The Busy Bee

Someone recently sent me an email asking me the following question, and I thought I would share the answer here.

The Question

“I’m hoping you can point me in the right direction about where to look to change my thumbnail picture that auto fills on one of your client’s WordPress blog when I post a response?”

The Answer

Those images are called avatars, and on a website powered by WordPress, you assign a photo to your email address by going to http://en.gravatar.com/.  There you can assign an image to your email address, or assign multiple images to different email addresses if you have several email address, like I do.  Since WordPress powers more websites than any other platform in the world right now, that is a lot of website blogs.

It is pretty quick to set-up and sometimes takes a little time for your gravatar to show up, but it should within 2 or 3 days from my experience.  I also recommend using a .png image file over a .jpg as I had issues with JPGs when I was last adding images, but that may have changed by now.  Not a big deal, just a preference.

If that helped, or you have something to add to my explanation, please share below, and see if your gravatar shows up.

Happy commenting.

If you are interested in the WordPress User Guide, click on that link to start at the beginning.

How to make an email address on your website automatically open a users default email program on their computer and insert that email address in the To: field.  Instructions here are specifically tailored to use with WordPress, but can be applied in any case.

1. Add the email address to your website’s content as you would any content.
2. Then you are going to make it a link, jut as you would make some text link to another page, for example. So you would highlight your new email address (ie double click over it or click-drag your cursor of the email address); and then click on the “Link” button in your website editor to open the pop-up dialog box that allows you to add a website address.
3. INSTEAD of creating a link starting HTTP://….. – you will want to erase that part and insert the following: mailto:john@cnca.com
4. …where john@cnca.com is the email address being used. By putting mailto: before the email address, this causes the effect you want.
5. That is it. Save your changes. You do not have to specify a Target for that link in the pop-up.

For instructions on how to create a Forward in a Cpanel based hosting environment, click on How to Create an Email Forward in CPanel.

For example, if you generally use an email address myname@yahoo.com, and you want to add an email address to your website myname@mydomain.com, and have that newly created email address (which has your website’s domain name), then you will want to create a forward to forward myname@mydomain.com to myname@yahoo.com).  This will have the effect of automatically forwarding all email to your yahoo.com email address without having to share it on your website, (and also you can share a more professional email address on your website).  This is often desirable if you do not want to change how you manage your emails, as you would still be able to continue to just check your yahoo.com account as usual.

Below I will share some ways you can build your blog by driving traffic to your blog. I will start with one way, and add them over time, (so come back if you just see one).

1. Write material on your blog that answers the common questions people have in your line of work. Then, the next time you run across someone, (in person, on-line, or elsewhere) who is seeking that answer, send them to your blog for the answer. Tell them your website or blog address and how to find the answer. If you are in person with someone, write it down for them.

How do I have a successful blog?

Your blog, like anything in life, will flourish if you provide the right nourishment. A successful blog is one that reaches and enriches your intended audience. And that is true whether your intended audience is 5 people or 5 billion people.

I will use the analogy of growing a garden in providing the necessary ingredients for your blog’s success.

In summary, your garden needs seeds, water, nutrients, the right environment, and appropriate care and love to flourish. In the same way, your blog needs seeds in the form of rich and focused ideas for material; water in the form of regular and consistent written material; nutrients in the form of media content (images, video, audio as appropriate), and in the form of appropriate search engine optimization; the right environment in the form of an aesthetically pleasing and user friendly website; care in the form of spell checking your copy, weeding out spam comments, and responding to user discussions in a timely fashion; and your blog needs love in whatever way your heart feels it needs.

What is the difference between tags and categories as you use them in your WordPress interface?  Lorelle provides a starting point in helping you figure out how to use them.

My friend Dawud, an avid blogger and small business adviser with a lean towards social marketing actively uses them on his site as an example of use.  Check out his categories and then at the bottom of the page, he has a tag cloud.

Just a starting place to get an idea of how to work with these two tools.