BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

Image by Andrew Wilkinson via Flickr

Sometimes its nice to know who’s been visiting your blog and where they came from, rather than just a numbers game – “i had so many visitors last week” etc. Making good use of visitor statistics can help you fine-tune copy and content if you’re a serious online marketeer.

And if you’re not, then there’s still nothing more satisfying than seeing daily visitor numbers rise week on week. If nothing else, it proves you’re doing something right.

Blogger and Wordpress blog platforms make it really easy to quickly add stat programs like Google Analytics and StatCounter through their Admin User Panels. In Blogger’s case, you simply need to add a html/javascript gadget and copy and paste the StatCounter tracking code into it. It really is that simple.

However, when I came to add StatCounter stats to my Tumblr account, I found it rather more challenging. Read the rest of this entry →

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by Kathleen Gresham

When you say WordPress, people automatically think of blogging. WordPress is the blog engine supreme. It is free, easy to install and easy to customize.

Thinking of WordPress as just a blog engine, though, seriously limits your options. That would be a shame, because WordPress offers so many options.

WordPress is a full-featured content management system (CMS). It can keep track of multiple authors and their privileges, provide a place to store documents and allow users to download them, keep track of document revisions and allow you to compare them and reinstate earlier versions—and so much more.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with WordPress. And most options are freely downloadable somewhere on line at no charge.

1. Web Sites

WordPress allows you to build a static web site much faster than any website builder software. Especially if you are not a wizard with that particular sitebuilder. That is, unless you are a super whiz with, say, DreamWeaver, you probably cannot match the speed—and certainly not the ease—with which you can set up a web site with WordPress.

Nowadays there are some great themes with dropdown menus that look like high-quality web site templates and can be easily customized.

Not only that, the search engine optimization benefits of a WordPress site versus a conventional HTML web site are tremendous. There are so many blog networks and SEO plugins and other tools that you can use to promote a WordPress site that are simply not available for HTML web sites.

2. Forums

There are several free plugins that allow you to easily set up a discussion forum, using WordPress. You can use that forum to make money from advertising, offer support for the products or services sold by your company (on line or off line), meet like-minded people, and so much more.

3. Membership Sites

Membership sites are a great way to make residual income. You can charge a fee for joining, for example for a niche membership site, and/or charge a monthly membership fee. Internet marketers often use a membership site to post their products for purchasers to download, to offer affiliate marketing tools and status reports to their affiliates, and to offer support for their products.

Others simply charge a membership fee for members to get access to a host of free downloadable ebooks, software, or other original content in a particular niche.

4. Article Directories and Link Directories

Article marketing is a staple of online marketing, and articles sites have many purposes. If your article site becomes popular, you can make good advertising revenue. If not, you still have a good place to post original or PLR articles with links to your main blog or web site.

You can download free themes and plugins to build an article directory with WordPress. Or  you can build yourself a link directory with other free WordPress themes and/or plugins. You could, for example, add a links page from your main blog to all your other sites.

5. Blogs

Yes, of course, WordPress is still the easiest and most flexible blog engine for self-hosted blogs. The very popularity of WordPress means there are thousands of theme designers and plugin makers constantly providing excellent new free or paid products to add value to WordPress blogs.

6. Combination Sites

Lately I have been making combination website-blogs for offline and online businesses. That is easy to do with WordPress.

For example, see the site designed for Temples Gate, a charming metaphysical gift shop in Houston, Texas. The old site was unfindable on Google for any related keyword or phrase.

The new WordPress-based site rose to Google PR2 in just a few months. It gets traffic via Google searches from all over world.

The site continues to grow as we add more pages, posts, and photos. Google loves sites that steadily grow. And site visitors like to see new and different photos and text whenever they visit the site.

The embedded blog fits seamlessly into the web site, and the site is linked to a Google Calendar so that the store owner can easily add and update the classes, workshops, and other events held at the store.

We will soon add a shopping cart to encourage online purchases. WordPress makes it easy to do that, and several of shopping cart plugins are free. We are still comparing features and usability on a separate test site.

Flexibility and Free Tutorials

Some of the same features can be found on Joomla and Drupal, but nothing beats WordPress for design flexibility and the huge array of plugins, widgets and other accessories available to easily customize it. Also, there is so much free training available for WordPress. WordPress video courses abound, and many of them are free.

So think outside the box when deciding how to build your next site, whether for personal use, to enhance your offline business or for ecommerce. Consider using WordPress even if you are not building a blog. Your imagination is just about the only limit to what you can do with it.

Adding Extra Value to Your Blog

And consider all the options that the WordPress community offers for adding value to your blog. Even if a blog is your main goal, WordPress allows you to add a forum for your reader community or a paid membership area.

If you want to do business on line, WordPress is a great tool for that, too. The sky is just about the limit when it comes to WordPress.

Select Your Hosting Service Carefully

If you intend to build a business in online retail sales, however, make sure you have a good ecommerce web hosting service. Make sure  you use a service that fully supports whatever it is that you are trying to do.

My first hosting was horrible. We could not even get a simple WordPress blog to work properly on their service, and it was a nightmare. So look for quality, not just price, in selecting a hosting service, even if you are not currently planning to get into ecommerce.

What cool things do you do with WordPress? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Kathleen Gresham designs, writes, and promotes blogs and websites and consults on search engine optimization (SEO) and directory listings for online and off line businesses in Houston, TX. For more information, see Houston Blog Web and Web Fresh Leads.

If you were to develop a site seven or eight years ago, you would likely need at least a basic understanding of programming codes like HTML or Javascript. Such coding was a significant barrier to entry for many non-digitally savvy users. The game changed when WordPress was developed in 2003. Since its release, Wordpress has grown to an incredible 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide.

WordPress is an open-source blog publishing application that eliminates web programming for the end user. As it is open-source, there are many different features that have been created by developers to enhance your blogging experience and website design. Many of these features allow bloggers to increase their SEO performance. We will discuss many of these features and how to use them in WordPress.

Use Static Key Words

The more key words you have on your webpage, the more attractive you are to web crawlers. (In simple terms, keyword density is one of many variables web crawlers look at. For example, Google Search looks for the quantity and quality of other sites linking to you).

WordPress has many tools to create sections to feature your own blog posts. In WordPress, click on the “Appearance” button in the left sidebar. A drop down menu will appear. Click on “widgets.” Then drag and drop widgets, such as “recent posts,” “tag clouds” and “links” in the sidebar 1 column on the right. These widgets will increase the number of key words that appear on every page.

Use WordPress Plugins

You might also consider a plugin that features relevant post. This will increase your SEO and pageviews by creating an additional source of keywords and generate relevant content for your reader. Simply click…

To read more about optimizing blog post headlines, go to Sparxoo, a digital marketing, branding and business development blog.

Sparxoo is a business blog that inspires breakthrough by tomorrow’s leaders. We are a strategy consulting firm with a pulse on marketing, branding, and development.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/optimizing-blog-post-headlines-in-wordpress-1526406.html

Today I received an Email from LINKWORTH which said that one of their advertisers is requesting to p lace a LinkPost on my Blog. This is the first invitation from LinkWorth. It is a site which we can make money blogging.

It supplies so many ways we can make money with our blogs.  The ways include: LinkPost , LinkAds, LinkWords, LinkInTxt, LinkBB, LinkSura , LinkMura, LinkPack , and Affiliate Program. If your blog is great enough, make money blogging with LinkWorth is a good choice.

Linkads – are simple text links that are normally places in a website/blog sidebar. Publishers make 70 percent of CPC (cost per click) of all links.

Linkpost – linkpost is a way where the advertisers set some outlines for their website or service and ask the bloggers of their choice to their review or words on it. Bloggers normally make 70 percent of total earning in this kind of scheme. Read the rest of this entry →

By Miss Sarah, guest blogger

I have seen quite a lot of AdSense publishers posted in different forums stating that their AdSense accounts were banned by Google due to fraudulent clicks. Most of these people claim that they are innocent and have never clicked on their on AdSense ads.

So they have no idea why click fraud can occur on their AdSense accounts. The truth is click fraud can happen in several ways and not necessarily caused by the AdSense publisher himself/herself who accidentally clicked on his/her own AdSense.

Below are some of the tips to protect your AdSense account:

Read the rest of this entry →

Do you have AdSense ads on your blogs? If so, you urgently need to read this!

Google now requires that every site that displays AdSense ads must have a privacy policy page with details Google’s newest privacy policy for AdSense ads. If that sounds complicated, it is.

You must comply by April 8, or risk losing our AdSense ad income. So what is a blog designer to do? I have about a dozen blogs, most of which are powered by WordPress, and I have been dreading having to deal with this.

Cavalry to the rescue! SEO whiz Eric Giguere has created a WordPress plugin to automatically generate a Google-compliant privacy policy on any page you choose, or to generate a complete new privacy page for your blog. And the plugin is free!

Download Eric’s new plugin from his personal blog, Synclastic, here.

There are instructions on the download page, but basically it is simple. Drop it in the plugin folder and make a few settings. 

Now, be sure to subscribe to Eric’s blogs, both Synclastic and his AdSense/SEO blog, The Unofficial AdSense Blog. I promise you will be very glad you did. Eric is a whiz, and he explains things in terms we can all understand

Excuse me. Gotta run. I have a bunch of plugins and privacy pages to install.