or suggestions to make them run smoother, work better, or whatever – please don’t hesitate to send us your ideas.

For now lets take a moment to review what we did for ThanksBlogging and take a look at a few of the highlights of the week.

 

ThanksBlogging Day 1 – Outside the Walls – PicMonkey Challenge

A few weeks ago Gina wrote a really great intro/tutorial for PicMonkey.  In our first challenge of ThanksBlogging we asked you to take pictures of some thing you were thankful for and experiment with PicMonkey to edit and/or alter your photo.

Some of you discovered that you LOVED PicMonkey.  Leslie over at Nobody Gave me the Instruction Booklet wondered where PicMonkey has been all her life.  She took a super sweet photo of her kids and transformed it into something really special.

Some of you were willing to give it a whirl and found that it just wasn’t your kind of thing.  Jodi of Everything and a Race Horse was bothered by the way PicMokey automatically cropped her photos when she was creating a collage. Jodi has vowed to stick with her own brand of editing in the future!  (And that’s TOTALLY okay!)

ThanksBlogging Day 2 – Thanksgiving Memories

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that seems to evoke a wide range of feelings, memories and traditions.  For a few of you the holiday was a difficult time as you dealt with the loss of loved ones, split families or just hard times.  For some of you Thanksgiving was really just another day and for some of you it’s a big deal that you look forward to every year.

Heather Davis of Minivan Momma (our honorary Arkansan!) wrote about fancy dress-up dinners and drunken showings of Top Gun.  Seriously.  I can’t make this stuff up!

Erin at Bideawee always enjoys a BIG family Thanksgiving and looks forward to listening to Perry Como each year.  You can see the video in her post.

ThanksBlogging Day 3 – I am thankful for…

Today we asked you to express some of the things you are thankful for this year.  And BOY is there a lot to be thankful for.  Even if this year was a tough one for you, I can bet that when you really think about it you have quite a bit to be thankful for.

Stephanie, founder of AWB and also known as The Park Wife, wrote a heartfelt letter of thanks to the many members of Arkansas Women Bloggers who reach out beyond their computer screens to get to know each other in REAL life as well as online.  I think we can all agree with her sentiment.

Kelly Jo from Delta Moxie put off making her grocery list to write a list of things she was thankful for including something she describes as “Bomb-diggidity”!

Kris (Moody Mom over at Little Rock Mamas) is thankful for a flat tire! I’m serious y’all. Check out her post to see how she put a positive spin on “the day from hell”.

ThanksBlogging Day 4 – 10 Reasons you Need a Facebook Fan Page – Facebook Linkup

If you guys haven’t liked Gina’s Facebook page yet, you really need to! She is so desperate for followers that she thought she could trick you all by linking up her Facebook page SIX times!  I have evidence:

 

Just messing with you,Gina! We love you!

If you haven’t had the chance to follow these wonderful ladies yet, please do! They share some amazing stuff on their Facebook pages and it will give you another way to connect.

Angie (A Growing Season) reminds us in the comments that you can like pages from your personal Facebook page as well as you blog/business Facebook page! Great advice, Angie.

ThanksBlogging Day 5 – Ham and Turkey Leftover {Foodie Friday}

My favorite part of Thanksgiving is the food!  I look forward to the meal all year and for a few days I just EAT and don’t even give second thought to calories. (Not that I really do on normal occasions but I digress.)  The problem always lies in the leftovers.  Sure a reheated plate of the main event is good later that night and maybe even the next day but then we all long for something just a little different.  So today we challenged you to share with us your favorite recipe for all that leftover turkey and ham.

Peggy over at Pork Chop Tuesday shared a yummy recipe for a  Turkey Cranberry Wreath and a few other party food recipes.

Brittney from Ramblings of a Little Wife cooked up a delicious looking ham and potato soup with her ham leftovers.

And Jessica from Life with the Bauer Boys didn’t share a recipe but they do have mashed potatoes on their heads!

ThanksBlogging Day 6 – Twitter Linkup

We ended the week by giving you a chance to link up your twitter feeds.  If you haven’t given everyone a follow, please do so!

Whew! What a week!  Thanks for playing along and now for the winners! Congratulations to….

Jodi B.  of Everything and a Racehorse and Kelly Jo M. of Delta Moxie!

You will each receive an AWB T-shirt, a copy of Lela Davidson’s book Blacklisted from the PTA and a handmade Christmas ornament from Julie of Eggs and Herbs!

 

ThanksBlogging has been a lot of fun! We will be doing a wrap-up post of the weeks events next Tuesday. We will be featuring some of your stories and announcing the WINNERS of the prizes! Be sure to check back.

But we’re not done yet! Today we are linking up our twitter accounts. Twitter has many of the same benefits of Facebook and is a great tool for bloggers.  Conversation on Twitter can be very fast paced and, through the use of hashtags, canpotentially be seen by a very large number of people.

Use the LinkyTool below to share a direct link to your twitter page.  Take a moment to follow some of your fellow AWB members and then tweet up some of your new buddies!  AND…dont forget to follow us and mention @arwomenbloggers and #ARWB in your tweets!

Facebook Fan pages are a great tool to grow your blog following and to interact with your readers on a more personal basis.  Does your blog have a fan page yet?  If not, THIS, is the perfect excuse for you to make one.  Here are 10 reasons why you should have a Facebook Fan Page.

1. Social Proof – A Facbook fan page provides legitimate proof that you are actually a REAL person!
2. Authentic Interactions – Fan Pages allow you to interact and have conversations with your readers in a way very different than blog comments.  You can even converse about topics not blog related! And…other people can join in on the conversation.
3. Numbers – There are A LOT of people on Facebook!  According to SocialBakers.com there are currently 167,554,700 Facebook users in the United States!
4. Familiarity – 167,554,700 people have heard of Facebook and nearly all of those have “liked” a fan page.  You are probably more likely to have people find your blog through your fan page than to find your fan page through your blog!
5. Separation – Your kids are adorable! I swear! But I like your blog because you have great crafting ideas! I don’t really want to see a thousand updates a day about all the cute things your sweet precious child has done. (A fan page let’s you have a place where you can be more about “business” and a little less about personal!)
6. Customization – Fan Pages are REALLY customizable! There are a lot of online tutorials to help you customize your page.  You can coordinate it with your blog and other online social media outlets.  This creates brand recognition.
7. Marketing – Most of us are looking to (someday, somehow) make a little money from our blog.  Companies always ask us about numbers.  What are your site analytics? How many twitter followers do you have? How many Facebook followers do you have?
8. Community Influence – If you can involve a few followers and keep them happy – they have the ability to influence an exponential number of people to also follow your blog and fan page.
9. SEO – SEO is based on relevence and authority.  Facebook wont directly effect SEO but building strong social media commuunities can help increase your level of relevence and authority.  Google pays lot of attention to links and social signals from Facebook.
10. Price – It’s FREE!

Today we are giving you the chance to link to your facebook fan page in the LinkyTool.  We also want to encourage you to follow the other bloggers who link up today.  Additionally, since it is Thanksgiving and we are in a sharing mood, we invite you to promote two of your bloggy buddies on your own fan page by inviting your followers to follow them!

Please post a link DIRECTLY TO YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE and not a link to a post on your blog.

Thank you for sharing your Thanksgiving Memories with us.  They were touching, funny and emotional.  It is amazing how a single holiday can evoke such different responses and memories yet all are tied to a spirit of thankfulness.

In keeping with the theme, today we are asking you to share some of the things you are most thankful for. Write it in a poem, make a list, show us in pictures.  We can’t wait to see what you are thankful for and share in your joy.

After you write your post, stop by here to link up and don’t forget to visit the 2-3 bloggers who linked up before you and leave a comment on their blog.

Great job on your photos!  You ladies did some great stuff yesterday.  There were quite a few photos that would make beautiful framed pictures, perhaps a holiday gift for family members!

Today’s post is all about Thanksgiving memories.  We each have different reason for having memorable Thanksgivings.  Perhaps it was the first time you cooked for your in-laws, the first thanksgiving after a loved one passed away or maybe it was the year your Uncle Frank burned down the garage while deep frying a turkey.  Use your writing skills and spin us the story of your most memorable Thanksgiving.

When you are done, link up your post below and don’t forget to visit the 2-3 bloggers who linked ahead of you and check out their memories too!  The LinkyTool will be open through midnight of November 20th.