5 Ways Your Blog’s Design Is Making You Susceptible To A Hacker

Guest Post - Our host is Stephan Jukic, Stephan lists how to to keep your blog safe from hackers.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Running a blog is often a work of love that takes a lot of work and creates something of enormous personal or even business value. This applies especially if you’re blog is old and loaded with thousands of posts that garner you thousands of visitors. Losing all this to hackers and intrusion programs over the course of a single day would be a serious disaster.

While no site or blog can be made completely and totally hack proof, you can limit the possibility for total damage by following the following crucial steps, and making sure that you do one other vital thing: Back up, back up and back up again! Do it regularly, never forget to do it.

Google+ Authorship: Where You Become The Link

Guest Post - Our host is Shannon Williams, Shannon is looking at how and why you should use Google+ authorship on your blog.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

You may have noticed the last time that you searched any newsworthy topic on Google—whether it be a recap of the Academy Awards or new developments on the latest iProduct—that some of the search results have a small picture of a smiling individual beside them.



That picture is likely the result of what is known as Author Rank. Sites with regularly updated content can add a specialized link onto each author’s name (a link that connects with the individual’s Google+ account), so Google crawlers recognize that this person wrote the content for the page. The more that author publishes, the higher their Author Rank.

Comparisons Of Wordpress Theme Customization Methods

Guest Post - Our host is Brian L, Brian is looking at the best ways to customize your WordPress theme for a unique look.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Wordpress has become such a popular CMS that it's common to see "cookie cutter" websites that use the same theme. Fortunately, it's possible to dramatically alter the appearance of your Wordpress site through various customization methods.

The most common methods of customization include editing a Wordpress theme's code, creating a child theme, using a theme mask and paying a custom designer. In this article we'll go through these options in more detail, along with the pros and cons of each.

Directly Editing a Theme's Code

How to Write Breathtaking Blog Posts with your Readers in Mind

Guest Post - Our host is Emmanuel Obarhua, who takes an in-dept look into article writing.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

The only way you can make your articles unique and mind boggling is to make a difference in how you write; your writing is the most essential part of blogging. It propounds how good you are, it brings paid writing opportunities, it reputes your blog and a million more... I guess you must have heard the blogosphere’s number 1 adage; “Content is king”. This cannot be attained by the length of an article, instead it either spoil the whole thing or delay the way you update your blog as you only want to write lengthy posts.

Load Posts With Infinite Scroll On Blogger Blogs

In this tutorial we have a new way for posts to be viewed on your blogs homepage, namely infinite scroll.Infinite scroll has been a popular trend in web design for some time and now you can have it on your blogger blogs.On Blogger we have on the home page by default 'Previous' and 'Next' buttons to load a new page of posts.Now this tutorial takes another step with adding Infinite Scroll to Blogger blogs.

This is user friendly and will cut down on load time.So I have the demo and a quick add button for you to add it to your blog in seconds.

Stuck on a Blog Topic ? Use These Exercises to Get the Ideas Flowing

Guest Post - Our host is Cara Aley, Cara has some fresh new ideas on getting those creative juices flowing on your blog.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Writing can be a fabulous avocation, but all writers at times face the inevitable writer’s block. It can be extremely frustrating to feel as though you are fresh out of ideas, especially as a blog writer who is under pressure on a daily basis to write original content.

Here we provide some ideas in for how to get those ideas flowing when you simply feel fresh out.

5 Creative Ways To Get To Know Your Blogging Audience In Real Life

Guest Post - Our host is Garrett Moon, who has some interesting views on how you can profile your audience.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Many of us think that we know who we are writing to, but do we really? The problem with identifying and understanding our blog audience is that we resort to dated techniques that don't help us understand who they really are. Sure, our audience might be made up of 25-35 year old females, but who is that, anyway? What keeps them up at night? What makes them happy? How can we, as bloggers, motive them to read and share what we have to say?

What Really Matters

For starters, you need to understand what matters to them. I have been an advocate for completing basic audience profiles. The goal of these profiles is to get a sense of how your audience thinks, rather than just who your audience is. In these profiles, you will identify a few key things:

• What is their name?
• What do they do?
• What keeps them up at night? (i.e. What are they worried about?)
• What motivates them to read your stuff?
• What do they need most from you? How can you help them?

The goal is to complete several profiles and then use them as you write new posts. As you write, you should be talking directly to one of your audience members. You should have them specifically in mind. When we write TO someone rather than simple FOR someone we can do a much better job of relating to them on a human level. But, sometimes even this exercise isn't enough.

Complete Guide To The New Google+ Comments On Blogger And WordPress

It's been a week since Google launched the new Google Plus commenting system for blogger.In this post we will look at how to use Google+ Comments on Wordpress, Bloggger and the custom blogger templates.

With Google Plus trying to compete in the social network scene with Facebook it's no surprise like Facebook they launched their own comment system.The question for us bloggers and publishers will be "Should We Use Google Plus Comments ?".

The thing that first struck me was the fact once implemented only people with Google plus accounts would be able to comment on your blog.With the current blogger treaded comments or indeed Discus and Intense debate readers had a number of options as to how they wanted to comment.I think the real let down with Google+ comments is the lack of an option for people that don't have a G+ account to comment either as anonymous or with name and email.

So the other comment systems defiantly have the advantage of choice but that is just one aspect.Google plus comments do look great, are lightweight and Google+ is a fast growing network.

If you think Google+ comments is for you below we have information on how to add them to Blogger and Wordpress.

77 Billion Wordpress Spam Comments To Date ! Are You Protected?

Guest Post - Our host is Jason Roiz, Jason is looking at keeping spam comments to a minimum on Wordpress.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

77,430,232,104- That’s the number of spam comments prevented by Akismet to date. Unbelievable but true! Are you wondering how many of these were directed towards your blog? If yes, then it’s time to quit thinking and start acting!

Spam commenting is at an upsurge. At the time of writing, 52,453,722 spam comments had already been detected for the day! It is the easiest way for attackers to compromise with the security of your Wordpress blog. So, what do you do? Akismet will obviously do its job, but as a blogger how will you decipher between ‘ham’ and ‘spam’? Let us help you. Enlisted below are some ways to give spammers the boot.

7 Reasons Why Acting Goofy On Your Blog Helps Business

Guest Post - Our host is Brianne Walter, here Brianne explains why you don't have to be serious on your blog at all times.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Bloggers, like any other business owner in the world, take their blogs very seriously. Every bit of information they put on there and every post is somber and serious and high on information. Not many would ever want to tamper with the serious image that they have created in front of their audiences. However, as many successful bloggers know, acting goofy on your blog could be a great alternative to always being super serious. Here are a few reasons why you should consider bringing out your goofy side every once in a while on your blog.

1. It helps you and your content team relax