This is just a little something, which I have tested and it has worked, and has increased my traffic nicely. MyBlogLog, as most of you know, is a social network for website/blog authors. You are able to create a profile, and list the websites which you author for other people to visit and comment on. It has proven to be an amazing social network, and as much as I am against these things, MyBlogLog is one which I will happily stand by and congratulate on a very successful system.

When you create your profile, you are able to upload a picture of your website/blog. Once you have uploaded your picture, you can have it resized, so it appears as a thumb nail to represent your website/blog. You can view an example of my blog log here. Once you have visited this link, you will see exactly what I am talking about. I am not going to go into explain all about MyBlogLog, as it is very self explanitory, and the website provides plenty of information.

I have spent the last while watching my statistics on the website, and trying to figure out, whether updating the thumbnail image of your website/blog makes a difference to your traffic, and I can honestly report back to you saying that it does. Firstly, if your website does go through a redesign, then obviously you should update your thumbnail, it would be silly not to, but even if you have not updated the design, but have changed a few things on the site, or have made a number of posts, take another screen dump, and change your thumbnail. I think this must be something related to the human mind, perhaps people who have seen your list of websites/blogs before returns and sees a slight change, perhaps they are compelled to revisit the website. I do know that I have a couple peoples profiles, whcih I visit often, and I certainly would click through if I saw a change to the thumbnail.

Give it a go, I have has success with this, perhaps you can too. Join my Webtrepreneur network here.

It’s time for another little Wordpress plugin, which helps you spread the word about your website, but also spreading the word with the idea of show casing it with your best information.

Recommend It is a simple to install wordpress plugin, which gives users the ability to recommend your website to other people. This sounds rather normal and straight forward, but the beauty of it, is that you can recommend them to your best articles. A lot of the time, you latest article might not be your best article, and therefore you might lose new readers through this - so with Recommend It, your new readers will arrive at posts, which are your best ones. The installation process is fairly straight forward, take a look:

1. Download recommendit.rar, extract the .php file and upload
it to the /plugins/ folder in Wordpress.

2. Activate the Plugin in Wordpress, as per usual.

3. index.php - add the following code before any other code:

<?php
if(!isset($_SESSION[’recpost’]))
{
		session_start();
	    session_register(’recpost);
     $_SESSION[’recpost’][0] = -1;
}
?>

4. Add the following code where you want the "Recommend this Article"
button in your single.php:

<?php RecommenditPlugin(); ?>

5. To add it to your sidebar, add this code to the sidebar.php:

<li><h2>Recommended</h2>
<ul>
<?php get_recommends(); ?>
</ul>
</li>

You can use get_recommends(5); or get_recommends(5, 60); for limitation purposes.

6. If you would like to style the button, add div#recommendit,
form#recommenditform and input#recommenditbutton into your css file.

These six simple steps can lead to a nice increase in reader loyalty and traffic. Play around, style your button/link appropriately, and enjoy the sharing of your information!

This must be one of those topics which is very often neglected, but so important! We all know that choosing a book, or renting a DVD relies a great deal upon the name of the book or DVD. Humans are fairly lazy by nature, and if a title is not attractive, the chances of making an effort to read the back of the book or DVD is slim. I am not going to go into telling you about the importance of domain names, but rather look into the importance of post titles.

Each post made on any form of webblog requires a title. Now, it’s obvious that the post title should sum up the post which follows, but should we take time planning our title? Indeed. The post title on most blogging software is hyperlinked automatically, this allows quick referencing, and is used for back links and RSS feeds. Just looking at back links and RSS feeds, we can tell how important the title is. If the title in not attractive, the chances of getting a click through are slim. Furthermore, knowing that the title is a hyper link, gives us a great way to target search engine spiders correctly. Search engine spiders read these titles, and find keywords. That being said, it is important to try and include your keywords in the title.

Often when I write articles, I try and decide my post title, before I start writing, and I try and keep the post as closely related to the topic as possible. Systems, such as, Delicious, Digg and Stumble are perfect examples of where titles are key. Hundreds of people surf around these web sites, looking for interesting topics, so if you can hit a great topic, the chances of someone clicking through is high. One can go as far as constructing a topic which sounds like one thing, but it actually another, playing with peoples mind so to say to increase your traffic, and hopefully, even though the person clicked through with one idea, perhaps the material he/she stumbles upon will be of interest! When trying this approach, just remember that you do not want to go too off topic, or try and be too clever with the title.

Another thing to consider when choosing a topic, is the categories you use on your web site, you want to hold things together, don’t make a paste about fish breeding and lodge it in the ‘fish types’ category, and entitle it ‘Fish Breeding’, rather try and entitle it ‘Breeding for different fish types’. This holds your topics together, and the idea behind this is that a visitor will read the topic, and then hopefully read other topics under the same category!

Play around with titles, see which titles get the greatest click through ratios, and work up a system as to how you decide your topics effectively!

Something I have learned over the last couple of weeks, and especially with the release of Afrigator and Amatomu is syndication. RSS feeds are an essential attribute to a website, and should always be available to readers. I am not going to explain what RSS is at this point, as I feel that most people will already know what it is, but more to the point, I have a little plugin and information about using RSS in an interesting and useful way to increase our traffic and reader experience.

If you look towards the top of my sidebar on the right, you will see.. “RECENT PIXEL GRABS ON BLOGVERTISE”. Now, basically what is happening here is syndication. Over at Blogvertise, there is an RSS feed, which sends out a message each time pixels are taken by bloggers. Each time one of these feeds is sent out, the plugin I use captures the feed, and displays the title of it. Nifty? I think so!

If you scroll down the page a little bit, you will notice two things.. “Latest from iMod” and “Latest from IT Carreer”, these are, again, two live feeds from other websites. One being a feed from my personal website, and one being a feed from a good friends blog.

How will this increase your traffic? Well, firstly, if you have more than website, you can display the topics from site B on site A, and display the topics from site A on site B. Basically bouncing readers between the two websites, thus merging your websites and handling a larger reader base, as you have now spread your two sites over one! I hope you are thinking to yourself, “Wow, that’s a good point”.

Secondly, and perhaps not as effective as my former point: you can display live feeds from other websites, which cover similar topics to your site. Now, of course this might mean a reader clicking to a similar site, and enjoying the other site more than yours, this is a risk you will need to take. Chances are, the reader will enjoy the fact that you shared useful knowledge and thus return to your website again. If the reader has taken the time to look through all the links on your sidebar/navigation area, chances are he/she enjoyed the content on your website, and therefore is taking the time to completely look around your site. Personally, I think they would come back. What you could do, is make friends with someone who authors a site similar to yours, and both put up live feeds to eachothers website, kind of like a backlink, but with a bit more too it?!

Right, how do you do this? Well, it’s actually extremely easy, all you need is one file, and a statement of code. I have uploaded the files onto my iMod server, simply click here, to download.

You will find two files in the zip file. One which has a .php extension and a readme file. Upload the .php file to your plugins directory on your wordpress install. Once you have done this, login to wp-admin, move your navigation to plugins, and activate the plugin. Now, the readme file is really easy to follow, but to make it even easier to you, here is the code to display the live feeds on your blog..

<?php RSSImport(1,”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webtrepreneurcoza“,false,true); ?>

That’s it! Simply include that code whereever you would like the feed to be displayed, and it will be displayed. Looking at the code above, there are 4 properties to this method. The first property (here a ‘1′), is the number of recent topics to display. The second property is the link to the RSS feed from the website you would like to display feeds from. The first third property, a boolean property (true or false) is for whether you would like only headlines to be displayed, and finally, the forth property, another boolean property is for whether you would like to truncate the headline - meaning that if you set the property to true, it will only show the first 30 characters of the headline, which is very useful if your design has a certain width.

What happens if 30 isn’t going to work for you? Perhaps your design is very narrow, and you want to only display 20 characters? Well, here is a solution for you:

53  if(strlen($item[’title’])>30)
54  {
55  $item[’title’]=substr($item[’title’],0,30).” … “;

These are lines copied out of the .php file. The 53, 54 and 55 represent the line numbers in the file. If you would like to only display 20 characters, yes you guessed it, replace the 30’s with 30’s in the file. Save the file, and upload it as you did before.

That’s it for today, a nice long post, I hope you make use of these useful syndication techniques! Let me know if you come up with other unique ideas based on these concepts.

The Webtrepreneur