Gravatar: Why You Need To Create A full Profile.

As a new blogger I get very excited when people like my posts, however, I’ve noticed one mistake a lot of people seem to make. Even by some bloggers much more experienced than myself.

They don’t have a full Gravatar profile.

Let’s start at the beginning.

You write a post on your blog and publish it and lo and behold, someone likes it. If you’re like me, you want to know who that person is.

Now if you’re on the app and get a notification, brilliant. You can click on the name of the person who liked it and go straight to their profile. But if you’re on your website you might decide to click on their avatar (The little box next to the ‘like’ button.)

This will take you to Gravatar.

So what is Gravatar?

Gravatar is a globally recognised avatar. If you are a WordPresser you automatically get a Gravatar account but it is recognised on many other sites too, and its FREE.

As you go from site to site and comment on posts your Gravatar is your link for people to find and recognise you. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t use it to its full potential.

If the person hasn’t set up a full Gravatar profile when you click on the avatar you will see this:

A ‘G’ symbol with the person’s name beneath it.

Ok, there is no picture but there is a name so you can always click on it to get to their website right?

Wrong!

If you click on the name it will just reload the page. Not very helpful.

Sometimes people do upload a picture to replace the ‘G’ which is great. But we still only get to see this page. So unless I want to go hunting through my notifications I can’t easily get to this persons website/profile and let’s be honest, we can’t always find the time to go the long way around things.

Now, setting up a proper Gravatar profile takes a couple of minutes and once you’ve done it you have a page that looks like this:

Anyone who clicks on your avatar instantly gets a link to information about you and your websites/Facebook page/whatever else you put there.

Surly as bloggers you want to advertise your site so why pass over a perfect opportunity to do so?

So, how do you set up a profile?

Well. if you don’t have a WordPress account you can go here: https://en.gravatar.com

If you do have WordPress, click on the icon in the top right-hand corner then click on your name. This will take you straight to your Gravatar account:

So what are you waiting for? Get your website on Gravatar so we can find you easier!