This is the tenth and last post of the “How To Blog” series and I’d like to close it with some advice on blogging etiquette. Indeed, behaving well in the blogosphere is important because:

• Reputation stays forever on the web
• We are all from different cultures and must learn to respect each other
• Blogging = communicating… isn’t it?

On writing posts:

• Blogs are a written medium, so do everyone a favor and punctuate, capitalize and spell check your posts. I’m not talking about the odd spelling mistake (will I ever be able to spell “neighborhood” properly?) but posts like: “lol u lik it 2, this Utube video iz my favoite”.
• Writing is caps is forbidden. Unless YOU ARE SHOUTING! Seriously, caps are hard to read, especially when write your entire post in caps.
• Paragraphs are an invention of God™. They separate your mains ideas and are nice to the eye. Plus, hitting the tab key only takes a second.
• Don’t ever copy someone else post/ blog/ entire website (yes, some idiots do that). You will get caught and will look very stupid. Trust me.
  

On using images:

• Please, resize your images for those who don’t have a fast internet connection. One large picture per post is fine, but if you took 1,000 pictures during your holidays, please resist the urge to post everything in a single post. You can either make a picture page, like on this blog (see Pics), send people to your Flickr, Photobucket or whatever account, or use thumbnails. Anything that won’t make my computer crash basically.
• Not everybody is a photographer or an artist. That’s fine. What’s not fine is stealing images. Copyright my friend, copyright… Don’t just use Google image to find something suitable for the article you’re about to post: chances are, the image will be copyrighted and you will get into trouble. No, no, trust me, you will. See this thread at Digital Point for example, where bloggers and webmasters are being sued by Getty Image Company for what appears to be relatively small copyright infringement… On the same forum, you can read the excellent: “copyright, what you need to know”. So if you’re desperate for pictures, you can either: 1) take them yourself 2) ask an amateur photographer on Flickr for example (I was contacted several and never said no — too flattered for that!) 3) buy stock photographies. You will save yourself a lot of hassle in the long run.

On blog design:

• Chances are you didn’t make your theme from scratch but rather downloaded a free theme/ template. Did you notice the small line at the bottom of it? These are the credits, usually a link to the designer who created the theme/ template, and sometimes a link to the blogging platform. For example, on my blog, you can read: “Copyright © 2008 Correr Es Mi Destino. Powered by WordPress. Options theme by Justin Tadlock”. Justin designed this amazing theme that I tweaked and customized. I got the theme for free. I get support for free on his forums. He is constantly improving his themes. Why on earth shouldn’t he get credit for it? Yet, a lot of people remove the credit line altogether or worse, attribute the theme as their own. This is just pathetic…
• Make sure readers can access your blog easily: check your blog loading speed (you can use Website Speed Test for example), don’t pile up thousands of widgets and images in your sidebar, make your font big enough and avoid flashy gadgets. Among others recommendations.
  
• Make sure your ads or your sponsored posts don’t drive readers away. Pop up windows are a big no-nos as most people can’t stand them. Text or image ads are usually fine but think about their placement: you want them to be seen but you also want people to read your posts. Just don’t overdo it… I personally hate sponsored posts but they are fairly accepted by readers as long as you have good content and don’t do that too often.

On promoting your blog:

• Wait until your blog is finished and you have a few posts to start promoting your blog. Asking for a review of an empty blog with just the “hello world” post and a bunch of ads can drive potential readers away for a long time.
• Promoting a blog doesn’t mean plugging your link anytime you can. A lot of blogs now use the Commentluv plugin which links to your last post when you comment on a blog. You don’t need to type your blog link several times in the comment when you leave one.
• Pay attention to people and they will pay attention to you. Blogging is a two way thing: read blogs that you are interested in, leave genuine comments, help whenever you can and people will visit your blog. Don’t be that obnoxious “check out my blog” person.

On interacting with people:

• Be nice. Not everybody share your point of view, your cultural/ religion background, your ideas. People can and will disagree. That’s life, and the keyword is r-e-s-p-e-c-t.
• And when you “tag” people for a meme, don’t just type their names or blog URLs: link to them. Likewise, if you complete the meme, you should link to the blogger who tagged you.
• Do things without expecting anything in return (links etc.). It works well in the long run.
  
• Post comments that are related to the entry. Don’t break the discussion with one of these “by the way, did you check out my last post” kind of comment. Most bloggers have a contact form if you need to ask them something off topic.

We all break the rules once in a while and I made my fair share of mistakes, but I hope these points will help you understand and enjoy the blogosphere to its best! Let me know if you would like to add points, I can update this post periodically.

Next week, I will start an “How To… In Canada” ten-posts series, where you will learn how to immigrate to Canada, how to find a job, how to open a bank account and more. See you then!

Related posts:

1. All About Blogging: Blog Monetizing, What Works Best?
2. All About Blogging: 5 Ways to Promote your Blog
3. Must Have On Your Blog (5/10)

Today, I’d like to share something even more personal than clothes, make-up or a toothbrush: bookmarks. We all have our favorite sites or tools to make blogging easier… here are mine: a collection of links to online tools, great blogs and generators for the geeks impaired.

Note that all these tools are free and none of these links are sponsored!

For Blog Design:

• Favicon From Pics: an online tool to create favicons (the small icon by the url of a website) from regular images.
• Color Scheme Generator: to create a nice scheme for your blog.
• Screen Resolution Checker: although most of us now use larger monitors with a 1024 x 768 resolution, there are still some 800 x 600 users. Would your blog look fine with this resolution? Have a look! Note: this tool only works with IE 5.5 or higher… not Firefox for some reason.
• Browsershot: this tools test your website in different browser… well, over 50 actually, including some browsers you have never heard of! This is really useful because browsers such as Internet Explorer are well-known to display some features differently. With this tool, you just enter your blog’s URL, bookmark the page, and pick up your screenshots later. You can view them online or download them. And good luck fixing the cross-browsers bugs afterwards!
• Flickr Toys: do more stuffs with your pictures! Make a jigsaw puzzle, a mosaic, an inspirational poster, a badge, a movie poster… Over 40 tools to do original things with your pictures. Note: you need to open a Flickr account to upload your pictures, either from Flickr, either from your computer.
• 101 Fonts For Designers: a list of fonts to download.
• Noupe: a great design blog, which often features design ideas, CSS tricks and “best of” lists.
• Smashing Magazine: a design website which features freebies (icons, wallpapers…), graphic inspiration, how-to…

For coding (HTML, CSS) :

• Kotatsu: this one generates HTML tables. Perfect to align pictures two per two.
• Dropdown Menu Creator: generates a custom dropdown menu. Just enter your links and get the HTML code.
• CSS School: CSS tutorial with examples, quizzes, references, and an editor.
• WordPress Max: a great blog which focuses mostly on WordPress, with tips and articles on plugins, themes, monetizing etc.
• Hack WordPress: a blog about themes, plugins, code, and WordPress hacks.
• Web Designer Wall: a blog mostly about design but which also features great CSS tutorials. It has an amazing theme!
• Pro Blog Design: design and hacks.
• Theme Lab: WordPress coding tutorials.

For SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and marketing your blog:

• The Blogger’s Guide To SEO: to finally understand what SEO is all about.
• Feed Analysis: analyse your feed and get an estimate of your future readership.
• SEO Tools: includes site analysis (page rank, alexa…), keywords tools, and links tools.
• Check Internal Page Rank: check the page rank of your site and its internal pages.
• Website Grader: grade your blog’s SEO.
• Internet Marketing: a good blog about marketing and blogging advices.

Blog Forum:

• Digital Point: a huge forum for coders, designers, webmasters, marketers and more.
• Bloggeries: a smaller but friendlier forum about blogging, webmastering and marketing.

Hope you will find something useful for you! And don’t hesitate to send me your best links, I’ll add them to this list.

Related posts:

1. Ranking A Blog (8/10)
2. The Art Of Promoting A Blog (4/10)
3. Must Have On Your Blog (5/10)

Who loves you? Yeah, probably a bunch of real life people. But blog-wise, who is you friend and who isn’t?

Today, we will explore the different tools you can use to assess your blog ranking. Is your blog popular? Easy to find? High-ranked? Followed by regular readers or one-time visitors?

Your blog’s position on the web is assessed daily by various sources, among them:

• Google, and its famous Page Rank
• Feedburner, and the number of your subscribers
• Technorati and the number of inbound links
• Alexa, which provides information on web traffic

Google love: the famous search engine uses a very complicated algorithm to “measure” the importance of your website in the web. Basically, you PageRank will be determined by the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to your website (“incoming links”). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page, there is no support for that page.

PageRank are updated every few months… the last time was in February 2008 but no one can really predict the updates. PageRank updates are known to bring good news to some and bad to others. Late 2007, bloggers who used Pay Per Post or similar services were slammed by Google and a lot of them, if not all, lost their PageRank.

How do you get a high PageRank? Some invest on their PageRank by buying links from high-ranking websites, some try to game the system and use black hat SEO, some just exchange links… there are many techniques out there. My best bet would be: work on your content and on your website and you’ll be just fine. It seems useless to me to link to a bunch of irrelevant websites which will, ultimately, reduce the quality and relevancy of Google search results. I didn’t know about PageRank at all until I reached PageRank 4 and trust me, I didn’t do much for that. Give it a bit of time, exchange links with bloggers in your niche and chances are, you will see your PageRank raise. And won’t get a headache in the process.

You can check your PageRank with the following tools:

• PageRank Checker
• Check PageRank of internal pages in your blog

Count your subscribers with Feedburner: Feedburner republishes your blog’s feed to make it more usage-friendly, it allows you to follow your RSS feeds and track usage of your subscribers. The service is free: you just need to sign up and “burn your feed”. You will then be able to see subscribers’ stats (who read what, when etc.), optimize your feed (make it browser-friendly, build interactivity etc.), publicize it (ping a bunch of website for example)… and even monetize it. Worth a try, doesn’t it?

A couple of tools might enhance your Feedburner experience:

• The Feed Analysis (a free detail report of your feed)
• The Feedburner Feedsmith plugin for WordPress (detects all ways to access your feed and redirect them to FeedBurner)

Technorati and the links: Technorati is a search engine for blogs, and probably the most popular around. It counts the numbers of unique links to your blog in a given period and rank you. Even if you don’t make it to the top page (seriously, who does?), it’s a useful tool to see who linked to you. Who added you in a blogroll? Who quoted your post? Who tagged you? A lot of blogger don’t mention it and it sounds like a good way to find out!

Have a look at:

• Technorati widgets (to display your Technorati rank on your blog, for example)
• For fun, check how much is your blog worth (er… where can I claim my $63,000?)
• Hack to add Technorati incoming links in WordPress dashboard

Alexa, the traffic queen: Alexa provides information on web traffic to other website. It gives a popularity based ranking, which is achieved by users adding a search tool on their website. Alexa then tracks where you go and compiles the information into rankings based on the number of hits to each site. This tool is mostly a “big guys’” tool though, since most of us don’t really compare traffic… and you need a lot of it to have relevant data showing!

You can still download the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer or Firefox (gives you infos about the website you’re visiting)

And let’s not forget about a few additional free online SEO tools you may use to check your blog status and improve it:

• Website Grader, a great tool to measure your marketing effectiveness. It’s very easy to read, includes some good tips on the report and it’s free. I love it!
• Domain popularity, an online tool that lists all your backlinks
• Website speed and loading time, when you think a billion of widgets might be too much, this tool will confirm it!
• SEO toolbox, includes pages indexed, domain age etc.

So, what are you waiting for? Go check how awesome is your blog!

Related posts:

1. 20+ Tools For Your Blog (9/10)
2. All About Blogging: 5 Ways to Promote your Blog
3. All About Blogging: Blog Monetizing, What Works Best?

Got a blog but no cash? Today, we will see what you can do to monetize your blog!

I spend about a year being ad-free on my Blogger blog but eventually, reality caught up. I was happy to see my blog was getting—just a bit—popular, but I also put a lot of work into it. So I decided to move to a more professional-looking self-hosted WordPress and to monetize my blog. Since I would need to buy a domain name and pay hosting fees, it sounded fair.

I had read a lot about monetizing a blog. Some claimed to make thousands a month (I’d have been happy with a couple of hundreds!), some were displaying more ads than content, some were complaining about scams programs that wouldn’t pay them. Phew. Where was I supposed to start? And by the way, did I mention I’m not a marketing person, that I absolutely hate commercials and ads, and that Naomie Klein’s No Logo was my favourite book?

But I put my little red flag in my bag and investigated how I could make money. Indeed, there are several options:

• Pay-per-click programs: ads are displayed on the blog, and you get paid each time a reader click on one of them. For example, Google’s Adsense,
• Pay-per-display programs: advertisers pay to display an ad on your blog, no matter who clicks on it. For example, Project Wonderful.
• Selling link words: advertisers buy a specific keyword on you blog, which they link to their page. For example, Text Link Ads.
• Sponsored reviews: advertisers pay for you to blog about a specific products/ website. For example, Pay-Per-Post.

There are a few methods I haven’t mentioned here, such as affiliate, selling services or products because I haven’t experienced them first hand.

I was personally very much against sponsored reviews. First of all, I found that there was very little choice of products to blog about if I wanted to stick to my main theme (immigration, Canada, politics etc.). I didn’t want to write personal posts about Canada and next thing be seen blogging about a new sweeper! I also found that sponsored reviews can easily “kill” a blog. Sometimes, the temptation is too big to write paid posts after paid and there’s no content left… I unsubscribed from too many blogs that fell into that trap.

That left me with the other options… and a few advices for you.

Adsense: I signed up with Adsense seven months ago. And I’m not ashamed to say I’m very far from the $100 payout threshold. True, I didn’t put ads units everywhere (I want readers to focus on what I write… yeah, I’m that vain) but I still expected a bit more. But anyway, not that many people click on the ads and I only make a few cents each time readers do (but it’s much appreciated!). I make about $5.00/ month with Adsense… not exactly what I thought I would make when I signed up.

Project Wonderful: PW is a bit original. You set up an account, display a code wherever you want the ad to be and advertisers bid to display their website on your blog. The first few months, I actually made a bit of money thanks to that system. The income was also much steadier than with Adsense… I also like the square-ad design I chose and found the ads displayed on my blog to blend in. Lately, I noticed bids slowed down.

Text Links Ads: Text Links Ads is basically a middleman between the blogger and the advertiser and they sell keywords for you. For example, let’s say you wrote a post about a trip to Paris. Someone may be interested in buying the keyword “Paris” and link it to a hotel. You will get paid for that: the price will depend mostly on your blog’s Page Rank. With a Page Rank 4, I usually sell my keywords between $10-$30 per month. There’s not minimum payment and every month, I get my money through Paypal. Text Link Ad contacts you when you have new ads to approve (you can also set to auto-approval) and you basically don’t have to do anything. It took me a couple of months to get a decent payment, but I now get a few new links every month and it adds up pretty quickly. So far, for me, it’s the best way to (no, this is not a sponsored review!).

So far, I get most of my blogging income from Text Link Ad, followed closely by Project Wonderful and Adsense.

So, how will you do better than me? Make more money than this blog?

Well, first of all, the more traffic you get, the more likely you are to sell your ads at a premium rate. This blog currently gets about 700 hits/ day and 200 unique hits/ day, which is I guess still average (but I’m working on that!).

Then, monetizing a blog takes time. First, you have to build good content. Yes, just signing up for a blog isn’t enough. These two days old blogs full of ads but still with the default “welcome” message always makes me laugh. Yeah, I wish it was that easy.…! You also have to somehow master the basic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to be found on search engines. And finally, you have to investigate the best ways to make money on your blog. You can probably strike good deals if you deal with advertisers directly. For example, the Digital Point forum has a good buy, sell or trade section and so does Bloggeries. Middlemen are not always needed, but you need to invest time.

And finally, like we will see next week, each blog has a ranking. Your page rank, your back links, your RSS subscriptions, all that matter.

Moral of the story… it is possible to monetize a blog but don’t expect too much, at least at first. Some people are extremely successful and brag about it endlessly but truth is, only good blogs get rewarded on the long term and monetizing a blog can be a slow process.

Meanwhile, you will have to make sure you don’t irritate your readers in the process. Nobody likes to read sponsored reviews in lieu of a fun blog post, have to close ten pop-ups to open a blog and being forced to scan through ads to spot a post! Watch out for that… there is a fine line between a monetized blog and a splog.

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Please, note that although this post was by no mean sponsored, I used my referral ID to link to the Text Link Ad homepage. If you’re interested in signing up with the program, please consider using it. Thank you!
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Related posts:

1. Must Have On Your Blog (5/10)
2. Tweak Your Blog (6/10)
3. 20+ Tools For Your Blog (9/10)

A fun part of blogging is tweaking and customizing your blog. Not only you will be able to transform a default template/ theme into a unique piece of artwork, but you will also get a chance to catch readers’ eyes. And that’s priceless!

We’ve already covered what you needed to put on your blog, and for WordPress users, what were the best plugins. Now, let’s have a lot at what you can do to tweak and customize your blog.

The first easy way to pimp your blog a bit is to add widgets in your blog sidebar. Widget are a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed on web pages. They could be a list of recent visitors, the weather forecast, pictures badge, polls, songs you are listening etc. Widgets are extremely easy to install: most of time, they are drag and drop elements. However, make sure you don’t add too many widgets as they can slow down your blog’s loading time…

For widgets lists, check out:

• 50 Great gadgets for your blog
• Widgetbox

The second thing you can easily tweak in your blog is your CSS. CSS stands for cascading style sheet and it’s used to describe the presentation of a document: it defines colors, fonts, layout (borders, margins, padding etc.). I was a total beginner when I started blogging (I dealt with Chinese language a lot, but never with code!) but I found tweaking CSS quite easy.

Most of the CSS is pretty much self-explanatory. Just take your time and read it a bit — you will notice things like:

• font:12px Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif; (controls the font’s size and family)
• border:1px dotted #959595; (controls the border’s size, style and color)
• background-color:#436EC4; (controls the background’s color)
• margin:0 0 0 10px; (controls the margins, around pictures for example)
• padding:14px 15px 20px 22px; (controls the padding, the space between a picture and its border for example)

This is just a few lines from my own blog CSS to show you how easy it is to play with it. You can start by changing colors, borders styles etc. Just make sure you backup your original CSS first!

Sometimes, you want to change something on your blog but you don’t know where to find it on your CSS. For that (and much more!) there is a very good Firefox plugin called “the web developer toolbar”. It will help you locate the CSS on your blog very easily.

You can also study CSS with W3schools. Weird name but pretty good tutorials! Think of Digital Point as well, this forum has a good helpful section on CSS questions.

Don’t feel like digging into CSS and need a quick fix? Popular Blogger CSS hacks include:

• Setting up a “related post” section (by Jackbook)
• Remove the nofollow tag (by Jackbook)
• Adding/ removing a sidebar (by Jackbook)
• Removing the navbar (by Blogger Templates)
• A wiki of popular hacks with Blogger

There are less CSS “quick fix” with WordPress (except layout control, colors, fonts etc.) because we also use Php files, plugins etc. A bit different here.

Finally, don’t forget to customize your blog by making your own header (Blogger, WordPress and other plateforms), signing up with Gravatar (everybody!) and even adding a navbar (WordPress and Blogger, thanks to a hack).

The header is probably the first thing you should customize if you use a default template. It could be an image (like on my blog), or just text. Changing your blog header is quick, easy and does wonders. For blogger users, check out background image for blogger header, and for WordPress users, you can read designing headers. It is always best to make the header clickable, so that your readers can find their way back to the main page: make the header clickable on WordPress, and on Blogger.

Then, you might consider signing up with Gravatar. Globally recognized avatar are free and they follow you everywhere. A lot of blog are now set up to display gravatar by your comments, including WordPress 2.5. I do it on this blog too (if you don’t have an avatar, my blog will display a snapshot of your website instead). They are convenient and quite cool in my opinion!

Finally, I recently came across a couple of really cool tutorials to make a nice navbar (the navigation bar is right below the header on my blog… it links to static pages). For WordPress users who don’t have a default navbar (one that was included in the theme), you can use a very cool plugin: WordPress Menubar. I also found a great tutorial to make an advanced CSS Menu, with button graphic. I used this tutorial for my own blog.

Blogger user can use the Add A Menubar hack. I haven’t tested it (I had already moved to WordPress when I found it) but it looks pretty straightforward.

And here you are! By now, you should have the best-designed blog of the web!

It’s hard to cover everything and I didn’t want to use too much “nerd-speak” but I hope these basic information will help you tweak your blog. Don’t hesitate to send me the result: I love blog design!

Related posts:

1. Must Have On Your Blog (5/10)
2. Blogger Vs. WordPress (1/10)
3. The Art Of Promoting A Blog (4/10)

We’ve already covered a few subjects in this series, and today, I wanted to highlight how important it is to have a few basic informations on your blog.

Although it’s by no mean a rule, I’d suggest you implement the following:

• An “About Me” // “About this blog” section
• Archives
• Categories
• A tag system
• An feed subscription button/ link

These will likely enhance your readers’ experience with your blog and will help them understand your work, following it and keeping track of it.

An “About Me”/ “About this blog” section: Even though we all like to stay mysterious, I strongly encourage you to explain your readers who you are, why you blog, and what is your blog’s general theme. We’re not talking about putting a real name (user names or nicknames are perfectly fine!) or a full-length pictures! But it’s nice to get to know each other a bit, isn’t it? Blogger comes with a build in “about me” section, but it can be a bit short. You could create a new post, set the date way back in the past (so that it doesn’t show it the middle of your current posts) and link to it in your sidebar. WordPress users can just create a page, like my “About me” and “About This Blog”. Some people also compile memes they get tagged for (like the “things about me”) and link to it.

Archives: This is extremely important. You want people to read your current post, but don’t you want them to dig into the old ones as well? Most blogs today come with a build in archive system, but it will likely be a chronological archives (by months, by years etc.). This doesn’t make it easy for your readers, because most people will rather like to browse your archives by post titles. So, for WordPress users, I personally love the AWSOM Drop Down Archive plugin (you can see it in action on top of each of my post). I also like the Extended Live Archive plugin, to implement on a separate page (see my Archive Page). And for Blogger users, you can also implement a drop down menu system with a bit of HTML tweaking — I did it when I was on Blogger.

Categories: This is another important part of your blog. Just make sure you don’t have too many categories, which can be extremely confusing for readers. Don’t create one category per item. Instead, try to group your categories into a few subjects. I’d say you shouldn’t have more than 20 categories. For WordPress users, I have a few plugins which make categories fun. First, the Category Icon plugin, which I recently implemented on my blog. It will associate a unique icon of your choice with each of the category. Warning: this plugin can be a bit difficult to set up and tweak… I spent a few hours on it! You can also check out the Category Cloud Widget plugin or the Category Order plugin that allows you to reorganize your categories the way you like.

A tag system: a tag is a hyper linked keyword you can use to describe a specific post. For example, I tagged this post with the “how to blog” and “tutorials” tags. They help your readers find all the content available on your blog on a specific subject, much like categories. However, unlike categories, you can use as many tags as you wish… they are a bit like sub-categories. WordPress 2.5 comes with a build-in tag system, which I find extremely useful (if you haven’t upgraded yet, check out the Ultimate Tag Warrior). Tag help your blog navigation. You can display your tags in your sidebar as lists, in a cloud like me… To my knowledge, tags don’t exist on Blogger blogs.

An RSS subscription button: Most people will follow up your blog with a feed reader, so it’s very important for you to implement a subscription button in a prominent place on your blog. Not a design specialist? You can download beautiful sets of icons for free: try Feed Icons, or check out this great list of over 35 styles of feed icons. Once you picked an icon, link it to your blog feed, usually something like “http://www.yoursite.com/feed/”. There are many WordPress plugins for your feed. Let’s mention Feedburner Feedsmith (which detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to FeedBurner to better track subscribers), Better Feed (extensive feed customization), and Subscribe Me (encourages subscriptions).

So, do you have all that on your blog? Anything else you find is a must-have on blogs?

Related posts:

1. Ranking A Blog (8/10)
2. All About Blogging: 5 Blogs Turn-Offs or Why I Stopped Reading Your Blog
3. 20+ Tools For Your Blog (9/10)

So now you have chosen between the two main blogging system, now that you have nicely set up your blog, you’re still missing something. Oh yeah. Readers.

Indeed, what most people (including me when I first started) don’t realize, is no matter how great your blog is, chances are that if you don’t promote it, people won’t find it. There are apparently over 50–60 millions blogs worldwide and your blog could be lost in a dark corner of the internet forever if you don’t “hunt” for readers.

There are basically three steps that you can take to make sure you give your blog a chance to be seen:

• SEO your blog
• Get the word out
• Connect to the blogosphere

Do you remember the time when Google was just a convenient tool to find the latest movie reviews or restaurants nearby? Well, now that you are actually part of internet, chances are you will develop a hate/ love relationship with most search engines! Indeed, the first thing you need to do after you create a blog is have it referenced. And it’s not always as easy as it sounds. Some people even turned that into a science, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), where they compete for the best spot on search results and try to be seen everywhere. I’m not a SEO expert, but I can at least give you these few tips:

• Help Google find you: if you’re not on Google, you don’t exist. Google your blog’s name and check that right away! If you don’t see your website, you can submit it for inclusion in Google’s index. Do the same with other major search engines. Google also has a very interesting page with tools for webmasters worth checking out (Google Webmaster Central). And if you’re using WordPress, check out the Google Sitemap Generator plugin.
• Submit you blog to a few directories: blog directories will also help people find you. Watch out: there are thousands of directories because apparently, a while ago, people thought they would be easy money. Stay away from directories which don’t look professional, have a low page-rank (or none) and ask you to pay big bucks to be listed. You don’t need that! But bigger and free directory are worth it: BlogCatalog, Blogorama, Superblogdirectory etc.
• Take any help you can: I personally use the All In One SEO WordPress plugin, because as I mentioned before, SEO isn’t my strength. You can also use some free online tools to check your SEO, like the SEO Tool Score, or LinkVendor.
  

Once this is done, stop talking to the machines and talk to humans. You know, people, behind the computer. Yep. You now need to get the word out.

• Participate in forums: an easy way to get the word out is to participate in forum. Most of them will allow you to put a link to your blog as a signature, and if you ask interesting questions or help others, chances are that you will get noticed. The two bigger webmasters/ blog forums that I know are Digital Point and Bloggeries. Both are also very useful for their tips on blogging and SEO. Don’t forget there might be forums in your niche as well (expats, travel, stay at home moms etc.)
• Be part of a blog network: In my opinion, blog communities are a double-edged sword. On one hand, they are a great way to discover new blogs and networks in your niche. On the other hand, being truly active in a blog community is pretty time-consuming… and your blog should be your main focus! Anyway, some communities are fun and are worth being checked out: MyBlogLog (and their popular widget), BlogCatalog, SpicyPage… just to name a few.
  
• Visit and comment on blogs: That definitely should be your main focus. Blogging is a two way thing and people who don’t exchange ideas or communicate well don’t usually last long. Find blogs in your niche or on a subject you’re interested in and comment if you can. It won’t be long before the curious blog owner will visit you blog! Think of checking out blogrolls as well.
  

And finally, once you start getting visitors, it’s important for you to connect to the blogosphere, otherwise your readership won’t increase. So don’t forget to:

• Be active in the blogosphere: Although it’s impossible to participate every meme that you get tagged for (and you will, trust me!), doing one once in a while can’t hurt. Pick one that you are interested in (can never go wrong with the “things about me…”) and complete it, with some link back to the blogger who tagged you. Don’t forget to tag others as well! Photography hunt are another great way to connect blog. I personally participate in Graham’s monthly photo hunt and usually get a nice visitors boost to my blog. Plus, it’s fun!
• Get Stumbled Upon and Stumble/ Digg etc.: Stumble Upon is an awesome tool to browse websites, tag the ones you like and discover the best of the web. And if by chance your blog get Stumbled, you will likely experience a big traffic boost! It’s quite amazing, trust me. So while you can’t Stumble your own blog, don’t forget to Stumble the articles or posts that you really liked and chances are you will receive a nice Stumble once in a while too. Same thing with Digg that I haven’t personally tested.
• Host a contest or participate in one: Once great way to connect with other bloggers is to host a contest. I organized two contests so far (to win three free ad spots on my blog) and I experienced quite a boost in my traffic. You don’t have to give away expensive prices to have fun: ad spots, reviews, links etc. can be great rewards as well. Participating in a contest is usually rewarding as well, especially most contest hosts link to all participants.

So, I hope you are now “hunting” for readers! See you next week for another chapter in the “How To Blog” series.

Related posts:

1. Must Have On Your Blog (5/10)
2. Making Money With Your Blog (7/10)
3. Tweak Your Blog (6/10)

Do you have a blog? Yes? Good. Cause I’m a pretty curious woman (some would say it’s an euphemism…) and I love to browse blogs. Chances are that if you ever left a comment at my blog, ever sent me an email or just showed up here, I visited you. I have plenty of feed in my RSS Reader and I’m pretty quick to click on the magic “subscribe” button. But I’m human too — not all blogs attract me.

Basically, there are three things that are likely to catch my eye when browsing the web for blogs:

• Something original
• Something easy to read
• Someone friendly

Yes, I’m that picky.

But let’s be realistic: there are thousands of blogs out there and not everyone can stand out. First lesson is, you have to be a little bit original.

• An interesting layout like Encore Seraphine, a funny view on the world like Mattress Police or Johnada is all you need. Just give me something. I’m tired of seeing the same Blogger/ WordPress default template, barely customized. I’ll usually pass on these blogs. Granted, not everyone is into Photoshop and coding. But you will need a personal touch, whether it’s a customized header or a funny “about me”. And with hundreds of websites to help you tweak your blog, you don’t really have an excuse anymore.
• For some, keeping a minimalistic blog is a statement. Which works very well as long as they have something to say. Look at Kung Fu Chewy: this bad boy didn’t customized his blog much (although he has the minimum: a President Bush “days left in office” countdown — don’t laugh, I have a Mozilla extension on my browser for the same purpose!), but he writes well and always has funny stories. Basically, he has something to say and in this case, his layout doesn’t matter that much.

Lesson number two is equally simple: you have a written medium, please make it accessible.

• The font, for example. It seems somewhat fashionable to have a very dark background and white font. It does look good. Until you tried to read and focus on the post for more than in a minute, which is about the time it takes to become cross-eyed and see white spots everywhere. Granted, I don’t have the best eyesight but I shouldn’t be able to read your blog without going blind. Period.
• Think I’m tough? Okay. I made that very same mistake when I first started to blog. I used a white font on a dark blue background (the one I now use as the blog’s wallpaper). A few people complained and I decided to add a post background (light blue) with a dark font. Did wonders. Now I’m not saying this white font/ dark background never works, it does on some blog. I’m not talking to you personally. But generally speaking, try to think of your readers: who likes to focus like crazy when reading a post? Can you make you readers’ live easier? If the answer is yes, just do it. Likewise, mixing up font colors or font sizes in a post might look supercool, but it might also makes it really hard to read. In a word: be nice to your readers!
• Oh, since we’re at it, one last thing: mind your &?%$ widgets! If you make my Firefox crash, I probably won’t be back. Some blog take forever to load, thanks to a bunch of useless things in the sidebar. Seriously, how many widgets can you fit in one sidebar ??? Don’t add up videos, pictures, stream etc. Think of those who have a slower computer. Likewise, I don’t mind music on a blog. But I do mind be greeted by ACDC and not being able to stop it. Example of blogs which are artistic yet super friendly to read include Times Journal, Video Store Blues or The Rain In Spain.

And finally, the third lesson: be a friendly blogger. Sounds obvious, but some people behave in the blogosphere the same way they behave when there is only one slice the chocolate cake left — they fight, they are impolite, they only think of themselves.

• Indeed, blogging is a two way thing. You need readers in the first place, so be nice to them. What’s being nice? Acknowledging them when they comment, for example. You can either reply to their comments, visit their blog, drop a quick line… it only takes a minute. Once in a while, you can also “reward” blog you like by linking to them: in this post, I decided to illustrate my points with some good blogs from my RSS feed. I’m sure the owners won’t mind! You can also organize contest, have a weekly “link love” post, a review once in a while… This is about acknowledging you’re not the only one in the blogosphere, that you enjoy other people’s work as well. One example of a friendly blogger who is good at networking is RennyBA’s Terella… check him out, you’ll see. This guy sent me a troll all the way from Norway a few months ago when I won his contest!
• The key is to share and exchange. If you only goal is to make tons of money or be famous, you’ll fail, because you can’t really do that alone. You need readers, you need subscribers, you need people to click on your ads. Remember, the internet is a small world after all, so behave!
  

Meanwile, I’ll see you guys next week for another “How To Blog” post!

Related posts:

1. Blogger Vs. WordPress (1/10)
2. Must Have On Your Blog (5/10)
3. Making Money With Your Blog (7/10)

One of the reason I fell in love with WordPress was because of the thousands of plugins available to help me enhance my blog, customize it, tweak it or do basically anything I wanted.

For those who use other blogging platform… don’t click away! Some of these plugins were adpated for Blogger etc. And anyway, maybe it will decide you to switch to WordPress! (just teasing you…)

So, what’s a plugin?

A Plugin is a group of php functions that can extend the functionality present in WordPress. These functions may all be defined in one php file, or maybe spread among more than one file. (source: WordPress Codex)

Installing a plugin is very easy. You have two ways of doing that:

• Manually: download the plugin from its location (usually from the page of the plugin creator or from a plugin library). Save it on your desktop. It will very often be zipped, so you need to unzip it, still on your desktop. Then, you will need to use FTP to upload to the “wp-content/plugins” directory on your webserver. The plugin will then appears on your “plugins” list in the WordPress admin interface. Now, you need to activate it: click on “enable” and… voilà!
• With Oneclick: Oneclick is a plugin and a Firefox extension that allows you to install plugins with just… yeah, one click. Note that you must first install the plugin via regular FTP. Once this is down, you just need to “right click” on the download link of the plugin you want and about two seconds later, you will be redirect on the “plugins” page of your WordPress admin where, magic, the plugin will be listed. This is extremely cool!

Don’t forget that sometimes, plugins authors put their plugin files in different folders. For example, if you download the “mycoolplugin” and unzip it, you will see a file named “mycoolplugin”. But the actual plugin files could be in a subfile named “mycoolpluginactualphpfiles”. If you don’t see the plugin even though you followed all the uploading steps, double check that.

In my first few months as a WordPress user, I was a victim of the well-known “download’em all” syndrom — that’s how you end of with 50 plugins, half of them being broken or not in use. Took me a while to downsize my impressive plugin list and keep all the best, but I think I got it now. Here are my all-time favorite:

Akismet: this plugin is bundled with WordPress by default. It’s a powerful automatic spam killer, and it’s one of the best.

All In One SEO Pack: this plugin saved my life. As some of you know, I’m pretty SEO challenged and can’t be bothered to tweak my blog for it. This plugin does the job for me: pretty permalinks, keywords, description for search engines… SEO for dummies like me!

Commentluv: this plugin is a great way to say thanks to your reader, and if you have ever commented on my blog, you have most likely seen it in action. Commentluv check the feed of the comment author and scrape the last post they wrote and displays it under their comment. Smart, eh?

Counterize: this plugin is for the stats addicts… and aren’t we all! I tested a lot of stats plugins before I settled for that one and I found it very accurate and easy to read.

Extended Live Archives: archives are a very important aspect of a blog. When new readers visit, they like to check old posts as well and we have to make their life easy. I hate archives by months or by year because readers don’t really know where to start — I like when archives show at least old posts’ titles. ELA saved my life: it shows archives by date, by category and also displays the posts’ title. You can see it in action on this blog: archives.

FlickrRSS: who doesn’t have pictures to show? FlickrRSS displays your pictures way in a nice stylish way… and you can customize the CSS. You can see the plugin in action on this blog, check out the sidebar bottom.

Fluency Admin: for those who switched to WordPress 2.5 but aren’t big fan of the new admin interface, Fluency Admin is your solution. This is the most practical and stylish admin I have seen in a while… Because it’s very new, there are still a few bugs (mostly some unsupported widgets like Simple Tag) but there’s a work around.

Leprakhauns Word Count: a simple plugin that adds a word count to your “write post” page. It works without reloading the page.

Maintenance Mode: this plugin adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Meanwhile, as an admin, you have full access and can play with your blog CSS and php.

One Click: the famous plugin I was mentioning earlier… to try it is to adopt it. Who likes to FTP files anyway??

Popularity Contest: this plugin will help determinate which ones of your posts are the most popular (using permalinks view, number of comments, numbers of ping backs etc.). You can keep the data for yourself or display it. The “most wanted” section you see in my sidebar is made with this plugin.

Similar Posts: this plugin will display a list of posts related or similar to the current post. You can parameter the plugin. I use this one on my blog, see it in action below each post!

Wassup: another one for stats addict… Wassup display all kind of visitor stats (real time) in a dedicated page in the admin interface. Very interesting!

Database Backup: you know it, always back up your blog regularly… this plugin does a great job of backing up your data and you can even schedule regular back-ups.

So, where to find other great plugins like these ones? The official WordPress Plugins Directory is a good start. I also like the WordPress Plugin Database. Look also for list of “must have” plugins in your favorite blogs (like mine!). So far, one of the most exhaustive I found was at Mashable, who teaches you to be a WordPress God with this amazing list of 300+ Tools For Running WordPress. I must admit I haven’t tested them all… And finally, don’t forget to be curious about the blogs you read regularly: which kind of plugins do they have? How do they display…? What’s the cool… I see here? Don’t hesitate to contact the blog administrator who will usually be happy to tell you how he/ she did it!

See you next week for part III of the How To Blog series!

Related posts:

1. All About Blogging: 8 Neat WordPress Plugins
2. Must Have On Your Blog (5/10)
3. Blogger Vs. WordPress (1/10)

To start this series, I’d like to answer a much asked question: what is the difference between Blogger/ Blogspot and self-hosted WordPress?

Remember, I was on Blogger for a year… before I moved to WordPress. I received a lot of emails and comments asking me which one is best and what was the difference between the two.

Indeed, it’s sometimes hard to make a decision, whether you are new to blogging or are looking for the best platform. So here is my comparison chart:

Please note that I’m comparing Blogger with self-hosted WordPress, not WordPress.com, which is a free platform similar to Blogger. I’m also aware they are many great blogging platform… I just choose the two that seem to be the most popular, and that I happen to know.

Finally, I’m really happy I switched to self-hosted WordPress. I think Blogger is great and it’s very user-friendly for beginners, but I found it limited after a while: not enough hacks, no control over my comment pages (which are all designed the same and don’t really fit a tweaked theme), a sponsored domain name… I find my WP blog much more personal.

Final word: if you’re an occasional blogger, don’t bother with WordPress which can be time consuming, especially at first. If you want to take your blogging further or if you want to be more self-reliant, move to WordPress.

Related posts:

1. All About Blogging: 8 Neat WordPress Plugins
2. The Best Plugins (2/10)
3. Must Have On Your Blog (5/10)