You may be asking yourself, “Who is Danelle Ice and what does she know about blogging, anyway?  How is she going to help me?”  These are great questions, and we’ll be happy to answer them!

Danelle Ice is a busy working mother of 4 kids: 11, 3, 1, and 2 months.  She and her husband, Michael, live in Fairbanks, Alaska, one of the coldest places in the world.

Danelle Ice is a problogger, consultant, speaker, and a systems expert. 

Danelle also owns IS World Media, and internet publishing company which is home to the IS Media blog network.  Their websites cover a wide variety of genres, from home and how-to topics to personal finance to freebies and coupons to fitness to technology.

Named one of Fast Company’s most influential people, she is one of the leaders of an elite group of online influencers in the web 2.0 world.

What Does Danelle Ice Know About Blogging?

As they say, the proof is in the pudding.  The statistics associated with our web properties show that we’re doing things the right way.

• Our flagship site, HomeEverAfter.com, ranks in the Alexa top 0.69% of all websites worldwide.
• Technorati ranked us in the Technorati top 0.04% of all blogs worldwide.
• Hubspot rated our flagship site at 99.5% in terms of marketing effectiveness.
• Our SEO enables us to rank for key terms quickly and effectively – on the first page of Google.
• Danelle is frequently brought in by major corporations as a blogging expert and brand advocate, helping them to initiate their online programs.
• Danelle attends the top blogging and technology conferences to keep current on the latest blogging trends.

Danelle is Great at What She Does – And She Can Show You the Ropes

Danelle loves to launch websites and blogs and watch their rankings skyrocket quickly towards the top.  Her tips are beneficial to brand new bloggers and seasoned mommy bloggers alike. 

Her commitment to blogging best practices ensures that you’re getting a blogging education that is completely above board and will help you become respected not only by fellow bloggers, but by corporations and search engines as well.

Are you ready to get started as a mommy blogger?  Great!  Keep reading the helpful resources on this site.    

Can being a blogger give you power and access to important people and places? You better believe it! Last year, I was named one of Fast Company Magazine’s most influential people.

Do bloggers really have any influence? Every day, approximately 13,000 people read everything I say on Twitter. You can imagine that it’s easy to let people know what you think when you have that kind of reach.

Needless to say, there are many power and access perks that come along with being a famous blogger. Here are a few.

Media Access

First off, as a blogger, I’m a member of the media. Having a press pass means I have access to people and events that many people don’t.

My press privileges with television networks mean that I also get access to watch their new hot television shows that haven’t even been released yet whenever I want.

Celebrity Chefs

As a famous blogger, celebrity chefs want to cook for you! They want you to brag about their new recipes, their new restaurants, and their new books. They want to you to tell people about their new magazines and love to be interviewed by you and photographed with you.

Blogging can get you invited to spend time with some important people. Above is a picture of me, Danelle Ice, with Kraft Foods’ Executive Chef, John Li, from their development team.

Imagine being able to tell the research & development team at a major national food manufacturer and distributor what foods you want created. That’s a pretty influential connection to have as a consumer!

Not a week goes by that I don’t get an invitation from a celebrity chef from Food Network or other television networks to cook with them, interview them, or try their latest recipes, books, or cookware.

Rub Elbows with Celebrities, CEOs and Presidents

How about fashion celebrities? 2 years ago I got to meet Paula Deen in Chicago. Here I am below with Carson Kressley, style aficionado.

I get to rub elbows with a lot of CEOs as well as company presidents and vice presidents. The photo below shows me with Kraft Foods’ Vice President, Lisa Mann.

Being a celebrity blogger can even get you fun and interesting privileges, like being driven around in the Weinermobile, a giant hotdog!

Giant hotdogs are fun, but usually, I just get picked up in a limo!

Below, I met with celebrity designer, Chloe Dao (far right) from Project Runway 2, to try her luggage line and offer my advice for improvements to the new line.

It goes without saying that being a famous problogger gives you access to people and places you wouldn’t normally have access to. Pro mommy bloggers also are privileged to know a lot of the most influential people in media.

Calling all bloggers running WordPress as their content management system (CMS) – yes, I’m talking about you guys and gals with self-hosted WordPress installations.  WordPress version 3.0.2 just came out (release date 11/30/10) and if you haven’t done so already, it’s time to upgrade your WordPress installation.

WordPress 3.0.2 is a mandatory security update, which means if you know what’s good for the safety of your blog, you’ll get on this update right away!

How to Upgrade to WordPress 3.0.2

To upgrade your WordPress installation to version 3.0.2, you have several choices:

1. You can follow the directions at the WordPress Codex here.

2.  Log in to your WordPress dashboard and you’ll get a message at the top of the page alerting you to the new version. It also has a link to the download information.

3.  Download the plugin WordPress Automatic Upgrade, which will guide you through a series of clicks in your dashboard to update to the new version.  This handy plugin is, by far, the easiest way to upgrade your WordPress.

List of the Changes Made in WordPress 3.0.2

From the WordPress.org site, the following changes were made in this security update:

• “Fix moderate security issue where a malicious Author-level user could gain further access to the site. (r16625)
• Remove pingback/trackback blogroll whitelisting feature as it can easily be abused. (#13887)
• Fix canonical redirection for permalinks containing %category% with nested categories and paging. (#13471)
• Fix occasional irrelevant error messages on plugin activation. (#15062)
• Minor XSS fixes in request_filesystem_credentials() and when deleting a plugin. (r16367, r16373)
• Clarify the license in the readme (r15534)
• Multisite: Fix the delete_user meta capability (r15562)
• Multisite: Force current_user_can_for_blog() to run map_meta_cap() even for super admins (#15122)
• Multisite: Fix ms-files.php content type headers when requesting a URL with a query string (#14450)
• Multisite: Fix the usage of the SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL constant for upgraded WordPress MU installs (#14536) “

Do you ever wonder how other bloggers can tell when you’re a new blogger?  There are common mistakes that many newbie bloggers make that are a dead giveaway for showing the world that you’re just figuring this whole blogging thing out!

If you are a new blogger, but don’t want the world to know, then print this list of common new blogger mistakes out and hang it near your computer monitor.  (Yes, some experienced bloggers do a few of the things on this list too, but not ALL of them!)

Common Blogging Mistakes

1. Writing in overly familiar style (“Hey buddy”, “dude”, “lol”).
2. Writing in all caps.
3. Putting your titles in all caps.
4. Having a title that is a paragraph long.
5. Putting smilies in your writing (or frownies).
6. Using animated gifs on your site (circa 1996).
7. Putting words other than the title of your post in header 1 tags.
8. Not capitalizing the first letters of words in your titles and subtitles.
9. Underlining text that is not a link.
10. Overusing bold in posts.
11. Using acronyms without defining them first.
12. Not using periods at the end of sentences.
13. Forgetting how to use paragraphs and writing posts as collections of 1-line-in-a-row sentences.
14. Not setting links to other sites to open in a new window.
15. Not providing alt text for your images.
16. Writing a “wall of text” (not putting spaces between paragraphs).
17. Putting dashes between words that don’t need dashes (e.g. week-end).
18. Assuming that your readers already know what you’re talking about.  Jumping right into the topic with no introduction or explanation.
19. Labeling the conclusion of a post “conclusion”.
20. Writing “The End” at the end of a post.
21. Not linking your header to your front page.
22. Not having a navigation bar at the top of your blog.
23. Not providing contact information for yourself or your company.
24. Setting photos in posts to click through to a full version of the same image.
25. After not posting for a while, writing a post that says, “Sorry I haven’t posted for a while…”.

The above list of 25 common blogging mistakes are things you do NOT want to do (unless you have a specific reason to do so)!  Can you think of other common mistakes that new bloggers make?  Let us know in the comments and we’ll add it to the list.

Welcome to MommyBlogger.me from the Ultimate Blog Party 2010!   We’re looking forward to bringing you even more blogging tips and advice, blogging best practices, and problogger how to articles in 2010. 

While you’re here, make sure to subscribe to our RSS feed or email updates to get all of our newest article sent to you while they’re still fresh.

By the way- we’re hiring for freebies bloggers right now for one of our sites.  If you’re interested, please email info(at)HomeEverAfter.com with your blogging resume.

Don’t miss visiting some of our other sites too, including our flagship home site Home Ever After, our freebies site And Freebies for All, our giveaway linky headquarters Product Reviews for Mom, and a few more up and coming blogs and other sites:

• Homemaker Blush
• DanelleIce.com 
• Free to Get Rich
• Sites and Web Hosting
• I Love Powershell
• Ice-Simmons Empire

If you haven’t made your party post yet, there’s still time!  Don’t miss this great opportunity to promote your blog(s) and meet fellow bloggers.  Have a great time hopping through the blogs listed at the Ultimate Blog Party 2010! 

I just wanted to remind all mommy bloggers (and female bloggers) that the Ultimate Blog Party 2010 at 5 Minutes 4 Mom is coming soon. 

This year’s Ultimate Blog Party will be held from April 9-16, 2010.  You can head over there now to get UBP 2010 info and UBP10 badges for the upcoming blog party.  As a woman blogger, trust me when I say this is one blog event you DON’T want to miss!

Alright ladies and gents, we knew the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines were coming for nearly a year, and now they’re finally here.  This is an urgent (and legally necessary) read for all bloggers, because it effects your reviews, sponsored posts, PR, news articles, and more.  I hate to be the one to tell you that the new Guides are in fact 81 pages long, but they are.

Grab a cup of coffee, because this pdf will take a while to read. 

Click here for the full 81 page pdf of the FTC’s “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising”.

Here’s a snippet from the headline from the FTC that hit our screens on October 5, 2009:

FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials

Changes Affect Testimonial Advertisements, Bloggers, Celebrity Endorsements

The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it has approved final revisions to the guidance it gives to advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act.

The notice incorporates several changes to the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, which address endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as the disclosure of important connections between advertisers and endorsers. The Guides were last updated in 1980.

Read the FTC’s full article here:  FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials

There are many reasons you may want to add nofollow tags to hyperlinks, the main reason being to block links from paying advertisers from benefitting from your PageRank.  Do you know how to add the nofollow tag to your hyperlinks?

There are 2 types of links: dofollow and nofollow.  When neither tag is present, the default setting is dofollow. The nofollow tag tells a search engine’s crawler not to give any weight or “Google juice” to the link you have posted.

An in-depth discussion of the benefits and uses of nofollow will be covered in another article.  For now, we’ll be focusing on how to add the nofollow tag to links when you know it should be there.

How to Add Nofollow Tags to Links

A regular link (to a helpful article, great post, or relevant blog) will be a normal, followed link.  Its code will look like this when you switch to the html view in your dashboard:

That normal code is how every regular followed link should look when you view its html. To add the nofollow tag in, you’ll add this snippet of html code to your existing link:

rel=”nofollow”

That one simple piece of code will prevent search engine spiders from following the link, in effect, giving no weight to the link.  In other words, the link juice from your page will not flow into that link or out to its corresponding site.

I’ve shown the nofollow tag in red in the example below so you can see the placement.  To add the nofollow tag, your html code will now look like this:

That’s all there is to it.  Adding nofollow tags is quick and easy to do when you know the proper way to modify your html code.  Remember that to be in compliance with Google and many other search engine’s policies, you’ll want to add nofollow tags to all paid links from advertisers. 

In a nutshell:  If you get compensation for the link, it’s best not to be flowing PageRank to the link.  Respectable webmasters and public relations reps know that building backlinks is something you do the old fashioned way – with great content and real relationships, NOT by buying links!

Is your blog feeling stale?  If your site has looked the same for quite some time, it might be time to freshen up your blog.  Here are 13 easy ways to give your blog a mini makeover; some are pretty major, and some are little changes that pack a big punch.

13 Ways to Freshen Up Your Blog

1.  Install a new template or theme.  Is it time for a blog overhaul?  Create a brand new look and layout by installing a new blog theme. 

Find a listing of free WordPress themes here, and free blogspot / blogger themes here.

2.  Get a new badge.  If you don’t do your own graphics, start looking for a graphic artist on twitter to design a new 125×125 badge for your blog.

3.  Change your link and title colors.  This small, easy change is quick to make and will give your posts a fresh new look. 

4.  Add avatars or gravatars to your comments.  Avatars next to commenter names make your comment section look more appealing.  Here are our step by step instructions for how to add avatars to your blog comments section.

5.  Rearrange your sidebar.  Move your widgets around to give readers a fresh perspective.  Bring some sections from the bottom of the sidebar to the top for a while.

6.  Get a new header.  This is another reason to find a good designer who shares your vision of the way you want to present your blog.  Asking for a designer on twitter is always a good starting place.

7.  Add a snazzy new background.  If you’re not up for changing your entire template and you like your current layout, consider adding a new background.  You can find free blog backgrounds at The Cutest Blog on the Block.

8.  Move your ads around.  Giving your ads a more prominent placement on your blog can present a very different look, not to mention helping you earn more money from your blog. 

If you’re using Google Adsense, you may even consider changing the sizes of your ads to change up the types of graphics which are displayed.  For example, using a 300×250 rectangle will give you the ability to display video ads.

9.  Add a new weekly or monthly feature.  Add excitement by coming up with a new regular feature that readers can participate in and look forward to.  Blog memes using Mr. Linky or MckLinky give your readers a chance to participate and help your blog get more exposure.

10.  Add Google Friend Connect.  If you’ve seen the widgets in blog sidebars with lots of faces, chances are you were looking at Google Friend Connect.  This feature allows your reader to join your blog’s community and connect with your other readers, as well as showing their picture off to your audience.

11.  Move your sidebar to the other side of the page.  It’s just like rearranging furniture!  Try moving your right sidebar to the left side of the page for a brand new perspective.

12.  Change the color of your navigation bar.  Does your navigation blend in or stand out?  Make the navigation buttons pop against your color palette to ensure your readers see it and know how to move around your blog.

13.  Change your site’s name.  This one is only to be used in extreme cases, such as when the content on your blog no longer fits with your blog’s name. 

Get more Thursday Thirteen at the new Thursday 13.  Thanks to stock.xchng for the graphic.

Have you seen faces next to comments on other blogs, but don’t know how to add them on your own blog?  Never fear!  Our step by step instructions for both blogspot and WordPress self-hosted blogs will teach you how to add avatars to your blog comments in no time.

Avatars next to commenters names make your comment section look more appealing. 

If you haven’t set up your own avatar for your site yet, visit Gravatar to find out how.

How to Add Comment Avatars on Blogspot Blogs:

• In your dashboard, go to “Settings”.
• Go to “Comments”.
• Near the bottom of the page, change “Show profile images on comments?” to “Yes”.
• Click the “Save Settings” button.

How to Add Comment Avatars on WordPress Self-Hosted Blogs:

• In your dashboard, go to “Settings”.
• Go to “Discussion”.
• Scroll down to the Avatars section.
• Under “Avatar Display”, choose the radio button for “Show Avatars”.
• Under “Maximum Rating”, select what pictures are appropriate to show up your blog.  Avatar ratings are G, PG, R, and X.
• Under “Default Avatar”, choose the picture you want to show up for readers who don’t have an avatar of their own yet.

Avatars are a great way to add some pizzazz to your blog’s comments section and encourage readers to leave some feedback.  It’s nice to be able to connect words with faces and help to foster the community on your blog!