It’s easy to get lost when you are new. After all, there’s too much to manage! You have design, content and what not. In all this mess, it is easy to make small mistakes.

Recently, I had a very bad experience when a friend’s blog got messed up because of some configuration problems and we had to setup WP and design from scratch! So I thought about writing a post that would save bloggers from making common mistakes and here they are:

Using A Free Service
Using a free host like Blogspot and WordPress.com seems good from far. But there’s a big problem with this option! You don’t own your content, the host does! Recently, blogger blocked and even deleted a lot of blogs. Among the victims was a customer who had 60,000 subscribers! Now, blogspot team is either nuts or using bots(which is likely high, considering it’s a property of big G) for blocking blogs.
In any case, the point is that you can loose a lot if you use a free platform. Consider getting a self hosted WordPress blog and while doing that, avoid the following mistakes:

Using “Cheap” Hosting
Many bloggers would move to a hosting company but would look for cheapest or worst – a free host. And the features they get are:

1. Regular outages.
2. Awful support.
3. Slow loading times.

Remember, you get what you pay for. Do not fall for the “unlimited bandwidth” and other tall claims! Before buying hosting, research well and shortlist 2-3 hosting companies and then compare them. It is also advisable to contact friends using different hosting companies.

Using Your Host As Domain Registrar And Vice Versa
Keeping both hosting and domain with same company is a really bad idea. Yes, there may be some discounts involved but it’s a bit dangerous.
Imagine something bad happens with your hosting company and there servers crash! Now, if you have both domain and hosting with them, your site will be completely down.

If you have domain with a different registrar, you can at least redirect it to a new page explaining something bad has happened. It won’t retain all the visitors but hey, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush!

Wrong Permalink Structure
No explanations for this one, just a quick question: Which one is better and easy to remember out of the next two URLs?

• http://myblog.com/?p=123
• http: //myblog.com/my-post

Of course it is the second one unless you have got a super photographic memory! Not to mention that it is also better for search engine bots(and they don’t have photographic memory even if you have! ).

You should always use a informative permalink structure for post. In WordPress, this can be easily changed by going to Settings → Permalinks. Set the structure to custom and in the text box, enter /%post-name%/ for structure like the second example. For more permalink structures, see WordPress Codex.

Using Too Many Plugins
Plugins add lot of functionality to WordPress. But the main problem with them is that it is easy to get carried away with them.
This was a mistake I made when I was new to WordPress. I fell in love with lot plugins and in first month, I had some 60 plugins active at one time. Now, you can imagine how slow the blog would have been. Thankfully, I realized it soon and uninstalled several useless ones. Now, I have around 30 plugins and performance is better.
As a rule of thumb, you should not install more than 25 plugins unless absolutely necessary and delete the inactive ones.

Not Tracking Stats
If you don’t know your stats, you are missing a lot. Using stats you can know where your visitors are spending more time on your blog, from which page they are leaving the blog, bounce rate etc. With all these data in hand, you can tweak the blog and significantly improve your blog and your readers experience.
And another thing is tracking feed subscribers. For this, you can use FeedBurner. You can use your platform’s default feed without any problems but FeedBurner has lots of advantages. First of all, you can track number of readers(although inconsistently). You can offer free e-mail subscriptions and also add AdSense to monetize your feeds.

Not Taking Backups
Taking backup is something you should start doing today.
Anything can go wrong at anytime and having a backup locally(i.e. on your hard disk) may be the only security measure. You should setup a automatic backup for your blog using a plugin like WP DBManager. For detailed tutorial, take a look at this tutorial: How To Backup A WordPress Blog.

These were top 7 mistakes that new bloggers tend to make. Do you have any tips for new bloggers? Do share with us in comments.

About Author: Hi, My name is Ishan Sharma. I am a teen entrepreneur and I love blogging and WordPress. I blog at Blogging
With Success about Blogging Tips and WordPress. If you need any type of help with your WordPress blog/website, I can be found at WordPress Blog Experts.

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Example Ad:
Orkut has a lot of users from India and it collects various user data like internet speed, demographics etc — get a clue from their advertise page This is used effectively for advertising.

Airtel broadband ads are more targeted to low bandwidth users and these ads show the ease of uploading photos to Orkut using their high speed internet connection.

Take away message:
1. We can learn how to advertise our content, product, service effectively.
2. We should sell at a place where we have our potential customers.
3. The ad copy must convey the message properly.
4. Showing the result in action.
Ex: Showing how your product has helped someone reach their goal or improve their business or life.

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Some of the interesting new things in WordPress 3.0:

1. The most interesting thing for theme developers is, it has a new default theme called Twenty Ten.

2. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing).

3. Facility to merge MU and WordPress.

And some other bug fixes.

Watch this video:

Want to wait till WordPress 3.1 is released? Think again or read below:
This time WordPress team will be concentrating on things around WordPress.org, like showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org etc. So WordPress 3.1 may not be coming any time soon.

We have upgraded to WordPress 3.0 and I already love the lighter interface.

Update:
There is a Maintenance mode, which gets activated while you are doing any upgrades. See screenshot below.


And if the automatic update fails, it shows a message at the top of your dashboard..

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Their “Hatchling Plan” costs $4.95 per month.

And with “baby plan” which costs $7.95(if purchased for 3 years) you can host UNLIMITED Domains and have UNLIMITED databases– This is the number one reason for me to prefer HostGator.

Update: You will also get $100 Free Google Advertising Coupon / Adwords /Google Search Marketing Coupon code along with the hosting. After signing up for the hosting, visit your cpanel and claim your $100 Adwords coupon(There is a link at the top left sidebar to claim your coupon).

If you have hosting needs, then its a good idea to give HostGator a try. You have nothing to loose, after-all your first month bill can be exempted by using the coupon code “TechnotipDOTorg” (without quotes), if you like it – you can continue or else there are many other hosting companies.

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Everybody knows that WordPress is extremely versatile. There are themes available for nearly every mood or whim and new ones are being added every day. When you’re ready to start blogging for yourself, how do you find a theme that will suit your needs? Here are some tips and questions to help you find the right WordPress theme for you.

1. Be aware of your purpose – To choose the best theme for your blog, you need to know what you are going to be using it for. Are you wanting to monetize it? Do you want to throw pay per click out the window and just write for fun?

2. Take a look at others, part 1 – Find the blogs that appeal to you and write the themes down. This first sweep looks specifically at form, rather than function. Write down the five styles that most appeal to you, then go to the next step.

3. Take a look at others, part 2 – There are two parts to any blog: form and function. Search around a little more to see if there are blogs that have the functionality that you want. Will the theme support the widgets that you want? Does it have the coding that you love already in place? Write down around five styles.

4. Do you need to learn a programming language? – Some WordPress styles are more technically intensive than others. Do you have the expertise to install the widgets, or would you prefer a ‘drag and drop’ sort of approach? Are you willing to learn new techniques? This is an important factor when selecting a WordPress theme.

5. Do you need to pay for it? – You might have found the theme of your dreams, but does it cost money? If you are plotting out a straight blog, do you need to have a custom theme available? Themes come in a variety of price ranges and you must be prepared to pay if you like one of the premium set ups.

6. Can you grow with your theme? – Are you satisfied with the WordPress theme enough that you’re itching to put all of your material into it? Can you grow with this theme? More importantly, are you willing to put a whole lot of work into the theme that you’ve chosen? If not, you may wish to choose something else.

7. Is there after sales support? – Does the company supplying the theme offer support in case something goes wrong? If they don’t, are you willing to search hither and yon for someone who can answer your questions? Adequate technical support is essential.

8. Does it upgrade regularly? – Are you going to be left in the dust at each new WordPress upgrade? Can your theme grow with you, or are you going to be left behind? Learn about this before you commit to the theme, because it will save some issues later on.

9. Read some reviews – Once you have answered your questions in terms of the theme that you wish to use, investigate to see if there are any reviews posted. If you can’t find any reviews, ask the people that have your potential theme on their site and see how they feel about it.

10. Give it a test run – All the preparation in the world is not a replacement for giving your theme a shot and seeing how it works. Kick the tires, put some comments in, play with the widgets. If you have to pay for your theme, see if the company will let you have a free trial.

Nothing can beat good content, but a great WordPress theme will make it easier on your readers and potentially attract new ones. It’s like finding the right partner, you’ll know it when you’ve found the right WordPress theme.
Image Source: flickr

This is a guest article from James Adams at Cartridge Save where he reviews merchandise like HP 350 ink to help customers make a more informed buying decision.

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Sridhar

Q. I have been tweaking my blog to make it load faster, but nothing seems to be helping. And eventhough I don’t have heavy traffic to my blog, often times it goes down Can you please suggest me something to over come my problem? Am I missing something or is it normal with all blogs. And I am hosting my blog with basic hosting package, so is that the problem?

To make blog load faster
1. Remove any extra widgets you are using on your blog.- Twitter updates, Facebook fan widget etc
2. If you are running banner ads, make sure you host all the images on your domain.
3. Make less http requests from any webpage.
Ex: Instead of using “http://yourdomainname.com/images/123.jpg” you can use “/images/123.jpg” in the img tag.
4. Use less images. Having one or two images for a article helps, anything more will really slow down the site. Use multiple images only if highly necessary.
5. Move all the CSS and JavaScript codes to an external file. And make sure to optimize them – remove extra spaces, delete the useless codes and make the scripts small and smart(good coding).
6. If you have any badges and banners which does not provide any value to your visitors, then remove it mercilessly.
7. Optimize the images that you are using on your blog.
8. Use Gzip compression. Add the following code to your .htaccess file if your web host have content compression (gzip compression) turned off. You can test it using http compression tool.

# Turn GZip compression on (as per http://tr.im/fnn6)
<Location />
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
# the above regex won't work. You can use the following
# workaround to get the desired effect:
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>

9. Do not make use of lot of javascript codes to track your visitors. Try to stick only to the necessary things. And do not forget to test your sites performance using Webmasters tool.
Goto Webmasters Tool -> Labs -> Site performance.

Here you can see the performance over view graph and lot more information like: Load time of certain pages from your blog, You can install a 1.5MB add-on to evaluate the performance of your pages and get suggestions on how to improve them, it also reports – what is consuming more time to load and what you can do to improve the performance etc.
10. Above all the speed of the servers where you are hosting your blog is very important – without which any tweaking will go in vain.

Bonus tips:
1. Use only the necessory plugins and remove the rest.
2. Do not use Widgets. Use handcoding and put the things into the WordPress theme directly – reducing the number of calls.

Have a backup of your blog, and if you are comfortable: Use DataBase cleanup plugin, Database optimizer plugin, delete the extra post revisions, use static links – this helps very little, if you already have Gzip compression enabled or Super cache plugin enabled.

Final Thoughts from Matt Cutts:

Hosting
Invest in a good hosting company. See to that you are paying atleast 5 to 6 $ per month for your basic hosting package. If you go far a cheaper web hosting, then the problems are mostly obvious. I suggest going with Doreo host, Blue host, Host Gator, MediaTemple etc. And a basic package is all needed in the initial days.

If you are hosting at a decent hosting company, and still facing this problem, then you must consider evaluating your blogs log files. It contains information about what is consuming the bandwidth. You can mail your hosting company support team and can ask them to check it for you and to report the possible problem. In most cases it would be a plugin problem or a faulty code introduced into the CMS. Or sometimes if you are using some automated scripts to handle some tasks, all these could create some problem, if there are some bugs.

A good hosting company should be able to help you with this – if not, you know, its time to move on. And there are plenty of good web hosts to opt.

Happy Blogging!

Related Read: 20 Tips To Optimize Your HomePage

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If you have not yet activated this feature, and you are using some plugin to do this for you – then take 20 seconds off and enable this little handy feature.

Plugin’s consume bandwidth and need to be updated whenever there is an update available. If you don’t take time to update, then you are at some security threat.

So do not think of doing it some day, do it now itself and save lot more time later.

How to enable socialize feature
Click on Publicize tab. On the left side, you can see list of features, and you can also see “Socialize Publish to the social web” option. Click on it and the rest is self explanatory

The interesting thing here is, Google has started using its own URL shortner. And this may be the only disadvantage, as you might already have your favorite URL shortner or built one for your custom use across all your network’s of sites.

Google may soon start showing stats for the click through rate and the performance of the shortened URL. You can get the clue about this on goo.gl.

Some benefits would be
1. Google will surly start displaying the click through rates of shortened URLs.
2. It may soon integrate goo.gl into its analytics and hence we can get a detailed report of the performance of the shortened URLs.
3. Reliability and Speed matters: We have seen some of the popular URL shortners being unreliable due to its downtime, so we can expect reliable service from Google.
4. Socialize feature comes with lot of option to customize the tweets according to our needs.

• Select Account
• Formatting Options
• Post Content
• Hash Tags
• Additional Text
• Item Limit
• Keyword Filter
• Preview

Interesting option
We can use keywords to filter some of the tweets. i.e., Depending on keywords specified, feedburner decides whether to tweet or not to tweet about a particular post.
This feature will come in handy for those, who hesitate to promote their own content frequently and who do not want to tweet irrelevant tweets.

Caution!

Duplicate tweets — be aware! and avoid before embarrassment
There is a option, in the “Item Selection” called Item limit. If you are posting multiple posts(8 posts) at once, then there is no problem. But if you post one or two (or less than 7) article(s) per day, then you must select the Item limit accordingly.
If you post only one article per day and you select the Item limit as 8, then the previously published articles will be tweeted again. i.e., you will be tweeting 7 articles published on your blog recently, other than the one you published on that day. This may annoy your followers. So be careful not to ignore this option.

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