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Gretchen Louise

mentoring digital wordsmiths

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Why I Love QuickBooks Online for Self-Employed Small Business Accounting

by Gretchen Louise

Why I Love QuickBooks Online for Self-Employed Small Business Accounting

My husband and I are the kind of self-employed entrepreneurs who have a lot of little income streams that, as it were, flow into larger tributaries of income. As much as this helps our savings account grow a bit bigger each year, it can make our bookkeeping a lot more difficult. (Ideally, to continue the metaphor, our savings account would…
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You Need A Budget

by Rachel Zupke · 20 Comments

The $70,000 reason we use YNAB.

Three months after receiving our undergraduate diplomas, we got married with not a care in the world. Except for that giant pile of student loan debt. And the impending cost of the master’s degree my husband had to take a week off from just so that we could go on our honeymoon. Did I mention this was the fall of…
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by Emily C. Gardner · 2 Comments

Why You Need a Budget (and why we use Mint)

Sitting in front of the roaring fire, a large picture window showcasing the snow covered trees outside, Tim and I huddled together on the couch. We had finished dinner on this weekend alone at a friend’s cabin and instead of cuddling up with good books or whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears, we were making a budget. Eight months…
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by Gretchen Louise · 5 Comments

4 apps and services to keep you sane and organized in the new year

I’ve given up on new year’s resolutions. Instead, I spend all year searching for the perfect apps to keep me more organized in the next year. Here are four perennial favorites that have literally saved my sanity this past year. These are the apps I put on my friends’ phones. These are the services I make my mom sign up for….
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by Gretchen Louise · 29 Comments

How to Create a Custom RSS Feed Summary with Featured Image in WordPress

In my search for the perfect solution to common RSS feed challenges, it was the beauty of Mad Mimi’s RSS emails formatted for “clean display” that finally gave me the inspiration. I’d spent hours trying to customize my MailChimp RSS campaigns to include a featured image along with the excerpt, but to no avail. (Then there is the constant frustration of extra-wide post images making the MailChimp email body drastically wider than the email header.) And even if I could get my emails to look how I wanted them to (just like Mad Mimi’s!), that still left the question of my RSS feed. That’s when I realized the solution was to start at the source and customize my WordPress RSS feed.

But customizing my WordPress RSS feed was a lot harder than it sounded. Until WordPress developer Robin Cornett took her plugin Send Images to RSS and made version 3.0 rich with all the features I’d hoped for an in RSS plugin–and more!

Here’s how to know Send Images to RSS is for you, and the details on how I set it up to create a beautiful custom RSS feed summary.

by Gretchen Louise · 5 Comments

WordPress RSS Feeds: Summary vs. Full Text or Custom?

I’ve been in a quandary about partial feeds versus full feeds ever since I knew what an RSS feed was. As a reader, I liked the ability to consume an entire post from within my feed reader or email inbox, especially when I didn’t have an internet connection at home. But as a blogger, I wanted to get readers to my site, where they could comment on posts, and of course, click on affiliate links and generate ad impressions.

But wait, what is the difference, you ask? WordPress offers two default options for displaying your RSS feed: summary or full text.

The truth is, I don’t like either option. But there’s an alternative.

by Gretchen Louise · 11 Comments

The Truth About Mompreneurs

There’s a myth about mompreneurs (mom entrepreneurs). We hear it in various forms, but it’s usually the well-meaning comment of a friend or a client: “I’m amazed by how you do all you do.” “I don’t know how you do it all.” Sometimes we try to explain the truth. Other times we just laugh it off. It is laughable, really….
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Want to convert more of your visitors to actual subscribers? Find out the top 10 places on your blog to place subscription forms--and the best methods and plugins to use!

by Gretchen Louise · 13 Comments

Top 10 Places On Your Blog to Convert Visitors to Subscribers

Converting readers to subscribers isn’t always easy. If content is king, then having a fabulous freebie to offer your email subscribers is surely the queen. But what you really need is a court jester or two dancing around on your blog, inviting your visitors to subscribe. Preferably, you’d name them Jester A and Jester B and do some A/B split testing…
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Want to encourage commenting on your blog posts? Check out these 10 super practical ways to streamline your comment section so it's easy to comment.

by Gretchen Louise · 24 Comments

10 Practical Ways to Encourage Comments and Conversation on Your WordPress Blog

It’s all fine and good to declare blog commenting alive and well. But how can we give the comment section on our own blog a shot in the arm? We’ve heard the usual suggestions time and time again: write good content, ask questions, be real, be controversial, be sure to reply to their comments, as well as comment around the web. But no…
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Although killing comments may be all the rage this season, here are 5 reasons you may want to not want to join the trend.

by Gretchen Louise · 55 Comments

5 Reasons to Keep Comments on Your Blog

There’s a tidal wave sweeping the blogosphere: bloggers everywhere are removing the comment feature from their blogs. They say that replying to the comments is no longer scale-able, it takes too much time to moderate spam, and the conversation is taking place elsewhere. Whatever the reasons stated, the fact is: comments are down, and many bloggers are willing to help them die….
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Wondering what to use for a related posts plugin now that #nRelate is gone? Here are reviews of the top alternatives!

by Gretchen Louise · 35 Comments

Top Ten Must-Have Features of a Related Posts WordPress Plugin

 by Gretchen Louise with Kelly Kathleen Many WordPress bloggers ran their plugin updates in early December to see a notice announcing the discontinuation of their favorite suite of related posts plugins: nRelate Related Content, nRelate Most Popular, and nRelate Flyout. We had until 5pm EST on December 31, 2014 before the nRelate plugins and service stopped working, according to the nRelate…
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by Gretchen Louise · 23 Comments

Understanding ShareASale Affiliate Links

When you first get started in affiliate marketing, you’re hit by a barrage of information that makes little or no sense, especially if you aren’t the blogger type. What are cookies? How do affiliate links work? Which link do I use? How can I include an image? What’s a disclosure? Well, I’ll start with a disclosure. This post on using…
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Hi, I’m Gretchen.

Gretchen I believe the tech side of your blog doesn’t have to keep you from writing. Read more...

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Gretchen excels in working with people who may not understand much about the web.

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