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I just read an article on Problogger about a fellows bad experience moving from Movable Type to Wordpress. The problem was not the data move but the names of the posts.

Last fall I moved nearly all of my blogs from Movable Type to Wordpress and it did go fairly smoothly although I did have a bit of a problem and have some ideas on making the process easier. Here are the steps.

Create a new folder for your new blog and create the wordpress blog

In this step you will just be going and creating the title of the blog and the permalink structure that you have on the old blog. Thei mportance of this is that when people go from the old location to the new location you do not want anything to break. Google is not very smart for finding your new post names when you break the permalink structure.

The other thing that may happen is that you may be moving a blog from one domain name to another, in this case you will be doing a 301 redirect so that people and search engines and incoming links can still find your content even with a new name of your domain. I did exactly this with three of my blogs. Read the rest of this entry »

I use Google Analytics and so today I am looking at some of my worst performing pages, you know some of your pages will get 100 or more visits a day but other pages get 0 or maybe 1 pageview a week.

I set up my Google Analytics view so that I could see the number of pageviews over the last week and then scrolled way down to the bottom and for all the posts that had one view (some of them anyway) I went into my Wordpress editor and looked at the post.

These are the questions that I asked.

What is the page about?

What are the keywords that this post should have?

Is there any post structure?

Is the topic interesting?

What can I add in content to fill out the idea that the post is about?

Can I add subheadings to the post itself

Page Analysis and Fixing

I would quickly analyze and then fix the page and save. Each page probably took about 5 minutes or so because the structure in the first place was already there. In some cases I did do a lot of rewriting of the content.

In one case I actually liked the new content enough that I changed the date of the post and made it my new post for the day…nice having content that goes back a couple or three years, most of my visitors had not seen this content ever.

Busy couple of weeks so far fixing my blogs and optimizing. I have also been posting up a storm over the last couple of days but still have not been adding many affiliate links like I should be.

This week, More Review Pages!

I have no problem writing blog posts. I kind of look at a blog post as a bit of conversation that I m having but just in my own head. Many other people I find though seem to have a lot of trouble getting started. There are all sorts of reasons that people can not write a blog post including the following:

Nervous about what people will think

Not knowing how long to write

Not knowing how to structure the post

The biggest problem though is that people are always having trouble figuring out what to write and how to keep the flow going in writing a blog post.

Chris Brogan has written a pretty detailed post on how he starts and writes a blog post but I will try to also follow up this week with losts of blog post writing tips

I am not sure how I missed this yesterday but Wordpress has been updated to version 2.5. The new version of wordpress adds lots of new features but is a real departure from what you are used to.

As an internet marketer you may want to wait until next weekend or a slow night this week sometime so that you can upgrade and get used to the interface. The last thing that you want to do is upgrade and have to take a hit on your productivity or suffer with nonworking plugins.

After you try it out let me know what you think. New streamlined interface, picture galleries within posts…what else do you like.

Do you write dry content? I know that i have been accused of just that in the past. I just found a free Firefox plugin called Zemanta that adds a bit of a sidebar applet to your Wordpress Write window that gives you one click access to adding pictures and links to articles. On a meta basis it will also add ideas for keywords and of course this may help give you more ideas for the articles and posts that you are writing in Wordpress. Best of all it does all of this on the fly.

Installation of this Firefox plugin is of  course very easy. Just go to the link, download the add-on and then after Firefox is restarted you will notice nothing new until you go into write a new blog post, then Zemanta sitting is in the right hand side of your Firefox as if it was a piece of Wordpress. Read the rest of this entry »

I often think that I educate in my posts but not always. I just read a post by Liz at Successful Blog that really brings me back to adding value for blog readers.

Liz says rightly that (and I really paraphrase here) that you need to give more of yourself to your readers and give them a reason to come back. Make them think, force your readers to act and comment, don’t have your readr leave having think that they have learned something instead write so that they are thinking of your posts message later in the day and tomorrow.

The post is great and I have committed myself to rereading the post every day this week so that I am forced to give more of myself in my blogs.

I have just today added a do follow plugin so that all comments that I approve will be adding quality to the sites of the comment posters. I get shit for traffic anyway and I think that anyone that adds content to this blog deserves to get something for it.

Dave Naylor was just commenting today that his blog has dropped a lot in the Google rankings and he figures that it was Google thinking that he is somehow gaming the system with his do follow on all comments. I am not worried although I probably am as paranoid as he is so this will be a nice fun experiment.

Feel free to comment.

The best way to build your traffic cheap and fast is buy posting in forums and making blog comments on blogs. There are two problems with blog comments for most people and these problems are actually an opportunity for you to be a commenting machine while at the same time getting ideas for new blog content yourself.

There are a few reasons to do blog commenting and the main ones are backlinks to your own sites (some nofollow blogs will not help but that is ok), getting blog owners know about you, and finally to have readers of blogs see you and get exposure to your site by clicking your website link on your name in the comments.

Finding posts to comment on

First problem is that most people doing internet marketing go to the classics, Problogger, Shoemoney, John Chow and others but these are crap blogs for getting traffic to your niche site unless you are in the internet marketing niche. If you are in any other niche then you have to hang with the thought leaders and then become a thought leader.

Do some searches, if you are interested in Organic Gardening then start looking for gardening blogs, environmental blogs, blogs about organic farming and of course your own niche or organic gardening. This is going to keep you on the pulse of your niche and also reading these blogs will give you lots of ideas to get new posts of your own out.

Do you have a Google account? You should as this is how you get access to a Google tool called Google Reader. Google Reader is an RSS reader and when you are using an RSS reader all you need to do is to copy the link location for any site and simply add the subscription to Google Reader and then you will get updates every time that this other blog makes a post. Add all of the blogs that you have found for your niche, and although you may be struggling a bit with Google Reader you will get the hang of it in a matter of hours if not minutes and have a nice easy way to access 100s of blogs if you want to all at one website.

Commenting tips

OK, this is the second problem, writing blog comments that will be read in the shortest amount of time. Now you have found lots of posts in your niche to do blog comments on so go ahead. The nice thing about blog comments is that once you have made one the site will remember your info for the next time that you comment. There is such a short supply of comments to smaller blogs that as you make a couple of comments the blog author is going to notice you and link back to your posts.

Anyway the blog comments themselves should be a couple of sentences long and should add to what the post is about. If you are leaving longer blog comments then try to write down the gist of your comment so that you can create a post out of your blog comment for your own site. (I just copy my comment into notepad for later viewing). The worst thing that you can do is leave lots of blog comments saying “I agree” or “You are right”, these comments add nothing to the conversation and will not be supported by the author and are not insightful enough for anyone to click your link to see your site.

How much commenting to do

I think that devoting 15 minutes or a half hour a day to blog commenting is great. I know that Yaro Starak says that as he was starting he would at the end of the day just leave comments as much as he could but I think that it is great to do this before you are tired. Get the blog comments in, get some ideas for future blog content, and move on to the rest of your work for the day.

One of the worst tendencies that I have is to jump into projects that are not very well thought out and very difficult to win at. I have tried some Amazon stores some Clickbank malls and even some crazy RSSG schemes to create huge sites that are not very original and quite spammy while I could spend a lot more time creating good content instead. These days hopefully are behind me now.

One of the things that is very popular these days is the idea of blogging about celebrities. Lots of people are interested in the lifestyles and transgressions of celebrities and as you may have heard there is huge volume in traffic going to celebrity scoop sites. I know because I have been caught more than once looking at Perez Hiltons site.

Getting good celebrity content

The problem with creating this kind of site is not just in one place but in two. We are all willing to put in time to a great venture, but just how much time? Perez puts out blog posts day and night, around 20 or so posts a day and the real problem for most people would be to get the pictures, that is what everyone is interested in and the content which is also really tough to get on a timely basis. If Britney Spears is dancing around naked at a club and you post it 10 hours after it happened then 10 popular sites have already posted about it, with pictures and even CNN has an article about it. And the next day? No one cares about day old news when there is always exciting news today. So you archives are useless.

Interesting Blog style

The next thing that Perez or TMZ or I don’t like you in that way, is that the writers are witty, make up names and have all sorts of funny pop culture references that are more of a writing gift then something that can be learned. I try to ber personable in my posts but I am nothing like Perez writing about UnFitney or pAArty times and I certainly could not make up a good nickname.

Low CPM

Lastly the problem with celebrity sites is that people just do not click the ads. The cost per 1000 clicks (CPM) is really really low. There is no reason for most people that go to a celebrity page to be interested in what would be interesting on the page besides the pic and article. The readers are not stalking Britney or Paris, they are just interested in the funny new story. Because of this you need huge traffic which of course is an expensive hosting proposition.

So if you are looking at any one of the always new popular niches to make money in you need to take a closer look at the market within that market. How fresh does the content have to be? How personable do you need to be, and even knowlegable to a large degree and finally, with these types of sites, constant huge content to get lots of visitors and still having a low CPM means that you will be always disappointed, well always disappointed unless you are Perez maybe.

I have had a quiet last couple of days and I suspect everything ramping up to the new year will really begin in earnest starting tonight. I don’t drink much so I am focusing on getting all of my business stuff in order so that I can really get started January 1st on my $100,000 in 2008 (still seems like a crazy idea but what the hell).

I have been working at updating all of my Wordpress installations, getting all of the plugins that I mentioned a couple of days ago good as well as cleaning up crap that may have been slowing them down and now I have just been killing time surfing news and junk. This is always my downfall and the reason that I like to plan my time before I get near the computer. I can waste hours surfing when I can get lots done in the same time.

Hope things are going well in your planning and setup for the new year. Building goals? Have big plans? Let me know.