Actually quite a bit can still go wrong, firstly hackers and scammers who take advantage of outdated blog software to exploit it. Often they can leave your blog intact, but use some space on the site to hide an extra page for a phishing scam. Then they spam the link to this bogus page everywhere to get unwitting people to divulge bank details. But guess who will end up getting taken off the server?
That’s right, your blog comes down, and your domain takes the rap for the spam and gets blacklisted on the spammer sites.

So rule number one is keep your blog software (and any other scripts for that matter) up to date so that any known security holes are plugged. Some updates may also add extra useful functionality, so it’s worth updating your software regularly for those reasons.

Even if your blog is up to date, things can go wrong, and often do. It’s not unheard of for a hosting company to completely disappear, but more often is a hardware failure at the server. When this happens most decent hosting companies will have backups, the cheaper ones won’t. Even the best hosting companies may not have your most recent blog updates saved for you, so you’d better do it yourself.

It makes sense to keep backups of any templates, and modified files locally, and probably a complete backup of the whole site. The thing with blogs and any other non static sites is that they store the information, in the case of a blog all your posts, in a database separately from your main files which run the site. Luckily if you run a Wordpress blog on your own hosted site you can use a plug-in to automatically back up your site as often as you like.

Wordpress Database Backup ( http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup ) can be setup to email your database to you whenever you like. A quick tip I’d like to pass on is Gmail.com, a free Gmail account can be used as the destination for your database backups, and as you get huge amounts of space you can store a lot of backups there. Keep a backup locally on your hard drive, and one online at Gmail and you are fairly sure to have one should you need a database backup.

The worse that can happen is your blog goes down, and there are no backups. Be prepared and this kind of disaster may not be a big hit to your blogs profit. Remember back it up often, and in more than one place.

I just found a quick and easy way to add a subscriber form to your blog with a new low cost plugin, which saves you time as you don’t need to play with widgets, or your blogs theme files.

For more information about Action Opt-in Click Here.

1. A blog automatically updates all the links on your site if you decide to add an extra section or page. A hard wired static site can use PHP or other includes to update the links across the whole site, but it then takes a re-organisation of the menu to fit it all in. A blog will update all the pages, and menus instantly with no further work on the part of the webmaster.
2. Posting to a blog is as quick and easy, as easy as filling in a form. You don’t need to look at html tags, and images can be added as you write. A static site will require an html editor or knowledge of HTMl tags to write your new post or update.
3. Plugins, wordpress has a great plugin system which means you can add functionality across your site with minimal effort. Almost anything you’d want to add to a site is available as a Wordpress plugin, from forms to social bookmarking, adverts to search engine optimisations, all are available to upload and activate.
4. Changing the look and feel of a website can be a hit and miss affair. Especially if the site has a few hundred pages to change. Search and replace software can be used on static sites to replace chunks of html across the whole site, but a blog just needs a new theme. When you theme your blog, the whole site changes with just a click of a button and you don’t need to upload the entire set of html pages each time. Don’t like it, change it back. Try doing that with a static site.
5. Search engines love blogs. Because the whole raison d’etre of a search engine is finding and cataloging content for people to find, a regularly updated blog will have the search engines coming around to check regularly for new posts. You can also choose whether your blog displays a static page at the front or one which changes as you add new posts. Which one do you think will bring the search engines back over and over again? The one which shows the latest post looks like a new page each time, fresh and ready to be re-indexed.

So there are some good reasons to blog rather than run a static site, what do you think isn’t it time you started blogging?

It’s got some pretty good information for a freebie product, some of it we already told you about on this site, but there are a few tactics and plugins for wordpress which we hadn’t tried before. So if you’re looking for information to help you get traffic to your blog, or any other site then we recommend this site

http://www.thediscountebookstore.com/likes/traffictactics

You have to sign up, and there is an upsell for more traffic tactics, that is up to you of course, but the blog traffic guide is free to download, and useful. Go ahead and download it and let us know what you think of it later.

http://www.thediscountebookstore.com/likes/traffictactics

Firstly I will run through the basic plug ins I add to all my blogs for traffic generation from search engines. I set these up first as they will be helping every time a new article is added to the directory. My first suggestion is All in One SEO Pack as this helps to make your blog posts get ranked in search engines with the appropriate tags, and titles etc. This helps no end in getting traffic for free from search engines, and making sure your listing is right in the searches. Using the defaults in most of the settings works well enough for the lazy people like me too.

In addition to All in One SEO I always ensure my blogs use permalinks, and use the structure
” /%category%/%postname%/ ” in the “Custom Structure” field in permalink settings. These together help give the search engine rankings a boost and bring the traffic in. Once you have traffic you can start monetising your articles, oh yeah we haven’t got to the articles yet have we? Don’t worry it’s coming but lets get it all ready for making your pocket money on the blog first.

To monetise a blog, I use a widget with Adsense in on the right of the page, and also a plugin called Adsense Injection available at http://www.biggnuts.com which will place Adsense blocks in the article text automatically wrapping it in the text. You can also add Link-A-Dink plug in to turn some key words and phrases within articles to text links to affiliate products or your other sites. Of course how you monetise your blog is up to you, and you may do it even better than I do, this works for me and I’m too lazy to experiment.

On this blog I also addeed Role Manager, WP-PageNavi and  MaxBlogPress Favicon plugins. The last of these helps to get your blog noticed by adding one of those little icons to the title bar of the browser and also to the title when bookmarked, which helps it stand out a little and makes people come back again. You can add your choice of plugins too, if you have other things you like to see on your sites.

We now have a Wordpress blog, which looks like an article directory and works like one. It also attracts traffic from search engines to the articles which we don’t have yet. This is where the best bit comes in, free content added automatically. The plug in for this is on the Unique Article Wizard Plugins  page UAW Plugins for Various Article Directories where you can download the unique articles plugins for various scripts including Wordpress. Activate the plugin, and fill in the details in the settings, and you will start receiving articles to your new site almost immediately.
In my case I have had over 3000 articles in a few weeks, and the search engines have started sending enough traffic to earn me some extra Google Adsense cash this month.

You can setup an article directory or any niche themed website with Wordpress, and start getting article submissions in minutes. As it grows, hopefully so will your pocket money. And if you’re one of those people who likes to test and tune, fiddle around with the settings, and you could probably be making a bit more than pocket money from a blog like the one outlined here. The choice is yours. But whatever you do, get started on your pocket money blog soon.

The blog in question at http://www.articlesand.info could probably make a bit more profit with tweaking, probably will make a little more as it grows, but in reality was just a way to use up a domain I already had paid for.  It took next to no time to set up, takes a few minutes a week to keep it going and brings in a little pocket money. Now that’s a way to get started blogging for profit.

So how did this come about?

Firstly I had the domain http://www.articlesand.info sitting around awaiting a script for me to publish an articles directory (I have used a couple before but they were insecure). I also have a reseller hosting account for all my domains at Hostgator which is paid for by my other sites profits. If you are hosting more than a couple of sites, Hostgator is a great place to put them. So I had everything I needed to put together a site except the script for the article directory.

That’s when I saw something about using Wordpress as an article directory. I experimented on my own but it was a bit hit and miss. I googled for a Wordpress article directory plug in and found there was one available at http://articlesss.com/article-directory-wordpress-plugin/ which also offers a nice article directory style theme to go with it. To get it up and running quickly, I used cpanel to install Wordpress from Fantastico (all included in your hostgator hosted account) filled in a few fields on a form and Wordpress was installed. I then installed the article directory plug in and theme. Now it was ready to take some articles from other authors.

Actually it wasn’t ready yet, if you have ever installed Wordpress on your own domain, you will probably have encountered comment spam. So one of the first plugins I activate in Wordpress blogs is the Akismet one which is usually installed with WP anyway. There are other comment spam filters, but Akismet does the job well enough. So this helps to keep my time spent on the blog to minimum as most comment spam is removed for me automatically.

part 2 to follow soon.

Having a blog on the Internet that gives people some good informaton doens’t do a lot of good if people don’t know that it’s there. If you want people to be able to find your blog, something that is important is that you have good Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

Whenever you put one or more words into a search bar to look for something, the SEO of a website is what helps bring up those websites. For example, if your blog is about Harry Potter, you are going to want to be sure that your blog includes popular terms such as Harry Pottter, JK Rowling, and other things that are related to Harry Potter. Think about the things that people look for when they are interested in Harry Potter, and the kinds of things that come up when you search.

It’s always a good idea to use your own experience when you are optimizing your blog for searching. Think about what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and use them for your own blog SEO. This way, when someone puts one of the terms that you put in your blog into a search engine it will be one of the sites that comes up.

Of course, there are other factors that come into play that determine where your blog will come up in the list, but everyone starts somewhere. The more keywords that your blog uses, the more people will come to your blog. It just takes time and patience.

With blog advertising, there are no set rates. It is up to the blogger to design the correct ad payment scheme that attracts advertisers and allow him to generate a reasonable income at the same time.

To help you determine the right advertising rates for your blog, it’s important to consider doing some research first, particularly about similar blogs and to consider your traffic and perform some simple experimentation using your site.

Playing with figures If you think that setting your ad rates at low prices will attract more advertisers, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Your $300 a month rate may not stand against another blogger’s $600 a month rate if you only have 50,000 page views monthly and he enjoys 600,000 page views.

An advertiser will look at the ratio between the cost of advertising on your blog against the amount of traffic that your site generates, the same traffic that will potentially click on the ads.

A good ‘constant’ to consider when determining ad rates is the CPM or Cost-Per-Mille - mille being equivalent to 1,000. Let’s say a blog receives 150,000 page views monthly. For a 125×125 sidebar ad (usually the most common), the blog charges $250 monthly. Divide $250 by 150 (that’s 150,000 divided by 1,000 to come up with the CPM) and you’ll get $1.66 CPM.

The same arithmetic is used by some of the most popular blogs, including JohnChow and Copyblogger. For your blog, you might want to consider how much traffic you generate and the number of genuine page views you get. These figures will help you evaluate your blog and come up with the appropriate ad rate.

Since these blogs are well established, you could start at far lower rates if you’re still building traffic. Consider a starting figure of about $0.5 CPM, which is friendly enough to your advertisers and good enough for you. Raise this rate gradually as your blog becomes more popular and as more advertisers and sponsors buy ad space from you.

Size and location Advertising rates also vary depending on the size of the ad and where it will appear. Larger ads and those that will be placed in prime locations or ‘hotspots’ will cost more. Ads will also be more expensive if they will appear along with content or on your blog’s header. Cheaper locations will be those found on the page’s footer and the area located after the fold.

Factors that influence ad rates Not every blog can enjoy strong advertising support. That’s mainly because not every blog has the right amount of site traffic, the right visitors, market demographics or niche. These are just some of the factors that affect your eligibility for ad placement and the rate you can charge on your blog.

Blogs, by the way, do not pass through the same channels as traditional print media. The cost of providing information in blogs is low enough that bloggers can offer low advertising rates and still earn a profit.

Many bloggers dream of entering the sphere of professional blogging. There are very few people who happily devote an hour or more each day to their blog without at least occasionally wishing that they could earn some kind of financial reward for all of their work. Several models exist for making money with a blog, the most popular being to sell advertising space through Google’s AdSense program or directly to a company that wishes to reach the demographic that your blog appeals to. However, there are very few people indeed who can make a comfortable living just by selling space on their blog sidebars.

A lot of the people who read weblogs are bloggers themselves, in part because of the fact that the people who use blogging technology on a daily basis are most likely to be interested in what other writers are doing with the medium. This fact begins to explain why the people who succeed in the world of professional blogging are mostly people who have devoted themselves almost entirely to learning about, talking about, and writing about blogging. More than any other topic, pro bloggers turn their attention to the phenomenon of blogging itself. A lot of pro bloggers make the topic of blogging the stunningly self-reflexive ongoing focus of their blogs.

Of course, professional blogging is destined to become much more complicated in the future than it is today. In the current moment, pro bloggers who attract the largest audiences and make the most money are mostly concerned with investigating the blogging movement and with offering advice to amateur bloggers. However, as the kinds of people who regularly read blogs changes, and the demographics of bloggers expand and diversify as blogging software becomes more user friendly, it is very likely indeed that the world of pro blogging will begin to reflect these changes. Indeed, it is very difficult to predict exactly what kinds of blogs will be reaping the greatest financial rewards five or ten years down the road. The world of pro blogging is one of constant change and flux, which is part of what makes it so exciting.

If you didn’t already know it, one thing which can help your blog get more traffic is backlinks. Backlinks are any link which points to your site. The more links you have pointing to your site the better, not just in the hope someone will click on the link from someone elses site, but also for Search Engine rankings.

Search engines (some of the major ones anyway) use the amount of links going to a site as part of the algorithm for deciding its position. That oversimplifies it somewhat as they also take into account many other factors but for the benefit of brevity and staying on topic we’ll just say that more backlinks will help your ranking in the search engines.

There are lots of ways to get links back to your site, such as writing and submitting articles, which is highly recommended as it gives you one way inbound links which count more towards your score. Another way which can help is by exchanging links with other site owners.

As the phrase “link exchange” implies, you will be exchanging a link for a link. So in other words you find someone with a similar site to yours, link to them and they in turn put a link on their site back to yours. With a blog this can seem a difficult and time consuming occupation, as you’d need to post a new page for your link exchange partners, and edit it each time you add a new link.

Wordpress comes with a built in link system called a Blogroll, which shows the links you add to it on your site. Obviously this could become unsightly and take up a lot of space in the sidebar as you start getting more and more link exchanges made. Because Wordpress blogs are easily upgraded to perform new tasks with “plugins” it isn’t as hard as it may seem to deal with link exchanges using the Blogroll.

You can download the Blogroll Page Plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blogroll-links which turns your blogroll sidebar widget into a full blown links page. Each time you add a link to your blogroll it will be added to the page. It even allows categories to be used to segregate the links however you wish.

Increase your sites visibility start your link exchange process today, it’s easy now you know how to make Wordpress Blogroll work for you.

Article by Douglas Titchmarsh (c)