Commenting on Blogs

Commenting on popular blogs is a great way to market your blog. It will be especially useful for a few reasons:

• It is a way to obtain new visitors. People often click on links to your webpage if you make an interesting comment. It is especially true if you are one of the first to do so.
• If you are posting on a do-follow blog, it is also going to improve your Page Rank, as it is going to count as a link. Obtaining links pointing to your site is crucial.
• Since popular blogs have really a lot of visitors, your comment might be viewed by thousands of people. That means that your blog is going to be more popular as well.

Most importantly make sure that you enjoy doing it.

Slideshows of Images

Even though WordPress is so popular, there are still millions of blogs that are hosted on blogger. Not everyone knows this, but Blogger has an interesting feature called ‘Blogger Play’. Basically, it is a site where you can see a slideshow of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click rather click on ‘show info’ to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. What is interesting about this site that it really shows a big diversity when it comes to the topics that bloggers blog about. This is one of the most fun features of Blogger.

What many bloggers are wondering about is whether it is a good idea to implement many images on a blog. Overall, it seems that incorporating images in some posts can make a blog look more appealing. Nonetheless, it is important that there should not be too many posts as images can slow down the loading on a website. There has to be a balance and it is up to the webmaster to decide how many multimedia elements to implement.

Widgets

BlogCatalog widget can be obtained directly from BlogCatalog’s website provided that you create an account with them. You can customize your own widget to whatever suits you by changing the color, number of rows, columns, and other elements. There are a few advantages of having this widget:

-By displaying the icons of people visiting a blog, a blogger can get some information about this reader base. This information will include gender and age among some of the details.
-It proves that a blog has visitors thus making a blog look more professional.
-Once you will see that somebody visited your blog you will be more inclined to visit someone else’s blog to return the favor.
-The widget looks very cool, and many bloggers will enjoy looking at pictures of people that visit their blog.

Blogs About Blogging

I believe that blogs about blogging will become increasingly popular. Some people might wonder why I think so. That is because such blogs are a useful resource for all bloggers no matter what niche they belong to. Basically, as long as there are blogs, there will be blogs about blogging, as people will need advice. It doesn’t matter what kind of blogs will be the most popular: business blogs, personal blogs, or technology blogs. The important thing is that all of them are blogs. Secondly, the cost of maintaining a blog about blogging is lower than is some other niches where you need to upload a lot of videos, files, or images. Many hosting companies claim they offer unlimited bandwidth, but in reality they will close your account if you exceed some limit that they set secretly. That is why it is an advantage to have a website which does not require a lot of bandwidth. Lastly, since there are so many new blogs being created every day, there is a large audience to address. Someone has to teach new bloggers about blogging, as there is plenty to teach. While blogging platforms might seem easier and easier to work with, in reality there are so many tools, plug-ins, and decisions to make that most webmasters will appreciate useful advice.

How to Detect a Blogging Addiction

Here are some signs by which you can say that a person has a blogging addiction:

• You suffer “comment envy” – another bloggers post gets 50-something comments.
• You “binge blog” 3 or 4 posts at once, but only to feel guilty and empty afterward.
• You ditched all your real friends for blog friends, because, well, “they understand.”
• Your usual lunch hour has become your “blog hour.” You keep a few posts prepared in your desk in case you need them during the day.
• After a few minutes of meeting someone really interesting you ask, “So – do you blog?”
• You filter everything through your post-writing. You cannot watch a movie, see a play, read an article, or share a sweet moment with your child without thinking of whether it’s blog-worthy.
• After reading this post you go straight back to your blog. “Just one more post for today”, you say. If your conclusion is that you are indeed addicted, do not worry – you are not alone.

I hope you enjoyed reading it, and I also hope you realize that blogging in reality is not so dangerous as I portrayed it above. Why not try blogging yourself, maybe you will really like it and you have nothing to lose.

RSS and Email Subscriptions

What is most important for readers is to have easy access to information. There are many ways you can present information to readers, and the most obvious one in case of blogs is simply through your website. You work hard on your homepage and you like when people appreciate it. Unfortunately, this might not be enough for some readers, because they have to visit your blog on a daily basis to see if there is something new. That is why RSS and email subscriptions have been invented: they allow readers to know exactly when a new post is posted on your blog. The question is whether you should use RSS readers or Email subscriptions. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. That is because even thought RSS readers seem to be more convenient, many people are not familiar with them. Technology is changing so fast that many Internet surfers still do not know what RSS really is, and they are happy that they learned about email recently. That is why I recommend offering both RSS and email subscriptions. This way your visitors will be able to chose whatever they prefer. Setting up both subscription methods is not that hard, especially if you look at all of the benefits.

WordPress Errors

It seems like a good amount of bloggers are experiencing the WordPress “mm_handled” error, which triggers when you want to write a new post. What happens is that the custom fields section shows mm_handled over and over again. There are hundreds of mm_handled fields to fill out and for some people this prevents creating new posts completely. On the other hand, for others it extremely slows down posting. It is hard to say why this happens, but so far there are at least two things you can do:

• Use Firefox, as at least you can create posts, but unfortunately posting is slowed down. While this is not really a solution to the problem, it will allow you to publish a important post without taking more drastic steps.
• You can reinstall WordPress. This should fix the problem, as it worked for many people. On the down side, this will take you some time and don’t forget to backup your database or any template changes. I cannot offer any easier solution, but if you think that you have a better idea please let me know by commenting.

I know that those who experience this problem might be feeling really lazy when it comes to posting, and that is why this error should be fixed as soon as possible.

Using Embedded Presentations on Blogs

Using embedded presentations on your blog or website can be a great way to put your point across, or to simply make your blog look more professional. Some time ago, Google Docs has updated their embedded presentation feature to support multiple sizes, which should make the presentations a lot easier to integrate with your blog posts. I think that using multimedia materials such as this can profit your blog. That is especially the case if you use it the proper way and do not overdo it. To integrate a presentation to your blog you should copy the ‘Mini Presentation Module’ HTML from Google Docs. I am sure that there will be a lot of bloggers using this feature, as it is quite useful in many circumstances.

If you are wondering what is the best way to use presentations, there are a few things that you may want to know. First of all, you can include Youtube videos in your presentations. All you will have to do is link to the desired video and it will be included. Other nice features include the possibility to include images and text captions to make your presentation even more appealing. If you wisely take advantage out of the different features it offers, I am sure your presentation will look great. Just remember not to overdo it, but rather use such multimedia elements whenever there is a proper reason for it.

Reinstalling WordPress

If you are an active blogger, sooner or later you may need to reinstall WordPress. This is usually advisable when your installation is corrupted and cannot be fixed otherwise. It is important for any blogger who is serious about blogging to know how to reinstall WP. That is why you may want to learn how to do it, and now is a good chance. In this post, I would like to share with you an easy way to reinstall WP. While this may not make you an expert when it comes to WordPress, you will feel a lot more confident, and you will not be worried even if something goes wrong with your current installation.

The most important thing when it comes to reinstalling is to make a copy of all of your existing files, in case something goes wrong. You should also know your WP database details. The next step is to re-upload all of the WP files, and overwrite your existing files on the server. This way any damaged files will be replaced with properly working ones. To make sure that all of your posts, comments, and settings will appear on your blog, you should edit the ‘config’ file to include your existing database details. This will ensure that your new installation uses your existing set up. This way if everything goes well, you will have your whole blog intact. Like I said, there are a few reasons for reinstall; however, most people reinstall after their blogging platform no longer works properly.

Plug-ins for Business Blogs

A business blog is a blog that was launched in order to convert visitors to customers. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to use some of the best widgets and plug-ins available to business blogs. Here are some of the best plug-ins you can choose from thousands of plug-ins available on the market:

-’Related Entries’ plug-in. If your posts are interesting, your readers will be looking for ways to read more on the topic. This plug-in is perfect for allowing your readers to explore your website.

-’Top Commentators’ plug-in. By showing your top commentators, you have a chance to prove to your readers how popular your blog is.

-’Clean Archives’. This plug-in is very useful, as it allows you to categorize your posts based on different criteria, such as date, category, etc.

-’Share This’ plug-in. By giving you readers a chance to share the content of your blog with others, you can increase traffic to your website.