Blogging Pointers

I came across an article today entitled The best time of the day to publish a post.  It had been written by Gary King and published over at BlogHerald.com.  You know this is something I have thought about many times and have even researched a little here and there, really with no outcome.  In the article he says:

I believe that you should keep things as simple as possible, and as such, in my opinion, the best time to publish posts are early in the morning.

Of course, this also depends on the timezone in which the majority of your readers are from; you want to try and publish a post in the morning of when your readers in the most earliest timezone wake up. This means that if you have a large Australian following on your blog, and you were from the United States, then you’d publish a post a lot earlier to synchronize with their morning.

Chances are, though, that the majority of your readers are American, and therefore, you should try and synchronize your publishing schedule with the EST timezone (-5 GMT), since this is the eastern-most timezone of the US (and it’s where places such as New York City are located).

My general rule of thumb is if I have a post that is not time-sensitive, meaning I can post it now, or a year from now, and it is still relevant to my audience, then I will aim to make one post a day.

So, if I already made a post today, then I would save a new post for tomorrow, instead of posting it immediately. I would change the timestamp of the post before publishing it so that it automatically posts the next day at a certain time; you use the ‘Post Timestamp’ box in the Write panel of the WordPress admin to do this.

I typically time my posts to be published in the hour of 6:00 am, because this is the crack of dawn, and if I used anything earlier, I would look like a lunatic for making so many posts at three in the morning.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the masses traveling to MySpace.com each day to meet people, advertise their businesses and just have fun, it has become a huge player in driving traffic to everything from personal blogs to huge corporations. Many bloggers have jumped on the bandwagon in hopes of driving their fare share of traffic to their blogs in hopes of picking up readership and of course making money.

MySpace has rapidly evolved from a peer to peer meeting place into a business networking giant for many companies. I live in the home of Starbucks and that wonderful black brew and I have even seen some of the drive-thru coffee shops advertising their MySpace pages at the window. The trick to MySpace is making it work for you. When first starting out you need to take the time to get involved with their community, add some people to your friends list and write new material for your page. You will quickly notice that by simply adding some people to your friends list, some of their friends will add you and then their friends add you and so on. This is the quickest way to grow your popularity from within this networking giant.

When setting up your about me page make sure you mention your blog(s) and what their about. When you communicate Read the rest of this entry »

Feedburner has announced that two of their previously paid services are now being offered to bloggers for free. This news come as a very pleasant surprise to the blogging world and many are looking forward to making use of Feedburners new found generosity.

Total Stats Pro is one of the new additions to their already useful list of feed freebies. Stats Pro gives you the ability to see who has viewed or clicked individual items within your feed and how many of your subscribers have interacted with your feeds on a daily basis.

My Brand is a really nice tool that gives you the opportunity to make your sites feed branded with your domain. For example, a typical Feedburner feed would be feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed with the implementation of My Brand your feeds will be feeds.yoursite.com/yourfeed.

You can read more about these new upgrades in the Feedburner Announcement that they released yesterday.

A great title is a difficult thing to write. The title is without a doubt the first most important piece of the writing process. Your title has to capture the reader, without it they will have no interest in the article itself. The title must also capture the attention of the search engines, which means it should include keywords, be descriptive and also relevant to the content.

There is a very fine line when trying to capture both the human and non-human audiences with nothing more than a simple sentence. Writing a great title is an art that has been perfected by some and destroyed by most. You have to balance your keywords without sacrificing the contextual appeal to a human reader.

The general consensus among internet publishers is that your titles should be short, no more than ten words in length. They should contain your most relevant keywords within the first three or four words of the title. They should be descriptive leaving no question as to what the article is about and most importantly they should be relevant to the content itself. Take out the filler, titles are kept short for a reason, they leave no room for filler or irrelevant words and keywords. If you have something Read the rest of this entry »

Ping! Ping! Ping! There you go three essential factors in driving traffic to your blog. Pinging the various social sites on the internet is a must if your plan is to drive serious targeted traffic to your blogs.

So why Technorati? Technorati.com is one of the largest and fastest growing social search engines on the web today. In the month of March alone they brought an astounding nine million unique visitors to their massive blog database. The majority of those visitors are there for one reason and that reason is simply to find people blogging their interests.

Don’t forget to use tags in your posts. Technorati is well known for the use of tags, or keywords, that are directly related to the content of your writings. Visitors at the Technorati site can perform a simple search for specific tags of their particular interests and get the results to match that specified criteria. So if your article is tagged “blogging” and the user performs a search for blogging tags you will fall into the search results. TypePad now offers a way to include technorati tags in your posts and there are several Wordpress plugins for including Technorati tag, one example that is gaining popularity is Bunnys Technorati Tags.

Technorati also features a list of the most popular Technorati tags. Writing around one of these popular tags could potentially create a huge influx of traffic overnight. However, beware of falsely tagging posts to increase traffic. This is considered spam and if reported will most likely get your blog blocked from Technorati’s services.

Welcome all!

I am pleased to announce that I have switched gears and stepped up to the plate for yet another blog right here at BloggingPointers.com. Some of you are familiar with my current work over at Css for WordPress and now I’m at it again, this time proudly blogging for 451 Press.

This is going to be a very exciting project covering some of the best tips and advice for todays modern blogger. I will be covering blog monetization, building traffic, news, not to do’s and more, so stick around, because the fun is about to begin.

Yours Truly,

Patric Herber

Have you found a plugin you just have to have? Don’t know how to install it? Great news WordPress has made this a very easy task for us to complete.

After downloading the plugin you will want to upload it to your server. For this I use fireFTP for the FireFox web browser. A quick search of Google will return many other choices for FTP programs. Ftp or “file transfer protocol�? programs simply transfer the selected files from your personal computer to your web server and vise versa.

Using your ftp program upload all of the files and folders included with the download to your wp-content/plugins folder on your server. Be sure to keep the structure of your downloads the same so you don’t cause problems with the functioning of the plugin.

After finishing your upload open up the WordPress administration panel yoursite.com/wp-admin and click on the Plugins option from the top menu. Scroll down to the newly installed plugin and activate it. You should now be ready to go.

Most WordPress Plugins come with some sort of options or help page that can usually be found under the Options tab in Admin. panel. Alternatively, make sure to check out the read me file typically included with the download. The authors website is also a good place to look for support or difficulties with a selected plugin. Happy Blogging!!!

wordpress plugins, wordpress, tutorials, installing plugins

Would you like to add an affiliate link or maybe a link to your other website from your sidebar navigation within your WordPress blog. This tutorial is going to teach you just that, so follow along and you will soon be blogging freely.

Step 1

Open up your Wordpress Administration panel, usually found at (http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/).

Step 2

Go to Presentation/theme editor and open up the sidebar.php file. You should now be looking at the file that contains the php for your themes sidebar.

Step 3

Scroll down until you find the menu section in which you would like to place the link. For instance if you are placing the link under Categories, you should be able to find a snippet of code that has something like:

<h2>Categories</h2>

On the theme I am using for reference it looks like this:

<h2>Categories </h2>
<ul class=�?menublock�?>
<?php list_cats(0, �?, ‘name’, ‘asc’, �?, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0,�?,�?,�?,�?,�?) ?>
</ul>

Most themes I have seen do have the sidebar items set in an “uncategorized list�? or <ul> as this example is. If I wanted to add my personal link to this code I could simply Read the rest of this entry »

Many people are looking to add a horizontal navigation bar to the top of their WordPress blog pages. These nav bars can be very helpful in displaying important information site wide. I will mention that the installation will vary from theme to theme, but with this tutorial you should be able to get your navigation up and running.

Step 1

Open up your Wordpress admin panel and travel to Presentation/Theme and click on your desired theme for this project.

Step 2

Next go to Presentation/theme editor and open up your header.php file. Scroll to the bottom of this file and add:

<div id=�?navigation�?>
<ul id=�?nav�?>
<li><a href=�?<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>/�? title=�?Home: <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?>�?>Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&title_li=’); ?>
</div>

If you would like to add a link to your RSS feeds you can add this:

<li><a href=�?<?php bloginfo(’rss2_url’); ?>�?>RSS</a></li></ul>

And if you don’t wish to show the sites pages but instead say outside links, you would remove: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the coolest perks of using WordPress for your blog is the limitless customization options. The one major option at your fingertips are themes (or templates) that can instantly change the look and feel of your entire blog. WordPress themes are widely available free of charge under the GNU License and come in all sorts of styles, colors and topics.

Where do you find WordPress Themes?

When starting your search for the perfect WordPress theme, keep in mind what your plans are. If you are interested in creating your own look, you don’t need to focus as much on appearance as you should the overall layout. You can always change the appearance. If you are still a little uncomfortable with jumping into the CSS and PHP, find a nice design that fits your subject and slowly make changes as you learn.

The first place I go when looking for a WordPress theme is the Theme Viewer. Here you will find so many different possibilities for the overall Read the rest of this entry »