Many people will just create a post and just publish in their blog. Then they will hope that some people will read their articles.

In a typical blog, next to the posting is a column or columns displaying the various categories and archives of their previous articles.

However from my observation & feedback from my friends, not many readers will take the trouble to look through the categories & archives. In fact they will just look at the current publish article or on the article they have googled and they will move on.

Also the blog readers can read your blog from:-
•    Your blog site
•    Google reader or similar products
•    Email ( eg Feedburner)

We can attract the readers to read a few more articles that you have written instead of just reading one article. One of the ways is to put a few links of your previous posting at the bottom of the posting.

The Google Reader & Email readers will be able to read the articles only. This meant they will not see the side columns that you have on your blog. If they use this method to read your articles, they will not be able to see your banners, links and archives.
However if put banner at the bottom of your article, they will be able to see it.

Try not to put too many links or banners at your article. Otherwise people will not be keen to read your blog content anymore.

Following is the sample links & banner that I put at the bottom of my postings

Following is the view of Google Reader showing one my article. Note you will not see Header, Footer, Right or left columns from your blog. It just displays the article content only.

Cheers

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Do you like to know which countries are your blog readers from?

Also you can know which country provides you with the most readers.

At the same time you can display this information at your blog for everyone to see.

Well now you can satisfy the above by having a Flag Counter at your blog.

Unfortunately this is not a Wordpress Plugin. So you need to paste some HTML codes.

Here is a screenshot of the flags & the counter for each country readers that have visited your blog.

Where to get

You can get it at http://s05.flagcounter.com

Features

At the above website you can configure:-

• Number of flags to be shown.

• Column of Flags

• Background, Text & Border Color

You need to click on “Get Your Flag Counter”

The following will appear

Steps to install the above code at your Wordpress blog:-

Sign in to your blog using your Administrator’s ID.

Click on Appearance->Widget

You need to decide which sidebar you want to set this Flag counter.

At the Widget, drag the Text to the selected Sidebar

Copy the HTML code from the Flag Counter Website and paste to the Text box.

No need to fill up the Title. Click Save

That completes the installation steps.

Note:

Plan properly the settings for the flags. This is because once this flag counter is displayed at the blog, it will start counting. If you decide to change it later, you will need to go to this website and configure again. This will cause your counter to initialize again.

Now you can show off to the world where your readers are from.

Cheers

Alwin Chuah

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Do you know about half of the world population do not understand English at all?

This meant, if we write our blog in English, only half the world population can understand what we write. The other half will not understand at all.

Therefore in order to increase readers to our blog, we need to have a plugin that can translate English language to other languages. This way we can allow more people to enjoy what we have written, ahem.

I search in the Wordpress plugin and found the Global translator is the most popular plugin.

Following is the screenshot your blog reader will see and by clicking the selected flag, the blog information will be converted to that country’s language.

Key features of Global Translator plugin:-

•    It can translate 41 different languages

•    It support 4 different Translation Engines:

from Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt & FreeTranslations.com

•    Search Engine Optimized:

It uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URI. For example the english version on www.domain.com/mycategory/mypost will be automatically transformed in www.domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost

•    Fully configurable layout:

You can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar by choosing between a TABLE, DIV or IMAGE MAP based layout for the flags bar and by selecting the number of translations to make available to your visitors

Plugin Download

You can download the plugin here at http://www.nothing2hide.net/wp-plugins/wordpress-global-translator-plugin/

Steps to install & configure

Download the Plugin into your PC.

Unzip it and upload to your blog’s plugin folder.

Go to your blog’s plugin and activate it.

Click on Settings->Global Translator

The configuration screen appears. You may follow the guide on the screen and configure accordingly. If you not sure, use default settings.

I hope you like this article

Cheers

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If you have created many posts in your blog, you might want to highlight your most popular entries to your readers. The purpose is that hopefully your blog readers will read more of your blog content.

There is a plugin that can help you. It is known as Wordpress Popular Posts.

This plugin allows you to decide the term “popular” either by the most comments, total views or average daily views. You can set it at the setting screen which I will show you later.

Then you need to go to Widget and drag the Popular Posts widget and paste at the sidebar of your choice.

Installation
•    You need to download the plugin from wordpress-popular-posts plugin
•    Unzip the files in your PC
•    Upload the files intoyour blog’s plugin folder.
•    Then you need to go to your blog’s plugin and look for Wordpress Popular Posts.
•    Click on activate.

Configuration
Click on Settings->Wordpress Popular Posts.

The configuration screen appears. You may follow the guide on the screen and configure accordlingly or you may change it to your likings.  Then click on update settings

Widget
Select Appearance->Widgets
Select the sidebar where you want the Popular Posts to be displayed.
As for my blog, it has a sidebar_top( Note: This differs for different wordpress theme)
Drag the Popular Posts widget and place it there.
You are done!

You can see my Popular Posts Widget at my blog’s Right Column

Cheers

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Most of blogs that I visited have serious look. Very business like.

A typical blog will have words only. At a glance it looks boring.

Some try to enhance it by putting static pictures or images in their postings.

There is nothing wrong with that. In fact I also capture images and included in my postings.

One of the ways to liven up your blog & to make it friendlier are to have active smileys that can move.

People tend to be attracted to things that move.

I have found a plugin that have active smileys known as Wp-Monalisa.

You can down it here at http://www.tuxlog.de/wordpress/2009/wp-monalisa/

Steps to download & install

Download the Plugin into your PC.

Unzip it and upload to your blog’s plugin folder.

Go to your blog’s plugin and look for Wp-Monalisa.

Click on activate.

.

When you go to Add New Post you will see the smileys at the right column.

Following are the samples of the smileys.

These smileys can be pasted, depending on your choice, in posts, pages or comments.

Hope this will help to inject a little bit of humor & remind your readers to smile a bit.

Hey! Life is meant to be enjoyed. Don’t take things too seriously!!!

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When I say, go and look at Archives articles on the blog. Where will you look first?
Most of the people will look at the right or left column of the blog with the title Archives there, right?

There is another way to allow your readers to search for your Archives content in a unique and refreshing view.

One of the ways is to use Snazzy Archives Plugin.
You can get it here. http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/snazzy-archives

Snazzy Archives is a visualization plugin for your WordPress site featuring an unique way to display all your posts. Your archive page will never be boring again!
Snazzy Archives simply lets you express yourself and your blog. You can select different layouts and special effects, Snazzy archives will make sure your content stands out.

Snazzy Archives Plugin allows you view the Archives content at the tab at the top.

The thing I like about Snazzy Plugin is that it allows you to present your previous blog contents in an interesting arrangement together with pictures.

It also has some other arrangements that you would like to view before you use it on your blog.

You can view the sample here:
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/snazzy-archives

In order to use this plugin you need to download the plugin from
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/snazzy-archives

Steps to install & configure
Download the Plugin into your PC.
Unzip it and upload to your blog’s plugin folder.
Go to your blog’s plugin and activate it.
Click on Settings->Snazzy archives.
The configuration screen appears. You may follow the guide on the screen and configure accordlingly. If you not sure, use default settings.

Next, you need to go to Page->Add New.

At the top, give it a name, eg Archives

At the content, you need to key  exactly as per screenshot below.

Save the page.

That’s it. You may go to blog’s home page. At the tab you will see new page that you just created.

Cheers!

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In order to increase traffics to your blog, you need to optimize the keywords in content and also in images.

Many people use keywords to search for information. As such it is important to optimize the blog with correct keywords in order to ensure your blog is displayed prominently in the search results page.

But there are other people that search for images or pictures. Therefore it is encouraged to have picture or images in your blog posting. Do you know pictures attract readers more than words?

In order to optimize the images or pictures into SEO friendly, you need to ensure the ALT & TITLE attributes are correctly done.

As I am not a programmer by profession, I have difficulty in checking the HTML programming lines and update the ALT & TITLE correctly.

Enter the SEO Friendly Images plugin that really makes my day. If you are seriously in increasing traffic to your blog, you really need to activate this plugin in your blog.
Once you have activated the plugin, it will automatically update all the images in your blog with ALT & TITLE. You can double check it by looking at the HTML codes.
It really makes your life easy. Now who says automation is bad?

SEO Friendly Images is a Wordpress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image.

You can download the plugin at seo friendly images

Installation & Configuration
Download the Plugin into your PC.
Unzip it and upload to your blog’s plugin folder.
Go to your blog’s plugin and activate it.

Click on Settings->SEO Friendly Images.
The following appears.

You can change the parameters for ALT & TITLE or you can take the default settings. After that click on Update Options to save it.

It will then update all of your blogs images with ALT & TITLE attributes.

Cheers

Alwin Chuah

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Are your Feedburner readers receiving emails with the same name of your blog or some other text that you specify as your email title every time you update your blog?
Similar to the list of emails below? If it is, then you need to improvise it. Otherwise, they might not read the email. They might think you are sending the same item over & over again.

You need to make some changes in the Feedburner to send your blog post title instead of your blog name.

1)    Go to http://feedburner.google.com and sign in .
2)    Click on the Feed Title.
3)    Click on Publicize Tab
4)    Click on Email Subcriptions
5)    Click on Email Branding
6)    At the Email Subject/Title , key in the following ${latestItemTitle}.

Click on Save at the bottom of the screen
See sample below

After you make the changes, the email will look like this with the blog posting inserted as the email title.

This will definitely attract &  encourage your Feedburner readers to read the emails.

Cheers. Hope this will help to improve your blogging knowledge.

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There are many ways to optimize your blog in order to speed it up.

One of the way is to optimize the MySQL database of your blog..

The reason you need to optimize the database is that over a period of time and usage, the database will be fragmented.

I have read in a couple blogs on how to optimize the blog. When I saw the commands, programming codes and lengthy steps required to optimize the database, I froze. I told myself I am not going to use those methods. I knew that all it takes is one wrong move and my blog’s database will be corrupted.

I have search around and found a useful plugin that allow optimizing your blog database safely and efficiently.

It is known as Optimize DB.
You can download it here at http://yoast.com/wordpress/optimize-db/

Installation
You just need to download the zip file from the above site.
Unzip the file
Upload the file to your blog’s plugin folder.

Usage
At the Manage Plugin screen, go to the Optimize DB plugin and select Activate.

At the Optimize DB’s plugin, select Optimize.

It will read your blog’s database and display a similar list. You just need to click on Optimize Now.

Once it finished optimizing, it will display below.

Simple isn’t ?

I hope the above article is useful to you.

Regards
Alwin Chuah

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If you do not like other people from copying content & pictures from your blog, you can copy protect it.
One of the ways I found it is easily setup & effective is to use plugin.
The plugin is known as WP-CopyProtect.

Installation
Firstly, you can download it at http://www.thechetan.com/wp-copyprotect/

Then unzip & upload it to your plugin folder

Settings
Go to Settings ->WP-Copy Protect
Tick at Disable right mouse click & Disable text selection
You can also add a message ( at the box just below the check to activate)
Then just save it.

However the disadvantage is that your reader might not be able to perform a right click on the links to open at new tab( For firefox)  or New Window ( for Internet Explorer)

In order to overcome it, you have to ensure all your links can open automatically at a new tab or new window when the reader performs a left click at the link.

You can read it from the below article

link that open in new tab or window

I hope this article can improve on your blogging knowledge.

Cheers

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