Wordpress v2.8 Released

Version 2.8 or Wordpress was released a few days ago and I have finished updating my blogs.

I am unable to see many changes – perhaps it is time to read the changelog. 

Previous revisions included a reworking of the admin GUI.  This time it seems to have remained largely the same with the exemption of changes to the ‘plug-ins’ page. I far preferred the plug-in management look and feel of version 2.7. Am I in the majority in feeling this way? Also, isn’t it time to introduce a one-click plug-in update capability in to the core functionality.  It seems that most blogger these days use 5 or more plug-ins and individually updating them across several blogs can be time consuming.

Blog traffic from unexpected sources

Recently, I discovered a previously untapped source of blog traffic that I will refer to as daisy chaining.  And here I will give an outline on how I employed the method to get a high authority PR7 link and good traffic spike.

Many larger media outlets link to blogs on their news and political articles, and editorials offering the reader a “finger on the pulse” snapshot of relevant blogosphere commentary.  Google Trends is another place that offers a similar snapshot.

The media outlets are more selective than Google Trends so if you plan to employ this method, consider a mid- to long-term strategy that will require significant effort. Having said that, the rewards are high.

Among the blogs I run is a political and current affairs comentary blog.  It is far from what I consider a mature blog, at 5 months old and about 32 000 words in 75 posts. However, it is active. I try to contribute 300 to 400 words per day and in the last month alone the blog has picked up a double figure RSS feed readership.

My interest in promoting this blog took a turn about 3 weeks ago when I pondered what might be the effect of a link from a major news organisation. So I set about honestly obtaining one (besides, dishonestly obtaining one would be nigh on impossible!)

Many media outlets and news organisation fully appreciate the power of the blogosphere and consequently feature frequent links and commentary references from what they perceive to be authoritative sources. They seem to gauge authority much as search engines do. They consider the authority of linkage to your site. So my first step was to identify authority bloggers in my chosen niche and set about acquiring links from them. This, I envisaged, would give me a little authority in the eyes of the big boys.

I identifed several high traffic and respected blogs in my niche and set about making my presence known to them through relfective and thoughtful commenting. One thing to remember is that blogging is a very incestuous (in a  permissive sense) activity. Blog writers are frequently the most voracious blog readers. So my logical interpretation of the situation was that if I became visible on high visibility blogs, my comments would appear before the noses of other high-visibility bloggers, who in turn would find their way to my blog and potentially become regular readers. Gaining them as regular readers is the precursor to acquiring a mention on their blogs.

A regular commenting regimen was undertaken and within ten days my blog was mentioned on an authoritative blog in the niche, appearing on a PR6 front page and receiving a traffic spike of several hundred unique views. It also picked up several regular readers.

However, these tangible benefits were not the only positive aspects at the front page listing. Certain news organisations held this individual’s blog in high esteem (occasionally link to it in their blog sections) so my blog came to the attention of the bigger players in the political blogging arena by way of a credible recommendation.

As a result, and within a further week, my blog received similar treatment from a major news organisation, appearing on a PR7 inner page.

Although this technique may work far better in some niches, it is worth investing time and effort in.

The power of blog commenting

Google began exporting its PageRank data recently and I noticed how one of my relatively new blogs had gone from being of ‘unknown’ PageRank to a rank of 2. On seeing this gratifying change, I reflected on the nature of the development of the blog and how I might duplicate its modest success on some of my other new blogs (not to mention this blog, which although the domain name is over a year old, the active blog is a lot younger.)

The new blog I mentioned is a political and news commentary blog. I agree that this is very much an active blogging niche (depending on how you choose your topics) so this fact may influence whether or not the success is reproducible.

The blog now has a total of 30100 words appearing in 71 posts.  This amounts to an average post length of about 430 words per post. (You can get all these statistics by installing the Blog Metrics plugin.) Very close to half of these words have been added in the last 30 days as I vowed to make at least one post per day beginning March 1st. For me, this seems to be a steady and attainable rate at which to publish content. I plan to continue at a rate of at least 200 words per day, but will aim to raise the daily word rate to about a 500 words per day average.

Minimal promotional work has been done on the blog.  I submitted it to about 20 low rank free web directories simply to get the blog indexed. The only other promotional work I did was to seek out about 10 active blogs in its niche (politics) and make good comments on the once per week.  Numerous regular readers have trickled in via these commenting efforts and the blog now picks up several RSS subscribers per day. The blog was also noticed by a high profile political pundit and mentioned on his blog which led to a spike in traffic and some good organic inbound linkage.

Why do I tell you all this information and not reveal the blog? My reason for giving this detailed information is purely altruistic. I want to make tell the story, perhaps bit by bit and in several follow up posts, of what I hope will develop further to become a very successful blog. My reason for not exposing the URL of the blog is to retain a little privacy and also keep hold of the reins of the narrative.

I attribute this modest success to the blog commenting. It also reveals how contingent the nature of internet marketing really is. You have to plug away at known good practices and await your moment.

Back up strategies for Wordpress blogs

Thankfully, I have never had to face the situation, but I have read of individuals who (usually through not remaning abreast of security updates) have had their blogs wiped out.

Recently, reading on a forum about an individual who had lost his blog content, I began to think about my own back strategy and how I might improve it.

Many shared hosting companies religiously backup up client home directories.  This is great and gives you the peace of mind that your site exists somewhere should all go wrong.  However, there may be a delay when it comes to getting your site off a tape or other media. Usually, the priority for most hosting companies is in keeping their machines online and available, so pulling a site or database from a backup tape will usually not be a high priority and could take anything from 12 to 72 hours. (Some hosts offer a hot spare snapshot of your site so that you can pull in backups yourself on the spot.)

So, what measures can you take to ensure you have a readily available, recent backup should disaster strike?

When backing up WordPress, there are two aspects that need to be considered: files and database.

In order to backup the files, you can set up a scheduled job to copy them to a new location (perhaps using cp -R) or you can archive the contents of your WordPress directory and keep it in a designated area.

In order to backup the database, you can the export/import tools particular to your database. Many run on mysql so a command line tool for this sort of backup would be mysqldump, or if your host offers standard packages like phpMyAdmin then you can use it to peform full database dumps. Once you have a full dump of your database you can copy it off to a safe location.

However, there are several plugins available that enable you to schedule regular backups of the database.  These plugins will run regular dump of your database and copy then to a specified location, some wil also compress and email them to a specified address.

Also, WordPress has an inherent export mechanism that allows you to dump your posts, comments, links and users from the administrator console. This is great for doing immediate backups that can be quickly downloaded to your local machine. You can find these functions under Tools -> Export. One tip when using the export tool is to ensure you clear your spam comment queue before exporting. If your blog receives a lot of comment spam and Akismet identifies it and places it in a spam queue, these are still exported, and given the nature of this type of spam it can bloat the size of the exported file quite significantly.

I recommend you check whether your host take regular backups. And also ensure you have your own off site database dumps that are taken at least once per week, preferably nightly.

How to set up an auto-posting blog

This is something I have seen come up in comments on various webmaster and blogging related forums, but have never really paid much attention to until now.  Today, I decided I would set one up if only to see whether I can learn a little extra about WordPress and blogging.

A year ago, I registered a domain about an upcoming pop star.  I ended up with the .net and the .info domain.  I have used the .info variant for a fan site but the .net domain sat unused for a year.  This is the domain I shall use.

Stage one: install WordPress and standard plugins

WordPress installation is straightforward so I shall not go in to that. (There is plenty of information about that over on the official WordPress site.)  Next come the standard plugins.  For most blogs, these will include:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/platinum-seo-pack/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/adsense-manager/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-no-duplicate/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-plugin-library/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/popular-posts-plugin/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recent-posts-plugin/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statpress-reloaded/

and perhaps a few more.

Stage two: look at auto post plugins

There are two free plugins that allow you to pull in content via RSS feeds and publish it on a blog:  FeedWordpress and WP-o-Matic.  Each has its benefits and disadvantages.

WP-o-Matic relies on the simplepie core.  Although a version of this is included, you can also download it as a separate plugin to remain current.  Fully automating WP-o-Matic relies on setting up a unix cron job to run the script periodically.  This isn’t difficult but if you plan on using this plugin to set up an autoposting blog then be sure to check that your host allows you to set up and manage jobs via a scheduler.  WP-o-Matic also uses the cURL libraries which like cron are usually standard features on most hosting packages.

FeedWordpress relies on the bog standard RSS feed pulling tools packaged with WordPress and also seems to use WordPress inherent scheduler to run. FeedWordpress also has a sister plugin that filters duplicate content – this can be very useful when pulling from one or more feed syndication sites, or single large syndicated feed sites that carry many versions of the same story.

WP-o-Matic offers a very powerful additional tool that I found useful.  It permits you to set up  a series of regular expression rules to apply to feed content.  This means you are able to “find and replace” certain phrases or words within the pulled content. For this reason, I chose WP-o-Matic to drive my auto blog.

Stage three: finding content

Once the blog is set up, the final stage is to pull in public domain content. This can be found at various article directories, although depending on your blog niche you might have to seach further afield. Popular niches such as finance, health, celebrities and electronics goods are relatively easy to find feed content for.

If you use feed syndication sites (like Google News or Yahoo! News), then be aware that auto blog plugins will not pull in the full content of stories but only the extract used by the syndication service. Also be sure to adhere to any copyright notices.

Although it has been only several days since I set up this first auto blog, the immediate results have been quite impressive with XX unique/day traffic flowing in right away.  Whether this remains we shall have to see and perhaps might be worthy of a follow up post.

Auto tagging plugins

I have been testing two auto tagging plugins recently.

The first if the WP-Auto-Tagger.  This plugin uses the Yahoo! API to query content for common tags.  It has a manual suggest button and an auto-tag feature that will automatically tag posts when they are published.

The second is the Calais Auto Tagger.  Again this uses an API to operate semanic analysis on the post content and then suggests tags on that basis.  One click to suggest tags, another to add them.

Mostly, I have been using the WP-Auto-Tagger and have been happy with the results.  Although, using full auto-tagging may lead to some irrelevant tags.  Generally, I use the manual suggest and then weed out the few that appear to be completely irrelevant.

I seem to get better results from posts over about 300 words as it gives the analysis engine more substance to work with.

Categories or tags or both?

It is easy to become confused about the role of each of these Wordpress features, so let’s look briefly at the role of each.

Categories afford the opportunity for broad categorization of posts.  Much like the categories in a web directory, Wordpress categories allow bloggers to choose compartments in to which to sort posts based on their principal content.  It is possible to drop a single post in to more than one category.

Tags, on the other hand, allow bloggers to put up a flag to searchers indicating that a particular word or phrase of relevance occurs within an article.  For example, this post might appear in a category “Blogging Tips” or “WordPress administration”, but since it talks largely about tags and categories, its tags might include more granular words and phrasing like “tags”, “categories” and alike.

On most blogs, I use both categories and tags.  I select categories based on broad subject matter and usually choose one category per post.  I then look at the content of a post and extract fine-grained phrases or words that relate to the important aspects of a a particular post.  I usually use at least 3 or 4 tags per post, but sometimes 12 or more.

Usually, I do not allow for a large overlap of words used in categories and tags.  The reason for this is to avoid duplicate content penalties from the search engines.  If the same material is found on your blog at different urls (as it might be if using similar tag and category names) then, depending also on how you have your blog set up, it could be perceived as duplicate content.  Duplicate content and its penalties is a topic we should address in a subsequent post.

When do I add advertising to my blog?

Scanning the ‘net you’ll see the entire gamut of ad configurations on blogs.  From single page/post blogs awash with ad blocks and affiliate links, to blogs of many hundreds of pages/posts without a single ad. 

The choice to include paid advertising on a blog should not be made lightly as it can impact user experience and thereby be self-defeating.  Monetizing blog traffic is of no use if the act of monetizing drives away the traffic.  Some choose never to use paid advertising, others go at it hammer and tongs from the outset.

So, when is a good time to add paid advertising to a blog?

Over the years, I have experimented a little with introducing different types of paid advertising at different periods of a blog’s existence and I now subscribe to the notion that paid advertising should be avoided during the early stages of a blog’s life. 

The early phase of a blog’s existence should be spent almost exclusively establishing a solid original content base.  By this I mean laying down about of the order of 100 posts, equating to about 25 000 words.  This can be accomplished within a month, however, I like to do this over a 2-3 month period so that organic traffic and linking can proceed naturally. 

On previous blogs, I loaded pages with affiliate advertising from the outset and although the sites contained good original content (though not 25 000 words in the first month) they did not ferment naturally at the outset and yield the organic search results or linkage of non-ad laden sites.  This could have been related to the ratio of outbound affiliate linkage per page/post to the overall content.

After the first three months, or longer if the content accrual has been slower than anticipated, I will usually include ads in less conspicuous positions, developing their presence over time as content and search engine reach develops.

10 blogging tips to build a successful blog

The techniques used to build a successful blog are ever-changing as new methods linearly supplant the old, and innovative methods of driving traffic to blogs open up new frontiers to the blogger. 

Here is a brief survey of ten proven methods for constructing a successful blog.

i.  Add content to your blog frequently and consistently.  If possible, maintain a daily posting routine, however do not compromise the quality and originality of content in order to maintain such a regime.

ii.  Write for readers and not search engines.  However, do bear in mind that compelling post titles and keyword density do contribute to how easy it might be for searchers to find your posts via the search engines.  Do not become pre-occupied with keyword density and search-engine driven composition.

iii.  Use clear, concise language.  Do not forget the lessons of school composition.  Express yourself clearly and develop ideas in a flowing, logical manner, however do not forsake enthusiasm and humor.  Avoid unconventional or unduly over-technical language usage unless you know your prospective audience is comfortable with it.  If you are unsure of a certain aspect of grammar or a particularly spelling, then look it up.  Writing can also be a learning experience.

iv.  Engage your readership.  Say something original.  Air your opinions, stand up and be counted on major issues.  Ask questions or your readers, solicit their opinion on certain matters.  Do all these things with the intent of engaging your readership.

v.  Look good.  Make your blog appealing to look at but not at the expense of functionality.  Do not overwhelm the reader with banners, buttons and too many outbound links.

vi.  Respond to your readers.  Always reply to thoughtful comments.  If a reader invests time in composing a response to your post, then honor that likewise with a response.

vii.  Link out to authority blogs.  Linking to other blogs in your niche can often bring traffic from curious bloggers.  Bloggers can be quite obsessive when it comes to monitoring their traffic and inbound links, so if you link out and subsequently send traffic to a blog, it’s possible the recipient will respond in a similar manner.

viii.  Be self-referential.  Build strong internal linking within your posts.  When posting a series of articles, be sure to link to all posts in the series from within each individual post.  Refer to other areas of your blog within posts (links within posts are usually considered higher authority links.)

ix.  Comment on other blogs.  Seek out other blogs in your niche and comment on them  Search the blogosphere (Google blog search will help here) for recent posts on topics similar to your own recent posts and comment on them.  Do this frequently, if possible daily.

x.  Use other communities.  Established and evolving social communities offer a huge melting pot of potential readers.  Become involved and engage other networkers.  Twitter seems to be the current in vogue method of networking.

Embedding adsense in blog posts

Once you have decided your blog has reached the stage where you would like to add some paid advertising to it, then Google AdSense is one of your many choices. 

Frequently, bloggers who use AdSense wish vary their ad positioning and make their ad blocks prominent in certain kinds of posts.  These are good ideas.  But how should one go about it?

Well, a fine plugin by Martin Fitzpatrick called Adsense Manager gives you very good control on how and where you choose to display ads on your blog.

Using AdSense Manager is straightforward and intuitive.  First, you will need to log in to your Google AdSense account and configure an ad block (AdSense Manager also work with many other paid advertising programs including YPN, EPN, CJ, WidgetBucks and more).  Once you have the ad block code, import it in to AdSense Manager.  To do this under the current version, go to  “Settings” -> “AdSense Manager” ->”Manage Ad Units”.  Paste your ad code in to the designated area, change the name of the ad block to something more descriptive if necessary, and then click on the “Import to New Ad Unit” button.

This copies in the ad block and makes it available in posts or pages.

Leaving the ad block in the default setting will enable you to insert it in to posts either above of below or as a breaker in a post.  However, if you wish to truly embed the ad block within the text of the post (with the text wrapped round the ad block), then you will need to add some additional formatting to the ad block settings.

If you edit the settings for your ad block, you will notice a small section for “Wrap HTML” which can be added.  Essentially, this place the ad block between the HTML you provide in the “Before” and “After” text fields.  This enables you to apply some on page formatting.

If you wish to embed your ad within a block of text, then before your ad you should add text like:

<div style="float:right;left-margin:8px;bottom-margin:8px;">

float:right will push the ad block to the right side of the post. The other two parameters place a small space around the ad (at the left and bottom in this example) so that text does not get too close to the ad border.

Similary you should close the <div> by adding the folloing to the “After” field:

</div>

In order to insert your ad, flip to HTML mode in the post writer/editor and drop down the “Adsense” drop-down box and select your ad.