Blog Exercises: How Many Posts Can Your Audience Handle?

In “Blog Exercises: How Many Posts? the exercise asked you to consider how many posts you should publish within a specific time period on your site, such as by day, week, month, or year. The goal was to set self-deadlines and monitor how many posts you felt were appropriate to publish within that time period. […]

Blog Exercises: Define Your Target Audience

The phrase “target audience” is an advertising and marketing phrase designed to help you aim your content at a specific group of people. Do you know your target audience? As a crafter, you may offer a wide range of craft ideas and projects, so your audience might be all crafters and do-it-yourself folks. If you […]

Web Design for God’s Audience: Learning from Church Web Development

Part of my joy in being an advocate for WordPress is showcasing how WordPress is used around the world. In a fascinating discussion with Darren Hoyt, Interviews with Church Designers looks at web design and WordPress blogs from a unique perspective: Christian churches, specifically American Christian churches. Like me, Darren admits he didn’t understand the […]

Ways to Build and Retain Your Podcast Audience

By Douglas Bell My friend Daniel Brusilovsky has posted a couple of articles here at Lorelle on WordPress about some of the technical details of creating a podcast, such as What is Podcasting? and Starting Your Podcast, and Lorelle has asked me to post an article or two to go a little more “in depth” […]

Building Your Blogging Audience One Reader at a Time

8 Steps to Growing Your Blog Community One Person At a Time by Ben Yoskovitz is a great step-by-step approach to helping you build a relationship with your readers and audience, one reader at a time. In the first three tips, Yoskovitz points out comments as the top of the list way to encourage your […]

Turning Diggs Into an Audience

In How to Build a ‘Digg Culture’ on your Blog, ProBlogger Darren Rowse may sound like he’s offering another article on “how to get dugg by Digg”, but it is much more important than that game. I’ve talked repeatedly about how important it is to provide your visitors with a reason to return, thus building […]

Blogging Challenge: Describe Your Blogging Audience

This week’s Blogging Challenge is who is your blogging audience? The saying is: “If you don’t know who you are writing to, how do you know what to write.” It’s true. Unless you understand who you are writing to, how can you figure out what or how to tell them what you want to tell […]

How to Handle Tough Questions (and Comments) from an Audience

Beauty is Only Skin Deep: Designing Blogs For Feeds, Search Engines and Audience

Crabby Night Owl’s post, “Substance Not Style is King”, caught my attention: About 20% of the hits CNO gets come via the newsfeeds, and I wanted to see what those feeds looked like when they’re read. What I saw was plain, unformatted text, devoid of any style that I may have imparted to it on […]

Blog Exercises: Emergency Drafts

I write my blog posts as far in advance as possible, using the future posts/scheduling feature of WordPress to set my posts to release over time, automating the process of self-publishing on my site and giving me time to live my life rather than be tied to my site. I rely heavily on my Editorial […]

Blog Exercises: Prepare for Summer

It’s Editorial Calender check-in and check up time. May is the shift from spring to summer. From blossoming flowers to green leafed trees casting shade, the weather is changing, bringing warmer days to the northern hemisphere and colder temperatures down under. For those of us living in the Pacific Northwestern United States, we are experiencing […]

Blog Exercises: Fall in Love with Words

There are certain clues that tell you how much a restaurant will cost. If the word “cuisine” appears in the advertising, it will be expensive. If they use the word “food,” it will be moderately priced. However, if the sign says “eats,” even though you’ll save money on food, your medical bills may be quite […]

Blog Exercises: Stand Up For Freedom of Speech

There are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is! 399,993 to 7. They must really be baaaad. They must be OUTRAGEOUS to be separated from a group that large. “All of you words over here, you seven…baaaad words.” That’s what they told […]

Blog Exercises: Footnotes

In “Creating Footnotes in WordPress,” the tutorial explains how to use footnotes in WordPress, and applies to other blog publishing platforms. Links are the footnotes of today, linking to citations, references, and resources on the web. Yet, there are still times when footnotes are necessary, especially when the citation isn’t online or if your topic […]

Blog Exercises: Site Policies and Bloggers Code of Ethics

It’s time to start working on all of your site policies, one by one. So far, we’ve touched on some of these in Blog Exercises: The Don’ts of Blogging, Blog Exercise: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About, Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies, and Blog Exercises: Quoting and Blockquotes. The basic policies […]