One of the most popular blogging platforms out there is WordPress — and for good reason. WordPress offers a flexible platform that is easy to use. You can get started blogging with a few minutes, and be well on your way to blogging success.

If you are trying to figure out which blogging platform is right for you, here are 7 benefits to blogging with WordPress:

1. It’s Cost-Efficient

One of the great things about WordPress is how cost-efficient it is. You can start blogging for free. WordPress is a free, open source platform that allows you to reach your audience free of charge. Additionally, there are paid upgrades that you can use to increase the attractiveness and customizability of your blog. However, even the paid features of WordPress are reasonably priced, meaning that you can get a high quality platform without paying a premium price.

2. Integrate with Your Website

WordPress is also easy to integrate with your website. WordPress is compatible with a number of control panels, and you can add a blog to almost any site with the help of WordPress. Blogging with WordPress is easy to start, and it’s easy to ensure that your blog is fully integrated with your brand and your website.

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Sellout….It is the ugliest word that’s routinely hurled at creative individuals of all types. This goes for writers, artists, musicians and anyone else who makes a living (in part or in whole) on the back of their creative endeavors.

That being said, money and art have to mix at some point. You need your money to support your art, whatever it may be, and that is equally true for bloggers and other authors online.

So how do you make money from your WordPress blog without selling your soul? There are many different ways you do that, but it’s important to find the right model that works for you, your niche and your site.

1. Advertising and Sponsorships

For many, advertising is a foul word. However, it doesn’t have to be if done well.  Advertising that isn’t intrusive and doesn’t get mixed in with the content can be a very simple and safe way to earn money from your site. However, this means keeping your ads away from your editorial content physically and figuratively, ensuring a total separation of the paid message from your creative one.

This can be tricky if you find yourself writing about the companies that advertise on your site (it might be wise to favor sponsorships as you can control who advertises better), but with proper disclosure this doesn’t have to be a major problem.

All in all, if you don’t intrude on your readers needlessly and don’t let your advertisers influence your work, you can host ads on your site without worrying sacrificing your integrity. [Continue Reading...]

Although it is somewhat off the topic of WordPress, I’ve always enjoyed it when blogs discuss their blogging setup with their readers.  After all, the typical blogger ranges from spending an hour a day blogging to doing so as a full time job, making the topic of comfort an important one.  I’ve been blogging fairly regularly for almost five years now and I have to say that thanks to some recent technology, over the past two years or so I’ve found my blogging habits have changed quite a bit and I’ve been able to make some changes/improvements to how I blog.  I’ve now almost completely moved away from using a desktop for my daily blogging routine and find I do most of my blogging now on a laptop or even occasionally from my iPad.

As a result, I’ve spent some time talking to fellow bloggers and getting input on some more comfortable furniture for doing my blogging.  I’ve tried a couple of different things ranging from laptop stands, to chairs/couches or other pieces of furniture, but hadn’t really found anything I could highly recommend to others….until recently.

This past week I had the opportunity to try out a product that isn’t completely new, but that I only recently discovered, called the Sumo Gigantor bag from Sumo Lounge.  My research showed that it had been featured in all sorts of magazines and received tons of great reviews from trusted websites, so I decided to give Sumo Lounge a try.

The closest comparison I’ve seen to the Sumo Lounge chairs is probably the Love Sac, which you may have seen for sale in most malls, however Sumo Lounge actually cuts out the middleman allowing them to make their similar bags available at a much more affordable price.  These well constructed bean couches aren’t built like the beanbags I grew up with, which was a pleasant surprise.  I quickly discovered that the great thing about the Sumo Lounge line of beanbags is that this allows me to comfortably do my blogging in front of my entertainment center or pretty much any room within the house (assuming their is adequate room available).

If you are interested in one for your blogging setup, here are some of the features that the sumo line of chairs boasts:

• Bean bag chairs range from 42″ x 42″ x 34″ to 86″ x 60″ x 40″.
• Includes a removable microsuede cover made with machine washable 100% polyester fiber.
• Each page includes several popular color choices.
• Stays fluffy and full over time (won’t ever go flat!).
• All bags include free shipping and a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

In addition to blogging I’ve also spent some time looking for other ways to enjoy my new piece of furniture.  The logical choice to me seemed to be to put it to the test playing video games.  I enjoy online gaming as much as anyone and decided to spend a few hours playing Call of Duty online with my friends.  Even though it may not have been reflected in my kill-to-death (KTD) ratio, it didn’t take long for me to appreciate the improved experience I was getting by sitting closer to the television.  As a result, I think I can also recommend these Sumo Lounge bags as an excellent gaming chair.  Lastly, I’ve also found that I often have to fight my wife for the Sumo Lounge chair as she often wants to use it for movies/Netflix, and then kids have been begging me to let them sleep in it pretty much every night since it arrived.

Overall I have to admit I’m very happy with my new Sumo Gigantor and can confidently recommend the Sumo Lounge line of bean bag chairs to friends and fellow bloggers.  I know we have hundreds of professional bloggers who read this site so I’d like to hear about your blogging setups.  Let us know in the comments below!!

This guest post was written by Matt Dunlap who blogs about website development. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

I’ve been coding with WordPress for a long time now. All the way back to when there was a my-hacks.php file. Shortly thereafter WordPress introduced plugins and widgets. Over all these years I find myself going back to a few key WordPress concepts that make blogs really functional.

1. Popularity of Posts – The plugin I use, and hack often, is Alex King’s popularity plugin. If you download it from wordpress.org, it works great, but if you really want to make some cool features, you are going to have to hack it.The popularity plugin displays the most popular posts based on time frame, or category in a list (<li>)by default. I’ve hacked it to get the the raw posts, so I can do my own formatting. You can see an example in my “hot list”.
2. Related Content – Notice how I didn’t say related posts. Finding related content goes much deeper then posts or pages.Related content is a must to build loyal readers (repeat visitors). You have to guide your readers and help them find content THEY are interested in. Remember, most people will find your content from Google, so feed them some related content and grow your user base. Related posts are easy to get, you simple have to a fulltext index to your database. You can then match terms to keywords.
3. Categories – WordPress is nothing more then a way to organize your content, hence the term CMS (Content Management System). 80% of my traffic from Google comes from a relation to WordPress categories. Either trying to display top level categories without children, or trying to build a top menu/submenu navigation menu.Working with categories in WordPress can be pretty frustrating. I wish there was better information. Luckily there are a lot of help from the WordPress Community.
4. Images – Magazine themes are the most popular style of theme on the Internet. It’s all about the cool graphics and images to get reader to click on posts. Content sliders and featured content sections with large graphics can be a pain to manually update, which is why you need to learn how to manipulate the images from your posts.

There you have it. If you want to be a WordPress hacker and make killer websites, you gotta have a good working knowledge of those four topics.  Thanks for reading my post, and as always, don’t be scared to ask me for help.

Blogs are built around comments. It’s always fun and rewarding to see your blog have a lot of comments on it. Trouble is, comments attract spam and it’s not always easy to distinguish between legitimate comments and spam.

Here’s a scenario: your post gets popular on Delicious. You get a ton of comments from “SEO BLOG TIPS”  saying “thanks for great post”. Comments like that add no value whatsoever to your blog post. Heck, they devalue it. So here’s the question: do you allow the comment or delete it?

Personally, I consider comments like that spam, but on the other hand, it does get the comment count up. So there it is. A short post, but there’s a reason for it; it’s meant to spark debate, so go on. What would you do?

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