There are two really great programs that I am familiar and associated with BlogMad and BlogExplosion. You earn traffic to your site by surfing the sites they feed you. This is where writing good content and catchy post titles will really pay off. A person has to have your site up for 25 seconds in BlogMad and 30 seconds in BlogExplosion. before they can move on.

In my opinion if you want to start earning mad traffic you should join them both. you can easily surf through a lot of blogs while you you are watching TV or Listening to music and if you are a multitasker like th two computers at your desk there is no reason why you can’t always have a browser window open just for these sites. You won’t give a damn about most of the sites that you see, but some times you will see something that makes you go wow and that is worth the time spent. If you feel you must pick one of the two I would say go with BlogMad. BlogMad Favorites can be directed to your Del.icio.us account which makes sharing what you find a lot easier and as a source of future posts. You can find more on my use of social networking sites such as Del.icio.us and twitter for content creation in an upcoming post. General use of social networking to increase traffic in part three of this series.

The install of WordPress 2.5 is a pretty painless event if you can follow easy directions and don’t go out of your way to make things harder than they really are.  I know what you are thinking thinking, why would anyone want to make things harder than they need to be.  The answer is simple, they are either idiots, morons who think they know everything already, or simply really bored smart people who need a challenge in their life and do so at the risk of being thought of as idiots, morons or assholes put on this earth to aggravate everyone else.

If you are doing a clean unassisted install on your server, you will need a few things.

1. A clear head, trying to do an install with a migraine going on is just plain stupid.  Do as I say not do as I do and you will have much better luck getting things done right the first time.
2. If you are caffeine junky you should get your fix before starting and keep another hit close at hand.
3. You need to know some pretty basic information if you are attempting a clean install on a new database.  The database name, your mysql user name and password are the ones you need most often.  If you set up the database, then you should know them too.  The address is 99% of the time the default: localhost.  Unless you know differently try this first.
4. Load up your directory  in FireFox your web browser of choice and follow the instructions.
5. First it will tell you  it needs to create a wp-config.php file.  Click the link and enter the information I told you to get in step three.
6. Click through the next two screens and enter the admin login information with its randomly generated password.
7. If you are used to earlier versions of WordPress be prepared to stumble along for a while trying to figure out where they put what.
8. Before stumbling around proceed immediately to the Users link in the top right corner of the screen.  Click on the admin user link and immediately enter a new passowrd that you can remember because you will never remember jhkj83l or what ever other crap it feeds you.
9. After that is done create a second administrator level user and make sure it uses a different email address.  You will be thankful you did this the first time you get locked out of your account and primary email at the same time.  I use one with a Yahoo and one a Gmail address to be the safe side.  A third Redundant isn’t a horrible idea, but a fourth is probably just playing to your paranoia.