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ProBlogger: Get to Know Your Readers: An Example of When It Counts

ProBlogger: Get to Know Your Readers: An Example of When It Counts

Link to @ProBlogger

Get to Know Your Readers: An Example of When It Counts

Posted: 13 Nov 2013 09:37 AM PST

Over on dPS today we launched a brand new photography eBook about buying the right camera gear. As I was writing a blog post to announce the new eBook I was looking for an opening to the blog post that might capture our readers attention.

Then it struck me – we had recently done a survey of our readers that contained the golden information.

A couple of months ago we ran a survey with a segment of our readership to gather some information to help us put together a media kit to approach advertisers.

One of the questions in the survey asked our readers about what photography gear they were planning to purchase in the coming 12 months.

The results of that question were fascinating both for us to give advertisers but also as we thought about what content we could publish on the site.

Screen Shot 2013 11 13 at 1 51 10 pm

Today I also realised that the stats gave me the perfect lead in for a blog post about the eBook.

Over 85% of our readers indicated that they were looking to purchase a camera or significant camera gear (a lens, bag, flash etc).

While we hadn’t decided to write the eBook on purchasing gear based upon these stats – we realised we were onto something!

The opening to the blog post became quite clear:

Screen Shot 2013 11 13 at 4 28 24 pm

Understanding Your Readership is So Important

The more you know about your readers the better position you’ll be in to serve them with great content, to find new readers, to build community with them and to monetise your blog.

Further reading on getting to know your readers:

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Build a Better Blog in 31 Days

Get to Know Your Readers: An Example of When It Counts
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How To Disable Post Revisions and Autosave on WordPress - DailyBlogTips

How To Disable Post Revisions and Autosave on WordPress - DailyBlogTips

How To Disable Post Revisions and Autosave on WordPress

Posted: 13 Nov 2013 05:01 AM PST

WordPress has a “Post Revisions” feature that automatically stores in the database various versions of your posts, so that you can roll back to earlier versions if necessary.

This is a useful feature in some situations. For instance, if you accidentally erase the content of a post you would be able to get an older version. Similarly, if you have multiple authors on your blog this feature might help to fix undesired changes or edits to some of the posts.

That being said if you are the only person posting on your blog and if you are careful when editing the posts you might find that you’ll never use the post revisions feature. If this is the case I suggest that you turn it off, as by doing so you will be reducing the number of entries on your database.

Suppose that, on average, each post ends up having five saved revisions. This means that a blog with 1000 posts would have 6000 entries in the database (1000 for the posts and 5000 for the revisions). In other words, you could be saving some space and improving the performance of your database queries (even if slightly).

To disable post revisions simply add the following code to your wp-config.php file (remember to back it up before making any changes, in case anything goes wrong):

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

Another change you can make is to increase the time interval of the auto-saves on your posts, as it can be annoying, specially on slow connections. The default is 60 seconds (i.e., WordPress auto-saves your posts every minute). If you want to increase it to 180 minutes (i.e., 3 minuteS), add the code below to the same wp-config.php file:

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 180 );

Finally, you can also remove all the existent post revisions from your database, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it unless you are quite familiar with MySQL and databases. There are some “database cleaning” plugins around as well which could be used for this purpose.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

Is Your Name Displaying Incorrectly on Your Blog? Here’s How to Fix It

Posted: 12 Nov 2013 07:46 AM PST

Every post and comment you write on your blog has your name attached.

And if your name is set to "admin" or "ali01" or similar, it's not going to create the best impression.

I made this mistake with my first attempt at a "pro" blog. For an embarrassingly long time – months! – my name showed up as "admin". Once I figured out how to change it, I was kicking myself for not doing it sooner.

Here's how to fix how your name displays on your blog. (These instructions apply to WordPress … but the same principles go for any blog platform; you need to make sure your name displays the way you want it to.)

  1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Go to Users –> Your Profile
  3. Enter your first name and last name, and change your nickname if you want.
  4. From "Display name publicly as", select the form of your name you want to use.
  5. Click "Update Profile" at the bottom of the screen.

Here's how my name information looks on DailyBlogTips:

change-display-name-wordpress-ali

(I've blanked out my username for security reasons.)

It's as simple as that!

Did you need to change your display name – or have you been on top of this for months already? Let us know in the comments!

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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