Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

If you’re blogging on the Wordpress platform, I’ll bet my entire life savings that the first thing you ever did was try to install a new Wordpress theme. I’ll bet my future earnings that even today you’re still occasionally changing themes and wasting a lot of time doing minor modifications that when summed up merely distracts you from blogging itself.
Yet, it’s easy to understand why themes beg for so much attention. With the correct theme, you can accommodate all the nifty little widgets and codes, and may also mean better search engine rankings and tons of fresh traffic every day.
So what factors do you need to consider to make this whole theme-hunting business easier? Here are five important ones:
1) Theme Width and Columns
Typically, Wordpress themes come in 2-column or 3-column formats, with widths ranging from 500 pixels to 960 pixels wide. If you’re blogging for non-profit purposes, a 2-column theme can look more compact and reader-friendly. Since you have less images of products or links to other sites to display, you can focus exclusively on the content without leading readers away from your site.
On the other hand, if you’re blogging for profit, you may want to consider a 3-column Wordpress theme that will be able to accommodate your Google Adsense, Chitika and Text Link Ads codes comfortably without squeezing everything in the content area. 3-column themes allow room for expansion, but in the event that you’ve filled up all available space with ads, then it’s time you removed the non-performers and use only the advertising services that work for that particular blog.
It is becoming more common but the big question I get when talking to people is “Why use a blog?”.
Off the top of my head I can think of 5 major reasons.
A blog is:
• Easy to update
• Easy to get started
• Liked by the search engines
• Creating feeds automatically
• Allows people to interact with you
Before I start let me take just a minute to define the term blog. The following is quoted from Dr. Mani one of the earliest marketers to embrace blogs.
“A blog is short for “web log” a sort of online personal diary where “anyone” can reveal his/her innermost thoughts, feelings, desires, dreams, ambitions, fears, hopes … you get the meaning.
Yes, it’s a website. With one small difference. It lists posts ordered by date in a personal journal format, and is easier to create than a website – just involves typing into a form and pushing the PUBLISH button”
The ease of push button publishing of most blog platforms make them one of the easiest web sites to update. On most platforms you don’t need to know HTML though it does help. If you can create a word document you can update a blog.