There is nothing easier than having a blog these days. Everyone and their dog is blogging. But that doesn’t mean that every blog is worth reading. As a matter of fact, most blogs suck and they suck for a reason. Most blogs are “me too!” blogs.

By reading this blog you already proved that you don’t belong to the “me too!” crowd.

Creating link-worthy blog content

Creating link-worthy content should be your main concern because everything else will follow.

Referring traffic, traffic from organic search and, in the end, direct traffic directly depend on how link worthy your content is. It’s that simple.

Just to make things clear, link worthy content is something people can’t help but link to. Even when they don’t know you, and in some cases don’t even like you.

Emotional reaction is the key

Just look at the story about a boy who stole his dad’s credit cards and hired prostitutes to play HALO and eat junk food. The story was fake, but genius. (Thanks, Lyndon!)

Its appeal came from a place where emotions and imagination live. The story received thousands upon thousands of links.

This example is perhaps a bit too strong, but the underlying principle is something every blogger can learn from.

But what can a common blogger do to create link magnets every day? Just keep on readin’.

1. Create a resourceful post (every once in a while)

Don’t you just love it when someone spends a month collecting, testing and reviewing Wordpress plugins just to bring you the best ones for a certain function? They even make sure to include installation instructions.

This kind of content gets linked because it saves people time and effort. In this case, people link to share the resource, or to reward the effort if it’s very extensive. Links to resourceful posts or pages accumulate slowly.

2. Make people laugh

This one works every time. OK, almost every time. You can make fun of the authorities in your industry or take the industry as a whole and make fun of it. Matt McGee created what is probably the best piece of humor about SEO to this day.

3. Start a conversation or become a part of one

Someone criticized something in your industry. You probably have an opinion. Share it! If you disagree, go ahead and write a post about it. A unique point of view and strong arguments will help make your post interesting and linkable.

4. Be the first to break the news

Being the first to break the news about something works like a charm. The downside is – you actually have to be the first and that is by no means an easy task.

5. Attack a product, service, person or an industry

This is one of the most POWERFUL ways to get links, but at the same time, it’s the most dangerous one. Recently, Derek Powazek attacked the SEO industry with a pretty aggressive and insulting rant – “Spammers, Evildoers, And Opportunists“. The end result is a surprisingly large number of links. But beware – don’t pick your targets randomly. Make sure that your community doesn’t like the target of your rant. Just like Derek did.

6. Eye Candy

How many times did you see different images, designs, or just pictures of people or places on the front pages of Digg.com or Reddit.com? These pictures, websites and images can sometimes be enough to cause a linking frenzy. It can be done in virtually every industry as long as the imagery is captivating.

To increase the number of links your posts gets, try to combine these 6 ways. A resourceful post with stunning pictures sounds great, doesn’t it?

Or you can think about it like this – would you get all excited about the post you just finished if it wasn’t yours ?

A guest post by Vedran, aka SEO Rabbit, a Connecticut based SEO guy.

Image by fdecomite

1. Optimize Link Juice Flow To Improve Google Rankings
2. Case Study: ProBlogger Guest Post Effect On My Traffic
3. Link internally to increase blog page views, improve usability and Google rankings
4. 3 Simple Ways To Monetize Your Blog RSS News Feed
5. Get your blog article on top of Google results today

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WordPress 2 iPhone app has just been released. I had a quick look and I like it. It is a perfect iPhone application for mobile blogging.

It is very simple to log in to your WordPress blogs (both .com and .org). Blog URL, username and password are all the things you need.

WordPress iPhone app now features a very easy to use navigation on the bottom of the screen with “Comments”, “Posts” and “Pages” . This  navigation allows you to easily switch between these areas.

WordPress 2 iPhone comments area

Comments area lets you review comments, approve, unapprove, delete and mark as spam.

Comments area looks very nice now as you can see the avatars of your readers and also their website URL’s.

Is it just me or is there no way to reply to a comment via the app itself?

Posts section of the iPhone blogging app

Posts area lets you view your published posts, your drafts and lets you add a new post.

If you go into “add a new post”, you get a post writing navigation menu which features “Write” where you can insert the title, tags, categories, the status (draft, private, published etc.) of the post and it is also here that you write the post itself.

Second tab in the post writing navigation is “Photos” which lets you add photos from your iPhone library or take a new photo with your iPhone camera.

The third tab is Preview and it allows you to see a preview of your post. Photos will be attached to the bottom of the post when you publish it.

Last tab is Settings and it allows you to schedule the publish date, set a password-protected post, and an automatic resize of photos option which results in faster publishing but smaller photos.

Pages area lets you see all your WordPress blog pages and you can also create a new page. It is also possible to add photos to your page, just like you do in a post.

Few more screenshots of WordPress application

WordPress mission accomplished

According to WordPress, the focus of WordPress 2 iPhone app was on better user experience and on eliminating the bugs and it seems that they have accomplished what they wanted. It is easy to use, it runs fast, what more can you wish for when you are on the go and have to publish something.

It is not possible to style the post in a visual editor, position the pictures, add H3 tags and similar yet, but if you are on the go, I do not think you need that anyway. It is all about getting the message across quickly.

1. Why You Should Upgrade To WordPress 2.7
2. Use WordPress TimeStamp to improve blogging productivity
3. Thesis Theme 1.6 Video Review – See what Thesis can do now
4. Why you should consider Thesis Theme design for your blog
5. Improve Blog SEO With Internal Linking Structure

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Linking to your internal blog posts is one of the most important aspects of building a successful blog. TechThinker commented on my blog traffic post:

I love the way you interlink all your blog posts. Your posts always remind me of the importance of doing Internal links.

Why are blog internal links important?

First of all it is a great service for your readers to introduce them to an article that has more detailed information about a topic you mention. It increases your page views, improves the user-experience of your visitors and introduces them to some of your older blog posts.

Blog internal links are also important for your search engine optimization. Same way that your visitors discover older posts via internal links, same way you show search engines which content of yours is worth crawling and indexing in their search results.

Internal linking and anchor text

I got this email from reader Anton recently:

Hey Marko, thanks for such good info here. Just had to ask a quick question. I haven’t seen many others do this but you do. I noticed you’re using anchor text and a link to

1.Marko Saric
2.blog consulting
3.Twitter Marketing Ebook.

Why did you do that? Is that for SEO?

I know anchor text is super important when you’re getting link to your site. But is it important to use when you’re linking to your own pages?

Thanks so much, I hope you’ll find couple of minutes from your busy schedule to answer my question.

Anchor text is that clickable text in your hyperlinks. It basically tells both your visitors and search engines what the page you are linking to is about. Anchor text is very important for all links including internal links.

As you cannot really control what anchor text other blogs link to you, you can at least make sure that you use the important keywords that you want to rank for in your own internal linking. For example if you have a fashion blog make sure to use keyword phrases like fashion advice.

Read more on keywords: 7 steps to increase traffic and revenue via keyword research

Link also from older posts to new posts

Most bloggers only internal link to their older posts from their new posts. You can also do it the other way around.

If you have a good, older post that is relevant to something you have written more about lately, go back and edit the old one and include a link back to the new post. This is a great way of sending some page rank juice back to your new post to help it rank better.

Use for example one of the page rank checkers. This one will give you your Google PR for all the pages on your site and will allow you to see which of your pages have good page rank to give away from.

Another way is to use WordPress plugin called Insights. It is placed just below your post writing field and lets you search for keywords that you are writing about and easily discovers nice pages to link to and also nice pages to link from.

Think internal linking when writing your next blog post

Internal linking is the easiest way to help build a successful blog, increase your page views, improve the user experience and at the same time also help your blog rank better in search engines.

Next post you are writing, take some time and create a couple of good internal links to your older posts but also go back and link to that new post from some of your relevant old articles.

Image by SantaRosa.

1. Optimize Link Juice Flow To Improve Google Rankings
2. Improve Blog SEO With Internal Linking Structure
3. Simple Tip To Improve Usability, Stickiness And Page Views
4. How Google PageRank affects my search engine rankings and traffic
5. How To Get Blog Traffic – Inbound Links And Anchor Text

Thanks for reading HowToMakeMyBlog.com

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I started my how to make a blog on October 25th so this week my blog turns one year. As I have recently achieved the 200,000 visitors landmark, I thought this was a good time to put down some of the things I have learned from the first year that I would recommend bloggers to think of when launching a new project and building blog traffic.

1. Commenting on bigger blogs can bring you initial traffic

My first visitor other than myself was someone clicking over from a comment I had left at ProBlogger. In those first days all my visitors came from comments I left on ShoeMoney, DailyBlogtips, Mashable, Chris Brogan and other relevant blogs. For example on November 9th 2008 I left a comment on GetRichSlowly and that sent me 15 unique visitors first day, 20 the second day and 7 the third day which was huge back then!

Read more: How one blog comment can bring you 230+ unique visitors

2. StumbleUpon is a nice place to get the first spikes in traffic

I started looking for targeted people on StumbleUpon fairly soon after launching the blog. First time someone stumbled my post was on November 8th 2008 and that sent me 19 unique visitors first day and 37 the second day and that was huge! Even to this day, Stumble is one of the top 4 sources of my blog traffic.

Read more: 10 Simple Steps To Increase Blog Traffic Via StumbleUpon

3. Use Twitter to get an audience and spread your links

On November 30th 2008 I joined Twitter, immediately started looking for people in my audience and got 55 unique visitors from there on the first day. It never stopped really, so Twitter along with Google is the biggest source of my traffic.

Read more: How I got my blog post retweeted by @problogger, @GuyKawasaki and 250 more

4. Write a guest post for biggest blogs in your field

On December 14th my guest post was published at ProBlogger and that sent me 97 unique visitors on the first day and again 97 on the second day. Writing guest posts not only sends you traffic, it gives you authority, spreads your name to a targeted audience and also gives you a great value link for your search engine optimization.

Read more: How to get your guest post featured at biggest blogs

5. Keywords are a must in the domain name

   • How to make a blog
   • Make a blog
   • How to make my blog

Looking at the traffic Google sends me, the 3 most popular keywords used to find my blog are very closely related to my blog domain name itself.

If I went with MarkoSaric.com I would have had a much harder time getting ranked for these three keyword phrases.

Read more: How to choose a domain name for your blog

6. Use big brands to attract attention to yourself

   • 8 things every blogger can learn by studying Perez Hilton
   • How Gary Vaynerchuk built a multi-million dollar empire around a video blog
   • 13 blogging lessons learned from Stephen King’s On Writing

In some of my most popular posts I have used other brand names to attract attention to myself. It is a great strategy as these brands have many fans so it is much easier to attract them to click over to you, much easier to get them to comment and also much easier to get them to share the story with their friends. See these examples:

7. Write magnetic headlines

In RSS, on Twitter, in Google search results, we are bombarded with choices to click on wherever we are online. The only way to attract attention among tons of other blogs is to write remarkable article headlines. In my experience “how to” and “top list” headlines work the best, are very clickable and shareable.

Read more: How to write blog headlines that make people click

8. Hitting Digg or Delicious is worth it – spikes and links

The spikes in my traffic are from the days when my articles went “viral”. For example my Twitter plugins article hit the front page of Digg for few minutes and sent me 2799 unique visitors on that day, then my most downloaded WordPress plugins hit front page of Delicious and sent me 3602 unique visitors on that day. These events also bring you lots of links and that improves your SEO and increases your traffic in the long run.

Read more: How I got two consecutive record breaking blog traffic days

All these factors should contribute to your blog getting a momentum in social media and search engines, and this along with you writing great content regularly, would be able to achieve you similar or even better blog traffic results in your first year in blogging.

1. How one blog comment can bring you 230+ unique visitors
2. 6 steps to make your blog visitors loyal commentators
3. How to write blog headlines that make people click
4. How I Got 2000+ StumbleUpon Visitors Using My 10 Step Strategy
5. How I got my blog from Google PageRank 0 to PR4 in two months

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Continuing from the offline blogging events blog post, I have gone to several more events in recent weeks. I am lucky to live in London, as many web 2.0 related events take place here regularly.

Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) took place earlier this month and Filip Matous, a great video editor I met on one of the blogging events, was kind enough to put together some video interviews and let me publish them here.

Facebook and FOWA video interviews

First video is from the FOWA edition of the Facebook Developers Garage. The video features interviews with David Nattriss of http://natts.com and Joshua March of http://theiplatform.com. Both of them are very active in the social media marketing area. David is working for BBC on social media integration for the popular show Mock The Week while Joshua is a consultant who worked with brands like Google and ITV.

The next video is with one and only Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary did a talk at Future Of Web Apps and Filip Matous was able to drag him away from the crowds for a quick interview. Gary is Gary, very passionate as usual, so check it out for some motivation.

Promoting online projects offline

Good stuff about going offline to promote your online projects:

• You build a network

• You learn

• You get new inspiration for your content

• You can get new content by interviewing or reporting on the event

• You meet the influencers

Go offline

Look around for events in your areas, tweetups, meetups or anything else related to blogging and the online world. If you cannot find anything, maybe you could be the one to organize an event in your area. All in all it is a great opportunity to get new connections and grow your blog.

1. 9 reasons why Mashable rules the social media
2. “Wetworld” Blogging – How offline events can improve your blog
3. How Gary Vaynerchuk built a multi-million dollar empire around a video blog
4. What Are Blogs?
5. Blog traffic – From 0 to 200.000 visitors, 8 blogging lessons learned

Thanks for reading HowToMakeMyBlog.com

You can also fan me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

Pete Cashmore started Mashable, the social media guide, in 2005 and has built it into one of the most influential blogs in the world with a 7 figure annual revenue.

Mashable gets 8 million unique visitors, 12 million page views monthly, it has 1,5+ million followers on Twitter, 300,000 RSS subscribers and its articles are always on top of Tweetmeme, Digg and social bookmarking sites.

These are the 9 reasons why Mashable is the king of social media blogs today.

1. Don’t plan it, just do it

   Pete Cashmore was passionate about the social media and the social networking tools. It was a personal interest that he spent a lot of time on and he just decided to go for it and start writing about it.

   “I felt like social networking wasn’t being covered to the degree it could be. I didn’t necessarily know there was an audience for it. I find it best to dive right in and learn the hard way.”

2. Be focused and work hard

   It took more than a year before Mashable started making money but Pete Cashmore was very focused and was constantly working on the site with 20-hour work days being a norm.

   “I blogged seven posts a day, and about a year in, I started getting ads on the blog. When I got a deal for $3,000 a month to put ads on the blog, it was massive for me”

3. Write for the web

   Mashable is great at writing simple blog posts. They make no assumptions about their readers and they explain everything, keeping the beginner in mind while writing.

   “Figure out blogging, short-form writing. You have to write the story in three paragraphs. We like writers who can take complex ideas and explain them in simple terms”

4. Write great headlines

   Most of Mashable’s posts have very attractive, shareable and clickable blog headlines. They frequently use top list or how to type of posts. They also use many “Alerts” and “Warnings” in their blog post headlines. Some examples from the last few days:

   • 3 Great Social Media Policies to Steal From
   • HOW TO: Get Real-Time Traffic Reports on Your iPhone
   • WARNING: New Facebook Malware Attack Is Spreading

5. Appeal to mainstream

   Even though Mashable is categorized as a tech blog, they have expanded their coverage to appeal to more mainstream audience. They focus on celebrities and other mainstream events / brands in their blog posts, and use their brand to attract attention to Mashable. Some examples from the last few days:

   • YouTube Feud Ends: U2, Madonna and Green Day Videos Set to Return
   • Dear Lily Allen: File Sharing Debate Now Has Lyrics [Video]
   • Obama Assassination Poll Rocks Facebook

6. Spit out content

   Mashable publishes some 20+ posts every day. Majority of posts are pretty short, but there is something for everyone in there and that is also a reason for you to come back to their site several times a day. This is very important as they want to increase their page views, as their main blog monetization method is banner ads.

7. Encourage sharing

   If you publish valuable information that your readers enjoy, they will spread the word to their friends for you. Make it easy for them to do just that by including different “share this” buttons for Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, Stumbleupon or whatever social network your audience is part of.

8. Go directly to the source

   If you read some Mashable posts you will quickly see how they track down the source of information, they check out the original report, examine the original study and write a short summary of the most interesting points. This way they are a great resource of information and visitors like it and other people like to link to it, in fact they link to Mashable’s summary much more than to the original report.

   “There is original reporting and there is curation, which is just as hard, saying, “This is what’s out there, this is why it is important.” Both have their places, and it’s not a case of either or.”

9. Be present offline

   Mashable regularly draws crowds of hundreds of fans in cities around the US. It is an income source for Mashable but it also creates fans of the brand.

   “A lot of the benefits from running events has been in terms of greater visibility for Mashable as a brand. We are connecting our audience to other members of the tech community, and people are going away and talking about Mashable.”

Mashable is a great example of how anyone can start from scratch and build a blog empire with some luck and lots of hard work, consistent work, passion and knowledge.

1. Blog traffic – From 0 to 200.000 visitors, 8 blogging lessons learned
2. Free WordPress Ebook – Blogging is dead, long live blogging
3. What is great blog content? How do you know your content is good?
4. How to turn your passion into a blog
5. “Wetworld” Blogging – How offline events can improve your blog

Thanks for reading HowToMakeMyBlog.com

You can also fan me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

I regularly hear statements like I just don’t have time to work on my blog, I am too busy to get out there and promote the blog, I have to do this, I have to do that, plus many other excuses. What these people really mean is I prioritize something else.

“Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.” – Harvey MacKay

Even though time is a limited resource, we still have 24 hours in a day, which is plenty of time, but it is a matter of reevaluating our priorities.

Most bloggers might have a job that takes some 9 hours daily, then you sleep some 7 hours and it leaves you with some 8 hours daily to do some house work, hang out with your friends and family or work on your hobbies.

That is why you have to learn to control your time, optimize it the best possible way and manage it wisely. There are the 8 ways that you can find more time to work on your blogging dreams.

1. Stop reading, take action

   Reading and learning is important, but only to a point. It is important to stop and implement some of the things you have read about. If you don’t take your time to use what you have learned, nothing will change and you will stand still. Be a blog producer.

2. Stop checking the stats

   If you are regularly stressing yourself checking your blog visitor stats, your RSS subscriber stats, your earning stats, stop. Checking them will not help, but actively working on things that will improve those stats will. Try not to check the stats more than once daily.

3. Focus on the tasks that have the highest impact

   You must focus your energy on the tasks that have the highest impact on your goals. For bloggers, the goal usually is to increase the readership, and the task that will bring you closer to that goal is creating remarkable content and pulling your target audience to your blog.

4. Don’t get distracted

   In the age of the Internet it is very easy to get distracted and waste several hours reading RSS, checking Facebook, sending tweets or reading Steve Pavlina’s blog (it happens to me every once in a while as Steve’s blog is so good). Shut out the distractions!

5. Throw away your television

   Most of the people that say that they are too busy to be able to work on their blogs regularly, still seem to have enough time to watch hours of television every day. TV watching might be entertaining, but it is not going to bring you closer to your blogging goals.

6. Forget your strict schedule

   Did you set yourself on a very strict schedule of having to produce regular blog posts? Forget about it. Your blog will not become extinct if you miss a day or two. The tight schedule just might strain you so much that you give up the blog. Writing one great post per week will have a much bigger impact than writing one average post daily.

7. Maximize your health

   Eat healthy. Do some exercise. Get enough sleep. Leading a healthy lifestyle will definitely make you more energetic, fresh and will improve your productivity and will win you time.

8. Your passion motivates you

   We always hear about the blog passion and it really is true. If your blog topic is something you really love, it is going to be so much easier to motivate yourself to work on it. You will not be able to fall asleep because you would want to blog, you would wake up very early energetic to get out of the bed and do even more blogging.

From passive viewing to active working

Majority of the “busy” bloggers are spending more time surfing the internet and watching TV than working on their blogs and at the end of another day they have nothing to show for. You must be disciplined and shift your focus from passive viewing into active working on your blogging targets and dreams. No one else but you can do it.

Image by Damon Garrett.

1. Blogging consistency and keeping a regular blog posting frequency
2. 13 blogging lessons learned from Stephen King’s On Writing
3. Use WordPress TimeStamp to improve blogging productivity
4. How to put your best blog posts back into the spotlight
5. Twitter-brand yourself to increase exposure and traffic

Thanks for reading HowToMakeMyBlog.com

You can also fan me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

I attended a couple of offline blogging events recently. Getting out and meeting other bloggers is a great way to build your network. You can get a lot on new ideas and inspiration, you can meet bloggers who can allow you to guest post on their blogs, and even get links.

I met Murray Newlands at a one of these events and was impressed by the way he made connections with people. So I asked him if he would like to share his experience and help bloggers get most out of their next offline event, be it a tweetup or a blogging meetup.

Wetworld Blogging

By Murray Newlands

Meeting bloggers in person, communicating and connecting with other bloggers is not just important to many bloggers. It can make a blog.

While a blog can be used as a medium for simply outputting your ideas, most bloggers want interaction and communication. It therefore follows that most bloggers are communicators. Bloggers use their blogs as a communication medium – networking events are just communication in the real world, wet world blogging.

Attending blogging events enables you to meet other bloggers in “real life”, “wetworld”. I have met many cyber friends who I communicate with daily and now know well. Meeting someone in real life enables you to build a relationship much faster. People connect with people and via people to blogs.

What are the benefits of meeting other bloggers?

Meeting another blogger enables you to connect with the aim of becoming what Chris Brogan would call a Trust Agent, someone of interest and a valued authority in your field. The bloggers you have met are writing a post they will, you hope, reference and link to your blog.

The benefits to being referenced by other bloggers are many:

• Audience share: the reader of one blog is likely to have a propensity to read blogs and read yours. You will get traffic.

• Audience share: if someone likes the blog you are referred on they are likely to like your blog.

• Trust share: if the readers trust the blog they are reading and they referred to you, they are more likely to trust your blog.

• Google Trust share: Google will trust your blog more if there are more links to it, which will lead to you getting more traffic from natural search.

How to succeed in becoming a wet world blogger?

Your primary objective should be to break the first rule your mummy told you: talk to strangers. I recently met a famous journalist and successful business woman. She told me that one of her rules to success was to talk to strangers; you never know the opportunities which will arise. You are there to connect with other bloggers. The only way you can do that is to talk to as many as possible.

A little secret: they are keen to meet people too. Another little secret is that if you are scared to talk to people they are probably more scared, and you seem confident, as you are the person who opens the conversation. The more people you talk to the more you will realise this, and the easier it becomes.

Once you are actually talking with people, the next stage is to get them to like you and connect with them. Ask them about their blog and be ready to give them a simple and interesting description of your blog. If you cannot describe your blog, how are they going to remember it or trust it as a source of information? If you find this hard, ask your friends to describe your blog, and work with them to prepare a description you can tell people.

Enter conversation with people and be part of ongoing conversations. You need to build friendships as well as demonstrate that you are a valuable source of information, and that your blog will be too.

How can I help you?

“How can I help you?”- the best question in the world. Why? Because you can help lots of people. The more you help people the more people will help you back. You will find the people who reciprocate and they are the ones you want to build relationships with, because they will be the people connecting with other connectors. There are pools of connected people all working together to help each other successfully and you want to join these.

How can you help them easily, blog about them, interview them on your blog, exchange guest posts (see Blog Consultant), introduce them to other people they can connect with who you know work in their area.

Exchange information. You must have a business card with your information on it. If your blog is a part time interest get some moo.com cards with the details of your blog on it. You want to be able to follow up after the meeting and connect.

Follow up. It will all be in vain unless you connect after the event. Ideally you will follow up with an email the next day. Try to connect through Facebook and Twitter.

How can you help Marko and me?

Connect with us: we are both looking for guest posts, and opportunities to guest post and connect with other bloggers.

Murray launched his Affiliate Blog in the spring of 2009 and has fast become one of the key players in blogosphere, a micro celebrity blogger. Murraynewlands.com covers topics from affiliate marketing to social media marketing.

Image by Peter Marshall.

1. How Google Wave will reshape the blogging world forever
2. How to make your blog stand out in a saturated blogging niche
3. How blogging ideas spread – 6-step plan for creating something big
4. Free WordPress Ebook – Blogging is dead, long live blogging
5. FOWA Gary Vaynerchuk And Facebook Developer Garage Interviews

Thanks for reading HowToMakeMyBlog.com

You can also fan me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

Thesis Theme 1.6 has just been released to all Thesis users.

For bloggers who are new to design, new to FTP, new to CSS and coding, this version is going to be of great help.

Thesis  theme has always been blogger-friendly and featured a lot of customization options without the need for coding, such as:

• Selection between one or two sidebars
• Position of sidebars vs content area
• Width of sidebars and content area
• Selection of fonts and font sizes for different sections of the blog
• Magazine style blog front page
• Selection, order, labeling of pages for navigation menu
• Display of full posts vs post excerpts

Thesis Theme 1.6 – Make changes without CSS and coding

Thesis Theme 1.6 features all of the above, but also takes it to another level in terms of styling of the navigation menu and styling of  the fonts and content area. See my video review of the new features:

• Thesis Theme now has its own home in the WordPress menu called Thesis Options
• Custom File Editor lets you edit custom.css and custom_functions.php from Wordpress interface
• No need to login to your hosting account via FTP anymore
• Thesis Theme now features automatic drop down navigation menu
• Background color control – Select content area background color, multimedia box background
• Text color control – Select text / link colors for different parts of the blog
• Navigation menu color styling – Link color, link hover color, background color, hover background color
• Navigation menu border styling – Select border width, border color
• Remove all borders – One click to remove all borders

Blogging on another level

All in all, version 1.6 takes the Thesis Theme to another level. If you were afraid of logging onto your server to edit the files and do some CSS and coding, this version will be a great way to make your blog unique through the Thesis interface.

1. How to create a sales letter landing page with WordPress Thesis Theme
2. How to get magazine style WordPress blog with Thesis Theme teasers
3. Improved blog look after upgrade to Thesis 1.4
4. Why you should consider Thesis Theme design for your blog
5. 8 Thesis theme design tips to make your blog better

Thanks for reading HowToMakeMyBlog.com

You can also fan me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

A worm is making its way around Wordpress blogging software, it sweeps across millions of blogs and hits whatever it finds vulnerable. Vulnerable are versions of Wordpress prior to the WordPress 2.8.4, which is the most recent version.

If you are following the best practices to keep your WordPress blog safe, you are safe. If you are not following the best practices, you are at a high risk!

Scobleizer hit; lessons to be learned

One of the high-profile bloggers that is affected by the worm is Robert Scoble. The consequence of the attack is that Scoble has lost a part of his blog archives, and Google has removed his blog from their index, which means that Robert is losing thousands of visitors that were sent from Google daily.

Robert now says that he doesn’t feel safe with WordPress, but if you look more closely into the case, you can see what went wrong:

• Scoble didn’t have backup of his blog archives.
• Scoble didn’t upgrade to the latest WordPress version.
• Scoble used the default “admin” username.

Backing up is so easy

Activate WordPress Database Backup plugin and set it to automatically backup your blog and send the backup file to your email address. Two minutes work to install it, activate it and set it so it sends you a new email with a new backup automatically every day, every week or whenever you decide.

Upgrading is just as simple

Upgrading your self-hosted WordPress blog is just as simple as backing up your blog archives. When there is a new upgrade available, WordPress will give you a notice on top of your dashboard. It will say “WordPress 2.8.4 is available! Please update now”. Click on it and your upgrade is a simple one-click away.

If you are afraid to upgrade because of some old WordPress theme you are using or some old plugin that you think is not compatible with the new WordPress, then please switch over to something more modern and something that you know has a serious developer and community behind it. Thesis Theme for example released a WordPress 2.8 compatible design on the day of the WordPress release.

Creating a new admin username

It is harder for a hacker to break into your blog when both the username and the password have to be cracked. That is why you should create a new user and delete the WordPress default “admin”.

You create a user by going into “Users” then “Add New”. When creating the new user, make sure to give it the role as an “Administrator”.

Simply logout from your default “admin” account and log in with the new user details. In “Users” you can now delete the default admin username. It even gives you an option to transfer the posts you wrote as “admin” to your new username.

How do I know if my blog got hacked?

According to Lorelle, there are two ways that you can know if your WordPress has been attacked:

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognise.

Best practices to keep your blog safe

Simple 10 minutes of work and you can feel much safer knowing that your blog is less likely to be affected by any security risk. The “trouble” of making your blog safe is worth it, it is much less than the real trouble of fixing a hacked WordPress blog. It can take weeks and months before you get back to the level you were at before the security breach.

1. 7 simple steps to make your WordPress blog more secure
2. Best Wordpress plugins – 18 most downloaded WordPress plugins ever
3. 9 settings I always adjust as soon as I install a new WordPress blog
4. Why You Should Upgrade To WordPress 2.7
5. How To Install WordPress 2.8 – Step-By-Step Guide

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