As part of your blogging activities, you should take some time to maintain your blog. Everything needs a special consideration to be productive in the long run.
The most common mistake that some bloggers do, is to neglect old posts. Once written, we get a feeling that “this” post is now the past and we are yet eager and preoccupied by “how to come up with new wonderful ideas” for the incoming days, months, years..

Old Is Gold

The best thing to do, is to polish your old posts which get the most number of hits. To deduce your elite posts, use your Awstats, sitemeter or any tool that you use to monitor traffic on your blog. This is one of the important reason of why you should use such a traffic monitoring tool.

Why Should You Bother To Polish Your Old Posts?

Some of you might be wondering why to waste your free time doing such a time consuming activity when you could just concentrate your energy on new posts. Well, let’s try to make you change your mind

1) From my own experience, I have observed that now I write in a better and improved “style” from what I used to do in my early blogging days. It’s all normal, since early days are the most uncertain, shy, weak and experimenting moments. As you persevere with time, you should be doing much better, at least to a level with which you are satisfied with yourself. (Set some goals!)

So, this “may” mean that some of my old posts are not to the level which I’m breeding now. It might not be to the same presentable fashion. Further, my readers might have some ambiguities and frustrations to read them. Do you want this to happen?

2) Polishing your post also means to fix broken anchor texts, removing non-existing links, remove and update videos and fixing grammars..etc

Did You Know?
The Google Spider is excited when it sees you are updating your blog, old posts and repairing dead links.

It’s time to dig that old archives to polish those diamonds and make them shine brighter than ever!

And How About Your Approach?

I did this activity myself for a couple of my old post, but I’m still not satisfied with some. So I think I will take some time with my archive this week.
And how about you, what is your approach?

Here’s another breaking news from the Wordpress development community:

Version 2.5.1 of WordPress is now available. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration.

By the first line, it may sound (for newbies) as if a new version of Wordpress is out. But no! It’s another “fix” and a fix is there to solve bugs which are present in the main version, namely 2.5
I have been observing the trend of each release of the Wordpress package. When a version, lets say A.B is out, there is bound to have other “fix” releases in this family, like A.B.1, A.B.2, A.B.3..etc, so in general it’s A.B.x
When they have enough of this bug fixing, they release a new family, more precisely a new “species”, A.C, just like the example of 2.5

(on blogcatalog, when 2.5 was released, I said to someone that you will see such fix release soon enough, but i guess at that time some people might have just laughed.. that’s cool!)

Now, if you have understood what I mean, prepare youself for other releases like, 2.5.2, 2.5.3, 2.5.4…etc This means you will need to update and upgrade your package “x” times per year!

[..] In addition to the security fix, 2.5.1 contains many bug fixes [..]
[..] If you download the entire 2.5.1 release, you will be getting over 70 other fixes. 2.5.1 focuses on fixing the most annoying bugs and improving performance. [..]

For those of you who keep an eye on these frequent releases, you will find certain common things mentioned each time:
1) important security fix
2) many other bug fixes solved (here about 70!)

As per the Wordpress team, it’s the culmination of 6 months of work to release the 2.5 species. Then again, they come back with 2.5.1 fix.
But this is getting so stupid and frustrating to each time having to upgrade like this - it’s basically like 3 to 4 updates per year for bloggers using self-hosted wordpress package. Does the development team not care for all this hastle for us?
Why the hell can’t they just take one full year, test it fully and then bring to the world a robust and strong package!!! I starting to be fed up with wordpress..

Anyway, I let you see some more fix releases soon.. enjoy it if you are a big Wordpress fanatic!

Content is King…
Content is King…
Content is King…

Content is The king and your blog is its castle, right? Well, at least this is what you must have been reading around. While this is true, there is a further deep meaning down the valley, which you need to understand. Since the medieval time, a King never lives without his Queen, in his Castle.

In other words, your blog will not bloom success in the long run without unique content.
King + Queen = A wonderful Castle (let’s forget soldiers for the sake of this discussion )

Queen always played a pivotal role. Even in chess, the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board. So, in blogging the Queen plays an important aspect as well.
I name this Queen “unique” content.

What Does Uniqueness Mean In Blogging?

=> Unique content means that you are not reproducing the exact copy or framework of another author. It should not be a duplicate. Write your own work and in your own words.

=> Do not say exactly what others are saying. Say it differently.

How To Make Your Content Unique?

=> The best thing is to always write an article from your own knowledge, experience and observations. An example is this article itself, which I’m just writing without any googling or reading. It is just about how I see things and I trust it is good!

But this approach might not always be sustainable. You cannot write such unique content every time, simply because no one knows everything. There will be moments when you will need to make some references.

=> Read what others are saying and write it in a completely different approach - will require creativity from your part.

This can be a very nice approach, because I believe that there is more than a hundred ways of expressing and explaining something. May be someone among them may come up with a more intelligible and pertinent way of explaining it. So why not make your article be that special one?

Wakish Encourages..

With some good techniques, observation and experience, it is all possible to breed wonderful ideas in your garden to shape unique contents. It just need a bit of motivation and creativity from your side!

What Is A Line Jump And Page Jump

Just to clarify any confusion, a line jump is just an action of moving from your current line to any line of the same article. And likewise, a page jump is the action of moving from a current article to any specific line on another article.
Would it be not cool to be able to direct your readers to a specific line in your articles?

How Will This Help To Boost Your Blog Posts?

=> Most of the time readers do not want to waste time searching for a word or line that you are mentioning. Besides, if your article is long, searhing through the entire page is tedious.
Line jumps and page jumps make this process easy and fast for your readers, so help them

Show Us An Example Of What You Mean

LINE JUMP: Click on “What Is A Line Jump And Page Jump”

Back here? Ok, what have you observed? When you clicked that link, you were instantly taken (observe the page moving) to that specific line which was mentioned. Cool?

PAGE JUMP: This is the same process as a line jump but directing in another article instead of the current one. (just play with the “articles’ address“)

How To Use Line Jump?

You need to know 2 things:
1) The anchor tag or command that will send your reader to where you want

Example:
To Make the text “What Is A Line Jump And Page Jump” clickable, you need to wrap it around with tags like this:
<a href=”http://domainName.com/postTitle/#linkName”>What Is A Line Jump And Page Jump</a>

- In my case the http://domainName.com/postTitle/ is http://wakish.info/enhance-your-blog-posts-with-line-jump-and-page -jump/
- And I have named my linkname as line01

NOTE: It is very important that you precise the following:
=> The address of your article where the line is. (you can use it for page jump too)
=> The linkname - any name that you want
=> Precede your linkname with # - This symbol denotes an internal link, without it our trick will not work.
=> The value linkname should be between double quotes ” “
=> The text is wrapped around tags
- href means hypertext reference, think of it as our post office
- a in <a> stands for Anchor (Now you remember why bloggers always say anchor text? A text which is anchored or wrapped around <a> and </a> )

2) The anchor tag or command of the place where you want your reader to jump to

At the place where the line “What Is A Line Jump And Page Jump” is, place the following tags like this:
<a name=”line01″> </a> What Is A Line Jump And Page Jump

NOTE:
=> This time, the tags are BEFORE the text.
=> We are using name instead of href .  name is used to actually name that place and any “letter” from href (our post office), will be “posted” to your home “name”
=> The value linkname should be between double quotes

An Important Note For WordPress Users

=> To use tags, on your dashboard, you have to click on the “code view” as shown below:

That’s it! Simple, huh? Hope this will be useful to you and please I will be glad to hear your comments and feedbacks or any additional tips you might have..

The following guest post was submitted by ReapMoneyOnline, who explains and analyses “how to find your niche with entrecard “

We usually think of EntreCard as a traffic generator or a blog network. There is more to it than being a social networking tool. It is a microcosm of the entire blogosphere, if not the web. After nearly two months with EntreCard, we realized that the categories under which we register our blogs represent general market niches and they can help us determine our next project.

Let’s take a look at the EntreCard categories that we can possibly leverage into online businesses:

1. Make Money Online – 475 blogs
2. Entertainment/Celebrities - 375 blogs
3. Computers and Internet - 353 blogs
4. Technology – 275 blogs
5. Fashion/Lifestyle – 258 blogs
6. Internet Marketing - 249 blogs
7. Blogging Resources - 241 blogs
8. Parenting and Family – 220 blogs
9. Humor - 196 blogs
10. Business - 173 blogs
11. Health and Medicine – 166 blogs
12. Finance and Investing – 155 blogs
13. Gaming- 139 blogs
14. Travel – 133 blogs
15. Education/Books/Science/History - 138 blogs
16. Web Development - 126 blogs
17. Self Improvement - 124 blogs
18. Writing and literature – 117 blogs
19. Photography - 101 blogs
20. Sports - 102 blogs
21. Music - 104 blogs
22. News/ Media - 100 blogs
23. Hobbies – 88 blogs
24. Cooking and Dining – 83 blogs
25. Marketing – 72 blogs
26. Politics – 70 blogs
27. Pets – 65 blogs
28. Home and Garden – 61 blogs
29. Automotive – 42 blogs
30. Environment – 41 blogs
31. Careers/Jobs – 35 blogs
32. Real Estate – 29 blogs
33. Philosophy - 26 blogs
34. Graphic design- 13 blogs
35. Law/Legal – 8 blogs

We took the top and lowest category in terms of blogs registered and ran them through WordTracker’s Gtrends online tool to determine the number of searches, Google competition, and visitors received per day by the top site.

There are 475 blogs under the category Make Money Online. The phrase “Make money online” has 4,254 searches. Down the line, we zeroed in on the long-tail phrase “make money online newbie” with 19 searches. Its Google competition is 9,650 sites or web pages. Actual visitors per day of the no. 1 site in Google are approximately 5.

On the other hand, the Law/Legal category only has 8 blogs in it. There were 39,187 searches that have the keyword “law.” We drilled down to a phrase with 19 searches, which also looks like a good basis for a blog or site, “top 100 law schools.” The phrase has a Google competition of 4,680 sites or web pages with the top site pulling approximately 160 visitors per day.

This is only a rough comparison using a basic online tool but it gave us a glimpse of the possible niches we can tap. If we only knew Law, we’d already be refining our research.

So what’s your opinion about this new niche finder tool?