26 Essentials for Blogging Success: What You Need to Know
Do you want to be a more successful blogger?
Are you keeping up with the newest developments in blogging?
Whether you are new to blogging or you have been blogging for years, you will find insight in this article.
It covers 26 blogging essentials, in an A–Z tour of the blogosphere.
Each one has a full explanation, along with a link to further reading in case you want to know more.
Note: For simplicity’s sake, I assume you’re using WordPress as your blogging platform. Many of these essentials, though, apply to other blogging platforms as well.
#1: Akismet: Anti-Spam Plugin
One problem that every blog faces is spam. Shady Internet marketers will attempt to promote their products through spam comments and trackbacks, which create a poor impression for your readers. (Imagine seeing a building covered in graffiti and scrappy posters: it wouldn’t give you much confidence in the company that owns the building.)
Some hapless bloggers spend hours every month deleting a never-ending stream of spam. But Akismet, a powerful anti-spam plugin, will do all the hard work for you. By stopping spam comments and trackbacks, Akismet ensures that your blog comments section always looks attractive and welcoming to readers. As they explain:
Akismet monitors millions of blogs and forums, watching the methods and tricks used by spammers in real time. We know all about their spambots, comment factories, buffer sites and social engineering tricks. 
7 WordPress Plugins to Grow Your Email Subscribers
Are you looking for more email subscribers?
The best way to gain email subscribers is to deliver great content via your blog.
Here are seven great WordPress plugins to grow your email subscribers and let you focus on delivering great content.
#1: Pippity Customized Popups
Popup boxes that appear when readers are browsing a website can get you more email subscriptions when they are used correctly.
But they can also annoy users, so they need to be handled with care and tweaked for your audience.
Pippity allows you to do this. Pippity provides you with the configuration options necessary to ensure that popups are delivered in the most unobtrusive and beneficial way to your users.
Pippity sets a new bar by delivering beautiful popups in a way that's more in tune with your readers and gives you useful analytics that show the true effect your opt-ins are having.
6 Ways to Convert Social Media Traffic Into Leads
Are you getting traffic from social media? Want to convert some of that traffic into leads?
This article will share six easy ways to turn lurkers into leads.
Some background
A little background starts by evaluating your current lead generation process and whether it’s helping or hurting your efforts.
It’s important to understand the relationship among your lead generation strategies, your social media channels, your blog and your landing pages. Many times when we think of generating leads in social media, we look at the content we’re posting and neglect to look at the surrounding elements that also touch the user.
Every status update about a new blog post has three steps to drive lead generation: the status update, the blog post and the landing page. Each one of these has a different role in the process and offers a unique opportunity to optimize lead conversion. A typical lead conversion process in social media looks like the image below.
7 Essential Design Elements for Great Business Blogs
When people hear the word design, they sometimes think only of making something look good, using colors and graphics to add interest. But on the web, and especially on a blog, design has a purpose: to grab readers when they arrive, make it easy for them to get what they want, and create trust through a consistent and professional look.
A well-designed business blog:
- Uses visual interest to make posts easy to read
- Brands your business in a consistent way
- Places useful information in places where it is easy to find
- Isn’t cluttered with things that aren’t helping you promote your business
- Makes it easy for readers to do what you want them to do
