Blogging Tips From The Experts

While listening to Tim Ferriss on WordPress.tv I toke some notes that might help people with their blogging projects. Here are some of Tim’s best tips to make your blog better. Of course watching the video is ultimately the best thing to do, however reading this short digest may give you that extra “push” you needed to take your blog to the next level.

1. If you use the Category widget on your blog, change the name of the header to “Topics.” This dramatically changed the click through rate. It’s easy to do in WordPress 2.8. When adding that widget, just put the name you want in the form. Tim reports better responses with the title – Topics.

2. Sometimes an older post doesn’t have as much appeal as newer ones do. To fix this problem, you can display the dates on the bottom of your posts. To get this done, you need to change some coding on a file in your theme. You will have to look at the index.php file in the theme you have and find:

[php]<span class="time"><?php the_time(‘F j, Y’); ?></span>[/php]

You’ll need to comment that out by replacing that with:

[php]<!–<span class="time"><?php the_time(‘F j, Y’); ?></span>–>[/php]

Then you need to find this:

[php]<div class="date">
<div class="dateleft">
<p><span class="time"><?php the_time(‘F j, Y’); ?></span>
</div>
</div></blockquote>[/php]

and cut that (that means copy it and delete it) and paste it after:

[php]<?php the_content(__(‘Read more’));?><div style="clear:both;"></div>[/php]

Save that file and upload it to see the changes. If doing that scares you, ask someone to do it for you.

3. List the total read time for your reader. 250 words = about one minute. This helps prepare your reader for what you have written.

4. Write about what makes you angry without being negative about anyone in particular.

5. Write your post and then do SEO research after. Then make your keyword insertions or changes.

6. StumbleUpon is one of the cheapest sources of traffic there is. One post that ranks well can bring 40,000 to 50,000 page views.

7. Flickr has a section of photographs that you can blog about by going to the advanced search and then choosing Creative Commons, then most interesting. You can actually blog about a photo right from Flickr.

These are just some suggestions to make your blog better. Tim Ferriss has some great blogging tips!

Keyword Case Study for WordPress

Keyword strategies are so important to the success of your website business that they just cannot be overlooked. Although word of mouth adverstising is golden and frankly much easier than doing keyword research, using a good keyword strategy is mandatory. This article will go over some keyword strategy insights gained from a case study done over a four month time frame.

My previous article on keyword strategies for WordPress covered blogging tips and the question of where exactly in your posts do you want to see your keywords. While that strategy is the number one strategy you should use, you also should consider what happens to your website as a whole when you start adding good content on a regular basis.

The excel chart below (please click on it to enlarge it and read it well) explains an interesting thing that happened to www.coolchecks.net as a result of posting content to the blog a regular basis.

Many hosting companies provide website owners with a way to measure their traffic through a program called the Cpanel. Cpanel lets the webmaster control a lot of things on a website, but the thing I like best is the daily reports it can give you about your website traffic.

For my four-month case study, using the Cpanel web stats, I charted the results of the traffic I received from the keyword phrase cheap checks. This phrase is important to the site because the site sells bank checks.

When I charted the results I could see a dramatic increase in hits during the month of October, for the keyword phrase cheap checks. I had only changed a few words on the home page of this site to try to boost the rankings for cheap checks” and I posted to the web blog on a regular basis.

My monthly hits to the site with that keyword increased by 1273! So how did that translate into real progress financially? There was an increase in revenue from the site of $601.38.

Examining the results from the chart above brought me to wonder about another statistic that I could easily pull from the Cpanel. I wanted to know how many search phrases were used during each month.

The chart below will show you the total number of keyword phrases used to bring people to my site over a four-month period of time.

You will notice a steady increase in keyword phrases. During October, there were 1299 keyword phrases people used to get to get to my site, while in July there were only 685. It appears that the number of keyword phrases almost doubled over four months.

There are several blogging tips you can learn from this keyword case study.

• Adding content on a regular basis can dramatically improve website traffic.
• The increase in traffic improves your keyword search results so you are ranked higher for the keyword you optimized for.
• More traffic means more revenue.
• Cpanel statistics are awesome and should be watched carefully.
• One keyword phrase that you rank well for can affect the other keyword phrases and bootstrap them to higher search result positions.

When you are developing your website business, don’t overlook the importance of a good keyword strategy and the power that it has to improve your financial condition.

Passionate Blogging Works

Have you ever wondered why some blogs become wildly successful while other blogs become ghost towns that no one visits?

In a recent interview on Breakfast Television, expert blogger John Chow was asked what is the biggest mistake that new bloggers make when they start blogging. His response was that it is a big mistake to start blogging just for the money. He recommends doing a blog just for fun.

When people start blogging just for the money, they neglect the passionate side of themselves. People like to read good content from others who are passionate about their topic. Choosing something to write about that you feel a lot of passion for basically makes the job, well, not a job. John said, If you are passionate about it, it’s not really work, is it?

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Blogging experts reveal their blogging tips

Learning To Blog Class Sessions

One of the fun things about going to BlogWorld Expo 2008 was listening to expert bloggers reveal their personal blogging tips and tell us how they make money with blogging.  Jim Kukral lead a question answer session with four very successful bloggers, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson , Darren Rowse  and for a brief time Jeremy Shoemaker.

Each guest was asked questions about what made their blog successful and what they recommended to others who are starting out a new blog.  They discussed issues such as which programs were making them the most money, whether Google Adsense was really Webmaster Welfare, and what topics are the best to blog about. They talked about how long it takes to establish a good blog and what to expect from your blog at the beginning.  All of them agreed that you need to have a passion for the topic you are going to be blogging about to avoid the dreaded “abandoned blog.”
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Blogging News From BlogWorld Expo 2008

BlogWorld Expo 2008 was held last weekend, Sept. 19-21, 2008, in Las Vegas, U.S.A. More than 200 expert presenters in the field of blogging and internet businesses spoke at the 2nd annual Blogging Convention.

With so many great presentations, the hardest thing about attending the conference was being able to decide which speakers to listen to.

The conference started off with Richard Jalichandra of Technorati presenting the State of the Blogosphere.  Technorati.com allows users to submit their blogs and provides people with a system of tracking their blog popularity. Technorati has a list of the top 100 blogs according to user voting and community interaction. You can read the best blogs on a variety of topics.
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Blogging Tips Plugin for WordPress

Blogging has become a popular way of building a website and many times that website can become a lucrative business.  Getting ideas to write about becomes difficult for some people and after they have written their first ten posts, they don’t know what to write about. They need blogging tips.

One of the first plugins to be written for Word Press was a plugin called, “Hello, Dolly.”  Similar to the Hello Dolly format, which puts a line of lyrics in the upper right hand space in the Word Press Administration screen, the blogging tips plugin displays random blogging tips and suggestions. The tips are just some ideas of what you can do to improve the popularity of your blog and improve the content.  All of the tips are designed to inspire you to be a better blogger.

It is easy to install plugins to your blog.  You just download the zipped file and then open the folder on your computer.  You read the installation instructions and then just upload one file to your blog.  You will put it in the folder called plugins which is under the folder called wp-content.  Then you look for the file in your plugins directory within your Word Press back office and find the plugin called “Blogging Tips.” You click on activate. Be sure you deactivate the Hello Dolly plugin if you are currently using that. Enjoy the plugin.

Add a little fun to your Word Press blog and download this plugin for blogging tips.

What does it cost?

I am releasing this WordPress Plugin with Blogging Tips into the blogging community as donation-ware.

However, these plugins do take time to write, update, and provide support … so if you find it useful then please consider making a donation. You just click the button below and it will direct you to PayPal. You can donate any amount you wish.