Wow!

This is exciting news from Ezine Articles!

They have created a plug-in for WordPress that will allow you to submit one of your blog posts as an article to Ezine Articles!

Talk about a time saver and spreading your valuable content around the web!

Fantastic!

Check it out on Ezine Article’s Blog.

Happy Writing!

Believe In Your Success, I Do!
Karen
mentor.karen.j.miller@gmail.com

I wish I had a nickel for every time I was working on the internet and something crashed…either the power, the internet, or a computer malfunction.

Worse is when I’ve lost some project I had been intently working on and was almost finished with.

Arghhh!!

We’ve all been there at one time or another.

A fellow Mentor, Jennifer Fisher, introduced me to a Wondrous FREE program—you all know how much I like FREE business building tools—you can use for your blog writing.

Windows Live Writer.

I was telling Jennifer how I had found a beautiful theme for my WordPress blog, but I didn’t like the difficult to read, grey font color.

I have Windows Vista and Microsoft Office Word 2007.  This version of Word allows you to write a “blog post” rather than a “blank document”.  It converts the characters to the correct format, and then publishes the post to your blog.

The drawback is that I could never figure out how to change the font color and size so it showed up on my blog.

OK, so I’ve never made a secret out of the fact that I am technologically challenged!

But that is one of the goals of this blog…helping anyone—even those who are technologically challenged like me—learn how to market online the easy way.

Back to my story…

So, Jennifer gave me the link to download Windows Live Writer.  I love it!

Some of the features I enjoy are

• ability to change the font color and size (black against white is easier to read)
• work on and save drafts on my own computer (avoids internet problems)
• publish to your blog or your dashboard (I like to add my tags and categories from my dashboard)
• add images and links
• see the draft as it will appear once posted in my theme
• manage drafts for all of my blogs

I’ve been without internet service this week, so this program has been a life saver.

I’ve been able to write drafts and save them to the program on my computer.  I can set a publish date for each post over several days or weeks.  Then, when I can access an internet connection, I publish the whole lot to my WordPress dashboard.

This allows me to keep current with my readers and the search engines.

There are many other features to list, but you can check those out yourself by going to the Windows Live Writer site.

Enjoy this new free tool!  If you need any help with it, give me a holler.

Your Friend and Mentor,
Karen
”Teamwork Makes the Dreams Work”

The time has come to blog with the Big Dogs!

We are now officially hosted through HostGator and are living under a real domain name, www.mlmnetworkingwomen.com!

We have a new look with a new theme, color scheme, and WordPress software.  This is going to be exciting learning a new format and playing with the plugins and widgets…as soon as I learn what those are for…haha! 

This is a new phase of my blogging journey and I am excited to share it with you.  Blogging is an important facet of your online marketing campaign.

The first step was signing up with HostGator.  They have a lot of tutorial videos and live chat support.  The technicians don’t mind if you ask what you might think are “stupid questions”.  If you’re like me, this is unchartered territory and there is NOTHING obvious about this process.  Some days I just sat and stared at the computer screen waiting for the heavens to open up and enlighten me. 

You want to talk about alphabet soup?!?  cPanels, FTP, IP, SSL, SSH, MySQL, php, MIME, and what the heck is a GnuPG key????  I am a Green personality type and I like to research and understand everything I do before jumping in.  But this was getting ridiculous!  I may not understand all of this stuff until my kindergartener graduates high school!  Besides, being techie is not my passion or talent…I had to accept the fact that I couldn’t afford the luxury of being an expert in this case and just get off the bean and DO IT. 

I got through the process though, and so will you.  I watched the videos and learned how to set up my cPanel (by the way that is your Control Panel).  I even learned how to upload a new theme and “unpack” it…process also known as “unzipping”…something you do to a bunch of related files that get packed (like in a box) or zipped (like in overstuffing and zipping a suitcase for your vacation) so they are smaller in size for sending through the internet.

Why host your own blog?, you may ask.  Because it is going to be the center of your internet business efforts.

If you are building your business and use your blog as your central hub, it would be catastrophic if you logged in one day to your blogging account and found that your blog was blocked.  Why would they do this?   Perhaps the blogging service you’re using found your content in violation of their terms of service.  Yikes!  There goes your connection with your clients and target market!

Hosting your own blog, like with HostGator, allows you to own your blog.  The content is stored on your host’s servers.  You pay a monthly subscription fee for the service.  HostGator still has their terms of service you have to abide by which are generally no illegal activity, no spam, etc.

Also with hosting, your blog has a more professional presence…you have a clean and accurate domain name that remains consistent with every page of your blogging site.  This is different than buying a domain name and having it redirect to your free blogging service blog (like Blogger).

I was happy with the service at Blogger and have no complaints.  Like I said, it came time to start blogging with the Big Dogs.

Wishing You the Success of a Lifetime!
Karen
karen@mlmnetworkingwoman.com
skype ID karen.j.miller