Archive for February 3rd, 2010
WordPress is surely one of the big-time favorite platforms for content management on the web. I use it for business blogging with full satisfaction. It doesn’t mean that when you use it, you will not need anything else.
Apart from setting up certain functionalities, it lacks some must-have ingredients everybody generally requires for achieving ideal results. Of course, for specific functions, there is a huge number of plug-ins that you can choose and install at your blog. Here are some main reasons why you better install plug-ins for your WordPress blog:
1) Improve Your URLs
By default, the web address of your blog posts is a combination of codes and numbers. This won’t help your ranking in search engines and many other blogs may have the same blog with different domain names. So, it’s better to install a plug-in from permalink family to improve your URL so that they use your title words in your web address. Of course, you will be able to edit what this plug-in offers.
2) Share Your Content
Social sites are such important media for your marketing and increasing exposure that blogging without using them is an incomplete experience. Apart from some blog themes customized for such functions, the majority of free wordpress themes do not have the particular buttons used for sharing a post with others.
Blog readers usually share what they read with others, bookmark them at their social bookmarking sites, tweet them, etc. having such buttons helps them remember and promote your site. So, it’s highly recommended to install one such plug-in.
3) Block Spam Comments
There is a lot of spamming softwares or services on the web these days that send out meaningless irrelevant comments to all blogs. To save your time, instead of manually deleting those spam comments, you can install one such plug-in and get rid of these spam comments.
4) Add a Contact Form
This is something that facilitates communication with your blog. Your audience visits your blog and decides to email you for any reason. The first thing he/she does is to go to your contact page. When there’s contact form at this page, it’s so easy to type in the name, email address and subject plus the message itself that it somewhat urges one to drop a few lines on the spot. So, installing a contact form plug-in can be a helpful experience for your audience.
5) Optimize Your Blog Posts
Everyone talks about how search engine friendly blogging and particularly wordpress is, but you can go further than this and optimize your blog posts to get better visibility at search engines. To get this done, you can install an SEO plug-in that allows you to assign a title tag and a meta description to your posts. Meta keywords are also provided in some of them, but search engines don’t consider them playing any role anymore due to the misuse of spammers.
6) Analyze Your Blog Traffic
Without monitoring and measuring your traffic, you won’t be able to find out where your blog is powerful and where it needs more improvement. You will certainly like to know how your blog has performed for certain keyphrases and which ones need more efforts to get better rankings. All this and a lot more can be discovered by installing certain plug-ins that pulls information from your blog’s log files and provides it to you in an understandable way.
Every marketing effort needs to be monitored and analyzed. If this isn’t conducted, you will never know which effort has been successful and why. Likewise, you will not find out which campaign has been effective and why. So, you definitely need to install some plug-in for this purpose.
7) Enable Comment Subscription
The blog readers who comment on a topic are most likely to be interested to receive more updates on the same entry. Therefore, it will be very helpful to let them subscribe to that particular post before clicking on the comment submission button. This helps them receive alerts notifying them of the new comments someone else will write on the same entry or even on the comment he/she has written.
The Last Word
As you have noticed, there are really fundamental functions that you expect a blog to have while with a great blogging tool like WordPress, you need to get and install them to be able to create better blogging experience. Fortunately, WordPress allows plug-ins to be installed in it so that people could boost the functionality of their blogs according to their requirements.
Of course, there are a lot more plug-ins that you might find useful and install at your blog, but the above ones are the general items that you should incorporate to get the best results from your blogging efforts. These days there are some fantastic plug-ins that can really boost one aspect of your blog writing and publishing experience. You can find and try them at your WordPress blogs to see the difference for yourselves.
Site Booster provides blog optimization services to help bloggers. You can order any of the blog writing services that you want at its blog: http://www.site-booster.com/blog/.
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A lot of people have already discovered the benefits of having a blog. Others, however, are still undecided about it. Blogs are used for different reasons. Some us it as a marketing strategy; to establish themselves as an expert, build trust with potential customers, and then redirect them to a website where the reader can buy their products. Others use it either as an online diary, or as a means of making money. In this post, I will outline the pro’s and con’s of having a blog.
Pro’s
Marketing – As said above, a blog is a very good way to market your product
Possible income – If you can get enough visitors to your blog, and enough subscriptions to your RSS feed, companies will want to advertise on your blog. Alternatively, you can get paid commission by ‘affiliate’ selling, where you mention a product sold by someone else, and for anyone who that product, and was directed from your site, you earn commission
Traffic from search engines – Search engines regularly scan blogs and add them to their search listings. The more pages your blog has, and the more relevant it is to the search term, the higher up your link will appear. This is good because you will get more visitors each day, which means more people to click your link; either to your products, or someone else’s.
Feedback – A blog is a great way to get some feedback about your product. Make sure you enable the comments though, otherwise you won’t get any!
Reputation – As long as you don’t have any silly spelling or grammar mistakes, your blog will help build not only your company’s reputation, but also it’s brand awareness as well.
Free – Most blogs are free. Others, however, cost money, but these usually have better features and stats analytics.
Con’s
v Reputation – Mainly, this is a pro, because most of the time a blog will improve your company’s reputation. As said above, however, any mistakes, speaking out of term, or giving incorrect information can seriously tarnish your reputation. It takes years to build a reputation, and seconds to destroy it.
v Time – While blogging is mainly free, you may see it as free marketing. It’s not. Ever heard the phrase ‘Time is money’? Silly question, of course you have! A blog takes a lot of time to maintain, and if you fail to maintain it, it could harm your reputation.
v Legal – Beware of this one. If you offer advice to your readers, make sure you include a disclaimer. If one of your readers decides to take you up on your advice, and it all goes horribly wrong for them, chances are it will also go horribly wrong for you, as they will either spam your blog with negative comments, or in the worst case scenario, commence legal action against you.
Well, there you have it. The pro’s and con’s of blogging. I hope you found this post helpful, thanks for reading!
I currently work for Keepers Accountancy, and I am in charge of all of our Email Marketing, Blogging, Social Networks; basically everything e-marketing! If you would like to read more posts, publishing tips on topics such as e-marketing, finance and tax, then head over to http://www.keepers.info/blog Thanks for reading!
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We all want more visitors to our blog, but importantly we want them to become regular visitors. We spend time carefully writing posts that we hope others will find interesting. We blog because we have a passion, we have ideas and thoughts that we want to share with people in the hope that in someway they become informed.
Here are my 7 easy things to do in February to make your blog better.
Get listed
Make sure your listed at DMOZ
Make sure that the whole of your blog is indexed on the main Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Get a Google Sitemap on your blog to help to get it fully indexed
Nowadays it is almost taken for granted – so it almost always forgotten, get listed.
What to do: Make sure your blog is listed and index on Google, Yahoo and Bing etc. and if you haven’t already submit your site to DMOZ.
Write quality content.
If you think about it all bloggers are teachers. Our posts pass on information and our visitors read it. We transfer knowledge.Now think about why people visit your blog – you have information that they want to read.There is very little point in writing a post just to write a post, make sure that it contains something that your readers will want to read – and share.
What to do: During February, whenever you write a blog post think – is this the quality I want to share with my readers, will they learn from it?
Give a pat on the back
Visit other blogs and leave constructive comments not forgetting to link back to your blog.You spend time crafting your posts, guess what so do others. It is always nice to receive feedback on our work. How many times have you visited a blog and been inspired by a post?Tell the author, leave a comment it gives encouragement. It gives the writer a warm feeling of satisfaction that their hard work is appreciated. Remember we all like to be appreciated.
There are multiple benefits here, you can link back to your blog, perhaps even a specific post. As people read the blog comments (I do) they often visit linked blogs and if you have quality blog content you may have a new reader.
What to do: Every day in February visit a blog and leave a constructive comment.
Share posts you find with your blog readersIf you find a great blog post share it with your readers. Don’t forget that just because you found it doesn’t mean your readers will. We all love recommendations, a reader who visits a blog by recommendation is much more likely to become a regular visitor and contributor.When sharing don’t just cut and paste, write a critique, tell people why you liked (or disliked) the post, what you found interesting and why.
What to do: Every day in February share one new found blog post with your readers.
Use the social networks like twitter
Twitter, Facebook etc are now so popular that it is impossible to ignore them is this list of easy thinks to do. If you don’t already “twit” them start. It’s quite easy just sign up at www.twitter.com.The social media like Twitter is all about sharing useful information and is a great way of getting links back to your site which will boost your rankings and traffic. Beware if you continually promote your own content, or use automated systems for regular posts it is easy to get banned for self promotion. There are also a great amount of Spam posts on twitter, people who post every few minutes (sometimes seconds) on irrelevant things.Just as you should create quality content for your posts create quality content for your tweets. Only submit useful content that people may be interested in. You only have 140 characters to play with but you would be amazed what you do with them.
Retweet posts you have found via twitter, again people love recommendations
What to do: Every day in February share and retweet one blog post with your twitter followers.
Encourage people to “go deep”
Typically a new blog post will appear at the top of your home page pushing your previous posts down the list. The more frequently you post the more your previous posts will move. This can make it hard for people to find and then read a post they haven’t already read. Encourage people to “go deep”, go beyond the front page and find those valuable previous posts. Here are two easy ways to do that.
use a list of related posts
create internal links to other posts.
What to do: During February make sure put internal links within you blog.
Set some targets
Targets are a great way of measuring how effective your blog actually is. Most of us already use some form of statistics (Google analytics or other) to monitor our visitors, but do we actually “use” them. Probably not.So my final suggestion of easy things to do is to use this information to set targets. Some ideas might be “During February I want to:…… increase my daily visitors from “x” to “y”.”
… see my visitors visiting more pages – i.e. going in deep”
What do I really mean?
Increasing daily visitors is easy to monitor. You have “x” now and by the end of February you want “y”. So set a target say you want to increase your visitors by 20% or a specific number. By setting the target you can then plan how to achieve it.
Get people to visit more pages, in simple terms let us say you have 100 hits a day you probably know how many pages visits you have, say 200. This means that on average people visit 2 pages. Why not set a target and get people to visit 3 or 4 pages. It will mean that more of your valuable hard work in crafting posts is read. The more it is read the more change you have of it being shared and therefore the more change of new visitors.
And finally combine all the ideas in the list above into targets.
Here are my targets for February?
I want to see an increase in daily visitors of 50%
I want them to read 5 pages/posts not just 3
I will visit at least 1 new blog a day and leave a comment
I will share a new blog post every day withy my visitors
I will tweet at least 1 interesting blog post each day
What are your targets?
Russell Parrott is a former lecturer in small business devlopment at one of the UK’s foremost higher education establishments and now runs ezeewp designing and developing WordPress themes and plugins. His blog is about WordPress and internet marketing for the small business.
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When you are growing your business or blog, a link from a popular blog can help you tremendously. It will bring you more visitors and hopefully some secondary links or traffic from other bloggers who follow the popular blog. But how do you get a mention and link from these influential bloggers?
It’s not that hard. One way is to pitch your business or website by sending them an email. After all, bloggers can only write about something when they are aware that it exists. But email promotions are not enough to guarantee a link or mention, especially when the blogger in question is incredibly busy or receives lots of emails everyday. To increase the chances of a successful email pitch, you need to build a tactical relationship with the specific blogger.
Building the Right Connections
The most important thing to remember is that online networking shouldn’t be any different from the way you socialize off-line. You don’t just go up to someone and ask them to promote your product in their shop. At the very least, you need to introduce yourself and establish a relationship of trust before the other person will bite.
If you are a new name or face to them, they probably won’t give you the time of the day unless your story is groundbreaking. Don’t just drop an email and hope for the best. Leave nothing to chance. Build a working relationship with the right people for the best effect.
The following tips are good ways to get some attention or links from popular blogs. Because of their time-intensive nature, they might not be necessary for blogs with a small audience. These methods are free or cost just a little amount of money.
Find Your Angle. Every successful pitch needs an angle. If you are really interested in targeting a popular blog, take a look at what they publish regularly to get an idea of what they kind of content they will run. Create your content with this angle in mind and pitch it accordingly. Creating content of a specific slant is quite easy to do and the rewards are high if you succeed in getting a mention. You can always go back to your usual content type or format after that happens.
Create the Perfect Pitch. There are some general rules to follow. Make your email concise and compelling. Check your copy and punctuation. Introduce yourself briefly. Use the blogger’s first name. Don’t flatter too much. Refer to specific posts when making comments. Be polite. Focus on their interests and benefits. Offer alternative means of communication (e.g phone, IM).
Establish Prior Email Contact. Asking someone to link to or check out your site in your very first email is poor strategy. Build up a regular email flow by sending an email to the blogger, without selling or promoting your website. One of the best ways to do this is to ask a question or simply thank
them for their wonderful website and content, which you’ve found helpful.You can also give helpful feedback on the site in general. This instantly elevates you from the rest of the crowd when you eventually decide to pitch an article.
Use Comments to Network. Many people have written about how comments can get you traffic from blogs but their true value lies in their networking potential. Comments are one of the easiest ways to get the attention of any blogger. Make sure you comment regularly and contribute to the discussion. Refrain from pitching your own website or article within
the comment section. Try to get at least 10 comments on separate blog posts before you even consider pitching your article.
Promote them with Social Media. Bloggers regularly check their sources of traffic and submitting their website to social media sites like StumbleUpon and Digg is a great way to get on their radar. StumbleUpon in particular, can send hundreds of visitors to any site and its a really easy way to get noticed. Just remember to tie the social media account you are using
with your own website by inserting your URL or site name in the profile. Alternatively, forums are also a great way to share the blogger’s content.
Set up an Internal Connection. Very large blogs are businesses. Sometimes it is difficult to break through the attention barrier and get noticed because these sites receive a lot of email pitches everyday. The easiest way to jump ahead of others is to establish personal contact with an inside source. For example, some of the staff writers or editors have their own personal blogs. Go visit and comment on these blogs and befriend the specific individual. Another alternative is to find a friend who has direct contact with an internal staff and ask your friend to introduce you to the specific person.
Link to them and send them traffic. This works particularly well if you have a website or blog of your own. Link to the blogger you are targeting a couple of times and reference their articles. Put them on your blogroll if you have one. Remember, a link doesn’t cost you anything but it may get you traffic and exposure in return. This is a great way to let the blogger know that you support their website. Even if the specific blog gets many links everyday, you will eventually be noticed somehow, particularly if you can send them some traffic.
Get Friends to Email Pitch your Article. Get a friend or another blogger to promote your website by sending an email tip. Some bloggers are not in favor of excessive self-promotion so this might give your specific site or article some extra validity. If you want to, get a few other friends to email pitch the same article. Bear in mind that you shouldn’t use this technique
often because it is easy to tell if you’re artificially promoting your website via email.
Use Alternative Contact Channels. Another way to get instant attention is to contact the bloggers on alternative communication channels. This include microblogging platforms, social networks and Instant Messengers. Not every blogger will have their details listed publicly but for those that do, consider using these alternative channels. Not many people will use these methods of communication and you’ll tend to stand out immediately.
Donations and Tips. Tipping bloggers and offering donations is a great way to show your appreciation for their work. This can be easily done if they have a Paypal donation button somewhere but even if they don’t, you can also email them to request for a paypal address. This is low cost and simple but it can definitely increase your potential for getting a mention in the future.
You should build an advantageous relationship by interacting with the blogger and appealing to their self-interest. How much time you need really depends on how you good you are at networking. Try using any or all of these tips – they will definitely help.
Sofia SapojnikovaVesta Digitalhttp://ww.vestadigital.com
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