Blog Traffic with Twitter
By Bloggington on March 1, 2009
Twitter is a relative newcomer to the social networking arena, but for the budding blogger /webmaster it offers plenty of opportunity to generate web traffic.
If you do not have a Twitter account, then you should get one right away. As a blogger, your next step should be to review and install some of the Twitter related tools available to bloggers. These plugins can be configured to operate in either a one-way mode (posting your Twitter tweets to your blog, or posting blog posts from your blog to Twitter) or in a full two way mode (posting both ways).
Additionally, you should consider installing a social networking sharing plugin to allow readers to post your blog articles to one or mopre social networking sites (such as digg, StumbleUpon or Twitter). There are several of these available form the WordPress plugin directory, but I can vouch for and recommend Sociable and TweetThis.
Ok, so now you have a Twitter account and your blog set up to interact with Twitter. The next step is to recruit/befriend potential acquaintances on Twitter. At the time of writing, the intrinsic Twitter search function is extremely poor. However, a there is a very nice tool for locating people who share common interests called Twellow. It is accurate and fast. Simply type in keywords related to your niche and “follow” people from the returned results. Oftentimes, there is a quid pro quo aspect to Twitter. If you follow someone based on a common interest, they will often follow you.
Add Twitter friends at a rate of 50+ per day. Be sure to Tweet frequently and in an interesting, personal manner. People like to read small dispatches from real lives instead of simply links to blog posts. The golden rule to using Twitter as an efffective traffic generation tool is to participate on a human level.
In order to generate large traffic from Twitter, you will want to gain “retweets”. This is where a link you tweet is subsequently tweeted by one or more of your followers. Of course, it then goes to all of *his/her* followers and so on; you can appreciate how traffic from this oucome can build rapidly. This is identical to the concept used by StumbleUpon.
Posted in Twitter | Tagged tweet, Twitter | Leave a response
Twitter on your blog
By Bloggington on February 24, 2009
Recently, I decided to hook up my Twitter account to another blog I write to see whether it would bring in any additional readership or traffic.
There are several WordPress to Twitter plugins, but I narrowed my choice down to two: Twitter Tools (by Alex King)and WP to Twitter (by Joseph Dolson).
Twitter tools is a more comprehensive package allowing two way posting. Links to blog posts are posted to Twitter as a tinyurl link, Twitter tweets can be posted back to WordPress as indivisual posts or as a digest and it includes a sidebar widget form that allows you to post Twitter tweets directly from your blog, which is a particularly nice addition.
WP to Twitter simply posts links to recent WordPress posts to Twitter. It does this using the cli.gs url rewriting site. In addition to a Twitter account, you’ll need to sign up for a free cli.gs API key.
My initial findings are that it does generate readers. Randomly walking through varoius Twitter profiles and following people with simlar interests can soon lead to quite a number of followers. And since Twitter has yet to fall fowl of bots and automated account spamming, many if not all of your followers will be real people.
If you’re a blogger and do not have a Twitter account then now is the time to sign up and get started with one of these helpful Twitter posting plugins.
Posted in Wordpress Plugins | Tagged tools, Twitter | Leave a response
How to Disable WordPress Post Revision
By Bloggington on November 6, 2008
WordPress is a sophisticated, feature-rich, ever-evolving blogging engine. However, as the author of largely single-author blogs, I find one of the recent additions to its feature set unnecessary, namely the post revision feature. When using this feature, WordPress occasionally alerts me that there exists a previously unsaved copy of the post I am working on that looks newer than the present version, when clearly there is not. It seems like a mistake on WordPress’s part and I feel cautious enough to rollback to double check its assessment of the situation, only to find that the current version is identical to the previously saved version. So, I have concluded on single-user blogs I have no real need for such a feature and wish to disable it.
How? There is a straightforward, single line addition to the wp-config.php file (located in the root folder of your WordPress installation) that promptly takes care of this:
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, FALSE);
EDIT: I recently discovered this plugin that allows greater flexibility when managing post revision.
Posted in Blogging Tips | Tagged Config, Current Version, disable, Flexibility, post revision, Revisions, Rollback | Leave a response
CommentLuv Plugin for WordPress
By Bloggington on August 27, 2008
One of the age old questions that faces any beginner blogger is this: Once I get people to my blog, how do I get them to comment? I think it goes without saying that the singlemost important factor in encouraging people to comment on your blog is to provide well-written, engaging and informational content. However, numerous helper strategies have been developed to help encourage blog commenting. Many of these strategies have come and gone, having passed in and out of favour quite sharply, but one of the more recent that appears to have the prospect of longevity involves a snappy plugin from Andy Bailey called Comment Luv.
What is Comment Luv?
Comment Luv is a small, single-file WordPress plugin that (optionally) appends a titled link to comments left on your blog. It accomplishes this by parsing the feed of the blog left in the URI field of the comment form, extracting the latest entry then appending the link to the end of the comment.
Using Comment Luv from a commenters point of view is very straightforward. Simply enter the root level URL (not a sub-page!) of your blog in the URI section of the form, and ensure the check box to “Enable Comment Luv” is checked; some, but not all, blogs will have this enabled as default.
Using Comment Luv on your blog
Using the Comment Luv plugin on several blogs, I have seen a marked increase in both the frequency and quality of comments. It has also encouraged returning visitors to comment more often, and some individuals who operate several blogs make multiple good quality comments per visit which, as they say, is all good for business.
When using this plugin, I usually ensure the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” setting is checked (under the current version of WordPress, v2.6, this is found under Settings -> Discussion). This will help weed out some of the comments from those simply seeking a link back to their blog by leaving worthless comments.
By default, WordPress uses the “rel=nofollow” attribute for links left in comments. This measure was introduced in order to help reduce link-laden comment spam. A consequence is that by default the links appended by Comment Luv are nofollow and therefore do not pass link weight for Google ranking purposes. To most, this is not an issue as it is the link visibility that leads to the extra traffic when using this plugin. However, you could change your blog set up to pass link weight too. Since I wanted this entry to be an introduction to Comment Luv I will not dwell on any advanced uses here, but save that for a later article.
You can find the Comment Luv plugin here or here. As with all third-party plugins, be sure to remain up to date and always run the latest version.
Posted in Wordpress Plugins | Tagged comment luv, commentluv, Wordpress Plugins | 3 Responses
Spam fighting with the Hashcash plugin
By Bloggington on February 3, 2009
Recently, I started using the WP-Hashcash plugin on several blogs and have been pleasantly surprised with the results.
Although I am happy with Akismet, it does occasionally allow automated spam through so Hashcash provides a welcome extra layer between the comment submission form and the Akismet queue.
Essentially, WP-Hashcash uses javascript to check on the client side that comments are submitted via the blog comment form in a browser window. Auto-spam bots use scripted submissions that do not need either the submission forum or the browser window.
The Hashcash settings allow detected spam to be either deleted or shifted to the Akismet queue for processing.
If you are seeing occasional spam make it through Akismet then I certainly recommend giving this plugin a try.
Posted in Wordpress Plugins | Tagged comment spam, spam plugins, WP-Hashcash | Leave a response