Jennifer recently wrote in with this question:
“I am such a rule follower and I’m so worried that I will do something wrong on my blog. Are there any basic legal things we should know about when first starting out?”
This is a great question and there are so many people I’ve talked to who want to start a blog but they’re so scared of doing the wrong thing or accidentally doing something illegal.
I recently received this great question from Elizabeth:
“How much time is necessary to grow a blog (and not at a snail’s pace)? I work full time at a job I love, commute 2 hours per day, and have two young children. My husband often works on the opposite coast of the U.S., so I’m frequently left alone with the kids and don’t have family to help out in the new town we just moved to.
We have some medical debt we would like paid off ASAP so I’m looking to bring in extra money. I’m currently getting up at 4:30 a.m. which allows me an hour to work on my side projects and I’m really trying to stick to 7 hours of sleep each night. My youngest is an early riser (often 5:45 a.m.!) unlike her older sister who is the better sleeper. Is it realistic to expect anything to result in a reasonable timeframe (I know better than to expect anything overnight) in only an hour of work in the morning before my daughter wakes up?”
I received this great question from Charity on the Your Blogging Mentor Facebook page about sponsored posts:
“I re-launched my blog about 2 months ago, and was recently approached by a company about doing a sponsored post. Do you have any advice about how to set rates for these posts and how to set guidelines for what you will and will not do in sponsored posts? Do you feel like it is wise to accept a sponsored post so early upon re-launching my site?” -Charity
This is such a great question, because I truly believe that one of the most lucrative ways to make money as a blogger is by working with brands and doing sponsored content.
Some of you may be immediately turned off by this idea and you might be feeling like, “Wait! But isn’t that sleazy to accept money from a company to write about their product?”
Well, it can be. Trust me, there are plenty of companies that want to pay you to post cheesy, sleazy posts — all they care about is getting their link in a post on your blog because it will help their SEO.
Does the idea of making money on your blog through marketing make you feel a bit icky? Does the word “marketing” leave a bad taste in your mouth?
If so, then I think you can relate to my reader Angie a lot.
Recently Angie wrote to me expressing her concern about starting her first blog, wondering if she could actually make money blogging without marketing. She didn’t like the idea of marketing at all, and was hoping for some advice. Here’s what she said:
I have lots of strong values (e.g., ethical products, environment care, standing strong against marketing strategies) so I feel like it would almost be going against my values to create a blog that makes money because how could I do that? But I still want to share what I’ve been learning because surely there are people like me. So I was just wondering if you guys have any thoughts. ~Angie
I applaud Angie for not wanting to compromise her values for a quick buck. However, I couldn’t help but feel that Angie’s hangup may be due to a very common misperception of what marketing is … or should I say, what good marketing is.Continue Reading
Recently, I received this really great question from one of my students over at Your Blogging University™:
“Should I have my blog and plugins set to automatically update or not? I currently do, but I read something that caused me to question whether that was a good idea. I wondered if sometimes an update could be the cause of my site not loading?” -Josette
Updates can definitely be a cause for confusion when it comes to maintaining your blog. To save time, some bloggers set their updates to automatically run so they don’t have to think about it.
But when it comes to updates, I don’t recommend setting your updates to run automatically. Here’s why:
Sometimes updates can conflict with your site’s settings, your version of WordPress, or other plugins you have installed on your site. When this happens, we always recommend looking at your most recent updates to see if an update to a plugin has caused a conflict.
Having your updates set to run automatically makes it a LOT more difficult to figure out the cause of a particular issue should one arise. Why? Because now you really have no idea if an update was performed and what exactly was updated.
Therefore, updating plugins, themes, and WordPress itself manually one at a time makes it far easier to isolate any issue that might befall your site due to an update.
Note: It’s important to always keep your WordPress site, plugins, and themes up to date to avoid any added security threats that are addressed within the latest provided updates. We do not recommend skipping updates altogether, but we do advocate having more control over when and how your site is updated.
Want more control over your WordPress updates? Check out the Easy Update Manager plugin to make this process easy and hassle free.
Having site troubles after performing updates? Here’s what you should do:
1. Deactivate updated plugins. If you updated a group of plugins, deactivated all of them. Did the issue resolve? If yes, then you know it’s a plugin.
2. Reactivate plugins one at a time, checking each time to see if the issue has returned. This will help you isolate which plugin is causing the issue.
3. Restore previous version of the affected plugin. You can do this by using a plugin such as WP Rollback. You can find that plugin here. Once WP Rollback is installed and activated, you’ll be able to easily roll back your plugins to any previous available version.
You can also use WP Rollback to restore the previous version WordPress or your theme if you discover a plugin is not the culprit.
Need more help with WordPress? Check out our new course WordPress 101 for more helpful tips and suggestions regarding maintaining your WordPress site!
