We’ve got a Halloween-specific blog hop for pet lovers here, a place to share all things Halloween! Look below for links throughout the blogosphere for everything from costume reviews to treat recipes to Halloween giveaways. And if you have a blog (whether it’s a pet blog or not), please be sure to join in the fun and add your links, too!

How to Join the Blog Hop

You can enter as many posts as you like to share your Halloween-related giveaways, reviews, recipes, tips, tricks, treats, and more!

Add your link specifically to your Halloween post (not your home page), and click “click here to enter.” You’ll be able to add a photo from your post, too.

Next, please link back to this post and, if you’d like to hop along, grab the linky code by clicking “get the code here” at the bottom of the linky.

Then hop along and enjoy some other Halloween pet posts from across the blogosphere…it’s a treat!

Through the years, we’ve launched over a dozen new sites and I’ve always done the banner design myself. Some of them have been a work in progress; others I’ve been pleased with and have maintained for many years.

For this banner, though, I wanted an entirely different look. I’ve been following many mom blogs the past year and just finished reading two books about mom blogging (more on those in an upcoming review). We want this new site to appeal, not just to dedicated pet lovers like ourselves, but to families with children who learn that their child is allergic to pet dander. We want the site to show readers that, in many, many cases, people with allergies can live happy and healthy lives in a pet household.

In following all these mom blogs, I’ve seen a common thread through many with illustrations in the header. To more closely align the site with those sites, I decided I’d like an illustration header.

The problem: those illustrations are vector files that are edited with Adobe Illustrator…and we don’t have Adobe Illustrator.

The solution: A Mommy’s Blog Design Studio.

I learned about A Mommy’s Blog Design Studio through Carrie over at All Things Dog Blog. I contacted them and then set about deciding what I’d like for the design.

First, I searched iStockPhoto.com for illustrations of a woman and a pet (to make sure your search brings up illustrations and not photos, just include the word “illustration” in the search.) I have an account with iStockPhoto but another good resource is bigstockphoto.com.

The result was pages of great illustrations which I finally narrowed down to one of a woman sitting beside a plant and a cat and purchased that file. That was perfect since cat allergies are widespread…but I also wanted to include a dog in the illustration. I found a dog in a similar style that was a separate file and purchased that file, too.

Next, I used the watermarked photos on istockphoto (which are much smaller than the big vector files) and I clipped the dog out of the file and made a very rough mockup of how I’d like the illustration to look:

Next, I made a mockup of the entire banner: You don’t have to do all this for a designer; they’ll be happy to select illustrations based on your concept, but it’s fun and it helps to you to narrow your ideas. I liked the colors in the illustration but wanted to give the woman in the illustration blonde hair and blue eyes to sort of match mine.

I also wanted to work in the color purple. Using Adobe Photoshop, I sampled the pink color in the illustration and, using the color wheel, found a comparable shade of purple. I gave A Mommy’s Blog Design Studio the number of the purple color I was interested in using.

Next, I looked through my fonts…but I didn’t see anything that really stood out. I wrote the designer and told her I was looking for a font that was “happy” (I don’t want this to look like a medical blog) with a very simple font for the tagline. I wanted the font colors to pull from the illustration and somehow work in that purple.

I sent in all the files, both the vector files I’d purchased and my mockups, and waited a few days…and voila: I just love the finished product! It was a quick and easy process and a great value. Next I’m ordering a Facebook page illustration and a badge. A big paws up for A Mommy’s Blog Design Studio!

I’ll be back next week to talk about selecting a blog template!

First, before we discuss paid hosting, let’s talk about the free versus paid debate. We know a lot of bloggers use Blogger, Typepad and other free services to create blogs and use their free hosting. Some even use their own domains but the blogs are still hosted on Blogger servers. We don’t…and here’s why…

If you are hosted by a free service, your blog can be closed down at any time. It probably won’t happen but there is always the chance that your blog could be somehow tagged as a spammer and you could wake up one morning without access to all your hard work.

Also, free blogging platforms don’t have the options you’ll have with a paid host. Self-hosted WordPress–that’s WordPress.org, not the free hosting of WordPress.com– is a very powerful platform with lots of plugins and plenty of options (too many options, it sometimes seems).

Since our hosting for our pet blogs and several of our travel blogs is with HostGator.com, we’ll be using that host for MyPetAllergies.com. (We’re not an affiliate of HostGator…we’re just sharing our experience.)

We selected them in the first place for several reasons:

• they offer cPanel. This control panel (which you’ll find at many host companies) makes it very easy to manage your blog from a simple interface. You can easily back up your site files and manage subdomains, parked domains, and redirects on this panel, too. (For example, say you also own the plural version of your domain name. You might want to redirect the plural version to the correct, singular version of your domain name.) On the HostGator site, there’s a demo of cPanel if you want to see what it looks like.
• they offer Fantastico. Fantastico allows you to very easily install WordPress.
• they offer unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. We’ve had hosts in the past that limited the size they’d host, either in terms of the total disk space (where your files and photos are stored) or in terms of bandwidth. Once, on one of our travel sites, we had a spike of 72,000 readers in a few hours and our host shut us down. That bandwidth issue isn’t a problem with Hostgator BUT sites can be temporarily shut down if they are using too many resources on the server. We had this happen once with DogTipper before we got our current cache plugin.
• they offer a free dedicated IP on business plans. We have business plans on each of our sites so we get a dedicated IP number which is very important. (You don’t get a dedicated IP with cheaper plans from Hostgator.) You have no control over what the other blogs and sites on your server are doing. What if there’s a spammer on your server, sharing your same IP number? He could very easily cause some serious problems for your site. By having your own IP number, you’ll avoid being grouped together with all the other blogs in your “neighborhood.” We learned, however, you have to make a special request to get your own IP number; it is not automatic.
• they offer unlimited domains on business plans. Let’s say you write a book and you want your book to have its own domain name for easy promotion. You don’t want to pay for hosting just for that domain (which might have only one sales page.) You can set up the domain as its own site using the same hosting plan you’re using for your blog without an additional fee.
• they offer phone, chat, and email support 24/7. This is a biggie. Problems always happen with blogs, sooner or later. You don’t want to wait until Monday morning to take care of that Sunday afternoon problem. We have had really good luck with chat support on all our sites.

You’ll find other hosts with those same features–they’re all ones you want to look for in a paid hosting service. Of course, you want to look for a very high uptime.

Next week: selecting a blog template

Hop along with more pet blogs in the weekly Saturday Pet Blog Hop!

After a lot of back and forth on which way to go, trying to decide whether to create a subsection of DogTipper, CatTipper, or an all-new site, we decided to launch a third pet site. And the name is:

MyPetAllergies.com

Since I have allergies and asthma and since allergies are one of the top reasons pets are relinquished to shelters, we thought it would be good to share news and reviews of products especially aimed at similar households. Watch for tips on living with pets when you have allergies, cleaning your home, reducing dander, and more

But first we thought it would be fun to start a series here on DogTipper about just how we start a new site and the decisions that go into everything from domain names to templates to hosting. Watch for the continuing “Birth of a Pet Blog” series to follow along as we show you how we go about building and growing our newest site. It joins our two pet sites and numerous travel sites…but this is the first we’ve built “in public” so it will be fun to share the process with everyone. We’ll take you along as we build the site, from start to finish (well, you’re never really finished…)

So let’s start at the beginning which, for us, is always choosing a domain name. It’s something you’re going to be stuck with for a long, long time and changing a site name is a big deal. Spend a lot of time on this step!

Here’s what we always look at when selecting a domain name:

• Keywords. For SEO reasons, it’s great if you can incorporate your main keywords in the title if possible. We will be targeting the term “pet allergies” but petallergies.com is already taken (although it’s not in use.) We always like to buy the .com version of a name rather than something like .info. That left the possibility of pet-allergies.com but we don’t like hyphens.
• Easy to understand and to spell. We always like to select a domain name that’s easy to understand and to spell. (That’s another reason not to select a hyphenated domain name.) For example, if you’re doing a radio appearance and say your URL, you don’t want to have to explain the URL. You don’t want a domain name like Pets4U or you’ll be explaining “the word pets and the numeral four and the letter U.”
• Short. We thought about trying to work the words “dog” and “cat” into the URL but that just got silly.

When you’re trying to decide on the keyword term you’re targeting, first do a little research on a keyword tool like Wordtracker or Google AdWords. (Just check our post on keyword research for shelters on how to do keyword research.) Are the keywords popular or should you look at some different terms? We liked the popularity of the term “pet allergies” and decided that adding “my” not only gave us a unique domain name but also helped first-time readers understand this was about human allergies to pets, not allergies that pets have.

Once you’ve settled on a domain, go to a domain registrar and check availability. We got lucky and found our second choice of names. (Getting DogTipper.com took almost a full day of research; domain names with the word “dog” are in short supply!)

Before you register the name, make sure the name is being registered to YOU and not the domain registrar. We have domains registered with Network Solutions and GoDaddy, depending on coupons and special offers at the moment.

When you register your domain, don’t just register it for one year but select the five- or ten-year registration option. Google takes multiple year registrations as a sign that you intend to be around a while and, according to many, looks more favorably on these domains. We registered our new domain for five years.

When registering, you can also opt for public registration or private registration (for an extra fee). Your WHOIS information, which shows the contact person for each domain, will show the domain registrar who acts as a proxy for you, keeping your registration information private. We own a lot of domain names so, to keep down costs, we generally register ours as public. (You’re going to be providing a lot of that information on your site itself soon anyway.)

Finally, when registering a new domain, we only sign up for the name itself, not for hosting, email, or other services that are invariably offered. Next week we’ll talk about selecting a host for your blog.

We’re hopping along in the weekly Pet Bloggers Blog Hop; you’ll find lots of pet blogs to explore below!

Since last Sunday, we’ve been monitoring Twitter constantly to find fire information for our immediate area and to determine if we needed to evacuate. We started compiling the information we were running across to use social media to help provide information to fire victims immediately in evacuating their animals and finding shelter and now in locating lost pets, getting help for injured pets, and obtaining assistance through boarding and food.

We wanted to share what we’ve done because it’s an easy (and free) way to help the animals of your area if disaster should strike. It’s an effort that can be done from anywhere (even if it’s not your area experiencing an emergency.) Here’s what we did:

• On Twitter, find the hashtag for your disaster. Here, the hashtags are #centraltxfires and #txfire. We followed these and retweeted information needed by pet and livestock owners.
• If your Twitter account is new and you don’t have a lot of followers to receive your retweets, just be sure to include (or add) the disaster’s hashtags. The hashtag will make the tweet appear in the stream of tweets for the hashtag (see illustration, above) and will reach those searching for information on the disaster.
• Make your tweet at least 20 letters shorter than 140 characters so it can easily be retweeted, spreading its reach to more readers.
• As we tweeted, we compiled the tweets into a web page. Since many people aren’t on Twitter and, by the nature of Twitter, tweets scroll by, it’s nice to have a single page to direct people to for emergency help. We titled our page “Animal Resources for #centraltxfires“, incorporating the most common hashtag in the title. Our RSS feed is picked up by our Facebook fan page and the feed of our Facebook page is picked up by Twitter so this carried the hashtag all the way to Twitter where it could be searched.
• We searched Facebook for related pages. Quickly there were numerous new Facebook fan pages created to provide resources and to help locate lost pets. Other longstanding pages, such as the Austin Humane Society, created photo galleries of the lost pets in their care. We tweeted the URLs of the Facebook pages so Twitter users would know about these pages.
• We compiled the URLs of all the Facebook fan pages on our “Animal Resources for #centraltxfires” page so there was one place people could go to as an index to all the Facebook pages and galleries.
• As we receive additional information, we update the page then tweet the URL with info on what we’ve added:

• When we add new information, we also delete out of date information on the page whenever we know it is out of date. For example, in the first days of the fire, there were many emergency tweets for help evacuating livestock. We’ve pulled those as we find them.

A page like this is an easy way to compile sources of help into one resource for pet lovers. Social media is an incredible tool in times of emergency like this but it’s easy for pages and tweets to be overlooked. If you’re already active on social media during a disaster, you can help by just compiling the information you find!

If you have a blog and you’d like to add the Google +1 button, you’ll find the Google instructions very easy to follow. It’s a two-part addition, adding one snippet to your header file and another where you’d like the button to appear.

Also, AddThis has added the Google +1 button to their offerings: www.addthis.com/features/google-plus1-button. If you’re already using their share toolbar, it’s very simple to add Google +1.

We’ll probably play around with the placement over the next few days but we definitely think it’s time to add the button as Google starts to use the results to determine what content is most relevant.

A “reveal” page (sometimes called a fan gate) is a landing page or tab in your Facebook fan page. When your new visitors arrive at this page, they’ll be greeted by an image of yours that welcomes them to your page. It invites them to “like” the page. Once the “like” button is clicked, the page changes to “reveal” another image, usually one with a link to a free download you’re offering readers.

There are several scripts out there to do the reveal page; the one that we use is the iFrames App for Facebook Pages from Wildfire. Right now, it’s free to add the app to your pages; in the future, it sounds like they’re going to charge for the service but will grandfather in the pages that are already using the app. (There’s more about all of that in this post on the Wildfire blog.)

Our CatTipper fan page has the reveal script installed. When a new visitor arrives at our welcome page, they first see this image:

The image that’s blurred out is the cover of a free ebook they can download after they like the page. Once they like the page, the page automatically changes and reveals this image:

The image is linked to the downloadable ebook, a pdf file. It all works seamlessly and has really helped grow our fan base on our CatTipper fan page!

Rescues and shelters can use the same technology to grow their fan page numbers. It only takes a few minutes to put together the images so the main question is what will you use as your free downloadable? It doesn’t have to be a novel-sized ebook; a small booklet is equally effective! Here are a few ideas:

• a printable coupon for a discounted adoption
• a printable coupon from an area dog-related store or service you’ve partnered with that would be a good match for families with newly-adopted pets
• a booklet of five games to play with your new dog
• a checklist of items to purchase or make for your new dog
• a checklist about puppy proofing (or kitten proofing) your home
• some recipe cards for treats you can make your dog

No matter how simple your download, be sure to make an accompanying image, whether that’s a coupon or an ebook. It helps readers visualize that they’re receiving an item of value, which they are, and makes it more likely that they’ll like your page.

In our continued blog mentorship series that we’re doing with Have a Heart, a Florida rescue, we looked last week at how they could optimize their Facebook wall to help better explain the purpose of their page and their organization and, at the same time, get more fans.  This week we look at the “Info” portion of the Have a Heart, Inc. Facebook fan page:

Just as with the wall on your Facebook fan page, it’s important to work keywords about your rescue in Info page as well. Right now, the word Florida is identified as the place of the rescue but it would also be good to add Florida in the Company Overview as well as some of the major cities served by the rescue or perhaps the term “South Florida.” Those keywords will attract more searchers who could potentially adopt; since the rescue doesn’t adopt out of state, they want to be sure to attract Florida residents whenever possible. The keywords “adoption,” “puppies” and “adopt” would also be good to work into the description.

A non-profit gets the following fields in its Information page on Facebook:

• Founded: this would be a good field to add, especially for potential donations, since donors might like to see how long the non-profit has been in operation.
• Address: Have a Heart has done a great job with this section; providing a valid address also lets people “check in” using Facebook Places and helps promote the page to their friends.
• About: It’s perfect that Have a Heart identifies that they are a 501(c)3 organization right away in this section.
• Company Overview: We’d recommend adding a company overview with more information on the organization in general here. This would be a good place to note that this is a volunteer-run organization then provide more information on the dogs in general, such as all dogs will have been spayed/neutered and are up-to-date on shots.
• Description: This might be a good place to explain the adoption policies of Have a Heart.
• General Information: This could be a “how you can help” section with information on fostering, donations, special events, etc.
• Mission: This is a good example of the mission statement of a rescue and includes keywords, too.
• Awards: Are there any awards that could be mentioned here?
• Products: Does the rescue have an Amazon Wish List or an Amazon Store? The URL could be listed here.
• Email
• Telephone. Right now, the Telephone Number field goes to a suggestion page so that’s a field that probably should be completed or dropped so there’s no misinformation.
• Website: This is a good use of this section with two sites listed.

You can also add links to your other social media accounts within your description fields; we’d recommend adding the URL for Have a Heart’s Twitter account in the About section (or one of the others).

It’s well worth the time to have a look at your Facebook Information page and see if you can add some keywords to better optimize this page. After all, there over 750 million active users on Facebook just a search away from your page!

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If you are enjoying our Social Saturday series and our other social media work, please vote for DogTipper for Best Social Integration Blog in the Petties! You can vote twice daily through July 29!

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As you know, we’re doing a mentorship with Have A Heart, Inc., a South Florida rescue. Have a Heart has a Facebook page set up: http://www.facebook.com/Haveaheartfl As you can see from the short URL, they’ve already gotten their shortened URL (far better than the looong URL that is given to Facebook pages by default. If you haven’t already gotten your shortened URL and you have 25 or more fans, see our “10 Tips to Grow Your Facebook Fan Page” post for more about getting a shortened URL as well as other tips.)

Have a Heart has also taken an excellent step in making their shortened URL the same as their Twitter name, Haveaheartfl, making it very easy to identify these two accounts as belonging to the same entity. They have also made great use of their profile photo area (see right), uploading a graphic that identifies that they have a Twitter account and a website.

Just below the profile photo, you’re allowed a short description of your page (this comes from the “About” section of the “Basic Information” page.) Here is the Have a Heart description:

They have some additional space there that can be used for a live link to their website and some additional keywords that describe their organization. (See our “Social Saturday: Keyword Research for Shelters and Rescue” post for tips.)

We’d recommend that they put their website URL as the first line of this description. (Why the first line? The description will be shortened by Facebook and part of the description won’t be visible unless the reader clicks the “more” link. You want to make sure the URL is visible from the start.)

Also, we’d recommend they add some keywords such as South Florida, adoption and rescue in that description, if possible.

Here’s a look at the description we use for our DogTipper Facebook fan page:

As you can see, we also have a link to our Twitter account in this description, although it isn’t visible until readers click the “more” link that shows by default.  To make a live link in the description, all you need to do is type in the entire URL (don’t add any HTML). Also, you’ll see we have a call to action, asking people to “Please be a fan!”

Next week we’ll look at completing the “Information” page of your Facebook fan page for better ranking!

Shelters and rescues are, in some ways, like any other local business that target local residents as their followers. But shelters and rescues don’t just want to grow their followers among residents among their local population but within the dog and animal welfare community as a whole. Community support can help spread the word throughout social media about fundraisers, urgent needs, and adoptable animals.

Growing your Twitter account’s number of followers is easier than growing your number of Facebook followers because you can go out and initiate the contact, rather than waiting for potential followers to come to you. You’re free to follow as many other Twitter users as you like (although there are limits per day on the number of people you can follow, depending on the number of people you are following and the number following you back).

In May, we looked at “How to Grow Your Twitter Numbers” with links to handy directories where you can find pet-related accounts.

Along with going out and looking for accounts to follow, be sure to alert your own blog readers that you have a Twitter account. We recently added the “Tweet Button” (you’ll see it in the right sidebar of every page). With this button, your blog readers are just a click away from following you. You have the option of showing your follower count number or not.

Another way to alert readers to your associated Twitter account is to add a social media icon. Search for “social media icon” and you’ll find numerous free icon sets in various sizes and colors you can add to your blog then link directly to your Twitter account.

Twitter is an incredible free resource for shelters and rescues to publicize their adoptable pets and their needs. Just a few minutes of time per day can, over time, grow your Twitter account and your opportunities for free publicity.