First of all I have to thank Valeria Maltoni for exposing me to new ideas. She is also a great writer so visit her blog, it is worth it.

The next person I want to thank is Kathy from Virtual Impax. She has been a dedicated reader of my blog and a person I admire because of her knowledge in marketing. By talking to Kathy I got new ideas about what to write about and it’s always been entertaining.

Further I want to thank Will for being so inspiring. His blog is just so different but because of that it is so great. You have got to visit it.

Thanks also goes to Daniel from Daily Blog Tips who has been very open and helpful throughout the year. I have to admit that I stole some of his great post ideas from him.

I also want to thank all the people that I have not mentioned. Without you I probably wouldn’t have gotten so far.
Thank you all for helping me accomplish this.

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To have something to work toward I created this list of my goals that I will hopefully have reached by the end of 2009:

1. Reach 1,000 subscribers
2. An average of 500 page views per day
3. Start actively Twittering
4. Writing on average 3 posts per week
5. Getting to know 5 new people every month
6. Reading 3 books every month
7. Make $250 through my blog on a monthly basis

These are my main goals for 2009. I hope I will reach them all.

Have you written down your goals? What are the things that you look forward to in 2009?

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That is what happened to me. I came across three very cool articles that I thought are worth checking out. It is not actually the article itself but the idea behind it.

The Thank You Idea

The first interesting idea was created by Valeria Maltoni who created an article saying thank you to all the people that have helped her through the year. The idea itself is great and I think it is also important for blog owners to be grateful toward their readers because without them they probably would be nowhere.
Thank You Valeria ;)

Smashing Highlights

The next idea comes from Smashing Magazine. Its blog covers a lot of topics but mostly how-to’s, tutorials on font and graphics, and CSS. Several days ago they created an article called Smashing Highlights 2008. The article basically sums up all the main posts that were created throughout the year. The idea is great and gives readers that recently subscribed to the blog the opportunity to have a look at all the important articles that were created throughout 2008.

Blogging Goals

The last article is about Internet Goals for 2009. It was written by Daniel Scocco, the author of Daily Blog Tips. In the post he lists his goals for 2009 and also checks whether he reached the goals he had for 2008. Of course you have to set goals that are specific like “Reach 15,000 RSS subscribers.” “Increasing subscribers” would also be a goal but as that it would be a lot more ineffective because you probably will achieve that goal but you would also do it just by gaining one subscriber.

What do you think of the ideas? Have you already tried some of them?

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The steps to receive feedback are really simple. You enter your website url and then questions for the people giving the feedback. Someone for example asked “What are your first impressions?What do you find confusing? What didn’t you understand immediately?” Afterwards you have to transfer the money via Paypal.

Some people also may doubt the value of the feedback but I guess the comments seem to be valuable otherwise nobody would pay for the service.

To get a glimpse of how the feedback looks like just visit the web site, there are lots of examples.

Tell me what you think about it? Do you like the concept?

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I’ve been recently reading a book about typography and I will share the knowledge I gained from it.

The Perfect Paragraph

Ok so what should the perfect paragraph look like? What do you have to keep in mind when changing your layout?

Different Fonts
First of all when creating or changing your design you should use a maximum of two different fonts. This is important so your design does not confuse visitors. It does not mean that you shouldn’t change the font-size, you really should. Also make sure that when you use two different fonts that they are very different to create contrast which is a key to a good layout.

The Space between Two Lines
The spacing between two lines should be as big as one single line or a little bit bigger. It of course depends on your layout. If you do not have space or very little between two lines it gets very hard to read your articles.

Highlight Regions of Importance
Highlight regions of text to which you want to bring attention. You can achieve this by making that font bold, changing the font, increasing the font-size or by changing all the letters to uppercase.

The Ideal Length
The ideal length of a paragraph should be about 8 to 12 words. After twelve words the eye wants to automatically jump down one line, and so it is hard to read the rest of the line if it’s too long. You can also make your paragraph shorter than 8 words as magazines and newspapers do.

New Paragraph
To indicate that a new paragraph begins you can do several things. First of all you could just leave a single line blank between the two paragraphs. But you can also just indent the beginning of the one paragraph.
Did you already know all of this? What do you think is important to keep in mind?

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I myself started this blog several months ago and it is starting to get better each day but there are still a lot of aspects that bother me about not yet having a well-known blog.

No Testing Possible
Because your blog is still small, changing parts of your layout or sentences around and then measuring the changes will not give you an idea if it worked well or not. There are so few people on your blog that your whole data could be influenced by the behaviour of a number of people. Because of this testing is only possible with rather well-known blogs.

Polls Are Inaccurate
Another aspect related to prior one, is that polls are inaccurate. The reason why they are inaccurate is the same as mentioned above, few people are visiting your blog. I actually once read that you had to have at least 38 responses to get statistically correct data. Even if that is the case I like to have more people responding to get a more accurate picture of the situation.

Knowing Your Articles are Useful But No One Gets to See Them
I think this happens to a lot of people. I myself always know whether my article will be a success or not. When I know that it is a good article it just bothers me to know that so few people get to read it.

Not Knowing the Right People
This is another problem about being relatively new to blogging, you do not know a lot of other bloggers. Take a look at Darren Rowse from Problogger. He just recently started a new blog called TwiTip, I think it was about a month ago, and now he has already 3000 subscribers.

What do you think? What bothers you about having a rather small blog? What would you add to the list?

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I actually found out about this by one of these malicious bloggers visiting my site. The issue the person exploited revolves around the use of the “Top Commentators” plug-in. A lot of people have been using it on their blog to show appreciation towards bloggers commenting often.

Reason for My Research

Let’s first take a look at how I found out about it. I actually took a look at my blog stats and saw that one visitor searched for the following: inurl:organic seo “top commentators”

The Investigation

There are a few things you can take from this. First of all the visitor searched something very specific. What is inurl:organic seo? inurl is a specific Google operator. Google operators are there to modify your search and make it more accurate. For example you could use filetype:log inurl:icq to find .log files that contain the word icq. You can find a list of Google operators here.

Let’s go back to what the visitor was searching for. Because of our knowledge we can now assume that he was looking at web pages containing the keywords organic and seo. But he was further trying to find web sites that also included the exact words “top commentators”. We can assume that he was looking for blogs using the top commentators plugin.

It is also important to know that the visitor left a comment on my blog saying something like: seo refers to search engine optimization. I also visited his site and it was about search engine optimization.

Because I still wasn’t sure what the visitor was actually looking for I queried Google for the same search as the person visiting. These are the results.

If you visit some of these websites you will realize that our theory was right. All pages are related to SEO and include the Top Commentators plug-in. The question why the visitor searched for these web sites still wasn’t clear. After looking at the source code of the Top Commentators plug-in on one website it became clear to me.

Do you see it?

The Trick

There is no rel=”nofollow” which means that the commentators gain part of the PageRank of this web site. I am certain that this was what the visitor was trying to find. He was increasing his PageRank through writing a comment that led him to being listed in the Top Commentators list.

Most of these blog owners probably do not even know that rel=”nofollow” is not activated in the plug-in. The reason for this is that the plug-in by default has nofollow turned off.

The Solution

If you want to add rel=”nofollow” to the Top Commentators plug-in just go into your administration section of Wordpress. Click on Appearance -> Widgets and select the sidebar to which you have added the Top Commentators plug-in. There click Edit on the Top Commentators widget and set NoFollow each name if hyperlinked? to Yes. Then just save the changes and you are done ;)

Feel free to ask me any questions. Do you want to know more about how to use Google operators?

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Wordpress 2.7 has totally new look. Many people helped through giving advice and in providing ideas for the new version. Because its developers took the time to actually listen to the people we now have a new fully customizable Wordpress that is even more in line with the blogging spirit. Take a look at its features:

• new interface
• a lot faster
• drag and drop dashboard
• ability to install plugins with one click
• built-in automatic Wordpress upgrade
• every screen customizable
• reply to comments from dashboard

These are several of the new features but there are a lot more.

I have actually been using version 2.7 to write this post and I must say I am very impressed. I think once you get to know it better you will be a lot more efficient.

You can download it here. It is really worth it!

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Because Wordpress is by default not really fast there are several steps you can take to improve its performance. This post points out several essential articles about speeding up Wordpress.

First of all, all the people that are interested in optimizing and playing around with Wordpress should seriously consider visiting Yoast. Joost de Valk, the blog owner, writes in his blog about how to improve Wordpress, new useful plugins and SEO. He created several useful posts that might give you more insight into optimizing your blog.

The first article you should consider reading from Yoast is about speeding and cleaning up Wordpress. It is a great article with several tips on how to make Wordpress faster. Take a look at it!

Also consider looking at How to Make Better use of Wordpress Functions. This is another article from Yoast.com about Wordpress hacks that might speed up Wordpress.

Speeding up the administration section of Wordpress is also important. I actually wrote this article myself. It should be pretty easy to follow along the steps explained in the article to make the admin section respond faster.

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Because of this situation it is essential for bloggers to make their articles stand out and more memorable. There are just two little steps you have to take to make that happen.

Use Headlines

The first step consists of using headlines. Although almost every blogger uses headlines but only a few use them correctly.

Headlines are supposed to reflect the main idea of the article. Scientific research shows that by doing so people understand and remember articles better.

Use Images

The second step is all about using images. Of course most people in the blogging world know about the importance of images but there are still a lot of people that do not use pictures the right way.

Images are supposed to engage readers and also make the article more useful. Further the picture used at the beginning of the article should relate to the article or headline.

I often enough come across blogs that have interesting posts but always have the need to put a picture of a half-naked, although gorgeous, women at the top of their article. Why? How is this useful in understanding the article?

Research done by scientists on the memory have found out that by using images related to your content you increase the likelihood of people remembering your article better!

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