Google Blog Search allows anyone to search blogs and only blogs. Just as you would want your site to be listed in Google search you also want to be listed in Google blog search.

Manual Ping
The quick and easy way to assure you are indexed in the Google blog search is to manually enter your sites URL, what they call a ping by going here and simply pasting your sites feed address. A feed address may appear as “yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml”, “yoursite.com/wp-rss.php” or “feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedname”. Enter your feed and submit. While this is easy it would be ideal to alert Google and others automatically every time your feed is updated.

Automatic Ping
WordPress and others have this set up already, recent versions of WordPress already have the Google blog search set to be pinged. However if you are using an older version of WordPress and do not wish to upgrade or have another content management system that has an XML-RPC client then check to make sure it is set up. In WordPress you navigate to the settings –> writing or in older versions options –> writing, there you will find the Update Services section, check to see if this is listed http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 and if so you are fine otherwise paste it in and save changes. If however you have a rest client the URL is http://blogsearch.google.com/ping.

More detail can be found on the Google Blog Search Pinging Service API page and Frequently Asked Questions about Google blog search.

Here are my Top 10 WordPress plugins if I were to start a new WordPress blog (and I do often) here are the plugins I would immediately upload and activate before all else.

Search Engines & Optimization
Your site needs to be listed in search engines and optimized to be found.

• 1. Google XML Sitemaps : A sitemap will be generated for you and will work with Google, Google is the largest of all the search engines so you need to be indexed properly before you can be found.
• 2. All in One SEO Pack : Once your pages are indexed in Google, and other search engines, you need to be sure to have Title, Description, and Keywords for your site. Just as important is the ability to easily change the Title, Description, and Keywords for every post you make as the topic and discussion is different it is best to have the Title, Description and Keywords match the content. This plugin provides all that and more as you can modify the above when you post or write a page.

Visitor Retention
Make sure your visitors continue to receive your stories after they visited your site and hopefully return.

• 3. Add to Any Subscribe Button : Make it simple for visitors to easily add your feed to their favorite reader and receive your posts, hopefully returning as well.

Visitor Acquisition - Virally
Once you have visitors, the best reference is a friend so have your visitors tell others through services such as Digg and other social bookmarking/sharing services. You cannot beat referrals, they are strong and free.

• 4. diggZ-Et : Adds a Digg button to every post, a simple click and submit from a visitor and you are referenced in Digg, finding a new audience and traffic.
• 5. Add to Any : Share/Save/Bookmark Button or Sociable : As there are many different sharing and social bookmarking services, you want to easily be able to offer the visitors preferred provider, such as Reddit Del.icio.us and others, with a click of a button. These two, pick your preference, provide them all.

No Spam
Comment spam is no fun when you get 100 a day, bots typically spam your site by leaving comments and it is best to block them or make them more easily identifiable then to allow them all and clean it up yourself.

• 6. Akismet : An excellent tool for blocking and highlighting spam comments for you.
• 7. reCAPTCHA : Stop bots from leaving comments by providing a confirmation code that can only be read by human eyes, I am sure you have see the word on a background which is difficult but possible to decifer.

Track Progress
Statistics help you to determine the traffic from your site, where they come from and where they go.

• 8.Google Analytics for WordPress : Google Analytics is a free, and very impressive, statistics package. Easily add the tracking code to your pages with this plugin and track your progress.

Administrative
Here are some plugins to make the administration of your blog easier.

• 9. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade : Every now and then you need to upgrade Wordpress to the latest version, with this plugin you can do so by clicking to upgrade and it is taken care of for you, even backing up your site before the upgrade.
• 10. WP Super Cache : Just in case you site becomes popular, or even on the more reasonably priced web hosting plans they may turn off your site if too much traffic comes and your site is putting too much of a load on the web server, with this plugin a static page is rendered and served up thereby saving server load.

These are incredibly easy to install, just download from the link above, unzip, upload to your /wp-content/plugins directory the entire plugin folder and activate from your plugin menu option within the WordPress admin.

Hope these help, and let me know if you have others you would prefer in your top 10.

If everyone that visited your site invited others you would grow much faster. Imagine if each registered person to your site cost you $1.00 and they each invited 10 friends and 1 joined, your cost is no$.50. Tell-a-friend has been around forever, but that’s not enough. You need each visitor to send emails to their friends by simply logging into their email account - checking off who to send to and done. Take a look at the Viralinviter, it does it all for you.

I found this Google Website Optimizer presentation that was created by Google. Basically a slide show with audio as well. Good introductory overview.

Want to know where your visitors click on your page, or increase conversions? Check out Crazy Egg and their heat maps.

Pubmatic publishes a monthly ad price index showing how much you should be making in revenue on your site from ad networks. Very helpful, find it here.

Post Ratings is a plugin to allow your users to rate all or a select number of your posts, stars or thumbs-up/down. Easy to install and free, instructions here. Try it on this post please, let’s see how well it works.

Total June revenue was $10,999.07, the highest month yet in the quest for $10,000 a month in revenue, part time. Arguably I achieved the goal, however that is gross and net would be preferred.

All in all things are going well, the first month was September when the site launched on 9/4/07, which was a naked Word Press installation and much of September was spent tweaking the site, and this June (well before the 1 year deadline) the revenue was over $10,000.

There is still much to be done and not enough time, or at least that is how it always feels. RSS and Newsletter continue to grow nicely, and now MySpace was added to the mix. Exactly why I added it I am not sure, other than the fact that it could increase awareness of this site and I can create blog entries there as some may prefer to obtain my latest updates there as well. I do not expect any direct revenue from having and maintaining a MySpace page, but I could be wrong.

I always like to point out that the above not only applies to this site longest.com but also the other niche sites I operate such as VentureCapitalUpdate.com.

September 2007 (Launch) — January 2008

February 2008 — June 2008

If you are using WordPress and your traffic increases, you may need to use a caching plugin to lower your CPU load or your webhost will make you upgrade your account to a more expensive server. Here is a great free cache plugin called SuperCache.

Wondering which of your split test (A/B) ads will perform better in the long run, or how they will perform? Got some initial click data? Check out this great tool: Split Tester, free and simple to use.