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Getting traffic to your blog is not as hard as maintaing it. When you start a blog, you might think you are the only person blogging on that topic - you are wrong. There are literally hundreds and thousands of others who write on that very topic. Out of that pool only handful make it big time. You may ask- How to know if others are blogging better than you on that niche. Just look around, they are already successful and you are not. If readers do not visit your site, make them. To do this, make every post interesting. Think outside the box and give them a twist. For example, if you are a blogger about making money online, you do not have to invent something to write to get traffic. If you cannot find new materials, just rewrite the old stuff floating around the net and spice them up. Be creative. Change the tone of your articles to more sarcastic and humorous. People like funnies. It keeps them coming back for more.

To inspire you folks, I have included an example of a “different” writing. This is a old piece and (written more than a decade ago) if you have already read it, read it again. I am sure it will make you smile again.

This essay was written as a college application essay by Hugh Gallagher.

Essay Topic: Are there any sinificant experiences you have had, or accomplishments you have realized, that have helped to define you as a person?

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don’t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But I have not yet gone to college.

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You can find top Wordpress plugins posted by virtually every blogger. Well, its my turn to put forward mine. I will rate the plugins on the basis of its necessity, importance and coolness.

10. Adsense Deluxe: This is number ten because not everyone uses adsense to monetize their blog. This plugin allows automatic insertion of google adsense ads or yahoo publishing network (YPN) ads in between posts or wherever you want it.

Necessity: * Importance: ** Coolness: ***

9. Simple Tags: If you want to tag your posts with important keywords then this plugin is for you. Tagging makes the post more search engine friendly and is proven to increase traffic.

Ultimate Tag Warrior the previous best tag plugin is not compatible with Wordpress 2.3+. For other tagging related plugins go here!

I haven’t used any Tag Plugin in this blog but you can see the keyword tags after each post. I just included a line of php code in the loop of my ‘Main Index Template’. So, if you want to give it a try, just copy and paste the code below in the loop after the post entry.

<?php the_tags(); ?>

Necessity: * Importance: *** Coolness: ***

8. Sociable: This plugin allows your to put small icons of various social bookmarking sites like digg, del.icio.us, etc after each post which helps your readers spread the word about your blog.

Necessity: * Importance: *** Coolness: ****

7. Wp-Super Cache: As the name suggests, this is a caching system which makes your blog load faster and makes it highly responsive. If you used the Sociable plugin and got your blog dugg then this plugin will help your blog survive the ‘Digg effect’. This plugin might not be as important if your blog traffic is low.

Necessity: ** Importance: **** Coolness: *

6. Related Posts: After each post, this plugin shows the title of other posts that are related to the current post. This is highly effective to engage your readers and get more page views. You can see the example of this plugin in this blog. After every post there are links to the older related posts.

Necessity: ** Importance: *** Coolness: ****

5. FeedBurner FeedSmith: This plugin was creatd by Steve Smith and now adopted by FeedBurner themselves. Here are Smith’s words about this plugin:

this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Necessity: *** Importance: **** Coolness: **

4. Optimal Title: This is a really cool and important plugin. Here is the original description of this plugin:

This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first. Having your page information appear before your blog name in the title is advantageous because it provides more meaningful search engine results and browser bookmark names. The text that appears between your <title> tags is used to generate both of these things, and will often be truncated when viewed. Because of this, it is more effective to have words directly relating to the content of your page appear before common markers. Not only will the titles be more meaningful, but the they will also be more scan able when being viewed in a list.

If that confused you, it simply means it makes the post title appear as the blog title for the respective post page. You can see the example on this blog.

Necessity: *** Importance: **** Coolness: ***

3. Google Sitemap Generator: This plugin generated a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your Wordpress blog which is supported not only by Google but also by Ask.com and Yahoo. Sitemap is basically the map of your site in the language search engine bots can understand. This is an important plugin for SEO purposes.

Necessity: *** Importance: ***** Coolness: **

2. Wp-Contact Form With Spam Protection: Wp-Contact Form allows your readers to contact you without having to email you. This plugin creates a simple contact form where readers can fill in their information and leave your messages. The Contact Form now comes with spam protection. So, yay!!

Necessity: *** Importance: **** Coolness: ****

1. Wordpress Database Backup: Now, this plugin is perhaps the most important plugin after Akismet. It creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. So, if you are not very good at backing up your database yourself, like me, then this plugin is absolutely necessary. You never know what accident might happen.

Necessity: ***** Importance: ***** Coolness: ***

Top Wordpress Plugin: Akismet is a spam protection plugin which comes by default with Wordpress ( You just need to activate it and insert the Wordpress.com API key). I would include this as Number 1 but since it is already present in your plugins directory, I decided to give this a special mentioning. Spam is a big and annoying issue and akismet really helps filter them out.

Necessity: ***** Importace: ***** Coolness: *****

Other Mentionable Plugins: Source:

No Ping Wait - Speeds up posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php.

PXS Mail Form - Creates a mail form with multipart verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send. It is much more easy to contact with website author.

SpotMilk - SpotMilk is the admin theme for WordPress 2.0. It makes wp-admin panel much nicer.

Super Archive - Implements a dynamic archive, the best archives system i know.

SRG Clean Archives - Super clean archive. Very simple and useful.

WP lightbox 2 - Overlay images on the current page for WordPress. You can turn it on and all images are now working with it.

fQuick - Sidenotes, short notes for WordPress. You can place it for example in sidebar.

CG-FlashyTitles - Implementation of sIFR 2.0 Flash-based - Nice graphical flash titles for WP. Very easy to install.

flickrRSS - Integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. Show flickr photos on your website.

Feedburner Feed Replacement - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

Gravatars - Add gravatar support to WP. Administrative interface to control default gravatar options.

Get Recent Comments - Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar or where you want.

WP Paginate - Create pagination for pages. It is the best plugin for that makes navigation easy with many static pages.

wp-notable - Add social bookmark links such as digg or del.icio.us to each blog entry

Exec-PHP - Execute PHP code in posts or static pages. When this plugin is on you can add php code to static pages or even posts.

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Now that you have your Wordpress blog ready, here is a simple change that will help your rank better in search engine which in turn will drive more traffic. By default, Wordpress uses the permalink (the permanent link of a particular post) which contains question mark symbol and lots of numbers. As mysterious and coded the permalink might look , it is not search engine or human friendly. So, I recommend you change the permalink structure to ‘Date and name based’.

First log in to the admin section of the blog and go to options and then to Permalinks. You will see a page like this:

Simply select the ‘Date and name based’ radio button and update the permalink structure. Now instead of just numbers, you will have the whole post title in the permalink.

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Step-by-step guide to setup up your blog powered by Wordpress

1. Choosing your niche and getting a relevant domain.
2. Finding a web host that supports php script and provides MySQL database.
3. Installing Wordpress.
4. Designing your blog to look professional and authentic.
5. Writing good content.

Now that you know what a blog is, let’s see how to setup a blog powered by Wordpress. As mentioned in the previous post, Wordpress is a blogging software which can be downloaded free. Before you install wordpress, make sure your web host supports php script and provides MySQL database. You will need them. If you are finding it hard to find a cheap web host that fulfill these requirements, I suggest you visit 1and1 web hosting (aff) because compared to other hosting sites, it is dirt cheap and more reliable. This site is hosted on 1and1 and I have never had any problems with them (It has been two years now). Don’t pay for your hosting yet, you will need something else first.

Choose your niche and get a relevant domain name:

You might say, “hey, I know I need a domain name, tell me something I do not know”. Getting a domain name might be obvious but obvious is usually the hardest thing to see. It is always better to register a longer domain name easier to remember and that makes sense than a shorter one that doesn’t. Try sticking with just letters. Numbers, hyphens and other unknown characters can confuse your user. And register the ‘.com’ domain rather than ‘.net’ or ‘.org’. Last point about registering your domain- It is always helpful if your domain name is related to the niche of your site. For example, if you want to blog about celebrities, then having a word celebrity or something related with help your site gain SERPs ( search engine result page). And hopefully, I do not need to tell you how does ranking at the top help your blog. Your site’s niche defines its content. Blog about stuff that you know inside-out and love to talk about. If you choose your niche that you have no knowledge on, you will soon run out of stuff to write and there goes your blogging career down the drain.

Installing Wordpress

Now that you have registered a relevant domain name, pay your hosting fees and download Wordpress. Unzip the file and upload all the files to your server then enter your database details in wp-config-sample.php file and rename it to wp-config.php. Point the browser to the directory where your have uploaded the files and Wordpress will install itself and you are good to go.

Look and feel of your site

You will now need to find a good Wordpress theme that makes your site look professional and authentic. This is very important. Although the Cliché “Don’t judge the cover by its book” is absolutely true, good cover does attract more customers. There are literally thousands of ‘Wordpress theme’ sites. Just Google it. If you cannot find a decent theme, ask for professional help. There are many coders who will do it for you for a reasonable price. Remember: if your blog looks professional, people perceive you as a professional. And, if you cannot maintain that image among your readers, then you, my friend, will learn it the hard way.

Finally, sit back, relax and write good content

As important as site design is, if you do not provide good content, you might as well sell books with just pretty covers and empty pages. So, write good content relevant to your niche. If you are finding it hard to get started, find a free lance writer to do it for you. Make sure you have a legible writing skills in whatever language your blog is in, else the unprofessional factor will come to play again. Write regularly and try to make it original. If you are just worthless in creative writing, find an article written by someone else and paraphrase it or rewrite it. Never copy directly from others and not only for moral reasons but also for legal and search engine’s hatred reason.

I will provide some composition and formating rules in the upcoming posts.

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