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. 
How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site
Is your blog slow?
Do you want to improve the experience for readers?
In this world of instant gratification, speed of content delivery really can impact your business.
Keep reading to discover ways to increase the speed of your website.
Why Website Speed Is Important
First impressions matter.
One way to see how fast your website is loading is to use Pingdom.
With Pingdom, you identify what areas of a web page are fast, slow or too big, what best practices you're not following and so on.
When new visitors come to your site, the first thing they notice is the load speed and then the design.
Even if you have a fantastic website, if your page doesn’t load fast enough, visitors might leave before they see your website design.
4 Facebook Plugins to Drive More Traffic to Your Content
Do you want more of your content shared on Facebook?
Are you wondering how to make it easy for people to share your site or blog content on Facebook?
Which Facebook widgets are best?
Facebook recently introduced the Facebook Recommendations Bar—which is different from the Facebook Recommendations Box—and the Like Button and the Like Box.
But what are the differences and how do you decide what will work best for you? And then how do you install them?
Similar to the Like Button, when people like an article using the Recommendations Bar, a story is published back to their Timeline and friends' news feeds.
We’ll dive deep into those questions in this article (hint: your best solution may be a combination of the options).
3 Steps to More Traffic With The Digg Digg Plugin
Wondering how to make it easy for people to share your great content? Keep reading…
You’ve done the hard part, which is creating compelling content that will keep your readers coming back to your blog again and again. Now that you have these amazing posts, the next obstacle is to get people to share your content.
I found this great WordPress plugin called Digg Digg, an all-in-one social sharing tool. It’s easy to configure and offers lots of choices.
How to Create Your Own Social Networking Community
If you have a medium- to large-sized online network, you might have noticed some of your contacts have been developing their own communities in the form of private groups, forums or social networks that are a mixture of free or paid memberships.
The Pros of Creating Your Own Community
So with all of the existing communities out there, what’s the benefit of creating your own?
Driving Traffic to Your Site – Let’s say that you start a forum on your own domain. If you’re successful in creating a popular community, you’ll be driving a lot of traffic to your website. The traffic, in turn, will lead to the next benefit.
How to Turn Your WordPress Blog Into a Social Network
Want to create your own social network? Are you familiar with WordPress? From the makers of WordPress comes BuddyPress, a tool that will enable you to make your own social network.
While major social networks offer tremendous reach and millions of users, sometimes that scope can actually be distracting for certain interest groups that have a more narrow focus. BuddyPress is a great solution for groups that want to set up their own social network to concentrate interactions around a shared cause.
BuddyPress allows users the opportunity to create a social network with specific membership and publishing rules. These features make the BuddyPress platform useful for all sorts of organizations and groups.
