About Top Mommy Blogs
- What
Is Top Mommy Blogs?
- How
Does Site This Work?
- How
Do My Visitors Vote For My Blog?
- How do I become a Featured
Blog
- Do I have to pay to join?
- Does my blog have to be about
kids and/or being a mom?
- What Can I do To Get More Votes?
Sign Up/Edit Account Questions
- I'm
Being Told I already Have An Account Here And Can't Sign
Up Again!
- What is a reciprocal link?
- I
Am Getting An Error!
- I'm
getting a 403 Forbidden Error!
- I Can't
Remember My Username or Password!
Graphics & Banner Questions
- I am getting errors when I a try to add
my banner
- I
don't have a banner. Where can I get one?
- I changed my banner. Can you update it?
- Where can I get
the
voting Badge, links &
banners?
- What is A Banner URL? How Do I
Upload My
Banner?
Your Listing,
Site Resets, Site Updates & What To Expect
- Site
Terms & Listing Diagram
- I just signed up for the site, why
doesn't my site appear?
- I
know My Blog Has Sent Votes In. Why don't They show?
- My site was listed and now it is gone
- What
happened to the facebook link?
Still have
questions?
- How Do I contact you?
What Is Top Mommy
Blogs?
Top Mommy Blogs is a free traffic exchange & ranked blog
directory for mommy bloggers.
Blogs
are ranked by popularity (popularity = incoming unique hits).
How Does This Work?
To participate, you
have to sign up for a free account here.
After your account is set up you will be given a special voting badge that you will need to place on your blog.
You will be given this badge after your successful sign up in
your welcome
email as well as being able to log into your account to get
additional links and banners.
Once you have placed the badge on your blog, you can
begin referring your visitors which gains you votes. When a unique visitor*
visits TopMommyBlog.Com after clicking on your special voting
link, your listing will get a
"vote" in. These votes from your blog are what
help improve your blogs ranking and move you higher up on
the list. People can also rate and comment on listings by
clicking the Ratings or Comment images on your listing. You
must keep this badge (or approved links found on the Links
& Banners page of your account) on your blogs at all
times in order to remain in the Top Mommy Blogs Directory.
* A unique visitor is determined by IP address in a 24 hour period. Votes coming in through proxy servers (or any method that attempts to hide info),
outdated browsers or browsers that do not accept cookies are not counted.
Visitors "vote" by clicking through from your blog to TMB (using your special voting link). Votes are essentially unique referrals. Visitors also can
find your blog listing and rate and or leave a comment about
your blog. Ratings and comments, however, do not effect your blogs
rank.
Tell me I'm pretty? Kidding (but feel free to do that anyway). To qualify to be a featured blog on the home page, your
site must be in the top 100. To qualify to be a featured
shop on pages 2+, your blog needs to be in the top 500. On
the individual category pages, the top 75 blogs from that
category will qualify. Of the qualifying listings, the FB will be chosen randomly.
If your site is not in the top 500 you may want to
consider where the ranking banner is located on your blog
and/or adding some additional links found by logging into
your account and choosing, "Get Links &
Banners," in the drop down menu. If you have several
pages of links, you may want to move it to the first page or
placing the banner on your home page will increase your
hits.
Do I Have To Pay To Join?
Nope! This is a free list to join. You do however have to
place a voting code or the voting banner on your site,
however, to get your site on the list!
Does my blog have to be about
kids and/or being a mom?
Absolutely not! Not all mommy bloggers blog about their
kids! We created Top Mommy Blogs as a resource for moms
who blog about any topic and as a sequel that is more general &
a larger version of our sister site, TopBabyBlogs.Com.
All we ask is that it is relatively family friendly of
course. If you have a blog that doesn't quite fit any of the
categories, place
it in the Everything Else section. We will keep an eye
on this section to determine what new categories we need or
feel free to suggest one. And yes.. daddy bloggers are
welcome too!
Here are some basic Do's and Dont's. Starting with the Do's...
- Do use a voting banner (text links work too but aren't as attractive)
- Do use your special voting code whenever you refer to TopMommyBlogs.Com on your blog
- Do place your voting banner/link on every page of your blog
- Do place your voting banner/link towards the top of your site
- Do place your voting banner/link in your post footers
Now for some of the Don'ts (things we've seen that aren't effective)
- Don't put your voting banner only in your link directory
- Don't put your voting banner is a scrolling marquee
- Don't just blog about joining TMB and so your voting link is only in one post but nowhere else
- Don't forget to use your special voting link (vs http://www.topmommyblogs.com) when you refer to TMB
I'm
Being Told I already Have An Account Here And Can't Sign Up
Again!
If you have an account already, there's no reason to sign
up again. Actually, if you do, you will likely get your blog banned. Duplicate accounts double the amount of work since accounts are manually reviewed. There's no reason
to have two! If there was a reset recently, DO NOT CREATE A
NEW ACCOUNT! Your old one is just fine and it's just a
matter of time before your blog will show up again.
What is a reciprocal link?
A reciprocal link is where you place the topmommyblogs.com
link/badge on your blog. When you sign up, you will be given a special
voting URL/Banner that you place on your blog. What
ever page you place that banner/link on, is your reciprocal
link! You will want to list at least one page URL in your
account info as your reciprocal link. This gives us an easy
way to check that you have a voting banner in place or if
you are having problems with it, we know quickly where to
look. Since many sites have hundreds of pages, we need a
specific and exact page. Please do not use your home page as
your reciprocal link unless, when we visit your home page,
we can see thetopmommyblogs.com link there!
If you are getting an error and need to report it, please copy and paste the entire
error message in an
email when you . The more info you give about what you were doing, what links you were
adding and the error message you received, the faster we can
help you!
A known cause for this error is adding your full Twitter link
into the Twitter Name field and not your Twitter username.
If you enter a URL you will get a 403 error. Either only
enter your username or leave the field blank. A second known
reason for this error happens sometimes when trying to
upload a banner from your Wordpress site. Try uploading your
banner to TinyPic.Com
(to get a new banner URL) and use this
link instead. If you still
receive this error after leaving the Twitter field
blank, .
Here the common image error message and are a few reasons why your banner may not be
accepted:
-
The supplied
banner has a file size larger than we allow..
This means your graphic is too large (weight not
dimension). It may be the right dimensions, but heavy
banners will slow down the page loading time so banners
need to be under 30,000 bytes. You can try to optimize
your graphic or try a different format (gifs are
usually the lightest) to bring the file size down
but
-
 The
supplied banner is either too wide or too tall
The max size banner you can add is 125 X 125 px
(as seen on your right). If your graphic's dimensions
are any larger than that, sorry, it won't be accepted.
You will have to add a smaller graphic.
-
The supplied
banner is not a valid image.
There is something wrong your banner URL/link.
Either the link isn't ending in jpg, gif or png (the
allowed file types), it is broken or for some other
reason. You should be able to view your graphic in a
browser window (like you are visiting any web page) and
see your graphic all by itself. If anything else shows
up on the page at all, the image is loaded in any
sort of frame or wrapper, then that is not the direct link
to your banner (often the case when you are using a free
image host such as tinypic).
Sometimes items from a "wp-content" folder or
similar Wordpress directories causes a banner to fail to
upload. If your having problems with your Wordpress banner
URL, try uploading your banner to TinyPic.Com
(to get a new banner URL).
It's important to note that if you are having problems
with your banner, creation of or changes to these images
needs to be done by you or your graphic designer. If you
need a web or graphic designer for help and don't have one, here
is a list of some popular web designers. Please do not
submit graphics to us to "fix" to fit. If you need further help figuring
out how to add your banner to your details (not to your
blog, that's out of our scope), for help. You will need to include the error message you received
and it is also helpful if you give us the banner link you
were trying to add.
I Don't Have A Banner. Where Can
I Get One?
You don't have to
add a graphic to participate (it's optional) but it does improve your listing visibility. Here is a list of some possible web designers if you
are interested having custom banners made -or- for a $5 fee, we will create and add
a 125 x 125 px screenshot to your listing.
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Sample Screenshot:
A screenshot is a snapshot of what your site looks like. This is not an
advertising banner or include any additional graphics and/or text but will
have a 2px brown border as pictured above.
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I Changed My Banner. Can You Update It?
Top Mommy Blogs is a free & automated program.
Meaning you are given account access to create, update and
maintain your account.
Please take advantage of this self-serve program and keep in
mind that you are responsible for maintaining your
account.
If you are having problems that aren't covered on this FAQ,
than please by all means, for
help but if it is to change something in your account, like
change your banner, title, description and so on can do so by logging into the
member section.
You will get your linking code and the changing rank
banner code in your welcome email after you have signed up
{and confirmed your email if requested}. You can also find
more links, banners and your voting code at the banner farm
by logging
into your account and choosing "Get links and
banners" in the drop down menu. Many blogs only
choose specific size linking banners (we don't blame you..
it looks better). If you need a specific size ranking
banner, please feel free to for us to consider adding.
What is A Banner URL? How Do I Upload My
Banner?
You add your banner by entering the URL (URL = direct link to image online) into the form
during sign up or when editing your account. Our
program grabs banners that are already online/uploaded and
require a Banner URL instead up offering an upload button to
upload it from your computer.
A banner URL (a.k.a banner link) is your banners web
address. Just like your blog has a web address, so do all
your images and files. So it's the location of your banner where it
has been UPLOADED to your server (your blog or 3rd party
image host). If you already have your banner added to a
web page, an easy way to grab the banner URL is to right
click on it and view it's properties (Address/URL). A banner
URL will look something like this: http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/125banner.gif
If you don't know your banner URL, are having problems with
your banner URL (such as it is causing 403 errors when you
try to add it) or don't have one uploaded anywhere,
visit a free image host such as TinyPic.Com
to upload your banner and get a banner URL.
To get a temporary Banner URL from Tiny Pic:
-Visit http://www.tinypic.com (no login/sign up needed)
-Where it says, "Upload Images & Videos" click the browse button and find your graphic
file on your computer
-Click "Upload Now" then enter the security (captcha) code
-After you upload your image the Grab
Your Code menu, you'll want to copy/paste the
"Direct Link For Layouts" link
-Under where it says "Share This Image" copy the "Direct Link For
Layouts" and use this URL in your account details.
The diagram above shows what a basic listing looks like
on TopMommyBlogs.Com. Here are some common terms and site
functions:
Site Updates: The site updates its stats every 60
minutes. So that means if you just added your blog and have
received the minimum number of votes to be listed, you may
need to wait an hour or so until the next update.
Site Resets: Several times a year the entire site
resets. All members stats are cleared
and everyone starts fresh from zero. In addition to being an
anti-cheating and clean up method to purge inactive or dead
blogs, this will also allow for new blogs a chance to
climb the ranks! If you have taken your badge off your site,
your blog will not appear again after a reset so this is a
great automated way to make sure that only participating
blogs are rewarded.
Votes In: This is the number of unique visitors
that have clicked on the unique voting link/badge given to
each member from the members blog in to
TopMommyBlogs.Com.
Visits Out: This is the number of visits out
to the members blog from their listing on TopMommyBlogs.Com.
The list updates every 60 minutes and at that time will
introduce any new sites into the list. So, if you just
joined, and you have confirmed your account (via a link in an email that is sent to you immediately after sign up) it may take up an hour or so to appear. Also, you have
to have a minimum number of unique hits in to be ranked.
Meaning at least 3 (or whatever the minimum vote number is which varies from 1-3) different visitors will need to click on
your banner on your blog before your site is visible. This is to improve
the traffic exchange for productive sites and to help
minimize cheating. That way, a site owner that clicks oh
his/her banner 100 times, doesn't automatically climb to #1
superficially! So, you will want to install your ranking
code onto your blog, in a high traffic area as quickly as
possible to start getting votes/hits in.
The list updates confirmed accounts every 60 minutes (not real time) and at that time will
update any new unique votes. You have to have a few unique & legit* votes to
show up on the list again after a reset or if your a new to
the list. 'Unique' doesn't mean you can click
your banner a hundred times! That will only land you in the
cheat record. Each person only gets one vote in a 24 hour
period and so as long
as your badge is on your blog in a good place where more
people can see it, you'll show up
after an update or two. You can also use the search box at the top of each
ranking page to search for your blog.
If you never confirmed your account, your listing will not appear. if you didn't confirm your account to have it activated.
* A unique visitor is determined by IP address in a 24 hour period. Votes coming in through proxy servers (or any method that attempts to hide info),
outdated browsers or browsers that do not accept cookies are not counted.
If your blog is missing from the list, visit the home
page for the Quick
Stats and see if there was a Reset recently. If so, most
likely there's nothing wrong with your account or the site,
it's just that the stats were "reset" recently.
This is something we do for clean up and fairness and you
can read more about Resets & Updates here. It
may take several hours and possibly several days for your
blog to re-appear on the list after a reset so please be
patient.
If your able to log into your account, check your stats
to see if you have any votes in (look for "Hits
In" right under "Hits Since The Last Reset").
If you have at least one vote, you should be listed (unless you never confirmed your account). You may
need to use the search box (at the top of each ranking page)
to locate your account or wait until the next update (also
shown on the Quick
Stats) if you just got your first vote.
If you can't log in because your account was suspended, then most
likely there was a rule issue that needs to be addressed. If
your suspended or locked, please
to discuss how to remedy any problems with your account or if you never confirmed your account.
If you can't find your account, and have already tried
the password reminder which tells you your account can't be
found, then your account may have been removed. Accounts are
removed generally for 3 reason:
1) you submitted a site that
wasn't a blog.
2) your blog was not appropriate for TopMommyBlogs.Com.
3) We visited your blog that seems
inactive (and double checked the reciprocal link that you
gave us in your account details) but couldn't find the
voting badge/link on your blogs sidebars or prominent link
section.
Inactive blogs are removed. So if you signed up and never
placed the badge on your site or removed it and we visited
your blog, we may have removed your account. Inactive
members artificially inflates the member count and that's
not something we want to do. Our visitors and us as well,
are only interested in active members! If this is your case,
feel free to sign up again but make sure your interested in
participating this time and place your voting badge on your
blog right away!
What Happened To The Facebook
Link?
Due to server security restrictions, there were issues
during sign up that was linked to the Facebook field. A
workaround was offered but unfortunately the instructions
proved too difficult for new members and so the field was
removed. We'll try to get it working again.. someday!
How Do I Contact You?
This FAQ page was created to quickly answer questions
that are commonly asked and to give more information about
common site functions and error messages. 99% of occurrences of errors or questions are
thoroughly discussed and
answered above so (please please please)
double check these FAQ's & your values
before email. While we do our best to review all members
sites, we do not endorse any of the individual blog's listed
and are not responsible for any of the member's blog
content. If you have any issues or questions about a
particular member's blog, you will need to contact that
member directly.
If your question is answered above, you may be referred
back here (especially
after a reset when
hundreds of panicked members email asking: "where did
my site go," which is answered
above.)
If you need help because you encountered an error during
sign up or editing your account, please:
- Cut & paste the exact error message into an
email. The error message will be the text
in red and not the words "There Was An Error."
-
If you are having a
URL problem or image problem, include the URL/link or image you were using as
well
- Include your member name & blog link
We Tweet News!! You don't have to be a Twitter member
to check out our @TopMommyBlogs
Twitter feed for news.
If you have any additional questions that
are not
answered above, . Please note that around the time of a site reset (see
recent/next reset dates here) "Where Did My Blog
Go," emails will not be responded to. There are simply
too many members who ask this question around reset times
and this is clearly explained above.
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