Blog Makeover!

Maybe you've noticed things are looking a little different around here?  No?  Well then you must be new!

Free Stuff From Plaid and some introspection

When I started out blogging a year ago, I wasn't really sure of my purpose.  Why blog?  I already had a crafty facebook page to show off my creations, but I also wanted to teach and inspire.  I wanted to share and connect with other artsy-fartsy folks like myself.  Was that all I wanted?  I'm sure deep down I wanted to be recognized as a crafter/artist.  I'm sure I fantasized about how Martha Stewart was going to knock on my door offering to co-author a craft book with me.  But after having one year of blogging under my belt, I've learned some hard truths and faced some tough realities.  Well, maybe not so hard and tough, but truths and realities all the same.  :)

I grew up in tiny town where I always stood out as artistic.  I was asked to paint signs for local businesses, I won ribbons for my artwork, and it was no surprise when I said I was going to art school.  I stood out a bit as an artist in college, which only spurred me to believe that I was pretty hot shit in the art department.  While I never was able to make a career out of making fine art, I contented myself with creative jobs in catering and youth art programs.  I got married, had my kids, bought my house, and then what?  I started sewing/selling purses via a facebook page which eventually took me to blogging.

What are the hard truths I was writing about earlier?  The truth is I'm not really THAT cool.  The truth is there are TONS of cooler folks out there than me.  I'm not going to rock the craft world and be the next Martha.  I'm not going to get tons of money and renown for writing about zippered pouches and hosting online sewing challenges.  I could try, but effort I'd have to put forth to market myself and my creations would have to be monumental.  An effort of that magnitude would make me and my family miserable.

Because at the end of the day, I'm not an artist.  

I'm a wife.  

I'm a mom.  

Unless you're married to a famous actor, political figure or a felon, or given birth to one, you'll never get famous for being a great wife and mom.  I'm OK with that.

For me, blogging has presented some unexpected obstacles as well as rewards.

The obstacles being:

1. HTML.  Thank goodness it's mostly cut and paste.  
2. Fragile ego.  I geek out on my stats daily.  My head inflates when the traffic increases.  But not all my posts become as popular as I thought they would.  I really worked hard on all my Tudor rose posts, but they never really caught on.  On the other hand, my No Dye Tie Dye post, took off like wild fire.  Go figure.
3. Time.  Here I am sitting at the computer for 1.5 hours.  I originally just wanted to share what Plaid sent me in the mail and now I've completely changed directions and am off on a totally new tangent.  I've rewritten the first three paragraphs several times and feel like I'm wasting my afternoon sitting at the computer when I could be sewing.  Time.  There is never enough to say all I want to say.
4. Ideas.  Every time I come up with what I feel is a radical and useful and wonderful new idea, I google it.  Chances are someone else has already blogged about it.  It's very difficult to come up with something original and new.

The rewards being:

1. Meeting people like me.  Not everyone is into making yarn out of t-shirts or Mod Podging old purses.  I treasure my blogging friends.  You rock!  You make me feel like I'm not alone, and you've taught me so much!!!
2. Having an outlet.  My husband and friends, bless their hearts, do not always want to hear about the inner workings of my sewing machine nor can they relate to the supreme frustration felt when I cut my fabric wrong.  
3. To inspire others and be inspired in return.  Sometimes you just need a jump-start to get your creative juices flowing.  Crafty blogs are great for finding inspiration.
4. A tiny trickle of money.  For my entire first year of blogging I made just under $200 for my ads and some paid posts.  That's after 140ish posts and a bazillion hours on the 'puter. Nothing to write home about, but better than a stick in the eye.  
5. Free stuff!!!  As you can see from the photo in this post, Plaid sends me free stuff from time to time.  I've amassed quite a collection of Mod Podge and such.  I've been approached by numerous companies and corporations to get free swag or articles in magazines, but Plaid is the only one who has really pulled through for me.  I love the products and the people are great. 

So what was my point?  I've written about identifying myself as a wife and mom, rather than an artist.  That is a hard truth that I have faced and accepted and embraced and am proud of.  I've written about the obstacles and rewards of me blogging.  Did I have a point?  LOL, not really.  But I do hope to learn some things from all of you.

What do you identify yourself as?  Has it changed over the years?

What are your biggest rewards and obstacles when it comes to blogging?

Thanks so much for your comments.

Happy crafting and big hugs from Montana,

a.k.a. My Love or Mama

Ways to increase your blog traffic

Hello and welcome to my little blog!  I've been publishing Ricochet and Away for one year now.  Happy bloggerversary to me!!!  Ricochet and Away hasn't become an overnight sensation or a household name over the last year.  However, I am now finally enjoying a steady, respectable amount of traffic that I am super proud of.  I have learned, mainly through trial and error, what works best for me and my abilities.  Today I'm going to share with you a few guidelines that I follow to make my blog feature-friendly and pin-able.

First, I'd like to go over some of my stats about where I'm at right now traffic-wise.  If you aren't already paying attention, you should be checking out your blog stats regularly.  Here's how I keep track of my referral traffic:

• If you have a blogspot blog, this chart will look familiar.  Here are my top 10 referring sites of all time (basically my entire first year of blogging) as of July 9, 2012:

• And here is all the above data put into a nifty pie chart:

[source]

Just in case you're wondering, referral traffic refers to other sites that have links 

to your blog and how many pageviews you get as a result of those links.  

• I've been using Google Analytics since Novemeber 2011 and their top 10 referral sites differ only slightly:

There are some discrepancies between the two charts, especially in the numbers concerning google.  Any ideas why?  What I can confidently glean from all this data is that my top 3 referral sites are:

1. Craftgawker
2. CraftGossip
3. Pinterest 

Why is it good to be square?

Craftgawker.com is a tough nut to crack.  I have torn out my hair over that stinkin' site and I know I'm not alone.  My current stats with Craftgawker are 11 accepted and 40 declined submissions.  The photo you submit must be very good and have specific dimensions.  This is reason #1 why I always try to have one good square photo in every one of my instructional posts.

CraftGossip.com is probably my all time fave craft site.  They have a little something for every type of crafter.  They frequently feature small-time bloggers like myself, and they are so nice!  Please take a minute and scroll down a few pages of CraftGossip.com.  Take special notice of the images and photos.  The photos that were rectangular and wide end up looking pretty tiny on the narrow format.  This is reason #2 why I strive to have nice square-shaped photos--especially titles--in all my new posts.

My pinterest.com referrals are growing at a very fast rate, and I expect them to overtake my Craftgawker and CraftGossip referrals eventually.  If you're familiar with the site, you know how important a pin's image and description are in its chances of being re-pinned.  You also know that wide rectangle shaped images end up being pretty small once they're pinned.  In response to those facts, I've been trying to make post title graphics that are both pin-worthy and re-pin-worthy.  This is reason #3 why I'm loving the square format for my post images and graphics.

Link parties are great ways to meet other bloggers and add a few new followers to your blog.  I have been getting a respectable amount of traffic from Threading My Way's ongoing link parties.  I suggest you give them a try because there are no time limits or specific days in which to participate.  When I join a link party, I like it when I don't need to take the extra time to crop an image to go with my link.    This is reason #4 why having a square photo in all my crafty posts just makes life easier for me.

So, now do you know why it's good to be square?  Could you share some of your blogging tips?

Happy crafting and big hugs from Montana,

Free blog buttons, well nearly free anyway...

My new favicon

Look at all the stuff I made on picnik.com!  I'll be sad when it's gone on April 19th.  Until then I'll be utilizing the heck out of it!  Normally I am a green sort of person.  If there is any choice of color I invariably choose green.  But this is a new year and it's time for me try new things.  So here I am trying red on for size!  I'm not sure how it fits, but it's new and kinda "pow!", right?

I've been wanting to make a cooler menu bar as well as those little social media buttons (facebook, twitter, etc.) for a long time.  I ended up stringing them all together in row.  I haven't seen that before, but I like the look.  It uses less vertical space as well.  Now that I have it all up and working I see I made a mistake.  The "t" icon I used to connect to my twitter is not the right font.  It looks like the tumbler "t" doesn't it?  I will eventually change it to the twitter bird icon.  For now though, I'm content to leave it be.

Besides the "red", I switched around and added many more things to this blog. I added a "challenge" button to my menu bar.  My challenge page is kinda lame at the moment, but I plan to beef it up a bit soon.  I changed the layout to include a column on each side.  That way I could keep all my ads together near the top on one side and all my favorite widgets are not shoved down towards the bottom.  Maybe you noticed the floating social media button on my left side bar?  I saw that on Donatella's blog, Inspiration & Realisation, and stole it! It's another way to conserve vertical space.  I got rid of all my gadgets at the bottom of my blog.  You never noticed they're missing?  Well, that just proves that they were superfluous.

I enjoy playing with graphics and will most likely change from this red before the year is up.  I hope to one day be proficient enough in both graphics and HTML to design and sell buttons and headers for other bloggers.  That would be fun, I think.  Until that happens, I would appreciate some practice.  So I would like to put out the following offer:

I'll make you a free blog button in exchange for an honest assessment I can use as a testimonial in the future.  

So, think about it and let me know if you're interested.

If you're reading this before March 31, 2012, go HERE and sign up! 

Happy Crafting and big hugs from Montana,

My favorite brand name is "clearance".  Here are some clearance boots you might be interested in:

Disabling the "right-click"

[source]

I am so sorry to do this to you all, but yet again I have no crafty post for you.  Instead I have come to complain a bit and ask for advice.  I enjoy blogging nearly as much as I love crafting.  If you look at my tutorial page, you'll see that I love to share tips and strategies with you all.  If you look at my sidebar, you'll see how proud I am of all the lovely people who have featured my work.  It is so rewarding to look at my blog's stats and see traffic coming from those sites that featured my work.

Today I noticed a tiny bit of traffic coming from an unknown source.  When I followed the link I found THIS.  (please take a minute to check it out, though I loath to give them more traffic.)  They took my entire post, omitted the text and re-posted it with a link back to the original post.  They did include the link back, but why would anyone need to follow it since all the photos had the steps written on them.  I did not appreciate that.  Why not just take a single photo and place a link under it?  I think it is rude.  I've seen a similar thing happen with a friend's blog and it's just infuriating.

In response, I've considered disabling the right-click function on my blog.  That would prevent anyone from right-clicking on my photos and reusing them on their sites.  I found an easy way to this HERE.  Just a simple code to embed in a gadget.  Would this end the problem?  Would it deter more noble-minded sites from featuring my posts?  I'd appreciate your thoughts on this.

Pinterest interest

Here's the latest thing I've been geeking out on: Pinterest pins that came from Ricochet and Away!  Other people actually pinning things that came from my blog!  Crazy, right?  You know, you probably have stuff pinned from your blog.

Do you know how to locate all the pins from your blog?

Well in case you didn't, here's the skinny.  You simply type this URL into your browser:

pinterest.com/source/YOUR BLOGS'S URL/

For example, mine is:

http://pinterest.com/source/ricochetandaway.blogspot.com/

And this is what I see when I get there:

I love to scroll through and see the descriptions people put on the pins.  Some of my favorites:

• handmade secksi clutch (lol, secksi!)
• Because I need more purses..... (awww, after my own heart!)
• Don't love this particular purse, but love the idea of modge podging fabric to an existing purse! (lol, 1 out of 2 ain't bad)
• Like the idea. Don't like the fabric in the tutorial. (different strokes...)
• This lady shows several ways to use blue tape as a sewing tool  (I'm "this lady"!!!!)
• I am officially gonna start going to thrift stores~!  (Go girl!)
• I don't even sew and this quilt looks easy enough for me to make!  (yes!)
• Too easy not to try once.  (Exactly.)

I appreciate my fans so much, and it feels great to know that I can inspire others.  Thank you to all you pinners and re-pinners out there.  I'd love to follow your boards so please leave a comment with your pinterest link.


I would really appreciate it if you would check out the Naughty Notions Challenge Finale and Voting page:



Anyone can vote once per day throughout February.  Please visit the links to each of the participants and "pin" the ones you like!  

Happy crafting and big hugs from Montana,

Craftgawker, oh how I loath thee!

  

vs.

RicochetandAway!

Have you heard about Craftgawker?  You can submit a photo, and if it's approved, your photo will show up on the site and link back to a corresponding blog post.  I thought it would be an easy way to get the word out about Ricochet and Away.  Well, I was wrong about the easy part.  After 30+  attempts, I have managed to get 3 photos accepted.  Not great odds.  I know.

I have developed a serious love/hate relationship with Craftgawker, which in turn has created a serious love/hate relationship with both my camera and my digital photo editing program.  I'm a wreck.  Well, maybe not a wreck, but I'm definitely spending an inordinate time with this whole Craftgawker thing.  To make matters worse, now I'm even posting about Craftgawker!!!

Like I said, I was able to get 3 photos accepted onto the site:

Craftgawker asks that you submit high quality digital photos that are 250 X 250 pixels in size.  If your photo is deemed unworthy, Craftgawker sends you an email telling the reason(s) why the photo didn't make the cut.  That's a infuriating nice feature.  I often try to fix the problems and re-submit.   More often than not, that doesn't work.

One time I was certain there was absolutely nothing wrong with the photo I submitted.  So I simply waited 8 hours and resubmitted the exact same photo, thinking that the next photo-judger on shift would not be so aesthetically-challenged.  That brilliant plan didn't work in my favor.  *sigh*

The main reasons they gave for my photos not being up to par are as follows:

• Harsh lighting and/or overexposed
• Lighting issues - dull/unsharp
• composition - too tight and cluttered
• grainy image - may be overly sharped in photoshop
• Low lighting and/or underexposed
• Lighting/exposure issues
• lighting/shadow issues

You see the trend?  Yep, I got a lot of lighting and exposure issues.  

Here's a big graveyard of photos that didn't make the Craftgawker cut:

And in no particular  order, here are the rejects>>

Rather than continue with the bitching and complaining, I'd like to finish this post with some good information and positive inspiration.  No one likes a whiner, right?  Here are some of things I've learned.  I hope you'll find some of this helpful.

1. No amount of digital photo editing will fix a photo that was poorly shot in the first place.  I can fiddle with exposure and contrast and sharpness all I want, but I just produce photos that look over-edited.
2. My best photos were taken outdoors on overcast days.  Natural light is best and the flash is not my friend.
3. My original photos need to be smaller to begin with.  I.e. shrinking a 3888x2592 pixel photo down to a 250x250 pixel photo will not produce as good of results as shrinking a 1936x1288 pixel photo down to 250x250 pixels.  This is where all my dull/not-sharp/unfocused issues sprang from.
4. Some photos won't crop down to perfect squares.  A good example are the photos I took of my daughter's pink quilt.  My best photos from that shoot didn't look right when I cropped them down into squares.  I wasn't taking those photos with appeasing Craftgawker in mind.  The results were none of photos could be cropped to show the whole quilt and Craftgawker labeled my submissions as being too tightly composed.
5. Include a nice square photo in every blog post.  Craftgawker requires the photo you submit to be found in the corresponding blog post or it is automatically denied.  Plus, it's nice to have a good square-shaped photo for linky parties as well.  Two birds.  One stone.  
6. The results are worth the effort.  For my little blog, I usually get +/- 200 daily pageviews.  When I have a photo up on Craftgawker, I jump up to over 1000 daily pageviews for several days.  The numbers taper down slowly as my photo moves further back in the que, but they never go away completely.  

Thanks for taking the time to read through this post!  Please let me know if you've had similar frustrations with Craftgawker, as I'd love to have someone to commiserate with!  I'm also interested in any good photography tips you may have or good links you've ran across.

Happy crafting and bug hugs from Montana,

p.s.  Don't forget to vote for your favorite tote from the Solids-Only Tote Challenge.  There are 18 wonderful totes to choose from made by creative bloggers from all over the world.  Anyone can vote once a day until December 31st.  You can find the poll HERE.