Everyone seems to have a blog these days, so you’ve got to make yours stand out and be better. I’m not talking about drastically changing what you have necessarily; sometimes small tweaks are all it takes to make your blog better.

Here are a few simple things to think about:

1. Turn off comment registration

Are you asking people to sign-up to comment? If so, then you’re loosing out on comments. Putting a hurdle in the conversation between you and your readers may be enough for them to tune out.

2. Update subscribe terminology

How are you trying to attract subscribers? Is it just with an orange feed button? Maybe your link says ‘RSS’ or ‘Subscribe.’ It’d be a good idea to look at it from a non-technical perspective and update it to be more meaningful. Something like ‘Subscribe to new posts’ or ‘Subscribe to Updates.’ Not everyone knows what RSS is so we may need to be more specific.

3. Add email subscription options

I’m pretty sure that there are tons of people out there that don’t get RSS, but they do get email. So making sure that they understand that they can get updates via email may increase subscribers faster than just giving out the feed.

4. Update ‘no comments’ to ‘comments’

Why does everyone advertise that they have no comments on their posts? Getting comments is hard, but we don’t need to let everyone know that there aren’t any either. Simply changing the terminology from ‘no comments’ to ‘comments’ takes the negative out of the equation and now it’s just a link to the comments form.

5. Unhide sharing links

I like to share good posts, and so do many others, so you should make it easy. Services like ShareThis or AddThis have a tendency to hide the social buttons until someone rolls over them. I say bring them out, at least for Twitter & Facebook, so people can see them and click them without having to search for them.

6. Create a translation button

Not everyone speaks English so why not add a translate button for other languages? It’s quick and easy and can open up your content to a whole new world of people.

7. Cleanup the ads

I get ads, I really do. Blog owners want to make money off their ads and pay for their hosting or iPads. But ads can distract from the content if they are placed front and center. Think about integrating ads in a way that doesn’t kill usability.

8. Organize sidebar

How many widgets are in your sidebar? Are there ads and counters and social plugins and everything else? The sidebar should not be your junk drawer, clean it out and simplify.

9. Check your theme

How does your theme look? Is it a sad knock-off of the default WordPress theme? Is it 5 years old and showing its age? The WordPress theme directory has thousands of themes that can give a quick facelift. Better yet, create your own and be original.

10. Write better content

Blogs are all about content. It’s about what you write and how valuable it is to your target audience. If you’ve been writing safe, mediocre posts, then now’s the time to step it up. A better blog post may take more time to write, but it’s worth it.

Your blog is your virtual home and it’s a good idea to keep it up and make it user-friendly. Not only will your visitors appreciate it, but chances are, so will search engines. And, in the end, that’ll make you happier too.

Want more blog traffic? Want more eyeballs in front of your content? Then why not translate it into other languages to appeal to a wider audience?

We often forget that no every speaks, or reads, English. The US, Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland and Guyana are the only areas that speak English as the main language. There is a handful of other countries that speak English, but not as their primary language. Then there is everyone else.¹ There are billions of people who don’t read English, yet few blogs offer translation options on their site.

To easily translate your blog from one language to anther you can add a Google Translate menu to your site and let Google handle the translations on the fly. They may not be perfect, but they are better than having none.

I like the Google Translate option as it’s easy to install and doesn’t cause any duplicate content issues. Plus it will work on any blog or website.

Another option is the Global Translator WordPress plugin. This one adds flags into your sidebar and creates sub-directories for all the translated content. All these sub-directories are then indexable creating a lot of additional pages on your site. They are duplicate content, yet in different languages, so I guess it’s up to the search engines to figure out how to handle that.

No matter how you do it, offering up your content in different languages opens up your site to a larger audience.

1. Source

It happens to all of us. We sit in front of our computers, stare at the screen and have no idea what to write about. It should be so easy, yet nothing comes to mind. Chances are, we’re thinking to hard.

If you do have bloggers block, here are 10 topics to help you come up with an idea to blog about.

Frequently Asked Questions – FAQs

Every business gets asked the same questions over and over again. These could come from prospects or clients and are great topics for blog posts. Chances are, if they are a FAQ, they’re also searched on a lot too.

New Products and Services

What’s new with your company? What are you offering now that you didn’t previously? Maybe its brand new or maybe it’s version 2 of an existing product. Don’t be afraid to tell the world when you have something new to offer them.

Feature Spotlight

I’d be willing to bet that most people don’t know how to use half the features of the products they use every day. That’s why putting the spotlight on different features is such a good idea. People love to get more out of what they are already using.

Industry News

What’s happening in your industry? Are their new laws that will affect your company? How about a merger or another big company folding? What’s changing and how could that impact your customers?

Interview Someone

Interviews can be pretty easy. Come up with a list of questions and then interview someone. You could do it in person, on the phone or even via email. You could interview anyone from the marketing department to shipping and even your boss. Everyone’s point of view is different and it’s fun to see different sides of a company.

Review Something

Everyone is searching the internet to find out if a particular product or piece of software is worth the money. If you can, look at what your company uses and write a review. It’ll work best if it’s something unique to your industry, but it could be for anything that helps keep your business running.

Create a Top 10 list.

Lists are a great way to make easy to scan and quick to consume posts. You could write about 10 Ways To…, 7 Tips for.., 14 of the Best…, 6 Mistakes. Pretty much anything you want. Just make sure your list is interesting and provides value to you readers.

Case Study or Success Story

Every company has them. A success story that they want to tell the world. So do it. Write out the situation, the actions taken and the results. Even if you already have a formal case study, summarize it in a blog post and then link to the full case study. Customers like to know that you’ve had success and it can really help sell your services.

Solutions/How Tos

Nothings perfect, and people spend hours trying to troubleshoot products and services every day. Wouldn’t it be great if you could offer up the solution? You’d be their hero! It could be solutions for your own products or maybe someone else’s. Either way, people like solutions and providing them can help build confidence in your brand.

Company News

What’s happening with your company? Are you growing? Did you promote someone? No blogs want to be completely self-centered, but no one likes a blog that doesn’t seem personal either. Don’t be afraid to talk about what’s happening as it helps readers feel more connected to the company.

There you go. 10 topics that will hopefully spur ideas on what you can write on your blog. So what are you waiting for? Go create.

When you think about blogging don’t think about quantity of blog posts, think about quality. The quality of content is one of the biggest factors leading to a successful blog because people like original, thought-provoking content.

If you output a lot of mediocre posts, visitors or search engines won’t see value. The blog will get less traffic, fewer comments, lower rankings, and visitors will be far less likely to share it.

If you take some time and create engaging content, with unique and original thoughts, the value of that content will be much greater. Those posts will get more attention from search engines, visitors will get more value, and the likelihood of those posts being shared on the social web increase considerably.

One thing to keep in mind is that quantity, or post frequency, doesn’t appear on this chart. The more often you post, the more hooks in the water you have; however quantity is often misinterpreted. People tend to think that the posting more often is so important that quality gets sacrificed when quantity comes into play. Yes, it would be nice to have a large number of quality posts, but that may take time to accomplish; and that’s OK.

Google’s Matt Cutts has even stated that Google doesn’t care about post frequency on a blog. To them, it’s all about quality of content.

The thing to remember here is that quantity is nothing without quality. You can have one post every day that is a link summary, or a generic post, and the blog still won’t be perceived as having much value to visitors or search engines. It will more than likely miss all of the KPIs put into place and the blog will feel like more of a burden.

Now it’s true that not everyone can come up with great content every day to support the kind of blog they want, but don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Even if you can only do one post a week, make it count.

Give people a reason to read your content and, in turn, they’ll give you a comment, share your post on social sites, or even link to it. People, and search engines, like originality and will often reward it.

Every company want to blog these days as they feel that it’s a good way to increase brand visibility, search engine traffic, and gain more sales; which it can if done it right.

Here are 10 tips you should keep in mind when working with a blog.

Don’t Over Think Everything

A blog should not be so complex that you can’t come up with posts or move forward. Stop, relax, and simplify. Post like you’re talking to your customers and you should be fine.

Know Your Target Audience

Are you posting for new customers, existing customers, industry professionals, or a little bit of everyone?

If posting for new customers, or people who don’t know your industry, be careful not to use acronyms or industry terminology without first explaining them.

If posting for existing customers, then don’t try to sell them your product when they already have it.

Posting to everyone isn’t a bad idea, but your posts should be broken out so that some are for newbies, while others are more technical. Mix it up and don’t try to target two different types of people with one kind of post.

Write Better Content

At last count, by Technorati, there were over 112.8 million blogs out there and if you don’t have any personality or passion, you’ll likely fade into the crowd.

What drives you? What makes you love what you do? What makes your blog stand out?

Make content that matters, not just content for contents sake.

Don’t Be a Perfectionist

Your website will never be perfect and neither will your blog. There are always changes that are going to be made but that shouldn’t stop you from getting your content out there.

Start with a soft launch, were you get your blog up on the web, but don’t promote it yet. That will give search engines a chance to index it and authors some time to get familiar with what they are doing. Then when it’s ready, promote it.

You’ll get more visitors and leads by having it public then it will ever get on the development site, even if it’s live in soft launch mode.

Think About Customers First, Search Engines Second

Some think that a blog is great for SEO, when in reality a blog is great for publishing content. In turn, search engines can easily pick up that new content and can then refer traffic. Plus, if your content is great, it’ll attract links and be promoted on its own.

However, if mediocre content is created just for search engines, you won’t get the results you want.

Create great content for your customers first, and keep SEO second.

Organize Content, But Don’t Over Do It

How easy would it be to read a newspaper if it wasn’t broken out into sections? How easy is it to find content on a blog when it’s not organized?

Categories are an easy way to keep like content together and should be used to do so. However, putting the same post in 20 categories can make it less organized.

Pick 1-5 categories and go from there. There is a fine balance between 0 and to many.

Keep Comments On

Comments are a great way to get feedback and interact with customers. Turning them off is a way of saying, “look at me, listen to me, but don’t talk to me.”

If you really want to connect with people, you have to let them speak and you have to respond to them when they do.

Match the Design To Your Brand

A company blog is an extension of the company brand and it should appear that way. Update the colors, update the design and make it look like a destination.

Simply switching out the logo or just making a few color edits makes it look like no one really cares.

Get a designer and make the blog a destination that compliments the brand.

Post

If all else fails, post. Post industry news, answer customer questions, talk about what you do and why. Even if you don’t know your target audience yet, even if you feel as you don’t know what you’re doing, post.

You’ve got to keep moving forward or you run the risk of killing off the blog.

Relax

Take a deep breath, relax, and remember that blogging isn’t that hard. It’s just writing something for your customers to read.

Every day we write emails, talk to customers on the phone, and interact in our industry; and blogging is no different. It’s just another way of getting information out to help educate and inform others.

So what are you waiting for, start blogging.

If you have questions, please post them below and maybe I’ll choose one of yours for a future post.

Do you like cupcakes? Who doesn’t? But what is it about a cupcake that makes you love it? And how do cupcakes relate to blogs?

Presentation

Lets start with the presentation. Most cupcakes catch your eye because of how they look. Maybe it’s the coloring of frosting or the overall design. This is the first impression and it’s important that the cupcake speaks to the right audience.

Now when you have a blog, the same holds true. When someone visits a blog, the first reaction is on the look and feel, the colors, the layout. Is it visually appealing?

Sure, cupcakes and blogs are about more than just the look and feel, but sometimes people can’t get past an ugly one.

Satisfaction

Maybe it’s how you feel once you’ve consumed one. Eat one good cupcake and you’re bound to have another. Eat a great cupcake and chances are you’ll tell a friend about it.

Reading a blog post should leave the visitor satisfied and happy. Readers should want to share it, bookmark it and come back.

No one is ever going to tell their friends about a generic boring cupcake, so why would they share a generic blog post?

Portion

And what about the size of that cupcake? Is it bite sized where you can consume the whole thing in seconds? Is it so big that you’re overwhelmed just looking at it. Or is it a good size that you’ll feel good after eating it and not sick from sugar overload?

Blog posts are the same way. It’s easy to consume a lot of smaller posts, but they’re not always as satisfying. A long post, with tons of detail, can be so overwhelming that readers don’t even want to start reading it. But then there is that happy middle where you give not to little, but not too much, that makes it the perfect size for your readers.

You see, blogs are like cupcakes. Visitors will judge them on the look, how satisfied they are after consuming it, and on the portion size.

Now would be a good time to go look at your blog and figure out if you’ve got a tasty cupcake that people will love, or if you’ve got to go back to the kitchen and re-work the ingredients.

TopRank’s recent Blogging and SEO survey of in-house, agency and independent marketing, advertising and PR professionals revealed that 95% of respondents incorporate blogs as part of their online marketing mix. Nearly 88% have successfully increased measurable SEO objectives as a direct result of blogging.

Thousands of new blogs are started by companies and individuals each day. Yet getting a blog set-up, optimized, and launched are just the first steps. No one will know you have a blog to read, subscribe or link to unless you take an important next step: promotion. There are plenty of places you can promote and market a new blog:

• Add A Link – If it’s a company blog, or if it’s attached to another site, add a link to the blog from the main navigation on the parent website.
• Create A Badge – On the main website, add a badge to the homepage, or sidebar, that promotes the blog. Images are a good way to catch a visitor’s attention.
• Email – Add a link to the blog in your email signature.
• Newsletter – Announce the blog in the company newsletter.
• Network – Announce the blog to your Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Linked in connections and any other social networks that you are apart of.
• Press Release – If you feel that the blog is important enough to support a press release, put one out.
• Submit – Submit the blog to blog & feed directories.
• Share – Share your blog with co-workers, friends and others in your network. You never know when they might promote it for you.
• Link – One way to get other bloggers to notice you is to link to them. Summarize someone else’s long blog post, expand upon someones shorter post, or just write your thoughts on a topic that someone else wrote about and link back to the original post.
• Give Away – If it’s a product blog, run a promotion on the blog giving away one of your products. Sometimes the value that can come out of giving something away can be more beneficial than all the items above.
• Guest Post – If there are other blogs in your industry, ask around and see if they’d allow you to guest post for them. In return, you’d get a link back to your blog in your profile, or post, on their site.
• Ask – Tap into the social networks within the industry you’re trying to reach and ask them what they’re interested in. Here’s an example of a post that did just that on Twitter for this blog. Show interest in the interest of your audience and they’ll pay more attention and share your content.

Probably the best promotion tactic is to create good content, post often and share. The more content a blog has, the greater the footprint it has on the web in terms of pages to appear in search results and to link to from other blogs/web sites. Work on creating a posting schedule and according to resources and reader interest, try to get one to five posts out a week.

“Build it and they will come” doesn’t work with web sites and it certainly doesn’t work with blogs. Promote relevant and useful content to create awareness and the quality of your information will propel your brand to a much larger audience.

A blog should be considered the central hub of your social networking universe. Everything you do should drive traffic back to your blog, or website, as a way of combining all your efforts to give your brand maximum exposure.

Once thing you can do to help populate your social networks would be to update your status with your blog posts when new content is published.

By no means is auto-populating a service like Twitter going to get good results on its own, but as one piece of a social networking strategy, it can help a network grow.

Here are just a few of the many ways you can automatically syndicate a blog post to social networks.

TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed is quite possibly the best way to syndicate content. TwitterFeed can update Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm, HelloTXT and Laconica. It also integrates URL shortening services, hash tags and keyword filters.

Ping.fm and HelloTXT

By default, Ping.fm and HelloTXT need someone to manually send out updates, but when integrated with TwitterFeed, you can auto post blog posts across the social web. Ping.fm and HelloTXT include nearly all social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, Tumblr, Posterous, Flickr, Yammer and many more.

FeedBurner

If you’ve already got FeedBurner setup, you can add your Twitter information and have it auto update your Twitter stream every time FeedBurner finds a new story.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a web based social networking aggregator. You can add in one, or more, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, Facebook pages, WordPress.com sites and even Ping.fm accounts and manage them all in one location. You can then manually update multiple accounts at once, or add your feed, select your accounts, and have it auto-populate your social networks.

RSS Graffiti

RSS Graffiti is the easiest way to update your Facebook, and Facebook Page, status with your latest blog posts. It takes the post title, a short snippet, and an image from the post and updates your status.

All the services noted above are free and work with any site that has an RSS feed.

Please keep in mind that automating a social networking account doesn’t provide quality to the people you are connected to. However, automated updates from your blog, mixed in with normal conversation and networking is a good way to help drive traffic back to your blog.

One of the biggest features that Blogger.com had over other free blogging sites is the ability to publish files to a website via FTP. This allowed site owners to have a blog in a directory on their site without having to install and maintain software on their web server.

Unfortunately, on March 26th, Blogger.com is shutting down their FTP functionality.

Blogger claims that only .5% of their users use this feature and that it’s a big strain on their engineering staff to keep it working like it should. So they are shutting it down.

So now what? Are you a part of that .5%?

Believe it or not, this is a blessing in disguise. If you were using the FTP functionality, then you probably are serous about blogging. And if you are, then it’s time to take the next step and move away from Blogger.com.

The best advice is to setup WordPress on your site and import all your blogger posts. Setting-up, importing, and learning new software may take some additional time, but the in the long run, you’ll be happy you did. Not only will you have more features and more control over your blog, but it’ll be better for your users and perform better in search engines.

Of course, Blogger.com is suggesting that you either use their domain mapping feature, or set-up a blogspot.com address, to keep your blog hosted with Blogger. However, taking the easy way out now may be something you regret in time.

Blogger.com is nice for new bloggers and those that aren’t technical enough to get a blog setup, but the freedom and advantages that come from hosting and managing your own WordPress blog is well worth the time and effort it takes to move.

If you need help moving your blog away from Blogger.com to a self-hosted WordPress blog, TopRank Online Marketing can help you out. Just drop us a line or give us a call and we’d be more than happy to discuss options with you.

If MacGyver has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t need big expensive tools to get the job done. The same goes for blogging.

There are plenty of free blogging tools and resources to do everything from creating SEO friendly sites to keyword research and analytics. Why spend the money on a tool when you could use that money on internet marketing services or to grow your company?

Here are 13 free blogging tools and resources that MacGyver would be proud of.

WordPress

MacGyver would surly use the most popular, customizable, powerful, and completely free, blogging software on the internet. WordPress offers a large number of feature and hundreds of plugins that will make any blog successful. From newbies to web design professionals, WordPress is a great choice for ease of use, search engine optimization and price.

Google Analytics

MacGyver’s got to keep tabs on his site and know where his traffic is coming from.  For this, Google Analytics is a no brainer. No need to spend hundreds on an analytics package, Google Analytics as all the features you need at a price that can’t be beat.

Firefox

Security issues? Not on MacGyver time. He needs a web browser that is not only safe, but also a web browser that turns into a blogging & SEO machine. Especially with extensions such as:

• SeoQuake – Keep tabs on page rank, inbound links, number of indexed pages and more.
• ScribeFire – A blogging client that allows you to write posts without leaving the page you are browsing.
• Pinger – Because a broken link is embarrassing, this tool checks to ensure all the links on a page are valid.
• yExplore – Quick access to many other SEO tools and page information.
• SEO for Firefox – Another SEO tool to get all sorts of ranking and linking information.

Adobe Browser Lab

Even though MacGyver doesn’t like IE6, he still has to make sure his site looks good in all browsers. Adobe Browserlab is a free tool for checking designs across multiple browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Mac, Windows) to ensure it looks awesome and is usable.

Feed Reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines

For spying on the competition there is no easier tool that a feed reader. You’ll want to subscribe to your competitions blog to ensure that you know what they are up to. It’s also good on keeping up with industry news. You never know when Duct Tape might come out with new features.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

For investigating new and interesting keywords that MacGyver should be optimizing his blog for, Google AdWords Keywords Tool is a good place to start. No expensive monthly subscription here, all you need is a Google Account. Looking for other keyword research tools?

Social Networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Who wouldn’t want to be friends with MacGyver? Social networks helps him connect with his allies and build a following who will help him promote his posts or who might come to his aid when he needs some assistance. It takes time to build them out, but building good connections will pay off in the long run.

Social News & Bookmarking such as Digg, Delicious & StumbleUpon.

Yet another avenue to promote good content and attract more visitors. It’s not always easy to become popular on social news sites, but with interesting content and patients, they could become one of the largest traffic drivers.

Blog Directories

You never know who might be using blog directories these days. Getting a free listing is one more area to gain awareness and expand the reach of a blog. Sure, search engines are all the rage, but an additional free link in a decent directory is beneficial.

Image Sharing such as Flickr and PhotoBucket

I’m sure MacGyver would have some great photos so photo sharing sites like Flickr would be a good spot to put them and reap the benefits of their built in community. Thousands of people do photo searches ever day and showing up in those results may be another way to drive people back to your blog.

FeedBurner

Tracking visitors in analytics is one thing, but not everyone visits the site; some only read the feed. That’s why we’d need to use FeedBurner to track those that subscribe to the blog’s feed. FeedBurner also has the ability to setup feed to email subscriptions as well for those that haven’t grasped feeds yet.

Google Webmaster Central

To ensure that no hackers put spyware on MacGyver’s site, and to ensure that it’s being properly crawled by the Google, Google Webmaster tools is a great resource. The amount of information that Google gives back can be used to improve the site for users and search engines. Yahoo and Bing also have webmaster tools, however they don’t give as much information at this time.

Creative Commons Search

Sometimes blog posts just need an image to polish them up.  Creative Commons Search is great for finding images and content that a blogger may want to utilize to make their posts more appealing. Creative commons search has websites, images, audio, and video that can be re-purposed for free.

So you see, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on tools and resources to make your blog successful. Yes, you’ll have to learn the tools and take the time to analyze the information, but there are a number of free tools out there that can get the job done.

With literally hundreds of millions of blogs in the vast blogosphere, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to develop a unique brand for your blog by writing posts that are unique, creative and entertaining. The next time you find yourself in a rut, try these 7 blog copywriting ideas for creating fresh and interesting content:

1. Start With the Headline

It might seem logical to write the body of the post first. After all, length-wise, it’s the most significant piece of the puzzle. Instead, try coming up with the most creative, most intriguing headline possible. Then design a post around that inspirational headline. Similarly, you could choose an image or create a call to action first. Whatever your typical process, turn it around to inspire some fresh thinking.

2. Tell Your Story With a Graphic

Instead of using words to convey a concept that’s perhaps been covered by other bloggers — or even your own blog — rely on a custom illustration to tell the story. This tactic can have some SEO benefits, as well. A creative, useful graphic or illustration can have the potential to go viral, with readers linking to it and sharing it.

3. Include a Resource Guide

As a blogger, you’re not always tasked with coming up with lengthy, in-depth original posts. Include a few resource-type posts in the mix, as well. For example, create a post listing the top 25 upcoming events for your industry, the 50 best industry blogs, or 100 useful books and publications. Not only are these posts easy to write when you’re finding it difficult to come up with a new concept, they’re also likely to be linked to.

4. Insert Your Own Opinion

Instead of simply reporting on the news or a recent development, incorporate your own thoughts on the subject. If a piece of legislation passes that affects your industry, write about your individual stance on the issue at hand. Instead of merely including an announcement on a major industry merger, offer your opinion of what you have done differently and what you think was handled well.

5. Rely on Someone Else’s Story

As a blogger, it’s not always necessary to rely on your own ideas for new posts. Contact an influential or interesting figure in your industry, and base a post around him or her. That could take the form of a guest-written post, a Q&A or a case study. Readers are likely to appreciate the fresh perspective.

6. Turn an Idea Upside Down

In lieu of the traditional tips or checklist post, create the reverse. For example, instead of writing “The 10 Steps to Start Saving,” try “The 10 Worst Ways to Send Your Credit Into Disrepair.” When it all boils down, both posts offer similar information — they’re simply positioned differently.

7. Think Outside the Box

Try this fun trick to come up with creative blog copy: Write down 20 words or phrases on separate pieces of paper. Get creative — think “pink elephant,” “wild flamingos” or “ace up your sleeve.” Next, place the pieces of paper in a container. The next time you write a blog post, randomly select a piece, and try to include that word or phrase in your post. In the end, the phrase may not work and can be eliminated. But at the very least, it’s an effective way to start thinking outside the box.

Guest posters are a good idea for all blogs. Different people have different ideas, different writing styles, and different ways to connect to visitors.

Not only is it a good idea for your readers, it’s a good idea for your blog.

The more authors a blog has, the more content that will get generated, the more active the blog will appear and, when that happens, search engines can give more rankings and traffic. All of this leading to more sales, revenue, or whatever the blogs KPI is.

More bloggers help out a blog in more ways than one and growing a blog with multiple authors, or guest posters, is a win-win situation.

And with that, BloggerDesign is happy to have Michelle Bowles, a copywriter at TopRank Marketing, publishing her first post here tomorrow! Check back to see what tips she has for bloggers.

The nice thing about the iPhone WordPress is that there is a plug-in for just about everything.

Lets say you want to create a fancy image gallery to showcase your photography. With NextGEN Gallery you can add as many images as you want and have the beautifully displayed in blog posts or on a gallery page.

Image Gallery with NextGEN Gallery

Want to poll your audience? With WP-Polls you can create as many questions and get as many answers as you want.

Polls with WP-Polls

Maybe you want to you want to add Google Analytics to all pages of your blog AND see your stats on your WordPress dashboard. Google Analyticator can do that.

Google Analytics via Google Analyticator

Lets say you want to create a contact form. With cforms you can create simple, or complex, forms all by dragging and dropping form elements.

Forms with cforms

Need to find out how to easily embed a YouTube video in your post? Viper’s Video Quicktags lets you embed YouTube, DailyMotion, Viemo, Flickr, MySpace and more.

YouTube Videos with Viper's Video Quicktags

Thinking about creating an XML sitmeap for search engines? Google XML Sitemaps has you covered. It’ll automatically generate one and tell the search engines.

Google XML Sitemaps

Lets say you want to make your blog iPhone, Android, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm friendly. Well the WPtouch iPhone Theme does just that. Install the plug-in, activate it, and you are good to go. No additional coding necessary.

Mobile Theme with WPtouch iPhone Theme

Want to turn your blog into an e-commerce store? WP e-Commerce has you covered with all the store options you need to start selling anything.

Create a Store With WP e-Commerce

You can also translate your content into 41 different languages with Global Translator.

Language Translations with Global Translator

Worried about loosing your blog posts or images? WP-DB-Backup and WordPress Backup can back everything up daily and email you a copy.

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There’s a plug-in to do just about anything, only in WordPress.

So, what are your favorite plug-ins? Or what functionality do you need?

As blogs grow, and new content gets created, old blog posts can quickly get lost in the archives. As much as bloggers try to keep everything organized, it’s hard to ensure that all posts get the exposure they deserve. However, there are ways to help ensure that older posts get additional exposure.

1. Related Posts

On individual post pages, add links to other related posts. This shows visitors that there is more content on your blog that might be of interest to the reader. I’d suggest showing 5 posts as it gives a little variety without giving to many options.

Tip: Try out the Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in to integrate related posts into a WordPress blog.

2. Top or Popular Posts

In the sidebar, create a section for the blogs most popular posts. Again, pulling in 5 posts from the entire history of the blog and showcase what users feel are the best posts on your blog.

Tip: Read How To Find Your Most Popular Posts for plug-ins and ideas for obtaining posts.

3. Recent Comments

Having a list of the 5 most recent comments, with links back to those posts, can highlight which posts are getting the most chatter. These may be newer posts, or they may be older ones, either way, we are drawing more attention to additional posts and possibly gain more comments.

Tip: Use the built in WordPress widget or get a recent comments plug-in to enable this functionality.

4. Random Post

You can add a random link to the blog navigation that when it’s clicked on, WordPress will choose a post at random to show. This works great for blogs with a lot of good information that doesn’t necessarily get outdated over time. Then again, sometimes it’s just fun to go back in time and see how things have evolved.

Tip: The Random Redirect plug-in will help in creating a random link on your blog.

5. Social Icons

Having social icons on each blog post helps encourage readers to promote those posts for you. As an example, if someone comes to your site from a search engine, lands on a post from 5 months ago, and likes it, we want to encourage them to Tweet it, bookmark it, or use one of the many social networks to drive more traffic to the post.

Tip: Sociable is a nice plug-in for creating a list of social bookmarking icon links at the end of each post. The Social Bookmark Generator works well for creating a list of links or a drop down menu.

6. Internal Linking

Internal linking is an easy way for a blog owner to control which older posts get additional exposure. When writing a post, cite what has been said in the past with links in the content. Readers may find that the supporting posts are evidence that you’re an authority figure on the topic too.

Tip: No plug-in required, just link to other posts in the content.

Most blogs can benefit from using one, or more, of the items above to help showcase posts that may have fallen into the abyss of the archives. Bloggers write a lot of good content and anything that we can do to promote additional posts will benefit not only the blog, but the readers as well.

What other ideas do you have to promote older posts? Share them in the comments below.

There are thousands of blog posts that get published every day and your posts are competing with them. Not only is good content needed, but so is a good image. Imagery can draw users attention to the content and give your post an additional boost.

Screenshots, logos, people, and product images are all good easy ways to incorporate imagery into a blog post. Almost anything is better than a big block of text.

When considering what type of image to add, think of what’s visually appealing. It may not always be a product shot, or a picture of a smiling person, quite possibly an image of the sky or an animal can convey the feeling you are trying to get across in your post much easier.

As an example, how do you feel just by looking at the images below?

Cat

Storm

Abstract Lines

Flower

Leaves

Each image should give a different feeling. When added to the post, the images can set the tone before someone reads anything more than the headline.

So where can you find imagery for your posts? Head over to Creative Commons search engine and they’ll show you images from Google and Flickr; which should be free to use. Stock photo sites, like iStockPhoto, are also great places to find imagery that can be used on your blog. Granted it’ll cost, but not usually more than a few dollars an image.

Imagery is very powerful. If you look at a magazine or a newspaper, the first thing you’ll probably notice are the images. Those images set the tone for the article and draw readers in. This is also true blog posts. Not only can imagery help catch more eyeballs, but it can convey an additional emotional aspect to your writing.

Bonus: Learn more about Creative Commons Licenses and Online Marketing at the Online Marketing Blog.

There are a lot of people that will tell you that you need a blog because it’ll perform better in search engines and gain more traffic. This is not completely false, but it’s not exactly true either.

Blogs tend to perform better because of the abundance of content. Blogs empower users to create content in a way that is easy and fun. By doing so, users are creating content on a daily, or weekly, basis.

More content means more traffic and links. This is more for search engines to index, more for users to link to, and more to share with their friends and co-workers.

More visitors can then lead to more sales and conversions. The more eyeballs that are in front of your content, the better the opportunity to turn them into your customer.

The same could be done on a website, but that doesn’t happen. People view blogs as something different than a website. This is probably because most website were built back in the day when you pushed a page live and then had to add a link in the navigation and it was all very technical. With blogs, those technical items get removed as blogs automatically do all the work of updating navigation, categories, feeds, and even pinging the search engines of new content.

Search engines like content, and they like fresh content. Blogs make this easy by giving the users the tools to create content easily. This in turn makes search engines happy and bring more visitors to your site. So, in a way, blogs do perform better in search, but it’s because users are posting more often and interacting with them more than traditional websites.

What do you feel are advantages to having a blog as compared to a traditional website?

When thinking about a blog, one big thing that a lot of companies are concerned with is control. They are worried about what may get posted on their blog, and are concerned with people saying negative things about them in their comments. Companies get scared that it’s going to be mass chaos.  The good news is content can be easily controlled by properly setting up user rolls and comment moderation.

When a WordPress blog is stet up properly, some users can be free to create content, but not able to push it live. Other users can be given the power to publish, but only after they approve the post.  When it comes to comments, turning on the moderation feature will ensure that no comment makes it on the site without internal approval.  This allows a company to weed out comments that are not appropriate, or formulate responses to negative comments so the comment and company response both go live at the same time.

So how do you set this up?  Lets start with users.

Users

Within WordPress, there are five different user rolls and each roll has different capabilities.

Subscriber
A user setup as a subscriber doesn’t have the ability to do anything. It’s just like any other visitor to your site except they have a login and password.  This is useful when creating a community around your blog where you can invite people to sign-up for an account and capture names and emails. You can then leverage other plug-ins to expand community features.

Contributor
A user setup as a contributor has the ability to create posts along with editing and deleting their own posts, however they don’t have edit access to any other users posts. This user level is good for controlling what goes live and when.  A contributor can create all the posts they want, and the posts wait for someone else to approve them and push them live.

Author
At the author level, the user starts getting a lot more capabilities.  They can create, edit and delete their own posts, upload media and publish their own posts.  This is a good roll for users that have been posting to the blog for a while and the company is confident in what kind of posts they will create and don’t feel they need to be approved anymore.

Editor
The next user step up is editor.  Editors can do anything the previous user rolls can do but they also get to manage the blog by creating, editing and deleting any content.   Editors can do things like approving or editing comments, managing posts, managing categories, managing pages, adding or removing users, and managing links.  They have full access to all posts created by any user and can control any content that displays on the blog.

This is the highest user level for an average user.  Editors have the power to control every aspect of content on a blog, without having to worry about any blog settings, themes or plug-ins.

Administrator

At the top of the user rolls is the administrator user. The administrator can do everything that’s noted above plus they can control the blog settings. They are able to switch and edit themes, activate and de-active plugins, change the core blog settings and edit the layout of the blog dashboard.  Administrators limits are only met when they want to do something that WordPress, or WordPress plugins, can’t do.

By setting rolls for each of a blog’s users, companies can easily control what makes it to the live site and what doesn’t in regards to actual posts.

Comments

Now when it comes to comments, it’s even easier to manage. Built into WordPress is the ability to moderate all comments.  This means that when a comment is left on the blog, a blog editor or administrator must approve it before it shows on the live site.

To set this up, go to the “Settings” screen on the admin side of your WordPress blog and click on “Discussion.”

Next click on the box that says “An administrator must always approve the comment ” then hit “Save Changes” and you’re done.

Each comment will now wait for someone at the company to approve it before it shows up on the live site.

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

Another item to consider is disabling trackbacks & pingbacks.  Trackbacks & pingbacks are a great way to see who else is talking about your company on their blogs.  If another blog links to one of your blog posts, an automatic link/comment is created.  Where as these are a great idea, they are quite often spammed.  Instead of turning them off completely, it would be better to get a good spam plug-in installed on the blog and let it filter out most of the unwanted content.

Summary

Control is something every company wants over their blog and is something that can be a deal breaker if it can’t be obtained.  By setting up proper user rolls, and ensuring that comments are all moderated, a company can control all content that gets posted on their blog.

Starting a business blog is no easy task. There are lots of things to think about and lots of things to consider. Sometimes companies think to big to fast, which could be setting the blog up for failure before it even launches.

The key thing to remember when creating a new business blog is to start simple and then expand. Going from 0-60 in two seconds sounds like fun, but there are a lot of risks involved. It’s better to ease into it by focusing on creating good content, measuring growth, and learning how users interact with the blog.

Here are five things to think about when before creating your business blog.

Time Crunch:
Launching a blog takes time. There has to be hosting, software installed, a design created, a template created from the design, testing, content creation and approval from management. This is not a process that can be done in a week or two. Rushing it only leads to mistakes and stress.

The best thing to do is create a plan and make sure to give enough time to each step of the process.

The same is true for ongoing blog post creation. One post a day may sound good, but that could translate to two or three hours a day. If you don’t have the staff to support that, realize that before setting the posting goals and find something more achievable. Maybe that’s two posts a week. Or maybe the goal is still one post a day, but from five different people. This spreads out the work.

Design Distraction:
Now I do think that a good design is important, but if the goal is to launch the blog in four weeks, we can’t spend three weeks continuously tweaking and changing the design. This leaves little time to actually building and implementing the design. There is also the content creation and testing to think about.

Instead, break the design into wants and needs. Does it need to have two sidebars? Or will one work for the initial launch? Do we need that advertising spot, or should we wait and see how the blog performs before integrating advertising?

The most important thing is to ensure that all the needs are in and the design works on all browsers. The accents and wants can be integrated as the blog grows.

Feature Compulsion:
It’s easy to look at well-established blogs and get lots of ideas. Podcasts, video, audio, post ratings, Facebook integration, profiles, and the list goes on and on. Trying to integrate every possible feature before launch isn’t the best use of time.

It goes back to our wants and needs. Do we need this feature? Or can we roll it out next month? Sometimes, rolling out features every few weeks will make the blog more exciting as there is always something new when the user returns.

Category Overload:
I’ve seen some get carried away when thinking about organizing a blog. It’s sometimes so detailed and complex that people don’t realize what they are creating; they’re just adding more and more.

I’ve seen blogs end up with over 30 categories at launch and they are integrated prominently into the blog interface. Now 30 categories is a lot. Heck 10 is even a lot for a blog launch.

If a blog were to go live with 10 categories, then there needs to be at least one post in each category. If the same post is in a few different categories, then the value of those categories will be diminished. There’s nothing worse than clicking around on different links only to get the exact same information.

So by having 10 prominent categories at blog launch, the site will need 20-30 posts to give a good mix of content for each category.

It’s better to build up categories as the blog grows. You can plan for 20, but realize that it may take a few months to get there. Start with one or two and add categories as posts get created. However, don’t try to assign 5 categories to one post thinking it’ll make the process go faster, it’ll only make the blog less appealing.

Death by Comparison:
“If TechCrunch can do it, why can’t we?” “ProBlogger gets lots of comments and so will our blog.” “This site says they make $2k on advertising with Google Adsense, lets add that.”

These are examples of comparing one blog to another that is completely out of its league. It’s not bad to have high goals, but sometimes they are unrealistic.

Traffic, comments, leads, and other KPIs come over time. It takes a lot of work to bring a blog up to a level like TechCrunch or ProBlogger. If one expects a blog to be the hottest thing on the net in a week or two, chances are they will be very disappointed.

So what should we do?
The biggest thing to remember is K.I.S.S; keep it simple stupid.

Don’t set the blog up for failure before it launches. Start with a few categories, focus on good content creation, and skip non-essential features. As the blog grows think about adding new features, tweaking the design and incorporating items that will be of benefit to users.

Launching a business blog can be fun and challenging at the same time.  By keeping it simple, focusing on needs, and creating good content, you will help ensure the success of the blog.

The grass is growing, the flowers are blooming and that means it’s spring! As people start the spring cleaning on their garages, it’s also a great time to do some spring cleaning on your blog and give it a tune-up.

A lot of things can happen to a blog over time and blog maintenance is a task that probably doesn’t get done as often as it should. When is the last time you tested your comments? Or filled out your own forms? Maybe looked at the site in Internet Explorer?!

It’s a good idea to take a step back and look at your site, as others do, from time to time to ensure everything is working, and displaying, as it should.

Here are a few things to help with your blog tune up and spring cleaning.

1. Upgrade your software.  If you aren’t running the latest version of your blog software, you may be missing out on features, security patches or bug fixes.  Upgrading could make for an improvement in performance for both blog authors and visitors.
2. Upgrade your plug-ins.  Just like with blog software, the plug-ins you run get updated from time to time to fix, update and improve.  Check those plug-ins to see if anything needs to be updated.
3. Remove plug-ins.  Sometimes a plug-in is a great idea, but you find out over time that you don’t really use it.  So why not remove it?  The less your blog has to load, the more responsive it’ll be.
4. Test in other browsers.  Take a look at your stats and see what the top browsers and platforms are to your site.  Then test your blog in those browsers to see if everything works as it should.  People sometimes look at everything through their browser, but forget that there are many others out there.
5. Test on smaller, or bigger, screens.  Every computer screen is different.  Some are bigger, some smaller; some have high resolutions while other low.  Again, it’s good to look in the analytics software to see what most people are running and check out the blog as they see it.  You may be surprised at how some designs break.
6. Fill out forms.  Contact forms, comments forms, lead forms, all should be tested to ensure they are working properly.  But don’t stop there, whom does the form go to internally and what’s the process to follow-up with the email?
7. Check 404 error page.  If someone does follow an invalid URL, what do they see?  Do they see your blog with a nice error message?  Or a generic server error page that may turn them away?
8. Check Google Webmaster Tools.  If you’ve got your blog verified, check with Google to see if they have any issues crawling your site.  You don’t want to miss out any traffic.
9. Search your blog.  Doesn’t matter for what, but you want to ensure the search is still working properly and the results page looks good.
10. Click around.  Just take a stroll through your blog.  Look at archives, random posts, and categories, whatever.  If something jumps out at you as an issue, then address it.
11. Check your title tags and meta descriptions.  Are they still optimized?  Do they look good?  If someone reads them, would it draw them into the site?
12. Check your external links. Just because the sites you were linking to six months ago worked fine doesn’t mean they still do.  Double check any blogroll or other links in your blog template to be sure they still go where they should.  You just want to be sure you know where you are sending your visitors.

Overall, it’s a good idea to take a step back once a year, or month, to look at your blog from a different perspective.  There are a lot of things that change over time and if you’re not looking for them, you may not know what’s really going on with your blog.

What other things should be checked?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

For years, the only way to get a good understanding of how many people are reading and interacting with your blog feed was to run your feed though FeedBurner.  Now, FeedBlitz has a service to compete.

FeedBlitz RSS claims to offer better branding, more social media integration by integrating Twitter and other social networks, a mobile optimized version of your feed, better SEO, filtering, and additional feed stats.  I was hoping for some screenshots on FeedBlitz’s site, but they don’t currently offer any.

Unlike FeedBurner that is free, FeedBlitz RSS is paid.  The price minimum is $1.49 per month and goes up from there based on the number unique active email subscribers in your account.  This is where it gets a little confusing.

If you use FeedBlitz RSS you don’t need to use the FeedBlitz email service.  In that case your cost would be $1.79 per month.  If you choose to use both FeedBlitz RSS and their feed to email service, the price you pay is dependent on the number of active email subscribers you have.  So if you have 45 email subscribers and 216 RSS subscribers, you will be charged at the 45 subscriber level.

Unfortunately I was unable to see what a FeedBlitz RSS feed looked like, as the examples on their site don’t render any information at the time of this post.  They do offer a 30 day free trial, however you need to enter in your billing information before you can get the free trial; and I wasn’t up for that today.

Along with all the current features, FeedBlitz plans to rapidly evolve the service over the upcoming weeks and months. It’ll be interesting to see what they come out with and if people choose to move from FeedBurner.

Overall, it sounds like FeedBlitz RSS is a promising service.  It’s good to have an alternative to FeedBurner as competition usually makes things better.  I think they just need add some screen shots and make the free trail really free to get more people interested and trying it out.

Have you tried out FeedBlitz RSS?  What do you think?