[Mistakes #4] Five Common Contact Page Mistakes … and How to Fix Them

Posted: 27 Dec 2013 01:34 AM PST

In this part of our Mistakes series, we're looking at Contact pages. You may want to read the previous post on About pages first.

Your Contact page will probably be the shortest page on your blog … but it could potentially be the most important.

Imagine that an influential blogger stops by, having read one of your posts. They want to contact you and ask you to guest post for them (the start of a relationship that could eventually lead to a joint venture) … but you don't have any contact information easily visible.

It'll be very easy for them to simply move on to someone else.

Even when your contact page is easy to find, there are some mistakes that will put readers off getting in touch. Here's what you need to look out for:

Mistake #1: Not Having a Contact Page

Don't bury your contact information in your footer or at the bottom of your About page. Even having it in the sidebar is often not enough – readers will look for a Contact page in the navigation menu.

Fix it: Add a contact page! Simple enough. For now, don't worry about the other mistakes, just create a page with the line To contact me, email [your email address].

Mistake #2: Only Including a Contact Form

Contact forms are great. They make life easy for your readers, who don't have to open up an email program to get in touch, and they allow you to collect useful information (e.g. by asking readers to select answers from a dropdown menu).

Not all readers like contact forms, though. Some will prefer to email you directly, and a form on its own can also seem quite distancing – it makes you less approachable.

Fix it: Always include your email address on your contact page. If you're worried about spam, write it out as name [AT] domain.com instead of name@domain.com.

Mistake #3: Having a Broken Contact Form

One big reason to have a contact method other than a form is that forms don't always work. Sometimes an update might break them, or you might make changes and accidentally break them.

Whatever the reason, a broken contact form is frustrating – readers may not see any error message, and you'll never know that they were trying to get in touch. Even if they suspect their message hasn't reached you, they may not know how else to get in touch.

Fix it: Test your own contact form regularly – at least once every few months. It only takes a minute or two to check it's working.

Mistake #4: Outdated Information

You probably don't visit your own contact page very often … and that makes it easy to leave outdated information in place. Perhaps your contact page says you're accepting guest posts when you're not (or vice versa), or you have a message like "I'm away on vacation" months after you've returned.

(Many thanks to DBT reader Raspal for pointing out this very mistake on my own contact page on my Aliventures site…!)

Fix it: Check for any outdated information when you test your contact form. If you put a temporary message on your Contact page, make a note in your diary to take it off once it no longer applies.

Mistake #5: Not Linking to Your Social Media Accounts

If you're active on social media, your Contact page is a great place to add links to these accounts. Sure, you probably have buttons in your sidebar – but readers aren't always as attentive as you'd like!

Fix it: Simple enough: add in links to your Twitter profile, Facebook page, and so on. You don't need to list every account you have – just the ones where you're reasonably active and likely to reply to readers' messages.

Have you spotted any contact page mistakes to add? Let us know in the comments…

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A Visual Editor for Your Widgets: The Black Studio TinyMCE Widget Plugin

Posted: 26 Dec 2013 07:22 AM PST

For ages, I've had a small but annoying issue with WordPress: it has a visual editor for posts, but not for widgets.

This doesn't bother me with my own sites (I can write HTML so I just use that for my widgets), but it's a pain when I set up sites for friends and family who want to be able to create visually interesting text-based widgets – e.g. an "About" widget with an image, links, bullet points, bold text and so on.

While I was looking for a good solution to suggest to members of our Get Blogging course, I came across this plugin:

Black Studio TinyMCE Widget

This adds a visual editor to your widgets, based on the standard one (which is called "TinyMCE"). As the creators explain:

This is intended to overcome the limitations of the default WordPress text widget, so that you can visually add rich text contents to your sidebars, with no knowledge of HTML required.

It simply adds a new widget type to your "Available Widgets," like this:

black-studio-tinymce-widget-available

To use it, just drag that widget into your sidebar and open it up. It looks very similar to the regular posts / pages editor, and you can add images and formatting in just the same way:

black-studio-tinymce-widget-in-action

(Note: it doesn't replace the standard "text" widget, which you can use for plain text or for HTML code.)

If you don't know HTML, or if you'd simply prefer a quicker and easier way to create rich text widgets, give this Black Studio plugin a go!

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Write Down and Share Your Goals - DailyBlogTips

Write Down and Share Your Goals

Posted: 24 Dec 2013 08:18 PM PST

I probably don’t need to convince you about the importance of having goals, right? There are many studies around confirming that people who have goals outperform those who don’t by a large margin, be it in the business world, sports and so on.

What you might not know, however, is that it’s quite important not only to have goals, but to write them down somewhere. This process has two benefits: first of all when you write something down you create a stronger connection with your brain, so by writing down your goals you’ll be making them firmer on your mind. Second, having the goals written somewhere is the only way to be sure of what the goals were in the first place, especially if you’ll want to go back to them years later.

In fact there are studies confirming that people who have written goals outperform those who have goals but don’t write them anywhere.

It doesn’t matter if you will write them down on a piece of of paper or on your computer, as long as you write them. And here’s a tip: one easy way to store your written goals is to email them to yourself. You can do this every year, and whenever you need to revise them simply search your email inbox for ‘goals’.

The second thing you might not know about goals is that sharing your goals with other people will also increase your chances of achieving the goals. That’s because when you share your goals with other people you feel a greater sense of responsibility, as you don’t want to let those people down.

In my opinion close friends and family are the best ones to share your goals with, as you see them often, and they are close enough to feel comfortable calling you out if you don’t achieve your goals out of laziness or lack of determination.

2014 is around the corner. What are you waiting for?

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Three Good Reasons to Use an Editorial Calendar

Posted: 24 Dec 2013 07:16 AM PST

Do you plan your content ahead of time … or do you just sit down on each "blogging day" to write a post?

While it's a perfectly good idea to write while you're inspired, it's more likely that you'll end up sitting down in front of a blank post or Word document, scratching your head and trying to figure out a good topic.

Even if you don't have trouble coming up with ideas, you may find that you've run five list-style posts in a row, or covered the same topic in two consecutive weeks.

An editorial calendar is simply a list of what blog post you're going to write when.

You can use a plugin, like the Editorial Calendar, or you can create a spreadsheet, use a physical diary, or even use a Gantt chart – or whatever works for you!

2014-calendar

Image from Flickr by danielmoyle.

Here's why planning and scheduling your posts in advance is a very good idea:

#1: It Helps You Stay on Top of Your Blogging

Do you ever find yourself rushing through a post at the last minute – or skipping posting for weeks on end because you never seem to have enough time or enough ideas?

An editorial calendar helps you stay in control. You'll come up with a bunch of ideas at, say, the start of the month – and then you know what you'll be writing all month long.

This makes it easier to plan the rest of life around your blogging. For instance, if you know you've got a big post coming up that will need a lot of research, you can spread the work across several days.

#2: It Gives You a Better Balance of Posts

I know from experience that it's all too easy to write the same types of posts day after day and week after week.

Maybe you've got into a bit of a list post rut, with "5 ways to…" and "7 tips for…" cropping up every single time. While list posts are great, and numbers make for compelling headlines, it's good to shake things up a bit.

A calendar lets you plan for a good balance of posts. This might mean having a regular series – e.g. I'm running the Mistakes series on Fridays at present. Or it might simply mean throwing in a few new types of posts – perhaps a review once a month, or a how-to every couple of weeks.

#3: It Allows You to Work with Other Bloggers

If anyone else writes for your blog (either as a guest or as a co-blogger), then an editorial calendar is especially important and useful.

Guest posters will want to know when their post is likely to run. If you don't have a calendar, it's hard to give them a good answer – and if you simply run their post as soon as possible, you may find that you end up with a whole lot of guest posts in a row, followed by none for weeks.

Co-bloggers need to know when you're posting and (unless you always cover different topic areas) what you're posting about. A calendar will keep everything running smoothly, especially if you edit one another's posts, or if one person approves them all before they go live.

Do you use an editorial calendar, or is this something you plan to do in 2014? Let us know your thoughts in the comments…

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