bizSugar blog and press center

If you use Blogger (Blogspot) to host your blog along with our voting button, you may have noticed an irritating little quirk: the total number of votes show up correctly on individual post pages, but not on the front page. Even worse, if a reader tries to submit a post from the front page, they end up submitting your entire front page.

But fear not, we have an answer.

The following will add the bizSugar voting button automatically to each post.

1. First, your blog should be set to save Post Pages, so that each post will have a unique URL. To verify or enable it, login to your Blogger Dashboard. Under Settings-> Archiving, set the “Enable Post Pages?” to “Yes” and save the settings.

2. While still in the Dashboard, click on the Layout tab and then the Edit HTML option. This should take you to your template code.

3. Click on “Expand Widget Templates.” This is located in upper right area near your template code.

4. Copy your entire template code and paste into a text editor.  

5. Now, let’s say you already have other voting buttons and want to add bizSugar’s to the list. Find the location where you want to add the code and insert the following:

<!-- bizSugar button -->   
<script type='text/javascript'>submit_url=&quot;<data:post.url/>&quot;;</script>
<script src='http://www.bizsugar.com/evb/button.php' type='text/javascript'/>

Now paste the code back into your template page and your finished!

6. But what if you want to create a custom location for your bizSugar button? We can do that too. First, in your template code, find the following snippet of code.

<p><data:post.body/></p>

This is the body of each blog post. If you want to put your button at the top of your post, you add the button code above it. If you want the button below you post, you add the code below it. For example…

7. Let’s say you want to add the bizSugar button to the top right of each blog post (like we have in this blog). You would add the following code right above the  <p><data:post.body/></p> snippet of code:

<!-- bizSugar button -->   
<div style='float:right; margin-left:10px;'>
<script type='text/javascript'>submit_url=&quot;<data:post.url/>&quot;;</script>
<script src='http://www.bizsugar.com/evb/button.php' type='text/javascript'/>
</div>

Now just paste the entire code back into your template page and you’re finished!

(By the way, notice the style tags ‘float:right; margin-left:10px;’ in the code above? Feel free to tweak those until you get just the right position for your button.)

Things can get pretty hectic at any start-up, so I always appreciate it when I have a good week. Last week went really well for bizSugar, so I thought I’d share a little. I had two interviews and we launched the first issue of Top 10 This Week.

First, Lisa Alexander interviewed me for WAHNewsToday. WAHN is a new website that provides some great advice for home-based business owners and for people who sell for companies that use a multi-level marketing strategy. Lisa is the founder of WAHN and I know she must be working like crazy because I’ve seen a lot of growth in the site over the last two weeks. It’s got a good niche and I expect it will do well.

Next, Julie Power interviewed me for the Internet Marketing Report Online. IMR Online is the blog that complements the Internet Marketing Report, a print newsletter that covers some of the best ideas for online marketing. Julie writes both publications with a style that’s entertaining and easy to understand. You don’t need to be an internet marketing pro to implement her ideas and suggestions. I was already a fan of the print newsletter, so I’m definitely adding Julie’s blog to my reading list.

Finally, we launched the first issue of our e-newsletter, bizSugar’s Top 10 This Week. The publication, e-mailed to our members every Friday, lists the most-voted-for articles over the last seven days. You may think that it’s rather un-Web 2.0ish to offer an e-newsletter, but we realize that some bizSugar members are more active with the website than others; so it’s our hope that the e-newsletter will encourage less active members to visit and contribute to the site while they’re reviewing and voting for the top 10 stories.

Not a bizSugar member yet? Click here to sign up and receive the newsletter.

Yes, it was a great week. Oh, I suppose I could mention how a small modification to our code accidently messed up our e-mail list and simultaneously removed everyone’s avatar for a full day. But no, I won’t mention that - not at all. It was a great week.

For those of you who use WordPress for your blog (and many of you do), I’m happy to announce that we now have a bizSugar social voting button plugin created especially for WordPress.

To download it, locate the “bizSugar vote plugin” on our bizSugar tools page. As of this post, the plugin has not been tested with the new WordPress 2.5, but should work fine with other WordPress 2.x versions.

This is a nice little plugin that allows you to either automatically add a bizSugar vote button to all of your posts or manually add a button to only certain posts. With a little tweaking, you can fine tune the button’s position or modify which style of button you want to use. I tried to make the instructions as simple and thorough as possible, but if you have any questions, please let me know.

A big thanks to Michelle MacPhearson, as this plugin was adapted from her SphinnIt button.

We’ll be offering more social button options in the future, so stay tuned!

Well, let me clarify, my first interview regarding bizSugar. My first interview ever was a television interview regarding a book I helped write when I was the publisher of a small business magazine. The entire experience could best be described as a nightmare. The local news station asked me to write down the questions the interviewer should ask. Simple enough, except that I was never asked any of those questions. Instead, I was asked questions that were best suited for a fictional novel rather than a how-to business book. I got flustered and ended up sounding like a blathering idiot. 

That’s when I learned my first PR lesson: regardless of what you’re asked, prepare two or three sound-bites and make sure you squeeze them in to your answers.

This time it was a much easier and more enjoyable experience. Corey Kossack, President of the Club E Network, sent me the questions by email. You’d think it would be easy to answer questions when they’re emailed to you but, truth is, I sent him two rounds of corrections of my own answers! I thank Corey for his patience.

You can read the interview here: New social news site for business owners: an interview with the founder of bizSugar

If you aren’t already familiar with the Club E Network, check it out. It’s a social network for entrepreneurs that, in addition to its Facebook-type features, offers insightful videos and local events in many major cities. The site is still pretty new, but I expect it to grow into a powerful resource for entrepreneurs. Michael Gerber, author of the business classic, “The E-Myth,” is chairman and Ingrid Vanderveldt of CNBC’s “American Made” is the CEO, so it’s got some well-known talent behind it.

The “Top this Week” sidebar feature has been modified to show the top voted articles within the last 7 days.

Before the change, the feature showcased the top voted articles Sunday through Saturday. While that’s a more accurate description of the term “Top this Week,” we thought it was rather unfair because an article submitted on a Friday or Saturday would probably never get a chance to be in a top position since the week starts over on Sunday.