The Cosmopolitan Blog

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about blog strategy, so here it is. I just found this amazing site: http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/, it has countless blog posts about ways to improve the success of your blog. But instead of being generalities and theory like most other expert blogs, these are a series of concise blog posts about specifics: how to increase comment traffic, useful plugins to increase traffic, best way to use StumbleUpon…

The only catch is that the focus is on Wordpress blogs, since it discusses plugins available for it. But at the same time, ask anyone, i think that Wordpress is fast becoming the only sensible blogging software, whether it’s externally-hosted wordpress.com or your own wordpress.org.

There’s something for everyone. The one tip i found the most useful and went ahead and implemented right away was the no6 on his “10 ways to increase the number of blog comments“:

Does it say “No Comments” underneath your blog article? Does that sound inviting to your ears? It certainly does not, even though it is the text on the standard WordPress installation and most probably on your blog as well. Open your comments.php and edit the “No Comments” to something more inviting and encouraging like “No comments yet, but your thoughts are welcomed”.

Go check the site out. And come back and tell me which you thought was the most useful post, or come and share with us here some useful tip for strategy.

Waow, that was insanely complicated! So, i’ve just upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.5 (no, no, THAT was the easy part), and i found this new plugin called “Twitter Tools” that seemed to do everything i needed:

1. If i write a new post, it will send an update to my Twitter, to notify my contacts of my new post. This is good because it takes care of some of my blog promotion, since this is still an exercise i’m working on.

2. Also, the tools promised that if i put a new status update on Twitter, it would create a blog post about it, thus achieving another goal of mine, ensuring that there are fresh posts on my blog regularly. Since i Tweet more often than i blog (tweets are just 140 character status updates), i figured this was a good way to let people know what’s going on in my life.

Of course you techies out there can picture the problem right? Every Twitter update creates a new blog post. Every new blog post creates a Twitter update. And here we enter the hell that is application circular reference. BUT, i checked the plugin’s documentation and it assured me that this scenario had been thought of and told me, specifically, that it would NOT “cause the world to end in a spinning fireball of death“.

And as you can all vouch for, the world is still here, and we’re not burning or dead. BUT, if you follow my RSS feeds, you might have noticed some crazy activity this morning. After I added the plugin, i also did some edits to my old blog posts, as i had found some typos here and there (well, you know, nobody’s perfect!). And apparently, everytime i edited a post, the plugin assumed it was a new post, and added it to my RSS feed and to my twitter updates!!! So all my contacts (all 1.5 of them) got about 20 new twitter updates from me in the same second, referencing supposedly new blog posts, but they were all, old posts!

So this is me, publicly apologizing to all my Twitter buddies, all my blog readers, and all my RSS feed subscribers, sorry for dragging you into hell for a few hours! Oh, and if you’re wondering, i’ve disabled the function that created a new twitter update everytime i write a new blog post, so here’s hoping that hitting “Publish” on this post won’t make the world explode again!