BestePortal Blog

Blogging is the word on the internet. The blog has created phenomenal impact on how online communication is being changed for the better. What is in your blog for you? How can you succeed at blogging? What can you do to enable your blog to grow into a successful marketing tool for your online business?

Tools and resources for blogging are plenty and at our disposal on the web. Still it is vital to maximize the effectiveness of your blog. Listed below are various strategies to succeed in blogging. The list is by no means exhaustive.

(1) Keep on posting regularly

In blogging, the most important requirement is to blog frequently, and over a long continued period of time. This is the only way for you to build and increase the quantity of your loyal readers. As long as readership increases, the possibility of bringing in traffic and money is high. It even works better when targeted traffic relating to your niche flows into your blog. Regular posting on your blog pays well eventually.

(2) Provide relevant content in your blog

You will be doing fine as long as content in your blog is relevant to what readers are searching for. Valuable information and links to other websites will help readers to return to your blog for more. Give your readers the best of content - informative, appealing, thought-provoking. They will love what they read and more importantly they will love your blog as the source of great content. Providing good relevant content is one of the many good strategies to succeed in blogging.

(3) Recommend interaction in your blog

The blog opens the door to interactive conversations. Bloggers share their opinions during their blogging sessions. As for a business blog, it is good to be prudent during blog conversations with other bloggers. If there is an interesting post in your blog, others upon coming to know about it will participate in a discussion or even in a debate. The blog allows readers to leave their comments, returns to your blog to read the replies, and may even offer another comment. Effective management of the comment box will certainly contribute to drawing in more traffic to your blog.

(4) Continual promotion of your blog

If you have so much good content posted on your blog but there are not much visitors reading them, it would all be sadly wasted. Promoting your blog continually using every available tool will pay handsome dividends eventually. It is vital that you use as much traffic generating tools that you can find on the web to promote your blog. Promotion must be done aggressively, because there are millions of blogs out there on the internet. More promotions will lead to increase in blog visibility.

(5) Build friendships and connections

The blog provides the best opportunity to build good friendships and strong connections that are so important for your online business. The concepts of community, linking, and even dialogue are an integral part of blogging. With the formation of friendships and strong connections, it will benefit your blog tremendously if you can get other blogs to link to you. This is one of the more important strategies to succeed in blogging because it will pave the way for more traffic to your blog.

(6) Make yourselves known

Blogging is fun; it brings out the lively side of you. This is because the blog provides you with the best opportunity to start networks with others, whom you can convert into buyers for your products. Social networking opens the door to marketing opportunities. You can make yourselves known by being active , participating in forums, blogs , and message boards. Your visibility in the blogging world will also increase tremendously.

(7) Provide great experience to visitors

When readers come to your blog, they will expect to see relevant content, easy navigation, and to experience warmth and friendliness while they are in your blog. It is so important to ensure that your blog provides the visitors with an experience that is really fulfilling and worthy. An intrinsic characteristic of the blog is being friendly and personal. Your blog must be able to allow visitors to read, chat and even socialize. Only then will they treat your blog as their favorite.

In conclusion, the search for information on the internet never stops. Blogging offers online marketers the best of opportunities to help feed information to those who need it. The blog is the best solution. You will definitely be required to understand and apply proven effective strategies to succeed in blogging.

The Giants of MarketingTGOM.USDragon Web SolutionsInternet Business AffiliatePlug-In-ProfitsInternet Marketing TrainingMarkMarkCarinaimarkethostingimarkethosting blogMyDnsStoreFree IM Reports

Blogging is one of the most popular activities people do on the Internet today. According to Technorati, there currently are seventy-five thousand (75,000) new blogs everyday and about 1.2 million new blog updates everyday. As the activity of blogging gets more popular, there will be more and more tools that will be created to specifically address the needs of the blogging population of the Internet users. This article will attempt to catalog some of the best ever blogging tools created for users. To help users find the tools that they need, these blog tools are classified here into four main categories - blog publishing, blog reading, blog searching and the blog toolbox - a collection of tools important to the serious blogger.

Blog publishing

Blog publishing tools can be further categorized into three sub-categories: Online blogging services, do-it-yourself blog publishing platforms, and accessory blog-publishing tools. Blogging services provide the blog engine that you need to get yourself started in blogging as well as the hosting. Though most of the services offer this for free, some of them require that you become paying members in order to fully enjoy all the benefits.

Blogger - Google’s Blogger is one of the earliest blogging services and it helped popularize blogging. It is one of the easiest ways to get started blogging because of the focus on usability and easy blog creation. The Blog this feature, which is integrated in many Google tools, makes posting to Blogger possible in many different situations. It is also integrated with Google’s Adsense advertising program that makes monetization of your blog quick and easy.

TypePad - Typepad is the largest paid-blogging service around. As mentioned, a paid subscription is required to create a blog using the service. It uses the Movable Type blogging technology but it caters more to the non-technical users.

Wordpress.com - one of the newcomers in the online blogging services, Wordpress gets its credibility from the success and popularity of the blogging engine that it uses -Wordpress.

Xanga - Xanga is one of the largest blog-networks, boasting a user base of 27 million users worldwide. It edges over its competitors by offering excellent community features such as blog rings, metros, and a social networking profile system.

MSN Spaces - Although it is relatively a newcomer in the blogging services space, MSN Spaces boasts of a huge user base, because of the ease at which existing MSN services users were able to start blogging. The integration with the rest of MSN’s services (hotmail, messenger) makes Spaces a very good blogging option for the existing users.

Do-it-yourself blogging platforms on the other hand, only provide the blogging engine. Although you have to find your own hosting service, DIY blogging platforms give you more control in configuring your blog. Below are some of the best DIY Blogging platforms.

Movable Type - Movable Type powers TypePad and it adds the usual advantages of a server-side blogging platform: flexibility, more advanced configuration, and total control over your blog.

Wordpress - Wordpress is an increasingly popular open-source blogging platform that is written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database.

Radio Userland - Radio Userland, one of the earliest content management systems used by the pioneering bloggers, is still a good blogging platform choice. It has solid RSS features that include a built-in aggregator. Configuration is done in a desktop web server then it is upstreamed or sync to the web server. This gives the blogger a cached copy of the whole blog.

Blog posting tools are third-party applications that are used to compose and publish blog posts. These tools usually support multiple blogging services and are ideal for those without a persistent Internet connection.

W. Bloggar and BlogJet - these are two of the best blog-posting tools in the market, and both are available for free. They support almost all of the blogging platforms. They do what most web-based posting apps does, including rich text editing, with the added feature of being able to save your drafts offline.

Performancing for Firefox - a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows you to immediately compose a blog post while using the Firefox browser. It is Ideal for active bloggers who use Firefox as their web browser. It automatically saves your unpublished posts.

Blog Reading

RSS/Atom aggregators and other RSS tools belong to this category.

My Yahoo - My Yahoo tried to bring the concept of RSS subscription to the Internet masses. Though it lacks the more advanced features, it serves well as a good aggregator.

Google Reader - Google’s web-based RSS aggregator that features an AJAX-driven user interface. It has a good support for tags or labels, and features a very nice reading interface. One of its best features is its labels-sharing feature that allows you to put aggregated content to your blog.

Bloglines - Bloglines is one of the most widely-used web-based RSS Reader. It uses the traditional two-frame reading interface, and subscriptions are grouped into folders. It has a good blog-suggest feature, that uses linking analysis to suggest which blogs might be of interest to you based on your existing subscription set. You can also share your subscriptions using Bloglines.

Blog Search

Tools used to search information and blogs, and to watch the blogosphere for topics or issues being actively discussed.

Technorati – Technorati is one of the best blog search engine, feature wise, and is indexing over 49.4 million web blogs. It serves as a one-stop shop for those who want to know the current happenings in the blogosphere, including features such as blog ranking based on linking, personal aggregator (for those who login) and many other nifty tools.

Sphere - one of the newcomers in blog search that came even after many other engines have folded down already. It promised to deliver more relevant blog search results, and it rightfully did so, as attested by its early beta testers. It features a “sphere it” feature that allows you automatically query http://sphere.com to see topics that might be related to what you’re currently reading.

Blogger’s Toolbox

A collection of other tools essential to the serious blogger

Mint / Measure Map /Google Analytics - these are three different tools used to analyze your blog statistics. Mint specializes in giving you a big-picture snapshot of your traffic, somewhat lacking in the providing specific details, something that Google Analytics is good at. Analytics can provide detailed information on what’s happening on your blog, which contents are popular, what keywords used in searches that bring you readers, and many others. It features a calendar to specify the time range of the analysis that you want to see. Measure Map, like Analytics is a fresh acquisition of Google, but still in early stages. It somewhat sits in the middle of Mint and Google Map in terms of what information is provided.

Akismet - Akismet is a highly-acclaimed anti-comment spam plugin for Wordpress blogs. It is free for personal use.

Feedburner - Feedburner is a tool that “burns” your RSS feeds in order to add tracking and analysis features. This way you can see statistics regarding your RSS subscribers.

The tools listed above are just a few of the many others that can help users; from those who are just starting to blog to those who want to become even better bloggers. It also includes some tools for searching and aggregating blogs, because a good blogger must learn to watch the blogosphere closely if i
t wants to be able to make more effective blog contents.

TGOM Market Place

There has been talk about using Wordpress beyond the typical blog set-up, into the realms of a full-fledged content management system or CMS. Yet, most people have no idea how this is even possible.

I have to stress that the default Wordpress software is intended to be a blogging tool, so if you’re trying to make it work like a different type of content management tool you’ll have to use the correct plugins (enhancements) and have the a clear idea of what you want to achieve.

While the exact step-by-step method is out of the scope of this article, lets explore some of the ways you can use Wordpress, as I have personally done before.

1) Wordpress as An Article Directory

To make Wordpress work as an article directory, you’ll need a special plugin, and a source for the articles. MyArticleMarketer.com is the perfect tool for this, as the articles there are usually human-approved. They also encourage free distribution of their articles to other article sites.

After you have set-up the Wordpress plugin, you need to sign-up for Article Marketer’s distribution list. By filling in their form and specifying the categories (or choose all categories), you automatically qualify to receive all old and new articles that are submitted to MyArticleMarketer.com

However, with Wordpress as an article directory, you’ll only be able to receive syndicated articles. Authors won’t be able to sign-up or create an account directly with you. It’s also against MyArticleMarketer.com’s terms or service to encourage authors to sign-up directly with you.

2) Wordpress as a Membership Site

You can set-up a free or paid membership site using Wordpress. All it takes is a few simple plugins to get the job done. Once you’ve installed the plugins, members will need to login to your site in order to view the content. You can also place a login form in your Wordpress theme files to make it easy for users to lo in and out of your membership site.

However, the plugins only create a simple membership system, so if you’re looking to create different membership levels and more advanced features, you’d probably want to sign-up with a professional membership system like AmemberPro.net and use their available plugins to ingrate with Wordpress.

At the time of writing, AmemberPro.net has available plugins for a reasonable cost and these will be installed by their support team, so you don’t have to worry about the technical setbacks.

3) Wordpress as a Classified Ads System

Wordpress can work like any other classifieds website too. Users can sign-up on your site and place classifieds in the form of new blog posts. They can even set expiry dates for their ads and specify listings or “wanted” ads.

However, you will need to create all the necessary categories and even create a sign-up information page to teach your users how to place ads. The upside of using Wordpress as a classifieds site is that you can also use tagging tactics to get traffic from social bookmarking sites and sites like Technorati.com

4) Wordpress as an Audio / Video Training Site

Using the membership plugins mentioned above or AmemberPro.net’s Wordpress compatibility plugins, you can create a membership site with Wordpress. Then, all you need to do is to add the “Podpress” plugin which takes care of all audio and video elements on your website.

You will be able to display and stream MP3 audio or FLV video using their built-in players. The Podpress plugin is really robust and also allows you to specify setting on iTunes, so you can make this commercially and available to the entire iPod / iTunes community.

As you can see by now, there’s a whole lot of possibilities when it comes to using Wordpress to the extreme.

I’ve created an entire video training system to help newbies and advanced marketers alike master Wordpress. Yet, every day brings new possibilities to using Wordpress as a complex CMS instead of the modest blogging tool it was designed to be!

TGOM Market Place

If you are new to the Internet and have spent some time here, you must have heard about “Blogging” and “Blogs”. But what exactly is a blog? How does it work? And how you can start one? Let me tell you one by one : So what is a Blog? In simplest language, a blog is a daily journal of your thoughts maintained you (a Blogger) on the web. When posting to a blog you will notice that it is arranged in chronological order - with the most recent additions on top. As you keep postings more and more posts, the older posts will enter into an Archive folder so that visitors can view your past posts easily. You can permit your readers to add their own comments/feedback on any of your Blog post. You can add audio to your blog known as Podcast, which readers can listen to. In fact it’s a great way remain in touch with your clients. How one can start a Blog? It’s extremely easy.

There are numerous options available. If you want to have an experience of Blogging without spending some cash, you can opt for the blogging service from Blogger.com or from Wordpress.com. These two websites are world’s most popular free blogs providers and have some great tools for starting a blog. On Blogger.com you also have the option to earn money from your free blog through Google Adsense program. Basically you only need to register at these blogging service for a free account, fill some information and lo your blog is live! Starting a Blog is just like signing for a new email account! However, I strongly advise you that after getting sufficient experience of running a blog on these free blogging platform, you should switch to a professional blog by purchasing own domain name and host. This can be easily done by using the Wordpress Blogging tool (wordpress.org) which is one of the most powerful and free blogging software on earth. Working on wordpress is as simple as a breeze. There are zillions of wordpress tutorials for newbie on internet.

Further, there are many web hosting companies which offered wordpress enabled site hosting where installing wordpress is just a matter of point and click. What a blog can do for me? Well, a blog can changed your life in reality. If your blog become successful, you will be freed from all your financial worries and problems. For many people, their blog has become a virtual moneymaking machine. If you have any doubts over power of a blog ask Steve Pavlina, the guy who is earning $1000 a day (probably more) from his personal Blog. What are other benefits of having a blog? There are many and some of them are: 1. A blog allows you to get to know your customers and their needs, as well as, allowing your customers to know the blogger - that is you 2. A blog is a strong communication tool to keep in touch with your customers. 3. A blog (if updated regularly) can provide daily, quality content - which the Search engines love and thus, increase your traffic. 4. A blog can be used to advertise your links. You can write review of an affiliate product in your blog post thus increasing the chance of a sale. 5. A blog can be used to bring social change as is doing by some bloggers from China, Myanmar and Iran despite stiff resistance from their Governments. 6. A blog can be used to answer inquiries that people may have about your product.

Well , the list is not exhaustive and I have not mentioned all the benefits of a blog as it’s an introductory article on blogging. In my opinion, there is only one weak point of starting a blog - you’ll have to maintain/update it regularly In fact a Blog is just like the fish shark. It’ll die if it stops. A blog needs constant feeding of your thought matter to exist. The blog should be maintained on a regular basis or it’ll lose its effectiveness. Now enough of my ranting on blogging. Get up and go blogging. My best wishes for your blog.

TGOM Market Place

Knowing “how” to think is much more important than knowing “what” to think. Those among us that understand how to gather knowledge, then how to use and apply what their small inner voice suggests are truly wise. The realization that our “inner voice” is our higher self (inject your own term, i.e., God, Angel, Spiritual Guide, etc.) asking to manifest itself can be a life changing event!

Okay, so what is a blog anyway? A blog is basically an online journal in which you can digitally pen down your thoughts, ideas, and opinions and practically anything that you want people to read. For more details go to: www.bloggers-guide-to-profit.com Blogs come in different styles, formats, and settings, depending on the preference of the user. Many blogging sites, offer built in features such as hyperlink, straight texts, pictures etc. Instead of writing texts, some bloggers choose to make their blogs more audio friendly, by using spoken word entries. This is called audio blogging.

Some blogging sites, even allow you to put video and mp3’s on your blogs. Blogging is popular all over the world.

Blog is short for the term web log. There are very few rules when it comes to blogging which means that bloggers have the freedom to express themselves in most any way they want. Perhaps the best thing about blogging is that most blogging sites are free. Anyone who wants to start a blog can do so by becoming a member of a blogging website of their choice. Once they’ve become members, they automatically become a part of that particular blogging community. They can browse through other blogs, and link them back to their own blogs. They can also make comments on other members’ blogs.

Bloggers usually communicate within themselves. This is one of the appeals of blogging. It creates a community of people sharing their ideas, thoughts, and comments with each other. Blogging is not just limited to personal usage. There are a lot of blogs that follow a theme such as: sports, politics, philosophy, social commentary, etc. These blogs build on their specific themes. In this way blogging becomes a medium in which people can share their knowledge and opinions about a variety of themes and topics.

Many groups exist within blogging communities. Of course, the members of the group have a common interest and the blogs provide a place for the group members to share their interest. Chats and forums are also contained within blogging communities.

A lot of entrepreneurs benefit from blogging by promoting their businesses on their blogs. With the rapid growth of blogging communities, entrepreneurs have found that this is a very cost-effective way to promote their products/services.

Some bloggers use their blogs as a means to advertise things such as Ebooks, while other bloggers, and use their blogs to shed light on current issues, events, news and catastrophes. It seems the uses of this communication medium are limitless!

Blogs are also being used by many teachers and professors. Lessons that they have discussed and taught can be posted on a blog which allows students access to this information 24/7. This provides a way for students to keep up with assignments and projects.

One of the advantages of blogging is that it is made up of only a few templates. In comparison to websites that are made up of numerous individual pages this is a much simpler format. For help visit: www.feed-reader-links.com this make it easier for blog users to create new pages, because it already has a fix setting that include: slots for title, body of the post, category, etc. This is especially useful for first time users, since they can start blogging right away. They can choose from a number of templates that blogging websites provide.

But by far, the most popular blog type is the one that takes the form of a personal journal. This is the kind that is usually used by first time bloggers. Individuals who want to document the daily struggle of their everyday lives, share poems, rant about their issues or perhaps world issues, or simply post their opinions will find that blogging offers a place to do just that.

Blogs varying in topics, themes, and set-ups, can be found in blog directories. Browsing through these directories is beneficial for first time users. They can check out a number of blogs before deciding on any. This provides an opportunity to get acquainted with what these blogging communities are like. An educated decision can then be made about which blogging community better meets the needs and appeals to the interest of the newcomer…allowing a first-timer to get exactly what he/she is after. Blogging is fun, simple, and easy.

TGOM Market Place

Even if you have a blog, still you need people to visit it right. It is more challenging than you think to make thousands flock everyday to read your blog especially with the millions of blogs online.  To make things even harder, blogs don’t have simple URLs or web addresses like websites. The blog URL usually is the name of the website hosting your blog then the name of your blog which turns up to be a very long URL.

Nevertheless, if there is a well there is a way! There are many effective techniques to use to promote your blog successfully. Some of these techniques are so simple that you will say to yourself why I didn’t think of that. Here proven free ways of promoting your blog:-

1-    Connecting with other blogs: - Blogs are a big community now. Even Google the biggest search engine has made a whole category by itself for searching for information in blogs. What I’m trying to say is you should connect with other blogs in the community to promote yours. You can visit other highly popular blogs and participate in discussions and make comments. Remember, every time you participate, leave your marks behind! Meaning a link to your own blog! Think of it as a piggy back approach. Also, other blog owners will be glad to put a link to your blog if you do the same.

2-    Your email signature: - Let me ask you this, how many emails you send a day? Or a better question will be how many in a week? I can safely say, at least 10 emails a week. There is this small section at the bottom of every email that you send and called the signature. Of course you know it! Your name, address, phone and other contacts are there right. Add your blog address too! That’s a free continuous advertising tool that you can benefit from.

3-    Web 2.0 anyone?: - That’s another name for the social networking mega trend that is spreading on the internet like wildfire! Face book, My space, Squidoo, Dig, linkedin, Fubar, deliciousio, Buzznet and hundreds more. These social networking sites are just stacked full of people who want to see what others got! Every time you make an entry in your blog, share it with minimum 5 social websites! Just open accounts in 5 to 10 social networking sites and post in parallel with you blog. Don’t forget to link to your blog!

4-    Using blog directories:- Think of it this way, in this age, the internet is full of millions and millions of websites, blogs, social sites, forums, e-zines, article directories and the list goes on. Because of this, thousands of directories have been set up to lead people to these blogs, social sites, forums, e-zines, article directories etc. Yes you got it! Blog directories. Include your blog in blog directories, but wait there are so many. Pick the directories that rank high in Alexa ranking. Download Alexa toolbar to help you determine which ones rank higher than others.

5-    Use newsletters to promote your blog: - You can actually do this in 2 ways. The first one is that many newsletters are looking for good and unique content. If you have good and unique content in your blog, a lot of these newsletters will gladly use your blog entries as content for their periodical mailings. Of course, they will reference the content back to your blog. The other way is to own a mailing list yourself and use your blog’s content as the newsletter’s content mentioning the blog with every mailing of course!

6-    Using forums and online groups: - Forums and online groups are the closest relatives of blogs. You can easily connect with other people in forums and groups and invite them to your blog to view your thoughts and insights and they will gladly come.

One final important note, the better the quality of the content you have in your blog, the better your chances of getting people to like your blog and keep coming back. No matter how long you work hard to promote your blog, if you don’t have good content that people will come back for, you will fail! Even search engines, which love blogs by nature, will not index your blog if it has low quality content.

For more info visit http://www.internet-business-and-money.com

TGOM Market Place

As WordPress and blogging become more and more popular, the list of customization options continues to grow. One can attribute that to each user wanting his or her blog to be unique or very much personalized. Who knows, one day a theme can be just as unique as the blog’s author! The following is an overview of the latest developments on WordPress themes.

WordPress Widgets

The blog software developer has recently come up with an edition of this plug-in for the full-version WordPress. A Widget here refers to those tools you can use to modify your site—its sidebar, design, or general layout—without having to know and use HTML codes. About a hundred Widgets are featured in the WordPress Widgets blog, and they are classified in categories such as photography, music, discussion, video, income, and links, among others. It is a fun and easy way of customizing your site, so that it features everything you care about, and nothing you don’t.

Not all themes are ready for these Widgets, however, and some modifications need to be done to include this fun feature in the sites that make use of such themes. http://Automattic.com gives full instructions on how to go about making your WordPress site Widget-friendly. WordPress is continuously adding to their already-vast selection of Widgets to suit their user’s whims and personalities.

Canvas Plugin

This blogger-friendly plugin has recently allowed blog users to create their very own theme for their WordPress blog. The good news is that this plugin allows users a pretty good level of customization without them having to study and use codes. The result: a site that looks very professional built within the range of a few minutes to a couple of hours. Even better news is that this plugin comes for free.

This stand-alone plugin opens up to a bare starting point, with a selection of blocks that you can include in your layout by drag-and-drop method. Among the many features of Canvas are Banner, RSS, Static Text, Feature, Digg, Flickr, Random Tagline, Comment, Category List, Asides, Archive, Description, Calendar, Search, Post, and Navigation functions. Meanwhile, an Ink tab gives the user the freedom to determine the styles to be used on the page, sans the need to check the actual stylesheet. This tab proves to be quite useful for beginners, because it features help links that corresponds to each theme component, the style of which you may be about to identify. These links load the template with an indication of the part in question, to give the user a clear idea of what effect the change will have.

“Being Moderated” Notification

It does not come as a surprise that some comments are being moderated by the recipient blog’s owner or moderator. However, it would be nice for you to let your eager comment writers know that you have received their comment, when the system is programmed to delay posting of comments on your blog until it has been read and approved by you. Without this notification activated, some of your readers may think that their comment just got lost and they’ll have to write their comment all over again, when in fact your blog has secured it and it’s only waiting for your approval. However, the blog author may need to be familiar with code to activate this feature. Nevertheless, it is one way to deter comment spammers from infiltrating your blog. Your may also word the notification in your liking. Here’s an example: “Thank you for your comment. It may take a while before your comment may be published. Please check back later.”

More Themes to Match Content

While it is all up to the blog author to decide, it would be quite useful to have a theme that will give first-time readers of your blog a pretty good idea of what to expect by simply looking at the design in use. For this reason, WordPress theme designers are coming up with more specific themes to match a variety of specific types of content. Experts say that the first several seconds spent by a visitor on your blog determine the impression they get of your site. So if your site fails to capture attention right away, then it’s most likely that you’re losing potential repeat readers or site visits.

When designing your site or choosing the appropriate theme, keep in mind that the first concern of a site visitor is whether or not the site has the kind of information needed by him or her. The visual elements, being much faster to grasp than the textual, will help in a big way. If the theme you choose does not correspond to the general content of your site, then attracting more followers will need more effort. Whether we like it or not, looks matter for a lot of people, as this is how beliefs and opinions are initially formed.

WordPress Theme Contests

To ensure your steady stream of new themes, WordPress and certain partners have organized theme contests to discover and recognize the best themes that have cropped up lately. Last year even saw several competitions that attracted theme creators and users alike. This year, however, the WordPress camp has witnessed a slowing down in the production of themes, perhaps due to the fading novelty of it all, not discounting the fact that a lot of those who submitted themes before did it for free.

Nevertheless, customization of WordPress blogs still holds quite a lot of promise, with the arrival of new customization features, such as the Canvas and Widgets plugins. It also promises more highly-customizable themes in the future. For now, you would already be missing out on a lot if you are not already trying out the latest WordPress customization plugins. You can also try modifying some basic features, such as whether your front page should show excerpts or the full blog entries, or changing the number of posts that will show up on your blog index, or both. Whatever you choose, there are hundreds of themes available and other options for you to use, to get as close as ever to your most desired look for your blog.

Stellenbosch

The term BLOGGING is phenomenal! Blogging has dramatically changed the communication scenario over the years, making it to be much easier, more personalized and more effective. Blogging has been the success factor for many bloggers. There are several important keys to success in blogging. These keys will unlock many stubborn obstacles along the blogging trail.

Many prerequisites must be fulfilled even before thinking about achieving success in blogging. They include having a clear and definite perception of what type of blog will best fit your marketing plans, how can the blog be tracked and how will comments be handled. Planning the most appropriate blogging strategy is another aspect that should not be omitted.

(1) Adhere to the culture of blogging

The culture of blogging requires the blogger to be real. This means that you must be identified with your audience, do everything for the readers, write good content that will captivate them and make space for their interaction. Regular posting, creation of links, providing good comments on other blogs, pinging your blog upon its completion, application of feeds, creation of catchy and compelling titles for search engines, and adding the element of fun - these are some of the keys to success in blogging.

(2) Bring in the traffic

Traffic is essential to blogs. Analyze the number of visitors per day, pages visited thus far, and the origin of these visitors. Blogging encourages conversations, therefore, it is important to look at the quality of the visitors and their visits. The sources of such incoming traffic may include search engines, links from other blogs, and other normal marketing efforts. It would be beneficial to study them to improve your strategy for building traffic. Factors such as providing comments on your blog, including interviews on your blog, and providing prompt responses to questions posted by other bloggers, play a vital role in stimulating traffic growth to your blog.

(3) Be actively involved in conversations

Blogging requires conversations. Conversations will lead to the development of traffic for your blog. It is an important key to getting success in blogging. Invite other bloggers to your blog. Link more to other bloggers. If there is an incoming link to your blog, it implies two things: (a) that you have content that interests the other blogger (b) that the door to exponential growth in traffic is being opened. Incoming links are precious, even if they are from minor blogs.

(4) Prepare for search engine optimization

Getting more readers and customers to your blog can be achieved when you have your blog prepared for search engine optimization. That is, make your site friendly to search engines, which can affect your traffic positively and negatively. Certain factors that will help include having meaningful addresses for instance www. ezinearticles.com, having links to the blog home page and main home page, and putting up great page titles.

(5) Extend warm welcome

Getting visitors to stay longer on your blog requires diligent work in extending your warm welcome. Encourage visitors to look around and ask questions. Provide a short introduction about yourself. Show them recent posts and links to other blogs of interest. Provide visitors the easy access to content that interest them by way of feeds. They will be able to subscribe to your blog and become readers eventually.

(6) Make your blog known

One of the keys to success in blogging is through promotion using conventional marketing methods. You can include your blog on your business card. This will create a viral effect, and people will come to know about your blog. With good content on your blog, visitors will be in for positive experiences. This opens the door to the building of relationships.

(7) Build the relationships

In blogging, relationships bring bloggers closer. Many lessons in blogging can be learned . Blogs can be better improved with ideas and contributions from other bloggers. Personalization is integral to blogging. A honest and transparent relationship brings out the best of contributions from every blogger. Positive experiences can be gained. Feeding comments on other blogs, linking to other blogs, sending emails to other bloggers, and even talking to other bloggers through innovative Skype - all these are vital keys to success in blogging.

(8) Discard all distractions

The blog for all its intentions is a good way of communicating with other bloggers, and in the process gain their trust and to build good relationships through good content on your blog. Preferably, ads should be not placed on your blog.These may distract your readers as well as not enhancing the value of your own business. Conversations are the main factors that will support your goal in trust and relationship building. Offering blog specific promotions such as contests centered on the ad, being involved in interesting charity events, or establishing a podcast interview with the advertiser, are sound ways to putting ads on your blog, if really needed to.

(9) Develop a community for your blog

No blog is an island. Increase the visibility of your blog. Build a community on your blog to share ideas and interests. A community will open up new opportunities. It provides new challenges, and it never fails to impart important information that will benefit others. Everyone in the community will stand to gain from the dissemination of latest news about new job opportunities, new fitness equipment or even a new hairstyling salon that may be of interest to the relevant business. Information from high profile bloggers will also add value to the knowledge of the community.

Blogging enhances the visibility of your business. It provides great opportunities for the exponential growth of your business. The keys to success in blogging have been listed above, but the ultimate outcome is still dependent on your commitment to your blog, the amount of hard work that you are ready to put in, and your desire to succeed.

The Giants of MarketingTGOM.USDragon Web SolutionsInternet Business AffiliatePlug-In-ProfitsInternet Marketing TrainingMarkMarkCarinaimarkethostingimarkethosting blogMyDnsStoreFree IM Reports

Wordpress is the best tool for Blogging. Moreover it has become popular as Content Management System. As its functionality can be enhanced by using pluggins .Content Management is total content control. With a content management system, or CMS, you can maintain consistency across your site with a few clicks. Whether brand messaging, news, or even look and feel, a CMS makes site wide maintenance simple and quick. But there’s more to it than that.

With the many capabilities of a Wordpress, businesses can leverage this technology to meet business goals, drive demand, and create deeper user engagement.

By immediately posting news, comments, and other information, a company can respond almost instantaneously to changes in the digital marketplace. Whether this means adding, deleting, or editing live content, a wordpress is a tool that should be carried in every webmaster’s toolbox.

Wordpress is easy to customize

Pick a theme that vaguely resembles what you would like i.e. 2 column, 3 column etc. I’ve chosen to use the default template for this example.

If choosing other than one of the defaults, download and extract the file to the your wordpresswp-contentthemes directory

Either extract the same downloaded file to the same place giving it a different name or simply navigate to the themes folder and copy/paste it into same directory giving it a different name.

You now have 2 identical themes one with the correct name and one with the name you gave.

From Your Theme directory, Open up the style.css file in your favourite text editor and edit the first few lines to suit e.g. Theme Name, Theme Description, version and urls. I made the changes shown below:

That’s it, save and close the style.css file. Then, if you haven’t already, upload those two theme directories (default and MY Theme) to the themes directory online.

Login and Open up your WordPress dashboard under Presentation > Themes you should see both themes, with the correct names beside them, activate the one with your name.

At this point this theme is exactly the same as the original (default), and if any edits you make to your theme do not do as expected, then you can do real-time switching back to the default.

Wordpress as a E-commerce Website

The lite version of this plugin allows you to sell products via PayPal only. Whilst it’s called ‘lite’ it’s not that simple as such. You can have your products in categories, there’s a shopping basket and it uses the PayPal IPN for instant notification. I’ve not gone through the whole process but I would assume that if you’re selling a digital product it will also then provide a download link to the buyer to download the product, as I’ve had the option to set how many times the product can be downloaded by the buyer.

WP e-Commerce is just like any other plugin for the installation. Just unzip the files and upload the directory to your plugins directory, and activate it in the WordPress admin. You then get an extra menu for it, where you can set your shop settings, other preferences, and start adding categories, brands and product information. It can deal with physical products or digital products, the latter was what I was interested in. You can also easily select which fields to have in the form on the front end, and which of these fields to send PayPal so that they’re prefilled. As I’m only looking to sell digital products I took the address details out as these are not needed.

Marketers need to remember that a wordpress gives them the ability to leverage unique pieces of content across multiple sites while providing multi-lingual support and content, a critical factor for companies with an international reach and online presence.

Wordpress as a Forum Website

WP-Forum is a WordPress plugin that enables you to have a forum directly attached to your WordPress installation. As one of the more popular forum software available today, SMF would be a good choice if you have no particular preference towards any forum solution. It’s still pretty bloated/bulky and can be difficult at times to customise (though less than many alternatives really), so I can’t say it’s my first choice solution at the moment. And while its backend integration with WordPress just requires the installation of a single WP plugin, I can’t seem to find a proper guide on layout integration yet. Here’s how you do it:

1.Install either one of two “bridge” plugins, i.e. WP SMF Bridge Plugin 1.0 or the CMS & SMF Plugin. While both provide user account integration (log into/register via WP = log into SMF/register into SMF), listing recent forum topics/messages on your blog, and etc., the latter plugin hooks WP to SMF via a portal CMS known as Enigma. This results in a more powerful setup, but also a more complicated one. So, for those who just want a forum to use with WP, I suggest using the former plugin.

2.Now that we have our backends integrated, layout is next. It’s a pity, however, that there doesn’t seem to be a step-by-step guide on how to do this. So, for now, you’re on your own on this. SMF does have documentation on how to create/edit its themes though.

More SEO For Wordpress

The Meta-Description is used by Google and other search engines to provide the description of a page. This is quite important - particularly since Wordpress by default does absolutely nothing about it. wpSEO can generate post descriptions in a variety of ways, however in most cases it makes sense to cite the actual postings - automatically. If you’d like to be more precise, you can also provide a brief summary for Meta-Description manually. The definition of used Meta-Keywords offers you more flexibility. If you are already using the plugins UT’W or STP, wpSEO can use your tags as keywords. Otherwise the keywords will be automatically generated from the article, which is not always a sound solution for efficient SEO. By default wpSEO generates keywords fully automatically, however you can let it extract text passages marked in bold or italics or in -tags. You can also use filters to ensure that only relevant data is being used

To install the plugin, it’s enough to upload it to the plugins directory (wp-content/plugins) and activate it in the Wordpress engine. You should avoid using two or more plugins (as mentioned before) at the same time. Previously installed plugins can cause conflicts, just like manual entries in your header.php file. To make sure the wpSEO is working properly, you should at least deactivate similar tools; better - delete them.

A last useful feature you might never use, but would be happy to have available once you need it: you may export all your settings as an XML-file and use them for another blogs. Therefore it’s very easy to maintain the optimal configuration and adjust it to a number of blogs.

At it’s very core, Wordpress content management is about reaching the right person, at the right time, with the right CONTENT. This creates an engaging user experience that drives demand. The dynamism of content management, and the re-purposing of relevant and engaging content, is an evolution in online strategy that will drive strong results for any organization.

Mark Salter

Do you blog? I hope you do, because blogging can do a lot for your freelance writing career. For a writer, blogs are not only an instant-publishing tool, they’re also an opportunity to find great writing jobs.

Blogs are a phenomenon. Although many “A-list” bloggers have been publishing for years and have built up strong audiences, it’s only in the past couple of years that blogs have become mainstream.

Let’s get definitions out of the way. What’s a blog? A blog is just a Web site in which the site’s pages are (usually) published in chronological order. Blogs are based on templates, and have a simple navigational structure, based on chronology, and on categories.

The major benefit of a blog is that it’s instant. If I want to post a message to a blog, I can do it in seconds. Contrast the “instant” nature of a blog with publishing in a newspaper or a magazine. The other major benefit of a blog is that it can be free.

How to Get a Blog Job

Top blogs are usually written by a group, rather than by a single individual, because high-traffic blogs are updated several times a day. This means that many, many blog jobs are available. All you have to do is look for them.

However, before you start looking, create your own small blog first. Anyone who hires you will want to know that you understand the nature of blogging.

Your blog should be in an area in which you want to be hired to blog. For example, if you have experience in health topics, then create a blog on a health topic. Or perhaps you enjoy celebrity gossip. This is a very popular topic in blogging, as it is in magazines, so create a celebrity gossip blog.

With your own small blog created, it’s time to find blog jobs. Yes, that’s plural. Most professional bloggers blog for a stable of blogs. Several colleagues blog for ten to 20 blogs. One friend blogs for many businesses. At last count, he was blogging for 30 blogs, and making an extraordinary income.

There are many ways you can find blogs jobs. The most common way is to approach a business which as a Web site, but which doesn’t have a blog, and to propose a blog to them. If you’re new to blogging, you may find this approach a little intimidating, so let’s look at other ways suitable for new bloggers.

Here are three ways:

1. Use the out-sourcing sites

There are dozens of out-sourcing sites, and you’ll find blog jobs advertised there. Bid on projects, but don’t under-price your services. All writing takes time, and if you under-bid, you’ll be too busy blogging to look for better paying blog jobs. So bid a sensible amount. Genuine buyers will hire you.

2. Approach other bloggers

Another easy way to get blog jobs is to approach other bloggers. This is simple and it works, but although I’ve been blogging since 2001, I’m rarely approached. Maybe such a simple solution doesn’t occur to people.

Since businesses who want to hire bloggers do approach me, I’m happy to make introductions, as are all bloggers.

So politely approach bloggers, and ask that they keep you in mind to recommend for blog jobs.

3. Advertise your availability on your own site

Please remember to advertise your availability on your own site. Again, this method is so simple that it’s often overlooked. I’ve lost count of the numbers of blogs I’ve seen of people I know are looking for blog jobs - but there’s no mention of this on their own blogs.

So go and get some blog jobs - they’re widely available, they’re fun, and they’re profitable too.

Mark Salter