1.  Blog every day.  Seriously.  This is the simplest, yet most difficult, step for many bloggers, but it’s critical.  In order the grow traffic and page views, your blog needs to become a habit for your visitors.  Be there every day.

2.  Serve your visitors.  This is absolutely as critical as blogging every day.  Who does your blog serve?  Yourself, or your visitors?  Think about it.  Why should people bother to come to your blog?  Are you promoting yourself, your business/products, whining, venting, writing about personal things only your friends or family would be interested in?  Blogging is a form of writing, and if you want to build traffic, you have to write to entertain, to inform, to serve.  Serve your visitors first.  The traffic (which then serves you) will follow.

3.  Advertise.  Don’t be afraid to spend money to make money.  Blogads, as one example, is a great way to advertise your blog on other like blogs that can help speed the process of building traffic.

4.  Join Facebook.  Network with friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends to spread the word about your blog.

5.  Use photographs.  Educate yourself, at least minimally, about photography.  Use crisp, clear, interesting pictures and keep the kilobyte (download size) small to ease user time.  Blog visitors love photographs.

6.  Design to please.  Use reader-friendly design, color, font size, etc, on your blog.  Don’t turn new visitors away with a cluttered, heavy, dark design.  Welcome them in with clear and functional navigation and a warm, friendly environment.

7.  Participate.  Talk back to your commenters.  Encourage the sense of community on your blog.  Don’t just post and disappear.  Blog readers love having their questions answered.  Answers emails, too!  Care about your readers, and they’ll care about you.

8.  Encourage page views during each visit.  Link inside your post to back posts, and make it easy for new visitors to find posts that explain who you are and what this blog is about.  I use a “Featured Posts” list in my sidebar.  I also have an “About Me” page that provides background for new readers.  I also use a Related Posts plugin at the bottom of posts to draw visitors to read further.  Give first-time visitors have a way to catch up and feel part of the story on your blog.

9.  Approach the media.  Write a press release for your blog and develop media contacts.  The best advertisement is free advertisement!

10.  Love what you’re blogging about.  If you have a passion for your blog topics, readers will see it and be drawn to it.  If you don’t care about what you’re blogging about, they’ll see that, too.  Love what you do!

Let me know what you think!  Do you have any great ideas for building traffic?  Feel free to share them in the comments here.  I want to know!

Open Filezilla and log in using the FTP user name and password your host provider gave you when you signed up for hosting.

In the top left pane, navigate to the folder on your computer where you want to back up your files. If you need to, right click, select make directory, and add a new folder.

In the right bottom pane, double click on the www.

Now in the left pane click on the file where you want to save the files. In my case, I click on the dbbackup file I made.

Now we’ll back up the Wordpress files from the server to your own computer.

Highlight wp-admin folder in the right bottom pane. Right click on it. Select download. When that download is finished do the same for the folders wp-content and wp-includes.

Next, see all those files under the wp-includes folder? Select all of them and right click, select download.

You now have backed up your Wordpress Files to your own computer. It is a good idea to backup your database as well as your Wordpress files on a regular basis, and always before you upgrade your Wordpress install.

This post will show you how to back up your Wordpress database using utilities in your CPanel. One of the many reasons I suggest getting a hosting provider that has Cpanel.

Log into your CPanel with the user name/password you received from your hosting provider when you set up your website. On CPanel, look for the PHPMyadmin icon.

Click on the phpMYadmin icon.

Next select the databases line marked here with a red arrow.

The next step you select your Wordpress Database. You probably will have only one database here. It might start with wp_ or whatever prefix the blog database was set up with. Select the database.

Click on the export tab at the top of the next screen.

Here you see where you set up the parameters for the database backup.

EXPORT

Under Export all the tables should be highlighted. If not, click on select all. Make sure the radio button next to SQL is selected.

OPTIONS

Under options, select the box next to Structure then select the following:

DATA

Select the box next to Data, but leave the rest of this section unchecked.

SAVE as file

Under the Save as file option, leave the file name template just as it is. Click on zipped.

Click on Go. The database will be backed up and saved on your computer. My next post will be about backing up the actual files on your Wordpress install.

For more information regarding other ways to backup your Wordpress database, see this website.

5 Ways Blogging Makes Sense (and Cents) for Writers

1. Revelling in the Freedom. Remember when you were a kid with your spiral notebook and a sharp pencil? You could write anything you wanted back then. A poem one day, a short story the next, the beginning of a novel even. A family newspaper, a little play, or a recounting of a summer trip. You could do and be anyone you wanted in your writing, back before you figured out earning a living at it meant delivering a specific product. Well, hello, unfettered youthful freedom–your blog is your inner child! You can be silly, sassy, serious, or sentimental on any given day on your blog and take any given writing format to express it. No rules–just write! You never know, you might even find entire new paths for your writing, pleasures you had forgotten, new forks in the road of your career.

2. Priming the Pump. The freedom of blogging allows a fantastic opportunity to get the creative juices flowing. For many writers, the hardest thing about sitting down to write is…..sitting down to write. Getting started is the biggest hurdle. Instead of sitting down and opening your book file, sit down and open your blog. A blog post isn’t so daunting–it’s short, it’s free, it can be anything you’re in the mood to write, and when you’re done, opening your book file is that much easier. Words breed words–write a post, then write your book. You’ve already gotten started!

3. Experiencing Immediate Feedback. It can be a year after finishing a book before it hits the shelves in bookstores, but a blog post? It’s available world-wide as soon as you click the Publish button in your blogging program. Feedback is motivating. Writers who write to make a living don’t write for themselves–they write to be read and a huge part of the experience is the feedback from readers. Get that satisfaction immediately with your blog.

4. Building Consistent Habits. Blog when you don’t think you have anything to blog about. Blog when you don’t feel like blogging and don’t want to blog. In many ways, blogging is like writing for a newspaper in the daily demand of it. But the thing about newspaper writing? It creates consistency, teaches writers to write through the pain. You don’t have six months to write a newspaper piece, or a blog post. You have to write it now or there won’t be a post today! No pain, no gain, and there is much to be gained for you as a novelist with six months to procrastinate by training yourself to write when you think you can’t.

5. Creating Confidence. You can do it. A book is a long haul, but a blog post is a few minutes, maybe an hour. That zip of excitement that comes with completing something is yours to take–every day!–with your blog. Empower yourself with the thill of “finishing” each morning then open your book file and know you can finish that, too.

Applying a new, enthusiastic attitude to your blog, rolling about in all its freedoms, creative juices, feedback, consistency-building, and confidence boosters will not only do a world of good for your novel writing, it will bring traffic attracted to your excitement….and thus more potential readers for your novels.

What have you got to lose–except your bad attitude toward your blog?

Recently, a friend of mine discovered that this was the message appearing to users at one of the largest employers in a state where one of her regular blog readers worked.  The blog reader worked for a state government office, and my friend’s site had been blocked on every computer in the state’s entire employee network.  She writes what some might consider racy romance novels, but it wasn’t her books that got her blocked.

It was the language (including certain four-letter words) she used on her blog.  Her blog being part of her website, this resulted in not only her blog being blocked but her entire website.

Her initial reaction was a defense of her creative expression.  Are employers, whether public as in this situation or private, going to become some sort of unofficial arbiter of our freedoms by the power they wield in controlling large numbers of computers?  And after all, she uses similar language in her books, so it seems fitting and part of her creative style to use the words on her blog, too.  If readers are offended by her blog, then they aren’t going to like her books, either.

But wait a minute.  Every computer in an entire state’s employee network has been blocked from her site.  Not because her site (and in tandem, her books) offended any of these particular users, but because the employer policy for computer usage bans sites that use unacceptable (by their definition) language.  This means plenty of potential blog readers who would enjoy her blog and buy her books can no longer visit her blog or website from work–and many blog readers read blogs at work.

And if her site was blocked at one employer, what are the chances it already has been or will be in the future blocked at others?  The potential loss of traffic and product (book) sales is enormous.

Worried about her website traffic and her book sales, she immediately did a search through her blog archives and deleted all the bad language, resolving to use no more of it in future blog posts.   She doesn’t intend to modify the language with which she writes her books, but with her website as her primary marketing tool for those books, she can’t afford the risk of having her site blocked for using that same language in her blog.

Losing traffic over the language used on her blog–not only losing readers who might actually be offended but even losing readers who are not due to a mass blocking–is something she’d never thought about before.  What about you?  Do you use four-letter words or other commonly considered unacceptable language on your blog?  If you found out your site was being blocked for language, what would you do?

Regularity. Not every big blogger posts daily, but most of them do, and if they don’t post daily, they at least post regularly, five out of seven days a week. Be there–or lose your audience. People generally read blogs as part of their routine. Fit into their routine without fail and watch your traffic grow.

Dependability. Readers know what they’re going to get when they click on one of their favorite big women’s blogs. Dooce is going to be telling brutally frank stories about her life, her daughter, her experiences with depression. Pioneer Woman is probably going to give you a shot of a cowboy’s backside. At CuteOverload, whatever it is, it’s bound to be cute, and Amalah is going to give you honest and touching stories about her struggles with pregnancy and her young son. When you visit a great women’s blog, you don’t reach into a bag of Doritos and find an Oreo. You get what you came for, and when your traffic knows they can trust you that way, they’ll be back.

Voice. The tone of the blog, found in the blogger’s voice, is dependability on another level. We know Dooce will be sarcastic. We know Pioneer Woman will be silly. We know CuteOverload is going to be, well, cute, and that Amalah is going to be bittersweet. Great women bloggers speak from the heart, and that’s the only way you can reach an audience. Be real.

Humor. The big blogs are funny, whether it’s dry like Dooce. sassy like Pioneer Woman, adorable like CuteOverload, or wrenching like Amalah, these bloggers make us laugh in the midst of their struggles with ordinary life. And who can’t go back after that?

Commitment. Great women bloggers like Dooce, Pioneer Woman, CuteOverload, and Amalah are in it for the long haul, and their audience knows it. Remember that TV show you loved that got the cut at the end of the first season? Viewers hate that, and so do blog readers. Make a commitment to your readers, and your readers will make a commitment to you.

Along with regularity, dependability, voice, humor, and commitment, another hallmark of the big women’s blogs is often stunning photography, so don’t forget the pictures. Put it all together and you’ve got a package that blog readers are hungry to discover. Make your blog the next great women’s blog! I dare you!

Let me know what you think, and tell me who some of your favorite women bloggers are–and why.

But what if you just can’t make yourself do that?

Blogger is a popular option. If you do go that route, lets talk about things you can do to make your Blogger blog more user friendly.

First off, do you really need the 10 digits of word verification before someone posts? We have to enter that EVERY TIME WE COMMENT on your blog. It makes it easy for the reader to just think, nah, I’m not going to bother to comment. Turn off the word verification option.

Let anonymous commenters leave a comment. Turn on the option for allowing anonymous comments for your blog. Not everyone has a Blogger account, nor do they want one. The reader wants to leave a comment on your blog and link back to their own website. It’s annoying enough that Blogger makes the reader enter their information, over and over, every time they want to leave a comment. (Blogger, if you’re reading this, get a clue. Wordpress, Typepad, and other blogging platforms save our information so we only enter it the first time we comment on a blog.)

Font size: I’ve seen a lot of Blogger blogs with small type size. Give your readers a break. That’s really hard to read, especially on laptop screens. Up your font size a few sizes. We’ll thank you.

That’s it. My quick suggestions for making your Blogger blog more reader friendly.

How to best follow your stats leaves you facing a maze of analytic tools, all of which seem to yield different numbers for the very same site.  Google Analytics (through Google), Awstats (through your cpanel), and Short Stat (a WordPress plugin) are just a few of your decent options–and I use them all–but the absolute favorite now in my stats-obsessing arsenal is Mint.  Mint was developed by the creators of Short Stat and is considered the “pro” version of Short Stat.  Unlike Short Stat, it isn’t a plugin installed in your WordPress admin so it doesn’t slow your site down, hogging resources.  Mint is installed directly through your domain.  It isn’t free–there’s a $30 charge to sign up (additional plugins, called Pepper, to extend your Mint program’s capabilities, are free.)  In my opinion, Mint is well worth the fee.

Mint’s flexible dashboard, configured to your preferences, gives you everything you could possibly want to know to know at a single glance.  Check your visits by past day, past week, past month, past year, totals, uniques, even by the hour.  Watch referrers–newest unique, most recent, repeat, domains.  Keep up with pageviews by the past hour up to the past 72 hours, as well as by most popular, most recent, and most watched.  You can hook your Feedburner right in there to read those stats by past week, past month, past year, subscribers and hits, and most popular Feedburner items.  Get your Technorati ranking, along with inbound blog and other inbound links.  See your searches–how people find your site–by most recent and most popular, and find out what links people use to leave your site.

Install Mint yourself using their easy installation guide and FAQs.  (There’s also a Mint forum for further assistance.)  Or, have your designer install Mint.

What I love about Mint–the attractive, user-friendly, at-a-glance display all on one page and, most of all, its real-time function.  If you love stats, you’ll be head-over-heels for Mint.  So go have a Mint, and don’t forget the Pepper.  Me, I’ve got to go look at my Mint again and see what’s been going on at my site in the past five minutes…..

I’m going to look at another option. Blogs that offer advertising directly through the blogger. No middleman. Which sometimes means you’ll get the same traffic exposure for lower prices. These blogs usually have a link to “advertise here” or “advertising rates” or something similar. Some will have a page and post their rates. Some will list off their statistics such as visitors or pageviews per week. While you can take them at their word, you should do some other research on your own regarding the popularity of their website.

Things to consider:

1) Do they have an active blog? Do they post daily or at least regularly?

2) Do they have a comment section with a lot of activity? How many comments do they get on their posts?

The following are some different rankings available that you can check. All can be gamed to some extent. So check them all out and make informed decisions. Go to these sites and put in the URL for the site you are checking out.

3) Technorati. Technorati ranks blogs based upon incoming links over the last 6 months. The higher the technorati authority “the better”. Technorati only counts one incoming link to a site per site. So if one site links to you 10 times, it still just considers that as one link.

4) Alexa . Alexa is another ranking system. It used to be heavily swayed by webmaster & internet marketing type people visiting your site with the Alexa toolbar installed. Alexa recently changed their algorithm to hopefully take out some of this bias. In this case, the lower the number in Alexa ranking, the better.

5) Google Toolbar Page Rank. Google ranks websites from 0 to 10. The higher the number on Page Rank, “the better”. This is Google’s view of the authority of the website. Their algorithm is vaguely known. They penalize sites for doing paid reviews, selling pagerank through textlink ads and other no-no’s they’ve determined. So a site could still have really good traffic for you and a low page rank. Google updates the page ranks about 4 times a year. Or not.

You can find out a site’s Page Rank if you have the Google toolbar installed on your browser. Go Here and scroll down to toolbar, click on it, and it will bring you to a page for the proper toolbar for your browser.

Use these rankings, along with statistics provided by the blogger to determine if you think advertising directly with the blogger is a good fit for advertising your blog.