The Benefits and Setup of your own Gravatar

Today, I will be explaining to you the importance and benefits of setting up your own Gravatar. For those who have no clue what I am talking about, GRAVATAR stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. In short it is a small image that is attached to comments you make on participating blogs such as WordPress. You may ask why this is so important to me. Well, let me layout its benefits and then show you exactly how to get your own Gravatar.

BENEFITS

1. Branding: I’ve recently been involved with many writes/authors and bloggers. About 80% of them do not have a Gravatar setup. If you have something important to say, a book to sell or other product to promote, you are missing out big time if you have not yet setup your Gravatar.
2. Traffic: Leaving comments with an attractive Gravatar on other people’s websites/blogs will generate traffic (back linking) to your own website. This traffic will also increase your own ranking with Google. And who wouldn’t want that kind of a benefit.
3. Reader Loyalty: It is much easier to spot and recognize a Gravatar on a comment and start to associate with the writer behind the image. This would establish a great relationship with the reader especially if your comments are meaningful.
4. Authority: We can spot you a mile away especially if we have seen your Gravatar on several other websites.
5. Quality Writings: This is a very important tool. A Gravatar with your image will force you to leave quality comments as nobody wants to associate their image/logo with meaningless comments. This will also separate you from the common spammer who does not use a Gravatar.

SETUP YOUR OWN GRAVATAR

1. First head over to the following link http://gravatar.com and click on the Create Your Own Gravatar (blue button)
2. If you already have a WordPress account then you will want to click on the ‘I already have a WordPress.com account!’ (shown in blue text above the new signup form). If not then enter your E-mail Address / Username / Password in the signup form.
3. Activate Account by checking and confirming the email you received from WordPress. Note that Gravatar is owned by WordPress.
4. Once you clicked on Activate Account in Step 3, you are now ready to Sign in to Gravatar (blue button)
5. From here you can setup several email addresses depending on your needs. They can all have different Gravatar images, again depending on your needs. Each Gravatar will correspond to that particular email address.
6. From this point on, you can find ‘My Profile’ at the top of the page and enter the details as needed (First/Last Names, Full Name, Display Name, Location, and About Me)
7. To your right of the screen you will find Photo Gallery (blue button). Click on this and Add New Image… This can be your face or company logo. Anything you wish but make it a high quality image, something that is nice and clear.
8. If you already have a website, on the right of the screen click on Websites and add your site.
9. You can click on Contact Information (blue button) also on the right and add another Email / AIM / ICQ / Gtalk / Skype / Yahoo IM / and Phone Numbers.
10. In Verified Services (blue button) on right you can also include Blogger / Facebook / Flickr / foursquare / Goodreads / Google+ / LinkedIn / Triplt / Tumblr / Twitter / Vimeo / WordPress / Yahoo! / YouTube accounts.
11. There are a couple of other choices you can include such as Crypto-currency Wallet Addresses and Background Image for your profile.

Once you have setup your Gravatar account you will need to allow 5 to 10 minutes for the avatar changes to take effect and show up on comments you have placed using that same email address you signed up with. Note: you may have to clear your cache in some cases.

Important Note for self-hosted WordPress blogs, you will want to go in your Admin to Settings / Discussion and scroll to the bottom where you see Avatars and make sure that ‘Show Avatars’ is check marked. There you will have several other settings you may want to look at.

Hope all this has been helpful to you however if you find yourself in a bind, you can also contact me directly and I will be glad to help out. 🙂