FAQs for blogger Part 2

My FAQ’s for New Bloggers was based all around questions from you guys that I have been emailed, left in comments and Tweeted over the last few weeks. Since then, I’ve had a few more questions so thought it was about time I did a second post like this. As always, feel free to send me any questions if you have any.

Let’s get straight to the point.

Is it okay to leave my link in a comment?

A lot of people are against this, but I think it’s fine to leave your link if you’ve actually read the post and left a comment. Don’t put ‘great post’ and then link drop. Someone did this recently on my post where I spoke about being trolled for having hairy arms, they wrote something like ‘looks great’ and then left their link.

You just look like an idiot if you do that! Also make sure you just leave one link to your blog. It is a bit spammy if you also leave all your social media links too, also comments like that get flagged as spam on my site so I either have to manually approve them or if they go into the spam folder, they get lost forever.

If you look at my comment section, there is a box to leave your link so there’s no need to leave it in the comments, as your name appears as a link to your site when you comment. For comment boxes like on Blogger where this doesn’t happen, then yes, leave your link! I always visit bloggers who have commented on my posts so I encourage it as long as it’s not just link dumping and then running!

Related post: 7 ways to leave great blog comments. 

How do you make your images circular?

This is so easy, I do this in PicMonkey.com. I’ll show you, come on!

Put your image into PicMonkey, go to basic edits -> crop -> square to make sure your image is square, otherwise it won’t make a full circle.

Then go to frames -> rounded corners.

Click on ‘Transparent corners’, move the Corner radius bar to 400 and then click ‘apply’.

Then make sure you save it as a .png file, not a .jpeg.

Well done!

I don’t know anything about html, css and other technical things, should I stay away from WordPress?

Not at all! Although WordPress is built to allow you to have more control over your design, a lot of this is done by installing Plugins or customising your theme through the customisation panel.

In regards to your blogs theme or layout, it’s very much the same as installing a theme or layout to blogger – you either download a free or paid one and then upload the file to your site. The can then customise various settings, like colours, post layout and headers. I’ll give you a quick look at how my theme lets me customise it:

It’s very much click to change certain things. Though different themes allow different levels of customisations, before you buy a theme if you want to pay, make sure you read what you are able to customise.

You can edit CSS and change your theme or even build your own, but you don’t have to.

You can also install plugins to help change the look of your blog and add things into your sidebars and features like related posts and comment luv.

Related post: Must have plugins for WordPress.

Do you have any tips on where to get a host and domain from to move to WordPress?

My domain is from Go Daddy and I’m hosted with TSO host. If I was to do it again, I would have gotten my domain from TSO host, too.

I had the same domain when I was on Blogger, so when I changed to WordPress I had to redirect the URL to point to my WordPress site. I remember it being a bit of a nightmare at first, but I managed it in the end.

With my fitness and technology blog, I bought my URL from TSO host (even though it cost me £8 instead of £4), but it made things much easier as the domain was already linked to my hosting account so I didn’t have to faff about with nameservers.

There are multiple hosting sites you can go with, the most popular seem to be Blue Host or TSO host. I’ve never tried any other the other hosting sites, but I can say that I’ve never hd an issue with TSO host, I host all 3 of my sites on the same account and pay only £2.99 a month. They also have a great trouble shooting service where you send a message through your user account if you have a problem and they reply pretty quickly.

I have heard you should avoid using hosts don’t don’t specialise in hosting, like a site that sells domain names mostly but also offers hosting. They are not specialised in hosting sites so aren’t as good. I’m not sure if this is true or not, but something to think about.

I’ve checked my DA and it’s saying it’s 91/100. Is that good?

Yes, that is very good, but probably not your true DA.

If you do not have your own domain, so your URL is something like myblogname.blogspot.com or myblogname.wordpress.com, then the DA is taken from Blogspots or WordPress.com.

You need to have your own domain to get a true reflection of what this is. This is one of the reasons why brands prefer to work with bloggers that have their own domain.

Related posts: What is domain authority? 

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