Blog Exercises: Polls and Surveys Follow-up

In Blog Exercises: Polls and Surveys I asked you to create a poll on your site asking for input from your readers. Today’s exercise is on creating a follow-up poll.

In that exercise, I invited readers to respond to the question, “What publishing platform are you currently using?”

The answers to that are typical, skewed more towards WordPress as Lorelle on WordPress is dedicated to WordPress. Therefore, there isn’t enough information for me to do something with. I need to follow-up on the poll to expand on the topic.

“Are you considering changing to a new publishing platform? If yes, which one?”

The answer options are Blogger/Blogspot, MovableType, TypePad, WordPress.com, self-hosted version of WordPress, Tumblr, Jux, Posterous, ExpressionEngine, Joomla, Drupal, and other, covering most of the web publishing options.

Your Blog Exercise is to go back to your original question and think of a way to expand upon it, asking for more specific information from your readers.

What would make your original question more specific and helpful to yourself as well as to your audience? Everyone’s question is different. Dig deeper to uncover what would make the question have more relevance.

Remember not to ask questions that assume you already know the answer. Be careful of adding bias to your question. Keep the question clean, simple, and easy-to-understand. Most importantly, be sincere. Ask a question that directly relates to what you want to learn from your readers. People are more likely to respond to relevance.

In addition to the resources listed on the original blog exercise on polls and surveys, here are more resources on how to ask an effect survey or poll question.

• Tips for Writing Polls and Surveys | Suess’s Pieces
• A new way to filter survey data – PollDaddy
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Public Opinion Polling
• Grammar Girl : How to Write Good Survey Questions – Quick and Dirty Tips ™
• Purdue OWL: Conducting Primary Research
• AP Stylebook on Polls and Surveys
• Survey Tips: How to write a good survey questionnaire – Accesscable.net
• 10 Tips for Writing and Delivering Effective Poll and Survey Questions – Adobe Connect User Community
• 8 Tips for Writing Effective Survey Questions – Constant Contact
• Designing Surveys that Count – Keen State College and Monadnock United Way
• Guide to Writing Survey Questions – Manaqgement Analysis and Development – Minnesota State University
• Designing a Survey – Science Buddies
• How To Write A Survey | SmartGirl
• SmartGirl – How To Write A Survey (Advanced)
• Customer Satisfaction Example Survey Questions | SurveyMonkey
• The Power and Perils of Polling | The Daily MBA

Remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.

Writing for the Web Course Starts June 3, 1013

I will be teaching “Writing for the Web” at Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education in Vancouver, Washington, Tuesdays and Thursdays, June 3 – July 8, 2013. The class will be at the West Coast Bank Building in downtown Vancouver, Washington, just a few minutes from downtown Portland, Oregon.

Writing on the web is now a daily habit for many around the world, sharing our thoughts, stories, and expertise via social media and blogging. We all do it. Isn’t it time you learned how to do it better?

The writing class is focused on web publishing and self-publishing on everything from blogs to Facebook and Twitter. Students will create a WordPress.com practice site and learn about content development, strategies, structure, and organization, understanding the power of self-publishing and preserving the written word.

Multimedia will not be ignored. We will cover how to create and include images, video, and podcasting, the art of regularly scheduled audio and video updates and shows.

Web writing techniques and styles will be covered including storytelling, writing for search engines, building an online community, comments and interactivity, linking, copyright, guest blogging, citizen journalism, and how to edit, research, and develop an article on a website.

We will be working on WordPress, so expect to learn more about content publishing and management on WordPress. If you want to dive even deeper into WordPress, this course is an ideal accompaniment to my classes and workshops on WordPress.

This is a must-take course for anyone working with the web and social media. It is also recommended for personal bloggers, crafters, artists, authors, family historians, and small business owners.

You may register online through their site, Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education, or by phone, 360-992-2939, or in person at the new Continuing Education offices in the West Coast Bank Building.

You will find more information on this course and other courses I teach such as WordPress college degree courses and continuing education courses, and family history blogging in Classes and Workshops.

These classes tend to fill up fast. I look forward to seeing you there and helping you learn more about having your say on the web.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.

WordPress Course at PCC-Rock Creek in Beaverton

I will be teaching a WordPress Introduction college course at Portland Community College in Beaverton, just west of Portland, Oregon, starting April 3 – June 12, 2013. The course is a hybrid online course meetings Wednesdays from 6-9PM with a minimum of two hours online per week.

Called “CMS Website Creation: WordPress,” this 3 credit college course is an introduction to WordPress and part of the web design and development degree programs at PCC.

Unlike the slow pace of my WordPress continuing education course, this is a fast-paced college course that requires familiarity with HTML, CSS, web browsers, and search engines.

The course explores the basics of WordPress functions and features, ideal for students as well as business owners and employees responsible for managing websites and web publishing.

Topics include WordPress basics, content structure and organization, social media integration, WordPress Themes, WordPress Plugins, and management of a WordPress site.

Registration is with the college directly or online through PCC Registration and requires registration fees and paperwork in addition to the course fees. Remember the course name is CMS Website Creation: WordPress and the class number is CAS181W.

You will find more information on this course and other courses I teach such as WordPress college degree courses and continuing education courses, and family history blogging in Classes and Workshops.

This is the first time PCC-Rock Creek is offering this course so expect it fill up fast.

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Blog Exercises: Where Are You?

After agreeing to take on a writing assignment regarding Oregon history, I happily settled down to do a little preliminary online research. Because some of the towns I needed to research were located in areas I was not completely familiar with, I was relying on their local websites to point me to what I needed to know.

Fat chance. One thing became obvious to me — nobody was thinking like a visitor when they set up their website. The thing that amazed me most is that so many history museums forget to post the TOWN they are in. The people offering the information forget the vast majority of website visitors may not already know that information.

“Don’t make it painful to find you“ by Musings of the History Queen (History of The Dalles, Oregon)

While it may not be important to identify your location on your site, it is important to identify your location if your site is closely tied to your location.

If you are a shop owner and your site is dedicated to supporting your business, you better not just name the city but the state and possibly the country if you wish to be found. If you are a community blogger, we have to know which community you blog about. If you are a museum or government agency, as this blogger points out so eloquently, you better tell your online visitors exactly where you are and that you have information about the area.

The blogger known as Winquatt, goes on:

A person shouldn’t have to dig for the gold of knowing what town your museum is in, or better yet, the orientation within the larger geographic region and proximity to roads. And yes, I eventually found my confirmation that the museum is, indeed, in Eugene… a factoid I wouldn’t have been able to guess had I been a resident of another state or country.

I have a family history blog and my locations are represented by categories, the states and countries my ancestors lived in for an extended amount of time. Much genealogy research is location specific, so identifying that you are the Anderson family from Wisconsin and Washington, not the Anderson family from New Orleans, Chicago, Atlanta, or Tampa is very important as my family never lived in those locations. The where becomes very important in genealogy and family history blogging.

I grew up in Snohomish County of Washington State. I learned early that when you refer to Washington as a residence, you have to distinguish between the state and the capital. My childhood revolved around the cities of Everett and Marysville. Hitting the road early in life, I was stunned to find out that there is a Marysville in almost every state in the country. There are also some Everetts. Traveling with my father cross-country a few years ago, he loved to brag about all the exciting places we’d passed through: Jerusalem, Lebanon, Palestine, Rome, Paris…and we never left the United States. If you are blogging about Marysville, Jerusalem, Paris, or Lebanon, you better clarify which one.

Your blog exercise today is to check your site for a clear indicator of your location.

Again, only if it is critical to your site and the needs of your audience. If your blog topic is not location specific, it’s up to you to decide if that information is important. If it is, make it clear and visible. If it isn’t really, but you’d like people to know, put it in your bio on your About Page. Otherwise, don’t bother.

If your site represents a specific community, look around the site and design for how to clarify the location. Should it be in the blog name, the tagline, the sidebar, a purpose statement, a category, tag? Maybe it should be a graphic in the header art representing your community like a scenic or series of landmark images for the area.

On Musings of the History Queen, it is in her tagline “Celebrating life in Historic The Dalles.” I’d like to see her add Oregon to that tagline as she covers more than just the town along the Columbia River but also the surrounding Oregon and Washington State area. Maybe it should include Oregon and Washington. Whatever it takes to clarify and represent your subject matter.

Remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.

Go to the 10th Anniversary of SOBCon in Chicago

I want to live in a world where my word and expertise initiates action in others. I want to say a few words and watch people jump. I promise to use this power rarely, but if I do, I would like you to act now.

If I had such a power, I would say the following.

Go to SOBCon this year.

I would expect you all to register immediately, no questions asked, knowing my word is truth. You’d trust me when I say SOBCon will change your life.

If you have been following me over the years, you will be familiar with SOBCon, the Successful Online Business Conference, the annual business conference that is unlike any business conference you have ever attended. I’ve told stories of how it changed my life repeatedly, and the lives of others, and how I and others would not be the authority bloggers, online experts, and web business professionals we are today if not for Liz Strauss, Terry Starbucker, and SOBCon.

So I’m done with trying to convince you. It is May 3-5, 2013, in Chicago. Just go.

This year is the 10th anniversary of this special event. It is not to be missed. Go.

If you need more words, check these out:

• The Most Powerful Life Changing Conference Event, SOBCon, Comes to the Pacific Northwest
• SOBCon 2011: Successful Online Business Conference – The Must Be There Conference
• Blog Struggles: SOBCon, Idea Whelmed, and Tell It To the Telephone Pole
• SOBCon 2010 Chicago: What Did You Learn?
• Inspired by Glenda Watson Hyatt at SOBCon09
• 24 Reasons Why You Should Attend These Blog Conferences
• SOBCon: Be There for the Business of Blogging!
• SOBCon 2007 Remembered and Recommended

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Introduction to WordPress Class at Clark College Continuing Education

I will be teaching another Introduction to WordPress course at Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education in Vancouver, Washington, starting Saturdays, April 27 through July 13, 2013. The class will be at the Columbia Tech Center in eastern Vancouver, just across the Columbia River off Interstate 205, just a few minutes from downtown Portland, Oregon.

The non-credit class is dedicated to learning the basics of WordPress at a slower and more comfortable pace than my WordPress college courses. The classes are designed to be smaller with more hands-on training and experience. With the smaller class size, I customize the course to the needs of the participants, personalizing each class to help students get the most out of it.

The course introduces basic WordPress terminology and techniques, focusing on content creation, management, development, and organization. It is designed specifically for three levels of WordPress users. The person new to WordPress, eager to learn how to use it, the person with a site and familiar with web publishing either switching to WordPress or wishing to improve their WordPress skills, and the long time WordPress user eager to refresh their basic skills and get concentrated work done on their site. The latter tell me this class is a “kick in their butt” when it comes to WordPress. It is ideal for the personal blogger, family history/genealogy blogger, and small business owner or employee wishing to have an active site.

Register online through their site, Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education, or by phone, 360-992-2939, or in person at the new Continuing Education offices in the West Coast Bank Building.

You will find more information on this course and other courses I teach such as WordPress college degree courses, web writing, and family history blogging in Classes and Workshops.

Online versions of these courses are in the works and will be announced soon.

These classes tend to fill up fast. I look forward to seeing you there!

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.

Blog Exercises: Trackback Check-Up

It’s time to check your trackbacks.

In Blog Exercises: Trackbacks and Blog Exercises: Backlinks you learned about trackbacks, the automatic process of a site linking to yours and generating a comment-like notification to alert you of the link to your article, and helping your readers discover what others are saying about your article.

In this Blog Exercises it is time to do a check-up on how trackbacks are working for you.

Go to your Comments panel on the WordPress Administration Panels. Do a search for [..] in the search form.

All of the results should feature comments proceeded by [...], the default for trackbacks in WordPress and other publishing platforms as the trackback “comment” is often in the middle of a sentence and an excerpt of text around the trackback link.

Begin by noticing the count number of the search results. I currently have over 11,532 trackbacks on 3,000 posts. Do the math and if each post had a trackback, that’s the equivalent of about 4 trackbacks per post. That isn’t how it works as I have 307 trackbacks on one post alone, but it might help you get a different perspective on your trackbacks.

Go through your trackbacks. While double-checking for spam trackbacks, pay close attention to what the trackbacks are saying about your content, and which posts are getting the most trackbacks.

There is much you can learn from this type of feedback. It helps you identify the water-cooler topics that people like and link to on your site. It helps you to know what others are saying about you and what you publish on your site.

What else can you learn by doing this trackback check-up? How does this change your blogging going forward?

Remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.

Blog Exercises: What is Your Posting Response Assessment?

A few years ago, the US Air Force created the Air Force Web Posting Response Assessment (PDF), a flow chart that takes their Public Affairs Agency and other agencies involved in web publishing and social media through a step-by-step evaluation of how to respond to comments and interactivity on social media sites.

The steps flow basically in this order:

1. The discovery of the post.
2. Decide to respond or not, or monitor.
3. Review the comment code for spam, emotional context, appropriateness, customer service, and facts. Respond appropriately by monitoring, fixing the facts, deleting, or finding a solution.
4. Choose to agree, disagree, or acknowledge.
5. Choose to share the success of the conversation or not.

The “Response Considerations” are very helpful to everyone in planning your response strategies.

• Transparency: Disclose your affiliations and connections to employers, expertise, or other policies or responsibilities that may or may not influence your response or the acceptance of your response.
• Sourcing: Cite and qualify sources in your response to support and defend your position if necessary.
• Timeliness: “Take time to create good responses. Don’t rush.” Couldn’t say it better. Not every comment requires an immediate response.
• Tone: The written word doesn’t always speak well for us. The Air Force states that the tone should reflect positively on the “rich heritage of the Air Force.” Make your response represent your own personal integrity and reputation.
• Influence: They recommend focusing on sites and policies of the Air Force, but you think about what and how things influence your response. Are you in a good mood, bad mood, biased, prejudice, or influenced by anything in your response? If so, explain what influences you towards your specific response, if necessary, but consider what might be influencing how you respond and check anything that might make your response be a little off target or a little too much on target.

The Future of Blogging – With a Glimpse Backwards

In “What’s next for blogging: I try to predict the future” by Yesterday’s news, the author, a Creative and Professional Writing Major at Bemidji State University in Minnestoa, used fantastic visuals to take us on a journey through the development of blogging and the blogging industry for a class on blogs and wikis.

She makes such beautiful points about blogging and the social web, I’d like to summarize them here for posterity. Trust me, out of the context of the visual graphics, my words are paltry by comparison.

• Blogging sprung out of USENET groups and forums to help escribitionists, the keepers of the online diaries, preserve their words.
• The development of the web, connecting servers to clients and interconnecting the pieces together through feeds, subscriptions, links, trackbacks, and blogrolls, created an environment for sharing, self-publishing, and networking from 1980 to 2001.
• The web’s use of blogs, wikis, and social media channels turned the web from reporting and self-publishing to the concept of sousveillance, “you become the camera.”
• The ease of publishing with online journals and weblogs (blogs) took off in 1999 as publishing platforms were launched such as Live Journal, Open Diary, Diary Land, and Blogger.
• Politics entered in 2001 with journalists, pundits, and “citizen journalists” having their say on the web and governments (and corporations) attempted to deal with the concept of transparency, open source, self-publishing, and freedom of speech. Governments continue to struggle to apply old-fashioned laws to the fast evolving social web.
• By 2006, the concept of the “social web” has taken hold with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other self-publishing and social media channels and networks. Perception is reputation in the online world.
• Describing the “perfect” blog, the author states: “Blogging will become a way to portray your personality. If you seem to be a generally likable person in your posts, more people will support you.” The author predicts:
  • Cyberbullying will increase.
  • Ranting and venting online will increase, though she admits, “Blogging does not work as a private venting station. Blogging does work as a way to publicize new ideas.”
  • Instead of language barriers, there will be coding errors. HTML will be the “language” of the future as browsers, search engines, and publishing platforms break down the language barriers with instant translations.
  • Fear of the “network” crashing will be of more concern than the stock market crashing.
  • Tracking the conversation with hashtags and social media tracking will be a prerequisite for future social channels and analytics.
  • Wikipedia will/is the default source for all research and references.

Is this the future (and past) you see as a blogger?

I love colleges and universities adding blogging and social media to their degree programs. It is so essential to teach students how to communicate and interact on the web, especially when it comes to writing skills and etticute.

Sometimes it is the students who teach us old teachers best.

Hattip: Jack in the Box

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.

Blog Exercises: Bottom Up Editing

What if you blogged from the bottom up?

In this Blog Exercise I’d like you to take a look at the article you are working on, preparing to publish it on your site, and take the last paragraph and put it at the top.

We are often locked into our basic language education that taught us to write much like the reverse pyramid order of old newspaper writing. Put your most important information at the top and work your way down to the least information at the bottom. Or they write following the old rules of tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.

What would happen to your article if you took the last paragraph and started with it?

Many people actually write their most profound statements at the very bottom of their posts. This is often the moment when they collect their thoughts and summarize what they’ve said. It is usually a call to action, to themselves or others.

What would happen if you started out with the last lines of your post?

Your blog exercise today is to write out an article for your site. Flesh out all the ideas and points you wish to make. Then take the last paragraph and move it to the top of the article.

Can you publish it this way? How does it change the tone and intent of the article?

See what happens and share your thoughts below in the comments or blog about it. If you do, remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.

Blog Exercises for February

We’ve completed the second month of Blog Exercises in February. Are you still with me?

Here is the list.

• Blog Exercises: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About
• Blog Exercises: Honor the Past with Anniversaries and Birthdays
• Blog Exercises: Your Byline
• Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies
• Blog Exercises: Backlinks
• Blog Exercises: Category Counting
• Blog Exercises: Fix Images in Your Content
• Blog Exercises: Category Cross-Pollination
• Blog Exercises: Current Events for February
• Blog Exercises: Random Edit Day February
• Blog Exercises: Weekly Link Roundups
• Blog Exercises: Quoting and Blockquotes
• Blog Exercises: Trackbacks
• Blog Exercises: Weather Reports
• Blog Exercises: Clean Up Your Most Popular Posts
• Blog Exercises: Clean Up Your Most Popular Posts
• Blog Exercises: Update Your Author Description
• Blog Exercises: How to Publish Code
• Blog Exercises: How Many Posts?
• Blog Exercises: Schedule Blogging Time
• Blog Exercises: Feed Readers

March will bring exercises to help you develop your blog policies and legal terms and conditions. We’ll dig more into WordPress features and functionality that may apply to all sites not just WordPress. I’ve got more on tags and categories and site organization and structure planned, some SEO, writing tips and techniques, and some surprises.

When I started this project in January, I had a basic idea of where I wanted to go, and about 100 posts written and ready to publish. Since then, I’ve rewritten most of them, changed the order around, and added new ideas as I develop this series with intentional plans and organic responses.

Many of my ideas come from you, so dig up your to do lists on the things you wish to know about blogging and web publishing and ask. Who knows, your request might be the next post in this series.

Thank you for hanging on with this for the first two months. We’ve got ten more to go. That’s a lot of blogging about blogging.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.

Blog Exercises: Feed Readers

Without the feed reader, my blogging life would be seriously hard work.

Feed, commonly misidentified as RSS, is the proper name for the contextual version of your site as distributed through various feed types such as RSS, Atom, XML, etc. They are basically your posts stripped of your website design, read like articles in a newspaper.

Today’s feed readers are more than the simple text readers of old. Google Reader is now incorporated into Google Currents, a mobile app that reads a site’s feeds in a magazine format. Other mobile apps that create a magazine feel for reading site feeds include Feedly, Flipboard, Zite, Pulse, SkyGrid, and News360.

Today’s Blog Exercise is designed to teach you the basics of how to use a feed reader to find something to blog about, specifically topical issues associated with your blog topic and industry.

Imagine monitoring 1,000 websites daily. Could you do it? Could you create 2,000 bookmarks in your browser and visit all 2,000 sites once a day? Once a week? Once a month? Maybe once a year.

I’ve been using a feed reader since they were developed to help me monitor the world around me, specifically my world, the world of blogging and WordPress. I now have over 1,000 sources in my feed reader just on WordPress. With a feed reader, I can scan down the list of the sites in a few minutes looking for what is new and interesting.

Blog Exercises: Schedule Blogging Time

When do you blog best? I do my best blogging between 8AM and 1PM, then in the evening between 8PM and 11:30PM. When is your best time for creative thought, writing, and blogging?

I blog professionally in addition to teaching, training, and public speaking on blogging, WordPress, and social media, so blogging is my life. Most of us work for a living, so our best time for blogging might not find us available to blog, so we have to train ourselves to blog at a time that works in our schedule.

John Grisham wrote his first books on the commuter train to and from home and work. That was the time he had free to develop his fiction writing craft.

Irving Wallace wrote the book The Sunday Gentleman showcasing his early short stories and articles from his early writing years. The book title was based on the old English Debtor’s Prison tradition of allowing men, typically arrested in public for debts, to walk around free in public on Sunday, free from imprisonment. Considering his real job as a form of incarceration, Wallace saved every Sunday to work on what he wanted to work on, his dream of selling his fiction. Just like Grisham, eventually his dream came true and he published best-selling novels.

When I first started writing and photographing, my “hobbies” were relegated to evenings and weekends, snatched moments when I could be free to develop my craft. Today, even though blogging and training are full-time jobs, I still schedule time to work on specific projects outside the scope of blogging about blogging and WordPress. For me, writing is my life and passion, but it is also my work. So I have work hours and play hours, writing all the time.

This blog exercise is about scheduling blogging time for yourself, carving out those moments on a regular basis when you can prepare content for your site.

In addition to the work you are doing developing your editorial calendar, start adding time to develop story ideas, to research, read your feeds, and scan the world for story ideas. Add writing time to the schedule, too, not just research time.

Some time may be easily scheduled, like Grisham and Wallace did, assigning time you can count on for concentrated creativity.

Also look for time in between things. My phone and tablet are often with me so I can do a little research and prep work while waiting for things to happen like doctors, dentists, trains, buses, traffic, whatever stalls my life and tests my patience. Sometimes these can be scheduled, other times you leap when the opportunity appears.

What time works best for you? Do you need time when your muse guides you, or do you take it when you can get it?

If you blog about this, remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.

Creating Footnotes in WordPress

Among the many techniques students and clients request in my WordPress and blogging workshops and classes¹, requests for creating footnotes in WordPress are rare, but they do happen.

There are very distinctive differences between traditional writing and web publishing styles.² Footnotes have been replaced by links to cite a reference or resource to support the concept or point of the article. Yet, many still like the traditional and familiarity of a footnote, especially academics.

According to Wikipedia³, a footnote is called a note, often confused with endnotes. Footnotes are notes in the “foot” of the page in which the reference is needed. Endnotes are collections of reference notes and citations found at the end of the entire document or book, like a bibliography. While a website is a collection of many web pages, a web page does not consist of individual pages like a traditional document or book, we use footnotes at the bottom of the article web page as endnotes would be impractical to maintain.

Example of footnotes in WordPress.

There are many pros and cons to using footnotes on web pages.

Links cover one or more words thus are easier to see and easier to click over a larger area. Footnote links are tiny, hard to see, and hard to click, especially if you have mobility issues.

Footnotes are familiar to academics, scientists, and researchers. If you are publishing such papers or writing for that audience, it would be natural to include traditional footnotes.

There are also times when you may need to cite a source that isn’t online. How would you site a paper or reference that is not online? A footnote serves to cite the source while not interrupting the natural flow of the content with explanations in parentheses.

The process of creating footnotes on your site posts involves creating a bibliography, a collection of your footnote citations and references at the bottom of the article, then adding links from within the content to the footnotes at the bottom.

All this talk of footnotes can be confusing so I will call the footnotes at the bottom the footnotes list and the links to them footnote links.

Blog Exercises: How Many Posts?

How many posts do you need to publish a year on your site?

Have you counted?

Do you schedule them in a way to count each post over a day, week, month, or year?

At my peak, I pushed 1,975 posts a year. Yes, someone counted. The number frightened me. I had to break it down.

That’s 2,370,000 average words a year.

38 articles a week.

5.4 articles a day, seven days a week.

When I break it down that way, it doesn’t seem like a lot. I can whip out five to six articles a day easy. Group it together, it’s intimidating – damn right frightening.

Your Blog Exercise today is to count the number of posts you regularly publish. You may count your currently published posts or count the posts you expect or wish to publish regularly in the future.

If you plan to publish a post a day, that’s 365 published articles a year.

Too much? Take away a few holidays or reduce it to work days (5 days a week) and it comes to about 260 days a year in the United States, thus 260 posts a year.

Still too much? How many posts do you think you could do a month? A week? One a week? One a month? More?

Figure out your numbers. Count up the posts you currently or wish to publish exploring day, week, month, and year.

Then head to your editorial calendar, the publishing schedule for your site, and start counting.

With the items you’ve included on your calendar, are there too many or less than your expectations on how many posts you should publish regularly? Should you increase or decrease the number? Does comparing the number change your calendar? How?

As a reminder, here are the exercises we’ve done so far on the Editorial Calendar for your site.

• Blog Exercises: The Editorial Calendar
• Blog Exercises: Blogging with the Seasons
• Blog Exercises: Current Events January
• Blog Exercises: Honor the Past with Anniversaries and Birthdays

There are no right or wrong number of posts to publish on a schedule. There are many myths about improving your SEO and ranking by publishing daily or frequently. The truth is that you need to publish on a schedule that walks a fine line between how often you need to publish and how much content your audience, your loyal fans, can handle. We’ll talk more about that later, so right now, concentrate on the numbers and compare it to your editorial calendar.

If you choose to blog about this exercise, remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

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