My fellow Brit Rob Benwell is only 24 years old but he’s already a millionaire.  Early in 2006 he published his highly successful ‘Blogging To The Bank’ ebook which made making money online a whole lot easier for a lot of people. Having gone through a number of revisions to keep up to date with the changes in blogging, he’s now issued Blogging To The Bank 3.0.

I got this book as soon as I could and it covers quite a lot of new tips and techniques to adapt your blog to the new demands of the major search engines. Many of the techniques in the old book are now out of date and don’t work as well as they once did. This is why Blogging To The Bank 3.0 is now a good buy.

Rob doesn’t consider himself to be a ‘guru’: he’s just a normal guy who wants to help other bloggers make money online. I find this a refreshing change because he doesn’t talk down to you like most of the other gurus do.

The material includes his ‘5 Blogging Commandments For 2009′ that you must follow to give your blogs the greatest success in 2009 and keep them future-proofed. This should be printed out and stuck on the wall of every online marketer without a doubt!

His book starts off with market research (so that you are making the most of your time) and takes you through all the stages to building your blogging empire.

One thing I like about this product is that, in the top right corner of the sales page, he has an email box where you can get a free blog theme and full instructions on what to do with it. You don’t have to buy the product - you can get started for free. He shows you exactly what to do!

If you are out there in the blogging world and want to know how to make money from blogging then I highly recommend Blogging To The Bank 3.0.

Get your free blog theme by signing up to ‘Blogging To The Bank 3.0‘ now!

1. Make sure the image is the right size. Sidebar widths vary, but are usually 100 - 150 pixels.  You want your image to fit snugly in the sidebar. If necessary, resize the image with Photshop (or similar software) to the width you want it to display. It doesn’t matter if this isn’t exact, because you can adjust it when you see it, but the closer you can get to the actual width of your sidebar, the better the image will display. Leave the height proportional to the width as this is not a critical dimension in the sidebar.
2. Upload your image to your server using FTP. Conventionally, you will create a folder called ‘images’ in the same directory as your blog and upload the image to that folder.
3. Then log in to your blog’s dashboard and go to ‘Design’ (’Appearance’ in Wordpress 2.7) and click on ‘Widgets’. If you have more than one sidebar, display the one you want. Then, from the left-hand menu, click to add a text widget to the sidebar.
4. Click ‘Edit’ on that text widget and it will pop open. In the top line, add any heading you want displayed. This can be blank if you don’t want a heading. Then in the body of the widget, enter a snippet of HTML to display the image:<img border=”0″ src=”http://myblog.com/images/mypic.jpg” width=”125″ ></img>where ‘myblog.com’ is the domain of your blog and ‘mypic.jpg’ is the name of your image. Adjust this, if necessary, if your blog is on a sub-folder of your root directory.  Adjust the width to fit your sidebar.
5. Then click ‘Save’ (’Done’ in WordPress 2.7) to save the widget and ‘Save Changes’ to save the sidebar.

That’s it! Now view your blog to make sure that the image displays OK. If it doesn’t, then go back and tweak the width setting by editing the widget until it displays how you want.

If this post was helpful to you, please help me by stumbling, digging or otherwise sharing this post. Thanks!

The upgrade went well and everything on the blog seems to behave as before. Plugins are still working, widgets are still displaying, theme is hanging together fine.

There’s a new dashboard interface which will take a bit of getting used to but an exciting new feature is the ability to have a sticky post on the front page.  This means you can have one post at the top of the page and all subsequent posts will scroll below it.

I haven’t yet explored all the new gizmos but what I do know is that I’ll have to redo my WordPress tutorial (again!) as soon as WordPress 2.7 gets released in full (sigh).

Read more about 2.7 here:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/whats-your-favorite-thing-about-the-27-beta/

Wordpress.com is a free blog platform, hosted by WordPress. You can have a totally free blog as a subdomain on their server. Your blog’s URL would be xxxxxx.wordpress.com where xxxxxx is your chosen username. The advantage is that it’s free and you have a wide choice of themes (designs) and blogging tools that you can choose from. The disadvantage is that you can’t monetize it: they don’t allow you to put Adsense on it and they can close you down if you have money-making or business links on your blog. And another downside is that you don’t own the blog - they do. They can remove your blog at will if you do something that is against their terms of service.

WordPress.org is the self-hosted version of WordPress. The software driving the blog is free but you have to pay for a domain and hosting service. This doesn’t cost megabucks and is essential if you are running any sort of business. The advantage of this is that the blog URL is your own domain that you registered. And you can pretty much do what you like on your blog: have Adsense, sell your own product(s), have affiliate links, plugins, banners, whatever you like. You own the blog - it’s your property and you could even sell it.

Well, it ain’t necessarily so. Let me tell you a story.

I have a friend, let’s call her Liz,  who recently did me a big favour and, when I insisted on doing something in return, she said I could teach her blogging. Now, although I immediately agreed,  I privately had my doubts. Here’s a (let’s be polite) mature lady with no great love of computers and an impatience with anything that is too technical.

She explained that she wanted to start a blog to keep her family in touch. She has four children in three countries and they have given her six grandchildren who, because of their parents’ businesses, travel frequently. She wanted each member of the family to be able to post their news and photographs and for other members of the family to comment on them. And she wanted this blog to be private: she didn’t want it indexed in the search engines, she wanted it accessible only to her family.

Fine. WordPress will let you do all of that, but I imagined a long learning curve for this total, untutored newbie . So, I printed out a copy of my free WordPress tutorial and took it round to her house.

We sat down at her computer and I guided her through the first few pages of the ebook. She did exactly what it said although she confessed total incomprehension at first. But, after we had been through the process of creating her WordPress account and selecting the theme, she began to see what was going on. With a little bit of help from me she made her ‘About’ page and she typed up and published her first post. And, we added a picture.

To my amazement, when she saw what she’d done, she immediately ‘got it’. We were soon going over to the section where you can set up authorised users and she added her sons, daughters and grandchildren.

Then, with a little bit of help from me, she emailed all her family with instructions on how to get their own WordPress accounts so that they could log in and contribute to the blog.  She instructed them all to download my tutorial and work through it. They are used, I am sure, to doing exactly what she tells them!

I left them to it. I kept in touch with her by phone and she called me a few times over the next few days to let me know how they were getting on.

The first to come on board was her son in Australia. He put up a lovely post with some pictures of his horse taken from his phone. And his young daughter added an account of how she had done in her gym class. Dad added a photo of her in her gym kit. And granny replied back with news of her old horse. And she put up another picture she had taken at Christmas of another grandchild with a face painting.

I was impressed.  But I was even more impressed the next time I went to see her and she showed me their blog on her computer. All by herself, she’d uploaded one of her photos and made it into the blog’s header! It looked totally beautiful and her family had all contributed to their unique blog, free of charge, keeping them all in touch from around the world.

Families can be together in a blog even when they are thousands of miles apart. Distance is no barrier. WordPress works for families as well as the web-geeks!

This is a true story.

First of all, what is a CMS? The letters stand for ‘Content Management System’ which is a fancy way of saying ‘website’. Yes, you can make a WordPress blog look and feel like a traditional website. A WordPress blog doesn’t have to look like a blog at all.

How? Well, first of all you need to decide what you want your CMS to look like. This is no different from designing a website. On some paper, sketch out what your front page will look like, where you want your navbars and where those navbars will lead. On a traditional website the navbars will likely lead to other static pages. So, make a list of the pages you’ll need to create.

Then choose an appropriate theme. If you’re using a free theme from WordPress, choose something minimal and simple. It’s easier to add features to a theme than take them away.

The front page of your blog will probably be a static page, one that is always displayed as the landing page of your site. This page could be a hub page with links to other pages, just like a conventional website, if you like.

Many themes have tabs or buttons that navigate to pages. If you’re going to have a lot of pages it will be better to avoid a theme that has a horizontal menu of pages because you’ll likely run out of horizontal space. If you’re going to have a lot of pages put your navbar vertically down one side.

You’ll soon find that there are a lot of ways you can do this. The easiest is to use a ‘Pages’ widget. This will automatically update as you add another page. You can specify the order of pages down the list if you want. And you can organise your pages into a hierarchy by specifying parent pages.

Strip out all the bloggy looking widgets from your sidebars. But be prepared to be open to ideas because WordPress provides some very powerful and flexible ways you can harness widgets to do what you want. Categories is one example.  By applying one or more categories to a page you get an alternative and more intuitive way of navigating your blog.

And if posts and comments are not appropriate, then you don’t have to include them. Just organise your blog as a network of pages and you’ll be fine.

The great beauty of WordPress is that, as you add pages, it automatically updates menus and links. You’ll never have to worry about broken links again and your CMS will grow gracefully as you add ever more pages. That’s got to be worth it!

As all bloggers know, sometimes you want to post to your blog but change of the date that the blog was posted.  You might want to change the date to some time in the past, or you might want the post to be dated some time in the future. WordPress lets you do both of these things.

By default, WordPress will provide today’s date and time and add that automatically when you publish your post. If you want to make a blog post look like it was published some time in the past, then all you have to do is look over to the right of the page, just above the ‘Save’ button and where it says ‘Publish immediately’, click on ‘Edit’.  A date/time box will drop down and you can change the date and time.  Hey presto, you’ve rewritten history! Changing the date to a prior date will also change the order of posts as they appear when scrolling down your blog.

You can also change the date of a post you’ve already made. When you go in to change or update your post, look above the ‘Save’ button for the prompt that says ‘Published on’ and you can change the date shown.

And yes, you guessed it, you can change these dates to some time in the future! This can be handy when you want to write a number of posts on one day but have them published over the coming days or even weeks.

To set this up, simply create the post as usual, but before you hit ‘Publish’, change the date to the date and time when you want the post to appear. Then, when you hit ‘Publish’, WordPress will keep that post and only release it on the date and time that you specify. You can stack up loads of posts this way to make it look like you’re tending to your blog when really you’re lounging in your hammock sipping Mojitos!

How do people find your blog and when they’ve found it, what makes them read your blog posts?

The answer is in the title or the headline.

Think about it. In the first place, your blog gets indexed by the search engines and blog directories. They classify your blog by what they interpret as its subject matter. What’s the most powerful way to tell the bots what your subject matter is? Why, your title. Bots are not that smart. Give them some valuable clues and the chances are that you’ll get indexed how you want to be indexed.

Then, when you’ve got yourself indexed in the right category, how do they list you in the search results? Why, your title. Now we’re talking about humans, not bots. You need to give your potential human visitors something to tempt them in.  An attention-grabbing title will do the job.

Let’s look at an example.

Say you have a gardening blog and you’re writing about dahlias. You could have the title to your post ‘Another Late Summer Plant’. Yeah, well. Not very specific, is it?

So how about ‘Dahlias - Late Summer Glory In Your Garden’. That’s better. An even better title would be ‘Dahlias - Beat The Slugs And Grow A Winning Dahlia’.  In both cases the title begins with the word that your blog post is about and you’re offering a title that tempts them to read more.

An even better title, at least for humans, is to ask a question. Make it short and snappy and impossible to ignore. ‘Dahlias -  How Do I Keep Snails At Bay And Grow Winning Dahlias?’

Whenever you’re writing a blog post, the title comes first. It’s what grabs your reader’s attention in the first few seconds.  And, if your blog displays other fascinating titles on other posts in your blog, it’s what will keep them there.

So what do you do? You click back, or you click away, and you instantly forget where you just were and what you just saw. Boring, boring, boring… 

So how do you get your reader’s attention and keep them on your blog?

1. Say something different, or, if you can’t do that, say something from a different angle. Suppose that you just went to the store and bought a pack of frozen fish. Now, you could report this in all its tedious detail because that’s what you just did, but the chances are that fifty thousand other people did exactly the same thing today - so what? How about ‘one fish’s journey from ocean to ice-box’ or ‘how an unknown fisherman caught my supper’? OK, I know it sounds a bit cheesy, but you get the idea.
2. Ask you reader a question. So, they’ve read all about the storm at sea and the fish market and the teenager at the grocery checkout, but don’t leave it at that. Ask them a question about their similar experiences or opinions and invite them to post a comment. People like to be engaged in a dialogue. They actually might have something very interesting to say. And when people have commented on a blog, the chances are that they’ll come back to see their offering on display.  You just got them hooked!

So, what do you do to get your blog noticed? Feel free to leave me your comments!

1. Don’t overload your blog with flashing banners, animated widgets and blinking gizmos. If your blog has so much going on that it looks like a fruit machine in a casino then no-one’s going to focus on anything. People will click away from your blog just to save their eyes. If you want to show off some flash and movement, make that gizmo the one stunning centerpiece of the page. Then you will have made your point.
2. Whatever language you are writing in, get your posts spell-checked. You may not think it matters but it does. You want to engage your readers, not irritate them. And it isn’t grown-up to have a lot of exclamation marks (!!!) scattered around your text - you don’t want to sound like a hysterical teenager, even if you are…
3. If you allow other people to comment on your blog, keep an eye on what they post. Yes, it’s great to have comments from readers, and, no, you don’t want to censor free speech, but some comments can be a pain, or offensive, or irrelevant. Remember that it’s your blog and you decide what’s shown. Don’t let others ruin your blog for you.

Bloggers blog because they’ve got something to say. So say it!