Others moving their blogs may also encounter similar problems so I thought I’d share what happened to save you from repeating my mistakes. You see, the wordpress version on my old host was a really old one, plus I wasn’t using Akismet but rather marking comments as spam locally. As a result, the backup feed included all the old comments marked as spam into it, producing a feed of over 47 Megs! What a monster. Of course my new WordPress (with backup feed size limited to 2 Megs) refused to eat it and choked on it. To sort out this mess I had to write a Ruby script to clean it all up and then still manually check things. Hence, if you notice your old comment on here has been nuked, here’s why.

How one should handle this situation ideally: if you’re using “Mark as spam” WP functionality go to spam comments BEFORE backing up your blog and make sure you delete all the comments there. Only after this is done you can safely back your blog up and import it into your new WP installation. Whew!

UPDATE: If you have a WP version so old that it doesn’t even let you look at your modded comments marked as spam,  go to your phpMyAdmin, select your wordpress database, go to the “wp_commets” table and run this SQL query:

DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `wp_comments`.`comment_approved`= ’spam’

- this should clean the comments table for you safely and fast without removing any previously approved comments that you’d like to keep in your backup (which, in case of such an old WP version, will most likely be a DB dump).

We are not even talking of search rankings at the moment – though as a side effect of these few steps you may improve them as well. These are purely traffic driving tips to increase your blog’s visibility:

1. Each time you post, make sure you ping at least all the main blog/rss indexing services (e.g. Technorati, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! News, etc.). If your blog platform is WordPress it can be configured to ping these services automatically. If you use some other platform and it does not support pinging when a new post is made, you can manually ping using Pingomatic. Google Blog Search and Technorati have an option to ping manually as well.

2. Create profiles in blogging communities such as MyBlogLog. Make sure you’re logged into your MyBlogLog (or other networks) account as you browse other blogs that have their widget displaying latest visitors who are members of that network. (Check a few prominent blogs on your topic to see what networks are popular among them – you can figure out the most prominent blogs on your subject by searching for your keywords in Technorati and checking what blogs have the highest authority there).

3. Every now and then, make posts quoting other blogs in your industry with links to them (e.g. review posts, news posts, analytical posts, etc.) – this should send trackbacks to the quoted blogs and create links on them to your blog, which should increase your visibility in your niche and attract people interested in your topic.

4. Leave relevant comments in other blogs in your industry using your blog URL as your signature URL – this should accomplish the same effect as the previous step and also help you start a dialog with other bloggers writing about your topic.

5. Bookmark your blog in whatever social bookmarking services you use.

6. Make sure you add the URL of your blog to your profile in different social networks you use.

7. Whenever you do a post that you think your readers should find really interesting/important/groundbreaking, consider submitting it to Digg, Propeller, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other similar sites. If you submitted a post, consider adding a “Digg this post” etc. button to the post so that your readers could do some promotion for you on those sites.

There is surely more you can do to build a successful blog and there are professional bloggers who made a career writing about it – but these are  the basics that are easy to implement and will let you see the effect pretty fast.

I asked myself this question many times before and asked it again today when I came across the blog of iPower, a web hosting provider. Why do they run a blog? With posts like this one, it is pretty clear that they want to use it as a tool for driving more customers their way. Great, but why would they want to place AdSense ads on their blog then? Aren’t they familiar with the way AdSense operates in that it will display ads topically related to the content of the page the ads are placed on? In iPower case, the ads of other hosts who are, clearly, iPower’s competitors. Isn’t that the contrary of what they are trying to achieve with the blog and wouldn’t it drive their potential customers away?

OK their reasoning behind this step might have been that those blog visitors who browse away from their site and buy hosting services elsewhere could at least be monetized by clicking those AdSense ads – but with the current cut down costs per click for AdSense publishers, it doesn’t quite justify it for me. Heck even affiliate links of those competitor hosts would have done better. However, in my opinion it looks like they do not have enough faith in their host if they provide their visitors with ways to leave their site and go to competitors. An ideal “landing page” (used in quotes here as a blog cannot be literally compared to a landing page – although each page of your commercial site should be aimed at converting your visitors and persuading them your service or product is worth their attention) is the one where the user has only two options: complete a purchase or get more information about your service or product. The less distractions, the better.

So if you try to combine different ways of making profit on the web, there is nothing wrong there – but you should consider carefully your monetization methods so that they do not interfere with each other. Pursuing contradictory goals will get you nowhere and neither of them will be achieved as well as it could have been otherwise.

To me, my blog is:

• a marketing tool – I started writing this blog before I launched the main site
• a traffic driver – bloging, when done right, gets nice traffic, and certain sucessful posts can bring you tons of new readers/visitors (but for it to be relevant traffic, you certainly need ot stay on topic)
• an online reputation building tool – by posting valuable on-topic stuff, you let people know what you’re worth as an SEO (replace SEO with your specific niche)
• a link building tool – blogs are generally more linkable than old-fashioned sites

What’s your blog doing for you?

So here goes the ultimate blogging tips list:

1. Linkbait types
2. More on linkbait
3. What to write/not to write in a blog
4. How to engage readers with titles
5. Blogging for beginners – a whole series of articles
6. Blogging tips to get on bloggers A list
7. More on what to blog about
8. Tips for attracting more comments

P.S. Just as I finished the class i have noticed something new and useful posted on ProBlogger – 10 techniquest for finding blog readers. This I think is some very good stuff – except for #2, tell me whatever you will but I have seen Ezine Articles become the industry’s biggest spam in the last half a year with nobody but scrapers reading articles posted there – so I’d make it top 9 list and drop #2.

We all know what happened to Google PageRank over the years – from being an innovative way to make sense of the SERPs as a whole and each individual site, it has degraded into something useless, dubious and spammed to death as more and more people found and exploited ways to manipulate it (or at least its visible representation). Now that the stakes are getting high in the blogging world, will people try to manipulate Technorati’s authority filters in a similar way, until the whole idea is devalued? Well, maybe – or maybe not.

Thing  is, with the Blogosphere, it’s a whole new game – as there’s the social element involved. Which might just happen to make it work better than the old PageRank. Due to this social element, it’s not about scripting and button pushing anymore – it’s rather about social engineering – and that is something more difficult to fake and does require the real value for any individual blog or blogging personality to make it to the top. Well, we’re gonna see as time goes how it all works out.

In the meantime, it looks like Google doesn’t intend to give up. It is definitely working out ways to deal with the Blogosphere. Lee Odden reports on Google’s acquisition of Measure Map, a blog analytics provider – definitely a move towards embracing the blogs data and making sense of it.

Whatever it is you write, it has either a long term value (e.g. site content) or short term value (e.g. a press release), though sometimes something that was originally meant to serve as material to attract short term attention can end up serving you long term (e.g. syndicated articles).

1. Finding stuff to write about and researching the topic’s popularity (most important for effective exposure of short term value content like press releases):
1. what do people talk about currently? – to find out, you can use:

i. Bloglines – create an account, subscribe to blogs posting on your topic of interest – this is good for both short term and long term value content writing, in the meantime you can subscribe to your own blogs to create extra exposure for them

ii. Technorati – tags by popularity

iii. Feedster

iv. PubSub – subscriptions to searches on certain terms – the info is updated as new posts matching the query are found, sample subscriptions are available

v. Furl: latest headlines, most popular

vi. Free Press Release site – for ideas what to write about for immediate publication (long term as well)

vii. Google news – the latest news at a glance, can be researched in depth for a certain specific topic

viii. Google Blog Search – what’s been posted recently on a certain topic – when sorted by date, shows what’s hot short term, when sorted by relevance can be used for long term material research

ix. Yahoo News – same idea as Google News

x. Yahoo News Search – searches news and blogs, search results can be sorted by date

xi. Wikipedia’s main page – they display a featured article as well as current news. Both can give you an idea of what to write about both short term and long term.

xii. Blogpulse – Top news stories, Top Blogs, Top Blog Posts, key phrases

2. Watch what your competitors do (e.g. at i-newswire.com or any other press release site, search for your competitors’ site URL and look through their press releases) – but instead of simply copying them, critically analyze their activities and try to make your work better by using and improving their good ideas and avoiding their mistakes.
   
   
2. Link bait concept – think what people will be interested in and likely to link to. Not necessarily something positive – negative reaction is good too for linking (see this article by Rob Sullivan on types of linkbait)
   Keep in mind, however, that in some cases negative stuff for link bait might not be a good idea – if it undermines the site’s reputation in the potential customers’ eyes, for example.
3. How not to write: www.clickhereyouidiot.com (the ideology of sales letters and what’s wrong with it when driven to the edge – got this one from a Threadwatch post by Aaron Wall)
   Consider an article title like this: Unimaginable Power Of [Our Product/Service]- Most Sacred Secretes Of [Whatever It Is We Offer] Revealed - what’s wrong about it? Well, everybody smells an exaggeration and hype before they even start reading your stuff.
4. Checking visitor logs for topics to write about – this concerns sites/blogs rather than articles/press releases but still can give you an idea
5. Checking rankings – are there any unusual terms the site ranks for? If they are still somehow related to the site’s topic they might be worth covering/expanding (tools: data.rankcount.com, googspy.com – thanks Aaron for these two links as well)