Updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes is a very important part of maintaining your WordPress website. Often, this can appear to be a very daunting task. But the recent updates to WordPress have made the process of updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes very easy.

As a WordPress website owner, it is a very important part of your website’s maintenance that you regularly update your WordPress installation – and this includes updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes.

Importance of Updating Your WordPress Plugins and Themes

There are several basic, and very well founded reasons as to why one should regularly update the WordPress plugins and themes. Lets look at those reasons before we get into the ‘how-to’ part of this post.

• Regular updates will ensure that your plugins and themes perform their best, and give you the best of what they are supposed to do.
• Often updates include more features – who doesn’t like more features?
• Updates also mean that some bugs, security related patches and so on are added to your plugins and themes, making your site data more safe.

Most theme and plugin developers are very active members of the WordPress community, and updates to their themes and plugins often involve either or all of the above mentioned factors.

Updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes means that you often get more features and bug fixes for your plugins and themes. These updates also ensure a compatibility with the latest versions of WordPress itself. So yes, it is very important to regularly update them.

Updating Your WordPress Plugins and Themes: How To

The latest versions of WordPress have made it relatively simple and easy to go about updating your WordPress plugins and themes. Here’s a step-by-step process of how to go about updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes:

• The first step, of course, is seeing that updates are available. And that notification is now present right in your dashboard toolbar – right at the top of your WordPress Admin interface.
• The second step is to click on that notification, and you will be taken to the updates page. You can also go to this updates page by moving your mouse over the ‘Dashboard’ icon (looks like a house) and then clicking on ‘Updates’ from the menu that pops up.
• The third step is selecting the plugins and themes you want to update, or selecting ‘Update All’ and clicking on the button to set the update process in motion.
• And finally, you will see an update page, where the results of the process will be displayed. Ta-Da! You’re done!

With such a simple and easy process, now you don’t have any excuse not to update your WordPress Plugins and Themes regularly!

Meanwhile, here are some pictures that should give you a fair idea of the process stages:

WordPress Updates in Dashboard Toolbar

WordPress Updates Step 1

WordPress Updates Step 2

After The Update

Video: Updating Your WordPress Plugins and Themes

And, of course, if you are like me, and want to see how it is done in a video, then here’s a really nice video for you!

In Conclusion…

Updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes is a very important part of maintaining your WordPress website. And the process is fairly easy, and simple to do.

So, what’s your excuse for not updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes regularly?

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

If you are a business or a freelancer and you have a presence on the Internet (via a website or a blog), then one of the most essential things for you to do is to define your ideal client. This is because knowing what you are looking for will help you tailor your website’s content accordingly.

Today, lets look at why and how to define your ideal client.

Any business or a freelancer wants to attract new clients. Typically,  one of the commonly used strategies is to make a website on the Internet that showcases the business, skills and services. So, why is it important for you to define your ideal client in this scenario? Lets have a look.

Why You Should Define Your Ideal Client

As I mentioned above, once you know what you are looking for, it becomes easy to find it. As a business or freelancer, you provide a number of products or services. And normally, your product or service has a target audience or client base. Also, most of the clients you are looking for will have certain characteristics that will make them your targeted clients.

When you define this specific client base, you will be in a position to do the following:

• Tailor your website’s content (this includes the written content and the images used) to appeal to the target audience.
• Create content that will serve the specific needs and requirements for your target clients, especially in connection with the products or services you are offering on your website.
• Create content that will appeal to your target client base.
• Offer products or services that are required by your target client base.

In short, if you know what your target client base wants, needs, understands etc., then you can provide it to them.

How To Define Your Ideal Client

There is a very simple way to define your ideal client: Brainstorm and make a mind map!

What You Offer: For this particular exercise, you will need to take into consideration the kind of products or services you offer, and then visualize your ideal client.

What You are Looking For: Then, just write down / mind map the qualities this ideal client might possess. You can go from the general to the specific – let your creativity go wild! Once you have your mind map in place, you can then whittle it down to create a succinct list of qualities that define your ideal client.

Imagine: After that, comes a very interesting step: Visualization. Close your eyes and imagine this ideal client in your mind’s eye. Give him / her a face and a personality. Make him / her real in your imagination. This way, when you create the content on your website, you will be writing to him / her directly, in person. And  it is this twist which will help you to make the content that will appeal to your ideal client.

Define Your Ideal Client: A Quick Example

Let me demonstrate this with an example.

First, here is a quick list of the services that I offer:

• Main Service Offerings:
• Content Writing for Websites and Blogs
• WordPress Installation, Setup and Training

• Incidental Service Offerings:
• Email Newsletter Setup and Content
• EBook Ghostwriting
• Proofreading, Editing of Articles and other content

So, now that I have that list on one side, let me make a list of the qualities I would like in my ideal client.

• What the Client Would Ideally Want:
• Wants to make a website with a blog
• Wants a simple and easy to manage website
• Wants to learn how to manage his WordPress website
• Wants to put out regular newsletters via his website blog
• Wants to put out regular blog posts on his blog

• What the Client Would Ideally Be:
• Small Business Owner
• Freelancer
• Products / Services Provider

• Other Qualities
• Should have an interesting products / service offering
• Should be looking for high quality work
• Should be willing to invest a certain amount of time, money and effort into his website
• Should be straightforward and honest
• Should be okay with web based communication (iChat, Skype and Email)

Now that I have this list, I can tone it down a bit further if I want to, or leave it just as is.

And of course, with this information, I have visualized the image of the ideal client in my imagination. Thus, when I write the content of my site, I write it in such a manner that this ideal client will like and appreciate it.

In Conclusion…

Do you have an ideal client for your business? Have you used a similar process to define your ideal client? If so, have you seen good results from the content that you have created in this manner?

Did you use this process to define your ideal client? Was it useful for you? What other points would you consider while you define your ideal client? Lets talk about all of this in the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

Do you want to have certain amount of content or links or images to be constantly displayed on each and every page of your website? If you answered ‘yes’ to this question, then your WordPress sidebar is the perfect place to find all your answers!

Today, lets look at how you can take advantage of your WordPress sidebar to display certain content continuously across all your website’s pages and blog posts.

Your WordPress website has a unique and amazing feature: the WordPress sidebar, which can be very effectively used to display a variety of links and content across all the pages of your website.

WordPress Sidebar: What and Why

Before we delve into the the ‘how-to’ aspect, lets take a quick look at the ‘what’ and ‘why’ aspect of this scenario.

• You might want to display a quick blurb ‘About’ you on every page of your website.
• You might want to put a bunch of links on every page of your website. These can be links to your favorite sites, or other things such as important pages on your website.
• You might want to show an image or a slideshow of images on every page of your website. (This comes in handy when you have a website dedicated to images or photographs, for example.)
• You might want to put links to your social media profiles on the Internet.
• You might want to show off your ‘featured’ products – comes in handy for a shopping website.
• You might want to put a ‘Buy me Coffee’ button or a ‘Donate’ button on your website.

As you have seen, the list of things you might want to display continuously on your website can go on and on. And the reason for having this information on your website’s sidebar is really quite simple:

• Give your website’s visitors instant access to the information you want to highlight.
• Give your website’s visitors a quick glance at certain pertinent information that you want to highlight across your entire website.

WordPress Sidebar: How-To

So, with that quick overview, let us go ahead and look at the various ways you can leverage your WordPress sidebar to make this possible. And the best way you can go about it, is by using your WordPress website’s ‘widgets’ feature. There are a number of built-in WordPress sidebar widgets that come pre-installed with WordPress. Apart from those, you can also install a variety of WordPress sidebar widgets into your WordPress website.

To go to your WordPress website’s widgets section, just navigate to the ‘Appearance’ menu item and click on ‘Widgets’.

WordPress Sidebar Widgets

Without any further ado then, lets look at some of the most useful WordPress sidebar widgets that can make these things happen for you.

Social Media Widget

I have already talked about this widget over here. This WordPress sidebar widget will put in a wide variety of social media links into your WordPress sidebar and help your website’s visitors connect with you across a number of social media websites.

NextGen Gallery Widget

I have written a great how-to post about this widget over here. This plugin also gives you a WordPress sidebar widget, where you can put in a slideshow of your albums or image collections in your WordPress sidebar.

Text / HTML Widget

This is a built-in widget which will help you insert any arbitrary text or html code into your WordPress sidebar. This widget comes in handy when some some websites provide code that needs to be placed in the sidebar of your website.

Pages & Links Widgets

These are 2 separate, built-in widgets. The Pages widget will put links to all your website’s pages in the sidebar, while the Links widget will put the links from your blogroll in the sidebar.

Meta Widget

Another built-in widget, this will put your site’s login and admin links in your WordPress sidebar.

RSS Widget

This built-in, configurable WordPress sidebar widget pulls in RSS feeds from different websites and displays them in your WordPress sidebar. This widget can be quite helpful for those of you who want to display certain news items from other websites on your website.

MailChimp Widget

Although MailChimp provides you with a bunch of code that you can insert into your WordPress sidebar, you can’t quite configure certain aspects of it. Enter the MailChimp Plugin, which allows a lot more in terms of configurability. Now your website’s visitors can easily find your ‘Subscribe to Newsletter’ form on your website!

Twitter Widgets

And if you are a twitter user who wants to show off your tweets and so forth, here are 2 of my favorite Twitter Widget Plugins – Twitter and Twitter Goodies – which you can use, depending on how simple or how complex you want your display to be like.

PayPal Donate Button

This amazing PayPal Donate Button Plugin can really come in handy if you want to put that ‘Donate’ button on your WordPress sidebar.

As you can see, this list is virtually endless too! Ahem! So I think I’ll just stop here.. ;)

In Conclusion…

There are many good reasons why you would want to display a certain amount of or type of content in your WordPress Sidebar, and just as well, there are a plethora of plugins available freely which you can use to put that content in your WordPress sidebar.

So what kind of content do you usually display in your website’s sidebar? What else would you like to display in the WordPress sidebar? Let’s talk about it in the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

Web content writers are constantly required to research on the Internet for information. We are constantly challenged by the requirement to write accurate and well written articles for our clients and on our blogs and websites.

Typically, all web content writers gravitate towards conducting their research on the Internet using Internet based Search Engines, like Google. So, lets dive into today’s article, and learn some simple tips that will help your process of research on the Internet to be better, and more accurate.

As I have mentioned above, most web content writers easily end up on their favorite Search Engines (mine is Google, of course) to do their research on the Internet. And when we do put in a search term in Google, we can end up with literally thousands and thousands of web pages and blogs which might carry the information we require.

So how do we end up sorting out the correct information from all that is out there? And best of all, where else on the vast network of the World Wide Web do we look? Let’s find out.

Research on the Internet: Places to Look

Apart from Search Engines, there are many other places where one can source information for our research on the Internet. Let’s go through a quick list of those places. For the sake of simplicity, I am also including Search Engines in that list.

• Search Engines like Google and Yahoo!
• Online Discussion Forums
• Mailing Lists
• Message Boards
• Wiki based sites like Wikipedia

Naturally, you might end up finding links to these sites from your Search Engine. But you can also look specifically for, say, Message Boards or Discussion Forums for your specific topic as well, and the Search Engine will point you in the right direction.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

Google Analytics is a great way to measure the success of your website. You can know how many people visited your site over a given period of time, and also how they arrived at your website in the first place. With tons of different metrics that will inform you about your website’s reach, Google Analytics is great addition to any website out there.

When you have a WordPress website, integrating it is ever so easy. Today, lets talk about why Google Analytics is very important, and how you can go about adding the Google Analyticator plugin to your website to give you all the important analytics information right in your WordPress Dashboard.

Google Analytics is a very handy tool that is brought to us by Google (an amazing Search Engine on the Internet), and it helps provide website owners and admins with a ton of analytics and metrics about their websites.

Google Analytics: What Information Do You Get?

A quick list of the different metrics provided by Google Analytics includes:

• Information about the visitors to your website, including new and returning visitors
• Information of their visit length, i.e. how long they stayed and browsed around on your website
• Information about the traffic sources, i.e. which sites and links led them to your website
• Google AdWords that led them to your website
• If you’ve set up Goals, then you can learn about their conversion ratio
• The browsers and operating systems are typically used by your site’s visitors
• The geographical location of your site’s visitors
• The pages and blog posts that your visitors saw / read
• If your visitors searched for something on your site, then what they searched for and where it led to
• If you’ve set up Events, then you can learn about their effectiveness
• If your site is an e-commerce site, then you can see the effectiveness of the transactions
• If you have set up any other custom variables, then you can track their effectiveness
• You can see the traffic metrics based on a date range, or on a particular day etc.

Google Analytics: Integrating it in Your Website

Normally, in order to integrate Google Analytics into a website, one is provided with a code snippet which one has to add to each and every page and blog post of one’s website. The presence of that code is what ensures that Google Analytics measures the number of people who visit your page or blog post, and who click on the links that you have put in there and so forth.

When you create a WordPress website however, it is not that easy to add this kind of a code directly into your pages and blog posts. Naturally, we WordPress-ers have Plugins to rescue us!

If you search out there, you will find a number of Google Analytics plugins that were created especially for WordPress. However, there is one amazing plugin that I use, and I most certainly recommend to all my clients. And that plugin is the Google Analyticator.

Google Analytics for WordPress – The Google Analyticator Plugin

The Google Analyticator plugin allows you to easily integrate your Google Analytics account with your WordPress website. The plugin takes care of adding the code to all your WordPress website’s pages and blog posts. Not only that, it also gives you a little peek into your stats by putting a little widget right into your WordPress website’s Dashboard!

Just to make things simple, here’s a video that will explain how to install and set up the Google Analyticator Plugin.

Here, you can see how to set up a Google Analytics account in the first place, and then install the plugin and set it up in your WordPress website.

In Conclusion…

Google Analytics is a great way of tracking your website’s reach and effectiveness, along with tons of other metrics. And integrating it with your WordPress website is just as easy with the Google Analyticator Plugin.

So, have you installed it already? What are your thoughts? Please share in the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

Writing and maintaining a blog can often start out as a very exciting opportunity. However, after a point of time, finding inspiration for your next blog post can become quite difficult, even for the most experienced among us. Today, I am going to share a few ways in which I find inspiration to write the different blog posts.

As the excitement of starting a new blog fades away, putting up regular blog posts and articles on your blog can turn into a very difficult task. Many of us find ourselves stymied by the prospect of coming up with topics and ideas to write that next blog post.

Here are a few places where I find my inspiration, and often come up with ideas and article topics to write my blog posts.

Finding Inspiration For Your Next Blog Post: RSS Feeds

I use Google Reader to subscribe to a variety of blogs pertaining to topics that interest me. Thereafter, I use the Reeder app on my Mac and the Mr. Reader app on my iPad to regularly read the different articles that get posted on those blogs.

Often, I read about things that interest me and inspire me, and before you know it, I have a bunch of titles that I come up with for my blog.

Finding Inspiration For Your Next Blog Post: Other Blogs

This is pretty much similar to the previous method, but with a slight twist. These are articles on the blogs that I haven’t subscribed to in my RSS Reader. Sometimes I come upon these articles casually while surfing the Internet, or while researching for my current article.

Also, I tend to notice the small and large things that the blog’s author may have touched upon in his article, and that suddenly sets a new thought process in motion, eventually inspiring me to write another article.

Finding Inspiration For Your Next Blog Post: Books I Read

I am a writer, yes. But I began my journey as a reader. And I read a variety of books on a number of topics – both fiction and non-fiction.

While I am not going to list my various interests over here, I can most definitely share with you the fact that the different topics that I end up reading about in these books has often served to spark my inspiration and boost my creativity.

Finding Inspiration For Your Next Blog Post: Experiences With Clients

Now, this is a really practical place where I unexpectedly find my creative juices flowing. As you may well know, I write for websites and blogs, and help my clients set up WordPress based websites. Sometimes, during my interaction with my client, I might be asked some seemingly innocuous questions about how to do a particular thing and so forth.

Naturally, this becomes fodder for my running list of article titles, and eventually appears on my blog as a post.

Finding Inspiration For Your Next Blog Post: Personal Experiences

And of course, to save the best for last, this is one of the best places for me to find inspiration the next blog post. I maintain my own website, and run my own freelance business. And during the course of all of this, I often encounter several different scenarios, which end up turning into blog posts on my site.

In Conclusion…

These are but a few of the places where I find inspiration for my blog posts. Of course, you might find inspiration in some other places as well! What are your sources of inspiration? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

There are several reasons why you would hire a web content writer. Perhaps you want content for your company website, or maybe you want articles to put up on your blog. Or maybe you want to revamp the company brochure on your website.

No matter what the reason, there are some things you should think about when you hire a web content writer. Today, I am going to talk about the 3 most important points that you must analyze as you hire a web content writer for your website or blog.

Having to hire a web content writer is an important decision for any company or organization. That being said,

there are certainly a few points that you should consider quite thoroughly before you select the writer that you want to work with.

If you had to concisely look at these points, you would consider:

• The understanding that the writer displays towards your work,
• The past work experience of the writer, and,
• The charges / cost of the services.

Now, lets discuss these 3 points one-by-one.

Hire A Web Content Writer – Understanding

This is the first, and most important point to think about when you hire a web content writer for your project.

Each writer brings a certain amount of understanding to the table right at the outset. Some are smart and ‘get’ things right away, even if they haven’t read about / known about a topic or a subject. While some writers need to spend time researching and learning something, especially if it is new. And of course, there are those rare scenarios where a writer might be an expert in a particular domain, which might not be the domain you’re looking for. You might consider the first two options for your project, and maybe give the third one a miss.

While the writer may have the ability to understand a new topic quickly, he must also be willing to discuss the topic at length. He must be willing to learn. For example, if you are planning to hire a web content writer to write the content of your company’s website, then the writer must be open to spending some time understanding your company and its products / services. This way, he will be in a better position to put all that information in your website content. If a writer doesn’t ask questions, then you know that he isn’t really listening.

Each writer also has a different degree of professionalism. It doesn’t really matter if he has his own office, or sits at home in his pajamas to write for your website. What matters is the kind of quality of work that he can provide.

Another thing to look out for is the time the writer takes to get back to you and answer your e-mail or phone queries. A decent turnaround time translates into quicker service, especially when you need to make some changes or additions to your content, and you have a deadline looming.

Hire A Web Content Writer – Past Work Experience

This is the second most important thing to consider while you hire a web content writer.

Does the writer have any past work experience? How about a portfolio of projects that he has worked on? Or maybe he has a bunch of testimonials from clients who he worked with?

Any and all of the abovementioned information will surely help you understand the kind of work he has done before, and the kind of satisfaction that he has delivered. Especially while hiring a web content writer, you might be able to see the samples of his work online, and you can catch a glimpse of his writing style(s) and approaches.

Of course, I must add that if you are considering a writer who doesn’t have any priors , you should ask for samples. Hey, everyone has to start somewhere, and all ‘Freshers’ aren’t always all that bad! When you ask for a sample page or two of the content you want, you can easily get an idea whether he can deliver what you are looking for.

Hire A Web Content Writer – Charges / Costs / Fees

There is a very good reason why I have included this point at the very last. Most people, when hiring web content writers, tend to make this the first point of consideration, which, let me tell you, is the biggest mistake ever.

My mom says, “You get what you pay for!” and in the web content writing arena, this statement is true in more ways than one.

Sure, we all work with budgets and the cost / charges is one of the main factors, but it should not be the deciding factor.

In fact, if you do end up spending a bit more, you might get results that far exceed your expectations.

Compare the different charges that web content writers work for – and don’t just look in the ‘bulk and cheap content writers’ category. That would be a huge mistake. Compare the charges for writers who fall, more or less, in a similar category in terms of quality of work. Once you do that, you will see the price range and the resultant quality range that is available out there.

Take your decision with these points in mind, and you will be pleased with the choice of web content writer you hire.

In Conclusion…

When you hire a web content writer for your website or blog project make sure that you hire a person who fits in with your needs. In short, the person you hire should be professional, must take the time out to understand your project, and should charge a reasonable amount of fees for doing your work.

If you follow these points, then you will be sure to reap a lot of rewards from your choice, and take your website or blog to greater heights of success.

What are the other points that you would consider while hiring a web content writer? Do write about it in the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

Do a Google search and you will find hundreds (if not thousands) of websites selling bulk and cheap content. They even claim to have several talented writers on board who can churn out tens of articles every single day, and each article is just about perfect for you!

If you are someone looking for a number of articles to put on your website, then you might even find yourself getting pulled into the whole deal. Who wouldn’t? After all, it isn’t every day that you find such a great deal, right?

But, here’s an important question that you might want to ask yourself: is this bulk and cheap content good for your website?

Finding a good deal is a very natural instinct for every human being. If something is priced at a certain price, we immediately start looking
for some place else where you can find that same commodity at a cheaper price.

However, this approach doesn’t necessarily work when you are looking for content for your website or blog. While looking for content writers for your websites, it can be very easy to fall into the trap of such ‘deals’ and spend your money, only to regret it later on.

So be warned: Bulk and cheap content, while at first, might sound like a great bargain, will cost you more than just money. It might just cost you your website’s ratings and integrity.

Bulk and Cheap Content – Is It Really A Good Deal?

Potential clients and customers often read Websites that regularly put out content on their blogs. Apart from that, such websites also draw in visitors who are seeking out more information about a certain product or service that you might provide.

In either case, what you are probably trying to do with the content you post is trying to build trust. You want to build a certain amount of credibility in the eyes of these readers. You want to make sure that these readers keep coming back to your website because they are sure to get valid and good information.

However, with bulk and cheap content, you cannot be assured of such kind of articles. When a writer churns out ten to fifteen articles every single day, you can be assured that:

• The writer has probably not spent more than ten to fifteen minutes writing that article.
• The article might not be researched thoroughly.
• The quality of the language used might not be superior.
• You might find grammatical errors.
• Or worse, the bits and pieces of content in the article have been simply copy-pasted from other websites.

With such glaring errors in the composition of your articles, you might discover, to your utter chagrin, that your site ends up building no credibility or trust amongst is viewers.

Bulk and Cheap Content – A Compromise Between Quality and Quantity

When you do hire people to deliver bulk and cheap content for your website, you are essentially making a huge compromise between quality and quantity. You are sacrificing the levels of quality that your site’s content delivers and substituting it with higher and higher levels of quantity of content on your website.

However, across the Internet, people have become wiser (and so have search engines too, btw), and they prefer quality to quantity.

Even if your site may not have thousands of articles, it doesn’t really matter. Just make sure that whatever articles you do have are rich with information, well written and are original. You will see dramatic results, and gain a lot of appreciation from your readers.

So, What Do You Do?

Understandably, each of us works within a given budget. Money isn’t something that simply grows on trees. And one still has to hire writers to write the content for your website.

Clearly bulk and cheap content is not the right way to go.

So how do you make the right choice?

It is quite simple really. Search for (use Google!) writers who work independently, and who offer high quality articles for decent rates. You might have to pay them a little bit more, and you might get a little bit less in terms of quantity. But whatever content you get, you can be assured that it will deliver the results you require! And you will more than recover your money’s worth from the amount of sales your site generates as a result.

Besides, these well-researched, high quality articles will also boost up your search engine ratings and satisfy the need for quality information of your website’s visitors. The results will speak for themselves. Whatever little extra you end up spending for such good content writers will pay itself off within no time!

In Conclusion…

Bulk and cheap content might sound like a good deal at first, but in the long run will only work to the detriment of your website’s credibility. If you need to hire writers to put informative and high quality articles for your website, then make sure you don’t compromise on quality for the sake of saving some money. You might live to regret it.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Please add your comments below, and lets talk about this very interesting topic.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

You may have a great blog concept, but regularly writing articles on your blog might often end up seeming like a very daunting task. Of course, you might also be aware that before you write your blog post, it is also essential to plan your blog post properly. There are many different ways and methods that you can use to plan your blog post content so that you write interesting and informative blog posts on your blog.

Today, I am going to discuss my most favorite methods that should help you plan your blog post content better.

Before you write and publish an article on your blog, it is very essential that you:

• Research the subject matter thoroughly,
• Mind Map the article flow for clarity,
• Make a note of the different SEO Keywords that you might end up using / want to use, and,
• Create effective and catchy Headings; both for the blog post’s title and for the sub-headings within the blog post itself.

With these four essential points in mind, lets get down to the gritty details of each aspect of planning your blog post content.

Plan Your Blog Post Content – Step 1: Research

This is, essentially, the very first step. Without research, you are not even in a place where you can begin.

And yes, this is still the first step even if you are a subject matter expert.

Researching the topic thoroughly ensures that you:

• Know the topic from the inside out,
• Know enough (or more than enough) to write about the topic in detail, and,
• Know about the topic so well that you won’t miss out on key details when you write your article.

With all the necessary information at your disposal, you can very easily be in a position of knowledge. Thus, when you plan your blog post content, your knowledge will form a very strong base / foundation for your blog post’s content.

Plan Your Blog Post Content – Step 2: Mind Map

A Mind Map helps you to easily define the flow of your blog post. It is a great way to organize the content of your blog post into blocks of sub-topics.

You can refer to my article about Mind Mapping before Writing for more information about how you can go about creating and using a mind map to effectively plan your blog post content.

A mind map will thus help you to:

• Divide your content into manageable / readable chunks, and,
• Define the flow of your blog post’s content.

Of course, this step will also prepare you for the next 2 steps as well.

Plan Your Blog Post Content – Step 3: SEO Keywords

SEO Keywords are a very important aspect of writing for the Internet. Without these keywords, you might as well be writing in a void. These SEO keywords help your blog post get listed in search engines. So when someone types these keywords into a search engine, the chances of your article popping up in the results are increased manifold.

Please refer to my articles about SEO Keywords and how to research for them, and use them in your blog post content.

Knowing which SEO Keywords you are going to use / include helps you plan your blog post content in a very useful manner. This way when you actually write your article, you can include these keywords in a very natural manner, thus ensuring that your article while being technically sound, also reads well.

Plan Your Blog Post Content – Step 4: Headings

This is also a very important aspect that you must consider as you plan your blog post’s content.

Here is an interesting blog post that I wrote about using Headings and Bullet Points for writing Blog Posts which you can refer to, and learn a little bit more about how to go about creating and using effective headings (and bullet points) within your blog post content.

Your blog post’s title and the headings and sub-headings within the article are actually anchors that keep your readers glued to your blog post content. Your headings must be relevant, effective, and very catchy so as to achieve such a status.

These brilliant and catchy headings ensure that:

• Your readers easily grasp the main points that you are trying to make in your blog post,
• Your readers actually read the stuff you’ve written between two headings, rather than just skimming over the article, and,
• Your blog post gets a bunch of social media love with FaceBook Likes, Shares and what-have-you.

Catchy headings must be carefully planned and included within your blog post’s content. Needless to say, the stuff that goes in between two headings should also be of the same superior quality, otherwise all would be lost!

In Conclusion…

There are essentially four easy steps that you can follow when you plan your blog post content. Each of these steps flows very neatly into the other, thus creating an amazing process that gets you to plan and eventually write an amazing blog post for your blog.

What do you think? Does this make sense to you? Have you got any other steps that might add to this process? Please do share your thoughts and opinions using the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

This article is a guest post by Christine Kane.

If you blog for long enough you’ve probably become very familiar with the spam comments that pop up. You know the ones, they usually have some ridiculous statement such as, “Dag naibbt good stuff you whippersnappers!” clearly marked by misspellings and a link to some obscure website. And sometimes the spam comments come in phases, on any given day I can log into my account and have 100 new spam comments waiting for me or zero – it all just depends on what I’ve written and where it’s pinged off to.

And no one wants to sit there and sift through comments marking the vast majority as spam just to reach the one genuine comment. So is there any way to reduce the number of spam comments you receive? Of course! It’s 2011 after all!

1.     Akismet

Probably the most popular spam-blocking tool, this software is highly effective at verifying if a comment is spam or is legitimate. It goes through a very detailed process of checking everything and leaves you a status report identifying how many comments have been marked as spam, etc. The one big drawback is that it can cost money depending on the type of blog you have – but for how effective it is it’s probably worth the financial investment. [Learn More at www.akismet.com]

2.     WP-Hashcash

This plug-in filters spam from genuine comments by having your visitors use obfuscated JavaScript to verify they are not a spam bot.  When used in conjunction with Akismet, the two can pretty successfully block the majority of spam comments that find their way to your website. [Learn More at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-hashcash/]

3.     Comment Limit

Because spam comments are pretty non-discriminatory when it comes to picking posts to comment on, they can end up on posts that haven’t seen the light of day in months. One way to eliminate this is by turning on Comment Limit, which allows you to close comments on posts after a certain number of days (specified by you).

4.     Comment Verification

You’ve probably stumbled across blogs that tell you that “your comment is awaiting moderation” after you try to leave one. This means that your commenters will receive an email to verify that they are the commenter or that you have to go in and manually approve it. Both are time consuming ways to verify comments, but they are effective.

5.     Captcha

You’ve probably seen this feature on hundreds of websites – once you leave a comment you have to type in a word or series of letters to prove that you’re not a spam bot before your comment will be approved. This is my least favorite way to combat comments because it can annoy regular commenters and deter them from commenting but it does work effectively. [Learn More at WordPress.Org]

It’s unlikely that you’ll ever remove 100% of spam comments from your blog, but you can drastically reduce them by using one or more of the above-mentioned methods. Every now and then though when I need a good laugh I’ll go into my spam section to see what they’ve come up with this time – you can’t help but giggle when someone posts something like “Thank God! Someone with brains speaks!”

Author Bio

This Guest post is by Christine Kane, a graduate of Communication and Journalism. She enjoys writing about a wide-variety of subjects including internet providers in my area for different blogs. She can be reached via email at: Christi.Kane00 @ gmail.com

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.