Blogging

Wordpress.

Although the quickest place to get started with blogging is on www.blogger.com, which still has some advantages as it is owned by Google, the best all round blogging tool is Wordpress. You can host it on your own domain, perhaps as /domainname.com/blog or even as a stand alone site i.e. by installing it in the root directory so that www.domainname.com brings up the first page of your blog.

You can select the appearance of your blog from hundreds of templates available both free and paid and when you get to know enough about it you can edit your own templates. 'Plug-ins' are readily available to add functionality to your blog and are easy to install - and best of all it's free!

If you would really like to develop your very own unique Wordpress theme then try this free Worpress theme generator.Despite all this I have to admit my first encounters with Wordpress were far from happy. I was expecting an easy experience based on the sort of introduction I realise I've just written myself in the last few paragraphs. But it was far from that, mostly because I was swimming in a sea of total ignorance.

Much later, I came across www.WordPressTutorials.com and kicked myself for not having found it earlier. Yes, there is a charge ($75 per quarter or $250/year) but it is slick and well presented in bite size chunks that allows you to learn the whole product in order to make most effective use of it. I see there is now some free help at www.wordpresstutorials.com/contribution/

That's one of the lessons I have learned to avoid. Implementing some new tool, blundering through to set up what I need at that moment and then rushing on to the next new thing. You never get real value from the work you have just done because you are not using that tool to it's maximum.

Semiologic Pro

Later still I came across Semiologic Pro that I thoroughly recommend if you do not like any technical issues to get in the way of your internet marketing efforts. Semiologic Pro is Wordpress wrapped up and fully integrated with a bunch of the most effective and useful SEO plugins so you don't have to worry about whether one plug in works with another or not. Excellent product support through the online forum that you can access directly from every installation.

As one seasoned user recently put it on the Semio forum: "Semiologic is a true bargain. For the initial price of the package, think of how many hours you could expend converting the standard issue of WordPress into the powerhouse that Semiologic has become? 5 hours? 10 hours? Certainly less than 2 days. From an economic standpoint, most could only afford to spend 2 days or less finding, downloading, testing and troubleshooting some 80 plugins and then verifying that they work together without fail before the cost of Semiologic Pro would be seem a bargain.

How many hours would it take to upgrade an installation each and every time that WordPress decided to make a change? Using the same analysis as above, isn't the cost of yearly upgrades also a bargain?"

It's not only the time taken to do the tasks illustrated in that quote but also the time taken to learn how to do them that really swayed my decision.

I am now creating entire selling websites using Semiologic Pro, in fact this site is a Semiologic site. The pages in the right hand Browse sidebar are all static pages that can have an hierarchical structure if you want. At the time of writing I am not actively using the blog element so you will find very little in the Blog, although this may change in the future.

Denis de Bernardy who produces Semiologic Pro has put together some really useful, down to earth information on blogging at http://www.semiologic.com/resources/blogging/.

Commenting and Trackbacks

Don't forget that Commenting and Trackbacks are an extremely powerful way of developing targeted traffic. You need to locate 5-10 blogs that are active in your subject area and begin to participate in their discussions. You can Comment on their blog and make sure that you include a link either in your signature or directly in the text, prefereably to the Permalink of the specific post or page of your blog that is relevant. Blog etiquette allows you the one link.

Alternatively, you can post on your own blog on the same or related subject making reference to the post you have just read on another blog. When you decided to make your post while reading the other blog you located and copied to your Clipboard the Trackback code from that post. When you complete your own post on your blog you paste into the correct area of your software the Trackback code from the other site. This will ensure that as soon as you publish your post the other blog will be notified with a link across to you.

To find relevant blogs on your subject use the free tool at http://blogsearch.google.com/ - it's name speaks for itself.

This is a great way of developing very focussed traffic.

Telling The World You Have Spoken

It's all very well scribbling away on your blog but if no-one knows about it then you are wasting your time. To tell the world you need to have Update (or 'ping' ) Services activated. Although your Wordpress blog will have Pingomatic installed by default you really want to major on this issue rather more. So go to Wordpress and copy the list of Update Services then come back to your blog and paste them into the Admin area of your blog at WP Admin->Options->Writing.

Mass Blog Creation

If any of your strategies include mass blog creation then I would suggest you use Blog Matrix Pro from J P Schoeffel. This enables you to create multiple blogs automatically as well as posting content.

Managing your blogging

If you get heavily into blogging, especially using a number of blogs, you might find www.blogdesk.com a handy tool. Blog Desk is open source software, therefore free, and allows you to prepare your blog posts offline, including incorporating lots of twiddly things like graphics resizing and similar tasks. This means that you need only go online for a few seconds to connect to your blogs, even on different hosts and post your latest bulletins for the world.

Windows Live Writer is a similar tool, also free and is downloadable from Microsoft.

Optimising Your Blog for SEO

I picked up a useful tip today from well known SEO expert, Nathan Anderson. He signs off all his blog posts with his name (that he wants to optimise for SEO) linked back to his blog home page. That seems irrational when the post is already on the home page. But it actually has 2 purposes.

1. When the posts are archived they will still have the internal link back to his home page. This will help promote his home page with the search engines.
2. More importantly, many of his blog readers take an RSS feed. So his posts are being distributed across the net and published in all sorts of places - still carrying that link back to his home page. So he is creating multiple one-way, inbound links just by posting on his blog.

Thanks Nathan - I'll be using that one!