How to Blog

WHY Join the Blog?

There are many reasons to add your 2 cents to our blog. All members will benefit from each others knowledge and experiences. We’re going to try to keep each blog to a specific topic making them a more usable reference source. We’ve decided to make this reference source available to the public in a hope to drive more traffic to our website which in turn should increase our membership resulting in more money to add more services for our members.

But a more direct benefit to you is the exposure you get on a website which is quickly growing in importance in the eyes of the major search engines. Did you know Google counts all the links from other sites to yours as one of the many parameters it uses to decide where it places your site in a search result? Not only does it count the links it rates them based on the site which is linking to you. We feel a link to your site from IFWTWA will help your positioning in search results.

We encourage you to conclude each of your blog posts with your name and a link to your website. See below for how to do this.

HOW to Join a Blog

The blog is open to all IFWTWA members. To blog you must be logged in to this site. See the upper right corner of this window. If you see “Log In or Register” you need to mouse over the “Log In” and enter your IFWTWA username and password. If you see “Log Out Dashboard” you are logged in. Click the “Dashboard” link to go to the blog admin panel and click “Posts>Add New” and you’re ready to start.

Here are some suggestions about the format of your blog:

• TITLE
  • The title is very important online. Try to use words that will tell a viewer or search engine exactly what to expect from your post.

• Keep it on topic.
  • Each blog has a topic which is described on our index page. Please be sure to select the "Category" or categories which your post is best suited to. It will make it much easier for search engines to categorize and viewers to locate. You will find the "Categories" option low on the right hand side of the "Add/Edit New Post" page.

• Keep it short.
  • Each post should be to a specific thought. If you have a couple points to make post twice.

• Use 2 carriage returns between paragraphs.
  • Blogger will convert your your simple keyed "Return" into the proper HTML. 2 returns will give you a single space between paragraphs.

• Include your full name.
  • We encourage you to sign your post (not required). This exposure can only help, feel free to add the blog to your credentials.

• Include your website’s URL.
  • As mentioned above a link to your website will help in your search results placement. To add the link simply add the URL in this format "www.yourdomain.com" (do NOT include the quotes) and Google will create the link for you.

• Labels
  • To the right of the text area in which you enter your post you will see a small text box called "Post Tags" If your post contains key words or phrases that may be of particular interest, they should be added with commas to separate them. The blog administrator has the ability to edit these tags, they should be used carefully. But if your blog post is about getting free airline travel then "Airline Travel" would be a good label. If we get several posts from several authors regarding "Airline Travel" a viewer could click the label and see all those posts (with "Airline Travel" as a label) on a single page.

• Images
  • You may add images to your blog. If they are pertinent to the topic the images add great interest to a post. There is a tiny icon in the header just above the text area in which you enter your blog post. If you can please crop your image and save it with a max width of about 900 pixels your upload time will be greatly reduced. you will be given options for the size of the photo displayed in the post.

• Publish your post
  • To the right of the page is a "Publish" button. If you click that your post will be live on the website for all to see. If you’d like to proof it first (recommended) click the "Visibility: Edit" link above the "Publish" button and change the visibility from "Public" to "Private". Then, when you go to the blog to view your post, you will be able to see how it will appear (as long as you are logged in) but it will not be displayed to any other viewers. You may then edit it and switch the visibility back to public when you have it the way you like it.

• Funny symbols in your post?
  • If you used a word processing program such as "Word" and then copied and pasted your text into the post it may have some strange characters in place of quotation marks and apostrophes. Word processors often automatically use the special fancy quotes and apostrophes, there is an option somewhere in your software to shut this off. But you may also delete and rekeypad the marks while in your web browser. A web browser will use the proper marks.