Being a blogger is one serious task. It’s challenging and scary because there are great chances of not succeeding. One might think that blogging is all about ‘writing’. How can someone fail at that? As long as you can put words together and think in a language, you can be a blogger, right?

Well, not really. Let’s take a look at the popular myths that affect the success of a blog and a blogger:

1 – Blogging Is Only About Writing

This is the first myth. No. Absolutely not.

Blogging is not just about writing, and more so, it’s certainly not about writing random things. Blogging is about connecting with people and sharing experiences. It’s supposed to be real people connecting to real people for any reason – common interests, ideas, services, products, technology etc. This is the nuance of blogging and one cannot afford to forget it. [Read more…]

Few things are worse for your bounce rate than an ugly blog. Users who aren’t immediately pleased by your appearance will likely pick up and leave before the site has even finished loading. Here are a few things to do right now in order to give your blog the professional edge.

1 – Use A Great Logo

If you want to be taken seriously, your site should have an attractive logo that will stay in people’s minds and convey something about your site. Because of this, it’s well worth it to pay an expert graphic designer to build your logo. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars to accomplish this, talented designers can be found all over the web.

2 – Optimze The Homepage Experience

Using your site should be an enjoyable experience. Make your blog easy to read and enjoyable to look at. The sidebar should be minimalist so that what is there actually stands out. Avoid clutter or risk making your site “noisy” to look at. Speaking of noise, your site shouldn’t make a single sound that the user doesn’t expect. [Read more…]

Guest posting on other blogs is a great way to promote your own site, and allowing other bloggers to guest post on yours is a great way to offer your visitors fresh content from a variety of perspectives. As a long-time publisher of guest posts on RLROUSE.COM and my other sites, the biggest problem I have encountered is sifting through all the garbage submissions to find the rare true gem.

Unfortunately, a large portion of the dozens of guest post submissions that hit my inbox every day are little more than spam-laden attempts to get a cheap link back to the author’s website. Don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with requesting proper attribution and a little “link love” in exchange for the use of an insightful, relevant article, but bloggers that spam other bloggers with poorly written pieces of link-filled junk do nothing to enhance their online reputations (and ironically, in the end their search engine rankings will suffer as well).

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If you have recently added a WordPress blog to an existing static HTML site, you might be wondering how you can display one or more excerpts from your latest blog posts on your home page. In reality, this isn’t nearly as difficult as you might think. All it takes is a couple of easy changes to the code of your home page.

The only real obstacle you’ll need to overcome is the fact that files ending in .html cannot “include” snippets from PHP files by default. The easiest way around this problem is to simply rename your home page from index.html to index.php and then redirect all requests for index.html to index.php by adding this line to the .htaccess file located in the public_html directory:

Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.example.com/index.php

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Since WordPress is such a popular and  powerful blogging platform, you might be thinking that it’s a complicated system to master. Well, it really isn’t. In fact, the true beauty of the entire WordPress structure is how the various functions that make your blog work are separated out into several discreet files.

Once you learn the basics of what’s in each file, you can easily handle your own WordPress installation, configuration, maintenance and upgrade tasks without having to pay a professional to do them for you!

What are the WordPress files and what to they do?

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