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Blogging Tips – Five Things Every Blogger Should Know

September 3, 2010 by Jay Shaffstall  
Filed under Blogging Basics

When you first start out blogging, you might want to make money, or just share your thoughts with others. Whatever your goal, there are some basic “best practices” that will help you to get new readers and keep existing readers interested.

1) Write Regularly

Blogs live and die by their content. The more content you have, the more visitors you’ll get from search engines, and the more visitors you have the more readers you’ll get. Regularly updated content is great for keeping your existing readers interested, too. A reader won’t keep coming back to your blog if they see the same post every time. Readers want new content.

A lot of people suggest a daily posting schedule. That’s a lot of work! If you think you want to try writing a new blog post every day, I suggest you try doing it before you create your blog. Use your favorite word processor, and write a blog post every day for a week.

If you find yourself tired of writing at the end of the week, then consider writing a post only every few days. The most important thing isn’t so much how often you write, but that you keep to a regular schedule. If all you can manage is one post a week, but your readers know it will be available Wednesday night, then they’ll come look for it then.

2) Spread the (link) love!

A common approach with new bloggers is to try to keep readers on their own blog by not linking out to other blogs. The thinking is that if I link out, people will actually click on the link and leave my blog.

That’s true, some of your readers will follow your links. But if they find what you linked to useful, they’ll be back to read your next post. And linking out to other blogs is a great way to get the attention of the owner of the other blogs. They will probably come to see what you wrote about them, and they may stick around and become readers themselves. Or they may return the favor and link to you sometime.

Linking liberally is a good technique for both providing value for your readers and getting more readers.

3) Read (and comment on) related blogs

Whatever you write about in your blog, you can bet there’s someone else out there writing a blog on the same topic. Reading those other blogs helps keep your inspiration going. You will often find topic ideas on other blogs that you hadn’t considered, and you can put your own perspective on the topic and write about it yourself.

Commenting on other blogs is also a great idea. By commenting on another blog, you’re announcing to the owner of that blog that you liked what they wrote enough to take the time to comment. The chances are good that they’ll come over to your blog and read some of the posts, and maybe leave a comment.

When you leave a comment on another blog you’ll be asked for a URL. Be sure to put the web address of your blog in that field. That way, when someone visits the blog and sees your comment, they can click on your name to go to your blog.

Regularly leaving comments on other blogs is a great way to make friends and build up a readership.

4) Market in moderation

Many people these days get into blogging to try and make money.

You can make money blogging by putting ads on your blog pages, or by linking out to affiliate products in your blog posts. Some bloggers think that the more of this they do, the more money they’ll make.

In reality, if you use too much marketing in your blog, your readers will tune it out. The ones who can’t tune it out will probably become annoyed and stop reading. It’s far better to be moderate in your marketing efforts. Subtle marketing is more likely to make you money than having your blog be like a carnival barker.

5) Be authentic

When you’re trying to make money through a blog, it’s tempting to promote any product that could make you money. Remember, though, that you’re dealing with your reputation. If you promote a product that isn’t any good, your readers that bought the product won’t trust your recommendations in the future.

Similarly, if you write a blog post that isn’t honest, just to get people to click on ads, eventually your readers will stop trusting you.

Always be authentic and honest in your writing, and never put anything online that doesn’t reflect how you really feel.

Author: Jay Shaffstall
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Panasonic Lumix G2

Blogging Tips – The Ultimate Blogging Tips (Part 2)

September 3, 2010 by Shawn Lim  
Filed under Blogging Basics

6. Always Ping After Posting

This is what you need to do after every posts. Remember, always ping your blog. This is to make sure that search engine spider will always crawl your blog after you’ve updated it. Search engines like sites that are always updated. Therefore you must ‘ask’ the crawler to crawl your blog regularly. This will also help you improve your ranking in search engine. A site which always updated is will rank higher than a site that seldom update. This will also help you tell your subscribed readers that you’ve publish a new post. You can ping your blog here at Ping-o-Matic!

7. On Page optimization

You can do this very easily. You can bold of italic your keywords that you want to optimize for in every of your posts. This is a strategy to that can help you increase your ranking in search engine. For example, if you are targeting keywords like make more money online, then you can bold those words. Just like what I did here in my blog. Although on page optimization is less
important than off page optimization (Number of links). But on page optimization still is a factor that will affect your search engine ranking. This is a very simple step that you can take. So be sure to bold or italic your keywords in your blog content. There are still many other on page optimization you could do, but this is for now.

8. Update Your Blog Regularly

I believe you’ve heard this over and over again. But since this is also consider as a blogging tips, so I included it here in The Ultimate Blogging Tips. You know, a blog is something like a diary, just that it is in electronic form. A diary is something that you should write down everyday, so goes for blogs. You should always publish new posts in your blog. The best is everyday, but if you’re busy, then go for at least 5 posts a week. This is what most people do with their blogs, post regularly. If you don’t have any topics to write on, simply use the search engines or any article directories to look for your topics. But don’t copy other people’s content. Just the rough idea, and write with your own words.

9. Include An “About” Section

I’ve stress about this in my previous post, 10 Common Blogging Mistakes. In fact, all the points in that post can be insert here. Why do you need an “About” section? Very simple, you want your readers to know more about you. And if you’re promoting products in your blog, a brief profile of yourself will definitely increase the credibility of your blog and products. Readers and visitors will trust your products more if they know more about you, right? By the way, you can consider including your photo in your blog as well. I’m going to make this short, because you can read the rest here, in 10 Common Blogging Mistakes.

10. Use Simple Language

A blog is site, a more user-friendly site. And if you tell your friends about your blog, the first thing goes into their mind is that they will think that your blog is about your personal life. Most people don’t know that blogs can be use for money making purposes. So, what I’m going to tell you is that, because content will be your main reason why visitors coming to your blog. Therefore you should have a friendly content, write using simple language. You want to be friend with your readers, and not those buyers-sellers relation. Don’t make your blog too formal, a warm friendly feeling blog is a good blog. So you get me, write in plain language just like you always talk to your friends. It will be even better if you can write in those language that a 7 year-old child can understand you. This will make sure that your readers understand what you’re going to tell them.

Well, these are the tips for The Ultimate Blogging Tips (Part 2). I hope that all these tips here are going to help you in your blogs. To your success.

Author: Shawn Lim
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Hybrid and Electric Cars

WordPress Traffic Tracking Plugin – A Vital Tool For Affiliate Marketing

September 3, 2010 by Jovi W  
Filed under WordPress

Most internet marketers know the importance of a landing page to the success of a affiliate campaign. A good landing page can tremendously increase conversion rate and sales income, while a poor one will make all your efforts go up in smoke. Now a lot of affiliates use WordPress to create landing pages, so we will focus on WordPress review sites and explain what qualities of a good review site should possess.

Important Information – Affiliates Need to Know About Their Landing Pages!

What kind of information do you need to know to judge if your WordPress review site is running well? Which parts are the “bottlenecks” that kill your conversion rate? Here we will introduce basic concepts that you should really master.

Traffic-the number of visitors to a website. It is one of the important measurements of the popularity of a web site. A high traffic means that a web site is very popular on the internet.

A page view (PV) -a request to load a single page of a website. Page views are the number of a certain page of web site requested to load. That is the number of a web page visited during a certain period.

The average number of page views per visitor – it is another important measurement to judge the quality of a landing page. A high number indicates that the average visitors go deep inside the site, possibly because they like it or find it useful.

Average visit duration – the average time of users’ visits. As a rule of thumb the more time visitor spend the higher conversion rate and the more sales income you will probably get.

Average page duration – the average time of pages are viewed for. The higher the data is, the better your landing page is.

External links-the outside links point to a web site. It indicates to some extent if other people are interested in a web site and if a web site is of value.

Aforementioned concepts are widely used by affiliates to estimate the effectiveness of their WordPress review site. And then according to the data they polish the web sites to increase the conversion rate and sales commissions.

Author: Jovi W
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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WordPress – Changing the Homepage Content From Posts to a Page

September 3, 2010 by Amy Lee Turgeon  
Filed under WordPress

WordPress is changing the way people setup and use a website. WordPress is revolutionizing the web design industry and allows anyone to easily set up their own website. The challenge is that by default WordPress is very blog orientated. One of the first things you’ll notice is that the homepage displays posts instead of pages.

So what do you do when your client does not want to blog and the theme’s homepage has a whole bunch of empty posts? You need to get WordPress to switch from posts to a page, but how? If your WordPress theme is currently displaying posts but you want it to display regular editable content, it’s easy change to make. First start by adding a new page and giving it a title. To add a page simply click on add new, under the pages menu.

Now add your page title and your homepage text then save it by clicking the publish button. The next step is to go to the reading link under the settings main menu. Once there, select a static page and then select the page you just added in the front page menu. Then click the save changes button to save your new options. Now go look at your website’s homepage, it will now have the content that you added to that static page!
You can go back and edit the homepage content at anytime by editing the new page.

It couldn’t be easier, except if you saw the screen shots that went along with this.

Author: Amy Lee Turgeon
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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Installing WordPress Blog Themes – Easy Instructions For Do-it-Yourself Novices

September 3, 2010 by Johnny B. Truant  
Filed under WordPress

Once you have installed a WordPress blog, you’ll be left with a plain-looking blog with a big blue rectangle at the top which contains your blog’s name. Functional, right? And that’s what you wanted in a blog… pure function.

No pizazz. No professionalism.

That’s what you wanted, right?

Probably not. But you wouldn’t believe the difference a theme can make. It will make your blog look super-snazzy in a matter of minutes.

Step one: Find a theme

There are three basic kinds of themes. You can get free themes, premium themes (that cost a bit but are more customizable) or custom themes (which cost a lot but are totally tuned to your needs). Let’s focus on the free themes.

You can Google “free WordPress themes” and find a lot of stuff, but I just stick with the WordPress themes directory (Google that). Find one you like, unzip the zip file it gives you, and note where the folder ended up on your hard drive.

Step 2: Upload it

1. Go and get a free FTP client like FileZilla. Download that and install it. Open it up.

2. At the top, enter your site’s address (whatever.com) and the username and password your hosting company gave you. Then click to connect.

3. In the left window (if you’re using FileZilla), find the place where you put the theme folder that you downloaded and unzipped. Then in the right window, navigate to where your blog’s files are. You should see a folder called “wp-content.” If you don’t, look for a folder called “public_HTML” or “www” and open that. The wp-content folder should be in there.

4. (If you installed in a subdirectory like /blog or /wordpress, you’ll need to root around and find that subdirectory folder. The wp-content folder will be in there if you did it that way.)

5. Open the wp-content folder. There should be a folder called “themes.”

6. Now, drag the folder from the left window (on your computer) to the right window (your website). The files will upload.

Step 3: Install it

Now, go to your blog’s admin console. It’s probably at http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin or maybe http://www.yoursite.com/blog/wp-admin (or …/wordpress/wp-admin) if you installed in a subdirectory. Log in using your blog’s username and password (which should be different from the username and password you used in FileZilla).

Go to “Appearance” on the left and then to “Themes” under that. You should see your new theme on the page, next to the “Default” and “Standard” themes.

Select your new theme and activate it.

Return to view your blog. Magic, right?

Author: Johnny B. Truant
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Android apps

Make Money Blogging WordPress

September 3, 2010 by Azamli Nawi  
Filed under WordPress

WordPress is an excellent tool for blogging to drive in sales or achieve what ever reason why you blog.

The main reason is inserting a set of Keywords- Keywords are the words people type to search for information in the search engines. The more relevant keywords you have on your web site or blog, the more chances you have of attracting the people searching for those words. This simply means a good unpaid traffic to your blog. Now you must know what keyword are the best to use on your article and how to make your keyword well inserted before any post to your blog

Other main reason is building a Link- Link is a highlighted words or phrases, usually set in blue and underlined that people can click to move from one blog to another. And if popular blog link to your blog, then the search engines will decide that your site is also popular and gives you a boost up their rankings. That’s because they see a link from a good, relevant site and gives you a vote in favor of your site. Building a good linkage does take times and you can shortcut the way of building links by certain ways.

A fresh content is a very good way to make sure that your articles meet your potential reader- Google and other search engines want to provide web searchers with the most up to date and relevant content they can identify. That’s why their technology is constantly gathering information about new web sites and updates to existing sites. If your blog is always updated with fresh content, the more often the search engines will visit to index your pages, and the better chances of those pages will have of climbing higher in the rankings. Blogging WordPress is a medium where you can update your post dynamically and attracting search engines indexer.

And so needless to say that Blogging WordPress correctly, in which you’ll learn step-by-step how to do in this in a matter of time and right guidance, make money blogging is easier than you thought.

Other reason why blogging WordPress is a money machine:

*Instantly boost your overall profits.

*Develop relationships with your readers through open communication.

*Build a community of interested followers.

*Humanize your business and let your potential customers feel comfortable buying from you.

*Establish yourself as a leading expert in your industry

*Build buzz around your new products or expertise.

*Collect visitors to your site email address and GROW your opt-in email list as providing a newsletter.

*Boost your credibility in your niche.

*Generate alternative ways of income

*Get paid to sell people’s products by Affiliate Marketing.

You’ll experience all of that and more once you say yes to blogging WordPress, then find a right guidance and appropriate tools.

You can visit my website to give your opinion or read other related articles.

Author: Azamli Nawi
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Unix inter-process communication (IPC)

WordPress Plugin Development Review

September 3, 2010 by Panah C Rad  
Filed under WordPress

Packet Publishing is one of the top publishers in the world, which specializes in open source technologies and CMS development. It has hundreds of books on CMS systems such as WordPress, Drupal, Elgg, and more. WordPress Plugin Development is its latest effort to reach out and educate the OPS community on how to develop WP plugins.

This is a practical book that teaches you how to write enhancements for this platform by showing you real examples. You don’t just get snippets here or there. You get the whole script, and you are walked through the process as well. If you prefer a hands-on approach, you can start writing your own enhancements in no time. As long as you know what you are doing in PHP, you should be fine.

Creating CMS add-on is more than just writing the code. You also want to think about security, deployment, and compatibility issues. WordPress Plugin Development teaches you how to:

  • Master the WordPress code-base, WP’s plug-in architecture, and the application programming interface (API).
  • Manipulate data, handle user roles and permissions, and posts.
  • Use actions and filters to write more sophisticated code.
  • Customize menus, sub-menus, and the plug-in admin panel.
  • Use AJAX and jQuery to write more dynamic plug-ins.
  • Integrate your plug-in with panels and the tinyMCE editor
  • Work with third-party APIs such as Flicker or Digg API
  • Localize your installation.
  • Publish your word to WP-Plugin Repository
  • Create safe WP-plugins to protect the users against hackers.

The author walks you through the process of creating a simple solution for your CMS. The script gets complicated as you delve deeper and in the end you learn how to develop secure code that takes advantage of everything the platform has to offer. If you know PHP but are eager to use your programming background to develop complex solutions for this platform, you should consider reading this book.

Author: Panah C Rad
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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