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Methods Of Successful Blogging

has become the trend of the day. Many webmasters have turned to content management systems like blogs to power their websites. Blog have also become a great tool that most businesses use to get the attention of more customers. With all the the different blogging software and options available nowadays, setting up a blog is much easier than it used to be.

For the independent professional, blogs are an easy communication tool to enhance credibility and trust among customers. Besides that, blogs make it easy for other people to locate you on the Internet.

But then, 9 out of 10 blogs that are created have the tendency to be abandoned because they can take up a lot of time. And time is one thing that professionals do not have much of. The result may not seem apparent in the beginning but it will be later on.

There are some keys to making your blog work best for you, instead of you working for it. Once you learn and practice these steps, it will only take you less than 20 minutes to post one entry.

A little more time should be spent reviewing, reading and commenting on your blog and other blogs sites on the internet. Interacting with your blogs visitors and interacting on other blogs will help increase your traffic and keep your subscribers and readers coming back to your blog.

Here are a few keys to a successful blog?

1. Write important and unique content. You can also narrate and share stories to highlight your knowledge and expertise. Never forget how telling your readers how you deal with clients or problems. Let them know the value of what you are offering. And make it easy for them to contact you if they have questions to ask or if they want to avail your services.

2. Post at least tree times a week or as much as once a day. These need not be very long articles. Short articles are fine as long as long as the essence and value is there.

3. Link to other useful resources available on the web. This is very important in order to build traffic and expanding your target market. You can research online for topics you can post that is related to your sites offering. Try to visit and comment on other blogs. Let them know that you are spending time reading about them so they know that you are always available.

4. Submit your blog to blog directories and do trackbacks. Blogskinny.com has a long list of directories, a link should be on the sidebar here. Trackbacks are links to another sites blog post within your blog post. Making reference to another blog post you liked may show as comment on that post and get a link back to yours.

5. Keep track of your visitors. Have a counter set up in your blog so you will see who has been reading your posts. This will also help you in figuring out the number of people that are coming in and coming back to your blog. There are for that do this.

6. Make a list of all your products and services. Check if the landing pages are linked correctly. Nothing can turn off visitors quickly than having been linked to some site not in any way related to your blog. If you have a shopping cart, you can use your affiliate links and ad tracking features for easy access.

7. Remember to link to your own website or other blogs you author and vice versa.

8. Blogs should not be pure sales talk. Readers are a lot smarter nowadays. They can sense marketing from afar. If this happens, they will not be interested in continuing on because they do not want to be marketed on. They encounter those things everyday so spare them the suffering.

9. Be patient. Although there are some blogs that work right away, some takes time. Update, update and update but do not expect instant result to come pouring in. Just sit back and think of other techniques you can use to your blogs to make it more successful.

10. Try not to use PLR articles like I have with this post! If you have read this article and know my blog and writing this is a lazy method for me to make an occasional post. Yes I admit it! I didn’t write this whole post but I did rewrite it a bit and it may have been faster to write my own post.

should not be set aside as something unimportant. It can be very useful for you once you know what you are doing.

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Dude Where’s My Blog

lost_blog.jpgMost people who blog know of the controversy surrounding the question about what blogging platform is better, and if a self-hosted blog is better than using Blogger by Google. I stumbled on a forum post today that should get some of you thinking about where your blog is hosted and why it is so important to take control of your blog.

Taken directly from a thread on the Digital Point forum here is the desperate plea from a Blogger blogger:

Hello friends,
When I checked my blogspot blog today, its showing the message “Error - Page is Not Found”.
When I checked in the Dashboard, there is nothing in it.I have lost a total of 5 blogs and one of them is a popular one too.
I have around 1000 Page impressions per day from it and I have updated it by the last post 2 or 3 weeks back.And I have PR3 too.

I didn’t get any messages from the Blogger team related with this issue.
Why its happened?
What I have to do now?

Will I get back my blog?

The whole thread can be found here: My blog disappeared suddenly - Please help

As of the time of this post the blogs are still gone and the poor blogger has no idea how to get them back up or even salvage any of the lost content. I wish I could help and others have tried and all that he can really do is try to contact Google. Maybe Google didn’t like his content, maybe it’s a Google server issue, but regardless he has to try to get service from a company he pays nothing to. So what kind of service can be expected for something you don’t pay for? You can probably tell that I am a big fan of self-hosted blogs, but no matter what platform you chose you are best to have control over it and hosted on your own domain.

In this post I make the argument for WordPress over Blogger: WordPress Or Blogger Is WordPress Better but again no matter what platform you prefer you better take over control of your blog!


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Add A Picture To Your WordPress Blog

As the Tagline states: WordPress Guides For The Geek Impaired, I at times forget what it is like to be a newbie blogger with little or no basic HTML knowledge. So here is a simple to add a picture to a WordPress Blogs sidebar.

The first step is to upload a picture to your hosting account either with an FTP client or from your hosting accounts file manager. Next is to get the actual URL of your picture or image. To test if you have the correct URL of the image, type or paste the URL into your browser address bar and see if the image appears.

To add the picture to the form the : click Presentation then Widgets. Open or add a text widget and use the code shown below substituting the URL with yours and add a brief description of the image after the alt tag:

<img border="0" src="http://www.yoursite.com/imagefolder/pic.JPG" alt="a Brief Description" />

Close the text widget and click Save Changes.

If you are placing the image within a text widget that has other items in it you may want to add some space between the two items by placing a break or two before and or after them like this:

<br/> <img border="0" src="http://www.yoursite.com/imagefolder/pic.JPG" alt="a Brief Description" /> <br/>

You can also center the image by adding the next bit of code but be sure to take note of the closing tag added here! If you don’t close the div tag it will center everything shown below the image and could make your blog look terrible!

<br/> <div text-align="center">
<img src="http://www.yoursite.com/imagefolder/pic.JPG"
alt="a Brief Description" /> </div> <br/>

You can also specify the size of the image by adding the next bit of code and experiment with changing the size:

<p text-align="center"> <img src="http://www.yoursite.com/imagefolder/pic.JPG"
alt="a Brief Description" height="84" width="113"
></p>

There are more HTML and XHTML elements that can add a border or padding around the image. Remember any type of HTML or scripts can be added to a WordPress text widget, that is what makes them so flexible.

Learn more about text widgets here: Working With WordPress Text Widgets


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Removing The Title of WordPress Pages

Removing the title of the page that appears just above the content may be something to consider if you are using static front page or just want a page on your blog that looks a little different than the rest of your pages. This short will give you some idea what to remove from your page template file.

In a few other posts: How To Use A Static Front Page With WordPress and: How To Create A Custom WordPress Page Template I cover how to create and use a static front page for WordPress. This is great option to .

To remove the title of your page that appears on the page above the content you will need to edit the page.php file or the custom page template file you created.

Open the file from either the WordPress dashboard or on your hosting account. Instructions to do this should be in one of the above mentioned posts. Make sure to make a backup of the file you are editing to fix any mistakes! Now look for and remove the code that looks like this:

<h2><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”<?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

Save the file and look at a page that is using the page template you just edited. The title of the page should no longer appear above the content.

You may also want to further customize your static WordPress front page by using a separate sidebar.


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WordPress Or Blogger Is WordPress Better

question.jpgBoth Blogger and offer free hosting on either blogspot.com for Blogger and WordPress.com for WordPress. Both of these have somewhat limited options as far as additional features and commercialization or making money with a blog hosted on their servers. Your blog can be shut down if they don’t like your content. So you don’t control your own intellectual property.

Hosting a blog on your own domain is the best way to go, the web is full of guides and questions about moving a blog to their own domain and hosting account for a reason. And just about everyone who started on the free hosted sites that got serious about blogging ends up either moving their blog or regretting they used a blog hosted anywhere else but a site they have full control over.

For self-hosted blogs the options offered by and the lack of them in Blogger are the big differences. While both can very easy for a beginner to use to just make an occasional post and if that is all you will be doing then it may not matter. However the scalability of WordPress and the features that can be added as the blogger gets more serious is where WordPress really stands apart.

WordPress is an open source code content management system that anyone can use and edit for free. WordPress is self-contained when installed on your site and is not dependent on any other outside source to maintain and run. Blogger blogs on your own website are still accessed on and the script is controlled by the blogger site. In very basic terms you create a post on Blogger and it is allowed access to your hosting account to create a webpage or the post.

The look of a blog is very important to most people as well and there are thousands and thousands of free WordPress themes available. And to look at some of them you couldn’t tell they were a blog. Changing a WordPress theme is as simple as uploading it to your server and clicking on the theme from the dashboard. Items on the WordPress sidebar can be added, moved and changed very easily with drag and drop using widgets. Changing your WordPress theme will maintain all the content, links and sidebar items. I don’t know how many themes are available for Blogger but if you edited your themes HTML or CSS, changing the theme, or template as Blogger calls them, it will loose any customization. Oh and I can usually spot a Blogger blog a mile away.

Other options available in WordPress:

  • Custom Permalinks - using only the category and the post title in the posts URL looks better and helps with SEO.
  • Plugins - Plugins add new features and functionality to the blog. These can be added as the blog evolves.
  • Static Pages - The option to create a page that will not go into the blog loop like a post. Using a static page for the main blog page, a WordPress blog can be used like a regular website in fact I have recently converted a PIPS site to WordPress using this option.
  • Categories - While Blogger has recently added categories I have yet to do much research on or have seen many of them. In WordPress all posts are added into a category of your choice and your visitors need only click a category on the sidebar to find more information they may be interested in, keeping them on your site.
  • Self Pinging - WordPress has a built-in pinging option with plugins available to enhance it. You can also add and remove the individual sites that you want pinged. Blogger blogs need pinged manually and using different services to ping may send duplicate pings to some sites.

I have read that Blogger blogs get indexed faster by Google than blogs and that might be true. However your self-hosted blog will also get indexed fairly quickly if setup correctly. One thing I have experienced with all my WordPress blogs and even while researching on Google: I have yet to see many or any Blogger blogs show up in the top of a Google search. Have you?


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