(This is a guest author article.)

Have you ever thought that your blog might suddenly have become too structured?

Have you ever felt that you have lost spontaneity in blogging? Have you created too many "compartments" to fit your content into and then felt restricted by that?

I think it happens to a lot of us over a period of time. I have tried my best to avoid over-categorization on my blog, but it happens almost subconsciously and it can become a mental trap. So rather than writing spontaneously, you end up writing content to fit into what you think already defines your blog.

Sure, a lot of people think that being focussed is a good thing. It is, but at the cost of creativity and originality. Too much focus on one particular topic has never appealed to me (well, I never cared about making money online, so sue me. :P ). A personal blog should have personality as well as spontaneity. Sometimes I think bloggers end up turning over-categorizing their content and creating regular features which they feel compelled to stick to even if they have nothing more to say on those topics.

And most of all, I think sticking to a rigid blogging schedule is the best way to become uninspired and dull. If you have nothing to share with your readers, don't share nothing. :razz:

(This is a guest author article.)

How many times have you seen that message on message boards/blogs and felt ever-so-slightly irritated? I must confess that I have felt the same.

You see, I generally comment on many blogs at a given time. I go around looking for interesting articles on my RSS/Atom reader and then comment.

Sometimes I miss out an article or two and then wonder why. So the reason I like comments to appear immediately is to remember that I have indeed commented on them. When a comment stays unapproved for a longer period of time, I am not sure whether I commented or not and then I'm forced to resubmit my feedback. At other times, I just don't bother.

The best reason I can give you for an unmoderated commenting system is the process of discussion itself. So even when one reader leaves a feedback in your absence, somebody else can respond to that, rather than waiting for you to make the comment appear. Have you ever thought about how many potential comments you might miss out because of this delay? The psychology of blog commenting is such that comments feed on more comments while articles with 0 comments usually don't generate any comments after a period of time.

There are better methods of spam prevention than manual comment moderation. If you are using a blogging platform like WordPress where you have full spam prevention control, please use those advanced techniques which are usually available through simple plugins. Don't rely on the manual method of comment spam elimination. It doesn't help your blog generate additional discussion since it facilitates reader interaction only through you.

Back in March, I wrote an article on how to interlink to increase your page views and why page views are important. I wrote it from a monetization perspective, but the concept works for non-monetized blogs as well.

When you write a new article, you should always link to any past articles which may be relevant to the topic at hand. This will always increase page views. What you should also do and you may not have thought of this, is to go through your past articles and link to newer articles that may be relevant to those topics. You should use interlinking, if possible, or add additional text to indicate you've written more about those topics in later articles.

I'm as guilty as the next blogger when it comes to taking care of details like these. I'm currently using a "similar posts" plugin to do the dirty work, but it's not always accurate and lists articles that aren't relevant at all. Other bloggers are using similar plugins. What I'm planning to do is to go through some articles every day, starting at the beginning, and updating each one (if applicable). I also plan to use conditional code to defeat the "similar posts" plugin for the pages where I'm going to directly add the links for bona fide related articles. I just looked at the number of articles I've written since I started the blog and it's over 900. It's going to take me a long time to catch up.

Interlinking backward should be done as you write each new article and interlinking forward on old articles should be done on a regular basis. Checking for relevant articles that you can't effectively interlink should be done at the same time. Don't do as I have done and wait too long to go through past articles. Do it at least once per month so you don't have that many articles to go through. Even as you write new articles, think about whether they're relevant to the old articles and update the old articles at the same time. It'll save you a lot of work and can only help your page views.

After an instant messenger discussion with another blogger (who I won't mention out of respect), it dawned on me that there are more than just a few people confused about using the built-in plugin and theme editors for WordPress. A simple question: When you try to use one of the editors, do you see "If this file were writable you could edit it." below the edit box?

A lot of plugin and theme authors seem to forget that only some blog authors are familiar with flavors of Linux, BSD or UNIX (and other non-Windows platforms). The line I mentioned can be confusing to someone who isn't familiar at all with permissions. Perhaps something as simple as a quick paragraph to explain permissions should be included with all plugins and themes, not just some of them.

If your server is on a Windows machine, or you're not self-hosted, none of what I'm going to tell you will apply to you right now. It might, however, apply to you if you move your blog to one of the aforementioned platforms.

This is what I do when I add a theme or a plugin (that has its own directory). I use an FTP program (like Filezilla) to upload the whole directory to the server under the appropriate directories. Then I check to make sure the new subdirectory has a permission of 755 (777 works too, but I won't go into details on permissions). Some FTP clients let you use the CHMOD option from a right click menu. Filezilla has a box of checkboxes and you click the appropriate ones until you get the desired permission in the box at the bottom.

The next thing I do is change the permissions for each of the files in those directories to 666. Once I've completed that, each and every file within the specified plugin or theme directory is editable by WordPress. Sounds simple right? It is if you've done it once or twice. If you've never done it before it might as well be Greek.

This has probably been mentioned thousands of times by bloggers all over, and I know I've mentioned it, but you really NEED to use Google Reader to view your feeds on a regular basis. Besides the fact that it's free and resides on their server (which means you don't have pull the feeds in yourself), it archives hundreds of your old messages.

I just went through it, looking to see how far back it goes for my blog. How does September 8, 2006 sound? How does 375 posts sound? Granted a lot of them are not full feeds because I wasn't using full feeds until February of this year (I think). Still, that's a whole lot of messages to have around as a backup in case your database server takes a dump and your last backup wasn't today.

Google Reader stores the post title, the content, the date, and even the time. Using the visual editor of WordPress, you can create a new post, copy the entire message from the reader (including links), set the time and date in the editor's "Post Timestamp" and publish. It only takes a few seconds to do it. The clincher is that you have to make sure you have a Google Reader account and subscribe to your own feeds. After that, you can get away with looking at it only once every month and all the feeds will be there.

While I'm on the subject of feeds, if you're not using Feedburner, along with the Feedburner Plugin for WordPress, you need to investigate if using that service might be beneficial for you. It is for me.

You hear all this talk about the "A-List"; you know, the kind of blogger that everyone wants to get a link from in return for a review or something? No, I'm not picking on John Chow (at least not this time), although it seems he would be classified as being on the "A-List".

Are you on the "Z-List"? You know, the kind of blogger that no one even knows about yet (or very few do)?

This is not the secret, but I'll let you in on something. There is no A-List and there is no Z-List. The A-List is nothing more than bloggers that work very hard at attracting readers and are very successful at doing so. Their reward is a larger paycheck, among other things. The Z-List is nothing more than bloggers who haven't found their "niche" or haven't applied themselves yet. Even though I've been blogging for 10 months now, and have seen my rankings get better and better, I still consider myself a newbie, but not quite on the Z-List anymore. Even after two years, I'll still consider myself a newbie — I still won't be anywhere near the A-List.

Here's the secret. To get on the so-called A-List, you have to connect with the so-called Z-List. Huh? Sounds like tripe, doesn't it? If you're a seasoned blogger, who's going to listen to you the most? The inexperienced. Who's going to link to you the most? The inexperienced. Who's going to visit you the most? The inexperienced! If you're a seasoned blogger, do you REALLY think your peers are going to help you achieve your goals? Not when they're competing with you. Oh, it might not be called that and many might deny it, but there's definitely competition. The newbies will not compete with you. If you're a newbie now, thanks for stopping by and reading. Sorry, I couldn't resist. If you're a newbie now, connect with as many other bloggers as possible, preferably those who are as new as you so you can learn from each other as well as the experienced bloggers.

You may ask me, how do I know this little secret? Because it's not a secret. The blogosphere (whoever coined that word should be shot) operates pretty much like the real world. The experienced feed off the inexperienced. Dog-eat-dog, or in this case, blog-eat-blog. When I'm doing my blog "drive-bys", do you know who I'm looking for? Yes, you got it. The bloggers who appear to be inexperienced. How do I find them? Well… I'll give you a hint: Technorati Favorites. What? You haven't claimed your blog at Technorati? Have you no shame? Some people use Technorati as a ranking metric, but I believe it's much more valuable as a resource of blogs that you want to read or "connect with".

If your blog isn't monetized, this article may not interest you. It should, though, because it'll still increase your traffic rankings with services like Alexa. Either way, I'll explain the why as I give you an example.

Which do you think will make you more money, 1000 visitors who view one page or 100 visitors that view 10 pages? It depends on the content, of course, but I believe the latter to be easier to prove. If your blog is monetized with Google AdSense, a single page may not have ads that are relative to the content and the ads displayed may be uninteresting to the visitor. If the visitor views more pages, more ads are displayed and the likelihood of the visitor clicking on an ad increases.

You may wonder how I know this. Well, I recently wrote an article on Clicky – An Easier Web Analytic Website. Using Clicky's "Spy" feature, I watched the activity for my article on Digg Me Not and saw people clicking the links that I included with the text. Ever since I started making a habit of interlinking my articles, Alexa has shown me that my page views fluctuate from 1 to 7 page views per visitor. Before that, they were almost always stuck at 1.

I also use the Similar Posts plugin for WordPress. It, along with various other "related posts" plugins, establish a list of related (and some not so related) articles below the current article. Using a plugin like this won't hurt (it can only help to increase page views), but I believe interlinking is way more effective.

A long hypothetical question is in order: If my blog and your blog are virtually identical and we both only use Google AdSense for revenue and Alexa says my traffic rank is 200,000 and my average page views are 5 while your traffic rank is 100,000 and your average page views are 2, who do you think will make more money?

Try to visualize this:

1000 visits x 1 page view = 1,000 effective visits (1 ad displayed per person)
100 visits x 10 page views = 1,000 effective visits (10 ads displayed per person)

See my point? By the way, I interlinked two articles within this article and I didn't even have to try hard to do it. There's your example.

Here are some more tips I'd like to pass on to aspiring bloggers:

1) Choose your web hosting service wisely. If a plan seems like a good deal, be aware that it probably can't handle the "Digg Effect".

2) Make it clear who your intended audience is, if it's a topic that has a specific audience, to prevent misunderstanding by other audiences.

3) Post articles frequently. The more the merrier. Trust me. Readers seem to gravitate toward frequently updated blogs.

4) Visit blogs on your blogroll daily (or whenever they have new articles) and comment. It encourages those bloggers to do likewise. It also encourages their readers to visit your blog.

5) Use a feed reader to see when your blogroll links have new articles. Don't forget to add their comment feeds. I recommend Google Reader because it saves feeds for several weeks.

6) Be leery of using widgets with pictures. They can slow your website to a crawl if they're hosted on a different server than your own.

7) Use HitTail for keywords and suggestions. It's free.

8) Use TheGoodBlogs widget. Your miniblog appears on other websites and will generate a small amount of traffic for you.

Here are a few tips I'd like to pass on to aspiring bloggers. I'll publish more as I discover them:

1) Use OnlyWire to bookmark your best blog posts to your own lists on the web services they send to. Yes, I know, it's only YOUR list. You'd be surprised, however, how many other people on the same services search (by tag) for information that you have. This saves you the trouble of going to each of the bookmarking services yourself.

2) Don't be afraid to be controversial. Post what's on your mind. People are attracted to controversy.

3) Check your spelling and your grammar, even if it's not intended to be precise. It reads better!

4) Submit your posts to social news sites such as digg and reddit, but only if your post isn't personal. Don't worry about losing points or being dugg down. You'll still get a a lot of visitors. Bear in mind, however, that people that come from these sites don't click ads and they don't leave comments, usually.

5) Investigate and post to less popular or newer social news sites. Who knows? You could be their next top poster.

An example:

I posted a simple post on reddit, not expecting much. I received over 1,100 unique visits that day. There's no telling how many of them came back later and no telling how many became new repeat visitors. I did manage to get a few comments.