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It is undeniably true that blogging revolves around great content. Forget about SEO and other promotion methods, what you need is great content to attract readers which will soon be your followers and subscribers.

In line with this, here are some basic elements of blogging which you cannot live without:

1. Write Attractive Headlines/Titles

People looking for information do not have time or do not want to spend much time browsing through all the words in your articles. The truth is, they will go for the title and decide whether they will read the content or not depending on how they like it delivered. Making your headlines/titles appealing will ensure that those who can read them will most likely read the rest of the article.

2. Make your First Paragraph Factual

People who are searching for information want to be sure that what they are reading are facts and not just the result of human imagination. And fact is, they will read the first paragraph as if they can find all the information they are looking for. You may think it is impossible to congest a 500-word idea into one paragraph, but anyone can do it; simply present the very core of the information you want to convey in the first paragraph as a sort of introduction. If you can do that, end the introduction abruptly to raise curiosity.

3. Always Make Your Content Physically Beautiful but Informative

Did you know that most of the people do not want to read plain texts? In this case, the physical structure of your article should be:

• Readable – always use easy-to-understand words and present your ideas in the simplest way possible.

• Scannable – most of the readers love to browse the whole article before reading it. Thus, if you have to present multiple ideas, use the following:

Bullet Points – best used in presenting 3 or more ideas in a row
Numbered List – best used in conveying step-by-step instructions
Bold Text – obviously used for emphasizing points within paragraphs
Good and Clean Spacing – there should be enough spaces between lines and words

4. Use Photos and Videos if Necessary

If a picture is worth a thousand words then what’s the use of writing when the picture you are presenting says it all? The thing is, do not overdo the use of these as it will make your post messy for your readers.

5. Keep It Simple and Brief

If you can present all your ideas in a 400-word article then there is no need to write a 700-word article which says of the same thing. Expressing your ideas in a “Simple Way” will always lead to brief content. It is important to note that readers always look for concise yet straightforward content.

6. Conclusion

You must end your article in a way that you started it. If you use a question in the opening, present an answer to your readers at the end of your article, if you present an argument then conclude it.

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Welcome to the wonderful world of Gravatars. Gravatars as the official site describes it are ‘globally recognized avatars’ and there is no easier way to put it. Gravatars are email specific and allows you to customize an avatar at gravatar.com. From the same guys that bring you WordPress, Gravatars have been incorporated into several other online services as well.

Head over to gravatar.com and get yourself a customized icon for your comments.

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However, if you are the newbie (or not) blogger looking to embrace other methods of presenting your information to your readers it’s not something you could do just like that (as you did when starting your blog), you could create podcasts by yourself that cover your content, but then again you maybe shy, or you may not have the hardware/software you need to get you started, in any case, thanks to iSpeech you can now automate the entire process and have a podcast of your blog’s post instantly.

For the most part, iSpeech is pretty much a text to speech service, but I didn’t build the whole suspense in the first two paragraphs if it was your average text to speech service, the ‘computer’ voice actually sounds quite natural, maybe even as good as better than KITT in the latest Knight Rider (too bad it was a flop). iSpeech provides a free WordPress plugin that lets you instantly convert your blog posts into a podcast which can then be directly listened to on your blog via their compact yet sufficient widget (provides all the standard functions of a media player).

You can listen to this post converted by iSpeech by hitting ‘listen’ above. The service is relatively new as there were quite a few glitches that needed to be ironed out initially, however I contacted them and they had the issues fixed in a day or two so integrating iSpeech into your blog should be seamless as you shouldn’t have these issues.

There’s a catch though, the ‘premium’ voice (as available on Computer Realm) is only available to blogs with a Google Page Rank higher than 1 and an Alexa less than 100k or you’d be left with the generic highly ‘computer like’ voices you probably have heard before in other text-to-speech software.

They’ve also tossed in a few paid services, which is pretty much the use of their API, available in different packages, the main purpose of which could be to remove the ‘brought to you by ispeech.org’ self promotion at the beginning of the audio, doesn’t really bother me though so I guess the free version would do.

One of the issues with the WordPress plugin is probably the converted audio limited to the number of posts you have set your feeds to display in your WordPress settings. While this setting is sufficient for the purpose of podcasting, the ‘listen’ widget on your blog is pretty much futile with older posts displaying an ‘audio not found’ which doesn’t really reflect well on your site readers.

Apart from that, I’ve not much to complain about, these kind of features are still pretty much untapped in the blogging world, implementing them while they are still new could give you the edge with your blog so I guess it would be a good idea to test drive iSpeech on your blog. Another similar service worth mentioning would be Odiogo, and as always don’t forget to leave your feedback and suggest similar services in the comments below.

iSpeech Website

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While it’s unfortunate that I have to do this (there were occasional ‘substance’ in the comments even though they were marketing a keyword), I think it will benefit the site and filter out the spammers, give the site a better SEO value overall, and keep things clean.

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There are a number of ways to incorporate polls on your website whether you use a particular content management software or general services that let you incorporate polls into any website by adding a snippet of HTML or Javascript. The sheer number of services tuned towards providing this service shows that it is a great way to engage with your readers and have an idea of what the/your community is looking for.

Before introducing polls into Computer Realm I did a bit of home work and tested a few WordPress plugins as well as some online services. As mentioned in that post, I went with PollDaddy which is from the same guys that bring you WordPress and it’s not surprising that they are apparently the market leaders when it comes to a polling service for your website. Used by ‘big boys’ like Techcrunch and Wired, PollDaddy provides all the functionality that you’d look for in a poll service.

It’s available in free and paid versions with the free version being crippled (obviously) off some features the main one being the self promotion in the free version, personally I don’t mind it though, the Pro versions provide indepth statistics on the votes which pretty much comprises of demographics and also prevents fraudulent votes. IMO I think the free version is sufficient for your website or blog. You can take a look at the features comparisons with the 3 different account types available here. It also allows you to create a public profile which comprises of all your polls with a gravatar, about section, your website and links to your social networking profiles which can come in handy as well. The poll has a ‘widget like’ interface with over a dozen different skins to choose from.

If you are looking to add polls to your WordPress blog there’s more good news for you as PollDaddy has a WordPress plugin (obviously) that integrates very well with your blog allowing you to create polls from within your dashboard and incorporate polls directly from your ‘add post’ page. There are quite a few other plugins for WordPress as well that allow you to create polls however I was a bit weary of trying them out as they had a low rating (the WordPress plugin database sets high standards so I consider a 3/5 a low rating) and I was right, I tried WP-Polls which is from the popular plugin developer Lester Chan so I was quite confident however as I was disappointed as I couldn’t get the plugin to work at all, I tried Democracy as well to find it really buggy as well, it could be a conflict with the theme or another plugin so be sure to try them out however I think Poll Daddy is the best option.

If you use any other similar services that deserves a mention be sure to mention it in the comments.

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Still, while it’s really no big deal, it’ always nice to do some house cleaning and keep your blog shiny. Thanks to the WordPress plugin community there’s a simple plugin that lets you create clean URL redirects out of your blog. GoCodes lets you redirect all your URL’s into a cleaner yoursite.com/[common term like "go"]/[Keyword for URL]. If you notice the common term maybe specified, by default it’s configured as “go” and then the next part is used to identify and describe the link it redirects to.

So for example, I’ve configured http://www.computer-realm.net/go/google to redirect to http://www.google.com. It also allows tracking of hits to the cloaked link. The plugin is very straightforward and does its job IMO.

This would be a great eye opener for Affiliate marketers as well, GoCodes could be efficiently used to cloak affiliate links which is one of the main ‘tweaks’ used in the affiliate marketing game.

GoCodes Website

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A blog is a very effective way to share your ideas about a particular topic of your choice with the world. It gives you a platform, by way of which you are able to let the world know what your views are regarding a particular topic and how proficient you are in a particular field.

In addition, blogs need not only be used for the purpose of sharing ideas and information. People who are engaged in work from home business can use blog posts to advertise about their services or products too.

However, as is the problem with the internet, it takes a lot of effort to make sure that your blog is read by people and is appreciated. The following are some of the ways in which you can ensure that your blog gets that much needed publicity:

• Choose the topic you want to write upon intelligently. The topic you choose should be market specific and should arouse interest.

• Make your blog interesting by using audio or video tools.

• Subscribe to link building services to make sure that your blog turns up on every search engine query.

• Include a good amount of key words to ensure that people stumble upon your blog.

Setting up a blog is pretty much a walk in the park with the blogging software available today, the most popular and also recommended point to begin for a new blogger would be blogger.com, Google’s blog platform. As you build your blog you might want to move to something more flexible like WordPress.

There are plenty of blogs focused on just blogging with a wealth of information on the topic, a couple of my favorites are Problogger and DoshDosh.

Happy blogging!

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Following up on the last point, you might have written ‘killer posts’ sometimes which indeed is worthy of more attention and somehow it passes your front page and goes under the rug, and not necessarily on a low traffic blog. Thus, the archives page can bring these posts back to life if a curious soul happens to find it and maybe submit it to a social bookmarking site.

There are a few WordPress plugins which add more functionality to your WordPress blog, there’s one plugin that I really would recommend which is the Clean Archives plugin. The plugin’s development was passed over to another, however it hasn’t affected the plugin whatsoever.

It displays a list of all months and comprises of expandable lists on just a single page thus allowing you to display the entire archive on one page and making it a lot easier to navigate, you can see the plugin in action in the Computer Realm archives.

Clean Archives Plugin Home Page.

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A great way to display as much content as possible on your home page is to display more of course. You could also do this by displaying the full content and displaying several posts however I find it highly inconvenient when the home page is never ending and the scroll bar has a thickness of 1 millimetre. A much better way is to display only excerpts and display as much posts as you can, thanks to the WordPress community there’s a plugin for everything, and there’s one which makes this tweak a walk in the park.

The Homepage Excerpts WordPress plugin by DailyBlogTips lets you do just that. It lets you display an excerpt size that you see fit by entering the number of words to grab from the post. You could also display any number of full posts before displaying excerpts. For example you could have the latest 3 posts with the full content and the rest with excerpts only.

On Computer Realm, I’ve displayed 10 posts with excerpts pulling the first 30 words, this is a good number as it ends where the sidebar ends thus I have a balanced home page displaying as much of the latest posts as possible.

The plugin is quite straightforward to use, download it from the plugin homepage (it’s not in the WordPress plugin directory), upload it via the WordPress Admin panel or manually by FTP’ing it, activate the plugin and configure the plugin to display the posts the way you want it.

Homepage Excerpts WordPress Plugin

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Referrer Detector is a handy plugin that identifies the source of the visit to your blog and greets them based on that source. For example if a vistor finds you via Google they’d be greeted with a message like this:

The plugin, by default has several pre-loaded popular sites with a custom greet message however you may add any number of new entries and completely customize the text and icon to display. Installation is pretty straight forward and usually integrates with your site theme. If it doesn’t you can easily include a template tag in your theme files to display the welcome message wherever you see fit.

This plugin is innovative (you don’t see it on many sites now, do you?) and instantly gives new readers a reason to stick around, it could also be used to increase social media promotion and RSS subscription by including relevant messages in the welcome text.

Plugin Website

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