You run a successful blog, popular with readers in various countries around the world. But how do you make your content relevant?

The chances are your articles and related services are already ideal for most of your users, but what about adverts? Perhaps you have affiliate ads linking to products that are unavailable in some territories, or you might even need to publish an article or display some other content specifically for readers in a particular country.

A quick look around at some of the mainstream media and big corporation websites reveals that this is possible, so how might you incorporate this kind of targeting into WordPress?

What Is Geolocating, Exactly?

Geolocating is the term given to the act of determining the IP address range and location of your blog’s visitors. This information can then be used to target content at them.

For instance, you might run a blog from the UK, but want to target adverts at readers in the USA. While it is easy to setup a block of Adsense ads for this purpose, you might have an affiliate relationship with stores providing specific types of content.

By installing geolocation plugins you can ensure that readers in the UK see affiliate ads for businesses local to them while those in the USA will see advertisements appropriate to their country.

Here are three very useful plugins with which you can target content at readers from specific countries.

Targeted Content with GT-Geo Targeting

Using the plugin GT-Geo Targeting you can specify content to be displayed based on the location of the reader. Whether you’re showing country-specific adverts, images or text content, template tags and shortcodes are available with this plugin to make your strategy a reality.

For example, you might use the following shortcode in a post to display information only for readers in the United States: [geo-out country="us"]test[/geo-out]

The plugin also supports multiple countries. The following PHP code can be added to a template to display content for readers in the USA, Australia, Great Britain and India.

<?php if(WPGeo_IsFromCountry('United States,au,gb,India') == true)
{
//Content here
}
?>

For more information on this plugin, visit the WordPress plugin site.

WordPress GeoTargeting Plugin

Another option is the paid, WordPress GeoTargeting Plugin, which you can purchase for $25.00 from thewordpress.net/plugins/geotargeting.

As with the GT-Geo Targeting plugin you can use shortcodes (known in this plugin as “quicktags”) to display information to users from particular countries which you can pre-select. Multiple countries can be specified at once, and the service uses a centralized database for keeping track of the various IP ranges that are used in different territories.

In addition, this plugin includes the option to forward visitors to a specific URL if they have arrived at your blog from a particular country. This might be useful for sending newcomers to a landing page, for instance, or a localized sub-domain.

What About Just Targeting Adverts?

If your content is pretty universal but you want to take advantage of affiliate relationships with companies in other countries, a great option is Ads By Country.

Available through the WordPress plugins menu (full details can be found at the WordPress plugins site) Ads By Country uses the MaxMind GeoIP JS Web Service to determine where readers of your blog are arriving from. This information is then used to display your chosen ad code.

Once installed, you can insert different advert code for the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and the rest of the world, ensuring that those territories only see the adverts you want them to see. HTML can be included in the code, and the ads can be displayed as widgets in your sidebar.

This is a great, simple plugin for targeting adverts at users based on their location!

Effectively Target Your Users!

Geolocating tools aren’t just for showing off how slick and modern your blog is – they can be successfully employed to generate additional advertising income on your website.

If you’re one of the many users for whom Google Adsense doesn’t yield favourable results, for instance, you might use the Ads By Country plugin to specifically display adverts that are tailored by country.

Alternatively, WordPress GeoTargeting Plugin and GT-Geo Targeting are available for displaying text and image-based content in pages and posts specifically for readers from particular locations.

Do you have any geolocating tips, tricks or plugins that you use on your WordPress blog? Share them in the comments below!

Tricky to code by hand, forms are potentially very powerful so it should come as no surprise to learn that there are several very good contact form plugins that you can install on your WordPress website.

While they are all capable of doing much more, the following “top five” have been tested to see how they fare with the basic task of creating a standard email contact form.

Easy Contact Forms

Making the creation of contact forms for your website simple – rather than forcing you to rely on HTML or PHP – is the aim of all of these plugins. Easy Contact Forms has plenty of options for creating custom email fields and much more.

Despite the name, however, this plugin isn’t easy to use. While the ability to construct a form might have been beautifully streamlined, the labelling applied to the various form components is pretty obscure in some cases.

Additionally, claims to be “template ready” are wide of the mark. Creating a simple email contact form with this plugin proved challenging, not an experience I would want to endure again in a hurry. However the plugin has plenty of options to be of use in other ways. You can find out more on the WordPress plugin site.

Contact Form 7

Providing tools to manage as many contact forms as you need, Contact Form 7 enables you to easily customize your forms and adds CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering support.

But how easy does it make setting up a basic email form?

Well, little work is required for creating this type of form as everything is provided. All you need to do is copy the shortcode into your page or post and the form is ready to use. However there are plenty of ways in which you can edit the form by changing wording and adding markup, while many different form types can be created. Forms with uploads, radio buttons and checkboxes can all be added, enabling the flexibility to add any type of form to your website. CAPTCHA is enables by installing the Really Simple Captcha plugin.

Full details can be found at contactform7.com.

Fast Secure Contact Form

As options go, you’ll barely find more in one place than you will in the settings view for Fast Secure Contact Form.

Like Contact Form 7, a set of basic email contact fields are provided by default with this plugin, so once again it is simply a case of pasting the shortcode and leaving it to its own devices.

However there are many options that can be used to enhance this plugin, beside the obligatory CAPTCHAs and anti-spam tools. An interesting feature is the option to provide an alternative means of contact beyond email in the form of a webcam chat or phone call. This taps into the vCita service for scheduling web-based meetings, and is a great way to bring customers and clients closer!

Further details on this plugin can be found by checking the WordPress plugin page.

Contact Form

On first impressions, the settings for this plugin might give the impression that it is very basic. While Contact Form doesn’t have the same range of options as some of the others in this list, it is far and away the simplest, but it also has some tricks up its sleeve.

Using the shortcode and a drop-down menu of contributors, editors, authors and administrators of your WordPress blog, you can easily select the intended recipient for the submitted message. There is also a field to enter an alternative, preferred email address.

In addition to the standard fields, Contact Form also provides the ability to upload attachments, attach sender IP information and even edit the form fields.

Find further details about Contact Form by visiting the WordPress plugin site, where you can also find screenshots.

Custom Contact Forms

Claiming to be more customizable than both Fast Secure Contact Form and Contact Form 7, this plugin is arguably better presented than either, offering good background to each of the options that can be used and a small tutorial.

Feature-packed and with a selection of tabs to easily find specific options, Custom Contact Forms also includes CSS styling tools, a bug report feature and many fixed and configurable fields for you to construct complex and basic contact forms. The most basic form type is already set up by default, and includes a CAPTCHA test. Details and an FAQ can be found as usual in the WordPress plugin index.

Plenty of Great Plugins!

There is barely a dearth of contact form options, but thanks to the efforts of the developers of these examples, there are plenty of good contact form plugins for WordPress users to choose from.

Most impressive, perhaps, is Contact Form 7, but all of these options are recommended.

The question is – did we miss any? Do you use a contact form solution that isn’t listed here? Or do you use contact form plugins in an interesting way?

Let us know!

The intention, of course, is to enable promotion of the website by visitors who might find something useful and share it, perhaps on Facebook, Digg or a similar service. By displaying a Twitter box in the sidebar, the site owner hopes to impress upon visitors the notion of following the site on the popular microblogging service.

In most cases, however, using all of these services untempered usually results in a mish-mash, a blog that looks a mess and lacks focus. This can severely impact the image of the site.

The important thing to recognize is that you need to be careful not to overdo things. After all, you don’t know who is reading…

Social Tools Plugin Overkill

For WordPress users, the gamut of social networking plugins such as Digg Digg means that it is extremely easy to add social links without getting your hands dirty dropping the code for the buttons into the post templates.

Being unaware of the power of these tools and the way in which your readers use them, however, will lead to problems. While Facebook can help (both as a “Like” button and as a comments solution) if your readers don’t have Facebook accounts then it is nothing more than a pretty button taking up space on your page. When you only have 1280×800 pixels with which to communicate your news and views to your readers, it is worth spending some time on identifying which social networking links are working for you and focusing on these.

For instance, Pinterest is becoming increasingly popular on largely image-based websites (or sites that rely on striking images to relay information), while Reddit users might share material that comes under a particular heading. If your blog regularly features articles in a category or subject that can be matched with a Reddit tag then checking just how well these social shares perform is a good idea.

Ultimately, keeping your website looking clean and tidy will attract more users – so cut down on the social sharing buttons!

The Point of Social Media

Thanks to the flexibility of sidebar widgets, it is possible to add a box to your blog that will showcase your recent Tweets and Retweets. There are some strong arguments for doing this, not least proving that any visitors to your site will get a good deal should they follow you on Twitter, but there are also very good reasons not to do this.

If your blog is providing an online presence with the aim of attracting customers or clients, they might be very impressed with the details listed on your “About” page, or perhaps be intrigued by your insightful posts. However any prospective client might be quickly turned off if upon discovering odd opinions and irrelevant comments sitting on your blog’s Twitter feed – more so if it is taking pride of place in your blog’s sidebar, for all to see!

On more than one occasion I have seen ill-considered comments shared with every single follower from a Twitter account in moments that the Tweeter would no doubt rather forget. The problem with this is that many Twitter sidebar widgets cache the information from the user’s account.

While it is easy enough to delete a regrettable Tweet, it might prove difficult explaining the deletion to a plugin. Would you really want a stupid or even offensive comment displayed on your blog’s sidebar?

Conclusion

Ultimately, the point of social media is to share. If you’re professional about the subject of your blog and running your blog, then you surely realize that what you publish on Twitter is of great importance.

Similarly, providing tools that enable your readers to easily share their favourite links is brilliant – but there are only so many of these links that visitors to your blog are likely to use. The best solution is to start small, keeping an eye on the reaction to, say, Twitter and StumbleUpon links. When clicked, these buttons will add clicks to the total that they display, giving you a good idea of how your readers share material from your blog.

If requests come in for different buttons, or your WordPress stats display a lot of hits from Facebook, or a service like Reddit, then you can feel vindicated in adding these.

Avoiding overkill can improve blog loading times, while being savvy about how you and your blog will be viewed following some badly-thought-out comments will help you to build your brand.

There was, however, one plugin which was overlooked, mainly because I was unaware of it at that stage. We’re going to redress the balance here by taking a good look at the RetinaPost plugin, a quite ingenious approach to the shortcomings of most of the captcha plugins we featured previously.

RetinaPost has been developed by Dan Negrea, who helpfully provided me with some additional insight which you will find throughout this review.

Where the Alternatives Fail

Available from www.retinapost.com, the attraction of this plugin is clear – it ties a great big knot in the obvious holes in the security of its competitors.

If I present a human with a small mathematical challenge (“5+7”, perhaps or even “six x 12”) you would expect it to be easily solved. Sadly, it can also be easily overcome by a small piece of software programmed to recognise digits and numbers represented as text. We’re often lulled into a false sense of security by the impression of supposedly “stupid” computers, overlooking the fact that these are powerful calculators, particularly perfect for completing basic math challenges.

The result is that number-based captcha tests are easily broken. With letter-based captcha tests becoming increasing tricky to read, an alternative is required.

So What Does RetinaPost Offer?

RetinaPost is a strong candidate for such a replacement.

You don’t need to be concerned with spambots finding a way of creating accounts on your blog with RetinaPost, as this plugin doesn’t rely on numbers or words.

Instead, the free plugin requires the commenter to read a phrase, spot which characters are highlighted with a colour and then confirm these characters. You might use RetinaPost for comments forms or signup pages, even to download material from your WordPress website.

Developer Dan Negrea tells me “in general I receive good feedback. RetinaPost is identified as “the middle solution”: not very intrusive but still secure.”

Once installed on your blog, the plugin settings can be found in Plugins > Engage & Anti-Spam. One of the aims of RetinaPost goes beyond protecting you from spammers – this plugin wants your readers to enjoy your site better, and so allows you to post snippets of content as the RetinaPost test.

Using RetinaPost

Getting to grips with RetinaPost captchas shouldn’t cause your readers any problems. With the small single-coloured images starkly underlining the letters that need to be entered to pass the challenge, the procedure is a basic logic test that should be easily accomplished.

Limiting the posters on your blog to genuine humans rather than those controlling spamming software will reduce the spam posts you receive as well as introduce an additional barrier to attempted hijacks. Remember that installing some WordPress antispam plugins adds load to your server’s resources when they are called into action – effective login test tools such as RetinaPost can reduce this demand.

Easy to Use and Configure

The main options are setup already when you activate the RetinaPost plugin; this means that it will automatically pull content from your blog posts and use this material to create the colour test.

Different settings are available for the comments form and the registration form, allowing you to select blog posts or a custom message to be displayed on each.

If necessary, RetinaPost can also be configured to produce XHTML 1.0 Strict Compliant Code, while the basic instructions can be edited to tailor the phrasing and information given to your readers.

Conclusion

This is one of the most ingenious WordPress plugins you will come across. From the moment I saw just how the captcha alternative worked it was clear that a lot of thought had been given to this, and while it isn’t clear just how long this method of beating the spam commenters will work before technology catches up it remains the most imaginative approach since the original captchas came along.

Dan Negrea tells me that a second version is “90% developed. Spambots are and will be capable of doing almost everything. The question is, with what cost? I plan to add many updates so that the spammers will have to implement new solutions which will cost them.”

Let’s face it – traditional captcha is becoming increasingly difficult to read and a new approach is needed. If RetinaPost isn’t the solution it is most definitely a step in the right direction.

As useful as downloading a backup of your blog as a precaution against server damage/destruction can be, the act of backing up often ends up with the blog owner leaving the data on the server!

Clearly this largely defeats the object of creating a backup. While you might not have time to download the data, however, there are alternatives in the shape of online backup and storage solutions.

Benefits of Online Backup

Considerable benefits exist in creating an online backup. Various popular cloud services can be used for storing your backups and this is made possible thanks to a selection of WordPress plugins that are designed specifically for backing up to online storage, either hosted by the backup service you choose or by taking advantage of a popular cloud solution.

A service such as Dropbox – a popular option for newcomers to cloud storage – is ideal for this task, and using this backup method allows you to download the archive without impacting the bandwidth of your website.

Online cloud backup tools also avoid the need to download your data to your home computer, thereby allowing you to maintain a continuous backup routine even when you’re on holiday.

Pressbackup

Offering a powerful backup solution, Pressbackup does more than just backup your website – it manages the storage and even enables you to easily roll back to previous versions of the site.

Scheduling enables you to backup themes, plugins and upload directories as well as the database, and this solution can also be used to easily migrate your site between servers. Whether you’re looking for safe and reliable online backups or a service that allows you to easily overcome crashes, hacks, corruptions and other errors with ease, Pressbackup is an option that you should certainly consider.

You can find out more about this useful plugin and the pricing (based on $10 per site, per month) by visiting pressbackup.com.

BackWPup

If you prefer to retain more control over your online backups, the BackWPup plugin is a free tool that enables you to schedule backups that will either be stored in a folder on your WordPress site or on any of the following cloud solutions: Amazon S3, Google Storage, Microsoft Azure, RackSpaceCloud, DropBox, SugarSync.

The convenience of having access to your backups via cloud storage cannot be contested, and BackWPup offers a great introduction to this method of archiving and protecting your data. Multisite support us also provided.

For full details on what you can do with BackWPup, visit the plugin page on the WordPress website.

Cloudsafe365

Like Pressbackup, Cloudsafe365 is part plugin, part online backup storage solution, offering online backups for free (or for $15 per month alongside existing blog security services).

Cloudsafe365’s specialty is to protect WordPress websites from damage and hijack from hackers, protecting sites from SQL injection and cross browser vulnerabilities. If you have a site that you feel might be at risk from these types of attack, it is certainly worth considering a service such as this.

While there is a free option, this offers fewer protection and cloud backup options; it does, however, allow backups to a Dropbox cloud storage account.

Full details can be found at www.cloudsafe365.com.

myRepono

Another paid service, myRepono offers a slightly different method of backing up your online data. Rather than paying for the storage after you use it, myRepono uses a pre-pay system whereby your account is topped up with credit and you are charged for the storage and bandwidth as you use it.

With pricing decreasing from the starting point of just 2 cents per gigabyte per day and the provision of a cost estimation calculator, you will find that this is a cost-effective solution for any website looking for an online backup solution on a tight budget.

Along with your website files and databases being backed up and stored on the myRepono servers, this service (along with its WordPress plugin) is one of the most impressive and effective available.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

Possibly the easiest to use of the options listed here, WordPress Backup to Dropbox keeps it simple. A single plugin that connects to a Dropbox account via the OAuth protocol, it can be setup in minutes, with scheduling options that allow you to set backups to run when your site is at its quietest.

Backups are temporarily stored on your blog’s server before being copied to Dropbox – you can specify which directory is used for this as well as excluding files and directories if necessary. There is also the option to specify the target folder in your Dropbox account.

If opted to installed this plugin right now, you could realistically expect to have a completed backup in your Dropbox storage in minutes.

Honourable Mentions

Along with those examples outlined here, let us not forget the rather smashing online backup tools for WordPress as featured in our previous article.

• EZPZ – creates a complete backup of your site with a single click, and can be configured to automatically upload the data to Dropbox.
• Online Backup for WordPress – three backup options are available with this tool; a ZIP file that can be downloaded, sent to your email inbox or stored on Backup Technology’s secure data center, which offers 100 MB free storage.

Remember that none of the services in this list should not be relied on 100% – there is always the chance that something can go wrong, so you will need to be aware that backups should be checked regularly.

Most of the time this will be via the comments section; a great way of gauging your readership’s feelings about recent articles. However this isn’t the only way to get feedback from your audience.

Posts – unless they are calls to action – tend to be passive in their impact. The reader will scan through, gain some interesting facts, and often move on. If the post touches upon an emotive subject, your community might be inspired to comment. This is usually good, but from time to time you might require something more.

Polls and surveys are a great way to get your readers thinking about what they like and don’t like, and for bloggers using WordPress there are various solutions that can be used to great effect. Better still, polls are magnets for visitors – even casual readers – to engage with, and the results can be used as inspiration for new content on your blog.

With these solutions you can embed polls into sidebars, posts, pages or even across your entire WordPress-powered website.

PollDaddy

Probably the automatic choice for a lot of WordPress users, PollDaddy is quick and easy to setup, making it a popular option.

Arguably more suited to polls than surveys (although it will give you good results for the latter) PollDaddy has a free-to-use service (alongside the $200 and $899 annual options) that offers the plugin for use with WordPress. You’ll need an API key from PollDaddy to use the plugin but once this is done you can create a new poll in a matter of minutes and display it on your blog with a number of different themes, one of which should match your own template.

Find out more by visiting the WordPress plugin page and paying a visit to PollDaddy.com.

4Q Survey WordPress

For a solution that focuses on surveys rather than polls, you might care to take a look at 4Q Survey, a premium solution with tiered price plans and a free option for modest surveys of 100 respondents per month.

Capable of offering different question types (ratings, multiple choice, text field) and data analysis when you sign up to the more expensive options (the $399 per month option allows you to collect responses from 500 users), 4Q Survey can be considered one of the most professional survey plugins and solutions for WordPress. The only downside is that you will need to use the 4Q Survey web console to design and test your survey.

Visit the 4Q website to sign up and find out more about the plugin before installing.

SurveyGizmo

Like 4Q Survey, SurveyGizmo is an existing website-based survey engine that provides a WordPress plugin for you to create surveys and embed them into your blog. In addition, SurveyGizmo’s plugin also enables you to view the responses on your site rather than having to login to a separate web-based console.

Suitable for surveys, polls, and quizzes and web forms, SurveyGizmo is also like 4Q Survey in that it has a premium option – but the $50 per month for unlimited surveys and responses is the only choice available. Fortunately there is a free trial that will allow you to test if the solution meets your needs.

Find out more at SurveyGizmo’s website.

SodaHead Polls

If PollDaddy is the easiest of these survey and poll plugins then the SodaHead Polls plugin comes a very close second place, offering you complete control from a single app with no web-based services to sign up to.

Like PollDaddy, you can add polls to your posts via a useful toolbar button, create polls on the fly and publish them in a matter of minutes. New and archived polls can also be summoned to display as a widget in your sidebar, and the system prevents multiple votes while providing social linking in order to draw new visitors to your blog.

Should you want to keep things simple yet effective, SodaHead is a great option.

WP Survey and Quiz Tool

Sometimes you might want to run a quiz on your blog. Other times you might prefer a poll; one day, you might want to run a survey. Must you install a new plugin each time?

With the WP Survey and Quiz Tool, you don’t have to go searching for three separate plugins. This versatile software can fulfill many roles from creating forms for job applications to feedback tools along with multiple and single answer quizzes, and running polls and surveys.

A very good catch-all solution, ideal for if you want to run various question types on your blog without installing multiple, you can find out more details about this standalone plugin from the WordPress Plugins site.

Get Out What You Put In

Regardless of whether you choose a free or premium option, WordPress poll and survey plugins will give you great results – if you’re prepared to put the time in.

While some of these will work straight out of the box (for example PollDaddy) others will require a bit more work (such as SurveyGizmo). But the results you gain from the latter can be analyzed and broken down with various statistical tools, affording a useful insight into your readers.

Choose your reader poll or survey plugin wisely, based on how you plan to use it, and you’ll find the quality of results you were hoping for.

Whether you just want to spend a few minutes checking which of your affiliate links your visitors clicked or if you’re more interested in the search terms that send a reader to your blog, the following selection should give you all the data you need.

WordPress Stats

The default option (available from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats) has become less popular over the years as other solutions have become available, but if you want to keep things simple or are running a WordPress.com hosted blog (for example you might be taking your first tentative steps into blogging) then this is probably your best option.

Offering a line graph of visits to your blog over the course of a week, month or year with plenty of page view information for each article, the WordPress Stats plugin will also display information about search terms and referrers, as well as the links clicked by readers (useful for gauging the success or otherwise of affiliate links).

One drawback with this solution is the complicated situation concerning the addition of the API key that is required to run the plugin. Even if you are using a self-hosted WordPress installation you will need to register at WordPress.com to acquire the key.

Statcounter

A popular alternative to the standard WordPress statistics plugin is Statcounter, which reports a much deeper collection of data.

In addition to highlighting the currently popular articles and locations where visitors have originated, Statcounter will also email you on a weekly basis with a summary of your blog’s performance, with daily totals.

The downside with this plugin is that it is a little difficult to for newcomers to website visitor statistics to understand. Although the initial Summary screen has an easy to understand bar chart, the subsequent breakdowns can quickly become confusing, partly due to information being poorly presented but also because it attempts to display too much at once without the advantage of a graphical representation. A few additional bar charts or pie charts would make all the difference.

If you can see beyond the numbers, however, this is a useful option. Find out more at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/official-statcounter-plugin-for-wordpress.

WassUp Stats

Currently one of the most popular stats packages for WordPress, WassUp has a simple drop-down menu driven interface making it easy for you to select options such as time periods and the type of visitor chart to display. By default it will display all hits and page views, but bots and spam hits can be filtered out to provide a realistic view of your actual visitor count.

The end result is something that looks a lot more attractive than Statcounter, thanks to well organized lists and an easy-to-read line graph that presents visits and page views as separate totals, allowing you to easily see how your readers are engaging with your content. The more page views per visit, the better, and this ratio is also displayed prominently at the top of the page.

WassUp looks great, is easy to use, and can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wassup.

NewStatPress

Probably the closest thing to a plugin that mirrors the functions of Google Analytics, NewStatPress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/newstatpress/) offers a wealth of features.

The main bar chart displays the total readers on your blog each day, incorporating different color tones to represent visitors, page views, spiders and feeds. Meanwhile an overview is provided that presents data such as time of visit, IP address, operating system and browser, and information about referrers, search terms and spiders is also available.

Surprisingly given the quality of the presentation, this is a free stat plugin, and perhaps the one you’re really looking for if none of the others listed here have grabbed your enthusiasm.

Google Analytics

If you’re reluctant to add a new plugin to your blog specifically for stats, the obvious choice is to use Google Analytics, particularly if you already employ the service on another website and have everything you need setup and ready to use.

Although the manual placement of code in your blog footer is required with this solution, the results are comprehensive and the depth of options speaks for itself.

For instance, you can profile your users based on the browser and operating system they use, while other options will provide information on which parts of your blog are clicked the most – a useful way of seeing how the layout is being interpreted by the end user. Are they using the links you want them to use? Are advertising links being ignored?

To use Google Analytics you will require a Google account. Head to http://www.google.com/analytics/ to sign up.

The Choice Is Yours

These plugins are just the tip of the iceberg. Many more are available but this selection represents the cream of the crop.

By understanding your readers you can get a better idea of what type of article they find most interesting, and by doing this you can begin to enhance your relationship with readers.

One last thing: it should be noted that you may receive slightly different results with each of these plugins. There are various reasons for this; some don’t include spam hits and spiders be default, others do, and some will count your own visits to your blog. No stats plugin can provide a 100% accurate figure, but the level of precision is such that each of those listed here is ideal for strategic planning on your blog’s direction.

It seems sometimes that there is a new social networking or social bookmarking service starting up every week, and in some cases this is true.

Pinterest is a little different, however, as it works as a visual medium, as opposed to something like Twitter which is almost exclusively text-based. If you’ve found Twitter lacking as a means of spreading the word about your blog, Pinterest offers an interesting alternative.

While this might not be suitable for everyone (most will notice that using Pinterest alongside Twitter is the best option) it should be ideal for you if your blog is a largely visual project (you might be an illustrator, for example) or if you create guides and how-to articles.

Because Pinterest embraces the two largest social networks, Facebook and Twitter, its users can share what they have pinned through status updates and wall posts. Its reach, therefore, is potentially larger than those services.

What Is Pinterest?

With Pinterest you can create a profile, create labelled boards for your areas of “interest” and then “pin” links to the appropriate boards thanks to a browser-based button.

What this means is that those friends and contacts that are following your activity on Pinterest can see the same favored links. They might share or comment on them, generating vital links and conversation.

Ultimately, Pinterest is like a large online scrapbook or cork pinboard to which you can stick or pin any useful links you have found around the web. Given how easy it is to forget that you saw something interesting when reading perhaps 50+ pages per day – not to mention the time it takes to check them when you do remember to make a note of the URL, perhaps as a browser favourite – it is obvious how Pinterest is drawing users to its service.

So how do you pin? It’s very simple, actually. Once you sign up, the service offers a button that you drag to your browser toolbar. This is basically a small script that is activated when you click the button, causing the web page currently being viewed to be pinned to a Pinterest board.

Using Pinterest to Promote Your Blog

As a blogger or a business running a blog, you’ll be interested in reaching new readers and these can be acquired using Pinterest intelligently. Just as importantly, however, the service – which in January 2012 experienced more referral traffic than Google+ and YouTube – can be used to help you identify trends that are suitable for your blog to key into.

Visual artists can use Pinterest to showcase work on dedicated boards, attracting links for users to share with their friends via Facebook or Twitter.

You don’t have to be an artist to use Pinterest, however. Looking at a picture – which has been claimed to be worth 10,000 words – is certainly quicker than reading. An appropriate image accompanying an article on your blog that is then pinned can yield excellent results. If your blog is about inspiration than suitably inspiring images should accompany the posts, and these can be selected to display on Pinterest when the article is pinned.

Pinterest Profiles and Buzz

A Pinterest profile can display your blog’s URL, enabling people who stumble across your account to find more about who you are. While items that you pin from your blog will lead back there, anything of interest that others users have pinned that you subsequently repin will not. Therefore having a URL on your profile and perhaps linking to a similar item on your own blog in the comment space is recommended.

Meanwhile, if you are planning on utilizing Pinterest as a method of reaching out to new readers (or even existing readers who don’t use Facebook or Twitter) there are a number of useful plugins for WordPress that you can take advantage of. Most interesting is the Pinterest Badge which adds a widget to your sidebar with a count of how many Pinterest followers you have and tile-like images of your recent pins.

Another Weapon in Your Arsenal

With so much information available every day, it can be difficult for the average web user to come to terms with what they are reading, whether they understand it and if they like it.

Pinterest offers an excellent way for readers to curate material, collecting it quickly and sharing it on their boards for others to see. One particularly useful side effect of Pinterest is that anyone can appear to be a trendsetter, thought leader or early adopter among their peers simply by pinning the right piece of information.

Keeping an eye on these trends can help you develop tailored content on your blog that taps into these trends and attracts new readers.

Yet many blog owners forget to do this, instead relying on the automated options provided by their web hosts.

This is leaving far too much to chance. If you truly value the blog and the work you (and others) are putting into it then you should be taking steps to ensure that regular backups are made. It might be reasonably straightforward to create a backup of your WordPress installation directory or theme via FTP and to create a dump of the MySQL database in phpMyAdmin, but these can be time consuming and confusing if you’re not technically-minded.

Fortunately there are various time-saving tools and plugins that can manage the creation and download of backups of your WordPress site.

Basic WordPress Export

Built into WordPress is an export utility, located in the Tools section of the Dashboard. While not a full database backup this does however allow you to easily create an export of all of the posts and pages in your blog, with tags and links to images.

Ideally this is designed for migrating a blog, but there is no reason why you wouldn’t want to use it as an easy-to-access backup tool. After all, should anything go wrong with your website and a reinstallation is necessary, then using the exported file via the Import menu option will be very similar to performing a migration.

WP-DB Backup

One of the most popular options you can choose from is the WP-DB Backup plugin, available from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/. There are no bells and whistles with this plugin; while you might schedule backups and have the option of selecting which tables are included, you don’t have the option of backing up WordPress folders such as your theme and plugins.

This is purely – as the name suggests – a backup of the database. Given the fiddling about you might have to go through to create and download a SQL dump on some hosts, however, this isn’t a bad thing.

WP-DB Backup is a useful option to anyone who requires just the SQL data, which can be saved to your server, downloaded to your local computer or emailed (although this last option is restricted by file size).

Backing Up While On the Move

Many bloggers are constantly on the move, perhaps chasing a story, recording events and live casting or even blogging purely from mobile devices.

Whatever the case, maintaining your online presence via your blog always has some behind-the-scenes overheads but fortunately there are various mobile admin tools that you can employ. Some might be designed for use on a mobile device; others, like Online Backup for WordPress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wponlinebackup/) offer an alternative to the typical download of your backup by providing a complete site archive of settings, pages, posts and comments, as well as any related media, themes and plugins. With the option to save to a 100 MB online drive when you’re on the move, you can also download the data and store it locally.

Complete Site Backups

Other complete site backup solutions are available, providing you with the option of single-click archives of your entire WordPress blog.

EZPZ One Click Backup (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ezpz-one-click-backup/) is probably the most widely-regarded solution for this, offering not just one-click backups (which can be left on your server or downloaded) but also a simple one-click restore.

Usually restoring a WordPress site can be a difficult process, requiring the uploading of downloaded public_html directories and importing the original posts via SQL or the WordPress import/export tool. With a streamlined one-click restore, however, this is made far easier and quicker.

Lock it in the Vault!

For a much more comprehensive backup solution that is perfectly aligned for use with WordPress is VaultPress, also developed by Automattic. Thanks to the developer’s familiarity with WordPress this service allows online, real-time, continuous and complete backup with one-click data restore that allows you to easily recover from any errors, data loss or hosting issues that you might experience.

In fact, using this option – which has a three-tier payment structure – can prove extremely useful in a disaster recovery scenario thanks to the support and recovery assistance that is provided.

The basic package suitable for sole bloggers is just $15 per month per site. Packages for premium and enterprise-level support can be purchased for $40 and $350 per month, with additional features such as Theme and Plugin Scanning. Head to http://vaultpress.com/ for more details.

Back Up Your Blog to the Cloud

Cloud computing is becoming ever more popular and given that your WordPress blog spends most of its time on a remote server it makes sense to back it up to a similar service.

Whether you already use a content delivery network service such as Amazon S3 or not the WP S3 Backups plugin is a useful option, again ideal to anyone on the move who is unable to download a backup.

Requiring an Amazon S3 account (available from http://aws.amazon.com/s3/) and the security keys that come with it, setting up is a case of copying those details to the plugin’s settings page, then configuring which data you want to sync. If you’re already happy with Amazon S3′s low price cloud storage service then this backup solution is a no-brainer; if you haven’t discovered the benefits of CDNs then it’s also worth pursuing further. Find the plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-s3-backups/.

Storing Backups

Making backups is only one side of the equation, of course. At some point you might need to restore data and in order to do this you will need to keep a record of the backups made and keep them close at hand.

The best way to do this is by downloading the backups to your computer and then burning to optical disc. While a static or removable hard disk drive or tape media is an acceptable option, optical discs (CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray) will allow for greater portability and flexibility when it comes to storing and restoring the data.

Preserve your backups in a clearly labelled, well-indexed environment, preferably air-tight.

Too many writers make this exact same mistake. They want to impress their readers with their knowledge. Therefore, they write a lot of long words that makes them look like they know what they’re talking about.  The problem is that they lose their reader and make their reader feel dumber than they are.

Here are some suggestions on avoiding this problem with your audience.

• Explain Acronyms – Instead of using acronyms that your audience may not, and probably won’t know, give them an explanation of what it means.  Assume that they don’t know what you are talking about. Assume that they don’t know, for example, what SEO stands for. The first time you use the term, spell out what it is that you mean.  Then you can put the acronym, in this case, in parenthesis. By way of example, you could write something such as: Search engine optimization (SEO) is something that is very important to the success of an online business.  Then when you write SEO again, they will understand what it is that you mean.
• Provide a Glossary – Another way that you can help your readers understand what it is that you are saying, if you need to use the actual terms, is to provide a glossary. Don’t make your reader go and look the term up. Provide the explanation of what it is that you are talking about if you have to use the actual terms for things.  The reader doesn’t want to take the time to look up what it means. They shouldn’t have to. They came to you for help. Tell them what you are talking about in way that they’ll understand.
• Provide Illustrations – A final way to help your reader out is to provide pictures of what it is that you are talking about. This is especially important when you are writing a how-to article.For example, say you are writing an instructional article about a process which requires a lug wrench.  Not everyone who is going to read that article will know a lug wrench from a socket wrench. So you might want to provide a picture of what a lug wrench is so that they know which tool they need to use.

Going the extra step when you are writing your articles can make a huge difference in the response of readers. Chances are that a large percentage of the people who are reading the articles know what you are talking about. But if just one person is helped by the extra step, it will be worth it. Because that person is the one who is going to remember what you did for them.