I’ve decided to ditch the top 10 articles roundup for 2 reasons: 1. most of the times it’s actually difficult to find something worth reading and linking too (and I do monitor almost 200 blogs) and 2. more than half of them don’t give a trackback, making this useless as a link building strategy. Since it’s a waste of my time and link “love”, I’ve decided to use Mondays for something better. Since my dissatisfaction with their content won’t make too many bloggers change their involvement, in the end it’s a subjective thing (what I find to be a lousy … Continue reading →

Fact: blog traffic DECREASES during holidays. Fact: your readers will come less often to read your articles. Fact: you won’t be able to post frequently, since you might actually have better things to do. And still, these days are important for your blog too. Even if traffic does decrease, this doesn’t mean you have zero visitors. Even if your readers are also busy celebrating, it doesn’t mean all of them are or that they can’t visit your blog at least once every 3-4 days. Now what do we do? Leave the blog hanging or continue posting in a more relaxed, … Continue reading →

For an experienced wordpress designer this is something pretty simple. It’s in the end a 2 minute job. Still, for some people who haven’t ventured so much into the code, creating a separate design for certain pages can seem hard. WordPress has a specialized template for the pages. It’s page.php, which you can find in your theme’s folder. But what if you’d like to have one or more pages that don’t run on the same design? First you open page.php. The code (as taken from the twentyten theme) looks something like this: <?php /** * The template for displaying all … Continue reading →

Having an active, frequently updated blog is the secret to success in this business. It will attract visitors and advertisers, providing good content on a regular basis. Although there are people who claim that posting 3-5 articles/day (especially if they’re long) might cause your readers to feel “overwhelmed”, posting daily is still an excellent idea. Still, even 1 post a day can become a burden and it takes TIME and EFFORT nevertheless. Read more

I’ve been blogging for the past 3 years. My Romanian blog is pretty well known, with a decent traffic and community. I’ve learned a lot of tricks these years and of course have made the biggest mistakes ever. One of these was to be inconsistent with my writing. I’d write 4-5 articles in one day (well, inspiration was sometimes generous) or keep the blog inactive for 2 weeks. HUGE MISTAKE! For the past 3 months I’ve made myself a new schedule on that blog. I write DAILY. No excuses, just 1 article/day, at least. My traffic DOUBLED. On this blog … Continue reading →

You read countless articles about the importance of social media and now you’re ready to take the bull  by the horns. And what better way to do this than install a plugin that will provide access to almost all important sites in this niche? Does this look familiar to you? Maybe this is what you’re using: Of course you’ve got the re-tweet plugin installed, a digg vote button and facebook like. Maybe a huge twitter widget in the sidebar. Plus your Facebook friends list. Yeah, something like this: And of course, since you’re serious about the traffic and subscriptions, you’ve … Continue reading →

My main blog is in Romanian. Though we are not pleased with how the content usually is in many of the blogs we have in the country, there are hundreds of excellent blogs, with amazing content. It’s easy for me to get to them, due to the fact I am an active commenter and also own a small “social bookmarking” site that lists the best of the best when it comes to content. For some days now, after the redesign for RamonaIftode.com and working on a posting schedule, plus tens of ideas in my drafts already, my next step is … Continue reading →

I have started my life as a “webmaster” more than 8 years ago (March 2002 to be more exact), when I had a small site, dojo.ro. My beginnings were as a forum admin and not a blogger. Well, back then I don’t really think there were too many bloggers. At least not to my knowledge. Those were the days … quality posts, good members, almost no spam. I even recall some of us, forum admins, were pondering if it’s a good idea to actually install an anti-spam plugin. Find out more

For years I have been trying to get all I could from my designs, if it was a forum or a blog design. Or any other possible platform. Working with wordpress has been a true blast and the fact you can customize it at will, really makes me love it. Some of my clients wanted this little feature added to their blogs, while you can also see it in action in the home page, (the 4 lists to the categories: forum management, blogging, web development and web business). Usually WordPress lists a number of latest posts from all the categories. … Continue reading →

We’re filled with all kinds of crap blogs, created for money only. Blogs with no content, blogs that steal content or are just there so that we bump into them. Getting to actually read some decent articles is getting harder each day. And still, for those who are still interested in bringing some quality into the world of blogging or at least get known as decent people, here’s an outline of what I consider a respectable blogger will never do: 1. Under no circumstance you should spam: email or forums/blog comments. Sure, you might get some visitors, but the overall … Continue reading →