Archive of ‘blogging’ category
Pound-for-pound, WordPress is my preferred blogging platform of choice, in terms of flexbility, customization and ability to optimize for SEO and traffic generation.
The current version, 2.3, still has a number of issues yet to be resolved, but the great thing is that the Automattic and third-party plugin developers are constantly chugging away at the hardest working blogging platform in my eyes.
Ryan Boren, part of the WordPress development team, just put up his “s/2.4/s.5/g” post that the WordPress development team will be skipping WordPress 2.4 and releasing WordPress 2.5 in March, together with the promise of “some big new features”.
What’re the “big new features”?
No secret really, if you check out the WordPress roadmap.
If you drill down to the specific WordPress 2.5 milestone level, you will find details of some of the features being worked on.
For example, WP 2.5 will have the ability to search through static “pages”, in addition to the “posts”.
Tweaks for WP plugins and cache (which should give better blog performance, as a cache file would require lower resource overhead compared to a .PHP script), uploading of flash and 3gpp files.
And a host of other features designed to make WordPress an easy platform for new bloggers.
For the comprehensive and somewhat gory list of WP 2.5 milestones, you can look here.
WordPress bloggers can rest easy knowing that the development team is on it…
On any given day, my blog comment spam filter throws more than 500 spammy blog comments into the digital trashbin.
I go through the remainder, and too a whole bunch more in as well. These are typically with the sender’s “website” listed as a squidoo lens with the lens title something along the lines of “/instant-money-bonanza” or “/5second-millionaire” and inevitably leads to a spammy/scammy page with a $27 ebook teaching you how to make $1,000,000 in your sleep, while sipping a margarita.
Right…
So if so many blog comments are ending up in the trash, especially if you have a vigilant editorial team checking the comment moderation queue, is it even worth taking the time to submit one?
Let’s expand this a little wider and include forums and social networking/conversation sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and even Yahoo! Groups too.
The primary goal in social marketing is to (more…)
If you’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1, you could have either the best blogging experience if you’re a new user, or one of the worst, if you’ve been using WordPress for some time.
A key reason is mentioned on the WP-Testers list by Ryan Boren, one of the developers:
“The big schema change is the dropping of the categories, post2cat, and link2cat changes in favor of the new terms, term_taxonomy, and term_relationship tables. Any plugin that queries against the old table will break horribly.â€
What this means is that the new WordPress has shifted its data structure from a category-basedsystem to a new taxonomy.
If you’ve extensively used category-based plugins to enhance your SEO or social marketing efforts, you’ll bang into lots of error messages, as anyone who’s posted a comment on this blog will attest to.
Given the number of social-based plugins I’ve installed, and the extent to which they interface with the old (now defunct) category-based data strcuture, you can expect to (more…)
Is Microblogging all it’s cracked up to be?
You might’ve noticed that one of the widgets in the sidebar is missing.
Twitter has been an interesting experiment, especially some of the exchanges I’ve had with Sam Harrelson, who’s certainly an intelligent and expressive microblogger.
So what’s my opinion of microblogging?
It’s great if you’re at the sidelines of a seminar or tradeshow and a good way to get updates out. We might see some interesting updates from the Blog Haus at Affiliate Summit.
If you’re waiting in transit at the airport, or on a long subway ride, it’s a good time killer [Although I think you’d get more out of a good book…]
Where microblogging doesn’t work for me, is blogging in the midst of work.
If you disrupt your usual work to file a 140 character update, it can mess up your train of thought.
So though I’ll be checking in regularly to my twitter account, I likely won’t be checking it fantatically.
What’s your experience with microblogging?
A client of mine showed me their blog, and asked: “I’m not happy with the income my blog is generating. Can you help me increase my profit? I run both google adsense and affiliate offers“.
While I can’t show the blog or do a screencapture due to confidentiality reasons, here are some points to help you bring your blog monetization to the next level.
Nothing beats a well-tuned blog. This means tracking your analytics and conversions, and making the improvements and tracking, and repeating the cycle.
Broadly, you need to understand the intention and outcome of every visitor to your blog.
Are they there to browse? To make a comparison? To make a purchase?
I’ve found that AdSense publishing is suited for browsers who are still looking for information and aren’t close to making a buying decision yet.
I’ve found AdSense to provide a fairly low ROI (return on investment), so I’ve focused on my affiliate marketing efforts.
You can’t have it both ways…
It’s unlikely that a visitor will both click on an adsense ad AND buy a product from you – It’s either one or the other.
I’ve heard pseudo blogging “experts” say that you should have both adsense and affiliate offers on your blog, because someone who doesn’t buy, will click on your adsense ads instead.
THIS IS COMPLETE NONSENSE.
If you follow such ill-founded advice, you could possibly (more…)
If you’re using social networking/web 2.0 technologies to generate traffic and you aren’t using the Flock web browser in your efforts, you’re missing out in a big way.
The Flock development team has just launched a new version of their software, Flock 0.9.1.
Here’s a screenshot:
It now sports improved tabbed browsing features, together with integration into web services like the major blogging engines, as well as photo and video services.
Note: If you want to get the maximum benefit, you’d need to (more…)
