The Future of Blog

Make The Most of an Old Post Getting New Attention

Jeremiah Hoyet — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:28:59 +0000

One of the magic qualities of search engines is their ability to breath new life into an old blog post. Months, even years, after you have published a blog post, good old Google could start sending lots of traffic to your old post!

If you’re monitoring your blog traffic and you notice this happening, it’s a good idea to go back and revise your post. The information may need to be updated, or maybe you have since written about something relevant to the topic of the post and want to provide a link. There are many ways to make use of the new traffic, and here are a few tips for doing just that!

Add Links in the Content

A great way to increase the potential of your old post is to add links to newer posts inside the content.Find keywords or phrases and link to relevant content within the text. This can increase the value of the information readers are seeking, increase page views, and help you to build your internal link structure for better SEO.

Update The Information

Sometimes an old post can have outdated information, and this can be a problem if it starts to get new search engine traffic. Users looking for information want the latest information out there. Don’t let them be disappointed, go back to your make sure the information you provided is up to speed.

You can also use this opportunity to write a new blog post with updated information. Be sure to go back an add a very visible link to the update at the top of the old blog post. This gives both new and current readers the latest information, and increases your page views.

Create a List of “Further Reading”

Although the visitor might be satisfied with the information you’ve provided in the old post, they might want to read further on the topic or a closely related topic. Take the chance to go back and add a list of any closely related blog posts at the foot of the old post. There are related post plugins that can do this for you automatically, but manually adding the links can increase the chance of them being directly related to the post content and increase their value for the reader.

Turn New Visitors Into Subscribers!

One of the best ways of making the most of new traffic is to turn new visitors into subscribers! There are a few effective methods for doing this, here are a couple in short:

Add an attention grabbing graphic to the footer or header of your old blog post.
Use a plugin to suggest subscribing to first time visitors.
Add a subscription link to the “Further Reading List”.

Don’t Sit Around!

If you see an old blog post getting some search engine love, don’t sit back and do nothing! Using a couple simple techniques can help you make the most of this new traffic.

Image by joiseyshowaa

Make The Most of an Old Post Getting New Attention is a post from: The Future of Blog

Updating Your Customized WordPress Theme

Jeremiah Hoyet — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:04:30 +0000

With all the themes available for little-to-nothing, customizing your Wordpress theme has become an essential task in the path to becoming a better blogger. Customizing your theme sets you apart from the crowd of others using that theme — it makes you that much more unique.

What happens when the theme developers release an update to the theme you have built your blog around? Are you going to have to lose all of your hard work just to get the latest features and bug fixes?

This has happened to me several times in the last several months, WooThemes.com (the developer of the theme I use, Busy Bee) releases updates to their themes at least once a month. I’ve made some changes to my theme, and avoided losing all my hard work during an update following a few simple steps!

5 Step Extravaganza!

Always Perform a Backup! - Backing up your current theme files is a must! There’s always the chance that something could go wrong, be lost, or not work properly. Having a backup of your current, working theme can save your butt if you run into trouble!
Find and Study The Change Log - If the developer of your theme doesn’t write a log detailing what has been changed in each new release, find a new developer and theme. WooThemes.com provides a list of all files that have been changed with each new release. The change log should let you know if you’ll need to edit something again, or just upload the updated files and continue on with your day.
Make Any Required Edits - If files you have edited have been changed, don’t panic! Most often there are only light modifications made to theme files, and it’s usually easy to get your theme back to it’s original appearance. Compare the new files and old files, then make any changes you need to get the new file up to “speed”.
Test Drive Your New Theme - Before you upload your newly updated theme for use on your blog, it’s always a good idea to give the theme a test drive somewhere else (a “sandbox”). I have a separate domain that I use for this very purpose. You don’t have to spend money on an extra domain, but testing the theme using a sub-domain or local LAMP/WAMP server is a good idea.
Upload Your Newly Updated Theme - This step is pretty self-explanatory. Upload your theme to your server and give it a go!

Final Note

Updating your WordPress theme can be beneficial to both you and readers — new features, bug fixes, etc. It can be a bit of a headache, like upgrading WordPress itself, but it’s not as hard as it looks if you follow these simple steps.

One last tip - Try maintaining a change log of your own while you are making changes and customizations to your WordPress theme. It can make remembering what files you have made changes to much easier in the future!

Updating Your Customized WordPress Theme is a post from: The Future of Blog

Increase Page Views With LinkWithin

Jeremiah Hoyet — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:02:43 +0000

One technique a lot of bloggers use to increase page views is listing links to related content at the end of each blog post. Displaying related content increases the chances that visitors will feel compelled to read more; they just read an amazing blog post related to the same topic, why not read further, right?

The problem is that a lot of bloggers just install any old related post plugin and call it a day. This leaves that list of related content looking like some random block of text, which isn’t very appealing or attention grabbing. Leaving a list of boring links at the foot of each blog post doesn’t entice visitors, you need to add something to grab their attention and get them to click that link!

LinkWithin is a Wordpress Plugin that will help you spice up your related content links, and do it without you having to lift a finger (in terms of coding-work).

Easy-peasy Setup

Go figure — the designers of the plugin wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to get it running. Here’s the 5 step process, abridged:

Visit LinkWithin.com and enter your information. Don’t worry about the email part, I haven’t been spammed by them (yet).
Download the provided ZIP file.
Upload the ZIP file from your WP Plugins Installation page. If you can’t find the page, please refer to Google.
Activate the plugin (click the link).
Sit back and watch the magic happen.

Give It Some Time

The plugin is amazing, but it does take some time to crawl the stories on your blog. So give it a few hours before you decide you hate it. Once LinkWithin has completed the crawl of your blog, you should start seeing some quality, attention grabbing links to related content at the foot of each one of your blog posts.

You should also remember that since there are literally thousands of different Wordpress Themes in existence, if it doesn’t display well on yours, you need to let the developers know!

Is there another way you can think of increasing page views?

Increase Page Views With LinkWithin is a post from: The Future of Blog

The Cost of Blogging

Jeremiah Hoyet — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:00:29 +0000

I was recently showing off my blog to a friend of mine. At first he was intrigued and started to ask me if I thought he should start a blog. It was at this point that I told him how much time and money I have invested in my blog, and how much I have receive in return for that investment. Hearing this immediately changed his mood about blogging. He thought I was crazy for investing so much time and money for almost nothing in return.

I told him it would be worth the investment if I continued to work hard!

Blogging is a great way to make money online, but it is not free or easy by any means. Blogging requires you to pay a cost and continue to pay that cost until you eventually receive a return on your investment or quit blogging altogether. Some of those costs are monetary, while others come in the form of time and energy you give up to keep your blog going.

Blogging Costs Money

Yes. Blogging costs you money. There are free blogging platforms, but if you want to control every aspect of your blog, it will costs you a few bucks. How much money does a blog cost? Here’s a run down of how much money I have spent on my blog this year alone:

Hosting Costs – I’ve been hosting this blog on Media Temple’s Grid Hosting service for almost a year at a cost of $17.99 a month. That comes out to around $216.
Wordpress Theme - Shortly after I started this blog I purchased a Wordpress theme from WooThemes. The theme was $70.
Advertising Costs - To help grow traffic on my blog from the beginning I purchased a few ad spaces for a month, that ran up a bill of $40.

Total cost of blogging this year – $326

Blogging Takes Up Your Time

Another cost of blogging is your time. I would be lying to you if I told you that blogging doesn’t take up a good portion of my free time. I’m a young father, so I don’t have a ton of free time to spare, but I spend a large portion of it doing something related to my blog.

I’m also constantly giving up something to make time for my blog. For instance, my daughter hasn’t been allowing my fiancé and I to get a lot of sleep the last couple of days. That, coupled with the hours of my regular job, have left me completely exhausted. Since I am dedicated to making my blog successful, I am up bright and early this morning writing a blog post, instead of sleeping in with my fiancé.

It’s All Worth It

I don’t want to paint a picture of blogging as a lot of hard work with no return. There are benefits to blogging, some more direct than others, but they are present. I’m just saying that blogging takes a lot of hard work, and it’s something you should know before you decide to give blogging a try.

That image is by TheTruthAbout…

The Cost of Blogging is a post from: The Future of Blog

Keywords That Bring Search Engine Traffic to New Blogs

Jeremiah Hoyet — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:45:24 +0000

Every blogger wants to have their blog rank high for extremely popular search engine keywords. If your blog ranks high for a very popular keyword there will be benefits. Those benefits are traffic, and recognition — by peers, advertisers, and readers.

When your blog is new, it is quite difficult to appear at the top of the search engine results for popular keywords. The lack of incoming links, traffic, and the young age of your blog all work against you.

Forget the popular keywords for now, and instead focus on ranking high for long tail keywords.

What Are Long Tail Keywords?

Long tail keywords are multiple phrase search engine queries that are much more specific than the broader, general keywords. Long tail keywords are commonly used when a visitor’s needs more specific information related to a broader topic.

A good example would be “blogging tips” and “blogging tips for new bloggers”. “Blogging tips” is a broad, general topic, whereas “blogging tips for new bloggers” narrows down the broader topic to a more specific set of information that the visitor is seeking.

Why Are Long Tail Keywords Important to New Blogs?

Ranking high for the broader, competitive keywords is difficult. There is a lot of competition from more established blogs, which makes it near impossible for new blogs to have a chance of ranking high in the search results. However, long tail keywords have much less contention surrounding them, making this type of keyword valuable to new bloggers. Here are a few reasons they are beneficial for new blogs:

It is Easier to Rank Well for Long Tail Keywords - The lack of competition surrounding long tail keywords means that it is much easier for you to rank well in the search engine results, where your new blog might not do as well for broader, more popular keywords.
Multiple Long Tail Keywords Mean Traffic - Targeting multiple long tail keywords will eventually bring your new blog a larger amount of search engine traffic.
Increased Subscriber Potential - Long tail keywords are much more specific than broader keywords, meaning that the visitors you receive from search engines have found your blog looking for specific information. If the visitor finds that information useful, they may want to return in the future to get more information from your blog.

Final Thoughts

While I encourage every blogger to target the popular keywords, the fact is that targeting long tail keywords is much more beneficial to new blogs. They offer a greater potential for high search engine rankings, and by targeting multiple long tail keywords you increase the amount of targeted traffic coming to your blog!

Keywords That Bring Search Engine Traffic to New Blogs is a post from: The Future of Blog

48+ Links to Help You Make A Buck Blogging

Jeremiah Hoyet — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:21:19 +0000

Let’s face it — making money with your blog is hard. I’m not going to tell you that it’s easy, or that it’s something you doesn’t require a bit of work.

I’m constantly testing different methods to increase the revenue of my blogs.There are a thousand blog posts, web pages, and forums out there that are devoted to the art of making money online.

So, to help you out, I’ve compiled a list that will help you to make money blogging. These links will help you understand how to use pay per click advertising, affiliate marketing, and other money making options to turn your blog into a source of income!

Without further ado, here are 48+ links you can use to learn how to make a buck blogging!

Have I missed a great link?

There are literally thousands of links out there on this topic! If you think I missed a really good article or tip, please leave a comment below and let me know!

Image by Rick!

48+ Links to Help You Make A Buck Blogging is a post from: The Future of Blog

How Can a Contest Help Your Blog?

Jeremiah Hoyet — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:12:31 +0000

I’m entering The Future of Blog in a Wordpress design contest being run by Keller Hawthorne from FresheVenture.com. The contest has a long list of prizes, from free premium Wordpress themes to premium Wordpress plugins. I’m very excited to see how well my blog will do in this contest, considering that I have put a little bit of work into customizing my Wordpress theme!

Entering this contest made me think — how is this contest going to help the FresheVenture blog? How would holding a contest help my blog?

Contests Mean Free Advertising

Contests are a great way to advertise your blog or products.

Why? Well, because the contestants want to win! By entering the design contest Keller is holding, I’m becoming a free advertisement for the FresheVenture blog. I will be promoting my participation in the contest, trying to gain more votes and win the prizes. In turn, each time I advertise my participation, I am handing out a link to the Keller’s blog.

Just holding a contest on your blog will turn the contestants into an army of advertisers.

Easy Quality Backlinks

One of the requirements to be included in the contest is that you must write a blog post that includes a link to the contest page. Sounds like a simple request, one that will let your audience know you are entering the contest. By writing about entering the contest, I’m also increasing the potential amount of votes I will receive.

How does this requirement help out Keller? Easy, Quality backlinks from all the contestants. Backlinks are important in SEO, and hold a large part in shaping Page Rank. By asking that each contestant write a blog post linking to the contest page, Keller is receiving free links. Not only that, due to the nature of the contest, the backlinks are more likely to be of a higher quality.

Asking for a link in return for entering the contest is a simple way to build backlinks.

Vote Now!

I’d like to say that entering a contest does help out the contestant as well. There are free prizes that make it well worth entering the contest, I get a free backlink from the page listing the contestants, and new people will be visiting my blog to judge the design and (hopefully) vote for me!

Image by ItzaFineDay!

How Can a Contest Help Your Blog? is a post from: The Future of Blog

StumbleUpon Traffic is Worthless to Your Blog

Jeremiah Hoyet — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:27:09 +0000

I’m a big fan of the social network StumbleUpon, it’s gotten me through many boring nights when I just couldn’t find something interesting or productive to occupy my time. It’s also directed a staggering number of viewers to a lot of blogs that I have owned in the past.

Recently, someone browsing past this blog decided that my words were worth-while enough that they decided to share the blog post with the StumbleUpon community. While I greatly appreciate whoever it was that shared the page initially, I can’t help but realize how worthless StumbleUpon traffic is to my blog.

Traffic Spike That Has No Value

Traffic Spike From StumbleUpon

In my opinion, StumbleUpon just offers you a traffic spike, but that traffic doesn’t offer you any real value. The day that my blog post was submitted to StumbleUpon I experienced a pretty decent increase in traffic. A few days after being submitted, my blog traffic returned to normal as the number of people “stumbling across” my blog diminished (as you can see from the graph snippet to the left).

During the time StumbleUpon was actually sending traffic to my blog, I gain no new RSS subscribers, and had no new comments. Not to mention, there wasn’t an increase in interaction with the advertisements on my blog.

Why is StumbleUpon Traffic Worthless?

StumbleUpon isn’t like other social networks. Sure, there are thousands of people actively participating in the social network; finding, sharing, and rating content; but a large portion of the users turn to the social network as a fix to boredom. That means that for blogs like mine, which are a source of entertainment in general, StumbleUpon’s audience won’t enjoy what they find.

In a nutshell, the users of StumbleUpon have 4 qualities that aren’t well suited for my blog:

They probably aren’t looking for information about blogging.
They want to be entertained, not informed.
They are very quick to judge, and often don’t look deeper than the title of a page.
They don’t tend to stick around and interact.

Has StumbleUpon traffic ever been valuable to your blog?

Image by MatHampson

StumbleUpon Traffic is Worthless to Your Blog is a post from: The Future of Blog

Mobilize Your Blog Theme With WPtouch

Jeremiah Hoyet — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:00:40 +0000

Two months ago Apple, Inc. released an update to their ever-popular iPhone mobile phone, the iPhone 3GS. According to Reuters, over a million of the phones were purchased within the first three days of the phone being launched!

What’s my point? Mobile phones that are capable of keeping people connected on the go are rapidly growing in popularity. That means that it’s becoming more likely that someone might be having lunch in a café, while at the same time checking their email, reading Twitter updates, or reading your blog!

There is one problem — your Wordpress theme is a monster download for mobile viewers! That’s where the WPtouch Mobile Wordpress Theme plugin comes into play, it delivers a mobile Wordpress theme to anyone viewing your blog from a mobile device.

Decrease Loading Times

WPtouch is a rather simple to use, and can decrease the time it takes to load your blog from a mobile device drastically. Take a look at the graph below, this represents the amount of time it takes to load a blog using three different mobile data connections:

Image from Bravenewcode.com

You’ll notice that the load time decreased by over 50% on EDGE when using the WPtouch plugin! That means that users will spend up to 50% less time loading your blog.

iPhone-like Theme

The WPtouch plugin will indeed lower load times for viewers, but the default theme it offers is clean and simple! Just take a look at these screenshots taken of The Future of Blog using my T-Mobile G1:

The Homepage of My Blog

A Single Post Page

WP-Cache Problems

WPtouch may decrease load times for mobile users, but the plugin doesn’t play nice with cache plugins such as WP Super Cache. Since cache plugins deliver a static, cached page to viewers the switch to the mobile theme will not occur. There is, however, and easy way to fix this little problem. Simply add mobile device user agents — an identifier that lets the web server know what browser you are using — to the “Rejected User Agents” field in your cache plugin’s options page. Here’s a list of mobile user agents you should add:

iPhone
iPod
Android
BlackBerry9530
LG-TU915
Obigo
LGE
VX
webOS
Nokia5800
2.0
MMP
240×320
400X240
AvantGo
BlackBerry
Blazer
Cellphone
Danger
DoCoMo
Elaine/3.0
EudoraWeb
Googlebot-Mobile
hiptop
IEMobile
KYOCERA/WX310K
LG/U990
MIDP-2.
MMEF20
MOT-V
NetFront
Newt
Nintendo
Wii
Nitro
Nokia
Opera
Mini
Palm
PlayStation
Portable
portalmmm
Proxinet
ProxiNet
SHARP-TQ-GX10
SHG-i900
Small
SonyEricsson
Symbian
OS
SymbianOS
TS21i-10
UP.Browser
UP.Link
webOS
Windows
CE
WinWAP
YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2

I Suggest You Give It a Try

WPtouch has many more options, including mobile ad management! The theme has worked great for me, and reduces load times for mobile viewers drastically. You can download WPtouch to install it manually, or just search for “WPtouch” from your Wordpress dashboard under Plugins> Add New!

Mobilize Your Blog Theme With WPtouch is a post from: The Future of Blog

Free Software Turns Your PSD into a Wordpress Theme

Jeremiah Hoyet — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:05:55 +0000

I’m sure anyone with a copy of Photoshop has played around and created a mock up of a Wordpress theme — I know that I have on several occasions. The issue arises when it comes time to turn that theme mock up into a fully functional Wordpress theme with all the bells and whistles. Most people lack the time, determination, or are just stumped when it comes to understanding the languages used to create a functioning Wordpress theme.

This is a problem that a piece of software called Divine aims to solve. Divine is a program that can take your mock up theme (in Photoshop’s .PSD format) and turn it into a Wordpress Theme. Hopefully, no coding involved in the entire process.

I only had a short amount of time to play with this new software, so please don’t take my word as the final verdict on it’s usefulness or how it functions. That said, the version of the software made available for free is limited in functionality and is still in beta testing — this isn’t the full, finished product.

A Great Start

Like I said above, I haven’t had the time to sit down and truly give Divine a good run for it’s money. That would require that I create an entirely new Wordpress Theme mockup and dive into numerous tutorials and guides the Divine Project website offers. What I did have time to do was check out the process using an example template that Divine Project offers to give users a chance to see how it all works. I’d say they are off to a great start, but it’s far from perfect.

Not Entirely “Code Free”

I had high hopes when I started up Divine, but it seems that (at least in this freely available version) there is no way to setup dynamic menus or lists. For those who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, I mean that I didn’t find a way to turn one portion of the page into a list of pages, which can be different depending on what pages a blog author may or may not have created. This means that you would have to be familiar with at least some basic CSS, HTML, and PHP to achieve the desired effect, which doesn’t entirely solve the problem the software sets to eliminate.

Until The Next Release…

Unfortunately, Divine isn’t a savior to those people that lack the wits to turn a beautiful mock up into a functioning Wordpress theme. I can only hope that the full version will somehow give users more options for controlling dynamically created content, without having to dive into HTML or PHP to do so.

Please keep in mind I only used Divine for around 45 minutes, so maybe I missed something during that time frame. I encourage you to check out Divine for yourself and please let me know what you think!

Download Divine

Free Software Turns Your PSD into a Wordpress Theme is a post from: The Future of Blog