Before making a post, you must know some simple ways on how to make a successful forum posting.

Find a forum related to your niche. This is the first step in forum posting. All you have to do is browse through some forums related to your niche. Internet browsers such as Google and Yahoo can greatly help you with this. If you have a goal to advertise, it is good to choose forums with high traffic.

Know the forum rules and guidelines. Before posting your first message, make sure you know the rules and guidelines in the forum. Different forums have different rules and guidelines. You must know and follow those to avoid being banned or blocked and losing your opportunity to post.

Check the quality of your posts. Make sure that your posts are informative, meaningful, and helpful to the readers. If you are consistent in doing this, you will gain good reputation and more people will read your posts and this will give you an opportunity to advertise if such is allowed.

Respond to the thread. Answering questions posted by someone in the thread or adding additional information to what has already been posted is also a good opportunity to build your reputation in that forum. Remember that when you have a good reputation, more people will want to read your posts and they are your audience for your advertisements.

These are the things that you must consider and take into account to be successful in forum posting. They are easy-to-do steps and it would make a great difference if you follow them in your next forum posting assignment.

10 Tips to Be a Successful Blogger

Determine Your Reason for Blogging

It is advisable to know your purpose of blogging. Are you establishing and promoting a business or just blogging for fun and for sharing ideas? The answer to that question will determine the outcome of your blog as a tool of information. Write and design your blog according to your personality and dedication.

Acknowledge The People Reading Your Blog

The people reading your blog will become your best friends. You have to know what they like and apply it to you blog for a loyal and solid relationship.

Continue To Grow

Blog writing is as progressive as it is. Your readers would wanna have something new to read all the time to keep them entertained. Your blog will become something they appreciate and they will cherish. You have to give them the buzz on what’s going on lately constantly. And you blog design follows the same drill for stronger loyalty.

Don’t Leave Your Blog Hanging

Blogs should always be updated, no matter what. If your readers visit often and they don’t see that much posts, they will start thinking of reconsidering other things to do. They should always get what they expect from your blog 100%.

Be Interactive

Most of the beginner bloggers don’t realize how important commenting is. It’s the only way for you to know what your readers can say that is why it should always be activated.

Participate

Blogging is a big community and you always have to do your part. Commenting on other people’s blogs can help you promote yours and invite people to it. There are probably a lot of bloggers similar to your interests, the community is revolving on everyone.

Don’t Be Afraid to Try New Things

You should always try new things on your blog’s design and the likes. Your readers would want to see something new once in a while like new plug-ins, photos etc.

Don’t Hesitate to Reach Out

Blogging is improving every year, even the well experienced bloggers know that. You have to constantly learn new things to keep up. Don’t ever hesitate to ask for help from better experienced bloggers. It will help you both building a stronger community.

Be Persistent

There are always new things going on with blogging, it is a constant process that you have to be aware of. Always search for new things online to get the latest and apply it to your blog. Your readers would appreciate your updated work.

Blog From Your Heart

Blogging for beginners can put a lot of pressure and confusion. One thing to keep in mind is that blogging is a personal reflection. You should always be yourself and write from your heart. It’s the only way to get your readers to know and appreciate your work. Your blog will become your masterpiece of self literature.

Assuming that you registered your domain to other registrars, in my case at namecheap.

How to Use A Custom Domain on Your Blogspot Blog

1. Register your domain, in my example, I’m going to show you how to do it on Namecheap.com, since I registered all my domains on the said site.

2. Since Blogger requires you to create a CNAME and point it to ghs.google.com we are going to modify the URL forwarding functionality.

3. Just log in to your account and choose the domain you wish to use. No need to modify your DNS settings. Just click the URL Forwarding link at your side bar.

4. Enter ghs.google.com for the CNAME alias, just like the illustration below.

5. Just wait for the changes to propagate.

WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.

You can check the details of the new version here

How to Upgrade to WordPress 2.3.2

1. Download the latest files here.
2. Copy the latest files to your blog’s host using a FTP client or your control panel ( or what ever means of transferring files to your blog’s host),over writing your existing wordpress files.
3. Since this is not a major update, there’s no changes in the database structure so updating your files finalizes the upgrade.

That’s it!

What is Entrecard?

Entrecard is the first and only free exchange network for 125×125 ads. Through this revolutionary platform, you can advertise your own 125×125 Entrecard on any blog in the network, for free, for a number of days.

You pay for this advertising with Entrecard Credits, that you earn for free by networking (a.k.a. visiting blogs and dropping your card for other bloggers).

All you have to do is to place the Entrecard widget somewhere in your site, preferably on your sidebar. For you to earn Entrecard credits, you have to drop your card for someone else, done by visiting their site and clicking the ‘Drop Yours’ on their widget. Aside from that, you’ll earn credits from advertisers and every time someone drops a card for you. It’s that easy.

My entry is still new, so it takes only 6 credits to advertise on my blog.

It’s really another way to increase traffic and interact with other bloggers in the blogosphere, so come and give it a try

It’s totally free so no need to consult some San Diego tax attorneys

How To Display Other Blogs Feeds to Your WordPress Blog

1. Open the template file you want to put the other blogs’ feeds. For illustration purposes, we will going to edit the sidebar.php. Our goal is to display the latest n posts of our target blog. In my example, we will going to display the latest 3 posts.
2. To do this, just add the following code anywhere in the sidebar.php where you want to display the feeds, customizing the highlighted text with your own preference :

<h2><?php _e('LifeGuide'); ?></h2>
<?php // Get RSS Feed(s)
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
$rss = fetch_rss('http://feeds.feedburner.com/EasyLifeGuide');
$maxitems = 3;
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $maxitems);
?>
<ul>
<?php if (empty($items)) echo '<li>No items</li>';
else
foreach ( $items as $item ) : ?>
<li><a href='<?php echo $item['link']; ?>'
title='<?php echo $item['title']; ?>'>
<?php echo $item['title']; ?>
</a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

3. Apply some CSS customization on the appearance, the above code should look like the image below.

Source(s): WordPress Documentation

Customizing the read more link (the_content)

To customize the read more link for your posts, just edit the corresponding parameter of the function the_content wherever it is called,  usually at loop-index.php of your child theme. Just type the text that you want to use as shown in the example below: <?php the_content( __( 'Continue reading the rest of the article <span>&rarr;</span>', 'twentyten' ) ); ?>

Customizing the read more link (the_excerpt)

Customizing the read more link for your summary pages (the_excerpt) is a little more complicated. Here’s what you need to do:

• Open your child theme’s function.php file
• Add the following functions
• Edit the read more text below on the text that you want to be used.

function after_setup_theme_extend(){    remove_filter( 'excerpt_more', 'twentyten_auto_excerpt_more' );} function new_excerpt_more($more) { return ' [....] <a href="'. get_permalink($post->ID) . '"> Continue reading this article</a> '   ;} add_filter('excerpt_more', 'new_excerpt_more');

That’s it. Your read more text should be customized upon viewing your wordpress site.

more – <!–more–> WordPress tag that breaks a post into “teaser” and content sections. Type a few paragraphs, insert this tag, then compose the rest of your post. On your blog’s home page you’ll see only those first paragraphs with a hyperlink ((more...)), which when followed displays the rest of the post’s content.

Source: WordPress Codex

How to use

1. While writing your post, just click the area where you want to end the excerpted content of your post and click the ‘more’ button on the Quicktag area
   The quicktags are the little buttons found above the editing window in your Administration -> Write -> Post SubPanel. 

   

2. You can now continue with the rest of your post. When viewed on your site’s front page, your entry will now appear as an excerpt of your post up to the ‘more‘ point. Your readers can now continue reading the entire article by clicking the link generated by the ‘more’ tag, pointing to the rest of your post (default).

Link Jumps to Top of Page

By default, clicking the read more link will load the page and jump to the area where you placed the <--more--> tag. But there are some instances that you want to change its default behavior (just like this blog). Here’s How:

NOTE: Applicable in WP 2.1 and higher only. When you upgrade wordpress to a higher version, it is most likely that the file will be overridden so just take note of the changes you had done and apply it to the new version (where applicable).

1. Open the file wp-includes/template-functions-post.php
2. Look for the following code:

$output .= ' <a href="'. get_permalink() . "#more-$id\"
class=\"more-link\">$more_link_text</a>";

3. Change the above code to the following code:

$output .= ' <a href="'. get_permalink() ."\">$more_link_text</a>";

4. The next time you click the ‘read more’ link, it will point and jump to the top of page.

Part 2: Customizing the ‘Read More’ – Designing the Read More Link

Upcoming Post(s):

• Customizing the ‘Read More’ – Adding image to the Read More link

As I had mentioned on my previous post, I had just submitted this blog to Google and now is the time to check if its already indexed.

For new blogs, you may do the checking two days after your submission. For older blogs, this can be useful if you want to check which of your blog’s pages are already indexed by Google.

How To Check If Your Blog Is Already Indexed By Google

1. Go to Google.com, and type the following in the search box

site:<your blog’s URL> (Example: site:easylifeguide.net)

2. Click the [Google Search] button.
3. If no search results were found, your blog is not yet indexed by Google.
4. Once your blog is in their index and you do a search like we did above, you’ll see your blog’s title, description, and URL in the search result.

As you can see this blog is already indexed by Google. It has been indexed two (2) days after its submission.

It is suggested that after you registered your domain or upon creation of your blog, submit it to different search engines. For simple reason that It takes time for new blogs / sites to get indexed by Google. The earliest inclusion time for my other blogs are 4 days. Not bad though but it could take longer. And hey, don’t waste your money paying others to submit your blog to Google, it’s really easy and you can do it by yourself.

How To Submit or Add a URL to Google

1. Go to http://www.google.com/addurl/
2. Type your blog’s URL (Top level page) in the URL box
3. Type some comments, or just add some keywords to describe your site (optional)
4. Click the [Add URL] button

That’s it!!

Google robots will then crawl your site the next time they’re out and eventually index it. Just wait for a couple of days or weeks on when your site will be indexed.

I had added this blog’s URL to Google today, so let’s see if when would it be indexed.