Posts

How to save your Blogger blog posts from an unwanted autosave?

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Many bloggers whose blogs are on Blogger platform have shared their dismay on the web about their posts disappearing while they were working on them. A friend said, she selected the text that she had composed over a week, something happened on its own and the next moment there was nothing on the post. Such experiences can be frustrating. The culprit is AUTOSAVE that comes by default on the Blogger platform, and you cannot avoid it. When you face sudden disappearance of text on a post, what happens is that you accidentally select the text and delete it (or you cut the text for pasting it elsewhere) and AUTOSAVE saves the post at that very moment. It saves the blank post and your text is gone! How to ret rieve post content on Blogger blog ? Google/ Blogger has no provision for undeleting post content. You can take these actions if you have accidentally lost content from a blog post on Blogger : 1. Quickly press Ctrl+Z (on Windows computers) or Undo (on iOS/ Mac) many times. ...

5 reasons your blog is stuck for a wrong reason, and how to come out of it

You start a blog. Then you write the best you can. You follow the advice that you see on the web - adding photos, sprucing up the headline, SEO, technical tweaking... The blog doesn't move forward. You realize that your friends who were initially commenting a lot on your  blog have become less interested, unless you had appreciated their latest posts. Something is wrong with the blog, you feel, and look for reasons for its NOT going the way you had visualized when creating the blog. You look for more advice and tips. You find a claim of getting a hundred thousand followers in a month and fall for it. You find some unethical tricks and are tempted to try them. Nothing works, or something seems to work for a few days and then the blog goes back to square one. What should I do? Why is my blog not getting enough traffic though I write so well? I have tried all SEO, even paid for it, but I'm not getting a lasting success, why? One of the main mistakes most bloggers make ...

Why series posts are great on blogs, and how to write them?

In the first post in this 2-post series on ideal length of blog posts, we discussed how long posts work better towards authority and SEO as compared to short posts. We also discussed how quality matters more than the size of posts. In the present one, we'd discuss in what situations, writing a series is better than one long post, and how it is a win-win idea in certain cases.  Before we go any further, let's be sure of what we are discussing he re . Technically, one dirty joke a day on the blog also is a post series, but we are dealing here with series of valuable posts around a central theme. Why should I break my long post into a series when it serves great value as a single post? We'd draw your attention to what we said in the last post in favor of short posts. In brief, in this age of short attention and smart phones, small posts have a better chance to be read, shared and commented upon. So, if your post is long it has an inherent disadvantage in terms of quic...

Should you copy others' blog title and post headings?

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Bloggers who want to grow fast with little effort often copy successful bloggers. Copying is not limited to images or passages but headings and titles too.  We were asked a question on Quora recently 'Can I use the same blog post title that's been already used by someone?' When we visited the original question, we found 5 answers, 4 of them supporting the idea of copying others' titles. Two of them added caution but yes, they started with supporting it. Why not, you might say. After all, it takes energy to make catchy titles . Sometimes you don't get great expressions even after trying for days. If you see a superb title used by somebody, why not use that? After all, just copying the title/ headline cannot be called plagiarism . As ethical bloggers, we can't support that. Forget the moral/ ethics part, the practical cost of copying others' titles is also much more than the intended benefits. One, you lose confidence in your capacity to write mar...

On the blog, should you have more posts or pages?

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We received a query on Quora, How do I know when to post an article into the website page or post it as a blog post? Then a blogger posted this query on an ITB post, Whether we should have pages or posts on a blog that is not too frequently required to be updated. We thought, let's have some discussion around the topic of 'blog post versus blog page' so that the matter gets clarified. The concept of post is inherent in the concept of blogging. Pages arrived when the need for some static content was felt. So, different platforms have their own definition of what is a page and what's a post. O ver the years, a lot of convergence has taken place among platforms but at the same time, the concept of pages, posts and blogs has widened to include all types of long-form content that is regularly updated .  All things considered, t here are some common properties that differentiate blog pages and blog posts on major platforms and on blogs independent of blogging platfo...

Professional blogging and social media presence show you are an authority!

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P eople look at your digital footprin t to judge your value "Does he have a blog? How good is his LinkedIn profile? What does he tweet and how big is his following?" These are some of the questions people looking out for experts in a field are likely to ask. HR managers and HR firms in the look out for senior level advisors/ consultants and all levels of employees also are asking these questions more and more .  Some years back, web presence of an expert started to be seen as supplementary information. Now, some HR firms say, they use one's social media profile as first source of information for judging a person's suitability for a job or an assignment. Being an expert blogg er in a field of specialization gets the b logger the tag of authority when he constantly works on it and proves it through the blog and other means (tutorials, ebooks, guestposts , etc).  You could be an expert (and then an authority ) on any subject however commonplace or speci...