Robert Rogers

Blogs have many advantages over normal WebPages when it comes to internet marketing. Blogs are indexed much faster, blogs can “ping” hundreds of blog and news directories, and blogs can be listed in places normal websites are not. Here are some Power Tips to get your blog rolling!

1.) If your blog is new, create at least three to five posts per day. People who visit will want something to read. Also, focus on keywords in your niche topic for “natural” search engine optimization.

2.) Add your blog to your My Yahoo! page. If you haven’t setup a My Yahoo yet, just go to yahoo.com and click on the My Yahoo! icon near the top right. After your setup, go to your My Yahoo page and click on the “add content” button found near the upper right. You will be presented with a form to enter your RSS link. It will look something like this http://affiliatepowertools.com/inside/?feed=rss2. When you submit your own RSS to My Yahoo it is indexed by Yahoo.

3.) Add your blog to your Google’s Reader. When you submit your own blog RSS to Google’s Reader the Google Blog Search will index your site. To do this, goto google.com, click on the “personalize home” or “my account” button in the upper left. After you account is setup, sign in and click on the “add content” button in the upper left of your page.

4.) Add a link directory to your blog and trade links with sites that share a similar niche. At this point, you want to trade links mainly to get direct traffic. In the long term, this will help with your rankings in the search engines as well. Use software such as seo elite to speed up your link trading and optimize you blog for the search engines.

5.) Use ping sites like www.ping-o-matic.com Ping your site every time you add a new post. Check to see if your blog software is already doing this. Wordpress and B2Evolution do this automatically and is a real time saver.

6.) Submit your blog to traditional search engines such as Google, AltaVista, and MSN.

7.) Submit your blog to traditional directories such as DMOZ.com Directories (particularly DMOZ) increase relevance with Google. DMOZ is very picky and can sometimes take months to get listed. For a good list of free directories, click here.

8.) Submit to as many RSS Directories as possible. There are over 150 listed at http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ . This is a simple but repetitive process that can be done automatically with software such as RSS FEEDS SUBMIT.

9.) Comment on other blogs and forums. Do not just leave short, lazy comments like “I agree.” Try to really answer questions or give opinions on subjects you know. How long your post will be depends on you. Generally, five to ten sentences is enough to explain yourself on someone else’s blog or forum. Most forums require you to register, so include a link to your blog in your profile and/or in your signature file. But be tactful about it; some forums get annoyed with those who selfishly drop a few links to their own site and leave. Find a relevant group on Google groups, Yahoo groups, MSN groups or any of the thousands of other FREE group services and find like minded people and talk with them. Make sure your use your blog URL like it is your name.

10.) Use track backs. If there is a blog that you refer to or quote and it is highly relevant to your subject, leave a track back. It increases your link popularity and may even score a few interested readers from the linked site.

Although these are some of the most popular ways to drive traffic to your blog, do not limit your self to tips and lists. Use your imagination and you will come up with thousands of ways to drive traffic to your blog!

About the author:

Robert Rogers is a writer in the Washington DC area. For internet marketing tips and tools visit his blog at affiliatepowertools.com/inside

Allen Hart

You want to grow your business online and a professional website is the next step. However, like most work at home dads, your budget is limited. It is possible to get a professional looking website at a low cost? Yes – using a no cost content manager called Wordpress. Below you’ll find the top ten reasons why you will want to use Wordpress for your business website.

Before you begin, you’ll need to have two things in place: web site hosting and a domain name. You can even host your Wordpress blog for free at http://wordpress.com/. Make sure that the hosting company you choose offer ftp access, PHP, and MySQL database support. I would head over to http://www.wordpress.org and read the article entitled “Before You Install” first http://codex.wordpress.org/Before_You_Install for a full listing of what you will need to get it up and running.

Wordpress has some key features that make it great for managing you website content. I am going to outline 10 of those for you.

1. Easy to Install

First, Wordpress is really easy to install. All you have to do is read the easy setup guide put together by the creators of Wordpress, titled “The Famous 5 Minute Install”. As long as your hosting supports the laid out in this guide, Wordpress can be installed very simply.

2. Easy to Set Up

Once you have Wordpress installed you can start blogging and creating pages for your site. You may also want to take some time and get to know the Administration Panel in Wordpress. There are a ton of options such as templates, plugins, etc that you can configure to fit your needs.

3. Easy to maintain

Now that you are up and running with Wordpress there is really nothing else required from you. It is great you can just run at this point. The only real maintenance is moderating comments if you choose to allow them and backing up your database on a regular basis. There is even a great plugin that you can use to do database backups, but I am getting ahead of myself I will cover plugins in a minute.

4. Easy to Add Content

As I said before there are two main ways to add content to your Wordpress website. You can add ‘posts’ and ‘pages’. It is so easy to add content to both. They have a great text editor built into Wordpress. You can easily copy and paste or type your content. You can also add content by adding links which is also a built in feature of Wordpress.

5. Easy for Users to Navigate

Wordpress automatically adds links to all of your pages and posts. All you have to do is create the content Wordpress does the rest. This makes it so easy to add content you will find yourself with more free time to create content.

6. Easy to Customize

Wordpress can be customized in three main ways:

Plugins - There are a ton of pre-built plugins that can be found on the Wordpress website, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. Most of these have been tested and are stable, but beware that sometimes you get unforeseen results. Always make sure and backup your files and database before you begin. Plugins can add all kinds of functionality to your blog. One of my favorite plugins is Scripturize. Scripturize adds links to http://www.biblegateway.com automatically.

Themes - Themes can be downloaded from the Wordpress website. http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/. They have tons of themes and even information on how to make your own. Themes are a way for the Wordpress admin to totally change the look and feel of any Wordpress blog.

Do-it-Yourself - As far as customizing Wordpress the skies the limit. If you know just a little bit of PHP, HTML, and CSS you can do just about anything.

7. Easy to find information and help

It is so easy to find help and support for Wordpress. I would start over at http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page. They have the official Wordpress support and help. Help is also only a Google search away. You would be surprised how much information is out there.

8. Easy to maintain a connection with your users – RSS

Wordpress has some great way to get your users involved and help you reach out and connect with them. I really like the RSS feeds that Wordpress supplies for you. This is such an easy way for your users to get your content and keep up with what is going on. You can also create a Podcast feed using Wordpress. It is also great that all of your posts can have comments. This is a great way to start some dialogue with your users.

9. Easy to Expand

If your website and blog are small Wordpress is great way to get started. As it starts to grow, Wordpress easily grows with you. You are only limited to the amount of room that you have for your database and other Wordpress files with your hosting company.

10. Easy to promote

You can easily promote your website and blog using the built in tools in Wordpress. They have a feature that every time you add content it pings all of the popular blog aggregators and adds your content. I know that I started getting traffic on my Wordpress blog the very first day because of these easy-to-use options.

In closing, if you are looking for a way to start a new website or redesign an old one Wordpress may be the best way for you to do it. It only took me a few days to get CWAHD.com up and running on Wordpress and I am sure that you can do it, too. If you don’t have any current content to move to Wordpress you could literally be up in minutes. Wordpress is molding the future of website design and you will be ahead of the game if you learn to use it now.

About The Author

Allen Hart is the founder of CWAHD.com, Christian Work at Home Dads. CWAHD.com was designed to assist dads in their quest for a work at home job or business. For more information and additional articles, visit www.cwahd.com or contact Allen at info@cwahd.com.

Sanjib Ahmad

Maybe you always wanted a feature that hasn’t been available in the latest release of Wordpress. What you can do is either install a 3rd party plugin or write your own custom code to extend the features of Wordpress.

Wordpress plugins are programming code that enhance the features of a standard installation of Wordpress. A well written plugin will be basically “drag and drop” without modifying the core code of Wordpress. As Wordpress has been designed in a modular way, plugins allow you to customize your site to your specific needs without modifying the core of Wordpress.Ever since Wordress version 1.2 plugins have been available. Wordpress plugins can be categorized according to the feature it provides. Here a list of various features that you can implement for your web site through Wordpress plugins.

* Administration: Install Wordpress plugins to customize features like Admin Tools, Anti-spam, Comments, Meta, Restriction, Statistics, Syntax Highlighting, Syndication, Tweaking, etc. * Design, Layout and Styles: Change the look and feel of your blog by implementing plugins that modify Archive, Calendar - Event, Navigation, Randomness, Styles. * Graphics, Video, and Sound: Add plugins that create Audio - Mood and Images for your blog. * Posts: Implement plugins for Editing Posts, Formatting Posts, and other Miscellaneous Post related issues. * Links: Setup Wordpress plugins that change the default behavior of linking. * Miscellaneous: You can install miscellaneous plugins that shows weather information or other outside information from external websites.

Installing a plugin for Wordpress is not difficult. Here are the list of steps that you need to take to install most plugins. Some plugins may require additional steps.

1. Upload your plugin to the wp-content/plugins folder 2. Go to your Wordpress site using a browser and login 3. Click on the Plugins link from the main menu at top 4. Scroll down the list of available plugins to find the plugin you just uploaded 5. Click “Activate” to make your plugin active Wordpress Plugin Sites

We found the following sites with a comprehensive list of Wordpress Plugins:

* Wordpress Wiki - Plugins: http://wiki.wordpress.org/?pagename=Plugin * WordPress Plugin Repository: http://dev.wp-plugins.org/ * WP-Plugins Download Interface: http://redalt.com/external/plugins.php * Wordpress Plugin Database: http://www.wp-plugins.net/

About the Author

Sanjib Ahmad, Freelance Writer and Product Consultant for Business.Marc8.com - Business Best Sellers. You are free to use this article in its entirety as long as you leave all links in place, do not modify the content, and include the resource box listed above.