Backstage @ StyleMePretty

Do you have an individual who is leaving spammy comments on old posts and promoting themselves? Is your spam filter failing to remove these comments?

In WordPress there’s a very simple way to block spam from one individual. On the Settings menu of your WordPress admin area, click on the Discussion menu item. You should see the following screen.

Find the Comment Blacklist input box and  enter the domain, email, IP, and/or keyword used by the person who keeps leaving spammy comments on your site.

Next time this individual leaves comment spam on your site it will get filtered straight to the trash.

These tactics will only work against somewhat simple forms of comment spam. Still, this method has proved very helpful here at Style Me Pretty.

More on Comments  and Comment Spam

A little while ago I wrote about how encouraging comments can cause spammers to come out of the woodwork.

Problogger has a nice article on how leaving comments on other blogs can help you.

WordPress discusses comment spam.

Style Me Pretty got a new look last night.   We’ve been kicking around some updates to our site for the past couple of months.  Our goal in redesigning our header was to emphasize some of the best features of SMP that you might otherwise miss.  We added a tab system that includes tabs for the our Little Black Book Blog and Style Circle.  We also redesigned our header navigation in an attempt to show off our Look Book (our bridal fashion section) and Little Black Book (our vendor guide).  Finally, we moved search to the sidebar and brought it together with tags, categories and archives.  We think this makes SMP a little easier to navigate and a lot cleaner.  We’re especially hopeful that readers new to SMP will have an easier time discovering all we have to offer.

We have a few finishing touches to put on our new look.   We’re going to organize our categories a little better and add a link to our entire tag cloud.  Look for these changes coming later this week or early next week.

Last night we launched a mobile version of Style Me Pretty.  To view it simply open your phone and go to http://www.stylemepretty.com. We were motivated to develop a mobile theme for SMP when we got frustrated by how bad the Style Me Pretty experience was on our iPhones.  The site loaded slowly.  You needed to manually zoom in to read a blog post.  The blog’s images were very large and therefore not cached.

In developing a mobile theme for SMP the goal was to allow anyone with a mobile phone the ability to quickly and easily read recent content from our wedding blog.  Other Style Me Pretty features like our Little Black Book and Look Book will be included in a later release.  It’s not perfect.  We’re already identifying a few tweaks to the layout and navigation that we’d like to make.  Still our new mobile theme makes keeping up with SMP when you are away from your computer a much more pleasant experience.

What do you think of our new mobile theme?  Does it load quickly? Did we miss anything?  We’d love to hear your feedback.   Leave a comment below and let us know what you think of our foray in to weddings on your phone.

We recently took some time to put down on paper where we are now and what makes our brand unique today. It was a good little ego boost for sure, but more than anything, it shows us that we have SO much room to grow. And that growth is completely possible. With out stats, we kept it really simple. Looking at one month out of the year vs. the same month out of the last year. Thus we were able to look at the changes without getting really overwhelmed.

Thought I’d share a bit of the findings.

CURRENT (Jan. 2010)
Monthly Pageviews: Around 4.64 million
Monthly Pageviews via RSS: Around 1 million
Monthly Unique Visitors: Around 333,000
Monthly Visits: 812,000
Average Pageviews: 5.7
Time on Site: 4:22

1 YEAR AGO
Monthly Pagviews in January of 2009: 1.69 million
Monthly Unique Visitors in January of 2009: 178,873
Monthly Visits: 374,498
Average Pageviews: 4.54
Time on Site: 4:51

We took this a little bit further and mapped out why we feel like our product is unique today. What make us valuable.

1. The instant, daily gratification. Content is written 4-6 times per day focusing only on the most beautiful, unique and incredibly person weddings and wedding inspirations. We work with 800 vendors from around the country to ensure that content is spot on.
2. The speed at which we can make changes, updates and adapt to the current climate. Since we have 2 full time tech people and have a team that we also outsource to, we can move quickly and efficiently.
3. The community vibe that our brides feel and the sense of intimacy within a blog. Makes advertising that much more effective.
4. Lower than print advertising rates which means many advertisers are pulling their print dollars and putting them on our site. Same goes for all online wedding publications which means that traffic is important.
5. Because we have such a HUGELY targeted market, coupled with the instantaneous click thrus, means that ad dollars are MUCH more valuable on our site. Again, traffic is a must to make this worth its weight.

This exercise gave me such perspective. It made me feel incredibly proud of the year that we’ve had, incredibly motivated to do more and incredibly excited about really breaking down SMP and figuring out what’s working. And what’s not.

So, if you want to do this exercise yourself, for your own business, here are some questions to ask yourself.

1. What was your revenue last year (pick one month) vs. this year (pick the same month)?
2. What was your traffic on website or blog last year vs. this year? Again, pick one month to compare.
3. Summarize what makes your business different than your competitors. What services or products do you offer that really differentiate you?
4. Where are areas that you want to move into, areas that you can really excel though haven’t had an opportunity to grow?
5. What makes YOU valuable? What makes your business valuable?
6. Where are the holes? Where are you struggling?

By writing all of this down, old school journal style, you will get so much perspective as to what your next steps should be. Where you should focus your time and energy, where you can skimp, where you can grow. If your numbers are down this year, it’s not necessarily an indication of what will happen throughout the year in its entirety, but it is a little red flag that should give you that motivation and drive you need to push harder.

It’s a great way to recap the month and see where we are at the very beginning of 2010. I feel so much more focused now, knowing where we need to put our efforts and dollars.

So, yesterday was a big day for us. We rolled out our new submissions tool, something that has been in the works for a while now. In a very small nutshell, this tool allows brides and vendors to submit real weddings and such using a streamlined tool, giving us a super efficient way to review them and get back to people in a super quick way. Here is a little peak into the awesome new tool that Adam and Tait built.

First, you decide how you want to submit…

Then, you upload your photos…

Add your description and your vendor credits…

Then voila…off it goes to me, Elaine and Eddye to review for the blog. From our admin panel, we can accept or decline submissions, assign them to the appropriate editor and import the images into our galleries (upon publishing). Plus, we get little email alerts every time one of you sends us a new submission so we know that it’s waiting for us to review. It’s AWESOME and will save me hours upon hours of opening, reading, waiting for attachements to scan and load, unzipping folders and reviewing submissions.

Now if only everything could be this simple!

To access the new tool and submit content click right here. You can also use the email address submit@submissions.com which creates a submission using our new tool automatically.

I really enjoyed this article by Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection discussing how WTC encourages people to comment on their blog posts and what sort of problems encouraging comments can cause.

Having a blog with active commenters is great.  It adds to the community feel.  You get great feedback on your posts, etc.  However, sometimes encouraging people to comment causes the spammers to come out of the woodwork and can create a comment maintenance headache.  For example, Weblog Tools Collection decided to selective remove “nofollow” directives from links in comments that they felt were especially good.  SEO professionals decided this was a great way to get some link juice over the the sites the work on.  More comments more problems…

If done well, selectively removing “nofollow” directives from links is a pretty genius way to encourage people to leave comments on your blog.  As bad as the Weblog Tools Collection people make the management piece sound, it’s not that hard to check the domain of the commenter.  You know the good blogs in your industry. If you’ve never heard of the site, don’t “nofollow” the comment.

Finally, there’s an interesting, albeit not that well spelled-out, warning in this article for people trying to leave tons of nondescript comments all around the web in hopes that those comments will send traffic back to their site.  If bloggers regularly flag your comments  as spam then spam filters will update their algorithm and become suspicious of any comments linking to your domain.  You might wake up one day and find you can’t post comments on any blog.

Anyway, give the article on Weblog Tools Collection a good read and give some thought to how best to encourage people to leave more comments on your blog.

You can learn a lot about what’s important to a company by how they SEO their pages.  If you’ve got an SEO savvy competitor check out the title tag and meta tags of some of their pages.  It will give you a good sense of what search terms they are going after.  The words that show up closest to the front of each tag are given the most “weight” by search engines.

Some examples:

Weddingbee wants to capture the search term “Wedding Blog”

http://www.weddingbee.com

<title>Wedding Blog by Weddingbee</title>
<meta name="description" content="Wedding blog by real brides..." />
<meta name="keywords" content="Wedding blog, ..." />

The Knot targets brides looking for dresses and cakes.

http://www.theknot.com

<title>Wedding Dresses - Wedding Cakes - Wedding Planning - Unique Wedding Ideas - By TheKnot.com</title>
<meta name="description" content="Browse Wedding Dresses and Wedding Cakes..." />
<meta name="keywords" content="Wedding Dresses, Wedding Cakes, ..." />

I find the title tags above the most interesting. Both of these companies stuff keywords into the title before the name of their business. From a usability stand point, there’s nothing wrong with this practice. Most of your readers will never see the title tag. However, it will show up in google’s search results.

So there you have it. If you want to see what your colleagues and competitors are doing to position themselves on the web, taking a look at their title tags and meta tags is a good start.

Update 01-26-10: I just changed the meta tags and title of Backstage.  Our new title:  “The Business of Blogging – Backstage @ SMP”.

So. I am REALLY excited to say that I think I have found a few new writers to help me out with Style Me Pretty. I want to bring on some new talent for a couple of reasons. The first is that I think the blog would really benefit from having a few different perspectives, a few different writing tones. It will only make the already lighthearted style even more fun. The second, is that Style Me Pretty is growing into a beast of a business and since it was my vision, I really need to have time to work on business development and on growing our company thoughtfully and with intention. And lastly, I think that it gives SMP more of a community feel. Which I love.

So, I thought that I would introduce you to a couple of the writers that we are looking at adding. The first, is Abby Shaughnessy, who is the voice behind the cute, cute, cute blog Life in the SuperBurbs…

Classic, timeless, and simple.  I love those words. Perhaps they are boring to some, but they excite me.  They always have. Think about how hard it is to be classic or to be timeless or to live simply. To appreciate the little things – to live for the little things.

Since the fabulous day Mr. C and I got engaged, I have used those adjectives over and over to describe how I envision our wedding.  But really, those words are how I would like to envision our life together…Classic, Timeless, and Simple. — A snippet from Life in the Super Burbs

Next up, I am REALLY excited that Erin Wayt of Erin Ever After is going to be joining our great little group of writers. If you don’t already read her blog….um, why in the world not?? It’s an adorable place to spend a couple of hours and I am thrilled that she’s agreed to share the wealth with us…

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love, love being engaged and planning a wedding but I have come to find that wedding planning has made me a bit…how shall I say this…obsessive, compulsive,overly detail oriented, up at 5 in the morning scouring zappos.com, going to make my sister and mother disown me if I don’t stop emailing them every two seconds with inspiration pictures….crazed. And that, my friends, is why I feel the need to blog.– A snippet from Erin Ever After

I can’t wait to introduce you to the handful of other writers throughout the coming week. The prerequisite was simple…fun writing style, uber-chic style. And man oh man, did we find some fabulous people!

So, there are a handful of blogs that I stalk. Design*Sponge obviously. I also really love Desire to Inspire, Smitten Kitchen (although this one usually makes me fat), Apartment Therapy, Young House Love and now…Little Green Notebook. I used to have this entire blog obsessing routine where I would wait until I had a nice cup of coffee, a cozy spot on the couch and Bravo playing in the background (makes no sense, I know) where I would devour every inch of them. But times have changed.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been noticing some serious slacking on my part. I kind of rarely read the text around the images, scrolling through really quickly, pausing only on those photographs that catch my eye. When I realized how completely lazy that is, it got me thinking. I wonder if that is how people read OUR blog. Do they only quickly skim the pictures? Do they skip right past the text and only pause when they see something that catches their eye?

So I looked at our stats. The average reader spends a little more than 4 minutes browsing Style Me Pretty. That number was lower over the holidays, obviously, and has been climbing steadily since January 2nd. So what can you do in four minutes? Do you read it? Do you just look at the pretty pictures and read only when something resonates?

I remember when Daily Candy launched and I read EVERY. SINGLE. ISSUE. Well, my inbox actually now has over 3000 unread Daily Candy’s. Although I chalk it up to being busy, perhaps I am just not as addicted anymore. Perhaps there is so much content out there, I have become a lazy reader.

So the question is…how do we ensure that readers not only stop by, but that they stick around for a while and really enjoy what we are doing? That the words I obsess over before I click “publish” actually get read. It’s a new challenge for us SMP-ers but I would love to hear any ideas that you guys have.

Aside from wedding related questions, those focused on starting a blog seem to be the most frequent visitors to my inbox. Here is one that I got just yesterday…

If there are any tips you can give to a first time blogger, what would they be? I have heard that both wordpress and blogger are good sites to use for start-ups, thoughts on these? I am also deciding on a name right now and was wondering if you think it is important to buy a domain name/what does that entail?

So today, I thought we could tackle some of the basics of starting a blog. And more importantly, starting it the right way.

Okay, here are my general tips for the first time blogger:

1. Don’t get too caught up in making your blog perfect right out the door. Just START WRITING. Having content, particularly good content, is way more important than the header, than the sidebar, the logo, than anything really. Without the content, you don’t have a blog. You can always go back and make tweaks and changes to your design. It is much more important to just get started.

2. Know what your focus is going to be before you start writing. You can always evolve and change as you go along, but like anything in life, it’s really good to have a plan.

3. Make a commitment to yourself to write X amount of times per week. Whether that X is once, twice or everyday, really make that commitment and stick to it. Your readers will learn to trust that they can come by for a visit and that they know they will get something new.

4. Make friends with other bloggers. Ask them for advice, tips and knowledge before and during your early days of blogging. Having friends in this industry is a must…it helps build your traffic, it helps you to find content, it gives you people to talk to when you need tips, guidance and advice. It’s a win/win.

5. Assume that with blogging, comes lots of different social media platforms. When you start your blog, compliment it with a twitter and facebook account. It can’t hurt and will help you grow your audience faster.

Those are all really broad tips. Remember that keeping up with a blog is definitely a lifestyle change. You will most definitely experience blogger burnout, you just might get discouraged early on as readers are sometimes hard to come by, you’ll find it difficult to come up with innovative and creative content. So before you dive in, make sure that this is something you really want to commit to. And although it’s great to set clear, metric goals for yourself…don’t compare yourself to other blogs out there. It doesn’t do anyone any good!

Now, here are some really practical tips for the first time blogger:

1. Choose the right blogging platform for you and your needs. We use wordpress but for a newbie, it’s a little more than you would require. I actually used typepad for the first year and it was great. Cute, simple templates that are easy to customize and good tech service. Blogger is also another great option. Here is a great article on picking a platform. The main thing to consider is that you want to try to get it right the first time, as it’s a huge pain to migrate over to another service after you’ve already begun.

2. Set up your blog so that it points directly to your url, rather than having the .typepad address. This is called Domain Mapping. Wordpress (and all of the others) give you easy to understand tutorials to do this. Although it’s not the end all be all of “musts” it is a good way to start off your branding on the right foot.

3. Sit down with a pen and paper (or something like Illustrator or InDesign) and map out your blog. Think about the categories within your site, the general topics, the layout, things like that. Choose a template that best suits your needs then start making it look pretty. Which leads us to #4.

4. Learn some basic css and/or html. By buying a book on CSS, you’ll be able to tweak the look and feel of your blog A LOT easier. It will save you tons of time.

5. Have a loose editorial calendar. We use Google Calendar. Again, this will change throughout the week, as you stumble upon new things to write about, but it will take a ton of the stress out of blogging. Make sure to include websites, links and any other pertinent information that you want to remember when you start writing.

The most important thing to remember when starting a blog: CONTENT IS KING. If you focus on putting out great content, the blog will naturally find its shape and being to grow. The more all over the place you are, the more challenging everything else will be. I promise.