Infographics 101

If I don’t go through an infographic every day, my day feels strangely incomplete. I absolutely love  them. But beside loving, I think they are extremely useful and prove to be a great tactic for marketing; they demonstrate data in a unique fashion that makes you want to

a) keep referring back to it

b) susbscribe for more and similar like it

c) share

Here is an infographic on how to create infographic of your own. You can try it for your business, for your class project, for your blog or just share.

 

 

Produced by Voltier Creative

Related articles

• The DYI Guide To Infographics [INFOGRAPHIC] (marketingpilgrim.com)

Blogging about blogging: Button your blog

I am big on appearances so when I started this blog, on one hand I wanted to keep a subdued theme, on the other, I wanted it to be good to look at. Personalizing your blog- putting eye candy is important if you want people to keep visiting your blog (ofcourse, apart from coming up with some amazing content!)

I am not an expert in either blogging or SEO or HTML codes for that matter but thank God for internet and for giving me an astute mind to do effective research; I learnt a few tips here and there and here I am, all the wiser. Although, most of the success came from trial and error, I am not complaining. I will explain here now how to make a blog button (on wordpress.com) and put a grab box underneath it so fellow bloggers can copy/paste that code and put the button on their blogs. Genius idea really!

Step 1:

Choose your image and personalize it

Choose an image or create one from scratch, if you are a photoshop whiz. Free images can be found on dreamstime, yaymicro, freedigitalphotos and many more (google it!). Use an online designing editor (like pixlr, fotoflexer, photobucket or online image editor)  to personalize an image for yourself and size it appropriately. By appropriate, I mean, check what size would be compatible with your theme i.e. If you put your button on the side bar, whats the highest width you can go for. Usually, buttons are square shaped (125×125 or 150×150) but you can also opt for rectangular buttons (like mine!). Keep the colors, designs and fonts in contrast and collaboration with your theme. Don’t write too much on the button; it would be very small when you finally put it up on your blog so precision with a sense of aethetic is key.

Step 2:

Save, upload and activate widget

Once your image is done, save it with an appropriate file name so your image is trackable back to your blog. Then upload it on your wordpress.com:

Dashboard — Media — Add new

After saving, wordpress would give you a file URL. Save it somewhere for the code.

Activate your text widget now:

Dashboard — Appearance — Widgets

Drag the text/HTML widget to your side bar (whereever you want to place your button). Now you are ready to…

Step 3:

Code-fy

This is the fun-nest and as most would describe it as the gruelling part. Creating the perfect code! 

Creating the perfect code is kind of like.. well, I cannot for the life of me think of an analogy because it is like nothing else. One space or character in or out of place and what you will get on your blog would be just some strange HTML-look alike characters crawling (not literally, thank God) around.

code 1

[div align="center"][a href="Blog URL" target="_blank"][img title="Blog title" src="Image URL" alt="Blog title" /][/a][/div]

Blog URL should look like: http://yourblog.wordpress.com/

Image URL is the file url that you saved earlier in step 2. It should end with (.jpg)

Blog title is the title of your blog which would appear when you move your cursor on the button. Mine says ‘Huma Sattar’s Blog’

code 2

[pre style="background:#f0f0f0;border:solid 1px #cccccc;color:#777777;font-size:90%;height:45px;text-align:left;display:block;overflow:auto;white-space:pre-wrap;width:90%;margin:auto;padding:10px;"]<div align="center"><a href="Blog URL" title="Blog title"><img src="Image URL"style="border:none;" /></a></div>[/pre]

Copy/paste these codes on notepad and edit them (see ‘things to remember’ below) and then paste them in your widget.

Things to remember

1) Make sure you do not add any unnecessary space or character to the code. Copy it as it is. In code2, there are NO spaces.

2) Change all the [ to < and ] to >

The thing about wordpress (dotcom) is…

This code is for wordpress.com only. The thing I discovered about wordpress (dot com) is that when it comes to codes, it has a lot of shortcomings, for reasons which seem sensible enough but nevertheless, if you are trying to use a code with javascripts in it, or codes in iframe, textarea( you can find the whole list here), your code will be stripped off from your text/HTML widget or post. Pity!

So yes, if all goes well, your button with its grab box would look like this:

 

<div align="center"><a href="http://www.humasattars.wordpress.com" title="Huma Sattar's Blog"><img src="http://humasattars.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/funky-musing-huma-sattar-blog.jpg" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

If the above method does not work, you can contact me with your code, I’ll tweak it and send it back to you. An easier way to generate this code is also to see (mycoolrealm.com), linked below with a customized grab box. It is a cool realm indeed; he has really done a great job at this application while unknowingly helped me with my code above.

Related articles

• Grab my button, Code generator (Mycoolrealm.com)
• How to make a blog button and grab box, a tutorial (TheLitte Hen House.com)

 

Blogging about blogging: just-another-blog, is it?

I used to scoff at people who wrote blogs. It is true and I did not used to have any qualms about expressing my thoughts on the subject either but many things happened one after another which drove me towards sitting down, registering on wordpress.com and start writing.

Why though did I found blogging such a waste of space, quite literally?  

Pile of crap…

For one, I thought it was a terrible waste of time. I came across some of the most useless content on some blogs which the world wide web could easily do without. I mean, no, I do not want to know about the anatomy of your dog’s poo, I definitely don’t want to subscribe to it. The amount of time people spend on the internet writing crap (excuse the pun) and creating philosophies based on this crap is astonishing.

 …with Spam on top

Misleading headlines, misleading backlinks, misleading words and terminologies, highly search engine optimized websites leading to a link to yet another ‘buy-this-to-view-this’ page. Awfully disappointing.

Guilty as charged

Alright so I did think it was a bit self-indulgent of people to assume that other people would want to know about them or hear them write about their lives or know what is on their minds or know what they were upto, so presumptuous of them to think people would ‘follow’ their every move or ‘like’ their directionless ramblings or ‘comment’ on their long tirade of incomprehensible, indescribable (yet described), humorless muck we fondly call posts.

Needless to say, I looked down upon blogging but I discovered after some shall I say, research that blogging is not just about you. It can be about anything, absolutely anything. (The variety of things people can and do write about is staggering). It really does not have to be a personal blog or a meaningless rant on not-anything-in-particular; you have no boundaries as to what you can write and talk about and somewhere, somehow there are people who would follow, like and comment on your work because it would attract them, draw them towards things that interest you or even inspire them to the point of making them sit down and start one of their own blogs. Yes, I am a convert!

Not an end note

Over time, I discovered some blogs which had some amazing content. Only, they were not optimized enough to be featured on search engines or attract traffic; isn’t it sad? If you spend so much time writing, you ought to spend equally long (if not more) in attracting readers to read it. A blog is not a private diary after all; the infinitesimal space you are given in the cyber world may well be infinitesimal but you still ought to be seen, heard, known, and mapped upon (like that crap I spoke about earlier)!

Why are you invisible? Why are you just another blog? What can you do about it?

Find out soon.

 

 

Related articles

• Marketing know how: Blogging – why it matters to your company and how to do it (premierlinedirect.co.uk)
• What Does Blogging Actually Mean? [Marketing Cast] (hubspot.com)
• Are You Making the Most of Your Blog? (smallbusinessbranding.com)