How to find out what others are saying about your blog/products

This series on blogging has gotten extensive! Here is a related info. by Heidi.

How can I setup my own blog?

Today I’m going to share one of the simplest, most effective ways for us to know what’s going online in regards to our site & people needing ACDSee help.

Has anyone noticed how I pop in within 24 hours & comment on blogs that mention our website or ACDSee products? My email inbox tells me what’s being said because I have Google continually searching for me! That saves me from reading a ton of blogs. And I love meeting all of the new people out there!

How do I have Google continually searching for me, you ask? Well, some call it them ‘ego searches’ or ‘vanity searches’. Google Alerts is a little feature that allows you to give them search terms & have the results emailed daily or on an ongoing basis. They’re easy to set up & can be turned off if you don’t find it useful.

So what should you search for? I have Google Alerts set up for the following searches:

digiscrapinfo, digital scrapbooking, digiscrapping, acdsee

This allows me to be updated immediately when someone mentions our website, blog, an acdsee product (in case someone needs help), and the general digiscrapping ones are for keeping up with trends. If you were a designer, you could use your store name & when Google alerts finds blog posts where people are giving you credit, you could comment on their layouts. There are a number of things you can do with these, just get creative & think about how you could use this tool.

If you try it, let us know how it works for you!

And sign up to receive our blog by email as we will keep sharing our tips.

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How to “see” your blog traffic and if your SEO is working

Today’s part on blogging is my favorite part! How do you know that your efforts toward Search Engine Optimization is working? Well there are some easy ways to see stat’s on your traffic & I love checking these.

Are you ready to take a tour behind stage on our blog? Come with me then … I spent some time making screenshots of all these to share with you.

For all of these you need to sign up & follow their instructions. Most of the time that includes putting some form of code into the blog (a marker so to speak). I’m not going to include that because Heidi set them up & each one has it’s own instructions. (ie – ask her if you have questions & she’ll be glad to help J ).

Here we go:

Technorati has two features that we’re using.

1. Claim your blog – Claiming your blog establishes that you are its owner, and allows you to use Technorati services to increase your blog’s visibility.

This is important because it allows you to add tags to help increase your visibility. When you log into your account you can see how many blogs link to you (remember how I mentioned the importance of blogs linking to you? Here you can see the rank which is based on the # of backlinks that you have)

2. Pingback – pings or notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog’s popularity.

If you insert this code from Technorati in your blog, then everytime you update your blog, it automatically pings for you. (Who could remember to do it each time? I have trouble with remembering to tag my post the way it is!)

I also signed up with Pingoat.com for that service to automatically ping when we update our blog. (why? Because it looked good. Does it make a difference? Well we do have a lot of spyders (search engines) crawling thru…)

Now these are in order of my favorites for reviewing the stat’s

3. Google Analytics is the biggy for stat’s! Heidi found this & set it up. I was used to looking at the stat’s and then they switched to a new version which I haven’t had time to learn. So here is an overview of the options – and I warn you it’s comprehensive!

But if you do nothing else, I suggest you get this one for sure. There are some very cool features that I like are seeing the following:

- where your visitors are from

- what sites your visitors are coming from

- what they searched for to get to your site (keywords are so important as you tag & write more posts)

- trends in numbers of visitors, how long they were there, how many pages they viewed

- and the list goes on to languages, browsers, etc

4. Next, you must have Feedburner!

The first screen shows me all the ‘subscribers’, but if you look at them many are spyders & search engines cruising thru. That is good news! There are tabs on the left so I can see where people are coming from & what they’re searching for to get there, etc. I do like this one though

5. Mybloglog – this doesn’t update until the next day, but I like it. On one screen it provides:

- Where people came from: links to their sites & google searches

- What people viewed

- What they clicked on

6. Feedblitz.com – we have this set up to allow people to subscribe to our blog. Heidi set that up. She can tell how many people are subscribed & how many have unsubscribed.

7. Finally, don’t forget about your website stat’s if you have connected your blog to your site.

I realize that I’ve given you a lot. And we have added these slowly over time. But once you have them all cooking, it’s a lot of fun to check them once in awhile!

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How to help Google find your blog (making SEO work for you)

Wow! This is the 4^th in our series on blogs. Here’s a quick review in case you missed the first ones:

• Anatomy of an effective blog
• Let a Blog Reader save you time
• How can I setup my own blog?

Today’s topic is ‘How to help Google find your Blog’ or it could be ‘What you need to know about SEO’.

What is SEO you ask? SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and is important to anyone that wants to be noticed on the net. I’ve started a couple of blogs and they were more like a journal because I felt like I was talking to myself. We blog because we want people to read what we’re saying & interact with us. And I must say that this series on blogging has been fun because people are leaving comments!

Google is the major search engine, but there are others. They have spyders out crawling thru the net cataloging blogs and gathering information. Your goal is to have your blog & site as SEO friendly as possible so you get noticed!

How can you do that?

Choose a domain name that suits your subject matter. Heidi & I agree that our domain name could have been better chosen. We chose it based on being descriptive, but it really should be based on what the majority will search for. But, I have seen many cautions about not changing your domain name mid-stream, so we will stick with ours. This site makes it easy to see if the domain name is available. http://www.checkdomain.com/ There are also resources for checking common keyword phrases. One application that I found useful is free called Good Keywods. You can give it a word or phrase & it will tell you how many times it has been searched in the past month along with related words.

Choose a blog style that can be personalized. That’s what we’ve done with our wrodpress blog. This is the behind the scenes types of things. Here’s the part of the description that influenced me to choose the style we are presently using:

heavily tuned and optimized for search engine relevancy: page titles are always relevant (the front page even shows your blog’s tagline), post content goes first in the HTML source, and semantic markup is used everywhere http://rudd-o.com/projects/burninr/

Tags & titles are very important once you have your blog up & running. Search engines don’t notice the body of the blog as much as they notice those two things. Tags are descriptive words that you assign to your post. Let’s say if I wrote a post about ACDSee Photo Manager. I would tag it with ‘organizing’. Posts tagged with ‘organizing’ would end up getting noticed by a Google search first.

Titles are also important. Pretend like you’re writing a newspaper headline. State the topic & be concise. This will also be noticed by the search engines sooner than something vague. I have to remind myself of this one often.

Inbound links - Awhile ago I posted about the importance of linking to other blogs whether by blogrolls or referenced within a post. This builds up credibility or your blog in the eyes of the search engines. On the bottom left of our blog you can see a list of who recently linked to our blog. Writing this just gave me a great idea that I may have to try!

Sitemaps - Sitemaps are text files (XML files to be exact) that list all your url’s for a website or blog. They help the search engines crawl/explore your site better including your blog. On wordpress, I have found a plug-in that generates and automatically updates my sitemap for our wordpress blog. Google Sitemap Generator Install the plug-in and follow the directions. It automatically submits your sitemap to google and you can also submit your sitemap to Yahoo or MSN. When you submit, you really are submitting a link to your sitemap. Then each time a post or page is added to your blog, the sitemap is updated.

If you would like to read more on Search Engine Optimization, Problogger has 15 ideas that are practical & easy to implement.

So you may ask, how do you know that SEO works? In my next topic I will show you how we’re collecting stat’s for our blog from free applications running in the background. That’s the most interesting part & provides feedback for improving your blogging. I check 3 sets of stat’s each day (can we say addicted?!! Maybe!).

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How can I setup my own blog?

You have a few options to consider:

• What type of blog do I want? This is really the software that runs the blog.
• Do I wanted a hosted blog (someone else hosts the blog) or do I want to host my own blog (I already have a host or want a host.)

Again, we will refer to this Problogger’s blog He has a great article Choosing a Blog Platform that explains this top in-depth.

Have you read that article yet? If not, go back and read it!

If you have decided on a hosted blog then go ahead and choose a blog and get started. If you want to host your own blog, keep reading.

Some basic steps to install your own wordpress blog

As I continue with the example of how to setup your own blog, I am going to give Wordpress as example since that is what we have chosen for our blog. Setting up other blog types is similar, just follow the instructions on their website.

Installation:

My chosen host and many other major hosts install the major blog systems with a click of a button. I asked my install wordpress and about 5 minutes later I was ready to start. If your doesn’t offer this feature, you need to follow the install instructions on the package. (Read through the wordpress install and see if you are up to this: Wordpress Install )

Installing Theme/Design/Style:

First, the default theme they start with is boring. So you need to go liven it up. Wordpress Themes has a whole list of sites to find themes. The site I liked the best for choosing my theme was at Theme Viewer. I liked this site because after customizing our blog the first time I realized that there were many things I wanted and my theme didn’t provide them. So I spent a whole weekend redo’ing our blog.

So what are you looking for?

Widget Ready: I highly suggest you get a Widget Ready theme. A widget ready theme allows the administrator very easy customizable sidebars. Here is our widgets and you just drag and drop them where you want and you click on the blue and black lined squares to configure them. The Sidebar1 is our left side of the blog and Sidebar2 is our right side of the blog. (Connie spends a lot of time rearranging them on me.) There is a tray at the bottom that holds the extras. Look at this diagram & you’ll see that it’s our blog’s sidebars.

Number of Columns: How many columns do you want? We chose the three column blog.

Fixed/Fluid Width: The last important thing is the fixed or fluid width. Fixed width means that when the user expands or shrinks the window, the blog stays the same size. Fluid width means that the blog expands when the user expands or shrinks the window. I personally like the fluid width but it can get you into trouble. (Our images in the blog have to a certain setting so they don’t overlap into our sidebars.)

Now that you have an idea of what you want, head back to the Theme Viewer and choose your requirements and see if there is blog theme you like. If not, head to the many other links at Wordpress Themes and browse. This can take hours. Once you find one that you like, you need to download it, unzip it, and ftp into your themes folder on your wordpress host, and activate it. Here are the detailed instructions: Wordpress Theme Installation.

At this point, if you have experience you can customize the theme to your liking. This goes way beyond the scope of this post.

Installing plug-ins:

This last step makes your blog work and have all the nice extra features. Installing plug-ins is similar to installing themes except you place the files in the plug-ins folder instead of the theme folder. Wordpress plug-ins information. Again much of the time spent is hunting or looking for what you want.

I will list some of the plug-ins that I think are necessary or nice:

• akismet: comes installed with wordpress, activate and enter your activition code, and this will stop all those spam comments. Absolutely necessary
• Wordpress Database Backup: You can backup your wordpress information. I have mine configured to mail me my backup weekly. Absolutely necessary.
• Tagging plug-in: This helps those search engines find your blog. I chose Simple Tagging I found it easy to use. Other suggestions are Ultimate Tag Warrior or Jerome’s Keywords
  
• Subscribe Me: This allows the blog readers to easily subscribe to your blog in different configurable ways.
• Bookmark Me: This allows the blog readers to easily bookmark your blog in different configurable ways.

Start Blogging

You now have installed blog, with a theme to your liking, with a few plug-ins. Start blogging… See what you like… See what you want to change… See what you want to add… I think our blog has at least one change per week. It may not be visible but it is change.

Once you start blogging, you want to start sharing your blog with technorati, feedblitz, etc… But this is better left to another blog entry.

Some things you should do for blog maintenance:

• Backup your blog database. (Our is automatically done with the wordpress database backup plug-in.)
• Copy all your theme files back to your computer and store them there. This serves to purposes: If the server crashes you have your stuff. If you edit a file and your blog stops working, you have a file to replace it with. (This is especially important when you have a sister that is starting to edit the files.)
• Periodically check and see if you need to install the latest blog software. Updates are every few months. This is especially important because of security issues. Many of the upgrades of blogs fix security issues.
• Periodically check and see if you need to upgrade your plug-ins.

Note from Connie - See what I mean??? Heidi KNOWS!! She has done such a great job in setting our blog up not once, but twice. And I LOVE being able to move widgets around in the sidebars. (A widget is each item in the sidebar: like the Search Button, the About Us box, etc). It’s so nice to be able to click & drag the widgets around whenever I want to. (I did put in some html code one weekend, but that isn’t safe considering my lack of knowledge. And that’s why Heidi talks about backing up your blog! But I have never broken ours……yet! *grin* But she’s ready just in case!)

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Let a Blog Reader save you time

If you already know about blog readers, then I’m going to suggest that you browse Problogger’s blog. Here he explains Trackbacks. And if you browse his blog, he has lots of practical advice on writing blog posts.

Today I’m going to talk about blog readers. They’re a wonderful timesaving tool!

Rather than bookmarking blogs & checking them every so often, a blog reader is a one stop solution.

For example, if you read 20 blogs, and visit them each day, maybe only 5 are updated. If you were visiting each blog thru bookmarks, there would be many that would have no changes. With a blog reader you can immediately see the new entries and after you’ve read them, most show that (like email does). At one point I was reading 75 blogs per day, but I’ve cut back now.

How does it work?

Blogs & news feeds have a symbol that looks like a little transmitting icon. And there are usually other buttons that correspond to specific blog readers. Most blogs also have the icons displayed somewhere on the page. Ours are located on the top right of our blog. In Firefox the universal feed symbol shows in the far right side of the toolbar. This indicates that it is a feed that can be subscribed to.

How to read blogs using feeds:

1. Set up a blog reader - some common ones are:

• Google Reader - my favorite but you need a gmail account (I have invites if you need)
• Bloglines.com - I used to use this, but it’s slower to read than Google reader
• Safari - for our Mac friends
• and there are others

• Update - my friend Ernie suggested that I include Internet Explorer 7’s built in feature.
• The Firefox browser has Live Bookmarks (but I mut have deleted mine off my toolbar..)
• And Thunderbird (Firefox’s email) has a Blog Reader that is built in. This is more similar to Google Reader. (Thunder bird is awesome because you can read many email accounts there. My sister accesses EIGHT in hers! and the folders options are great.)

2. When you visit a blog that you want to read in the future, click on the universal feed icon. Your blog reader will ask if you want to subscribe.

3. When the blog is updated, you’ll be able to see that when you visit the blog reader. And you can read just the blogs that have been updated. The great thing is that you won’t miss anything either if you haven’t visited a particular blog in a few days.

Here’s what Google Reader looks like:

And here’s Bloglines.com

Pro’s -

I like how you can see how many people are subscribed. Google doesn’t offer me that.

Con’s -

Sometimes you need to open each entry to read the posts in their entirety like in this example. In others, you can read the whole post without leaving Bloglines. It probably depends on where the blog is coming from.

Some additional reading can be found here:

How to explain RSS the Oprah way (an easy to understand explanation)

So set up your blog reader and spend less time reading more blogs! It definitely puts more joy in a routine thing.

And if you’re thinking of starting a blog or are a seasoned blogger, I’m going to link you to the same blog that I did at the top. He has so many good ideas. Blogging for Beginners And if you’re not a beginner, then try Write a Better Blog

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Anatomy of an effective blog

In the first part of our series on marketing for digiscrappers, we talked about forums.

Marketing Your Digiscrapping Business: Forums

How Can I set up my own forum?

Blogs are another tool that many are using for marketing and simply expressing themselves. And in thinking about the topic I realized that there are a number of topics for us to cover. So these are topics that can look forward to!

• How to Choose blogging software & set it up
• How to help Google find your Blog
• RSS & Blog Readers
• How to find out if anyone is reading your blog or if others are talking about you on their blog
• Finding your voice

Before we talk about those topics I want you to think about what features make blogs effective? I have been driving Heidi crazy with my requests. Everytime I read about a feature or see one on someone else’s blog that I think is a good idea, I ask my sister to add it here. Have you noticed how our blog has evolved?

My wish list became so long that we decided to switch from a 2 column to a 3 column to accommodate it. This change in style about a month ago took Heidi hours to do. But we’re pleased with the results and in using some free web applications we’re able to see those statistics & know that it’s effective. So join me in a tour of our blog & it’s features & then at the end I’ll give you some examples of 2 column blogs. Then you can go home to your blog & tweak it (or ask your webmaster to do it).

In left column:

• photos of us (well they were there - is it better to have them there or no? that is the question?)
• about us information (a bit more information about who we are)
• contact us (so people can ask questions or send comments by email)
• links to other areas of the site (so important to connect people to the whole place)
• Search box to find information in previous blog posts
• Recent posts
• Archived posts

In right column: (and these are here because this is the most prominent location)

• Place to subscribe to receive blog by email
• Subscribe by RSS feed or blog reader
• Category tag cloud is clickable & allows user to search blog posts by topic (try it & click on one!) The largest words have the most entries.
• Blogroll of links to other blogs

After each blog entry:

• Link to Email the blog entry to someone else (this encourages spreading your blog information)
• Subscribe to the blog by email (another opportunity to in case they missed the top right corner)
• A number of Social Bookmarking Lists so the reader can easily add the blog entry to their list for future reference.
• Comment area

If you’d like to see an example of a great 2 column blog, check out Angie Pedersen’s Scrapbooking Industry News. To be honest, many items on my blog must-have list have come from her’s. She also has another blog that I read, Scrapbook Marketing.com That’s also a 2 column blog.

My suggestion is to look at blogs when you’re reading them & consider what features you like and which ones you think are helpful. Then go back home & implement them. Much of it can be done yourself & for free. Everything that we have here is free with the exception of the site that hosts it. Stay tuned & we’ll take you behind the scenes of this blog.

Do you have questions about blogs or blogging? Please ask & we’ll try to answer them

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Stuffdock.com is Digital Scrapbooking Blog Heaven!!

Have you seen Stuffdock.com? It’s quite an interesting read! It’s a conglomeration of many blog posts from a number of people. Some are famous in the digiworld & some are like us - infamous, maybe? It’s updated daily and grabs whatever is new from whoever has blogged.

• How does it work? (I always like to know!). Each time it updates it checks to see if your RSS feed is updated (just like a blog reader). Cool eh?!

• How do you sign up? You will need your blog address (URL) & RSS feed for your blog

• Here’s how you find your RSS feed - go to your blog & click on the RSS symbol on the right side (in Firefox browser - I don’t see it in IE - sorry ladies! you just need to convert to Firefox I guess!). Then the new address is your RSS feed.

• For example ours is: http://digiscrapinfo.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2

Send those two things to dana@stuffdock.com with a friendly request & she signs you up. It’s that easy!

And people have asked me for permission to link to our blog. I just want to express that anyone is WELCOME to link to our blog every time you want! We have blinkies in our forum if you want to post on your blog to blip over to us quickly if you’re an ACDSee user.

Blogs are all about linking & backlinking. That’s most of the fun! A backlink is when Dana sees that I’ve linked to Stuffdock in this blog entry. I’m using Wordpress here (which I *heart* by the way) and Technorati shows me all the blogs linked to our blog.

So leave a comment with your blog’s address if you want to join our blogroll. The more the merrier!

If you’d like to receive our blog by email, it’s easy to sign up on the top right.

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How can I setup my own forum?

Well there are few options and it really depends on your skills and what you currently have.Three options:

1. Use a hosted forum (free or paid)
2. Add a forum to your existing site.
3. Find a web hosting company that you can set up your forum and later other features you may want

1. Use a Hosted Forum

This is by far the easiest way. The forum hosting company installs, sets up and upgrades your forum as needed. Administrating the forum is probably easy also. The downside of this type of forum may be advertising or limitations. Limitations may be in the forum that you can’t have ads/banner on your website or limited number of styles/themes (the look) to your forum. You can always upgrade to the paid version and limitations are reduced.

I have provided some links of some popular free forum hosting but I have never tried them.

• http://www.freeforums.org/
• http://www.forumspring.com/
• http://www.talkthis.com/

Incorporating a forum into existing website:

If you already have website, see what your host provides for forums.

• Many hosts offer setup of specific forum packages so see what your host offers.
• Another option is to create a hosted forum as suggested above and just link to that forum from your website. That isn’t as nicely contained but it would be easy.
• Or you can setup your own forum and that information is same as the next option so see below.

Find a Web Host and start your own website with forum:

How to choose a Host:

This is by far one of the hardest things to do. I spent quite a bit of time searching and found a lot of information. As with most products, the unhappy people are the most vocal about the product so it feels like this host is bad or that host is bad. In the end I chose GoDaddy (reasons: cheap, large, reliable, and easy to register my domain.)

First thing you need to decide in choosing a host is what is most important to you.

• Price
• Bandwidth which is the amount of data that can be transferred. If you exceed the bandwidth, the host charges extra or your site goes down.
• Disk space, this is the amount of room that you have on the host for everything.

And other things that can’t really be determined until you use it:

• Upload/Download time which is how fast the server is.
• Customer Service
• Uptime/Downtime Downtime is how often the servers are inaccessible. You want Uptime to be close to 100%.
• Security

This is a simple updated list of top hosting companies: Best Web Hosting 2007

I liked this person’s method of finding a host: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=530676

An important thing to look for when you are choosing Hosts is see what packages/tools they install for you. (By packages/tools I mean software that runs forums, blogs, shopping carts, galleries, etc.) This will make life a lot more easy for you if they install it. So what packages/tools do you need? Well today we are discussing forums, so I will give you some popular choices.

The free to use forums: by far the most popular are these 2 choices:

• www.invisionboard.com
• www.phpbb.com

Best Purchased Forum is www.vbulletin.com

I will give you hint about choosing forums, as you move around websites reading forums, go to the very bottom. The forum package name being used is at the very bottom. DigiShopTalk uses vBulletin. We use phpbb. The reason they all look different is the style/theme of the forum. Packaged or customized styles/themes can be added to the free or purchased forums. Many times a specific style can be found that matches closely. If you want to start customizing, be prepared to learn html and other coding.

Once you have web host chosen, you go through their process of creating an account. If you have chosen well, the web host should provided a good documentation and help to guide you through the process. GoDaddy gave me a 55 page getting started guide. Along with this process is choosing a domain name. A domain name is simply what appears after www. I think this took Connie and I hours to decide. (Connie’s note - yep! until our husbands got sick of helping & when they started giving inappropriate ones, we knew it was time to decide!)

In setting up your own website with a forum you will learn as you go. It is also time consuming.

Connie asked me to write this blog entry and I feel like I have only touched upon it. I could type for hours of all the things you need to do, look for, etc. They are many resources are the web that are useful in doing this. You just need to search for them. So if you are interested in starting your forum, hopefully I gave you enough information to ponder the idea and point you in the right direction.

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Spice up your address bar with a Favicon made in ACDSee Photo Editor

I don’t feel good today - so I’m here to entertain you!

My sister had requested that I make a favicon for our site… (Can’t sisters just be demanding?!) So my first question was WHAT! is a favicon? I didn’t ask her because as a librarian, I Google all the time (or let’s say - pretend to know things but rely on the net heavily? maybe!).

Wikipedia says - A favicon (short for “favorites icon”), also known as a page icon or an urlicon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon, and many recent web browsers can then make use of them. Browsers that support favicons may display them in the browser’s URL bar, next to the site’s name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page’s title in a tabbed document interface.

And for those of us that use Firefox & LOVE our colored tabbed browsing, we see favicons all the time - we just didn’t know what they were called! I use that icon all the time when I bookmark by dragging it into the toolbar just below the address bar. Here’s a screenshot of my browser for those of you that like visuals:

Making a flavicon is VERY easy!! Now everyone has to realize that I do NOT have PS. I scrap in ACDSee Photo Editor and am quite happy with being able to get things done. And on a side note, on the weekend I made my first blinkie, but I had to have a friend animate it because I am PS challenged. I digress, sorry… (we’ll save the blinkie making instr’s for another time).

So the first thing you need to do is decide what flavor of icon you want? (I love plays on words - and doesn’t favicon just look like flavor?) It’s not very big - so it has to be simple and specific. We decided on a question mark. Then there was the color … because it needed to match with our website. So once I knew that I wanted a red question mark with a blue circle & red border it was easy. In ACDSee Photo Editor I made a 2″ square and filled that space with the circle & question mark and saved it as a png.

Now for the fun part! There’s a site that makes favicons from your image. (I saw a site where you could pay to have them made, but… we’re on low ‘no’ budget). So once you have your image, go here to FavIcon from Pics

• browse to your image
• click on ‘Generate Favicon’ It will show you a preview & you can test it in the browser.
• Then if you like it, you can download it as a zip. When you unzip it there will be a Read Me file giving instructions on how to place the code in your webpages. (My sister did this. As I’ve said before, she’s the brains of this operation.)

So, if you make one, add a comment & link us to it! I want to see what flavor you choose for your favicon & how it personalizes your site!

I just found this:
Adding Custom Favicon to Your Blogger Blog

http://how2make.blogspot.com/2007/02/adding-custom-favicon-to-your-blog

My sister, the techie, adds this suggestion –
As you starting installing favicons, they might not show up right way.

In firefox, Tools | Options | Advanced Tab | Network Tab | Cache Clear Now Button.

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Marketing your Digiscrapping Business: Forums

This series is dedicated to a couple of friends of mine. The first posted at DST wondering out loud about how to get a forum pumped up. I really respected her for asking the question publicly. And the other friend is someone who has been encouraging me to gather my thoughts for awhile on this topic for her.

To start with I need to explain my fascination with the social interaction on the net. And digiscrappers are incredibly intense online. One year ago I was introduced to Web 2.0 thru a couple of library speakers. And I’ll explain what Web 2.0 is later too. (You already know but just didn’t realize it - so if you’re intrigued - sign up on the right to know when our blog is updated so you don’t miss out!). I will be covering SEO too (search engine optimization) - what people know as the goal of being prominently seen by search engines like Google.

Forums are all about people. And my saying is that for every one person posting, there are 100 reading possibly. So you have active people & lurkers & the question is how does one get people to come out & play? engage them if you will? Here are some ideas that I’ve used & once you get the ball rolling… it’s a exciting to see the forum take on a personality of it’s own!

1. Be present - as a site owner it’s important that you’re there, active & making people feel good - people will notice & respond. (It’s a great time to be charming!). Vicki Stegall does this so well. So check out Oscraps if you want to see a great example.
2. Engage the people that are active at your forum because they probably think you walk on water. (You know who they are - the ones that stalk you! lol) They’re you’re biggest fans & can help you greatly.
3. Create a motivational team from your inhouse fan club. Have them help with posting at DST & supporting your marketing efforts. (It took me a long time in life to realize it’s ok to ask for help… you don’t have to do it all yourself.). Those ladies will be so excited to help you. Have them help monitor the ISO threads at DST & paste up your great designs (with images).
4. Empower them - give them a private area in the forum & let them brainstorm. You’ll be amazed at what a group will come up with! Encourage them to keep it simple so no one gets worn out. Let them scrap with your kits & advertise your work. Have them help moderate, blog, etc. Have them choose a scrapper of the week/month if you have a gallery.
5. Establish a routine at your forum by trying the following -
   • encourage members to post their picture - this personalizes things (if they resist - offer a prize to all that do so & you’ll find it becomes the standard)
   • use your name rather than admin. for your username - admin is sterile
   • encourage people to come out of lurking -run a game or contest to see who is frequenting your forum. You maybe will be surprised!
   • if you have other designers selling, ask them all to post & get involved. Ask your CT to actively post at the forum.
6. Make your customers feel special. Assuming that you have a store connected with your forum, offer a coupon thru your blog, on the forum, etc. All of us love coupons.
7. Listen to your customers. This means ask them what they’d like to see in the forum, what typs of designs they’re looking for, what they’d like to learn, talk with them.
8. Ask yourself what makes your site unique? or how would you like it to be unique? If you wander around our site - my sister & I started this with a goal of reducing our typing when we were answering questions around the net. It’s not so much a social place, but it is very friendly. We respond to posts within 2 hrs during waking hours. And we do ‘housecalls’ - yes, when people are in need friends let us know where & we go to that site to answer questions. This evolved. This leads me to the next one… But first, consider what makes your site unique & focus on that. If you can’t think of something - then create a daily routine at your site. Your regulars will love it & more will join.
9. Be flexible…. and realize that sometimes you’ll have a great idea & oopsie, things don’t go as planned. But try try again. Be creative… watch what others are doing & gather ideas. I’m a people watcher, can you tell? And I love trying to figure out why things are successful. Plan ahead - this will guarantee success - and make you happier when you’re more relaxed in the execution of your plans.
10. Be transparent - say what you mean & mean what you say. You’ll gain far more respect with all those you work with. And this is obvious, but good business practices are absolutely necessary. Remedy customer service issues quickly & follow up. Meredith Fenwick gave me the BEST customer service back when I was getting started. People don’t forget that (obviously I haven’t!). The joy of the digiscrapping world is that people get such GREAT customer service. Designers are THE best at it!
11. Some other things in no particular order: offer a freebie, find ways to creatively get people moving thru your forum like a scavenger hunt (they’ll have fun while doing so too!), send a newsletter out to your members, create a blinkie for your loyal customers to wear & add a clickable link in the address - so when they wear it at other sites, you have people clicking over. (These stat’s are interesting to watch). Post instructions on how to get it into their signature.

I think what holds site owners back is that they’re afraid to take risks, but consider it an experiement instead! It can be great fun trying new things & going in new directions. My sister obligated us to a year & I thought - what if this doesn’t work…. and now we’ve grown so much in 3 months, it was the obvious thing to do! (We’ll see if she reads this!). But we’re having a great time & love our dedicated followers. Both of us learned digiscrapping online & we’re enjoying giving back to the community.

Here are some links that have interesting reading:

10 mistakes that will kill a forum

Top 10 lessons I’ve learned about managing a forum

10 tips for promoting your forum

Do you have more ideas for motivating a forum? Please post them here for others. I think the next topic will be blogging & SEO. Stay tuned….

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