Simple Tips for a Popular Blog

  Blogs are, hands down, one of the easiest possible ways for you to publish your thoughts or messages on the internet. Blogs are excellent for spiking search engine enthusiasm, meaning that by writing in a blog you can easily attract plenty of traffic. But are you aware of what you should and should not do when it comes to setting your blog up in order to attract the maximum amount of traffic for all of the effort that you are putting in your blogging effort? Here are some simple tips for how you can significantly increase traffic to your blog, creating a popular blog out of your modest writing effort.

Step 1 - First and foremost, you need to make sure that you are using the right blogging platform.

Do not fall into the trap of using a free blogging platform for your website. These may be an excellent solution for keeping your costs down, but you end up relying on someone else’s computer, and if their server goes down, you could potentially lose everything. So while it may seem wise to start off on LiveJournal or Blogger, just don’t do it! If you want to create a secure blog, you should spend some extra money to make sure that you are in control of your own blogging endeavor.

Step 2 - The second consideration is to absolutely never, ever duplicate your content.

If you are using the default settings on a blog platform like WordPress, then your blog posts are going to appear in a number of different locations on your website, including your main page, your post page, your category page and your archive page. Unfortunately, most search engines are going to view this as duplicate content, and you may end up being penalized if you do not clean it up. Make sure that your settings are not sabotaging your blogging effort.

Step 3 - Finally, and perhaps most importantly, post as often as you possibly can.

Search engines are intelligent enough that they can tell roughly how often you are posting in your blog. Search engines are always on the look out for content that is fresh and new. The more often you are capable of posting to your blog, the better off you will be. Daily is always best, but every other day or twice a week are also acceptable solutions. Make sure that you are posting useful and relevant content when you post, rather than simply posting for the sake of search engine spiders, because your readers and subscribers matter most of all.

These tips may seem simple, but they are extremely important when it comes to preparing your blog for good, long term traffic. The more popular your blog becomes, the more viral it will be in attracting new, unique visitors every day, week and month.

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6 Ways Social Media Can Help Your Websites

Social media normally refers to a category of websites where content is created by the participation of the users of that website for the remaining community. In short, we can say that social media websites are basically tools to share the information among their users. It gives its users a chance to interact with other users.

Human beings are social animals and they always love to interact with others discussing their hobbies, interests and personal lives. These tendencies gave birth to lot of social media websites like Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon, etc. and produced new channels of traffic which webmasters can use easily to drive some good traffic to their websites and generate some leads. Due to huge advantages of social media it’s become an important part of a successful SEO campaign. You can’t do good SEO without including social media in to it.

How Social Media Websites can help you:

• The biggest advantage of using Social media is that it helps you to create various bridges.

• New traffic can reach your website easily and reduce dependency on search engines to an extent (if run successfully).

• This one is not a secret… Social bookmarking websites help in getting backlinks for your website. It can help you in your SEO Campaigns.

• It helps you to interact with your target audience easily. You can find your target audience quickly on social media websites and can see what about they are talking about, their needs, happenings in your industry, etc .

• It helps in establishing yourself as a brand and can help you in reputation management.

• As popular social media sites are getting good rankings in search engines you can use them to promote your website. It’s very effective if you have a new website with no links then try to create a page on social media website. It’s much easier to get it ranked as compared to a new website.

Social Media websites are very important for a successful SEO campaign, therefore you should not ignore its importance. It’s a subject worth consideration and if planned wisely and implemented successfully, it can show you wonderful results.

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5 Twitter Tools for Better Blogging

Are you already familiar with the micro blogging platform known as Twitter, and what it can do for the online marketing world, especially when it comes to blogging? Twitter is taking off so swiftly that it offers its own language, with tweeps/tweeples being followers of tweeting, or making posts in the Twitterverse, which like the blogosphere, is meant to describe the world of Twittering.

Twitter is already easy to use to begin with, but there are a number of tools and resources that you can add to your arsenal in order to get even more out of the platform. There is an overwhelming amount of tools, applications and plugins that are being developed specifically to make Twitter more enjoyable or more effective as part of a marketing endeavor. Here are some of the best Twitter tools and resources that will allow you to get the most out of your Twitter endeavor.

1 - TwitterFox -

This is a plugin for the FireFox browser, and it allows you to keep up not only with your Tweets but also direct messages that come your way. There are similar plugins, including Tweetdeck and Twhirl, but TwitterFox is the favorite among many because of the simplicity that it offers.

2 - TweetLater -

The primary function of this particular tool, which can be found at TweetLater.com, is to permit Twitterers to stop up on the tweets that they write so that they can be posted over time on a schedule. What makes this a useful tool for the less die hard audience is that you can you forward the e-mails about who follows your Twitter feed to your TweetLater address, and the followers will automatically get a private message from your account, which is an excellent way to automate some of your most basic marketing tasks.

3 - TwitterSearch -

This particular tool offers up a quick and easy way to search about what people are posting about when it comes to specific keywords or topics in the Twitter universe.

4 - TweetBeep -

This particular tool is the equivalent of Google Alerts but designed specifically to work with Twittering and Tweets. TweetBeep permits you to track keywords like mentions of your name, your product, your company, or any keywords that you are researching, and it notifies you when these keywords or terms are mentioned anywhere on Twitter.

5 - TwitterFeed -

This is a fun and simple service that will allow you to feed your blog posts directly to your Twitter account. You can control the frequency by which your blog posts are displayed by Twitter, and you can also choose what text will preface your blog feed. This is excellent for attracting more people to your blog by showing it in bits and pieces on Twitter.

Twitter is not going away because it is a sturdy blogging platform rather than a quick fad. These tools will allow you to maximize your Twitter use, enhancing your social networking endeavor in the process.

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Finding the Best WordPress Plugins for your Blog

WordPress originally saw the light of day in 2003, and is now being used on thousands of different websites in countries all over the world. WordPress is designed to be a simple open source blogging tool that can be taken advantage of in two different ways: You can either take advantage of the hosted option, or you can take advantage of the free software download option.

WordPress offers a number of additional features that can be downloaded and installed, and these extra features are known as WordPress plugins. These WordPress plugins make it possible for you to customize your blog so that it suits you, the genre of your website and the nature of your audience as well. There are a wide variety of different WordPress plugins that you can choose from, many of which are downloadable directly from WordPress, while others can be found elsewhere on the internet. If you are new to blogging, it may be difficult for you to figure out which WordPress plugins will best suit you. Here are some of the mot popular WordPress plugins that are available online for free download.

* All in one SEO Pack -

This is a WordPress blog that helps to optimize your titles, generating automatic META tags as well. It gives you the chance to override titles, setting any descriptions and meta tags that you want. Depending on what version of WordPress you are using, you can usually simply install this plugin to have it work straight away with little work or issue.

* Akismet -

This is a truly fantastic tool, helping you sort out potential spam in your blog. It will check all of your comments to analyze whether or not they are legitimate, allowing you to review the potential spam so that you may decide whether or not to keep the comments accordingly.

* Twitter Tools -

This plugin is capable of integrating your WordPress blog and your Twitter account together. Twitter is a free micro-blogging and social networking service that can be easily integrated into your WordPress with the right plugin.

* WordPress Stats -

Although there are many different ways that you capture data and statistics regarding your website, most offer more information than you really need when it comes to blogging. The WordPress Stats system was designed specifically to focus on the information that a blogger actually needs.

* DMSGuestbook -

This is a guestbook plugin that can be easily customized, which makes it possible for you to change colors and customize mandatory fields where users can fill out certain information that you are looking for. You can fully manage all of the user entries, and you can even edit or remove posts before they are shown on the website.

Each WordPress plugin has its own unique set of advantages and benefits that can help to turn your blog into a user friendly place. With so many different plugins to choose from, it is worthwhile to spend time searching for what is available, selecting those plugins that will benefit you, your blog and those who are visiting to read.

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Top 10 Tips for Writing a Blog

Most of the rules and tips that are associated with writing for eZines and newsletters also apply to writing blog entries, though there are some truly important differences as well. If you keep these top ten tips for writing a blog entry in mind, you will be creating excellent blog content in no time at all.

1 - Write with the reader in mind.

What is in it for your readers? “WIIFM” is jargon for “What’s in it for me?” in the marketing world, and this is what you need to be keeping in mind with every post that you write.

2 - Make your content worthwhile and valuable.

Do not waste people’s time by posting content that is not worthwhile or valuable. If you do not have anything to say, don’t bother blogging. Review books, share articles, conduct interviews. There is plenty to say, so say it.

3 - Proof read every entry and comment.

Look for typos and for grammatical errors. Don’t publish spelling mistakes. Polish your content to show that you respect your readers.

4 - Keep posts short and simple.

Keep things short and simple, because most people simply skim and scan over material. People do not have a lot of time, so do not burden them with too much information unless you have a really good reason to post lengthy entries in your blog.

5 - Keep your blog lively.

Your blog should be snappy and snazzy, interesting and lively. Write like you are having a conversation with a friend, and get to the point quickly. Make sure to touch on the who, what, where, when and why.

6 - Provide plenty of links.

Building links builds credibility, and it positions you as an expert in the industry or niche that you are posting about. People do not have time to know what everyone else is doing, so you should tell them by sharing links in your blog entries. Link other blogs and websites to build a network of associates online.

7 - Use keywords as often as possible.

Using keywords that are relevant to your niche will keep you on task, help search engines find you, and attract more traffic to your website. Your rankings will go up, and people will find you more easily than ever online.

8 - Write clearly.

Make sure to use short sentences, and touch on only a single concept per sentence. Do not use double speak, do not use jargon, and do not overwhelm your readers by cramming more than a single idea into each sentence. Spoon feed your content to your readers and they will return to your blog for more.

9 - Write in the same way that you talk.

It is okay to use common expressions and to write conversationally. Let your blog be fluid, conversational and friendly, and your readers will keep coming back for more.

10 - Use a headline that is clear, concise and descriptive.

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Unique SEO Content

You are probably already aware of how important link building is, and how important it can be to select the right meta tags, and to select frequently searched keywords that can be added to your website for the purpose of boosting search engine optimization or SEO, but are you also aware of how easy, inexpensive and effective it can be to use fresh and unique website content to drive an increase of traffic to your website through SEO? This is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to garner higher rankings in the most popular search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo, and it requires little to no technical expertise at all.

If you add fresh content to your website regularly, you will be effectively increasing the visibility of your website by boosting your search engine rankings naturally and easily.

It is important that you avoid making the SEO mistake that so many other websites are making, which is that they are failing to add new, fresh and unique content to their websites on a regular basis. They spend hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars designing the look of their website, and then it fails in the search engines because they believe that once the website is running, their job has been completed. The truth is, if you stop updating your website once you have taken it live, you are doing something very wrong.

Why is this? This is because search engines love and feed on fresh and unique content. This is so true, in fact, that they literally troll the internet specifically looking for websites that have updated their contents. In the world of search engine optimization or SEO, content is the king.

Adding fresh content will help to significantly improve your search engine results, because search engines are literally constantly on the lookout for websites that have updated content, making sites with fresh and new content the best on the web. You can easily give these search engines what they are looking for simply by regularly updating the content that is on your website, adding informative articles and refreshing the content on other pages. Your content should never simply sit still or stagnant unless you don’t want people looking at it.

If you are unsure about writing the content yourself, you should have no trouble finding help online as there are plenty of proficient writers capable of writing niche specific content for your web pages, you simply need to know where to look and what to ask for. SEO writers are writers that specialize in search engine friendly website content creation, and they will deliver polished work that is web ready. They can write search engine friendly content for your website that is written specifically so that it can be found and indexed by search engines, and they will write website content that uses your keywords naturally and in a fitting manner in order to benefit your human readers as well. SEO writers are designed to write with your marketing goals in mind, so if you are afraid to craft your own content, do not be afraid to ask for some assistance.

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Wordpress as a Website: 4 Great Reasons

When you think of Wordpress you probably think of blogging. That’s how most people use it. They sign up for a free blog and start posting about a variety of things. Some blogs are very specific and targeted while others are just general every day kind of blogs. You might not be aware of it, but some excellent looking websites are also using Wordpress without using it as a blog at all.

Ease of Use: Wordpress is designed for the masses. That means there’s really no specialized knowledge necessary to sign up for a blog and get started. If you want to go beyond the free blog and take advantage of their premium features, they’re thrilled. So they lead you through it step-by-step to make it easy.

Deciding to go from a free blog to hosting a domain with your blog as your site is fast, inexpensive and easy. At that point, your .com address contains the blog, which you can arrange pretty much any way you want.

Built-in Tools: Using the blogging and content tools provided by Wordpress, it’s easier for many to create a great looking website than it is to use a more complicated piece of software. To create a Wordpress site you don’t need an HTML editor or some “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) software to help you build the site. You can still use these, for the most part, but you can also do the same things right through the Wordpress interface, including using CSS.

You also won’t need a tool for uploading like an FTP client, and you won’t need to learn a complicated file manager or control panel. If you’ve chosen a theme and made a few blog posts, you already understand how making changes in Wordpress works. There’s really no learning curve in going from free blog to website.

Search Engine Friendliness: Wordpress blogs, if they’re using keywords and contain relevant content, can rank high in searches on those keywords. Google tends to favor some sites over others, while completely ignoring some domains. Content on Wordpress tends to be favored. So your website, as long as you actually do concentrate on keywords and content a bit, will probably have a better chance at showing up in search engines than if it were hosted somewhere else.

Popularity and Community: If you’re not paying Wordpress and website experts to do your website for you, then the idea of setting up a website anywhere, let alone on Wordpress, is probably daunting. But because Wordpress is so popular and used by so many people, it’s easy to get help with a problem.

If you have your website set up with Host X and you’re having problems with the PHP, you can wait to hear back from them or do an online search and try to find the exact problem in the exact server configuration in detail. But the Wordpress community has active forums where you can ask questions. And chances are your blogging question has already been asked and answered, so your problem could be solved with a quick search.

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10 Benefits of Hosting your Own Blog

If you want to create an edge over many of the other bloggers on the web, then one of the best things that you can do is host your own blog. There are a number of benefits of hosting your own blog over having some other service host your blog. Here are ten of the most prevalent benefits.

1 - Professional Appearance -

Hosting your own blog gives your blog a professional appearance, because you can use your own domain name or website name and can host your blog on your own website. If you do not host your own blog, you will have a lengthy blog URL which will make it appear less professional and will make it more difficult for readers to recall the name and website for your blog.

2 - Design -

Another benefit of hosting your own blog is the fact that you have a lot more freedom regarding the design. When you host your own blog, you do not have to follow a pre set design but can design your own blog layout instead.

3 - Recall Ability -

By hosting your own blog, you can make your blog easier to recall among readers. What address do you think is easier to recall, http://www.blogsite.com or http://blogsite.blogger.com/~blogname? The easier your domain name is, the easier it will be for readers to recall it, and this is one of the greatest benefits for hosting your own blog.

4 - Content Control -

While there are not normally really strict guidelines regarding content, when you have your blog hosted by a blogging network, your choices in content can be restricted. By hosting your own blog, you can have much larger control over your content.

5 - Security -

By hosting your own blog on your own website, you can have more control over your security, and will be better able to protect your own blog rather relying on someone else to do it.

6 - Brand Promotion -

By hosting your own blog, it will be easier to develop and promote your own brand. Even if you are not selling something, hosting your own blog will provide greater individuality than what shared hosting can offer.

7 - Revenue Generation -

When you host your blog with someone else, you have less control over generating revenue. When you host your own blog, however, you have much greater control over how you generate revenue online.

8 - Growth -

While starting on a blogging network makes sense, if you want to grow your blog, you need to go independent. By hosting your own blog, you can create a much larger level of growth over time.

9 - Site Integration -

By hosting your own blog, you can integrate your blog with your website, rather than having to create a completely separate website from your blog.

10 - More Traffic -

Hosting your own blog will also allow you to generate more traffic, because your posts will be easier to find in search engines.

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Why is WordPress the Best Blogging Platform?

There are a variety of reasons for why WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms on the internet. Many people try different blogging platforms, but they end up coming back to WordPress because it offers so much greater functionality. Here are five of the greatest reasons for why WordPress is the best blogging platform to use regardless of whether you are brand new to blogging or have been blogging for years.

 

1 - The Plugin Functionality -

WordPress has a seemingly endless supply of plugins that can be downloaded, installed and utilized for absolutely free. The installation of these plugins is easy, and involves uploading the plugin to your blog space and simply activating it through the admin section in your WordPress site. Whatever you end up needing in terms of functionality, there is more than likely a number of plugins that can be downloaded and installed to improve the capability of your blog.

2 - The Theme Functionality -

Most people are going to be interested in customizing their blogs. There are literally thousands of completely unique themes out there, offering one column, two columns or three columns, graphics, color combinations and a variety of other details which allow for complete customization of your blog to suit your needs, the theme of your blog and the needs of your readers.

3 - Auto Ping Functionality -

Many scripts may offer this particular possibility, but many free blog hosts do not offer auto ping, meaning that you are going to need to ping yourself after every single post that you make. On the other hand, WordPress can do the pinging for you, which makes your life significantly easier and saves you a lot of time in the process.

4 - The Trackback -

The trackback feature is an important one if you want to know who is reading and responding to your blog, and if you want to be open about who you are reading and talking about in your blog. If you link to a post in another blog using WordPress, WordPress will automatically make a comment in the post that was linked to in order to facilitate communication between the two different blogs.

5 - The Overall Feeling of Simplicity -

WordPress is an extremely user friendly blogging platform. By using cpanel, you can install WordPress in a single click in most circumstances. After the WordPress blog is installed, you are pretty much ready to get going, provided that you do not want to do any tinkering beforehand with stats, themes and other details. You do not have to know anything at all about computers in order to set up a WordPress blog. When it is installed and ready to go, you simply have to log in to your WordPress panel, which is also extremely easy for you to use in most circumstances.

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Installing a WordPress Blog

If you want to install WordPress on your own server, the first step is to download the necessary files from the website at WordPress.org download. Next, you will use an FTP program to upload the files to your host site. If you use Cpanel, you can use Fantastico in order to set up your database and files for the site. All you have to do is look for the Fantastico icon under Cpanel in the Blogs or Content Management System area of your hosting space. WordPress should be listed, along with a variety of other popular blogging formats. This creates for an extremely simple, one click installation and makes it quick and efficient to set up. Setting up WordPress this way literally takes only about a minute.

If you choose to install WordPress manually, it really does not take much longer, only about five minutes in comparison to one. Keeping track of your databases and database names is especially important if you will be working with multiple websites, so keep in mind that you may need something to keep track of all of the site names and their information. One simple way to accomplish this is to buy a rolodex and create a card for each of your sites. Add the relevant information to each web site on the card, including user names, passwords and other required information. This way, if you ever lose track of site information you can simply refer to the card and you will be just fine.

If you are installing WordPress manually, then you should be able to figure out what information needs to be written down as you go. The process will not be as obvious if the installation is done automatically.

Here are some basic tips for installing WordPress and having the installation go smoothly and comfortably:

- Use the public_html directory so that people will reach your blog when they type your domain name in the URL address locator rather than having to navigate around in search of your blog.

- Fill the title and tag line in. If you’re optimizing for SEO this is especially important but it should not be as difficult as some people make it. If you know what keywords to optimize for, it should not be that tricky for you to figure out.

- Delete any and all extraneous information, like sample posts, unnecessary tags, comments and posts and any other information that you do not need to be in your blog.

- Add an interesting theme rather than sticking with the one you get started with. There are thousands of unique WordPress themes out there, so choose one that suits the concept behind your blog and offers ease of readability and functionality. You may also be able to further customize the WordPress blog theme to suit your needs.

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How much traffic can social bookmarking sites bring to your blog?

If you a regular net surfer, you must have noticed an increase in number of social bookmarking sites in the recent past. Also the number of people that use these sites is also increasing steadily. What is the reason these sites are becoming increasing popular among the users and webmasters? Social Bookmarking sites like Technorati, Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us are helping webmasters make their websites popular and get quality backlinks to their sites. These sites help you to advertise your website to the readers in your niche , thus helping you to get highly targeted readers for your blog.

What are Social Bookmarking sites?
For the readers who are wondering what is a social bookmarking site.It is a site where you can go and share your site with readers in your niche, share your list of favourite sites,news and articles of interest with like minded bloggers. Any social bookmarking site cannot be compared with other one simply because there are huge differences in the way they operate. Although there are many differences between different bookmarking sites, one thing is same in all of these sites- anyone can share the sites they have stumbled across , they can voice an opinion about a particular site and have freedom of expression while doing it.

Is social Bookmarking really helpful?
Let us assume that you have added a social bookmarking button to your blog and you receive a million visitors to your blog out of which only 1% bookmark your site, it may not sound like a huge number but you are rest assured that this number will grow with time and will help you get good number of regular visitors to your site. Also by submitting your site to these sites you get a backlink from sites having a PageRank as high as 9. These backlinks will definitely help improve your PR and help you get good search engine placements and hence good search engine traffic.

Will it work for your site?
If you are still confused whether this will work for your site or not, bookmarking will work only thing being that you need to have good and unique content on your blog. Remember it is not difficult to get visitors to your website, only difficult thing being to make them come again.The most important thing being that you need to provide something which is very useful for your readers free of charge if possible. It should be planned that your first time visitors along with bookmarking your site pass it on to their friends so that your websites popularity spreads virally so that you can tap the traffic and make the most from it.

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How to Add Adsense to Wordpress Without any Adsense Plugin

I realize recently that people who migrate from blogspot to wordpress are facing lots of problem adding Google adsense code to their wordpress blog.

Adding adsense to wordpress is very easy. Even if you are not familiar with wordpress, you can add it in minutes.

This article is for those who wants to show their advertisement on the sidebar of your blog.

First of all login to your adsense account and create a channel and copy the ad ad unit you want to show.

Your code will be something like this:

    <script type=”text/javascript”><!–
    google_ad_client = “pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”;
    /* 300×250, created 1/26/07 */
    google_ad_slot = “2012343546?;
    google_ad_width = 300;
    google_ad_height = 250;
    //–>
    </script>
    <script type=”text/javascript”
    src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
    </script>

 

 

Once you have your adsense code, login to your wordpress blog and click on widget under appearance

 

 

 

 

 

Select the sidebar you want to use (depends on your wordpress theme)

Select Text widget and edit it and paste the Adsense code.

You can also add heading to your text widget like “Useful links” “Sites we like”.

With simple two minute of work you can add Google adsense to your wordpress blog.

Alternatively if you want to advertisement above or below your post, you need to edit your single.php file in theme editor.

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