Blogs are a very popular outlet for Internet marketing? they are easy to start up and easy to keep up, they’re also a free medium to advertise products and ideas with content. Blogs are popular because readers get to participate in the conversation about niche markets and aren’t as formal as sales pages and website pages. Once you have a blog up and running, you need to promote it to get traffic to your blog? we won’t go into what you should have in your blog (compelling, interesting and informative articles/copy that engages the reader and creates a dialogue), but we will look at the top 10 ways to promote your blog and get the traffic that you need.

1. Social Bookmarking Sites

Sites such as Digg and Delicious grab traffic and have it head right for your blog. These are quite easy to use (so long as you don’t vote for yourself)? create a free account, write a description, add tags and the address to your blog, and voila! - With compelling headlines and descriptions, you can quickly gain traffic to your blog.

2. Visiting Forums

Visiting forums in your niche market is nearly as old as the Internet itself ?but this works and it’s free. Participate in the forums with relevant (and compelling) information that leads to what your blog is all about. Having a great signature line with a link to your blog is the key.

3. Free eBooks

Writing and offering free eBooks will also bring traffic to your website. Your eBook should be compelling, well written and chock full of useful information (otherwise, no one will visit your blog, thinking you’re nothing real to say anyway).

4. Join Groups

Look at MSN, Yahoo and Google groups and find some that are relevant to your niche. Don’t spam them ? enjoy the conversation and ease into it.

5. Video it

Create a video (or hire someone to do it) then submit it to one of the many popular video sites (such as YouTube) and find more traffic being directed to your site. It’s not a secret that video sites are incredibly popular and that this popularity is only growing each and every day ?so get in on the action, create a compelling video and get more traffic to your blog.

6. Update Regularly

Updating your blog regularly is very important. You have to continue updating with relevant information that is interesting and leads to more information yet to come. This will bring people back to your blog time and time again.

7. Blog Directories

This is very simple ?submit your blog to blog directories for backlinks and new potential readers. Although most blog directories will require a link back from your blog, it may not have to be permanent. Here are a few of the most popular blog directories you should submit to:

• BlogCatalog
• Blog Flux Directory
• BlogHub

8. Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

RSS feeds are also incredibly popular and this allows your loyal readers to know when you’re updated your blog (which should be often and regularly). It’s quite easy to RSS your blog and this allows your readers to know when you’re posted more information that they want to read.

9. RSS Directories

Don’t forget, now that you’re syndicated your blog, to submit to RSS directories as well.

10. SEO your Blog

The most importnat, SEOing your blog will lead to receiving completely free traffic from search engines. The main things you need to do is make sure your markup is error-free, and you’re using headings, such as <h1>, <h2> and <h3>’s, the most important three. You should also link to your homepage with the appropriate anchor text. You should try and get as many quality backlinks as you can to help this along.

With WordPress, you have pages that display the content you put on those pages. To style the content on these pages, we use different files in a WordPress theme. But which files are assigned to which pages? That’s where the Template Hierarchy comes in. Depending on what templates are available in the theme, different files will be assigned to certain pages.

“WordPress looks for template files with specific names in the current Theme’s directory and uses the first matching template file listed under the appropriate query section below.” - WordPress Codex

There’s no better way to understand the WordPress Template Hierarchy than to see it visually.

Source: WordPress Template Hierarchy Diagram

When designing blogs, there are a few different design elements that we need to take into account every time. BlogDesignBlog has written a really nice article about “How to Blog Design Style Guide” and he has broken these different design elements into different parts. The more attention you give to each part, the better your overall blog design will be. He has divided the design elements into 9 categories, analyse each part with us carefully with some very nice exmaples.

Source: How to Blog Design Style Guide

We are happy to announce the winners of 2 x Market Premium WordPress Themes Giveaway are

1. SE7EN
2. Kelly

We have just contacted Astereostudio and they will send you an email about getting the free Market Premium WordPress Theme very soon. Thank you for all of the participants. We will have a new giveaway event very soon. Please stay tuned.

Trackbacks are the messages displayed in the comments list whenever another blog links back to one of your posts. If you use trackbacks on your blog, it is best if they are not mixed with the comments. The comments are a conversation between between real people. Having machine-generated links in the middle of that will only serve to disrupt the conversations.

ProBlogDesign has shared a method that will lift out all of the trackbacks, and then display them as a numbered list after the list of comments is finished. Once you have this done, customizing the trackbacks to appear however you want them to is simple.

P.S. Thank you Eli from Photoshopstar letting me know this lovely WordPress trick.

Source: Separating Trackbacks from Comments

How do you get your new site in front of thousands of people? The best and easiest way is to get featured on CSS galleries. Being featured on CSS galleries can give you traffic increases of up to 5,000 uniques a day that last for several days. Once the initial spike ends, you will continue to see several hundred visits a day. CSS galleries are quickly becoming one of the first places professionals look when trying to find talented web designers.

You could randomly submit your site to one gallery and more than likely end up on many more. However, if you take a more structured approach to your submitting, you end up getting featured on more sites. There are some galleries that want to be the first to feature you, and probably won’t feature you if you have already been seen on too many other sites. The key is to submit and get listed on these first, then follow with the less picky sites. DesignReviver has a great list of CSS galleries and the order of submitting it, please view Promote Yourself Through CSS Galleries.

Source: Promote Yourself Through CSS Galleries

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? WordPress 2.5 will remain familiar to seasoned users while improving the experience for everyone. This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint, it’s very organized so that you can forget about the software and focus on your own creative pursuits. Here is a sneak peek of WordPress 2.5.

With the new design, the number of navigation options are cut in half, separating the primary functions (writing, managing posts and pages, editing the blog’s design, and managing comments) from secondary functions. This presents information at a more comfortable pace, revealing only the information that’s necessary. Everything you need is still there — just better organized.

The new write screen only displays the information that you’ll use most often. It displays the most common fields in a way that makes posting incredibly easy. Additional options are hidden away until you need them. The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write, and is smart enough to remember the way you left it so that your preferred writing environment is always quickly available. The new visual editor even has a handy full-screen mode to help block out distractions while composing your newest post.

The Manage screens have been redesigned and unified so that now, managing your pages, posts, media, and comments all use similar, consistent interfaces. I am really looking forward to use WordPress 2.5.

Source: WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peek

Astereostudio has released his first Premium WordPress Theme titled simply “Market“. Market allows you to easily run your own Wordpress powered marketplace. There are many custom fields do much of the work for you - from setting a price to including that price, the name of the product, and other info and sending it all to Paypal for you. The theme can also easily be used as a way to showcase a portfolio as well. Below are some of the features found in this theme.

• Function over form - The market theme was designed to focus on its functionality as opposed to its design. The theme is intended to be customized to meet the needs of its specific store, so the design may seem fairly boring at first. But, with the power of css, you can do a lot with it.
• Hassle free integration - Using your admin email as specified in the Wordpress settings the buy now button will forward all payments to you.
• Custom fields working hard for you - The theme uses multiple custom fields including one for a large product image, additional product images, price, and specs.
• Thumbnail Generator - Code included and setup for you so thumbnails are all generated at the right sizes.
• Fancyzoom for thumbnail pop-ups - Fancyzoom is in use for product thumbnails on the single post / product view page.
• Multi-Pack Downloads - Download the standard Market theme install or a few other custom packages, such as one with the “buy now” option replaced with a “add to cart” option powered by FatFreeCart.

Market is available for just $40 USD in the form of a standard license. A Developers License is also available for $120 USD. Now, Astereostudio is very kind to give away 2 copies of Market standard license to us. All you have to do is leaving a comment under this post and tell us the reason you like using WordPress, and then you would have a chance of winning one of the 2 copies of Market Wordpress Theme immediately. The winners will be announced on 31th March 2008.

P.S. The Market theme now has a affiliate program with extremely competitive payouts of 50% per sale! This works on both the Standard License and the Developers License.

When we are designing and coding our blog’s template, it is always good to seperate the representation from the content using CSS. There are a lot of CSS tricks we have to learn. However, I found 8 Premium One Line CSS Tips by CSS Globe particular useful. It shows us how to:

1. Vertical centering with line-height
2. Prevent oversized content to break fixed width floated layouts
3. Prevent line breaks in links
4. Always show Firefox scrollbar
5. Centering block elements horizontally
6. Remove vertical textarea scrollbar in IE
7. Force page breaks when printing your document
8. Remove active link borders

Source: 8 Premium One Line Css Tips

ThemeShaper has asked 11 people who have committed to thinking creatively about WordPress themes and what they mean. These are some of the people who will carry and lead WordPress theming into 3.0 and beyond. Some of these people will set the agenda for the future of WordPress themes. And this is what they think The Future of WordPress Themes will look like.

The WordPress platform has a bright future. And that future needs to be themed. Premium WordPress theme designers, Web Developers building custom themes and enthusiasts releasing free themes are going to help change WordPress in the next year—just like they did last year and the year before that. Whatever the future holds it’s going to be exciting.

Source: The Future of WordPress Themes