I have a promo code for you, that is good for a free month of classes on Educator.com.  No credit card required.  They offer math, science & computer courses.  The code will give you full access to their entire catalog of video lessons.

I recently tried a few classes on Educator.com.  Like many bloggers, I do my own code editing & design on my blogs.  Sometimes more successfully than others, but their are a lot of things I just don’t have the knowledge to even try to tackle.  I’m going through the HTML course right now, which is going pretty quickly, so far, and will go right into CSS after that.

Classes are available at the junior high, high school and college levels.  If you don’t finish the course you are working on within the month, there are 2 extension options.  $35/ month or $240/year.

Free Educator.con Access Instructions:

1. Go to http://www.educator.com and click on “Create Account” or “Subscribe”
2. Make sure “Basic Plan” is selected. (Code Will Not Work Otherwise)
3. Enter your account information.
4. Disregard “Payment Type”, you will not be asked to pay.
5. Below the “Continue” button, check “Special Billing” and enter BUZZFA626
6. Press “Continue” and you are done.

Many bloggers see optimization as far too daunting a task to tackle, but we can take some lessons from online marketers and streamline the process.  Marketers often use specialized pages called landing pages to capture visitors attention and direct them to purchase or at least investigate their product more.  Now think about it wouldn’t a well written and SEO’d Landing page optimization be easier than trying to SEO every post.  One very well SEO’ed and advertised landing page is likely to bring  more traffic to your blog, than a series of haphazard posts.  Take a look at the posts readers are already coming in on regularly, how can you best optimize those pages, to generate more page views.

Marketers generally have the goal of grabbing a sale out of the landing page.  Landing pages built specifically to convert traffic into a specific product purchase are often called “squeeze pages”.  While most bloggers do not have a particular product they are pushing, rather their content itself, Conversion rate optimization techniques could be instituted to motivate readers to delve further into your blog.

For example: If you share some very interesting and useful information on your landing page, but don’t cover every aspect of the topic in depth, you leave yourself doors open to direct readers to auxiliary posts on your blog, which cover these issues in depth.  The more pages a new visitor is exposed to, the more familiar they become with you, and your “brand”, as a blogger.  They are also more likely to take the action of  following your blog or social media accounts, which will of course extend your engagement with this particular reader further.

I am not saying every blogger should start pimping  themselves, like the spammiest of marketers, but there are many lessons to be learned from those who market online with class.  Don’t be afraid to sell yourself a little.

I’ve dabbled in Stumble Upon for some time now.  Until recently, I rarely got much blog traffic from it, other than an occasional small burst of visits.  I was a StumbleUpon amateur. I decided to put in a bit more effort, toward generating some Stumble traffic a few weeks ago, and learn how to use the service effectively.   I am now seeing some very positive results from my involvement.  On this blog, Stumble visits are  still a relatively small (but worthwhile) percentage of my overall traffic.   Stumble traffic has really helped me out on my less established food blog though.

Help Stumble and Stumble Will Help You

The best way to use Stumble is how it is intended, paired with the help of the tools they provide through su.pr.  People will tell you there are tricks and schemes that will bring you great Stumble traffic.  Don’t waste your time.

Getting  Set-up

1. Install the toolbar.
2. Sign-up for su.pr, and add your blog, Facebook and Twitter account. (su.pr is Stumble Upon’s  free URL shortener service)

How do I Use Stumble Upon Effectively Then?

Stumble Upon needs 3 things : page views, ratings and quality content.  Supply those things and you will become a valued member.  Your word in the community will mean more, which will in turn help you generate traffic.

Page Views: There are 2 ways you can bring page views to Stumble Upon.

1. Select the categories that interest you, and start hitting that Stumble.
2. When you share content on  Facebook or Twitter use a su.pr url.  This will add a small Stumble bar to the shared page.  This is not the same as rating or discovering a page, you are merely directing traffic, to not just the page, but Stumble Upon as well. Stumble will smile Upon you.

Content & Ratings:

1. Submit or thumbs up fun, interesting and/or helpful pages.
2. Submit content that will fit into the primary Stumble categories.  If you are the first to submit, make sure the item is properly categorized, and leaving a short review is helpful.
3. Do not submit content that will be quickly outdated, unless you are sure you will come back and delete your submission, when it is no longer valid.  Otherwise someone is sure to give the outdated content a “thumbs down”, which will not reflect well on you.
4. Do not submit “non-Stumble worthy” content.  After you have used Stumble a bit, you will begin to know what is likely to do well. Stumbling content that other Stumblers don’t like, will not help you, it may hurt.
5. Don’t be stingy with your “thumbs up”.  Of course you shouldn’t give everything your approval, but ratings increase your Stumble influence and help the service send you pages you will enjoy.
6. You can submit your own content, just make sure it is a small percentage of what you have in your favorites.  Keeping it under 10%, probably even less is best.

Once you get the hang of Stumble Upon, you may want to focus on specifically creating some content that is geared toward the service & start using the statistical tools available in Su.pr to help you in your traffic generating efforts.  I will cover these topics soon.

So you started a blog a little while back, and you were contacted by a company to host a giveaway.  It seems like it would be fun, and your readers might like it.  How do you go about running the actual giveaway?

How to Host a Blog Giveaway

Setting Up the Giveaway

Don’t reinvent the wheel.  Look around and see what other bloggers have done with their giveaways.  Pay particular attention to the way they set up entries and rules.  When you see a few you like, copy the entry & rules sections, print and apply them to your own write up.  Do not copy anyone word for word.  Write your own, but these printouts will be a great guide.  Once you have your own version written up.  You can use that as a cut and paste template in the future, because it is your own creation.

While run times vary most blog giveaways are in the neighborhood of 2 weeks long, and include a few different ways to enter.  It is wise to keep each entry as simple as possible, entrants do not want to jump through hoops, just for the possibility to win.  If you are on WordPress,  make your giveaway more user friendly, by installing and activating the “Comment Flood check” plug-in.   It stops entrants from getting those annoying “slow down your commenting too fast” messages, while putting in entries.  If you are on Blogger, deactivate captcha.  It is the most annoying thing ever.

Picking Winners

You will now need to decide on a winner picking system.  The selection of a winner is generally done randomly.  While some bloggers still use random.org to pick their winners it is a time consuming process, which is also prone to error.  Unless you have comments numerically ordered on a post by post basis, it can be a real pain in the backside.  I use a WordPress plug-in called  “…and the winner is”, myself.

Notifying the Winner

We all hate to be conveyors of bad news, luckily with blog giveaways it is customary to just contact the winner, no need to email everyone who lost.  While some bloggers write a separate post announcing the winner/s, others either have a “winner’s page”, or simply note who the winner was at the foot of the original giveaway post.  I prefer the latter method myself.

Make sure to clearly note the amount of time the winner has to respond right in the email, to avoid later issues, especially if you have to redraw.  Always thoroughly check spam folders for winner response, before redrawing.  Do not delete email correspondence related to a giveaway, until either the winner has let you know they received their prize, or at least 6 months has passed. You may need to refer back to it, if they do not receive the prize.

Google uses page load speed, along with many other factors to calculate where you land in their search results, and fast blogs are reader friendly, so finding ways to increase the speed of your blog page loads is an increasingly important part of blogging.

I’ve been trying to improve the page load speed of this blog, over the past month or so.  I started off with a theme with a slider (Lifestyle), and WP Super Cache.  My load times were a little slow, but as mommy bloggers go, my speed was about average.  The middle of the pack in a turtle race is not hard to achieve.  Mommy blogs are notorious for rows of useless buttons cluttering their sidebar and lots of big frilly images.  I could go grab a snack, while some of them load.  I wouldn’t say I have a fast blog now, but it isn’t cursed with the dreadfully slow page loads it had.

5 Easy Ways to Speed up a Blog

• Faster Theme: I started by switching to the Prose child theme,  it is a quick loader with built in minify and is very easy to customize, especially for those of us with limited coding skills . This change cut a nice chunk off my load times.
• Declutter Mercilessly: I pulled a few things off my sidebar.  My ad button with paste-able  code was moved to a page, and I deleted unused plug-ins & themes from my dashboard.   At the suggestion of Trisha from MomDot (see: Spring Clean your Blog!),  I ended out dumping my stats widgets too.   Speed increase for all this, minimal, but things looked less cluttered.
• Dump Time Hog Plug-ins: While I liked the LinkWithin plug-in, I realized that it was adding nearly a second and a half  to each page load.   Removed it, and will be trying a few similar plug-ins. (Update: I ended out adding this plug-in back.  The extra page views it generated was worth the small time difference.  It loads below the post, so really doesn’t effect page speed viewing for readers anyway)
• Ditch the Gravatars: Gravatars are enabled by default on WordPress and we have all become accustomed to them.  The problem is each of those little pics needs to be called up and loaded.  Do they really add anything useful, no.  Disabling Gravatars didn’t make a big difference on pages with only a couple comments, but on some of my giveaways & other popular posts,  it knocked off a full 2 seconds from load time.  Pretty impressive.
• Smoosh.it: Smoosh.it (available as free service,or WordPress plug-in) shrinks image files without losing picture quality.  I already compress most of my pics, before publishing, so the difference I saw was not as much as some bloggers will see, but I still got a 9-15% reduction in file size for most images.  I did try it on one uncompressed image, and there was over a 50% reduction in image size.  Speed improved on  image heavy posts.

These simple changes have sped my pages up quite a bit.  My load times have decreases significantly, despite having several external ads running.  I have a few more things I plan on trying over the next few weeks, but this has been a productive start.

Many mom bloggers struggle to earn any money on their blogs.  Doing product reviews are usually fun, and if the product is useful for your family, then there is a mutual benefit to both the blogger and company, if you like the product and share your experience with your readers. The problem is product reviews by their very nature do not generate income, beyond whatever the traffic they generate garners for you.

There is quality sponsored and promotional work out there for excellent products, but it is often difficult to find, and is usually only available to small groups of selected bloggers.  There are also,  those companies which offer bloggers a small payout to recommend their product to your readers without proper disclosures.  I strongly suggest you avoid working with those companies.  It is not worth risking the wrath of the FTC, or losing readers over.

So….

How can a  Mommy Blogger make some Money?

Social Spark is a good place to start.  If you are wondering if they are a scam, or legit, I have been posting with them for some time now, and have been pleased with the results.

The facts about Social Spark:

1. Everything is very clearly disclosed to your readers. Disclosures appear at both the top and bottom of all posts.  No FTC worries for blogger or companies.
2. All links are NoFollow. To follow the TOS of Google, all posts done through Social Spark automatically have nofollow links.
3. Pick what you want. you are not obligated to take any offer.  If it is not a good fit, just pass.
4. Write what you want, as long as it meets the guidelines of the offer and includes required links.  Your blog, your style.
5. Payments via Paypal. Funds become available 30 days after post is submitted.  $50 payout threshold.
6. Negotiate your price. If the topic is a good fit for your blog, but the money offered is less than you want, make a counter offer.  In my experience many advertisers are receptive, as long as, you have the  traffic to back up your price.
7. Excellent Customer Service. For the first time ever, I recently had a payment issue.  I sent them a quick email, and they took care of it promptly, with good communication.
8. Referrals. Social Spark just started a new referral program, so if you try it & you like it tell your friends, and Social Spark will give you a little kickback.

What does a Social Spark post look like?

Here are a couple I have done:

http://blommi.com/win-great-prizes-in-the-gauc-rocks-sweepstakes/

http://blommi.com/not-just-any-hot-sauce-will-do-for-the-big-game/

How does publishing work on Social Spark?

I am on WordPress, so I simply set up a new author on my blog.  That is the user name and password you give to Social Spark so they can publish the post for you once it is approved.  Social Spark only publishes what you have written and submitted.  They do not do any editing.  You will not get any surprises, and they can’t make changes to your blog.

If you have any questions regarding Social Spark, I will answer them to the best of my ability.

Want to try it out?  I would love it if you would use my referral link:  http://izea.in/rJ30