Greetings and Salutations!

We should all hail Jilly / Blogs with shimmering clouds of kudos for her help with a grueling 3+ hour test of the forums tonight. With her assistance we were able to track down a bug with the watched forum feature, and figure out a solution!

Watched forums are a HUGELY helpful way to keep track of new posts in your forums - so you always know instantly when new posts are made that you should go respond to. Here is how to do it.

1) Log into the forums.

2) Go to My Stuff (in the top center), then Edit Preferences.

3) About 1/3rd of the way down look for "By default should anything added to your Watch Lists be emailed to you?" - check it and click SUBMIT.

You have to do that part first! Odd, I know.

4) Now go around to whatever forum areas you're interested in. Many of us are using the Life Coaching, Self Development, and Stress Management forums to set up our one year priorities and get them in motion, so that's a good place to start! Watch your own forum, of course :)

To watch a forum area, go to the forum area's main page (so for example on the Blogs forum main page, you would see all the posts people have made about blogs). Just above where the posts begin, click on "Forum Options" and choose "Add Forum to Watched Forums".

5) To quickly see all new posts in all forums you're watching, go to "My Stuff" in the top center menu bar, and choose "Watch Lists".

Voila! You can now see at a glance all the new posts in areas you're interested in, and you'll also get email alerts when these areas are updated.

When you are looking at that watch list, you can even click on "Edit Watched Forums" and set exactly which ones you want to get emails about, and which you just want to have show up on your watch list.

It's amazingly helpful to manage your forums in one easy to use location!

Let us know if you have any questions about any of this :)


AUGUST WEEKLY WRITING

Our first August winner has been with BellaOnline since our very beginning in February 2002! Jeanne Egbosiuba Ukwendu has worn a number of hats over the years, and her current run with the African Culture site has been since October 2007. Jeanne is also our Resources manager, providing help with the forums and with using images in your articles! If you have any questions at all about how to use the forums well, or how to incorporate images in your articles, Jeanne is the person to talk with!

http://africanculture.bellaonline.com



Our second winner in August is Stacy Wiegman, of our Conception site! Stacy has been writing with us since August 2008. Stacy does an *awesome* job with naming her articles. Each of her article titles is crystal clear, indicating exactly what content is found within. This means she gets great Google results, because Google really cares about what that title says! So Stacy has article titles such as:

Travel and conception
Water and fertility
Donor egg recipient pregnancy
DHA versus EPA fish oil

When you're making titles, keep these examples in mind! The more your title states exactly what the content of the article is, without punctuation, cute words, or other extraneous material, the better your traffic will become!

http://conception.bellaonline.com


Congratulations to Stacy and Jeanne! Stacy and Jeanne - - please write me with what email address you'd like me to send your $50 Amazon gift certificate to, for your weekly writing from May through July!

Now that we've caught up with the prize drawings, I've updated the bottom of everyone's main admin menu to show the status for Jul-Aug-Sep! Enjoy!

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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