WordPress – The ultimate blogging platform

WordPress is one of the leading blog platforms in the Internet today. However, do you know that there are two major types of WordPress systems, and what are the major differences between the two?

WordPress is one of the leading blog platforms in the Internet today, and based on a search on Google trends, the number of searches with the word WordPress has at least tripled today, since the end of the year 2004.

Having really tried and fiddled around with WordPress system, I must say that WordPress is indeed a very powerful system to put your blog on. Unfortunately however, the system does take time to get used to.

WordPress comes in two versions. The first one is provided by WordPress.com, which is the hosted version. The second version provided by WordPress.org, and usually in order to use this version of WordPress, you will need to have your own domain name, and web hosting space.

Blogging at WordPress.com

Using the version provided by WordPress.com, you will be given a subdomain URL, like http://blogopreneur.wordpress.com. While this still sounds nice, it is definitely more professional and stylish to tell people that your blog is at “blogopreneur dot com” rather than “blogopreneur dot wordpress dot com”. WordPress.com does, however, provide domain mapping services, meaning you can go and grab a domain and the redirect it to the WordPress blog. This comes with a fee, of USD$10.

The default and free configuration of the blog at WordPress.com comes with 50 megabytes of space, and allows you to select a template from the list provided. For some templates, you can further customize them using your own header images and colors. However, in order for you to take control over the CSS that goes behind the blog, of get more webspace, you will need to pay a fee.

Blogging using WordPress.org

The version of WordPress provided at WordPress.org is the more powerful version, and is the platform used by many A-List bloggers in the blogosphere today.

To set up this version of WordPress, you will need to download the system from WordPress.org, extract the file contents, upload, and install it on your own domain and hosting. For total Internet starters, this process may prove to be quite a roadblock, but as you get used to using FTP and using your hosting administration panel, setting up a WordPress.org blog is a five minute job.

As mentioned, this version of WordPress is extremely powerful.

Firstly it allows you to have full control over your templates – from the CSS to the individual pages that make up your blog. You can even have a different page look and feel for each category you use!

Secondly, it allows you add on functionality to the system by using WordPress plugins! With a simple search on Google for “WordPress Plugins”, you will realize that there are millions of plugins available for free for you to use. Plugins are extremely powerful – allowing you to add functionality to your blog like social bookmarking icons, subscription to your blog comments, and specifying a different front page for the blog.

With 57 million blogs as reported by the Technorati state of the blogosphere report in October 2006, every Internet entrepreneur must learn how to blog, and if you want to blog, you simply have to use a powerful blogging system with unlimited functionality – WordPress!

For more great tips on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s Blog Marketing Blog

How do you choose the correct blogging platform for your needs?

There are hundreds of blogging platforms out there on the Internet, and choosing one single platform to blog on is often a tough choice. What are the things you should consider when choosing a blogging platform then?

As a blog marketing trainer, one of the most frequent questions I get from my friends and the learners in my workshop is: Which blogging platform is the best? I think this question would be near and dear to many Internet marketers too, especially those who have realize the immense potential in using blogs to drive traffic to their sales websites.

My answer, as you would expect – is “There is no one single platform that is the best! It really depends on what you want.”

However, there are a couple of things you need to consider when choosing a blogging platform, and these considerations will still stay, even of the current blogging platforms today are phased out in the next few years, as technology progresses.

So what are the factors to consider?

1. Full control of template

To first and most important aspect to consider when choosing a blogging platform is the ability to tweak your template. While most popular blog platforms do allow you to switch templates, not all solutions allow you to go behind these templates and edit the HTML code for the templates.

Why is this important?

The primary way (and very powerful way) of traffic generation for blogs is through search engine optimization, or SEO, in short, and one key aspect of SEO is about tweaking the code that goes behind the website? While your site can be aesthetically attractive, the search engine spiders only see the words and the HTML code! So in order to “give the spiders what you want to give them”, you need to have full access to the HTML code behind the template!

2. Hosting on own domain

The second aspect to consider when choosing a blogging platform is that it must allow you to use your own domain. Why? With experience in marketing blogs, I feel that the time spent between marketing your blog and posting content on your blog should be more or less equal. A blog with excellent content that is not marketed well will not go far, and neither will be a well marketed blog with junky contents.

So, since you are going to spend time to market a web address or URL, it would make sense to market an address that you fully own, isn’t it? Besides, it is more professional to use your own domain name in your name cards and marketing campaign, then to use a subdomain or subfolder provided by a popular blogging platform.

3. Advanced Features

The third most important thing to consider when choosing a blogging platform is the advanced features of the blog. There are many blogging platforms out there which are simply “instant publishing platforms”. While these blogs serve the purpose of a personal diary or journal where you publish you daily ramblings, this is insufficient for you if you want to use your blog to reach out to others.

Blogs are about creating conversations, and the only way you can create a conversation is to have people to visit your blog and post comments… and the way people are going to come is that you need to reach out to them!

There is therefore a need for advanced features in blogs like the ability to send trackbacks, automatic pinging of popular blog search engines, management of blog feeds and scheduled posting. With these features available, connecting your blog to the blogosphere would be a much easier job!

For more great tips on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s Blog Marketing Singapore Blog

How do you know if your blog is successful?

With the introduction of new technology, some measures that work well in the past will not work well today. What are some good ways to measure the success of your blog today?

One very important aspect of any Internet endeavor – regardless of whether it is an email promotion, or website, advertising campaign, putting products to sell online, or a blog, is to be able to measure the success of the venture. Afterall, without proper measurement, one cannot determine if the venture or endeavor has been successful and decide if there is a need to invest more effort and resources.

Using the correct measurement is also critical – because there are a couple of measures which worked in the past, but as Internet technology has evolved over the past few years, some of these measures are becoming less significant.

Here are three ways you can use to measure the success of your blog.

Comments

Blogs are all about creating conversations! Comments measure the quality of the post in terms of the ability to create conversation. The number of comments you get for every post that you make on your blog is the first good measure of success of your blog. However, in doing this, it is valuable to not that the number of comments is tagged with how controversial your blog topic is. Normally, blog posts that touch on very popular and controversial topics should garner more comments.

That said, it would be unfair to measure the number of comments day by day. Measurement in terms of blog comments should be done probably best by the month. If your comments have been increasing in number, you are doing a good job in writing and promoting your blog!

Readers of Your Feed

People subscribe to your feed only if they find the contents of your blog interesting and when they see the value in receiving the latest updates to your blog. Using popular feed management tools like Feedburner, the blogger is able to track how many subscriptions there are to your feed.

Again feed readership will fluctuate, and subscription to your feed does not necessarily mean that people are reading your feed, so it is important to use this measure alongside other measures.

Unique Visitors

One of the better ways to measure the success of a blog is the number of unique visitors coming in to your blog. In this, I emphasize unique, because if you are a fan of your own blog, editing and posting on your blog all day and night, it would be easy to contribute significantly to your own page views, especially on days you spent tweaking your blog template.

In using unique visitors, it is also valuable to note that there will be traffic spikes – like at times when your blog post gets Digged, or someone notices your post and email the link to your post to his or her mailing list of a million people.

In conclusion, measuring the success of any Internet venture is critical. While there are multitudes of ways in which one can measure success, it is important to use the ones that work well for the current practices in Internet trends.

For more great tips on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s Blog Marketing Tips at Blogopreneur.com

Follow these 7 steps to blogging success

As of October 2006, there were 57 million blogs tracked by Technorati, but its sad to say that a majority of the blogs out there are not achieving as much traffic as they wish they can. How do you change that?

Do you have a blog or plan to start blogging? Is your blog achieving the amount of success that you have wished for? If not, here are 7 steps to follow to make sure you are maximizing your blog towards success!

1. Write about something you are passionate about

Especially if it is your first blog, it is important that you write something that you are passionate about – this is to ensure that you have a smooth flow of ideas to write. It is often easy to start with a few posts, on any topic, but if you are not truly passionate about your topic, you will start to find that it gets harder and harder to keep blogging!

2. Write regularly

If you are serious about marketing your blog, you need to commit time to your blog. Blogs are favored by search engine for one reason – they are updated very regularly. For a start, it might be good to build up the content in your blog by posting at least twice a day. After the first month of frantic posting, you can revert to a regular schedule, and this can be from anything to a minimum of twice a week. Anything less than twice a week will not make your blog enticing enough for readers (of course, unless your blog is tagged to the development of a piece of software, for example)

3. Write in the language you talk

The key thing attraction about blogs is that you can write just about anything and everything, and what brings readers back again and again is the style of writing. Most bloggers write in their own voice. So instead of “Seeing that the situation requires attention, I immediately picked up the phone and called security”, you can write in a more first person and exciting tone like “I thought the situation was getting out of hand, so I called security”. You can feel free to use all the “I”, and “me”!

4. Ask questions to encourage discussion

Blogs are not only about instant publishing, but also about conversation. One way of doing this is to present several perspectives and alternative to a problem and pose a question at the end of your blog post – literally as if there is someone waiting on the other end for question. Readers will tend to comment more, if you just ask.

5. Use media

With the widespread availability of broadband networks, many Internet users are now not limited to the 56K download speed. Things are moving towards interactivity, audio, and video. Go ahead and publish a podcast or stream a video from your blog. Different media will help to keep your readers awake!

6. Make your blog readable

I have come across some blogs which have a super cluttered layout, with ad smacked thoughout the top fold of the page. While it has been said that most users do not scroll after the first fold, it sometimes really turn people (like me) off when I see ads splattered everywhere, so do note your blog layout.

Another point to not to make your blog more readable is to have subtitles for your posts. People like to read in chunks. Long paragraphs of text turn people off.

7. Link, link and link

I have talked to some friends who blog, and they are worried that by linking out to other blogs or articles, you are effectively sending away your visitors. While this is true to a certain extent, bloggers also need to note that the whole blogosphere is a world of giving.

It is only when you give a link to a fellow blogger, that he or she will take notice of you – and who knows, if you have established a good relationship with some bloggers, whenever in the future you post a particularly good article, you will find people linking to you! Link out and people will link back – that is how the blogosphere (and the web) is run!

For more great tips on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s Blog Marketing Tips at Blogopreneur.com

Are you sabotaging your reader’s experience?

One of the best ways for you to make your blog readable by more people through RSS feeds. However, many bloggers chose to publish partial feeds, making it irritating for their readers.

Most blogs, by default publish RSS feeds, to allow their readers to subscribe to the updates of the blog. The whole point of having RSS feeds in the first place, is so that people who are interested in keeping track of many blogs can read them all at one single place – their RSS aggregator software, like Google Reader or Newsgator.

Blogging platforms would allow bloggers to either publish full or partial feeds, and in the hope of bringing their RSS readers back to their blog page, many bloggers publish a partial feed.

While it probably works to bring readers back to their main page, this irritates the hell out of many people who keep track of tens or hundreds of feeds. Imagine, keeping track of 200 blog feeds, and having just a mere 10% – which is 20 blogs having partial feeds. How many new browser windows (or tabs) would you have to open to read the contents of the blog?

Most of the time, after reading the blog contents, the readers will either bookmark it the page, or just click on the red cross that closes the page. It is especially irritating when the blog page loads slowly with teeny font sizes and a cluttered layout.

Consider this, why not publish full feeds, and promote this user behavior instead – people read your article, they find it interesting, they click on the link that brings them direct to your blog post, and then they bookmark it straightaway! This saves the trouble of many readers visiting blogs, opening and closing browser windows!

I personally feel that the users will tend to look around your site more too, when they have already read your blog post contents in their feed reader. Think of it this way – whenever a person visits a site, he or she will want to read something, right? So if the person is brought to your blog post to read your post, that is what he or she will read… but if the person is brought to your blog post after reading your post, (i.e. visiting the blog to bookmark the page) he or she will find something else to read, which can be what you have at your sidebars – the adverts your are publishing and your related posts.

Are you publishing a partial RSS feed for your blog? Consider what hassle you are bringing to your readers! Switch to full feeds today!

For more great articles on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s blog on Blog Marketing

Can you afford 5 more ways to bring traffic to your blog?

Marketing on the web is all about traffic, traffic and traffic. How to do you drive traffic to your blog?

Successful blogs are normally the ones whose authors are able to extend the reach of their blogs far and wide! These bloggers actively build links, leave their blog addresses along with every person they meet, use connections, joint venture and whatever other means they can to build up the popularity of their blog. In turn, what they get is more traffic, which means more leads, and more revenue.

There are several ways you can use to bring in more traffic to your blog, and while some marketers argue that it is sufficient to master in one, I believe that there must be a balance of techniques.

Here are the five.

1. Article Submission

Article submission is by far one the best ways to leave an inbound link to your website on an established website, and bring in very targeted traffic. To do so, simply write a 400 word article and submit it to major article directories.

What is important in article submission is the author bio – it is where you have the opportunity to talk about yourself and your services, and provide a link to your website!

2. Forum Comments

The second way to leave links is in forums. In this, there are two ways to leave a link. The first way is through signatures. Most forums allow the user to leave a signature in their comments. One could leave a link to their blog though the signature.

The second (and less explored) way is to find a problem to solve, solve it and post a blog post about the solution, and then simply contribute to the forum, saying “I have your solution here”, indicating your blog post as a link.

This way, users are enticed to click and be directed to your blog to see the solution to the problem.

3. Dropping Comments on Other Blogs

Another powerful method of bringing in traffic is to comment on related blogs, and leave your link in the comment. In doing this, it is much like the forum posting – you need to add value to the post. There are many Internet users who really spend time reading blogs and clicking through the comments to find more related information.

4. Give Something Away Free

Bloggers who are serious about marketing their blog would normally spend an equal amount of time blogging and marketing their blog. Giving something away for free is a very powerful method of bringing traffic to your blog! This thing could be an e-book, or a newsletter, or an audio clip… what is important is that it must be viral – it must be so good, that it entices people to pass it on to others.

At the end of the book, newsletter or audio clip, talk a little about your blog, and people curious to know more about the topic will pay a visit to your blog.

5. Offline Advertising

While there are so many ways to market a website or blog online, one must remember that depending on the country you are in, for every person that is on the Internet regularly, there are probably at least 4 or 5 who don’t go online as regularly.

The only way to reach out to these people effectively is through offline advertising methods. Traditional marketing still works – via your daily newspapers, namecards, brochures, and advertisements.

For more great articles on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s blog – Blog Marketing Singapore

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs

Much has been going on about SEO for websites, but with the evolution of blogs, it is important to recognize that some tweaks are needed to for most blog templates, to optimize for search engines.

We all know that building a website is only part of the strategy. If there is no means of marketing a website, a website is will be just another shop in the Sahara desert. With more people getting online everyday, and search engines being the major starting point for most Internet searching, it is important for every blogger to make sure that their blogs are optimized so that they can be found on the major search engines.

Unfortunately, most blogging platforms come out of the box, without much consideration of optimization for search engines. As such, bloggers need to be able to tweak their blog templates the right way to ensure maximum optimization.

What are the ways then? What are the things to tweak? Here are five to start off with!

1. Page Title

There is absolutely no way to argue that the page title is the most important thing to note for a page where SEO is concerned. Many blog engines like WordPress ship out wit the titles for individual posts in the format of [Blog Title] >> [Post Title]. This is not good for SEO, instead, one should eliminate the [Blog Title] in individual posts, or put it in the format [Post Title] – [Blog Title]

2. Meta Tags

It is critical to understand that with a permalink created for every post you make, there is a need to specify and different meta description and meta keyword tag for each post. Most blogging engines do not come default with this.

3. Your Blogroll

Most blogs feature a blogroll, and in the SEO point of view, it is important that these blogs you link to need to be of relevance to your blog. This not only helps spiders better identify what topic your blog is about, but also encourages the bloggers in your blogroll to link back.

4. Blog Archives

Blogs normally feature a reverse chronological order of posts, and as new posts are added to the main page, the old posts are rolled off the page. It is important to keep the these old post linked via your main page, in some way or another.

Often this is done using a blog archive. The advantage of using a good blogging platform is that most of the time the archiving is done automatically for you. Bloggers can choose to archive by week or by month. However, some may unknowingly adopt a one-column template and layout that does not feature the archives.

5. Frequent Posting

This is by far the most effective way of optimization for search engines. Search engines have a job to do – to bring the best and the freshest news to the Internet user behind the search box. By updating your blog frequently, as much as even a couple of times a day, you are telling the search engines that “Hey, my blog has fresh content, so come often!”. Blogs that are updated frequently will see that the search engine spiders come frequently to actively seek new content, and it is only when your post is indexed that it appears in the search engine results pages.

For more great articles on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s blog – Blog Marketing Singapore

Do your blog entries have zero comments? Find out why.

The blogosphere is a friendly place, where many bloggers interact with one another. However, there is one distinct difference that segregates the more successful blogs from the no-so-successful ones. What is this?

Blogs can be thought about from different perspectives. While the history of blogs reveal that they are meant to be online journals where people vent their daily frustrations and feelings, today’s blogs are becoming the mainstream media for the most updated news for any topic in the world.

A good blog, however, requires good consistent traffic. One key feature of blogs is the ability for readers to leave comments, and the great thing about the commenting feature is that bloggers can choose to allow anonymous comments, which is unlike forums, where user usually have to create an account in the forums in order to post.

So how then, do you get people to come back again and again, and leave comments? The answer lies in two keys – the first is “Writing on controversial topics”, and the other is “Responding to comments”

Writing on controversial topics

People feel an urge to voice opinions when they find an idea worthwhile commenting on, and when there can be different viewpoints to a certain topic. So, if you want them to comment, leave some room for chatting!

As an example, you could pose an introduction to both viewpoints, and then end of with a simple question – “What do you think?”

Responding to Comments

It is important to realize that in many successful blogs, readers comments will eventually form part of the blog contents. To be able to get people to actively contribute value to your blog is a very powerful way to build a value added site!

However, your readers’ contribution is only the first level. In order to bring the quality of your blog to the higher level, you need be able to hold a conversation under every post – that is exceptional!

To achieve this, there must be a few things that you must be do.

The first is of course, to recognize that you must respond to your comments. Your response to your blog comments acknowledges the reader and their contribution, motivating them to drop in time and again, to leave more comments.

The second, is to build in functionality in your blog to allow your users to subscribe to comments. This can be done using the comments RSS features, or using a comments subscription service.

Thirdly, there must be a good commenting policy on your blog. To promote conversation, it is recommended that do not require explicit moderation of every comment! If you are concerned about comments spam, install a spam filter.

Lastly, you, the blog author, need to be informed of comments on your blog. Most blogging platforms allow email notification when there are new comments on your blog – and bloggers can maximize the use of this in conjunction with a frequent email checking practice to get almost immediate notification of comments on your blog.

For more great articles on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s blog – Blog Marketing Singapore

Traffic Generating Strategies for Blogs

We all know that a blog, like any website, needs to be marketed in order to kick start a flow of traffic to the site. There are many traffic generation strategies in use, but which are the best?

To search engines, blog are no different from regular websites. However, because of the nature of blogs, being frequently updated, having a normally simple HTML structure, blogs are very much favored by search engines, making it an easy platform for you to perform will in a search engine promotion campaign.

There are, however, some very distinct advantages in using blogs over website, in terms of traffic generation strategies. Here are a few.

Blog Comments and Trackbacks

One of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your blog is to comment in other’s blogs. This can be done in two was – the first, as a regular comment (i.e. typing in the blog’s post comment box and clicking submit) and the other is by sending a trackback.

When you do either of these, alongside the entry to your blog comment is your opportunity to get an in-bound link, and remember, the more in-bound links you have to your website, the better.

Submission to Blog Directories

Another means of bringing traffic to your site is by submitting your blog to blog directories, like BlogExplosion.com, and BlogFlux.com. Some of these blog directories, also act as traffic exchanges, but usually, traffic exchanges do not bring in targeted traffic.

When you submit to a blog directory, it might take some time for your blog to be approved. However, when that is done, you will have an opportunity to receive traffic from these directories.

Tag and Ping

A tag is a means for your to label what your post is about. Usually, one blog post is tagged with one or more tags. After the post has been tagged, the next thing you need to do is to ping the different blog aggregating services like Technorati and Google Blog Search using your blog.

A ping, basically tells the service “Hey, I’m updated, come and the updates”.

When the ping is sent, the blog aggregating services will search your blogs for the latest post updates, and when it discovers that you have tagged the post with a particular phrase, it also labels your post as such, in their database.

When people search these blog aggregating services using the phrases you have used to tag your blog post with, your post will appear in the search results, and that is where traffic comes in.

Conclusion

As you may have already concluded, while search engines treat blogs and regular websites alike, these three traffic generating strategies specific to blogs make it very much easier to promote a blog.

For more great articles on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s blog – Blog Marketing Singapore

Why Start a Blog and Monetizing Your Blog

Blogs are becoming very popular nowadays, as people are publishing their thoughts online at the speed of a click. Find out how you can use your blog to make you real money!

I guess that by now most of us would know what a blog is. The word Blog is the short or Web Log, and the term Blogosphere refers to what the online community of people who blog, sometimes which are hyperlinked very extensively with each other.

The key differences between a blog and a normal website is that blogs are frequently updated, and most blogs use a very personal language, representative to the personality of the author the blog.

Through the past few years, the numbers of blogs have grown tremendously and exponentially, and today, even people without technical education can set up an account on Blogger.com and get started with blogging.

Blogs have indeed become a very important part of the Internet, and information age.

So, why are blogs so important today?

Companies and businesses can use blogs as a medium to interact directly with their customers! One very powerful property of the Internet is “instancy” – real time information, real time news, real time feedback! What traditionally took one day to appear on the newspaper will take 2 seconds to post on a blog!

In fact, during the recent world cup finals in Germany, I was frantically refreshing the news page of New York Times to see how fast these journalists are in updating their site. 45 seconds! Yes! The moment the winning goal was made, the articles are already on their way to the web server.

The Internet has also become one of the primary mediums of research today, and by marketing your blog will with quality content, blogs can help to position you and your company as experts in the industry.

Most blog engines also make marketing easier by publishing RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds. So for people who are interested in your blog, they can just subscribe to your blog feed and receive instant updates when you update your blog.

Also, while it sometimes takes hundreds of dollars to post an advertisement on the newspaper, adding another page of information on the Internet cost virtually nothing. With that, people are also more generous in adding links from their websites or blogs to your blog, especially if your content is good – and this means better search engine rankings.

After you have marketed your blog, the next step is to monetize your blog!

How do you monetize your blog?

There are several ways in which you can make money from your blog, and here are just a few ways:

1. Selling advertisements – When your site starts to draws eyeballs, it is time to offer advertisement space out to interested parties to put their advertisements on your site. Whether it is a banner, graphic or text link, people out there will be interested to have a piece of your traffic!

2. Using Google’s AdSense – or other pay per click engines. If you are lazy to manage your own advertisements, just sign up for a Google Adsense account and use the code provided by Google. When people click on the ads on your site, you get paid. Simple as that.

3. Affiliate Programs – Search through ClickBank.com for a suitable affiliate program to sell, and get paid when you make a sale.

Al of these three schemes can make you enough money to live on blogging, when you have enough traffic!

So, are you ready to start blogging?

For more great articles on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s blog – Blog Marketing Singapore