blogio blogging blog

I like checking out other blogs for inspiration. Sometimes this brings new ideas that I can use on one of my own blogs, but I also see blogs that show you what not to do. I’m not going to point the finger at anyone, but there are some blogs that are just too horrible to visit. Here are a few things for you to think about when figuring out the layout of your blog (or any other website for that matter)

Readability
People come to your blog or website to read your content, so make sure they can read it. Some people like to use pretty background pictures that continue behind the text and make the content very hard to read. Use an even background color for your content and make sure your text has sufficient contrast to the background. Font size is another important factor to think about. Too big or too small makes text hard to read.

Video and audio
Video can be a great medium to communicate a message to your website visitors, but it shouldn’t start playing as soon as your page opens. Please let me decide if, and when, I want to press play. The same goes for audio, I don’t need to hear your favorite song playing when I visit your site.

Ads
Some people have more ads than content on their website. Ads should be subtly integrated into your website, if at all. All too often I see sites trying to sell their own product or service and show ads of their competitors. Do you want to sell your own stuff or make your visitors aware of the competition?

Plugins
There are a great number of useful plugins that you can add to your blog. Before adding them all, think about which ones would be useful to your visitors. I don’t care what the weather forecast at you place is. I’m also not likely to be interested in the current moon phase when reading a blog about cars. When adding widgets to your sidebar, try to use static ones. Flashy, animated gifs distract your visitors from the content.

If you don’t agree with the above advice, you are not alone. There’s a huge website with people just like you, it’s called MySpace.

You see this same question over and over again: how can I make lots of money with my blog? Especially on the a-list blogs. People want to know how these bloggers pulled it off to become so popular and make mad money with their blogs. Like the question, the answer is also the same each time: you don’t!

There’s no money in blogging, sure there are a few that reel in the cash, but there are millions of bloggers that don’t make any money at all, or at least not nearly enough to justify the time they spend on their blogs. Try to blog for money and you will be frustrated pretty soon. In stead, treat it as a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you do it for a few years, maybe, you can turn your hobby into your job.

As soon as you stop worrying about the number of visitors and the number of ad clicks you get each day, blogging becomes so much more enjoyable, as a hobby should be. Readers will notice a positive change in your writing and before you know it, positive things will happen.

I am running a couple of different blogs, one of them never got too much attention, but these last few weeks I have been feeling very positively about it and really enjoyed working on it. Last week I suddenly got an e-mail from an editor of a printed magazine. He liked the information on my blog and wanted me to write for the magazine!

I know, it’s not the jackpot, but I got a few hundred bucks for about a days work plus very targeted advertising for me and my blog to 70000 magazine readers. Plus, they liked my writing so much, that they offered me a regular column in the magazine.

It’s stories like this that the big bloggers will also tell you: the blog doesn’t make the majority of the money, but it helps the money to find them.

Most hosting providers and domain registrars hide stuff they don’t want you to know about in their “general terms and conditions”, “terms of service” or “acceptable use policy” you agree on those when you sign up for their service. It’s that 40 page long document you scroll thru to click the “I agree” checkbox at the bottom.

Some domain registrars have high fees to transfer your domain to another registrar. easyspace.com, for example, charges $22 to transfer your domain or $37 to change the owner! Their 45 page long Terms & Conditions includes:

You agree that you may not transfer a domain name registration to another domain name registrar during the first sixty (60) days from the effective date of the initial domain name registration with us. After that time, you may transfer your domain name registration to a third party domain name registrar of your choice, subject to our then-current policies and procedures incorporated herein by reference.

Note the marked part! Basically they can add whatever they want after you have agreed! Read more »

Looking into more ways to get free advertising and traffic, I found the Xavier Media Banner Exchange program. Programs like these are a great way for the starting bloggers to get some visitors to their blog, without having to put down any cash for advertising.

The program works with a 3:2 ration, which means that for every 3 ad clicks on your site, you will get 2 visitors send back to you. You will start with 1000 banner impression credits and you can get another free 5000 banner impression credits just for writing a review. Since I was going to write this review anyway, that’s 5000 totally free banner impression credits for me, yay!

What I really like about this banner exchange program is that you don’t have to do any clicking to earn points, your visitors can take care of that. This makes this program a lot better than Entrecard in my eyes.

You can put your own ad in several of 35 different categories, so the traffic you will be getting should be pretty targeted. As with any banner campaign, the number of clicks on your ad will depend on the design of your banner. Since you can have multiple ads running through this program, you can do some split testing and see which banner design performs best for you.

I’ll have to see how this works out in the long run, but my first impression of the Xavier Media Banner Exchange is very positive. You should give it a try! If it doesn’t work out for you, too bad, but at least you didn’t loose a dime trying it.

Looking at different methods to bring traffic to this very new blog, I decided to give Entrecard a try. I was very hesitant in using this method because it is very much like the numerous traffic-swap programs out there. Been there, done that, didn’t like it!

You basically put an ad button on your site and visitors who are also signed up with Entrecard can click it to earn points. I can in turn visit their sites and click to earn points for myself. The earned points can be spend on displaying your ad button on other peoples websites.

The great thing about this method of advertising is that it doesn’t cost you a dime, which is great for people just starting out blogging. The downside is that you’ll have to do a lot of clicking to earn enough points to put your ad up on other sites. Also, when not clicking, the other users of the system will not notice you and will not visit your site.

So, if you click a lot, you get a lot of visitors. Great, if you have the time to visit all these blogs to click the button. But be aware of the type of traffic you get in return: they are other Entrecard members, only visiting your site to click the button. Most of them probably don’t even read a single word on your blog. They are the click-n-run visitors.

You might wonder how Entrecard got so popular. I’ll tell you: it’s all in the marketing! With a few big names, like Darren Rowse and John Chow, promoting your service, things can start snowballing pretty fast. Shame on you, both of you! Although it looks like they are both not using the service anymore.

If I don’t like this method of getting traffic, why am I using it? First of all, I believe in trying out things for myself before writing a review about it. Sure, I could just browse the web to see what everyone is saying, but that wouldn’t make a very objective review. I also think that this service can potentially bring me some visitors that might decide to hang around or subscribe to my rss feed. Since they are all bloggers, it is very targeted traffic I’m getting for this blog. The only question that remains is whether or not they actually read my posts.

So, to summarize: if you measure your blogs success in visitor numbers only and have time to spare to visit 350 blogs a day, just to click the Entrecard button, go ahead! If you are more interested in growing your blogs community, I’d say there are better ways to spend your time.

Keeping your WordPress installation, or any other software installations for that matter, up to date should be high on your to-do list. No matter how well programs are planned, there will almost always be bugs and security holes that are only discovered after the software has been released. They are often patched by software updates as soon as the issue has been discovered and a fix has been created.

It’s these known, and fixed, software issues, that cause the most problems. There are a lot of wanna-be hackers around, that are too stupid to figure out how to hack websites by themselves. Instead they just exploit the known bugs to gain access and impress their wanna-be-hacker-friends with their l33t h4cker 5killz.

If you keep your software up to date, you will probably have a more than 99% less chance of getting your website hacked. Here’s what happened to one of my WordPress blogs, that I didn’t upgrade:

I have a blog that has been laying dormant for well over a year. At one time I just didn’t have the time to post updates and I never got back to writing on that blog again. It was still making some money from a few scattered AdSense clicks, nothing major, but enough to cover the years domain registration and hosting fees. I figured I’d keep the site and maybe one day start writing on it again.

Recently I started getting email from the hosting company, notifying me that the site was nearing its bandwidth limit. Checking the website statistics I found a sudden rise in traffic back in August. The number of visitors and page views has been steady, but the used bandwidth went up. Not just a little: in July 2008 the site used 68 MB of bandwidth, which is about the normal monthly usage for the website throughout the rest of the year, but in August the traffic jumped up to 994 MB, in September the bandwidth usage was over 5 GB and the highest peak was this past November with nearly 10 GB of traffic!

I had my email alerts for the site set to 10 GB. So, nearing this amount of traffic triggered the system to notify me on the site usage. Checking the stats, I noticed visitors finding my website through search terms that I’m not even going to mention here, just open up your average spam email and you know what terms I mean.

I went to look at the site and everything appeared to be normal, but the little icon in the top right hand corner of my browser, which indicates the page is being loaded, wouldn’t stop spinning, even though my screen showed the complete site already. Looking at the source code of the page, I found a lot of links at the bottom of the page. I didn’t count them, but there where literally thousands!

I requested a free sample from each site linked to, so I could make my friends envy me for the rest of my life. Well, actually, I just removed the links and went to bed. The next morning they where all there again! I must have forgotten to save the file after removing the links. I removed them again and double checked the site. All looked good, but a few hours later the links had been put right back into my source code files.

This WordPress installation had been installed in January 2006 and hadn’t been upgraded since, so I decided to install one of my favorite WordPress plugins: WordPress automatic upgrade. With my installation being almost 3 years out of date, I wasn’t expecting the plugin to work, but it worked perfectly, upgrading my WordPress installation to the latest and greatest release with just a few clicks (sorry Keith, I should have known better!)

The links didn’t come back, but I’m still worried about a Google penalty my site might have received for having all these links on there. I’m glad big G didn’t close my AdSense account that was displaying ads on the spammed pages.

Search engines have their bots roaming the internet, looking for new and changed website pages. There’s no telling when the bots will visit your site and indexing new pages on your site can take anywhere from minutes to days or even weeks.

If you’re running a blog and people have subscribed to your rss feed, you’ll want to let them know immediately when you have posted new content. The rss services, however, also rely on checking your site to see if new content has been posted. Checking every blog every minute of the day would be a big burden, both on their servers, as well as on the one hosting your blog.

This is where ping comes in: by pinging a service, you let it know that you have updated your site and it should come over to see what has changed. (not to be confused with the tcp/ip ping command, which tests the connection between two systems)

Within the WordPress admin panel you can find Update Services under Settings -> Writing. Here you can type in the URLs of the services to ping, whenever you post something new to your blog.

There are loads of ping services available, but be careful! Don’t just put every ping service you can find in there. Services like pingomatic will forward your ping to multiple other ping services. This will cause multiple pings, both from you and from pingomatic, to the same service. With multiple pings coming in for a single post, your blog could be marked as spam!

Here’s the list of ping services I’ve put into my WordPress installations:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

WordPress is a great software package. One of its greatest features is the plugin engine that enables programmers to easily add new functionalities or change existing ones. Many people have created great plugins, so you don’t have to. Currently there are over 3400 plugins listed in the WordPress plugin directory and many more plugins are available on the authors websites.

Here are some of my favorite plugins:

Akismet
The ultimate comment-spam buster! If I could only use a single plugin, this would be the one. Akismet protects your blog from comment spammers that put links to all sorts of nasty websites in your post comments. Without Akismet you will be spending a lot of time digging thru the spam comments. All you need to do to activate the Akismet plugin is get a free API key from the WordPress site. The plugin itself doesn’t need installing as it comes bundled with the WordPress installation.

All in one SEO pack
WordPress is not fully optimized for the search engines, but that changes after installing the all in one SEO pack. This plugin gives you full control over page titles, meta tags and keywords.

Broken link checker
Whenever you put links into your posts, there is a chance that you will have broken links on your site in the future. This plugin checks all your outgoing links and lets you know if any of them are not working any more.

do-follow
Get rid of the no-follow attribute, because it doesn’t help.

feedburner feedsmith
If you want to be able to track your rss subscriber numbers, I suggest you sign up for a free account at feedburner. Once you have your feedburner account, you’ll need to change your rss feed links to point to the feedburner feed. “Where are the rss feed links located that need changing?” you might ask. That’s where this plugin comes in: install, activate and put your feedburner feed URL in the config screen.

no self pings
This plugin prevents pingbacks from showing when linking back to your own posts.

share this
A nice little button to enable visitors to submit your blog post to various social bookmarking sites or send an e-mail to friends.

top commentators
Say “thank you” to your top commentators by giving them a side wide link.

wordpress automatic upgrade
Upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest release from within the admin panel. Upgrading this way saves a lot of worries and time.

wp-cumulus
A beautiful flash tag-cloud to spice up your blog. This is probably not helping with SEO, but it looks awesome!

There are many more great WordPress plugins available, but these are some that I really like. Oh hold on, I almost forgot to mention the best plugin of them all: my very own ad buttons plugin! Actually, it’s not that great yet, as it is still a work in progress, but feel free to download it and give it a try.

I don’t think I, or anybody else, has the time to give the thousands of plugins available on the WordPress site all a try. Do you know of some particularly good plugins, please let me know!

With your domain registered and hosting taken care of, it’s time to install your blog software. There are different software packages available for blogging, some free, some paid. The only one I have ever tried is WordPress and I didn’t ever bother to look at others, that’s how much I like it.

Being a programmer myself, I know a good piece of software when I see it. WordPress is one of the software packages that I’ve liked from day one and it is getting better with each new release. The feature I like most has got to be their plugin engine. Once you figure out how it works, it’s very easy to write your own plugins for WordPress that add functionality or change existing functionalities of the software. If you are not a programmer, there are free WordPress plugins available for most tasks you can think of and installing them only requires uploading the plugin files.

I’m wandering off, this post should be about installing WordPress, but it’s turning into a WordPress promotion, I’ll save the rest for a later post. Truth is, there’s not much to write when talking about installing the software. After downloading the latest stable release from the WordPress download page, all you have to do is edit the configuration file, so the software can access your database. Detailed installation instructions can be found on the WordPress site.

Once you have your domain name registered, you will need to sign up for a hosting account. Hosting accounts come in many forms and sizes. Think about what you want to put on your website, so you can get a hosting account that can handle the task. My preferred blog software is WordPress, which needs php and MySQL running on the server, other software packages might require a windows server and asp. Make sure you know exactly what type of hosting you need before signing up for one.

A server running on Linux is usually cheaper, because it doesn’t require an expensive software license like Windows servers. Php and MySQL are also free to run unlike Microsoft’s SQL server.

Another option would be to host your website at home, but I would not recommend it, even if you have the knowledge to run your own server. No matter how well you manage your server, there are tons of things that can go wrong and bring your website down. When things go wrong it is usually when you are not there to fix it, preferably when you just left for a long weekend away. When you sign up for a hosting account, the hosting provider will look after the server and make sure your website is accessible day and night.