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.

Upgrade? Don't Upgrade?

Yes, WordPress 3.0 is now available, but it may not be a good idea to upgrade to it just yet.

Here are 3 things you need to complete before you upgrade.

1) Do you really need to update now?
WordPress 3.0 is a big update and it’s been under construction for quite a while now. Yes it’s good, but sometimes there are security holes or bugs that the developers didn’t see in the testing environment. You never know what kinds of things people find until you release it. So it may be a good idea to wait a few days, or even a week or two, to ensure that no big issues get uncovered. Or, if they do come up, WordPress can fix them with a security update.

2.) Check your plugins
Just because a WordPress update is out, that doesn’t mean that all your plugins will work. There’s a chance that you’ll need to update a plugin to be compatible, or that the plugin just isn’t going to work until the developer updates it. Then you have to decide if you can live without certain plugins, or if you’d rather wait until all plugins are WordPress 3 compatible.

The good news here is that I haven’t been hearing any plugin issues, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.

3) Backup your blog
Before you upgrade, backup everything first. All your files, database, plugins, themes, everything. Just incase something goes wrong, you’ll want to be sure that you have a backup.

In reality, there is no reason to upgrade today. WordPress 2.9.x is still stable and secure and it’ll remain that way for a while. However, if you do want to upgrade, make sure that you have backups. Better safe than sorry.

Have you updated?
If so, what issues, if any, did you run into?

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.

Salesforce recently launched a WordPress plugin that allows you to add a form to your blog and capture lead details in Salesforce.

The good news here is that it’s easy to install, easy to set up a form, and integrates nicely into your WordPress theme.

Settings

Form Fields

Integration

Widget

The downside is that there are no custom fields, no spam protection, and you can only create one form. I’m hoping these are limitations of the initial release and future versions will have more options.

Overall, for an initial release, the Salesforce WordPress plugin is a simple way to capture leads in Salesforce from your WordPress blog. It’s easy to set up, easy to use, and Salesforce fans will find it very handy as long as you don’t need to get to complex.

I know that popups are one of those words that bring chills to some people, but they can be an effective way of promoting a product or service your blog.

Now we’re not talking about old school popup browser windows, but rather a small CSS window that shows on top of your content. These types of popups often bring a higher conversion rate, as compared to a button or form in the sidebar, as they allow the visitor to easily focus on one thing.

Call to action (CTA) popups can be used to:

• Announce a new product or service.
• Advertise a sale.
• Obtain more subscribers.
• Promote an event.
• Call out a white paper or case study.
• Publicize company news.
• … and many more.

More than likely, you’ve just seen ours.

If you want to add a CTA popup like this to your WordPress site, grab the WP Super Popup plugin. WP Super Popup makes it easy to create and configure these types of popups.

Options include:

• Show content from:
  • a URL
  • create it with the WYSIWYG editor
  • pase in HTML
• Set height and width.
• Determine how often the popup shows.
  • Example: Every x days or for the first x visits. (based on cookie in browser)
• Set popup delay and speed.
• Configure which pages the popup should show on.
  • Example: All pages, only specific pages, exclude pages.
• Live preview for testing.

Call to action popups can be a great way of increasing conversions but, like with any type of CTA, it’s important to know your blogging business goals, measure results, and tweak the popup as needed. Simply setting and forgetting about it isn’t going to be as effective as understanding what your visitors like and changing it as needed.

One obstacle that most bloggers face is spelling and/or grammar issues. The issue isn’t that they don’t proofread their work, it’s that when we know what something should say, our minds can correct spelling and grammar mistakes in our head. This lets typos and grammatical makes make it into our content without our knowledge. The good news here is that there is a new plugin called After the Deadline that will proofread our content.

After the Deadline uses “artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions.”

Now WordPress, by default, has spell check and so do all browsers. A few even have grammar check, but the question is, how good is it? After the Deadline tries to make it smarter and help you avoid both spelling and grammar errors.

As a WordPress plugin, After the Deadline replaces the built-in spell check and it works really well. By default, it only proofs your content when you hit the ‘Proofread’ button, however you can change the settings to proof as you type too.

Don’t agree with what it’s suggesting? After the Deadline can educate you as to why it’s suggesting an edit if it’s got a good reason.

I’m adding it to my ‘must have’ WordPress plugins list as typos are so easy to make and can be very embarrassing.

After the Deadline is not just for WordPress though. You can get it as a Firefox addon or bookmarket to spell check any form field on the web.

You can grab a copy of After the Deadline from http://afterthedeadline.com/ or add the plugin directly to WordPress by using the built-in plugin installer.

Don’t let typos and grammatical errors get in your way, look professional and write content that people will be happy to read with the help of After the Deadline.

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.

The idea of trackbacks and pingbacks are great. It’s a way of getting notified when someone else posts about you on their blog. However, spammers have taken over and it makes you wonder if there is any value in trackbacks anymore.

My guess is that most bloggers will say that the value is little to none. The number of spammy trackbacks are overwhelming at times and, even if you do have a good spam plugin protecting you, the ones that get through are not quality. The chances that a good trackback comes into your site is rare, but when it does, it is great to see.

The idea of trackbacks is fantastic, however it is to easy for spammers to abuse; and they know that. The system has been corrupt for a while and it makes a blogger think that it may be time to just disable them and forget about them.

What do you think?

Do you still see value in trackbacks and pingbacks? Or have you disabled them and let them die?

Yes, trackbacks/pingbacks are dead. Lets turn them off.

If you’d like to disable trackbacks on your WordPress blog, go into your blogs settings and then click ‘discussion’ and un-check the box for ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)’

No, trackbacks/pingbacks are still alive, they just need to be monitored better.

If you’d like to keep trackbacks, but manage them better, check out one of these plugins:

• Moderate Trackbacks
• Simple Trackback Validation
• Auto-Close Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks
• Disable Trackbacks

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.

A bloggers dream is to get noticed. That could be in the form of a post getting re-tweeted hundreds of times, hitting the homepage of Digg, shared a lot on Facebook, getting noticed by the media, or one of the many other ways a blog can get traffic. However, a flood of traffic can quickly cripple a blog and turn that dream into a nightmare. The good news here is that the WP Super Cache plug-in can help minimize issues caused by too much traffic.

The WP Super Cache plug-in creates a static HTML file of each post and serves that file up to users. This static HTML file loads faster and is a lot less demanding on the web server and database. Now if hundreds or thousands of people were to visit the same post in a short amount of time, instead of re-pulling that post from the database and piecing it all together, WordPress would just show the cached page; aka a static HTML version of the post. This page now loads faster and more efficiently.

Think of it like this, you are selling lemonade and every time someone wanted a glass, you measured out the water, sugar, and lemon juice to make one glass for that one person. If you became popular, it’d take forever to fill all the orders one glass at a time. Not to mention all the work you’d have to do. You’d be tired! So instead, you make a picture of lemonade that allows you to easily serve many people in a short amount of time. The WP Super Cache plug-in works the same way. It ensures that your posts are served up quickly and are ready for a flood of viewers.

As a perk, the user never knows the difference. The blog loads faster, they get to consume the content faster, and hopefully, they continue sharing the post.

It doesn’t matter if a blog has a few visitors or thousands, installing the WP Cache plug-in helps ensure that a blog continues to run smoothly and every visitor has a good user experience.

It’s also good to note that the WP Super Cache plug-in and WP Cache plug-in are not the same. The WP Super Cache plug-in does a much better job at reducing the amount of work the web server has to do. If you are using WP Cache, it’s time to upgrade to WP Super Cache.

Whether you are new to WordPress, or have been using it a long time, there are always features that are available in the software that people either forget about or don’t know exist. So I thought I’d write up 10 lesser known WordPress features.

1. More options in the WYSIWYG editor.

When writing your blog post in WordPress, there is a toolbar with items such as bold, italic, and lists. At the of that toolbar is a box with little squares on it. Click it to reveal another toolbar with options to underline, change the font colors, embed meida, undo, and more. Quite a few handy options hiding there.

2. The convenient drop down menu.

At the top of the admin area, in the dark grey bar, there is a drop down menu that lets you add a new post, add a new page, go directly to the drafts, upload media and a few others. What are a few clicks away via the sidebar may only be a click or two away with the drop down menu.

3. Edit, reply, delete, and approve comments from dashboard.

When looking at the WordPress dashboard, you can monitor the most recent comments, approve or un-approve them, delete them, or mark them as spam. You can even reply to the comments right there on the dashboard.

4. Change the screen options.

At the top of most admin screens, there is a ‘screen options’ tab. This is where you can change what appears on the screen. You can add boxes, remove the ones you don’t use, and find other settings as well.

5. Minimize, expand, or move boxes.

Most boxes in WordPress have the ability to be minimized. Hovering over the title of the box should show an arrow on the right side. Click that arrow and the box should minimize. Click again and it’ll expand. Don’t like where it’s located, click the title of the box and drag it around the screen. You can create the layout that works best for you.

6. Minimize the sidebar.

The sidebar is nice, but it also takes up space. If you’d like, you can click on the << in the sidebar and it’ll minimize to just show section icons. When minimized, it also has a nice rollover effect to show what options each sidebar item has. This can reduce the number of clicks you have to make to get to different areas of the blog.

7. Expand a sidebar section and locking it open.

If the sidebar is maximized, click the down arrow on a section to reveal what options it has to offer. Once that happens, the box will be locked open and no matter where you navigate, that box will remain open. Want to unlock it? Just click the arrow again to minimize the section.

8. Access the media library.

When writing a post, every piece of media that’s ever been uploaded to the blog is accessible via the media library. Simply click on the add an image button, then click on the media library tab and you can page, and even search, through past images and files. Want to use one? Click on ‘show’ next to the item and you’ll be able to insert it into the post.

9. See the most used tags or categories.

When writing a post, there is the ability to see the most used categories and tags. This helps save time if there are a lot of categories and you don’t want to scroll through them all, or are unsure what tag to use in a post.

10. Add widgets.

Widgets are one of the best items in WordPress. They allow for anyone to customize the sidebar. Click on Appearance -> Widgets and you’ll see a list of widgets and the sidebar. Just drag a widget into the sidebar and you’re done. Drag it up and down to reorder and drag it off the sidebar to remove. There are also text widgets that will allow someone to add JavaScript, images, text and just about anything to your WordPress sidebar. No coding or FTP required.

WordPress does have a lot of features and functionality under the hood. Take the time to look around and see if there isn’t something you’ve never discovered before. I’m pretty sure you’ll find something new.

Google Analytics is a full-featured analytics suite that is free to all to use. The data it captures lets blog owners know referrers to their site, keywords, popular posts, unique visitors and so much more.

With the Google Analyticator plug-in, you can view a summary of the blogs Google Analytics, for the past 30 days, right on the dashboard for quick and easy access.

Here’s how to setup Google Analytics on WordPress’ dashboard.

1. Sign up for a free Google Analytics account. If you already have a Gmail, or other Google account, then just sign-in. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Get Google Analytics

2. Get the Google Analyticator plug-in, install it on the blog, activate the plug-in, and remember to configure it.

Download The Plug-In

3. Once you have Google Analyticator up and running, go into the settings click the link to authenticate with Google.

Authenticate with Google

4. Google will then ask you to grant access.

Grant Access

5. Once access is granted, Google Analyticator will confirm that you are indeed authenticated.

Authenticated

6. Head back to the WordPress dashboard and check out the blogs Google Analytics summary for the past 30 days.

Dashboard Google Analytics Summary

That’s it. Google Analytics integration into WordPress’ dashboard is complete.

What I’d love to see is the ability to break down data based on a specific date range, however for a quick summary, Google Analyticator provides an easy way to see Google Analytics information on a blogs WordPress dashboard.

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.

Backup Your Blog with WP-DB-Backup and WordPress Backup

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?