Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey: Building a Better Blog

As I keep telling students in my Blogosopher seminar- the answers are out there- you just have to look for them.

Here are easy ways to get more hits for your blog- and how to build posts- and a great tip about clicking on your links after you make them (so the linked site can see your hits in their stats).

There are some really good blogs on how to blog- I’m working on making this site one of them. While I only offer the seminar in Dayton right now- I hope to soon take it out as a road show- to other locations. I’d especially like to start making presentations to Ad Clubs around the country.

This site is less than 4 months old today.

The amazing thing is that it is already drawing over 100 unique visitors a day- and if it keeps going at this rate of growth, will quickly leave The Next Wave site in the dust (which is averaging 60 unique visitors a day). Note: The Next Wave site has been up since 1994 in some shape or form and has a lot of great content.

When we added the WordPress blog to The Next Wave site- we were averaging about 200 unique visitors a month! And this was with a code compliant site- that was built with search in mind. The difference was in how difficult it was to update the site with new content- simple additions could take hours. WordPress- or any actively served Content Management System makes changes take minutes- by someone with no HTML knowledge at all.

Granted, everyone is interested in blogging and easy site creation right now- and this subject is “so much sexier” than great advertising- but, the key is- building a site in WordPress isn’t only cheaper- it’s much better at doing what a good site is supposed to do- attract visitors.

This is why attending one of our “Blogosopher” (or “Blogosphere” as so many keep reading it) seminars can help you build a web site that can begin generating hits so much faster than an expensive hand-coded website.

WordPress20-20Upgrade20to20version202.0

This link has a long- in-depth discussion of the upgrade.

We had a catastrophic melt-down of the entire Next Wave site yesterday by just upgrading one section – the WordPress blog. If you have a theme developed before 1.5 like we did- it may do odd things- so, BACK-UP EVERYTHING- not just your WordPress install- if it is a part of a larger site. We were lucky to have the Server back-up available for a reinstall.

If you just have a 1.5 WordPress install as your entire site- still do a complete back-up, including your MySQL database (our server has a back-up data base function in the CPanel)- and then proceed following the instructions above.

We still offer our clients the upgrade service for $49 and you can pay online- see the sign-up section.

Good Luck!