WordPress is unarguably one of the most popular business blogging software that is available right now.

It is not difficult to install, but it comes to no surprise that many people hesitate to try it because they think everything related to installing web applications/scripts is just that — too technical for them.

I said I would not be surprised about it because many wanna-be bloggers even are offended with Blogger.com, which only require not more than a short form to fill in for registration. It even is easier than registering an email account with Gmail or Yahoo.

Another thing is, many of us want to test WordPress out first before they decide to use it or migrate their existing blogs to this opensource platform.

For years I have been watching how a great fan of one blogware would be very loyal to their existing blogware and resist to dump and move. Nevertheless, if you are new to the world of blogging, then you are welcome to try WordPress because they offer the most community support with freely available blog themes/templates, plugins and probably best of all, it is opensource.

1. Use WordPress.com.
Well, this is not a way to install WordPress but this is the easiest and yet free way to dip your toe into WordPress. Although what you see inside the dashboard is not exactly what you get with standalone WP installation, pretty much all the features are included.

If you take the time to learn how to use this, you will not have difficulties in using WP when installed on your own domain or site directory.

2. Automated script installation tool like Fantastico.
Fantastico often is part of the hosting package. Many newbies only sign up with a hosting company when they know the hosting provides this feature.

Basically Fantastico is a script installation tool that allows everyone to easily choose and install from a myriad of web scripts, including WordPress.

While this installation is hassle free, this type of installation is not supported by WordPress though so if you stumble upon problems while following it, you are on your own. Most web hosting service will not accept support for such installation too.

3. Manually install WordPress
This is for more intermediate users, although it is really not that difficult if you follow the instructions correctly. Most hosting control panel allows you to create database without knowing a single thing about web server administration.

This is by far the most flexible option because you can update anytime you wish, independently from Fantastico or any other automation tool.

4. WordPress on your own computer
Your Personal Computer or Mac is more than enough to run a personal blog system, including a database and web server software. If you have a spare computer that you can network together, you can do so without affecting your own computer resources.

I personally have a used laptop just to test different scripts and blog software. Not only they are fast, but you can also play with it without worrying about your current installation.

With this option you can have more control because all access is granted, but it might not have the same configuration as the web hosting server.

If you already own a hosting account, either use Fantastico or manually install WordPress into one of the directories in your existing site. You can keep this private while you test different things before migrating to new domain or take it live. Whichever option you choose, please remember that none of these is too difficult to do.

Bill Flitter of Pheedo has written 5 tips to ready your blog and RSS feed for big brand advertising. While ad spends on blogs and RSS feeds are still not as large compared to traditional media, there is an increasing amount of money being spent that publishers big and small can take advantage of.

Following are the five steps that will help bloggers to ready their blog for advertisers:

1. Know your readers. Advertisers want their new media spend to take advantage of the unique characteristics of the new medium.
2. Accommodate IAB standard ad sizes, such as 728×90, 160×600, 300×250. Make it easy for them if they decide not to create new creative.
3. Keep it clean (and professional). Part of the reason why advertisers are interested in advertising in blogs are their personality but beware of inappropriate rants that could do harm to brands.
4. Focus your content. Blogs don’t have to be big. They attract readers with very focused interest.
5. Join an ad network. Leverage the marketplace so that advertisers could locate your easily.

While for small to medium publishers, blog and RSS advertising are important to help generate revenue for them, still they are quite different from conventional website advertising.

The key is to maintain personality but still allows the publishers to monetize their content and effort.

Read the full article for full coverage and also action item for each step above.

[Revenews]

Text Link Ads have just made available a new advertising format called Feedvertising — a new format that allows bloggers to run text link ads, sell in-house ads or affiliate programs.

Feedvertising lets publishers to display ads in their RSS feeds easily. Currently it supports WordPress 2.x bloggers but more blogging platforms are coming shortly. It is available as a simple plug-in that you could install as part of you standard WordPress installation.

For Advertisers

What could advertisers do? They can drill down on even the toughest target audience by selecting individual blog RSS feeds to advertise in.

Interested advertisers could browse top feedvertising packages from the marketplace — based on the top 25 Technorati ranks, browse by categories and search by keyword.

Feed Publishers, Especially Bloggers

Bloggers could use this to:

1. Promote your own products, services, or affiliate programs.
2. Sell ads by allowing TLA sell the space for you in their marketplace.

Feed publishers don’t have to worry about advertisements in their feeds because they could make them as unobtrusive as possible by displaying only text links and tagging the line with Advertisements or Sponsored By.

Upon sign-up bloggers could choose between using Feedvertising for commercial use (possibly sell some of the ad spots in the TLA marketplace or for personal use only.

Pricing

TLA allows flat rate pricing, not based on page views (CPM) or cost-per-click (CPC). According to them, it is about “cost-per-influence” and reaching your target audience.

Running ads on Personal Development site owned by Steve Pavlina costs $525.00 per month while on Professional Blogging Tips site by Darren Rowse costs $250.00, although the former ranks 101 while the latter currently secure the 70th position in Technorati.

The actual pricing depends on the blog topic, Alexa ranking and Bloglines subscriber numbers.

The Future

For now, it might still be too early to show results from this program. However, allowing advertisers to reach very focused feed readers is something many marketers should pay close attention to. The cost is considered affordable even for low budget business.

For bloggers, this is yet another way to monetize and generate revenue from what could be mostly untouched space for most blog publishers: RSS feeds. Although RSS advertising itself is nothing new, Feedvertising should give both advertisers and publishers an organized way to move the ad medium forward.

Randfish of SEOMoz has a blog post consisting 11 guidelines or best practices for successful URLs. As the blog implies, these points are based from an SEO perspective although they are also beneficial for commoun uses too.

1. Describe your content. Because URLs also get pasted, shared, emailed, written down and recognized by search engines.
2. Keep it short. Shorter URLs prevent typos. They are also easier to remember.
3. Static is the way & the light. Some search engines treat static URLs differently than dynamic ones.
4. Descriptives are better than numbers. Words are better than numbers.
5. Keywords never hurt. If you can get every competitive advantage, why not.
6. Subdomains aren’t the answer. Subdomains can be treated separately from the primary domain.
7. Fewer folders. Avoid excesive folders.
8. Hyphens separate best. Hyphens are the separator for words, just like spaces. The next best things are underscores (_), pluses (+) and nothing.
9. Stick with conventions. Let users grasp how you organize folders and pages.
10. Don’t be case sensitive. Make them all lower case.
11. Don’t append extraneous data. This could potentially confuse users and search engine spiders.

For bloggers, these could be used as guidelines when customizing permalink is possible. Some content management software also allows configuration of the URL. Yet, on some sites I decide to go the simple way. For instance, on one of my site that uses Drupal, I decided to stay with /node/<number>, which is very simple and neat.

WordPress blog users are able to customize the permalink to the level where they could follow the domain name immediately with the title as the “file” part of the URL or permalink. This sometimes creates a lengthy permalink. For best example, look at this blog. I purposely include nothing in the permalink structure other than the title of the blog post, separated by hyphens.

Bloggers.com automatically truncates URLs. In this case, it is probably not possible to have keyword rich URLs unless the keywords are at the beginning of the title.

Nowadays, there are rare cases where you have to pass URLs without users capability to click on the link. Most emails support that feature. If you really want to shorten URLs, there are a lot of services out there. You can even setup your own script that also functions to track activities.

Again, don’t sweat though if you can’t comply with any of these. They are nice to have but not by any means compulsory. Even from SEO perspective, getting the perfect URL only benefit your search engine ranking a bit, perhaps negligible.

[SEOMoz]

Blog title is probably the most important component of your blog content. It is the first thing that people read, and probably the only thing if they are not interested to peruse further, based on the information the title gives.

Blog titles serve the same purpose as newspaper headlines, although compared to direct marketing headlines, they are relatively more limited in space.

The body content of your blog maybe your best piece, one of which should be the most sought after. It may cater to a big problem your target market has been facing for long. But, of course, unless the headline drives them in, the rest of your words may as well not even exist.

Unless you write for a group of people who know your work very well, chances are they won’t read the blog content unless the headline triggers their curiosity. Moreover, some web feeds syndicate only headlines, so it is obvious how the blog title has to effectively draw the readers in.

Here are four tips to help create a powerful and compelling blog title:

1. Know your readers
Who are you writing this post for? A powerful headline usually highlight either the problem you are trying to solve, the solution you offer or techniques to prevent it. If you know your readers, you will recognize the issues surrounding them and they will feel you are part of them through your communication.

2. Define purpose
Including a purpose in your blog title is important. The benefits are twofold. First, the headline shows a promise about what is coming to the readers. Through the headline you communicate the value of the post so the prospective readers will continue reading.

The second benefit is to keep yourself focus on the outcome. While obviously you can rewrite the headline after finishing the content, you are more likely to fulfill the purpose if you have it written upfront.

3. Impose clarity
“Blog Promotion Tactics”. The blog title is quite clear. Your readers should expect to read about how to promote their blogs. If this topic is a concern to them, they might read further.

Of course, the title is not strong enough and doesn’t have much in it for the readers.

Do I need to promote my blog? What can I get from that?

Although the title doesn’t communicate benefits, still it should get the attention of the readers who realize the value of the topic in question.

4. Include benefits
“… to Get More Traffic and Readers”. Suddenly the title is now better because not only it communicates what the content is about but also what the readers is going to get if they read and do what the blog post suggests.

Other powerful words such as “easy” and “simple” could help increase anticipation, as long as they are honest.

Whenever you are writing a blog title, you should try to keep these points in mind. While these rules are by no means etched in the stone, they are helpful to increase your blog readership.

Just take the time to carefully create a good blog title because at the end of the day, what matters is the number of people who actually read your blog, not the amount of posts collecting dust at the corner of your blog archives.