For many bloggers, increasing traffic to their blogs is not the sole goal. Most individuals that blog want to keep their visitors coming back for more. The following are four ways to keep visitors coming to your blog site.

Update your blog: The simplest way to keep visitors coming back to your blog site is to update your blog on a frequent basis. Subscribers will stay true to blogs that are updated day-by-day.

Some blog writers even updated several times a day. Subscribers will tend to lose interest in your writing if they have to wait several days for new material. Be loyal to your reviewers and your subscribers will be true to your blog. Likewise, there are literally zillions of blogs available on the Net. If your blog is not updated on a regular basis, you will lose your readers to another blog site.

Another fun way to update your blog and keep your readers interested in your site is to include something fun for your subscribers to relish. That could be as elementary as a joke or maybe a link to a humorous narrative you have found on the Net. You might also try including a trivia game or polls for your readers to enjoy on a regular basis.

Take Part in web communities: Taking part in web communities or discussion meeting places and mentioning your blog whenever contingent will help keep subscribers coming back to your site. In addition, you can gain new subscribers when doing this.

Understand who reads your blogs: Another great way to keep blog subscribers coming back for more is to understand who reads your blog and publish content that is targeted towards them. This does not mean that you have to compose on only one particular subject, though.

If you are a stay at home mom and write about your life at home with the kids, your loyal subscribers may not appreciate it if you write about cutting-edge issues or use a lot of offensive language in your writing. If you mostly write humor, do not bog down your readers down with sorrowful woefulness’s and stories. Your subscribers will be interested in the things that attracted to your site in the first place.

Include keywords: You can gain readership and help keep your current readers by including certain keywords in your blog. If you have entered your blog on a search engine, these keywords that point to your blog will come up after a search. This is a great way to get readers interested in your blog. This is also a good way for companies to increase the traffic to their blog. This is THE best way to receive backlinks, ranking and SERPs from the engines – the best way because it’s the easiest way.

You already have someone writing the content for you, or you might be writing it yourself – either way, by using keywords, you could beef up your visitors by blogging with keywords, adding tags on the blogs, and keeping up with the blogs. Google usually suggest 1-3 blogs every 3 days in order to get the best results possible.

Guest article by Kristi Ambrose (a huge fan of http://www.kristiambrosecontent.com)

Now certainly, I could have used one of the php bits to create thumbnails on the fly like TimThumb – but I really dislike using plugins for things I can do without them. She also gets totally confused using custom fields, so that’s out as well.

What I needed to do:
1. Determine a standard size for thumbnails and post images that would work well for her theme.
2. Create a post thumbnail using the first image attached to a post.
3. Display the post thumbnails on the blog main page listing of recent posts.
4. Create a standard image that would be displayed if she forgot to add any images to a post.

Since I’m a big fan of reusing code, I decided I wanted to use the built in sizing options of WordPress to get this done. I remembered recently reading an article with a chunk of code, so I found it again and reused that. The code process can be found on Web Developer Plus.

Setting The Image Sizes

Go to your WordPress backend and then Settings -> Media and configure the sizes that work well for your theme.

The thumbnail size is the most important. I set this one to 150px by 150px and selected the option to crop the thumbnails to that size. The reason I selected the crop is in the likely case the photo she’s using isn’t a perfect square, the image won’t look out of proportion when it’s sized down to 150×150.

Creating a Thumbnail From The First Image

This is where we get the code bit from Web Developer Plus and with a couple of minor changes end up with this:

<?php
// Get images attached to the post
$img = null;
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'attachment',
'post_mime_type' => 'image',
'numberposts' => -1,
'order' => 'ASC',
'post_status' => null,
'post_parent' => $post->ID
);
$attachments = get_posts($args);
if ($attachments) {
foreach ($attachments as $attachment) {
$img = wp_get_attachment_thumb_url( $attachment->ID );
break;
} ?>
<!-- Display the image in here -->
<?php }
?>

The code, at this point, doesn’t do much but it will in the next steps. I do want to stop and explain the terminology a bit. You’ll notice the use of the word ‘attachment’ in the code above. That’s how WordPress identifies the image associated with the post. Think of sending an email and attaching photos to it. The code finds the images attached to the post and selects the first one. It puts the information about that image in the $img variable we’ll use later.

It is important to note that this only works for attached photos because that is what WordPress it set up to handle. That means that if you host your photos elsewhere and just link to them – it’s not going to work. You have to actually upload them into WordPress using the media uploader.

Deciding Where To Put The Thumbnail Code

Since I want the thumbnails to show up on the main page of the site in the list of recent posts down the content section, I need to edit the index.php that displays the content. Your site may use the_content() but in this example the site is using the_excerpt(). It doesn’t really matter, so long as this stuff goes inside the loop but before the spot you want to show your photo.

<div class="thecontent">
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<span><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="readon">Read the rest of '<?php the_title(); ?>'</a></span>
</div> <!-- end thecontent -->


I’m going to add the bit of code right above the call to the_excerpt() because that’s easiest at this point.

<div class="thecontent">
<!-- get the thumbnail -->

<?php
// Get images attached to the post
$img = null;
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'attachment',
'post_mime_type' => 'image',
'numberposts' => -1,
'order' => 'ASC',
'post_status' => null,
'post_parent' => $post->ID
);
$attachments = get_posts($args);
if ($attachments) {
foreach ($attachments as $attachment) {
$img = wp_get_attachment_thumb_url( $attachment->ID );
break;
} ?>
<!-- Display the image in here -->
<?php }
?>

<!-- end get the thumbnail -->
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>



Display the Thumbnails on the Main Page

Now the code is actually in the area it should be, but it’s still not going to show anything until we put something in place of the ‘<!– Display the image in here –>’ placeholder. What the code HAS done is created the $img variable we can call. So let’s get that working by putting in some code that will call the image.

<div class="thecontent">
<!-- get the thumbnail -->
<?php
//Get images attached to the post
$img = null;
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'attachment',
'post_mime_type' => 'image',
'numberposts' => -1,
'order' => 'ASC',
'post_status' => null,
'post_parent' => $post->ID
);
$attachments = get_posts($args);
if ($attachments) {
foreach ($attachments as $attachment) {
$img = wp_get_attachment_thumb_url( $attachment->ID );
break;
} ?>

<!-- ***** THE ACTUAL IMAGE ***** -->
<span class="the-thumbnail">
  <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
    <img src="<?php echo $img; ?>" />
  </a>
</span>
<!-- ***** END THE ACTUAL IMAGE ***** -->

<?php }
?>
<!-- end get the thumbnail -->
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>


What the above code has done is take the placeholder and replace it with a call to the image.

Then since this is for a front page thumbnail, we want people to go to the main article so we create a link around the image that points to the article.

Finally, for CSS styling I wrapped it in a span called the-thumbnail (you can wrap it in something other than a span, name the class anything you like, and style it any which way you can think of).

But What If… There’s No Image?

But wait… what if my client forgets to add an image to a post? That one article will look strange on the main page without an image when most of the others have one.

I want to create a fail-safe for dealing with an instance where she might forget to put in a photo for the post. What to do first is create some kind of dummy image (maybe just a large square with the site logo / branding or whatever you want). Upload that image somewhere.

<!-- ***** THE ACTUAL IMAGE ***** -->
 
<!-- # if post has an image # -->
<span class="the-thumbnail">
  <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
    <img src="<?php echo $img; ?>" />
  </a>
</span>
<!-- # END if post has an image # -->

<!-- # if post doesn't have an image -->
<?php } else { ?>
<span class="the-thumbnail">
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
<img src="http://thedomain.com/fallback-thumb.jpg" />
</a>
</span>
<!-- # END if post doesn't have an image -->

<!-- ***** END THE ACTUAL IMAGE ***** -->

The most important line in that new section is <?php } else { ?> — that tells it to do something if there is no photo.

You’ll see that you can just as easily change the url of the image to be any image location you upload the fall-back image to.

Putting It All Together

So here’s what we came up with after that. I’ll highlight the sections of my template code so you can see where I put it inside the template. Remember, your index page may not use the_excerpt() – it may use the_content(). That’s perfectly ok so long as:

1. You put the code that generates the thumbnail somewhere inside the loop – the loop beginning looks like this: <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
2. You put the image display code where you want it to be.

So here’s the final code I used on my clients site:

<div class="thecontent">

<!-- get the thumbnail -->
<?php
//Get images attached to the post
$img = null;
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'attachment',
'post_mime_type' => 'image',
'numberposts' => -1,
'order' => 'ASC',
'post_status' => null,
'post_parent' => $post->ID
);
$attachments = get_posts($args);
if ($attachments) {
foreach ($attachments as $attachment) {
$img = wp_get_attachment_thumb_url( $attachment->ID );
break;
} ?>
<!-- ***** THE ACTUAL IMAGE ***** -->
 
<!-- # if post has an image # -->
<span class="the-thumbnail">
  <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
    <img src="<?php echo $img; ?>" />
  </a>
</span>
<!-- # END if post has an image # -->
 
<!-- # if post doesn't have an image -->
<?php } else { ?>
<span class="the-thumbnail">
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
<img src="http://thedomain.com/fallback-thumb.jpg" />
</a>
</span>
<!-- # END if post doesn't have an image -->
 
<!-- ***** END THE ACTUAL IMAGE ***** -->
<?php }
?>
<!-- end get the thumbnail -->

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

Oh, and remember — if you don’t like the size your thumbnails are coming out as — change it in Settings -> Media.

I hope you found that useful

~Nicole

Social Media by Luc Legay.

The social media movement has expanded the amount of people we can reach and connect with on a personal level. The new relationships and connections we create with people all over the world can have a profound effect on our personal and business growth. We learn about cultures and nations that we were, perhaps, previously ignorant of. None of this is a new concept, but what may be is how quickly you can destroy your business by using social media incorrectly.

Transparency is a Utopian Concept

Not too long ago, Michael Fortin wrote an article titled “Don’t Be Transparent, Be Authentic Instead.” That article is an important read for any social media wrangling business blogger.

That article is the tip of the iceberg in the concept of ‘transparency’ being too Utopian to work within the jaded confines of our society. Of course, true transparency is ideal. Many things about a perfect world are Unfortunately, as a group, most of the world isn’t ready or willing to accept true transparency without penalty.

When Transparency Fails

Let me give you a couple of examples of transparency failure we’ve seen.

Failure 1: We had a copywriter who was posting on Twitter about the work he was doing. He made several posts within a few hour period which were ugly complaints about a client and how ‘stupid’ he felt that client was. We obviously considered this unacceptable and immediately removed him from our list of subcontractors, but think about this: If he was hoping to use Twitter to get more client work – how many potential clients just read that and thought… “I’m not going to risk being badmouthed on here, I’ll find someone else.” Everyone gets frustrated, but what if the client he was working on read that? Put it this way, if you wouldn’t say it to your client directly – don’t post it either.

Failure 2: We had a designer who was a day late returning her design phase work. When we contacted her, she said she had a family emergency the night before and was unable to send in her work because she wasn’t home. A quick check on her Facebook showed that she was actually out at a party that night and posted multiple times while drunk talking about how much she was drinking and even hinting at wanting to bring a man she met there home with her. Obviously, we relieved her of the design work, handed it to another designer who caught up on the time schedule, and never again worked with her. In this case, people are allowed to have a life, we understand that. But if you cannot get your work done and have to lie about why – it’s a problem. If you do not have enough class to not post details about your ‘wild nights’ to everyone on your social networks — that’s also a problem.

How We Monitor Social Media Conversations

My business has been around for over a decade and is very focused on client satisfaction and excellent treatment of our web design clients. We have a network of hundreds of copywriters, designers, and coders who work with us on projects. However, even with screening of those experts when they come on board with us – you don’t always know someone until you have observed them over a long period of time.

That’s why we monitor what they say online.

How do we do that? Well first we get as many of their social profiles as we can. Usually, we ask for a list of them. We’ve also found that most people won’t provide them all. We then Google search the usernames of the ones they have given us because most people use the same usernames over and over. We also monitor blogs, and check for listings of social networks on those.

We have a system set up to consolidate all their social media comments into one master feed. That master feed can then be browsed directly to see what they’re up to, but that’s a lot of things to read each day. What we do is take the master feed, run it through a filter that creates two sub-feeds based on certain things we think are important to monitor. The first sub-feed is created by running the master list through a keyword & synonym filter that pulls out words related to business – for instance, “client” “business” “work” etc… The second sub-feed has a filter that runs their posts through a check for foul language and words like “sex” “drugs” “drunk” etc… There are hundreds of words in each filter.

Seem a bit ‘big brother’? It probably is – but reputation and client treatment is very important to us.

Here’s the thing: If we can read it and you can lose work with us over it… how many POTENTIAL clients did you lose also?

7 Ways to Edit Yourself

We’re not suggesting you stop having a life and stop making mistakes. You can post about those things and it simply makes you a more interesting person to read about. Just use common sense:

1. If you wouldn’t say it to a client or boss – don’t say it where they can read it either.
2. If you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother – don’t say it on your public posts.
3. If you wouldn’t say it to police officer – don’t post it on your social networks. For that matter, don’t do it either.
4. If you plan to lie to your boss – don’t put the truth where they can see it.
5. If you plan to go out and get drunk and know you have a tendency to post while drunk – give your phone to a friend to keep for you.
6. Learn how to use privacy settings and understand how visible your posts are on different social networks.
7. If you want a place to vent – create a completely different identity for yourself to do that. Name no names in your posts, and make no connection to your other profiles or email addresses.

Consider it all part of Internet Etiquette. Social networks are great to hear more personal things about someone and we encourage people to share a bit of themselves online (using normal cautions etc..). In the long run, full transparency is too Utopian for our modern world to handle well. We’re still at a point in our societal growth that when someone seriously calls a client an idiot – they tend to get a bit upset about it.

~Nicole

Evan R., attending community college full-time and thinking of heading into a business major, has this to ask:

Q: “What is the best thing about being a business owner?”
A: “The best thing about being a business owner is that no one can fire me for wearing rude tee-shirts.”

Make sense please.

AND it’s also really nice that no one else can fire you either. Except yourself. But then, if you want to fire yourself, there are bigger problems going on.

Fine fine, I’ll get serious. The most awesome part of being a business owner is knowing that you created something that it lives or dies based solely on the strength you have to keep it alive. It’s entirely up to you to keep it afloat. If that kind of pressure doesn’t sound exciting … it’s not for you. But if it is something that sounds appealing, watching your business prosper, struggle, change, improve, etc… it’s like being a parent. A totally awesome, completely horrifying at times, experience.

~Nicole

Fireworks.

There are many things that come to mind on the 4th of July. Things that remind of us being American. Things we’re thankful for. Things that need changing. Things we have yet to do.

Today, I want to celebrate on my blog by combining two of the things on that list: The ‘Freebie’ and the American small ‘Mom and Pop’ business.

I’m giving away 4 free web site and design critique and will write an article with my feedback.

Keep in mind – yes, you’d get a live link on the post. Yes, you’ll get a professional and experienced review of your site. BUT if you do not want to hear where your site needs improvement, and you do not do well with hearing criticism of your site — pass on this freebie.

If you want me to review your site and write about it, hop on over to the contact form. Make sure and tell me your name, give me an email address to contact you when if I pick yours to do and to let you know when it’s done, and (obviously) tell me the URL you want reviewed. Anything additional is up to you.

Have a great 4th of July!

~Nicole

If you’ve never tried it, the challenge is to start a new business from scratch and make your first $1 in 30 days.

It’s in pre-season right now, meaning they’re just posting the preliminary info videos right now that will teach you what you need to do to get ready for the challenge and make it easier on yourself.

~Nicole

They’ve got a pretty nice incentive for anyone worried about the planet. First off, the designs are pretty nice, so no ugly badges to suffer with.

Second, the badges link off to a site called One Million Acts of Green, sponsored by Cisco, which tries to promote being green one act at a time.

Third, and pretty awesome of them to do, when the badges have reached 100,000 impression views – Six Apart (the people behind Vox and Typepad) will donate $1000 to The Climate Project, which is one of the best known green awareness projects online.

Aside from all that, there’s nothing on the badges about Six Apart or Typepad or Vox, they’re just images for green support and link off to non-Six Apart companies. Doesn’t strike me as very self-promoting at all for them to do, which is very cool.

You can grab your own badge off the list of green site badges.

~Nicole

Quit Using URL Shortener Services.

Why Not Just Use Some URL Shortening Service?

If you’e arriving at this article directly, head back to part one to read about why to make your own short urls.

Moving Along

Well, so far I’ve shown you ways to work with your existing CMS to create short urls, but the last methods are sometimes less time consuming in the long run but a bit more technical to start with.

Let’s talk about what some good options might be.

If Your Domain Is What’s Long

So what if you have a piece of software or structure that allows you to shorten the end of your url into something more workable. For instance, the last article in this series has a page link that looks like this normally:

http://blog.websitestyle.com/index.php/2009/04/19/make-your-own-short-urls-in-ee-mt-joomla-drupal/

Since I run that site using WordPress, I can also access that page this way:

http://blog.websitestyle.com/?p=458

Now my nice page names can be as long as they need to be, and that part of the URL is nice and short. In this case, it’s actually my main url portion ( blog.websitestyle.com ) that could be shorter.

Using an Alternate Domain

So what’s an easy maintenance option for that? What if I take another domain name and forward it to that. You could make something short, but in my case I just use one of my other domains on this one to manage it (although this may change in the future so don’t count on this being testable forever using the link below).

I take my websitestyle.net (16 characters) domain, and redirect it to blog.websitestyle.com (21 characters).

Redirection Screen in GoDaddy.

So now my short url to that last post will be 30 characters total:
http://websitestyle.net/?p=458

Yes, that’s longer than the url shortened version of tiny shortened version with only 20 characters.
http://tiny.cc/M9CHx

But again, it’s about trust, if I looked at the two links below, I know which I would trust more.
http://websitestyle.net/?p=458 OR http://tiny.cc/M9CHx

Can It Be Even Shorter?

Sure! If your going to get a new domain name, nothing says you have to get a name that is exactly your domain with a different ending.

Anyone who follows TechCrunch.com on Twitter has seen their links done like this: http://tcrn.ch/Uj

Nothing holds you back from finding a creative way to put your site name in the link because it still tells people that it’s your brand, your site, your trust that you’ve earned.

Can I Do This On WordPress.com Blogs?

Sure! If you’ve got a free blog on WordPress.com you’ve definitely got the long domain issue, but you have the built in option to use the numeric version of your post. You’d do it exactly the same way, get a new domain name, forward it to your WordPress.com blog URL, and it works.

My Post Title Is Still The Problem

If you’re not using any of the services mentioned in the second and third articles in this series, then you’re probably going to need another solution to shorten your urls.

Obviously a bit more of a learning curve to do this, but there are definitely options. In a nutshell, you just install some software that basically provides the same functionality as a TinyURL service – but using your domain name.

You can try out the two software options below that you would install on your server hosting:

TightURL – http://tighturl.com/project/

Shorty – http://get-shorty.com/

Wait Wait, Can’t I Just Use mod_rewriting For This?

Yes, but manual mod_rewrites are way more technical than the simple solutions we’re talking about. If that’s what you’d like to look into, here are a few articles on how to mod_rewrite.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully this has given you some options to consider when you’re thinking about using a url shortening service. My emphasis to you would be this:

Keep it yours. Keep it simple. Keep it safe.

Read The Whole Series:

Part 1: I Don’t Trust Short URL’s
Part 2: Make Your Own Short URLs in WordPress
Part 3: Make Your Own Short URLs in EE, MT, Joomla and Drupal
Part 4: This Article.

Quit Using URL Shortener Services.

Why Not Just Use Some URL Shortening Service?

If you’e arriving at this article directly, head back to part one to read about why to make your own short urls.

Short URLs for WordPress

See Part 2 of this article series on making short WordPress URLs.

Short URLs for Expression Engine

Colly.com has a plugin that creates your own short urls in EE. Keep in mind that a new version of EE will be coming out in the relatively near future and I’m unaware if there will be compatibility issues.

Short URLs for Movable Type

This is less of a full solution and more of an explanation of an option available to create short links.

Short URLs for Joomla

This is a URL redirection extension for Joomla that creates shorter urls.

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/structure-&-navigation/url-redirection/7058/details

Short URLs for Drupal

A few resources for the Drupal folks out there that can help you learn methods of creating your own shorter urls.
1. Automatically turn a Drupal site into a TinyURL-like service.
2. You can use the option of your node number for the link. http://drupal.org/node/76112
3. Try out the Pathauto extension.

Any other suggestions or plugins I’m missing?

Stay tuned for the last installment, coming up on Tuesday, of this article series where I talk about ways you can create your own URL option using a secondary domain name, free server software, or both.

The series so far:

Part 1: I Don’t Trust Short URL’s
Part 2: Make Your Own Short URLs in WordPress
Part 3: This article
Part 4: Make Your Own Short URLs With Domains or Software

Quit Using URL Shortener Services.

Why Not Just Use Some URL Shortening Service?

If you’re arriving at this article directly, head back to part one to read about why to make your own short urls.

In a nutshell, I’ll summarize the whole article by saying that asking people to trust a cloaked link is not something you should ask anyone to do.

Methods of Shortening URLs

There are several different ways to handle URL shortening, and I’m going to list as many as I can think of here.

For WordPress Self-Install Users

If you use WordPress, you have it fairly easy. Remember back to the day you installed WordPress and you had those ‘ugly’ urls that were just your domain and a number? Did you realize those URLs still work? They do, nowadays they just redirect to whatever nice readable format you changed your permalinks to be (which I’m sure you did, riiighhht?).

In fact, you users have two options. Use a plugin or add the code yourself.

The Plugin Option:

A good one is la petite url which uses your own domain to make your short url. When you save a post it shows the short url in the sidebar of your administrative interface. You can then drag this into your post. If you’re comfortable editing your theme files, you can add a bit of code to your single and page files so that it shows up automatically. It’s available on the WordPress Plugin repository here: la petite url

The Template Option:

Just head into your template editor and add a link to your short url into your Single and Page files. This should work fine for most templates, although a highly customized one may have different page types that you will need to add this to separately.

For a simple text display of the link, add the following code where ever you want in your theme file:
<span>Short URL: <?php get_bloginfo('url'); ?>/?<?php the_ID(); ?></span>

If you want to use a textbox type of display where people can easily select the text, try a variation on something like this:
<span>Short URL: <input type="text" value="<?php get_bloginfo('url'); ?>/?<?php the_ID(); ?>" style="width:50%;"/></span>

For WordPress.com Users

As you know, you can’t install plugins or edit template code if you have a WordPress.com blog. You can, however, still make your links a bit shorter than they are now because your posts still have a numeric version available.

You would need to add (manually) text at the bottom of your posts to provide the short link to your visitors. The link would look like this:

http://yoursite.wordpress.com/?POSTID

But how do you find the POST ID for a WordPress.com blog? It’s not hard at all. I’m going to provide two screenshots to show you where to find it.

From the posts list screen:

Finding Post ID From List Screen.

From the editing screen:

Find Post ID While Editing.

Remember, for WordPress.com people, this means adding that at the bottom of your posts when you make them.

The series so far:

Part 1: I Don’t Trust Short URL’s
Part 2: This article
Part 3: Make Your Own Short URLs in EE, MT, Joomla and Drupal
Part 4: Make Your Own Short URLs With Domains or Software