But it simply isn’t enough for a blogger to receive tons of organic traffic — unless you can make those visitors ‘stay‘ on your blog by providing them with ‘related content‘ from your blog they will soon leave your blog and move on; thus attributing to a ‘high bounce rate‘.

Since, many bloggers or website owners struggle to increase their number of page view it is a good idea to add a related post WordPress widget bellow your article, since they are often effective in increasing page views and lowering bounce rate. This is where nRelate Related Content plugin comes in.

nRelate Plugin Helps Reduce Bounce Rate and Show Related Articles on Your Blog

From the plugin page:

“nrelate is not just another related posts plugin. Our patent-pending technology continuously analyzes your website content and displays other related posts from your website. This ultimately leads to higher page-views for your site, and a better user experience for your visitors.”

nRelate Related Content Plugin (for WordPress) Features:

- nRelate related posts plugin is not just visually appealing but it has more interesting features and benefits as well. Some of the more obvious benefits of using this plugin are: it helps you engage readers, increases page views, lowers bounce rates and helps you turn casual one-time blog visitors into regular returning visitors.

- The customization of this plugin is so easy that the plugin fits perfectly with your blog’s frame and style (CSS). They even have a large number of thumbnail themes to select from.

- You can also set the plugin to show related content from other sites. That’s pretty cool if you have a network and you want to keep your readers on your own sites as long as possible.

- If you have not placed a photo in your post, you can set the plugin to display a default photo. Nrelate gives you the option of thumbnail size also, from 100 pixels up to 150 pixels.

- You can enter your own ‘related posts‘ title like ‘Check out these awesome articles‘ or can change the text to whatever you want.

- It is absolutely spot-on in generating accurate related content and thus helps your visitors in seeing content related to what they are reading/searching. Hence the readers might stick around a while longer and browse more of your articles.

- nRelate is not your average plugin, it comes with a service from their side that spiders your entire site and analyzes all the content, so it can not only show related posts, but really show related content from all over your site.

- On the plug-in dashboard page it shows you its progress and on the settings page you can determine whether you want to show related content with image and text or with just text, and also what size the image should be.

- However, the thumbnail for related post might not appear on your blog immediately because it takes some time to index all your blog posts and pages. But once the indexing is done, it is immaculate in displaying laser-targeted related content for your articles.

- They have a completely optional nRelates ad network to make money through . You can turn off the ad feature at any time.

- As an added benefit, because of the increased page views, you can also expect to see a sharp increase in your Adsense revenue.

Overall, the nRelate plugin works very well and does everything it says. Don’t believe us? Then ditch LinkWithin (or any other related posts plugin that you might be using right now) for a week and take nRelate for a test ride and be amazed.

Just like a blog (or a website), an RSS feed also needs marketing and promotion. Increasing your RSS feed subscribers will widen your reach. You need to invest enough effort and time into promoting your RSS feed. The following are some proven guidelines for promoting your blog’s RSS feed.

RSS Feed icon

Make sure all your web pages have an RSS feed icon. The icon should be obvious, as well as visually appealing. It should be situated ‘above the fold’, meaning that that visitors should be able to see it without having to scroll down, up, right or left. The icon should be included in all a site’s web pages so as to enable visitors to subscribe no matter what page they navigate to.

Make Use of RSS Feed Directories

Submit your RSS feed to different RSS search engines and feed directories. Many people visit RSS feed directories to find topical feeds which would be beneficial to them. Being list in such feeds can help you attract a fresh audience who are always in search for a better blog.

Publish a Press Release

Send a press release pronouncing the availability of an RSS feed for your website content. In the release, you could briefly describe what sort of information the feed contains, and explain how the feed can be of help to interested individuals.

One-click Subscription

Make sure your RSS feeds have a one-click subscription option. This will enable your blog visitors to subscribe easily and quickly.

Announce RSS Feed Availability

Make use of all communication channels to inform people about the availability of your RSS feeds. Details of your RSS feed should be included in email and forum signatures. Remember to make a mention in product or company newsletters. Such announcements have been effective in promoting the RSS feed in blog.

Educate and Explain

Though some people understand the capabilities and powers of RSS, other might not. Make sure you help visitors to your site understand how they can subscribe to RSS feeds, and how this can benefit them. A little education  for your blog visitors can help you increase your RSS subscribers significantly.

RSS content

The following are some guidelines in regard to feed content.

- Offer quality content which is relevant to your subscribers. To retain the attention of your readers, you need to make sure that your material in interesting.
- Your RSS feed content should focused. Make sure your feed’s theme is narrow and concise.
- Make sure you regularly add new content to your RSS feed
- Avoid inserting self-serving content and ads in the RSS feed. Use advertising sparingly.
- Regularly examine your logs to find out what content is popular with your readers. When you discover what is very popular, you could create additional content which goes deeper into the subject of interest.

Also Read – Top 7 Tips on How to Increase Comments on your Blog Post

Author Bio: This guest post is contributed by Charles Mburugu who often writes about internet marketing and e-Commerce. He also blogs about coupon deals at discount blogs that share webhostingpad discounts and register.com coupons. He is currently writing for a coupon site that offers webhostingpad promotional codes and register.com web code.

If you’re in a services business, blogging about aspects of the service you provide can help to educate your potential customers about the challenges involved; and “help” articles provide a free resource which keep people coming back. Similarly, If you’re into product business and selling to consumers, the topics you choose to blog about can help to build your brand identity. Here is top 5 most important reasons why you need a blog for your business success:

Everyone Is Searching Online

Most people are searching online, and a large proportion of people use the internet as their only form of inquiry, when searching for products and services. It has become even more prominent since mobile internet has become popular, and it has brought easy and portable access. It makes the most sense to be present where most people are looking for your products or services and if you do it right, you can get tons of free web traffic via your blog.

No Technical Requirements

It may seem like an overwhelming prospect, but in reality very little technical understanding is required. With WordPress, setting up a business blog can be as simple as getting yourself a quick haircut. Once your blog is setup and running, the ability to make updates to the blog is easy to learn. This is as simple as using email.

Business Branding

People often judge your business, based on how your blog looks. A well designed and functional blog would reflect a professional image of your business and will help you build a credible online presence. It immediately establishes credibility and this is often going to be the first impression of your business. This promotes your brand very effectively, and can significantly grow your business.

The positive attention and these value-based, long-term experiences don’t just create trust. They also help to create a stronger, better brand and in turn a stronger online reputation. This leads to word-of-mouth advertising, which is one of the best forms of promotion you can get.

Become More Competitive

You will most likely discover that your competitors already have a better blog. Then your potential customers are searching online and they are able to explore your competitor’s blogs but you are not findable at all.

Be Accessible Round the Clock

Since your blog is always online, it works while you sleep. People can access your blog 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. People can contact you, and access all the functionality at any time.

Informed and educated visitors become confident, loyal customers. More people are turning to the internet to research before they buy. You can position your company as a go-to resource, thereby winning more business.

Social Networking

Many businesses have realized the value of social media. Facebook and Twitter being the most important social networking blogs today. But promoting your business on these sites is not enough. It need to be complemented with a blog. This is because after finding you on Facebook or Twitter, the next time they look for you they will search for you on a search engine, which is where you would want your blog to be found and when the customer wants to buy your products or services.

Guest Author: This is a guest article by Mitchel Xavier who is a Sydney Website Design and web development specialist.

Over twenty million blogs (and websites) are powered by WordPress since its inception in 2003. This open source project allows many to share their thoughts, grow their businesses and connect to followers online. What started as a single line of code has grown into an entire content management system where users can customize their sites completely with plugins, widgets and various themes.

As we all have limited amounts of time on this earth many of us have better ideas to spend our time relaxing on the couch watching movies rather than freaking out about endless lines of meaningless code. Learn how to use a few of these WordPress post-installation tips to make your blog leaner and meaner.

1. How to Reset a WordPress from phpMyAdmin

Your WordPress blog can get hacked. It happens to the best of us, and when it does happen, it is essential to know how to reset the password from phpMyAdmin in order to stop the damage from continuing. Follow these steps before a hacker can rip apart all of your hard work.

Step 1: Find out the name of your database. Go to your WordPress Directory. Locate the wp-config.php file. Click on the file. In that file you will discover the name of your database.

Step 2: Go to the Admin panel in your MySQL database. Click on phpMyAdmin and select the name of your database. Once you are in the phpMyadmin look for the prefix: wp_users or whatever prefix you assigned it in the installation. Select the prefix.

Step 3: Click on the “Browse” tab on the left side of your screen and then click on the pencil icon to reset your password. A field will pop up and you can enter in a new password using a MD5 generator (WordPress does not allow plain text passwords). Copy the password and paste it into the value field. Save and you’re done. Your blog is now protected.

2. Add Some Personality to Your Blog

Do you have plain blog? If your readers yawn in boredom when they look at your site, it is time to freshen it up with personality. Do these things to make your blog look more attractive to readers.

-Add a favicon to your blog. Follow our simplest method to add a favicon to your WordPress blog.

- Add an avatar to your username. When you post a picture and simple byline about yourself or about another author posting on your blog, it will go a long way. People like to match a face to a name.

- Incorporate pictures, graphs, videos and other images. Be visual. People like color and pictures to help explain the concepts you are discussing.

- Limit your blog’s theme to no more than three colors. Four is zany, three is manageable. Don’t scare your readers away with a kaleidoscope that is too hard to look at.

- Use BIG fonts. Keep the font a sans serif, such as Arial or Calibri. Make the font large enough to see easily to avoid squinting and eye strain.

3. Make Your WordPress Blog Faster

Maybe you have installed a bunch of WordPress plugins to doodad up your blog. You might like how it look, but have found that it is now moving at a snail’s pace. Here a tip: get rid of the unused plugins. That cool drop-down thing, or flashing, moving, icon thing might be cool for a couple of months, but if it isn’t contributing to the health of your blog, cut it. Keep the essential plugins to keep the site organized and kill the rest. The plug-ins insert added coding, making it longer for your blog to respond to a user’s request.

Coding can be difficult, but you don’t need to know a lick of it if you can follow a few simple steps to cache your queries. Caching allows your server to make shortcuts, which reduces the number of queries, bogging down your blog. Put this little bit of code in your wp-config.php file (that’s the same one you used to find your database name) and save it.

// Enable the WordPress Object Cache:

define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);

Voila! You have got a meaner, leaner and faster blog. Your readers will be happier at the faster load times, and you will be happier with the increased traffic.

4. Highlight the Author’s Comments

While you should get rid of the unused plugins in your WordPress blog, a good one to hang on to is the Author Highlight plugin. This allows you to change the color of your comments, distinguishing you as someone different from the rest of your readers. This plugin makes it easier for readers to identify and follow conversations. Find the plugin at: WordPress Plugin Directory (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/author-highlight/)

5. Use a Relative Date Plug-in

Relative date is a term that describes the date in general or relative terms. So instead of dating a post with numbers, you can install a plugin that says “4 days ago” or “1 week ago” or whatever time has lapsed since you wrote the post. This plugin, while not essential to your blog, does make it easier on the eyes. Find it at: WordPress Plugin Directory (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-relativedate/)

Bonus Tips: Subscribe Your WordPress Site to a Monitoring Service

Keep an eye on things without checking the vitals of your blog every few minutes by using a monitoring service. Also known as a ping service, these sites will alert you when your website goes down. Some offer trouble shooting help and performance reports on the specifics how your website is running. Consider using these monitoring services to keep track of what your site is doing, even while you are away from your computer:

1. Mon.itor.Us
2. Pingdom.com
3. Watchmouse.com

Remember, incorporating even a couple of these tips will improve your blog, making it look better, work faster and become more enjoyable for your followers. Using these tips will allow you to still be lazy, but lazy with a purpose.

Guest Author: This is a guest article by Sierra Dawson is a social media advocate with CreditDonkey, a US-based small business credit card comparison website.

Ever since the recent launch of their Plus one (+1) button, Google +1 has remained in the spotlight. Google had been testing the plus one button in their search results for 2 months before they finally announced that now it could be used on blogs as well.

By using Google Plus one buttons people who love your content can recommend it on Google search, thus helping you rank higher on SERP. Read on to find out how to add the Google plus one button to your WordPress powered blogs and other websites without needing any plugins!

Google +1  is very similar to the Facebook “Like” button, but will most likely have much larger implications for search result rankings in the future. Think this as a new way that Google has launched to tailor search engine results  and Google Adsense ads.

Advantages of Google +1 Button on Blogs

1. Faster page indexing by search engines (especially, Google).
2. Easier for you to get your well-written articles go viral when your friends and readers click the button (vote for it).
3. Better SERP ranking for your blog.
4. Better targeted ads for your visitors.
5. So a win-win for you, your blog, your visitors and your advertisers as well.

How to Add Google +1 Button to WordPress Without Any Plugin?

Google lets you use ready-made code here that you can simply paste and the button will work. But that works ONLY as long as we are talking about static pages. But if you want to add Google Plus One buttons on dynamic WordPress blog posts then you will need to make some modifications to Google’s factory-made code.

Steps 1: If you are using WordPress, find and open your header.php file in edit mode. And paste the following code right before the </head> tag.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

Step 2: Then depending on where you want the Plus One button to appear, find that php file and open in edit mode. e.g. if you want your Google +1 button on every article (blog post) that you publish, then open the single.php file in edit mode. And then paste one of the following line of codes depending on the button size that you want.

<g:plusone size="small" href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”></g:plusone>
For small 15 pixel button
<g:plusone size="medium" href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”></g:plusone>
For medium 20 pixel button
<g:plusone href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”></g:plusone>
For standard 24 pixel button
<g:plusone size="tall" href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”></g:plusone>
For tall 60 pixel button

And that is it. Your Google Plus One button is installed and running. Now, on all your old and new blog posts a unique button will be displayed, using which your visitors can recommend (vote) your content and thus help boost your SERP rank.

Learn More About the Google +1 Button [Watch Video]

Even a novice to site building will easily be able to create a Website/blog using WordPress that is fully functional and easy on the eyes. Once you have created a plan for the site itself, you will need to figure out where your site will be hosted. Finding a good hosting plan for your WordPress blog/site can seem like a daunting task when you begin to look at all the options that are available. Since there are so many web hosting companies to choose from, you might think that they are all about the same. This is simply not the case. There are several things that you need to look for in good web hosting companies. So here’s a few things to look for when shopping for a plan to for your WordPress blog hosting.

What to look for in a WordPress web hosting plan?

1. Blog/site Uptime: You will want to find a hosting company that has a history of excellent customer service. Remember, every moment that your site or blog is offline, you are losing out on money and potential visitors, readers and customers. Research any hosting company that you are interested in and check out its user reviews before making the purchase.

2. Reliability: WordPress is very resource intensive, which means it uses a lot of server CPU and database bandwidth. The larger and more popular your site becomes, the more important it is for you to have reliable and inexpensive web hosting.

3. Compatibility: WordPress is constructed in PHP language and runs on a MySQL database. So your hosting account should support both PHP and MySQL. Most hosting accounts that use Linux hosting plans should meet the requirements for hosting a WordPress blog.

4. cPanel: Most of the people who are using WordPress are not so geek. Having a web hosting with cPanel will make your life easier. You can quickly add addon domains, create FTP account and many other things with cPanel GUI.

5. Intuitive user panel: WordPress installation is pretty straight forward, but some new users may not feel comfortable installing it by FTP or even from within cPanel. That’s where installers like Fantastico and SimpleScripts make the job much easier. You can install WordPress in your hosting account from an intuitive user panel rather than having to manually upload and extract files.

6. Live chat: WordPress sites are prone to hacking and issues like high CPU usage and many times website goes down due to any buggy script. If your hosting support live chat, you can quickly ping them and ask them to look into the issue. Phone support is usually offered by most of the hosting but with live chat support, your life would be easier.

7. Ability to update WordPress easily: It’s important to keep WordPress updated, as there are frequent security fixes and updates. A script installer like SimpleScripts or the built-in solutions used by iPage and FatCow notify you of WordPress updates, so all you need to do is click a button and your blog will be automatically updated with the freshest, most secure version.

8. Bandwidth and storage: The word “unlimited” is highly overrated and there is nothing as unlimited! But still it is possible to find a web hosting provider who offers unlimited resources, which is usually very high and good enough for any high traffic blog. Go for hosting, which offer your WordPress blog maximum resources in terms of storage and bandwidth.

9. Ability to handle Digg front page: Blogging and social media have created a new need for stable web hosting. If you’ve ever had a blog post hit the front page of Digg or another blog mashup service, you know that traffic can instantly spike to insane levels. That’s why buying a reliable hosting plan now should be your top priority even before you get your first visitor through your door.

10. Accessibility: As great as WordPress is, you can experience occasional issues with your site that can be the result of a poorly coded plugin or theme. It’s important to have good support with your hosting plan so you have somewhere to turn to if your site suddenly shuts down or you get the dreaded “white screen of death” or a 500 server error. Make sure you WordPress hosting company has multiple methods of contacting support included email, chat, support tickets and phone support.

A lot has been said about validation services for xhtml and css validation and I must admit that there are more controversies regarding this issue than solutions! Top notch SEO gurus and experts claim it is the critical onsite SEO tweak every page on the internet needs in order to even qualify for getting indexed by search engines leave alone a good page rank. Those who think otherwise will show you examples of successful blogs and sites with a pagerank which definitely qualifies as more than decent and a traffic stats counter to die for!

So what really is the fact behind xhtml and css validation? Is it a SEO pre-requisite for a successful seo campaign? or is it just another SEO scam designed to draw money from poor webmasters? Lets put an end to this discussion with a conclusion to this post and shut up all speculations and misleading guides from pseudo SEO-experts.

What does validation mean?

The first thing that I must clear here is that , it may read “validation” but it has got nothing to do with your site being valid to be indexed and crawled, in fact , in simple terms it just means that your code is “grammatically” correct. Simply put, every language has its backbone in its grammar, the same holds good for programming languages. If you use wrong grammar does not mean you are not fit to talk and be heard but think of all the bad impression it makes!

So this clears your primary doubt if having invalid xhtml and css markup is a sin? NO!! you can absolutely rest assured that your blog posts will be indexed and have all normal properties like a pagerank and traffic flow like other blogs. But before you tag me as one of those web-masters who say that this is useless you might want to read further!

So what has this leet grammar got to do with SEO?

The fundamental of why a page code should be valid leads to a concept that shows how primitive our modern day search engine crawlers are. It will help to understand how a crawler behaves.Basically a crawler is a toned down version of a text browser.It can not see the site as we see it, and it definitely does not have the privilege of colored images or any images to that matter! So that is what we are offering to the crawlers, pure text! That will define whether your site will get indexed or not and what Google pagerank you get.

What happens when my Markup is Invalid?

This depends on what is invalid.Basically the CSS files lay a function call to the various parameters like the text box and pretty much everything on the site.If the markup is broken then it can prevent the crawler from crawling text inside the broken tags and markup.This will make you lose valuable content juice and result in your page not being indexed.This is a probable and a very harmful impact of broken markup.

Future of search Engine Algorithm.

Once you have made sure you have followed all the mandatory Quick onsite and offsite SEO tips pre-requisites from this checklist you cant still heave a sigh of relief , the leading search engines have been changing their ranking algorithms very frequently and you never know google might just include valid markup as a pre-requisite for good SERP and it wont be a wise decision to run havoc trying to edit the code of your site which is already implemented on a number.

Conclusion- As of now, it has never been mentioned by any search engine that they require valid markup and it would never affect your indexing apart from the above glitch mentioned, but it will definitely be useful if you have a clean code.A clean code means sites will not only load faster it will also increase your SERP due to reduced loading time and be a more pleasant stay to recurring visitors. So Is your code valid?

There’s no doubt that WordPress rocks as a blogging and content-management system. Once installed, you can do amazing things with it right out of the virtual box. In this post, I’m going to share with you the most essential plugins for your WordPress blog — 20 Must Have Killer Plugins for WordPress. I will explain why I find these plugins extremely useful as well as speak about some widgets that are worth using. These excellent WordPress plugins are intended to reduce and simplify tasks associated with blogging so that you can spend more time creating content, and less time with site administration.

For months, I’ve been able to bookmark hundreds of plugins, and now I’ve done all the work for you by sorting the best plugins you only need to truly leverage WordPress! In no particular order, here they are!

1. Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. This plug in can also check the trackbacks for spam. It’s no wonder why it’s already present in the default WordPress installation!

2. All in One SEO Pack: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). As the name suggests, All in One SEO pack  provides an array of easy to understand options and helps your blog become SEO optimized. This is an absolute must have when it comes to SEO plugins. With over 2 million downloads and growing, I think it needs no more proof that it really works.

3. Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Every time you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

4. ShareThis: The ShareThis WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more.

5. StatPress Reloaded: This plugin (previously known as StatPress) shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

6. WP-DB-Backup: WP-DB-Backup allows you to easily backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database. It also allows you to optimize database, repair database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.

7. LinkWithin: Unlike similar plugins that display a list of related posts, LinkWithin doesn’t just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recency. In testing LinkWithin on our own WordPress blog, the suggested posts were always spot-on, but obviously, your mileage may vary.

8. WP-Polls: WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and CSS styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selections of answers.

9. WordPress Thread Comment: This Plugin is an enhancement for WordPress’s comment function. It enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.

10. cformsII – contact form: cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi-form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

11. WP Hyper Cache: WP Hyper Cache is specifically written for people who have their blogs on low resources hosting provider (cpu and mysql).  This caching plugin can dramatically speed up your WordPress blog by generating static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more resource-hungry WordPress PHP scripts.

12. CommentLuv: Comments are a way of your readers showing love for you and your blog. CommentLuv helps you to return some love by including a titled link to your commentator’s last blog post or tweet at the end of their comment. This plugint crawls your commentator’s site/blog , gets the latest URL (up to 10 latest URLs if the commentator is a registered CommentLuv user) and parses it as HTML beneath the commentator’s name when they click submit. No wonder why this plugin has been found to increase comments and the community spirit for the thousands of blogs that have installed it.

13. WP-Optimize: WP-Optimize is a wordpress 2.7++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue and un-approved comments within few clicks.

14. WP FollowMe: WP FollowMe is a WordPress plugin that allows you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your WordPress blog.

15. WP Greet Box: This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to Digg your post if they like it. The plug-in also includes out of the box support for getting messages from users coming from Reddit, SU, Facebook, Google , Mixx, etc. You can also easily add your own custom greeting for people coming from any site you choose. Best of all, this plugin is compatible with WPMU and various WordPress cache plugins (so you do not have to sacrifice speed).

16. Popularity Contest: Shows your readers your most popular posts based on views, comments, pingbacks, among other criteria. You can also change the weight of each criteria to determine the most popular post.

17. WP Since Last Visit: Indicates with a small “New” picture beside your post to users who have not yet seen your post from their last visit. Also works with comments.

18. Maintenance Mode: Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.

19. Advertising Manager: This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognizes many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.

20. Viper’s Video Quicktags: Tired of copying and pasting the embed HTML from sites like YouTube? Then this plugin is for you.

How many of these pugins are you using already? Would you want to add one to this list? Feel free to share your thoughts.

As a reader of blogs I also like it when the authors let their readers in on the blog statistics. For TechChunks, there have been many highlights in these 5 months. When we got our first commentators/subscribers, when our first post got featured at PCWorld and MacWorld, when we were featured as the “Site of the Day” at SiteProNews, when TechChunks was interviewed at SpeakBindas, when we hosted our first ever Contest where we gave away prizes worth over $1000, when Google awarded us PR2, when we launched guest blogging here at TechChunks… too much to list. Also just the feeling of starting something from scratch is a great feeling in itself.

Blog Statistics:

- Google PR from 0 to 2
- Alexa traffic Rank – 72,100
- 153 published blog articles
- 1257 approved comments
- Over 10,200 Twitter followers
- More than 20,000 visitors per month at the moment
- More than 50,000 page views per month at the moment
- Most visitors in a day 4968 (happened on Jan 29)

Lessons Learned:

However, it’s quite disheartening to see posts I literally spent all night writing having only a few hundred pageviews, while other posts that took me literally minutes to sum up are the most popular ones. But it is something that tells me quite a lot:

- People don’t like series. They like everything in one go.
- Top 10, Top 5 lists and How to style tutorial posts are popular. Very popular. Next comes latest technology updates.
- The majority of readers just want the info; and none of discussion stuff that I like to shoehorn in.
- Writing about Twitter, iPhone, Google, WordPress or even Windows is a surefire way to generate some buzz among your readers.

20 Most Popular Articles on TechChunks in these 5 Months:

Finally, thanks for reading/subscribing/commenting on TechChunks and we hope that we can continue providing interesting content for you to come back again and again. Happy Blogging

There are some Stunning, amazing, cool Premium themes out there which are nicely designed, innovative, SE optimized, flexible and yet being FREE! I am not the first one to write about these FREEMIUM WordPress themes and I won’t be the last as well. But I am restricting myself to those Free & Premium WordPress themes which can be used for Blogs with Magazine or News based content. Today I present only 10 Free Premium-like WordPress Themes that are truly impressive and you might be willing to use for your next project.

Stunning Free but Premium WordPress News / Magazine Styled Themes:

1. Androida

Live Demo | Download

2. FREEmium wordpress theme

Live Demo | Download

3. Mimbo 3.0

Live Demo | Download

4. Magasin Dos

Live Demo | Download

5. Magasin Uno

Live Demo | Download

6. Arthemia Free Magazine Theme

Live Demo | Download

7. Branford Magazine

Live Demo | Download

8. Skyye News

Live Demo | Download

9. Grungezine

Live Demo (Unavailable) | Download

10. Zinmag Tribune

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