If building your blog traffic is the key to the success of a blog, then the RSS feed is part of the system that will make it work. But why, and how?

As a blog owner, hopefully you know and understand exactly what a RSS feed is, but just in case you don’t, here goes.

Sharing With RSS
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds are an easy way of sharing content. The blog owner is in totally control of what is shared and it makes keeping up to date a really easy task.

Increase Return Visits
For the blog owner, it can increase traffic back to your website. Primarily it is increasing the repeat traffic to your blog, which is very important traffic. If a reader is willing to come back time and time again to see what interesting new content you have placed, they are valuable dedicated readers. Not only does this increase your traffic levels, but they are then also likely to start joining in by placing comments, book marking with sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon and sharing your ramblings with their friends directly and through sites such as Twitter.

Best of all, because they are long term readers not only do you get to interact through comments and replying to their comments, but they also have more trust in what you say and are more likely to respond to affiliate promotions.

Increase New Visitors
But RSS Feeds are not just about existing visitors. Some websites like to share the content of other websites and they do this by utilising the RSS feeds. By displaying your RSS Feed content on their website they are possibly showing it to new readers, who might become your visitors.

How Do You Install RSS?
So, how do you use them if they are so fantastic for generating traffic? Well any decent blog software will have an RSS feed built in, but there are also tools such as Feedburner that gives more options.

Then, make sure you have a big, obvious RSS Feed icon on every page. Make it obvious, somewhere that people will look to and always notice it. Also, add a page about using the feed – how to subscribe, what it does and so on. Invite your readers to subscribe and keep up to date.

You Choose Your Options
It is up to you how you run your feed. Options will permit you to have, for example, just the most recent 10, 20 or whatever number of posts you want to include. Some people like to just include a summary of the post, fearing that others will use the feed to steal content, whilst others like to share as much as possible to get the best advantages.

You can also use tools to exclude certain categories from your feeds. I like to drop the uncategorised posts from my feeds – I categorise every main post so anything filed in uncategorised is usually off topic and I don’t want to trouble regular feeders with them.

It is up to you how you use the RSS feed, just make sure that you do as they are invaluable in building your website traffic.

Here is another way for earning money blogging that I use quite frequently. InPostLinks is another blogger / advertiser marketplace from the Izea family.

InPostLInks comes from the Izea family, the same as PayPerPost. But, they are quite separately different.

For a start, InPostLinks does not just accept any blog. You have to have a blog that has at least 20 content posts, spread out over at least the last 90 days. Your blog will be reviewed by their support team, who will reject it if it is obviously just their to make money. They want quality blogs.

Earning Money
This is easier said than done! You must keep logging onto the system and looking to see if any opportunities have appeared that you are eligible for. If there are any, you reserve a slot and are given a link.

You then write a post about this link. Anything will do, as long as it is on the theme of the provided link, but it must not review the website in the link. You are expected to write about 200 words, although quite often posts as short as 160 words are about all I can manage and they are accepted.

You can submit as many established blogs as you like and can take up to 4 opps per day per blog. Once you have completed an opp in 1 blog, your account is then benched for that opp (you cannot take the same opp in another eligible blog).

How You Are Paid
Submit a link to the post, the post title and tick the terms box. The post is later approved and then 30 days later the whole fee for that post is automatically transferred straight to your PayPal account. No minimum fees, even if it is a $0.50 post it is sent on the 30 day mark and you don’t pay any fees.

Who Is It Suitable For?
Bloggers with established blogs (90 days plus) with some PageRank (ideally PR2 plus seem to get most ops) running blogs that are genuine content blogs.

The Disadvantages
The only way to get ops is by logging on throughout the day and reserving one the moment it appears. One day I tried to reserve over 20 consecutive different ops and between seeing they were available and hitting the reserve button, other people beat me to it. Very frustrating.

The other problem is the price. Considering you are expected to write around 200 words, I’ve seen offers for PR3 blogs as low as $0.50 and even higher PR requests in very niche areas for next to nothing. The payments the advertisers are offering can be very low. If you are lucky, you might grab a $5.50 task for a PR3 blog, but these don’t appear often.

So with the bun fight to get work and the low prices that exist on a lot of it, it is not my favourite system.

Summary
The lower prices and the fight to get opps plus the account benching mean that the potential earnings are far lower than through its sister PayPerPost, but it is very easy to work with as there are no individual post requirements every time you do an opp.

Low PR blogs are going to get next to nothing in InPostLinks and new blogs / spammy blogs / those just for money are not going to be accepted, so there is a good quality control. If you are none of these, then you can sign up and logon each night to see if there is anything there for you.

Well worth joining, even if you are only earning $50 per month.

If you are starting a new blog, or even auditing an existing blog, then you might not have yet considered the pages of your blog other than your posts. But, there should be some almost standard pages. Here are my suggestions and reasons.

A Home Page – On the whole, it is pretty obvious that you are going to have a home page. Most blogs will display recent posts either in full or just as excepts. But, if you are intending to sell posts, then you really should include the full posts to give advertisers full value, and increase your advertising fees.

Contact Page – You may not think that a contact page is a necessary part of a blog, but it is totally essential and should not be excluded! It is vital to have a contact page if you are wanting to run any sort of advertising at all, or to communicate with others who might be interested in your activities.

Displaying your phone number and address is probably far from ideal and displaying your email address opens you to all sorts of spam, but a simple contact page with a contact form is easy enough. Have a look at the newsletter plugins and even captcha form plugins that are available for this.

Why is it essential? Well, once your blog is doing well advertisers might find it and want to ask you about buying space. Other bloggers might want to contact you about guest post opportunities on your website. Having some way of contacting you is invaluable.

Disclosure Page – Only needed if you are making an income in some way from your blog, if you are affiliate selling, sponsored posting or a variety of other paid methods, disclosing that this takes place is a good idea. Just say that you do accept payment for posts and so on.

Subscribe Page – This is another one you might think is pointless, but is actually very useful. You might have a big, easy to use RSS icon on every page, but does every reader of your website know how to use it and what the advantages are?

Create an obvious page, that can be called Follow Us, Read More or something fairly obvious to indicate that it is the page to go to in order to find out more about what you are writing. Give on this links to your RSS feed, plus a comment on the advantages on using RSS Feeds. Sell it to your readers, if they have got to this page rather than using your RSS icon, then they probably need help.

Then either add instructions on how to use the RSS feed or a link to a site that explains it. Some readers could be so pleased to learn this new trick that they decide to follow your blog.

Also, offer a newsletter feed. Use either a suitable plugin or a third party service for this. You are giving your readers plenty of choice as to how to keep updated, meaning they are more likely to keep reading and coming back, thus increasing your traffic!

Here is an offer that you might be interested in if you are starting a blog – 3 years of free website hosting with Robson Communications.

If you are starting a blog then the Robson Communicaitons BBB A+ Rating should be a comforting rating and with their 3 years of free hosting, you should save yourself a lot of cash!

But be quick, their generous offer expires 30th September 2010, so go to the Robson Communicatons website and use the voucher code of WGT38864 to grab this offer.

I promised a couple of weeks ago a series based on ways to turn your blog into a money making machine, so about time I actually started to put down the ideas!

So, to start with, my most successful and probably my favourite way to monetise a blog is via PayPerPost.com. I’ve already talked in a lot of detail on these pages about using PayPerPost, so what is it that makes it so good?

Well the latest version, PPP4, is just an open market place between bloggers and advertisers. There are absolutely no acceptance criteria, other than you own a blog. That blog might have been created 10 minutes ago on a free system and you can still submit it to the system and hope for work to appear.

Earning Money
You earn money quite simply by posting on your blog. The system provides the link (or links) that you have to post to your blog, maybe a few requirements and a minimum word count. You write the post, submit the link and the advertiser approves it within 3 days, or can request changes or just reject it outright. Should they not approve it in 3 days, it is auto approved.

30 days after submitting the post, as long as it is still found on the same URL and the link is still in place, the fee for that post is transferred from your confirmed balance to your earned balance. When this reaches $50 you can cash it out, although if you are desperate, you can cash out less than that for a $2 fee.

How You Are Paid
By PayPal. There are no PayPal fees to cover – these are all prepaid by PayPerPost, hence the minimum cashout or $2 fee. Payment usually arrives in seconds into your PayPal account.

Who It Is Suitable For
One word – bloggers!

Whether you are low or high traffic, low or high Page Rank, few or many Yahoo backlinks you can sign up and get posts. Recent changes have made it easier for advertisers to pick those bloggers who are from native English speaking countries, which seems to be moving opportunities to these places and away from non-native speaking countries, so if you are from one of these then you might not get as much work.

Also, there are many complaints from bloggers about low levels of opportunities. But, usually the blog is full of spelling or grammatical errors, or too much advertising or other aspects that are putting advertisers off.

If you have a good blog, say PR2 or above, then there can be plenty of work at a price that you set yourself.

The Disadvantages
Yes, there are a few problems. Advertisers set up the opps themselves and sometimes get the setup wrong, demanding hundreds of words per post having clicked the option for just a link only. However, maybe there has been a system change as I haven’t seen that recently.

On the same theme, some advertisers request 30 word posts and 3 links and other equally silly requests which do them no good and can harm the blog.

Summary
If you have a well written blog with a few Yahoo Backlinks showing, then you should be able to get at least a few opportunities from the system. PR0 / PR1 blogs seem to get a lot less work, but there is some there for them to get going. As with any of these systems, the work is in fits and starts. But it is well worth joining and probably the best of the lot.

Promoting a blog is easy! You can get loads of new traffic quickly and easily and improve your Page Rank whilst you are at it. You just need to know how. So follow these tips!

Promoting a blog is all about getting your blog noticed in as many other places as possible. The more places that your blog is mentioned the more likely it is that visitors will start arriving at your blog. Here is what you need to do.

Install A Stats Package, Or Two!
It seems daft that the first part of promoting a blog is installing a statistics tool, but you need to know which techniques are working for you to concentrate on them. However, one is not enough! I like to use two packages together. This seems like overkill, but if one stops recording or is showing strange results, the other works as backup. I use the WP-Stats plugin and Google Analytics together.

Target Some Keywords
Head over to the Google Keyword Selector tool, of a title suggestion tool on an article directory and work out some keywords that are being used that have traffic. Your own website stats will also reveal this information – look for keywords that the lesser search engines are sending traffic on and then target these on the higher volume search engines

Write For These Keywords
Now, write content based around these keywords for your blog. Use the keywords naturally in the title and throughout the post. Next, write more articles based on these keywords and submit as articles and guest posts, linking back to your blog with the keywords. Targeted writing will give far more benefits than random writing.

Take Part In Forums
Find a few support forums that talk about subjects related to your blog and sign up to them. Upload a picture of yourself to your profile and add your blog URL to the profile. Now look for questions that you can provide answers and suggestions to and start answering. Over time, people will see your answers, click your photo and visit your site. It really works,

You can also try the same with general discussion forums as well, but they don’t quite carry as much traffic to your site, although there might be more chances of leaving a post.

Join In With Blogs
Look for other people’s blogs that are talking about similar subjects and read their recent posts, If you have something sensible to add to the post then leave a comment. Comments such as ‘Nice post’ quite often get deleted and if they don’t, attract no traffic. But if you can leave a comment adding to the subject or backing it up with your own experience, then your comment is seen as being valuable and should be accepted, whilst other people will see that you are talking sense and might want to know more.

With all of these, be watching your traffic logs and seeing where your traffic comes from. If you see hits from certain forums, blogs and article directories then you know which you should be concentrating on posting to in the future to create more traffic to your blog.

Protecting your blog from idiots that would like to abuse it is essential. There are a lot of changes that you can make to protect it. Here we look at a few essentials.

WordPress is a good solid tool for blogging, but as with any tool, especially such a popular one with open code, security breaches are possible. It is therefore essential that you make some simple changes to protect your blog and keep it secure.

Keep Up To Date
The most important security step is very simple. Make sure that you are on the most recent version of WordPress available. As security problems are detected they are fixed in new releases. So if you do not have the current version installed, get a copy and install it now! I know some people like to wait a while before using a new release so that problems can be ironed out, but with the release candidate process that WordPress goes through, these problems should be minimal so I start my upgrades within a week, upgrading the least important blogs first, as tests.

Delete Your Administrator
The first change should be your admin id. From WordPress 3.0 when you install your blog you can choose a different user id to the default name of ‘Admin’. I do recommend using something different! If you are still using Admin, create a new user with Admin rights, log off, log on as the new user and delete Admin. You will be given the opportunity of moving all posts created by Admin to another name, so you can choose the new administrator.

Give Yourself A Nickname
Now, change your nickname! If your Administrator id is Fred and you display that the posts are written by Fred, you have given the game away. So give the userid a different nickname to the signon name. If you want to go a step further, you can create a new user and just give it author status and use that for adding new posts, keeping the administrator safe for when you need to upgrade the system. This means that if you are blogging away from home and someone gets your sign on details, they cannot change any of the admin side of your bog.

Activate Akismet
This brilliant plugin used to be optional, as with other plugins, but is so useful it is now packaged with WordPress. You must sign up for a Wordress userid and get an API key, but then you can activate the plugin and be protected from Spam comments, which will be automatically removed. However, you should check for false positives where valid comments are detected as Spam.

There are lots more changes you can make to your blog to secure it, depending on how you are operating. For example, if you are running many blogs on one hosting package and one MySQL database, you might like to create a new database userid that has less permissions than a database administrator and altering wp-config to use that database user. But, when you upgrade WordPress and install certain Plugins, you might need to go back to an administrator level.

A couple of days back I successfully migrated one blog to feedburner. Yesterday, I tested with a second blog and then moved this blog.

It’s a shame that I didn’t test this blog when I moved it – it appears that the feed has been down over night. Sorry to anyone trying to access it!

I’m working on it now, but the Feedsmith plugin just does not seem to want to accept that I’ve given it an incorrect Feedburner URL and although I keep updating it, every time it still shows the old URL.

Should have it sorted soon. I hope (I’ve plenty of other tasks to be doing!).

UPDATE: The answer to fixing it is quite simple! You just write a new post and then it all picks up again. Posting the post to say the RSS was down fixed it. Who would have guessed that!

Over on one of my other blogs, I finally set-up Feedburner. It wasn’t too difficult, but it gave me a nice surprise today!

I set up the feed yesterday so I’ve been checking back every so often to this annoying message about taking the bubble wrap off. Basically, it takes Google 24 hours to compose the initial statistics and release them.

And when I viewed the stats I was surprised to see that there are several subscribers to the RSS feed, even though that blog hardly gets any traffic at all.

I’ve got another blog with tons more traffic, so tonight I’ll be setting up Feedburner on that and then watching on Friday to see what the stats say there.

It is interesting though to use. For those who don’t blog and don’t use Feedburner, it basically gives counts of how many subscribers you have, which pages they have accessed and a few other factors, such as the browsers they are using.

But the fact that people are subscribing to the feed and using it to read posts is really great. It make me feel that somewhere out there are people wanting to read my blogs!

There are other reasons for wanting to apply Feedburner. Basically, there’s a theory out there that traffic brings Search Engine Optimisation success. Maybe more about that over the next month.

For now though, I’m just watching Feedburner!

You have installed WordPress, or gone to a free tool. Now you want to make it look as you want it. Where do you start?

I have to say that the default theme provided with the latest versions of WordPress is far better than the themes provided up to version 2.9.2, but even still, on the whole it is not a choice for a serious blog. Why? Well because you want to look unique. If you and thousands others are using the default theme then you are lost in the crowd of same looking blogs.

Find free themes
The first thing to do is to search the internet for some good looking free themes to start of with. There are thousands to choose from, some on WordPress.org and others on a whole myriad of other sites. Take your time and find a few that you like the looks of. I never just choose one and start with that, because quite often what looks good on the sample looks totally different when you install it. I have even download themes and installed them, only to find that they are not compatible with certain popular browsers.

So download a few themes, unzip them to your computer and upload them to your blog (if you haven’t done this before, you load the entire theme directory to wp-content/themes).

Install a theme
Now sign on as your admin user and go to appearance and look for one of the new themes. Click on it to preview and then choose activate. Then have a look at your blog and see if it looks right. If you aren’t sure, activate one of the other themes that you have uploaded and try again.

Customise it!
The customisations available to you will depend on you theme as some have options for different header colours and so on. If this is your first theme that you have uploaded you will also need to go to settings and name your blog and give it a description. “Just another WordPress blog” proudly displayed on the top of your blog does not give a serious impression!

Take a look at the side bars of you new look blog and see what changes you want to make. You might like to go to the widgets section of the appearance menu and choose a few widgets to install. You can select widgets for a whole different array of options, for example different ways to display the archives. Personally, I like to have the archives available on every page, but depending on what you are doing with the blog this might not be needed. Have a look through the widgets and select which you want to display and how.

If you are happy with a bit of PHP code then you can edit the code instead of using the widgets. For example, I always remove the Uncategorised category from the list of displayed categories (just add &exclude=1). My reason being that if I am writing off topic then it is not so essential to link to it from everywhere.

There are loads of customisations you can make, exactly what you do is your choice and you will probably be making changes for a long time.