The people who sign up to your feed or newsletter will do so because they are interested in what you have to say.  Take a look at your web browser bookmarks, I bet it is full of websites and blogs that you once thought were really informative and useful, but now you have no idea what they really are.  Now take a look at your feed reader, I bet you are much more familiar with the bloggers and their websites.

Once people are subscribed, you have taken a step and have (for the moment) secured their interest.  This will keep them updated on what you have to say.  From this point, if you promote a new product or service for which you gain commission, the people who have subscribed to your blog are much more likely to buy through your recommendation than somebody who stumbled upon your blog, read a single post and then left straight away.

My goal leading up to Christmas is to increase my RSS readership.  Following a variety of tips from Darren Rowse and Copy Blogger I wish to increase my count to over 40 by the end of the year.  I know 40 readers is not a huge amount and the number of subscribers can fluctuate, but I will be happy with that amount.

As I work on increasing the number, I will document what techniques seem to be working.  If you have any tips yourself, let me know and I will give them a try on here.  On that note, why not sign up to my feed in order to keep updated with the latest news and help me with my goal of 40 subscribers by the end of the year?

All of our advertisements are powered by AdToll and ProjectWonderful and these price won’t last for much longer.

I have added some statistics to the advertise page and urge everybody to check them out at the price they are set at now, I’m sure they won’t stay around for long.

By default, WordPress tells the search engines to ignore external links when they are crawling Wordpress-powered blogs.  By disabling the NoFollow attribute on links, search engines won’t be prevented from crawling links in your blogroll or links that commenter’s post.

As long as the comments posted are related to the post and haven’t been picked by Akismet as being spammy, I generally allow any comments to be displayed on this site.  By disabling the NoFollow attribute you can also get yourself listed on DoFollow lists, which will drive traffic and possibly get you more readers than before.

This post has been the first of a variety I have planned regarding WordPress plugins that I make use of on a daily basis.  If you would like to keep track of the posts, sign up for my RSS feed or alternatively enter your email address in the form to the right and get them delivered directly to your email inbox.

The previous versions of Blogging to the Bank have been recieved with great pleasure by everyone who has read and followed what Rob Benwell has to say.  Having made $14,480.13 last month from just one blog, this guy sure knows what he is doing and is willing to help you out.

I have purchased this e-book myself and recieved all of the added bonuses for getting in early and although I haven’t had chance to read any of it yet, I would highly recommend you sign up soon.  If you are failing to make money from your blog and need some help, this would definately be my first port of call.

Once I have had the opportunity to take a look at some of the goodies contained inside, I will be sure to let you know my opinion of this blogging blueprint.

Ensuring your server is running as fast as it can is important to your business online.  There is a great tool from iWebTool called the ‘Website Speed Test‘ where they will analyse your website along with up to nine others at the same time and give you the load time for your site along with the average speed per KB.  The lower this final value is, the better your site is running.

As you can see from the image above, this blog isn’t running as fast as it could do potentially.  As this isn’t yet a full-time venture and is only a hobby, purchasing a dedicated server is not viable, but if your server isn’t running as fast as it should, it may be time for you to upgrade.

Again, it seems to be the do-follow community that is bringing the most traffic to my site with Nicusor Do-Follow List and Tucsan SEO Solutions Do-Follow Internet Marketing Blogs.

Having signed up for Twitter this month, I have begun posting there and currently have 7 followers on Twitter, along with 11 RSS Subscribers, so hello to you guys!  Over the month my site has stayed at a Google PageRank of 2 and an Alexa ranking of 376,417 has now been achieved.  Although this is an improvement, I am beginning to see a diminishing importance of PageRank throughout the blogging community with many people no longer focusing on their rankings in this way.

I started off my series of posts regarding WordPress plugins and I intend to carry this on.  If you feel you know of a plugin that is worth a mention then let me know in the comments.

Akismet is a web service that checks each of your blog comments as they are made and attempts to determine whether they are legitimate or would be considered spam.  Looking at the stats in my WordPress dashboard, my installation of Akismet on this blog has caught 596 spam comments so far with an accuracy of 96.622%.

According to the Akismet website “86% of all comments are spam“.  If you aren’t using Akismet then you are leaving yourself wide open for a barrage of spam comments, especially as your blog has been online for a while.

Although I do occasionally get a ‘false positive’ (where Akismet has labeled a spam comment as being legitimate) the amount of time it saves me from going through each comment on a daily basis is enormous and best of all it is free.  You can download and use Akismet for free on your blog, as long as your return doesn’t exceed $500/month and if it does, you only have to pay $5/month for the privilege of using this great plugin.  The only requirement for this free service is to sign up for an API key via WordPress and you are all set.

If you have a blog, but you aren’t yet using Akismet to prevent spam comments on your blog then you need to download the plugin right away and get started.

This post has been the first of a variety I have planned regarding WordPress plugins that I make use of on a daily basis.  If you would like to keep track of the posts, sign up for my RSS feed or alternatively enter your email address in the form to the right and get them delivered directly to your email inbox.

The theme I am using at the moment is called Revolution and was produced by the amazingly talented WordPress theme designer Brian Gardner.

I have made some minor modifications so far and I have many more on the way.  The first thing that you should notice is that I am offering readers to follow the blog posts via FeedBurner and have included a box to the sidebar which will allow you to subscribe via email, rather than the conventional method of adding my RSS feed to your preferred reader.

When you visit a post page, you will also see that there are social bookmarking icons for some of the most popular sites and I encourage you to submit any of my posts that you find interesting or helpful to the services, as a way of supporting the site.

I promised a series of posts regarding WordPress plugins I while back and they are still in development.  With the new theme, I have been testing out some new plugins.  It may take a little while longer than I originally thought.