Finally, we have looked through many aspects of starting a new blog. In summary, we have seen:

Introduction
What is a blog – what can you use a blog for? What exactly is a blog?

Starting A Blog
The free way to start a blog – how can you start a blog totally for free? What is needed and how can it be done?

The best blog tool to use – what tool should you be using to start your blog? The answer depends on your intentions!

Installing WordPress for a new blog – It’s my favourite blogging tool to use, so how do you install it?

Essential pluggins for your blog – what plugin are vital to the success of your blog, that you really cannot do without?

Customising the look of your new blog – make it look and feel your own. You do not want it the smae as every other blog out their.

Essential security changes – making your blog secure is vital to keep it safe. What can you be doing to protect it so that it runs happily for years to come?

Essential pages – what pages are needed in a blog? There are more than you might realise, or use. So check out this list.

Making Money Blogging
Earn money blogging – how can you earn money through your blog? There are loads of ways, here is just a taster! We’ll look at making money from a blog in more detail next month!

Getting More Blog Traffic
How to promote a blog – how can you get more traffic to a blog painlessly? Just building isn’t enough, you need to take actions.

RSS Feeds – What is RSS and why is it useful. Can it really help you to gain more visitors?

Mailing Lists – If you have RSS, why have mailing lists? They both work well together and both are needed. So, how do you run a mailing list for free?

Article Writing – Promoting your new blog through article writing for search engine optimisation and direct traffic.

Analyse Your Stats – by spending some time looking through your blog statistics you can increase the number of visitors to your site and the number of pages each is viewing.

Commenting For Traffic – the best ways to leave comments on other blogs to generate traffic.

What exactly is a blog and what is blogging? Many people do not know, yet they are interested and want to give it a go. What do you have to do and what do you need to be able to starting blogging? Read on…

A blog is basically a simple website, although a lot are far from simple these days! Originally blogging started as writing an online journal to share with people, but these days they have evolved and a blog is anything you really want it to be. It can be a journal of what you are doing and plan to do or it can be you sharing your thoughts about anything that you want. You might be talking about events that affect your business or you might be providing help and advice to your readers. You could even be reviewing latest products, films or publishing discount voucher codes. A blog can be anything that you want it to be.

A blog usually uses specialist website creation tools, which makes the process of blogging very easy. Although, if you prefer, there is nothing to stop you writing your own blogging system. But there are so many excellent blogging tools on the internet, mostly available for free, that there is absolutely no need to write your own or even pay for a tool.

When you start blogging you write a some text and post this to your blog. Therefore, a new entry is known as a post. You can normally also assign categories and tags to each post. These identify related posts by putting all of the same themed posts into the same category, or tag. Each post can fit into as many categories and tags as are relevant to it to help readers and search engines find their way around your blog.

A blog will normally display the latest posts on the home page so that search engines and regular readers can quickly see what is new and read that without having to explore the entire site. As well as these posts living on the relevant category and tag pages, plus their own page, they will also be indexed on an archive page based on the date their were submitted, usually down to month level.

It is this fantastic cataloging, that takes place automatically, that makes blogs so welcomed by the search engines and regular readers alike. And because they are so easy to use, anyone can quickly have a well organised website in minute. But, there are also other tricks such as Pings, which notify search engines that a new post has been written and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) that allows readers to see what you have recently written without having to visit the website!

So what do you need to do to start blogging? The first step is to set up your blog and then after that you just write regular posts. How long they are, whether they have images, graphics or illustrations and how frequently you write is entirely up to you, There are no restrictions as to what you need to do – it is your blog, so do with it as you like!

Leaving comments on other people’s blog is a good way of getting a share of their visitors, with their blessing. So, what should you be doing?

No Spam Here!
Well for a start, no spammy comments. Spammy comments are likely to be deleted by the blog owner and spammy comments do not encourage traffic.

You are trying to encourage people who read your comments to see that you have something useful to say and then to click on the link to your blog to see what you have to say. This requires quality comments that add to the post. Not just generic how pleased you are to find the site rubbish.

Be Happy With One Link
Many comment leavers try to add extra links to their comment, not be satisfied with the main link. But, this is a flag for spam and looks tacky, meaning that you are more likely to be rejected. It also looks impolite and reduces your click through rate.

Finding Blogs To Comment On
This is the hard part of this process. Look through other blogs in your niche and see if you can comment on any recent posts. Trying to find high traffic blogs is the trick, but then you might find your comment buried amongst hundreds of other comments so that none of the other readers see the comment. Also, commenting on old posts might result in no other visitors popping by.

There is a trick that you can use here and that is to look at the people commenting on popular blogs and visit their blogs. It is likely that these people are commenting to raise the profile of their own blogs, so if you go to their blogs and start reading recent posts you might be able to leave comments.

When these owners see that they are getting comments, they are likely to wonder who you are and they themselves might follow your link to your blog (I know, done it myself). As you already know that they are going around blogs leaving comments, there is a good chance they are looking for new places to leave comments and so will try out your blog. Direct traffic creation! Best of all, they might even keep coming back to leave more comments.

Measuring Your Success
There is no point in leaving hundreds of comments that have taken you a while to read the post and then a bit more time to think of something constructive to add. So you want to know that the system is working and concentrate on just these blogs for leaving comments.

So make sure you have a decent traffic statistics package installed and use it to see which blogs are sending you visitors from your comments. You can then subscribe to the RSS feeds of these websites so that as they place a new post you can be amongst the first to comment.

Taking It A Step Further
If you look on a list of do-follow blogs, then the comments that you leave will not only generate traffic for you but will also give you a tiny bit of search engine favour. Maybe not must, but if you can leave a comment a day it soon adds up. This means that you are getting an additional benefit to your work.

Increasing traffic to a blog is a lot about being able to read and understand your statistics. So, how do you do it?

Recording Your Blog Traffic Statistics
First of all you need some way of recording and reporting back to you your traffic statistics. But, the problem is, that some of the time you will doubt the figures. That unexpected day when you have received no traffic, or a huge traffic blip. Are they for real, or are they errors in the reports?

For this reason it is good to use two traffic packages together. And the pairing I use and recommend start with Google’s Analytics. Sign up for a Google Account then to Analytics and install their code. The problem is that you can be overwhelmed with information, they record so much. But you get a lot of detail and it is stored a long time.

I partner this with WP-Stats. A simple plugin to install and activate, you just need the API key. This provides real time monitoring of your visitors showing the information that you need on a daily basis on a single report page. Works a treat!

Visitors And Hits
Now that you have your statistics, you can start monitoring visitors and hits along with search engine keyword terms and visited pages.

There is a big difference between page hits and visitors. Ideally, both are high, but 1 visitor can look at several pages and create several page hits in a visit, day or a longer time period. Ideally you want your visitors looking at many pages as it shows that your content is interesting and you are building up regular readers.

So, a high ratio of page views to visitors is ideal. But you also want a good number of daily unique visitors as this represents the new people visiting your website.

Well Read Post Pages
Have a look at the pages that are regularly read. Are they being found through searches or are visitors finding them by browsing the site? If some posts are very well read, make sure that the navigation of every page makes these easy to find. This way, not only will visitors be more likely to see the popular material, these posts will also be highlighted to the search engines, who might then rank them better.

Review Keyword Terms
Lastly for now, look through the search engine keyword terms to see what terms are sending you traffic. Could you write new, better posts that are directly related to these terms? Could you do some link building on these terms to make sure that your site is performing well on all search engines, not just on those sending your visitors?

By taking some time to look through and understand your traffic statistics you can be gently remodelling your website so that you are increasing the number of new visitors that arrive each day and increasing the number of pages that they are each reading.

With a little bit of time and effort, your traffic statistics will increase and your blog’s popularity will go sky high.

Building traffic to a blog is essential and one of the great ways of doing that is through article writing. This process, along with guest posting, works on 2 ways.

But to begin with, you need to do your research. Before starting to write a random collection of articles that you can submit to you favourite collection of article directories and blogs, you need to prepare the groundwork.

Targeted Writing, Not Mass Waffle!
Just writing, writing and writing is not the best way forward. It might, long term, increase your Page Rank, but this is just an indicator of the trust your website has gained from Google and does not affect the traffic that you will receive.

Instead, you need to research keyword phrases and write about them. Use tools such as the Google Keyword selector tool and type in a couple of keywords that relate to your website. From this you can see the volumes of traffic that are associated with your preferred keywords and then pick some that are probably not that competitive and you might be able to perform well with.

Find The Longer Keywords
You should be able to dig around these keywords to find longer phrases that include these keywords, which have probably got less traffic and less competition. It is these longer keywords that you should start on, as by default as you work on the longer ones, your ranking for the shorter ones also starts to improve.

Not Just Search Engine Optimisation
But, this is only the first aspect of article writing for traffic. As you write and submit articles you are spreading your incoming links far and wide and it is these that the search engines reward you for with more traffic.

There is a second, huge, advantage of article writing. If you are submitting also to the high quality, high traffic article directories rather than just the low quality directories that exist only for page rank, there is a huge benefit that you might initially overlook.

Real People Read Your Writing
And this benefit is in actual traffic arriving from these article directories and blogs you are guest posting on. One article alone that I wrote a few months ago still sends me 1 or 2 visitors every day, just from one article directory.

For this to work you have to submit to quality site, produce useful and well written pieces that provide some valuable information that the visitors to the sites want to read, can find and then tempt the readers over to your site to discover more about what you have to say.

It Is Not Easy, But It Works!
No one has ever said it is easy, but it is possible to use article writing to increase your website optimisation and also directly increase the traffic to your website, if you take your time to research the subject and then write a good article.

It can be wonderfully rewarding to start seeing a trail of visitors arriving at your website because of your hard work. So try it now!

You may or may not use a mailing list for your blog, or website. If you don’t you are missing a huge slice of traffic and profit. Here is why.

You can use a mailing list in many ways, even alongside an RSS feed. Some people think that because you have an RSS feed that a mailing list is not needed, but that is not true. They both have their advantages and both can be used together.

RSS Feeds Are Immediate
An RSS Feed gives immediate information to your readers. As soon as the bookmark updates, they can see if you have posted anything new. They are also in control of when they look for new posts. These feeds look far better than mailing lists, so why use both?

A Mailing List Gives More Control
Well with a mailing list, you are in control of what you send and when. If you have found a special offer or valuable piece of information then you can highlight it within the newsletter, but getting the readers to read that particular RSS Feed entry is down to your skills of writing a good, succinct, title.

The benefits of sending a weekly or monthly newsletter are great. You can send to your list a summary of recent posts, along with a few extra adverts that might not fit in with an RSS Feed. You can highlight the main post that you want to draw people in with at the top of the newsletter and other lesser posts further on.

The Hidden Extra Values
But a mailing list once it grows has a bigger appeal than just that. If you are hoping to profit from blogging it can also have a marketing value on top of what you might expect. I am not advocating selling the names under any circumstances, that could destroy the list and is unethical. But there are subtle ways to make cash.

If advertisers discover you have a list of people that like to read your blog then they might be interested in placing a small advert in the newsletter. Or maybe if they have an affiliate product on offer you can write a post about it, selling the advantages, and then include a mention of the product in your newsletter. Maybe even just send a newsletter about this one post to really highlight it. As long as you are only sending odd newsletters, every couple of weeks, this should not offend.

A Newsletter Is Easy
Running a newsletter is easy. Sign up to a free service and grab their signup form. Put this form onto somewhere obvious on every page and promote it. Maybe even one of those bars that scroll up above the rest of the page to really attract attention.

Reassure your readers that you will not spam them and will not sell their email addresses and make sure that they newsletters you send are of valuable and sell your blog and themselves. Make the newsletters something that your readers will want to receive.

This way, the mailing list will give you the opportunity to run an excellent newsletter that increases your website traffic and adds value to your website.

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.

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!

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.