Archive for the ‘Blogging Platforms’ Category:
4 Cool Wordpress Themes For Your Personal Blog
There have been many bloggers who have made a business out of branding their own names. If you happen to have had any success blogging or doing anything else for that matter, you want to make sure you build your domain name (e.g. [Firstname][Lastname].com) to help people find you more effectively and leverage the site to push your other endeavors. Personal blogs are also useful for those who just want to aggregate all their activities on social networking sites in one place. Even if you don’t have a plan for your domain name, you still want to take the first steps to make sure you get the proper credit from the search engines.
Thanks to Wordpress, anyone can put up a website in a matter of minutes. There are plenty of themes that you can choose from to give your website the look and feel you crave. But if you are interested in giving your visitors ways to contact you or follow your work online on your blog, these 4 personal blog Wordpress themes come in handy:
Social Life: integrates all your favorite social media services into one page. So essentially, you won’t have to do anything other than doing what you have been doing on Twitter and other social networking sites. This theme takes care of the rest.
AntiSocial: one of the best aggregator themes on the market. If you happen to be invovled heavily in the social media, you are going to love using this theme. It’s pretty flexible and makes it easy to create a website that your visitors can use to get in touch with your work. Read more »
Fixed Social Plugin: Wordpress Meets Social Media
In a perfect world, your readers will take the time to remember to submit your best content to all relevant social media services around. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if you got some exposure on those sites for all the work you have done without having to lift a finger. That’s actually possible as long as your content provides unique value to your readers. You also want to have the proper tools on your blog to make it easy for your readers to submit your posts to those sites. If you are running your blog on Wordpress, you are in luck. There are plenty of plugins that make it so easy for your visitors to share your content on top social networking sites.
Fixed Social Plugin is an amazing little plugin that is worth a try for anyone who’s looking to get more exposure for his/her content on sites such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, and other top sites. This plugin is very flexible. It lets you pick and choose the style of your buttons and also the ones you want to show on your blog.
3 Powerful Cache Plugins To Speed Up Your WP Blog
Millions of people run their blogs on Wordpress. It’s the most popular blogging CMS hands down, and it keeps getting better. No matter what CMS you are using or how attractive your theme is, you want to make sure your blog loads fast when your visitors come to your blog. Wouldn’t you find it annoying if your favorite blog took forever to load? No matter how popular your blog, you are going to have to deal with speed issues on your blog at some point. One way to speed up your blog is by adding the proper cache plugin in to your website. Caching not only reduces the load on your servers, but it improves the performance and speed of your blog, hence keeping your visitors happy.
If you are looking to speed up your Wordpress blog and improve its performance dramatically, here are 3 powerful cache plugins worth trying:
WP Super Cache: one of the most powerful cache plugins available for Wordpress. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog, meaning that your server won’t have to deal with those resource intensive PHP scripts all the time. The bad news is this plugin is known to have issues with some web hosting services (e.g. Dream host). Read more »
reCAPTCHA: Protect Your Blog Against Spam
Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform around. It’s not only free but can easily be enhanced through its huge database of plugins. But like every popular platform, Wordpress is susceptible to spam attacks as well. If you don’t believe me, just start a Wordpress blog with no security plugins and write a couple of posts on it. Once your site is crawled by Google and other search engines, you are going to see those nasty spammers make their way to your blog with their Viagra and other obscene plugs. That’s why you don’t want to abandon your Wordpress blog as far as its security is concerned.
reCAPTCHA is a powerful Wordpress plugin that helps you manage spam much more easily. Everybody who has been on the Internet for more than a few months has seen those annoying CAPTCHA systems. Yes. They can be annoying, but if you are getting a lot of spam comments on your blog, you’ll have to do something about it. I am sure your audience would understand. With reCAPTCHA, you can stop spammers in their tracks and make the process less convenient for them. Read more »
Job Board Theme: Add a Job Board To Your Blog
There was a time when having a job board feature on your blog was something unique. Not anymore. Many top blogs come with job boards to enable readers to find or post jobs. When you think about it, the idea of having a job board on your blog is not too crazy. As a blogger your goal should be to build a more solid community. What a better way to do that by helping your readers to connect with those who are seeking for a job or looking to fill a job. A few years ago, you’d have to spend a significant amount of money to get a professional looking job board up and running. But these days you can get the job done easily with the power of Wordpress and a decent premium theme.
Job Board Theme is a premium Wordpress theme that lets you create a job board for your blog fast. You won’t even have to know any programming to get started. Of course, if you know design or have the budget to hire a designer, you can change the default look and feel and get even more value out of the theme. Job Board Theme makes life easy either way. Read more »
Enhance Your Wordpress Blog Posts with WDTGFH
I don’t know about you, but I never realized I had so many posts until one day I stopped and noticed the actual number. On another blog of mine, I blog on a daily basis and have been doing it for 9 years. After a while, you stop focusing on the number of posts you have and spend more time adding quality to your posts. But posts add up quickly, especially if you write a new one everyday. If you happen to have many posts on your blog, you want to make sure you provide your readers with the chance to go through your other posts and spend more time on your blog. That’s where WDTGFH comes in. It’s a powerful Wordpress plugin that let you users discover new posts on your blog and get more out of it.
If you have bought anything from Amazon recently, you have probably seen the above message. Essentially, Amazon is trying to encourage you to browse through more of its products and spend even more money on the site. That’s exactly what WDTGFH does, except it focuses on your blog posts instead of actual products. It keeps track of what stories people click on and provides a link to them on the source page. So your readers can go through your posts and figure out what posts other readers have found interesting after viewing a specific post.
5 Attractive Video Blogging Wordpress Themes
Filed under: Vlogging Tips, Wordpress | View Comments
Starting a video blog doesn’t take much these days. You obviously have to know what you are doing and have a plan on what you want to accomplish with your video-blog. And of course, if you play all your cards right and get a bit lucky, you may become the next Internet video superstar. But before you do all that, you are going to need a place to share your videos with your fans. A lot of newbie vloggers start with YouTube and only after they have gotten a few subscribers, they put up their websites. But you should always do the reverse. Whether you want to use Viddler or YouTube to host your videos, you should always have a website to post your videos to and let your fans to connect with you. That’s the best way to get the biggest bang out of each video.
As someone who has built close to a thousand websites and blogs in the past few years, I can tell you that creating a simple vlog is not as tough as it used to be. With technologies such as Wordpress, Drupal, and Ning, you can build a killer video community without breaking the bank. Even if you are not a designer, you can still use a premium video theme to get started fast. There are lots of video blogging themes available for Wordpress, so you should have no excuse for not having you site up and running before posting your videos on YouTube.
1. TV Elements: TV Elements is very clean video blogging theme that makes it easy to put your web show online. Great way for your visitors to browse through your episodes.
2. Tubular: Tubular is a cool dark video blogging theme that allows you to embed videos from YouTube, Viemo, and other top video sites to your site. So you can essentially have your own videos as well others that you find interesting.
3. Groovy: Groovy is cool, fun video blogging theme from WooThemes that gives you plenty of options to share your videos with your fans. 17 color schemes to choose from, so you have a lot of options to choose from.
4. WooTube: WooTube is another great theme for YouTube vloggers. This is an ad ready video blogging theme that is very easy to customize. And you get 7 color schemes to choose from.
5. eVid: evid is a cool little video-blogging theme that makes it easy for you to share your videos with your visitors. Your visitors do get a chance to rate your videos too, so you can get feedback and work on creating better quality videos.
These theme won’t cost you a fortune, but they do give you the chance to get a head-start over vloggers who only focus on putting their videos on YouTube without having a real long-term strategy. If you are just getting started with your vlog, I strongly recommend registering your own domain and putting a website that your fans can refer to for more content. Have fun vlogging!
Search Engine Optimize Your Blog with All-in-One SEO Plugin
Whether you are a professional blogger or just getting started with blogging, you are going to need a tangible amount of traffic if you want to make it in this business. Getting more traffic to your blog not only gets your more exposure and more opportunities, it will also give you a better chance of building a more solid community around your blog and monetize it in the long run. Blogging superstars that have made big in this business all possess a solid, dynamic community around their blogs. But that would not be possible if only ten people know about your blog.
One of the best ways to drive traffic to your blog is by optimizing it for the search engines. Getting free traffic from Google, Bing, and other top search engine sites enables you to spend money on growth and more premium advertising opportunities. There is no simple way to dominate the SERPs on Google and other engines. But you got to start somewhere, so you might as well start with the most important SEO factor that you can control on your blog — your title tags. Your title tags can make a big difference in the amount of traffic you get for free through the organic search. Choosing the right keywords and using them through your content gives search engines the indication that your page should probably get ranked for those keywords. I admit there are a lot of moving parts here. But without optimized titles, you are not maximizing your blog’s traffic.
All-in-One SEO is a cool free plugin for Wordpress bloggers that allows you to optimize the title tags on all your pages without doing too much. If you happen to have a blog that has never been optimized for search engines, you can use the plugin to mass update your title tags in a flash.
How To Improve Your Blog – Part I: Job Boards
So you want to improve a blog? If you don’t, you are probably in the wrong business. Every blogger, whether newbie or advanced, should be on the lookout for ways to improve her blogs and take it to the next level. You can always work on your content, broaden the topics that you cover, and put more time into your daily research to write higher quality content for your visitors. But, there are plenty of other ways to improve your blog. Your goal should to provide more value to you readers, and one way to do that is by creating a job board, specific to your niche. These days a lot of people are looking for jobs, and many of your readers will appreciate it if you provide them with opportunities to improve their position or find a new job. Besides, if your job board catches fire, you can always charge the employers for the right to list on your job board. So you get to help other people out and monetize your blog in the process.
There are plenty of scripts and software packages that help you develop your own job board. But if you are using Wordpress, that’s all you will need to get started. You are going to need a premium job listing theme to make things easier, but you won’t need to pay for an expensive license or a script that may or may not work on your site. There are two themes that are specifically made for bloggers who want to build a job board along side their blog. Both are very easy to install and help you set your board up without having to write too much code (if any):
- Jobpress
- Tapp Jobs
Track Your Blog SEO with SEO Booster Pro
As much as you want to avoid it, search engine optimization should be one of your top priorities if you want to take your blog to the next level and build a real business around it. Traffic is not everything, but it is very important if you want to become a pro blogger and quit your day job. There is a lot of science and art behind the field of search engine optimization and the industry is changing so much all the time. So it’s fairly tough to keep up with the latest development, but unless you know how you are doing with your search engine optimization efforts, it’d be tough to figure out what you need to do. If you can’t tell what keywords are bringing you traffic from what page positions, you are not going understand the opportunity available to you.
SEO Booster Pro is an innovative Wordpress plugin that helps you find out how you are doing on the SERPS, and how you can go about improving your positions. The plugin is designed to let you know where you are getting your traffic from (from which page, what position, and what keywords). It also keeps track of changes in your search engine rankings, so you can figure out whether you are making progress, and which one of your search competitors are stepping up their game.
The plugin comes with a lot of useful options. The Top 10 SERPs tab shows you the top keywords and referring URLs for your pages. The last 35 SERPs visits show you what keywords are driving traffic to your site, and what other keywords you could be taking advantage of to increase your overall traffic.
