i. WP to Twitter. WP to Twitter is a one-way plugin that posts blog updates as tweets. It uses the cli.gs or bit.ly url shortening service to include a link back to the blog post. Once installed, you can fine tune the format of the posts made to Twitter and the plugin goes about its work seemlessly.

ii. Twitter Tools. Twitter Tools offers two way posting. It posts updates from WP to Twitter very much like WP to Twitter. It can also post tweets back as blog posts. A further nice feature is the widget that allows manual posting to Twitter directly from the blog page.

iii. Twitter Widget Pro. The third Twitter related plugin I found useful on some blogs is Twitter Widget Pro. This is essentially a Twitter feed parser that posts Twitter updates from your Twitter account directly in to a sidebar widget on your blog.

Here, I want to talk about some of the methods I have found useful in getting started on a blog entry.

i. Read other blogs in your niche. Reading the efforts of other bloggers can often ignite ideas for your own posts. For instance, you may disagree or wish to pose a contrary viewpoint to the article.

ii. Read the comments on popular blogs in your niche. This can be even more inspirational than reading blog posts as there are often many good supplementary points made in response to good blog posts on busy blogs. The responses and perhaps your response to them can help shape your own ideas for a post.

iii. Join busy, active forums in your niche. Good, informative forum posts are often like mini blog posts: they can be succinct and pithy, and contain good information for furthering a discussion. In an active forum thread you often see many arguments and counter-arguments, all of which can help provide ideas and information for your own posts.

iv. Keep abreast of offline media in your niche. Despite a great shift to online media in recent years, there is still an overwhelming majority of matter in print. With strong competition from online publishing, newspapers and magazines have been forced to raise the bar in the quality of their content.

v. Listen to talk radio. There is a great amount of excellent discussion that goes on via radio. Some might see this as a dead medium in the 21st century, but the argument made above in (iv) about offline media outlets raising the bar in the face of online competition applies to radio too. BBC Radio 4, NPR, and many other local and national talk radio stations provide a huge amount of challenging and informed discussion daily, much of which can be used to shape your own ideas for blog posts. Of course, the degree to which talk radio might help will depend on your niche – for news, current affairs, politics and sport, radio coverage is almost unrivaled.

v. Watch TV. Although there is a lot of “background noise” and advertising on TV, there is still good solid programming that can be converted to blogging material. A lot of (v) above applies.

vi. Re-visit previous material. Over time your ideas and stance on particular issues develop. It’s natural. Therefore, you might like to look at previous entries on your blog and see how you can embrace and extend them

vii. Niche related press releases. Staying abreast of recent releases in your niche via PR releases can provide you with cutting edge information that you can weave in to blog articles.

viii. Article directories. Read the better efforts in your niches posted at some of the larger article directories (such as Ezine Articles or Go Articles).

ix. The buzz on social networking sites. Check your favourite social networking media to see what people are discussing related to your niche.

x. Try a list. See whether you can make an original list based article for your niche. This might be along the lines of “10 best ways to…”

In the past, I used Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives plugin, but this seems to have been superseded by Scribu’s Smart Archives Reloaded. The latter seems easier to work with as it does not require page code edits.

To set up clean archives similar to the ones you see on this blog, head on over to the Smart Archives Reloaded page (linked above), grab the plug in, install it and activate it.

Next, create a new page and add the following tag to the page body: [smart _ archives].

The presentation of the archives can then be tailored to your needs by tuning the settings in Settings -> Smart Archives.

As bloggers, directory submissions do still offer a chance to build links albeit largely weak links, and some would argue whether there were any value in spending time to build links in this way for decreased return. However, feed syndication directories which accept RSS feeds do still offer a good means of building links to your blog content.

Here, I offer a list of RSS feed directories that accept free RSS feeds.

http://www.weblogalot.com/Ping/ – you can also add this to your ping list for automatic update.

http://rssmountain.com/submit_anonym.php

http://www.rssmicro.com/feedsubmit.web

http://www.feedage.com/ (requires free login)

http://www.ablogin.com/
http://www.allforblog.com/
http://blog-collector.com/
http://www.blogdirectory.ws/
http://www.blog.instantapprovelinks.com/
http://www.blogratedirectory.com/
http://www.blogswirl.com/index.php
http://www.shoutyoursite.com/
http://www.submitblognow.info/
http://superblogdirectory.com/
http://problogdirectory.com/
http://www.lsblogs.com/
http://www.heliosblogs.com/
http://www.linkledger.com/

I am unable to see many changes – perhaps it is time to read the changelog. 

Previous revisions included a reworking of the admin GUI.  This time it seems to have remained largely the same with the exemption of changes to the ‘plug-ins’ page. I far preferred the plug-in management look and feel of version 2.7. Am I in the majority in feeling this way? Also, isn’t it time to introduce a one-click plug-in update capability in to the core functionality.  It seems that most blogger these days use 5 or more plug-ins and individually updating them across several blogs can be time consuming.

Many larger media outlets link to blogs on their news and political articles, and editorials offering the reader a “finger on the pulse” snapshot of relevant blogosphere commentary.  Google Trends is another place that offers a similar snapshot.

The media outlets are more selective than Google Trends so if you plan to employ this method, consider a mid- to long-term strategy that will require significant effort. Having said that, the rewards are high.

Among the blogs I run is a political and current affairs comentary blog.  It is far from what I consider a mature blog, at 5 months old and about 32 000 words in 75 posts. However, it is active. I try to contribute 300 to 400 words per day and in the last month alone the blog has picked up a double figure RSS feed readership.

My interest in promoting this blog took a turn about 3 weeks ago when I pondered what might be the effect of a link from a major news organisation. So I set about honestly obtaining one (besides, dishonestly obtaining one would be nigh on impossible!)

Many media outlets and news organisation fully appreciate the power of the blogosphere and consequently feature frequent links and commentary references from what they perceive to be authoritative sources. They seem to gauge authority much as search engines do. They consider the authority of linkage to your site. So my first step was to identify authority bloggers in my chosen niche and set about acquiring links from them. This, I envisaged, would give me a little authority in the eyes of the big boys.

I identifed several high traffic and respected blogs in my niche and set about making my presence known to them through relfective and thoughtful commenting. One thing to remember is that blogging is a very incestuous (in a  permissive sense) activity. Blog writers are frequently the most voracious blog readers. So my logical interpretation of the situation was that if I became visible on high visibility blogs, my comments would appear before the noses of other high-visibility bloggers, who in turn would find their way to my blog and potentially become regular readers. Gaining them as regular readers is the precursor to acquiring a mention on their blogs.

A regular commenting regimen was undertaken and within ten days my blog was mentioned on an authoritative blog in the niche, appearing on a PR6 front page and receiving a traffic spike of several hundred unique views. It also picked up several regular readers.

However, these tangible benefits were not the only positive aspects at the front page listing. Certain news organisations held this individual’s blog in high esteem (occasionally link to it in their blog sections) so my blog came to the attention of the bigger players in the political blogging arena by way of a credible recommendation.

As a result, and within a further week, my blog received similar treatment from a major news organisation, appearing on a PR7 inner page.

Although this technique may work far better in some niches, it is worth investing time and effort in.

The new blog I mentioned is a political and news commentary blog. I agree that this is very much an active blogging niche (depending on how you choose your topics) so this fact may influence whether or not the success is reproducible.

The blog now has a total of 30100 words appearing in 71 posts.  This amounts to an average post length of about 430 words per post. (You can get all these statistics by installing the Blog Metrics plugin.) Very close to half of these words have been added in the last 30 days as I vowed to make at least one post per day beginning March 1st. For me, this seems to be a steady and attainable rate at which to publish content. I plan to continue at a rate of at least 200 words per day, but will aim to raise the daily word rate to about a 500 words per day average.

Minimal promotional work has been done on the blog.  I submitted it to about 20 low rank free web directories simply to get the blog indexed. The only other promotional work I did was to seek out about 10 active blogs in its niche (politics) and make good comments on the once per week.  Numerous regular readers have trickled in via these commenting efforts and the blog now picks up several RSS subscribers per day. The blog was also noticed by a high profile political pundit and mentioned on his blog which led to a spike in traffic and some good organic inbound linkage.

Why do I tell you all this information and not reveal the blog? My reason for giving this detailed information is purely altruistic. I want to make tell the story, perhaps bit by bit and in several follow up posts, of what I hope will develop further to become a very successful blog. My reason for not exposing the URL of the blog is to retain a little privacy and also keep hold of the reins of the narrative.

I attribute this modest success to the blog commenting. It also reveals how contingent the nature of internet marketing really is. You have to plug away at known good practices and await your moment.

Recently, reading on a forum about an individual who had lost his blog content, I began to think about my own back strategy and how I might improve it.

Many shared hosting companies religiously backup up client home directories.  This is great and gives you the peace of mind that your site exists somewhere should all go wrong.  However, there may be a delay when it comes to getting your site off a tape or other media. Usually, the priority for most hosting companies is in keeping their machines online and available, so pulling a site or database from a backup tape will usually not be a high priority and could take anything from 12 to 72 hours. (Some hosts offer a hot spare snapshot of your site so that you can pull in backups yourself on the spot.)

So, what measures can you take to ensure you have a readily available, recent backup should disaster strike?

When backing up WordPress, there are two aspects that need to be considered: files and database.

In order to backup the files, you can set up a scheduled job to copy them to a new location (perhaps using cp -R) or you can archive the contents of your WordPress directory and keep it in a designated area.

In order to backup the database, you can the export/import tools particular to your database. Many run on mysql so a command line tool for this sort of backup would be mysqldump, or if your host offers standard packages like phpMyAdmin then you can use it to peform full database dumps. Once you have a full dump of your database you can copy it off to a safe location.

However, there are several plugins available that enable you to schedule regular backups of the database.  These plugins will run regular dump of your database and copy then to a specified location, some wil also compress and email them to a specified address.

Also, WordPress has an inherent export mechanism that allows you to dump your posts, comments, links and users from the administrator console. This is great for doing immediate backups that can be quickly downloaded to your local machine. You can find these functions under Tools -> Export. One tip when using the export tool is to ensure you clear your spam comment queue before exporting. If your blog receives a lot of comment spam and Akismet identifies it and places it in a spam queue, these are still exported, and given the nature of this type of spam it can bloat the size of the exported file quite significantly.

I recommend you check whether your host take regular backups. And also ensure you have your own off site database dumps that are taken at least once per week, preferably nightly.

A year ago, I registered a domain about an upcoming pop star.  I ended up with the .net and the .info domain.  I have used the .info variant for a fan site but the .net domain sat unused for a year.  This is the domain I shall use.

Stage one: install WordPress and standard plugins

WordPress installation is straightforward so I shall not go in to that. (There is plenty of information about that over on the official WordPress site.)  Next come the standard plugins.  For most blogs, these will include:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/platinum-seo-pack/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/adsense-manager/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-no-duplicate/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-plugin-library/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/popular-posts-plugin/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recent-posts-plugin/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statpress-reloaded/

and perhaps a few more.

Stage two: look at auto post plugins

There are two free plugins that allow you to pull in content via RSS feeds and publish it on a blog:  FeedWordpress and WP-o-Matic.  Each has its benefits and disadvantages.

WP-o-Matic relies on the simplepie core.  Although a version of this is included, you can also download it as a separate plugin to remain current.  Fully automating WP-o-Matic relies on setting up a unix cron job to run the script periodically.  This isn’t difficult but if you plan on using this plugin to set up an autoposting blog then be sure to check that your host allows you to set up and manage jobs via a scheduler.  WP-o-Matic also uses the cURL libraries which like cron are usually standard features on most hosting packages.

FeedWordpress relies on the bog standard RSS feed pulling tools packaged with WordPress and also seems to use WordPress inherent scheduler to run. FeedWordpress also has a sister plugin that filters duplicate content – this can be very useful when pulling from one or more feed syndication sites, or single large syndicated feed sites that carry many versions of the same story.

WP-o-Matic offers a very powerful additional tool that I found useful.  It permits you to set up  a series of regular expression rules to apply to feed content.  This means you are able to “find and replace” certain phrases or words within the pulled content. For this reason, I chose WP-o-Matic to drive my auto blog.

Stage three: finding content

Once the blog is set up, the final stage is to pull in public domain content. This can be found at various article directories, although depending on your blog niche you might have to seach further afield. Popular niches such as finance, health, celebrities and electronics goods are relatively easy to find feed content for.

If you use feed syndication sites (like Google News or Yahoo! News), then be aware that auto blog plugins will not pull in the full content of stories but only the extract used by the syndication service. Also be sure to adhere to any copyright notices.

Although it has been only several days since I set up this first auto blog, the immediate results have been quite impressive with XX unique/day traffic flowing in right away.  Whether this remains we shall have to see and perhaps might be worthy of a follow up post.