It really is true, the more you put in to a blog, the more you’ll get out of it. Pretty obvious, but unless you’re receiving a large number of backlinks or are featured somewhere, like in a magazine or on another website, you just won’t get the traffic.

For a few days last week, I didn’t post here and I noticed a dramatic downturn in my hits. I had gone from an average of maybe 300 hits, with about 110 unique per day…to a complete downturn of only 100 hits, with 50 or so being unique.

For a young blog it is obviously imperative to post every day, or every other day if you can manage it. It is the quality and quantity of your posts that carve your way in the world of blogging. You’ve got to think of it like this: the more content you have, the more likely it is that you’ll appear in a search engine result for something! And from there, users may well explore the rest of your blog, or even subscribe if they like your content.

I by no means am an expert in blogging, and many of you reading this will be thinking I am a bit of a numpty for even posting this, but for others just starting out in blogging (a bit like myself), you’ve got to post as much as you can!

“Eeeeeeeeeey”

After the initial post, I thought I should follow up with a few more useful applications to help you on your way to creating a website. I by no means am at that point yet but I’m documenting every step along the way. Click here to read the first post in this series.

1. Short Stat for Wordpress - I use the Short Stat plugin by Markus Kaemmerer. It tells you how many hits you’re getting each day, which keywords are dragging people to your site, how many unique visitors you’re getting and much more. The only problem is that it’s easy to get addicted to reading your stats! Get It Here

2. Feedburner - Everyone is using RSS these days. Feedburner allows you to create a feed to send all the goodies from your website to your loyal subjects, your subscribers! No website should be without it. Feedburner is great because it allows you to quickly check how many subscribers you have and helps to promote your feed. Get It Here

3. All In One SEO for Wordpress - Another Wordpress plugin, allowing you to tweak your titles and automatically create meta keywords. Or if you want, you can tweak it to throw up whichever keywords you want. I can’t say enough how this little plugin has improved my search engine ranking for certain keywords. Get It Here

4. Social Bookmarking Buttons - You might be noticing those funky wee buttons I have there on my sidebar? Social bookmarking is a big thing these days, and I mentioned before about submitting your content to these sites. Well when people start arriving from these sites, you want to make it as quick and easy as possible for them to “Digg” or add your contents to favourites. So aside from looking nice, those buttons serve a purpose. And if all else fails, at least the buttons let your visitors feel some sort of familiarity when they see that Stumble icon orFurl “F”.

I used the Text widget to put the code for the individual buttons into my sidebar. The codes are available on the individual bookmarking sites, although sometimes the images don’t look too hot. Again, it’s fairly easy to link to your image instead of theirs. A lot of people also have social bookmarking buttons at the end of articles, this is a god idea, which I am yet to find a suitable plugin for but I’ll let you know.

5. JAW Popular Posts Widget - Again for Wordpress (sorry!). You can see on my sidebar that I have my most popular posts listed? This is useful because quite often people get to your blog and don’t know where to start, or are ther looking for particular content they have heard about. It is quite likely then that if the word is spreading, it will be a popular post. Visitors are a fickle bunch and the more accessible your page is, the longer the stay and the better the reception. You do also need to download Popularity Contest by Alex King, as this will decide which of your posts is popular and JAW will display them. Get Them Here

There’ll be more soon! And remember to contact me if you know of any programs, tools or tips I might find useful.

Holy moly - after trying to upgrade to the newest version of Wordpress, the site well went down! What with old versions being copied into new folders, things being renamed, it all went tits up!

But thankfully, the Gods of server backing up have smiled upon me. Hope I haven’t lost much new traffic

This whole website/blog thing is new to me and a few months ago a list of useful programs or sites would have been good, so here’s a start to mine.

1.Web Developer toolbar for Firefox - Very handy as it allows you to see the css for all websites you view and for quickly getting the location of all images on that particular page. I found it useful to check the CSS after I had attempted to change things in my stylesheets and saw no change. I wanted to see exactly what the page was displaying before I went in to edit further Get It Here

2.Colorzilla for Firefox - A great little application allows you to use a dropper tool to select any colour on any webpage and gives you the html,RGB etc for it. So when matching your backgrounds up with your templates you can be spot on the right colour Get It Here

3.StumbleUpon - Most of you will know this site, but if you don’t…it’s a social networking site where members share cool content they have found on the web. Other users then view the content randomly through a toolbar in their browser and are taken to all these wonderful sites around the web. I’ve used Stumble to get a few extra visitors to the site by submitting my own content. Also, by browsing other sites, I have found stuff I can write about for instance, World Wide Fido.Get It Here

4.Wordpress - The very page you are looking at is powered by Wordpress, a powerful blogging tool. It is so customisable, with plugins and widgets galore. Most websites have a blog and so should yours! You don’t even have to be good at design as there are hundreds of free templates out there.Get It Here

5.Web CEO - I used this to submit my site to the search engines, it’s great because you just fill in your details and hit submit, you don’t have to manually do it for each search engine.Get It Here

That’s all for now!

If anyone wants to add any I should try, let me know!

The forum is up and running, it’s a place for all us Northern Irish to chat about whatever tickles our fancy. For so long we’ve had one small part on a number of forums, and if we do have a forum all to ourselves, it’s on one particular topic. So here we have, a multi-topical forum, just for NI…justNI, get it?

SIGN UP TO THE JUSTNI FORUM HERE