Archive of ‘blogging’ category
Having a policy like requiring blog registration prior to posting comments can reduce your blog to a one-way web publishing medium.
While not as extreme as banning blog comments altogether, it can severely reduce the number of comments you receive in your posts.
Let’s face it, we already deal with a multitude of usernames and passwords, and blogs are designed to be an easy communication platform to set up, publish to and for readers to access.
By adding additional layers of registration, and requiring users to login each time they’d like to comment, you’re increasing (more…)
If you’ve experimented with social traffic strategies, you might’ve encountered the Digg Effect (or also known as the Slashdot effect) where a torrent of traffic (upwards of 1,000 unique visitors a second) brings your webhost to a screaming halt.
Matt Coddington over at NetBusinessBlog is masterful at this technique.
Observe his traffic:
One of his Dugg posts is: Building a Niche Minisite (Part 1)
One of the reason why your webhost might crash is due to the processing required in compiling the PHP code and serving up the page for each visitor.
This could literally kill the server resources during peak periods.
So Ricardo Galli’s WP Cache provides a workaround, by caching your blog posts as static pages, enabling you to serve hundreds of times more pages per second.
In fact, the plugin serves to “reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.”
The plugin is (more…)
New bloggers take note, you will for the most part be invisible unless you list yourself on the relevant directories and you’ll soon see a surge in traffic headed to your blog.
Blogging newbies might try submitting their blogs to the search engines and perhaps the Dmoz open directory project.
For the biggest bang for your buck, however, you’d likely want to google for “blog directory” and “rss directory” and list the high authority directories. Though it can be a somewhat mindnumbing process to submit the same data over and over again, it will result in sustained and long term traffic if done correctly.
Once accepted, you will have a backlink (with possible Google Pagerank of 3 or higher) helping you rank in the search engines for your keywords and key phrases.
One of my favorite directories continues to be Blog Explosion which incorporate various fun elements (which generate traffic too).
For details, you can read the earlier post: Explode your blog traffic with Blog Explosion
If you’ve not experienced a corrupted blog or having your blog data wiped out, or even worse, hijacked, consider yourself lucky.
With WordPress evolving fast and furiously since 2.1.x, the number of improvements to the user interface, processing, and bug rectification has made WordPress the preeminent blogging platform in my opinion.
However, with the release of WordPress 2.1 onwards, you may have noticed that the “Backup” function might’ve been missing from the “Manage” tab.
According to Austin Matzko’s blog “The lead developers decided to un-bundle it (the WordPress Database Backup Plugin) from WordPress starting with version 2.1”, which is a pity because the latest version includes the ability to schedule backups using the CRON function.
If you’re an adventurous blogger, constantly experimenting with plugins (and possibly corrupting your blog in the process), or want to provide an easy restoration in the event of “blog malfunction”, be sure to install Austin’s WordPress Database Backup plugin.
Adsense publishers should also check out (more…)
Your blog setup can make or break your blogging efforts.
And the major problem is that many new bloggers have a “more is better” mentality.
Their blogs up as a dumping ground for too many unnessary plugins, icons, and “Top Blog site” tags.
You are a “Top Blog” because your readers come back constantly to check the content.
You are a “Top Dog” when other bloggers point at your blog posts as a resource for their readers to check out.
So if you’re guilty of abusing the social WordPress plugin (which allows readers to bookmark your post at popular social bookmarking sites) in the following manner:
or even:
So if you choose it, don’t go hog wild and display 20 services. Plug 3 services, or a maximum of 5 if you have to.
StumbleUpon is good, so’s Digg and Reddit.
There’re even worse things you can do however, and that’s to (more…)
There’s a discussion brewing over at the Webtools Collection post “Top 6 Most Prolific Bloggers” listing 6 of the “most prolific” bloggers with 1,000 or more posts. (courtesy of Darren Rowse’s Speedlinking 4 March 2007).
Does post quantity lead to a better reader experience?
It would, especially if you’re giving your readers more choice, and they’re likely to find something that interests them.
At the same time though, we have (more…)
