Sue Worthington » Blogging

How To Choose A Stunning WordPress Theme

admin — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:33:54 +0000

I always recommend the WordPress platform to people looking to get their own website or blog up and running, because I always use WordPress for my own websites.

It is effective, efficient and a relatively easy learning curve.

Once you have learned how to build a WordPress website you will want to choose a nice template to show it off. What a template does is determines the look of your site, and allows you to customise the look, and presentation of your site.

Once you’ve installed WordPress, by default you will have one of the standard templates. In most cases, you’ll want to find something a bit more unique which suits your taste.

There are so many choices, and you can go with a free theme or pay for a premium one. There are countless free themes available and you are likely to find one that fits your vision for your site.

You can also get a premium one for a good price too. But, why would anyone ever pay for a theme when there are so many free themes available?

One reason is that you may find yourself wanting to customize your site later on, and add bits and pieces, and it can be time-consuming and frustrating to try and change your theme. Premium themes generally include lots of options, making it easy to customise. There is also support and documentation available if you have questions or problems.

When I first started using WordPress I created a few sites using free themes, and then I came across this – Artisteer Software

This software allows you to create an endless number of variations and colours of themes, and is really fun to play with.

When I launched my current site, I decided to purchase the Fresh News by WooThemes.

I wanted to be able to customise a little more and to have support if I had any problems.

Fresh News by WooThemes has a clean, professional look, which really appealed to me. I have been extremely happy with Fresh News and their current offer is buy one and get 2 more free so that is a great option.

The WordPress theme directory is a good place to start looking for a theme which appeals to you, but you will need to set aside some time to do this because there are so many to go through.

So those are your choices for your special WordPress theme – there is no need to end up with a site that looks like everyone else’s!

Artisteer Software

Fresh News by WooThemes

Good luck choosing your theme!

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Writing The Perfect WordPress Blog Post?

First Thing To Learn After Starting A Blog

admin — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 14:36:48 +0000

Author: Anil Gupta

Many have always felt that blogging is a learning process and that there is a huge learning curve to it. So when a newbie first begins to blog, there are many paths to choose. He can choose to learn SEO basics, monetization techniques, traffic building and Social Media Optimization. But none of these is what the newbie blogger has to learn first. The first and the task of prime importance that a newbie has to master is that of content writing. A blogger who is looking at a long and fruitful career out of blogging needs to understand the power of engaging and magnetic words.

Your expertise in writing can make all the difference on how much money you make online. Whether you make a tweet, Facebook status update or a blog post – it is your words that people read. So this is why it is important that your fundamentals are right when you begin to blog. Any successful blogger who has a readership base in thousands and has been able to establish an authoritative blog is because of his quality of writing.

Blogging, especially if you are trying to sell affiliate products requires compelling writing that convinces visitors enough to turn them into customers. And you cannot compel a visitor to trust you if your grammar is off-place and your command over the language is poor. This is where blogs like CopyBlogger can help you become a better writer. They offer great and regular tips to improve your writing skills.

Another reason why you need to understand that the first thing to learn after starting to blog is to write well is because you need to be concise. In today’s world, people are busy and in a hurry. They want the maximum information in the shortest amount of time possible. If you provide them information in a rambling and off-the-mark manner – it is definitely not healthy for building up your readers. If you are an effective writer you can provide your reader with complete entertainment on the driest of topics. Articles can be made more interesting by sprucing it up with humor, interesting facts and building curiosity within your reader. But there is one thing that you require for it and that is the killer skill to write!

Scopeformoney.com blog focus on topics like making money online, blog tips and seo tips etc

Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_1781762_13.html

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sue worthington blog

4 Foundations For Successful Blogging

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:34:30 +0000

Preparation

Think about the design of your site and how you want it to look, but remember you cannot please everyone’s tastes, but my biggest advice is to keep the design as simple as possible, without too much clutter. This is a great article about design for your blog – the 4 principles of sound design

Content

The content of your blog is what will keep people coming back to you, so it has to be good quality and accurate. Readers want you to solve their problems – they are online looking for answers to their particular issues, so give them a ton of quality, accurate and interesting information.

Promotion

This is where the hard work comes in – there are so many ways to generate the traffic you need to your site – you might want to check out my posts on traffic generation strategies Here is some really great information on Blog Promotion

Build your community

Combine your blogging efforts with social media to build that community you need. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are your weapons in building that all important community of raving fans. Of course it goes without saying that you have to pay attention to the above 3 points in order to be successful in building your community around your business.

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Writing The Perfect WordPress Blog Post?

admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:03:40 +0000

Is there such a thing as the perfect WordPress blog post?

Your blog looks great – beautiful design, getting some traffic, opt in box on sidebar, the works.

You are posting regularly – but are you posting in the correct way?

In many cases I suspect new bloggers will simply get the inspiration and start writing.

However a few simple routine steps taken with each blog post will make a lot of difference to how many people read your posts, how much traffic your posts generate, who sees your posts, and ultimately how popular your blog becomes.

Here are my simple steps to writing the perfect WordPress blog post:-

Research your content so that your post is accurate.

Use your favourite search engine, articles, news items, your favourite blogs. Here is a link to the top 100 Internet Marketing blogs. But be warned clicking on that link will cost you a serious amount of reading time!

You could also set up Google alerts for your keywords.

Research your keywords

Use your favourite keyword tool and compile a list of appropriate keywords for your post. Use the main keyword in your title, and in the body of the post at least twice. You can also use the main keyword(s) as anchor text, to an outgoing link.

Ensure your writing is grammatically correct.

This speaks for itself. Although your writing should be simple and easily readable, it should also be correct grammatically and the spelling should be accurate. If your spelling is poor then use a spell checker every time. Although having said that, a deliberate misspelling can aid your position in Google, because a lot of people misspell when searching Google.

Write interesting / informative / funny content.

Your style will be very personal to you – everyone writes in a different way. Try to tell a story. Craft your post with a beginning, content, and then a conclusion.

Write about what is current.

Write to inform on relative, topical or interesting information and news, within your niche.

Create controversy.

Write about something which generates strong feelings in your readers. Do not be offensive or too outspoken though!

Your Headline

Create an eye catching headline. Use your keywords in your title. Research shows that asking a question, or using numbers in the title gets more attention.

Use a blog image

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Readers are often attracted by a blog image rather than just pages of text. Always use an ‘alt’ tag to ensure that Google image search can find them, especially effective if your ‘alt’ tag is one of your keywords.

Include outgoing links.

People travel around the web using links and you should always use outgoing links in your posts. This helps your link building campaign. If you have written other topics on the same subject, make sure you link to them internally. It is good for SEO if you link to Wikipedia, Technorati or Digg etc., and you are also providing a service for your readers. One efficient way of getting backlinks is to find recently posted blog posts talking about the same topic as you. Leave a nice comment with your signature URL. It is also useful to bookmark the blog post with your comment on it.

Use tags for your post.

Your tags are the keywords associated with the content of the post, and are used to categorize and file information.

Conclusion

Writing the perfect blog post is time consuming but will pay dividends in the long term. It will become a routine.

Here is the condensed version of ‘Writing the Perfect Blog Post’

Research your content for accuracy, and interesting news.
Perform your keyword research and use keywords throughout your post
Write in your own style, and construct a story with a beginning, a middle and a conclusion.
Create an eye-catching headline, using your main keyword(s).
Use your main keyword as anchor text to link to another of your own posts (if any) and to an outgoing link.
Comment on a recently published post about your topic, bookmark it and link to it.

I hope you find this post an interesting read – if so, please Digg it, Stumbleupon it, Tweet it, or link it to any other bookmarking site of your choice!

Hereare some more links to this subject:-

http://www.mccordweb.com/weblogs/2009/03/27/tips-for-crafting-the-perfect-blog-post-title/

http://www.xarj.net/2008/seo-secrets-to-writing-the-perfect-blog-post-wordpress/

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Top 10 Reasons For Using FeedBurner

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:37:43 +0000

Google FeedBurner is an excellent service that lets you offer a wide variety of different RSS feeds from your blog with ease and it also lets you keep track of RSS subscriptions.

The basic service is free!

When you go to the FeedBurner home page, the first thing you see is “Ready to burn your feed? Start here.”

Enter your feed name and then you can use the wide variety of services that FeedBurner offers.

Here are my Top 10 reasons for using the FeedBurner service:-

Add FeedBurner Subscriber Buttons to your site. Add a generic RSS button, or choose from lots of others such as ones for Google Reader, Pageflakes, Bloglines, etc. Just pick the button you want, your blogging platform, and Feedburner gives you the HTML
Track your subscriber stats. Feedburner lets you see just how many people are reading your feed each day. But not only who is reading, but where they are coming from, what browser they are using, what type of feed reader they used, and many other stats. If you can tell which feed readers your readers are using to access your feed, then you can make sure that the reader is easily available and maybe add it to your sidebar for ease of access for your users. You can also track your visitors to your blog by adding some code to your blog template. Although most people stick to other analytical methods like Google Analytics.
Consolidate your feed tracking. If you have a Blogger blog, Feedburner has added the ability to redirect all your blog feeds to the one you burn with FeedBurner. The advantage of this is that you can get a more accurate view of how many subscribers you have, and how they are reading your content.
Allow your readers to subscribe by email. This gives your readers another option for receiving your content. Many people that are interested in getting your feed in their inbox probably aren’t able to read your blog on a regular basis, and want to use the email option to stay up to date. FeedBurner gives you a widget you can add to your blog, and then lets you see exactly who is subscribing to your feed via email, and how many times the feed is being read each day via email. Gives your readers yet another method of reading your content.
Put a FeedBurner Headline Animator in your emails and on your blog. This is a great feature that you can add to your emails and blog, that gives your blog’s name and scrolls the title to your latest posts, with a link to them. I use this as my signature for forums. It also has a subscriber button for the feed.
WordPress Plugins. The FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin automatically redirects any of your feeds to FeedBurner. You can also create a comments feed, and have this directed to FeedBurner too.
FeedBurner FeedFlare. This feature allows you to place a simple footer at the bottom of your post, allowing your readers to email, tag, share and act on the content you publish, by including services such as email, email author, Technorati link, subscribe to feed, and more. This can be useful if a reader has not previously subscribed, but enjoys a particular post it could prompt them to subscribe if the link is right there for them. Read more HERE about FeedBurner FeedFlare. FeedBurner Link Splicer, and FeedBurner Photo Splicer. This service lets you send links you have added to bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, and photos from sites such as Flickr. Both your bookmarks and photos will be merged with your blog feed.
FeedBurner BuzzBoost FeedBurner BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed’s content as HTML. You can promote your blog on other sites that you manage, via a snippet of code.
FeedBurner Podcasts. On this blog I use the Odiogo Plugin to enable readers to listen to my posts. They can also subscribe to the Podcast feed, and download recordings if they so wish. This feed can also be directed to my FeedBurner feed, enabling complete integration of my feeds, and the ability to track statistics on where all my subscribers come from. So If you want to get serious about optimizing your blog’s feed, Feedburner has all the tools you will ever need.

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30 Essential Blog Plugins

30 Essential Blog Plugins

admin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:40:00 +0000

This blog is still new and I have just installed my ’30 Essential Blog Plugins’, and would like to share these with you.

They are in no particular order of any kind.

Zemanta Get suggested links, images, related content, and SEO tags that makes your blogging fun and more efficient.
Broken Link Checker This useful plug in checks your posts for broken links and notifies you on the dashboard if it finds any.
Simple Tags Tagging simply. Autocompletion, suggested tags, tag cloud widget, mass edit tags, related post tags.
Twitter Tools Provides complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog, and your blog posts to Twitter. Show your tweets in your sidebar, and post tweets from your WordPress admin panel.
SmartYouTube Easily insert You Tube videos in your posts. Simplest of the YouTube plugins.
FeedBurner FeedSmith This plug in detects all ways to access your feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every subscriber.
YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorythm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A template feature allows customization of the display.
MaxblogpressPingOptimizer This overrides the WordPress automatic pingign function, and just pings when you first publish your post, and not each time you edit and update as WordPress does.
Photo Dropper Add Creative Commons licensed photos to your posts from Flickr.
Quick Flickr Widget Display up to 20 of your latest Flickr submissions in your sidebar.
Sociable Automatically adds links on your posts to all your favourite social networking sites, and adds the pretty icons.
Odiogo Gives your blog a voice. Adds ‘Listen Now’ button to your blog so readers can listen to your posts and download podcasts.
Google News Sitemap Generator This generates an XML sitemap for submission to Google.
CommentLuv This plug in shows a link to the last post of the commenters blog when they leave a comment at yours. Rewards your readers and encourages more comments.
WordPress Backup Backsup your upload directory, current theme directory, and plugins directory to a zip file, and can optionally be emailed to your email address.
Login Lock Down This adds extre security to your blog by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re attempted.
Permalink Redirect Redirects all ugly looking characters on the end of the URL.
PingPress Fm Connects your blog to Ping.fm, where you can connect other social networks and spread your blog content.
DJ Email Publish Publishes your blog posts to other blogs by email
Livespace Sync This plug in allows postings to your Live Space blog.
Top Commentators Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site.
Social Follow This plugin allows users the ability to add links to their social media profiles in their blog.
Askimet As most bloggers know Askimet checks comments to see if it looks like spam, and informs you.
Do Follow Removes the nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments.
SEO Friendly Images Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C valid.
Simple Archive Generator A plugin which lists all posts by category on one page.
Thank Me Later Send an automatic thank you email to those who comment on your blog. Engage your readers by reminding them to check back for responses or new blog posts.
WP-Polls Adds a poll to your blog post or page. Customizable via templates and css styles.
Widlink Widget Created especially for Alex Jeffreys Coaching Students.
Clickbank Hop Ad Allows you to create Ckickbank ads in your sidebar, based on your chosen keywords. If you have any ‘can’t live without blog plugins please share.