J'z Place

I think that Blog Challenges have become addictive to me. I will be joining The Ultimate Blog Challenge and I want you to join with me. The first one I did was hosted by Connie Ragen Green and I didn't complete it. So when I heard about the Blog Challenge hosted by Jeanette Cates. I knew I was going to complete this one. Even if I had to get up a little earlier before my daughter so that I could prove to myself that I could actually complete it. I must say that you have to be pretty disciplined, but the habit that you gain is priceless. See since the last blog challenge I have been posting on a regular basis. I am not posting everyday, but every other day seems to work best for me.

The Ultimate Blog Challenge is hosted by Michelle Shaeffer and Michele Scism. I have joined these two wonderful women on the previous two blog challenges I did. They have collaborated and have given us, bloggers another awesome opportunity to challenge ourselves, network and make some really good friends.

So if you are ready to make the commitment – then Join Me and the rest of us at The Ultimate Blog Challenge

I came across a great little plugin that I want to share with you today! It's called WP Responder and it's an email newsletter and follow up autoresponder plugin for WordPress. If you are looking to build your list this is an inexpensive way to start. Here are the features that WP Responder offers

• Create Unlimited Newsletters
• Gather Unlimited Subscribers for each Newsletter
• Create Unlimited Follow Up Autoresponders
• Send Unlimited Follow Up Email messages
• Create and Schedule email broadcasts
• Send HTML e-mail broadcasts with customized HTML templates
• Provide e-mail subscription to new posts on your blog
• Provide e-mail subscription to blog categories
• Use blog posts as follow-up e-mail through the Post Series feature.
• Send only excepts to your blog subscribers
• Import/Export subscribers from Feedburner/Aweber
• Find, edit, and manage the subscribers of your blog easily

I will be trying this plugin on one of my other sites to see how it works and if I will be using it or not. Stay tuned for my personal review of this WordPress plugin.

I never could have imagined that a blog post from @DeniseWakeman at Build A Better Blog would have started such an Awesome thing. Here is Denise's blog post that started it all 5 Ways A Blogging Buddy Can Help You Blog More Consistently. See I had just started the 30 Day Blog Challenge hosted by Jeanette Cates and Connie Ragen Green when I came across Denise's blog post about having a blog buddy. This actually made since to me and I was interested immediately. I sent emails to a couple of people who had left comments on the post. I had a couple of responses, but I knew that Eydie of Eydie's Office and I clicked. She has really motivated me to become a better business person. Eydie who is located in California was also contacted by Erno of ErnoHannink.com who is from the Netherlands and Kay Newton of KayNewtonCoachng.com who is from Spain. So we all connected this past Wednesday on Skype. We discussed our blogging goals and how we can keep each other motivated to blog. I learned from the 30 Day Blog Challenge that having accountability and support can help you accomplish things that normally you would put on the back burner. So stay tuned to see what our Blogging Buddy Group is up to.

Check Out My Blogging Buddies:

Eydie – Her site: Eydiesoffice.com connect with her on Facebook.

Kay – Her site: KayNewtonCoaching.com connect with her on Facebook.

Erno – His site: ErnoHannink.com connect with him on Facebook.

So today I came across a site called LinkyTools. This site allows you to add a list of links provided by your readers and also allows your readers to add the same list to their sites. This is a great way to keep up with certain blogs you want to follow and build relationships through link building. Feel free to add you and your site to my list.

Here is My Blog Buddies Page

As most of you know that I have been doing the 30 Day Blog Challenge Hosted By Jeanette Cates. Since I have been posting on a daily basis I had a routine down. I would post on my blog and then post on Twitter my blog post and link to @jeanettecates. And I am so upset to see that my scheduled posts have not been going out like I scheduled.

So this got me to thinking and I realized that I had not set up my blog to post to Twitter automatically. At least this would have gotten each of my posts this past week out to all of my followers. Well I did it now. So hopefully, this won't happend again. Gosh this really frustrated me!

So I suggest setting your blog up to post automatically to your Twitter account using TwitterFeed to do this wonderful task. What TwitterFeed does is, it updates both Twitter and Facebook with your blog posts feed. I chose this option because it was really simple to setup and it has tracking to see whats happening with the traffic for each blog post.

Setup TwitterFeed Here

An alternative to my above suggestion is to use the Twitter Tools Plug-in that is found on the WordPress.org website. The TwitterTools Plug-in has a lot of great features and provide complete integration between your WordPress Blog and your Twitter Account.

Download The Twitter Tools Plug-in Here