I was going through my Woopra stats not so long back when i noticed something very exciting and very unexpected.  My political blog, Brad’s Tiny World, was receiving a lot of traffic from CNN and within a few days of watching that incoming traffic I started noticing them coming from The Wall Street Journal.  When tracking down this traffic I found it had come in the form of a sweet little plugin I had accidentally left on when I was testing what did and didn’t work with the new theme tools and WordPress  2.6.  I had long known Sphere Related Content plugin existed, in fact the version I had in the plugin directory was a few versions out of date, but I never really expected much from it and as such never used it.  What a mistake that was.

While the traffic generated was small, it was all relevant traffic and directed at specific stories.   To get those links I was citing and linking to stories on the major sites.  This was usually an excerpt with a backlink.  it was a small common courtesy, but well worth it.  That new traffic which fades after a story is no longer popular, does bring you people willing to give relevant comments and more important, it increased my social bookmark submissions.  I can’t promise you will gain anything from this plugin, but I also know it doesn’t take up very much room either.  Add it and comment on sites using it and see what happens for yourself.  You too might just find links from unexpected places.

Homepage
Download: Sphere Related Content

It has been another behind the scenes weekend for me tweaking the theme over at Brad’s Tiny World and editing Pack hopefully some agent will just fall in love and be on my side for a six figure advance. Alright I know I really looking at probably a $5k advance at best, which means I have to sell 4900 copies of it in paperback just to cover that so when it is out I expect every damned one of you who read my blogs to buy at three copies.

I was going through my feed this afternoon when I found the coolest new tool to share with you. It isn’t out yet but that shouldn’t stop you from drooling over it tool. i found Utility Poster through Jack Humphrey’s Friday Traffic Report. If you aren’t reading this you should be, and I have added it to my blogroll just for you guys.

One of the best techniques for really driving traffic to your site  is the use of keywords and knowing just how to use them  Wait! Wait! Stop!  I know some of you are thinking other blogs say keywords are dead and don’t matter to your PageRank or this or that program because they can be manipulated.  That is true to a point.

What isn’t mentioned often enough is keywords do still matter and that Google isn’t the only game in town. Search engines are getting better about seeing who is fudging their keywords and actually looking for them in the text of your post.  You can’t get away with just picking out popular keywords, plugging them in and thinking you are beating the system.  Other search you can still get away with that on, but it isn’t to your benefit even there.

So how do we pick a search engine oh mighty guru?  There are a couple of methods.  There are plugins of course which will do it for you automatically.  The best ones cost money though and I haven’t had very good luck with free ones using WordPress 2.5.  My preferred method is a little more time consuming but seems to produce pretty good results if you look at my Feedjit widget.

I use the site wordsfinder.com, enter the text, usually cut straight from word, and tell it to search for my keywords.  It usually gives me a nice long list and I cut highlight copy into notepad for cleaning it up.  First, this will pick out any horribly misspelled words if you didn’t already spell check the text, so correct them before posting.  According to highestranking.com you want to comma separate your terms or phrases, but don’t leave a space.  Using notepad or any text editor you can quickly do that, then simply cut them and paste them into your keywords field in WordPress and push the add custom field button and bam you have hot keywords.

What I said about the feedjit widget is quite true.  If you look at my other blogs especially you will find a high number of the incoming visitors are coming from Google via keyword searches.  Check out The Other Blog and Brad’s Tiny World to see what I mean.  You can also use Google Analytics to see your actual stats and make decisions about the kind of posts you want to be making as well.

The First thing you need to do when thinking about a theme is deciding who you are designing it for. There are a number of tools that will tell you what your visitor’s monitors resolution is set to and this is a key factor to consider. As often as not these days new computers come with a wide screen monitor and most of the older 17 and 19″ 4:3 monitors were capable of 1280×1024. Like I said use one of the many site tools to figure out what size people are viewing your blog at.

For me 1% were using 640×480, that is just too small to design an effective money making blog. 9% were doing 800×600, which can be done, but 90% of my viewers were using something more, so I chose to go bigger. Only 25% had resolutions above 1440, meaning If I went higher than that 75% of my people would lose something and I Almost certainly would love that low res 10% crowd.

I settled for going with a width of 1000 pixels for the theme. Some of the other considerations that went into this size were the fact I knew as I grow I will attarct more and more people using legacy resolutions and didn’t want to alienate them. 1000 pixels fit on most everyone desktop and didn’t waving me looking around for information all over the screen. In consideration for the low res crowd I made my text window which has all the posts and pages visible on their full screen.

If you take a look at http://www.bradstinyworld.com you can see how it looks since it is the newest theme I have done, even if it is based on an older design. I build a single continuous banner in Photoshop and began to slice it up after I knew how I wanted the final lay out to work. I used the method described on Photoshop Candy to design the graphics after having looked through several interesting Photoshop sites.

There are those who dislike the notion of a big graphical banner when you enter a site, but for me I think it gives a great vision of who you are and the mood you are trying to set. There are some SEO considerations though since at most all a spider has to read in an image is the alt tags and the links if you used separate images. I solved this problem by using some CSS tricks which we can get into later. On Brad’s Tiny World you get a full package of text in that header, but the average viewer is never going to see it. I matched the color and made it transparent which is enough for most browsers, but for good measure I made it only 1 pixel high. Google will read it all the same, but as a designer I get the satisfaction of putting together pretty graphics unmarred by ugly text.

In the next part of this we will discuss whether you should widgetize or not.

I modified the original LiveJournal CrossPosting plugin and have had it sitting on Brad's Tiny World since the day 2.5 came out. It is a rather handy tool to have as cross posting your blog entries to your LJ page certainly brings in more traffic without any extra work. With the move going on at Tiny World I am bringing the plugin over here.

LiveJournal XP WordPress25

Featured links

Brad The Blog Boy - http://bradtheblogboy.com A Blunt Blog About Blogging.

Reciprocal links

	Brad’s Tiny World - http://www.bradstinyworld.com/ Current Events and Technology
	The Other Blog - http://bradsotherblog.com Brad Hart’s Pop Culture Blog!
	Mailboxmoney - http://mailboxmoney.blogspot.com A blog about making money online
	Experiments - http://www.experiments-experiments.blogspot.com This website talks about blogging and making money online
	ARC’s Earn Online - http://arc-earn-online.blogspot.com/ The purpose of starting this Blog is primarily try out all possible avenues in making money online and share the status and the outcome here.I am not here to make you millionaire but I could guide you
	Make Online Income - http://makeonlineincome.wordpress.com Learn to make a full time income online for no charge.

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I will give a free 60 Day Featured Link on my side bar to anyone who tell help me autoload this links table using the free php script PHP Link manager 1.4 from PHP Junkyard.

When you want to talk about doing things right and really getting traffic to your blogs, the first thing you need to do is get on Technorati listed.  If you want to talk about authority getting I have posted on it at http://bradstinyworld.com a few times and those posts will eventually make their way over here too.  I explain how to really raise your authority and get noticed.  While sometimes I might seem like I am all talk, let me tell you a week ago I had an authority of six on Brad’s Tiny World Leaving me a modest spot in the top 1.5 million blogs of the more 9 million they have registered.  After six days of carefully crafted posts and replies on other websites I jumped past my previous authority of 7 to an authority of 9 putting me in the top 800k blogs.  The last time I looked at my authority was 36 hours ago, I am not a comfortable surprising 12. resting at 674k  This is what following my advice can do for you too.   There are a lot of blogs behind me, but there are a lot more behind me too.

Technorati Profile

WordPress 2.5 seems to be more particular than early releases to coding errors.  One possible result is the loss of sidebars and footers.  Elezend asked about this very problem on Lorelle on Wordpress, then again at Brad’s Tiny World.  Elezend’s footer which contains MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog displays just up and disappeared upon upgrading.  Personally I think upgrading on day one of any software upgrade is a bad idea, but that is from years of going WTF and looking at frozen computer screens.

This is going to be a multistep fix and some trial and error So lets get started.

1. The first thing I want to try to make sure this is not a general theme problem is to remove the MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog coding
2.