I get asked a lot to refer people to different resources that they can use to either create or make their blogs better. People ask for everything from my favorite training sites, to plugins, to themes.

So I’ve put together a list of all of my favorite recommended blogging resources for 2010. These are all resources that I have personally used and would use again.

Platform:

• WordPress.org – Though I started this blog on the Blogger platform, I would recommend that you start out using a hosted wordpress blog. Take my word for it that it’ll save you a ton of headaches in the long run!

Read: how I moved from blogger to wordpress

Hosting:

• HostGator – I love hostgator because it’s easy to use, inexpensive, and their customer service is top notch.

Blog Themes:

• StudioPress – This is where I got the theme for this blog. They offer really great admin options that are easy to use. Also their support forum is amazing! I’ve had to ask questions a few times and I’ve always gotten help super fast.

• WooTheme – I’ve used WooThemes on other blogs and they have a really easy to use, and extensive admin panel. Plus I like the look and feel of their themes.

Blog Training:

• WordPress Chick – This is one of my favorite blogs to find out about cool new blogging tools. Also she is obsessed with StudioPress themes so she has a ton of great training on using and customizing them.

• 31 Days to a Better Blog – This is a workbook written by ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse that I highly recommend. It helped me a lot, especially when I was just starting, to really understand how to create content. It gives you a series of tasks to complete each day for a month that will help make your blog better.

• CopyBlogger – One of the best resources online to learn how to write and create better content.

• ProBlogger – Darren Rowse’s main blog is chock full of great stuff. This is a list of his best content for starting your first blog. You’ll be reading for hours!

Blog Plugins

• Askimet – This is a life saver! It helps to catch all of those crazy spam comments before they reach your readers.

• All in One SEO - Though there are other SEO plugins out there, this one just happens to be my favorite.

• CommentLuv – This gives your readers a chance to promote their latest blog post in the comment section. It gives them more incentive to leave a comment.

• WordPress Database Backup & WordPress Backup by BTE – Both of these are really great ways to help create automatic backups of your site. It helped save me from total meltdown when my site was hacked a while back.

• Onlywire - This is a great plugin that will allow people to bookmark your content quick and easy.

• No-Nofollow – This plugin removes the no follow attribute to links in your comment section. If you’re going to use CommentLuv then you might as well give your readers some link juice too.

Other Tools

• Aweber – If you’re building a list (and you should be!) this is one of the best autoresonders around. It’s by far my favorite.

• Feedburner – Helps you to manage your RSS feed and lets people subscribe to your blog feed either with a feedreader or by email.

• Goggle Analytics – Great way to track your blog’s stats. Find out where your traffic is coming from, what pages the read, what they click on, and all kinds of cool stuff.

Hope these will help you in your quest for blogging domination (or whatever YOUR goals are!). Oh and btw, some of those links are indeed affiliate links in case you’re wondering

Enjoy!

P.S. Don’t forget to hit the RT and LIKE buttons to share it with others. Also, if you have any tools to add to my list feel free to share them in the comment section. Thanks!

If you’ve been paying any attention lately to the internet marketing arena, then I’m sure you’ve heard all about the changes going on over in the Google camp. Not only making changes to how they run Adwords, but also making changes to their search engine algorithm. So what does this mean for you?

Well, in the beginning, Google started out by putting heavy emphasis on the use of keywords on a site in order to decide what it should rank for. This allowed scammers to fool the system by shoving as many non-relevant keywords as possible onto their pages and they would instantly rank.

Soon after, Google realized their mistake and began putting more emphasis on the number of backlinks and later the number of quality backlinks that a site had. Though they soon found out that this too gave people a loophole that allowed them to rise in the rankings.

So once again, Google is changing it up. Now they have decided to add what they’re calling user activity into the mix. This means that no matter how many links you have or how great your content, if your site remains unchanged for weeks on end Google will probably pass you by.

Therefore, the more blog comments, retweets, and feed subscribers your site has, the better! If you can show Google that your site is in fact alive and well, you have a much better chance of moving up in the rankings.

So here are a few tips on improving your site’s user activity.

1. Share your content with people in your circle of influence first. The people who already know, like, and trust you are more likely to leave you comments. So this would include your personal list, facebook friends, twitter followers, blog subscribers, and so on.
2. Give you readers an incentive to leave you comments. Install the CommentLuv plugin which allows people to promote their latest blog post. Also install the No-Nofollow plugin which makes you comment links Dofollow so readers can get some link love
3. Ask for the comments. You can do this by specifically asking what people thought about the content, or by asking an open-ended question that your readers are compelled to answer.
4. Join a content syndication tribe. This is one of the best ways to ensure you get not only user activity, but also tons of free traffic to your blog. I recommend that you check out Tribe Syndication Association which is a wonderfully active free community. I also recommend Katie Freiling’s The Unified Tribe which is a paid service but will give you almost instant traffic.
5. Last but not least, write content worth commenting. This goes without saying really, but you should be writing content that people are interested in reading. If you give them good stuff they will want to comment naturally.

I hope that gives you some ideas on how to generate the user activity you need on your site. If you can get this right, along with a good linking strategy and good content, there’s no reason you can’t get your site to Google’s #1.

If you would like even more information on Google’s new policy and how you can put it to work for you, check out The Perpetual Traffic Report today!

P.S. If you have anymore cool ways of generating user activity, I’d love to hear it, so don’t forget to leave me a comment and hit the green RT above

So I’m sure that you’ve seen blogs, such as this one, that have ads in their sidebars and you may be wondering how you can do that too. Well here is a great little plugin called WP125 that will handle everything for you.

Simply input a few pieces of information and you will have a sidebar with cool ads in no time! Check out the video below for my easy to follow tutorial.

If you were like me when I first started online, then the thought of starting up a wordpress blog seemed a bit daunting.

It felt as though there was simply too much of a learning curve to deal with, so better to try something a little easier. That something turned out to be a free Blogger site which I figured could handle all of my blogging needs.

However it quickly became apparent that Blogger was simply not up to the challenge of running a professional blog. So I decided it was time to move on to a hosted WordPress site instead, though this is where the problems came in.

How to move from blogger to wordpress without losing my precious page rank and alexa ranking?

Well here is how I successfully moved this site over without you even noticing! (admit it, you didn’t notice did you?)

Step 1: Configuring Your Blogger Site

Now if you have been using a domain such as sitename.blogspot.com then you are going to lose all pagerank and traffic if you move everything over to wordpress.

However, if you have it published to your own domain such as sitename.com then it will be easy to transfer without losing your hard earned traffic. So to do this, you should first make sure that you are publishing on your own domain which you can do through your blogger backoffice.

**note: It can take up to 2 months for the search engines to transfer your rank to the new domain, so you should do this a soon as possible. Try searching Google using the operator site:sitename.com to make sure that your site is being indexed.

Step 2: Change the DNS Setting of Your Domain

Once you are satisfied that your domain name is being picked up by Google you can go in and change the DNS settings for your domain. This process is different for each domain registrar so check with your site’s faqs for specific steps.

You are looking to change the settings that say Nameserver. So if your hosting account is with Hostgator for instance, your nameservers would look something like ns1.hostgator.com and ns2.hostgator.com. (DON’T use these unless they are the nameservers given to you in your welcome email!)

Step 3: Add Domain To Your Hosting Account & Download WordPress

This step is also dependent upon which hosting service you are using, but essentially your are simply adding the domain to your hosting account. Then you will want to install wordpress, and if you are with a hosting service that uses cpanel, this is a quick process through fantastico. Check out my post on installing wordpress for a video tutorial.

Step 4: Configure Permalinks

Once you get into your wordpress backoffice, go to settings: permalinks and select the custom structure.

The add this string: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

Step 5: Import Blogger Posts to WordPress

Now you can go ahead and import your blogger posts into your brand new wordpress site. From your wordpress backoffice click on tools: import and select blogger from the list of options. Once you grant access to blogger to connect your account you will come back to a page like the one below.

Go ahead and select import next to the correct blog and follow the prompts as it imports all of your posts and comments.

Step 6: Fix Permalink Structure

The last step is to maintain the permalinks from blogger to wordpress. If you’ve noticed the structures are a bit different between the two sites. For example:

blogger: move-from-blogger-to-wordpress-the

wordpress: move-from-blogger-to-wordpress-the-easy-way

Since the whole point in this move is to maintain traffic and page rank, we need to make the permalinks exact in every way. So the easiest way to do that is to install the wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks-1.1.zip plugin.

Once you activate the plugin go to  tools: maintain blogger permalinks and click on the button that says Maintain Blogger Permalinks. That’s all there is to it. If you want to double check that everything worked perfectly then head over to Google and do another search for site:sitename.com and click on one of the links to make sure that everything is going to the new wordpress site.

Step 7: Extra Steps

Now you can go into your appearance settings and install the template of your choice. If you can find a wordpress equivalent to your blogger template then you could possibly create the illusion of having not moved at all.

Also, if you are using feedburner, remember to go into your settings and update your primary feed so that your subscribers get redirected accordingly.

So that’s all there is to it. I hope that this tutorial was helpful and that you enjoy your new wordpress blog!

Recently, I have had a number of people interested in knowing how to set up a WordPress blog on their own domain. So, instead of trying to explain it individually to everyone I thought I’d make a video series to walk everyone through the process. The video below is the first installment and is the basics of using the fantastico plugin to install a WordPress blog. It’s super easy to do so follow along and I hope you enjoy it!

If you would like to see the blog in the video , you can check it out here:

http://askangeltaylor.com

This is also where I will be uploading the rest of the videos in the series so bookmark the page in order to keep up!

Happy Marketing!