In my quest to provide an every better experience for all my readers I have added a new feature in the way of the WP Link Directory. This handy plugin allows site owners to make use of the constant flow of internet traffic. Whether you are actively promoting your wordpress based site or not, this plugin also comes with some handy searchable identifiers. Like CommentLuv, NoFollow Free and KeywordLuv blogs using the WP Link Directory can seach out blogs using it by searching for “Powered by WP Link Directory“. If you don’t want potential spammers finding you that way their is the option of removing the text link. There is also the option of requiring a reciprocal link for sites of a designated page rank to increase your own backlinks and a nofollow option. Post Origin: Local News and Newspapers Click this link to get your own syndication code. Update:  Be advised Wordpress 2.7 beta 2 has problems displaying this plugin.  It works but the display is kind of screwy and it hangs up on the scripting a bit.

I was asked recently how to get a 1000 visitors a day to your blog network.  If you have a network it is quite easy.  The more blogs you have the more content you have, and more content you have the better chance you will get hits from search results.  Here is my quick list of do’s and don’ts.

• Content isn’t enough.  You need content with good keywords and for that material to be indexed.  If you run a wordpress blog the Google XML Sitemap Plugin is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for getting indexed.  If you want to be properly indexed it is highly important that you use good content specific keywords and tags.  I generate specific keywords with Wordsfinder and use the Calais Tagaroo Plugin to generate Semantic tags, both of which appear as meta keywords to search engines thanks to my theme.
• Write about popular things.  If you follow the first rule of good tagging and and getting regularly indexed, writing about popular topics is going to greatly increase your traffic.  While it goes without saying that writing about football in the off season isn’t going to bring you a lot of traffic for those posts, when I say popular I mean really popular.  The Google Trends page is your friend if you learn to read it correctly.  At any given time these are the 100 most popular search terms on Google and they all have links to recent blog posts through Google Blog links.  Incorporate something from here and your search traffic will go up.  Mention sixty or seventy of them over a couple of relevant posts and you are search gold for as long as the trend continues.
• Write something worth shouting about.  If your posts are pretty good there is always someone willing to submit it to the Social Media outlets.  Promoting yourself is held by some as being tacky and rude, but I don’t think so under some circumstances.  if you aren’t the only one you are promoting.  if you submit, comment, stumble, and rate hundreds of pages a week a little self promotion isn’t a bad thing.  Once a page has been submitted by someone else there is no reason not to jump on the promotion bandwagon.  If you put up a couple of stumble worthy pages a day your traffic can easily exceed a thousand hits a day.
• Comment on popular blogs in your niche.  I can’t begin to tell you how many thousands upon thousands of visitors this can bring to your blog.  This is a long term strategy that has to be cultivated and worked over time.  You need to leave relevant comments on these blogs and do it often.  One good comment will likely get you some traffic, but a hundred comments on a popular blog a year or more is golden.
• Give people a reason to come back.  Unless you are giving your people a reason to come back they likely aren’t going to.  There are lots of good sources of the same information you are providing so you need to give people a reason to return.  I use CommentLuv, KeywordLuv, Nofollow Free, plugins and interact with the people that comment.  Some of my blogs I offer an integrated forum so readers can interact with each other.
• Make it easy for people to come back.  Not only do you need to give people a reason to come back, you need to make it easy for them to return. (I need to do a better job of this on this theme.)  You can do things like put a Del.Icio.us, Technorati,  Yahoo as well as rss feed or many other buttons that make getting back to you easy for people to return.

The least utilized option in Wordpress, the custom field, is also quite possibly the most powerful function of the entire platform. I have been writing up my own tutorials on this option for several days now and thought I would share with you a few of the other great posts on the subject.

The Top 5 Uses for Wordpress Custom Fields  by  Oak Innovations Blog

For the vast majority of bloggers, this incredibly usefull, and versatile piece of functionality goes unused. At the moment you may be thinking that the reason you don’t use it, is that you have no use for it. This may very well be true but, its also likely that no one has really explained what’s possible.

Learn how to use Wordpress Custom Fields | Kriesi.at – new media design

WordPress gives an author the ability to add extra data to each written post and page. This data is called meta-data and is stored in custom fields.

WordPress Custom Fields Contest

If you are a wordpress blogger, how many times have you used the often overlooked feature called Custom Fields. It is sitting below this post page as I type and though I look at it everyday, I never got around to using it. Technosailor is organizing the WordPress Custom Fields Contest to bring forth the usefulness of this feature and its possible applications.

Jazz Up Your Site: 28 Ways To Use WordPress Custom Fields | Performancing.com

Reasons To Use Custom Fields

You create a custom field, then choose on a post by post basis what information you will add. That information can be manipulated by custom WP/PHP code to present additional textual or visual content when a visitor views a post page. To summarize:

1. Add metadata for reporting or other purposes.
2. Add visually cohesive elements to your site.
3. Manipulate information and control its display programmatically.
4. Make global changes across all your posts with a single code change, instead of manually updating each post.

The lists below show some ways that WP custom fields can be used to provide more textual and visual info to your site visitors. If you decide to change something, say a border or background or even placement on the post page, without custom fields you would have to make changes manually to each and every post. If you have hundreds of posts, you’d have a daunting task. With custom fields, you have structure and homogeneity through custom handler code.

redswish – a web design blog » The power of Wordpress Custom Fields

I can’t believe I’ve been playing with Wordpress for so long and never explored the Custom Fields feature. A website I’ve been working recently has required me to push the boundaries of Wordpress, or more appropriately my understanding and knowledge of it. In doing so I’ve bravely slipped deeper into the Advanced Options and lived to tell the tale – the tale of the Custom Fields…

WordPress Custom Fields; laying text over your lead graphic

WordPress Custom Fields; laying text over your lead graphic

For WordPress users, there are certain scenarios when the typical reverse chronological presentation of content is just not enough. I have experimented with different methods of presenting content on 5thirtyone.com each time a redesign is uploaded – from the text-centric to the image heavy version in use right now. With hundreds of WordPress driven blogs being published on a daily basis, it’s difficult to stand out; even more so if you stick to the standard two-column blog layout.

The undersigned » Blog Archive » WordPress how-to: Custom Fields

WordPress how-to: Custom Fields

Most WordPress users have seen the custom fields section when they write a new post or create a page – but what is it exactly?

Post 12 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

If you are reading this post then you have taken your first step in moving beyond the amateur blog level.  The first thing you need to accept is you don’t know everything and you should be reading a lot of blogs how to get set up right.  None of us know everything, and I am more than happy to point you to the people who know a lot more than me on any subject.  That said let me tell you what we can all agree on.

• Figure out why you want to blog.  This is the most important step and the reason most people never bother with.  Deciding you want to blog for money is perfectly acceptable.
• Once you figure out why you want to blog you need to decide on what your blog is to be about.  This is one specific thing that your blog will be known to the search engines for.  This is going to be your keyword phrase.  See my post on picking your keywords for more information.  The short of it is you want to find something that defines your blog with a lot of daily searches, but not very many search results.  This choice will define your blog for a very long time so choose wisely.
• Once you know your primary focus you can start to choose a domain name.  Choosing something simple like your name seems easy enough, but frankly that isn’t necessarily the best choice either.  your name is a particularly bad choice if you want to sell your blog later.  Some schools of thought are Google will look more favorably on you if your keyword and your domain name are similar.  Once you decide on a Domain name register it.  You can do this almost anywhere so I suggest looking for a cheap place that has been around a while.  You can host anywhere once you have the domain, but if you lose the domain because you were dicking around making other decisions, then you are SOL and have to repeat steps two and three.
• Choose a blog platform and a basic theme design.  The fact is Google loves wordpress best of all, but without a well designed theme it doesn’t matter what kind of advantage you get from the platform you are taking blind swings.  Not only will you need to choose a good theme, you need to be able to alter or fix it yourself, unless you have a paid tech guy.  it doesn’t matter how good your writing is, if you don’t look profession to your readers your won’t be seen as a professional.  This goes doubly for google and every other search engine that could care less what sort of pithy commentary you make.  Search engines want the nitty gritty of posts.  They want meta information to match the text.  They want images that have full SEO treatments since they can’t interpret the visual.  They want to know what your navigation priorities are.
• Last but not least is you want to choose your host.  You need to do your homework and not let some affectation pull at your heartstrings.  You can switch hosts as you like.  Many hosts these days are even on month to month agreements so switching is easy.  The biggest thing to look for is how fast sites using the network move.  If the cost is next to nothing for a whole lot of promises beware.  Any company that doesn’t charge a minimum of $10 a month and promises the moon probably means that have three or four times too many sites for their bandwidth and if you ever try and use as much as the promised they will likely cancel you account.

If you can manage these steps you are well on your way to moving beyond the amateur blog level.

Post 9 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

In the early days of web design one of the few interactive things you could do with your readers was set up a guest book. At first this was next to impossible because almost anyone and everyone who had a website was operating on free sites like Geocities, Angelfire, or Tripod. There was no cgo access unless you paid for it, so there was no interaction beyond the simple mail form. Eventually most of them had heard the call for interaction and offered up ready made guest books. By that time it was really too late to do anything about it, blogging had been invented and was taking quick hold on sites like LiveJournal and Blogger. The world of interactivity was upon the average website owner, and we went from simple users to publishers.

The advent of blogging with threaded post and comments we respond to or at the very least should be responding to left behind the old guest book format. Users could now interact with authors directly over on subject specific ideas. Simply put the guest book was stiff, bereft of use, pushing up digital daisies, had run down the curtained screen saver, had emptied the recycle bin with ccleaner, overwritten multiple times with randomized ones and zeroes, and joined auto-starting background midi files as things Skippy should never put on a site. The guest book was and ex-webpage! That was until I figured out a use for it.

I know you are thinking this guy is ought of his bloody mind. Well I might be, but never the less I know how to make the guest book useful once again. Every blogger gets comment like ‘this is nice’ and ‘I like the post’. For those of us kind bloggers using a dofollow system this is annoying crap. However with a nofollow guest book and a move comments plugin we can preserve those comments, because some of them actually mean what they say and could give a damn about the backlink, and keep our blogs from being fodder for spammers.  The second plugin you will want if you wish to keep dofollow status is a conditional plugin that allows for conditional nofollow noindex posts and pages.

Once you have your plugin installed you can start by creating the guest book. If you are a nofollow blog the process is pretty simple, just create called guest book add a few lines of text and stick the post link in your menu. Alternately if your theme allows for comments on pages you can make it a page and it should automatically go into your navigation structure. Assuming you are a kind dofollow blogger honoring your readers comments, you are going to need to do a few things differently for the guest book to work like it should and not screw up the rest of your blog.

After activating the plugins the next thing you will want to do is make a copy of your single.php and rename it guestbook_template.php. This is the file we will edit.  Top the top of this file you will want to add the following code:

<?php
/*
Template Name: guestbook
*/
?>

Once this page is uploaded create a new page using the guestbook page template.  Say a few words of kind warning about the kind of comments that should go in posts and the kind that belong here.  Set the page to nofollow and noindex and you are ready to go.  Move your comments at will and enjoy your new found guest book.

Post 8 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

One of the least used and most powerful features of wordpress is the page template. The page template to make a long story short integrates non standard coding into your blog seemlessly. It is probably used most often as an archive page in free themes, but most of those free templates forget to tell their users how to use the template and therefore it goes unused. They can be used for so many other things than just an archive page though.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger makes extensive use of page templates. If you look at the beautifully designed landing page you will find a lot of information all packed neatly into one space. If this were a standard freebie theme you wouldn’t be able to see much more than this. It is my esitmation that his home page is home.php rather than the standard index.php. (for more information see the the wordpress codex on) By making use of the home.php as a landing page in your theme you can then make a blog template that will display all of the posts in a nice chronological order. This is especially nice on multiple author blogs like ProBlogger. I know some of you are thinking isn’t this just an archive page? The answer is no. A good archive page should give you little more than a quick excerpt of the post. My preference for an archive page is nothing more a link to the posts.

Here are a few more places where I make use of page templates since I am having a hard time actually finding other good uses of them at the moment. This page makes use of the Pandora Internet Radio Widgets on a single page rather than a sidebar present throughout my blog. The contact form on the Free Online Music Articles site makes use of the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form by Mike Cherim & Mike Jolley. Most of the other pages on this blog utilize my standard article directory information with the automatic pulls from the blog’s information. It saves needing to write these over and over again for different sites utilizing that or similar template. Plop the info into a template and it puts in all of the correct information. Another popular or should be popular page template is the sitemap. If you look at it there is a sextion for my pages, not all of which are listed on the landing page header. You get a list of my categories with how many posts are in each category. Then there is a listing of the ten latest posts in each category. If there were mutlpile authors to this blog you would find a listing of the ten latest posts from each author as well. Notice, this page template has absoluetely nothing to do with your google xml sitemap.

In the end if you are capable of doing simple theme editing you can create a wealth of useful pages not possible in your standard blog layout. If you aren’t so handy with the coding, try looking for themes that provide you with more template oportunities. Not only wiil they create a better reading experience many of the them will improve your SEO.

The biggest means to increasing regular readership is involving your occasional readers through a better comment experience.  These five pugins will do just that if you do it right.

1) Nofollow Free:  Without going nofollow free few small blogs have a hope in hell of drawing lots of comments straight out of the box.  You will get some spam, but nothing worth having comes without a little bit of work.  there are easy ways around this too.  Akismet will block most spam.  Moderated comments will hold all of them until you can look at them.  You can also moderate them so regular commentators can post without moderation. You can also set it so the nofollow doesn’t kick until you have X number of approved comments.  At the very least the  plugin writes “Comments links could be nofollow free” to the end of the comment form, and this is a popular Google search phrase.

2) CommentLuv: This is one of the best ways you can reward your visitors.  CommentLuv will give a title and link to the latest blog post of the commentator.  This deep link will help them in the Google rankings.  It also makes you a popular destination spot.  Once again you can get some comment spam, but that is trivial as having a link directly to their website paints them as an asshole should you choose to publish it.  The same rules for moderation apply with CommentLuv.  This plugin also adds “Enable CommentLuv which will try and parse your last blog post” which is another popular Google search phrase.

3) Brian’s Threaded Comments: This plugin requires a little bit of work.  You have to replace your themes comments.php with the provided comments.php before activating the plugin.  This is a simple matter and you will likely want to edit the plugin itself through the WordPress Plugin Editor.  I find the default border color and width too light to really stand out and show the threads, but it is an easy fix.  This plugin also moves the trackbacks and pings to the bottom of the post rather than intermingling them with actual comments.

4) Quoter:  With Quoter you and your readers have the ability to both quote article text, but other comments.  If you run a hotly contested blog like politics or other charged subjects you almost certainly will want to use this with some sort of comment moderation.  It is powerful, and like the others has the power to be misused.  This is just one more instance where you need to actually work your blog rather than thinking you can sit back and do nothing.  Quoter is another plugin that will require you to add a bit of code to the comments.php.

5) Subscribe To Comments: This plugin makes it easy for people to track new comments by email of posts they care enough to comment on.  “Subscribe to comments via email” is another Google search phrase popular with people looking for blogs to post on.

All in all you have to ask yourself do you want people who are searching for places to comment?  My answer is most definitely.  There will be some assholes who leave spam, but most people are going to read the article and post something relevant to avoid linking their name and blog with spam activity.  Not everyone who searches for these terms will comment on your blog if it isn’t interesting so you must have good content.  in the end you really have to decide what level of commitment you your blog and its readers you want to have.  If the answer is very little you probably should just quit blogging.

Every blogger wants a reaction to their posts. Whether or not everyone will admit, this is the whole reason we do what we do it. It is no fun talking out of your ass if everyone ignores you. So ask yourself what are you doing for those people?

I have put a lot of thought into this of late. I know how to get a lot of diggs when I want, and a lot of traffic too. What I was missing though were lots of comments. I read what the big guys were saying. Then I realized many of them were just talking out of their asses, because if it were really great advice they would be doing it themselves.

When big name Blogger X loses a lot of credibility by saying remove the nofollow from your comments, but doesn’t do it themselves. I am taking a stand. Nofollow is gone from all my comments as of now. I am not stupid enough to not moderate my comments, but I am going totally nofollow free in the comments. This is step one. I recommend the nofollow free plugin for WordPress. I also recommend using the nofollow from home and nofollow those dupes to keep Google juice flowing the right direction from there.

Secondly give back to your commentators. I not only have I made the link to their blog nofollow free, but using CommentLuv and KeywordLuv the link to their last post is nofollow free. This will pass along some serious Google juice when you are indexed.

The third thing I am doing is providing subscribe to comments by email. Your commentators will know when someone else posts a follow up comment. Last but not least I am using Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin. Commentators will be able to respond to each other. If you run a political or religiously minded blog you will probably want to be careful how many levels deep you let that one run though.

Lastly I intend to do a better job than most of the big guys when it comes to interacting with you. This is another area you see top name blogging gurus telling you to be social but never have anything to do with the people commenting on their own blogs. I can promise you this if you comment and leave your site I will at the very least give your site a visit, which usually will translate into an ad click or comment of my own if your subject interests me. Also be sure to check out the weekly CommentLuv Link List posted every Friday at Blogging For Noobs.

I was recently had the unfortunate experience of using a one of my local libraries computers to access one of my blogs.  Not only are they still using IE 5.X they have very limited resolution.  Despite 17″ monitors and a couple of 19″ for the really blind folks the resolution was horrible.  They were all stuck at a static 800×600 except for the large monitors for the severely visually impaired which were stuck at 640×480.  While those setting should be an option, they made for pretty horrific view of many sites I took a look at.

My challenge to theme designers is this design a theme or more importantly themes that make use of the theme switcher plugin.  I don’t have all the details worked out yet but there needs to three available sizes of the theme to choose from.  The small size should be readable full screen with 800×600 screen size with important data above the fold. The second size should cover the most prominent 1000pixel width size, but not extend past the edges of a 1024 width.  The last size should make use of wide screen monitors in either the horizontal or vertical.  Figure the resolution of 900×1440 as the widescreen standard.

I don’t know what the prizes are yet either, but if there are any sponsors who want to get in on this let me know.  The contest will begin August 1st.

If you read my blog, it is most likely you are either a) a friend who is trying to get inside my head, or b) want to make money from blogging. I am going with the latter. You, like me, may be frustrated with Google for a variety of reasons that we won’t go into, but I am here to say there are alternatives. I am partial to BidVertiser myself, but I am looking into a number of affilate programs right now to replace Google on The Hart Blog Network blogs.

The latest new affilate I have found is ScribeFire which I also see Darren Rowse has up on his website, Pro Blogger.

John Cow wrote up about the soon to be gone Adsense Refferals.

Instead of their Adsense Referral program they are now going to use the Google Affiliate Network. What this is going to allow is now publishers are going to apply for an advertiser program and then get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of the usual clicks or impressions.

Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger has an interview with Kristopher Jones of Pepperjam Network

Earlier in the week I posted that PepperJam Network was giving all new publishers who signed up with their network a signup bonus of $10. Today I’ve managed to get a quick interview with Pepperjam Network’s CEO and President Kristopher B. Jones to ask him about the network, why he started it and what tips he could give us as publishers for using it in a way that earns us the most money.

John Chow has been pushing NeverBlue Ads pretty hard of late. I am also interested and owe them a return phone call. It seems these days even the bigger blogs are abandoning google so fast we can smell smoke. Possibly it is the guys at google taking the torch to ever more bloggers. It is hard to say for sure.

Earlier in the week John also wrote on TinyMasive.com

What do you get when you combine the contextual advertising of Google AdSense with an interactive shopping widget that can offer some pretty good deals to the visitors of your site. In some respects, TinyMassive.com may just look like another shopping-based ad network, but over the course of doing this review, I came to discover that it has a few unique qualities as well.

There are many other networks available. Some of them are sketchy. Some of them just hard to get into. Some of them only in beta, like Yahoo. They are out there though and for those who are frustrated with Google, fear not there are options.