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A lot of people have been updating to Wordpress or updating their current Wordpress site lately. Thomas McMahon recently published the article, “How To Upgrade Wordpress”. He gives some great tips as well as instructions that I thought I would share with you.

It seems to be a pretty simple process, there are just some precautions to take. Here are just a few of the steps Thomas mentions in his article:

· Backup your blog’s database.

· Backup your blog’s files.

· Update any plugins.

Once you read through all of the steps, you will see they are all pretty easy things but very important to remember.

To read the rest of Thomas’ post on upgrading to Wordpress, click here.

Also, here are a couple more links about upgrading Wordpress:

Should You Upgrade To Wordpress 2.5?

Blogging Simplified With Wordpress 2.5

Good luck upgrading your site!

Lately, I’ve been seeing articles on how to get more comments on your blog. So I decided to put a few together that I think are the most important.

· Invite users to comment. - At the end of your post, you might want to say, “What do you think?” or “Do you agree?” Encourage readers to comment and make sure to have a link right under your post.

Also don’t make it difficult for readers. If they have to login just to comment they probably aren’t going to spend the time to do so.

·Interact with the comments you do have. – You want to show the readers that you are paying attention to their comments. Thank them for commenting, and reply back to the comments they leave.

· Post regularly. – Obviously, to get more comments you need more readers. People aren’t going to keep coming back to your blog if you don’t post that often.

· You should also moderate comments. – Delete any spammy or off-topic comments. It might make the number of comments go up but people probably aren’t going to continue commenting after the other comments have went slightly off track.

· Leave your post somewhat open-ended. You don’t want to cover everything or answer all questions because then your readers will have nothing to comment on. Give your readers a chance to add something to the conversation.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas to get more comments on your blog. Do you have any to add?

Some people say that anyone can write content. While that may be true, it’s the quality of your content that is important. Aaron Wall recently published a great article on this subject called, Do You Have Remarkable Featured Content? A few of the things he points out are:

• consider the competition for mindshare
• popularity of the subject
• targeting one idea at a time
• offering content of various levels of depth and quality

To gain any lead-way above your competition, you need to have fresh, unique content. You want your ‘featured’ content, the stuff you want to be known for, at least as good, and if at all possible, better than any other content on that subject. To help you achieve this for your site or blog, I’ve put together a list of articles on content for you to check out:

Fresh Content Pays Off with Search and Visitors
How to become successful Content Writer
Why Republishing Your Content Can Be Useful
Article Writing Guidelines - Creating Quality Content
Content Optimization
Great article about what you publish on your blog

WebProNews is running a series of weekly SEO Tips that I recommend checking out. They should be up every Thursday. Topics will include:

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competition Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

The first one from Dave Davies of Beanstalk is currently up here with the next one on competition analysis from Stepforth CEO Ross Dunn due Thursday.  Articles in the series will be able to be found in the Expert Articles section on the WebProNews front page.

In my last article I discussed the importance of getting your site in shape for mobile devices.

Recently, I have run across a couple of other articles further emphasizing my point.

YouTube seems to have made a mobile version of its site a high priority, by making it nearly as big and plentiful as it’s original version. Before there wasn’t much to the mobile incarnation, but they have clearly seen the importance of providing quality mobile content in the growing mobile age.

Karl Long recently pointed out that out of those developing sites for mobile use, many don’t seem to look beyond the iPhone for compatibility.

Sure, the iPhone is quite a popular gadget, but does it end there? Of course not. Karl discusses the importance of using web standards to provide quality content across the mobile board.

Do you have a mobile version of your website? If not, It’s probably way past time you go to work on that.

Every day, more and more people are using their mobile phones to access the Internet. I imagine the number will be growing exponentially as the iPhone gains popularity.

In fact, Google has just released a horde of new features specifically for the iPhone.

Mobile advertising is expected to reach $1.4 billion over the next few years.

This day and age, people want to be able to access the information they want at any given time. Even shopping carts will soon have Internet capabilities.

If you want your site to be seen by as many people as possible, and if you want the ones that do see it to return, it is best to have your site represented well on as many platforms as possible.

If a visitor finds your site and it is not optimized for mobile devices, they will just turn around and find a competing site that is properly represented. Now multiply that by all of the other potential visitors out there with mobile devices with Internet access and you’re likely missing out on a ton of traffic.

If you are selling a product or service with your site, this can be a huge blow to your potential profits. If you aren’t selling anything, you probably still want people to visit your site. Otherwise, why are you even running it.

There is a plethora of articles on the web about how to optimize your site for mobile devices. I suggest you do some research and get to work if you haven’t already done so. You may be losing money right now!

This article by Thomas McMahon may be a good starting point.

One of the main goals of a webmaster is to try and attract as much traffic as possible via low cost or free methods. One of the strongest sources of free traffic is what is known as organic traffic, that is, traffic that comes from search engines.

Generally, this traffic is generated by people searching for some sort of information and then being directed to your site from the search engines. If you can manage to get your site listed in the top positions for various common phrases you can drive a large amount of free traffic to your site, a wonderful result for any webmaster. Read the rest of this entry »

Of course, every webmaster knows that in order to draw traffic to their site they need to have compelling content, and in particular they need to have content that ranks well in the search engines. However, a problem occurs when webmasters forget what traffic is, and begin to only think of it in terms of raw numbers and conversion ratios.

Remember this as doing so will set you head and shoulders above most webmasters out there. Traffic consists of real people.

That’s right, real people. Read the rest of this entry »

The goal of any webmaster is to try and make money from their internet business pursuits. Now, it may not be the case that every webmaster starts out this way but certainly there are many that started in this business because of its highly lucrative promises and its ease of entry. This is perfectly fine but what I’d like to talk about in this article is the common misconception that more advertising equals more money.

It is often the case that webmasters are fooled into thinking that by doubling the amount of advertising on their site they can cause a doubling of the amount of revenue generated by the site. If this were the case then a simply site that earns $1 per month could be made into a massively profitable site by simply loading the site with a ton of advertising. Certainly this isn’t the case, so what then is the secret to more profitable websites? Read the rest of this entry »

Usually, as webmasters and as entrepreneurs, we are always interested in trying to beat out our competition in any way that we can in order to get the upper hand and become more successful. However, is this really a sound strategy? Is it possible that being on friendly terms with the competition is perhaps more profitable? Let’s examine this question.

It is standard practice in business to try and out do the competition and to view them as the money but this style of thinking is like trying to paint the world black and white, it rarely ever works in practice. In fact, most of the time your “competition” isn’t really offering a replacement product to yours but rather a similar product that could possibly enhance your product. Read the rest of this entry »