# Blog Advice



## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

Hello everyone,

I've recently began to understand the ways blogs can be used to promote my site, and so far I've liked the results. My first step was to start reading the blogs by people with a similar aesthetic to mine. I wrote an e-mail to a blogger, got some positive feedback and even got my site mentioned on their blog. Now that my site is starting to get traffic, I want to start a blog of my own. My question is what should I bog about? Initially, I was just going to start a livejournal type thing, and the blog would be about all of the different adventures and projects I'm into. T-shirt designing would be but one of these, and I would hope that ALL of my interests would sort of draw in many different types of readers. But now, I see an advantage to putting my blog right on my actual site. Now that this is the case, does this mean I should only blog about things directly related to the specific business and brand? If that is the case, then there probably wouldn't be much to say on a regular basis. The example I'm thinking of is Johnny Cupcakes. The first page you reach when going to his site is his blog. Of course he mentions new shirt releases, etc, but often, he's just talking about what he's doing on vacation or whatever. Is that something he can get away with because people already know who he is? I mean I wouldn't blog about my vacation, but I would want to talk about other artistic ventures, and even mention t-shirts I have in contention on sites such as Uneetee and Threadless. Sort of a cross-promotion. Would this kind of personal interaction make me seem less professional? I think the overall goal of the blog is to help people get to know me and have an interest in me personally, hoping that will help them want to make a purchase. It is also to get people coming back to my site on a regular basis even when there aren't new products to promote. So what do you guys think?


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## queerrep (Jul 18, 2006)

I'm no blog expert, but the reason I _read_ blogs is for personal interaction and to find out more about people.

I started a blog recently (again, I am no blog expert) and I talk about whatever interests me – TV shows, silly stuff, current events, etc. Of course I also talk about new products.

I think being down-to-earth in a blog just shows that you are a 'real', accessible person and that you are willing to take the time out to 'talk' to your potential customers.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

Hi Ryan, you can find some good tips about blogging (and what to write about) in past blog related posts here in the forums: 

blogs related topics at T-Shirt Forums

Here's a good thread about it: http://www.t-shirtforums.com/t-shirt-marketing/t42403.html

Here's a couple of blog posts that I read when I was researching "what to blog about" for myself and my other businesses:

Seth's Blog: Just one post

Having a Blog Can Be Bad For Business

Having a Blog Can Help Your Business


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## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

thanks, Rodney. I checked out those links, and they were helpful. I actually ended up starting my blog last night. I've decided that the Johnny Cupcakes model will work pretty well for me. I don't think I will mention personal activities such as going to the movies like Johnny does, unless I can somehow make the post relate to how such activities provided creative inspiration. I like the format, though. It is a part of his actual site. It is mostly just a bulletin board, with no way for readers to really participate or leave comments. That will work for me, mostly because I don't know how to make a blog that can do that, and still have it be part of my actual site. I want my blog to show the artsy side of me, so they can associate that with the brand. I will post any art I do, even if it isn't related to t-shirts. I'm hoping this will make sense because I use paintings of models instead of photos for my product pages. I only use myself and my girlfriend as models, and in my blog I can sort of talk about that, too. It takes a long time to release new products, so the goal of my blog is to have something interesting for people to see on a regular basis so they don't forget about me!


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## biophase (Aug 12, 2007)

I think you are on track with your blog. Also, one thing you can do with your blog every once in a while is just feature a shirt that you are selling. Talk about how it got its design or why its your favorite or why its the hottest seller. The important thing is to get the content out there.

Let's say you have a t-shirt with a firebird logo. Make a blog post about it using the words firebird in the title and many times in the post. Eventually search engines will pick it up and someone searching for firebird tshirt will find your blog post. It's much more difficult to get the search engine to find your firebird tshirt store URL because its just a picture of the shirt with no text.

Newer and recent content gets better search engine love. Also, with blogs you can add alot of text to your site. Most ecommerce stores lack text for SEO.


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## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

Wow, it never would have occurred to me to write a blog about current products. That all makes a lot of sense. That's killing two birds with one stone: getting SEO points and also plugging a shirt that is already selling pretty well if I have nothing "new" to blog about. Thanks!


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## coloroverload (Jul 28, 2008)

Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging - ProBlogger is the ultimate blog about blogging. Ive learned most of what I know from them.

Daily Blog Tips is also a good one.

I would keep your blog to the same niche as what you are selling so your traffic is as targeted as possible.


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## SBEMedia (Jun 26, 2008)

Blogs are a good way to keep your website updated daily. Considering how search engines run, they especially like to see when your website gets updated. If you are blogging daily the better the search results will be on different search engines. This works incredibly well, especially if you have a lot of other people blogging or using threads much like this one. Easy way to do SEO, you can also post a bunch of ads on Craigslist, not necessarily to sell a bunch of product, but to be used as a cheap alternative to marketing


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## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

OK, so I'm starting to realize the limitations of the kind of "blog" I have directly on my site. Being that I don't know much about php, xhtml, etc, I don't know how to build a "real" blog, so what I have is mostly just a news bulletin. The problem with that sort of blog is that there isn't always going to be news related to the store. Also, with no way for people to leave comments, it is not as interactive, and so they have less of a reason to read what's there. So now I have questions about what I should do from here. 

Option 1- Make a supplimentary blog on blogspot, xanga, livejournal, etc. in addition to my little news bulletin on my site. Pros: I can write in more stream of consciousness and be more entertaining without the limitations of having to only talk about my store. Also, apparently, being affiliated with a community like that, you get more traffic from random people. Cons of having 2 blogs: It's hard enough to get traffic to one, why would someone bother reading the one on my site after reading the other one. Cons of using an outside blog service: It seems less professional to have that 3rd party URL. I suppose I could simply stop calling the blog on my site a "blog" and start calling it a news bulletin. Then I'd have an external blog and an unrelated news bulletin, with separate focuses, yet I could still promote my store on my blog.

Option 2- Use a 3rd party blog INSTEAD of my newsbulletin blog. Pros: one blog, easier to get traffic, less confusing. Cons: Without the news bulletin dedicated to my store, there will be too much being blogged about that is not specific.

Option 3- Pay someone to build me an actual functioning blog attached to my site with my own url, customization, etc. Pros: More professional. Cons: lose the traffic which comes from the random people in blogging communities. Also, I'm sure its expensive.

Any ideas?


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## Binary01 (Jun 2, 2007)

i would recommend keeping your blog separate from your website.... i had this discussion with my programmer...... depending on how you setup your site/etc...... my site is html and has my SS store embedded in it for now...... i talked about embedding my blog and he said i sould keep it "out" of the site due to search engine functions...... just make sure to put my site link in the blog and some fany pictures to push the curiousity a bit....

b


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## SBEMedia (Jun 26, 2008)

You can always go to www.merchantcircle.com its a great free website. There you can create your own blog and have it link back to your website. Additionally, its a fairly simple way of connecting with potential customers/vendors in your area.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> Option 3- Pay someone to build me an actual functioning blog attached to my site with my own url, customization, etc. Pros: More professional. Cons: lose the traffic which comes from the random people in blogging communities. Also, I'm sure its expensive.


If you're going to be blogging regulary (and from the looks of what you've got, it seems like you are), I would actually go with putting a functional blog on your site with your own URL and customization.

I don't think the random traffic from a blogging community would beat the professional look and branding of having everything on your own URL. People will still find you.

It looks like you're with lunarpages, which means you can easily install a blog (I would highly suggest wordpress) on your site with one click. You don't need to know any PHP/XHMTL/etc to get it installed.

As far as the customization goes, you could mess around and figure it out yourself with help (as you did with the mojo script), or you could hire someone. Hiring someone to do it wouldn't cost more than $200 to have it fully customized the way you want (ie: matching your existing layout).

If you have the time, I really think you could customize your blog yourself. Once you've got the layout in dreamweaver, you basically copy and paste the URL into the wordpress templates.

It will really give you a much better way of organizing your blog and having a good URL for reach separate blog post. 

I wouldn't recommend the merchcircle method as your goal isn't really to connect with vendors in your area and it takes the control of things away from your own site and puts it on a third party site. It also doesn't allow for the level of customization you're looking for.


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## Binary01 (Jun 2, 2007)

i have blogspot...... does wordpress have more "search/crawler" features?

i have my blog practically looking like my site...same theme at least..... all i did was find a decent template that blogspot offered and changed the top banner and tweeked the colors/fonts a bit.....

i figured blogspot was good since it's tied to google...........

and i dont know much about programming/html....

b


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## SBEMedia (Jun 26, 2008)

I like WordPress personally, but it definitely takes a little bit of HTML coding knowledge to make it work, but as Rodney said if you have Dreamweaver it'll be a piece of cake


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> i have blogspot...... does wordpress have more "search/crawler" features?


I'm not sure what kind of "search/crawler" features you mean. 



> i have my blog practically looking like my site...same theme at least..... all i did was find a decent template that blogspot offered and changed the top banner and tweeked the colors/fonts a bit.....
> 
> i figured blogspot was good since it's tied to google...........
> 
> and i dont know much about programming/html....


I'm not saying it's a bad choice for *everyone*, if blogspot is working for you, I'm not saying you need to change it or anything 

I was mainly offering my recommendation about Ryan's specific case. Based on what features he was looking for and what he was looking to get out of it, and his level of knowledge.


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## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

Thanks everyone for the quick response! I think I will look into both blogspot and wordpress to see what I can do with them. But I'm confused-If I use those, wouldn't I end up with something like www.donkeyshines.blogspot or .wordpress? Would it still seem professional with those in my url?


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## biophase (Aug 12, 2007)

I think your blog URL is fine. What software are you using for it right now?

I would second the wordpress recommendation and just find a nice template that you like. With plugins and its admin panel, you should be able to configure and customize it without knowing to much html or php.

Wordpress will give you everything you ever wanted in a site. From reviews to comments to RSS feeds to anything you can think of.

Check out my store and its blog. The blog is run on wordpress with a free template that I customized to match my store colors.


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## biophase (Aug 12, 2007)

gorilladuck said:


> Thanks everyone for the quick response! I think I will look into both blogspot and wordpress to see what I can do with them. But I'm confused-If I use those, wouldn't I end up with something like www.donkeyshines.blogspot or .wordpress? Would it still seem professional with those in my url?


Don't go with blogspot. Go with wordpress (not the wordpress hosted blog), but download wordpress and install it on your host and set the URL to what you have now.


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## Binary01 (Jun 2, 2007)

i was just concerned on hits really..... if wordpress had a better system of tagging words/lables/etc that might work better than blogspot.....

i know when i started my blog i was in the same situation....hence i worked with blogspot and after about a few hours.... i was up and running....hhehehe....

just curious on hits/visits really.....



b


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## biophase (Aug 12, 2007)

237am said:


> i was just concerned on hits really..... if wordpress had a better system of tagging words/lables/etc that might work better than blogspot.....
> 
> i know when i started my blog i was in the same situation....hence i worked with blogspot and after about a few hours.... i was up and running....hhehehe....
> 
> ...


The reason I wouldn't use blogspot is that your url is 237am.blogspot.com. This doesn't help your 237am url in terms of SEO.

A much better url is www. 237am.com/blog or even blog.237am.com.

Also, you don't own the content on your blogspot URL. One day they could delete it and all your blogging work would be lost. If that day came and only your blog url was ranking in SEO what would happen to your store traffic?

Same goes for xxx.wordpress.com blogs...


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

gorilladuck said:


> Thanks everyone for the quick response! I think I will look into both blogspot and wordpress to see what I can do with them. But I'm confused-If I use those, wouldn't I end up with something like www.donkeyshines.blogspot or .wordpress? Would it still seem professional with those in my url?


To clarify, I wasn't talking about the wordpress.com hosted solution where your url would be donkeyshines.wordpress 

I was talking about the wordpress.org version which is software that you install on your site. 

Since you are with lunar, you can get that software installed on your site for free with a couple of clicks and your url could be example.com/blog or blog.yourURL.com (or whatever URL you want on your site)


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

237am said:


> i was just concerned on hits really..... if wordpress had a better system of tagging words/lables/etc that might work better than blogspot.....
> 
> i know when i started my blog i was in the same situation....hence i worked with blogspot and after about a few hours.... i was up and running....hhehehe....
> 
> ...


To be honest, whether you are with blogspot or host it yourself isn't going to have too much impact on "hits".

Hits come from your marketing, promotion and unique content, not from any special features or the fact that one is owned by google.

I wouldn't get too caught up in the SEO stuff like tags, keywords, etc. That doesn't mean forget about it, but don't make it all too technical or get caught up in any special "tricks" that someone tells you about that will give you free hits.


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## Binary01 (Jun 2, 2007)

biophase said:


> The reason I wouldn't use blogspot is that your url is 237am.blogspot.com. This doesn't help your 237am url in terms of SEO.
> 
> A much better url is www. 237am.com/blog or even blog.237am.com.
> 
> ...


How to Backup / Export Blogger - Jerry Ong Community Blog

some backup options ......

i would just think that having a link on the blog back to the main site would give you a better standing in google.... you cant link to yourself in your own site

just discussion really........


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## biophase (Aug 12, 2007)

237am said:


> i would just think that having a link on the blog back to the main site would give you a better standing in google.... you cant link to yourself in your own site
> 
> just discussion really........


From what I have read, links for blogspot URL's do not count very much. This is because anyone can make a blogspot blog for free. A few years ago, it took me a day but I had over 100 blogspot accounts created with content and linking to each other and to my sites. This was before I truly understood link juice.

I wouldn't worry too much about the links coming from blogspot URLs especially your own single one. Did you ever notice that the pay per post and text link selling companies do not allow blogspot URLs? That is because they are looked upon as not worthly URLs for paid links.


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## AnalogJunkie (Aug 26, 2008)

hmm well if you have a retail location or a work shop people may be interested in reading about how you go about your daily business.

They might be interested in seeing pictures of your design process, or printing methods. Learning about new business ventures you're taking on .. like maybe partnering with a website for their merchandise or if you are making deals with a retail store to carry your line. If you do photo shoots they might like to see behind the scenes images too.

I always find it kind of interesting to learn about the people 'behind the html', especially if they are a small operation with big dreams. : )

I also agree with installing your own blog on YOUR webspace, because then the keywords are on wordpress' site, and not YOURS. If the blog is hosted on your server then searches will lead them to your site where the store is.

If you really like blogspot I do believe they have an option where it will host the pages on your site. I seem to remember doing that at one point..

Tabz


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## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

Thanks everyone. I think I will go with the wordpress option. It might take me a little bit, but I think I should have it up and running within a few weeks!


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## tshirt0mania (May 27, 2008)

I had a look at your blog. I like how you talk about the paintings, and even posted a step-by-step... Loved that. It's refreshing & unique. I don't think I've come across any other t-shirt blog like that. 
It positions you as an artist first & foremost. I think people will start taking your designs a little more seriously after having read the blog. At least I did.


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## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

Thank you! I'm just afraid I'll run out of stuff like that to talk about. Currently, my "blog" is just an html file which I add a paragraph to once a week. Once I get this wordpress thing going then hopefully people will be able to ask questions, make comments. It will be fun AND functional!


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## tshirt0mania (May 27, 2008)

gorilladuck said:


> Thank you! I'm just afraid I'll run out of stuff like that to talk about.


Write from the heart, and write in your own voice. You'll never run out.



gorilladuck said:


> Currently, my "blog" is just an html file which I add a paragraph to once a week. Once I get this wordpress thing going then hopefully people will be able to ask questions, make comments. It will be fun AND functional!


I have a little bit of experience installing Wordpress. If you read through their instructions, it should be quite simple. Shout if u get stuck, I'll see if I can help. If not, I'm sure there's always someone more experienced 'round here.

Keep us posted!


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## saneTV (Sep 9, 2006)

I did a major site redesign and a change in focus on my blog (aiming more at women), and now I need to remarket my blog and site.Here I am thinking I needed to post a request, and here are the answers I needed! Thanks!


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## AnalogJunkie (Aug 26, 2008)

I've installed word press several times, and it's pretty straight forward even if you are not a site wiz. They have their 'famous five minute install'. Which is all it should take if you make sure to follow all the directions.

The hardest thing for an inexperienced person will probably be creating the database, because they will most likely never have used their MySQL features before, but that's only a matter of learning to navigate. : )


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## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

I found it very easy to install wordpress through Lunarpages, but in order to make it worthwhile, I need to be able to customize the look to match my site. I haven't been able to figure out how to do that. Since people seemed to be finding my wordpress blog in it's unready state, I ended up taking it down. When I have more time I will try to play around with themes, etc.


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## SBEMedia (Jun 26, 2008)

A great free website which will help with coding, especially for those who don't have extensive experience with coding procedures is www.w3schools.com and gives great tutorials and other information


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## AnalogJunkie (Aug 26, 2008)

If you want to do some simple mods to your blog you can use wordpress itself. There's a menu inside to let you edit a current theme, and you can change the headers, backgrounds, ect. that way.

Or just upload new pre-made themes, and they will be selectable for you. : )


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## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

yeah, even in wordpress I can't figure out how to change the header. Even when I select "header", I still don't know because it doesn't seem to be as simple as uploading images, etc. With time I probably can figure it out. I just don't have time at the moment. Perhaps next week I can get into it.


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## SBEMedia (Jun 26, 2008)

Are you talking about creating a header within a post? If so, its a simple '<h1>, <h3>, etc.' command function.


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## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

No, I mean customizing the header of the entire theme to exactly match the top portion of my site layout which contains my logo and all my site navigation links. Because I built my site using dreamweaver in layout mode, it doesn't seem to be as simple as cutting and pasting html code from my site to the header template of the wordpress theme. I just couldn't figure it out. Not understanding SQL or php or whichever is used in wordpress, I don't understand which templates to edit to get which results. Intuitively, I wanted to go into the header template and mess around with the layout of the page, but that's not what the header template seems to be about.


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## biophase (Aug 12, 2007)

Maybe this will help.

Designing Headers WordPress Codex


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## gorilladuck (Jan 28, 2008)

wow, I think that will be a pretty good resource. Thanks!


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