Tag: Confusion

Publish Guest Posts Under A Separate Username

Link back to the guest writer’s blog or twitter a/c is a good way to show that the article was written by a guest writer. But if you have your name on the homepage(where you show only post excerpts and show “published by yourname“), then showing “published by Guest” would make more sense..

Create a user called Guest and then publish all the guest posts under that user name. This approach may help in multiple ways.

1. You can get all the guest posts from few clicks(under dashboard) — See all the posts published under the username Guest.
2. Visitors can see all the guest posts by clicking on the link Guest(if its clickable and displays all the articles published under the username Guest).
3. Visitors/readers confusion as to who wrote the article would be reduced to a certain extent.
Link back to the guest writer’s blog or twitter a/c is a good way to show that the article was written by a guest writer. But if you have your name on the homepage(where you show only post excerpts and show “published by yourname“), then showing “published by Guest” would make more sense to your readers. This way you can eliminate a certain degree of confusion and add more clarity(and good usability). People will be knowing, whether its written by you or a guest writer – before clicking on the read more link.

Guest authors

Showing Authors Photo, Bio and a Link – using a smart plugin
Another nice way to show credit to guest writers is to show their bio, a small image and a link to their website/twitter a/c at the end of the article, in a well structured manner. Did you just say its a tedious job? No its not. There is a good plugin called Author Image, which can do the job for you. It creates a widget that you can insert in a sidebar, or much about anywhere and you can also add author’s description in addition to his/her image.

Who should care for it ?
If you are receiving 1 or 2 guest posts per month, then managing guest posts will not be a big challenge. But once your blog is out there for some more years and you blog consistently, you will start receiving a lot of guest post requests, so you will certainly need some strategy to manage them effectively. So keeping things organized from the beginning is smarter then messing up with things later.

What strategies do you follow to maintain/manage guest posts.

Avoid Confusion between Search form and Email subscription form!

Have you ever found the email subscription form and the search form boxes confusing?

I have seen many people keying in some keywords(query) and hit the subscribe button bymistake and they will be taken to the popup subscription form and they will close it. And sometimes people put there email ID in the search form and press search button, expecting the subscription form to come!
email-search-form
This happens because the search form and the feedburner email subscription form somewhat look alike.

To avoid confusion it is recommended to show some message inside the box, like Subscribe now, Google Custome Search Engine etc. Take a look at the below image:
email-search-form
Along with these changes[adding custom message], changing its look is better, to avoid any sort of confusion.

So inorder to avoid confusion among your readers, just make them look different.
Do not make any changes(manually in the coding) to your Adsense Search Form, as it may be against Adsense TOS.

So the leftout option is email Subscription form. Make it look different. Add colored borders, make it thick, change the length of the email form, etc.
Here is some code to help you change the look of your subscription form:
Put these codes into your style.css (StyleSheet)

.emailformbutton{
cursor:pointer;
border: solid 1px #ccc;
background:#2683AE;
color:#EAF3FA;
font-weight:bold;
padding: 1px 2px;
}


Look at the below codes[marked area] and change your codes accordingly:-
email-search-form
And before feeling happy about the changed subscription form, just check it once, whether it is working properly or not. Some times it gives the error message like, you have not enabled the email subscription option in your account or something like that.
If this is the case with you, just check the coding once again and it should work(if done correctly), if you have not disabled the email subscription option in your feedburner account!