If you use WordPress for your blog then you are going to find that you need to update your blog plugins fairly frequently. Rather than update them, it can often be a good opportunity to check out what is available and whether or not there are better plugins available to do the same job.

WordPress.org is the home of many of the blog plugins available, particularly for the latest version of WordPress. The only trouble I have with visiting this site is that I often come away with far more than I went looking for.

One of the blog plugins that caught my attention today was PodPress, which as the name suggests, is a plugin that provides a range of options for publishing your podcasts including download stats. It can even manage your video podcasts as well.

WPDigsby is a blog plugin that allows you to place a widget on your sidebar. Through the widget you can communicate with others using MSN and ICQ. There are other instant messenger services covered as well.

This one large respository of blog plugins (over 2200last count) so there will be a plugin there somewhere to do the job you want. Either that or at least an upgrade to what you are currently using.

With this, you are able to learn from the masters of blogging on what works and doesn’t work – straight from their own mouths! These bloggers have loyal followers and are passionate about the subjects and their ability to blog. These are the 30 most successful bloggers in the United States and truly are the cream of the crop.

Whether you already have a blog or are merely even thinking of starting one, this is the perfect book to get true insight on the industry and the success stories within it. The list of prominent bloggers include Mary Jo Foley from All About Microsoft, Peter Rojas from Engadget, Rebecca Lieb from ClickZ, Eric T. from Duct Tape and 26 more!

The good thing about this book is that it interviews both professional bloggers who are paid to blog and other ones who merely do it as a hobby. Both have become successful in their own right and are certainly worth reading about. In the book you will learn the various motivations and factors that were vital in driving the success of these bloggers. After reading, you will have a very thorough list of things to do if you want to start your own blog and make your current blog even better.

Some blog directories are better than others when it comes to the amount of traffic they generate. There are hundreds of directories available and some of the niche directories may bring even more traffic. I have stuck to the more general directories in this listing.

Number 5: I Blog Business - This is a really good directory if your blog is a business blog or if you run a small business. There is no spam on this site due to the hand selection of listings.

Number 4: Blogoozle - Plenty of categories to choose from and a nice & easy interface. Featured blog of the day and blogs sorted by PR. If you are looking for high ranking sites, this one place to easily find them.

Number 3: Technorati - Many would place this at number one. Very popular and placing a social media button on your site helps. Reasonable traffic depending on the subject.

Number 2: BlogHub- Another popular directory that works like a social bookmarking site. Get active in the community to get extra traffic.

Number 1: blogFlux - My favorite. For some reason this directory seems to send plenty of traffic, depending on the subject matter.

Everyone has their own favorite blog directory; often it’s the first directory they joined. If you find a directory that is sending you good traffic, have a closer look and see if you can determine why. You may be able to repeat it later.

What comes first, blog SEO or Blog design? An argument that has done the rounds for a long time so I am not going to enter into it - at least not in this post.

Where blogs SEO and blog design do clash is where the design defeats the SEO processes. A good example is where poor code prevents the search engine spiders from reading your complete site.

When a spider comes to visit it reads your site page by page following all the links that they are allowed to follow. As it comes across content, it reads and indexes that content so that it can be found by a searcher. The page also starts to develop a ranking that will determine its place in the search engine results pages.  Your blog design needs to facilitate the work done by the spiders. Your blog SEO provides the links and keywords that you want the spider to concentrate.

If your blog design has any code problems then it is possible that your content will not get read and consequently not get indexed.  Not only that, the spider will probably not continue on to any of the other pages so they will not get indexed either.

There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to check to see if your site is W3C compliant. This checks the code of the page to see if there are any problems with the blog design. The second option is to use a spider simulator. This is a software program that displays a copy of your web page as the spider sees it. You can see whether or not the spider can read the whole page or if it, and where, it  breaks down.

Part of your blog SEO strategy should be to run regular checks on your pages for both compliance and spider readability. If your blog design is good, your site will pass both checks.

This is a question that all bloggers will need to face at some stage in their blogging life: Do I or do I not monetize my site and try to derive some blogging income from my blog?

The bottom line is why not? The question often raised is how.  Whether or not you run ads on your blog is always going to be a personal decision. The reality is, until you can generate a ton of traffic you are not going to generate much in the way of blogging income anyway.

One of the clever ways to generate blogging income is by not generating income at al - at least not initially. As you are not going to earn much, leave the ads out for starters. Over time, as your blog starts to get more and more traffic, start to incorporate ads - ads that are relevant to your site.

A good form of blogging income is through affiliate links. You can often find affiliate links to products that are closely related to your site. As you incorporate these ads, don’t be afraid to market them yourself either through direct blog posts or by highlighting the affiliate links.

Blogging income is a personal decision that should be made taking into account your blogs overall aim and whether or not you can incorporate ads that do not conflict with the sites overall look and feel.

Notice the headline said to promote yourself, not your blog or website. This blogging tip is designed to promotes yourself to the socialites around the various social sites.

All social sites provide a way to promote yourself through profiles. They may even provide a page that you can tart up to look fancy and maintain your complete bio. However, if you are active on a range of social sites then it may become a pain having to go through all of them to make updates. This blogging tip may make life a little easier.

When completing profiles on social sites, submitting to directories to creating a profile box for article submission, include a link to your ‘about me’ page on your blog. If you wish to keep your about me as a more formal page, then one blogging tip is to simply create a dedicated social media landing page. This page could contain all the pertinent information about you along with links to your profiles on each of the social sites you are on.

If anyone ever asks, ‘what sites are you on’, just send them to the landing page. There they will find all your social links in the one place. If you ever add more networks to your activities, you only have to update the one page. Likewise, if your details change then you can simply update the landing page first, and over time slowly go through the other sites.

A simple blogging tip that would take about an hour to put together but could make life so much easier for all your new friends through the social networking scene.

Despite a lot of negative publicity surrounding the release of WordPress 2.5, it is still the number one blog software package in use at present. Like all things new, WordPress took a lot of flak for the massive changes it made to the popular blogging product.

Now that the dust has settled, a lot of users are coming to terms with the changes and even admitting, somewhat grudgingly, that most of the changes have been useful. There are still some areas that concern users, particularly the widget interface that has lost its drag and drop function between sidebars. Only one sidebar can modified at a time in the new version of the blog software package.

Positives that are being talked about are the built in plugin update function that enable quick and easy plugin updates. The inclusion of video and picture uploads are also a welcome addition. Overall, the initial poor response has been replaced with an acceptance of the new look. WordPress has little in the way of strong competition when it comes to blog software packages. Whilst the new version has done little to enhance its position, it has not hurt its overall position either.

With version 2.6 expected in the coming months, developers have assured users that some of their concerns will be addressed with improvements to the widget interface and the dashboard likely. The real downside to using WordPress as a blog software package is the constant need for updates. Having included internal plugin upgrades with version 2.5, perhaps version 2.6 could include auto updates for the blog software package itself. That would certainly help.

Timing is everything, at least that is what I have been told. It seems to be true then it comes to social bookmarking as well.

Do you know where your ‘friends’ on any of the social bookmarking sites. For many sites such as Digg, they say you have 24 hours for your post to get noticed, after that forget it. For Digg, it can often be as short as 12 hours.

If your in the UK and many of your followers are in the US, when would be the most appropriate time to submit your post. Social bookmarking can be tricky. You can submit a post and get zero response one day and then next day get a flood for a different post.

Timing can be important, both in what time you submit and on which day. Some days do seem to perform better than others depending on the genre and your target audience. It is only by trial and error that you can determine the times and days that produce the best results for your genre.

As a general rule, social bookmarking across the board is more active between 10am and 3pm US Eastern Time and between 8pm and 11pm. Weekdays appear to be active than weekends. Different genres will produce different active periods and it seems that weekends are more likely to see page one activity for topics that generally don’t get a look in during week days.

There is no hard and fast rule for submitting to social bookmarking sites, however, if you can find an ideal time then make the most of it.

Blog content is becoming more important as time goes by. Internet users are now either looking for answers or looking for entertainment. If you can provide either one or both then you will gain a strong following of loyal readers. Of course, you need to attract those readers in the first place and the best way to do this is with a great title. In fact, see if can turn your title into a great headline.

Titles need to be written so in such a way that they catch a prospective readers attention and then brings them onto your website to read your blog content. Titles can be witty, or in the traditional ‘how to’ or numbered as in 7 Great Ways to…..Look at some of these titles and tell me if you would follow them up:

Facebook Gets A New Face Lift

Google Gets The Giggles

Microsoft Gets Harder

Yahoo! Says BooHoo

What about our parent site, Brick Marketing.

Brick Marketing Turns To Stone

These are more headline type titles but they can be very effective in drawing in new readers. If you follow the headlines with some great blog content then your readers are going to want to come back for more.

What about keywords, I hear you say. It is still possible to include keywords in your headlines, it just takes some clever word use. Often, the company or business name is included in your list of keywords anyway. The headlines from above could have keywords placed either side of them. For example if search engines is one of your keywords:

Search Engines: Google Gets The Giggles

The headline still works - perhaps better as it now has a category in the title. Blog content is important. Your title sells the content. If you think back to newspapers, headlines, particularly sensational, sold newspapers. Your headline needs to sell your blog. Your blog content seals the sale.

Two old saying contradict each other - First impressions count and Never judge a book by its cover. When it comes to blog design, your landing page is not just the cover, it essentially a snapshot of the whole blog so First Impressions Will Count. Avoid these six blog design mistakes and you may keep your visitor long enough for them to read the content.

Avoid the overuse of Flash: in fact, if possible don’t use it at all. Flash graphics can look great in a blog design but they can also be turnoffs as well. If you need to use flash graphics, place them below the fold so the visitor at least gets a feel for your blog before the flash scares them away.

Avoid auto play video and audio files. These slow down the load speed of your blog and can often be a huge turn off for your visitors. Give them the option of playing the file if they wish.

Avoid placing badges and banners everywhere. A nice clean look to a blog is the ultimate aim. You can still have banners and badges, the key is to balance how many and where they are place. Having too many can be counter productive as the visitor can be confused as to which button the need to press when the time arises.

Avoid fancy fonts and/or fonts that are too big or too small. This is a simple equation. If I cannot read your site, I am gone. Be sensible with font colors and sizes.

Avoid the use of ‘click here’ links. When providing a link, use anchor text that makes sense to the user. you should also avoid simple home page links. If you are discussing someone else’s article, link using good keywords and using the articles URL.

Finally, tell me where I am! I don’t know how many times I have clicked on a couple of links only to find the page I have landed on has no indication as to who they are.

If you can avoid those six blog design mistakes you may find your traffic staying a little longer and your conversions, if you have them, increasing. Your blog design is selling you and your brand.

Feedburner is about to lose its identity, or at least, its look and feel as it migrates across to a typical Google look and feel including using your Google details to log in.

According to the Feedburner blog, you wont see many changes to start with but you will be managing your feeds through your Google account (if you have one). The blog also reports:

Following on the footsteps of this account migration, FeedBurner will start to look and feel more like a set of Google services, and we will be completing much tighter integration into other Google services such as Google AdSense.

Slowly and surely the internet is getting smaller. It wont be long and you will be able to log into Google; manage your Feedburner feeds, slide across to several different social sites before returning to your home page to check your gMail.

At least your Feedburner feeds wont change - although then again, reading more on their blog:

If you are a feed advertiser, don’t worry: we have some happy surprises coming for you as well, and if you are an advertiser who is not yet a feed advertiser, you too shall be blessed with good fortune.

Sounds a little confusing, particularly the last phrase. That is Feedburner and Google for you. So long as everything passes seamlessly everyone will be happy. From past web experiences, I doubt the seamless part. Happy feed burning.

Marketing used to be about getting your name out there, getting known and talked about. Guess What? Blog marketing is no different. What has changed is how you go about it.

Traditional marketing consultants often have difficulties when it comes to online marketing, particularly when it comes to blog marketing. In the past, marketing consultants would look around the local environment to determine how and where they could advertise their clients business.

Is the online world really that different? To be honest, no it probably isn’t. We still look around, find appropriate sites and try to get some form of advertising going. Those scenarios are advertising more than marketing. The old methods of marketing often involved seeking out publishers and trying to convince them to talk about your products or your brands. Radio was a very popular means of delivering these messages.

This is where the online world takes a major detour. Whilst the online world is quickly gathering its own version of ‘traditional media’, it is no longer a marketing experts job to talk people into discussing products or brands. Blog marketing now is about first, producing content that everyone finds useful.

From that point on, a blog marketing expert will ‘introduce’ the blog to the various social sites. The hope is that over a period of time of form of organic discussion takes place where the blog in question is referenced, hopefully as an authority on a particular subject.

If your blog is being talked about or if you are receiving visitors based on recommendations, you will know that your blog marketing strategies have been successful.

If you use WordPress and have a presence on Facebook then you may like this little blog plugin - Facebook Dashboard Widget - that enables you to stay in touch with your Facebook friends.

The blog plugin is quick and easy to install running under WordPress 2.5 and utilizing the dashboards widgets feature, will add an RSS feed for each of your friends.

….this plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard. So now you can keep up with whats going on in your friends lives from anywhere without needing to access Facebook!

Now there is no reason not to stay in touch with your Facebook friends - at least not if you install this blog plugin.

Podcasts are very popular and can easily be added to your blog content with five simple steps. Since a podcast can be downloaded and listened to at any time, it makes sense to offer it as a subscription option as well.

Five Steps To Podcast Success

Plan your podcast: is it going to be a recording of your blog post or are you going to do special one of posts like problem solving or how to’s. Part of your planning is to script what you are going to record.

Record your podcast: recording is fairly simple and straightforward. There are many free and paid software packages available - it is simply a matter of following their instructions.

Upload to a server: upload to either your website server or to a podcast hosting service. If you plan on doing regular podcasts then using a podcasting host will be money well spent. Podcasts can put a drain on your bandwidth and storage space.

Create a podcast feed: create a podcast feed using either a dedicated service or Feedburner. If you use Feedburner for your RSS feeds then using them for your podcasts is quite sensible. They also provide reasonable tracking statistics as well.

Promote: that is it. Promote your podcast, on your site, through social media and in emails.

Podcasting is not difficult and can become a valuable addition to your blog content. The next step is to learn how to promote your own products within a podcast - thats for another post I think.

…..And Nasty. I forgot to add the tag to the end of the title! Being serious for just one moment, if you were hoping to find out how to get your blog and website services really cheap, don’t bother. The two do not belong together.

In today’s online world, you really do get what you pay for. If you pay $5 per month for hosting then you are going to get $5 worth of blog and website service and that is it. Possibly limited bandwidth and SQL  databases and when it comes to person to person service, forget it.

I have known some of these cheap providers to take 30 minutes to answer a phone call and the person on the other end of the phone not having an answer to your question - even hanging up on you.

If you are serious about running a website or blog then you need to start by being serious about your blog and website service provider. It is not just about bandwidth. What support do they have? What is included with your service? What software, particularly eCommerce do you have access to?

The top quality blog and website service providers include features such as search engine submission when you launch your website. Many of the good providers also have webpage design, graphic design and search engine optimization service available.

Select a cheap host and you will, eventually, regret the decision. Saving a few dollars now may end up costing you a lot more down the track so think about your blog and website services right from the start and find a professional service that meets your needs, not just your wallet.