I happen to be in the business of marketing consulting and I happen to see a lot of companies and Individuals actually spending money on website design. But yet there are some striking examples where no design was needed except maybe for the logo and a bit of customization.In a nutshell, here are some things you must know about wordpress blogs:

1.Unless it’s web development or website customization, you don’t need designers: Most small business owners think of buying a domain name and actually take the trouble of  hiring a web designer to design the website. If you have a wordpress blog, you don’t need a designer. The blog itself can be set-up within minutes of buying the domain name and the blog can have a theme (thousands and thousands of themes available for use).
2. Blogs are good fodder for search engines, but you got to prepare your blogs: Blogs are certainly prone to being found by search engines and that’s good news, but then, it isn’t going to happen naturally. Chances are greatly improved if you do certain changes to permalinks, write keyword rich blogs with titles and have a healthy keyword density within your posts. Additionally, you will have to add certain plugins like All-in-SEO and others which can help boost your search rankings.
3. WordPress blogs are better than a static site: If possible, don’t ever go for a website( static) for yourself or for your company. Websites are passe; we now have blogs that look just like websites and even some of the Fortune 500 companies seem to be taking to  blogs because of the sheer networking abilities, ease of upkeep and maintenance and also the ease with which content can be produced and uploaded,notwithstanding the auto-scheduling and social media optimization possibilities.

What do you think?Need some inspiration? Check out 10 Great Website Designs That Use WordPress as the CMS

Every blogger or blog  likes extra traffic, so here’s a good way to increase traffic to your blog.  Take for instance by default, WordPress  will let different RPC services know that you have updated your blog by sending what is called a ping to them. It also is referred to as a RPC (Remote Procedure Call).  A ping is sort of like a tap on the shoulder or just a friendly reminder to check out your blog for the latest news.  By default, a WordPress blog is setup to only ping the service Ping-o-matic which pings over 20 other RPC services. By updating this list, your blog will ping many other RPC services not included with Ping-o-matic.

Advantages
The sole purpose of some of these services is to gather all of the latest news on blogs around the world and to promote them. This of course, will drive some traffic back to your blog — not tremendous amounts though, since a lot of these services aren’t too popular. Also, this will also help your latest post get crawled and indexed faster by search engines as they will find your post faster.

Disadvantages
Not to many really, except that if you ping a service too often, you may get black listed. When I say too often, I’m meaning in the hundreds of times a day so as long as you don’t go wild (spamming), I wouldn’t worry about it.

Updating your Ping List
In WordPress, you can update your ping list from the admin page under Options->Writing. Here is a good list of RPC services. I found this list at a site by Vladimir Prelovac @ Prelovac.com.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

As I frequent some of the well-known forums out there on the Internet, I see that new bloggers( and veterans too) have a tendency to lean towards the “easy” ways of blogging. You see, automatic blogging, importing RSS feeds and making your blog a mere hosted aggerator with no real content on it to speak of, is the worst kind of shooting you could do to your own feet.

No blog can sustain itself without proper content on it that actually solves people’s problems, entertains, makes you laugh, educates or informs. There is no point in setting up a blog if you all you could think of was to do this automatic blogging.

Easy ways are not for long-term. These promises that people make about making things easy is going to make money just for them and no one else. Don’t be fooled by their outrageous promises and the conniving sales talk.

Think of your blog as a magazine: would you care to subscribe to a magazine that just aggregates everything published on every other magazine? Is that a sensible investment for you? I am sure if I found a magazine like that, I would use it to wipe my car’s wind-sheild.

Each time you blog, pretend as if you are being paid top dollar to do that job. Think of your blog as premium membership site. Also, imagine that your blog is one of the most trusted and well-respected blogs on the entire planet.

With thousands and thousands of subcribers, everything posted is instead read, commented about, shared, ‘digg’ed and bookmarked — now, how would you feel writing posts for such a blog? Would you still plagiarize? Steal content? Write meaningless rant about why your cat got chased by your dog and died a tragic death?

Think about it.

One of the most irksome entries in a bloggers’ to-do list is to decide which theme to select for their blogs. Should you go for a free theme which are abundant on the Internet or should you bite the back of your hand and pay through your teeth for the expensive paid ones? Should you go for the flexible magazine type themes or should you keep it simple and go for minimalist ones? Too many questions out there and there isn’t one simple answer for all this. Here are a few tips though:

• When you know how to deal with the free ones, you don’t need to pay: One of my hobbies is to develop blogs based on various niches and over the years I had noticed that you can set up 2 blogs in a day using free themes and people won’t even be able to recognize which theme you use. Trust me, I have no clue about what CSS is or how themes are designed. I just learned how to tweak themes for desired results. All you have to do is to learn little things like making logos, tweaking the themes for desired results.
• Unless you develop blogs for clients, you won’t need developer licenses: A developer license is for those who develop blogs for clients. You will not need one unless you do domain flipping, website or blog flipping.
• Paid Themes: I never saw the need to buy a paid theme. Of course, bloggingelements uses citrus theme( which is a paid one!) that’s because of Mike. I, for one, am a major proponent for free wordpress themes. The only advantage paid themes have over free ones are that they  have an easy dashboard type settings panels, choices of colors and other customization options. If these are important for you — go ahead and buy your paid theme would either customize a free theme or have someone design a new theme for me.

2.

I was reading The life of an Internet Mogul just yes’day night and I thought there was so much a blogger can learn from Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Autmattic and WordPress — yes, the iconic, much touted, madly used and the juggernaut you and I keep talking about all the time. I managed to pick certain things off that lengthy article that might be a great pointer for us:

1. Matt worked hard; he still does: He started when he was a high-school student; he worked in his room and by the time he touched 25, he is the founder of wordpress which apparently powers more than 12 million blogs — I don’t think I need to explain what that means, right? Although he claims that he doesn’t follow time much and that he is terrible when it keeps to managing and keeping time, he still works very hard. He does the akismet coding himself, for instance.

2. He is a voracious reader: This was expected. One of the most common, well-defining traits most successful people is that they are all well-read. If you don’t read, you can’t be successful. Matt reads the kindle everyday, reads a lot of business books, magazines and keeps on top of his business. When he isn’t reading, he is busy dreaming about wordpress. As a blogger, you must be reading all the time; keep on top of your niche; familiarize yourself with all the tools, SEO, content development and a lot more.

3. Care for your blog, give it your personal attention: With all the success and being so iconic, Matt could automate the whole blogging thing; but he doesn’t. He doesn’t automate. He personally reads and approves each of the hundreds of comments. He avoids getting flamed, and ensures that the positive comments are edited off anything offensive.

Source:  BlogWorldExpo.com

-  Over 12 million American adults maintain some kind of blog.

-  Over 57 million Americans actively read blogs.

-  Technorati is currently tracking over 65 million blogs.

-  1.7 million have said making money is one of the reasons that they  blog.

-  9% of regular Internet users say that they have created a blog.

-  Over 100 thousand blogs are created every day.

- There are over 1.5 million blog posts every day.

-  51% of blog readers shop online.

-  Blog readers average 22 hours online every week.

Some people ask, “Why do I need a blog?”  I say anyone can benefit in some way from actively maintaining a blog of some sort.  Whether you are a CEO of a major company, a nurse, a cabinet maker or a stay-at-home mom, there are many benefits to having a blog.  First off, a blog is a simple, cost-effective way to create a professional (and personal) online presence.  A blog can deliver a large impact for very little money.  Creating this web presence used to require a hefty budget for things like graphic design, programming and hosting.  Worst of all, every time there was a need to update the content or graphics, additional cost incurred; all the while, waiting for someone else to fix it!  Today you can launch a WordPress blog in minutes, at the cost of only pennies per day.  And the best part is, this process has become so “user friendly” that anyone who is willing to invest a minimal amount of time can start their own blog without the need of computer expertise or professional service.

Do you have a blog?  If so, how has it helped you and/or your business?

What do you think are some of the key upsides of having a blog; either personal or business?

Let us know with a comment!

Some things in life are just mandatory. There is no way you should post on your blog without getting your blog configured and all set to go. Some plugins save you from inundating spam and many others bring you traffic. Some make your blog look good while some can make your blog a super-charged, roving maniac that roams the Internet searching for fodder. But there are some, without which your blog can’t even exist. I mean, it can, but there’s no point. See what those plug-ins are:

1. WordPress Stats: WordPress stats is a plugin that displays great statistics in a graphical format so as to enable you to be on top of your blog and see where your traffic comes; what it does and what they click on each day. It could also show who is linking to you –all on one single page. It is dynamic — see new stats just by refreshing. Google Analytics is just as good or probably even richer. features wise, but the trouble with Google Analytics is that it is updated daily. That means you will have to wait until a day or so to see your statistics.

2. All-in-One SEO Pack: WordPress blogs are mean SEO machines – or so you must have heard. But they can’t be so unless you have something that super-charges the juggernaut that the wordpress really is or can be. All-in-one SEO pack is a great plugin to have because it immediately makes a meta tag, meta description and updates keywords for each post or page that you might want to publish making it even more accessible for the search engines.

3.What Would Seth Godin Do: To make your blog really reach out to as manysubscribers as possible, you will need to cast a net wide enough. One great way to do that is to offer RSS subscriptions. But if you just post a little graphic or chiclet that says ” subscribe to my blog”, it isn’t going to move mountains. However, one little plugin called “What Would Seth Godin DO” literally displays a little box before and after every post to promt the reader to subscribe to your posts. YOu can customize the messages to be displayed too. Easy and incredibly effective.

4. Tweet This: Are you guilty of indulging yourself in the frenetic twitter mania yet? I personally don’t know how it’s going to be effetcive or how it can add value except bring streaming traffic in pulses to your blog posts and get ” Retweeted”, which will boost your ego. I can clearly see that a lot of people are taking to it and creating communities, groups, friends and boosting their network. “Tweet this”  will diplay a miniature button which enables your readers to click on it and tweet it to their follows. Inundating traffic; one click.

Have you heard of any plugins that I missed out? Please feel free to let me know. It can’t hurt to share, eh?

Their have been a lot of bloggers that started out using blogger as their blog platform. Soon after they got going they found that they were limited in capacity. Most decided they wanted something more and that was found in the WordPress blogging platform. Why WordPress? Well you can read more about the features on the official site WordPress.org but here are three great reasons:

WordPress is specially designed software for use in the publishing business. WordPress has been created in such a manner that it will be easily understood by the seasoned blogger as well as the novice trying to get in on the scene.

That is only one of the advantages of WordPress software. This particular type of software falls under the label of ‘open source software’. Open source software is the kind of software that is full extensible; in other words it allows the user to make as many modifications to the program as he wishes.

The blogger benefits from this as it can enable him to make improvisations on his blog. As publishing their material has become quite a strain for bloggers, this particular software will turn it into a rather pleasant affair. WordPress can also be described as a high class publishing platform that will propel the blogger (novice or seasoned) into a sphere of sophistication and professionalism without the backbreaking and cumbersome computer jargon.

In addition to understanding how your specific blogging software works, such as WordPress, there are some terms and concepts you need to know.

Archives

A blog is also a good way to keep track of articles on a site. A lot of blogs feature an archive based on dates (like a monthly or yearly archive). The front page of a blog may feature a calendar of dates linked to daily archives. Archives can also be based on categories featuring all the articles related to a specific category.

It does not stop there; you can also archive your posts by author or alphabetically. The possibilities are endless. This ability to organize and present articles in a composed fashion is much of what makes blogging a popular personal publishing tool.

Feeds

A Feed is a function of special software that allows “Feedreaders” to access a site automatically looking for new content and then post updates about that new content to another site. This provides a way for users to keep up with the latest and hottest information posted on different blogging sites. Some Feeds include RSS (alternately defined as “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”), Atom or RDF files. Dave Shea, author of the web design weblog Mezzoblue has written a comprehensive summary of feeds.

Blogrolls

A blogroll is a list, sometimes categorized, of links to webpages the author of a blog finds worthwhile or interesting. The links in a blogroll are usually to other blogs with similar interests. The blogroll is often in a “sidebar” on the page or featured as a dedicated separate web page.BlogRolling and blo.gs are two websites that provide some interesting functions or help related to blogrolls. These sites provide methods for users to maintain these rolls effortlessly and integrate them into weblogs. WordPress has a built-in Link Manager so users do not have to depend on a third party for creating and managing their blogroll.

Syndication

A feed is a machine readable (usually XML) content publication that is updated regularly. Many weblogs publish a feed (usually RSS, but also possibly Atom and RDF and so on, as described above). There are tools out there that call themselves “feedreaders”. What they do is they keep checking specified blogs to see if they have been updated, and when the blogs are updated, they display the new post, and a link to it, with an excerpt (or the whole contents) of the post. Each feed contains items that are published over time. When checking a feed, the feedreader is actually looking for new items. New items are automatically discovered and downloaded for you to read. Just so you don’t have to visit all the blogs you are interested in. All you have to do with these feedreaders is to add the link to the RSS feed of all the blogs you are interested in. The feedreader will then inform you when any of the blogs have new posts in them. Most blogs have these “Syndication” feeds available for the readers to use.

Managing Comments

One of the most exciting features of blogging tools are the comments. This highly interactive feature allows users to comment upon article posts and link to your posts and comment on and recommend them. These are known as trackbacks and pingbacks . We’ll also discuss how to moderate and manage comments and how to deal with the annoying trend in “comment spam”, when unwanted comments are posted to your blog.

This post is from WordPress.org the prefered Blogging platform of Blogging Elements