The Blog Boat » Grow Your Blog

50 FREE Shutterfly Photocard for Bloggers!

admin — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 18:19:07 +0000

Shutterfly is offering all bloggers that write a post about them 50 free photo cards! Simply fill out the form to claim your free photocards!

Click HERE to sign up!

FREE eBooks: Windows 7, How to Build a Wordpress Site & More!

admin — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:31:51 +0000

There are several FREE eBooks available:

The Windows 7 Guide: From Newbies to Pros

The Ultimate Guide to Gmail

Free Guide: “Twitter: Best Practices and Tips”

Free Book Summary – “The Art of the Start – The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything”

Free Underground Guide to the iPhone

Microsoft Office Live Small Business – Free 263 page eBook

Build Your Own WordPress Site Guide

Webby Chat – Get a FREE Chat Room

admin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:47:54 +0000

I LUVE WebbyChat! I have it on my other site and people spend all day hanging out and sharing deals. It makes the site a lot more fun and helps me to actually get to know my readers. If you want your own you can get one that will hold up to 10 people for FREE! If you need a larger room they do offer very inexpensive monthly plans or you can pay a fee to get get an increase for 24 hours. This is a great way to connect with your readers. Not too mention chat parties are FUN!

Also the owners are really nice guys that will go out of their way to help you set it up. If you have Wordpress or Blogger they offer a simple plugin that you can install to get the chat room on your site in a matter of minutes!

Click HERE to sign up and get your free chat room!

Make the Most of the Boat – Cool Features in the Forum!

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:05:28 +0000

When I built this site I added features that I thought bloggers could use to connect with other bloggers. Some are sort of hidden so I thought I would tell you about them….

All of the features below are located in the Forum. You will need to be registered to view them.

Design & Implementation
If you have ever built a blog there has come a point where you had a question about how to do something and couldn’t find the answer. That is what this section is for, to allow you to ask questions and get answers. I am not a coding genius but I can usually figure it out and if I can’t hopefully some other reader will be able to!

Hot Deals
Every day we find great deals and are eager to share them with others. Whenever you find one, post it here so that everyone else can see it and link to your deal!

Link Trading
One of the best ways to build your blog is to start trading links with other blogs. Start a new topic here and start trading links with other bloggers!

Linky Posting
Adding your blog to a linky posting is a great way to get new readers and to build your inventory of back links. Back links help improve your Google rankings and will improve your placement in Google searches. If you are doing a Linky Posting or spot one, post it here!

Affiliate Questions, Concerns, and Advertising
If you have a question or concern about Affiliate/Pay Per Lead programs (including billing questions), post them here. Normally other bloggers have already been through what you are dealing with and can help out. This is also a great place to post your advertising questions!

MyBlogSpark – Get Stuff to Giveaway!

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:05:11 +0000

I get asked alot how I get prizes to give away. I always send people starting out to MyBlogSpark. MyBlogSpark is a fun and exciting program that gives you access to exclusive offers, sampling opportunities, prizes to give away to your readers, surveys, and events where you can meet up with fellow bloggers.

They send some pretty cool stuff to try out and then offer you other gift packages to give away to your readers. Once you sign up, make sure to watch for emails from them. They offer the “Sparks” to everyone and the first ones to respond get it!

Click HERE to learn more about MyBlogSpark!

Twitter – What are the symbols for?

admin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:17:55 +0000

So far we have discussed “What is Twitter?” and “How to Set Up a Twitter Page”. Now that you have your account up and running it is time to start using it!

There are several tags you can use in Twitter to do a multitude of things. There are really only three things you need to know how to do to use Twitter effectively.

@ Reply – An @reply is any Twitter update that begins with @username
People say lots of things on Twitter, and sometimes you want to say something back. In fact, early Twitter folks wanted to talk to each other so badly that they started using the @+username+message to designate their message as a reply to another person.

Since people loved using it so much, they made it an official feature. You can start a tweet with @username and it will appear in the person’s replies tab. You can also reply directly from someone’s tweet: every update has a curved arrow, just click it to and they will automatically add @username to your next tweet. Now you can send a reply to the author of any tweet just by clicking a button!

#Hastags – a #hashtag is any Twitter grouping done by keyword
Because Twitter provided no easy way to group tweets or add extra data, the Twitter community came up with their own way: hashtags. A hashtag is similar to other web tags- it helps add tweets to a category. Hashtags have the ‘hash’ or ‘pound’ symbol (#) preceding the tag, like so: #traffic, #followfriday, #hashtag.

If you add a hashtag to your tweet and you have a public account, anyone who does a search for that hashtag may find your tweet. Although any keyword with a # in front could be considered a hashtag, there are many commonly used hashtags. Because of this it can be a great idea to add “key” hashtags to your tweets to try and spread the word of what you are tweeting about!

RT Retweets – An RT is the resending of an original tweet to all that are following
Sometimes you come across a tweet that you just have to share- tweets can be a big deal when they’re newsworthy, informative, or even just really funny. Twitter’s new retweet (RT) feature helps people quickly share information, which is pretty much what Twitter is all about.

For example if you are running a contest, ask offer those that are entering an additional entry for “retweeting” the contest. Then you are just tweeting to your followers, when they retweet it goes to their followers as well! You can track your retweets by clicking on the “Retweets” to the right of your Twitter page.

Now start Tweeting!

Set up Your Twitter Page

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:18:38 +0000

Today, Twitter has roughly 6 million users and is projected to grow to 18.1 million users by 2010. With all those people, the chances for networking are endless and connecting with new people can lead to new opportunities, so it is essential that your personal brand exists on the service. Today we are going to learn how to create, build, and promote a Twitter page.

Since The Blog Boat is a new site and I hadn’t set up the page yet, I thought I would walk you through how to set it up and customize your page. Of course this are the simple/basic instructions, but it should get you on your way to having your own page!

Step 1:
The first thing you MUST do is to claim your Twitter name, click HERE to go to Twitter. The username is your Twitter name. Hopefully you will get the one you want the first time, but if not you may need to try a few different names to find one.

Step 2:
Step 2 is to set up your account. Click on “Account” and you should see your username (Twitter name) and your details. Set your time zone, and enter your site’s web address and your one line bio. Keep the bio short!

Step 3:
Step 3 is to upload your image. This is the small image that will be attached to all of your tweets. Click on the “Picture” tab then click the “Browse” button and select the image off your computer. Your image should show up to the right. Images are important to help you brand your site. It is very acceptable to use a personal photo for this.

Step 4:
Step 4 is to choose your design. Twitter offers several very nice backgrounds that you can choose from. If you already have a back ground image you are using on your site you can use that one. My philosophy on this is you want your Twitter page to resemble your website/blog. It may just be me but I like uniformity

See Step 5 if you don’t like any of the backgrounds available or if you have your own.

Step 5:
Step 5 is what you do if you don’t like any of the stock images. If you have your own click the “Browse” button and select the image and upload it. If you upload an image make sure you select the “No Background Image” box. If you don’t the defaulted Background image will show up at the top of your page. Although you could play around with this and get a pretty interesting looking page!

If you have a small image (or background image) that you plan to use, make sure to select the “tile background” option. This repeats the choice over and over to give you the entire screen covered in it. Make sure to use something that isn’t too busy…see example below.

Step 6:
Step 6 is actually customizing the colors of your page. Each of the boxes represents one portion of the page. To get to these options click on “Change Design Colors”. These boxes will pop up. Your choices are background, text, links, sidebar, and sidebar border. You will need to enter HTML color codes to get the colors you want. ***The color that shows in the box is not the color, you will see the color option selected represented ON your page, you can see it in the background. I use Color Picker to find the codes I need. Once you are done you have designed your page!

Step 7:
This is my finished project. I know it looks plain but this is the basic page I will use for now until I get time to REALLY customize it. The colors match my current site so this works for now!

I also wanted to show you what NOT to do. The image below is one I was playing with. I created a custom background using my boat image. I set it as the background and used the “tile background” option. As I said above this ended up being WAY too busy to use and blended in way too much. The background area where the tweets are posted is white and not easy to change…. so keep that in mind!

Well that is it, you now have your own Twitter page that you can start promoting. Make sure to place a link on your site and in your emails. Look for upcoming articles on how to customize more and ways to promote your site!

Twitter – What is it?

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:29:07 +0000

While I know many of you are TwitterAddicts, I am sure some of you have not jumped on the band wagon yet. This is a great way to grow your readership and start connecting to your readers. I found the above video and while it is a great tutorial on what Twitter is, its also pretty funny…lol.

So take a few and check it out, it will explain what it is and how it works and watch for updates on how to customize pages, integrate your feed into your Twitter account, post your Tweets on your Facebook page and more!