Web Hosting Design and Blogging

Blog Rush is a blog syndication network that works using a widget that the blog owner puts in their website or blog. The widget displays headlines coming from other related blogs on the network and which shows your links on their blogs as well. This is a very lucrative way to increase website traffic to your blog.

The goal of service is straight forward: to give you more traffic and readers while sharing your traffic with other blog owners.

There have been many similar services in the past, but Blog Rush is introducing some interesting innovations. First of all you earn “syndication credits” every time the widget is loaded on your blog (i.e., one credit for each page view). If your blog has 1000 daily page views, your headlines will be displayed on other blogs using the widget 1000 times daily.

Secondly, you can also earn credits by referring people. Every time the widget is displayed on the blog of your referrals you will also earn one credit.

Lets face it, we don’t appeal to every person. Our energy resonates with the people it’s supposed to resonate with and vice versa. By sharing a small piece of real estate on your blog, you earn credits which then increase website traffic back to your site from all over the web.

You can have multiple blogs under one account, further increasing your page view credits

Everyone wants to increase website traffic to their blog. This little Blog Rush website widget from John Reese seems to be able to do the trick.

Changing the permalink structure for a wordpress blog may have your inbound links end up as 404 not found errors because they’re pointing at an old link structure. Changing your permalink structure is something you have to consider quite thoroughly before doing. It may not be common sense to future think and know what the impact of such a change would make, but it’s what you have to do. Do not make changes to your permalink structure without knowing the implications. Can it be easy and seamless? I just found out that it can.

You may or may not know my story of how I once weighed 475 pounds and then took it upon myself to learn about health, nutrition and fitness and lose 300 pounds of fat. I then took up bodybuilding and gained another 50 to 60 pounds of lean muscle. I first began a website about it where I wrote about natural weight loss, health, fitness, tips and tricks etc and then in 2004 began a blogger blog on the backend of my website. My expertise was in microsoft, IIS, Active Server Pages and I used what I knew.

Enter wordpress blogs

I see how wordpress is much easier, much more robust, has the ability to make changes and allows for many plugins and automatic RSS feeds. It’s just plain easy for anyone to get started blogging and for a seasoned expert / programmer / html designer to get into simply and easily.

I began a new wordpress blog and launched it using th keyword phrase weight loss blog. It has quickly become a great resource for people wanting to learn how to take action on their health and weight loss by learning, being accountable and by taking action… and then getting support.

I chose the permalink structure early on having the category followed by the postname which is just good SEO.

in the options -> permalinks tab in the wordpress dashboard, you set the permalinks to “custom” and enter /%category%/%postname%.html

%category% and %postname% are variables that get replaced with the category and the postname, so by entering in the text above you end up with a post something like www.formerfatguyblog.com/weight-loss/how-i-lost-300-pounds-my-weight-loss-story.html. It has the domain name, a keyword phrase (the category) and then the post name followed by .html

This was how it was up until I decided to have guest authors.

The idea behind guest authors was to have the actual expert in their field write and educate the reader in their chosen field of expertise, then provide a revenue sharing model for them so that they not only educate and inspire, but then split the income from the advertisements. It would then be in their best interest to promote their author page and their posts driving traffic to the site. Each author doing this would results in more net views, more lives changed, more people educated and a cross promotion system going on. A person coming to the site to learn about Emotional Freedom Technique would then also learn about exercise from a top ranked personal trainer. Then maybe learn about creating more passion in their relationships from the teachings of another writer. More passionate relationships, better support for the person on the weight loss mission, less stress and better results. win-win.

This is the model I’m adapting and promoting.

However, one possible problem arises. Duplicate page names. Duplicate titles to posts. Rare yes, but possible. Two authors may enter the same name for the post which would then cause a system crash of sorts. Avoiding this would be a good idea.

Changing the permalink structure to reduce this possibility is the direction I’m taking.

By adding in the year and the month of the post, the odds of two posts being entered with the same name in the same category, in the same year and same month is highly unlikely. This also allows for the reader to then read older posts by date (year and month) within a category.

The permalink structure has been changed to /%category%/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

Crash.

Well, not crash, but certainly not good either.

All the links I had in place from my previous marketing are now dead. They pointed to the old name and are now all turning up 404 not found.

Not exactly.

Normally, a bunch of work in the .htaccess file would be required to capture the old inbound links, process them, and then redirect them with a 301 redirect to the new page.

Have YOU got time to do that? Me either.

Enter Deans Permalinks Migration Plugin which does this all automatically with an upload, a click and then a change to the new Wordpress permalink structure.

I’ll tell you how easy this was: I had a new author log into the site and text me a message (SMS) that she was writing a post. I texted her back saying “hold on a minute, I have to make a change”. Then downloaded the plugin, unzipped it, uploaded it, activated it, clicked on the plugin tab, clicked update, changed the permalink structure and then texted the author back saying “it’s good to go”.

That was it. Painless, and she was impressed too at how fast I did that.

Now my goal is to track the inbound links to the old posts and update them as best I can.

Changing your wordpress permalink structure might seem to be complicated and scary to do, but with Deans Permalink Migration Plugin, my job was done in two minutes.

Thanks to the Download Squad for this great starter list of post install Wordpress To Do List.

Depending on how you’ve installed WordPress (manually or by a “one-click-install” that many hosting providers offer) - one of the very last installation steps is to choose a blog name and provide an email address. That’s where this checklist begins. Click on a heading below to get started!

1. Create blog title, add email address
2. Change your password
3. Disable visual rich editor
4. Add users
5. Change the tagline
6. Edit Membership permissions
7. Set a date and time format
8. Modify Reading and Writing settings
9. Edit Discussion settings
10. Modify Permalinks structure
11. Pick a theme
12. Customize your theme
13. Write down CSS info
14. Change title format
15. Edit blogroll
16. Edit the About page
17. Add some categories
18. Edit the example post for testing
19. Install plugins
20. Check blog and test plugins
21. Create a favicon.ico
22. Create a shortcut to the Dashboard / setup WordPress client
23. Start posting

I will be going through this Wordpress post install checklist one by one in greater detail at a later date

The first paragraph of your blog post should capture the readers attention, tell them what you’re going to tell them and use the keyword phrases in the first and last sentence. The first paragraph of your blog post is used in many ways including imports into facebook, and as snippets in archives and rss feed. It’s important to express the main theme of your post, use your keyword phrases and describe what you’re going to go into detail about.

Google may only look at the first 1000 characters of your blog pages, so a good practice is to use the “more” feature just shortly after the introduction paragraph, or just a few more characters into the blog post. Consider grabbing their attention with the first paragraph, then hooking the reader by using the “split post” tag also known as the “more” tag. Grab their attention, then ask them to “click here to read more” (what the “more” tag does).

By doing this, you can keep your front page at 5 to 10 posts but they’re so short, that Google spiders the entire front page and catches everything. It also allows your readers to browse the front page and see what sort of things you write about.

Then there’s the little issue of how the archives work. Generally, the archives are limited to the first paragraph, so again, you’re being efficient at informing the reader about your post and it carries over automatically to the archives.

The Facebook app “Notes” allows you to import automatically from your blog feeds right into your mini feed, alerting your friends and profile viewers about your new blog post. They make a decision about your post based on the title of your blog post and then the first paragraph they read. If they like it and it’s informative (ie: tell them what you’re going to tell them), and relative to what they want to know, that first paragraph is the “GO - NOGO” decision to visit your site.

If people are limiting the amount of info they read in their rss feed reader, the first 100 to 250 words are critical. Again, based on the description, it’s the GO - NOGO about visiting your site and reading the post.

Tip for the week: Be aware. Be open to learning. Pay attention to what you’re seeing when you read blog posts, rss feed snippets and other blogs “first paragraphs”. How can you learn from what others are doing and what do you notice about how they could improve. Use what you learn to improve your own first blog paragraphs.

The first paragraph can be critical in the decision process to whether or not your reader visits your blog, continues to read the post and or even stays on your website. Your first paragraph can be beneficial in Google spidering your site, you getting listed and being identified in the search engines. If your interest is in increasing your income, then visitors and eyeballs are what you need. If your interest is spreading the word, or sharing your thoughts to as many people as possible, write a great informative first paragraph. As my English teacher taught me in grade 10, “Tell me what you’re going to tell me, Tell Me, and then tell me what you told me”.

Your blog post title is probably one of the most important aspects of what you write. Your blog post title should have a lot of thought put into it before you publish.

Just as you can build a great looking blog, it’s nothing unless someone comes to read it. You need links.. you need traffic.. you need readers. You’re a blogger, it’s the stuff of blogging.. the life blood.. the readers.

There are two thoughts on this..

1. You’re a creative writer.. you write from inspiration.. you write to journal your thoughts and then share them with others. You’re emotional based ie: in touch with your feminine.

2. You’re a professional blogger who is logic based. You write to inspire people, to promote things, to get traffic based on trends or on the topic at hand… you’re a niche blogger. This is logic based and comes from the masculine.

The creative person just pours out his or her soul into the creation of the thought… it flows… it’s divinely inspired.

So.. creative person.. write, write and write some more. Then and only then should you write your title. Even if you had a great title in mind to begin with, write your title last because what actually came out of your fingers may not be what the title was about. Write the post and THEN write the title based on the post

Logical person with a purpose to the post. Same for you. Write the post.. use keyword searches to find the long tail keyword phrases and embed them in the post in the first paragraph and for sure in the end paragraph.. you probably already know this. Then.. and only then, write your title. However, write your title based on the keyword phrase you intend to optimize your post for. Make sure you use keyword search tools to find the long tail phrases and use them in the title. Make the title descriptive and related to what the post is about, but do it last and do your research first.

Your title becomes the clickable part of search results when people are searching for things using google or any other search engine. The title is what catches their attention, so it should be descriptive as well as search engine optimized (using the keyword phrase).

Your blog post title is also what people are looking at in their rss feed readers. If the title grabs their attention, they come back to your blog to read the post.

See, it’s all about the title.

Write a good blog post title after you write your post.

Never let your prime writing material for your blog post end up disappearing because of an online editor crash.

Before posting your precious work for your blog, write the post using an external editor like Word or Textpad or other tool. This way you can take advantage of the word processor power, spell checking and grammer checking take place before posting. As well, you will have a back up copy in the event that your blog platform crashes while you’re writing, or after you press the “Publish” button.

Why am I telling you this? Because the very same thing just happened to me and I needed to remind myself why I write in MS Word first. I had decided to write up a quick post with a paragraph or two, but it turned into an essay with lots of affiliate links and such. Then I entered some Amazon affiliate information into the post, using the “Code” tab, and POOF! Away it all went.

I have been in the habit of writing first, then copying and pasting into my blog editor after running the text through a text washer. I use notepad to wash my text. I call it text washing because as I used to teach my student, copying directly from word into your html editor brings a long a great number of MS Word formatting crap. It looks like text, it smells like text and it feels like text, but have a look at the underlying code and there’s a bunch of crap that needs to be washed out. Notepad is a simple editor that removes the extra formatting for you before you paste it into your wordpress editor window. A client of mine, a writer from Wyoming calls it “taking the text for a bath”.

I’ll explain “washing your text” in another post.

When you first install your wordpress blog, there are a lot of features or options that you MUST do before you enter you first post. I’ll go through those one by one in another post, but one of the primary things is to setup your Feedburner account. Feedburner is “the” feed provision service that you must use to truly harness the power of your work. All Wordpress blogs have built in feed creation software for providing your content to the masses, but Feedburner takes it a step farther and allows for many features. I’ll cover that in another post. The thing about setting up feed burner, is that you must have at least one post before it recognizes the feed because without the post, there is no feed. Make sense?

Your Wordpress blog comes with one post and one comment by default. It’s like Wordpress is providing you with one post so that when you install your first template, you will be able to see what a post with a comment will look like. Thing is, it’s built into the system and is not really appearing in your feed.

To facilitate burning a feed with Feedburner, you have to make at least one entry which will then allow Wordpress to publish a feed with that entry which Feedburner will then recognize. Without it you’ll get some sort of cryptic error message saying “improper nested tag” or “expected blah at blah … and I can’t continue”. It just means that there’s no feed to grab yet.

Once you’ve got a feed burned, then you can customize so many parts of it and use it to yours and your readers advantage. More on that later.