WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms, is capable of being more than just a blog platform. It’s capable of being a full-blown CMS (Content Management System). As someone who has both written small, custom CMSes from scratch as well as evaluated million-dollar professional CMSes for large corporations, WordPress’ robustness never ceases to amaze us.

WordPress has a lot of community support, free themes and plugins, and is relatively easy to customize or to find someone who can for a fair price. Performancing has presented us 48 Unique Ways WordPress can be used.

Source: 48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress

You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

“You just need to know how to type,” says Matthew Hurst, an artificial intelligence researcher who studies this ecosystem at Microsoft Live Labs. WIRED has presented us how the whole process goes down during the big game called The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You.

Source: The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You

WPDesigner has just launched a $5 Premium WordPress Themes Club. You pay $5 per year for unlimited access and downloads. Each year, you are guaranteed to have at least 12 themes. You may use your club themes on as many sites as you wish including your clients’ sites. There’s no copyright or credit removal to purchase or add on to the $5. You pay $5 for the whole year. The club themes come without copyright labels or links.

And also, you can also gain access to the forum and themes support. The quality of the themes are so good, you can have a look at the first released theme called “Gossip WordPress Theme“. What are you asking for more? You can view the full details about the $5 Premium Themes Club here.

Source: http://www.wpdesigner.com/2008/01/24/launching-themes-club-happy-5-year/

I am sure you have heard some of the popular blogs have been hacked by someone. When we are having a WordPress blog, we are scared that our blog will be hacked too. Matt Cutts has shared Three Tips to Protect your WordPress Installation.

• Secure your /wp-admin/ directory
• Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file
• Upgrade or apply patches
• (Bonus Tips) Delete the line that contains bloginfo(’version’)

Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/three-tips-to-protect-your-wordpress-installation/

As you know, Feed Analysis provides bloggers, with the aid of beautiful interactive charts, a more detailed report and analysis from our feeds. You can also view the number of subscribers, hits, views and clicks for every single day from the line chart.

By using Feed Analysis, we can discover some evil bloggers who faked their RSS numbers. How do we find the evil bloggers? If the hits stayed the same but the number of subscribers have increased sharply, they probably are faking their RSS number (See the picture below). It is because normally, if you have more subscribers, you will have more hits as well, because readers will actually click on the feed items you published. Affiliate Lounge has written a very nice and detailed explanation about someone who faked his RSS Number on “Feedburner Hacked or just plain Cheating!?“.

How can they fake their RSS number? They probably bought some readers directly or subscribe to his own feed with a lot of different email addresses. Wayne Liew has told us the ways to boost the number of RSS subscribers on “No More RSS Feed Numbers Hide and Seek” and told us how to use Feed Analysis to analyze our feed nicely as well.

Choosing a suitable type of font for our websites can be very time consuming. It is even more time consuming to look for a really nice font and yet free to use. Urbanfonts might be the one to help you. There are over 8,000 freeware fonts you can choose from.

First of all, the site looks very clean, and modern to me. Because of its well-structured, it really helps you choosing the right font easily. On the top part of the site, you can see all categories of fonts in alphabetical order. Mouse over the category text, you can get a preview of the font, it can really saves you a lot of time. If you have clicked on one of the category, you can see a list of fonts with large previews. You can change the preview text from editing the textfield on the top. The large previews will be updated immediately.

If you still find it hard to use, you can use the tag cloud on the right hand side. The “Top 100 Fonts” is also very useful. It is an automatic list of the most downloaded fonts on Urbanfonts, so that you can have an idea of what other people like.

If you need some inspirations to create your own fonts, Urbanfonts is a very good place to look at as well. “Font Blog” brings you all the latest news about fonts and typography. And also, you can interact with other font lovers on the forum.

A blog’s bounce rate is a percentage measuring the amount of visitors who leave the way they came, i.e. a search visitor who arrives at one page and leaves without navigating anywhere else in your site.

Each visitor who ‘bounces’ out of your site is a lost opportunity to gain a loyal reader or new subscriber.

Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to cut down your bounce rate. This will help you convert more new visitors into loyal readers (something we all want). In addition, a low bounce-rate will add value to your blog if you ever decide to sell it.

Here are 8 methods you can use to lower your bounce-rate:

1. Prune your main page down to essentials.

A new visitor has a limited amount of attention to give your site. You want to show-off its value as quickly as possible. Widgets and unimportant elements divert attention away from what’s really important about your blog. Uncluttering and making the layout simpler will help new visitors give their attention to the things that most strongly sell your blog to them.

2. Highlight your best posts above the fold.

With so much outstanding content to choose from on the web new visitors are becoming increasingly bored with everyday content. They want the best of everything. You can satisfy this want by showcasing a list of your best or most popular posts somewhere they can be easily spotted (preferably towards the top of your sidebar).

3. Show off your categories list.

In addition to being a useful navigational element, your categories list provides a quick overview of what you write about. If a new visitor sees a category they’re interested in you can bet they’ll be more likely to stick around. Around 10 categories is an ideal length: it’s long enough to be specific and short enough that your visitors will be willing to spend the time needed to look it over.

4. Use post excerpts if your posts are long

One of the ways new visitors will evaluate your blog is to scroll down the main page and get an overview of the kind of posts you produce. If your posts are too long and there’s too much content on the main page they’ll probably get tired of scrolling and decide to stop.

You can alleviate this problem by displaying post excerpts on the main page with a ‘Continue reading’ link underneath. This will lower your bounce rate because it allows new visitors to quickly get an overview of your blog while also encouraging them to click through to the full post.

5. Share related posts on single post pages

Social media and search traffic will mostly end up at single post pages on your blog. They also represent the kind of traffic most likely to bounce out of your site. You can improve the situation by providing a list of related posts at the end of each single post page. You can do this manually (at the end of each post) or Wordpress users can utilize the Contextual Related Posts plug-in.

6. Provide an easy to spot link to the main page.

Social media and search visitors who’ve landed on a single post page and decide to explore further will probably want to visit your main page first. If you make the link to your main page hard to find they could lose patience and navigate away. I suggest making your header image link to your main page. It’s also important to provide another link in your navigation area.

7. Make your About page easy to find.

Your About page will often be a first port of call for new visitors wanting to get an idea of what your site is about. Visitors will always bounce out of your site if they think it isn’t relevant to them. You can use your About page to explain why it is relevant. For that reason, you should make the link to your About page very easy to find.

8. Write a tag-line or blurb for your main page.

A short tag-line or blurb can help a visitor quickly establish what your blog is about and what it has to offer them. Including a descriptive tag-line or blurb on your main page will encourage more new visitors to investigate rather than wandering away.

Thank you Skellie for Writing this amazing post on Blog Perfume

Zen Habits with over 26,000 readers has published a e-book called “Zen To Done”. Zen To Done takes some of the best aspects of a few popular productivity systems (GTD, Stephen Covey and others) and combines them with the mandate of simplicity. It makes things as simple as possible, and no more. Zen To Done is a simple system to get you more organized and productive, and keep your life saner and less stressed, with a set of habits. ZTD teaches you:

The key habits needed to be productive, organized, and simplified … and no more than that.
How to implement these key habits … tips on forming a habit.
How to organize these habits into a simple system that will keep everything in your life in its place.
How to simplify what you need to do.
Minimal ZTD. Also includes an even simpler version called Minimal ZTD.

Dozens of readers have written comments about how ZTD has changed their lives, made them more organized and less stressed, and has worked better than other productivity systems. It’s definitely worth a try.

Source: Get a Copy Now

If you’re having trouble bringing in a sustainable income online, it might be because you’re emulating approaches taken by people who got in early on a particular model. The problem is that the nature of these models makes it difficult if not impossible for new players to achieve the level of success they want.

The key to avoiding this kind of frustration is to see where things are going and become an early-adopter in the next big wave of the commercial Internet. Of course, even if you’re already doing well, it never hurts to take a look forward, right?

This free Teaching Sells report from 10-year online marketer Brian Clark is your guide to what’s coming next, and what some savvy online entrepreneurs are succeeding with right now. Here’s What You’ll Learn When You Enroll in the Teaching Sells Training Program (All Five Courses are Included):

• Course One: Multimedia content strategies that result in valuable paid courses and a sustainable business
• Course Two: Detailed marketing methods that work without wasteful spending on advertising
• Course Three: Tools and techniques for producing dazzling interactive content that creates happy repeat customers

• Course Four: Multiple business models to choose from in order to best achieve your revenue and lifestyle goals
• Course Five: Easy instructions for building airtight interactive learning environments and membership websites
• Plus: Forum access to instructors and a step-by-step methodology to build your first paid interactive content site.

Source: Get Free Teching Sells Report Now

Many bloggers are unconsciously making it hard for new visitors to decide to stick around. They’re not selling themselves, nor are they selling their blogs.

If marketers behaved in the same way, nobody would ever buy anything and we’d all live like Zen monks! (Though maybe that’s not such a bad thing…)

In this post, I want to explain how you can use lessons learned studying how marketers sell products to convert more new visitors into loyal readers.

Selling the maker

Just as a company invests millions of dollars into its brand image, you need to emphasize the qualities of the person who makes the product. You!

A blog might promise to provide life-changing advice and suggestions, but for this promise to be effective, the visitor needs to trust that the author is worth listening to.

While personal information about your interests and your family is important (it helps show visitors you’re a normal person and not some kind of scam artist), many bloggers forget to sell themselves.

Use your About page to tell visitors why you’re worth listening to, and why the content you create is likely to be of a high quality. Here are some questions you can answer — though you want to filter out answers that don’t help to sell you.

• How long have you been involved in the field you’re writing in?
• Do you have any formal qualifications relating to the topics you write about?
• Has any of your writing ever been linked to by a popular blog visitors are likely to recognize?
• Has something you’ve written ever been very successful on social media?
• Can you demonstrate that you have a passion for what you write about, even if you don’t have formal qualifications? For example, you might not have had a story published, but what if you’ve completed NaNoWriMo five times? That’s worth mentioning.

When a company markets a product it often markets itself alongside the product. By doing one, you’re doing the other. If you think of your blog as a product, you need to emphasize the strengths behind the maker of that product.

Don’t be afraid to sell yourself. People are used of it. It might seem like boasting to you, but it’s the kind of information readers are hungry for. They want to know that you’re a capable and trustworthy source of information.

Selling the product

When companies sell a product, they don’t focus on its innate qualities alone. Instead, they focus on ends: what the product can do for you. People aren’t interested in an iPod just because it’s an iPod. They’re interested in what it can do for them (and what it will allow them to do).

New visitors approach your blog with the same mindset. They ask themselves: what will I get out of reading this blog? What does it have to offer me?

When selling your blog to new visitors, you need to convince them that it has something to offer. You should start with your About page. This stuff needs to go at the top, right above where you sell yourself.

• What does this blog offer?
• What kinds of people will benefit?
• Why is it worth reading?
• Has your blog been very successful on social media?
• Has is been linked to by a popular blog?
• Have you written for other well-known blogs?

All this information engages new visitors and helps convince them that your blog has something to offer. You can take your answers to these questions even further.

What can you offer?

You can convince new visitors of the worth of your blog outside of your About page, too.

Showcasing your most popular content (or what you think is your best content) helps to do this, because it puts your best selling points right under the noses of each new visitor. Just like a store will put the products it most wants to sell in the front window, giving lots of exposure to your best stuff will draw people into your blog.

Tag-lines can also be an effective place to sell your blog. In a sentence or two you can make a statement about what your blog has to offer and who it’s written for. You can also do the same thing with a little ‘About’ blurb on your main page (but I don’t think this is ever a substitute for a dedicated ‘About’ page).

Packaging is key

Even if you don’t have a budget for design, it’s worth investing as much time as is needed to finding a really nice theme for your blog.

Brands pour millions into packaging. That’s because decades of studies and focus-groups have shown that packaging matters. People will judge your product by the care that’s taken in the packaging it comes in.

Luckily, when it comes to finding a quality theme for your blog, you’re in the right place :-).

And remember: don’t be afraid to experiment. Try new themes, re-jig your About page, add new selling points to your blog and refine existing ones. Don’t feel obliged to stick with something just because it’s what your readers are used to.

Unless your blog is growing at a cracking pace, change is the only way you’ll be able to breathe new life into your blog’s growth.

Thank you Skellie for Writing this amazing post on Blog Perfume