45 Ways To Power Up Your Blog

Here are my notes for the John Pozadzides’ podcast on 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog. It includes my comments.

1. Yes, it’s still important, because it drives traffic to your blog. Google is the main one, of course.

2. Use English names for images instead of numbers. Use ALT text on the images and TITLE on all the hyperlinks.

3. Article titles should be extremely direct, concise and keyword loaded.

4. Use TITLE elements on hypertext links. It produces a pop-up on mouse hover.

5. Pick the right theme. John Pozadzides believes that site architecture is more important that aesthetics. I agree, but I don’t think aesthetics should suffer in favour of site architecture. Balance is important.

6. Your web host affects your traffic. Cheaper web hosts will affect your traffic negatively, because cheaper web hosts cannot handle the amount of bots sent by search engines, so the search engines will measure the response of your server and limit the amount of bots sent to your site.

7. Host your own images rather than pull them in from external sites, because when people do searches for images, they get pulled into those external sites rather than your website. If images bog you down, upgrade your server.

8. Use a sitemap. It helps Google find every single post you have so they can catalogue all the elements in your post.

9. Don’t believe the hype. You don’t have to stick to one narrow topic. You do not need to have a niche blog.

10. Keep ‘em engaged. Post regularly, no less than every 2-3 days. Write articles in advance and date them later. Sometimes I do this, but lately I haven’t been. I should get back to doing this.

11. Draft early, draft often. If you have a good idea, capture it in a draft. Doesn’t matter if it’s not completed, because once the idea’s gone, it’s gone for good. Incidentally, this is the main reason I have a PDA – to record my ideas as and when they come. Don’t you hate having a great idea, and then forgetting everything about it except the memory that you had a great idea?

12. Always show Related Posts, because this gets 2-3 visits for the price of one by bringing readers back to older content. Also, search visitors might find a related article appealing. I just started doing this on my company website, which I’m handling now.

13. Have a print stylesheet, in case readers want to print it.

14. WP Admin Bar Reloaded Speeds Blogging

15. Have an author biography, an About Me section. It forms a bond with your readers.

16. Include a photo of yourself.

17. Links should say where they go. Tell people where they are going and what they’ll find at the other end of the link.

18. Showcase top articles.

19. You need your own domain name. Businesses MUST have a domain name. It makes it portable.

20. Encourage email subscriptions, rather than RSS feeds, because they are more well-read. The recommended tool is Feedburner. I don’t agree with this one, actually, because just as people don’t always read RSS, people don’t always read email.

21. Full RSS feeds actually encourage more readership than less, since “Related Posts” brings them back to the blog’s older contents. I agree with this totally. I thought that if I published my full feed, no one would come to my blog. For one thing, it doesn’t make you seem like a dood who just wants more readership on your blog!

22. Open up to comments. He says to make it easy for people to leave comments, and not moderate them. While I agree to this for most blogs, I don’t think it a good idea for my blogs, because I’ve received hate comments before, and I’ve received spam comments by real people (not bots) before, including faux popes. But let me give it a try again…

23. MyBlogLog makes it personal. It helps regular readers to recognise one another and builds up a sense of community among readers. Community is one thing that my blogs lack that I think I need to relook into.

24. Show Recent and Top Commentators using plugins. WordPress.com has a recent comments widget, but not a top commenters plugin.

25. Social media matters, such as Digg.com.

26. Make it personal. This is the hierarchy of connecting with people:
- Face-to-face
- Video (photos)
- Audio (podcasting)
- Writing (e-mail, blogging)

27. Promote your RSS feed. Give readers the opportunity to subscribe via RSS and email.

28. Optimize and resize every image. This makes for faster page loads which are good for visitors, and good for search engines. The faster your site loads, the more traffic they will send you.

29. Offload server load.

30. Tame that theme. If you want faster site performance, turn to your theme. Remove extra crap and trim it to the bare essentials.

31. WP Super Cache is King. It is a static caching plugin for WordPress by generating HTML files without PHP, speeding up your blog significantly. I can’t seem to do this for my company website. Oh well.

32. Track, test and respond. See which posts are getting the most traffic and write more about that.

33. Check your topic’s Digg-ability, which basically means to find out what keywords or topics are much more likely to attract links to your site.

34. Write authoritative content. Keywords are no good if your content sucks. Write your article as though it was the only article that a person’s going to read and if that article doesn’t make him want to come back, he’s gone forever.

35. Review everything. I’ve been doing this for a bit, reviewing the games I play, the movies I watch, and the books I read. It’s good because people want to read reviews before they buy anything.

36. Always include at least one image per article. I learnt from work before that images draw people in. You can use thumbnails (this doubles up on your Google search on images.) Another way is to put one giant image before the rest of the text.

37. Be creative. You need to stand out from others who have their own articles on the same topic.

38. Please, no begging. It makes a blogger look so small.

39. Homepage Excerpts increase pageviews.

40. Friends don’t let friends see ads. There is a plug-in that allows your regular readers not see your ads, just the visitors.

41. No more “Make Money Online” blogs. This is not the way to make money.

42. Viddler is the only way to go. It’s way better than YouTube as it offers high quality video with no file size and length restrictions. You can record from a webcam, and comment within the videos.

43. Tools make the difference for podcasting and Vlogging. Get a good cam and mic.

44. Use PodPress plugin for podcasting.

45. Use Woopra! Woopra is a brand new stats program, which was launched at this session. It can show you real-time the number of visitors on your blog.

I missed one in the first run, and had to go back to find it. >.<

Once again, this has been John Pozadzides’ 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog. I have already started using some of the new things I’ve learnt!