Timothy Ferriss

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!

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.

John Chow

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?

If you can actually take that advice to heart and focus on what moves you everyday, then you are tapping in to an unlimited source of energy and insight that you can share with others.

John Chow was also asked what his original goals for his blog were. He said that he originally wanted to make $2,000 a month. Basically, to make a full time income with part time blogging. Currently making over $30,000 a month from his blog, he has surpassed his goals.

How does he suggest you get people to read your blog? His overall, number one strategy that cannot be overstated enough is to have good content. No one is going to read your blog if you don’t have good content.

Produce good content and then you have got to get your name out there. John suggests that getting your name out there is a matter of finding other bloggers who are writing in your niche area. Stop and say hello. Leave a comment on their blog that will benefit their readers. Link back to something on your blog that will help that audience.

Getting readers is all about linking to each other in the blogging world. A blog is like one big link chain, as far as I’m concerned, said John Chow.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YklanpTMQ8M

What do you have to contribute today? What can you offer the blogging community? Perhaps an attitude of giving is the best one to have when it comes to writing and owning a successful blog on the internet.

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.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5T17234L4Q

Superior Blogging Class Videos

Before I continue, I need to say that I have found a much better video of this Blog World Expo Blogging Tips session than the one I took.  It covers the entire 45 minute session and you can even see me sitting in the audience. I’m the blonde on the right, below Jim Kukral.

I found this today after discovering that Twitter has a search feature that you can search for keywords. Just click on that link and replace the word “keyword” with whatever you want to search for. It’s a great way to hear the latest on the topics you are interested in.

Guest Blog Speaker  – John Chow of JohnChow.com

John Chow gave some good advice to people starting a blog. He recommended several things. One of his favorites is making money with the WordPress Themes through the Thesis Showcase Gallery

• Blog about something you feel passionate about
• Lay everything out on your website blog and be honest about all your offerings
• Use residual affiliate programs
• Offer direct advertising to people
• Offer great content

He mentioned that if he were to shut off his website blog, he would still be able to make a five figure income because the affiliate programs he offers people are all producing residual income. He also got to the point where he used his Google adsense advertising areas to offer direct advertising and immediately made more money.

Guest Blog Speaker Brian Clarke of CopyBlogger.com

Brian Clarke gave these blogging tips

• Repetition is the key – Talk about things over and over again
• The worst thing on a site is banners – the best things are product reviews where you convey to people that you are a real person, you used a real thing and you should too – teaching sells
• Don’t be a cat blogger where all you talk about is your cat.
• You may want to check this out with him, but he says that he’s able to make a lot of money from recommending WordPress Themes through the
• Build an audience and find out what they want to buy.
• Build an email list
• For handling newsletters and email lists, use AWeber
• Write for people, not search engines
• Word of mouth traffic is golden
• Use Chitika for advertising

Guest Blog Speaker Zac Johnson of ZacJohnson.com

Zac Johnson’s blogging tips

• Zac started on the internet 12 years ago and he’s only 26
• He makes 5 figures a month
• He likes direct ads and blog ads
• Meet with and talk to affiliate managers on a regular basis
• Zac tells people on his blog how he made $860,538.38 in 4 months

Guest Blog Speaker Darren Rowse of ProBloggers.net

Darren Rowse recommended these blogging tips

• Put ads inside of the content of your posts
• Affiliate products that you personally recommend sell well

Thank you to Jim Kukral who inspired me to invest in a Flip Video camera! He shared with the audience that these five star bloggers, pardon the language…”Bust their ass with blogging.”

Blog World 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.

Richard Jalichandra presents the State Of The Blogosphere 2008

In the state of the blogosphere report that Richard Jalichandra presented, we learned that there were 1.5 million posts in the last week on any given day and that Technorati has indexed 133 million blogs since 2002. Between 50 to 100,000 blogs where considered influencial.

The advice Mr. Jalichandra gave bloggers was to be transparent and authentic. He said that the new influencer in the blogging world, is…you guessed it…YOU!  Blogs are all about information and influence.

Technorati has a system of assigning blogs an authority ranking.  This ranking is based on a number of factors, one of them being the interaction or number of comments people are making on the blog and the number of times your blog is mentioned in other blogs.  They have said that there are between 50 to 100,000 blogs that are considered to be “influencial.” This authority ranking can be tracked by going to Technorati and registering your blog. 

There seems to be a critical point at which a blog turns the corner of being one in millions to becoming influencial.  Mr. Jalichandra stated that blogs with rankings in authority of 50 or higher have reached that critical mass point.  So bloggers, aim for that 50 authority.  Apparently there are only only 76,000 blogs that have reached that point.

The people at Technorati.com have conducted surveys to determine the answer to the question – How old are bloggers?

The results showed that 37% where between 25 and 34, 27% where between 35 and 44, 15 percent where between 44 and 54 and 8% were over 55 years old.

Only 14% of the bloggers surveyed were using their blogs to enhance their business. One out of 4 people spend 10 hours a week blogging. Out of the high money earners, (the top 10%) made 81 posts per month. $19,000 a year was the media income from blogging.

Blogging is here to stay and in my humble opinion will only become more influencial as time goes on. With the free software provided by WordPress and the inexpensive costs of buying a domain name and securing a hosting company to host your website, there aren’t any big hurdles to high to jump to get your blog started today.

* You can read the State of the Blogoshpere 2008.

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.