Blogging Secrets

Introduction to Blogging

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Weblogs are commonly known as "Blogs". They are personal websites consisting of regularly updated entries displayed in reverse chronological order. Some read like a diary or journal with the most recent entry at the top.

The more common use for blogs is hosting articles. When you post an article on your niche topic, it is know as publishing that article. If the blog software was set up with the article announcement plugins, the article will "ping" the article directories. In other words, the blogging software with notify the other sites that you published a new article. That is known as pinging.

People search those article directories for information on topics of their interest. When your article is announced, it will usually be indexed within a few hours. Traffic to your blog can happen just as fast if the article is unique, intriguing and has a good, keyword-rich title.

Blogging Software and Services

There are free blogging services that allow you to set up a free blog to publish your articles or personal journal. Some of the free blogs include blogger.com, livejournal.com, soulcast.com, blog.com and wordpress.com, who also provides the blogging software that you can install and manage on your own website.

WordPress is our favorite blogging software for several reasons: It is free, highly customizable with thousands of site templates, expandable with many plugins and easy to maintain. Once set up on your website, the most you will do is publish articles and manage the comments that are posted by others. Installation is very easy if your web host uses the cPanel website control center software with Fantastico built in. Fantastico is a point and click software management tool that saves countless hours installing and updating software on your website.

Some of our favorite WordPress plugins, in alphabetical order, are:

Adsense-Deluxe - Easily put Google AdSense Ads on your in your articles and pages. You can set up multiple formats depending on the position you want to use them.

Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg.

Autometa - Automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post. You will have to edit the tags after they are generated.

>Bannage - Ban users by name or IP address who abuse your blog (it happens)

BDP RSS Aggregator - Show titles of articles from other blogs on your sidebar. Good for SEO and cross referencing.

CompleteRSS - Makes sure your RSS Feeds contain full article text and are fully valid.

Feed WordPress - Syndicates content from other newsfeeds and lists them on your WordPress webblog. Great for SEO by including snippets from related blogs on yours.

Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo!, are notified about the update.

HeadSpace2 - Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many other goodies. By John Godley.

Jerome's Keywords - Allows keywords to be associated with each post. These keywords can be used for page META tags, included in posts for site searching or linked like Technorati tags. By Jerome Lavigne.

Lightbox 2 - Plugin that turns linked images into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups instead of just linking to the full-size image. When an image is clicked, it is given full focus while the rest of your page is put into the background. Visitors can view all of the images on your page like a slideshow.

Login LockDown - Adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range. Distributed through Bad Neighborhood. By Michael VanDeMar.

Maintenance Mode - Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Navigate to Options >> Maintenance Mode to get started. By Michael Woehrer.

HOT! MaxBlogPress Stripe Ads - Forget pop-ups, float-overs and other intrusive advertising methods. MaxBlogPress Stripe Ads puts a thin stripe on either top or bottom of your blog with your message. Some of the options include setting the colors, showing the stripe after your visitor has been there several times, always showing, hide after x number of visits. See it in action on the Affiliate Referral Sources Blog.

podPress - Add podcasts to your blog so your visitors can listen to your articles instead of reading them.

Post-Announce (the original) - This plugin will allow you to notify users who subscribe to your blog when a new article is posted.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer - Optimizes the pinging function of wordpress. It saves your blog from getting black listed at ping services by avoiding unnecessary ping as well as it make sure to ping your blog when pinging is actually needed. By Pawan Agrawal.

SH-Autolink - In posts and comments, it transforms predefined words automatically into hyperlinks. Stop manually entering links into your articles! Use this instead.

ShareThis - Let your visitors share a post or page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites. By ShareThis and Crowd Favorite.

SimpleTags - Allows you to create a list of Technorati tags at the bottom of your post by providing a comma separated list of tags between the [tags] tags.

Sociable - Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.

Subscribe Me - Displays a list of subscribe buttons for popular news sites.

WordPress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Manage >> Backup to get started. By Austin Matzko.

Wordpress Mobile - A plugin to let you post and upload files to your WordPress blog from your mobile phone. It also enables mobile phone users to view your WordPress posts, archives, comments and pages in a mobile friendly environment. Users can even reply via comments. This plugin supports MTLD and W3 best practices plus optional mobile revenue from admob.com. It is a quick and easy way to make your WordPress posts mobile ready. By Andy Moore.

Wordpress Post Emailer - This plugin will allow you to notify users who subscribe to your blog when a new article is posted.

WP-Cache - Very fast cache module. It is composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to Options >> WP-Cache. By Ricardo Galli Granada.

WP JavaScript - Some nice javascript snippets for your head. Go to Options >> WP-JavaScript to configure. By Martin Hipfinger.

Adding Images to Your Blogroll

A Blogroll is simply a list of links to your favorite sites. You can categorize them or list them all under the Blogroll category.

Spicing up your links can be done with images. If you have a folder that is set to allow uploading files, you can easily add those images as links instead of plain text. Go to Write Post or Write Page. Scroll down below the editing window and you will see a form to upload files. Upload the image, then go to Manage > Files to get the link to the file.

When you are adding an entry to your Blogroll, there is an option to include an image. Paste the link to your image in the box and add that entry.

Making Money From Blogging

On the business side of blogging, you publish articles to get others to visit your site and read what you have published there. Once they have read one of more of your articles, you will give them a link to your main website where you can offer more information or products for purchase.

Getting trusted as a content provider takes time and persistence with writing good articles. Your time can be paid for through the use of ads placed sparingly within your articles. Those ads can be from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) services such as Google AdSense or the Yahoo Marketing Network. The idea with those services is that the ads shown are, or should be, related to the content in your article. When your readers click one of the ads, you get paid the a percentage of the amount the advertiser is willing to pay.

Instead of making just a few cents for each click, you can advertise your other products, services, or even affiliate links. Although you will not earn money when the link is clicked, you will earn commission when a sale is made. In most cases, that commission will be higher than the per-click amount.

Putting your own ads in the articles is quite easy. You can either create a small table that allows two ads, or simply use a banner. When writing your articles, copy and paste the code for the ad table or banner directly into the article.

Learn more about setting up your blog, making money from it using Google AdWords, changing themes (because visual styles count) and step-by-step tutorials, you owe it to yourself to check out the newest edition of the Super Affiliate Handbook.

Once you have set up your blog and start writing articles, you will want to start driving traffic to it. To start generating website traffic on a small budget, you should learn How to Get Free Website Traffic.