Hey people,

It has been a while since I last made a post, so I thought I better just let everyone know that I’m still alive.

I also need to give you an update about the report that I’m writing which I talked about at the end of my previous post – How I built my List from 50 to 2000 in around 15 weeks!…

Basically it is taking me longer than I thought to create, I’ve had a busy few weeks with things in real life and I had to put a few things on hold, mainly because we’ve been having work done in our house and had to keep turning the electricity off so the work could be carried out safely… Anyway I’m back on track now and I’ll try and get the report completed as soon as I can.

Okay, so moving on to the main topic of this post…

6 Super Tips To Get Your Articles Read

It is no secret that there are many people who dread having to write articles, reports and even blog posts. Many just feel like it seems to be too much work and it all just goes to waste when nobody reads them.

To some people reading articles can seem like work too, especially if the article is boring and bland. Well, articles are supposed to be read, that’s their purpose, to pass on your message and information. If it is not read then it is clearly a waste of time and effort.

But all the same articles have to be written to be read, it’s just a matter of making them good. Making a good article doesn’t have to be strenuous and straining, there are just some points needed to be reminded of, and some guides to follow. Once you get the hang of it writing articles can be fun, as well as profitable for you and your site.

Of course, when writing articles it must be on a subject that you know about, that’s why if you own a site you are probably knowledgeable about that certain topic and theme. When you write about it you won’t have a hard time because you already know what it is, and what it’s about. It’s just a matter of making your articles creative and interesting.

To make sure that your articles get read and enjoyed, here are six tips to get your articles read. These tips will make your articles readable and interesting to your readers.

1) Use short paragraphs. When the paragraphs are very long the words get jumbled in the mind of the reader, just looking at it It can get quite confusing and make it hard work to read. The reader will usually just quickly scan long paragraphs and move on, so it’s much better to make your paragraphs nice and short. Paragraphs can be a single sentence, sometimes even a single word!

2) Make use of numbers or bullets. As each point is stressed, numbers and bullets can quickly make the point easy to remember and digest. As each point, tip, guide or method is started with a bullet or number, readers will know that this is where the tips start and end. Format your bullets and numbers with indentations so that your article won’t look like a single block of square paragraphs. Add a little bit of flair and pizazz to your articles shape.

3) Use Sub-headings to sub-divide your paragraphs in the page. Doing this will break each point into sections but still would be incorporated into one whole article. It would also be easy for the reader to move on from one point to another; the transition would be smooth and easy. You will never lose your readers attention as well as the point and direction to where the article is pointing. (One person that I’ve noticed doing this well is Vance Sova, who is a regular reader of my blog, you can find a link to his blog in my Top Commentators list to the left)

4) Provide a good attention-grabbing title or header. If your title can entice a person’s curiosity, you’re already halfway in getting a person to read your article. Use statements and questions that utilize keywords that people are looking for. Provide titles or headers that describe your articles content but should also be short and concise.

Use titles like… “How To Quit Smoking and Live Longer”, or “How To Beat Tobacco and Quit For Good” .You could also use titles that can command people, for example, “Quit Smoking NOW In Six Easy Steps…”. These type of titles reach out to a persons’ emotions and makes them interested.

5) Keep them interested from the start to the finish. From your opening paragraph, use real life situations that can be adopted by the reader. Use good descriptions and metaphors to drive in your point, just don’t over do it. Driving your examples with graphic metaphors and similes would make it easy for them to imagine what you are talking about. Making the experience pleasurable and enjoyable for them.

6) Utilize figures when necessary and not just ordinary and boring statements. Using specific facts and figures can heighten your article because it makes it authoritative. But do not make it too formal, it should be light and easy for people to follow. A bit like a friendly teacher having a little chat with an eager student.

I’ve recently been using MyBlogLog to drive some targeted traffic.

And in this post I’m going to go over what I have been doing to get this extra traffic. And I will also go over some settings to keep your MyBlogLog profile information secure.

First I’ll go over what I have been doing to get this extra traffic I’ve been getting recently.

MyBlogLog Traffic Generation

Step 1

Add your site to MyBlogLog and add the recent visitors widget

Add your blog to your account, you can do this under the ‘My Sites and Services’ section. It is located on the left on your profile page.

Once you’ve done that, you will be able to add the MyBlogLog widget to your site. If you are adding to a WordPress blog just add a new Text widget to your sidebar, and then paste the MyBlogLog widget code in there.

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Always make sure you are permanently logged into MyBlogLog, so that you appear on the recent visitors widget when you visit blogs with it installed.

Step 2

Join other communities in your niche

I have recently found out that you are limited to the amount of communities you can join per day. I’m not sure of the exact time frame, but I’ve worked out it’s somewhere between 12 and 24 hours until you can join more.

So try and join 15 communities per day in your niche. You can do this using the search function on MyBlogLog.

You can also do this by finding someone with a blog in your niche, and look through which communities they have joined.

Step 3

Add people who have a blog in your niche to your contacts

As far as I know you can add as many contacts as you want each day, there’s probably a limit somewhere but I haven’t found it as I only add about 15-20 every couple of days.

I also add the creator of each community I join, to my my contacts.

Step 4

Introduce yourself to people in your niche

When you add someone as a contact, and join communities. Visit one of their blogs and then write them a short message introducing yourself. You can do this using the ‘messages’ tab on a members profile, and when you send the message choose private.  If you liked their blog let them know, if they have an interesting blog post you could also leave them a quick comment on their blog too.

Doing this won’t always lead to traffic, but it certainly helps. And at the same time you are also building relationships with like minded people.

Step 5

Occasionally message members of your community

This is a feature I’ve only recently found out about, and it allows you to message all your community members at once.

I haven’t actually used this feature myself yet, as this is not a feature that I want abuse. But I will be using it when I have something to tell my community members, that I think will be of value to them.

For instance I will most likely use message them when I release my first free ebook. Which coincidently I will be releasing in the next week or so.

If you want to use this feature you can find it on the community page for your blog. You will see a link ‘Message Members’

And that’s all I’ve been doing really, and I’ve noticed quite a lot of extra traffic since I started doing the above steps.

Try it out for yourself and keep an eye of your google analytics to see how well it’s working.

And don’t forget to come back and tell me how it went, I’d love to hear your results.

MyBlogLog Privacy Settings

I checked my privacy settings recently, and found out I’d been giving my contacts access to my email. I’ve changed the setting now, and I don’t really use that email address for anything other than MyBlogLog anyway. But I think it’s better to keep your email private, so I’m going to show you where to locate the setting so you can check it is set to private, unless you prefer to share it?

1. Click the My Account link at the top of the page.

2. Chose whether or not you want to hide your birthday?

3. Scroll down the page to Additional Info, and review the settings and set to ‘nobody’ for things you want to keep private.

Hope that helps? I know Jacinta Dean was wondering about this.

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Alexa Rank Challenge Update

On a side note, as I predicted I have easily made my Alexa rank goal. I wanted to get it down from 900,000 to 500,000 in 3 weeks! But it looks like I gave myself too much time to do that in, It’s been just over 2 weeks and I’m already at 405,971 !!

I’m very pleased with the result and will continue doing what I’ve been doing, and start to implement a few more of the Alexa rank tips from my Top Ten Tips To Increase Alexa Rank Post soon.

But for the moment I will be concentrating on getting my first ebook ready for releasing. And creating some gift packages for GiveAway events, as I’ve not really been working the GiveAway’s like I should have been. So I will be making sure to take advantage of them in the next few weeks, and see how well they perform for me.

So James Howard will have some time to catch me up now! 

For those who don’t know, me and James Howard are helping each other push ourselves, by making our own Alexa rank challenge between us. In a recent comment on this blog I gave myself the challenge of staying in front of him, and challenged James to catch and overtake me.

James has taken me up on the challenge and has recently made a post about it on his blog titled Alexa Rank Challenge. If you have a moment go and check James Howard’s blog out, he’s doing some good stuff over there.

This is a perfect example of how blog commenting has been used to build a relationship. So if you’ve not been doing much blog commenting recently, then you’re missing out on traffic and relationship opportunities.

I have some more case studies of this which I will include in another post soon… Watch this space

Until next time…

Paul.

I’ve just verified this blog so that it shows a green tick on my MyBlogLog community page. It’s just to prove this blog is owned by me, and if you have a MyBlogLog account it’s something you might as well do.

See screen shot below:

If you are a MyBlogLog member and would like to verify your blog, check out this link for more info – http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/comm_verify.php

I’ll try and make another post tomorrow.

Paul.

Here is the video that I said I would produce in the last post. I finally go to grips with Camtasia Studio, and you know what? It’s really easy to use, after watching the great tutorial videos that camtasia provide for you that is.

So this video basically shows you how to easily search for, and install WordPress plugins from within your WordPress admin control panel. This saves you a lot of fuss and messing about with uploading it to your server with an FTP client (FTP software). I only recently discovered I could install them directly from within the control panel, I had been using FTP to upload each plugin. So as you can imagine that ws a huge waste of my time, so just in case any of you didn’t know about this, I thought I’d make this video to make you aware of this feature.

I hope you enjoyed the video, please let me know what you think as it was my first attempt at this sort of thing.

Until next time…

Paul.

Which Plugins Do I Have Installed On My Blog?

This is a question I’ve often wondered when looking at other peoples blogs, so I thought why not make a page on my blog listing all the plugins I have installed on MY blog. That way anyone who would like to model their blog on mine can easily do so.

I also thought it’d be a good idea to include a short description of what each plugin does. So that is what I’ve done, you will now find the ‘Blog Plugins‘ tab at the top of the page, underneath the title.

But to save you needing to click away from this post, I might as well include the list here too, so here goes. But you still might want to visit the ‘Blog Plugins‘ tab, depending the date you are reading this. The blog plugins tab will be updated whenever I install a new plugin on my blog, but this post here will not be updated.

List of all current plugins installed on this blog

Akismet

This is a spam filter. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. In order to use it you will need a wordpress API key, you can obtain this by creating an account at wordpress.com. After you sign up they will email you an API key.

All in One SEO Pack

Allows you to easily optimize your blog for search engines, I would recommend all wordpress bloggers to install this.

CommentLuv

This is quite a clever little plugin, it shows a link to the last post from the commenters blog. It helps encourage people to comment on your posts. You can see an example of this by commenting on this post and putting your blog URL in the form.

Follow My Links

This is to prevent WordPress from automatically nofollowing links in comments by the post author.

IP Host Blocker

Does what it says on the tin, allows you to block IP’s of unwanted spam bots and repeat spammers.

Sociable

Allows you to automatically add links and logos of your favourite and most popular social bookmarking sites, to the bottom of posts, pages and RSS feed. There’s a massive amount of sites to choose from too.

Top Commentators Widget

Allows you to add a sidebar widget to show the top commentators on your blog. This is yet another way of encouraging people to comment on your posts, it also shows how active your blog is, and can also give the impression that your blog is more active than it maybe is, which is a good thing.

TweetMeme Button

It adds the Tweetmeme button to your blog posts, which if you have an interesting post, it makes it easy for a Twitter account holder to decide to retweet the post to their followers. Which in turn gets you more traffic, and helps the post go viral.

WordPress Database Backup

Gives you on-demand backup of your WordPress database. Because it’s better to be safe than sorry.

WP to Twitter

Sends a tweet out on your Twitter account whenever you create a new blog post.

Contact Form 7

This is a simple contact form so that, you’ve guessed it, people can contact you. The purpose of these contact forms is, so you don’t have to publicly display your email address, which means you get less spam.

That’s all the plugins I have installed right now, if you know of any other good plugins feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments. I’m always looking for new plugins to enhance my blog.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I won’t be updating this post with any new plugins I install. Instead I will be updating the ‘Blog Plugins’ page, which you will find located in the tabs at the top of the blog, under the title.

I hope this has helped some of you enhance your blogs, or maybe even inspired you to start a blog? Let me know what you think of the post either way by leaving your comments.

Thanks for reading,

Paul.

P.S.

I’m planning on making a sceen capture video for my next post, basically showing you how easy it is to find and install your plugins.